Yeah, absolutely. So it’s still going up. What’s changed is how people click or don’t click. That’s really what’s changed because of the AI overviews that are happening and people using ChatGPT and others like Perplexity or Claude to be able to use as their primary search engine. So it’s not that search is dead, but Google is certainly in trouble from some of the things that are happening.
But it’s really the evolution of search. Back in oh 4 or 506, as social media started to come along in the early 20 tens, that was really one fragmentation of search. But it was the social network; it grew on its own and Google continued to grow through that. This is just from my perspective. Another one of those similar things are happening.
And but at the same time, because these are new platforms, because these are new things that you have to be found for, and that zero click attribution and all those big fancy terms that basically mean people aren’t clicking on your link anymore. You have to adapt to the new reality.
John Corcoran: 10:04
So what sorts of adaptations are you seeing? Companies take, you know, one thing I’ve heard frequently is that the gen AI, the LLMs are, you know, they’re searched on, they’re trained on the same information that is across the web. So it is just as important today, if not more important, that you have a good web presence. In other words, what you did for SEO up until now is still just as important if you want to show up in the LLMS.
Dave Burnett: 10:35
So yes, I would agree with that in a general statement that it’s one of the components that you need. Good SEO, depending on how you look at SEO, is really one of the components. So there are other components though. So the easiest way I think of it, or try to explain it, is SEO was really all about website authority. Getting your website to show higher in the rankings, get your little blue link higher up in the rankings.
Optimizing for large language models like ChatGPT and others is really about entity optimization and entity authority. So what do I mean by that? Basically, out on the internet, there are a lot of different places that mention your entity. You know, say your business, right? They mention your entity.
They mention you things like PR that you have. Maybe you got onto the New York Times or Huffington Post or something like that. They mention your entity. You may have a Wikipedia page that mentions or is about your entity. You may have a directory listings in the local directory Google My Business, Apple, you know, Apple Maps, whatever.
Those are all about your entity. They’re not necessarily as much about your website. So your website with backlinks is one component. But you have these directory listings, you have PR, you have backlinking itself, you have Wikipedia and all the other directories in addition to all the things that you were doing. So SEO is traditional SEO is important, but it’s only one component of what you need to do these days to be able to be found on AI.
John Corcoran: 12:09
So in other words, PR firms must be thrilled because it’s like, well, we’re more relevant than ever. We need, you know, you need to get your name in these publications.
Dave Burnett: 12:19
They are. And it’s really interesting. So there’s a couple of things just going down the PR path for a moment. Say for example, you did something noteworthy. That’s one of the things you got to keep in mind, doing something noteworthy that people would talk about that would be worthy to show in a Huffington Post or a, you know, National Post or whatever.
When you do something noteworthy, what happens is you get an article written about you. But the key here is which platforms, in terms of what we call high crawl websites. So those are the New York Times and the Guardians of the world. Those high crawl websites, news websites have, like every website should, what’s called a robots.txt file associated with their website. This robots.txt file is instructions for the bots. So okay, I think I need to back up a little bit. But basically some new news sites let ChatGPT scrape their site. Some don’t.
John Corcoran: 13:16
And that’s a big a big issue right now with Cloudflare taking a strong position against scraping.
Dave Burnett: 13:22
Absolutely. So this is one of the key things. So I need to back up a little bit though because to understand this fully, it probably I should expand a little bit about how large language models learn, which is what you had talked about kind of in the initial part. So large language models are different from Google search. Large language models are trained like you were going to high school.
They get trained up to a certain. So once you’re your high school senior and then you graduate high school, you have a certain amount of knowledge, you know, a certain amount of science, certain amount of math, certain amount of history, whatever that is. The same with these large language models. They know a certain amount up to a certain point, and there are cutoff dates. And these cutoff dates are public and they talk about them.
The thing is, those cutoffs in that knowledge is really just to teach the models how to think and how to answer. So then they spend a bunch of months putting training in place. They call it model tuning. They’re tuning the models to be nice to so that they don’t tell you how to build a bomb to, you know, do all these things to answer correctly and in helpful ways. So they spend months training.
But that’s all based on their data that got cut off. So they they’re, you know, a high school graduate knowledge is what they have. And then they put this layer over top that’s called that helps. And it’s called retrieval augmented generation or Rag. So they put a you know you have your brain, they put a rag over top of it.
