Revolutionizing SEO with AI: Unlocking the Future of Digital Discoverability with Gert Mellak

But very often we see this ego is a big part of SEO, which is a problem. I think sometimes we need to balance out the ego versus ego versus outcome. If zero conversions are next to it consistently, think of how you can actually monetize it or do something with it.

Hey, I'm Joe Fear and welcome to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. This is where we talk all about building businesses so they give you the freedom and fuel for your life. I'm not here to help you build a billion dollar business, but I am here to help you create a business with systems that work for so you can make more money than you need just by working part time. You know, I was a chronic hustle mode kind of guy and I want to share my experiences and mentors I've met along the way to help you reframe things to be the most effective as an entrepreneur. I wish I had this guidance and insight when I was younger. So that's what I'm doing here for you. Please share and enjoy.

Hey hey, it's Joe. I'm back with another episode and this is a kickoff to an SEO focused segment series of podcast episodes with my friend gert malik from seoleverage.com this guy has been my mentor and coach and basically the guy that is everything expert when it comes to SEO for years now with Matt and I, previous co host and business partner with our old website, he was the one. He and his team have helped us optimize our websites to bring a bunch of organic and referral all this SEO traffic, to grow our email list, to grow our podcast and our brand to help us grow our conversions as our for our own products, but also as affiliates for other products. And I'm bringing them back here to kick off a series of episodes on SEO that are gonna help you understand what to do in this wild world right now of SEO that's changing rapidly and it's mainly because of AI and all the different ways that we can now create content really quickly, but also Google and Bing and all the different search engines. ChatGPT. There's so many different ways that we're searching for information now and how this information is being presented. I want to make sure that you are clued in so you're not going to get lost in the sauce and drop traffic on maybe your brand and content that has been doing well over the years. Or maybe if you feel like you can optimize a lot of things from the past, those are the kind of things we're going to be talking about in this specific episode. So this is all about unlocking the power of SEO and AI. Some strategies that you can use right now. So you're aware of what's going on right now with SEO and AI, the basics of those two and how you can optimize it. There's tools that he gives you, a lot of them that I've been using that are kind of blowing my mind. There's ways to prepare yourself for the future and what's coming. He shares some case studies and also some very tactical ways that you can start optimizing or creating new content right now that will set you up for success. As best as we could predict, because Gert's been doing this for 20 plus years. He has a team of over 30 people. SEO leverage. These guys are the go to. So definitely go check out what Gert's doing and his team. If this resonates with you, go hit him up@SEO leverage.com so expect more like this episode. We're going to keep it punchy for you and actionable. Let's get into it. Gert, you are back. And it's been ages since we've had you on the podcast. Well, now it was we before, you know, it was Matt on here. Now it's. Thank you for joining me again. And this is a kickoff for multiple episodes around SEO. And, yeah, it's going to be fun, man. So how you doing?

Definitely looking forward to it. Thank you so much for having me back. It feels ages. Lots of things have been going on here.

No kidding.

And also in your world. In my world. So I'm absolutely looking forward to this.

Yeah, man. So we've been. We've been chatting and I got to give you big props because you helped me immensely when it came to. Well, first, the SEO and the evergreen profits domain. And that was our previous company with Matt and myself for what, almost 10 years or over 10 years. I was looking at it last night. I was like, wow. And then finally, and just yesterday at the time of this recording, I did the. The domain switch or the change of address through Google. So now everything officially is pointing to hustleandflowchart.com and it's you that assisted with this, giving you the strategy and walk me through the 301 redirect, all the fun stuff that goes into that. So thank you.

Yeah, no problem. Happy to help.

Yeah. The SEO world's not easy, you know, and. And it's changing all the time, so you're always the guy I think of. I know. James Schramko you're always on his podcast, too. Kimmy Seltzer is another one. She was in a Mastermind with you, I guess, the other week and mentioned you and how she's like, oh, yeah, this SEO guy named Gert was like. He was just calling out all these things. Like, I'm like, yeah, I know him really well. And she's like, what?

It's a small world. Yeah, especially seems global, but it's a small world at the end of the day.

