Nowadays, you can find that there’s some gaming going on where “Oh, Let’s list all these prestigious things. And we’ll put some craft in there, too, that’s paying us.” So Google has to up their game in terms of spotting the stuff and finding unnatural patterns and so forth. But as AI is getting more and more advanced, they can detect those unnatural patterns, not just in links, and not just in content, too, in pretty much anything and everything; there’s a correlation. And let’s say that you’re doing some sketchy link-building.

Welcome to the SEO Leverage Podcast, where we talk about search, marketing, and conversion. Welcome back to SeoLeverage.com. My name is Gert Mellak. This is episode 106. Today, I’m very pleased and really appreciate it; he took the time. He is a real SEO expert, one of the greatest SEO we look up to in this industry, and he has been for a while. Stephan Spencer, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Gert. It’s great to be here. And thank you for the kind words.

Absolutely. I mean, if you’re an SEO and you haven’t been living under a rock, you probably have heard of your books like The Art of SEO or Social Ecommerce or, like, heard you speak at some point. We got introduced a few years ago by our common business coach, my mentor, Tim Franco, which I definitely appreciate at some fun touch points there as well. But yeah, you have been on my radar for quite a while, even earlier, with your books and, obviously, with the speaking arrangements.

And something I definitely want to try to extract some information out from you around cross-channel SEO, is not something many people speak about. But I know you have had quite some experience. And you definitely have this perspective a little bit beyond what is the narrow focus of SEO and really look a little bit above the fence and see how else can we leverage other channels and see us marketing a little bit more global.

I want to mention I had the pleasure to speak in your Marketing Speak Podcast, which came out recently; you are also the host of the Get Yourself Optimized; you’re very much in personal development, in academics, you’re surrounded by really big names like Jay Abraham, Tony Robbins. So, reading your history, I love it. My first question probably would be, how are you able to bring so many things in such a short life? I mean, your About Page really reads like you probably don’t sleep much more than four hours, do you?

No, no, no, I sleep; last night, I think I got a full eight.

So, what’s your secret?

We’re actually working while we’re sleeping? I don’t know if you know that. But we all work while we’re sleeping. We’re in the astral realm or doing studies or whatever, and our soul leaves the body and then goes and does stuff. So we don’t actually take a break. Our body might take a break.

Definitely, definitely impressive about patience.

But in answer to your question about how I get all this stuff done, It’s really about intentionality. So, if I bring a strong intention, let’s just say I show up for a family reunion. There’s one every year in Michigan that I go to most of the year. If I just showed up, let’s say it’s a speaking gig or a podcast interview, right?

If I just show up without intention, then maybe some good things happen. But if I show up with a powerful intention, let’s say, to reconnect with somebody in my family at the family reunion that I haven’t really spoken to for a while, or maybe somebody I hadn’t ever said I love you too, because it’s just so awkward because they never say I love you to anybody. If I overcome that discomfort and do the uncomfortable thing, get outside of my comfort zone, that’s my intention. It’s amazing what you can accomplish.

It’s like the universe conspires to make your dreams come true. You don’t have to do all the hard slog, all the Gary Vee sort of hustling. You can get kind of carried down the river instead of having to swim it. And that’s how you accomplish great things: you just realize and surrender to the co-creation and the collaboration that you have with your Creator.

Very interesting. Have you always had this intentionality around the things you do?

No, I had to learn some hard lessons. I used to be agnostic, and things were very hard back then. There’s this quote from Carl Jung that life really begins at age 42; up until then, it’s just research. And it was age 42. In fact, when I had my spiritual awakening in India, I was touched on the head by a monk. I know this has nothing to do with SEO, but it does answer your question about intentionality. Getting touched on the head by a monk and getting an Oneness blessing put me into a psychedelic state. I’d never done drugs.

