S1. Ep20 - How To Get Your Business To Rank In ChatGPT Search

Katie: Welcome to the AI Automations for Business Podcasts. We're your hosts, Katie and Null, and we'll be discussing how you can use AI for your business along with the latest news, updates and automations to help you stay ahead of the curve, allowing you to grow and scale your business more efficiently. Please be sure to subscribe and I hope you enjoy this episode. Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode. Hi, hello. I'm Katie and I've got Nol here me. Hi, Noel.

Noel: Hello.

Katie: How are you doing this afternoon?

Noel: You know as Mason as always, isn't it?

Katie: You're going to have to come up with another word.

Noel: I will. I will someday. Not yet, though. Okay.

Katie: Amazing's good for a few more episodes.

Noel: Yeah, yeah. We'll see what it's like in 26. Oh gosh.

Katie: Well, we are joined today by Milana Thornton from Echo AI and I'm absolutely thrilled and excited at the same time because Milana is going to talk all about SEO but for AI. Hi, Milana. Hi, Milana. I'm excited to be here. I'm good. Good. I'm so glad you're here.

Milana Thornton: Thank you. I'm excited to be here. It's going to be a fun conversation. So yeah, I'm excited. Yeah.

Katie: So I think we should start off because I think most people listening know what SEO is, like in the traditional sense. But obviously, the AI world has exploded. It's very fast-paced. And now we have AI SEO. So how is that different to, let's call it traditional SEO for the purposes of this podcast? Yeah.

Milana Thornton: Yeah. So just to break down really quickly, everybody knows what a Google search page, we've all Googled before. So previously, you would go into Google and you'd put a question or a keyword or something, right? and then you're going to get that list of websites. Sometimes at the top you would have ads, people that had paid to be there to answer that question. But most of us tend to skip over those ads and go down to the websites. And what you would have to do is search through. You'd have to click on each one of those websites, right, to find the answer to your question. Google on their side of things, their Google bots had gone through all of these websites and decided that those were the ones that answered your question best. But then you had to go and search for it. So now, even Google has the little answer, the AI answer at the top. They kind of started coming around to things when they saw the right. Yeah, it's fun. It makes things really, really nice.

Katie: I know, especially me who's like a crazy Google, especially like when I'm watching films, or a Netflix series, because I'm like, oh, my God, I recognize them. Where have I seen them? And before, I would have to search through different websites. And now that, you know, AI part of the top of Google just tells me straight away. And I'm like, oh, it's the best thing. Yeah.

Milana Thornton: And you know what? We're still on the same page with that. I get teased. Every movie that we watch, my husband's like, do you want me to pause so you can Google the cat, you know? Yes, please. That's what I'm going to do. so yeah but that AI answer at the top just cuts down all that time right of having to go through all of those websites yeah and then if you take it even further now over to chat gpt or perplexity or gemini it takes it up even another notch right now you've got a whole page of actual answers to your questions not just go to this website and then dig around all the pages for your for your answer it's like here you go we're going to hand this to you on a silver platter and sometimes they'll put at the top like here's YouTube videos that answer your question and they take it even further of if you click on that YouTube video it's going to go right to the section of that YouTube video of where it answers your question so it's cutting out so much work for you right like all the steps that you did before you don't need to do anymore you can just get those answers right away. But if you're a business owner, it now poses the question of, well, how do I end up there, right? Like, how are people going to find me? So it's a really big shift, like really, really big. And it's hurting a lot of businesses right now, too. So if you were active in doing SEO and all of a sudden now you're going, oh, our leads were all up here, and now this has dropped, why? You know, and that's why for the first time ever, Google saw a massive drop a few weeks ago. Yes. Yeah, it was huge. And I'm sure Google was like, what?

Katie: Panicking, lots of panic. Yeah.

Milana Thornton: And it was a pretty decent number. And it's, you know, people are like, well, why would I keep doing that? I'm going to go over to this other cool new tool that I'm using, and it just hands me the answer. So, yeah, so it's really affecting things, but then it does pose the question for business owners of how do I get there, right? How do I, I show up there?

Katie: Yeah. And I think that's what we all want to know now because I feel like I know SEO it's been around for so, so long, but I feel like as business owners, you have your website and then you have your website, you're really pleased with it. And then you hear about SEO and you're like, oh my goodness, that's something else. I've got an ad to, you know, my workload and maybe they've just kind of got their head around what it is and, you know, how to get showing up in Google. And I know like a lot of people spend a lot of time writing content for Google, you know, to rank on the first page. So now like this has come along, it's kind of like I feel like I don't want people to feel fatigued or thinking, oh my goodness, this is just something else I need to add to my work. I feel like we let's talk about maybe why this is going to be so important. So we kind of just mentioned it about, you know, Google search as being, you know, down and, you know, you know, having that crazy, crazy crash where, you know, so many people are now not Googling as much. Right. So, yeah, maybe we can talk about the importance, like, a little bit more if that's okay. Yeah.

