The Reputation Audit That Reveals Everything

When Dennis audits a website, the first thing he looks for has nothing to do with technical SEO. He's checking if the business satisfies E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) from Google's perspective.

Dennis told me about auditing a pest control company with 200 technicians and nine locations. He could immediately see they were legitimate from their reviews, ranking keywords, and overall presence. Everything pointed to a company that knows what they're doing.

On the flip side, he sees companies where links don't work, sites load slowly, or their YouTube channel doesn't exist. These basic signals tell both users and search engines something's wrong. When you're evaluating a new restaurant or any business, you check their website and LinkedIn. Google does the same thing.

The 80/20 Rule for Marketing Channels

One of the biggest mistakes pest control companies make is trying to be everywhere at once. They're running Google Ads, LSAs, Facebook ads, Yelp ads, and billboards, all while none of it is working well.

Dennis said to look inside your CRM and figure out what's actually driving provable phone calls. Is it referrals? Your Google Business Profile? LSAs? Whatever is working well, do more of that. Focus 80% of your effort on the 20% producing results.

He gave me an example of a doctor who did liposuction plus 10 other procedures. The doctor wanted to market everything, but 90% of his revenue came from liposuction. Dennis told him flat out to focus on that. Same with pest control. If residential mosquito treatments drive most revenue, lean into that instead of spreading yourself thin.

The key is amplifying what's already working instead of chasing every shiny new tactic.

Why Offline Marketing Works for Established Brands

Dennis explained that TV commercials, billboards, and radio are incredibly effective, but only when you're at a certain level. He worked with brands like Jack Daniels, analyzing which bands to sponsor based on audience overlap. They used this data to inform offline media for WWE, Nike, Adidas, and other major brands.

But here's the critical part: offline marketing only works when you're over $10 million a year, operating beyond one small city, and can afford to spend money over six months to a year building frequency. As Dennis said, "You can't just run an ad one time like one mailer and expect that to work."

For local pest control companies under $10 million, billboards and TV are usually a waste because you don't have enough brand recognition. The reason offline media works for established brands is a 30-second TV commercial has way more impact than a skippable YouTube banner ad. Dennis called this "digital dimes and offline dollars." You can't compare them directly.

Building a Brand Through What Others Say

I asked Dennis how a local business builds a great brand. His answer was simple: Google your name and company name. If there's a knowledge panel and reviews across platforms, you're building a brand. Your brand isn't what you say about yourself. As Dennis put it, "Your brand mathematically is the sum of all the positive and negative interactions from your customers, your employees, your community, anyone who knows who you are."

Dennis made an important distinction about reputation issues. First, your operation actually sucks and you don't take care of customers. No marketing will fix that. You have an operational problem, not a marketing problem.

Second, someone is actively trying to destroy your reputation. Dennis told me about his friend Harrison Getts, who got named in a $1.7 billion Bitcoin lawsuit he had nothing to do with. Because the lawsuit was on government sites and the Wall Street Journal, it showed up when you Googled his name. Dennis helped by getting Harrison on podcasts, having business partners create content about him, and getting him speaking at conferences. They flooded the internet with legitimate content about Harrison's actual businesses, pushing down the negative results.

The lesson: protect your name in advance. Build that reputation now before something bad happens, because it takes months to get enough positive content ranked.

The One Minute Video Strategy That Solves Everything

This is where Dennis really blew my mind. He said most people overthink content creation. They think they need expensive cameras, perfect lighting, professional editing, and hour-long videos. But the reality is completely different.

Dennis showed me his favorite book on social media, which is about TikTok. The key isn't young people singing and dancing. It's about sharing one tip in 22 seconds. That's it. Not an hour. Not even 10 minutes. Just 22 seconds of you sharing one thing you know.

Dennis explained that if you're a pest control company in Greenville, South Carolina, people don't necessarily want to hear you talk about bugs and chemicals all day. But you probably know the best hiking spots in Greenville. You probably have a favorite restaurant. You shop at Costco and see other local business owners there. You have relationships with roofers, electricians, and other home service providers.

Dennis told me about being at a Brazilian steakhouse with some people, and someone said, "The trick is don't load up on the salad bar because they're trying to trick you by making you eat salad and chicken so you don't eat as much of the expensive meat." That's a 22-second video right there. You pull out your phone, point it at someone's face, and capture that one tip.

