#104: SEO Questions Answered, Blogging, and The Right Way To Use AI For SEO

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1, 2, 3, 4. Exit, exit.

Exit.

All right, it's the top of the hour. We're going to start this thing off. Don't call the webinar. It's a live session. We're here. Dave is here. That's me. Mitch is here. Betsy is here. Good to see people already in the chat. I love this. We had 721 people registered for this. So I hope if you can hear me wherever you're listening right now, this could be in the future. You're listening to this on the Exit 5 podcast. But if you're here on the day that we're doing this live, go into the chat and write in where. Like, where are you coming in? Where are you listening from today? So I'm Dave in Vermont. It's my favorite part. See where everybody's coming around from? Oregon, Boise, Idaho, D.C. colorado, Dallas, Texas, the Bay Area, Romania, New York City, Ontario, Dallas, Arlington, Charlotte, London, Phoenix, Buenos Aires, Tennessee, Uruguay, Alabama, Louisiana, Brazil. See, this is where this is global. How cool is this? This never gets old for me, people. Every time, every webinar, I just at the beginning, I love it. It's real. People are legitimately here from all over the world to hang out with us and chat, which is awesome. I got two great guests and this topic always seems to draw a crowd. For what reason we can discuss in a couple minutes, but I'm just gonna give you an overview. Lay the land. We're gonna talk for about an hour. There's no slides here. There's no presenting. We're here to hang out, chat, answer your questions. But for me, the best part is there's hundreds of other marketers that are here. So besides us, you all are here because you work in marketing, you're in and around content and SEO. Please have. Have conversations in the chat. Help each other out. If you hear a question and you have a way that you did it inside of your company, drop that into the chat. And the chat is often the best part of this. We're here to take your questions. I want to prioritize the time today for people who are here, and we want to help you get smarter, get unstuck, settle a debate with your boss, whatever it is. So use the Q and A. Go in the Q and A. Put your questions in there. Do that now. Fill that up with questions. Now. Right now you can see the chat, but if you go on the top, there's Q and A, and then I can sort them by upvotes. So if you see questions that you like or you want to plus one, go and upvote them, and then I can handle that. Otherwise, we're going to get into things again. I want to prioritize your questions, but we're going to kick things off. So first, let's just do go around the horn. Quick intro. Betsy, start with you. Who are you? What do you do for work, and what is your background in SEO?

Betsy?

Hey, everybody, I'm Betsy Koleba. I work at DemandWell. We are an SEO platform. I head up the customer growth team there, which is sort of a combination between services and success to help our customers. I also manage a book of business on my own as well because I like to stay close to the work. My background, I've been doing digital marketing and SEO for about 16, 17 years, I think, at this point in time. So I've just dedicated my career to it started in SEO, have kind of moved through another, a number of different digital channels throughout my career, and then came back full circle to really get back into SEO with one of the things that I love. So that's me. Nice to meet everybody. Excited to do this today.

Before I kick it over to Mitch. What is your biggest or one of your biggest pet peeves or myths about SEO?

Oh, man, that is a good question. That it is not about the audience, that it's just about the robots.

Ooh, interesting. So people believe that you just write for a robot, but there's more about content and what it takes to rank for content than some magic algorithm?

Yeah, I mean, I think that they, you know, they think let's lean in entirely to the robots, and then therefore, a lot of people don't want to do it because they think that good marketing should be about the audience. And I think that good SEO is also very much so about the audience.

And is that because like, is there something that actually fact that that's weighted into Google's algorithm given like how people read and interact with content? Or are you just saying as actual person, like cater to some emotional response from your content?

Yeah, I think that good SEO is always going to start with the audience because you're going to start with what are they searching, what are they looking for, what questions are they asking, what resources are they looking for? It's not what Google's looking for. Google is going to serve up that content to users. And so it is another marketing tactic that should also start with the people.

Awesome. All right, Mitch. Who are you, sir?

Hi, I'm Mitch. I work at the Manual as well. And similar to Betsy, I am more in the service and customer success side. So I have the bulk of our customers working kind of with them on a daily monthly basis, getting them set up in our platform, but also all the, you know, keyword research services, kind of the day to day that goes along with SEO. I've been doing this, oh man, since what, 2006, so that's over 15 years or so. Started in public relations, so was doing more communication and writing and PR and transitioned into the paid side of digital and eventually into just demand gen in general. Betsy and I crossed paths at an agency a long time ago and we're back together with a few others that we used to work with there. And that's where we really learned a lot with, you know, SEO and been doing that now for about 10 years as a more of a specialty. So I'm in Indianapolis as well. I think I saw one other Hoosier in the chat. So welcome from Indiana.

Is everyone from Indiana a Hoosier? Like, is that a confirmed thing?

Correct. Yeah, and it's a good thing.

So it's not. That's not like the mascot of the university. That's like a.

It's both.

Yeah, yeah, both.

And what is a Hoosier?

