IN OUR SEASON FINALE OF SEASON 4 OF ITB TALK, LISTEN IN AS WE DISCUSS HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR BUSINESS FOR CHATGPT & OTHER AI!
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CHAPTER MARKERS
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0:00Inspector Toolbelt Talk Season Finale
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5:08Future of Search Engine Optimization
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12:02Optimizing Website Content for ChatGPT
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22:55Optimizing Local SEO With ChatGPT
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28:33SEO Optimization Tips for ChatGPT
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:
Ian Robertson
Can you believe it, David? It is the season finale of Inspector Toolbelt Talk, the end of season four.
David Nyman
That is pretty crazy. I didn’t think you’d last more than a week.
Ian Robertson
I know, right? Like, if somebody said, hey, there’s gonna be a bunch of people that are gonna listen to you talk for four seasons, let alone maybe 10 minutes, I would have been like, huh, you’re making stuff up. But here we are.
David Nyman
Yeah.
Ian Robertson
End of season four.
David Nyman
It’s crazy, and we have a lot of, a lot of loyal listeners. I mean, you know, we do get comments and emails from a lot of the people thatlisten week after week, I try to plug it too whenever I do trainings, so we try to get new ones.
Ian Robertson
Oh, that’s nice. I appreciate that, but it is funny. Just today, four people contacted me about the podcast, and they’re asking questions and thanking me and giving podcast ideas. And we have a wider audience than I ever expected. I mean, home inspections, we’re not a huge industry. There’s like 33,000 of us overall in the US, Canada, Australia, South America, and Europe. And I’m pretty sure we have the vast majority that listen, and I’m pretty proud of that. You know, our numbers always go up every year too, but it is always a sad day when we hit the end of a season. So typically, what will happen is the last two or so weeks of December, you know, there’s no podcast, and then, typically, mid January, we come on back. Beon usually does the first episode with us, and it’s a huge blast. But end of season four, I thought this was a good subject to talk about. Two years ago, almost to the month. It was in November of 2022, it’s now December, ChatGPT launched to the public. Pretty crazy. And as much as AI has changed our lives, basically not letting us know what’s real or not on the internet, even more so now than ever before. And actually, ChatGPT just launched their videos to the public. You can’t create an account yet. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t, depending on the volume, but now you can just create random videos, throw crazy stuff out on the internet, and people will never know what’s true. But ChatGPT, in particular, all AI has kind of taken over, but ChatGPT has done some pretty amazing things, and it’s come up a lot of how to optimize to be found on ChatGPT. We talk about optimizing for Google. That’s been the big thing for 20 some odd years. We talk about getting found, and ChatGPT is quickly becoming the way that we are found. Would you say that’s accurate, David?
David Nyman
Yeah, I’ve seen the data too. Like people are saying that they’re using ChatGPT more and more for their searches, so I’m sure that’s why every single other company out there starts developing their own, like Google is probably scrambling quite a bit right now.
Ian Robertson
Gemini is their AI. I really don’t think that was ready for the boardwalk, so to speak, but Google had their own AI, and they just kind of quickly repackaged it. They’ve had it for many years. They just quickly tried to repackage it for the public. But here’s a couple of things to think about, and this actually came up with one of our previous guests, Sean Garvey. By the way, if any of you listening, have not listened to the podcast with Sean Garvey, I just, I always learn something from that guy, and the six principles that we talked about in that podcast, just awesome, but we were talking about optimizing for ChatGPT. But here’s a couple bit of facts. Everybody’s saying that ChatGPT has taken over the world. Now, a guy like me, I use it for just about everything. I almost never do what we call an informational query anymore on Google. If I want to know how something works, if I want to learn something, get information. I almost never touch Google anymore. Matter of fact, I fixed my dishwasher the other day. I just like tinkering, what I do. So I looked up on ChatGPT and said, can you help me troubleshoot my dishwasher? And I followed the steps, and I figured out what was wrong, and it’s worked. I fixed the whole thing, and I’m like, this is great. I used it for my snowblower. Helped me figure out what was wrong with my carburetor. Awesome. But here I want to read this though. Reports suggest that around 8% of Internet users now consider AI chat bots their primary tool for finding information. I’m going to pause there for a minute. That’s less than I expected. 8% is, I mean, that’s, that’s not really shaving a whole lot off of Google’s percentage, which still is hovering in the 80% range for all internet queries.
