Can you automate an SEO agency with AI? How to build Claude skills and agent workflows for SEO

0:00Have you ever wondered how many SEO tasks you could be automating using AI? Or if you could automate an entire SEO agency using AI? I know I have. And those are the kind of questions I'm hoping to answer this week. And I'm joined by John Morabito, who will hopefully fill us in with a lot more information about automating SEO using AI.

0:20John Morabito: Wow, we can build a skill for everything. And we can just press a button and just train it on these deliverables. And we can crank these out really quickly. At first, I was like, all right, this is cool. and then I started seeing like substantial rankings and traffic and I actually started getting more leads than the website's ever gotten so there's a bunch of agents and they're all pulp picture characters and each of these agents has a job one of them's the CMO and the CMO basically looks at all of this stuff puts together a content plan and then passes it off to a writer agent that does all of the writing and then puts that through a passive humanization I grew up playing with model trains so I'm keeping the train on the track and I'm the observer in a lot of this stuff I don't say this because it's general AI wisdom that you should check everything.

1:01John Morabito: I say it because I've literally had stuff be like, oh my God, that's horrifically wrong. But realistically, to even know what you're talking about when you present something like a tech audit, you have to be hands-on with that. You have to spend time on the website. You have to sit there and watch Screaming Frog painfully crawl for hours. And you don't have to sit there and watch it like paint dry, but you have to suffer through some pain to really understand what's going on there.

1:27Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Search with Candor. I am Jack Chambers-Ward, I am your host as always, and this is the podcast where we talk all about AI search. I know we're into the season now, we're three episodes in, and we're talking all about AI search in various different forms. The first episode, if you haven't already checked it out, was with Charlie Whitworth talking about what traditional SEO tactics and strategies are still working for GEO and AI search optimization. The previous episode, episode two, was with Nathan Gotch, and we got into a lot of statistics about the growth of AI search and how the demand has shifted and the state of the industry at the moment as we head towards the end of 2026.

2:09And this week, I'm joined by John Morabito. I'm going to talk about a lot of automation that we can do in SEO using AI and things like Claude Skills and Gems and things like that. It's a really interesting conversation because John has been doing some experiments about basically running agency tasks and having different roles and different agents all working together and communicating with each other. It's a really interesting conversation. And I think even if you don't plan to fully automate your agency anytime soon, it's still full of really insightful, interesting topics and ideas that I really learned a lot from John in this episode.

2:45If you haven't already, please do like and subscribe. Like I said, this entire season for quite a few months now is going to be all about AI and AI search. So join me for the ride along in season five. If you want to learn how to use LLMs in your SEO workflows, how people are optimizing for AI search, what we need to worry about, what's changed, all that kind of stuff and the things we've been worrying about in the industry. This is the podcast for you, and there'll be new episodes out every single week that you can check out all about how to do AI stuff in SEO, how to optimize for AI search, and so many other topics as well.

3:24Without any further ado, here is my conversation with John Marambito about optimizing and automating SEO tasks using AI.

3:38My guest has worked in SEO for over 15 years. He's the creator of a talk track and the founder of Winston digital marketing, as well as the senior vice president of search innovation at stellar rising, which by the way, has won over 30 awards, including search engine lands awards, best SEO agency. Welcome to search with Canada, John Morabito.

3:57John Morabito: Thanks so much for having me, Jack. Pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for joining me, man. I know we were just having a very a fun conversation before we started recording, because you've got a pretty spicy topic, a pretty interesting topic for us to discuss. We are now in season five and we are talking all about AI search. We're talking all about how people are using AI and SEO. And I thought your email to me was particularly interesting because, as I said to you, for Total Transformation, I said to you before we started recording, I get a lot of pitches of here is how I've automated my entire SEO process and I don't need people to work with anymore.

4:33Yours was slightly different in that I know you've been working a lot with building Claude skills, but also keeping that expertise side of things and keeping it integrated. Obviously, you with so much experience yourself and working with the Stellar Rising team, and now what you're doing with Winston. Talk to me a little bit about that initial thought process to experiment with this stuff. think about how you could use cloud skills to automate SEO processes. Yeah.

5:00John Morabito: Um, I mean, so it's basically like, as soon as co-work came out, we started to recognize the power of, of what this could look like. And, um, honestly, at that point, most of the team was still using chat GBT. So before co-work came into the picture, we were, we were not really even using cloud. I mean, a little bit for some writing. And I think I've done a little bit of like data analysis and stuff like that with it. But we very quickly were like, wow, we can build a skill for everything. And we can just like press a button and like just train it on these deliverables. And we can crank these out really quickly.

5:36John Morabito: And I think it was not too long that, you know, we started to realize that that was it. That was easier said than done. And that there was some work to be done in order to make sure it really happened correctly. And in fact, that maybe not everything needed to be just a skill. Some things needed to be a plugin. Some things needed to be a workflow. Some things needed to be done by hand and then fed into AI. And then some things needed to, you know, happen the other way around where you use AI and then you do a lot of manual massaging. And so we started to then really approach it in a different way, which is, I think, you know, we'll talk more about today.

