1945 – Leveraging AI for Content Creation and Off-Site SEO with Rank Harvest Digital Marketing’s Michael Chagala

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1:05With us right now, Michael Shagela. Michael, you are the founder and CEO of Rank Harvest Digital Marketing. Your website is rankharvest.com. Michael, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Well, listen, I'm grateful you are here because I don't think I've had an SEO expert in a little bit. And I have been seeing a lot of evolution taking place in search world, thanks to two letters, AI. So I'm sure we'll be talking about that. But Michael, if you could maybe just give us an overview of the work that you do with Rank Harvest. Well, at Rank Harvest, we specialize really in just two things, paid ads and SEO, ways to drive traffic to people's websites.

1:50Those are our main two things we do here. And so in that world, for folks that maybe have not been obsessing over that world, say over the past year or so, can you kind of catch us up with what's been going on in both paid and organic search? Yeah, so especially around organic search, Google is always making changes to its algorithm, which changes how websites rank in search results. and we are consistently seeing situations where someone was holding, let's say, the number one position in Google for a long time. Suddenly, they're down by a page and someone else is just as surprised to have that new number one spot.

2:40And there's been a lot of shuffling around like that recently. Yeah. Well, what would you say are, well, can you talk, let's just talk about Google. What is Google saying right now that folks should be paying very close attention to? Quality of content. And when I say content, that means text. So with ChatGPT and other AI programs coming out that write content as good as you or I would sit down and write content, perfect grammar perfect spelling there are a lot of advantages to that but at the same time sometimes that content is a little bit dry and uninteresting to read compared to what a human would write and it's not actually so much that google cares who the author was but google pays attention to things like how long does the visitor on average stay on a given page on your website If people come to your website, they land on a page, they hit the back button three seconds later, you're basically teaching Google that visitors don't find that content valuable.

3:51But if they stay and they read the entire page, well, then you're more likely to get moved up in search. And Google's paying a lot more attention to that quality of content recently. Yeah. And so what do you work with in particular industries or niches? I know you're based in San Diego. We work with just about anyone. In fact, we specifically didn't want to focus on any specific niche, mostly for our own reasons. We just kind of want to keep things interesting and not have to, for example, I came out of the solar industry doing digital marketing over there. You know, and after a few years, there's only so much you can write about a single industry or, you know, a new way to package the same product.

4:38So we really try to keep things interesting for our own purposes and keep our own creativity flowing and not pin ourselves down. Yeah. Well, Michael, to our friends that are listening right now, you talk about, obviously, quality of content. What does that mean? Especially, I'd say, when you also have leaders that are saying, well, look, if we're not using AI, I mean, that just seems dumb. We should be using AI. How do we, any best practices for like what you'd recommend for kind of the best prescription to be, you know, to be efficient, right? So we don't want to be overpaying for stuff that can, technology can help us with the job.

5:24But then again, there's no point in doing it if we're just, there's no benefit to it, which I can see that if you're just doing sloppy, crappy AI generated stuff, it's clearly AI. And we all know what that AI voice sounds like. We see it, you know, resplendent with a cornucopia of opportunities are at your doorstep. And come on, please, nobody talks like that. Right. Yeah. So we do suggest that AI should be part of any business owner or marketing manager's toolkit. But you just have to know how to use it. So if you are going to use AI to, let's say, write a long form, let's say, a blog post, go back through it and humanize it a bit.

6:11Kind of erase those kind of weird words that, you know, humans don't use. But then also, AI really works well for things like a short product description. You know, let's say you're selling iPhone cases and these iPhone cases, you know, you've got 10 ,000 of them for sale and they're all just about the same thing. But for SEO purposes, you need a unique product description for each one of those. Well, let AI loose on that. Say, hey, I need 10 ,000 product descriptions that are unique. And the only thing that changes is what phone model it applies to and maybe the color. that will save you an enormous amount of time.

6:55So it definitely has, AI has its place. It's here to stay, but it's always, I believe, going to have to be driven by a human to a pretty, a large degree. Yeah. Michael, looking at your LinkedIn feed, I see that you are getting on a lot of lists. You're kind of getting awards. Certainly, you're out there sharing your thought leadership. So, again, you're kind of sharing these placements. I suspect that that's kind of a part of your off-site SEO strategy that you recommend. Can you maybe just take us through a little mini TED Talk on how to get a lot more of those attributions out and around the world?

