Beyond Keywords The Evolution of SEO in the Age of AI

Well, a little hint for you if you like more caffeine in your coffee. Light to medium blends or roasts have more caffeine. The dark roasts have less caffeine. So if you want more caffeine, don't go for the dark roast.

Old school SEO is about like throwing the keyword in a million times and the content just stinks. Everyone, I think nowadays is aware of when they see a page that's just optimized for the sake of SEO. Yeah, I mean, link building has evolved. The way I was doing it 15 years ago was push a button and bam.

Thousands of links are going to your website. That of course has changed. But the concept and trust, it's like, do you have a plumber that you can recommend? I'm going to trust the plumber because I trust you.

AI, I think its best purpose and use case right now is just helping with things that used to take a lot of time and just reducing that time. If there is consistent data entry or push button clicks or dragging things that can all be automated. I think people are just tired of seeing AI everything. There's a meme out there.

It's the Jordan Belfort Wolf of Wall street selling me this pen and their sponsors. It's AI powered elder Millennial, you know, who's used to doing things a very certain way, especially when it comes to search. But I'm also changing the way I'm using Gemini for Q and A. Using on my computer chatgpt to answer random questions that I might have.

I'm pointing my phone at it and having a conversation with Gemini about things I can do. Mmm, that's good. And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew. And I'm your host, Brett Deister.

If you please subscribe to this podcast and all your favorite podcasting apps, leave a five star review. It really does help with the rankings and let me know how I am am doing. But this week we're talking about SEO and content. Like the two main things about marketing that either is great for marketers or a terrible headache for marketers.

And sometimes it goes in between. Anyways, I have Jason with me. He's a founder and CEO director of Break the Web, the CEO and content marketing agency. Helping in house marketing teams of DTC and BTC brands make SEO more measurable.

Measurable, accessible and less annoying. So welcome to the show, Jason. Thanks Brett. It's a pleasure to be here.

And the first question ask all my guests is are you a coffee or tea drinker? But like with Limits. So coffee in the morning, but after it gets a certain point, I stay a little too wired. I have a hard time sleeping.

So about one cup of coffee in the morning is what usually sets me going. Got you. Do you have like any like specific blends you do or it's just whatever you can get your hands on? Whatever I can get my hands on.

My wife, I know likes strong, dark blends. I don't care. I. I don't really notice difference.

I tend to drink it in the mornings black, so it's maybe mixing it up adds different flavor, so to speak of the day. But yeah, I'm. You have a cup of coffee? Sure, I'll drink it.

Well, a little hint for you if you like more caffeine in your coffee. Light to medium blends or roasts have more caffeine. The dark roasts have less caffeine. So if you want more caffeine, don't go for the dark roast.

I'm gonna tell her that maybe you'll get one less cup per day on her side. So I gave a brief summary of your expertise. Can you hear those a little bit more about what you do? Yeah, pretty much.

Like you said, I'm the SEO director of Break the Web. We help in house marketing teams of direct to consumer or business community type brands really just take the annoyances and frustrations of SEO, which is ambiguous, nuanced, jargon heavy, and just break it down into simple forms and make it work. Because marketers have to report on organic to their leadership team and sometimes when they don't really know what's going on, or the SEO agency they're working with just is giving them jargon heavy language, it's just hard to translate internally.

So that's where we come in. SEO is often seen as a mysterious black box by many. Can you demystify your approach to crafting strategies that consistently rank content at the top? Yeah, I think it's more so of a mindset shift as to why we're really good at SEO.

Because we're not intentionally. I mean, rankings is absolutely a powerful measurement of success, but instead we're trying to solve problems and answer questions that our clients, their customers are asking. And when we're able to align content that accurately matches the intent on what somebody might be searching for, or maybe more transactional type pages like a product page. Aligning that with the intent allows us to be natural in the way we do things.

Old school SEO is about like throwing the keyword in a million times and the content just stinks. Like everyone I think nowadays is aware of when they see a page that's just optimized for the sake of SEO. It's words for the sake of words that has no, no value. We aim to kind of blend it all.

