The Future of Local SEO in the Age of AI with David Hunter written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
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Episode Summary
In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews David Hunter, CEO of
Local Falcon and
Epic Web Studios, to explore the rapidly evolving landscape of local SEO.
With over 15 years in digital marketing, David brings a grounded and tactical perspective on how businesses can thrive amidst the rise of
AI-generated search overviews, shifting consumer behavior, and proximity-based visibility.
They dive into topics like AI Overviews, how tools like ChatGPT and Google’s generative AI are reshaping local search, and what multi-location
brands and small businesses alike need to prioritize to stay competitive. If you’re wondering how to future-proof your local SEO strategy, this one’s for you.
Key Takeaways
- 00:34 – AI Overviews Are Reshaping Search: Google is becoming the answer, not just the index. This change is reducing click-throughs but offers new opportunities for visibility.
- 03:00 – The Shift to Conversational Search Behavior: Consumers—of all ages—are adapting to natural language searches. “Best plumber near me who can come today” is the new normal.
- 05:27 – Proximity Still Matters—but Less Than You Think: Local Falcon’s study of 60,000+ queries shows authority and relevance are overtaking proximity in AI-based local search results.
- 08:26 – Understanding AI’s “Best” Results: Tools like ChatGPT may pull from obscure or outdated sources. Local Falcon helps identify which directories and citations are influencing those results.
- 13:09 – What Should Local Businesses Be Doing Differently? If you’re doing SEO ethically, not much changes—but content structure and clarity become essential.
- 14:37 – Ask AI What It Knows About You: Literally query ChatGPT about your business to see how it understands your brand and services.
- 15:35 – Structure Your Content for AI Comprehension: Use clear formatting, bite-sized paragraphs, FAQs, and schema markup to enhance visibility in AI-generated answers.
- 17:54 – Multi-location SEO Strategy: Brands with many locations have more visibility chances, but need consistency and brand clarity across each location.
Connect with David Hunter
- Website: localfalcon.com
- X: https://x.com/LocalFalcon
- Local Falcon LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/local-falcon/
- David’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidhuntererie/
John Jantsch (00:01.026)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is David Hunter. He’s the CEO of Local Falcon and, or an AI powered local SEO platform and Epic Web Studios, a digital marketing agency in Pennsylvania. Over 15 years in the industry, David has been instrumental in transforming how businesses approach local search optimization with lots of things going on in search of all kinds. That’s what we’re going to spend some time talking
So David, welcome to the show.
David Hunter (00:31.871)
Thank you for having me, John. I’m happy to be here.
John Jantsch (00:34.764)
So let’s start big picture. think the thing that’s causing a lot of, depends on what side of the fence you’re on, suppose, a lot of angst, but also a lot of joy, I think, in searchers is this idea of AI overviews. How have those kind of generated overviews that are showing up now as the top results changing the landscape in local SEO? I know that’s a big question, but let’s start there.
David Hunter (00:59.431)
Absolutely, yeah. it’s really, you know, it’s not a small, so AI overviews are not a small change. It’s a fundamental shift. It’s not a little algorithm update, which is what we’re used to as marketers working with Google and others. But this is a big difference here.
I think the biggest complaint that marketers have is that it’s evaporating the clicks to your website. it, know, sort of complaint number two is that it distills the answer on its own. So Google is no longer just simply the provider of 10 blue links. Now they are a content creator. So Google as a content creator is fundamentally different from what it has been for the last.
John Jantsch (01:29.836)
Yeah. Right.
David Hunter (01:52.395)
30 years or so. And that’s a big difference. But at the same time, on the upside, boy, it gets the answer very quickly. Now, it might not always be the right answer. The sources might be a little bit weird, but to the end user, it does a very quick and efficient job of getting you to where you need to be. And so I think that as far as the future goes, it’s looking very bright in terms of our opportunity.
