Stop Chasing AI Visibility Scores: Mick Selman & Aaron Towlson, Intrigue Media

Rob Murray (00:29): Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the IM Landscape Growth Podcast. really cool episode today breaking down some of the big like misconceptions and kind of foundations around this crazy topic everybody refers to, which is search engine optimization. And I happen to have two subject matter experts on the call today, Aaron Talson and Mick Selman. You guys are awesome. Thank you for taking the time to do this.

Mick Selman (00:54): Happy to be here.

Aaron Towlson (00:55): Pleasure.

Rob Murray (00:55): as per the format, can you just give the audience a quick little Coles notes summary of like what you do around here and and kind of what your core focus is when you’re when you’re helping the landscape industry?

Aaron Towlson (01:07): Go Mick.

Mick Selman (01:08): Yeah, do it okay, sure. so yeah, I’m SEO and digital optimization strategist at entry. So primarily what I’m b assisting in creating processes that b optimize websites, content, things like that for our clients in order to rank and in and search results. I’m also looking into or but kind of monitoring all of the the new pieces that come out about AEO, GEO, anything AI related to but optimize for for those pieces as well, and helping the the team, content team in b utilizing the the information that comes from that.

Aaron Towlson (01:45): Yeah, my name’s Aaron. and Mick does all that hard work that he just listed there. does all the research stays on top of all the trends, and I I do the fun part of actually speaking to the clients about why they should be doing these things. all our awesome clients and taking what Mick finds, applying it to their business, to their website, and trying to drive those results and conversions from them through all those latest developments that we see and making sure they get the kind of clients that they need.

Rob Murray (02:10): Sweet. Okay, well the the the catalyst to getting you guys on this sh episode was just like the noise that has just kind of cranked up around everything AI. And you know, now we’re even getting clients sending us SEO audits that may or may not be quality in their output, but whatever. but it be it just kind of creates this opportunity to like help people see clearly like what are the things that we should be paying attention to, what are the things we should not, and like I’m guilty, right, as charged. I was sending mixed stuff like all the time. It’s like, hey dude, this LLM.txt file, I think it’s a legit thing. And he’s just like, Yeah, I don’t think so. And I kept sending it to him and he’s Seriously, dude, you gotta stop. And I was Well, I I

Aaron Towlson (02:42): Mm.

Mick Selman (02:43): huh.

Rob Murray (02:45): don’t know what’s going on, like help me understand. And so you’ve done a really good job helping me understand what’s going on. And for whatever, the better part of a year, it’s become clear that the the foundational components to earning trust online really haven’t shifted at all. So why don’t why don’t we start with helping people understand what that even means? Right, ’cause we always talk about how there’s kind of two audiences for any business and one of them is robots and one of them is people. And if the robots trust you then they’ll show you to people. so how the heck do you get a robot to trust you?

Mick Selman (03:14): Yeah, so b what’s kinda funny is that ultimately, yes, we’re we’re writing for robots and for people. we tend to to stick to Google’s guidelines just because they’re still but ahead of of all of those search results. Like primarily searches are going through there. And their process for monitoring whether or not it’s piece of content is going to be optimized for the robots so that they’ll present it is if it’s optimized for people. So it’s kind of like a the a b weird jumble of things, but ultimately it can be categorized into something that Google calls E E A T. and I the b it’s a framework that it uses to judge the c quality of content, so thats experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. and it’s it’s it’s not like a real metric in terms of you you can’t find a number on it in b analytics or anything like that. but it’s basically just sort of a b almost a checklist to frame your your content around. And there are different like specific pieces that fall into that in terms of but are you including your author on a publication? And does that author there then have a page? Is it linked to a LinkedIn or something like that that has all of this information so that Google can connect these pieces and understand that like you are an authority talking about this this piece of information? ‘Cause that’s going to be stronger than something that pops up out of nowhere.

Aaron Towlson (04:38): Yeah, I think a lot of the, you know, mystery that you sort of explained there, Rob, stems from this idea and, you know, Mick really touched on it there, that it’s really complicated. That like Google’s doing some really big mysterious stuff behind the scenes, which it is obviously in some ways, it’s building these algorithms. But at the end of the day, I think Google is at its core trying to help people answer the questions that they want answered. It’s like it comes down to that. That’s all it’s trying to do. So if you can do that in a really good way to folks who are actually relevant to your business, you’re actually doing the services, providing the information that they’re looking for, you have experience in that. You need to get that out there, and you’ll probably do a decent job of it, as long as you set things up in a certain way. Sure, there are details. But ultimately, it comes down to that. And sometimes it feels, and Google is a bit like the Oscars in this way, like we sort of know how it works, but no one really knows why anyone wins anything. Yeah, exactly.

Rob Murray (05:23): And why it took so long for Leo to get one?

