Pest Control SEO in 2026: Stop Chasing Keywords and Start Building Authority

Okay, on today's podcast episode, let's continue our discussions about SEO content, that kind of thing, but really put a spin on it for 2026. Things are really changing. Stick around and we'll get into that conversation in just a minute. You own a pest control company and marketing and advertising ain't what it used to be. So you know, software and millennials are not the answer. This is the pest control marketing domination podcast. Our passion is to teach you online and digital marketing without all the techno babble. Oh, it still takes hard work, sales and a sprinkle of tech, but we'll teach you how to do it in simple terms. Let's do this. Let's get out with the show. This is the pest control marketing domination podcast and this is your host, Casey Lewis. Well, welcome back, everybody. I'm your host, Casey Lewis. And today we're going to be talking about one of the most important changes happening in pest control marketing. And we'll call it pest control SEO 2026, but more specifically, what we're going to talk about is why pest control companies need to stop, stop looking at SEO as nothing more than a game of chasing keywords. As we go through this, I'm going to try to tie together a lot of the stuff that I've been talking about for the last couple of weeks. Try to bring it all together for you so it makes sense. And the reason I really want to do this is I get calls every day. And I just feel bad that so many of you are being really misinformed and adhering to really, really old strategies that have died, you know, maybe two years ago. But for years, the strategy was really chasing keywords around, you know, find a keyword, try to write some page or maybe some content around that keyword, mention the keyword a whole bunch of times out of city name to it, maybe wait for this, you know, wait for that page to rank, right? And then, you know, you get these guys and they give you these reports and they go on, you know, Google keyword track, or they do all this cool stuff, but it doesn't do anything. That's because search has really changed. And the way people search has changed, I mean, it's come a lot you think about it yourself in terms of you using search mechanisms, whether it be voice, whether it be chat GPT, whether it be Google, whether it be Bing, whatever it is, you think of yourself, you, you as a user, you become far more sophisticated in the way you search for things. You may write to a three sentences when you're trying to figure something out. Now, you know you need to give full context to what that is that you're searching for. And then artificial intelligence comes along and it's really changing how information is discovered, how it's summarized, compared and even delivered. So people, when you think about this, they're really just no longer only typing short phrases. You know, just termite company Dallas exterminator and Phoenix. They're really using complete sentences. And in many cases, look at my wife, my wife just talks to her phone. She'll just tell Syrian, give a whole long explanation of what she's looking for. She uses chat GPT, you know, uses Google's AI generator results. So chat GPT, Gemini, other AI platforms for recommendations. They're searching for answers before they're searching for companies. Okay. And so we want them to really be looking for us, but that's not always the case. And then you wonder what she, I'm not getting these form fills or I'm not getting some of the leads I used to. That must be the economy must be bad, right? The market's just disappeared. Nobody's using pest control. None of that is, no, that is right. Come on. It just means your SEO strategy can't simply be about trying to insert keywords into pages and into content. And I wonder why it doesn't work. And then getting people that you work with to tell you, oh, yeah, no, we're getting there. We're getting there. And you're getting frustrated. You're getting frustrated because you don't really know how to do it. And that's what I want to try to talk about today here. Taking all these things that we've been talking about and trying to say, okay, yeah, that's boring. I've listened to you talk about this now for two hours. What can we really do about it? You know, you need to understand it's about building enough content with context, credibility, and authority for search engines and AI platforms to understand. I mean, we really want them to understand who you are, what you do, where you do it, what and why you are qualified to talk about. And then why your company should be included when someone is looking for an answer or a local service provider. So if you think of it, the sort of the emphasis or theme of this episode today is in 2026 and 2027, which will be dealing with, you know, just a few months away. Successful pest control SEO is less about chasing individual keywords and more about building topical local authority. So let's begin by talking about what, you know, what do I mean when I say keyword chasing? I'm definitely not saying the keywords are irrelevant. They still matter. But you really need to understand what your customers and the consumers in your market area are searching for. You have to have and you need pages that clearly communicate your services and your locations. And you still need to use the language that homeowners and commercial property managers are going to use when they're describing their pest issues. And keywords are certainly no longer the main or primary strategy. And the problem happens when companies treat SEO as a collection of isolated phrases. You know, and control near me, spider exterminator, rodent removal, termite inspection. Yeah, those