Bruno Felicidade Jones is Senior Vice President at Trace Brand Building, a company specializing in brand strategy, digital marketing, and agile digital transformation to help businesses enhance customer experience and drive sales. Under Bruno’s leadership, Trace Brand Building has enabled clients to achieve impressive results through innovative AI-driven marketing systems. With over two decades of experience in brand building and digital transformation, he is an advocate for leveraging AI to accelerate content creation.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [03:20] Bruno Felicidade Jones explains why authority and trust matter for Google and ChatGPT
- [06:03] The secrets behind Google’s E-E-A-T ranking factors
- [10:07] Why you should optimize staff LinkedIn profiles and Google Business for trust
- [11:12] Leveraging external reviews to skyrocket your site’s credibility
- [13:21] How to structure your website for maximum services page SEO impact
- [27:03] Elevating content with author bios and off-site authority links
- [34:29] How to use your sales team insights to create valuable, high-ranking content
In this episode…
If you think a polished LinkedIn profile is enough to build credibility online, think again. In an era where AI tools decide who gets seen and who gets ignored, the real question is: how do you prove your authority and earn trust in a way that both humans and machines recognize?
For Bruno Felicidade Jones, a seasoned brand strategist and digital authority expert, the answer lies in mastering E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authority, and trust. He explains that search engines and large language models are constantly “crawling” your digital footprint, evaluating not just what you say about yourself, but how the broader internet validates it. That means optimized team bios, linked LinkedIn profiles, external reviews, authoritative backlinks, structured service pages, and content that reflects real-world perspective, not generic AI filler. When done right, this layered approach doesn’t just improve rankings; it positions your business as the obvious, credible choice in both search results and AI-generated recommendations.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Bruno Felicidade Jones, Senior Vice President at Trace Brand Building, to discuss how to drive authority and trust to get more traffic and sales. They explore E-E-A-T fundamentals, optimizing About and service pages, leveraging off-site reviews and backlinks, and using long-tail content to win AI visibility. Bruno also shares advice on turning email newsletters and sales insights into revenue-driving SEO assets.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Bruno Felicidade Jones: LinkedIn | Email
- Trace Brand Building
Special Mention(s):
- Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO)
- Jason Patel on LinkedIn
- Tyler Olson on LinkedIn
- Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller
- Google My Business
- ChatGPT
- Gemini
- Perplexity
- Fathom
- Replit
- Lovable
- Cursor
- Google Keyword Planner
- Yoast
- Rank Math
- Microsoft Clarity
- Grammarly
- Substack
- Medium
- Huffington Post
- About.me
- The HOTH
Quotable Moments:
- “And then they say okay well you’re actually a trusted source for this material for this subject matter.”
- “So LinkedIn, Reddit, Google, my business, you know, all those platforms and you should be writing some sort of article to be featured in a publication.”
- “You should have one page that lists all your services and gives an intro paragraph into those services.”
- “What you need to make sure is that the content is valuable and has either factual information that is not available elsewhere on the web or has a unique perspective on it.”
- “So if you can answer those long questions, you know that’s back.”
Action Steps:
- Build out detailed About and team pages: Showcasing real experience, expertise, and credentials helps search engines and AI tools validate your authority.
- Create a dedicated page for each service you offer: Clear, structured service pages improve internal linking and make it easier for AI to understand what you actually do.
- Earn and highlight third-party reviews: External reviews on platforms like Google build trust signals that carry more weight than testimonials on your own website.
- Publish long-tail, question-driven content: Answering highly specific queries increases your chances of being surfaced in AI-generated responses and niche searches.
- Promote new content to your email list: Driving immediate engagement to fresh articles signals relevance to search engines and strengthens overall SEO performance.
Sponsor: Rise25
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Episode Transcript
Intro: 00:02
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:19
Hey everyone, this is John Corcoran. I am the Co-founder of Rise25, which is a B2B focused podcasting agency. And this is doing double duty. We got a live webinar here. This will also be a podcast episode.
