Andrea Katen on Why AI Says 'Prove It' While Google Lets You Claim Anything

Jordan Lally:0:00
Welcome back to the [High Ticket AI Systems] Podcast where we talk about sales, marketing, client acquisition, AI, and everything in between. Everyone, please welcome for a very special Mr. And Mrs. Dan and Andra Capeton. Dan and Andra, how are you guys doing?

Andrea:0:18
Great, thanks for having us today. Yeah, great, thank you.

Jordan Lally:0:24
Absolutely perfect. Now for those of you got for everyone listening that does not know the company or the brand or the names yet. Can you please describe what you guys do at a very high level? How you guys help businesses grow?

Andrea:0:40
Well, we help you get seen in AI searches. And our goal is to put you in front of your customers when and where they're searching. We got started with this because I had previously been in marketing in various roles from oil and gas to an agency. And I just kind of came across this little niche and decided, you know what? This is what I really want to dive into and focus on.

And so from there, a vanity was born.

Jordan Lally:1:16
No, I love that. And side note, I'm going to have a ton of questions on how this actually works. If you don't want to give all the sauce on today's podcast makes total sense. Maybe afterwards you like everyone could connect. And cause I'm actually looking into this for my own company. I think a lot of individuals are utilizing LLM for search engines, post to Yahoo or Google, obviously. Right. So I'm very excited to dive in.

How long have this, when did you make this pivot? I it makes sense as to why you pivoted, but when did you make this pivot to be exact?

Andrea:1:54
started about 13, almost 14 months ago for me. was actually part of the business is consulting and I do oil field, really oil and gas, offshore drilling is where I was at at the moment. AI came into the organization and I noticed that it was trailing everything that I was doing and eventually it ended up taking my role there at the organization. So from there, my wife had the marketing company, but I started to... kind of morph and bring it together.

Jordan Lally:2:29
Gotcha, gotcha. So definitely sounds like a perfect duo, a perfect team. How do you guys divvy up responsibility in terms of like the business, if you don't mind me asking? Because first and foremost, I want to say it's super freaking cool that you guys are obviously husband and wife and you own a business together and you guys are both deeply involved. That is a dream of mine. It really is.

The last girl I dated wanted nothing to do with it. She was a genius in her own way. But maybe this next go around I can find somebody who wants to partake in the business. So how do you guys do it? How do you guys divvy up responsibilities? See all that fun stuff.

Andrea:3:07
Well, it's definitely had its challenges. We actually fight over who is supposed to be doing most of the sales because we both hate sales. So we kind of divvy it up. But like I'm a diplomat with the local chamber of commerce. So I'm in the local area. I'm more out in front of people. And then he does a lot of sales calls though.

So we, on the sales side, kind of help both do those. I'm more on the administration side though, in the account management. So he'll reel the clients in. And then I just make sure that, you know, we get all their I's dotted and T's crossed and help deliver on, you know, deliver on their packages.

I kind of more enjoy the strategy piece of it myself.

Jordan Lally:4:03
From a business standpoint, what do you think?

Jordan Lally:4:08
Absolutely. Absolutely. I love high level conversations. Another reason why I started the podcast. I love strategy talk, especially with different businesses where I actually have to think about how to execute and actually help them get results. know, it's, think everyone likes a challenge, but where I was going with that initially was what do you guys think is actually more important? Kind of a trick question. We'd love to. to your insights on this. What's more important, bringing in new business or retaining the current clients that you guys have?

Andrea:4:43
cool.

I say retaining because there'll be a great referral source for new sales.

I would say you still got to churn. always got to watch the churn and you always got to be hustling.

Jordan Lally:4:56
Okay, and Dan?

Andrea:5:02
Can you hear me?

Jordan Lally:5:04
I love that. I did that on purpose. I'm sure you guys can tell, but so I'll make an argument for both. Okay. Without sales and marketing, you have no business. Okay. If zero people know your product exists and you have a zero freaking percent conversion mechanism, doesn't matter how good the product is or how good you are at keeping the client. You're not going to have any clients, right? So obviously sales and marketing, vitally important. On the flip side to that, the amount of

Andrea:5:17
Absolutely.

