← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Leveraging AI To Scale Content Marketing & SEO
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- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Tyson Stockton.
- [00:43]
Tyson Stockton
Hey, what's going on? Welcome to the Voice of Search Podcast. My name is Tyson from Previsible IO and today we're going to be talking about AI powered content marketing. Joining me today is Drew Moffitt, who is head of marketing at Kumo Space. Kumospace is a unified communication platform for remote and distributed teams that centralizes all your people and their communications in one place.
- [01:07]
Podcast Announcer
This podcast is also sponsored by ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO, health backlinks and organic rankings at no costs? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not, because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over 100 technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus, AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most linked to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO, health, backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.com AWT that's a H R E F S.com AWT.
- [02:25]
Tyson Stockton
So with that, here's my conversation with Drew Moffatt, head of marketing at Kumospace. Drew, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:32]
Drew Moffitt
Yeah, no, thank you for having me.
- [02:34]
Tyson Stockton
Now, the topic today, it's a common one in our space. We know kind of the headlines of last year. I think it felt like almost every single episode we were Doing had some sort of connection to ChatGPT. The conversations around is OpenAI and Microsoft giving Google run for their money. And we had the, the landscape shifting and evolving but also like the tactical side. So I look forward to kind of diving in to this topic and hearing kind of your perspective on it. But from your side, like from a high level, how would you kind of recommend or advocate that marketers be thinking about AI in a content creation perspective?
- [03:19]
Drew Moffitt
Yeah. So I think my career has taken me through a lot of different channels at Kumo Space. We've tried every type of marketing tactic with the exception of TV ads. So we haven't done any super bowl ads yet. We also haven't done billboards and we haven't thrown live events like organized a remote work conference for example. And for us, the two best channels have turned out to be a performance structure for influencer marketing and then content and SEO. And then obviously another piece is speaking and pr, kind of what we're experiencing in this moment. So I think the first thing I would say is advice just to startups or any business is go ahead, be willing to fail, be willing to succeed, but just make sure that you're testing. Just because content and using AI works well for us doesn't mean that it's necessarily going to translate for your business. This is the seventh time I've helped build an early stage business and a lot of the tactics I've used in the past didn't work at Kumospace and tactics I'm using at Kumospace today would have not worked at some of those businesses in the past. So each business is kind of unique and I think that's the first thing you need to do.
- [04:32]
Tyson Stockton
Absolutely. And maybe from that aspect, so it's like there's almost kind of like a market fit for this channel. Like if you were talking to a business owner, whether it's startup or larger one, like how would you first go about kind of that determination of like, could this be a strong channel for the business?
- [04:53]
Drew Moffitt
Yeah. So I think data is a very challenging thing, but you need to look at your analytics, you need to understand your business. Something it took us a while to really understand, but we have now gotten really good at doing is viewing our business as a funnel. You put stuff in the top of that funnel and you work that funnel and then you get revenue at the bottom of that funnel. So I think the real first step is understanding that. And the second piece of that is does it make sense from a logical perspective that people would be coming to your Business from search. So our product is neither traditional video conferencing nor team chat. Right. It combines the benefits of Zoom and Slack into a single platform with none of those drawbacks, none of those setbacks. And at the core, it's really fixing lack of collaboration that can happen in remote work, a sense of loneliness or lack of company culture. And it gives greater visibility in a physical office. You can stand up, look across that office and see what someone else is doing. So from a search perspective, it makes a lot of logical sense that you might have people searching things like managing remote teams, hiring remotely, onboarding remotely. Those are more like informational topics. But that would be good topics for a product like Kumospace to be creating content about. So if you can, as a first step, say, okay, the product, the thing, the service I'm selling, people are going to be searching for, not just the commercial topic. Right. You know you're selling a pillowcase. Right. Like you're up against Amazon to sell pillowcases. But you know, what is the best hyperallergenic pillowcase or what is a hyper allergenic pillowcase? If there's those kind of topics, that's probably a really good starting point. It's going to be a lot easier to rank in those keywords. And especially you start using AI, you might get really near the top really.
