How to Get Unstuck in Marketing and Actually Get Found | Dave Burnett

What does it really take to adapt in business when the rules keep changing?
 In this episode of Small Business Pivots, host Michael D. Morrison sits down with Dave Burnett, founder of AOK Marketing and PromotionalProducts.com, to unpack 27 years of entrepreneurial lessons in sales, marketing, and digital pivots.

From handing out free samples for Bacardi in college to building one of Canada’s most recognized SEO and digital marketing firms, Dave reveals:

• How to spot the exact moment you need to pivot in business.
• The five stages of customer awareness—and why most businesses fail at the first step.
• What SEO for AI really means and how search is fragmenting beyond Google.
• Why adapting faster than your competition is the only way to survive shifting markets.

Whether you’re a small business owner just starting out or running a multi-million-dollar company, this conversation will show you how to create awareness, stay relevant, and actually get found in today’s noisy, AI-driven world.

Ranked in the top 10% of podcasts globally, Small Business Pivots brings you the raw stories and strategies from entrepreneurs who’ve been in your shoes.

Dave Burnett: Founder & CEO of AOK Marketing

Website: https://aokmarketing.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davebburnett/

Blog: https://aokmarketing.com/blog

Podcast: https://aokmarketing.com/learningcenter/podcast/

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Chapters

• 0:00 Meeting Dave Burnett from Toronto
• 2:30 From Hockey Enforcer to Entrepreneur
• 5:53 Marketing Pivots and Business Evolution
• 10:40 Time Management for Marketing Success
• 22:10 Three Buckets of Content Strategy
• 27:18 The Future of SEO and AI
• 36:52 Finding the Right Marketing Partner
• 42:50 Final Advice and Contact Information

Transcript

Michael D Morrison: 0:00

All right, welcome to another Small Business, pivots, where we actually have guests from all around the world. And today we have a guest just a little bit north of us in Oklahoma, up in another country. But I know that no one can introduce themselves or their business like the business owner, so I'm going to let you tell them what country that is, where you're from, your name and company and all that good stuff.

Dave Burnett: 0:23

Thanks, michael, I appreciate it. So I'm Dave Burnett. I'm actually based out of Toronto, canada, and I'm sure my accent will give it away at some point and I'm really, really grateful to be here. Business is in the marketing field. I've been in business for 26 years now to no sorry 27 years now so I've had a little bit of experience, mostly mostly related to marketing and that whole side of things, so it's been a real fun journey. I'm looking forward to sharing what I can with your listeners.

Michael D Morrison: 0:51

Fantastic. Well, what do you think we're going to be able to help them with today? What are some takeaways that you hope they take away today?

Dave Burnett: 0:59

Well, I know in our chat that we talked about, there tends to be people who are stuck and a lot of times people are stuck in their marketing. You know, we got all this craziness going on and there's always something new in the marketing side I can think back to all of a sudden well, to fully date myself before Google was invented how you got noticed. I know, I know there was a time there really was.

Michael D Morrison: 1:20

I was there, and it wasn't that long ago. Wasn't that like 99, 98, somewhere back in there?

Dave Burnett: 1:25

Exactly, my first business was in 97 and we did the old school sampling. So if you've ever been to Costco or any of those other stores and somebody is there with the hairnet on and saying, hey, you want to try this Dorito chip or whatever it might be, that's what we used to do. That was my very first business, except here in Canada. I actually did it for alcohol companies. I did it for Bacardi and Labatt's at the time. So I was in third year university giving out free booze and I think everybody liked me for my personality. I don't think it was because I had free booze. Everywhere I went I had a minivan full of free booze. It was me, I'm sure it was you.

Michael D Morrison: 2:27

Well, I can't wait to hear this story. So let's go ahead and introduce the show and we'll be right back. Simplified for success. Our business is helping yours grow. Boss offers business loans with business coaching support. Apply in minutes and get approved and funded in as little as 24 to 48 hours at businessownershipsimplifiedcom. Hi, welcome back to Small Business Pivots. Hi, welcome back to Small Business Pivots. Well, my friend, I know you know that most of us didn't just come out the womb and become an entrepreneur. We had a journey growing up and unfortunately, sometimes that journey is what keeps us being stuck. We can't get over those humps, those trials and tribulations, those maybe limited self-beliefs. What was your childhood like? Just briefly, so we can get kind of caught up to who you are today.

Dave Burnett: 3:10

So my childhood was great. I really can't complain. I know lots of people entrepreneurs had a tough childhood and they had all these things to overcome and all these challenges. I really wasn't. That wasn't me. I mean, I grew up Toronto hockey player, grew up all these in that kind of a great, great environment. My father worked for Exxon, my mom was a teacher, and so a good middle class upbringing that I can't really say, you know, isn't really that interesting, except for the hockey side of things. I got to a reasonably high level of hockey and then became an enforcer, and that was something that I wasn't really fond of.

