Mat Rogers on the second digital marketing renaissance and the KPIs that matter now

Late one night, a fourth tow truck pulled up to the house of Mat Rogers, then COO of Lizard Marketing. His Tesla was dead in the garage, and three other companies had already failed to get it out.

The driver got out wearing Ray-Bans, walked to the hood and said, “Hey Meta.” A tutorial played in his glasses while he jumped the 12-volt battery, and then he put the car on skates and got it to the Tesla shop. He’d been using AI on his own marketing too, and in about 6 months he’d gone from one truck to four.

I’d asked Mat to tell that story on the show. Blue collar isn’t exempt from AI, he said, but it doesn’t need to scare owners. It can be rocket fuel in your engine.

This was Mat’s first time on Pest Control Legends, and most of the hour went to what he calls the second digital marketing renaissance. He lived through the first in 2012, and he says this one is happening much faster.

Who is Mat Rogers?

Mat Rogers is CEO of Lizard Marketing today. When we recorded in 2025, he was COO of the 3-year-old agency, which works with pest control and a range of other service businesses. Allan Draper founded it, and Mat started watching my show because Allan had been on.

He’s been in digital marketing for nearly 20 years. As VP of marketing at Killingsworth Environmental, his family’s Charlotte company, he helped guide 6 years of growth, from $8M in revenue to $28M, and a successful sale. Later he was CMO of Aruza Pest Control during its expansion. He watched his family go from the laundry room all the way up to Lake Norman by the time they sold.

I told Mat before we started that I think he’s arguably the number one person in pest control marketing. He didn’t quite believe me. A few weeks later he came back for a second conversation about E-E-A-T, reviews and the AI tools Lizard uses.

Clicks are losing their place on the report

Mat asked owners to hold what he was saying loosely. He said the KPIs we’ve all tracked for years were changing in 2025, and clicks were the first he named.

“They’re taking the content that’s being fed to them by AI and they are consuming that information and making a decision about what they want to do before they ever get to your website.”

When owners complain they’re not on page one of Google, Mat tells them it doesn’t even matter anymore. AI Overviews give people instant answers, and ads and organic results both lose clicks. Nobody was going to read your pest control blog anyway, he said. It was there so you’d rank and get offered as a credible solution.

Mat expects fewer clicks but more high-quality conversions.

AI Max is paid SEO

Local Service Ads used to hold the top left of a Google search. Big players like Anticimex, Rentokil and Terminix bought in and crowded out the little guy. The first thing you see in that corner today is Gemini.

Mat described Google’s new AI Max for Search as paid SEO, quoting an article he’d read. The article called these campaigns hybrids that need SEO-level page quality, technical structure and schema on top of the usual PPC signals. For your ads, that means page experience counts now, and your landing pages need to be connected to your domain.

You can test this yourself. Ask Google a lawn care question, then ask how it sourced the answer at the top. It will point to sites and landing pages that show trustworthiness and authority, and that’s how you get into that corner.

Tell your story, and tell it a lot

Search always needed a body of information about your company, and so does AI. Gen Z gives you another reason to keep posting. Mat calls himself an elder millennial, and he says they don’t search the way his generation does. As they come into their buying power, they’re finding brands they love through content on TikTok and Meta.

He pointed to 3 companies that tell their story well. Mat would put money on Nice Pest Company, run by co-founders Travis Bottoms and Tyler Sublette, becoming a force to be reckoned with in the Phoenix market. (My partner Jonas Olson wrote up how Travis got 500 accounts in 5 months.) Rian and Noelle Goins of Get Goins Pest Control are so good at putting content out there that everybody at PestWorld knows them.

Natura Pest Control in the Pacific Northwest, a Lizard client run by Jake and Jana Claus and Eric Bassett, was his third example. When we recorded, Mat said Eric’s cost per qualified lead was $94 for a $700 return. He credits Lizard’s SEO, paid search that works with it, and Natura telling its own story.

Mat’s advice is to post images and video. Load a video to TikTok and let it roll down to Instagram and Facebook, and one piece of content lives in 3 places, which gives AI and search more chances to find you. AI cares about authority and testimonials, so if you use a tool like Podium, let your customers tell your story.

Polished and robotic won’t land with Gen Z. A realtor Mat knows had a Gen Z employee cut every word out of a house tour, so the whole video was him breathing and fixing his hair. It blew up on every platform, and his calendar filled up for the rest of the year.

Paid social is for opening doors

When I asked where paid social fits, Mat didn’t soften it.

