Food Blogger Pro & Yoast Live Q&A Replay: AI Strategies for SEO Success

All right, we are officially live. Really fun to have this moment where you start to see everybody tuning in and jumping into the conversation and the live stream here as we are starting. Would love to hear from people where you are tuning in from and maybe the name of your site or if you haven't started your site yet, maybe social handles, we'll see that in the little webinar chat area and make sure you switch it over to everyone so everybody can see that as you are posting in. Give us some background. Carolyn, you are deep in the world of SEO. You have been for a really long time. You are with Yoast, which is a plugin that my guess is many, many people who have been in the WordPress publishing space have used and if they're not using it, they should use it because it is one of those standard plugins that we recommend people use. So tell us a little bit about your story, your background and then we're going to get into the world of SEO and AI, two really important things for creators.

All right, well, where to start? So if I started at the beginning, the beginning would take us back to like the mid-90s. I started out, I was a co founder of an Internet service provider which was, if you had AOL back in the day or CompuServe, that was like your dial up provider. So we did that, but we started doing, you know, websites and trying to rank things on the Internet really as soon as things that ranked things came to be. So I've been really deep in this for a very, very long time. I spent the better part of a decade at Tribune Publishing running the newspapers SEOs. So the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore sun, we had a dozen daily newspapers. And then I went to Disney where I worked at ESPN and helped with the global network of sports chann there. And then I ended up at Yoast, where I've been for the last couple years. I'm the principal SEO, but what I do is less SEO on the website and more focusing on the product. I keep up with all the changes in Google to, well, Google and AI. And it was Google primarily in the beginning. It's really kind of expanded now with the shifting landscape that AI has caused. But I keep up with that stuff and I help translate it into how we can make our product better so that it's better for all of you. So that's, that's what I do.

And I was saying this before we jumped on the call. To me it seems like fire hose. Like there's just so much information to Take in to translate. And then what you do is, and this is why we love Yoast, is translate that into a way where somebody who is a creator. A lot of people tuning in here. You know, we can hear from people from Quebec, from North Carolina, Greece. We have somebody turning in from Greece. Tara Teaspoon, Hungry Bites, HQ Truck parts. So all about, you know, truck parts. My guess is using Yoast for five years. WordPress, WooCommerce, my casual pantry. A lot of folks in the food space, but also some other creators publishing content. But the point is we want to have an understanding as creators. We want to have an understanding of SEO best practices, but what we don't want to do is like be the ultimate expert. And that's why it's nice to have a tool with somebody like yourself who is the ultimate expert, translating that into features, functionality, or things that are just baked in to. So we don't need to make decisions as creators around how to do that. So great tool. Really appreciate Yoast for sponsoring this and working with us at Food Blogger Pro. We're going to talk about AI and SEO today and how those two things kind of can complement each other, but also things that we need to be aware of. And so we have some questions that have come in. And what I'm going to do is I'll just work through these questions and we might go off on some rabbit trails if we feel like it would be helpful to talk about those things. But let's start with this one. So this person is asking all about this idea of refreshing existing content. And I know especially within the last few years, people have started to focus a lot on not only publishing new content, but just making sure their existing content is continually maintained, is refreshed, is updated, and if they are ranking well, that they stay there, or if they're not ranking well, that maybe they can start to rank better if they improve a piece of content that's pre existing. And this person is wondering what are some of the AI tools that they might be able to use to help understand how to approach their existing content. And you could maybe speak to features that exist within Yoast if there'd be anything worth mentioning there as well.

That is a. That is a complicated question. So I would let's start out with not every piece of content needs to be refreshed unless it actually needs to be refreshed. There is no value in changing things just for the sake of changing things. It's like you can do that if you have time, but I imagine most of you don't have time. If there is something that is materially changed that would change the value of the content for the reader, then you should go back and fix it. So if you know. And I'm. I'm going to try to use all food examples.

Sure.

You know, if you know that you had a recipe that featured a type of food that has maybe fallen out of favor, maybe just for purely an example, please don't attack me for this. Let's say, for example, you had a recipe that prominently featured saccharin as a sugar substitute, and all of a sudden there was a study that came out that conclusively showed, or at least convincingly showed, and it blew up on all over the media. And now it was a thing that saccharin absolutely causes some sort of, you know, dementia.

Yeah.

Or something. You would absolutely want to go back and scan your entire site for any mention of the word saccharin, update all of those articles to say, hey, we've taken all the saccharin out of our recipes. Now you can come back and not go crazy from eating our stuff. That would be the kind of thing where you would definitely want to do that. Would AI help you? AI could help you. If you had a good content inventory, you could. Or honestly, I'd want to have a content inventory. I wouldn't trust it just to go through. You can't tell an AI. Hey, can you just crawl my site and tell me all the. All the times you find this? Because it's not going to do a really thorough job. If you were to somehow have a spreadsheet that had a good content inventory, you could probably go through and say, here's all the pages on my site and I've extracted the recipes, or I've extracted the text and put that into the spreadsheet too, because it can handle really big spreadsheets. Can you go through and tell me each one of the articles that mentions or has saccharin as an ingredient and make a list for me? Then you've got this list. Now that you've got this list, you can go back through and say, depending on where it's at, there would be different ways that you could go through and update that. My guess is it's going to be most logical and easy to do those updates manually. But I could probably engineer a way to automate that if I needed to. Now, the other thing that AI could do to help you, especially if it's recipe adjustments, I would say that if you gave it a recipe and said, here's the recipe I have. I need to rewrite this recipe so that it presumably tastes the same but does not use saccharin as the sweetener. What can I use that isn't saccharin as the sweetener? That is still going to be low calorie for my readers or something like that. And I know that this works because I've done entire meals for Holidays based on. I would like to build a menu around this specific cocktail because I think this is fun.