Dave Burnett: 3:47

So I ended up you know, I didn't like my nose being broken six times and getting teeth knocked out and taking stitches. It just really wasn't worth it. So I quit hockey, went to university and things got rolling from there. So yeah, but childhood was great.

Michael D Morrison: 4:03

Well, I'm glad you're a distance away from me being an enforcer, but tell our listeners I played ice hockey growing up, not on the scale that you did, but I know what an enforcer is, but can you explain what that is?

Dave Burnett: 4:17

Sure, back when I used to play hockey in the nineties, um, there was a role that was played that basically, when somebody say you had a really good player on your hockey team and that person got bumped or body checked into the boards or something, somebody else had to be their bodyguard and that bodyguard would go out and fight whoever was causing trouble out there on the ice and that person was the enforcer.

Dave Burnett: 4:42

And so that person, unfortunately, was me. As I moved on because I fell into that role, because I got put into a situation where I ended up getting into a fight with a guy who got sent down from the NHL and I got called up to the league above mine and we got into a fight and I won and that showed the coach that I could fight. And then he's like, well, you're going to have to go fight this guy. And I got to go fight this guy, and I got to fight this guy and it just my unfortunately, my career ended potentially prematurely because of that, because it just wasn't where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do.

Michael D Morrison: 5:16

So you're one of those guys that the average hockey fan goes to watch when the fight breaks out. If a fight didn't happen, then the hockey game or the match was boring.

Dave Burnett: 5:28

Yeah, it was. It was not my finest time as a teenager growing up, for sure. I definitely took a lot of punches and gave my, gave my fair share, and uh, yeah it was. It made for excitement. It could swing a game, it could sway a game, you could get the team all riled up and everybody cheering and all of a sudden you could start winning the game. As ridiculous as that sounds, to say out loud.

Michael D Morrison: 5:53

Well, you know, every sport needs something, and hockey that's what they need. So well, that kind of rolls us into business, because every business needs enforcement. They need something that breaks through the boring, you know digital world. So let's talk about marketing. And but let me start with how did you get into marketing and what were some of those pivots or things that you learned right away when you started being an entrepreneur that could maybe help our early seasoned entrepreneurs?

Dave Burnett: 6:24

Yeah, well, my first business I was basically I mentioned earlier I was doing sampling. And what happened was I was working for a company that was doing sampling for other companies and I thought to myself this is ridiculous, I can do this, I can do this better, no problem. So I went out and I cold called, I went and knocked on doors, I went and actually drummed up business and ended up getting Bacardi and Labatt's as clients and representing them with 50 employees across the province. You know, you guys think of across the state, but across the province. And so I was in third year university, full-time, 50 employees, running my business on Thursday, friday, saturday, and so that was that's what I was doing. So I got into that. My first pivot was going from somebody who worked for somebody to just saying, hey, I can do this, I can do this better than they can, and so I did.

Michael D Morrison: 7:11

And then you got out of that and you got into marketing.

Dave Burnett: 7:15

Well, yeah, it's not that far of a jump. It probably sounds a little bit farther than it actually is because I was in marketing. I was in point of purchase sales as we were doing on the sampling side of things. So I ended up getting out of that business, selling it to my partner at the time and then getting into the promotional products side of things, so promotional products being t-shirts, hats, pens and as a result of that, I was doing more sales because I didn't have a problem with no. I heard no a lot. You know this is back in the day where I literally would have like a suitcase full of stuff and I'd be knocking door to door on businesses. So imagine a strip mall of businesses. I'd knock on the door hey mom and pop, shop that does dry cleaning, do you want some pens? You know. Knocking on the next door hey, mom and pop shop that you know sells groceries, do you need something else? Like I literally went door to door to door knocking selling promo and then went in-house and use the phone a lot more efficient to to sell promo, and that's that's how I got started. So the promotional products business was the second business that I was involved in and then I did the same thing that I was like, hey, why am I doing this for somebody else? I can do this myself. So I started my own business that's now called promotionalproductscom back in 2002, after various other adventures. So that was how I got involved and started on the marketing side of things. Now how I got into digital marketing. So I also own AOK Marketing.

Dave Burnett: 8:44

Digital marketing happened back in the Great Recession. So I realize I'm completely dating myself here. I'm telling stories from before Google was invented and telling stories about knocking on doors and things. But when the Great Recession happened, all of a sudden I went from a great business, nice, profitable business, to losing $70,000 a month in my business. That's not sustainable, you know. It just wasn't great. So I had to pivot. I realized, okay, the way we were doing things before cold calling, cold outreach, knocking door to door which worked in the promotional products business it just really wasn't working anymore, especially during that hard time. So what I did was I went out and I bought 3,000 URLs and I put up 500 websites and got good at SEO.

