Getting Your Business Found Online with Dave Burnett, AOK Marketing: Show Notes & Transcript

Post | Sep 30, 2025

Welcome back to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business! Looking for Marketing Smarts? You’re in the right place. After almost 4 years of helping to make you savvier marketers, we decided to broaden this podcast to include more business-oriented topics that will make you savvier business leaders.

In this episode of Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business, we’re talking how to get your business found online with Dave Burnett. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots – follow and leave a 5-star review!

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Show Notes
Marketing Smarts Summary
Transcript

Getting Your Business Found Online with Dave Burnett, AOK Marketing

The complex world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has now taken a hard right with the introduction of AI (Artificial Intelligence). It’s no longer enough to be one of the top options when someone Google searches a keyword you have attribution to. Now, oftentimes the top response is AI’s answer to your search. To show up there, you have to be recognized as an authority. We wanted to feature an expert who can help you package that authority in the new world of AI, so we welcomed on Dave Burnett, Founder of AOK Marketing. He helps you acquire more loyal customers. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

Why AI SEO matters
The Eight Essential Elements of SEO
SEO for AI vs. traditional SEO
Technical considerations – how do robots.txt files work
What happens when information is wrong?

And as always, if you need Strategic Counsel, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at: ForthRight-People.com.

Check out the episode, show notes, and transcript below:

Show Notes

Getting Your Business Found Online with Dave Burnett, AOK Marketing
- [0:00] Welcome to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business
- [0:32] The new complexity: SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing), and AI‘s (Artificial Intelligence) impact on search
- [2:17] Dave’s background and SEO journey
- [3:43] How SEO has changed with AI
- [5:09] Understand the two layers of information authority
- [6:35] Wikipedia‘s critical role in AI
- [7:57] Introduction to knowledge graphs as a source of truth
- [9:51] The value of PR (Public Relations) in modern SEO
- [12:10] Technical considerations – how do robots.txt files work
- [14:07] How do large language models (LLM) actually work?
- [17:02] AI knowledge limitations
- [19:15] What happens when information is wrong?
- [21:04] Why AI SEO matters
- [24:26] How to audit your AI presence
- [25:53] The Eight Essential Elements of SEO
- [28:16] Creating a Wikipedia page
- [32:38] Deep diving into knowledge graphs
- [36:28] Getting social proof for algorithms
- [39:56] Content strategy with AI
- [43:03] Why the human lens can’t be replaced
- [48:19] Generic vs. unique content
- [50:13] How to vet SEO/AI experts
- [54:42] SEO for AI vs traditional SEO
- [1:00:17] Take a first principles approach
- Quick-Fire Questions
- [1:03:34] What is Dave reading?
- [1:05:01] The best advice he’s received
- [1:05:30] Dave’s best advice to others
- [1:06:59] How Dave’s various previous roles shaped where he is today
- [1:15:03] Connect with Dave Burnett on LinkedIn and at AOK Marketing
- Make sure to follow Strategic Counsel on your favorite podcast spot and leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts
- Learn more at ForthRight-People.com and connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn

What is Strategic Counsel?

Thanks for listening Strategic Counsel. Get in touch here to become more strategic.

Transcript

Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

00:03
Welcome to the Strategic Counsel by Forthright Business Podcast. If you’re looking for honest, direct and unconventional conversations on how to successfully lead and operate in business, you are in the right place. In our discussions, we push on the status quo and traditional modes of thinking to reveal a fresh perspective. This unlocks opportunity for you, your team and your business. Now let’s get to it. Welcome to the Strategic Councsel Podcast. I am Anne Candido.

00:32
and I am April Martini. And today we’re going to talk about how to get your business found online. Now, when we say this many think SEO and SEM, and maybe you already even have some of that going on, which is definitely part of the strategy, but the complex world of search engine optimization and marketing has now taken a hard right with the introduction of AI. Now, it isn’t enough.

00:56
to be one of the top options when someone Google queries a keyword you have attribution to, it’s not good enough anymore. Now, oftentimes the top response is AI’s answer to your query. And to show up there, you have to be recognized as an authority. Yes, and if SEO isn’t enough of a black box, now there is a treacherous path to navigate around it, which just feels mean.

01:19
Let’s just be honest. But nevertheless, it really isn’t necessary evil to close with customers or clients or consumers depending on what business you’re in. Onlines where your targets do their research, they look for recommendations, they verify that you’re a legitimate business. So when you don’t do the hard work to ensure that your rank is high enough, it’s difficult for people to find your business. Honestly, at the end of the day, and this is part of the quote unquote problem with AI, people just don’t want to search that hard.

01:48
So you really have to serve it up for them in a way that they can connect with. Right. So how do you navigate this quagmire so people can find your business? So our guest has all the intel on this. His name is David Burnett. He’s the founder of AOK Marketing. So welcome, David. It’s great to have you here. I’m sure everybody’s going be so excited to hear what you have to tell them. But do you want to just start by saying hi and give listeners a bit of your story? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. And just for clarity, I usually go by Dave because when I’m David, I’m usually in trouble.

02:17
So my fair enough Dave. Got it. I appreciate that. No, Davey though. We don’t have to get to Davey. We’re not that close of friends, right? Oh my goodness. No, we’re not that close yet. Nor does anybody ever call me that. was his nickname as a kid. So just want to make sure I knew my latitude. So, okay. Yeah. No, you got some room. You got some room. Okay. Um, so yeah, no, thank you very much for having me and it’s great. And I’m really appreciate being here. Uh, yeah, a little bit of history. I’ve been doing SEO since the

02:45
Great recession to fully date myself. I had another business that was losing a ton of money as a result of the great recession, realized we were doing marketing wrong at the time. So I had to get into digital marketing. That was when the real kind of smack in the face happened for me. So I went out and I bought 3000 URLs and put up 500 websites and that got me good at SEO. So that’s kind of the background of the story as to how it got started anyways. Oh, that’s really, I’m…

03:15
putting it all in and going all out, I think in a time when it was really hard to do that. So obviously from the ground up, your experience and expertise are going to be critical here. So I’m going to jump in and I’m going to start with just like a very baseline question. So can you explain how SEO has changed with the introduction of AI and maybe give a little bit of context for the current landscape of SEO too, because that’s also changed, not even just with AI.

03:43
Yeah, for sure. And the main thing to think about is, everybody knows SEO on the background has always been basically the same. We’ve been pretty spoiled over the last 20 years or so that Google has been the go-to and you’re always trying to get your page to rank higher in the Google search results. And what’s changed is that was all about page authority. It was all about getting your website page to rank. What it is now is you need entity authority.

04:10
So how much authority do you as an organization, you as a person, you as whatever it is that you’re trying to get shown have out there in the world. So it’s a little bit more complicated. It’s a little more involved, but at the same time, it actually really brings to the surface the people and the entities that really should be surfaced. So if you have a shady organization that has different kinds of information all over the internet with different addresses and different phone numbers and different, whatever.

04:39
that’s not gonna make the machines trust you and therefore you won’t rank as high. But at that same organization could relatively easily get a page to rank as opposed to their entire entity to rank. So that’s basically one of the main fundamentals that right now we’re looking at entity authority versus page authority. Go a little further with what is all involved with entity because I see where you’re going and tracking, but just to make sure that people are abundantly clear with what

05:09
all that could encompass. you started with the, if they have different addresses and all of those kinds of things, but take another click and talk to us about, those of us that maybe aren’t trying to dupe people, which is where my brain went with that, right? Like kind of falsifying information for the normal business that’s looking to make this work for them. What does that look like? Yeah. Well, and entity authority has many kind of layers to it. It’s

05:35
We look at it in two different ways. We look at what is the information on your website and then what is the information online about you. So the information on your website really is important. Still. I know I just talked about getting a particular page to rank and a particular part of your website to rank and that’s still important. So traditional SEO is still very important. What is also important though, is all this other information out there in the world. So what is that? That’s your backlinks.