6:17yeah like i said i've heard a lot of people talk about how they're integrating into the process there's a lot of the conversations i'm having this season are about how we're all integrating various different llms into our processes have you found that kind of i guess the opportunity to experiment and and try different things how does that then influence you know you coming from 15 years of seo does that lead you in the direction to experiment a little bit more with the the smaller side of things like you know you i know a lot of people talk about for years like have your own website to experiment with right yeah absolutely the classic kind of thing yeah yeah

6:55John Morabito: for sure so i'm a big proponent of like practicing what we preach in terms of having your own properties and having hands-on with um trying stuff out i think one of the things that like my own Winston website. So my day job and 99 % of my focus is Stellar Rising, but on the side, I've had the opportunity to run, you know, like many of us in the SEO space had people come to you like, hey, can you help out? And it just sort of grew into something where eventually I had a handful of people helping me and that's then the last 10 years. So Winston's website itself is a place that I get to really try things out.

7:29John Morabito: And honestly, even Winston business is where I get to try things out and move. Stella enables me to move very quickly. So I'm not trying to say that we're not moving quickly at Stella, but I can sort of like fall forward faster, that old saying, right? And like, I am really the only one accountable for any mistakes or whatever. And so I get to just kind of throw things into the mix that I've tried out, see how clients react to them and see how Google reacts to them. So I think one of the things that I've been playing with a lot lately is just my own website sort of loop. And so it was, I don't know, three months ago that, I think it was April.

8:08John Morabito: It was in April, somebody who I work with, like one of my freelance clients. And this is, again, one of these benefits of working with freelance clients is because I don't think I ever would have started thinking like this if I hadn't spoken to this developer. And in the enterprise space, I can almost guarantee I would never speak to a developer who had this mindset where she was like, you know, for a lot of my smaller business clients, like we're not even using like servers or CMS systems or anything like that. Like I'm just like building them websites and then deploying it directly to Cloudflare and like having workers handle all of the storage and everything like that.

8:44John Morabito: And just it's like virtually cheap for some of these folks. And I was like, hmm. And so it was at that point that I moved my Winston site off of WordPress, um completely did like a rebrand of the website using cloud design etc um and then actually started basically i i built like like honestly i i like pause and sort of like cringe myself here like i built an agentic workflow um that that automates the creation first of blogs like i picked like kind of like the dumbest thing if i'm being totally honest is like i should just make a bunch of blogs and I'll get to like where I had it start making and doing other cool stuff in a minute.

9:28John Morabito: But basically the first thought and the experimentation with Winston was like, let me create a blog loop that listens to my Winston calls, my conversations with my team members. I use sometimes my looms of like what I'm giving people feedback on and how I think about like reviewing a particular deliverable. Or sometimes I'll just have a general idea on something like talking to clients about attribution and how so much more of their organic traffic is now being bucketed as AI assistant and or direct traffic. And measurement's difficult these days, right? And so I was able to just have a quick conversation with Claude and then throw up a blog based on that.

10:11John Morabito: So the loop basically looks at all of my calls, generates briefs. When we were talking off before we recorded, you mentioned the sort of Pulp Fiction reference. So there's a bunch of agents and they're all Pulp Fiction characters. Each of these agents has a job. One of them is the CMO. And the CMO basically looks at all of this stuff, puts together a content plan, and then passes it off to a writer agent that does all of the writing. And then puts that through a passive humanization. there's also a skill that looks at it's basically been trained on all of my call transcripts ever and so i've been recording calls for the last like four years and so it's called write like john and so then it helps it to write like john um and my my sort of little cool and stuff like that um and then i'll just automatically publish it to the website and so at first i was like all right this is kind of cool um and then i started seeing like substantial rankings in traffic and I actually started getting more leads than the website's ever gotten.

11:13John Morabito: So I've like started getting more leads from dispensaries and started getting, um, you know, leads from other law firms and stuff like that. Um, and traffic right now is up like 500 % year over year on the site. And, and even withstanding like all of these, uh, like a couple core updates or at least one core update to spam updates. Um, and it, it just keeps getting better. And I think the reason here is the context as opposed to like, like it literally is scaled content, but I don't know if it's abuse because, because it's good context. Right. So that's one place that I'm doing some kind of like weird experiments and things like this sort of like letting it fly and see what it does.

11:57John Morabito: But broadly, that's, you know, not where it's at for clients and serious businesses that have real consequences attached to them. yeah i think that's a a big part of the industry discussion right and i appreciate your transparency you know you publish so much of the the playbooks you have on the winston site right like how this stuff is actually working and how it's doing and i think for me i think that was the big kind of differentiator when we started having this conversation is some of it works some of it doesn't and you're not kind of like trying to oversell the capabilities of a lot of this stuff to think is something a lot of people are very guilty of in this industry.

12:36Unfortunately, this industry is full of people who are, you know, snake oil salesmen and all that kind of stuff, right? Trying to make a quick buck and, you know, screw over a client here or there. We have been on the recovery end of quite a few other things. I'm sure you have as well. Any good agency has been on the end of, oh yeah, we had a bad experience with the previous agency kind of thing. Yeah.

12:55John Morabito: Others bad business is good business for us, for sure. Exactly. Exactly. They keep us in business in a way. um and and for me i think that's that interesting kind of approach you said there of like start with a blog post and see how it goes what have been those kind of i guess the most surprising things for you in terms of that workflow did you naturally sort of progress through you know starting with content and then think about more technical stuff or what was the kind of thought process going through yeah things you should be automating what things you've tested that kind of thing for sure so i mean you know in the case of the winston site it which again is really just an experiment there there i sort of forgot to mention it but there was like a writer agent that was sort of like the content strategist but then there was also a technical seo agent and then another agent that was supposed to be building like service pages and so if you look on the site there's like an incredible number of service pages as we all know these work very well from an seo perspective um and then also looking at some of like because we do a bit of dispensary marketing That's it.

