August 7, 2026 – Buy then Build Scott Meier and GreenBananaSEO Kevin Roy

00:03 Intro 1: From the AM/FM 24/7 Radio Network, broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration Award-winning School for Startups Radio.

00:14 JIM BEACH: Welcome to School for Startups Radio. Sorry, we don’t have time for the introduction today. The show is too crammed, packed with great guests. First up, we have Scott Meier. He is the guy behind the plush creations that look exactly like you, your pet, or something you imagined. It is a cool story. And then Kevin Roy is with us. He is with GreenBananaSEO. I bet you’ll never forget the name now: GreenBananaSEO. It’s a great show. Let’s get started. Very excited to introduce a really creative entrepreneur. Please welcome Scott Meier to the show. He’s the CEO of Budsies.

01:08 JIM BEACH: They make stuffed animals that look exactly like you, your favorite imaginary animal, your pet, or whatever. I think that’s what they do. He took over the company in 2021. Before that, he had been working in television and film as a filmmaker, director, executive producer, and showrunner for both English- and Spanish-language productions. Pretty cool. Scott, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

01:41 SCOTT MEIER: Jim, thank you so much. It was a great introduction.

01:46 JIM BEACH: I appreciate you being with us. So what kind of TV and movies and stuff did you do? Anything we might have heard of?

01:56 SCOTT MEIER: So, I did a lot of work in Latin America. I was living in Chile for six years, in Mexico City back when it was called Distrito Federal for a couple of years, and in Spain. If you have been in those markets, the answer is maybe. And then in the US, I did some independent films and a bit of TV. And yeah, the list is long. So lots of fun projects there.

02:30 JIM BEACH: What was the interest in living in Spanish speaking countries?

02:34 SCOTT MEIER: Uh, I was just kind of following the the magic and the yeses in life and was interested in photography. Through that, I met a guy who had studied photography under Ansel Adams. He was working on a shoot for Vogue when I met him, and then I corrupted him into the world of moving images. We started making documentaries in Spanish-speaking markets.

03:07 JIM BEACH: Very cool. Interesting career. All right, what draw or drew you out of that? And why did you decide to go for Budsies?

03:16 SCOTT MEIER: Sure, so flash forward, uh, 10 or 15 years, and I found myself in Los Angeles pitching, um, TV shows and films. I would find intellectual property, like interesting stories or books, and then I would package them up, um, with options and agreements and pitch them out to different studios and, uh, directors and and actors to package them and get them made. And somewhere along the way, I got extremely sick from eating a panini, actually.

03:52 SCOTT MEIER: I got hepatitis A and had to drop everything. When that happened, I started investing and learning about what I could do from the couch, fearing that just going to get the mail was going to be a challenge, which it was for many months. Through that, I discovered acquisition entrepreneurship. I learned about the SBA 7(a) and Walker Deibel’s book Buy Then Build. I followed that process, went through the Acquisition Lab, and found Budsies, which had been on Shark Tank.

04:34 SCOTT MEIER: And, you know, the SBA 7 A is such a cool thing that’s just so uniquely American, where the country, you know, helps entrepreneurs acquire businesses and grow them that way.

04:48 JIM BEACH: Very cool. So many follow-up questions. First, tell us about Budsies. Did I get it right? A stuffed animal of me?

04:58 SCOTT MEIER: Absolutely. It is a stuffed animal of you. A stuffed animal or a puppet of you, and then all your friends and enemies can make you say whatever they want. We also do drawings, which is where it started. We take a child’s drawing, you upload it to our site, and we turn it into a one-of-a-kind stuffed animal. This is totally made from scratch by our artists and artisans and designers. And this is not like built from a base where we’re just kind of slapping things on. Every single one is truly built one of a kind.

05:41 SCOTT MEIER: That expanded into Petsies. If you love your pet, you have to have a Petsie, where we honor the bond between an owner and a pet: dog, cat, parrot, or parakeet. We’ve done a ferret in a wheelchair, all in plush. That’s our pet-dedicated business. We also do B2B work through Stuffed Animal Pros. We work with everyone from small book authors doing a short run to Fortune 100 companies. We’ve done the mascot for the Chick-fil-A Bowl, the Duke’s Mayonnaise jar, and a whole lot in between.

06:32 JIM BEACH: Wow, very cool stuff.

06:34 SCOTT MEIER: Yeah.

06:35 JIM BEACH: It looks really cool. On my LinkedIn profile, I have a picture of myself as a LEGO minifigure. I had a LEGO minifigure made of myself, which I thought was kind of cool. Um, But this is a whole new thing. I might have to have a, a, 6 foot version of myself made.

07:01 SCOTT MEIER: Yeah, we also do figurines. I have a great figurine that is actually a handmade, hand-sculpted bobblehead. Those are some of the other products we do. It is so cool because the figurine has a tiny stuffed animal of me in its arms, like one of those Russian nesting dolls.

07:23 JIM BEACH: Yeah, the matryoshka. Oh, I love it. So why were the Shark Tank people selling?