06:05
And what is a backlink? That is when another website links to your website. That is a link back to you. So those are still important. Those are, those were kind of more traditional SEO, but they’re still very important. Another thing that’s important actually these days is PR. So public relations is super important now because public relations really gets you a lot of third party independent verification that your organization exists and is notable for whatever it’s notable for.

06:35
And so that’s really, really important, which helps you with other things like Wikipedia page. So your Wikipedia is another thing that is really important if you can actually get a Wikipedia page. There’s two reasons for this. Number one is it’s independent third party verified. But the other thing is it’s really, really one of the fundamental things that the AI models train on. So when the models are learning how to speak,

07:04
They get trained out there on the internet on all the free information that’s out there. Wikipedia is a whole bunch of free information that’s pretty accurate. So as a result of that, that’s what the models use as a huge part of their training data. So if you can actually get into Wikipedia, you have a, you know, bypass right into the large language models, right into the chat GPTs of the world. That’s, that’s really an important thing.

07:32
Another important thing are the directories that you actually can be a part of. So we talked a little bit about having a consistent address across everything, but it’s also where else do you show in directories that are publicly available? And is that information the same everywhere? Because entity authority is a lot about how relevant the information is, how accurate the information is.

07:57
And all those things come together in the fifth thing that you need to actually have, which is something called a knowledge graph. So a knowledge graph without getting too, too technical is basically information about your, your entity out there in the world that the machines can use to reference as a source of truth. So say you have multiple websites. One of them says, you know, they’ve been in business for 25 years. The other one says you’ve been in business for 20 years.

08:26
ah What is the actual source of truth? So having your own source of truth out there in the internet is really, really important. Cause I mean, you’ve got all these people who have their really great Instagram page and they’ve got a million followers and you’ve got this, you know, tick tock page or whatever your LinkedIn page, whatever may be. But all of those things aren’t owned by you. They’re not a source of truth that you actually own out there in the internet. So if you have a source of truth, that can be the foundation and say, okay,

08:56
A-okay marketing. That’s our company, right? You can have that source of truth being a-okay marketing.com, but there may also be a article about A-okay marketing and you can link over to that article from your knowledge graph and say, that is the same organization. This is the same as, so basically what you can do is you can relate it to things, your organization, you can make it associated with things. And if you have a Wikipedia page, you can reference back and forth and there’s lots of different.

09:22
Kind of highly technical, super boring, and I don’t want to put your audience to sleep type stuff, but basically the more consistent your information, the more free resources that are independently verified about your organization and the better your source of truth. Those are all trust factors because I hate to say it, but there’s a lot of people who are trying to lie, cheat and steal out there on the internet. And all these things really kind of fight that. So hopefully that helps give you a little bit more information about entity authority versus.

09:51
Well, and I find this extremely, again, fascinating because this is something that, because I come from the world of PR, there’s been a fundamental way that you grow awareness and grow findability for your business is by having those third party authorities be able to generate content about you that makes you searchable, right? And so, I mean, still that there’s this belief that we can pay our way through it.

10:21
But it seems like now because of maybe because of the amount of fraud and everything that has been going on, the systems maybe maybe they’re reacting to that and now that’s making it a necessity to be able to really build this authority in a different way or.

10:43
I guess I’m kind of trying to ask in a very roundabout way, especially to reinforce the fact that PR is so extremely valuable. I knew this was going to Give herself the credit and the pat on the back. I know I’m just just I’m just so ahead of my time. But all my this is for all my PR peeps out there. But I’m like, it feels like it’s different. It feels like the landscape is shifting. It feels like the mindset is different. Like even just having to have what did you call it? It’s called the knowledge base. What did you call it? I know the graph, the knowledge graph. I mean, which

11:13
I never heard about and I’m that like in itself. mean, I’m sure people like to know a little bit more about that, but very roundabout way and a very diverse way of asking the question of like, is this whole thing change? mindset need to change? Is there approach in how we, our businesses get found have to change based on all of this? Yes, basically it does. So you’ve actually seen a knowledge group

11:41
a knowledge graph and didn’t realize it. So if you’ve ever gone online and you say you search for Starbucks, like you don’t do Starbucks.com. You just like put in the keyword Starbucks on the right hand side. There’s a whole bunch of information about Starbucks when it’s founded the, you know, all this kind of stuff there. Here’s all their, their social media. That’s called a knowledge panel. That knowledge panel is fed by the knowledge graph in the background. So you’ve actually seen a knowledge graph.

12:10
like the visual representation of it, uh, in real life. I’m pretty sure everybody who’s listened has seen that at some point. And so yes, PR is super important. yes, you way ahead of the curve. Thank you. Thank you. oh There’s some interest. There’s caveats though, for those peeps out there. So I don’t want to get too technical, but on websites, there’s something called a robots.txt file. And basically what that is is a file that’s right after your URL, whatever URL is, and then it’s a slash.

12:40
the word robots and then dot TXT. And what that is, is it tells all the different crawlers out there, all the different bots, what to do about your website. So the interesting thing is you can actually specify and block different bots from crawling your website so that they don’t get the information on your site. So on the PR world, New York times is very famously suing open AI and chat GPT because of having all of their

13:08
Articles scraped and put into chat GP’s GPT database without their permission. Right. They’re a publisher. So as a publisher, you want to, well, potentially want to keep your information proprietary and you don’t necessarily want to use it in training data in the models, the large language models like chat GPT. The challenge with that is they now block the chat GPT crawlers from crawling any of the information on their site.

13:38
So you might want to say, Hey, I want to be found in a large language model. And you as a PR person could say, absolutely. We got you a great placement in New York times. And then the reality is it doesn’t get crawled because New York times blocks chat GPT. I mean, there’s other reasons why New York times is great to have an article in New York times. I’m not saying it’s not, but from a find ability in the large language models, which is where we started, it’s not going to help. What it will help with though is.

14:07
It makes you more what I would call notable. So if you’re notable, you’ve done something notable. can often get press related to that notability and notability is what can help get you a Wikipedia page. And if you get a Wikipedia page, then you’re in the models that way. So you kind of have to figure out which entrance points you can use to get into the large language models database. Now there’s something else I think I need to kind of cover fundamentals about the way these things are trained and learn and all that kind of good stuff.

14:37
So large language models have crawlers go to the internet, grab the information, bring it back into their knowledge base. That’s their core knowledge, but it’s a little different from Google search. Google search is like a live living, breathing thing that goes out, finds the information, surfaces the right answer right now. What happens with the large language models is they put this information into a database, kind of like you go to high school and you only learn so much math. You only learn so much science, whatever it might be. And then you graduate from high school. You stop.

15:07
That happens with the large language models as well. They have a cutoff date and every one of those cutoff dates is different for the different models. There was a different cutoff date for chat GPT 3.5 chat GPT 4 chat GPT 5. That’s why they named them the different models because they have different cutoff dates. They have different knowledge. What they then do is they spend a bunch of time teaching them be nice, answer questions properly and not be, you know, teach you stuff you shouldn’t know. And so they spend months doing that. So right now.

15:37
You know, right now it’s September, 2025, but what happens is this model, the last chat GPT, GPT five, the training cutoff was October of 2024. So it’s been 11 months since it’s training data stopped. And then they didn’t actually release it until August. So it was 10 months after they stopped training it before they released it to the public. So as a result of that, you’ve got its core knowledge, the models core knowledge.

16:07
And then you have search. So just like a high school student, you get asked a question you don’t have the answer to, you go to the library, AKA the internet, find the answer, come back and give the answer to the person. This is exactly how the large language models that are enabled with search work. So they go out, they find the information, they come back and they give it to you in their own words. That’s prompt.