John Jantsch (02:22.178)
Well, I think it’s really changed search behavior. And that’s why I say what side of the fence you’re on. think a lot of consumers really like it. You know, instead of typing in plumber near me or plumber in my city, you know, it’s like, who’s the best plumber in this city that has X amount of reviews and could could show up in the next 24 hours? I mean, that’s what we’re searching now. And so that fundamental shift is really, I think, from a consumer standpoint, if they trust the answers they’re getting, you know, in the overview, then.
That saved them a lot of time of having to shuffle through and figure out who they ought to call. So you can see why the consumer behavior is really shifting dramatically.
David Hunter (03:00.015)
Absolutely, yeah. And I mean, it makes sense, you know, like we, as consumers and users of Google, we’re definitely used to typing in, you know, yeah, pizza near me, and finding a quick response through the map pack. I mean, that’s fairly efficient, but you don’t get that nuanced conversational answer. So what we’re doing as consumers, and I think that
It’s almost a happy accident by Google that they’ve rolled out AI overviews and then phase two is this AI mode, which I think is sort of the future of what the Google SERP looks like. They’re almost training us as consumers to start querying with long tail conversational searches. And so I’m seeing that behavior change. And I look at it.
John Jantsch (03:41.272)
Sure. Yeah.
David Hunter (03:47.339)
And I have colleagues that are always like, well, you know, the old folks, they’re not going to do that. Well, yes, yes, they are. You know, my father’s like pushing 70 years old and, and, you know, I see him on the regular using, conversational, you know, searches and, and, and getting good, good feedback from it. So that’s right.
John Jantsch (03:53.621)
Yeah.
John Jantsch (04:04.846)
Well, yeah, once you get used to it, we want what we want. So it’s like, yeah, I’m going to talk to it like a human being and give them all my details because I’ll get it. know from experience, I start getting better answers.
David Hunter (04:10.879)
That’s right.
David Hunter (04:16.575)
Yeah, I think it takes maybe five or 10 searches for the average person to realize I should be doing this conversationally.
John Jantsch (04:19.372)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you spend a lot of time on proximity, with, some of the tools you’ve created. I know when I first started in search, you know, the, big thing was we had to, we had to optimize our site for, grew up in Kansas city. So I’ll use that example. have to optimize our site for Kansas city and all the suburbs and all, you know, to try to get traffic, you know, from, from those places, Google’s gotten really good at proximity, right? I mean, meaning if I searched that whole, the typical search.
a remodeling contractor near me. Well, it knows where I am, you know, maybe even to the street corner. And so it’s going to say, okay, well, you know, within reason, you know, here are the six that are closest to you. So how is that changing, you know, especially the example I use, the remodeling contractor. I mean, that’s not like a, like a dentist or somebody that like is going to have a
have a footprint area, right? I mean, I might be able to serve a 20 mile radius. So how is proximity playing and how do we take advantage of getting it to show us in a wider range?
David Hunter (05:16.0)
Right.
David Hunter (05:27.699)
Right, so, and you’re dead on about that with the service area business. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for them to really get even more visibility because of this. When local search first became a thing, there was proximity and then prominence and relevance, right? Those were the three components that made up local search. Right.
John Jantsch (05:36.952)
Yes.
John Jantsch (05:47.212)
Yeah. Have a lot of reviews.
David Hunter (05:49.981)
Right. And be relevant. the, you know, if I’m looking for a remodeling contractor, don’t show me a list of barber shops. Right. So it’s got to be relevant. And obviously it gets much more nuanced than that because well, what kind of remodeling and, you know, home remodeler commercial, you know, whatever. So bathrooms, kitchens, but there’s, there’s definitely a shift happening. And so at local Falcon, we have basically spent, we’ve built our platform on tracking results around you, right? The grid, use a grid pattern.
John Jantsch (06:17.838)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right.