Great.

Help me build. Help me build a menu. And then it built me a menu and I said, okay, so for this particular product, I have. I'm just going to pick on my, my stepmother here for a minute. I have someone coming to eat who does not eat vegetables. He will literally. Yeah, he doesn't eat vegetables. He will eat peas or corn, which I pointed out are starches. He doesn't eat vegetables. He won't eat salad dressing on his salad. It's just torn up iceberg lettuce in a bowl. And he also won't eat mushrooms or onions.

Great. That's what you're working with.

You make a pot roast with no mushrooms and no onions. And tell me how that goes. But it was really good about making adjustments and say, okay, but we can't use this. Okay, well, let me readjust it. Or normally I make it with Lipton onion soup mix, but Lipton onion soup mix has onions in it. And even though the onions are undetectable, he won't eat it. So how can I replicate Lipton onion soup mix without onions in it? It's really good at figuring that stuff out. So I would also use AI for that.

That's great.

Does that answer that question?

Yeah. And I think to pull that out, a couple of the things that I heard you mention to paraphrase is like taking a large set of data, the data being an export of your site, put into a spreadsheet, and then asking it questions about that data. It could be an ingredient, but it also could be, you know, anytime there's, you know, maybe it's like that doesn't include recommended drink to go with it. Like, you can just. The specific example isn't the point. The point is using AI to look at a large set of data and ask it questions about that. So that would be one. The second would be as like a brainstorming partner for a certain piece of content or a recipe to say, okay, here's this thing I'm working through. I have this problem. Can you be my partner in figuring out how to come up with a solution for this problem. And what I like about what you're saying is in your example example, you were the expert not only on what it is that you wanted to create, but on the recipe itself. And so we are all our own experts, so we are experts in the loop, but we have like a co expert that has like broad insight and then we kind of have niche insight for our specific audience and what their needs are. And so we are still really important within that. But it's great to have that kind of sparring buddy to think through things.

So the way. I don't know how many. I don't know how many people in the audience are neurodivergent, but I've got the adhd. I mean, and I'm not just making that up. It's literally diagnosed. It's a thing. The AI has been awesome for me because it's like body double. It's me. And it just. Maybe it's not right all the time, but I'm not right all the time either. That being said, it can recall data and scan things faster than I can. And sometimes it just helps me recall things that I already knew. So I'll ask it questions and it'll tell me things, and sometimes I know it's wrong, so I'll say things like, nice try, but that's not accurate. And it'll say, oh, you're right, and then it'll go back and fix itself. So it's helpful that I have all the information trapped in my head, but sometimes I can't recall information as fast as it can recall information. And even when it recalls the information incorrectly, because I do know it now that it's presented me with something that I know to be incorrect, I remember that information now because I know it's incorrect. Yeah, it's. It's just, it's like having a second me that I can. I can work with all the time. So instead of talking to myself in my head, I'm talking to the AI. But it makes things go faster. And I'm really. It's been a great tool for me.

It's really like a kind of a second brain to have that you can develop and tweak and it has, you know, perfect memory. It's not always going to give a perfect answer, like you said. But how about, you know, when it comes to refreshing content, would you have any advice for people on when they, you know, you gave the example of, like, if there's an ingredient that falls out of favor, I think that's a great Example, there's, you know, 100 other examples you can maybe think of of something that shifts or changes that would result in you needing to go back and update it. How about from a performance perspective? Would you ever look at a piece of content and say, okay, it was performing really well within search. Now it's kind of dropped down, you know, 10 blue links on a Google page. That's kind of not really how content is showing up anymore. But hypothetically, let's say it's kind of dropping down within the search results on Google. Um, would there be a point where you would look at it and say, like, hey, I should go back and like, try to reignite the search juices for this piece of content.

