123 - Cracking the Code – Google’s “Ask for Me” Update, Local Service Ads & What It Means for Auto Shops

123 - Cracking the Code – Google’s “Ask for Me” Update, Local Service Ads & What It Means for Auto Shops
May 27th 2025 - 00:56:06

 

Show Summary:

In this episode, Jimmy Lea welcomes Dan Vance from Shop Dog Marketing to explore the transformative power of AI in marketing for auto repair shops. They highlight how AI has shifted from an experimental tool to a central part of digital marketing, influencing how customers discover and interact with local businesses. Dan shares how understanding your ideal customer and problem-solving strengths can better align with AI-driven search results, enabling shops to stand out as the preferred choice. They discuss practical ways shop owners can leverage AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to brainstorm marketing strategies, assess online sentiment, and optimize their presence for both human and AI-driven searches. The conversation also emphasizes the importance of personalization, community engagement, and consistent online activity across platforms.

From single-location shops to MSOs and mobile techs, the advice is universal: AI isn't the future—it's the now. And shops that adapt will lead.

 

Host(s):

Jimmy Lea, VP of Business Development

 

Guest(s):

Dan Vance, Owner of Shop Dog Marketing

 

Episode Highlights:

[00:07:27] - Dan shares a surprising story of a customer finding a repair shop via AI, bypassing traditional reviews.

[00:10:15] - AI search favors shops based on category and customer preference, not just keyword ranking.

[00:12:29] - Shop owners need to identify their ideal customer and market directly to that profile.

[00:15:25] - Using AI as a brainstorming partner is powerful—ask good questions and refine with human insight.

[00:17:31] - AI can evaluate your online presence and suggest what you're known for in your community.

[00:23:09] - AI can create engaging subject lines for marketing emails with a personalized voice, like Oprah.

[00:27:35] - Dan outlines how to optimize your local presence for AI search results—focus on consistent content, reviews, and social engagement.

[00:44:10] - Tips for both MSOs and mobile techs on how to leverage AI and local search effectively.

[00:48:28] - Avoid incentivizing reviews; instead, use AI to analyze sentiment and improve service authenticity.

 

In every business journey, there are defining moments or challenges that build resilience and milestones that fuel growth. We’d love to hear about yours! What lessons, breakthroughs, or pivotal experiences have shaped your path in the automotive industry? Share your story with us at info@wearetheinstitute.com, and you might be featured in an upcoming episode.

 

👉 Unlock the full experience - watch the full webinar on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn0m3CSVg4c&t=1394s

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Episode Transcript Disclaimer
This transcript was generated using artificial intelligence and may contain errors. If you notice any inaccuracies, please contact us at marketing@wearetheinstitute.com.

 

Episode Transcript:

Jimmy Lea: Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, or goodnight, depending on when and where you're joining us from today. It is a gorgeous day outside here in St. George, Utah. We are entering into the 90 degree temperatures per day, which is awesome, especially if you like the heat.

Jimmy Lea: And if you don't like the heat, then it's not so awesome. Very quickly, we'll be cresting over that 100 degree mark very quickly. And then the next thing to look for is 105 and 110. Anyways, enough about the weather. So excited to be here with you today. Excited for this conversation that we are gonna have, which is all about marketing, which is all about your shop and how things have changed yet again.

Jimmy Lea: If we go back in history, we start back with the blacksmith. Blacksmith in town was the gentleman or the lady that was working on your wagons would create wagon wheels for you. Somebody came along and created the automobile and the natural person to fix those things was the blacksmith. Go down the road, a few go down the road a few miles, and what happens?

Jimmy Lea: Somebody invents the telephone and there's a knock at the front door from a salesperson selling you. Advertising on a phone book. The phone book, because there's a device called a telephone gonna be in every household. Well, don't worry about that. My customers, they just come down and see me go down the road a few more miles.

Jimmy Lea: We're gonna create something called the web and it's gonna be in the cloud. Your customers are gonna search you on a computer. Oh, my customers, they call me on the phone when they need me. They come down to the shop. Well, it's gonna change yet again. For our discussion today, it is going to be amazing as we talk about what's happening in the wide world of the internet and the inner webs that are out there with us working together to keep our customers safe on the road.

Jimmy Lea: I, I just, I'm so excited to have our guest today. Our guest today is Dan Vance from Shop Dog Marketing. Welcome, Dan. How the heck are you, brother? Your camera's buffering. Oh, technology at its greatest. I don't see Dan. Does anybody else see Dan on here? Oh man. This is awesome. Awesome. Here we go. Oh, Dan, you're on now.

Jimmy Lea: I see you on camera. Do you have audio up?

Jimmy Lea: Oh my goodness. Well, we'll give a couple more shout outs while we're on here. Melissa at Berks Transmission Service in Sarasota, Florida. Dan, can you hear us, brother?

Jimmy Lea: I don't know if he, we do now. Rich Lucas. Oh, rich from Lucas Tires. Am I the only one? Not hearing Dan, he is frozen. Thank you, rich Dan Vance. Might need to go the way of Windows and restart that computer. You know, it's a funny thing and it happens. It happens when you do live events. Oh, Dan, you're back.

Jimmy Lea: You're moving.

Jimmy Lea: Do you have sound? 

Dan Vance: I'm here. I thought I've been here the whole time. Yeah. Yeah. I'm hearing great. 

Jimmy Lea: Okay. Yeah you were frozen there for a minute. Did you? Me, Dan, thanks for being here brother. How are you? 

Dan Vance: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. So happy to be here. Oh, good. 

Jimmy Lea: Really? Oh, good. Good.

Dan Vance: Even 

Dan Vance: more now than I wasn't even here. 

Dan Vance: Exactly. 

