494-Solo-AI-SEO.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Carol Cox:
How would it feel to get an inquiry into your inbox from someone who wants to pay you 5000, 10,000, even $20,000 for a speaking engagement or a workshop? An even better. That lead came from an AI chatbot. Yes, it can happen has happened to me and has happened to our clients. And that’s what we’re going to talk about on this episode of the Speaking Your Brand podcast. Hi, I’m your host, Carol Cox, and we’re continuing our Bookable Speaker podcast series. Last week, we talked about how to use social media effectively as a speaker, not by following the trends that the algorithms want, but instead making sure that event organizers can find you on social media and see the social proof that they’re looking for. Today, we’re going to focus on how to get the AI chatbots to recommend you, to recommend you as a speaker, as a workshop trainer, and for your business in general, because event organizers are using ChatGPT and Claude to find speakers. Our clients have gotten speaking engagements worth 5000, 10,000, 20,000, even $30,000 from event organizers who have found them on ChatGPT. And Claude here is speaking your brand. Half of our leads now come from AI chatbots and from Google, including not only for our programs like our Thought Leader Academy and our in-person speaking retreat, but also for speaking and for workshops. Not only is this increasing the number of leads that we’re getting, but these are really high quality leads. These people are ready to buy, and they trust what AI has recommended to them.
Carol Cox:
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been talking to a prospect on a console call, and they’ve said to me, Claude told me that you were the best, or ChatGPT said that you were the top recommendation for what I needed. If you also want to get these types of inbound leads, knowing how to get the AI chatbots to recommend you is key. And you may think this is hard to do, and it’s not technically hard at all. What it does require is a clear, consistent message across the different online channels, including your website, so that the AI chatbots understand you, your brand, and your topics. Now, if you haven’t received any leads from AI, you definitely should be. Make sure you’re asking prospects where they found you, either on the form when they schedule a call with you, or if they sign up with something for you or in a conversation. I’m going to share with you here in a little bit exactly what else you can do to find out if you are getting any traffic from AI. Earlier this year, I created an entire course on AI, SEO for the university where I teach. So I did a lot of research and experimenting on this. I really went deep. So I’m going to give you the highlights in this episode so that you can learn what AI chatbots are looking for when they recommend someone, and what you can do to get them to recommend you.
Carol Cox:
And I have something at the end that I’m going to share with you as a recommendation that you’re probably going to be surprised about. I was surprised about this recommendation when after I had done all of this research. If you’re new to speaking your brand, welcome. We work with women entrepreneurs, professionals, and leaders to craft your signature talk, identify your thought leadership message, and build your speaker platform. We do that primarily through our online program called our Thought Leader Academy, where we work with you one on one to map out your signature talk from beginning to end. And we also work with you in small group calls to build your speaker platform. You can learn more at speaking your brand.com/academy. Now let’s get on with the show. The first thing that you want to do is you want to assess where you’re currently at. Go into your website analytics. They could be embedded within your website platform. Or if you’re using Google Analytics and see, are you seeing traffic to your website from the AI chatbots. You’ll especially see it from ChatGPT because there’s a referrer tag that it sends. Claude is less reliable on that, but you should start seeing traffic from ChatGPT. And ideally you want to see that referral traffic increasing over time. You also want to assess, are people telling you that they found you from ChatGPT and from Claude? I recommend adding a question on your consultation call, booking form, or on an enrollment form that you have on your website that says, how did you find us? How did you find me? And then I just have a free form text box on that so people can type whatever they want and 50% or more of our leads.
Carol Cox:
This year, people have put ChatGPT, Claude or Google in there. So that’s what the first thing to do is assess where you’re currently at. And again, you want to see these trends increasing over time. The second thing you want to do is a keyword audit. Go into ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini and ask each one what it knows about you. Say, what do you know about Carol Cox speaking your brand? What do you know about speaking your brand and see what it says. Now, obviously, if you’ve been using ChatGPT yourself or Claude yourself, it’s good to know already a lot about you. So it’s going to be skewed in the sense that it, it already has that information about you from all of those that chat history. You can use sites like answer the public.com where it will send those queries. What do you know about speaking your brand to ChatGPT and Gemini through their API so that you’re not skewing the results based on your chat history? So I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. Answerthepublic.com. I have used that myself so I could get a better sense of what the chatbots know about me and about speaking your brand.
