In this special episode, Senior SEO Strategist Mandy Politi reveals key strategies for mastering SEO in the age of AI, focusing on Google's EEAT guidelines. Through the compelling case study of a real Optidge client, Mandy and Danny highlight the risks of relying too heavily on AI-generated content for the sake of ramping up quantity, emphasizing the importance of aligning content with user intent. The conversation shares expert insights on on-page and local SEO, comprehensive content audits, addressing technical challenges, and best practices to ensure long-term success in search rankings.
An Optidge "Office Hours" Episode
Our Office Hours episodes are your go-to for details, how-to’s, and advice on specific marketing topics. Join our fellow Optidge team members, and sometimes even 1:1 teachings from Danny himself, in these shorter, marketing-focused episodes every few weeks. Get ready to get marketing!
Episode Highlights:
- Mandy emphasized that AI is a valuable tool but must be used in alignment with Google’s EEAT guidelines. Content created at scale using AI can lead to a dramatic drop in traffic if it prioritizes search rankings over user experience and relevance, as seen with Client X.
- Taking the approach of targeting every possible keyword, even those that are irrelevant, and producing low-quality content are both harmful tactics for a website’s long-term performance. These strategies were especially detrimental for a business in the medical field, where establishing trustworthiness is essential. Unqualified traffic results in users quickly exiting the site, signaling to Google that the content is irrelevant, leading to drops in rankings and overall site performance.
- The conversation highlighted that duplicating content, especially using AI, dilutes SEO value and confuses Google about which pages to rank. For Client X, this led to non-indexed pages, poor rankings, and irrelevant traffic, showing the importance of targeting the right keywords and maintaining content quality.
- The solution lies in a thorough content and technical audit, focusing on removing irrelevant content, resolving duplication, and optimizing for qualified traffic. By following these best practices, the client could see improvements in traffic and conversions over time.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Danny Gavin (00:05):
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Mentor.
I'm your host, danny Gavin, andtogether with industry leaders
and marketing experts, we'llexplore the meeting point of
mentorship and marketing.
We'll discover how theseconnections have affected
careers, marketing strategiesand lives.
Now get ready to get human.
This episode is brought to youby Odeo Academy.
(00:38):
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Forward slash podcast and get$150 off with code mentor.
Hello, I'm Danny Gavin, founderof Optage, a marketing professor
and the host of the DigitalMarketing Mentor.
(00:59):
Today we have a very specialguest, mandy Politti, who's a
senior SEO strategist at Optage.
Mandy is our resident SEOgenius and we've been lucky
enough to have her on thepodcast before, so this will
actually be her third time she'sbeen on before to break down
SEO best practices, run throughcase studies and learn from her
expertise.
Today we're back with anotherscenario breakdown content at
(01:27):
scale.
We'll dive into Google's EEATguidelines, best practices and
why content at scale through AIcan lead to problems at scale,
using Client X as the example.
So we're not actually going totell you who the client was.
We want to kind of keep thatconfidential, but you'll still
learn from the case study andget a lot of information.
How are you, mandy?
Mandy Politi (01:39):
Good, good.
I'm very excited to be talkingabout this case study.
Danny Gavin (01:42):
Yes, I know you put a lot of effort into the
original audit and case study,so I'm excited that we can now
bring it to everyone else.
Client X thought they were onthe right track with their SEO
strategy.
They were cranking out tons ofAI-generated content and racking
up hundreds of backlinks weekly.
Now they were actually workingwith an SEO specialist.
Now they were actually workingwith a SEO specialist, and this
(02:06):
SEO specialist is known ingeneral to get a lot of quick
wins and to get a lot of trafficquickly, and any time that you
promise things quickly leads toissues.
Some SEOs swear by this forquick wins, but the cracks
started showing when Googlestopped indexing their new
content.
Despite all the effort, theirrankings weren't improving.
That's when they turned toOptage for Answers.
It became clear that, while thisapproach might seem effective
(02:28):
at first and bring a lot oftraffic, recent Google algorithm
updates have left their siteand others like it vulnerable to
penalties.
Before we dive into Client X,let's first discuss some of
Google's changes and bestpractices, most recently less
than a year ago, in Februaryactually, it's more than a year
ago.
I forget that we're in 2024.
In February 2023, googleprovided specific guidance on AI
(02:50):
generated content, stating thatthe ranking systems aim to
reward original content thataligns with EAT, which stands
for expertise, experience,authoritativeness and
trustworthiness qualities.
Authoritativeness andtrustworthiness qualities so,
mandy, that's a lot of likejargon.
What does this practically meanin lay terms, and why should we
be concerned?
Mandy Politi (03:10):
So basically, it means that AI is not inherently
bad.
It's just another tool.
There are best practices, thereare good and, like there are
best practices, there are badpractices.
Of course, before AI, googlewould recommend that we create
original, human-generatedcontent.
It wouldn't be a best practiceusing AI to also create content
(03:32):
that was created in that way.
But since February 2023, googleupdated the guidelines because
AI is a reality, people areusing it and, at the end of the
day, it came down to we don'treally mind how you're going to
create the content.
It just needs to still followthe guidelines of being quality
and relevant and optimized forusers and search engines, but
(03:53):
primarily for users.
Now, the problem here is that,if these guidelines are not
followed, a lot of industryexperts actually conducted
research that proved thatwebsites would maybe perform a
little bit and then Google gotit up and then traffic would
drop dramatically and the entirewebsite would actually beat the
index, which is kind of whathappens to our clients.
(04:15):
They started seeing trafficdrops and then they started
seeing a big portion of all thiscontent that they were creating
, that it wasn't being indexedand it wouldn't bring any
traffic.
Basically, so, yeah, I thinkthat at the end of the day, it
comes down to using AI in a waythat follows the guidelines and
it's not trying to manipulatesuch results.
Danny Gavin (04:33):
Basically, yeah, that's really good.
So, just to kind of stress thepoint, this concept of EEAT
making sure that your contenthas these qualities really, like
you said, it really isn'tdirectly related to AI.
It's something that's existedfor a while but with AI coming
along, where it's easier toproduce content right.
So it's a lot easier to producecontent that doesn't have these
(04:55):
qualities.
And if you're producing contentin a mass scale and it's
missing this quality, andespecially with our client who
is medical related or healthrelated then you're really right
, it's a recipe for doom.
What is considered bad practice?
How do you risk violating theguidelines?
Mandy Politi (05:14):
First of all, it's creating content for ranking
reasons and not for the users.
It's trying to create contenton a scale that doesn't help the
users.
In a way, it just aims onputting your website on the
search results for any giveneven remotely relevant keyword.
It's also using automation togenerate low quality content or
unoriginal content at scale in away that, again it comes down
(05:35):
to, the content is not reallyuseful.
It doesn't really provide anyinformation other than
aggregating different pieces ofinformation from here and there
and just trying to create enoughtext to give the website some
chances of appearing on thesearch results.
And it's also websites that,because they focus so much on
creating the content, they don'treally pay enough attention on
poor user experience in a waythat indicates exactly with this
(06:00):
client, the content was notreally optimized.
The links, the way, theparagraphs were too long, too
wordy.
There was a lot of informationbecause, again, the focus was
let's create as much text, asmuch content as we can, but at
the same time, when it comesdown to creating content, you
also need to ensure good userexperience.
You need to include things thatwill help the user to go
(06:21):
through the content, read it,understand it and get something
useful out of it.
And another thing is that thecontent because exactly it's
created just to target everypossible keyword it's content
that doesn't actually drivequalified traffic, relevant
traffic.
We have examples of that todiscuss in a bit.
But imagine this trying totarget every single keyword by
(06:42):
default.
It's not going to work.
Not every keyword, even if it'sa little bit relevant to what
its client does, you shouldn'tbe targeting all of them.
There are keywords that makesense.
There are keywords that don'tmake sense.
There are keywords thatseemingly make sense, but if you
really think about it, thesearch intent behind the query
is so different that youshouldn't be driving it.
You shouldn't be targeting it.
Driving it, you shouldn't betargeting it.
(07:06):
And something else is why is itimportant to drive qualified
traffic?
It's not only because you wantto position yourself in the
relevant search results and todrive the users that actually
are interested in reading yourcontent and potentially asking
more information about yourproducts or services.
It's also having to do with ifyou drive someone who is not
really interested in what youhave to offer and they click
back, this is a signal youropponent is not relevant.
So this law of the term it doesimpact performance.
(07:29):
It does impact your website ingeneral, your rankings, and
imagine now having that on scale.
Imagine having 1,000 pages ofthe all-target irrelevant
keywords.
Over time, people is going tobasically consider that your
website is not relevant.
It's not, it shouldn't beperforming and, especially
because you're in the medicalhealth industry, you want to
make sure.
Like we said in the beginning,you need to establish your
(07:49):
expertise, your experience, yourauthoritativeness, your
trustworthiness all of thesequalities.
So people land on your websitebecause you're trying to
clickbait them into clicking onthe website and then they leave
because what they see is notwhat they want to find and the
website and then they leavebecause what they see is not
what they want to find and theyclick back.
Danny Gavin (08:07):
Over time, your website is going to start seeing
drops in performance it's as iftheir seo specialist that they
were working with was like it'sbasically just like taking a
machine gun and just shootingwherever you can, but not
realizing that there's damagethat happens.
So just because you produce abunch of content, it's like okay
, some of it's good, some's good, some of it's bad, but the bad
you know who cares?
The problem is is what we'reabout to say.
(08:27):
We'll see that that actually itcan hurt things.
So, coming back to Client X,they had tremendous content,
right, a tremendous amount ofcontent that Google was not
indexing, and remember that wasthe first sign hey, danny and
Mandy, for some reason, ournewest blog post.