Yeah, man. Hey, I want to pause this episode really quick to shout out a tool that you gotta have in your SEO arsenal. So with this episode with Gert, we're talking all about how SEO is kind of intersecting with AI, and things are developing super fast right now, and it's more important than ever for you to optimize your website, but really keep monitoring all these different changes. And that's why I've partnered up with Ahrefs as a partner and sponsor of this SEO series that I have on the podcast for you. And this is the first episode, so there's more to come. And the cool thing is Ahrefs is a tool I've been using, and Matt and I, over the years, when we did this thing together, we used it for many years for ramping up our SEO, our organic traffic, and really having a finger on a pulse of what things are going on. There's a free tool that I want to make sure that you have in your arsenal, and this is what they want to also provide to you because it's super helpful. It's called the Ahrefs Webmaster Tool, and it's a free tool. It's totally designed for you to maximize your SEO performance and keep your finger on the pulse. So it gives you 140 common SEO issues. It kind of helps scan and monitor your website. It gives you expert advice on how to fix them, and then continue to monitor your SEO health over time. So, totally free tool. I highly recommend you getting it. You can go grab it at www.ahrefs.com awt and I'll spell that out for you. So it's super clear. It's www.a h r e f s.com awt. So go grab that tool, and let's head back to the episode with Gertrude.

I guess.

Where do we start? Because, like, right now I'm. You know, I see where there's old SEO tactics, and I don't know if they're really old or not, but we have AI and all this content that we can create. I Guess seemingly very simple, simply now, but doesn't mean that it's great for SEO or it's going to work. Seeing algorithms change Google and the way that they're going to start presenting search, ranking or, you know, results. Yeah, I guess what's the lay of the land these days? I guess we'll start there from you.

I think the status right now is that every day things can change. I'm pretty much used after so many years in SEO to moving target, but right now it's like going crazy because every. You don't really know what's going to come next week. We do have obviously some ways to test what seems to be coming specifically Google Bing was a little bit faster with this and starts rolling things out. Google is more careful with their brand, I think, and what could hurt their brand and very reluctant to put things out there right away. But they have experiments running that we can test. We see some results, we see where things are going and it is true. SEO has never been changing so much as we anticipate it's going to change now.

It's interesting, you were just saying, you know, you have access to the new Google.

The labs. Yeah, the search labs. The search labs. And they already have a test for the search generative experience, which is ultimately where Google starts answering verbally based on resources.

And that's what's interesting. And I remember reading something maybe a few weeks ago when it was talking about that and how possibly, and I don't know if this is true, but like how it could possibly cut out a lot of content creators from being searchable in Google and or at least like discoverability is going to change. So I don't know if you have any perspectives on that or how we can kind of think about it.

I think it's definitely going to change, but it's going to change in two different ways. On the one hand, we have to assume and it's even the Google just continues their way of having the user in mind and the user's happiness. So they come back to Google tomorrow to do their next search. And what this means is that we have to accept that sometimes it's really the best thing that can happen for a user, that Google gives them the answer if they know it. So I don't have to go to a specific website to know Barack Obama's birthday. Google is just going to give me the answer. And as a user, I appreciate it. I don't have to check your website to find out the height of the Eiffel Tower. It's going to give it to me even before I press enter in the search box and I'm happy with it. So there are going to be certain searches where Google is just going to give the answer as they already are doing with featured snippets with these kinds of immediate results. Immediate responses, we call those very often. Also, the zero click searches might have search volume, but no click comes really to a website because Google just gives the answer. I think this trend is definitely going to continue because it's just good for the user in most cases. On the other hand, we also know that the large percentage of searches that Google gets today with the current version never have been made before. Google puts out statistics regularly how many new searches they see every single day. I don't remember exactly if it was like 10, 15, 5%, something around this. This number I believe was the number of searches of queries they never have seen before. So if you think about keyword research, and this is what I base everything on, I think these times are definitely over and now more because when we start talking to AI engines, we're going to have very, very different ways of searching. Because I'm going to tell this search engine an entire story to make sure it has enough context to find the right answer for me. So there is going to. At the same time as traffic can be expected to drop, at least temporarily. What we can expect is that there are going to be tons and tons of queries coming up that we had never seen before because the way we search is going to be very different. If this one thing is going to balance the other thing out, it's going to be expected how people really, really react for which searches the search engines actually push the chat. How many people actually use it? Do they like it or not like it? There's so much in there right now. But what we definitely already know is, is that we absolutely. If somebody hasn't been looking into topics like semantic search and being very explicit about what they do and we might come into tactics a little bit later. I think the best time was last year. The next best time is today.

