SEO & AI. Do We Need Different Content? Kevin Roy from GreenBanana SEO Speaks Out.

Speaker A: Hi and welcome to Not Another Marketing Podcast where this week we are talking to Kevin Roy, the CEO of Green Banana SEO. So we're going to be talking AI SEO or GEO or I don't know, what do you call it? Eiaio. I don't know. So many acronyms, so little time. Well, it's AI. AI Overviews. Okay. What do we have to do to our content to get it in ChatGPT as a source? Do we have to do anything different? Gonna talk all about this, uh, over the next 25, 30 minutes. So make sure you give it a listen, make sure you give it a subscribe as well and check out uh, the show notes for all the links and connect with Kevin. Right, let's get on with it. Hi Kevin, thanks for doing this. We're uh, gonna be talking about AI search. Very exciting.

Speaker B: Uh, thanks for having me.

Speaker A: Um, what are you calling it? Is it, is it aeo, geo, B I E, I O?

Speaker B: What? You're right.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: I think the universe hasn't picked one yet. So I'm calling it Answer Engine Optimization. Some people are calling it Generative Engine Optimization. If you get one, you want to get really technical. They're actually two different things. They are not interchangeable. Um, you know, um, I could super geek out on this, but answer engine optimization is really about entity building and generative vendor optimization is about how you're shaping the content. Um, but they both do the same thing. You want to get mentioned in AI.

Speaker A: Yeah. Because the world needs another acronym. Does it?

Speaker B: Absolutely, we sure do.

Speaker A: So are folks using AI overviews, ChatGPT tools, Claude and things? Are they actually using it for search? Is there any data? I mean, we assume they all are. Ah, I mean, is Google getting hit? What's good?

Speaker B: So there, the, there was an article out in late June by, I think it was Dun and Bradstreet that said that um, 60% of Google searchers are now zero click searches.

Speaker A: Sure.

Speaker B: Which means that people are getting the answer, they're still using Google or uh, you know, there's a lot of people that are using Chat GPT. I am a chat guy. Um, but they're going to Google and they're getting the answer before they're clicking. However, we have, I don't know, probably about 300, um, clients that we manage here. And we have B2B. We have B2B, B2C in almost every industry. I like to jokingly say we work in like everything but adult content, but we have like doctors and lawyers and fintech and advertising companies. People that sell really expensive pajamas and beef jerky. And I have seen in the B2B companies I've seen a drop, but not a big drop, like a 10% drop in traffic over, over a year. In B2C I've seen like a 15 to 20% drop. So it is not a massive drop. Not. However, like from my site, for example, I've seen a 20% drop in traffic. However, I've gotten more leads now. So I'm getting people that are coming direct to Green Banana SEO, um, because they're finding me in chat now inside of Google Analytics you can see if someone has clicked you from Chat GPT or Perplexity or Claude. Um, but those are only the people that clicked. Right. So it doesn't show if they got an answer. And it's a little bit hard to tell directly. There is software that tells you if you're being mentioned in there. Uh, and I've evaluated almost all of them and they all give me different results.

Speaker A: Yeah. So the next question was going to be how are your clicks doing? Are you getting any? And it's kind of, it's interesting that you say that you're still getting leads. You're still getting leads even though I'm

Speaker B: still getting leads and my direct traffic has gone up. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah. So do you think the intent, the search intent is slightly different when folks are using a, uh, ChatGPT type tool than Google search?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. I think people that are doing Google searches are still doing the Boolean search like that's pizza. And now with the LLMs, people are doing more conversational like where can I find the best pizza? Or who has the most delicious deep dish pizza that's close to me. Um, and you can also make mistakes with it. You can do spelling mistakes or you can, you can do a terrible sentence and it's still going to pick up the gist of what you are, what you're doing. Um, so, and I think people are, are doing that. I am seeing like some inaccurate, um, like some people are coming to Green Banana for instance, that are finding us for products that we offer, but not, um, deals that we offer. Like I had a company come to me yesterday and said, I asked ChatGPT who is the best performance based crowdfunding company. Um, you know, we, it's, we don't do that. But I ranked for it.

