Winning Local Search With Smart AI Habits

The noise around AI makes it feel like a silver bullet or a looming threat, but the real advantage comes from pairing smart prompts with strong SEO bones. We walk you through a practical, repeatable system to win local search and get cited by AI tools like ChatGPT and Grok, without chasing every trend or burning cash on guesswork.

We start by resetting expectations: AI pulls from the web’s existing sources, so your job is to become the clearest, most trusted source in your niche. That means tightening your Google Business Profile with accurate categories, detailed services, fresh photos, and consistent updates. It means shoring up your site’s on-page SEO—clean titles, fast pages, structured headers—and earning backlinks from local chambers, partner sites, podcasts, and credible directories. These signals teach both search engines and AI that your business is real, relevant, and nearby when customers ask for help.

From there, we turn AI into a brand-trained copilot. You’ll hear how to build a living persona inside your AI tool: feed it your voice rules, product details, positioning, and examples so it drafts on-brand copy for emails, captions, and landing pages with minimal edits. We also demo a “cheat code” workflow: ask AI for a localized ranking checklist, mine keyword clusters and hashtags with clear intent, and convert them into a four-week content plan that maps topics to posts, stories, and pages. Along the way, we share a case study of a local agent who rose above competitors by aligning profile updates, backlinks, and keyword-driven content.

If you’re tired of vague advice and want a clear playbook to show up first—on Google, inside AI answers, and in your customer’s feed—this is your guide. Subscribe for more practical marketing breakdowns, share this with a business owner who needs it, and leave a quick review to tell us what you’ll try first.

Transcript

Old Tactics Still Matter

Where AI Gets Its Answers

The Checklist Cheat Code

Don’t Panic: Keep Showing Up

Closing And Where To Find Help

Using Multiple AI Tools Wisely

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Hey y'all, what's up? It's Shelby. Welcome to another episode of your favorite podcast. I'm excited to talk today about AI and marketing and how we can use that to really help your business thrive in today's world. Marketing and SEO and AI and all the things, those terms are just being thrown around so much by different industry, like industry partners of mine, people that are trying to scare you, people that are trying to make it seem so big when really it's very simple. It's something that you can do on your own if you have the time, if you have the patience to learn it, or you can even hire someone like me who's like, y'all, we don't have to spend a thousand dollars just to figure out what your Google Business Profile is trying to do for you. So when we're talking about AI and SEO, I want to kind of simplify some things for you guys to just really help you understand how easy it is to make sure that yours is exactly or optimized how it needs to be for your business. So whenever we are searching on AI engines, so that'd be like Chat GBT, Grok, Jasper, there's all kinds of different ones that you could be using for AI. Um, they are directly pulling their information from you guessed it, Google. They're they're getting their information from Google, from Yahoo, from Bing, from the other search engines. AI search engines are nothing special. It's something that it is literally pulling information from the internet that has already been there, at least been there since 2019 or before that, because sometimes it's got to be updated. I'm not quite sure what that update is right now. So it's very important to understand that when you are thinking about your SEO and your AI, how all of that incorporates together, know that we are not just gonna shoe away the old SEO optics that we have been using or tactics that we have been using. I still want you to go to social media, post three times a week. I want you to stay on your story. I also want you to update your Google Business profile and make sure the back end of your website is optimized. We want to make sure it's SEO optimized. If it is not, then it's not gonna work for you. If you don't have backlinks on your website, it's not gonna work for you. If you're not constantly showing up on podcasts or interviews or getting your website linked on other websites like chamber sites and things like that, it's not gonna work to the best of your ability. Now I'm gonna give you a little cheat code. I did this for a client of mine. It um they are a state farm agent, and I went to AI and I put his name in there as well as the city and was like, hey, how can I optimize his web presence to where it will show up first on Chat GPT before his competitors? It gave me a checklist, y'all, of the things that I needed to start incorporating. That means I needed to start incorporating certain keywords on social media, certain hashtags. I needed to do a couple of backlinks on his website, of which I didn't have any control over because State Farm does that. And it also was telling me how I needed to update his business profile on Google. Um, it was already updated once a month. I thought I'd been doing all the things, but there's a couple of things that it lacked on there that it was like, hey, if you will update this stuff, then we will be able to push forward him before anybody else on in his territory. Now AI is still new and I prefer Chat GBT over anything. I do have a few clients that prefer Grok. So I don't want you to be scared and think that everything that you've done so far, SEO-wise, has not helped. Like, yes, it all helps. It's still helping. You still want to get out there. But think about like back in the day when the internet came about, Google came about, like everybody didn't really rush to it, right? But now it's just like a freaking traffic jam. We're trying to get in front of other people as much as possible. Another way you can use AI to your advantage is go on there and start a chat, and I want you to pretty much explain your entire business to the AI system that you're using. So Chat GPT knows me, the marketing broker, knows how long I've been in business, knows how I like to write things. Um, I'm almost to the point to where I don't even have to edit anymore that what Chat GPT is writing for my business stuff because it knows me so well. In fact, it knows me personally so well, I rarely um edit the stuff that I ask for it to write for me as well, like emails and things like that. So you want to go on there and educate your bot about you and your business. How do you like to portray yourself? How do you like the content to be um read? What are your your values and missions and things like that? Like you need to really thoroughly explain yourself to this bot. Don't be afraid about it because guess what? It's already googling you, it's already looking you up, and it probably knows you better than what you already know yourself. So just dive into it. If you're gonna dive into it, go for it. Do not just halfway do it. I want you to go for it. So create a persona through your Chat GPT or Grok or whatever AI system you're using, and make sure that it knows you up and down, left and right, your business, it knows everything. Then I want you to ask it a few questions, like those are also called prompts. Um, what are some keywords in fill in the blank of whatever your industry is? Uh, what are the best keywords to use on social media in the marketing world? What are the best keywords to use on social media in um the insurance industry? And so then when you are really nailing it down to those specific keywords, I want you to then create posts around it so you can continuously use that and make posts if you want to, or you can make posts on your own. So don't be afraid of AI. I want you to go for it, dive into it, because I promise you, you will learn that you will have success in it in the end. If you need any help, I'm always here, themarketingbroker.com, or you can buy me on all the socials. See you next week.