Aaron Towlson (05:26): So there is some of that mystery to it that Google intentionally has there so that people can’t copy them obviously. but ultimately it is just trying to get people the answers to the questions that they’re asking. And that’s what it comes down to, doing that the best.

Rob Murray (05:38): Yeah, so let’s break that down a bit because there’s a bunch of AI slop out there now, right? Like the the rate of content production has just, you know, exponentially jumped into a you know, crazy world. And anybody can write a blog post for landscape in seconds. It might suck, but it would be it’s written.

Mick Selman (05:54): Mm.

Rob Murray (05:56): And so kinda going back to your point before, Mick, about you know, does the author have a page? You know, maybe they have a degree in horticulture. are are they referenced as, you know, is that degree mentioned in the page or even the in the author note so that, you know, these tools can be like, okay, this is a source of expertise, not just AI slop. but can you just talk a little bit about what this is doing to people and like what to avoid and maybe what to look for when le y leveraging a tool?  Like an AI tool for for content writing.

Mick Selman (06:22): Yeah. I think it’s really easy to use b an AI tool as a sort of like genie, immediate wish fulfillment piece. but but an AI tool is never going to have the full amount of context that you would have if you spent time b understanding like what to put into something in order to make it good for for Google to to showcase or just to be something that’s helpful and beneficial for for users. Cause if you spend too much time thinking about, Google needs this and this and this and this, you kind of have to take a step back and be like, does anybody do any of my clients actually want to read this? Is this going to be helpful for them? Because that’s sort of the main key, because

Rob Murray (07:00): Mm.

Mick Selman (07:01): if people are interacting with your blog, that’s the biggest trust indicator that something is is valuable. Losing my train of thought.

Rob Murray (07:09): Well, just AI slop versus expertise, you know, written cotten

Mick Selman (07:12): Yeah.

Aaron Towlson (07:13): I think the biggest piece is, you know, a lot of folks with AI and everyone’s getting very excited about it, right? It’s this new tool, it can save me a ton of time. Why do I have to pay anyone if I can just tell it what blog post to write? and it does it for me. Okay, that’s a good question to ask. Well, a lot of people make the mistake of just pressing basically play on these AI tools and then letting the blog post appear and never looking at it again. And you know, and then we see this because we actually you know, when we produce content for clients, we go through it with the clients so we get their expertise to actually go through it line by line with us and say, this doesn’t quite make sense actually for our region. Or there’s a little inaccuracy here, whatever it is. This is the wrong type of soil. that’s why we have their expertise in there so they can actually fact check it along the way. It’s still their expertise. AI’s got them a lot further along, but they’re still fine-tuning it. I think the worst mistake folks make is the set it and forget it aspect. And this is where you get a lot of this slop. But you can also get ahead of that by putting more at the top end of it, right? The better quality you put in, the better quality you’ll get out. So feeding it all the experience that you have, showing it your business, being able to feed it your experience, your testimonials, things like that, what your customers are saying about

Rob Murray (08:15): Hmm.

Aaron Towlson (08:15): You, you’re gonna get better results out. Whereas if you don’t put anything in, that’s basically garbage and you’re gonna get garbage out because it’s got less to work with. so that’s a big tip I’d give folks. The more if you want to play with these tools, give it more. And then check on the other end, finish that loop while it does stuff in the middle.

Rob Murray (08:30): Yeah, subject matter expert to start the prompt and then someone to review it. Well it’s interesting you say that too with the experience component because if I were to write about let’s say how to run a landscaping company and I were to or how to how to how to design a backyard. And I tell a story about this one client had this one space and they wanted to do this one thing. And so when we went there and we looked at it, we ran into a couple of different ideas and we saw that there was an issue with the you know the grade and so we’re gonna have to level it out. That kind of content in itself almost speaks to this EEAT framework, that E E A T framework. And a lot of people don’t necessarily think about writing that way. So can you give a little bit more just you know, tangible clarity on like what the idea of like experience is ’cause it’s not just necessarily the fact that you’ve been in business for twenty years or you’ve been in landscaping for, you know, twenty-five. There’s there’s a piece to this about like maybe even the way we write that helps Google see this as, you know, EEAT framework.

Aaron Towlson (09:25): Mm. Well, it’s basically can you give examples, right? here’s a before and after. Here’s the testimonial from the client from an example project that we’ve actually just we’ve been talking about landscape design in general. Well, here’s a landscape that we designed. Here’s how the client felt about it afterwards and here’s why we made the decisions. And like with your name quoted in it, maybe even your name as having written the post or whatever. Even these signals help a lot. So you just gotta give real world examples, right? And like you said earlier, Rob, do you have a degree

Rob Murray (09:50): Yeah.

Aaron Towlson (09:51): in something? Can you put that in there somewhere? Link to your LinkedIn page, anything. Basically that gives this example. those are ones I that come to mind for me, Mick. What do you reckon?

