HOW AI SEARCH IS RESHAPING SMALL BUSINESS MARKETING WITH PETE KLEINJAN

Ignite Your Small Business with Improved AI Search Visibility

AI search is opening new doors for small businesses, and this episode with Pete Kleinjan is your guide to capturing local search success! Embrace AI search to position your brand as a trusted choice in Google search and beyond, connecting with customers seeking your services. Build a robust digital presence and engaging social posts to shine in AI-driven local search. Stay ahead by exploring AI tools like ChatGPT to understand consumer queries, fostering business visibility. From roofers to bookkeepers, small businesses can leverage AI search to drive growth and secure a competitive edge. Start now to claim your digital real estate and thrive in the AI search era!

EPISODE NOTES & RESOURCES:

• Free SEO Audit Tool: Evaluate your website’s SEO performance with our free tool
• Tiger29
• ChatGPT

Episode Transcript – How AI Search Is Reshaping Small Business Marketing with Pete Kleinjan

Jesse Dolan (00:19)

Welcome back everyone to Luminate Local. We’re going to help you stay ahead of the curve in the ever-changing world of digital marketing. Today we’re talking about something that’s moving fast. AI isn’t just about streamlining your operations anymore. It’s becoming the new sales and marketing channel where you need to get found, gobble up that digital real estate that is available, and stay ahead to gain or keep your competitive edge.Today, my guest is Pete Kleinjan, founder and owner of Tiger29. Pete’s an experienced SEO and marketing expert who has been helping businesses navigate general digital visibility for years. Obviously, he’s getting into AI search where this is converging and reshaping the way businesses get found online. Pete, welcome to the show. Glad to have you.I’m excited to have you.

Pete Kleinjan (01:05)

Hey Jesse, glad to be here.

Jesse Dolan (01:10)

I’m excited to have you on here today because this topic is something that people are starting to talk more about, which is how AI search is creating basically a whole new digital area, new digital real estate for businesses to capture and stake their claim in. I’d like to start with that landscape. Most people have been thinking about AI as an operational tool—how can we use it to do things, replace human beings, replace labor, improve processes, save time to write content, things like that.We’re going to get into some of that a little bit. I’ve got some great questions for you that will hopefully unlock some secrets or teach some people some things. But let’s start with you. You’ve seen a shift into something bigger right now. Can you talk about how AI is starting to reshape the way that people search and discover businesses, maybe how that compares to traditional Google search, and just set the stage for everybody there and what we’re seeing happening more recently?

Pete Kleinjan (02:10)

It’s something that’s been tickling at the back of my mind since October of 2022 when ChatGPT really hit the scene and started making waves with people. Here’s this thing—it’s a tool. I’ve always had this opinion that a tool is a tool. What you do with it is what makes it useful or not. Everybody for the last two, three years has been figuring out how to use this tool inside their business to create more efficiency, improve processes, save money, reduce staff, whatever.I’ve been watching closely to see if this tool would become a potential marketing channel for acquiring new customers. People have been talking about it kind of throughout, like, “Hey, this is coming. It’s going to be a thing. Watch out. AI search is going to be a thing.” But beyond anecdotal evidence—somebody posts a screenshot on social media that says, “I just had a customer reach out to me and they said they found me on ChatGPT”—that’s great. Who wouldn’t take that? But it’s anecdotal. Can you repeat that process? Can you measure that process?That’s what I’ve been watching for. We’ve been doing that with our clients in our reporting, watching: Is traffic coming in from AI? Are you getting leads from AI? Are there signs coming through your site that indicate you’re getting new customers from AI? In the last couple of months, we’ve seen that heat up a little bit. It’s still nowhere near traditional Google search. But it’s starting to build a little bit, and it’s something that small business owners should probably start to pay attention to.More and more regular consumers are starting to use these tools in their everyday lives. A part of that is they’re going to start looking for service providers. The big change that I’m seeing is that when people use traditional Google search, they might go to Google and search for “DUI lawyer, Sioux Falls.” When they do that, they get a list and narrow down their options of who might be a good lawyer. They look at reviews, that kind of stuff.When somebody’s interacting with ChatGPT or Gemini, what they’re doing is saying, “Hey, I just got my second DUI. I live in South Dakota. My first one was in Tennessee. What do I need to know?” The AI is going to come back with some stuff, and then they’re going to ask it more questions. Then they’re going to say, “Who’s somebody I should talk to in my area about this?” The AI is going to pre-qualify all that stuff that people used to do on a search result page.

Jesse Dolan (04:33)

All right.

Pete Kleinjan (05:00)

They’re going to click on this website, think it’s a good-looking site, trust these people, make an appointment. They go to the next one, make an appointment with that guy, and then choose one based on how they feel after meeting with them. A lot of that pre-qualification is going to happen on the AI platform, where by the time a customer reaches out to you, they’re going to be teed up. They’re going to feel like they have all the information they need to make a decision.If you’re that DUI lawyer, you just try not to screw up in that initial meeting, and you probably have yourself a customer. It’s really shortening the sales funnel. It’s not huge volume yet, but it’s shortening that sales funnel. It’s much easier to close on those service opportunities for local businesses when those customers come to you through AI.It’s something that’s emerging, and I think small business owners need to be aware of it. Just like everything else—whether it was Google ads, Facebook ads, Zillow ads—if you can be that small business early adopter, you’re going to get the cheapest leads at the start. When everybody else floods in, it’s going to get more expensive, even on the organic side of search when it comes to AI.

Jesse Dolan (06:01)

You’re pointing out some pretty interesting nuances. Let’s think about it. As digital marketers, we have made a career in getting people found in Google. Inversely, I feel like I’m a pretty good Googler. If I’m trying to search for something or find something, I’m sure you’ve had experience with friends, family, where somebody is trying to look something up, and you’re like, “No, no, type in this, you’re going to get your results. Trust me, I know what I’m doing here on the reverse end of this.”

Pete Kleinjan (06:31)

Yeah, totally.