I still have never done any drugs, but from my understanding of what a psychedelic state is, everything is kind of like in technicolor super bright, like a cartoon, and that was what happened, and I felt a deep sense of peace and connection to the Creator. And remember, I was agnostic, didn’t believe really in anything other than science, and had a master’s in biochemistry real nerd, right? Then boom, I get plugged into the fabric of creation, and I feel so easeful, connected, and deeply loved. Then, all the miracles started happening. And it’s just been one after another after another. It’s quite magnificent. Well, so I’m sorry to go off on this tangent. But, you know.

It definitely sounds like a life-changing event. I do want to get us a little bit back to our main topic today, but it’s definitely nice to have some personal background, and I know you have been doing quite some personal development as well, obviously, with something with Tony Robbins and the like. So, it definitely all fits together. One of the things I want to point out is it’s really interesting. You have been working with a lot of big brands.

In our case, we are mostly with six- and seven-figure businesses, mostly e-commerce sites, online courses, and coaches. This is probably where we have a little bit more of our focus. I know you have been working with a lot of international multinational brands, 8, 9, 10 figures, probably; what is the difference in challenges for the big companies when it comes to SEO when compared to a six or seven-figure company? Is there anything out there that is very different there?

Yeah, it’s big, it’s big. So let’s say with a six, or seven, or even potentially an eight-figure brand or organization, there’s nimbleness that you don’t have with a billion-dollar brand. So, billion-dollar brands can be incredibly frustrating to deal with. We even had one that we fired, which was so untenable, but let’s just take an example where let’s say, it’s a very visual, high-end, stylish brand.

And they’re very particular about what goes on the website. So it’s very visual, not much text. And let’s say that the most important pages of the site, things like category pages and homepage, of course, were required to be all visual with no text. And that was a guideline from on high, I can’t change that. So here comes an SEO company me and my team trying to optimize a website on which the most important pages we can’t add any copy.

Incredibly frustrating. So I loved being able to have big brands on my portfolio on my client list, but I realized that was ego. And so I’ve stopped trying to focus on the big household names. Instead, focus on companies and organizations that are more nimble, flexible, and able to implement the changes that are required. And they have an incredible mission that is changing the world, making it a better place, not just providing yet another beautiful thing to wear.

That’s interesting. I have my own experience with one of those companies, which I think was more of a technical nature; I think it asked him to create a subdomain or change a subdomain or something that is, something where you would usually, my usual client was probably the owner of this domain. I talked to them, and they would open up their domain panel and they would walk them through the steps to make this change.

And in two minutes, we would be finished. And I was like, on this call, I said, yeah, if you could just open it or if you have permissions, can we just open this panel? We do this really quickly. And I remember the CMOS, like no, no, this is not going to headquarters, and they’re going to respond in a couple of months, right? And then they probably are going to send this to our country’s headquarters, and they also take a couple of months, and probably around six months or so, we could create this subdomain. But there is a chance that in five months, they tell us they don’t want to do this.

It was like the moment whereas, ‘Okay, probably we, this is not going to be our best case study just because it’s just such a rigid system just for Google Ads landing page, I think we did on top of some SEO optimizations. But it’s just such a rigid system. There was no way to move anything as if it was like pushing the Titanic; as a small agency, even with 30 people, you can’t do this. And it was really frustrating.

So, I absolutely see this point. Another thing we have come up with was really that we were just randomly adding or removing stuff we were working on. I remember, I think, it was Regis years ago, and we had like two countries, then suddenly you get five countries, and suddenly they take this away, they’re centralized. They move things around like in a spreadsheet, and whenever they move something in a spreadsheet, you get a notice of what needs to change. It’s really hard to maintain a long-term strategy.

Yeah. And circle back to and correlate to this question. A question you asked a few minutes ago about cross-channel and integrating different departments or functions and channels together. So, with a big company, inevitably, it’s like pulling teeth to try to get that cooperation to happen. So they’re silos in the organization. So, social media is run by a completely different team; they don’t talk to each other, and they don’t coordinate anything. And they probably don’t even like each other.

