Nikhil Aitharaju & Ryo Chiba - Artificial Intelligence, SEO, and Copywriting

The reason we kind of started Topic was it's a problem that we faced in our previous company. We grew our company with content and SEO as the backbone. And writing content is extremely difficult, especially when you bring on new hires. Kind of having them follow the same process that you've been following is extremely difficult. So after we sold the company, we were kind of looking for ideas in the space and one of the things that was kind of taking off is using NLP or AI in SEO. And that kind of led to the inception of Topic. So Topic in a nutshell. It helps you write and optimize high quality SEO content.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Mount Wolf and Joe Fear. Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. I am your host, Matt Wolf, and I'm here with.

Let me clear my throat.

I hit the record button right while Joe was in the middle of chugging water just to make it awkward.

My name is Joseph Fear.

How are you? I'm great.

Me too.

Artificial intelligence. What are your thoughts?

Oh, it's scary. I don't know, man.

SEO thoughts.

Taking over the world.

SEO's taking over the world.

Ways you don't know. Yes. No, I'm back. I was caught off guard by Matt's. His introduction here. Yes.

I think you'd be used to that kind of thing by now.

You wait till the most awkward times to hit the recording button.

I know.

Literally it was like, okay, let me just like, oh, he's about to drink and go.

Yep.

So, carrying on. AI my thoughts.

Yeah.

Well, you'll hear them in this episode. That's why you hit play.

And you also hear a couple other guys, their perspectives as well.

Yeah. So today we've got Nick and Rio on the. They are the co founders and operators over at usetopic.com, which is a really cool SEO tool that we've started using along with Ahrefs, which we'll talk about in a minute. But I think it's just called Topic, right? Yeah, it's Topic, but the URL for their site is Use Topic.

Cool. Just wanted to clarify that.

Yeah. So their company's called Topic.

Yes.

You can get access to the tool@usetopic.com.

Nick and Rio.

Two dudes that I found so damn fascinating.

Yeah, both engineers. So they have that sort of engineer analyzer brain.

Right? That's how they're coming across. That's exactly. I'm thinking of just how how people approach problems. I think it's super fascinating. They approach things like software and marketing and all of these things in a totally different fashion than we would think, you know, or how like a lot of digital marketers or direct response folks would think. So I thought that was cool.

Yeah.

You know, you got, you have these two engineers that come from a very startup culture, you know, TechCrunch. And like we're actually talking offline right after this that like we're actually attending a TechCrunch event right now virtually. Yep. We're actually in a booth with Unicorn Equity, so. Hey, shout out. So. But I just thought it was cool. So we're getting their perspective on how to use AI and SEO and how how that impacts your content in business. Really too. So fascinating episode.

Yeah, I mean, we're talking about. We talk a lot about artificial intelligence. So we're going to talk about how artificial intelligence is affecting writing content, how artificial intelligence is affecting SEO. Joe goes off on some tangents about how they're getting into our brains.

Just.

Connecting to the concept.

No, I know, I'm just messing with you. But we talk about their partnership and the dynamic of how the two work together as partners because it's always fascinating as partners, ourselves. So wide ranging conversation, but mostly focused around SEO, AI and content marketing. Right.

I would say that sums it up.

Well, my friend sums it up well.

And I learned something I didn't know that Elon has OpenAI and it's basically regulation of AI.

Yeah, well, it's an open source AI, so like anybody can governing body for AI.

That's scary.

Yeah, that is a little crazy. Anyway, grab the notes on this episode because there's some dense stuff that we talk about in this and you're going to want the notes so you can get Those over at hustleandflowchart.com computer that is hustleandflowchart.com comp. You got two weeks to get them, otherwise they get pulled down. Only the latest two weeks worth of episodes are available in free note form.

That's correct.

That is correct.

I would agree with that statement. So get the notes. All right, so ahrefs, they're back. They're our friends. And actually they are friends of Nick and Ryu as well.

Use Topic the tool we're Topic the tool we're talking about today. Well, if I repeat, Use Topic. People remember to go to Use Topic.

Right.

So the tool we're talking about today, Topic is an SEO tool. Ahrefs is an SEO tool, but you can use them in unison. They do not compete with each other. They serve completely different functions. In fact, here's Rio from Viewstopic saying what he likes about Ahrefs.

Yeah, I mean, I've used all the SEO rank tracking tools, and Ahrefs is definitely the one that has the cleanest ui, shows the data in the best way. We recommend it to all of our customers. Yeah, that's awesome.

And, yeah, so you could use it with. With Topic and Ahrefs, they kind of blend together nicely. And in this episode, we'll probably talk a lot more about that. So you heard it from the boy.

You heard it from them. And they got a$7.7 day trial. You gotta go grab Ahrefs. It's an amazing tool. We use it in our. In our business. They. They do not pay for our account. We pay for our own account. We used it long before they were a sponsor. And Joe's just making me crack up right now. So. $7, 7 days. Go grab Ahrefs. Now let's go talk with Nick and Rio.

Hey, Nick and Rio. How you guys doing?

Doing good. Thanks for having us.

Of course.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, this is sweet, having a partnership. Two partnerships. Chatting on the podcast. We were talking. We don't get that opportunity a lot, so I think we'll have a cool chat around that. Yeah, we got connected to you guys through Jurgen over at Polymash, and then before Jurgen, it was Lisa Byer, which I think I know Lisa listens to the show, so she'll hear that and probably. So that's cool. I just wanted to give a shout. But you guys are just fascinating with what you're developing with software and AI and SEO. And I think a lot of folks here listening are going to. It's kind of just kind of like open their eyes to what's possible and what's actually happening right now.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's a real honor to be on the show, and we're glad that we got connected.

Sweet.

Well, let's go back a little bit. How did you guys get in business together? How did the company you guys are working on form? What's kind of the storyline here?