Speaker A: Right. So is it, is it hallucinating, do you think? Is it.

Speaker B: I think it's, it's hard to say because I don't know the exact string that the person said, and we do, we do run a lot of performance based campaigns. It just doesn't align with crowdfunding. So maybe, uh, it's hard to say why Chat pulled that piece. Maybe they emphasize more on performance marketing agencies rather than um, the crowds on increasing it.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Because it's difficult, isn't it? Because like you say, you don't know what somebody's typed into chatgpt, do you? You can go in Google Search console and figure out what folks are looking at in searching for in Google, but we can't with the ChatGPT, we're, we're blind a little bit, aren't we?

Speaker B: We're a little bit blind, especially when it comes to the fact that Chat is, is. You know, in Gemini, the agents that you're using are storing your historical data.

Speaker A: Sure.

Speaker B: Um, so they're looking at some of your preferences and saying, oh, you've mentioned this before. So I don't know, maybe the guy was looking at bananas before. Just came up.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. You never know. Um, so is brand awareness going to be more important going forward, do you think with all this AI stuff?

Speaker B: I do. Um, so one of the things that, that AI is really emphasizing and getting ranked in AI is entity or entity structures or stacking entities and they are pulling from third party sources that are mentioning your brand. So they are. It's funny, one of the things that we've done as a company and we did this because of AI is now we have a profile in Clutch. I never cared about that before. Now I have a profile in the Better Business Bureau. Now I have a profile on Yelp. It's things that, that as an agency like that's not our target, target demographic. But they're high authority trusted publications. You put your brand on those, it helps you with brand mentions and you get more business through that.

Speaker A: Before Google we'd have done that though, wouldn't we?

Speaker B: Because it's a, it's a good link. Um, I, we have, we use different um, types of link building one for traditional Google. So we're creating relevant um, links through press releases. Um, but AI seems to be, they definitely like press releases. That's one of the things that we've seen. But they're also citing established business entities like the Better Business Bureau or things like that.

Speaker A: Sure, yeah.

Speaker B: But in short, I've been able to rank without those and now because of Chat, I thought it was important.

Speaker A: Yeah, but kind of like before Google existed we'd have done all the PR stuff, we'd have done all the, the local directories we'd have advertised in the right places. We'd have put ourselves in those, those paper directories that we used to be like bricks when they came through the, through the letterbox.

Speaker B: Correct.

Speaker A: And we used to do this branding and I think in a way this uh, the advent of Google and the keyword matched article. Right. We can just churn out all this content that's keyword matched. It's kind of like uh, stopped us working on brand awareness and brand building a little bit, doesn't it? Do you think?

Speaker B: Yeah, I agree and I think, but I think that the people that have done like good SEO, um, and some traditional marketing and branding have fortuitously been um, uh, had an advantage in the answer engines because they are looking at things like that.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So does our content need to change to attract AI tools a bit?

Speaker B: So the content, um, I'm actually on the fence about this. So one of the things that we're doing here. So if everyone on page one has 2,000 words of copy, they are outranking you. It's going to be very difficult to outrank them with 500 words a copy. And I know that Gemini pulls their training data from their grounded search data. So they're looking at Google results and making informed decisions about who they should include in their training data. And where do you think Perplexity and ChatGPT are getting their information? They're getting their information from the web. However, one of the things that we're adding to our pages, so rather than stripping content from pages, we are adding in the top bite sized pieces of information like little questions and answers. We're adding FAQs to all of our pages that we're the new pages that we're writing now. Um, because they're little bite sized pieces of question and answers. And then if you really want to go down the rabbit hole, we're adding FAQs into the schema for the structured data because we found that the answer engines can access that quicker.

