Show notes:

This podcast episode features an insightful discussion with Charlie Marchant, the CEO of Exposure Ninja. We discussed the impact of AI and SEO on the marketing landscape within the wedding industry and how to get your wedding business into AI search. As we navigate the complexities of AI search, we emphasise the necessity for wedding business owners to establish a coherent and transparent online presence, particularly regarding pricing. Furthermore, we explore actionable strategies that can enhance visibility across various AI platforms, and look at the importance of aligning website content with consumer expectations and search behaviours.

Exposure Ninja's YouTube

Charlie's LinkedIn

Time stamps:

00:18 - Introduction to Wedding Business Growth

07:27 - Understanding the Shift to AI in Search Marketing

21:32 - Navigating AI and SEO for Wedding Businesses

28:04 - Understanding AI and Pricing Strategies

43:51 - Navigating AI and Search Visibility

Are things I learned from my past experience and that is that everyone expects the person who's running the company to be calm all the time, always be calm, it doesn't matter what's happened, and to be positive, to keep the positive mindset, the motivation for everyone and the team as well.

I'm Becca Poutney, wedding business marketing expert, speaker and blogger, and you're listening to the Wedding Pros who Are Ready to Grow podcast. I'm here to share with you actionable tips, strategies and real life examples to help you take your wedding business to the next level.

If you are an ambitious wedding business owner that wants to take your passion and use it to build a profitable, sustainable business doing what you love, then you're in the right place. Let's get going with today's episode. Today I'm chatting with CEO of Exposure Ninja, Charlie Marchant.

They're passionate about sharing their knowledge with you. I first met Charli when we were both speaking at the UK Wedding Conference, so I'm looking forward to chatting with her on the podcast today.

Charlie, welcome to the podcast.

Hey Becca, thanks so much for inviting me. I'm so excited to finally be here.

It's an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast. We're going to be talking all things AI tech search, but for those listening and thinking, yikes, this might be over my head.

Bear with us because we're going to make this easy for you to understand and it's important that you don't have your head in the sand about it. You understand what's going on out there. So our promise to you today is that we're going to make it as easy for you to digest as possible.

But before we go there, Charlie, whenever I have a new guest on the podcast, I like to find out a bit more about them. I think it's important that people know who they're listening to. So obviously I gave a little bit in the intro, but what's your background?

So what did you do even pre exposure Ninja? Did you work in another sector? What did you do first? And how did you end up in this world of AI and tech search?

Wow. Pre Exposure Ninjas A long time ago. I've been there for 12 years, so don't try and guess my age.

But prior to that I actually did a lot of internships in marketing with film companies. So I worked at BBC Films.

I worked at Pitch House Office's head office for their marketing department as well, then moved to Taiwan, took a punt on doing something completely different, taught English as a second language in Taiwan, absolutely loved it, and then decided to jump back into marketing because I felt like that's where my true passions and my talents, if I'm really honest, actually lie. I also wanted to work remote so I could do a bit of traveling. So I had the absolute privilege of working freelance for a couple of years.

I was doing SEO content, digital PR type of work, Learned a lot of skills by starting a travel blog during that time as well.

Lived all over, all over Central America, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico and traveled around pretty much all of Latin speaking America which was a fantastic experience.

My Spanish is much rustier than I'd care to admit given the amount of time that I did spend living over there and then relocated back home to the uk, became full time employee at Exposure Ninja working in marketing and then worked my way up. So I worked as head of Content Marketing and Digital PR for the agency for a good number of years.

Then I was very much behind the scenes working as coo.

So operations side, scaling the business, scaling the profitability across departments, actually looking at growing our own marketing side as well, making sure the business functions smoothly and that all of our clients have the best possible experience that they could.

Because ultimately we work for our clients and then became CEO and have the pleasure of sharing everything that we know about SEO and AI search, which is very much our area of expertise, our specialism, our wheelhouse.

That's awesome.

I love hearing people's background even when you feel like you're going way back, because I know that we learn so much from the experiences that we live through, the things we do in our distant past. And Charlie, I let you into a secret. All the best people start out in TV and working for the BBC because that's my background too.

So if you go, that's where I started to in media and somehow we wind our way through this journey and end up where we are today.

Before we go into what you're doing today, I'd love to know, on reflection, do you think there's lessons learned, especially from that time of travel and being a freelancer that you think you now bring to business today?

Always lessons learned. I think a lot of my role as CEO people are never quite sure what a CEO actually does in their day to day and CEO roles vary so much.

But I think there's Some commonalities that are things I learned from my past experience and that is that everyone expects the person who's running the company to, to be calm all the time, always be calm, it doesn't matter what's happened. And to be positive, to keep the positive mindset, the motivation for everyone and the team as well.

And then just to share all of the amazing stuff that everyone in the company does. Which is one of my biggest pleasures, if I'm honest, is talking about the work that my team actually deliver day to day.

And I'm just so proud of seeing everything that they do.

