Content Creation Transformed: The Power of AI

As AI tools are becoming more and more prominent and people are using spammy content, the deciding factor between what site ranks above the other as future goes on and on and on, backlinks are a lot harder to replicate. Content blogs that can be replicated quite easily through AI tools. It's going to be what site has the highest quality backlink profile.

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All right, folks, welcome back to the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast. Today we're gonna talk about SEO and how it's not a 4-letter word. Technically it's 3, but why do you actually need to take advantage of SEO in the e-commerce world? That's today's topic. So as always, um, help me, uh, welcome our guests by encouraging, liking, commenting, sharing, helping us beat big tech, put something mean, pick on his hair. I don't know, just comment to help the social media thing go out. Um, don't pick on me, of course, because I need my fragile ego. So as we go through this conversation today, the real goal here is to learn about the power of using e-commerce and SEO in combination. As we should be doing. Many of you understand that in the world of Amazon and SEO, we talk about search engine optimization in the form of Amazon and e-commerce products, but that always translates backwards into what does it do on the worldwide web? How do I get more traffic and availability to that through other secondary channels, my website, YouTube, Reels and Shorts and videos, and now TikTok Shops and the SEO component of that. I'm sure we're going to cover that and a lot more. So guys, welcome to my show today. The guest, Mr. Josh. Who's coming in from the UK, correct?

Yes. London, to be precise.

London. I'm sorry, I didn't want to mess it up and say like Birmingham and be like, oh, I don't slum up in Birmingham. I'm not from Sherwood. I'm from London.

Yeah, that's crazy.

So what are you doing out in London these days? Living, working?

Yeah, honestly, I tend to just work and go to the gym. Like, that is my life. I wish I could say like, yeah, I do this, I do that.

I really—

No girlfriends, no boyfriends, nobody else in the Yeah, you know, I've got a lot of friends that are in the music industry. A lot of them moved from London to LA now and they're singers, songwriters, producers. So yeah, a lot of my good friends aren't really that close to me proximity now, which is quite sad. I'm really looking at a little sob story.

We're gonna skip past that real quick, Josh, and we're gonna move on to—

no, I'm just kidding. No, no, no, no.

This isn't a dating podcast.

Yeah, no, I mean, like, other than that, honestly, I tend to work probably more than I should. And I think it's just, I enjoy what I do. Like, I've been doing SEO for Since 2015, which doesn't sound like that long, but it's come to 10 years now and a lot of change.

Yeah, exactly.

I think there's lots of changes across digital marketing in general, right? Email marketing, Meta ads, Google ads, but SEO seems to evolve so rapidly. You're always learning new strategies, new tactics. So I think the fact it evolves so much kind of keeps me on top of my toes and keeps me very well interested into the next algorithm updates.

So there's a bit of a thing happening right now, isn't there?

Another kind of under-the-table quiet SEO happening, a change that Google made, a CMS-related option. Is it referring to the AI content now? Or what are we seeing as the impact of this change?

Yeah, I mean, gosh, there's one thing I've noticed in the last 2 years is there's typically like, let me, 3 to 4 Google algorithm updates a year, like core algorithm updates. And with the release of AI and ChatGPT becoming more and more prominent, Google are releasing more updates and they're targeting more things. So it's kind of, I feel like Google's kind of losing a little bit of control over how to determine what site ranks above another one. Because again, back in the day, it was just Write high quality content, write high quality content. The problem is now everyone's using AI tools and everyone's writing content. So how does Google start to value that content and determine whose site has the best content and what site ranks above the other? So it's a very interesting time for sure.

Are you seeing a positive or negative impact with some of your clients with those things right now?

I would say on the whole, we're seeing positive. We do see issues where clients are just going on to ChatGPT and maybe they have an e-com brand selling, I don't know, water bottles and they tell ChatGPT, write me a blog post about water bottles, and they just literally copy and paste that upload into the website. Like, that's not going to add any value and it's not going to support your SEO campaign. It's going to do more harm than good. And more times than not, the content they publish through ChatGPT doesn't actually even get indexed. So it's literally wasting time and resources as well.

So really, the regular straight-up content, human-interacted content, is the best tip?

Yeah, I think it's just because you can add a human perspective on content, right? I've noticed as well, especially in the review space, like if you're reviewing an e-com product, yeah, you're trying to put an affiliate article on your website. If you can use first-person terminology, like, I reviewed this, I think this, we noticed this, and like, it's all about you and your experience using that product, Google can pick that up in the algorithm to say, hey, this is actually firsthand experience, this person uses it. And this, as a result, is going to get a higher ranking over this page that just says, this product can be good for this, it can be good for that, it may help this, it may be that kind of broad and vague. That's not the way you want to go if you want to provide value to the users.

