Dennis: 0:00

Almost no one knows what a Google Knowledge Panel is, but they know what it means to be Instagram verified or YouTube verified. It's very important to be Google verified, which is free, and all that is showing to Google that you are who you say you are. So what is notable about you, about your company, about your consulting, about who your friends are, about what you've done, about where you've published?

Joeri: 0:23

Hey, Dennis, it's so good to see you and to have you finally in my podcast. Yes, Joeri, good to see you again. Guys, I am with Dennis, Yu and Dennis. I'm wondering what brought you to.

Dennis: 0:35

Portugal. I love Portugal. The people here have been so nice and I love all my friends that speak Portuguese. So I've spoken at Digitalks before. So Flavio and these other folks I've known for six, seven, eight years.

Joeri: 0:52

And whether it's Sao Paulo, or here it's so good hanging out with my Portuguese friends. Yeah, you know what? I saw that you are coming to Portugal. I said Dennis is coming. I need to meet you guys, Dennis, because I met you online with Mark Schaefer I am. I saw you on conferences before in the US when I was there, and now I said, okay, let's meet Dennis, but not only meet Dennis, but also speak at the same conference. Tell us, Dennis, what was your keynote about?

Dennis: 1:15

We're talking about AI and how that's helping us process social media and do SEO and basically have our coworkers. So I showed everybody here's all the co-workers that I built and I gave everyone all of the training so they can literally create their custom GPTs in three minutes.

Joeri: 1:34

Yeah, that's amazing how much value you give. You have been doing this, I know, and since I follow you, you give a lot of value. It is out there. Is that a strategy, or is it just because you love to give so much knowledge?

Dennis: 1:48

I would like to claim that I'm some very generous person who's giving, but I have a vendetta against bad marketers who do bad work, and I think of it as I'm the scale manufacturer and there's a lot of obese people that are running around and I want everyone to step on the scale and let's see what the scale says. And so a lot of people get mad at the scale. They get mad at the scale maker when really they should be getting mad at someone else.

Joeri: 2:13

Yeah, the scale maker. I've seen also because I've been following you with your $1 a day strategy, where you take good content but you scale it, you boost it. Maybe for our listeners that has never heard about this strategy, dennis. What is it about?

Dennis: 2:29

A dollar a day is a testing strategy. So, Joeri, if you have 10 pieces of content, one is going to always do better than the others, and it's not the one you think and testing.

Joeri: 2:40

When we find something that works, then we put $10 a day, and in some cases we put a million dollars a day, like Rosetta Stone or some of these other big brands, and so when you find a winner, you just put more on that instead of just constantly trying to come up with new things which I think is largely a waste of time, absolutely, and so today you've talked to us about how you can use AI for your SEO to rank on Google, but I'm also wondering, dennis, people are using ChatGPT now as their new rule, so everything that you are doing to rank higher on Google does it also work for ranking in ChatGPT, if I may call it like that?

Dennis: 3:21

So where does ChatGPT get its information from, if I may call it like that? So where does ChatGPT get its information from? There are friends of mine that said, yeah, I was looking for advice on Facebook ads and who some of the best people were, and I was asking ChatGPT and they mentioned you and other people. Tell me that ChatGPT has recommended me and so I asked them. Okay, so there's all these consultants that are talking about how to win in AI and the new kind of SEO. They're selling new crypto, whatever it is, and the answer is that AI is just another consolidation level on top of the information layer, so search is always going to be there.

Joeri: 3:56

Yeah, I think and, of course, the content that is being, I would say, captured by the AI. Is there a typical kind of content like, maybe, blog articles or social media stuff? What is the kind of content that is working better for SEO and maybe for ChatGPT?

Dennis: 4:17

Real content is what's working the best. So real experiences. You saw this morning I made some videos with the big supermarket, well-known brand and I showed that and I showed how we could take that and process that into articles. And there's lots of real clues. And Google's looking for something they call E-E-A-T and it used to be eat, but they added the extra E. And that's real experience. So most people they don't know it, but they're abusing the AI. They're misusing the AI by having it just generate instead of process real ingredients.

