Podcast With Andrew Ansley

How AI is Transforming SEO Strategies Forever with Andrew Ansley

Show Notes

In this eye-opening episode of the Agency Insider Podcast, we delve into how AI is transforming SEO strategies forever! With insights from Andrew Ansley, a seasoned SEO expert and digital marketer, we explore the step-by-step guide to mastering SEO strategies with AI. Want to rank your website number 1? This video covers everything from crafting effective SEO strategies to driving more organic traffic through proven techniques. Whether you're a beginner or an advanced user, you'll discover how AI tools and strategies can help you achieve a #1 ranking on search engine results.

We'll discuss the impact of content AI tools like Content Sprout AI, and how they stand out in the competitive landscape. Learn about the importance of staying updated with SEO trends and practical ways to improve your website's visibility. If you're ready to transform your approach to SEO and unlock the potential of AI, this video is for you.

Want personalized help to rank number 1? Leave a comment below, and I'll be happy to guide you! Don't miss this opportunity to empower yourself with the knowledge and confidence to enhance your SEO strategy. Subscribe for more insights and updates!

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro

00:35 - Andrew’s Journey

05:07 - Content Sprout AI Features

09:58 - Content Sprout AI Demo

12:09 - Using Content Sprout Effectively

18:07 - Content Ranking Factors

20:20 - Determining Content Length

22:05 - Article Generation Costs

24:20 - Development Challenges of Content Sprout

27:00 - Content Marketing Strategy Integration

31:40 - People First Content Approach

33:30 - AI Misconceptions in Content Creation

37:50 - Competitive Field Strategies

39:55 - Effective Business Strategies

41:40 - On-Page SEO Techniques

48:05 - Top SEO Tools

51:30 - Emerging SEO Trends

56:15 - Personal Motivation

57:35 - Staying Motivated

58:20 - Connecting with Andrew

Transcript

Intro

0:00 hello and welcome to the agency Insider podcast I'm navit kosel CEO Pace traffic

0:05 and today we have a special guest Andrew Sterling anling Andrew is the director of marketing at Helium SEO the the

0:12 founder of content Sprout Ai and a contributor to search engine land he's a seasoned Su expert and a digital

0:19 marketer [Applause]

0:28 [Music] Andrew welcome to the show Good to be

0:34 here thanks for having me so Andrew let's start by diving into your background can you share with us your journey into the world of su and

Andrew’s Journey

0:40 marketing what were some of the pivotal movs that led you to where you are today

0:46 yeah I would say my background was in sales well technically I started with data analytics and sort of like a credit

0:53 card processing world so I know everything about credit card processing I hate I hated that world and I ended up

1:00 going into sales and after sales I realized I just don't like selling uh at

1:07 least not in the way that I was taught to sell I did some I did door-to-door

1:12 sales for a little while too so I sold educational books and software and I would just knock on doors and the whole

1:19 goal was you know you need to you can't say you can't caught quits until you've

1:25 gotten 30 NOS so that was like the the whole thing so

1:30 that'll really honestly I think sales is one of those things sales and uh bartending were the two jobs that were

1:37 like the most pivotal I think for foundational skills that allowed me to be an entrepreneur allowed me to I think

1:44 really get these soft skills where talking to people I don't know there's just there's a lot to it and not being

1:50 denied it just isn't as big of a deal so I ended up getting off and on I was

1:55 going to school it took me seven years to finally graduate I had a lot of uh medical bill BS that I was trying to pay

2:00 off and I didn't want to take on too much debt so I ended up pivoting at the last second for my degree I had six

2:07 months left and I had a Philosophy degree and I was like well I'm not going to do anything with this so I need to figure out what I'm actually going to do

2:14 so I started Googling jobs that involve creativity that I can do from home and I

2:19 had no idea I like all right let's see marketing came up found marketing so I

2:25 ended up getting this one random job where it was uh this guy who there's a

2:32 famous commercial with Budweiser with like this frog um it was like on the Super Bowl back in like 98 or something

2:40 anyway so that guy who made that the creative mind of like he had a bunch of commercials and diddies the Shell

2:46 station he did like all of their diddies too anyway so he hired me because of

