How To Make Your Business Rank On ChatGPT

Brandon Welch: 0:06
Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I’m your host, Brandon Welch, and I’m joined by Caleb, Suntan, Agee. Hey.

Caleb Agee: 0:16
Hit the beach last week with the kids. He’s got the beach.

Brandon Welch: 0:19
Looks like SPF 30 treatment all over you. Looks like I’ve been kissed by the sun. You have been kissed by the sun, this whole body, body. That’s how John been kissed by the sun. You have been kissed by the sun, this whole body, body. That’s how John Mayer would say it. Body, body, yeah.

Caleb Agee: 0:28
I think that’s a who’s, that it’s a family guy.

Brandon Welch: 0:33
It’s a family guy thing. All right, I was actually you better be okay with it.

Caleb Agee: 0:37
I was actually going with the singer.

Brandon Welch: 0:39
But body.

Caleb Agee: 0:40
Baddies I don’t know.

Brandon Welch: 0:42
Seal, I don’t know who knows. Hey, this is the place where we help you eliminate waste in advertising, grow your business and achieve the big dream. And we all know big dreams all start at the search engine.

Caleb Agee: 0:52
right Wrong, but it does have a lot to do with it. Right, that’s where dreams are made or broken.

Brandon Welch: 0:57
Yeah, they’re going to be broken. I got to tell you, hey, SEO is changing and we have. We’ve been fielding questions for this and building strategies for the last gosh year or two, but it’s really, really hit the road the last few months and, for whatever reason, peak literally like May. April and May of 2025 was the peak of like. I think everybody I encountered was like, how do you rank on GPT? And I’m seeing my competitors and customers. You know customers use it. Competitors rank there. Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t there. So how do we do that?

Brandon Welch: 1:34
And we have a nine part answer for you today and if you do even a handful of these things, you are going to be miles ahead of the game. We don’t need to sit here and belabor the point that AI is taking over. Ai is rapid adoption, more than any technology, like faster than by 10 to 15 times than the average technology adoption curve, If you think of, like, iPhones and good old-fashioned Google. This is happening in months, not years, and we have the master. Caleb has long been the SEO architect at Frank and Maven, and so I’m going to throw things up and he’s going to actually bring some technical.

Caleb Agee: 2:16
Knock him out of the park. Knock him out of the park.

Brandon Welch: 2:18
I’m going to toss up, he’s going to knock it out of the park, but today you’re going to leave with nine things you can be doing to have a fighting chance and actually a huge competitive advantage, because I bet, if you are one of the owner-operated companies we love to serve, your competitors probably aren’t doing this.

Caleb Agee: 2:36
Yeah, and this whole world is new. So we’re going to open with a caveat of saying what we say today will probably change in six months and it’ll definitely change in a year. The basics of what we’re talking about, the principles here, I think they will apply long term. They’re not going to go away. We’re not going on any like super basic nerdy piece that will be outdated or outmoded, you know, in a very short time. But the nuances of all of these how much one thing helps versus another thing will shift and change, just like we’ve seen Google algorithms change over the time. It’s all new and everybody’s trying to get their legs about them. Fun thing the going names are GEO which stands for Generative Engine Optimization.

Caleb Agee: 3:23
So generative means an AI is a generative engine, or I like AIO, but it sounds like Old MacDonald has a farm.

Brandon Welch: 3:35
Whatever you are EOing, we have an answer for it, because here’s why it doesn’t change. Here’s why this podcast will actually be relevant in 10 years from now. You heard it here. What is the big idea? What has Google always been trying to do?

Brandon Welch: 3:52
Serve the searcher, serve the searcher the answer to their question. They’ve always been trying to be more human. They’ve always been trying to deliver you the best answers, or else you won’t use that, you’ll use something else right. Deliver you the best answers, or else you won’t use that, you’ll use something else right. And so all of the technical stuff there’s over 200 little tiny parts of like a search engine algorithm. All of those were never designed so that you could hack them and like make some magic answer to their invisible problem. It was all. That was their best guess and that was their best way to sort out all the billions of pieces of data on the internet in a ranking fashion that they had a pretty good confidence they were giving you the best result. Well, the same underlying principle is true for AI. It’s just way dadgum smarter. It’s just way smarter, way faster, and it’s more intelligent and able to regurgitate information in the way we actually want to see it. So it’s kind of like SEO, as it’s always been on steroids. Yep.

Brandon Welch: 4:52
And so the people that were really good at SEO are probably already miles ahead, but there are some very specific things that AI is not looking at as much that you can control, frankly, faster and better than you could have on SEO. And that’s what gives you the advantage, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Caleb Agee: 5:09
Well, let’s talk about some stats on AI. Real quick, to just drive the point home, I’ve got a stat.

Brandon Welch: 5:15
Bring it on 79% of people have used generative AI to find answers instead of a traditional search engine. Generative AI, let’s just be clear that’s your GPTs, that’s your Geminis, that’s your Google AI overviews. Generative AI means it can take big pieces of information and then summarize its own version of that. It can make up things that weren’t previously written because it has the code of human language.

