Latest / Profit With A Plan / EP364 SEO Isn’t Dead- How Small Businesses Get Found by Google and AI

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EP364 SEO Isn’t Dead- How Small Businesses Get Found by Google and AI · Profit With A Plan

• 0:04
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Hey, if you've ever been told that SEO is dead, that Google is changing way too fast, or now you need an entirely new strategy for AEO search, AI search, GEO, or whatever the next acronym comes out, you may be thinking it's a lot harder than it needs to be.
• 0:23
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Because getting found online is never really about chasing algorithms. It's about understanding what your customers are searching for, answering their questions better than anyone else, and making it easy to search for the search engines, and now AI, to recognize that you have the answer.
• 0:42
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So before you go throwing out your SEO strategy and start chasing the next big thing, we're going to separate what's actually changed from what's simply being renamed.
• 0:53
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And the best part is, is you don't need an expensive agency, a complicated software, or a massive marketing budget to improve your visibility.
• 1:03
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So if you want more of the right people finding your business online, this conversation on today's Profit with a Plan podcast could change the way you think about your SEO completely.
• 1:16
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Hey, entrepreneurs, are you working too hard for too little?
• 1:20
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Welcome to Profit with a Plan podcast, the podcast where we help business owners grow smarter, increase profitability, and build a business that's worth more, whether you plan to keep it or sell it.
• 1:31
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I'm Marcia Riner, business growth strategist and the profit booster behind Infinite Profit.
• 1:37
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Each week, I bring you practical strategies, expert insights, and real-world steps to help you grow revenue, improve margin, and build a stronger business.
• 1:47
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Today's episode is brought to you by Infinite Profit, where strategy turns into profitable growth.
• 1:52
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But before we jump in, I have something special for you. If your business is just doing okay, but you know it could be growing faster or producing more profit, go grab my free Profit Booster Growth Map.
• 2:05
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: In just a couple of minutes, you'll uncover what may be holding your back your growth and where that profit may be slipping away, and where the best opportunities are to make more of the business that you've already built.
• 2:19
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So go get your free growth map at ProfitBooster.biz after the show. And it's quick, it's free, and there's no sales call required. Now let's get into today's conversation.
• 2:31
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: My guest today is Matt Diamante, founder of Hey Tony, a seven-figure, multi-seven-figure Canadian SEO agency.
• 2:40
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: That helps small businesses get found in more often in local search.
• 2:46
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: He has built an audience of over 800,000 followers by making SEO easier to understand and far more practical for everyday business owners.
• 2:56
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Matt is also the best-selling author of Get Found and the creator of several free SEO tools designed to help business owners improve visibility without relying on complicated tactics or expensive software.
• 3:09
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: What I like about Matt's approach is that he cuts through a lot of the noise around SEO, AEO, GEO, and AI search engines.
• 3:18
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: to bring the more… more… bring the conversation back to what really matters, helping the right people find your business. Matt, welcome to Profit with a Plan Podcast!
• 3:29
  Matt Diamante: Thank you so much for having me. That's quite the intro. Yeah, it's mouthful. I will say you forgot one acronym, E-I-E-I-O. It's old McDonald's SEO.
• 3:42
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right.
• 3:42
  Matt Diamante: No, thank you so much for having me. We were just chatting before and I'm so, so, so excited to chat today.
• 3:48
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Me too! I love that. Oh, McDonald, I got… that's… you know what? That is a perfect social post for you to be able to throw that out there and have everybody laughing, because, you know, people are thinking, you know, what do I gotta do to be the next, right? Where can I go? What can I find? Everything's changing. That's really…
• 4:07
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: The stress about marketing and getting found, because otherwise we're just the best kept secret in town, and we're building and talking and not helping customers.
• 4:18
  Matt Diamante: Yeah, it's like… I feel like a lot of the times, people will put up a website, they won't do any kind of SEO, they won't tell anybody about it, and my comparison is…
• 4:28
  Matt Diamante: That's like opening up a physical store location, not putting any signs, not having any windows, and not even having a door. Nobody. They just think it's a brick wall. Nobody knows it's there.
• 4:39
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Exactly. Hope is not a plan. Yeah, you know, you've got it. You've got to be out there. You've got to be doing things. So with today's Well, first of all, before I go into the questioning, I just love the name of your company. Tell me why you chose Hey Tony.
• 4:52
  Matt Diamante: Okay, so this is a really fun story. And I feel like I tell it every single day. So.
• 4:58
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So cute!
• 4:59
  Matt Diamante: Yeah, absolutely. So, when I was trying to come up with a name for my agency, I didn't want it to be something like Map Marketing or Diamante Digital. I was like, I wanted to have a little bit more substance behind it. So.
• 5:12
  Matt Diamante: When I was trying to come up with a name, I was thinking of all these moments in my life that really had an impact on me. And I thought back to one where I was walking to lunch one day and I was, you know, walking by this, these construction workers, like the big burly guys, like, you know, their arms are the size of your head.
• 5:27
  Matt Diamante: And these are like the manly men that don't really express emotion or anything like that. So I overheard them talking and the one guy goes, hey, Tony, you always know how to put a smile on my face. And I just thought, what a genuine expression of emotion from somebody you wouldn't expect. Like, hey, man, you make my day better. You brighten up my day, you put a smile on my face. And that was the kind of transparency and feeling that I wanted everybody that the business touches to have.