No one knows.

It's amazing.

It's just a person from Indiana. That's all we know.

No one knows.

This is great. All right.

The Q and A has already absolutely blown up. And these are the two questions that I would have put in there if I wrote. The first one is number one and we'll get to both of them. Number one is about blogs and number two is about AI, which I think that's the 8020 of like what I see at least people asking about SEO and I'm not an SEO expert. I pretend to be one. I think I know everything about marketing, which is not true. It's a joke. For those who don't know me, I'm more humble than I come off on a microphone. But those are the two things that I see, like, what's the value in a blog? So let's. This is a great one. I'm going to share this up on the screen. And let's start by this first. This is from Joanna. How relevant are blogs in 2023 to ranking in search results? And I'm just going to add some color to this and then we can hear your opinions and hop in. But I think, you know, 10, 15 years ago with the rise of digital marketing came, you know, inbound marketing and this idea of you creating content to generate search traffic and bring people into your website. Back then in the early to mid 2000s, you could basically win by existing, right. If you had a blog on a topic, it was easy to build authority and the, the advantage was to those who were there early decade later, 15 years later, all that stuff exploded. There is more content than we can even handle on the Internet. Right. So how many people are still going to read blogs? Plus you have this other. And then by the way, there's more competition than ever. So it's very hard to rank for a particular term like B2B marketing. Back in the early days of HubSpot, you could win by having the only B2B marketing blog today. That's too broad of a thing. Right? So we have that, we have the rise of competition. There's 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 competitors in any industry and the competitive nature of all these companies and people trying to create content for the same keywords. Right. And then we have this other trend which is there's now video, short form video content. More people are getting answers and informations from information, from TikTok, from YouTube shorts, from Reels. Oh, and I just thought of another thing as I'm talking about this lot and there's AI, there's chat, GPT and tools like that giving people answers. So, Mitch and Betsy, where does a blogging fit in before we even talk about SEO? Where does blogging fit in in somebody's marketing strategy today?

Yeah, I think when we're talking about myths and things like that, I think even just the word blog starts to kind of irk me a little because some people think that's the only way, especially for B2B companies or to produce content. Right. In terms of, you know, words on Pages that can be discovered via search. It's not the only way, but it was kind of the first way at least to say, I'm a company. How do I actually produce my thoughts and my information in a way that people can find that and read it. But really what a blog is is just a series of pages that interlink well and have timestamps and have authors to them, which is a good way to display content. But it's not the only way. Whether it's a resource library, a collection of articles, pillar pages, all of that, I would say are becoming, I think, more relevant when it comes to search results. They're more evergreen, they're more high level topics, kind of intros to things. And it really depends on the keyword. If the keyword is how do I do something, you probably need a blog that's more content forward. If the keyword is more of a category like SEO software, you're probably not going to rank very well with that blog about SEO software. You probably need more of a pillar page, long form piece of content about SEO software. But it's still very much relevant. There's so many ways to get information out there, right? A podcast with a transcript, a YouTube video. All of this, I think, and I don't have a lot of evidence for this, but this is my thought on this is it's leading to more Googling. It's still part of the mix, but.

Yeah, the thought is, is it more like. Forget that it's called blog. Like is written content still relevant? Yes. Isn't that the kind of crux of it? And whether you have it go to our blog or not, like wouldn't the better strategy, like for me for Exit 5. Right. I don't need necessarily an Exit 5 blog, but it would be smart to have exit5.com articles/every now and then or whatever. We have a content strategy. We're writing content to bring people and that strategy is still relevant, right, Betsy?

Yeah, I absolutely think so. I was going to say the way I think of it is about different content types. And blogs are definitely a part of your SEO strategy. And you know, Mitch mentioned too, lots of different other content types. I think it's about pairing the search term and the intent of what the user is searching for with an experience that makes the most sense. So if someone is searching for a question, we should give them an answer. Maybe consider even putting together an FAQ section inside of your site so that you can answer lots of questions. If someone's asking for a definition of something Give them a definition and maybe consider putting a glossary together inside of your site so that you can answer a lot of definitions. If someone's asking about a software or a platform or a system, give them a demo they're already ready to look for. They're already looking for those solutions for them. So I think it's about making sure that, you know, if someone's looking for a guide, give them a guide. If someone's asking a question, give them an answer. If someone's looking for a demo, give them a demo. And the content type then is just sort of aligned with that. And you really can bulk your whole strategy out to have a blog section that is relevant to lots of different topics and FAQ section that answers questions specifically in glossary, etc. Etc.

I like that because that that means you can basically that pushes you to create a strategy. So it's not necessarily like, go write a blog post about X, it's which topics and keywords do we as a company care about attracting? Do we want to attract people from? And then it seems like, given the rise of all this other content, you might write an article about it, you might make a short video about it, you might, whatever the list is. Is that how you would think about it? Just from like a marketing strategy standpoint? Forget, like, tactically, like, this person's on our team and they own the blog and they're writing articles. But like, basically 75% of our audience at Exit 5 is marketing manager or above that. And so most people are here because they want to think about this strategically. They're not the SEO tactician. They might hire that person. So just talking to the marketing managers, you know, out there, is that how you'd think about, like, how do you articulate where SEO fits in that strategy?