are legitimate words. And but then they create one thin page or you do for each phrase and they assume the job is done. This is not a complete SEO strategy. It's just a collection of pages. And then Google and AI systems are attempting to understand a broader meeting and relationship between the information. Now let me just sit for a second. Let's talk. Okay, what does all that mean? Really? And you guys, you know, you heard me talk about a book once. This guy Marcus Sheridan, who's big in the content marketing, he wrote a book. They ask, we answer. And in his book, it's an older book. The story's sort of older. It's, you know, it's really was back in the early days of content marketing. But I still use that theory or that idea a lot today. And that is they ask you answer. And it's really honestly the whole concept we're seeing with AI generated information. What did they ask? What is the answers? What are the best answers in relationship to the context in which they asked the question? And we, you know, we make this all sound so damn complicated, but it's really not because what we're really trying to do. So let me give you another example, a drift a little bit. So I'm talking with a client that we're going to start working with on Monday. I've had a couple, they've had their pest control business for a while now. The wife has really been trying to get things done on her own. And she made a classic critical mistake. It's not bad though. So she has written content, but the content is all over the map. Like I'll, I'll, I'll even give you some examples. So one, the first most recent blog article that I'm looking at in here is she writes about water bugs. And then the next one is about carpet beetles being a fabric pest. The next one then is about rent, red ant activity. Then back to the next one. to water bugs and then one just comprehensive pest control solutions in their city name. And seven warning signs you need immediate professional pest control services, best pest control services, pest control services, affordable exterminator. So that's pretty good. At least she has several there under pest control. But what happens here is this much like keywords, right? You have a keyword. Okay, what do I do with it? If I'm not showing up number one in my market and I got these guys telling me, "Oh, gee, we'll get you a number one on page on local search." And then you have to step back and you wonder, "Okay, be a number one on local search." What does that really even mean anymore? Right? I mean, there was a time there were basically 10 links. And being number one meant you're right there. Now you got local service ads on top. You got to Google map listings. You have AI overview. You have your Google paper click ads scattered in there. So and then Yelp gets a review list in there. So there's so much crap. Right? That what does it really mean to get ranked? I want to be in the top three three. I'm on page for my search or or do you want to be recognized by Google and others, AI and others, as an expert on a topic in your market that you can make money on selling recurring pest control or other services. But think just think about what I just said there. Because what I want you to understand what I'm saying to you is the concept of chasing keywords around and trying to get yourself somehow to rank number one organically for something in your marketplace is going to kill you and you're going to spend forever doing it and you're going to be frustrated. You're going to think all marketing companies suck and you're going to think nobody knows what they're doing and you're probably not going to find anybody that can really get that done for you. So where do we go with all this? Okay. So again, we have those two pathways I've always talked about. We have our paid advertising side of the house. It's going to be based on almost entirely ROI. So I spend a thousand do I get at least 2000 back? Period. And I'm not going to get into all the details surrounding well, how do we do that? What's a conversion mean? Is a conversion really a lead? Is a lead? How many leads do I need to get a sale? That's that's that bucket. Then on the right, you have this bucket that is about organic. I will refer to it as sweat equity listings for everything in your marketplace. And I mean everything. Because this is where we got to get away from a keyword. So do we want to show up for pest control near me in our market? Yeah, absolutely. So how do we do that? How do I get to show up high ranking? How do I get to show up maybe even in the AI overview if it shows up for that in my market? How do I get there? And the way you get there is what we're going to talk about today. And I really want you to understand what I'm going to talk about and I don't want this to sound like a bunch of BS. I want you to sort of get this. So I'm going to we're going to go through it slow. But I really want those of you who listen to me and those of you who are trying to understand how can I do better long term for my company just in general in local search for everything or anything that's related to what we do. Three, three words I want you to think about. Content, context and authority. And this now we're working on the organic side. We're not really working on paid side. And the paid side we're going to use while we're building this while we're doing this. And the overall goal is going to be we get to point where we're doing so well with organic stuff that the paid is just used to supplement and to do specialty stuff we want to add in. It's not used to be desperate and survive because we have nothing else. And that's a real big difference. So content is just that it's the content, the information that you