It’s Tuesday!!! Hope your week is chugging along well 🚂 I have loved connecting with a couple of you via email following last week’s newsletter. If you ever have a question or need someone to bounce ideas off, I am always only too happy!!

IN THIS WEEK’S ISSUE:

If you were forwarded this message, you can get the free weekly email here.

When it comes to Meta Ads and Meta Business Suite, my hot take is that the most important setting in your Meta ad is not your budget, not your creative, and not your caption… It's your location targeting — and most trade businesses who DIY their ads are getting it completely wrong.

If Meta is serving your man’s ad to someone in Melbourne when he works in Toowoomba, that's your money gone. Every click from outside your service area is a wasted dollar that could've reached an actual lead.

Unfortunately, Meta is so geared towards product-based businesses that they actively try to take this control away from you with their Advantage+ system. But there's a way around it — and it takes about two minutes to set up properly.

I wrote the full breakdown (with screenshots) on the website this week, including a step-by-step on exactly where to find it (it's hidden, of course, because Meta Business Suite loves to suck).

Butttt the TL;DR of the web article is lock down your location targeting before anything else — nail that and you’ll get the best bang for your buck with your ads.

Health & Safety can be an absolute punish… but it is a necessity. We are in the process of simplifying and modernising a lot of our systems (finally), and one of those things was digitising our H&S checks, which, until the start of the year, we just did the old school paper on a clipboard type vibe.

I looked into using a third-party app that specialises in H+S protocols buttttt I really didn’t want to pay and deal with another subscription, so I came up with this easy and free workaround that works well for our small team of 5 carpenters.

I thought I would share what we do here, as in this current climate any savings (in time and money) are a huge win for small trade businesses.

Feel free to use these instructions to set up something similar for yourself!! I’m happy to hear any feedback on it too - just hit reply to this email and I will see it 😃

(Note: this download expires after 7 days, but click here to grab it from the website)

As you know from previous emails, Google has been dropping some big updates. One I thought I would flag is that Google is now bringing Preferred Sources directly into AI Overviews and AI Mode, so when someone has already saved a website as a trusted source, links from that site get clearly labelled and stand out in AI responses.

In relatable terms, if someone in your area has visited your website, found it helpful and bookmarked it — Google is now more likely to surface you again when they search for related services.

That's brand loyalty doing SEO work for you.

Google is also adding a "Highly Cited" badge to articles and pages that other sites frequently reference — basically a credibility stamp that says this content is the real deal. Which brings me back to something I say constantly — original, specific, genuinely useful content on your website is more valuable than ever. A blog post answering "how much does it cost to build a deck in Christchurch" that other sites and AI reference? That's a highly cited page in the making.

The takeaway for your trade business is simple. Build a website worth trusting. Write content worth citing. Show up consistently with real information and real prices. Google is actively building systems to reward exactly that — and punish the generic AI fluff that everyone else is churning out.

Be the real thing. The algorithm is increasingly built to find it. 🔨