#74 Local SEO in the Age of AI Search with Tyler Henn

Tyler Henn
[Speaker 2] (0:02 - 1:13)
Welcome to the Podfather podcast. You can find all our episodes on podfather.me. Our guest today is Tyler Henn, founder of Henn House Digital Growth Studio. Good name because it's very memorable.

A local search engine optimization agency helping contractors and service businesses get found on Google Maps and now AI platforms. Tyler's background is actually in user experience design, which shapes how he thinks about SEO. For him, it's never just about rankings.

It's about the whole picture, the website, the message, the reviews, and what happens the moment someone actually finds you. He's also the host of the Henn House podcast. So he sits on both sides of the microphone and he's here to make the case that most podcasters are measuring the wrong number entirely when they judge the show by downloads alone.

Welcome, Tyler. Thank you, Roy. It's a pleasure to be here.

I mean, straight away, I was like, I'll always remember that name. Once I was doing my research, I was like, oh, that's good. I mean, you must tell us the story on that.

[Speaker 1] (1:14 - 2:11)
Yeah. So my last name is Henn, obviously, but every Friday and Saturday growing up, my parents would always have the neighbors over and they would have their wine and cheese and talk and probably complain about their jobs and all that adult stuff. And our next door neighbor, the husband, every time he would come into our house, he would open the garage door.

Everyone came in through the garage door and he would open the door and go, Henn House. And so it just always stuck with me. And so all of my business names have the word Henn House in it somewhere or any of my endeavors now.

So my podcast, I have a construction LLC as well. When I was selling roofs a couple of years ago, that's Henn House Construction. And then this LLC is Henn House Consulting.

And so I just have carried that with me for some reason. I always really liked it. And like you said, yeah, everybody thinks it's really catchy and thinks that it's a great name.

And so I'm glad that I picked it.

[Speaker 2] (2:12 - 2:18)
Brilliant. So I suppose kind of tell us your career, how you've kind of grown to what you're doing now.

[Speaker 1] (2:19 - 10:19)
Yeah. So I have a bachelor's degree in user experience design, or it's called interactive design at the school that I went to. But I think UX is a more widely understood term.

And for anyone who doesn't know how that works, it's more so instead of looking at maybe how pretty a website or how pretty an app or some kind of digital product is, we look at how usable it is. And so we would look at things more like, okay, maybe we should move this button from the top left, the top right, because more people are right handed, and it'll be easier to touch that button when you're holding the phone with one hand, and you can get your thumb up there, stuff like that. Or maybe, hey, the color of this button might not be indicative of the urgency of that button, how important it is to press that button in the process of the app.

Or maybe the wording, it could even be the wording of a sentence of maybe people aren't understanding how the app works. And so that's my background. And I've been able to obviously bring that with me into my web design side of my SEO agency and what I'm doing.

But it took me a while to get to where I am now. I was very, I don't want to say rebellious, I'm trying to think of the right word. I was very hesitant to apply for jobs out of college, because there was something in me that just really did not want to sit at a cubicle and work a nine to five for the rest of my life.

That just sounded like torture to me. And I know some people I think find comfort in that, but I thought that that was extremely uncomfortable for me. And so my mom, God bless her, who was always very supportive, come up in my room after college every couple of days, and like, how's the job applications going and everything?

And I go, oh, it's good, it's good. I was probably applying for one job a week, because I didn't want to get a job doing something that I didn't want. And so I was kind of being a thorn in her side for a while and pretending like I was looking for one of these jobs.

But meanwhile, I was comfortable at a car dealership that I had worked at through college. And so I was, I had four years of tenure there, and everybody loved me, and I loved everybody. And not too long after that, they offered me a position to move up.

And it was money I'd never seen or made before. And so I, you know, very excitedly accepted it and was, you know, very that I was able to move up. And so I worked there for about eight years total.

About six years in, I met my, she was my girlfriend at the time, now wife, who moved to the United States from Brazil as in an exchange program. And she came here as an au pair. So she lived with a family and watched their children.

And in exchange, she was able to go to school, practice English and take some college classes and all that good stuff. And so I met her, and we got serious pretty fast. And we kind of just started having that conversation of like, what does our future look like?

And it came down to, well, I'm making, you know, more than the average American, but it's really not a lot. It was a pretty sad amount looking back at it now. And the only kind of opportunities to go up from where I was would have been my boss, who was the department manager, his boss, who was the general manager and the owner.

And I was like, well, I don't think I'll be the general manager or owner anytime in the next 30 years. So definitely not the owner, right? Because it's not my family business.

So we just kind of started thinking like, okay, well, where can I go from here to kind of level up my career and start, you know, making a name for myself and kind of call my own shots? So what does that look like? Well, my stepdad owns a roofing company, still does.

And he had always been kind of encouraging me, hey, you should try roofing sales. There's a lot of money in it. But I was always reluctant for that as well, because if you don't sell a roof, you don't make any money.

It's a full commission job. And so I was very worried that it wouldn't work out and, you know, just lacking self-confidence as a young man. And my wife was just so supportive of it and really pushed me.

She was like, I think you should go for it. What's the worst that could happen? You go back to the dealership.

And I was like, yeah, that's true. They would probably hire me. If I quit roofing on Friday, I would have a job on Monday.

And so the worst that could happen is I have a rough month. And so I took the dive. This was in 2023.

There was a huge hail storm in my state, Georgia, that tore apart half of the city. It was like three inch hail. And I was very blessed.

I sold about 86 roofs all in the same neighborhood. And it was a great year. 2024 was not as good of a year because we're technically not really a storm market here.

It's a lot of retail roof replacements, which is a lot. It's a lot harder to convince someone to pay $20,000 for a roof than it is to convince them to pay their $500 or $1,000 deductible on an insurance claim and have insurance pay the rest. And so 2024 and 25 were extremely rough.