So I think those are the kinds of lessons that I've learned from working in different businesses, freelance versus employee as well, is that actually you just want to be with someone who's calm, who's positive and who talks about the work that you do.

Amazing. I love that. So interesting. And you're right because a lot of times we think what does a CEO actually do? But you're right.

It's definitely, it's almost like being the business owner really at the top of the tree. It's the same kind of pressure where you've got to be the like happy face of everything and like the buck stops with you.

And actually sometimes we have to go and scream into a secret hole somewhere else where no one else can hear it because we still feel the pressure, but we're just not sharing it. We're not sharing it with other people. And yes, I definitely understand that as well.

So in a nutshell then explain to someone who maybe hasn't got a tech background, maybe hasn't even got a marketing background. In a nutshell, what does Exposure Ninja do for businesses?

Sure.

So we help businesses get to the top of Google, become more visible in ChatGPT, Gemini Perplexity and other AI models to ultimately get them more qualified leads for their business through their website thanks to their online marketing. So it's pretty much all of search marketing, things like SEO, AI search optimization, which has various different names at the moment.

Some people are calling it geo, which is Generative Engine Optimization. We call it AI Search just to keep life really simple and then ppc. So what's known as Google Ads and Meta Ads we also run as well.

And you're not just working within the wedding industry because lots of people I speak to on this podcast are very specifically wedding industry. You have clients across various different sectors, don't you?

Yes, we absolutely do. So predominantly we work for clients who are lead generation or service based businesses. They're trying to get More leads through their website.

We have a couple of e commerce clients as well, but we work across industry and we have done for over a decade. So we do work in the wedding industry fairly regularly as well.

But we also work across things like legal, financial, education, all of those different types of areas, which gives us a nice breadth of experience because our specialism is very much SEO and AI search. And doing that for any business who has a website that needs more leads.

Amazing. Okay, so we understand who you are, we understand what your background is and what you do day to day for some of your clients.

And one of the common trends that we've seen is a rise of AI features in the Google search results.

So a lot of businesses, if they looked in their Google Analytics in their search consol, what they actually started to see was less people coming through to the website, so lower clicks, but an increased number of impressions. If people were actually seeing answers from them in the AI overviews or seeing them in the search results still.

I've said ChatGPT first because at the moment it's the biggest AI chatbot. It's the one that's most popular that most people use.

But there are of course also Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Microsoft, Copilot, Grok, there's lots of different ones. And Google has been pushing back very aggressively about ChatGPT taking its market share. Their new model of Gemini, for example, is very well Loved.

And a lot of people think it's better than ChatGPT. In January this year, they've also made updates to their AI mode. They're testing ads in AI mode as well, which is really big, big news.

They're also testing in AI mode being able to buy directly. So if it's an E commerce business, you can actually make purchases directly in the results without navigating to the website.

So there's significant amounts of change going on and a huge amount of competition between ChatGPT and Google happening. And that's because people are not just searching in Google like they used to. Of course people are searching in.

Google is still the biggest search engine, but a lot of people have started shifting to ChatGPT and AI platforms as well, which means that the businesses we're working with have started to think about how do we optimize for all of these different search journeys. How are we thinking about how our business shows up and is visible in ChatGPT, not just Google?

Yeah, it's a fascinating shift.

And I think even when we reflect on our own habits, I always say to people, think about how you shop, how you search, because we are kind of representing the regular person. Even as business owners, we might be slightly ahead of, you know, people who aren't in business, but we are still having those consumer insights.

And I was thinking about my own way I've been working. So I've decided to opt for Claude at the moment. Don't know why I decided I liked it more than chatgpt. I like the little logo on the bottom.

It's pretty. I like. So I've started using Claude and it's interesting because when I want to find something, I now have a decision in my head.

And sometimes I'll reach for Claude and sometimes I'll reach for Google. And I think that's really interesting to think, okay, what, what is it that makes me want to make that decision?

So if I want a really detailed answer, I will go to Claude. If I want a quick, easy answer, I will still go to Google.

And I think, okay, I'm just one person, but actually probably lots of people are now living in that mindset where they don't go automatically to one, but depending on what they're searching for will depend on where they go. Is that what you're seeing as well?

Yeah, this is really, really true. A lot of people haven't just backed one horse or switched over completely from Google.

A lot of people actually do the same searches in Google and in ChatGPT, or they do something like have a conversation in their favorite AI chatbot like ChatGPT, and then when they're ready to actually make a decision, they might just go and type it into Google and go straight to the website. And so particularly that would be things like looking for a wedding venue.

They might ask lots of questions in ChatGPT because you can ask for much more detail. So instead of just like wedding venue Sussex, they can actually add context, like, this is my budget, these are the kind of dates I'm thinking about.

This is the, you know, the way I want the venue to feel or look. I want a kind of farmhouse style, that type of thing. They can give so much more context than you'd ever be able to type into the Google search bar.

So so much of that research phase goes on in ChatGPT. Sometimes there are links in these AI chatbots straight through to websites, but not always, which makes tracking very difficult at the moment.