Jesse Dolan (06:57)

I think we can pick up on how people search in ChatGPT or Gemini or any AI tool. They search differently than they search in Google because, as you’re pointing out, if somebody is doing a Google search, you’re kind of starting your research process, looking for entrances to businesses. Whereas when somebody is searching in ChatGPT, it’s aiding in that. It’s doing some of the research, that pre-qualification. The search itself that the human is doing, their intentions, and what they’re doing on the other end of the keyboard are different than just going to Google.The results are going to be different once they do knock on your door, call you, or email you as a business owner and a marketer. You’re hitting it right on the head: it’s a much more qualified lead. It’s try not to screw it up when they come to you through that channel because they’re so much more educated and further downstream, whether they’ve done it themselves or ChatGPT, for example, has done it for them.

Pete Kleinjan (07:40)

Yeah. I think too, as SEOs or digital marketers, we have this keyword mentality. We know that X percentage of people looking for a DUI lawyer are going to go to the search engine and search “DUI lawyer near me” or whatever. With AI, my opinion is that there is going to be an infinite number of things that people put into the search box and an infinite number of outputs that they get back.How do you measure that? The rank tracking that we’ve traditionally done, I think, is going to be thrown out the window. You’re going to have to figure out better ways of understanding the funnel that people are moving down when they come to your site. What are they doing? How can you do the lead attribution coming from this AI stuff? That’s a big mystery right now. All the big companies—SEMrush, Ahrefs—are trying, but I’m not super excited about what I’m seeing yet.That doesn’t mean it’s in its final form—they’re learning and figuring it out too, just like we are. But it’s really an opportunity right now for small businesses or all businesses. Yes, use AI as a tool inside your business, but also think about it as an emerging marketing channel where you can reach new customers.

Jesse Dolan (09:03)

To that regard, a thought that’s been bouncing around in my head, Pete, is talking about attribution. If I compare it to Google Search Console, just for a different analytics approach, we have the impressions and the clicks. I’m really curious if somebody can figure out on the AI side how to measure those impressions.

Pete Kleinjan (09:19)

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Dolan (09:26)

You’re not getting as many clicks. People are just maybe reading some of this, not even visiting your website. They’re just reading the overviews or the snippets that come out, which is still great for your brand and your products and services if you’re the one being featured, but it’s completely invisible to you. If you had a hundred people a day seeing you in AI search results, like, “Here are some great options, and here’s what they say,” if they never click, they may have consumed all the information you had on your website that you wanted to put in front of them, but they never visited your website.

Pete Kleinjan (09:51)

Right.

Jesse Dolan (09:54)

I think, as you’re saying, things are going to change quite a bit from an analytics standpoint. I feel like that’s something we’re going to look at more—not the attribution of the actual click, but how many impressions, how much visibility, how much advertising will. That’s going to be so hard to capture.

Pete Kleinjan (10:07)

Almost like a share of voice thing. How does my voice compare in the market to others? I think too, you mentioned Google Search Console, and we actually told the team—we had a conversation about it on Monday—that we should keep an eye on Google Search Console. I believe in the next 30 to 90 days, we are going to see information in Search Console about AI visibility.In the same way that we have the performance tab or section in Google Search Console where you can see those impressions and clicks, we also have the Google Discover section in there, which is not Google search, but it shows you what your visibility is on Google Discover and the click-throughs. I think we’re going to see AI information in Google Search Console soon.

Jesse Dolan (11:01)

That’s a little bit of marketing nerd speak there, but for business owners and marketing managers listening, this can probably feel a little overwhelming. A lot of change happening, a lot of change happening fast.

Pete Kleinjan (11:06)

Hahaha!

Jesse Dolan (11:26)

Whether it be the visibility or how to use this stuff for operations, a lot of things are happening quickly with AI. It can feel like a lot of anxiety if you’re listening or watching this. There’s so many things I’ve got to take advantage of or try to implement here. What is some advice? What do you say to the business owners who are feeling anxious, trying to get ahead? If this is real estate, that means it’s not finite. There are people that are going to get in there and people that will be left behind, which could cause some anxiety, some scary thoughts. What would you say to the entrepreneurs and managers right now having that feeling and looking at this?

Pete Kleinjan (11:57)

I’d say I have the same feeling in my business, and it happens probably once every couple of weeks or once a month where we’re working on something with AI, and we think we really got something, and then we come across a podcast or a social media post or something where we’re like, “My gosh, these people are 10 miles further down the road than we are with this. What are we doing?”The anxiety is definitely there. What we’re doing is just using it and doing the things that we need to do inside the business to make ours more effective as a tool. We’re using it as much as we can. One of the things that we keep top of mind is we can’t just use AI operationally as an easy button. People talk about a human in the loop, like, “Hey, create a blog post for me.” But then you want a human to read that blog post too.Especially for small business owners, marketing managers, it’s almost more like human along for the ride when you start. You’re going back and forth in that chat window, starting to understand, “When I put this in, this is what I get back out. If I change this word, I like the output better.” That’s what a lot of us deeper into AI were doing back in December of 2022: “Hey, how does this thing work? How can I manipulate or influence this input-output to get what I want?”Those marketing managers, those business owners, they know how their business works. It’s really just about, “All right, how do we use this new tool inside what’s already working to make it better?” It’s not unlike when email came out with businesses. There were early adopters, late adopters, and the glut of people in the middle. It wasn’t like they said, “We’re going to completely change how we communicate with customers. We’ve got to change the words we’re using.” It was just a new tool and a more efficient way to communicate both inside and outside your organization.Everybody probably implemented it a little bit differently in those early days. How long did it take Google to come out with Workspace and have Gmail for a business? We are far from the final form of all this stuff and how it’s going to work. If you can get in there and even just play around with it, ask it what it knows about your business, what’s the good, the bad, the ugly about your business, and what does AI know about it? You’ll start to get ideas about how you can use it inside your business for operations.Even HR stuff—I don’t know anything about HR, and I don’t want to, but if I have an issue with one of our team members, I can go to AI and say, “Hey, this is what happened. Here’s what I was going to say.” The AI says, “Nope, you should say this and this instead. You’re going to get a better outcome with that person.” If somebody’s showing up late for work or not putting in their timesheet correctly, that’s a difficult conversation to have.