- [06:49]
Tyson Stockton
Quickly, which I think makes, it makes a ton of sense. I'm going to be biased, like, obviously I'm for the most part going to be an advocate of the channel. Sure, there's some bias in that and probably for a lot of the listeners to the podcast as well. So we've identified there's a potential fit as far as like the channel goes then when it comes to the actual creation. I think this has been an area where businesses have struggled in the past and I think they're still struggling to finding like, what is the best use case. And we hear things like, Google doesn't like machine generated content or like other people saying like, no, that's bogus. Like, here's evidence of how machine generated content has performed well. But I think businesses typically have this challenge of like, okay, do we have in house writers? Do we outsource and use freelance writers? How do we bring in AI? And maybe like, from your perspective, what has worked for you on leveraging AI in that content creation process?
- [07:52]
Drew Moffitt
Yeah. So I think we're pretty far along in our journey. We're approaching probably two years of really focusing on this channel, using AI in this channel. A little closer to like six, nine Months really actually now I think about it since the middle of the summer. So the first piece is, I think you want to. The way I always approach things is try to get 80% of the way there and then see if it works and then iterate on that process. So that would be the first thing I would do is suggest to someone is like the mistake I often see people do with AI when they talk to me is they're like, okay, I'm going to make every long tail topic. And first off, that's not going to work. Google's definitely going to be mad at you regardless of whether or not that is AI or not AI content, that's just not good practice. It's very spammy. So there's that. The second piece is like AI should be a mechanism to make your process faster. So today AI drafts for us, we have a human edit that and then we ultimately have someone offshore upload that content to get the images, upload that. And we've figured out all those bottlenecks over that course of roughly the last two years. And that's how we've been able to optimize this process so much. So now, right now we're going to be creating in this coming month 50 pieces of content in a month. This is long form, good looking content. And by the summer the quality of that content will not only improve because we're going to get better at describing our brand, that's something that makes editing a little harder. But the next piece is like we're going to probably double that. We'll be over 100 by the summer, by three to four months from now. So that's one piece of it. But don't be overwhelmed by like we have to build this used process. Just start off with one piece of content. Use a tool that has AI and some component of it. So for like us, we tried with ChatGPT and it is not the tool for the job in my opinion. We use a tool called Surfer AI. At its core Surfer is a conversion like a content optimization tool. So they let you feed content into it and then they tell you how to write that content better. And the way that their AI approaches this is sometimes you can feed URLs so competitor topics like something you authoritatively think you could speak about. So you're really following that EAT guideline and then you give it keywords and it's giving you results, it's reading human content and then it gives you an output. And when we send this content through an AI detector, we don't See this content having any red flags And I think where to draw this line of like what's the debate on AI content? I think Google has been very vague on this and I think that is deliberate because Google doesn't know the answer they want to error on. What they want is you to continue to create content that follows that EAT guideline. So if you're having AI assist you and you're speaking through a perspective of trustworthiness or authoritativeness, we as a company that's a remote first company who builds software to make remote and hybrid teams communicate better, we really accurately can talk about topics about remote work, onboarding, interviewing, managing, running a virtual meeting from an authoritative, trustworthy, etc. Perspective. So you just have to really approach it from that perspective, I think and start small, see if it works. If it works, find the bottlenecks within your organization and in your process and start trying to apply resources to fix that. And I think the way that we've done that really well is think about kind of tiering the labor, right? The AI is probably the cheapest, highest potentially quality from a ranking perspective and drafting content speed perspective. You put a human who's a native or near native English speaker on top of that to edit the content and then you go really offshore for the person to put that content into the cms. And that's how those different tierings of resources allow us to run this process really quickly.