And I started kind of trying to pivot and think, well, what am I going to do that is where I don't have to rely on Mother Nature to kind of generate work for me? And I started doing research on SEO. I had already taken an SEO class in college as part of my degree.

But it wasn't the SEO that I know now. It was like adding alt text to your images and a general consensus on keywords and page structure and stuff like that. But it didn't go into any of what I'm sure we'll get into shortly here.

But I found a buddy who had just started his own company. He was doing some general construction outside of homes. And I was like, hey, would you mind if I build you a free website and just see if I can figure this thing out?

I mean, who's going to say no to a free website? He was like, I'm all for it. Yeah.

And so I gave it a shot. And in about a month, I had him ranking number one for deck builder for his city. And it was this like adrenaline rush of like, wow, I guess I know how to do this.

And so kind of at the beginning of this year of 2026, my wife and I were talking and I was like, hey, I think I want to do this. Like try to try to make this my my full time thing. And supportive her as always, like, I totally think you should.

I think it would be awesome. And it seems like you're good at it. So give it a shot.

And so I started just going to networking meetings, I started going to joining like Facebook groups and stuff like that, and just marketing myself any way that I could doing podcasts. And my goal was to have 10 clients paying me monthly by the end of 2026. And I think I'm at 16 or 17 right now.

So it's been a blessed year. And it's all kind of just come together in a in a really organic and kind of on my own terms way. And so it's just been a really, really cool journey to kind of come from, from the college background to kind of figuring it out with with brute force and now having, you know, a lot of clients who speak very highly of me, because I've, you know, either upped their business or save their business or, you know, just help them get more customers.

So it's been really cool to get to where I am now. And I'm very thankful for for how it happened.

[Speaker 2] (10:20 - 10:31)
Very good. And I'm just curious to go that you got number one in the ranks that you've done for free. Did he actually reward you for that when you actually because I'm assuming he got a lot of claims from what you've created?

[Speaker 1] (10:32 - 11:27)
Yeah, he did months down the line. He did send me something. But what ended up happening with that is his Google Business profile got suspended because he was using his home address.

And you aren't supposed to do that. There are ways around it. But they took it down.

And when the Google Business profile goes down, so do your rankings. And so it was kind of a one of those roller coasters. And so I don't think he's still ranking well anymore.

But he's also not working with me anymore. So that was more of an experiment where we would have had to get him a true office or true, you know, verified Google Business profile to keep him up in ranking. And that unfortunately wasn't the case.

But it was a great experience. And he still has a great website.

[Speaker 2] (11:28 - 12:27)
So excellent. And just kind of going back to the kind of user experience that you were talking about, because like Zoom, they've just made, I don't know, do you use Zoom much? But like I do my podcast, I'm using it for eight years.

They've made some new features. So even the record before you just hit the record, and then at the top, you just hit stop. And I know you have to go hit the thing.

And then when you're closing it, it's another button. So it's like it might seem nothing, but it's like an extra three seconds. And it's an editing thing that you have to do.

And somebody just today wanted to share the screen. And before you just hit the button to share a lot. And it took me five minutes to figure it out.

Like I just got a whole page. And I look at a lot of the things that like even LinkedIn as well, like if you're inviting people to your page before you just scroll along, and now it's you scroll and then you have to load more pages. And loads of them are doing things like that.

Why do they add features that makes it wrong? Is it engineers trying to justify their job?

[Speaker 1] (12:28 - 15:22)
Well, so I would like to think with my training that all design decisions are made based on research. So the way that I was trained would, if we, maybe everything kind of starts with an assumption, but it's not good design to make the design choice based on assumption. Like, well, we think that people will like it.

If we move the button over here, what you actually have to do is find a couple hundred people and split them in half and show half of them the app with the button on the left and show half of them with the button on the right and tell them what to do. And then watch them see if they get frustrated. If they get frustrated, write it down, see what, write down what they say.

And when we get these data points, we can actually figure out, okay, it's, you know, it actually was 50 50. So maybe it doesn't matter too much or it was overwhelmingly that the button should be on the right. Everybody who had the button on the left was frustrated and couldn't figure it out and wasn't able to use it.

And everyone who had the button on the right, it was like, like clockwork. And so I would like to think that these big companies have large budgets for user testing. But I mean, when it comes to loading stuff too, that may fall on the, on the backend engineering department of maybe they, their servers were just pushing too much data all at the same time.

And it was running up their, their bills with like Amazon with AWS or something like that. That's one problem with, with these big corporations is that a UX guy can't just go and make a change and submit it and it's live the next day. It has to go through legal.

It has to go through the computer engineers. It has to go through HR. It has to go through all these things.

And so the bigger the company gets, the more hoops you have to jump through to, to get these changes made too. And that's one reason I like working with with smaller clients too, because I don't want to have to go through, jump through all these hoops. I want to say like, this is what's going to work.

I'm going to put it on the page and it's probably going to rank pretty soon. Cause I know that my framework works. But it does a roundabout answer of saying there, there's so many factors that come into play when you're looking at a company like LinkedIn or Zoom.

Yeah. I don't know why Zoom would make their, make it harder to start and stop recording. I know too, like I go in, I'm in an SEO community where we just kind of talk shop and compare notes on what's working and what's not.

And the leader, every time someone wants to share their screen, he's like, you can share your screen, but you have to ask twice. It's going to instantly deny you to share your screen the first time. And then the second time it'll prompt me to, to allow it.

And so, yeah, there's just, there's some really weird stuff that some of these companies have, and I would love to think that they have a great reason for it, but you know, who knows.

