My name is Victoria Massali. I’m the People Operations Manager here at Longridge. And today we’re very excited because we have Sam Torres, who is here to chat with us today. She’s from the Gray Dot Company, where she acts as the Chief Data Officer. And the Gray Dot Company is an SEO and data consulting company, where Sam has worked with over 90 B2B and B2C companies.

And today we’re going to chat a little bit about how to use AI to optimize your SEO and generally talk a little bit more about how generative AI tools can help within the kind of marketing space. So Sam, thank you so much for coming on today.

Thank you for having me. So I’m going to, so we’re going to start with the first question. I’m going to put on some slides and, you know, you never quite know what’s going to happen with your technology when that happens. Can everybody see that? Sorry, is that yeses?

Not yet.

Loading.

Getting there.

Okay. Also my, hold on. See, this is what I should have fixed earlier.

It says you’ve started sharing, but I don’t see any content yet.

Okay. Let’s see. Sorry, y’all. Give me two seconds.

Can we see it now?

Yes.

Okay, cool. All right. So yes, I will be talking about AI specifically around an SEO lens. Of course, we’re going to expand a little bit beyond just SEO and also talk about digital marketing in general. But overall, really going to be talking about what has been the hot topic for at least 14 months now. So let’s just dive into it. Why is everybody talking about AI? Why is everybody talking about AI? Why is everybody talking about AI? Why is everybody talking about AI? Why is everybody talking about AI? Why do you want it to be part of your strategy?

So first off, it’s really just becoming the norm. It’s all about how can we become more effective, more efficient with what we’re doing? And one of my favorite things is actually there’s often ways that we can use AI that kind of challenges what my perspective was, or makes me think of other areas that maybe I hadn’t considered because I have my own blinders on. Because even though I’m doing SEO, we run an agency, so I’m working with all different kinds of companies all the time.

And there’s still just little bits about the industry that maybe because you’re in it, you don’t see that maybe a layman would have questions about or misunderstandings. So a lot of times there’s going to be those kinds of nuggets that we can uncover with generative AI. I’m also going to start talking about some machine learning models as well. So feel free to interrupt at any time if you have any questions, anything you want me to explain. Full disclosure, I used to be a developer. So sometimes I get really nitty into the nitty. gritty and technical.

So again, feel free to call me out on any of that. And anything I say, if you have a question, please do ask. All right, so we know that AI is obviously something that everybody’s talking about that we want to keep using. So what are the ways that we see it actually impacting in search specifically? So first off, what has happened, what has happened is because of generative AI, creating content is really easy, I’m going to say easier, put that in quotes than ever.

And the reason I put it in quotes is because it’s questionable on whether that’s going to be quality content, right. But because there’s more content, there’s more websites, I see case studies all the time, or people on Twitter, x, whatever you want to call it, about how they created a site with 10, 000 new articles in a week, and they’re getting this kind of traffic and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Well, what that means is that there’s now so much more internet for Google and other search engines to crawl.

And crawling, indexing, that requires resources from Google and other search engines. So it does mean that now, whereas, you know, a couple years ago, having your site content crawled and indexed was kind of a given, it was something you could count on. But now there’s so much content out there that we can no longer depend or rely on the fact that Google is always going to index our content. And we’re seeing that right now with the update that they just rolled out in the past couple weeks, where they’re actually reducing content.

or expert content something that’s really providing a unique perspective that’s going to enable you to have better visibility because that’s something that generative ai can’t do llms like chat gpt are basically fancy autocomplete so they’re just doing word predictions they’re just doing word predictions.

based on what are the more common, most common patterns that they see from their source material. So finding something unique or new is going to be almost impossible for a tool like ChatGPT to create. So that’s still going to require a human touch, human input in order to have to use. And then, of course, the last part is we are seeing Google has implemented SGE, the search generative experience, or also sometimes called now it’s called Gemini.

It is now showing results within the search page itself so that essentially Google is taking clicks where we previously may have gotten traffic to our sites. So in short, what generative AI is doing. What we’re doing to search is making it more competitive and really requiring and putting the onus on us to add unique value, unique perspectives. Let’s see. I’m looking at the question.

So, Sam, we did have a you mentioned, you know, Google in the age of information is a lot more content out there. Someone asked, is AI generated content penalized by Google? And if yes, what’s the percentage of AI content acceptable for SEO rankings?

Great question. And up until a few weeks ago, before the current. Update that’s still in process of rolling out, we weren’t really seeing AI generated content be penalized, quote, it was more like if it was low quality, it would just be harder to rank because, you know, SEO is a race. What else is out there to rank? Now, as far as since the update. I wouldn’t say we’re really seeing generative AI generated content being penalized, but we are seeing.

A lot of it lose visibility and especially those pieces that maybe haven’t been curated by people or haven’t had a unique perspective added to it.

