#136 Your 2026 Google CV, How to Boost Your Online Reputation, EEAT & Visibility

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Episode 55. Episode 55 of the 90 Day Website Mastery Podcast. We are live right now. Perhaps you are joining us on LinkedIn.

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Perhaps you're joining us on Facebook. Maybe you are on Instagram or you're listening to us on the replay. However, you're here. Welcome.

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Thanks for being here. I'm with my co-host, Pascal. Hello, Pascal. Hello to you and hello to our lovely friends again.

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Thank you for your support live or on replay as you heard a moment from Johnny. I've looked at the show notes by the way Johnny, I peeked, I cheated and this looks like a fun fun episode for you know our Mastery Programme podcast. It certainly does. This is your perfect companion to the 90 Day Website Mastery Program and our book published on Amazon Web Proud.

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We're excited to bring you even more valuable insights and practical advice to help you enhance your website's performance. So join us right now as we explore the strategies to make your website work harder for you and reignite your pride in your online presence. We have four segments as always. And the first segment is You Ask, We Answer.

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Now for the first time, actually, since we've been launching this podcast, we have almost a link between the segments. So this is actually inspired by our call to action in the last episode. You may remember joining some of our viewers and listeners, I was recommending doing what I called with affection the Google CV, whereby you search yourself, either as an individual, as a business, maybe sometime at some kind of different qualifiers, and you see for yourself what it's like to be a searcher.

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And we recommend that you capture those results as PDFs, you know, you do. So you actually introduced this concept many years ago, when we used to do that website masterclass, the Google CV, the idea of someone perhaps have been tasked with checking Johnny Ross, they know the decision maker, necessarily, they're going to go through the Google, or they're going to go through Google Images, Google News, Google Photos, you name it, and imagine for a moment they would print that page of results, staple this together, and say, here you go, boss. This is what the internet says of Johnny.

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Whatever the internet says is true. And there's a result to which the decision maker can go, nah, I'm not sure, and potentially delay making the decision to deal with you, Johnny, which is not what we want. Worst case scenario, you go in the bin. That's never happened, I'm sure.

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Or quite the contrary. As this individual is flicking through the printing pages of that Google CV, it kind of confirms and concur what they have heard of you. And that's kind of the whole concept. So what happened, I got an email, um, last week from someone that says, um, as it, as you recommended, uh, in the last episode, I've Googled myself.

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And I've got all the search results across my services, and I've even included AI mode. But then, sorry, Pascal, what do I do now? And what action should I take? And I realized, yeah, I suppose with a call to action, we go through this quite fast, don't we, Jonny?

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And maybe it's worthy of a revisit of, right, you've done what we've asked you to do, Jonny and I. You've done your Google CV. What do you do with this? So yeah, what say you, Jonny Ross?

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Yeah, well, I mean, that's the point, isn't it? That it's all well and good sort of finding out, but then you need to do something with it. And what's happening, especially in this AI age, is that we don't know what's being said about us as well. And it's so important that we grab that information to find out what's being said so that we can reshape or we can learn or we can adapt, etc. And so I think there's a number of things, but it reminds me a tiny bit of back in my very

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early SEO days, which was all about dominating page one of Google for your brand name or for your own name, for personal branding. And that was about making sure that your LinkedIn account was optimized, your Twitter account, so that whatever you Googled on those 10 blue links you owned, So I think it's, I guess the first step from my point of view would be having a look at that and seeing what it says. And does it feel right?

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Is there something there that shouldn't be there? Is there something that's missing in terms of, well, you know, Why don't they know that I'm an expert in whatever, or why don't they know about this particular service? And why don't they know that perhaps you've been published, or perhaps you've had some significant PR, and that's not visible? So yeah, the first thing is just a sense check of what you're seeing.

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Does that even feel right? Yeah, where do you start, Pascal? Well, for me, what is interesting as well is, so people, and the reaction to the email was, shall I just not just look at the stats? You know, I said, well, the stats gives you the perspective of someone who's already been on the website.

