John Corcoran: 11:43
Wow. Wow. Yeah. So you have that experience and you are freelancing, and then two years later, Covid hits, and you also go through a divorce in this. Not too much longer after that.
So this is just kind of like one hit after another. It seems like.
Josh Hanosh: 11:59
Yeah. I mean, Covid was rough. The Friday that lockdown was announced, I hired my first two employees and I was like, oh.
John Corcoran: 12:08
Is this a mistake? Yeah.
Josh Hanosh: 12:10
And luckily, the pandemic was good for us. Just because people needed to get online. They needed to run social media ads, they needed ordering systems. So we were able to ride that out fairly well. And then, yeah, I mean, the divorce, it’s kind of a long time coming.
I mean, it was something that, you know, my ex-wife and I, you know, we were, you know, working on our marriage for about five years before we separated. And, you know, it just was one of those things where we just wanted different things, and luckily we still keep in touch and we’re still friends and we, you know, we have a good relationship. We don’t see each other a ton. But yeah, it was it, it worked out and it was difficult. But it also was, you know, for the best.
John Corcoran: 12:56
And so you go from working at the animal sanctuary to focusing more on the digital agencies and, and about a little over a year ago now, you decided to merge with another agency. So talk about, you know, tell me a little bit about what the philosophy was around that, why you made that decision.
Josh Hanosh: 13:15
Yeah. So my current business partner, Kevin, how he lives in Florida, he and I were friends for probably four years before the merger. I knew him from EO. We had one of my very best friends, who is also one of his really good friends, and he connected us and Kevin. He’s been in the agency world since he was 20 years old.
He went to school to be a graphic designer. Has a way like just a ton more experience than me. My agency, Dedicated Designs, was very much marketing first and web second. We did like brochure websites, but not really anything complex. Kevin was the opposite.
His development chops were first class. They were building custom apps, custom websites, custom integrations into things like CRMs and ERPs, and we would refer a ton of work to each other. And one day I just told Kevin I was like, what if we just merged? I feel like, you know, we’re doing a lot of business together anyways. At the very least, we could save money by cutting costs.
And we looked at the numbers and they made sense. And so we did like a soft merger just internally with our teams in August of 2024. And then it became legal on January 1st of 2025. And it’s been a year and it’s been awesome. I mean, it’s been really difficult.
I likened it to the sanctuary. I think, you know, we didn’t know what we were getting into with the sanctuary. Had someone told us how hard it was going to be, I don’t know if I would have done it. Same with the merger. I thought it went smoothly, but so many things had to be handled.
John Corcoran: 14:52
A lot of details.
Josh Hanosh: 14:53
Yeah a lot. And you know we have an amazing team that helped us get through it. And now we are a much stronger entity because of it. And I think that shows in, you know, what we’re doing right now with Geo and helping clients in this next evolution of digital marketing.
John Corcoran: 15:11
And I’d love to ask people about what it was like when Covid hit, like what their experience was like. Similarly, for those who were aware of it at the time, I’m curious to ask people about what your experience was like when ChatGPT came out. So do you recall what the experience was like when you first experienced it?
Josh Hanosh: 15:30
Yeah, so I actually used an AI before ChatGPT. This app was not good, but I remember like you could do test prep with it like it would. You would like to feed it information and it would like to make note cards for you.
John Corcoran: 15:44
Okay.
Josh Hanosh: 15:45
And it was at this growth factory that I was helping out with in Roseville. And I mean, ChatGPT came out on 22 November 22nd. And at first it was just, you know, kind of like almost like a I thought of it as just like a party trick, like a fun, like.
John Corcoran: 16:04
Right.
Josh Hanosh: 16:05
You know, just.
John Corcoran: 16:06
Oh, that’s cool.
Josh Hanosh: 16:08
Exactly. And, you know, that’s right around when zero Click SEO was really on the scenes, you know, people were freaking out because they weren’t getting as much web traffic, because people were stopping at Google, because they could get phone numbers and addresses and leave reviews and see reviews and make orders on Google. And people were like, you know, what do we do? Like, how do we handle this? And it hit me that I don’t know.
Probably in. Only maybe it probably took me like two years. So 2024 was when I realized like, oh, like AI is getting to the point where it’s like it’s changing buyer behavior. Like it is. You know, I have a talk about how technology enables us to DIY more and more and more.
