31. Your Phone Stopped Ringing. AI Search Is Why. Here's the Fix. | Marketing and Visibility

Get your free downloads for this episode here: https://www.outcomeacademy.com/episode31

If your phone has gone quiet lately, you are not imagining it, and you are not alone. Local service business owners everywhere are watching calls drop and Google clicks disappear while doing everything they have always done. Ginny has been talking about this shift for two years, and now it is here: AI search has changed how customers find local businesses.

In this episode, Ginny breaks down exactly what changed and how to fix it fast, mostly for free. She explains why customers are asking Google's AI, ChatGPT, and Alexa real questions like "my dryer is squeaking, who can fix it," and why the businesses whose websites answer those questions are the ones getting recommended. You will learn the Compound Marketing Machine approach of using content as currency instead of renting attention through paid ads, the Marcus Sheridan "They Ask, You Answer" principle of answering the questions nobody else will (including pricing), and the four levers that move the needle: optimizing your Google Business Profile for AI search, getting and responding to reviews, auditing your name, address, and phone consistency, and building a website content library from the questions your customers actually ask.

This one is for every HVAC, plumbing, appliance repair, electrical, lawn care, or bookkeeping owner wondering where the leads went. Ginny's own appliance business, Cavalry Appliance Service, is alive and well through this shift, and that is proof this is fixable for you too. The next Compound Marketing Machine group experience starts Tuesday, August 4th at 12 pm Eastern, with a free digital presence audit for fast action takers.

Grab your free downloads at the link above, and let's get your phone ringing again.

Thanks for listening to The Business Mountain Podcast.

If you enjoyed this episode and want to keep learning how to work ON your business with systems, strategy, and practical tools, here are a few ways to stay connected:

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Transcript

Okay, my friends, for at least two years I've been telling you that AI was going to change how customers find you. And guess what? It's happening. And lately, my inbox and all of our Facebook groups that we follow are full of people in utter panic mode, wondering why their phone stopped ringing, why nobody's visiting their Google, they're getting no clicks. And today we're gonna talk about that, and we're gonna dive really deep, really quickly, about how to fix it fast. I'm here to help you. I'm not here to say I told you so, but we've all heard the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago. The second best time is right now. So buckle up. We are diving deep into AI search today and what the heck is going on and why your phone's not ringing.

Welcome to the Business Mountain Podcast. I'm Ginny Seeley, business strategist and longtime process improvement expert. My husband Joe and I own an appliance service business and a co-working space, so I know firsthand what it takes to juggle growth, leadership, family, and faith all at once. Every week we climb together with real-world strategy, smart marketing, and practical tech for service-based business owners. Grab your gear, let's climb.

Back in episode four, I recorded an episode all about why your phone isn't ringing and how to make it start ringing again. At that time, it was a warning, and I was telling you that AI search was going to change the way customers find local businesses, and that owners who prepared would be fine, and the owners who waited would wake up one day wondering where everybody went. I wasn't trying to scare anybody. I was trying to help you get ahead of it.

But here's the thing about big shifts. They always feel super far away until they don't. And lately the messages I'm getting have changed. It used to be curiosity. People would say things like, "Ginny, is this AI thing really going to matter for my little service business?" Now people are in an utter panic. "Ginny, my calls are down. My leads have dried up. I'm doing the same things I've always done, and the phone is just not ringing. What is going on?" And I want you to hear me say this clearly. If that's you, you are not imagining it and you are not alone. Something really did change. And of course, the economy isn't the best right now, but things don't usually completely fall off a cliff like this.

So it's a combination of things, but there is super good news. Over at Cavalry, our appliance repair business, our phone is still ringing. It's not because we had some kind of magic pill or that we got lucky. It's because we've been doing the work that I've been talking about on this podcast for this entire time. From the very beginning, when we opened our doors in 2021, we've been doing the things that I teach everybody to do. And I'm not saying that to brag. I'm saying it's proof that this is fixable for you. And I'm going to show you how.

I'm going to go through a lot of information today in this episode. And I want you to feel free to pause, go back, but please, please share this with your friends that own businesses, in your BNI circles, in your networking circles, in your chamber. This particular episode is going to be the one that I want you to share and really rescue your friends that are business owners right now, because this work really matters.

About two years ago is when I started talking about this with my inner circle, people in the 8000er accountability groups that I run, people in our appliance mastermind, people in our UASA peer group, people in our local community. I started sharing about this topic, and I started sharing what I was doing and how we were getting ahead of this phenomenon of AI search. The first time I taught about this publicly to a room full of people was at the ASTI convention back in January of 2025, so a solid year and a half ago. And here we are now, solidly in the summer of 2026. And I'm here to tell you that throwing money at your Google Ads is not the answer. Everything I'm going to talk about today is virtually free for you to do. And you have the power to turn things around, and you have the power to turn things around pretty quickly. So please take out a piece of paper, make your to-do list. I'll have some resources in here that you can download. You're not alone, and I'm here to help you. So let's dig in.

