June 4, 2025 • 25 mins
In this episode of Over The Bull, Ken Carroll explores the unraveling of once-trusted marketing tactics in the face of AI-powered search. From low-domain microsites to landing-page hacks and pay-per-click crutches, strategies that used to dominate are now in their death throes.
AI isn’t just disrupting the game—it’s rewriting the rules. Ken explains how large language models are bypassing gimmicks and favoring content from credible, well-cited sources. If your strategy relies on throwing ad dollars at thin content, it’s time to reassess.
You’ll learn what actually works in an AI-first future: structured data, digital reputation, real authority, and content worth citing. This isn’t about fear—it’s about getting ahead of the shift.
Listen in and learn how to move past the bull before it buries your brand.
Over The Bull is brought to you by IntegrisDesign.com. All rights reserved.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut
through marketing noise.
Here's your host, Ken Carroll.
SPEAKER_01 (00:09):
If your business uses Google Ads, you're going to
want to absolutely listen tothis episode of Over the Bull.
What's going to happen in thenear future is going to rock the
world when it Welcome to Overthe Bull.
(00:31):
My name is Ken, and I lookforward to talking to you today
about some incredible changesthat are going on in the world
of artificial intelligence.
So it's probably no surprise toyou that large language models
such as ChatGPT and others,they're really taking the world
(00:52):
by storm.
People are talking to them moreand more.
People are asking artificialintelligence for
recommendations.
they're kind of using artificialintelligence as a friend.
And as that, any recommendationsthat these models are giving to
people are becoming morevaluable to them than
(01:14):
traditional search, such asGoogle searches and things like
that.
Now, all the big tech companiesare fully aware of what's going
on.
And they know that this is thenext big push.
Look no further than what you'rehearing about the energy
(01:34):
allocations that are going to berequired to build these models
and how you're hearing companieslike Google talking about
building nuclear power plantsand the urgency of doing so.
And so it's here.
Like it or not, it's here, andit's going to affect businesses
in a lot of dramatic ways.
Now, if you're not careful, whatyou're going to do is you're
(01:56):
going to fall prey to fallingasleep behind the wheel because
a lot of agencies, especiallyone agency that I've had my own
in the last week, they're usingpractices that are quickly
becoming antiquated, and theywill be absolutely irrelevant as
practices artificialintelligence becomes more and
(02:16):
more relevant.
So here's the question.
How is your business going toride the wave of artificial
intelligence and be somethingthat artificial intelligence
will recommend to people whenthey ask questions about
services and products in yourarea?
Now, this is huge.
(02:37):
You know, 30 years ago when Iwas a kid, I remember Kmart was
big.
You know, Kmart was thedepartment store, is what
everybody trusted, and theylooked so big they weren't going
nowhere.
There was Sears.
You know, you can draw your ownanalogy.
But those were replaced, right?
So now we got our Walmarts.
(02:58):
And so looking back then, if youwould have invested one way or
spent all your time, you know,trying to get into Kmart versus
Walmart, you would see where youare today.
And so what we're seeing in thistrend of artificial intelligence
is that it's kind of that big ofa swoop.
(03:21):
And we don't know who's going towin the battle.
Now, there's a lot ofundercurrent, and there's a lot
of speculation, and there's alot of people who are creating
some hyperbole around the ideaof what artificial intelligence
is going to do.
Now, of course, they're usingthe buzzwords, artificial
intelligence, all these kind ofthings.
And what they're trying to do issell product, but they're not
(03:44):
really getting to the brasstacks of what it means.
You know, the idea that you'rejust going to use things like
chat GPT to write content, whichif you're doing that, you really
need to go back and listen tothe EEAT conversation in an
earlier Over the Bull episode.
(04:04):
because it's much morecomplicated than that, and it's
really going to really impacthow people shop and look and
research.
Therefore, it's going to impacthow your business is also going
to need to address those issues.
So let me talk about thisspecific instance, and let me
(04:26):
give you an example of what thisis going to mean.
Now, before I do that, what weneed to do is we need to kind of
look at what AI models aredoing.
AI models, just like Google andother models, what they do is
they want to pull up the mostcredible resources.
(04:47):
And so the people that have themost trustworthy, reliable,
organic, authoritative content,original content, those people
are going to show up more andmore while some of these people
kind of turn and burn processesare going to be less and less
effective.
(05:07):
So really pay attention towhat's going on here because I
think this is going to affect alot of you who are listening and
you're going to want to forwardthis to people that you want to
understand exactly what's goingon.
So when it comes to Google Ads,here's what a lot of agencies
are still doing.
(05:29):
They're creating these littlemicrosites, these little one or
two page websites.
And these websites, what they dois they actually send the paid
ad traffic to these littlemicrosites.
And they're built, you may hearlike squeeze pages, you may hear
(05:49):
terms like funneling, you mayhear these other terminology.
