August 13, 2025 • 42 mins
In this episode of Over The Bull, Ken peels back the fantasy surrounding AI and Google’s so-called “all-knowing” powers. Using fantasy films as a launching point, we explore the common misconception that these systems magically understand everything online. But here’s the truth: without structure, even the smartest algorithms miss the point.
We ground the conversation with a practical tool—schema markup—a way to speak clearly to machines by structuring your website’s information. Schema isn’t sorcery—it’s a collaborative way to increase credibility, improve visibility, and help both Google and AI platforms actually understand what your business offers.
Whether you’re a small business owner or a digital marketer, this episode will show you how to stop chasing myths and start building with intent.
RESOURCES:
• Google Structured Data Guide: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data
• Schema.org (Official Site): https://schema.org
• Google’s Rich Results Test Tool: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results
• Google Structured Data Markup Helper: https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/
• JSON-LD Playground (for testing schema): https://json-ld.org/playground/
Over The Bull is brought to you by IntegrisDesign.com. All rights reserved.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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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):
John Wick, the Terminator, and Mad Max on this
episode of Over the Bull.
Hi, thank you for tuning in.
This week, we're going to breakdown a little bit about the
internet.
And I wanted to start by takingyou on a journey through the
world of the mind.
(00:29):
So I was listening to a podcast,I don't know, about a month,
month and a half, could havebeen a little bit longer.
And it was between a theist andan atheist.
And these were top thinkers, youknow, who were going at it.
And you may remember the podcastif you run in certain circles.
And one thing they were talkingabout in this podcast was the
(00:52):
atheist was talking about howboring heaven would be.
He said that, you know, in thisworld, there's a tension.
All the movies have tension.
Everything has tension in theworld because they don't make
movies where you're in a utopianexistence.
And in that utopian existence,you know, you just watch that
for two hours.
You know, there's always a rub,a friction, a bad guy.
(01:18):
And the dystopian futures arethe ones that are the most
attractive to humans, right?
And so I started thinking aboutthis and I realized that, you
know, in the mind, we look atfantasy as something that is
attractive to us.
You know, we imagine, you know,sometimes being the hero or we
(01:41):
watch these tense moments, youknow, for enjoyment, you know.
But if we were to take thosesame situations and apply them
to real life, you It would beanything but what reality is.
You see, we're in a playgroundof imagination, and his response
was in the playground ofimagination.
(02:01):
It wasn't in practical everydaylife.
For example, if you have a lifeand a family and you have
everything going on, probablythe last thing you would want is
someone to hack your bankaccount and you go on a big
journey to try to recoup themoney.
You probably wouldn't want harmto come to someone in your
(02:25):
family or yourself, and youspend a long period of time
trying to get justice for thatexperience.
You probably don't want thesethings.
But in the mind, in theimagination, when we watch
certain things, we think thatthat dystopian future, because
it's entertaining, is what wewant.
(02:46):
When in reality, we do wantpeace.
I mean, a day where my family issafe, my kids are safe, my
clients are in good shape, youknow, there's not a lot of
tension and we're able tofunction a fairly seamless day.
Those are the best days.
It's not the days where yourspouse is kidnapped and you race
(03:10):
through time and space in orderto try to save that person.
And it was stunning to me thatThis particular atheist, which I
didn't know him, you know, Iknow about Hitchens and a lot of
these other guys.
But but, you know, when when youlook at him, I was really
surprised that he was someonewho actually said these things
(03:32):
and that people were listening.
But, you know, the human minddoes really good jobs of like
putting together faults that areincoherent and making them seem
as though they're logical.
And a lot of times in the worldwe live as humans, we skip over
the nuances in order to connectthe dots and make sense of it
(03:57):
and then build a worldview inwhich we live.
But you see that the dystopian,the fantasy, is not what we
really want in reality.
We don't want these things.
It's just something that weentertain in the recesses of our
mind.
And so a utopian existenceobviously is a great existence.
(04:21):
It's not one that's not.
Now, if we transition that,let's move over to, as promised,
let's talk about Mad Max.
So, you know, the series, andI've loved the series, you know,
I've gone back to when MelGibson played the character, and
then after that, of course.
But the idea is that it's thatdystopian future, right?
(04:42):
It's that dystopian realitywhere everything is sideways.
You know, you have people whoare even deformed.
It looks like they have cancergrowths and things like that.
And it's very militant and, youknow, everyone for themselves
and all that.
And in our mind, we go, wow,that's, you know, it's such an
exciting premise to sit thereand watch that for some people.
(05:03):
And so then, you know, your mindkind of gets whisked away into
thinking the drudgeries of dailylife would not be as great as
living in an environment likethat.
However, we also don't think ofourselves as the guy that gets
run over by the car, you know,the incidental kill, the guy
crossing the street to maybe goget some water and the hero or
(05:26):
the bad guy takes him out.
We also picture ourselves asbeing the hero of the movie and
not the innocent bystander or afamily's victims of a situation
that gets out of hand betweenthe two.
So, we also don't think aboutwhy the bad guys are the bad
(05:46):
guys and, you know, what theirstories are because it's a
narrative within a very limitedscope.
And so, we kind of take that andwe kind of run with it.
Same thing with the John Wickseries.
I just got through watchingBallerina, which is the latest
installment from the John Wickworld.
(06:06):
And, you know, there are so manymurders and so many things that
are going on throughout thatworld.
story you know uh i don't wantto go into the premise i don't
want to ruin it for you but butthere's just a ton of things
that uh you know a ton ofkillings and so if you could
imagine you know the person inthe beginning she goes through a
situation where somethinghappens and for the rest of the
(06:28):
movie you know this person goesout and takes out a bunch of
people you know in in In themovies, they make killing seem
like eating a cheeseburger orsomething like that.
But in reality, it's far, farfrom that.
It's incredibly different.
(06:49):
Then if you transition that to,say, the Terminator movies, we
have this idea of Skynet, where–In Skynet, you know, it's a
supercomputer, and it goes andultimately it rises up against
the people that created it.
And when it comes online, nowyou have this war between
(07:10):
computers and humans.
And, of course, we have, youknow, things such as time travel
in the movie and other thingsthat are just sensationalistic
and kind of outside the scope ofhumanity, similar to knowing
what's going on outside theuniverse is real.
beyond the scope of humanity.
It's in the place of a fantasy.
(07:30):
And, but you know, it's, it'sthe playground of the mind.
So when we look at the internetand we look at, um, artificial
intelligence and we look atGoogle search results and we, we
listen to what the media issaying, you know, such as
(07:50):
they're saying that the, um, thelarge language models, or
there'll be a point of wherethese computers become sentient.
And once they become sentient,and I believe the number one
point was around 2030, I don'tknow where it's at right now,
but there's this idea thatthey're going one day, they're
going to basically have aconsciousness to them.
(08:15):
But the weird thing is, is thatas humans, we still can't define
what consciousness is.
You know, we have a hard timeunderstanding these concepts for
ourselves, and we actuallywouldn't know if they became
sentient or if they justsimulate it to such a degree
that fools us into thinking thatthey are sentient.
(08:36):
Like, for example, if you wereto take– they say you download
your mind into a virtualexistence, and in that virtual
existence– you'd be able to, intheory, live forever or
whatever.
They're making a lot ofassumptions.
Number one is that memories andwhat makes a person what they
(08:58):
are and what makes you what youare.
You're actually a combination ofyour experiences and you assume
identities throughout your life.
You may assume the identity of aparent or a business owner or
whatever.
And then later a granddad, maybea great granddad if you're
lucky, and all those things.
(09:19):
But as you go through, it's likeyou're assuming identities.
And so to assume that we evenknow what consciousness is, is a
little bit, in my opinion, it'ssilly.