• 5:51
  Matt Diamante: Whether it's the team, strangers on the internet, or clients, let's all put smiles on each other's faces.
• 5:57
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I love that. That's the best marketing story ever. Branding story. It really just connects to it. And every time I, you know, now see this, hey, Tony, I'm like, hey, Tony.
• 6:07
  Matt Diamante: Yeah.
• 6:07
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You're.
• 6:08
  Matt Diamante: Like, I know somebody named Tony. Like, yeah, you probably know a bricklayer named Tony, a tile setter. You probably know a bunch of guys named Tony. Hey, Tony. Yeah.
• 6:16
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Exactly, exactly, especially, you know, in the trades industry, you know, that's very common, so that's cool. Alright, so let's get into the topic, I love it. So business owners keep hearing this SEO, right? It's changing because AI is there, and now they're calling it AEO or GEO.
• 6:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: What exactly has changed and what mostly is the label?
• 6:39
  Matt Diamante: I think it's, like, it's all SEO. At the end of the day, it's all SEO, it's all search engine optimization, and whether people are using AI, or they're going to Google, or Yahoo, or Bing, or whatever platform they want to use to search something, it's all search engine optimization. Now, people are saying, well, I'm going to ChatGPT. Isn't that a different kind of…
• 6:58
  Matt Diamante: SEO, that's AI, SEO, all this kind of stuff, and
• 7:02
  Matt Diamante: at the end of the day, what ChatGPT and what Claude and all these other platforms are doing is they're looking at the search results. So, if you type in, you know, a really complicated query.
• 7:13
  Matt Diamante: or I say query, a really complicated prompt, they're gonna go and do a bunch of searches on a bunch of different platforms, find all the answers, look at the answers, and then deliver to you
• 7:24
  Matt Diamante: What is the best result specific to you? Does that make sense?
• 7:28
  Matt Diamante: So it's like somebody doing 10 Google searches, doing all the research for you and saying, here's your three options, right? So they're using the search results that currently exist.
• 7:38
  Matt Diamante: So, if you want to show up in ChatGPT, in Claude, or in any LLM that you're using, any AI you're using, you want to be doing the traditional SEO stuff.
• 7:48
  Matt Diamante: Right. You want to be helping your customers. You want to be writing blog posts. You want to make sure that you have service and product pages on your website, which we can get into all of this in a little bit more detail. And you also need that credibility factor, which is getting other people online to mention you and link to you.
• 8:02
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Mmm.
• 8:03
  Matt Diamante: That's it. I know that might sound complicated, but it's really, that's the extent of SEO.
• 8:10
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But that's always been SEO, right? I mean, except for way back in the, you know, 90s or 0s, that, you know, you were stacking keywords that were invisible to the naked eye, right? I mean, that's old SEO, but now SEO, I mean, that's nothing that's really different. It's the…
• 8:28
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: It's the reviews, it's the content, it's the questions you're answering, and is it also the fact that people are visiting your site and how long they're staying on it? Is that involved too?
• 8:40
  Matt Diamante: Yeah, I mean, there's, there's, kind of controversy…
• 8:43
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Thanks.
• 8:44
  Matt Diamante: Yeah, there's controversy between, like, is time spent on site really, does that matter? I think it does. I think if people are taking actions on your site, and they're completing whatever the journey is, so they come to your site, they look at your pricing page, they look at a blog post, or they look at whatever, and then they fill out your contact form, and then they leave the site.
• 9:01
  Matt Diamante: I think completing the action, completing that journey really has an impact, but.
• 9:06
  Matt Diamante: There's no actual documentation out there that says this is something that we're tracking.
• 9:12
  Matt Diamante: And even Google, like they have a whole portal documentation as to what you should be doing, what you shouldn't be doing. And even within that, some people are like.
• 9:24
  Matt Diamante: This, the thing that they tell you not to do is actually a very common thing that just happens like, for example, I was at a restaurant last week.
• 9:32
  Matt Diamante: And when we were done eating, the server comes up to us and is like, hey, I actually have the little card here.
• 9:38
  Matt Diamante: She's like, hey, if you guys could leave us a Google review, we'd really appreciate it and then she puts her name on the front and
• 9:47
  Matt Diamante: Google doesn't want you to do that. Firstly, Google wants the person to leave the premises before you ask for the review so they don't feel pressured to leave a review, and they can be really honest with the review.
• 9:58
  Matt Diamante: Right. So Google tells you not to do that. But a lot of people do that. They also don't want you to name specific people who helped you at that business. I mean, people do that, right?
• 10:09
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right.
• 10:10
  Matt Diamante: They're like Matt really helped me out.
• 10:11
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Asterisk waitress, she brought on everything, it was really good, she even came back and got, you know, whatever the… whatever the review that you want to have. Does… when… I guess the question would be, when… with that example, does… does the search engine know that they were sitting at the table when they filled out that review? I mean, are they doing.
• 10:31
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You know, mapping?
• 10:33
  Matt Diamante: I feel like they could be. So a lot of I'm sure if you talk to a lot of business owners.