And what they're doing isthey're sending ads to those
particular pages.
And then that's how they'retracking their conversion.
So they don't want to confusetheir leads because what they're
doing is using that to provetheir worth to a company.
(06:12):
So the danger in this is that AImodels are looking for credible
content.
Now, businesses...
may or may not know this, butevery website has what we call a
DA score or a DR score.
Depends on the resource that youuse to gauge the
(06:34):
authoritativeness of a website.
And the higher the authoritativenature of the website or ranking
of that dictates kind of likeits credibility factor.
So in auditing a couple ofwebsites, matter of fact, I
audited about 15 websites overthe last week, and I saw this
(06:57):
kind of hurricane on thehorizon.
So what the company does is theygo through and they build these
little websites that they thinkare highly converting and they
concentrate on the wrongfactors.
These websites typically have aDA score or a DR score of under
(07:19):
one.
And the reason is, is they'renot worried about building the
credibility of of thatparticular website up.
They're just worried aboutdriving traffic from Google Ads
to there in order to get thephone to ring so that you'll
basically use their services.
Now, the problem is that the AImodels are not going to trust
(07:43):
that content.
And as a matter of fact, it caneven create confusion by having
these little microsites all overthe place and not give your
business the credibility that itshould get from that traffic.
Now, this is huge, absolutelyhuge.
And so what this means is thatyou're going to have to make a
(08:04):
decision if you're going toinvest in Kmart until it goes
away.
Or are you going to start movingtoward Walmart in how you look
at your business?
And this is huge because a lotof times when you think about a
business and you think aboutyour KPIs, KPIs is just a fancy
(08:26):
word for the stuff you're tryingto track, the things that are
meaningful to your business.
And typically they fall into twogroups, traditional KPIs, such
as phone calls, um, you know,email signups, filling out
forms, making a purchase.
Those are traditional KPIs.
But now what we need to do is weneed to concentrate on KPIs that
(08:50):
are less direct sell, but betterfor long-term visibility.
And those KPIs would be thingssuch as creating a a better
domain score for your websiteand building up your website,
which is going to include thingssuch as content marketing,
(09:12):
posting to social, a holisticapproach, something we've been
calling for a long time here atIntegrus, the snowball effect,
meaning that we want to build acumulative effort to build the
reputation of a business so thatthey show up everywhere.
Last week, I gave a mentionwhere Google Ads is a small part
(09:34):
of what we do.
And it garnered for one of ourclients 50 some odd phone calls
last month with their budget,but their overall phone calls
was almost 200.
Now that's a huge difference.
And it's because what we'redoing is we're building
credibility for that businesseverywhere on the internet
that's applicable to thatbusiness and driving traffic
(09:54):
from multiple resources.
And so this idea that you'regoing to continue to have these
little micro websites that haveno credibility and that it's
going to continue to beauthoritative for your business,
I think this is a huge, hugemistake.
(10:16):
And the idea that...
you're going to be able to getaway with that in the future.
I think what you're going to seein the next six to 12 months is
more and more of a transition towhere people are going to chat
GPT and asking questions.
So not only is it going toaffect how you run ads and where
(10:37):
you send those ads to, But nowit means you really need to
start building the authoritativenature of your website and your
business in general on theInternet.
So you can't focus on one thing.
Now, here's a trick.
Here's a trick to this.
So one of the common responsesto these concerns is that no
(11:00):
single person or no singleagency can be great at
everything.
So somebody's got to concentrateon your Google ads.
You've got to have somebodyconcentrating on your website,
somebody concentrating on yoursocial.
and et cetera, et cetera, etcetera.
Now, the problem with that modeland having all these cooks
trying to make you a meal topromote your business is a lot
(11:21):
of times this will becomedisjointed.
And if it becomes disjointed,you're going to have a whole
other subset of problems.
Plus, you're going to havedifferent temperaments,
different moods, differentwhatever, which is why the only
thing we saw we could do on ourend is to learn how to do
everything that's important.
So we have our own social mediaposting model where we can post.
(11:47):
Our clients can post in additionto it.
We're working on GoogleBusiness, getting our NAP scores
increased, using the right toolsto get our NAP score, which
basically is name, address, andphone number.
That needs to be consistent.
Getting everything lined upwhere everything is optimized,
getting the website where it'shappy, optimizing the website to
(12:09):
where it's structured correctly,and then doing a few other
things.
So the take-home, the urgenttake-home is if you're using
Google Ads and you're happy withyour Google Ads guy, and he's
not sending traffic andcontributing to building the
overall authority of yourwebsite up.
(12:30):
So let's talk about this andbreak it down a little bit so
that you can understand it in away that's going to help you
describe what's going on.
So let's talk about the oldplaybook, what used to work.
These little microsites usingkeyword stuffing and
pay-per-click dominance.