Dave Burnett: 9:29

So that's how my digital marketing business got started is we were doing SEO for ourselves, for our promotional products company, and then, all of a sudden, everybody started noticing us and they're like, hey, we found you, can you do this for us? And it actually was our competitors who originally started reaching me, because they're like, hey, all our customers are all finding you. How are you doing this? I was like, well, I'm not going to tell you Right. And then, and then like, honestly, the sixth, seventh, eighth time I got this phone call, I'm like, okay, fine, there's a business opportunity here. Just, I'll just capitalize on it. I'll use their marketing dollars to learn how to do SEO even better.

Dave Burnett: 10:02

So I started an SEO company doing it for my competitors in other geographic regions, mostly in the US, and at that time I didn't have a US presence, a US office or anything. So we were doing it for our American counterparts from Canada, and that's how we got started. Then we got into digital marketing on the like. Once we started with SEO, we got into the paid search side of things. And then social media was a bigger thing, because that also had been invented, and so we started doing paid social, conversion rate optimization, a bunch of other things on that side. So we had to pivot several times to adapt to what was happening and right now we're in the midst of yet another pivot, as search is getting tremendously fragmented due to what's happening with AI and AI search. So we're right in the middle of that right now, which is exciting and fun and crazy and scary and all those other things that happen when the world gets turned upside down.

Michael D Morrison: 10:58

So you used a word adapt and that's what a lot of business owners just can't seem to do, especially when they feel like they got something figured out for you. It was knocking on doors, getting your nose bloodied, as they say in sales, which that's probably where your enforcer part comes in. It's like I've had the real nose broken, I don't know.

Dave Burnett: 11:22

You're telling me no, I think I had a higher tolerance than most. Yeah, exactly.

Michael D Morrison: 11:28

But how did you learn to be adaptable and actually make that pivot? Was there anything special? Or you just said we're hurting too bad. I got to do something. What was it? Because a lot of people can't switch.

Dave Burnett: 11:42

Well. So I've had several pivots that are mostly environmental, right. So back before Google was invented, we had to adapt to the AI boom or sorry, not the AI boom, the dot com boom. That's totally dating myself again, right the dot com boom. So you had to adapt and go and get online. So that was the first kind of thing that I had to do to adapt, and for me it's always been about learning. But learning is only as good as the actual behavior change that you do.

Dave Burnett: 12:10

You can read books. I have read a lot of books. Most of them have one or two good points in them, but really the important thing is, what behavior change do you actually have as a result of having read that book? So the behavior change the ability to adapt is really comes down to what you do. So for me it came down to okay, we realized, you know, that we had to stop the cold calling. The same way as it was, marketers destroyed the phone right, like you can't answer your phone. The same way as they destroyed the doorbell you can't answer your door because you don't know who's going to be there. All that stuff, right, I blame marketers. Speaking as a marketer, I apologize for our industry. They really did wreck all that stuff.

Dave Burnett: 12:52

But, that being said, you know, it was very important to realize okay, this is a new change in consumer behavior, so how am I going to change to adapt? So when I was learning how to do SEO which really comes down to your website authority, which really comes down to being able to speak uniquely about what you do I realized, okay, if I'm going to speak uniquely about what we do, we have to do some unique things and, as a result, we had to learn and change. We had to adapt to the new marketplace Because, if you don't, I know lots of companies that went out of business in the Great Recession. I know lots of companies that went out of business in COVID. I know lots of companies that went out of business and are going out of business right now, just because of how things are changing. So adapting comes down to understanding, which then you need to apply that understanding in terms of what you're going to do.

Michael D Morrison: 13:47

Absolutely. Well, let's talk about marketing for a second, because for those business owners that are stuck, they're still trying to figure it out, if you will. But there's a lot of things in marketing that you don't have to figure out, it's just they're the essentials of knowing, understanding your target market and this, that and another. So what some insights and tips that you have for those business owners that might quite not be ready, revenue wise, to hire a firm or an agency that they can be doing now until they can, because there are quite a few businesses like that that just don't have the revenue.

Dave Burnett: 14:25

So if people aren't buying enough from you, you have a fundamental problem. I think of there's kind of like a funnel, right, in terms of how marketing works. It's the easiest way to think about it. The very top part of the funnel, the widest part of the funnel, if you will, is awareness. Right, people have to know you exist to be able to then potentially buy from you. Now then you have problem aware. There's the next level, down. So people realize they have a problem and so you know, let's just take any business. So say, like an electrical contractor, okay, say you have a contracting business and you sell your services to homeowners and other small businesses. We'll use them as an example. Right, unaware, people don't realize that they need an electrician for anything because their lights and switches work right, they can change the light bulb, whatever. Then people become problem aware. All right, that switch in their room isn't working. That's the next level. Is problem aware? Okay, solution aware is the next level. They realize that there are people out there who can help them fix this right, so they've got their aware that electrical exists. Then they've got the problem that their thing isn't working and then you know there are people who offer this. Then you have product aware. Okay, so who is a local solution provider, a local electrical company that can help you, because you don't want to go necessarily national, but you might, but you really just need your switch fixed. And then, once you realize who your local solution is, you're product aware and then you get them in. They do a great job. You are now most aware, basically the easiest way to think about it. And if you have another problem that's similar to that, you need your electrical panel replaced or some other wiring done you will be very aware, most aware of the people who helped you before. So those are kind of the five stages You've got unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware and most aware. So, depending on what stage people are at, I went through that whole exercise because if people aren't buying from you, not enough people know you exist.