• 10:39
  Matt Diamante: They'll say, I get a ton of reviews, and then they disappear from my profile, or they never appear, and my customers will show me, here's the review that I left, and it's not showing in the public reviews. So, I don't know 100%, because it's… there's not public information, but I have a feeling, like.
• 10:55
  Matt Diamante: All of our phones are geolocated, right? You open up Google Maps, it shows you exactly where you are. So if you have that tracking turned on, it will know that you're at the restaurant still. It'll know that you're at that nail salon or that whatever it might be.
• 11:07
  Matt Diamante: Where it gets kind of complicated is if you're a service-based business, you're still at home. You can leave the review. They can ask you for a review right there. They can say, you can mention us by name, you can do all this stuff, and they could literally sit there if they wanted to and watch you type out the review to make sure it's good.
• 11:22
  Matt Diamante: You know what I mean? But like, and Google has no way of really policing that,
• 11:27
  Matt Diamante: Besides, like, having AI go through and doing all of whatever their AI is doing, deleting reviews, or… not shadow-banning reviews, but making them not visible to the public. So, it's…
• 11:39
  Matt Diamante: it's really interesting, because Google will say, don't do this thing, but then it's like, when else am I supposed to ask for a review? I'll give you an example. My wife and I go to this nail salon. We love getting pedicures together every, like, 3-4 weeks, whatever it might be, and at the very front, they have a thing that says, leave us a review on Google with a QR code.
• 11:57
  Matt Diamante: Now, this business, you would say, well, just text the person a couple hours after they leave.
• 12:02
  Matt Diamante: Right? When you know they're at home. Or an hour later, have an automated text go out.
• 12:07
  Matt Diamante: This nail salon is run from the Stone Age. You have to call them. They write down your name on a piece of paper. Like when you're there sitting in the chair, you'll see them. They'll get a call and they'll be like, okay, when do you want to come in? Yep, that works. And they'll write the name on a piece of paper.
• 12:21
  Matt Diamante: That's their scheduling. They don't have a computer in there, they don't have an iPad.
• 12:25
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Oh my gosh.
• 12:27
  Matt Diamante: Right, so what else are they supposed to ask?
• 12:28
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right!
• 12:30
  Matt Diamante: So, it's just stuff like that, where I'm like, there's…
• 12:34
  Matt Diamante: Like, good and bad with Google's rules and
• 12:38
  Matt Diamante: Like, they're not gonna necessarily know if you're breaking them? I don't know. It's… it's really… it's up in the air. Because how else are you supposed to get reviews?
• 12:45
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, you have to ask, right? Because they're not gonna… rarely do you find the person that just goes, I'm gonna go review this company. They will if it's bad.
• 12:55
  Matt Diamante: will.
• 12:56
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: If it's bad, if there's a bad service, they're going to nail you to the wall right and they're going to do it immediately and they're going to tell 20 people oh, never go to Marcia's place ever again, because you know, I mean, they'll always do that. But to get the good reviews, yeah, you have to ask. I mean it's, it's.
• 13:12
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: It's insane, they don't, they don't think about it, they don't think about, oh, thank you very much, here's your tip.
• 13:17
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But, oh, by the way, I should leave a review, right? Yeah, it's not part of it, so, interesting. Alright, so AEO and SEO and GEO, give us the real definitions of SEO as search engine optimization. What is AEO?
• 13:34
  Matt Diamante: Answer engine optimization. And then, oh my God, what is it? Geo, generative engine optimization. Okay. So it's all like.
• 13:42
  Matt Diamante: The other ones are all based around AI, right? Showing up in not the traditional search results with the 10 blue links, which if you go to Google now, you're not even seeing, sometimes you don't even see 10 links. You'll see sponsored results and you'll see the AI overview. Then you'll see videos in there. And then you're like, where's the first link? And there might be one or two.
• 14:01
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And those are paid. Those are paid. You paid to get on there and you're getting bumped down even by AI, which is insane.
• 14:07
  Matt Diamante: It's really crazy. But the thing is, AI can recommend your business. So how do you get ranked in AI? How do you get mentioned in AI?
• 14:17
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Good question.
• 14:18
  Matt Diamante: The… the biggest thing is…
• 14:20
  Matt Diamante: On every single page of your site, you should have, well, sorry, on every single page on your site, you should have every single service or product that you sell listed. That just makes sense, right?
• 14:33
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You would think.
• 14:33
  Matt Diamante: you.
• 14:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You would think.
• 14:35
  Matt Diamante: Well, so I, I look at websites all day, every day, you know, for work, whether it's a client or whether it's somebody in my community and
• 14:44
  Matt Diamante: let's just use, like, heating and cooling, for example. You're like, okay, we do heating and cooling, what other services do we put on the site? Well, I'm like.
• 14:51
  Matt Diamante: Do you do furnace installation? They're like, yeah. I'm like, what about furnace repair? They're like, yeah, we also do that. What about furnace replacements? Yep. And then I'm like, okay, well, how about air conditioner installation? They're like, yeah, we do that. Air conditioner repair.
• 15:04
  Matt Diamante: air conditioner, replacement, all this, like, you know, all that stuff. And you can get really granular with that, those kinds of services, because people aren't necessarily looking for a furnace installation. They might just be looking for furnace repair or emergency furnace repair.