publish. It's going to include not just an ultra downable list here of stuff. Service pages, past identification pages, city pages, blog articles, FAQ articles, videos, guides, checklists, case studies, customer stories, social media posts, images, technician explanations, inspection videos before and after examples. That's a content library. And I'm going to tell you without question when we are working with clients and they're busy and they've got a business to run. Doing all this stuff, it becomes something that's not really important to them. They think it is and they'll admit to it but now it gets down to okay let's create a guide. And why do we want a guide? Do we want a guide really because we think all these people in the market, they're downloading guides and reading them about Pesca Troll? No. We want a guide because we want to develop the authority and provide the information in that guide. Again, the guide being maybe one of our pillar pages, right? Remember that concept? The guide can be around the ultimate guide to preparing yourself for bed bug extermination. And then we can go through all of the detailed information in there about if we come out, we do heat treatment, if we use apprehend, if we do whatever we do, and we have all this content in there, what are we doing? We're establishing authority. And yes, we hope some people come across it and so forth. And then we create our additional content for that that's going to that page that's building that authority around that checklist and guide. But it's all about what? In that case, anything and everything that I look up around that, it shows up with a reference to me, to us, to my company. Why? Because I have all this content, all this information out there. And when the algorithms are seeking and searching and answer, they ask you answer. When that question comes, you're the obvious answer. Why? Because you built up that what authority? So first thing I'm going to say to you, first thing. And I know of as majority, aren't going to, you know, it's going to go in one ear or not the other and it just doesn't seem like it's worth the time, the energy of the money. You need to sit down yourself with your team. Hopefully you've got a good team. And you need to create via cluster, topic cluster, content, a library of content like this for everything. Now, what I'm saying is this, do you want to really do it? I told you last week, if you listened at all, sometimes I get frustrated because I will get people that call me back four or five years later saying, okay, you know, we're ready. Let's do it. And I think to myself, you know, I just read you this laundry list of content and creative information. If they had started and we had been doing that for the last three or four years, where they would be today as opposed to starting over. And that's what I'm going to tell you right now. So it's June 13th, 2026. So that means Monday is going to be the 15th, right? Right in the middle of June, right? Dead end as we're getting into the hardcore best months of the year for pest control. Excuse me. If you will sit down and do this, pick one topic. What is the one thing that you make the most money on that you want to show up always in your market to anyone who's looking for something related to that? Define it. Find it. Figure it out. Once that you do that, then sit down. And if you need any help, give me a call, send something over you. You don't even talk to me just some email or something. And I'll send you something to help you get started on a content library. But build a content library with meaningful legitimate content. Don't go to AI, chat, GPT and say just write this all for me. You can use it to help you. But make sure you're there. sure you know the context of that content. And then go get that published and start getting to publish. Now June 2026 by March 2027, if you do this, you'll be a subject matter expert in that topic, that one topic, and you will be showing up all over the place for it. And all of a sudden you're going to realize, wow, if I did that for the top 10 topics that I have and really spent some money on that and understood that I'm investing in myself, my business, and my market, my community, then you're going to start to understand very quickly how well and how, excuse me, how fast that you can become that authority in that market. Again, go, go look in the way. In Southern California, anywhere in Los Angeles, area, look, look up, pest stuff, and you're going to find Lloyd, Lloyd pest control. I don't know how long Lloyd's been doing it, but they've been doing a long time. I can tell just by looking and you're not going to see anything. You go, wow, that is really outstanding website. It's not. It's kind of an ugly website. It's kind of, you know, not even design all that well, but I will tell you on the back end of it, it answers all the questions. So that is content and content has to be a strategy and it has to be unique. And you don't go on Fiverr and find someone for five dollars that will just whip out some content for you. They use chat GPT in five minutes to do. This is real local content created and developed with a spin by you because you're the guy that's been there a long time. You know the market, you know the consumers, you know the tendencies. And so it's not necessarily that pest control companies have a content quality problem. That's not always where it starts. They have a content volume and content organization problem. For example, they may have a decent homepage. They may have a page for residential pass. They have termite, run, mosquito, blah, blah, blah, right. But to have them create any supporting information to demonstrate a broad spectrum of