- [11:59]
Tyson Stockton
There's a lot, I feel like there's a lot of tips in there to unpack for it and I want to dig into the process a little bit more, but I think like one just a call from what you're saying is there's going to be unique elements to that process depending on the company and like especially in like the upload component. But I think you hit one really key element where the type of content that you're using these tools for is still focused in an area that you have the ability to layer in your expertise or your authority so you're not strained too far off topic. And it's something that when the content is generated, you're also able to potentially layer on top of it in the editing process. Something of additional value. But kind of going back to this because it sounds like you guys have taken kind of this like walk run approach from it for maybe a business that's just starting to embark on this. How long did it take to kind of get through those first growing pains? And I like how you said like just go through one.
- [13:11]
Drew Moffitt
Yeah.
- [13:11]
Tyson Stockton
And like just start getting one out, and then you're the. The bottlenecks are going to start. Like, they're going to emerge by themselves and it's gonna be really obvious where the pain points are. But, like, how long was that journey for you guys to get from embarking of, hey, we want to, we want to grow this channel. We're going to invest in it. Like, how long do you feel like it took you guys from that initial use case to then getting into a. A stage that you felt like you were actually kind of getting up to a good volume?
- [13:42]
Drew Moffitt
Yeah. So I think, you know, we really embarked on this in April of 2022, but we had a lot of things we needed to fix right along that journey. We made a lot of mistakes prior to that. We had to restructure the way our domain was structured. So these were a lot more technical. Our pages didn't load right. There was indexing, it was rendering client side versus server side. So there was a lot of those fixes that were taking place pretty early on. And we invest very heavily into that. And our page feed scores reflect that today. So that would be one piece kind of a little separate from this topic. But by the fall of that year, we started writing content. We were doing that ourselves. I was writing some of that content. I'm not a particularly fast writer. Another team member was writing and we were struggling to kind of get four or five pieces of content out in a month. Some months we could only do three. So the immediate bottleneck for us became apparent as, like, I'm not a writer by, you know, that's not my strong suit. I'm probably stronger at figuring out how to build this process. So let's look for alternative resources. And we initially went to freelancers, and we tried a combination of offshore content shops, onshore content shops, and individual freelancers that we recruited. And we kind of ran all of them at once. And we realized that some just did better than others. So we focused on those. We eventually focused on this one, one of these kind of freelance marketplaces. And that's where we spent a lot of time for a period of time. And at that point, AI was really starting to rise up. So this is when ChatGPT, it's about a year ago. And our CEO, he comes from a technical background, so he was just very excited about the space. Had read about it being an engineer, an ex Google engineer. He's kind of reading about this, especially Microsoft and OpenAI versus Google. There was probably some personal interest there as well, just like his career. So I started playing with it. And kind of right out of the gate I was like, I'm a little red flag, a little worried about this. The thought process is like, I'm not sure if this will fit into eat really well. They kind of thought at that time like, we've just done all this work. I, I'd rather focus a little more on the human. And yeah, it can make me a nice essay. But this essay isn't actually what we need. It's a college essay that it's spitting out for me that goes through the kind of standard things that you would have if you remember your kind of time in college. But it doesn't present that information in the way that humans consume information on the Internet. It's not in headers, it's not in bullets, it's not in subheaders. So the content's just like not really structured, right? And I was like, okay, let's do this. And then we did that and we had a human edit that and it was like, this took more time. And then we're paying a freelancer and it's like actually the freelancer's charging us more money to edit this thing. Like this is not, it's not working out. So that was kind of thrown by the wayside and then restarted visiting it in the spring of 23 and I'd stumbled across Surfer as a tool for our content optimization. And I started playing with the AI tool and it was creating content that looked right, it was structured in the right mannerism. And then there was a problem with that which was didn't have images, it would just give you placeholders. And it also doesn't have any links. So then we started developing a process, okay, what can we do to do that? And we did that ourselves at first. And then we started getting better at figuring out how to run that engine. And all of a sudden we were the bottleneck again. So we went to and figured out a labor way to supply and fix that bottleneck, which was part time people to help edit that content. And now today we're creating a piece of content for a fraction of what we were able to do when we were using the freelancers. And the content is not only, I think equal or better quality, definitely maybe skewing towards the better, but Google likes the content a lot better. We never ranked at the volumes of traffic that our content that's getting generated with this AI plus human editing process anywhere near this. And the peak of that, just to put some comparison, at the peak, we were kind of struggling to get freelancers to get us to 15 to 20 articles a month. Now we're, you know, in this month we're doing 40. Next month we'll do 50.