Also put it up onto YouTube as well. And so I’m really excited about this, but we’re going to be covering a lot of material. We’re going to be talking about how to drive authority and trust to get more traffic and sales. And so we’ve got Bruno here who’s going to be talking about that. But first, before we get into that, I will I like I’ve been sharing a little quick tip at the beginning here.
Just something that I’m learning and something that I’ve implemented. So first, a couple of different things. For those of you who are in the EO SEO in the age of AI WhatsApp group, which is the group that I started, it’s got a lot of engagement, just past 500 members. So if you’re in that group. Our next presentation is going to be on February 25th at 3 p.m. Eastern Time.
How to Get Seen by ChatGPT and Other LLMs with Jason Patel is the CEO and Founder of OpenAI, which is a tool that I’ve been playing around with in preparation for that event, and really cool software. And then also on March 11th at 12 p.m. PST, we have How to Code Your Next Startup in a Weekend with Replit with Tyler Olson of Bionic Wave AI. And then on March 26th, we have How to Get Your Team Engaged With AI with Sam Klein. Sam really focuses on helping people that are just starting. Like how unlike us, who have been up to our eyeballs in AI, people who are just getting started with it and don’t know where to get started.
And so he’s really helping with getting teams involved. So a couple of quick tips. So how to build landing pages ten times faster. This really blows my mind because not to date myself. But you know I remember coding web pages with HTML.
I remember using Netscape. Was it navigator not navigator? Some some one of the built in free tools before WordPress to create web pages. And now you can you can vibe code landing pages and it’s absolutely bonkers. So this is what kind of strategy I’ve been using is first, go and research your keywords.
So find some terms that people are already searching for that you want to show up in. So people are right now looking for you, your service, your company by searching for different terms. A very simple, easy way to do that is just to go and Google Keyword Planner. There’s also paid tools you can do as well, but this is a very easy one. And so you can do that.
Find a couple terms that you really want to show up for and then have someone interview you on that topic. So I just did this last week with a couple of clients, and it was a very niche search term that they wanted to show up for. And so we took that niche search term and they created 7 to 9 subtopics within it. And I just interviewed them about each of these topics. And these are things that they could talk about in their sleep very easily.
And we use it for two purposes. One, it became a podcast episode, and then we could take those subtopics and we could divide them up and create individual landing pages for each of those subtopics. Then what you can do is you can take the recording of it. Fathom is a very easy tool to use. Take the transcript and then use that to actually vibe code the landing page so you can feed that into your AI tool of choice.
Gemini, perplexity, whatever, and use that to design your landing page. And once you have a template in place, it gets a lot easier to do. So that’s just a quick way to create various different landing pages. So Bruno was really helpful and instrumental with guiding me in how to do that. Just to sum it up, number one, research a keyword you want to get found for in ChatGPT Gemini perplexity.
Have someone interview you about that subject matter, which is the nice part about that. It’s easy. You don’t have to think and you can just about your expertise recorded with fathom. Transcribe it. Use a coder.
There’s replit, there’s lovable, there’s cursor, there’s lots of them to build a landing page and then put that up onto your website. And then also create blog posts with long tail keywords to link back to them. So whatever that term is that you want to search for, you can create longer blog posts on those topics. All right. So with that let’s go over to Bruno.
So Bruno, what we’re going to talk about today is how to drive authority and trust. So I’ll confess that for me, for many years I thought, you know, I got a cool looking LinkedIn page. That’s all I need, right? I thought like, okay, that’s that’s enough. That conveys authority and trust.
They look me up on LinkedIn. How wrong I was. Because the machines, which is just this kind of like general term that we use for Google and now ChatGPT and Gemini, they have these bots. It’s like a search party that’s going out and crawling the web and they’re assessing or another another way of thinking about it is like like restaurant reviewers and like going down a restaurant row. And they’re going they’re assessing all these different businesses and they’re looking at them up and down, and they’re kind of evaluating them.