That’s very frustrating. And on the flip side, if you’re working with a small, nimble, hungry company. I love Les Brown‘s adage, “You got to be hungry enough,” if you know who Les Brown is, but he’s a super inspiring motivational speaker and personal development guru. I want to work with companies that are hungry. And if they see there’s potential to integrate these two different areas together and gain some leverage, because if you have, let’s say, a campaign for a book launch that is pretty much focused on social media, and you’re not taking into account SEO.

What if you merge those two initiatives together and coordinate, and so now you don’t have a knowledge panel on Google? And now you do because maybe you’re not on Wikipedia, but you’re on Google Book Search. And what is the description that’s displayed in your knowledge panel? It was thought about ahead of time by the team that coordinated the book launch. And it was a multifunctional team that included SEO and social media expertise. And then you put out videos that aren’t, let’s say, just on TikTok but are on YouTube as well.

And YouTube is the number two search engine and a much more important property from an SEO perspective than TikTok, so you’re kind of leveraging the opportunity to its fullest potential. But also bearing in mind that, you know, a lot of these social pushes that you’re going to do aren’t going to have any real tangible effect on SEO because of the links being ‘no follow’ from all the social platforms and so forth. So you gotta kind of think outside the box. And it’s really fun. It’s like a puzzle, trying to figure out how to leverage social platforms that actually yield SEO benefits.

Absolutely. And it comes down to this intentionality. You mentioned that. At the beginning, again. I remember client calls were usually one of the first things is, I asked was how to get clients. And then they would mention the channels, and we do some social media, we do some Google ads, we do this, we do that. Usually, then I tried to get the contact details of the people working on the team just to reach out and say, “Hey, we do SEO, and you’re doing Google ads. Is there a chance to exchange some information? We have found some things that convert really well that might be interesting for you.

And maybe you can give us some keywords that you know are converting well, and we can add this to our research and our process.” And then you just see the real difference. Basically, there’s one company that also wants this SEO project, but it just only got Google ads, so they’re kind of trying not to share too much. And then you have another project where it’s like a dream working on this. You get together on a Zoom call. I really had a good time; everybody had the intention of getting the best results for this client; it was really a dream working on those projects.

I love those projects where it says, ‘Okay, hey, I found something that converts really well. Don’t you want to do something on social media about the same angle? This seems to be resonating, right? Where the YouTube person comes back and says, “Hey, we just had a video go viral; let’s take some keywords that could be interesting.” And everybody just trying to get the best results is really amazing. What would be a use case where you would say social media could benefit SEO, for example?

So, let’s go back to the case of a book launch. So, I’m going to take a page out of Justin Bieber‘s playbook. It’s kind of funny. He’s actually a very smart marketer. What he did back in the day to promote the launch of a song called ‘What do you mean?’ if you know that song. But it was quite popular. It broke some records, in fact, like that hadn’t been broken since the Beatles.

So what he did was he coordinated with a bunch of influencers, a bunch of his friends who are famous celebrities, people like Ellen DeGeneres, famous singers, Ed Sheeran, so amazing, amazing celebrities. And each day for 30 days, he had at least one major celebrity do a countdown, put a post on social with them holding a piece of paper that said, day 30 Or day 28 Or day 26 Or day 15 or whatever, all the way to day one and day zero then, which was the launch date of the song, with the hashtag of ‘What do you mean?’

So it actually said on the piece of paper day 30 Hashtag, “What do you mean?” And let’s say Ed Sheeran actually did a little bit of a song that sounded like “What do you mean?” It actually didn’t sound anything like the actual song, but he used a little bit of the lyrics or something. So that was intriguing to people. You know, let’s say it was Jimmy Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon, or somebody would do some funny-looking photo.

So, it was just a still image holding the piece of paper or something, and it created quite a stir. So, how does that spill over to SEO? Well, what if you got these folks to have such huge followings on social media, many of whom probably have a pretty authoritative website? Give them something that makes it enticing for them to post it to their blog as well. Not just an embed of whatever they came up with, for Instagram, or YouTube or whatever, but gamify so that maybe it’s a fun puzzle, or trivia question or interactive game or something that they can then post it to get a good reason.