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Yeah. You were here, but you were frozen, so it was like that buffering mode. Right. So glad you're here. One more shout out to 

Dan Vance: frozen face. 

Jimmy Lea: Yeah, you were frozen face for a minute. Betty or Toro from Greg's Auto in Florida. Betty is here as well.

Jimmy Lea: Thank you Betty for joining us. Hi Betty. Hey, our conversation today, we are going to be deep diving into AI and how AI has changed marketing. I love marketing. I love the process of marketing of, you know, it's like a phishing where you try a different lure, you try a different lure, you try a different bait, and then once you find that thing that works, man, you're just able to sink in.

Jimmy Lea: And that works really well. So Dan AI has changed everything. Got a quote from, I. Google's CEO Wanna read this real quick and get your feedback on this? It's not a quote. This is a summarization that in Google's CEO's last announcement, Google, CEO highlighted some massive AI adoptions.

Jimmy Lea: 480,000,000,000,480 trillion tokens processed monthly, monthly. Yeah, that's a 50 times increase over last year. 400 million Gemini app users. Gemini is the Google app users and over 1.5 billion, B billion, 1.5 billion monthly AI overview users. So these are people that are using and, but they don't have the app downloaded.

Jimmy Lea: Like myself I use Gemini, I use chat. GPT, I do buy the chat GBT, but I don't buy Gemini. So he's, I'm one of those 1.5 billion using Gemini, but I'm not registered. Right? Yep. Yep. It's crazy. So yes. I mean, we knew this was coming. We knew it was gonna hit. Now the ripples have happened and it's starting to even out a little bit years ago we would talk about using ai, trying it out, test it out, see what you can get.

Jimmy Lea: AI was learning. It's still learning. We were creating pictures and artwork and puppies with six toes, and that was a lot of fun. 

Dan Vance: Yeah, exactly. 

Jimmy Lea: How has AI changed marketing, Dan? 

Dan Vance: Well the truth is we don't know because it's just moving so quickly, but it is changing things. And I think this would be a great time to just share a quick example of like, stuff that's even surprising us is when a client calls us and says, Hey, I just got a car in from somebody that found me in.

Dan Vance: Gr, which is Twitter's AI language model. And what they had done, they were at the dealership and they went in and decided they didn't want to do business with the dealership. And they said, who in this town can fix Subaru transmission? And this client came up as the only option and they called him, oh my word.

Dan Vance: And got the car in. And what's so credible about that is, is that there was no reviews. There was no cross-checking or looking who else was an option. They just picked up the phone and they called and booked an appointment. So that's just an unbelievable example of how AI is changing our experience with the internet and collecting data and making decisions, and we're gonna see a lot more of that.

Jimmy Lea: Oh, it's so true. And to reiterate this with you, Dan there was an 10 years ago. 10 years ago? No. It wasn't 10 years ago. A few years ago, 4, 5, 6 years ago. 

Jimmy Lea: Was 

Jimmy Lea: going out with my soon to be son-in-law, and he said, he says no. We can't go to this restaurant. And he was basing that on reviews.

Jimmy Lea: It was Yelp reviews. Google reviews, the restaurant that I really like to go to. He says no. They got a 3.5. I'm just not going in there. 

Dan Vance: Yeah. 

Jimmy Lea: Oh, okay. Where are we going then? So it, it's gone from Father knows best friends know best reviews, know best, and now AI knows best. Yes. And here's a client that didn't even check reviews, didn't check with anybody else, just brought the car right on down because Twitter said it's the best place for Subaru transmissions.

Dan Vance: Yes. Yeah. And I don't know, I don't know what his repair order was on that, but. People that listening would know and it was healthy. And as a marketer, I'm just like, that is pretty sweet because being able to stand out to be isolated as the best option is an incredible win.

Dan Vance: And so I think that's another thing that AI is gonna provide and we can talk more about how it's doing it and how cool this is for auto repair shops, but we're gonna see a lot more of that for sure.

Jimmy Lea: Well, and then let's dive into that, Dan. 'cause I, anytime you can be the only solution, you know, it's always great to be the guy selling guns when you show up to a knife fight. Yes. 

Dan Vance: Yeah. 

Jimmy Lea: If you are the only solution, if you are the only one being recommended, I. How can I do that more often? 

Dan Vance: Yeah, well, I've been talking about this a long time, how the internet has become more of a search personalization.

Dan Vance: And so this idea that I, Hey I need to market to search engines by ranking for keywords is actually very old thinking because back in 2012, Google made a shift to categories. On your Google business listing, it's a category, it's auto repair. So I like go to the library and I go into fiction and there's a hundred books or a thousand books under that category.

Dan Vance: And so the. Thing the Internet's been doing is it's been taking people that batch up with that category and the things that you're telling, the search engine that you like to work on, like Subarus, and it starts to match those people to you, especially in a local environment. It's called Search Preference.

Dan Vance: It's been around a long time, and now we're seeing AI just take that to the whole new next level because they're, it's completely. Preference around you. They know a lot about you. They know of things that you've been asking, concerns that you have a whole gamut of things. And then it can pull all this data from the internet and give you very quickly the perfect match 

Jimmy Lea: and really this.

Jimmy Lea: Okay. So, so, so what I'm hearing you and I want to summarize this just a little bit to make sure I keep up with where you're going. 'cause AI is changing so quickly. It's taking software from a three month lifecycle to, it feels like almost like. Yeah. Monthly, weekly daily things are changing in this AI cycle.

Jimmy Lea: Okay. So everything that we've done in the past, everything that we've done for marketing and reviews and social media and public outreach, that has all gone into what AI is discovering today. It do I understand that right? 

Dan Vance: That's correct. 

Jimmy Lea: Okay. 

Dan Vance: All the things you've been doing are good and healthy, and you haven't lost that.