Mick Selman (10:00): Yeah. but ultimately those I was going to share kind of similar examples of just if you have project photos, project specifics, things like that that you can include that adds to that both the experience and the the trustworthiness aspect of of those. but it’s also something that builds up over time because say you have that blog, you’re working on a different blog, having that blog and all of that information, especially if you’re linking to that blog from your new blog, then that blog’s experience and trustworthiness kind of that helps the the experience and trustworthiness of this new blog that you’re writing.

Aaron Towlson (10:33): you actually touch on something that I think was gonna be more of a closing statement later on, maybe jumping ahead. But but yeah, this idea that things compound as well, right? experience compounds, investment compounds. And actually the longer the earlier you start doing this stuff and having more blog posts on the site, more projects in your portfolio, the longer your website’s been around, the longer you’ve been around as a business you’re always adding to that experience. So the sooner you start this stuff, the more it’s gonna pay off just like any other kind of investing, right?

Rob Murray (11:01): Well, sure, and like planting a tree, right? The best days to plant is twenty years ago, next best day is today. Well, it’s the truth though, right? And this

Aaron Towlson (11:05): Thanks for bringing it around to a landscaping metaphor, Rob. Yeah.

Rob Murray (11:09): and so there’s there’s a couple of things I want to get to, but you kinda brought up this idea though of like, hey, get started now ’cause this stuff takes time and compounds. What do you say to the entrepreneur who’s like, Why would I invest in something that’s not gonna give me a a return for a year or two or maybe three?

Aaron Towlson (11:25): well, your competitors are investing now and in two years when they have more leads than you and they’ve got more projects in your area than you, you might wanna like go back in time and talk to your past self, right? other people are doing this. we see when we compare data of our clients and where their their competitors are at, they’re often missing some pretty low hanging fruit that their competitors have already gone for. that could be why they’re missing leads. So that’s it. If you’re gonna do you wanna look back in two years and think, hey, I wish I’d done that then? or are you gonna be happy with all the projects you got because you were getting some organic traffic that took a little time to get traction, but now you have it and now you’re only ever gonna build on that and you’re already ahead of people who are behind you. Yeah.

Rob Murray (12:04): Yeah.

Mick Selman (12:06): Yeah. W I mean, ultimately do you want to build up do you want to have a larger organic audience than you do now at any point, regardless of if it’s two years in the future? ‘Cause like you you that’s the way to do it is you just have to get started. And you b can start small if you if you need to, if that’s like just what you can allocate, but having it is better than not having it. It’s going to compound. And then also with the ads isn’t self-sustaining in the same way that that having organic content on the site is. Not self sustaining necessarily, but you can have a blog and over time that blog or even a landing page or anything like that is going to increase as l in authoritativeness as long as you keep it up to date, it’s good quality content. but and it’s just going to keep pulling in more and more b potential leads for you. without needing to

Rob Murray (12:59): Yeah, straight up.

Mick Selman (13:01): write it or pay for it all over again or anything like that like you would

Rob Murray (13:03): Well, we talk we we at our talks we always talk about how Google ads are like the the addiction. It’s like you know, it’s like a hit. And so

Mick Selman (13:10): Mm-hmm.

Rob Murray (13:11): you gotta keep paying to get another hit. And SEO at its foundational core really is the cure. And so like I think the biggest thing is that the the folks that we see winning with this and for anybody listening, it it’s the it’s a long term thought approach. It’s long term approach to business. And this is just part of that approach. And so we’re not saying that you have to invest all your dollars in SEO today for the three years out, but it should have part of the strategic plan to build th this idea of trust in in your geography for your topic, landscaping. And so I wanted to understandably, because we had all these people do these SEO audits. We’ve had, you hundreds of SEO audits we’ve done for folks. And with the advent of AI, we’re now able to summarize all of them very easily and which is amazing because we can aggregate and it’s almost one of the coolest things about what we’re doing with all the data with all of our landscape clients, and whether it’s the landscape marketing index and aggregating results from people doing SEO or paid ads or websites, whatever. But now we have all these SEO audits, we aggregate them all and we see a couple of like common themes. One of them is poor authority score as dictated by a tool called SEMrush or SEMrush. Now other, you know, global leaders in SEO tools, AHREFS or MOZ, have similar scores. They’re not all called authority scores, but it’s trying to capture this idea of like how are you perceived as an authority around your domain and topic within your given service area. Ish. Is that fair?

Mick Selman (14:39): Yeah. The something that serves as a good like touch point or keeping an eye on it, especially if it’s somebody that we we wouldn’t have access to like their Google Analytics or Search Console or anything like that, just to sort of get a general vague idea that we can take with a grain of salt. But yeah.