So like back in the 90s, there was the Yellow Pages. And if you are professional, then you went to the Yellow Pages and the biggest ad or the company that was named like a like got the most business right. And then, you know, Google.
John Corcoran: 17:13
Not because of actual reviews, not because of actual quality or any kind of buyer signals that indicate that they were actually good.
Josh Hanosh: 17:19
Right. And, people relied on other people for that information. It’s like, oh, have you worked with AA auto insurance? Like yeah, yeah or no, they’re really bad. And there was so much gatekeeping.
You know, if you were going through a divorce or you were wanting to start a company, you were kind of starting at level zero, talking to the attorney, and you didn’t really know anything unless you talked to friends who had done it before you. And they’re kind of like doing the whole thing. They’re walking you through the whole thing, and you’re kind of lost in the beginning. Then Google organized the internet in 98, and the level of DIY was exponentially increased because now we could research ourselves, kind of get a handle on how this is going to work before we start talking to a professional. And then we have all these websites that we can go through and businesses sort of realizing that if they put information on these websites, it was actually not taking away business, but increasing business, because it proved that they could do what they say that they could do.
And people trusted them because they were kind of giving away some of their secret sauce. And then it just kept accelerating. Technology, like I said, allows us to DIY more and more of our lives. So then you have social media and YouTube coming out in like 2004. And now we’re learning in these videos and it’s giving us even more information, and we’re reaching out to professionals with more information and not starting at square zero anymore.
But we’re still needing them. And then phones, you know, Apple came out with the iPhone in 2007, and now we have this information at our fingertips. And the DIY just keeps going up and up. So now you get to AI and DIY is off the charts because now we have our own personal research assistant. You go into ChatGPT and you’re like, hey, I need to form an S Corp.
What attorney do you recommend that I work with? You know, please give me a short list of like five attorneys to work with. And it recommends five attorneys. And people trust AI as if it was the 90s again. And they’re talking to their next door neighbor about who they used.
They trust AI on that same level, for better or worse. And I’m not saying they should trust AI. I’m just saying that they do. And fortunately or unfortunately, the businesses that are being shown are the ones that are getting that business. And no more clicking through ten blue links on Google.
You just ask AI and it gives you what you want.
John Corcoran: 19:45
Yeah, yeah it’s incredible. And so it’s it’s people say kind of like the bottom of the funnel is collapsing or the top of the funnel rather is collapsing. And so people, you know, might spend all the time researching on ChatGPT and then go straight to contacting a company. They maybe don’t even poke around their website that much because they don’t need to at that point.
Josh Hanosh: 20:05
Exactly. Yeah. All the analytics that we’re seeing show that AI traffic. So traffic that comes from Gemini or ChatGPT or cloud or whatever converts three times as often as organic traffic, organic traffic still likes by far more than AI traffic. And traditional search in my opinion, is still going to be around for probably 2 to 3 years.
But whether we like it or not, because we’ve experienced this, all of us have experienced this using Google. We are being pushed into AI results.
John Corcoran: 20:35
Yeah.
Josh Hanosh: 20:36
Whether you start in Gemini or you start on traditional search, you usually end up in an AI search result.
John Corcoran: 20:42
And if you think about it, I guess Google could just flip a switch and it could switch from. There aren’t even any blue links down below. It just transforms into and it’s kind of starting to do that already, where the AI summary is just the entire answer to, depending on what question that you ask. And I think that their technology is doing that depending on if you ask, you know, what’s the Shakey’s Pizza Parlors phone number in Esac and then like it’s going to give you that. But if you ask, how do I make a pizza?
That’s, that’s, that’s the same as the Hawaiian pizza from Quiznos or whatever, some place. Right. Then it’ll give you a different kind of answer.
Josh Hanosh: 21:23
Right. Yeah, totally. And I think that there’s, there’s also problems around ads. So how do you monetize AI search results? And I think that there’s ways that they’re going to start doing that and kind of have already.
John Corcoran: 21:35
Yeah. ChatGPT just announced its ads. Yeah. Yeah.
Josh Hanosh: 21:40
But it’s interesting because you know. There’s so many companies that still haven’t even fully embraced social media and they’re way behind. And then you think about, you know, okay, well SEO is, you know, obviously older and then Geo is, it is new and you’re designing you’re still designing websites with a visual element. And I think something that people aren’t fully realizing or talking about is like in 3 to 5 years, the visual side of a website isn’t really going to be necessary or important because we’re all going to have our own agent that’s going to go do things for us. You know, we’re going to ask it, hey, go book me a restaurant reservation at this restaurant.