07:31 SCOTT MEIER: Um, the founder went on Shark Tank and put, you know, 8 years into the business and he was interested, you know, he was a very much a tech and business minded person and really wanted to kind of go back into dedicated tech. Uh, and that’s when I came along. What was cool is that Budsies has a proprietary back end that lets us manage the entire order flow. It is a lot of logistics to produce hundreds of thousands of unique designs over the years. And It’s it’s pretty spectacular how it works.

08:26 JIM BEACH: Well, I’m on the website and the pictures are incredible of the things you’ve built over the years. This one little kid drew a bug with 12 or 18 arms. It is amazing. Just amazing.

08:48 SCOTT MEIER: Yeah, I tell people we, which is true. We do the hardest part of making toys, the design of a true one-of-a-kind item, as our core business over and over again. So if we were to have our storefront, if you imagine like, you know, the old toy store where there are 10 of everything in our in our store, there would be one of everything and it would be unique to what you want to see.

09:22 JIM BEACH: Yes. Oh, this is just so creative. I wish I had kids of this demographic again.

09:29 SCOTT MEIER: We get a lot of kidults, too, as the industry calls them.

09:34 JIM BEACH: I would have to think what I want, though. I just got 2 kittens. Maybe if they had a kitten of themselves, they would enjoy that. I don’t know. They would rip it apart.

09:50 SCOTT MEIER: We get great reaction videos from customers. Everything is driven by our customers’ experiences, which we are always trying to improve. Our team takes every order to heart. They really do. And, um, and so, you know, when we get a pet, they’re trying to make sure that every detail is the same and, you know, from what we can see from photos and, uh, so it’s that part of the process is cool. We get these UGC videos. That means user-generated content. I use too many acronyms. We get videos of dogs and cats reacting to a Petsie made in their likeness.

10:41 JIM BEACH: Oh, that was really funny. Are the videos on your website?

10:49 SCOTT MEIER: Yes, and on social media. We have a great following on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, including about 2.5 million followers on YouTube right now. And, um, you know, it’s so much of what we do really, especially on the pet side, that’s where Petsies is, It’s all about the emotion and that, you know, if you are a, it sounds like you’re a cat lover and a pet person. So you know that that bond is so unique. It’s so every single pet that we’ve ever had, I’ve had a unique relationship and bond with every dog. We were never cat people growing up.

11:38 SCOTT MEIER: I love cats, but we were always dog people. And um, and every single one is just such a special thing. So that’s what we try and honor and to try and be a part of that journey with people.

11:58 JIM BEACH: Yep. You have Petsies buried on the site here. I had to go looking for it. I would add Petsies near the top, Scott. The little Petsies link is below Budsies. I had to go digging through Budsies to find Petsies, in other words.

12:18 SCOTT MEIER: If you go to MyPetsies.com, you won’t have any trouble finding Petsies.

12:23 JIM BEACH: Well, that’s different. You are? I am just saying the two sites should link to each other more easily and quickly. I had to go looking for Petsies, in other words.

12:38 SCOTT MEIER: For sure, yeah. They absolutely do. And I think it’s they’re they are definitely unique. Uh, you know, customer subsets, which is why they were broken out into 2 different sites because, you know, when people are more creativity and arts driven, they’re looking for that specific thing. And then if they are pet driven, It’s really a different mentality. It’s a different journey for each customer.

13:09 JIM BEACH: Tell us about Buy Then Build and the negotiation involved in acquiring the company from the founder who wanted to return to technology after eight years. What was that like buying the, was it openly for sale? How did that you stumble across it?

13:31 SCOTT MEIER: Sure. For those who are not familiar with what is now called ETA, it means entrepreneurship through acquisition. Buy Then Build is the book Walker Deibel wrote, and I believe it was a Wall Street Journal bestseller. He created what is called the Acquisition Lab. In 2020, when the world shut down for a virus that shall not be named, I started reading Buy Then Build and went through the Acquisition Lab. They help you understand how to read a P&L and evaluate a business listing through the eyes of an acquisition entrepreneur.

14:20 SCOTT MEIER: There are many things in black and white in the P&Ls, but there is also a lot to the story. Does the company have licenses that might be needed, or some kind of accreditation tied to the owner? And so I’ve looked at, you know, hundreds and hundreds of businesses that are listed for sale on multiple different sites. There is everything from QuietLight.com to high-volume listing sites such as BizBuySell. So there are so many businesses.

14:59 JIM BEACH: What’s the best one for you, Scott?

15:03 SCOTT MEIER: Quiet Light ended up having the listing that I closed on.

15:10 JIM BEACH: I haven’t heard of that. Is it L-I-T-E or L-I-G-H-T?

15:17 SCOTT MEIER: L-I-G-H-T.

15:18 JIM BEACH: Okay.

15:19 SCOTT MEIER: Yeah.

15:20 JIM BEACH: All right. And then how was the negotiation?

15:23 SCOTT MEIER: Well, this was a unique one because, um, I saw the business listing. I immediately said this is not for me. I’m not gonna, I’m I’m a grown man. What business do I have playing with toys, right? And then as ideas and creativity come, I just was flooded with like, 0 my gosh, we could do that. We could do this. There are all these different things. I started talking it through with my now fiance and my family and I was like, man, this could be really cool.