Dave Burnett: 16:32

So you as an individual practitioner, whatever it is that you're doing, the question is what are you doing every day to make people aware of your product and or service? Are you actually doing outreach? There's really only so many things that you can do to make people aware of your offering. You can do cold outreach, like I was talking about earlier. You know it's slightly changed these days, because it's not only cold calling via phone. It could be cold email, it could be cold direct messages, it could be reaching out via LinkedIn, whatever it might be. That's cold outreach. There's warm outreach. People who know you already exist. You can say people who are in your Rolodex Warm outreach. People who know you already exist. You can say people who are in your Rolodex Again, dating myself. People in your phone, right? People who are in your phone and you could be like I have all these contacts, people who follow you, you're connected with on social media, people who you've got their contact information somehow. That's all warm outreach. You've connected with them. That's warm outreach.

Dave Burnett: 17:25

Fourth and third way that you could do it, sorry, is content. Something like this podcast, right? People create awareness because of something like this podcast. It's free content that we're putting out on the internet, sharing expertise, and people hopefully stumble across this and say, hey, that's something that you know. Michael and Dave, these are two cool guys. Whatever it may be, whatever they're going to say, I don't know, we'll see in the comments, right? It's not the booze, though.

Michael D Morrison: 17:48

It's not the booze, no no, I gave that up years ago.

Dave Burnett: 17:51

And then and then the last way is paid ads. So if you've got content and you've got information, you've got your website, whatever it may be, you can actually do paid ads to drive people to your website. Those are four things that you as an individual practitioner can do to raise awareness. So then it comes down to all right, what are you actually going to do? Because I can hear everybody out there going like Dave, I have so much to do already. It's crazy. Like literally I have no life, you know. Yeah, what you have to do is prioritize your time. Like, if your priority is to grow your business, you need to set aside hours a day to be able to grow your business. You need to set aside chunks of time, focused effort to be able to do this, and I like the rule of 100. And I know there's people who can't see this because it's audio, but I actually, on my desk, have a block paper that is 100 blocks. So if you sleep for seven hours and 20 minutes a night and then you're awake for 16 hours and 40 minutes, the rest of it makes up 24 hours. 16 hours and 40 minutes. In 10-minute chunks is exactly 100 chunks. So every day you have 100 blocks of 10 minutes that you can allocate your time, blocks of 10 minutes that you can allocate your time. So what I recommend is, whenever you get up and whenever you go to sleep, get seven hours and 20 minutes or more if you need it, but get seven hours and 20 minutes of sleep because you need to sleep and then block your day. Spend the first four hours like each block of a hundred, like I think of them as chunks, like each line. You have 10, 10 chunks of 10 every day. You can spend the first hour and 40 minutes of your day doing something that might be cold outreach. You could go to LinkedIn. You could go to message people. You could spend the next hundred minutes working on your content, what is unique to you, what experience to have that you could share. And there you've got 200 minutes of your. You still have 800 minutes left in your day that you're going to be awake, so you still have lots of time. You know you may have to give up the most recent hit on Netflix instead of growing your business, but it's really how you spend your time and what you spend your time doing. I like doing it.

Dave Burnett: 20:07

First thing, it's when it's quiet. Still, the day hasn't gone crazy. There's nothing that's kind of exploded in the work that's going to take you the middle of your day to the afternoon and whatever may be. So if you spend and say you know what, I'm going to wake up, I'm going to have my morning coffee, whatever you need to do, and sit down and get to work and then I'm going to spend the first hundred minutes working solid on something. That's what I would recommend you doing. And the other thing that I've got on my desk which I can also share is my block timer here. Hang on, it's right there.

Dave Burnett: 20:39

So a hundred minutes, just a simple thing that you get off Amazon. You just press the button and it starts counting down. I cover this up and sit there and I don't look at my email. I'm running down. I cover this up and sit there and I don't look at my email. I turn off notifications and I just work on this until I'm done the time. Then you can sit back and say, okay, I was right in the middle of a flow, I'm going to do another hundred minutes or whatever may be. And if you don't have your email open, you don't have your notifications on, you don't have anything for your phone whatever, you'd be amazed at how much you can actually get done anything for your phone whatever. You'd be amazed at how much you can actually get done. So, for the people out there who are struggling with marketing, it's because nobody knows you exist and you need to let people know you exist. That's the very first thing you need to do.

Michael D Morrison: 21:21

I love questions about that.

Dave Burnett: 21:22

Does that make sense?