Nice. Yeah, it's like it's the whole tree analogy, right? Like plant the tree 20 years ago, do it now.

Absolutely.

And it seems like whenever these big shifts are, it's like as long as you're right there, you know, understanding what's going on and understanding user behavior. And you mentioned something interesting because I have changed and I think a lot of us with ChatGPT and the way that we prompt that, I mean, I Find myself using that as the search engine a lot of times now instead of Google. Unless it's like some specific local thing or something like that. But it's the way I'm searching is different. Like I'm thinking differently now and I'm putting way more context into that search through ChatGPT and I love using the app, you know, with ChatGPT plus and I'll just ramble for like a minute and then like that's my search. In a way it's fascinating.

I had yesterday, I think one of the last clients I would expect to jump on something like this so fast was showing me his app or his way of accessing AI and he just has a WhatsApp chat that access as an AI chatbot and he just asks questions there. Right. So people that are even not the most technology savvy audience really, really jumps on this because it feels natural. And I think this is the big power. And this is why ChatGPT has had so much success because it's what we always wanted. We wanted to just talk to this computer, not use this keyboard. Forced into thinking in a technical way about certain keywords, we would just want to communicate.

That's right, yeah, communicate naturally. It'll help us kind of decipher what that means in the context and then give us results that actually matter. And so are you seeing Google kind of doing possibly something similar and then maybe citing sources and then allowing people to kind of go deeper that way.

We are going to see about the citing one. I think this is where we in the experiments see that sometimes you would expect really citations and they might not be linked, they might not even happen. This is definitely a topic. I think that's going to create quite some discussions before this actually gets launched. Because obviously if there are no citations, what about the copyright? Can they use it? Can't they use it? How much is really goes back to the original author or should go back to the original author? Are they going to be compensated? There are a lot of topics in the area, I think. But I would expect Google is going to provide long term a way to dig deeper, a way to figure out who was behind it, just for legal purposes. And then again, Google is going to continue to provide a normal traditional search because this first result might not just be good enough. Some users might not want to have the chat response altogether. Like right now they have certain search tools nobody uses, just we use an SEO probably. So I think they are going to give different options for different audiences and there might be a bunch of People who don't want those chats.

Yeah, that makes sense. And I've thought about it that way, too. It's like there's multiple ways to find the information you're after and it's not one size fits all, especially not these days.

Absolutely. One thing I've heard also, I would love to credit someone about this, and I said it's probably going to be related to how many ads are showing on top, which makes sense. Perspective. If I have four ads on top, I'm not going to put a chat response on top of it. So they might relate this to how competitive a term is whether they trigger another chat response. So this is also something to affect the ring. They're not going to eat up their own revenue, possibly short term to not lose market share, but long term, they're definitely going to make sure they keep up their revenue figures.

That's a good point. All right, well, this is all good perspective. And these are questions that have been pinging around in my brain for a while since seeing this come out. And I think I'm. I think I'm on the wait list or something for Google Apps. So I'm gonna start poking around. I might have access as well. But, yeah, either way, let's all get in there and at least toy around and get familiar with what's coming. Google's not going away and I know they're not going down without a fight with Bing. I know they're paired up with ChatGPT. So it's interesting, Gert, I wanna get into, because, like, with this episode, I really wanna figure out where that intersection of A is now. So we can give some actionable things, you know, obviously good strategies, context. But then say, like, all right, what are the action steps? Because this is kind of like the start of a series of SEO episodes with you and I. And definitely I want to. Because there's importance behind SEO. So you're obviously given a bunch here. But also let's talk about, like, the basics of what we should know now and how AI, like how we can use AI to optimize SEO the best we can right now.