Yeah, so about seven years ago, Nick and I met in the basement of a university library. We were actually working on a Pinterest clone. And so at the time, that was the hot new thing in Los Angeles where we went to undergrad and, you know, we got seed funding, worked in Pasadena for a while. We pivoted that business to be a social media aggregation business. So in marketing Technology and then we grew that to about 5 million in annual revenue over the course of six years. And so that's how we've really forged our relationship.

That's awesome. Have you guys always. So what, you started in LA at a university there. Have you always worked together or has it always been remote? Because obviously right now with COVID and all that, different locations, it looks like we're breaking the rules.

Yeah.

We actually lived at one point together while we were working on our previous startup, but for the last six, seven years, we've been working in person. But prior to meeting Rio, I never work with them, but when I started working with Rio, it was smooth and that's really what really kept us going for this long.

Yeah, partnerships are always interesting because where it starts in some way, but then you almost have to mold and figure out who does what or who's best at what or, you know, so how do you guys fit? Like, explain your guy, like how you guys work together. I guess let's start there because dissecting the partnership and then maybe we can chat about some cool ways that we don't even know about and share best practices.

Yeah, I think that we can each present our perspectives and they might be different.

You'll learn a thing or two.

Yeah, I mean, I've always considered Nick to be, you know, really much more of the ideas guy. He's really creative. He's constantly thinking of new ways to approach problems. And then I tend to be a little more operational, like how do we get things done and what are the next steps? But yeah, I think one thing is that we're both developers, so we do have something to connect on that we both relate with and respect each other on. So there's some overlap, there's some differences, but yeah, I'd love to hear. I'd love to hear Nick's perspective as well.

Yeah, I mean, we are pretty much covered. I think we have. We definitely have complimentary skill sets in terms of our execution. Like, I like being the idea guy coming up with innovative ideas and Rio is the one who kind of takes it to the finish line. So it's happy. It's nice to have someone that you can trust on to kind of execute what ideas you have. Even on the engineering side, I do a lot of back end engineering things that people don't see and Rio works on things that people do see. So there's a lot of complimentary skill sets in every aspect of a relationship that really makes it work.

Yeah.

Now, do you guys ever, like, butt heads? At all, or you guys like, pretty much like everything just kind of flows.

You just assume that they fight all the time.

No, I'm asking.

It's very rare, actually that we, we argue, but when I know Rio is upset, I take a step back and let him kind of vent out. But it's very rare that we argue on the most fundamental things. We usually argue on minor things that every co founder relationship would, you know, should do. But I mean, no big problems. And that's, that's what's working for us.

I think that's one of the benefits of having a longer term relationship is that with the trust, you can, you know, easily mend something like a disagreement just because you know so much about the other person and what makes them tick and what, you know, what is actually going on behind the scenes behind an argument. You know, oftentimes when you don't have that trust, it just seems like the other person's being irrational or something.

Yeah, that's a good point. Because once you know who the person is for that period of time, and it does take time, I feel like, or really hard experiences, maybe in a compressed amount of time. But you know, like, if something's bubbling up in conversations, like, you don't want to ignore that because you want to talk it out, I feel like you can address that because you have that trust. And it's like, hold on, slow down, let's address this before it gets any bigger. Have you found. Because that's a thing that we really honed in on, I'd say, well, we've.

Gotten good at sort of reading the room, but like reading each other. I could tell with non visual verbal communication, like, all right, he's getting upset about something. Let's figure out what's going on here.

Yeah, totally. I think we have a similar relationship and we actually do weekly check ins where we ask the tough questions. Hey, how are you feeling? Are you optimistic about where we're going? If not, what can we change? So these weekly check ins kind of serve us. It provides a formal platform for us to vent out our frustrations. That way you're not bubbling it up. So that was something that we implemented that really is working for us.

I like that concept of those questions. They're deeper questions than like, hey, what kind of projects are we working on this week?

Yeah, interesting. So what other, I guess explain some of the meetings or check ins that you guys do as co founders on a consistent basis. So you have a weekly check in. Is there a little bit more to it than Just what you said there.

So, yeah, for weekly check ins, we basically. So we call it a weekly goal setting meeting where one portion of the meeting is set aside for check ins and sort of understanding how they're doing on a personal level. And then we kind of dive into our weekly goals. Since this is two of us right now running topic, it's very important for us to be alone, aligned and on our goals every week. So we do that meeting every Friday or Monday, depending on the day and the busyness of that day. And we also do like a daily standup just to kind of get our, get ourselves on board on what we're working on. And occasionally I keep hitting up with ideas throughout the day. So we keep using zoom to kind of checking in on each other. Especially with COVID it's important to stay in touch. Yeah, but yeah, those are some of the meetings that we do. But one other thing that we do is for every customer call, both Rihanna and I join the call because we both get, you know, that's a good way to kind of keep ourselves motivated, you know, and also understand our customer problems really well.

Yeah. Now is it just the two of you or is there like more teams, developers or right now it's just the two of you guys doing everything?

Yeah, it's just two of us. Yeah, it's just the two of us.

Nice.

That's so cool. I mean. Yeah. All right, so a couple of things there I want to hear. I want to dissect what that, that daily standup sound or looks like. And then I want to go over to shoot the other one was. It's going to come back to me. Let's start with the stand up. I'm curious, like, what does the daily standup meeting look like for you guys to check in with each other?

Yeah, so the daily standup, I mean, it's pretty simple. It's about what we've got going on and then any blockers. But really, I think it's also an opportunity to mix in some of the social time because with COVID you know, we don't have an opportunity to have the informal conversations that you usually would in an office. So it's, you know, about noticing somebody's haircut. Like Nick just got his haircut, you know, yesterday.

I have not had a haircut in seven months. So I'm jealous.

I've been cutting my hair. I'm like, it's faring all right so.

Far, you know, sharing hair cutting tips, like all sorts of shout out to my wife.

Good.

