150 | AI Meets SEO: Secrets to Driving Traffic and Rankings with ChatGPT with Andy Crestodina

0:00Hello, and welcome to another live episode of the Leveraging AI podcast, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to improve efficiency, grow your business, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host, and we have a really exciting show for you today. First of all, if you're joining us either on LinkedIn or on the Zoom, please share where you are from and what you're looking to get out of this specific session. And later on, obviously, if you have any questions, feel free to ask those questions. If you're listening to this as the podcast afterwards or watching us on YouTube, what the hell are you doing?

0:36Come join us every Thursday. We do this every Thursday at noon, and we have amazing guests every single week, just like the guests that we have today. But today, our topic is going to be creating great content, and specifically creating great content that resonates with people, that drives engagement, and is good for SEO, which is, in theory, one of the main things that people use AI for. So many people figured out that they can create content with AI. They're just doing it wrong. And then what they're getting is they're getting generic, non-interesting, and most importantly, content that doesn't drive any results.

1:14So yes, they can generate a lot of content, but the content is not necessarily very helpful in what it does. And the point of content is to drive business results, and they should just do it for fun. So to help us to understand how to do this, we have Andy Crestodina, who has been one of the people that I've been following for SEO for many years. So he has been an SEO celebrity for a while. And we run into each other in a conference about AI a few months ago. And we started chatting and said, this would be an awesome topic to do on the podcast. So here we are. So what we're going to talk about today, we're going to talk about everything you need to know on how to use AI to create content that doesn't sound like AI, that is not vanilla and generic, and that actually drives business results, which is a topic that literally any company on the planet should know by now.

2:10And this is just a great opportunity to get somebody who is a real expert on the topic to share with us how to do this. So I'm really excited to welcome Andy to the show. Andy, welcome to Leveraging AI.

2:24In the next few years, AI technology will change our world dramatically. Whether you are a business executive trying to catapult your business forward, or just somebody who refuses to be left behind and want to advance your career, this is the show for you. I'm your host Isar Maitis, a serial entrepreneur and an AI enthusiast. You'll hear invaluable practical tips from innovative business leaders, AI practitioners, and some of the brightest AI minds in our world today on how you can leverage AI in ethical ways to advance your career and grow your business.

3:04Isar, thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this. This will be fun. Same here. Like I said, probably everybody who's listening has at least tried to create content with AI. And some people just post it as is because it's easy. I'm like, hey, I created a post or I created a LinkedIn post or I did this thing. And most of it, some people are like, this doesn't sound like me and it's not really what I wanted to touch and it's not the points that I want to deliver. And so I don't really know what to do. So I'm going to go back to doing it manually and both are wrong, right? Like just posting the AI stuff is not a good idea.

3:38And just going back to, oh, I'm going to write it all from scratch on my own is not a good idea either. So I'm really excited to have you here. Give me two cents about like your background so people know a little more about you, but really in like a minute, and then we'll dive right into how to do this properly. I'll be very brief. Co-founder of a digital agency focused on websites, Orbit Media Studios is an agency that builds and optimizes websites. Started in 2001. So I've done about 23 or 24 years of SEO and analytics, going back prior to Google Analytics. And today we're a team of 55 people.

4:13We build and optimize maybe 30 or so B2B lead gen sites per year. And so I am a practitioner in the trenches on the front lines as a content marketer, content strategist, and SEO. And I love it. It's super fun. It is. And now there's AI in this whole mix that didn't exist 24 years ago or two years ago for that matter. So yeah, so share your wisdom with us. Yeah, I joke sometimes. I say, I've done 24 years of SEO and 24 months of AI. Yeah. Same as everybody. It's almost to the day, right? I know. Yeah, it's very close to that. Okay. There are several separate conversations about SEO, about search and AI, and it's helpful to keep them separate.

4:52We can try to stay practical today and we can set aside things like what do AI overviews within Google due to click-through rates? We don't need to go into that. Obviously, they reduce click-through rates, same as every other SERP feature. Another one, is AI going to replace Google as a way to get information? Super interesting, perplexity, lots of interesting things. Is Google itself disrupted? Also interesting, separate topic. We can set that aside. So we can set aside bias and labor market impact and hallucinations and copyright law and all that stuff another day. Right? That's not... Yeah, like you said, there's a lot to unravel here when it comes to AI and search in general.

