The Next Era of SEO: Advanced SEO Strategies to Expand and Excel

All right, everybody. So welcome to the webinar. We're going to wait maybe like a minute or 2 before we get going, wait for some more people to hop in. And wherever you're coming from right now, whether it's from X, whether it's from— I guess maybe there's a LinkedIn stream today. I see a YouTube stream too. Just type in where you're coming from. Always keen to see where people are coming from. And this will also tell us if the chat's working or not. So for today, we're going to be talking about— we're going to be talking about some advanced SEO stuff and maybe we'll give you some bonuses as well if you stay till the end. So make sure you stay till the end. And there's going to be 1 or 2 things for sure that you're going to be able to implement. But we'll give it maybe 15 more seconds before we get going here. And then I will introduce our speaker for the day and we'll give it 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Okay. We're starting for real now. All right. So those that don't know me, my name's Eric Siu and I'm part of this agency called Single Grain. And this is our head of SEO. This is Maria.

Hi.

And today, Maria is going to be talking about some advanced SEO strategies to prepare you for the future and guarantee you there's some stuff in here that you've never tried before. So stay till the end and you're going to get a lot of value from it. But without further ado, Maria, please go ahead and take it away. It's all yours.

Thanks, Eric. Hey everybody, nice to meet you. I am the Head of SEO, as Eric said, here at Single Grain. And I've been in this digital space and SEO for over 10 years, with Single Grain for about a year and a half. I've worked on the gamut of business types with various industries, including SaaS, travel and tourism, e-com, healthcare, manufacturing, and many others. I'm super excited to get going here today. So let me share my screen and we can do just that. All right. So our goal here today is to really jump into how AI is transforming SEO and digital marketing. And as Eric mentioned, to include some some practical AI tools and workflows that you can implement or refine in your day-to-day and how you're already using AI. We'll go through some specific examples on the Single Grain site as well as some of our client sites just to show you the different workflows and elements that we're integrating to help for performance. The last thing, as alluded to, we have some special things at the end, a quiz to help you gauge your AI usage complete with tool recommendations, as well as an opportunity to meet with me one-on-one discuss your SEO strategies. Before we get really into it though, just interested to know in the chat from everybody if you are or aren't using AI in your day-to-day. Just simply type in yes AI or no AI so we could get a pulse on where you're at with the AI scheme. All right. Well, if you aren't already using AI in your day-to-day, there's definitely a lot of opportunity for you to do that. And hopefully you're going to pick up some additional tools, tips, tricks from our session here on how you can do that. If you have any questions along the way, please feel free to drop them in the chat. We'll answer them as we can, but we should also have some good time at the end for Q&A. So as mentioned, if you're not already using AI in your day-to-day, you are behind. Nearly 70% of marketers have integrated AI into their marketing ops in some way, shape, or form. And if you haven't started using it, start. It will revolutionize the way that you're working. Myself, my team, the agency here at large, we've been finding a lot of different workflows and efficiencies in our administrative task work as well as our client work. to really get things moving in the right direction for ourselves and to make sure we're not left behind in this AI world. Now, admittedly, not every test has panned out, and that's where continually refining those strategies comes in, but we'll get more into that in a minute. Some things we're using to actually— or some things we're implementing AI for to help us work more efficiently are analyzing data, creative brainstorming, even creating coded HTML elements so we can circumvent using our developed In summary, I think you guys know the long and short of it. AI is enabling us to work faster, make more data-driven decisions, helping us to automate tasks that are often tedious, and really helping us to maximize the way we're spending our time. So jumping right into the first example here, we're going to talk about Single Grain's website and how we've been seeing traffic, impressions, clicks, and conversions grow as a result of leveraging a variety of AI tools and workflows, which we're going to get into. We've boosted the Single Grain website's impressions and clicks by 36% and 30%, respectively, by implementing a variety of these workflows. So let's focus on a section of our website that has been created programmatically, where we're targeting hundreds of pages, hundreds of terms across hundreds of pages for agency terms. You name it, SEO agency, pay-per-click agency, digital marketing agency, we're ranking for about 7,000 different agency keyword targets. And how are we doing that? We're doing that via these sample pages, these pages, and this is just a sample of one of those pages created by a large language model targeting those various agency terms. It's not just the content on these pages though