E46 – Service Stories: Turning Content Into Traffic with Joe Toscano

E46 – Service Stories: Turning Content Into Traffic with Joe Toscano

In this episode, Gary interviews Joe Toscano, CEO of Service Stories, renowned keynote speaker, and author of ‘Automating Humanity’. Joe discusses his extensive background in AI, his work in Silicon Valley, and his contributions to the Netflix documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’. He provides insights into how Service Stories was developed to help service-based businesses, like auto shops and plumbing services, transform their daily tasks into effective AI-generated content. The conversation emphasizes the evolution of SEO towards long-tail, conversational search queries and the significant traffic increases businesses can achieve by automating and optimizing their content for AI. Joe outlines the tangible benefits users have experienced, including a 410% increase in direct traffic. He also provides practical guidance on the implementation and contact information for interested listeners.

Discover:

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome

00:32 Joe Toscano’s Background and Career

02:32 The Birth of Service Stories

03:40 Challenges in SEO and AI Answers

05:52 The Evolution of Search and AI

09:27 Service Stories’ Approach to Content Creation

13:43 AI in Professional Content and Future Prospects

16:47 Implementing Service Stories in Businesses

19:22 Marketing Strategies for Auto Shops

19:49 Creating Content with Minimal Effort

21:10 Efficiency in Content Creation

22:01 Turning Content into Traffic

23:09 Adapting to Modern Search Queries

24:29 Long Tail Keywords and SEO

28:13 Real-World Success Stories

29:27 Service Stories: The Future of Marketing

32:35 Getting Started with Service Stories

 

servicestories.com

joe@servicestories.com

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Gary Ruplinger: Hello and welcome everybody to another episode of the Pipelineology podcast. Today I’m joined by a very special guest. I’ve got Joe Toscano with me. He is the CEO of Service Stories. He’s been a featured expert on Netflix’s Social Dilemma. He’s also the author of Automating Humanity, and he’s an international keynote speaker. Joe, welcome to the show.

[00:00:25] Joe Toscano: Yeah. Thank you for having me. I’m very excited to talk to everybody.

[00:00:29] Gary Ruplinger: Yeah, I’m, I’m looking forward to this conversation. But before we kind of jump into the topic today, for anybody who’s not familiar with, you know, your work at Service Stories or, or your book. Can you just give some, everybody kind of a quick, you know, background about yourself, how the, the origin story of Joe?

[00:00:46] Joe Toscano: Yeah, sure. Well, I have been in AI since we were teaching chat bots the difference between hi, like hello and HI, like Hawaii. So consider that, that, you know, there was a day when that was a thing, and that work for me was out in Silicon Valley, out of Google. I was a consultant for Google. I oversaw a few other projects that were non Google stuff too, through the, the firm I worked with, but Google was my primary.

And yeah, for anybody who hasn’t heard my name or seen the work, what happened was I saw enough of a mess in Silicon Valley that I felt that we needed to speak out about it. We need to inform the public about the dangers and try to make the internet safer. And so I wrote a book called Automating Humanity.

It’s all about the fact that we are automating everything that’s human, but also still at a point where we can make it humane. I think everybody’s concerned about Terminator and all these sci-fi things we’ve seen through movies, and I’d say it’s not that that couldn’t come true, I just don’t know that it will come true.

I’m a big optimist. A big believer that the internet is and will continue to get safer over time. We just have to fight for it. So that was the book to inform people to raise awareness and literacy. And then that book got me into a film called The Social Dilemma on Netflix. And that film, if you haven’t seen it, join the rest of the world.

