#17 - Local Search, AI Style—And Why You Still Get Spam Texts

In this episode of Over The Bull, Ken breaks down how Google’s new AI Overviews are reshaping local business visibility—drawing from a recent whitepaper by Local Falcon, a leader in local SEO tracking and analysis.

AI Overviews now appear at the top of many local search results, replacing the traditional map pack in some cases and pushing small businesses further down the page. But does your proximity to the searcher still matter? And what role does your content play in getting featured?

You’ll learn:

What GAIO (Google AI Overviews) is and how it works

Key findings from Local Falcon’s study across thousands of businesses

Why user intent and content quality now matter more than location

Which types of queries trigger AI results—and which don’t

And to wrap up, Ken offers a surprising take on phishing scams—why scammers still send obviously fake texts and emails (hint: it’s not by accident).

This is an episode packed with practical insight and strategy for business owners, marketers, and anyone trying to stay visible in a changing digital landscape.

Over The Bull is brought to you by IntegrisDesign.com. All rights reserved.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut through marketing noise. Here's your host, Ken Carroll.

SPEAKER_01: 0:09

The wheels are coming off the bus. Are you still hanging on to some old techniques that are dying a quick death and no longer a slow death? Are you hanging on to those one-page or Google Ads optimized landing pages that Welcome back to Over the Bull. So, This episode is predicated based on an article that came across my desk and is presented by a company called Local Falcon. Local Falcon is a pretty neat tool. We use it in part with a bunch of other tools, but it's a tool that you may want to check out. They have their hand on the pulse specifically on... Google Business, its position, things like that, you know, one of the critical areas of business. And oftentimes, it's one of those places where Google Ads providers, when they build those little dinky websites that have no meaning, that are optimized for conversions, they often will point your Google Business to those landing pages to help stack the deck to make their program look more effective than it is. Now, with this being said, let's jump in here and talk about the article a little bit. So I'm going to start by just reading the overview and then I'm going to go over to my notes and you're going to see me clicking back and forth. Sorry, it's going to happen that way, but there's kind of a lot to cover in the article and I want to make sure that you have everything that you may need to help you understand things a little bit better, maybe ask better questions to your marketing and web people and help you understand help you basically prevent from going dark as search engines are adjusting to this new world of artificial intelligence. All right, so let's dive right into the overview. This is, again, by Local Falcon. Google AI overviews, and in brackets they put AIO slash GAIO, just Google, A-I, is transforming the way search results are delivered, particularly for local business queries, by summarizing information directly in search results. GAIO changes how visibility is earned and how users discover local services. This white paper investigates a fundamental question for the future of local SEO. Does the physical location of the searcher impact Google AI overview's visibility today? And if so, how? So as you can see here, everybody's getting on the train of looking at how people are going to change how they basically search for information. You know, if we look at, for example, ChatGPT, I've talked to several people and I even heard one comment where one gentleman said that his wife considers ChatGPT her best friend because basically people are communicating with it. And if you've not done it yet, you can physically install the ChatGPT app and talk to ChatGPT as you're driving down the road, just as if you were talking to the passenger of a vehicle. Now, what this means is that the way people are going to start searching is going to be in part due to the search engine that they use, the chat engine, or the large language model. And it's also going to be predicated on that conversation that they have, especially when they go through asking questions to asking how they solve a problem and then looking for resources like your business to solve those problems. It's going to dramatically change what you've been doing. looking at. And again, if you're not thinking credibility and you're thinking piecemeal systems with different people doing different things and not a collective argument, then you're going to want to switch gears fairly fast in terms of this. So let me start digging through my notes here. First of all, my main header is Introduction to Google AI Overviews. And I'm going to call it GAO, I don't know how you pronounce it, is a new feature in Google Search that provides AI-generated summaries for local business queries, often appearing above traditional search results. So what you're seeing is that these overviews are getting premier placement when someone searches for something on Google. And this is where we're starting to see the transition, which I believe, again, the way we're looking for things today is going to be archaic in a relatively short time. And also the metrics at which we look at things will also be heavily impacted by those changes. So this is premium position when someone's searching