That makes Sense. Yeah, I mean it's simple as. Because it's just crazy. I know it's like simple that I asked that, like, what does your standup meeting look like? But it's like just a partnership. I know we don't always do that. We do check in somehow daily, but sometimes it just ends up being like a slack message or two. But it's like him asking for something of me or me vice versa, you know, But I like just the, like, do you have any obstacles? Like we all know what we're working on or what are you working on? Anything, you know, anything in your way. Oh, cool. Nothing. Sweet. Let's go. I think us doing that daily would be actually really helpful and probably more fun too. I feel like it's more motivating that way when you check in with each other.

Absolutely. And I think it's part of the daily exercise of building trust. You know, Nick and I encountered that in our previous company where occasionally we'd have doubts. Where we were, I mean, like spans of time when we were so focused on working and getting our goals done that, you know, we'd forget to check in and it would, it would bubble up, you know, over the course of a couple weeks where all that pent up energy comes out in an outburst or like a misunderstanding, you know, and you notice that kind of thing. And I think so much of so much of the co founder relationship.

Is related to, you know, like another human relationship, like a romantic relationship. All the advice that you read about maintaining like a romantic relationship applies. It's like communication, checking in regularly, understanding the other person, super critical.

One of the things that we do in addition to doing a stand up is sharing wins from previous days. So if you have any customers signing up, we usually share that win so that we set that tone for the entire day. Like we're going, we're approaching our day on a positive note. So that's one thing that really is helping us is kind of sharing the wins on a regular basis and celebrating them just by smiling at or just being happy about it.

It's crazy that some of these easiest things like start with gratitude or mindfulness and you're like, there's so many of these morning routines we have for ourselves. But then business, it's like, okay, you have another relationship there or you have these goals or motives, like, why not start that with the positives? And like, yeah, it could be someone in support. That's like writing in and saying like, I love your podcast, help me do X. You know, like, heck yeah. Or. Yeah, we've been getting. I gotta shout this guy out. Brian Bennett. Yeah, he's a listener of our show, and he's been sending us a dollar per day through Venmo each. And he's been sending a video attached to that as well, basically like a personalized message each day. And it got our attention, but that's been kind of like our daily practice lately is like, oh, there's a video from Brian. That's a good way to start your day. So, yeah, build that into your daily meetings. Super smart.

Yeah. So before Topic, did you guys. You guys had another software before Topic that you guys were doing together?

Yeah, we worked on four products total, including Topic. So we worked on Hype Marks, which was the Pinterest clone that Rio mentioned. Sort of a social bookmarking website that didn't take off. And then we used the same technology and we pivoted to a product called Tint, which does social media aggregation for brands. So essentially, you know, aggregating content that their users are sharing on social networks and getting legal permissions to repurpose them. So our technology, technology enabled them to do that at scale. We ran that for almost six years, and then. Yeah, now we moved on a topic after that.

Yeah, that's. Man, that's so interesting. So I'm kind of curious, like, just the marketing with the startup, because we come from, like, a marketing forward kind of industry, and I'm always fascinated by, like, how does a software company with a whole different perspective, I guess, way of marketing themselves grow into, like a substantial. You said five million, right? Was. Okay, so, like, what was like, one or two of the key marketing factors that led you to that kind of growth?

Yeah, I think one of the key things that was really the turning point for us with that business was that our product was an embeddable product. It's basically a social media widget that people can put on their website. And so we had a freemium version of that. And so we basically had a powered by Tint logo at the bottom and that we basically engineered backlinking strategy where we would have that link to specific landing pages with targeted copy and use that to gain our initial traction to rank for keywords like Instagram widget or Twitter widget. And so when people were looking for the official one, they'd see ours and see that it was a superior version and choose that.

Yeah, that's like chess compared to checkers. Compared to, like, oh, just run a Facebook ad to this thing. It's like, no, you just engineered a Piece of software that's a freemium. It's a tool, useful, valuable thing. But you engineered backlinking so your SEO strategies can be more effective. And that generates money on the back end there, I'm assuming, when they upgrade.

Well, as well as the viral sharing, that too. Because every time it goes on somebody's site, however many people that site see powered by on there, and a handful of those people are going to click it and go grab the free version and then they put it on their site and it's like there's this sort of exponential component to it.

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like there's the bread and butter of SEO or content marketing advice where it's like, create great content.

Guest post. But occasionally business will be lucky enough to have that unique little spin that they can take to take an alternate path to success.

And that can be interesting too.

And that's exactly. Kind of like the thinking that was going on in my mind is like, yeah, the standard approach is write more content, run more ads, drive traffic. It's almost like this push, push, push strategy. But you're just kind of saying, here, do something with it. But you kind of know what's going to happen. They're going to share it around, they're going to embed it there, and all this is going to happen because of that. It's like it's chess, you know?

Yeah, I think that's one of the things that every startup or every business should kind of take a step back and see what are some levers that we can pull that can engineer our SEO growth. I mean, doing it in a traditional, you know, white. It's not snake oil techniques.

White hat.

Yeah, yeah, white hat techniques. But yeah, I think that's a good thing that every startup or every business kind of need to establish. Even though SEO is a long term play, kind of laying that foundations early on can really yield results. Compounding results, actually. So that's one tip that we would love your audience to take away is to figure out if there are any nice opportunities that you can utilize to get that traction initially on the SEO front.

Now, let's talk about topic a little bit. Can you sort of explain the concept? Because I think it's going to sort of set the groundwork and the context for the rest of the episode. So can you explain why you came up with Topic and what it does for people and their companies?

Yeah. So the reason we kind of started Topic was it's a problem that we faced in our previous company. We grew our company with content And SEO as the backbone. And writing content is extremely difficult, especially when you bring on new hires. Kind of having them follow the same process that you've been following is extremely difficult. So after we sold the company, we were kind of looking for ideas and the space, and one of the things that was kind of taking off was using NLP or AI in SEO. And that kind of led to the inception of Topic. So Topic, in a nutshell, it helps you write and optimize high quality SEO content. And we do that in two ways. We help you create an effective outline by automating all the research involved in creating an outline. And B, once you have your first draft, we kind of highlight some gaps in your content and help you fix them so that you can publish your content with more confidence. So that's how we do it. That's what Topic does.

