With the explosive growth in popularity of Chat GPT and AI-generated content, one of the things we have been talking about is how it’s going to change the way we write content or blog posts for our business. And with that, there’s been a lot of talk about how AI-created content will rank on Google.
In this episode of Art of Online Business, I sat down with Gert Mellak, my resident SEO expert, to talk about what all of this means in terms of SEO for our business.
Gert Mellak is an SEO Expert and Digital Marketer, and the founder and CEO of SEOLeverage.com, a conversion-driven SEO agency. Gert works with online coaches, course creators, and e-commerce brands to help them convert more relevant traffic into leads and sales.
Gert walks us through step by step how to use AI to simplify and speed up the process of writing SEO-friendly articles for our website and the importance of semantically related content. He also shares an important update from Google about how we can maximize our content.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- How AI is changing the way we create content
- How Google works with AI-generated content
- Why evergreen content doesn’t really exist
- How Gert is using AI to create content for his business
- What semantically related content is
- Tips for creating your content with AI
- AI detection tools
- How this is all going to affect SEO
Links & Resources:
- The Art of Online Business website
- DM me on Instagram
- Visit my YouTube channel
- The Art of Online Business clips on YouTube
- Full episodes of The Art of Online Business Podcast on YouTube
- The Art of Online Business Podcast website
- Check out my Accelerator coaching program
*Disclosure: I only recommend products I use and love and all opinions expressed here are my own. This post may contain affiliate links that at no additional cost to you, I may earn a small commission.
Gert Mallek's Links:
- Visit the SEO Leverage website
- Learn more about Gert
- Follow him on Instagram
- Connect with him on LinkedIn
- Follow Gert on Twitter
- Email Gert at gert@seoleverage.com
Please support the podcast by giving an honest Rating/Review for the show on iTunes!
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And I was a kid and I got new shoes. I felt that I could run faster. Right? So I put on my new shoes at five. As a six year old and I had a feeling I could run faster. The feeling I have with I. I have I now and I feel I can do so many things so much faster. Right? Rather than thinking about 20 different title ideas to make the perfect, compelling clickbait title. I just ask to tweet for 100 versions and pick the best ones and refine it a little bit. Or instead of thinking about an SEO joke, I just ask it for five SEO jokes and pick the best one for an opening, right?
You've totally done that, haven't you?
Absolutely. Absolutely. And even I took it to the next level with SEO Dead jokes.
Oh, amazing. Amazing. All right. Welcome to today's episode of The Art of Online Business podcast. Rick, I'm already here and I want to talk to you today about, you know, since chat GPT has kind of blown up here and we're all talking about it. And, you know, one of the things that we keep hearing about is how easy it's going to make. Or it is making writing articles, creating content, writing blog posts for our site, writing social media captions, etc.. And, you know, we also keep hearing that Google is going to not rank as high content that is written by AI.
There's this whole conversation about that going on. And so I've been super interested about it because I have a hard time writing a piece of content, whether it's a blog post or an email. It takes me a long time and this whole thought of the opportunity to speed all that up and to simplify writing a blog post or a piece of content for the website is really appealing, right? And so I invited my my buddy Gert Mellak from SEO Leverage dot com, who has been a guest here in the podcast and is sort of my resident SEO expert here to come on to the podcast and share with all of you how we can be like what is the what's going on in this whole world of And even though it's changing every day, as we talk about here today in this interview, how do we use AI to write SEO friendly articles? Is should we be doing that?
Should we not be doing it if we should be doing it, you know, what types of things should we should we make sure that we are doing to the content in order to maximize the SEO possibility from the piece of content.
And so Garrett just walks us through step by step today, actually, for how to use AI to simplify and to speed up the process of writing SEO friendly articles for our website. He brings up this concept also of semantically related content, and I was like, Huh? Like, what are you talking about? So he breaks all that down. And that's a that's actually one of my biggest takeaways from this interview here with, with Gert that we need to be making sure that our articles are written through the lens of semantically related pieces of content within our blog post. So don't worry, he breaks all that down here And today and in the day that we recorded this episode, which was Thursday, February 9th, he had just heard from Google the three questions that each article that you write needs to be answering. And he shares what those three questions are on today's interview. So Garrett from SEO Leverage, I refer a lot of our accelerator coaching members to them and have great results through Gert’s agency. And so without further ado, let's go talk some SEO and I with Gert Mellak from SEO Leverage dot com.
So we're just talking before we hit record. Record. And this is like it's going to be like you're going to break news here. And no pressure. But we're going to you're going to break news here on the podcast. Oh, a little bit has happened since you were last here on the show. A little bit in terms of SEO, in terms of AI. And that's really what I want to dive into here today. So what's going on? Like, is SEO dead now with all this? With all this A.I.? I know that you're getting that question a lot.
Yeah. We have been getting this question for 20, 20 years. First of all, things, for Thanks for inviting me is always a pleasure. You bet, man. Let's just say a lot of things have happened since our last said here. Specifically with chatbot artificial intelligence coming. I think this we're going to dive into this quite a bit. And it's really like I was saying, it's like being in a newsroom these days, every single day, maybe twice, you get new information. You have keynotes from Microsoft, from Google to Google versus Bing is a is a new battle that comes up. Bing might be gaining some market share because they seem to be a little faster, but then Google might be a little bit better. So we really don't know. But it's it's fascinating what kind of approaches you see and how they really try to stay in the market here.