[Speaker 2] (15:23 - 16:55)
And, you know, cause I want to touch on your podcast as well. And I'm not sure where you host yours, but I moved mine for Spotify to Podbean. Cause I always had my Polish one there and twice it's happened.

They done an update, I don't know, six months ago or a year. And it was like a lot of hassle. They've just done one recently.

I think it was on the 16th and everything downloads and everything. I I'm getting reports. Cause I have a few different software stuff.

That's telling me like, Oh, your number, this and the chart, your number 50, number 10, like this is number 10 now in the U S and yet it's just showing zero and no earnings and everything. And then I'm reaching out to him and it took a week for him to resolve and it's still not sorted. And then they said, okay, look, it'll get fixed and everything will, you know, get, get right.

But it's still the previous week is still showing zero, which with, I know I've got about 14 different podcasts, you know, that's a big income that's kind of showing zero yet they're charging clients for it. And then I want to add new channels cause I've clients coming in and that feature is gone and I'm writing to him and it's like four or five days. Cause people like, I've heard no, because like I've kind of the circle.

I mean, there's a lot of people now after leaving them for that. So it's amazing that they'll do an up. And I mean, you hear that in lots of different companies, they'll do an upgrade and then they're kind of going, Oh, we don't know what to do.

So it's like, so how, how can they do like, what's the right way for people to do that? Just with your own experience that they don't have that kind of situation because it's frustrating for not just me, for everybody.

[Speaker 1] (16:57 - 19:25)
Yeah. I mean, it's so, I know I can speak from an SEO standpoint of like, it's so hard to switch softwares once you, once you've adopted one and gotten used to it, because if, if it doesn't work out, yeah, you get into this, this vicious cycle of, okay, well I tried this one. I didn't like it.

Now I'm back to the one that I was using before. I still don't like it. Yeah.

And I think that support is going downhill on a lot of these companies too, where they're getting bigger and bigger and they're not answering the, the people that are using it every day. And like, you're obviously a powerhouse, 14 podcasts. I mean, you should have your own private phone line with these guys.

But that's, you know, obviously not the case. And so I don't know, it's, it's really hard to say, I mean, what I can say, if you want a recommendation on podcast software is that Riverside is unbelievable. That's what I use.

And it hosts everything online for you, record and stop record or the same button. You just send someone a link, like you sent me, they, they jump right in. And then the best part is that let's say, you know, I'm in the United States, you're in Poland.

There's a very decent chance that at some point, one of us, our internet will drop off for a second in our connection. On a Riverside, it records, it shows us both talking and we see each other during the recorded conversation, but it also records both of our sessions locally. So if you drop off for a second where I can't see you at the end, it'll still upload your recording in full quality.

And so we get like a 1080, 1080 or 4k, 4k total quality video. And then it's got all kinds of AI editing features where it'll take out the uhs and ums. It'll take out really long pauses.

And it'll, it'll even recommend, it looks like maybe you wouldn't want this part to be kept in the podcast. Like if I said, oh, that's okay, we'll cut this out later or something like that. It'll pick that up and highlight that section and say, do you want to cut this out?

And you say, yes. And it just goes, and it's unbelievable. It also will make like short form clips for you on what it thinks are good topics.

Now you have to, you have to sift through those and make sure that it actually makes sense. But it really just makes the whole podcasting process easy. And I probably wouldn't be podcasting as much as I am like hosting my own if I didn't have a product that was so easy to use.

[Speaker 2] (19:26 - 19:38)
So, I mean, it's the podcast. So how long have you been podcasting? Are you talking about SEO and yeah.

So yeah. And how long have you been doing it?

[Speaker 1] (19:39 - 21:15)
Yeah. So I think I started, I think two or three months ago. We have, I think nine episodes out, but I've recorded about 15.

So I'm trying to stay really ahead of the curve in case I ever need to take a month off or something like that. But yeah, about two months. It's been going really well.

I've been using Podmatch to find people. And my kind of target guest would be anybody in digital marketing or marketing or somebody who is at the forefront of their company and has helped it grow by somehow letting people know that that company exists. And what we like to explore is how SEO is working currently, and then how all other marketing channels affect SEO in some way, because they do now more than ever in 2026 with all these AI models and ChatGPT and Gemini is able to pull so much more context so quickly on any entity that we want to look at what are all the ways that you are online as Roy Coughlin or as Podfather.

And how can we let these algorithms know that you're the right person to choose to show at the top for what that person is searching. And that's what my agency does too. That's why I like to explore it that way is because we like to kind of layer on different marketing aspects over time to kind of solidify that existence online, if that makes sense.

[Speaker 2] (21:15 - 22:37)
Yeah, absolutely. And kind of getting into the marketing saying with your hosting platform, because what I liked, I mean, I've tried a few actually, I'm using transistor for internal podcasts, and that's working very well. I like that.

And now I've actually tried an external one as well. And yeah, I mean, it was doing well before it was my Spanish one is number one in the at the moment, which is incredible. But what I like about Podbean, because I know I was kind of bitching about it, like, but they have a lot of the social shares and a lot of connecting with the account, whereas they all do a few, but I could see that they do a lot more.

I'm just, it's Riverside, you said is the one that you're with, is it Riverside? Yes, Riverside. How are they for kind of connecting with your socials?

Like, for example, when I put out an episode, and I schedule it, like, because breaker, you couldn't schedule it. So I just moved it. I was like, how can I not schedule because I liked this, I'm systemized, I like kind of having everything.

Sometimes I can have 20 organized for something. And what it's doing is it's because I put in the transcript as well as putting it on my LinkedIn and my Facebook, I'm finding I'm getting good engagement on my LinkedIn based on the transcript going over the episode. And it really helps when just with Riverside, what kind of social connects and like, what's what's it doing, that's going to help you grow your show?