David Nyman
Yeah, but I think, my thought on that number being so low is, as with any technology, it’s still fairly new. So the ones that are going to embrace it are always going to be the ones that are most adventurous. And I guess younger generation probably is quicker to pick it up than older generations. So you’ll you’ll see a shift pretty quickly over the years.
Ian Robertson
That’s actually a good point. I like your thought on that. That makes a lot of sense. I expected a bigger number, but you’re right. The adoption rate is still relatively low. I mean, look to your point, look how long it took people to get on board with Google, before Google even became a verb, it really wasn’t that long ago, 17,18, years ago, I started hearing people say, Google it. You know, before that, people are like, oh, the internets. We’re not going to use the internets.
David Nyman
I used web crawler.
Ian Robertson
Remember, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo. I still know people that use Yahoo. But anyways, predictions suggest that by 2030, AI driven tools could account for 30 to 40% of the total search volume. That’s a bit more significant, and that is only five years away, approximately.
David Nyman
That’s scary, too to think about.
Ian Robertson
Well, let’s think about that by 2030 hypothetically searches in ChatGPT. And now remember, we’re not just talking about regular ChatGPT. They have their own search engine now, so they have ChatGPT and their search engine. And this is supposed to be a combined percentage here, but if they take over 30 to 40% of total search volume, that would put Google approximately accounting for a couple of differentials, about 45% of search volume. So that tells me two things. First of all, it’s going to be split. You know, it’s not like in a quick succession, Google is going to find a huge downfall, and they’re going to find some way to stay afloat and be relevant, but they’re going, that’s going to mean making Gemini better than it is, which is the other AI, if you’re following along. The second thing it tells me is that we’re going to need to split our efforts if we’re going to want to be found by people. What also increases with this is people’s usage and type of usage on the internet to find service providers. Now, big push 10 years ago, people are like, reviews. Let’s get reviews. Now all of a sudden, your 800 reviews that you’ve built up over the past 10 years, you realize don’t matter as much when half of your searchers are using ChatGPT and whatever they come out with over the next five years.
David Nyman
Yeah, but I mean, at the same time, these chat bots do use available Internet data. So..
Ian Robertson
It’s true.
David Nyman
I’m pretty sure that if you have a conversation with a chat bot and you’re like, what, what kind of reviews does that company have? You know, find me a home inspector. Okay, here’s a home inspector. What do people say about them? So I think the reviews are still going to be relevant, but chatbot is probably going to be be scraping that information off of Google.
Ian Robertson
Well, here’s a guess that I have, and this is only a guess, I noticed that most of the queries come back with when I asked for references, it’ll use Bing as a reference, not Google, and I almost wondered if that’s because Google blocks ChatGPT from scraping a lot of their content. So we spent all this time pushing into one arena, we have two to five years to push into a new arena and split our efforts. Second thing is we, before we get into how to optimize for ChatGPT because, I mean, this really tells us we need to do it. It’s going to be higher volume for the first few years. My estimate is 2027 which is only two years away, on into the early 20, 30s, it’s going to be high volume of searches that we could take advantage of, but we need to understand before we talk about how to optimize, the difference between a transactional query and an informational query. Do you know the difference between the two, David, we’ve talked about this. Have we talked about this?
David Nyman
No.
Ian Robertson
Okay.
David Nyman
I mean, I do have a general idea when I see the statement, but I did not actually look into it beforehand. My thought is, yeah, my thought, my thought is seeing it like transactional query. Okay, I need this. I’m gonna look it up versus I want to educate myself. I want to learn more about this subject, which I would see as informational.