5:30Yeah. And my content strategy has always been to publish practical information. I'd never really address those things. And there's other people who you can chat with. You're someone who has a great point of view on those things. Okay. So search. SEOs are not famous for publishing highly differentiated content. They publish stuff that tries to rank. So frequently there are SEOs that just read the other pages that rank and try to make something that's like, you know, 5 % better without trying to be different at all, which is what you just said about AI, right? It's like AI is just very good at summarizing the internet and the things that it creates are inherently undifferentiated.

6:03I literally had a chat with a guy yesterday who has a, on one hand, brilliant, on the other hand, exactly what you're saying, platform that knows how to go to your competitor's website, see what they're ranking for, pull up the keywords and write new content based on that. But when you think about it, it's not really new content. It's just trying to replicate what your competitors are doing, maybe slightly better. And those platforms, and I can teach that and we could do it today. There's ways I can show like how to see what your competitors are ranking. And we could run the method and you could rank higher and get more traffic.

6:33That content is, and that might be a goal in brand visibility is important and let's not completely dismiss it. But no, I think that some of the most important outcomes in marketing are being memorable, getting referrals, staying top of mind, things for which there's no metric to measure. So digital marketers often de-emphasize those things, even though those are actually the most important things. And whenever I make anything, I'm trying to make something that is so compelling that people talk about it or remember it for months, right? That's my ultimate goal. And some of the things that I make are keyword opportunities.

7:06So I do SEO. Maybe half my articles are optimized for search, but not all of them. Search is not my main goal. It's one of the channels through which we can promote content. Okay, so SEO. There are lots of different things that affect search rankings, and many of those things have AI methods that can support them. For example, are there technical SEO opportunities? You can write a prompt that audits any page to identify missed schema structured data opportunities. And I could write and read the prompt now. You could write it yourself. Here's a webpage, list missed opportunities to add schema and micro formatting to this to have better structured data to appear better in search results.

7:50It'll do that. Extremely good at that. It sounds so much fun. No, it's not. I'm just... Technical SEO is not... Yeah, and it's funny because tech SEOs aren't really user-focused anyway, right? They're trying to be better for the crawl. I don't think that... I agree. I'm not really mostly a technical SEO. I'm mostly a content marketer. But there's a method for that. Hey, link popularity is important. AI can help you find blogs to pitch to and help you write your pitch. Hey, content should naturally attract links. What kind of content does that? Original research attracts links much more than any other format for content.

8:21Okay. There are prompts that will tell you exactly what topics you could cover that other blogs are likely to link to. It sounds like this. Here's my persona. We haven't touched on it yet, but I always believe in giving AI a persona first. I know you agree. Most people, I think, have figured this out. AI might as well stand for average information until you give it your persona. Okay, so here's my persona. Based upon my persona's information needs, Give me a list of topics that are frequently asserted, but rarely supported with evidence in my audience's industry. Wow. Here's a whole bunch of things that no one's written or hardly ever written that would definitely attract links because they support other people's assertions.

9:04Brilliant move, right? Great content strategy. It'll tell you what other blogs aren't covering. That's awesome. I'll add something to that. recently I interviewed the CTO of you.com and it's a brilliant, amazing research tool. And you can throw this kind of prompt in there and it will give you a very detailed, highly researched, 120 sources, summary of ideas on the prompt you just gave. So it's way beyond what you're going to get from tools like Google or OpenAI or Cloud or any of the other ones. That sounds really powerful. That is such, AI can do gap analysis on the internet in general and tell you what has not been written yet or what are the claims people make that aren't supportive with evidence.

