The 80/20 of AEO in 12 Minutes (Rank on ChatGPT and Google)
A local SEO keyword research process that flips the order: map every service and area into pages first, then let Search Console tell you which ones deserve to stay.
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Interview
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Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Local SEO and AEO results come from keyword research done in reverse: build a page for every service and area you offer, then let first-party Search Console data and real lead flow decide which pages survive.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You run a local service business, or an agency serving one, and want a repeatable way to decide which service and city pages to build.
You've been relying on Ahrefs or Semrush volume numbers for local keywords and suspect they don't match what actually drives leads.
You want your site to show up in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude answers as well as traditional Google results for local searches.
SKIP IF…
You run a national or e-commerce brand where city-level service pages don't apply.
You want a step-by-step screen recording of the full process; this video only walks through a doc outline, and a longer demo sits behind a paid community.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Keyword research is the 80/20 of AEO and local SEO, but third-party volume from Ahrefs and Semrush is a shaky guide for local terms. The process here starts by listing every service a business offers, cross-checking that list against AI-generated ideas, then building a distinct page for each service and one for each service-and-city combination you can actually serve. After publishing and internally linking the pages, review Google Search Console at 7, 14 and 30 days. Pages with under five impressions in 30 days get merged or removed, and lead flow confirms which services to expand.
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Why keyword research is the main lever, with two case study sites as proof.
02:00 – 04:20
02 · Why Ahrefs and Semrush lie about local volume
City-level volume is a shaky proxy, and national numbers hide how people really search local services.
04:20 – 07:04
03 · Map every service, then every area
List every service a CPA firm offers, cross-check with AI, then build service-and-city pages within the real service area.
07:04 – 09:45
04 · Let Search Console do the keyword research
Review 7, 14 and 30 day data, prune pages under five impressions, and confirm with lead flow.
09:45 – 12:18
05 · ChatGPT business hub and the Ship or Die drop
Verify your business in ChatGPT, plus community and product plugs.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Keyword research is the 80/20 of AEO: it sets the floor for how many leads your site brings in every month.
City-level volume from Ahrefs or Semrush is a weak proxy for local demand, and third-party keyword data keeps getting noisier.
Each distinct service someone might search for produces a completely different set of search results, so each deserves its own page.
Multiply every service by every area you serve and you get the page list, but only build pages for places you can reasonably serve.
The process is inverted: map out and publish the pages first, then check whether searches follow, instead of researching first.
Search Console is first-party data showing the exact query someone searched and clicked, which makes it more reliable than any third-party tool.
Impressions on a service-and-city page are a floor on local search volume, but the real question is whether anyone searches for the service at all.
A page with under five impressions over 30 days is a candidate to consolidate or delete.
Within two to three months, lead calls and form fills tell you which services actually perform, and lead flow is the most honest metric.
Some services you list won't match how people actually search, and the only way to find out is to publish and watch the data.
Verifying your business in ChatGPT's business hub plays a role similar to Search Console for AI search visibility.
Takeaway
Build the pages, then trust the data
WHAT TO LEARN
Local search demand is easier to find by publishing pages for every real service and area and reading first-party Search Console data than by trusting third-party keyword volume.
Third-party city-level volume is a weak proxy for local demand, and national numbers hide how people actually search for specific services.
Start by listing every service the business offers, then cross-check against an AI-generated list so nothing sellable is missing from the master list.
Give each distinct service its own page, then add service-and-area pages only for places you can reasonably serve.
Link new pages from the menu and homepage to build a silo structure before judging performance.
Review Search Console at 7, 14 and 30 days; the exact queries and clicks are first-party and more reliable than any keyword tool.
Pages with under five impressions in 30 days get merged or removed, and two to three months of lead flow shows which services deserve more investment.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
AEO
Answer engine optimization. Making your site show up as a cited or recommended result in AI answers such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, alongside traditional Google search.
GEO
Generative engine optimization. A near-synonym for AEO, focused on being surfaced by generative AI search tools.
Google Search Console
Google's free tool that reports the exact queries people used to find your site, with impressions and clicks per page. It's first-party data, unlike keyword tools.
GBP
Google Business Profile, the listing that drives map results and local pack visibility, stacked on top of website keyword work.
Service area page
A page on a local business site targeting one service in one city, such as tax planning in Austin.
Silo structure
Organizing pages and internal links so related service and area pages link to each other from the menu, homepage and elsewhere.