Jordan Lally:5:32
revenue a company can generate by retaining one client is substantial. There's a substantial difference between the new acquisition of a client versus a 12 month retention of a client. So I wanted to throw that out there in the world to see what you guys said. Both have its place. Both have its place. Now for me personally, I'm a sales and marketing guy. I'm not going to lie.

Jordan Lally:6:02
So I feel like you and I, Dan, we can definitely relate on that. Okay, cool. Let's see. I know you guys said you work with local.

Andrea:6:08
Yeah, I like it. I don't like the upcoming part. I like the strategy.

Jordan Lally:6:18
My mistake. When you say strategy, could you give us some examples or maybe one specifically when you like recently worked on a strategy with the client or even internally?

Andrea:6:31
Well, for me, got, I saw a framework developed out of this process. So it's really about the AI piece is you still got to do your fundamental baseline baseline of SEO, but it's SEO plus, right? Cause you got GEO and AI SEO is kind of a hybrid mixture, but it's all boils down to the authority is a major piece of it. Structure of your content. meeting your website and how it will be interpreted by that AI. And then the clarity of what you actually do and the visibility piece is the overlap in between those three major areas.

Andrea:7:14
And that's called what I call the AI visibility framework, right? It sets the tone for what we're doing.

Jordan Lally:7:15
Got you, Duhatsin.

Andrea:7:22
So if you're not mentioned in the right places, you're strongly signaled in the right places, meaning you could be, let's use Yelp as an example versus Google reviews. Google's the major player. You're get a little more uplift from the Google than you are from the Yelp, right, as an example. So you gotta be signaled in the right place depending on your business model. So it's really fun to look like in a manufacturer. You have multiple things you gotta worry about. Not only they're their main brand, but then you got to look at all their individual products that they want to own and dominate the market with. Does that make sense?

Jordan Lally:7:59
100%, absolutely. With the triangle that you presented earlier, might be a tough question. What do you feel like is the most important out of those three that you listed?

Andrea:8:16
I'm going to say authority. So what AI is doing is it's shortlisting what I call shortlisting, but it's taking 20 people in a conversation piece of a particular business model. And it's saying based on the authority ranking and freshness and some other key factors, right? It's squeezing that list down and it's only giving us a handful or less people that it's showing in the summaries or the overviews.

Jordan Lally:8:47
How does one increase their authority via online or within online presence?

Andrea:8:56
That's the interesting piece. That's where you can make your money in this particular segment is knowing based on the particular industry, the customer, you got to hit those particular signal zones for AI and what it wants, not what you think it wants. So you got to do a lot of testing to find those particular places. And it is 100 % industry related because...

Jordan Lally:9:16
Mmm.

Andrea:9:21
You can look at, a local florist versus a private security company. They're going to be listed in completely different spaces, but still Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X, you know, all those normal places, but it's all those extra like industry specific rooms that they need to be in as well.

Jordan Lally:9:48
I did hear about that, that because of those backlinks in like you said, the industry specific rooms, because those industry specific rooms or websites have been around for such a long time, that domain authority is really dominant, right? How, you don't have to answer this from the pod, because again, this is your secret sauce.

How does one actually go into the back end of an LLM and do AISCO though? Like how in the world does that even, like how does that happen? You know what I mean?

Andrea:10:25
We may have talked that one offline, but there are some tricks that you can do to see what's going on a little bit. And it's not real getting too deep in the code or anything, but you can literally see. And it depends on what platform they're on. If WordPress, Wix, there's, different things that you've got to do depending on what platform or what CMS it's built on.

Jordan Lally:10:33
Okay.

Jordan Lally:10:46
Okay, understood. For local service businesses, I know a couple of clients internally. They work in like HVAC or maybe not solar anymore, but like roofing and pest control. A lot of these guys utilize go high level for their CRM. I also utilize it internally among other softwares as well, but from like a website hosting and like a pipeline tracker, et cetera, CRM, right? We use GHL.

Andrea:11:06
Yeah.

Jordan Lally:11:16
Are you guys allowed to do the same thing, AISCO, within GHL?

Andrea:11:23
Yes, so we don't actually do a majority of the work in there, but we do like the tracking and the reporting in there. Each one of our clients, that's how we track their statistics and their progresses in GHL.

Jordan Lally:11:45
Gotcha. Okay, cool.

