AI, SEO, AEO, GEO & The Future of HVAC Marketing

The HVAC industry isn’t just changing in the field anymore—it’s changing online.

In this episode of HVAC ADHD™, Jeremy Begley sits down with entrepreneur, marketer, and Content Credits founder Adam Koehler to break down how AI is completely reshaping SEO, digital marketing, search visibility, and customer acquisition for contractors. 

From AI-powered search engines and authority-building strategies to the future of online trust and content creation, this conversation dives deep into what contractors need to understand right now if they want to stay visible in a rapidly changing digital world.

This episode goes beyond marketing buzzwords—and into how AI is fundamentally changing how customers find HVAC companies online.

We cover:
 • Why traditional SEO alone is no longer enough
 • The rise of AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) & GEO optimization
 • How AI search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity are changing customer behavior
 • Why contractors need structured, authoritative content now more than ever
 • How Google, OpenAI, and AI agents are reshaping the internet
 • The role of PR, backlinks, and authority in modern search rankings
 • Why HVAC businesses must adapt to AI-driven marketing workflows
 • How private equity is accelerating digital transformation in the trades
 • The future of contractor branding, automation, and customer interaction

Adam also explains how his platform, Content Credits, is working to democratize paid media online through micropayments—allowing readers to pay for individual articles instead of expensive subscriptions. 

This episode also explores a major shift happening across HVAC and the trades:

👉 The contractors who understand AI, authority, and digital visibility will dominate attention.
 👉 The companies relying on outdated marketing strategies will struggle to keep up.

Whether you're an HVAC contractor, home performance professional, HVAC business owner, marketer, or trade educator, this episode offers practical insight into where digital business is headed next.

🚀 Season 2 continues—and HVAC ADHD™ is expanding.
 Not everything will live where you expect it.

🔗 Adam’s Links

Website: https://contentcredits.com/
 Cincinnati Exchange: https://thecincinnatiexchange.com/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hey guys, welcome back to the HVHT ADHD vodcast. I'm your host, Jeremy Begley. Today's episode is about as close to live as we can realistically get. Well, not really. We could have just gone live, but we didn't. We literally filmed this and turned it around the same day because the conversation was too good to sit on. I'm jumping on with my good buddy Adam Kaler. Last time Adam was on, we talked about Content Credit, the platform trying to change how people pay for media by letting you buy individual articles instead of getting trapped into subscription hell. Since then, things have moved fast. In this episode, we get into AI, SEO, GEO, AEO, Content Authority, Private Equity, the future of search, and why contractors and business owners better start paying attention to how the internet is changing. Because the old just build a website and hope people find it strategy is dead. Was that ever really a strategy? Not really, but SEO isn't the only thing you have to worry about now. This turned into one of those ADHD style conversations where we bounced from journalism to Google AI to HVAC to private equity to Disney, and somehow it all tied back together. If you're trying to understand where business, content, branding, and AI are headed right now, this one's worth your time. Let's jump in. Hey guys, we're jumping on today with my good buddy Adam Keeler, and we're gonna do a quick ADHD moment with him. We're gonna do a quick catch-up. With last time we talked to him, he was just getting started with content credits, and which is a micro payment for media behind paywalls that that is I'll let him update us on where they're at with that. But the basic premise is that instead of having to pay for a whole subscription, you get to pay for the article you want to read and you use a content credit to do that. So Adam, just go ahead and briefly reintroduce yourself. We don't need to go all the way back down memory lane. We did that already, but just briefly introduce yourself and tell us what's what the heck's going on with content credits and what you're seeing out there with this big AI push that's going on. Because you're you're definitely in the thick of it.

SPEAKER_02 2:10

Yeah, yeah. I actually just got back from DC also with a bunch of media companies and chatting with them about what they've got going on. But yeah, the idea is you buy $10 worth of credits from us, you get 40 credits, so they're they're pegged at a quarter each. And then any newspaper we work with, if you hit that paywall and it says, hey, sorry, you need a subscription to read this, instead of getting a subscription, you click a button, use one of your credits, and you get to read the article. So it it's essentially democratizing paid content across the web. And you know, you've got all these newspapers and everybody else, you know, they claim to care about, you know, the poor people and all this other stuff, but you gotta be rich to get their subscription. Why not, you know, give your readers the ones you you claim that you're you care about so much?

SPEAKER_00 2:57

And if you do a if you do one of these trial subscriptions and you forget about it, God forbid, dude. I did a trial, a seven-day thing, and I've to forgot about it. I at the worst possible time, four hundred dollars came out of my bank account for some crap that I don't even read. I swear, like that is a true story. It literally just happened to me. I was so sad about that shit, dude.

SPEAKER_02 3:17

Well, dude, literally this morning I realized my Taylor.com domain name. I have an email address in Google, and I'm getting charged $28, almost $29 a month for it, and I don't even use it. Like I it was I just did it for my political campaign. I needed it from my website, and I'm like, man, I'm sitting here getting charged $28 a month for something I don't even use, right? So yeah, I had to had to downgrade that today to $8. Just in case somebody emails me. You know, you never know.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Oh, I know, like because we've switched companies' names and stuff a couple times. Like I'm constantly like try having to manipulate Google Workspace to like get down to the eight dollar thing so that I can keep the email address, but you know, like not have to pay for all their other services that they try to sweet you into, so to speak.

SPEAKER_02 4:02

Yeah, yeah. Well, you see, I'm wearing my Bearcats hat for you today so that you know I can represent.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

I don't even got any I had a lot of Lakers hat today. I didn't even wear any Cincinnati stuff. Shame on me. I just got two A. Mind is my weapon.

SPEAKER_02 4:14

I just got speaking of ADHD, I'm about to go off topic too. I just got went to GameStop and got my LeBron rookies graded. I got one into PSA 9 now.