Joeri: 4:52

Yeah, the ingredients. That's because, actually, guys, I was posting on Facebook a reel about how to get good prompts, how to give good prompts to chat GPT. Of course I know Dennis also talks about you need to give context to the AI, but I was not really mentioning that. Because you give the word prompt, people can think that it's a short prompt. And tell me what you said about that, about prompt.

Dennis: 5:16

I said that prompts lead people to believe that there is a shortcut abracadabra magic phrase, when really it's a conversation. So you and I, Joeri, we're having a conversation. Now you could ask ChatGPT I'm going to be sitting down with Dennis. What do you think we should talk about? And here's what do you know about me? What do you know about Dennis? Come up with a really cool topic, come up with specific things for our avatar that we serve, but that's not. I don't think of that as a prompt when you have a conversation with somebody.

Joeri: 5:46

Yeah, I think it's a matter of definition and of how people understand it, because I don't see a prompt on itself in the narrow definition. It's a question or maybe. But I see, you know, I'll use AI is not only a prompt and it makes sense to not use that word anymore. I think it's better to use talk about conversation starters maybe.

Dennis: 6:05

Yeah, a conversation starter is you're coming in knowing that the other person is going to contribute too and they're going to ask you questions. So the idea of a prompt pre-assumes that you are giving instructions and that it's going to come back and give you the finished product. And usually when people say prompt they mean a one-shot prompt. Yeah, but prompt is that's something that you give a computer. But if you're talking to a colleague, a real human, you're not going to say prompt.

Joeri: 6:32

Absolutely A prompt. For me also, it's a discussion. But also when you start a conversation now because I was listening to your keynote and I'll be following you I haven't done. What I usually do is do the preparation before the conversation, which is actually what you feed to the AI, which you also show that you need to feed it.

Dennis: 6:53

You've got to tell it the background, tell it your goals, tell it something that it might not know. So I'm pretty Google-able. So if you ask Google, you ask ChatGPT about me. It knows it's ingested thousands of articles and videos and whatnot, but maybe on the topic you're talking about, maybe on you, maybe on products that you want to, whatever it might be, you have defeated that. So we like to start by saying what do you know about this particular topic? So I interviewed another friend just an hour ago and I said what do you know about him? What do you know about his organization? And it only knew part of this part of this. So I had to feed in the missing gaps because if it didn't have that the baseline of the raw ingredients it wouldn't be able to. The chef wouldn't be able to make the dishes I would like it to make.

Joeri: 7:37

Yeah, it's interesting question. You could ask yourself to chat with you or another AI what it knows about you. I did the same thing, yeah, but then are they like maybe not because people like to have shortcuts the everything that people can find about you? It's findable on Google, as you say, but can you also feed it in ChatGPT by answering its questions or uploading information you?

Dennis: 8:01

can. But there's a much better, more powerful, more elegant answer and that is organize your knowledge graph items. So Google is a big database of things, people and places and objects and products. So if you train those items through schemaorg, through links, by putting it out there on social media and all that, then Google understands who you are. If Google understands who you are, then ChatGPT and Anthropic and Perplexity and Gemini and all these will know who you are. Because if that information layer isn't organized properly, okay, fine, you could reprompt it, you could feed in these documents, you could create custom LLMs and whatnot. But that's not as good as actually solving it the correct way, which is solving search and social and AI at the same time, which is what we talked about.

Joeri: 8:53

Absolutely, and it's then the authority score that you have for your website.

Dennis: 8:57

You showed this also this morning. That's really important.

Joeri: 9:00

That's also something you build up. I've been starting my blog again a few years ago and it's just by being consistent it works right.