Yeah, I think it's kind of what we were saying earlier about the written piece. Right. If you had a blog or if you had a podcast and all you did was create those podcasts and distribute them through the podcast channels, maybe you put an episode page together, but all that's on that page is just a link to the audio file. Those pages are not going to be discovered via search. There's not enough written content for Google and other search engines to crawl and consume and really, truly understand the value of that page and what it brings. It has to have that written content throughout your site on multiple pages to help inform Google what the page is about. So to me, I think Google and Organic as part of the. Your overall marketing strategy is so much about I like the word discoverability. If you're creating content and you have to constantly push it to your audience, whether that's on social, on other channels, paid distribution, then you're only doing one side of that, which is paying lots to push and push and push and push in front of the audience, instead of creating assets that also would pull somebody in, in that moment of truth when they're actually searching for that information. And so you have to consider that as a major piece of how your audience is going through their emotions and going through their research. It's not just they're scrolling through their social feeds and will have to be interrupted with what you're talking about. You also have to be there when they're doing that search and can discover what you have.

I have a question, Dave from Vermont here in the audience, with that in mind, where would you. For people that are listening a lot, a lot of people right now are going through planning and thinking about 2024, right. And thinking about strategies. If you were a newer company, a startup, or maybe a company coming into a space, where do you recommend getting started? From a keyword standpoint? We want to bring in inbound traffic, right. Given that there is so much competition, and maybe this is my, you know, uneducated opinion on this, but there's so much content, like to just come in and think about what are these big massive keywords that you're trying to rank for that are so competitive? Like, how does somebody get started? I see a lot of management teams get wrapped around the handle on, like, these are the big, you know, we only want these keywords that have this massive search volume because we're going to convert some percentage of that. But it just seems so unattainable to go and try to rank, like, where do you start and how do you balance what's too small versus what's too big? You know, I'm trying to say by.

That, yeah, I think I would always start with understanding what pains and problems that you solve that your business solves for someone. So. Because that's really what people go to search engines for is they go, they've got a problem, they've got a pain and they're looking for something to help them with them. Whether it's asking the question the pain is, I don't know the answer to this question, or if they're looking for a solution that's going to help them do X, Y and Z, whatever your brand does, starting with those things, that's really where good humid research, I think, starts is Just understanding what you solve for a user, because those are the questions and those are the things that they're going to be searching for. And I think that it's hard to balance what to focus on first and which one to go for. I think that that's one of the biggest things that a lot of our customers struggle with is where do we begin? You know, we've got all these keywords, we've got all this stuff that we need to focus on. And I think it's less about understanding what, you know, what is a good keyword or what is a good search volume to go after. And it's more about, is this topic an area that I want to win for? Is this space what I want to own? Google's looking for depth and breadth in topic areas. And so building that strategy around, you know, solving for a pain and a problem, building that topic out in your site is going to be rewarded by Google. And I think, you know, you're going to want to look at search volume on a bell curve and say, is the juice worth the squeeze on this one? If I put too much effort into it, is something going to happen or is there too much competition? I mean, I think those are definitely things to think through, but I think ultimately it's more around. Let's create really, really good content around a single topic on multiple different keywords that we might want to go after and combine it all together to give Google that depth and breadth that they're looking for.

Yeah, I think the clustering is key. Right. I'm going to use like two analogies. One I'm going to steal from you, Betsy, but one is we always call it the keyword universe because at first you really want to go out and just see all the keywords that could possibly go apply to you. And then the clusters are kind of the galaxies of related pieces. Right. So there's SEO software and then there's keyword research, and then there's technical audits, and then there's content strategy and then there's production. Those would be like the galaxies in the SEO universe. And so if we were demand, well, thinking, all right, what are we going to go after? It's better for us to focus on one of those galaxies at a time and saying, what's the content? What's all the pages? What are the blogs? What are the videos I need to create to establish relevancy and answer as many questions as I can within that galaxy. Versus this is where Betsy, I like this one because she says, if you're trying to clear a forest, you don't go hit every single tree once with an axe. You keep hitting the same tree until it falls down and you move on to the next one and move on to the next one. I think it's difficult to try to do all of those galaxies at once and they're kind of spreading yourself thin from a content and relevancy standpoint versus tackling those things one at a time tends to be what we see not only be more effective but just helps you from going crazy on like what should I do next? In the SEO world, how do you.

Think about measurement of do you all or have you all worked with, I think on the company side, like working with a company who wants a high volume of traffic.

Right.