• 15:19
  Matt Diamante: Right? Or they'll go to Google and say, I need somebody who's available right now to come in, because it's minus 40 outside, I don't know, whatever temperature, it's minus 40, and my furnace isn't working, my family's freezing to death, I need help right now. And then AI will go and look for somebody who mentions that they do.
• 15:38
  Matt Diamante: Now, like Google, I don't know if you've gotten any of these calls, but Google's AI will actually call you.
• 15:44
  Matt Diamante: And see if you do emergency service, how much it costs, all this kind of stuff.
• 15:48
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: That's great.
• 15:48
  Matt Diamante: You can, you should also include all of that information on your website. Like we always have somebody available 24 seven call us. We'll pick up the phone, that kind of thing.
• 15:57
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: The reason for that is so that Search can find that information and report back to me, the consumer, right? I mean, it is really that simple.
• 16:06
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You know,
• 16:08
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: It's not the spam of the words, it's done conversationally and asking in a frequently asked questions section, or something like that in your site, but when you have that information there.
• 16:20
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I may be searching for one thing, but meaning another, so I've got to have all the words and all the abilities that are… Yeah. …that are out there for it, so…
• 16:29
  Matt Diamante: Well, I think, too, what I'm describing here is solving somebody's problem.
• 16:35
  Matt Diamante: Rarely does somebody go on the internet to not solve a problem, right? If they're looking for information on how to do something, they're looking for that problem to be solved. If they are looking for somebody to come fix it for them, that's a problem that's
• 16:47
  Matt Diamante: being solved. If they are looking for a product to fix their problem, to solve their problem, again, that is a problem being solved. The other…
• 16:55
  Matt Diamante: Side of it is people are looking for entertainment, right? That's a whole different type of SEO.
• 16:59
  Matt Diamante: It's a whole different type of content or intent, which is another thing that I feel like I need to mention is the intent part.
• 17:07
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Oh, tell me.
• 17:08
  Matt Diamante: So if you go to Google and say, I have a leak in my roof, what do I do?
• 17:12
  Matt Diamante: What is your intent?
• 17:14
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: To fix my leak. I'm going to fix it right. I'm not going to hire somebody to fix it. So Joe Schmo's hey, tony's cleaning service isn't going to come out and do that right or fixing.
• 17:23
  Matt Diamante: So… So, you're looking for information.
• 17:27
  Matt Diamante: Right? If you type that into Google or into ChatGPT or an LLM,
• 17:32
  Matt Diamante: It's going to give you, likely, people who are talking about how to do it yourself, or how to troubleshoot, or how to do, you know, they're giving you that information. Now, if you were to go to Google and type in.
• 17:45
  Matt Diamante: I need my roof repaired. Who do I call?
• 17:48
  Matt Diamante: Who should I go with?
• 17:50
  Matt Diamante: That has a different intent, right? You're looking to buy, you're looking to solve the problem or for somebody else to solve the problem for you.
• 17:57
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right.
• 17:57
  Matt Diamante: Right? And then if you go to Google and say, I need a roof patch. I don't know if they make roof patches, but let's just say they do. I need a patch for my roof.
• 18:05
  Matt Diamante: That is another intent, they're looking to buy a product.
• 18:08
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Buy a product. So, do we need to be training the user on how to find us a little bit better, or we need to align ourself with the way that the user is actually using the service or the search engine? I mean… Exactly. Yeah, I know it's a duh question, but in reality, it's not, right? Because a lot of people market to educate, which…
• 18:31
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Good or bad, right? Rather than to, you know, bring in and solve the problem, right?
• 18:38
  Matt Diamante: Yeah, I mean, market to educate, that's like very top of funnel. You don't want to ignore that. That is a very important part, which we're going to talk about a bit later. And I have that lead magnet for it. Or I say that lead magnet, that tool. It's a lead magnet for me. It's a tool for everybody listening.
• 18:52
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I.
• 18:53
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: It's all good.
• 18:54
  Matt Diamante: So, with that in mind, you need to align the intent of what you're writing to the intent of what people are… what they mean when they're searching that. So, the best way to do this is go to Google and type in whatever you want to rank for, right? If it's, furnace installation Niagara Falls, let's say.
• 19:13
  Matt Diamante: You want to look and see, are these service pages that are showing up? Are these product pages? Are these blog posts? In that case, it's probably going to be service pages. So, you want to make a service page about that. You wouldn't want to write a blog post about that, because that's an informational intent thing, and that doesn't align with what people are looking for.
• 19:31
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Interesting.
• 19:32
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So it's how you're setting up
• 19:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: what you post and what you do that's going to attract? And is it still very.
• 19:42
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: helpful to have fresh content on your site all the time, that Google goes, oh, well, this was made in 2022, so… yeah, no. But this was done in 2026, so yes.
• 19:55
  Matt Diamante: I think it's what I tell everybody in my community with and with our clients, like post one to two times a week, like a blog post or update a page or do some kind of update on your site because it shows that you're doing that maintenance.
• 20:07
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right, it shows.
• 20:07
  Matt Diamante: It's active and you're an active business. Additionally, if you're doing one blog post a week, you're showcasing your expertise on that topic. If you're not an expert, you can't write one blog post a week.
