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- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network.
- [00:06]
Stefan Spencer
Looking to launch or scale your podcast.
- [00:09]
Podcast Announcer
I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice?
- [00:19]
Stefan Spencer
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.
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Podcast Announcer
Your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom.
- [00:38]
Stefan Spencer
Here's today's host of the Voices of.
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Jordan Cooney
Search Podcast, Jordan Cooney hello SEOs and marketers. My name is Jordan Cooney from Pre Visible. Joining me today is Stefan Spencer, who is an SEO expert, author and speaker offering innovative solutions in digital marketing and web development.
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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 link 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.
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Jordan Cooney
Stefan specializes in helping businesses establish a strong online presence. And today we're going to discuss using AI to to build linkable assets. Here's my conversation with Stefan Spencer, co author of the Art of SEO. Stefan, welcome to the Voice of Search podcast.
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Stefan Spencer
Oh, thanks for having me, Jordan.
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Jordan Cooney
Yeah, looking forward to diving into our two topics today. A lot has changed in the SEO space over the last 20 years, but I think notably in the last 24 months it's been pretty unique to see how the industry has evolved. In particular I think link building is one of the hot topics right now. What and how to use link building, is it still relevant? Is it becoming increasingly important as consumers discovery changes towards environments like ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI search experiences? But ultimately, when we talk about linkable assets, I think we should start our show off by just getting a baseline understanding so all of our listeners know what are we talking about when we talk about linkable assets? What's the general purpose of those? Maybe we should start there, Stefan.
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Stefan Spencer
Yeah, well, in order to acquire a link, you need to earn it, unless you've paid for it and Google doesn't like it when you pay for it. So in order to earn a link, you have to have something worthwhile. Why would a webmaster, a journalist, a TV producer, whoever, why would they link to you? You must have something of value. And what is that valuable thing? It's a linkable asset. Now if you wonder if link building is even a thing still because of AI, if you go all the way back to the very early days of Google, even before it was called Google, when it was still called Backrub, can you believe they had that as the name? Crazy. Thank goodness they changed that. But if you think, think about what the foundation of what made Google Google, instead of Infoseek and Lycos and all that, it was citation analysis. It was weighting the link based on authority and trust and importance. It wasn't just one link is one vote. So if you now apply that idea of citation analysis, which is that predates search engines, that was, you know, from back in the information retrieval days and everything. If you think about how do I value somebody's vote, somebody's citation, I need to consider it more seriously if it's in a reputable journal. I need to consider it more seriously if it was a reputable author. You know, the more prestige the journal, the author, the researcher has, the more I'm going to take seriously that link, that reference. So it's still valid whether we're talking about an LLM giving you the answer or Google in the search results. Either way, we still need to have links, we still need to be cited. If you're invisible, if you're the best kept secret, how is an LLM or Google going to know that you exist to recommend you as one of the sources, right? So that means you have to play this game. You have to be a worthy linkable site with linkable assets 100%.
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Jordan Cooney
And I mean the evolution of linkable assets has also changed a lot, right? I mean, I Gotta safely assume that it probably started off by with some content or context based sharing. But it's changed so much in the last decade in terms of what we're traditionally thinking of as linkable assets. What were those assets and how have they changed in the past, you know, 10 years or so? And I'm curious to also get your take on where they might be going. What are the investment areas in pioneering places that creative and talented, whether they be SEOs, PR folks, content marketers, are taking linkable assets?
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Stefan Spencer
Great question. So if you look way back ten plus years ago, it wasn't really called linkable assets, it was called linkbait. And linkbait included things like controversial articles and listicles and quizzes and personality tests and infographics, a lot of you know, kind of buzzy, like buzzfeed type of stuff. You know, which city should you actually live in, which superhero are you? And that sort of stuff that just doesn't really excite anybody these days. It's kind of done and over. Like way back in the day, scholarships were a thing. You remember that, right?
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Podcast Announcer
Right.
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Jordan Cooney
I remember the scholarships.
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Stefan Spencer
Thousand dollar scholarship and you got a bunch of links for offering $1,000 scholarship. And you thought you were so clever.
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Jordan Cooney
Well, we needed those edus, Stefan. We needed those edu so badly.