It is the most watched technology documentary in the history of the world. Don’t know the exact number, but I know it’s past 500 million views at this point. We have, we’re in schools all around the world. My book also, I’ve been getting calls as low as like sixth grade teachers in different countries that want me to come talk to the classroom. So, made a lot of impact, helped draft some laws and do a bunch of cool things, but in the process of doing that I was also helping my family’s auto shop here in Omaha, Nebraska with their marketing, with their digitization, their transformation. And that’s where Service Stories was born. Now Service Stories is new, it’s only within the last six months, five months actually that we’ve really been doing it. But, it’s born from many years of me helping them with their SEO, with their website, helping them figure out strategies and then thinking about how we could automate it and make it easy as pie. So that’s what Service Stories is. We work with service-based businesses, not just auto shops, but plumbers, HVACs, chiropractors, software agencies, service-based businesses at large. And we help take the work they do every day and turn it into AI answers. So that’s my life story in maybe, what was that, two and a half minutes or so I think.

[00:03:29] Gary Ruplinger: Well, excellent.

[00:03:31] Joe Toscano: Yeah.

[00:03:32] Gary Ruplinger: So yeah, it kind of brings us in to the topic of today’s show, which is, you know, getting more traffic from things like AI answers. I know that’s been a big concern for people, as you know, we’re at the end of 2025 as we’re recording this, and it’ll be

published in 2026. In 2025, you saw so many news stories of, of people saying, you know, our traffic has just dropped off from, you know, search engines like Google. It’s, it’s plummeted. Because they basically, Google’s been routing all that traffic and just keeping it on their platform with, with their AI answers.

So I know for a lot of people this is definitely a big concern. Theirs especially as more, google’s keeping more of that. How, how do you get yourself featured and be the one that Google says, well, here’s the answer to that? You need to, you need to go check out the this auto shop or something like

[00:04:23] Joe Toscano: And this is the question, isn’t it? That’s what everybody’s trying to figure out. Well, I can tell you that the answer problem that we’re all experiencing right now, which is Google’s not giving 10 million results. They’re giving one answer, and you better hope to God that you’re in it. Otherwise you’re gone, you’re disappeared.

That’s something that I took to the antitrust investigators maybe seven years ago when I was helping, first left Google. Not this specific use case today exactly as it is, but I told them, I said, hey, look, you know, you’re investigating antitrust on, on Google, Facebook, all these. I said with Google, you’re looking, they were looking at like double click.

They were looking at Android. You know, they’re looking at Chrome browser. I said, you need to look at Google search. That is the throttle for the information for everyone, for the world, and they’re not gonna give you 10 million results anymore. It’s gonna become this, what we’re now experiencing today. So I’ve always known, and I saw some of that obviously when I was at Google.

I saw the future of it when we were inside of it. But yeah, it is a big challenge because like how do you rank when it’s, it’s got a lot of parallels to the old world of SEO, right? Because ultimately we’re still transitioning, right? You, you’re a hundred percent correct. Even my parents shop where I’ve plugged this in, their organic search traffic is down 10% in the last five months. But because of the platform we built, their direct traffic’s up over 400%. So makes up for it significantly. But my belief is that we need to think about this as the natural progression of search, not as a separate paradigm. So people who’ve already invested in SEO, they have a leg up. It’s not something where that’s all gonna get thrown out the window tomorrow.

You know, originally, if you think about SEO we had originally, originally, right? It’s just like have good HTML. That was it. Have a good structure. Like that’s all we needed for a while, right? Especially in trade businesses and service business that you weren’t a big marketing company, you didn’t need to be optimized kind of thing.

Well then Google, you know, phones came into play and Google said, well, now you need to be performing on a phone and a tablet. You know, so you had to be mobile responsive, that’s what you call it, web development, engineering, whatever. Right? And, and so that was something that if you weren’t, that if your page didn’t load fast, if it didn’t perform on, on mobile, you’re gonna get cut. The algorithm’s gonna dip on you, right? Then they added, you know, Google Business pages. Then they, basically because of competition, everybody started to have to have location pages and service pages and all these different things to just keep up, right? And that’s intentional by Google, right? They’re always changing their algorithm.