Rob Murray (14:54): Yeah, okay. So and and we’ve s I I’ve personally done I don’t know, upwards of two hundred of them. Whether it’s at trade shows or just on calls with folks and we take we have a little like SEO tool that we can like access these tools super quick from a Google Sheet. And when somebody has a an authority score of over thirty, they typically don’t have a lead problem. And a lot of our clients come to us, excuse me, with authority scores, say around ten. Sometimes two, sometimes seven. Rarely do we see it fifteen or higher, just because they haven’t but focused towards this this idea. But what is it? And how do we influence it outside of just writing blogs? Like are blogs really the thing, or is there other components to this and how does that play into it?

Aaron Towlson (15:32): I just wanted say Mick loves this topic by the way. So I’m I’m excited to hear what Mick has to say.

Mick Selman (15:37): The domain authority in particular or

Aaron Towlson (15:39): Yeah, yeah.

Mick Selman (15:40): so it it is made up of more than blogs. it’s but a metric of I believe three different things. It is traffic, backlinks, and content. but I can verify that that last one specifically, but ultimately it’s sort of it’s an internal metric used by SEMrush to calculate your likelihood or just sort of like what percentile you sit in of being ranked in a in a search result.

Rob Murray (16:06): I always I always call it the robot trust score. Just just to try like oversimplify it

Mick Selman (16:07): Yeah.

Aaron Towlson (16:10): Right. The robots like us at least. Right. Yeah.

Rob Murray (16:12): Yeah, it’s just like it it’s like on a scale of zero to a hundred, like how much do these things think I’m legit? Anyway, sorry.

Mick Selman (16:19): Yeah. so sorry, yeah, just to clarify, it’s link power, which has to do with backlinks, which I think we can we’ll probably touch on a little bit more here in a second. but apart from that it’s organic traffic and then a natural profile. so that one b is a little bit more  behind the scenes stuff of just like Yeah. The

Rob Murray (16:40): What the natural profile? Yeah, like what does that mean?

Mick Selman (16:44): it it’s even more to do with backlinks, but it’s less about like the authority that you’re getting from links and like are your links real? Are they unique?

Rob Murray (16:52): Yeah, like are you legitimately on a bunch of like, you know, Chamber of Commerce or landscape association sites? Are you in directories?

Aaron Towlson (16:58): Mm.

Rob Murray (16:58): Are you referenced by, you know, maybe your local paper? Do you have social media profiles that are all accurate? That type of stuff? Yeah, okay.

Mick Selman (17:05): Exactly. It’s

Aaron Towlson (17:05): Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Mick Selman (17:07): you’re not being linked to from b or b you’re not linking out to b online gambling if you’re a landscaper or something like that. Like

Rob Murray (17:14): Sure building this authority score somehow and we have a natural profile that’s gonna help us get there, a bunch of backlinks and then this content play and that’s gonna get us traffic to the site and the more we kind of work in this cycle you’re saying the more we’re gonna build this authority score. So what if we were to look at it like you know top two, three, maybe four things that we want to be doing on a regular basis, what would we want to focus in on?

Mick Selman (17:36): Yeah, the the biggest piece so it’s the getting people to the site is actually part of something that improves your domain authority. So like you want to get to people people to the site, but also getting them to the site is how you do that. ultimately what you want to be doing is creating reasons for people to come to your site and making it easier for people to find your site. But I get that that kind of seems like b you’re going in a circle.

Rob Murray (17:59): A little bit, but that’s okay, we’re getting there.

Mick Selman (18:01): yeah. But I ultimately you create content that draws people to the site, and if that content performs, if people come, then that content is going to rank higher and then more people are going to come to the site, which is going to force it up even higher. So it’s you just want to keep building, you want to pay attention to what people want to see b on your site whether that’s in regards to like providing them with valuable information or even just a better experience. Like if you look at the data on your page and see, okay, so people really like to look at the gallery. Should we highlight the gallery more? Should we spend more time on updating this gallery, putting in more s project specific information or things like that, just sort of paying attention to how you can give your users, the users that you have, more of what they want so that we can bring in more users.

Aaron Towlson (18:51): Yeah, and I think the other side of that, Rob, you know, you talk about the robot trust score. and yes, there is an element of again, we’re always playing Google’s game to some degree, but this is also I think an easy way to think of it is like traditionally domain authorities, how how much you appear across the internet, right? And who’s linking back to you? Where are you recognized? that’s changed in more recent years because people can mention you in different places, like Reddit’s a big one. then we also know that LLMs are looking at a lot as well. but you compare like, you know, a lot of Google playbooks come from SaaS companies, software as a service companies, tech companies, you know, that proliferated over the last decade or so. and they were always up against like big legacy companies. so it’s hard to battle against those because those legacy companies have been around a while creating a brand being everywhere across the internet, it’s really hard to break that. And try and you know take some of that away from those big older brands. the game’s very different in our industry for landscapers, right? You can do a lot of stuff locally. You can be in local events, you can be in local Reddit groups, Facebook groups, things like this where people are mentioning you. This is a big part of that. It’s not just domain authority, it’s what’s your authority? Like are you a trusted figure, right? In your

Rob Murray (19:59): Mm-hmm.