[Speaker 1] (22:38 - 24:48)
Yeah, I think it can connect to most major platforms. So as far as the streaming platforms that it goes out to, right now it has YouTube, Apple, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, and Amazon. And then I know that I've added the RSS feed to probably 25 or 30 extra websites just to make sure that it's getting out there.

But I know that at least iTunes, a lot of the bigger podcast websites, like I think there's one called pod index or podcast index that pulls, it just basically scrapes the RSS feeds from these bigger platforms and already has it. So probably on like five or six of them, when I tried to add it, it was like you're already here. I was like, Oh, cool.

But and then as far as like, social posting, it has that as well. I don't use it because I when I got Riverside, I already was using Metricool for social media posting, which is a scheduler and analytics and all that kind of stuff. And so I'll actually export my shorts out of out of Riverside and schedule it in Metricool.

But it does have a planner you can schedule out. I'm scheduled out through I think October right now for the posts that I've recorded or the podcasts that I've recorded. And so it makes it super easy to do that.

You can add one thumbnail there. It'll auto write the descriptions for you based on the transcript. And then I think right now it has Instagram.

I know it has LinkedIn, YouTube. I don't know if it has Facebook, but it has definitely most of the major platforms. But I've been using Metricool for social because it has I think you can add like 13 platforms or something like that.

So I'm posting on the eight major platforms about three times a day right now trying to just up the up the relevance and get the clips out there. And then I'm also chopping up the transcripts and doing short like little writings on on other topics throughout the podcast as well.

[Speaker 2] (24:49 - 25:39)
And I'm interested in kind of because my business partner for the virtual assistants like she was getting me and it was like last week or the week before she she was asking me for a long while to do the Metricool because you know she's got access to everything. But she was saying look this is the way but and I'm just I'm there's so many outgoing things like this is 50 bucks this is this is 100 bucks this everything is got and it all adds up. And I was like do we really need this?

But she's saying how good it is. So it's good that you're saying it. So you're I know that you can connect like the LinkedIn and there's different options.

I think I've done like 10 channels or something like that. So like 50 bucks for the 10 channels and connecting yeah Twitter. It's got all the major ones that you that you need yeah.

So you I mean with your experience and you're finding it good so that's a that's a good thing anyway I suppose yeah.

[Speaker 1] (25:40 - 28:41)
Yeah and so it probably takes me what let's say that I recorded an hour-long episode on Riverside. I can realistically have it edited and scheduled the podcast itself 20 minutes after. It processes for maybe 5 to 10 minutes and then I go and I say take out all the uhs and ums.

It cuts it for you really nice. If the audio is messed up it might take me a little bit longer like if someone doesn't have a really good microphone. But it I mean it cuts out most of the bulk of the stuff for you and then like I have to add my intro video and I have to add uh like I recorded one commercial promoting myself and then I add uh about 30 seconds in I add an overlay that says like like and subscribe like the the normal YouTube stuff.

And then with my social workflow I look through all the short form content that it creates. I pick the ones that I like the most, tweak them if I because like sometimes it'll for the sake of keeping the video a minute it might not say the next sentence which is really important. And I'll say okay add that back in so it's a minute and five or a minute and seven or something like that.

But it's going to provide more value. I do right now Monday through Saturday I post one short form clip a day on eight platforms. And then I give the the transcript to usually Claude and say what are some other topics that we could write that we could write text posts about that may generate some either controversy or generate some interest.

And I actually have Claude plugged into Ahrefs which is an SEO tool that can find keywords that I think that we can rank for on those posts. And the reason that I do that is because anywhere from four to six out of the 10 results on page one of Google right now are UGC, user generated content. So stuff like Reddit, Instagram posts are ranking, LinkedIn posts are ranking very well.

And so if we start a post with a target keyword that we think we can rank for it then we have a high chance of that showing up organically. And not only showing up on the search page on the search results page but getting cited by ChachiBT, by Gemini, by Claude and all these agents. So then all of a sudden you could have said something on LinkedIn and then if someone asks a question related to it it can say well Roy Coughlin says this in this post.

And that just can be a web of relevance that can spread like wildfire. And so I do my text post with that strategy and then I schedule everything out. So I post at 10 a.m. the short goes up at noon and then another text post at 2 p.m. and that's Monday through Saturday every week. And that takes me editing and getting the social media scheduled no more than two hours a week. And that's 20, what 24 posts a week.

[Speaker 2] (28:42 - 28:47)
And you're getting, I mean you're obviously seeing engagement so you see that it's working.

[Speaker 1] (28:48 - 30:13)
Yeah it's a slow burn. But I try to remind myself you know people get caught up in the in the subscribers and the follower count because you know we're all comparing ourselves to people like Mr. Beast now who has 500 million and that's not attainable right. But also we don't need, I was having a conversation with a guy on my podcast he's like you don't need 500 million people for your business to be successful.

And one thing that I try to do is like my podcast has 27 subscribers right now. And you can mope about that and say oh I wish I had a thousand or I wish I had 10,000. But imagine if there was 27 people standing in the room with you who wanted to hear what you had to say.

That would flip a switch right. That would actually make you excited like wow there's 27 people who care about what I'm putting up every week. And so it's good to remind yourself like 100,000 is some like arbitrary number that we've deemed to be important because of the social media kind of structure that our our world has now where you have to be cool online and all this stuff.

But yeah it's a slow but sure and I try to remind myself too like well even if a billion people aren't watching it I can still every post and YouTube video that I put up is a chance for me to show up in Google which is my whole SEO thing. So there's also that angle.

[Speaker 2] (30:14 - 30:27)
And you know you mentioned like 16 clients. Have you got clients from the podcast based on because it's fantastic what you're doing having you know the different time frames and everything. Have clients come in through what you're doing?