Andrea:11:45
Claude can be your friend. If you mix the two together, can be...

Jordan Lally:11:51
clock and be my friend.

Jordan Lally:11:56
Yeah, no, Claude is definitely my friend. Claude's my bestie, not just my friend. That most of all is my bestie. Yeah, Claude.

Andrea:11:56
with Go High Level.

Andrea:12:02
Yeah, I like being target a little too early.

Jordan Lally:12:06
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I absolutely love Claude. Essentially, as long as a software has an MCP, couldn't tell you what that stands for, but as long as a software has that in an API key, you can get all of these softwares to talk to each other. And that is how internally we utilize like full scale autonomous AI agents. for multiple different parts within the business. mean, like for outbound sales, for creating content, for client retention, like there was literally so many things you can do with cloud code and all the MCPs I just listed off, et cetera. It's, it's the world is changing. Business is changing at such a rapid rate and you guys are positioning yourself in the perfect area, in my opinion, with the new wave of AI because local service businesses, right? Like a florist. or a roofing company. Have you ever spoke to a roofing company? God bless them. They know nothing about marketing, nothing about SEO. They know roofs and roofs only most of them, right? You know what I mean? So yeah.

Andrea:13:10
Yeah. to do with the commercial side they think a little better

Andrea:13:21
They all want billboards. That's what they want. They want billboards. Yeah, the commercial roofers, they tend to have a little better understanding of marketing spend.

Jordan Lally:13:21
The commercial side?

Jordan Lally:13:28
But-

Jordan Lally:13:34
Do you think because they're at a different revenue range so they can take on bigger risk than a residential roofing company?

Andrea:13:45
Absolutely. think that's the big key to what we're doing. Like I said earlier, it's the standard SEO you got to do, but more. It's more work than we used to have to do to rank you in Google. Right. And you just, you can't short circuit the, you can't hack or short circuit. call it the, the algorithm with the AI, because it literally is a black and white reader. It's only looking for what it's looking for and it can't, it won't reason beyond that. So if you're not structured right.

It's going to move on and just drop you out of the conversation. I think that's where a lot of people are going to struggle in this. As it matures this year, I think it's the end of this year, the early part of next year is we're going to see drastic impact that people are just going to fly under the radar because they're going to be removed from the conversation altogether by AI.

Jordan Lally:14:37
I know you guys primarily work with local service businesses, but to shed some light on exactly what I do, I install, like I was saying, fully autonomous AI agents into other B2B businesses. used to own a marketing agency, which is why I started the podcast, because it's a topic I am very, very familiar with. with podcasting comes content and authority and trust and business.

Some of the softwares that I actually utilize, I learned from LLM's, like Claude, like ChatGBT before I switched to Claude. Like I'm going to be selfish really quick. I want to be known in like, AI agent company or how can I install an AI SDR like an AI client management tool, et cetera, et cetera. Like I want my name. I want the company to, populate in these LLM. So we're definitely gonna have a talk after this 100%.

Andrea:15:40
Sounds good. Absolutely.

Jordan Lally:15:43
Cool. Perfect. Right now, I'm on the topic of client acquisition. What does your guys's current growth systems or growth strategies look like? Are you guys using any outbound channels? I know you're on the commerce side of things.

Andrea:16:05
So right now, we do a lot of personal outreach because this is so new and there's so much noise out there, a lot of people are very hesitant to try anything new. So a lot of our outreach has just been very educational. I do a lot of classes, especially like with realtors, some of the local chambers. and things like that. That's where a lot of our outreach has been focused right now. But we are slowly expanding into, you know, different channels as we're continuing to grow.

Jordan Lally:16:47
Absolutely. Gotcha. Yeah. I think when it comes to building trust in a brand new market, like AI SEO, how would one, do you have any proof for like case studies of like a company that obviously had zero AI SEO? You guys worked with them for XYZ time. Now you do? Okay, great. I think that's one of the best ways.

And the reason why I bring this up is because with some of the clients that I have, what we do is we basically do cold email. We send that lead basically a free lead magnet. Like here's a done for you thing that typically people pay us for. We already did it for you completely free.

We treat that lead magnet like an education tool and like a funnel in a way. And that's how my clients like enroll, enroll clients into better program. But I'm trying to think like from that perspective, how would that like, what would that done for you lead magnet be between educating them and like maybe like a done for you SEO package with AI, but like, don't even know if. Like if it's the same as SEO normally, you know, what am I trying to say?