It’s not going to care how pretty your website is. It’s going to be how clear the signals are, how easy it can get the answer, how easy it can make a reservation.
John Corcoran: 22:34
Right. So I think that’s what a lot of us don’t appreciate . We’ll look at a pretty website, be like, oh, this is beautiful. I want my website to be like this. But it might be a mess on the back end. And those are two different things, like how pretty it is on the front end, how it is on the back end, and understanding how they’re organized in the back end is so important.
I didn’t appreciate that for many years.
Josh Hanosh: 22:54
Yeah, 100%. And a lot of times. So my, my business partner has this saying, he basically just says like pretty is not your problem. Having a pretty website is not going to convert more people than having a clear website. So, you know, our biggest thing that we talk to our clients about is like, you know, if we’re working with, if you’re working, if we’re working with like a divorce, a divorce attorney, let’s say the last thing we’re going to say on the home page at the top is we do divorce.
Like you, you’re not going to. That is the worst use of that real estate, because people already know what you do because they’re on your website. So you need to tell them, how are you different from the other 14 divorce attorneys that they’re currently looking at? And the same goes for ChatGPT. You have to tell ChatGPT why you should be the one that it recommends and not just say that, oh well, I’m a divorce attorney.
And also people go to websites and agents the same way they self-identify. So many websites have just services. So like one of our clients, they produce wheels and tires for agriculture and like fleets of semi trucks. And their old website was like their services were wheels, tires, axles. And we realized that people go to their website first.
Self-identify within their industry so they want to know I’m a farmer. What services do you have for farmers? Now I’m going to go to your wheel services and then figure out if you work with farmers. Yeah. So it’s also how you lay out your website if you can, if you can lay it out by industry first with your target like ICP, and then dive into deeper content, that’s just a better way to lay out the website, kind of.
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 24:45
Yeah. You know, it’s amazing how many businesses out there just do a very simple website. You know, they have like an index page that has all their services on there and they call it a day, you know, versus like what differentiates, you know, the successful businesses are ones that create a lot more pages to explain what they do in, in the language of the buyer. You know, and I was looking at a website earlier today that was a VA service in the construction industry, and they must have had 50 different pages, probably a hundred different pages, that were describing the different type of VA that they could create, like a payroll VA project manager, VA, you know, executive assistant, VA. It was slightly different, but you know that there are people out there that are thinking in their head like, I need a payroll VA and they’re not searching for a general construction VA.
They’re searching for a payroll VA. So they’re very specific about it. And so having a page like that on your website is going to get more people coming to you for that service.
Josh Hanosh: 25:45
Yeah. No. Yeah. Absolutely. So yeah, I mean there’s a ton I could go on.
But one thing that I am really excited about. So you know, SEO has been around for obviously like two and a half decades. And there’s so many analytics that, you know, GA, SEMrush, like all these tools that you can use to keep track of how you’re doing and where you should go. There’s nothing right now for Geo which for people that are listening is generative engine optimization.
John Corcoran: 26:15
Yeah. And that’s one of the problems, is that there’s no agreed upon language yet. So some people call it a geo.
Josh Hanosh: 26:22
Yeah. We switched to Geo because and this is, this is part of the content side of, of Geo. We actually looked at the keywords that are ranking. And there’s way more volume for GE.
John Corcoran: 26:34
I’ve heard that. Yeah. Yeah.
Josh Hanosh: 26:37
And so you know really good Geo is great SEO because good Geo incorporates the questions that you’re asking AI plus the keywords. The converse is not true. Really good SEO is not good Geo for a lot of different reasons we might have time to get into, but because of the lack of analytic analytical tools, we created our own. So we bring in third party data that we then assimilate in our program. It’s called site AI, and it allows us to show our clients in real time bot traffic.
And there’s three types of bots. there. Citation bot which is the gold. That means a bot came to your website and is grabbing a piece of information from your site and citing it in an answer to a prompt. There’s learning bots.
And what’s cool about learning bots? If you look at a month graph, you will see like 2 or 3 days in a month where these huge spikes of bot traffic come to your site and then drop off. And it’s the bots learning and updating the Lem. And then there’s just straight indexing bots, which are like, you know, like the normal, like Google bots. But then we can reverse engineer so we can have our clients, we can show them, okay, you had whatever 20 bots come to your site yesterday and we can actually show them.