User experience, conversion, rate optimization and really good SEO so that our clients can get really awesome success. But also especially nowadays, see that success in multiple different places in AI platforms and other communities that people might be sharing. So when you're focused on the user first versus SEO first, it's a really big paradigm shift. And what's one tactic you swear by that's that the others might overlook?

I think the aspects of link building. People tend to say that link building, which is the concept of a link from around the web from another relevant website pointing back to yours is no longer important or no longer necessary and just content is king. But we see it as still a 50, 50 split with digital PR outreach to journalists, connecting with publications. That's off page SEO, that's trust being built on pages relevance of your website.

But you and your competitors can all be relevant. How can search engines differentiate trust factors? And that's where links still very much do play a part in an overall SEO strategy. And we have clients, for example, that have taken away links from the service because maybe links are hard to justify because you see something, but it's the multitude of aspects leading into good SEO.

But when links are taken away and things aren't performing well and we bring links back in and you're able to be competitive, that's when first party data shows the benefits. So basically still old school tactics, all of them. But some of them, like link building is still key to doing really good SEO. Yeah, I mean link building has evolved.

I mean the way I was doing it 15 years ago was push a button and bam, thousands of links are going to your website. That of course has changed. But the concept and trust, it's like, hey Brett, do you have a plumber that you can recommend? I'm going to trust the plumber because I trust you.

And they came from your recommendation. That's how search engines might see links. They're going to trust our client because they trust the website that's linking to our client. Got you.

And so with Google's algorithm always changing, it seems like changes daily. Sometimes it's, sometimes it's a quarter. But how do you stay ahead of the curve? And what's one update in recent years that completely reshaped your playbook?

We just have an understanding of where Google wants to be and I think that's always been extremely helpful, especially nowadays where they have to compete with all the other platforms or potential traffic stealers, which Google still owns. There's data to prove that Google still owns the largest percentage of market share in search by. By a long sh. Just staying, you know, staying course on the data and following what's taking place.

What changes Google is making in their tech innovations can allow you to adapt. But also our philosophies on our playbook hasn't necessarily changed. I mean, our clients at this moment are still seeing some really great success. Even though we're in the middle of an evolution of SEO right now, the impact that AI overviews, AI mode, other platforms may have in SEO, there's still a lot of really great success to be seen.

And I think that's where just really good SEO helps cover all the bases is you're helping a brand gain more visibility. Content is king, but distribution is queen. So how do you balance creating high quality content with ensuring it reaches the right audience? User questions like collaborating directly with our clients.

If they are a product or an e comm business, there should be some post checkout surveys. How did you hear about us? What did you type in? Getting an idea of what people are asking or what pain points are being solved allows us to really target content that is very specific.

Now there might be a lower search volume if you're looking at it from a keyword basis, but that doesn't really matter because there's a common problem taking place among the customer set for our clients. If we're able to solve and answer that accurately in a way that's meaningful, compelling and going to help with conversions, then it's, it's a shoe. And really just understanding our client's brand and their customers has been really fruitful. A lot of marketers struggle with creating content that's both engaging and optimized for, for search.

I mean we either, a lot of times we either do one or the other. And usually you want to do more engaging than optimized research, but still you want to do both. So how do you find the right balance without. Without really sounding like a robot?

Yeah, I think it's first off for our clients if we're helping them with content creation is understanding their brand, their style, their tonality, and adapting the content to maybe include SEO, which SEO optimization is kind of broad, you know, is a topical relevance. So if we're able to be topically relevant and whether it's us briefing the clients on how to write an article, you can Take the style or the way the content goes, the angle in any direction as long as it's still topically relevant and that can still hit the SEO buttons as long as the intent is being matched.

While also speaking from a brand's voice and style and tonality. Versus sounded like you just got an output from an AI content creator in a way. So really just getting our clients voice dialed in to the writing has been. The differentiator AI since it is the shiny new toy in marketing.

Well, it's a shiny new toy in almost just about every industry right now. Everybody's trying to figure out how to use this effectively. How are, how are you using AI tools to supercharge your SEO and content efforts? And where do you draw the line between automation and human creativity?

AI, I think its best purpose and use case right now is just helping with things that used to take a lot of time and just reducing that time if there is consistent data entry or push button clicks or dragging things that can all be automated. What's interesting also is kind of research aspects. You can let AI just aggregate tons and tons of data in one simple format which can be used to build new workflows, new content, new things. So our AI usage is predominantly around automation related to workflows.