So you can always track a percentage of what's coming from an AI chatbot, but not the full amount, depending on the type of answer it gives you.

So a lot of people do that in search, but then when they're thinking, oh, I've kind of got a top three from having this conversation with ChatGPT or Claude, and then they go to Google in order to get to and find the website. So at the moment, we're in this kind of strange shift where AI is becoming part of our normal search journey, but it hasn't taken over.

We're still used to going to Google, finding and going to navigate to the website the old way through the 10 blue links on the search engine results page. The other big difference, I think, is also demographics. We know that our younger generations by far are much happier to jump onto ChatGPT.

Claude, Gemini, perplexity. For them, it's much more normal. They've grown up with this kind of tech already with AI inbuilt in a lot of the structures that they already use.

So it's less of a switchover compared to millennials, boomers, everyone else. We've been using Google for decades, so moving away from Google is like almost a crazy thought.

But we're seeing everyone actually start to experiment, all demographics.

And what's interesting, again, is kind of coming to me as you're talking is that again, in my own way, I work as a very much a millennial.

I'm like, I think there's something in my head that trusts Google more than AI, even though they're probably both still going off the same systems, right at the back end. But it's like, oh, I'm going to ask Claude all of this information, but then I'm going to trust Google to tell me the opening hours.

I'm going to trust Google to send me the correct link. Because somewhere deep in my millennial brain, Google has built my trust, and I think they're telling me truth.

Whereas we're told AI can lie, AI might tell you lies. However, Google's also using AI.

So it's a ridiculous theory, but I bet there's a lot of people that have that similar instinct that Google can be trusted more.

Yeah. And I mean, Google algorithms are more sophisticated in general. They've been building them up for a lot, lot longer. But there are also.

We do also need to remember there are mistakes that happens in Google's AI as well.

If you're using Gemini, for example, owned by Google, it's a Google product, then it has the same risk as other AIs, where it will hallucinate quite often. If there's missing information about a business, for example, it's more likely to just make it up than it is to. It will never say, I don't know.

The AI tools are not programmed to say, I don't know the answer to this question. So they just do their best with the information they can find online.

But also Google's AI overviews, we see that make results from time to time as well. Google recently pulled back some AI overviews on certain types of queries because they were making mistakes.

But things like traditional search, the 10 blue links, the Google Maps listings, because we've used them for so long, we're so used to them, we just trust them. We trust them much more than we trust AI. But I think it's healthy to have a little bit of not too much trust for AI.

Yeah, I don't think we should trust any of these companies, really, because we know that ultimately they were all working for their own good and we're all just pawns in the game. But let's not go too deep down that rabbit hole.

So I do want to ask you a question, because sometimes I'm a bit skeptical when it comes to AI and teaching about AI, because, you know, it's a new thing, it's changing and evolving so rapidly and has done over the last couple of years.

And sometimes what I see is people popping up all over the Internet being like, here's how to get rich from AI search, here's how to make AI search work for you. And deep down, I think they don't really know what they're talking about because it's changing all of the time.

And I had a really interesting chat just with a friend who worked at Samsung about how to manipulate AI search. And he was like, if you believe you can manipulate AI search, then you need to think in a different way because there's different models.

And he ended up having this huge, big, long discussion.

He drew me a massive diagram and explained to me how if I can manipulate AI search, then all of the big players would be manipulating it to show their own results.

And it was an interesting conversation, but it did get me thinking, because actually, how do we teach this stuff when none of us really fully understand it? And is what's working in one model different to what's working in another model?

So having given you that big, long explanation, how do you see it from your position? How do we navigate teaching this without pretending we know it all?

From my perspective, I think the way we need to think about it is not so much as manipulating.

Because if you could manipulate it the same as with SEO and Google Search as well, then everyone would just be doing that and they'd be at the top of the search results. And in reality, optimizing for Google, optimizing for AI platforms is much more complicated than that.

And it's not so much about manipulating them as actually, how do I make sure that my website, the information online about my business and what we do, is the most accurate and the best that it can be for my customers, ultimately, because the customers are the people making purchases at the end of the day.

And our goals with Google, our goals with AI in particular, is that I will surface the correct information about our business that explains it to our customers in the way that we see ourselves. And that is not so much about manipulating.

It's about telling a really clear story about who you are, what you do and who you do it for, and doing that both on your own website content and on other websites.

So I'm talking about doing primary, like when you're featured in the news, if you have reviews online, if you're in wedding directories, for example, all of those things also feed into what AI says about your business. All of those things also feed into how well or not you rank on Google as well.

So there are similarities across both of them in terms of tactics, in terms of how we're teaching it. I think we have to realize that these are evolving models. This is not a fixed system, but we know this from Google Search.

Google has multiple algorithm updates every year. It's Not a fixed system.

A lot of the classic tactics and techniques still work, but things that worked 10 years ago in Google don't really work the same way now because the systems are always updated to be more sophisticated. And that's because they're trying to share the right answers to the person who is searching.

It's trying to actually give them the result that they want so the systems will always update. And we have the same with AI.