Carol Cox:
Once you do that keyword audit to verify that with the AI, chatbots know about you is accurate, then take a look at your key website pages and content from the perspective of an AI. Can it easily find what it’s looking for? Is your content clear and consistent? Is it well structured? For example, go to your speaker page on your website and if you don’t yet have a speaker page, you should definitely add one. I’ll include a link in the show notes to my speaker page. So you can see an example and you want to write this in third person. So using your name, not I, because as the robots are going through and looking through all of these website pages, you want to make sure that your name and your company name keeps coming back in the content. So all my speaker page, I don’t say I am the founder of speaking your brand. I say Carol Cox is the founder of Speaking your Brand, host of Speaking your Brand podcast, etc. create your speaker page or update it as needed. Make sure you have good information on it that the AI chatbot would find helpful when it’s deciding who to recommend as a speaker. So that leads us to. The second thing was how to become the answer that the AI chatbots give to the user. In traditional SEO, search engine optimization links were the primary way that Google established authority. If there were a lot of websites that had a link back to the New York Times.
Carol Cox:
Then the Google ranking algorithm figured that the New York Times website was a high quality website that a lot of people link to, so therefore, it would rise in the top of the search results rankings. I’ve been in digital marketing for, well, ever really since the internet came about 25 years. I teach digital marketing and business at the at a university. So I have been steeped into this industry for decades. And SEO used to be such a hot thing because everyone wanted to get into the first listing on the the famous ten blue links on the first page, or at least the first few that were listed on there. The opportunity now with AI chatbots is that this is a completely different paradigm than links. It’s not about who links to you. Instead, it’s about making sure that you have clear, consistent content on your website that AI systems can understand and connect back to you, your brand, and your topic. You want the AI to draw a thick, permanent line between your name and your company name and what it is that you do. Your topics. Here’s a quick primer on how large language models work. They are a neural network very similar to the neural networks in our own brains. And so they have all this information and they need to make sense of it. And so what they do. Much like how our brains work, is that they group like things together.
Carol Cox:
For example, one part of their neural network, say one little corner of their neural network, they’ll have things related to cat, dog animals, fish, horses, cows, etc. so all of that is kind of grouped together, farms, anything related to that. And then on the opposite side of their neural network, they may have word associations related to say, topics in history Napoleon and the French Revolution in World War II. So all of those things are grouped together. Now, of course, they can cross-pollinate. You could talk about the use of horses in the Napoleonic Wars. And so that would be a connection. But it’s a much longer connection. That connection is weaker than it is between, say, dogs and cats as pets. I know this is kind of wonky, isn’t it? But I love this stuff. I was a software developer before I started speaking your brand, so AI has definitely brought back the techie in me. My point is that you want the AI chatbots to draw that thick, permanent line around what it is that you do. You want those associations to be closely connected to each other. You don’t want that long weak line. You want it to be close together. When I’m on consultation calls with prospective clients and they have found speaking your brand from ChatGPT or Claude, and then I will ask them, well, do you remember what you were chatting with with the AI about when they recommended speaking your brand? And they always say one of two things.
Carol Cox:
Either Clore thought that I needed help with thought leadership, and they recommended speaking your brand, or I was looking for help with the signature talk. And so ChatGPT highly recommended you. Those are the two topics thought, leadership, and signature talk that the AI chatbots most associate with speaking your brand. And they are right. That’s exactly what we do and exactly reflects all the content we’ve been putting out for years. So speaking, your brand has become one of the answers. When users are working with their AI chatbots and trying to figure out their own thought leadership or their own signature talk. How did this happen? How did speaking your brand get to be one of the top answers? It’s because of all of the content we have been putting out, specifically on the Speaking Your Brand website for years. And there is one very specific type of content that has made the biggest difference. And I’ll share that with you here in just a little bit. Ai systems, just like your potential clients and event organizers, are looking for specific answers to specific questions such as, I’m looking for a speaker on personal branding who lives in Orlando. And then it’s going to bring back speakers. You want the content on your website to be well structured, clear and direct, but don’t lose your brand voice when you do that. Make sure to include what makes you unique and differentiates you from other speakers and other service providers for your business.
