Land Tier 1 Media Mentions and Win at AI Search: Digital PR for Local Service Businesses

Summary

In this episode, Chris Panteli, co-founder of Linkify, discusses how local service businesses can leverage digital PR to gain media coverage that enhances their credibility and drives revenue. He explains the concept of expert quote link building, the importance of having a strong online presence, and how to effectively pitch to journalists. Chris also highlights the value of backlinks from reputable media sources and the role of AI in modern media strategies. He shares common mistakes businesses make in media outreach and provides actionable steps to implement a successful digital PR system.

Takeaways

• Digital PR can significantly impact revenue for local businesses.
• Expert quote link building is a powerful strategy for gaining media mentions.
• Having a well-structured about page is essential for credibility.
• Visibility on platforms like LinkedIn enhances your chances of being quoted.
• Broadening your expertise can help you respond to diverse media requests.
• Pitches should be concise and directly answer journalists' queries.
• Not all media publications hold the same value; assess their authority.
• Setting a routine for media outreach increases success rates.
• Your first media mention can lead to more opportunities.
• The landscape of media and SEO is evolving with AI and LLMs. 

Chapters

00:00 Unlocking Media Opportunities for Local Businesses

02:45 Understanding Expert Quote Link Building

05:49 Navigating Inbound Media Requests

08:09 Positioning Yourself as an Expert

11:20 Crafting Effective Pitches

14:20 The Value of Backlinks from Media

17:09 Leveraging AI and LLMs in Media Strategy

20:19 Common Mistakes in Media Outreach

23:21 Implementing a Digital PR System

25:54 Achieving Your First Media Win

Links

https://www.linkifi.io

https://x.com/Linkifi_

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-panteli/

Free High-Converting Website Checklist: FroBro.com/Checklist

Transcript

Jeffro (00:02.089)
If you run a local service business, you might think getting featured in Forbes or the BBC is out of reach. But what if it's actually easier and more profitable than you realize? Well, today's guest is Chris Pantelli, co-founder of Linkify, a digital PR agency that helps service businesses land media coverage that actually makes an impact on revenue. He and his team specialize in expert quote, link building, helping everyone from plumbers to roofers show up as trusted authorities.

Not just on Google, but in AI powered search results too, which matters a lot these days. Now in this episode, we're gonna talk about how to win inbound media mentions, why your competitors probably aren't doing this, and why digital PR is the most powerful SEO asset you're not using yet. So welcome to the show, Chris.

Chris Panteli (00:44.472)
Thank you so much for having me, Geoffrey.

Jeffro (00:46.878)
Yeah, definitely. And I'm excited to talk about this because this approach is different from the typical backlink building strategies we often hear about. But before we dive into some of those tactics, what exactly is expert quote link building and why is it working so well right now?

Chris Panteli (01:01.494)
Yeah, sure. So digital PR, think you can split into sort of two buckets outbound, which is where you're coming up with the story. You're building a list of journalists that you think might be receptive to the idea. and then you're sending that out with the hope that it's going to get picked up by multiple publications. Whereas inbound digital PR requests, specifically expert quote requests is where journalists are proactively working on a story and they're looking to pepper in quotes from experts that are going to

enhance the credibility and authority of the article that they're working on. And the opportunities now are the best that I've seen them in half a decade, because I think with the onset of AI, it's now more important than ever for true editorials to be published with authenticity and have real expert insights. So journalists are just loving to use this as a way of...

making their articles better so that opportunities are just there.

Jeffro (02:02.142)
Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I like the distinction you made between the outbound approach and the inbound. But when you said that, it makes me think that you'd probably have to do outbound for a while until some of the journalists start to know you before they come directly to you with those inbound requests. Is that the case?

Chris Panteli (02:17.706)
That is not the case. There are a number of platforms, aggregators, the journalists post these requests too. So they'll put out a wide net. There's a service called Harrow, help a reporter out, which was founded by Peter Shankman about 15 years ago, then got purchased by a big media conglomerate. They ran it into the ground. It's now been brought back to life. Peter Shankman, the original founder of Harrow also launched another service called SOS, Source of Sources.