Michael D Morrison: 21:23

I love that time management. I do a a day planner the night before. So, for those that are listening, any kind of prep for your day works. Just find one that works. But for those that are doing more than others, that seem to get more done than you, if you're a listener it's probably because they're using some type of accountability chart, like you kind of discussed. So that's great advice, great advice. Well, moving into the social media, can you share the value of using the, a company like yourself, versus? I see a lot of small business owners trying to do it themselves and they spend so much time taking pictures, writing content using AI and get no results. Can you kind of share what that advantage of that you have over others?

Dave Burnett: 22:18

Yeah, and it's not just us. I think it has to do with the content that people choose to share it's. I view content in kind of three buckets, one being kind of the lowest level bucket where you can.

Michael D Morrison: 22:31

You're listening to Small Business Pivots. This podcast is produced by my company, Boss. Our business is helping yours grow. Boss offers business loans with business coaching support. Apply in minutes and get approved and funded in as little as 24 to 48 hours at businessownershipsimplifiedcom. If you're enjoying this podcast, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and share it as well. Now let's get back to our special guest.

Dave Burnett: 23:01

I view content in kind of three buckets, one being kind of the lowest level bucket where you can use AI, and we do recommend you potentially use AI is kind of the foundational content. So say, you're that electrician, again going back, you know what is an electrical standards, what is? You know how do you replace a light switch, what do you do? Blah, blah, blah those fundamental things that are really informational about your industry or what you do. There's no reason why you can't use AI-based content around that. So if you want to give a here's how you change a light bulb example on YouTube, perfect, right, that's fine. It's good foundational content. It allows the machines to know what your website is about and the type of authority you are Beyond that. The second type of content is news-based content, so content that's related to something that's exciting and happening in the world. So whenever you may be listening to this, there might be something that just recently happened related to the electrical industry. There may be something just related to the accounting industry or the law firm or whatever may be that you can piggyback on. You know, maybe there was some ruling that came down you could comment on. This is the first level of being able to share your expertise, being able to say things that only you can say, that nobody else can say. That's the really important thing about news is what is your spin on it, what is your take on it and I don't mean spin in a bad way, I mean what is your interpretation and how do you you know, how is this meaningful for you and your potential clients? That's really, really useful. Then the third and highest level is your experience. Share your thought leadership. So what are you doing that's different from everybody else? Like, if you're doing what's the same as everybody else, then why would they pick you? Why wouldn't they just go for the lowest cost provider? But if you say you're that electrician and you spin your morerettes a certain way, I can't believe. I just used that in a sentence. But if you do something special and you take a picture of it, you know whatever may be that's unique to you. That's something that you can then say hey, we are the best marrette tighteners there are. We use this special kind of whatever marrette that is not only yellow or green, it is purple and because it's purple, you know we did this for you.

Dave Burnett: 25:12

Whatever your thing is, being able to talk about your thing that makes you different, that makes you memorable, makes you remarkable, because that's what people will do. They will remark about you if you do something different. And that's how you get known. Because, again, stepping back, that's how you get people aware of you, because you're doing something a little bit different. So this is kind of again going back to the fundamentals of what you should do to raise awareness and talking to people about social media, posting free content that, just again, you can do the same thing. You can post fundamental content. That's fine. But then what's happening that you want to post unique content on or who you're speaking to, that it's unique. And then what is the thought leadership associated with that? Because that's what's really going to set you apart, no matter what you're doing, and there's a concept that's adding more value for each second watch. So the more valuable you can make something and the more relevant to your target market, the better.

Dave Burnett: 26:15

So that's always a question that I start with with a lot of people is who are you actually selling to, right? If you're that electrician, smaller electrician firm you do homes and small business, if all of a sudden, the largest building in town came to you and said we want you to fix every single thing we're replacing. We're going from knob and tube wiring to, you know, up to modern standards. Is that something you want as your business? I'm sure everybody's like dollar signs. They hear the dollar signs, but could they really do it? If you're an accountant and you do local taxes, could you really do you know, a fortune 500 tax filing for somebody like where, who is your target market? How do you serve them best and serve them really well? That's, that's kind of just marketing and operations, fundamentals, but that's, that's an important thing.

Michael D Morrison: 27:02

It is, and you mentioned something in that statement as well about finding what are you different, what makes you different. You're a differentiator. So, on top of what you said, I want to make sure that our listeners heard that part as well, because, if not, you're just a commodity. Right Now, you're competing on price versus why I picked you. So, moving to SEO, similar but different. You want to be found. That's about the only similar part of it is you want to be found. But with all the technology out there, we try to keep our content relevant, so it has a shelf life or something of a few years. But I know AI is really changing this world, but I also think that SEO will forever be different. So I think there, for a while, we kind of got stuck with keywords and kind of following traditional marketing. But what do you see? Where do you see SEO going with all this new AI? Because it's not stopping anytime soon.