SPEAKER_00 4:23

Oh, I saw your sentence. I mean, what was the what did you get them back? Uh no, no, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:28

You know what's the crazy thing is is they won't ship them here to another GameStop. I actually have to go back to GameStop in Cincinnati, show my ID, and get them from there because that's where I had them. And this was months ago. You know how long it takes PSA to grade stuff.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

It's because of chain of command. Like, they don't want anybody, you know, like any. Well, and I appreciate it. I don't want you don't want no fake stuff either. Like, let somebody switch your stuff out in the mail and see how you feel about the colour.

SPEAKER_02 4:49

Yeah, my two thousand dollar card just have some random coming in, just yeah, taking my stuff. So, yeah, or the mail, yeah, definitely. But anyway, long story short, things are going good, man. Like, I mean, we've got a deal with the Virginia Press Association, which is pretty much every newspaper in Virginia, 170 papers. And so we've got to deal with them. We've got a few papers that we're trying to get onboarded with now. Uh one of the big ones is the an organization that is kind of like the content management system for a lot of newspapers, not just in the state of Virginia, but all around the place. So these newspapers that are on this system, think of it like WordPress. Like, think all the newspapers that are out here on WordPress. Well, this is a specialized system just for newspapers. So a lot of newspapers subscribe to it. It's got all the AEO, the SEO, the AI stuff all tied into it. Makes their lives a whole lot easier to run a newspaper. So we're partnering with them, we're getting our technology. Matter of fact, we're sending them out an email today because we're going back and forth, right? They have a specific technology that we have to kind of integrate with. And we're getting that today, we're getting an email out to them. We have to upload our documentation we just did to our website. So we have a WordPress plugin, which is so easy. Like if you got a WordPress site, I love it. Uh plugin, right? Easy. We have an SDK also that if you don't have a WordPress website, there's some integration stuff that has to happen. So this would be for any other website that's not WordPress. And then we have to get our guy involved, and it's a little more work. So this entire system, and there's hundreds of websites on this system that we could potentially tap into with content credit. So it's a huge move for us. If we can get this integrated and get a bunch of websites on it, it's gonna change your trajectory of the company.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

I think you went through you went through some funding, haven't you? A round or two of funding.

SPEAKER_02 6:39

Yeah, yeah. We just raised essentially a friends and family round using a special purpose vehicle, an SPV. So the state of Kentucky they said, hey, look, if you can raise 25 grand, we'll match it essentially. And we'll set up this fund so that you can do it. It's like five grand to set up a SPV, but they did it for us. This organization called Invest Blue. And Key Horse, which is a group out of the state of Kentucky, they matched everything we raised. So we got a little cash. I use that to hire a writer for our newspaper, the Cincinnati Exchange. Uh, you can also check it out. It's a Cincy C I N C Y X.com. That'll just redirect to the site.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

I got a lot of there.

SPEAKER_02 7:21

Yeah, we're doing like five to ten articles a day. I'm writing a couple articles a day. Every time something comes up, you know, I'm writing an article.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

So tell us, tell everybody how that, how, why you what what originally got you to the paper? Because are you, I think if I remember, you're using that in a specific purpose with the content credits as a test vehicle or something like that.

SPEAKER_02 7:40

That's right. Yeah. So I mean, if we're gonna sell to newspapers, we should understand what it's like to run a newspaper, right? So uh when I was running for my campaigns, you guys know, and some of you guys know I ran as a Republican in the city, which is very difficult. But I also realized that when I was going and I was speaking at all these events, a lot of people would say, Hey, I'm getting rid of my local newspaper subscription, I don't like it. They seem like they're leaning the other way. I'm gonna get rid of it. So, you know, instead of just thinking politically, I thought, this is a market opportunity. If you got all these people that are getting rid of their subscription, what are they replacing it with? So I said, Well, we'll start up a more objective paper, truth-telling paper. You know, we'll we'll fact check everything. We have FAQs at the bottom of every single article. So, you know, if you don't like what we have to say, well, then you don't like facts. I don't know what to tell you. So, you know, that's what we're doing. But we're also talking about just regular stuff that's happening around town in the business community. We've partnered with a group called Boost at discoverboost.com. Stuart Rabkin, he's a big consultant in the business community, you know, the pro, you know, the big, big companies, you know, and all of the people that work with him have all held executive positions. So they're writing articles, which then stream onto our site. We've also got national news now streaming on our site from Center Square. We've got Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana news. So we don't have to write any of that. It's all coming in just to provide extra value to our readers. So we're doing that. Uh we got our news break, which is huge for distribution. We we're running close to a million impressions so far from our news that's being syndicated out on news break next door. You guys are familiar with Nextdoor.

SPEAKER_00 9:22

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:23

That we're on there too. We're on Flipboard. Um, we're working on getting on Apple News and Ground News. It's still out there, yeah. Ground news is another one. It grades your content on how far left or far right it is, or if it's in the center. We're we actually just got an email back from them last week. Uh so that's good. We're making progress with that. Apple news would be huge, obviously, if we can get on Apple News. But it's not just about these, you know, syndicating things out. Like you've got to provide value. So we're learning every time we write an article, you know, we have to do specific things with our content when we structure the page. And this is one of the things I was talking about is you can't just write a blog post or an article anymore. Like the actual page itself has to be structured a specific way. So when the bots come in, they can read it and say, Oh, this is your article summary. So you have to wrap that article summary at the top of your blog in a specific type of schema that says this is an article summary. Your FAQs have to be wrapped in a specific type of schema that says, Hey, bot, this is where the FAQs live. And then those FAQs could then get picked up, and that article summary could get picked up in that learning model that Google has.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

Dude, literally, I'm gonna tell you right now, like I already I'm hip to that, and we've been going back and redoing all of our old blog articles, like changing the format, and we're making sure like I have a sandbox set up in GPT so that all my articles I just dump them in there and it reformats it right in the right format. Then I put it right onto the site and I use Yoast on my WordPress. So, you know, we're filling in all the little little extra stuff that helps push it out there. But literally, and Karina, who's on the call as a producer here, she's my executive administrative help. Her and I were on a call and together, and a guy called in, and I just happened to take the call, and I asked him, he said, You guys came recommend it to us. And so I said, Who recommended? You just said we know. He said, Perplexity AI recommended you. And I'm like, Man, that was so great to hear because we work, been working so hard to like reform our stuff stuff to get found that way. He's like, Yeah, here's the prompt I used. He told me what he asked the thing. He's like, and you came up as the only one that was recommended. He's like, There's another guy in Atlanta that did something similar, but like you're in Knoxville, where we want to, you know, where we're building that, so we're gonna choose you. And it was all based on an AI decision. So like it is real life, dude. Like what you're saying is a hundred percent works exactly how you're you're saying it works.

