← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Training Clients On Using AI In Their Content Workflow
00:21:34
Loading summary
Transcript30 lines
- [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 Pre Visible and joining me today is Catherine Watier Ong, who is the founder at WO Strategies. WO Strategies is organic traffic Marketing partner and trainer to science based organizations. They collaborate with you and your team to ensure that you have the skills and strategy necessary to grow your organic traffic, with the goal of getting scientific answers into the hands of your customers.
- [01:12]
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.
- [02:29]
Tyson Stockton
AWT today, Katherine and I are going to be discussing training clients on using AI in their content workflows. So with that, here's my conversation with Katherine Watier Ong, Founder at WO Strategies. Katherine, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:47]
Catherine Watier Ong
Hey, thanks for having me.
- [02:49]
Tyson Stockton
Now, I When I saw the subjects of the episodes come through, I kind of just Jumped right on it. One I was interested in, you know, the kind of spin or the niche of the academic side as well as just the, the kind of focus on the training and education element, which I'm quite a fan of. So diving kind of into this, maybe starting from a high level, like how would you describe kind of like your perspective on where education fits in, supporting clients through like an agency or third party perspective?
- [03:26]
Catherine Watier Ong
Yeah. So before I ran my business, I actually helped build out the online marketing and analytics team at Ketchum, which is a global PR firm supporting their clients globally. So I got a chance to talk to a lot of very well established brands who had never thought of SEO before. And so I continue to accumulate those types of brands. So they are, especially in the academics journal space, there are millions of pages, so they often have technical issues when they come to me. And then they have an already set content process that needs to be improved. So that way their content would actually be found online by their searchers. Right. So from the beginning, I firmly believe that with an organization like that, where they're publishing their own stuff a la like a healthline, which you and I know, have nine SEOs on their team, they should have SEO internally so they could have me too. And I certainly, it's not like I don't help them. I help them for a variety of years as they get their training wheels under them, but I just firmly believe they need to have somebody internally that can troubleshoot stuff. So most of my academic journals, I train them on technical SEO. So I've trained at this point three different people that work on enterprise level sites on technical SEO. And they're crawling and ticketing their own issues. And mostly because they're on platforms that roll out updates every month. So they really need to stay on top of like what's happening, did they roll out something that broke something, you know, that kind of activity. And it's really hard to do that as an outside agency. They're much closer to it. And then their process of accepting either accept they can't optimize the articles that are received from authors. But some of the journals have podcasts and blog posts and collection pages, all of which could get optimized for search. But to do that I have to change the subject matter experts flow of picking a topic because in some instances they pick things they can't ever rank for and then actually building out a content brief that will help them rank for that topic versus just writing stuff in a vacuum without even looking at what's appearing in Search and all of my clients are brand new to SEO.
- [05:37]
Tyson Stockton
And I mean, I guess first to just pause a minute right there with you on the first packet about this, we were talking before, like the episode, but yeah, like I, I can't advocate enough the, the value of having, you know, SEO and in house and working with those internal members. Most of these cases, especially on the enterprise level, there's never a shortage of things to be done right. And just being in the systems and as much as we try to have, you know, our teams integrated into our client system, there's always going to be that kind of potential limit of how far ingrained you can be. And then also from the, yeah, general kind of like education side, it allows you to move through quicker, easier, have a different type of conversations. But with this, with this episode, I want to kind of like dive in a little bit more to the content element here. So within this episode we called out wanting to look at kind of content workflows and how to use AI in those. Being that AI has become so much more common knowledge. It's, you hear it on the street and whatnot. It feels like, at least in my experience, a lot of clients have a little bit better general understanding and know, hey, maybe I should be using this, but don't really know where to start. How do you initiate these conversations and what's your kind of starting point to embark on training and development within this area?