2:52 like we had connections and I basically just researched for him I found

2:57 solutions to problems so basic I kind of called myself like a tech consultant

3:02 almost where Logistics tools crms you name it I just went out and started

3:08 really learning the world uh and as that was going on I was also researching and

3:13 constantly trying to practice SEO because I heard that SEO needs the least amount of money uh it's just a Time sync

3:19 like if you put enough time into it you don't need money I'd say anyone can do SEO

3:25 for probably $100 a month you could have a really successful SEO project but you

3:32 are the only one on that project so after that the basically I got this

3:37 random job by I called everyone that ranked number one for like my city SEO

3:43 and I just tried to get a hold of them and I said can I work for free can I work for free someone finally answered I

3:48 I started offering a poror and I offered 50 bucks I'll buy you lunch give you 50 bucks just meet with me this one guy met

3:55 with me that guy ended up getting hired by a tool called raven tools and at one point they were you know one of the

4:04 biggest tools I mean HRS was just getting started M uh was obviously huge

4:09 but on we have Rand fishkin on one side and then we had uh John Henshaw on the other and they were neck and neck for a

4:16 while and then I'm not going to get into the full backstory of that but one of them declined and and one of them did

4:23 not so that kind of got my my start I started posting YouTube videos started going to conferences started uh my own

4:29 own business and it's just kind of gone from there now I have an AI software

4:35 tool and director of marketing and I got rid of my agency because I didn't want to run an agency anymore and uh I don't

4:42 know if I ever will run a full agency again but yeah that's that's my background okay that's interesting so in

4:48 which year was this when you looking at these jobs what year was it when with SEO yeah uh I'd say

4:55 2017 okay okay so uh so now you do more with

5:01 content sprout a which we going to talk a little further as well yeah okay so

Content Sprout AI Features

5:07 let's talk about uh content Sprout of course you are the founder of content Sprout which has been making waves and

5:13 how does content AI Sprout AI stands out from other tools available in the market

5:19 yeah I would say there's this sentiment I think that

5:24 a lot of people I I don't think actually I don't know where you lie on this where what's your opinion on AI content right

5:31 now do you think that it's just like good bad is it usable can you post it without editing it what's your current

5:37 opinion okay agree so I tested every AI tool I could find I found like 25 tools

5:44 and there's some that just like they don't meet the bare minimum for me to even consider them a real tool but I

5:50 tried 25 of them and I only saw probably four I think that actually

5:58 had decent content so I think that's one of the things what makes content Sprout different is we're up there we did a

6:03 test and I think there's a couple ways to to to view or to grade your AI

6:09 content there's just overall readability is it nice to read does it sound like

6:14 it's AI if it does sound like it's AI That's boring uh the formatting so is

6:20 the formatting good then we have um onpage optimization how optimized is it

6:27 is it going to require a lot of work with an Tool uh then there's I think some new stuff in there which is uh

6:35 diversity of content formatting so bullet points lists tables that kind of

6:40 thing and then last would probably be the entity optimization so if you're

6:47 familiar with Corey tugt he really made everything kind of uh famous for this I

6:52 would say his uh work where he talks about heading vectors that's a big one

6:57 so are you familiar with what a heading Vector is or like a another term for it is a topic sentence yes so but but for

7:05 our listeners uh for our listeners if you can explain it yes so basically the way that AI or we'll just say machine

7:12 Learning Works is it's going to read content it's going to try to imitate or get as close to understanding you know

7:19 understanding as possible so how do you do that we see that Kyle rof in 2018 did

7:25 the famous uh his famous study where he was able to rank with LA Laur myum and

7:31 Laura msum if you can rank with that it means that well back then content wasn't that important uh it's really just the

7:37 placement of keywords and the frequency of keywords while you can still game the system we're moving to this point

7:44 rapidly where that's no longer the case where Google's actually really getting

7:50 good at kind of understanding content but there are zones inside of your

7:55 article so same principles as what Kyle rof showed keyword zones but now there's

8:02 it goes into sentences paragraphs The Logical order the whole hierarchy of your article the headers so how you even

8:10 unpack an article so for instance um every single article you should be

8:17 contextualizing everything that is below the H1 with your first few paragraphs or