That's so cool. And I think it was when we first heard about you guys, it was like we were saying from Jurgen, and that was with the implications to podcasts and how to use Topic with podcasting. And you had some amazing strategies around those. And then I think from that then, yeah, you started using it with some of our affiliate blog posts that we already had. So we ran those through Topic. And then what created our post? And then I don't know, you were doing this, Mads, maybe from our perspective.

So I had a blog post on a software tool that we were promoting as an affiliate. I ran it through Topic. I think it gave me like a D or something like that. But it said, here's what other people that are ranking for this, here's what topics they're they're talking about in their post. Here's what questions they're answering, here's keywords that are commonly found in those posts. And it gave me all of this data about now if I add this stuff to my post, then it's going to be the most comprehensive piece of content among the other ones that are ranking for that keyword. So I went and I followed all the suggestions. I got it up to like an A plus. And yeah, it did a great job of basically telling me this is what you need to be writing about if you want to rank for these keywords.

Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of the times content producers, especially if they're experts in a subject, have a hard time understanding what a newbie or their audience really wants to learn about. So it's our software just helps connect the dots and exposes those things so that, you know, you talk about the right things and it applies to both podcasting and to, you know, blog posts.

Yeah. And that's where, you know, because we are SEO is still, I think, the number one driver of traffic. Right. Yeah, so. And it's been like that for, I feel like, years now. And especially because of our podcast and us releasing two episodes a week with content, a pretty big show notes page, AKA blog post for each person and all these links. So it works out well for us. And this is just gonna enhance that part of our business. But I think it was Jurgen that said, or it was one of you, I forget. But the comprehensive content concept and how that's so powerful, or why it's so powerful right now. Can you talk about that and kind of explain what that is and why that's important right now?

Yeah, absolutely. So when Google's showing specific results on the search results page, you know, their goal is to get people to read the content, get value from it, and then stop searching, you know, and stop clicking around. Because if they're clicking around, if they're bouncing out, that means that Google didn't show the results that satisfied the searcher. And so what they're doing to optimize their system on an ongoing, continuous basis is they're measuring things like bounce rate and how long people are spending on the site in order to determine, you know, how much value is this article giving. And so the idea is that the better that you're able to add value to your audience, the longer they're going to stay on the page and the less they're going to bounce. And since those are key metrics in how Google ranks, that's why it's so important to create comprehensive content.

Yeah. And that's where it's so interesting is I think you were telling me that I think on the first call we had that you can have a website with a pretty low domain authority, but if you're more comprehensive than this site, that might be ranked a lot higher than you. You can actually kind of leapfrog because you have everything that Google wants to present to the highest ranked pages.

Absolutely. It's, you know, if Google just relied on authority, there'd be, you know, it would be worse for people who are searching because you just get the same results over and over again. You know, they really want to reward the content and not just the authority.

Yeah. And I noticed in Topic too, it'll actually tell you inside of topic when, when you search for a specific keyword, it'll show you everything that's ranking for that keyword. And it'll actually point out the ones that are sort of punching above their weight class, so to speak. Right. It'll, it'll actually show you like this has a low domain authority, but they're ranking, so maybe pay attention to this.

Yeah, those can be really interesting to look at, especially since oftentimes the marketers listening to the show might not be working with Fortune 100 brand with a huge domain authority. And so they want to see who's sneaking into the top of the serps and how can I be like them and what can I learn from them.

Interesting. Yeah. With topic. So the way that, I guess the biggest, what the fastest way someone can actually implement your tool is to essentially, what, run some previous content they've written through the software. Right. And then it gives some kind of results with a checklist called an outline. A brief.

A brief, yeah. So, yeah, the best way, I think, is to kind of optimize your existing articles because you're going to see results pretty quickly versus creating a new piece. Might take a couple of weeks for Google to kind of rank it. But yeah, the best way to kind of get more value out of topic at the very beginning, especially if you're trying to convince other stakeholders, is to optimize some of your existing content. Go look for content that's actually in page two, just trying to, you know, just low, low hanging fruits that has a lot of potential and then go ahead and run it through topic, cover those content gaps and then publish it. I think that's the best way to kind of get value out of topic at the very beginning.

Yeah, well, and one thing, this was actually from when you guys were on Jurgen's show, or Rio was on Jurgen's show, you were talking about podcasting specifically. And I thought it was a really smart strategy of like, if you're going to bring a guest on for your podcast, look up the topic, create a brief on the topic that that person talks about, and it'll essentially give you a cheat sheet of like, here's what to talk about on that episode. Right. And then you can make transcripts or notes from that. And you're being comprehensive based on all of the data that Google told you to, is what people are searching for, essentially. And I thought that was just such a. You could probably explain it better than I just did, but I just thought it was such a brilliant concept.

Yeah, I thought it was absolutely clever. We hadn't even thought about that use case, to be honest. And when Jurgen came to us and he was like, we could use this to plan interviews. You know, I was like, this is smart because you've got the domain expert, you know, and you're basically connecting all the people, like thousands of people are searching for that information and this expert together, and you get to be the person in between who's presenting that information and curating it.

So yeah, that's a cool way to. That's a cool perspective. It's like the curator and that's exactly what we do.

And having a tool like this to help you curate more the right people or the people looking for the thing that you're solving through the curation process, it's like serving the community better by using something like this, getting.

Absolutely. It's like you're doing Google's job by basically generating great content.

Right.

So let's talk about AI copywriting. And how do you define AI copywriting and how does it fit into the mix of what you guys are doing?

Yeah, so AI copywriting is the concept of having AI kind of give you that first draft. A lot of people have the opinion that AI is going to be giving you that final draft. But the way we see it is we, we see AI augmenting your content production process and not replacing your writers. So the way we do that is we hope, you know, there, there are avenues in the product where AI can cut down that ideation time or creative energy cycles that you spend coming up with paragraphs. And we, we envision AI sort of augmenting that process so that you have your first job draft and your writers are editing your content. So that's how we see AI copywriting.