[Speaker 1] (30:28 - 30:52)
Not yet. But you know eventually I would like to and I've started. I didn't record a commercial until probably like episode.

I don't know if an episode with a commercial has come out yet actually because I didn't start it till episode 9 or 10 because I was like well I'm gonna post my first episode ever and be trying to pull people in. And that's probably not the right mindset. I probably should have just done it from the beginning.

[Speaker 2] (30:52 - 31:27)
No because I'm doing that as well. I think because sometimes people will switch off but once they're in they won't and then when they kind of bit of momentum. So I'm kind of the same.

I've like ones I've done. I try to do the first 10 or maybe 20 without the ads and stuff like that. And then after that because you can see okay there's like you said 27.

I mean yeah straight away like you've got 27 people you're going wow this is incredible and you're at nine episodes like you keep that momentum you know and it doesn't go at three per show. It'll start increasing a lot more.

[Speaker 1] (31:28 - 34:06)
Yeah and it's not only people watching the video too. It can be you know this is very big picture mindset but every time a video goes on YouTube Gemini has access to that transcript that entire video transcript. So if there's 150 videos of me on YouTube saying who I am and what I do and why somebody should work with me that compounds over time and Gemini starts catching on.

Chat GPT doesn't really have access to transcripts right now but there's other ways to do that. I mean if it's if the transcript is provided on the host's website or my website or a clip from it is on a social media platform then over time like people would might start getting recommended to me to hey you should work with Tyler because he pretty much does what you're asking for. And I've had that happen one time not necessarily from the podcast but just from the way that I've structured my website and the kind of personas that I've defined that are like my ideal customer base and a guy about two hours from me in my state called me a couple months ago and was like hey I saw you on or hey I just wanted to see you know what how your services work and what you charge and all this stuff and I closed him over the phone which was really cool and I was like I'm just curious how did you find me and he was like oh I wrote like two paragraphs of what I was looking for in Chat GPT and it said like you were number one. I was like wow I was like well I must be good at it then right and I even asked him I was like do you mind sending me the conversation you had because I'd be curious like what Chat GPT thinks that I'm worth recommending for like what use cases and it was pretty right on the head and so I thought it was really cool and that just goes to say like you can't show up for things online that there isn't content about you online for.

So if you want to have people on your podcast who are underwater basket weavers and that's not advertised anywhere online then Chat GPT would never be able to say like oh you should go on Roy Coughlin's basket weaving podcast because it doesn't exist and people don't that doesn't click for people for some reason I think and so I always make sure when we make a new website or when we're doing posts or anything I'm like what do you want people to know about you and how should people be finding you what is your ideal customer because if we don't define that

[Speaker 2] (34:06 - 34:50)
then these agents are gonna not recommend you and because Claude I'm just curious or other ones but I mean I find with Claude like you can't put in say a LinkedIn profile or say even pod match or anything like that you have to cut and paste why are they blocking that because I mean somebody can say hey look at my pod match profile and the person can go in and look at it it's different I understand kind of going into the back end when somebody's actually a member and things like that but there's a lot of stuff that's actually open to the public and the same at LinkedIn I mean everyone can go in yes it you then it's giving you another job you just have to cut and paste and go through it like if you're looking for stuff on this what why are they doing that

[Speaker 1] (34:51 - 38:28)
well so I mean the way that all these LLMs work like Chat GPT and Claude and Gemini is they have training data that they can access super easily that is basically what they have defined as the truth and so it it Chat GPT very likely by now knows very well that Nike is a sportswear company and they sponsored Tiger Woods these are like 100% truths that it that it knows so if you go ask Chat GPT right now who is Tiger Wood mostly sponsored by it's going to come back instantly and say Nike now let's say that I'm a little bit newer on the scene and it doesn't necessarily know a lot about me like I may may or may not be and it's hard for us to know if we are or not I may or may not be in the training data of Chat GPT so what it would do in my case let's say that you go on Chat GPT and ask who is Tyler Henn and what does he do it has to go and basically google that because it doesn't know off the top of its head that data is not saved and so it's going to reword the question a couple times this is called a query fan out and so it might say Tyler Henn background Tyler Henn company name Tyler Henn age name weight something like that it's going to basically summarize all the results and then deliver that to you and so what all these platforms are basically doing when they don't know the answer for certain is googling it for you and it's basically a faster googler than we are and so we can we have to in that case make sure that there's content on the internet about us uh I'm not sure am I answering your question yeah yeah yeah yeah okay and so if yeah it kind of goes back to what I was saying if if there's not content on the internet about us then we have to put it there and uh it just depends on the entity I think like there like I said there there are certain parts that it knows for certain and there's certain parts that that it has to go and find out and that part can be heavily manipulated so if I went in well I'm probably managing 30 total websites right now um across all all my customers and then I have some personal endeavors too if if I wanted to convince chat tpt that your new basket weaving podcast is the number one basket weaving contest on planet earth I could go and make a page on all those websites and say top 10 basket weaving websites and put yours at number one then when chat tpt goes and looks up what's the best basket weaving podcast well it must be yours because these 30 websites are saying that it's yours and so they're super easy to manipulate right now and it's kind of dangerous um obviously from a pr standpoint because anybody can go say they're the best um and that doesn't mean that that you necessarily are like if I did that with a roofing company chat tpt can't call a roofer out and get their roofer placed and see how the experience was so it has to go off consensus and so I think that will get fixed eventually I'm not sure how yet um but I'm sure the the powers that be will will figure it out um but yeah it's kind of those two different ways I mean there's there's training data and then there's data that it goes and uh has to find and then it will eventually get decided does this go in the training data or are we not certain

[Speaker 2] (38:28 - 38:34)
enough and with like say linkedin when it won't allow it to go in why would linkedin block that