Jesse Dolan (15:08)

Yeah.

Pete Kleinjan (15:10)

Especially if you’re not accustomed to it, you’ve got a small team, and everybody’s tight. AI can help even with that little stuff, like, “Hey, how do I have this conversation?” You could ask it, “Hey, my kid isn’t putting their shoes away. What can I do?” It’ll come up with some ideas for you. You could spend two hours sitting on the couch arguing with your wife, looking at blog posts about what to do, or you can just ask AI, and it gives you some ideas. Then ask it for clarification.

Jesse Dolan (15:23)

Right?

Pete Kleinjan (15:38)

“No, I didn’t like that. What else you got for me?” If you start using it, it becomes pretty clear how it can be helpful in a lot of different ways. It’s just a matter of looking for more ways to use it. You don’t have to be a coder and worry about make operations and connecting it to Google Sheets and all these crazy things that people are doing with it. Just use it a little bit, and you’ll start to see the value of it. It’s free—go to chatgpt.com, use it for free.

Jesse Dolan (16:07)

Like you’re saying, you can really automate. You put that phrase, a human in the loop. That’s something I try to impart on a lot of people: yes, there are tools, people, systems, courses where you can completely automate things and have AI replace a human being fully, from a decision-making process, quality control, everything else. I think we’re a little early for that kind of stuff yet. That human in the loop, using AI as a sounding board, as a research function—if we think about a traditional office, it’s like having an assistant right next door to you that you can go to for anything.It’s an assistant, not your boss, not your mentor, but somebody who is your equal or lesser—not to minimize or put somebody in a box—but if you treat it like that, like, “Hey, it’s really good at basically any question or anything I want to know,” but you’re still in control. You make the final call, push the final buttons. If you position it as that and not something that’s going to do everything for you, it’s more approachable. You’re still there to make that final call. You’ll learn a ton. Start getting in there, like you’re saying, and just using it. You’re really going to see what it can do.

Pete Kleinjan (17:22)

Yep. It’s funny too. We run in circles of people who are a little more advanced with AI. We do some things on social media, as we were talking about earlier before the call. I’ve had people say to me, “Hey, how much AI do you have in this? This post sounds AI-generated.” I’m like, “That one you’re talking about actually wasn’t. That was one we did manually.”Everybody’s in this thing of, “I can spot AI. I know when it’s AI or when it’s not.” So I’m not going to use it. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about getting better. SEO has been in my mind for as long as I’ve been doing it: it’s not about perfection, it’s not about this perfect outcome that you’re looking for. It’s about, “How can I use this tool to make me better? How can I use this tool to improve the way that I’m talking to my team or to my customers? How can I use it to generate more prospects for my business?”It doesn’t mean you get all the prospects from AI just because you’re on top of it, but it’s about getting better.

Jesse Dolan (18:43)

You’re evolving, right? You’re riding the wave. There’s no finite end to this. You can’t be like, “I’m going to catch up on AI and use it how everybody else is.” Every day that’s changing. So just get started, get in there. Shifting gears slightly, to hone in on the AI here. You’ve been working with businesses for years—I don’t want to say decades because I don’t want to age you too much, we’ll just say for a number of years—in SEO and digital visibility in general.

Pete Kleinjan (19:36)

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Dolan (19:36)

How are you advising your clients without giving away your secret sauce, but how are you advising them today to start thinking differently, particularly about AI-driven search, and being found in that, getting that visibility, maybe getting that click? What are you saying to people right now to get them going in this?

Pete Kleinjan (19:52)

We’re actually in the process of creating what we’re calling an AI optimization workbook for small businesses, which is basically, “Here’s a series of half a dozen questions. Go to chatgpt.com, put in the first question, check out the response, and then write down, ‘Here’s the things that it said that I like, here’s the things that it said that I didn’t like, and here’s some things that we’re missing.'”You start to think about it like if you got feedback from a business partner or a friend, like, “This is something you should be doing in your business.” You look at it and go, “I liked that part of what he said. I didn’t like that part of what he said. I’m not quite sure about that part.” Then you have an idea of how you go back and influence people to think differently or think the way you want them to think.That’s a big one: just start to use these tools—ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, whatever. Imagine that you’re a consumer. Next time you need to call the plumber or the HVAC guy, go in there and pretend like the AI is that HVAC guy and be like, “Hey, I noticed it’s starting to get hot outside. Last night when I went to bed, it was 78 degrees in the house, and when I woke up in the morning, it was 64. What are some issues? Do I need to call the HVAC company?”It’ll tell you, “It’s probably your thermostat, check the schedule, check the settings, that kind of stuff. If it’s not that, you can check this and that. If it’s not that, you probably need to have a service professional come in.” You start to get in the same headspace as people who are using it. Once you’re there, you can start to think about how you influence those answers.Where did it come up with that answer when I asked it about my bookkeeping service? It’s on our about page. I haven’t updated that about page in 17 years. Maybe I should go back in there and update that with our current information. We don’t have two employees; we have 35 employees. That might be an important piece of information for somebody looking for a bookkeeper. They want to know they have a team that can help them with a lot of problems.

Jesse Dolan (21:45)

Okay.

Pete Kleinjan (22:00)

If you’ve got bad information going into the AI systems because of your website or listings or wherever they’re getting that data, you can learn where it’s getting that data based on the response. Then you go out and change it so that it’s more accurate. In the future, people are going to get better information and be more likely to choose you. If you give that good information, not only are you going to attract the right kinds of customers and prospects because they get who you are, but you’re also going to repel the bad ones.If you’ve got somebody looking for, “Hey, who’s the cheapest bookkeeper in my area?” that’s a customer that a lot of bookkeepers don’t want to talk to. If you’re on your website and you have a pricing page or an about us page and you are clear about who you are and who you serve, it’s going to weed out a lot of the people who are time-wasting prospects for you too.