(12:50):
You may have heard terms likeclick funnels, old-style landing
page with manufacturedauthority, or paid-only
visibility with low effort oncredibility or depth.
Directory-based reputationtricks.
like keyword spam listings.
These are techniques thatmarketing people have used, and
(13:11):
honestly, they've kind of workedhistorically.
Now, we've never banked on itbecause I've won awards in SEO
and other things, and I justknow kind of the value of this
whole snowball effect in whichour company is based.
But now let's talk about how AIis shifting and what is changing
(13:32):
as this is becoming moredominant and people are using it
more and more as a trustedfriend.
Okay, so first, large languagemodels favor content from
authoritative, well-structuredsources.
Large language models thinklarge language models equals
artificial intelligence.
For lack of a better word,that'll get you over the goal.
(13:55):
AI-driven search bypasses paidads in favor of verified
information.
This means you need tounderstand what EEAT is.
You don't need to start postinga bunch of stuff that's strictly
artificial, intelligence-driven,like create me a blog article
based on this.
By the way, that's a horrible,horrible idea.
Anyone doing that withoutputting in human intervention is
(14:18):
really making some hugemistakes.
The rise of AI agents usingconversational sourcing,
citation, and trust signals.
So what does this mean?
Well, as you get more into chatGPT and some of these other
models, you're finding thatpeople are asking questions that
bounce around from the top ofthe funnel to the bottom.
(14:39):
And they're asking a lot ofquestions.
Well, the idea is it's going tochange how you write content so
that people these large languagemodels can actually use that as
part of their citations asthey're making recommendation.
And this idea of can I trustthis brand is no longer based on
(14:59):
first page placement.
It's about reputation signals.
So you see, this is phenomenalbecause it's only going to kind
of like completely kill the oldplaybook.
And now it's like, okay, well,how do we write content that's
going to be conversationalcontent?
How do we build our website andproperly structure it?
(15:20):
So terms like schema are goingto become more and more relevant
because schema is a way for youto flag content and pages on
your website to help these, um,AI models understand what your
site is about.
And so certain things that SEOpeople have traditionally
(15:40):
thought about now is reallybecoming more to the forefront.
And we're hitting this newfrontier on how you become more
reputable, more trustworthy, inaddition to visibility.
And using old visibilitytechniques like this old hat
landing page process is going tobe something that is going the
(16:04):
way of the dinosaur ifeverything continues to trend
the way it is, and there is nosignal that it's not going this
way.
So, let's talk about how AIdisqualifies low-value tactics.
Thin content and low-domainmicrosites don't get cited,
okay?
This means that They don'tlisten to them.
(16:25):
They don't like them becauseit's like someone without a
voice, someone without areputation is saying something.
And just like Google wants togive you the best results,
artificial intelligence is onlygoing to want to serve up
content that is the most trustedbecause they want to be trusted
as well.
Recycled or duplicated templatesget ignored.
(16:47):
Okay, so think about that.
Think about these recycledtemplates that are out there,
these really pretty websites,but not websites that are driven
for these models.
And it's very common in today'sworld that you're seeing people
use these templates, especiallyin agencies and freelancers,
because they're easy to build.
(17:07):
There's high profit margins init.
They look good, but it'scompletely the wrong process.
So you want to make sure thatyou avoid that.
Fake urgency or spamming CTAsare penalized in conversational
answers.
You see, now the stuff that wasworking is no longer going to
work.
And here's another one.
(17:28):
Google Ads won't influence AI'straining data or retrieval
results.
You see what's going on here.
Those KPIs that once are drivingyour business, you got to get on
the wave here and you're goingto have to start thinking about
the type of content.
You know, I'm thinking rightnow, like one of the things we
use are our content tools thatactually look at the most
(17:50):
relevant questions being asked.
And we actually create contentaround those questions.
We don't just guess as far aswhat those articles are.
That's just one phase of thisthing.
So think about like if you'recreating blog articles and your
guy is saying, okay, let's runthem through chat GPT.
Here it is.
(18:10):
Can you look at it?
And does this work?
And they don't reallyconcentrate on the length of the
article, the keyword densities,the subject matter of the
article.
Would it be relevant toartificial intelligence?
If they're not asking all thesequestions and kind of putting it
together in a soup, then you'regoing the wrong direction.
And so Walmart's coming.
(18:32):
You see what I'm saying?
And so now let's talk about whatwins now and going forward.
Okay, so we're going to look atthis other technique.
We're going to call them legacy.
We're going to call themoutdated.
We're going to call them theeight track tapes, these
microsites.
And now we're going to say is,okay, now what's going to be the
future and how's it going to go?
(18:53):
First, long-term investment inbrand trust and structured
content.
Okay, it's about building trust,reliability, original content.
We've already talked in previouspodcasts how that AI doesn't
really like reference AIcontent.