that's being created programmatically. We are optimizing the meta titles and descriptions at scale using keyword data and SERPs to help inform the page and to help especially pages that have falling click-through rate. And by doing these these different workflows and things help augment and create these pages. In 9 months, we've been able to increase our impressions and have a daily average, a regular average of 160,000 and daily clicks of 160. This has all brought us about 700 or so leads with about 115 of them being MQLs. So in short, in very short time, we've been able to increase our visibility. We've been able to secure leads and we've been ultimately able to sign a few clients to 12 the contracts as a result. All right, so pivoting a little bit off of the single green site and onto one of our client sites, I want to focus on this e-com client. We are also leveraging scalable content solutions in this example. You can see a lot of content created at the bottom of this page with a dynamic insertion of wines by type as well as by price. These are— we created here about 200 pages in our first batch, and in a short few months, we saw well over 300% increase in clicks. We're going to dig into more of the performance of this page further on in the deck, but just wanted to use it as an example to show you guys how, again, we can target scalable content as an opportunity for AI integration. So how do you get started with creating these types of pages, whether it's for an e-com client or an agency website like our own, or even a SaaS client? Well, it all starts with keyword research. It's where everything starts for SEO. And in this example that we're showing you, we've gone through the keyword research phase and started to build out a list of top, middle, and bottom of funnel opportunities where we can easily swap in and out different variables to create long-tail opportunities for targeting. Despite or regardless of what your goal ultimately is, if you're wanting to just drive traffic, you're wanting to drive awareness, you're wanting to bring home the conversion, there really is a programmatic target that we could hit for each kind of client and for each stage of the funnel. So where do we go with this list of opportunities? Well, once we hone in on what our end goal is, we extrapolate variations. And in this example, you could see the different wine types under the different price points. Some of these have much greater search volume than others. Others have very low search volume but are some of our best converters because they are so specific. So it really is an opportunity to target, you know, the most already trafficked pages as well as find those ones that are not maybe as popular but still have a really solid opportunity for conversion. So once we build out the list after keyword research, we've dialed in on what variation we want to write, and we extrapolate all the opportunities, we then have to work on our template. The key to a strong LLM content output is strong human influence template. And this template is for another client, a SaaS client, but the process is the same. We start with defining all of the elements on the page that we want the LLM to create— meta tags, headings, FAQs, you name it. And from there, once we've agreed on the first output and that we like the way it's targeting, we think it's gonna— it's well optimized for our efforts, then we start to batch test those. And what I mean by that is creating 5 pages at once and making sure that the quality stays high, and then creating 10 more pages, making sure that nothing's degrading or going out of whack for, you know, what we're trying to ultimately achieve. And if we're finding things that aren't working out, the opportunity then is to go back refine the LLM and give it more detail on what to do and what not to do so that we can get our desired result. Jumping back to a real-world example and showing you that this scalable content solution is useful across industries and business types. Here's a SaaS client that we did a small-scale PSEO batch with targeting solutions and industries as the keyword variation. Again, these are some really low-volume terms, but very highly converting. As you can see, been able to achieve a 71% increase in leads month over month. I will say that this was an interesting learning for us. It wasn't our easiest PSEO project because of the high level of technical expertise that's needed to include in these pages. There was a bit more of a manual editing process that happened in the long run. But from it, we had some really great learnings on how we can build our LLMs in the future for these types of clients to be a bit more specific and more technical in nature. So how else beyond content are we actually using AI? Well, in this draft, you can see this AI-driven SEO manager, we're touching on various aspects of the day-to-day. It's not all-encompassing. This is just an example. But this is a way to start breaking down all the areas where you can start to integrate AI into your workflows. The goal is to create, obviously, new workflows, new ways of doing the work for our SEO managers, for yourself, to execute on all of these regular tasks we, we do to drive performance. The whole goal is really to work smarter, not harder. And there does come, you know, like there is a lot of hard work that does have to go into making sure these work the way that we want to. But once we have the core pieces dialed in, it really just becomes about optimizing