Both of these are free at the point of service for the experts to sign up to and start receiving these requests. There's a plethora of other places you can go, quoted, spelled with a Q. Press plugs, response source, editorial press flow, press plugs. can even follow journalists that you know are repeatedly covering the industry in which you operate and follow them on social. They're most active on Blue Sky, X, Threads.

Set alerts and these journalists they'll post these requests across multiple platforms and also on their socials as well So they're always looking for these experts and they are posting these daily. So the opportunities are there

Jeffro (03:31.391)
Yeah, so and like you said, horror has been around for a while, but doesn't, I imagine that would bring in a ton of pitches and information, like a quote, people saying like, hey, use my quote, right? So how do you actually get through that and be the one that they pick? Because I'm sure they just ignore a ton of those.

Chris Panteli (03:50.348)
Yeah. Well, I think that's one of the reasons that Harrow in its original format sort of died was because of this onset of AI spam bots pitching the journalists to death or extinction even maybe. So yeah, we do have to be extremely wary of the amount of emails that they're being sent, the amount of responses, but I also think it's a golden opportunity, a golden era to quite easily stand out amongst the crap because...

And especially for home service businesses, like if you are a genuine roofer construction expert, and, you know, you've, you've done some basic things, which I can discuss now. We'll set you like 99 % above the crowd and the journalists will spot that instantly. And, and they'll be really, really intrigued and want to use what you've said.

Jeffro (04:39.486)
Okay, well I want to hear more about how you find the specific media opportunities that are worth pursuing and what's changed enough now so that it makes this approach more powerful and worth doing.

Chris Panteli (04:53.282)
So what I would recommend is first of all, as a business owner, you need to have a few things in place. You need to have really, really good about page and you need to make it really, really easy for journalists to navigate to your website and with one or two clicks, be able to determine who you are and how you are associated with that business. So if you are Mike's Roofing Company.com, then

The journalist is going to click on that website and they want to be able to just quickly and easily see an about link and about button. When they click there, they want to see a big picture of Mike, the CEO of Mike's roofing company. And they want to see a good fat juicy bio that explains how long he's been in the industry, why he's a roofing expert, all of his awards, credentials, accolades, all of that good stuff. So they're not going to be doing a CIA level investigation on you and your business, but they are going to make that click and that search.

And if somebody else has made it easy for the journalists to verify that they are who they say they are, and they've got the skills and credentials that they say they do, and you've made it difficult, then they're just going to pass on your submission and go to the next person. So super simple. We should be doing this anyway for SEO, EAT, LLM visibility, but get that nailed down. And then you also need to have visibility outside of your website. So a really, really strong LinkedIn profile. This is the journalists go to.

doesn't have to be LinkedIn. You can use other social platforms as well. a lot of people in home services will have like a large YouTube channel, the YouTube following.

Jeffro (06:41.725)
Hey, you're back.

Jeffro (06:48.195)
you're still connected were still recording so maybe just back up a sentence or two and then

Jeffro (06:58.799)
If you need to leave and rejoin, you can.

Chris Panteli (07:16.947)
Sorry about that. I'm back.

Jeffro (07:20.294)
All right, is it better now?

Chris Panteli (07:23.431)
Yeah, it's okay.

Jeffro (07:25.338)
Yep. All right. So you were telling us, walking through how it works for a roof or something, you've got the website set up and then talking about the next part.

Chris Panteli (07:35.773)
Yeah. So once you've got that done, you need to have that wider visibility outside of just the website. You need to make it really easy for the journalists to go outside the website to again, verify who you are. This is more diligently done in like YMYL spaces. So not home service, think anything medical finance where the journalists really want to make sure that the people that they're quoting are experts and reliable. But

Again, like you said earlier, like they are getting tons and tons of responses from other roofing experts. So if, if they can quickly and easily verify who you are, the skills and credentials that you've got, it's going to make their lives much easier. And they're much more likely to stick with, with, with your response. So I definitely recommend having that optimized optimized about page. And then also that secondary profile on a platform such as LinkedIn, but the more, the better, you know, if you can get listed in,

trade publications, citations in different places where you are repeatedly explaining who you are, how you are associated with the company, skills, awards, credentials, accolades, all of that stuff. That is a huge part of the puzzle before you've even started writing a response to one of these requests.