7:47Yeah, happy to talk about that. So you recognize something that we are doing, which is you may call it sort of a PR angle to SEO. So as time goes on and more and more websites are applying SEO to their websites and Google is having a more difficult time, it may find that it has 10 ,000 websites available for a certain search. And those websites are virtually identical. Google says, well, how am I supposed to sort these from position one on down? So one of the things that's starting to do is to look at maybe the company management, who owns the company. It's almost like Google will do a parallel search and try to determine of these businesses, who are really experts in this industry.

8:42So one of the things I do is I try to get myself out into the digital world, into online conversations, position myself as an authority in my space, which I am. And that is a very advanced SEO strategy that we're using. As you can imagine, being a digital marketing agency, there's no more competitive space to try to fight over rank than a bunch of other experts doing exactly what you're doing. So we're trying to look ahead and kind of get into the PR space of this rather than just focus on, you know, technical SEO on our website. Talk about how you engage with your clients. What does that typically look like?

9:35we we try to do things a bit different in that we're a little bit old school when it comes to engaging with our clients and that there's a lot of human interaction a lot of conversations a lot of face time we find that a lot of our customers come to us because they fired their previous seo agency and surprisingly the number one reason for firing your agency wasn't lack of results it was of communication. You know, they're writing a check each month to this agency. They have no idea where their money is going. You know, they may pick up the phone and call customer support for this agency. You know, they get someone new each time.

10:12That person has to get familiar with the account. We just don't do that. We have dedicated account managers that have a relationship with our customer and our customers can pick up the phone and their account manager will answer. It's, you know, it seems like a lost art in this industry. Yeah. Well, for me, you know, and at least, you know, kind of folks in our world too, I don't know. I don't like being treated like a number. I like to feel like together, you know, we got humans kind of figuring out and solving big problems. And I think that's badly in desire as much as I think some service providers try to, you know, frank through more clients and, you know, kind of, I don't know, systematize, automate a bit too much.

10:59So, Michael, I'm certain that you've got resources and, you know, for someone that may be listening, you know, content that you'd recommend, maybe just something that you feel that would be valuable. And by the way, I want to put this out there, and I didn't share this. You've worked with some pretty significant brands. NFL, AIG, Sony, Huawei. I mean, if I said that correctly. Huawei. Huawei. Thank you so much. But yeah, BaltimoreRavens.com, my goodness. Yeah. How did you, you know, there might be like, let's say another B2B service provider that's listening to us and they're like, dang, how did Rank Harvest get them as clients?

11:48Well, I think part of it, I mean, first of all, I've got a wonderful team here. but it's also because I've been doing this for so long. I, you know, I was in corporate digital marketing for, for 20 years before I started rank harvest. In fact, rank harvest was a side hustle that I, that I created in my, in my mid forties and it grew, I grew it into a multi million dollar business from there. But I had, before this, I had this long career. Um, and gosh, I've been doing SEO since 2005, 2006. So I've just built a lot of partnerships. A lot of people know about me and my strategies work. And again, I do have to say that a lot of it, most of it perhaps is my wonderful team here.

12:43Excellent. All right. So Michael, your website, as I was sharing earlier before I got distracted by your roster of clients, which is pretty impressive. RankHarvest.com. But, you know, again, you know, are there any resources that you'd recommend that someone take a look at? Or, you know, maybe, again, just kind of education. I know you've got some great blog posts here. The best, well, I'll put it to you in terms of advice. If you want to improve your SEO and maybe you don't want to engage with an agency or freelancer or whatever, the number one thing you can do is fill your website full of pages of information.

13:28Google consistently, larger websites consistently outrank smaller websites. And it's simply because Google wants the confidence to know if it's going to send a search visitor to your website, that that website has enough information to satisfy whatever they're looking for. the easiest way to do that is fill your website full of information, not just promotional information, but even just information to help visitors understand your industry and how to make decisions. Yeah. Yeah. Truly, you know, writing for humans and truly being a good steward, truly trying to help, help, help, help, help. Google knows what you're writing.

14:09Google knows what you're doing. Never underestimate Google's intelligence. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So again, your website, rankharvest.com. When somebody goes there and let's say that they, maybe they fired or maybe they've had some negative experiences with an SEO provider and they'd love to at least have a conversation and see what engagement might look like. What do you recommend for them? Just come to our website, fill out the contact form. In most cases, if someone wants to get on a Zoom with me, I will make time to do that. I'm very transparent. I give them honest advice, even if that advice is that we're not a good fit for them.

14:57I will help put them on a path towards whatever I think is best in their situation. Excellent. All right. Michael Shagala. Did I say that correctly? You did. Michael Shagala, again, founder and CEO of Rank Harvest Digital Marketing. Again, your website, rankharvest.com. Michael, thank you so much. Thank you.

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