I think there have been quite a few shifts in the last month, last year, maybe last two years. And where we see in SEO, the biggest shift is in content creation. So really summarizing it, the days where you start with a blank document are over, right? You're as an agency, as somebody working in digital marketing, as somebody creating a considerable amount of content. You're always going to start with at least a very detailed Outline, but probably an automatic draft. How you come to this draft is now can be different, right? And a very basic level. People try to use ChatGPT and they write me a blog post about SEO and something is going to come out of it. It's probably useless and worthless and you can throw it away. But this is how we figure out that the more context the machines have, the more they're going to come close to a usable draft. And this is what where I have heard this comparison which I found really, really accurate. ChatGPT or other tools are like an intern with not too much experience, right? And if you tell an intern, write me an article about SEO, they're fresh from university, they are going to produce something that's about SEO. It's not going to be at all in line with what you expected, but you have to train this intern, you have to train the machine, the program, the software, etc. And now that you we have tools like AIPRM for example, that handles templates for prompts and you can share them, you have them public is a really good tool. Be we have terminology like prompt engineering now flying around. So this is even a new high paid job apparently to figure out the best way to get the best results. There's an entire new industry coming up and then you have tools that prepare certain things. There are tools like Surfer AI or others as well that just ask you for a keyword and then really do their research. And it takes a few minutes, but they come out with a really good first draft already. But you could also possibly feed additional context in for the machine to actually understand where you want to go. So SEO or today is really making sure the content creation is as efficient as possible. Why? Because this goes together from my perspective with another concept that has been around for a while, which is topical authority. So go two years back, roughly three years back, we already knew that if you write a lot about a certain topic, you are seen as an authority around this topic. It just makes sense. This person, you know, this person in your among your friends is always talking about CrossFit. They probably know a thing or two about it, right? On the Internet the same this website is always talking about SEO. Probably have some experience with SEO. It just makes sense and especially if the content is quality. And this is what we have been trying to emulate for quite a while already with articles. Just that it was really, really costly until now because getting a human writer to write this piece of content and do this 50, 100, 200 times in order to establish topical Authority is time consuming, but it's also very expensive. Now fast forward a little bit. You have AI tools and now the process gets more efficient, but it still doesn't mean that you can just fire up an AI tool and you're done.

Yeah. So the idea here then would be to figure out that topic and ideally it's something you've been doing for years and to focus there because I would imagine with any changes Google's going to do, or Bing, they're going to carry that same kind of theme because that's just how humans work anyway. They want that trusted authority, that top of mind. So Google's going to probably rely on that type of authority virtually.

I think niching down has always been a good idea, but especially now. What I actually try to train my team a little bit on now is to think like a machine. We have been trying a few years to get them think more like humans and they engage with the content and stuff like that. We're going the other way around. For me, SEO has becoming really technical these days. So we try to really think, what is a machine that's processing this text, that's trying to make sense of this text actually going to think. And if you think about a website that talks about a little bit about everything, podcasts very often have this problem. What should Google really rank? What are you really an authority for? Right. Where should they really trust you? Talking on one episode about SEO or five episodes versus thousands of other sites that are completely focused on SEO? How are you going to establish that your content should still rank? And these are questions that are not easy to answer. So if anybody has a chance to niche down and to say, look, this is the core of what I'm doing, I could be talking about, about digital marketing and affiliate and all these kinds of things, but the core of what I'm doing is really this. By all means, stick to it and establish this topical authority because it's going to be easier for the machine to make sense of it.

That makes sense. So when it comes to the tool and it's AI prm, Right. And thanks for the recommendation because I have been using it for a variety of things and so that's like a. It's a free and a paid plugin that plugs into chat GPT and yeah, it's essentially, it has all these predefined prompts that are rated and reviewed already for you to kind of search and. And super powerful. So thanks for that recommendation. So how would someone. And like you said, it's still kind of like an intern. Because yeah, the more you train any large language model like ChatGPT, the the better it gets. Just like an intern I guess would be, you know, if that were to be a person. So would you say start with a draft? Like let's say we're niching down or we already know our niche and but we just want to expand on the topics within there. Is that how you would start as a first draft and you know, find one of those prompts and then I'm sure there's a process behind that as well.