Aaron Towlson (20:00): industry. So again, it goes back to that point, do the good stuff well and like the rest of this technical stuff kind of follows. You’ve got to do the technical stuff as well. But it’s not that complicated. But in the same way that doing exercise every day isn’t complicated, it’s simple. But are you going to do it and are you going to pay for it in a decade’s time, right? Because your domain authority does build over time. And again, if your competitor has a higher one than you, they’ve got more opportunities to rank than you do. You can still start somewhere, as Mick said earlier. Don’t be put off by that. but the sooner you do it, again, the compounding thing, as we’ve touched on.

Rob Murray (20:32): Yeah, okay, that’s cool. And and so then how does social media play into all of this? It seems like more and more eyeballs are there. More and more people are using it for search. And so like social media and search engine optimization, I didn’t know those were linked, but they do seem to be. And it kind of in line with the way you’ve both been describing it. So can you give us a bit of an insight in terms of like how that works?

Aaron Towlson (20:51): so the role of social media in SEO, it’s one of those things that’s again, Google keeps some things close to its chest and things like this, but it goes back to what I was saying before about just being in more places across the internet and social media is a big part of the internet, right? More than ever.

Rob Murray (21:09): Yeah.

Aaron Towlson (21:09): That’s where folks can find you now. so it’s giving people more opportunity to find you, having your name appear in more places and then maybe they write about you somewhere else as as well and share your posts. So the more you’re doing that, the just the more presence you have around. you know, you’ve again it gets complicated because technology is involved, but it’s not really. Imagine if you just opened a local store and you didn’t advertise it and you just hoped people would walk by and see it. Versus if you were out there in the community putting flyers up, speaking to people, knocking on doors, right? Social media is just another way of doing that. so the more that you do that, the more opportunity you’ve got to get picked up by all these other signals that’s going on to create don domain authority. and you know, as the way that LLMs work now is they’re always mimicking human behavior. They got a lot better at this, has actually helped drive down hallucinations recently, is that they go and actually search in the way that we search. Yeah so the LLMs, they’re basically always mimicking what humans mimic, right? That’s how they were built, that’s what they do. And so in the way that folks used to go and scroll social media, look at Amazon reviews if they’re buying a product, look at Google reviews, which is a big one. Maybe we’ll touch on that later. now AI, the LLMs can do all that for you and summarize it for you. So this is what people are doing now. They’re looking to those summaries. So again, the more you have out there, the more AI LLMs have to s research you and surface your stuff. So it’s just giving yourself more opportunities for that to happen. That’s my high level overview of it. Mick may have some actual data to back up my point here. Yeah, it talks about data, Mick.

Rob Murray (22:36): Yeah, that’s the idea, a hundred percent.

Mick Selman (22:38): I but I but don’t have specific metrics or anything to to pull up and b share in this regard. but ultimately if we’re d it differs between different social s social media points, but it b offers a way to sort of interconnect your business, your brand throughout Google’s like mind map of you, which ultimately goes back to contributing to your your EEAT and how how much Google trusts you or or values you in terms of whether it wants to rank you. So that’s b all of your different citations across directories, b how you’re set up in Facebook, Instagram, if you have a b an X or a Twitter or a LinkedIn or or things like that and how much information do those profiles have on them? Do you have reviews on those? And if you’re able to sort of connect all of those and keep everything consistent and optimized, that tells these b search engines that you’re putting in the effort, you’re putting your best foot forward with everything, you’re keeping up to date. It means that they’re somebody that you would f they would find reliable and prioritize because if they know that you can be trusted and they know that people want to see you, they’re gonna be more comfortable and confident that they’re providing the right answer when you rank first.

Rob Murray (23:51): Love that. Well, I mean that and tight too. I I I think this is just kind of part of what you’re saying, both of you, about like look at y there’s always a million different things you can do to get on the internet. Some of them probably shouldn’t be done and whatever. But if you look at like Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn and TikTok, you look at your website, you look at blog posts, you look at reviews and Google and Yelp and you talk about Reddit and forums like I mean, those seem like a pretty strong base if you can start checking off some of those boxes without having to like blow your brains out in terms of like this huge cascading, you know, web across the entire internet. this idea of backlinks was referenced earlier. How do I get backlinks? Why do I care about them? And why does nobody do that? And by nobody do it I mean like our clients. Like w bef before they start working with us typically they’re not focused on this.

Aaron Towlson (24:40): Well, it’s a cheat code and Rob Mick’s about to explain exactly why it’s a cheat code. and they should be doing it.

Mick Selman (24:46): Well, that’s what I was gonna ask wha which which version of the answer do we want?

Rob Murray (24:50): Honest always.