David Nyman
Yeah, I saw, complete tangent there, but I did see a recent YouTube video on the whole science behind how they set those up, how they actually get people to spend more money than they want to. Yeah, fun thing, if you want to, if you want to educate yourself a bit.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, to nail on the head. So well, first of all, an informational query was, you know, who is Pierce Brosnan’s second cousin, you know. And then you Google it, and then up comes that. Whereas if you do ChatGPT, it kind of does all the scrolling through the pages and figuring out the information that you need for you, and kind of puts it together so it can show me a picture or whatever, however, and it’ll give you the information you’re looking for. Whereas a transactional query is, I need this auto part. I need this for my car. That’s a transactional query. We’re looking for something to buy, or in our case, hiring a home inspector, is a transactional query. So people will do an informational query on ChatGPT, saying what’s involved in a home inspector and what questions should I ask him? And then, almost invariably, go to Google for the actual transactional part of it, finding the home inspector, looking at his reviews, looking through lists of home inspectors. Very, very few people out of that 8% of the internet users use chatbot as their primary tool for finding information, very, very few of them will use it for a transactional query. And I’ve tried it, so I’m like, hey, can you get me a contractor in this area that does this? And it’ll give me a few people and give me some information. And I find myself, it’s like, limited so I end up having to go to Google, and no matter how ChatGPT tries to paint it, transactional queries are still going to be heavily relied upon in Google. So out of that split, I actually think it’s going to be overall split, whereas transactional queries are still going to be heavy on the Google side, personally. But ChatGPT may change things. We may be getting reviews from ChatGPT and have on their search engine, and they’re gonna make it like Google and Bing is, or maybe they’ll partner with Bing, I don’t know, but either way they you’re still gonna need to look things up. It’s kind of like walking into McDonald’s and those kiosks that they have, and it’ll say, hey, which one of these three items would you like today? I mean, I don’t, I don’t choose those, you know, I go, just show me the menu and I pick what I want. That’s how we’re built. Matter of fact, McDonald’s is struggling with that because of those kind of issues. We still want options.
Ian Robertson
I’ll have to look that up, and then maybe we can work it into a podcast.
David Nyman
Yeah, it’s, I mean, it’s a genius method for them to make, you know, okay, you want to add this on, you want to add this on. And people spend like, you know, I can’t remember the percentage, but it was a significant amount more money. So you could probably figure something out how to use that as a smart marketing tool. Yeah.
Ian Robertson
But the problem is people don’t like to use the kiosks.
David Nyman
Nope.
Ian Robertson
And that’s what I’m using as an example for this ChatGPT is basically the McDonald’s kiosk. People still don’t like to use it. Now, the market needs to change for that to happen, and five years is long enough for at least a percentage of the market to change. Yeah. So that being said, let’s go right into website optimization, or online presence optimization, for ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence. So what are some things that we can do if our website is not really coming up for these kind of queries from ChatGPT.
David Nyman
So I mean, a big part of it is to remember how these chatbots work. So they work on conversations. You basically are supposed to talk to them like you would talk to a human. So our website should have content that’s built for conversation. FAQs, for example, have common questions that our clients have asked us about home inspections, something like that. The chatbot can then pull that information like someone asks, what’s involved in a home inspection? How long does a home inspection take? If you have the answers to those, the chatbot can pull that information from your website, and that will make that content more accessible to your clients.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, we need to be careful how we go about it. And so first of all, if you’re a website client or an SEO client of Full View Home Inspector Marketing or Inspector Toolbelt, your website is already optimized for ChatGPT. We started doing that a year and a half ago. Before we even knew how to do it, we were guessing. And then ChatGPT basically explained, okay, this is how you do it is. Well, there’s similarities to how you do it for ChatGPT and Google, so they’re close enough that they interlink and actually compliment each other in a lot of ways. But one of the one of the things that we need to remember are information pages versus blogs. Now blogs have become ever more important with ChatGPT. So I’ve always stated the importance of blogging when it comes to Google, but Google, kind of, over time, is like, we’re kind of blurring the lines, and we like new content. And you know, they said, long term, they’re going to kind of change things. They kind of rolled that back, because now ChatGPT is like, we want blogs. We want blogs, but they also want anchor pages which are like your homepage. So a mistake that I see people do is they try to un-humanize the content, and they ask too many questions on like their homepage. Like, instead of saying, why hire us, it’s like, oh, okay, cool. There’s the, there’s the question, answer it and give good information. They say, why hire us? How would you hire us? And it’s like they’re just answering queries from ChatGPT. It’s artificial intelligence. It’s not dumb. It knows what we’re doing. It wants our main pages to stay informational, a lot like how Google structures data. It wants titles. It wants relatively keyword rich. And I say relatively, keyword stuffing is still a bad thing to do. Don’t keyword stuff, but this is where you can ask some questions, but keep it minimal on those anchor pages, like the about page and all that. But this is where blogs come in. Blogs are amazing for asking these questions, how do I find the right home inspector? And these are the questions, how, why, and when? Why should I get a home inspection on a new construction home? Write down every question that any client has ever asked you, and turn it into a blog. When should I service my AC unit? And what it’ll build up over time is ChatGPT will start visiting our website to answer these queries. And these are informational queries, and it’ll rely on us for a source. And so the average person they see, okay there, when they ask a question, it’ll give a link. Here’s where I got the answer from. The more our website is linking there, it’s like, oh, sweet. You know, when they go to hire a home inspector, they’re like, I’ve seen this, this guy has answered half my queries on ChatGPT, this, this seems like the guy. So it builds authority.
