Donkey Kick Digital

30/08/2026

One week in.

$177.54 in ad spend. 28 families registered for a client's fall events.

Here's the part I didn't expect, and it's why I keep saying this is about systems and not ads.

Some of those families have since registered for a second event. A few have registered for one that has no ads running at all — a December date whose campaign doesn't start until late October.

Nobody paid for those. They came from a confirmation email.

That's the difference between running ads and building a system.

An ad gets someone to raise their hand once. What happens in the next ten minutes, and the next ten days, decides whether that hand-raise becomes anything. The thank-you page that offers a real next step. The confirmation email that does more than confirm. The sequence that keeps showing up helpfully for six months without anyone touching it.

Most businesses build the ad and skip the rest. Then they decide paid ads don't work in their industry.

For professional services especially — where one client is worth thousands over the life of the relationship — the system is where the return actually lives. The ad is just the front door.

It has not been a clean week, for the record. A payment method failed and shut delivery off for a couple of days. Cost per registration went up while that got sorted. Both are normal, and both are why you don't judge a campaign in week one.

But eight days in, the machine is doing work the client didn't pay for.

If you're a professional service provider wondering whether any of this applies to you — it does. Send me a message and we'll talk it through.

04/07/2026

Happy Independence Day from all of us at Donkey Kick Digital!

This year marks 250 years since America declared its independence.

And while the world has changed a lot since then, one thing hasn't...

It still takes courage to build something of your own.

To every small business owner betting on themselves, taking chances on ideas, and building something from nothing—thank you for what you do.

Enjoy the holiday, spend time with the people you love, and we'll be back helping businesses grow smarter after the fireworks.

Happy Fourth of July!

01/07/2026

Google spent last week quietly turning a lot of "get seen by AI" shortcuts into liabilities.

On June 24, Google rolled out its June 2026 spam update. Buried in it: buying or altering the citations that show up in AI answers now officially counts as spam. Same bucket as the link-buying schemes a lot of businesses got burned on a decade ago.

If a vendor has been promising to "get your business into AI search" with special tricks, that promise just got a lot more expensive.

Here's what's actually getting hit:
Thin "best of" lists built to farm AI mentions. Paid networks that plant your name across random sites. Comparison pages spun up just to harvest citations. All of it now carries the same demotion risk as classic spam, including getting pulled from Google's AI citation pool entirely.

And it's not just websites. Google is suspending Business Profiles for keyword-stuffing the business name. A listing like "Smith Law Best Divorce Attorney New York" used to look clever. Now it gets you suspended.

So what still works?
The boring stuff. The stuff that has always worked.

Real content that answers the questions your customers actually ask. Real reviews from real clients. A clean website Google can read. Consistent business info everywhere Google looks. None of it is exotic, and none of it comes in a bundle you can buy.

That's the part I like about this. The shortcuts keep getting closed. The fundamentals keep getting rewarded. Which means the businesses doing the honest, unglamorous work are the ones who stay visible.

If someone sold you a "GEO package" full of tricks, this is a good week to ask them what's actually in it.

Boring, done consistently, wins. It just took Google another spam update to prove it.

What's the flashiest marketing "shortcut" you've been pitched lately?

25/06/2026

Research shows that roughly 8 in 10 small businesses have now invested in AI tools for marketing.

That number surprised me when I first saw it. Then it didn't.

Because adding AI to your workflow is easy. There's a tool for everything — writing, scheduling, ads, email, social. Most of them are cheap. Some are free.

What's harder is having those tools actually move your business forward.

A hammer doesn't build a house. It helps someone who knows what they're doing build it faster.

That's what AI is for marketing. In the hands of someone with a clear direction and a real strategy, it's extraordinary. Without that foundation, it's just another line in your monthly subscriptions.

80% of small businesses have the tools. The ones seeing results have something else.

What would it look like for your marketing to actually work with AI — not just have it?

22/06/2026

There's a pattern I see all the time in small business marketing.