These systems are even newer than the Google search algorithm, so they're constantly being evolved, new models being released by OpenAI by Gemini, which is owned by Google, to try and give the best possible answers it can.

And so I think when we're teaching and thinking about AI search and how we show up, we should really be teaching and thinking about how we want our business to be known to our customers and then looking at how we communicate that online in a way that is useful to sharpen AI. But understanding that is going to change over time. It's not a fixed thing. Same as getting to the top of Google. You might get to position one.

You don't get it forever. You're there for a certain amount of time. You do more work and optimize to try and hold that position.

I think that's a really wholesome, helpful way for people to frame it. I think.

I think with anything, we have to be careful when someone tries to give you a quick fix because ultimately we know as marketers, there is never a quick fix. And there's so much nuance, so much change, so much different players in the game.

And actually when we go back 15, 20 years in SEO, people were trying to sell you a quick fix of, you know, pay this money and we'll put backlinks on 20 bazillion websites across the Internet. And all that happens when you try and find a quick fix is Google realize and just change their algorithm and it hurts you.

And we still have this now, we still have people exactly of you, said Becca, buying from what we call like link farms, loads and loads of spammy links, which probably 15 years ago was relatively useful in the short term. A lot of websites who bought those spammy links had a little like uplift and then immediately crashed off of a cliff. But people still do that now.

People are still trying to sell that as SEO now. And it's really, really unhelpful. And there's, there's some commonalities that we also see with AI, things like Listicles, for example.

AI tends to love them and is more likely to surface lists of you know, the best wedding venues in London, for example, because it likes that content, it's easy for it to read, it's easy for it to break down.

Eventually though, if people tried to manipulate that by publishing 100 different listicles and your business is always number one, AI is going to solve this problem, it's going to clean it up. It's not going to work long term.

So these sort of short term manipulation tactics, they are very, very short term if you can even get them to work for quite a lot of effort if we're honest. And actually the best way is thinking about positioning content. What your website says, what other people say about you, amazing.

Okay, so let's get practical then. So we know that wedding business is listening, thinking, right, we need to do something, we need to set ourselves up for the best chance in AI.

So what are a couple of practical things that wedding businesses, venues, suppliers could be doing right now to help themselves show up better in the AI search results?

Okay, love this question. I've got three, three ps, three pillars for this for wedding businesses. The first is positioning.

Very, very clear positioning on your website about what you do and don't hold back in putting it in the titles. So if you're the best wedding venue in Sussex, great.

If you've won an award for it and you can say that even better if you're actually trying to go after a more niche audience, you know, you're a farmhouse style wedding venue, whatever it is, decide your positioning, decide who your target customers are and make it very, very clear on your website. The reason for this is that positioning is incredibly important. When people search in AI, that is because search and AI is personalized.

It knows us, it starts to learn who we are, we can, we can turn this off. But most people just have their settings as they automatically are.

So it's going to start to learn like, oh, Charlie, you're 30, you live in East Sussex, all of this information about me and then it's going to serve me content that it thinks is most relevant to me and the kinds of things that I care about.

Which means we need to know our customer Personas really well because we want to be targeting the people that we actually want coming to our business that we consider qualified leads for us, that we have a service that we know they're going to love. So making that positioning really clear. The other thing on positioning is, is it must not be different on other websites.

So what you say about yourself on your own website, that's just a fraction of the pie that AI looks at, there's the whole rest of the pie, which is what other websites say about you and how they describe you. So things like even what your Pinterest board says about your business at the top.

So if it says, you know, my wedding venue is this kind of wedding venue, and your website says something completely different, AI reads all of these different descriptions of your website across lots of different sources. If they're different, it's very confusing because AI then has to figure out what's the most common and surface that instead.

So you want to be very clear and you want to update that across all of your social profiles, everything that you own, anywhere that you're referenced in online articles, PRs, review sites, all of that stuff is incredibly important.

Okay, so one clear positioning statement that describes who you or your businesses are or is, and then use it everywhere. So for me, I say Everywhere. I'm the UK's leading wedding business marketing expert. So as long as I'm using that everywhere, then that's going to be.

That's how you become known by people, but also by AI.

Yeah, and for us, so Exposure Ninja, we're a digital marketing agency. We specialize in SEO and AI search. And you will see that everywhere and AI will start to understand and surface that information about your business.

But the other important reason for this positioning is it then puts it into relevant answers.

So if someone's not searching the name of your business, which most people aren't, when they're first looking for something, especially in the wedding sector, they're just thinking, I need a really good wedding dj, I need a really good wedding venue. I need to buy a wedding dress dress. They're not thinking first of the brand.

So their searches begin with something like best wedding dresses for X or best wedding venues in this location under this budget.

So if your positioning is correct, AI, and this is true of Google too, understands what kind of results to surface you in, because it's got all of that. Second, and this one is particularly specific to the wedding industry.

And Becca, I think you're going to have thoughts, is pricing, especially when it comes to venues. Because AI, more often than not, if someone is searching for a wedding venue, they've got a budget roughly in mind.