• 20:18
  Matt Diamante: Right. I mean, you probably can with AI now, but…
• 20:21
  Matt Diamante: it's not going to be good, and it's not going to showcase your actual expertise. And what I mean by that is when you're… any page on your website should include your expertise, your experience, any case studies you have, opinions about whatever you're talking about, whether it's furnace installation, or the size of the furnace, or, you know, whatever.
• 20:40
  Matt Diamante: Sure. It should include your unique view of the world on that topic.
• 20:45
  Matt Diamante: Because everybody else can do the same, you know, if you go to a dentist, it's like, yeah, teeth whitening's all the same, right? It's the same process, but certain dentists might have a different way of looking at it, or a checkup, or whatever. They might have a different process.
• 20:58
  Matt Diamante: And they probably do, but they all just talk about, like, you already know what this is, so just come hire us. It's like, well, no, like, I want to know, like, maybe I'm scared of the dentist.
• 21:07
  Matt Diamante: Right? Maybe this dentist is geared towards children who have dental trauma. I don't know, I'm just making stuff up, but you want to talk about your expertise in that field.
• 21:18
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Love it.
• 21:18
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Oh, see, this is so good. And it…
• 21:21
  Matt Diamante: you.
• 21:21
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But the funny thing about it is, is it's not new.
• 21:25
  Matt Diamante: not.
• 21:26
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Still, it's still the same thing we've been doing over and over again. It's just now we have to make sure that we're making ourselves
• 21:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: even more visible out there, and having more current content that goes out, so that way the engines can find you, right? Now, I've heard that, the engines want frequently asked questions more. They want those questions answered. So you should have in your blog post or on your page, you should say, here's a question that's commonly asked, and here's my response for it.
• 21:59
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Because they're searching that more than going through the fluff of a blog. Is that true?
• 22:04
  Matt Diamante: I don't know that that's a hundred percent true. Like if it makes sense to do it, do it. But at the end of the day, I always say, what is going to be actually truly helpful and useful to a real person?
• 22:15
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I.
• 22:16
  Matt Diamante: Are you scrolling to the bottom of the page and looking through all the FAQs? Probably not.
• 22:21
  Matt Diamante: Right. If it's maybe a really in-depth piece of content that you want to actually learn, maybe, maybe you do. Maybe you need that stuff there. But when I see FAQs on a site, a lot of the times I'm like, does this make sense that this there? If it doesn't make sense, this person is just trying to game the system.
• 22:38
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And.
• 22:38
  Matt Diamante: At the end of the day, we're not trying to game Google's algorithm or ChatGPT or whatever other search engine you want to use. We're not trying to game the algorithm. We're just trying to help people and attract customers. And the way you attract customers is by being helpful.
• 22:55
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: That makes sense. Absolutely. You're not trying to game the system, but everybody out there is. Everybody else is out there trying to game the system. But I think what's happening and I'm starting to see it because
• 23:06
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I see what's written by chat, you know, even… and I'm not… I'm not, you know… yeah, I'm trained on it, but in… in a way, it's like, so… so for my… just for this, for this podcast, I'm getting a tremendous amount of guests that are going through chat to find me, getting on my apply list to become a guest.
• 23:25
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And all I see the same BS in their in their introduction to me. Oh, I love your site, I love what you're doing because blah blah blah blah. And I'm like, okay, that was totally AI, bud. You know, 100%.
• 23:37
  Matt Diamante: percent.
• 23:38
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And I think that we're getting… even us humans are getting ready for that. So the ones that I could see that they put an effort forth, and they spoke to me in their language, and I could hear their voice, then I'm like, that's a real person.
• 23:54
  Matt Diamante: 100%.
• 23:55
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I think people want that, right? They want the information, but they also want.
• 24:00
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: to know your personality, and who you are, and what you sound like, and talk like, you know? And I think that's…
• 24:07
  Matt Diamante: guys.
• 24:07
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Be part of your site as well.
• 24:09
  Matt Diamante: I think that's we're getting more and more into an era of everything. Everybody's pushing AI. Why does a fridge need AI? It doesn't make any sense. Why does my stove need Wi-Fi?
• 24:20
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah.
• 24:21
  Matt Diamante: Why, like just, I just want something that plugs in and turns on right. Why does my lamp need Wi-Fi? That doesn't make any sense to me, or why does it need AI?
• 24:32
  Matt Diamante: Yeah, it's… it's… people are… I almost want to use the word yearning. People are yearning for connection, right? Especially with everybody working remotely and from home and doing Zoom meetings and not actually being around a community of people.
• 24:46
  Matt Diamante: They're looking for the physical thing, they're looking for that, that connection and
• 24:52
  Matt Diamante: Like, let's just be honest, it's easy enough to get into AI overviews and trick the system. And a lot of people do that kind of stuff.
• 25:00
  Matt Diamante: So who do you believe? The person who had the smarter strategy or the person who actually is really good at their job?
• 25:07
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Well, you know, that makes sense for once they get to you.
• 25:11
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah. Right? Once they find you, then that engagement, that personal connection, this is who we are, this is why we do what we do, this is how we can help you, and these are the results that you'll get from whatever, buying our product or buying our service.