Mick Selman (24:51): So the ideal way to get backlinks is to create extremely valuable content that people want to link to and reference. That is the priority. That is the easier said than done in many cases. if you can perform your own studies or like create your own research or things like that. Even just writing directly from your own perspective is probably going to be the key for most of f like our landscaping clients, specific projects and things like that with examples of how something turned out one way or unexpectedly, or perfectly expectedly, based off of how they how they had planned it. It’s always ideal to get these these real natural organic backlinks from people that just really value your content and want to share it. There are other strategies that utilize either purchasing backlinks from individual blogs, blog writers or link building services or things like that. that’s something that Google says that they they don’t particularly like, or or rather I believe them when they they say they don’t particularly like it, but th is just a a s n another methodology of being able to build links with a little bit more regularity.

Rob Murray (25:59): Yeah. So you pay to play.

Mick Selman (26:00): Yeah, b ultimately. and but in terms of why people don’t necessarily do it. Th a lot of people don’t

Rob Murray (26:04): So it is like the Oscars.

Mick Selman (26:08): know about it, but ultimately

Aaron Towlson (26:09): Mm-hmm.

Mick Selman (26:10): my recommendation would be that people who don’t who who aren’t familiar with it shouldn’t necessarily be going down that that route. ’cause it is something that you can do wrong and end up harming your your rep reputation with Google.

Aaron Towlson (26:23): Yeah. I mean when I say cheat code, I mean that in the like, you know, Gen Z good thing, like do this and this will happen, that people don’t know about.

Mick Selman (26:29): Yeah.

Aaron Towlson (26:30): and you know, to to pull the curtain back a little bit, and I say this to clients as well when they ask about what backlinks are, almost any article you see online, which is like top five this thing, best headphones, best microphone, the producers of those that equipment, whatever it is, those services, have let the writers of those articles know, hey, we make this thing, please feature us. Now most of the time you would hope they wouldn’t feature it if it wasn’t actually any good. Who knows how often that’s the case. But the point is, if you are good, you still have to let them know that you exist a lot of the time and you there is a pay-to-play game going on here.

Rob Murray (27:03): Do you wanna add to that one?

Mick Selman (27:04): Yeah. I mean, honestly, even b if the backlink that goes to your website, even if people aren’t necessarily following that directly, the link still plays a part in transferring authority from that page, that site, to yours by virtue of them basically trust signaling. Like if Google trusts their site and they trust you, then you get a little bit more of a a benefit from Google on on that. It’s like a word of mouth

Rob Murray (27:30): Yeah, it’s a robot referral.

Mick Selman (27:31): rec recommendation from somebody.

Rob Murray (27:33): Yeah, it’s a robot referral.

Mick Selman (27:34): Yeah.

Rob Murray (27:35): It’s it’s true though, and like if word of mouth is such I word of mouth is such a powerful driver for most of these companies,

Mick Selman (27:40): Mm-hmm.

Rob Murray (27:42): to to leverage it in a way that gets you know, trust built online, it’s probably a worthwhile endeavor. And and it’s so it’s it’s interesting because this is kind of why, you know, a couple of years ago we came up with this idea of OTS. And so like a lot of companies will provide SEO services or search engine optimization services. Yeah, but we went with like, okay, let’s do own the search. So whether they’re getting found on social or Google or maybe an L L like ChatGPT or Claude, let’s just do everything we possibly can to make it so that these people get found everywhere. And and then we realize well, content and a specific approach to content had a big impact.  Backlinks had a really big impact. Consistency had a really big impact. so maybe can you help us understand about like not all blogs are treated equal and what we need to kind of focus our attention on even though it can be a pain in the ass?

Mick Selman (28:32): Yeah. But ultimately the way that we’ve sort of structured the this campaign is that it is very blog and blog focused, being supported by backlinks and social posts directing to those blogs. and we structure it in such a way that we have we start off with a pillar blog. what that means is it’s sort of a a more holistic resource. It’s a much larger blog than you would typically post on like a recurring monthly, it’s like three thousand to five thousand words. How in terms of how much is

Rob Murray (28:59): It’s like a mini book.

Mick Selman (29:00): the exactly, yeah, it’s kind of it’s a little the on your website novella.

Rob Murray (29:05): Yeah.

Mick Selman (29:06): but we we build that out to sort of create a framework that we can then build off of with supporting blogs. So for example, if we were to write a blog that has to do with outdoor kitchens, as like the pillar blog, the whole thing is like a complete holistic design build guide. Then we could have a supporting blog that’s top twelve b outdoor kitchen the stove tops or or barbecues or grills or things like that that are built into it. So it’s still

Rob Murray (29:33): For Gainesville, Florida.

Mick Selman (29:34): for for Gainesville, Florida, we would we would localize it.

Mick Selman (29:37): as best as possible as long as it’s with

Rob Murray (29:40): This grill’s good for cooking gaiters.

Mick Selman (29:43): perfect that’s

Rob Murray (29:44): But I think that kind of is the point though, right? Like it i it is meant to be like this. And you know, Jason maybe one day from Skyfrog will listen to this podcast and be like, There probably is he’s even re I didn’t even realize I I didn’t the real escape rodeo, huge shout out.