13:58John Morabito: Like, I'm not advocating for doorway pages, but this is maybe a good place to talk about that, right? Like, people search state-specific queries as it relates to cannabis marketing because there are specific legislators. So they're not like, I need a dispensary agency nationally. They're looking for someone that has expertise in their state with the laws. And so we were building out, you know, it's building out pages specific to different areas that we focus on in states that we've actually serviced clients and have experience around. um you know i think the thing where and this is all within the past few weeks so i can't really speak to how much it's changed things but it's fascinating because what i said to my my wife is the source of many of my good ideas um so they're really her right right yeah notice how i said that too she's the source of my good ideas no but it was really it was really she i i was explaining this to her um i was like hey look the website's up and i'm like i'm doing this cool loop thing right and it's almost like getting to eat my own dog food in a sense where she was like well is it making you any money I'm like well there's been some more leads um but like realistically like no right um and so then I kind of like this is where you know I guess like this sort of like experimentation gets interesting as I was like all right Claude I want you like these blogs are cool but we need to make some money and so like what are some things that you can do to make me money i want you to make me a hundred thousand dollars in the next three months well i mean i know that sounds insane but like we're out here you know like we're doing we're doing it's not beyond the pale so i was like all right claude like go go go get that um and so to be entirely transparent which i don't know if your audience or you're gonna hate this but it's like It then started reaching out to podcasts and getting me on podcasts.

15:52John Morabito: Yeah, right. But here's the thing. We've only sent like under 100 emails. So like, and I've also booked two discovery calls as a result of it. So it's doing half discovery, like reaching out for clients. Hey, these are the issues with your website. This is what we're seeing. The site built its own audit system. So you can like put in your URL and run a little GEO audit with data for SEO and some stuff on the backend and stuff like that. So it shifted its focus to more of the traditional agency play. So it's like, let's go out and do thought leadership from a podcast perspective. Let's go do outreach.

16:25John Morabito: And then it also started building info products. And so instead of just talking about the skills, it now has a whole products section where you can go and actually buy skill packs. And then I had it basically automate all of that, like going into Lemon Squeezy, setting up the products, doing everything. So I'm just really, I grew up playing with model trains. So I'm just sort of, I'm keeping the train on the track and I'm the observer in a lot of this stuff. And I can't say that it's made me a bunch more money yet, but I can say that in terms of experiences that have historically mapped back to money, i.e.

16:58John Morabito: podcasts and getting discovery calls with clients that seem like they're really interested in what we're doing, it's been able to go up and do that. So there is hope that some of these automated workflows can bring real things. But realistically, coming back to where we go out and we make money for clients, I think there really does need to be a lot more human in the loop. Because if everything for Winston came crashing down tomorrow, we'd still have a business. Because realistically, as most SEO agencies know, the website isn't the thing that brings us to business. It's candy, and clients look at it.

17:36John Morabito: Every now and then, you can be like, look, I rank for this thing. And clients are like, wow, cool. You know what you're doing. But I think most of the time, the inbound leads are not the best. And sometimes, you know, honestly, like Stella gets a lot of great inbound leads. So I shouldn't, I shouldn't like tempt the gods there because we've done a really good job of getting out there. But like for an SMB agency like Winston, like we're mostly word of mouth. We do a bit of outreach, yada, yada, yada. So, you know, that's been more of an experimentation. But what I've really come to learn again is it's not even like, this is one of these, like, I think I saw this at some like AI transformation conference, but it's not even human in the loop.

18:17John Morabito: It's human at the center. But it is realistically, like it's, you know, I think the human in the loop sort of phrasing gives you this picture of your like, like human in the loop is like what I'm doing at Winston. I'm sitting there and I'm like, oh yeah, do this. Oh yeah, do that, do that, do that. Right. I'm just nudging it, but it takes more oomph than that to do meaningful marketing work. So at Stella, we've been looking at these types of automations and really starting with the process at the beginning. Number one, keyword research. And that's a place where with the right inputs, with the right training, we were able to get to something that was generating our keyword research approach with 80 % to 90 % sort of like done accuracy, maybe need to spend a few minutes tweaking it.

19:08John Morabito: The process that used to take us eight hours now takes us two max. And so we can, you know, we can go and we can apply that thinking and we can apply that time somewhere else. You know, what we're not doing is just sort of like pocketing the difference. Ultimately, the clients are still getting more value and more work. But that is an example where it was really quick and easy. Monthly reporting we've been working on for a year. And so that's not a place that it's really easy to just press a button, automate a report. Monthly reporting is supposed to bring you the why behind the numbers. It's supposed to be a data narrative.

19:47John Morabito: It's supposed to unpack what's happening here and what we can do about it. And so I think these are great opposite end of the spectrum examples of something that I was able to take our SOP documentation. This is a quick framework for how you should think about this, right? Take SOP documentation, take gold standard examples of things that I really liked and places that it really worked well. We had literal training videos and step-by-step training guides that were designed for humans that we then provided to AI. And then we had to have the right connectors in place. but realistically that also I think complicates things.