• 25:29
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: That's really important. But I think the conversation is how do we get people to find you in the first place? And I think that's the game with the, you know, the AEO and the SEO and the questions and how do you stack the hidden words at the bottom of the page and all that stupid stuff.
• 25:44
  Matt Diamante: Don't stock hidden words.
• 25:45
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I know, I know, I'm just saying, no, that's… that's… that's the one… when I think of SEO, that's the first thing that always pops up, is in the 80s, you stack the… you stack the keywords. But, I mean, I'm like, you still… I can have the best website.
• 25:59
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I can be the most helpful, I can be so crystal clear to my ideal client that I can solve that exact problem. I'm reasonable, I'm on time, I'm everything that that client wants, but if they can't find me.
• 26:12
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I'm useless!
• 26:14
  Matt Diamante: Well, that's when we get into, so if you have all of that on your site, and if you have all of that and you have these individual pages and you're being very intentional with what you're actually putting out, then, and you're not getting found, it's probably because you have a reputation problem. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I don't mean people are leaving negative reviews.
• 26:33
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You know, my number's on the bathroom.
• 26:35
  Matt Diamante: But, like the reputation is that you don't have a reputation. Nobody knows you, nobody's talking about you online. Maybe you're not posting on social media and your only thing that you have is your website. You don't even have a Google business profile.
• 26:49
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Hmm.
• 26:49
  Matt Diamante: Go sign up for the Google Business Profile, get listed in the Yellow Pages, on the website, and on Yelp, and whatever all these other sites are, post on social media, and then start getting backlinks from other websites. So, a really easy way to do this is join your local Chamber of Commerce, right? They're active, they post on social media, they do all this stuff.
• 27:09
  Matt Diamante: like, I joined mine, and I paid for, like, a featured listing. It was, like, 500 bucks for the year, or whatever it was. And right on the homepage, here's a link to my profile on the site, and then my profile describes what I do, who I serve, what kind of business we are, and then it has links to my main services. Right? So now I'm…
• 27:27
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So that's people talking about you right there, even though they're not necessarily.
• 27:32
  Matt Diamante: yeah.
• 27:32
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You know, putting reviews out for you, but they're, they're, that's a talking, that's somebody mentioning you and backlinking, right?
• 27:39
  Matt Diamante: Well, even, like, if you go to…
• 27:43
  Matt Diamante: Google and you type in local charities or charities near me. Go to those charities and make a donation.
• 27:49
  Matt Diamante: and say, how do I become a bronze sponsor, or, like, one of the sponsors that has the logo on the website with the link? How do I do that?
• 27:56
  Matt Diamante: And they will gladly tell you how much money you need to spend, sometimes it's 50 bucks, and they'll say, cool, yeah, we'll add you to the sponsors list, or whatever it is, because you're a business. And…
• 28:06
  Matt Diamante: That's a really great way to get local backlinks and get like people talking about you. On the other hand, if you sponsor a community event, all of a sudden news publications are picking that up. They're saying, hey, Tony sponsors, you know, Little League, whatever it is.
• 28:20
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah.
• 28:21
  Matt Diamante: And then you can use that. You can post that on social media. Other people can share that. Other people can talk about you. Like, give people a reason to talk about you.
• 28:30
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Good point, good point. This is so good, and so…
• 28:36
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: easy, right? If we're gonna hit that silly easy button, right? You know, because it doesn't have to be really hard and crazy, it just means that we have to be active.
• 28:47
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And thinking of active, if that business owner's going, I don't even have time to, you know, do this because as we mentioned earlier, I'm busy chasing clients and putting out fires. I don't have time to do this stuff. How could a business owner do this or add this to their you know, multitude of tasks?
• 29:06
  Matt Diamante: That's the big question is we're busy all day doing the work. How do we build the business? So there's two ways to do it. Either you can hire somebody to do that, like to do the posting, to do all this stuff for you.
• 29:18
  Matt Diamante: Which is gonna cost you a salary, or an agency, or whatever it is. Okay. And even with that, it's not completely, you know, white glove, you're not touching anything, because they need your expertise, they need you to look at stuff, approve stuff, all this kind of stuff. So you're still doing.
• 29:32
  Matt Diamante: Something.
• 29:33
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And it takes time, right? I mean, with with that kind of content, you may have to pay for six months of effort before things really start to pan out and get going for you.
• 29:45
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Or, you know, a whole bunch of likes don't mean business, but because they got the like, because they got this, and it's that daisy chain that comes back to you, your business is improving. So, I think it's also hard to validate the ROI on this kind of action.
• 30:02
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Oh, right off the get-go.
• 30:04
  Matt Diamante: But it's also like people will.
• 30:06
  Matt Diamante: You know, because even though we don't have time, we're all doom scrolling on our phone. We're scrolling reel after reel, or TikTok after TikTok, and sometimes a tip will come up. Maybe it's one of my videos, maybe it's somebody else's video, and they'll say, here's this viral marketing, or this viral SEO thing, or email marketing, or social media, or carousels, or how to make hooks, whatever it is.
• 30:26
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: People.