It wants original humanauthoritative content because
(19:14):
it's using that in its largelanguage models.
Schema markup.
Schema, learn about schema.
Ask your web guy, ask yourmarketing people about schema
and what schema is and howthey're using it in today's
time.
And can they give you examplesof what schema is and how you
can participate in that process?
(19:35):
NAP score.
Remember, name, address, phonenumber.
Name, address, phone number.
NAP consistency is huge.
So when you put in trackingphone numbers, you also have to
have a way where you can unifythat phone number across
multiple platforms forconsistency.
So just putting a tracking phonenumber on things without
connecting the dots is bad.
(19:56):
It's always been bad, but nowit's worse than ever.
And we also have to create thiscontent designed for AI
readability.
So this is kind of a big onebecause people think putting
words on a page sometimes doesthe job.
And sometimes your agency,rather than doing the hard work,
does the busy work because thebusy work is easier to do and
(20:18):
requires less thought and lessexpertise.
You also want to get cited inarticles, directories, and
reputable third-party sites.
So this could be indicating thatwe need to start getting back
into press releases strongerthan ever.
At our company, we're constantlypumping out press releases, not
(20:38):
just for that reason, but wewere also looking at how they
get distributed among X and thenX's relationship to Google.
So you kind of want to thinkthrough that a little bit.
And then we want to get actualcustomer reviews and proof over
flashy conversion language.
Okay, so this means that justlike in a political race or
(21:01):
whatever, popular votes matterand getting real reviews also
matters.
So we've got to think beyondwhere we have been historically.
So let's talk about some actionsteps for you guys.
You need to evaluate yourcurrent strategy.
Are you relying on short-termpay-per-click gimmicks, these
(21:22):
little scrape websites that haveno authority you're pushing
people to to get thoseconversions?
You need to get away from it.
If you're going to live with itand you're going to ride it out
as long as you can because youthink that it's working,
remember that it's on itsdeathbed.
Audit your website presence.
(21:43):
Would an AI model cite yourcontent as a trusted resource?
How do you know the contentbeing put up on your website if
you have an SEO guy?
Is it just something generatedby artificial intelligence and
thrown up on a website?
How do you know that it's beingadjusted and fine-tuned to
optimize its opportunity forsuccess?
(22:05):
Huge, huge Qs.
Or if you're not looking at someof that content, you want to be
able to look at it.
You want to be able tounderstand it.
And you want your guy to be ableto explain to you how that
content is being created.
And if they use very ambiguouslanguage, like, well, we target
certain keywords and write anarticle based on, you know,
(22:25):
whatever, ask them the toolsthey use.
Because there are some tools outthere that will blow your mind
when it comes to content.
Okay, we need to shift ourbudget.
OK, you need to start thinkingabout investing in content
citations and your long gameSEO.
That's right.
You know, the SEO is not shortterm game.
(22:46):
It's six months.
It's a year.
It's longer.
It's constant.
It's a battle.
If you want to survive, you'regoing to need to start thinking
about your SEO strategy, thekeywords you choose, the
structure of your website.
Last year, Google put out, Ithink, a leaked document.
They didn't put it out.
It was leaked, I believe, and ithad over 12,000 points that are
(23:07):
going to impact or that impactssearch engine optimization.
It's a serious game.
And I met a guy three or fourweeks ago, and he was talking
about The way they were doingit, they were trying to go full
AI on this thing.
And it's one of the dumbestthings I've ever heard.
Matter of fact, I've heard twopeople in the last 60 days talk
about it.
So make sure your SEO guy's onhis game and not just chucking
(23:30):
up stuff.
Embrace structured data,reputation building, and go back
and listen to the EEATPrinciples podcast that we
produced.
This is huge.
Okay, the future of search.
If I could leave you withanything, it's the future of
search.
It's not about who shouts theloudest.
(23:52):
It's about who's trusted themost.
You need to understand thatbecause this is way different.
If your KPIs are all about who'sgoing to spend the most money
and get the most immediateclicks but not thinking about
the long game, you can forgetabout the AI thing.
You're investing in the Kmartmodel, not the Walmart model.
(24:14):
We want to start looking at thefuture.
We don't want to get stuck 30years ago.
And the thing about AI and thething about the internet in
general right now is it is inhyperspeed.
It's like, you know, if youheard about like, you know,
people live so long and there'sso many human years and a dog
year, things like that.
(24:34):
Just think about that whenyou're looking at What's going
on on the internet today and theshifts that are going on and the
growth and the technology?
I mean, we're talking about daysto years in our language.
We're seeing huge shifts very,very quickly.
And if you don't get on thebandwagon, if you don't do this,
(24:57):
your business, although what'slooking may be working right
now, What you're doing isinvesting in a daily game
without any long-term planning.
You're living paycheck topaycheck, and you don't have
anything in retirement.