First, I want to start with explaining what's going on. For about 20 years, local business marketing worked one basic way. A customer had a problem, they typed it into Google, and Google handed them a list of websites and a map with pins on it. Your whole job was to be one of those pins, ideally near the top. Maybe you paid someone to help you with that. Maybe you didn't think much about it at all because the phone rang anyway.

There's different ways to even show up on that Google list. One is organic. That's what I always teach and what I always encourage. And one is paid. One of the main concepts that we start out with when we go through the Compound Marketing Machine™ experience is understanding what that concept means. And what it means is that basically whenever you do paid advertising, whether it's Facebook or Google or anything like that, when you're paying, you might get some leads. Your phone might start ringing again. As soon as you stop paying, the phone stops ringing.

What we do with the Compound Marketing Machine™ is we start to put, I call it money in the bank, just like compound interest, and we use content as our currency. So in the Compound Marketing Machine™, we're creating useful content that answers real questions that our customers are asking. And we're putting that primarily on our website. And then we're sharing that content all over the place, including our Google Business Profile.

So now people aren't going to Google and asking the same types of questions they used to ask. People are going all over the place looking for these answers. They're not just going to Google. They're typing things like, "My dryer's making a squeaking sound." "My washer is jumping all over the place and banging." "My sink is leaking. Who can help me with that?" "All of the weeds in my yard have suddenly broken through and I can't stay on top of the weeds." They're asking real questions, and they are looking for real answers.

And so when people are asking these types of questions, Google has an AI feature now that is going out and looking for the answers for the exact questions that people are asking. So the websites that are out there that have the answer to the questions, or they have that type of language on their website where they're using sentences and words that the people are using when they're searching, Google is recognizing that that is a valuable website and that that company knows something about what the customer is looking for, and it's serving up those businesses on a silver platter to the customer.

If you've searched in Google lately, you know that we're not getting that same page of 10 highlighted links that we used to get. We're getting a suggested answer that's an AI-generated answer. The same thing is happening when people are searching in ChatGPT, in Claude. They're saying, "Hey Alexa, can you help me find a plumber in my area?" All of those types of things are happening now. So the types of searches that are out there are completely different than the way that people were searching 20 years ago.

We've been talking about this over the past couple of years. How do we build that content bank up? I talked about it so much that everybody was rolling their eyes at me a couple of years ago. Well, last summer we went with our mastermind group, that is all appliance repair businesses all across the country, to a conference called the Huge Convention down in Nashville. And there was a speaker there called Marcus Sheridan, and he has written a book called They Ask, You Answer. And basically, he is talking about a very similar concept, but not necessarily exactly how to do the Compound Marketing Machine™ method. But he talks about making sure that you're answering questions that people are actually asking.

Specifically, he talks about answering questions that nobody else wants to answer. Things like, how much does it cost for you to show up? Approximately how much does it cost to fix a certain issue that somebody has? What is your consultation fee? What are the different kinds of estimates that you can come up with?

So Marcus Sheridan used to work in swimming pool installation. And one of the things he talked about in his keynote is that we all think that we are special snowflakes, and we couldn't possibly tell people an approximate range of what it would cost to do business with us, because of course, there's so many variables. And his answer to that is, answer it anyway. Give people a ballpark. They just want to know what is the worst case scenario, what is the best case scenario. You can give them some ideas about what might impact the different ranges and what might make something more expensive or less expensive.

Alex Hormozi talks about the whole concept of good, better, best. I think it might be the $100 Million Money Models book. You want to give people a picture of what it's going to cost to do business with you. It's the number one question everybody wants to know. How many times have you gone to a website, you're looking for maybe a strategist, maybe you're looking for a fitness trainer, maybe you're looking for somebody to come mow your lawn, and you want to know how much it's going to cost? And the first thing you see on their front page is, click this button, fill out this form, we'll do a consultation, and then we'll give you your price. Well, I don't know about you, but I don't have time for all that. I just want to know the answer. And I don't care if it's not exact. I just want a ballpark so I can make a decision. I want to know if that person is the most expensive person to do business with, the cheapest person to do business with, and exactly what they're offering for the amount of money that they're charging.