So by proxy, Google and probably other platforms have been advancing their AI counter-initiatives stronger than the AI development teams are building the large language models to—

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a race to— it's a race technology-wise, isn't it?

100%. It's actually really interesting. Google used to say when AI first came out, like in terms of AI content tools, that AI content is not allowed. You can't use AI to produce content because It's trying to manipulate the Google search results. And then after they realize no one's going to listen, everyone's going to keep using AI to write content, they change the rules to say AI content is allowed, but it must provide value. And now they're saying it is allowed, it must provide value, and you also must mark that it's produced by AI.

Now you have to disclose it on videos and things. TikTok's requiring that now as part of its disclosure policy that you put AI in your videos. Yeah, they're just trying to increase, I think, the value of the content, right? Or are there other things they're trying to stop?

Yeah, and that should be the ultimate goal, right? Like, if you're producing any form of content, whether it's a video, a blog, I don't know, social media posts, like, if you're not providing value, why are you providing that content in the first place?

Victims of their own success, really, at the end of the day. Because they're content technology aggregators, and then people found a way to use technology to aggregate more content, and now they want it to stop.

Yeah, it's a funny time we're in at the moment. I mean, that's why I find myself working most weekends, though, just like, ah, Google said this, ah, Google said that, and it's like—

Up and up and up. Yeah.

We face those battles on platforms like Amazon and stuff too, where they constantly are changing and shifting. The core, some of the core fundamentals of the SEO haven't changed, but the way that other bots and mechanisms and, and policies are changing around it to try to minimize the impact of people using that technology for good, but also nefarious reasons in the marketplaces. And they're changing that. And are, are you seeing that in the e-commerce world on your end impacting things that you're doing and how are you, you know, mitigating those challenges?

So we are literally taking control of all content for clients we work with now. So normally we'd say to the client, look, you have someone in-house writing the blog posts, that's great, we'll do our own thing with the SEO, we'll work with them together. And we've found that when we do that, like the person in-house or even the client, they don't really care or really understand what we're trying to do for the SEO. It's like, yep, I need more SEO, I want to diversify my sales channels, I want to cover it full out on paid ads, so let's get ClickSights in to help us out. But I'm also going to try and help ClickSights and just spam out loads of content myself. So Yeah, in those instances where we have that, we see those campaigns struggling the most. And back in the day, you can have like one high quality page on your website, maybe a category or collection page, right? And that ranks, it does well. And the rest of your other pages could be like pretty much poor in terms of content, even link building as well. But now to rank, like you need all of your pages to have high quality scores across them, kind of like Google Ads, right? Google assesses the quality score of each individual page. It's pretty much the same thing we're seeing on the SEO side now. So we need more of a holistic approach. It isn't just let's focus all my resources here and produce as much content.

Yeah.

Let's make this page great and this one bad, or you really need to be addressing all points of your website to see success from it.

So no, since it's going to slow down the content production process we've seen speed up in the last year due to AI, it's going to pull it back quite a bit. Content's going to slow down, but content should become a lot better in that process.

100%. It's interesting. I spoke with a massive brand, actually D2C brand in Canada who had 2 people in-house basically handling the SEO. And all they were doing was basically publishing blog posts, which isn't really SEO. It's just one part of SEO. And when I was asking them like, like, Where are you coming up with these ideas? Come up with blog posts? Like, oh, we're just asking ChatGPT. We have an e-com brand in the lingerie space, and we asked them 100 blog post ideas. Great. And then they also asked ChatGPT to write the content. And I was like, okay. And I looked at all the pages, right? And on the website, to be fair, like they did a lot of editing to it. So it wasn't just like copy and paste, a little bit of human intervention, but half of these content, like I think maybe 60 out of those 100 in total, they weren't even indexed. So although it looks great, it's on your website, Google's not even aware this content is relevant to the topic of your website. So again, it's not supporting their SEO. And I think too many brands are overlooking that.

They're just— So the publishing, of course, isn't just the main mechanism. It's what do you do after? Once you've got something on the content, what do you do next? What do you recommend someone do when they publish something? Say I'm on Substack, which is a major platform for this, or Beehive. I've got my own blog on WordPress or whatnot. What do you recommend the next step is after I publish something? I wrote it, I enjoyed it, I had great content, it wasn't AI generated. What should I do?