And you can bet that they're going to add that as a qualifying statement.

When they type into AI, they're going to be saying under 10 grand, under 20 grand, whatever it is that they roughly have in mind as a budget for the pricing that they want. AI will very often for wedding businesses surface information from a Pricing page.

And I'm not talking images, I'm talking text on a web page that gives some kind of pricing and that it could say from X it can have different columns of different pricing for specific days, for bank holidays, different seasons, whatever it is. I will read that and surface it if it gets asked about pricing. And it will be asked about pricing if you don't have pricing information.

It's therefore less likely to surface you against competitors who do.

I couldn't love this more. You know how much I love people having transparent pricing on their website.

So anything that backs it up I love and I think it's important because you're right.

And actually sometimes when I search on AI, even if I don't mention pricing, it still gives me a grid with rough pricing in it, even if I haven't specifically asked for that. So it obviously sees it as a key factor.

Okay, deeper question because when I talk about putting pricing on websites, I know people come back with me, oh, I'm always bespoke. And so I say to them there's different ways of putting pricing on your website.

You could have a from price, you could have a range of prices, you could have package prices. With AI, is there a particular type of pricing way they want to see it presented or do we not know that yet?

No, AI generally is just interested in seeing very like clear pricing. So the simpler to understand the better for AI. True for humans too in my opinion.

And it also would prefer to read it in text so either in a table or in a very clear text format on the website.

I know that some wedding businesses love to have like really beautiful graphics that have like the, the prices written on that are just uploaded as JPEGs.

It's much better if you can actually just put it as a text table and format it nicely on the page because AI will just read the backend code of the page and then the text on the page from relevant sections as well. Other really important thing of the structure of that page is having a heading that makes it clear that this is the pricing.

So it, it can say whatever it needs to say. This is the pricing for bank holidays, this is the pricing for summer season and so on in that kind of structure.

That's most important in terms of whether it's from pricing, a total package price, a price band or if there's add ons that doesn't matter as much.

Or again, do we not know?

I would say the clearer pricing is more likely to be favored because AI will anchor something like £200 to. If someone gave a budget of 2 to, to £300 versus not necessarily showing that business in.

Someone who says they've got a budget of 500 pounds is more likely to show them something for their budget price because that's what they've specifically said. The other side of that is not related to AI. You also don't want to undersell yourself, right?

If you put a from pricing, people anchor to the lower price.

So if you're from £200 but you're trying to sell at 500, you've got a bit of an uphill struggle to prove the value of why you're selling to them at 500. But sometimes people get sold that same thing at 200.

So in that kind of sense, I would think about making prices more fixed or at least banded so that it's very, very clear what you're actually selling at that kind of package. Because AI also won't want to give people something significantly cheaper than what they've asked for.

Because when someone's asking for a certain price point, if they're asking for a thousand, but there are offers around 200 or 500, there's a quality assumption, right, that someone believes they will be getting more quality or more included, even a quantity for a thousand. And so AI is trying to match that as closely as possible.

And I think that's really interesting because, you know, the old way of people thinking in the wedding industry, going back sometime and some people still fix that, is, well, I'll give them a low price to get them on the call. And once I get them on the call, I can up upsell them.

But actually with the new way of searching in, the new way of people looking in, the transparency, you could end up with a lower quality of lead because instead of bringing people in that you can then upsell to, you're going to bring people in at the bottom of the pile who are searching for the lowest possible price. And actually you could be losing out on the people that would actually pay you a decent amount of money.

So the moral of this story is be as transparent in your pricing as you possibly can and have it clear on your website, no downloadable brochure to get the pricing. Because AI can't read that. Get it on a pricing page, Charlie. Yeah, I love it.

And my top tip for that as well is if you're wondering what AI is going to say and if it's showing up what kind of pricing it likes and finds clear, just search it yourself, just do it. Don't do it on your already logged in account, do it on an incognito tab on your web browser to a free version of the account.

Because that will just give you a bit of an idea of what many people see more broadly and then see what businesses it actually surfaces of what pricing it gives about them. And do it for your own price range, do it for your own sector, for your own price range.

Do it in the kind of query that you would put into ChatGPT and you want to be top of, do it for that and see what the pricing pages actually look like for those. Because it will, it will tell you what direction to go in.

And can you also search your own? So could I say, you know, how much does a cake cost from X company to see whether where it's getting its information from?

Because I've done that before where I've then found that ChatGPT or whatever is pulling information that I'd forgotten was on my website website, which then prompts me to go and change it.

I would 100% do that because the other big risk that will happen is it's not pulling information from your website, it's decided to pull it from elsewhere.

If someone wrote in a review that, you know, they paid £150 for the cake and then AI references that instead of referencing your website, that's not what you want at all. Especially because hopefully for most businesses our prices are rising annually, that is going to become old information.

So then we need to find ways to give it fresh, relevant information that it's more likely to reference.

Okay, very quickly, before we go on to the third P, then if someone does that search and realizes it's pulling irrelevant information from somewhere else, what can we as the business owner do to try and get our showing instead of that?