- [07:14]
Catherine Watier Ong
Yeah, so I mean, about like 2ish years ago, when the AI stuff started, I actually pitched myself to speak at a nonprofit digital strategy show on purpose because I wanted to think through how to integrate various AI chat prompts or custom GPTs or whatever into the flow. But because mostly I work, I mean, these associations are technically nonprofit, so they're always looking for software that's the most affordable. And previously, before this most recent boom of ChatGPT, I had actually recommended for some of my federal agencies that they purchase software from places like Marketing Muse. Right. Market Muse, which uses AI and text embeddings and et cetera. Just because they had few people internally, they had like two part time of their roles, was doing SEO. So they're really crunched for, for them, I was like, you know what, I think you need to purchase this software. So that way the content briefs are super easy and the internal links on your half a million page enterprise site is easy. Right. But selling that through to my current clients is more challenging. Most of the time they're like, how much is ahrefs? Right. Because they also have to buy Software from. They're big beginner, right? I'm like, you need SEO software. And fascinatingly, most of them are actually using ChatGPT. I had one, one of my clients where the editors were somewhat new and I do have training material that starts from the very beginning, which is like, this is how LLMs work. This is how you should be worried about hallucinations, et cetera, et cetera. Don't personally identifiable information in there. And this is what that is. And if anybody wants these, they're actually visible in my speaker deck. So you can kind of see my basic 101 to LLMs. But most of my clients now are just jazzed about, you know, learning about the workflow from picking a keyword that has search intent where you can actually appear straight through, to baking a content brief by using various custom GPTs and some chat prompts and stuff. Additionally, I've done things like with one of my clients, they had no meta descriptions in any of their blog posts. They had 350 of them. And so on a whim I thought, well, let me try GPT in sheets and see if I can generate something. Because I think something that's been somewhat strategically generated is probably better than Google generating something from the blank page. So they happily were like, oh, awesome, I've got like five to pick from. I'll just pick one then. There you go. We've got something filled in versus nothing. So, yeah, I've done a variety of stuff like that with clients, but at the moment my entire workflow on the content end includes AI prompts and custom GPTs. Not the writing except for meta ties on descriptions. But going through the content brief, all of that stuff is actually run with a variety of different prompts to get to that end result. Yeah, you can also purchase software that does the whole thing for you. It's like quick turnaround. It really just depends on your budget. I also have a list of software I recommend to my clients and if they'd rather just pick a one and done kind of thing, I can ship them the ones that I've used and liked.
- [10:13]
Tyson Stockton
But yeah, interesting. So in that you're saying basically, hey, these are tools that I vetted or vouched for or have some sort of kind of green light on.
- [10:26]
Catherine Watier Ong
Yeah, I tried. Yeah, yeah.
- [10:28]
Tyson Stockton
And then the other one is kind of more through like homegrown. And as far as systems and environments like that you're using for those like on your own, is it pretty much follow these steps and these prompts.
- [10:44]
Catherine Watier Ong
Yeah, it's follow these steps I actually have two that I like that I lean heavily on and hopefully they continue to exist because obviously they're not mine. But there is this custom GPT you might need to have AIPRM installed to get to it. I forget possibly, but it's called Dr. Keyword and it actually uses the AHREFS API and it's amazing. It walks you through most of the process. However, everyone new to SEO is super confused about search intent. I don't know why, I find it pretty straightforward, but I spend a lot of time revisiting search intent with my new to SEO people being like, no, no, no, don't pick it in a vacuum. Go see what's actually appearing. Is it people like you? You know, is it your type of website? Can you rank for that before you start writing? Because I'm always starting with folks that have written a ton and it's in a cold, dark hallway. Nobody's finding it. It's good stuff, but it's not targeted.
- [11:35]
Tyson Stockton
In addition to that, like, what are some of the other common barriers or things that you're finding that are more commonly hard for people to digest in the beginning, like, so you gave the example of intent.