Speaker A: Sure. What about quotations are you writing? Because it's something which I've been looking at a little bit, is writing more with a quotation in mind. So a company could say we do this, that and the other, blah, blah, blah, we're great at it. Right. Or we could say uh, Kevin Roy, uh, CEO of Green Banana says we also do this and we're great at it. Blah, blah, blah.

Speaker B: Yes. If you connect it properly. So just putting a quotation around something could be, I'm just making Something up. Like, Sally said this great thing about Green Banana. And Sally doesn't really exist. It was just generated. So there is. One of the strong entities is author identity. So one of the things, um, that we've done with our clients and that we've done ourselves is like, you can actually. There's a great example of this on my LinkedIn page. So my LinkedIn page has a link to my author page. My author page has my author bio that has content. And then when I write an article, I put my author bio in the footer of it and I link it to my author page, which links to my LinkedIn page. And the reason I'm using LinkedIn to link to my author page is because that's a highly trusted source. So, yes, I'm using a quote that I'm writing, but I'm saying to chat. Uh, this is a real person. And I think it's kind of funny and ironic that the, that the LLMs are looking for the authors. And it's almost like saying that, hey, they don't want to get pushed out for creating fake stuff. So they're saying, give me a citation that we can. That we can, um, use as a fallback for how this information, uh, was created.

Speaker A: Yeah. So authority and trust are, uh, still very, very important.

Speaker B: More so important now.

Speaker A: Yeah. And externally building that trust. So that we are doing. Would you say we should be doing more pr, more outreach?

Speaker B: I think you should. I think we have ramped up our clients PR and we have encouraged them to do a YouTube channel. We've encouraged them to get on podcasts and mentions. So. Yes. So other people talking about you. It's the. You remember back in the SEO, early SEO days, eat was, you know, the, um, you know, expertise, experience, authority and trust was only really for the physicians and the finance guys or the finance people. Um, and now it's becoming. It's becoming everything because it's so easy for me. I could write a, um, I could send you a paper about DNA, um, splicing. I don't know anything about that. Yeah. But I could go to chat and have it written and send it over to you.

Speaker A: Yeah, Yeah. I talk about this in some of the training sessions I run. And it's kind of like you can say anything you want about yourself, but when somebody else says something about you, that immediately makes it much more powerful.

Speaker B: True, true.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Um, so you also mentioned about the Google search bit. I've written that down because I hear this a lot. So, like, chat, GPT all. It's doing is a Google search. Um, is, is, is normal SEO still important to be able to get into the, into the results of a chat tool?

Speaker B: So I think it is and everything that I've read points to that. So where else is, where else are these LLMs getting data from? They're not like I know there a lot of people like, like perplexity got behind the paywall of um, the Merriam Webster and you know, jumped into that and got behind some like the New York Times, um, but all that stuff is accessible on the Internet. And I found that SEO is, I think SEO if you're doing good SEO, not blackout SEO, but if you're doing high quality content, trusted authorship, high quality links, good schema, um, that's 80% of what you need to do for answer engine optimization. Yeah.

Speaker A: So do you think the tools like if you type in something in ChatGPT, do you think it goes to Google, it looks at the top 10 results or something and then it figures out, okay, those top 10 results or top however many it is, we don't know. Obviously um, that's got authority, that's got trust. Because Google's got 20 odd years of learning how to understand trust on the Internet, right?

Speaker B: Yes it does. So it, so it, so there's something called um, the um, re ranker and re ranker is. So when you're doing a Boolean search on Google it's, it's, it's making a decision on what's the most relevant and it's pulling up the top 10 results. ChatGPT is pulling information from search and re ranking it based on things like authority and entity structure and entity stacking and schema. So uh, they are pulling from it, but they're making a different decision on what to say at the top than Google's Boolean, um, results.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Understand. Yeah. You also mentioned kind of like diversity of traffic like YouTube and things like that. Do you think it is more important now to diversify your traffic and to uh, and to spread yourself out a little bit more than maybe you would have done before.