16:32
generation, that’s a generated prompt result that they give to you. They speak it to your own words. Like if you ask me the same question again in 30 seconds, I would say basically the same thing, but in different words. That’s what the large language models do too. They don’t say the exact same thing every time, but the overall message is the same. So that’s the important, that’s a number of important things. Number one, how they get trained. Number two, that training gets cut off. Number three, search happens after the fact with knowledge they don’t have, but because they know how to speak.

17:02
They can then give this information to you as the user. Now, the other other thing is all the information they have in their knowledge base about you is basically accidental because they’re just learning how to speak out there in the internet. They found information that helped them learn how to speak. And then that’s what they know about you. So this is one of the things that it’s not used the same way.

17:26
Google search is out there indexing the most appropriate answers to a particular search that’s put into Google. AI models are trained so they know how to answer questions and speak to you in a good way. They’re not specifically designed to go out and get the answer to what is the, I don’t know, what’s the periodic table of elements or something. Like they just happen to know it because there was a Wikipedia article about it. So.

17:53
I don’t know if that helps you at all or can, or makes it harder or better or worse, but that’s kind of the reality. The other other reality is if they index information about you, that’s wrong. It’s kind of like me saying, I’m going to go into your brain and remove the forest from your brain. You can’t it’s in there somewhere. We don’t know where it’s stored, how it’s stored.

18:16
We know generally the area of speech in the brain, but we don’t know exactly. It’s the same thing with large language models. When they learn something, we don’t know exactly how it’s stored, where it’s stored, what it’s related to. It’s not like a table of data that you would have had in the past. So if somebody’s like, that’s the wrong information about you. That’s the wrong information that it’s going to have. So that’s the other important reason why you want to make sure your data is correct out there on the internet when it finds it by accident. And then.

18:46
regurgitates stuff about you, brings it back up and regenerates information about you. So. This is kind of freaking me out. I told you, fascinating, not necessarily interesting, not necessarily interesting, but fascinating. Well, and I mean, I’m sure the same as the listeners, like the fear base around these tools, you just highlighted right there. So I guess a question would be, what what do you

19:15
do when the information’s incorrect? that’s, before you just said all the things you just said, that was going to be my question is, isn’t it wrong then sometimes if the tool’s dated, it can’t always be accurate, especially if it’s that far behind. So you find something that’s wrong, then what happens? Well, if it’s in the model’s core knowledge, there isn’t a lot. There is nothing, yeah. There are the large language model companies like OpenAI and others do have the ability, if it’s harmful,

19:44
or if there’s information that’s really bad, they can exclude things from the search. But the knowledge is in there and it kind of creates a broken experience if somebody did search something. But they do have those kind of emergency measures to be able to block stuff. But if it’s like your address is instead of 1234 Main Street, it’s 1354, that’s just that, That’s just the…

20:09
That’s just the wrong information it has in its core. If it goes out and searches online and your information is correct now though, it’ll find the right information and give it to you. But if it’s, if it doesn’t go out and do that because it’s. It’s less resources for it to just give you information from its internal knowledge than it is to go out and search every time. it, so the large language model companies are like, yeah, give the, I’ve already got all this information. I’ll just give you the answer.

20:39
So unless you specify a lot of times, it’ll just give you the answer. So it’s very important to be in the large language models correctly. Now that’s kind of good news about it is like, can’t change what’s already there, right? So chat GPT-4 is set, chat GPT-5 is set, Gemini 2.5, Claude, like, you know, Sonnet, all these are already set, but by getting your information correct out there now.

21:04
Chachi PT6, I don’t know, they may be training it right now, or they may be already done that and it may be into Chachi PT7 is what they’re training right now. So the sooner you can get your information correct, verified, trustworthy for the models and the machines out there to crawl, the better.

21:23
So I guess the question that I think a lot of people are going to have is why is this so critically important? why is it important to be on both or think about both or do I think about one more than the other? Because it sounds like getting it right or being able to be that authority from an AI standpoint feels a whole lot harder than to run some

21:51
SEO and just kind of come up on the Google search, right? So why is this even something I should be putting my thoughts and my efforts into?

22:04
Search has become more and more fragmented, right? And so as a result, it’s gonna, people are changing behaviors. They’re changing their behavior to AI and they’re changing their behavior. And it’s not just the people that are changing their behavior, but it’s also the technology that you’re using. So we’re talking about large language models. The reason why they’re called large language models is because they have a lot of training in them. So they’ve got a lot of data.

22:30
There’s also something called small language models, SLMs instead of LLMs, if we’re going to go acronym on this. But basically what that means is like your phone is going to have its own small language model in it. by having your information correct, it’s going to, you know, maybe not seven, Apple 17 and maybe not whatever the 2026 is for Samsung, but that’s the way the technology is going as well.

22:58
You’re going to have large language models that are generalists and you’re going to have small language models that are very specific to particular tasks or technology as it comes out. So what you’re going to do is it’s going to already know. So you need to have the correct information out there about yourself from an AI perspective, because that’s the way everything’s going, whether we like it or not. That’s the way it’s going. advantage to doing all this additional work, which is

23:27
really not, shouldn’t be additional. You really should have the right information about you out there in the world. But if you want to think about it, regular SEO is a part of SEO for AI or geo, know, generative engine optimization or AEO, is, you know, artificial intelligence engine optimization or LLMO, large language model optimization. Nobody knows what to call it yet. So it’s all these things and more.

23:57
But if you want to be found, then you need to do these types of things. So that’s why you need to think about it. And you need to understand that when you have good AI, SEO for AI, you will have good SEO, period. So is there a way, because we do a lot of auditing through our work, Like checking on competition, all these types of things.

24:26
Is there a tool maybe you guys offer or a way that people can individually be going in to check, like a checklist of things to see if what I have is right? Because I’m sitting here imagining that people are like, oh my gosh, I show up all over the place, right? Like I have this PR thing and then I have our website and then we have LinkedIn and all, which I know we don’t own those things and all of that, but just the sheer amount of channels where you could show up is a lot.

24:55
And then kind of a checks and balances of how do I know? Yeah. So how do you, how do you know there’s a, there’s a number of different tools out there. We actually put one together that checks 17 of the large language models and chatbots to see how you show up. And then it’ll end to see if you show up both in the core knowledge of the models and also in the search models. It’s called LimTel. So it’s LLMTEL.com and you can go online there and you can sign up for free and you can run a check.

25:25
or two or 10, depending on what you’re actually looking at. When you listen to this, there are, there’s the ability to be able to check there for yourself. So you can see how you show up and how you rank and whether or not the models know you there. And if you find that the information is incorrect or you find that all of a sudden all your competitors are showing up, then you do some specific things associated with this. we have eight, not including monitoring.

25:53
We have eight different things that you need to get right. And I mentioned them, but I’ll just mention them again, briefly, technical SEO on your, so you got on page and off page. So on page technical SEO. So that’s all the different, um, programming behind the scenes so that the machine knows what your site is about. You have your content on your page. Cause going back to the Starbucks example before, like if you, if you search Starbucks.com, you’ll get the Starbucks.com. If you search.

26:22
Starbucks near me, it’ll show all the different locations with a map. If you search Starbucks Frappuccino, it’ll give you the Frappuccino page. The reason why Google and any of the other machines are able to bring up that difference is because you have content. So one of things you want to do is a content audit to make sure if I want to show up for Frappuccinos, I got to have a Frappuccino page. So that’s the second thing is content. Third thing is the style.

26:49
So if you want to actually show up in large language models, you got to think about how it answers you. It answers you in snippets, which are kind of short bits of content. It answers you in short chunks and it speaks in a, I don’t know, middle school to high school level conversational tone. So if you are highly technical on your site, it’s difficult for the machine to take that highly technical information and surface it in a large language model. So.