Carol Cox:
So you want your content to be well structured on the blog post and on the key pages on your website. So you want to make sure that you’re having a clear idea, an explanation, and description of it, examples that support it, and then at the bottom having. Frequently asked questions. So a Q&A section. I’ll also include a link in the show notes to one of my blog pages that specifically has this structure so you can see what it looks like. One of the best ways to get AI chatbots to cite you and to recommend you, is to invent a term or a phrase. That way, you’re differentiating yourself from others out there who may be talking about very similar things. For example, here at Speaking Your Brand, we have our signature talk canvas framework that I came up with years ago, and it is trademarked. And I use that phrase signature talk canvas in a lot of content and a lot of blog posts on my website. So then as the AI robots are going through and scanning the websites, they find O Signature Talk Canvas framework. This looks really helpful to users who are wanting to work on their signature talk. I will cite speaking your brand and their framework as an answer to help this user. So becoming the answer for the AI is making sure that the AI knows exactly what it is that you do, that you have that clear, consistent message for speaking.
Carol Cox:
Your brand is around thought leadership and signature talk. What is it for you? And then do a conversational audit. Go into ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and type something like, help me find a speaker on whatever your topic is. Help me find a speaker on personal branding in Orlando and then see, does the AI ask you clarifying questions like, what is the budget? Are you looking for someone who has a certain background? Are you looking for a certain type of audience that this speaker normally speaks on? When you see those clarifying questions now, you’ll know, oh, I need to go add that type of FAQ, that type of information to the speaker page on my website or to my trainings page, or to my offer page on my website. So then update your page to make sure that you’re explicitly answering those specific questions. So the AI has the answers ready. Next time someone asks and you are a good fit for that topic or for what that person is looking for. So far, we’ve talked about number one, assessing where you’re currently at. Are you getting traffic from AI and what is the AI already know about you? Number two was how do you become the answer? So making sure that you have that clear, consistent message that the AI in their neural network knows to associate with you. The third thing is to publish content regularly. Right now, I’m publishing twice a week on the Speaking Your Brand blog.
Carol Cox:
One blog post every week is the show notes for the podcast episode. The second blog post for that week is generally a longer version of what I talked about on the podcast that week, or some other content related to the work that we do around thought leadership, signature talks, women and leadership, and building confidence in speaking. So some something related to that, because I want to keep those associations strong. And it’s really key that you’re publishing this content on your own website. The problem with places like Substack and Instagram and TikTok is that they’re walled gardens, the AI robots and the Google robots cannot go through and scan those websites. Substack is behind is behind an email, opt in, Instagram and TikTok. Well, they’re mostly video, so the AI is not getting that type of structured, long form content that it likes. You can still post on social media, you can still use Substack, but I highly, highly recommend making sure that you have content like this regular content on your own website. That’s why LinkedIn is better than some of these other platforms, because LinkedIn does allow the robots to scan its content, so your LinkedIn articles and your LinkedIn profile will show up in search. As I mentioned before, the AI chatbots really like well structured content. So if you’ve been using ChatGPT or Claude for a while, it probably already has a good understanding of you, your brand, what it is that you talk about, you can just ask it to write an AI, SEO optimized blog post for you.
Carol Cox:
Give it the topic, ask it to interview you first about that topic so that it can get some additional information. And then be sure to tell it that you want that post to be structured and written for both AI and for humans, and then it will go through and give you that summary at the top. All of the information examples, the FAQs at the bottom. And again, I have a link in the show notes. So you can see an example of this that will make it really easy in all transparency, most of the blog posts that have been published on the Speaking Your Web Brand website this year have been written by ChatGPT. Chatgpt knows speaking your brand really well because of the for years now almost that I’ve been using it, so I just tell it right. An AI SEO optimized blog post based on this podcast episode, and then I will write the whole thing because I’m posting this content for specifically for the robots. Now, of course, you as a human are welcome to go read the blog post. But let’s be real. Who’s reading blog posts nowadays? Not that many people. So I really am doing it for the AI. And I think that’s why we’ve been getting so many leads from the chatbots this year. Now, I mentioned in the intro that there’s something that I was really surprised about as far as what the AI chatbots like.