Well, these, these, these machines, these bots are out there doing that on your website. And if you don’t play their game, then you will not have trust. You will not have authority. And ChatGPT Gemini perplexity will not take you seriously. They will go send their traffic.
They will go send attention to other websites that play the game that have the rules that they’ve defined. Bruno. Hopefully that sets it up a little bit, but I’d love to hear from you about, you know, some of these ideas of building authority and trust.
Bruno Felicidade Jones: 06:01
Well, John, I think you’ve done a fantastic job. You kind of summed it all up in the right in the beginning. Well done. That’s awesome. So yeah, what what they trying to do is they trying to establish what’s your authority and how are you trusted on the internet with this information.
And they’ve actually got a term for that. It’s E which stands for experience expertise authority and trust. And so you’ve got to meet those criterias. And then they say okay well you’re actually a trusted source for this material for this subject matter. And then you start slowly ranking up the page.
Up the search page. and and I mean, a good thing is whatever worked for Google is working for Gemini and ChatGPT. And I’m only going to talk about those two llms because they are they they account for the bulk of the LLM traffic, obviously, ChatGPT being the bigger one. But Gemini, I mean, it’s really catching up quickly. So they just want to see okay, well what is what experience have you got in this subject matter.
What expertise have you got. And now you’ve got to show them this thing. So when you write an article well first of all we should start with your about page. Right. So you’ve got to show okay who are the people that work for this organization.
What are the what is their expertise. What are they. You know, what are they good at? Where are they on the internet? So we should ideally be linking to their LinkedIn profile, and their LinkedIn profile should be optimized for the expertise that they want to demonstrate.
John Corcoran: 07:58
And Bruno, you know that we struggled with this idea. This was one that, you know, a couple of years ago, if you’d asked me, I would have thought, oh, you don’t want to put your employees up onto your website because they could get poached because your competitors would go find them. And you very eloquently said, look, they can find your employees anyways. You just go to LinkedIn and you can scrape them very easily. Yeah.
So you might as well get credit for it, you know, put them up onto your about page. So it doesn’t just look like some solopreneur, you know, with with no employees you might as well get credit for it.
Bruno Felicidade Jones: 08:35
Absolutely. I mean, you struggled with that for a while, and I think I actually scraped the like a results page of you did. Yeah. I don’t think I missed one. I even got past employees and that was simple to do.
What I did is I just used Google Gemini and I did some deep research on your organization. I mean, it wasn’t I didn’t do anything special. I didn’t have any special.
John Corcoran: 08:59
Special software or anything like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bruno Felicidade Jones: 09:03
So if you have that fear, let me tell you, your employees are out there showing their expertise because, you know, they might be thinking about their career path and how do they evolve. So they want to show okay, well, I’m an expert in this subject matter. And especially white collar workers focus a lot on that. People that work out in the field, they don’t care about their LinkedIn profile. Yeah.
Typically blue collar workers don’t don’t don’t really worry about that kind of stuff. Yeah, I could even.
John Corcoran: 09:46
I could show as an example our about page, which we eventually evolved. And some of the pieces on there if you want to do you want to walk us through some of those pieces and feel free to criticize what we’re missing, too. Sure. That’s pulling up here, but keep going.
Bruno Felicidade Jones: 10:07
Yeah. So your LinkedIn profiles for your staff are important. All businesses, regardless of what you do, should have a Google business profile that you used to call it Google Business. No, they used to call it GMB. Google.
Business.
John Corcoran: 10:25
My business.
Bruno Felicidade Jones: 10:26
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 10:27
Yeah.
Bruno Felicidade Jones: 10:28
Google my business. Yeah. So you should have a profile and you should be canvassing for reviews. That’s another way that you establish Your authority is just having those constant reviews and Google Trusts reviews that are external to your website more than they trust the reviews that you’ve canvassed and put on your website because.