David Nyman
Yeah. And trust.
Ian Robertson
It’s really important.
David Nyman
And trust, yeah.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, so answer those questions, but we should be blogging a lot. And interestingly, I wondered the other day, I’m like, what if ChatGPT helps me write the blog? Does it trust or does it give any more or less credence to the blog if it wrote it or it was written by a human or anywhere else? So I asked ChatGPT, so this is what it says. Says as an AI, I don’t decide more or less credence to information based on whether I wrote it or a human wrote it. Instead, I focus on the quality, accuracy, and reliability of the information itself. Credence should be given to sources that are these four things. So if you’re going to write anything down, this is what ChatGPT looks for, accuracy. So we can’t just make something up according to our opinion. Blogs used to be opinion pieces. In my opinion, you should never, you should never caulk the bottom of your bathtub. You should just grout right up to it. ChatGPT is going to verify that against facts and say, well, 80% of the websites out there says you should caulk it, and InterNACHI says it on their website and their an authority, it’s going to throw out the content. Keep our opinions to ourselves, well sourced. Now, interestingly, Google recently said it’s no longer considering outbound links as important. So if you put an outbound link in your, on your homepage or something. I still do it for ChatGPT, and I still think Google gives credence to it, even though John Mueller said no. But either way, an outbound link or the information referring to something, or even just how it’s worded, is the most common way, it needs to be well sourced, in other words, supported by reputable references or evidence. So if we write something, we need to not only not have it be factual, but have it be supported by evidence. So if we say you should caulk the bottom of the bathtub, even if we don’t believe it, that’s well supported, then relevant, aligned with the question or content, we should not digress like you and I do like you know, when we’re talking.
David Nyman
We never do that.
David Nyman
In a lot of ways, I mean, those principles, that’s just good writing right there too. I mean, whether you do it yourself again, whether you do it yourself or ChatGPT does it, if you have a good, well written article that’s easy to read and understand, the saying goes with ChatGPT, it’s gonna understand it well.
Ian Robertson
We never do that. You know what are funny, are monkeys? I love monkeys. But it needs to align with the question or content. So if we ask the question, why is clay tile roofing often considered a superior product for dry, sunny climates, we need to talk about that subject. Don’t start off with the whole, here in sunny Arizona, and you know, this is how clay tile is manufactured, and this and get to the point, and then consistent, coherent and logical without contradictions. So this is all to say, whether we write it ourselves or ChatGPT wrote it for us. It’s going to give it the same amount of credence. So funny is, it’s going to reference itself a lot of the time. It’s like, oh, we wrote that blog, but here’s our references that we got it from. So I’m going to link to this guy’s blog and then and then show it to this person who’s asking that query. So that’s basically how it works.
Ian Robertson
Yeah. And to be honest with you, that’s good for Google. Google is going to like your website and ChatGPT are going to like your website for the same but different reasons. So it also wants consistency in new blogs being added. And here’s a here’s a pro tip, so blogs being added, be regular with it. Try to do it once or twice a month. You don’t need to blow up your blog and do 30 blogs in one day and not do anything for two weeks. But here’s a pro tip, when writing the blogs, try not to go with broad stroke keywords or broad stroke, not keywords, content. So for instance, why should I hire a home inspector for a new construction home? I can guarantee you there are hundreds of 1000s, if not millions, of blogs that say that for ChatGPT, to give that answer from our website is very low likelihood, and we’ll get people all over the country. Now, let’s refine it down even more a little bit. Why should I get a new construction inspection for this particular builder who builds homes in our area? Now that’s a better keyword structure, a better content structure. Google’s gonna look for that and also ChatGPT, because that’s something that someone, well, it’s something that somebody in our areas..
David Nyman
That builder is gonna be mad at you.
