The Home Service Expert Podcast
How to Optimize Your SEO Strategy and Start Converting (Nate Fischer)
31 Mar 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What makes Nate Fischer's approach to SEO unique?
If you are not already running ads, doing SEO, testing e-local, testing thumbtack, then I don't think there's a chance that you're going to be around in five years from now.
Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership. to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you.
First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take notes for you. Just text Note, N-O-T-E-S to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299. And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode.
Chapter 2: How can home service businesses leverage real job data for digital marketing?
Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview. All right, guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert.
I got Nate Fisher in the house. He spent some of his time in Lake Tahoe and some in San Francisco. Today, I'm super excited. Reminds me of a story. I interviewed the CTO or the CMO at Groundworks, Matt Malone's company, and they were telling me their lead ag percentages. They were telling me what they spent on PPC.
And the reason I'm really excited is I was like, how could you spend 24% of your money on PPC and 22% of your comm on lead ags? And I went through all these questions and he said, dude, organic. He's like SEO, Google optimization on the GVPs. He's like, you've got to dominate those. And that's what will pull it down to 10%. And I think most contractors miss this. Nate is the CTO of LocalOptics.
Chapter 3: What role do reviews play in a successful SEO strategy?
It's a modern marketing platform helping home service companies turn real job activity into digital authority with a focus on automation, CRM integration, and search visibility. Nate leads the technology to transform Completed work into optimized content across Google business profiles and company websites without adding extra work for operators.
By bridging operational data with marketing execution, he helps contractors show up consistently, stand out in a competitive market, and build trust at scale. Nate specializes in building systems that make local visibility effortless, measurable, and sustainable for growing service businesses. And Nate's a buddy of mine. You know, we work with these guys on a regular basis.
He spent the night at the house dozen times. And I think you're a genius. I think you understand algorithms. You understand code. You started building with AI about a year ago. Let's just get started by having the audience get to know you a little bit. Tell us
why you got so obsessed with development and code, uh, and why you got so obsessed with getting found and you probably work with a thousand agencies as well.
Yeah. Uh, definitely. So background was, uh, lucky enough to grow up with a dad who was a computer scientist, math guy, uh, aerospace engineer in orange County. Um, Just started on a computer at a very young age, probably 10, maybe even 9.
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Chapter 4: How important is a multi-channel marketing strategy for local visibility?
You know, looked up to my dad, wanted to do what he did, so got into software. Very early on, I actually started in what is probably the nerdiest thing ever, which is there was a world called IRC, which was like the OG chat rooms from the 90s. Started there, was distributing music.
in some chat rooms and needed to figure out how to get more eyeballs on it so probably 11 12 years old figured out that there was a world of digital marketing that google could bring a lot of traffic to me and to the things i was working on so started there and uh was just kind of in the right place at the right time with the right interest it turns out
getting into software at a really young age was a really good thing to do. Um, as I got a little bit older, got into some affiliate marketing, got into deeper and deeper into SEO and just kind of mixed in software, SEO. And then really the only other thing I did in my whole life was play soccer.
Yeah.
That's awesome. And you spent a lot of time overseas as well. Some of your teams in Europe and Ukraine and other places, right?
Yeah, I spent about a decade. I was in Southeast Asia, spent some time in Brazil, Argentina, Spain, and then about three, three and a half years in Ukraine.
And so local optics, been around since 1998, but kind of reimagined this past year. Many things have changed in the last 25 years, right? What do you think has made this company last so long?
I mean, digital marketing and SEO and just search engine marketing is something that I think will always be around. And as an operator, as a builder, as a strategist, just focusing on staying ahead of the curve or at least on the curve is something we've been doing for essentially my whole life, my whole adult life, definitely. So just...
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Chapter 5: What are the common mistakes home service companies make with their Google Business Profile?
having a good mix of clients, our own businesses, consultation with other companies and seeing what actually, what it takes to win at any given time.
And is Google still God or is the LLMs catching up or what about Bing?
Great question. Google is still God. They have the lion's share of all search, the lion's share of all lead flow. Depending on the industry, Bing can be a really valuable channel. And then LLMs are definitely up and coming, shifting consumer behavior, shifting how people search. I think we'll see more and more of the chat style search results from Google as LLMs become more popular.
And LLM is large language model. It's like a chat CBT or a cloud or there there's perplexity. There's a lot of different ones. Uh, You know what's really interesting is Google's changed a lot. It used to be the 7-pack. So basically with GVP or Google My Businesses, it gives you the hours, the reviews, and it doesn't really cost much. I mean, it's not like PPC or LSA.
You pay for that stuff, and you're going to pay more for PPC than LSA. And then organic still works a lot. We still get a ton of traffic, especially on the research terms, but they're not as intent-based.
Yeah, I think a big shift that we're seeing, I know you guys are seeing, is Google is sharing, if we put it nicely, more of the inventory of search with the paid channels.
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Chapter 6: How does job data inform location selection for service businesses?
So we saw the rollout of LSA. Historically, AdWords was a fairly complicated ad platform you had to have.
marketers and analysts alongside setting up successful adwords campaigns and then lsa came and it was basically google saying hey let's make this as simple as possible you're a garage door company owner you tell us what type of jobs you want and we will deliver those jobs and in order to do that they added lsa ads above the local map pack so you have lsa or google screens and then you have adwords and then the map pack so that was i think the first shift
against organic traffic a really big shift where if you were getting 100 leads a month prior to lsa lsa comes into your market you might be getting 50 60 maybe 70 leads now moving forward and what we've seen in the last year is google is putting more and more effort towards having companies pay them so that is in
kind of a direct attack on organic traffic, maybe attack's the wrong word, but it is lessening the amount of organic leads that all companies are gonna be receiving.
