Unscripted SEO · Host: Jeremy Rivera · Guest: Josh Thompson, founder of Brightbeam SEO
Picture the homeowner who never opens Google. They ask an assistant for estimates from the top three plumbers in Boise and walk away. Josh Thompson, founder of Brightbeam SEO in Boise, Idaho, thinks that request is coming for every local contractor, and on this episode of Unscripted SEO he explains how he is preparing his clients for it. He has been testing what it takes for a client to start showing up in the chat results, and one of those tests moved a client to the number one spot in about a week.
Josh came up doing SEO for his own companies and for national brands before pivoting to local work. Most of his clients now are contractors. He calls himself “dirty jobs adjacent,” and he thinks that’s a good place to be for the next decade.
Your next customer may be a bot asking for the top three
When I asked how AI has changed the way he runs his agency, Josh didn’t start with traffic. He said the clicks from chat results are still thin in small and mid-sized cities. What he is watching is the agent layer:
“Somebody’s going to say, chat, get me an estimate with the top three. You know, plumbers in Boise, right?”
In that world, a search still happens. The AI runs it on the person’s behalf, and the person “isn’t even looking at their screen anymore.” Josh wants to be good at that middle step before it becomes the default.
He also split home services into two camps. A custom home builder or an interior designer sells taste, so the choice stays subjective. A plumber, an HVAC tech or a roofer sells a job done right, and as Josh put it, “I just want a good job.” Those are the trades most exposed to an agent picking three names and sending the form. I brought up how Lead Truffle already qualifies leads with an AI chat on the contractor’s side. Put a bot on the homeowner’s side too and you get two chatbots negotiating calendars with each other.
One word in the H1 moved a client to number one
This is the part of the episode you can act on today. Josh noticed that chat answers for local questions usually pull from regular search results, not from the map pack. So he ran a test:
“I typed in top three, you know, companies for one of my clients. They weren’t there. Great. That’s exactly what I wanted. I went and put top in their title in their H1, top company. And then within a week. They were the number one, right? In that search.”
One client, one query, one week. It isn’t a controlled study, and Josh didn’t pretend it was. His read is that words like best and top are about to matter a lot more, because that’s how people phrase a request to an assistant. Once every competitor copies the move, you are back to the old tiebreakers:
“If authority matters and backlinks and all that are going to matter because they’re pulling from search results, then nothing really changes.”
Bing is the index most local businesses forgot
Josh lives in Google Maps. He told me about 75% of his clients’ customers call straight from the map and never reach the website. So he asked me what I’m seeing on Bing, and I gave him the short list I give every local service business:
- Install the IndexNow plugin so Bing gets your pages without the indexing fights you have in Search Console.
- Claim your Bing Places listing.
- Remember that Bing has counted social signals as a ranking factor for over a decade. Josh’s reply: “So the one million power washing companies on TikTok are actually doing the right thing.”
- Do the basics Bing Webmaster Tools tells you to do. If your H1 is wrong, fix it.
That matters for chat because ChatGPT leans on Bing. I mentioned a test someone ran on how ChatGPT picks map results: a verified Bing business, a first-page Bing ranking and the number of Google reviews lined up almost perfectly. Chris Garrett made the same case for Bing on an earlier episode.
Local is bottom of funnel by nature
National brands are watching AI answers eat their informational traffic. I brought in Michael Buckby’s line that AI is your least trained customer service representative, and his advice to move content down the funnel. Josh’s answer is that local businesses were already there:
“That’s what local is. It just basically is bottom of funnel by its nature, right?”
Nobody searches Google Maps for a top-of-funnel question. If you are national, you can still find bottom-of-funnel searches that nobody is targeting well. Those are the ones where somebody has to take an action or pay money, which is the part AI can’t do for them yet. His advice: “get out of the top of funnel.”
What Josh does first for a new contractor
Josh likes the new starts best: the contractor who has work but no real brand yet. When I asked for his number one move on a new local service client, he gave me a checklist:
- Build a website and set up the Google Business Profile.
- Fix the business name. A company called “AA” with no trade in the name needs some keywords in it, without stuffing.
- Move service-area businesses toward a real map pin where possible. He called that “a huge piece.”
- Build service pages and city pages with clean slugs and a correct H1, because “people underestimate how much Google uses your website, especially locally, just to see what you do.”
- Make calling easy. “Just put your phone number in a bunch of places.”
If you want the Google Business Profile side in more depth, Mike Martin’s episode on the GBP loop goes there.
You know more than your local competition thinks
Josh closed on something I hear from a lot of local SEOs. On Twitter, everybody talking SEO is pretty sharp. In his local market, the gap is huge. He talked to a business owner the day before whose website was “just bonkers.”
“You probably don’t realize you’re a lot smarter than a lot of the people that you would be competing with there as opposed to on Twitter.”
Think about the asphalt guy working five days a week. When would he have time to learn any of this? He gets cold called the day he registers the business and again the day the site goes up. A local SEO who will sit down, shake his hand and tell him the truth is worth a lot to him, and probably worth more once AI agents start doing the searching.
Find Josh at brightbeamseo.com. 🎧 Listen to the full episode or watch it on YouTube, and subscribe to Unscripted SEO so you catch the next one.