knowledge of those individual subjects. That's what I'm trying to get to get, you know, you to think about. One page does not normally establish expertise. Authority is built through depth, consistency and a connection. Now, again, I'm pounding, man. This is two, three weeks in a row that I want to get this through to you because now now is the time to take action on this and build your house. And I can give you an example. One of the things. So it's hard for us. So we may go build someone a great, what we refer to as a smart pest control website. And it will be built initially, essentially, on replacing one that was probably substandard and then making sure we have all those initial pages we need, making sure all the contents good, making sure everything's, you know, optimized properly. It's indexed properly, et cetera. And so, but then people, you know, they'll spend a good amount of money on that and they think, okay, well, now I'm done. Right? I'm done. No, no. All you've done is build the foundation for the additional volumes of content you want to now connect to that site to create authority to now drive traffic. And what are those basic numbers for online marketing, right? Traffic, a percent equals leads, a percent equals sales. That's your basic funnel. And the broader and bigger, your funnel is at the top, the more stuff coming into it, the bigger the number or that, not necessarily the bigger the percentage, the bigger the result of that percentage because we have a bigger number at the top to begin with, that can turn into leads. And then now what? More leads. Again, same percentage equals more sales. That's the essence. It just in terms of your thinking, the upward to downward flow of what we want to happen. So that was the first C content. Then we're going to go context and then authority. So context, what do we really mean by that? Right? You hear people talk all the time and they'll say, well, they took that out of context. Right? You see the crime shows, right? It's not a confession. He really didn't kill anybody. It was taken out of context. Well, what does that really mean? So let's, let's explain how your content might relate to somebody's situation. For example, a generic article that's titled, how to get rid of ants may be useful. But an article that's titled, why are Argentina's invades Southern California homes during hot weather is going to provide significantly more context. And it's going to be able to identify for AI engines, Google and Bing search engines. It's going to identify the pests, the geographic area, the environmental conditions, the customers likely concern the type of expertise the company possesses. You understand what I mean there? I'll tell you something you can do just for fun. And we do this in one form or fashion for almost all of our customers. So I'm going to, I'm actually typing it out right now because I just want to see how many of our guys still show up. So there is a term and it's called some variation of do spiders really crawl on me while I sleep or while you sleep or did they go in my ear? And apparently this is an enormously searched term in terms of context. Context. I guess people really worry about spiders are crawling on them at night. So I'm looking through this. I just did it. And the very first, the very first link I get right at the top is one of our clients. And it just says, do spiders crawl on you while you sleep? And then that's the answer to the question or the search query that I put in was, do spiders crawl on me at night. And then I looked down a little bit more and there's another one of ours and then another one of ours, et cetera. All right. And you may ask yourself, okay, why do you do that? I mean seriously, why do we do that when that's going to generate nationwide kinds of search and results and we may be in a certain area and we're not going to necessarily benefit from somebody who's looking and reading that article. Is that right? No, that's absolutely wrong. Because we're matching that up, we're gaining that authority, we're gaining some traffic. When you have traffic and domain authority, all of your other content starts to rise in terms of where it's found. So it's very significant. Now, we don't always want to have just individual articles that are going to have nationwide attention and not provide us anything local. And that's why, you know, again, this one, we're talking about why Argentina and some Vades, Southern California homes during hot weather. That's a very specific question that's going to have a very specific answer that's going to resonate in terms of context in a very specific area to a very specific issue. And then your context can also come from the relationship between the pages. So your main and control page should connect to supporting content. So this is sort of that pillar page. And then those spokes, right, I talked about a bicycle rim and the pillar page is in the center and all the spokes going out to the rim. Those are all your, your connected content. So your main and control page should connect to supporting content about different ant species, for example, seasonal ant activity, indoor ant prevention, exterior ant treatments, why store bought ant sprays may cause more problems than they solve, pets safe treatment, considerations, ant activity around your kitchen patio and landscaping, frequently asked questions about ant control. And you can see these could all be a combination of blog articles and videos that are building the authority for that topic for your area. And last I'm going to talk about the authority, but I want you to stay with me because I know this can get a little boring and you're going, oh my God, how am I going to do all