The stuff your marketing guy has never heard of: 🧵
->1 CITATION DISASTER
I ran a citation audit on all 50.
Average practice had 47 errors across directories:
→ Wrong suite numbers on Healthgrades
→ Old phone numbers on Zocdoc
→ "St" vs "Street" inconsistencies
→ Duplicate listings cannibalizing each other
The top 6? 100% NAP consistency across 80+ directories.
Google just flipped the whole game upside down.
AI Overviews everywhere now.
Eating up the entire screen before anyone even sees your listing.
Old SEO playbook? Throw it out. Seriously.
I had a client ranking #1 for 2 years straight. Traffic dropped 30% in 6 weeks.
Ranking didn't change. Google just stopped sending clicks.
Panicked call at 8am. What do we do now?
Took me 3 months to figure out the new rules.
Here's everything I learned the hard way 🧵
First thing that hit me nobody types keywords anymore.
Best plumber Houston? That's dead.
Now it's why is my water heater making a banging noise at night or how much does it cost to fix a leaking pipe under the sink.
Full sentences. Real questions. Like talking to a friend.
And guess what Google's AI loves to pull answers from? FAQ schema.
Started adding FAQ schema to every single location page. Real questions people actually ask. Not made up corporate nonsense.
Within 60 days that same client started showing up IN the AI Overview. Not under it. Inside it.
Traffic came back. Different source. Same money.
Second problem almost broke my brain.
Client had perfect on-page SEO. Schema done right.
Content was fire. But AI Overview kept pulling competitors instead.
Spent 2 weeks trying to figure out what was wrong.
Then I checked his citations. Business hours said 9-5 on Google. 8-6 on Yelp. 10-4 on some random directory from 2019.
NAP all over the place. Name spelled different on 3 sites. Old phone number still floating around.
AI sees that mess and goes nope. Can't trust this one. Shows someone else instead.
Cleaned up 47 citations. Took forever. But AI started trusting the listing again within 3 weeks.
Boring work. Massive results.