27:19
You got to think about how you’re speaking to your audience, both the machine and the people. So those are the three things on site, technical SEO content style, five things off site. So you’ve got your backlinks, which we talked about. You’ve got PR, you’ve got Wikipedia, you have your knowledge graph and you have the directories and Wikipedia represents more than just Wikipedia, just in the way we think about it, just so you know, cause other things like Reddit are very important. Quora.

27:48
very important. All these, all these public platforms that are very human, at least mostly human are very, very important as well. So being found in those types of places. So we’ve got eight things. You’re like, got to check these off, got to check off these three on page and these five off page. And if I do all those things right and I monitor them, then you’re going to be golden. That’s the checklist. Okay. So I’m going to try to drill this into then some

28:16
specific tactical things that I know people are going to ask about. One is, I know people are going to ask, how do I get a wiki page? Right? Is there some sort of- going to ask that. Yeah. Is there some sort of like magic being able to do that? And then the second question, and I have this question too, is like, what exactly is a knowledge graph? Is it a thing? Is it a group of things? Is it like a backend of my website? Like-

28:45
explain some of the like specifics. Cause I know people are like laboriously taking notes and they’re like, who do what do I even do? Like what’s my even like the thing that I even go like look at. Okay. I a hundred percent understand. So first of all, the Wikipedia thing. Yes, it is a, is, it is its own beast, its own animal, its own thing. There are amazing Wikipedia editors out there and they are very, very possessive about the neutrality.

29:15
of Wikipedia, how it shows up, how the information on it shows up. And people all the time are trying to manipulate Wikipedia, put false information, vandalize pages. Like there are people out there who are really taking good care to make sure it’s as accurate as possible. So that’s the first thing that being said, it is a lot of effort to be able to get a Wikipedia page because of that very specific thing. Like if you are a PR person,

29:44
and you’re trying to get your client to Wikipedia page. It’s usually, and I’m not saying you would do this, Anne, ever, of course, but it would be, it would be, you know, it might be a little promotional. might want to put the client light. might, they might ignore some of the bad stuff that’s out there. would totally do that. But the problem with doing that is it comes across as promotional and this is an independent source of truth ish.

30:13
Right? So as a result, you need that bad news in there with the good news. And so first of all, if you’re going to go to Wikipedia page, just know that if you do it right, you’re going to have all the bad news out there too. Cause if you don’t put the bad news in there, somebody’s going to say, you missed all this bad news and I’m going to highlight it and make a paragraph about it. And I’m going to show how poorly the company did in this situation. And like they are, they are going to make sure that that information is there.

30:41
So you have to kind of balance that. there’s a full process that you have to go through. Like basically you have to get a Wikipedia, you have to draft a Wikipedia page, put it into draft, have Wikipedia editors review it. And if they approve it, usually Wikipedia editors will post it for you. You wouldn’t post it yourself. Like if you go in and post it yourself, the odds are that it’s just gonna get taken down and banned. And once you get taken down, it’s like,

31:10
exponentially more difficult to get a new one put up. So there it’s, it’s its whole ecosystem. It’s its whole environment. And one of the main things about a Wikipedia page is notability. I’ve talked about it a couple of times, but basically that means is you need to be the subject. Like you can’t just be in an article commenting on an article in New York times or Washington post or wherever maybe you have to be the subject of that article.

31:39
for whatever reason. So you need to have multiple citations and subjects of articles to get a proper Wikipedia page. So that’s kind of the first thing. So how many of the smaller businesses or individuals out there are the subject of those types of articles? And not that many. And as a result, there’s a limited number of articles and Wikipedia pages that will be up about them. So does that answer the…

32:08
Wikipedia mystery a little bit. I think so. I think so. think for now, I’m sure there’s going to be a gazillion other questions, but they could always reach out to you with your expertise and all your tools and they could be part of your solution. I would imagine if that’s what I understand what it takes. Right. Like, I mean, that was a good synopsis of it’s serious. It’s a good amount of work. There’s lots of hoops and it better be truthful. And it’s going to take you a year.

32:38
Before your Wikipedia pages up, right? It’s cause it’s because there’s lots of people putting Wikipedia pages up for draft doing the right thing, making sure that it’s, but it just people is a volunteer thing. So they go through and they check it out. Then they were like, okay, yeah, fine. I’ll publish that. Right. Or no, I won’t or whatever. Maybe. So that’s, that’s kind of the Wikipedia site. No. So knowledge graph. So a knowledge graph is hard to explain without visuals. So a knowledge graph.

33:07
Okay. So Google has their own knowledge graph about you. If assuming you’re notable and newsworthy. And that’s what I was talking about before with the Starbucks example, having a information. So a knowledge graph, easiest way to think about it is you have a source of truth and then you have to use what are called triples to be able to reference other information about you on the internet.

33:36
So basically it’s like, say like Dave Burnett, there’s an article out there and I have a LinkedIn page, right? So it could be Dave Burnett is the same as my article author page on aokmarketing.com. Dave Burnett is the same as my LinkedIn profile. Dave Burnett’s the same as my uh ex profile.

34:03
But you can also use it as Dave Burnett knows about SEO. Dave Burnett knows about, you know, paid search, because that’s one of the other things we do. Dave Burnett knows about SEO for AI, whatever, however you want to use it. So a knowledge graph is you have an entity and that entity is related to other things. You know, if that entity is labeled an organization, like AOK marketing is an organization, that organization knows about digital marketing.

34:32
that organization knows about SEO, that organization has the CEO of Dave Burnett. So that’s basically how it’s all, all the knowledge is linked together. If you can imagine like a star with like planets around it all linked together to that thing and they’re linked to other things. it’s, it’s really how the knowledge is all related to each other out there in the world. And then therefore,

35:00
The more knowledge that is relevant and accurate, that’s referenced in the background, the better and more authority that that particular entity has. So if you have like this subject of this article on New York Times is the same as AOK marketing, that gives more authority because there’s more things referencing through to that authority. Like if you think about like Elon Musk, Opinions about him vary, but whatever.

35:28
He has a lot of notability. He’s got a lot of authority. There’s a lot of articles about him. There’s a lot of information about him. There’s a lot of, know, he’s the CEO of this and he’s the CEO of that. And, you know, all those different things, he becomes a very authoritative entity on the internet. So that’s basically without getting too technical, how this all relates in the background and the AI models really like.

35:56
the information because they can know how things link together. And because it’s usually shorter snippets, they don’t have to read like Dave Burnett founded AOK marketing back in 2007 when the great recession happened and he had to go and buy 3000. Like it’s just like Dave Burnett CEO, AOK marketing, right? So it works well with the machines for them to be able to understand how things are related and how much authority they have. So it’s kind of like, it’s kind of like social proof for the algorithm.

36:26
So when we talk about social proof and marketing and how important it is, and that’s kind of goes back to some of the PR principles of message tracking. So making sure that your messages are consistent, making sure you’re referencing things the same way every time. So that connectivity starts to generate that social proof that’s needed so that when people think of these things or they see these things, it connects back to you. And when they search for those things, all those things start to kind of lead back to you. So.

36:52
We talk about the power of the message track all the time and how to generate social proof in a marketing context. So it feels like it’s social proof for the algorithm to some extent. So you’ve just described a knowledge graph. What you are doing is building a knowledge graph. Got it. You just didn’t realize you were doing it, but that’s exactly what you’re doing. That makes total sense. Cause I think that is it all kind of connects in a very now.