Here’s what the person typed in to ChatGPT that sent that bot to your site. So then we can compare and contrast. It’s like, well, do we want to be ranking for this prompt? No. Yes.
Okay. If yes. Like how? Like we break things down into questions like question clusters. So that’s how we go about writing content.
Rather than looking at keywords and what’s interesting about AI. So there was a research study done, I think it was done by Cambridge. They looked at open AI data in Gemini, and they realized that ChatGPT on average sites, websites that are ranked 231st and Gemini averages sites that are ranked in like the three thousands.
John Corcoran: 28:39
Oh, wow.
Josh Hanosh: 28:40
What that means is these bots, these AI companies, know that the first page on Google is a game. It doesn’t. If you’re ranking first on Google, that doesn’t mean you’re the best company or that you know the most out of anyone else.
John Corcoran: 28:54
It just means you mastered the game. Yeah, you’re right.
Josh Hanosh: 28:57
You’re great at SEO.
John Corcoran: 28:59
Yeah, but there may be great information that’s found on all kinds of websites that don’t show up on the first page of Google.
Josh Hanosh: 29:06
Yeah. And this is really cool for small companies because there’s a lot of small companies, a lot of like founders that have a ton of information. And this new shift kind of opens the door again. These experts are being found because AI cuts through all the BS like.
John Corcoran: 29:25
Well, I guess that answers the question I was going to ask, which is I was talking to someone yesterday who said, you know, I’m not sure if websites are going to be around in a couple of years. And I said, no, I think they are. I don’t think they’re going away. Actually, I think in some ways they’ve become more important. I actually think maybe like a year ago, some people were thinking, oh no, like our website’s going to be meaningless.
But I do think that some of the outages have swung around and they realize, oh, if you actually use your website as your digital home for the for the web and really, you know, right, for the, the AI engines, then you can educate the AI engines and people might not land on your website until they’re getting to the contact form, but they might read it. They just read it somewhere else.
Josh Hanosh: 30:07
Right.
John Corcoran: 30:07
Yeah.
Josh Hanosh: 30:08
And I think this is more true than any other time in web development. But there are truly two internets, I would say, or two websites, I guess, where you build a website for the human to make it look pretty and fun, and there’s a lot of JavaScript that’s involved in that to make the animations happen. And then on the back side, you have all this schema and structured data where you’re just taking the visual side and just throwing it into like robot language basically. And you need both right now because there’s still people that need websites, but then the robots don’t care about the visual side and they just want the information. And if you have a, you know, if you have a really flashy website with a lot of JavaScript, any text that’s within JavaScript, like if you’ve got a FAQ box that you click on the question and like the answer drops down.
Bots can’t see the text in there because they don’t get through JavaScript. So that’s why you need that’s why you need an FAQ schema. So that you have that information for the bots. But yeah, websites are not going away. If anything, they’re going to be stripped down more.
And it’s all going to be about expertise and documentation, like giving the AI everything it needs so that it can help its user point to you when it thinks that you’re the one, you’re the expert that can help.
John Corcoran: 31:28
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting. I think people were afraid for a little bit that, oh, maybe I should hold off on content creation now. I think actually the important thing is to put it on the gas, put on the gas, but be deliberate about it and think through what your approach is.
Do keyword research, you know, that sort of thing. Any final thoughts for people? Josh, before we wrap things up, any other suggestions for people who want to get found in the AI search engines?
Josh Hanosh: 31:54
Yeah, I think PR is having a renaissance. I think PR was kind of on the down trend for a little bit, but AI wants to know that other domains trust you and that if you can get a backlink, even if it’s paid for like a local, it depends what your business is. But on a local like for us, Sacramento Business Journal is a good resource. Even nationally. If you get an article on like Forbes.com or wherever that is going to be gold because AI knows like if you’re on Forbes.com, you’ve got to be pretty reputable and they’ll cite you more often.
John Corcoran: 32:31
Yeah, yeah. Good advice. Josh, it’s been great. Where can people go to learn more about you?
Josh Hanosh: 32:36
And Three29 yeah, I mean, you can follow me on LinkedIn, Joshua Hanosh or look up my newsletter called CMO Mindset or go to three29.com.
John Corcoran: 32:47
Awesome. Thanks so much. Josh.
Josh Hanosh: 32:49
Yeah. Thanks, John.
Outro: 32:53
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.