Leveraging AI

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

• Isar Meitis, Andy Crestodina • Season 1 • Episode 150

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Discover the Future of Content Marketing with Andy Crestodina!

AI is reshaping how businesses approach SEO and content marketing. But are you leveraging it effectively to stand out? Join us for a dynamic session as Andy Crestodina, Co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media, breaks down practical, game-changing strategies to harness ChatGPT for driving traffic, boosting rankings, and creating unforgettable content.

Andy is a thought leader in digital marketing with years of expertise in turning complex SEO concepts into actionable insights. His unique perspective on AI, informed by hands-on experience and real-world results, makes him the perfect guide to help you transition from "lazy prompts" to impactful, audience-focused content.

In this session, you’ll learn:
- How to use AI tools to develop personas, content missions, and SEO-friendly articles.
- Proven methods for auditing and optimizing content for maximum reach and engagement.
- Strategies to create thought leadership content that sparks conversation and drives results.
- Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from one of the best in the business!

About Leveraging AI

If you’ve enjoyed or benefited from some of the insights of this episode, leave us a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform, and let us know what you learned, found helpful, or liked most about this show!

Isar:

Hello, and welcome to another live episode of the Leveraging AI podcast, the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to improve efficiency, grow your business and advance your career. This is Isar Meitis, 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? Come 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. So 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 on this. You're just doing 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'd run into each in a conference about AI a few months ago, and we started chatting. I 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 nearly any company on the planet should know. By now, and 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.

Andy:

Isar, thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this. This will be fun. Same here.

Isar:

I'm, I, like I said, I, 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's 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. And 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. If I like your background, so people know a little more about you, but really like a minute, and then we'll dive right into how to do this properly.

Andy:

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. We build an optimized, 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.

Isar:

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, share your wisdom with us.

Andy:

Yeah, I joke sometimes I say I've done 24 years of SEO and 24 months of AI.

Isar:

Yeah. Same as everybody. It's almost to the day, right?

Andy:

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. we can try to stay practical today and we can set aside things like, what do AI overviews within Google do 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. Has 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. We'll talk another day,

Isar:

right? That's not, yeah, like you say, there's a lot to, unravel here when it comes to AI, and search in general.

Andy:

Yeah. and my content strategy has always been to publish practical, I'd never really address those things. And there's other people who you can chat with. And you're someone who has a great point of view on those things. Okay. So search, search, SEOs are not famous for publishing highly differentiated content. They publish stuff that tries to rank so frequent. there are SEOs that just read the other pages that rank and try to make something that's like, you know, 5 percent 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.

Isar:

I literally had a chat with the 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 it's, 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. Yeah.

Andy:

And those platform 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. That content is, and that might be a goal and brand visibility is important and let's not completely dismiss it. But no, I think that some of the most important outcomes in Martin in marketing are being memorable, getting referrals, staying top of mind, things for which there's no metric to measure. So marketers are digital marketers often deemphasize 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 are a keyword opportunity. So 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. Thanks. 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 web page. list, missed opportunities to add schema and micro formatting to this, to have better structured data, appear better in search results. It'll do that.

Isar:

Extremely good. Sounds so much fun. No, it's not. I'm just

Andy:

technical SEO is not. Yeah. It's it. And it's funny because tech SEO isn't really user focused anyway, right? They're trying to be better for the crawl. That's not, I don't think that I agree. I'm and I'm not really mostly a technical SEO, 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. Okay. 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. He's how are you? most people, I think I figured this out. AI might as well stand for average information until you give it your persona. Yeah. Okay. so here's my persona, based upon my personas, information needs, right? 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. Brilliant move, right? Great content strategy. It'll tell you what other blogs aren't covering. That's awesome. Yeah.

Isar:

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.

Andy:

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, what are the claims people make that aren't supported with evidence? And then you go 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 reader guidelines, get feedback on a URL. That's another SEO, 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. Hi. 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 can do it together. Actually, I, 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. So 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 SAO 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.

Isar:

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. How does ChatGPT figure it out? Like, how does it know what you rank for?

Andy:

it doesn't know that and you'd have to use a tool to export that list or choose the key phrases from there. So you

Isar:

start with an, Ahrefs or, one of the other SEM rush or one of those. Yep. And then you take the data from there, upload it to gpt and then ask the questions.