I don't know if you utilize AI SEO the same way you utilize like regular Google SEO. That's what I'm trying to say.

Andrea:18:09
Right, no, you would want to, it's more about brand position. Because that's really what it is. It's more about building the brand with that authority, the trustworthiness. So you can kind of look at it more of like teaching them how to deliver a clear, concise message, making sure they have a person associated with that brand. to help build those relationships. I mean, there's different things that you could do if you look at it from a brand perspective.

I don't know if we're going to be hitting YouTube or anything, you can see that. I've kind of got the model there where you can see the...

Jordan Lally:18:50
in

Andrea:18:58
the three major buckets there and then the overlap in the middle is your visibility.

Jordan Lally:19:01
You have visibility?

Jordan Lally:19:06
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So structure, clarity, authority. Yeah, no, we can see it for sure. For sure. We can definitely see it.

Andrea:19:07
Have you seen it?

Jordan Lally:19:15
When you say the structure, what do you think?

Andrea:19:16
So the main bug is right for winning, winning in some rooms is you got to have clear, clearly communicated what you do. Right. So the AI knows, okay, I'm looking for this because a searcher search for this. Your company does that. You better communicate that effectively. Right. There, you got to go and prove that you're that expert for the AI to go, okay, this is the right person to put up for my, my client, the searchers to answer.

And then you've got to be consistently seen as that person by other saying, hey, this is the right person. Does that make sense? That rolls up the whole visibility piece into the summary or the overviews.

Jordan Lally:20:00
and how you get other people to stay.

Andrea:20:00
And there's a lot of work that goes in there, but that's the high level of strategy and structure.

Jordan Lally:20:07
For sure, for sure. And when you say, other people saying this is the website to go, this is a trusted service, you're referring to those business rooms or those industry business rooms, like you said earlier, Andrew?

Andrea:20:22
Yeah.

Yeah, obviously if I'm working with a manufacturer, I don't want to go to Yelp, right? Yelp is not going to help a manufacturer. I need to go to their specific industry, say if it's a CNC manufacturer, need to go to the forum where they're looking, people are looking for that. And ThomasNet would be a better choice than Yelp as an example. Or say a home builder, like here, the Greater Houston Builders Association. That's where you want to be. know, so just industry specific.

Jordan Lally:20:33
you

Andrea:20:58
Because AI doesn't care. Google would allow you to say I'm the best at what I do, but AI says, prove it to me that you're the best at what you do. That's a significant difference. A lot of people saying I'm the number one plumber in this city. Well, you better have an award or hundreds of people saying that for AI to go, okay, this must really be the number one plumber in this area. Because if not, it's going to say, I don't believe you, so you're lying, move you to the side.

Jordan Lally:20:58
you got you okay how

Andrea:21:28
who actually is the number one plumber. Or you're getting featured on some really awesome podcasts. That helps. Yeah.

Jordan Lally:21:39
Got you, got you, okay. Let's see. When it comes to local service businesses, do you feel like one LSB would get better results over another?

Andrea:21:57
Yes. Most definitely. There are a lot that we exclude from even.

Jordan Lally:21:57
Like a floors versus a roofing. Yeah. Okay.

Andrea:22:03
Yeah. And why that is, is it all depends on if the client's going to listen and let you do everything that you need to do. I have clients who are not only working with us, but they may be working with another consultant and that consultant may be wording things differently than the way we are. Even though I've explained we need brand consistency and that can kind of skew the clarity. so yeah, it, it, it all depends. She does on a key point, the clarity. So the AI is looking for clarity. It's not looking for confusion. If it gets, this is where you people talk about it hallucinating. So if it gets mixed results, say a phone number, your business phone number has three variations over time sitting out there lingering in different places. you confuse the AI and then it's going to move on because it can't say, that's an old number from five years ago. That's an old number from 10 years ago. It wants the freshest newest piece. And so if it's got any lingering confusion like that, it's going to move on. And that's why clarity piece is so important as well.