And they're expensive. Look, I spend anywhere from 20 to 25% of... I'll give you guys that example. I'll spend $250,000 to get a million dollars for garage door leads. And I think we're in a very unique situation because our booking rate, our conversion rate, and our average ticket is so much higher. But yeah, we still get five-star reviews. And when I met you...
I just was blown away because you were like, how many reviews can you get? Can you get the pictures in them? Can we help train your clients how to get the reviews? And then there's a lot of other things. Let's just jump through these hoops because there used to be this thing called NAP, name, address, phone number, and the citation sites.
And this is really why I wanted you on Nate is to educate people because I don't think you could run a business only off just having this listing in the map pack. Definitely. I want to talk about optimization real quick. So let's go through just some simple steps that someone could take right now. I'll give you one real quick.
Make sure you're open 24-7 because if you're not, you're losing to your competitors when it says closed, even though you could have somebody answer the calls. So when you go search your company and you see the reviews, see if it says open hours, including Saturdays and Sundays, and you're going to make a lot more money. What else?
I think the simplest thing to start with that you guys do a great job of is actively being involved in the process of getting reviews and having that operationalized across your company. We've worked with... hundreds, if not thousands of companies, thousands of agencies. And there's a stark difference between a company that's doing well and a company that's not doing well.
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Chapter 7: What is proof-based content and why is it essential in marketing?
They need to be trained on the soft skills of being able to interact with customers, provide a good experience. And then you also need automation or software and processes to back that up and at scale request reviews, make sure they're getting routed to the right location if you're a multi-location company.
And there's a little bit of nuance around Google reviews versus Facebook reviews versus Yelp and some of the other third-party platforms. But I think the first step of any sort of digital success is making sure that you're treating review generation and your reputation as a first principle.
Talk to me a little bit about citation sites. So back in the day, I used to go on, I mean, this is a long time ago, Fiverr. And I'd get a list of, and there was some tools that would tell me where all my competitors were listed too. Yep. And we'd go through and I'm talking yellow, but there was thousands. And you'd go in and you'd maximize the profile.
You'd put in the exact, and here's the thing. The name needed to be A1 Garage Door Service, not SRVC. It needed to be the exact same name. And if you're on street, either you spell out street or you put ST, but it needs to be the same every single time. And I've probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on tools that would fix these things.
They find out and say, this one's broken, this one's broken, this one's broken. How important are citation sites now if you don't have any?
So to your point, 10, 15 years ago, even within the last seven or eight, people would slam citations at their business. They might have 500, 400, several hundred links. And a lot of those sites are just very low quality, have no authority. Google has no reason to value them.
To your point of the intricacies of the name, address, and the phone number being exact, that used to be a big thing in the industry. You'd always hear about nap consistency. Hey, let's do a nap cleanup. Google has gotten a lot smarter over the years, and that is definitely no longer an issue. Personally, I think in any given industry, there might be
10 and at a ceiling, 20 profiles that are actually important. So gone are the days of building hundreds of citations.
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Chapter 8: How will AI impact the future of SEO and digital marketing strategies?
And what you should be focusing on is making sure that your Yelp profile is as built out as possible and that it has a good reputation. Your Facebook business page, your home advisor, Angie's List, all of these industry-specific platforms that get actual traffic, customers actually go to, Thumbtack. Thumbtack, yeah.
These are all places that used to be like Merchant Circle and some other ones.
Yeah, there's there's a whole cottage industry around citations. And I think it's a good thing that Google has gotten a lot smarter. We don't have to worry about that sort of low level citation building anymore. And we can focus on more of the impactful, important things in digital marketing.
You know, I knew this, but you really took the time and spent hours and hours and hours with me and the team explaining that. Let's just talk about... And I've said this on many stages. Not necessarily... So many times you pick a location that's great for you. You pick a location that's in an industrial area. It's going to be a lot of square footage for your warehouse.
It's going to be perfect for your vehicles. It's close to a freeway. And what you told me is you need to change and reimagine the way you think about where you're going to pick your location. Number one, you don't want to be right next to a competitor that's got...
2 500 reviews number two you wanted to be in a fluent area without a lot of commercial property number three you want to be somewhere where you know your ideal client lives and you guys have kind of really worked with me because phoenix is a monster i mean we got six plus six million people here there's no way i want every single guy coming to every meeting here in phoenix
So we've got a location in Scottsdale. We've got one on the West Valley. We've got one on the East Valley. We've strategically picked these. Yes, it's difficult because we got to go through advanced verification. We got to get, you know, we get the front of the building wrapped up. We pay for a lease. We actually have the internet and everything turned on. We got security cameras.
We've got parts. We've got a CSR running out of there. We have Thursday meetings at these locations. But that changed everything. And I think you know this, you're our number one lead source. Yep. Our Google My Business profile brings more leads.
Now look, it goes neck and neck from PPC as far as revenue, but it's the clear winner is you guys bring in more leads for us through our Google My Business profile than any other marketing we do. How important, how should people think about when they're going to pick a location or expand their locations within a market?
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