9:54And then you produce that content, you'll attract tons of links that way. Original research has been a goldmine for us for link attraction. So these are all different methods. You can tell AI to act like a quality rater and using the quality rater guidelines, get feedback on a URL. That's another AI SEO method. but mostly what I do when I meet with people and they're trying and their goal is traffic I use AI to I use normal tools to find phrases for which a page ranks but not yet high and then I take the page and the keyword and I give it to AI and I say suggest copy edits to this page that would better incorporate the semantically related phrases we could do it together actually if you wanted to live demo a method but it's really interesting because there are most pages rank for phrases that aren't on the page.

10:47So just by incorporating the phrases for which a page ranks, but aren't, but are absent, that page will rank higher. It's semantic SEO. It's been the method for SEO forever. If you just, and so AI can help you identify those and then actually take the next step, which is why it's more powerful than typical SEO tools and write draft copy or new paragraphs or new sentences that better incorporate the semantically related phrases. It's magical when you see it work. So first of all, my question, and it's, I assume the answer, like SEO tools usually know this stuff because they're connected and crawling like a gazillion tools.

11:25How does ChatGPT figure it out? Like how does it know what you rank for? It doesn't know that. And you'd have to use a tool to export that list or choose the key phrases from there. Got it. So you start with an Ahrefs or one of the other, SEMrush or one of those. And then you take the data from there, upload it to Chagipity, and then ask the questions. Exactly. And that's the more thorough way to do it. But if you don't, if you're not an, maybe you're not an SEO, and this is not a thing you do every day, and you don't even have one of those tools, it can emulate that first step. If you just give it the page and the key phrase and say, what are the semantically related phrases for this primary target key phrase, it'll give you a list.

12:05It's a good list. AI is amazing at language generation and summarization. So it's actually Actually, if you scan through that, any SEO, expert SEO, scan through that list and they would agree, this is actually really good, right? These are clearly those semantically related phrases. And then you have maybe another prompt or two. And we could, again, we could do this exercise live. It will then come back with a list of, you'll end up with a list of phrases for which, phrases that are adjacent to the primary target key phrase. now give it the page and say suggest copy edits to this page that will improve rankings by better incorporating the semantically related phrases from the list and it will just make a bunch of sentences for you showing the original in the draft and the original in the draft and you just scan through and there's probably out of let's say there's 10 there's probably four that you would that don't hurt the flow for the reader that are maybe even more compelling more specific You know, of course, if it sounds spammy or keyword stuffed or off brand, just ignore it.

13:04I think people say sometimes judge AI too harshly based on an output. Of course, most of what it gives you might be useless. That's fine. But the few things that it does that you take might are exactly the types of things that impact rankings quickly. Because this was if you use the tool first, the SEO tool first, this will show you the phrases for which you almost rank high already. It's very effective. So I want to summarize and I want to add something from a tools perspective that I think will be interesting for people. So first of all, a quick summary. What we just said is think about the topic you already wrote about that already exists on your website.

13:40Don't give the AI the web page, just tell it the topic and say, okay, what related topics I should include if I'm going to write about this from an SEO perspective, it's going to give you a list, then give it the page, then have it compare what's on the page to the words that it suggested or the phrases that it suggested, and then ask for potential recommendations. I will add one thing, and it's actually a very interesting thing because it happened two days ago with a whole new announcements with OpenAI. So OpenAI has Canvas has been around for a couple of months. It's an incredible tool that allows you to really work together with the AI.

14:16So you can have the AI write a draft, but you can go in there and make changes or highlight one paragraph and ask it to rewrite it based on anything you want. But now they've added Canvas into GPTs, those media automations. So you can literally build a media automation, a GPT to do what Andy just said. You can build an automation where all you do is you drop in a keyword and then it will give you the related phrases. And then it will ask you for a link and you will give it a link. And then we'll open it in Canvas and we'll make suggestions, literally in comments on the side, just like you write comments on a Word document.

14:55And then you can pick and choose the one you wanted to implement and you will implement it straight in your document. You copy and paste it back to WordPress or whatever it is that you're running your website and you're done. And you can do this whole process in five minutes per page, which is way faster than anybody has ever done this before. Canvas is a major improvement. I have only experimented with it a little bit, but it really needed, JTBT really needed that UX change, right? Because it was awkward before. Moving, tabbing between things. It all happens in the one tab now. But yeah, there's still, I would still manually move these things into WordPress or look at them carefully or add more formatting because inevitably, whatever JTBT or whatever your favorite tool is, creates for you.