Right.

If it’s just, hey, spit me out a blog post about. The best vacuum cleaners. Right. You’re not going to overtake consumer reports are wired for that just because of who they are. So really adding that unique perspective. As far as the. Percentage of how much content can be AI generated. I’d say a lot of that depends on your prompts themselves. So the reason I say that is because maybe part of your prompt is adding that unique perspective.

So I would hesitate to put any kind of ratios or percentages on it because there definitely are times where you can use generative AI to create content that will rank and does provide value to users. So that’s ultimately going to always be the question of. Is this providing value is anybody else publishing about this, am I actually providing something unique and if the answer to that is no, I’m not then you probably won’t see it really be ranked, but we also haven’t seen any quote penalties incurred yet, so hopefully that answers that question.

And yeah, the tldr is Google has said they’re not going to penalize it as long as you’re still providing value.

Okay.

All right, so what are the things you should do as far as adjusting your SEO strategy. For what’s going on. So it means that your EAT experience expertise authority trustworthiness that’s even more important. So in addition to your unique your unique perspectives, why should people trust you right if your aunt Marge is telling you to go to this chiropractor that doesn’t mean nearly as much as your friend who’s a professional athlete right. Because. You have to know who your viewers are and your clients are.

So that’s the first thing you really need to think about when you’re trying to do this, is who has the experience of who has the experience who really understands what’s going on. Be transparent and authentic with your content authenticity is absolutely something that Google and users are looking for. So that is why we see read it is doing so much better now of course there’s also the the current conspiracy theory, because Google and read it are actually in a in a partnership right now.

like Reddit and TikTok, because they want to see what other people have to say and not necessarily brands, because it’s much harder for an individual person to trust a brand. So that’s why where we can really put forward that authenticity, be human in our communications, we are seeing that those types of content do typically have better visibility on Google.

Google.

Um, if you do have a lot of content right now, so we are talking over a hundred thousand pages. If you’re sub a hundred thousand, um, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. I’ll get into some guidelines for that. Uh, but maybe look at our, is there content on your site? That’s not really needed. One of the positives I think that has been happening with this change and what’s been going on with Google is that a ton of the, what is concrete types of blogs aren’t needed anymore, right?

So if you’re in the tech space, how often is it that you have to write a foundational blog post? And you’re like, you know what, if someone has to ask what is SAS, they’re not really going to be my target market. Because if you have to ask that question, then you’re not really qualified to buy our products. Um, so the good news is we’re seeing less need for that type of content. So I would say, start looking at, is there content that’s not providing value? That’s regurgitation of what’s already out there and start pulling. Those back.

And you can also automate this process, this process a little bit, just by looking at your data in Google search console, what content is kind of losing visibility, what has low rankings. Um, and then also in Google analytics or whatever analytics platform you’re using, what has super low user engagement, right? Cause from there, we can usually glean that that means there’s a small amount of user value. Um, and what we’re seeing, especially with this latest update is that we’d rather remove that.

Um, then just have it float there because it’s taking up that crawl budget, which is now more valuable than ever. Um, and again, it’s kind of diluting the authority of your site overall, um, navigation, I, how your site is structured, how the content is organized. Does it make sense is always important. It’s a huge part of user experience to users being able to understand what we’re talking about. Um, but it’s also a huge tool for internal linking.

So with the fact that crawl budgets are limited, Google’s not going to crawl, absolutely everything, making sure that we have proper internal linking structure. So in your nav, your top nav, your primary links, are they going to the primary sections of your site? Are they going to the right pages? If your number one performing page takes a linking problem, right? So think about what’s the process for getting to, to the content that you really want users to be interacting with.

And if the process is too long, then maybe your IA needs to be re- looked up. Um, and then schema markup. If you’re not familiar with this, that’s totally okay. So there’s a structured data. It’s really just a tool set that we have to be able to kind of deliver the top level, the highlighted information to Google and other search engines on a platter. Uh, this definitely mattered a lot more in past years. We’ve been seeing the value or the return of structured data start to decline as Google just continues getting smarter.

Um, but definitely look for where these are. So places where this can be really handy, you can put markup around your reviews. So let’s say you’re a SaaS platform. You’ve got reviews from users, testimonials. You can go ahead and add markup and actually have those reviews show up in search results. Same with let’s say you have how to’s or FAQ’s really just outlining that information makes it easier for Google to understand. I think hands down the most under leveraged or underutilized schema type is going to be for your videos.

So if you do have videos on your site, explain your videos about who you are, what kinds of products you have, then absolutely put schema around that. While Google can understand videos and we know that they can because of like they’ll create chapters and YouTube and things like that. It takes a lot of resources for them to do that. So we. Really want to serve the value, make, make it really evident what the value of this video is so that Google doesn’t have to put in that work and they do show preference for video content users do as well.