Caleb Agee: 5:45
Yeah, it’s not necessarily direct, quoting you right. A Google search engine pulls up a snippet of your webpage, typically, or a page from your website, and even in the meta description it might highlight I don’t know if you remember it’ll highlight the word you searched and show you. Or, if it didn’t have the perfect result, it’ll say show results that have to contain this word. Yeah, you know, ai is not doing that. It’s taking you at your word and it’s searching the whole internet essentially for you.

Brandon Welch: 6:16
It’s taking those three hours you would have spent parsing articles and it’s doing it for you.

Caleb Agee: 6:20
The first page of Google is 10-ish web page. Actually, it’s like an infinite scroll now, but it’s taking all 10 of those pages, reading them for you and summarizing for you. Hey, anybody, hate these lazy kids, because this next one you’ll love 43% of Gen Z now start product discovery on TikTok, youtube or AI chat tools, not Google.

Brandon Welch: 6:41
I’m actually going to take back that statement because Gen Z is the least lazy generation I’ve seen in, like ever.

Brandon Welch: 6:47
That’s why Nate the camera guy is in here working with his nine arms. Gen Z says this is stupid. I don’t have time to waste on this. Yeah, they have a extremely high filter for what is worth their time and what is not worth their time, and how they can natively use technology their time and what is not worth their time and how they can natively use technology Like they were born little inspector gadgets and they can just, you know, go go chat GPT and tell me this before I have to waste weeks or months or hours on a YouTube video learning it. Yeah.

Brandon Welch: 7:17
That’s why, like, that’s how they start their product discovery that’s not one thing they use. That’s like they don’t even reach for Google. They go yeah, that’s dad one thing they use. That’s like they don’t even reach for Google. They go that’s dad’s old, rusty tool. We’re going straight to GPT.

Caleb Agee: 7:29
Fun trick. We did the road trip to Florida. Said, hey, I’ve got kids. One of them’s a baby. We need to stop every two to three hours. Give me great stops along the way Planned out our entire itinerary. Wow Chat GPT did.

Brandon Welch: 7:46
And the way planned out our entire itinerary. Wow, chat gpt did and it was brilliant cheat gpt for the win. Yep, so hey, ai generated answers. Uh, stat number three influence buying decisions for 61 percent of users who interact with them.

Brandon Welch: 7:57
So, uh, they’re taking it to the bank yep I want to say that the the the most trusted form of advertising back in the days when I kind of knew this dad off cuff was obviously referrals from a friend. It was like 90-something percent of people did that. Then there was like traditional media, like newspapers, and then search was just like closely behind that, but it wasn’t that high. It was in the 40s or 50s percent. People are trusting GPT inherently and quickly, which is interesting because it can’t be bought.

Caleb Agee: 8:29
That is the key here. At the moment, there are no ads inside of these GPTs, and so you can’t cheat the system. You can’t run paid AI ads to land at the top of these search results. They are agnostic, they look at the internet as a whole, and unless you apply these principles, that we’ll talk about later. You lose.

Brandon Welch: 8:48
Somebody asked me the other day do you think this will go the way of Google? And I’m like man, I would be really, really shocked if any AI platform let ads into it, definitely on a paid version. Yeah, I guess I could see the ad-supported model becoming a thing later. Like your Quora’s and your Reddits and stuff like that. Those are being supported by ads and at one point they were almost all organic, so I can see that happening. So, like GPT takes over Google Spot and they, you know, you could have a premium version, which we have right, but if you’re just any everyday person, you might be limited to the amount of searches.

Caleb Agee: 9:31
I don’t think they dilute the search. We’re just speculating right now.

Brandon Welch: 9:41
I don’t think they dilute the search any more than they just put. Be extremely trusting of the technology and to kind of have your own experience of it being useful. There’s no scent of it being skewed.

Caleb Agee: 9:58
Yeah, it didn’t sell out.

Brandon Welch: 10:00
It didn’t sell out To the man you know, yeah, we’ll see.

Caleb Agee: 10:03
So 58% of consumers say AI recommendations feel more relevant than traditional search engine results. That’s from.

Brandon Welch: 10:09
HubSpot, probably because they’re summarizing it. And then, lastly, websites optimized for AI-driven search, which is what we’re going to talk about today. For example, structured answers, schema, faqs see up to a 35% increase in organic visibility across these platforms, and the inverse there is that you are losing traffic if you’re not doing this. We’ve already seen it in some of our websites that are in the highly competitive spaces and weren’t necessarily investing in this type of optimization type of optimization. Just a quick housekeeping note it has always been Caleb and I’s position that if you build a really good website and you were in a medium to low competitive category and you just do a really good job on your site, a lot of this fancy SEO stuff that gets sold to you in packages and stuff has been not productive in the past because it really comes down to is your site fast, is it built well, is it structured well? Does it say the right things?

Brandon Welch: 11:11
Yeah, and so a lot of our clients and if you’re listening, you know this is true we always look at SEO and we say, hey, is it time to do something here? Because sometimes in our big cities we have to do that, we have to create more content, and when we do that. It’s expensive because we do it. Right Now, sort of yesterday’s SEO is making a case for everybody to need to invest in this, and we have an answer for that at FrankenMaven. We have a way we’re doing this and we’re doing it basically on a project basis, of saying let’s go in and inject your site with some really friendly AI type stuff. But I want to just point out that there’s a shift in how you might actually apply this to your marketing budget. For the first time ever, we may say to most of our clients like, hey, we may pull a little bit from paid ads, which tend to get the fastest results, and then apply that more to SEO or GEO, because it’s actually happening faster. Yeah.