I would definitely just find your own process that works for you. Right. So I have, for example in my Notion app I have a document where I have a little bit of a questionnaire and say, okay, I'm going to use this whenever I go to ChatGPT before I ask ChatGPT to produce a draft for content, I go to my notion tab and fill in all these blanks. And there is one that says target audience colon. There is another one that says length colon. There's another one that says factor column. And I would just go literally through this and say target audience, e commerce sites or site owners. Right. Facts X amount of users do not click on a search result because we have zero click search. I don't know what you give. It just effects that you actually want to transmit. And then the last line is now based on all this create another clear for a blog post for example and things like those. So it's going to process this again thinking like a machine is going to process all information I've given it on top of. And then it's going to see this line that says now write a blog post about this. So the better we get at giving this context, the better the outcome is going to be. Again, I would tell this intern, look, we need a blog post. This is the person that's going to read it. This is what we want this person to do afterwards. So we need to have some calls to action. The call to action is an ebook. So you build up in the content to download this ebook because it's going to give the answer. You would kind of brief them. And the briefing is probably what you could look at when you look at this prompt want it's a briefing for this machine about what you want out of it.

I like that. Yeah.

Then those briefings are pretty much what now has value, so to speak, like an app store. And AIPRM is one of the first platforms I think that did this. There might come be others coming as well, but they Were really, really fast in providing this platform. And there you can not only manage your own prompts, but you can also use other prompts. You see reviews, you see prompts that have been used 50,000 times, 500,000 times, and uploaded and stuff like that. And you can just use them either with. Depending on the subscription, I think, with viewing how they were made, or just using them and then get really good quality out of it.

I like that. I like the reframe of Briefs. Yeah, it's like, that's like a template of Briefs, AI prm and like. Yeah, we're just. With any kind of chat GPT use, you're going to want to refine that based off of whatever context you want to give it and figure out the outline. I know you have great outlines for like the structure of your post, but also it's like us listening right now or talking, you know, like we might have our own. That work for us and our audience. Maybe we can refine it a little bit for SEO, you know, with, with certain things like a table of contents. I know that's, that's something you recommend at the top of some of these posts, you know, and headers and all that fun stuff. But that kind of goes back to the basics, right, of SEO and technical SEO, I would imagine.

A lot of things definitely haven't, haven't gone away. User experience is still a big one. Ultimately. You also want the traffic to convert, so you need to factor this in as well. How. What are they going to do? What is it they're supposed to do? What do they want to find out from this article? Why did they come? Don't hide it too far at the bottom. Usually what we see, and this is in general now, with the machines processing this and trying to make sense of everything, whatever goes first is more important. And this is when you think of the structure in an article, for example, something that's at the beginning is going to be more important. If you're in a subsection, something that gets close to the sub headline is going to be the important part. And once we start paying a little bit more attention and trying to really scan this article like a machine would, we sometimes say, okay, of course I'm not ranking well, because this is in the last sentence of this article. It doesn't seem as important as I thought about it. So obviously it's not going to rank well.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, the structure. And that's why I'm thinking of my website now, because after this whole transition, there's so many Modifications I want to do, but I want to just waiting for Google to see that whole change of address. But that's my own situation right now. But I'm sure there's, there's a lot of folks that are, you know, there's things to optimize and how would you go about. And maybe this is back to the basics a little bit. But for someone who does want to optimize what they have currently and they know they have some great articles out there, are there suggestions on how to identify which articles or, you know, posts that could be really helping them, but they can optimize with the use of AI and some of these tools you're just talking about?

It's a really good question because a lot of people come to us with 500 or 5,000 blog posts that have been building up over time. And the question is, okay, I can't do everything at once. Where do I have the 8020 that are going to give me the fastest impact? From our perspective, we were never traffic driven, but also always conversion driven. So for me it's important to establish what are those blog posts that actually drive the right audience in. You might have huge amounts of traffic, but maybe it's useless traffic. So unless you establish the conversion rate you get from those articles, I couldn't even start telling you which articles probably are a good idea to start with. And once we know which articles are the conversion drivers, or at least drive an engaged audience in, then we can look at the articles that have the best potential. Articles that have been going down in the last months in traffic and visibility might be a reason why this happened. I'll see which article has got the most backlinks from other websites, links coming into their articles. Why did they come in? Have they stopped coming in? What's happening there? So then really the analysis process starts. Because ultimately what you definitely want to avoid is that you just go have somebody and your team go blindly through 1500 blog posts and say refresh them all. And then in two years we are done. And in two years the situation is completely different. We always want to make sure that the resources we put into SEO have a why behind them. So we literally tell clients, we want you to touch this article. There's a why section and the why we fill this in. So I have my team trained to always be able to justify why we think it's a good idea that they spend time on, so we spend time on it for them. Because this is a conversion driving piece. This is a bottom of funnel content. This is driving in the right audience. We had in the past, we had much more, many more conversions than we have now because it has gone down. All these kinds of things are then a good reason and set everybody up for success to actually do a good job with this piece.