them per client, per use case, and refining them to get exactly what we want out of them. So jumping into, again, the other ways that we are integrating AI into our work beyond content, and we're going to start with highlighting linkable assets. Beyond written content, we're leveraging AI to create linkable content like this calculator you're seeing here, where we're using ChatGPT and other developer tools to build out base code for a calculator. So ultimately what you're seeing here was built by an SEO manager with little, little developer support, and the only place where they really came in was in the final testing and implementation stages. So this allowed us to not wait, not spend any more resources outside of our current team on a developer to create a tool that's not only useful for users as they're planning an event. You can see this calculator is really all about party planning, so you can input the size of your party, the type of wine you want to drink, what your budget is, and it will output exactly what you need to purchase. And then ultimately connects back to the programmatic pages we created and will display a programmatic page that is all red wines under $10. So it's a really cool way to connect the strategy and build something something that we might not have ordinarily been able to build, either due to resource constraints or budget constraints. And for us, linkable contents go— or linkable assets go far beyond just being, you know, useful, cool tools. They are also great opportunities for link generation. So, you know, keep that in mind if you're starting to, you know, dabble with this. It's not just about what lives on the site, it's about creating something that people want to link to on the site. All right, moving on. We talked about keyword research in the first examples that we went through, but I want to define our scalable content targets a little bit more. We are using your standard tools— GSC, Ahrefs, SEMrush— for keyword discovery, but ultimately we're pairing that data with ChatGPT and custom workflows like the one you see here to hone in on opportunities for efficiency, determining content ideas. And all of this is based on not just the data from GSE, Ahrefs, and SEMrush, but bringing together other data sources and scraping the top SERPs and how they're ranking for the terms we want to target. The sky's the limit on how we can tweak this workflow and configure it. It really comes down to your imagination and what your specific goals are. So depending on, you know, what kind of task you're working on, whether it's PSEO or just trying to come up with different blog content ideas. This is a great way to pair together different tools to help find the opportunities a little bit faster than we used to just doing it manually. All right, another way we're integrating AI into our work is content optimization. I know this isn't probably too earth-shattering, but optimizing old content is a key strategy to success, or pruning it if it's not working at all or has no chance of working. Using tools like Surfer, which is pictured here, but also Jasper and others, is a great place to start. But you could take this a little bit further using the custom GPTs as well as other tools to really make sure you're getting a client-specific optimization and not just a broad third-party optimization. Before we move on, interested to know from everybody what kind of optimization tools you might be using, if any, whether it's Surfer, Jasper, Clearscope, custom GPTs, or a combination thereof. Just want to get a gauge of what everyone is using to achieve their optimization success. All right. Well, as your answers come in, I'm going to just jump into one of the ways in huge component of our content optimization work that we're doing, and that's using custom client GPTs where we're building out client-specific models with tons of uploaded documents from our clients, as well as taking different PDFs of their web pages and updating— uploading those to inform the large language model. We refine prompts within these different custom GPTs and save prompts depending on the type of work that we're we're doing, and we use these tools to help optimize our content further, whether it's a combination of using Surfer and the custom GPT or just the custom GPT, being able to build out something that's much more client-specific versus, um, more general and broad like Surfer and some of the other tools, um, have. It really helps us to find the voice of our client, make sure we're on point, make sure we're using data that's theirs, and make that content more useful and more unique and less AI-y and more human-like. I see a lot of people are using custom DBTs, which is great. Okay, so beyond keywords, beyond content, beyond optimization, there's this whole other world of SEO we haven't really talked about, and that is in part technical work. A few examples of ways we're using AI for technical work is automatically shortening meta tags over the character limit. Another is is internal linking, finding— using workflows to input a URL and then have that workflow go find on our website the most semantically related places where we can anchor and link those URLs. It does everything from finding the anchor text opportunities and outlining different anchor text to, um, actually end-to-end implementing the the link or the updated meta tags. So these workflows aren't just about, you know, doing the task at scale and then manually having to go implement the