It's silly to think you candownload a bunch of memories and
all these other things anddownload someone, but we don't
even know really what we'redownloading.
(09:40):
So basically what you would haveis You could have just a really
good virtual rendition of aperson, and it does not contain
the essence of the person.
In other words, it doesn't takethe person out.
And through my belief system, Ido not believe you can translate
the spark of God to a computer.
(10:05):
I think it's kind of a sillyconcept.
So anyway, getting back to largelanguage models and all that
kind of stuff, we overthink it.
We think that these systems,these Google algorithms and all
these other things are sophenomenally complicated and so
(10:25):
much smarter than human beingsthat they can do things that we
can't.
And they're almost a modern daymagician.
I believe it was Google that putout that they said that they
were making an AI god.
I forget where that quote was,but I believe I read that.
And it's like, you know, we'remaking these presumptions that
(10:49):
are a little bit silly, I mean,frankly, from my opinion.
And we really kind of overshootwhat exactly the technology
does.
And then it becomes more ofmystery than of substance for
people.
So where am I going with allthis?
When it comes to marketing, theidea is that you want to show up
(11:14):
on these search engines if youown a business.
And you want to also bereferenced by ChatGPT, Grok, and
all these other large languagemodels, Perplexity, you know,
down the line.
And Gemini, of course.
Let's not forget that one.
And the idea is you want yourbusiness to show up in those
results.
(11:35):
And if we think that theInternet is somehow so
sophisticated that it thinks onits own and that this
information solely goes to thiswhatever, this recipe that no
one can know, and that basicallythe effort becomes nebulous.
(11:57):
Like, what do we do?
When we get our answers fromChad GPT, you know, how does
that work?
And so then you either stumblearound in the dark or you start
chasing different ideas andconcepts.
And a lot of businesses stillchase the magic bullet theory,
you know, where they think.
(12:17):
one thing's going to solve alltheir problems.
And, and then they bounce fromperson to person and they have
these fantasies of their own offinding a person that has the
magic bullet, their businessgrows, you know, magically and
that they don't live in the realworld where people price shop
and people, um, look around atoptions and they work with
people that they want to workwith and that those things take
(12:39):
time to, to get around to, youknow, I talked to, uh, a
business here recently, and itwas amazing because we were
talking about starting a newdivision.
And he talked about theinvestment.
He says, you know, there's yearsto get a return on investment
with some of these concepts.
And so he was prepared tounderstand that starting a new
(13:01):
division didn't justautomatically put him into
black.
In a similar fashion, we seethat new businesses, when they
start up, the establishedbusinesses do so much better.
Well, why is that?
They're established.
People already trust them.
They know where to go for stuffand they know what they're going
to get.
And so to switch to anothercompany means that you need to
(13:25):
be there at the right place andtime, which is where things like
awareness KPIs come in.
And you have to be patient andyou have to work harder if
you're the new guy on the blockversus being a company that's
more established where youPeople already trust that brand.
This is where branding comes inand building that trust factor
and the top of mind awareness orTOMA, as they like to call it.
(13:50):
And so when you think of largelanguage models and you think of
AI and you're coming back to it,you're like, well, what do I do?
How do I practically dosomething?
That's meaningful on the webrather than just giving somebody
a monthly staple of ads that arerunning, and you may or may not
(14:10):
know how effective those ads arebased upon the people you're
working with.
Now, at Integris, this is wherewe've been talking a long time
about the idea of building a thereputation of the company and
avoiding the get-rich-quickmodes when it comes to online
(14:31):
marketing.
Yes, your budget matters.
Yes, you got to figure out thesandboxes you can play in for
what you got.
But you also have to come to apoint of reality where if you
don't fund certain things or puta serious financial effort into
it with a serious group ofpeople, then odds are you're
going to fumble around in thedark.
(14:52):
And it's a sad situation, but alot of businesses, frankly, do
that.
And they think that if they justfind that right person or
whatever, that the world willjust magically open up to them,
which is a fantasy.
So when we come back to thesethings like chat GPT and all
this, the Internet is changing.
(15:16):
And this is something I've beentalking about for some time now.
The evolution of the Internet isin hyperdrive.
to use whatever science fictionterm you want to use there to
represent quick speed, but it'schanging in a phenomenal way.
And the statistics such as, youknow, 800 million users plus
with chat GPT, I believe as oflate last year, earlier this
(15:40):
year, you know, you realize thatpeople are changing the way that
they're doing things.
I talked to a a person that isan entrepreneur, he's starting a
business, smart guy.
And he said that he never usedGoogle searches anymore.
He says, I just talk to chat,you know.
And the thing is, is that you'refinding that more and more
(16:02):
people are shifting how theysearch and what they search for.
And you find out that the oldconcepts of the sales funnel,
they speed up too.
where people can now get theanswers that they want, enter
into a conversation and make apurchase quicker than they would
(16:22):
traditionally when they had tosearch for something and back
out and then do another searchand refine their search until
they got to a point of purchase.
And so then you get into thosekind of situations.
So what are one of the weaponsthat you can use in your
business to help people AI outand help Google's algorithms
(16:46):
out, because here's the deal.
They're not sentient.
OK, it's like if you really wantto look at it in a practical
way, what you can look at isit's a really sophisticated way
to take information and give itto you in a meaningful way where
it's going to save you a ton oftime.
(17:06):
And then it can also take thatinformation, kind of recycle it
and do different things with it.
So let's talk about schema.
This is where we're going toland the plane today.
So schema, if we look at it, letme pull up Google's definition
(17:26):
because, you know, when you dopodcasts, people are always
looking to point out littleweird things, which is why I
like to quote other people too,because, you know, I'm not just
a lone gun out here trying totell you things that aren't
true, but it's actually whateverybody's thinking.
So, a schema in the context of awebsite, and this is Google's AI
(17:48):
overview, we'll go ahead and dothe AIO, remember, Google AI
overview.
Schema in the context of awebsite, also known as
structured data or schemamarkup, refers to a specific
vocabulary of code that you canadd to your website's HTML.
This code helps search engineslike Google understand the
content of your pages, leadingto more informative search
(18:11):
results and potentially higherclick-through rates.
Essentially, it's a way to tellsearch engines what your content
is about using standardizedtags.
So let's break that down alittle bit.
Schema is a way for you to takestuff on your website, And then
what you can do is you canformat it in a way to where
(18:33):
Google AI, Google's SERPs, chat,all these other guys can scour
your website potentially.
And then what they can do istake that information and
understand what it is and thenuse that information in some of
the richer search results areasand be a source of information
(18:57):
for you.
these ways to market yourbusiness, which essentially is
those things.
So what you need to do or thinkabout in the terms of schema is
do you want to take the time toor have someone take the time to
properly mark up your language,which markup's a fancy word for
(19:19):
just putting the right tagsaround things, helping these
search engines understand andhelping the AI systems
understand what is on your site,and in the aspirations of
gaining more visibility.
So as you serve it up, make iteasier for them to understand,
then they can reference iteasier, and the wheels on the
(19:40):
bus go round and round.
So schema is one of thosethings.
It don't sound good, though,does it?
Schema.
It sounds like scheme, doesn'tit?
But it's actually a very goodthing.
And so the idea is there'sactually, when you dive into
this stuff, Let's go over here.
I'll pull up my notes here realquick.
(20:03):
So Google, first of all, they dotell you this scheme obviously
is something very good.
And they also highlight the factthat this does help your
business show up in richresults.
But the idea is that it has tobe implemented on your website
in a correct way.
So if you could imagine when wetalk about the do-it-yourself
(20:24):
builders and things like that,why it's so important.