for something. Now, these summaries aggregate information from various sources, changing how businesses gain visibility online. Okay, so think about that statement for a second. The summaries aggregate information from various sources, changing how businesses gain visibility online. So, when you think about this, you need to start thinking about your NAP score, right? If your marketing person's not talking to you about your NAP score, if they're not talking to you about your overall credibility, your website health, how your social's tying into it, if they're not building a collective argument, then this piecemeal system that your business is sitting upon right now is going to fall apart. Now, what that means is... You know, I keep going back to the Google Ads guy, okay? If you've got a Google Ads guy and he's building some landing page in Never Never Land and sending your Google Ads traffic to that page, that page is not going to have a very high score and it could actually create some conflicting information. And so you want to have everything harmonize and everything needs to harmonize. And in order to do that, Big picture thought has to come into the equation. And it's critical to think like that. So here was the research objective. The study aimed to determine whether a searcher's physical location affects the appearance and ranking of businesses in the GAIO results. So their methodology overview. Here's what they did. They analyzed 4,423 businesses. across 20 countries, focusing on 430 U.S.-based businesses for detailed geographic analysis. They conducted 60,000 searches using a 7x7 geogrid, which are 49 points. So just think a grid that's got 49 total points, seven across and seven down, within a four-mile radius around each business. So Let me break that down a little bit. When you research a local optimization plan for Google Business, Local Falcon and a lot of these other tools, what they'll do is let you look at how well your business is performing within a 4, 5, 6, sometimes up to 9, 10 mile radius. And what it will do is it will tell you how you're doing well, say, in the northeast corner or the southeast corner, not just if you're sitting at your office Googling something related to your business, because if you're sitting in your office and you drive a mile down the road and conduct the same search, you wouldn't appear necessarily in the same result area. Like, for example, if you're showing yourself and you go, well, I'm number one on Google Business this sitting in your office and you drive two miles down the road, you may be in the third, fifth, or even 20th position and it could drop off relatively quick. And so what these tools do is they specialize in building these geo-grids and kind of giving you a snapshot as to how strong your business is within those particular radiuses. And in this case, it was a four-mile radius around each business. Now, they generated seven types of queries per business, reflecting various user intents, such as informational, transactional, etc. So, let's break that down a little bit. So, when people are looking for products and services, they typically look in different points. Now, you may hear this called the process. the funnel, you may recall sales funnel, and some people refer to it as an ecosystem. But basically, it's people go to different points within the buying cycle, mainly looking for either information or to actually make a purchase. Now, most people obviously want to be at the point of acquisition, which is lower in the funnel and closer to that point of purchase. But Sometimes injecting yourself into the informational area, which is traditionally considered higher funnel information style questions, they typically would not cost as much because they're not as valued as much. And then if you built your content correctly, you could help filter people down from a higher funnel perspective. informational intent to a transactional point, and then you can compare that with paying for lower funnel, usually higher cost clicks or conversions is what we would typically call it. And then what you do is you kind of compare the two and then see if you can you know, save money and decrease your RMI, Return On Marketing Investment, or ROI, if you do a traditional return on investment style model. And so what this does is this is already telling us something. So if you could imagine You know, a lot of times when you do traditional search, what you do is you would sometimes start off by looking for something general, shoes. And then as you do more, you start looking for a specific type of shoe. And then once you do that, then you look for a shoe that you can purchase. And so you see you go from information to transaction. Now, when people are using these large language models like ChatGPT, or AI, you know, whatever you want to call it, what they're doing is they're kind of mix-mashing this whole concept that was traditionally different queries all together in different spaces. But now what you're going to see is that people are now asking these large language model questions and then asking their input as far as transactions. And so what you're going to start seeing more and more are a muddiness between the information and the transaction. And what that means is it's important to know how to inject yourself and create content that can bring you into different places within the information and transactional spaces. And so that's a lot, lot different than what we traditionally look at in ways from a marketing standpoint. So moving on, the