37:17
obvious way to some extent, but it’s in so many different places. Like before it was only important because you were doing it on, you you wanted it on print and you wanted it on TV and you wanted like those like more of the social aspects or even now then later on to like social media. And now it’s like behind the scenes almost. So there’s so many different layers of why

37:42
that is so important and those practices are so important. So I go back to my PR peeps and say, we need to keep on fighting the good fight because I think that’s really uh important. is extremely important. And if you think about it, it works just the same way as anything works with like in with humans, like Rolex, you think watch and luxury, right? Like it’s the same thing. I mean, for most people, it’s the same thing.

38:09
when you’re creating any kind of association between entities, between information that’s happening online, it’s just now that the machines can bring it all together and create more trust and raise your result higher or generate a response with you in it. That’s love that. That makes, yes, that drives a lot of clarity. The question I have, and this might feel like a… uh

38:36
an obvious, not obvious question is it feels kind of kind of we’re caught in the hamster wheel because a lot of people then would say, okay, if I have to go create content, for example, I’m gonna go do PR. A lot of people are using the large language models, chat GPT to create their content. So now you’re just kind of taking what’s already in the system, putting it in your system. And then I don’t know, what does that do to somebody’s

39:04
authority then when they’re just kind of regenerating what’s already in the large language models. So the large language models, the way I think about them is they are the average, right? They are predicting, so the way they work is they predict the next most logical word in a sentence. It’s actually a part of a word, but anyways, I don’t want to get too technical. They predict the most logical next word when they’re answering something.

39:28
And so they’re going to be the average of everything that’s out there because it’s the most likely next word. So whenever you create content using AI, it’s really interesting because you can create foundation from my perspective, you can create foundational content, right? Like what is PR? How do you, know, what is a newspaper? What is radio? What was the evolution of radio from, you know, to TV to whatever else, like the internet.

39:56
All that foundational information that’s going to be the same across everybody, you might use a few different words, is kind of irrelevant, but it lets the machine know that you know about these things. Okay. So that’s part of the knows about. Beyond that, what you want to do is there’s news information. And so if something happens out there in the world that’s related to whatever your field is,

40:21
I don’t know, using the Starbucks example, maybe there was a great Frappuccino somebody made the most, world’s best Frappuccino. And I don’t even drink Frappuccino. don’t know why, but anyways. I was going to ask actually that. don’t even drink was going to be like, can we talk about Frappuccinos? Yeah, no, got nothing. I got nothing other than an example for you and a Frappuccino. But, but if somebody has that like news breaks that, um, you know, somebody did this thing. So then you could write in your own words, some information about.

40:47
this Frappuccino, because say you’ve already established that you make coffee, you’re a coffee shop, whatever it may be. So that is news-based content. But that would be in your own words, news-based content, because there isn’t the most logical next thing that AI can do for you. That’s kind of the next level of content, which is good. But the best level of content is thought leadership. And what that is from my perspective is what have you actually done?

41:15
What is different about you and what have you actually done out there in the world? Cause nobody else can say, you know, I’m nobody else can say they’re Dave Burnett. They might have the same name as me and they might even be called David and they prefer that. But there’s nobody else who’s got the same life experience that I do and, or the same perspective of things. So I need to write that. And where this became very obvious for me was as I was trying to put information together for the tool that we were inventing, Limtal, I was trying to use AI to

41:44
like to create information about it, right? Cause I’m like everybody else. use AI to generate as a tool. because it hadn’t been invented, it couldn’t do it. It wasn’t the next logical thing. So I had to, like, I could use frameworks about how you could write an article or how you could write content or how you could do these different things. But because it was something that didn’t exist yet, there was no AI visibility tool.

42:10
As we’re inventing these things to like, how do you do SEO for AI when that’s never been done before? And so it was, it just like, it didn’t blank, but it made up some bad stuff that just didn’t apply. So for us to be able to really stand out in the marketplace, we need to talk about what’s our experience. Cause somebody might be like, Hey, I’m an accountant. Everybody does accounting. It’s busy when it’s tax season. It’s not when it’s not, know, whatever it may be, but taxes are taxes. True.

42:39
But there may be a ruling that comes down on something like Trump’s big, beautiful bill or whatever. And you can be like, this is going to impact you in this way. In my experience, because I deal with small women owned service businesses, and this is how it’s going to impact you. Like that is thought leadership, but building on a news item. So that’s the type of content when you’re talking about content, foundational stuff, AI news, put your own spin on it.

43:03
and actually have some thought leadership. The thought leadership can give you notability that can give you PR that can do all these. we talked about all that other stuff, all that other good stuff and talk to Ann about PR. Apparently she’s good at this. Yeah, that’s exactly right. You’re just setting her up. I just I didn’t know she was good. I didn’t know she was going to do it herself, so I had to give you show. You just preempted. like that. Well, the thought leadership is an important part, too. mean, April, I was going to imagine you were going to go there, so I don’t.

43:31
I can jump in or if you want to take it, because we talk about personal brand all the time and the importance of thought leadership. Did you have a different question? no, that’s exactly. Sometimes Anne and I share a brain, as you will learn, Dave, but that is exactly where I was going to go because one of the big things that we get asked and when we’re talking to people and per Anne’s question about, you know, using the tool to develop content that then feeds the machine and how does that actually work?

43:59
I think the human lens piece is so huge and the piece that we can’t replace, right? And so when we talk about whether it’s personal branding individually for people or branding in general and messaging that we’re putting online, we’re telling people all the time that the thought leadership component is the piece that you own because it’s something that is inherently in you. And like you said, Dave, based on your experience and all of those things. my question, we’ve asked this question a lot of times along the way is,

44:28
How have you seen that shift people’s perspective on, whether it’s thought leadership or just again, to Anne’s question, like how they’re thinking about content differently or my head goes to how do I stay in front of all of this so that I maintain relevancy as a person to then have my competitive edge versus all the other stuff that’s out there.

44:52
So there’s a lot to that question. Yes. I was like, how are you going to unpack that? Sorry. That was a trickle I will try to unpack it one bit at a time. with all of that, basically with the thought leadership side of things, I get asked that question often as well. And it goes back to what have you done? and, and where I run into, if somebody’s relatively experienced, they have lots of things they can tap into. They may or may not know it.

45:22
but they do have a lot of relevant experience. If there’s just getting started out, that’s harder, right? So I always say, you know, do the thing to get the experience and then talk about it and then do bigger things and then talk about that and then continue to do bigger things and talk about that. And then you can only ever talk about stuff you’ve done. And as a result of that, it’s always the truth. It’s always stating the facts. It’s always being different.

45:52
because nobody else has your truth. So for me, in terms of standing out is like, talking about a source of truth online to be shown by AI. Like honestly, more people just have to have their own source of truth. honestly, everybody lives an interesting life. There are cool things about whatever it is you’re doing, even if it’s just watching the latest Netflix thing, know, whatever it may be, but it’s still interesting in what you’ve experienced. So how you…

46:22
take that information, apply it out in the world is really your thought leadership. What makes you stand out might be you’ve got a really interesting framework. Might be that you’ve got a really interesting perspective on something. Might be because you’re the only person like me who suffered a traumatic brain injury and may have been incapacitated for months and years and so that kind of stuff. it’s like, I can talk about stuff like that because that actually did happen to me. I can talk about losing $70,000 a month.

46:51
in the great recession and had to go online because that happened to me. can talk about, you know, a business that I was involved in and co-founded that sold for $110 million. I can talk about that stuff because that’s actually me. There are others, I’ve had partners in that one business, so they can talk about it. There’s, you know, there are others who can tell similar stories, but there’s a lot that just comes down to what have you done and how does that make you different?

47:20
The one thing that you can do with AI is you can make your stories better. So not saying that, not saying that you’ve been particular. don’t mean to sound like I’m picking on you, but anybody who’s listening can make their story better by using AI. You know, it’s like, I had this thing make my story better, you know, like it’ll just give you some ideas, right? And it’s like, okay, that’s not true. This is what actually happened, but you can, you can make your stories better. So by learning to tell better stories.

