Mat Rogers on AI, E-E-A-T and why smaller pest control companies can win now

Around 2012, when Mat Rogers joined his family’s pest control company in Charlotte, his dad was spending $323,000 a year on yellow pages ads. Mat spent 6 years fighting to move that money into digital, and the company grew from $8M to $28M. Today he’s the CEO of Lizard Marketing, and he thinks the same shift is happening again with AI, only faster.

I recorded this one with Mat in person in Charlotte, as a follow-up to our first conversation, which was my channel’s most-viewed video within a day or two of going up. This time we spent most of the conversation on AI, E-E-A-T, SEO and paid search, which is what I work on every day.

Full disclosure: Mat and I both run agencies that serve pest control companies, so we’re technically competitors. We’re also good friends, and there’s plenty of pie to go around.

Who is Mat Rogers?

Mat Rogers is the CEO of Lizard Marketing, a successful agency serving pest control companies and other home service businesses. He calls himself the black sheep of his family, the college graduate who was never going to work in pest control. His dad ran Killingsworth Environmental in Charlotte, and by his dad’s count, Mat said yes on the 10th ask.

When Mat joined, Killingsworth was about an $8M company. By 2018 it had reached $28M and number 36 on the PCT Top 100, and the family sold it to Anticimex with help from Paul Giannamore. Mat made his dad a coffee mug that said 36, and his dad drank from it every day. Mat then stayed with Anticimex for a couple of years, learning from digital marketers in 75 countries.

You won’t get 6 years to adapt this time

In 2012, Killingsworth marketed the old way: door hangers, mailers, AM talk radio, some broadcast TV and, above all, the yellow pages. Mat’s dad had started his career selling yellow pages ads.

Mat knew as a consumer that nobody used phone books anymore. Moving budget to Google Guarantee (now LSA), Google Business Profiles and reviews took knockdown, drag-out fights. If big changes feel contentious in your office, Mat says that’s normal. Change is hard, he says, and you still have to make it.

This time it’s moving a lot faster. Mat feels more has changed in digital marketing in the last 6 months than in his previous 12 years. He had 6 years to win over his dad, but owners today may have a month or two before competitors who take this seriously pull away. I pushed back a little, since pest control moves slower than e-commerce or software, but we agreed this is the fastest marketing has ever moved.

Small companies can show up in AI from page 10

Some owners believe AI will run small companies over, the way the national brands’ big budgets have sucked the air out of digital marketing. Mat, who grew up in a double-wide and is always rooting for the little guy, sees the opposite.

“All of a sudden it’s not about being rank one on Google anymore. All of a sudden, you can be on page 10, but your voice starts showing up because you’re doing the right things.”

Mat says AI is looking for E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authority and trust. If your marketing shows those 4 things, even a small company gets a lot more visibility in AI Overviews, on its Google Business Profile, in its LSAs and in paid search.

The old line between SEO (the slow game) and paid search (the fast game) is blurry now, so you have to do both. And expect website traffic to dip even when your marketing works, because with zero-click search, AI shows people your information before they click anything.

Put your landing pages on your own domain

Lizard builds its clients’ sales pipelines in HighLevel, and it used to host their ad landing pages there too, as “satellites” outside the client’s website.

In the 3 months or so before we recorded, Lizard moved those pages onto each client’s own domain, where Google can crawl them together with the site’s content, schema, FAQs and linked Google Business Profile. After his paid search team made that change (along with some other work), Mat said client conversion costs plummeted and quality scores went up.

That’s how I like to structure Google Ads too, with paid traffic going to relevant pages on the website instead of a separate funnel. When paid visitors engage and convert on a page, Google sees that people like it, and that can lift your organic pages as well.

Run your Google Business Profile like your Instagram

One Lizard client has bet everything on PPC. He isn’t doing any SEO or AI optimization, and he isn’t working on his Google Business Profile. Like the yellow pages at Killingsworth, PPC now sits at the bottom of page one when it shows at all, and the lead quality is poor. Mat keeps telling him the other work would improve his PPC too.

Now compare 3 Lizard clients in competitive markets (Florida, Orange County in California, and Portland) that do every part of digital marketing. Their blended costs per qualified lead are $74, $113 and $94. The $74 client, Mat’s favorite, told him he got a 3.64 return on investment from digital marketing in the first half of the year.

For Mat, doing every part comes down to 4 things.