Yeah, I mean, you saw I'm sure you saw the news when Google did their they were doing their sort of announcement on Tuesday of this week. So we're recording this on Thursday, February 9th. Two days ago, Google had their announcement with Bard and they had an example of it. And it was the wrong information that that the AI kicked out, which isn't, you know, like the factuality of information that it's kicking out that I want to, you know, I'm sure we're going to talk about here today is like this is part of it. But what Google's market cap dropped like $100 Billion because of it. Holy cow.
That's an interesting topic. Anyway, it seems like it pretty much self corrected. A little bit of market cap, but this is it's funny how people see a lost right away when some bad news happens and they don't see what what is actually was and that it might be much stronger maybe in a month. Yeah definitely the numbers are crazy when you look at them.
So there's you know you mentioned chat GPT and there's other platforms that we can be using to write articles and stuff like that. And we keep hearing that, you know, Google will, you know, Google give you the Google slap or whatever you call it with. If you go directly with an AI generated article, what's going on with all that? And I know that when I reached out to you to chat about this, you were like, Yeah, we've been using you know, there's been an element of AI in how we do things for for a long time. So how are we, what's the story with everything that's been going on lately?
Yeah, I think what's really important to see is that first of all AI has been around for a while. Tpt got huge press. Yeah, Elon Musk is in there being made several financial injections as well. So just got a little bit of a boost here and I believe just it was a little bit faster than Google expected it to be becoming mainstream. I guess the user numbers were crazy. They can't keep up with the capacity, can't even keep up with the premium plans to actually build their infrastructure out. Yeah, it has had really crazy growth, but A.I. has been around for a long time. Google specifically has been working with AI in their algorithms for years and years. I remember conversations I had with clients eight years ago where I was saying The AI is coming to a way how Google is going to react. This was definitely eight years ago. I just remember a conversation with a particular client from back then.
Eight years ago.
This was already when we started with this because we we kind of saw the first experiments where content was created automatically to be completely useless, like the first translation systems you found maybe that you could really not use. But we said, okay, this is going somewhere, right? And then suddenly a few months ago TPT comes up and we had been playing with it for like 6 to 8 months before it like really got known already with their platform. It's called open AI. So they have a specific access and we're connecting it to our software platform as well. We have been playing this and it was it was crazy. They had like some playground they call this where you could play around with this and reformulate this summer as this four or five year old or something like this or for a second grader, things like those. And it was funny where this went, but I didn't honestly, I didn't see all the applications that would come up once it was launched. So now Tbbt, I encourage everybody to try it because it's going to be part of your life if you want it or not, these or similar tools.
But essentially what it does really, really well is generate content. And this is where everybody who has ever been writing a blog post and it's been sitting there for a day or two or maybe a week or at least half a day to put something decent together, actually kept their mouth open and said, okay, if this is now the way we create content, I'm going to fire my writer, I'm going to fire my assistant. I'm just going to do in 5 minutes what they usually take a day to do or train somebody to do this in 5 minutes. And instead of one article per month, I create ten a day. And that's going to be great because then I'm going to rank, I'm going to get a lot of traffic, I'm going to cover my topic. I don't have to think about any anything any more. Now the machine is taking over. So this was like the the dream resident. But the dream also means that everybody is going to do this and this is what it's going to be.
Right. I have a feeling you're going to tell us like, no. Yes, but. And you're going to tell us that this is not, you know, ten articles a day or what have you is not necessarily best practice in terms of SEO. Maybe you're not maybe going to be like, Oh, no, this is good.
I think the frequency, it was never really an issue. There were myths around where you should be publishing all the time on your blog in order to keep up and get good rankings. Again, this has been has been disparate and proven to be to be a myth several times and and also claimed by Google that it doesn't really matter. Google is about the page quality and making that particular Google user habit is going to land on your page. So you want to keep the content updated and maintained and make sure that you go back to it, rewrite it, optimize it, etc. But it's really not about the frequency.
The frequency comes in where people saw they could build out a website faster and really cover the entire topic. So we call this typically authority you gain. So when you go really deep, like in your case, you might be talking a lot about Facebook ads on a lot of different articles. And at some point you say, I pretty much covered all this topic. I've been working with an online course in the language learning space. In their language, they have covered every single thing you can imagine.
Yeah, there is nothing new. We can only maintain and optimize and tweak the conversions, but they can't come up with new topics anymore. A market leader, they cover everything. So Google has no other recourse than seeing them as an authority and ranking the stuff because they just covered everything. And this is a very interesting goal from an SEO perspective where you go in a vertical into a vertical really, really deep and say in this vertical and cover it all and the faster I am the fast I'm going to get to this authority status and the faster I'm going to actually be able to monetize this.
And this is where people now really tune up the frequency, especially affiliates that are always trying to deliver it, like being a little bit ahead of Google and and and try to leverage every single thing are really testing a lot and really ramping up those frequencies. And it's like 510 articles per day is nothing weird for an affiliate these days because they just trained their Vas to use AI not to write anymore.
Yeah. I mean, I was on a call. I'm in an I. Quote unquote mastermind. And, well, he does a mastermind. We meet once a week and it's only about 11. It's only about 12 weeks long. But anyway, I was on a call yesterday and someone was talking about how they have like they've taught chat to right in their voice and a specific style of article and they were looking to to to ramp this up and scale this up to like 1000 articles. I was like, is that even needed? But it sounds like this is one strategy if you are very, very niche specific on a on a website.
