The New SEO Rulebook: Trust, Ownership, and Generative Engines with Kevin Roy

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Techstar tv. I am happy to have our next, uh, guest on his name is Kevin Roy.

He's the founder of a company called Green Banana, SEO. Kevin, welcome to Tech Drunk tv. Thanks for having me.

So before we jump into, uh, entity au author, authority Engineering, and GEO and these other kinda new things we're gonna talk about, let's talk a little bit about you, Kevin, you're the founder over here at Green Banana. Give us, give us a sense of kind of your journey. I, so I'm just like a, I, I own it.

I'm a internet geek. I've been doing this forever. Um, this is our 18th year as an agency.

I ended up, uh, having a business partner bottom out about four years ago. Uh, and we are, we're basically a full stack digital ad agency, so we tons of AV Google ads, um, geofencing, geotargeting, meta, LinkedIn, uh, but we're, we're really rooted in search engine optimization and now answer optimization geo. Um, uh, and because I'm the resident geek for that, like I've would study SEO for my entire career at that as well to get excited Cha gt and let speak a lot, things like that.

Excellent. And so Green Banana's been around 18 years, you said? Yeah.

Yeah, we've been around a long time. Good for you. I mean, look, I'm doing this, you know, I'm, I'm the founder of Techstrong and we started in 2013.

Yeah. So we we're 12 years in, but, um, that's great. And, and it, you know, it's a great, uh, it's great to be able to have a business that has legs like that.

Right. So are most of your customers like kinda local or you help people all over the world or? We, we have clients.

All, most of them are in the us. We have some in other countries, but 99% of our clients are, are in the United States. And I always jokingly say like we have every type of client, but adult.

Like, we have doctors, lawyers, we have FinTech, we have biotech consultants, United Nations, we have defense c**k directors, we have, uh, um, aerospace, um, we have financial technology, we have education. Um, I have people that sell beef jerky and really expensive pajamas. And um, uh, like then we have HVAC clients and insulation contractors and chiropractors and doctors and lawyers.

So it's, people hire us because we're, we're a data, gee, we're good at ROAS returning, you know, getting a, a good return on ad spend. It's very rare that someone comes in with a branded plan and has us do that. A lot of branded planners, designers hire us to get their marketing to work.

Absolutely. So, Kevin, look, over the last couple years we, we've seen a drastic sea change in the SEO business, right? So here at Tech Strum, for instance, we operate, I don't know, nine to a dozen different websites.

Very niche, DevOps, security, you know, cyber, uh, cloud native, very geeky, very focused sites, communities, and, you know, we all ride that Google algorithm wave where they change the algorithm on SEO and all of a sudden our traffic goes down, but, and then we figure it out and just by the time you figure it out, they change it again. And it's like that constant cat mouse game. But, you know, things have changed with, with AI and generative AI and, and so forth.

Fact of the matter is, a lot of companies like mine are not getting a lot as much traffic from Google as they used to. 'cause Google's keeping more of that traffic on their site, right? They're, you go to a Google search now and, you know, you get your Gemini kind of, uh, findings, Gemini results, then they have a whole bunch of sponsored results.

And unless you're playing that game, you, you know, it used to be you fought to get on the first page, Right? Correct. It's Really hard to get on that first page.

However, you know, God, God gives with one hand takes with the other 35% or more of, of, you know, search traffic today is now coming via AI portals. It seems right from some of the AI models out there, uh, in the LLM. So, you know, the industry has sort of pivoted in saying, okay, well, SEO is not what it was.

We could optimize for what's there, but it's just not there as much. But we wanna optimize to take advantage of, you know, chat GPT, which is probably the, the 800 pound gorilla. Mm-hmm.

But there are others, right? There's Anthropic and Prometheus and, and others that, that are, are part of it. From where you sit, what are you seeing?

Is that what you're seeing or? So I, so I, I'm, I think I, I'm gonna agree with, with Chad, GPT being the, you know, 800 pound grill. I think Gemini and Chad are neck and there, there's a, there's a race.

There's a lot of really smart people like De had in, in once they brought him from, uh, deep line. And Google has, they've, Gemini has made some significant updates. They just had a big rollout on the 18th, uh, that changed the way their algorithm works.

Uh, we do see across all of our clients a drop in organic traffic, but not a massive drop. So for B2B clients, um, you have to remember that with the answer engines, you're asking a question and getting a small soundbite of information that when you get all of your answer questions answered in that soundbite, you don't need to click onto the, so in a B2B, um, the website or a B2B information, you typically need more. So people are either clicking those and going to the website or just googling the name of the company and, and going to the website to get all of that information that wasn't answered in that little soundbite.

Um, consumer is getting hit a little bit harder with that, but we're still seeing a pretty good amount of traffic coming from organic. But thankfully, a really healthy organic base is what gets you, um, it's basically 80% of the work to get you in these answer questions. A absolutely.

So Kevin, what, what is, uh, you, you've developed something, you're calling entity authority engineering. So there's, you're, you're, we're hearing answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization, um, LLM ranking, and there's a, there's, there's a lot of confusion on, on what to call it. We are calling it, um, the entity engineering, uh, because of, you know, we think that it encompasses both generative engine optimization and answer optimization.

Now, those two words are not interchangeable. They're actually two different things. So in order to get right in answer engines, they need to trust you, which is kind of ironic because a lot of people are coming up content that answer engines are actually writing for them.