47:50
you will resonate with people because we’re still as crazy as the last few years have been and A.I. and whatever else. We’re still storytellers. We’re still listen to stories like people are going to remember that the frappuccino thing. And I’m now going to be associated with frappuccinos even though and, know, like that kind of thing. But that’s just because I told that story. So is that is that did that unpack anything in what you ask? Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, I think it it is the

48:19
simplification of what does the idea of being a thought leader mean now? And how do you contextualize that in a way that’s ownable to you? And I think that that’s the message people need to hear because going back to the hamster wheel thing, we see people use the tools as tools and we see people use the tools as the be all end all solution. And when they do the solution piece,

48:46
It doesn’t work. But when they do it as like you said, like make my story better, or there’s a lot of people that I talked to on the client side that are trying to be thought leaders, but they’re not good writers. And so they’re using the tool to help them start to put it together. And then they can go back and edit through that instead of here’s the facts I want to tell, make it a story. And I’m just going to spit it out there. So, no, it’s a very powerful tool you can use in a ton of different ways. And that’s a great way to use it. You know, just list down, list down all the

49:15
best moments you’ve had list down all the worst moments you’ve had and talk about the worst moments. Cause nobody wants to hear about all those amazing things you did. They want to hear about how you crashed and burned and it sucked. And then you came back like the, know, the hero’s journey thing. If you’re big into storytelling, the hero’s journey is an amazing thing. you know, from, from my perspective, when you’re, when you’re getting into these discussions and when you’re thinking about how to be a thought leader, if you can put somebody else’s logo on your website,

49:45
and it makes sense, it could be their website, you’re not being a thought leader. You are just like everybody else. We use that exact example all the time. It’s always safe. put your hand over your name and put anybody else’s name in, but same sentiment. Essentially. Yeah. So maybe one day we’ll be an authority on that. We just have to compete against Dave. You guys would win. You’ll be good. I’m out there doing SEO stuff, so not to worry.

50:13
Well, to that point, too, Dave, before we wrap up, I wanted to ask a question about this because and I’m probably going to insult a lot of people who do SEO, SEM, but this feels like the next level to what traditionally people are used to when they think about I need SEO, SEM. can you speak if people want to go out? And I know you guys are included so that what are they looking for? Like, what are the criteria? Like, what kind of questions should it be?

50:43
Using to vet somebody like you or somebody else um or even just their existing SEO SEM person to make sure that they have the right expertise in order to be able to do this work.

50:56
So I’m not going to defend my industry. There are some slimy sleazeball people out there who don’t know what they’re about. it’s like, I was saying this to somebody. It’s like going and getting a used car salesman, except with a used car salesman, at least you get a car. With SEO you get, ah, it’s going to work. Just stick with us. It’ll work. okay. The people who are metrics driven, this is just kind of in general, when you’re hiring anybody,

51:25
People who are metrics driven tend to know more about what it is that they do than others. The quantity and quality of metrics they use is a great indicator. If somebody says to you, if you look in GA4, sorry, I’m gonna use acronyms and things here. If you look in your analytics account and you can see the difference between your direct traffic, your organic traffic, your referral traffic, your paid search traffic, and you look at all those things, first of all, do you have analytics installed? Second of all, do you look at these things ever?

51:53
Third thing is what all these things mean when you, if somebody can explain those to you and how they’re going to impact those numbers, usually a good start, right? That’s, that’s kind of the first thing. Do they understand tracking? Do they care about tracking and are they tracking the right things? Right? A lot of SEO, SEM people be like, okay, keywords, right? You got to get the right keywords. You got to focus on the right things. And we’ve got to rank for more keywords.

52:19
still relevant because Google still does a ton of searches, right? That’s more traditional SEO. Now you got prompts and prompt results. How do we show up in the generated prompt results? Now you got a tool or more out there that you can go and check, right? So if you’re actually going to be tracking these things, that’s the really important thing. And then when people are talking about it, how well did they really understand it? Right? If they’re like, I’m going to make you rise in the rankings with some stuff and it’ll happen. It’ll be awesome.

52:48
right? Is not exactly a very compelling case. You know, like, but that’s really when it comes down to that’s really what they’re just saying with lots of bigger, fancier words than just, it’s going to work out. It’ll be great. It’d be awesome. My bank account number is this for you to make your direct deposit. And so as a result of all of that, it’s like, what have they done? People come to us and ask that. And we’re like, okay, we worked with the encyclopedia Britannica whose competitor is Wikipedia.

53:16
And we took them from 340 million page views a month to 510 million page views a month, which resulted in $24 million in additional revenue that year. And people go, oh, okay. You might know a thing or two. And I’m like, yeah, a couple of things, you know, but that, that scenario is something that we’ve done that nobody else can say and represents experience that might be relevant to your particular situation. So that’s really just me.

53:45
doing everything we just talked about and saying to people. So if people say to you, yes, I can do this for you, you know, might be an accounting firm or whatever it might be and be like, okay, who else have you done this for? What else have you done? And give me some examples. And this is my existing scenario. What do you think about it? And so a lot of people come back and say, hey, I got to do an audit and all that kind of stuff. And those are very valuable. And so I would also recommend that you talk to a few different practitioners, whoever they are.

54:14
And then eventually after kind of five, seven, they’ll all say, have said some of the same things and you’ll be able to identify who actually knows what they’re talking about and who is just going to get you some good results if all of the stars align. So I don’t know, is that what you’re looking for? I mean, I think so. And I think what I want people to hear is it is a different, again,

54:42
conversation that it is for somebody who’s just going to like help you Rick against certain keywords, right? Oh, for AI. Oh yeah. If you’re talking about SEO for AI versus SEO in general, then yeah, there are very, very few people who understand what a knowledge graph is or how it works or how to, how to optimize for one. There’s very, very few people understand how PR impacts. And there’s very few people even understand that because of the robots.techs that half the PR that you get is even going to work. They don’t even, they have no idea. So there’s.

55:12
There’s a ton of things out there that people just don’t get in terms of how all the puzzle works together. so, I mean, hopefully they’ve listened to this episode and they could speak inherently about that, but it really depends on what it is that they’re looking for. So SEO for AI is different from traditional SEO, but traditional SEO is encompassed when you’re doing SEO for AI. it. And then you also.

55:38
brought in the next question I had in using some of the case studies. But I’m sure everybody’s kind of like, okay, so I invest in this, I spend some money in this, what can I reasonably expect when I do it right? And I know it depends based on where they’re starting from and where they want to go, but maybe you could just speak to a couple of your clients, obviously don’t have to speak any names, but if could tell them kind of some industries where this has worked well or.

56:05
some context for what people can expect when they do this right. So this is all brand new. So the people who are doing it right and well right now, it was one of two things. It was either accidental, they just happened to be doing the right things. They got great PR, which got them a Wikipedia page, which meant they were in the model and they just happened to be in the model, right? Like that is the case for a lot of people and they’re just ahead of the game as a result of that.

56:32
If you’re not one of those fortunate people, then you have to try and get found an SEO for search. And there’s things that you can do with your content. There’s things that you can do with the way that the technical SEO is done in your site. And there’s things that you can do with your style of your content that will help you. So there’s a number of things you can do as well as building your own knowledge graphs so that they can follow it and all those kinds of things. So there’s things you can do now. So as an example, some of the things that you we’ve done and we’ve worked on, which I can’t.

56:59
mentioned because of NDAs, but basically within a few weeks, a couple of weeks, two to three weeks, you can start to see results change depending on what you’ve done and how you’ve done it. So within the first month, you can start to see changes based on how you do things. If you fix up stuff that’s broken, if you want to get like going to the other extreme, go to, know, to do a PR effort to put together.