Ian Robertson
He’s gonna be mad, you have to be careful. So let me redact that a little bit and say, just be careful legally. But um, like, here’s another example. In my area, there’s a place called Delmar. Are there termite issues in Delmar, New York? That’s a much better keyword set. So now, anytime somebody types that in, very likely there might be a few blogs out there about it, but maybe none. So what’s ChatGPT going to look for to give as a reference when somebody searches that query. Now they’re searching the, 50% chance they’re buying a home, and they’re like, oh, that reference is to a home inspector. He seems to know his stuff about the local area, so just refine our searches down there, you know.
David Nyman
So are there termites in Delmar?
Ian Robertson
Little bit, yeah, if you’re listening and you live in Delmar, I’m sorry, you guys got termites, especially in certain neighborhoods. But anyways, how about schema markup? How can we use that, David?
David Nyman
Oh, I don’t know that much about schema markup. That’s the problem, but it’s a little advanced. Yeah. So, I mean, I’ve seen, I’ve seen the term used, I’ve never actually gone into what does schema mean, but it is, it has to do with the structure of your data, so you use headings and other things to help organize your content, which in turn, in the past, search engines used to find specific points in the content, but also ChatGPT does it as well.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, exactly. So if you look up schema markups, you’re gonna go down a rabbit hole of just crazy technical information. Don’t stress about it. If you use WordPress, and let’s say you use Yoast, which is a SEO tool, they’ll actually do some schema markup for you on your, on your website, like if you’re on your about page, you can go and mark it up as your about page and all that stuff. Don’t get overly technical with it. Do some basics. They’re smart enough that they’ll figure it out. I did want to bring that up just because that is important, schema markups and all those things. But in reality, at the end of the day, it’s going to figure it out. Personally, I think schema markups are going to go away because it’s just a way to tell search engines and AI what’s important information when they kind of decide that anyways. So how can we optimize for ChatGPT, search engine feature, not just for Google?
David Nyman
So a lot of the things overlap, same thing there, as in the past. Like you said, you don’t want to keyword stuff in the material, but keywords do matter, so having some well targeted keywords, and not trying to hit every single keyword in the industry. But those work well for your area, your industry. Those should be prominent and make sure that, you know they they fit well with the work that you do. Yeah, and the more local, the better usually, you know these towns, because, you know we have inspectors are like, oh, I do inspection inspections in all of Alabama, which, I mean, it’s not a lot of people doing there, but still, if someone searches for a home inspection in their town, they’re a lot less likely to find you if you’re covering all of Alabama, as compared to one that says, I do inspections in this specific town.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, that is well said, because so many home inspectors don’t want to be limited by putting down where they’re located. And what they do is they just make it guaranteed that they won’t be found by anybody anywhere. So for instance, I have a, I have a client that says something like serving all of North Texas. And it’s like, okay, so I started putting some cities in there and some towns that he likes to service, and he’s like, no, no, all of North Texas, once you start putting a city or town that bottlenecks me, I’m like, so you’re either work nowhere, or I can at least get you some leads in this place in a 50 mile radius. Like, can we, can we do something? Both Google and ChatGPT run off that same thing. Now this is from ChatGPT itself that goes right along with what you just said, optimize for city specific keyword sets like home inspections in “city name”. It has been like that in Google for 20 years. They’ve been very geocentric. Where are you? Where do you work now? The opposite end of that is, I have some people that say, list every town and city in all the state of Alabama. Like you just said, I work in all of Alabama. So then you have half a home page that just lists 800 towns and cities. It’s like, okay, personally, I like to go after either one big city on a page or multiple really small towns. I.e. under 30,000 people per town, and the larger the town, the less of them I target with a page. That way, it’s just a lot better that way. So, yeah, we just need to let people know where we work, and that should happen in the content, I would say, better than half the people that come to us that need a new website don’t even state where they work, let alone where they’re located. We need to start from somewhere and ChatGPT wants to know that it has local relevance. So now we’re talking about anchor pages right now. What we were talking about before is primarily blogging, so we’re talking question, answer, you know, authority of the content. Now we’re talking, what is it looking for on your anchor pages. Homepage, About Us page, Services page. One of the things that we mentioned before are citations and data that make our content relevant. Personally, I love referencing InterNACHI. That really is the best place to reference, in my opinion, because it is one of the largest industry websites on the internet, and it is considered by ChatGPT and Google to be one of, if not the authority. So for instance, if we’re writing a paragraph on our home page, what’s included in our home inspections, first of all, that’s pretty good for ChatGPT, or just what’s included, doesn’t matter. And we start listing out a bunch of stuff, we should probably put a hyperlink in there, maybe where we say our home inspections follow industry standards, and either hyperlink home inspections or industry standards and bring it right to InterNACHI standards of practice. And people are like, well, that, that’s not good. I don’t want them going to InterNACHI. Why? It’s authoritative, both for our user and for ChatGPT and Google.