this? But here's what I want you to consider. Okay. One of the things that makes me mad is in the last two homes that I've sold, they looked their best and they had finally gotten finished right before I sold them. You know what I mean? I kind of had to get everything done because we got people that are going to start looking at it and we got inspectors that are going to come around and so forth. So you finally kind of forced yourself right, 15 trips to Home Depot and paint and stuff and well this is the same thing and don't do what I did when you're working on all this stuff and wait until it's the last second you have to do it. Start right now. Every weekend what I should have been doing, my wife tried to get me to do it. It didn't always work out so bad that every weekend I should have been gotten up Saturday, morning, say 8 a.m. and just spend three hours, get some stuff done. And every Saturday, every Saturday, every Saturday, right? And then before I sold the house, now I don't have a cascade of stuff that I've got to get done all at once because I've got buyers coming over and we're trying to make as much money as we can and I should have got all this stuff before. So get this stuff done. And if you need help, give me a call and we're going to be having workshops and we do have workshops periodically and I'll let you know just for this, just for this, to get this stuff done. Then the authority. So we have, remember I said three words, right? Now let's talk a little bit about authority. So authority is what you gain when your content and context consistently demonstrate that your company knows what it's talking about. And I do understand folks that all this stuff is somewhat ambiguous. You know, Maws came up originally with what was a domain authority score, but the reality is, and what you've heard me talk about, nobody knows, everybody's sort of acting and masquerading around like they're the expert on all this stuff and they know how and why and when and where. And they don't. I've been doing this stuff since it started. Okay. I mean, I was the, I was the guy right left in the in the in the battle torn yellow pages when they came collapsing down because nobody thought Google could actually become a threat. I was in and I was there and I was around when pest control guys first started building websites and they were ugly and awful and didn't work and nobody even knew how to do them. They were all coated from scratch. It was terrible. And I don't know exactly what domain authority is and that's why I always use that rather ambiguous example of Google authorship. But what I am here to tell you is when you do this and you follow through and you get around 25 bits of good content that's in the right context, it starts to show authority by means of showing up. It shows up and I can give you example after example of our own clients that we've been with for a significant amount of time that are killing it in their local market and it's not because we're chasing keywords around and we got these guys doing these spreadsheets and all this cool stuff and all these reasons why it's not working on what we need to do next. No, it's because we've provided a large volume of authority with the right context over an existing period of time and it's built up authority. And once it gets to that authority, all our Lloyd pest control, everything starts to show up all over the place. Why? You're a trusted authority by those algorithms that are tasked with matching up search queries. That's simple. So again, authority is what you gain when your content and your context consistently demonstrate that your company knows what it's talking about. It's not created for example by just claiming, you know, we're the best pest control company in town. Everybody says something like that. Authority is demonstrated through evidence and that's what I was just talking about. So we can talk all the crap we want if we're going to walk the walk, authority is demonstrated through evidence. So it can be demonstrated by an a list of things here for you to consider. Detailed and accurate service information, real technician experiences, the authors, biographies, professional licenses and certifications, original photos, original videos, customer reviews, local case studies, your years of experience, industry memberships, your community involvement, your consistent business information, mentions unreputable local and industry websites. Those are your better links and go into some link building form and just paying to try to get links that don't matter in your industry anyway. Helpful answers to specific customer questions. When all of these signals are working together, the search engines have a greater and more clear understanding of your company. So you're just not seeing a website that contains a key word or two, right? They're seeing a legitimate local business with meaningful experience and a substantial body of information. So the question guys, is that you? I know for most of you because I deal with this every day and have for many years here. The answer's no. Let's not, you know, let's not pussy footeray. It's no. The bigger question is what do you intend to do about it? Anything? Are you willing to take a pot of money and just center decide and say, I'm going to invest in this. I'm going to go put together a plan. I'm going to stick with it because I know it works and I know I don't know when it's going to work. Exactly what day it's going to be that all of a sudden my content on a particular topic starts showing up in my market area and I start getting leads from it. Is it going to be Wednesday? I don't know. I don't know because this stuff has to get out there. It has to get indexed. It