Brandon Welch: 12:11
There’s a play for it.

Caleb Agee: 12:13
And I think we’ve had maybe like a negative. Some of our past SEO episodes have felt like maybe we turned our nose down on some of the SEO packages that have been sold, because so many people overspend on it.

Caleb Agee: 12:24
We turn our nose down on some of the SEO packages that have been sold Because so many people overspend on it. It’s usually the real problem here is it’s very often for a small business, maybe less than a million dollars or maybe less than $3 million in size. It’s very often the first marketing they’re sold. It’s like, hey, you have a website, now pay me $500 or $1,000 a month to build your SEO and that’s what you’re spending your first thousand dollars on. The reality is you need the, you need business, you need the bills to be paid and you are. You’re in your first one to five years of business. You need leads, you need business opportunities and that shows up in a lot of other medias and ways. That’s today customer marketing. Seo can be a today media, but it does not show quick results. It’s a long play and it’s just not the first place we would tell you to spend that $1,000. Now, once you have your bases covered, yeah, you should definitely have it inside of your plan.

Brandon Welch: 13:14
Yep, because you can afford to wait for it to work, because it takes a bit, but what I’m seeing is GEO is taking place a little bit faster. If you’re doing the things we’re about to talk about, and without further ado, we’re going to go through the nine things you ought to be doing.

Caleb Agee: 13:29
Number one focus on topical authority. Okay, so what we’re going to do here is you’re going to have very depth and explain things very, very well, because you’re giving the AI really strong specific content to pull from to create an answer for somebody who would be searching or not.

Caleb Agee: 13:56
They’re actually not searching. They’re asking yes, think about you. Got to think about the customer at the end of this. They asked a question. It’s going to pull from potentially you and a lot of other places. Are you going to have the specific information that helps that person?

Brandon Welch: 14:11
answer their question. It’s going to. In a way it’s running its own Google search and just doing it way, way, way faster, reading the things that you might read as a consumer. But when it shows up to the game, do you have the stuff to answer it the way that it’s supposed to be?

Brandon Welch: 14:29
answering as a robot or are you trying to fluff things? And when? I saw so many times in the past and we’ve always pushed for more clarity than this, but they would be like you know how to choose the right roofing company and then they would be just giving you a bunch of fluff Well, what you’re going to want to do is look for a roofing company who’s been in business for at least 10 years. Well, lo and behold, that company has been in business 10 years and you’re going to want to look for one that has, you know, maybe three locations, multiple locations.

Brandon Welch: 14:58
And it’s like they’re just giving you their selling points and they’re trying to make it relevant. And the truth is, if you’ve used blog writing and we have as well in SEO there was a period of time where you could write the blog content and it didn’t have to be all that helpful, and just by way of word count and by having extra content on your website, you would sort of please the search engine algorithm enough to get you some placement. That is the exact opposite of what you want to do today and that has shifted literally on a dime. Yeah, I mean late last year there was some real big Google attention to that.

Caleb Agee: 15:37
Google has also shifted in this way. It’s not just an AI thing, that is a Google shift. It’s how quickly and how. We’re going to talk about this a little bit later as well. But how, um, how uh specific can you be about this? And um, I think I think that’s a really a really key thing is, instead of framing your things as kind of this ambiguous third party, you need to frame it as I am the searcher and I have asked a question, so therefore, make your article essentially the answer to that question.

Brandon Welch: 16:12
A good lens is like what would you tell your grandma if she asked you this question? And so we want people to search for, and this is how we used to do it. We want people to say well, how should I shop for an estate planning attorney, mr Estate Planning Attorney Expert? And it’s like nobody was actually probably searching that. They know their own dadgum reasons for shopping an estate planning attorney, they’re going to do it their way.

Brandon Welch: 16:32
So what you want to do instead, instead of writing this big, glorious blog article how to Shop for an Estate Planning Attorney you want to have pages that talk about exactly what people are looking for, like what is an estate plan? Can I write my own estate plan? Ooh, that’s scary for a law firm to be able to even answer that question. You have to, because people are asking it without you and you need to answer it and say probably yes, and this is what you would have to know. And these are all the steps you’d have to go through, and even teach them how to do it.

Brandon Welch: 16:59
You can leave a cliffhanger there. How do I avoid probate? That’s what people are actually searching for. How to make my own a power of attorney. What does an estate plan cost? If you want to be relevant in AI, which is the search engine of the future, you have to be answering these questions legitimately. Or just don’t expect to have any real estate on that in that search, because what’s happening? By the way, I feel like we need to clarify this when you ask GPT, it’s giving you a summary and then it has these little links off to the authorities that answer that question for it. Because GPT doesn’t know that on its own, it still has to rely on some other website or a set of websites to give you the answers. But if you are the website without the answers, you’re the website only with fluff and you’re not answering these things that people are actually punching into GPT or any other AI you’re toast.