So is that something that might be integrated into topic in the future? Is that kind of like the roadmap where maybe you plug in a keyword and it would write a rough draft? What's your game plan using this information?

Yeah, we recently rolled out a couple of integrations last week. So right now we are able to generate titles and descriptions based on a keyword, which are pretty good. I think the next step for us is to kind of. I don't, we don't foresee AI to completely write an article at the current time because I think the AI is as good as the inputs that you give it. And if you give it a really good outline and kind of organize your content and sort of give it as an input, then AI is able to kind of come up with the first draft. We haven't figured out. We are working on that as in the next couple of months.

So how does. Yeah, so you said the inputs and you know, the output, it's kind of, you know, it's what you give it. What would the inputs be for? Like writing a first draft of AI copy.

Yeah. So the inputs that you'd give us if you're writing a piece of AI copy with topic, would be give us the keyword that you're targeting. Then we're going to pull up the current top results, and then what we do is we take the current top results and we feed them into the AI system and then it outputs recommendations for titles, descriptions, different ideas for headings that you can include in your article. And so basically, like we mentioned earlier with the curation, if you're writing a blog post, you're going to be an advanced curator who's picking out, out of these 10 choices, which one is really going to resonate with your audience the most? And then assembling that.

Yeah.

Now, is there like a possibility where if, like multiple people are going after the same keywords, but they're all using topic, that you end up with a front page of like, almost the same article, just different wording of all the same article?

Yeah. I think that in terms of that question, which we do get a lot, is the, the idea is that, you know, a topic is helping you do the helping you get to the point where you're as good as everyone else, and then it's up to you to do the critical thinking involved to add even more value. So, you know, figuring out what unique angle could you provide? Do you have access to a data set that nobody else has? Or do you have, you know, do you have the UX ability to create a really beautiful experience for your readers? Those are the kinds of things that really, I think, take content to the next level once you've reached that level of comprehensiveness.

Yeah, this is such a cool concept. And I wonder what copywriters feel like right now.

Well, I mean, I don't think this will eliminate the need for copywriters because like you said, this is writing the rough draft. You still need somebody to go in and polish it up.

Exactly.

If you're trying to write a persuasive piece, they still need to add the persuasive elements and all that.

But it's that first draft and we know how hard. I mean, we've been writing a lot more copy than normal lately. It feels like, like email copy, all that sales page copy, and like. Yeah. Having that first draft. Just think about the mental load that takes off your.

That's the hardest part.

Oh, yeah, yeah. So that's Just worth it right there alone to get the ball. You have some motion now.

Yeah. I think these in the next coming months and years, we'll see more systems where you'll have a really tight feedback loop between the AI and humans, you know, at each step of the way creating little pieces of content until you get to something really polished. I think finding that balance between the two is really going to be be the tricky part, you know, because you don't want the system to be entirely in charge.

Yeah, well, you're already seeing better and better AI in the form of like chatbots and things where it's harder and harder to tell if you're talking to a bot or a human. So I imagine it's sort of the same sort of technology and concepts applied behind the scenes as what you're seeing there. And that seems to be evolving pretty quickly.

Absolutely, yeah. Nick, did you have something?

Yeah, yeah. One thing I think immediate benefits of using AI in your copywriting is especially if you have a ton of product pages where you need to come up with titles and descriptions. I think AI is going to do a decent job there. If you're looking for social media posting, even though we don't want AI to do that, we want humans to do might be capable of coming up with social media messages. Short form content, I think long form content, we still need human intervention because there's a lot of story backstory, there's a lot of voice and whatnot. I think that's going to evolve. But I think these are some areas where AI could immediately benefit.

Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense with the short copy because you're mixing in things like keywords and probably qualities or aspects of that thing based off of data, you know, people buying or searching for things.

Exactly.

You mentioned the type feedback loop. I was thinking, I'm like, man, it'd be so cool to get like almost immediate feedback. You know, tie, I don't know, a page or elements to a conversion and then you can like edit split tests and stuff in the fly on the same place in the copy.

Well, you can already do that right now with tools like VWO and stuff like that, right?

Yeah, but I'm saying like kind of tied in all together so, you know, it kind of, I don't know, like having that dynamic changing copy based off.

It'S just like constantly optimizing itself as new viewers see it.

It's almost like an input from what the demand in SEO and what the keyword and then comprehensive content with so.

Nobody's ever reading the exact same article. Everybody's reading a slightly different article because Google's looking at the bounce rate of an article and going, okay, this person didn't bounce so quick, so these words must be good. But. But when we ran this version they bounced quickly. So scrap. Those were.

Well, it's dynamic everything, right? It's like pricing on Amazon. We were just having a podcast about this earlier. It's like our airline pricing. No one pays the same price twice. It's always fluctuating. So maybe content can be like that.

Interesting.

Tricky with Google. Google doesn't like your content to constantly change.

Now does Google mind it getting like up updated, like if you're adding stuff to the end, or do they. They don't like to see any change to existing sort of established content.

I think the core content that is answering the user's questions and that Google is recognizing change dynamically at a very faster pace. But there's still like user generated content that keeps changing, which Google probably recognizes and is okay. But if you're changing long form content based on the Persona, like, like people landing on the page, it could be a little tricky. Yeah, that's something that we wouldn't recommend.

So how would Google know to rank it if like the keyword density of certain words are constantly fluctuating? Yeah, it wouldn't. It would be hard for their algorithms to even handle it, but.

So maybe it's more of a sales page copy changing tied in with that, but based.

Yeah, I think personalized onboarding or personalized lead like target ad targeting and then kind of creating that perfect landing page based on the Persona. Yeah, yeah, something would be super beneficial.

Yeah, I mean we're already seeing it quite a bit in like Google AdWords. They now have like dynamic ads where you can plug in like five different headlines for your Google Ads and it'll just constantly swap all the possible variations and eventually land on the one that performs the best.

Well, you could use topic for that. Then there you go. You know, for whatever keyword that the ad I'm just thinking of, like that's a use case right there. They could write all the titles and descriptions right. For all the ads on Google.

