The Best Local SEO Strategy in 2026

in the local pack anymore.

Today, I'll show you what it really takes

to rank in AI search platforms

like ChatGBT, Google, AI Mode, and Perplexity.

Let's begin with step number one,

which is to figure out who you're really competing with

in AI search.

So number one, pick your seed keyword.

Start simple.

Pick a seed keyword phrase

like personal injury lawyer, Chesterfield, Missouri.

Then just plug it into traditional Google search

and look at which types of pages are ranking.

That seed phrase is your starting point for AI.

Number two, convert it to natural language.

Open RankAbility's free AI search query generator.

Then paste in your seed keyword

and it'll generate a few natural language prompts

like who are the best personal injury lawyers

in Chesterfield, Missouri.

Then just pick one and move on to step number three,

which is to run the query across AI platforms.

Take your prompt and run it through Google AI Mode,

Google Gemini, ChatGBT, Perplexity, Grok, and Claude.

Then you're going to collect two things from each platform.

The citations and the brands within the AI answer.

Number four, set up your tracking sheet.

Create a new Google sheet

and add two tabs, citations and answers.

This is where you'll store everything you pull

from the AI platforms.

Number five, use the bookmarklet to grab citations.

Under this video, I've provided a bookmarklet.

Make a copy of the code

and paste it into a new bookmark in Chrome.

Open one of the AI chats,

expand the citations or sources that the AI shows,

and click the bookmarklet.

It'll copy all of the citation URLs.

Then paste those URLs into the citations tab in your sheet

and repeat this for every platform

so you'll end up with one big list of URLs

that AI products are using as sources.

Now, number six is extract the brands

and positions from answers.

Copy the full AI answer from one of the platforms,

open your preferred AI tool,

and use a prompt like extract only the brand

or firm names mentioned in this answer

and list them in order of appearance in a table.

Then take this list of brands

and paste it into the answers tab

and make sure you have columns for brand name position

in the answer and AI platform.

Repeat this process for every platform

so you have a complete view

of which brands are being recommended,

where and in what position.

If you feel like you don't have enough data,

just repeat the process with a different seed keyword.

Moving on to number seven,

which is identify your top three AI competitors.

So once you have your citations and answers filled out,

you can analyze the data.

Here are two quick moves.

First, find your top three competitors.

Just ask ChatGPT or your preferred AI tool

to count how often each brand appears

in the answer tab across all platforms.

And the brands that show up the most

and in the best positions are your true AI competitors.

Second, find the top sources of retrieval.

Do the same thing with the citations tab.

Count how often each domain appears.

In our example, 40% of citations came from directories

while 60% came from actual law firms in Chesterfield.

And that brings me to local SEO step number two,

optimize your Google business profile.

This is the foundation of your local presence

and in our data, better performance in the local pack

lined up very well with better visibility

in Google AI mode.

Plus, Google is by far the most popular search platform

for local queries.

So optimizing your Google business profile

is actually very easy.

First, nail the fundamentals by having an address

in the city that you're trying to rank.

Pick the correct category.

When in doubt, look at your top ranking competitors.

For example, you can see that personal injury attorney

is the primary category for our example.

Create a standard description that properly describes

what the business does.

This is critical because of entity optimization.

To keep it simple, the AI doesn't read,

it extracts entities, which are people, places,

organizations, or things to understand associations.

For example, if you see a sentence like John Doe

is a top personal injury lawyer in Chesterfield, Missouri

that specializes in slip and fall accidents,

John Doe, personal injury lawyer, Chesterfield, Missouri,

and slip and fall accidents are the entities.

This matters because if you improperly describe what you do,

you'll get poor performance in traditional search

and AI platforms.

So create a standard business description

that you'll use across all platforms.

And at the same time, use a consistent business name,

address, phone number, and website across all listings.

The truth is ambiguity is the enemy of search visibility.

Second, become obsessed with review generation.

If you need inspiration, look at how many reviews

Four Seasons Heating and Cooling has.

I could dedicate an entire video to this,

but the best thing you can do is build

a review generation culture at your business.

You can't incentivize customers to leave reviews,

but you can create competitions among your employees

and offer bonuses to whoever scores

the most five-star reviews in a month.

Lastly, make it stupidly simple

for a customer to leave reviews.

Google gives you a review link that you can copy

and send to customers, and you can easily create a QR code

for your review link inside of Canva.

So here's a quick recap.

Your Google business profile and local pack presence

influence how visible you are in Google AI mode

and Google Gemini.

For example, Roche Law ranks number one

in Google's local pack and is a top three recommended firm

in Google AI mode and Google Gemini.