• 30:27
  Matt Diamante: watch those they save those like i should do that and then either they don't do that i would say most of the time people won't actually go back and watch their saved things and do the thing and the other thing is they will try the viral hack and it might work temporarily
• 30:41
  Matt Diamante: But then it's gone.
• 30:42
  Matt Diamante: Or it might not work at all, and in most cases, because people don't know what they're doing, it might… it's probably not going to work for them. And if it's, like, a viral, like, here's what's working right now, like, this week, this thing just popped up, that's probably gonna go away in a week or two.
• 30:57
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah.
• 30:58
  Matt Diamante: So you might get a temporary boost and then you're back down. So you're spinning your wheels, spinning your wheels, spinning your wheels. What do you do?
• 31:04
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: The million dollar question, what do you do?
• 31:06
  Matt Diamante: So going back to your question about time, you can do SEO in one to two hours a week yourself. You don't need to hire an agency. You don't need to spend, you know, thousands of dollars every single month to hire somebody to do that for you.
• 31:19
  Matt Diamante: The way to do it yourself, or sorry, before I get into the way to do it yourself.
• 31:25
  Matt Diamante: You need to allocate time.
• 31:28
  Matt Diamante: Right? Because if you're just busy doing the business, unless you're like getting all these referrals and you're busier than you could ever be, I love that for you. Who cares about marketing at that point?
• 31:38
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right?
• 31:39
  Matt Diamante: Then there becomes a point, and I had this with my business like four years ago, where those referrals start drying up. Right? Maybe people are getting they they've sold their business. They, you know, went to a different vendor, so that person's never gonna refer you anymore.
• 31:53
  Matt Diamante: Right? Because the person who bought the business has the other vendor that they want to use, and even… doesn't matter if you're getting results, doesn't matter if you're the best plumber, heating and cooling guy, electrician, whatever, does not matter.
• 32:03
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Everything changes. You have to do something right, you know, nothing's gonna stay the same.
• 32:09
  Matt Diamante: Well, and it's not going to say the same. So if you like, if you are a referral business, things are good right now. This is the best time to be marketing. And I even say this in my book. What's, what's the first thing that gets cut when things are bad marketing?
• 32:21
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah, which is the way.
• 32:23
  Matt Diamante: What's the first thing that gets cut when things are really good? Marketing.
• 32:28
  Matt Diamante: Like, we don't need to do marketing, because…
• 32:31
  Matt Diamante: Look at look at the results, we're doing really great. And then on the other side, you know, you can fill in the blank there.
• 32:36
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: really cyclical style that goes through most businesses and they end up chasing.
• 32:42
  Matt Diamante: I always ask businesses and I ask people, like, not just businesses, but, like, people running the businesses.
• 32:48
  Matt Diamante: Do you want a steady business or do you want a business that's like this, that you're like, we're the king of the world and we're making so much money. And then the next month you're like, I'm broke.
• 32:57
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: you.
• 32:58
  Matt Diamante: Right? Like I need to I need to eat rice and ramen. Right? So what do you want? A stable business that has a good foundation where people are finding you maybe every day, maybe every other day, or maybe multiple times a day, depending on the business. What do you actually want to achieve?
• 33:13
  Matt Diamante: Now, with that being said, it can be a couple hours a week, but I think everybody should spend at least one to two hours per day.
• 33:21
  Matt Diamante: doing something to work on their business. Not just in their business, because when you're working in your business, nobody… you're not… nobody else is knowing about what you're doing, besides the customer you're helping. When you're working on your business, that's creating content on social, that's writing a blog post, that's updating your service page, that's posting on your Google Business profile.
• 33:39
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Making phone calls, all of that stuff. Yeah.
• 33:42
  Matt Diamante: It could be cold calling. I don't like cold calling, but it could be cold calling. And I know Alex Hermosi talks a lot about this is like spend 100 minutes every day doing like an activity that's going to get people to know about your business.
• 33:54
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Exactly. Exactly.
• 33:56
  Matt Diamante: You don't do that.
• 33:58
  Matt Diamante: What are you doing?
• 33:59
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You're you're yeah, that that that's the perfect recipe for that cyclical business of you're the king and you're broke, you're the king and you're broke, you're the king and you're broke, right? 100%.
• 34:08
  Matt Diamante: percent.
• 34:09
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Nobody wants that kind of stress. So I love the idea that you carve out a little bit of time each day to do this, whether you hire somebody that can do it.
• 34:19
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You still need that time to go, hey, how's it going? Are we on track? Should we be doing something different, right? That little managing thing, if you're not going to do it yourself, right? But I think it's still really important that something gets done every day to promote your company.
• 34:35
  Matt Diamante: 100%, oh my god, I was gonna say something, it's…
• 34:41
  Matt Diamante: It's either you have money to solve the problem or you have time to solve the problem. And if you're not doing either of those things, then the problem is just going to be the problem. It's not going to get solved.
• 34:51
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Exactly, it's gonna become a bigger problem, so that's great.
• 34:55
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Alright, so I know we could talk about this for a long time. I really love this conversation, and I think it's not just for
• 35:03
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: specific companies, it's for everybody. If you're a doctor, if you're a… if you're an HVAC company, if you're selling bakery goods, if you're a grocery store, everybody.