8:23 first couple paragraphs however many before your first age2 that's one element of this and that would be a

8:28 heading Vector it's theide AA is you want to have content that answers the

8:34 heading as quickly as possible so with an H2 it says is uh

8:40 SEO well you would immediately say this you don't most AI writers are going to say SEO is a incredibly important facet

8:50 of the digital marketing community and it is something something something blah blah blah and then maybe by sentence two

8:56 or sentence three it's then kind of defining it you want to just Define it um there's

9:03 no no room for fluff so if it says what is SEO then this The Heading Vector is

9:09 SEO is this and that's I think a big thing with my tool there's no fluff the

9:15 AI words like delve and critical and I don't know you name all the furthermore

9:21 there's just like all these sort of there probably like 20 words the AI really overuses and just kind of Beats

9:27 you over the head with we get rid of that we optimize for heading vectors everything is we tried a bunch of

9:34 different tools we get a 100 out of 100 on in links for every article and then

9:40 Kora optimize we're usually beating number one with no editing for Kora as well so it's just like that that's

9:47 probably the biggest thing in terms of our content quality and it has tables no almost no hallucination and uh it really

9:53 doesn't even require editors I still like to edit but I'm just saying that's that's kind of one of the the major

Content Sprout AI Demo

9:58 differences okay so so so uh would you like to show

10:05 this tool just a walk through if possible oh sure happy to share it do I

10:12 share how do I share present there we go right screen can you see my screen not

10:18 yet oh here we go yeah just let me just right you got it yep perfect so the idea

10:29 is simple everything is put into projects projects is what is going to be kind like your website name so it could

10:37 be a niche it could be whatever you want it to I'm in my developer environment so this isn't the actual live environment

10:44 but uh in the developer mode I get unlimited credits so obviously that's the one I try to to use that's to

10:51 subscribe right yeah you wait what' you say so I said developer mode is the one

10:57 which everyone should subbe yeah everyone subscribe to developer mode so you start with just adding a project and

11:03 the idea is just put connect your what you're working with here so we have

11:08 context when the AI is writing so we have what's the general search intent what's the website's purpose what is the

11:13 niche you're in we get AI to basically understand this anyway it's going to

11:20 read things on the Internet it's going to to have background prompts that make sure that we have a a firm understanding

11:27 of your business intent reading level you can act as somebody I don't

11:32 recommend these two they de optimize the article but uh the metad description

11:38 prompt you can customize that you can sync it with your WordPress and what's nice is you can actually sync it both ways so if you up update within the tool

11:45 it'll update inside of Wordpress and if you do changes in WordPress it'll uh reflect here then you can upload your

11:51 CSV so if there's any internal links you'll just be able to apply that by just having a simple uh links on one

11:57 side keywords on the other and then applies it so that's generally how that part works the actual

12:05 writing uh oh and just hit this to connect to your WordPress site let's do a flask and Barrel which is a project

Using Content Sprout Effectively

12:11 I'm building in public but hopefully the developer is done working on this because it wasn't working

12:17 earlier yeah it's not one of course he's still working on it tools content

12:23 sprout. I'll load that later so while because he's working on it what

12:29 I'll just show you is you have table of contents here you can generate schema you can improve highlighted sections you

12:35 can generate FAQ questions your internal links right here you can analyze your article we have a GPT here so that your

12:42 editor doesn't even need to leave and the GPT takes the entire article context and uh basically uses that as a system

12:48 text so you can dialogue with it and it has all the knowledge of your your article okay you can send it off you can

12:55 schedule it if you schedule it just select the date you want

13:00 easy peasy the uh you can bulk write outlines so I could create outlines this

13:07 way I could write articles or I could send them all off just select my categories the URLs

13:13 hit my schedule and then how many days how many posts per day and you're good

13:18 to go and you can bulk write them bulk do all that stuff the other piece of this is that you could do your topic

13:23 research so you can either import your existing research or we create a topic map and then it allows you to get kind

13:30 of explore and dig into categories So currently let's see if there's a good

13:35 one to do about cash flow I'll do cash

13:43 flow I just gave a demo of cash flow so if you have no research the idea of the tool was how do we make it where we have

