The Home Services Business & Marketing Success Podcast - Interviews, Tips & Strategies for Achieving Optimal Success In your Local Home Services Company

SEO + GEO in 2025: The New Lead Gen Formula for Home Service Pros

• Don Franklin

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 🎙️ New Podcast Episode: The Future of SEO & GEO for Home Service Pros 🚀 

The game has changed. For over a decade, Google was the king of search and SEO was the proven path to leads. But in 2025 and beyond, customers aren’t just searching on Google anymore — they’re asking AI-powered platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and even voice assistants for quick, trusted answers.

This shift has created a new lead generation formula for home service businesses:
🔎 SEO (Search Engine Optimization) → still critical to fuel traffic
🤖 GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) → the key to showing up in AI-generated answers

In this episode, we dive deep into:
 ✅ Why search behavior is rapidly evolving and what it means for landscapers 🌱, pool builders 🏊, garage door companies 🚪, soft wash experts 🫧, and all home service providers.
 ✅ How SEO and GEO work together to keep you visible in BOTH Google and AI-driven engines.
 ✅ Real-world examples of companies already generating 250+ leads a month with this strategy.
 ✅ The 4 pillars of SEO success — technical setup, content depth, backlinks & citations, and user experience.
 ✅ How to make sure your business shows up when customers ask ChatGPT or Google, “Who’s the best in my area?”
 ✅ Why video is your secret weapon to cut through AI noise and build trust with real faces and real stories.
✅ Action steps you can take THIS WEEK to test your visibility and start improving your rankings.

👉 If you’re a home service pro and want consistent traffic, leads, and long-term growth, this episode is packed with the insights and strategies you need to stay ahead of your competition.

Don’t get left behind. The future of search is here — and it’s multi-platform. 🚀
 🎧 Listen now and learn how to master SEO + GEO to grow your visibility, leads, and revenue in 2025 and beyond.

If you're interested in taking your Home Services business to the next level, online, visit LeadNurtureClose.com today and learn more about our services, and download our free Internet Marketing Checklist for home service contractors, discover what you can improve for your business online.  Also checkout our Marketing & Automation CRM

🔗 Stay Connected with Lead Nurture Close
🌐 Visit us: leadnurtureclose.com
📱 Follow us on Instagram: @leadnurtureclose
👍 Like us on Facebook: Lead Nurture Close
🎥 Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for more marketing tips: YouTube

👉 Ready to grow your home service business? Get in touch with us for a free consultation!

Speaker 1:

Today, we're going to be talking about SEO and GEO for home services. This is the new lead generation formula for landscapers, pool builders, garage door companies, soft wash pros pretty much any company that's in the home service industry. Today, we're going to actually take a deep dive into this new formula for ranking your home service business. It's not just on Google anymore, but it's across the platforms where your customers are actually searching in 2025 and beyond. For over a decade, google was the only game in town, but things are shifting, and they're shifting pretty quickly. Customers are using ChatGPT, perplexity, clod Brot, and what they're doing is they're asking questions and expecting quick, trusted answers.

Speaker 1:

You can look at the evolution of search. In 2010, google dominated the search landscape. In 2020s, ai-powered platforms started to emerge and now, in 2025 and beyond, it's a multi-platform search ecosystem, and you have to be taking advantage of this or you're going to get left behind. Why Google still holds the most traffic. Earlier adopters are shifting. Voice and generative engines like ChatGPT now play a serious role in search behavior, especially for local and FAQ or frequently asked questions style query. Google is way ahead still, but market share is slowly transitioning, and so we want to make sure that you're putting your best foot forward and that you're being where your customers are. So let's define these terms AEO AEO helps you show up in the voice responses, while GEO is about ranking in the AI generated answer. Geo is generative engine optimization and you want visibility in both of these, especially the GEO now, where users are now making decisions based off of what they're asking these AI and chat GPT or large language models. Here's a real example A user has chat GPT for landscapers or garage door repair nearby. The AE will pull from the map and the citations and reviews and ranks companies accordingly and then SEO feeds the GEO. So SEO is still a major part of the game, but you want to make sure you're doing things correctly so that it's feeding GEO and giving it the resources. So this is your new playing field.