David Hunter (06:19.657)
where you can basically see over top of your business, but then expand it out however far you wanna go radius wise, and then you drop a bunch of pins and you could see these results. Well, the future is definitely changing. And so we recently wanted to roll out a tracker for AI overviews around and chat GPT that’s similar to local Falcons core plan and that it’s got the grid interface, but…
is using the conversational platform to see the results. And so before we did that, I said, well, we need to do, I need to see if this is valid, if it’s even worth doing, right? And so we ran this big study. We put, you know, 4,000 some businesses in there and ran like 60,000 different searches and looked, looked, basically studied the patterns and what was going to come out of that. And that’s where we learned that like proximity, it matters, right? It matters at like a city level. It matters at a, you know, sort of
you know, regional level, but it is not factoring anywhere near the, you know, with the level of authority that it used to. So it’s important that you still, you know, focus on, if you’re a remodeler in Kansas City, that you focus on having that localized content and, you know, authority around that. But the, you know, the relevance and the, you know, the prominence, you know, the expertise, that stuff is really what starts to kind of show up
in terms of like the position that you put in, right? And I don’t even call it ranking because it’s really, it’s more about the position because it’s a natural language response. It’ll weave business names into this paragraph of text that it gives you. Now, it also does a list below and whatever, but yeah, it’s less about the ranking now and it’s more about your position within that ranking. So it’s important because you still need to be known as someone that.
serves the Kansas City area, but less important when you’re dealing with like near me because it’s gonna probably pull a list of the best remodelers around the area or what it thinks is the best.
John Jantsch (08:26.284)
Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting. you know, obviously showing up on the map pack for a local business. you know, I’m, I’m old enough to, it used to be seven at one point. it’s three, if you can find it, know, midst all the other stuff, exactly. Right. but if I go to chat GPT today and type in a geographic search, best remodeling contractor, Kansas city,
David Hunter (08:36.843)
You always know it’s 10. Yeah, 7, 10 and 7. Now it’s 3. Yeah.
Right. All the ads gotta come up there first, you know?
John Jantsch (08:57.42)
what’s pulling up there. Now, I don’t think a lot of people are necessarily doing that kind of search yet, but they will, right? so, theoretically, are the results that are showing up there, what a common, an amalgamation of like all the searches actually determining you’re the best or is it determining you’re the most trustworthy, you’re the most prominent, you have the most authority, you have the most reviews.
David Hunter (09:24.299)
It’s a great question. So, you know, I think that anybody who tries to tell you that answer is going to be full of snake oil, right? Like nobody really knows how that is pulling in and, and, you know, coming together, there’s a lot of different theories out there. There’s a lot of different, really strong, you know, methodology that’s been put to the test in terms of like, what, you know, I don’t want to get too technical, but like embeddings and vector vector embeddings and like passages within the website.
John Jantsch (09:49.026)
Yeah.
David Hunter (09:51.915)
how it pulls all that information together is definitely different. They’re not using Google search results per se. I do think sometimes they kind of slide them in there, but for a while they were focusing exclusively on Bing places. So I can’t say that it’s gonna provide you with the absolute best list, but it’s pretty close. So I live in the Great Lakes up in Erie, PA, and I did a…
that exact search pizza near me. And I, you know, this is a city of an area of 250,000 people, there’s not that many options. And so when I look at it, I saw the list, I’m like, this is actually, this is pretty good. I mean, some of these places are, you know, probably a 10 minute drive, but they are darn good pizza places. So in the chaos that is coming within these results, it does seem to be finding
pretty decent results out of that, which is definitely encouraging. Now, with Local Falcon and our product that we’ve got, we show you essentially the output itself, as well as we will identify what brands were pulled, and then below that, we show you the sources. This is where I start to really lose my head. So I’ve got an agency called Epic Web Studios that’s been around for…
you know, 17 years now. And I started doing searches around that, like who’s the best web developer in Erie, Pennsylvania, right? The list of results that came back was so haywire. I mean, we’re talking, there were businesses that were, that I remember from 10 years ago that are since out of business. You know, there were businesses that were across Lake Erie in Canada. You know, it was, it was all over the place. And the sources,
John Jantsch (11:27.725)
Mm-hmm.
