Ranking in ChatGPT and Google: What Actually Works in 2025

Jeffro (00:06.798)
Welcome back to digital dominance. know, SEO isn’t dead, it’s just evolving. And if you’ve been wondering how to keep your business viable or visible in a world of AI answers and disappearing clicks, you’re not alone. So in this episode, we’re diving into what actually works in SEO today and what service businesses should be focusing on to keep those leads coming in. Joining me today is Stephen Schneider, the founder of Trio SEO, an agency that helps B2B brands grow with ROI focused SEO strategies.

Before launching Trio SEO, Steven co-owned a portfolio of 40 affiliate blogs, publishing over 400 articles a month and scaling to seven figures using SEO alone. No ads, no social, no email. So if anyone knows what moves the needle, it’s Steven. Welcome to the show, Steven.

Steven Schneider (00:48.93)
Hey, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Jeffro (00:51.32)
Yeah, definitely. And you can tell I’m excited because I’m tripping over my words in that intro. So I’m to have to dial in and stay focused here. But I think we can start with the elephant in the room. I want to hear your opinion on how AI is affecting SEO. Are we really heading into a future where Gemini and ChatGPT answer everything for us?

Steven Schneider (00:55.555)
Ha

Steven Schneider (01:09.87)
Absolutely. I mean, I think at the end of the day, we have to kind of think back to where, you know, what was the internet like in 2000, when people were still a little mysterious of this thing called Google and they didn’t really know what it had to offer. And then they realized that their business could be found and their website could be shown. And then it was this mad dash to figure out how do we ensure that we are number one in this magic thing called Google and, you know, flash forward to 2025 and beyond. Same thing is going to happen with ChatGPT and I think that anybody who has considered SEO or is looking at SEO is really going to have to reconsider how do they incorporate AI into their search to be found in the evolution of what we’re now going to be understanding as AI search.

Jeffro (01:54.2)
Yeah. What do you think the next verb is going to be? So instead of saying, I need to Google that, what are we going to be saying?

Steven Schneider (02:00.942)
Yeah, I don’t know. That’s good. I think that like chat GPT is already so synonymous with all AI that I think something along the lines of GPT it, I don’t know. I cringe at trying to think if I know exactly. I was just thinking, I’m like, oh, that’s not really, it doesn’t really roll off the tongue. So, um, I hope some, you know, Jen Zier or someone could come up with that for me and I can just adopt it.

Jeffro (02:10.841)
It’s kind of a mouthful.

Jeffro (02:21.848)
If you need something better, yeah. So here’s something that’s kind of scary actually. One of the teachers at my son’s school, they, instead of calling it a search bar, like on, you know, when you type in something to search on the internet, she was calling it the truth bar. And my son was like, yeah, we found for some, we put it in the truth bar. And I’m like, no, no, no. The internet does not just have truth. This is a search, it helps you find stuff and do research, but we can’t call it that. So yeah, no, no, no, no, no. I don’t like that.

Steven Schneider (02:34.668)
Steven Schneider (02:42.168)
Yeah.

All facts, no lies, 100%. I love it.

Jeffro (02:49.462)
But anyways, all right. So a lot of business owners ask how they can show up in those chat GPT responses because that is so popular, right? So is that even something they can influence? And if so, how do they do that?

Steven Schneider (02:59.34)
Yeah. So the main thing is really thinking about how much authority does your website hold. And so there’s this what’s called domain rating. It’s a scorecard essentially, if you think about it from zero to a hundred. And what that pretty much does is it stamps how much Google likes you and puts a score on it. So you can build the score by working with allies in your space to get others to talk about you and link back to your website. These might be called backlinks if you’ve heard that phrase. So over time, as you get more backlinks, you build more authority and this is pretty much like your credibility score at the end of the day. So since chat to BT and AI wants to show credible resources within their search in order to improve the trustworthiness of their overall search query. You will be able to appear in that search by having an authoritative resource to display. So that’s kind of step number one. The other part of it is actually just having the content to display. So if somebody is searching for, you know, how to bake a cake probably would make sense that you should have a blog about how to bake a cake. So part one authority, part two content, and you just do that a long, time, do it much better than your competitors, and overall it works out well.

Jeffro (04:11.352)
Yeah, and that makes sense at a high level. One thing I do want to point out, though, you mentioned the domain ratings like a score that Google has for you. But my understanding is those are the third party tools attempt at quantifying what Google probably would rank you at in terms of a domain rating. So it’s still a helpful metric to let you know where you stand if you’re getting worse. But Google doesn’t publish a number that says here you are, right?