Well, it just seems more andmore silly the further along I
get that, you know, they justseem to think that the average
Joe can come in and startdropping in all these things and
launch their own site.
It's absolutely crazy if youlive in this industry to think
that business owners actuallythink that that works.
(20:46):
And it's even more crazy if youthink that a professional would
use those tools when they've gota, you know, instead of an
eight-pack box of crayons,they've got a You know,
watercolor paints or, you know,something more sophisticated.
But nonetheless, people are herdpeople, and herd mentality says,
oh, well, those things work forwhatever.
(21:09):
X number of hundreds ofthousands of businesses, so
obviously it's good enough formy business too.
That's the herd mentality.
So remember, in the old day, Idon't think this is actually
true, but lemmings do walk offthe cliff and they follow each
other.
It's kind of like that.
Humans, they do that too.
Well, if it's good enough forthem, it's good enough for me,
and then it's just a horribleway to think when it comes to
(21:33):
the Internet.
So schema, what it is, is youcan do things like you can mark
up different parts of a website.
Like, for example, FAQs is agood example.
What you can do is you canactually build a schema.
around FAQs, and then you couldmake it more intelligible for
(21:56):
these things to see your FAQsand then possibly present them
in the chat stream as someone isasking questions.
And you can become that point ofreference.
You can imagine the value ofdoing something like that.
But let's look at how this canbe really kind of messed up.
(22:18):
Because the idea is that theowner of a business who's
selling something will, one,either try to brainstorm
questions, which isn't a badthing in itself, but then
sometimes they even trust theirweb person to create the FAQs,
which I think is disastrous.
But here's kind of the deal.
(22:39):
So if you think about it, let'sjust take this FAQ schema.
So What you've got is you've gotthis little bit of language.
And by the way, if you go to,I'm trying to think of the
website off the top of my head,it's schema.org actually.
And if you go to schema.org,it'll actually show you the
different kind of markups thatyou can do on your site.
And so if you get back to theFAQs, what you can find out is
(23:02):
that, yeah, you could do that.
And you know what?
Using your experience to createsome questions and answers, it's
not a bad thing in itself,right?
But there are tools out there onthe web where you can actually
go through, find a topic, andthen find out the most popular
questions related to that topic.
So what would a business ratherdo?
(23:24):
Guess, use their experience,which is good, or would they
rather have a list of questionsthat people are asking actively
on the internet related to whatthey do?
And then focus their attentionon those questions.
Now, the next thing is you can'tfeed the answers through AI.
(23:45):
AI wants authoritative humancontent that is meaningful
content, not the generic contentthat is often created through
AI.
And so they value human content.
I've heard it said that AI hatesAI content, but that's what it
(24:08):
produces, correct?
Correct.
So the idea is you've got toanswer the questions on your
own.
And we actually give a cheatsheet on how people should
answer those questions, likewhat they should consider when
they're doing it, such as thelength, the focus, things like
that.
And then when you take thatinformation and then you wrap it
(24:30):
up into the proper schema, thenyou're kind of future-proofing
your business.
What you're doing is you'remaking it where current searches
and current AI models and allthat can recognize your data and
possibly use it.
But then you're alsofuture-proofing it because it's
(24:52):
also the best practice in orderto do it.
Now, the thing is that inbusiness that you– One thing as
an owner, you really need tounderstand as far as what I see,
is that the majority of theseSEO companies, web companies,
(25:12):
they're not following bestpractices.
Matter of fact, they're justkind of turning and burning a
lot of projects.
And so to be able to dosomething meaningful on the web,
you have to insert yourexpertise.
Like, for example, a good friendof mine and a client of mine for
a gosh, over, I guess, over 20years now, he's an electrician.
(25:36):
Really, really good guy.
And we're talking about theseideas.
Now, could you imagine mewriting the answers to the FAQs
for his particular businessbased on his expertise and where
he functions and then givingthose answers to him?
You can imagine that, one, it'sprobably going to be technically
(25:57):
messed up.
The other thing you wouldprobably realize pretty quick is
that it's not him.
It's not speaking from the righttone or voice.
And so what we're able to do isgive him the homework, give him
the data, and then send it tohim.
And then over a period of time,he's just going to feed us
gradually real-world answers tothose questions.
(26:21):
So what he's doing essentiallyis he's he's creating a rhythm
or we're creating a rhythm withhim where he can provide us with
real content.
And then we can take thatcontent, you know, check it out,
make sure it's all grammaticallycorrect.
And then we could take thatcontent and then we can use it
in FAQs.
Now, the other thing you coulddo, too, if you got an iPhone,
(26:43):
you could actually he couldactually take those questions
and he could answer them byspeaking into his phone.
It transcribes it.
And then we get thetranscription of the answer.
So it doesn't have to be thisbig elaborate effort to do it,
but it does need to come from asource of experience.
So we're recommending sometimesthat people just talk into their
phone and send us thetranscript.
(27:03):
You know, do whatever it takesto get us the right information
that pertains to their specificbusiness, and then we use that.
So you can imagine that's a lotdifferent than allowing your SEO
guy or your web guy to createyour FAQs for you on your
behalf.
And the reality is, is that it'smuch harder to put in systems
(27:25):
and ask the client to do somework than it is just to do it.
Because I realize that in theworld of business, it's, hey, I
just need to get this thingdone.
I need to knock this thing out.
Well, in the world where yourcredibility is going to be your
currency, being able to standout with original content is
(27:47):
going to be huge.
Now, just as people are usingdo-it-yourself website builders
to create websites, and theythink those are effective,
they're also going to use, a lotof people are going to use
ChatGPT and these other systemsto actually write the answers to
the questions, and they're goingto publish them, just like they
(28:08):
do blog articles and all thisother stuff, generic content,
and what's going to happen isit's going to backfire.
The reason being is thatGoogle's already seeing the
signals that AI content ismessing up their search results.
It's cluttering up their searchresults, and as such, they're
going to respond to that.
(28:30):
Now, if you think that Googlecannot find AI content, you are
mistaken.
There are a used in theeducational world in different
arenas.
And Grammarly's even got a toolwhere it can actually look and
see if the content appears to begenerated by AI.
And then what it can do isactually say, hey, either fix
(28:53):
this or you may want to put acitation with this or something
like that.
And so making sure that yourcontent is original and it is
based in your area and thenproperly marked up is
phenomenally huge.
Now, This is work, guys.
This is not let's get out of thefantasy world where you find the
(29:14):
right SEO guy, puts up a bunchof content, and the world goes
round and round, and you'rehappy.
Or you have a guy who's runningyour Google Ads to a little
landing page, and it's workedalways, and you're thinking it's
always going to work.
In the world of credibility,these things are breaking down.
In the world of credibility...
(29:34):
Google's never liked theselittle scrape websites that are
standing out there, and they'vedone a lot to purge them from
their search results.
And so as you're seeing thegames, as you're seeing the
fantasy becoming untangled andare basically winding up, and
you're seeing these models, nowthe idea is to provide the best
(29:56):
possible data.
Then you're able to see whythings like schema are
important.
So you want to talk to your webguy about schema.
How are you using schema?
What's your idea with schema?
And exactly how are we going touse that with our website and
our content in order to show upin these richer results in both
(30:18):
AI, Google, and the others?
So I strongly recommend you lookat that, and I'll provide you
with a few resources at thebottom of the page where you can
go look at schema.org.
Again, that's S-C-H-E-M-A.org.
And also, I'll pull up Google'sinformation about that, too.
Now, here's the really sad partof this.
(30:40):
The real sad part is we're justplaying by the rules that these
companies have set forth whenwe're doing these things.
We're trying to work with themto give them an accurate
portrayal of the company.
We're not trying to trickGoogle.