Yeah, there's two things.

The first is making sure that your own website is incredibly clear and that it's using relevant text like relevant language, the kinds of things that people would be searching for around the pricing. The second thing is, depending on what it is, you can go and try and sort it out with that website owner.

So, for example, in like a clutch profile description, you can probably get that changed because it's about your business in a review, it's going to be a lot trickier to get that changed, but you potentially could. If it's like a news website or a blogger, you can definitely get that changed by just speaking to them and saying, hey, we've updated our pricing.

Could you either remove that line or could you add in our new information?

And another quick question on this, just because it's popping into my head, I know on some of the big directory sites they have like from prices, and often people are told keep that really low so that it shows you in more searches. But presumably then I could pull from that and use that as the source rather than your actual pricing.

Yeah, and it does.

Which is probably one of the key areas to consider because directories are so influential in the wedding sector, both in general, but also for AI as well.

So if you are seeing that, then it's definitely worth going and fixing that to make sure that your price is actually the kind of customer you want coming in, rather than just your lowest low scraping of the barrel price.

Okay, that's really helpful. Right, let's do the third P then. Otherwise we'll never get to it. The third P. The third P. The

third P is your pr. And I'm speaking more here about your digital pr.

So anyone who has been investing in SEO, hopefully has already been doing some kind of pr, some kind of link building, not the type we were speaking about earlier, where you buy 20,000 links from a link farm. PR when it comes to AI is a little bit different.

So when it came to Google search and wanting to get to positions 1, 2, 3, really high on Google, the link building that used to be done, the digital PR that used to be done, is more generalized. We're just going after all of the sites that we think Google will think is authoritative.

With AI, we have the opportunity to actually reverse engineer what AI thinks is worth referencing, which is great news because it's actually much clearer what AI is likely to reference. The key point is that the sites that Google values and the sites that different AI platforms values is different.

They don't have the same algorithm, they're not working the same way. They have different preferences for sites that they usually reference.

So, for example, AI might be much more likely to Reference something that was published on a LinkedIn article or a medium article. Whereas Google might place much more emphasis on something that showed up in a really big news publication. Just an example.

It varies per business with PR.

What you want to do when it comes to AI, make some of those searches in ChatGPT or the AI platform that you're thinking about optimizing for and see what gets referenced.

So AI will give you what's called sources, a little bit like if you wrote a dissertation at university, and then at the end you have to give all of the places that you quoted, all of the books and articles that you quoted. AI answers does exactly the same. And this, you can do this in chat, GPT, Gemini, Perplexity, all of them. And you have to open sources.

So in ChatGPT gives you an answer and it's right at the bottom. Then you click the sources and it will give you a whole panel of all of the websites that it referenced in that answer.

If you are not referenced in those websites, you will not be showing up in that answer. It's highly unlikely.

So if you make a search, for example, for the best wedding venues in London and you're thinking, all of my competitors are here and I'm not here, I'm not on this list, it's probably because you're not cited in any of the sources that AI is actually pulling from.

So that could be all kinds of articles, you know, that could be be Cosmo articles, it could be best of lists in the Telegraph, it could be something that a blogger posted on their review blog. It could be a wedding directory rankings.

AI generally looks across multiple different website sources to try and try and amalgamate the information and get like trends to understand. Rather it doesn't usually just cite one source, so you'll usually see multiple ones. Then the PR side, this is where the PR side comes in.

You want to be being placed ideally in those articles, if you can. So contacting the editors saying, hey, is there a way that I could get added to this list?

Neither do humans, neither does Google.

Love it. Okay, so we've got our three P's, and I think that's incredibly helpful.

I think for most people, that's going to give them something to work on, because like we said earlier, it's not a quick fix. This is a bigger process that we need to think about. And actually we've got to think about it in all those different areas.

But there will be stuff in there for every single business to do. Now here's a question for you. I'm gonna, I'm gonna be honest with you, Charlie, because last year this was on my agenda.

So obviously, as a marketeer, a bit like you, we're always trying to be ahead of everyone else in terms of thinking stuff, testing this stuff, looking at it. And one of my big tests last year was right when people search in AI search, I want my podcast to turn up.

When they're asking for a wedding business podcast, I want my podcast to turn up. And so my focus last year was like, how, how do I make this happen? How can I do this? How can I get on list?

And I did what you said, that people is a short term fix because it worked right now because there was no best business wedding business podcast list. So I just made one on my own website.

Now, it did help that I won the award for best business podcast of the year because then that gave me the pr, which actually backed what I'd also said. Now, what's interesting, number one, I'd like to know, okay, am I going to get penalized for using that list?

Or if no list exists, can we just have a list on our own website in the short term to give us that boost? So that's my first question. And then my second question. Well, actually, let's do the first one first and then I'll do the second question.

So lists aren't inherently bad. I think what becomes bad is trying to create like hundreds of different lists on your website or wherever on the Internet.

You're doing that to try and get in multiple things.