Dave Burnett: 28:03

No, it's been really interesting because for the last 20 years, however long it's been, we've really been quite spoiled. You know, you go to Google and search for your stuff and it's the however long it's been we've really been quite spoiled.

Dave Burnett: 28:11

You know you go to Google and search for your stuff and it's the best answer and it's looked basically the same for the last 25 years. Like honestly, it just didn't look that different. I mean a little bit different, but not much. There's highlights and blue links and that kind of stuff. So where we are now is search is getting fragmented. People are using ChatGPT, claude Gemini even which is the Google one more and more every day and by the time people listen to this. Who knows what else is going to be out there. There's going to be more things. It's going to get more and more fragmented. So then the question becomes okay, the way people are finding us is changing. We are going from search results. So you put something into Google, you search for it and it gives you answers in the form of blue links. So that is a search query with a search results page.

Dave Burnett: 28:59

If everybody's with me here, these models, these large language models like ChatGPT and other generative engines like that, are question and prompt based, and what happens is they come up with a different answer. So you put a prompt into the machine and you get a generated prompt response. The interesting thing is, the prompt response will be slightly different each time. It's like me asking you what does a business growth coach do? You could give me an answer and it'd be a very good answer. I could ask you that same question 20 minutes later. The answer will have all the same fundamentals, but the way you phrased it will be slightly different. The highlights of what you said will be slightly different. It's exactly the same thing with prompts and generated prompt results. So everybody's like they hallucinate. Well, they do. They make some stuff up, but they also just answer differently based on how they've been trained. So if you wrap your brain around that, that's kind of one fundamental thing. Secondary to that is authority.

Dave Burnett: 30:02

So SEO is all about building your page authority or your website authority. So you show up higher in those Google search results. You actually show up as one of those blue links sooner, because somebody puts a specific search query like electrician near me into Google and it will show a list of the top electricians that are near you based on their site authority. But even more important is their page authority. So from an SEO perspective, if you have like, say you live in Miami, florida, if your website page for electricians is optimized to say we are the best electrician in Miami Florida. When people in Miami Florida put in best electrician near me, the odds are that electrician will show up higher versus somebody. If I say I was optimizing for Toronto, there's no reason why Google would show that result in Miami Florida, right Like it, just it's designed that way. Now that's your page authority associated with your site.

Dave Burnett: 31:05

What's different now about AI and I think this is actually going to stand the test of time is your entity authority. So say, you have that electrician's website, or even you know our website, aokmarketingcom. You have a certain amount of authority associated with your website, but it's not only what is your page, what is that particular website's authority, but also what do the other things out on the internet say about you? Is your address shown the same across all different listings, like, is it the same on Google Maps as it is on Apple Maps, as it is on Yelp? Consistency is very important, so that goes into your authority, right? So directories how you're listed on the directories, is part of your authority, but you don't control that necessarily. You can influence it, but you don't control it.

Dave Burnett: 31:53

What about public things like Quora, Answers on Quora, or Reddit, the way people are discussing on Reddit or even Wikipedia, having a Wikipedia page. All those things are independent, third-party viable resources that talk about how much authority your entity has. So if you're that number one best electrician on your website in Miami, but you go online and everybody on Quora is trashing you and you've got no good reviews online or any of the sites and your website address has shifted, there's no trust out there for the machines to be able to latch onto and say these are great reviews, this is verified information, this is truthful information then you won't rank either in the AI or in search engine optimization, because what you have to think about is how authoritative your entity is, what's your reputation online associated with your entity, and so the better your reputation is, the better you'll rank for all these different things. So that's a very long-winded answer as to how things are changing, like they're getting fragmented. But the fundamentals if you do the fundamentals well, I think that's going to stand the test of time.

Michael D Morrison: 33:10

Very well said in a short amount of time. That would have taken me a hundred years, I think, to explain that, but that's very well said. I use both AI and Google search, depending on what I'm looking for and how specific I want it to be. So for those out there, that's kind of what he's sharing is over time, I do feel like people will find their platform of choice, like I have. If I'm searching specifically for something, I'll use this, and if I'm kind of wanting just some general ideas, I'll choose this, and so it's kind of like search everywhere optimization right, it's gotta be everywhere. That's a great way to put it.

Dave Burnett: 33:52

Yeah, well.

Dave Burnett: 33:53

and and not only that, but people search on social media too right If you're looking on TikTok right, that's another part of search If they're searching on Facebook or Instagram, if they're searching on Pinterest, if they're searching on in addition to traditional Google search and now AI-based search. So there's a lot of things out there and the thing about AI that I also think is important, which may be getting a little too technical, so I apologize to all of you out there, but there's two parts of AI. The first part is AI is trained on a certain amount of information. Think about it like going to high school and then, at the end of high school, you graduate and you only know so much science, you only know so much math. You know here we have to take French, there you may take Spanish, whatever it is. You only have so much knowledge.

