October 1, 2025 · with Chris Williams & Trip Show
Chris Williams of Elite Web Professionals on Google Business Profile updates, structured data for AI search, and how a local business out-ranks a national brand.
The episode
Chris Williams runs Elite Web Professionals and, by his own account, now handles SEO for the Marketing MadMen operation itself, which makes this a checkup with someone grading his own homework. Nick Constantino opens on the fundamental that keeps getting relearned every few months: claim and optimize the Google Business Profile first, before spending a dollar on ads. Google recently tightened its links policy so a listing's website field has to point at a real site, not a social profile or a meeting link, closing a loophole businesses were using to look more established than they were. Multi-location operators feel this hardest. Williams and Constantino both run several locations and each one needs its own page, its own photos, and its own local signal, or Google quietly folds the smaller location into the bigger city next door and it never shows up in local results.
From there the conversation turns to what AI search actually changed. Williams argues the panic that hit in the early summer, when Google's AI Overviews rolled out, has mostly cooled off, because the people getting their answer from the summary box were rarely buyers to begin with. The traffic that still reaches a website now arrives further along and more likely to convert, which shifts the job from generating clicks to closing the ones that show up. What has changed for real is what AI rewards: not the biggest budget, but the best-structured content. Constantino describes watching a client location get folded into a larger metro area because its page read as an extension of the flagship instead of its own entity, a mistake schema markup and dedicated pages fix directly.
They close on brand as the one lever neither Google nor an AI model can take away. If people already search a business by name, no algorithm update can route that demand somewhere else, which is why Constantino keeps pushing brand marketing even when it's harder to attribute than a paid click. Williams backs it up with his own numbers: six to eight months of daily, tedious content work took Elite Web Professionals from ninth in Atlanta for web design to first, not through a trick but through volume and structure competitors hadn't bothered to match.
“It'll actually look to my page and pull stuff about me from my page because it's the best structured data. It's not necessarily relevant, it's structure and format.”
Chris Williams
What to take from it
In their words
“If you don't know how your tag manager is set up for what your conversions are, then none of these things work.”
Nick Constantino
“No one's searching specifically for 'jewelry store earring.' They're searching for the keyword earring. Every jewelry store sells earrings. So you've got to be smart where you approach, where you dip.”
Chris Williams
“A lot of people look for us by name. So Google can't mess with us. You can't AI around the name.”
Nick Constantino
Questions this episode answers
Welcome to a special edition of the Marketing MadMen. We are doing our SEO, then AEO, now GEO checkup with our boy Chris Williams. Chris, how you doing, bud? Good to have you. All right, Chris, tell me what you think people need to be looking out for right now.
People need to be looking out for their Google Business page. Before it was all video, everything going into TikTok, and that's important too, but now making sure that you have your Google Business page optimized, claimed, and then there's the recent links policy update where you actually have to have a link to your website. No social profile, no meeting links.
Because people were manipulating the system, trying to make addresses seem more prominent than they were. So if you have a location, each different location has to have its own location page.
Exhausting, because we have three and they're very different places and they don't want to see the same pictures. They ding you if the stories have the same pictures. It's got to be its own. Claiming your profile, optimizing it, getting the reviews on the page, it's a big conversation, and if you don't know how your tag manager is set up for what your conversions are, none of these things work.
And you taught me about schema and what we were doing with how the Sharpsburg page was really living on its own, an extension of Atlanta rather than a market of its own. Google didn't even acknowledge the competitors there because it was looking to Atlanta.
Which makes it difficult for it to compete against the local market out there. So you have to give it its own. Everybody was so upset at the end of May, beginning of June, when the AI Overview came out, people were terrified. It's settled down now because they're recognizing that the people getting information from the AI Overview weren't shopping, they were just trying to get information. The people who need a service are still going to the websites. When they land on your website, you have a more interested buyer.
It used to be Google was looking toward the places with the most influence, the ones with the most money. It doesn't work that way anymore.
Right, it'll actually look to my page and pull stuff about me from my page because it's the best structured data. It's not necessarily relevant, it's structure and format. So that's been hard, but the person putting out the most well-structured content is still going to win, because volume these days is the most important thing you can have.
You were number nine in Atlanta on your ranking. Tell everybody how hard it is, how many people in a market like this are fighting for that, and how you did it.
We're number one in Atlanta for Atlanta website design now. It took about six, seven, eight months. Tedious work, understanding the marketplace, talking about current events, which made me more relevant than some of the sleeping giants who've been dominant so long they don't have to work as hard as everyone else. That's what's special about the internet right now: it's open, if you're willing to put in the work.
You don't need fifty keywords anymore.
Pick your best ten keywords and optimize. No one's searching specifically for jewelry store earring. They're searching for the keyword earring. Every jewelry store sells earrings. So you've got to be smart where you approach, where you dip.
A lot of people look for us by name, so Google can't mess with us. You can't AI around the name. What advice do you have for people who used to get a lot of links and are losing leverage as Google summarizes instead of sending clicks out?
Press releases, editorial content, awards, anything tied to third-party recognition. Google doesn't like subjectivity, it wants objectivity. A five-star review is easy to understand. Being recognized from Forbes or a local magazine does a world of difference versus just saying it about yourself.
Chris, my man, as always, wonderful. I think we check in right around the holidays. This next three months is going to be epic.
Epic. All right, you've heard it. Thank you so much.
From the show to your numbers
It is free and ends with a written, ranked list of what to fix first. Ask for the channel read: what each channel you buy actually returns, local search included.