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My concern, Johnny, is that someone who is making the decision to visit your website or not whatsoever. You know, so first impressions are going to be very important. And we also have explained that for many months, indeed, that with the AI overviews, you're not going to get the traffic anyway. So the stats are going to become actually less important.

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What is important is to understand and to feel what it's like to be someone who is curious about your brand, your business, and so on, and what the internet is saying about you. And for me, that reminds me, when we used to do the Google CV practically in the masterclass and the workshop, we used to say, you've got three scenarios. Scenario number one, the Google CV is just OK, and that's not what you want. The Google CV is good, and there's lots of information about you from you.

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Scenario number three, you recall, the Google CV is excellent because there is information about you From you and from others. And the from others is really important. So what I do with the Google CV, essentially, once you've had the first pass at essentially clarity and, and to your point, you know, is it correct? Is it all information about me from me?

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Or is it actually punctuate with information from others? All the websites feature me as an organization and as an individual. And that's what I want the Google CV to reveal the others. You know, that's really quite important.

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Yeah, and we talk a huge amount about that in terms of building authority and showcasing your expertise as well. But also we know how that has such a weighting on your positioning in, for example, things like Google, but also whether you're going to be mentioned and what people say, sorry, what AI is saying in all of these chatbots we're using. And the more we can get other people talking about us in a, of course, a positive way. And to some extent, you know, that's some of that is, is the real basics of, you know, are you collecting reviews?

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Are you collecting recommendations? You know, creating case studies, all of that sort of stuff. But, but yeah, getting the power of other people. It's, it's, it's PR, isn't it?

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It's it's the, the, the old fashioned, nothing wrong with good PR. Someone else saying, this is who you should be using. Yeah, and what is interesting is, you know, you have full control. So you're going to review Google CV.

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And as you heard a moment, Johnny mentioned, things are missing, things are not quite right, or because of the bias towards all the information, things needs to be kind of updated. But if you were to Everybody, if you were to Google yourself and choose AI mode, I would pay attention to what's happening. Use a laptop or desktop computer. That's much easier.

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Google yourself as an individual, your business, and pay attention to what's happening on the right-hand side. Because on the right-hand side of the AI mode, you have the panel that is showing you the execution and the kind of reflection. And you're going to see how many sources of information is being verified against your name. AI overviews and by extension your own journey search results don't just look at your website look at every mentions out there and you're much better off having 17 different sources of information with your business name than just to you your website in your LinkedIn profile.

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Yeah. And it's got to be part of your marketing strategy in terms of how you are facilitating other people to be talking about you, other people to be mentioning you, and part of your growth program. Yeah. Any final tips we've missed on what else, other actions that we should be taking here, Pascal?

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I like the idea that you've I like the idea that in the last episode, we gave it as a call to action, but actually then didn't really follow up, you know, how to do it. And I like that we're exploring that now. So any, any other sort of bits of gold that we should consider? I mean, for me, the one thing to realize the first time you do these journey, it's your baseline information.

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So minimum, I would do this two or three times a year because actually your actions in terms of improving the quality of relevancy and being mentioned by others, your action should then be featured. So maybe every four months, something like that, you know, you could kind of do your Google CV and then do compare and contrast. And by the way, if you don't feel like doing a compare and contrast yourself, we have a platform we love called Notebook LM that can do that for you. We certainly do.

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We certainly do. Let's move on to our next segment, which is website stories. Now for this segment of the show, Jonny, I've chosen an article. And we're going to do things a little differently because this article, it's so good and it's so rich in information, we need to do it in parts.

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So today, if you'll allow me, Jonny, we're going to do part one of our reaction review to this article. I'll read you the title for you. E-E-A-T, how to build trust and boost web and AI visibility. That's from people working at the wonderful platform Ahrefs, Matius Makusovic and Joshua Hardwick.

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And they've literally gone through the E-E-A-T acronym In such details, I mean, I have to congratulate them. And also for all of us, what a way to show what good blogging is, you know, to go in depth, to mix data with drama, to add visuals and so on. So I would encourage everyone to really take a look at the article. We're going to do a quick summary, but what we're going to do today then, is start with the first acronym of EEAT, which for everybody stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust.

