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Welcome back!

Most SEO reports are filled with charts, fluff, and words like "engagement" or "authority."

However, very few demonstrate precise results, such as increased traffic, more leads, and more customers.

If you're a franchise brand, service business, or local operator, you've probably been told to "trust the process" while rankings stagnate and costs accumulate.

The truth is, most agencies don’t explain what actually works or why you’re not seeing results.

Today, you're going to learn 5 honest SEO truths that most providers won’t tell you, based on a conversation with Dean Gravina, founder of Results Media, who’s helped dozens of franchisees and service businesses grow their rankings and revenue.

Dean was the head of SEO at King Kong and Megaphone marketing, and now runs a successful SEO agency!

Don’t forget to check out my Franchise Marketer Podcast for the audio interview.

A 600-word blog post with a few keywords won't rank.

The content that works now answers a specific question, shows expertise, and includes:

Dean's team starts with raw voice notes from clients.

They turn those into helpful, expert-level posts. No fluff, no filler.

If you're publishing templated blogs from your SEO agency, you're wasting money.

Ask your agency what backlinks they earned this month. Most will dodge the question.

Why? Because genuine backlinks take work.

Dean shared a process that works:

No money. No link farms. Just relevance and trust.

You can also earn links through interviews, partnerships, and press mentions. If no one is linking to your site, Google has no reason to trust it.

AI can draft content. But without original input, it’s just noise.

Dean’s team uses AI like this:

That’s how AI helps content scale without becoming generic.

Most agencies skip the personal input. That’s why their content reads like a Wikipedia page and never ranks.

You're now fighting:

If you're not updating your Google Business Profile on a weekly basis, you'll be invisible.

Dean’s advice:

You need to treat your Google Business Profile like your homepage.

Not every business should run SEO year-round.

If you're spending $1,500/month with no traffic or leads after 6 months, pause.

Here’s when Dean says to pull the plug:

Shift your budget to faster wins: Google Ads, lead-gen pages, or sales outreach.

Revisit SEO later when the business has momentum and content to build from.

Whilst outbound clicks may be down for most sites from blog traffic, your brand's visibility is most likely up and showing in a whole bunch of new places like Chat GPT and other LLMs where you weren’t before.

People searching for LLMs is only going to increase; however, how do LLMs know who to trust?

It’s going to be the same SEO fundamentals that matter, links, good content and technical things like proper schema, fast load times, etc….

What I do see changing is the type of things that people are asking about our brands.

Here is a prime example of a searcher in Chat GPT who searches ‘Create me a comparison table of the pros and cons between Fox Mowing and Jim’s Mowing’

As you can see, very comprehensive and informative, this wasn’t with search enabled; if it was, it would have had a different result.

One great thing about this is the amount of new content and opportunities it opens up; this is the type of content you need to add to your website or discuss in some of your posts.

Heck, I am going to even use this in a Facebook recruitment ad.

The point is, SEO is still crucial for any website; however, it’s no longer just a Google or nothing game anymore.

Chat GPT will keep eating into those searches as Google dips below 90% of searches for the first time in a long time.

Try Chat GPT or Perplexity and tell me which is a better search experience?

I hope you enjoyed this week's edition, and check out the podcast with Dean, which goes for 60 minutes.

As a subscriber, you can get access to it here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Oyw3daW6nxR1fWPH3rwaiYSEMaa_h-mwJsifZeeOqcE/edit?usp=sharing

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