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Stefan Spencer
Yeah, right. And so if like fast forward to today. What is of high value, it's stuff that's more interactive and engaging. You know, instead of maybe a personality test, it could be a full blown self assessment like if, if chatgpt, especially with its research mode now you pay the 200 bucks a month. I mean what you can do with an LLM is just mind blowing. So the level of, of expectations that our visitor has and the person who's linking to us potentially is sky high now. Right? The days of here's a guest post, can you please publish it? Are over. Like why should I give you a free link just because you gave me a free article? I can type in a prompt in about 10 seconds and get ChatGPT to give me just as good of an article.
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Jordan Cooney
Right.
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Stefan Spencer
Where are we heading? Was another part of your question.
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Jordan Cooney
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Stefan Spencer
So let's take an example. For me, like I'm a podcaster like you, you know, you're, you're a host and I'm a host. And I need to differentiate myself. I don't just have a marketing podcast, I have a personal development podcast as well. Spirituality and biohacking and so forth. So I have, I have competition. I have folks like Luke Story and Ben Greenfield, who are far more well known in the space of like biohacking and personal development. And I need to do something a little more notable, more remarkable, worthy of remark, to use Seth Godin's definition of remarkable. Right from the Purple cow.
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Jordan Cooney
Yeah.
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Stefan Spencer
So what I'm doing is we are rolling out across all of our episodes and I have done a decade's worth of episodes on both of my shows on Marketing speak and get yourself optimized. So that's 900 hours, almost a thousand. Okay. What we're going to do is use AI to create full blown video based 3 module online courses out of every single episode.
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Jordan Cooney
Wow, interesting.
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Stefan Spencer
That includes not just videos, but quizzes per module. Three quizzes, three modules. Right. Downloadable workbook and who knows what else. I mean, we could do worksheets, checklists, and all sorts of things that you would expect to see from a paid online course.
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Jordan Cooney
Right.
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Stefan Spencer
And we're going to do it for free.
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Jordan Cooney
Fascinating.
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Stefan Spencer
And when we approach our guests who have been on, let's say five, ten years ago and say, hey, you have a heard from me for a while, but I've got something you might be interested to, to know about. I'm creating and have created actually a draft of this online course based on our interview. And, and I'd love for you to take a look at it and you can use it for your own purposes, no problem. I'm happy to, you know, send you the, the audio, the video, the video scripts, all of it. And in fact, if you want it to be in your voice, then we'll use ElevenLabs, with your permission, we'll make it in your voice, the narration and like, who's going to say no to that? And we'll get some business out of that for sure. Because some of these clients, some of these folks will become clients, they want to know how this is done. And then they'll just say, actually, can you just do it for me? Can you do all this AI stuff for me? Because you're clearly on the cutting edge. So that's one way of differentiating yourself from all the other podcasters. I don't know of a single podcaster who's doing this, who's creating online courses based on the episodes.
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Jordan Cooney
I mean, it's a remarkably great idea. Right? Like, I mean, you have experts who are coming on to give their expertise and their knowledge on a show, on a podcast show. So by virtue, you already have a knowledge center and a resource that can be facilitated into some sort of other education material. Right. Whether it be a Course, a quiz workbook.
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Stefan Spencer
Yeah. But the problem is it's really spotty because, you know, we might go onto some tangent for 10 minutes. Yep. And then there's these. These gaps. Like, for example, one of the early episodes that we've done this to Mary Resenbeck. She's an expert in homeschooling, and we didn't even talk about Ed Reggio or something. I forget exactly the name. Think that might be it.
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Jordan Cooney
Okay.
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Stefan Spencer
But that's a style of. Of homeschooling or. Or like alternate education, like Waldorf is and Montessori is. There's this Ed Rio.
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Jordan Cooney
Right. Right.
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Stefan Spencer
And she didn't even talk about it. But the AI, we used Claude for this part of it, for creating the. The lesson plan, the outline, the video scripts and all that. It knew that was a gap. We needed to include Ed Reggie or whatever his last name was.
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Jordan Cooney
Yeah.
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Stefan Spencer
In. In the plan. And then I sent it to Mary. She's like, wow, this is phenomenal. I love it. Like, run with it. So, yeah, you just need to skate to where the puck is going to use the Wayne Gretzky quote.
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Jordan Cooney
Yeah.