Yeah. I think what we do need to see is that the overall recommendation of the consensus really is to still have a human element in those articles, right? It's not like you have this written. It's really fun to watch how the article gets written and then you copy and paste it to your blog and hit publish and that's it.
This is not the case yet, at least it's not recommended. I've seen some SEO experiments in masterminds as well where where Google might still rank it, but what they say essentially is that they use this as training data to then be able to figure out what they should actually demote and not rank and not take into consideration. And this has happened a lot with Google in the past with links, for example, there was a lot of link spam and if you had 500 links and your competitor had 700 links they might outrank have outranked you.
But Google just check this out, let it be for a little while, train their algorithms and then really make a cut and say, okay, now everybody who's using spammy links is going to be demoted in their visibility. So for us as SEO consultants, it's not really possible to recommend to go all in with AI. But we do see we have defined and I'm going to share this afterwards, a little bit of a process that might make sense for your listeners, specifically on how to leverage AI for their content writing, where there's still a human element and we are going to touch upon a few really very, very recent news from Google and how to think about our content.
Now with with Chad Beatty being incorporated into being. Does that change any of of this? Because Google's market share is, what, like 93% or something. Of search? Is that does that change the the playing field here or is it still too early to tell because stuff seems to be changing every single day?
It's definitely too early to tell. My personal expectation would be the Bing might temporarily gain some market share, but I would expect that Google's AI version wants to have fixed the most important.
But it's going to be superior and it's going to be integrated in every single tool. And if you think about how often we use Google, it's not only search, it's Google Maps, it's YouTube, it's Google. My business is the entire Google Docs, spreadsheets, all kinds of things, strife. It's going to be everywhere. Yeah, it's going to be able to proactively tell us things that we don't even ask for because it knows our Gmail and knows what we are in into. And it's going to start a conversation like a chat board or whatever. I mean, there are so many ways they can integrate this. It's not only search, right from a search perspective. I mean, Bing has has had a really hard time for 20 years compete with Google. Yeah. So I would expect their share if they really are able to launch this in a in a really good quality.
First, their market share might be timber a little bit higher. I don't think that the overall weight is going to change too much, but they definitely have been able to put themselves on a map again.
Sure, sure. You mentioned something earlier that I'd like to kind of unpack a little bit. You mentioned the it's it's once an article is up there, it's not like a, you know, write it, get it up and forget it. It's like you kind of have to keep it. You have to use what the data is telling you in terms of how it's ranking and so forth. And then, if necessary, go back in and make some edits or updates or changes or what have you. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Absolutely. So so the reason really is because very often people talk about evergreen content, and this is a big misconception, right? In my in my opinion, this doesn't exist because evergreen content would mean not only that the content doesn't change, but it would also mean that users don't change. And what we definitely know after so many years in digital marketing is that user expectations change all the time. User behavior changes, right?
If I see today an article with a title and a video and a long text, it's not going to rank because users are not consuming this anymore. We we have higher demands. We have higher requirements. So sometimes going back to an old article, it might be updating the layout and making it, structuring it differently, adding more images, adding more links, highlighted subsections tables of contents, making this really user friendly piece.
People don't read from top to bottom anymore. They want to jump to the section they're interested in and move on with their life. Right? So it's it has changed. So even though the content doesn't change. Google is going to adjust to a changed user behavior. So Google has a lot of data and they just know that this article that used to work six months ago because people were behaving in a certain way now doesn't work anymore because now more people are at home and working from home and they behave differently and they check this type of article more out than their on their mobile phone versus they did this before in the office, maybe on their computer, and they're going to adjust automatically.
So we need to go back and say, okay, what is it that we want to rank now and see? Do we still have the content that can compete? And what is missing? What is the gap really between what we have and what Google wants to rank? Yeah, and how can we bridge this gap to stay up to date? And then Google is very happy to give you the visibility back. But a lot of people come to us that, for example, got a lot of traction eight years ago and say no, that our performance has been going down consistently year of the year and we have not been able to bring this back up.
Why? Because they're still using the SOPs from eight years ago and this op was titled Text title, text title, text one image, which is the feature, the image. And then we put this out and we just expect that we still have those users from eight years ago that didn't even browse on their mobile phone. Maybe. So we just have to keep up. And this is where we will just see in our platform and with our processes. There is an article that's in decay, so it is getting a little less and less traction. Let's figure this out. Let's bring this article back to life.
And you you mentioned like what we do. So it's SEO leverage. Is SEO leverage is your is your agency. I know a lot of people are thinking, well, I'm going to do so. And we talked about this on a previous episode that you're on. But they're saying but we talked about a lot of people are thinking like, oh, I can do all this myself. And I remember you recommended not relying on like the plugins like SEO or, you know, basically the SEO plugins that are I don't mean to call out that specifically, but just the plugins in general aren't maximizing your SEO opportunity, I guess.
I guess you just want to want to know what you want to have. Get out of it. Right. What's the, what's purpose? If the purpose is to, apart from social media, build an organic channel where somebody is searching for what you do and should be finding you, which is the ideal case and I think should be a must for every business, then you want to really dedicate resources to it.