16:04 SCOTT MEIER: All right, I’m going to see if I can do something about this and dig deeper. And it got to the point where I was like, hey, I called up the broker and I said, hey, I’d like to make an offer. And he said, that’s great. But you’re too late. The business has already accepted an offer and yeah, you’re too late. So I was like, oh. Well, please keep me in second position, if anything goes wrong or if anything starts to trip up, give me a call and I’ll be there and I can follow through with this thing.

16:54 SCOTT MEIER: Because I had all my ducks in a row, which is what the acquisition lab helps you do. And all my ducks in a row in terms of how I was going to finance the down payments, how, you know, My lenders, all that stuff is in place. And so, um, lo and behold, three, 4 months later, I got a call. It was right after Thanksgiving of 2020. And they said, hey, you still, you still interested? And I took a deep breath and said, yeah, let’s do this.

17:34 JIM BEACH: Okay, fantastic. So did you ever find out what happened with the other deal? Why it fell apart. Why the other guys fell apart?

17:46 SCOTT MEIER: I think there were actually two or three other buyers whose deals fell apart. One was because they had had, uh, you know, like a close family member get sick. Another one, um, you know, just kind of didn’t fully understand the process. I think, actually, yeah, there were just two. So didn’t understand the process and got far enough down the line to then realize that like, oh, I might be in over my head.

18:22 SCOTT MEIER: Um, and, you know, without a community uh, of all of fellow entrepreneurs, some who have already gone through the process of acquisition and some that are in the same process. Um, without that community, I wouldn’t have been able to to make the leap because there’s some, it’s a big thing. You know, it’s like buying a house, except this house comes with employees and health insurance for others that you have to be making payments on and cash flow and the whole thing and you’re you’re you’re on the line. So, there’s personal guarantees and and it gets real pretty quick.

19:10 JIM BEACH: I have gotten an SBA loan. Tell us about what your process was like and how your local SBA helped you.

19:23 SCOTT MEIER: It was not a local SBA. Actually the bank was already connected. And at the last minute, I talked to the head of the bank. And after that conversation, this was just a few days before close. I said, I’m not going to do this deal with this bank. Sorry. I called the deal out. The guy started talking to me like Batman, saying, “Come on, Scott. You have to close the deal, Scott.” “You are on the 99-yard line, Scott.” “You have one yard to go. You have to do this, Scott.”

20:09 SCOTT MEIER: And I was like, uh, wow, I I was looking for a bank partner that was going to be supportive and this bank happened to be connected to the deal and there were all these timing issues. And, you know, I basically said like, I don’t feel comfortable with this bank, you know, 24 hours or 72 hours before we were supposed to start closing. They had said things that were not correct under the SBA rules. I finally found the complete rules, which was not as easy five years ago as it is now.

20:55 SCOTT MEIER: Uh, It just wasn’t quite as easy to find and the internet, you know, Google, you know, but things were not easy to find and analyze as they are now with some of the AI stuff that is one of the benefits of where things are going. I was consulting with other bankers, seeing if I could hop to another bank and one of them was like, yeah, everything, like these 4 things that you’re saying they said are mandatory or not at all, which was like how I was going to finance a down payment, et cetera.

21:43 SCOTT MEIER: So, uh, long story short, I talked to every single, you know, person in my network that had been an advisor to me. Um, One of them said, listen, you know, the SBA has a set of rules. You may not like this bank, but you just need to know like, you, uh, you just can’t slip up with them and they have to follow the rules just like you do. So not that much changes. You know, were you really going to be best friends with them anyway? So I actually ended up closing with that bank.

22:29 SCOTT MEIER: Um, a couple years later or 3 years later, I refinanced into a new bank, which has been a better relationship. And that old bank went under and now all their assets were sold to a different bank that’s now managing that. I had gone through, went through 3 different entities in the time that I had dealt with them, and I’m still getting letters about it.

23:04 JIM BEACH: My goodness, what a nightmare.

23:06 SCOTT MEIER: It’s just, you know, that’s how these things go. In business, you start to, you have to double the amount of patience at least that you’re prepared to have. And if you do that, then you’ll never run out of patience.

23:26 JIM BEACH: I got an SBA loan over a weekend. Scott, the paperwork was two and a half inches thick.

23:35 SCOTT MEIER: Yep, to get a loan.

23:37 JIM BEACH: Two and a half inches thick.

23:40 SCOTT MEIER: Yeah, you get a hand cramp signing all of those forms 40 times.

23:46 JIM BEACH: Yes, it was unbelievable. Unbelievable. Where do you stand on ETA, entrepreneurship through acquisition? There are so many boomers retiring and their kids don’t want that damn business. Now is the best time ever to buy a business. What are your thoughts?

24:06 SCOTT MEIER: There is no denying the Silver Tsunami, with all the boomers retiring and looking for an exit. I think two interesting things are happening. Because the ETA space of buyers is growing, I think that for a lot of the boomers who previously were like, ah, I need to pass it on to my son or just shut it down, they’re kind of opening up to new opportunities where they can start to find all kinds of unique relationships with buyers and qualified people that are, you know, looking to help bring whatever business it is into the 21st century.

24:51 SCOTT MEIER: And, you know, I really think that The SBA obviously is really focused on the independent like mom and pop, small buyer, like myself, whereas, uh, you know, you have like all these equity firms doing like HVAC roll-ups and all that stuff, which is that’s a whole its own thing. Um, but there’s really a lot of space out there for the everyman. And I think it’s pretty cool.

