Jason Barnard's strategy for Brand SEO centers on a critical pivot away from a singular focus on keywords and toward building a strong brand entity.

As the founder of Kalicube, he argues that commercial success is found at the bottom of the acquisition funnel, where high-intent, branded searches occur. His methodology emphasizes clearly defining the brand's identity, who it serves, and its unique credibility.

For future-proofing against AI and Large Language Models (LLMs), he stresses the necessity of establishing the brand's website as the "entity home," ensuring message consistency across all digital footprints, actively seeking third-party corroboration, and making all offline activities visible to search machines.

Guillermo Bravo speaks with Jeremy Johnson of Quality Roots outlines the critical role of SEO as a top growth channel in the highly regulated cannabis industry, which faces severe restrictions on paid and out-of-home media.

Quality Roots employs a dual-focused SEO strategy: a wide-ranging e-commerce focus on high-intent product keywords and a robust local SEO effort to dominate the Maps Pack for foot traffic. Johnson details advanced tactics like a universal URL structure to combat product cannibalization and long-range targeting of consumers in surrounding states.

Ben Foster of Steady Demand, a Google Business Profile (GBP) product expert, explores the critical role of GBP, which can account for up to 70% of a local business's revenue and is linked to paid media like Local Services Ads.

Foster details his journey from web development to specializing in local SEO after the deprecation of Google+. His core philosophy is an "entity-first" strategy, which means providing the database (Google/AI) with the correct semantic and contextual information about a business.

Ben also shares a four-step strategy for managing a business's entity association, which involves actively searching for brand reviews, analyzing the sentiment overview, identifying negative citations, and using "positive and negative reinforcement" (feedback) to effectively retrain the Large Language Models (LLMs) that interpret a brand's holistic image.