has to get evaluated. So I'm going to take you back and I have a lot of content of my own right here in front of me that I want to share with you, but it's too much. It really is too much because I'm going to kill you with this stuff. You're going to get bored hanging up on me and I'll never hear from you again. But I'm going to just touch on one more time. This concept of pillar pages and topic clusters around a single topic is what you have to do with everything you're doing and do it for a long time consistently. So here's the concept again. I'm going to I'll go slow and then then we'll call it a day. It's Saturday. It's you know I'm in Las Vegas. It's now busted 100 degrees and so I may actually go out and do a little swimming later today. I have a nice pool I built. I really had it built mainly for the kids. Kids my grandkids have now moved to Tennessee so I've got this pool and it's weird right just me and my wife got there sometimes but my daughters here so hopefully we can have a little fun. Anyway one of a topic cluster is a group of related content built around a primary subject and those subjects you need to really get narrow. You know like even thinking about termites you can have one that's just termite inspections. You're going to have another that's termite treatment and the variations of treatments we can provide and then we can have another that's yet about termite repair work. So now we have termite damage it needs to be repaired so we can clear escrow this kind of thing and then you can go all the way to will we do structural fumigation how all that works. So there's four basic clusters around one topic and all of those could have a pillar page all of those could then have their own individual related content so that it's in the proper context so when someone out there is looking not just generically for a termite company but they're specifically looking for an inspection or report or maybe they already know and they want to see about getting treatment. or they want to get repair work done, they've already got the report. Now they're trying to, you know, shop around, find someone to can do the actual repair worker or fumigation. So all of those can be very, very different. So let's just say that what we do is that we create it. And it's the complete guide to termite control and repairs. That's going to be the concept of the pillar page we're going to create. Excuse me. And then in that pillar page, we can talk about common termites in your area, signs of a termite issue, how termites enter your home, what are your inspection procedures, how do we remove, and all of these kinds of things. That's in the pillar page. That's the pillar page. So we're going to, then the, the supporting clusters of content around it might be how to tell whether you have termite problems, what are common termite entry points, etc. Right. So we have 15 documents and five videos and they all link to and go back to our pillar page. Go do that. Go do that. And that same structure can be used for bed bugs, for mosquitoes, for rodents, for ticks, wildlife, commercial, lawn care, eco-friendly services, property management, restaurant. So you just keep going, right. You're building this Winchester Mystery House and you just keep going. And I'm going to go to Lloyd. And I'm going to just do this. So I'm going to go to Lloyd, Pest Control. And I want you to do this. Just go look at this. Okay. So I go to Lloyd, LloydPest.com, L-L-O-Y-D, Pest.com. And you're going to see, there's a website there, right. Well, okay, big deal. And it's not even really anything exciting in terms of the design, seeing many, many of them better in terms of what they look like. And then I'm going to go, and I'm going to just go, I'll just select, I want to serve services. No, I want to residential and has up here on the top. And I'm going to go to bed bugs just for the heck of it. And then I'm going to look at this and there's some bed bug content on the top. And then there's talk about canine inspections. And then there's articles here. I'm just looking. They've got connected articles, the frustrating factors that have helped bed bugs flourish. How do you kill bed bugs? Bed bugs, the wrong kind of vacation souvenirs. And these are just three. And I'm sure there's more. And that is just one bed bug page. It's not even done all that well. But let's go, let me just go over here and let's go bed bug companies. Let me just see what happens in Southern California. And let's see who's who's doing it with bed bugs in this market, right? Okay. So I go and AI overview. Southern cow has numerous licensed pest control company, especially in a bed bug treatment. So we end up here with corkies right at the top. Bed bug seekers, Griffin Stanley and the bed and the bug man and Lloyd's not even there. So maybe Lloyd isn't doing as great or as big around bed bug as I think and they're more about general pest control. Corkies is the counterpart to me of Lloyd. Corkies is another one that shows up for damn near everything in Southern California. And if I go look at corkies, pest control website and I go look, I'm just looking at areas served right now and same thing. They actually have done some of the almost same thing that Lloyd has done. They got their pricing here. They got road and control pricing gofers. They got all one of the most common pests. They're all here. So go look at some of this stuff. Challenge yourself and I don't care how small the market is. I don't care where you are. The main thing is if you're in a smaller market with less competition that's not doing this, the all of this will matter and happen faster. So I'm going to just go back real quick. Just what do we just talk about