Andy:

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 I think 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 semantic related phrases for this primary target key phrase, it'll give you a list. It's a good list. AI is amazing at language generation and summarization. So it's 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 submitted. Clearly those are medically 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 keyphrase. 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 and the draft and the original 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. Now, of course, if it sounds spammy or keyword stuffed or, off brand, just ignore it. I 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.

Isar:

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. Don't give the AI 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 a page, then have it compare what's on the page to the keywords that it suggested or the phrase that I 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 open AI. so open AI 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. So 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 re write 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 and then you can pick and choose the one you wanted to implement and it 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.

Andy:

Canvas is a major improvement. I have only experimented with it a little bit, but it really needed, JDPT 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, no, inevitably, whatever chat, your favorite tool is, creates for you, it doesn't have things like internal links or images or contributor quotes or your specific examples. Or, data from your own or 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. And, I use AI all the time for research and recommendations like this, SEO on page SEO recommendations. but, but there are still, limits and things where you get better results, I think if you do it by hand.

Isar:

Okay, great points. So let's do this. Let's do a quick example and then we can continue to the next

Andy:

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 we, how do you want to frame this?

Isar:

Yeah. First of all, we're going to describe everything we're doing on the screen, but also, you, you can go watch this on YouTube. The link is on. the show notes of the podcast, if you're on the podcast platform, but 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.

Andy:

Yeah, we'll explain it all. Don't, 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. And, I'm going to go to my prompt library and I'm going to grab a, A prompt that will help me that through which AI will recommend, adjacent keyphrases. These are all SEO prompts. here, I'll read it out loud. You're a semantic SEO expert, skilled at selecting keyphrases that are semantically related to a primary target keyphrase. Suggest 10 phrases that are adjacent to the following keyphrase. I'm in chat GPT, I paste that in, and I'm going to type in, supply chain consulting. Okay. it's going to, 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 symmetrically adjacent to supply chain consulting, logistics optimization services. Inventory management strategies, procurement process improvement, right? supplier relationship management, lean supply chain practices. I don't think I would have thought of hardly any of these. Oh, granted I'm not in the market. now I'm going to add a second prompt. Add 10 more. This time with a bit more semantic distance between them. Spread out the meaning. The sort of, the general idea here is that SEO is not about incorporating one primary target keyphrase and 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 the, 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. These are actually pretty broad. I'd almost rather have it narrow it down, but, and I would keep having this conversation. It's PT 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, 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. It came back and it's not more specifically talking about logistic supply chain inventory management. instead of that enterprise resource stuff. Very good. Okay. Now the, the next prompt is the money prompt. I would say, search optimized. Here's what it sounds like search optimized. Pages are focused on a specific topic and key phrase, but they also incorporate those closely related subtopics and smithy related key phrases. You're copywriter skilled to making copy edits that improve search rankings of web pages. By incorporating key phrases and indicating relevance. I'm giving you a webpage. Suggest 10 copy edits to 10 sentences on this page that would incorporate phrases from this list. Make 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 a credible brand. So I care about the people who might read it. So I add that sentence. And then highlight the key phrases in the suggestions. That last bit is going to have it usually it bolds the phrases that, 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. I 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 webpage to an AI?

Isar:

So it depends. It depends what I'm trying to do. If it's just, the, what you're doing right now, I'll probably do the link because it's the fastest. Yep. 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 the There's like a way to do a full screenshot of the page in there as well. or 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.

Andy:

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.

Isar:

I use awesome screenshot, but they do the same thing.

Andy:

They do the same thing. They're both free. so with this, but, per your input, I gave it the link and, that's perfectly sufficient because we're just doing copy edits.

Isar:

Yeah.

Andy:

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 keyphrase supply chain efficiency analysis, and it bolded that text next one. We help businesses improve their logistics operations. It revised it to say we improve. We provide logistics optimization services to enhance your transportation and distribution processes. That is actually a great way to incorporate a commercial intent. Keyphrase logistics optimization services. That's the services related keyphrase. That's actually, 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.

Isar:

Yeah.

Andy:

I'll read one more. The original sentence on that page written by a human was effective inventory control is crucial for business success. I 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, 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, feel free, I sometimes joke AI might as well stand for another input because we should feel free to dismiss 80 percent 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 a, 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.

Isar:

No, 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. You don't need AI or an SEO expert or an SEO expert to, or have any specialty tools. Like a HFS and all the other ones to do decent SEO work and in. A minute like this didn't take very long at all.