I'll use exit 5 again. Simple business. We want to get people to the website, get them to sign up for a low ticket product. They can do that by after reading an article they sign up. It's easy to measure SEO's impact in that sense, right? We can look at organic traffic, growing people reading our content and then signing up for our newsletter, subscribing to the community. How do you think about this in the enterprise? Or if you have more of an outbound motion or if it's more of a considered purchase, right? We're selling. I'm the CMO of a B2B SaaS company. The product we sell is 100 grand plus a year. It's not like someone's just going to read an article and then buy our product. Right? So help people listen and get smarter on how you might think about measuring SEO in that sense and articulating the value of SEO and organic content to the CEO, to the cmo, to whoever it might be.

I think the principles are the same. I think a big part of it is just understanding that SEO is something that can work for smaller businesses and midsize and enterprise and that the best practices and the principles are the same. I think that if you are someone who is really trying to drive an inbound approach to your software or your system, specifically your blog posts, like you said Dave, you know, those people aren't going to read an article or a blog and go, oh, I'm just now I want this solution. I think there's still something there for them to create those SEO pages that are more conversion specific, that have more of those conversion elements inside of them so that they can draw in, you know, searchers who are searching for platform, system, tool, app, etc. To their site and offer them a demo I think that if anyone at any time is at that stage of the buying cycle and they're already in the consideration stage, if you become someone on that list, you're not going to become it because they read a blog or an article. You're going to become it because they recognize what you've done and they've perused your website and they've, you know, there's multiple touches throughout the entire experience and SEO is going to be one of them. Likely. You know that inbound search. But I mean, the principles across the board are going to be the same. You want to create really, really great content around what pains and problems that you solve for your audience and help them understand that you're the right choice for them.

Yeah, I think. And if you're looking to measure something, it kind of goes back to those galaxies or those clusters. Right. It's all about understanding whether your audience is an enterprise audience and you know, you're attacking maybe a specific part of the funnel or a specific area of pain that you're experiencing as a business. Maybe people are really misunderstood a certain topic or something like that that you really want to educate the audience on. You have to set that like here are the keywords that I want to go after. Therefore, I'm going to create these pieces of content and measure impressions, traffic and conversions and activities and engagements that happen from that new content that you've built. So I still think like the more you can say these are the keywords I'm going to try to influence and be more discovered from those keywords might be a different set depending on the business you offer. If it's something that is more low funnel, then you might measure the results of that differently. If I'm trying to get on page one for those high intent keywords, you probably need to see some actual leads come in from that. Where if it's what is how to things like that might have a different goal where I'm just trying to get them to go to that page and then visit my blog or then visit and download a piece of content or a case study, something like that. So having different goals depending on the intent of the keywords that you're going after.

Very nice. And they're still humans, ideally, they're still going to research stuff, I hope.

Yep.

Right. Oh, Lachey has entered the chat. High intent, of course. Hi, Lachey.

All right.

I only did that because I wanted to extend this 25 minutes before I asked the inevitable question about SEO and AI, you each had mentioned this over email in our prep too. Let's use this as a jumping off point to talk about all things here. So Steve wants to know how are you using AI for SEO and content strategy and what tools specifically? I know you have some thoughts on content and process and workflows. So please, what should we be thinking about?

I think it's truly think about your workflow without AI and just think about the information you need to make decisions, the data that would help you, the things that would help inform that information. Right?

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Workflow is always going to be somewhat the same, or at least, you know, the hundred customers we work with. It's kind of that same principle. You have to know the keywords you're going after and why. That is kind of that foundation. You're putting them into groups and saying, you know, here's how this is going to work. You have a content strategy to go after those in the form of blogs, different pieces of content, and you're deciding that, putting that together and then there's the execution of that. So if I say I need 50 pages, how am I going to actually write and create and optimize and publish and put together design those things on my site, where is it going to live, all of that. And the more you can kind of rinse and repeat and go through those things and evaluate how those things are working, there's a whole set of tasks and tools and data that's needed to make those things easier, better, faster and more informed. You can do it without any tools and any AI at all. Right. You could just come up with what you think people are searching for and use that as a keyword and write a blog and see how it goes. You could do it all yourself or you could use tools like basic keyword research tools, SEMrush, see what your competitors are ranking for. You can use Google AdWords to find the keywords and the volumes, all that data, how they put together. You can use AI to tell you keywords, even just chatgpt before we'll give you a list of terms. So there's a set of tools there to kind of put that list together that you can then comb through and organize. But I think the biggest thing with AI especially that's been more game changing recently is just the ability to produce actual text. It's hard to say, write me a blog and include these 50 keywords to a human writer. It's hard for them to kind of work those in. But I think with AI it just can do those much more seamlessly and much quicker and much faster and so cheaply with tools like Jasper and, you know, ChatGPT, all of those things to like rewrite, re optimize, include keywords, talk about this, make that a bolded list. That actual production of copy, I think is one of the biggest game changers that allows people to do more of the volume that's necessary from a text perspective to start ranking well. So I think AI can be used all throughout that process. You can fully look through that entire workflow and just really map that out and say, what's a human doing now? Or what am I doing manually now that maybe AI can help assist me with? Even if it's something just like writing title tags and meta descriptions, you can give it an article and say, write me an optimized title tag and meta description to target this keyword, just straight. ChatGPT4 is amazing at that. If it's more of a blog post, long form content, you might need a more sophisticated tool that kind of knows who you are and your brand and things like that. But that's a big thing, and that's something we're working on with the Manwell too, is to help not only just with the production of that copy, but how do you cluster together keywords correctly? How do you put that data together from all those different data sources, swirl that around and say, based on who you are, based on what you've told us about you, here are the keywords that you need to go after. Here are the campaigns you should focus on. So those things are going to get more and more better over time and more and more useful to help throughout the whole process, even when it comes to publishing, making technical changes. That's kind of another sphere to think about too.