Milana Thornton: Essentially, what you're doing is you're optimizing now for answers instead of keywords. So in the past with my clients, right, they would come to me, even our packages for SEO, a lot of times, were based around how many keywords you wanted to rank for, right? And so, and we had all of that information. You know, you would say, okay, for this keyword, it has a high search intent. A lot of people are searching. So, you know, you can go and you can start optimizing your website for that keyword. You know, in the beginning, there was like the keyword stuffing, right? And then Google caught on to what people were doing and they were like, oh, hold on. And so then there were rules around that, like, let's just put it in a couple of times, naturally, you know, throughout the content, those kinds of things. And I used to tell people all the time, all the time, Google's King. They're going to decide, you know, what they see on your website. And we're just trying to do the best, right? But now it's different. Now we're actually using either answers or queries is kind of the term that we're replacing that keyword phrase. with. Because people are looking for answers. And so they're not clicking anymore, right? You're wanting to be cited in those answers. So it's all about building trust, not just trust with, you know, your potential clients or people that are looking for you, but also with the AI. And so it is a big shift because before you were writing for Google and we kind of had these set of rules as to what to follow, what Google would look for and things like that. And now you're having to write for AI. So we know a little bit. We don't have the full picture yet because a lot of these LLMs like chat TPT, perplexity, even Gemini, they haven't given us the back-end view of how everything works. So you're not able to take a query, for example, and say, well, how many people search for that? We don't have that answer yet, right? But what we do know is in past, they're called People Also Ask. You'll see them a lot of the time at the bottom of Google, right? Or right now you'll see them at the bottom of like perplex. maybe you put in a prompt or a question, it answers it, and then it says, you know, these are related questions that go with that. We're really able to use that information now to kind of build out what we're building for your AI search and your AI visibility. So it's definitely still going to be work, right? Like it's just a different kind of work now. And really at the core of it, is knowing your customer really, really well. So whatever you want to call it, whether you want to call it your ideal customer avatar, like there's so many names for it now with AI, right? But at the end of the day, that's where we want to begin with this whole process. And I can walk through that. Do you want me to kind of walk through how we now we're going about this? Yes.

Katie: Everyone's screaming. Yeah.

Milana Thornton: So when I started this all, because my company is pretty young, right? And even with my SEO background, when I built my website, I obviously built it with SEO in mind, but it didn't have like years of SEO strength coming in. And so I went, okay, I'm going to put my website as kind of the test because what I want to see is, with this shift, are people that were doing SEO for years and years, are they going to just now transfer over to this AI search and be the ones that show up for everything, right? Do us little guys even have a chance to be able to be cited in these answers? So I kind of used my website, my company as a test dummy for this to kind of in action, right, see how it worked. And then I documented it all on LinkedIn. So we all could kind of learn together how this is working. And it's really, really interesting the things that I've discovered and just how much it's changed just in the last three weeks is crazy. But the starting point for everybody is going to be knowing your customer inside and out. So you think you might know. but you you probably don't right because sometimes you're in an industry and you start using all of the lingo that's for you and that's not how your your customers are asking questions and so so that's where you want to start is saying okay even even go and interview your your current customers right get to know them um from that starting point that their point view of when you were looking for my business, what were your questions, right? When you were looking for my services, I should say, what were your questions? That's where you want to start. I have a client that I was working with. They'd been in their industry for five years, and we were kind of going through our discovery period, getting to know each other and really diving into things. And I said, okay, so which social platform would your customers show up on? and she just blankly stared at me

Katie: and I said

Milana Thornton: I said so like LinkedIn Facebook where where are they going to be and she goes I have no idea and I said well tell me about your ideal client and she sat there a little bit longer and she was like I don't know I'm like well your your competition does right so that's really important like for the last five years you've just been getting whatever comes your way you could be getting so much more if you just knew who you were talking to, right? And so we want to back up and get to know our customers really well. Because the thing that we don't know yet from these LLMs is we're not able just to plug into a tool yet your business name or your website and say, how many times am I cited on chat GPT. We don't have anything, at least that I've been able to find, unless somebody developed it yesterday, we don't have a tool like that that's going to give us the information. So there's still some manual work that we have to do in the beginning. And one of those is finding out the questions that our customers are asking. So that step number one is, I would say come up with about 30 questions, 30 queries, that your potential customers, your potential clients would be typing into chat GPT or perplexity to be answered, right? So even if it's not necessarily, because they might not even know that they need your service yet, right? So maybe it's a pre-question to leading up to, oh, okay, actually, I need to hire this person, right? Yeah. So, yeah. So that's step number one is get to know your client really well. find out the questions that they're asking. That's the manual work that you've got to do straight out of the gate. So does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense.