Justin Bieber did not do this; he only did the social media portion, which was phenomenal. I mean, literally, he broke records doing this. But if he were to have put something together that addresses people’s, the celebrity’s desire to look magnanimous, or just awesome to their fan base, on the website, as well, well, then that would link back to Justin Bieber’s sites, because whatever you put together will also link back in then he gets all this authority for Google.

So that’s just something kind of, off the top of my head, that you gotta really think strategically and outside the box because that’s where all the juices, you know, tactics are great. They’re very helpful. I use tactics all the time. But strategy can leapfrog those tactics. And a great quote, my favorite quote from The Art of War by Sun Tzu, is, ‘Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.’ So trying to figure out some tactical way to link up social media and SEO. I think that’s kind of a waste of time; it might move the needle a little bit. But to figure out a strategy, like the one I just outlined, that could be a game changer.

Absolutely. It’s just big leverage as well, for a long time. Even afterward, people talking about this campaign might still, might still link to this, might still give this a little bit of boost months or even years afterward, very often in these kinds of things are really like to strategic thinking here behind it. Also, I’ve heard our guys using social ads, for example, for link-building purposes, where, just like, give a lot of visibility to certain posts or a certain tip or something like that.

And then tie this together with actually, the end outcome nobody talks about this, that there going to be a lot of links happening because, as you do say, they have like some sort of strategy, rather than everybody puts this on their blog, or even normal, smaller influencer campaigns where there’s a blog component where influencers might charge you a little bit more to also put these on their blog. But ultimately, this can actually be much more beneficial long term than probably the actual campaign with some stories, is that right?

Now, the thing that I don’t love is when it’s like this kind of circular linking pattern that looks totally engineered; it doesn’t look like it was earned by merit. Whereas in the hypothetical scenario, I gave with Justin Bieber, it would be very viral-looking and natural for all those big celebrities to link to Justin.

But if it’s like, Okay, I’m going to link to this person who’s also in my, in this little wheel of promotion, or whatever. And then they’re going to link to the next person, they’re going to link to the next person, and it’s all going to circle back, and we’re all going to link out and give each other some juice, or Google can easily see the pattern in them. Do you remember from Seinfeld Soup Nazi? Remember that skit?

Okay. So there’s a famous skit, and Soup Nazi was famous for saying to Seinfeld, or to anybody that it didn’t like, no soup for you. And then he’d make them leave his restaurant. And so that’s like Google thing, no link for you, or no juice for you, right? So he’s got the links, and you think it’s working. But Google’s quietly saying to themselves and the algorithms, no juice for you?

Absolutely. It’s interesting how Google these days doesn’t even care about penalizing too much anymore. It’s been a while; not sure about you. It’s been a while since I have seen something that was obviously penalized by Google. I’d like a manual penalty issued. It seems like Google just demoted to completely ignore it. Like it’s okay that they can do their thing; they can do the scheme. I just don’t take it into account. And that’s it.

Well, I think there’s more to it than that. Personally, I would guess that it’s not so obvious, but it’s essentially a penalty when you have such sophisticated AI-based algorithms that the programmers don’t even know what the criteria are that the algorithm is using to base its decisions on pick. How do they even know when a penalty or algorithmic adjustments even happening?

It’s like, the EEAT, two Es now AT and human who are using those guidelines to try and rate your site, irrelevant. I don’t even know if they bothered to spend much time or money with that team of human reviewers anymore because there’s plenty of training data now that they’ve accumulated over the years from having that army of manual raters.

So true. We had just had episode 96; I was speaking to Jonathan Gilliam from Originality AI. So, they have an AI detection tool. It was really fascinating for me because I knew some detection tools like Predict Always, the Next Word, which is the most likely word coming from a language model perspective. And you would like, yeah, the tool pretty much was trained with natural texts and trained with AI texts. At some point, a tool figures it out; they really don’t know how it does it, but it’s really the tool that does its job.