But if you are a top wedding business podcast, which you are, for example, you want to be in those lists that should already have been in mind as your PR strategy in general. So anyone, even if it's not you, anyone writing a list of the best wedding business podcasts you want to Be in there, right, Becca?

And it's not made up like you are one of the best wedding business podcasts. Winning an award is the perfect kind of accolade to also do well in those lists. So yes, you can absolutely publish a list.

Don't start creating hundreds of different lists on your website and trying to spam into every best kind of category that you can actually focus on what you do and what you are best at. And then there's the other side, which is the PR side.

You definitely want to go after getting yourself featured in lists of the best wedding podcasts. And sometimes that will happen naturally. Like people will have seen the award, they'll have heard about you, they might have seen you at an event.

For example, I saw you at the UK Wedding conference. So they learn about you and then naturally that PR happens. That's ideal. We love that.

But there is also the side of PR where journalists, for example, ask for comments from people in this sector and you become known as an expert in the sector because you give comments to the journalists. There's a great platform called Quoted. I'm not affiliated in any way. That's Q W O T E D. They like to make it really complicated to spell.

So it's hard to find for your pr. But journalists there, they put out requests, for example.

Also putting yourself forward to go in articles where you know that those kinds of magazines do best wedding business podcast roundups. All of that stuff is great PR and you should absolutely do it.

The thing you want to avoid is creating hundreds of spammy articles to try and manipulate AI's best of lists. That is probably what long term will be penalized. But listicles have existed for years.

We've always had best of posts and articles, so absolutely publish those. Okay.

And ultimately you do have to share your competitors, right?

And that so you are being helpful to AI because actually I think my list of that I've compiled is quite good because all the other people I put on the list I rate as well.

The other thing I would say is do put yourself at the top though. Don't put your competitor first on the list. And you do have to be okay with having a list of other competitors on your own website.

So not everyone's going to feel comfortable doing that. The other option is to look at also publishing that somewhere else.

So that could be you creating that article and then pitching it to someone else if you feel like it would be more relevant on a different website instead. That is very commonplace, very well practiced. Or if you have like a really strong LinkedIn profile.

For example, you're building your LinkedIn, you could publish it on your LinkedIn as a personal post from you as well if you don't want to have it on your website.

Okay, secondary question then because I think this is where a lot of people get unstuck. How do we know whether the work we're putting in is actually working? So I know last year that that was my goal.

I can do an incognito search on Google because I understand that better and search what's the best business wedding business podcast and mine now comes up and guess where it quotes from my list. However, AI everyone gets different results so I can say to my members, everyone search this and everyone comes up with a different number one.

So how do we actually know whether what the effort that we're putting up in to doing this work for AI is actually seeing any success if it's actually working?

I love this question so much. Firstly, I hate to break it to everyone, but Google also personalizes some of the results, right? Especially if you're a location based business.

One of the biggest differentiators Google does is decide your location and show you different information based on location. Probably doesn't really affect you, Becca, because you podcast across the whole of the uk.

Anyone who's running a wedding venue or is a DJ or is a makeup artist, focus on a very specific locality.

Even if that's the Southeast Google's already personalizing against you for, that's kind of fine because we don't want to be in the wrong areas, right? We want to do business in the areas that we can actually serve. So okay, not the end of the world, but it does also.

It is also starting to personalize based on preferences. They now have AI mode, which is another version of the browser. So it's a fully AI experience.

If you look at the top of your Google browser, where you see news, images, shopping, you'll see AI mode as well. That is also personalizing. The more and more it knows about you long term their expectation is that will be personalized even more.

Even based on your where you've been, where you walk to on Google Maps, what you bought, what it sees from your Gmail, all sorts of things. Personalization is going to be big for Google and AI.

Getting to your actual question though, which was okay, we know ChatGPT and other AI results are really personalized per person and we know that we want to go after our target customers so that's fine, but how do we know we're showing up and how do we know if there's any impact of this? Firstly, Google Analytics, you can split out in your Google Analytics to see traffic and conversions.

So form fills or phone calls, for example, from your website that came from AI. And you do that. Unfortunately, you have to do it yourself because Google doesn't want to give you all that information naturally.

But you can create a custom channel group to do that and then you can use the URLs for ChatGPT Gemini Perplexity to split out that traffic. So then you can see, okay, you know, 5% of my traffic actually came from AI or oh, actually I'm getting quite a lot of conversions fair.

From AI platforms. That will show you a decent chunk.

Not everything, as you gave in your example of how you search earlier, Becca, not everything has a click directly from AI. Some people will just copy and paste, go into Google and search. The business that there's not so easy to track, unfortunately.

So that's great because what we ultimately care about is how many leads are coming through our website and are those leads actually good? So we can see how many of those are coming from AI just with our Google Analytics. If you use Looker Studio reports, even easier.

You can also segment that in there if you're the kind of business that has that in your marketing. Same if you use Adobe analytics, which is a bit more advanced.