SEO still I think at this point and very much believe needs some human oversight and creative thinking. Sometimes clients and brands might have some roadblocks and we have to creatively navigate around those roadblocks to see success. And, and I don't believe AI is at a place right now where it can replace humans. But in order to get there and succeed, there are ways you can utilize AI or automations to make just the processes so much faster, easier.

Some parts of SEO are just annoying and boring. So let the robots take care of it. We can focus on other things and then put everything together and make data and make action out of the data. And how do you think AI will transform the role of SEO specialists and content creators in the next five years?

I think content creators more than SEO specialists. It's, it's rough out there for content creators right now. I think AI has already transformed it, especially for freelance writers and maybe in house writers too who are thinking about their job security. I think transitioning to being a content strategist or at least a content editor is a really good move in the short term.

AI is at this moment by itself cannot produce a really awesome article that's ready to publish. But content editors are winning right now for brands that want to keep costs low with content Production and use AI content editors can come in, fill in the missing pieces, adapt even further to a brand style and voice. That's probably a really good move. And then strategy, I mean, it all starts with the strategy.

What we're going to target, the buyer, Persona, interviews, all these different things that you can't you, I mean, you probably could use AI for. But I mean, asking a client's customer to speak to an AI bot is just weird and takes away from that personal touch. So I think the strategist role is really awesome and very similar to be said for SEO. You know, there's going to be, I mean, right now there's tools that can AI recommend things to do for SEO, like titles, descriptions, add in these questions, but at what cost?

Does the recommendations just suck? Do they take away messaging? Are you adding in FAQs that don't help anybody, but AI suggested that you add them in. That's that weird place.

And again, it might just make things easier in the future, at this moment or even in the next five years, both sides, creativity, creatively. For content and SEO, the best brands will have some human oversight. So are we just all going to be prompt engineers or editors soon? Just because AI is just really going to supposedly take over.

But I think there might be a little bit of a backlash and people may still want that human element. I think there's definitely an AI burnout right now. I think people are just tired of seeing AI everything. There's a meme out there.

It's the Jordan Belfort Wolf of Wall street, sell me this pen. And the response is, it's AI powered. It's hilarious because I think there's definitely, even in the tech world, most consumers aren't even aware of what's taking place in the world of AI and OpenAI and Gemini. But people who are in the broad category of tech are still also kind of burnt out.

Like AI is being thrown in our face at every single thing, like hopping on here. I had a tool ask me if I wanted to record this with AI, and no, I don't. So we may very well become prompt engineers, so to speak. I think a super awesome goal would be, you don't need to be a prompt engineer because natural language processing is just so advanced that the AI can just pick up your intent and how to navigate a prompt.

Does it need to be a skill? I think that's like really wide adoption. But also there's a lot of cool things with AI too. I mean, I have on my phone, I use Gemini Live.

It's actually pretty incredible what I can do with it. Yeah, it does some amazing things, but we all still want a little human element involved with it. Injected there, here and there every once in a while. I mean they still, for the video side, they still don't get hands right for whatever reason.

I think it's pretty funny. But they don't get hands right either. There's like six hands or six fingers or there's like the hands are like way too big for that body type type of a thing. So there are some weird quirks that it still does.

Yeah. And I think it'll be also just dependent on what the younger generations lean to. I don't think anyone really has any. There's a lot of assumptions and predictions out there on, on what's going to happen with AI, but nobody really knows.

It's about what the younger generations. Plus I'm a, I'm a self proclaimed elder millennial, you know, who's used to doing things a very certain way, especially when it comes to search. But I'm also changing the way I make searches. I'm using Gemini for Q and A.

I'm using on my computer chat GPT to answer random questions that I might have. So there is an evolution taking place. And I mean good marketing is about being where your Persona and your customer is making these searches. And so what's one SEO trend on the horizon that you think most marketers are sleeping on?

How and how can they start to prepare to use it now? Thinking of SEO in its own little silo. SEO historically is like the ugly stepchild, so to speak, and put in its own little box away from all other marketing activities. They need to be well rounded because SEO in fact can support all the other marketing initiatives taking place, especially when it comes to some of the research that could help with social email and vice versa.