Part of it is because they are actively fighting cyber attacks and people trying to hack the algorithm to get to number one, all that kind of stuff. So they do change it all the time. Sometimes it’s micro, sometimes they’d be big macro changes. And that’s what we’re going through right now. We’re going through a macro change in the way that the internet is understood and the way that consumers find businesses. And that macro change is going to lead into a world of chat, whether we like it or not. There’s just too much financial incentive to it, it’s not gonna go away. And it is something where, if you think about the progression of computing itself, we went from punch cards in the forties, fifties, sixties, to then command line where we were learning the computer’s language to work with it, to then graphical interfaces where we can click and compute, to now chat and conversation where for the first time in human history, computers are speaking our language instead of us speaking theirs.

So this is the natural progression. It will happen and, and yeah, we all need to prepare for it and it’s probably a two or three year period where if you’re not getting up to speed or caught up by that time, I do believe people get lost in the dust.

[00:08:16] Gary Ruplinger: Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. Because I’m, you know for me, when I hear SEO, I’ve been doing, I’ve been doing SEO since 2003. Old school days of, you know, any, wild west of anything goes. So I’m, you know, like, oh yeah, there’s 10 results and you always wanted to be on the first page of Google. And it’s like that, that’s long gone. That doesn’t exist anymore.

[00:08:39] Joe Toscano: Yep.

[00:08:40] Gary Ruplinger: But I know recently, my wife and I, we moved, earlier in the year. So one of the things, we needed lots of things, but one of the things I needed this spring was I needed some, some topsoil. Because putting a garden in in the back, it was a new area. I wasn’t quite familiar with stuff, so naturally went, went to Google and tried to get some answers. And okay, who’s a good result here? And I actually found it pretty challenging to find reliable results anymore. Then I ended up going to, I think, Nextdoor to get a recommendation. And it was, it was fine. But yeah, nobody really kind of invested in, in that space to get a good, good answer.

I was like, well, this is interesting. Like not a single place, like the top result was just a directory.

[00:09:27] Joe Toscano: Well, that’s the thing is, and that’s part of why I think what we’re doing is so important at Service Stories. Because if you think about the way AI is trained and what it knows, largely it’s trained on a bunch of social data, right? It’s going to Reddit. They’re paying what, I think it’s like about $80 million a year that most of these companies are paying to Reddit, to crawl Reddit and learn things from the answer forums.

Wikipedia, Quora, all those websites where you have answers, but they are more or less like community wisdom. You know, like you hope they’re right, but how does an algorithm qualify that, you know. That’s the tough part, we don’t have institutionalized, licensed professionals on those forums all the time answering questions, right? And so you can’t get qualified answers. And those answers you get from AI, that you ask it about some kind of marketing thing or something you need to do that’s creative, that’s pretty safe. Because number one, if you, if you write a blog post wrong, you can just edit it, right? There’s a bunch of parts of AI that it’s like, it’s wrong, but I’m not upset about it.

What you’re talking about, and what we’re doing with Service Stories too, and creating content for trade businesses is you’re talking about an answer engine. Being able to answer very technical, license level knowledge, and it’s just not out on the internet. So how would it be able to know, how would it be able to suggest?

Because it doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong, good or bad. And so what we’re doing when we take, for example, I’ll start with my family’s auto shop so we just have like one example to talk about. Every time that someone comes and checks out, we do 4,000 jobs a year or more, every time someone checks out I can take that ticket and turn it into content. That one ticket can become a blog, a Facebook post, a LinkedIn post, a Google business post, a curated Google review that the customer can copy paste. All of those happen in one action, and what you’re then gonna be doing over time is printing stories about the actual work and how it was done. Now there’s a ton of nuance in that too, right?