Katie: Quick question. So this is something that I've always told my clients to do is to interview potential, you know, ideal clients, dream clients. Because I will say, like, you want to record it and then use the language and the words that they use in your content?

Milana Thornton: Absolutely.

Katie: So is that the same for the SEO part as well?

Milana Thornton: Yes. Yeah, because that's going to come into play later quite a bit. So, you know, because it's a fine balance now with AI and with the human touch, right? So we have to play that balance. We can't just because there's a lot of prompts out there. Noel probably has a ton of that you could just plug in. And it's a good place to start, right? Of saying, this is my business. This is my business website. This is a little bit about what we do and all of those. You can dive into your services and you can feed that to chat, and then say, who's my ideal client, right? And that would take you a portion of the way of knowing, okay, now I need to go and talk to that person, right? Yeah. And actually, and recording them, right? like using Firefly or something like that. Because one of the really good things that ChatGPT is really good at is plugging that transcript in and then saying like what are the emotions that are coming up here? You know, you really want all of that data. Again, it always comes back to data, doesn't it? Yeah. All of that data to be able to use in the content that you're creating, in the information that you're putting on your website. somebody can build a website you know maybe you're an hvac specialist right and you're like i know everything about hfac and you build a website and it's super technical and it has all of the hvac lingo on it right but it doesn't make sense to us you know people that don't know anything about hvac we're like my water heater went out you know i need you to fix it you know do you even do that i don't know because you're calling it this and this and this so you're promising get you so far. It can go, okay, and I always start with that prompt, right? Who is my ideal client here? And then you go and you talk to them. And then you 100% record those conversations and use that information that now the AI, that maybe you didn't notice when you were having that conversation, but the AI can detect. And so you just further use that into your research to then go out and talk to those people, get those questions that you're answering and put it in a spreadsheet somewhere so that, because you're going to be using it on the next steps. Okay. So, so the next thing that you want to do is take those queries and you want to plug them into the different LLM. So, you know, start with chat TBT. I recommend going to all of the different ones, right? They're each different. They each do different things and answer differently. and maybe your client's using one and, you know, another client's using another. So again, you want that data. So go to that, plug it in, and you're going to look for a few things on that page. First of all, next to the answers, there's going to be a little citation. And so you're going to want to click on that citation. That person is now your competitor. Okay? So they're answering the question. for you that you want to show up for. So document that. Put that into your spreadsheet. Okay, this is somebody I want to pay attention to because they're showing up. So what are they doing differently than I am? And not saying that you have to copy what they're doing, right? But it's always good to see what other people are doing and kind of do it better. We've been saying that for social media all the time, right? Like, see what's working for other people, use it, frame it for yourself. And then repurpose it and put it out there, right? So it's totally okay to do. It's data that you want to use and use for your benefit. So the first thing you want to do is click on that citation, document who is showing up for those answers. Now, there's a little bit of kind of, you know, talk out there that everybody always skips the first question. But documented anyway, you know, that's just kind of, you know, I don't know, people are making up stuff. I have no idea.

Noel: But documented anyway.

Milana Thornton: So then the second thing you want to do is go down to that bottom of the page and see what those related questions are. Grab them and put those into your spreadsheet now as well because those are now questions that you want to answer on your website. So I'll get into here in a little bit different ways to be able to answer those questions on your website. And it's not, I keep saying on your website, but really it's in your social media, right? It's actually so much. It's just a wealth of possibilities and knowledge that you can now use. You know, I mean, I used to spend hours and hours and hours of researching and trying to put together, like social media calendars and all of that kind of stuff. Now you've got it all at your fingertips here of what people are asking and how you can answer it for them and put it out there, right? So you could create, you know, a whole calendar worth of stuff to be able just to say, okay I'm good so yeah for sure on that page that's the first thing that you want to do put that query in and then now every week as you go in and you search for these things because it's all changing so fast you're also going to want to use those related questions and stick those into those LLMs and search for those as well because it's going to bring up now a new set of questions which then you're going to take and document it's like this never-ending flow of And it can become really overwhelming, but if you are using AI along with that, it calms down the chaos a little bit. So that's the first step. It's that all about the research.

Katie: Yes.