57:27
everything that you need to have something notable to talk about, to then get PR, to have those placements happen, to then be able to go and get a Wikipedia page, to then also make sure you’re basically, you know, very, very sure you’re to show up in the next model. You could be a couple of years. And that is not what people want to hear, but that’s the reality associated with this. This is about, this is the long game. This is building trust. This is making sure you’re an authority.

57:56
tomorrow by doing the right stuff today. So that’s, mean, people have always said SEO is a long game and you got to do this and do that. And it takes a while and all that kind of stuff, nobody knew, nobody knew why it was a long game. It’s all because of all this stuff that’s going on in the background that I’m hopefully demystifying SEO a little bit today. It’s cause of all this stuff that goes on in the background that it, it works. just so you know, the big, deep secret that how we helped.

58:24
Encyclopedia Britannica rank as well as we did for as many page views is because they’re all think about all the images that are in an encyclopedia. Those were all labeled like ABC one, two, three. They weren’t a picture of Vincent van Gogh. They weren’t labeled. So all of the information was not indexable by the machines. The machines didn’t know that was Salvador Dali.

58:52
or whoever or an aardvark or whatever it is. So we went through and fixed, you know, 150,000 images. And that resulted in all of a sudden the machines like, oh, Salvador Dali. Here you go. And then boom, like it just was, they’ve just went like a rocket ship. So it was a technical fix. We didn’t change a single word. Yeah. Like that was written.

59:20
for that particular fix on their website. And we just made their authors pages better by having like the head of neurology who wrote an article for the encyclopedia Britannica is a much higher, you know, the head of neurology at whatever Harvard university or wherever it would have been, you know, have them write an article about neurosurgery as opposed to

59:47
having an article from Wikipedia, which could be just as good. And I’m not trying to trash Wikipedia, but the authority associated with that author, who’s also linked out, of course, same as, you know, neurosurgeon at the Mayo Clinic and neurosurgeon at Cleveland Clinic and Harvard educated, whatever. And like, you know, all these authority things, all of a sudden you get all this authority and say, oh, that’s a real authority article. We should show that ahead of the Wikipedia article.

01:00:17
So those are the types of things that we had to do when we were going up against Wikipedia, which was a challenge. But those are the types of things that we had to do. So if you know the first principles, you know the fundamentals behind why the things work, you can adapt and grow and change. Because no matter what happens, if you know how they work, how they surface, you can adjust to how they surface.

01:00:44
April, do you have any other questions? No, I just say my brain hurts. I don’t know. Well, I was actually going to say I the comment I was just going to make is I think that’s a good way to end it, because I think that that’s a very easy reference point for people to understand through that case study example of the way that you look at it as a professional in this differently than things we would think about. Right.

01:01:12
Like that, that seems like a duh, but I would have never ever even thought about that being the fix for that sort of thing. Right. Well, and you get something simple. Like people’s like, I own a, you know, ABC dot agency domain or a dot whatever domain. And like, how much authority does having a dot com give to you as opposed to a dot agency domain? It’s like one of those fundamental things like how much harder would you have to work to prove to Google to

01:01:42
prove to the AIs that something that ends in dot agency is or dot marketing or dot whatever is more authoritative than a dot com. If you take a look at any of the top 10 results, old school Google, all dot coms, maybe a dot net mixed in there, a dot org, all those high authority things, but there’s no dot whatever. They just aren’t there. Those are the fundamentals. Pause for a moment.

01:02:10
and think about it and just look at what’s out there and then do more of that. That will help. Right. Like it’s really not that hard. So least not for I apologize. I know it’s I know it’s difficult and complicated. And I’ve been doing this way too long to say something like it’s not that hard. So it is it is difficult and complicated. I totally get it. And hopefully this has been a little bit helpful to some of those out there. Well, I mean, a thousand percent. And I think the thing is, it’s it’s

01:02:39
simple in its contextual understanding of why, but it’s just so many things to consider. And then how they all connect and having somebody actually process through that for you, I mean, is so critically important because we don’t have time in our day-to-day to be putting all of that, the knowledge graphs and considering where we can optimize and fixing things.

01:03:05
It’s just, it’s a lot to consider, which is why you need like Dave and his crew to help you go through this and go through this process. So no, it has been super helpful. Like I said, extremely fascinating. And I think everybody got a lot out of that. mean, I know I did. I mean, I was taking notes just as much. know me too. I’m sure everybody else is going to be when they listen to this, but before we close out, you ready for some rapid fires? Yeah, bring it on. I’m excited. Absolutely. All about Frappuccinos.

01:03:34
Oh, but no, no frappuccino question. Your authority now for some reason that’s going to continue to pop up. It’s like Starbucks frappuccino. Oh no, it’s, it’s All of sudden you’re get served on your ads every time you see A-OK marketing. Okay, bring it on. I’m excited. Okay. So the one, the first one’s always easy, but one that everybody always likes to know and that’s what are you reading right now or what are you listening to right now? So I am reading a guy named Alex Hormozi.

01:04:02
Oh yeah. We know Alex. know Alex. Yeah. Not personally, but know a lot about his work. Absolutely. Yeah. Excellent. I’ve been in business for a long time and he connected some dots for me in great ways. Anybody who hasn’t read or done any of the stuff. Yeah. Highly recommend. He’s got three books now. Buy them all. you’re, especially if you’re an entrepreneur or if anybody who’s looking to improve their business acumen and understanding, he simplifies things in great ways and makes it very applicable.

01:04:31
So yeah, that’s what I’m reading right now. Well, and funny enough, Alex Sermozy is one person who has admitted that he did not think about branding and marketing and didn’t appreciate it. And now he does. So if you’re going to read his stuff and you’re going listen to his stuff, listen to the stuff in the later part, because that’s when he really talks about branding and marketing and how important it actually is. Yeah, absolutely. We like Alex too. He definitely does simplify it and bring it down to tangible.

01:05:01
actionable bits. So that’s great. okay. So best piece of advice you were ever given. Focus. And the reason why I think that that’s the best, it’s just one word, but it’s also the best piece of advice is because I have all the things that entrepreneurs have the brush shiny object syndrome, the no attention span, the this looks great. Let’s do that whole thing. So the best piece of advice.

01:05:30
would be, for me personally is focus. The best piece of advice that I’ve, that I would give to others if the focus isn’t there is get a mentor. I’ve been very fortunate to have a mentor now for almost 10 years, a gentleman named Warren Rustand. He is exceptional in every way possible. And I was looking for a mentor who represented the things in their personal life.

01:05:59
family, business, community, and he is an exceptional human being, I’m very grateful to be able to have in my life. find a mentor, understand what you’re looking for, but find a mentor because he’s short-cutted, saved me hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in mistakes by having a conversation. And so it’s, yeah, that is the best piece of advice that I can give to anyone else.

01:06:27
Yeah, we like that. Me and April both have business coaches too. So, um, I mean, what’s what we say too. It’s like even Tiger Woods has a swing coach. Absolutely. There’s coaches in the NHL, the NFL, like they’re, they all have coaches. So we are not above that by any means. I appreciate that a lot. So I don’t know how to ask this question, but I’ll see if I can ask it and see if you get what I mean by it. So has there been a previous role that you have held that has shaped who you are now?

01:06:59
There, yes. Actually, there’s a couple. So before I started my first business, I worked as a employee for a marketing agency that was doing sampling. Like, you know, imagine going to Costco. So it shaped me because I didn’t enjoy who I was working for. Great people, but I didn’t think they were doing things right. I was young and, you know, arrogant and thought I knew everything and knew nothing.