All of my technicians do work slightly different, right? It might be the exact same problem, but because of the way they were trained, the way they’ve learned over 20 years, they have a different opinion on how to actually craft this work. Right, and then there’s stuff that’s more standardized. So there’s a lot of variation in the content. That’s a good part about we’re doing too. It’s a lot, a lot of nuance. But the flip side, there are just literally millions and millions of stories to tell. In our case every year, make, and model of a vehicle and the problems that could go along with it. That’s a huge, huge matrix. But then you think about, you know, we’re working with plumbers, they have a similar thing with piping and everything they work with. And a chiropractic or dental office where it’s so many different stories of things that happened in, you know, someone’s mouth or their body. So we’re gonna be extracting that and helping companies promote the work they do by literally just telling the story of what they do every day.

No personal information. We don’t put the customer’s info, we don’t put the pricing. We tell the story of what happened and why. And try to point people back to you if they have similar problems in the future.

[00:12:42] Gary Ruplinger: That’s, that’s a, that’s fascinating. I have so many questions. I guess, is this, is this video content? Is it pictorial, is it text? kind of curious what, what it looks like.

[00:12:54] Joe Toscano: It is all text based at this point.

We’re adding in image generation, but I don’t know that I think that that’s the future of everything, you know? I think there are industries, right? Like we have a creative photography agency and they can use some of their own photos if they want. Like everybody actually can use their own photos, that’s what we hope for is you’re using real photos from the work. But you know, something like that where some of their work’s a little more abstract or something. Maybe they just want to use like a Getty editorial or you know, something like that, those kind of pieces of content. That’s where I think AI image generation could come in.

It’s just kind of a, I don’t know, situationally generic type of piece of content. It’s not like an auto shop where we’re pulling a ticket, we’re looking at the inspection photos and using that in the content, right? A little bit different. But ultimately I’m, I’m pro AI. I’m not really super enthusiastic on let’s make AI images and video about this technical work because I don’t think it’s anywhere near close enough to be able to be done properly.

Not yet. Not that it can’t someday, but.

[00:14:02] Gary Ruplinger: No, that’s, that’s, that’s the thing is, you know, how, how fast is it gonna move and when is it gonna be there? And is it, is it something people even want? I’ve noticed, like with AI use, I’m like, I as somebody who uses it daily and likes to use it, I’ve found that from my line in the sand is that as long as it’s, you know, if a person’s saying it, I’d like to know that the person has read it and not just pushed a button and said generate this message and send it out. I’d like to know that that’s them. 

But if it’s a chat bot or a tool or something like that on a website, I’m totally fine interacting with it as long as I know what I’m interacting with. That’s been for me, the big thing is I just, I just wanna know who I’m talking to.

A person, an AI, I don’t actually care. Just tell me which one it’s so I, I can respond accordingly.

[00:14:49] Joe Toscano: I know. Yep. I I hear you. And, and that’s kind of the, the uncanny valley we’re working with right now, right? It’s, this is getting so good that some people can’t tell the difference. Actually, let’s say a lot of people can’t tell the difference for especially photos and videos nowadays, they’re getting so good.

But how I feel about doing it with what we’re doing is that we are representing professionals. We are representing their, their name, their logo, their brand, their company, and their reputation. And I don’t feel secure enough with the quality of output of AI to say I can confidently publish end to end without you touching anything yet.

The text base, I think we’re pretty good, yeah. To, to make a text blog or text Facebook post or something like that. We do have a lot of things, you know for example, we’re pulling in labor guides, we’re pulling in different custom. We’ve built our own knowledge, for every different kind of industry. So we have definitions of the work and the value to customers and things. So we’re not just saying, hey, AI, here’s a engine job, you know, make a, make a blog about an engine job. We’re taking the full ticket, we’re extracting the text, we’re looking at the steps. We’re just expanding the notes that are already written by professionals.

We’re then working through and injecting, like I said, from labor guides or different professional handbooks, whatever we need, specific knowledge that’s gonna make it sound more professional. And then we do allow you to edit. I think, like I said in the beginning, AI photo, video, all this. I think it’s great for content creators, people who are super creative and they’re like, yeah, I, I, I wanna look like I’m in a banana suit, but I don’t wanna wear the banana suit.