content, volume, segregated and organized into segments around topic clusters. Context. They ask you answer explain it all. Don't be generic. Don't be short. Be specific and have lots of lots of stuff in the right context for whatever you want to be able to service that they may be looking for. And then the authority aspect of it when you really look at it, what are we, what are we really saying that we are doing all of the things we can in our marketplace to demonstrate and show authority. And I gave you a list of stuff that you can do. Do it. Do these things. It will pay off for you in spades. It's like I said, it's like working on your house every weekend, right? Then when you go to sell it, all that equity you have in it because you've already got it all done and you're not being dumb like me and waiting till it's time to sell it. Now I got to run around like a crazy man and do it all at once. I've talked a lot about topic clusters and pillar pages and I don't want to pound it anymore. I think you get the idea and how extremely important it is. But then let's talk a little before we finish up about not treating your blog like it's a storage room. And what do I mean by that? What I mean is most of you who have a blog may or may not understand really, okay, now I have it. That's cool. What do I do? Who posts the articles? Who's creating the articles? Are they organized and in the seasons by topics so I get some value? So in essence, for many S. Control companies, the blog just becomes a storage room, right? I mean every month or so another disconnected article gets thrown in. One month it's about termites. Next one's about mosquitoes. Then there's a holiday article that an article about spiders or rodents. You know, there might be a generic post about preparing your home for winter, but there's really no structure or no clear objective. There's no real relationship between the articles. You know, a company you may have published a hundred blog post, but the website site still doesn't really establish any meaningful authority around any particular subject. Think about that. Don't waste your time and your money. Do one things just to do things and you don't really understand why are we even doing this? Publishing more contents, not enough. You need to publish content with an intention. Before you create an article, really just ask what is what's the main service or topic that this supports? What customer questions is it going to answer? Where does it belong within the website? What page should I link it to? What related pages should it link to? Does it provide information that's genuinely useful? And does it reflect our actual experience? Can we add an original photo, a video example, or even a technician's quote? Does this content help the customer move closer to making a final decision? So your blog should not be just a random collection of articles. It should be an organized knowledge system. And that's what makes AI workflows. So let me just think here. So moving forward, I'll just going to say something without really getting too elaborate. And this is one of the biggest mistakes that SEO make in writing content. SEO people or gurus or everybody knows everything out there right? Is writing content that sounds as though it was created for a search engine rather than a person? I mean, here's an example of what these keyword experts might put together. If you need pest control in Nashville, our Nashville pest control company offers the best pest control Nashville homeowners can trust. Call our Nashville exterminators for Nashville pest control today. But nobody wants to read that. It doesn't build trust. It doesn't demonstrate any expertise and it does not create a customer experience, right? Modern content should clearly [BLANK_AUDIO] answer real questions in natural language. Think about the way a humor might speak. I found what looks like termite wings near my window. Does that mean I have termites? I keep seeing ants in the kitchen, even though I cleaned everything. Where are they coming from? And so forth. And so on. So I want you, I'm not going to I have a bunch of stuff in me in front of me. And I'm actually looking through now. But I don't want to go off here on a podcast episode trying to teach you and train you how to put together your content. What it should see or excuse me, what it should say for each topic and to whom we're trying to talk to you. Now, the next and final piece of information I want to talk about and this is something we're dealing with a lot here in our organization right now is SEO for AI or V chat GPT and voice search. I mean, that that's really important because pest control, you're really no longer optimizing just for those 10 blue links on a traditional Google search results page. Those days are long over you go look at that Google search result page. And even the top two or three results for pest control now page, they may be buried two thirds of the way down the page. Because that information really now it can it can appear in Google's AI generated answered featured snippets, your local map results, voice search responses, chat GPT answers, Gemini results, on and on and on. There is no guaranteed trick that's going to force an AI platform to recommend your company. But you can make your information easier to understand, trust and use. Now we have been adding to some of our older clients to each one of their pages of frequently asked questions section. And then to that section, we're making sure that the frequently asked questions and answers there are really topical in nature to that page and that information's that makes sense. I hope so. But that's what we're going to do. And then once that we started doing that, guess