And a lot of times people thinkthey want to, you know, if
there's like a little trick,like a secret code in the video
(31:02):
game.
Like I remember when I was akid, I used to play a game
called Contra and there was acheat code that would give you
30 extra men.
I mean, you probably know whatI'm talking about.
And it was like this great cheatcode.
Then you could beat the game.
Well, these cheats today andthese little things that people
have done are now starting to goto the wayside and best
(31:23):
practices are rising again tothe surface.
SEO, the term, is evolving at arapid pace.
And what SEO was a few years agois not what SEO is today.
And there are things thateverything, basically everything
needs to play together.
And schema is just a piece ofthis.
(31:43):
So Do not leave here thinking,oh, schema is going to solve my
problems.
No, schema is not going to solveyour problems in itself, but
just like a puzzle, it's a pieceyou're probably missing from
your model and you need to thinkabout it and you need to
introduce this into yourconversations.
And then once you do that,you've got another checkbox
(32:05):
checked off.
And if you do this and work onthings like your NAP score and
other things that we've beentalking about, your business
will become more credible overtime.
And then you're going to gainmore visibility.
Similar to if you run ads toyour main website and get away
from these Google Ads guys whoare doing these other things,
(32:27):
you're going to be better off inthe long term.
Period.
It's just that easy.
So the one thing I wanted toalso kind of talk to you a
little bit about is the idea ofindexing pages on Google.
So this is a little bit related,but I just want to throw this
out.
Now, this is predicated based ona resource I read a couple weeks
(32:52):
ago that talked about howChatGPT typically doesn't refer
to websites that are on the top20 results on a Google search.
So that tells you howindependent these companies are
and how they're doing it.
So you can imagine thediversification of how you need
to set things up and theimportance of following best
(33:13):
practices so that you can appealto all of these search engines
or large language models orwhatever may have you in a
meaningful way.
And again, best practices arethe way to do it.
But the SERPs for Google, whichis Search Engine Results Page,
if you hear the term SERP, it'sjust a neat way to say once you
(33:35):
search and you hit the searchbutton and the results come up.
That's just a fancy way to saythat.
And what you find when you talkabout the SERPs is that Google's
process of indexing websites andkind of ranking the content, for
lack of a better word, is a lotdifferent than, say, ChatGPT
(33:59):
does its job to determine whatit pulls up.
And so they don't use the sameresources or the same things.
And yes, you could say Google isstill the big dog, and I don't
disagree with that for a second.
I mean, they are.
Numerically, you can't argue thepoint.
But with the evolution of theweb...
(34:21):
If you live long enough, whatyou find out is that businesses
climb and they topple, and thenother people rise up, and other
organizations and other ideasrise up, and then they grow, and
then somebody thinks they'regoing to be around forever, and
they topple too.
Now, I'm not saying Google'sgoing to topple.
That's not the point.
(34:41):
The point is that the marketshare could diversify
dramatically, and thepercentages at which people do
certain things could alsodiversify.
change dramatically as well,depending upon how everything
goes.
And this is still in the infancystate of this evolution of the
(35:02):
web toward these LLMs or largelanguage models.
So best thing you can do isfollow best practices as a
business owner.
And you probably don't know whatbest practices are, which is why
you got to ask a lot ofquestions.
And one of those questions couldrelate to a schema and not just,
(35:22):
are you building an FAQ schema?
Because the easy answer is yes.
The real question is, well, areyou building an FAQ schema?
What questions are you asking?
Where did you get the questionsto begin with?
Can I see the data on thequestions?
And how did you ensure that theanswers you're giving to the
(35:43):
FAQs relate to our businessexperience and focus on what we
know as a business as opposed towhat is generically known, which
could be easily overlooked andnot validated by one or more of
these online resources?
(36:03):
You see, it's a lot differentthan just ask, are you using
schema?
You know, that's a simpleversion of something you should
dive into.
So I think this is huge for alot of reasons.
One, we're unmasking the ideathat AI and Google is this magic
(36:23):
thing that has an infiniteamount of knowledge and it just
can go grab stuff andautomatically understand it.
They all readily admit we'reworking together to build a
community of data.
And the most important or themost credible data is going to
rise to the surface.
And in the world where, youknow, this transition started to
(36:46):
happen forever ago, where you gofrom nationwide searches to
hyper-localizing, you know,results, then you've got a real
opportunity if you do thingsright as opposed to trying to
cheat the system.
Now, I do want to conclude withthis.
I talked about this earlier.
(37:06):
you still have to pay the bills,right?
And the idea is if you're usinga Google Ads company or using
some ways that are not the bestpractices in the world for your
credibility long-term, butyou're making sales and you're
seeing what's going on and youkind of want to keep that train
(37:27):
moving, the idea is you do haveto figure out how to move.
And I understand that.
But staying at home base andsticking your head back in the
sand with practices that aren'tthe best in the world is
definitely not the way to goabout it.
You know, you need to have astrategy where you move toward a
(37:47):
plan and get ready for theripples.
And make sure you're not doingbasically things that could get
you into trouble.
For example, number one, youdon't want to fake reviews on
Google Business.
That's a really, really bad ideato fake reviews.
Not just because you could getkicked off, you know, have your
(38:12):
listing suspended by Google, butactually the Federal Trade
Commission considers fakereviews a form of deceptive
marketing.
There are consumer protectionviolations and, you know, fines
that you could You could gothrough and also lawsuits.
And so the idea of trying tojump in line with fake reviews
(38:32):
probably is not the best thingin the world you can do.
And there are still services outthere that do those things.
So you see, it's like, is itreally worth it to you?
Similar cold email marketing,you know, getting hold of an SEO
company that's not using bestpractices, not doing your
(38:53):
homework.
And the list goes on and on andon, not just with lost money
that you're paying them, butalso with lost time and hurting
your reputation.
All those things go into it.
And a lot of these things arestill kind of pseudo-working.
If you go back and look at PBMs,for example, private blog
(39:16):
networks, you're going to seethat there's still a whole
industry around this idea andthat– This is all going to come
full circle.
So maybe next time I'll talk toyou about a lot of these
deceptive practices and what youcan do to maybe identify them
and avoid them because youshould avoid them.
(39:36):
All right.
So also, hey, just let's finishup on a few things.
I just blocked probably 20 or 30cold emails to me.
Some were promising our companyleads for a few bucks a piece.
Some were offering services.
Some were offering farmingthings out to other countries.
Let's see.
What else was there?
(39:56):
Oh, yeah, I get the occasionaltext messages or the loans.
I'm sure you've gotten thosethings.
And I get those cold emails fromboth these crazy little new
startups, but then I also getthem from big companies.
Big phone companies are spammingme, and I don't seem like I can
get off their list.
(40:17):
Make sure you block thosethings, okay?
Because you're not just savingyourself time.
I mean, if you took...
10 minutes to answer each one ofthose emails, and you do six of
them, well, 10 minutes times sixis 60.
That means you've lost an hourof your day entertaining these
crazy notions and chasingfantasies.
We live in the real world.
(40:37):
Stop doing it.
Just block them.
Move on.
And, you know, make sure youfootnote the idea that you don't
work with those companiesbecause what you're doing is
when you answer an email likethat, What they do for pennies
on the dollar, they go, ah, Igot a lead.
And then they're going to keepdoing it to other people.
So it's a good way to kind ofkeep the community clean.
(41:00):
It's a good way to keepeverything nice.
And it's sending a message tothe people that are sending
those cold emails that itdoesn't work.
And so that's one of the thingsthat we need to actually got.
All right.
So seriously, you know, in thelast four years, I've been
getting like text messages sentto me.
by politicians, like inviting meto town square meetings and
(41:25):
crazy stuff.
It's like, what does that sayabout the politician?