“Before, we did the research, then built the pages. Now we map out the pages and then see if the searches follow.”
clean statement of the inverted process, no setup needed→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
08:40
“The most honest metric you can look at is lead flow.”
short, quotable, contrarian to tool-first SEO→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
The Script
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Today, we're going to be walking through the most important aspect of AEO or GEO, and that's keyword research. I don't think enough emphasis goes into this, but I think that's part of the 80 -20 nowadays. So Tristan and I will walk through it.
Tristan's got a huge doc going, getting ready. How's it going, Tristan? It's going well, going well.
Just, you know, standard day, standard stuff. Awesome. Awesome.
Yeah. Yeah. So let's just jump into it.
I saw the doc beforehand. Got a couple examples. Looking good, man.
Why don't you share your screen and we can just hit the ground running. Sounds good.
Here we go. So put together this nice little doc prior to the call or this video. And basically, like Jackie said.
Big 80 -20 of AEO, SEO, whatever it's going to become in the next few years. The 80 -20, the main thing you want to focus on that's going to drive like 80 % of your results is the actual keyword research process, right? Figuring out the different types of ways people search for your service and targeting those different ways they search so that your searcher shows up on your site, whether it's through ChatGPT.
traditional Google search, Gemini, Claude, you name it, right? And so I've shown the Local Rank Academy members exactly how to do this, mainly through Movement Room and Vet Pet Alliance, right? If you implement this keyword research process correctly, it kind of establishes the baseline and the floor for the number of leads that you can bring in.
every single month through your website. And then when you stack that with your GBP, you know, you're cooking. So you can see just some two examples here, movement room, that pet alliance, we implemented the same process we're going to talk about today.
And you can see they are, you know, they're, they're doing pretty well. So big thing here is just refining that process, right? The old way was you go into Ahrefs, SCM Rush.
And you look at like that city level search fully, right? Good example is like you search Plumbers Houston, gets like 500 searches a month, right? You use that as a proxy to be like, okay, there's a lot of people searching for plumber near me, emergency plumbing, plumbing near me.
But the thing is, it's not always accurate. And especially nowadays with how crazy all this third party data is with Ahrefs, Ahrefs, SEMrush. whatever SEO tool you use to kind of do your keyword research, things are getting crazy.
So you need a very refined, very dependable way to do keyword research. And this is what I've been teaching the people on our Monday calls and through our videos. So the way to actually do a local SEO that gets you like leads that turn into cold, hard cash, this is what we do.
We list the services that people might. search for. Like if we're going to use the example, like let's pretend I'm just going to LARP as like a CPA firm, right?
Most people are going to search like CPA near me, right? But the thing is, they're also going to search for the different ways or different services that a CPA firm might offer. So if I'm a CPA firm owner, or I'm a local SEO agency working on a CPA firm, the first thing I'm doing is I am sitting down and I'm figuring out every single service.
that my firm can provide, right? So example here is CPAs offer tax planning, tax consulting, Schedule S formation, or not, I don't know, I said Schedule S formation, S Corp formation, LLC formation, tax advisory, tax extensions, emergency tax filings, 915 tax filings, right? I'm just going back to when I was in accounting and I remember all the different things, you know, people would hit the tax firms I worked for.
like why they would reach out to them. But the thing is, each type of way people search for this service results in a completely different set of search results, right? And when you multiply that by each location that you want to show up for, it can get pretty crazy.
So I always start by mapping out all of the services that I know my client, or if I'm the client itself, like what I can offer, right? So each of these services, again, it's a distinct way someone searches for your company. And Ahrefs, SEMrush, they rarely tell you that because when you search like tax extension, you're me, it's looking at the national level number of searches, right?
Then what I do is I pretty much cross -check the AI list because there might be services that I have on my list that the AI list didn't necessarily find. The whole idea is to get a consolidated aggregate master list of services. that you want to show up for when someone is searching for that service, right?
And then that's where I say, that's where we go to kind of number three. Once we've kind of given each distinct service its own page, right, we're gonna then create build pages, we're gonna build pages for the areas where we provide that service, right? So if I'm an Austin CPA firm, right, the high -level keyword I'm going after is CPA services in Austin.
CPA firm in Austin, but I'm also creating a service area page for every single type of service that I offer, right? Tax prep in Austin, tax planning in Austin, tax consulting in Austin. You know, I can go down the whole list and basically, you know, every service you offer, every single area you offer it, we're creating pages for those.
But, you know, you can't go crazy with it, right? If you're in Dallas, you... and you can't reasonably service people in like Houston, don't create pages for those.
That's why it's called local SEO. You want to be within bounds of where you actually provide those services, right? So let's say I'm an Austin CPA firm.
