I had Dan Leibrandt back on the show only two months after his first time on. So much had changed in SEO that I wanted him back fast, and I am glad I did.
We talked for almost an hour, and I filled a whole page with notes. Dan runs Pest Control SEO, where he helps pest control companies grow with search. Here are the takeaways that stuck with me after we hung up.
Dan grew a big brand on Twitter, but it did not happen fast. He started with about 28 followers, and those were just his friends.
For the first month, most of his posts got five likes or less. Then one tweet finally hit 50 likes, and another one blew up even bigger after that.
Later he ran a giveaway about how he grew, and that was the real turning point. As Dan put it, "that giveaway got me 700 followers, it got 1,200 likes, 500 retweets, a thousand comments and that's what really blew me up."
This is the same thing I see with our podcast and our YouTube. Our first 50 videos got almost no views, and then one of them took off. Last year we hit 19 million views, so I know it works if you stick with it.
Dan calls organic posting free testing, and I love that way of putting it. You post every day, some posts flop, and a few of them blow up. You learn what people like, and it costs you nothing.
People can smell AI content
Dan and I agree on this one. When someone posts pure AI writing, you can just tell, even if you don't always know why.
Dan came from copywriting, so he spots it faster than most. He gave me one easy tell to watch for. "If you use an emoji before or after your first sentence, it's almost 100% chat GPT," he said, because most people don't write that way on their own.
His warning was simple: do not just paste a prompt into ChatGPT and ship whatever comes out. As Dan put it, "do not write content just going into ChatGPT and saying write me a blog for how to do DIY pest control. Do not do that."
Here is the part that really hit me. Bad AI content can cost you trust, and trust is hard to win back. Dan said it might be "better to not post at all than to put out bad quality posts that people know are clearly AI." If people think your content is fake, they will think your service is fake too.
Start with real content, then use AI
So Dan is not against AI at all. He uses it every day, but he starts in the right place.
His move is smart and easy to copy. He gets the company owner on a call and asks questions that pull out the real answers. Then he takes that transcript and turns it into a blog, so the words and the voice both stay real.
"We have to start with real content and then we can train the AI on the real content to then make artificial content," Dan said. The order is what matters most.
There is a nice bonus here too. You can post that same interview as a YouTube video and then link it on the blog. Now one piece of content is working for you in two places at once.
Put a real author on every page
Dan talked a lot about Google's rules, and one of them stuck with me. It is called E-E-A-T, which stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trust.
Part of it is simple to act on. Google wants to see a real author on every blog page, not a faceless brand but an actual person.
For most pest control companies, that author should be the owner. They have done this work for 20 years, maybe at a big company or at their dad's shop first. They are the expert, and Google can see that history and count it in their favor.
Google is not going anywhere for local
There is a lot of noise about new AI tools right now. DeepSeek and Qwen both just came out, and Dan said DeepSeek was built for around five or six million dollars. It is giving ChatGPT a real run, and Nvidia even lost a huge chunk of its value over it.
But for local home service work, Dan is not worried about Google one bit. He gave me two solid reasons.
First, homeowners tend to be older, so they are slow to switch to new AI tools. They have used Google forever, and old habits stick.
Second, Google owns the data, and that is the real moat. "Google has so much data in Google Earth, in Google Maps, and Google Business Profile," Dan said, and all the reviews live there too. Nobody else can match that.
His take was clear and made me feel better. Google will hold most local searches for at least the next 10 years. It may have to share the stage more, but it is not going away.
You have to be everywhere now
I asked Dan what to focus on for 2025, and his answer was kind of annoying in a good way. There is no single magic move you can lean on anymore.
He shared a line from Neil Patel that I liked a lot. It is no longer search engine optimization, it is search everywhere optimization, and you have to show up in a lot of places.
For Google in particular, Dan named four spots that matter. Those are Google Ads, Local Service Ads, Google Business Profile, and your website. His rule of thumb is simple: if you do over a million a year, you should be using all four.
Why this all works
Here is the idea that tied the whole talk together for me. Dan thinks Google works a lot like the human mind does.
People trust authority, so we want news from a source that has been around a while. We do not trust some random site that popped up last week. Google wants to show that same thing, and it rewards experience, trust, and a real track record.
So the game is not about tricks. It is about being a real expert and then proving it over and over. Post real content, stay consistent, and be everywhere people search. Do that, and Google will back you up.
Dan's course and book go even deeper than what we covered here. But these takeaways alone are worth the listen, so go check out the full episode.