Jeffro (08:50.929)
Right, and at this point, correct me if I'm wrong, but I would imagine if they're looking at these other places like LinkedIn and your social presence to kind of validate the fact that you're an expert and you're speaking on this stuff, that's almost gonna be more important than just the about page saying, I've been doing this for 20 years, right? It's more like, I've been doing this for 10 years and I'm all over these other platforms, that's probably gonna win over the guy who's just, you know, super roofer.

Chris Panteli (09:14.993)
Yeah. So they're looking for, they're looking really for that clear visibility to their audience, to their readership, that they have got somebody that is backing at whatever point that they're making in their article. So let's say realtor.com is doing an article on property valuations and the age of a roof. Like, is it worth getting a new roof a couple of years before you sell a house? Like, is that a good investment? A roofer can have a really good opinion on that.

a, roofer that's, know, just got an about page and no other web visibility, like their readership will go and check these people out. So it's on them as journalists to deliver the best information and reliable information that they can to their readership.

Jeffro (09:59.642)
Yeah, no, that makes sense. So what about for the business owners who might not think of themselves as, I mean, they know they're good at what they do. They know they're a professional. They might not think of themselves as an expert in the sense of, I'm the person that gets quoted on the news, right? So how do you help them get past that hesitation and kind of embrace the fact that I could do this?

Chris Panteli (10:19.229)
Yeah, it's crazy because the opportunities are so wide and varied and they are producing content at such a ferocious rate that if you've got that real world experience and really are, a roofer has been in business for 10 years, then it's more than legitimate that your opinions are valid. And what another key is, that you

that you are prepared to read these requests in a way that you broaden your expertise to be able to match the request. So what I mean by that is you don't want to be answering queries from journalists for Healthline about cancer as a roofer. It makes no sense. But if Architectural Digest is sourcing for an expert to talk about home staging, let's say.

and you're a roofer and they're looking for tips on home staging. Yeah, they're going to get a bunch of responses from home stages, real estate experts, realtors, but as a roofer, you could legitimately have an opinion on, you know, a few cosmetic touches to a roof can have a significant impact on the sale price of the property. And that is a really valid, legitimate contribution to that journalist article. But they may not have viewed themselves as somebody who could...

answer that query. you just need to have that open-mindedness to the sorts of queries that you can answer.

Jeffro (11:51.098)
Got it. Are there any positioning elements that increase your chances of being quoted or featured on something? Like as a general rule?

Chris Panteli (12:01.161)
in terms of like how you pitch.

Jeffro (12:03.97)
Yeah, how you talk about yourself and what you know and present yourself.

Chris Panteli (12:08.229)
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So two things. One, answer exactly what the journalist has asked you. Don't do any more. Don't do any less. They're normally extremely specific. So if they ask for three sentences, half a paragraph, then give them three sentences, half a paragraph. Don't give them a PDF. Don't send them a link to one of your obscure blog articles. Don't send them a YouTube video or a Loom video. Do exactly what they've asked. And then be really

concise in the way that you deliver your pitch. Just do a simple subject line that matches their request. You don't need to think about like click through rates on email subject lines. Like the journalist is getting a bunch of these and they just want to be easily be able to see what's related to what. So if they're looking for a roofer to answer a query for an article about roofs in architectural digest, then just put a response for architectural digest roofing query. Really, really straightforward and simple.