Caleb Agee: 17:50
It’s using logic, not just an algorithm, right, and that’s the difference here is it’s using logic. So we’re going to talk about some. Remind me to talk about traffic at the end here, because I think it’s important. Nate the camera guy has got traffic bookmarked. Yes, so you need to have very specific questions, as your you know what your blog’s about Number two, optimize for featured snippets and AI summaries. This we’ve been talking about, actually for a little while. We have yeah Because even our last SEO.

Caleb Agee: 18:21
You know blogs that we’ve or podcast episodes we’ve done. You really want to write concise answers at the beginning of the content so that whole too long didn’t read kind of summary. That’s not really what you want to do, necessarily, but write a paragraph. If you could boil the whole thing down to one answer which is really what they’re looking for.

Brandon Welch: 18:43
It’s what everybody wants. It’s what they’ve wanted all along yeah.

Caleb Agee: 18:46
Give them the short version right at the top and just say how much does it cost? To how much does an estate plan cost? Give me the exact answer, even if it’s a range. Give me that answer right away at the top of the page. You can give a bunch of nuance in 500 words for the rest of the page, but give it to me in 100 words at the top.

Brandon Welch: 19:09
So the old way, if we were to ask, hey, what does it cost to replace a roof? Would have been like oh, there are many considerations when estimating the price of your roofing project. You might have said a quality or a qualified roofing specialist can examine the damage, talk to you about your material options and produce a custom quadrant for your home. And it’s like you didn’t really learn anything from that. Right, that’s the old way. What you want to do instead now? Literally the first words just shut up and answer the question as asked. Our average roof replacement was $8,764 in 2024. Our average repair ticket was $281, which includes our $75 service fee. You answer questions like that. You are going to rise to the top of every AI answer in your category. Yep.

Brandon Welch: 19:54
And then you might even add stuff. According to the National Roofers Alliance I hope there is one, I just made that up, but the average replacement cost for an asphalt shingle roof is $10,487 nationwide. Like you were giving them the literal answers so they can, which was the best thing to do all along.

Brandon Welch: 20:10
It’s just some of us were too afraid to do that, and you might even put things like a projected 7% increase in material costs across the roofing industry could affect this in 2025 and beyond. You are going to soar if you start answering it like that. So that’s what you’d want to do at the very top of the page, like your own bullet-pointed review, and the robot’s going to go out and go oh gosh, thank you, you know, billy’s Roofers, for doing that for me. They’re going to just grab you and say this one’s going in our list, like they’re still giving one, two, three, four, five recommendations. What you’re going to want to do after that?

Brandon Welch: 20:54
Again continuing the theme of no fluff. You want H2 sections for what affects the cost of a roof. Start giving all the contextual around the topic type things. This is where you can start being the expert again and kind of giving maybe some plausible doubt that they can do this on their own and that they do need to reach out to you. But you’re doing it in a way that is helping them first and expecting the contact as a byproduct.

Caleb Agee: 21:23
Yeah.

Brandon Welch: 21:23
So you might have how to know if you need repair or replacement. What’s the average lifespan of a roof? Will insurance cover me? Think about this. In your category it could be literally any of them, Just all the questions that probably your front office people or you as the practitioner are getting. Put them on the website and answer.

Caleb Agee: 21:39
Yes.

Brandon Welch: 21:42
Yep, I did this little quick search. By the way, google is grabbing this too. So what pleases GPT is pleasing Google, literally. There’s a section when I say how much does a roof cost? And, by the way, there was no local companies doing this well.

Caleb Agee: 21:56
Yeah, okay.

Brandon Welch: 21:58
Literally gave the answer $5,700 to $12,000 for a 1,200 score for roofing.

Caleb Agee: 22:03
With most homeowners spending around $8,400 on architectural singles.

Brandon Welch: 22:08
Yes, Yep, so that’s what you want to do, that’s clear as can be. Yep, that’s going to get you featured in those featured snippets, which are the same thing that GPT likes to pull that and some of the other things we’re talking about.

Caleb Agee: 22:23
Number three get more reviews and brand mentions. The social signals have been a thing for a very long time. Your website, your brand existing on the internet and people pointing back to you has been a thing since the beginning of seo and it is still a thing, even more, I think, with geo or aio or eieio um because, uh, both google and all of these uh gpts are like trolling the entire internet and they’re looking not just at individual bits of content, but they’re looking at where all of the content leads and points.

Caleb Agee: 23:06
And so if you are the reference point for credible information from several other sites, they’re going to view you as more credible than somebody who nobody has ever referenced ever before.

Brandon Welch: 23:16
Yes, so your review count still matters folks, and I would like I’d be focusing on that heavier than I’ve ever focused on it, because they are looking and they’re looking at all of them, by the way but they’re also, you know, google, facebook, you know Angie’s List all that stuff where you could have a five-star rating that is being taken into account, but also places like Reddit and places like Quora. Reddit would be more of a local type thing. There are probably local threads in your market. Literally, this used to be like the nerdy, super dork forums of the internet, but it’s kind of become more relevant than Google in a lot of cases because it’s real people giving real answers. But it’s kind of become more relevant than Google in a lot of cases because it’s real people giving real answers and there’s probably a subreddit for your town and people are asking about mechanics and hospitals and doctors and service companies in your town on these big national websites. So you ought to have a profile there. You ought to take some time and just create your own answers to those questions.