25:22 JIM BEACH: Another thing now, Scott, is go back to that SBA and see if they’ll give you some kind of award, entrepreneur of the year or something like that. I’m serious. I got media person of the year from the SBA.

25:41 SCOTT MEIER: Oh wow.

25:42 JIM BEACH: And it’s been great for my career, you know, I don’t I don’t know about that, but it’s, you know, it’s a cool thing to throw out, right? Even you said, oh wow. And so, uh, totally through the SBA, they have tons of awards to give every year and they look really good on paper, you know?

26:11 SCOTT MEIER: All right, I didn’t know that. I’ll have to look.

26:16 JIM BEACH: Yeah, your government gave me a media award. You can tell it that way. You know, you can tell the banker, “Your government, Mr. Banker, gave me an award.” So it can’t be a bad idea, you know? But seriously, there’s tons of SBA awards. Go get yourself one of those now.

26:40 SCOTT MEIER: All right, I’ll have to look into it.

26:43 JIM BEACH: How’s the business doing now then? Is it grown since you got it? Has it been a good decision? Do you love it?

26:55 SCOTT MEIER: E-commerce has a stepped pattern of growth: building, refining, changing, and improving processes and the customer experience. That’s the process we’re in. We are following this pattern of build, grow, build, grow. And I’d say right now we’re in a build phase and we’re doing cool things, in the background that hope we hope to start revealing to people, but yeah, there’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s an interesting process.

27:30 JIM BEACH: Yeah, I got to think Chick-fil-A plushies and all sorts of other things would sell.

27:38 SCOTT MEIER: Yeah, totally. I mean, we’re also doing really cool stuff that is kind of makes it all worthwhile. For example, we just partnered with Make-A-Wish. It was a Make-A-Wish organization on the West Coast, in Oregon. A previous wish participant who survived and meant so much to them helped bring us in as a Make-A-Wish experience for children going through difficult medical journeys. And When I came into the company, there were people just, I was like, what’s this line item here? And there’s an, it was explained to me like, oh, people just love what Budsies does and they just send money.

28:24 SCOTT MEIER: And I was like, where does that go? And it turned into, You know, and it would send money with a note saying, hey, please give this experience to a kid that deserves it and maybe couldn’t otherwise afford it. And that kind of culminated in somebody, A person donated a $10,000 check to us. And I said, well, we got to turn this into something. We looked at building a nonprofit, but that involved many hurdles and compliance requirements. Instead, we created a nonprofit fund through the Community Foundation of Tampa Bay. They have been a good partner.

29:12 SCOTT MEIER: Now we can receive tax-deductible donations into that fund, and then partner with nonprofits to bring the Budsies experience to children. And so that enables them to have funding. So we do matching. We have nonprofits that come with all their own funding. Sometimes we can do most of the funding. It’s a small thing and we’re always trying to grow it, but it is really where our heart is. We’ve worked with Ronald McDonald House and CHOA, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. We’ve also worked with smaller schools and after-school programs.

29:54 SCOTT MEIER: I do not remember the exact type of school, but it provides after-school care for children whose parents work nine to five. And, you know, sometimes those kids aren’t getting, you know, all the best things and we’re able to bring budsies, which is, you know, Budsies is not the same price as your typical stuffed animal because it’s totally custom made. And we’re aware that not everybody, that’s a stretch, you know, for a lot of people. We try to use Budsies Pals to bring the experience to children whenever we can.

30:37 SCOTT MEIER: Um, and, you know, recently what is so near and dear to my heart is what we’ve been doing in the education space. Human creativity is what differentiates us from the robots. Teachers tell us that when children see an idea or character they created come to life, it short-circuits the thought, “I cannot do this,” and turns it into, “Wow, anything is possible.” It complete, like, it’s short circuits that I can’t do this and turns into, wow, anything is possible.

31:16 SCOTT MEIER: And so we’re trying to to underline and reinforce that and we’ve been working with some really cool teacher influencers on that space too.

31:28 JIM BEACH: Wow, that is so cool, Scott. Amazing job. A-plus, buddy. You have done great. All fantastic.

31:35 SCOTT MEIER: So, yeah. All we can do is give it our all.

31:40 JIM BEACH: That’s right. I understand that I am officiating your wedding. Have you heard that yet or is that new news to you?

31:51 SCOTT MEIER: That is news to me.

31:53 JIM BEACH: I was going to ask, where are you? I am in Georgia, so Puerto Rico or wherever you are is easy. Where is the wedding going to be?

32:05 SCOTT MEIER: Okay. It’s going to be in San Francisco where my fiance is from.

32:11 JIM BEACH: I’m allowed to be there?

32:13 SCOTT MEIER: You’re allowed to be there.

32:15 JIM BEACH: Okay, good. I did a wedding on the edge of a cliff, with waves crashing below.

32:22 SCOTT MEIER: Oh, yes, I will be the one who gets wet first.

32:27 JIM BEACH: I performed my first wedding about a year and a half ago, and it was a Muslim-Jewish wedding.

32:35 SCOTT MEIER: Oh cool.

