An AV and integration-focused podcast broadcast weekly

This week's episode of Automation Unplugged features a webinar from One Firefly focused on one of the biggest shifts happening in marketing today: how AI is changing search, SEO, and the way prospects find and evaluate your business online. We originally recorded this webinar in April 2026.

As homeowners and trade partners increasingly turn to tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity to research solutions and choose service providers, it’s no longer enough to only think about how your business shows up on Google. In this session, we break down what’s changing, what still matters, and how integrators can start taking action to improve their visibility in both traditional and AI-powered search.

During this webinar, you’ll hear from myself, Kendall Clark, Director of Sales & Marketing at One Firefly, and Nathan Steinmetz, SEO Strategist at One Firefly, who joined us to help answer technical questions around AI visibility and SEO.

In this session, we cover:

• How AI search is changing the way prospects research integrators, compare companies, and decide who to contact
• Why foundational SEO strategies — like Google Business Profile optimization, on-site content, backlinks, reviews, and technical SEO — still matter in the age of AI
• And what business owners can do now to help AI tools understand, trust, and recommend their company when potential clients are searching online

SEE ALSO: #353: Leading Through Innovation: AI, Video Walls, and Servant Leadership with Shawn Hansson

=

Transcript

Rebecca:

Yeah. Alright. Well, welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us today, taking an hour of your time in the middle of the week. We appreciate it, and, we'll do our best to present our content, leave some time for q and a, and get you out of here by two PM eastern. So a couple of housekeeping things before we get started. We are recording this. You will get a copy of the recording as well as the deck. Look for that in your inbox tomorrow. And if you don't receive that email, please feel free to reach out to us directly, and we'll send it to you. As I just mentioned, the chat is open. The q and a is open. Please feel free to drop any questions, comments that you have throughout the webinar. I'll be keeping an eye on those to collect for q and a at the end, and Kendall and Ron may do their best to try to get to some live if we see them pop up. We are One Firefly, if you haven't interacted with us much before. We've been around since two thousand seven, and we do marketing, a full service marketing agency, specifically for technology professionals, like custom integrators, security dealers, and the like. We'll make a couple of quick introductions before we get started with the content today. So I'll introduce myself first. I'm Rebecca Sternlicht. I'm the corporate marketing lead here at OneFirefly. So I work very closely with Ron and Kendall to oversee all of OneFirefly's marketing initiatives and educational initiatives like these. I am going to give you guys an intro order to follow. So we'll start with you, Ron, then we'll go to Kendall. And then finally, we'll end with our special guest today, Nathan. He is one of our SEO strategists here. We brought him on specifically to help us out with our q and a section so that you guys have an expert answering, your questions today. Alright. Ron, how about you kick us off?

Ron:

Hello, everybody. Ron Callis, CEO and founder here at One Firefly. I get to work with all these lovely people every day. I feel very blessed, and I, I enjoy what we do here at One Firefly helping our industry both with marketing and with hiring. I'm wearing my Amplify People shirt today to support Amplify People. And, this topic is very, relevant. It's frankly one of the hottest, most interesting topics, I think, in business globally today, and that is how is, this thing called the Internet changing and evolving and impacting the ways that, in your cases, for your businesses, the way your customers are doing research about you. And, ultimately, is that research supporting them making the decision to hire you, or is it not supporting them making that decision? And and I I hope you walk away with a lot of new ideas and information today. So it's a pleasure to be here.

Kendall:

Awesome. Thanks, Ron. My name is Kendall. I am the director of sales and marketing here at OneFirefly coming up on my thirteenth year, I think it is. And I come to One Firefly with a background in computer science. When I joined, I actually was building websites. So I built probably a couple hundred websites for this industry as well. So super passionate about web and how that supports SEO and your overall online visibility and excited to spend some time. So Nathan.

Nathan:

Hi there, guys. My name is Nathan Steinmetz. I am an SEO strategist here at OneFirefly. I am coming up on, two full years here at OneFirefly, and I've been working in digital marketing and SEO for a little over a decade now. And I am really excited to talk today about how SEO is evolving. I know that a lot of people have burning questions around how AI is different than SEO, how they interlock, and really how to how to make moves in those spaces. So it's something I hear a lot from our clients, and I'm really excited to, you know, provide a little extra perspective and background for y'all today as well.

Kendall:

Awesome. Thanks, Nathan. I'll just remind everybody, we have a really great technical expert with us today, so please drop in. Well, I think we're gonna try and leave about fifteen minutes at the end for questions, so plenty of time to drop in any questions around AI and SEO that you might have. So wanted to kick us off with just a little bit of data that we've personally collected. A few weeks ago at a buying group event, we did just a a a poll out there to kind of get an understanding of the land and how people are feeling about AI in general and how they're incorporating AI into their business. And it was a handful. I think we had twenty, twenty five people, but I do think the results are pretty telling. Of that group, seventy percent said that they're very interested in learning how to use AI in every aspect of their business. Obviously, SEO is a portion of that, but throughout your business, there's many ways you can do that. Although seventy five percent still considered themselves early adopters in that, and eighty percent want more guidance. So many of you here, many of people in our industry are all in this same boat of trying to understand and navigate these new waters, and we're help you know, here to help you bring a little bit of clarity to that.