Yeah, I was going to mention that I think in my mind, at least initially with AI, and it's starting to just really gain traction for SEO in the SEO world and in the content space. I think I automatically went to, okay, well this is going to be a game changer for everybody's workflow. We're constantly telling customers you need to create a ton of content and it can be incredibly overwhelming. And I'm like, well, this is going to solve that. They're going to be able to create lots of content a lot faster. And that is true. We are able to create lots of content faster now because of that. If you just publish AI written content, then I think there's some editing that needs to go along with it. I think we need to look at it, make sure that it meets what we're looking for from a brand standpoint. We need to polish it, edit it, and make sure that it's ready to go live instead of just generating content and publishing it. But one of the things I didn't think of, Mitch was kind of touching on this just now, is that I didn't think about all the other ways that SEO is going to benefit from the use of AI outside of just copywriting. And Mitch mentioned that one of the things that we just launched recently as a feature with demand, well, is the ability to take people's information, your information as a brand, and put who your target audience is, what their pains and problems are, what the solutions are. Run that through AI plus SEO data and allow you to have keyword research that's clustered together in a way that makes sense for your business, makes sense for your strategy, and makes sense for the type of content that you should be creating across your website. Yeah, and those are things I just didn't think as much about. And I think that more and more of those tools are going to be built in a way that's going to help us do SEO faster, better than just copywriting.

I think everybody's just gone into. I think it can be awesome and it will be awesome and there's lots of great use cases for AI. But man, if we haven't already like ruined it from marketing standpoint because, like, everyone has it now, right? And so like, if everyone's creating the same, like, part of my language, shitty copy for blog articles and emails and like, I see it, it's now in my LinkedIn comments. Like, I know when someone asked chat, GPT or whatever to like, write a comment for this post and like, what gets me excited about marketing is the creative problem solving, right? And the ability to think about ways to do that. And so like, I get worried about defaulting to letting AI create your content and write your articles and write your emails. And like, we're all humans, right?

We're.

This is not even a knock. We're humans, we're busy, we're lazy, we are moving fast, we got 20 different things to do. Shoot, I got to send this email, so I might as well let AI write it. Well, if it sounds like the same email that 15 other vendors are now sending, your email is now just going to get put in that pile. And so I think that can apply with written, you know, with all types of written content. But what you mentioned is, ah, now that's where these tools can be actually a superpower is like, let's use the way that they can aggregate all this information and serve you up relevant data so then you can go and act on something. I think if you're going to use AI as a robot to do your marketing, you're going to get left with the same, you know, kind of average results. And so I, I am like, look man, if a competitor of mine wants to use AI to write their copy right now, like it's great, let them. Because I think that my combination of writing ability, storytelling ability plus AI is going to beat you who just uses AI to pump out some generic content. Am I wrong? For sure?

Not at all. You're definitely hitting the nail on the head. I think, you know, it's like you have to edit it, you have to polish it, you have to make sure that it is aligned with your brand. It is a tool to help us work faster. It is not your marketer, you know, and I think that you have to think of it like that, like how can I utilize this new tools to make me run faster, be better and you know, be smarter with my strategies that I'm doing across all marketing channels. That does not just apply to SEO, that applies to all of your marketing tactics that you are potentially using AI for.

Yeah, even just augmenting existing content or pages that are performing and you know, seeing. Actually I could probably answer a lot more questions on this page that I'm not answering in this content. So rather than me write all those out even though they are generic, the fact that I already have my own thoughts and thought leadership on this page, but what I lack on this page is the stuff that's going to get this page to be more discoverable and more helpful. I'm going to use ChatGPT or Jasper or something to just build those three extra sections that I need to answer those three other questions that would make this more of a complete page. Because I already have the great video, I already have the great intro that I wrote. I already have like the bullet points that I've outlined. So it's just you can plug it into any different piece of that workflow and just make yourself kind of that perfect combination of human and, and robot.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean going back and looking at we're going to do an exercise like this on demand, well, website soon where we're going to look and see like what are our lowest performing pieces of content and what are ways that we can turn those into higher performing pieces of content? You know, I think we've always done that. That's always been part of the strategy to say this blog was written in 2015 and it's just not really done anything like nobody's really seen it. But the topic is good and I think it still is relevant to the questions people are asking. How can we elevate this piece and how can we elevate it fast? With the use of AI that can be done pretty quickly to take low performing content and turn it into higher performing content.