32:36 JIM BEACH: So if I can handle Muslim Jewish, I can handle y’all’s problems.

32:42 SCOTT MEIER: Are you ordained through the Universal Life Church?

32:46 JIM BEACH: Uh, I don’t know where I am. I’m Internet.com, $15 certified.

32:52 SCOTT MEIER: Yeah, that’s that’s the one.

32:54 JIM BEACH: I have performed one wedding myself. I took the instructional course from Conan O’Brien himself, in prerecorded video form.

33:04 SCOTT MEIER: Very cool.

33:05 JIM BEACH: Yeah, Scott. How do we find out more, follow you online, contribute to the cause, and get a cool plushie of our family?

33:17 SCOTT MEIER: Yeah, follow us on all the social media platforms you could think of. We are @Budsies, B-U-D-S-I-E-S. Petsies is P-E-T-S-I-E-S. You can also visit StuffedAnimalPros.com, MyPetsies.com, and Budsies.com.

33:30 JIM BEACH: Fantastic. Scott, thank you so much. I’m so glad you were on the show. Great, great information. I had not heard about the ETA program before, so I’m glad to learn about that. Thanks a lot. Great stuff.

33:49 SCOTT MEIER: Jim, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Have a lovely one and we’ll see you at the wedding.

33:59 JIM BEACH: I will be right back.

34:01 SCOTT MEIER: All right, thank you. Bye.

34:10 JIM BEACH: Thank you very much for being with us. Very excited to introduce my next guest. Please welcome Kevin Roy to the show. He is the CEO and co-founder of GreenBananaSEO. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget that name it works so well. They have been on the Inc. 5000 list three or four times in a row. They have more than 1,000 clients across 30 different verticals. Damn, pretty impressive. Kevin, welcome to the show. How you doing?

34:40 KEVIN ROY: I am great. Thank you very much for having me.

34:43 JIM BEACH: Where did the name come from?

34:44 KEVIN ROY: Oh, so that’s a funny, funny story that I was doing a presentation years and years ago, um, right when we first started the company, and it was about SEO, and I went to a conference, and everyone’s presentation before me was boring. Mine was boring, and I got up and said, I’m not going to talk about my presentation that I planned. I’m going to show everyone how to get on page one for the word banana, because banana was fun to say.

35:07 KEVIN ROY: So I drew a picture of a fruit store and my my goal was to show them how to rank banana on page one, but I couldn’t find a yellow pen. I could only find a green pen. Um, I came back and told my business partner at the time. I said, I think I came up with a great way to explain SEO that people actually enjoy. And he said, um, now we don’t have to think of a name.

35:29 KEVIN ROY: I remember being embarrassed about the name. I had a meeting with a prominent doctor in Boston, and he looked at me and said, “I have meetings all day, but no one forgot the banana guy was coming.” So I was like, well, I guess I guess it sticks. So we kept it.

35:43 JIM BEACH: Does the green have anything to do with anything?

35:47 KEVIN ROY: It had to do with not having a yellow pen. They did not have a yellow pen. They did not have a yellow pen, and a red banana looked phallic, so I could not pick that one.

36:00 JIM BEACH: Well, you’ve got to figure out now what the green means.

36:03 KEVIN ROY: It’s like we’re ripening your company. There you go. Yes, there, yeah, there are, there are, um, there are a lot of analogies that I could put in that, that would be wonderful.

36:14 JIM BEACH: All right. Well, use the method then. Explain how SEO works using green bananas, please.

36:19 KEVIN ROY: Well, all right. The secret is relevance, and that still applies today when ranking in AI engines, which is what we have focused on for the past two years. So how relevant is the page that you have created to the keyword phrase or to the topic that you want people to find you on? So back to my green banana fruit store analogy. If you’re trying to rank on page one for green banana, and you have a page, you have your homepage that has bananas and fruits and nuts and berries and strawberries and watermelons and all different kinds of things on there.

36:53 KEVIN ROY: When Google is looking at your site, and says, I need to pull out the most important page that exists on the internet for the word green banana. That banana is on your site, is going to be diluted by all the other fruit. You need to create a page on your website that is specific to that keyword phrase. And you have to have links that go to that keyword phrase that support that.

37:15 KEVIN ROY: There is a separate discussion about helping a page rank in AI, but the central question is whether this is the most important page on the internet for the search topic you want to rank for. If you cannot answer yes, it probably is not.

37:31 JIM BEACH: Does that lead back to page loading and cramming in the SEO tags as many times as possible, even if it sounds like horrible English? I mean, that’s…

37:41 KEVIN ROY: Google’s multiple algorithms now make sure that you are creating conversational content. Um, you can’t just say green banana 6000 times anymore. You can’t hide it in the in the background. You can’t have a bunch of images that’s over optimized for it. It has to be a legitimate page. With AI, the content has to be more conversational. It will want to see questions such as: Can you make recipes from green bananas? What else can green bananas be used for? Um, you’re gonna want to have some topical relevance based on that. So no, you don’t you don’t stuff it.

38:12 KEVIN ROY: Um, that worked for a hot minute, you know, back probably 19 years ago. It does not work anymore.

38:19 JIM BEACH: Then your page, GreenBananaSEO.com, is inherently at a disadvantage.