• Create content structured for AI, habitually, and organize it well on your website.
• Build clusters of pages by service type, treatment type and pest type, and link them together. (That’s the idea behind a topical map.)
• Treat your Google Business Profile like your Instagram: respond to reviews, post new content and link to the hyperlocal, schema-informed pages on your site.
• Run paid search that supports all of it.

Mat wants content going out every day. And if you skip SEO, he says, expect your paid search conversion costs to rise and your quality scores to fall.

Steady reviews beat a big push

A lot of people don’t realize that in Google’s guidelines, experience, expertise and authority all sit under trust. So I asked Mat how owners build trust with customers and with search engines.

He credits review platforms like Applause (co-founder Chris Anderson has been on the show) and Podium with giving small businesses a real shot at reviews. But he thinks AI has changed how you should go about getting them.

“With AI trust velocity, you actually have to play a little bit of a slower game. You have to build consistently and slower to let Google know that you are trustworthy.”

In Mat’s view, piling up 1,000 reviews in a short time can be a negative flag now, and stopping after a big push hurts too, because you’re no longer building velocity. You want reviews coming in steadily, whether that’s from an Applause or Podium subscription or a consistent SOP in FieldRoutes for asking customers you know love you.

I agree. Count and star rating matter, but so do recency and consistency. If you haven’t gotten a review in the past few months, you can’t expect to rank.

Let customers know you before you’re in their house

Of those 3 top clients, 2 have strong brands and just have a good time on social media, without being salesy. Plenty of owners still use theirs like a library of pest control catalogs nobody cares about.

Owners who drop the veil of professionalism on TikTok and Instagram let people feel like they know them. That counts for a lot in this business.

“When you welcome a stranger into your house… that is an intimate space and there has to be some type of trust quality there that is better than your uniform.”

Mat says this pays off in the leads you’re already getting, with higher closing, click-through and conversion rates. It’s a lot cheaper than it used to be, too. Killingsworth went viral exactly once, with a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl the Carolina Panthers played in. Today a TikTok trend that makes you laugh costs next to nothing, and telling your own story helps your agency get you better leads.

Run lean with AI before you sell

Mat’s main tools are ChatGPT (he’s fed it so much of his material that it talks like him), Google’s Gemini for paid search and n8n for building AI assistants, plus Zapier to connect pest control tools that don’t talk to each other.

SEO is where Lizard has changed the most. Keyword research, content creation and execution used to take hours every month. Now they do it in a fraction of a fraction of the time, while keeping their fingerprints on the schema and the signals going to Google. That’s a long way from cheap automated SEO, which came up when Mat joined my PCM partner Jonas Olson to talk about Google’s LSA shakeup and the $99 SEO trap.

For owners, automation takes repetitive work off payroll, and better margins make you more marketable when you sell. Mat closed with a message for small and medium companies hoping to make the PCT Top 100 and sell with Paul Giannamore one day. He told them to embrace this, partner with an agency that’s embracing it, and run lean so a buyer has to pay a big multiple. Nobody crawls under houses and digs trenches all year to be the same size 2 years later, he said.

My take

I’d show Mat’s PPC-only client to every owner I talk to. The results page has a lot more layers now, with AI Overviews, AI Mode, Local Service Ads, Google Business Profiles and paid ads, so you can rank #1 on a great keyword and still barely get traffic. When I interviewed Neil Patel, he called this search everywhere optimization, because people search on Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, TikTok and YouTube.

In E-E-A-T, I’d put the most weight on the newest E, experience. Google added it a few years ago, and I think AI is why. A language model can repeat what experts say, but it can’t have experience of its own. That’s why I opened by asking Mat about Killingsworth. Nobody can take that story from him. (I made a similar case to Jonas about why real content still wins in SEO.) Mat put it well: “AI cannot replace trust. It can augment the consumer’s ability to trust you, but it still needs the human connection.” You need the real ingredients, and AI can help you put together the meal.

From what I’ve seen auditing pest control Google Business Profiles, I’d back Mat’s Instagram comparison. I’d also put reviews first among the ways to build trust. Trust is huge with people, and I think the search engines are optimizing for what people are looking for.

Where to find Mat

Mat runs Lizard Marketing and is on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram (though he admits he’s not big on selfies).

• Lizard Marketing
• Mat Rogers on LinkedIn
• Mat Rogers on Facebook
• Mat Rogers on Instagram