I've built out all of these pages, right, on our site. The way we're doing things now is once we publish those pages and we've kind of linked to it from like the menu nav, the homepage, wherever else we link to it. on the site to build that like silo structure that we really like, we start reviewing like the first 7, 14, and 30 days in Google Search Console.
And that's what I really told Ali to do, because he gave me a full list of services. And I was like, you know, some of these might not be, you know, people might not actually search for it that way. But let's see what the data actually shows us.
And the reason this works is because Google Search Console is first party data, it tells you the exact query that someone searches and clicks on to hit your site. There's a little bit more noise now, but it's still more reliable than Ahrefs or SEMrush, right?
So basically what I'm doing is I'm filtering the performance report for each page, and then I'm looking at the queries, impressions, and clicks. And so if like my Austin tax planning page got 350 impressions in the past 30 days, that's kind of a bookmark for you as like, okay, we can, assume that around the Austin area, there's at least 350 searches a month for whatever month that is, right?
But the main thing I use it for, I don't even look at the search volume. I'm just looking at, are there people actually searching for this service, right? At the end of the day, the most important thing I care about is if leads are actually coming into our site.
But this at least gives you a good idea of if the service that you're targeting even gets... even get searches, right? If it doesn't get searches, here's what we do, right?
You know, even if it gets a few clicks, because you have to remember, like this is local SEO, you're not going to get crazy number of clicks unless you're like, working on multiple on multiple state brand or a nationwide brand. But any any of the pages where you know, you're not seeing very many impressions, very many clicks, let's say under five impressions over 30 days.
we typically consolidate or just kind of straight up remove them. But if you do it correctly within two to three months, you should have a good idea of which services are performing well based off what people are calling you or filling out the lead form for, right? Again, the most honest metric you can look at is lead flow.
And this kind of helps you at least get a proxy for what works and then just see what the leads are saying. see what type of service they're coming to you for, and use that as kind of the direction for where to take things, whether that's expanding into new cities through your local SEO strategy or trying to offer related services that you don't advertise on your website currently.
So that's about it. It's a pretty straightforward keyword research process. We actually kind of inverted it.
Before, you know, we did the research, then built the pages. Now we map out the pages and then see kind of if the searches follow. Yeah, I think after this call, what Tristan was going to do is probably give you like the prompt or SOP in Local Rank Academy on how to do it just like with AI and ChatGPT.
You can obviously send ChatGPT this YouTube video have it uh try to generate it but it's probably just easier if you just um check out the local ranking academy uh first link in the comments section check it out there also uh make sure you verify your business on chatgbt now it's so easy um it's i think it's called like business hub on chatgbt so it's kind of similar to search console make sure you do that and lastly there will be a secret drop on a new local SEO SaaS tool that I'll be doing for the competition with Mark Liu and I don't know if you saw Jack Fricks.
It's called Ship or Die. Make sure you check that out. Sign up for my, I think it's, just go to jackichow .com, sign up for the newsletter, and then you guys will be notified when it drops.
Price will obviously keep going up until every five users. Anyways, hope today was helpful. Tristan, what are you going to drop in Local Rank Academy for this episode again?
I think it was like the prompt, right? Or was it like an... Yeah, I mean, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to kind of film a video just for them, right?
I think it's easier to, you know, prompts work, but I think giving like a concrete video with the transcript, it's kind of like the YouTube video, right? You can just paste the transcript in. And then that gives Kodak's like technically gives it a rough prompt to, to work off of.
Um, but the, the video we'll post in local, local rank Academy will be way more detailed. I'll use like a real time example to show like how it, um, show myself kind of doing the keyword research for, um, a business and then kind of seeing how I keep those service, how I choose, like whether I'm keeping services, not including the service and the page build out, things like that.
So it'll be. Basically this, but on steroids. Cool.
All right, guys. Let us know if you liked the episode down below. Like and subscribe if you haven't already.
And yeah, we'll catch you guys hopefully next week. Get back into the groove, man. Take it easy.
There we go.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Keyword research is the 80/20 of AEO and local SEO, and the old way of doing it is getting less reliable. This walkthrough shows a service-first process that builds the pages first and lets Search Console decide what stays.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
04:30list
Pages first, data second keyword research
List every service
Cross-check with an AI-generated list
Build one page per service
Build service-and-area pages
Review Search Console at 7, 14 and 30 days
Merge or remove pages under 5 impressions
Follow lead flow to expand
An inverted local keyword research process that publishes pages for every plausible service and area, then uses first-party query data and leads to prune and expand.
Steal forany local service business site
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
10:00link
“check out the Local Rank Academy, first link in the comments”
Soft pitch after the teaching, pointing to a longer real-time demo inside the paid community.
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