SPEAKER_02 11:53

So the your industry, yeah, the you know, and anything, not just you know, HVC, but you know, plumbers, electricians, you know, all the trades.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

Anybody that's trying to get found, let's say.

SPEAKER_02 12:05

Anybody's trying to get found. Like it's what you just said is super important to those folks, but they're not like people, they don't understand any of that stuff. I mean, we run a digital ad agency, so we do this for people all the time, and and you know, we've got a bunch of SEO clients, but it's not just SEO anymore, right? Now there's all this authority stuff you have to have.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

AEO and GEO. We've got all the O's.

SPEAKER_02 12:26

But it's I E I O. But the rules are still the same. Right. You just got to be an authority, right? You've got to produce authoritative content, you've got to produce real content that has real value, that uses EEAT. There's an acronym called EEAT. You guys can look it up. Uh, when you write, you've got to think about that. You've got to think about how am I writing? You know, am I is is this authoritative? Is there proof? Do I have facts to back this up? And these are all the things we we have to think about with the newspaper as well.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

It's really good journalism, it's just requiring good journalism. Like I went to a lot of people don't know this about me, but I went to, you know, this because you know me, but I went to Hughes Center, which was a city school, but it brought in a program. It had it was called Huge Center at the time, and it had these different professions programs. And the program that I was in was the communications program. So it was all about media at the time. Like they brought in Jerry Springer, they brought in Rob Braun, they brought in all these different people to work with us, and like we went and seen the Jerry Springer show live, like in high school. It's wild to say that now. Like, no high school's ever taking you to the Jerry Springer show. But because it happened to be filmed in Cincinnati and he was like just, you know, the mayor and everything else at one time, like he was just a guy people trusted. So they took us down there and we watched that thing getting filmed. So I, you know, I this is like some full circle stuff here, dude. It's like wild how much like we're coming back to like integrity and journalism and like really having to be able to in in integrity and advertising, too, because you can't just pretend like you know something now, it's gonna get sniffed out so quickly. AI exists. People can literally today. Google just announced that anything that you can do in Chat GPT or Anthropropic or any of these other AI things, you can now do it directly in Google.com. You could create agents, you could create media, you could do whatever you want inside their browser now, dude. You don't even have to use one of these services if you want. They built Gemini Omnio right into the browser where now it's just like AG. The browser itself is AGNic. They just announced that today. So like well, it's awesome.

SPEAKER_02 14:32

I mean, and it was a matter of time before Google caught up to everybody else. Yeah. And and I think OpenAI was probably out in front of everybody. And then I think Claude with Anthropic, I think they started getting a little bit better than what ChatGBT was doing. It's a little more personal. Like when you speak to Claude, it feels like you're you're speaking to a person, not so much with with ChatGBT. So I think people started drifting towards that. I noticed Grok is actually really good at certain things. Like they're all good at one thing or another, right? But once I think OpenAI started stepping on the toes of Google and got their own browser, I think Google was like, we gotta do something here. I mean, I got the Ask Gemini button right up here at the top of my browser.

SPEAKER_00 15:15

But it's crazy. Microsoft and Google is both invested in both of those companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, they've got huge investments in both of them. So they, you know, it's just all scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. And Google was never not going to be the guy. They're always gonna do the thing to be the guy they own to search. But like I said, now the rules are different. Like now you got five things to worry about instead of one.

SPEAKER_02 15:37

Well, I'll tell you what, when I do when I'm looking for emails and somebody says something like, Oh, Adam, did you see that email from so and so? Like, did you see what you needed help with? And I'm like, Oh crap. I just go into the little star thing inside of my Google and I ask, I say, Hey, can you go through all the emails that were sent by what's her name and and tell me what she was asking? And it'll just tell me.

SPEAKER_00 16:00

Yeah, oh, it's crazy. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:01

Can you reply to her? Can you send me an email back to her with what we need to do? And then by the way, can you send it to my development team so that they know what to do? It just boom, right there in the email.

SPEAKER_00 16:10

Like bro, I have sandboxes built in OpenAI, Chat GPT, because of for everything that we do, like on the technical side, shit that used to take me hour days to hours now takes me minutes because I have all my stuff already built in there into the memory, how I want it formatted and how I want it handled. So I can just literally like this morning, these people just sent over a thing about a kitchen hood. Here's the hood we're using. Can you create the spec? All I had to do was dump the kitchen hood spec into GPT, and it wrote the whole entire thing exactly how I would write it because I've already trained it, how I want it to do that stuff.

SPEAKER_02 16:43

So, like my SEOs send me all these reports every single month for each client that we work with, and they're all PDFs from Google Analytics, it's stuff from ARFs, it's it's it's a it's a an entire Excel document that they put in, show me what went up and what went down. Actually, nothing ever goes down, so not not when we're working on it, it only goes up, right? So all the things that go up, all the different blog posts we reply to, everything else, right? Drop all those reports into Chat GPT, and I say, Hey, write an email to the client. These keywords went up, you know, this is where we need to do work, this is what how many blog posts we produce, these are the keywords we went up, like all that stuff in an email. I mean, that that would take at least two hours to do normally to go through those reports, see what we all did. Easily, yeah. Yeah, and then I could just put it in Chat GPT, it spits it all out. I read that, and now I'm up to date. Yep, but it didn't. I didn't didn't take me all that time. So you know, where we're headed, and I I know a lot of people are afraid the AI's taking all of our jobs and all this other stuff, but I mean, did the coffee maker take away coffee shops? You know, I mean you can make a a 25 cent cup of coffee at your house, but you know, I mean, me and you are cheap bastards, so we'll keep doing it.