And once you dedicate resources to SEO, you want to make sure that those resources are well invested. And what we see a lot of times is that people spend over year's resources with their assistant, with their writers, with their tech team, etc. to SEO. But after five years I could have told him that the last five years they could have probably ten x their results focusing on the right things. It's like me doing a workout as I think I should do it, or doing it with a personal trainer who gets much better results in a much shorter time. And this is where I think you should find someone you trust in SEO, where you say, okay, they have been getting results for similar niches.
Ideally, they they guide you, they hold your hand and they check in with you at least every couple of weeks and see how are things going. What should you be focusing on? Maybe you could tweak this maybe and really focus on conversions. So a lot of people just want to report higher traffic, but have seen so many sites getting a traffic boost and nothing happens with conversions or Google even gets more confused with too much irrelevant content that it's really not ultimately meeting the goal. So you want to get some guidance from someone who you trust.
Yeah, and that's another reason, too, of like, all right, this we you all monitor different articles based on different the sites and different articles and so forth based on whatever the goal is of that business. And going back to like, all right, you know what, this needs to be updated or maybe change the format of this article or something like that. You all are giving you all are watching that and giving suggestions based on what you're what you're seeing.
Exactly. We have five, five people usually on every project in the team, including myself. And we just check this out all the time, right? And we just say, look, in the next couple of weeks we recommend you focus on these three, four tasks. If you have more capacity, fine. We can help you with that as well, but at least focus on the three four tasks. So there is one article that usually drives a lot of opt ins that has been on a downward strain for a couple of months. Let's bring it back a couple of months, not two years. And then there is another one. We see you, your competitors, getting traction.
With and you're not. So let's build your version about this topic, for example, and then do some internal linking or check this out. Try this and just talk to a client. And we recommended him to create over the next month 50 articles about a topic to really go very, very deep and cover this topic inside out. And then he's going to probably double his business with this. So it's just really figuring those things out ultimately saves a lot of money and resources because you might be going completely wrong. I have seen people write content for eight years and throw it away. Yeah, and this was eight years every week publishing an article and expecting SEO results that never come. You really don't want to do this.
So when you were giving suggestions like that, for example, of like, All right, let's write 50 articles or let's and that's just one example, right? Your, your, your suggestion might be just be like write one article about like really in-depth article about whatever topic. So this is where I can get it can be helpful, I assume, right? At least getting things started. So you mentioned kind of like an I like a process for how we can use AI to make things easier or make things faster. What are you recommending?
Exactly. So, so the 53 articles are definitely the exception is usually one or two in a couple of weeks. But for for I use now we have like one process. So first of all, I definitely encourage everybody to use AI for content creation. But especially in a research phase. So if you think about an article, even though you're an industry expert, you probably or should you probably do some research or should be doing some research on what Google wants to rank. So just because you know a lot about this topic and can write about it doesn't mean that you're going to produce something that Google wants to rank. So ideally, you type in the keyword, you want to rank into Google and just check out those articles, Get a feeling for what Google likes to rank in the top spot and then say, okay, this is something I could and want to want to produce and then get this started. But this goes a little.
Now, I, I compare this very often and for for the lack of a better, better comparison when I was a kid and I got new shoes. I felt that I could run faster. Right? So I put on my new shoes at five as a six year old and I had a feeling I could run faster. Is the feeling I have with I. I have I now and I feel I can do so many things so much faster. Rather than thinking about 20 different title ideas to make the perfect, compelling clickbait title. I just ask to tweet for 100 versions and pick the best ones and refine it a little bit. Or instead of thinking about an SEO joke, I just ask it for five SEO jokes and pick the best one for an opening, right?
You've totally done that, haven't you?
Absolutely. Absolutely. And even I took it to the next level with SEO Dead jokes.
Oh, amazing. Amazing.
But it's just. It's just so easy, right? Or coming up with topic ideas, right? What? Tell me ten topics that year about how to use AI for an Instagram influencer. Right. And then it's just going to spit out whatever it thinks. It can come up and it gets the creative juices flowing, right? I'm not a creative person myself. I'm very technical, very strategic and organized myself. So I have a lot of help in my team from the creative side of things. But it's really interesting how how many ideas you can get. Just create an entire Google ad campaign based on Tbbt just having titles and descriptions and calls to action suggested.
Oh really?
Openings for the landing pages. And it was an hour instead of two days. Yeah. It's crazy, right? This is crazy if you think about it. So so definitely in the research phase and to get ideas, get up and get a structure. For example, create an outline. We now create outlines for clients. So we used to ask them to create a piece of content, gave them a tool to to help with it. But now we even create the outline for them and say, Look for this article. Even if I have no idea about your industry, I can still produce an outline. So you already have an outline and you just need to fill in the blanks and you can still use TPT or whatever tool on your end to do this.
But I can give you an outline about what this article should look like and maybe even give you a few keywords below every, every subsection. So you really just need to go in and dictate this into into auto I or some some other tools. I will probably and get the first version going. Right. So the research is really good. Outline content, structure, those things, you just ask it. Give me an outline for this in this topic. Right? Once you have picked the best topic, you get an outline you can maybe an opening. I really like to kind of ask it about semantically related content, and this is probably something I want to explain a little bit.