Ron:

Yeah. No. I just wanna add a quick comment here. This slide even, this poll was talking very much about businesses and how they were thinking about and using AI or experimenting. It it what it is not doing is collecting how you all are thinking about the impact this is having on the customer experience. And I I had a conversation just the other day with a a large client, large integrator out of the West Coast, and he admitted as much. Large, very successful business, award winning business, and he admitted all of his thinking is about how to bring AI into their proposal process, into their financial analysis, so on and so forth in their business. And he he shared that he had not, for one moment, thought about how is this changing the way the customer is trying to ultimately either find you or research you. And, folks, that's what we're gonna cover today.

Kendall:

Yeah. It's really in the conversations we've been having, it's like this light bulb moment when people think, oh, man. I've been trying to think about myself and my own, you know, ecosystem of what's impacting me. But then when you start to think about how end users are interacting with these tools, your head really starts to spin. So many of you are here today, hopefully, for that exact same reason. Maybe you've started to use AI yourself and realizing, wow. This is becoming very powerful, very quick. You may or may not know its impact on how it's starting to change, how prospects are researching and doing research online and where they're going and information that's being served to them. And you're here because you wanna be in control of that. There's a huge opportunity with change anywhere in the market. It becomes an opportunity to be a leader, and you wanna take control of your business' visibility and the narrative, and you wanna be in that conversation. We'll talk about what that looks like. So our goals for today, we're gonna try and break things out into three parts. The first is I wanna give you a little bit of foundational knowledge about what's changed. We'll talk about a few statistics there. Then I want you to understand from those changes and how AI is searching, how people, you know, do online search and research. Then I want you to understand how SEO impacts that. So what changes can you make to make sure that you are becoming visible as they're doing this research and what how those two play together. So let's jump ahead and get started in part one here. What's changing? And I have to acknowledge that before I give you all these crazy things about what's changing, I do have to acknowledge what is still remaining the same, and that is that Google still matters for traditional search. So it is scary. There is a lot of change out there, but this was a research study that was done that said that in twenty twenty five, eighty four percent of browser search still happened within Google. So Google is still that overwhelmingly dominant, player for search queries, And the good news is is many of the tactics and things you can do to show up in Google is are all of the things that you can also do to be visible in AI. So they go very hand in hand, and we're gonna walk you through what that looks like. The thing we cannot ignore, though, is that AI search usage is exploding. So this was a q four twenty twenty five report done by Search Engine Land that showed three hundred percent year over year growth of AI search usage. And we're seeing it even here at One Firefly. I'll use ourselves as a a case study. We've been, you know, we've been optimizing our online presence and kind of doing this AI focused optimization for the last couple years here. And I am seeing, even within the last three to six months, an increasing number of inquiries and people calling in or people reaching out to us through our contact forms, telling us that they found us through an AI recommendation, through one of those LLMs that they interacted with that said one Firefly was who they should work with. So it's everywhere. Go ahead, Ron.

Ron:

Jordan had shared Jordan's a leader of our SEO team, and he had shared this stat with Nathan and and us just recently. And that is that we've seen more traffic. And I'm gonna be a bit technical here for a minute. When someone visits your website and they're coming from another location, that's called a referral visitor. And we've seen more referral visitors visiting our clients' websites in the from from AI, from ChatGPT, from Claude, from other, you know, Perplexity, from AI visiting your website, and we've seen more of that traffic in quarter one of twenty twenty six than we saw in all of twenty twenty five combined. So, folks, that's called an exponential growth rate. So that's a trend you wanna be aware of, and you wanna make sure you're optimizing for.

Kendall:

Yeah. One of the most interesting, you know, personally, one of the things I find most interesting in a lot of the research that we've been doing around that exactly what you said, AI referred traffic, is actually the conversion rate. So when we talk about AI referred visitors versus a Google referred visitor, I want you to think of going into Google, typing in something, clicking on a website's link, and navigating to their site. That's a Google referred visit. AI referred visit is when you're going into one of those LLMs. You're having that conversation, clicking directly into it. And what we're seeing is that traffic that's coming from an AI source is actually converting at over a four times higher rate than what's coming through Google. Like, that is it is crazy. And if you go to the next slide, Ron, I'll talk a little bit on why that is. And that's truly because the behavior of how people are using these two platforms has changed. So on the left here, what you're gonna see is what's very familiar to all of us, and that's a Google search search query box. And you can even see by the design, they're only giving you one little line. So the the way that most people are interacting with this, with Google is that they're going in, and they're typing in some statement. Hey. The best home theater installer in St. Louis, Missouri or Crestron versus control four, and they're doing that one query, and then they're navigating to all the links that are presented to them and doing their own research and trying to draw their own conclusions. Maybe they're going back in, typing in another query, and trying to make sense of all of this through their own research. How that has shifted with all of these platform these AI platforms on the right here is that oftentimes people are giving a lot more context in their research. So they give you that option to put in a paragraph, and they're saying, hey. I'm building this home in St. Louis. I'm looking for a high end home theater. I want a company that can handle x, y, and z for me, and here's what I care about. What are your recommendations? So oftentimes, they're iterating a lot more with these AI platforms, and then they're being served results as if they're the answers to it. They don't have to go in and do all this deep level of research. They're being presented those answers, accepting that because they've given all that context and moving straight into that site. So what we're seeing is that traffic is much lower in the funnel. People have done their research, and when they land on that site, they're ready to take that next step. So it's really, really interesting. Oh. Yep. Awesome. The other thing I just wanna acknowledge as we go through this is that this is such a an emerging category. So this concept of AI search and AI visibility, you're going to see, if you haven't already, a lot of new language and a lot of new terminology and jargon that's out there. GEO and AEO and AIO, and it's honestly it's honestly it's a little overwhelming, but, really, it all means the same general thing, and that is that you're taking steps and tactics towards being more visible in those types of search environments. And so for the purposes of this webinar, we are all gonna use the term SEO just to not confuse anybody. But if you are interested in what all these terms are, we actually wrote a blog on it, on this kind of emerging category and the language and lexicon people are using. So I have it linked here if anyone's interested in that. And I think we're gonna jump to a poll. Aren't we, Ron?