David Nyman
Yeah. And, I mean, even, even if we’re not a member, you know, you can still quote them. You can still refer to them as an authority.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, good call. That’s actually a really good point. Not everybody’s an InterNACHI member. They’re becoming fewer and farther between. On the reverse of that, external citations are important. So ChatGPT has something similar to what Google does. Imagine a soccer game, and you see everybody on the team pass the ball to this one player. Everybody in the audience assumes that one player is important. What Google and ChatGPT both do is they work off of citations. So if you have multiple websites that aren’t, don’t go to fiverr.com and hire somebody to make you 900 citations, they’re going to be garbage citations, and they’re going to hurt you actually, that’s why Google has a disavow tool that you can, if they still have it. Actually, they may have gotten rid of it because it hurts your SEO, but if they’re good, relevant, like business websites, home inspection websites and more places linking back to your website, ChatGPT will consider you more of an authority. Now, interestingly, where are, who controls and creates most of the citations on the entire internet that has to do with home inspections, InterNACHI. So InterNACHI within nashi.com or nashi.org rather, creates 1000s of citations for us, and then they also operate 1000s of other websites that create citations for us. If we’re not a member of InterNACHI and we haven’t completely filled out our profile with our, with all of our links and information, we are missing out hugely. It’s immeasurable the SEO value for ChatGPT and Google that you get from just being an InterNACHI member with a link to your website up there.
David Nyman
Yeah, it is amazing.
Ian Robertson
It’s pretty huge. So how about, what is real time accessibility? What is that? I really, I kind of had to think about that one.
David Nyman
Yeah, no, I looked at that. I mean, one thing is a very good point that was mentioned, your area coverage, your pricing, contact information. If that is out of date, that’s probably going to be something that, you know, ChatGPT notices, you know, if there’s discrepancies between what you have on one page and another, it’s good to have, you know, professional that works on your website. But if you do it yourself, if you do change any of these details in one place, make sure you scrub your website, find out, okay, I reference my phone number on these, these, this and this and this page. I have different phone numbers on each. Yeah, ChatGPT is gonna be like, this is not a reputable source.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, same thing goes for like, business hours. If our business hours are different on Bing, our website and Google, it’s not going to like that. Phone number is a good one. That could be a whole separate podcast of why we should never use different phone numbers or change them, because that’s going to be looked at very heavily. Matter of fact, it’s, it’s part of what’s called our NAP. It’s the P in that, well, you should never have p in a nap.
David Nyman
It happens.
Ian Robertson
Hey, if it’s a good enough nap, man, this is appropriate for the season finale, but, um, make sure everything stays consistent. It gets harder and harder when you have a larger and larger website. So try not to create blogs with information that needs to get updated. Like, a good example of that is, we’ve done over 3000 inspections, and you put that at the end of every blog, or in the middle of five out of 500 blogs. Now, when you’ve done 6000 inspections, you need to update that. And now you need to go find it on every blog that you’ve ever put it on, every citation you’ve ever put it on, try to keep the information that you put on there updateable. And that’s really what real time accessibility means, which I thought that was, I thought it had to do more with, you know, like keeping your website running, yeah. But also too, Google and ChatGPT both care about optimizing for mobile first and speed. So if our website is slow, ChatGPT is going to notice it. It has to search the internet just like we do. And if it takes four minutes for your site to load, not going to like it.