Jesse Dolan (22:51)

That’s back to the better-qualified leads and prospects coming to you through AI-driven search results, a more educated prospect base and invasive leads. I like the way you frame that up too, because we always assume we want to position ourselves to be found, and then you’re going to have that attrition, a certain amount of closings. But this is able to make that first interaction that much better by weeding out the ones you don’t want and catering to the ones that you really have the service for.If it’s HVAC, for somebody commercial versus residential, their website and their persona are going to put all that forward, and you’re not going to get the wrong people visiting or calling out to you. It really does allow you to better align. You were talking about working with your clients, recommending that they get to know this, explore this, learn it, use it.

Pete Kleinjan (23:31)

Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (23:46)

Are you wanting them to do some research on their own brands and entities to see how they’re represented as well? Then go back and give you some feedback to maybe implement as the SEO and marketing team? How’s that interaction going? Can you spend a few minutes breaking that down and what things you’re looking for there?

Pete Kleinjan (24:14)

We’re really in the early stages of this as a marketing tool where there are so many unknowns, whether it’s, are the clicks happening? Are they being attributed properly in analytics? There’s so many unknowns that it’s really hard to nail some of that stuff down. What we’re looking for is to present yourself in an authentic way online.You could even have an about page or a “who we serve” page, which a lot of small businesses have. “These are the companies we work with: bookkeepers, income tax preparers. We don’t work with veterinarians.” You’ve got to talk online like you talk in the real world. You go to a Chamber of Commerce mixer and you’re having a conversation in the corner over a beer with somebody, and pretty quickly they get an idea of whether or not you can help them.We have these conversations in SEO all the time. You have a talk with somebody, and you say, “Hey, I do SEO.” They go, “My gosh, I’m so glad I met you. I’ve been looking for someone to do SEO for years. I have an e-commerce company.” You go, “Wait a minute. We don’t do e-commerce SEO.” They’re pretty quickly like, “Okay, you’re not for me then.”If you have a bookkeeping company and you work with a lot of different people but you don’t work with owner-operator businesses, only companies that have employees, the AI is sorting out all that stuff for you before that person ever calls. If you want to do those brand audits, go to ChatGPT and say, “Hey, tell me about Tiger29 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.” That’s my company. See what it says.If there’s good information in there, get an understanding of where that information is coming from. If there’s bad information, try to get an understanding of where that information is coming from and then go change it, which is similar to what we’ve done in SEO for a long time. Why isn’t this working? You’ve got a different phone number on your Google Business Profile than you have on your website. That could be a problem. Let’s change it and see what happens. Things got better.The danger with this AI stuff is people think it’s an easy button. It’s just another tool that you can use to get a better understanding, to create better online influence with people. The way to do it is just get started. We’ve built some tools in-house here. We think they’re really cool to try to track these things for people and to see, “Here’s what we’re seeing when we asked ChatGPT about your company. Here’s what it was two weeks ago. Here’s what it is today. We think we’re making progress on this front.”It used to say that you did X, Y, Z. You let us know that you don’t do Z like all the other competitors in the area. It came from an old page on our website that we forgot about. Let’s get that off of there. The AI learns and realizes, “They don’t do service Z anymore.” We’re not going to serve them up for people looking for that.I’m kind of skeptical of people who stand up at this point and say, “I have the answers to AI optimization.” Maybe, but we’ve seen that in SEO before too, where people say, “I’ve got this incredible tool or this amazing tactic or strategy, and you’ll be number one in 30 days.” Maybe. But I’m skeptical. It’s really a figure-it-out stage right now for a lot of people.

Jesse Dolan (28:14)

I think we’ve both done SEO long enough to see that maybe there can be some software products, some SaaS, some trickery, some services people provide to quickly get you some SEO rankings compared to how I would do it, maybe fundamentally building the business entity. But we’ve seen those come and go, whether it be Google algorithm changes or just market stuff.

Pete Kleinjan (29:00)
Right.

Jesse Dolan (29:20)

Those tricks, those guaranteed to get you a blank by X days, they can work, but then they don’t work too, eventually. Doing it the right way, maybe the old marathon versus a sprint analogy, really does fit. It seems more future-proof, more stable over time, because at the end of the day, Google has always wanted the better businesses, the more legit businesses to be presented. As SEOs, we’ve worked with keywords and content to jockey those rankings and help people.Now we translate that over to AI, and I think you’re saying the same stuff here to paraphrase, but doing things the right way to have a great business is the number one. You just have to explain yourself, be clear in what you do, what you don’t do. In the firms I’ve been engaged with, we’ve always tried to pull this out of our clients: Who’s your avatar? Who do you serve? What are you good at? What are you bad at?It’s always like, “Look, I just want to rank for these five keywords. Let’s quit with all the esoteric philosophical stuff. I’m not wanting a mission statement from you. I just want to be ranked number one for blank near me.” With AI, the optimization isn’t just going to be keyword-based. It really will be more knowledge-based. Have a good about us page. Have a good history page. What are these things that you’re saying when you’re sitting down in front of somebody with a cup of coffee?

Pete Kleinjan (29:52)

Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (30:14)

The questions they’re going to be asking need to be readily available because when AI does a search for you or does some research for you as a user, you may not be asking all those things, but it knows those are the things it’s looking for. If it’s comparing Jesse versus Pete, it’s like, “Look, Pete’s been around for a while. Look at his great about us page. Look at all the information about his company. I trust Pete more than Jesse.” So it’s going to tell this person about Pete for the AI result.

Pete Kleinjan (30:33)

Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (30:41)
Optimization is going to change, but it’s still optimization. It’s the small levers, the small buttons. The definition of optimization doesn’t mean easy and quick. It’s granular, it’s nuanced. On top of that, all this stuff is changing daily. Whether you use Grok, Open AI, there are different partners, they have different specialties, they’re all advancing at different paces.I agree with you. I don’t believe the person that stands up championing that they have the recipe or some software tool: “Don’t touch it. We’ve got your SEO and AI optimization. You don’t even have to lift a finger anymore.” I feel like that’s very short-sighted if it’s even plausible.