Like that kind of stuff. That’s what AI is really good for, right? Like, like, make a situation funny or comical or, or very creative and unique. I think that’s great. There’s a lot of that, but to risk a professional reputation? I’m not confident. I haven’t built into our software yet, so, that’s kind of our line of sight on it, how we think about it. 

[00:16:46] Gary Ruplinger: So I know one of, as, as somebody who worked in the automotive space in the marketing department, one of the things that you know, is first coming to mind and probably a lot of, you know, business owners who are thinking, oh, this would be great. If only my people would do X. I mean, what, what do, what do the boots on the ground need to actually do? If, I guess in the case of an auto dealership, what do the techs need to do?

What are the service, you know, advisors doing? Where, who’s, who’s kind of making sure this gets published? Where, what’s, can you kind of walk me through like the, the logic and, and movement through the, the system?

[00:17:28] Joe Toscano: Yeah, that’s a great question. So the long story short is it was built to capture your everyday work. So the answer is we don’t want you to have to do anything extra, right? We’re pulling from, for example, you know, Tekmetric, Shopmonkey, Shop Boss, Shop-ware, these different services where they’re already digitized and they have an API.

So as long as your team is taking notes, as long as your team is writing down what the customer said, like all those actions that are relatively standard nowadays. We can pull all of that automatically and then we generate content. Now you asked, the real question is who’s editing or publishing it, right?.

We, we will have a system shortly that would allow you, if you’re confident in it, to just say, hey, auto publish this. We’ve, we’ve structured this way. You know, there’s a lot of people who they just think we’re sending it in with one giant prompt and like, let it fly. We have a very structured system. We’re, we’re literally creating in a blog, for example, we’re creating it section by section and there are specific actions and things that are happening per section. It’s, it’s not just a big pipe dream and Hail Mary that this works. So I do think some people will turn that on. Similar to like, you have a, an agency that you hire. And I, I’ve openly had agencies we work with say, hey, you know, most people they wanna check our work for like two or three months and then they just let us publish, right? I feel like ours is probably gonna be pretty similar, where you might wanna have someone regularly editing and looking at it and then you’ll realize the quality of the output’s very good, and maybe you’re just like, hey, I wanna let it fly. The flip side is who, who do we talk to? Often it is the owner at a shop, like, you know, especially a shop, with one to three locations.

It’s often the owner who is the point person, and then they either have an agency that will take it and run with it, or maybe they have some staff that helps, maybe they have family that helps. On a, in a little larger shop, maybe three to 15 locations, you’ll see that often they may have their own marketing team or person internally that they’ve hired.

Sometimes the point person we’re talking to is the GM who helps make the decisions and oversees. But often I’m, I’m also talking to owners even at that level. We haven’t gotten into the franchise or like enterprise level of, of auto shops yet. We’re still pretty early, so I’m not stressed about that.

But, but yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s a thing where, I mean you know, you’ve done the, the writing, often as a marketer you’re going to the guys at the front desk. You’re going, hey, what did we do this week? What kind of stories can I tell? That kind of stuff. I just said they, they do work all day, they take notes on it all day, why can’t I just pull that? Don’t make them do any more extra work, you know, and then make that into content. And that’s where the idea came from. I was literally just watching the guys every day and thinking like, how do I make more opportunity with less work? Right? Nobody wants more work. 

[00:20:24] Gary Ruplinger: No, I, I think, I think that’s probably the, the brilliant part about it is because again, it’s trying to get, especially for people who are busy, getting them to do extra things so that your marketing stuff can promote them is, is a nonstarter, really.

You might, you might get one guy out of 10 who’s like, yeah, I’ll take you some extra pictures this week. Nobody else is bothering and they’re like, I got work to do, Gary. Get, get outta here. Go go back to your office.