Caleb Agee: 24:16
That are being asked yeah, help people.

Brandon Welch: 24:18
Yeah, that will help a ton in getting at the top of the Google or sorry, the GPT queries. So that was number three. Get more reviews and brand mentions. As always. Number four align with conversational queries. This is my favorite one. This is probably the most groundbreaking, I would say, thing that most people are not doing. Do you want to take this one?

Caleb Agee: 24:42
You got it.

Brandon Welch: 24:42
Okay, you’re excited, so I’m so excited about it. So what you should have noticed by now is that AI is not using fluff language. It’s using real language. It’s trying to sound like a human, and so it’s paying a lot of attention to the actual structure that people are looking and in the order at which people are asking questions. Keep in mind, you know all the AI platforms Gemini, gpt all of them are re-informing themselves like tens of thousands of times every minute as to what somebody else in another town has searched and what’s going on in this topic. So you need to be obsessed with okay, if they ask this, what else are they going to ask? And so this conversational query and you can almost use your own logic to say well, what would I be asking if?

Caleb Agee: 25:28
I were them. Why are they asking this question?

Brandon Welch: 25:29
Why are they asking that right? And so there’s a really great tool called alsoaskedcom and you can literally just go in and put your search engine query and so if I put in here like how much does it cost to replace a roof in Missouri, it literally spits out like the top 15 other things that people are searching. How much should I expect to pay for a new roof? Does insurance cover a new roof? What is the cheapest way to replace a new roof? How to negotiate the price of a new roof? How much does it cost to replace a 1,000-square-foot roof roof? How to negotiate the price of a new roof? How much does it cost to replace a thousand square foot roof?

Brandon Welch: 26:00
Guys, these should be pages on your website, or at least FAQ sections. On an FAQ page you literally take these questions that this service and, by the way, google does the same thing. They have the little people also ask box that pops up on basically every search. You need to be writing pages and answers to those questions, because that’s what’s happening, that’s how you become a conversation and that’s how the modern robots know if you are real or fake and if you’re helpful. So a quick way to do it would be just Google something and go look for the five or six questions that pop up in.

Brandon Welch: 26:35
The People Also Ask that’s a very good modeling of what else they’re also talking about. And then, if you want to get deeper, go to alsoaskedcom. You won’t be surprised to see what’s on there, but you will be surprised to see how much you haven’t been answering those questions. You will be a little bit embarrassed and go. This is easier than I thought. Just give the people what they want. So summary for point number four is align with conversational queries and just answer all the questions. Build stuff around the page.

Caleb Agee: 27:03
Yeah, number five add more detailed structured product and service pages. So we want to make sure that our service pages, or your product pages, are going in depth. They’re not generic. It’s just same as these blogs we were talking about, but if you, I’m trying to think of a different example of a company. We’ve talked about roofers and we’ve talked about attorneys.

Caleb Agee: 27:27
But let’s say it’s that estate planning page, If it’s very generic, if it could literally the copy of it, if we replaced your name and it could go on a different website across town and it’s all pretty much the same, then you haven’t been specific enough or detailed enough, because it’s not just about you, and so you need to make sure you list the benefits, all the specs, the features, all the comparison and especially, answer some frequently asked questions, getting those mixed up.

Brandon Welch: 28:02
I put how long is your consult time? What exactly do you get? Here’s something that the GEO engine is doing that Google didn’t really. They are comparing all of the details that they can find about you to the other places and it will give a little summary of like it even did this for Frank and Maven.

Brandon Welch: 28:20
And I was like I didn’t know we specialized in that or I didn’t know we had that on our website, but they inferred all these little details about our service and they pulled in reviews from what other people had said about us online some we hadn’t even seen.

Brandon Welch: 28:32
And so the more you can put and say well, we have our free consultation is a full hour and a half, and that’s with a certified attorney, not an actual or not a paralegal. And you know you leave with these five things and just giving the actual details. If it’s a product that you’re selling, you want every technical spec you can possibly find on it.

Brandon Welch: 28:54
You want key benefits, an outline of key benefits of this product versus another one. Comparison shopping is what GPD is going to do, better than anything it’s ever done before. Yeah. And if you don’t have the details for them to compare to, you’re going to get left off the list. Yeah.

Caleb Agee: 29:09
So more detail on your product and service pages.

Brandon Welch: 29:12
If it’s a service company. By the way, I think it covered. You put really detailed parts about your warranty in there what we cover and what we don’t. Yep. So that’s good Number six go for it.

Caleb Agee: 29:23
Embed first party data and expertise, so share your own statistics, customer data, surveys or case studies. Ai wants. We’ve said the word specific. I think I’ve said that about 10 times.

Brandon Welch: 29:37
You were really specific about that, since we started recording this episode.