And it does a good job, apparently, connected again to 94, 95% accuracy, which is really impressive. But it’s like this world now, apparently, where there’s a lot of stuff happening. Nobody has an idea what is actually happening. But then, ultimately, those algorithms make life-changing or really impact business-changing decisions for us, right? In this industry, obviously, also, for a while, I have lost count of how often people talked about link building going to go away and links not going to matter. And Google obviously was trying really hard to figure it out without links. My feeling is that the more AI comes to the front line, the more links are getting more important again; what do you think about that?

I would agree. The reason why I think that makes sense is because the origins of links, as votes, is citation analysis, which happens in academic journals. The more prestigious articles, the ones that are the more milestones or leaps and advances in science have mentions and other prestigious articles and journals about them. And they also mentioned in their references, very prestigious articles.

There’s no cruft in making it into their references, and conversely, you find another article that references this one. Usually, there’s not any cruft in that either. Now, this is within peer-reviewed journal articles back in the day before Google, and that’s a very brilliant innovation that came into the search engine world. Nowadays, you can find that there’s some gaming going on where, Oh, Let’s list all these prestigious things.

And we’ll put some cruft in there, too, that’s paying us. So Google has to up their game in terms of spotting the stuff and finding natural patterns and so forth. But as AI is getting more and more advanced, they can detect those unnatural patterns, not just in links, and not just in content, too, in pretty much anything and everything; there’s a correlation. And let’s say that you’re doing some sketchy link building, but you think that you’re gonna get away with it because you could just say, ‘Well, that was my competitor.’

But then you did some sketchy stuff a few years ago on the page; well, that on-page stuff will come back to bite you now, even though you got away with it back then because it painted a picture. Now, with the AI, as this is a sketchy guy or gal doing unnatural stuff, the link building is probably their thing, too, because of the on-page stuff that clearly didn’t get hacked to do this, sketchy on-page stuff. So now they’re doing sketchy, off-age stuff. And it’s them. It’s almost certainly them, and the algorithms are going to be right.

Absolutely makes a lot of sense. Where do you think AI is going to go? We now have an in the middle of often record this now the end of January 2023. We have a big boom in Chat GPT. Even people who have never been really technical are starting to play with it, starting to write posts about it with articles, etc. What’s your view? I mean, this is moving really fast.

I was just reading an article from Open AI about GPT4, it’s going to be lots of expectations around it to talk about video being AI-generated very soon as well. How do you think Google is going to react when content creation is so commoditized that it really doesn’t take skill anymore to put together a 500-article page about whatever industry you want?

I think the AI at Google is going to get incredibly good at spotting AI-generated content. Because what’s missing from an AI-generated article is the soul. Yeah, there’s fact-checking, and there’s stuff that’s not relevant. I was using chat GPT just as a test to create a bunch of article titles and descriptions. And there was stuff in there about Penguin, and like what the heck, you have to stay current on SEO algorithms like Penguin, etc.

And no. That’s pretty terrible. And so somebody needs to fact-check all this content; if they’re going to have a chat, GPT generates their articles for them. But further from that, it’s like, imagine, if you’re very intuitive and you’re very creative, you’re tapped in, you’re tuned in, you’re, you’re turned on to the magic of you’re plugged into the to the matrix and in a good way into the fabric of creation. So you’re like this dumb terminal plugged into the supercomputer? It’s like universal Google, but it’s universal intelligence.

And imagine what you can create from that. Did you know that the book by Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist, was written in 12 days? Amazing book 12 days, he just downloaded it from universal Intelligence, the bigger, better cloud, and it sold 150 million copies. I’m sure you can find plenty of other kinds of examples like that.

How is an AI going to achieve that? We can’t because what it does is it doesn’t stand on the shoulders of giants; it steals from the shoulders of giants or from the Giants. So there’s no credit to all the originators that the AI model is based on. Right? You see, ask it for this artwork, impressionist style, blah, blah, blah, and it does the thing, and it looks amazing. Where’s the credit to Matisse or to whoever the originators that the algorithm based your image on? Not there.