[00:20:53] Joe Toscano: I’ve heard so many times. I, I totally get it. And then, and then the, and then the statement comes, what do you even do for work? Right? Like, well right, I guess so. But I hear you, man. Yeah, that’s what I dealt with for years and, and it is hard. And they’re, those guys work really hard every day. I, I, I think we shouldn’t add more work to them.

And, and if you’re talking traditionally trying to do what we’re doing, you know, even let’s, let’s put aside ChatGPT, you could go and try that and you can get there if you really want to, you know, do that. The flip side is you do it all manual. Think of the time it takes to curate the tickets. Find the tickets that you want to promote. Then go through and write up a blog about them that’s technical enough to make sense. Then get feedback from your team if you need it and where you need it. And then finally get approval for publishing. You’re talking probably on a low end, two to three hours, maybe as high as five hours for one piece of content. And we’re confident if you’re using our system, even if you’re editing it, you’re gonna be able to do that in 10 to 15 minutes at the max per piece of content, per blog. For a Facebook post or something, it’s probably a lot less. But for a blog that’s more technical and long, yeah.

[00:21:59] Gary Ruplinger: So then. How is this turning into to traffic? Can you kind of walk people through how, okay, you’re publishing all this content, how does this translate into, how does this translate into new, new customers showing up at my door? I guess that’s ultimately, right, that’s what people wanna know is how, how is this actually working?

[00:22:20] Joe Toscano: Well, I’m gonna start at the high level and keep it simple, and then I’ll talk a little bit of the technical nuts and bolts. But at a high level, just a volume basis for what we’re doing for our package, it’s 2 99 a month and you get 30 tickets, not, not 30 blogs. 30 tickets or daily, maybe 31 on a 31 month, right? Daily pieces of content and you service one ticket, turns into as many, you know, 3, 4, 5 pieces of content as you need, whatever platforms you’re on, okay? Now you come to us and you have that done and you’re getting a volume that just no one nearby is gonna be able to keep up. Brute force. There’s a volume factor to this to where if you have 30 blogs a month go out and your neighbor has three, the internet’s gonna pick you up first. Okay. That’s one thing. the second part, and, and the more technical side of this is we’re, we’re creating content that is reacting to the new way people are searching. So for 30 years, we looked up auto repair near me, fix my Toyota coma, Toyota Tacoma near me.

You know, we had pretty brute force, like caveman level interactions with computers, queries is what we call it, right? And today what’s happening is people are picking up their phone, they’re holding it to their face, and they’re talking to it. So they’re saying, why is my Toyota Tacoma blowing hot air when my AC is on blast? You know, why is my Dodge Charger making a funny noise in the passenger wheel bay when I am turning left? You know, like they’re asking full on questions. And so you’re, you’re going from a world where you had three to five, maybe six keywords, to now it’s like 15 to 30. It’s a, it’s a full sentence structure, and so to answer those questions is also much more difficult, but that’s part of the magic in what we’re doing.

Your customers came in, they told you what they were hearing, they told you what they were smelling, they told you their concerns. All we’re doing is flipping that into a question, which is what they’re gonna ask. Or they’re, the next person is gonna ask their phone and you’re gonna have a piece of content ready to answer that person, right? So what you’re doing in that is called long-tail keywords. And the more technical nuts and bolts of that is that for years we tried to get these short-tail three to five keyword phrases. And, and it’s, it’s not that it’s completely saturated, but it is largely saturated, right? Like everybody’s written a blog about maintenance to do before your road trip or oil, why you should change your oil regularly, things like that. Now we need to answer these questions because these are totally untapped. This, this is an opportunity also, if you look at like the ads you’re buying, you’ll see what key words and phrases people are finding you for, and 30 to 40% of those and that that list are these long-tail keywords that we’ve historically not really been able to capture very well because it is time consuming and expensive and almost fiscally irresponsible without AI to make this volume of content, right. So it is, it’s, it’s both hitting your current and existing SEO value in a traditional way and getting into this new era, which is you gotta have these long-tail keywords.