[Speaker 1] (38:36 - 41:01)
well I mean a lot of these companies are are aside from being a a business you know kind of networking platform they're a data company like tesla is a car company but they're also lidar scanning the entire earth right now with their self-driving thing and so why would they want to give that proprietary data to a large language model um and there's also money in it for like chat tpt just did a huge partnership with yelp and yelp actually did give their back end to chat tpt and it's kind of a double-edged sword for local businesses because if you now want to show up for certain questions in chat tpt you kind of have to be running ads on yelp and nobody likes yelp like my customers don't want to spend an ad budget on yelp and so it's kind of frustrating um but we'll see how that unfolds over the over the next year or so um how important that becomes but the reason uh just a side note the reason that yelp is so heavily weighted by uh by agents by gemini and chat tpt is because it's so so difficult to fake a review on yelp like they'll go as far as let's say that you've never left a review on yelp before if you leave your first review on a company that doesn't have very many reviews it's very likely that yelp will just take it down because they don't trust you they don't trust you or the company yet and if you get in trouble on yelp for trying to manipulate reviews over and over yelp will literally put a badge on your uh business profile that says something like we we tried to manipulate the the review system we're not trustworthy and so if you have really good reviews on yelp and a lot of good reviews on yelp um that's something that's worth a lot and a lot of people a lot of business owners weren't prioritizing yelp but the ones that were we've now seen a big jump um because there was a lot of people who for for whatever reason for years and years were asking could you leave us a yelp review instead of could you leave us a google review when when google reviews were very important and now yelp reviews are very important too and those people are going to be ahead um but yeah i think it probably comes down to money and people not wanting to share their data

[Speaker 2] (41:02 - 41:50)
okay and like trustviolet is the same i mean i remember somebody gave a review and i didn't find it for a long time later just i don't know why he came across and i was like i don't even know who this person is you know they were like with an american name based in bangladesh or something like that and they allowed the review up and i'm like i've never worked with them don't know who they are and they still leave it up and so all i could do then was comment on it but yes it gives you know because i i never asked for reviews on things like that it just looks like if someone done a search they're going oh this guy is not trustworthy you know because it's showing a three star or whatever it is like and you know it's silly that people can go and do things like that and it's not vetted so it's actually good that yelp are making sure that it's uh it's decent

[Speaker 1] (41:50 - 44:04)
and we have to be really careful now because all those reviews can affect ai in some way where you could be the best you know you're the pod father but then that one bad review could maybe sway chachi bt from recommending you and so i actually had a case of this the other day um not a client but uh somebody in one of the smaller uh more kind of intimate networking groups that i go to he's an older guy and he just bought a driving school that helps people uh you have to take driving classes in the united states if you get a dui and you have to take like defensive driving and do hours of of good driving and all this stuff and so he bought a business that does this and about two weeks ago they got a bad review on facebook and they realized that it was for a different franchise location across the country and so they're now going through and trying to say we're sorry you had a bad experience but this is not us this is i mean the school that you went to is is 2 000 miles away from us could you please take this down because it's affecting our reputation um so it's good to catch these and try to get them removed and one thing that i always tell my client well i don't let my clients touch their reviews i handle it all for them because i know how i know the best way to handle you know reputation but if you ever do get it like a spammy one-star review on google uh and you are 100 certain that it wasn't your customer that it's malicious or that it's just somebody who's bored and leaving bad reviews never respond to it because once you respond to it it's a lot harder to get taken down so the first thing you got to do is go and report it and google is actually pretty good about taking them down if you report it quickly and don't respond for whatever reason it triggers in their system once you respond to it that they almost see it as a customer because it's like agreeing that that you provided bad service and so um i'm not sure how how far that translates to other uh platforms like trust pilot and stuff but i i would probably consider it to be a good rule of thumb like if you want to get a review taken down don't reply to it and just report it first excellent advice excellent

[Speaker 2] (44:04 - 44:46)
and i'm just curious because when you were talking about kind of doing your own marketing in your own shows does riverside allow dynamic ad inserts because like that was one of the things with pod being in my i'm doing then it was supposed to be included i know they're charging like a buck per thousand which kind of defeats the purpose yet if you take the package before it it's included but then they charge you for more downloads but other platforms don't charge at all and i'm just wondering is that feature available in riverside where you can actually just do one mp3 and insert it and then it goes out on all the episodes no i don't think it is that would be

[Speaker 1] (44:46 - 44:50)
really nice where so it would just be automatically included in in the video you don't have to add it

[Speaker 2] (44:50 - 45:40)
every time no exactly because i've done ones i've done tests for like you know a quarter of a million because i'm getting you know one 1.5 million downloads combined monthly and i can do like half a million just whether it's me talking or if a client gives me the recording and put it out in all the episodes maybe they don't want it on certain but it's brilliant because i'm doing another thing where it's based on someone making a phone call and if the the number lasts like a minute but it's so much work because then i have to insert it in it's not the inserting it's the saving because the whole computer slows down then i'm saying all right i have other computers around but then you're transferring it across then you're going it's just a pain you know of course the dynamic ads part is uh is decent so yeah be curious to see if they they have yeah i'll have

[Speaker 1] (45:40 - 46:04)
to look into that or and if they don't i'll have to request that because that would make my life even easier you're telling me that i can just have the intro added to every single video and yeah that sounds great i'll uh i'll definitely look into that because i'm by no means a great editor which is one reason why i like clicking one button and it takes out all the us and ums and takes out all the pauses um wow that's cool i didn't even know that was an option yeah so like

[Speaker 2] (46:04 - 46:25)
when because i mean i know a lot of podcasters they all have some sort of say to us usually people are coaches of some sort they've got some sort of business so what's kind of the process of working with you like do they have to make changes to the website you do they are you just give them access like what's the kind of whole process how does it work yeah so i always audit