Do you all have any knowledge about how like what's happening with Google in particular with AI generated content? Do they have a way of detecting that? Does it have an impact on search rankings?

Yeah, they initially were with the helpful content update.

Very.

I mean they're always a little bit vague in how they come out with their statements to say like we want content that is written by people to help people. And then people interpreted that as don't write for AI, don't use AI to write. And then they came out a couple months later saying, actually we're totally fine with AI generated content as long as.

And they completely removed that.

And they completely removed that and said we're not looking for the difference and we're not marking something AI, non AI. We just want content that's helpful and good. Which again is a very vague thing for them to say. But you know, the AP News Network, I mean, people have been using AI for the last five, six years to write news stories and content and blogs. So it's not like this is obviously blowing up. More and more people are using AI than ever before. But it's been around and it's been ranking and there's nothing that says just because it's AI, we've detected it, it's this flag that's not going to rank, at least not in Google's, you know, hard algorithm. And we've definitely seen plenty of people write stuff with AI that ranks really well.

Yeah, I mean they're just looking for content that is relevant to what people are looking to get, you know, to get answered. What are their search queries? They're just, Google is just wanting to serve up good content. I say it all the time. Google's a business. If they stop serving up good content, no one's going to keep using it. And so they want to make sure that it's good. Good doesn't necessarily mean that a human wrote it. I think there's lots of good AI generated content that's out there today. And I think Google has made it very clear that they're okay with that as long as it's Relevant to the topic, as long as it's helpful to the customer or to, you know, to the searcher, then you're good.

All right, related to the Google algorithm stuff, this question is from Amir. What are the new Google algorithm updates meant to tackle? How is it affecting rankings? Do either of you two have any knowledge about this? If so, when was there an update? What's the latest kind of playing field look like?

Yeah, I mean, I'd have to look to see what some of the latest algorithm updates are. Mitch, you maybe. Maybe you know what more recent ones are.

There is no, there's no algorithm anymore. It's just make good. What was your line? Make content that people want. All right, thank you.

It was called the help. Yeah, it was called the helpful content update. That was earlier or later last year. But I think they have their core updates that they do these twice a year and it's always about search quality. They're really trying to go after spammers. They're always trying to tackle people that are abusing the algorithm. Spamming, repurposing site. That's the kind of a thing that AI has enabled that is bad, which is it can almost consume an entire. You can create a 10,000 page site overnight with. You almost could just like take Wikipedia, have it just be rewritten and republish it on another domain and then try to rank. So there's those types of things that are going on that I think Google has to really focus on and try to combat because now it's easier than ever before to just create, create, create, create. They need to dial it in on other signals like backlinks and so all of those things that they still look for quality, they're always just changing the dials when they do those types of core updates.

Yeah, I don't know that there's. To answer your question, Dave, about is it just we make good, you know, good content? It is. I think it's, you know, Google is back to my previous point. If it takes forever for your page to load, that's not a good experience for the user. Google's not going to reward you as much as if you had a site that loads all of your images really quickly and an experience that gives the user the content that they were searching for. If the content, if it's a bait and switch situation and you send people to a page and you went for that and then they bounced right off of that page and didn't get what they wanted, that's not a good experience. The ultimate goal with any content on your website. And I think Google, you know, like Mitch said, it's just about turning the levers and the dials. A lot of times when they make algorithm updates, they've really gotten to a place where they have told us, make it a really good experience, make it really good, relevant content and keep making sure that it's. You know, there are SEO things you have to do to make sure that it's connected with internal links and, you know, make sure that you're talking about the right things, the way people are searching them. So you've done good keyword research. There are things that you have to do like that to make sure that Google is paying attention to it. But ultimately, if you get Google to pay attention to you, it's because you've created an experience. Experience is going to be good for users.

Yeah, just make more memes and blog posts.

Yeah. The larger thing that's coming is really what Bing has done in their search engine. If Google is already testing that type of an experience, if that type of an experience and, well, not if, but when that type of experience gets rolled out as like the main part of how people use Google. It's not just a list of links to click, but an actual response generated by a language model or an AI bot with cited sources. And we're yet to see if you talk to some of the. Or see some of the other influencers on LinkedIn talking about this. Some of them are calling it. You know, probably the biggest change in search that's going to happen is if. If that user behavior changes from I go to Google to get my answer, not to actually click on something and get the answer there. If there's a big spike in that type of activity, that could change a lot for the type of traffic you'll get to your website, the type of content that you need to produce in terms of how do you get something cited versus actually just going in more of the traditional results. There's a lot of unknown in that, and that's really probably in the next six months or so.