38:23 KEVIN ROY: Correct.

38:24 JIM BEACH: And so, and that’s a really important thing to think about. So do I want to rank for green banana? That would be that would be something that would be interesting.

38:32 KEVIN ROY: However, if I rank for green banana, Google is going to think I sell fruit. And I don’t want that. There is a well-known case study about a successful roofing company in the Midwest. So he said, I want you to start optimizing for roofing products because they ranked for everything that they needed the rank for. And the SEO guy was like, I can’t rank you for anything else. We’re in the top 3 for everything that matters. So the owner of the roofing company says, start ranking me for roofing products. And so we did.

39:01 KEVIN ROY: The SEO specialist did such a great job that Google delisted the site for service searches. Google concluded, “You are not a service company. You are a product company.” So you want to think about that too. I do not want to rank for green banana because I do not want Google to think I sell fruit.

39:18 JIM BEACH: Right. So then. I thought we were past the page. I feel like I can write a page that sounds broad but still ranks highly. It’s gonna sound like broad, but it’s going to rank high.

39:29 KEVIN ROY: You have to remember that a major ranking factor in Google and Bing, and a major determinant of relevance, is which other words support the phrase. And that is as important, if not more important. So you’ll see top ranking sites for a keyword phrase, or top ranking pages for a keyword phrase, where the main keyword phrase is only mentioned 2 or 3 times on that whole page, that there are all these other words that go and support that. So think about if I wanted the rank for peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

39:57 KEVIN ROY: I’m going to put peanut butter and jelly sandwich in my URL. I am going to put it in my H1 tag, which is the header and the first thing you read. I’m not going to say it again. Then I’m going to say how a sandwich is made. I’m going to talk about bread. I’m going to talk about jelly. I’m going to talk about strawberry and butter knife and presentation and plate and peanut butter and nut allergies. So all of those things are supporting what a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is.

40:25 KEVIN ROY: And if the page is written really well, I can read you all the supporting words, and I can say, what is this page about? And you should be able to say that’s peanut butter and jelly sandwich. So I can say bread, peanut butter. Um, plate, picnic basket, snack, jelly, strawberry. Um, spreading. What am I talking about? Like peanut butter and jelly sandwich, right? So that, that, that is as important to relevance as the word itself. You’re not doing any good to the audience if you just say peanut butter and jelly sandwich 7000 times on the page.

40:55 JIM BEACH: Have you heard of using the process of making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to teach coding? It came out of Stanford in the late 1990s. Have you heard about that?

41:04 KEVIN ROY: I have not heard of that Stanford example. I just happen to really like peanut butter and jelly.

41:09 JIM BEACH: Okay. I was the one who did that. We had a computer camp at Stanford in the 90s and we, uh, one of our examples was how many steps does it take to build a peanut butter sandwich and we would bring peanut butter and jelly and a bread and knife and plate and everything. And, you know, the kids would learn sequential thinking and stuff by, okay, pick up the jar. You can’t pick up the jar. You already have the knife in your hand. And then they would go, ah, ah, they were geniuses. And one day, a kid just freaked out.

41:38 JIM BEACH: He was like, we forgot to wash our hands. It turned out there were 57 steps to making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich correctly.

41:44 KEVIN ROY: Wow. That’s amazing.

41:45 JIM BEACH: That just reminded me of that example. Every once in a while, we would use [unclear phrase] or something like that. We would have to pull out something really smart to teach the children when we had no program.

41:57 KEVIN ROY: I love that.

41:58 JIM BEACH: Yeah. Okay. You are talking about backlinks. You’re talking… You are not that far from where we were five or ten years ago. Mapping still matters. Content matters.

42:06 KEVIN ROY: Yes, yes. Backlinks matter, but relevant backlinks matter. Right. If you are trying to rank in AI, a significant amount of the search data the engines pull comes from websites. So they are looking at the top searches. They are also looking at Reddit and Quora, reviews, online directories, and other linked sources that discuss your topic. If you have solid SEO, you are about 80 percent of the way toward ranking in AI. There are three additions, and one of them is an on-page tactic. The on-page tactic is to make sure the first two sentences clearly define what the page is about.

42:39 KEVIN ROY: The second element is supporting data. That can be a checklist, reasons something is better, instructions for building it, or a service list. The final element is an FAQ. Those different sentences support the topic because AI is conversational.

42:51 JIM BEACH: The second thing is schema, or markup language. You want the schema to match exactly what is on your page. Who, what, why, when, and where. Schema?

43:00 KEVIN ROY: Schema is JSON markup language in the back end of a website. Think of it like a blueprint or an architectural blueprint of what is visually represented on your page. It’s data that the engines can pull a little bit faster. A good example is concert tickets on Google. Some websites, such as Ticketmaster, show the nearest dates and ticket prices directly on the search results page. That is pulling schema. It is markup language that pulls information from the site.

43:24 JIM BEACH: Where do I work with that in WordPress?

43:26 KEVIN ROY: Uh, you put that in the code. There are tools such as Yoast that have schema plug-ins, but they only let you add a few types. The best approach is to put it directly into the HTML code and learn about schema yourself. If you want to learn about schema, go to my website and use the drop-down link called Schema Mountain. I am a skier, so Schema Mountain seemed fun. I thought it would be fun to, you know, do that.