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Stefan Spencer
And this is one aspect, one way to do it. I mean, there are hundreds of ways to use AI to create linkable assets that someone in 2026 would be blown away by.
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Jordan Cooney
Yeah. And I mean, the beauty of your show is you probably have experts from a variety of different fields, and for one individual to be able to fill in all those gaps is very unlikely. Right. Because you have everything from education to business to legal to healthcare. You're not gonna have one person who come in, create lesson plans or course material or any useful education, educational tool, and fill in every single gap that exists in all those. But AI can facilitate that. And then with the support of the expert, you quickly have a very clear linkable asset, but also a very useful and effective tool to educate and engage with your core community, whether it be the podcast community or the community of that particular expert that's on your show.
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Stefan Spencer
Yeah. And we're talking about hundreds of these.
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Jordan Cooney
Right. At scale.
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Stefan Spencer
Yeah, it'll be at scale. So if we can fine tune the prompts and really pick the right tools, like 11 labs for the audio and, you know, in video or whatever we're using for the video. You know, we're. We're trying out different tools to fine tune the sop, and then we scale that out, and you just have to apply that same kind of methodology and thinking to whatever your cool stuff is that you want to kind of multiply out or Expand.
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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 rates. 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 Previsible IO. That's Pre Visible. P R E V I S I B L E I O.
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Jordan Cooney
One of the themes that we've had in the pod quite a bit lately when it comes to AI is how do you make this an effective tool? And as we're talking about linkable assets and the art of link building, it's interesting to me this example in this scenario you shared and the need for critical thinking throughout the journey of execution. You'd need some level of kind of human direction to ensure that each of these lesson plans and resources when shared with that guest, have that kind of wow impact. That wow impact with, with this expert in homeschooling you had, you know, she reviewed this and was like, wow, this is really impressive. But if it was pure hallucination, if it was pure nonsense, if the entire delivery that AI gave you was off the mark, you'd have to, you know, reel that back and use a little bit of critical thinking and some baseline knowledge to make those assumptions. As you think about the application of AI, excuse me, in linkable assets and in link building, what are those baseline skills and knowledge that we're all going to need to have the critical thinking to do these kinds of efforts effectively?
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Stefan Spencer
Well, you need strategy and you need discernment. So the strategy is going to be like, how can I create something that is worthy of remark that not everybody and his brother is doing? It doesn't have to be the best, it just has to be worthy of remarkable. And then that discernment part is where you're going to look at what you're producing using whatever tools and prompts and does this make the cut or am I letting stuff get through that's not gonna like. It could potentially even be dangerous. Right. So in personal development and biohacking and so forth. Yeah. You could argue that that's a Ymyl space. Sure. Your money or your life. Well, what if I apply some supplement to my biohacking regimen that isn't good for me? What if I use a biohacking wearable device that is, you know, giving bad data and I make some bad decisions based on it? So you have to be mindful that you're not just creating content that gets links. You're helping people make choices and live a better life and business and run a better business. If you screw up, then you know, your hallucination could really cause some severe damage. So you gotta, you gotta be discerning, like, what things am I gonna do? Is this kind of a fun novelty thing where the risk is low or is this like high stakes?
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Jordan Cooney
Right.
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Stefan Spencer
And you have to constantly be monitoring this. And as I said, you're going, you're skating to where the puck is going. Because if you're gonna take six months to launch this thing, the AIs are going to be massively better by the time you launch.
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Jordan Cooney
No question. Yeah. As we see that evolution and as we see an effort to deliver on quality within a model of AI and building linkable assets, do you foresee that this is going to be exploited in the many ways that historically link building was exploited and arguably maybe tarnished the SEO industry to some extent. Where do you see the risks?