Ron:

We are. Kendall's or sorry. Rebecca's gonna get this launched for us. And I want you all to look in the mirror and self reflect just for a moment. And that is if you right now, we're we're doing this webinar, April twenty second twenty twenty six. If you were gonna go buy a luxury watch or a luxury car or or add a a set of technology or maybe a renovation into your home, where would you go and start doing your research right now just to to to look at our dataset of our audience? And then we're gonna compare your answers to some some public polls around the similar question just so that we can connect the dots for you in terms of, really helping you understand, that potentially search trends are changing. So, Rebecca, can you, assist and help us get this officially launched? There we go. So you guys have options. You can say, that you start on Google. You could say you start on, an LLM. That's a a Claude, a Gemini, a Perplexity, a ChatGPT, or or whatever your cup du jour is, and or are you starting somewhere else? And let's let's see if we can get a hundred percent participation. Let's I'm gonna start the Jeopardy music here.

Kendall:

We're seeing a couple come through.

Ron:

There we go. We got some answers coming in. This is really interesting data.

Ron:

Already interesting. It's it's different

Kendall:

It's different than

Ron:

the a couple weeks ago when we we ran this poll. So let's let's see if we can get one or one or two more answers in here. If you're out there and you haven't clicked on a result, please click and just be honest about yourself. Where do you do that research? I'm gonna name your name if I don't see you here in the search results to identify the guilty there.

Kendall:

I got one.

Ron:

That always gets me another answer or two. There's still a couple of people that haven't voted, but that's that's okay. We'll we'll protect you. We won't name you. Let's go ahead and end that poll, Rebecca, and let's get that published. And so for this audience, it's very interesting. I'm gonna zoom in. Thirteen percent are using AI and, twenty five percent doing something else. So that's, that's very interesting. I by the way, I recommend this is a fun question for you to ask your customers or your builders or your designers, the people that you're working with. I think it'd be, an interesting set of data for you to be aware of. Now what the national data is showing is that the the trend for consumer research is exponentially increasing. It's in the fact that it's starting in AI. So I I know for myself now, maybe I'm an outlier. Okay? I accept that. But I'm absolutely in AI, multiple hours a day every day. I've historically personally been in ChatGPT, for the last month. I've been diving, well, I would say for the last four months, increasing my use of Gemini as we, one Firefly, are a Google workplace, so our team is using Gemini more often. And, you can't ignore the hype around Anthropic. And so I've been personally becoming a power user in Claude just in the last thirty days, and I'm I'm dumbfounded at how awesome and amazing and and amazed at what it can do. The thirty seven percent, that's what I want you to think about. This is a this is real data from the United States. Your consumers, some that you may not be aware of, are going to AI, and they're doing research. And, well, how do you determine if your business is showing up, and how do you know, how do you even analyze the effectiveness of your brand's visibility in AI compared to what you've known about Google? We, as an agency, have been talking to you about Google performance. Keeping in mind, Google, historically, we would talk about paid ads, usually at the top of a page, and then we would talk about organic results for Google. And so when we talk organic results, we're always talking about ranking. And in fact, we're very specific. We tell you that you should be in you should strive to be in organic position one, two, or three. That is still true. You want to have your business placed in organic position one, two, three. That's gonna garner about fifty percent of the clicks off of page one of Google. K? So SEO strategies that deliver that result for you around a target phrase, absolutely relevant. The rules are completely different when you're talking about the effectiveness of your brand showing up in AI. That is because the way the algorithm works that's you know, you've heard of the transformer technology and GPT. It's a bit of a closed box. And inside of that closed box, it is not going to deliver even with the same context of a dialogue with chat. It's not necessarily gonna deliver exactly the same results every time for you and certainly not for other people. And so what we look at is not the ranked position of your brand. At least this is the way the rules work in April twenty twenty six. We look at how frequently your brand is positioned on that page of results. And whether or not your brand, your website, or assets you have on the Internet are cited as a source of information. And whether or not it's ultimately gonna recommend you as the answer if someone is in fact asking their AI consultant to give them an answer. So the way the reporting looks, I'll just say this is on the left. I'm now showing you what a page one result on Google looks like. Here in this scenario, home theater installer, Saint Louis, Missouri. By the way, you could all type that in, see if you get a similar result. It'll probably be somewhat similar, at least in the organic results. And you see below what's called the snack pack. This first top part is is generally being derived from your Google business profile. That's called a zero, a zero click search result. But if we go below that, that's called organic results. And you guys want to be in position one through ten and ideally at the top. Here, I'm showing position one, two, and three. On the right is an LLM result. There's a chat, and there's now a full explanation as if you were talking to a consultant, and they're giving you an answer, generally multiparagraph answer. And in that answer, there absolutely can be businesses that are in some order of ranking. Now if you were to do that search again, it probably would be in a different order. So it's it's not gonna consistently position a one, two, and three by default. So how does the reporting look? When we go back to Google and you work with an agency like one Firefly or another local agency, they're gonna use reporting software platforms, and they're gonna log in all the tracked phrases that are important to you. You've defined service solutions and brands and geographies. You put those together to create long tail phrases. Those long tail phrases are loaded into the software. And in the software, you can actually view how are you ranking on desktop search and how are you being ranked for mobile search. There is a difference, by the way. Now when we go over to AI reporting, it's different. What you're now looking and I'll I'll just guide you through what you see on the screen. This is actually a report for us, for one Firefly, for our own brand. And you can see that the search the target phrase here was marketing agencies for AV integration businesses. And if you scroll down, it says ninety one percent of the time when Fireflies being named in the result. And then over here, it's saying that there's a hundred mentions. Now what is this really doing? And it says it up there in text. I'm gonna wave my hands and describe it to you. It's actually running a query, a full interaction on most of the major large language models. Because it's not only how are you showing up in ChatGPT. It's how are you showing up in ChatGPT five point two? How are you showing up in five point one? How are you showing up in Claude, Opus four point seven? How are you showing up in their other models? How are you showing up in Perplexity? How are you showing up in Gemini? How are you showing up in Gemini three point five Pro? How are you show you get the idea, folks. There's different people depending on their plan or program that are using different large language models. So you have to look at the aggregate of all of those common large language models and then view your percentage of visibility. Because, a, you want that AI recommending you, and b, so you wanna be in the overall results. And then if they say, yeah, there's five great companies, but which one's the best one for me? You want to be that company. And in some cases, they're gonna click over and then go visit your website. That's the referral visitor that we're talking about. So I just wanna paint this picture. A, you're getting brand influence by being named in the results. Two, you're getting referral traffic, and that referral traffic is gonna convert at an exponentially higher rate than someone visiting you from any other platform. So you hopefully, it makes sense that you likely would want to design or engineering your AI visibility. So we're gonna take a minute here. You do the search for you right now. Go to if you don't mind, go to your favorite chat environment. Go to Gemini. Go to ChatGPT. Go to Claude. Go to Perplexity, and go into that environment. Crack it open on your mobile phone or on your desktop and ask it. Say, hey. I'm building an act like a homeowner. I'm building a new home in this town. Hopefully, it's your town. In in this town, and I'm looking for this, that, and the other solution and service. Which company should I consider hiring? And press enter. And I want you to see now, hopefully, some of you see very positive results. Some of you are gonna potentially be scared or shocked with your lack of visibility. And the fact that