David Nyman
Yeah. And, I mean, it’s the same for humans. I can’t remember the research exactly what it said, but a load time where over so many seconds and people move on to the next page. So yeah, you only have a few seconds really, for keeping people’s attention. So yeah, and it’s like you said, it’s similar with ChatGPT and Google.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, well, because they also want a good user experience for their users. ChatGPT, if you’re going to click that link that says, here’s where I got the information, and you sit there for 10 seconds waiting for the page load, and you click off, ChatGPT is probably not going to use you as a reference anymore. It’s going to say, well, I want a reputable website, but I also want one that loads fast enough that people don’t bounce off of it, because after you do anything with ChatGPT, it’s watching you afterwards. Yeah. So those are some basic things. If I had to sum up for the average home inspector, for us, it’s complicated, but for the average home inspector, I would say, put outbound links in your anchor pages. You don’t have to do it in your blogs, but in your anchor pages, put outbound links. For your blogs, answer a question, make it relatively local, and you can have ChatGPT write it as long as it’s unique content. Tell ChatGPT to make it unique content, and do that regularly. Those two things alone, mixed in with all the other things, would really get you a great optimized website. I mean, we have some things that we’re doing that are quite a bit more advanced, but that’s really going to get you a great start, I think. And there’s some tools that we can use too, like, what are a couple of tools that we might be able to use to help optimize?
David Nyman
Yeah, so Google Search Console, it’s a fairly simple to use tool where you can check your SEO, and I think you can get some suggestions through there if you need to work on something, exactly what direction to go.
Ian Robertson
Yeah. I use Google Search Console extensively because that’s all it focuses on. So if you use Google Analytics, that’s fine, but Google Search Console will actually give you the information that you need to optimize for ChatGPT for both its regular query version and also its search engine version, because it runs off of this some of the same content. So for instance, if Google Search Console says hey, it’ll tell you some crazy things, like your main content shift took more than four seconds. It’s like, okay, what in the world does that mean? It means your website’s running too slow. You know, it’s just like, ask ChatGPT, what does this mean? And say, how can I fix this? And it’ll and it’ll tell you, you know, it’ll help decipher those things for you. So don’t get intimidated by it, and you don’t have to do all of it, but Google Search Console, it will totally help you understand what you need to fix for ChatGPT, too.
David Nyman
And then, as we spoke about schema, there is a generator, Google structured data market helper. So even if you don’t understand exactly how the market works, you can get some help with it.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, I will give a warning. Man, the first time I did my first schema markup, it was 15 years ago, and I think I jacked up my website because I’m like, oh, this looks important. That looks important too. Let me do this. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, Google’s like, did you just scribble all over your website for me? Like, what did you just do, man?
David Nyman
Did you just have a seizure and fall with your face first on the keyboard?
Ian Robertson
Yeah, and if you can do it, cool. I mean, we obviously know how to do schema markups, but it takes a little bit of time, and that’s advanced. I’d say, do the basic stuff first. And one last thing I’ll mention is make sure that you do all of your metadata. So any website provider that’s worth its salt is going to give you a spot where you can put, where it’ll tell you, hey, write a little bit about what this page is about. Put something in there, something relevant, like this is about my company, this or that. And you know, you can ask ChatGPT. Help me to write compelling metadata about my company, ABC Home Inspections, for the home page, and then for the about page. Here’s some information about me, and it’ll just start spitting that out. Adjust it. Don’t take it as it comes. And then that’ll help us to get some metadata in there, help us to get, get off the ground.
David Nyman
And it is amazing that way, you know, ChatGPT like, you know, it’s not perfect. It is a pretty amazing tool for stuff, anything that you don’t know exactly how to do. You can start a conversation and get everything explained to you.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, it’s pretty fun. Sometimes I still forget that I can do that. Like I forget I was doing something very technical the other day. I’m like, man, this is hard. I’m like, oh, wait, hey, ChatGPT, can you make me a tutorial on this and show me how to do it? Here’s the point I’m at, and it did. I’m like, oh, that was easy.
David Nyman
Soon human beings won’t even know how to do, tie their own shoes. Check with ChatGPT.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, exactly. Is it bunny through the hole or two bunny ears? How does that work with tying my shoes there ChatGPT.
David Nyman
Yeah. Drop a hand grenade on your foot.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, exactly. But I’ll tell you, we got some cool AI stuff coming up for Inspector Toolbelt. We’ve talked about it on the podcast before, so I’d like to tell all of our competitors that listen in. We got some AI stuff coming up. We’d love to see what you have going on too. But it’s really gonna, as I said, in a different podcast, we’re gonna make sure that we own AI in our industry so that it doesn’t own us. You know, we don’t want another company coming in and, you know, taking over the industry and paying people $50 to review AI inspections that homeowners do themselves. We want it to be a tool in our toolbelt, so that we can perform really good inspections for people. But either way, this was a fun podcast. I think it was a great way to end season four. Are you excited, David, for season five?