outputs. But we can and have made it end-to-end so that we can auto-publish to draft or to live on our website with very little human intervention, making it a little bit more of a regular optimization task that requires a little bit less time in the long run. Okay, beyond SEO. So let's talk about AI beyond SEO, and one example of that is personalization. On the SG site, we've just started to deanonymize user data, which really means tracking users who visit our site and building profiles around them, understanding what kind of content they've, you know, interacted with, what kind of content we can feed them to help them down the user journey, and really creating an awesome remarketing effort around gathering some of that user data. We've only really started to scratch the surface on this for our own website, but we're figuring out ways that we can maximize performance to make sure that, you know, we're taking advantage of every stage of the user cycle and not losing them after just a quick visit to the website. All right. So again, staying beyond SEO, another area where we're exercising AI is CRO. And really the purpose for such a heavy CRO focus is to help the content we're creating perform better. So we talked about content creation optimization, but, um, you know, the page is only as good as the content is only as good as the layout and the interaction we can garner from it. So CRO is a very important part of how we do things here at Single Grain, especially in our SEO department. And before I move on to some other CRO opportunities and ways we've been integrating there, want to just ask everybody in the chat if you are implementing any CRO recommendations along your— along with SEO. A simple yes or no will definitely answer the question. But if you're not, then it's time to get started. There's so much more that we can get out of our content by moving calls to action to the right place, making more content or assets interactive or linked, and a part of the user journey, more of a part of the user journey. We're leveraging information and data from Clarity for heat maps and recordings and aggregating those insights with AI summaries, using those insights, feeding them to an LLM with PDFs of the pages that we're wanting to optimize, and getting a really holistic output from the tool on elements that we can improve site-wide and page-specific, but also the content of those pages and getting actual recommendations on headlines to improve and UVPs to include and other ways that we can help to bring the user on the journey and convince them that, you know, this is the base place— space they want to be and spend their time and interact with. Cool. It looks like some of you guys are implementing CRO recommendations. Some of you are not. Hopefully this helps to inspire you in some direction. Keeping on with that CRO piece, this brings a few different things together. And what you're looking at here is, again, another opportunity for us to circumvent developers. Not that we don't love our developers, but they're busy. And if we can create an HTML button like this one here using code and then ultimately having us— telling us where exactly to implement it on the page so that it shows where we want to, we can move and test a whole lot faster. We're able to do small-scale tests like this on some of our clients' websites outside of tools like Convert or VWO, or again, waiting on a developer to start to improve our content and see where we can make a difference. On the single-grain site, we're doing that with our programmatic pages. Again, if we're making programmatic content, there's no reason we can't do programmatic CRM. And this is a way for us to target all these pages at scale and update headings, logos, images, CTAs, etc., to make sure they speak to the content on the page and really target the terms that we're wanting to rank for in the long run. You know, CRO is kind of, I think, the magic sauce between all of the channels. If we're able to get our users to convert better, whether they come in through organic or paid or whatever channel, then in the end, we're— that means more wins for the website. And you can see that here in one test where we're aligning our CTAs on the PSEO pages for Single Grain, we boosted clicks by almost 50%. Okay, so that's a lot. I'm gonna start to wrap it up here and bring you guys to the future of AI, SEO, and digital marketing. And the future really is agents, agents to help us get our jobs done faster, whatever that job might be. I myself have recently built my own MeGBT. It's me in a custom GPT to help me through— think through things faster. It's got examples of how I think, emails I've written, all sorts of information and things that I've created to help inform its output. It is by no means perfect, but that is a part of this whole game. It's refining it and trying to make it better and better. So where does all of this AI and SEO and digital marketing bring us? It brings us to the workforce. the AI workforce. All of the tools that we mentioned are part of this workforce, and they will help us to do our work more efficiently, spend more time on strategy versus time-intensive tasks. And our roles now are to leverage this AI to do a chunk of that work for us, monitoring it and making sure the outputs and human optimizations are spot on. And here's just a quick snapshot of some of the different tools we've developed, with numerous others in the backlog and being worked on as speak. Now back to the wine