13:50 an incredibly scalable system you can have a uh remove the need to have entire

13:55 content teams so basically you could run an ENT ire agency off of

14:02 one person that's kind of editing your uh content across the the agency because

14:07 you don't it only takes five to 10 minutes per article if you're trying to get it to the highest quality but the

14:13 research too is all done through through this and then you can append further research through like HRS and stuff

14:18 let's look at cash flow statement the idea is it creates these categories you can expand the categories you can rename

14:24 the categories add custom categories and then you just ask it to research so you

14:30 can research you can cluster and analyze you can get search volume you can append your data or just view the topics so

14:37 this one's been researched and we have Cate it's been clustered and analyzed so let's just open Cash

14:43 Flow so I haven't done my search volume yet basically my way of doing this is I'll just export this using this

14:50 here okay get get my hrf data or whatever and then I can append that data

14:56 here so the nice thing is I can also append like keyword difficulty or any of

15:02 the things you like about ATS Global volume traffic potential and then you still have it here in this system that's

15:08 going to be kind of like your mission control to be able to then figure out which articles you want to send into

15:14 your project we cluster it based off of three similar results so if opening

15:19 operating cash flow operating cash inflows and operating cash outflows

15:24 they're all uh cluster seven that means that it's the same article that likely could rank for this so all that means is

15:32 you can just filter it out if you want and say well I only want to show one keyword per cluster and let's just keep

15:39 the one that has the highest search volume done great we create titles based

15:44 off of the the Ser so whatever the titles are on the Ser we're going to reverse engineer those we can do it

15:50 based off of intent so we tag the intent too because we're reading every page for every keyword for the top 10 and then if

15:56 I only want to write blog articles then I'm just going to mark that and now this is kind of all I've done now I don't

16:03 need to do anything else I have all everything you're seeing here is ready

16:08 to be written so I have 102 articles that can be written if I wanted I would just hit this will drop

16:15 down it's drop down here I could hit all and then I could just select this send

16:21 to my project um let's do sample send a sample and now all those

16:29 articles are uh ready to be outlined and written and that's kind of the whole

16:35 flow of the tool so that's all there is to it you can do some other visualizations too if it helps so you

16:41 can see it this way okay that's so the whole topical cluster you can look into

16:47 it yeah so I like I use it even to get Enterprise clients because they love visuals like this one so I'll export the

16:54 all the data I'll touch it up a little bit and then I'll give them an image like this as well and say hey we've

17:00 we've created the universe of topics for you here it is this is what it looks like when it's visualized this is here's all the keywords you can switch it up

17:06 and see it this way too so we've separated out where it has questions the keywords and it will aggregate the search volume as well one of the ideas

17:13 of topical Authority is that you want to focus on single categories and expand it so this allows you to do that where you

17:18 can focus on we're in one category and I can just focus on single subcategories if I wanted to so really helpful uh the

17:26 workflow is super simple once you send it off like I said it's going to be you'll see it in here where the title

17:32 was was here so simple steps to create your business budget what is a business spreadsheet you create an

17:38 outline you can scrape competitor outlines you can do a manual one you can bulk create them as well we

17:45 do it asynchronously and then you can rewrite your articles you can uh write your

17:50 articles in 15 major languages so super simple really elegant tool to just kind

17:55 of do a lot of the things that I wanted to do for my agency and I just didn't have a tool at the time the end result

18:02 is this content sprout. sample actually no let's use this one we

Content Ranking Factors

18:11 can't see yeah let me share are you able to see it yeah yeah so I'm building this

18:18 site in public so people can see it but let's do bourbon nutrition

18:25 facts completely from here right all of it is Ai and my editing process so I

18:30 have an entire process for creating AI content AI my AI photos I have a process

18:37 for okay let's get audio for it here's what my AI image with canva looks like as well and then I'm doing very little

18:43 editing to any of these it's just it automatically bolds it automatically internally links uh it automatically

18:50 creates these tables and they rank really really well so yeah that's the question I was coming to so do they rank

18:57 right let's uh look hi CPU usage detected so here's the past six months

19:02 for the website for what we've basically been publishing since this year and translate the content to other languages

19:08 too because why not get some good uh and which tool are we looking into it this