Steven Schneider (04:35.512)
Yeah, very true. But I think that there’s enough data out there that suggests that if you have a brand new site, which corresponds to DR zero, you likely don’t have a lot of authority and you’re not going to rank as well as somebody who has a DR 80 or DR 90 or even, you know, Facebook and Reddit, which are in the nineties, which is pretty much unachievable. So yes, third party tool scorecard, et cetera, how you want to look at it. But there is a strong correlation between higher is better, lower is worse.

Jeffro (04:45.857)
Sure. Yeah.

Jeffro (05:05.089)
And that’s also why it’s better to get backlinks from those higher domain ranking sites than other zero rated sites. Cause I could spin up thousands of my own sites, right? Buy the domains, put a blog up, chat, TBT generated content, and all the link back. But that’s not going to do as much as if I get one Forbes article linking to me or one CNN, whatever high domain rating site.

Steven Schneider (05:16.044)
Yeah.

Steven Schneider (05:29.762)
Yeah, exactly. I always like to think about it. It’s very similar to as if you were the new kid at school and randomly the most popular person in school took you underneath their wing, you would become very popular. So over time, if you can get your website to do the same thing where other big popular websites start mentioning you, they link to your homepage or whatever pages you want them to talk about, that increases your credibility from Google’s point of view. And all of those links are just trust signals at the end of

Jeffro (05:58.049)
I like that analogy. I’ll have to remember that one. Now, you’ve run high volume SEO operations. For a small service business owner who’s not publishing hundreds of articles a month, what are some of the highest leverage SEO moves that they could be making right now?

Steven Schneider (06:12.92)
Yeah. So the core fundamentals are always going to tie back to, know, making sure you have a really fast website. It’s clean. It makes sense to the user. And do you have all the, you know, basic boring stuff like a navigation menu, a footer, some internal linking, blah, blah, blah. At a higher level, when it really comes into how does SEO equal ROI, the conversation turns into having content that aligns with the right intent. So and everyone can chase a vanity metric that might be tied to a top of funnel piece of content. And at the end the day, that’s not going to produce leads, but if you’re going after a bottom of the funnel, really high intent conversion focused piece of content that is actually, you know, structured with keywords and all the nuts and bolts to succeed, that will inherently draw on your ideal customer and produce a lead. So everything is psychological and what is the purpose behind the content and where does the search query.

start and how does it end?

Jeffro (07:14.486)
When you’re doing keyword research for a business like that, do you do a range of top of funnel keywords and bottom of funnel keywords, depending on where the buyer is in their journey? How do you decide what to focus on?

Steven Schneider (07:24.204)
Yeah. Yeah. So every single keyword research strategy we have, we collect at least a hundred keywords, which are primary topics. You can think about a keyword equaling one page on your website, essentially. and every single one of those keywords gets assigned top funnel, mid and bottom. And so that just helps us understand what the total landscape looks like. And then we design a 90 day sprint targeting say five articles a month, 15 topics total and really hyper-focused bomb the funnel right out the gate because at the end of the day, we want to build your site like we’d build one of our own sites and that should be tied to ROI.

Jeffro (08:03.318)
So in that 90 day sprint, what can someone expect to see at the end of that? Because people have heard so many times like, SEO takes time. Just wait longer, six months, 12 months. You’ll see the results eventually. But what would you say to those people?

Steven Schneider (08:15.276)
Yeah. mean, total honesty, your first 90 days sprint is not going to, you know, equal a massive return. That’s just not realistic with SEO. What you’re looking to do is build progress toward long-term results. So, you you’re going to get content. We’re going to work on conversion metrics. We’re going to work on analytics and get kind of the foundation built. It’s like, you know, when you build a house, you don’t start with the roof. You build the foundation, you put up the walls, you know, you put the stairs in and you look back at the end of the year and you have this fully furnished livable house, and that’s exactly how you should treat your website. So at the end of 90-day sprint, you’re going to have all the core fundamentals in place to succeed, and then it’s really a waiting game. I always like to remind people that Google is my boss at the end of the day, and they make the rules.

Jeffro (08:59.637)
So here’s just an interesting thought exercise. someone had the resources and they’re like, okay, I want to hire your team, not just once, but five times to compress time essentially and do that 90 day sprint with additional resources. So instead of 15 articles, we’re doing, you know, I don’t know, 45, 65, however many, let’s say 75 in that same period, getting the backlinks like you would, would Google honor that same massive increase in content and additional backlinks and things or is it going to say, Hey, whoa, whoa, are you cheating here? What’s going on?