The brilliant part of this strategy is you're not doing extra work. Dennis emphasized this multiple times. You're not becoming Gary Vaynerchuk or an Instagram influencer. You're just documenting things you're already doing with people you already know. As Dennis said, "You do it with your style, and if you're a good business person, and if you're watching this I assume you are because you're following Danny, then you're constantly elevating other people in your network."

When I pushed Dennis on what actually happens when you do this for six months, he said you don't even need six months. Just spend one hour per month going into Google, searching for the main thing you want to rank for like "mosquitoes Greenville South Carolina," and looking at the "People Also Ask" section. Answer each of those questions in about one minute. Maybe there are 10 or 15 questions. Answer them all. Have your technicians answer them. Have customers answer them.

The raw videos are the hard part, but it's only an hour per month. Then your agency or marketing team repurposes those videos into YouTube content, blog posts, tweets, Instagram posts, LinkedIn content, all of it. The same raw ingredients get reformatted for every platform.

Dennis was adamant about this: "Making the videos is really easy, just an hour every month. You can do that. It's worth it. It satisfies all the things that are necessary to win in this AI-driven world."

Why Partnerships Create Link Authority the Right Way

Dennis explained that one of the best ways to build legitimate link authority is through local business partnerships. When someone's looking for a house, they talk to a real estate agent first, then they talk to a mortgage broker. These businesses naturally work together. Pool construction companies and landscapers work together. Real estate agents and bathroom remodelers work together because when someone moves into a new house, they often want to remodel.

For pest control, this is huge. When you come into someone's house to handle their pest issue, you notice other things. Maybe their lawn has problems. Maybe their water heater warranty expired three years ago. Maybe their garage door is broken. You have relationships with people who handle those services.

Dennis said you're not necessarily doing this for referrals, though that can happen. You're doing it to show Google that you actually play in this industry and have real relationships. When the HVAC technician comes to a house and mentions you, when the garage door guy knows you, when you all appear in content together, that signals to Google that you're all legitimate local businesses in that area.

As Dennis explained it, his job as a search engineer was incredibly frustrating. Someone types in "Cleveland Ohio Pest Control" and all these results show up, but 99.9% of the internet is spam. He needed to find any local signal showing that a business actually operates in Cleveland. Did one of their technicians stop at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Do they have relationships with other Cleveland businesses? These tiny signals matter because they prove you're actually there, not just some random website claiming to serve that area.

Dennis was clear: "You don't have to create thousands of videos, right? Just a few things to show that you're actually there. And don't just post a picture of the Cleveland Cavaliers stadium or whatever, anybody can do that. Show real experiences. Show the other home service businesses in Cleveland, Ohio that you're with. Real pictures, real videos. Doesn't have just quick little could even be 10 seconds long, right? That's it. It's so simple."

Personal Brand vs. Company Brand (And When Each Matters)

I asked Dennis whether pest control companies should focus on their personal brand or their company brand, because I see owners confused about this all the time. His answer made perfect sense.

If you're under a million dollars a year and it's mainly you and a couple technicians, you ARE the personal brand. Your personal reputation is the company's reputation whether you like it or not. As you start to grow and have other people running operations, handling the call center, managing technicians, doing quotes, then your personal brand becomes less important.

Dennis gave the example of Colonel Sanders starting Kentucky Fried Chicken at 63 years old. Originally it was him in the kitchen making the fried chicken. Same with Gordon Ramsay, it was him as a chef. But then they built a reputation where the personal brand separated from the company brand.

Dennis told me to think of it as two overlapping circles. There's your personal brand, there's the company brand, and there's an intersection between the two. The sweet spot is producing content at that intersection because it serves both purposes.

He emphasized that personal brand content doesn't need to be deeply emotional stuff about when your mom died or when you were broke. That's what self-help people do. For pest control, you're just showing your professional relationships. You can show where you went to school and got certifications. You can show yourself training team members or attending an industry conference. Is that personal brand or company brand? It's both, and that's the point.

Dennis said when Sarah in the office celebrates her third anniversary or someone has a baby, those moments reflect your company values. Companies put posters in their breakrooms about honesty and integrity and hard work. But as Dennis asked, "What if you actually told little stories and every one of those stories was just a minute?" A real video of everyone celebrating Janet's birthday is worth way more than an HR poster on the wall.