queries were executed on both desktop and mobile platforms to capture device-level differences. And that's another key point, too. You do want to make sure that they're just covering all their bases, looking at different devices. All right, so here were the findings in the article. Searcher location impact. proximity has a minimal effect on whether a business appears in the GAIO results. While closer businesses are slightly more likely to appear, proximity doesn't significantly influence ranking order once included. Now, query intent matters. So we'll talk about this in a second. GAO results are more prevalent for informational queries than for transactional or navigational ones. So query intent matters. GAO results are more prevalent for informational queries than for transactional or navigational ones. So process that. To get that space, think about the kind of content that needs to start being processed. And so you can't just say, I'm going to create, you need to understand what questions are being asked and actually research those questions that are being asked in the informational process in order to highly optimize your content to address questions that are actually being asked. And that means research. That don't mean you just think what people are asking and then go, you know, sputter up an article on an AI engine and then post it and then think job well done. That's not how it's moving, going to be moving forward. You gotta be very deliberate and diligent. Remember, busy work is not, it's not necessarily gonna get you over the goal. It won't get you over the goal anymore. It'll make your marketing people look as though they're doing more work, But in reality, it's not going to get what you need to get unless you get that research done first. And so content quality over proximity. Okay, so content quality over proximity. So what they're asking is the content, the quality of the content is over the location. So think about that with Google Business. GAIO emphasizes authoritative, structured, and intent-aligned content over mere geographic closeness. So think about that one for a little bit. You've seen those landing pages that are built with all those geo areas listed at the bottom of the page, the counties and the zip codes and the cities, and those things that SEO people and marketing people won't put out there to try to leverage your business for locational purposes. Now we're seeing a little bit of a flip of the script. And so if you're seeing all those locations at the bottom of your webpage or you're seeing all these things being built, you need to go back to your person and say, okay, what does this look like in regards to GAIO? What are you doing here? And what is your intent overall that would align not just with my local SEO, but my overall SEO plan and my overall marketing plan? How does that impact everything? And so as you can see, they're waving a flag here. And they're kind of saying, guys, you might want to start thinking about this. So what are the implications for local SEO? Now, local SEO obviously is a loaded term because people, it's crazy, but you'll see some marketing people, they intentionally mix mash products. what they determine as local SEO. Some of them will say it's just your Google business profile, and then others will say it's trying to get your website properly ranked. So you need to get a clear definition of local SEO. But here's what they're suggesting, a shift in optimization strategies. So traditional SEO tactics, focusing on proximity, need to adapt, prioritizing high-quality content that aligns with user intent. Okay, that's a mouthful, but let's process that a little bit. So traditional SEO tactics, focusing on proximity, meaning they're really hyper-focusing on area, that needs to be adapted. And they need to start prioritizing high-quality content, not just... writing a bunch of blather based on a keyword or writing based upon a conversation they're having with you, but based upon research data that they can show you is high quality content that aligns with the user intent. What is the user intending to do with their search? What are they looking for? What are the questions that they're asking? And then how do you build that content in a way that's meaningful to where when these large language models or AI models start picking up and they want to find information, how are they going to pull up your information versus someone else's? And these are serious questions that you really need to really have a serious talk with your marketing people to make sure that they're in alignment and they're not just riding this dead horse as far as they can ride it and then try to react in a different way because Because if you think about it, you need to start building your argument today. You don't want to try to react and then try to, because that's going to take time. So let's talk about the importance of structured data, which is the next bullet point. Implementing structured data and providing clear authoritative information can enhance visibility on GAIO. And I'm sure they probably have a way to pronounce that, as I mentioned, but I'm not going to embarrass myself again by trying to make a pronunciation of it. So what this means is when you're creating structured data, there's something in web development called schema. You want to ask your web guy about schema. and ask them what they are doing with schema. Do they plan on doing anything with schema? And do you need a plan to incorporate it if you're not currently paying them for that? And then