Yeah, and I remember you doing a deep dive with Matt and I on the old Evergreen profit site and you did a just a mat you and your team did this massive audit that allowed us to see. Wow, there's a lot of content for one. And partially it's because we have so many, you know, podcast episodes. But there are ways to optimize those. And based off of conversions, you know, we, we have lead magnets and things like that that we were tracking. So you did help us identify a lot of those and it made it way, way simpler to go through and optimize those from basically best to worst, I guess, you know, and put them in a ranking order.

I think it's always also sometimes a relief. We had recently a website where them to remove a lot of articles that dropped in traffic, but they were useless articles. They had nothing to do with their core business. And this is always when Google has too many dots to connect, as I usually say, the image gets blurry. So they can only connect so many dots and still know what you actually want, what kind of traffic you want. But if you start talking about everything, you really need either to have a perfect structure, which is hardly the case, or it's easier really to get rid of some of those traffic because the traffic isn't doing anything anyway way so. And sometimes it's really a relief when you say okay, I've got 1500 articles, but 500 of them are not doing anything that never drive conversions. They have huge bounce rates because people see they are not at the right place. Why not look at them and maybe get rid of some of them.

That's a smart idea because it's not.

Helping your business anyway. And this is then also sometimes a relief as okay, it's not 1500 anymore. Now it's 1200 or a thousand. And this is already a little bit more manageable. Now it's let's do the 8020 again and say what's still driving conversions and where do we see SEO potential short term?

That makes sense. So yeah, based off of conversions and bounce rate. You mentioned that and I know Google looks at that because they want user experience time on site. They want you going to multiple pages within that domain to show that it.

Does depend on the search intent. Right. A high bounce rate on an article talking about the height of the Eiffel Tower is normal. Nobody's going to read the entire history. We need to be careful and see this in context. So bounce rate is not a metric per se, but it does indicate, indicate very often that people are not finding what they're looking for or might expect something a different website. So if you start suddenly talk about cancer treatment, they might read this article, but they see this entire site is not about cancer treatment. So I move on.

That makes sense. Not relevant for me for going deep. Yeah, okay. This is great context, man. And it's great for all of us because I can already picture there's some high traffic pages and posts from our old site that I was looking in Google Analytics, which, by the way, I know there's a Google Analytics, what, four coming out. So make that change, y', all, if you haven't already, because that's where the data's at. So you need to have that hooked up. Yeah. So there's already pages in my mind, I'm like, those aren't really relevant anymore and they were written, you know, five years ago or something. High traffic. But I'm like, I don't know where it's going or why it's even here. So I'll be doing that audit soon for sure. Yeah.

I think sometimes we need to balance out the ego versus ego versus outcome. It's good for my ego that I get hundreds of visitors or thousands of visitors to this article every month. If zero conversions are next to it consistently, think of how you can actually monetize it or do something with it, or maybe redirect it to another site and get a deal or something. There are probably ways to still make it work for somebody if it's not you.

That's a good point.

But very often we see this ego is a big part of SEO, which.

Is a problem, I guess. To kind of wrap up this first episode, I'm curious of any tools and things that we can do actionable, are, must do and have have things in our arsenal. Things like I mentioned Google Analytics. I mean, that's a pretty basic one, but still, it. It blows me away with how many people don't have that installed. And these are companies that just don't know what it is or at least how to even, you know, the metrics that are in there. We mentioned some of them, but things like that. Maybe Google Search Console is another one. I know, I dealt with all that, so I guess rattle off some of the basics and maybe some other things that you use that are kind of must have.