SPEAKER_00 17:59

Look, you know, you know, I'm in the in the process of building, like building HVAC to home performance into basically a thing called verified, which is like a way for contractors to do high performance work and be supported and interact with builders and stuff like that as well. And it's just it started out as one thing, but the point is like as I've been building it, the whole ideal has shifted because of how quickly all the AI stuff has shifted. Like basically, with my interaction with Chat GBT and AI, it started telling me, like, hey, hey, hey, hey, slow down on all the coursework. Like, we everybody already knows all the stuff you know that you're trying to build as teaching mechanisms. You need to really start integrating yourself and your unique workflows and the data points that you understand and what you can do into this and make this a data-driven platform instead of some kind of thing where contractors come in and they try to learn from you an old school way because all that coursework and everything that people have been making a ton of money on is about to become obsolete, in the opinion of Chat GPT, anyway, because of AI, because AI exists the way that it does now.

SPEAKER_02 19:06

Yeah, I mean, and and look at the amount of work you can get done now. Like, I mean, I was stuff would pile up, like you know, and I'm like stressing out. I go for a walk in the morning now. You know, I go outside, I do a little lap, uh mile and a half lap or whatever, just to get to get the blood flowing, and uh, you know, before I step on the scale, you know, get a little sweat, get sweat out and stuff like that. But before you go see Mickey Mouse, yeah. Before we go see Mickey Mouse. Hey, dude, look at my look at my espresso cup. Melissa got me a Mickey Espresso cup.

SPEAKER_00 19:35

She's telling you, you've been down there less than a month, and she's already got you fully converted. Bro, look at this.

SPEAKER_02 19:42

Look at this, our our our bag clips, bro.

SPEAKER_00 19:44

Oh my goodness. Look at the mini bag clips. Kim, my wife, would love it. She's also obsessed with Disney and Mickey and all that. She loves it, dude.

SPEAKER_02 19:52

I mean, I can I can look around here and there's uh there's a red panda book bag, there's a fan with Mickey's face on it for when we get hot at the parts. Oh my goodness. We got all kinds of Mickey stuff, but but you know, it's cool to be in an environment where there's energy. You know, I think you know, outside of talking about all this AI stuff and everything else, I think, you know, being around places that are on the move, there's construction, there's a homewood suite going up right next to our our our our place here. And outside is a sign that says, hey, if you want to invest in this place, you can. Like it's it's going up right here. And it's in one of the most popular areas in Florida. I mean, we're in Celebration, which is like right next to Disney. We get drive five minutes down the street, take a write, boom, you're on Disney's campus. I mean, this is actually kind of part of Disney. Disney built this neighborhood. But you got an up a hotel going up right here that I know is gonna be busy. I know for a fact. Matter of fact, when people come visit us, they don't have to stay with us. They can stay right here in this hotel if they, you know, a couple people. So I know it's gonna be busy. There's businesses everywhere, there's energy, there's investors, you know, there's houses here. We we just go on tours through some of these expensive houses. I met the owner the other day of this $2.75 million house. The guy's an investor, you know, commercial investor, builds hotels, all this other stuff, developer. He's like, hey man, you ever want to go play golf at the course? You know, hit me up. I'm like, was this?

SPEAKER_00 21:16

I mean, you make a good point. Like, regardless of AI and what it's all doing, like the real business is still gonna get done face to face. You gotta work. Like, you gotta be, you gotta be out and about, and you gotta get in front of people. Like, I swear, like, I always like, you know, in our industry, conferences rule the industry, and like that's where a lot of the business gets done and stuff. And I'm always remiss to go, like, I hate all the trail that's associated with it, but like they're impractical as hell. But at the end of the day, man, like that is where the stuff, like every single time I come away with a real lead or a real ideal, it's usually from those conferences. Like, I've went and I've met and it's not so much for me the sessions anymore, like the learning. Like, I've I can get something out of that if I try hard enough, but a lot of it I've sat through so much of that stuff so. So often that it's a little monotonous, but like the in-person interaction with the people that are there, you are always going to come away with something, and you are always going to come away with some kind of business opportunity that you're going to be able to try to make bring into fru bring into fruition. Like, and that's just, I think that's, you know, exactly the same thing you're saying with with where you're at and being outside is being outside. You know, in the in the hip hop and industry world, they're like, we outside. Like, well, you know, sometimes you gotta be outside to get the shit done. Like the inside cats never got any the last time I saw you, it was before we even moved down here, and you were in Orlando. I was at a conference. I was down there at a conference, and you were down there doing, I don't know what you were doing. I mean, that is it, though. I mean, literally, that's it.

SPEAKER_02 22:51

Well, now we got a place down here, Jeremy. So we got an extra room in there with the PlayStation set up for you and everything. So when you come down, you need to post up. There you go.

SPEAKER_00 23:00

Half the conferences I attend are in Orlando, dude. So I'll definitely be taking you up on that. There ain't no.

SPEAKER_02 23:05

And see, that's another good thing, man. Like, I mean, when you're staying somewhere like like here, you know, this is where all the conferences are. Miami. I can get on the bright line and I can head down to Miami in three hours and go to my place in Miami and hang out there and just go to a conference whenever. That's where this is where all these big people are meeting up at. Bezos, Ken Griffin, like all these big guys and these hedge funds and everything. They're all moving down to Miami, you know? Yep. And in in both of these cities are huge for conferences. I mean, these are Vegas is kind of dying now. Nobody wants to gamble any. You can pick up.

