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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? My name is Tyson from Previsible IO and today we're going to be discussing unlocking SEO growth through AI. Joining me today is Eric Hoover, who's the Director of SEO at Jellyfish. Jellyfish is a global advertising agency with over 100 SEOs stationed across the globe, working on earned media, SEO, content and PR for brands like Deckers, Nike and L'Oreal and LG.
- [01:09]
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.
- [02:28]
Tyson Stockton
So with that, here's my conversation with Eric Hoover, Director of SEO Jellyfish. Eric, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:34]
Eric Hoover
Hey, happy to be here. Thank you for having me on.
- [02:37]
Tyson Stockton
No, of course. It's been a hot topic. AI we went through, it felt like last year, you know, almost every episode it Was, you know, talking about it in one, one lens or another. But of course it's something we can't be ignoring. There's just countless applications and workflows for it. But this conversation, we're really kind of focusing in on scaling and so maybe to set the stage, and I always like to do this at the beginning of the conversation, but just set the stage for the listeners. What do you mean by scaling in this sense? And why are these tools so inherently well positioned for the challenge of scale?
- [03:19]
Eric Hoover
Yeah, so there's something I've been sort of angling it to when I talk to clients about like using AI and I've been sort of viewing it as it's like having a new member on the team. It's someone who can give kind of a fresh look at what we're at, the landscape where the clients live within that landscape and competitors. So using it as a tool to sort of, to speed up that process in a sense. So whether that's utilizing something as sort of newer like ChatGPT or even there's plenty of tools like Semrush has AI components to it now. SEO clarity has AI components to it to really sort of take a look at that wide landscape within moments as opposed to hours upon hours of initial research. So it's similar to traditional keyword research in a sense where you would have your seed keywords, you'd pump them into whatever tool you're using, whether it's keyword planner, what have you. Semrush again. And just trying to build that web, build that universe out from there, but with certain components, certain tools that use AI to enhance that. It pulls all of those areas in much, much quicker and it makes it more strategic and conversational for the teams where as opposed to just diving in so deeply on their own, they have that sort of backup that way, that conversational way that you can speak to AI where you can literally like a chatgpt, ask it questions like, you know, can you expand upon. An example I used recently was Persian cats. I'm a bit of a cat obsessed person. So it starts off with, you know, give me a bunch of categories around Persian cats. And it's about, you know, different types of Persian cats, what to feed them, how they act, how they're different from, from your typical domestic, so on and so forth. And from there we can take all of that, each category and ask the AI to dive deeper and deeper into those categories and build out more recommendations, more IDE around, keywords, content, et cetera. So that's Kind of like the strategic look at it from a tactical standpoint. It's become very commonplace for many of us SEOs. I'm not confirming nor denying SEOs on my team or other teams outside of Jellyfish are doing this. But when it comes to things like building out a content brief or building out some sort of initial audit of a website, pumping that information into, into an AI and having it replicate what you need over and over again very quickly and succinctly, and then having the team take it back and update it from there versus starting from complete scratch. So in a sense, we're using it to set ourselves up, whether it's that sort of strategic view of a landscape or we just need to build, you know, 50 content briefs in a short amount of time as a starting point, as a template, and then taking it from there and making sure that the SEOs, the human SEOs on the team are also taking a look and qaing and so on and so forth. Because especially in the early days of AI, we got some very interesting and way off results doing some of these tactics. But between the advancements in AI and just having our own sort of language models, learning over and over for the brands that we work on and the categories that they live in, having a better understanding of where to start with those as well.
- [06:54]
Tyson Stockton
And it sounds like, from, from that approach, and we've, we've talked about on the podcast a few times, like different applications within the content creation process and like, you hit on some of them with like content briefs, outlines, maybe first drafts. And a lot of what we've talked about is, you know, thinking about the entire process and then testing into different ways that you can apply this into that overall process. And it sounds like from your perspective, you're almost applying that same approach to different areas of SEO work beyond just the content, maybe breaking into like a few of those. Like, do you recommend to SEOs listening out there to, you know, feed in existing examples of what you're looking for or anything that you could kind of give as guidance to maybe those out there that are earlier on their journey of application of this to ensure that they're getting kind of a more usable output from these systems?