Then are we showing up positions one, position two, position three when we're searching for, you know, best wedding venues in London, that's what we also want to know. There is a way to track this and there are lots of new tools that are exploding onto the scenes for tracking this.

So with our traditional SEO, there are tools like SEMrush and SE ranking which show you if your positions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, whatever. On Google for AI, there's different platforms that do this. There's one called profound, which is tribrofound.com.

there's one called Peak AI P E E C A I. There is one called Scrunch AI. There's one called Clear Scope.

All of these tools essentially do a very similar thing and they show you for the words that you're tracking, the prompts, the queries.

So Best Wedding Business podcast, in your example, Becca, they show you where you're showing up because they run that search multiple times every day to then get a position to understand how visible you actually are in AI. So there is a way to track your AI visibility as well.

Exciting. Okay, the geek in me, some people. We've lost some people now, right? But for me, I'M like, okay, I need to go and find these tools.

And I think it's incredibly interesting. I know you have a lot of resources yourselves with your YouTube, your podcasts. Do you have any kind of tutorial videos?

If I wanted to know how to set up a custom channel group, for example, like, can I go find a video about that on YouTube, either from you or someone else?

Oh, you'll absolutely be able to find that. Yeah.

And on our YouTube channel, we publish all sorts of videos around how to actually track how well you're doing in ChatGPT, how to set up these tools so that you actually have tracking that's useful to you, and how to know what AI is driving for your business in terms of. Of conversions, traffic, and ultimately revenue.

Amazing, right? I will make sure that we link to your YouTube channel in the show notes so that people can go and check out.

Because I was watching a few of the videos yesterday and I mean, there's huge scope, there's loads of videos. Not all of them will be relevant to everyone, but it's worth going and having a look because there's a great resource there.

Charlie, I could talk to you all day.

I've got far more questions than we possibly have time for, so maybe I'll have to get you to come back for another episode towards the end of the year when we know that the AI algorithm will have changed again. But in the meantime, if someone has to do one thing, they can only do one thing today to help with their search.

In AI in their wedding business, what's the one thing you would say do this today?

The one thing I would do is make sure your website is extremely clear about who your business is and what it does and who it's for. Make your positioning statement of your business really clear and make sure it's in the title on your homepage. Saying what you do.

Don't try and be clever. Literally say what it is that you

do and use it everywhere else as well. Instagram, TikTok, everywhere.

Yeah, yeah. Make sure you're really happy with the way the, like the one sentence description of what you do.

Make sure you're happy with it and you love it and then use it everywhere.

Love it, love it, love it. Okay, everyone's got some homework now.

For some of you, the geekier ones like me, that want to go into the data, you've got some more advanced homework for everyone else.

Even if you do just one thing, get that positioning statement right, that's helpful in your marketing anywhere, because if you use it all the time people start to repeat it back to you and then they understand who you're for as well.

Now, Charlie, I always have my podcast, every episode with the same question which I'm going to pose to you now, which is in business, what's one thing you wish you'd known sooner in business?

One thing I wish I'd known sooner.

I think the one thing that I wish I'd known sooner is that if you stay calm in moments of panic, stress, change, and you can think logically about them, that puts you so far ahead of competitors who are panicking when there are huge changes and shifts that happen. I think an AI search is the perfect example of it. Our initial reaction is like, everything's changing. What am I gonna do? This is.

I don't know anything. I feel like an imposter. What if I don't have enough knowledge? This all seems very technical. Don't let your mind spiral there at all.

Just think very logically. Stay calm. Where are my leads coming from? Where is my traffic coming from? Is that changing?

How am I going to manage this and how am I going to do it before my competitors who are still panicking about it? And that's true of everything, not just this. If you can keep clear headed, then you already are on the front foot.

So true. The people that get panicky and just moan about it to everyone else end up getting left behind. And the people that stay calm take action. Go ahead.

Exactly. But we so easily fall into it. Charlie, this has been a fantastic conversation.

Thank you for breaking this down for us in such a simple, easy to understand way. If people want to find out more about you, about Exposure Ninja, where's the best places for them to go?

Best places to go is our YouTube channel.

We have an absolutely huge fan base, over 100k YouTube followers because we put out amazing videos and podcasts every week about SEO, marketing and AI search and try and break, break it down if you want to find me. Personally, I am very keen on LinkedIn so you can find me just by typing Charlie Marchant into LinkedIn and I'm more than happy to take questions.

My favorite thing to do all day is talk about AI search and SEO. So if there's anything you want to ask, drop me a message on LinkedIn and we can have a chat.

Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time and I'm sure we will reconnect and do more together soon.

So much for having me.

Becca, what a fantastic conversation. That is one of the best conversations I've had about AI in a long time because it was down to earth.

There was no quick fixes, but it also made sense and there's practical applications for all of you to take away. And if you take away nothing else, it backs up the fact you need absolute price transparency on your website.

Don't get overwhelmed by this stuff, but put the work in and try and understand it to put yourself in the best position.

And why not go now and search some questions about yourself on your preferred AI platform and see what the sources are and see what the results are that come back. I'll see you next time.