So we did a deep dive audit I'msaying we, but primarily Mandy
(08:51):
to determine what are some ofthe reasons why this was
happening.
I'm going to give a quickoverview and then we're going to
go through this in depth, andyou're not even keeping track of
what's going on.
There's a lot of duplicate thatcan happen.
They had suboptimal on-page SEO, so a good part of SEO is not
(09:14):
just the content, but also howyou format it, your tagging, and
all of that was missing.
They had non-indexed pages,like we spoke about, and most of
their pages were performingpoorly.
Finally, they were creatingcontent designed for search
engines rather than content thatwas intended to attract and be
valuable to their target market,and therefore it resulted in
unqualified traffic.
(09:34):
The traffic that was coming inis not people who are interested
in their services, but ratherjust popular traffic that had
nothing to do with anything.
So let's now go through this indepth.
Can you share an example ofwhat driving unqualified traffic
could look like?
Mandy Politi (09:48):
Void is a specific client they created.
Like we said, they were tryingto target every possible keyword
, so one of them was whethercats can have ADD.
If you really think about that,they did perform for this term
and the blog post that theypublished was appearing on the
search results for relevantqueries.
But at the end of the day, youhave to consider two things here
.
One, do you really want toposition your website or the
(10:12):
search results of the first page, or the top three positions,
even for a term that it's aboutwhether cats and animals can
have ADD?
And the second thing is what isthe search intent behind that?
Is the person who is lookingfor that looking for general
information and fun factsomething they might have
thought about looking in thenight?
Or are they looking for theexact services you offer, which
(10:33):
is, of course, for human beingsand not animals?
And then what are these peoplegoing to do?
They're going to find yourwebsite.
Okay, they're going to click onit.
They're going to start reading.
They will decide that this isnot really relevant.
It's an irrelevant website.
They're going to click backthis, like we said, it's a
(10:54):
signal that the content isirrelevant to the search intent.
Are they going to spend time onthe website?
Are they going to click toother internal links?
Are they going to actively askfor information about the ADD
for children or for adults?
No, so again, no matter theamount of traffic that this blog
post brought it broughtthousands of clicks, yes,
brought like thousands of clicks, yes, and thousands of
impressions.
But all of the non-branded termsthat it drove traffic for they
(11:17):
were irrelevant.
They were relevant to whethercats could have these kind of
symptoms, these kind of issuesand, yeah, in the end of the day
, this blog over time starteddropping performance and this is
also another point that evensome pages that they actually
performed a little over time,because of all these signals of
(11:38):
people leaving the website, notstaying in, all of that, it
started actually dropping overtime.
So you would see that the linewould go up, even for relevant
terms, but because the overallstrategy was poor, then after a
while you started seeing thatthe page performance would just
drop and that, if you see thatover time and you group the
pages and you filter accordingly, it was actually devastating to
(12:01):
see.
You could see that the website,all the traffic was just
sinking and again you have a lotof content at scale that was
targeting unqualified leads,basically like the example of
the cats, whether they can haveadd or not and the confusing
thing for the client is you knowthey're seeing this report,
they're seeing all this.
Danny Gavin (12:17):
You know the traffic coming in, it's growing,
it's great, great, great.
But when you actually breakdown that traffic and you see,
wow, 10 000 of those clicks allare for people searching for
cats.
Do they have have ADD?
I mean it's just totallymisleading because we can assume
that most people who aresearching for that don't care
for a site that helps childrenwith ADD, and it's just totally
(12:42):
misleading.
So that's why, digging intoyour queries and seeing where is
the traffic coming from, fromwhat pages, from what queries,
to see, is this increase intraffic that we're getting?
Is it actually good, is itactually valuable?
You know that's reallyimportant.
Mandy Politi (12:58):
What I have seen in the years of the years that I
have been working in theindustry is that a lot of people
report on traffic and on thetrend line going upwards, but in
the end of the day, if youactually go and check the
queries, most of the day, if youactually go and check the
queries, most of the timethey're either branded or
irrelevant.
It's not only about seeing theline going upwards.
It's not about seeing, monthover month and year over year,
(13:19):
the number increasing.
It's about is it for thekeywords you actually want to
target, is it for the keywordsyou actually include on your
blog post?
And is it for your moneykeywords, your transactional
terms, that you want people toreach out to your websites to
actually get the quote or askfor more information about the
services?
And this is where the trueoptimization lies and this is
where you can actually measuresuccess.
(13:40):
It's not about just the numberof clicks.
It's about what exactly it isthat it's paid for, performs for
, and in this case you mighthave 10,000 clicks, 20,000
clicks, 30,000 clicks over oneblog post, but if you look at it
, it's irrelevant and mostpeople don't realize that over
time it can actually hurt you.
It's not just let's have theclicks and let's continue
creating content.
You need to fix that.
(14:01):
You need to remove this content.
You don't want it there.
Over time, it will hurt eventhis content that you have on
your website that actually worksa little bit better.
Danny Gavin (14:08):
Yeah, content that you have on your website that
actually works a little bitbetter.
Yeah, Google sees that thetraffic that comes from this is
irrelevant and therefore, likeyou said, if the article about
cats having ADD itself over time, we're already starting to see
it to drop, how much more sothose articles that are actually
relevant but are hidden amongstall the junk?
Of course they're going to beaffected as well.
(14:30):
Let's pivot over to EEAT.
Following the fact that EEAT isessential really for all
content, why is it critical forthose clients like Client X, who
are specifically deal with themedical industry?
Mandy Politi (14:42):
Basically Google.
When they wrote this update,they wanted to target
specifically websites that fallinto the category of your money,
your life Are websites contentthat can actually impact the
life of the users, or impacttheir well-being and their
welfare in general, or financialability.
For example, this is anythingthat has to do with medical
services, financial services,legal services.
These specific websites aremonitored, let's say, even more
(15:06):
broadly, by Google.
They put more weight onreviewing and making sure that
the websites that perform on thefirst page of Google, they
align with the guidelines on howto establish your expertise,
trustworthiness and experience,because these websites can
actually have a real-life impacton the users and especially
when you're operating themedical vertical, you need to be
(15:27):
even more careful about that.
You cannot afford signaling toGoogle that your website might
be spammy.
It might have content that'sscant in a way that it's not
optimized and it's a little bitblack hat, let's say so, for
this specific client.
Of course, this had an impactbecause they fall into the
category of your money or yourlife websites.
Danny Gavin (15:43):
Right.
So if you have content that'snot optimized or the wrong type
of content, you actually feelthe effect in many ways worse
than, let's say, a site if itwas about baseball cards.
Mandy Politi (15:55):
Exactly, and it's generally a little bit more
challenging and more difficultto establish online presence for
these websites on the rankingresults, exactly because Google
is a little bit more strictabout are you 100% following the
guidelines?
Are you doing all that you canto establish your expertise on
the results?
So it's already a little bitdifficult to position these
websites on the first results.
Imagine now if you're activelydoing something that violates
(16:16):
basically the guidelines.
It gets a little bit moretricky to manage performance and
even optimize later to makesure that you take all this bad
strategy away from that.
Danny Gavin (16:25):
So with a lot of AI content.
We spoke that often multiplearticles are being written on
the same subject.
In the words of SEO, that meansduplicate content.
Mandy, is that really that bad?
Is duplicate content harmful?
Mandy Politi (16:37):
Yes, because basically you are telling Google
that I have five pages thatthey target the same thing and,
okay, I can't decide reallywhich one I want to keep, and
then Google doesn't know whichone to choose to perform and
then it basically ends up thatnone of them is performing.
This is again something thathappened to this client.
You have page competition, youdilute the SEO value, you end up
(17:00):
with poor performance.
Google doesn't know what torank from your content, so it
just decides not to rankanything, and it's something
that you can easily resolve.
It's simple SEO analysis, doinga content audit, identifying
this duplication, creating onepage that better targets the
content in a way that is goingto be helpful for the user, this
client specifically.
(17:22):
They created a lot of pages fora specific issue, let's say, if
children with ADD have thisdifficulty concentrating.
They ended up with five pages.
They were very similar, theyhad headlines and they were
duplicate.
The content was overlapping.
The questions that they weretrying to answer on, the
subtopics were the same.
(17:42):
They were not optimized and ifyou check on the sponsor, you
would see that none of thesepages basically was performing.
They would get the same amountor less of links and impressions
, which indicates that peoplecouldn't really decide what
should run for the specifickeyword, so none of them
actually performed.
Danny Gavin (17:58):
Going a little bit deeper into some of the titles,
like why do you need a blog postabout concentration in ADD and
then another one about managingconcentration in children with
ADD and concentration difficultysymptoms and treatment?
All three of those basicallycover the same topic.
There's no reason to have threeseparate, unless you're not
keeping track, and then it justgets messy and troublesome.
Now, interestingly enough, Iknow that not only did we find
(18:20):
that the headlines were verysimilar, but we found that a lot
of the subheadings on thosearticles were also very similar.
So, mandy, why do subheadingsmatter?
Mandy Politi (18:29):
First, they are a very important part of all page
SEO optimization To usecorrectly.
You can target keywords and youcan help Google and search
engines to understand what yourcontent is about.
Three, they are very good forthe users Users really,
especially in the digital eranow they like to just read
through the content really fast,as can and headers, actually,
(18:49):
and headings and subheadings.
They help the user quicklyunderstand if the content is
relevant, if it coverseverything that they want, how
it is, and then they decide tostay on the page and read the
paragraphs.
If you know a good subheadingstructure, optimization and
strategy, you should be able totell what the blog post is about
just by seeing the headingstructure.
(19:09):
You shouldn't even need to seethe paragraphs.
Now, imagine having five pageswith the same structure.
Google gets confused.
Then you have also subheadings.