SPEAKER_00 23:36

Well, I mean, Nashville's, they're calling Nashville baby Vegas, dude. Like they're about to try to get gambling legalized in Nashville now. Like it's the city of lights, dude. It is my daughter lives over there. Destiny, my daughter lives over there, and it's in, you know, I got three grandkids over there now, and like so I'm over there a little bit. And it's insane, dude. Like the downtown, I even from like when I first moved here and the Bengals like were doing real good and they were playing in Tennessee a bunch, I'd go over there to the games and it'd be cracking and the streets would be like crowded. But compared to what it is now, it is just like, yeah, I've been here five almost six years now, and it's a night and day difference, dude. Like in the amount of lights and bars and crap that is down there. Like, that's not really my scene anymore because I'm too old for all that shit. But like anybody that wants to go have fun, like, dude, that's the place, bro. Like, that's where people ain't even drinking anymore, man.

SPEAKER_02 24:25

You hear these like these young generation, they're not even drinking anymore, dude. So, yeah, that's kind of good. They go out, have fun. You know, you know me, I never drank, so I always had to babysit all of our all of our friends who just want to get into fights and stuff, but but nah, but I you know me, I'm you know, I could go out and have fun and not deal with that. But I mean, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Florida, Texas, those are the places you really want to be. That's where all the money's moving.

SPEAKER_00 24:50

Dude, it's like Knoxville is insane, bro. Like the from the since I moved down here to now, like the number one, the cost of living is four times as much as it was when I first moved down here. And also, too, the development is just insane. I'm getting ready to try to move to the outskirts somewhere like this year when my lease is up. We've been in the same place six years. This year, when my lease is up, I'm gonna try to get like out to Jefferson City or something like that, where there's a little more land and and not as much hustle and bustle, dude, because I can pretty much work from anywhere now the way I got it set up. So I I'm gonna look look at the other places, but like just like you're saying, like basically this down south, dude, it's it's hot, man. It's where it's at. It's where all the business opportunities are.

SPEAKER_02 25:31

Everything's moving, and and you got all this energy and everything down there. And you know, once once they invented air conditioning, man, it it opened it up. People wanted to be in the south, you know.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

Yeah, oh yeah, dude. Air conditioning, that's another in Florida, bro. Air conditioning's like, you could go, that's the the the non-stop moneymaker of you know, down there. Like my brother, both my brothers, Sean and Aaron are in Melbourne and they work at an air conditioning place. And dude, they just the amount of business that they do into the season that other people don't get to do because their seasons extend so long is insane. And because air conditioning is used so much, they go out, you know, the the average life of an air conditioner is eight to ten years. Probably you could get 12 to 15 if you take care of a good and you get lucky, but like the average is eight to ten. There, it's about a five-year swing, dude. They're getting people replacing their air conditioner every five years, just about five to six years. So, like, because it's being used so much and it takes a beating. So, like, there the even down, even for the trades, the money, like especially air conditioning, like that. That's there's more money to be made in Florida.

SPEAKER_02 26:32

Now you gotta count the years for my condo. Like, when am I gonna get assessed for a new air conditioner?

SPEAKER_00 26:37

Well, you are you on the water? You're not on the water, are you?

SPEAKER_02 26:39

But we're hot, we're like a block and a half away from the water.

SPEAKER_00 26:42

Yeah, well, oh, you are so you may like there's you know the stuff that's on the beach, that's another, like those things are like four to five years because they the salt the salt water eats them up so bad. And there's like coatings you can get to like spray on your to have it sprayed and dip that'll help extend the lifetime sum, but even then the corrosion just gets the shit and it eats it up, eats it alive.

SPEAKER_02 27:03

Yeah, yeah, we're not far, so yeah, we're we're we're pretty much uh the where the Miami Heat play, that's right on the water. And then we're like two blocks from that.

SPEAKER_00 27:14

Okay, so block and a half. So we're pretty much the beach or intercoastal. Intercoastal. Intercoastal. They're not as bad.

SPEAKER_02 27:20

Yeah, flying around and stuff, so yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:22

Yeah, that's not true. That's fine, but that's not as bad as being right on the beach, but it is it's something though. It's still the same.

SPEAKER_02 27:29

Yeah, so now you gotta be counting these years, like when are they gonna have to, you know, replace the condensing units or whatever on top of the building?

SPEAKER_00 27:36

Yeah, it's gonna be coming for the five.

SPEAKER_02 27:38

The fans and everything, yeah. So yeah, I mean, I mean, so content credits, I think, is going pretty good. I mean, we it's a little slow because I've got you know other responsibilities with the you know, ad agency and all this other stuff, too. But nobody else is nobody else is is is really doing it.

SPEAKER_00 27:54

You know, so look what if you like what's your advice to people out here trying to figure all this AI and marketing and stuff out? Like, what should they be doing? Like, do a five, what's the top five things you should think they should do?

SPEAKER_02 28:04

Well, number one, content, right? Number one, uh produce content somehow. Like you gotta produce content.

SPEAKER_00 28:10

Not AI content, though.

SPEAKER_02 28:12

Not uh even they don't really even care. I mean, they're so in ARFs, it does tell you if if it's AI content or not. Like, I would use it. Uh we've got our own automated newsroom that we built, and it uses Claude to research, write topics, things like that. You still got to be able to come up with the topic, it's got to be interesting.

SPEAKER_00 28:32

Let's preface it generic AI content.

SPEAKER_02 28:35

Generic AI, yeah, no generic AI.

SPEAKER_00 28:36

Because I what you're saying, I do the same exact thing. Like, I use it the same way to write all my shit. And they knows me. Like, I've programmed myself into the thing where it knows who I am, what how I feel about stuff, what my preferences are, you know, like where I go to find information. Like, I literally, you know, if you're paying for the probe version, you get a pretty extensive memory with that thing. You can have it remember a lot, a good bit of information about how you wanted to do business.