Speaker B: So I, I'm uh, very fortunate to be part of an SEO mastermind group that I had to interview and apply to get into and I've been part of it for about five years now. And there are some very smart people in my group that said if you're not doing a YouTube channel, you're stupid to be putting it bluntly. So they're seeing a lot of results and signals from that.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I, I saw a Graph I think it was, I think it was semrush graph or something which said that Google AI overviews particularly um, they were, they were YouTube sources. It's something like 25, 30% of the, of the results.

Speaker B: That doesn't surprise me. And um, I, yeah and I bet Reddit's up there too. I know it's not a video but um, I bet Reddit is pulling, getting pulled a lot as well.

Speaker A: And what kind of, what kind of video, video content are we talking about? Because obviously Google's transcribing it, it's learning from it, it's understanding the words in the video and things like that. Um, is it, is it how to stuff? Is it answering questions, solving problems, that sort of stuff?

Speaker B: I mean uh, I think it can really be whatever you want. I personally if, if you're trying to position yourself as an authority, it's nice short chunk videos with questions and answers in there or simple steps like um, you know, here are the top five things you need to do to rank your site and or get cited in chat GPT.

Speaker A: Sure. So you don't think it's necessarily a content thing, it's more of an authority thing.

Speaker B: I think it can be a little bit of both and it depends on what you do. I mean if you're um, there, there is a lot of support behind long form content on YouTube and people are actually going and watching it and it's a longer transcript. Um, I'm just seeing, I'm seeing results with long form content and short form content. So we're personally doing short form content partly because it's easier.

Speaker A: Um, can smaller brands, small companies, I always hear this, you know why, why is the, we know why the big company is always top of Google and all of that because more people talk about it because they're great at what they do. But um, can the, can the smaller brand fight back a little bit easier with, with the ChatGPT?

Speaker B: I absolutely think so. I'll say SEO or AEO for companies that start aggressively. Um, getting into this now one of the things, so we have some high profile clients. I can't mention who they are. Um, they are concerned about privacy and so they are putting disallow chatbots on their sites and I'm seeing that more and more. So what does that mean for those of us who don't care about that we're going to get out there more often and get cited more often.

Speaker A: So you think it's easier uh, as it democratized things even more.

Speaker B: Do you think a little bit and has, I mean you're right, someone that's, that's um, you know, a massive company, ah, like Coca Cola that is just being mentioned over and over and over and over again in so many publications. Things that's going to be, you know, daunting. But if you've got a niche, ah, industry and you're, you know, you're, you're starting out and someone is, you know, just 10x bigger than you, then you have a great opportunity to get ahead of them.

Speaker A: So if you were a marketing person in a SME, small, medium, little company or something, maybe there's just you and one other person doing the whole, all the marketing everything you've seen that company a thousand times. M. Uh, what would you kind of like say to them? Are the, the kind of like the most important things to focus on for, for, for kind of getting more visibility in AI search?

Speaker B: So I would start off with the easy things. So because if you make it too daunting, no one's going to do it. So, um, have content on your site, on the tops of your pages, do some bite size, um, questions and answers, pieces of information. Um, put an FAQ at the bottom of your page. Make sure that the pages in your site link to relevant pages. Because these, these LLMs are making entity associations. And what I mean by that is if I write, if I want to rank for uh, peanut butter and banana sandwich, I need to link to a page about bread, a page about bananas, a page about peanut butter. I don't want to link to the Green banana homepage. Right. It doesn't make sense to do that. Um, so you do that, um, and then um, you know, if you can get good citations or trusted backlinks, great. If, if not one of the things that is loosely related, um, the Google Maps or the GBP is still a very high trusted authority by Gemini. And one of the things that I have found is that if you have a keyword phrase that you're trying to rank for and a location that you're trying to rank for, having that in your review is very powerful because it is a signal about a specific location and you know, keyword phrase that the LLMs are pulling from now, that's really hard to do. It's really hard to get reviews and it's even harder to get people to say certain things in reviews. However, you can respond to the reviews with that in there. And to the best of my knowledge and from the stuff that I've researched and the things that we've learned in My mastermind group Google does not distinguish a uh, review response and a review. So you can. So think about that. That's a high authority signal with relevant content and relevant location based data.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned Google. Business profile reviews are so important, aren't they? Somebody else saying something about you.