- [18:13]
Podcast Announcer
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- [19:41]
Tyson Stockton
I think there's a lot of value in that approach there and I think it's worth a, it's worth a call out to where you started on that is starting with the kind of making sure you didn't have any leaks in the boat, so to speak with having that technical foundation. Because I think that's an area where I've seen people kind of misstep is like they're jumping right into the content production and they're creating, regardless of how they're creating good content that then's not servicing because there are these limitations behind it. So I like that you called out hey, you know, we first made sure that from a technical perspective that there wasn't going to be anything holding back the content. But then I also like in your approach here is you start small like you just have a human go through what this is from ideation of topic ideas into creation, into publishing. Because I think through that you're surfacing out like where those thresholds and where those things are that you need to address. But I think it's also, there is some value in that also like slower approach and then ramping up in content because I think also from a search engine eyes that's a lot more natural. And if someone just jumps in and all of a sudden floods the index with thousands of pages when the website was not normally producing a high volume of pages, it kind of throws out some red flags where you guys were going from a few pieces a month and then you're starting to address some of these pain points and now you're scaling up, scaling up. And it also from like I think a search engine perspective is that becomes a lot more natural, a lot more normal than someone that would just all of a sudden unlock the floodgates. It starts going and they're trying to improve quality. So I think it's a great call out for companies looking to embark on this is like start slow, figure out exactly how you're going to integrate this and then being able to layer that on. Another question that I would have is like from this, like how are you going out like the, the topic selection component so it makes sense where you have your, your pieces that you want. Getting that initial draft from Surfer AI, having the human component of it, that's kind of like your safety net. And then you have whatever upload mechanism or process is required and then typically it's going to be, you know, unique to different businesses. But what is like the selection criteria? Like how are you defining those initial inputs to go into Surfer AI?
- [22:18]
Drew Moffitt
Yeah, so the challenge for us is there's large incumbents in the space, but that's also an opportunity to help find these topics quite easily. So Kumospace today, if I'm working off memory, I think we have around 500 indexed pages right now. That's for the U.S. if you look at like zoom in the U.S. i think there's 25,000 pages. So there's just a lot of content that's getting between Zoom, Microsoft, RingCentral, Slack. So there's kind of three places we get this content from. So the first one is we've emerged as the number one player in the space. So you know, that's a exciting thing to have done. And a big piece of this is because of search and just because I would say we largely have out marketed our competitors. But in instances where we see our competitors, I'm talking about these small startup virtual office type competitors, not a legacy, traditional Microsoft Teams type competitor. They may have written about a topic. So we're like, okay, we have very good authority with a similar kind of product. Product, we can talk about this. So that's one place. It's not just for them. It can be if we have a keyword looking at who is ranking at the top of that. You look for example, like what is a small business? There's some company that has the first result on that. So you kind of look at that content. You can then go look at these big competitors as well and do the same thing. So those are two kind of places or one place that we look and different ways of looking at that. Another is the team suggests ideas to us. Hey, why don't we write about this? Hey, maybe that. Then we just throw that into. We use Semrush. But any of those type of tools and you just look, is there valid traffic in being searched for this topic? Okay, great. Let's figure out how to address it then. The second piece is we use those type of tools Surfer and we just look at really what I would call umbrella keywords. And they are huge umbrella umbrella keywords that we're looking at. Online meeting, platform, video conferencing, video chat, team chat, remote work kind of like goes on and on, on. And we can just get a lot of topics and then just combing through that and saying okay, we really authoritatively should be talking about that. Sometimes you find weird things, right? You're not going to want to write content even though it's in that umbrella that say like adult video conferencing content, right? Like that. That wouldn't be one. So you filter out the stuff that's applicable. But we are lucky in the sense that there is just a lot of content getting written or already existing out there.