20:25John Morabito: So the first iteration of the skill and I think even the skill today relies on you still going and doing the exports. So you have to go and export all your competitor age for SEMrush and all the keywords that they rank for and you'll get your first party data and you'll crank that in there. And then it really just does kind of the tedious work of putting it together in these categories and stuff that AI is really, really good at especially when you give it sort of a finite set of keywords to look at. If you were to just be like, hey, build me a keyword research for this client, it's going to be garbage.

20:59John Morabito: So basically having a process that we felt really good about and then not just handing off the thinking to AI, but having AI do the steps for us is how I think that one became successful. Yeah. yeah i think that's a particular point where you know like you said the the human at the center kind of phrase there that is key to i think to a lot of the processes we have when it comes to integrating more tools whether it's ai powered or not the tool is not going to do the work for you as you said with reporting being a perfect example of like the conversation we have so many times is you actually pulling the thing from search console or whatever and putting it into data studio is you know 20 of the job whatever it is but the actual insights of like what has changed why is it changing what does this mean for the industry what does it mean for us all that kind of thing is so driven by the hopefully by the brain of the person leading that account right in terms of in terms of working in an agency.

22:02For me, I think that's a lot of where the, kind of the, I guess, understanding the limits of where a lot of the AI tool stuff comes from. Where do you find sort of the most, I guess the most useful applications the most times? And you mentioned keyword research there, I think is a big one a lot of us have been talking about. Have you found, you know, sort of, you know, working with a smaller team, you were able to get more people to do more work in a small amount of time in terms of, you know, audits, crawls, keyword research, competitor research, all that kind of stuff. Or is it still kind of, you know, I'm not saying bottlenecked, but you still have to have that human at the end of the process.

22:45When it comes to auditing, how much does that kind of like speed

22:47John Morabito: up that process yeah um i mean i think in terms of so so in this you know a smaller team for context the winston you know team is like i think like five people right now um so it's a much much smaller team um and and really most of them are are not even full-time so it's it's a very small nimble team now in that particular context we have standards of practice deliverables but i think like something that I've done in Winston that I would almost never do at Stella is kind of, I wouldn't say abandon the idea of every EAT audit or every onsite competitive analysis, you know, has to look the same.

23:28John Morabito: It's now more about kind of like a lot of the team are becoming sort of very comfortable in using cloud. So in the absence of a skill, they're essentially like coming at it from almost a new way each time, which then enables them to sometimes hit stuff that maybe the template wouldn't hit. And so if you're giving co-work, I mean, I want to be pretty specific here because this wouldn't happen in chat. You could definitely do this stuff in quad code, but specifically we're using a lot of co-work. So if you're giving co-work, here's an example of a historical deliverable that we've done for on-site competitive analysis.

24:09John Morabito: It looks at page templates. It looks at the elements on these templates. And it gives recommendations about how your site might be missing these things. So like you don't have FAQ blocks. You don't have a how to use it on your PDP for beauty. And it's going to see everyone else in the beauty category has these things and you don't. This is not the type of thing we need to click around three websites for. Like this is absolutely the type of thing that AI can get pretty good at. um and and i also would you know i i think it it there's a lot of reasons for sort of rigidity of your standard of practice but in winston like if my team shows me an on-site competitive analysis that looks nothing like our template but hits these same principles and is generated rapidly but then they spend their time actually going into the website and making these changes with the client, then that's kind of like a win for everyone.

25:01John Morabito: Because like, we don't really like, sometimes standard practice deliverables getting a boring because it's like this passage taught us nothing. But we hit it because it's in the SOP. Right. And it's like, and my boss would tell me I missed nine slides in the SOP if I didn't do these, even though there's nothing to learn. And like, this is like part of the problem of standard practice, like kind of like waves of working in agency life. And we can tell our team all we want, you know, well, if there's nothing there cut the slide whatever you're still going to get slides that are like um so cloud won't really generally do that and so it just kind of like give you the impactful stuff if it has this general guideline um so that's one of the places that you know i think we're seeing much more and also myself so my team's doing it at winston but then when like one of the things that's happened at Winston is like, because of the ability to do stuff more rapidly, you know, in my free time, which I don't have a lot of, I can crank out a tremendous amount of work for client partners that then I'm the one personally vetting and can feel really good about.

26:06John Morabito: So again, coming back to this idea of like, I don't necessarily need a particular existing groove, I just need like a business challenge, a general gist of where I want to go in the right context. And then I need arguably the 15 years of experience to know what good is, right? The taste. And then I can get really far leaning on my AI a fair bit. You know, there's still, and we can get into like, you know, how I prevent it from doing like Claude-isms, right? Like there's a really cool, I posted about it recently on LinkedIn. So if you go to my LinkedIn, you'll see, like, if you want Claude to stop sounding like Claude, do this.

26:49John Morabito: i've been so working that thing like meaning like i use it in everything i do now i lean on it a lot it's a humanizer approach that takes this big study like the first like big academic study of ai writing and the shape of ai writing and people have probably seen this graph or something like that on on reels if your reels or your instagram is infiltrated by marketing stuff like mine um i kept seeing it and so i went i grabbed that and that really that really helped um a lot too yeah let's get let's get into that man i think that's an interesting part of like like you said not making everything sound the same the classic claudism the chatty beauty isms whatever you want to call it like yeah how do you have that i guess i guess that like you said that method you've got but also to communicate that to clients of like this isn't just a clawed thing that you're going to see if you ran the same thing yourself if that makes sense yeah Yeah.