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And we're going to take our time. I think this is really quite important. We have visited this before, but we've kind of flown through it. As a bit of background for everybody, and please don't jump in, this is essentially a framework that was introduced, you know, in the 2000, 2021, 22 began this journey by Google to essentially help humans understand what, you know, such quality results would look like.

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So it's not something that they use to give you a score. It's not something that they use necessarily to penalize or improve your website. They're saying, listen, if you want to understand how our desire to provide helpful information is being kind of governed and inspired, use the EE80. And the best way we could summarize is for me to kind of paraphrase the example given by the team at Ahrefs, which is, imagine a doctor.

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You know and you're looking for medical advice and you really want to get the advice for the best possible individual organization so what you would want to join is rather someone who has actually lived through, live through personally your particular health concern that's done to experience and actually ideally not they live through it but actually they've been trained. properly to deal with this. That's the expertise.

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And not just that, actually doing that, other doctors approve of them. That's the authority. And finally, they have a legitimate business, you know, legitimate medical practice entity, and that's the trust element. So that little story kind of tells you everything.

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But back to, I suppose, how we started. I think we need to go deeper. And to go deeper, we have to go slower. So today, all we're going to do, everyone, is talk about the first E, which is experience.

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And then we're going to move on next episode to expertise. And so it goes on. And for me, really, the question I have for you today, Johnny, and for ourselves is, all right, then, if we know that this is part of the guidelines from Google, and it will favor people who have shown experience in their content for the search results and the AI overviews, What do we mean by experience?

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And literally your content, Johnny, everyone answers the question, has this person actually done the thing they are writing about? That's really what it is all about. Yeah, and I think if you have the EEAT framework in your mind, whenever you're writing any content, so that's even homepage content, article content, whatever it might be, service page content, This is really going to give it that level where it becomes worthy of being included. Um, so, and I love that doctor analogy, by the way, I've not heard that before, but that's, that, that makes it really simple.

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I like it. And, you know, must think again that much as, you know, Michael Sivitz, you know, he did that analogy. And I think that's important because then you kind of go, all right, I understand that because actually, as you'll see next week, it's actually can quite sometime be difficult to understand the difference between experience and expertise, you know, and you can splitting hairs or are you. So I, so I think in, in terms of, uh, answering your question around experience, it is, it is about that either firsthand or that life experience and the fact of, uh, you know, how many years have you been doing this?

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That is experience, isn't it? So it's about, but are you actually, you know, you might know that and you might assume some people know that as well. But are you actually making it abundantly clear in some of the content that you're writing? Just simply the fact of how many years you've been living and breathing this.

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And I think, uh, demonstrating, uh, that via putting that in your content is just one simple way. So it's around, um, you know, talking about your, your own experiences, your life experiences, uh, that are relevant and relate to the services, the products, um, and, and. Just being quite clear in the content and highlighting these things without just assuming that, well, you know, people know, well, they'll go to my about page or it's in the footer of my website. Well, the point being is that we need to introduce all of these things into the actual content itself.

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Yeah, for me, we've said it many a time on the show and during our workshops and conference kind of engagements, this idea of being explicit, not implicit. And I know that sometimes modesty, discretion can be seen as a quality, but in the age of AI overviews and search results that need to tell the full story, that's going to work against you. We sometimes say this to our clients, you know, avoid what we call under communication. That is to say, if I met you face-to-face, Johnny, and you tell me about your business, you're going to be telling me lots of different stories, things are going to be quite memorable and very engaging.

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But then if I go on your website, if there's no parity between face-to-face interaction and the online version of what you're sharing with me, then we have that kind of disconnect. So to me, experience is almost imagining for a moment that, because modesty will get in the way, It's that somebody else is doing that for you, even though you're doing it for yourself. So some recommendations that were featured in the article, and then feel free to jump in with your own examples, is actually use your own photography and video, and even not so good photography, not so good videos, because that shows you doing it, you know, that kind of things. Actually writing the behind the scenes stuff, not just the result, don't just share the end point, but share how you've done it and actually share some time, the difficulties in making this happen.

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You and I mentioned this time and time again, but customer reviews, all of them, different parts of the website, not just what our clients say. case studies, but we're real, real outcomes. And something that I suppose you and I would do without thinking, but that may be worth reminding using the first person in your content. Do you know what I mean?

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That, that seems like a simple things, but people may forget or used the Royal we, because they want to look bigger, but actually I'm trusting the individual in the business. Yeah. No, you've mentioned reviews there, any quotes or testimonials, um, definitely detailed, uh, case studies, um, and making sure that you're, you know, whenever you're writing content that you're making sure that, uh, for example, blog content that you're making sure that it's clear who's written it. I, you, and there's an author bio next to that piece of content.

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I think that's just a really explicit way of putting things across, um, maybe even walking through. whether it's a product or a service that you're selling so you know showing the process or behind all that behind the scenes that you're just tapping into there and if you've done any sort of industry speaking or any certifications or awards all of that goes towards experience as well and i think lastly that Most importantly it's the first hand sort of insights from client work that you've actually worked on. So you know this is what I've seen with the type of businesses I work with or you know except that sort of first hand experience I think can go.

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a really long way. Thank you very much. So listen, I'm pleased actually we made the decision to split this because can you imagine if we were trying to squeeze in expertise, authority and trust. So if you're happy, everyone, you know, we'll stop there.

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This is your moment of reflection when it comes to, am I sharing sufficiently and explicitly my true experience? And I give you a final example, Johnny, where I was helping a client of mine who launched a business And, and modesty was massive part where we're dealing with. And I had to remind her that the business she was launching was a result of 40 years experience, not 40 days of building the business. So that's really quite important, your journey.

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And if you need to get a pal to literally interview you or get digital assistant to act as a journalist and ask you all the questions relevant to your experience. Look forward to the next episode, where we'll be going into expertise. Sorry. So that was experience.

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We're going into expertise next. Very much looking forward to it. Let's move on to the next segment, which is the website engine room. In this part of the show, we'd love to share with you two apps or two solutions that can make life easier as a content creator and website manager.

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So Johnny, what is your discovery for Episode 55? So I noticed an app called Cleanup Pictures, Cleanup.Pictures, a very small little app that you can use to upload a picture very quickly, mouse over what you're wanting to remove, whether that be an object or a person or a defect. and using a bit of AI behind the scenes, it'll reconstruct it and get rid of it just within a click. Now there's loads of tools that you can do this with, but what we always say is depending on exactly what you're trying to do, depending on your workflow, depending on how you use different apps, it's quite a personal choice.

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So really simple app, cleanup.pictures. If you're looking to clean up some pictures, have a look. It might be something very useful. And you know why the timing's impeccable?

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Because I've been writing a short script for a movie, and I've got an image for the poster, Johnny, but there's a slight, slight defect. There's something I need to remove. I was racking my brain about how I might do that, not using, if you like, you know, the likes of ChatGPT, where they change the picture, not just remove this. So thank you.

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You shall be getting a credit note on the movie once it gets produced. But my selection for today is actually inspired by the fact that we chose an article from the team at Ahrefs. So many years ago now, I'm a LAPS user, but did you used to use their or someone else's backlink checker? Absolutely.

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A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, you know, backlinks are still very, uh, important these days. They are very important.

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So in a similar way that people can perhaps do a baseline study of their Google CV, they should do a baseline study of who currently is supporting their ranking and supporting, you know, their brand mentions. So I think you should know who, where you are featured. That's really quite important. And then analyze whether you could build a relationship further and get more mentions be a more regular contributor and so on.

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But also you might discover that some links are perhaps up to date or a little content pool so you can do so many different ways to improve the current situation and more importantly you can then study the competition in that manner. and find new linking partners. But please understand, I'm sure everybody listening to this and watching this journey knows this, you don't ask for a link, you present an offer, whereby you're going to offer your time and your content so that you're featured within that particular platform. So for me, it was back to this idea of what you know, I'm not done backlink checking for such a long time.

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But maybe in a way the AI overviews are helping me reconnect with key SEO principles. And one of them is making sure that you are mentioned, but the mentions are really supporting your business with backlinks. I'm really glad you brought it up, because for me, it's something that I do on a daily basis, steeped in SEO and GEO, et cetera. But I don't think we talk about it much on the podcast, and so I'm really glad you brought that up.