That’s why Google does. And before I get into the don’t my thoughts on entity based schema. So that is huge. Entity based schema is basically about putting together almost like they look kind of crazy when you’re done. But a mind map.

So this is why are you the authority? Why should someone trust what you have to say? Right. If you are tax software, obviously someone should trust you who has CPAs on staff way over the mommy blogger who for some strange reason is ranking for, you know, how to take the child tax credit. Can you all tell I did my taxes recently? So it’s top mind. So really just thinking about what are the ways that you can establish who you are. And we do that a lot of times with structured data.

So if you do have maybe your CTO or my understanding is you guys may are likely more in the software space. So your CTO, what is their experience? We want to add markup around that so that Google and other search engines understand like, no, this is that same person. Who’s also listed on crunch base. Who’s on the venture profiles, right? We want all of these other sites to help validate that. This is that person of interest who really knows their stuff. This is also super important.

If you’re in any regulated industries that may have any kind of certifications or compliance, you know, saying where I have my accreditation come from is super important to establishing that EAT. All right. That was a lot of information. One solid flow. Any questions before I get moving? Sweet.

It looks like we got a question in or maybe a chat. Dinesh said Google seems to have recently changed what is a video page and corresponding schema markup. Could you provide any details regarding videos which used to get indexed within search seems to have dropped?

Yes. Great question. Love this question, actually. All right. So first off, the lessons that we have from what has. Changed is really unless you’re doing something super sophisticated with your video hosting, like you have interactive quizzes in the middle of it or you are actually utilizing the viewing analytics of your hosting platform, post your videos on YouTube, that is hands down going to be one of the best ways to get visibility for your video content. Google owns it.

So while they’ll say all day that they don’t have a preference, there’s too much data that shows that they do. primary video, what should that page actually be about? And I would also say from that you should also consider, is it at the top of the page? Is it kind of the first thing that people see? Is the content that’s within the video itself described in the page content because text is by far the easiest thing for search engines to understand. So for sure, what you want to do is make sure that you are.

Highlighting the right videos, consider only one video object per page, and then there are some changes in how they’re reporting on it in Google Search Console. Also, we’ve had some communication from the Search Console team that the reports as they stand right now are not how they are going to be in perpetuity. So expect for more of that to change.

But another thing, something that we’ve been testing at great company and actually having a nice amount of success with is taking snippets from the explainer videos or the longer videos that we have and creating. So we create content that would be an Instagram reel. You can put it on TikTok and then it’s also a YouTube short. So when we’ve noticed when we add YouTube to the mix, we actually start making shorts that has been performing much better for us as far as the visibility of the video itself.

So I’d recommend think about how can you if you already have video content takes a lot to make them. So go ahead and also figure out how can you cut those to make some good teaser videos, social media fodder, and then also throw them on those other platforms to help with getting that getting that interest going for your video. Sorry, and I’m just reviewing through chat here. All right. We’ve got that. Any other questions before I move on?

So, Sam, I thought this you started to touch on this. A bit earlier, we had a pre submitted question on if we use generative AI to help inform our SEO and content strategies, what governance and controls in place to ensure the LLMs used are properly trained to meet the needs of our industry use cases and consumers. So, Sam, I’m going to start with you.

So, Sam, I’m going to start with you.

So that is going to depend entirely on which LLM you’re using. So if you are using something like a chat GPT, the answer is there is none. There is no governance. We cannot, we don’t know everything that’s gone into it. There is a website- well, sorry, there’s a. There’s a page on Washington Post actually that can tell you. You know what’s the percentage that a website influenced or educated the chat GPT model, so like, for example, you’ll see like Wall Street Journal has like 4%.

So you can start to see like: was your site content used to train chat GPT other than that is? If you want to get into anything that has governance or has compliance or bias is being considered, that’s when you have to start going to custom LLM solutions and I would say frankly, nobody’s really proving out themselves to be racing ahead of anyone else in this space, mostly because, it comes down to, the model is only as good as the source material used to train it, and right now for these types of considerations there isn’t enough content ready.

So a lot of times what we are having to do is use the tools that are available. Yeah, like a chat GPT or um, you can also do a custom GPT, but again, that’s still kind of based on opening eyes model. Um. There are some other tools like uh- and I’m blanking on all of them right now, so I know some of our listeners in here. There are some where you can add in your own content, uh, to train the model. We’ve done that ourselves for helping to kind of pre- write, like do a first draft of SEO content of articles for our own website.

Um, we’ll be honest, they require a little bit of editing, um, but normally what is happening is on the tail end. I’m using tools like cog bias, AI. Um is one of my favorites. That helps identify if there are any issues where bias is at play, based on the language that we’re using or any, you know, just socioeconomic things that we need to consider in the content. Um, but overall, nobody’s really winning in this space. I’d say this is an opportunity.