Pete Kleinjan (31:02)

Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (31:38)

What we need to be working with clients on for AI visibility going forward is super complex. But at the end of the day, it’s back to what I say when people ask for reviews, Pete: if you want five-star reviews, you’ve got to be a five-star business. Same thing here. If you want AI to say, “That’s the business I recommend,” you need to be recommendable in all these different ways.

Pete Kleinjan (31:50)

Yeah, 100%.

Jesse Dolan (32:03)

Keeping going here to help everybody out. We’re talking a lot about AI visibility, positioning your business. A couple of questions for you here, more on the operational side and within marketing, outside of being found and getting leads. Are there any tips or tricks or use cases that you have experienced with AI on how people listening can help improve their content, their marketing operations, still in the marketing space? You were talking about HR earlier. Any tips for anybody out there to start using AI for their business in that way?

Pete Kleinjan (32:37)

Here’s a story, Jesse, that literally just happened last week. I have an old friend who’s really active in the financial advisor space. She is doing some really cool things with teaching financial advisors how to speak to their clients and how to serve those clients better, but also increase their sales. I’ve been seeing her stuff on social media, and she’s in the same town as me.I said, “Hey, I’d love to go to lunch with you and hear more about what you’re doing. I think it might relate to my SEO agency and how we talk to customers. We want to do a good job for them and increase revenue.” She’s like, “Yeah, let’s go to lunch.” Of course, my life’s busy, and literally 10 minutes before our lunch, I was like, “Crap, I’m not well-versed enough in what she’s doing to have a good lunch meeting and have a good outcome for both of us.”I went to ChatGPT and said, “Hey, tell me about Christina who’s doing this stuff and what has she been talking about?” It said, “There’s actually three people with that name in your town. Which one are you talking about?” I said, “This one right here.” It said, “Here’s her background. Here’s what she’s working on, who she works for, all that stuff.” Then I said, “I want to know specifically about her work with this.” It spit out three, four paragraphs about that.Being a 45-year-old guy that grew up before email, I took a Post-it note and wrote down a couple of quick notes: “This is what it’s actually called.” I went downstairs—the lunch meeting was in my office building at a restaurant downstairs—and we had a fantastic meeting. We’re going to meet again and talk more about this stuff. That’s a win right there.I could have spent a half hour, 45 minutes, an hour trying to find old social media posts, looking at her profile page on her employer’s site, trying to piece all these things together. Instead, I was able to do it in 10 minutes when I was short on time right before a meeting and was able to have the outcome that I wanted. Especially for small businesses, Jesse, they don’t have to do these crazy automations.There’s just little ways if you start to use it and think, “Maybe I’ll go ask that question to ChatGPT instead of searching for Christina on Google.” I got a much better, much faster, great outcome and experience from it. That’s not to say that it’s for everything—Google has AI overviews and AI mode now—but that’s a real-world example right there of AI saving my butt and making me look good in a real-life meeting with somebody that I respect and wanted to look good for. It was great.

Jesse Dolan (35:52)

I think back to my example earlier, Pete, like having your assistant in the office next door. That’s what you did. You said, “I’m running late. I’ve got 10 minutes. Hey, can you do some research real quick? I’ve got to talk to her. I don’t remember a couple of things. Can you just remind me? I don’t need you to give me the exact questions. I’m not going to be a drone in the meeting. But can you give me a couple of quick snippets to refresh me on those topics before I run out the door?” And boom, you got that.

Pete Kleinjan (36:01)

Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (36:19)

It would have taken you much longer than that. I think it’s a great example. We talked about how AI is turning into a search engine on its own. Do you have any other recommendations, advice, anything else we didn’t touch on for how businesses can make sure they show up in AI, not just in traditional Google search?

Pete Kleinjan (36:43)

What we’re seeing, Jesse, is that a lot of the things you do for search engine optimization actually translate really well for better AI, answer engine optimization, whatever you want to call it. I think the reason is Google Search has been about gathering data and understanding that data algorithmically to create a good search engine result page, good results that people can use.AI is about gathering data, and they don’t use an algorithm, they use machine learning, passing that data through and spitting it back to people based on what it found. Things like the NAP information—name, address, phone number, website—is that stuff consistent across the internet? It matters for SEO, I believe, and it matters for AI. Why wouldn’t it?If you told 10 people, “Here’s my address,” and then told 10 other people a different address, that’s going to cause problems for you in the real world when you have your birthday party—half the people are going to show up to the wrong place. AI is going to look at it the same way. If I recommend Jesse’s jewelry store to somebody, where do I send them? Which address is the right address? I’m not going to recommend Jesse. I’m going to recommend his competitor because I know for sure where they’re located.The same way with the website, this idea that content is king, I think that’s still going to remain true in a lot of ways. You can create content a lot easier now with AI, but even the AI stuff that people create, it’s not just about volume. It’s about quality and telling your story in your voice, authentically, who you are, what you do, where you do it, when are you open, how many reviews you’ve got, how do people contact you? All these things that people are curious about in real life when they get to know you or your business.They don’t even realize they’re curious about it—it just becomes a part of our brain. Same thing with AI. You just tell your story. We do search engine optimization and track this stuff for our own company too. We start asking, “Hey, who’s a good resource for SEO for small business in my area?” We’re consistently coming out. I went in and said, “Hey, I’m a small business owner, just started a roofing company. What do I need to know about marketing?”SEO was one of the things on there. I said, “SEO sounds interesting and like a great way to get new customers. I have a roofing company who’s really good at roofing SEO.” It pulled up information from our social media posts and results that we had gotten for roofing companies and said, “This Tiger29 might be a good one. Here’s why: they increased phone calls 120% year over year for a local roofer.” You think if that’s a customer, they’re going to reach out to me?

Jesse Dolan (40:06)

Right.

Pete Kleinjan (40:07)

It’s really just about telling our story and telling it everywhere that we can and hoping that the AI is going to pick up on it. We didn’t create those posts with the intention that this is going to get us better visibility on AI. They were created with the intention of communicating with people on social media. AI gobbled up that data and is now part of its training data and information that it’s given back to people.I still go back to talking about authority, relevance, and trust. The technical stuff in SEO is EEAT—expertise, experience, authority, and trust. But really, how do you demonstrate that you’re a good result? In SEO, for a long time, people have had this mentality of, “How do I trick Google? How do I manipulate Google into showing me on search?”