Mick Selman (29:54): landscape rodeo.

Rob Murray (29:57): but I think it it it makes a lot of sense. Like you don’t wanna be building a grill in Gainesville that’s gonna get I mean, they don’t get stormed as much, but it’s still humid as shit, and they do cook aider. And so like having something that’s suitable to that versus say something in San Diego, which is gonna be near saltwater and it’s gonna be cooking a lot of fish, the the ideal grill for those kitchens is probably different. And I think this is the point of what we were saying before about this like experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness is like when you start getting into this detail about understanding the nuance of your customer and the equipment that you need and the type of shit you’re gonna cook, your stuff isn’t AI slop. And then money. Yeah. And then next year do another one.

Mick Selman (30:34): Next year do it otherwise.

Rob Murray (30:35): And then the year after that do another one.

Mick Selman (30:37): Mm-hmm.

Rob Murray (30:37): AI visibility scores. This is the most important thing people need to worry about now, right? Like these are they’re very validated and and empirical and scientific in their methodology. What’s the what’s the deal? People are like telling me my AI visibility score is bad. I need to pay them to make it better. What do I do?

Mick Selman (30:52): Ha ha ha. Easy answer is don’t do anything if somebody is telling you to pay them to fix specifically your AI visibility. b an AI visibility score is not a real thing. nobody’s going to be able to provide you that.

Rob Murray (31:05): He’s still he’s still being polite. He’s like, it’s fucking bullshit, guys. Don’t even listen to this garbage. But help us understand what it is and what it isn’t.

Mick Selman (31:14): Yeah. ultimately it is b a tool that would run prompts. You’re you’re typically able to set up the the prompts that you want to run and it will tell you like how many times it comes back with your your brand mentioned or linked to or or anything like that. different tools have different settings, but typically it’s just going to like it’s gonna run all of these prompts one day, track them and then build them up over time so that you can see if you’re going up or down or how it’s changing or anything like that. that is a very ineffective way. actually it’s kind of just not a way at all to be able to track your appearance in AI the in answer engines or or anything like that. but I think there’s about we the have a new blog on our site which sort of goes into this a little bit more in in detail. but I believe it’s something along the the lines of like an eighty percent b rate of like b error or potential like if it’s your score is twenty percent b or I guess it wouldn’t be, but either way, eighty percent on either side. It’s just not something that you’re able to like legitimately make any decisions or investments or choices off of. what we do know is that the actual providers of the tools, so like Google, in terms of Gemini and b AI overview and things like that, is in the process of adding th visibility for AI into Search Console data. it’s in the process of rolling out the sorry. F yeah,

Rob Murray (32:38): From the source. From the source.

Mick Selman (32:42): exactly, directly from Google. they’re in the process of rolling it out. I know a lot of places still don’t have it yet, but we know that it’s at the very least coming. And same thing with Bing actually already has it rolled out and they’re b making even more improvements to show more visibility from their search tools, so while it’s a little bit of a smaller pool, it’s at least helping to kind of encourage these other tools to start sharing their their data, which is where you would want to actually be measuring your your AI visibility. Yeah, we’re not and a third party tool w wouldn’t be able to to b give that to you. What we do know, like we we have all of this information from Google and Bing better like, hey, here’s a document that tells you what we do to rank or to show up in the answers for our our L L Ms or our answer engine tools. And it’s the same thing. It’s E E A T. Is your content helpful? Is your website organized and easy to navigate? Do you have backlinks? Do you have backlinks from reliable sources, from other trusted sites? Are people talking about you online? So in social media, on Reddit, things like that. it’s the same things that are going to help your site rank b in a normal search engine.

Rob Murray (33:53): Do you have a ton of reviews? Are you responding to your reviews? Which is just another forum for people to talk about you. Yeah, and so then this is an AI readiness approach. I think this is what you kind of, you know, led us to, Mick, about instead of AI visibility, let’s do an AI readiness you know, not necessarily audit or score, but like an audit and then and so when people come in to work with us, we’re like, okay, well what do they have in place? And and I think we just recently posted a blog on this AI readiness approach that people will be able to go reference from this podcast. So it’ll be on intermedia dot com under resources, but we’ll put the link in the the summary of of the podcast, whether it’s on video or or on all the podcast spots. So what what should people like what’s coming when it comes to AI readiness, knowing that it’s foundationally similar, like the whole approach is I mean, it’s almost exactly the same.

Mick Selman (34:41): Yeah.

Rob Murray (34:42): If it is if it if it isn’t actually exactly the same. I’m sitting there okay like I I gotta do something. And I do wanna improve this thing. And I don’t wanna have shitty leads in three years from now. And I want better leads in two years from now and maybe some leads in the next year. If you were to prioritize it, you know, one, two, three, what’s the number one thing that I gotta make sure I check my box off?