Jimmy Lea: Okay. Is there a but that goes along with that. 

Dan Vance: Yeah. The but is that we need to do better as marketers, whether we're an agency or as a shop owner, to accept the responsibility to know who our best client is. Okay. And start marking around that person. So, you know, so you 

Jimmy Lea: need to know your avatar. 

Dan Vance: You need to know your avatar and if you put more energy into that, AI will perform better for you as people get more comfortable with using that as a channel to find you.

Jimmy Lea: Okay. So when we talk about our avatar are you talking about the cars that they drive? Meaning, I really like working on Ford F1 fifties. Anything Ford, Chevy Dodge, that's in my wheelhouse. Do I focus on that or do I focus on my ideal client, which is fleet vehicles, construction workers, that type of a truck?

Dan Vance: Yeah. It's a great question and I would say the first thing anybody needs to do is first say, what problem do I solve and why am I really good at it? And because there's lots of people that do Fleet or BMW or whatever, it's right. What problem do I solve in my local market and why am I the best? Why am I unique about doing that?

Dan Vance: Okay. And then start building things around that support, that like. Not only am I really good at fixing BMW, but that type of driver, that type of owner I get along really well with. We resonate, we have commonality. They're my best customer. And the reason they're the best customer is because of the income they make right where they live.

Dan Vance: How new their vehicle is, how many vehicles they have, the whole list. So you build out a customer profile on demographics about them, and then you build out a profile about the vehicle and why you're so good at it. So it's two sides of the same coin. I'm understanding who the client is and their demographics, and I'm understanding my side about the problems that I fix and how it ties to that customer.

Dan Vance: And love it. This is Marketing 1 0 1. It's been around for a hundred years, but a lot of people that get into the internet because it's so simplified, we forget some of those basic principles and, but it's going to be a core driver for how AI works in helping bring local business. As we see more and more of that, those two things, what do I really do and why am I really awesome at it?

Dan Vance: And who's that customer that really loves what I do? Who 

Jimmy Lea: are they? No that's so true. That's so true. And when we're sitting down thinking about this, is there any tools that we can use that will help a shop owner? Because I, I run into a lot of shop owners, Dan that really struggle with what's my unique sales proposition?

Jimmy Lea: What's my USP? 

Jimmy Lea: What makes me different than my competition? What is it that I do solve? Is there anything that, that, a, an AI can help provide a shop owner to prompt those? Yeah, results. 

Dan Vance: I would tell anybody listening to this that if you're not using AI language models like chat GBT or Gemini or whatever your choice is as a way of brainstorming.

Jimmy Lea: Brainstorming, 

Dan Vance: yep. Yeah. Then you're losing out on the power of having a massive knowledge base bring you. Perspective and fresh ideas that it would be very challenging for you or a group of 50 to come up with. Yeah, and it's just about asking questions and getting better about asking questions and knowing that when you're communicating with ai, you're not communicating with a real person.

Dan Vance: It's a machine. So it's okay to tell the machine. Hey, stop. Okay. You're being weird. We're not really talking about that. Let's refocus. Want you to redo this Looks like you got lazy. Like you have to be in command on one level. Stop making 

Jimmy Lea: up information. 

Dan Vance: Stop making up information. I know that's not true.

Dan Vance: And then and then, but the other piece is just asking really good questions. So you could ask a prompt like. I'm an auto repair shop owner, and here's my website. Look at my website and tell me what you think we are the best at in our local community. Might surprise you, but it will come back with a result and it'll do a really quickly and it will tell you, well, you're actually really good at this.

Dan Vance: And can you, I would start there. 

Jimmy Lea: And so I, I love adding the website as a reference website. Can we also add in for example our Google Business page, Google Business Profile our Facebook profile, our Instagram, our Twitter. Can we Twitter? What's in a x? Yeah. Can we add that as reference websites as well, percent?

Dan Vance: Yeah, but you don't have to work that hard. You can just say, go out and look at all the social media channels that belong to me. Because they have your website address. Yeah. And come back and give me feedback on how I'm communicating, what I'm really good at. 

Jimmy Lea: Oh, I love it. 

Dan Vance: And I would start there.

Dan Vance: And as it starts to feed back to you, it's gonna create more questions. You're gonna be like, I. I didn't think about that. I have another question. Maybe you write three or four questions down on a piece of paper so you remember to get 'em in. 'cause it'll start moving pretty quickly. But it's all about brainstorming and it's all documented.

Dan Vance: Yeah. So then you can say, I wanna make a copy of this so I can print it off and think about it and process it and bam, all, you've got some really powerful tools there. And then you can say, okay. I agree with this. That's really is our strength. That's what we're really good at. Who in my community matches with that?

Dan Vance: Who would be some people, some demographics of people that would match up with that? And we have a case where we know somebody did that and the response came back. Teachers driving Subarus, 

Jimmy Lea: oh my gosh. 

Dan Vance: Yeah, and this owner, she was smart enough to know like, well, that would include firemen, military, and police too.

Dan Vance: And so that became her demographic profile. She knew their ages. She had a pretty good idea of their income, but then chat, GPT can refine that too. What's the income brackets in our community for those professions? And Okay. Is it mostly female or male? 'cause that could change my marketing. Okay. What is things that we know they like?

Dan Vance: You don't have to make that up. You just ask the AI model. It'll give you some ideas. Yeah. Then we use this to go, okay, that's a little weird, but that is a really good idea. 

Jimmy Lea: You still gotta have the human element in there to fact check, to qualify, quantify, make sure that we are on target.

Dan Vance: Yes. And just like the reference I was giving you, like teacher Subaru, that's great but it got built on by saying right here, like, well that's gotta include police, military, and. Fire too. 

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. 