Hey, Sam, yes, so, uh. So I was the one who sent in that question and um I. I sent it in uh for a different reason. Um, you made a really interesting point at the beginning of the session here when you talked about the amount of content being generated out there and the effect it’s having on search and Google and so on and so forth. Um, so we’ve started using Gen- I tools to help bootstrap some of our content ideas. Um, now, we do that for two reasons.

One is we’re a small team and we we want to be really scrappy, so we want to get other ideas into our mix. But primarily we do it because we don’t have confidence in the underlying LMS that we use. Um, you know, so we’re a big HubSpot user. HubSpot has a great Gen- I tool in their platform. Um, but again, you don’t know where that comes from, right? So so we we use the tool to help kind of bootstrap ideas and form what we want to do to some extent.

But ultimately we go back to everything you said earlier, and that is, we care, highly curate all the content and highly contextualize it toward our industry and use cases to make sure it’s highly relevant for our customers and prospects, which that, I think, also satisfies your first point earlier, that is, make sure your content is very relevant and highly contextualized.

Um, but yeah, generally speaking, we just don’t trust, uh, these LMS, but we do trust that they’re able to kind of bootstrap our process, and that’s exactly right and that’s honestly how I recommend people to be using the tool.

So Bravo, I think you guys are nailing it because it is about like w, we use it all the time um. So just kind of our content process that I’m talking about this as a great company. You’ve ever encountered any of our articles that are like 3000 to 6, 000 words? Obviously, uh, me and my partner, we talk a lot um, we have a lot of opinions on so what that means. It used to be a very long process. So where we’ve kind of shortened is we still do our own research, we’re creating the briefs um and then we actually feed the briefs um into uh.

So I’m actually partial to the tool copy AI because I like how it can help keep things on brand um. You can do that with chat, GPT, but it takes a lot of training, a lot of prompting and I don’t want to uh. So from there, uh, yeah, we start asking questions like what might be missing. So if you heard me talk earlier about you know, sometimes it helps me find you know what’s missing out of this. What point do I need to make? Um? I also love to use it as far as like: Hey, can you make this somewhere elevated?

Can you make this somewhere casual and down to earth? Um, but, yes, absolutely like the original thoughts. Those and the curation I think is is really where the human touch is needed. What we’re using LMS and generative AI to do is kind of take a shortcut on the things that maybe a junior level would be doing. Or, you know, for me, I’m not a writer, so it takes me forever, so having something to edit is so much easier than it is to create, so I love that.

Um, so, ultimately, what does this mean? Stop creating content that doesn’t make sense. If it doesn’t serve your user, why are you doing it? So this is the what is foundational content.

If you are selling to enterprise customers, right? Um, really thinking about, does it serve that end user? Because if it doesn’t, then you’re probably spinning your wheels in a place that it doesn’t matter.

Um, all right, and i feel like we’ve. So we’re going to start getting into, like, specific tools that i use for different use cases.

Was there anything else anybody wanted to go into before we go into that? This has been great conversation, by the way.

Thank you, okay, great quick question. Have you uh tried using 11 labs and any podcast related content and associating with blog articles?

Um, i have not used 11 labs, um, and you did. You say podcasting, yeah, so mainly like it.

It uh, you can create voice through 11 labs instead of text, and i’ve seen people use it for translating and even summarizing blog. So your blog article content can be summarized to a few key points and people are associating it with. On the top of blog article, you can also listen to what’s the content of a blog. So i was wondering like anything like that has been done, yes, so there are a lot of tools that are really good for that um.

So i will say, when it comes to like, podcasts and video content, um, there are a few things out there. It is gotten to a level of creepy, um that i’ve actually tried a few tools where i feed in recordings that i’ve done and i can actually write an entire script and it sounds like me.

Um, you can also do that with video avatar, so i’ve done that as well and combined the two together. So, essentially, i was able to create eight hours of video content with a script that was already created for something else. Um, without me actually having to sit in front of a camera for those eight hours, which, of course, is really like 12 to film that much and then edit.

Um. So there are a ton of those tools out there.

There is, of course, now also the one that open ai is coming out with, which will probably start to dominate everybody, uh, just because of who they are and the backing that they have.

Um. So there are plenty of tools for creating video and audio content. Um, a lot of those, i will say from my experience, work best only in english. I don’t think there’s a lot of tools out there that are.

I haven’t seen many of those that are operating really well in other languages. Um, i did see on the video side, the new alibaba model is actually really great at being able to create video content from images. Um, so these are just ideas of how you can create video content on the cheap.

Um, then- and i’m sorry i’m losing my thoughts- so that’s creating the content now for analyzing, yes, doing things like summarizing content, creating summaries for you, creating social media posts.