And then introduce yourself at the beginning, who you are, and clearly explain your position, your company, your experience in a very, very short way, less than a paragraph. Mike from Mike's Roofing have been in business for 10 years. We're one of the largest roofing companies in X, Y and Z. And, you know, we won the nation's best roofing company last year, let's say. Another great thing to do.

tack on the end of that. If you have managed to land one or two pieces of tier one coverage as you go, let them know other places you've been featured as well. So let's say you start this journey and you manage to get a quote in realtor.com and I I say I've also been quoted in architectural digest and realtor.com then hyperlink and your website within that opening paragraph, but also in brackets include a naked URL. that's important just on how journalists email systems handle.

hyperlinks. So you want to give yourself the best chance. We're not like throwing it in their face that we want to link, but we're you know, quite politely saying, this is who I am. This is my business. And this is the link to the business. Cause ultimately, you know, that is what we want. Then go straight into your pitch and then at the end, be polite, again, say who you are and provide that social proof as well. So provide that, that LinkedIn URL or that YouTube URL, just so that they can easily all from within that single pitch email.

Chris Panteli (14:34.569)
Click to go and do their verifications on who you are.

Jeffro (14:38.499)
That makes sense. So let's say once you've gone through this, your thing gets published and you're quoted, you get a backlink to your site. So what's the difference between a backlink from one of these journalist sites versus one that you've maybe got before that was just for SEO? Tell us about that.

Chris Panteli (14:58.089)
Okay, well, firstly, you don't always get a backlink, unfortunately. So, to the scourge of those embarking on this sort of link building digital PR journey, actually it's quite common for them to not link. Now, that could be for a number of reasons. They forget, they're lazy. So they'll often just copy and paste stuff from the email. They won't even amend your quotes. And if your link is within that...

Jeffro (15:01.432)
you.

Chris Panteli (15:28.019)
Let's say the link breaks or their email adds like a safe scan metrics to the link. Like there's a whole number of reasons. may get stripped out at the editorial process. That particular publication may have a no link policy. There's a bunch of reasons you might not get a link. So what's really important to do is to have some simple tracking in place. And this will massively increase your link.

The brand mentioned in of itself is super valuable, especially for LLM optimization and visibility. But ultimately, if we're going to get the brand mentioned anyway, we may as well go after the link, especially if we've already pitched it and won. We've won that pitch, the journalist has quoted us. So yes, you want some really robust but simple tracking. So the way that we recommend it, Google Alerts and Talkwalker Alerts. And within there, you want to put your name.

with open quotation mark, closed quotation marks, your business name, but every variation of your business name. So if your business name is Mike's Roofing, you want open quotation marks, Mike space Roofing, closed quotation marks. And you also want open quotation marks, Mike Roofing, no space, closed quotation marks. Any variation of your business name that the journalist could potentially attribute within their quotes.

And then you want to have these alerts come directly to your inbox and check the alerts. You also want to manually search the SERPs as well. Depending on how aggressively you're pitching. mean, in-house we do this every 24 hours, every day, every week and every month. But you could just do this on a weekly basis. So you just go into Google, use those same search syntaxes. So your name and every variation of your business name within the SERPs and just go to the tools section, search and set the timeframe to seven days.

And you can look through all of the results of past seven days, check your alerts as well. then, there we see an article on realhomes.com. It's got my name in it. You click on it, you go in, they haven't linked to me. So then you go, okay, that's fine. Then you want to see, have you got an open email thread with the journalist? Maybe they emailed you back and said, thanks for the quote. This article is going live next month. Which case that's your first call. You email the journalist, hey, I've just seen this article. It's awesome. But you know, is there any way you could.

Jeffro (17:35.447)
you

Chris Panteli (17:50.761)
add a link to my site. And then after that, then there's other strategies. You can try and find the editor of the publication. can systematically follow up with that journalist over a period of time if they don't get back to you. So there's lots you can do, but 40 % of the links that we win for clients start their life as those unlinked mentions. So it is an important part. And then your second question, why are these different to just SEO links? So these babies are hard to get.

A lot of SEO links, you can just go to an SEO marketplace. They're linking out to a load of other garbage, casino sites, porn sites, weapon sites. You're in a bad link neighborhood. To win a link on architectural digest, you've got to go through this process. It can't be bought. It has to be editorially earned. They're huge branded websites that will pass huge amounts of authority to your website and you as a personal brand and your business. The trust signals, the...

large language models, they're taking like, you know, 80 % of the businesses they recommend. If you look in the sources, recent studies showed that like 80 % of these are from tier one media. So it's just all good stuff. Yeah.