So on our website for Cavalry Appliance Service, we absolutely talk about how much it costs for us to come out and do a diagnosis. Does that mean that people are gonna say, "No way," and they're not gonna do business with us? Yes. There are gonna be people that open our website and see that we charge to come out and give a professional diagnosis, and they're gonna say, "No, thank you." They would rather pay somebody $50 that doesn't have any idea what they're doing, and that's okay. We all know that the final outcome of that is that they're gonna pay somebody that's a professional anyway. So we're gonna be there to serve them when they're ready to hire a professional.

So I'm not afraid to tell people that we charge for our professional service. And you shouldn't be either. If you're gonna be in a race to be the cheapest person to do whatever you're doing, you are gonna be bargaining your way down to the very cheapest way, and you're gonna go out of business. We are in the business of offering the best quality experience we can do. We have a money-back guarantee. We train our people at a super high level. We have uniforms. We have lettered vehicles. Doesn't have to be a wrap if you're just starting out, but you need to show up looking like a professional, and that costs money. We have insurance. We have the right equipment for our people. We have software that helps communicate with our customers to let them know when we're coming. All of those things.

And what does that matter in this whole topic that I'm trying to talk to you about, this AI search topic? Well, it matters because all of these things that I just named, they're all things that people are curious about. So if you're putting all this information on your website, do you think that somebody's gonna come to your website and start reading your website from top to bottom and start taking notes because they're so interested in everything you're gonna share? No way. I am not under some delusion that everything on my website is so engaging that our ideal clients are sitting there rapt, looking at our website. What I'm doing is I'm building a library of content so that when people search online, and they're using all different kinds of search, they're using Google, they're using AI, when they ask their questions, the answer is on my website and the AI can find it.

So, to be perfectly honest with you, I hate the idea of writing something for an AI, but that is the reality of where we are right now. And so I want to be very honest with you. I want to tell you what really matters. Of course, you're sharing useful information with people, and they can find it and read it. Our blog that we have is fantastic. We have so much amazing information on there that will save people hundreds of dollars on appliance repair if they take the time to read it. We send it out in our newsletters and all the things to try to educate our people. But ultimately, if somebody searches for an answer about an appliance issue in our local area, we're gonna be at the top of the answers because we have all that information on our website. We have how much it's gonna cost. We give useful information. We have locations that we service on our website. All the things that somebody could possibly search, we are doing our best to make sure they show up on our website.

So I want you to take a minute and think about your own business. I want you to do a brain dump and write down every single thing that your customers are asking you on a regular basis. One of the concepts that I talk about in the Compound Marketing Machine™ experience is the idea of really annoying things, things that you roll your eyes at. When people are asking questions and you think to yourself, "I cannot believe they asked this question. It's so dumb. I can't believe they don't know the answer," I want you to realize that you're an expert at what you're doing. People pay you because you're the expert. They don't know all the amazing things that you know about your area of expertise. That's why they're coming to you. So when you're rolling your eyes, even though it is annoying that everybody asks the same question, that's a really great place to start with the content that you're putting on your website.

So, how do you even get started? Well, we cover every single step in the Compound Marketing Machine™ group experience. And not only do we cover every single step, but we meet every single week. We answer questions. You have milestones to complete. So I highly recommend, if you're investing thousands of dollars in Google Ads, this is a very small investment on your part to understand how this works and how you can take action right now.

Once you invest in the course, you get access to a course called Brand Builder Blueprint™ that has some really important information about how to make yourself look super professional and polished online. Then we have the Compound Marketing Machine™ course that goes through every single step. So once we get through our four weeks of working together, you have a whole library of courses that you can go back to and listen to again.

Also, go through all of the steps in our How to Show Up in AI Search workbook. And that is included inside the Compound Marketing Machine™ as a bonus lesson. So part one of that bonus lesson we've already covered today in this podcast episode. That is all about what is AI search and why does it matter? There's several other parts that we go through in that particular workbook. It's all yours as part of the group lesson. Part two is all the ways that you can optimize your Google Business Profile for AI search. And the really cool thing is it also helps you rank organically in Google. Part three is all about reviews, how important they are, how to get more reviews, and also how to respond to your reviews, especially the negative ones. I know it's painful when you get a negative review, and you want to just respond with anger, and you're so frustrated. A negative review is one of the most precious things you can receive and respond to, to make yourself look professional and classy. So take a deep breath if it happens to you. Don't respond right away, but absolutely do respond. Part four, we talk about something called NAP consistency. And I have a tool for you to help you audit all of your online assets to make sure that everything is consistent across your name, address, and phone number. So we talk about that and what that actually means.