SPEAKER_02 29:00

So ours, the way it works now, I put in a topic, I put in links to research that it could do, then I write something, right? So it's gonna use that. Yep. And then what it does is it goes out, it it figures it all out, it it writes it out in however many words, 700 words, 1200 words. But what it does is the next step, it creates it, it it looks and it actually adds things to Yoast.

SPEAKER_00 29:28

That's what my yeah, I have it, yep. I have it set up the same way.

SPEAKER_02 29:32

So it puts in the the the key phrase, the title, the description, the slug.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

Key phrase, slug, yep, all that stuff automatically does it. Meta description, like the whole, the whole nine, yeah. Yeah, dude. I mean, if you're not doing that stuff, your your shit's going nowhere. Like, why are you not? You're wasting your time.

SPEAKER_02 29:50

Yep. Like, I don't want to, and then it puts in five FAQs automatically.

SPEAKER_00 29:53

So, me and you are it's so funny to write the same thing.

SPEAKER_02 29:57

Yeah, dude, you could even use it to do the feature image.

SPEAKER_00 30:00

Like, you can even have it created in. I make it the feature image a ton of times with it. I definitely do. And I also too let it do things like tell me what internal links I should use, what are some other outbound links I can use? You know what I mean? Like all the different elements that should be in there, dude. I have it all built in. Like we even the ones that I have, because now that we have Yoast fully plugged into everything, like I have a bunch of red on stuff that I had previously created, and you know what I mean with the green and the red little, you know, if it's good or if it's not. So like we're actively going back and repurposing a lot of content. And that's the other thing, too, about it is like once you have content created, it's evergreen, dude. As long as it's good, accurate content and you update it frequently enough, like you can literally you repurpose that stuff over and over and over again in different shorts and just different methodologies to be getting it out there, like especially any kind of video. Are you guys doing any mostly just print? Are you doing any kind of video or audio stuff at all with that paper?

SPEAKER_02 30:56

Yeah, there's an AI application that we use that sometimes will add a video, but we're producing so much content. Like, I I'm more interested in producing more articles than I am spending a bunch of time doing videos, but video is huge because if your article has a video that comes from YouTube, so you upload your video to YouTube and then you embed it onto your blog post or whatever, I do that, it actually boosts it even more because Google's saying, Oh, well, they're using more of our products, like this is great.

SPEAKER_00 31:28

Send them that way.

SPEAKER_02 31:29

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the article I want to promote. So, yeah, that's that's a good thing to be doing as well.

SPEAKER_00 31:35

They have the article linked in the video in the description of the video. So you got a cross-link and both it goes both ways. Like, that's right.

SPEAKER_02 31:42

That's right. Yeah. People just don't understand how all this stuff works. They and a lot of times they're so focused on their business they don't want to think about it. You know, it's not rocket science, it can be rocket science. Like once you get into Arefs and some of these applications, it's gonna constantly tell you that there's missing links, that there's broken links, there's all this other stuff going on. Some of it is real, some of it's not, some of it's just the way it crawled the page. But there it's it's crazy. Like some of the stuff.

SPEAKER_00 32:08

Let's be clear the geo formatting does matter, though. I mean, like, like you said in before about the summary and the FAQs and the internal links, like that's stuff that is like fairly new to the game as a requirement to be found. Like, there's there was always the AEO and SEO. Well, there's always the SEO, and then AEO came in the game a little bit, like, but like that particular formatting for the bots is like really, really new, and people should really pay attention to making their articles that way. Because, like I said earlier, we got found on AI a few times already because of doing that stuff.

SPEAKER_02 32:41

So, like you're not like PR is important. So, one of my co-founders in content credits is he's a run of PR firm for 25 years, Dan O'Keefe, and he's with a company called O'Keefe PR. We had a brand new client with a brand new website, a brand new name, right? They they were switching from Valkyrie to Nerova. And Nerova's a brand new company, right? There's a brand new domain name. The internet doesn't know they even exist, right? And they have no domain authority, right? Like when you have a brand new domain or you start a brand new company, there's no domain authority. Nobody even knows you're around. So we did a PR push for him. And from that PR push, we didn't just get backlinks, we got valuable backlinks from authoritative sources. So whenever you do a PR push, if your article gets picked up, you know, their name change is what the PR push was about.

SPEAKER_00 33:41

Is there a methodology for getting it picked up, like as a PR promotion?

SPEAKER_02 33:44

Yeah, you have to send it out through like PR Newswire or one of the news platforms. So he has to pay every single month to be a part of those things, and they and then they charge you I think it's like $2,500 or something to just send out a generic PR push. But I mean, you're gonna get picked up by a hundred something sources every single time you do that. But those are valuable links. And I mean he's getting picked up in Dallas and you know, San Francisco and Chicago, and all these other local news channels are picking up this news because they're all looking for constant news that they can post about, right? Right. And then they'll pick it up, they'll just repost that that thing and add your link to it. And here it goes, back to your website. So that's one quick way to just build domain authority and and build quality backlinks to your website. And that's part of the AAO.

SPEAKER_00 34:34

Yeah, and I never that's something I never even knew about or thought about. I mean, I'm sure every people that are in your industry know, but as a person, just you know, mostly manage my own stuff and using a little help here and there. Like I did not know that about the PR thing.