Mick Selman (35:02): But just because I had the the AI readiness checklists pulled up and one of them is that your site is indexable, that’s kind of a big one. You should make sure that Google is able to to locate your site in the first place. Yeah, I guess so. Have a secure website.

Rob Murray (35:18): And and well, can I ask Gemini if my site’s indexable?

Mick Selman (35:21): you would be able to, but it the whether or not you’re going to get the correct answer isn’t necessarily right. I’ve seen lots of SEO audits come through being like this page doesn’t have the correct settings, so therefore it can’t be found by the AI tools. And I’m like, you are an AI tool that told me that this page didn’t have these settings, so you couldn’t find it, but you did find it because you’re writing about it.

Rob Murray (35:42): And the tools are in place.

Mick Selman (35:43): Yeah. The exactly, yes. so more so th it’s just a lot more reliable to b log into your search console and check and see if that page is indexed.

Rob Murray (35:54): Sure, like everybody listening to this knows how to get to search console.

Mick Selman (35:57): Okay, fair.

Rob Murray (35:58): I mean, I’m curious though if i if Gemini is a better source for is my site indexable versus chat.

Mick Selman (36:03): Fair. As don’t yeah, not the direct URL, I suppose.

Rob Murray (36:07): Yeah. So assume it’s indexable and people have done that. But I’m sitting there being like, Okay, I’ve got a website, I’ve got some social media, I’ve done some Instagram, but I and I’m like, Okay, I wanna do this thing. Outside of like self-oriented promotion to say just call us and we’ll help you figure it out because it’s kind of nuanced based on the situation. If you were to you know, provide a general overview with some general advice that would generally apply to ev generally everybody. What would you say is your number one or two priorities that have to be done to start getting this whole search thing figured out?

Mick Selman (36:35): I would start posting your own content on your website. I would write blogs or update your your gallery with specific projects or pieces like that. Like just build the system or get into the rhythm of whenever you’re doing something, but write about it, make content out of it, or but make a make a TikTok while you’re doing a project or

Rob Murray (36:53): I no, but like seriously, it’s that’s beautiful though. And I I think it’s really neat because if you go to the gym for fifteen hours one day, it is not really helpful. If anything, you probably won’t be able to walk for the next couple days. But if you were to go to the gym for twenty minutes a day for 45 days, the results are massive. And so I think that building the muscle up that you’re referring to is probably the single biggest important thing that someone can do out re regardless of what they’re doing. The consistency is what’s gonna create impact. But wait, I have to shoot I have to shoot myself on camera. Like I gotta put Well, you know what though you no, I fair well I mean but I practice. I used to hate it, dude. Hated this. and reps, reps, reps. However, but I I think it’s also important that someone you don’t have to film yourself explaining it. You can just explain it while filming the project. Like you can go even more simplistic and not be in the whole thing if you’re really uncomfortable with it. So I love, love, love that. If you were to so we got the idea, okay, consistency is better than you know, just doing it once a year, like, all this stuff that you don’t know what you’re doing. if there was one thing people should check out if they wanted to learn this more, if they wanted to dive into this more, is there a place you’d point them to? Go check this out, maybe on our site, somewhere else? Like is there a an authority in the space that you think is worth checking out or or a resource that you’ve seen that helped you guys?

Mick Selman (38:06): Definitely our site has a lot of really good information that’s going to be specific to landscapers. I feel like that’s sort of going to be the the biggest piece. just sort of like Aaron said, there’s a lot of SEO information that’s more for like b SaaS businesses and things like that, whereas we’re very focused typically locally. apart from that, b honestly if you’re just getting started, becoming familiar with the the way that Google works. So like Google has a full database about like SEO and what it prioritizes and how it ranks things. Like just go in and learn about EEAT f directly from Google as a starting point. And then maybe if you find that you’re you’re really interested in it, you can start spreading out into the more the wider the net of SEO, ’cause you might find some things that people have found where it’s like Google says this, but they say that for a reason because they it’s like the what’s the spam email of like nine out of ten doctors don’t want you to know this secret or something like that. It’s

Rob Murray (39:01): Right.

Mick Selman (39:01): like sometimes Google doesn’t want you to know that things work in a certain way.

Rob Murray (39:05): Right. And we’re seeing in the data, like the landscape marketing index is starting to show like o I think it’s almost one percent of all leads are Chat GPT or have been year to date, so I’m not sure if it’ll stick, but Okay. You guys rock. long story short though, if you wanna have a nap, go read this Google search guidelines. If you want some help, just go to intranet dot com and check out our resources or just give us a call and you don’t have to worry about it. There’s the agenda, right? The podcast with the agenda.

Mick Selman (39:28): There you go.

Rob Murray (39:30): Yeah, Mick, we appreciate you, buddy. Thank you so much, Aaron. You guys rock. and thanks for listening to another episode of the IM Landscape Growth Podcast.