Yeah, but what you write for your title isn't necessarily the keyword you're going after. There's probably something there.

Maybe, I don't know, think of all these other creative ways, I don't know, AI and copy. It just seems like it's cool. It's not something to fear, but it's something that gives you a great foundation, that's data driven. But also then you can add persuasion or modify stuff.

Yeah, absolutely. I think people are going to be working at the level of ideas rather than sentences. People are going to be spending more time, time thinking about how these ideas flow together and the message they want to share. And in the end that's going to result in higher quality content for all sorts of different searches. And so it's going to be beneficial for everybody and still require human intervention.

Yeah. What do you think is the future of AI in regards to SEO specifically? I mean, we've talked about AI in the content and actually creating the content, but how do you see it sort of of impacting SEO? And because you mentioned earlier on working with AI through SEO is when you were saying that, were you talking about specifically more the copywriting or is there other AI implications with SEO?

Yeah, I mean, I feel like there are certainly AI implications for SEO in terms of Google's ability to match content to the user search intent. You know, people are already used to not only being able to see the right page that they're searching for, but also like the right sentence within the page. And that requires a pretty detailed understanding of what that sentence means and what the user wants to do. But I think in terms of the future of AI and SEO, one interesting thing is that.

The biggest buzz around AI is currently centered around GPT3, which is OpenAI's model that they're starting to commercialize and get everybody to use. But in their terms of service, they mention that generating SEO copy en masse is not allowed according to their terms of service and they'll shut you down if they notice you doing that. Which is really interesting because at that point, you know, it's sort of saying that the technology is capable of doing that is just that doing that would probably harm the Internet because you'd get a lot of spam and it would confuse Google and you'd start to see bad results come up. And so, yeah, I think there's a mix between what technology is capable of and what humans and what people think would be best for everyone involved.

Yeah.

That could be a loaded topic right there too. You can go all the way to like, look what Elon's doing right now with neuralink. And that goes all into. I'm just thinking like the implications of AI, you know, like, how far do you go with it compared to like you were saying, with kind of like the human intervention side when it comes to.

Yeah, it definitely, it definitely ties in because it's like some of the other cases are, you know, like, posting on social without a human involved or, you know, all sorts of things that can be used to manipulate people. And it definitely ties in.

Yeah.

Fake news is also going to be problematic. Every guy is generating fake news, so definitely there's a lot of regulations that need to be involved.

Well, just imagine how good it probably already is at creating clickbait headlines.

Right?

It's already happening.

I mean, the AI already knows how to create the clickbait headlines that everybody wants to click on. And if they start tying that together with, like, fake news. Yeah, it's sort of like a recipe for disaster there.

Well, then you have.

I think OpenAI is actually Elon's investment. Yeah, it's founded by Elon Musk just to prevent. To have more regulations in AI space. I think that's the main vision that they're going after, to create a safe space for AI to coexist with humans. But that's the mission that they're going after. It's not let AI not let AI do manipulate human emotions.

It is interesting. Yeah. I mean, I used to use Twitter a lot, and then I stopped for several years. And actually I'm a fan of Twitter once again. But the reason I stopped using Twitter for, like, several years was it got to a point where it just felt like Twitter was a whole bunch of bots chatting at other bots. Right. Like, everybody was using it to, like, as like, a secondary RSS feed for their blog post and their podcasts. And then you had all these other social media tools that would automatically share stuff for you. And it just felt like it turned into this, like, bots talking to bots. And I think that's sort of the potential rabbit hole you go down with social media and AI. Right, Is it. It turns into a place where there's actually nobody really on social media anymore. It's just bots talking to each other and then another bot giving a Fire Flex emoji below it. And that's what social media could become. Well, some of them already become that, but yeah, Instagram.

I mean, that's. Yeah, you described Twitter almost like, what happened there? Moved to Instagram, you know, with Instagram bots.

No, Instagram. Like, all the comments are fake. Right. It's just like a fire emoji and a Flex emoji, and it's just like bots commenting on everybody for them. And I think that's my concern with the whole AI and social media is like, we got to figure out how to Sort of keep that stuff at bay so that people are still communicating with each other.

Yeah, definitely. It's like all about the signals involved on social media. It's all about engagement through likes or somehow signifying that this is something reshares. And so luckily on the SEO side it's a little more tied to the value of the content. If you're writing a recipe, if you're writing a recipe for search and you write it to infuriate the user, you're not necessarily going to have them spend more time time on the site, they're going to bounce out. But if the recipe site actually creates content with like a really tasty, healthy recipe, then people are going to spend more time on it, it's more valuable. So luckily the signals are more in more in searches favor than on social.

Right?

Yeah, sort of self regulates itself where you guys.

No, I was just thinking. Yeah, it's just interesting all the different inputs that are in there. That's like you said on the social, it's all engagements. A lot of the metrics are based off of that. And I don't know, it's always changing too. And I guess that explains why Google's always changing, why social media algorithms have to always change because there's I guess AI or some input or someone's found a loophole to kind of push things in their favor a little bit. Is that kind of true? I don't know.

I think that's really, that's true. I think even with Instagram at the very beginning, people were utilizing their fake followers to get more, you know, traction, get their post bubble up. But Instagram scratching down on that. Same with Google, the very beginning at the inception of SEO, people were just stuffing keywords in to have their article show up. But then Google started getting smarter and smarter and I think that's eventually going to happen with any platform. Initially you'll have loopholes that people would, you know, make users, but then the platform's going to come cracking it down because it's not in the long term interest of the platform and its users.

Yeah, yeah, makes total sense. So coming back to the SEO topic, is there any other sort of best practices or sort of things that we can talk about to really help people improve their SEO on their website? I mean we know what use topic does, right? Or topic the website to usetopic.com, right? So topic, you plug in an article or a keyword, it gives you this brief and it tells you this is the type of content you should be posting about. This is what you should be writing about. Outside of that, are you seeing any other creative, unique ways that people are impacting their SEO?