“There will always be that PCO that stands up and swears that paid social is converting. That’s not what paid social is for. Stop it.”

If you have a door-to-door team, he wants you using paid social to saturate the zip codes they’re knocking. Then measure your reps’ conversion ratio, because more people open the door for a brand they feel they know.

Without a door team, think of paid social as a Super Bowl ad you can afford. Flood your area with fun branding so people remember you when your truck rolls down their street, or when they spot ants on the counter.

Mat studied graphic design and believes in indirect marketing, while his dad wanted the used-car-salesman look with a big red number and “call us.” Killingsworth’s ads pulled on family instead. Their viral Super Bowl commercial showed Mat’s daughter painting his dad’s nails green at tea time, and nobody in it asked you to call about bugs. Nice Pest leans on humor. When a funny post already has some traction, Mat would boost it with around $100 a week.

Put Main Street in your mosquito post

I asked how to show up in ChatGPT and the other AI tools, and Mat’s answer was content. Since Lizard started, it has been refining an SEO approach built around each client’s Google Business Profile and the website connected to it.

Mat wants shorter paragraphs, FAQs (he says they trigger authority awareness for AI) and answers built around what the person is searching for. He’d rather you think in content themes than single keywords. Your agency should have a real handle on schema and content organization. If their pitch sounds like a sales smoke screen, eject those jokers, he said.

Then make it hyperlocal, which Mat thinks has the biggest impact. He lives in a small town outside Charlotte, so a mosquito post for his area should mention Main Street and the pop-up shops there, even a boutique that has nothing to do with pest control. (I cover where location terms belong in a blog post separately.)

Link that content to your Google Business Profile and keep the profile updated with it. That helps Gemini reference what you publish, and Lizard’s clients have seen their cost per lead and cost per qualified lead drop drastically.

Cost per qualified lead is partly a sales number

Some companies came to Lizard with reports from their old agencies showing $200, $300 or $400 per qualified lead. One had been paying more than $500. On a $750 contract, Mat pointed out, you won’t see that money back until the next year.

He also wants owners to stop putting the whole number on marketing.

“Cost per qualified lead is not solely a responsibility of your marketing team. That’s on your sales team. That’s their closing ratio. Write it in pen.”

An agency can work on lead quality and get you a cheap cost per lead, but your team still has to close.

Mat also thinks AI means LSAs will slowly replace PPC, so Lizard is trying to move client budgets over. LSAs get more traction, and you can get credits back on leads that don’t work out. They’ve started showing up inside the map pack too. I see it more and more as a fourth listing on top of the usual three, marked “sponsored” in tiny letters, and that listing is a Local Service Ad.

Spend like the checks are still precious

Mat ended on a careful note. Don’t take out a crazy loan or mortgage your house over this. As his dad would say, don’t let your eyes get bigger than your belly. You already have a profitable machine underneath you.

“This renaissance has the possibility of either bringing your growth to a halt or fast forwarding you into the future.”

He wants owners sure their marketing partner is actually working these changes for them. Mat remembers how precious his family’s checks to their marketing people were. Back then, they ate at Quincy’s on Tuesdays because kids ate free, and his stepmom heated her laundry-room office by leaving the dryer open.

October is the best time to onboard a new agency, he said, but don’t wait until then to start thinking about it. He explained why to Jonas later, when they talked about winning at digital marketing in 2026.

My take

Near the end, I told Mat I think we’re in almost a trust economy now, where trust is the rare resource. Owners should hire partners they trust, and they should be the company their own customers trust. Mat ran with it. In his view, AI is building a trust economy, an authority economy and a local economy.

I started out doing only Google Business Profiles, then added websites. On the show I told Mat that SEO alone isn’t enough. You need organic web, organic social, paid search and paid social covered, ideally with great branding behind them. He said I was preaching to the choir.

Organic social costs a tripod and some time, and a family with ants all over the house wants a company they already feel they know. An AI-generated image with an AI-generated caption won’t get you there, because there’s no connection in it. AI can’t copy the relationships you’ve built or the stories you have, so when you make something good, post it everywhere. (I’ve written about using a podcast to anchor local social media.)

Where to find Mat

Mat spells his name with one T. Search for “Matt” with two, he warned, and you’ll never find him. Lizard’s website has a short form if you want to talk with his team.

• Website: Lizard Marketing
• LinkedIn: Mat Rogers
• Facebook: Mat Rogers
• Instagram: @mat.rogers