Milana Thornton: Yeah, that's the big manual part of this. And so it's scary, but I also go, okay, well, knowledge is power. And if you're doing this, you're going to, you're going to, to be on the forefront of this change because there's a lot of people still stuck in that SEO cycle. So when I first started posting about this on LinkedIn, which was just three weeks ago, mind you. So not very long ago, you still had all of the big SEO people screaming from the hilltops. SEO's not dead. SEO's not dead. SEO's not dead. Now they're all changing their tune three weeks later and you see everybody they're adjusting their message a little bit right which is um you know these are the things from SEO that you still need to use right which is important because SEO is not completely dead there's still things that you're going to want to do that are really handy in the AI search right but if you're coming into this and you're you're putting the effort in you have a real opportunity to be doing it before a lot of people are. And so it really can be amazing. You know, you don't have to. I guess my point is, is don't be discouraged of coming in and being like, well, I didn't do SEO before, right? What chance do I have? Well, now is your chance. That is, now is your opportunity. Yeah. Yeah. So jump on it. Put that grunt work in, right? to kind of do it and see where it gets you. So case study-wise, just from me testing my website, for a week, I put together a six-week plan. That six-week plan has now changed multiple times in the last three weeks just because every day there's something new. But that first week, I did all of these things that I'm now talking about, right? Yeah. and started making the updates and talking about it and, you know, changing. And in a week, I went from no citations in chat GPT and perplexity to 17. So for an SEO person where I used to have really tough conversations with my clients and up front, I was always super transparent of this is not an overnight thing, right? Like you're looking at us go, we're talking six. six months to a year, you know, at the very least. And those are for keywords that are not highly competitive, you know. You're talking about those ones. We're talking long game here, right? So to be able to do that in a week is insane. So from, in three weeks, from just from AI tools, AI search tools. So chat, GPT, perplexity, the ones I'm trying. tracking our chat GPT, perplexity, Gemini, I've got being in there somewhere. Like, I just put everything that I possibly could, right? And I've had 349 visits to my website from AI citations. So in three weeks. So it's worth doing. I know it seems overwhelming.

Katie: As business owners, right, you're wearing all the hats.

Milana Thornton: but it's worth saying okay for you know an hour every single night I'm just going to spend time on this and putting these steps into place so yeah so I don't want anybody to think like well it's not worth it right because it really is so

Katie: yeah it's it's going to pay off a lot quicker than you know traditional SEO because like you were saying malano like it the SEO journey was incredibly slow and if not a little bit painful but yeah to go from like zero to 17 in such a short amount of time is just yeah incredible yeah it's

Noel: going on my to do list yeah

Katie: next week yeah no you thought you were finished once we had finished recording this podcast oh no no no you have a payment

Milana Thornton: So, yeah, no, it really, it blew, I will not lie. I plugged it in because you'll, you can use Google Analytics, you can use GA4 to do this. It's one of the one places that you can track how to, how to do it. And I was just kind of messing around, like just setting it up, right? In my mind, it was for future use, right? Oh, well, I better be doing this, right? so I can see when it does happen, if it happens, right? And I plugged that in and like, you know, all of the information loaded. And I was like, what just happened? I was blown away. I was absolutely like, it's been a week. It's been a week. How is that possible? But that's that old SEO mind of mine that just

Katie: my head around it. It is. It's mind blowing that it's working that fast.

Noel: Yeah.

Katie: And the impact that can have on businesses is incredible. So anyone listening now, if you didn't bother with SEO before or you just, like, for whatever reason, like I get it, it was a lot of effort for, you know, maybe not a great kickback. But now if you're doing this, you're already ahead of the curve. Like you are ahead of millions of businesses. which I just love.

Milana Thornton: It's fun. It is really, really fun to just see it evolve and see the possibilities there is pretty exciting, especially as a business owner, right? It's like, okay, this is cool. And I always love, like, that's so exciting for me now to be able to tell my clients, like, hey, this is working, right? Because we all want to see that ROI pretty quickly. And I think that, like, AI has done that to us, right? It's the whole Amazon, you know, being delivered in two days kind of thing, right? Not very patient anymore. So it's, it's, I mean,

Katie: Amazon's same day delivery.

Milana Thornton: Exactly. Yeah, I say two days now, but it's not even two days. It's, yeah. It's same day,

Katie: same day.