Again, they try to market everypossible topic.
It doesn't even make sense tohave such a long blog post.
For example, no one is going toread something that is like
more than 5,000 wordspotentially.
So they're very important forSEO.
(19:31):
They are very important for theusers.
They need to be optimized andyou need to be mindful of what
you create and how differentsub-handlings and different
pages over.
Danny Gavin (19:39):
Yeah, and in addition to that, I would also
say, like, there's the conceptof content cannibalization and
the way that I would explainthat is if you have five
articles on the same topic,imagine if you just had one
article and it got 100 visits.
It's not that now that you havefive that those 100 visits get
spread out.
So 20 visits to this article,20 visits and the same 100
visits.
No, when you have five articlescompeting for the same keywords
(20:02):
, same topic, it affectseverything and often you're not
going to show at all like lessor at all, because Google just
doesn't know what to do andtherefore, instead of getting
100, let's say, visits over fivearticles, you may just now get
40 or 30, just really depends.
But that's what cannibalizationdoes.
Not only does it just spreadout the visits, but it actually
(20:23):
takes it away and can destroythe effects that you're trying
to accomplish.
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(21:14):
receive $150 off.
We mentioned the fact abouton-page SEO.
That's really important, youknow, for some people that's
like obvious, like obviouslyneed title tags, obviously need
certain tags, but we saw withthis client that a lot of
on-page SEO was missing.
So do you want to just get intoa little bit more about what
happened in this specific casewith the on-page factors and
(21:36):
what's important when it comesto on-page?
Mandy Politi (21:38):
So of course, you want to have optimized meta
titles and meta descriptions.
In this case, we found thatmeta titles were basically
duplicated by eight ones, oreight tools or headings.
The meta descriptions wereeither too short, too long.
They didn't include the keyword, they didn't include a call to
action.
Again, meta descriptions arenot let's say, google doesn't
write them, but they still havea purpose to play and they need
(22:00):
to be optimized.
Then we noticed that a lot ofpages didn't have an inch-long
tag, which is really basic SEO.
It's one of the first rules youever learn when you start
working in the industry.
Every single page needs to havea unique H1 that is optimized
and not spammy.
It helps the search andunderstand the page.
It helps the users as well.
A lot of images didn't have alttext.
(22:22):
We had a lot of pages wherelinking to external content and
that's an actual issue, becauselinks do help a lot.
They help actually, accordingto my opinion, tremendously when
it comes to optimizing content,re-optimizing content and also
indexing new content but onethey didn't link to existing
internal web blog content.
So we had blogs that they weretalking about something and
(22:43):
instead the SEO expert whoworked on that who decides to
link to an external website, soeffectively driving the users
away from the website of theclient.
And two, they were linking toexternal pages with the keywords
that they wanted the page thatthey were optimizing to run for,
which is bad practice.
You don't want to take Google,but there is another external
(23:04):
page that basically, maybe evenexplains better or develops
better the topic that you aretrying to get Google to index
and rank you for, you know.
So that was really.
It was really astonishing forme to find, because it is basic
SEO.
Danny Gavin (23:17):
The example I like to give like that is imagine if
you're McDonald's and whensomeone walks in the door
there's a big sign that says ah,the best burgers are Burger
King, Don't eat here.
That's crazy.
You think like McDonald's wouldactually do that, so, but it's
crazy.
A lot of people do that.
In their content.
They take those keywords thatideally the home base should be
(23:39):
on this page, but then they linkthem out and say, hey, no,
Google really the place for this, and it just confuses anyone.
Should I eat at McDonald's orshould I eat at Burger Burger
King?
Mandy Politi (23:47):
And then, on top of that, they also had poor
anchor text optimization.
So the links, even internallinks, they didn't have the
correct way of adding the anchortext on that.
So you're going to linkdifferently.
If you link to a blog post.
You're going to linkdifferently if you link to your
main service pages, if it's, forexample, the service that you
want to promote.
They didn't have that.
(24:08):
No CTA, no mention of whychoose this specific client, no
mention of the services theyoffer.
So it's not only that you seecontent, that scale, that
overlaps, green duplication,targets, irrelevant keywords,
all of that.
This is basic SEO.
When you start in the industry,the first thing that you learn
is how to optimize a basic page,and a lot of people don't
(24:31):
really pay attention to that.
They don't think that thesethings matter.
They try to implement all sortsof crazy weird, like how they
see your strategies.
At the end of the day, whatthis thing with bad content from
good content is.
Do you even follow these basic10 rules, which is literally the
first thing that someone learnsTo me, when I analyzed this
website, it hurt me seeing thatsomeone who wasn't a search
(24:55):
person would actually do that,would publish a piece of content
not optimized at all foranything and linking to external
pages for keywords we wantedthis website to run for.
So, again, it's not about thequantity.
A lot of people can generatecontent and start publishing.
It's better to have five piecesof content that are very well
optimized and they drive lessbut more qualified traffic than
(25:18):
having 10,000 pages that they'rein these states.
Over time it will help you andit did help this client, as we
will see.
Danny Gavin (25:24):
Awesome.
Thank you for that overview.
So we know that the main issue,or the issue that kind of
raised the flag, was the factthat the new content that was
being produced wasn't beingindexed.
So let's talk a little aboutindexing and canonicalization.
I know that's a hard word forsome, so let's first say what is
the purpose of a canonical tagon a page, on a website.
Mandy Politi (25:44):
Basically it's a soft hint.
You tell Google that you have apage that's similar to another
page and you would prefer theseother pages to rank and not the
non-canonical version.
Basically, canonicals are useda lot in e-commerce websites.
So, for example, if you have a,let's say, a product, a t-shirt
, and then you have variationsof this t-shirt, like in
(26:05):
different colors, let's sayblack, red, white and blue you
don't want all of thesedifferent variation pages to
start competing on the sameresults.
So basically, you tell Googleokay, I have a blue dessert, a
red dessert, a white dessert andso on, but the main one that
they want to perform like themain page is the main dessert
page, let's say.
So you implement canonicals tobasically help resolve a little
(26:28):
bit cannibalization andcompetition of pages when it
comes to having similar pages.
This makes sense in e-covers,but it doesn't make sense in
other types of websites, like inthis one.
Another way is sending redirectsIf you have a duplicate page.
In the case of this clientspecifically, there was a
technical issue that wasgenerating variant pages of the
same blog post and instead ofredirecting to resolve the issue
(26:51):
, canonicals were set.
So basically, you are tellingGoogle I have two pages.
I prefer to write this one.
But remember, a canonical is asoft hint.
Sometimes Google doesn't reallyfollow the hint, they just
ignore it.
I've come across a lot of timesthat I've been setting
canonicals and Google wouldprefer, for whatever reason, to
write the non-canonical version.
So in this case it was also aproblem of poor technical issue
(27:15):
was implemented.
You had a problem but couldeasily be resolved by setting
redirects, but a canonical waschosen and this would also
impact performance furtherbecause Google couldn't really
design and they would end upperforming with a page with
variants.
Now the URL does impactperformance and you don't want
(27:36):
the users, especially themedical website, to end up
seeing a weird URL, becauseusually weird URLs with weird
characters, they might be spammy, they might be non-legitimate
websites and again, that'sanother signal if you operate in
the medical industry.
Danny Gavin (27:50):
I think it's worth at this point saying that the
platform that the client wasusing, specific for their
website, was Webflow.
I know that with WordPress,which we highly recommend, or
Wix, for example, those are twoplatforms that we think are
really good from an SEOperspective.
I know they can also have theirproblems, but it seems like
with Webflow, that theseparameter pages are being
generated automatically, cause alot of issues that maybe, if a
(28:11):
different platform was used,wouldn't have existed.
And yes, there's the canonicaltags that you can put there to
try to solve the issue, but youknow it just makes it messy and
it just makes it even moredifficult.
So, as we discussed, mandy,they ended up with a lot of
non-indexed pages, including aslew of location pages that they
had.
You want to tell us more aboutthat?
Mandy Politi (28:30):
including a slew of location pages that they had.
Do you want to tell us moreabout that?
So locations were veryimportant for these clients.
However, looking at data, wefound that a lot of them were
not indexed and also we foundthat over time, the general
performance of all the locationpages increased a little bit and
then it started droppingdramatically.
And then, when we looked intothe performance the good
(28:52):
performance in the first placewe found that almost all of it
was branded and if we were toremove the brand's name, we
would end up with onenon-branded term that didn't
even include the location and itwas an irrelevant term that
brought one click over a yearand then it disappeared.
So, yeah, that was a big hitbecause, again, like I said,
(29:13):
especially if you offer thistype of services, like this
client, location pages were very, very, very important.
So we started looking about why,what it is that they did, and
basically, the location pageswere duplicate content, the same
exact content, just changingthe location.
There was no interlinking,there was no structure to
organize them into a way thatmade sense, into, let's say,
(29:35):
regions, sub-regions, etc.
And, like I said, the mostimportant, everything was
duplicate and it was alsoAI-generated.
Now with location pages,inevitably you will have some
overlapping content because, ofcourse, if you're operating,
let's say, in all the states andyou have different regions,
it's impossible to generate 100%unique pages.
But there are ways to tacklethis.
(29:56):
Like you try paraphrasing, youtry mixing a little bit of the
structure, if you try to addunique local content that will
resonate with the specificlocation you want to target, and
this is a very good way to dealwith the problem of duplication
.
And then, of course, the basicissue, like we said, optimizing
the data.
Make sure you have call toactions, make sure you include
(30:16):
your services, which is very,very important.
You cannot have a page withoutsaying that I am this provider
of medical services and this iswhat I can do, which again was
the case For this client.
All of that it worked for awhile until Google got up and
then you started seeing theperformance dropping.