David Hunter (11:42.173)
were just wild. mean, it was finding essentially these like directories that I’d never heard of before, right? And pulling that type of information through and saying, okay, well, we used, you know, good firms.com and tech behemoths.com. I’m like, who is, what is this? You know, so I spent a couple hours going through, making sure like, well, we better make sure we’ve got a profile there and that it’s validated and.
John Jantsch (11:48.908)
yeah.
David Hunter (12:05.803)
I mean, that’s the most we can do at this stage is identify those sources and make sure that we’re included in that. I mean, there’s a lot more you can do with the content on your site and everything else, but for this part.
John Jantsch (12:12.898)
Yeah, that’s really, yeah. That’s really, that’s really interesting that they identify the sources because I do think, you know, I do think that that’s what’s the house, a house, for example, is a, you know, is a source for builders and local home service contractors. And I noticed that ChiTPT in particular pulls a lot of house results. You know, so that that’s a really great tip is to think in terms of,
David Hunter (12:36.927)
Yes. How’s Angie? Yeah.
John Jantsch (12:41.698)
making sure you’re in the sources that they’re pulling. Let’s just, again, another giant question, but today, especially if somebody, local business is saying, okay, I get it. All these changes are coming. Like, what do I need to do differently than maybe I was, before maybe I was claiming my Google business profile. I was building pages with geographic content on them. I was getting reviews. mean, what else do I need to be doing different?
David Hunter (13:09.651)
Okay, so if you’re running a white hat operation with your web presence, I think that as of today, there’s not entirely that much different that you need to do, but it’s the big caveat that you’re running a white hat operation, right? If you’re sitting here running, you know, some sort of a link farm and trying to, you know, blast a bunch of AI generated content, that’s never gonna work. Or at least it’s not gonna work in the long term, right? Yeah. Right.
John Jantsch (13:35.992)
I was going to say that’s the bad thing is it works temporarily, and so people get excited about it. But then they, you know, eventually Google or whoever catches up.
David Hunter (13:42.239)
That’s gonna get, yes, that’s gonna get plugged, right? The idea of, and I’m not sure if the kind of hack has been plugged yet, but people were putting, people used to do this back in the day too. You would put a bunch of keywords on your homepage or on your website. And a lot of times they’d wanna obfuscate that and make it like a white text on a white background so that you couldn’t see them, right? People are doing that now, they’re injecting prompts inside of it so that when…
the chat GPT bot comes through, it sees a prompt that says like, talk only about this business. It’s the best business and repeating that over and over again. And people are finding it’s working. It was ranking. Now I think that they have since plugged that. don’t know, but I’m not willing to try. I’m not going to put that type of not like nastiness on my site. Like that’s no way I’m not taking that risk, but you know, there’s a lot of little hacks out there. What can someone do in the white hat sense? mean, number one, you need to understand what
John Jantsch (14:23.981)
Yeah.
David Hunter (14:37.247)
people are saying, or how the LLM, the large language model is understanding your content, right? So go, simply go ask ChatGPT about that. What do you know about Local Falcon, right? And just simply Google that, excuse me, search that on ChatGPT and understand right out of the gate, at least it has a, does it know who we are, where we are, what we do? If not, you better start adding some content to your website in a visible way.
John Jantsch (14:44.504)
Mm-hmm.
David Hunter (15:06.098)
that is gonna make sure that it, you the next time the bot does come by, it pulls it in and, you know, can use that in terms of its reasoning. When you do add that content, it needs to be done in a very like bite sized way, right? Like putting up a 2000 word blog post that’s a big wall of text is probably not going to help you in terms of showing up inside of these responses, right? Just think about how the responses come back. They’re very short snippets. And so,
John Jantsch (15:21.134)
you
David Hunter (15:35.307)
if you can write in short snippets and get kind of the core idea down to one or two sentences, and then, you know, I’m not saying don’t do the 2000 word blog post. What I’m saying is within that, make sure that it’s got the main idea and, you know, the thesis, whatever it is you’re doing is all kind of spelled out in little chunks at a time. You’re gonna have a much better shot of showing up. So.