You gotta be answering questions that people are actually asking, not just trying to get surfaced on brute force keywords.

[00:25:37] Gary Ruplinger: You know what, and I, what I like about what I, what I’m hearing is that it actually sounds like it’d be useful for the person who stumbles across your website, even the old fashioned way, right? They do. Is they do a regular Google search. They find it. It’s like, oh, that’s the problem. Yes, that was the problem I had. That’s my car. Oh, that’s how they fixed. Okay.

[00:25:56] Joe Toscano: Yep.

[00:25:57] Gary Ruplinger: So it’s, it’s not like you’re, because I know back in the, you know, if we go back 20 years, right? The solution to this was just basically spam the search engines.

[00:26:05] Joe Toscano: Yeah,

[00:26:07] Gary Ruplinger: and that worked. But basically what you’re doing now is actually, actually answering each of those questions,

[00:26:14] Joe Toscano: yeah, 

[00:26:15] Gary Ruplinger: with technology that is, is instead of spamming the search engines, actually giving people the answer that they really would like right now. Because that’s the problem, they need help right now. 

[00:26:26] Joe Toscano: I want to make a note on that too, because you’re a hundred percent correct. There was a period, there have been periods, where we could just bulk force spam and the engine would just think, oh, new things, let me go. Oh, new things, let me go check. Right, it would just robot, at the end of the day it’s just a robot.

[00:26:40] Gary Ruplinger: Right. 

[00:26:42] Joe Toscano: The problem with that is that you eventually got penalized, right? Either the content was like not high enough quality, or it was, it was totally fake or whatever it was. What we’re doing with this, it is a high volume. And we actually are able to get people to one a day, but we start you off at one a week because we don’t want you to get penalized.

We will warm you up, you know, every month or something we’ll add another one. Or you could do it on your own timeline. You can tell us how fast you wanna move, but generally, let’s say first month you get one a week, then you get two a week, then you get three a week, right? It rolls up. So number one, you’re warming up your website. It doesn’t look like you just applied AI and you’re getting blasted. Number two, because every question and every customer complaint is unique, all these pieces of content are unique. And because it has actual notes from technicians and professional service writers, it’s also expert to the point where Google can’t discern that this was fake.

It’s very real. The authoritarian, the, sorry, authority is there. The expertise is there, the experience, the trust, everything that you need for Google’s algorithm is there because we’re taking the actual work you do in making into content. It’s not like all these other AI systems where they go read your website and they say, here’s a hundred keywords you could own. Press a button, we’ll make 10 articles. They’re just guessing. I am using AI to tell exactly what you do every day and just expand the shorthand notes, not BS it, right.

[00:28:12] Gary Ruplinger: That’s awesome. And I know you, mentioned this at towards the beginning of the episode, but could you tell people how big of a difference you’re seeing? Like how big much traffic increase you’re, you’re seeing, on websites that have implemented this?

[00:28:26] Joe Toscano: Yeah, I wish that I could show a graphic because the spike that we’ve seen so far is outrageous. But my family shop, for example, we’ve been doing it since June. They’re up 410% plus increase in direct traffic to their website. Shop we have in LA, similar patterns, over 200% increase in direct traffic in 90 days, a hundred days.

So we’re pretty early on. You know, we have a handful of shops across the country who are already onboarded. We also have a plumbing company. We have trucking and logistics. You know, broadly, we’re going to talk to service-based businesses. And it’s working. And I think it is a couple factors.

One, nobody else in your market’s doing it. So if you’re first to do this, like it’s really gonna take off. Secondarily, I think that in the future people will need a service like service stories. If it’s not us, it’s not us. But I think people will need a service like service stories just to participate if all their neighbors are doing this, right?