15:41It doesn't have things like internal links or images or contributor quotes or your specific examples or data from your own other research you've already conducted other places. This is why I'm actually not a huge fan of using AI to write in general, because a lot of those key success factors for content marketing, visuals, contributor quotes, internal linking, specific examples, your own data, your own research, and strong points of view. None of those are things that AI does super well. I'm still holding fast at I'm writing everything myself. I have a very, very specific kind of structural style.

16:14And I use AI all the time for research and recommendations like this, SEO, on-page SEO recommendations. But there are still limits and things where you get better results, I think, if you do it by hand. Okay, great points. So let's do this. Let's do a quick example, and then we can continue to the next thing. Sounds good. I'm going to share my screen. If this is an audio format for you, You can come back and see it on YouTube. Or Isar, how do you want to frame this? Yeah, first of all, we're going to describe everything we're doing on the screen. But also, you can go watch this on YouTube. The link is on the show notes of the podcast if you're on the podcast platform.

16:50But if you are driving right now when you're listening to this, then don't watch the YouTube channel. Just keep on listening. We'll explain everything that we're doing. Yeah, we'll explain it all. Okay. And you should be here live anyway. Thursdays. Put it on your calendar. This is happening every week. Okay, so I picked a random page. This is not a company I know. Probably anybody could quickly make recommendations to this page. We picked an easy one. I just searched for like supply chain consulting and went to page five in Google and found a page. Okay, I'm going to go to, I'm going to, let's assume that is the primary target key phrase for this URL.

17:24And I'm going to go to my prompt library. And I'm going to grab a prompt that will help me, through which AI will recommend adjacent key phrases. These are all SEO prompts. I'll read it out loud. You're a semantic SEO expert skilled at selecting key phrases that are semantically related to a primary target key phrase. Suggest 10 phrases that are adjacent to the following key phrase. I'm in chat GPT. I paste that in. I'm going to type in supply chain consulting.

17:58Okay. It's doing a little test here. It's going to give me two different responses. They're probably very similar. We'll just take the first one. It really makes no difference for this exercise. And here we have logistics. So phrases that are seemingly adjacent to supply chain consulting. Logistics optimization services. Inventory management strategies. Procurement process improvement. Supplier relationship management. Lean supply chain practices. I don't think I would have thought of hardly any of these. Granted, I'm not on the market. Now I'm going to add a second prompt. Add 10 more. This time with a bit more semantic distance between them.

18:34Spread out the meaning. The general idea here is that SEO is not about incorporating one primary target key phrase in the title header and body four times. SEO is about making the best page on the internet as evidenced by your inclusion of the related questions, the subtopics, all of the... We want to target the topic and not just the key phrase. That's one way to think about it. Target the topic and not just the key phrase. Okay, so it's got 20. Now we've got 20 phrases. Supply chain efficiency analysis, warehouse management consulting. Oh, those are the first ones. Circular economy, logistics, risk management and supply chains, enterprise resource planning integration.

19:13These are actually pretty broad. I'd almost rather have it narrow it down. But and I would keep having this conversation. It's called chat to put you because we're supposed to keep talking to it. This is not a single instruction, right? I'd say that. In fact, let's demonstrate that. Good, but a bit too broad. revise with slightly tighter targeting and less semantic distance between the phrases. Show the... That should be sufficient. Okay, so it's going to come back. That's just an idea. Hey, I read these and it sounded a bit like too spacious. I want to narrow my focus a little bit. Very good.

19:57It came back and it's not more specifically talking about logistics, supply chain, inventory management instead of that enterprise resource stuff. Very good. Okay. Now, the next prompt is the money prompt, I would say. Here's what it sounds like. Search-optimized pages are focused on a specific topic and keyphrase, but they also incorporate those closely related subtopics and simultaneously related keyphrases. You're an expert SEO copywriter, skilled at making copy edits that improve search rankings of web pages by incorporating key phrases and indicating relevance. I'm giving you a web page. Suggest 10 copy edits to 10 sentences on this page that would incorporate phrases from this list.