Yeah. Would you expect some regulation there? Or would you expect just to follow the platforms, enough to not give it visibility?

I would expect that chat GPT and similar tools will get away with this. But it has karmic repercussions when you steal without giving credit, karma comes to bite you in the butt. So I’m contemplating maybe starting a campaign like hashtag chat GPT as theft. Cause it is. Maybe you would get away with writing, maybe having it come up with article ideas. But once you have it writing the article titles, and then the articles themselves like it’s a slippery slope, where does the inspiration end and the theft begin?

I remember I had a discussion with Dixon Jones here from InLinks. And I think he said something like you were dumbing down the internet, because it’s going to be AI copying from AI at some point, so there is no innovation. Melanie, me, I know, nothing new. Nobody thinks things through and or presents a different angle, which obviously has its point here.

Then others say, obviously, it’s an efficiency tool that can, rather than sitting down and creating 100 article titles to pick the best one, you can read the 100 article titles and pick the best ones. But I’m really curious about what Google is going to do. What I expect over then is to tell people I expect some sort of integration in Google Search Console, probably maybe issue some warnings, as they do with core web vitals and with links and everything that has come up that was altering the overall scheme a little bit.

Google eventually then had, like, some sort of warning issued and demoting and things like those. I am interested because it’s really, I guess they need to define some sort of threshold. I mean, it’s going to be the AI defining the threshold and are going to say it’s kind of 30% is okay, 31 is not okay. But there must be some sort of a threshold, I guess, where they still allow some efficiency and say, Okay, it’s more efficient to do it this way. But we still need to balance it out a little bit.

And I think you’re still thinking like a computer program that someone would have written rather than a generative AI, figuring this out, like, take one very sophisticated AI that we can’t figure out what its attributes are and what the thresholds are that if we cross we get the big red X. We’re not going to know we’re going to try and reverse engineer but will we succeed it?

I don’t know. And I don’t think it’s in Google’s best interest to share that threshold with anyone in Google Search Console or anyone else anywhere else. Have you heard of the dead internet theory? So, if you Google it, you’ll find that there’s a lot of information about it online. And the concept is this that it’s credited to conspiracy theorists. But there’s a lot of truth in this. And if it’s not true now, I have a feeling it will be true later. And that is that most of the internet is fake, written by bots for bots. All these social media posts and so forth that they’re clamoring for change.

And you know, there’s like, a lot of it’s fake, that a lot of it’s fake. And we are getting fooled. We’re getting swayed by it. Popular opinion is swayed by fake content, fake outrage, fake travesty, tragedy and so forth. It’s all fake. So much is fake. And we don’t know what and to what degree, but I have this sneaking suspicion it’s going to get a lot worse as tools like chat GPT really hit the mainstream, and more and more people realize that I don’t have to toil for six months or six years writing a book, I can create it in five minutes, give chat GPT a storyline as a prompt and let it write 50,000 words for me?

Yeah, this gets even worse, I think, especially when you’re thinking, ‘Okay, most of what we see is probably as cute somehow, when you then see the movements in social media networks in the last couple of weeks, where they actually feed you more of what you already think anyway, and already like and already engage with. So, just feed you more and get more confirmation about whatever you think is probably wrong anyway and not based on facts.

It’s going to be an interesting scenario out. Yeah, I do believe there are platforms that are definitely going to figure it out. I guess Facebook, at some point, would probably, for example, base it on whatever they want to push, what they allow, what they don’t allow. It reminds me of another theory that I’ve heard people as we don’t read anymore, which is guided by headlines into where this comes from; I would love to credit this to somehow. Someone read this, okay, read all the news; everything we think we know is based on headlines because we have never read the entire article.