Dan Vance: And so I love that because that's, that is truly brainstorming. Like my mind is just racing and all these little sparks are coming out and I'm thinking, wow, this is such a relief because it just feels so heavy and like I can't get past first base and now I feel like I'm just hitting home runs boom every time.

Dan Vance: And that's how AI can help you be a better marketer and understanding. Fundamentally, who is my customer that loves the problem? I know I'm really good at fixing. 

Jimmy Lea: Oh, I love it. I love it, man. That's awesome. That just takes it to a next level now, and I have two questions that I want to ask.

Jimmy Lea: One goes down the realm of do we continue to do what we're doing in replying to Google reviews and whatnot. But before we get to that, I want to talk about AI being a draft one, draft two, draft three. Can I take that information that Google gives me and put it as a copy paste to use for my marketing? 

Dan Vance: No.

Dan Vance: Just think about it. It's brainstorming. It's a conference room meeting. It's, you know, internal documentation, and then you wanna go back and you wanna put your human touch on it and your expertise, like you better have some expertise. Like you don't want AI to tell you things about brake repair that you didn't know.

Dan Vance: Or you're probably not an expert, right? Right. So use your expertise, but use it for that brainstorming to give you creative ideas that you're, it's challenging to come up with when you're isolated, either by yourself or a team, a small team. So, but no, don't ever copy paste. Don't ever put that stuff on your website.

Dan Vance: Like this is legitimate content for the search engine. That won't work. 

Jimmy Lea: Go ahead. 

Dan Vance: Oh, I was gonna say definitely like what we're seeing right now with ai. Two years ago in an interview with a, b, C, you can go back and watch it. It was a 60 minute segment. They asked the president and CEO of Google about ai and he essentially said, we're so excited about where this is going, but we're nervous about rolling everything out.

Dan Vance: So what we're doing right now is we just have the baby. 

Jimmy Lea: Yes, 

Dan Vance: the adults in the closet, the adults lives exists. It's real. It's just in the closet because we're not sure about whether the public can handle it or not. Oh that's mind blowing to me. But that just illustrates like they already have very complex models that are ready to go, and when those come out, there's additional expansion that we'll see with this technology.

Dan Vance: So it's very young and we're just testing it. And the things that we're having, the experiences we're having are awesome. Freaking awesome. 

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Oh, they are. They are. And I love it as a draft one, draft two, draft three. Definitely don't use it at any marketing on the internet as far as websites.

Jimmy Lea: But what about emails? Can I use can I use the AI to be able to send out emails? Well, am I safe doing that or does that get into a danger zone? 

Dan Vance: Now you're safe on that, and I'll give you a pro tip. Everybody watching this, don't tell your friends and neighbors or other shops or your group 25, this is just for you, but.

Dan Vance: There is a thing called clickbait, and it's an old style where you wrote headlines that just grabbed people and they couldn't resist just clicking it. And you can go in and you can have AI help you write an email for a service or an offer you want to do, and then you can say, okay, write 50 clickbait type of headlines that will draw people in to read my email.

Dan Vance: And it'll give you 50 in about two seconds. And you can go through there and you can pick out the ones that you love and try a couple of them, test half with half, and test another headline with the other and see what happens. 

Jimmy Lea: Well, and I've also done this, Dan I've said, oh, all right. Gimme the top 50 subject lines that will, entice people to open my email and then I'll say you know what I like number seven and 21 and 32. Combine those into one tantalizing email subject. 

Dan Vance: Okay. Now I'm gonna blow your mind, Jimmy, because if you did, if you really understand your customer and their demographics, like teachers driving Subarus, 

Jimmy Lea: yeah.

Jimmy Lea: Then 

Dan Vance: you're gonna know what kind of TV programming they like. Ooh. 

Jimmy Lea: Let's say, 

Dan Vance: let's say Oprah. Then you say, give me a headline in the Voice of Oprah. 

Jimmy Lea: Oh, that's funny. And you get a car. And you get a car. But 

Dan Vance: AI will design those headlines with a reading voice, which is legitimate. It's a real thing that will resonate with teachers who are educated and it will draw them in, but they'll feel comfortable with that.

Dan Vance: They'll feel a connection with your headline. 

Jimmy Lea: For sure. That's phenomenal. Okay, so now a question. This comes from Yvette and thank you Yvette, for this question is using copilot just as a, as good as using Gemini? And the second half of this is, does it matter which AI I use? Yeah. All right. Well, I 

Dan Vance: think AI is a preference.

Dan Vance: You gotta find one that feels like jiving with you. But I'm, I feel pretty strongly into saying right now the best AI model for chat and brainstorming is chat, GBT the paid service. I do like 20 bucks a month. I mean, it's not 

Jimmy Lea: that, is it 20? Exactly, 

Dan Vance: yeah. Something like that. Yeah. I think you can get five users for 1 25, so maybe 21 or $22.

Dan Vance: Yeah. And Jim. Yeah, I love how I'm doing searches and a lot of times my informational type of search, like, how does this really work? The Gemini is much easier, faster for a response and understanding than going into chat GPT. But if I'm legitimately working on marketing and want to ferre out ideas for content or whatever I'm doing, I'm in chat GBT and I'm working that thing.

Dan Vance: And I get great ideas from that, some of the ideas we're talking about today of help been formulated by experimenting and doing that. 

Jimmy Lea: Oh, for sure. So my, my wife uses Chachi pt, she also uses Claude. And she uses Claude because it does have a more human-centric conversation. It seems like is she using 

Dan Vance: the voice?

Jimmy Lea: I don't know that one. 

Jimmy Lea: So she's, that's 

Dan Vance: one of those that's coming that people are gonna love. 

Jimmy Lea: Oh, I know. It's a great TV show called The Voice, but I didn't know it was an AI app. That's for our next one. We'll talk, there's one that starts with a p. What's the one that starts with a PP?