I mean, regardless if they cansneak it under some law or
whatever, what does that sayabout them when they are mass
producing text messages toeveryone that don't want to be
involved in it about attending alocal town hall?
You'll see that those games arejust insane, insane.
(41:49):
So from a nuanced perspective,you know, hey, don't play with
these guys.
Get out of the sandbox.
Do things legitimately.
Work with your people.
Be patient.
And know that doing things rightis not doing things quick.
You know that in every aspect ofyour life.
Until next time.
SPEAKER_00 (42:05):
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):
John Wick, the Terminator, and Mad Max on this
episode of Over the Bull.
Hi, thank you for tuning in.
This week, we're going to breakdown a little bit about the
internet.
And I wanted to start by takingyou on a journey through the
world of the mind.
(00:29):
So I was listening to a podcast,I don't know, about a month,
month and a half, could havebeen a little bit longer.
And it was between a theist andan atheist.
And these were top thinkers, youknow, who were going at it.
And you may remember the podcastif you run in certain circles.
And one thing they were talkingabout in this podcast was the
(00:52):
atheist was talking about howboring heaven would be.
He said that, you know, in thisworld, there's a tension.
All the movies have tension.
Everything has tension in theworld because they don't make
movies where you're in a utopianexistence.
And in that utopian existence,you know, you just watch that
for two hours.
You know, there's always a rub,a friction, a bad guy.
(01:18):
And the dystopian futures arethe ones that are the most
attractive to humans, right?
And so I started thinking aboutthis and I realized that, you
know, in the mind, we look atfantasy as something that is
attractive to us.
You know, we imagine, you know,sometimes being the hero or we
(01:41):
watch these tense moments, youknow, for enjoyment, you know.
But if we were to take thosesame situations and apply them
to real life, you It would beanything but what reality is.
You see, we're in a playgroundof imagination, and his response
was in the playground ofimagination.
(02:01):
It wasn't in practical everydaylife.
For example, if you have a lifeand a family and you have
everything going on, probablythe last thing you would want is
someone to hack your bankaccount and you go on a big
journey to try to recoup themoney.
You probably wouldn't want harmto come to someone in your
(02:25):
family or yourself, and youspend a long period of time
trying to get justice for thatexperience.
You probably don't want thesethings.
But in the mind, in theimagination, when we watch
certain things, we think thatthat dystopian future, because
it's entertaining, is what wewant.
(02:46):
When in reality, we do wantpeace.
I mean, a day where my family issafe, my kids are safe, my
clients are in good shape, youknow, there's not a lot of
tension and we're able tofunction a fairly seamless day.
Those are the best days.
It's not the days where yourspouse is kidnapped and you race
(03:10):
through time and space in orderto try to save that person.
And it was stunning to me thatThis particular atheist, which I
didn't know him, you know, Iknow about Hitchens and a lot of
these other guys.
But but, you know, when when youlook at him, I was really
surprised that he was someonewho actually said these things
(03:32):
and that people were listening.
But, you know, the human minddoes really good jobs of like
putting together faults that areincoherent and making them seem
as though they're logical.
And a lot of times in the worldwe live as humans, we skip over
the nuances in order to connectthe dots and make sense of it
(03:57):
and then build a worldview inwhich we live.
But you see that the dystopian,the fantasy, is not what we
really want in reality.
We don't want these things.
It's just something that weentertain in the recesses of our
mind.
And so a utopian existenceobviously is a great existence.
(04:21):
It's not one that's not.
Now, if we transition that,let's move over to, as promised,
let's talk about Mad Max.
So, you know, the series, andI've loved the series, you know,
I've gone back to when MelGibson played the character, and
then after that, of course.
But the idea is that it's thatdystopian future, right?
(04:42):
It's that dystopian realitywhere everything is sideways.
You know, you have people whoare even deformed.
It looks like they have cancergrowths and things like that.
And it's very militant and, youknow, everyone for themselves
and all that.
And in our mind, we go, wow,that's, you know, it's such an
exciting premise to sit thereand watch that for some people.
(05:03):
And so then, you know, your mindkind of gets whisked away into
thinking the drudgeries of dailylife would not be as great as
living in an environment likethat.
However, we also don't think ofourselves as the guy that gets
run over by the car, you know,the incidental kill, the guy
crossing the street to maybe goget some water and the hero or
(05:26):
the bad guy takes him out.
We also picture ourselves asbeing the hero of the movie and
not the innocent bystander or afamily's victims of a situation
that gets out of hand betweenthe two.
So, we also don't think aboutwhy the bad guys are the bad
(05:46):
guys and, you know, what theirstories are because it's a
narrative within a very limitedscope.
And so, we kind of take that andwe kind of run with it.
Same thing with the John Wickseries.
I just got through watchingBallerina, which is the latest
installment from the John Wickworld.
(06:06):
And, you know, there are so manymurders and so many things that
are going on throughout thatworld.
story you know uh i don't wantto go into the premise i don't
want to ruin it for you but butthere's just a ton of things
that uh you know a ton ofkillings and so if you could
imagine you know the person inthe beginning she goes through a
situation where somethinghappens and for the rest of the
(06:28):
movie you know this person goesout and takes out a bunch of
people you know in in In themovies, they make killing seem
like eating a cheeseburger orsomething like that.
But in reality, it's far, farfrom that.
It's incredibly different.
(06:49):
Then if you transition that to,say, the Terminator movies, we
have this idea of Skynet, where–In Skynet, you know, it's a
supercomputer, and it goes andultimately it rises up against
the people that created it.
And when it comes online, nowyou have this war between
(07:10):
computers and humans.
And, of course, we have, youknow, things such as time travel
in the movie and other thingsthat are just sensationalistic
and kind of outside the scope ofhumanity, similar to knowing
what's going on outside theuniverse is real.
beyond the scope of humanity.
It's in the place of a fantasy.
(07:30):
And, but you know, it's, it'sthe playground of the mind.
So when we look at the internetand we look at, um, artificial
intelligence and we look atGoogle search results and we, we
listen to what the media issaying, you know, such as
(07:50):
they're saying that the, um, thelarge language models, or
there'll be a point of wherethese computers become sentient.
And once they become sentient,and I believe the number one
point was around 2030, I don'tknow where it's at right now,
but there's this idea thatthey're going one day, they're
going to basically have aconsciousness to them.
(08:15):
But the weird thing is, is thatas humans, we still can't define
what consciousness is.
You know, we have a hard timeunderstanding these concepts for
ourselves, and we actuallywouldn't know if they became
sentient or if they justsimulate it to such a degree
that fools us into thinking thatthey are sentient.
(08:36):
Like, for example, if you wereto take– they say you download
your mind into a virtualexistence, and in that virtual
existence– you'd be able to, intheory, live forever or
whatever.
They're making a lot ofassumptions.
Number one is that memories andwhat makes a person what they
(08:58):
are and what makes you what youare.
You're actually a combination ofyour experiences and you assume
identities throughout your life.
You may assume the identity of aparent or a business owner or
whatever.
And then later a granddad, maybea great granddad if you're
lucky, and all those things.
(09:19):
But as you go through, it's likeyou're assuming identities.
And so to assume that we evenknow what consciousness is, is a
little bit, in my opinion, it'ssilly.
It's silly to think you candownload a bunch of memories and
all these other things anddownload someone, but we don't
even know really what we'redownloading.
(09:40):
So basically what you would haveis You could have just a really
good virtual rendition of aperson, and it does not contain
the essence of the person.
In other words, it doesn't takethe person out.
And through my belief system, Ido not believe you can translate
the spark of God to a computer.
(10:05):
I think it's kind of a sillyconcept.
So anyway, getting back to largelanguage models and all that
kind of stuff, we overthink it.