Carol Cox:
They love conversational content, so having that well structured content is great. The FAQs. But they really like conversational content, hints, transcripts from podcasts, and YouTube because they want to know how to converse with their human users. So they’ve been trained on a lot of transcripts and conversational content, and they want to continue to do that. This is why I think that starting in the fall of 2025, so over a year ago when I first saw the referral traffic coming from ChatGPT and we were getting our first leads from that, I think it’s because of all the podcast transcripts I’ve had on the Speaking Your website for years. I’ve had this podcast for over nine years. This is episode number 494. So just think there are almost 500 blog posts on the website related to the topics that we talk about, and most of them have transcripts. And I notice also that when I’m doing searches for something related to, say, signature talks or public speaking. A lot of times my YouTube videos on the Speaking Your Brand YouTube channel will also come back as search results. And here’s what’s so interesting about that. A lot of those quote unquote videos on my YouTube channel are not videos at all. They’re just audio. They’re the audio from that podcast episode. But I always published every single episode from this podcast, even the audio only once to YouTube. And I’m glad I did because the AI chatbots, yes, they did.
Carol Cox:
They scanned through all of YouTube as, as well in their training data. So now you may be thinking to yourself, oh, but Carol, I didn’t, I don’t have a podcast. I don’t have a YouTube channel. I haven’t been publishing for years and years like you have. What am I supposed to do? And I get it. I think you have more content than you think, though, that you can start adding to your website. As the old saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, or maybe 5 or 10 years ago. The second best time is today. So start doing it now and then you’ll start seeing the benefits. The content you may already have. Maybe you have blog posts, but they haven’t been updated in a while. Go to ChatGPT. Give it an existing blog post and have it restructure it for AI SEO. If you’ve been sending out email newsletters, but those email newsletters have just been going to your email list, they have not been publicly accessible. Take those email newsletters and go publish them on your website blog. You can date them back to the date that they originally were sent out. So if you sent out an email newsletter a year ago, just put that date as the date it was published. So that way now everything is landing on your website on the exact same publication date. So you can do that. Take all those email newsletters.
Carol Cox:
If you have articles that you’ve written for Substack or for LinkedIn or post, or more substantial posts that you have been posting on LinkedIn. Go and take those and add them to your website blog. You may also seriously want to consider starting a podcast. And I know you may be thinking, oh, I don’t have the technical know how to do that, or I don’t have time to do that. You don’t have to do a podcast every single day for almost ten years like I have. I mean, you’re welcome to if you want to. I love podcasting, but you could just do seasons, maybe do a ten episode season on topics related to what you do, have solo episodes, have some client interviews or guest interviews, but remember to make sure that everything is coming back to how the AI is going to associate you with certain topics. Do a season for 8 or 10 episodes, take a break, and then do another season. But now you’ll have that conversational content not only out on podcast feeds, but also posted to YouTube, even if it’s audio only. Still have it sent to your YouTube channel. And make sure that you have transcripts in addition to the written show notes on your website blog. I use sonix.ai for the transcription for the podcast episodes because it’s very, very high quality transcription and it has the speaker names. It’s very well formatted. And then I embed that into the show notes page for every episode.
Carol Cox:
And you can see that on this show notes page, if you go to speaking your brand.com/494, that’s the episode number speaking your brand.com/494. If you scroll down the page, you can see the embed of the transcript of this episode. So let’s do a quick recap here. The first thing is to assess where you’re currently at. What traffic are you getting from AI. Be sure to ask leads if they found you from ChatGPT or Claude, do that keyword audit. Number two, become the answer. Make sure your key website pages and your blog posts are well structured, and that you have a clear, consistent message related to you, your brand, and your topics. And then number three, publish content regularly, especially on your own website, on your own blog, and consider starting a podcast. If you would like to work on your online visibility, including your speaker page, your LinkedIn profile, and content for AI SEO. This is part of what we do in our Online Thought Leader Academy. We also make sure that you have that clear, consistent message that you want to be known for as we work together one on one to craft your signature message and your signature talk. You can get all the details, including pricing and our next start dates for our Thought Leader Academy as speaking your brand.com/academy. Again, that’s speaking your brand.com academy. In the next episode, we’re going to wrap up this bookable speaker series. And I’m going to talk about why thought leaders get paid more as speakers. Until next time. Thanks for listening.
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