Dan Vance: I don't use that one, but it's like proximity or something.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people are using this AI as the search, though, they don't go to Google anymore to search stuff. They go straight to an ai. So if I am a shop owner, Dan, and I want to make sure that I'm on top of things how can I optimize my online presence so that the AI. Bots, assuming that's what's out there, searching for information.

Jimmy Lea: How can I optimize my online presence so that I'm attractive to an ai? 

Dan Vance: Yeah, there's some of that. That's still an unknown because there's not a lot of data that's available, but what it looks like to us is this stuff that you do for local search. So good social media presence that you're tying in with your Google My Business, and you're publishing SEO content on Google My Business.

Dan Vance: And your website supports local search all of the backend metrics support local search, but then you have a page on your website that talks about community things and you're building like this awareness around it. The AI models because of a lot of the formulation of these questions is like, who in this town does this?

Dan Vance: It's gonna look for those kind of content pieces. 

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. 

Dan Vance: And it's, you know, this is the AI we're using right now. This model that we're using right now is not going back and using old data. It's doing a search right now in whatever everybody else is seeing, and it's coming back with information for you. 

Jimmy Lea: So the the idea that everything from a AI is two years old, that's is not true anymore.

Jimmy Lea: It's all current now. 

Dan Vance: When you're in Chad, GBT, you can tell it to do a live search or you can do it to use its regular model. So I would recommend using the live search and ask it for resources so you can validate the websites and the resources. You'll learn this stuff as you get going. If you're hearing this and you're like, man, I'm not sure where to start.

Dan Vance: The answer is just get started. Start doing some stuff and playing around with it and brainstorming and saying, I really want to know who my customer is. I really want to know what the internet thinks I'm really good at and crossing my fingers. That's true. And if not, I'm calling my marketing guy.

Dan Vance: 'cause we gotta fix some things. 

Jimmy Lea: So the same questions you want to ask your marketing person, the same questions that you want to ask in that marketing realm are the questions you can ask to a chat GBT. And now when you go to your marketing. Company, you'll have a much better conversation because you've already done the research and educated yourself.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. For those first steps. 

Dan Vance: Yeah. 

Jimmy Lea: Okay. So what are some of the I wanna ask this question, right? 'cause I'm thinking like I'm a shop owner. What are the, some of the things that I can do as a shop owner versus what are some of those things that I definitely need to hire out because. It's gonna take too long.

Jimmy Lea: I don't have the expertise. A marketing company would definitely do a better job at it than I would where? Where's the separation there that says I can handle this, but I need to hire this. 

Dan Vance: Well, a lot of the work that we do as an agency is, for example, we write content, so that's labor intensive.

Dan Vance: Now we're using tools and innovation like everybody else to get to the very best place. But it's a lot of work. It's a, it's akin to like, I know I gotta chop this tree down, so I'm gonna give my marketer the best tools possible so he can do it efficiently and give me the best results, which is to get that tree cut down.

Dan Vance: So if I give him a hand saw. I gotta have reasonable expectations versus if I give him a chainsaw. And so again, of our conversation, which is so critical today, more than ever, what do I really fix? And who is my best customer? I'm giving my marketing guy a chainsaw and he will go out, he'll create content.

Dan Vance: He knows how to fix the language on the backside of my website, so it makes sense to. He knows how to do this stuff and it's technical, it's hard work, and they can do this for me for a small investment. I get this huge return and I empowered them efficiently because I gave 'em a chainsaw instead of a handsaw.

Jimmy Lea: Oh yeah. That definitely helps a lot. I'm seeing some comments here from Sheila Costa, Sheila and Daniel Costa out of California. Gemini has not been that great in, in for them, which that's interesting that it's not working. They're using more Claude and Perplexity. Yeah, perplexity 

Dan Vance: is the one we were trying to think of.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you Sheila. Way to 

Dan Vance: go. Ka. Yeah. Good job. 

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. So, okay. Back to the the handsaw and the chainsaw. So, do we continue to answer all of our reviews? Do we continue to. Post on social media, do we continue to do that type of activity or do we let AI do that kind of activity? Yeah, 

Dan Vance: you know, right now we're in a weird time in the economy. There's, I think there's a deficiency of trust and we're, it's almost like a trust recession and reviews have always been like our solid.

Dan Vance: Foundation of like how we secure third party trust. 

Dan Vance: And you don't want to do anything different with that. You want to keep going the way you've been doing. You wanna get regular reviews, new reviews, you wanna respond to those. You always ask questions like you tell us about what we did and where you came from to do business with this.

Dan Vance: And not just that you loved us, but why, you know, was it. The warranty or was it the loaner car or whatever. You definitely want all of those things, but I'm having a lot of thoughts and conversations with what else can we do to reestablish trust? Because I think reviews don't have the same kind of power that they had even two years ago.

Dan Vance: AI is definitely a place where people have a lot of trust in it. We're seeing that, but what can I do to build trust in the community? And so that's a conversation for maybe another time, but definitely do reviews and definitely be asking yourself or brainstorming sessions with ai, like, what else can I do to build my brand and trust?

Dan Vance: Because we know people are clicking and they're looking at your stuff, but they're not necessarily calling. There's a large percentage of them that don't call, and I think that's trust. That equates trust. How do I solve that? How do I fix that? 

Jimmy Lea: Yeah, that'll be different 

Dan Vance: for everybody, but. 

Jimmy Lea: Yeah, and I like what Yvette said in here about using chat to summarize her Google reviews so she can get a sentiment of what her clients think of her or of her shop 

Dan Vance: a hundred percent.

Jimmy Lea: And I think that's a great draft one. This is draft one, draft two. Yeah. Where you're getting that sentiment. And now I want to jump to John's question. So John's got a great question here. Why is it I would want to have a single AI search on my website reviews to see the things that we're best at instead of just going to our customers.