- [08:00]
Eric Hoover
Yeah. So with any tool that's learning, there's going to be a bit of that learning curve. It's going to take time for it to understand exactly what you need. So when it comes to something, I'll use the content briefs again for an example. When we initially started this, we would essentially take existing templates that we had and start feeding those into the tools themselves. So it's sort of strange. You have to, it's not something where, and I stress this with my team as well, you know, AI is, it's here. We need to learn to use it, I think for our careers alone, let alone, let alone the sort of outputs that we'll get from it and the assistance we'll get from it. And I also sort of joke, but sort of realistically so it doesn't quote unquote, take our jobs, but you have to know how to do the thing before you can have AI do the thing for you, if that makes sense. So when it comes to like a content brief, say we have a hair and skincare brand and then we work on a similar brand, some other form of, of self care or health brand, we might take the existing hair and skin care brand templates and feed those into the AI and then say, okay, replicate this for me. We need these X amount of content briefs. But instead of talking about, you know, conditioners for thinning hair, we're going to talk about how to best exercise for summer. Summer's coming up. Let's get summer bodies going. That's sort of a, not a one to one comparison, but just having that knowledge the SEOs and content folks have of building those templates out. Those need to be set in place first and then they need to teach the AI those initial steps before it can continue to learn by analyzing that and just producing outputs over and over again until it gets to a point where it's going to be able to, we're going to be able to go into it and say, hey, I need a content brief for best men's aftershave and pop in a couple of keywords and then boom, there's your content brief ready for SEO review.
- [10:15]
Podcast Announcer
Time for a one minute break to hear from our sponsor, Pre Visible. So you're looking for SEO help and you got a couple of options. You could start replying to spam from agencies that claim they can get you to rank number one on Google. You can pay an hourly rate for a consultant who will inevitably nickel and dime you with hourly charges. Or you can work with a cookie cutter agency to quickly launch a strategy less project with low success rate. None of those sound very good now, do they? Well, that's where Pre Visible's integrated consulting model comes in. Pre Visible draws From a collective 40 years of SEO and digital marketing experience to unlock your organic growth opportunities. They build custom solutions that combine strategy, technical expertise, content and reporting to effectively operationalize SEO for your business. Pre Physical's four stage approach ensures that your SEO programs thrive by starting off with a strategy first approach. Then they support you in your efforts to create quality content, help you identify technical issues and most importantly, they'll work with your cross functional teams to integrate your SEO strategies to make sure that your SEO budget actually drives results, not just your agency's bottom line. So join brands like Yelp, eBay, Canva, Atlassian Square, all who rely on the SEO consultants at Pre Visible. For more information go to Pre Visible IO that's Pre Visible P R E V I S I B L E I O.
- [11:43]
Tyson Stockton
And you've mentioned this a few times, but maybe like boiling it down. So obviously we're going through the workflows first. We're identifying these points of application where including examples or additional context and the prompts going into them. So the output is going to be in that ideal kind of like state. But you've hit on a few times QA and I feel like with these systems, with the nature of the topic here on scale, that's a huge critical aspect of ensuring the output and not having kind of like a blind application. What kind of process are you guys using from a QA perspective? Is it one to one? Everything gets checked. Spot checks, like what kind of QA would you recommend to SEOs when they're thinking of they went through the testing period, now they're ready to scale.
- [12:40]
Eric Hoover
Yeah. So there's still, I mean obviously it still needs to be QA'd. I think there is a point where it really depends. It depends on a lot of things and I feel like in SEO that's always the answer is it depends, but it depends on the complexity of the subject. For one. I think that I'll go back to using the sort of the self care models, you know, we will still thoroughly check them to an extent once we get further down that phase where we're about to actually start creating the content where jellyfish for a lot of the brands we also create the content as well. And if we don't, we work very closely with the content teams at the brand. So when we're starting that process earlier on, like I was just talking about, it's very much everything that gets output is getting looked at from a, from a human standpoint, very, very detailed. And then as you get further down the phase it might be, I don't want to use the word skimming because they're still looking at it, but it's still gotten to a point where we know Just based on the structure of a template, it's still worth it for the team to pass it on to the content folks. The content folks are going to examine it as well as they're writing stuff out and ask questions. But there's definitely a sort of sense where as we get further down the line, as the language models start to teach themselves and understand the topics better and understand the prompts so the prompts maybe aren't as detailed or aren't as, as complicated, we can sort of take it back and say, okay, we're going to give this a once over view, but we don't need to critique it as, as harshly as we did initially. I don't know if that answers your question exactly, but. And I also want to stress that there's still a QA process going on. There always needs to be a QA process going on from the SEO team to content people writing it to when it goes to a brand for reviewing before it gets either sent back with comments or gets put into a queue for publishing. That's generally the way we would like to do it. That's not always the case. Depending on things like again, if we're doing more brands that have tighter legal restrictions or different types of brand of voice, that's very succinct. It needs to sound very specific, a certain tone, things like that. Those are areas that we're always going to be very, very deep and very concentrated on qaing everything that gets output. And again, I'm not confirming or denying we do this for every brand. We don't, I should say I can confirm we don't do it it for every brand because there are some brands that are super sensitive and we have a pretty good. I'll say one thing definitely about Jellyfish use of AI. We're very tight on governance. It was one of the first things when AI started rolling out, we started playing with these tools was making sure we have tight guidelines about what gets put into them. We're not putting any sort of specific client information into them. Some of the stuff we do, the output is still very generic where it might not have any brand specific mentions at all and those will have to be put in after the fact. So it's about that sort of transparency with who we're working with and the complexity of, of what might be again, their, their brand messaging, their tone of voice, their legal things like that. All those things are taken into consideration before any of this goes in, goes into play.