So that, that's, it's interesting that you say that because the, the, the belief that if you just refresh your content, it will bump it up in, in the results is one that is. Does that work? It works in specific situations and specific industries. I, I come from a news background and in that works amazingly. We would do it literally every 15 minutes to get stories bumped back up in Google News. I don't think that works in recipes though. If you're seeing a slow decay, a slow decay is indicative of, we call it link decay. So the backlinks that you've gotten, the popularity that you've gotten, the velocity of the sharing of the virality of your piece decays over time as it becomes less popular. Sometimes things rocket up to the top and they just stop. If you're losing rankings though, maybe someone else has a similar product or recipe that is getting virality and that's shifting you down. I would look at why. Why is that particular piece not performing as well? So what you would do is you would then compare, okay, let's take me and the five recipes are above me and run them through a tool. There's several tools that might work. Semrush is the one that comes to mind and say, just compare my domain against these other domains and tell me what the differences are. And it's probably going to show that somebody's got more recent publicity, more backlinks. Their backlinks have been growing faster. You've been losing backlinks for some reason. So there's this. Refreshing the content in and of itself may not necessarily help you. If you refresh the content in a way that attracts attention, which attracts backlinks, and you can promote the fact that you've got a refreshed recipe that could renew interest, which will then result in you regaining some of your position. So I just don't want people to think that it's a. If I make it new, it will automatically pop up to the top. Because in this particular industry, that is not how it works.

That's great. Super important point. And one of the things that we talk about is this idea that we are marketers, we're not marketing. Usually we're not marketing a product that we are selling. If we are content creators, we are. It's marketing the actual content. Hey, here's this awesome recipe. You need to check it out, share it, like, you know, follow on social media, pin it like all of these things around the content. And it's kind of like if you had a recipe just standalone, it was a really good recipe, People made it, they liked it, and it was at a restaurant, and then people stopped ordering it. It's probably not because the recipe itself wasn't as good. It's the same recipe. It's probably that you're not marketing it and you need to revisit how you're attracting attention to it. So that's a really great point. And sometimes refreshing the content can make it easier to market. Or naturally, what you do when you refresh content is talk about it, share it, promote it. And so maybe it seems like there is causation. I refresh content and then it does better. But it's actually correlation. And to your point, maybe most of it is due to the fact that you are creating a lot of energy sharing.

It's like a downstream kind of effect. It's not right there. It's more like, I did this and then all these other things happened and it resulted in a little bit of a lift.

Great.

Let's say you have an old recipe and you made it again. You made it again for a special occasion or something. You took some pictures. You could put that back on your Instagram. You could update the pictures on the recipe and then promote those pictures on Instagram or post about it somewhere else. Say, you know, old, old time favorite. Everyone loves it. Look, I made it again. You don't even have to materially change the recipe. It's just. It's a fresher picture. Maybe somebody new tried it. Maybe. Maybe your nana came to visit and Nana got to try it for the first time. You know, there's. There's something new and different about it that would count as a refresh and it would be an excuse to repromote that same URL.

Hmm, that's great. Love that. Super helpful takeaways there. How about AI as it relates to actually generating content. So we talked about this idea of using AI to understand a large set of data. You Export all your WordPress data and you exit to look through it. Or we talked about it as kind of a brainstorm buddy, a second brain that you can use to get information from and help you think through a problem. But there's a lot of people who are also using AI to actually create content, and some of those people are publishing that content on the web. So as it relates to SEO, the question is this. How can AI generated content be used responsibly without hurting a blog's SEO performance?

I think you cannot let AI write content without any supervision. Even when you're using it to write something you need to have, you're still doing the driving. You're letting the AI help you, and there's different levels of letting the AI help you. So when you say AI content, I never quite know if people think that letting AI touched at all is suddenly AI content, or if they mean that they're going to just say, write me five recipes and accompanying blog posts and make them all about hot dogs and then putting them up.

Both are technically a version of AI content.

Right? Right. So if you're 100% letting the AI just do whatever it wants, you are playing with fire because it's going to tell you things like putting glue on your pizza, and that's bad. Are the search engines going to punish you for using AI at any level? No, they're going to punish you for writing either bad content or unhealthy content that's potentially dangerous. So as long as you're not doing those things, it should not hurt your search engine performance or your visibility. What I would suggest doing. There's a couple different levels that you can use AI at. There's one level where if you are prone to writer's block and you find yourself, like, let's say you have a little bit of executive dysfunction, and you would find yourself sitting and staring at a blank page for 23 hours. But that last hour, right. The hour before it's due, and you start cranking.

Ultra productive.

Yeah. The problem is, yes, it gets done, but you are so stressed out and it's such a painful experience to do that. If you were to say, hey, ChatGPT, or whichever one you're using, I have this recipe blog post that I need to write and it's due in 24 hours. It needs to be about hot dogs and the 4th of July and you have to use neon green relish. Making things up I'm going to attach three recipe blog posts that I've written in the past to use as reference. Can you write a new blog post and recipe for me? It's going to say why? Sure, I can definitely do that. And it will barf up a draft instantly. Right. Is it going to be perfect? Probably not, but it's a starting point. And if you're anything like me, I might have a hard time getting started, but if you get me something that's wrong. Oh, my gosh. Nothing makes the dopamine in my brain go faster than I get to fix things that are wrong. There's someone wrong on the Internet, and I get to correct it. You know, that's just. It'll save you time, because instead of spending 23 hours wishing you were dead, only to have that one hour of creativity burst, you're starting right out of the gate with, I don't have to start from scratch. I just have to fix the things that are wrong. And by the time you're done fixing all the things that are wrong and need to be corrected, it's 100% yours. You're just using that AI as a tool to get over that hump. You can use it for ideation, you can use it for all sorts of things, but as long as you're not letting it run wild and posting things that you have not personally reviewed and corrected, you know, there's nothing wrong with it. If you let it run wild and you don't seriously review and proof edit or, you know, copy copy. Proofread. That was the word for proofread. What. What's going up? You get what. That's what you get if you let it go. Go wild. So don't do that.