So this is an urgent message.
I think this is extremelyrelevant, and so many people are
still using the old-school game,and it's going to bite them.
(25:20):
I hope this helps you out.
To your success, and next timewe meet, I'm Ken with Integrous
Design.
Thank you.
SPEAKER_00 (25:26):
Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bowl, brought to you
by Integris Design, afull-service design and
marketing agency out ofAsheville, North Carolina.
Until next time.
You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut
through marketing noise.
Here's your host, Ken Carroll.
SPEAKER_01 (00:09):
If your business uses Google Ads, you're going to
want to absolutely listen tothis episode of Over the Bull.
What's going to happen in thenear future is going to rock the
world when it Welcome to Overthe Bull.
(00:31):
My name is Ken, and I lookforward to talking to you today
about some incredible changesthat are going on in the world
of artificial intelligence.
So it's probably no surprise toyou that large language models
such as ChatGPT and others,they're really taking the world
(00:52):
by storm.
People are talking to them moreand more.
People are asking artificialintelligence for
recommendations.
they're kind of using artificialintelligence as a friend.
And as that, any recommendationsthat these models are giving to
people are becoming morevaluable to them than
(01:14):
traditional search, such asGoogle searches and things like
that.
Now, all the big tech companiesare fully aware of what's going
on.
And they know that this is thenext big push.
Look no further than what you'rehearing about the energy
(01:34):
allocations that are going to berequired to build these models
and how you're hearing companieslike Google talking about
building nuclear power plantsand the urgency of doing so.
And so it's here.
Like it or not, it's here, andit's going to affect businesses
in a lot of dramatic ways.
Now, if you're not careful, whatyou're going to do is you're
(01:56):
going to fall prey to fallingasleep behind the wheel because
a lot of agencies, especiallyone agency that I've had my own
in the last week, they're usingpractices that are quickly
becoming antiquated, and theywill be absolutely irrelevant as
practices artificialintelligence becomes more and
(02:16):
more relevant.
So here's the question.
How is your business going toride the wave of artificial
intelligence and be somethingthat artificial intelligence
will recommend to people whenthey ask questions about
services and products in yourarea?
Now, this is huge.
(02:37):
You know, 30 years ago when Iwas a kid, I remember Kmart was
big.
You know, Kmart was thedepartment store, is what
everybody trusted, and theylooked so big they weren't going
nowhere.
There was Sears.
You know, you can draw your ownanalogy.
But those were replaced, right?
So now we got our Walmarts.
(02:58):
And so looking back then, if youwould have invested one way or
spent all your time, you know,trying to get into Kmart versus
Walmart, you would see where youare today.
And so what we're seeing in thistrend of artificial intelligence
is that it's kind of that big ofa swoop.
(03:21):
And we don't know who's going towin the battle.
Now, there's a lot ofundercurrent, and there's a lot
of speculation, and there's alot of people who are creating
some hyperbole around the ideaof what artificial intelligence
is going to do.
Now, of course, they're usingthe buzzwords, artificial
intelligence, all these kind ofthings.
And what they're trying to do issell product, but they're not
(03:44):
really getting to the brasstacks of what it means.
You know, the idea that you'rejust going to use things like
chat GPT to write content, whichif you're doing that, you really
need to go back and listen tothe EEAT conversation in an
earlier Over the Bull episode.
(04:04):
because it's much morecomplicated than that, and it's
really going to really impacthow people shop and look and
research.
Therefore, it's going to impacthow your business is also going
to need to address those issues.
So let me talk about thisspecific instance, and let me
(04:26):
give you an example of what thisis going to mean.
Now, before I do that, what weneed to do is we need to kind of
look at what AI models aredoing.
AI models, just like Google andother models, what they do is
they want to pull up the mostcredible resources.
(04:47):
And so the people that have themost trustworthy, reliable,
organic, authoritative content,original content, those people
are going to show up more andmore while some of these people
kind of turn and burn processesare going to be less and less
effective.
(05:07):
So really pay attention towhat's going on here because I
think this is going to affect alot of you who are listening and
you're going to want to forwardthis to people that you want to
understand exactly what's goingon.
So when it comes to Google Ads,here's what a lot of agencies
are still doing.
(05:29):
They're creating these littlemicrosites, these little one or
two page websites.
And these websites, what they dois they actually send the paid
ad traffic to these littlemicrosites.
And they're built, you may hearlike squeeze pages, you may hear
(05:49):
terms like funneling, you mayhear these other terminology.
And what they're doing isthey're sending ads to those
particular pages.
And then that's how they'retracking their conversion.
So they don't want to confusetheir leads because what they're
doing is using that to provetheir worth to a company.
(06:12):
So the danger in this is that AImodels are looking for credible
content.
Now, businesses...
may or may not know this, butevery website has what we call a
DA score or a DR score.