Speaker 1:

Our model supports your growth with consistent traffic and lead flow. Seo and GEO are both drivers that feed conversions, retention and revenue. If you look at the chart here, conversions are what turn prospects into customers, and then you have repeat referrals. You've got to build that loyal customer base and then optimization is ongoing to get better and better results by refining things, and then your leads, seo and GEO fuel the top of the funnel. That's how people are going to find you, your brand and questions, the answers they're asking for in these chat, gpt and Google queries. Here's an example of a real client in the softwash space and they dominate insert over 250 leads a month, incredible cost per lead of only $18 and 67 cents versus. If you're doing pay-per-click and paid ads, which is still a great channel, you're going to pay quite a bit more for each lead there. But SEO this proves SEO still drives the result, especially when layered in with GEO, and that's going to be more and more important going forward. Whether it's in Google or ChatGPT, these engines reward the same fundamentals trust, authoritativeness, proximity, relevance and we want to dial all of those in. You can't just take one of these. You gotta factor all of these in and get them as best as you can to get the best outcome.

Speaker 1:

This is your new SEO checklist. It's no longer just about keywords. You need to have a great user experience. You have to have a fast site speed on your website. When you go to a website and you're having to wait for it to come up or load fully, images aren't there. That's a poor user experience and Google recognizes that. Users recognize that and they bounce, and so you're going to have a poor SEO and, of course, poor conversions because you're now losing customers coming to your website. And then you have to have solid off-page signals or other websites that are actually giving a thumbs up or nod to your website, and that's kind of sending some trust signals over to your website from these other trusted sources.

Speaker 1:

And then you have technical fundamentals. You got to make sure those are in place. Those are like the baseline. If you don't have those, then you're missing a big, important piece in your whole overall SEO and GEO strategy. So these speak to our four core pillars of SEO. Which is technical you wanna highlight the issues like title tag, optimization, status codes and schema and make sure all of those are correct along your website. And then content this is a big player the depth, the relevance and the topical completeness of the page's content Hugely important not only for SEO but for GEO Authority. You need to identify whether the page has sufficient backlink and citation strength, because those are all signals to Google and other platforms that your website and your brand is actually an authority in your industry, and so you have to make sure that you're hitting the head on all of those and making sure that you're checking the boxes there.

Speaker 1:

And then, as I mentioned before, user experience you want to look at your mobile and desktop speed. Mobile is more important than desktop for most industries. Google does go mobile first in their index. However, you still want to make sure your desktop speed is great there as well, because people might be searching from work or their home when they get home and they're not always on mobile, although mobile is driving 70, 80% of the searches and traffics for most industries. So you just want to make sure both of those are spot on. And then, of course, your call to actions are very clear and your whole website in general is laying out very clear expectations, very clear, just clarity. In general, you want a user to be able to come there and not have to search for your phone number or search for their answer they're trying to get. You want it to be right there in front of them.

Speaker 1:

Geo, generative engine optimization that success starts with clear, human content that AI understands and that users trust. So real videos, structure, tech, consistent answers these are all critical to show up in the AI result. And so, if you look at the screen here, your website is your hub in your Google business profile and so all of these things are reflected from that. So you have your AI engines, youtube, social platforms, google maps, directories and you want to make sure all consistent and congruent across all these platforms and that they're connected. On your website. You have links to your YouTube and to your social platforms and so that AI engines and Google they can actually come and make the connections and connect the dots that you are an authoritativeness in your market across all of these Very important Creating content. You can actually syndicate that content, that's sharing it to those trusted sites. So it's not just necessarily a link from your website, but it's actually putting that content onto these other sources and then those content sources can link back to your website as well. So you wanna syndicate the content.