Caleb Agee: 29:41
If there’s nothing you take away from this, it is be specific. Be more specific, and AI values originality and insight. Like specific insight. Google last year rolled out major changes throughout the middle of the year and will continue to do that, but they are basically discrediting anything that’s not quality and not original. And how do you be original? You have to be specific, you have to be unique to you, and so, if everything on your website is a regurgitation of something else, if you, by the way, this is why I would be careful about having AI write your webpages. I think it can help you write your webpages, but unless you give it specifics, it’s interesting, ai will respond like a human. It’ll respond in the language that you speak, but as soon as you tell it to write, it actually does use fluff.

Brandon Welch: 30:39
It uses fluff and finds it’s trying to blend everything else together because it doesn’t.

Caleb Agee: 30:44
It’s because it’s reading all those old articles and it thinks that’s what you want. I’m writing a blog for like, if you give it that kind of prompt, I’m writing a blog for my website for a roofing company, and it’s like write one with this thing and you don’t give it anything else. It will be a fluffy blog because that’s what it sees the rest of the internet doing.

Brandon Welch: 31:03
Yeah, ai is not. Ai is maybe has original summaries, but does not have original ideas, yeah, or facts. Until you it does not exist as a human right, until you help it.

Caleb Agee: 31:13
Have that. But all that to say be specific, be original and have case studies. Those are things that nobody else can do. Be specific, Be more specific. So on a lot of our home improvement websites we’ve had completed work, completed jobs. We’ve had specific, individual pages. So not always just like a gallery, like here’s a bunch of pictures, no-transcript. In.

Brandon Welch: 31:57
Springfield, missouri.

Caleb Agee: 31:58
You mention everything about it as much as you can, and that’s so specific because that job happened one time and it’s got pictures, it mentions the city that it’s in, it mentions all of those things, those kinds of posts. I think we’ve had tremendous value in the past with SEO, but I think they’ll continue to have value going forward with GEO.

Brandon Welch: 32:21
Yeah, and all the better if you can put real reviews linked to those actual experiences or products, so you might do the case study. If you are, I don’t know. Let’s just say you’re a payroll company you do a case study of how you saved them 43 hours a month on their payroll and you increased employee satisfaction by 23% and all of that stuff. And then you are actually putting a video with an embedded transcript about that.

Caleb Agee: 32:48
Yeah, about Sherry’s experience with A+. Exactly, and yeah.

Brandon Welch: 32:52
Yep. So case studies sound like how we saved one family $82,000 in taxes. Podcasts might be like I don’t know how to make your business rank on chat. Gpt Customer surveys just like if you found the emerging trends the five most popular colors for siting in 2025, that would be like crack for GPT in 2025. That would be like crack for GPT and all you have to do is send out an email to like.

Brandon Welch: 33:25
I don’t know 20 of your customers and say what color siding do you like right now? And, like then, you got yourself a survey and a case study right, the insights right. That is really, really powerful if you can put legs to that. So that’s embed first party data and expertise. Number seven optimize for multi-platform discovery. Sounds fancy.

Caleb Agee: 33:42
Fancy.

Brandon Welch: 33:43
We won’t spend a ton of time on this, because this is in the category of what you should be doing anyway. But when GPT sees you and I’m saying GBT I mean all the others too but when it sees you with content on YouTube, maybe a page on Pinterest, maybe some posts on LinkedIn with your brand, podcast transcripts on your website, and they see it all syndicated in the same way, it takes that as a signal. And that’s kind of unique, because Google has used, for as long as I’ve been in the game, what they call no follow links, and so somebody who was really prolific on social media didn’t really get an SEO boost from that directly. I think GPT is taking that as a little bit more of a direct indication it doesn’t care. It doesn’t care, yeah.

Caleb Agee: 34:33
Google is the one who created all these rules for SEO, because they were the leaders, so they dictated all of this like what’s a good link, I can follow. What’s a repeated page? Canonical links Like if you have the same page on your website two times. Google created this whole ecosystem to help their algorithm. Because they wanted to help you help their algorithm.

Brandon Welch: 34:52
Yes.

Caleb Agee: 34:53
AI doesn’t care. It looks at all of it and makes its own decisions. That’s right, which is crazy to think about.

Brandon Welch: 34:59
What it does know is more of what you actually want, because guess what? Guess what GPT is doing better than anything else? It’s looking at the last three months of what you’ve been thinking. That should scare you, but it should also be like, oh wow, that’s what’s happening to my business and you want to do something super creepy. If you’ve used GPT or probably any of the tools, but definitely GPT does this ask it say hey, tell me about me in 500 words and it will write you an astonishingly creepy description of who you are what you think, what you believe, what you care about, how you work, and it’ll be on the kind side of things.

Brandon Welch: 35:45
It probably won’t say you’re probably a narcissist, you obviously have it ugly here, but it’s going to give you a. It knows what you’re doing and so it’s weaving that into what you want to see. So what Caleb searches in AI probably gets a different result than what I search. Now some of the authorities in the same topics may pop up on the list, but it’s going to give him a different summary than me, because it knows how he rolls Something you should do just for fun.

Caleb Agee: 36:11
Have it. Tell you about your business. That’s what we did for Frank and Maven. Tell me about the marketing agency frank and maven and then just see what it says, and it was pretty interesting how it um made conclusions about our business, not exactly how we’d say what we do but it was.