01:07:28
But I thought to myself, hey, I can do this better. So that was the impetus for me to start my first business was I went out and got Bacardi and Labatz as clients. And I was in third year university and started my first business because that really shaped me that I’m like, if I’m going to have to work for people who I don’t agree with or aren’t doing things the way that I would do them, then I’m just going to go and do it myself. So that was the impetus for me to go out and be an entrepreneur and man, that was both good and bad. So I think.

01:07:56
Think more carefully than I did if you’re going to go down that path. Well, that’s a good one. I was also hoping you were going to tell your hockey enforcer story. Oh, gosh. Yeah. And so that that story is a whole different story. So that story is I I’m sure you could tell by my accent that I’m from Canada. I’m in Toronto. hear it. Yeah, I’ve said a bunch of things that sounds like about and house and all those wonderful words that we say. I know. So anyways.

01:08:24
All that being said, I grew up playing hockey and when I grew up playing hockey, um, I was reasonably good. So I got to a pretty high level. got to the level below pro. And as a result of that, um, what happened was I was not a finesse player. I was out there as somebody who could bump into people and knock them over. Instead of me falling over, I was the type of person who could smash into the corners and come out and be fine.

01:08:53
And so I, um, one, one day I got called up to the league above me and one of the guys from the NHL got called sent down and, uh, we’re, so we’re playing in a game and there was a fight. It’s called a line brawl. And basically that means everybody on the entire ice fights somebody, right? There’s only two refs out there and there’s 10, there’s five fights going on. Right. So there’s a little bit of tough on the refs, but you know, it’s also tough as a player because like in you’re in a fight and you’re in a real fight.

01:09:23
And so I ended up fighting the guy who got sent down from the NHL and I ended up winning. mean, it sounds great. I’m not going to brag about it because I took a lot of, you black eyes and different things, but I ended up winning the fight. Well, what happened was then the coach said, Hey, you beat up this guy who was from the NHL, who was an enforcer in the NHL and you’re, was 17 at the time. And so, um, he’s like, guess what?

01:09:52
you’re now, you’re now an enforcer. So an enforcer is somebody who has the role on a hockey team that if, if the team is down and they need to pick me up, cause you’re playing, we’re playing in front of small arenas of like three to 5,000 people. And so they need to pick me up. need to get the team going. You’re going to go out and beat somebody up. Oh, and yeah, this is welcome to hockey, right? Like this, this is hockey in the nineties, just so we’re clear. Um, this is not the same anymore, but

01:10:20
So yeah, so that was my role. I had to go out and fight people. So six broken noses later, I’m like, okay, this is not for me. Like I don’t enjoy taking stitches and I don’t enjoy these other things. And so I went to the coach and I said, hey coach, this is BS, right? I can play hockey. I don’t just punch people in the face. I can actually play.

01:10:50
You know, put me in, put me in coach. can actually do it. So he said, all right, I’ll give you a shot. I’ll put you in for a regular shift. And I’ll play you like a regular player instead of just an enforcer. And I went out that game and as a defenseman, I got a goal and two assists. The game that he played me on a regular shift. And I was like, okay, this is, this is awesome. I write, write coach, like put me in a regular shift. He’s like, go fight that guy. Oh no. So I quit hockey.

01:11:20
And like my senior year of high school. So back when I went to high school, we actually had an extra year of high school. were five years of high school in Ontario when I went there. So there was a grade 13 is what it was called. So halfway through my grade 12, my senior year of high school in the U S I quit hockey, which was my ride. I was going to go to the U S on a scholarship. I was going to do all these other things, but because I quit the coach basically blacklisted me and I was done. So I had.

01:11:49
I had to do all of, all a high school basically in a year and half, cause I wasn’t really paying attention. I hope my kids don’t listen to this, but you know, I wasn’t getting great grades. wasn’t doing any of kind of stuff. And all of sudden I had to do well. So I had, I had to do all a high school in a year and a half. ended up getting to a great university. I ended up, you know, meeting my wife there. I ended up starting my first business. So it was all, it’s all about the path that you didn’t take.

01:12:18
And I didn’t take the hockey path. I would have ended up in the U S on a scholarship somewhere. Um, I was, you know, talking to Dartmouth university and I was talking to go bowling green and a few other places. And so, but I didn’t. So I stayed in Canada and I went to university, met the love of my life, got two kids, 25 years married, and it’s just, it all worked out. But at the time I was really tired of taking shots to the head. So yeah, that’s, that was.

01:12:46
That’s my hockey enforcer story. Thank you for sharing. So would it be fair to say that the large language model got the wrong data in that situation? I have told a brief version of that story on another podcast. It was three minutes out of 60 and the large language model.

01:13:08
picks it up. that I’m selling it now that I’m telling it again, this is how I’m going to be known. I’m just going to show up to every interview with my gear on and it will just call it will call it you know, I’m just going to be the hockey enforcer who’s now the marketer or something. But again, this is unique to me. Nobody else is an SEO. Well, okay, maybe there is but not that I know of another SEO expert who used to be a hockey enforcer. Right? That’s true. That’s fair. I think that’s right.

01:13:36
Well, because I didn’t even know what a hockey horse was, so was news all news to me. Well, I learned that. But also I was sitting here thinking, it’s amazing that you’re doing what you’re doing, because that’s a lot of brain cells to lose. Imagine how much better I would have been if I didn’t have a beer company that gave out free liquor. like not that I ever partook, of course, you know, right? Of course not. know, especially when I was in third year university with a minivan full of beer every Thursday, Friday and Saturday. was never, never impacted me in any way, or form.

01:14:06
Nope. Nor did tremendous blows to the head as a, you know, a gentle hockey player. So imagine, imagine, you know, or, I haven’t even gotten into the fact that I had a severe concussion in 2018. don’t remember 2019 or half of 2020. So I do. Imagine if I actually had all those brain cells, how good it would go. But so that just goes to tell everybody else here. If you don’t have traumatic brain injury,

01:14:33
and you don’t, you didn’t get punched in the face significantly. You too can do this without too much difficulty. So I’m going to set the bar really low. this is, is okay. but in all fairness, like it isn’t, it isn’t, it isn’t difficult, but it’s hard to do. Yeah, that’s exactly right. A great distinguishing factor, which leads me to my final question, which is, or ask is, can you

01:15:03
tell people where to find you. If there’s anything else that we missed, you want to put a bow on or to leave people with, please feel free. No, I, yeah, you can find me at AOK marketing. You can find me on LinkedIn. I do some thoughts on X and then I built a website for my kids called algorithmforlife.com where I share some thoughts, none of which are hugely insightful or anything. It’s mostly for them, but those are, if you want to know more about me, that’s kind of where I’m at. In terms of putting a bow on it, no, I just think

01:15:32
I’m very grateful for you guys having me on say listening to my stories, listening to all the different things that you can do. But if you’re a smaller organization, right? We, tend to work with large to medium to large organizations because there’s so many things you can do as a smaller organization. Like the low head lowest hanging fruit is just go out there and make sure all your data is the same everywhere. Be consistent everywhere.

01:15:58
Like if you moved, if you have a different unit number, if you whatever, like make sure your information is consistent out there that shouldn’t take much time, shouldn’t cost you much. And you can go and do that. And that is a great place to start. And then the other place to start is start talking about what only you can talk about. You do those things and you’ll have a great foundation and hopefully someday we could work together. I love that. Thank you.

01:16:21
And with that, encourage all of our listeners to take at least one powerful insight you heard and put into practice. And Dave just gave you a really good call to action there at the end. I missed all the others and remember strategic counsel is only effective if you put it into action. we spark something with this episode that you want to talk about further? Reach out to us through our website, ForthRight-People.com. We can help you customize what you have heard to move your business and make sure to follow or subscribe to Strategic counsel on your favorite podcast platform!