Jeffro (18:58.41)
So let's talk about the AI side and the LLM for a bit. Is that the only reason that the earned media is showing up more in the LLM responses and the search summaries? Is it because it comes from the tier one sources?

Chris Panteli (19:11.143)
I mean, it's really early days to definitively say anything like SEO is so established. We've got the tools, Ahrefs, SEMrush, you know, it's all very, very established and quite easy to track. It's a bit like the Wild West I'd say at the minute with the large language models. What I will say is what we're seeing with clients and what some of the early studies are saying is that they're using these tier one sources. They're also using listicles from like authority sites as well.

I mean, you can see this in real time, just, you know, make a search and you can click on the sources and see where the large language model has pulled those recommendations it's making. But one has to assume that very much like in the early days of Google, they needed to put 10 blue links on the first page that they could trust. If someone's searching about cancer treatment, they don't want to be putting on some scammy affiliate site. just, know, they have to, they had a system which was largely based on links.

So LLMs are going to face the same issue. So one would assume that tier one sources is a safe bet for them. yeah, early suggestions are that this is the long-term. At the end of the day, building a brand, trust, it's never not going to be a good thing.

Jeffro (20:24.553)
No, that makes sense, that's intuitive. What are some of the most common mistakes that you see people making when they're trying to get media mentions on their own?

Chris Panteli (20:33.257)
Not having a good system. So you want to set aside a certain amount of time each day, maybe the same time per day. Start with the free sources. Harrow, I think, is emails thrice daily. Pick one of those times, sit down for an hour, look through the emails. Only pitch what's relevant or what makes sense with the caveat that you can broaden your expertise to queers. And then also have a good system.

to make an assessment as to the quality of the publication. Not all of the journalists and journalist publication combinations of these requests are worth the same. So we've all heard of Architectural Digest, we've all heard of realtor.com. You may see a site that's called like houseandhome.net. Like have a system to determine the validity of the publication that's sourced in. I'm not saying it's a scam.

But house and home.net might be like a very low DR site. It might be like a mommy blog or something. No real power, no real authority. And it's just a waste of time for you to pitch that. Whereas you'd have been better off pitching the architectural digest request. You may have less chance. You may have to pitch that more, but have a system to determine the validity of the publications that you're going to pitch. We've got a free blacklist, which people can use linkify.io go.linkify.io slash.

a DPR dash blacklist. you can sign up for that for free. That's our internal blacklist. I mean, you can use that, make a copy and then have that as like a living, breathing document. We also use Ahrefs as like a first step in determining that. So DR and traffic, but really the ultimate, deciding factor is have you heard of the publication? If you've heard of it, then go for it. Yeah.

Jeffro (22:23.145)
Yeah, now that makes sense. All right, so while we're talking about systems then, can you break down how your system works for a service business? If someone comes to you, they wanna hire you and say, hey, help me do this. I'm a website expert, so you can use me as an example, but what does it actually look like to say, let's do this and then blah, blah,

Chris Panteli (22:40.819)
So the first thing we do, obviously, look at your website, look at your business. So make an assessment, is it a good fit for digital PR? And the way that we would suggest that is almost all home services will be, but some you need to be a bit broader than others. So let's take pest control, for example. That's a great space, but not every query is going to be specifically talking about pest control. There may be articles where there's a broader topic where we can inject some form of

pest control related topic to be worthy of discussion within that article. Some might be much, much broader. could be, I'm thinking homes, kitchens, I'm thinking, know, restaurants sort of stuff. It may not be hyper relevant to like, let's say their main service offerings or their main service pages that they want to rank, but that's not the goal here. The goal is to drive real authority to the homepage, to the website, and then to the founder or the

expert representative. So we'd look at that. We'd make sure that that founder expert representative is, is clearly, like I said, associated with the website and visible on the website. It's no good if a pest control company rings me and say, Hey, look, can you pitch as my marketing manager? Like no journalist in their right mind is going to quote a pest control company marketing manager as an expert on some broad pest control query. So once everything's aligned there,

then we would make a pitch template based off the onboarding form. take all of the information, make them look as brilliant as possible in terms of their expertise, accolades, awards. And then obviously we're fully built then just to identify and assign the the opportunities which we think are the best fit. And then we start pitching. And in terms of pitching, if you are pitching yourself as an app,

Chris Panteli (24:50.895)
Sorry, man. I've got a really temperamental microphone and it just keeps, if it goes loose, it disconnects. You all right?