Um, that’s actually going to be one of the use cases we talk about.

We use it all the time.

Um, now, you always want to edit, uh, you always want to curate anything before you post it, but, for sure, these are great tools and really interesting things to be using. Uh, because, again, with it, not only summarize my blog post, but also what are four questions that this blog post answers? Or because that’s great social media content. Um, you know a lot of these things are are things that you can pull together, that you can take one piece of content now and kind of split it into 20 different applications. Um, so it becomes that much stronger.

So do you feel like i answered your question. Have more questions?

Uh, i understand. Yes, okay, cool.

Um, all right. So, getting into the use cases, running your blog generating organic traffic? So yes, we use it as a drafting tool. Pretty often i ask questions like: what am i not talking about in this outline?

Are there other perspectives?

I should add, what are the top questions related to this topic? Um, is something i really like to ask too.

So like, for example, i said i talked about javascript, seo all the time.

I’ll just go in and say what are the top questions about jsseo and then kind of respond to that. So if you’re ever running into a circumstance where it’s not that there’s a lack of expertise, it’s just it’s hard to come up with what.

What am I going to talk about? These are great ways to do it: to ask questions about what are the top questions, what is the use case, where are people missing it? To start going into that.

My favorite tools, like I said, copy AI. I also really like perplexity for this. Perplexity will actually give you the sources of the information that they feed you. So it’s something that you can use to research a little bit further. Now, things that you should always be careful about across the board, depending on which LLM you’re using, you do need to be worried about others’ copyrights.

So, for example, I know OpenAI right now is being sued by, well, actually a lot of people, but authors, movie producers, because their content was used to train the model. Always curate. If you are using any proprietary information, just know that once you feed it into the model, it may not belong to you anymore. So this is going to change depending on which model you’re using, which tool. I can tell you to chat to UPT. It belongs. To them, if you put it in. So anything that’s in your prompt, they can potentially serve to another user.

That’s how Samsung obviously had their crazy system code leak. So we do like to use them for non- sensitive tasks. And then monitoring performance. So we’ve actually built dashboards where we’ve kind of compared looking at the process of what’s my 100% human generated content that maybe took a little bit longer. Basically, we’re trying to determine is the juice worth it?

Squeeze so that we can start seeing where are the wins in our content and the process, because also you might see that may be an outline for for a blog done by chat to PT or copy or perplexity or cloud or any of those. Does that work better, right? Do you not see a difference as far as the end result? And if so, then save the time. So really, this is a time to start iterating, start testing and start really digging in and seeing. What works for you specifically in your team?

So, like I say, for my team, my business partner, Tori, and I can talk about all kinds of subjects. But for some reason, when it comes to what am I going to write next? We draw nothing but blanks. So these are the tips that we’ve learned to help us. And it’s because we do a lot of testing, tailoring your custom landing pages for SEO and SEM. This is huge, especially when you’re talking about SEM, so any kind of paid media, whether it’s Google ads.

Bing ads or even social, having landing pages that are targeted according to the topic and the audience that you’re talking to is so important for conversion rate optimization. And this is where you can start using templates to actually spit out these pages in mass and actually provide a more personalized experience than just keyword replacement. Right. So that’s what we used to do. We did dynamic keyword insertion all the time. DKI. You can now really start customizing. These things, and it’s so much more effective.

So one of my favorite tools is called graft. You can actually put in a spreadsheet, maybe what are the terms that you’re focusing on or the audience, and actually it will create a prompt for you for each page for each iteration in that row and create unique page copy for every single one of those. So this is where you can start gaining back so much time to think about how much time we used to spend creating 30 different landing page. Variables. Now you don’t have to do that.

You can actually start curating the process and just edit instead of having to create. So definitely one of my favorite things. If you guys haven’t checked out graft, it is super cool. I say we had someone send me a question. Um, yes. Can, uh, are people blocking LLMs chat, GPT, et cetera, from crawling their websites content. Some are for the majority. I see this happening in like news publisher sites. Um, or anybody who is publishing copyrighted material. So we’re seeing that more in like the entertainment space than anything.

Um, usually businesses, what I’ve been seeing, especially if you’re B2B, um, are wanting to be part of the LLM response. They want to be kind of the source. Um, I’d say probably the major one there is that we’re waiting to get any kind of feedback on how can I track if my content has been used or has. Um, I’m out of the answer. Um, so yes, people are, I would say businesses generally are not except for news organizations, at least from what I’ve seen. Um, and I’m also not seeing many of the LLMs actually respect that. Also be totally candid about that.

Um, you can ask them not to crawl your site. Uh, it doesn’t mean that they don’t.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Um. So, creating social media posts- we talked about this. Um, use existing content, start spinning it out. Hey, what is this about? What are some highly quotable moments from this? Um, what would users learn from reading this content? Those are some of the prompts we like to use, and then you can also use mid journey and dolly to create images to go with them. Um, so that’s really cool. And, of course, all the tools that are coming out to start creating video as well. Um, you can really have a lot of fun. Um, i know.