But looking from it again, fromthe expert perspective, like
digging into data, we figuredthat it actually never worked in
(30:40):
the first place because everyterm that drove traffic to these
location pages was basicallybranded.
It wasn't non-branded, which isthe point of optimizing with an
SEO strategy.
Danny Gavin (30:49):
So what would you say is best practice when it
comes to using AI for locationpages?
Mandy Politi (30:55):
I think you can use it to generate a template
and then start again, likeGoogle recommends generate the
content, but have the humanbeing review it, paraphrase,
optimize and also add uniqueinformation.
There are ways to createprompts, to add unique content
(31:16):
to each of them.
You have your main template,which you then start
paraphrasing as much as you can,as much as possible, and then
you start creating specificcontent or prompts for each
specific location, and that wayyou target ultra-local terms,
you make sure your pages are notduplicating and that's, for
example, a good way of using AI.
(31:36):
You save time by generating atemplate and then you want
special local, let's say promptsthat will allow you to target
specific content that it's notbasically duplicate and highly
relevant to the location as well.
Danny Gavin (31:48):
Love it and I'm going to stress again Mandy,
who's the queen of doing thingsmanual.
She is not saying not to do AI,but, once again, you need to
use AI in a way where it'shelping you, but you still have
to make things unique andspecial and valuable.
The biggest problem is when youturn things on autopilot.
You get a website that we arereviewing here today.
(32:09):
We've just gone over all theissues that the site has, but
how did this actually affect theperformance at a higher level
view?
Mandy Politi (32:15):
First of all, from the top 10 keywords that they
ran for, only a few werebasically relevant and if you
check on non-branded, it wasalmost nothing.
So the top terms they wereperforming for were for
irrelevant content.
Second, the general performanceover time decreased and also
for the amount of content theyhad.
(32:37):
The total amount of clicks wasjust didn't match.
So if you have I don't want tosay that you have 100 pieces of
content, like 100 blog posts,you need to see an extra amount
of clicks.
But if you have 1,000 blogposts, you're expecting to see a
certain amount of clicks ifit's healthy traffic and all
that.
So for the amount of contentand the impression they've made
(32:57):
to create all of these content,they didn't really have any
valuable, relevant, non-brandedqualified traffic, which is a
little bit of the same, becauseyou do spend money to create
this content and then you seethat it doesn't really have any
return of investment and alsoyou don't really get the right
users.
Then the important thing isthat the most important pages,
(33:18):
the ones we call the money pages, which are the service pages
and the location pages, theybasically don't perform at all,
which, again, you do a blogstrategy because you want to
complement and promote thesepages.
Exactly you do a blog postbecause you want to complement
and promote these pages.
Exactly you do a blog post.
You offer useful information.
You target these people thatthey are looking, they're
considering, they don't know,they might not know that they
(33:39):
need your services.
They might not know they'reconsidering you but they don't
really know if they want to signup with you.
You create a notice call.
Then you link to your servicepages.
They didn't have that.
You link to your location pages.
They didn't have that.
So the main pages that theywere supposed to be boosted by
this strategy, they just didn'tperform almost at all and even
if they seem like they performedfor a while, it was what it
(34:00):
ended up traffic.
Danny Gavin (34:01):
And just to give our listeners a bigger
perspective on numbers.
So imagine, like we spoke aboutearlier, cats and ADD had over
10,000 clicks over a period of12 months.
Add therapy, which is whatthey're primarily focused on,
had only 130 clicks, right,which is, you know, it's almost
1%.
And then ADD therapy, forchildren, which is even more
(34:22):
specific and would be like theirbest phrase, they had zero
clicks.
So you can clearly see that allthis wonderful traffic that
they were seeing wasn't reallyso wonderful.
It was a lot of traffic, onceagain going to the wrong things
and all those key is but intruth, if you go deeper, like we
(34:51):
said before, and you start tolook at the parts, it's like, ah
, this doesn't really add up.
So, mandy, what's next?
How would this client, client X, fix up the situation?
Or someone, another company,who would be in a situation like
this?
What would they need to do toget things fixed up?
Mandy Politi (35:07):
So the first thing is full content and technical
audit.
You want to have fullvisibility of every single page
of the website.
You need to have everything inone single document and start
analyzing it to figure exactlywhat is wrong and try to fix it
so that it aligns with Googlebest practice guidelines.
What we recommended was to do acontent audit.
Basically, what does thatinclude?
(35:28):
You export all the pages of thewebsite and then you start
analyzing them in groups andalso one by one, using data to
drive your decisions over whatto optimize and how.
A content notice is very usefultoo for us as search experts,
because it allows us to identifycontent gaps, duplication,
cannibalization and low qualityor poor performing pages and
(35:49):
from there we can make decisionsover what we can consolidate,
how we can tidy up a little bitthe content, what needs to be
removed because it's irrelevant,traffic like the dogs and cats
having AEDs.
So we recommended to do thecontent audit, resolve content
duplication, eliminate anythingthat was irrelevant, and also
review SEO or base SEO elementsand recommend optimizations.
(36:11):
And then we also recommended todo a technical audit because we
did find issues that there weretechnical issues that they
required fixing, like, forexample, the canonicals.
Usually also, when you see thatthe blog post is not optimized
and it doesn't even follow thebasic SEO guidelines, chances
are that your technical SEO alsoneeds some attention.
(36:33):
So we always do a content auditand a technical audit just to
make sure that Google can seethe pages, maybe find out if
there is anything else thatmight be blocking Google from
indexing the pages, and try toalso identify any kind of errors
that might actually impactperformance.
These two usually go hand inhand.
We also recommended to rewritemetadata, because website-wide
(36:56):
metadata was just not optimal,and we also recommended a
vigorous internal linkingstrategy to help improve a
little bit the way that Googleunderstands the structure of the
website and try to guide users'ad search engine more to the
services application pages tohelp with a little bit more the
structure of the website, andtry to guide users at certain in
more to the servicesapplication pages to help with a
little bit more the performanceof them.
Danny Gavin (37:16):
So I know we can't predict the future, although we
try, or at least people expectus to.
But if client X or anyone elsechooses to move forward with the
recommendations that you justlisted, what do you see actually
changing related to performance?
Mandy Politi (37:30):
So basically, you start seeing you might see some
drop in your traffic, especiallywhen you have traffic like
again that is relevant.
But then what I have seen in myexperience optimizing websites
that have similar issues is thata little bit later we start
seeing the line going up againand it's for the exact same
keyword that you want to target.
(37:51):
It's for the right searchintent, it brings qualified
traffic.
You see your conversionsincreasing.
You see that people stay onyour website.
They spend more time, they stopclicking and if you do all of
that, then you start seeing yourrankings and organic traffic
increasing over time.
It also helps, like I said, totarget the correct keywords for
the correct search and then itallows the right clients and the
(38:16):
right customers to find yourcontent, to find your services,
to find your website.
It helps increase the traffic,the conversions, and also you
have better user experience ingeneral.
People land on your website andthey stay there because what
they find is relevant to them.
And also it helps a lot withlocal.
Local again, it can be a littletricky because of all that we
(38:36):
discussed about how you cantarget the same things and
change other locations, but witha good SEO, a local SEO
strategy, you can also seeimprovements on local results
and that's very importantbecause if you look specifically
for local, you tend to have ahigher intent of signing up for
a service or buying product.
So you might not have thousandsof clicks per month because
(38:59):
local Turks, by default, theyhave lower search volumes but
they have higher search intent.
So it's a different thing frombringing 20 people that they
don't really are interested tobuy something, they just look
around, and it's a differentbreaking tool that they're
already almost convinced thatthey want to sign up with your
services or buy something thatyou sell.
Danny Gavin (39:17):
This SEO analysis illustrates the profound impact
content at scale, using AI inparticular, can have on website
traffic and the consequences ofpoor quality content at scale.
The changes that Opticsuggested are about more than
boosting traffic.
They're about drivingmeaningful engagement,
increasing conversions andimproving the overall visibility
(39:37):
of client X's essentialservices.
What we learned today is thatyou really have to look behind.
What are the strategies?
What are you doing?
Are there SEO best practices?
Is the traffic that I'm gettingreally what I want?
And even if it is something thatI want, but if I'm doing a lot
of things that are against theguidelines, how long is that
(39:58):
traffic actually going to lastand when is it going to turn a
corner, like where we saw, wherenew things aren't going to be
indexed?
Pages that did work well arenow starting to drop and
therefore you really have toconsider when you choose an SEO
company what is the strategy?
Are you going to take the longpath, which eventually leads to
the short path, or are you goingto take that short path, which
(40:21):
seems really really good, butwhen you get to that, there's a
really long path waiting for you?
Mandy, I didn't know if youwanted to share any closing
words.
Mandy Politi (40:29):
The general comment I have is I know that a
lot of SEO experts and a lot ofclients they're using AI content
Me initially, with mylinguistics background and what
I believe and how I like working, I was reluctant to try it.
I said no, it's a reality.
So it's what I said at thebeginning AI is not inherently
bad.
It's a tool.
The thing is, how do you usethis tool?
(40:53):
With a best practice strategyand in a way that's not going to
hurt you and it's not going togive you short-term results that
will last for a month or twofor irrelevant terms, and then
you're just risking harming yourwebsite longer, you know.
So at the end of the day, itcomes down to make sure you
follow the best practiceguidelines, make sure you
implement everything you need toimplement.
Use AI, but use it intentionallyand consciously as a tool.
(41:15):
You wouldn't go export akeyword list from SEMrush and
just target everything.
You still need to think abouthow to target specific terms,
where to target them with whatkind of content, where to put
them on the website, things likethat.
So at the end of the day, youcan't take the human factor and
the expertise out of thestrategy.