Jimmy Lea: What do they think of us going to our old customers that come in and ask them? It seems like the human perspective would be much better than an AI perspective. What's your feedback on that, Dan?

Dan Vance: I, I think as a business owner, you have to know like, this is the problem we solve. 

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. 

Dan Vance: And going to your website is a way for you to say what I think the problem we solve and what the community and the internet space thinks. Are they a match? 

Jimmy Lea: I love it. 

Dan Vance: And if they're not a match, what do I do to get them to be a match?

Dan Vance: Because I'm unique because I can solve this problem. 

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. 

Dan Vance: I had a guy, he told me, he says, Dan, he says, we're really good at fixing transmissions in Porsches. This so called some pkt, or, I don't know what it's right. But I was like, okay, that's something they're really good at fixing and there's a place for them in the marketplace to get more of those and they're profitable for them, so why not?

Dan Vance: Why not know that? And then see if that's what you're communicating digitally. I do love the idea of going in and saying, look at all the reviews I have on Google, and tell me like, what is the sentiment being the emotion towards us. What are some things that they complain about the most?

Dan Vance: Is there maybe like three or four di of services that are commonly referred to as complaints, brake repair, oil service? Oh boy, I gotta fix those, 

Dan Vance: right? 

Dan Vance: Right. And then the other one would be, what is it that customers think is really good about us and unique about us? And hopefully that matches up with what I think the, I'm really good at fixing as a problem in our community that my competitor can't do that.

Dan Vance: Jimmy, how many of these guys ever tell you like, oh, we get calls from people that have called other shops and they're just like, they can't fix this, but we can fix this. We get that car in and we do it. 

Jimmy Lea: Oh yeah, all the time. All time. All the time. They're, they are known as the go-to in town because they can fix anything.

Jimmy Lea: Cars talk to them. They're the go-to. I was talking to a shop the other day and I'm trying to remember who it was. The car had been at two other shops. They had already spent 2300, 20 $800 at these other shops, and it finally brought it to him, and they were able to fix it very quickly.

Jimmy Lea: It's amazing because all this troubleshooting that they had done and all these parts plug and play didn't get to the problem and these shops threw up their hands and were like, yeah, we don't know. Take it somewhere else. Oh, it's a paperweight. It's scrapyard. Yeah. That wasn't an option. They had to fix.

Jimmy Lea: Put that car down. Yeah. Put it down behind the shed. It's time for the shed. Oh, man. It, it happens all the time. It, and it's scary. It's unfortunate that these shops aren't known for that, that they're not known as that. Go-to and to John's question, by the way, John, thank you very much for your question.

Jimmy Lea: I love it because, I think what Dan is suggesting here is using AI as the draft one, draft two. So you gain an understanding. You start with somewhat of a foundation. Now as you're talking to your clients and your customers, you can ask them specifics about specific areas. 'cause if you ask clients and customers you know, what do they think about you?

Jimmy Lea: Or what do they think you are unique at? You might get deer in the headlights like they don't know. Yeah. They gotta think. But if you're able to come in and say you know, according to the internet, they think we're really good in these areas. And you list out four or five different options, which one do you think we're the best at?

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Now you've given them options. They're gonna be able to choose one. So using AI as a draft one, draft two is a really good platform. Then introduce that human-centric side of things. Which I agree, John, that the human side, we want to connect with humans. The more we connect with humans, the better. And out to Sheila's question.

Jimmy Lea: Sheila, this is a great question, by the way, is that related to SEO versus GEO transitioning? That's happening now. SEO focuses on traditional search engines like Google, while GEO focuses on AI driven. Search engines and platforms. It seems like eventually AI, GEO will take over SEO and position itself like an authority when recommending business for our customers.

Jimmy Lea: Now, I'm not familiar with the term GEO. Maybe you are, Dan. I've heard SAO for search algorithm optimization, search, artificial optimization. Are you familiar with this term? 

Dan Vance: Yes. A lot of marketers are talking about like. It's not SEO anymore. It's search everywhere now. Search everything. Optimization.

Dan Vance: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Search engines. The this, people are not going to change to something new until they get more comfortable with it and have more experiences. We don't really like change as human beings, so the search engines aren't really going anywhere, but everybody is racing on the AI stuff because they see what's coming around the corner.

Dan Vance: So we definitely are going to be experiencing AI driven local search results. Moving forward 100%. You count on that. The question is, what does it look like in a year or two years is really unknown. Well, and what it 

Jimmy Lea: looks like one year from now is gonna be different than two years in three years.

Jimmy Lea: It's just, it takes money from now. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's gonna evolve so quickly. 

Dan Vance: So it's a great question, but I would also just add to this kind of like this level of like, find stuff that's working for you. You have to know that local search, when practice right, is the same elements that AI is using in pulling out into search results.

Dan Vance: And we think that's a big reason why our clients are telling us they're being found in AI models. 

Jimmy Lea: And so when you're talking about local search, Dan, are you talking about the LSA local search ads? 

Dan Vance: Nope. I'm talking about organic search, which is ranking a specific effort to rank better in Google Maps mobile.

Dan Vance: Another way to think about this is mobile ranking. What do I do so that I rank on mobile devices that are based on proximity? How close am I and how strong, yeah, prominence and how strong is my brand? So those factors, that's all local search, it's all mobile device driven. There's specific techniques that you apply.

Dan Vance: A lot of SEO companies don't do it 'cause they think it's a bother, but it's the leading edge of taking us from mobile users, having a great experience with Google Maps to the next thing, which is mobile users getting personalized, highly personalized returns. Based on their search and their behaviors based off of mobile devices.