43:53 JIM BEACH: Is your website KevinRoy.com?

43:55 KEVIN ROY: No, it is GreenBananaSEO.com.

43:56 JIM BEACH: Okay. Go to GreenBananaSEO.com, and there is a drop-down menu for schema. Schema Mountain.

44:00 KEVIN ROY: On Schema Mountain, I have taken every kind of schema you could possibly need and organized it like a ski trail map: beginner, intermediate, and expert. And I explain, and I did it in a, like a, a beginner, intermediate expert, like you ski, like a ski mountain trail map. I included examples and cheat sheets. You can click and get sample code to copy and paste. It may not make much sense when I say it, but it will make sense when you look at it. For example, there is author schema.

44:28 KEVIN ROY: If you wrote a book, certain schema identifies the author. Other schema identifies a business, a logo, or content on the page. So if you go look at that. It is literally a cheat sheet that you can use. Okay.

44:41 JIM BEACH: Awesome. That was the second thing, right?

44:43 KEVIN ROY: That is the second thing. The third thing is going to make sense to everybody. The third thing is something you are helping me with, along with anyone else who appears on your show. This is probably the most important factor in ranking in AI right now. One of the biggest challenges AI has faced is determining who originated the content. So anybody can write anything about anything now, and it’s going to sound awesome. So I could write a new brain surgery technique that I just imagine.

45:09 KEVIN ROY: I can put the idea into ChatGPT and have it produce a step-by-step brain-surgery process that I supposedly invented, with examples, images, and references to Johns Hopkins. I can take that new brain-surgery technique, put it into Claude, and ask whether it was written by AI. Claude is going to say, “It seems good, but let me check the author.” It will check whether this is real. Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity will all do the same thing. Like, Does Kevin Roy know anything about brain surgery? Where did he go to medical school? How many other surgeries has he done?

45:44 KEVIN ROY: Has he ever been published in a medical journal? What other sources support it? Can the engine say, “Yes, we are comfortable that this is a legitimate brain-surgery technique Kevin invented because he has done all these other things in the field?” So they are verifying what you do. It is verifying that you are credible enough to cite. Being on a podcast or radio show, or creating a YouTube channel about my subject, helps establish that credibility. That is how we rank so highly in AI.

46:13 JIM BEACH: If I need to add that, how do I do it? Do I just appear on a bunch of podcasts?

46:20 KEVIN ROY: You already host a podcast. So what you want to do, I find if, if you’re like, I’m not famous, right? Famous people don’t have to do this because AI already knows who they are. I have to show AI that I know what I am talking about. When I write a blog post or a page about answer-engine optimization, I include a short author biography at the bottom. That links to a page on my website with all of my author information and media appearances.

46:43 KEVIN ROY: I was on Adweek last week, I was in Business Insider, and I was on Fox News. I put all of that on my author page. When I write an article, I tell AI that Kevin Roy wrote it and link directly to his author page. I point the engine to that page, which has all of my information. I also put author schema on that page so ChatGPT can pull it faster. I am saying, “I wrote this. Do not try to figure out who I am. I will show you.” I show the engine who I am and what I have done.

47:13 KEVIN ROY: Do not worry if you have not appeared on podcasts, radio shows, and similar outlets. A strong author biography that explains what you do and how long you have done it will help. Think of it like a resume. And if you want to add to that, take your LinkedIn profile and link it to your author page because your LinkedIn profile is technically an online resume.

47:33 JIM BEACH: All right, some great advice there. That reminds me of a story, Kevin. I am intimately aware, and I will not tell you how, of an orthopedic surgeon who was scheduled to perform a surgery that afternoon. That morning, he was sitting at the kitchen table reading a magazine. Someone asked, “What are you doing?” He said, “I am performing a new surgery this afternoon.” “I have never done it before.” “I am learning how to do it.”

47:54 KEVIN ROY: That is awesome.

47:56 JIM BEACH: Then, Kevin, he smoked a big bowl and went to perform the surgery.

47:59 KEVIN ROY: Did the surgery work out?

48:00 JIM BEACH: He was one of the best doctors in the area.

48:04 KEVIN ROY: Well, there you go. There you go. Okay. He mastered his craft and knew his limits.

48:08 JIM BEACH: I have always been envious of people who can do that. I wish I could smoke. It does not work for me. I would be curled up in a ball. It affects different people differently. It does not affect me the right way.

48:20 KEVIN ROY: That is what alcohol is for, or whatever. That is what martinis and beer are for, right?

48:25 JIM BEACH: And caffeine or religion.

48:26 KEVIN ROY: There you go. There you go.

48:29 JIM BEACH: Right? Give us a little entrepreneurial history of the business. How did you build such a successful agency?

48:35 KEVIN ROY: I like to say I was an overnight success in about 2,700 nights. There were many periods of three steps forward and two steps back, and that continues to this day. I earned a master’s degree and got a good job at a startup in Cambridge. I was their trade-show lackey, and I happened to share a cubicle with their webmaster. The webmaster said, “I need someone for my team.” “If I send you to MIT to take coding classes,” “would you go?” And I was like, absolutely.