Try Instagram. Nothing happens. Try ads. Get a few clicks, no conversions. Try email. Send three newsletters, then stop. Try SEO. Wait six months, give up.

The problem isn't the tactics. There's no through-line connecting any of them.

I call it Slot Machine Marketing. You keep pulling the lever — new tactic, new platform, new agency — hoping this one finally pays out.

It almost never does. Because there's no strategy underneath it.

Strategy is the architecture that makes every tactic make sense. Without it, even the right tactics produce the wrong results.

Most small business owners have 30 to 45 minutes a day for marketing. What would it feel like if those 35 minutes had a clear direction — and you actually knew they were working?

19/06/2026

Google just changed what it's looking for in your Google Business Profile.

For years, the formula was simple: get your category, keywords, and service areas right. Keep the profile updated. And in many cases, that was enough to get you found. But AI Mode is shifting that.

Google is moving local search from keyword matching to intent and lived experience. Instead of "family law attorney Richmond," the AI is now parsing signals like "calm," "upfront about fees," and "good for first-time clients."

Those aren't the words you put in your business description. Those are the words your clients use in reviews, in the questions they ask before they book, and in the way they talk about you to a friend.

Your Google Business Profile is no longer just a listing. It's a trust page. And what it reflects now could determine whether AI surfaces you in the answer or skips you entirely.

Most GBP profiles were written two or three years ago and haven't been touched since.

What does yours say about you?

18/06/2026

"Google appears to have decoupled what it cites from who it recommends. For many brands, ranking yourself No. 1 could be a vote for your rivals."

An interesting read. It actually sounds like good news to me. There's no reason that self-generated, self-promoting "best of" content should earn a recommendation.

The principles behind an actual good reputation haven't changed. And search engines and answer engines know this.

The best way to be known as "the best" is to actually BE the best. Your #1 focus should be on providing world-class service.

Google appears to have decoupled what it cites from who it recommends. For many brands, ranking yourself No. 1 could be a vote for your rivals.

17/06/2026

What are you really optimizing for: rankings or visibility?
Here's how SEO and GEO fit together 🔎

17/06/2026

Google just made a quiet but significant move.

On June 5, Google updated its official documentation to name GEO (generative engine optimization) as a legitimate, recognized service category. The kind of thing vendors have been pitching for two years without any official backing.

But here's the part that didn't get much coverage:

In the same update, Google published a list of GEO tactics it says you simply don't need. Things like special AI schema markup. Content rewritten in a "style tuned for AI." llms.txt files.

And then there's this, verbatim from Google: "Third-party tools don't have access to our internal ranking data. They can't guarantee performance."

If a vendor has promised you placement in AI search results, Google just said that's structurally impossible.

What actually works? The same fundamentals that have always mattered. Clear, useful, well-organized content that Google can crawl. Nothing proprietary. Nothing exotic.

GEO became an official category this month. A lot of what's been sold under that label didn't survive Google's own review.

Full article in the comments. Worth a read if you've been pitched any of this recently.

16/06/2026

Something changed at Apple's developer conference last week that most local business owners haven't heard about yet.

Apple unveiled Siri AI, a completely rebuilt Siri, now running on Google's Gemini models. The same AI that powers Google Search and Google's AI Overviews is now behind every Siri request on every iPhone.

That's about 1.5 billion daily Siri requests, now routed through Gemini.

Here's why that matters for your local business:

When someone asks Siri "find me a good estate attorney in Springfield" or "who's a good chiropractor near me," Gemini generates the answer. It surfaces the businesses it knows enough about to cite... based on your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your website content, and how clearly you're described online.

If you're not set up to show up in those answers, you're invisible before the person ever opens a browser.

This isn't a future problem. Siri AI goes into general availability this fall.

The good news: the same fundamentals that help you show up in Google's AI answers also help you show up in Siri's. Clear business descriptions. Real, detailed reviews. Local pages that explain what you do in plain English. A Google Business Profile that reflects how your clients actually talk about you.

None of it is complicated. It just needs to be done.

If you want to make sure your business is ready before fall 2026, I'd love to help you get there.