This week's teardown · Claim your lane The map pack is the podium. Three spots, no page one. Hey Reader, Quick one this week, because it's the highest-return hour in local marketing and almost nobody spends it. When someone searches “near me,” Google doesn't lead with ten links. It leads with a map and three businesses. That's the podium. If you're not one of the three, your website never even gets a shot at the click. The good news: getting into that map pack doesn't take a six-month content...
about 7 hours ago • 2 min read
This week's teardown · Take out the bricks Your site isn't underpowered. The trunk is full of bricks. Hey Reader, Quick question: when did you last open your own website on your phone, with the wifi off, and actually count the seconds until it loaded? That's the connection a lot of your customers are on. And if you're tapping your foot waiting, so are they, right before they hit the back button and click your competitor. A beautiful website that loads slowly is still a slow website. That's...
14 days ago • 3 min read
This week's teardown · Volume vs. intent 30,000 visitors. Zero bookings. Hey Reader, An agency once bragged to a business owner that they'd sent him 30,000 visitors in a single month. He was thrilled. Then he checked his calendar. Zero new bookings. Not one. Here's what went wrong, and it's the most common mistake I see: he was chasing volume instead of intent. Volume with no strategy is a dragster with no steering. Big search numbers feel like winning. Loud, fast in a straight line, useless...
21 days ago • 2 min read
100+ ChatGPT Prompts to Revolutionize Your Day This week's teardown · Read the telemetry Where did your last five leads actually come from? Hey Reader, Quick question, and be honest with yourself. Can you name where your last five leads came from? Not “the internet.” The actual channel: organic search, a paid ad, or your Google Business Profile. If you hesitated, you're not alone, and you're not bad at this. You've just been driving without a dashboard. Let's prove it, and then let's fix it....
28 days ago • 3 min read
This week's teardown · Rent vs. rank Your cost per click is a confession. Hey Reader, Quick gut check. Go look at your Google Ads bill from last month. Now answer this: how many of those keywords could you be ranking for organically, for free, right now? If the answer is “I have no idea,” you're not alone. It's the single most common blind spot I see on sales calls. And it's expensive, because every click you pay for on a keyword you could own is rent. Rent builds equity for the landlord. Not...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
This week's teardown · The AI answer era In an AI answer, there is no page two. Hey Reader, Quick experiment for you. It takes 30 seconds and it might change how you think about your marketing for the rest of the year. The 30-second experiment 01 Open ChatGPT right now. Go ahead, I'll wait. 02 Ask it to recommend a business in your industry, in your area, for the thing you actually sell. 03 It probably gave you three names. Confidently, instantly, no scrolling required. The uncomfortable...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
This week's teardown · Clicks vs. leads A click is not a lead. Hey Reader, Quick story. An agency told one of my clients they'd landed 100 leads in a month. One hundred. Great number, right? So we did what I always do with great numbers: we went and checked. The diagnostic · what those 100 "leads" actually were → About half were telemarketers. People calling to sell my client something, counted as people who wanted to buy. → A bunch of the rest were bot clicks. Not humans. Not customers....
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
This week's teardown · The audit hustle 16,962 leads. 21 were real. Hey Reader, Fair warning: I'm fired up this week. I'll explain that headline number in a minute, but first I need to tell you about a client of mine. Let's call him Mike. Mike runs a healthy multi-million dollar business. His campaigns are working: organic traffic climbing, cost per lead dropping, pipeline filling. And every 60 to 90 days, like clockwork, Mike forwards me a PDF. Some agency he's never heard of has run a...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
This week's teardown · A true story He went all-in on AI lead gen. Google quietly stopped indexing his pages. Hey Reader, A business owner came to me recently with a site that wasn't getting traction. And the way he got there is the part I need you to hear, because it started with advice from someone he trusted. A friend of his, a roofer, had gone all-in on AI lead generation. Cancelled his other marketing. Let the AI do the content. And it was working for him. Real results, real leads. So my...
2 months ago • 4 min read