SPEAKER_02 34:46

Well, yeah, oh, you gotta use it, man. I mean, it's it's I mean, if you can afford, you know, just to send out uh, you know, one or two of those every six months or you know, once a year or something like that, just send out one of those. I mean, it's gonna help you get ranked. What's gonna help you with the authority? I mean, you've got the digital PR inventions, so getting cited in those like authoritative publications and not just link to, like actually getting an article or your PR thing actually published or speak at some universities, right? Like go speak at you know, a school, uh ITT tech or whatever, I don't even think they're around anymore. But Cincinnati State, let's say Cincinnati State, let's say, right? Like if you're an HR professional or a uh HVC professional, go there, right? Go go to a local community college, say, look, I I'll speak at your school, but I'd love for you guys to write an article about me coming on the blog and link over to my website because that's a.edu domain name.edu smart. Yeah, edu, govs, dot orgs. If it's not a dot com, if it's one of those, they have more authority than just a regular old dot com, like another business linking over to you. So that's a good way to do it. Speak at the universities, speak at trade organizations that might have a.org or government. If you can get on any kind of like government website when they can link back to you somehow, try to do that because that's even better. Like that's even the high, like really, really high authority. So you want to do that, just make sure you're writing like structured semantic content. So any like question-based headings, like if you're writing a blog post, make it a question, put a number in it, you know, bullet points. So if you, you know, anytime you do unordered lists, which are bullet points, or ordered lists, which are numbered lists, one, two, three, four, five, Google usually likes that. But you're always trying to be clear, be super clear, be super concise with anything, any answers that you provide in your content.

SPEAKER_00 36:45

Where even now, dude, like even with these the vodcast, like I've started taking this, and this is another chat. GBT gave me this idea. But now on the page, I reformatted our page. So now we have the vodcast, because we already already had a page on the website, the vodcast page where we're all, you know, every episode's listed and all that. But now we are putting a transcript right, it's a drop-down where you can click on the whole entire transcript of the vodcast and read the thing right in front of it. And above it, we have a G O A O S E O formatted blog article about the content. I've redone yours, I've redone a couple of of them and reformatted them that way. And that's another big like Chat GPT, like be found by AI suggestion is like to turn all of your video content into blog content because for some reason, when there's the video and the blog, like you were saying earlier, it's easier for that AI bot to find it.

SPEAKER_02 37:37

Well, even my even my newspaper now, right? Like my newspaper has a a specific authority now because we produce so much content and it's all focused on the Cincinnati area. So you're Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Cincinnati. So if if there was a like you, you know all about HVAC. So if you were to write an article about, hey, what's changing in the HVAC, what's gonna, you know, an article about your furnace. Hey, your furnace only lasts this long. Here's a way to to keep your furnace going for even longer. And you were to write an article about that that's interesting to our audience, right? Answers questions, provides authoritative information that they think is valuable, it's gonna add value to my website, it's gonna add value because the the the it's it's providing good content for the audience, but it's also gonna help you because then that gets linked back to you, and now you become an author on a newspaper website. Like I would, if you're writing articles for us, I would have to list you on our author page. Yeah, and so you're you you be on the author page, you would have content on the website, and then that links back to you. So now you're a certified author, certified.

SPEAKER_00 38:52

You put we have I have an article up on that. Remember, I did a marketing article for you.

SPEAKER_02 38:56

Yep, yep. So if you but you want to be consistent with that too.

SPEAKER_00 38:59

So the whole thing I'll drop an article a month for you.

SPEAKER_02 39:02

There you go. Send it over. Yeah, send it over. So so that kind of stuff is important. So if you can get with your local news organizations, they're producing 25, 30 articles a day, right? So they are super authoritative in a specific niche in your city. So if you're doing business in Cincinnati and you get on Cincinnati.com or Cincinnati Exchange and you have articles on there, you're listed as an author on there, that's gonna help boost your authority in that region.

SPEAKER_00 39:32

Yeah. That's and it's like another that you make another point about local, because that's like if you like our business, we we do business nationwide, but I don't even have them up yet. But we're gonna do so, we're gonna do a local page for Knoxville and a local page for Cincinnati, but also any con, because we're building a system where if you want to use our verified system, we'll partner with you as a contractor. So if we get a contractor in a geographic area, we're gonna throw up a local page in that area and just start, you know, producing local content for that particular area to help bring in leads for that contractor to feed back to that contractor that partnered with us.

SPEAKER_02 40:07

Yep. Yeah. So I mean it all it all ties together. Like you can't just be a complacent business owner. Like you can't just, you know, you can't just go do your business and then hope you know it's just gonna show up, right? I mean, things years ago, I mean, when Google first started out, all that word of mouth advertising, which is still very important, like a lot of the business I get's word of mouth, but the everything kind of switched from like newspapers and all that other stuff over to the internet, right? So not only so I couldn't just spend money and get listed in the newspaper and get phone calls. Like I now have to learn how to use the internet, how to use this tool, how to get found, what SEO is. Like, you can't just hope some advertising company is just gonna put your ad in there and boom, all of a sudden I get called.

SPEAKER_00 40:58

Especially not now, man. I mean, it's to the point where if you don't have certain things in place, you're gonna lose, dude. You know, like somebody they want to be able to do business on the internet. Like, that's one big thing we're building right now on our website is a chat bot that I have that is actually interactive and able to, it's up right now, it can do certain things, but but what when we get it remapped, it's literally gonna be interactive where it's like, what's your project about? And it just guides them into the business that they need to be doing with us and closes this the deal inside the chat bot. Like, we got that coming. We're building it through Zoho using a Zoho developer. And that's gonna that's already like people are already like, I love the chat bot, you know. I love being some people are like, I want to pick up the phone and call, which is cool because right in the chat bot it says, Do you want to call or continue? So if you want to call us, you can still call us. But like for the younger crowd that wants to do business and that, and that's more and more, dude. Like, there's so much stuff being written about the transparency of pricing. Like, people don't want to have to get a quote, they want to be able to push a button and do business. Like, you gotta be, you know, have some packages built where like they're like, hey, how much does the air conditioner cost? $9,000 plus the cost of duct work. There's a bunch of different ways you can do it where you could get your pricing right on the internet, push a button. This is gonna be a funny video because my camera's turned and my arm's out of it the entire time. So that's freaking hilarious. But anyway, push a button and do business. Like, that's where the world's going. They don't, they want even they want to be able to do business on the internet. There's still some people that are gonna want to call and have you come out to their house and sit there and do a quote and all that, but more and more so, dude, people just want the instantaneous information and sell, and that's what that is the platform as a contractor that you got to be creating to be able to do business moving forward. I mean, it just is the way it is.