The Psychology of Why Familiarity Wins

This part completely changed how I think about marketing. Dennis explained that pest control customers, and really all service customers, don't actually care who's better at the work. They don't care whose chemicals are better. They choose whoever feels more familiar.

Dennis told me about his friend Dr. David Verley, one of the nation's leading cosmetic surgeons in Denver. This guy teaches other cosmetic surgeons. He's invented technology. He has all the credentials. But when Dennis asked him why women were choosing him for surgery, Dr. Verley said it was because he gave out a $1 lip gloss or because they liked how he sounded or looked.

Dr. Verley was frustrated because he thought people would look at his credentials, where he went to school, his patient reviews, his health grades. But they weren't making important life decisions based on whether the provider was actually good. They were making decisions based on familiarity and small emotional connections.

Dennis emphasized that this is even more true for pest control than cosmetic surgery. As he said, "These consumers, they don't care who's actually better. They don't care whose chemicals are better. They don't care." If someone does a Google search and sees five pest control companies, and they've seen something from one of those companies before (even if it had nothing to do with pest control), they're going to choose that one. People literally choose the one that's more familiar.

The reason billboards and branding work is because when people need a plumber or pest control service, they don't remember who the companies are. They look at a list and choose whoever feels familiar. It makes no logical sense, but that's how human psychology works.

Dennis referenced a study about choosing a babysitter. People had to choose between a family friend who was an okay babysitter versus a professional babysitter with a fantastic resume and great reviews but who they'd never met. Almost everyone chose the family friend they knew, even though she wasn't as good. Familiarity beats credentials.

How Click Signals Actually Drive SEO Rankings

Dennis revealed something that most SEO people don't talk about. Three months ago, Google revealed in their DOJ lawsuit with Apple that they heavily take into account click signals, more than links, more than beautifully written copy and pictures. Click signals matter more than all of that.

This connects directly to the familiarity principle. If you build familiarity and trust through content, that leads to more click signals when your website shows up in search results. People are more likely to click on your Google listing, your YouTube video, your Facebook post, everything.

Dennis proved this by making a tweet and then Googling his name. That tweet showed up instantly in the search results. If Google can see something, they're taking it into account. The millions of websites that got tanked in Google's recent core updates got penalized because they were trying to trick Google instead of doing things for users.

Everything Dennis talked about, from the 22-second videos to the local partnerships to the personal brand content, is completely legitimate. It's not a trick. As Dennis said, "If you do stuff that makes you more familiar and more human, imagine an engineer needing to tell you this, then people are more likely to click on your stuff."

When people click on your content more than competitors, Google sees that. When people recognize your business name in search results and click on you instead of the other options, Google sees that. This is why building familiarity through simple, authentic content is actually the core of modern SEO.

The LSA Strategy That Actually Works

We spent time talking about Local Service Ads because Dennis is an LSA expert and I get questions about this constantly. The biggest misconception is that LSA is some separate advertising platform you can just throw money at. Dennis explained that LSA is an extension of your Google Business Profile. If you have a new GBP with bad reviews and you haven't properly filled it out, don't expect your LSA to work just because you put $1,000 a week into it.

LSA ads are automatically created from your Google Business Profile. You don't write ads in LSA like you do with Google AdWords. You configure your LSA, set your budget and service areas, but that's about it. So if you don't have many good reviews, the other LSA companies will get the clicks instead of you.

Dennis explained that LSA is a "rich get richer" game. Whoever gets the most clicks that result in phone calls marked as actual leads within 24 hours will continue to get more leads. This is why answering the phone professionally and promptly is critical.

Dennis told me he looks at call recordings all the time for home service businesses. The owners claim they answer the phone great, but then he listens to the recordings and hears technicians saying "yeah, what's up?" instead of "Joe's Pest Control, how can I help you?" That unprofessional phone answering kills LSA performance.

The key things Dennis said to focus on for LSA are having a good reputation with lots of reviews in the last 90 days, answering the phone professionally, marking leads correctly, and setting an appropriate budget that doesn't flood the market. Don't start at $2,000 a week from nothing because it'll stall out. Build up gradually.

One critical thing Dennis revealed is if your LSA account is more than three years old, you might need to create a new one. The old version can't always migrate properly to the new system. It's a dirty little secret, but starting fresh with a new LSA account can solve performance issues.