Steven Schneider (09:35.439)
Yeah, definitely, I Google’s lot smarter than we give it credit. So I mean, they can, they can catch on, but at the end of the day, what really matters is ensuring that the content is high quality. I think it would be much different if you were spitting out AI content, it wasn’t structured, it didn’t make sense, it didn’t really fit the basics. If you wanted to work with us and pump out 50 articles, by all means, that would definitely accelerate your growth. But the other part of the equation, like I mentioned, is authority.

So if you do have a DR zero site and you want to publish 50 articles, sure, that’s great, but it’s probably not going to work as well as if you did five articles a month while also building backlinks and putting those resources into building your authority. So classic SEO answer is yeah, it depends at the end of the day, but I think it also, you have to be realistic with where you stand, what do your competitors look like? What does your industry look like as a whole? And how do you.

Jeffro (10:19.477)
Yeah.

Steven Schneider (10:29.154)
you know, allocate resources strategically so that long-term you are happy and realistic with the outcome.

Jeffro (10:36.145)
Yeah, but I think it’s an interesting exercise for people to think about because sometimes they think, okay, if I just get this perfect article written on whatever keyword, then I’m suddenly going to get a whole bunch more traffic. And that’s one piece of the puzzle, but it’s not the only piece.

Steven Schneider (10:49.804)
Right. Yeah. And there’s, I can run through the, the laundry list of best practices and they could probably bore the listeners to tears, but, that’s kind of what we do is we make sure that you don’t have to worry about that. And you don’t have to think about all the extra nuts and bolts that come with it. And so, I always like to just remind people that, you know, nobody got into business with the idea of selling their company within 12 months. Like that’s just not realistic. So if you’re the opposite of that, and you do think long-term about your business, It would make sense that you have a short-term marketing strategy like PPC, but you also have a long-term marketing strategy like SEO. know, successful businesses have a whole suite of lead generation at the end of the day and how you kind of build those over time. It’s really what, you know, can make or break the difference in your company.

Jeffro (11:37.652)
Having the short-term strategy can cover you while the SEO is getting built up and eventually it could overtake and even replace in some cases or at least work alongside the ads. So I like the image that now I know you said you didn’t want to go too far into the jargon and details, but let’s spend just a couple of minutes on the EAT. Just so you know, for someone who isn’t knee deep in SEO lingo, they still might see this come across their feed or an email from Google or stuff. So what would they have them understand it and then

What could they actually do to improve those signals?

Steven Schneider (12:09.294)
Yeah. So E E A T, which we just call eat is a fancy acronym straight from Google. Uh, they put it out a couple of years ago and it stands for the experience, the, uh, expertise, the authoritativeness and the trustworthiness that is pretty much perceived when somebody visits your site. And that is how Google will determine what quality is. And it’s very arbitrary and very subjective, but, um, that’s SEO at the end of the day. So examples you could tap into would be if you have a blog, do you have an author with an author picture and bio? Like for example, on mine, I have my face, my bio, and I linked to my LinkedIn to show that, Hey, I am real person. This is an AI. you’re kind of putting all of those trust signals in place. Other things would be if you have a homepage, do you have a banner that shows brands that you’ve worked with or case studies and testimonials? So when you kind of run through the, you know, the checklist of things, They start to make sense that, yeah, I should probably have that. And like, yeah, that makes sense. But you wouldn’t be surprised by how many people overlook the core basics of what signals trust, credibility, and expertise at the end of the day.

Jeffro (13:21.521)
Yeah, I see it a lot too when I’m doing website redesigns. I’m like, guys, you don’t have any testimonials on your homepage. It seems like an obvious thing. You should put that there. speaking of SEO best practices, there’s a lot of stuff out there. A lot of people sometimes give conflicting advice, especially when it comes to AI content and everything. But are there any common things that you see that might sound good in theory, but they’re actually a waste of time?

Steven Schneider (13:29.549)
Yeah.