So semantically related means we have we have been talking about so called semantic search for a long time, but it never became really mainstream. I think where where area SEO was doing it. Ultimately what it means is that Google focuses on the meaning of the words and even tries to interpret the meaning from the search query. So you type in a search query, but they're going to try to interpret what you actually meant, right? If I type in pizza in Madrid and you type in pizza wherever you're located, in a certain moment, we are going to get different results because Google understands that the meaning behind our search query is different.
Yeah, So semantic search really tries to connect concepts with each other. So if you think about this .2. game the children play where they connect number one, Number two point number three. And this is a kid. This is what Google is trying to do. They're trying to connect the dots on your article on your website and try to see, does this make sense? What's the images coming out? And this is where very often articles, especially the ones that are just written without too much, adding too much value or really too much thought or like a general theme, they don't really make sense.
And this is why they very often don't rank well. But if you go in and say, okay, I'm going to talk about these concepts, this is how I connect those concepts with other related concepts. This is something a machine can understand, and it's also going to make more sense for the user. So if I talk about email marketing, I'm going to connect it to subject lines and I'm going to connect it to copyrighting and they're going going to connect copywriting to some storytelling and they're going to connect storytelling to the hero's journey. And suddenly I have this path that a user but also Google can understand and suddenly they see this image of this cat, right?
Whereas if I don't do this, I just see a lot of dots and they try to connect to here, five there, and this cat might only have one ear and no tail, and it doesn't make sense for the machine. And what I believe where this is really going is that Google or Bing or whatever AI engine is going to answer our search queries. They're really going to rely on this. So it's essentially our content, our articles talking or feeding into this machine. And the better they can understand this, the better they are going to be able to use it as a source to answer a search query at some point.
Would you argue that those of us who are getting understanding this now and doing things about this now give ourselves basically a head start and. You know, I don't know. Like, I guess the question is I'm trying to ask is like, do we have a for those of us who are understanding this, can we. Is the opportunity to win bigger now. Does that make sense?
Foster You start with this better. If you started with this two years ago, it would have been better. Sure. The second best moment is today. Yeah. And to really get this going, first of all, I think the if you have a business, you need to be found, right? This was always the case. And you would you would be paying Yellow Pages to do this 20 years ago or 30 years ago. But now the most important thing is that you can be found even if your Instagram is going really well, whatever it is, you want to have this extra pillar and be found not only for your brand name, but also for what you're actually offering.
So this this is site. Next one is now content creation and really checking out how do I need to produce this content that it has a chance to actually compete in an world. And this means going to back to a lot of articles, especially the ones that drive conversions and taking what can I do in order to actually connect to concepts there a little bit better because the I might deal with this content a little bit differently. I believe the time where we just wrote whatever was in our mind based on our experience without taking an extra step and looking into the semantics of the connections that I'm actually making our over. So we really want to go in this into this and not wait for our site to be demoted because we might not connect enough dots.
Is that a prompt that we can put into chat GPT for like that semantic, you know, like rewrite this article, include the article and you tell it which way to rewrite it. You can just tailor give me give me semantically related topics to this subtopic for example. Or to this subtopic. Right? Or you paste in an article and say, okay, give me, give me ten semantically related topics that are missing in this article. And suddenly it might come up with delivery rates when on your email marketing article because you haven't talked about it, but it's so related.
Right? And it's just means that this image gets clearer and clearer when you fill those gaps. Gotcha. Whereas otherwise, the machine, just because you have mentioned a word somewhere, doesn't mean it's really related to the rest and really coming across for a machine as an important part of it.
Gotcha. Okay. So we do our research. We Google whatever topic we're thinking about writing on then or we can use chat to come up with those ideas. Then go to Google, see what like, see what the what, what Google's ranking based on the term that you're doing or that you're interested doing. Let's just say, you know, you settle on a term and like, all right, I'm going to write an article about this. Then you can go into chat and. Do you recommend starting with the outline first, or can you just go write a 1000 word article about said topic that I don't know something the prompt like semantic semantically connected or what have you.
What are you starting there or starting with the outline?
First, I prefer to start with the outline honestly, because then I can give more specific instructions. Imagine you ask it, you find your topic right might be suggested out of a list of 100 topics. You pick one. This is what I want to write. I would probably copy and paste it into Google. Just a topic and tag. Is this really something people are asking for? Right? If we don't want to forget that SEO only makes sense if you're answering something somebody is searching for. And it seems obvious, but eight out of ten clients or potential clients they talk about and talk with on a call having having an issue because they expect to rank something that doesn't answer anything. And this happens with podcasts, for example, very often, right?
So depending on the angle you give on a podcast, it might be answering something or it might just be sharing useful information. If you just share useful information nobody asks for might be really good for your for your listeners, but it might just not be for SEO. And that's okay. But if you expect this article to rank, you want to make sure that you answer something somebody is actually searching for.
So imagine you have this topic, somebody is searching for this. You now are writing this. The first step I like to take is to really get an outline and I might tweak this outline, right? So I get an outline, but there might be a few items that I wouldn't put in, what it might be one that I'm missing. Right. And I say, okay, correct is outline, but also make sure that you talk about subject lines. Right? And then I have an outline that I really like and then I personally go section by section and I might talk about the opening and ask it maybe for a
funny idea for an opening, right.
What could be like two sentences to really get users into this into reading mode and engaged, engaged reading mode and directly brief it. What kind of articles is going to be? I want short sentences. I want short paragraphs, right? I don't want to use any fancy words because depending on my readers, probably, maybe so it's really important that we give the machine some context. I improves with context. So very often.