We think that these systems,these Google algorithms and all
these other things are sophenomenally complicated and so
(10:25):
much smarter than human beingsthat they can do things that we
can't.
And they're almost a modern daymagician.
I believe it was Google that putout that they said that they
were making an AI god.
I forget where that quote was,but I believe I read that.
And it's like, you know, we'remaking these presumptions that
(10:49):
are a little bit silly, I mean,frankly, from my opinion.
And we really kind of overshootwhat exactly the technology
does.
And then it becomes more ofmystery than of substance for
people.
So where am I going with allthis?
When it comes to marketing, theidea is that you want to show up
(11:14):
on these search engines if youown a business.
And you want to also bereferenced by ChatGPT, Grok, and
all these other large languagemodels, Perplexity, you know,
down the line.
And Gemini, of course.
Let's not forget that one.
And the idea is you want yourbusiness to show up in those
results.
(11:35):
And if we think that theInternet is somehow so
sophisticated that it thinks onits own and that this
information solely goes to thiswhatever, this recipe that no
one can know, and that basicallythe effort becomes nebulous.
(11:57):
Like, what do we do?
When we get our answers fromChad GPT, you know, how does
that work?
And so then you either stumblearound in the dark or you start
chasing different ideas andconcepts.
And a lot of businesses stillchase the magic bullet theory,
you know, where they think.
(12:17):
one thing's going to solve alltheir problems.
And, and then they bounce fromperson to person and they have
these fantasies of their own offinding a person that has the
magic bullet, their businessgrows, you know, magically and
that they don't live in the realworld where people price shop
and people, um, look around atoptions and they work with
people that they want to workwith and that those things take
(12:39):
time to, to get around to, youknow, I talked to, uh, a
business here recently, and itwas amazing because we were
talking about starting a newdivision.
And he talked about theinvestment.
He says, you know, there's yearsto get a return on investment
with some of these concepts.
And so he was prepared tounderstand that starting a new
(13:01):
division didn't justautomatically put him into
black.
In a similar fashion, we seethat new businesses, when they
start up, the establishedbusinesses do so much better.
Well, why is that?
They're established.
People already trust them.
They know where to go for stuffand they know what they're going
to get.
And so to switch to anothercompany means that you need to
(13:25):
be there at the right place andtime, which is where things like
awareness KPIs come in.
And you have to be patient andyou have to work harder if
you're the new guy on the blockversus being a company that's
more established where youPeople already trust that brand.
This is where branding comes inand building that trust factor
and the top of mind awareness orTOMA, as they like to call it.
(13:50):
And so when you think of largelanguage models and you think of
AI and you're coming back to it,you're like, well, what do I do?
How do I practically dosomething?
That's meaningful on the webrather than just giving somebody
a monthly staple of ads that arerunning, and you may or may not
(14:10):
know how effective those ads arebased upon the people you're
working with.
Now, at Integris, this is wherewe've been talking a long time
about the idea of building a thereputation of the company and
avoiding the get-rich-quickmodes when it comes to online
(14:31):
marketing.
Yes, your budget matters.
Yes, you got to figure out thesandboxes you can play in for
what you got.
But you also have to come to apoint of reality where if you
don't fund certain things or puta serious financial effort into
it with a serious group ofpeople, then odds are you're
going to fumble around in thedark.
(14:52):
And it's a sad situation, but alot of businesses, frankly, do
that.
And they think that if they justfind that right person or
whatever, that the world willjust magically open up to them,
which is a fantasy.
So when we come back to thesethings like chat GPT and all
this, the Internet is changing.
(15:16):
And this is something I've beentalking about for some time now.
The evolution of the Internet isin hyperdrive.
to use whatever science fictionterm you want to use there to
represent quick speed, but it'schanging in a phenomenal way.
And the statistics such as, youknow, 800 million users plus
with chat GPT, I believe as oflate last year, earlier this
(15:40):
year, you know, you realize thatpeople are changing the way that
they're doing things.
I talked to a a person that isan entrepreneur, he's starting a
business, smart guy.
And he said that he never usedGoogle searches anymore.
He says, I just talk to chat,you know.
And the thing is, is that you'refinding that more and more
(16:02):
people are shifting how theysearch and what they search for.
And you find out that the oldconcepts of the sales funnel,
they speed up too.
where people can now get theanswers that they want, enter
into a conversation and make apurchase quicker than they would
(16:22):
traditionally when they had tosearch for something and back
out and then do another searchand refine their search until
they got to a point of purchase.
And so then you get into thosekind of situations.
So what are one of the weaponsthat you can use in your
business to help people AI outand help Google's algorithms
(16:46):
out, because here's the deal.
They're not sentient.
OK, it's like if you really wantto look at it in a practical
way, what you can look at isit's a really sophisticated way
to take information and give itto you in a meaningful way where
it's going to save you a ton oftime.
(17:06):
And then it can also take thatinformation, kind of recycle it
and do different things with it.
So let's talk about schema.
This is where we're going toland the plane today.
So schema, if we look at it, letme pull up Google's definition
(17:26):
because, you know, when you dopodcasts, people are always
looking to point out littleweird things, which is why I
like to quote other people too,because, you know, I'm not just
a lone gun out here trying totell you things that aren't
true, but it's actually whateverybody's thinking.
So, a schema in the context of awebsite, and this is Google's AI
(17:48):
overview, we'll go ahead and dothe AIO, remember, Google AI
overview.
Schema in the context of awebsite, also known as
structured data or schemamarkup, refers to a specific
vocabulary of code that you canadd to your website's HTML.
This code helps search engineslike Google understand the
content of your pages, leadingto more informative search
(18:11):
results and potentially higherclick-through rates.
Essentially, it's a way to tellsearch engines what your content
is about using standardizedtags.
So let's break that down alittle bit.
Schema is a way for you to takestuff on your website, And then
what you can do is you canformat it in a way to where
(18:33):
Google AI, Google's SERPs, chat,all these other guys can scour
your website potentially.
And then what they can do istake that information and
understand what it is and thenuse that information in some of
the richer search results areasand be a source of information
(18:57):
for you.
these ways to market yourbusiness, which essentially is
those things.
So what you need to do or thinkabout in the terms of schema is
do you want to take the time toor have someone take the time to
properly mark up your language,which markup's a fancy word for
(19:19):
just putting the right tagsaround things, helping these
search engines understand andhelping the AI systems
understand what is on your site,and in the aspirations of
gaining more visibility.
So as you serve it up, make iteasier for them to understand,
then they can reference iteasier, and the wheels on the
(19:40):
bus go round and round.
So schema is one of thosethings.
It don't sound good, though,does it?
Schema.
It sounds like scheme, doesn'tit?
But it's actually a very goodthing.
And so the idea is there'sactually, when you dive into
this stuff, Let's go over here.
I'll pull up my notes here realquick.
(20:03):
So Google, first of all, they dotell you this scheme obviously
is something very good.
And they also highlight the factthat this does help your
business show up in richresults.
But the idea is that it has tobe implemented on your website
in a correct way.
So if you could imagine when wetalk about the do-it-yourself
(20:24):
builders and things like that,why it's so important.
Well, it just seems more andmore silly the further along I
get that, you know, they justseem to think that the average
Joe can come in and startdropping in all these things and
launch their own site.
It's absolutely crazy if youlive in this industry to think
that business owners actuallythink that that works.
(20:46):
And it's even more crazy if youthink that a professional would
use those tools when they've gota, you know, instead of an
eight-pack box of crayons,they've got a You know,
watercolor paints or, you know,something more sophisticated.
But nonetheless, people are herdpeople, and herd mentality says,
oh, well, those things work forwhatever.