Jesse Dolan (40:57)

Right.

Pete Kleinjan (41:01)

That’s like saying, “How do I trick this girl into marrying me? How do I manipulate this person into?” That’s not going to be a long-term thing. I think that’s the same with AI. You might be able to trick AI for a little while, but just like the algorithm updates come along and smack you on the side of the head when you trick Google, it’s going to happen with AI. Eventually, it’s going to figure out, “Hey, these people are fake. It’s inauthentic. It’s not a good user experience.”You’re going to lose. The best thing to do is be a good business, take care of your customers, and spread the word everywhere that you can on the internet about what you’re doing. The AI is going to reward you for it. It’s pretty generic and vague—it’s not a great answer. We love to be able to say your position went from number 15 to number three, and aren’t we smart and great. I don’t know that we’re going to get there with AI where we say, “Hey, your visibility used to be here, and now it’s there.”It’s got to be a much more in-depth thing: “Hey, you used to have two employees. We started working with you, and today you have 18. Where’s that growth coming from? Let’s see if we can identify the different marketing channels that are being effective for you.” Walk beside that business owner as a marketing expert and not just as an SEO technician. At the end of the day, they’re going to look at a lot of the same stuff and maybe some new stuff too.If you can do the SEO stuff, you’re going to be ahead of the competitors that aren’t doing the SEO stuff when it comes to AI.

Jesse Dolan (42:39)

I think it’s really smart. Your example of the social media posts—we’ve known for the last couple of years, even before AI, before ChatGPT made the big waves, that Google was paying attention to our social profiles as brands, as entities.

Pete Kleinjan (43:06)

Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (43:09)

Fast forward to today, like you’re saying, they are not only aware that you are active, that your profile exists, but pulling out the verbiage and the text off a specific post that you had posted, and using that through the AI as one of the decision points it’s making or points of recommendation, trust, whatever. I think it’s really smart for us as not even calling ourselves SEOs anymore, but general marketers to help clients understand: if you make a piece of content or have a little win or just want to mention a thing to somebody, that goes everywhere.If you’re on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, your website, a blog, you leverage that, use the right words, to our SEO roots, I think the wordsmithing and the intent—there’s some nuance there on what words to choose and why—is going to be important. It’ll be applying this to marketing in general, not just the blinders on the website, which is traditionally how people view this stuff.

Pete Kleinjan (44:34)

Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (44:35)

That’s going to be fragmented, and you’re not going to know exactly which thing from where. That point on the social media post pulling in speaks volumes because you craft that, it might not have been an exact blog post that would have been on the website, just a quick little win. If you’re evaluating who to choose and who to use, just like the AI results did there for you in your example, that makes total sense. Very logical, very much a human decision-making process, what I would want.

Pete Kleinjan (44:43)

If you were that human being, a roofer, a small business owner, and you just stumbled across that social media post, you might take action off of that. It’s an important piece of information for what you’re looking to do and understand. I think too, you mentioned brand earlier, and I don’t know, it’s kind of touchy-feely, but I think our job is going to change from tactician to more of a digital brand champion.We’re going to champion, help you champion your brand online so that the AI understands that you’re a good result for people or when you’re not a good result for people. It’s almost like a lot of companies have a business development person, and you’re like, “Hey, what do you do?” “I go to networking events and Chamber of Commerce mixers and lunches. I have a lot of lunches with people.” We’re that person online.Make sure you’re going to the networking spots and having the right conversations, and you’re going to attract those people. Big businesses have known that for years: you put people out in the community and have them champion what you’re doing, and you’re going to attract more of the right kinds of clients and customers.

Jesse Dolan (46:08)

Same thing here, mirrored into the digital world. I like the way you’re framing that up. Are you seeing people change how they search, the way they phrase questions in the AI compared to Google? We talked about it earlier in the nuance of looking for “blank near me” versus maybe explaining my problem in there more. I know we don’t have a ton of data to show us all these queries from AI and how we got found, but anything you can expand on there for any esoteric feedback or straight logical documented feedback that you’re getting in that respect?

Pete Kleinjan (46:57)

It’s probably speculative, but the way people search has been changing since the Yellow Pages, the old books where you looked up alphabetically. When we grew up, when we went to school, we had the Dewey Decimal System, where you started broad and narrowed it down. If I want to look for a Corvette, I’m going to type in “Chevrolet, Corvette, 1987, red.” You went from big to small—what are you actually looking for?When Google search came out and people got more accustomed to searching on Google, they just type in what they want: “1987 red Corvette.” They want a good answer out of that. Search engines got pretty good at that too. People have been talking about voice search for 10 years or more. Mobile is another good example—mobile phones came out, it changed how people interact. It didn’t necessarily change the outcomes.With AI, I don’t know if you see kids interacting with AI, like my kids talk to Siri. They don’t sit there with their thumbs and type out what they want to know from Siri. They just talk to it. Just like we were talking before about that roofer that goes to ChatGPT or an AI and says, “Hey, I started a small business. What do I need to know about marketing?” It’s going to be more conversational.It’s going to be more like, “I’m having a conversation with this platform, and I want to have a good outcome or understand what to do next when I’m done with this conversation.” It’s not going to be a search query. It’s going to be an interaction, whether it’s happening on voice or typing it out, it’s going to be more of a back and forth.I also think—and I’ve tried to do this a little bit, maybe I’m just too old to do it well—I would love to go to Gemini and say, “Hey Gemini, I like the South Dakota State University Jackrabbits. Put every SDSU home basketball game on my Google calendar for me.” I got it kind of working a little bit, but it wasn’t good enough that I knew I was going to have every one on my calendar. I went back and did it manually myself anyway.That kind of stuff—it’s going to get better and better. Gemini will be able to do that if it can’t already. I haven’t tried it for a while. It’s going to become a better part of your life. I think Elon Musk said something about, “We’re already like cyborgs, human-machine hybrids.” We’ve got these phones attached to us all day, every day. We’re already cyborgs; we just don’t have a very good interface. When you can start chatting with something and getting that feedback, that’s the better interface. There’s a lot of things changing, and I think the way people search is definitely going to be one of them.