It's. Learning. It's learning exactly. And when somebody says they have trained to attempt to do something, they have just opened up one of those chats. You can open on the side and give it a lot of information. And one of those chats is, is for content writing. And they say you pretend to be an Instagram expert or a Facebook ads expert and you do this and you you have this experience and you have worked with course creators and you have this and you have done coaching as well, and you just give it the context, right?
And it's going to use all this context for whatever answer comes afterwards. And this is the great thing really. You can train your it's like training virtual artificial intelligence assistance. Yeah. That are gaining better over time. And this is really the exciting part. So you have might have one at some point. An image creation I think is still a little bit further away than text creation to really work as we really want it. But there might be an AI engine that you just use for your videos and you just give it all the information until the videos are at the level where the editing effort is going to be minimum.
And then you have another one for images and you have one for ad copy, for example, or for social media posts, and you just can open them up again and say, Now I just asked you for the next social media post and it's already going to take into account everything it has learned from the previous statements.
So cool. Is it working? Is it learning real quick? Is it learning on when you have all the chats open, like the different chats that you can do that that you can open there and chat? Gpt Is it learning on previous chats or is it just learning within the one chat?
I believe this is separate. Whenever you start a new trade, you kind of have a new situation or you can even I have even seen people just in case they typing forget it in this chat. Forget everything you have learned so far.
Oh, interesting. You said it right and then you're absolutely sure. But I believe a new trade is is just forgetting everything because it might be something completely different, Right?
Oh, that's so cool.
But I mean, the idea here is usually you have the outline and then go section by section. This is what we recommend at least. And then I have my section and say, okay, give me ten semantically related words to the subheadline, for example. And maybe even ask it for the first version, Right? So the first step is really get a first version of this article together, but in the best possible way. And then you hand this article over to an experienced writer. And this is a very important part, right?
We have Google just today, and this was the last new news from the NEWSROOM, came up with a recommendation where they said, you want to answer the who, how and why on an article. And this is something you probably also want to train to TBD on. You want to make sure this article brings across who is the author who has written this? Right. We see some experience, some sites starting to to put an eye or typed as the author of a kind of a piece of content as a test and see how Google is going to take this up and users are going to take it up.
So instead of putting a moderator that just put off written by chatbot to be transparent about this approach, don't like it too much. I don't think this is the future, but Google definitely is going to give you extra points. I think when they connect can connect the author to their own related field. So they definitely know that Rick already has been in Facebook ads for how do they 15 years or something like that, because they just connect you with everything they know about you, all your social media profiles, everything you have ever published, everything.
Okay. If you have a book, they connect you with a book. So this is where really branded search also comes into play. And we have been focusing on this for a while where if you type in your brand name. You really need to make sure you educate Google enough to know who you are, what you stand for, who you work with, because it's going to be beneficial, especially with AI coming forward.
I'm going to Google myself right now. Guard. Okay. So I don't I don't know. I don't know what I'm supposed to get. But I get just my my website is the first.
Right. So what you get is very normal. You get your website, you get what we call site links like links that go directly to your important sections of your website. Hopefully the important ones you have your social media, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook.
Facebook has a five star rating, which is great. And then you have Instagram, Apple podcast and I think guest appearance on on another podcast. So this would be really a normal and I would say pretty much neutral search result. But what you could get, for example, with some optimization is what's called a knowledge panel on the side.
I think that's I was yeah.
And this is especially when you're an author you definitely want to to do some optimization to get it. This is something Google triggers based on how well you educate them. Google being like a child and you teach them stuff about you and the algorithms stuff about you. If you're consistent with this over a few months, it's going to usually trigger a knowledge panel. And this is where really the brand appearance in search is vastly different. So imagine a lot of people before they buy your service, your course, your product are going to call you or your brand name or both. You try to find anything on you that might be a red flag. It's very normal, right? Sure.
However, most people are going to stick to page one. So what really matters is what comes up on page one about you. How do you come across? How professionally do you come across? And this is going to impact your conversion rate is not something you can easily measure, but we all know that the home page is usually among the best converting pages because this comes from the branded searches people search for for your brand name and come to your home page and this is why home pages convert so well.
So there is a direct, direct relation between how well you come up in search for your brand name. And extra sales. Hmm. Is this where people start looking into reputation, for example, and try There might be competitors ranking for your brand name. There are things you can possibly do about it. They can. There are things affiliates may be trying to rank for your brand name to to cash in on on your branded searches with affiliate commission. And you might see if there is anything you can push on top of them in order to lower them a little bit. So there are there are different tactics, but definitely Googling your brand name in different locations because each location might be different is a good practice just to be aware of it.
With the new site, we're going to we're going to fix this because why do you say we're going to fix this? All right. So so we go through that process. We we we basically build out the piece of content section by section, and you're teaching it along the way. Once we have something that we feel pretty good about, then we hand it off to to a to a writer once.
Exactly.
Once that happens, are they added, is that the point where they're adding in more of like the personality, the human element? What specifically are you looking for as an SEO expert to make sure that these articles contain?
We definitely do this this writing process then from two angles. One is SEO. So we we try to teach the word morally to take into account certain things and certain places on the article, but then also say, okay, this is, this is actually why did we put this piece of content together?