19:13 what is this SE so I'm using yeah so my buddy Matthew I believe his last name is melinger he co-owns this tool called SEO

19:20 gets highly recommend it all it is is search console data but it takes away a lot of the lag it allows you to do

19:27 filtering much easier and you can append notes so like right here I appended the note hey I added the sidebar that

19:34 promotes other articles so like a semantic sort of in linking thing and you can append data there's also Google

19:41 updates that's on here as well and uh you can do reports you can add your brand name if you wanted to but yeah so

19:49 this was throughout all the updates that have been happening it's just a Content website and it's working very well the

19:56 actual user data is really good too people are actually reading the Articles they stay on it for a long time they read at least two articles yeah if I I

20:03 think if I was to turn on display at this point uh I would have about 250 bucks of monthly income I don't want to

20:10 turn on display because I have a different strategy for monetization yeah this stuff works okay I can I do ask a

20:18 couple of more questions for this yeah go for it so how does so it is is there

Determining Content Length

20:25 a Content limit to this when it's being generated or have a choice or it just generates reach and generate so top

20:32 three results have so how does it determine how much longer the content will be based on the search does it do

20:37 anything so it's not I've taught it I basically created an AI model that is

20:44 based purely off of semantics and a semantic understanding and entity SEO

20:49 perspective the idea there is you want to have an established topical border

20:56 where you don't go too long and it's not too short short so sometimes the Articles will be uh 1,200 words on

21:03 average they are about 3,000 and then typically you might have uh 400 words

21:10 too much okay but the idea is we'd rather give you too much then not enough

21:16 and really it's just about right all the time so the the length is kind of autod

21:22 determined AI is making that decision automatically it's not based off of the surf it's based off of semantics and

21:30 does it based on the Ser so this is more on centic size yeah length is based not

21:35 off Ser but based off of your own based off of semantics okay okay now you can adjust

21:43 your outline you can based on the amount of headings you have it's obviously going to increase the article size or decrease it so you always get to choose

21:50 the outline before you before you publish or before you start writing so if you wanted to increase the outline

21:56 then it would go longer if you wanted to decrease said go shorter it's just up to you okay so that is actually a very

Article Generation Costs

22:05 interesting tool on um coming up and I think so how much does it on an average

22:10 Co cost to generate one article like this yeah so there's three different

22:16 things you can do there's if you want to use us to outline then it's one and you

22:21 want to edit the outline stuff that's one credit a credit is a dollar and then

22:27 if you want to to write the article at seven credits and then if you want to do a rewrite where we are writing the

22:33 article basically two and a half times so I think most people if you don't know

22:39 all those tests where we see hey the AI passed the bar exam and you know it's

22:45 it's so good it's passing all these things it's those tests are often multi- iteration tests so they might get

22:52 prompted five times and then did you get at the right answer after five times that's what I'm doing and I should have

22:58 said this earlier but that's actually a big difference between content Sprout and other tools we don't cut Corners

23:05 we're doing it the way that like PhD researchers tell us to do it and it ends

23:10 up working so if you want to do a rewrite where it goes in the extra mile make sure that you really get that depth

23:16 those tables and stuff too then that's an extra three credits at minimum seven credits maximum 11 so you can go

23:24 anywhere between 7 to1 does it uh researching does it go out on the web and do a real I mean

23:32 latest research or yes yes it does okay that sounds a good package right yeah

23:39 and so so of course this tool I mean I I see honestly a lot of tools so this tools actually stand out quite different

23:46 from what I've seen I mean we use a lot of tools as well definitely I would love to give it a try as

23:52 well awesome yeah I would love to love to have you there we have a Facebook group if you need anything and yeah

23:58 super helpful tool obviously there's still more to do for SEO to rank but I think uh content's kind of like half the

24:05 game if you can get that part done then technically if you had enough time and

24:10 good content it becomes about 80% of the game it's just that people don't want to

24:16 wait years you know right so so it seems lot of lot of

Development Challenges of Content Sprout

24:21 thinking must have gone into this tool while you develop so what were the biggest challenges you faced while

24:27 developing content sprout Ai and how did you woke up man I was

24:33 literally just writing this last night too trying to get it get that story out