Uh, one of the other times i was talking about this we also talked about um, canva does a great job with this as well. So if canva is a tool that your teams are using for creating, uh, graphic media, um, they have put in a ton of ai tools as well. They’re not going to be quite on the same level as, like, a mid journey or a dolly, but honestly, mid journey, i think, requires quite a bit of training. I don’t know why that’s happening. Uh, requires quite a bit of training in order to start using and get the right look and feel that you want.

I would say canva is a much easier like entree into ai generated illustrations um adobe’s new tools. If you’re using the adobe suite as well, um, those are quite powerful, um, and i’m waiting for them to start monetizing that, because actually it’s been some of the best stuff i’ve seen. So, if you’re already using any of those, uh, definitely take the time to investigate it. The tools are already there and you’re probably already paying for them. Um, all right, then some other places repurposing existing content.

So, um, dinesh, your question about podcasts is great, because that’s actually something we do. We take podcasts, podcast transcripts, and say, hey, can you make me a twitter thread out of this, or let’s make a blog outline? Um, so really start thinking about where can you use what’s already been created, because it’s so much less effort. Um, also with the fact that video production is becoming cheaper and easier to do and you can use it to create your own content.

And you can use it to create your own content and you users what we’ve been seeing- because i do a lot of research on tiktok as well- consumers, especially if you are b2c, they are more likely to respond to less produced videos when it’s online. Now, it’s not. That is not true for, uh, like your tv media or more traditional media. Um, but especially since video production costs are coming down, take your top performing blog posts, have a tool, actually create a script and then use it to create your own content.

And then use it to create your own content for you and then start trying to create video content out of. That becomes so much easier, um, and then we have talked about you know, tailoring your content to readers, putting in your own context. Again, here’s this blog post. How do i position it to talk only to millennials? Things like that. You actually can totally use the tools. Uh, claude’s really good for that one. So it is perplexing, um and same with idea generation.

So, really, taking all of those, just ask it a lot of questions and then be prepared that sometimes what it’s going to spit out is going to be totally not usable and not helpful, um, but other times it you may find a gem or you may also have it spark ideas within you, um, so ideally, what’s happening is you’re using these tools to take off some of the tedious work, some of the the monotonous things, so that you can gain more brain space to be more creative and more authentic in your creation.

And yeah, uh, anybody else want to talk about how they’re using gen ai to create content. Anything i didn’t mention anything you’re really excited to try.

I’ll talk about something that dinesh and i are actually working on, which is, uh, in our industry, we know that lifestyle content um is very important for someone. We work in the 55 space, so people are picking homes based on a lifestyle, and so, uh, dinesh is uh banging um up against google maps to get a list of all the lifestyle attributes.

Uh, you know things like, uh, where are the concert halls and where are the dog parks and where are the beaches and all that type of stuff, and that will provide us a collection of all these lifestyle items that are within a geographic space. And then we plan on using perplexity, which seems to have to do some testing- although i haven’t tried claw three, which is very recent, it’s in its release, uh- to help provide summarized kind of content around these various lifestyle opportunities.

Okay, i love that. Yeah, um, we’re going to scale it.

If it works, we’ll scale it across the entire country.

Yeah, that’s, that is super cool, um, so some things that i might add to it to try, if you’re okay with me giving my two cents, um, so i actually love to do a lot of topic modeling and topic clustering, um.

So there’s actually free tools provided by cornell that will get you just up and running so that you can start then also figuring out how to categorize some of these things and take off that work, because then maybe you know, let’s think about how are we going to categorize some of these things and take off that work, because then maybe you know, let’s think about, let’s think about, you know.

You know, dog park versus walking trail? Um, are there related things that maybe it’s just one larger content piece about a lifestyle with a pet? Um, really start looking at that, because that top level content- you know, category level pages- can be really there.

We are seeing the performance or the value of clps um performing really well compared to how it has been in the past versus product detail pages, um, so really figuring out where can you kind of organize those different tags and lifestyle attributes so that you get kind of that greater content and category page? Um, i think something that could be really interesting.

I’ve got access to a. I have a friend of mine who’s building a new platform. It’s based on topical um uh groupings. It’s called topic. It’s done by a company called graphite um. It’s in pre- release. That give me actually access and, yeah, we’re going to use it for that exact same purpose. So cool, yeah, oh yeah, i put a link to it.

This stuff is.

Every week there must be 50 new things. I i can barely even keep up reading it.

I actually have.

One of the things i do now is i actually have a script that runs against my google, my, my um runs against my browser history and my gmail to organize all the stuff that i’ve touched in a day or every week, to give me a list of. Here are the things that have come out that i’ve been informed about. That i had 30 seconds to look at so that i can figure out what’s the important thing to go do.