Dave Burnett: 34:38

Then that's the same with the large language models like chat, GPT. What they then do is they spend a bunch of time teaching it to answer nicely and not you know, not give away information. It shouldn't. So that takes a few months, and then they release it to the public. So I'm not sure when you're listening to this, but you know there was a release of GPT, chat GPT originally in November of 2022. Then there was GPT 3.5, and then there was GPT four and then there was 4.5 and then GPT five in the summer of 2025. So there was like three years between GPT 3.5 and five. So that's because of the training. So GPT five, for example, was trained up to October of 2024, and then they stopped training it and taught it to be nice. That's basically what they did to it.

Dave Burnett: 35:25

And so that's the first thing is understanding fundamental, foundational knowledge of what they have. And what they've done is they've taught it how to answer correctly and really well, right, Really smart. So GPT-3.5 may have been a high school graduate. Gpt-4 may have been a college school graduate. Gpt 4 may have been a college graduate. Gpt 5 might be the equivalent of a master's degree graduate. Right, it keeps getting smarter and better over time. That's the first thing. So it answers more questions better.

Dave Burnett: 35:52

Now the second thing is you get into these engines that also have search. So now, for example, if they haven't heard of your entity, your company, you, whatever it may be, they can go out to the internet, their own you know search engine, their own database of knowledge, come back and say, hey, I found information. And now, because they know how to speak and speak nicely, because they were trained. That way they can now give you information.

Dave Burnett: 36:17

So there's two things that you're going to optimize for. You're going to optimize to be in the original database of knowledge, but then also to be found when they go out and say, hey, you know if somebody's on ChatGPT, hey, who's the best electrician in the Miami area? You want to also be found by the machine, to be able to show up in the search results once, even if you weren't in the base search results. You want to be found in the search results when it goes out to the Internet and be found. So that I don't think is going to change the more authority you have, the easier it'll be for the machines to find you, whatever that machine looks like in the future.

Michael D Morrison: 36:50

So I hope that's helpful too. Very much, so I hope what you're hearing is.

Michael D Morrison: 36:59

That's great if you're attempting and learning to do it yourself, but you can advance so much faster hiring a company and that is a segue into me asking when business owners that we work with being a business coach the business owners we work with they get a wide array of estimates when they go shopping for SEO and this AI stuff. It can be anywhere from, I wouldn't say, less than 500 bucks now I don't know anybody less than that but it could be 500 to thousands and thousands of dollars. The unfortunate thing is business owners just don't know what they're getting, other than someone saying, well, I can get you the top of this page or I can do this and do that. That's all they know. So can you kind of share a little bit of insight on getting them up to speed as far as you need to look for this and this, and here's kind of a good range.

Dave Burnett: 37:51

Sure, I think it's important that people in the past have kind of looked at SEO as kind of black magic snake oil salesman. I don't want to speak badly about our industry, but, okay, there's a lot of that out there. What are you really doing, right? Yeah, so for me, that's why it's really important to understand how people are measuring your onsite and offsite authority. Right? Can somebody look at your site? You will know.

Dave Burnett: 38:18

The best advice I can give is talk to 10, 12 different providers and you won't know what questions you should ask until you start asking questions and then always the first say okay, use it. Think about this as a process in your business. You want a particular service, seo, accounting, whatever it is. Talk to the first people, ask them the questions you think go to chat, gpt or whoever ask it what questions you should ask and then at the end ask the person what other questions should I have asked you? And that will add to your list. And then you ask the next person. You know all those questions, including the one, and then you ask them what other questions should I have asked you? By the time you get to the seventh or eighth, you'll hear the same things and you'll start to be able to differentiate. The best thing is, you may have realized that the guy or the gal that you're speaking to first was the original best answer. You may want to go back to them, but that's the first thing. So, learning what questions to ask and then getting enough reps in, enough practice in to understand who and how you should hire. Because if everybody's saying the same thing, they look at your website and they say, hey, your page speed is slow, you got to fix that. Here's how you fix it. If they all say that, okay, fine, check that box, that's legit. As soon as you get into somebody who's like well, I have experience, so like, for me, it would be.

Dave Burnett: 39:42

We worked on the SEO of Encyclopedia Britannica. They had 500,000 pages that were looking to be optimized and they were getting 340 million page views a month. And they came to us and said, hey, we got some problems, we need more because we're going up against Wikipedia, which has 2.2 billion searches a month or page views a month. We want to beat them. So we were like, okay, this will be fun. So we dug in and we ended up getting them up to 510 million page views a month because of some structural changes they did with their website and because, they're honestly, their images weren't optimized, so we optimize their images. Image search is a big thing when you're looking for things like encyclopedia answers, and so, as a result, we were able to get them and grow their business by millions of dollars a month in page view revenue, not including any of the other stuff that they did.