Jesse Dolan (49:56)

As you’re saying that, it’s making me think: are there, in your experience yet, or if you just want to give opinion and project and speculate, different types of content that we produce as marketers? Whether it be a quick social media post, a long-form blog post, service and product pages, location pages, about me pages—do you feel, or what have you seen for the strategy on that content for being more effective in building out a presence for AI search?

Pete Kleinjan (51:12)

I think it’s worth mentioning that even in traditional search engine optimization, we don’t do e-commerce SEO, affiliate SEO, or informational-based SEO. Those industries have really gotten hit hard with changes in the search result pages, as well as AI. It’s been tough in those industries. We do a lot of local SEO with brick-and-mortar service-based businesses.The first thing I would say is you’ve got to understand the kind of business that you have and how you attract customers. That has to be a piece of how you create your content. If you’re an informational-based website and you want to get into AI overviews, when somebody says, “How do I build a deck?” that’s very different from a local hardware store that sells lumber. The final destination for that customer is different, and your content on your website should be based on that as well.For small businesses, local businesses, what we talk about is, first of all, you have to have a foundation. Does your website actually talk about all your services? If you’re an auto repair shop, do you have a transmission repair page, or do you just have one services page that talks about everything that you do? Let’s build out your website so that it actually talks about everything that you’re doing. That’s phase one.Before I would go onto blog posts, I would encourage small businesses to establish a real social media presence and start posting on social media, which is a challenge. I have the same challenge. I don’t like social media, particularly myself. I don’t like to be on a camera. I’m not going to walk down the sidewalk with a selfie stick talking about SEO.

Jesse Dolan (53:11)

You…

Pete Kleinjan (53:36)

Although you might see that someday on my social media channels now that we’re doing more. I would go there next: establish a social media toehold and get consistent about posting on social media and hire an agency to do that for you if you can’t do it yourself. In those social media posts, you want to talk about your products and services. Don’t talk about the company picnic. You can talk about the company picnic, but it’s not fun and games when you’re on social media as a business. It should be about how you’re speaking to customers on this channel and what AI is learning from these posts.Develop a cadence for that kind of content. If you’ve got that base covered, the next thing I would say is video—get on YouTube. When you load a video on YouTube, it creates a transcript that lives on the back end of YouTube. Guess where that transcript goes? Straight into Google’s AI. If you’re creating that video, just like we’re here talking about SEO and AI optimization, Google knows this video is all about SEO and AI optimization. This is going to become part of the training data for Gemini.Jesse Dolan (54:33)
Just getting yourself out there talking—it doesn’t have to be a crazy, highly produced video either. You’re making fun of yourself, not going to be the guy walking on the sidewalk doing selfies, but anybody listening, do that about your business and put it up there. The transcripts are automatically created. They weren’t that long ago. If you just follow the evolution, AI agents, Google bot, things like that, they’re going to be able to start parsing that stuff out in real time, regardless of a transcript, in the probably not too distant future.

Pete Kleinjan (54:49)

Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (55:03)

Just putting your content out there, getting on social media. I love what you’re saying there because it’s not just for humans. It’s not just social anymore—it is content that is scraped. It’s part of your encyclopedia as a business of who you are, what you do.

Pete Kleinjan (55:14)

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Dolan (55:34)

Not to be fear-mongering for people here, but maybe somebody’s watching or listening, Pete, and they’re like, “Wow, this is a lot. I’ll get to that next Tuesday. We’ll do this.” The next Tuesday comes, and they push it off. What happens if business owners wait too long to get started here? Do you think there’s any risk of them losing out if they don’t claim that digital real estate early now? Do you think they’re going to get left behind? What’s your two cents on somebody’s inaction here?

Pete Kleinjan (56:06)

I don’t think you’re going to get left behind. We’re digital marketers, and we know that this is such a great way to reach customers. I live in an HOA homeowners association, and there are very specific rules about how things have to happen if you’re going to build a deck or whatever—that’s a whole other conversation.

Jesse Dolan (56:33)

Yeah.

Pete Kleinjan (56:39)

What that means is we have service providers who understand the HOA rules. They know what needs to be done. They build decks or do siding and roofing, who you call when you need something done, and they do it right. Then you don’t have any HOA problems. These guys do not have websites. They do not have email addresses. Maybe they’ll text you if you text them. They like phone calls, and they’ve got great businesses.Some of them, I know, have two and three homes. They’ve got a lake house and a mountain house. Phenomenal businesses, and digital marketers like us would say, “Hey bud, you’re missing out. You’ve got to get on this digital marketing train, or you’re going to be done for.” That guy goes, “I’ve got three houses. You’ve got one. I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing, and you keep doing what you’re doing.”

Jesse Dolan (57:26)

Right.

Pete Kleinjan (57:36)

That’s a part of this too: if you’ve got a great business, keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t lose sight of what’s working to try to chase something that might work later. If you are concerned about falling behind, start to surround yourself or have conversations with people who are living in this world and this space. You can’t help but start to have light bulb moments: “Hey, what he just said, I can do in my business. What he’s talking about, my team could do that. I’ve got smart people on my team. They could figure that out for me.”It’s really just about exposing yourself. Number one, get on the platform and start having conversations with it. Number two, expose yourself to conversations that people are having, like we’re having right here. Hopefully, people are watching this on YouTube. Expose yourself to these conversations. You start to expand your mind and have different ideas.If you’re in a city of any size, there are groups of people gathering at coffee shops, startup organizations, or Chamber of Commerce events where these conversations are happening. You run into real people in the real world who are doing these things, and you can have a coffee with them, have a lunch with them. Say, “Hey, if I had a budget of $500, how could you help me in my business?” Start small with a professional, maybe see what they can do.Just like everything else, you might find a dud the first time out, and the guy doesn’t follow through. But you might find a diamond in the rough, and all of a sudden, that $500 is a great leap forward for you and your business that every other HVAC company in town isn’t doing because they’re still worried about whether their deliveries are coming in on time or if they have the next furnace to install.It’s really just about being active. Activity leads to success is something that I believe. You don’t always know what that means when you’re doing the activity, but someday later, it becomes apparent: “I remember when I first met that guy 15 years ago, when I first met you, Jesse, five, six years ago, probably. I never thought I’d be on his podcast. I didn’t even know he had a podcast.” Look where it brought us to today.Get active, do something, have conversations with people, surround yourself with people who are smarter than you, and you’re going to find yourself in a pretty good spot, I think, in a year or two or three years.