27:45John Morabito: I mean, I think so. First off, it is like literally having some type of skill or guardrail that does a check before something goes out. So the humanizer skill that I mentioned is like basically it's a skill and then also a quad instruction that tells your quad to then run that every time it puts out something. But realistically, this is I think I come back to the human piece, which is like this is where we come in. And this is where every deliverable that you put out really should have some time where you're going through it and you're like, you know, making the it's not this, it's that type things a little bit more of like an actual sentence.

28:25John Morabito: Because what I've found is like you can beat a lot of that out of it, but ultimately you're still going to want to go in and give it some of your voice. Now, in terms of your voice, you know, as I mentioned before, I think, right, like I have a skill that is trained on my voice. And so that's something that you can do, too. and and if you have you know let's say like a fathom or fathom is great it's it's free you can get a lot of value out of it um i now use fixer we use fathom here again yeah so i use fathom people are like why do you have two note takers and so i have fathom and i have fixer so fathom is connected fixer just released an mcp so we'll see how fathom sticks around for me but i use fixer because it also sorts and categorizes my emails that's another sort of like if you're someone like me that gets literally hundreds of emails per day, having them automatically sorted by like to respond and FYI, it's, it's amazing.

29:17John Morabito: So Victor is, you know, I know it's supposed to give a tip at the end. So I'm dropping some, some tool recommendations out here too, right? We'll build up to the big one at the end. So, um, yeah, so basically taking all of your call recordings and then creating a skill that looks at how you talk is I think one of the best ways how you write to, you know, looking at all your emails. These can be ways that I would then apply that to your deliverable. So you could have a guardrail skill that then runs at the end of every deliverable and take some of your thinking and applying it. And that's, that's also one of the ways that we've started to, and this is again, a newer thing, but take some of like finding myself giving the same feedback in certain places.

29:57John Morabito: I've actually started to put that into what I'm calling like the guard rail delivery guardrail skill that is sort of a summation of all of my feedback across my team which is like all of my looms and all of my emails back to folks that kind of like you know those things as a leader that you tend to like okay we should try to like give the why behind this metric and we should never just you know show that traffic's down we should try to explain why traffic's down are these things that are like core to the way that we work right like you don't have to keep repeating those things and also you don't have to keep repeating them to claude and claude You don't really want to rely on Claude's memory that you told it not to do that in some other chat three months ago.

30:35John Morabito: So, you know, having these skills that basically summarize everything that you kind of tend to want to give it and then running that in collaboration with a humanizer skill, your sort of guardrail skill that looks for the types of things that you don't want to see. Don't put charts this way, put them this way or don't put this type of chart for this, do this type of chart for that. and then from there you start to go from something that is very general and now has a really strategic layer of like you put into it which is like what we're trying to do and then still I would advocate that when it comes out the other side you still need to put you into it by manually looking at it by massaging it by by feeling good about every slide that's in that depth or that presentation um and look i'll be honest too like i like i can say that you want to do that because i'll be the honest one that says like i've definitely thrown a slide up in front of a prospective client or maybe even an active client what the hell is this thing like oh no and so like it happens if you're moving too quick sometimes and you don't catch everything and so it's i don't say this because it's like general ai wisdom that you should check everything like i say it because i've literally had stuff be like oh my god that's horistically wrong um so you want to build these things in and sort of beat it out of class yeah i think that's a really good point and i want to pull on something you mentioned earlier as well like the the nature of working with something like the cannabis industry with dispensaries and stuff like that you mentioned like state specific regulations and things like that and obviously a little bit different here in the uk i know it is a much wider problem for you guys in the us i know you being in new york john like that will change you move a few miles west and suddenly it's completely different rules like completely different regulations and i know we had this conversation a little while ago when uh app for our tool also asked we talked about we got some inquiries of like how do i make a general us inquiry and Mark literally does the support chats as well.

32:41Yes. We literally have a founder do our support chats was like, there's no such thing as somebody searching from the U S like you are, you are somewhere, whether you like it or not, you are somewhere and search is personalized to you where you are. And so many people were asked that, Oh, I don't want it to be from New York. I don't want it to be from Manhattan, Brooklyn, whatever. Like tough. You are there and that's where you're searching. so i guess my thinking and pulling on that thread you mentioned for the the more of the kind of low i guess the local stuff for the dispensaries how do you make sure those kind of things are i said those guardrails right from a legal perspective from a regulatory perspective all that kind of stuff i know i have had those conversations with clients for like okay this industry have these specific regulations and to understand that do you have those kind of conversations with clients where you're thinking of you know do you have internal documents i can process and understand do you have you know how transparent do they have to be with you to get the best out of it and those kind of conversations does that make sense yeah absolutely um and this

33:48John Morabito: is another place that i would i would reach for a skill so they actually started um so i'm thinking of one of our we have we have a big mso um so that's a multi-state um dispensary and they operate Ohio is one of their states, and Ohio is really strict. There are other states you can basically say most things, and so we don't have to get too careful about it. But Ohio is like pharma-level regulation. And so they built a custom GPT that was trained on a lot. So they kind of started it off. So I'll give credit where credit's due. But essentially, we've then onboarded the brains of that custom GPT, all the knowledge that it had, into a skill that's part of a content pipeline that we actually built up for that particular client.