Speaker B: Right. And one of the things that you've probably noticed is that that hasn't been taken over by AI yet is the gvp. And I think it's because it's such a revenue generator from Google that they're keeping it in there.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I suppose one thing that the AI can't do yet and probably won't be able is a, uh, It's a good YouTube video.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, we'll see. We'll see, right? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: I mean you can make fantasy on YouTube, you can make people say things. But I think when you're looking at that question, answer, how do I paint a door? Uh, how do I do this, how do I do that? How would I fix, you know.

Speaker B: Yeah, I agree and I still think, you know the, I think people still really respect and appreciate human interaction and are maybe turned off by some AI. So we just started the YouTube channel and we're doing it as an experiment for AI. I'm doing the videos and I hate doing the videos. I make mistakes in the videos and you know what I'm like, I'm going to keep the mistakes in there because people will know it's not AI because I'm screwing it up.

Speaker A: The final thing I've written down is schema because you've mentioned that like about a thousand times. And I think that's important, isn't it? Um, so kind of like, I mean for the average marketer they're not going to get into the weeds of schema. But I mean I still hear web developers who don't know what it is. I mean how important is it to badger your web developer about schema?

Speaker B: I think it's very important. So here's my hypothesis on this. Um, and I think it's pretty sound. So a schema file has, it starts off with uh, a uh, JSON sect. In other words it's really easy to find a schema file in your website if you know what to look for. So if you think about a giant web page with JavaScript, so like moving buttons, things telling it what colors to put on, things like readjustment sizes and all that stuff, um, the answer engines have to comb through all that, right? And say I, I'm going to Skip through the font tags. I'm going to skip through this, I'm going to skip through the, the moving menus and if you put the information right in the, the schema, they're going right to that and say, you know what, here's an FAQ in the schema, here's the author information in the schema so they can get that faster. And it, you're basically saying, hey, this is for the, this is just for you. I'm going to stick it in the back of my website. Now writing schema is hard. It used to be really hard before chatgpt. Right? And you can ask it how to write schema or how to make this schema better, or grab the schema from another a great website and say like, I have schema examples on my site. Like take it, rewrite it for, for you.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I've, I've, I've spoken to folks and say, look, if you've got FAQs, then just throw your FAQs into ChatGPT, right? And say, right, um, turn these into FAQ schema for me. And it does it and it's pretty good.

Speaker B: You can go to Schema Checker or like go to Google Search Console and it'll say this is broken and it will tell you it's broken. And then you don't even have to, you can be lazy and throw it back into chat and say, you broke this, fix it.

Speaker A: Yeah, and then you can give that to your web developer and say, dude, sort this out. I know you don't know what it is, but sort this.

Speaker B: Right, right, go, go put this in. And any, ah, any person that's been developing websites for a little bit of time knows where to put schema in. Um, one of the things that we found is that like there's like Rank Mathers for instance, will have like a schema, uh, editor. But it's not, it's not hardcore schema. So you have to figure out a way to just take schema and cut it and put it in the code of your page.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah, fascinating. Uh, I've enjoyed this chat.

Speaker B: Me too.

Speaker A: I like the SEO world. Been doing it a long time. Uh, and SEO's not dead. He says, no, no, not yet. Um, so where can we find you, Kevin? Where's, where's um, Green Banana? Where's your website?

Speaker B: So you can go to Green Banana, SEO or this, this won't work in chat GPT because it's going to say who cares? But you can Google, I just met Kevin and it will take you to my author page, or I think it takes you. It takes you to a page that you can get in touch with me on.

Speaker A: Fantastic. Okay. I'll stick that in the show. Notes folks can search or.

Speaker B: Wonderful. Thank you. This was great. Thanks.