That's a really good question. And so I think to understand what to do with the blog post, we first need to understand how blogs support the overall SEO campaign. So most agencies, when they're working with clients, is they would just, like I said, publish a blog post after blog post after blog post. And even if the blog posts do get indexed, what you will see is an increase in organic traffic. And most clients say, wow, my traffic's gone up, 100 blogs, this is the thing to do, publish blogs, get more traffic. But then you ask them, like, have you generated more organic sales? Have you made more money? They're like, no, I haven't. Because what you're doing is you're publishing blog posts, which are typically informational intent keywords, right? Like, if you own I don't know, a men's grooming, say, e-com brand, and you have products selling men's razor blades, you may have blogs on the pros and cons of razor blades. How much do razor blades cost, right? And if you're publishing that type of content, and that is your main strategy as part of your SEO campaign, all you're doing is attracting information-related traffic, which isn't going to make you money. So how blogs actually should be used for SEO is instead of just publishing them and kind of hope for the best, is you should interlink them. So good example, again, using the same e-com brand, A men's grooming brand that has razor blades for sale should be publishing the same blog post I told you how to use a razor blade, the pros and cons, how much do they cost, and all of these blogs should interlink to each other. So kind of like a hyperlink text, right? Blog 1 links to blog 2, links to 3, and blog 3 links back to blog 1. And you've got what we call a TC, a topical cluster you're building. Now you don't just leave those blogs interlinked, you link them back to the category page. And that's how you further start to convince Google this page is about men's razor blades. Because you don't just have your category page, you've got your blog post supporting that.

So it's kind of a spindle approach to a, you know, a centralized category page with a spindle of blogs talking about particular conversations, topics, how-tos, etc. Those are all interlinked with each other and they all link back to that primary category page within, say, Shopify in this instance, right?

Yeah, 100%. And I think even a part like before people start writing content, they need to understand what to write content about. So another good example using the same website, maybe being a men's razor blade website, right? Most e-com brands will have the category page trying to rank for razor blades or men's razor blades, right? And then they'll publish a blog post, the top 5 razor blades. And it's like, how do you know you should have a blog post to serve that user intent? Should you have a category page? And if you don't do the research and what we call keyword cannibalization, you're gonna end up having 2 pages on a website competing for the same term. It doesn't mean you have 2 pages ranking. It means one day one page may rank, and the next day another page may rank. And all that means is Google's confused. Like what page should it serve to the user?

So really one page, one intent.

Exactly. So doing that research, number one, is crucial. And most people just don't do that when they're using ChatGPT.

Is that just, I mean, Shopify, say if I got an Amazon-only brand at this point, I haven't gone DTC and I haven't opened additional channels. Can I use a similar Spindle sort of technology suite sort of intent and strategy to positively impact traffic and rankability on Amazon in that way?

You mean rank inside Amazon?

Sending off traffic onto Amazon through a blog posting style network that pushes me back to Amazon as opposed to say to my Shopify Gotcha.

Yeah, it's exactly the same strategy, because only you're trying to rank in Google. And then it doesn't matter where you send that traffic, whether it's to your checkout page on Shopify, whether you send it through an affiliate link, or whether you send it to your own store on Amazon, where users end up at the end doesn't really matter too much. It's how you capture those users.

And the whole overall structure makes a lot of sense. Yeah, if someone's gonna open a blog post in their Amazon and they want more traffic, they were going to— they should know their buyer intent keywords. They should know that buy red baseball caps is going to get their red baseball caps sold. And so they should actually have a page for buy red baseball caps on a blog somewhere, post Either on their own or third party. Is third-party blogging still a great way to leverage that connectivity?

Yeah, it's— I would say like in terms of leveraging another site, we use that for predominantly link building.

Okay.

We don't really use that third-party site as a mechanism of generating traffic and sales for our client. The problem with using third-party sites and kind of basing the whole strategy on that is again, you don't own that asset. So you're actually spending money, time, and resources to upload content on a site you don't ultimately own and I'm very fond and very big of building your own asset because ultimately if you want to sell the brand in 2, 3 years' time, it's not much value saying, yeah, this is a brand. Also, I've got 5 blogs on these other websites and hopefully they lead it up for sale. I can't really say like, yeah, it creates more risk.

No doubt. Intrinsic value. How long does SEO really take these days? I know the myth is that SEO takes a long time and a lot of work and you can screw one thing up and break the whole mechanism. How much truth is that? And where's the myth? And what's the reality?