[Speaker 1] (46:25 - 51:57)
first um because some people are actually ranking better than they think they are and they just maybe aren't ranking for the things they want to um and the problem with rebuilding a site from scratch which i is usually what i end up doing um is that if you're ranking well and you rebuild your site you're basically telling google hey i'm starting over and so google says okay well we are too like we don't trust you anymore um and so and you can overcome that with really good redirects and making sure that all the old pages are going to a new page and trying to keep the content kind of similar um but that tends to not be the case in most of the people that i work with um because a lot of people have a three-page website that doesn't really tell google even who they are and what they do it'll say like oh bob's paint shop we paint stuff and you can call us if you want something painted well google wants you to talk about and people too people want you to talk about um what do you paint how do you paint it what's your process how much time do you spend prepping covering things so that there's not paint on your piano and paint on your on your favorite picture of you and your wife um and what can you speak to about painting in the area that you serve maybe there's a particular kind of siding on the houses that needs to be prepped a certain way maybe the paint on the gutters chips away because it's so dang hot and humid and there's all this kind of expertise that you can provide um about working in your area and that gives google a lot of context as to who to recommend you to and that also gives users when they land on your website okay this person actually knows what they're doing i trust them um and so i find that the majority of customers that i brought on are nowhere near that level that i want them to be and so we typically do start over um but i always check first like i'm the guy that i brought on who said that he found me on chat gpt he's actually ranking pretty good um and so our approach is going to be more so trying to expand his reach than it is creating his reach at all um so it'll be a slightly different process and probably we'll run some ads alongside it and and try to kind of take over we're more more so trying to take over the top half of of georgia than we are trying to take over his city he's already got that so it's kind of a higher level approach um and so it's kind of a case by case basis um but we first look at the google business profile most people don't even have all their questions answered on that and so that's that's step zero is what i tell people is that we got to get your google business profile optimized and actually telling google who you are what you do and why they should pick you um from there i build the website to reflect as closely as possible what's being said on the google business profile so if your google business profile says that you're open from eight to five and your website says that you're open from nine to six google's like well right i don't know i don't trust you i don't i don't want to figure it out and it just doesn't show you um we make sure that the the home address is or the the business address is being shown because if it's not being shown you don't rank google does this really weird thing where if it asks you do you serve customers at your business location and a lot of people don't right because a roofing company isn't inviting people to their to their office for the service to be provided typically um and you say no well the google says okay you should be a service area business and we're going to hide your address and you say okay and then you come to find out years later that you've never really been shown because google doesn't show businesses that don't show their address and so we end up always showing someone's address um it's extremely important and then we create a page on the website for every service and every every category on your google business profile and then we talk about our expertise in that service in your area and we found that that gets people ranking uh super well uh pretty pretty fast um obviously depends on the the competition so like i'm going to be able to rank a maybe a locksmith out in the country better than i'm going to be able to rank a roofing company in metro atlanta because there's 3 000 roofing companies in metro atlanta it's very competitive um and so that timeline kind of expands out uh depending on the on the niche but it's pretty cut and dry i mean it's it's getting the the website google business profile aligned and then kind of layering on stuff from there so once we are getting some traction there i start saying well okay do you want to go on podcasts because that's a great way to to get your name out there um what are you posting on social media if if at all and if if you're not posting on social media as a business owner or as a business in 2026 you're behind you got to do it it's really important um and then we look at what are the captions saying what are the what's the content about because we want you showing up on chat tpt for these posts we want you showing up on google for these posts um i look at every post as an opportunity to rank and to show up for someone who may need your service and so it ends up kind of being this holistic approach of how can we just let google and chat tpt and gemini and claude know that you exist that you're ready to help the people

[Speaker 2] (51:57 - 52:08)
that that are looking for your service so two things i'm gonna ask one is the blog first of all is a blog helping when you're putting in stuff that's obviously relevant not just waffling but

[Speaker 1] (52:08 - 55:52)
yeah um so i don't typically put a blog section on my customers websites because people who read blogs are not always necessarily ready to spend money or sign up um and so i always explain to my customers that there's kind of three stages of the funnel when it comes to seo there's top of funnel middle of funnel and bottom bottom of funnel and my favorite example for this is always pizza so let's say that you want to know what new york style pizza is you go and google that that doesn't necessarily mean you want to buy pizza it just means that maybe your buddy just said hey uh have you ever heard of new york style pizza it's pretty good and you go what is that i'm curious and then you go and search it and it says new york style pizza is thin crust it's very crunchy and it maybe i don't know has pepperoni on it usually i don't know if that part's true or not um that doesn't necessarily mean that you wanted pizza that just means you were curious about something and you wouldn't got your answer then you get to middle of funnel which is like maybe a week later you're like you know what new york style pizza sounds pretty good i think i'd like to try it um but i don't know any good places around me that uh that have new york style pizza and so you go and search something like uh best new york style pizza near me now you're getting into you think you probably want to get some but you want to compare your options first and so this place over here has it it's pretty good this place over here has it it's not as good and okay you know now you know well if i get it i'll probably go to this place and then we get into bottom of funnel which is like i've got money in my hand and whoever shows up number one is going to get my money and so you go let's say that you're having a party at your house and you want some pizza delivered and you google uh 30 minutes or less delivery new york style pizza whoever's number one is probably going to get that order placed and i've found that it's hard to talk to write blogs that target that kind of search intent um an informational intent typically doesn't make you very much money and so what i do instead i use quote unquote blog style content to help build up topical relevance for a particular service or category that needs a boost and so the way that i do that personally is you know when you go on google and you you search something and then there's a section that says people also ask and uh you can hit that drop down and and see like okay people are also asking this related question and this related question typically those questions are there because google as a platform feels that those questions are not being answered well enough uh for for users and they're so they're basically asking you to make a page about that question and so i use that as a what i would consider a content gap for the area of the client so let's say a roofing company in atlanta i'm trying to rank them better for a roofing contractor uh atlanta georgia which would be their primary category then i may make a i'll create a frequently asked questions section on that category page and answer questions like what does a roofer typically do on build day how long does it take to replace a roof in atlanta what is the average cost to replace a roof in atlanta i answer it concisely there on the category page and then i link out to a more detailed answer page that's structured below that category page if that makes sense and that helps build up the topical relevance to this the target keyword that we're trying to rank for it very good very good the question i'm