Kendall:

I was gonna say one of the most one of the scariest parts about this, and and you gave the best case scenario. Right? You you show up in the top five, and hopefully then they say, who's best for me? And then you're number one. I'll inverse that and flip it on his head. The the scary part of that, if you're not in that top five, like, you you don't have a seat at the table. You know? You're not even an option. Whereas, you know, if you're doing search within Google, maybe you go into the next page, maybe you scrolling. There's there's always a chance. But on the inverse, you you don't have you know, you're not a player in the game if you're not visible.

Ron:

I did this exercise. And if, guys, if you meet with one Firefly, myself, or our sales team, they're gonna probably ask you to do this, so they'll do it with you. As with that that top integrator, I won't mention the market, but they're our number one player in their market. They're dominant, multi decade award winning integration firm. And they went, and we did this. We opened up, in this case, ChatGPT, did the search, and it was recommending all of their competitors, and they weren't even named.

Kendall:

Yeah.

Ron:

And it was shocking. And it was you could argue, not good. So, you know, that's key. The key to what is it? As GI Joe said sorry. I'm a child of the seventies. Knowing is half the battle. So now you know, and now you can, Kendall's gonna take us through some of the things that you can ultimately do to, affect that change. But I just I wanna I wanna drive this point home. People like yourself and your customers are not just asking it for a list. They're asking it in some cases, who's the best and why are they the best fit for me. And I just want you all to process. This is dramatically different than someone using Google in a traditional sense. They are now asking AI for the answer. So AI here's here's the here's the the rub. AI has to know enough about you to differentiate you, to compare you, to position you as the best for whatever context that consumer has punched in. And if you have not made it easy for AI to do that, then you're behind you're behind in the game, And that's what we wanna raise your awareness to. If you think about that consumer that consumer that is referred to you, there they are in the middle. They don't know you yet. So what do they do when they're told by the builder to call you or they're told by missus Jones? Because missus Jones loved your install, and they tell their neighbor at that cocktail party on Friday night. They don't know you yet. So often, they go to this thing called the Internet, and they start poking around. Either it's your name, your business name, the brands that they're in that other project, or it's the type of solutions and categories. And they're landing on your website. They're landing over on social media. They're landing on various places around the Internet. In this bubble over in the bottom right quadrant, this is what has dramatically changed here over the last several years, and it is growing exponentially. They're going to AI, and they're asking for help. And I want and we want at OneFirefly for you to be the answer. So the game of search historically was the two bubbles here on the left, traditional search that's organic on Google and then paid. Right? You could do Google Ads. We at One Firefly run a a sizable Google Ads business for our customers. So Google Ads are not good. They're not bad. They're just another modality for you to be visible when someone does a search. The new category over here on the right is AI search. So you really need to be thinking about all three of these primary, if we call pillar or foundation locations where you need to be easy to be found and you need to control the narrative, this is now what we want you thinking about. And if you do want it to recommend you, over here on the left is what needs to be true. You need to have rich content. You need to have answers to the questions that they're asking. You need to be verified. You need trustworthy people linking to you, and you need reviews online where people are saying positive things about you. Reviews in this this era of the Internet are more important than they've ever been on the Internet because that's how AI deems whether you're trustworthy. Right? You can tell people you're the best in the world. That carries a little bit of weight. What other people on the Internet say about you carries a lot of weight. So if you don't have an active strategy, for example, to drive reviews, guess what? A review strategy, I know Kendall's gonna talk about it, is an active part of an SEO strategy to make sure you're getting found both in Google and in AI. So it's all connected. It's really a system that needs to be activated for you to raise the the visibility of your business. And I'm gonna give you the technical details in two ways. Because AI, when we talk about in Claude, Opus four point seven, that is a training set. K? That didn't just happen. That was trained over the last year. It was trained on Internet content. Specifically, it was, trained on this content. It was trained on websites. It was trained on reviews. It was trained on podcast. It was trained on YouTube videos. Right? So you want your business found in the training set. That's how it automatically knows to put you in the list. The other vector of visibility in AI is that when you provide a prompt that warrants AI and if you've turned on the the the connector or the tool and you allow your AI to crawl the Internet, then it literally acts like Google. It goes out and does a live crawl, and it's crawling all of these same places. So, a, the best time to impact your visibility was last year because that's what's impacting the training sets today. And, additionally, if you're impacting or affecting your SEO today, then you are at least raising your visibility for the live crawls that all the platforms are doing. Kendall's gonna tell us what to do.