make sure you have a clear plan of what that schema looks like. And then their last point is monitoring GAIO appearances. And so basically businesses should track their appearance in GAIO to understand and approve their visibility in this new search feature. So from there, they make some recommendations. Let's talk about the recommendations for businesses. Enhance content quality. So focus on creating informative content that address common customer questions and needs. Okay, so you see here, focus on creating informational content that addresses common common customer questions and needs. You don't want to throw a dart at a dartboard for these questions. You don't want to, and I can't emphasize this enough because I've seen too many companies over the last, especially, well, it's been pretty parasitic in my world, but in the last two to three years, these so-called agencies are popping up and they're just creating companies just junk content and posting it just so that they can show you that they're doing something and it doesn't have the research behind it. Now, this is important, okay, because what has to happen is you've got to be able to give people the time, which is money, to do the research to create quality content. This isn't who writes the... the biggest book, the quickest. It's about who writes meaningful content that is well-intended, and it also considers EEAT strategies, which is basically experienced, authoritative, trustworthy content. And I did a podcast on EEAT, and you definitely want to go back and check that out, especially if you're just dumping a lot of AI-generated content on your website and thinking job well done. It's not. And so it's time we get serious about this. Utilize structured data. Okay, we talked about that. Implement schema markup to help Google understand and feature your content in GAO. Okay, so what that means is schema is a way to mark places and pages on your website that kind of tells these models what kind of content is on that particular page. And by incorporating a schema strategy, what you're doing is you're making that easier for computers and large language models to be able to go through and see the content, understand what the content is, and then properly catalog that information for users To reference. Okay, so if we look at what's going on here, it really shows when a company like Local Falcon does this. And by the way, this is not a Lone Star project. company out there doing this. There are some popular tools that are used in the world of search engine optimization, such as Ahrefs. And Ahrefs, their portal, now it shows, basically it gives you an indicator of how well your business is being citated or possibly citated when People are asking questions about the services and products you offer in some of these artificial intelligence models. And so what you're seeing is just this shift, right? All right. So the next thing is it's impacting some things in some very curious ways. I saw an article. Gosh, it was great. couple weeks ago, I guess, and it was talking about is Google killing the Internet? It was some, you know, real, you know, kind of pitchy title. And so in that title, what it was indicating was one of the examples was Forbes magazine. And what they were seeing was that with Forbes magazine, you were seeing a decrease in traffic to their website. Now, the reason that you were seeing it, or the argument from the article from what I remember, was that because large language models are pulling up the cliff notes or the synopsis or the reference material from, say, Forbes or one of these other websites, what it's doing is it's putting the conclusion or everything that they need into the chat, and so therefore people no longer need to visit the website in order to get the information. So Basically, they cut out the middleman, right? They're just going– asking these artificial intelligence models questions and is pulling the meat and potatoes from the websites, publishing it directly in the chat. And so therefore, there's really no reason to go to that website any longer. And so the question– was, well, what are we going to do and how do we react to that? And what does that mean? So then questions become, are websites even going to be relevant in the future? Or how will that look in the future? And we're in a strange new world. We really don't know, except for the fact that I don't see the end of websites, just like I don't see the end of paid advertising. I mean, when You know, the big titan of the world today, which is Google, you know, it's reported that their income is over 70% from paid ads. You know, they're not just going to hand that over. You know, they're going to have a model that's going to have to be pursued. And there's going to be a need to constantly feed these AI machines. Now, what happens when they reach a critical mass of understanding? We don't really know. I mean, when you hear Google using blasphemous language like, you know, they're going to create an artificial god, it does make one wonder, you know, exactly where it's going to go long term. But, you know, for right now, we can definitely see that the content is needed in order to feed the machine. And remember, the machine is locked up in a box. And as the world progresses, then likely the content and the needs are going to progress too. The other thing is, you know, as I'm looking at this AI thing, and I kind of want to just, I've really been doing some heavy, like, communicating with this system. And the idea is that the way that the language works