Yeah, it's. It's. It's something that. It feels so relatable to me, which is the difference between blank piece of paper and you creating all of it to finished product. And the level of effort that it takes to do that versus something that's 60% there, and then you finish the last 40%, it's. It's undeniable how much effort is in that first 60% to get something from blank canvas to 60%, it feels like that's kind of the majority of the effort, is the creation of the thing. And so to have something to help do that kind of initial lifting is really a beneficial thing. One of the things that I know is true is that, and you're gracious in not having this be an ad for Yoast, but I also want to point out the fact that for those who are using Yoast, there are now AI tools that are starting to be integrated into the plugin itself. What does that look like? And for anybody who's using it or thinking about using it, how are the ways that you could use? I think there's like, know, an optimized kind of version and then something that's like a little bit more generative as well. And my guess is that it's actually hooking into, via API, one of these, like Claude or ChatGPT. And so it's kind of like you get access to some of the greatest features of ChatGPT within the tool itself, and you're not having to go outside of WordPress to use it. So can you talk about, for those who are using Yoast or interested in using it, how that would be kind of baked into the product itself and where they could find it?

Absolutely. So to get full unrestricted access to our. The AI boosts that we offer, you would have to have premium. But premium is right now, what, $99 a year. So it's far less than what you would be paying for a pro membership Pro subscription like ChatGPT, which I think is 20 bucks a month, right?

Yep.

So what it will do is you can, within the tool, you have the ability to have it, you know, run its magic on your titles, your meta descriptions, specific fields within. Within the creation area. So for titles in particular and. Or meta descriptions, if you have some, a site where you've got a lot of pages that tend to have. There's not that much difference between them. You get. Your brain gets tired of writing the same thing over and over again. You don't want to just say everything is, you know, learn how to x read more. Why? You know, it's just. It gets. It gets a little old. You click the. It's a little sprinkle button. So you click the little magic sprinkle button and it will present to you five alternatives, and they're contextual alternatives because what it's doing is, it's reading. It'll check to see what your. The keyword phrases that you've. The focus phrase that you specified for that page. It will check to see what your article's about. It tries to be as contextually relevant as possible, but it's still doing a little bit of the creativity for you. So just taking what you've done and it's reworking it a little to jazz it up or to tighten it up or sometimes it doesn't tighten it up. It actually makes it longer and you have to go back through and say, yeah, but I feel like it should be shorter. It does try to keep things within the recommended. You know the guidelines. So if we know that your title tag should only be 60 to 70 characters long, it will try to recommend a title that's 60 to 70 characters long. It knows enough to keep your meta descriptions within a certain length. It knows to put the basically everything that we recommend. As a good practice it's going to try to do because we bake that into the prompts. So we're saying, okay, read what they've got here and then do these things. Because these things are the best practice for this prompt. And it, it'll give you three to five options and you can pick the one you like. You're still free to make your own adjustments. It's just that little bit of extra. I've been working for 12 hours straight. My brain is fried. I don't know what to do. I can't think of anything useful. You push the magic button and it's like, hey, here's, here's some things I got you. It's okay. Yeah, it's a nice, it's a nice little warm hug.

The thing that I love about AI in an instance like that is it's replacing the manual things that we otherwise would have done, which is as an example, you have a word and you're like, I feel like this should be a little bit different. You take that, you copy it, you go to Google, you type in, you know, synonyms for amazing and then you look through those and. And then you're like, okay, what am I talking about? How does it fit within the context of this? And then you go back, it's like, oh, it just puts that in there and it shortens the process to do that. Or Googling, how long should a meta description be? Just as you kind of forget and you're like, how many characters is it? You're not having to do that anymore. It's baked in. All of these efficiencies are allowing us as creators to do more creating and less of that non value add type of work, like researching how long a meta description should be, it's like, that's not what somebody who's really good at recipes should be spending their time doing well.

And even without the AI boost, so even if you were just using like Yoast free, there are, there's a content analysis that it will do for every article. And that's what those green lights are. The green lights are saying, you Know, is the. Are your sentences too difficult to read? Do you have enough keyword distribution throughout your article? Do you have, you know, is your title too long? Is your meta description too long? Are they too short? Are they missing? Did you put in any external links? Did you put in any internal links? Do you need recommendations on internal links? Here we've got some recommendations for you, those kinds of things. It'll even tell you if you've used the same focus keyword before on other articles, because it doesn't want you to. There's this concept called keyword cannibalization, where if you've got, theoretically, each article should only be going after one keyword phrase. So even if you've got 10 different recipes for tacos, they should not all have the target phrase taco. You would have tacos, carnitas, barbacoa, American tacos, Venezuelan tacos. You know, like, they're different kinds of tacos. You wouldn't want them all to be going after the same target keyword because if they're all fighting for the same target keyword, that means they're fighting against each other. Because Google's only going to pick one of your articles to rank for tacos.