Milana Thornton: Yeah. So, yeah, like, yeah, we all, we want it really, really quickly. So, so this is exciting to be able to see. And I don't know how it will change in the future, right? But right now, this is what it is looking like, which is exciting for us, you know, little guys that you don't have to be some big, huge brand that's spent millions and millions of dollars to be able to show up for people. So, yeah. So step two, are you good if I, or three, I think we're on step three now. If I raise up the steps, I apologize. So really what all of this comes down to is is trust, right? So I don't know the number now, but it used to be like you had to have seven to 10 touch points with a, you know, a customer or a person before they would actually, excuse me, before they would actually, you know, purchase or something like that. So, and still, even probably more so now, that purchasing point of things, there's a motion drawn into that. And so it's all tied together. So even though we can use AI to do a lot of these things, this next portion of what you're going to be writing about and putting on your website and those kinds of things, you need to still make sure that there's authenticity. coming through, right? So what you're going to do is you're going to take that data now that you have in your spreadsheet, you're going to take those questions, and you're going to start answering them. So, you know, whether it's writing a blog post, you know, putting it on one thing that is different, just total side note where it has to do with social media, SEO didn't really take any of that into account, right? So you could optimize for YouTube, you know, SEO, right? But that was strictly for YouTube, right? Instagram, you know, anything like that. It just didn't carry over at all to SEO. With AI search, it does. So, which is so cool. Right? Yeah. So much fun to now be able to go, okay, like I'm doing all of these things and now they're all being tied to which is fantastic for us because you don't feel like you're you're wasting any time so um so you can take some of those questions and like I mentioned earlier you can create a social media strategy around it and um and put those questions into your into your post right answer those make a YouTube video about it get on to Reddit Reddit is not my favorite place in the whole entire world, but your potential customers are on there, researching, asking questions, those kinds of things, be seen there. So get on and interact. Don't get in there and be like, oh, you know, my business does that, you know, but build that trust and those relationships and be the answer and then be the trusted source that they're looking for because AI is going to grab that information. So as you see, when you're in chat, GPT, and you put your question in and you see it doing its thinking, right? At the top, it's going to rotate little images of the sources that it's looking at. And you'll always see Reddit up there. It is searching Reddit like crazy because it's a goldmine for these answers to these questions. So you're going to take, you know, your spreadsheet, take your questions that people are asking and you're going to work that into your strategy now of, you know, posting on your, on your website, posting on social media, those kinds of things. So any questions about that and how that works?

Katie: So I have a question about Reddit, if that's okay. So I have seen those Reddit citations. pop up. And I know, like, we want to go in and answer questions. Are we setting up then an account in our name? Are we setting up an account in our business name?

Milana Thornton: Yeah, you know, that's a good question. I would probably set up an account in a business name just so that that branding is coming through, you know, because that's what people are going to see. And if you, you know, We all do it, right, where we're in a subreddit or a forum, you know, on Facebook or whatever. And it tends to be, oh, so-and-so is always answering the questions that have to do with this industry or this subject, right? And so you kind of get used to seeing that name. And people are visual, right? So if maybe you have like your little logo or even the picture of yourself, you know, that is tied with your business. and it's just you're trying to get into that subconscious right of that you're now the first person when they actually go to purchase or to you know move forward with that next step of of actually buying that you're the one that pops up in their head because they're like hey they really know what they're talking about where this is concerned so yeah

Katie: so we use in read it in the same way that we would be using a Facebook group community. We're going in. We're being helpful. We're answering the questions. And then people eventually get to know us, trust us, build that relationship with us. And then when they're ready, we are literally the only choice because they have that relationship with us and they know that we can help.

Milana Thornton: Right. And it's kind of dual purpose, right? Because you may have been doing that before, especially in Facebook groups, right? That was a common practice to show up in those Facebook groups and stuff. But before, AI wasn't searching those groups and then giving the answers. Now, AI is actually searching those groups. And so AI is recognizing this person's always answering these questions, right? I'm speaking for AI like I, you know, know what it's thinking in its mind. But, you know, essentially the AI is going in there. And then it's drawing it back to say, okay, I keep seeing this person answer this question. I'm going to go and I'm going to, that's now going to be cited. And maybe it does tie to, okay, they're answering it here in Reddit. They're also answering it on their website. Okay, this is somebody that we can trust and that we feel comfortable giving this answer to the people that are asking. And so you don't necessarily need to just rely on that process of waiting for people to see you over and over and over again in Reddit and and that's that could pay off right that's traditionally what people were doing but now you've got the AI aspect of it of of tying you to showing up in those those searches which is fantastic so you know where before you know it's like posting on or creating on YouTube. You hear all the time, I've been doing this forever. I only get, you know, and at some point in time, you have to go, is it worth doing anymore? It's taking up all the time. And the same thing goes for posting in Reddit previously or posting on and being involved in Facebook groups. It was, is this bringing me any business? Like I'm glad on one side, you're happy to help people, right?

Noel: But from the business

Milana Thornton: aspect of it, we're all really busy, you know, is this worth my time? is it actually bringing people to me. You know, you have to ask yourself those questions. Well, now you can rest assured of, okay, there's a dual purpose here. This is actually working in several different ways for me. So it really is worth my time to be showing up in here and doing that. So it's pretty.

Noel: Yeah.

Milana Thornton: Absolutely awesome, I think. Yeah. I think out about this stuff all the time to my family members, anybody that I'll listen. that are they just can kind of share at me and be like, why are you excited about this, you know? But it really is exciting.

Katie: It is. I'm with you. I totally get it. I'm like really excited about that. Yeah. And yeah, it would be really interesting to see it in practice as well.