20:36Make suggestions that would improve the flow and clarity for the persona, because I want this to read well. I am not just looking for rankings. I want to convince a human that we're an incredible brand, so I care about the people who might read it, so I add that sentence. And then highlight the key phrases and the suggestions. That last bit is going to have it Usually it bolds the phrases that were incorporated. I'm going to give it that prompt, paste it in. And then I also have to give it the page. Isar, I could do that by sharing a link to the page. I could do that by saving the HTML and uploading it.

21:07I could do that by taking a full page screenshot. Which do you think would be, I've got perspectives, but I'd love your input on this. How do you give a web page to an AI? So it depends what I'm trying to do. If it's just what you're doing right now, I'll probably do the link because it's the fastest. If I'm trying to get also an analysis of the structure of the page or the visuals on the page and so on, I will either do the HTML or the screenshot. Both of them are very easy to do in any browser. You go to the settings on the side and you can either grab the HTML or you can grab, there's like a way to do a full screenshot of the page in there as well.

21:46or you get one of those third-party tools that run in the browser to do full-page screenshots. But if it's just to do what we're doing right now, I think the link would be good enough. I totally agree. Thank you for that. That's very validating to talk to an AI pro about that. The full-page screenshot, I love when you're doing conversion optimization because it sees little trust signals and badges. I use Go Full Page. There's two popular browsers for Chrome extensions for Chrome. Go Full Page and Awesome Screenshot. Yeah, I use Awesome Screenshot, but they do the same thing. They do the same thing.

22:18They're both free. So what this, but per your input, I gave it the link and that's perfectly sufficient because we're just doing copy edits. Yeah. Okay. If this was a baking show, we'd take this out of the oven. Let's see what we got. Our team's, this is the original text. Our team specializes in optimizing your supply chain for maximum efficiency. Perfectly good sentence. It's suggested revision. Our team specializes in supply chain efficiency analysis to maximize operational performance. See how it incorporated an additional semantic key phrase, supply chain efficiency analysis, and it bolded that text?

22:56Next one, we help businesses improve their logistics operations. It revised it to say, we provide logistics optimization services to enhance your transportation and distribution processes. That is actually a great way to incorporate a commercial intent key phrase, logistics optimization services. That's the services related key phrase. That's excellent SEO. Thinking of ways as a writer, we all do this, right? Think about a way to get that service, that commercial intent service related phrase into the copy. I'll read one more. The original sentence on that page written by a human was effective inventory control is crucial for business success.

23:35I agree. The revision it suggests is implementing robust inventory management strategies is crucial for business success. So it changed inventory control to inventory management strategies. You may know someone who's in the market and an expert in this topic and industry might dismiss that knowing that more people talk about inventory control. If so, don't make that change. But you may have good reasons to believe that inventory control might not attract as a very qualified visitor. Management strategies might align better with your target audiences, frame of mind. So every one of these is an idea.

24:18Feel free, I sometimes joke, AI might as well stand for another input because we should feel free to dismiss 80 % of what it gives you. But some of these might be very good. And everything here, as long as it doesn't ruin the flow and clarity for your human reader, would better indicate relevance in search. And that's our job, To make the best page on the topic, not just the key phrase, you target the topic by spreading out your meaning and incorporating these semantically related phrases. AI turns out to be a useful tool of both identifying those semantic key phrases and suggesting copy edits to incorporate them right away.

24:52No, that's amazing. I think the cool thing about this specific example is it shows that you don't need to be an AI expert. Or an SEO expert. Or an SEO expert. Or have any specialty tool like Ahrefs and all the other ones to do decent SEO work. And in a minute, like this didn't take very long at all. it's in a way what i sometimes think of when i'm using these prompts and trying these methods is that the prompt is it almost feels like software yeah this is doing what expensive software would have done if you'd told me two years ago or three years ago that you built a tool that does this i'd be very interested in that and if it was just 100 bucks a month hey that's actually pretty tempting but here it's like the prompt makes the ai into software the They jokingly sometimes say, maybe you've heard, English is the hot new programming language.