Andy:

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. 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 a hundred bucks a month, Hey, that's actually pretty tempting. But here, it's like the prompt makes the AI into software that they jokingly sometimes say, maybe you've heard English is the hot new programming language.

Isar:

Yeah. Yeah.

Andy:

It feels like I just made a bit of software. It's amazing.

Isar:

I'm just thinking about the implications of that. And I know we're going to go into a few, a couple of other examples, but the, just even doing this, let's say you invest. An hour a month. Exactly. And then an hour, you can fix four pages. That's four pages that are upgraded and do better SEO for you every single month. And that's one hour a month. That's not like a full time employee or a part of just you yourself. Let's see your small business, whatever. One hour a month, you fix four to five pages. You do this for a year. You have most of your content on your website, because you probably don't have hundreds of pages if you're a small business, way better optimized with no, any fancy tools and no preexisting knowledge, that's amazing.

Andy:

And eat your vegetables, go to the gym and optimize these pages once a week, right? Put it on your calendar. If you could do maybe it's just weekly, like two a week, half an hour, yeah. Yeah. the next question, and I just did a post on LinkedIn about this. It's like, where to prioritize or how to prioritize your time. for this exercise, I would deliberately go look, if you have a minute and are, can wield the tools, but go look at a, go look at, GA four and see which of your pages has the highest conversion rate. That's your mouse trap. Put this better cheese on those mousetraps. Or start with the high traffic pages. Hey, the homepage is actually never, no one's ever done a single round of SEO edits on this page. start with those key pages. It's always tempting. I'm a content marketer to focus on the blog and find, missed keyword opportunities on articles. And there's so much language on those articles and they rank for so many random things. It's not hard. But let's start optimizing from the bottom of the funnel and do this for those key money pages first, and then move upwards through the funnel, optimize all of your service and product pages before you go use a method like this on your articles, it's going to make a big difference.

Isar:

Yeah, there's a question from Denny in the chat, she's asking, are there prompts specific to geo? I assume she means like geographic targeting. Or is that off topic for this session?

Andy:

Actually, I wonder if, if Denny is, means generative engine optimization. Have you heard this yet? Yeah, I don't know. Optimizing to appear in AI, responses. Oh, like instead of

Isar:

SEO. Yes. yeah. Okay. Maybe that's what she means.

Andy:

I think that might be. Yep. That's what, you see that? Yeah. You just saw the beginning of a new linguistic trend in marketing. Yeah. Might be. And no one, I don't think there's a settled name for this yet. It's not going to be AIO because Google made that the AI overview.

Isar:

Yeah.

Andy:

I thought it was going to be called AIO. how do you get mentioned, so in,

Isar:

in the summarization engines and stuff like that,

Andy:

Yeah. how do you appear if someone's using perplexity or chat GPT to ask for recommendations for a partner or a service provider? how do you get, how do you appear in those responses?

Isar:

Yeah.

Andy:

This is a fascinating topic and probably the most important. Does anybody

Isar:

know yet out of the top of your head of the stuff you're following? Because I haven't seen anything concrete yet.

Andy:

I, I have taken a stand on this topic. And I have, published some, articles on this and I will share, a link to a video I made on this exact thing. and and I'll share, and okay, the, this, it's the same question is how do I appear in AI training data, right? How do you get mentioned? How do you get recommended by AI? Fair. So your job is to appear in training data in many places with that context. So here's some possible tips, right? Totally uncertain. Hugely speculative answer. I'm going to qualify that. Okay. But first of all, you write for more than just your own website. Make sure that your brand appears in many places. This is like directory marketing in the early days of the internet, guest blogging. Make sure that you're on other domains, right? reverse engineer it, ask AI for recommendations in your category, and then look at those sources and confirm that you're in those sources.

Isar:

So your

Andy:

competitors are appearing, look at the sources and make sure you're in those sources. also it's very obvious that if you make a press release, submit to Newswires, that instance will appear in hundreds of places in a day. So write an AI training press release that injects language into the knowledge sources that show all the business categories you're in, who you work with, what you do. And then also, the kind of, there was a bit of an example of this one in my introduction. If you ever get the chance to describe your business or to say what you do in a format that will be transcribed, say specifically what you do, name the keywords, use the keywords in the category. Orbit Media is a web development company that builds and optimizes websites for B2B lead gen mid market brands, like all of that language. If that gets transcribed and ingested. Now, there's one more place on the internet. And then bottom line, anything that you do on the homepage to tell Google what your, what business you're in, that's also solid for AI because, if you have a very clever, highly branded, header on your homepage, that's not helping you. the AI crawler is one of the important visitors to your website today.