24:39 I say the biggest challenges were it took me a thousand hours and so many nights of just like I would stay up till

24:45 3:00 am. I'd pass out on the floor here and just like I'd wake up at I don't

24:52 know 7 a. start again and it was just mind-numbing the

24:59 what what I found was it's easy enough to get the AI to give you something good

25:05 80% of the time it's really hard to get it 100% of the time and with no extra

25:10 prompting required on the end user typically you could always at least have like a follow-up prompt that I manually

25:18 go through and now the section's fine but how do I you know automate that that part was hard removing those words was

25:25 really hard oh the outline was super hard so there's like a Telltale sign if content

25:31 is AI and a lot of times it's just how the outlines are structured so um I'd

25:37 say that chat GPT and all llms they have they're trained on dirty data they

25:43 didn't they just start getting everything so its concept of what an outline is of what an article is of what

25:50 a Blog is I tested every possible sort of like word permutation of like okay is

25:56 it better if I call it a Blog an article a manual a guide you know and then I'm asking all the same prompts and then I

26:03 mess with the temperature okay if I mess with lower Randomness higher Randomness what's what's happening there that's

26:10 super hard too so I'd say that's probably consistency the outline removing those

26:17 AI words and just kind of overcoming the whole dirty data thing and then semantic

26:23 SEO has a very particular way of handling content so I needed to to teach

26:29 teach it I needed to strip away it's its bad knowledge and fill it with good knowledge so that was the difficulty and

26:36 uh I'm glad I'm not I'll probably have to to dive back into that phase of my of

26:42 development again because I'm doing this with the AI ad copy trying to build that module where we can do emails and

26:48 landing pages and stuff but it was nice at least taking a break from you know

26:53 just literally just staring at an open AI scream or CLA claw screen

Content Marketing Strategy Integration

27:00 okay all right now so given your background with the content Sprout how do you see content marketing fitting

27:06 into the overall strategy so how do I see like content it's like blog content

27:14 fitting in to too the whole content marketing all content

27:20 marketing so I think I don't think SEO is the answer for everybody I don't

27:26 think at least voting tons of resources to it I actually think that for a lot of

27:33 people I don't see a reason why not to have SEO if it is low impact on your

27:38 finances so like if I was a SAS company and I'm writing to let's say it's a

27:44 cashlow accounting software or something just if it's cheap enough to write

27:49 content just get content out there and you might start ranking if you start to see movement and traction maybe you'll

27:55 get to page two that happens all the time with like ask and Barrel I'm on page two for I think over 100,000

28:01 monthly searches right now and I haven't done any backlinks to it but I'm just posting it raw if I get there then it

28:09 goes all right well maybe it warrants some further investment so I think AI is allowing us to sort of if you can get

28:15 the right tool the right workflow you can minimize the amount of Finance Financial impact and the amount of time

28:21 and then it helps you sort of prioritize your content that's only one piece I think content is going to be or SEO in

28:27 general is becoming more about brand I have a buddy Michael Marino and he calls it brand optimization and I think uh and

28:36 now I'm starting to see what's his name Neil Patel Neil Patel is also uh I think he's caught on too and he's calling it

28:42 SEO everywhere optimization or like search everywhere optimization I think

28:48 so I kind of like that idea so either brand optimization search everywhere optimization but if you read the patents

28:55 everything in patents ends up being somehow used in in the search engine later and there might be a 2-year delay

29:00 fouryear delay uh there's old patents that are on LinkedIn they're on how uh Google's using social media to determine

29:07 sort things about your uh brand your content is trying to create a brand profile and try to think about it from

29:14 the perspective of a Google engineer black hat SEO it's been pretty easy because for a while it was just based on

29:19 page rank which by the way is now deprecated if you read the Google be so now it's page rank NS I'm not going to

29:26 go into that but there's there's more if there's more things that

29:31 Google is looking at and it's not just one thing that's easy to game makes it more likely that Google's going to have

29:38 a more dependable Authority metric or whatever so I think that's what's happening right now we're

29:44 if you have social media presence if you have brand searches if you have if there's some sort of popularity signal

29:51 and we can look at YouTube which is probably the best algorithm out there or Tik Tok for that sort of an AI that is