Speaker 1:

Your keywords matter. You want to start with services that drive revenue, like landscape lighting install or garage door spring repair. Those are important transactional keywords that are actually going to drive revenue for your business. And then you can expand into longer tail phrases and questions, and so you want to have as many fishing poles in the water along all these different keywords, but you want to start with the ones that are service related, that are going to drive your revenue, and then you can focus on broadening and widening up that scope as you go. You need to make sure, along these lines of the services and driving revenue, that you create one page for every service and city that you serve or provide for a service, because Google ranks pages and not a website, and if you don't have a page for each service, you're more likely not going to rank for those services. So you're going to give a much better signal to Google by having specific pages for each one of these services and then you want to optimize them with unique copy, strong what's called H1s or your headers, and then have conversion points throughout the copy on that website. This table here shows that these are like the basics. It's the table stakes for SEO and foundational for GEO. So you need to make sure that these are all in place in order for you to be positioned with a foundational platform that's strong, to get yourself into the rankings for SEO and into the answers for GEO.

Speaker 1:

Slow site these will lose rankings and leads. I kind of mentioned this before. When core web vitals are looked at from Google, it's basically a scoring system that's seeing and experiencing your website, and it matters more than ever when it comes to ranking. Google knows the importance of it and so it's a huge ranking factor. So you've got to make sure that your core web vitals and your speed and the user experience are all top notch for your site. You want to make sure it's fast, accessible and it's conversion friendly. Those are very key If you want to win in the map. You need to make sure you claim and optimize your Google business profile.

Speaker 1:

Get consistent reviews. I can't stress enough the consistent part. You don't want to just get like 10 and then get nothing. The consumers, as well as Google, want to see the consistency. If I go to a website and I see the last review was a year ago, that's not consistent and that doesn't give me a good trust of what I might experience if I were to use that company. And so you want to make sure that when a user is looking at the reviews, they see some recent reviews. So you want to be consistent in getting those reviews. And then you want to show up in all of the directories that that ai pulls from and this is key. So chat, gpt and other large language models, as I mentioned early on, they pull from a lot of sources and directories are some of these sources and so there's key directories that they pull from. You need to make sure that you're in those direct. We can help you with this foundation and kind of help lay this all out and foot forward for you.

Speaker 1:

You are getting found in the AI GEO answers. Video is your edge, the edge against the AI noise that's out there. Customers trust real faces and real people. I know there's a lot of companies out there. They don't have the time or they don't want to be the face in these videos and if that's the case, then assign one of your technicians as your video rep and give them a system to follow, because video is important to consumers but it also drives rankings and trust to both Google and the consumers. So video is going to be your secret weapon and get you outside of the AI noise and getting you in front and top of mind of your consumers.

Speaker 1:

You can reverse engineer the GEO visibility. You can test prompts in ChatGPT and you can see who ranks and then match their formatting and visibility. You can test prompts in chat gpt and you can see who ranks and then match their formatting, and then you can focus on directories and answering content based off of what you're finding when you're doing these test prompts and reverse engineering your competitors. So that's a really important tip that you can do the formatting, using it in headers or lists or call listicles. I'm having very concise paragraphs. There's a lot of strategies around that which you can also ask ChatGPT on that as well and how to do that. So ChatGPT or Grok or a lot of the others can be your friend in helping you find out these answers and how to move forward in the best way.

Speaker 1:

These are some tools to help you dial in the strategy that I've mentioned. You can use these to analyze competitors, you can use them to find search terms and you can use them to improve your site speed and authority. These are just a few out there. There's a lot of different technologies out there and tools that you can use, but these are a few important ones to kind of get you started and get you a good foundation. The GT metrics is one of the ones that grades your speed and then Google keyword planner. You can use that for helping come up with your keyword research. Spyfu is another great one for analyzing competitor strategies and then Answer the Public is a great one for finding the long tail keywords that are around your particular industry and coming up with questions, should have asked questions, frequently asked questions and a lot of things around that that you can easily create content for both text and video content as well.