49:00 KEVIN ROY: I took the classes. He eventually left, and after a few years I took over his position. The company got bought out. I went and started something on my own. I did not have any money because I had not saved when I was young. I approached three businesses that did not have websites and said, “I will build your website.” If you like it, tell your friends.

49:20 KEVIN ROY: I told them, “Just do not tell anyone I did it for free.” Then I started networking. Before long, I could not handle the amount of business coming in, so I brought on a business partner who helped us grow. I ended up buying him out. Then I almost lost the entire business when our salesperson took half of our clients and sued me for commissions on the deals he stole. That was about four years ago. Well, the lawyers won that lawsuit, and it was probably the best thing that ever happened. We are the strongest we have ever been.

49:53 KEVIN ROY: I have the best team I have ever had.

49:56 JIM BEACH: Why did that turn out to be so good? What happened?

49:59 KEVIN ROY: I had a business partner at the time, and the lawsuit stressed him so much that he offered to let me buy him out if he would no longer be liable. He had reached the point where he did not want to do it anymore. I took that opportunity. It forced me to focus on our best clients, tighten our systems and processes, rank highly, and generate business organically. I focused on making sure the business succeeded so I could make it through the crisis. Honestly, I do not think I would change it.

50:31 JIM BEACH: Wow. It is impressive that you can view something so negative with such positivity. What a lesson that is.

50:40 KEVIN ROY: It was not easy. I believe Winston Churchill said, “When you are going through hell, keep going.” Every day, I focused on having one good thing happen so the day was not a complete disaster. It might be a good workout, my daughter beating me at Connect Four and laughing about it, or time with my dog. I have a golden retriever who appears in every one of my YouTube videos. I am pretty sure that dog saved my life.

51:07 JIM BEACH: That is nice. It is a good thing you had a dog that did that. When my mother was having labor pains with me, she walked and walked, and the dog walked every step with her, looking at her as if to ask: “Why are we going?” “It is three in the morning. Let us go to bed.” She went to the hospital at seven, and I was born at 7:06.

51:28 KEVIN ROY: That is amazing.

51:29 JIM BEACH: Yeah, they are amazing. They are amazing animals. Pets are amazing.

51:32 KEVIN ROY: Yes. They are wonderful.

51:33 JIM BEACH: This Father’s Day, my children gave me two kittens.

51:36 KEVIN ROY: I love it. Yes, we have two. Kittens are great. We have cats. They have great personalities, but they do whatever they want whenever they want. That is their nature.

51:44 JIM BEACH: I was hoping to find a business partner. I have not found a partner for a business in which we rent kittens. As soon as they get old and are no longer friendly, we take them back. I have not figured out what to do with the ones we take back. Do you have any ideas, partner?

52:01 KEVIN ROY: I do not know. Maybe you need a farm. A farm with many cats.

52:06 JIM BEACH: Yeah. That is one poor farm. There is a reason the phrase “crazy cat lady” exists. I would think about that. The kitten-rental part is awesome.

52:15 KEVIN ROY: You would crush it. You would kill it with that. Yeah.

52:18 JIM BEACH: You cannot use the K-word in this conversation because it implies that you are going to kill the cats when they get older.

52:27 KEVIN ROY: Exactly. That is how the business works.

52:29 JIM BEACH: I still cannot figure out what to do with the older cats. If I could just solve that problem. A farm can only take one cat. One cat will run the other cats off a good farm.

52:40 KEVIN ROY: Really? I did not know that.

52:41 JIM BEACH: No matter how large the farm is, one cat will take it over and run the others away, even its own children.

52:47 KEVIN ROY: Really?

52:48 JIM BEACH: Yes.

52:49 KEVIN ROY: Wow. I did not know that.

52:50 JIM BEACH: My mother did not get electricity until she was 17, one of those situations.

52:54 KEVIN ROY: Wow.

52:55 JIM BEACH: Yeah. She walked nine miles to school, uphill both ways, that kind of story.

53:00 KEVIN ROY: Both ways, yes. Yeah.

53:02 JIM BEACH: Apparently my dad did the same thing. He had the same walk. That is what I heard.

53:07 KEVIN ROY: They were probably in the same class.

53:09 JIM BEACH: That is one of the things I learned. There is one cat per farm.

53:13 KEVIN ROY: I did not know that.

53:15 JIM BEACH: We had a tenant house, and they had their own cat. Maybe it is one cat per household on a farm. I do not know. Who knew?

53:22 KEVIN ROY: That is a great fact.

53:23 JIM BEACH: Kevin, how do we find out more, follow you online, and get in touch?

53:28 KEVIN ROY: You can go to GreenBananaSEO.com, or you can Google IJustMetKevin.com. I always forget my business card, so I ranked that page. You can get to me that way. I am a true data geek. I am happy to answer questions whenever anyone has them. Every question is usually a problem I have to solve, and that helps me learn more. That is my favorite thing about this business.

53:45 JIM BEACH: Fantastic. Thank you so much for being with us. Great job, Kevin. We would love to have you back. Thanks a lot.

53:50 KEVIN ROY: Thank you. Thank you.

53:51 JIM BEACH: We are out of time for today, but you know what we do? We come back tomorrow. Be safe. Take care, and go make a million dollars. Bye now.