Jimmy Lea: Alright, so now I have another question. Going down this this idea what about two different scenarios. One is a a mobile tech. 

Jimmy Lea: And then second is MSOs, multiple shop operators. How does that local search affect? Let's go to the MSOs first. How does a local search, how can they set them up sales up for success?

Jimmy Lea: If they're a multiple shop operator, they've got two shops, three shops, 10 shops, 21 shops, what's the best way for them to see success now here with this new AI model? Yeah. 

Dan Vance: You know, I, I'm not associated with this company, but I'm gonna tell you this brand Christian Brothers, if you go to their website, they're a perfect example of how they've taken multiple locations and they built one website around the model of promoting services and each one of those locations.

Dan Vance: And if you go in and you look at that'll probably answer a lot of questions. For an owner that has multiple locations, what kind of website should I have? Christian Brothers website has a what's called a domain authority, which is an internet scoring model. That's over 45 and that totally blows away Most auto repair shops, I've seen some of the best performing auto repair shops in the twenties.

Dan Vance: Oh wow, so, so just so you know, like it takes you to the new level. So yeah, I have multiple shops. I have both. I have a brand that's tied to all of those, or an associated brand, but they're all on one website and I can see that structure interesting. And all of that works really well for ai. 

Jimmy Lea: Okay. So that's 

Dan Vance: how they would do that.

Jimmy Lea: Well, and what about the mobile person? The mobile tech? Yeah. Yeah. So they don't have brick and mortar, but they probably have a radius of 20 miles that they might travel to repair vehicles. How can a mobile tech optimize their online information? 

Dan Vance: There's a way to set up the business listing for guys that have a business location, but don't publish it.

Dan Vance: I work out of my home, but I don't want people to know where I'm at. Yeah. If you just set up that way. Google does like mobile auto repair. It's a place that if you're doing that, will boost your rankings. So even if you are just a traditional shop with an address, but you do mo mobile repair, I would add that as a subcategory, it'll boost your rankings.

Dan Vance: Those guys. I think what they have to do is they have to do more as more social media posts talking about their services, how they come to you, customer reviews and social media, and then similar type of posts that they do that. Oh, I was, I can't read that. I gotta finish my thought. Oh, it says 

Jimmy Lea: I don't necessarily agree with AI telling people what to do, but I can't deny what's happening.

Jimmy Lea: Oh yeah. I totally agree. That's just. Fascinating that people are agre going after AI first. So you were talking about mobile technicians. Google likes the mobile text. They like that convenience factor, and I think that's what's happening in that algorithm is Google is going for that convenience factor of of convenience for the client. 

Dan Vance: Yep. And so work on getting great reviews when you're on the job. Take pictures, post those on your Google business. Listing pictures are a huge thing. Reviews, obviously as we've discussed, and then I would do Google posts that I could also share into social media.

Dan Vance: And the Google posts are gonna be things like, Hey, we are really good at oil service as much as we are like diagnostics on your vehicle, either in your office, parking lot or your house. 

Jimmy Lea: Love it. 

Dan Vance: And that'll help the ranking system understand you better as a mobile place without maybe you don't even necessarily need a website.

Dan Vance: A website enhances that too, but definitely not a business location. 

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Well, you don't need a business location, but I think the websites are still in necessity. You've gotta have a website to be found. 

Dan Vance: Well, I'm guys get away with not a website. Yeah. 'cause the algorithm likes them. But look, if I'm a mobile guy and I'm busy, I'm good.

Dan Vance: But if I wanna hire a couple guys and get a couple more techs out there, then you wanna make sure you have a website. Like you build that foundation like everybody else has to. For sure. Yeah. 

Jimmy Lea: You gotta keep doing that. Yeah. All right, so, let's go to John's question here. Do you think. That social media presence and trying to market to the AI on each of those platforms will be better, or staying on Google search engines, they're much different kinds of marketing.

Jimmy Lea: So there is a bene is there a benefit to one versus the other? 

Dan Vance: I'm not sure I understand that. You know what he's saying, 

Jimmy Lea: Uhhuh. Yeah. So, do they, is it more important to be active on your social media and your reviews or? Which is optimizing it for ai or do you stay with the Google and search engine optimizations?

Dan Vance: Yeah. Years ago Google had a thing called Google Plus, which was their social media attempt to compete with Facebook, and I don't think they ever got rid of that algorithm. I think they use that in local search. 

Jimmy Lea: Ah, 

Dan Vance: so anything I do in social media. Seems to work. Like we can't really put our finger on why or what it's actually doing, but we see better performance when we do it that way.

Dan Vance: So that's why I think you use social media 'cause it ties in with locals. It's this idea of community and groups and things that I like and where I live. And so I would definitely utilize social media with my Google Maps local search 

Jimmy Lea: for sure. Yeah. This goes right back to your. Definition of SEO, which is search everything Optimization.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Yeah you really do need to focus on all of it. Make sure it's there. All right. Lance has a question here. Any recommendations on combining organic customer reviews versus shops that pay or discount to entice or encourage positive reviews? 

Dan Vance: Yeah, I'd stay away from that. That's, that usually violates most of the review sites guidelines for the way you're supposed to put reviews up there.

Dan Vance: And discounts or enticing is a violation of Google's. And for sure, Yelps will just close you down. Well, they won't close you down. They'll just make you like a one rating star. 

Jimmy Lea: Well, yeah, they'll take away all your reviews, and I've seen Google do that. I saw Google take a shop from 440. Reviews down to 80.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Overnight because they were incentivizing five star reviews. Yeah. So it's not good. 

Dan Vance: I do have a tip for you though, like if you're wondering like. Hey, I know this shop is intense. They're doing that. Then use AI to say, ai. Go read the reviews these guys have on Google My Business, and I wanna know what the sentiment is.