[Speaker 2] (55:52 - 56:22)
curious about because you know some businesses they're kind of from home boss you know the the google and i remember one time i i had an office that i had the address for and it was silly really but other people they don't want to show their home address do they allow p.o boxes because i know there's some companies and they charge a hundred bucks a month or something where you can have your address as such is that accepted and does that hurt you i believe it's against the

[Speaker 1] (56:22 - 58:13)
terms um but i have seen people get away with it um but yeah people i think people make a really big deal about using their home address and but the reality that i've seen is that nobody's coming to your house um if you and if they do i mean call the cops it would be the same as someone coming to your house anyway um they yeah like if somebody puts in directions that they see your your quote-unquote office uh address and they put in directions and realize it's in a neighborhood they go oh it's in a neighborhood and they just move on with their day or they call you or they go on your website and fill out the form that doesn't mean that you can't provide the service um and this is the reality for for most of americans and probably most business owners in the world like we can't all afford to go and get a really nice office and spend five thousand dollars a month on rent and and have all these facilities to serve people and i mean google needs to be kind of reasonable about that which is why they allow home addresses um the only caveat is that you're supposed to have permanent signage on the address so if you have a business at your home it would be good to have a sign on your door or in your window that stays up ideally they would like to be year-round because if someone who doesn't like you drives by and sees that there's not a sign there they can report your business is closed um and so to be as careful as possible you would want to have permanent signage up uh 24-7 but uh you you can film the video with the signage up and get it verified and take it down um so it depends on what level kind of you want to be at and how careful you want to be and and how how much you want to follow google's rules um

[Speaker 2] (58:13 - 58:38)
there are ways around it very good and i suppose just finally because every time there's the algorithms are changing and everything you know like you figure it out hey everybody's at the top and then they just move to gold post and it's like like do they actually tell people what they're or is it a case of you have to then go away and do all the research and figure out what the new rules

[Speaker 1] (58:38 - 1:01:35)
are yeah i mean there have been i mean multiple cases over years and years where google says oh this particular thing is not a ranking factor and then we see their algorithm leaks in a court case and it's very clearly was a ranking factor um and so they do blatantly lie or or give political kind of those politician answers uh where they're not really answering the question while answering it um but what i've found in general is that if you do good seo that is not spammy or or kind of like dirty tricks um you will kind of prevail over time um there are quick wins that could be made i could get all my customers higher than they are right now most likely um but they might drop down to 20th position when google finds out what i'm doing and so it's better to just play the long game and the the answer that a lot of people don't want to hear too is that if you want to stand out in seo in business in general at at refer or networking meetings online you have to be an excellent company like i can't out seo a bad company because it'll catch up with you and so you do have to keep in mind that you have to provide a great service and you have to be around for a while too like a 25 year veteran roofing company in this area who has very rarely screwed up is going to have some notoriety that's just that's just how it is if you just started your roofing company three months ago is it even fair for you to be expecting 50 calls a week um so it's good to get that you know we set a baseline um but i also set expectations i'm like you just started um you're not your phone's not going to be ringing off the hook because you haven't really done anything yet you haven't proved yourself yet um but that's not to say that you shouldn't uh get your google business profile you know verified optimized get a good website up um but you may need to be posting on social media more than usual you may need to go knock on some doors and offer free inspections you may need to to be cold calling your commercial businesses commercial buildings around you you may need to go to 10 networking meetings a week to to get those reps in and start building up your online reputation but once that happens once you start making some money people start recognizing you like i i'm going to minimum probably six networking meetings a week right now and it's starting to come full circle where people in those meetings have become my clients and now at the end of these meetings people are saying oh i just wanted to shout out tyler hen really quick he he got me you know he's helped me so much and if you haven't talked to him yet you should definitely talk to him that goes so far and it's the same thing as is kind of you earn that with google you earn that with with chat gpt um and so you have to

[Speaker 2] (1:01:35 - 1:01:47)
put in those reps and and stand out in some way excellent excellent well look you've given fantastic tips totally enjoyed the conversation you might let the listeners know where they can find you

[Speaker 1] (1:01:47 - 1:02:19)
yeah so my website is www.hen.house h e n n.house uh you can reach out to me there you can learn about the services that i provide um and then i've also got my a podcast section on my website which is my podcast is called the hen house podcast and we cover a lot of topics like we kind of did today it's seo digital marketing focused but we look at how all other marketing channels affect seo in some way uh because they are now more than ever in 2026 i didn't realize there was a dot house

[Speaker 2] (1:02:19 - 1:02:53)
i know there's dot a million things but you're lucky that that one exists that's brilliant fantastic thank you very much tyler thank you so much for it um so that's all for the podfather you find all our episodes on podfather not me find everything about me scan the qr code you find all the podcasts and i've also got a private business networking group you find that and if you're for virtual assistance go to va.world sure to give us a thumbs up five star rating maybe share with three friends i mean you check out tyler's podcast i mean it's new really will help in 27 subscribers come on we get him a few more until next week take care