Kendall:

Awesome. The first thing that I want to kind of acknowledge before we jump into some of the tactical stuff is that I want you to now keep two audiences in mind. So, you know, prior, you may have may have thought, man, when I'm putting stuff on my website, the people that I'm building this content on my website or on my Google Business profile are for my end users, my buyers, maybe my home homeowners, whoever that may be. Yes. That is going to be one audience. That audience, of course, is the never gonna go away. Still very important. Those are gonna be the people that are paying the bills. But the new audience that I want you to keep in mind whenever you're building out your online visibility is now AI because that is the recommender. So just like we talked about earlier, if you're not feeding the AI and in in one firefly land, we like to call it the the AI overlords, but the AI bots of the world that are going through and crawling all of the content on the Internet. You need to be able to feed it relevant content that it can understand and easily navigate. So it's a two way road now that we need to make sure because without that, your recommender is not going to put your business in front of your buyers, and you wanna make sure that happens so you're in the story. The way that one firefly likes to approach SEO is really from a four legged stool. So we like to look at four different pillars, and each of these pillars are really categories of tactics that we can implement to increase the likelihood of you being more visible in different categories. So starting off in local, there's a series of local things that you can do that you're telling the AI robots of the world where you operate. And these things are directly what they're pulling from when they're saying, I'm looking for some who's the top people near me and giving those results? That's from your local SEO work. Next up will be your on-site SEO. That's gonna be really answering questions when people are in the research phase of things. So when they're trying to understand what's what type of service, what type of solution, what do they need, and then who offers that, they're in that research phase, and that's gonna be directly pulling from that content on your site built with on-site SEO. Next up is off-site SEO, and that's gonna be telling, again, those AI overlords that you are trustworthy because other people on the Internet trust you, and there's ways to build that trust through backlinks, and we'll get into that stuff. And then our fourth category is technical SEO, and that's simply going to be, does your site run technically well? Is it easy for those AI crawlers to navigate? And then is it great for end users to use? If you've ever been on a site and you land on it, takes three or four seconds to load, we get impatient, and we tend to navigate away. And that's what AI sees as less trustworthy.

Ron:

And I just wanna make a comment here, Kendall, real quick. I know you're gonna cover technical SEO, but I just wanna it's a disclaimer, if you will. Sure. Even for one fire we one Fireflies probably built probably close to a thousand websites across this industry over the last fifteen years. If your website, even on day one, was pristine, the reality as that website goes on, if it's not being managed for technical SEO, this is literally going into Google Search Console and cleaning it up, it ultimately degrades in a lot of different ways. Kendall will take us through that. But I just want you all to know that your website needs to, air quotes, look pristine in the eyes of AI crawlers and Google crawlers. And if your website looks more pristine than the others, that's your advantage. And so, like, you you just can't build it and forget it. That game doesn't work anymore.

Kendall:

Yeah. Great point, Ron. Alright. So let's take a look at the first pillar, local SEO, and the first thing that I wanna touch here is your Google Business profile. Because I would argue, Nathan, you could correct me if I'm wrong, but outside of your website, the number one focus that I would you want you to put your effort into is your Google business profile. I consider it like a second website. Here at One Firefly, we treat our own business profile like a second website, meaning it is always kept up to date. We are rotating pictures in and out. We are making sure that everything is correct on that, that your hours are actually accurate, that you post updates and projects, that it's reflective of the services and solutions that you offer, and, of course, that it's kept up to date with reviews. Because, again, when you are pulled either in AI and asking for a set of recommendations, give me the top three, give me the top five, they're pulling that information. They're summarizing that information from your Google Business profile. And then on the inverse side of things, when you're in a Google search and you're brought up that map pack, that three, you know, three businesses in a table there, again, that's summarizing information pulling straight from your Google Business profile. And then the one other tip I'll just kind of say of things that I've noticed with reviews is that when you're brought up that three pack, generally, you're gonna see it actually chronological through the number of reviews that you have. So, generally, when you're doing that search, it'll pop up. It's going to be the people with the most reviews in the order of how many reviews they have. They're that important, and they're that much of a trust indicator. Outside of other local things that you could be doing, directory listings, and then you're gonna hear this phrase called NAPW consistency. And, essentially, all this is is making sure that everywhere you're listed on the Internet, you look exactly the same. Because, again, these are all trust indicators in the eye of Google and the eye of these AI robots. Meaning that I'll give you an example for One Firefly, our business name, One Firefly LLC. If we wanna have it like that, it needs to be listed as one firefly, comma, LLC in every in Yelp, in Google, on your Google business profile, on your Facebook page. If you have versions, if you've moved locations, your address has changed, your phone number has changed, you have your name listed incorrectly, it's going to demonstrate to Google that you're not maintaining your online presence, and that can be seen as less trustworthy as those that might do this do the opposite. Alright. Next up is on-site SEO. And, you know, the story I'll really give for on-site SEO is converse a conversation that I have pretty often with dealers, and that is they will come to me and say, man, Kendall, like, I don't understand why I don't get any home theater leads or, you know, insert service and solution there. And they'll say, I just don't understand it. And I'll tell them, well, mister customer, does your website say that you offer that? Does it say that you do home theaters? Do you have content on your site talking about home theater and the work that you do? And they say, well, no. And my rebuttal to that is if you don't have any content on your website talking about the services and solutions that you wanna get leads for, then the Internet and, essentially, the world doing research does not know that you offer that service. So that's the concept with on-site SEO is that we wanna make sure that your website is rich with information and is reflective of the type of work that you do, and then I'll even challenge it, the type of work that you wanna get more projects of. Because, yes, you can put a lot of information on your website, but you wanna attract the type of projects that you wanna get more of. So you wanna make sure that it's rich in content and that it's also telling people where your your service area is too, so both in location and in service.

Ron:

Kendall, is this the place we could give that little tip about robot text and markdown kind of in this new AI era?

Kendall:

We'll do it in technical SEO.

Ron:

Alright. I was just looking at what's ahead here. I wanna make sure we that's how I can

Kendall:

It it fits nicely in the technical category, but that's a a good reminder.

Ron:

Okay.

Kendall:

other portion of on-site SEO that is becoming increasingly more important in how people are navigating and interacting and doing research is, creating content that's answering questions. So if you think about and we showed that example of how people interact with Google and then how people are prompting these AI tools, a lot of them are asking they're asking questions. They're doing research, and AI is trying to find, man, there's so much content on the Internet. How do I find the relevant answer to all of these questions that are now being queried of me? And the the best thing that it likes to look for is what's gonna be easiest. So presenting content and information on your website in a question and answer format, again, is really, really great in the eyes of Google because it's very readable, very crawlable, and now they can say, great. Someone has this answer. These people must be pretty trustworthy. They have the answer to that question. I'm gonna go ahead and present that for them and recommend them as a business. So what we're doing here at WinFirefly is incorporating a lot more of FAQs and guides and strategies because it's telling and giving indicators to those AI crawlers that you are the thought leader on that particular topic. Alright. And then next up is off-site. So, again, like I mentioned earlier, this is all about building your authority and building your trustworthiness in the eyes of our recommenders, And a great way to do that is to have other people link to you. Because when others are linking to you, then it's you're actually gaining some of the juice, some of the, you know, points from those that are recommending you. So a great example of this would be yPliance. They had an article that was featured in CE Pro magazine, and we wanted to go ahead and make sure that CE Pro directly linked to the yPliance site because CE Pro has a nice authority. They're seen as a trustworthy domain by linking to one or to yPliance. Now it's passing on some of that authority and some of that trust over to yPliance. So that's a great way to do it. Another way to build those backlinks and to build that trust is also for you to be active on social platforms because those are connected and linked directly to your domain as well.

Ron:

Yeah. Something I would add here is when you do work with an agency such as one Firefly, there's other tools in the backlink game that we also bring to the table. And we have networks of very high domain authority, powerful sites throughout the Internet that allow us to link their powerful site to your site. And specifically and I'll use a very specific nuanced example. Let's say that you wanted to drive your lighting and shading business in a particular part of town or in some city, then you might build an authoritative page on your website specifically for that service in that market, and then you get a powerful link into that page because that page is a brand new page on the Internet. So if you get a powerful page on the Internet linking to it, it it just think of it as pulling it up. And if you start doing that systematically, and that is what we do in our SEO services, it ultimately just keeps raising the power and value of your website on the Internet. And it is, you know, link specifically in off-site link building, this according to Google is one of the top ten ranking factors for impacting the way you show up in search. So it's it's incredibly important to have an active strategy here.

Kendall:

Yeah. That's a really great point, Ron. Alright. And then last but not least is going to be technical SEO. And just like the title says, this is making your website easy to trust. So there's a lot of I won't get too too technical in the weeds here, but we have a team on OneFirefly that's actually dedicated towards increasing and, working on the technical, makeup of your website and our clients' websites. And some of the things that we're gonna be really focused in on is gonna be things like your load time. Again, that impacts how others stay and land on your site and the amount of time they spend navigating your site, so it's it's good for both of those audiences, the mobile friendliness of your site, how easy is it to read and navigate on mobile. But, also, we wanna just kinda make sure the technical back end and all of the code is really clear. There are things like four zero four errors. Have you ever clicked a link on a website and gone to a dead page? That I'm sure that frustrates you as a user. Google knows that. They deem that as a little bit less trustworthy because you have this dead end on your website, and it seemed like, you know, maybe you're not maintaining that website. So we're gonna do things like, you know, those four zero four and HTTP errors. And the thing that Ron mentioned earlier, is there's a file actually in the back end structure of your site. It's called robot dot TXT file. It's funny. It actually has robots in the name, and the purpose of this file in particular is to give direction to crawlers on how and where to crawl your website. So if you wanted to exclude pages from not being crawled, it would be in that file. But on the other side, you also need to tell crawlers. You need to tell all of these platforms, yes. This site is okay. Please crawl it. Here's how to crawl it. Here's how to prompt it to crawl it. So, again, there's these little back end things that you might not be may not be visible to you or your end user, but can make a really big difference in the eyes of Google and AI crawlers.