It's not all about feeding afew keywords on chat, with the
(41:37):
end creating 10,000 blog posts.
It's about what is the strategyand how do you implement basic
SEO, which is the essence ofwhat we do on the daily?
Danny Gavin (41:47):
no, yeah, agreed, and I think I'm going to stress
one more time the basic SEO, theSEO fundamentals.
If you're going to miss that,it's like building this
beautiful house and not havingthat really good foundation.
So, yeah, I think, bottom line,this was the perfect storm of
possible issues that could occurall in one website and we do
(42:07):
hope that Client X takes this tomind and all the listeners who
may have tried these sort of SEOstrategies maybe step back a
second and think is this reallythe best thing that you're doing
long-term for your brand or foryour website?
Mandy, thank you so much forbeing a guest on the Digital
Marketing Mentor and thank you,listeners, for tuning in.
We'll speak with you next time.
(42:27):
Thank you for listening to theDigital Marketing Mentor podcast
.
Be sure to check us out onlineat thedmmentor in.
We'll speak with you next time.
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Mentor.
I'm your host, danny Gavin, andtogether with industry leaders
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mentorship and marketing.
We'll discover how theseconnections have affected
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Now get ready to get human.
This episode is brought to youby Odeo Academy.
(00:38):
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Forward slash podcast and get$150 off with code mentor.
Hello, I'm Danny Gavin, founderof Optage, a marketing professor
and the host of the DigitalMarketing Mentor.
(00:59):
Today we have a very specialguest, mandy Politti, who's a
senior SEO strategist at Optage.
Mandy is our resident SEOgenius and we've been lucky
enough to have her on thepodcast before, so this will
actually be her third time she'sbeen on before to break down
SEO best practices, run throughcase studies and learn from her
expertise.
Today we're back with anotherscenario breakdown content at
(01:27):
scale.
We'll dive into Google's EEATguidelines, best practices and
why content at scale through AIcan lead to problems at scale,
using Client X as the example.
So we're not actually going totell you who the client was.
We want to kind of keep thatconfidential, but you'll still
learn from the case study andget a lot of information.
How are you, mandy?
Mandy Politi (01:39):
Good, good.
I'm very excited to be talkingabout this case study.
Danny Gavin (01:42):
Yes, I know you put a lot of effort into the
original audit and case study,so I'm excited that we can now
bring it to everyone else.
Client X thought they were onthe right track with their SEO
strategy.
They were cranking out tons ofAI-generated content and racking
up hundreds of backlinks weekly.
Now they were actually workingwith an SEO specialist.
Now they were actually workingwith a SEO specialist, and this
(02:06):
SEO specialist is known ingeneral to get a lot of quick
wins and to get a lot of trafficquickly, and any time that you
promise things quickly leads toissues.
Some SEOs swear by this forquick wins, but the cracks
started showing when Googlestopped indexing their new
content.
Despite all the effort, theirrankings weren't improving.
That's when they turned toOptage for Answers.
It became clear that, while thisapproach might seem effective
(02:28):
at first and bring a lot oftraffic, recent Google algorithm
updates have left their siteand others like it vulnerable to
penalties.
Before we dive into Client X,let's first discuss some of
Google's changes and bestpractices, most recently less
than a year ago, in Februaryactually, it's more than a year
ago.
I forget that we're in 2024.
In February 2023, googleprovided specific guidance on AI
(02:50):
generated content, stating thatthe ranking systems aim to
reward original content thataligns with EAT, which stands
for expertise, experience,authoritativeness and
trustworthiness qualities.
Authoritativeness andtrustworthiness qualities so,
mandy, that's a lot of likejargon.
What does this practically meanin lay terms, and why should we
be concerned?
Mandy Politi (03:10):
So basically, it means that AI is not inherently
bad.
It's just another tool.
There are best practices, thereare good and, like there are
best practices, there are badpractices.
Of course, before AI, googlewould recommend that we create
original, human-generatedcontent.
It wouldn't be a best practiceusing AI to also create content
(03:32):
that was created in that way.
But since February 2023, googleupdated the guidelines because
AI is a reality, people areusing it and, at the end of the
day, it came down to we don'treally mind how you're going to
create the content.
It just needs to still followthe guidelines of being quality
and relevant and optimized forusers and search engines, but
(03:53):
primarily for users.
Now, the problem here is that,if these guidelines are not
followed, a lot of industryexperts actually conducted
research that proved thatwebsites would maybe perform a
little bit and then Google gotit up and then traffic would
drop dramatically and the entirewebsite would actually beat the
index, which is kind of whathappens to our clients.
(04:15):
They started seeing trafficdrops and then they started
seeing a big portion of all thiscontent that they were creating
, that it wasn't being indexedand it wouldn't bring any
traffic.
Basically, so, yeah, I thinkthat at the end of the day, it
comes down to using AI in a waythat follows the guidelines and
it's not trying to manipulatesuch results.
Danny Gavin (04:33):
Basically, yeah, that's really good.
So, just to kind of stress thepoint, this concept of EEAT
making sure that your contenthas these qualities really, like
you said, it really isn'tdirectly related to AI.
It's something that's existedfor a while but with AI coming
along, where it's easier toproduce content right.
So it's a lot easier to producecontent that doesn't have these
(04:55):
qualities.
And if you're producing contentin a mass scale and it's
missing this quality, andespecially with our client who
is medical related or healthrelated then you're really right
, it's a recipe for doom.
What is considered bad practice?
How do you risk violating theguidelines?
Mandy Politi (05:14):
First of all, it's creating content for ranking
reasons and not for the users.
It's trying to create contenton a scale that doesn't help the
users.
In a way, it just aims onputting your website on the
search results for any giveneven remotely relevant keyword.
It's also using automation togenerate low quality content or
unoriginal content at scale in away that, again it comes down
(05:35):
to, the content is not reallyuseful.
It doesn't really provide anyinformation other than
aggregating different pieces ofinformation from here and there
and just trying to create enoughtext to give the website some
chances of appearing on thesearch results.
And it's also websites that,because they focus so much on
creating the content, they don'treally pay enough attention on
poor user experience in a waythat indicates exactly with this
(06:00):
client, the content was notreally optimized.
The links, the way, theparagraphs were too long, too
wordy.
There was a lot of informationbecause, again, the focus was
let's create as much text, asmuch content as we can, but at
the same time, when it comesdown to creating content, you
also need to ensure good userexperience.
You need to include things thatwill help the user to go
(06:21):
through the content, read it,understand it and get something
useful out of it.
And another thing is that thecontent because exactly it's
created just to target everypossible keyword it's content
that doesn't actually drivequalified traffic, relevant
traffic.
We have examples of that todiscuss in a bit.
But imagine this trying totarget every single keyword by
(06:42):
default.
It's not going to work.
Not every keyword, even if it'sa little bit relevant to what
its client does, you shouldn'tbe targeting all of them.
There are keywords that makesense.
There are keywords that don'tmake sense.
There are keywords thatseemingly make sense, but if you
really think about it, thesearch intent behind the query
is so different that youshouldn't be driving it.
You shouldn't be targeting it.
Driving it, you shouldn't betargeting it.
(07:06):
And something else is why is itimportant to drive qualified
traffic?
It's not only because you wantto position yourself in the
relevant search results and todrive the users that actually
are interested in reading yourcontent and potentially asking
more information about yourproducts or services.
It's also having to do with ifyou drive someone who is not
really interested in what youhave to offer and they click
back, this is a signal youropponent is not relevant.
So this law of the term it doesimpact performance.
(07:29):
It does impact your website ingeneral, your rankings, and
imagine now having that on scale.
Imagine having 1,000 pages ofthe all-target irrelevant
keywords.
Over time, people is going tobasically consider that your
website is not relevant.
It's not, it shouldn't beperforming and, especially
because you're in the medicalhealth industry, you want to
make sure.
Like we said in the beginning,you need to establish your
(07:49):
expertise, your experience, yourauthoritativeness, your
trustworthiness all of thesequalities.
So people land on your websitebecause you're trying to
clickbait them into clicking onthe website and then they leave
because what they see is notwhat they want to find and the
website and then they leavebecause what they see is not
what they want to find and theyclick back.
Danny Gavin (08:07):
Over time, your website is going to start seeing
drops in performance it's as iftheir seo specialist that they
were working with was like it'sbasically just like taking a
machine gun and just shootingwherever you can, but not
realizing that there's damagethat happens.
So just because you produce abunch of content, it's like okay
, some of it's good, some's good, some of it's bad, but the bad
you know who cares?
The problem is is what we'reabout to say.
(08:27):
We'll see that that actually itcan hurt things.
So, coming back to Client X,they had tremendous content,
right, a tremendous amount ofcontent that Google was not
indexing, and remember that wasthe first sign hey, danny and
Mandy, for some reason, ournewest blog post.
So we did a deep dive audit I'msaying we, but primarily Mandy
(08:51):
to determine what are some ofthe reasons why this was
happening.
I'm going to give a quickoverview and then we're going to
go through this in depth, andyou're not even keeping track of
what's going on.
There's a lot of duplicate thatcan happen.
They had suboptimal on-page SEO, so a good part of SEO is not
(09:14):
just the content, but also howyou format it, your tagging, and
all of that was missing.
They had non-indexed pages,like we spoke about, and most of
their pages were performingpoorly.
Finally, they were creatingcontent designed for search
engines rather than content thatwas intended to attract and be
valuable to their target market,and therefore it resulted in
unqualified traffic.
(09:34):
The traffic that was coming inis not people who are interested
in their services, but ratherjust popular traffic that had
nothing to do with anything.
So let's now go through this indepth.
Can you share an example ofwhat driving unqualified traffic
could look like?
Mandy Politi (09:48):
Void is a specific client they created.