So you just based on the headlines you get based on headlines you have, like, some certain, certain emotions that affect your values, your beliefs. And this is pretty much what you think you know, and nobody actually cared enough to read the entire thing because, definitely, it’s another rabbit hole. I want to just wrap this up a little bit. It’s a really interesting discussion here. I want to wrap this up a little bit and really talk about some strategies our listener could take away from your experience, really coming back a little bit to content creation.

CSM, a six, seven-figure company, the online course creates a piece of content. What would you say they should take into account in order to make this article really, first of all, obviously resonate with the users ultimately? Pretty much everybody we talk to wants to drive conversions but also stand a good chance to rank on Google and actually get the links necessary to be backed up and stand there as a good piece of content.

Great question. This is a little bit of a complex answer. I think it is simple, but there are a lot of parts to this. So the first part is you’re writing for three audiences: you’re writing for the Linkerati, those influencers who have a lot of authority, trust, and importance in the eyes of Google; you’re writing for your core audience, that ideal client avatar, and you’re writing for search, you’re writing for Google, you’re writing for rankings, these can compete with each other.

Oh, I want to have a keyword-rich headline for that third audience. But that’s probably going to take away from the curiosity gap that I’m trying to create for the Linkerati. I’m trying to bait the Linkerati. Oh, I gotta click, you know, it’s kind of like clickbait, but it’s Linkbait. So, by putting all these keyword-rich phrases in there, it waters down that ability to be really punchy and creates that curiosity gap. A curiosity gap is when somebody looks at the headline or the title of the article, let’s say, in a Google search or in a social media feed, and they just can’t help themselves; they have to click on it.

And then you don’t give away the punchline straightaway; you kind of give it to them bit by bit. You don’t want to show your cards too quickly. So, that’s a style of writing that is not easy to accomplish; you have to do that with intentionality. And then, on the other hand, that audience that you’re trying to reach with the algorithm at Google, let’s lead with the most important keyword in the title, and then let’s make sure we mention that keyword in the first paragraph and maybe a couple of times in the first paragraph at least one other time in the next two, three or four paragraphs.

These two strategies do not normally intersect. And somebody writing for SEO copy is usually not trained on how to write link bait or stuff that’s going to appeal to the Linkerati, and vice versa. And then you’ve got that audience, the second one, that’s the most crucial to the business. And that’s the ideal client avatar. Because if you’re posting something to your blog, and it’s just link baity, and it’s not really talking to their core audience, then it’s a big mess. It looks like you’re talking about your ideal client and not to them.

So, how do you accomplish all that? Well, you probably can’t accomplish all of it in one article; probably need to have a plethora of articles, some of which can have some overlap and targeting between those three audiences. Rarely, sometimes, you can target all three very effectively, but in most cases, it’s just one or two. So you can’t just say I’m going to post two times a week because what’s that two-post threshold addressing? Who is it addressing? And what problem is that trying to solve? This is difficult stuff.

So, one thing I recommend as a process is to think of this as a funnel or multi-phase process where you’re starting with the topic. And then you’re going to the headline, the title of the article. Maybe you’re going to have some provocative adjectives or adverbs to further sexy up the topic, the main keyword you’re targeting. And now that you’ve got the title, you can come up with some bullets, like an outline for the article. And maybe you’ll also come up with a few viral-type images, memes or things like that.

So let’s say the topic is the kitchen sink. Well, then you’re going to do a Google Image Search for funny kitchen sink in Google image search, or kitchen sink meme in Google image search and see which ones you can use from a copyright standpoint, fair use and all that in Creative Commons. You have to take all that into account. So which ones can you use and which ones can’t? Yeah, so now you’ve got a really good brief, a writer’s brief that you can give to a writer. And where does the AI fit in all this? Maybe in the first part where you’re trying to figure out the topic.

Yeah, you can definitely ask ChatGPT to sexy up the article. Get like there is no variation.

Yes, but then again, I feel that that’s a slippery slope. Once you get article titles from Chat GPT, what’s stopping you from getting sub-headlines? And what about captions to go under the images that you’ve found on Pixels or Unsplash, et cetera, et cetera? And it’s a slippery slope, and it’s, it’s all theft. In my view, it’s all theft.