Ron:

Yeah. Love it. Alright, folks. So the the name to the game, particularly with raising your visibility online, is consistency. This is not a sprint for ninety days and see dramatic results. It doesn't work. In fact, if that's all you were able or willing to do, I would recommend not bothering and keeping the money. But if you are planning to you know, you appreciate the value of the Internet, you appreciate that AI and Google and the way that all works is changing, that the way your referrals are navigating the Internet and conducting research is changing. Then it's in my opinion, here at One Firefly, I would say our position as an agency that you investing time, money, and energy with someone in house, with a local agency, maybe with One Firefly, but making that a part of your always and forever investments because it's going to deliver fruit and dividends for your business years and years into the future. So just to compare and contrast it with an ad strategy, in a given month, if you ran ads, whether on, you know, social media or Google, if you don't get your lead in that month of your spend, you have no residual value to your business. By the way, that doesn't make ad strategies wrong. They're very right as a part of an integrated approach to marketing. But I'm gonna contrast that with consistent efforts where you're staying active and building your authority. If you're doing at the level your business either justifies financially because that's all you can afford out of your cash flow or that's all you, maybe prioritize in terms of the importance of the Internet. Remember, it's always a decision that you're making. But you want to do that every single month, and then you wanna look at data to know what's working, what isn't working, so you can always prioritize or triage spending that time and money in the most effective places to to make the biggest impact for your business. Very much data driven. The game of AI, it is continuing to advance. This webinar is not even touched on what we are also at the tip of the spear on here in our society, and that's what's gonna be called the agentic age. And that's where your clients are gonna have agents that are actually out there doing the research. So this is different than the LLM where your human is doing research. There's going to be agents that are crawling the Internet, and you have to make sure your website and your web and your brand is agent ready for visibility. So that that's coming. It's and it's coming very fast. I won't be surprised if we're offering that webinar in the coming quarters. So it's it's really a matter of right now, it's early days. It's early days, and I see that as a win. I see that as a win for you because you can decide if you want to lean in and impact the visibility of your business before the rest of your competitors figure out what's going on. It's always a decision. That's what makes business so fun. It's a it's a game, and it's there's there's winners and losers, unfortunately. But it's a game that lasts for the entirety of your desire to run your business, and so you can make better moves than your opponents, than your competitors. And we think look thinking about your AI visibility or your overall visibility online is really a a winning move. So remember, we have this. You can scan this QR code. We're also gonna email you this, presentation. We do have some educational content right there on our website to check out. We welcome you to do that. Our podcast, if you did not know, I have personally been interviewing guys and gals like you since April of two thousand seventeen. We're on somewhere around show three fifty, and, we put out a show every week. You can listen on your your your truck drive out to your next job site or maybe on your morning run, or you can watch. It's on YouTube. But starting in June, we're gonna have a brand new segment. It's gonna come out once a month. So there's a show every week, but once a month, there'll be an AI focused segment, and, stay tuned for that. We've already got some of those shows in the hopper. We think you're gonna love them. And, lastly, this is our our this is some of our sales team. There's actually more players, but you can reach us at sales at one Firefly. But I did wanna let you know of the offer. We talked about AI visibility, and we have Kendall, we have a link. Rebecca, you're here. We have a link. And if you would like to know how your business right now is doing in terms of AI visibility and you want more of a comprehensive report, we will run that comprehensive report to you at no cost to you. We're gonna give you a form if you want to do that. We're gonna ask you to define who you are, of course, but your target geography and the target service. And then we're gonna run that comprehensive report based on a luxury consumer buyer persona, and we're gonna run that across all of the large language models. So you can either see the good news or see the bad news, but the key is knowing. And we're gonna help you understand. And I think we're now gonna pivot to q and a with Nathan.

Rebecca:

Yes. Thank you, guys. I dropped a link in the chat, for that report. Please, it's a super quick form. So if you just fill it out, then you'll hear from someone on our team reaching out to you with the results of that. Alright. Q and a, again. So we do have one of our SEO experts here, Nathan. So I highly encourage you if you have questions, please drop them in the chat or the q and a. I'll start with a couple that we've already gotten in, including one that I I've seen and I I think probably you've seen and heard a lot too recently, Nathan, is this question around, well, what about keywords? Are keywords still important when it comes to AI visibility?