Oh, that’s super cool and, yeah, there’s definitely so many tools coming out. I feel like i’ve done a couple of calls like this and i get a lot of: have you tried this tool?

Have you tried this, this actual and like y’all- i don’t know how much time you think i have- like, i’m trying as much as i can, but there are so many out there, um, so i will say that’s- uh, i’m gonna do another call out for graft, because they actually do all of these things and you, um, what they do is it’s basically a ui to tap into all these different models that are out there, um. So that’s why i really love it, because you’re not relying on any particular model. You can actually play with it, twist it around and see which one works best for you.

Um, yeah, we do need a tool to bend this. Tools and actually what you’re talking about with your script. That’s super cool. You should productize that. I would buy it. That sounds cool. Um, anybody else want to share any use cases or something that they found that they’ve been excited about? You know, we’ve only got like a couple of minutes left.

I can share something that i’ve seen it work. So, uh, this is about uh faq schema in. So i’ve used uh chat, gpt, api to read the blog post. Create faq. So in combination with public city. Public city is better for factual content, yes, but recently i find gemini 1. 5 is better than public city for factual content. So you can use either of those with references and also it’s good with getting the paa content- and in combination with your existing blog post.

Now you can create, uh, let’s say, five or six faqs and then create a json script, ld script, out of this and add it to each of the page in the schema. So i’ve seen that work better because, as google is changing, seo is also going down on the page. So what i’m seeing in work is all these paa content. If you are able to rank in paa, then we can get more traffic and it’s getting more upper in the page. Version.

Zero searches: yes, i would agree with that, um, and i like how you’re doing that all together of creating the content and putting the structure data around it. I do want to say, you know, faq structured content and it impacting the look and the cert is obviously no longer something that google supports. Uh, mostly because, uh, seo really abused faq markup. Um, so the faq is popping up with your listing since the latest update because it let me down so much early on. So it’s well, 1.

5 is pretty good because the input is 1 million tokens. You can literally pass a whole book or a movie and it does a really good job for factual. I didn’t like the previous one, that one was bad.

Oh, it was terrible. Yeah, so it’s terrible.

And cloud three seems to be doing really- they just came out this last week- is also pretty powerful as well. That’s the french.

I have played with that one um. I actually got to be part of some of the beta, so i’ve been playing with it for a little bit. It’s super powerful. I love using that one, too, for doing analysis. So even sometimes i’ll take, like gsc data um also because you can actually so with cloud. They’re not selling your information, um, and not using it to train the model outside of your own use cases.

Um, so i’ll actually put a data from gsc and say what’s notable about this and it can actually understand that, whereas, just so everybody knows, chat gpt can’t do math or data to its life. Um, nope, please don’t try, it’s not gonna work. Um, let’s see. I think we do have a couple more things, but i think this is good conversation. Plus, you guys will get copies of these slides. Is that right? It’s right. Yes, so you’ll have all this um. Yes, there’s lots of it. I’m working with metadata.

It can produce alt text, meta descriptions, all of those things for you super quickly. It’s something that, honestly, seos have been doing for a long time. They just used a lot of fancy python scripts, um, now it’s much more easier for people to get onboarded into it. You don’t have to know python anymore to run those.

Uh.

Where i do think it’s really interesting, though, is pulling insights from traffic data. So, again, this is what i was just talking about of putting in data sets into cloud um and having it, you know, having a conversation with the data of hey, what’s going on? Um. You can also use those machine learning model tools from fornell to start doing topic clustering. So ways i’ve used this um.

For example, i was working with a global streaming platform and they were wanting to know, basically for a specific audience, what are kind of the topics within this, this audience, that are not as saturated by their competitors? Um, and they wanted to know for, not based on their own streaming platform, but everywhere else they where they show up. So we pulled competitive data from their organic keyword keywords.

Uh, we pulled 16 000 youtube videos and pulled all of the data with those videos as far as what’s the engagement, what are the comments, how many comments, and so we were able to kind of put all of those videos into clusters, tag them appropriately and then analyze each tag, and then we were able to kind of put all of those videos into clusters and run uh sentiment analysis on comments so we could start to understand where, where are these audiences with these specific topics feeling unsatisfied, so that we can tell the provider: hey, this is the type of content that you want to create over the next year to answer these questions.

These topics aren’t are the ones that are not being tackled. So what that did is that was a use case outside of seo, but consider you could do that too, to say, okay, i am educating on what are the things that, um, a senior audience should be considering for their lifestyle and where they want to live, and what are all the things that could go into that.