Steven Schneider (13:46.039)
Yes. the biggest thing is just trying to get content out because some SEO guy told us to publish content and that’s the opposite of what you should do. Don’t just create content because you think that your users will like it and also don’t do it on a quantity versus quality game. So, you know, I think that if you have a blog, you should absolutely make sure that you’re writing with a keyword in mind and not just closing your eyes, publishing content, hoping that it will rank because at the end of the day, it probably won’t. You’ll be upset. You’ll think SEO doesn’t work. And that’s your introduction to that process. So that would be the first one. The other thing too is trying to write for people and not trying to write for Google. It’s very easy to want to ensure that it ranks by stuffing it with keywords and trying to trick the algorithm, which you just can’t do. Good luck and you have to remember that people are reading it. So conversational tones and analogies and fun little snarky comments to read between the lines. That’s actually what Google likes best at the end of the day,

Jeffro (14:52.147)
Well, because Google’s looking at how long somebody stays on your site too, right? If you got your Google Analytics tags on there, it’s paying attention to that. It knows if somebody clicks the link from the SERB, reads for 10 seconds and goes back to the search results page, right? That’s a ding against you. yeah, there’s no point in writing something that tricks someone into clicking only for them to be like, this is trash, I’m leaving. It’s not worth it.

Steven Schneider (14:55.438)
All

Steven Schneider (15:14.218)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s one of the biggest things that we train writer on, a writer on is how to create a good hook. mean, at the end of the day, your introduction paragraph of your article should probably be your core focus because if that sucks, people will leave and they’re going to not come back. And like you said, Google tracks that they understand over time and your real rankings will suffer.

Jeffro (15:37.702)
Yeah. Do you have any tools that you like, that you teach your writers to use in terms of making sure that a piece of content is going to be authoritative enough? Because I know there’s things like Surfer SEO and things like that that tell you, this is what your score is, or Jasper at one point had that. So any of those tools that you recommend?

Steven Schneider (15:58.925)
We, I mean, I love those tools, think that they’re great. We actually don’t use anything like that because it’s really easy to become reliant on those. And over time, do you have enough AI suggestions and writers become, you know, they’re human and they want the easiest path of least resistance. And so we just kind of stay away from them. And it’s like, you how can we make this the best piece of content possible? Looking at competitors, doing our own research, all the strategies we know in-house.

And then we obviously do ongoing trainings in order to do round robin style quality checks and check-ins with the team. So, great tools, but we would rather edge on the side of, you know, risk reduction and safety and making sure that we’re not jeopardizing quality content by accidentally slipping into too much AI content at the end of the day.

Jeffro (16:48.017)
Yeah, that makes sense. All right, I want to circle back to backlinks for a minute. Let’s talk about actually building those backlinks, whether that’s reaching out and doing guest posts or publishing press releases. What sort of backlinks do you recommend going after and what’s the best way to do that?

Steven Schneider (17:04.12)
So there are few different options you can explore. I traditional ones would be like guest posting. That’s the easiest one that probably most people are aware of where you reach out to somebody and ask them if you can guest author a blog on their website. And then they link back to you, making sure that obviously the site and blog is relevant to your website. Other things would be like an update or what’s called a niche edit insertion. So you find a blog and say that you have an expert opinion on the topic. You could update them and say, Hey, Would you mind if I, you know, offered a quote or some sort of advice? And when you update the guide next time, include me, include a picture and a quote, and please link back to my website. Those are really easy. I would say a lot of the really high quality strategies nowadays tie back to podcasting, it or not. I think that people have a multi-win approach there. I mean, the guests, do you get content? I get content. it’s authority backlink if you link to the right people. It’s great networking. You can reach a wide audience. You can repurpose the content. It’s like one of the golden gems, I would say, of link building at the end of the day. And obviously it’s scalable based on your time, but at the same time, if you make the right connections at the end of the day, it’s definitely worth it.

Jeffro (18:22.224)
Do you think that press releases are worth doing? Because those can get picked up by a number of sites, which sometimes have decent domain rating, but they also don’t stay around forever in a lot of cases.

Steven Schneider (18:32.408)
I think that if done by the right people, would say it’s probably not best for people to try and do them themselves or try and do it from an in-house team. think if they’re going to spend the money on a PR link building campaign, be prepared to pay the price, but also know that it does come with more upside. So, I mean, I think that I’ve seen PR articles starting at, you know, a thousand bucks each. And to some people that’s very expensive and I’m like, okay, am I really going to recoup this? And you have to be realistic.

Jeffro (18:39.248)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Schneider (19:02.072)
that’s it’s not a one-to-one relationship with spending versus ROI. So I would say that PR is probably for people who have a little bit more budget to play with. can think about their marketing budget is more of a holistic annual spend rather than how do I get three X on this dollar tomorrow? That’s not how PR works.

Jeffro (19:22.841)
make sense. What about directory citations? I know for a long time that was a big thing that SEO people, it’s got to be exact address and everything across the whole internet. Is that still true today?