Dennis: 9:08

Joeri, you and I know a lot of the same people. We go to a lot of these conferences like Social Media Marketing World, and when I'm on Mark Schaefer's site, for example, and he or we have a podcast and he turns into a blog post, that's a domain rating I think 72 link that comes in. So when I have a guest article on Social Media Examiner, I think that's like an 81 that comes in on social media examiner, I think that's like an 81 that comes in. So every time you have media, blogs, newspapers, speaking books these are all things that increase your authority, not just from a link authority, seo standpoint, but social media reputation authority, like being shouted out by someone on Instagram or us being friends with the conference organizer those are all kinds of authority. It's like you would want to be known by other people in your industry. That's authority, whether or not it's like a do follow link or like reviews, even though those don't pass juice.

Joeri: 10:00

That's authority Absolutely, and because and that's also authentic right, because people say this about you I know you're also. I see a lot of content about your social media where you're speaking about Google knowledge panels. Can you talk about the importance of that and maybe explain to my listeners what that is?

Dennis: 11:30

Almost no one knows what a Google knowledge panel is, but they know what it means to be Instagram verified or YouTube verified. It's very important to be Google verified, which is free, and all that is showing to Google that you are who you say you are. So what is notable about you, about your company, about your consulting, about who your friends are, about what you've done, about where you've published all this information? If it can be associated with you not your company, but with you as an entity, through your personal brand website, through schemaorg, via whatever your favorite SEO tools are in WordPress then you can then submit to Google and be Google verified, and then you can claim that particular object. So everything on the internet is every object is a item in this big database. So we created a tool that hits Google's knowledge graph so that it's free, right? You go in and type your name or you can build your own tool.

Dennis: 12:26

It's not very hard to build these things if you're a programmer To do these things. You get Google verified, then you claim your name and for the last few years, just for fun, I've been helping dozens of my entrepreneur friends get verified. So now when you search their name, there's all these colored boxes that show up and people think, oh, he must be a celebrity. He's a big deal. It has nothing to do with the number of followers you have. It's Googled completely clear on who Joeri is, and if not no knowledge panel.

Joeri: 12:57

How about this? Your advice? How can people get to what is maybe the first steps to get to? Yeah, their own knowledge panel.

Dennis: 13:05

Just Google me. I teach by example. If you Google Dennis space, why you you'll see a knowledge panel and look at the items that are there. It's my LinkedIn. It's my personal brand website. It's the bio. It's speaking. It's YouTube. It's being on other people's podcasts. It's a bestselling book.

Dennis: 13:20

They're simple things like if in your bio it's speaking, it's YouTube, it's being on other people's podcasts, it's a best-selling book. They're simple things like if in your bio you show your birth date on your personal brand website, then that's information that Google can factually, because Google's trying to determine what is factually true. Not, oh, this guy is the best digital market. Google can't factually determine if that's true. But it is true that at one point I had the bestselling book in social media on Amazon. There's a screenshot on that. There's other people that reference that being true. It is true, I've been on CNN multiple times. It is true that I'm friends with these other people. Google can tell what. Google is a big fact seeking, judge right, and all we're trying to do is just trade it on the facts. Do you have those facts? Here's one that most people fail on Of all the things about you because you're very well-connected lots of information, podcasts. What do you think the authoritative home is for Joeri? What's the one place that should have the most information structured about you?

Joeri: 14:21

So for me, it's my blog, my personal website that I have, Because I always say, like Joe Polizzi says, don't build on rented land. That's right, Because your LinkedIn profile can be really strong, but one day or another it can be like you can have a problem, without even being your fault, that someone you know makes a fake profile.

Dennis: 14:40

So, yeah, that's the correct answer the personal brand website. But where on the personal brand website should I have the definitive list of all of these objects that you're associated with and what you have done?

Joeri: 14:52

Well, it should be like. I have not so many sections on my page, so I have my about me, where I would say that you need to have a lot of information. Then I have my blog, which is linked to my podcast, and then I have where they contact me. So I think, about Me it's an important place.