what? Little by a little they start showing up all of a sudden an AI overview. And why is that because nobody yet is got there it's starting. It's happening now. And that's why encourage you to go get on it. This is the one time you can maybe leap frog a little bit in front of some of those other companies that have been doing all these things for many years and you've fallen behind. Well, AI overview, chat GPT and voice search just changed all of that. By making it possible for you to again to kind of leap frog in front of those guys that have always had that, you know, the number one full page out in there that you could never get by because he always had renewed it and was always there. So think about that. And I'll finish up with this. Keeping us keeping my context to my content about this topic in line. Remember experience expertise, authoritativeness and trust. That's EAT that comes from Google. I'm not making up some cool marketing hyperbole here. It is what you need to do in your content in the right context to establish this authority in the digital world. So that your company shows up and you make money from all this and you need to start doing it now because what we're talking here is about building a structure that's going to last in time. And it doesn't have to really be complicated. For example, simple technician can shoot a short video explaining why ants are entering a home during a particular time of year. An inspector could photograph termite and mub tubes and we can explain what they indicate a wildive technician could take a picture or short video and show a common roof entry point. A lawn care guy could show and explain how hot weather conditions will affect the weeds or your turf health. It's original, it's experienced based content. And it is very difficult for competitors to duplicate it because it comes from your company. It's that simple. That's not hard. That's not hard. So I'm going to kind of leave it there. There's even more to this. I mean, we can go on and on. We can talk about the authority of your website and what you need to be doing to make sure that that we're staying on top of that. You know, the architecture of it, the content of it, the ongoing growth of it. So do we have a budget to make sure we're always adding more because that's what we want to do. And I keep saying I'll end don't I? I'm an end. I'm an end. I'm sorry. I shouldn't drink coffee before I do these. But anyway, the last but not least, technical SEO is still your foundation. And I'm not trying to put myself in a position where I'm saying out there, abandon traditional technical SEO. You know, although this episode, it's really focused heavily on content and authority. Technical SEO still matters. You can't build a beautiful library of useful useful content on top of a website that search engines cannot properly access. So the basics have to be done. I mean, it has to be mobile, friendly, it has to be has fast needs fast load speed needs to be secure or properly indexed, logically organized, supported by an accurate XML site map that's delivered and connected to Google search console. We have analytics installed. We have all of our title tags and descriptions and et cetera, et cetera. So all of those what I'm not saying is don't worry about it. I'm not saying that at all, we provide as part of our services ongoing management to all of those things to ensure they're always in play. Because as I just said, if we do all these wonderful things, I'm talking about content topic, clusters of context and authority and all this, we have to have all of it go to a good place that's organized logical indexed et cetera. And that's going to be done through a lot of our old and traditional SEO best practices, I guess, if you will. So I think that's really about what I want to talk to you about. And next week that what we really need to start moving towards another area that I'm seeing that it just kills me guys, it kills me. But that is surrounding a real strategy on how should we how should we increase the number of our leads that convert into sales? How do we do that? And if we don't have the right people that we are employing to do that or if we're trying to do it all of ourself, then we have to have some training in place, some basic minimum requirements on what are we doing with these calls that we're spending all this money to generate? We'll talk more about that as we get into it next week. I hope I'm not boring you to death and that I'm not doing too much on this SEO stuff, on this AI stuff, on these topic clusters. But I need you to understand this because we can't move forward in time and get you to the place to where you're able to take advantage of all this because there is great opportunity here. If we look at the other side of that coin or we look at that glasses half full, there's great opportunity. So as always, always everything we're doing here is to your success. So God bless my name's Casey Lewis. I'll see you next week and we can continue the discussion. You've been listening to the Pest Control Marketing Domination podcast. If you own a pest control company anywhere in the country by using our services, we will help you grow and prosper. Casey has 30 years in marketing and advertising under his belt. He managed and oversaw a sales force of 4,000 inside and outside sales reps task to work with every pest control owner in the USA. Thanks for listening to the show. Make sure to like, rate and review and we'll be back soon. But in the meantime, find us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube at Rhino Digital Media. Let us take your digital marketing to the next level. See you next time on the Pest Control Marketing Domination Podcast.