Nathan:

It's a really good question because keywords kind of have a couple different jobs historically, and I think it's really easy to kind of lose sight of what those jobs are. From, like, a client point of view, we've historically thought of them as kind of a ranking benchmark. Right? Like, how is performance going? How are we showing up for x term in y geography? And that's a really important piece of how they work. But the kind of the other piece of that historically has been that they drive the actual SEO choices made on the page, like, while we're doing the research, while we're doing all of that. So they are kind of the backbone for the topic that the page is around. And what's really cool about that is it actually aligns really well with how's how AI tools tend to think about things. Because AI tools aren't running like home theater St. Louis and just calling it a day. Even in the most basic version of it, it's gonna have more context than that. It's gonna have more background than that. So it's really on the AI visibility side, it's about the topic. Right? It's about owning that topic, owning that conversation, which when we're looking at, like, the rank tracker, that's what you're seeing is how you're owning that topic in the Google traditional search environment. So put another way, yes, they matter the same way that they always have because they drive the backbone of, like, the topic choices. They provide really good insights into directional performance. But, also, they're kind of we're gonna shift how we're talking about them. So it's not just ranking for that keyword. It's about owning that topic, owning that corner of things. So that way, the AI tools have the ability when they're looking for you know, they're not looking for it in those terms, but they are looking for best home theater Saint Louis, for example. But instead, you have provided because your content has provided the right information and the right backbone to, a, make you eligible to be considered by the AI tool in the first place. Like Kendall was mentioning, you gotta have the content. And then, b, your keywords, the choices, the ideas, and strategy behind how you're supporting that is gonna be very, very clear as well. So they matter. And if anything, they matter more, but it's becoming a bigger conversation. Right? Like, it's about how you're showing up for that in the ranking tool as well as in the AI visibility. Right? So, like, kind of what we're looking at with this AI visibility report that's on offer here. So in in in a nutshell, yes, they matter just as much as they did. And if anything, they matter more because they provide the backbone for how you analyze how you show up in AI.

Rebecca:

Awesome. Thank you, Nathan. That was a great answer. We have another one here that's come in. What about social media? What role is that playing in AI visibility?

Nathan:

It's really interesting because from the regular old traditional SEO point of view, they have always mattered because they're a structured source of information about you. Right? Like those citations, directories, Google Business Profile. That's kind of their old job in in, like, the the traditional search environment. But now kind of like what Kendall and Ram were talking about earlier about the fact that AIs love reviews, right, because that's third party human validation of sentiment. Right? And so, like, on Google Business Profile, your reviews over there. Okay. Cool. How do people feel? What are they saying? What words are they using? Search engines have always done that with reviews and especially GBP. But on the social media side of things, that has been kind of a black box. Search engines haven't really thought about or cared about that too much because it's a lot of information. Right? Like, if they're crawling going out, crawling the Internet, trying to pull up a big pile of what everybody's saying. So that hasn't been a focus. The AI, however, loves that fresh contextual sentiment. Right? And so in the same way that a search engine would go, okay. Cool. I see that the reviews say x, y, and z. They're pretty trustworthy. But the the AI tool looks at those reviews as well and then goes, what are people saying on Twitter? What are people saying on TikTok? Or is this is this something that people are talking about on Instagram? Is this is this brand how many followers do they have? All other things equal, what's their social media kind of presence look like? Like, it's thinking about all of these things. Not every time, but it can is really kind of the critical thing. Like, if it feels like it's important, which the sentiment often is, it'll go out there and it'll look for that information. So you wanna do what you can to control the narrative on social. So in, of course, controlling what your messaging is, what information you're putting out there about yourself. But also and this is this is a little outside of the SEO wheelhouse a lot of times. You wanna join that conversation. You wanna be part of that conversation because you can steer it and guide it. Right? And so if anything, the social media side of it is more important for AI visibility than it has historically been for traditional search.

Kendall:

Hey, Nathan. One thing that you said just kind of sparked something that I was thinking about and that we hadn't touched on regarding being a part of the conversation. Yeah. Ron, I see you nodding. Maybe you know where I'm going with this. And that is, you know, we talk about the importance of reviews.

Nathan:

Yes.

Kendall:

One of another important concept to go with collection of reviews is for actually you to be replying and having a thoughtful reply to that review as well because, again, it puts you in the conversation. Absolutely. And it actually gives you a chance to start incorporating some of the phrases, services, and solutions that you wanna be found for. You can almost kind of expand upon that review and continue to tell the AI crawlers of the world, like, hey. Don't forget. I do all of this stuff as well. So it's another cool tactic.

Nathan:

That's a super good point because the reviews, responding to reviews, that that matters a ton. And we've we've been talking about the AI wants to solve these problems. Right? Your website's gonna have a ton of information on it, but it's probably not gonna have, like, a case study of a time that a client had a bad experience and needed to be kind of, you know, massaged, managed, more value added, fixing problems, and things like that. So let's say you somebody asks the AI, you know, about that kind of thing. It's very unlikely that they'll find website based material around that, but you can absolutely be part of that conversation if you are joining the convo in your reviews on social media. Basically, giving you a voice in a conversation that is going to happen and that the AI is going to care about.

Rebecca:

Thank you so much, team. That's all the questions that I've received in so far, and it looks like we are right at time. If you have any additional questions, please feel free to reach out to us directly. We're happy to get you an answer. And if you would like to fill out this form for your report, please grab the link here, and then I will resend it when we send out your email with the recording and deck. Thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate your time, and I hope everyone has a great rest of their week. Thanks, everyone.

Kendall:

Thank you. Bye.

Ron Callis is the CEO of One Firefly, LLC, a digital marketing agency based out of South Florida and creator of Automation Unplugged. Founded in 2007, One Firefly has quickly became the leading marketing firm specializing in the integrated technology and security space. The One Firefly team work hard to create innovative solutions to help Integrators boost their online presence, such as the elite website solution, Mercury Pro.

Resources and links from the interview:

• On the Blog: Confused by AI + SEO Terms? Here’s Your Cheat Sheet.
• On the Blog: Your Competitors Are Ranking — Even in AI Results. Are You?
• Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel