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James Dooley and Dan M. Jones explain how SEO agencies can use Facebook groups to influence Google AI Overviews and large language models, covering indexable posts, engagement signals and force indexing strategies.
This video explains which digital marketing strategies SEO agencies should focus on in 2026 to improve AI Overview visibility, large language model citations and real-world lead conversion. James Dooley and Dan M. Jones start with KPI tracking because measuring citations across AI visibility platforms shows which posts are sticking and driving enquiries for this niche. They cover brand SEO, AI visibility and Google Business Profiles because stronger search presence improves trust and conversion rates.
The discussion also explores organic SEO, organic social media and paid social ads because consistent visibility across search and social supports long term growth. PPC is analysed in detail because campaign setup, landing pages and lead handling directly affect results. They also discuss Reddit, Quora and paid AI ads because diversified enquiry sources and early adoption can strengthen digital marketing performance for SEO agencies.
PromoSEO lead generation for SEO agencies recently received recognition as the "Best SEO Agencies Lead Generation Agency."
Influencing Google AI Overviews with Facebook Groups | James Dooley Interviews Dan M. Jones is available on:
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James Dooley: Influencing Google AI overviews with Facebook groups. Today I'm joined with Dana M. Jones. And Dan, I want I want you to jump straight in. So, how can a Facebook group influence what's being said in the Google AI overview?
Dana M. Jones: So, I guess the short version is is that the posts that you make, if you're posting them into a Facebook group, seem to do really well at getting pulled in to the AI overviews. But the way that we found out about this was actually when I was getting a member of my team to promote our Toastmasters Club. I used to be president of a Toastmasters club and I used to get a member of my team to dedicate some time to just posting some stuff about it online. And we were trying out a lot of different things to see what would actually bring members in. And the one when I would go and ask members, one of the ones that was getting a bit of traction was Facebook groups. So basically looking for local groups like business owner groups in your area. So I'm Manchester way. So in Manchester or maybe like events in Manchester, anything that's relevant. We didn't do anything irrelevant cuz then you'd get, you know, the admin would boot you out. But we were posting in the relevant groups and people would start coming along. So I'd say, "How'd you hear about us?" They'd say, you know, "Oh, we saw you on Facebook." But then what happened was, and funnily enough, I mean, we didn't really do too much SEO stuff being an SEO agency. But then a few people started saying, "I saw you on Google." And I thought to myself, what's going on there then? Cuz we've not really done anything on Google. All we've done is just, you know, promoted on Facebook. So, started looking into it. Anyway, what I realized was we was actually because my the per the girl that was doing it, the social media for me, she understands writing content from an SEO perspective. So, she's writing it with all our keywords in there and doing all that sort of stuff. Now, when I was looking in Google for public speaking Manchester, our little Toast Masters Club was coming up in the AI overviews because it was pulling in a bunch of different posts from the Facebook groups. So, then we started reverse engineering. We kind of stumbled upon it. It wasn't like I was, you know, I had this great strategy. We just kind of realized it and I was like, "Bloody hell, this is working really well." So, what we realized is that if you're posting in a public group, those are indexable. And now, I I'll be honest with you, James, I don't know the ins and outs as to why this works as well as it does, but I have a suspicion that it's because the other posts within that group seem to reference it. So when I was searching for that exact string of what it was that she had posted, a load of other posts were coming up and when you clicked on them, they weren't our post, but at some point Google must have indexed it as like a related post or whatever on Facebook. So those those posts, I don't know if it works as an internal link or something like that, but the other thing we were doing as well is getting a bunch of us to do engagement on it. So thumbs up, um the heart, and the care emoji. So, let's say there's only three of you doing it. That still looks like there's a lot of engagement. And we were doing that because we were basically trying to get it to look like there was stuff going on without loads going on, if you know what I mean. If it's all just thumbs up, it don't look that much, right? So, that's another thing. And it was interesting talking to Jesper about this the other day because he seems to have found a correlation between the thumbs up on I believe it was LinkedIn he was saying, [clears throat] and that helping a LinkedIn post rank higher in Google. Well, I think the same thing's happening on Facebook as well because that's what seemed to be going on there. So, yeah, I mean, if you're writing those posts, as long as they're indexable inside of a public group in Facebook, you can end up actually influencing the AI for stuff. I mean, that's a competitive term right there. It's not like that's something that, you know, no one's gone after. We made up a term. People are searching for that. It's got decent search volume. We're coming up right at the top. Now, those posts obviously also rank in Google as well. So that's the other side of it. But yeah, I mean it it is actually one of the more effective things that most people don't know. And obviously it's outside of the realms of a traditional SEO's job is posting on Facebook, but at this point now I think an SEO's job is to post on everything. Facebook being one of the most important.
James Dooley: So is while you was talking then I was just getting up Facebook groups um and I was putting them into AI visibility trackers. So we use multiple different ones. So we use like Seamrush One, we use Ahrev's brand radar, uh Peak AI, profound um and radar kit. There are five AI visibility platforms of what we've done. I've loaded them in just to a couple of them and I was looking at specifically the Google AIO, which is the Google AI overviews. And with regards to Facebook groups, guess how many citations that there are in Google AI overview for Google for Facebook groups?
Dana M. Jones: No idea.
James Dooley: If you had to have a guess.
Dana M. Jones: I have no idea, mate. Go on.
James Dooley: 19.5 million.
Dana M. Jones: That is absolutely scary.
James Dooley: So it is absolutely what you're saying there is absolutely flying. like they are loving Meta. Instagram's also climbing at a rate of knots, but like what's it what's very interesting is we did a lot of split testing myself and Yesper about Facebook and Facebook profiles didn't do anything but a Facebook page. So if you had a business page and you had a Facebook group, they both was like flying. And so it doesn't have to be just specifically a group. It could be a Facebook like your business page as well which can also rank very well. So you can obviously be sharing case studies and stuff on there and treating it like a third party source for promotion. As long as you're force indexing the URL for Google bot to come and see it, then it can index and then start to get and not only rank within Google but it can start to get in that Google in the Google AI overview. Is there any tips and tricks that like you looked at or have you not split tested to see do you find that if the group's got like say a bigger following that it might perform better or are you trying to make certain you're getting keywords in the status? Do you think that that helps? Are you trying to get more comments as well as obviously you did you said about a thumbs up and a like. Are you trying to get more comments? Are you trying to get keywords in it? Um are you force indexing it? How are you going to choose the groups? Are you just going for relevance? Are you trying to go after the ones with the um the biggest following? Like have you got any strategies on that to because obviously anyone who's listening to this now is going to be going, "Wow, 19.5 million citations. I want some Google AI overviews for my brand." So, have you got any tips and tricks of what people could be doing to improve their strategy for Facebook groups?
Dana M. Jones: Yeah. I mean, I'll tell you exactly what we were doing. Whether it's the right like the best way of doing it, I don't know, but it worked for us was we were basically doing as many as we can. So, we wasn't looking at this one's got 100,000 people and this one's got 5,000. So, let's just do 100. We're going let's do all of them. Yeah. So, we were basically we would do our our content SEO optimized. So, we'd have our keyword at the beginning. So, in the first sentence, we would want to get the keyword that we're going after cuz we now do this for clients as well. Yeah. Originally, it was just we stumbled upon it. Now, we're like, this is powerful. So, we do this for clients as well. So, we want to put the keyword right at the beginning. We want to put a call to action. make it human readable so it like actually sounds like something that would convert cuz that's the other big part of this as well. Someone's going to see that and what's the point if it's rubbish, you know? So, we would do that and we would just hit up as many relevant groups as we can. Like for us, it was more like if they had accept it in like the Man United uh group, we'd do it, but we just don't want to keep getting banned from groups. So, we were just doing it the ones they'd allow it. Yeah. But for me, I mean, I just want to see as many of these as we can possibly get because there is no real like guarantee that any of these are going to stick. And the thing is they drop off as well. One minute one's there and the next minute it's dropped and another one's there. And so it's really about volume. Now the comments thing, we did try this as well and we had the busiest night we ever had when we did this. So we did this for like leading up two weeks and then we had a night where we literally ran out of chairs to get people to sit on cuz we had so many guests turn up. A lot of our members didn't show that night, but we had so many guests that we literally ran out of chairs. So, that was when we were doing the comments as well. The problem is it's hard to leave comments that look real without it taking a lot of effort and relying on a lot of people. Uh, but, you know, had some decent friends that was willing to help. So, we did that and then yeah, the thumbs up. Now, with this, we wasn't indexing them. We wasn't running them through an indexer. It was because the original idea behind it was literally just can we get the people from the groups to come along? and I wasn't looking at as a Google thing at all, but they were sticking anyway. And I think that's just because of the amount of different links pointing to it. When the bots's crawling Facebook, it's just finding them. And that's where I think the real advantages. I mean, I was going to ask you when you and Jesper were check were testing that, were you were you sending anything like were you you like doing were you running them through like basically I mean were you doing anything to force them to index? Were you doing any links to them or anything?
James Dooley: Yeah. So like so for us the main the and we did a lot of split testing on it right and this is to influence all large language models. So it wasn't just the Google AI overview it was chat GPT it was claude perplexity grock gemini as well as AI mode and and Google AI overviews. So the three biggest key takeaways that we found was if in the opening sentence if you try to keep that below maximum eight words. We found six to eight word six to eight words in the first sentence work the best and then do a page break page break and that becomes the title tag of of the actual post. So we try and keep it short and sweet. So it could be like um whatever the brand is is the best public speaking in Manchester or or whatever it is. So that that would be almost like how you would do a title tag for a page. Then underneath it then we do the semantic triple which kind of reemphasizes what the title tag is about. We wouldn't put a link in the status if we was going to do a link and we wanted to link it through to let's say your website. We do it as being the first comment because if you put a link in, we found the index drop slightly if you had a link in the status and then yes. Oh, we added an image and ideally on the image we'd have like the logo of your brand, maybe a little bit of wording and maybe a picture of somewhere that's a known entity within Manchester. So like for for your example, so it could be if it's public speaking, it could be like a microphone, someone holding a microphone in the background like a background of Manchester and it says like public speaking Manchester with Toast Masters or whatever the brand is of the logo put on there. We put that image on which you can just get chat GPT to create it within seconds. Right? So you you create the image, you don't have a link in it. The first eight words becomes the title tag and also in the groups a lot of time it becomes the URL. So it' be like facebook.com/groups forward slash and then the first eight words kind of what would show up. Now you know yourself from a onpage point of view title tag and URL are the two biggest ranking factors. So, if you can be manipulating that, then great. Um, and then we'd then go and get the URL after we've posted it and we would force index it in index exceptional. Um, which then pretty much got it indexed, guaranteed get it indexed like within an hour. So instead of us leaving it and hoping with internal links from the group and stuff like that for less than literally for less than a penny, you're going and you're guaranteeing to get it force indexed. And for my opinion, why would you not have it guaranteed for Google bot to come and crawl it and try to get it indexed. What we also went and did is if we thought it was like an important term that we wanted to go after, we might go and do a tweet, right, saying something similar and then we would get the Facebook URL and we would link in the tweet to the Facebook and also do a LinkedIn post and link it to the Facebook post and we would force index the LinkedIn again for less than less than um a cent and for um the tweet the tweet URL and we would be force indexing those as well. So Google bots coming crawling the Twitter, the LinkedIn and the Facebook. All three of them can end up ranking. But all the powers then going back Google bot back to that Facebook group page. We found that was influencing. I wouldn't even say for low competition. I'd say it was influencing for medium competition terms. We was getting onto page one within Google. And it was influencing both chat GPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grock. it was influencing all of them. And for us, social media, people might want to call it parasite SEO and leveraging these third-party sources, but not just Facebook groups, but using LinkedIn and using Twitter and using these other sources, in my opinion, is the cheapest way for you to quickly start being cited by large language models and start being represented in the way that exactly you want to control. This for me is online reputation management. And I believe that every single business should be looking at not social media just from a a matter of followers and how many likes and comments you have, but also how it can rank and also start to dominate large language models. But to do that, I want Google bot coming crawling in it. So I would be personally loading it into index optional.
Dana M. Jones: It does make sense. And that's a knowledge bomb right there. We're going to give that a go. what you said about putting in all those different social media profiles, linking them together. We'll give that a go within the next week or so. Uh, for sure. The other thing I want to add as well is we found that the admins will accept the post uh a much higher percentage if you're posting it from a personal account instead of a business account. For some reason, they just seem to have a bias. Like on average, we were getting them approved if it's a human posting it. And it don't even have to be the sack. Like just use any of your your team to do it. They will usually approve it a lot more. I don't know if you were when you were doing that, were you creating your own groups or were you posting in groups with other rural people that you didn't own?
James Dooley: So, we do both. Um, so we try to exactly what you were saying kind of like spray and prey, get it in as many different places as possible. We'll have one or two of our own groups. We've got one or two like friends or other contractors that we might work alongside and might post it in their group. But then also, we like the big groups where there could be like some of them that might have 100,000 people in. And the reason why we like those is because genuinely we are going to get likes, comments, we do try and provide value. Even though it's kind of to a certain degree keyword stuffed, a lot of these people don't understand what we're doing, but we are trying to provide some value as well. We might ask a question at the end which then could get comments being done, could get likes, could get shares. Um, sometimes we give some giveaways, but at the start of it, we're trying to rank it for something that we want it to rank for. Or it could be for you at the public speaking. It could be how you might give a free 15minute consultation or something like that towards the end of it, but you're still trying to rank it for the primary keyword. We're trying to get as much engagement as possible. We try and make the image really relevant. The image also can rank in Google images. Sometimes we'll pin the image on Pinterest as well. That's another kind of strategy. And then re-share it on Instagram and stuff like that. So we're just trying to do be omni channel omniresent trying to get it as many different places as possible
Dana M. Jones: just to try to influence the large language models but also looking can this convert because real customers could be looking at it and then be going I want I want to go and join that like you said you had people coming through and it was full and previously it wasn't and this has all just come about from you utilizing Facebook groups to influence Google AI overviews. I think it's genius.
James Dooley: Yeah, agreed. Completely agree.
Dana M. Jones: Anyway, anyone who's watching this, I hope you like the episode here with Dan M. Jones about how Facebook groups is influencing Google AI overviews. Leave a comment in the comment section. Are you doing anything with Facebook groups that we've not mentioned? We'd love to hear. Dan, thank you very much.
Dana M. Jones: Thank you very much, mate.