We actually had this really interesting scenario where we had two posts that looked very similar, were structured very similar. One was air, I think it was air fryer salmon and air fryer tofu. And Google actually, and we're trying to unravel this right now, said, hey, these are, we think these are the same. We're just going to redirect, like it's canonicalized one of the recipes and, and is redirecting or like prioritizing. It's not, it's not actually redirecting on our site. Like the post itself still exists, but it dropped the recipe out of search because it said, hey, this is, I don't forget which is, which is. It's too similar. And so this needs to be what it is.

And so there needs to be 30% difference in the text. So I would, I would run it through. You know, AI can do that for you. Give it to AI.

It's actually great news. We'll do it like today after this.

Say Google thinks these two articles are too similar. Can you give me the percentage difference between this one and this one? And then show me where those differences are. And then just take one of them and say, okay, rewrite this to be more than 30% or less than 30% similar, whatever the percentage is. That's correct. Do that.

Yeah, to be at least 50% different. Maybe that's it. We'll just be conservative.

There you go.

But to your point, like, that's an extreme example, and we haven't run into that before, but it's happening. And it was like a significant hit on the performance of a certain post. So I think important for that to be varied. And for creators like us, you know, a lot of times we have 15 years of content and you. You forget, like, oh, yeah, I did. We. We also just had a recipe where we're like, these are really similar. Let's just redirect this one to the one that's performing better. But I think if you had a tool that was monitoring that for you, you wouldn't have to have some process where you're manually looking through your content and reviewing it and being like, did I do a, you know, a protein pancake or not? Like, so.

And this, regrettably, is not something that Yoast can do for you, but something that you could use do is go to your favorite tool that does keyword ranking tracking. And this is not keywords that you are tracking. Everyone's like, oh, yeah, I'm tracking this, I'm tracking that. I don't care what you're tracking. I want to know what's ranking. Even if you have no idea why it's ranking and it shouldn't be ranking at all, I want to know why it's ranking. So you can export all of the keywords that you have rankings for out of one of those tools. You can export it as a spreadsheet. Then you can upload it into the AI tool that you're using and say, I would like to know. I would like to know what keywords I have that are ranking on page. On pages two to three. I want to know what the keywords are and I want to know what the lift in traffic would be if I were to improve all of those rankings to page one. It will figure that out for you and it will tell you exactly the lift that you'll get. And then you'll have a list of all of these articles and the keywords they're ranking for to go and rework to improve those so that they rank better.

That's awesome.

You can do that. And you could say things like, of. Of all these keyword rankings I have from one all the way to whatever it is you have, how many of these are for the same destination URL? How many of these key. How many are the same keyword with different URLs? If you do same keyword different URLs. You will then know what is the top ranking. You know, this article is top ranking. This one's on page four. But you can redirect page four up to page one and make page one stronger. Does that make sense?

Yeah, for sure. That's great. And again, it's like kinds of stuff.

You can do with that.

Yeah, it's that large set of information and feeding that in and asking questions about that information. As opposed to five years ago we would have looked through or we probably wouldn't have. I wouldn't have, you know, looked through it, tried to make sense of it. Or you hire an analyst who's doing that and giving you, hiring you.

That's what I would do.

Yeah.

Stuff is stuff I would. So I would do audits and I charge a lot of money to do an audit. And like, oh, why is it so expensive? Because I have to download all of your information, learn your business, basically. And then I sit and I stare at spreadsheets and I stare at the data and like, what can I do to make this better? And a lot of it is just looking for those patterns that I eventually got quicker at identifying. But now that I know to ask, AI can just go and find them because it doesn't need to flip through pages of documents, it just goes and it knows what's going on. So it's. Yeah, it's super handy and it's very time saving. But you have to be able to articulate, you have to know the question, know what you're trying to get at and be able to articulate that in a way that's going to produce the output that you're, you're desirous of.

Yep, that's great. And that's where it's such a great tool to accompany an expert. Because now somebody like you, if you remove the lift of, you know, the looking through a document or a spreadsheet and you can just get to the question, man, that's an incredible time saver for creators. We need to either know what those questions are, work with an expert who has understanding of those questions, or work with the tools that have those kind of features built in. And so they're kind of watching out for us, like they're aware of that and making decisions or suggestions based on kind of the awareness with it. So that's great. Here's a question that somebody's asking just about voice as they are thinking about AI. So how can AI help me optimize recipe content for both search engines and readers without losing My voice and storytelling style. And maybe a follow up question to that, with some of the generative content that Yoast is doing, is it ingesting the existing content within the site itself that you know of for, like, writing style?

No, but it does look at what you've got on the page.

Sure. So it has that contextual awareness.

It has that contextual awareness, but only. Only within the. The page that you're on right now. So it's not looking. It's not looking at the. The total. Your total body of work. Not that that's not something that we would love to incorporate and may or may not be on the roadmap, which I'm now the. Right now, what you could do, you could take your. You would want to use an AI tool that has some memory available to it. There are some tools out there that don't have memory. I don't know that Grok really remembers things more than 24 hours out.