34:35John Morabito: You know, the content pipelines as an aside are something that I think is another great use case where anyone can just like plug in, you can write me an article about this, but then having like a really cool like sequence of things that happens is interesting. But I would say that, yeah, so like that regulatory piece is an important one. And we build that into essentially the client specific writer. so for each client we have a writer streamed on their brand voice and then any sort of like specific brand guidelines and then that would fall under one of those like sort of like basically like context files that's in the skill um that would speak to any particular state regulation or anything like that yeah i think that totally makes sense and i think like i said i think you've run into a lot of that stuff where you know the transparency between you and the client, obviously that rapport, that communication is such a key part of that relationship.

35:30Have you had any issues even sort of discussing this kind of topic with a client, you know, compared to the kind of conversation you would have at Stella versus Winston or, you know, from previous experience, do, has a client ever come back and been like, right, but I could just run the AI myself, right? Why? Oh God. Yeah. No, that's exactly. need you in that process why should i pay agency rates if i can just run an ai myself kind of thing

35:53John Morabito: yeah for sure i mean so so at stella what i would say we're encountering is more nuanced because i think a lot of people that we encounter thank god get it and they're not sort of like trying to push content as like a, as a service, like down, you know, like in terms of the, the pricing. Um, but we have encountered that in certain pockets and, and it's interesting because incidentally the same places we're encountering some of those, uh, economic pressures, shall we say predicated by exactly what you're saying, which is like, well, we can just press a button. Why are we going to pay you a lot of money to do this?

36:38John Morabito: We can press a button. are the same folks that are asking, well, do we have to be worried about scaling content very quickly on our site? Does Google have any beef with that? Yeah. Especially this stuff, especially when we're trying to push the price of the content down to the floor and we're forsaking the strategic piece. And so that is a place that we've had to have some pretty open and frank conversations about what Google expects out of content and what it means to realistically inject AI content with subject matter expertise and information. Like we can't, with AI answering every basic question out there, the only currency we have left to sort of trade on is like net new information.

37:22John Morabito: And like the AI can't give you that. It can help you construct that. It can help you call that. It can help you write that in beautiful ways. But like you need to give that to the AI to then generate something that's meaningful. And that's why I think the Winston stuff's working. so those have been the stella conversations in in in winston it's more exactly that like hey we've you know we could just like i've literally had a client say exactly that where um i kid you not we charge 150 per article so he was like i don't want to pay this 150 per article that i could just press the button myself um traffic's after fearing for him by the way um but you know um and so like honestly for him i'm still working on him um and and i have but i have i think i have an answer because what would have built actually um i'll kind of describe it i just i just sort of built it briefly we built a content pipeline and this content pipeline i know it sounds cringy i'll call it cringy there too but it essentially it's it starts off with a brief and the brief does market news content harmony right like sort of like that same sort of deal go out analyze the top 20 search results extract entities what are the most common does a little what a year tool does people also ask right like sort of the whole the whole kit and caboodle there in a brief takes that brief passes it off to a draft then there's a step that does all the internal linking so it's trained on everything that's on the website and what we're trying to link to from a product perspective and that's a distinct step we're in this content tool we actually have like a dashboard where you can see the piece moving through each step and you can see the results of that there's a brand voice step there's a humanizer step and there's a geocorecard where what we did was we basically um ceo just call it teo because everyone wants to hear geo um clients geo teo teo we sell geo by the geo um so so it basically looks at google helpful quality reader like quality readers guidelines google helpful content update information and the feedback that they gave us and the direction that they gave us.

39:32John Morabito: It looks at the leaks, debate me on whether or not you think that's valuable. I think it's cool. And then also looks at the chat to BT leak that was recently published by MetaHan, who's like the homie as it relates to the GEO stuff and does this scoring system of like what it basically like a probability that this is going to go out and rank. And if it doesn't meet a certain score, it kicks it back to the writer and just keeps writing it until it meets a high enough scoring that it's going to sort of like predictably go out and rank. I also then train that on a bunch of revision loops or sort of like as well as taking a look at like what ranks for about 500 queries, which is a ridiculously small pool.

40:14John Morabito: I want to go build something that looks at like a million queries, but like looked at like 500 queries, what ranks in the top, what are the sort of notable features of these types of articles, looked at another set of queries that rank, but like 90 through a hundred, what are the features here? Like, what does relevance look like? And then ultimately puts out the final article. And so I can bring that and be like, you can push a button, but you can't do that, bro. Like, don't tell me that you can do that. Like you don't even know half the stuff I just said. So like that, that's what, that's what I think we can continue to sell, right?

40:50John Morabito: Like we have to, And whether or not you agree or think my approach or strategy is cool or whatever, you can't just be like, we do it better, right? Like you have to have some sort of like sequence of events and a reason that you're doing things. I would argue what's missing from my pipeline and probably the most important piece would be like subject matter expertise. Like, can we get on the phone with your team? So another tool that I have not used it yet because I've just been doing it manually, but I think it's totally rad. It's called interview Bob or interview droid. I think it's interview droid.

41:27John Morabito: But the idea is that it, you can set up like an agentic interview for your subject matter experts and it will call them and ask them questions. And then you can use those recordings to enrich your article. This idea of interviewing your subject matter experts for each article, if you could find the time to do it, every article would rank amazingly. um i'm serious like a 30 minute interview right um if we were to take this conversation and to turn it into how to automate your agency and put it on a blog i better do okay um because it's the it's the actual expertise in there so i would say that might you know i can go back to him if this is a pretty cool pipeline it's easier i'm sorry it's better than you pushing the easy button um here's how we could make it even better does that kind of answer your question yeah yeah i I think you nailed it right at the end there.