And basically that’s what you’re working with when you’re in ChatGPT. Now the retrieval augmented generation, what that means is when you do a search on any of the AI platforms, it will actually go out, find some information, come back, use its knowledge to write an answer that you can understand. So this is how even though it only has a high school level education, it can answer questions that are university college level questions or about stuff that’s never learned before because it knows how to talk. That’s basically the way that it works. So when we’re talking about when you talked about, you know, being found on the internet and SEO being just as important.
It is because there’s two things. Number one is you want to be in their original database of knowledge, and then you want to be found for your more recent stuff because it’s not learning anything new once it has a cut off date. So that’s I hope that’s a little bit helpful to help you understand how it works. Yeah. And what it does.
John Corcoran: 15:51
And so then if it has a cut off date I mean I know these cut off dates are increasing that, you know, they’re as they’re adding more information. So maybe this is less of an issue. But I was going to ask if there’s a cut off date then how do you try and feed. What’s the point in SEO? What’s the point in feeding more information?
How do you get more information into those large language models if they have a cut off date? But I guess it’s kind of a moot point because eventually, because they’re always adding more information in, in.
Dave Burnett: 16:19
Exactly. So, you know, ChatGPT 3rd May have been a high school graduate. ChatGPT 4th May have been a university or college graduate. ChatGPT 5th May be a master’s level graduate, so they keep adding to their knowledge, as you said, and they keep getting larger knowledge bases. But there’s two parts to it.
So one is being found in the original fundamental model. And then the second part is being found in AI search which is becoming more and more popular. So Perplexity the AI overviews those kinds of things. So it depends on what type of search is input as to whether or not the large language models just choose from their memory, or they go out to the internet search and come back to you with an answer.
John Corcoran: 17:02
Yeah, it was interesting. I just yesterday was looking for a window local window company and so normally I would go to Google, but I’ve been doing everything in AI lately to kind of train myself to get used to using it. And so I said, oh, I’m going to check it, check for like local window company and my local area. And you could see in Perplexity the sources that it’s drawing from. And it was Yelp and like all the usual local sources.
And then it recommended like 2 or 3 of them, which I didn’t cross-check from Yelp, but I’m pretty sure it just picked like the top 2 or 3 results from Yelp.
Dave Burnett: 17:40
And Yelp is a good example. Being found on Reddit is another good example.
John Corcoran: 17:44
Yeah, it’s.
Dave Burnett: 17:45
There are a lot of these other like this is about the entity authority. Right. So the top 2 or 3 results on Yelp probably had a decent number of reviews, probably had a good optimized profile and would show up. So showing up on these other platforms can now get surfaced. And if you’re using Perplexity versus others, Perplexity is great.
But they all have their own, you know, challenges. And whether or not the model itself chooses to work from its memory or chooses to go out to the internet is really an interesting stage that we’re in right now.
John Corcoran: 18:18
Yeah it is. It’s interesting too, because it’s like it’s it’s almost like I imagine you’ve had some clients come to you or like said, what are the hacks? What are the shortcuts? What can you do for me to know? You know, we’re a local company or whatever, so we can get to the top, right?
And it’s like, you have to be good at what you do. You have to get good reviews. Your customers have to like the work that you do. And if you do all of these things, you will show up in the gen AI search engine. But that’s not a very satisfying answer. But that sounds like that’s the truth.
Dave Burnett: 18:52
It’s 100% the truth, like marketing is great as long as you put it on the front end of a really good product, a really good service, we can expand any market. You know, we can expand any product or service exponentially if it’s really good until eventually it breaks, right. You can only grow so big, and then different things happen. But there’s no faster way to drive a company into the ground than to have a crappy product or a crappy service and then market it.
John Corcoran: 19:19
So, right.
Dave Burnett: 19:21
This is one of the things that you’re absolutely right about. So the fundamentals do matter. But it’s your entity that matters. It’s not you know, and an interesting thing is a way to look at your website just to kind of shift people’s perspective on things. A way to look at your website is as a source of truth in this new world.
I mean, all kinds of truth, not truth, whatever may be. I’m not going to get involved in anything outside of the information you have on your website. Should be accurate. It should show your, you know, your name, address, phone number. It should show who your executive team is.