Like we said, they were tryingto target every possible keyword
, so one of them was whethercats can have ADD.
If you really think about that,they did perform for this term
and the blog post that theypublished was appearing on the
search results for relevantqueries.
But at the end of the day, youhave to consider two things here
.
One, do you really want toposition your website or the
(10:12):
search results of the first page, or the top three positions,
even for a term that it's aboutwhether cats and animals can
have ADD?
And the second thing is what isthe search intent behind that?
Is the person who is lookingfor that looking for general
information and fun factsomething they might have
thought about looking in thenight?
Or are they looking for theexact services you offer, which
(10:33):
is, of course, for human beingsand not animals?
And then what are these peoplegoing to do?
They're going to find yourwebsite.
Okay, they're going to click onit.
They're going to start reading.
They will decide that this isnot really relevant.
It's an irrelevant website.
They're going to click backthis, like we said, it's a
(10:54):
signal that the content isirrelevant to the search intent.
Are they going to spend time onthe website?
Are they going to click toother internal links?
Are they going to actively askfor information about the ADD
for children or for adults?
No, so again, no matter theamount of traffic that this blog
post brought it broughtthousands of clicks, yes,
brought like thousands of clicks, yes, and thousands of
impressions.
But all of the non-branded termsthat it drove traffic for they
(11:17):
were irrelevant.
They were relevant to whethercats could have these kind of
symptoms, these kind of issuesand, yeah, in the end of the day
, this blog over time starteddropping performance and this is
also another point that evensome pages that they actually
performed a little over time,because of all these signals of
(11:38):
people leaving the website, notstaying in, all of that, it
started actually dropping overtime.
So you would see that the linewould go up, even for relevant
terms, but because the overallstrategy was poor, then after a
while you started seeing thatthe page performance would just
drop and that, if you see thatover time and you group the
pages and you filter accordingly, it was actually devastating to
(12:01):
see.
You could see that the website,all the traffic was just
sinking and again you have a lotof content at scale that was
targeting unqualified leads,basically like the example of
the cats, whether they can haveadd or not and the confusing
thing for the client is you knowthey're seeing this report,
they're seeing all this.
Danny Gavin (12:17):
You know the traffic coming in, it's growing,
it's great, great, great.
But when you actually breakdown that traffic and you see,
wow, 10 000 of those clicks allare for people searching for
cats.
Do they have have ADD?
I mean it's just totallymisleading because we can assume
that most people who aresearching for that don't care
for a site that helps childrenwith ADD, and it's just totally
(12:42):
misleading.
So that's why, digging intoyour queries and seeing where is
the traffic coming from, fromwhat pages, from what queries,
to see, is this increase intraffic that we're getting?
Is it actually good, is itactually valuable?
You know that's reallyimportant.
Mandy Politi (12:58):
What I have seen in the years of the years that I
have been working in theindustry is that a lot of people
report on traffic and on thetrend line going upwards, but in
the end of the day, if youactually go and check the
queries, most of the day, if youactually go and check the
queries, most of the timethey're either branded or
irrelevant.
It's not only about seeing theline going upwards.
It's not about seeing, monthover month and year over year,
(13:19):
the number increasing.
It's about is it for thekeywords you actually want to
target, is it for the keywordsyou actually include on your
blog post?
And is it for your moneykeywords, your transactional
terms, that you want people toreach out to your websites to
actually get the quote or askfor more information about the
services?
And this is where the trueoptimization lies and this is
where you can actually measuresuccess.
(13:40):
It's not about just the numberof clicks.
It's about what exactly it isthat it's paid for, performs for
, and in this case you mighthave 10,000 clicks, 20,000
clicks, 30,000 clicks over oneblog post, but if you look at it
, it's irrelevant and mostpeople don't realize that over
time it can actually hurt you.
It's not just let's have theclicks and let's continue
creating content.
You need to fix that.
(14:01):
You need to remove this content.
You don't want it there.
Over time, it will hurt eventhis content that you have on
your website that actually worksa little bit better.
Danny Gavin (14:08):
Yeah, content that you have on your website that
actually works a little bitbetter.
Yeah, Google sees that thetraffic that comes from this is
irrelevant and therefore, likeyou said, if the article about
cats having ADD itself over time, we're already starting to see
it to drop, how much more sothose articles that are actually
relevant but are hidden amongstall the junk?
Of course they're going to beaffected as well.
(14:30):
Let's pivot over to EEAT.
Following the fact that EEAT isessential really for all
content, why is it critical forthose clients like Client X, who
are specifically deal with themedical industry?
Mandy Politi (14:42):
Basically Google.
When they wrote this update,they wanted to target
specifically websites that fallinto the category of your money,
your life Are websites contentthat can actually impact the
life of the users, or impacttheir well-being and their
welfare in general, or financialability.
For example, this is anythingthat has to do with medical
services, financial services,legal services.
These specific websites aremonitored, let's say, even more
(15:06):
broadly, by Google.
They put more weight onreviewing and making sure that
the websites that perform on thefirst page of Google, they
align with the guidelines on howto establish your expertise,
trustworthiness and experience,because these websites can
actually have a real-life impacton the users and especially
when you're operating themedical vertical, you need to be
(15:27):
even more careful about that.
You cannot afford signaling toGoogle that your website might
be spammy.
It might have content that'sscant in a way that it's not
optimized and it's a little bitblack hat, let's say so, for
this specific client.
Of course, this had an impactbecause they fall into the
category of your money or yourlife websites.
Danny Gavin (15:43):
Right.
So if you have content that'snot optimized or the wrong type
of content, you actually feelthe effect in many ways worse
than, let's say, a site if itwas about baseball cards.
Mandy Politi (15:55):
Exactly, and it's generally a little bit more
challenging and more difficultto establish online presence for
these websites on the rankingresults, exactly because Google
is a little bit more strictabout are you 100% following the
guidelines?
Are you doing all that you canto establish your expertise on
the results?
So it's already a little bitdifficult to position these
websites on the first results.
Imagine now if you're activelydoing something that violates
(16:16):
basically the guidelines.
It gets a little bit moretricky to manage performance and
even optimize later to makesure that you take all this bad
strategy away from that.
Danny Gavin (16:25):
So with a lot of AI content.
We spoke that often multiplearticles are being written on
the same subject.
In the words of SEO, that meansduplicate content.
Mandy, is that really that bad?
Is duplicate content harmful?
Mandy Politi (16:37):
Yes, because basically you are telling Google
that I have five pages thatthey target the same thing and,
okay, I can't decide reallywhich one I want to keep, and
then Google doesn't know whichone to choose to perform and
then it basically ends up thatnone of them is performing.
This is again something thathappened to this client.
You have page competition, youdilute the SEO value, you end up
(17:00):
with poor performance.
Google doesn't know what torank from your content, so it
just decides not to rankanything, and it's something
that you can easily resolve.
It's simple SEO analysis, doinga content audit, identifying
this duplication, creating onepage that better targets the
content in a way that is goingto be helpful for the user, this
client specifically.
(17:22):
They created a lot of pages fora specific issue, let's say, if
children with ADD have thisdifficulty concentrating.
They ended up with five pages.
They were very similar, theyhad headlines and they were
duplicate.
The content was overlapping.
The questions that they weretrying to answer on, the
subtopics were the same.
(17:42):
They were not optimized and ifyou check on the sponsor, you
would see that none of thesepages basically was performing.
They would get the same amountor less of links and impressions
, which indicates that peoplecouldn't really decide what
should run for the specifickeyword, so none of them
actually performed.
Danny Gavin (17:58):
Going a little bit deeper into some of the titles,
like why do you need a blog postabout concentration in ADD and
then another one about managingconcentration in children with
ADD and concentration difficultysymptoms and treatment?
All three of those basicallycover the same topic.
There's no reason to have threeseparate, unless you're not
keeping track, and then it justgets messy and troublesome.
Now, interestingly enough, Iknow that not only did we find
(18:20):
that the headlines were verysimilar, but we found that a lot
of the subheadings on thosearticles were also very similar.
So, mandy, why do subheadingsmatter?
Mandy Politi (18:29):
First, they are a very important part of all page
SEO optimization To usecorrectly.
You can target keywords and youcan help Google and search
engines to understand what yourcontent is about.
Three, they are very good forthe users Users really,
especially in the digital eranow they like to just read
through the content really fast,as can and headers, actually,
(18:49):
and headings and subheadings.
They help the user quicklyunderstand if the content is
relevant, if it coverseverything that they want, how
it is, and then they decide tostay on the page and read the
paragraphs.
If you know a good subheadingstructure, optimization and
strategy, you should be able totell what the blog post is about
just by seeing the headingstructure.
(19:09):
You shouldn't even need to seethe paragraphs.
Now, imagine having five pageswith the same structure.
Google gets confused.
Then you have also subheadings.
Again, they try to market everypossible topic.
It doesn't even make sense tohave such a long blog post.
For example, no one is going toread something that is like
more than 5,000 wordspotentially.
So they're very important forSEO.
(19:31):
They are very important for theusers.
They need to be optimized andyou need to be mindful of what
you create and how differentsub-handlings and different
pages over.
Danny Gavin (19:39):
Yeah, and in addition to that, I would also
say, like, there's the conceptof content cannibalization and
the way that I would explainthat is if you have five
articles on the same topic,imagine if you just had one
article and it got 100 visits.
It's not that now that you havefive that those 100 visits get
spread out.
So 20 visits to this article,20 visits and the same 100
visits.
No, when you have five articlescompeting for the same keywords
(20:02):
, same topic, it affectseverything and often you're not
going to show at all like lessor at all, because Google just
doesn't know what to do andtherefore, instead of getting
100, let's say, visits over fivearticles, you may just now get
40 or 30, just really depends.