(21:09):
X number of hundreds ofthousands of businesses, so
obviously it's good enough formy business too.
That's the herd mentality.
So remember, in the old day, Idon't think this is actually
true, but lemmings do walk offthe cliff and they follow each
other.
It's kind of like that.
Humans, they do that too.
Well, if it's good enough forthem, it's good enough for me,
and then it's just a horribleway to think when it comes to
(21:33):
the Internet.
So schema, what it is, is youcan do things like you can mark
up different parts of a website.
Like, for example, FAQs is agood example.
What you can do is you canactually build a schema.
around FAQs, and then you couldmake it more intelligible for
(21:56):
these things to see your FAQsand then possibly present them
in the chat stream as someone isasking questions.
And you can become that point ofreference.
You can imagine the value ofdoing something like that.
But let's look at how this canbe really kind of messed up.
(22:18):
Because the idea is that theowner of a business who's
selling something will, one,either try to brainstorm
questions, which isn't a badthing in itself, but then
sometimes they even trust theirweb person to create the FAQs,
which I think is disastrous.
But here's kind of the deal.
(22:39):
So if you think about it, let'sjust take this FAQ schema.
So What you've got is you've gotthis little bit of language.
And by the way, if you go to,I'm trying to think of the
website off the top of my head,it's schema.org actually.
And if you go to schema.org,it'll actually show you the
different kind of markups thatyou can do on your site.
And so if you get back to theFAQs, what you can find out is
(23:02):
that, yeah, you could do that.
And you know what?
Using your experience to createsome questions and answers, it's
not a bad thing in itself,right?
But there are tools out there onthe web where you can actually
go through, find a topic, andthen find out the most popular
questions related to that topic.
So what would a business ratherdo?
(23:24):
Guess, use their experience,which is good, or would they
rather have a list of questionsthat people are asking actively
on the internet related to whatthey do?
And then focus their attentionon those questions.
Now, the next thing is you can'tfeed the answers through AI.
(23:45):
AI wants authoritative humancontent that is meaningful
content, not the generic contentthat is often created through
AI.
And so they value human content.
I've heard it said that AI hatesAI content, but that's what it
(24:08):
produces, correct?
Correct.
So the idea is you've got toanswer the questions on your
own.
And we actually give a cheatsheet on how people should
answer those questions, likewhat they should consider when
they're doing it, such as thelength, the focus, things like
that.
And then when you take thatinformation and then you wrap it
(24:30):
up into the proper schema, thenyou're kind of future-proofing
your business.
What you're doing is you'remaking it where current searches
and current AI models and allthat can recognize your data and
possibly use it.
But then you're alsofuture-proofing it because it's
(24:52):
also the best practice in orderto do it.
Now, the thing is that inbusiness that you– One thing as
an owner, you really need tounderstand as far as what I see,
is that the majority of theseSEO companies, web companies,
(25:12):
they're not following bestpractices.
Matter of fact, they're justkind of turning and burning a
lot of projects.
And so to be able to dosomething meaningful on the web,
you have to insert yourexpertise.
Like, for example, a good friendof mine and a client of mine for
a gosh, over, I guess, over 20years now, he's an electrician.
(25:36):
Really, really good guy.
And we're talking about theseideas.
Now, could you imagine mewriting the answers to the FAQs
for his particular businessbased on his expertise and where
he functions and then givingthose answers to him?
You can imagine that, one, it'sprobably going to be technically
(25:57):
messed up.
The other thing you wouldprobably realize pretty quick is
that it's not him.
It's not speaking from the righttone or voice.
And so what we're able to do isgive him the homework, give him
the data, and then send it tohim.
And then over a period of time,he's just going to feed us
gradually real-world answers tothose questions.
(26:21):
So what he's doing essentiallyis he's he's creating a rhythm
or we're creating a rhythm withhim where he can provide us with
real content.
And then we can take thatcontent, you know, check it out,
make sure it's all grammaticallycorrect.
And then we could take thatcontent and then we can use it
in FAQs.
Now, the other thing you coulddo, too, if you got an iPhone,
(26:43):
you could actually he couldactually take those questions
and he could answer them byspeaking into his phone.
It transcribes it.
And then we get thetranscription of the answer.
So it doesn't have to be thisbig elaborate effort to do it,
but it does need to come from asource of experience.
So we're recommending sometimesthat people just talk into their
phone and send us thetranscript.
(27:03):
You know, do whatever it takesto get us the right information
that pertains to their specificbusiness, and then we use that.
So you can imagine that's a lotdifferent than allowing your SEO
guy or your web guy to createyour FAQs for you on your
behalf.
And the reality is, is that it'smuch harder to put in systems
(27:25):
and ask the client to do somework than it is just to do it.
Because I realize that in theworld of business, it's, hey, I
just need to get this thingdone.
I need to knock this thing out.
Well, in the world where yourcredibility is going to be your
currency, being able to standout with original content is
(27:47):
going to be huge.
Now, just as people are usingdo-it-yourself website builders
to create websites, and theythink those are effective,
they're also going to use, a lotof people are going to use
ChatGPT and these other systemsto actually write the answers to
the questions, and they're goingto publish them, just like they
(28:08):
do blog articles and all thisother stuff, generic content,
and what's going to happen isit's going to backfire.
The reason being is thatGoogle's already seeing the
signals that AI content ismessing up their search results.
It's cluttering up their searchresults, and as such, they're
going to respond to that.
(28:30):
Now, if you think that Googlecannot find AI content, you are
mistaken.
There are a used in theeducational world in different
arenas.
And Grammarly's even got a toolwhere it can actually look and
see if the content appears to begenerated by AI.
And then what it can do isactually say, hey, either fix
(28:53):
this or you may want to put acitation with this or something
like that.
And so making sure that yourcontent is original and it is
based in your area and thenproperly marked up is
phenomenally huge.
Now, This is work, guys.
This is not let's get out of thefantasy world where you find the
(29:14):
right SEO guy, puts up a bunchof content, and the world goes
round and round, and you'rehappy.
Or you have a guy who's runningyour Google Ads to a little
landing page, and it's workedalways, and you're thinking it's
always going to work.
In the world of credibility,these things are breaking down.
In the world of credibility...
(29:34):
Google's never liked theselittle scrape websites that are
standing out there, and they'vedone a lot to purge them from
their search results.
And so as you're seeing thegames, as you're seeing the
fantasy becoming untangled andare basically winding up, and
you're seeing these models, nowthe idea is to provide the best
(29:56):
possible data.
Then you're able to see whythings like schema are
important.
So you want to talk to your webguy about schema.
How are you using schema?
What's your idea with schema?
And exactly how are we going touse that with our website and
our content in order to show upin these richer results in both
(30:18):
AI, Google, and the others?
So I strongly recommend you lookat that, and I'll provide you
with a few resources at thebottom of the page where you can
go look at schema.org.
Again, that's S-C-H-E-M-A.org.
And also, I'll pull up Google'sinformation about that, too.
Now, here's the really sad partof this.
(30:40):
The real sad part is we're justplaying by the rules that these
companies have set forth whenwe're doing these things.
We're trying to work with themto give them an accurate
portrayal of the company.
We're not trying to trickGoogle.
And a lot of times people thinkthey want to, you know, if
there's like a little trick,like a secret code in the video
(31:02):
game.
Like I remember when I was akid, I used to play a game
called Contra and there was acheat code that would give you
30 extra men.
I mean, you probably know whatI'm talking about.
And it was like this great cheatcode.
Then you could beat the game.
Well, these cheats today andthese little things that people
have done are now starting to goto the wayside and best
(31:23):
practices are rising again tothe surface.
SEO, the term, is evolving at arapid pace.
And what SEO was a few years agois not what SEO is today.