Then we really get into the nitty-gritty of the Compound Marketing Machine™. It all starts with a blog post on your website. And then we do all the things with that content to make sure it's getting all in the right places online, including your social media. I'm not a fan of posting just to post, because your posts only show up for a couple minutes, and maybe nobody even sees them. But this is a really methodical, strategic way of getting your content into the right places. So we talk about all that. Then we talk about how to make sure that we keep on top of this cycle, and we keep doing this consistently, and we keep building our Compound Marketing Machine™.

One of my most favorite quotes that I share all the time is by James Clear. "You don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems." And that's what we do here at Outcome Academy, is we really dive into systems. We make systems behind our branding. We make systems behind our marketing. We make systems behind working on our business in the 8000er program that we have. So everything here is about systems. My background is I'm a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. I have 10 years in healthcare quality improvement and process improvement. And in the hospital setting, when something doesn't go right, people can die. When something doesn't go right in your business, your business can die. It's really important that you get a handle on this marketing strategy. Everything else from here on out, you can make a huge difference without spending any more money.

I do want to make it really clear that it's super important at the onset of this program to have a website and to make sure that you are able to get on there and update things on your website. You need to be able to have a place to put blogs, and you need to be able to put the blog post on there and then get the link for your blog post. And then we take that information and we move forward with it. I've had a couple people enroll, and they didn't really have access to their website, or somebody built it and they're holding it hostage or something like that. Always make sure that you have ownership of your website and that you can get in there and make changes, or that you can get in contact with the person that can make changes and that you can regularly update things. So that's really important.

Now that Logan has joined the team full-time at Cavalry Appliance, we have ramped up our content marketing strategy. It used to be something that I did once a month. I have done that for a solid five years. Logan now is doing this every two weeks, because that's how important it is right now.

Everything we do at Outcome Academy stems from the concept of the Business Mountain Framework™. If you've been climbing with me for a while, you know this already. When you're climbing a mountain, things can change that you're not expecting. Oftentimes, when you're hiking or climbing, you know when something is going to go wrong. You can see the gray clouds coming in, so you can prepare. But sometimes things are a surprise because you were talking or you were having fun or you fell asleep or something. If that's been you, if you fell asleep on your climb when it comes to marketing, I'm here to help.

It means something to me when good people who own businesses stay in business and do well. That means that the bad actors in the industry don't have as much space to hurt people and take advantage of them. So I'm here to help all the amazing business owners that are out there crushing it. I want you to stay in business. I'm here to help you. If you have any questions at all, respond back to my emails that I send every week. Ask me anything.

One of the fast action bonuses that I'm going to make live by the time this podcast airs is going to be an audit of your digital online presence. So if you sign up for the Compound Marketing Machine™ group experience, that is going to kick off the first Tuesday in August at 12 p.m. Eastern Time. It's always going to be lunchtime that we get together. If you're somebody that is on the road, it's an hour. If you can do your best to wrap up whatever your call is before this, even if you join from your work van, it's totally fine. If you can't join and you miss the meeting, they're recorded, there's summaries, there's action items, there's homework. Everything's there for you. I get it. If you're one of my Camp 1 people, which means you're doing everything in your business yourself right now, I understand it's hard to get there by noon. But I want you to try. I want you to take this time for your business. Go all in on something for four weeks, four Tuesdays in a row, and it will make a difference in your business.

So the fast action bonus: if you sign up for the next cycle of the Compound Marketing Machine™ by 11:59 Saturday evening, I will give you a free audit. I'll take a look at all of the assets to do with your business online. And then we will have a 15-minute, super intense strategy session, and you will walk away ready to jump in and fix the things that are broken. You'll be able to do something for sure that will move the needle. And then if you implement all the things in the Compound Marketing Machine™ and that whole AI search audit that we walk through, you will be in a much better place than you are right now.

I know that was a lot to take in. It's not a very happy subject today, but the happy part is that you are absolutely in a place that you can make a difference here, and you can do something about this. But the reason that we're doing it in four weeks this time, it's usually a six-week program, is that I want you to hurry up and get on top of this as soon as possible so that you can start making a difference in how you're showing up online.

That's all for today. I'm very excited for you. Thank you for your hard work in your area of the trades or the service businesses. You're out there doing really amazing things, and you're operating with integrity. And I'm just so proud of you, and I'm here to help you. And I cannot wait to dig in and make a difference in your compound marketing strategy. Cheers.

Before you go, here's your next step. Take the free Find Your Camp quiz at OutcomeAcademy.com/findmycamp. In about two minutes, it shows you exactly where you are on the mountain and which path fits you best, whether that's the Eight Thousander Expedition, the Compound Marketing Machine™, or one of our other resources. And if this show is helping you, follow it wherever you listen. Subscribe on YouTube and share it with a business owner who needs it. Thanks for spending this time with me. I'm super grateful for you, and I'll see you in the next episode.