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Guest: Kevin Roy, a pioneer in digital marketing and the co-founder and CEO of GreenBanana SEO, a three-time member of the Inc. 5,000 Fastest-Growing Companies list.
Overview: If your digital marketing strategy is still focused on improving your company’s SEO rankings, you’re playing an outdated game. To get BIG in 2026, your company has to be the answer to the questions that customers are asking AI.
On today’s show, Kevin Roy explains how the rise of AI and large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude is transforming the way businesses attract leads, build demand, and Make BIG Happen.
Kevin Roy on breaking through “zero-click” searches:
”As of June, 60% of searches are now zero-click searches. So that’s 40% of people that are doing a search in Google and going to a website, and 60% are getting the answer in that little answer snippet. So the first thing that you should be doing as a company is make sure that your foundation is understandable. Make sure you have your “Who, What, When, Why, Where, How” on your website so people are able to see a comprehensive view of the company. The answer engines are going to be asking questions and looking for answers, and they want to be able to get a holistic understanding of the company. So making sure that your site isn’t just about marketing and positioning, but really describes what you do and how you do it will be the first step that you need to be taking.”
Kevin Roy on search engine vs. answer engine optimization:
“ SEO is about if you’re optimized properly, if you’re following the rules that Google has put out and you’re not doing black-hat tactics where you’re buying junk links and trying to hide text in backgrounds. Making sure that your page is relevant to the keyword phrase that you’re trying to rank is really important. Making sure that high-authority links that are relevant to the keyword phrase that you’re trying to rank are pointing back to that page. Making sure that your citations are all locked up. Those are the foundational things that you need to do for SEO. It’s the things that we’ve always done.
“The two pieces that you should add to it are, one, learn to love schema markup language. That’s data that the website is saying to the search engine, ‘Pull this directly.’ We’re finding that the LLMs can access markup language faster because they know exactly where to look and so they’re pulling data from that. So we are putting FAQs that are relevant to the keyword phrase that we’re trying to rank inside of the schema on those pages. And second, you can put schema inside images now and take an image and use that to make it more relevant to the search that you’re trying to appear for.”
Kevin Roy on humanizing yourself and your company:
“I’ve always been a believer that people buy from people. Like it or not, I’m going to have to be the YouTube person, the face of the company. Someone else for the company can do that too. But I think it’s really important. I’ve made a decision not to do this: there are some people that are using AI to generate videos of them and they’re putting it on YouTube and it’s working. But I still go back to people buy from people and they want to see a real person that is really talking to them and really relating to them. And it’s okay that they do a few ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ and make mistakes and scratch their eye at the wrong time, because that’s human. That’s the way people speak. I think something that you should be putting forth in the videos is humanize yourself. Especially if you’re in a technology business where there’s a large knowledge gap. People are not going to understand what you do and how you do it, but they’re going to understand that they can relate to you. And I think that should be the crux of the channel.”
Links:
Leveraging AI, SEO, PPC, and Top Talent in Your Digital Marketing Plan – Search marketing expert Bruce Clay discusses how AI has accelerated digital marketing’s evolution and how to tweak your marketing attack.
Preparing Your 2026 Annual Planning Meeting Agenda – Finding the right balance between AI optimization and person-to-person service should be a top priority as you plan for the year ahead.
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