Your Google business profile performance

is not the only factor, but it's probably the strongest one

for visibility in Google's AI products.

But now this is where things get interesting in local SEO.

You can dominate Google's local pack,

but it won't often translate to visibility in ChatGBT

or other AI chat platforms.

An example is Dizer Law Firm,

who is recommended by Google AI mode,

but was completely invisible in ChatGBT answers.

Which brings me to the next critical step,

which is to build and optimize your directory footprint.

The good news is that you already did the hard work

in step one.

Look at your citations tab and sort or tally by domain.

The domains that show up the most

are your must-win directories.

For legal, it's usually sites like Superlawyers,

AVO, Justia, and a couple of niche local sites.

These are the sites that AI products

keep going back to for consensus.

But here's the key, don't just sign up,

but execute SEO best practices on these platforms

to try to actually rank your profile.

Look at how this law firm's profile

is perfectly optimized for the target city.

They're building reviews and the profile's descriptive.

If you wanna take this to the next level,

run your target keyword through Rankability

and write your profile description

based on the topic recommendations.

Then repeat this with a unique description

for every profile or asset you're trying to rank.

And then after that,

focus 80% of your review generation efforts on Google

and the other 20% on driving reviews

on the most critical platforms.

This will create review diversity and consensus

that nearly guarantees visibility on the AI platforms.

Now for pillar number four,

which is good old traditional SEO.

So even in an AI world,

ranking in classic organic search

is one of the strongest ways to influence AI answers

whenever retrieval is used.

In our study, about 60% of retrieval sources

came from the actual businesses competing for the query.

In fact, all five of the law firms

that had the best visibility in AI

were also ranking in the top eight

in Google's traditional search results

for personal injury lawyer in Chesterfield, Missouri.

So my YouTube channel is full of free videos

about how to rank number one in Google,

but here's a brief overview

of the core pillars of traditional SEO.

Pillar number one is content.

So start with commercial pages

that sell your services first.

For a law firm, that means pages

that target different categories of personal injury

like car accidents, medical malpractice, and slip and fall,

plus your target city.

Just plug your target keyword phrase

and existing page into Rankability

and see how relevant your page is to the query.

Remember when I talked about entity optimization earlier?

Well, Rankability makes this process 100 times easier

because it shows you the entities you need to cover,

and these entities come from extracting

the top-ranking Google competitors

for your target keyword.

So the better you cover these relevant entities on your page,

the more search engines and AI platforms will understand it.

So to keep it simple,

clarity and relevance is a precursor to rankings.

Don't make the AI work hard.

And here's an example

of what a perfectly optimized asset will look like.

Notice that it covers all the critical topics.

So once the commercial pages are strong,

build supporting content

to create localized topical authority.

Avoid generic content like what is medical malpractice

that every site has already made and AI can easily answer.

Instead, create something like

the most significant medical malpractice cases

in Chesterfield, Missouri in the last 10 years,

or Chesterfield car accident statistics

and what they mean for injury claims.

The goal here is to prove to search engines and AI systems

that you're an authority on this topic

in your target location.

The second pillar of SEO is technical.

So just cover the basics like using an HTML-driven website

because AI doesn't render JavaScript

and make sure your website is crawlable, indexable,

and retrievable by search crawlers and AI platforms.

Just use RankAbility's free AI search indexability checker

to do a quick check.

You also wanna have a mobile-friendly responsive website

that has an SSL certificate installed

and use internal linking and a strong site architecture

so that every page on your website is easily accessible

and ideally no more than three clicks deep.

And lastly, make sure your website is blazing fast.

And now for the final but arguably the most impactful pillar

for traditional SEO, backlinks.

For local businesses, your best moves are sponsoring

or donating to local organizations,

getting brand mentions on local news,

and scoring links in local business associations or chambers.

Just use this prompt in ChatGPT's agent mode

to find these opportunities on autopilot.

Then expand into PR-style opportunities

by using platforms like Featured, Haro, and Quoted

to provide expert quotes.

If you're not the subject matter expert,

then I recommend interviewing the SME,

recording it, and transcribing it.

Then create a project in ChatGPT and upload this knowledge.

Keep adding more context to the project

and then you'll be able to respond to these expert requests

in the voice of the client.

So this will give you more than enough to work with,

but if you're an agency owner

and you're ready to turn this into a repeatable system

for all of your clients,

this is exactly what we do inside of RankAbility Academy.

Inside the program,

I give you proven step-by-step AI SEO systems

grounded on what's actually working right now, not theory.

Plus, you'll get weekly coaching

and access to our private community

of some of the top AI SEO experts on the planet right now.

So just scan the QR code on screen

or click the link below to apply today.

Thank you so much for watching.