Dennis also warned about LSA scams. In the last six months, there's been massive fraud largely from companies appearing to be out of Israel. They set up call centers under fake LSAs tied to local landmarks like parks or churches with thousands of reviews. When they get leads, it goes to their call center, and they try to bait and switch customers to overpriced services. These lead gen companies are basically holding legitimate home service businesses hostage by dominating LSA results.

The solution is to report them to Google repeatedly. Google only responds when enough people make noise about spam issues. It's frustrating, but that's how the system works.

For cost expectations, Dennis said LSA calls should generally cost $50 to $80, though some people claim to get them for $30 to $35 in suburban areas with lower budgets. But if you're getting calls at $35 and you want to scale, you should be willing to pay $50 or $60 per call to get more volume. Your cost per call will go up, but your total volume increases. It's supply and demand.

As Dennis said, "Anyone who's saying yeah I'm getting calls at $30, I'll say you're not spending enough. You could get twice as many calls but you got to be willing to pay a little more."

My Main Takeaway

1. The biggest thing Dennis taught me is that customers don't choose service providers based on technical superiority or credentials. They choose based on familiarity. This completely changes how you should think about marketing. Instead of trying to prove you're the best pest control company with the most eco-friendly chemicals and the best training program, you should focus on becoming familiar to your local community through simple, authentic content. When someone sees your face or your company name enough times, even in contexts unrelated to pest control, they'll choose you when they need your service. Google revealed that click signals matter more than links or website copy, and familiarity drives those click signals. Dennis proved this by tweeting something and watching it show up instantly in Google search results. If you make yourself more familiar and more human, people click on your stuff more, and Google sees that.

   
   

2. The one-minute video strategy solves almost every marketing problem at once. Spend just one hour per month answering the questions people are asking in your market. Go to Google, search for your main service, look at the "People Also Ask" section, and answer each question in about one minute on your phone. That's it. No fancy camera, no perfect lighting, no professional editing. Just point your phone at your face and share one tip in 22 seconds. Do this with your technicians, with local business partners, with customers. These raw videos become the ingredients that your agency or marketing team repurposes into YouTube content, blog posts, social media posts, everything. Making the videos is easy and only takes an hour per month. The magic happens when those videos get distributed everywhere and start building your familiarity, your reputation, and your local authority all at once.

   
   

3. Personal brand and company brand are two overlapping circles, and the sweet spot is content at the intersection. If you're under a million dollars a year, you ARE the personal brand whether you like it or not. Your personal reputation is your company's reputation. As you grow and have other people running operations, the brands can separate more. But the most powerful content shows your professional relationships and values. When you capture 22-second videos of Janet's birthday celebration in the breakroom or you training a new technician or you at an industry conference, that reflects both your personal commitment to your people and your company values. It's way more powerful than a poster on the wall claiming you value honesty and hard work. Show it through real moments, not corporate statements.

   
   

4. Local business partnerships create legitimate link authority because they prove to Google you're actually operating in your market. When you appear in content with the local HVAC company, the roofer, the electrician, the landscaper, that shows Google you have real relationships in that area. Dennis explained that as a search engineer, his frustrating job was filtering through 99.9% spam on the internet to find signals that a business actually operates in Cleveland or Greenville or wherever they claim. If your technician stopped at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and you have a 10-second video of that, if you have relationships with other Cleveland businesses and you appear in content together, those tiny signals prove you're legitimate. Don't just post stock photos of local landmarks. Show real experiences with real local connections.

   
   

5. LSA is an extension of your Google Business Profile, not a separate advertising platform you can just throw money at. If your GBP has bad reviews, incomplete information, and no recent positive reviews, your LSA won't work no matter how much budget you set. LSA ads are automatically generated from your GBP, so you must have a strong foundation first. Focus on getting lots of reviews in the last 90 days, answering the phone professionally every single time, marking leads correctly and promptly, and setting budgets that build gradually instead of flooding the market. If your LSA account is more than three years old, consider creating a new account because the old system doesn't always migrate properly. Expect to pay $50 to $80 per call in most markets, and be willing to pay more if you want to scale volume. Most importantly, own your LSA account directly instead of letting an agency control it, because some agencies will hold you hostage.

You can connect with Dennis Yu on all the major platforms. He's one of the most accessible people in digital marketing and genuinely wants to help home service businesses win. I've learned more from Dennis than probably anyone else in this industry, and I'm grateful he's my mentor. If you want to learn more about Dennis and his approach to digital marketing, just search his name and you'll find tons of content where he shares these strategies in detail.