Yeah, absolutely. Google Analytics for conversion conversion tracking. It's really interesting. Seven figure businesses coming to us without conversion tracking in place. Eight figure businesses sometimes with no conversion tracking affiliates, not tracking clicks, they just track revenue. A lot of information really getting lost just because the tracking isn't in place. Google search console definitely, as long as they still give us search queries. I don't think it's going to be too long with the TED features coming, etc. But they still give you an idea what kind of terms you're visible for, what kind of click rates you're getting, etc. So this is definitely one and one I usually recommend at the beginning anyway is Google. Because what people very often don't do is Google the thing they actually want to rank for. So they have a good idea in mind. They want to be ranking when somebody types in Life Coach Miami. But they never Google this themselves because if they did they would see what it is that Google is looking for and then they could produce something similar. Sometimes we see people just putting out what they think is the best content they have ever created and it takes them a week just to then see it sits on page five of Google where it's not doing anything because it's not what Google was looking for. Maybe Google was for a listicle and you have a 5,000 words article. Maybe Google is for a comparison site and you are just not a comparison site, you are just one of those providers. Maybe Google is looking for an E commerce site and you're a blog. Very often people have a strong mismatch between what they actually have and what they want to achieve. It's just not compatible and you need to go a little bit around, find a workaround to get what you want. So very often the first start before you look into tools or keyword research or whatever get clients really feeling prepared for SEO but not getting results. Why? Because they didn't even do the first thing. You just Google what you think you you should be ranking for. And if you're absolutely sure this is the term that brings in buyers and it's not just an ego driven term you want to be number one for because you were the first or the best or something like that. Then definitely see what is it that Google is looking for. Check out at least the first three results. This is going to give you a good overview what Google thinks people want and then see is it actually realistic that you can provide something like that Makes sense.

That shows you the context and the style of the page and structure and yeah, the actual intent of the people because, yeah, it's going to raise rank the results that people want. I mean, so Google's the best at that.

Yeah, absolutely. And then really, I think I do recommend these days chatgpt just to really get a little bit into this mindset of what this could mean or how it can actually help you and get a little bit smarter about giving enough context to a tool in order to get something back. And this really, at the very basic level can be analyze your Persona. What are the pain points of your audience? What can be. How can I structure a content? This is the content content for a blog. Is this a content for a sales page? Is this an FAQ section? Right. What kind of questions could come up that I could deal with? What kind of topics am I missing in this article? All these kinds of prompts can actually help you produce a piece that has a very good chance to rank. But then also be prepared to then rework this manually factoring your own stories. Storytelling has been in the media for years now and still people are not thinking of it. Right. And ultimately, ideally, it's one thing to drive traffic, it's another thing to actually get this conversion happening. So there needs to be a human element. It's not going to be the spun content from ChatGPT only that's going to do it. And then one thing we always need to take into account as well is the information gain. Which means what are you actually contributing in your article to the Internet that wasn't there before or that you see in a completely different way? Where are you adding value? ChatGPT and the likes are just going to spin the content that's already there, there and predicting what sounds like a good answer, but it doesn't have to be one. But the moment you start adding a story with one of your customers or a case study or say, look, we did this, we did that, describe your story a little bit. This gets really personalized and this is where the information gain is. And I think this is going to be one of those things that's going to spread apart the AI only content. But people just copy and paste and they sometimes literally copy like footprints or footers from ChatGPT into their blog post without even reading it. And the ones that, that get a very efficient content process going, but still have this brand personality, this experience coming across.

I like that. Yeah, because it's very simple to fall into the trap of just coming up with a whole blog post based off of like five keywords And I know that AI prm, a lot of those prompts are just like, hey, just describe the topic. And it's like, well, and the way I've been using it is like, no, no, no, I'm going to put way more context in there, maybe even a previous blog post and have it kind of altered it using one of those prompts. Because it is very easy to just, just get the spun content and then feel like you did it. But that's. No, it's. You're right, you need to add that your own human element, your own expertise. That's how obviously the large language models get smarter as well. But you know what, at least if it's sourcing from you, you know, don't, don't, don't forget about your own brain.