deals example and to wrap things up. This scalable content example was a really great opportunity for our client to see a huge CTR growth. We started with only 0.8 as our sitewide CTR, and our goal was to obviously drive more traffic and conversions. We were able to do that by leveraging that AI-enhanced keyword research and content ideation that we mentioned earlier and created over 200 pages to target that best wine type under price point. That is, with that in mind, we were able to drive in just 4 months 300% more clicks, 41% more impressions, and vastly improve our click-through rate by nearly 3%. On the flip side of that, that translated into more keywords ranking, especially in the top 10 and top 3, those traffic-driving positions. And we also increased engagement time, not to mention some soft CTAs or conversion actions for add-to-carts as well as cart views. So the long and short of all of this and the results that we were able to achieve is to take it to the next level. And that's what I hope you guys can do today is, is start to use some of these ideas, this quiz that we have linked here, to expand your opportunities for integrating AI. And the best way to do that is to start small, smart, start with automating simple tasks, test and iterate those examples and initial tests, see how effective they are before you start to really scale up and use it across all of your clients or all of your processes. You definitely want to train your team. Everyone should be in sync on how these tools are being used, how they're being developed, how they're pulling the information they're pulling. And ultimately with that is maintaining the human oversight. So keeping humans involved, make sure that it's as good as we want it to be. Because the AI is only as good as we instruct it to be. Last but not least is the expansion opportunity. So, you know, growing beyond these initial tests, as long as they're working and you're seeing results, you could start to expand it to more complex workflows like some of those content creation and technical elements that we mentioned earlier. Again, this QR code goes over to our quiz that can help you to rate your AI integration and some tools that you can use to dive further into that. I know I've seen a few chat Recently come through on what tools we're using, so you can check those out through that QR code. All right, and that puts us at the end of things here. We have time for a few questions, but at the same time would love to open up to you guys to drop in any topic suggestions, things you want to learn more about in a future webinar. And if you can just drop those in the chat, we'll take them into consideration after our opportunity here today. So any questions, uh, that you guys want to ask about any of the projects, workflows that we've shared with you today, please feel free to drop those in. Um, I'm also available after the fact here, as I mentioned, and for a one-on-one session. So if you're interested in signing up for a one-on-one session with me to talk a little bit more about SEO strategy, how you can start implementing AI into SEO, digital marketing, whatever part of your business you want to start to tap into, please Please feel free to reach out and schedule that. All right. Well, let's see. We've got some questions coming in. I've got, what are your favorite AR marketing tools and agents you're currently using? Hmm. I mean, it, I think it probably depends on the different tasks that I am working on. Which tools are my favorite, but I really do enjoy, um, using like GPT in its rawest form and really my custom GPTs more than anything. Like, we've spent a lot of time creating those for our clients, um, and creating them for myself. Like I said, I have a me GPT that really helps me to move things forward much quicker than my own brainstorming I love to be able to feed it certain prompts of my own that I've created and developed, and then just keep reusing those prompts for similar tasks. My favorite place I've been spending a lot of time is with CRO and uploading that CRO, those CRO insights, or more so the heatmaps and recording insights into the GPT to get more information on how I can improve those pages at scale. Another good question here that we can wrap up with is how AI tools are helping to— how can AI tools help in regaining traffic impacted by the Google algorithm update? Honestly, this is a really great question, something that one of our developers started in on as soon as the Google algorithm update happened, and that was to use a workflow to basically rate our content, and not just based on rankings but also against the SERPs and where we were losing. So we honed in on pages where we were losing and found the opportunities by comparing to the top SERPs as well as keyword opportunities to find opportunity for optimization. So once we use that workflow to identify the pages that could use the most help and had some output from them on what could make that page better. It really just became a comparison, comparing our page to the top page and finding opportunities to integrate some of those top page elements into our own. Any other questions before we sign off here today? Appreciate everybody's comments along this journey the past half hour. All right, with that, I hope to chat with you all again soon. If you do have, again, any ideas, suggestions of new topics that you want to have covered in future webinars, please drop them into the chat and we'll talk again soon.

Thank you.