• 35:16
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: needs visibility, and it's not just hanging a sign or a shingle out on your door and going, we're open, right? You gotta do something else. So, I think that this is really an important conversation that needs to be revisited on a regular basis in every single company.
• 35:33
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: to see what can I do to do better.
• 35:36
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And because it's an ever-changing
• 35:39
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: market, or piece, or part of the business, you have to stay current, right? You have to do things, and I think that that's why listening to shows like this.
• 35:50
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: helps. Gives you those ideas and sets you back on track again, so I love it.
• 35:54
  Matt Diamante: 100%.
• 35:55
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Where can listeners, yeah, Matt, you've got really good stuff for us. You mentioned that you've got a tool that'll help us with our SEO and marketing. Where can listeners find out about that?
• 36:04
  Matt Diamante: Okay, so I have a tool, and I have a prompt, so you could use whatever, if you want to use ChatGPT, or Claude, or Gemini, whatever you want to do. So, the website is findquestions.com. Now, today we talked a lot about putting your expertise on your website, and this helps you do that. So.
• 36:22
  Matt Diamante: The idea here is your customers are asking questions on Google, on Reddit, on all these different platforms every single day.
• 36:29
  Matt Diamante: And they're looking for answers and I want you to be the answer.
• 36:33
  Matt Diamante: Right? I want them to find your expertise and your experience, which is part of what you're asking, like, how… even if we do all of this, like, what's… you know, what… what…
• 36:41
  Matt Diamante: How do we rank? So…
• 36:43
  Matt Diamante: This is part of the equation, so go to findquestions.com, and then use this prompt, or you could use your own version of this prompt, but
• 36:50
  Matt Diamante: The prompt is, I'm writing a blog post answering this question. So find questions will find you your customers questions. Take one of those questions, say I'm writing a blog post answering this question. Ask me anything you need to know the answer to in order to write a blog post that is truly helpful and unique.
• 37:04
  Matt Diamante: It should include my expertise, experience, case studies, examples, opinions, etc. And make sure to add this. Keep it limited to 10 questions and ask me them one at a time. Otherwise, they're going to ask you 35 questions, 50 questions, and then it's going to be this massive document. It's going to be a mess.
• 37:20
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Fuck. Yeah.
• 37:21
  Matt Diamante: And well, the other thing that I add at the end, too, is I'll be using voice mode to answer them, so you don't even need to type anymore.
• 37:27
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yay!
• 37:28
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right.
• 37:29
  Matt Diamante: And make sure to say, give me time to breathe as well before going to the next question. Otherwise, you're going to get interrupted by AI when you take a pause or a breath. So you can use that. It will write you a blog post.
• 37:41
  Matt Diamante: Go through, check it for factual accuracy, edit it, add in images, graphs, whatever you got, whatever makes sense for that piece of content that's going to be helpful to a real person.
• 37:52
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And.
• 37:52
  Matt Diamante: And you can publish that on your website. Make sure to, in that piece of content, link to what I call a money page. So a money page is a product or service page. It's where somebody is going because they want to give you money.
• 38:05
  Matt Diamante: Also link to 1 to 2 other resources on your site, like other blog posts that might expand a little bit on the topic that you're talking about.
• 38:13
  Matt Diamante: And…
• 38:13
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: That's it. That was good. You know, I don't link in my blog posts. I mean, I do link.
• 38:19
  Matt Diamante: not.
• 38:19
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Other blog posts on that. That was really good and juicy. And I love the fact that, you know.
• 38:25
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: We can make it so much easier now.
• 38:29
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And you just gave us the prompt. All we have to do is findquestions.com, right?
• 38:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Go there, get the prompt, figure out how to do it, and now you have fresh content every week on your site that will get you ranked easier. It gives you fresh stuff to talk about. You can rip that apart and make, you know, five, six social posts on it. You know, it there's so many different things that you can do with content that you build.
• 38:54
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And if it's…
• 38:56
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: discussing the questions and concerns that your ideal audience is asking themselves, you now become the authority. So, I mean, it's just… it just exponentially
• 39:07
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: from one prompt, right, turns into this stuff that is really super helpful. So, that's awesome, thank you.
• 39:14
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Thank you.
• 39:15
  Matt Diamante: Thank you, yeah, that's great. Awesome.
• 39:17
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Okay, cool. Hey, so, thanks so much for tuning in today. I know that you're walking away with a lot of questions, and I think these questions are going to be really
• 39:29
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: perfect for following Matt and watching what he puts out in his content, so that way you can stay on top of SEO and get that visibility that you're so desiring for your company. Every company needs it, so I would encourage you to do that.
• 39:44
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And, well, before we go, why don't you… it's time now to go grab your free Profit Booster Growth Map. In just a couple of minutes, you'll see exactly where the best opportunities are to grow your revenue and improve your profit. You can get yours at ProfitBooster.biz, and remember, there's no sales call required.
• 40:02
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And if this episode gave you value, be sure to subscribe and share it with another business owner who needs to hear it. I'll see you on next week's show with more strategies to help you grow smarter and profit stronger. So until then, make your plans and profit with them. Thanks so much, Matt.
• 40:19
  Matt Diamante: Thank you for having me. This was so fun.
• 40:22
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Oh, I loved it. I loved it. It was good. Good stuff.