on the system, it kind of gives you the impression that it's sentient, right? That it gets it. And because you talk to it, it gives you feedback and you kind of have this thing going on. But then there was this idea that as I'm chatting with it and as I'm talking with it, I found out that it's really bad. At least the ones I've been using are really guilty of kind of like giving you a confirmation bias. Like they're almost confirming that whatever you plug into it at some point, you're right. And I made different arguments with it, just kind of seeing what it does. And it was kind of like having that friend that's an enabler. At some point, it just starts agreeing with you and tells you how brilliant you are and then just gives you this vacuum feedback, making you think that you're right about everything. The other thing is that... The models also tend to give you inaccurate information. From what I'm seeing, it seems to be pulling from outdated information. It seems to be pulling from inadequate information and inconsistent information. And depending upon how you ask the questions and where it gets the answers, it can dramatically change how those models give you feedback and the accuracy of that feedback. You know, there was a Gosh, I can't remember the name of it. But there was also some articles going around recently talking about it's creating like this, almost like this psychological problem with AI because when it gives you a confirmation bias and you start to live in that vacuum and you get in that feedback loop, it's actually causing people to have some some weird psychological issues. I can't think of the term of it, but it's somewhat kind of staggering. I mean, you're talking about people who need serious mental help after a short period of time, after getting in that feedback loop. You know, some people are A couple of the stories that I remember, and this is me giving it to you anecdotally, but one thinking that AI was telling them that they're basically a messiah and they could lay hands on people and heal them, just all kinds of crazy things. And so we also don't know what it's going to do to us psychologically as we do more and more of this kind of interaction with a non-sentient entity gathering information and kind of presenting it. And if the confirmation bias isn't going to be somehow managed, I think that's going to be a real problem. The other problem that I perceive happening with AI is they're biased. I mean, incredibly biased. What I tried to do was I would ask pretty tricky questions with it. And I would ask it something that I knew was sensitive. And what I found was that if I'm asking sensitive questions about pharmaceutical companies, it's hard to break the barrier and get unbiased or an opposing view of the narrative that it's programmed to give you. And so... What that means is that the people who are writing these programs, whatever their philosophical predisposition is, they seem to also be controlling the philosophical predisposition of what it's going to give you back. And if you can't break that barrier, then ultimately you're going to have a harder time getting opposing views to certain things, and it'll be easier for you to— more accept a certain narrative versus being able to make your own decisions. And so I don't know if people are going to start asking more questions about this. And, you know, it could have a reverse intent that if people start seeing that it shows more and more of a bias toward a certain view or towards certain companies, then it could have an opposite effect on how much people trust these models. Now, I don't know if that's true or not. I don't know how it's going to go. You know, all we can do from a marketing perspective is just kind of ride the train, do the best we can, and react. But it's very interesting to see how these things are coming together. But the sentiency of AI, meaning consciousness, is not there. As a matter of fact, there's some really interesting side notes on this. the philosophy of sentiency. Like they say it'll become conscious at a certain point. You hear these terms. Well, there's some real problems with these terms. The first one is we can't even really define consciousness ourselves. And, you know, we can make a subjective view of what consciousness is based upon how it's relating to our five senses, but is that true consciousness? You know, likely not. Likely it's just mimicking consciousness based upon how the programmer is putting it in. And we're making a philosophical assumption the whole way about, you know, can you evolve to sentiency or whatever. And then that gets into theological style questions and those kind of things. But those are the kind of things I've been looking at lately, which are kind of interesting in my opinion. So, when we get back to the marketing leg of it, and we see that the way it's going, and we don't know everything. We really don't. We don't know how this is going to be received. I mean, one of the things that I've seen from the younger generation especially is they've become more aware of when an image is generated by artificial intelligence, they're They're able to detect whether or not that that is AI-generated just by looking at it. And so we're seeing some signs that– some holes in the game, but it could just be it's a– you know, it's really new on the market and everything, and I'm sure it's going to adapt and get better. Yeah. But I know when I try to use AI to generate images or something like that, typically it's impressive from one standpoint. But from