- [24:59]
Tyson Stockton
Fair. And it sounds too like you're hitting on two key elements where you have a QA or like a quality check essentially on the inputs going into the system. So it's not just letting it programmatically identify and generate content on everything or within some rule that would be set. But it's like you have a human checkpoint there at the like initial point and then you have the other human checkpoint of once it is created in that editing process. And I think that's a really strong recommendation because again all these systems are tools or ways that we can work faster. But there still is that kind of like sanity validation touch point to ensure that it is on brand. It is intentional of the content too. And I think that's where sometimes you see more of the hey, this type of content doesn't perform. And it's when I think there's, it's lacking a little bit of that intention and how deliberate the action is. Maybe just as kind of like a final kind of touch point on this. Like do you have any other initial like recommendations for the listeners that are either, you know, struggling with this or maybe they're just starting to embark on it? Like any final kind of recommendations for the listeners?
- [26:25]
Drew Moffitt
Yeah, I, I would just say I'm a very impatient person and that is a double edged sword for me. Right. Because very good at trying running straight at a problem, but when the problem is immediately not a win, I tend to get upset about that. That and in search, you know, it's, it's a long journey and I often upwardly manage that to the co founders and other team members. You know, talking about the fact, it's like, hey, if we want to be targeting that, we probably need six to 12 months of marketing focusing on that. We need to start today. If you guys think we're going to be having this new feature in nine months. Right. So I need to have that heads up to start doing this would be an example. So just think about, I'm trying to set us up to succeed not just this year, but hopefully in five years from now. I use that example of Zoom. It's like, how do we go from 500 to 5,000 and even if we get to 5,000, that's still only 20% of where Zoom's at. And if it takes us a couple years to get there, that's fine because it'll take us a couple more years to get to 50%. So it is a long journey and we go back and if the content doesn't perform well after a period of time, now we just refeed that back into the machine and we content optimize that and try to figure out how we can continue to improve that. But I very much would encourage people to. One, success is going to be slow in this channel. So really think about the fact that you're building a foundation, right? Like we're building a foundation to talk authoritatively about remote work and the best practices and all the communication and collaboration and culture and visibility and productivity that happens when you're running a remote company. So there's just a lot of topics there and it's not going to happen overnight that you're going to be the authority, but in five years, if you've invested five years earlier, then that will start being the reality.
- [28:31]
Tyson Stockton
And it's another great recommendation on the revisiting content. I think that is super, super critical. So you calling out that piece of maybe pieces that were not initially performing. It's not completely just abandoned, but there is that. Yep, this is a good topic for us. Let's reinvest again, re optimize and give it some additional kind of legs to it. Now with that, that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks to Drew Moffitt, Head of Marketing at Kumospace, for joining us. As you heard from the podcast, if you guys are a remote first company, be sure to check out his company's website in part two of this conversation, which will be published tomorrow, Drew and I are going to continue continue and we're going to dig into SEOs for startups. If you can't wait until the next episode and you'd like to learn more about True, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or you can visit his company@comospace.com.
- [29:33]
Podcast Announcer
Okay, thanks to Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter where his handle is TysonStockton. Or if your team is interested in SEO consulting, consulting or organizational education, you can always head to their company's website, which is previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O and a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore. Thanks to Ahrefs because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks, and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's Ahrefs a h r e f s.comAWT just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter and you can even send us your topics, suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben JSCHAPP. B E N J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed to tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.