It should show why you’re in business and how long you’ve been in business, and all these different types of things, like a real source of truth. Then what you need to do is you need to reference that point of truth, or that, you know, subject matter, truth, place from all of the other places on the internet. So if there’s a Yahoo listing, you make sure that it points back, make sure the Yahoo listing lines up with what it says on your website, all these different types of things. Your Wikipedia page lines up like these third-party things need to really match up to be able to give you the entity authority. So Google and the eyes can trust what you say, because there’s so much misinformation out there that really expertise, authority and trust are what matters.
John Corcoran: 20:41
So I think what we’re getting into a little bit is the importance of all the technical SEO, which needs to be properly formatted, properly set up. You can’t have broken links on your website. And this is an area where I, until recently, really misunderstood the importance of it. And the analogy that I give is it’s kind of like, you know, there’s two high school students who do an essay for their English class, and one is seven pages long and has run-on sentences. It has all the information in there, but it’s not well organized.
And then you have another high school student who writes a really well-organized essay that has headlines and an outline. It’s really well organized, and it’s clear and concise, and to the point. And Google has got so much competition for any particular search, depending on the category, of course. And so they could send those search results. They just want to send that traffic to the best result.
And if they’re going out there and they’re crawling the web and they’re looking at all these different websites, and if some of your competitors have a well-organized outline, basically where everything is technically correct, versus you might have all that information in your website, but it’s not organized in the fashion that Google likes to see it. Then they’re going to send that traffic to someone else. I’m not sure if that analogy works, but for me, that seems to be that seems to resonate for me, the way that the importance of of thinking about technical SEO and how your site is set up and organized.
Dave Burnett: 22:14
Absolutely. And there’s I agree with everything you said. You know, think about it like what’s bold, what’s bullet points, all those different things for the individual content pieces you’ve got. The way I think about it is there are multiple people or things that you need to optimize for in your website. You know, you need to optimize your website for appearance.
So the people who are actually on it recognize what it’s there for and, you know, are easily, easily navigated. That’s one audience. Second audience is Google search. So you need to be able to have all your information. This is called something called schema markup is one of the things.
And basically that’s telling the machine what entity you’re related to. And there’s a whole bunch of other things. And so making sure that your site is crawlable well-organized for sure. And then there’s the eyes. So not only do you need to have your site user-friendly and then easy to read by the machine, what does that content say?
And think about how the AI’s answers you. It’s usually kind of a casual tone. It’s in shorter snippets unless you ask for something longer. So if your information on your site is in a format like that, like if you’re in a highly technical field and you’re talking about all these big long words that nobody understands except for you in the field, that isn’t necessarily going to get surfaced as much as if somebody speaks to you in a normal voice or a normal language about what it is that you do. So there’s a balance there.
But when you think about how the AI’s answer, how you structure your content on the page, as well as the technical stuff behind the scenes that then can be referenced to your entities authority, it’s really kind of you got to work together to please three masters when it comes to your your website right now.
John Corcoran: 24:02
Wow. It’s becoming more complex. Tell us about the story. This client that you worked with is a is a SaaS company. You helped this. It was a B2B SaaS company that you helped to generate $1 billion in potential. Client’s business through their website. Tell us the story.
Dave Burnett: 24:21
Yeah, so we were very fortunate to work with a company that was doing. Google ads and LinkedIn ads. So we’re it’s a B2B company. So those were the two primary platforms, and we were working with them and we we got a bunch of leads and they’re a really, really high-ticket, very expensive service that’s very highly specialized. And they basically serve governments and, you know, other large organizations like that.
And we got in ten leads in this one particular period. It was a month and we were kind of like, hey, how was how were the lead quality? Was everything good? You know, we were looking there, HubSpot, everything looked like it lined up. And we got a Slack message back that said, yeah, loving it.
These last ten leads were worth $1 billion in potential revenue. And that was unsolicited. We did not know that that was the, you know, we could see in their HubSpot what deal values were there. But, you know, $1 billion was a new record for us.
John Corcoran: 25:21
I mean, my reaction would be, we are not charging this client enough money.
Dave Burnett: 25:27
No, no, absolutely. Yeah, that internal reaction was like how much weight the be. So yeah. No, it was very, very happy to have seen that.
John Corcoran: 25:35
That is crazy. And so break down for me like what were some things that you did to produce that. Like what changes did you make?