Depends on the resource that youuse to gauge the
(06:34):
authoritativeness of a website.
And the higher the authoritativenature of the website or ranking
of that dictates kind of likeits credibility factor.
So in auditing a couple ofwebsites, matter of fact, I
audited about 15 websites overthe last week, and I saw this
(06:57):
kind of hurricane on thehorizon.
So what the company does is theygo through and they build these
little websites that they thinkare highly converting and they
concentrate on the wrongfactors.
These websites typically have aDA score or a DR score of under
(07:19):
one.
And the reason is, is they'renot worried about building the
credibility of of thatparticular website up.
They're just worried aboutdriving traffic from Google Ads
to there in order to get thephone to ring so that you'll
basically use their services.
Now, the problem is that the AImodels are not going to trust
(07:43):
that content.
And as a matter of fact, it caneven create confusion by having
these little microsites all overthe place and not give your
business the credibility that itshould get from that traffic.
Now, this is huge, absolutelyhuge.
And so what this means is thatyou're going to have to make a
(08:04):
decision if you're going toinvest in Kmart until it goes
away.
Or are you going to start movingtoward Walmart in how you look
at your business?
And this is huge because a lotof times when you think about a
business and you think aboutyour KPIs, KPIs is just a fancy
(08:26):
word for the stuff you're tryingto track, the things that are
meaningful to your business.
And typically they fall into twogroups, traditional KPIs, such
as phone calls, um, you know,email signups, filling out
forms, making a purchase.
Those are traditional KPIs.
But now what we need to do is weneed to concentrate on KPIs that
(08:50):
are less direct sell, but betterfor long-term visibility.
And those KPIs would be thingssuch as creating a a better
domain score for your websiteand building up your website,
which is going to include thingssuch as content marketing,
(09:12):
posting to social, a holisticapproach, something we've been
calling for a long time here atIntegrus, the snowball effect,
meaning that we want to build acumulative effort to build the
reputation of a business so thatthey show up everywhere.
Last week, I gave a mentionwhere Google Ads is a small part
(09:34):
of what we do.
And it garnered for one of ourclients 50 some odd phone calls
last month with their budget,but their overall phone calls
was almost 200.
Now that's a huge difference.
And it's because what we'redoing is we're building
credibility for that businesseverywhere on the internet
that's applicable to thatbusiness and driving traffic
(09:54):
from multiple resources.
And so this idea that you'regoing to continue to have these
little micro websites that haveno credibility and that it's
going to continue to beauthoritative for your business,
I think this is a huge, hugemistake.
(10:16):
And the idea that...
you're going to be able to getaway with that in the future.
I think what you're going to seein the next six to 12 months is
more and more of a transition towhere people are going to chat
GPT and asking questions.
So not only is it going toaffect how you run ads and where
(10:37):
you send those ads to, But nowit means you really need to
start building the authoritativenature of your website and your
business in general on theInternet.
So you can't focus on one thing.
Now, here's a trick.
Here's a trick to this.
So one of the common responsesto these concerns is that no
(11:00):
single person or no singleagency can be great at
everything.
So somebody's got to concentrateon your Google ads.
You've got to have somebodyconcentrating on your website,
somebody concentrating on yoursocial.
and et cetera, et cetera, etcetera.
Now, the problem with that modeland having all these cooks
trying to make you a meal topromote your business is a lot
(11:21):
of times this will becomedisjointed.
And if it becomes disjointed,you're going to have a whole
other subset of problems.
Plus, you're going to havedifferent temperaments,
different moods, differentwhatever, which is why the only
thing we saw we could do on ourend is to learn how to do
everything that's important.
So we have our own social mediaposting model where we can post.
(11:47):
Our clients can post in additionto it.
We're working on GoogleBusiness, getting our NAP scores
increased, using the right toolsto get our NAP score, which
basically is name, address, andphone number.
That needs to be consistent.
Getting everything lined upwhere everything is optimized,
getting the website where it'shappy, optimizing the website to
(12:09):
where it's structured correctly,and then doing a few other
things.
So the take-home, the urgenttake-home is if you're using
Google Ads and you're happy withyour Google Ads guy, and he's
not sending traffic andcontributing to building the
overall authority of yourwebsite up.
(12:30):
So let's talk about this andbreak it down a little bit so
that you can understand it in away that's going to help you
describe what's going on.
So let's talk about the oldplaybook, what used to work.
These little microsites usingkeyword stuffing and
pay-per-click dominance.
(12:50):
You may have heard terms likeclick funnels, old-style landing
page with manufacturedauthority, or paid-only
visibility with low effort oncredibility or depth.
Directory-based reputationtricks.
like keyword spam listings.
These are techniques thatmarketing people have used, and
(13:11):
honestly, they've kind of workedhistorically.
Now, we've never banked on itbecause I've won awards in SEO
and other things, and I justknow kind of the value of this
whole snowball effect in whichour company is based.