Isar:

These are great tips. I think the biggest one that I didn't think about is that it's about, and that might be very different than traditional SEO, but it becoming very much a game of quantity and not just of quality. So SEO was very much a quality game, create quality content, unique content, original content, thought provoking content. And quantity was Less critical. And I was saying, yes, the more places you're going to show up, the more places the crawler see you, the higher, the chances it's going to pull it up as the right answer. and I think that's a great piece of advice.

Andy:

Yeah, it's also, and along those same lines, if you set aside all of the link popularity and domain authority considerations, let's say your role today or your priority is to get is to create content that will be ingested by the AI and you've got two podcast opportunities. One of them is on a famous podcast with lots of listeners, but no transcript. The other one is on a tiny, small town, little podcast, but with very detailed transcripts, right? The second one might actually be better for getting AI mentions. Generative engine optimization, if that's what we're going to call it, because that, because AI doesn't care if that page has a lot of links on it and this page does not, it all just goes into the mix. So links become a completely separate thing. but original content and quality, I think will matter in contexts where if you can create word of mouth or people talking about you in these, like in communities, like Reddit seems to be prioritized or have a heavily weighted thing. first of all, make stuff that's memorable, that goes, that's top of mind, that gets word, that creates word of mouth that AI or Google. But, now if you want to be really tactical about it, yeah, you begin, you have different considerations and ideas for targeting and topics. but get really good. if you're elevator pitch and using that basic blurb, about the category you're in and make sure it's everywhere

Isar:

points, I think we have time for one more thing if you want to show another little tool or strategy or something that we can use, that would be fantastic. while you're picking that up, I will say something about what you just said as far as, Saying what you do in a clear way and using AI and all the other stuff we just talked about and appearing in the AI tools. The other thing that we need to remember, and nobody knows where it's going, is that more and more of the internet is going to be used by agents versus people, which raises a whole other list of questions like, okay, so how is the content should be built to be optimized for agents versus people and how should it be structured and so on. And that's coming. Faster than we think, I think in the next, 24 months, we're going to see more and more agents that are doing stuff for humans, whether companies or individuals. And that will drive a lot of change as well, as far as how the content needs to structures almost to the point that we'll need two separate versions of our website, one that's going to be optimized for agents and one's going to be optimized for people. And there's going to be like a ghost version of. Of each page to be optimized for other things, but that's way beyond our topic for today

Andy:

I find that so fascinating though, because that's where we're going to go that where you know people are using agents to take the next step And to make everything robot friendly in the end, websites are only partly about UX, they're also much more than ever about injecting data into other places where you can appear. okay. I'm going to share again and give an example. Here's one more AI method. and I, for this, I'm going to start with a tool because the tool is the only way to do it. I'm going to use SEMrush, which is maybe the most popular tool. So this one is one where this is a little bit more for the pro SEO or people that have access to a tool like this. That's what millions of us do. Okay. I'm on the keyword gap tool and I put in four websites. In this case, I'm a space launch services company. This is a deck from a conference, and I put in three competitors and it shows me the overlap between our key phrases, very attractive report, right? It shows you the key phrases you rank for and they rank for and where they, where there's common overlap. I've got just the homepages in here. So you don't

Isar:

see, it's just a Venn diagram and then the table under it and the Venn diagram shows you the keywords in different colors. And then the list just shows you the actual keywords versus the Venn diagram.

Andy:

Thank you. Yes, exactly. So there's columns on this table that show the phrases I rank for, the phrases they rank for. And you can see when I'm a zero, and they have numbers, that means they rank, but I don't. Keyword gap analysis. now this is, and I, my mouth waters every time I see an export button because I love updating, uploading day to day AI. So there's an export button here. And when I export that file, it's got all of them, the keyword, it's a spreadsheet, a CSV file that shows all the keyword performance for all of these websites. With my, with me as the first column, basically I upload it. Here's the prompt. You're an expert SEO and a marketing data analyst. I'm giving you keyword data showing the SEO performance of my homepage, column B, compared to the keyword performance of these competitors, column C, D and E. Can you analyze? And it comes back and it's, of course, does a great job of analyzing subsequent prompt. Your goal is to optimize my homepage to rank for more of the key phrases that I do not rank for, but my competitors do, which additional commercial intent phrases are the best opportunities for my homepage. Based on the ranking of the competition. So basically rather than crunching through that whole giant file and doing it manually over hours or hiring an expensive consultant to sift through the data, Chad, dbt can, we can right away, tell you which of these phrases that you rank for, but they don't. And then actually create, the next step is to create a chart. it could do the copy edits as we just mentioned, but I, but here's a prompt I love using. I write this a lot, draw a chart visualizing the relative size of the opportunity of the keywords, right? Or draw a heap map matrix that shows the opportunity, right? I'm always asking AI to draw charts for me because it works great in content. It's good for meetings, PowerPoint, and it's just the easy way to learn and get insights. So what it did was it made an opportunity, it created a device, the new metric. Called the Opportunity Score, and based on search volume, keyword difficulty, and the CPC, cost per click, that's the paid search equivalent. And comes back and basically lists the phrases that it thinks I should focus on, based on the rankings of my top competitors. So bring that to a meeting and, you're going to look like a wizard first of all, when you point out like, Hey, these are the phrases that they rank for and we don't, and this is how we should prioritize them based on the analysis of the AI. The next prompt writes itself. Here's a copy of the homepage. Apply your SEO expertise and write additional paragraphs to target those high opportunity score phrases. Copy in your homepage.

Isar:

Just to put things in perspective, how brilliant this is. You would have paid 5, 000 to a marketing agency to give you this that we just did in 35 seconds using ChachiPT.

Andy:

You start to be honest, I think it's worth more than 5, 000. no. I'm saying just to do this, just to do that quick

Isar:

analysis for somebody, you would pay that amount of

Andy:

money. And I agree with you it's worth more

Isar:

because if it drives traffic to you, then yes.

Andy:

It might help us make 100, 000, if a consultant offered to do this for you for five grand, it's probably a good deal, but actually now, you know how to do it for free in minutes, right? It takes, it I'm making it look really easy. I actually experiment with prompts all the time and many of my experiments are failures. So I've spent hundreds of hours on prompts that did not work and still don't work. I keep trying. This, but this method here you can see as a way to, to quickly get insights and ideas and recommendations, again, feel free to dismiss most of them, but they're probably a few nuggets and this isn't blue sky starting from nowhere. Keyword research. I started with the phrases for which my competitors rank, but I don't. That's an excellent starting point. so that's a point of view. It's, keyword gap analysis. devise a new metric giving it a score, that was partly for fun, and then SEO edits based upon the missed keyword opportunities on my site. but that my competitor, that's the battlefield, that's where they're winning and where I'm not yet fighting. Now I'm going to fight in that battle.

Isar:

That's awesome. Andy, this was brilliant. there's obviously a gazillion other examples and things we can talk about, but the reality is, there's so much that we can do with SEO. That is. But we gave a lot of really great examples to people of what they can and what they should do. Some with more professional tools, some without these professional tools. And so I'm really thankful for you being here. If people want to work with you, find you, follow you, learn from you, see what you're doing, learn more of this kind of stuff. What are the best ways to connect with you?

Andy:

LinkedIn is my best professional network and right now the blue button says follow anyone listening to this if they're at all interested, just you click the little menu dots and you can find connect and send me a connection and say, hey, I heard you on a show and I'll happy to connect them. We can message each other, but orbit media dot com slash blog is where I write one article every two weeks. That's my frequency for 15 years. You can find all my best and latest there.

Isar:

So thank you again. Thanks everybody who joined us live all the people on linkedin that was with us all the people on zoom who were with us. I really appreciate you taking I'm from a middle of a busy day and a busy week before the holidays and still joining us, being engaged. everybody's saying, yes, this was amazing. Thank you so much. So I'm passing a passing that thanks you to you. some of your summer friends from Chicago are there on LinkedIn as well. So saying thanks from Chicago. so have happy holidays, everyone. We have one more live show, I believe next week before we break it off, for the new year's, Thanks again, Andy. This was absolutely fantastic. I appreciate you. I appreciate everything you're doing and I'm humbled that you joined us today.

Andy:

I look forward to seeing you at another event. Yes, sir. Let's stay. Amen.

Isar:

Amen. Very good. Have a great day, everybody. Bye bye.

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Isar Meitis

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