Dave Burnett: 25:44
So we did some ABM, sorry, account-based marketing campaigns. So really focusing on LinkedIn, really focusing on who the people were. These organizations were large enough that actually just the people who worked in the organization, we could target that one organization. So we targeted the entire organization, set up specific landing pages for that organization, specific messaging, and then, you know, did a combination of things to get people to go to the to the website, to the landing pages, and then fill out a form for an inquiry. And then to, you know, the sale the internal sales team at the client took over from there to get the appointments and eventually close the deals.
So what ended up happening is we used remarketing as well. So basically that’s when somebody comes to your website but doesn’t fill out a form. We could then remarket to them, you know, those ads that follow you all around the internet.
John Corcoran: 26:31
Yeah.
Dave Burnett: 26:31
And so we did that and we actually ended up getting three of the ten leads from a secondary remarketing ad, as opposed to the initial outreach or the initial marketing ads we were using.
John Corcoran: 26:40
So by the way, so you mentioned, like, you know, building these dedicated landing pages and stuff like that, how are you using the AI tools in your workflow in order to speed things up, produce, you know, this, these sorts of campaigns faster? Are you using any of the vibe coding tools like Cursor or Lovable? Are you, you know, using the different LLMS for drafting copy faster? What are your thoughts on those?
Dave Burnett: 27:07
Absolutely. So I am not a sound technical, but I’m not a programmer by trade. I’m I’m a marketer, right? So how do I use these tools as a non-programmer? GPT five just came out.
One of the things that you can do with GPT5. So as an example, we dropped in a screenshot of a page and said, I want to adjust this page to be for this target company, this target audience, rewrite this page. And so it rewrote the page. And then I just typed in code this for me, and it coded it all in react and basically created a landing page. And I ran the code and there was a landing page.
I took a screenshot of the landing page and sent it to my designer and said, make this. So it was, it’s really it made things a lot faster from an iteration, like how doing different variations and things like that. So just literally being able to visually represent what I want or even it gets close and you just kind of highlight something and be like, instead of this, do this here. Yea, but what? What the feedback we’ve gotten from our design team and from our programmers makes their life so much easier too, because they don’t have to try and figure out what I’m trying to say, right?
John Corcoran: 28:14
Immediate or a bunch of different versions back and forth like, oh, did you want this to be this color or whatever? You can do it on your own.
Dave Burnett: 28:21
Yeah, exactly. So I can show it to them and be like this exact thing, except make it green instead of blue and, you know, match the client colors and we’re good to go. And then they show it. And so we’re able just to iterate like testing and making sure that the best options are always available is a big thing of what we do. So trying to optimize is, is huge for us.
John Corcoran: 28:40
Yeah. That is truly amazing. Any other things that we haven’t covered? As far as you know, SEO and the age of Gen AI. Any other thoughts on that?
Dave Burnett: 28:51
There’s there’s so many thoughts. The other thing that people don’t really know how to do yet is to monitor any of the large language models to be able to track what’s happening. So we’re actually building a tool that by the time this goes live will be out of beta. It’s called LLMtel. So that’s L L M T E L.com.
And that’s large language model intelligence. And what you can do with this is you can actually track the individual query. So search is a search query. So if you go to Google Search and you type in something that’s a search query. But for AI, what it is a prompt and a prompt response.
So you’re able to track not only your entity’s authority in LLMtel, but you’re also able to track different prompts and the prompt responses. So if you have if you say, for example, you were that local window company and you wanted to track how local window companies were doing, you could be a local window company. Where do I find the best windows in Toronto? Best window installers in Toronto? You could then track that to see how it’s changing over time, as you do optimizations, to see whether or not you’re showing up in the AI searches.
So that’s the other key that we really need to figure out is, you know, what moves the needle because they’re going to be changing the rules. So ongoing. What moves the needle? What gets us found today. Because if you’re not in the base knowledge like we talked about before, getting into the search results is key.
John Corcoran: 30:12
Yeah that’s great. Dave, this has been really fascinating. Really appreciate your time here today. Where can people go to learn more about you and AOK Marketing, PromotionalProducts.com any other places you want to point them to?
Dave Burnett: 30:25
Yeah, just connect with me on LinkedIn. That’s the easiest way. Go to PromotionalProducts.com or AOKMarketing.com and find me there. We’re doing lots of fun and great stuff on those places, and try to keep up to date on the blogs and things with all the most relevant information. So yeah, if anybody would like to, I’d love to be able to connect.
John Corcoran: 30:42
Cool. Thanks so much, Dave.
Dave Burnett: 30:43
Thank you so much for having me.
Outro: 30:47
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.