It wasn't only to rank, it should actually convert, right? And this is where very often we see people not having pages that don't convert because the content doesn't prepare for the lead magnet. You can't you can't write it, talk about whatever you want to talk about, and then put your book on up and expect people to to rank there. But if in the content, for example, you refer to your e book as the solution for a particular problem, people are going to be much more inclined to actually take the next step.
So this is where I think it's really the human being then is going to have a good idea about the project. About the other content you have is going to take for brand voice, etc. But we as a conversion driven SEO agency definitely also affected us in and say, okay, what can we do with this article? What we have to do with this article in order to build up some tension really for the reader, some emotion, and and show the gap between where they are and where they could be and where this next step be the course, be the lead magnet being an update can actually help them to get to the next level.
Are you all as within the agency or you all? Is that part of what you do too? Are you are you all setting up that tracking for whatever lead magnet on the page that maybe you're creating or you're having your client create? Is that fall under what you guys are doing or are you more revising it?
The first thing we help with the tracking set up usually and as part of the consulting.
So the first week with us is usually setting up the conversion tracking. If it's not set up double checking that we are tracking everything. There are seven figure businesses without conversion tracking, so we definitely want to double check, double check if everything is in place and that we track the right data and that that actually is accurate because it's going to be the basis for a lot of decisions moving forward. If I have 500 articles to optimize or maintain, I'm going to focus on the 8020 that make the most conversion impact. This is sounds logical, isn't it? Isn't right.
So because very often people work on those articles that just think are more relevant, but don't ignore how many conversions are driven by the different articles. Ultimately, very often you end up with a set of ten or 20 articles that move the needle for your business, and those are the ones you have want to have very close and and update frequently and the rest maybe with one an update every year, every two years is enough.
You know, that was something you I'll link up the previous episode that Garrett was on because we talked about that thing right there where it's it's not often a case of writing all these articles or having to make sure all these articles are SEO optimized. For example, it's like, what are the few that are going to drive results? And then focusing on those we weren't really in depth on on that.
Absolutely.
Absolutely. I've even a news story in the meantime.
Yeah, I. Came in came in with us with a problem where they had been dropping in conversions from Google for 12 months straight. And I had a theory on the first called why it was, but I did some research and really confirmed it and we did something really drastically different on this, on this product. We actually lowered the traffic by 80%, 85%.
Lowered the traffic.
I lowered the traffic. So it's not exactly why people come to us usually. But in this case, I'm going to tell you what happened. They had been creating so much content at such a huge scale and frequency with all their users and members, etc.. That most of the content of on the page was completely irrelevant. So while they were growing in traffic and this is why they did even more and maybe two articles per day with their huge community. Sure, they were getting completely irrelevant.
They were putting so many dots on this page where they want to draw this cat that there was no cat anymore. So Google had no idea what this business was about. It's become a very niche business for 20 years, and suddenly it became an online magazine that could be ranking for everything.
Okay, so. I had two calls with this with this client to make sure that we are all on the same page. What's going to happen? Because it's not it's not easy, right? It's not an easy step. Yeah, it takes quite some confidence, but they were really on board. And I do appreciate how how much trust they had in this process as well. But two months later, I got an email and said, Look, we are stopping Google ads because we have so many conversions again that we can invest this money in better as you're going forward. And this was really the best compliment.
This also shows how what a vanity metric traffic actually is. It's so good for the ego to see whatever you produce brings you to a higher traffic level. But if you don't know what the conversions are from this, you are going nowhere unless you want to sell the site because of the traffic. As an online magazine, there is no point. You might be much better off with half the traffic that actually converts and then you have half the articles to maintain and focus on. And you can do a bottom scale your business by doing a lot less work, but really focused and really make it clear for Google what you stand for.
That reminds me a question.
What what about, like, a a niche site? Mm hmm. You you go through this process, and let's just say that you don't want to can. Will Google? Well, it's still work. If you have chat typed, write an article. And you get it to where you want it to. And then you pass it through like Hilbert or something like that to, like, just rewrite the article in a more non straightforward way that you're going to get from chat to.
There's going to be there's there's a new industry in parallel with A.I. coming forward. Mm hmm. There's a new industry with AI detection tools coming forward. Yeah, right. The AI detection works largely is with another AI engine that tries to identify if the first AI content was produced by a different AI. Right. So. So this is the level where we are human being can can tell. So you need an AI that actually defines if this other text was written by a different language model. Right? Yeah. What Google says right now and this might be different tomorrow, what Google says right now is AI content per se isn't bad.
We have been dealing with automatically generated content for years. Imagine all the weather sites, news sites, portals, sports results, all this is auto generated. There's no human intervention, but it's extremely useful. And it's exactly what a Google user wants.
And again, Google wants to make users happy. So I'm absolutely sure that Google is going to factor in how happy people are with your content. And even if Google has a suspicion that 80% of it is AI generated, if it serves the user and Google specifically says this must be useful and written for people, not for only, only for rankings might be perfectly fine. Unfortunately, Google doesn't tell us 30%, perfectly fine, 80% perfectly fine. But really it's it's a lot about the intention behind this article that we put out. Why do we write it? It's fine that we obviously want to have an end result with more leads from from Google search. But the first idea must be that this is serving a user much better.
If I write this piece of content, then everything else I have because I'm not covering it yet or I'm not covering it in death yet, so I create a new content piece, but this must be the main intention.