David Nyman
Yeah. I mean, I heard there’s a major plot twist coming in season five.
Ian Robertson
Oh, man, there’s plot twists. One of the main characters dies.
David Nyman
Beon takes over.
Ian Robertson
Beon takes over. Well, now you just gave it away. I’m the character that dies, okay, but don’t worry, I don’t really die. It’s like Star Wars, where I just come back as a force ghost.
David Nyman
It was just a clone that dissolved in acid. Yeah.
Ian Robertson
Yeah it was just a clone. So all right, weird way to end season four, but thank you everybody for listening in. Thank you all for listening in all of season four, and we look forward to seeing you in January for season five. Thanks again, David.
David Nyman
Thank you Ian.
Outro: On behalf of myself, Ian, and the entire ITB team, thank you for listening to this episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk. We also love hearing your feedback, so please drop us a line at [email protected].
If you’re enjoying the conversation, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button. Our podcast is available on all major podcast platforms. For more information on our services and our brand-new inspection app, please visit our website at Inspectortoolbelt.com.
*The views and opinions expressed in this podcast, and the guests on it, do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.

PODCAST SUMMARY/BLOG
The digital landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace, driven largely by the transformative power of artificial intelligence. In the season finale of Inspector Toolbelt Talk, we delve into the future of local SEO and ChatGPT optimization. As AI technologies become increasingly integrated into our daily lives, they are reshaping how we access and interact with information online. This episode provides a roadmap for businesses looking to adapt to this rapidly changing environment, ensuring their continued visibility and relevance.
The discussion begins by reflecting on the success of the podcast, emphasizing the unexpected growth in a niche industry like home inspections. With AI tools like ChatGPT gaining traction, businesses must reconsider their search engine optimization strategies. As of now, only about 8% of internet users rely on AI chatbots as their primary source of information. However, this number is expected to grow as the technology becomes more mainstream. The episode highlights personal stories of using ChatGPT for everyday problem-solving, illustrating its practical utility.
By 2030, the dynamics of search engine optimization are predicted to shift significantly, with AI-driven tools potentially capturing 30-40% of the total search volume. This poses a challenge to Google’s dominance, prompting it to enhance its AI capabilities, such as through the Gemini project. The distinction between informational and transactional queries is crucial, with ChatGPT excelling in the former and Google maintaining a stronghold on the latter. Businesses must adapt their strategies to remain visible, as traditional reviews may become less influential.
A critical aspect of this evolution is the optimization of website content for conversational AI. The episode explores how businesses can enhance client interactions by crafting well-structured information tailored for chatbots like ChatGPT. The importance of blogs and anchor pages is emphasized, with blogs focusing on frequently asked questions to build authority and trust. ChatGPT evaluates content based on accuracy, sourcing, relevance, and consistency, necessitating a focus on factual, well-supported, and coherent content.
The podcast also addresses the evolving landscape of local SEO, highlighting the importance of localizing online presence for businesses like home inspectors. Optimizing for city-specific keywords and authoritative references is crucial for boosting credibility and search visibility. External citations from relevant business websites, such as Internachi, play a significant role in establishing authority. Maintaining consistency in business information across platforms is essential to avoid credibility issues.
Practical tips for optimizing websites include ensuring fast loading times, as both Google and ChatGPT consider speed a crucial factor for ranking and user experience. Tools like Google Search Console and schema markup generators are recommended to aid in SEO optimization. However, the complexity of schema markup necessitates caution, with a focus on starting with the basics.
The podcast underscores the need for businesses to embrace AI-driven tools and adapt their SEO strategies to thrive in the future. By understanding the nuances of AI optimization and local SEO, businesses can position themselves ahead in the digital landscape. The episode offers a comprehensive guide to navigating this new era, ensuring businesses remain competitive and visible in an AI-driven world.
As we look towards the future, the integration of AI into search engine optimization presents both challenges and opportunities. By embracing these changes and adopting new strategies, businesses can harness the power of AI to enhance their online presence and connect with their target audience more effectively. The insights shared in this episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk provide a valuable foundation for businesses seeking to future-proof their SEO strategies and thrive in an ever-evolving digital landscape.