But that's what cannibalizationdoes.
Not only does it just spreadout the visits, but it actually
(20:23):
takes it away and can destroythe effects that you're trying
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We mentioned the fact abouton-page SEO.
That's really important, youknow, for some people that's
like obvious, like obviouslyneed title tags, obviously need
certain tags, but we saw withthis client that a lot of
on-page SEO was missing.
So do you want to just get intoa little bit more about what
happened in this specific casewith the on-page factors and
(21:36):
what's important when it comesto on-page?
Mandy Politi (21:38):
So of course, you want to have optimized meta
titles and meta descriptions.
In this case, we found thatmeta titles were basically
duplicated by eight ones, oreight tools or headings.
The meta descriptions wereeither too short, too long.
They didn't include the keyword, they didn't include a call to
action.
Again, meta descriptions arenot let's say, google doesn't
write them, but they still havea purpose to play and they need
(22:00):
to be optimized.
Then we noticed that a lot ofpages didn't have an inch-long
tag, which is really basic SEO.
It's one of the first rules youever learn when you start
working in the industry.
Every single page needs to havea unique H1 that is optimized
and not spammy.
It helps the search andunderstand the page.
It helps the users as well.
A lot of images didn't have alttext.
(22:22):
We had a lot of pages wherelinking to external content and
that's an actual issue, becauselinks do help a lot.
They help actually, accordingto my opinion, tremendously when
it comes to optimizing content,re-optimizing content and also
indexing new content but onethey didn't link to existing
internal web blog content.
So we had blogs that they weretalking about something and
(22:43):
instead the SEO expert whoworked on that who decides to
link to an external website, soeffectively driving the users
away from the website of theclient.
And two, they were linking toexternal pages with the keywords
that they wanted the page thatthey were optimizing to run for,
which is bad practice.
You don't want to take Google,but there is another external
(23:04):
page that basically, maybe evenexplains better or develops
better the topic that you aretrying to get Google to index
and rank you for, you know.
So that was really.
It was really astonishing forme to find, because it is basic
SEO.
Danny Gavin (23:17):
The example I like to give like that is imagine if
you're McDonald's and whensomeone walks in the door
there's a big sign that says ah,the best burgers are Burger
King, Don't eat here.
That's crazy.
You think like McDonald's wouldactually do that, so, but it's
crazy.
A lot of people do that.
In their content.
They take those keywords thatideally the home base should be
(23:39):
on this page, but then they linkthem out and say, hey, no,
Google really the place for this, and it just confuses anyone.
Should I eat at McDonald's orshould I eat at Burger Burger
King?
Mandy Politi (23:47):
And then, on top of that, they also had poor
anchor text optimization.
So the links, even internallinks, they didn't have the
correct way of adding the anchortext on that.
So you're going to linkdifferently.
If you link to a blog post.
You're going to linkdifferently if you link to your
main service pages, if it's, forexample, the service that you
want to promote.
They didn't have that.
(24:08):
No CTA, no mention of whychoose this specific client, no
mention of the services theyoffer.
So it's not only that you seecontent, that scale, that
overlaps, green duplication,targets, irrelevant keywords,
all of that.
This is basic SEO.
When you start in the industry,the first thing that you learn
is how to optimize a basic page,and a lot of people don't
(24:31):
really pay attention to that.
They don't think that thesethings matter.
They try to implement all sortsof crazy weird, like how they
see your strategies.
At the end of the day, whatthis thing with bad content from
good content is.
Do you even follow these basic10 rules, which is literally the
first thing that someone learnsTo me, when I analyzed this
website, it hurt me seeing thatsomeone who wasn't a search
(24:55):
person would actually do that,would publish a piece of content
not optimized at all foranything and linking to external
pages for keywords we wantedthis website to run for.
So, again, it's not about thequantity.
A lot of people can generatecontent and start publishing.
It's better to have five piecesof content that are very well
optimized and they drive lessbut more qualified traffic than
(25:18):
having 10,000 pages that they'rein these states.
Over time it will help you andit did help this client, as we
will see.
Danny Gavin (25:24):
Awesome.
Thank you for that overview.
So we know that the main issue,or the issue that kind of
raised the flag, was the factthat the new content that was
being produced wasn't beingindexed.
So let's talk a little aboutindexing and canonicalization.
I know that's a hard word forsome, so let's first say what is
the purpose of a canonical tagon a page, on a website.
Mandy Politi (25:44):
Basically it's a soft hint.
You tell Google that you have apage that's similar to another
page and you would prefer theseother pages to rank and not the
non-canonical version.
Basically, canonicals are useda lot in e-commerce websites.
So, for example, if you have a,let's say, a product, a t-shirt
, and then you have variationsof this t-shirt, like in
(26:05):
different colors, let's sayblack, red, white and blue you
don't want all of thesedifferent variation pages to
start competing on the sameresults.
So basically, you tell Googleokay, I have a blue dessert, a
red dessert, a white dessert andso on, but the main one that
they want to perform like themain page is the main dessert
page, let's say.
So you implement canonicals tobasically help resolve a little
(26:28):
bit cannibalization andcompetition of pages when it
comes to having similar pages.
This makes sense in e-covers,but it doesn't make sense in
other types of websites, like inthis one.
Another way is sending redirectsIf you have a duplicate page.
In the case of this clientspecifically, there was a
technical issue that wasgenerating variant pages of the
same blog post and instead ofredirecting to resolve the issue
(26:51):
, canonicals were set.
So basically, you are tellingGoogle I have two pages.
I prefer to write this one.
But remember, a canonical is asoft hint.
Sometimes Google doesn't reallyfollow the hint, they just
ignore it.
I've come across a lot of timesthat I've been setting
canonicals and Google wouldprefer, for whatever reason, to
write the non-canonical version.
So in this case it was also aproblem of poor technical issue
(27:15):
was implemented.
You had a problem but couldeasily be resolved by setting
redirects, but a canonical waschosen and this would also
impact performance furtherbecause Google couldn't really
design and they would end upperforming with a page with
variants.
Now the URL does impactperformance and you don't want
(27:36):
the users, especially themedical website, to end up
seeing a weird URL, becauseusually weird URLs with weird
characters, they might be spammy, they might be non-legitimate
websites and again, that'sanother signal if you operate in
the medical industry.
Danny Gavin (27:50):
I think it's worth at this point saying that the
platform that the client wasusing, specific for their
website, was Webflow.
I know that with WordPress,which we highly recommend, or
Wix, for example, those are twoplatforms that we think are
really good from an SEOperspective.
I know they can also have theirproblems, but it seems like
with Webflow, that theseparameter pages are being
generated automatically, cause alot of issues that maybe, if a
(28:11):
different platform was used,wouldn't have existed.
And yes, there's the canonicaltags that you can put there to
try to solve the issue, but youknow it just makes it messy and
it just makes it even moredifficult.
So, as we discussed, mandy,they ended up with a lot of
non-indexed pages, including aslew of location pages that they
had.
You want to tell us more aboutthat?
Mandy Politi (28:30):
including a slew of location pages that they had.
Do you want to tell us moreabout that?
So locations were veryimportant for these clients.
However, looking at data, wefound that a lot of them were
not indexed and also we foundthat over time, the general
performance of all the locationpages increased a little bit and
then it started droppingdramatically.
And then, when we looked intothe performance the good
(28:52):
performance in the first placewe found that almost all of it
was branded and if we were toremove the brand's name, we
would end up with onenon-branded term that didn't
even include the location and itwas an irrelevant term that
brought one click over a yearand then it disappeared.
So, yeah, that was a big hitbecause, again, like I said,
(29:13):
especially if you offer thistype of services, like this
client, location pages were very, very, very important.
So we started looking about why,what it is that they did, and
basically, the location pageswere duplicate content, the same
exact content, just changingthe location.
There was no interlinking,there was no structure to
organize them into a way thatmade sense, into, let's say,
(29:35):
regions, sub-regions, etc.
And, like I said, the mostimportant, everything was
duplicate and it was alsoAI-generated.
Now with location pages,inevitably you will have some
overlapping content because, ofcourse, if you're operating,
let's say, in all the states andyou have different regions,
it's impossible to generate 100%unique pages.
But there are ways to tacklethis.
(29:56):
Like you try paraphrasing, youtry mixing a little bit of the
structure, if you try to addunique local content that will
resonate with the specificlocation you want to target, and
this is a very good way to dealwith the problem of duplication
.
And then, of course, the basicissue, like we said, optimizing
the data.
Make sure you have call toactions, make sure you include
(30:16):
your services, which is very,very important.
You cannot have a page withoutsaying that I am this provider
of medical services and this iswhat I can do, which again was
the case For this client.
All of that it worked for awhile until Google got up and
then you started seeing theperformance dropping.
But looking from it again, fromthe expert perspective, like
digging into data, we figuredthat it actually never worked in
(30:40):
the first place because everyterm that drove traffic to these
location pages was basicallybranded.
It wasn't non-branded, which isthe point of optimizing with an
SEO strategy.
Danny Gavin (30:49):
So what would you say is best practice when it
comes to using AI for locationpages?
Mandy Politi (30:55):
I think you can use it to generate a template
and then start again, likeGoogle recommends generate the
content, but have the humanbeing review it, paraphrase,
optimize and also add uniqueinformation.
There are ways to createprompts, to add unique content
(31:16):
to each of them.
You have your main template,which you then start
paraphrasing as much as you can,as much as possible, and then
you start creating specificcontent or prompts for each
specific location, and that wayyou target ultra-local terms,
you make sure your pages are notduplicating and that's, for
example, a good way of using AI.
(31:36):
You save time by generating atemplate and then you want
special local, let's say promptsthat will allow you to target
specific content that it's notbasically duplicate and highly
relevant to the location as well.