Grok being X's AI.

Grok is X's. Yeah. I mentioned ChatGPT a lot because that's what I happen to be using. You can set up projects within that and your project can have up to 20 documents that are like permanently available to it. So what I've done is I go through and I make a list or I make PDFs of previous things that I've written, and then I stitch all of those PDFs together into a binder in Adobe Acrobat, and then I can upload that binder as a single document in my project.

Massive single document.

Yeah, massive single document. So that means I still have 19 slots left. It really depends on how much work you want to give it. But you can give it all of your prior writings and say, look at all of my prior writings in my voice, in my writing style. Please help me prepare a draft. You probably don't have to say please. I just do that because.

Love it.

When our robot overlords take over, I.

Want them to look at me.

Please help me prepare a draft that maintains my voice. And please include a recipe for 4th of July hot dogs that pair well with this particular wine, you know, for example. And it will do. It'll do that. I've written things before and said, hey, can you just review this and tell me how this works? Based on my prior writings, can you look at this article and based on my prior writings, can you recommend things that I've written before that I could reference back to from this new piece? You know, once it's got that body of information to work from. It's really good at preserving your voice and reminding you of some of the amazing things that you've written before that you might not even remember you wrote. I go back sometimes and I'm like, I wrote that. I wrote that. Like, that was good. Yeah, I don't even remember doing that. That was really good.

Yeah. So I've just started probably within the last month building out some custom GPTs and some projects as well, have experimented with that. One of the ways I had a conversation with a creator, his name is Alex from a Couple Cooks on the podcast. And he was talking about how he created, I think it was a custom GPT with instructions around how he wants a recipe to be displayed. Like, for instance, the ingredients should show up in the order that they are talked about in the instructions. And now what he does is before he publishes a recipe, he runs it through that custom GPT just to double check to make sure that that was structured in a way that he wants it to for his site. And so there's all of these different really creative ways that you can use those projects or this custom GPTs. And to your point, specifically with this, you can have it understand your voice and then you can go back to what you were talking about before, which is being that writing partner to get you something that kind of gets you there. But maybe isn't the thing that you take and press, publish on, or maybe it's taking a post that you have and it's helping you have a custom GPT that has, you know, Instagram description, a Facebook description, it's something that you share on Pinterest and it has opinions that you've given it on how to create and craft all of those. And again, you still want to be the expert in the loop. You still want to tweak and adjust and change, but if it can shortcut some of those things that would have taken you a lot of time, it can be a huge time saver. So great action item for anybody listening. Check out projects within ChatGPT and or custom GPTs is kind of a way that you can create some of these projects on your own.

Yeah, the custom GPTs, I found that they can be a little bit less, less personalized because they're, they're open to the public, really. Sure, other people can come in and use them, but in those projects, projects, it's very, it's very tuned in to you and all of your interactions with it. And the more you, you interact with it, the more it knows about you and the more it gets to understand your likes and your dislikes and, and your quirks, the things that, that make your voice, your voice cool.

That's great. We're continuing on here. If anybody has any last questions that they want to make sure that we get to. We should be able to get through most of the ones that we have, but also would love to hear if there's maybe anything that you've thought of as we've been talking through these, that we could answer as we go through these last handful of questions here. This person is asking what are the most effective AI tools or strategies for keyword research? So if somebody's trying to ideate, you know, what recipes they could create or for our truck parts person, like what, you know, content they could create, is there an AI tool that would help with that? And my guess is there probably isn't one that also has understanding around search volume. So maybe those are kind of two different things. But what are your thoughts on that?

That's really a thing that I would use, that technique I described earlier, where I would export all of the existing rankings and I would, I would really target things that I've already got. I've already got a ranking for. But the ranking isn't great because I know that I can get traction. I know I've got content that supports it, which means if I'm already on page three, it's, I've got a real good shot at taking that particular thing and moving it up if I wanted to. I mean, if you're looking for the problem with long tail, it's not a problem. Long tail is long tail because you're not going to get a ton of traffic for it. It's not a thing that is going to have incredibly high volumes. So you're probably not going to find that in a recommendation because the recommendations tend to focus on things with high volume. There are businesses where they're never going to find keywords because the volume for the things that they sell is just so low, it's not going to register on those tools. But if they sell one of those things, they'll make $2 million. So some of that is a function of knowing your business. I think it's more important to explore the build a Persona of the kind of person who is going to either interact with your site, search for your site, or need your product. So at least with the truck parts, those are products, we can identify who's going to buy those products, what kinds of things might cause them to search, and, and then we understand how they Search for things and we build out articles that speak to them in their voice. So for recipes, most of your monetization is going to be just people coming to the site. So you're just looking for eyeballs. So let's think about the people that are going to be cooking this particular recipe. What do we know about that person? We know they're willing to cook. That's good. We know that. Let's say it's hot dogs. If it's hot dogs, we know that they either have an appreciation for wholesome American cooking or they're not very fancy, or maybe they have lots of kids, or maybe they're feeding big groups of people. If you develop Personas like that and then give that to the AI and say, I need to come up with things that these kinds of people might be interested in and I haven't written about them before, so I don't have any existing rankings for that. It will, it will be good at coming up with. If I were this person, these are the kinds of things I might be searching for. And then you can use that to. It's not going to give you volumes. It's not going to have volumes. And if it does give you volumes, it's making them up. So don't trust them. Sure, yeah, I would take that list. I would take that list though. And then if you really wanted information about that list, you can go to one of the tools that does like the bulk keyword analysis and give it that list and say, now please tell me what the volumes are around this and do it that way. But I would not, I wouldn't trust AI just to randomly go retrieve data points unless you're feeding it a spreadsheet that has the data points in it. Because if you ask them to just create or retrieve those data points, you will get bad data points anyway. That's, that's how I would do that.