42:15I think there's that kind of,

42:20there's no way you could be doing that. Like, I think a lot of people feel like it is the, oh, I just press a button and it kind of works kind of thing. But for me, that is really where a lot of that expertise comes from. We talk about it so much in our digital PRT and we talk about it so much, you know, when it comes to content and things like that, why I do this podcast is talking to experts. And obviously I'm gaining knowledge, but we're sharing knowledge with the listeners and the viewers and all that kind of stuff as well and i think for me that is where a lot of the as much as google's talked about the non-commodity commodity content stuff right they talked about ea t the frameworks you mentioned earlier john like those bringing first-hand experience real world expertise all that kind of stuff everything we've been talking about for the last 40 minutes is also relevant from the client side of things as well.

43:08Yeah. So understanding where you can pull that in and

43:13John Morabito: yeah. Yeah. I think that that's a, that's a big conversation, you know, we're having with what to do with these kinds of podcast conversations, turning them into, like you said, to blog posts and things like that. And having that kind of, it's almost guest posting in a way kind of of like, Hey, we've got John from Winston and he's talking about this thing kind of will we'll link back to you all this kind of stuff right but it feels genuine it feels you know we're not you know there's no bs here in the same way that your approach to the claude skill thing is like i'm being honest here here's how we do it if you want to go and do it yourself be my guest but i've kind of already done it for you so why would you why would you take the time right yeah yeah yeah well i mean i think you know i said like that because i think even if i had all of like if i had i don't have a perfect process workflow or skill for everything we do yet so again i'm not trying to front we just have a handful of them i actually pulled some stats at least in terms i don't i like i've built 140 distinct skills or a template um and realistically only about 30 of them are actually like in regular use, according to my cloud.

44:29John Morabito: And so like, again, you know, like there's, there's, there's a lot of, you have to try a lot. This isn't something where we're going to just get it on the first go. And I think the reason I pause is because even if I could pass off all 30 that work perfectly to the entire FCO community, I think what makes them good is the custom context of my team, my agency, my client, my business, my people. And that's what I would encourage everyone to think about how they bring it, right? Like you don't, you're not gonna, um, some dude on LinkedIn who's like comment skill, right. Is not going to revolutionize your agency.

45:04John Morabito: Um, is, is tempting as it sounds. And I've fallen forward to wonder what's in there. Maybe it can save me a lot of time, right? Like you can, I promise you listeners, you can build a better skill and a better plugin and a better system. You know, when I guess one sort of like big discovery that we had, if you will, and I'll credit Chris Gayless, our director with this one at Stillarizing. And he's like, you know, what I'm seeing and what I'm thinking is that we're not really aiming to build skills here. We're aiming to build workflows that are powered by skills. And so, again, if you're thinking that like a singular skill can generally replace something as complex as a technical SEO audit, not really what we've seen.

45:46John Morabito: It's more that you can assemble maybe your findings, or maybe you can put together the executive summary, and there's a skill for that, and there's a skill for this, or there's a skill for that. But realistically, to even know what you're talking about when you present something like a tech audit, you have to be hands-on with that. You have to spend time on the website. You have to sit there and watch Screaming Frog Paintsley crawl for hours. You don't have to sit there and watch it like Paint Tribe, but you have to you know, suffer through some pain to really understand what's going on there.

46:16John Morabito: So yeah, it's really about the custom piece. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, let's get into and wrap things up with some recommendations. Sorry, John. And I know you've hinted at a couple of examples of tools you've been using, but we'll get into the actionable tip first of all. So if there is something, just one thing, I know you've got 270 plus examples of things for people to go and do, what is one thing you think people should start doing today um i think if you're not already connect like for me it was a little nerve-wracking to start really maybe not nerve-wracking but i was like do i really want to connect claude to like my email do i really want to like give it that level of context and i think for me connecting my email my call recordings my asana just like literally having Claude at the center of everything that I do from a connectivity standpoint powers the tool to then have greater context that makes it more valuable.

47:21John Morabito: And so I think, you know, I guess from like a more like a tactical perspective, right? It's really look at like your setup and how, you know, what MCPs you're connecting and, you know, Search high and wide for MCPs that give you the data, like Appify, the support of a tool, but also Appify and Data for SEO and even OpenSEO to an extent are all great and cheap ways to make your Cod better at doing this type of stuff. So definitely don't rely on Cod's native capability to crawl a website or give you keyword volume. We're assuming the audience knows basic stuff like that. But yeah, you need to think about your setup and I would say be a little bit bold and maybe just trusting that they have security and connecting a bunch of stuff and see how it goes.

48:14John Morabito: Yeah, security is not my bag.

48:20We'll avoid some security recommendations. Let's move on to tools and software. Something that you think deserves a little bit of shout. You mentioned a couple of AI note takers and a couple of other bits and pieces. What else is in your daily workflow that you'd recommend that you don't think people know about?