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Stefan Spencer
I don't know. I don't think so. Honestly. I think it's more of an arms race to deliver more and more value to try and keep up with AI. Because if, well, like you run an agency, I run an agency, so much could be created in terms of deliverables, strategy type deliverables, audits and things like that. You feed it an example, whether it's ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, you feed it an example and you tell it, do an audit or do like YouTube strategy or whatever for this particular brand or website or client and it will produce something pretty impressive. Imagine if it's pretty impressive now, how mind blowingly awesome it will be in a year's time because it's the law of accelerating returns. Moore's law, Metcalfe's Law, everything is advancing at a faster and faster clip. So the last hundred, this is according to Ray Kurzweil, the last hundred years of technology development could fit into the next 20 years going forward because we're at a much faster rate of change now than we were a hundred years ago. But because it's continuing to speed up, accelerate, then it would actually fit into the next 12 years, not the next 20. So we're going to experience what it was like for a person 100 years ago to jump into the future to today and how discombobulating that'll be. Imagine 12 years from now, it'll be just as discombobulating for us in 12 years time as it would be for someone from 100 years ago to today. That's just mind bogglingly, I think, awesome, but terrifying for many people. So you constantly have to innovate. Innovate or die. Like Peter Diamandis, founder of the X prize and of abundance360. I love this quote. He said there are going to be two kinds of businesses that will be around by the end of this decade. That's it, companies that are using AI at their core and companies that are out of business.
- [21:08]
Jordan Cooney
Interesting. Fascinating.
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Stefan Spencer
And that'll, that'll apply for everybody from the local dry cleaner and plumber, everybody. If they're not using AI, they're, they're obsolete. They can't compete with their competition who is using AI to cut costs and to scale their efforts across a larger service area and, you know, do lots better marketing, etc.
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Jordan Cooney
Yeah. So Stefan, as we think about this evolving future, this perpetual need for businesses to leverage AI, where do you see our listeners going? What should they be doing? What should they be prioritizing to ensure they are capable of leveraging AI in link building and in link building assets?
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Stefan Spencer
So this is just general good business advice. It's not just for building linkable assets. You have to stay on top of all the advances with AIs, especially like OpenAI's, ChatGPT and Anthropics, Claude and Gemini from Google, you need to be on top of it. So block out some amount of time each week to be playing with these tools, to be following on the developments that they are releasing and watching the demos and dreaming up ways that you can utilize these things in your business and various ways, not just in the link building side, so that's that's crucial. You need to stay up on like you, if you fall behind, you're dead. And this is just to tread water, just to stay up with the current stuff. Like if you really want to be ahead of the curve, then, then you need to act like it's a no brainer to be paying $200 a month for the highest level of chat GPT.
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Jordan Cooney
Right?
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Stefan Spencer
Like that's like as soon as you heard about it, you'd be signing up for that because you know that this is invaluable, this gives you an edge.
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Jordan Cooney
That's right.
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Stefan Spencer
So that's one thing. But in terms of linkable assets, specifically feed in a whole bunch of ideas that maybe you've seen in other industries or in competitors in your industry that really are remarkable in your opinion. And ask ChatGPT and Claude and whatever your LLMs are that you prefer to use, and you can also use all of them at once, like chathub, GG and so forth will give you the ability to run these prompts across all of the LLMs simultaneously and compare and contrast those results and go with the best ones. So you're going to feed it some data or some ideas and then you're going to get some output back. So you get in the habit of constantly using the AI as your brainstorming partner and allocate some time each week to be thinking big picture like this and coming up with strategies, ideas, campaigns, et cetera. Keith Cunningham, brilliant businessman. He's got the book the Road Less Stupid. It's amazing. So if you have what he has in his home, he calls it the thinking chair where you only go and sit there when you are going to really think deeply and you schedule time to do that and you do it and you only sit in that chair when you're going to think and not like check email and do stupid stuff that isn't going to keep you on the cutting edge of this new utopia we're heading into. So that's applicable no matter what business you're running. Do those things and you'll stay relevant.
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Jordan Cooney
Awesome. And that's a great place for us to wrap up this episode of the Voices of Search podcast. Thank you to Stefan Spencer for joining us in part two of this interview, which we'll publish tomorrow. Stefan and I are going to discuss personal brand building with AI. If you can't wait until our next episode and would like to learn more about Stefan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or visit his podcast website marketingspeak.com and personal website stefanspencer.com okay, thanks to.
- [25:19]
Podcast Announcer
Jordan Cooney, the founder of Pre Visible. If you'd like to get in touch with Jordan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter. His handle is J.T. cooney. That's J T K O E N E. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Pre Visible 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.com awt that's ahrefs a h r e f s 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 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, Facebook. Or you can contact me directly. My handle is benjschab B E N J S H A B 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.