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Yeah. Feels an obvious one to me, but actually so many businesses are not checking their backlinks. And I'd highly advise you go to the, well, yeah, a tool like Ahrefs, have a look at your backlinks. There's so much you can learn.

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And also, you know, have a look at a competitor's backlinks as well, because you can start thinking about how you can start generating your own. Well, with every episode, we always finish with our final segment, which is the website call to action. Every piece of content should have a call to action on Pascal. So here is ours.

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Now this is about the one change, the one adjustment you should be making right now to make your website work harder for you. So Johnny, what is your recommendation? Accessibility. Accessibility is important for two very main reasons.

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First of all, if your website is not accessible, you are missing out on a huge proportion of the general public, your potential clients. that are unable to use your website and will immediately use a different website. So the first thing is the users themselves. The second thing is all the tools, Google, et cetera, et cetera, and even the browsers are far more interested in websites that are easy to access as well and follow the rules of accessibility.

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So have a look at adding an accessibility toolbar to your website. Now, for most content management systems, whether that be WordPress, whether it be Squarespace, whether it be Shopify, there are add-ons or plugins that you can very easily add on to your website to sort of make that a lot easier as a website manager to be able to make your website more accessible. So really consider accessibility, think about adding an accessibility toolbar and a lot of the time you can, you know, go quite a significant number of points in terms of the measure of accessibility with just adding the plugin or the add-on with just a single click and then you

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can start optimizing from there. So yeah, This episode accessibility toolbar from me. Thank you imagine a wonderful reminder as well so i want to look into the near future with my recommendation and unite you know actually we should be clear with our audience that for all we are massive massive fan of ai as the enabler to make website work harder for you.

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We are very much on the camp of responsible and ethical use of ai. We are slowly but surely making our way as a society towards a massive AI backlash. The media is gonna have a field that can show you all the malpractice and all the kind of horror stories of people using AI for the wrong reasons. And therefore, my kind of thought on that, Johnny, is to take the initiative and show your hand first, not let the market assume that because you're using AI, you're like the others.

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So my recommendation would be to do two things, to actually add an article on your website That actually explains, in your own words, as we mentioned a moment ago by experience, your responsible and ethical approach to using AI in your business. That's really quite important. And then to have actually, in addition to you have the terms and conditions, you have privacy policy, you've got all those different things in a footer, I would add actually a AI pledge as part of your footer section. If you're not sure what to start, it so happens that with some colleague of mine, we've been working on the human first responsible AI pledge framework and template.

Speaker 1

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I'll put the link in the show notes, which will be within the video or the podcast. Literally, you can have a team activity. You can use AI as well to kind of create your own version. the AI pledge but I can assure you that there's going to be a massive AI backlash and we cannot allow people to decide you know who we are so can you be explicit by your responsible ethical use of AI write about it and create an AI pledge that

Speaker 1

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would be available in the footer of your website. Really, really important and some of us are doing it naturally but being explicit again about being transparent, showing that you're thinking about this and you're right, there will be a backlash. It feels like we're riding on quite a wave at the moment. Um, but you know, waves always come down, do they not, uh, you know, and, and it's just making sure that we are considering, uh, how this wave is, is going right now.

Speaker 1

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Uh, I love that call to action. Uh, Pascal, thank you very much indeed. Great episode. Uh, I love that we're sort of turning this into a mini series on the EAT.

Speaker 1

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Um, and we're going to explore, uh, the second part of that in the next episode, but that is a wrap. for episode 55, focusing on your 2026 Google CV and sort of how to boost your online reputation. And of course, to continue feeling proud of your website. This has been the 90 day website mastery podcast, your audio companion to the 90 day website mastery program.

Speaker 1

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For more information, visit 90daymarketingmastery.com where you can book a discovery call with either myself or Pascal. Pascal, thank you very much indeed. And we will see everyone soon. And thanks for joining us.

Speaker 1

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Let us know what you think and enjoy our outro.