48:34John Morabito: Yeah. So I'll give a shout out to SEO Get. It's basically like an API. They basically pull in the Google Search Console API. It's a dashboard. You can see all of your clients in one easy place. I didn't even realize this until recently, but if you're an agency like us that has multiple client GSC profiles, you can connect them all. So you can have this wonderful whistic dashboard that you can see all of your clients. It's pretty amazing. and for me there's probably 50 million ways you can connect your google search console data via mcp but this one provide proves to be very easy um and so it's like how i'm getting google search console data into my cloud um it's like 29 bucks a month and it's like flat rate and so it's like you can just have like a bajillion clients in there you can add a bajillion people it's ridiculously cost-effective it's got these really cool sort of um like topical clusters and keyword clusters so you can cluster pages and and look at like trends across those so it's um like most people who are doing a lot of cloud stuff i could build that in cloud attendance cool go do that whatever i pay 29 bucks a month and um you know it's like so it's it's just a really cool like ui for engaging with um search console data i'd say the one last thing that i think it does that i've not really come across elsewhere is you can pay them a little extra.

49:56John Morabito: You can log more than 16 months of data so they'll handle all that stuff. Again, if you're not super technical and you don't want to deal with setting up a Google Cloud instance and BigQuery and everything like that, you can just pay these guys and they'll log your search funds for data in perpetuity. And then the other piece is they also are pulling in the page reports via API. So if you have 100 ,000 pages crawled but not indexed and you want to know literally every single page there because you want to like go build a sitemap or something like that it will over time hit a thousand pages per day and then build an index of all of the pages across your website and their indexing status and then you can actually get the full download not limited by that thousand row limit in gsc but basically it gets you over row limits um they're very cool for 29 bucks that is a delight yeah you're not the first person to mention this here again so shout out to matt and the team i know they do some great work there uh we know those guys and like yeah the getting past the thousand road limit is such a big deal and then data warehousing like you said also such a big deal makes such a big difference absolutely last but not least john what have you been enjoying recently not seo related not work related what have you been enjoying that you'd recommend for other people to check out so all this on i think i'm beginning to finally achieve a goal at the beginning of all this automation stuff i was like you know i'm not really that technical i just want to go play more guitar like i'm trying so that i can just like chill and play guitar and that's what i've been doing i've been um not not that much but um but yeah i've picked up playing guitar again a little bit um and so that's what i've done every time excellent but of course the ai crept in there and i was like I played with you know and I was like oh wow and like it's like such garbage um and so it's it's really it's interesting as a musician having this experience of like I think I feel I have no qualms about AI content as you've heard and I I just couldn't get with like what writers were feeling but as a musician I'm like oh this is the devil this is evil yeah so bad there's no soul in this but it's pretty cool how I can go from little idea to fully fleshed song in like two minutes.

52:10John Morabito: And so I've been playing with that a little bit. So not work related, but I guess kind of, but more, more, I like, I like learning old songs and stuff. That's what I do. Nice. But just to wrap up, what kind of genres? I'm a bass player myself. So I, Oh yeah. So like, I just learned how to play a home stars. Like I like, I like just a lot of like early nineties, indie grunge, that type of stuff. That's why like Nirvana, and I play some Foo Fighters songs. Nice. A lot of like really cliche stuff for people that learn guitar as an example. And then I also, I'm really into like, which you guys have it made in the UK.

52:47John Morabito: I'm really into like dub reggae. And so. Oh yeah. My dad is a huge dub reggae guy. Yeah. I grew up on a lot of dub stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So I like, I sort of set this goal that I wanted to learn how to play. I've always played rhythm guitar and just been like the guy. I used to play in bands and the perennials and weekend dads if you want to go look them up. And so like I used to just like play rhythm guitar and jump around the stage and stuff like that. And I never really learned how to play lead. And so in my late 30s, I'm like, you know, I'd like to like actually like go back to learning more about scales and like actually playing some lead stuff.

53:20John Morabito: And so like playing lead over dub is really fun. It's very slow and easy. And you have the safety net of all the delay and reverb to make it sound cool pretty much no matter what you do. So been having fun with that. Great shout, mate. Great shout. Thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure to pick your brains about Claude Skills and all other kinds of fun stuff. Really appreciate you coming on, John. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Where can people find you? Where can people follow you? Where are the best places to keep up with what you're doing? So you can find me on Twitter, John Morbito SEO.

53:55John Morabito: Also on LinkedIn, I post some stuff there. And if you're looking for, I posted recently a skill sort of like reference to a Claude thing, to a Claude skill that you can run this prompt and will automatically install the skill that helps humanize your content. So maybe go grab that. But if you're looking to maybe work with, you know, Stella, reach out, Stella Rising website and same thing with Winston. Amazing. Thank you so much, man. I'll put links for everything in the show notes. Folks, go and check out John, what the guys are doing at Stella Rising and Winston. And thank you again, John. Been a pleasure.

54:26Thank you so much.

54:31and that wraps up this episode i hope you enjoyed my conversation with john as much as i did please do go and check out what he's doing with winston and all the cool interesting experiments next week i'll be joined by andre pt and we're talking how to debunk some ai search myth there's plenty of misinformation going around as i'm sure you've probably encountered on social media and YouTube and all the other places and Andre brings some really interesting topics for us to discuss and debunk some really common misconceptions and myths around AI search. The following week after that I'll be joined by Chris Walsh and we'll be talking all about how AI and agents are shaping e-commerce.

55:12They did a really interesting study over at IDHL where Chris works and it's a really interesting topic about how demand has shifted, how people are searching has changed and what it means for us as SEOs, especially if you're working in e-commerce, I highly recommend you check out that episode as well. Thank you so much for watching and listening all the way to the end of the episode. I really, really appreciate you guys who stay all the way until the end. And like I said, I'll see you next week when I'm joined by Andre Petey and in two weeks when I'm joined by Chris Walsh. Thank you very much and I'll see you then.