Brandon Welch: 36:28
It was pretty close to accurate.

Caleb Agee: 36:28
Um to an outsider looking in it would have been accurate yeah, um, and it’s also telling, because then you’re like oh, this is how people see us. Maybe we should adjust how we talk about ourselves to that.

Brandon Welch: 36:39
Speaking of that, tactic number eight is you need to keep updated and fresh content.

Brandon Welch: 36:45
Keep in mind GPT’s, looking at the entire internet history of you and one you want it to be accurate.

Brandon Welch: 36:51
There are things you do and there are ways you you know show up in the world that you didn’t used to. So you need to make sure that the old stuff is gone but the new stuff is frequent. I’m going into the mode of, like somebody needs to be generating content for you very regularly, like there was a time that there was like kind of do some of it and then let it coast. I think we’re going into a season where we’ve got to have regular people contributing to this content and, frankly, like on our end of things, we are geared up to do that now because it’s a need that we see that wasn’t as big a need before, and so you can get an agency to do it, if they understand you well, or a third-party writer, or if you’ve got a good writer in your office, him or her plus somebody who’s skilled enough to structure this and build it into your website in the right way, because it’s part writing and it’s also part technical implementation on the site. But you need to have fresh stuff.

Caleb Agee: 37:54
Speaking of that, which leads us to number nine and the final one. All the old SEO tactics still apply as far as all those things I told you Google kind of invented. They didn’t invent HTML, no, they didn’t invent that.

Brandon Welch: 38:08
But they did invent how to read it Times a billion pages.

Caleb Agee: 38:11
And so structure your page, make sure your page title at the top of the page is a strong H1, the first heading. And then you know it’s kind of like when you’re in school you did the three-point paragraphs and you had very specific like. My second point is this so your title is your H1, then your H2s are maybe your secondary headings, and then if you go deeper than that, which we’re kind of advocating, that you probably don’t on most pages You’re going down to H3, h4, and it’s just a tiered structure, it’s like bullet points.

Brandon Welch: 38:44
Like your outlines for high school or college papers.

Caleb Agee: 38:46
Yep, make sure you’re using FAQ schema. You can. So schema is a fancy way of saying. A schema is like actually like the structure, the makeup, the way something is built is actually the structure, the makeup, the way something is built. And so a schema of a database has all these. It’s got names over here, it’s got email addresses over here and how it all interacts with itself the schema on your website. You’re telling Google how you’ve structured this page and there are schema snippets you can include on the page. Not just you have an FAQ section, but there’s also you can set separately in your heading and in other places on the site. You can say I have FAQs on this page, here is the question, here’s the answer and you can tell it all of these things.

Brandon Welch: 39:32
You can do that. You’re probably hiring a nerd to do that.

Caleb Agee: 39:35
That’s nerdy stuff. There are also tools that can help you with some of these things.

Brandon Welch: 39:39
WordPress puts you in a good spot to do that.

Caleb Agee: 39:41
Yeah, there are like plugins or different things that could maybe help you with that. But make sure, if you have like e-commerce, that your product schema is set up really well, that it knows the schema tells it hey, this is the featured image. Hey, this is the price. Hey, this is the price. Hey, this is the product title. Hey, this is the description. And that way it’s not just random text on the page that happens to be the title or the price. It is hey, google, this is the price. Hey, google, this is the description. So use all of that. Make sure you get the concise answers.

Brandon Welch: 40:10
We did this preemptively. We kind of saw this coming. We have a client who’s in a very, very high-end jewelry business and, frankly, they don’t really need to compete locally with SEO. They just have that. They have such a strong brand. But they were like, hey, this other company, we’re paying them a pile of money a year and is it doing us any good? And we’re like, no, it’s not. Like they were buying the SEO package that a lot of you probably are buying, which is A blog a month or something like that A blog a month, or hey, we’ll check your keywords or we’ll write meta description.

Brandon Welch: 40:44
It’s like you know what that is so old and that is not even, it’s not even helpful in the algorithms anymore.

Caleb Agee: 40:51
Yeah, it should be done.

Brandon Welch: 40:52
It’s a box that should be checked Because it’s for user experience.

Caleb Agee: 40:55
But, by the way, when you have I don’t know, even if you have a big website 100 pages on your site once you’ve written 100 meta descriptions. That’s done. It’s over.

Brandon Welch: 41:05
That’s right, unless you have some new marketing angle or some promotion or something like that.

Caleb Agee: 41:08
Unless you added 10 new pages, then you’ve got 10 more meta descriptions to write, do it while you write the page.

Brandon Welch: 41:13
That’s kind of like no-duh stuff. So if you’ve got a nerd like you know taking a pound of flesh out of you every month, or even a few hundred bucks, that’s probably a sign it’s not working, because they’re not thinking about the stuff we’re talking about now. But we had a client that did this gosh late last year and we did like 50 of these pages, like all this type of stuff we’re talking about. The people also ask the contextual, really conversational type snippets. We put a lot of detail to it. We were really specific and literally for the entire internet. Now this is a company that is based in the Midwest not at all a national company.