So if have a like a niche set and you put up your AI content, it might be working. It's not something we can recommend as an agency. Everybody on their own side can can do whatever they want. I'm not recommending it to my clients. We are more conservative here, but I just want to make sure that whatever we put out really has the intention to serve somebody. So if you are this target user and you come to this article, are you going to have a good experience? Are you going to feel that your search intent is actually met? The reason why you actually typed in the search in the first place? And then really ask this who, how and why? Question Right. Who wrote it? How was it written? Why was it written? And if you can answer those questions, you probably already have been doing some human work anyway because the AI out of the box might not be doing it. And if you have this level of control and editing, etc., it might be fine. I think it can't hurt to have some some AI tool once in a while go over your content.
Also, if you have writers work for you, you also kind of want to test how much work they put into whatever they charge for.
Yeah, I was just going to ask you that question.
Obviously you want to to have a little bit of an additional layer, but the tools aren't perfect, right? The tools aren't perfect. They give you like a probability. And this might be very often just by changing a few sentences.
What are some of the just a couple of the tools that you recommend if if people are, you know, getting articles written or what have you, that they can have the articles that they're receiving? Checked out like I know on my end. I'm just looking this up right now. It's let me move some things around on my screen. I just had it up. Like originality Dot.
I this is I think this is the best one right now, and this is the only one I would really recommend.
Originality. Originality. I even had the founder on the on the podcast the other day going to come out and he walked me a little bit through this process. They had this tool actually more as a plagiarism tool and then tweaked it a little bit to also do detection. And they are really good with this. So this is the only tool I would recommend right now. But there are new tools coming out every single day and it's definitely going to be a battle. Who is the best AI detector out there? I would expect Google is, but they're not going to offer a tool for that.
Yeah, Interesting. So. Is there anything else that we're missing in terms of how we can use AI to to speed all this up, to simplify it, obviously. And we talked about focusing our efforts on the right topics and the right types of articles and so forth. Is there anything else that we're missing?
I think it's just important to see it as what it is, right? It is a tool that's going to help us do what we were already doing. Yeah, probably better and probably faster, more efficiently. And if we see it this way, you already have the right intention. If you think this is now going to help you get a quick win in and scale your business and ten X growth with fewer resources, you're probably mistaking, or at least not are not going to get the long term result right there. But there might be temporary gains for a few articles, but you are really essentially putting your website in a negative light.
Google has a history about a website. So even even the argument that I just put up these articles and as long as they rank, they rank, and then that changed them. Google has a history about what this domain has been doing on the algorithm for a while, and they know what what kind of spammy links you had in the past. And they know about this. These 500 articles you put up for Facebook ads automatically generated last week.
You have a reputation with Google, right? So I would not jeopardize this easily. If you want to do a test and create a new website and put only AI content and see how far you can get. Don't do it on your main domain. Use this tool efficiently. Use it every I use it every single day. The other day I asked I had to explain to my ten year old daughter the political system in Spanish in Spain, and it just came up with a game and said, look, you can you could do this as a game. And one one level is democracy.
Another level is is political parties and another level. So just just be creative with it, play with it, get a feeling because it's going to be part of our life if we want or not. Yeah, play with it and try to use it efficiently and then you're going to see a whole new world come up.
And a big takeaway for me today was this semantically related content and that you can actually tell Jack to. To include this within the framework of the piece of the article.
I think it's like the question you just ask What am I missing? What were we missing today? Right. What is what is the question I should have asked on the podcast very often. Right. So this is exactly what you do. You paste in this article and say what? What would be semantically related that we're missing here? And it's going to come up with a few topics you would never have thought about, and then you just ask it for her to write another paragraph about it and you're connecting more dots and they're going to set you up for success. Because ultimately it's all about educating the algorithms. So they can make a better informed decision.
And if they don't suggest you as a as a main brand right now, you need to do a better job educating them.
Yeah. I'm excited. I'm excited about it. Thank you, my friend. Echo Leisure dot com. Is there any just I know that before you I think you gave out your email or some other podcast. Do you want to do that again for people to.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I love I love writing emails so people it's get g e r t at SEO leverage dot com. This goes directly to me I'm happy to to respond to everybody personally and and see if there is a way to help and otherwise just head over to SEO leverage dot com. We have quick audits. We have now a search branding audit which goes a little bit in line with searching for remotely seeing, checking what comes up. Is there anything we don't like? Is there anything we can do about it?
So this is a new product we have just prepared, and I think this goes very much in line with preparing your brand for AI and see what does Google already know and what do I think they should know about me? We have coaches coming across only as authors, but not as coaches. We have podcasters coming across as musical artists because Google gets it wrong and if they don't understand what you actually stand for, it might just be because they have contradictory information about you.
Interesting, interesting. New tools, new fun, new goodies over at SEO leverage.
That never got never getting boring.
I love it. Thank you, my friends, as always, thank you so much on the podcast. I appreciate you.
Awesome. Thank you so much.
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Thank you, my friend, as always, for coming to hang out with me today and listening to today's interview with Gert Mellak from SEO Leverage. Hope you got a ton out of it. Let me know what your big takeaway takeaway was by DMing me over on Instagram at Rick Mulready. Just shoot me a quick message there. Let me know that you listen to the show and what your big takeaway was from today and how you're going to implement it into your business. Thank you again for listening. I appreciate you, my friend. Until next time, be well and I'll chat with you soon.