What is, in your opinion, quantity versus quality comes in? When it comes to content creation? Imagine the news sites dog out they want to do SEO; how do you balance out quantity versus quality and blog articles?

It really is all quality quantity; I think it’s a mirage, like the desert. So if you’re trying to hit three articles a week, and you’re not really going for the quality, and what is quality, it’s something that’s remarkable, and I’m gonna use Seth Godin‘s definition of remarkable worthy of remark. That’s from his book, Purple Cow. If it’s not worthy of remark, it doesn’t matter if it’s two articles or 200 articles a week; you’re gonna get trampled, and chat GPT will eat your lunch.

So how are you going to tap into that Universal Intelligence, the universal Google up there, to come up with such incredible, insightful, helpful, thought-provoking, maybe controversial, maybe hilarious article ideas, and topics and headlines and so forth, that you can then really serve an audience with. And remember that audience isn’t just your core audience. It’s the linkerati, too, and that’s the audience. It’s usually forgotten with all this article writing.

I also wonder, with all this, if we as readers are going to get better at identifying what has this soul that you mentioned initially, as AI content doesn’t have a soul, maybe we get a little bit better as well. And just based on our signals, we give Google what we like and what we don’t like. This also helps feed this back a little bit to also have, like, a layer of a filter.

I do believe that I think I’m experiencing that myself personally. But I don’t spend a lot of time on Facebook. But when I’m on Facebook, the stuff that I get in my feed and talk about is a positive filter bubble. I get the most awesome content in my Facebook feed. And the danger for me is I get sucked into love and light, awesome, amazing stuff that’s very inspiring and beautiful. Then I blow my day away like I had big plans for today, and I just spent two hours on Facebook. What did I even do?

So that’s why I deleted Facebook from my phone. I basically have an unspoken, unwritten rule for myself that I’m not going to go on Facebook on my laptop, either, except maybe a few times a week. It’s so good for me. It’s great for my productivity, and you know, I could buy into the myth of FOMO; you know, FOMO stands for “Right fear of missing out.” But you know what, on a spiritual hand, I learned this from one of my Kabbalah teachers. FOMO is assigned to turn and run in the other direction because that’s part of the illusion.

Something is off. If you think that every minute you’re not doing XYZ, you’re missing out on something, something’s probably off, right?

Yeah, and FOMO is like the things that you’re meant to experience and to be in your life that you’re meant to meet your soulmate. You’re meant to meet your next business partner, and so forth. Those things happen. They’re waiting in the wings, like a supporting actor at the edge of the screen on the stage, waiting to make his or her entrance.

It’s not a random chance. It’s not like oh, I just happen to miss the train. And now I met my soulmate. Wow, imagine what would have happened if I hadn’t missed the train. That wasn’t going to happen. You had to miss the train. That’s the only answer. So if you live life like that, everything becomes magic.

So, live a very inspiring talk today with Stephan Spencer. He is very different from the usual episodes. Appreciate it. I want to be respectful of your time and appreciate that you’re, you gave us so much of your of your busy day here. Where can people go if they want to find out more about you?

Well, my main site is StephanSpencer.com. I have the two podcasts that you mentioned already: Marketing Speak, which is marketing speak.com, and Get Yourself Optimized, which sounds like an SEO podcast, but it’s not. It’s all about personal development, spirituality, biohacking, and all that.

Yeah, definitely a good one for a run, in my experience.

Yes, yes. And for a workout or for a long drive. And that’s getyourselfoptimized.com

Awesome. Perfect. Thank you so much, Stephan Spencer, ladies and gentlemen, here. We have episode 106. We’re going to have a written summary and all links over at SEOLeverage.com/podcast. 106. Thank you so much, Stephan. It’s been a pleasure to catch up again. And I hope we can do something like this soon. Again. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thanks, Gert.