Jordan Lally:23:16
Man, yeah, I can definitely see how this would be a process. This is not an overnight thing, especially if a business, you know, LSB has been in business for over 15, 20 years. And like you said, you know, our number changes. There's so many different backlinks that they have to, they all have to talk to each other. No, that is, that is wow. Out of curiosity, what are the ranges of price for

Andrea:23:25
We out.

Jordan Lally:23:45
these potential services.

Andrea:23:50
Yeah, so we have, really we have four packages. We've got our foundation package, which is for those that are like, oh, I don't know if I really wanna do this. Let's just see how it goes. And what we do is over a 90 day period, it's $750 and we just fix your foundation. That's all we do. And it's 750 a month for 90 days. Then from there, we have our very bottom base package and that's where we really start to push you out there and get everything consistent all over the board. And that's 1500 a month minimum 12 month contract. And then we have a 3000 package and a 5000 package. Each package what we do is we do an audit.

So like a smaller local service business, they don't need the big huge package because that's for more nationwide or you have really high, high competition. So most of our clients fall in the 1500 to $3,000 package. It kind of depends on there again, what their competition is like and how aggressive they want to be. So like I said, we just do an audit first and we find out where they want to be and then We what the reality looks like to get to that.

Jordan Lally:25:22
Right, right, kind of like where they are now versus where they want to be and you guys essentially fill that gap for sure. In regards to maintaining clients, kind of going back to your retention, Andrea, do you have any specific, I guess, tips, tricks or pointers? I suppose what's your communication cadence with your current clients?

Andrea:25:48
So really what I do usually weekly is I'll send them just a short quick update. Most of our clients don't want to look at these crazy reports. If they do, absolutely I'm more than happy to send reports to them. But most of time I just send them an update with, this is what we're working on this week. And then usually once a month we'll send, okay, here's your monthly review. This is how you looked on day one. And we're at day 30 now and this is how you look.

So that way they can kind of see the growth, you know, and get a high level overview. So weekly cadence with just high level overviews and then once a month, you know, more details. And then of course, we're always available in between. We also do websites and digital ads. So it also depends on if we're doing those for them as well.

Jordan Lally:26:35
Okay cool.

Jordan Lally:26:49
For digital ads, which platform do you guys utilize for your clients?

Andrea:26:56
So we have some that are TikTok, we have some on Facebook, some on Google, just depends on where that client would show up at.

Jordan Lally:27:08
Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, because like local service businesses probably going to be Google, right? If you're something that's I don't know, like if you're on e-commerce something like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok would be the best. You think you think Facebook for local service businesses? How come out of curiosity?

Andrea:27:15
Thank or Facebook.

Andrea:27:24
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Andrea:27:31
It depends on the industry. category, but like saying we have one that's an amusement park type stuff and it really works well with Facebook. Yeah. In fact, they're on all three platforms actually.

Jordan Lally:27:46
Yeah, I feel like an amusement park would actually work because you're showing the amusement park, people on the roller coaster, kids screaming, everyone's having a good time. It's hard to capture that from a Google perspective. feel like it really kind of depends. in a, Google, the way I describe it, Google and Facebook are kind of two different platforms, obviously, but here's what I mean. Google is like defense where Facebook and Instagram is like offense.

Andrea:28:11
Mm-hmm.

Jordan Lally:28:15
We're like, oh, I have a fricking roofy. I have a leaky roof. Where am I going to go? Google. Or if you're a roofing company, I'm having a promo right now on a brand new roof that's like top tier. Here's the offensive play. Here's my promo for the roof. You see? So two different strategies within that marketing umbrella there. Makes total sense, Dan. No, for sure. Thank you for that. Dan, I kind of want to ask you a question, my friend. Since you kind of handle sales and marketing,

Andrea:28:38
Yeah. Well, let me ask you a simple question.

Andrea:28:47
Go ahead.

Jordan Lally:28:47
I was just going to bring up your sales process from stranger to hopping on a call to that consultation to enrolling them in the program. How does that look?

Andrea:29:03
Well, what I've I've developed a tool, an assessment tool using Claude to help me build that. what I do is I present with, I say, okay, how would somebody find you? Let's go right now. Let's do a search. And we'll actually do a search right there and see if they show up. And then my tool will go and list five competitors and lines up right next to their business. And I show them and I rank them by that particular framework that I showed you earlier, Clarity. all those buckets and it'll show them green light, red light. Where do you rank amongst your competitors? And when you see your competitor is all green and you're all red or all yellow, it's naturally pretty easy conversation from that point. Especially when they're seeing it in real time because, you know, we can't alter anything in real time.