Milana Thornton: Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of the fun part of all of this. So, and even if you start at the beginning and you do, don't really know your clientele, you know, or you think you know, but you, this is all a learning journey going through this. Really, we should have been doing this all along, right? You know, when we were doing SEO, a lot of times you were writing for Google's bots. You were following those. You were just filling in the blanks, right? You weren't really connecting with your clients. You may be, you know, face to face, but really when you're trying to just get onto Google's first page, that was your goal. mind.

Noel: But I feel like this process,

Milana Thornton: it's almost like AI is forcing us to keep that human connection, right? And so it sounds funny, but I feel like that's kind of a side thing from all of this is that at the end of it, you're going to be like, oh, no, I know exactly who I'm speaking to, you know, to know them pretty well. Yeah. So yeah, it's fun. But that next step is really the big one is blogs, right? So we've kind of touched on the social media thing and working that into that aspect of things. And this is where AI automation can come in. You know, you've got quite a few blog automations out there. And there's that big conversation, right, between AI generated content and, you know, still writing the content. It was even brought up, right, with Lucy. talking about the legal side of things. And so you're going to take those questions and now create, I just always take them. I feed it into chat, GPT, and I say, which of this list do you recommend me starting, writing, you know, my blogs for, right? Kind of prioritize, right? And then I just start working through those. Now, I do have a blog automation that I created that brings in all of the best practices for AI visibility and AI search. And so it works that into that. But for me, that's a starting point. It's not a one and done type thing. And Noel will really understand where the automation side things comes into this, right? Because everybody kind of has a different way of doing it. So this is my way. I'm not saying it's like right for everybody, but, but at least for me, this is kind of how I blend all of it together, I guess. So I'll take that FAQ and I'll plug it into my blog automation, right? You have things that are called cornerstone blogs. Those are going to be your larger blogs. So for me right now, some of my cornerstone blogs are really explaining AI visibility to people, which is tough. And Noel and I were teasing about this because nobody has a term for this yet. No.

Noel: Katie asked me earlier. She said, what are we calling this? I said, I don't start. We don't know yet.

Katie: Yeah. And I think you came up with about four or five different ones. And I was like, do you know what? I'm just going to call it AI SEO because everyone kind of knows what I mean when I say it. and it's just the most straightforward, like, term for it. Absolutely.

Milana Thornton: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's so many. And it's all so confusing because even the, you've got GEO, right? And you've got AEO and LLMO. And they all do, they all mean different things. It's not that it's not all about AI search or AISEO. So it's just different levels. Some of it has to do with like the UI, you know, the look of your website and things like that. And so there's all of these different aspects. So one of my cornerstone blogs is diving into like the structure of that and kind of explaining things, right? So it's a longer blog that goes into more details and kind of talks about that. Then you've got just kind of your smaller blogs that don't have to be very long, maybe answers just that query, just that question, and kind of goes into detail there. So I put that into my blog automation. I tell it how long I want it to be. I give it some more details to kind of direct it, you know, as to which way I would like it to go. And then it runs through and it gives me the output. And then I take that and I put that human, human in the loop aspect of, right so it's for me it's like a 80% of the way there right it's doing all of the you know heavy lifting research for me um and then i get to go in and add my stories and you know my case studies and um you know that kind of thing that actually

Katie: makes it real

Milana Thornton: yes yeah um i'll go in one of my blog or my automation right now is giving me the same links because you do want to include links in your blog post, right? So that was one of the aspects of my automation is to go out there and do some research and bring those in. It's giving me the same three links every single time from Salesforce and I think I don't even remember the other two, but I'm like, they can't all be coming from the same place, you know. So like I said, like these things glitched sometimes. but it takes me about 80% of the way there and then I go in there and I add my own personal touch to it. So that when people are reading it or if it, so I'm writing for both, right? I'm writing for AI because I'm answering those questions. So AI can go in there and it can grab that information and then cite me. But I'm also answering those questions and making it feel human and real and that they're not just reading some dry yuckiness, but, you know, AI spit out for them because nobody wants to do that just in case just in case somebody comes along and reads it so um so so yeah don't just have AI write your blog post uh because everybody else is doing that right now yeah you're going to get the same information the same answers the same stuff every single time and you know back in SEO days we used to always say like don't just copy what everybody else is doing you've got to make it different or that's Google's going to hit you for that.

Katie: This is similar.

Milana Thornton: Yeah, this is similar, right? So make sure that you are using AI wisely as you're creating the content, even for your social media, right? Not saying don't use AI, but then put your human touch on it is important. Plus, I think that it also, by doing that, it brings in the legal aspect of things, right, is that, you know, it is your content.

Katie: You're shaping. Yeah, you know, I was, I was just about to touch on that point. It was like what Lucy was saying in the previous episode. If, yeah, it's like, who owns the content if you haven't created it or you haven't co-created it. Yeah. Yeah, that then becomes difficult, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah.