Steven Schneider (19:37.527)
It is for local brick and mortars. I would say if you have a, like say like a mechanic shop or like, any sort of brick and mortar local business, it’s really important to have what’s called your NAP, fancy acronym for name, address, and phone number. That should be pretty much the exact same, not even pretty much a hundred percent exact same across every directory, your website, your Google business profile, anywhere where you are mentioned, it should be exactly the same in order to build that relevance and that trust with Google. The link building side of local citations don’t add the authority. So what I mean by that is like, if you got a link from yellowpages.com, that website is probably like a DR 80 or 90. Does it mean you got a DR 80 or 90 link? Because anybody can sign up and use yellow pages to insert their business. So it’s not really a, there’s no moat in order to get that link and Google understands that. you evaluate, but from a citation perspective, it’s still to show that you are a relevant business. You’re open here, the hours of operation, here’s a phone number. And so from a local presence, it does help provide support from that side of things. But I wouldn’t go, you know, adding a bunch of citation links just because you think that you’re going to be able to wiggle your way into a handful of DR eighties. It’s not how it works.

Jeffro (20:59.087)
Makes sense. Now, so all the things we’ve talked about so far, I mean, and we haven’t really spent too much time on the on-page stuff. We talked a little bit about the keyword research and whatnot. But if someone listening has a small SEO budget, maybe they’re doing everything else in-house, where should they invest first, in your opinion?

Steven Schneider (21:15.404)
The two, I mean, the two core pillars at the end of the day are just authority and content. mean, I’m, I probably sound like a broken record player at this point, but content is probably the best bang for your buck immediately because if you build links without a place for people to gravitate toward, you’re kind of working on steps eight through 10 before one through seven. So get content on the site. Make sure it’s the right content has optimized. There’s a lead magnet somewhere on that page for people to opt in you know, work them into your sales process, kind of all of the fundamentals there. And then once you have, you know, maybe anywhere from 20 to 50 pieces of content, probably even fewer depending on your niche, then you can start building authority and start, you know, exploring backlinks and, you know, building the funnel and compounding from there.

Jeffro (22:03.022)
that makes a lot of sense. All right, well, is there anything else you want to touch on before we end our episode today? I mean, we’ve kind of given some interesting analogies, which I think can be helpful for how people can think about SEO and understanding what actually matters, where to spend their efforts. We talked even about some potential things that aren’t worth the time. So what else should people know?

Steven Schneider (22:26.69)
I think just the SEO is not going anywhere and it’s going to become increasingly more important for you as a business owner to appear in Google and AI and chat, GPT and all these other ones that are popping up. So if you think that, that is going to change, I highly encourage you to reconsider that idea. And if you are curious about how to rank in chat, GPT and drive meaningful organic business, I’d be happy.

Jeffro (22:55.673)
Well, thank you so much for sharing your insights today, Stephen. It’s super helpful for businesses who want to stay ahead without wasting their time or their budget on things. So before we wrap up, I do like to ask my guests a final question. Yours is, what’s one mindset shift or habit that business owners need to adopt if they want SEO to actually work for them? Not just as a marketing checkbox to say, yeah, we’re doing it, but something that actually drives revenue.

Steven Schneider (23:21.614)
I think the biggest thing that I’ve seen over the years is that although SEO does take a long time to come to life, it’s very similar to investing in your retirement account. And so, you know, if you think about the paycheck that you make at the end of the month, that’s going to be almost equivalent to a PPC where it’s very immediate gratification and you see the results and all that sort of stuff, which is great but at the end of the day, you’re investing also in your retirement over a 30 year period. So that at the end of the day, when you retire, you have this lump sum that you’ve worked so hard to get. And that’s kind of how SEO works where you do a little by little every month and you see this like very slow crawl and you’re like, Oh, okay. We’re getting a few clicks. That’s interesting. And then it really starts to compound and similar to your retirement account, the compound interest takes effect and the snowball starts to roll and you look back.

And out of nowhere, you have this organic compounding machine. And so I think if you think about it from that perspective and want to apply a marketing strategy to your business, it’s very similar to long-term investing, financially speaking, the two go hand in hand. And so I always try to encourage people to think about that where it’s like, how many people have retirements and that’s not a dumb idea. So why wouldn’t you give SEO a try?

Jeffro (24:40.983)
Well, thanks again for being here, Steven. If you want to connect with Steven or learn more about Trio SEO, check out the links in the show notes. And if you got value out of today’s episode, please leave a quick review. It helps more service business owners discover the show. Other than that, take care and we’ll see you next time. Thanks again, Steven.

Steven Schneider (24:56.975)
Thank so much.