Great question. So there's some truth in that. But I think a lot of— I don't want to name any agencies— a lot of dodgy agencies have kind of been milking that for a bit too long. Typically, it can take 6 to 9 months to see results, but depends on what's been done in the past, what niche you're in, what the budget is as well. We've taken on loads of brands, loads in the US, loads in Canada, and we've got results in the first 3 weeks. So there's no reason why you can't get results. They just need to know where to look and where to focus your resources. And I think the reason why most agencies drag it out is they say 6 to 9 months, and it's because they tie you into a 6 to 9 month contract. There's no incentive for them to make you money in month 1 or month 2, where we work on a rolling 30-day basis. So if I tell a brand, sorry, 6 to 9 months, and you have to wait 6 to 9 months, I get you one sale, like they're gonna drop off.

A $30 product. Yeah, they're out.

Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

They gotta see the value in that shorter term. So what is it, what do you normally try to work through in a relationship with the client expectations in that way in terms of like physical product sales? And then what kind of brand product sales are you looking for that you see really the best in the market? Someone listening to this could say, hey, that matches me. I have a product that's this much. I don't do that. You know what, give us that profile.

Yeah. So in terms of like expectations, what we set with clients before we onboard them, we do an audit of the website anyway. So we see exactly what we're working with. And we always identify and we even tell them ourselves that, by the way, we looked at your website and based on all our historical data and previous campaigns we worked on, These 3 things are really holding you back. And even if you did them yourself, you'd actually see an impact in organic traffic and revenue going up just doing it yourself. So we're very transparent and upfront that we never try and say you have to hire us and we'll tell you the 3 things like, no, we tell brands exactly what's wrong. And some brands go away, implement themselves, and happy for them. It's a win. We help them make more money. We haven't onboarded that client. But end of the day, I trust them to come back to us in the long term when they want to expand the site further. But typically, the most common things e-com brands can do. Like, if you're an e-com brand listening to this and you have a category page, or you're on Shopify, you have a collection URL. If you have your content— so if you have your, all your product pages on your category page, right, listed— again, men's razor blades, you've got 100 razor blades to sell. Again, if you look at any other category page on the internet selling the same product, they've got the same thing. They've got a title saying razor blades, and then they've got products, right? So category pages are notoriously thin because Google doesn't understand what they're about. You've just got products and products. So A really quick way you can actually implement to increase your rankings for that transactional page, your category page, is to add topically relevant content below the products on that page. And all that is just a fancy word for content relevant to the products on that page. So if you're selling razor blades again, then just add a buyer's guide, things to look out for when purchasing a razor blade, the width, the handle, the type of razor blades, right? And that will further convince Google this page is about razor blades and increase the chance of that page ranking. And you can do that Okay, literally in a week I'll write the content, upload it, and no doubt like within 2 weeks you'll see an increase in ranking just from that.

That's cool, dude.

Are you predominantly in the e-commerce world? Do you ever help like clients or coaches or real estate people or local business and total co-ops? Do you work with anybody in the e-commerce world or SEO world, excuse me, or do you just predominantly focus on e-commerce?

Yes, 90% of our clients are e-com. That is kind of our niche. But the great thing about Google is it has the same algorithm whether you're e-com, lead gen, SaaS. So It's the same principles and strategies you follow. And ultimately, you just want to convince Google you're relevant and authoritative. So the only thing that changes is essentially the keywords we target, like our website, clicksize.co.uk. We're not an e-com brand, like we are an SEO agency, right? So we do SEO for ourselves. That's not an e-commerce SEO campaign. That's true enough, service-based business local campaign. And we rank number 1 in the UK for SEO agency London.

So smart strategy. You actually put it into practice for yourself.

Exactly. It's one of the best sales techniques. Like we just say to people, like, if you don't hire us, you are literally going to hire the person below us. Oh, that's smooth.

That's very smooth. By the way, you're going to lose because we own the SEO side of London.

That is it. That is it.

The SEO Mafia. That's what you should have as your website. seomafia.com.

I don't know.

Was that taken? You should go get that and coin it. You've heard it here first. If you could open your crystal ball future time for a moment and speak at 2024. Right. By the time this comes out in 2024, where do you see, where do you think it's going? And maybe even into 2025, if somebody's looking forward, knowing it's a 6 to 9 month process minimum to kind of see that impact, what are you saying? What should they be doing? What should they be thinking? Are you bullish on it? Are there things you'd be more conservative about in the SEO world?

Great question. Again, I would say the things people need to be more bullish on and take more seriously is if they are doing SEO, even at a basic level, They want to take link building more seriously. And the reason I say that is because link building has always been one of the biggest ranking factors in Google's algorithm. They have come out multiple times and said they don't use links to determine what site ranks, blah, blah, blah. But there's so much evidence and data that suggests otherwise. And I think what people forget is that listening to Google about SEO advice is so, it doesn't make any sense. It's so illogical because Google doesn't, Google is never going to tell you what to do to rank organically because if you rank organically, guess what? You're not going to spend money on Google Ads, which is where they make the bulk of their revenue. So you shouldn't be following Google, number one. And evidence of that is, again, all the data you'll see on like all these SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush. But only you want to be focusing on link building. And the reason I say that is because as AI tools are becoming more and more prominent and people are using spammy content, the deciding factor between what site ranks above the other as future goes on and on and on is going to be what site has the highest quality backlink profile. Backlinks are a lot harder to replicate. Content, blogs that can replicate quite easily through AI tools.