- [16:02]
Tyson Stockton
And with a governance. So we spent a bit of time kind of on the content side of this, obviously that's just, you know, one application and in terms of other data sets that you can be adding to this one, I guess, like, are you using that today? Like are you taking crawl data from websites, analytic data? Like are you inputting any additional data sets to the systems for like other automations or. Yeah, anything from that standpoint point?
- [16:37]
Eric Hoover
Not at this point we would like to, but again that kind of falls into this sort of weird gray area of what we're allowed to put into these tools and also what in general we feel comfortable. And even speaking outside of like my current role, I would even add a personal use of using AI for like a freelance gig or something. I would feel very, I would be very careful about what we would put into the AI itself. There's certain things, I mean if you're putting in, you know, keywords for guidance, you might want to add in monthly search volume for those terms if it's useful for what you're trying to output. There are certain practices I've seen. I haven't done these for brands yet currently. Again, it's sort of a weird area. It's a bit of, you know, we have our governance, but AI is still a bit of the wild west going on out there. One thing that I have seen put into practice, I'd like to do it some more myself is the use of doing basically content audits or competitive audits with AI and taking much more sort of proprietary, may not proprietary data, but data that might be a little sensitive that we would share for our brands. But looking at say, you know, feeding Google's quality guidance into, into an AI and then giving them a website that you're a competitor for and saying, okay, how do, how can I get my site or my topics to rank better? This site that currently ranks in expositions for, for this category or these keywords based on these quality guidelines. So stuff like that I've seen. Again, I, I haven't done it. No one at Jellyfish has done it personally. I haven't done it personally, but those are areas that I think are worth exploring once the sort of governance of it all gets a little more intact. But as of this point, I haven't done it personally.
- [18:25]
Tyson Stockton
I mean, I think that's like a fun part of where we're at is like, you know, and we do have, I think that component in our industry where, you know, people are very generous in sharing things that they're testing on working, you know, and I think there's endless applications of this and, you know, talking to people like yourself, I think every additional conversation that you have, you pick up little pieces of like, oh, that's an interesting one to, you know, include or have like the quality guidelines as like a reference point or an additional input to it. Yeah, so I think, yeah, the, the creativity feels like we're just kind of getting started in that standpoint.
- [19:08]
Eric Hoover
Oh, yeah, absolutely. And there are some brands that are very open to us, you know, kind of going deeper with this. I've worked on a brand recently, I won't say its name, but it allowed us pretty wide access to utilizing a language model that the team at the company I work at, they built a language model internally and we utilized it to optimize the organic product feed for this brand. So, again, teaching the AI everything from all the different product variants, from like sizing to color to whether it's for, whether it's gender neutral or for men or for women or for children, feeding all that information, feeding tons, thousands upon thousands of keyword data into the tool. And from that, it output product titles, product descriptions for. I think it ended up being around 12,000 different products and variants. We ended up publishing it testing and the AI enhanced ones, compared to the AI enhanced with human editing product titles and descriptions ended up performing better than the traditional just human written ones, something like 25% better from as far as conversions and revenue. So it was a really great win. And with that, we, because of that trust that we were able to take that data that again, might not sound very sensitive, but, you know, brands can, you know, especially when it comes to AI, they want to be careful about what they're putting out there. So they put a lot of trust in us to produce this test. We didn't know if it would go well and ended up succeeding, thankfully.