Absolutely. And I think podcasters in this case are now in a very good place. If you remember all the transcripts, transcriptions that podcasts usually used. Now you can just take this transcription, this is your material, right. Use it as the source and get it written into an article, for example, or get an article, extract the top 10 factors for SEO in AI times from the transcription and put in a piece of content together, get it, write a summary that you can use on social media and then edit this a little bit. I would always have a human common element editing the content. We at SEO leverage. We still use filters to check does it automatically get flagged as AI content or does it add today, for example, at least passes non AI content. We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. Just to be a little bit on the safer side, we don't know how Google is going to react to AI content at scale. But the fact is that AI is here to stay and Google is not going to force anybody to work like 10 years ago just because they can't handle AI.

Yeah, yeah, I love it, man. Yeah. So a lot of us that are sitting on content, that's where I'm always thinking, podcaster, that's one thing. Or just spilling out content. I feel like a lot of us and. Cause it's, it's easier to chat. I feel like those kind of things out. But think of even people with courses, you know, there's a lot of folks with old courses that are unique to you, your processes, your IP. Well, those can be also loaded into ChatGPT and structured in a way that maybe can become a blog post or some an outline for a podcast, potentially, you know, like something that can assist you. So lots of uses of the AI tools and how you can layer it with SEO for sure. Thank you for one, because my brain's already spinning. You're giving me a bunch of ideas as always, and I know that's what everyone says when they chat with you. So I want to invite people to go reach out to you if anything pinged in their brain. Because. Because all of us, obviously, we need to be prepared for the changes to come and the things that are happening now. And especially if you're sitting on a lot of content and a website that has conversions in mind. I mean, you have helped us tremendously over SEO leverage. So I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about briefly or, you know, I know seoleverage.com gets you there and you can chat with the guys, you and your team.

Absolutely. I think this is the best. I would love to test. Obviously. I think one thing that's really important is that we see that SEO has changed a lot. So we see a lot of people coming and say, look, I have a good understanding about SEO. I got to a decent point with SEO. Just maybe in the last two years it started slowing down a little bit, etc. In the last two years, a lot of things have changed and it's getting very, very technical. And the normal thing is when you brought your business to a certain level that you just can't keep up with everything and you might have somebody for Facebook ads and maybe have kept SEO always on your end because how you grew a brand, etc. I believe we are at the level where this is not possible anymore or hardly realistic. When business owners come to me and say, I'm going to handle all this, we know it's not going to happen. So at this stage, we pretty much work only with teams, small teams at least, or they outsource the work to us directly just because it has gotten so complex that it's enough if you have to approve and edit some articles here and there, but you just can't keep up with the fast move. It is where I'm always happy to chat and explain a little bit what the situation is like today, what has actually changed in the last years just to set everybody up for success, but also see that there is still a lot of room in the SEO world in Google. Google has always been, although they had so many algorithm updates, to have sent us more and more traffic to websites in general. So it is to be expected that the new changes might reduce on one end, but might also compensate on another end. How much traffic comes to us and how much visibility we get for our brand.

Yeah, and. And definitely over the years, Matt and I, we. We realized how much SEO carried our business. And it wasn't just for the ego traffic sake. It was conversions. That's how we made a ton of affiliate conversions and our own product sales grew. This podcast was through SEO and your help. So that's why. That's why I was like, okay, Gert's the man. We're doing a series here. We're gonna. Because you have been asked. And there's a friend of mine, Dan Ryan. Ryan, he said he loves you, follows all your stuff. There you go, Dan. He always loves a good mention and he appreciate it.

Oh, yeah.

So you'll be back for more, so.

Yeah, absolutely, Ruben, my pleasure.

Thank you, man. So seoleverage.com is how you get to Gert, and yeah, go. Go check out what he's got over there and how he can help. All right, all right. That's what I got for you today. And remember, it's not all about living to work. It's all about working to live if you need to do the work. But, you know, work can be fun and it should be fueling for your life. So if you enjoyed what you just heard, if you got some nuggets of wisdom that you want to share or you're just noodling on right now, please go tell others. The way that people find this show and how you can help others get their aha moments is through word of mouth. So if it is telling on your friend, telling your family, send an email to your list writing a review or whatever it might be, everything helps. So thank you so much for listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, and I will see you next time.