Yeah, so cool, man. Such great insight. I appreciate you sharing that with me. Last question, or well, last couple of questions, if you don't mind. If there's something that I didn't bring up, something that we didn't talk about, or something that you wanted to cover topic-wise, and we just didn't get to it yet, now's your chance. What would that topic be? What did you want to say?

I would say this is probably one I hear a lot of e-com brands tell me, especially the last couple of months is like, yeah, Josh, I'm building links, like this guy's building me 5, you're offering me 2. So obviously, like, I'm getting better value for money. Link building is one of the most complicated processes of SEO. There's thousands of nuances involved in it. And I don't like to confuse people. But essentially, what I would say is not every link is equal. And just because someone got you featured on a website that on the surface level looks great, looks pretty, and it sounds pretty relevant to your website. So imagine you sell golf clubs, right? And you got featured on golfclubhqparty.com. Golf clubs is relevant, right? Most of these agencies are building these sites themselves and they own them and they actually have no SEO value. But to you it looks great. They got me featured. This is a guest post. What's the issue? And what I always tell clients is, you know, if you are working with an agency or you're unsure about the quality of the work, just ask them to tell you how much traffic does that domain actually get?

Yep.

What is the domain rating of that website? Has that site been hit by a Google algo update in the past, right? What other links are linking to that site you got a link from? This level of quality and making sure the domains you get are high quality has a massive impact on your site. And again, another brand I just took on last week in the outdoor niche, they had been working with another agency for I think 7 to 8 months, and they've been building 6 links a month. And I looked at the links, half of them again aren't even indexed because they're on shoddy websites that they own. So again, no value, but it looks like it's providing value. And I think that's kind of my main take from this, is there are a lot of scammers in the SEO industry. You need to be very careful and I always say like anyone who's good at SEO is not going to reach out to you from a cold email or a LinkedIn message. Like you're most likely going to find them from the organic rankings. So yeah, there's evidence in people's rankings for sure.

Very smart. All right. Final question. If there was someone in my network or power or just somebody that you would want to speak with, spend some time with, grab 15 minutes, have lunch, pick their brain, who would that be? What, who would, we've got all kinds of names that have come up like Elon Musk and Warren Buffett and somebody said Andre 3000 and we've had some obscure names. Who would be possible? Maybe even tag them in the network if they're alive. And see if 6 degrees of separation, they might be connected to us in some way, shape, or form. Any ideas who you'd want to speak to?

It has to be Jeff Bezos, Amazon. Like, it's so funny. We look at their site so much because obviously they're in the e-com space where every client we target, and they are making so many errors. It's absolutely unreal. But they get away with it because they're Amazon and they've got lots of authority.

Big old domain authority, big 99 on the domain authority.

Yeah, you can kind of like just cheat your way. It doesn't matter what you do for SEO if you're authoritative enough. Google will just rank you. So yeah, it'd be—

All right guys, 6 degrees of separation. Someone in my network through Amazon has gotta be connected with Jeff. So I will tag him in the post below this video. We'll see what happens. Never say never, right? It could happen. And maybe we'll share lunch when that does. Josh, thank you so much for coming on, man, and giving me some good words today. I appreciate you.

All right. Thanks for having me on, Neil.

Ask you this. If you're serious about building an e-commerce business starting on Amazon FBA, what if myself and my team worked with you one-on-one to execute the steps outlined in the podcast? While helping you discover what the heck to sell, how to make sure it's profitable, and how to successfully launch a brand. Plus, how to do it under a consulting plus performance-driven model where I put a $10,000 skin-in-the-game guarantee for those that show up and are serious about building a real business done with us. If yes, text keyword profit to +1-417-413-4209. That's 1-417-413-4209. And I will personally respond with a few simple questions. If you're not in the US or Canada, please visit voltage dm dot com. That's voltage dm dot com. Click Get Started and book a no-pressure discovery call with me or a member of my team to learn more about the Business Builders one-on-one coaching and mentoring for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and those looking to build an empire or retire using the power of e-commerce. Once again, thank you for listening, and be sure to tune in next week for a brand new episode of the High Voltage Business Builders podcast.