But now let's talk about how AIis shifting and what is changing
(13:32):
as this is becoming moredominant and people are using it
more and more as a trustedfriend.
Okay, so first, large languagemodels favor content from
authoritative, well-structuredsources.
Large language models thinklarge language models equals
artificial intelligence.
For lack of a better word,that'll get you over the goal.
(13:55):
AI-driven search bypasses paidads in favor of verified
information.
This means you need tounderstand what EEAT is.
You don't need to start postinga bunch of stuff that's strictly
artificial, intelligence-driven,like create me a blog article
based on this.
By the way, that's a horrible,horrible idea.
Anyone doing that withoutputting in human intervention is
(14:18):
really making some hugemistakes.
The rise of AI agents usingconversational sourcing,
citation, and trust signals.
So what does this mean?
Well, as you get more into chatGPT and some of these other
models, you're finding thatpeople are asking questions that
bounce around from the top ofthe funnel to the bottom.
(14:39):
And they're asking a lot ofquestions.
Well, the idea is it's going tochange how you write content so
that people these large languagemodels can actually use that as
part of their citations asthey're making recommendation.
And this idea of can I trustthis brand is no longer based on
(14:59):
first page placement.
It's about reputation signals.
So you see, this is phenomenalbecause it's only going to kind
of like completely kill the oldplaybook.
And now it's like, okay, well,how do we write content that's
going to be conversationalcontent?
How do we build our website andproperly structure it?
(15:20):
So terms like schema are goingto become more and more relevant
because schema is a way for youto flag content and pages on
your website to help these, um,AI models understand what your
site is about.
And so certain things that SEOpeople have traditionally
(15:40):
thought about now is reallybecoming more to the forefront.
And we're hitting this newfrontier on how you become more
reputable, more trustworthy, inaddition to visibility.
And using old visibilitytechniques like this old hat
landing page process is going tobe something that is going the
(16:04):
way of the dinosaur ifeverything continues to trend
the way it is, and there is nosignal that it's not going this
way.
So, let's talk about how AIdisqualifies low-value tactics.
Thin content and low-domainmicrosites don't get cited,
okay?
This means that They don'tlisten to them.
(16:25):
They don't like them becauseit's like someone without a
voice, someone without areputation is saying something.
And just like Google wants togive you the best results,
artificial intelligence is onlygoing to want to serve up
content that is the most trustedbecause they want to be trusted
as well.
Recycled or duplicated templatesget ignored.
(16:47):
Okay, so think about that.
Think about these recycledtemplates that are out there,
these really pretty websites,but not websites that are driven
for these models.
And it's very common in today'sworld that you're seeing people
use these templates, especiallyin agencies and freelancers,
because they're easy to build.
(17:07):
There's high profit margins init.
They look good, but it'scompletely the wrong process.
So you want to make sure thatyou avoid that.
Fake urgency or spamming CTAsare penalized in conversational
answers.
You see, now the stuff that wasworking is no longer going to
work.
And here's another one.
(17:28):
Google Ads won't influence AI'straining data or retrieval
results.
You see what's going on here.
Those KPIs that once are drivingyour business, you got to get on
the wave here and you're goingto have to start thinking about
the type of content.
You know, I'm thinking rightnow, like one of the things we
use are our content tools thatactually look at the most
(17:50):
relevant questions being asked.
And we actually create contentaround those questions.
We don't just guess as far aswhat those articles are.
That's just one phase of thisthing.
So think about like if you'recreating blog articles and your
guy is saying, okay, let's runthem through chat GPT.
Here it is.
(18:10):
Can you look at it?
And does this work?
And they don't reallyconcentrate on the length of the
article, the keyword densities,the subject matter of the
article.
Would it be relevant toartificial intelligence?
If they're not asking all thesequestions and kind of putting it
together in a soup, then you'regoing the wrong direction.
And so Walmart's coming.
(18:32):
You see what I'm saying?
And so now let's talk about whatwins now and going forward.
Okay, so we're going to look atthis other technique.
We're going to call them legacy.
We're going to call themoutdated.
We're going to call them theeight track tapes, these
microsites.
And now we're going to say is,okay, now what's going to be the
future and how's it going to go?
(18:53):
First, long-term investment inbrand trust and structured
content.
Okay, it's about building trust,reliability, original content.
We've already talked in previouspodcasts how that AI doesn't
really like reference AIcontent.
It wants original humanauthoritative content because
(19:14):
it's using that in its largelanguage models.
Schema markup.
Schema, learn about schema.
Ask your web guy, ask yourmarketing people about schema
and what schema is and howthey're using it in today's
time.
And can they give you examplesof what schema is and how you
can participate in that process?
(19:35):
NAP score.
Remember, name, address, phonenumber.
Name, address, phone number.
NAP consistency is huge.