Milana Thornton: So, plus it'll just make you feel better to have your voice in there a little bit, right?

Katie: I think it's actually really important to have. your own experience, stories, you know, anything that makes it more human, because I think actually we are really interested in one another and, you know, you kind of remember situations more I find if there's, you know, a story, even if it's like a really funny short story. Like I think of all the content I've consumed, all the, you know, business books I've consumed. And when someone's told me a story about a situation, I always remember that, like, way more than if they are just kind of like given me all the information.

Milana Thornton: Yeah. And you never know, right? What's going to connect with somebody, right? They could read that experience and go, oh, that really resonates with me. you just, you know, that human connection is still, and people are looking for that trust and that connection and that authenticity. So, you know, we can still use all of these AI tools. We can still do all of this, but still have that connection. And then I feel like it's actually going to get us further ahead by having that aspect and that, you know. Like, Noel has a fantastic, I've built it, your automation from you to me for social media. of, right? It's awesome. So you could 100% use that in this scenario, right? Set up and automation. Build that calendar. I am not a big fan of the month-long calendars. I know that that was once upon a time of thing.

Katie: Yeah.

Milana Thornton: Change to quickly now.

Katie: Yeah, I'm not a fan of that. I feel like things change so much, so quickly. And I feel like the energy that you are, planning that month of content in changes, changes very quickly. And what you have spent then a lot of time writing, actually, in a couple of weeks' time, you just think, actually, that doesn't align with me or I'm not in that energy. And then you've wasted, you know, time creating that monthly content calendar. And I think also it doesn't allow you to jump on things. that are, like, newsworthy as well? Yes,

Milana Thornton: exactly. That's all of my clients. I build a lot of social media systems for my clients, and I always recommend to them, you know, even if you want to do it for the whole week, maybe on Sundays you set that time aside and you

Katie: go into

Milana Thornton: your dashboard or into your spreadsheet, and you, like, just make it an idea, you know, session with yourself and you put, so you could take these people ask queer, and you can plug them in, right? But then be fluid about it, right? If you wake up on Wednesday and something's in the news that's in your industry and you're like, ooh, I'd really like to talk about it, be flexible that you can switch that out. And that's where the great thing is about these automations, right?

Noel: It's because now you

Milana Thornton: don't have to spend hours planning it out and putting it together. You can plug it into Knowles automation, run it, and then take it and tweak whatever you want to do or maybe get really creative with the. the image that you're going to use or whatever you can put your your you know but but i tell all of my clients i'm like i will never hand you anything that's customer facing that you don't need to touch before it goes out to your customer out to your customer and if you're if they're going to see it like that's not going to be the case with like our SMS systems or uh you know our voice systems or things like that but but if it's content yeah you need to look at it first and you need to So anyway, but that's the cool thing about this is that it's going to help your AI visibility, your AI search, your AISEO, whatever you want to call it. But we're able to shorten down that time by using some of the automations. And it really can help. So even though it might be overwhelming, you do have things that can come in and help cut down on that time. So, you know, the social media automation, a blogging automation, those kinds of things. Use it, but then, you know, put your twist on it and don't be afraid to tweak those things. So, yeah, so the blog is a big one because you're able to answer a lot of questions in there. You may even be able to chat to BT when you plug that in, may even say, oh, well, actually, these four questions go together. So let's go ahead and combine that into one blog and answer those questions. And then the next key point, like key part with that blog is that at the end of it, you want to do an FAQ section. So yes, this is the big thing with AI search. And it's a little thing because this you can 100% have AI right for you. You don't need to be, you know, all human about it. Like just stick what your, you know, stick your blog post into, you know, one of your tools. and then say, write me some FAQs that I can put at the bottom of the blog that go along with this. And really, ideally, you're going to want an FAQ section on every single one of your pages on your website. Yeah. So that's another big thing. It's simple, but it is one of the things that AI is looking at when they're going to site.

Katie: So would you say like even on your like home page and about page even FAQs on those or