Dennis: 15:07

So the About Me is important because that's where you're going to tell stories and context and the why behind. You know who you are, but the number one place to contain the factual information that drives a knowledge panel, which is the hub of this whole wheel, is actually the homepage. Yeah, because the homepage is where everything that's connected. The homepage is the thing that actually deserves to rank number one on your name. Now, when you blog, when you do podcasts, those are all more stories, more interviews and whatnot. That show like a slice, like a spoke right, and these are all spokes that tie into the hub. But the hub is the homepage and most on their personal brand homepage, if they even have a personal brand site, it's all a big keynote speaker, here's a couple articles, book, a call with me, buy consulting, but they don't have all this other information. So because the most linked to the most powerful page on your personal brand site is the homepage, they miss on this huge opportunity.

Joeri: 16:05

Yeah, but that's actually I have on my homepage. I have the links to the podcast. I have the links to the podcast. I have the links to the blog, to a book that I've written. I have all these.

Dennis: 16:13

But the information, the actual factual information, the list of those items needs to be at the. You can put it at the bottom of the whole because it's for visual book. Me it looks nice, but further down on the bottom you can still paste those items.

Joeri: 16:26

Yeah, makes a lot of sense Down on the bottom, you can still paste those items. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. That's really good advice. If you want to action advice on this podcast episode, do that. Yeah, you mentioned also this book that you've written. It's about TikTok, right? Tiktok? Is that the rant at land, or how do you see TikTok fit into this story?

Dennis: 16:47

TikTok is a smarter clone of Facebook and all social networks are just ways for people, in the most frictionless way, to be able to produce content. So the thing here's like the little secret A lot of people that read this TikTok book and TikTok, of course, paid us a lot of money to write this book because they know we're very well known in Facebook advertising and they wanted to bring the Facebook advertisers over. But the very things that we teach on how to succeed on TikTok is exactly what we've been teaching all along on Facebook, exactly what we've been teaching for YouTube or for Twitter, which is 15 second videos or one minute videos. And when you make real, authentic, raw videos, real stories, tiktok calls it being flawsome right, not being awesome flaws and all of this together flawsome. Then those are things that you can boost and TikTok's algorithm is so smart it will find, because the newsfeed is so good at figuring out what you like. Yeah, the ad side is just is the same algorithm. Basically, it'll find those same people.

Joeri: 17:46

Okay, so you are not banished because you suddenly start to pay for your content to be spread around, because sometimes people could think, yeah, now I start to pay, I get less organic reach. But this is not the case.

Dennis: 17:59

That's not true. There is a little bit of cannibalization because if you're boosting for engagement on Facebook or Twitter or TikTok or even LinkedIn, the algorithm organically will naturally find people that would have seen it that they think is most likely to engage, and so when you boost a post for engagement, it's also using that same algorithm. So there is a little bit of cannibalization, but unless you're a huge brand, I'm not worried about it.

Joeri: 18:25

Also, ticket can go the other way around, because if you use ads, it can be shown to people.

Dennis: 18:30

It creates more engagement, actually improves your SEO. I have a friend at Google. He's the lead engineer in. I can't tell you his name because he would probably get fired if I told you what he admitted to me. But yes, when you run ads and if it's very relevant and has high engagement, that does impact your SEO. Why, if it's very relevant and has high engagement, that does impact your SEO? Why, because Google had to admit that the Chrome clickstream behavior data the actual engagement people watching videos for a long time is a clear signal for search, whether it's paid or not. Google still and they should it makes sense they should take into account behavioral signals. Now, if your content sucks and it's just ads that you're boosting, it might not help you. But if people stay and watch, yeah, why shouldn't Google take that as a signal? That's a legitimate signal, as long as it's not from bots or something, right?

Joeri: 19:18

Yeah, absolutely. I've also been seeing that if you boost content and it gets eyes and people maybe comment on it and it gets more reach. But also you need to be able to measure everything. Now, with the world changing, what is the best practice today, dennis, for metrics, when it comes to measuring the results of your efforts on now and content creation?