Yep. And, and so it's almost this two part piece. You have the brainstorming and I could almost view it as like three parts. You have the brainstorming and previously you might do that and still might do that as a food creator, at least by jotting down ideas in a note. You might get, go to a restaurant and be inspired. You might have a Persona, maybe you have a certain dietary restriction. And so you kind of build, you could even build it as a project within ChatGPT. And what you're doing is you're trying to come up with like the raw material. Okay, what is that information that I'm going to Create content about. What are the recipes I'm going to create content about? And then you can go over to one of these tools, semrush hrefs, and say, here's the ideas of kind of the focus topics I'm thinking of. Help me understand how much are people searching for this. It doesn't mean you can't create a piece of content if nobody's searching for it. You just need to understand people probably aren't going to discover it through search if nobody's searching for it. They could discover it through social, through Pinterest. There's other discoverability platforms, but it might not be search. So then you have the ideas, you've created those you've understood search volume, and then you go into the actual content creation process. That's where a tool like Yoast is really great. It lives within WordPress and it starts to advise you around, okay, if this is your keyword, if this is the thing that you've decided to focus on, here are some considerations. Here's the way that this content should be. You know, it's nudges. It's not like strong opinions, it's nudges for you as the creator or even like reminders. You talked about that kind of green light example. Hey, here are some things that we know because we work with an expert like Carolyn who has informed how the product will be shaped, which informs how you shape the content. Here are some things that we know. I'm talking about we as like Yoast, around how you should be creating this piece of content. And so you can kind of see start to finish, how that looks as a content creator. And in each step along the way we have these little AI agents who are now kind of guiding and they're kind of like these Sherpas for us. They aren't climbing the mountain. To your point before, it's not like they are going to do all the work. We're not like jumping on their back and they're bringing up to the top of Everest, but they are guiding us along the way. And each step has its own purpose, its own kind of AI agent that is shaping and helping. It's almost like a modern version of like, I think of spell check as like the most basic, you know, old school example of digital Sherpa. And now they're just getting so smart and so integrated and have these like niche understandings of whatever vertical we're, we're working in. So yeah, anything you'd add to that.

I know that it's a niche understanding of Our vertical is so much as, it's just, it's, it understood, it derives its understanding from the context of what we've written.

Sure. Yeah.

So if you find that it's getting, it's got weird results or a weird understanding of what you're writing about, you've probably not done a very good job of contextualizing your concept. So it's a mirror. And back to your point about the Sherpa, I think that's a great analogy. It's absolutely not going to carry you up the mountain, but it's going to walk next to you, you know, and cheer you on and kind of hold your hand if you need it, but you actually have to put one foot in front of the other and do the work.

That's great. I saw this thing from Sam Altman, who's the CEO of OpenAI, and he talked about different generations and how they are using ChatGPT. And he talked about, you know, baby boomers using it essentially like Google, like a search tool, millennials using it, kind of like a life coach. But then he talked about Gen Z using it as an operating system. And that's kind of what I hear you talking about, is like, you are building your operating system for how you create content, how you run your business, and you're helping it understand how to, you know, work day to day. And so that within ChatGPT, but then you also have these other instances like with Yoast, where it's showing up within the tool itself and that Sherpa example guiding you and kind of helping to shape what you're doing. I have one more. Yeah, finish that thought. And then.

Well, I was just going to say, you know, one of the things that is nice about the Yoast plugin at this point in time is because so much is moving to, you know, the LLMs are increasing that they're growing their market share pretty incredibly month over month. And so much so that Google's actually like losing market share, which they haven't done, like, ever. Right.

Like dropped below 90% market share for the first time.

I know, it's just that's not that much. If you look at the chart, like, yeah, but that's huge. And when you're talking about trillions of queries a day, a 3% drop is. Your brain cannot wrap around how much, how, how much that is. But what I was going to say was, in terms of writing your content now, to be ingested by the LLMs and to be picked up and cited by those AI driven searches that the boomers are doing. Yoast is useful in that the recommendations are compatible with having your content be structured in a way that the AI really, really likes, which means it's going to be easier for the LMS to come in and do the things that they do to understand, which is they tokenize and repackage the content. So Yoast is telling you to make your sentences a little bit shorter and make sure you've got only so much text between subheadings and make sure that you're using a specific range of reading ease scores. And all of these things are very compatible and appetizing, even to the LLMs where they want to come in and munch on your content versus someone else's that maybe is isn't adhering to those guidelines as well. So without you having to go out and learn all that stuff, you've got this partner within WordPress that's nudging you and kind of enticing you with those green lights to just your content a little bit to make it as appetizing as possible for those LLMs to come in and eat up.