But what the answer engine engines are trying to do is to, is to say, who takes ownership of that and how can we back that up? So they're looking at who the author is behind this content. They're looking at what other websites or high authority links are, are pointing back to the site.

That's called entity stacking, which is answer engine optimization. It's the trust portion. The generative engine optimization is how your, how basically how your website is formatted with schema, with questions and answers that are really easy, um, with information that's connecting.

So think of answer engine optimization as the resume in an interview, and your actual interview is generative engine optimization. So those things two together way you're looking at it. Yeah.

Yeah. So they have to work together. So one without the other, you can have a great website, but with, without the trust of the models, they're not gonna refer to you.

If you have amazing trust and no content, they're not gonna know what to refer to. Right. So you, you kind of need both.

Absolutely. Devin, look, there was a time, I don't know, five years ago, um, 70, 75%, maybe 80% of the traffic to our tech strong sites were coming from, uh, you know, organic search as we called it. Right?

And, and 99% of that was Google. What percentage would you say of search is coming via, uh, the AI models at this point? So, And it's hard 'cause Google uses GEM and AI realize.

Yeah. So the, the, the hard part of that is if people are getting the answer in their AI model and they're not clicking, how are we gonna know if it's an accurate percentage? So it's really, if you look at the number of clicks like we get from chat GBT, it is, yeah, like 50, 60 a week, it's not a lot.

Um, but it doesn't mean that we're getting mentioned a lot more. So there are tools to figure out, uh, if, if you're being mentioned or you're being cited, so you can see how many people are actually looking for you, or how many times you're being mentioned in answer engine models before they click to the site. So it's a, it's kind of like a tough, it's answering that question would almost be inaccurate because there's a lot less, uh, people that are coming from the answer engines, but it doesn't mean they're not seeing, they just might be getting everything they need in the, in the response before clicking to the website.

Does that make sense? Yeah, no, perfect sense. You know, it, and it makes it hard.

I'm wondering, look, we're, we're a tech company, we cover the tech space. I get all this, this all makes sense to me. I'm not a lawyer, a doctor, a dentist, or some other sort of, you know, local business or even not even a local business sells, you know, online, but who's kind of savvy to tech, let's say.

How are you finding, explaining all this to them? So I, I think, well, number one, we're using tools to figure out the baseline if they're being mentioned, the answer engine. So we can, we can talk, uh, intelligently to some of the gaps that they're having or some of the reasons that they are showing up or not showing up.

But one of the things that we do is we try to look at, like, there's the, you know, crawl law around what are some of the things that anybody can do to start getting mentioned in answer engines. And two of 'em right off the bat when I was talking about the, the, the trust component of it, or the answer engine optimization component is when you're putting content on your site, make sure there is an author that is taking ownership of that. And then you, what you do is you create an author age that, uh, mentions all the things that you've either authored or if you've been in a podcast or if you've been mentioned something, you put that on your author page that links to the, um, the article that you write, right?

So the article that you write, I'm sorry, it links to the author page. And then what I recommend people do is you put your author bio in your LinkedIn page and link it to your author page because LinkedIn is a very high trusted source. So you're amplifying that trust signal, right?

So the, so the number one, the easiest thing to do is to take credit for the content that you're writing, that's the entity, um, or the answer magic authority component of it. The second thing that you can do is you can actually, um, double, if you're a logo business and you have reviews to your website, what really, really helps you get mentioned in answer engines and in SEO is if there is a keyword that describes your service and or a location of where you do the business at, if you can get that in the review, that's really helpful. We all know that's next and possible.

It's really hard to get a review, so forget about asking someone to use words that you want in the re review. However, you can respond to reviews and Google treats them equally so you can say, really, as corny as it sounds, thanks Alan, I'm really happy that you thought that we had the best pizza in Boston. Please come again.

Um, that, that significantly helps. So that's the, the answer component, the generative optimization component. The simplest thing to do is sound bites.

So think of when you are reading a newspaper and there's a little call, you know, they make text base smack in the middle of a page. It's the call out, click the call out, or the main subject at the very top of the page. Uh, and so those simple things that you can do will help you start gaining momentum in answer.

I love it. That's excellent, excellent business. Um, Kevin, for people who maybe want to get more or maybe look into Green Banana helping them, where, what's the website?

com or, um, this works in Google, it does not work in answer agents. If you go, if you Google, I just met Kevin on page one, number one in Google, but if you say, I just met Kevin in chat, it's gonna say, who cares? Big deal.

Look, We can't, we, you know, right? I try to tell my wife this too. I, you know, in tech, people know me and, and, and tech stroke.

I'm side of tech, not so much. Um, Hey Kevin, thanks for coming on here and gi and giving us a quick little lesson in, in, uh, answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization and enter the authority engineering for people. Want more information on this?

Go check out Green banana, SEO, or like Kevin says, go on Google, you know, and, and ask for Kevin. Um, keep up the great work. This is a ra, this, this whole industry right now.

Fun. I mean, this is the most excitement we've had in this in a long time, right? I know, I know.

I think it's the golden h for SEOs. I I really is. Yeah, I know.

And a lot, it's a golden nature for a lot of things in tech, man. Yeah, good stuff. Kevin Roy, founder Green Banana, SEO, here on Techron tv.

We'll be back in a moment.