Dennis: 19:41

So we have a framework called MAA Metrics Analysis Action. This is a logical process to be able to troubleshoot and make smart recommendations instead of just like randomly doing lots of things that you heard someone else say. The metrics start with the business metrics things like sales and conversions, things that a CFO would care about, things on a balance sheet not number of clicks or views or ridiculous SEO metrics, but real business metrics. And then when you look at these other metrics like quality score and click-through rate and domain authority, those are all diagnostic metrics. The diagnostic metrics are in support of understanding why the key business metrics went up and down, because there's thousands of metrics that you could look at. You can generate thousands of different kinds of charts and bar charts and pie charts, but that's not what's it. You always start with the important business metrics revenue, cost, margin, cost per lead, those kinds of things and then you use secondary metrics to help you understand why did a metric go up or down? And then you go into analysis Analysis, which almost no one does Like Google Analytics. There's no analytics in Google Analytics, right? Anyone else analytics that you name? Any of these analytics, business analytics tools? There's no analytics, they just generate reports and charts. Absolutely yeah, analytics is understanding in a non-obvious way why did this number go up? Why did this campaign do better than this other campaign? How did this creative perform? Why is the competitor outranking us? Analytics is understanding why.

Dennis: 21:11

If you look at the same set of charts every week, that doesn't tell me why it's going to be a different set of data that answers that particular question. I need to look at something. Every time, I have a different question. I need a different set of data, and that requires, right now, a human to be able to do that. And then from that analysis, I then determine therefore, here, be able to do that. And then from that analysis, I then determine therefore, here's what I should do, and any action you take should be driven by that analysis. If it's action that's not driven by analysis, it's random, it may or may not work.

Dennis: 21:40

So we think of it as a hospital. Hospital comes in. They scan you Joeri, it looks like you have a broken shoulder. Oh, you have a good shot, because we scan the data, the blood, the x-ray, all of this. That's the metrics. The analysis is oh, it looks like you have a heart attack. It looks like. And then, based on that, the treatment plan is heart surgery or take this medication or go to bed because you're very tired, and so the idea of metrics analysis, action where you're grabbing all the vitals right, we're operating in a hospital, get all the vitals, you're diagnosing the problem, which requires some amount of equipment and expertise, and then the treatment plan.

Dennis: 22:17

Yeah, so if you ever go to the hospital they give you the treatment plan. But they always go through the and so we say prescription before diagnosis is malpractice. But the majority of people in social media and digital they go straight to the recommendation without any metrics. Yeah, taking medicine, maybe without If everyone takes this one pill. You should take the same pill too. Yes, but my grandma is taking this pill for this other thing and I have a different situation than her. Yeah, exactly.

Joeri: 22:41

And it's also in the action. You know what you do with it. Like you see, you have the data, because I had a business analytics firm before you have the data, because I had a business analytics firm before you have the data. You have information and then you get the knowledge, but then you need to take action on it because it's not because you understand, and then you need to continue to measure that, and now, with the AI today, we will be able to get more knowledge or maybe see trends that we couldn't see before and take action upon that. Yeah, so many exciting things happening. Denis, thank you so much for sharing this knowledge with you. Good to see you.

Dennis: 23:16

I've seen you on Zoom enough times, but it's good to see you for real, in real life. I'm not a robot. This is real.

Joeri: 23:22

This is real Denis Hu and guys me, I'm a connector. It was so great to see Denis Hu in Portugal and, Denis, hope to see you at another occasion.

Dennis: 23:31

Yeah, beyond Sintra. See you in San Diego? Yeah, I hope to see you guys Love to hear what you think about this.

Joeri: 23:37

Absolutely, Let me know. And what I always say at the end of my podcast episodes, this episode with Dennis was again. There was so much value in it. Every day, everywhere, the knowledge that Dennis shared can be useful. So share this episode with all your friends, your neighbors, other entrepreneurs. If you're not yet following the show, this is a really good moment to do this. If you haven't given me a review yet, as Dennis said, reviews are important. If you give me these five stars, I would reach an even bigger audience and, of course, I would like to see you back next time. Take care.