Milana Thornton: home page I would just do it a little bit differently right so um find kind of the top questions and as you're going through and making your content just work those in don't work them in like like you would have keywords but um just answer questions on your home page like not in like a question answer type format, just make sure that it is included in your messaging in there. And it doesn't have to, it doesn't have to change all the time, it doesn't have to, but just maybe go, okay, these are the citations, these are the queries that are coming up a lot. So let's make sure that they know that we handle that or, you know, that's part of our services. And so you just work it into a content. So I wouldn't put like an actual FAQ section on the bottom of your homepage. But the rest of them, I would. So your service pages, you're going to want an FAQ that's just all about those services that answers those questions. And then on top of that, have a just FAQ page. So if you have different services, go ahead and maybe break it into blocks on that FAQ page. The answers questions about that service. And then don't put it on your top navigator menu. just put it in your footer, you know, at the bottom of your website. Yeah. And again, it's just one more. That's more for like AI to be able to see and know that it's there. But the difference is when we were doing SEO, a lot of times in the beginning, everybody would be led just to your homepage, right? And it made it super simple because you had everything on your homepage, right? Like that was all what you did. some of the chaos that's talked about with this AI search thing is that you really have no idea where they're going to go and where they're going to end up, right? It might be on your social media. It might be on some random page on your website. So interestingly enough, when I first did that search that first week to see, you know, if I was showing up anywhere, the one page that was seen the most. I created a content demo for people that visited my website where they're just able to fill out a type form. And within five minutes in their email box, they have just an example of what's possible with social media automation and like a newsletter, right? So it sends that over to them. And that was the page that was cited the most. Well, the only thing that's on that page is it says content demo and then it has the type form and that's it. So I found that just crazy, like, but it's a perfect example of that you don't really know where AI is going to send them. So you want to make sure that every single page that's on your website has some answers, you know, about what you do. And like, because if somebody were to go to that page now, they probably would just look at it and go, what is this? And then they'd have to go to different pages to find. So I went in and I added like an FAQ section at the bottom and which I would have just never thought of doing before.

Noel: Right.

Milana Thornton: So yeah. So you want to optimize every single one of your page with in mind that it's very likely that somebody could end up on that page.

Katie: Okay. So we've got one last part that people need to implement haven't we, Milana. Do you want to share what that is for everyone.

Milana Thornton: Yeah. So the very last thing that you need to do after you've written this awesome blog and put your FAQ questions on is the schema. And so schema's been around for a long time. We used it in SEO, but now it's really, really important because the AI is crawling that information. And so this is not something that your users on your website are going to see. It's in the background. It's code that's that's behind the scenes. And it's just going to map out really, really clearly what's included in your blog post. And it's going to actually write the FAQ questions in the schema code as well. So there's a few ways that you can do this. There are schema builders that I'll share and you can put with this podcast to be able to just hop in there and use. And it will actually, like it has, it'll prompt you through building it. So you don't need to go in there and be an expert of any kind. You can go in and just say, hey, this is the title of my blog. You know, these are the FAQ questions that I asked. And in some of them you can even paste your blog in there. The other thing that you can do is use chaty PT and just prompt it to write the schema for you and you just paste the blog post in there. You'll also want to do schema on your other pages. There's different kinds of schema. So there's organizational schema. That's going to go on your homepage. If you are a business that focuses on, you know, your local area with SEO, that was the way we did that was by having keywords that said like, I've already used a check, but like HVAC in Salt Lake City, right? And that never made my clients happy ever because they were like, well, what if somebody's in Provo? And, you know, they think I only service Salt Lake. So you don't need to do that anymore. But what you do need to do is include that information in your organizational schema and your local schema. And you can stack those codes together and paste those into your blog builder or your website builder,

Noel: whatever you're using.

Milana Thornton: It's pretty just a simple copy paste, but it gives all of the right information. And one extra little tip is to include in every single one of your schema, your social media links. So put your LinkedIn, put your Instagram, put your Reddit, put anything that you have social into every single one of your schema so that that information is just readily available to be able to crawl and get. So, yeah, so it's really, really a great tool to be able to use and kind of that secret code in the background that just gives it that extra push over to the AI search. So it's a good thing to note for sure.

Katie: That's such great information. Like I feel like that was a whole Utrecht. that I feel like I would have paid really good money for Milana. That was incredible.

Noel: I've got so much to do now. Yeah.

Katie: No, you are so busy.

Noel: Just off my Reddit account.

Milana Thornton: I know. And that's just like there's, you know, I don't know. It's crazy and it just keeps building every single day. But it's all it's all good stuff. and, you know, just ways to be able to show up. But I think it's going to change even more, you know, as the weeks and the days go by as we just cover more. Yeah. But it's pretty fun. It's pretty exciting. So it's fun to talk about. That's for sure. Yeah.

Katie: Yeah. Thank you so much for all of your knowledge and wisdom and sharing it with us today.

Milana Thornton: Of course. happy to. That was so much fun. So much fun. Like I said, I'm usually talking to people that are just staring at me like, what are you even doing? I enjoyed that.

Katie: No, it was brilliant. It was so helpful. And I know that people listening are going to find it incredibly helpful as well. And yeah, I just feel like it's such an exciting time right now to be a business owner using AI. yeah it's amazing I love it thank you so so much of

Milana Thornton: course I appreciate it you guys

Katie: if you loved this episode then we will put all of Milana's details below in the show notes and you can come over to our free LinkedIn group as well come and ask any questions Malana is actually in there as well so maybe you know you've got some more questions for her if she doesn't mind then you know pop over there absolutely Amazing. And we will see you next time for another episode very, very soon. Take care.