Jesse Dolan (1:00:01)

It still goes back to just building a good business, doing it the right way, not taking shortcuts or quick tricks. That’s what Google wants for businesses to show, that’s what AI wants when it’s giving you the answers.

Pete Kleinjan (1:00:04)

Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (1:00:31)

I was asking you a question that was a little fear-mongering, like, what if you don’t take action? What’s going to happen? On the flip side, if somebody’s listening and watching here and they’re like, “Hell yeah, this is the thing I needed to really push me over the edge,” I know we don’t have a crystal ball, and this is kind of a mushy topic anyway to try to project on, but what do you think if somebody dives in today?They start doing some of this, just starting small, practicing what you’re preaching here, Pete—there’s a lot of alliteration right there. What kind of growth or competitive advantage do you think a business is going to get if they start right now today, positioning themselves as that authority and hitting these different media outlets? What do you say to those people to encourage them or let them know that maybe they’re making the right choice versus if they’re not taking action here today?

Pete Kleinjan (1:01:09)

I would say the sky’s the limit. If you’re somebody whose brain works in the right way and you’ve got the work ethic and the attitude to get after this stuff and start using it and build automations, the sky is the limit. It’s a little bit like if we had a time machine and could go back to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and watch the Wright brothers take their first flight, we’d be like, “That was kind of lame.”

Jesse Dolan (1:01:39)

Great points.

Pete Kleinjan (1:01:42)

Here we are 110 years later, which is a blink of an eye when it comes to AI and how fast the technology is moving now. We’ve been to the moon. You and I could buy a plane ticket and fly anywhere in the world within a day based on that starting point of the Wright brothers, who, if I remember right, Jesse, weren’t even engineers. They were like farmers messing around with machines and created flight.

Jesse Dolan (1:01:46)

Yeah.

Pete Kleinjan (1:02:07)

They weren’t AI experts. They didn’t go to Google or ChatGPT. They were just people who were interested in this new technology and wanted to see what they could do with it. If you’re that person and you’re like, “This, I’m on fire for this stuff. This is super interesting. It’s the future. It clicks in my mind,” who knows where you can take that?I know people in my life who are that way. One of them, a good friend of mine, has an AI organization called AI Edge that he trains people with. Three years ago, he had a fireworks stand. That was his job. Now today, he’s got hundreds of people enrolled in his online courses. Hundreds of people come to his conference every year. He is probably one of the best AI experts in the Midwest here. Three years ago, he was selling fireworks on the 4th of July. I think he still sells fireworks, but…

Jesse Dolan (1:03:18)

Radar.

Pete Kleinjan (1:03:32)

Just get in there, be the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, and see what you can figure out. You’re going to crash a time or two, but at the end of the day, you might go to the moon.

Jesse Dolan (1:03:35)

That is such a cool metaphor, Pete, because as you’re saying this, I’m envisioning people watching that flight. You’ve got two different guys or gals: one that’s like, “Holy cow, that thing just flew, however many feet it went.” And you’ve got the pessimist going, “Okay, cool trick, but I’ll still use my tractor or my horses. This is a very novel thing.”

Pete Kleinjan (1:03:58)

Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (1:04:03)

I don’t see what’s going to happen with this. Then, like you’re saying, boom, we’re going to the moon off of that first flight, eventually.

Pete Kleinjan (1:04:13)

The other cool thing about it, Jesse, and sorry to take the metaphor so far, but we talked about surrounding yourself with people who are talking about it, seeing what they’re doing with it. That’s the same deal with the Wright brothers. They flew their plane, and then all the other people who were struggling with flight loved it, wanted to figure it out, but couldn’t.

Jesse Dolan (1:04:18)

No, it’s a good point.

Pete Kleinjan (1:04:36)

All they had to do was look at what the Wright brothers did, and they took a massive jump forward. If you’re out there tinkering with your AI airplane and you think you’re doing some good things and you flew 50 feet, then you see somebody else and what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. All of a sudden, you’re like, “I’ll put a jet engine on my airplane. That’ll work really cool.” Now you’re way further ahead than what you were, but you would have never understood that a jet engine can make your plane fly higher, faster, further if you didn’t have that Wright brothers’ little tinker-toy airplane in the first place.Jesse Dolan (1:05:12)
Community of people focused on taking those next steps. I think some great wisdom there for everybody. Pete, I think this episode and discussion has been incredibly helpful. I know I’ve learned some things. I think anybody listening and watching has definitely picked up on some nuggets. Do you have anything else that you want to share or impart on everybody before we wrap it up?

Pete Kleinjan (1:05:34)

Not really. Just get in and start using the tools. Start thinking about how people are using these tools. Get involved with different communities and have conversations with people. I am more active on social media these days than I used to be. If you want more of this type of content, come find me on social media, Pete Kleinjan. You’ll see some things maybe you like and some things that make you scratch your head, but we’re talking about it, we’re doing some things, and maybe we can help you take that big jump forward in your business too.

Jesse Dolan (1:06:04)

Your agency, Tiger29, we mentioned earlier. I’ll link to your LinkedIn, your website, all this stuff in the show notes for everybody if you want to track Pete down. Pete, thanks for coming on. Pleasure talking with you today, and hopefully you’ll come on again in the future.

Pete Kleinjan (1:06:06)

Cool, thanks Jesse.

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