- [20:52]
Tyson Stockton
Now, any. Any other applications that you'd recommend to the listeners out there, you know, even to just spark new ideas on how this can be applied into scaling efforts? Yeah. What are some other kind of like, applications for SEO work that you've been coming across or even that you maybe want to. Want to test yourself?
- [21:15]
Eric Hoover
Yeah, I think the biggest one I want to test was definitely the ability to basically teach a language model to assist you with a competitive audit. I think that alone will, I think the overall use of AI for SEO and content strategy is freeing up our time, freeing up our time to actually take all of that initial analysis and dive in and be more creative with our output, you know, come up with stronger recommendations quicker. And I think using a language model to Dive deeper into a website, whether it's your own website looking for gaps or a competitor's website. I think that alone is something that will be very valuable because as SEOs I think we're naturally inquisitive. But I've seen, and maybe this is because I worked primarily at agencies over my career, diving into so much data over so much time, you can tend to get a little burnt out and sometimes you don't see, as the expression goes, the force through the trees. So having, and this also goes back to my thought on AI being another team member that can help in and assist. It gives you those fresh eyes that hasn't, it technically hasn't worked on the account as long as you, for example. So maybe it has a bigger, a better, wider lens of what's out there and having it be able to look at all of that, that far reaching data and bring it to the forefront quicker and easier than an SEO might be able to do. And again, working at agencies a lot, you're always in a bit of a time crunch, or typically you're in a bit of a time crunch. So having it pull that analysis together at an initial standpoint for you and quickly kind of gather based on what initial data you've given it, what are some areas that your brand site might be able to improve on, or your messaging, things like that, I think is highly valuable. Just again, giving more of that freedom to spend time building out the strategy, being as creative as possible. Because as SEOs, I think a lot of us are very creative when it comes down to it. We're sort of an interesting mix of data analysts and creatives. So really taking as much of that information as we can get, having that information be categorized as well, saving us sort of time on some of the quote unquote, more tedious tasks allows us to have more of that mental strength to analyze what we're looking at, come up with strategy and be as creative as we, as we can be.
- [23:53]
Tyson Stockton
Absolutely. And I feel like that's a good summary of the applications. Here is one. Get creative, be testing, try different ways of applying to it. Also don't be set in those. Like what you're gonna try and test with today is probably not gonna be the same mix that you might, you know, six months from now. But I think leaning into that inherent strength that we have of creative or original thought in this regard, but also leveraging these tools for what they're able to do and what they're able to do in some regards like better than a human given the nature. And so when it comes to a sense of scale and repetitive task or, you know, going through larger data sets, there's a lot of opportunities to utilize this. And I think, you know, we're only at the beginning stage of finding these applications and it'll be really exciting to see kind of how this continues to evolve.
- [24:52]
Eric Hoover
Yeah, I always want people to look at it as an extension. AI is a tool. That's the term that gets thrown out a lot. But I look at it more as an extension of the SEO, whether it's the team or just an individual themselves having it assist them along the way to dive deeper into that information. I look at it also, in a way, I'm a bit of a nerd. So I used to, you know, I watched Star Trek growing up and Star Trek the Next Generation are always talking to the computer on the ship. They're saying, hey, computer, can you help me? What does this mean? What does that mean? What's going on on this planet? You know, the humans are running the ship, but the onboard computer, that's essentially an AI is in the background as a, as an extension of the crew, helping them out with multiple tasks to get to a solution before the hour long episode is over. So that's one way to sort of look at it.
- [25:47]
Podcast Announcer
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.com AWT that's Ahrefs a h r e f s.com AWT Absolutely.
- [26:21]
Tyson Stockton
And also, I mean, I think a very pointed. Yeah, kind of illustration of it. But with that, that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks to Eric Hoover, Director of SEO at Jellyfish, for joining us in part two of this conversation, which we'll publish tomorrow. Eric and I are going to be discussing mentoring your SEO team effectively. If you can't wait until the next episode and you'd like to learn more about Eric, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in the show notes or visit his website@erichuvordigital.com and if you didn't get a chance to take notes while listening to this podcast, just head over to the voiceofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes, contact information from our guests, and you can send us your topic suggestions or SEO questions, or even apply to be a guest speaker on the Voice of Search podcast. You can reach us on social media, where our handle is voicesofsearch, or you can find me at TysonStockton. And if you haven't subscribed yet and want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish a new episode every workday. So hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed in the next following business day. With that, that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast, and we will see you in the next episode.