a commercial application standpoint, it seems to be less viable unless I get it like really specific directions where I'm putting in sketches or doing some things that already kind of give it kind of a real big clue rather than just– feeding it a bunch of prompts and getting what I want. Sometimes it does work in ways and other times it doesn't. So to kind of wrap up here, get back to the marketing leg of things. There are a lot of businesses that are not prepared for what's going to happen. They've built their models either hyper-focusing on one thing and not really understanding the other 99 pieces of a puzzle that go into a business, or their model is designed specifically to isolate certain things in order to generate more revenue for their company. Like, for example, not being able to properly nest content onto a website kind of forces their customers to use their inadequate web development practices. But it's done intentionally for the good of that particular company because they're trying to generate more revenue. They're not really thinking outside of that. For the freelancer, freelancers... are all over the map. Some of them really try to do a good job, and others, they just slap together a template, upload it to some cheap hosting. and throw together an about page and a service page and a whatever page and then send you off selling as they collect their check and look for the next guy. And then other ones have those real conversations, you know, those harder conversations where you talk about what really goes into internet marketing and all the factors that go into it and the cost associated with it, the cost of learning, adapting, growing, and also the fact that it never, ever stops. I mean, we have clients that have been They've been with us forever. And the marketing never changes. I mean, I can think of one company. We started with them years ago, and there wasn't that much competition. It's a charter company. And they didn't have that much competition. They were the best game in town. You fast-focus or fast-forward– you know, five years, six years. And we're at where we're at today. And now we're oversaturated with clone-style companies offering the same style service. But they don't. But they present it on the internet as though they do. And so we had to carve out a niche in order to explain why The differences between the companies, the experience, the high level of reviews and the number of reviews, and carving out a brand new niche for this one particular company. And we do the same thing across the board for everyone. We work with franchises. Each franchise location is different. It varies based on the competitive nature of the market, how people look for things. Just a lot of different factors go into it. If you got that person that you love that's doing one thing that you really like, like paid Google ads, but they're not part of the big picture, then you've got some serious decisions to make. And Local Falcon is raising the flag. They're saying, hey, guys, look over here. This is serious stuff. You want to start thinking about this and you want to start reshaping how you're generating content to feed those large language, non-sentient models with information that it considers trustworthy enough to put its reputation to when someone searches for a particular thing. And that's also known as intent. And that's where you got to be with this thing. Okay, guys, thank you so much for jumping into Over the Bull. Thank you for attending this week. I really do appreciate it. Like every, you know, I'm looking at the numbers. We're growing every episode. And I just find that really encouraging because that tells me that there are so many of you out there that I meet with like people I meet with every week who own businesses. They don't know who to trust. They don't know if their person's doing the right job. They don't know if they're moving in the right direction. They don't know if it could be better. And on the other side of the gamut, they're also still answering those darn cold emails. Oh, by the way, let me go ahead and pull something up here real quick. I want to give you a little bonus. I was going to actually save this for another podcast. But I want to do this just because I think it would be interesting for you to know. Let's see here. So you're getting me a little bit unplugged here because I'm just going to kind of wing this. So this was kind of fun for me. So I got an email, and I'm sure you get these. This is an email that was solicited from, it was a cold email. And I've been getting a lot of these lately. And they're just like, it's an email and they're just talking about, you know, trying to build me up. And, you know, they're using that whole psychological strategy of telling you how great you are and how awesome your website looks. And by the way, for any of you who think your branding is great because everybody tells you it's great, No one ever tells you your branding is horrible. A lot of times it's just a compliment or they're just saying something. So you can have really bad branding but still get compliments on it or other experiences too. But anyway, this particular person wrote me this email and they talked about– Am I interested? Here it is. Am I interested in acquiring your company because your tailored strategic solutions position you as a leader in advanced digital marketing and web development? And then it asked me, do I have 10 minutes for a quick chat next week? So if we look at it, we start to see this whole thing here, right? So generic