Dave Burnett: 40:28

So, talking to somebody, remember I talked about the different types of content. This is an example of what I can say that nobody else can say that they did Right. So this is what's unique and sets us apart right? So this is what's unique and sets us apart is I worked with. I also worked with a Merriam-Webster dictionary optimizing for keywords like aardvark. You know those kinds of things which nobody else would ever be asked to do, but we were. So we did help them and help them with paid search and a bunch of other things.

Dave Burnett: 40:52

So there's, what have you done? What stories can you tell? And then, what questions do you ask? Because really, it comes down to understanding.

Dave Burnett: 41:01

Now, the last thing I would say in regards to SEO is understanding what metrics people use to measure success. If they're not guaranteeing or talking about metrics at all, huge red flag If they're like they don't know what page views are, they don't know how to set up your Google analytics, they don't know any of these kind of technical things. Major red flag If they're like they don't know what page views are, they don't know how to set up your Google Analytics, they don't know any of these kind of technical things. Major red flag.

Dave Burnett: 41:24

But if they say to you look, by having this much time on site, this is your highest level page, this is what your content pillar should be, et cetera, et cetera, it's important to be able to understand what they're saying and how it matters to you. So the amount and number and relevance of the metrics they use to measure is a super important thing, right, like, even if it's an accounting firm, it's okay, we saved our past 20 clients X amount of dollars because of you know X, y and Z. If it's your electrician, hey, we'll be in and out in 30 minutes because we've done a thousand jobs just like this. Whatever, whatever it is, there should be something that they can measure and do and give you that information. So that's. Those are kind of the main things that I would look at when you're trying to source anything for your business.

Michael D Morrison: 42:10

Yeah, that's. That's great. I've never heard anyone share at the end of the conversation, ask what questions should I have asked or what's another question I should have asked. I'm going to start using that. That's great advice. Well, speaking of advice, I'm almost out of time, but I'm looking at your website For listeners. I encourage you to go there. You have a fantastic blog page that looks like you put a new article up about every few days and it just covers all these things you've talked about in more depth. But can you share what AOK Marketing does and who your ideal client is?

Dave Burnett: 42:50

Absolutely so what we do? We only do a few things. We try to be very specialized. Some marketers try to be all things to all people. We're not that. We do SEO for AI. We do regular SEO, which is now just honestly completely evolving into SEO for AI. We do paid search and we do paid social. We also add in a little conversion rate optimization. So basically, in English, what all that means is we bring more traffic to your website and we help them buy more stuff from you. That's what we do, and so who our ideal customers are?

Dave Burnett: 43:20

Really we work with kind of the medium to large enterprise three to five million dollars in revenue and up is where we tend to fall, just because we're not the cheapest option out there. So if you're looking for the cheapest, unfortunately that's not us, but we're happy to help and point you in the right direction. But yeah, that's, we'd love to be able to help and take a look at whatever it is that you're doing. The people we have the most success with are people who are highly metrics oriented, so that really lends us well to e-commerce businesses. We also do a lot of lead gen for B2B, but we also work on some other fun projects, like I said, about the Encyclopedia Britannica and others like that. So that's where we tend to fall.

Michael D Morrison: 44:01

Well, I know there's some listeners out there that could use your services. That's listening to us today. What's the best place to find you? Follow you.

Dave Burnett: 44:07

Uh, to find me personally, the best place is LinkedIn. I would. I would be happy to connect with anybody there. Secondary to that, if you want any of my thoughts, I built a blog for my kids called algorithm for life, and also post the odd time to X whenever I'm feeling so inspired. But I know X has a noise problem, so I feel you know, tread with care there, so yeah, but aokmarketingcom, or find me on LinkedIn. I'm just Dave Burnett and I'd love to be able to connect with you.

Michael D Morrison: 44:34

Well, I always wrap up the show with one final question, and that is if you were in front of an audience of small business owners different sizes of business, different seasons of business what's one thing that's applicable for all of them? In other words, a quote, a book tip, anything.

Dave Burnett: 44:53

A quote, a book or a tip, I would say work harder than you think you have to, because the people who are ahead of you are working just that, just as hard as you are. And you know, people always say work smarter, not harder. But I think my competition is actually pretty smart, so if they're smart and working hard, I'm going to have to work a little bit harder. So that's, that's the only thing I can say. It's great philosophy.

Michael D Morrison: 45:20

Dave, you've been a blessing to many and a wealth of information. I certainly appreciate you today and your time and our listeners do too and wish you continued success.

Dave Burnett: 45:29

Thank you, and to you and to everybody else as well, thanks for having me, my pleasure.

Michael D Morrison: 45:33

Thank you for listening to Small Business Pivots. This podcast is created and produced by my company, boss. Our business is growing. Yours, boss, offers flexible business loans with business coaching support. Apply in minutes and get approved and funded in as little as 24 to 48 hours at businessownershipsimplifiedcom. If you're enjoying this podcast, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and share it as well. If you're enjoying this podcast, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and share it as well. If you need help growing your business, email me at michael at michaeldmorrisoncom. We'll see you next time on Small Business Pivots.