SPEAKER_02 42:43

And it it I mean, that's how business works. I mean, and if if you don't like it, I mean, maybe sell to you know, another company or neighbor Jim Bob. Yeah, sell to somebody else that knows how you know it's got a nephew or a son or somebody who knows how the internet works. Or private equity. You know, a lot of these HVAC companies and stuff they're all getting bought up by private equity.

SPEAKER_00 43:02

Oh, Ps in the trades big time. That's but pushing a lot of this stuff that this way. That's the thing people don't understand is like the more PE eats up the trade, the less you're gonna be able to do business the way that you did it before. Like you're gonna have to get on board with what how business is being done in the modern world because that's the way all these companies are gonna be working very soon, dude. And like the thing with the PE and the trades is they're now so savvy, they're able to make you think you're still doing business with the same mom and papa company because they keep the name, they keep the shingle. They were like consolidating and it was all air serve or something like that under one name. But now they got hit that people don't like that, you know, that feel of that PE too much. They want to feel like they're doing business with a local company. So now if it was Chuck's H V A C, it stays Chuck's H V A C. It's just owned by like Corporation X or whatever it is that owns a hundred other companies the same exact way, and they're all connected together and you know, price. And everything like that. So, like the games change, man. And HACP is here and it has changed the way everything, including technology, is being done in the business.

SPEAKER_02 44:10

Well, yeah, but they add in shared services. So they all will be on the same content management system, on the same hosting platform. Correct. They're all using the same quoting software. And it just saves so much money when you can utilize all the same services. You're not using this piece of software and that piece of software, and everybody knows how to use it in the organization. Right? So the PE guys are smart. They come in and they just they'll save money just doing that stuff, right? Yeah. But also, you guys like they're consistent with the voice, right? Like the brand voice, no matter what they do, where they show up, Bob's H V A C, right? Bob talked a certain way when Bob used to own it. It's important to keep Bob's voice the same when now a PE company owns it. Just like you said, right?

SPEAKER_00 45:03

But that's 100% correct. Yeah, Big Bob's used carpet. Like Big Bob doesn't know to use carpet. Catherine's bedrooms, whatever the job. Why buy new when you got Big Bob? Right. Yeah, see, there you go. I never like how we were probably 10 years old when that commercial was there, dude. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:18

That is hilarious. But all those things, I mean, those big companies, like, yeah, they're owned by private equity or whatever, but they still got the little cartoon guy, right? They still got his little voice, you know, they'll do stuff, you know, all that, all that stuff is just uh it's just all gimmicks, right? But that voice and that consistency that stays that stays there, and that's really important to make sure you always have that, no matter what you write. So you don't have the LLMs, like if you're using them to write your blog posts, you don't want it to talk in one voice and then talk in another voice, and then people start getting you have to police that a little bit too.

SPEAKER_00 45:51

Like I have mine set up really good, and a lot of me been into it, but it always wants to drift, dude. It wants to put that ChatGPT generic crap in there that you know, like people there's certain identifiers that if you don't watch it, dude, it it people will be like ah chat GPT wrote that because it's so easy to recognize because it uses the same type of little generic lingo all the time when it's doing stuff. Like it'll say stuff like, and this is why that matters, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, get that out of there. Like, we don't need that that generic language in there. Like, I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 46:21

And also you got KPIs that, and everybody knows key performance indicators, KPIs. Yep, some people may just be using you know Google Analytics, and that's what they're constantly looking at. They're just looking at organic sessions on their Google Analytics. Like, you've got to look outside of that, wherever your brand lives, wherever that share of voice is, if it's on Facebook, you need to be looking at your Facebook analytics. You gotta be looking at if you're on X, X has its own set of analytics, all these different platforms. Uh, you need to be able to like look at all that stuff together, not just not just your GA, right? Like it's it there's a lot of stuff out there where your brand lives that you might not even be thinking about. Like, oh, my brand lives out here.

SPEAKER_00 47:05

Which is why we use Zoho Social and Zoho Analytics, it pulls all that stuff in and puts it right into an analytic platform and shows me, you know, the ticket and all of it, dude.

SPEAKER_02 47:14

Yeah. Yep, that's what's important. But not everybody does that, you know, not everybody even thinks about doing that. I mean, even these articles I was telling you about, if you get on, if you get, you know, you got an article out there in the world from University of Cincinnati or Cincinnati State or whatever it is, share, share those analytics with me. I want to understand like how that did for me. Or or pay attention to, you know, hey, I just did this. I want to see what kind of effect it has. Because if I'm if I'm on a blog post for UC, you know, that may you know increase my audience for two or three days. But what's the effect of that? Like they're coming into my website, they're reading that thing on UC, they're clicking on my website. Where are they going? Are they just going to the homepage? Do I have something on there that welcomes them on the homepage? That's I know I just did that interview and I know it's gonna bring me traffic. So do I have something wherever that link's going, do I have something on there that's gonna give them an offer or that's gonna do something for them, right? When they get there instead of just a generic homepage.

SPEAKER_00 48:17

Yeah, man, there's so much we could talk all day, but I think we we beat it up a little bit. So and then we're uh we're running up on an hour, and I was gonna do a 30-minute session. Me and you always just get in.

SPEAKER_02 48:27

We'll just talk forever, bro. Like, yeah, but yeah, man, come back down to Orlando, man, hit me up that way.

SPEAKER_00 48:32

I'm gonna hit you up. I'm gonna take you up on it for sure. You already know, bro.

SPEAKER_02 48:35

I know all the restaurants now. 100% take you to Charlie's steakhouse.

SPEAKER_00 48:39

Do all the old man shit. I'm gonna pull my socks up to my knee and I know we'll go golfing and tan shorts and go short go golfing and shit. Yeah, yeah. All right, I'll see you, brother. Thanks for jumping on, man.