Okay, ladies and gentlemen, just gentlemen. We're good to go. Matt was going to introduce me, but he forgot my name, so I'm Gavin Burnett, CEO and founder of Locafy Limited. LCFY is the stock code, and probably as good a day as any to have a look because it's actually had a pretty good day so far. Bit of background about us: listed on Nasdaq, LCFY, LCFYW. Software- as- a-s ervice company specialized in location-based digital marketing. We help businesses and brands get to the top of rankings faster and more cost-effectively than alternative methods. Founded in 2009, headquarters in Subiaco, so it's a long, long way from home for me. It's about 30 hours to get here, which I'm more than happy to be here. We have more than 20 global publishing partners, which I'll get into some more detail about that later.
There's actually close to 600-plus paying customers now. The key markets we operate in are U.S., Australia, and Canada. Australian financial year runs to June 30. Revenues for FY2024 were AUD 4.15 million, and the nine months to March, which is the last we just filed on Friday, AUD 2.9 million to March 2025. Okay, so what problems do we solve? Securing visibility for small to mid-sized businesses is very difficult. It's typically extremely expensive and often just doesn't work. The problem is, if you guys have done any searching yourselves, you'll know that you don't go to page two. If you don't see it on page one, you'll put a new search term in, and these days you're just as likely to use ChatGPT to find what you're looking for.
But again, if you're not at the top, you're probably not going to click on it or call them because people are busy. So typically, SEO will take companies a year or more. And for those that don't know what SEO is, search engine optimization, it's how you basically tweak your website or structure your website to make it appear higher in rankings. For most people, 12 months to a year can even be three years. We typically get results within 30 days to 60 days, and that's through, I'll just introduce you to a gentleman to my left here, Jimmy Kelley, probably one of the top three SEOs in the world who has basically engineered our systems and made them so that they are scalable, easily deployable, and very cost-effective for us as well.
We've got proven performance in all the markets we operate in, whether it's Australia or U.S. or Canada, and we're now ready for scale. It's a big market that we're operating in, so companies globally will spend about 790 billion this year to get visibility. So everything from websites to SEO to online advertising, all of that money is being spent to try and get in front of more customers. And in the not-too-distant future, it'll be a trillion-dollar market, so you don't need a very big slice of that pie to have a decent company. The search landscape is changing very rapidly. Google still dominates. However, for the first time in 22 years in the March quarter, they had a downward dip in total search volume. So it's not panic stations yet by any means. They're huge, and they're going to be here for a while.
But AI, ChatGPT, which is Microsoft, grabbed about 8% market share, which is significant. So it can't be ignored, and it's here to stay. What we have found, though, through extensive testing, and we are constantly testing and developing, it's what we do to stay ahead of the game, in a nutshell, AI is basically pinching Google searches. So to be at the top of AI, you need to be at the top of SEO. Without getting into all the nitty-gritty detail, that's basically what you need to do. We can prove that through hundreds of tests that we've done. So the problem for most businesses is they're in one single location. Now, Google is very specific when it comes to local businesses. If you're standing pretty close to where the business is and you're looking for a coffee shop, odds are that coffee shop is going to come up.
If you move a mile away, probably not, because Google's looking for distance or relevance, sorry, distance and relevance. So while it's easy for businesses to rank right where they are, as soon as you start walking a mile or driving two miles or three miles, the odds of you appearing in any search highly is very low. So we've basically figured out a way as well where, through using the one technology, you can appear very high in both organic rankings and also AI rankings. How do we do it? Well, it all starts with content. Not that content is a major ranking factor for Google, that's a whole different story. It is important to have content because when people find you, you need to have accurate information, and by having accurate information out there, it basically tells Google who you are.
It can be confident in your business, where you're located, what you sell, and what you do. The first thing we do is we publish business listings, which might seem like a simple and obvious thing to do, but believe me, 90-odd% of businesses don't do it, and they don't do it very well. So if you think about it, if you've got different addresses or old addresses or old phone numbers and you've published that in lots of different places, that's going to confuse an algorithm. It's not going to know exactly who you are. So we make sure that your information is consistent across lots of different endpoints, all of the major ones.
The second thing we do is we take that same content that you're publishing to Yellow Pages and Yelp and those sorts of places, and then we produce our own landing pages, which are specifically structured to rank very quickly in Google search results for the keywords you're going after. And by default, those same keywords you'll find yourself ranking for in AI search, whether it's ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini. You'll get the whole lot as a result of that. And here's the humdinger for local businesses. Most calls, most traffic for local businesses goes through the Map Pack. So if any of you guys have ever done any searching on either mobile or desktop, when you put in a local search term, the map pops up. It'll pop up 93% of the time or more for local search. Now, most people are in a hurry.
Most people that are doing local search will actually take action very quickly. Within 24 hours, 90% will actually go to the store and make a call or look to buy something. Most traffic goes through the top three positions in Map Pack. So if you're looking for a roofing contractor, a plumber, or whatever it is, that's a local service. So what'll happen is a map will pop up when you put that search term in. Most people will actually click on one of the top three positions in that map and get the business. So if you're below that, you're not getting much business at all because the vast majority is going through those top three positions. Here's a real example. One of our new clients, you can see who it is. He gave me permission to put this in the presentation.