I think one thing that was mentioned previously that should be highlighted again is that oftentimes re optimizing your existing library can make a bigger difference than creating new content. And that's often a gold mine. We meet new companies and they tell us, oh, we spent like we spent so much money creating this library and now we want to figure out how to create a second version of our library. It's like, let's dig into what worked previously and amplify that. So I think that's a treasure trove. I think another thing too is.

Being able to to efficiently prioritize what you're going to change like the on page optimizations based on what's going to impact the user rather than the latest shiny thing or what you read recently or heard in heard in like a conference recently. It's like, you know that thing that applies to things like page speed optimizations. You really have to take a step back and think, you know, is this going to be the, the best value for me in terms of the effort that I'm spending versus the value my users get.

So I'm thinking about it from that perspective.

Yeah.

To add on to what Rio mentioned, being data driven about their SEO, especially when you already have a huge content library that you're working with. A lot of people underutilize Google Search Console. So Google Search Console actually has the high fidelity data of the queries that you're ranking for the traffic that you're getting from Google. It's the best source of truth. And going into that data set and sort of figuring out what topics are resonating with the users. Can I double down on that? Can I create more interesting pieces of content around? That would be a good place to start instead of trying to go after some new domain or new topic that you're not. Not really authoritative in. So that's something that we have done personally at our previous company and with consulting before we start a topic, just go into Google Search Console, help them kind of create their content calendars based on the queries that you're showing up on where you're not ranking high, but you're showing up for those. So helping them create those missing pieces really kind of boosted the traffic numbers as well.

Yeah.

That's so smart to start. I like that you called it the source, the one source of truth or the best source of truth. It was like from Google's data Yeah, they don't always give you the best stuff, but Search Console, I guess is even better than analytics and all that stuff in your perspective.

Exactly. Yeah. I think Search Console has interesting data like click through rates, which is interesting because impressions is only one metric that is only like the tools like Moz or Semrush or Ahrefs, they give you the click through rate and approximately impressions that your keywords getting. But the actual source of truth, like how much are you actually getting is what you find in Google Search Console.

Now, when it comes to deciding what keywords to go after, let's say that I want to go create a content brief. I haven't written a piece of content on, I want to write a new piece of content.

Where do you guys go to determine which keyword to create a brief on and to and to get going? Like, do you guys have a process to decide, like, okay, this is the next keyword. Let's assume that my site's not getting a lot of Google love. I don't have existing keywords that are ranking real well yet. How am I going to go pick out a keyword to start with?

I think the best place to start is do a keyword research project where you kind of identify keywords that you want to go after or topics that you want to cover from that. You know, use tools like Ahrefs, which is awesome. We love it at topic. Yeah. Use Ahrefs or other SEO tools, tools to kind of figure out like actual subtopics that you need to cover under that umbrella topic. And then from there you plug in those keywords in the topic, generate outlines and hand it off to your writer. So it has to be done as a process. It's not, it shouldn't be done ad hoc. So you need to do your keyword research and come up with at least a month, a quarter's worth worth of work and then execute on that instead of ad hoc searching for a keyword and then generating a brief. So we advise people to do it in bulk.

Yeah. And I think that ties in with competitive analysis, figuring out who's in the market, who's really succeeding, how they're doing it. One thing is that for people who are just starting out, oftentimes the first instinct is to go out and try to create content because that's all they hear. But really, we usually recommend focusing on authority first until you have a certain baseline of authority. You know, in ahrefs, I've seen that, you know, roughly like a domain rating of like 30 to 40 is when you can start ranking for long tail keywords. So if you're just starting out from scratch, it's, it's a bit of a. It's an inefficient use of your time to create content. At that point you should be thinking of how to get backlinks, how to, you know, generate some authority.

Makes sense now for backlinks then, you know, you guys described, you had the tool where it's embeddable, so that generated a lot of backlinks. Like, what are some other good ways that you recommend that folks can use to get backlinks at these early stages?

Yeah, I think one. Or go ahead, Nick.

I think one way that we're doing it is, and we recommend other people as well, is to kind of figure out some free tools that you can offer to your audience. So we've launched two free tools that has been getting good traction by the community and that's a great way to build backlinks. The other way is to create really good pillar pieces of content, like really good quality pieces that are data driven. If you have unique set of data that you're working with and then reach out to big publications to kind of share that, you know, that blog or embedded in your, like add a link in their blog.

Kind of like the skyscraper.

Skyscraper.

We had Brian Dean on the show maybe a year ago. I think he walked through that whole process.

He did, yeah. That's smart. And then you layer in pr.

You amplify it. Yeah, just amplify it. And then you start getting the link backs and cross link, all that.

Exactly. And it has to be very organic. You shouldn't be trying to gamify or Google. You should makeup. It should be very organic. People need to start talking about your brand because they love your brand. You can't force people to talk about your brand. So that's some of the suggestions I have.

Really.

Do you have anything to add?

Yeah, I think for this question, one thing that can be useful is thinking about your own unique strengths. You know, we mentioned the tools because we're both engineers, so it's very affordable for us from a time perspective to create especially valuable tools. But what are the unique angles? One common angle is if you run some sort of marketplace, you can feature your vendors. And so that feature helps your vendors. But also you can encourage them to put a badge on their site. But there's all sorts of different techniques like that. And looking at your competitors can actually help inspire you because you can see how they're getting their backlinks Both organically and through a planned fashion. You know, are they ex. What kind of backlink campaigns are they executing and who are they reaching out to get them?

And AHREFS can give you that kind of data.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So that's, that's, I mean, another guest, you know, backlinking strategies go on other people's podcasts. You know, that's something obviously you guys are doing right now, so you'll get links back and all that. But yeah, it's interesting at the early stages, like that's a good thing to focus on when you don't have that domain authority.

Yeah, a lot of hustle. That's how I would describe it. A lot of hustle. Things that don't scale, you gotta do it.

Yep, that makes sense. Yeah. Well, what else, what do we have? I mean, is there anything else on SEO that you wanted to touch on, Matt?

