Shane - Local Business Growth Facebook ad: “Read if you want leads”

About this ad

Meta Ad Library ID

1712155500509728

Platforms

Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, Messenger and Threads

Relaunches

0

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Ad text

I checked our marketing report and almost spit out my coffee: 86% of our leads came from Google and ChatGPT. Not from the $4,200 a month we were spending on Google Ads. Not from the billboards on Route 9. From people asking Google or ChatGPT who to call. Let me back up a little. We run an HVAC company in South Jersey. My dad started it in 1991. I took over in 2018 when his knee gave out. 11 employees. Solid Google reviews. Decent reputation in the area. For years, word of mouth kept us full. But by 2022, the phone started slowing down and I didn’t know why. Our reviews hadn't dropped. We hadn't changed anything. So I did what made sense: I turned up the ad spend. First $1,500 a month. Then $2,800. Then $4,200. Leads came in, but they were mostly price shoppers. Our cost per booked job crept past $340. I hired an SEO agency in 2023. Paid them $18,000 over 12 months. They built backlinks. Wrote blog posts called "5 HVAC Tips for Homeowners." Our organic calls went from 4 a month to 6. I tried posting on Facebook three times a week for four months. I tracked every post. Total inbound calls from Facebook in that time: 2. I was doing all of this after already putting in 10-hour days. Coming home. Staring at our analytics. 1,100 website visitors last month. 9 called us. I kept asking myself the same question: why are we invisible? One night I found a thread in an r/localSEO Facebook group. Someone had posted asking why their HVAC business wasn't getting organic calls despite ranking on page one. Dozens of other owners piled on. All of us in the same boat. Someone in the thread linked a BrightLocal report from March 2026. I clicked it. It said that AI tool usage for finding local businesses jumped from 6% in 2025 to 45% in 2026. I read that line three times. It also said that 31% of people used ChatGPT specifically to find a local business in the last 12 months. ChatGPT. To find a plumber or an HVAC company. So I typed into ChatGPT: "Who is the best HVAC company near Voorhees New Jersey." It gave me three names. Mine wasn't one of them. I went back to that thread and kept reading. Someone posted a link to Google's own Business Profile help page. It said directly: businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local results. It also said Google looks at how many articles, links, and reviews exist about a business when deciding who to recommend. That hit differently. I looked at our website like I was reading it for the first time. Homepage. About page. One services page listing AC, heating, duct cleaning. Nothing about Voorhees specifically. Nothing about Marlton or Haddonfield or Medford. No pages that matched the kinds of questions people were typing into Google or asking ChatGPT. Then someone in that same group shared a Pew Research Center study from July 2025. It showed that when Google displays an AI summary, users only clicked a regular website link 8% of the time. Without an AI summary, they clicked 15% of the time. Our website wasn't even in the AI summary. We were invisible before people even had a chance to click us. The problem wasn't that we had bad SEO. The problem was that our website had almost nothing for AI to read, understand, or use to recommend us. A week later, someone in the group mentioned something about an AI SEO agent they were using. They said it scanned their business, studied their competitors, looked at what locals were searching for, then built the pages their site was missing. Pages for each service area. Pages that answered the specific questions real people typed into Google and ChatGPT. I was skeptical. I had already wasted $18,000 on an agency doing something similar on paper. But this person showed a screenshot of their organic calls going from 11 a month to 37 over five months. They shared a link, so I tried it. The setup was incredible quick and easy, but the results weren’t instant (I didn’t expect them to be). The first month, nothing dramatic changed. But by month three, our organic lead count went from 9 a month to 24. By month five it was 41. That's when I pulled the marketing report that made me spit out my coffee. 86% of our leads coming from Google and ChatGPT. $4,200 a month in ads turned off completely. We still get roughly the same number of calls. Except now they're free, because Google or ChatGPT recommended us when they asked who to call. If I could say one thing to someone in the position I was two years ago, it's this: The reason your customers aren’t finding you isn’t because your service is bad or your reviews are thin. It’s because the way people find you has changed, and your website still looks like 2018. People aren't just clicking links anymore. They're asking questions. They're asking who. They're getting one or two names back, not a page of ten. If those names aren't yours, the job goes to someone else before you even knew the phone should have rung. Look at your website right now, would Google understand it well enough to recommend it? That's the question I wish someone had asked me three years ago. 🚨📢EDIT: My bad I forgot to share link to the AI agent, so my DMs are full of questions. Here's the link: https://nuurank.com/start Each day you’re not using AI is your loss as a business owner!

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