- [11:49]
Catherine Watier Ong
Oh my gosh, I am floored. And I don't know why I'm still shocked by this. Because, I mean, I was the Ketchum for five years, I'm at year nine of my current business and the brands I work with are. People know them, they're very well known brands. And yet when I dig into things like, because I was a VP of social media at Ketchum, so I actually asked things like, what's your brand voice? What's your unique brand value? You know, digging into that kind of, why would somebody pick you out of the plethora of options, right? And you would be floored. How many of them cannot answer that question? They absolutely have never done that work. It just floors me every time. But all of them don't know all of them, including the Feds. They also sometimes don't know their target audience. Sometimes they have a feeling. And some of them are more established than others. And I've worked with some very well known big brands, asked for their Personas, particularly. I was working on a YouTube project and then I look to see who's actually watching their videos on YouTube and it couldn't be any different, like radically different. Like you think you're talking to this female, 30, whatever, and instead it's an Indian dude that's 60, like radically different. But yeah, the Persona stuff is really Challenging the knowing and owning your brand voice. And I have this great partner that does these brand workshops. I've like side by side with her with a startup client and saw her develop a brand voice that like gave me goosebumps. It's ownable. Oh my God. It's ownable. You know, it's very exciting, so it can be done. But my clients, you know, it's brand new to them. Just like search intent, that is totally brand new. And then if you layer on what it takes to appear in those AI overviews, that's a whole other challenge. Right. And I always feel like that is the next step beyond like, you got to get the basic blocking and tackling and write content that's targeted to intent and an audience first. And then we talk about the extra stuff that you should do to become part of those AI overviews. I had some clients that do the Knowledge Graph work in tandem, but most of them think of it as like, okay, let's do some basic stuff first and then we'll do Knowledge Graph stuff. But I did have one client because they had a particular brand that was not found in the Knowledge graph. And so while we were doing basic blocking and tackling, they were working with my Wikipedia coach and actually working on some Knowledge Graph stuff too.
- [14:07]
Tyson Stockton
Interesting.
- [14:08]
Catherine Watier Ong
And I had the feds do some of that too because they had some confusion around their name on the Knowledge Graph.
- [14:13]
Podcast Announcer
So, 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 Visible'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.
- [15:43]
Tyson Stockton
And within this vein of kind of just general training and development, AI, of course can be applied or, I mean, let's be more specific, generative AI can be applied to a variety of different facets. Like within our workflows as SEO. Do you find common content being like the easiest starting point for it? Like, I assume you're also layering this into other aspects, whether it's technical or different components. Is this like, have you found this to be kind of like the easiest starting point?
- [16:15]
Catherine Watier Ong
They're all using it for content. So yeah, I mean, except for the. The one group where I had to start from the beginning and they were much more new and hadn't touched it generally. The rest of them have definitely used AI to summarize and brainstorm and they've already played with that kind of stuff. So opening their eyes to the fact that the LLMs have scraped the entire Internet and so you can help them, they can help you strategically brainstorm stuff that you should then validate with like real life data because they could make stuff up. But it's interesting to do things like get Persona information out from the LLM. That's always really interesting to me. Or validate your current Personas or adjust your content to reading level kind of stuff. That's always very helpful.
- [16:57]
Tyson Stockton
And maybe it's a little bit of a teaser for the conversation tomorrow, but I've seen a mixed, I don't know, mixed comfort level or interest or even opinions on being included in the LLMs being excluded. There's been conversations around like the New York Times within, kind of like you're in a unique position of working with like, you know, on the academic side, like, is there a general.
- [17:28]
Catherine Watier Ong
Yes, they're pissed that their stuff's been stolen. And you know, and I can always empathize because so I believe it. So I just put this on like that. I keep forgetting what newspaper I think is a Washington Post article where they let you search the common crawl and figure out how many tokens have been taken from your website. And ironically, my little tiny little website has gotten more tokens taken than National Academy of Sciences journal. So I mean, I'm like, hey, my stuff was stolen too. I'm also not very happy be. But yes, they're all. I've had a thousand conversations with them. They want to block all of the LLM training. And as you know, with Google, it's not possible. Right? You're going to ditch yourself from Google Search if you want to block the training. And I actually had a new to me journal talk to me and the starting conversation here I am, year 20 of being an SEO, and the starting conversation was, we're thinking of ditching Google. What do you think?
- [18:20]
Tyson Stockton
Not yet.