Now you can start seeing where are the areas that are super saturated, that people are talking about a lot, and where are the areas where people are not and that can help you with all of your content programming, what are you producing, how are you positioning your product? Um, all of that really starts to come together so you can do all kinds of things. It’s very fun, um, and a lot of these like the youtube api, the tick tock api, uh, reddit uh, just became a paid platform but, like the youtube and tiktok apis, are free.

You can tap into this information. You can start seeing what are the social trends, which i think is really valuable, because what happens on social search trails behind and any kind of search data you have is always going to be based on historical, so you can always balance the historical data but also start getting the forecasting. What’s coming, what’s new, from these social platforms? Uh, and these tools make it really that much easier to see. Um, we’ve already talked about this. Making it content.

It’s going to be more about creating one really strong piece versus 10 000 pieces. Um. So, provide value, provide authenticity. Um. Think about where you can take things that have been performing really well for you and repackaging them in a different way. Um, if you’ve ever seen, uh, ross simmons, he beats this drum. It’s not about content creation. It’s about content distribution. Distribution is really the key, um. And then common pitfalls: you have to edit it.

If you don’t edit it, you might say something that is either completely not true, uh, you could find yourself in some compliance hot water, depending on what you do. Um, and then also consider the copyrights. Um, and i know we’re a little bit. Yeah, we’ve got only a few minutes left, so just know that, when it comes to copyright, what has happened? Um? The eu has not really made a direct claim yet, but for the most part, anything created using generative ai, uh, is not copyrightable.

The us office of copyright has now said that you can copyright content that had generative ai be part of it, as long as the human input was significant. Now, of course, they use the term significant, which is open for interpretation, so we’ll see how that goes as far as the law is concerned, but if it’s important enough to you that you want to be able to copyright or trademark it, do it yourself, um. And then yes, now we have questions, um. But if it’s important enough to you that you want to be able to copyright or trademark it, do it yourself, um.

Um, so how can…

Oh, Sam, before we happen, so these are a few pre- submitted questions, but just wanted to take a pause and anyone who’s in the room right now, were there any questions top of mind that you had for Sam in the last couple of minutes that we had together?

Awesome.

Okay.

Then maybe we can, we can jump into a pre- submitted one. How can AI help in backlinks?

Yes.

So with this, this is where I think, um, so just full disclaimer, I am not a fan of backlink outreach. I don’t think it works. Um, now you can of course use ChatGPT to help create templates for link outreach. We’ve seen some companies have seen success with that, except I’m not a fan. I don’t think it’s worth it. The juice is not worth the squeeze. Um, where I do see it helpful is things like establishing, getting PR links, um, understanding what your competitors are doing.

So running analysis on their own backlink profiles, you can start feeding that data into something like a cloud and start saying, okay, what kinds of sites are these? Um, so that you can understand kind of what’s their portfolio of, you know, just business links to nonprofits that they’re sponsoring to local directory links, things like that. So you can start to really understand is your backlink profile similar? Is it better? Where are the places where you can improve it?

Um, and also start seeing like, what are some of the content ideas where your competitors are getting backlinks or even what content for you has produced backlinks? That’s where I see really Jenny, I, and these tools helping is on the analysis side. Um, but by far what happens, um, with the best backlink strategies I’ve seen are ones where you are creating something unique. Um, and also think about the tools that you can create. So is there some kind of calculator that you could create?

To help people, this newspapers and periodicals love linking to stuff like that. Um, so is there something, a takeaway, an infographic, a white paper that you can provide? Um, and you can use AI for helping to create those things and seeing kind of what’s a void in the, in the industry right now. Um, but that’s not how we typically do with backlinks. Um, like I said, we don’t do like outreach. I hate it. Um, the second question is how organizations prioritize. And then in AI strategy, um, success stories from other agencies.

Um, so I know for us, really, what’s been working is helping us to focus on the things that we really need to do and free up brain space. Um, so it’s all about what kind of processes do you have, um, and the documentation around it. So that is one of the reasons why my team, uh, for any content that we’re creating for ourselves, we like to use copy AI because I can put things in there about keeping things. So for example, we are really committed to making sure that our content is as inclusive as impossible as possible.

So we have guidelines written in there. Um, so that we’re not having to spend a lot of time on the backend figuring out, oh, shoots, this reads super biased. We’re going to need to fix that. Um, so I would say it’s a big part of that too. Um, some of the larger agencies that I do get to work with and where they’re having an AI strategy.

Yeah.

They actually have entire teams dedicated to figuring out the tools, um, but they are investing quite a bit in training, uh, but they are definitely slower adopters. So I think where we’re going to see the most innovation is going to be on the people who are running fast and loose, uh, it’s technology. That’s typically how it goes. Um, but I would say one of the things we’ve learned is keeping documentation on what are the things that are important to you, um, outlining exactly what kind of content can go into a prompt and what can’t, um, to ensure.

That you and your clients are protected.