And so I think that’s really where it’s headed and, and what you really, I hope everyone walks away with this about is that the new era of search is about having conversations with your customers, right? We, we have ads on Facebook and Google and it’s a different psychology. On Facebook, people are trying to be entertained. That’s why the ads are cheap, you gotta hit them a bunch of times. With Google, they’re actively trying to find a result and that’s why they cost more. People are psychologically prepared to figure something out, maybe buy. With these chat engines, these AI answer systems, people are literally talking to these bots to find the answer.

And by the time they get to you, they’re ready to buy. And so it’s important that we treat this equally as a conversation, and that’s why Service Stories works the way it does. We’re constantly sending in, we did this job today, we did that job tomorrow, you know, this kind of stuff. So we’re having a conversation with the AI, who’s then gonna have a conversation with our customer on our behalf.

And that’s what I hope everyone thinks about and that’s how you should design your content systems.

[00:30:31] Gary Ruplinger: It’s very, it’s very cool. It sounds like it would, you know, solve even, it would help people. Right. I know another, another story from home ownership tales is, the blower on our furnace went out. Right around when it was getting cold, so a couple months ago.

But it was one of those, do I know anything about fur-? I don’t know anything about furnaces. I know where it is and I know if I knock on it, it’s made of metal. That’s about all I can tell you. So, you know, it’s like, it’s not, it’s not blowing and I’m like, okay, let me ask AI. Maybe this is an easy fix.

It came, I don’t know what it came up. Some type of, it may as well have told me the flux capacitor was broken, because wWhatever made up was just wrong, totally wrong.

So having actually good content from somebody, a professional who actually knew what they were doing and fixed it, would’ve made it a lot easier that, you know, at least confidently call up somebody and say, you know, can you come fix this? I think this is, you know, what we’re experiencing? Or at least tell me, no, that’s not a problem I could fix. Because that’s what all, that’s all I wanted to know was can I fix it?

[00:31:36] Joe Toscano: And I think, I think that’s the reality of it too, though. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I know me. And if I’m doing even what you said there, and even if it gave me good and qualified answers, there’s a lot of times where I would just call a professional. Like especially anything with like gas or electricity or something that could blow up, light on fire, like I’m calling a professional.

Even if it gave me a good answer, because guess what? Either one, I don’t wanna do the work. Number two, I don’t trust myself to do the work. Or number three, I don’t trust the AI fully enough. So you will, I’m, I’m not, I’m not gonna try to BS I think there will be customers who don’t show up to the door as much because they think they’re gonna do it through AI.

I’m betting a lot of money that that’s a very small portion of the entire population. I think a lot of people, even if they went home and tried it, then they’re gonna bring it to you and have a bigger problem. So AI is about the marketing for all these service-based businesses, and I think that’s what we hope we can get them ahead on.

[00:32:35] Gary Ruplinger: Good deal. So if somebody, somebody listening there is like, I need this help. You know, traffic’s down. We need some, we need some visitors here.

How, how do they get in touch with you? Where do they go?

[00:32:46] Joe Toscano: Yeah.

[00:32:47] Gary Ruplinger: How can they learn more?

[00:32:48] Joe Toscano: Yeah, the domain is servicestories.com. It’s plain English, no funky spelling, so servicestories.com and you can book some time, talk to me. Just hop on there and it’ll, you know, click book a demo and it’ll get you to my calendar and I’ll see you shortly. That’s the best way to it. You wanna email me?

You can also email me at joe@servicestories.com.

[00:33:11] Gary Ruplinger: Excellent. So check out servicestories.com. if you need, to email Joe, check him out. Otherwise, Joe, thanks so much for coming on. This is, really interesting stuff, really cool what you’re doing there. So I appreciate you, you coming on today.

[00:33:24] Joe Toscano: Thanks for your time. I look forward to seeing it.

[00:33:26] Gary Ruplinger: Take care.

[00:33:27] Joe Toscano: Ciao.