Other marketing initiatives could help with SEO. So I think still to this day there's that stigma that SEO is its own little line item put away in its own little box, but it needs to be integrated with other marketing initiatives. We like to collaborate with other marketing departments also, whether it's internal third party, because we are all serving the bigger picture, a very specific campaign goal or marketing goal. How can we collaborate?

How can we benefit each other in this way? And I think SEO may no longer just be SEO might fall into a larger category of just good digital marketing in the future. And with voice search, which is kind of evolving into AI search at the same time, how is the CEO landscape evolving? Does it feel like More like Star Trek where we just kind of like use the computer and it talks back to us and it gives us the information.

I mean even then that was still pretty limited in even the TV series, but it was still futuristic when it came out. So what's your bold prediction for search is headed and how should content creators adapt to stay relevant? I think being aware of what people might be speaking about because I like I mentioned before, I use Gemini Live from my phone so I can turn my camera on, point to something like I have an issue with my lawn. Like there's like weird patchiness taking place in my lawn.

The other day, I'm pointing my phone at it and having conversation with Gemini about things I can do. Now the interesting part is I wasn't, I'm not in purchase mode. I'm not ready to spend money on a brand. I'm just looking for answers at this moment.

So I think good marketers and good content creators can focus more middle bottom of the funnel, keeping the focus more to transactional intent versus answering high level questions, which even if you are ranked number one on Google, may not have led to a conversion anyways. So if you could focus more on the conversion activities versus the Q& A high level answers, that's a route. And Gemini Live is already that conversational. And ChatGPT has it too.

Where I think the coolest thing is I can point my camera on my phone at something and just talk to it. Like I'm like, hey, what's happening over there? Oh, your dog is really seems to be very happy playing with her ball. That's weird.

What type of dog do you think this is? Oh, that looks like a cocker spaniel, you know. And so for aspiring SEO wizards listening, what's one actual tip or tool you recommend they start using today to boost their skills or results? I would say a tip over tool because it's like a tool overload right now.

But one tip is try to avoid the noise and the shiny objects and let data drive decisions. SEO is very data driven. So let the data speak for itself and how you adapt your SEO strategy, how you change things in your playbook versus oh, I read this LinkedIn post that said SEO is now switched to this and I got to do that. Let the data speak for itself.

Take a breath. And one of your unique value propositions as an SEO could be that you have your own framework of success that works versus someone else's framework of success. Yeah, I mean how many times have we heard that email marketing is dead? Everything is Dead right.

SEO, email marketing, social. Now, social media platforms are going to go away now in favor of the metaverse. Who knows? They're still trying to do the metaverse that people actually want to go to.

I think that circles back to what you said before about people still. I mean, we are humans. We're going to need human interaction. We can't just put on a goggle and just communicate virtually.

It's like a black mirror. If you ever watch any black mirror episodes. I haven't, but I mean, I understand it. I mean, I could even go even further.

Like Demolition man kind of had like that dystopian future too, a little bit. And then that's, you know, we as humans evolved the way we have been because of real time, real life community, you know, and you take that away, you can have community, but it's virtual, you know, like, I'm meeting you, Brett, for the first time. The likelihood of us meeting a person is very low. We can still absolutely maintain a friendship, but there's going to be a point where if the friendship needs to grow, there's going to be.

There's going to need to be a real life exchange. And people listening to this episode, they're wondering, where can people find you online? You can find us at breaktheweb Agency, you can go to Google, type in Break the Web. And I'm on LinkedIn.

Jason Berkowitz. All right, any final thoughts for the listeners trucking along? Yeah. All right, well, thank you, Jason, for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew and sharing your knowledge on SEO and content.

Thank you, Brad. I appreciate it and thank you for listening as always. Please subscribe to this podcast and all your favorite podcasting apps. Leave.

A five star review really does help the rankings. Let me know how I am doing and join me next week as I talk to another great thought leader in the PR and marketing industry. All right, guys, stay safe. Get to understanding your SEO and your content strategy and maybe learning a little bit more about AI if you need to.

And see you next week later.