It's State Farm Insurance, biggest insurance company in America, I believe. I'm Australian, so forgive me if it's not. I'm told it's pretty big. He's a top agent. Now, we did this in 24 hours, which is unheard of. Now, you can't do that all the time, but sometimes you can get lucky. But in this case, because of the combination of the very, very good optimizations that were done, the power of the AI technology we have behind it that pushes the map rankings, and combined with a very powerful brand, we're able to do that. We've done six other keywords for him. Whilst having gone to number one in the immediate area for all of them, they're all on the way up.
So what that's going to mean for this particular customer is that when people are searching for insurance, whether it's home insurance, renters insurance, auto insurance, and you're in like a five to seven, nine-mile radius of where he's located, he's going to pop up in the top three. Now, that's worth a lot of money, the leads that are generated from that. And we do that on a regular basis for our customers. And as I said before, probably too small to read, but I can give you a copy of the presentation. You're going to have to take my word for it. That's one of our clients that's at the top of rankings for AI. This particular one is ChatGPT. The question I think you're most interested in is, "That's great. Cool tech. Excellent. How are you going to sell it?" That's the obvious question.
One thing we've been doing over the years is building up some very, very big databases. We own a number of directories: Hotfrog, AussieWeb, Pink Pages, Superpages, and we intend to add to that list over the very near future. Why do we do that? These directories have a lot of business listings in them. Broadly, the numbers that we have, just in the target markets that we're going after, we have 40 million business listings. We also have 11.4 million claimed listings. Now, what that means is we have permission to market to them, which is a huge advantage. We've been trialing, and we just put an announcement out this morning, so I'm pleased to be able to share this with you. We've now built an AI sales team. Our sales team is AI.
We did a test market in Australia in the middle of August, 900 absolute cold outreach SMSs to people we'd never spoken to before. We engaged with 200 of them. I can assure you that most of them thought they were talking to a human being. In fact, two of them asked if they could hire the people that were talking to them. Out of the 200 engagements, we secured 25 appointments. The AI bot plugs it straight into the sales team calendar. We didn't have a single person not show. We currently have 12 active POCs underway with those agencies, and they're not insignificant agencies. So the quality of the lead was also very, very good. So that's given us huge confidence as to what we can do with this AI sales team given these results. Now, why this is also significant is that these are not end customers.
These are digital agencies that actually have hundreds of customers and dozens of customers, so by cracking a nut with one of these agencies, we're opening up the door to potentially dozens to hundreds of clients, and that's where we got the State Farm gentleman from, so how do we scale this? What we do is we use the AI technology that we have, target the marketing agencies with this product. The product is what I showed you before. It's listings, landing pages, and map-boosting technology. That sells for $690 a month, which is very, very cost-effective if any of you know anything about pricing in SEO. Very, very cost-effective. What do customers want? What would they pay to be number one in maps or number one in search? They pay a lot more than that.
It's a very attractive product for marketing agencies to go and take to their clients. Our engagement model with the partners is you contract a customer to Locafy. We pay you a commission. And by the way, we're going to release our AI sales team on our database in your geographic region and send you the leads. We haven't had anyone say no yet. And why would they? Because we've got permission to market to them. It's a great product. It's well and truly proven. They look after the customer. We don't have to have the account managers. We just look after the tech. That's how we're going to scale this to a billion-dollar company. Bunch of good-looking guys on the board. But in all seriousness, Collin Visaggio, former CFO of InterOil, sold to Exxon Mobil for about $2.6 billion in 2016, 2017.
The other gentleman, apart from myself, are all financial guys, ex-auditors. So we have a very strong compliance aspect to our company. And that's it. I'm happy to take questions. We have about 10 minutes for questions here.
I don't know if the audience has a question, but maybe I'll just start off, Gavin. Kind of high level, what would you say you're most excited about in terms of opportunities in front of you, and what should investors be focused on as you capitalize on this opportunity?
Honestly, the most excited we are is about the opportunity with the local product that we have. Excuse me. It's a massive market opportunity in the target markets that we're going after. The product is priced well. We know that it's affordable for most companies. We're not being greedy. We know we could charge more, but we're not going to. It's a great product for agencies to have as part of their kit bag because most digital agencies are not good at SEO. They typically sell Google Ads. They do websites. They do all of the other stuff around SEO because they don't understand it, typically.
So for them to have a plug-and-play solution that is easy to deploy, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, that they can make 30% commission on and then use that as an intro to a client, they can sell them other stuff, it's a bit of a no-brainer for them. Then when you throw leads on top of that, I'm really excited about that because I've seen this work now. And I've seen it firsthand, how good that AI sales team is. So if we can even get half those results going out into the market, you can do the math on the size databases we have and draw your own conclusions from that. But yeah, that's what we've got. That's what I'm most excited about.