And you're saying that Bing is already doing this and it's a. An example of.

Of that. Yeah, it's an example of they rolled out that ability to like, basically ask more complex questions of a search engine. I think the example was like, I need a menu for 10 people that are coming over for dinner. Two of them are vegan and one of them is vegetarian. What can I make? And it gives you, like an actual answer. Whereas if you did that in a traditional search engine, it would be like dinner party, vegan dinner menu, something like that. And you just get a list of things that you have to kind of click through and find what exactly what you're looking for. So Google's already rolling that out and tests and there's screenshots and people are in like beta programs of how that works.

I've noticed that sometimes for some things that I plug in on Google, like what's the time and temperature to cook, you know, whatever. And they don't take you to somebody's site, they just tell you.

Yeah, that's kind of the biggest thing that even just the like frequently asked questions. There's a lot more zero click activity in the past year than there has been previously. So that's already starting. We're starting to see a lot more impressions though too because it's not just a list of 10. There's just a lot going on in a search result that you can show up. So there's more opportunity as well for your content to have more visibility.

All right, I want to jump into some more of these questions. I've been enjoying talking to you too. I could spend an hour on each one of these. But this question is from Erica in the chat. I actually call this the Dave Gearhart content writing strategy, which is do no research at all and just write an article based on whatever comes to your mind.

Mind.

There's nothing wrong with that. Maybe there is. What do you think about writing content without any keyword research focused on solely what customers care about from CS or sales? And I'm joking about this, but I actually love it because it's this blend of like, what are you hearing directionally come up and then what is the algorithm want? But Betsy, maybe you take this one. What's your perspective on that? Like, you get an idea, you get off a customer call, you have an idea for an article you should write. Should you do it?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely you should do it. You know, if something is calling to you and you want to write about it, write about it. You know, I think that there's going to be an audience that's going to want to read about it. When I write blog posts, oftentimes I don't think about keywords at all. If the purpose of it is to, you know, not necessarily drive an inbound audience. If the purpose of that is, I'm going to pass this through LinkedIn and promote it in other places, I'm going to share it, it's going to be visible on my site and I want people to really, truly engage with it. That to me is somewhat of a different content tactic. You know, I think people put content and SEO sort of in the same bucket. And truly, yes, SEO should be a part of your content strategy, but your SEO and your content strategy, you know, I think there's absolutely a place for content that has no place with regards to search. You may end up winning for it in search engines. You might not. The purpose of it is to get it in front of people so that they can engage with it and read it and enjoy it. I think that with SEO copy specifically, if you're thinking I need to create good performance SEO copy in a lot of ways, you are looking to speak directly to Google. You're saying, hey, Google, pay attention to me. I'm writing all of this copy, I'm creating a good experience and this is what you like. And that is just one form of content that should be on a page. You're going to have other content that users are going to like as well. Google really likes that long form text. So if you're wanting to win for search on certain pages using that long form keyword, rich text is going to get Google's attention. If you're wanting to make somebody laugh and you're wanting to, you know, give them some tips and tricks to use in their strategy. If you're wanting to, you know, if you've got something that's called to you and you just got to get it out on paper and you got to write it, you know, that's a different approach. That content probably won't work well for SEO, but that doesn't matter. It doesn't mean that it's not got a really great place inside of your content strategy instead of your marketing strategy. It's still important copy.

Yeah, and you can work backwards too, right? You can write and know what the problem you're trying to answer and look back and say, like, all right, just like you would think about, I have this piece of content, how am I going to distribute it? You can have a piece of content and say, how are people going to discover this via search. What would somebody type in and hope to find this article? And this would be the perfect match. And in that case, you may end up changing some pieces of your article. If your article H1 says like, dare to be different, get started on this strategy. And if you know that tells Google no information about what this thing is about, right. Instead of saying get started on your strategy, you could say, get started on your keyword that you're trying to Go after strategy. So there's ways to pepper things in that can help you make that piece of content more discoverable in search. If you think about it that way, as like, SEO is just a channel in which this content can be found. So how do I align it with what people are searching for today? Which is different than saying there's a keyword I know about, I know people are typing this in, so therefore I should create that. This is just a different form of knowing why you should create something.

Here's a question from Samantha. How important is partnering paid ad tactics with SEO for success? Can you have success in organic without paid?

Betsy and I might have different conspiracy.

Theory.

Thoughts on this. I think paid helps SEO, but Google has said over and over and over there's absolutely no link between the two. You can absolutely have organic sess without paid. And I've seen that demonstrated over and over again. People with zero paid search budget are able to create content, rank well, get traffic, get leads. So it's absolutely not something you need to do in order to have SEO or organic success. But my theory is if a keyword is valuable to you as a business, you should try to get as much real estate as you can on that result page. So that is a combination of paid and promotion. Does seeing you on there twice help you click on one or the other? It could be like a one plus one equals three kind of thing. Right. It's just you're taking out more real estate, you have more visibility for those keywords. That's going to be better for your business than only having one or two of those spots. But as far as like an actual algorithmic tie between the two, I don't think it actually exists. But there is some sort of gray area there.