Danny Gavin (31:48):
Love it and I'm going to stress again Mandy,
who's the queen of doing thingsmanual.
She is not saying not to do AI,but, once again, you need to
use AI in a way where it'shelping you, but you still have
to make things unique andspecial and valuable.
The biggest problem is when youturn things on autopilot.
You get a website that we arereviewing here today.
(32:09):
We've just gone over all theissues that the site has, but
how did this actually affect theperformance at a higher level
view?
Mandy Politi (32:15):
First of all, from the top 10 keywords that they
ran for, only a few werebasically relevant and if you
check on non-branded, it wasalmost nothing.
So the top terms they wereperforming for were for
irrelevant content.
Second, the general performanceover time decreased and also
for the amount of content theyhad.
(32:37):
The total amount of clicks wasjust didn't match.
So if you have I don't want tosay that you have 100 pieces of
content, like 100 blog posts,you need to see an extra amount
of clicks.
But if you have 1,000 blogposts, you're expecting to see a
certain amount of clicks ifit's healthy traffic and all
that.
So for the amount of contentand the impression they've made
(32:57):
to create all of these content,they didn't really have any
valuable, relevant, non-brandedqualified traffic, which is a
little bit of the same, becauseyou do spend money to create
this content and then you seethat it doesn't really have any
return of investment and alsoyou don't really get the right
users.
Then the important thing isthat the most important pages,
(33:18):
the ones we call the money pages, which are the service pages
and the location pages, theybasically don't perform at all,
which, again, you do a blogstrategy because you want to
complement and promote thesepages.
Exactly you do a blog postbecause you want to complement
and promote these pages.
Exactly you do a blog post.
You offer useful information.
You target these people thatthey are looking, they're
considering, they don't know,they might not know that they
(33:39):
need your services.
They might not know they'reconsidering you but they don't
really know if they want to signup with you.
You create a notice call.
Then you link to your servicepages.
They didn't have that.
You link to your location pages.
They didn't have that.
So the main pages that theywere supposed to be boosted by
this strategy, they just didn'tperform almost at all and even
if they seem like they performedfor a while, it was what it
(34:00):
ended up traffic.
Danny Gavin (34:01):
And just to give our listeners a bigger
perspective on numbers.
So imagine, like we spoke aboutearlier, cats and ADD had over
10,000 clicks over a period of12 months.
Add therapy, which is whatthey're primarily focused on,
had only 130 clicks, right,which is, you know, it's almost
1%.
And then ADD therapy, forchildren, which is even more
(34:22):
specific and would be like theirbest phrase, they had zero
clicks.
So you can clearly see that allthis wonderful traffic that
they were seeing wasn't reallyso wonderful.
It was a lot of traffic, onceagain going to the wrong things
and all those key is but intruth, if you go deeper, like we
(34:51):
said before, and you start tolook at the parts, it's like, ah
, this doesn't really add up.
So, mandy, what's next?
How would this client, client X, fix up the situation?
Or someone, another company,who would be in a situation like
this?
What would they need to do toget things fixed up?
Mandy Politi (35:07):
So the first thing is full content and technical
audit.
You want to have fullvisibility of every single page
of the website.
You need to have everything inone single document and start
analyzing it to figure exactlywhat is wrong and try to fix it
so that it aligns with Googlebest practice guidelines.
What we recommended was to do acontent audit.
Basically, what does thatinclude?
(35:28):
You export all the pages of thewebsite and then you start
analyzing them in groups andalso one by one, using data to
drive your decisions over whatto optimize and how.
A content notice is very usefultoo for us as search experts,
because it allows us to identifycontent gaps, duplication,
cannibalization and low qualityor poor performing pages and
(35:49):
from there we can make decisionsover what we can consolidate,
how we can tidy up a little bitthe content, what needs to be
removed because it's irrelevant,traffic like the dogs and cats
having AEDs.
So we recommended to do thecontent audit, resolve content
duplication, eliminate anythingthat was irrelevant, and also
review SEO or base SEO elementsand recommend optimizations.
(36:11):
And then we also recommended todo a technical audit because we
did find issues that there weretechnical issues that they
required fixing, like, forexample, the canonicals.
Usually also, when you see thatthe blog post is not optimized
and it doesn't even follow thebasic SEO guidelines, chances
are that your technical SEO alsoneeds some attention.
(36:33):
So we always do a content auditand a technical audit just to
make sure that Google can seethe pages, maybe find out if
there is anything else thatmight be blocking Google from
indexing the pages, and try toalso identify any kind of errors
that might actually impactperformance.
These two usually go hand inhand.
We also recommended to rewritemetadata, because website-wide
(36:56):
metadata was just not optimal,and we also recommended a
vigorous internal linkingstrategy to help improve a
little bit the way that Googleunderstands the structure of the
website and try to guide users'ad search engine more to the
services application pages tohelp with a little bit more the
structure of the website, andtry to guide users at certain in
more to the servicesapplication pages to help with a
little bit more the performanceof them.
Danny Gavin (37:16):
So I know we can't predict the future, although we
try, or at least people expectus to.
But if client X or anyone elsechooses to move forward with the
recommendations that you justlisted, what do you see actually
changing related to performance?
Mandy Politi (37:30):
So basically, you start seeing you might see some
drop in your traffic, especiallywhen you have traffic like
again that is relevant.
But then what I have seen in myexperience optimizing websites
that have similar issues is thata little bit later we start
seeing the line going up againand it's for the exact same
keyword that you want to target.
(37:51):
It's for the right searchintent, it brings qualified
traffic.
You see your conversionsincreasing.
You see that people stay onyour website.
They spend more time, they stopclicking and if you do all of
that, then you start seeing yourrankings and organic traffic
increasing over time.
It also helps, like I said, totarget the correct keywords for
the correct search and then itallows the right clients and the
(38:16):
right customers to find yourcontent, to find your services,
to find your website.
It helps increase the traffic,the conversions, and also you
have better user experience ingeneral.
People land on your website andthey stay there because what
they find is relevant to them.
And also it helps a lot withlocal.
Local again, it can be a littletricky because of all that we
(38:36):
discussed about how you cantarget the same things and
change other locations, but witha good SEO, a local SEO
strategy, you can also seeimprovements on local results
and that's very importantbecause if you look specifically
for local, you tend to have ahigher intent of signing up for
a service or buying product.
So you might not have thousandsof clicks per month because
(38:59):
local Turks, by default, theyhave lower search volumes but
they have higher search intent.
So it's a different thing frombringing 20 people that they
don't really are interested tobuy something, they just look
around, and it's a differentbreaking tool that they're
already almost convinced thatthey want to sign up with your
services or buy something thatyou sell.
Danny Gavin (39:17):
This SEO analysis illustrates the profound impact
content at scale, using AI inparticular, can have on website
traffic and the consequences ofpoor quality content at scale.
The changes that Opticsuggested are about more than
boosting traffic.
They're about drivingmeaningful engagement,
increasing conversions andimproving the overall visibility
(39:37):
of client X's essentialservices.
What we learned today is thatyou really have to look behind.
What are the strategies?
What are you doing?
Are there SEO best practices?
Is the traffic that I'm gettingreally what I want?
And even if it is something thatI want, but if I'm doing a lot
of things that are against theguidelines, how long is that
(39:58):
traffic actually going to lastand when is it going to turn a
corner, like where we saw, wherenew things aren't going to be
indexed?
Pages that did work well arenow starting to drop and
therefore you really have toconsider when you choose an SEO
company what is the strategy?
Are you going to take the longpath, which eventually leads to
the short path, or are you goingto take that short path, which
(40:21):
seems really really good, butwhen you get to that, there's a
really long path waiting for you?
Mandy, I didn't know if youwanted to share any closing
words.
Mandy Politi (40:29):
The general comment I have is I know that a
lot of SEO experts and a lot ofclients they're using AI content
Me initially, with mylinguistics background and what
I believe and how I like working, I was reluctant to try it.
I said no, it's a reality.
So it's what I said at thebeginning AI is not inherently
bad.
It's a tool.
The thing is, how do you usethis tool?
(40:53):
With a best practice strategyand in a way that's not going to
hurt you and it's not going togive you short-term results that
will last for a month or twofor irrelevant terms, and then
you're just risking harming yourwebsite longer, you know.
So at the end of the day, itcomes down to make sure you
follow the best practiceguidelines, make sure you
implement everything you need toimplement.
Use AI, but use it intentionallyand consciously as a tool.
(41:15):
You wouldn't go export akeyword list from SEMrush and
just target everything.
You still need to think abouthow to target specific terms,
where to target them with whatkind of content, where to put
them on the website, things likethat.
So at the end of the day, youcan't take the human factor and
the expertise out of thestrategy.
It's not all about feeding afew keywords on chat, with the
(41:37):
end creating 10,000 blog posts.
It's about what is the strategyand how do you implement basic
SEO, which is the essence ofwhat we do on the daily?
Danny Gavin (41:47):
no, yeah, agreed, and I think I'm going to stress
one more time the basic SEO, theSEO fundamentals.
If you're going to miss that,it's like building this
beautiful house and not havingthat really good foundation.
So, yeah, I think, bottom line,this was the perfect storm of
possible issues that could occurall in one website and we do
(42:07):
hope that Client X takes this tomind and all the listeners who
may have tried these sort of SEOstrategies maybe step back a
second and think is this reallythe best thing that you're doing
long-term for your brand or foryour website?
Mandy, thank you so much forbeing a guest on the Digital
Marketing Mentor and thank you,listeners, for tuning in.
We'll speak with you next time.
(42:27):
Thank you for listening to theDigital Marketing Mentor podcast
.
Be sure to check us out onlineat thedmmentor in.
We'll speak with you next time.
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