Jeffro (24:55.284)
All good.

Yep, I can hear you good.

Chris Panteli (25:00.803)
Okay. So in terms of pitching, we want to, if you are an absolute expert within that space, then you can, my best advice for you is to use a hybrid AI approach. So look at the query. If you do need to do a bit of additional research, then use some of the good research models like perplexity. Have those notes in front of you and then your own, obviously, knowledge base. And then you want to dictate your response.

into an AI dictation tool. can use the notes feature on an iPhone or one of these like Mac whisper tools. and you want to just speak your response and have absolutely no regard whatsoever for your ums, ours, just speak your, speak your truth. and just inject your own, flurry of the, of the English language, idioms, turns of phrase, your linguistic tone, just allow all of that to sort of.

role-free, but obviously, keep the content exactly what you want it to say. You're to get a big block of text in your iPhone note or in your outputted dictation. And then you just want to use a really simple prompt in another AI tool, so it's a ChatGPT or whatever you're using, and ask it to reformat and correct the text into readable paragraphs and sentences, retain as much of the information as possible, but improve

the logic of the response. That will output a 99.9 % human response, but it will also be perfectly formatted and legible for the journalist.

Jeffro (26:43.537)
Yeah. OK, makes sense. Well, this was really cool, Chris. So thank you for walking us through how this all works and how a local service business can kind of punch above their weight class a little bit when it comes to PR and search visibility. And it's a very cool approach. And I'm excited to revisit it for myself as well. So for those of you at home, if you want to learn more about how this works or get started with your own media strategy, you can check out the links in the show notes, including Chris's free press coverage cheat sheet.

Chris Panteli (26:55.472)
Yeah.

Jeffro (27:10.151)
and that other one that you mentioned earlier, the blacklist, right? So we'll put all that in the show notes. And I've got one last question for you, Chris, before you go. What's one media win that somebody could reasonably land this quarter? And what could that do for their visibility?

Chris Panteli (27:14.467)
The... Yeah.

Chris Panteli (27:30.299)
in terms of publication.

Jeffro (27:34.018)
Yeah, because I mean, OK, out the gate, you know, are you going to get the best one out there that's going to quote you? Maybe not Forbes, right? But what's within reach?

Chris Panteli (27:39.899)
Okay, okay. So I would say that realsimple.com, realhomes.com, go banking rates, do a lot of stuff. These guys are like the sort of the first rung that most people will land. If you get that, then direct impact to the business. If you've got a low authority score, it's going to pass juice to your homepage straight away, but it does two things I'd say.

the more than that. One, it gives you that first publication to cite within your opening paragraph to the next journalist. So already you've got that instant legitimacy. And two, it gives you the confidence and the buzz of that first win. So it's actually really cool when you first get featured in an article and then you can share it on social. You can share with your customers, you can repurpose. There's just so much you can do with it. yeah, just...

Go out there and get started because the opportunities are there. And if you haven't got the time, that is something we can help you with. you can definitely go and do this 100 % on your own.

Jeffro (28:42.822)
Nice, and that first one will start that snowball for you. Yeah, that's so cool. All right, well, thanks again, Chris, and thanks to everybody who's listening. When you try this out and get mentioned in some big publication, please tag me on LinkedIn or Instagram to let me know, because I'd love to hear about it. But that's it for this episode. Thanks again, Chris. Guys, keep dominating, and we'll see you all next time.

Chris Panteli (28:45.637)
Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Panteli (29:02.287)
Thanks, Geoffroy. Thank you.