Caleb Agee: 41:53
They’re actually in a suburb, like a small town. With what? 50,000? Yes, not even 50,000 people. Suburb like a small town. With what? 50,000? Yes, not even 50,000 people. Suburb, yeah.

Brandon Welch: 42:01
But they are literally ranking for the entire internet. Their local jeweler site is an authority because of the way we wrote this content. Now, will it always be? Probably not, because somebody else that’s a bigger website and frankly cares more about that is going to outrun them on a national scene, but they will very likely be the local authority for a long, long, long time. Yeah, partly because they’re first, but also partly because we just did it really well.

Caleb Agee: 42:34
And they did the work to answer the questions.

Brandon Welch: 42:35
They did the work to answer the questions and they were willing to tell you what their hourly cost is for the jeweler.

Caleb Agee: 42:42
you know, behind the jeweler bench, customized jewelry and all that stuff. Yep.

Brandon Welch: 42:46
So the takeaway is that there’s time for you to be first to the game and wouldn’t we have all loved to have been first to the Google game 20 years ago?

Brandon Welch: 42:54
Wouldn’t we have all loved to have discovered Bitcoin? Well, this is your holy grail moment of like. I can level up here and it’s not terribly expensive. I mean, if you have any decent ad budget, you can sliver something out, and this can go to that. You want to find an expert like good writing and somebody who is really really objectively not inside your business so that they know how to say oh, but the person’s probably thinking this they’re going to keep you from fluffing and BSing and doing crappy fluff writing. You need somebody like that.

Caleb Agee: 43:28
They need to call you out too. They have to be able to shoot straight and say nope, that’s not specific enough, You’re trying to hide it. Tell me more. Tell me exactly what.

Brandon Welch: 43:36
Tell me what the nail actually costs. Yeah, you’re trying to hide it. Tell me more. Tell me exactly what yeah? Tell me what the nail actually costs, right? Yeah, so we’ve used estate planning and roofing. Those are just really easy examples to grab because everybody gets them, but this literally applies to everything you do. We’re doing this on our own website for the record. And we don’t even. We don’t really need to.

Caleb Agee: 43:54
We don’t really need to because we don’t. Yeah, we, well, we don’t. That’s not how we usually get business yeah, what we want actually is for this podcast to help more people. That’s why we do it absolutely at the end of the day is we want to help answer these questions about marketing so that, because there’s a lot of marketing fluff out there, if we can help people get down to the nitty-gritty, the actual answers, then we’ve done our job too so yes, we have, and hopefully that’s your motive at the end of the day, obviously, you got a business, you have to grow, you have to get customers, you have to pay the bills, um.

Caleb Agee: 44:22
But even if you’re in, you know, on the East coast and you help somebody in Washington, you know solve, you know get a clear answer on their estate plan or how they’re, how, how, like the right questions to ask a roofer, or or how to claim insurance or whatever that might be, you’ve done a good job and and, by the way, you’ve, you’ve increased your authority, you’ve helped build a reputation, yeah, Um why?

Brandon Welch: 44:46
why do we want this podcast to to reach more people? Caleb, like what? What are we doing?

Caleb Agee: 44:52
Well, uh, cause Frank and Ma frankenmaven exists to create a world where entrepreneurs can confidently grow their business without wasting money on advertising. And, um, that really comes from brandon’s story and the story we’ve seen from a lot of entrepreneurs, which is they’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars not knowing whether or not it works not knowing whether or not it’s helping to grow their business. It is. Is my business just growing on accident because I do good work, or is it growing because this marketing is actually drawing people to me?

Brandon Welch: 45:23
Which leads them to compromise their ability to impact more people in their community in their workforce, in their family, all of the things.

Caleb Agee: 45:31
Yeah, you could. I’d rather you save the money that you would spend on marketing and give everybody a raise.

Brandon Welch: 45:39
Absolutely. We would rather that. That’s why we eliminate waste. We keep the stuff that’s good. That’s going to allow you to do more and we eliminate the waste for the other stuff. Did you know people will spend 94 more times under the roof of the small business they work for than they will at their own church?

Caleb Agee: 45:58
I did know that, I did know that, you did know that, sean Copeland.

Brandon Welch: 46:02
Yeah, Sean Copeland taught Caleb and I both that Wonderful book called 94X about what happens when you bring God into your business. But think about our responsibility, even if you don’t take it to the analogy of the church our responsibility to do more, have more, grow more, build more. And it is tough the higher you go, the steeper the climb. But that is why we’re here. That’s why this podcast matters to us. That is, the vision we have for the world is that entrepreneurs would not only thrive and survive through all the headwinds and highs and lows, but we would step into our calling and our purpose to bring more impact to people and that’s how we’re doing that with this podcast.

Brandon Welch: 46:41
We are seeing that permeate through the people we get to serve directly and then through you indirectly, and we just love, love, love hearing your growth stories.

Brandon Welch: 46:49
I’m going to leave you with something I read from Robert Louis Stevenson, and this is very relevant to GEO as well as it is to business and life, and that is don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant. We’ll be back here every Monday doing our best to plant seeds, and we can’t wait to see and hear more about the ones you are planting. And that is why we’re here, because marketers who can’t teach you why are just fancy lies. Have a great week.