Jordan Lally:29:50
Yeah, that's.

Jordan Lally:29:57
Yeah, no, I was just going to say like that's that would definitely be a good lead magnet, you know, like here's where you're running versus your competitors. No, for sure. You were going to ask me a question.

Andrea:30:04
Yeah.

Andrea:30:08
Well, I'll ask you a quick question. Yeah. You and the audience, just in general, think about it. I found myself looking back over the last six months and I don't go to Google much anymore. I'm either with Gemini, I'm with Claude or I'm with Jack. And when I get the results in there, used to early days, I would go to Google and verify and double check. But now I'm finding that the results are well, well within the range of I'm going to just use what I'm seeing.

Are you experiencing the same thing?

Jordan Lally:30:42
Yeah, the software, some of the software I utilize come from LLMs. I didn't find the software I utilized to make the AI agents actually work from Google. Like the LLMs told me how to conduct the process. And I think I said this.

Andrea:30:49
Mm-hmm.

Andrea:30:54
Yeah, you did. Yeah, you did. You didn't find any of that on Google and you didn't follow up on researching on Google, did you?

Andrea:31:05
Ha ha ha!

Jordan Lally:31:05
No, I just trusted the LLM, because I don't think the LLM would lie to me. I think Google would lie to me more than the LLM, you know?

I think I brought this up in our first call.

Andrea:31:15
And the LLM

Jordan Lally:31:23
That is funny. That is funny. man. Yeah. So for everyone listening out there, stop using Google, use any LLME one and probably get a more trustworthy answer. That's funny. I think I brought this up on the, first call, but you guys.

Jordan Lally:31:46
I'm sorry, what was that? What was that? I'm sorry.

Andrea:31:51
I said we got to be careful not to get in trouble with Google. They're still a major player in the game. Don't let anybody fool you there. There's still 80 % of the game currently and it's changing, but they'll still be playing with Gemini.

Jordan Lally:32:08
I think I brought this up on the first call. You guys are in a fantastic position. I'm a little bit, well, you and I are both in a fantastic position because our business is built on the back of AI and we're selling essentially selling AI as a service, kind of like software as a service, but AI and with the growing rate of like, I don't know, 300, a thousand percent year over year with the adoption of AI, I I think it's a really fun time to be a business owner in this space. You know, how do you guys feel about it?

Andrea:32:43
It is. It really is. I think this is our year. mean, it's like a gold rush out there at the moment. If you can get them to search for themselves and put themselves in that searching...

Jordan Lally:32:55
It will make more millionaires think it goes right

Andrea:33:00
You're probably right. Should. This opportunity is lost. Hey, you know what? We're just going to hire you to come sell for us because you're just very... We'll just put the whole package together. Here you go, business.

Jordan Lally:33:03
Sorry.

Jordan Lally:33:11
Sorry about that, I get excited as you can tell.

Jordan Lally:33:25
No, for sure, for sure. I definitely think there's some synergies there. Let's see. It was a fun conversation. I think the audience took a lot of nuggets from this conversation. I mean, obviously, know, plain, simple point. If you're not using AISCO, you're falling behind times, right? Everyone is utilizing. If not, if they're not utilizing it now, they will be the next one to two years.

LLMs are the new search engines. So get on it now before it's too late. That's what I would say.

Andrea:34:04
Totally agree with you on that.

Jordan Lally:34:04
Anything you guys want to leave with the audience?

Andrea:34:12
Just if anybody's curious and really wants a true picture of how they show up, we'd be happy to show them. Good job. I'll run you a report. Let you see how you look compared to your competitors. Live.

Jordan Lally:34:32
Absolutely. Yeah, we'll make sure to leave your guys's information in the show notes such as like LinkedIn company website all that fun stuff Mr. And mrs. Katen I think right. Yes. It was a pleasure having you guys Yeah Perfect. It was a pleasure having you guys. You guys are awesome

Andrea:34:46
Yes. Same here, Jordan. Thank you for having us on your show.

Jordan Lally:34:55
Absolutely, Audience, until next time.