praise without any really details or just trying to, you know, You know, blather, blather, you know, those kind of things. And then if we move on down a little bit, then they have a very generic business name they're using. And, you know, it sounds legitimate. Like they'll use the word like holdings or unite or, you know, words like that. And then– You look at the emails, they're suspicious, you know, 10 minutes to chat. So, you know, they're trying to opt in and tell me I'm awesome. They're part of a group and they're just buying up companies, which I wouldn't sell Integris anyway. So it's silly to me. So obviously the big question is, is why in the world do these people still do this? Right? Like you sit here and you look. Here's the kind of thing, okay? So when you look at it, okay, when you look at these emails you get, when you look at these form submissions you get that are just junk and crap, and you go, why are they doing this? Or worse, if you're answering those things, if you've been listening to this podcast for any time, just go, whap, just hit yourself real hard here real quick because you should not be answering those emails. So here's the thing. Mass cold emails are cheap to send. OK, they want to to book and they want to move the needle, but also they're looking at their ROI model if they're legitimate. But but even if that what they're trying to do is they're they're. phishing to find out if they can get you on the hook. Now, there's different ways they do this. One way is they send you a text message. Hey, I saw your number in my phone. Who is this? Can I reconnect with you? Those stupid things like that, those are long-term scams. What they're trying to do is develop– they're playing the long game. They're wanting to try to build a false– communication, relationship, whatever may have you, and then they're looking to con you in the long game. So ignore those, block those. Those are no good. If you don't know them, just block them. But when it comes to these emails and these things, the thing is that if they can send off 100,000 spammy emails using bots, and they get three responses, because of the ease at which it's done, They can actually have a positive ROI by sending out those mass emails saying, hey, just a friendly thing. I looked at your website and I saw this problem. You got 10 minutes. I'll talk to you about it or, you know, any of those things. It's junk. It's absolute junk. And if you're sitting there as a business owner. Looking at someone sending you a cold email telling you they've got the answers to your marketing problems when they can't even market themselves correctly, that should tell you something. And so you don't want to throw away your current situation by chasing rainbows or these things that people are giving you. because it's all just fake and it's all phishing and it's all scammy. And believe it or not, people even still do it by hand. Even submitting posts, you know, where like you got a blog and you get all those junk comments, you know, even those, you know, there was a strategy, gosh, 10, 15 years ago. And I think, Part of it is people still think these things work. What they do is they try to post things with URLs associated with it, hoping that your site will either automatically approve it or somehow it'll make its way through. And then either they somehow get a benefit for a link or they get traction or some marketing. And then what they think is, okay, I broadcast this junk across, you know, uh, 50,000 sites, but it sneaks through five, but because it's easy, you know, um, then it still accomplished the goals. And so when you see these kind of strategies for you as a business and credibility, we circle back around to the whole credibility thing. Then the idea is, do you really want to be associated with that kind of practice? Do you want your business to be associated with a company that operates in such a fashion? Do you want them representing the name of your business and everything that you've built up? doing things like that? Even if they said they wouldn't do it, do you trust this company because they did it to you in order to get you to call them? You see, reputation and credibility is huge. It's getting to be bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And the more credible, real credible, not fake credible you can be, and the more content that is authoritative and original, and really addresses real questions based on real research is going to help you propel to the top. And if you do that, you're going to be ahead of the curve when your competition is still using these Google Ads guys who are going around building these splash pages, sending traffic to those splash pages, and creating disharmony in your overall credibility. All right. So there you go. I thought I'd throw that out there. I know it was a little clumsy there at the very end, but I thought I'd throw it because I get a lot of questions about why these people do this, why they scam and why they do it. And you want to look up like phishing and spam and these different kind of things and different kind of scam techniques. And You definitely do not want to play ball with these guys. So until next time we meet, this is Over the Bull. I really do hope the best for you and your business. And thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time.

SPEAKER_00: 47:15

Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bull, brought to you by Integris Design, a full-service design and marketing agency out of Asheville, North Carolina. Until next time.