Speaker 1:

This is what we do here at Leader. To Close, within our AI powered organic traffic system, we implement and track SEO and GEO for you. We help you build authority and visibility where it counts most, and that's going to be Google, as well as ChatGPT and other large language models using GEO. And then the map pack is another important one. A lot of leads and queries come from the map pack, which is only three in the Google map pack, so it's important to do everything you can to optimize your Google business profile as well, and then a lot of other signals that you want to use in order to get you the authoritativeness and trust within Google. We do a full audit for your business at no charge and you can walk away with a keyword list, a ranking heat map and a plan that's gonna help you grow. And if you're interested in this, just head over to leannurtureclothescom forward slash strategy and we'll be able to set you up and take care of you and get you a good foundation of how to move forward in using all these tools and tips that we just talked about.

Speaker 1:

You need to get your SEO and GEO solid. You need to be trustworthy, visible and everywhere that your customers are searching and, as I mentioned, more and more are searching through AI, large language models, chatgpt, grok, et cetera. And SEO in Google is still key. I think it's always going to be there, even if it loses market share and more people are using chat. I think there's still going to be some kind of evolution of Google and that will still be important to meet. But even if it's not, this is why you're wanting to be putting your best foot forward for GEO and making sure that you're optimizing for that as well, so you're prepared for both spectrums, and that's just more fishing poles in the water, that you have more channels to actually catch more fish. So it's key to start thinking about both SEO and GEO, and that's the new formula. It still matters. It's your foundation of all digital visibility. As I mentioned, video is gonna be your advantage. Differentiate yourself from your competitors with real footage. We used to always say authentic images, and that's still key, but now trying to get in real video is going to be even more powerful with AI coming around, and that's going to be what sets you apart from everybody else.

Speaker 1:

How long does it take to start seeing results with this SEO in GEO approach? That's a really good question. Typically, our clients start seeing some kind of movement in 60 to 90 days, but the real traction is usually 90 to 120 days, and it could be longer depending upon where they're actually starting from and what the local market competition is, and so there is some variations there that make an impact on that. But the importance is that it compounds. The more consistent your content, your citations, your reviews all of that, the stronger your SEO and GEO footprint begins to grow, and so you need to be consistent. It's a momentum play and it's not just a one-off tactic. You have to be consistent across all of these things.

Speaker 1:

Do I really need both SEO and GEO? Isn't one enough? Well, not anymore. Seo will get you in the game maps, organic listing your site, but GEO is how you show up in the AI tools, as I've talked about, like ChatGPT and others. Ai LLMs are more and more coming about, and consumers are using it more and more, so they're actually searching in both now. So you really really need to be visible in both of those and not just SEO. Especially as time goes on, less and less could be happening in Google and more and more is happening in these LLMs or AI, large language models, so you want to be positioning yourself to be visible in both. What's one thing I can do this week to improve my rankings? Well, that's easy. Test it Go to chat GPT.

Speaker 1:

Open it up and ask who it recommends for your service in your city. If it doesn't mention you, that's your signal that you need to optimize your citations, your reviews and your whole content structure. If you're not sure how to do that, if you'd like some help on that, reach out to us. As I mentioned, we'll do a full audit for you and we can give you a really clear picture of your visibility, not just on Google, but also on chat and other AIs, and then we can see what areas that you have gaps in and that need improvement. So reach out to us. We can help you with that. If you're watching this on a replay, please post in the chat that you're watching this at, and if you have questions there, me and my team will see those and we'll gladly get an answer back to you on that. Looks like that's it.

Speaker 1:

I wanna really thank you for taking the time. Thank you for being here. If you wanna help with implementing any of this stuff that we covered today, just reach out. We'd be glad to help. Our mission is to equip the home service entrepreneurs with a world-class marketing system, ai-driven innovation and unwavering partnership, so that they can realize their full potential. We want to help you build lasting legacies and impact the families and communities that they serve. That's our mission, and we would love to help you reach your goals. Reach out to us and let's grow your visibility together. That's it for now. Until next time, please take care.

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Don Franklin

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