Yep. And part of what we in. Well, yeah, I'll finish this thought and then we'll have Emily share some of the information about Yoast. Part of what we try and remind people of is, like, what our goal is as content creators isn't to just show up on Google. That's important. You want that. What our goal is is to be discovered, and we want to be discovered on the platforms that people are searching. And right now, the reason we talk about Google all the time is because that's where everybody is searching. That will change, as we've talked about. And so what we need to do is we need to change if people are showing up in a different place and searching in a different place. Our goal as creators is to figure out how do we show up in that place with the content that we are creating so we can be referenced, so there can be links there, so people can start to come to our content via ChatGPT as well as Google, as well as, you know, Pinterest and all the other places as well. The great thing. This is what I was gonna say before. The great thing about what you are doing, what Yoast is doing is like, it is this bonkers offer where you get all of the stuff that we've talked about. And then plus, there's a. For anybody tuning in here, there's a discount code. Emily shared that in the chat here. Food blogger. 10 for 10% off Yoast Premium. It's an easy relationship for us because it's one of the tools that we are like, you start a site and you need to install this and the premium version is 100% worth it. And so it's super easy for us to say, look into installing this. There's a free version, but the premium version is going to get you such an obvious return on, on the investment. Especially when you look at other software tools like, you know, convertkit or Kit. You know, people pay thousands of dollars which is important to have email, but it's like, man, a very affordable tool for what it does and how important, especially in our industry search traffic is. And so there's a link there. Be sure to check that out. Anything that you'd point out about the plugin for people who maybe haven't upgraded to premium or haven't even installed Yoast at all that they should be aware of and looking for as they start to use it more?

Well, one thing is in order to get premium, you have to have free first. So if you don't have it at.

All, easy first step, free is free.

So please just go install it and give it a try. Whether you have free or Premium, it's very important that you go through all the settings and make sure that you've completely filled everything out. There is a first time configurator in the back end that will be started, started, but there's so many more settings beyond that. If you're not setting, if you're not configuring everything wholly, you're, you're missing out on so much of the functionality. I, yeah, I think that's, that's the biggest takeaway because I, I find people all the time. Like I installed it and it's not working. It's like, and then I look, I'm like, you really didn't fill it out. Like it's not configured.

You have like buying bricks to build a building and then it's like you got to put them together.

Yeah, yeah, it's like, yeah. So that would be big thing number one. Big thing number two would be pay attention to those green lights. You know, I usually tell people that the world's not going to end if not every light is green. But you should at least make sure that the lights aren't red. And the greener they are, you know, honestly, the easier it is at the very least for those new LLM bots to come through and ingest your content. So nothing guarantees anyone a number one place. Anyone who promises that is a liar. And I would Never promise that to you, but I will say that what the tool does is the tool puts you in a good position. And if you're creative and if your content is worthy, we will help make sure that it's structured in a way that those robots see that your content is, in fact, worthy.

Yeah, it takes both of those things. The content has to be great. But if great content doesn't have the technical components of good SEO, it's going to suffer. You could have great technical elements of your content, but if the actual content itself isn't good, it's also going to suffer. And so I think a lot of people showing up today understand what it takes to create good content or good content creators. And that's why it's nice to have a tool that lifts the burden of some of the technical considerations that are also required and kind of table stakes if you want to show up. This was great, Carolyn. Super appreciate your time and your decades of expertise. Sharing best practices. Where are you showing up on the web like you are publishing a lot of content? You are sharing best practices in multiple different places. If people want to follow along with you and what you're up to, where can they do that?

Well, I have a regular monthly column at Search Engine Land. I have a column at Search Engine Journal. I right on yoast.com and if you're interested, you can find me either like on LinkedIn or on X as Seashell. C S H E L C for Carolyn. S H E L for Shelby. It's a, it's a UNIX joke. So I'll.

So if, you know, you know, if.

If you're, if you're that much of a nerd, then yeah, you're my people.

Love that. Super helpful to talk through this stuff, Carolyn. I learned a lot. I know other folks did as well and appreciate Yoast and the team that helped to pull this off. And also Emily on the Food Blogger Pro team who is providing links along the way. So some people saying thanks, Kelly's saying thanks, and Martin as well. Super interesting and encouraging, which is always great to have both of those things. And a thank you from Mary. So lots of folks saying thank you tuning in here and really appreciate it, Carolyn. So if anybody has any questions, you can follow up with our team. We'll do whatever we can to help you out. And this is a great last comment by Carol. She says, love my Yoast, which is a great way. Which is a great way to end it. All right, thanks everybody. Bye, bye, bye, bye.