- [18:21]
Catherine Watier Ong
And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You've never done SEO. But I mean, to be fair though, they published this book. If I told you the book, you've used it. Everybody's used the dang book and their book got stolen. It's out there. And so I honestly was like, you know, at this point it's gone. Other than suing, which I recommend you do, there's nothing I can do from like a robot text. Like, it's a nice handshake. I can blow past that with screaming frog. Like, there's nothing. You should put legal language on your website. You should sue them. But, like, there's nothing technically I could do to block these LLMs. Some of them aren't clear about what IP they're coming from. They're changing their IP. Perplexity says, I don't even care. Right? It's just not. And there's new ones popping up every day. Like it's impossible to really tighten that down and make sure your stuff is not getting stolen. So instead I was like, let me look at just your brand name. So here I am with my mid level Ahrefs account and totally hit the limits. I got half a million keywords with a variety sets of volume and frankly, more than half a million. I just hit the limit with Ahrefs, all branded, most of which they're not ranking for. It's their name and they're not ranking for it. I was like, you have so much opportunity, you don't even know. Right? I think we should start there. Let's start with like, having you appear. So most of what I'm actually doing, especially for them, is thinking through how to make sure they are referenced in the AI overview. Answers. But I will say I know one of my clients is nicely referenced everywhere, but has lost clicks. So good for brand impressions, right? And good for brand exposure, but really bad for website traffic.
- [20:01]
Tyson Stockton
So obviously being in the SEO department, that's a little tougher. Have you. And maybe, maybe it's too early, but like, has. Has any business impact been felt by the less traffic, like just coming off Brighton, this was like a main piece in one of Will's talks and presentations. And I'm sure a lot of people have seen the material he's put out on LinkedIn on this, but he kind of talks about this and like, hey, Cyr, we saw a decrease in traffic, increase in leads. You know, basically making the case of, hey, traffic's not the end all KPI in this situation. Because it is kind of unique too, where they're not making a. You know, it's not like they're looking for a lead or necessarily, I guess, depending on the source, like making a sale.
- [20:47]
Catherine Watier Ong
I mean, they sell subscriptions, but they're usually institutional subscriptions. Right. So a library is going to want access to that journal because of the authority of that journal. But I will tell you that the citations directly feed into their impact journal factor. So there's this measurement that academic journals track. You could assume it's like a domain authority, sort of, but it's driven based on links, interestingly, which is why I tell all of them, I'm like, why are you migrating without an SEO? Because of course, I've come to some of these. The first one was about to migrate without one, and then I've helped two other journals migrate with me. Right. Redirect, mapping and testing. Because I'm like, you don't want to lose your citations. It's going to directly impact your impact factor, which is why people submit to you. It's very interesting. So I think it's like a delayed, like a lagging factor. Right. Because as less people find the science and link to the actual articles, maybe it'll impact their overall impact factor.
- [21:50]
Tyson Stockton
Yeah, you have kind of like the chicken versus the egg scenario where, great, we're actually doing it because of this and this. But if you're less discoverable, then you'll probably get less links, which then leads you. So it's a lagging kind of business impact.
- [22:07]
Catherine Watier Ong
Yes.
- [22:07]
Tyson Stockton
With that, though, I feel like that is a little bit of a cliffhanger. But I'm going to leave the listeners with that as we're going to kind of just make room for the conversation tomorrow as we're going to dig a bit deeper into SEO in this kind of niche world of academic journals. But for now, that's going to wrap up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Katherine from WO Strategies for joining us. And as mentioned in part two of this conversation, which is going to be published tomorrow, we're going to be covering SEO for academic journals. If you can't wait until the next episode and you'd like to learn more about Katherine, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in the show Notes. You can also contact her on Blue sky, where she can be found at K watier that's W a t I e r K W A T I E R. Be sure to go on over and check out her company's website@WStrategies.com and while you're there, be sure to check out her podcast, which is@wostrategies.com DigitalMarketing.
- [23:15]
Podcast Announcer
Victories podcast 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 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 topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which will 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 tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, remember the answers are always in the data.