Other questions?
I think we have another one. What would you say is the most misunderstood aspect of Locafy's story from an IR financial perspective?
Ooh, that's a tough one. Misunderstood. Well, I guess SEO is quite broad. So we've had a look at a couple of different markets and things like national. People will pay a lot of money for that. But companies don't see as much value. It takes a lot longer. It's a lot harder. And we have talked about that in previous releases that we're doing national and other things like e-commerce. And notwithstanding that those products are very good, they work very well, they're nowhere near as scalable as what we've got in the local space in terms of deployment of that product. So that's our focus going forward. So whether that's misunderstood or not, I don't know, but that's to sort of clarify to the market. That's where we're going. Yes, sir.
So obviously, it's a very competitive space.
Yes.
The fact that you're based in Australia, does it matter at all being globally local to expand your market size?
No, not at all. But it's a good question. Jimmy is actually based out of Texas, so he's a representation here. But also the way that we see our partners, they're part of our firm. So when the partners sign up, they are Locafy. We have now guys in Missouri. We have a fellow now based out of Colorado. They are branded as Locafy, and they act as our sales agent in the market. We can sit in the background. And where the technology runs from, it actually does run out of the States. But where it sits, that kind of doesn't matter so much. But what we recognized is that it's very important to have account managers or sales agents that are close to the customer. They know the customer. They look after them. They can call them. They need to be in that same time zone.
So that's how we solved that problem. And that's what they get paid the commission for. But does that answer your question, Vernon?
I've got to ask a follow-up.
Absolutely.
Obviously, so it's the same thing. It's very competitive. For you to grow your business, is this standard block and tackle what sets you apart? What's unique about Locafy?
I guess what we talked about there, the ranking, the getting the visibility in such a short period of time, that's really the if you talk to anyone in SEO or digital marketing and you say that we can do this in 30 days and prove it, absolutely prove it, they'll be stunned. The two large agencies that we signed in the U.S. in the last few weeks both said the same thing, and they've been in SEO for years.
Do you compete on price at all, or?
No, on value. But our pricing is more keen than if you wanted to engage an SEO agency, even for a small to medium-sized business, I mean, think the average is $1,500-$2,000 a month. If you do your research on that, I think you'll find that that is about the average price that customers will pay. Yeah.
Thank you.
No worries. Thank you.
I guess what would be your average customer ROI? Do you tell them per dollar spent on you?
Very hard to do that in terms of for us ROI or for them?
For them.
Oh, it varies tremendously because if we compare the plastic surgeon to a plumber, I think plumbers charge more these days, don't they? But it's hard. I guess to answer your question, the metrics we look at are how many extra calls are we generating, and how many extra visits to your store are we generating, and how many more web impressions are we generating. Once customers get to position one, they don't tend to want to turn it off. But really hard to get an actual ROI because we don't know what they're selling their product for. But at $690 a month, most businesses, "Okay, let's just take a tradesman." That's two callout fees for the month. So their ROI is pretty quick on that. It is a tough question to answer. It's a fair question, but it depends on the type of business, the location it's in.
It depends, yeah.
Thanks.
Yes, sir.
As this sort of you get more calls from this new product, do you need to add any more employees from kind of what you have?
That's a good question. There will be some degree of account management that will need to come in. But that's not going to be a lot of people. An account manager could comfortably handle several dozen agencies. That'll be a good problem to have. We would look to increase the size of the engineering team, but not massively. The idea is that we leverage the partners. We leverage the agencies that have the staff to look after the client base. So that's a big shift in our strategy. Previously, having resellers, it meant we needed more of our own account managers to look after them. So this also mitigates risk in terms of the billing is directly to us. We collect the money, and we pay it out as opposed to relying on the resellers to pay us. So yeah.
You just landed.
As a new customer, why did they select you? What does it mean for your business going forward?
We landed an agent from State Farm. That's correct. A guy by the name of Greg, lovely guy, and his wife, Danielle, getting married very shortly. Look, I think the potential there is huge. Provided we deliver on what we say we can do, which so far we have, I think the opportunity there is tremendous. Yes.
Can you tell us anything about the recent experience?
Yes, I can. So we're distributing their technology in Australia. I can't give you the details of some of the commercial deals that are underway, but we're actively pursuing that opportunity. We're also looking to work the other way with that company as well and have them market our technology to their customers. So those discussions are well and truly underway.
Maybe one more visionary question. Fast forward two to three years, what does Locafy look like?
Oh, two or three more years. So Jimmy and I have been talking about this. And what we do is not easy. The technology build is not easy. Google constantly changes. But we do think we've now got the tech in a very, very solid position. We've got the operation side of things nailed, and we've got our go-to-market plan very clear. We don't have to advertise. We don't need to spend money on Facebook advertising. We've got the database. We've got the clients already sitting within our ecosystem. Now it's a case of execution. So I hope we execute very well because the opportunity is there for this to be a very sizable business in the next couple of years.