Dan Vance: I want to know what the negative comments are. I want to kind of get an idea of like, I. The underlining from the mass of data crunch, all that, mash it all up. Give me something good. And we had a shop, we did that too. And the reviews came back that basically said even though they were rated high like a five score, the sentiment was negative.

Dan Vance: Ne the sentiment was negative. And what we also saw was that there was common words like rude. 

Jimmy Lea: Oh my word. 

Dan Vance: And it was tied to services like brake repair and oil service. So that gave me the power and our client the power to kind of like display, like, we're really good at this, we're really good at these things.

Dan Vance: You'll have a better experience with this and we're not gonna pay you to give us a review. That doesn't really reflect the experience you had. So you can, so you gotta be 

Jimmy Lea: open to all reviews. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 stars. You need the full rainbow of flavors there, right? 

Dan Vance: Yeah. 

Dan Vance: Spam is a huge issue with reviews.

Dan Vance: Google's saying they want to fix it, but they, I don't think that problem ever goes away, but if you, but agencies can definitely do this for you, where they can go in and they can file complaints against that shop and identify specific reviews and hopefully get Google to take some kind of action. That's a lot of dang hard work, but it will generate some results, but the problem still doesn't go away.

Dan Vance: So it's much better to kind of tackle it another way just to say where are their weaknesses? And I'm gonna market to that and I might even run some Google ads. So I know somebody's searching for brake repair is gonna find me right up with that other guy, like I'm gonna start pulling away his lead source into me.

Dan Vance: And start hurting his business. 'cause he's doing bad business practice anyway. And I'm better at fixing breaks. That's my thing. I fix breaks. I'm really good at that. That's the problem I solve, right? Yeah. Porsche 

Jimmy Lea: breaks. I fix Porsche brake better than anybody else. I fix. Be 

Dan Vance: competitive and think that way.

Dan Vance: Like, okay, I'm not gonna try to go head to head, but I'm gonna look for where they're weak and where I'm strong and I'm just gonna pull those people. I'm a stronger magnet, I'm a better place for. 

Jimmy Lea: Oh, I love it. I love it. I can't believe how quickly this hour has flown Dan. Phenomenal. So, so I want you to be thinking here, I'm gonna go into a little bit of a commercial for the institute, but then I want you to think, if you had a magic wand, what would you do in the automotive aftermarket?

Jimmy Lea: So I wanna let everybody here know that Dan is coming to our Mars intensive September 4, 5, 6 in Ogden, Utah. Ooh, I hope I have those dates right. September 4, 5, 6. Ogden, Utah. Mars is a marketing for the automotive repair shops. This is an intensive, we are limiting the number of seats, so it's gonna be a very good and intimate group.

Jimmy Lea: We're limiting the tickets to 40 tickets. The tickets just went on sale just the other day, and I think we've only got a few tickets that are sold so far. So those of you who are watching this that want to be here, you want to be here to ask questions. Dan, face to face. We're limiting the number of seats, so it is gonna be a really good conversation at our Mars Conference, our Mars Intensive marketing for repair shops.

Jimmy Lea: I'm so excited for it, Dan. It's, it is just gonna be an awesome event. We're gonna have so much fun. 

Dan Vance: It's always the best, really. 

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Yeah, it is. All right. So Dan, if you had a magic wand, what would you change in the automotive aftermarket? I. 

Dan Vance: Well, we wanna change the thinking and we want people to accept the fact that AI is here.

Dan Vance: It's not going anywhere. It's just gonna be deeper and deeper water. So we're looking. We're about to announce, but I'm just gonna give you a T teases that we have some AI tools that are gonna empower shop owners to build a better, more marketing profile. And also some tools that'll sit on your website for better conversions that are all gonna be AI driven.

Dan Vance: So you wanna stay tuned for that because this stuff is coming and you can be on the forefront of like utilizing that for more success and it's not going away. This is something that we can do right now to empower. So that's kind of cool. That's what I think is gonna help the industry because we can't keep doing what we're doing and we gotta stop thinking about the way we've thought about search engines 10 years ago.

Dan Vance: 'cause nobody does that anymore. 

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. 

Dan Vance: We gotta fix that. Gotta fix that. 

Jimmy Lea: Yeah, definitely gotta fix it. It The future is bright and we're here to be on that ride with you. So as we lock arms, we become greater together as an industry, we can rise together. Not all this, not everybody's ship is built the same.

Jimmy Lea: We're all in the same storm, and this storm is one crazy wicked weather pattern that we just can't predict. Yeah. So I'm super excited for what's coming up down the road. If you find this information fascinating and interesting, we've, we at the institute have partners like Dan that are gonna be there to help you and your shop.

Jimmy Lea: We have programs for advisors, managers. Owners with coaching one-on-one coaching, as well as 20 groups of shop owners that are getting together and holding each other accountable. It's a higher level of understanding, it's a higher level of coaching and training. You wanna advance yourself as quickly as possible to go from the face-to-face coaching on a one-on-one to a group environment.

Jimmy Lea: It'll just hockey stick your business. It's so much fun. So much fun. Yeah. Thank you Dan. We're having a great time, brother. I can't believe how quickly, let's not do it again fast. 

Dan Vance: I know. There's a lot more we haven't even started on. Let's do it again. I know. 

Jimmy Lea: We gotta schedule out our next webinar for sure.

Jimmy Lea: Let's talk after here and we'll get on the books here. 'cause man every three months it's a new lifecycle. Yeah. Every three months for sure. Sure. A hundred percent brother. Thank you everybody. Thank you for being here. Look forward to talking to you again here. And this week we have quite a few webinars, so hopefully you get to catch us a few times this week.

Dan Vance: Yeah, hope to see you soon. See you soon. Thank you. Bye-bye.