And there are things thateverything, basically everything
needs to play together.
And schema is just a piece ofthis.
(31:43):
So Do not leave here thinking,oh, schema is going to solve my
problems.
No, schema is not going to solveyour problems in itself, but
just like a puzzle, it's a pieceyou're probably missing from
your model and you need to thinkabout it and you need to
introduce this into yourconversations.
And then once you do that,you've got another checkbox
(32:05):
checked off.
And if you do this and work onthings like your NAP score and
other things that we've beentalking about, your business
will become more credible overtime.
And then you're going to gainmore visibility.
Similar to if you run ads toyour main website and get away
from these Google Ads guys whoare doing these other things,
(32:27):
you're going to be better off inthe long term.
Period.
It's just that easy.
So the one thing I wanted toalso kind of talk to you a
little bit about is the idea ofindexing pages on Google.
So this is a little bit related,but I just want to throw this
out.
Now, this is predicated based ona resource I read a couple weeks
(32:52):
ago that talked about howChatGPT typically doesn't refer
to websites that are on the top20 results on a Google search.
So that tells you howindependent these companies are
and how they're doing it.
So you can imagine thediversification of how you need
to set things up and theimportance of following best
(33:13):
practices so that you can appealto all of these search engines
or large language models orwhatever may have you in a
meaningful way.
And again, best practices arethe way to do it.
But the SERPs for Google, whichis Search Engine Results Page,
if you hear the term SERP, it'sjust a neat way to say once you
(33:35):
search and you hit the searchbutton and the results come up.
That's just a fancy way to saythat.
And what you find when you talkabout the SERPs is that Google's
process of indexing websites andkind of ranking the content, for
lack of a better word, is a lotdifferent than, say, ChatGPT
(33:59):
does its job to determine whatit pulls up.
And so they don't use the sameresources or the same things.
And yes, you could say Google isstill the big dog, and I don't
disagree with that for a second.
I mean, they are.
Numerically, you can't argue thepoint.
But with the evolution of theweb...
(34:21):
If you live long enough, whatyou find out is that businesses
climb and they topple, and thenother people rise up, and other
organizations and other ideasrise up, and then they grow, and
then somebody thinks they'regoing to be around forever, and
they topple too.
Now, I'm not saying Google'sgoing to topple.
That's not the point.
(34:41):
The point is that the marketshare could diversify
dramatically, and thepercentages at which people do
certain things could alsodiversify.
change dramatically as well,depending upon how everything
goes.
And this is still in the infancystate of this evolution of the
(35:02):
web toward these LLMs or largelanguage models.
So best thing you can do isfollow best practices as a
business owner.
And you probably don't know whatbest practices are, which is why
you got to ask a lot ofquestions.
And one of those questions couldrelate to a schema and not just,
(35:22):
are you building an FAQ schema?
Because the easy answer is yes.
The real question is, well, areyou building an FAQ schema?
What questions are you asking?
Where did you get the questionsto begin with?
Can I see the data on thequestions?
And how did you ensure that theanswers you're giving to the
(35:43):
FAQs relate to our businessexperience and focus on what we
know as a business as opposed towhat is generically known, which
could be easily overlooked andnot validated by one or more of
these online resources?
(36:03):
You see, it's a lot differentthan just ask, are you using
schema?
You know, that's a simpleversion of something you should
dive into.
So I think this is huge for alot of reasons.
One, we're unmasking the ideathat AI and Google is this magic
(36:23):
thing that has an infiniteamount of knowledge and it just
can go grab stuff andautomatically understand it.
They all readily admit we'reworking together to build a
community of data.
And the most important or themost credible data is going to
rise to the surface.
And in the world where, youknow, this transition started to
(36:46):
happen forever ago, where you gofrom nationwide searches to
hyper-localizing, you know,results, then you've got a real
opportunity if you do thingsright as opposed to trying to
cheat the system.
Now, I do want to conclude withthis.
I talked about this earlier.
(37:06):
you still have to pay the bills,right?
And the idea is if you're usinga Google Ads company or using
some ways that are not the bestpractices in the world for your
credibility long-term, butyou're making sales and you're
seeing what's going on and youkind of want to keep that train
(37:27):
moving, the idea is you do haveto figure out how to move.
And I understand that.
But staying at home base andsticking your head back in the
sand with practices that aren'tthe best in the world is
definitely not the way to goabout it.
You know, you need to have astrategy where you move toward a
(37:47):
plan and get ready for theripples.
And make sure you're not doingbasically things that could get
you into trouble.
For example, number one, youdon't want to fake reviews on
Google Business.
That's a really, really bad ideato fake reviews.
Not just because you could getkicked off, you know, have your
(38:12):
listing suspended by Google, butactually the Federal Trade
Commission considers fakereviews a form of deceptive
marketing.
There are consumer protectionviolations and, you know, fines
that you could You could gothrough and also lawsuits.
And so the idea of trying tojump in line with fake reviews
(38:32):
probably is not the best thingin the world you can do.
And there are still services outthere that do those things.
So you see, it's like, is itreally worth it to you?
Similar cold email marketing,you know, getting hold of an SEO
company that's not using bestpractices, not doing your
(38:53):
homework.
And the list goes on and on andon, not just with lost money
that you're paying them, butalso with lost time and hurting
your reputation.
All those things go into it.
And a lot of these things arestill kind of pseudo-working.
If you go back and look at PBMs,for example, private blog
(39:16):
networks, you're going to seethat there's still a whole
industry around this idea andthat– This is all going to come
full circle.
So maybe next time I'll talk toyou about a lot of these
deceptive practices and what youcan do to maybe identify them
and avoid them because youshould avoid them.
(39:36):
All right.
So also, hey, just let's finishup on a few things.
I just blocked probably 20 or 30cold emails to me.
Some were promising our companyleads for a few bucks a piece.
Some were offering services.
Some were offering farmingthings out to other countries.
Let's see.
What else was there?
(39:56):
Oh, yeah, I get the occasionaltext messages or the loans.
I'm sure you've gotten thosethings.
And I get those cold emails fromboth these crazy little new
startups, but then I also getthem from big companies.
Big phone companies are spammingme, and I don't seem like I can
get off their list.
(40:17):
Make sure you block thosethings, okay?
Because you're not just savingyourself time.
I mean, if you took...
10 minutes to answer each one ofthose emails, and you do six of
them, well, 10 minutes times sixis 60.
That means you've lost an hourof your day entertaining these
crazy notions and chasingfantasies.
We live in the real world.
(40:37):
Stop doing it.
Just block them.
Move on.
And, you know, make sure youfootnote the idea that you don't
work with those companiesbecause what you're doing is
when you answer an email likethat, What they do for pennies
on the dollar, they go, ah, Igot a lead.
And then they're going to keepdoing it to other people.
So it's a good way to kind ofkeep the community clean.
(41:00):
It's a good way to keepeverything nice.
And it's sending a message tothe people that are sending
those cold emails that itdoesn't work.
And so that's one of the thingsthat we need to actually got.
All right.
So seriously, you know, in thelast four years, I've been
getting like text messages sentto me.
by politicians, like inviting meto town square meetings and
(41:25):
crazy stuff.
It's like, what does that sayabout the politician?
I mean, regardless if they cansneak it under some law or
whatever, what does that sayabout them when they are mass
producing text messages toeveryone that don't want to be
involved in it about attending alocal town hall?
You'll see that those games arejust insane, insane.
(41:49):
So from a nuanced perspective,you know, hey, don't play with
these guys.
Get out of the sandbox.
Do things legitimately.
Work with your people.
Be patient.
And know that doing things rightis not doing things quick.
You know that in every aspect ofyour life.
Until next time.
SPEAKER_00 (42:05):
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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