Yeah, I mean, they've never said that it exists, but it is the same company who, if you're spending money and paid, you're sending a signal to them that these are keywords that are important to you and your brand. So, you know, they may not use that information or that data to help you organically. They haven't said that they have. They might. I do think it's absolutely possible to have success in organic without paid, though. I think that, you know, you don't have to do both. You can see success from an organic standpoint without it. I do think that they play really, really well together. I mean, it's ultimately the same viewpoint that you're trying to promote your brand inside of. And in some cases you have to pay to win for keywords. And in some cases, you don't. I think that paying attention to them too, if you've got a really siloed paid team and, you know, away from your SEO team and they're not talking to each other, there can be problems there because you may be bidding on keywords that you're in position one for and are driving a ton of organic traffic for, and maybe you don't necessarily need to be bidding on those anymore. So I think putting the two strategies together and paying attention to them and fluctuating your bids and your positioning based on where your performance is is incredibly important. So if the two teams aren't talking to each other or if you. You're working with two different agencies, I think getting those two folks in the same room to understand which keywords are we working on from an organic standpoint, which keywords are we bidding on? How are each performing? What are some levers you could pull on your end versus levers that I could pull on mine? Because ultimately, it's the same page. It's just two different tactics living in the same space together.

Very nice. Two different tactics living in the same space together. That's a lovely rapper. We get to end on a good one. That's the rule for anything. If you're playing catch, if you're playing golf, you're playing doing what you end on a good one, you got to end leaving high. Here's a good one.

It's from Carl.

How do you think about platforms like LinkedIn and how they should be leveraged for SEO? And I will edit this question and just kind of dump in all social platforms. Right. I'm a big believer in companies becoming their own publisher, using creating content on social platforms to build an audience and drive traffic back to your site. Where do you see SEO and those channels fitting together?

I think this is another gray area too. Right? It's if you're more active on these social platforms, is there anything actually in the Google algorithm that can pick that up, understand that, and therefore rank you higher? I don't think there is a direct correlation, but I think there is an indirect correlation between the strength and the frequency of the posting and the engagement that you're getting across these different channels. Google has to. It can't just be ignoring that. You know, that's just kind of my opinion. They have to have something that can see that and understand that and take that into account. Even if it's just you have profiles on those different channels and there's a link back to your website. Those types of Things I would call strong social kind of third party validating signals that are going to tell Google, hey, this is a quality site. They're actually a real legit thing, not just a content farm.

Also, like, yeah, doesn't having, I feel like I've just noticed with my own stuff, like having an active presence on those other channels, those seem to carry weight in what show up on the first page of Google. Like you're likely going to see like my LinkedIn page as an example, if you type my name in Google. And I think the same is true for companies. So you're still bringing people to those properties, right?

Yeah, I think so. I think a lot of times when you publish on a third party, one of the biggest goals that you have is to get people to come back to your site. It's to get people to engage with at a place where they can talk to sales, get more resources, better understand what you have to offer and talk to sales. So you know, a lot of times when you're doing marketing on those third party sites, you do want that to be a part of their journey that brings them back to a way that they can contact you and also purchase what it is that you have to offer. And so to Mitch's point, if you're active on those third party sites and it's driving traffic to other places, that's going to be recognized as inbound traffic from those sources. So it's basically telling Google, because Google has your analytics and they can see what is driving traffic in from a direct standpoint, what is driving traffic in from a various source, whether it's social, is it organic traffic that's coming in. All of those signals are telling Google a story as to how active you are on those other channels. And ultimately, like Mitch said, if you're active in other channels, then it's likely that you've got a really great experience on your website and that you're somebody who's got something great to offer.

All right, I'm going to put a pin in it there. Mitch, Betsy, fantastic. Thank you so much. We could have done six hours on this, but I hope that people will go find you both on LinkedIn. Go check out Demand. Well let the folks over there know how helpful you were. I'm trying to put my finger on why these sessions are so popular. Like what is it about content and SEO that people are in and around the Exit 5 community are so interested in? So drop me a note. Hello, exit5.com. Tell me like what's interesting about this? What topics you want to hear more of otherwise? Mitch, Betsy, thank you so much. Go and check out demandwelldemanuel.com Send them a note. Maybe they'll give you an SEO tip or two that you missed. I appreciate you. You're both thoughtful, kind, you have great ways to explain this stuff. And I appreciate you giving us an hour out of your day today. Thank you very much.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Thanks everybody.

Later. Bye Bye. Thank you. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com we've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates. Plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing. Marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there. You can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want sure to make make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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