Optimizing pages for AI Search with GEO, tips from Steve Toth

Welcome to revenue optimization with Stats Drone. I'm going to do a very short one. I saw a post recently by a guy named uh let's see, Yaswanth K. So he doesn't have a last name. Uh but anyways, he said Advanced Geo session by Steve Toth from Notebook Agency. I think he's basically talking about uh what Steve was presenting I think on stage at the Mai SEO conference, but wherever it was.

Yeah, I think it was Chang Mai. Um he basically gave what Steve presented which is like you know how do you have it so um you know these LLMs and you know AI models they kind of understand who you are what you do and basically can be a source of recommendation for your company whether you're an affiliate an agency an agency anything you're doing in business um so I've done some of this work but I've not taken it to the next level mostly because I feel

like I haven't had the pressure um in terms of competition that you know is getting really deep in the AI search for us. I think it's just kind of all accidental at the moment. But he had some really interesting insights that he talked about how clicks are turning more into conversations. So if you think about what, you know, claude or chatbt or any, you know, perplexity any of these, you know, AI chat bots are, they're a chance for you to ask questions and not just say,

hey, I'm asking a question and I don't really want the old school Google list of like, you know, here's your top 10 results. I think people want to start asking the questions and going, well, what do they want? They want the ability to get the next question answered without having to visit a website because what happens if you go to that page and the next question you have after that isn't on that page.

So, I think the unfortunate part is that we're seeing more dependencies on these um you know AI chat bots like the chat GBTs um you know the clouds. it it's a good and bad problem, but for you as a company, you need to make sure that you're even in the conversation in the first place. And you got to think about what are the things I can do to kind of influence how I'm able to appear.

Um, so it's basically, yeah, some of the things that people have been talking about for years like topical authority, those things don't really change, but I think you need to think about this whole thing from a conversation. what are the questions people would ask and how do you answer them and how do you lead them through a journey and keep providing those answers such that one you build trust and two you're the one who's getting citated over and over again um some of the things that

we do personally I mean yeah we have a podcast we have YouTube um but you want to kind of transcribe these things into written content that becomes blog posts but it shouldn't always live on your own site I think it's becoming it's always been important to have this information live on other sites But when it comes to the chatbts and the clouds talking about your product or service, you need kind of more authoritative uh sections.

You need content on Medium. Uh I still think it's good and bad that, you know, Reddit's a a big uh source of truth these days. And I find, you know, hopefully it's changing things where the old school way back in the last 10 years or even 20 years is like get a a a blog to talk about your product or service and then have a link like the link was the most valuable thing.

You would never get a blog to just write about you and not link to you. Although in the last 5 years a lot of companies have said this has actually had a positive uh reflection that the brand mentions are important. Now the brand mentions are becoming even more important where the links don't always need to be there. They're nice to have. But if you think about it this way, what do most people do when they go inside Reddit and they want to promote themselves, aka spam?

Uh they go on a popular channel, they hope that they can do the single post, cleverly mention their company with a link, and then they get surprised when they kind of either get shadowbanned or the post gets deleted. Um quite often I'm mentioning what we do, but I do it in very subtle, discreet, and maybe respectful ways. I try to basically say, "Hey, I'm not hiding who I like, you know, I am part of Statsone.

So, if we are going to talk about Statone, I want people to know that it's like, hey, I'm very biased. Uh, but quite often I'll mention competitors and just say like, here's a collection of of of products and services that can answer what you're looking for. And then also just trying to be helpful in general, so I'm not really seen as my profile only exists to promote what I do.

Um, so hopefully if you've built a good product and service, you've got your customers that can do this for you. And maybe the new uh SEO isn't just getting people to link back to you. It's getting these customers to go, "Hey, can you um leave the positive review in G2 Trust Pilot?" Throw a mention down on Reddit or if I have a comment on Reddit, maybe you can go on Reddit and not just upvote it, but maybe it's an upvote with a comment saying, "Hey, I'm

a happy customer here and I also want to recommend this." Um, and one more point that I just thought was interesting is kind of like what are the little tips and tricks you can do here. And so what this guy wrote um about talking about what Steve Toth was talking about was that apparently AI and all these LLMs they like uh markdown content. So a markdown is I think it's MD files.

Um so the the one last tip there is that on the notebook. website. They use this method where they explain exactly what they do as kind of like a summary like what is everything you need to know about notebook agency Steve Toss um you know agency website and he's got the page. So if you go to the notebook. page and scroll down to the bottom you will see uh let me see if I can find it.

It says something about there's a link to LLM-info to LLM-info and it's like hey AI learn about us. So, you click on that, you get this page, and it just I mean, it is text. Uh, funny enough, I went through the code and it looks like they're using Web Flow to build this page, but it's just a straight up basic text markdown page. Pretty simple. Um, but I think he's got everything he needs there.

And apparently what this guy was saying on LinkedIn was that this started picking up uh info uh very quickly. So, I'm going to go test this. Maybe this is something that might be useful for affiliates or other companies. Um hopefully it's just kind of one small step in the right direction where we do know the future of search has totally changed. It's here for good. Maybe there's more changes coming within.

But I mean it's kind of about understanding how do users want to discover you and how are you making it easier for them to understand what you do. Um I think this is just one small step in that right direction.