So when you put in trackingphone numbers, you also have to
have a way where you can unifythat phone number across
multiple platforms forconsistency.
So just putting a tracking phonenumber on things without
connecting the dots is bad.
(19:56):
It's always been bad, but nowit's worse than ever.
And we also have to create thiscontent designed for AI
readability.
So this is kind of a big onebecause people think putting
words on a page sometimes doesthe job.
And sometimes your agency,rather than doing the hard work,
does the busy work because thebusy work is easier to do and
(20:18):
requires less thought and lessexpertise.
You also want to get cited inarticles, directories, and
reputable third-party sites.
So this could be indicating thatwe need to start getting back
into press releases strongerthan ever.
At our company, we're constantlypumping out press releases, not
(20:38):
just for that reason, but wewere also looking at how they
get distributed among X and thenX's relationship to Google.
So you kind of want to thinkthrough that a little bit.
And then we want to get actualcustomer reviews and proof over
flashy conversion language.
Okay, so this means that justlike in a political race or
(21:01):
whatever, popular votes matterand getting real reviews also
matters.
So we've got to think beyondwhere we have been historically.
So let's talk about some actionsteps for you guys.
You need to evaluate yourcurrent strategy.
Are you relying on short-termpay-per-click gimmicks, these
(21:22):
little scrape websites that haveno authority you're pushing
people to to get thoseconversions?
You need to get away from it.
If you're going to live with itand you're going to ride it out
as long as you can because youthink that it's working,
remember that it's on itsdeathbed.
Audit your website presence.
(21:43):
Would an AI model cite yourcontent as a trusted resource?
How do you know the contentbeing put up on your website if
you have an SEO guy?
Is it just something generatedby artificial intelligence and
thrown up on a website?
How do you know that it's beingadjusted and fine-tuned to
optimize its opportunity forsuccess?
(22:05):
Huge, huge Qs.
Or if you're not looking at someof that content, you want to be
able to look at it.
You want to be able tounderstand it.
And you want your guy to be ableto explain to you how that
content is being created.
And if they use very ambiguouslanguage, like, well, we target
certain keywords and write anarticle based on, you know,
(22:25):
whatever, ask them the toolsthey use.
Because there are some tools outthere that will blow your mind
when it comes to content.
Okay, we need to shift ourbudget.
OK, you need to start thinkingabout investing in content
citations and your long gameSEO.
That's right.
You know, the SEO is not shortterm game.
(22:46):
It's six months.
It's a year.
It's longer.
It's constant.
It's a battle.
If you want to survive, you'regoing to need to start thinking
about your SEO strategy, thekeywords you choose, the
structure of your website.
Last year, Google put out, Ithink, a leaked document.
They didn't put it out.
It was leaked, I believe, and ithad over 12,000 points that are
(23:07):
going to impact or that impactssearch engine optimization.
It's a serious game.
And I met a guy three or fourweeks ago, and he was talking
about The way they were doingit, they were trying to go full
AI on this thing.
And it's one of the dumbestthings I've ever heard.
Matter of fact, I've heard twopeople in the last 60 days talk
about it.
So make sure your SEO guy's onhis game and not just chucking
(23:30):
up stuff.
Embrace structured data,reputation building, and go back
and listen to the EEATPrinciples podcast that we
produced.
This is huge.
Okay, the future of search.
If I could leave you withanything, it's the future of
search.
It's not about who shouts theloudest.
(23:52):
It's about who's trusted themost.
You need to understand thatbecause this is way different.
If your KPIs are all about who'sgoing to spend the most money
and get the most immediateclicks but not thinking about
the long game, you can forgetabout the AI thing.
You're investing in the Kmartmodel, not the Walmart model.
(24:14):
We want to start looking at thefuture.
We don't want to get stuck 30years ago.
And the thing about AI and thething about the internet in
general right now is it is inhyperspeed.
It's like, you know, if youheard about like, you know,
people live so long and there'sso many human years and a dog
year, things like that.
(24:34):
Just think about that whenyou're looking at What's going
on on the internet today and theshifts that are going on and the
growth and the technology?
I mean, we're talking about daysto years in our language.
We're seeing huge shifts very,very quickly.
And if you don't get on thebandwagon, if you don't do this,
(24:57):
your business, although what'slooking may be working right
now, What you're doing isinvesting in a daily game
without any long-term planning.
You're living paycheck topaycheck, and you don't have
anything in retirement.
So this is an urgent message.
I think this is extremelyrelevant, and so many people are
still using the old-school game,and it's going to bite them.
(25:20):
I hope this helps you out.
To your success, and next timewe meet, I'm Ken with Integrous
Design.
Thank you.
SPEAKER_00 (25:26):
Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bowl, brought to you
by Integris Design, afull-service design and
marketing agency out ofAsheville, North Carolina.
Until next time.
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