No, I think we covered a lot of ground. I mean.

I think we should sort of wrap up just sort of talking a little bit more about topic and.

Well, first of all, why don't you tell people where they can go learn more about topic and grab it and all that good stuff.

Yeah. So if you're interested in topic, if you're interested in improving your content, you can check it out@usetopic.com and that's our URL.

Cool. Right on. Yeah, we use it, we love it. And I think it seems like it's going to just keep building, building into more the AI and all these other signals out there that just.

And I mean, I think, I think we signed up like two months ago, and I think just in the last two months, a whole bunch of new things have rolled out. Like after I signed up, there was like a, a Google Docs functionality where basically you can just type your stuff in Google Docs and it'll pull in like the suggestions right into Google Docs for you. And you guys just mentioned that it'll help with your subject line and description now. And it's like, so you guys seem to be constantly improving it and, you know, innovating in that area. So, so pretty exciting stuff. Any other stuff that's in the works that you're excited that might roll into topic in the future that you could talk about?

I think one area is summarization. So these AI systems are also really great at taking really long pieces of text and then distilling them down into their meaning. I think that that has huge implications for enhancing the research process. So that's an area that we're Going to be focusing on, on focusing in, on to make that even faster.

That sounds so freaking. I'm just thinking of like wow. Yeah. You know those book summary sites. Well, it's like you can kind of summarize, you know, any or big long post. Yeah, that's, that's really cool. I like that.

Yeah.

Even for podcast research, that would help us a lot.

Yep.

Anything else on your side there?

Yeah. So there's one other feature that we are planning to roll out in the next couple of months is to help you identify those low hanging fruits in your content library that you can immediately optimize. Right now people have to do it offline in Google sheets. We're trying to bring that using our AI technology. Sort of help you identify those thin pages of content that could get some love. So that's the next one of the features that we have in the pipeline as well.

Very cool.

Well, shoot. I think you're in an exciting space at the right time. Like with AI and all that stuff is really like to sum everything up with what you guys are doing, like how does the future look like? Obviously topic is part of the journey now, but is it always like AI somehow wrapped around there and maybe content? It seems like it's always.

Are you asking what future tools they develop?

What's interesting on the horizon? I guess even further outside of how you see this all kind of head.

I think in the, in the further out future, you know, I think the research process is going to be as polished as the consumption process. You know, like I mentioned earlier, you search for a term and Google's so good at giving you the right answer. It's going to be the same way on the other end for the person producing the content. You're going to be trying to come up with something and the system is going to be so good at giving you the information that you need to synthesize that.

And most of the time you don't even need to click into the website anymore. Google just puts it right there, which is a whole nother rabbit hole that I don't know if we want to go. But like, you know, there's that whole implication of like, will people still be clicking away from Google in the future or is Google just going to pull all the content to the front page and say here's what you were looking for. But I don't know, maybe. What are your quick thoughts on that? But I don't, I don't want to go too deep.

Yeah, I mean. Oh, go ahead, Nick.

For me personally, if A user wants to get a quick answer, then Google should do it. Like for example, if you're trying to run a calculation and you have to go onto this website and run it, it's not going to be conducive to the user. That's why Google shows that, you know, when you type in a math number or equation, it shows you the answer in the. In Google search itself. Same with flight details or any other information. So anything that can be quickly should be quickly accessible to the users. Google will end up showing that in the search results itself. But anything that's more informative, I don't think Google is going to replace, you know, use people have both still click into those pages and read content in dep. If, if it has, if it isn't, if it's informative. But that's my take on it.

That makes sense. Yeah, but it's. Yeah, I don't know. It's interesting. I guess it's utilities. If they can just get it done in a quick utility fashion like a calculator or like converter. You know, you see a lot of those embedded on. On Google. Yeah, but. Yeah, no, that's. Yeah. It's interesting to hear your perspective from being a developer and engineers. We don't chat with many and then how affects marketing.

I think that's it. Yeah. So usetopic.com go grab it and guys, it's been fun. Thank you.

Sounds good. Thanks for having us on.

Thanks for having us on.

Hey, hey, hey. Thank you for listening to that episode. This is Joe Fear. I'm sure you probably already knew that, and Matt is not here right now, but I'm pretty sure he enjoyed the episode just as much as you and I did because he went into the production of kind of making that thing right along with me. So thank you very much and I want to give a quick shout out to our buddies over at Easy Webinar. These guys have been supporting us for a while, a long time. And Casey Zieman is just a super good guy all around. He's actually been on the show before. He's the founder of Easy Webinars. So if you look up Casey Zieman on any podcast platform you're listening to, go check him out. Go check out his backstory, what he's all about. You can learn a lot about webinars as well. Well, and right now, you know, Easy Webinar, these guys are actually hooking you up with a great trial. It's a completely free trial to test out their software. Soup to nuts Check it all out and see if it's a good fit for you. If you go to easywebinar.com hustle, that's H, U S T L E. If you didn't know how to spell hustle, there you go. So if you go to easywebinar.com hustle you can go grab a free trial and EZ webinar literally lives up to its name. It's super simple. I mean, super easy. And it does all the stuff that you're looking for in any kind of thing with webinars, I mean, they literally cover every single type of webinar you possibly can do. So from live to automated to scheduled at specific times, and all these crazy features in between, can't even list them all out. I'll be here way too long. They give you a ton of advanced analytics, what's working, what's not. During your webinar, based off all these actions, you'll see who attended, how long they stayed, if they clicked the offer or if they didn't. Basically, you're gonna make more money and you're gonna work less with this thing and you're gonna create better relationships with the folks that are listening because it's a good experience. You wanna give that good experience along with some great content, of course, and a killer offer if that's what you got for them. So go try it out yourself. Go check out easywebinar.com hustle. That's easywebinar.com hustole. Alrighty. Righty. So that is the end of this episode. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, enjoying it. Hopefully you did. I'm pretty sure you did, if you lasted this long. And go check out Easy Webinar when you get the chance. And we will talk to you next time. Bye. Bye.

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