The best business in town is usually not the easiest one to find.

I started this in 2014. Since then I have worked with more than a hundred businesses, some as clients and many more through classes, webinars, and courses.

Two of those rooms taught me more than all the rest.

The first was the Microsoft Store in Bridgewater, which asked me to come in and explain search to their customers. Ordinary business owners, no marketing background, no patience for jargon. I spent most of it on Bing, which was the polite thing to do in a Microsoft Store. What I actually took away was simpler than anything I taught that day: if I could not explain this in plain words, I did not understand it well enough to be trusted with somebody’s livelihood.

The second was Julian Goldie’s search community, where I ended up being the one they pulled in whenever local came up. That room was the opposite. Everybody in it did this for a living. And the local part turned out to be the piece most of them had never gone deep on.

That is when I stopped being a generalist. The businesses that kept getting results had the same handful of things in common, and they were rarely the things agencies like to sell.

Then the question itself changed. People stopped only searching and started asking. A search bar, a map, ChatGPT on their phone. Being on page one matters less every year than being the name that comes back. That is the part I work on now.