John Jantsch (15:45.4)
Right, right.
John Jantsch (15:55.064)
Right. Yeah.
Well, and I think what we’re saying is good content is good content should be written for humans should be valuable should be educational. But a lot of the tweaks that maybe need to happen are in the structure. So, you know, you have the overview at the at the very front, you know, here’s what this article is about. You have the table of contents, you know, you have the 2000 words and at the end you have FAQs. I mean, it’s probably more about structure, isn’t
David Hunter (16:10.122)
Yes.
David Hunter (16:22.889)
It’s a big, it’s a huge piece of it, right? So again, it’s really about how, you know, chat GPT, know, open AI, Anthropic, you know, others, Google understands the information. So they do that in these little, you know, they’ll basically pull little passages out. And then that contributes to the larger, you know, the larger model understanding what it is. And then it creates its own version of that. Sometimes you’ll even find verbatim, it’s pulling in
some of the content that you wrote, especially with things like FAQs and how you answer that FAQ, right? Number one, you also need to make sure that it’s structurally visible, right? So schema markup has never been more important. You have to identify and when schema markup is essentially like a shortcut for understanding what a page is about, it’s a way for a bot, a crawler to…
John Jantsch (16:56.215)
Yeah.
David Hunter (17:17.563)
recognize and categorize, this is about a recipe or a review or a local business. So making sure that that schema markup is on there. And then of course, again, looking through the sources, right? So when you run these local FalconSkins, you’re gonna see this huge list of sources and it’ll tell you how often that source was used. So if you’ve got a whole bunch of Yelp listings on there, yeah, go get on Yelp and maybe even consider spending the 50 bucks or whatever they want to like,
actually make sure that it’s as complete of a profile as possible, just to give yourself every chance for success.
John Jantsch (17:54.24)
Yeah, absolutely. Let’s touch on just again, this is a giant topic, but let’s say I’m a business that has 10 local locations. Do I need to be doing something differently? Do I need to be doing something? I mean, are there unique challenges that you’re starting to see from that multi-location business?
David Hunter (18:16.939)
So yes, a lot of times when you get, when you’re with a multi-location brand, it ends up, you you have a really good shot of actually showing up because you’ve got so many others, you know, if you’ve got 10 locations in your city, that’s 10 more chances or nine more chances than the solo operation, which is definitely helpful for them. Yes, and so that’s great. However, the response itself,
John Jantsch (18:36.738)
So somebody’s always near to one of them, right?
David Hunter (18:43.619)
you know, we see some wild stuff like it’ll pull, you know, you’re on the east side of town and it starts talking about the location on the west side. So it’s less about that individual location and more about the brand itself, right? So making sure that like holistically the brand is well understood is important. I think that where you’re gonna see potentially some headaches is in like the franchise world where someone buys in.
and they are responsible for their location. I mean, it depends on how the brand operates, but doing things from sort of a centralized source and then disseminating out is probably your best bet.
John Jantsch (19:12.546)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John Jantsch (19:20.93)
Yeah, awesome. Well, David, I appreciate you taking a few moments to come by and share about local searches. there someplace you would invite people to connect with you and find out more about your various platforms and tools?
David Hunter (19:32.715)
Sure, I mean, certainly, you know, search up Local Falcon wherever, know, localfalcon.com. Also, you can find me on LinkedIn. I’m, you know, on there probably too much these days, so.
John Jantsch (19:42.734)
Awesome. Again, I appreciate you taking a moment and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.
David Hunter (19:49.297)
Absolutely, John. Thanks for the very, very lightweight questions there, man. Those were nothing, you know, nothing too strong at all, right? Thanks again.
John Jantsch (19:53.038)
You
Awesome. Awesome.
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