29:59 trained to recognize and use popularity signals we're at that point it's much easier also to just measure basically

30:06 we're using the human brain instead of trying to quantify everything in a math formula where it's you know what what is

30:14 the this secret math formula for identifying the perfect content learn how to re how to react and understand

30:21 what people are how they're reacting to content so that's what Google's doing they got they're in a lawsuit right now

30:28 and they literally had to Spill the Beans it's called nav boost if anyone wants to search nav boost that's the

30:33 also in the Google leak but uh yeah that's where content marketing is going it's more diversification and if you're

30:40 going to diversify you can either you can do I think a couple things you either spread yourself thin and do be

30:47 like okay in a in a lot of areas or you get you choose one area to go super hard

30:52 on that could be YouTube and then you'll typically want to have one or two other

30:57 channels that you're at least doing like mediocre at I think that's what everyone should be doing with content marketing

31:02 we have enough tools now where you can be mediocre just with AI and like a tiny sop so just do that maybe it's

31:09 converting those images on your blog into Pinterest posts maybe it's creating a video or audio version of your content

31:17 or maybe providing your own thoughts in a video and then embedding it on an article of you know I review the the

31:24 best laundry machine okay well maybe just put a video on there easy enough to

31:30 do people want to connect with people not Brands so I think that's the other thing with content marketing try to get

31:37 become uh any project you're doing there should be a person behind it there should be personality behind it and

People First Content Approach

31:43 that's what I'm seeing ranking that's what I'm seeing work I'm seeing businesses built out of thin air just based off of that do you think the

31:49 content should be uh people first I think I've read some of these of yous

31:55 where you are a strong advocate of people first content is that correct yeah with as long as you keep

32:02 within the framework of how a machine will read your content yes so I think a

32:09 lot of times it actually aligns though like the topic sentence you know having ah header and then immediately answering

32:15 it people want their questions answered immediately anyway so that happens to align and a lot of people first

32:20 philosophies are actually overlapping with what go how Google is reading content to begin with the one difference

32:27 might be some of the topics I'm including or I might reiterate myself

32:33 multiple times in an article and if I was just people first I might not do that I might just you know move on to

32:40 the next section so there are some little tweaks where I might be doing some things that are a little bit more

32:45 robot focused but yeah ultimately if you can create content that people like I would

32:52 say the majority of of ranking at this point is user signals especially with local SEO

32:58 and this is why CTR manipulation is so big right now is because yeah like if you can manipulate and and not get

33:06 caught Google will rank you so fast you need some other base metrics of authority to and like is Google wants to

33:13 see other things and as long as you can kind of Hit the minimum and then you have that other stuff that's when you

33:18 shoot off like like crazy it's the people that try to just go from zero to let me just start sending 100 clicks a

33:24 day or you know those are the people that get penalized okay now there are many misconceptions

AI Misconceptions in Content Creation

33:31 about AI in content creation and SEO of course uh when we discussed that it

33:37 creates bad content of course now what are some that you frequently encounter and how do you address

33:45 them people have said that you can't get AI to like on LinkedIn I see this more so than anywhere else and it's usually

33:52 the the communities nothing against M but it's usually the people that are in those M type communities they're the

33:58 ones that are usually saying hey AI can't do this it can't do that and I'll see it can't can't create good outlines

34:05 I disagree I think it creates great outlines it can't write good content it

34:11 can write good content uh it can't replace content writers it literally has

34:18 it has been replacing content writers and uh I have friends who are content writers who they've had to adapt and

34:24 they can no longer do their what they previously were doing right AI

34:31 content it will get penalized that's I don't think it's AI

34:36 That's getting penalized it's PE irresponsible use of AI that gets penalized there are to touch on this

34:44 briefly I don't think Google just wants you to push out there are exceptions and

34:50 you can get rewards I just believe that you are ripe for a slap in the face from

34:56 Google if you start posting 60 a day from get-go or 100 a day from the get-go

35:02 whatever it is or you just want to do 10,000 posts you know just upload them all that kind of stuff I have seen so

35:09 many just huge ranking spikes into and then crashing down so My Philosophy with

35:16 with content is you should be doing Google's a business they don't want you to spam them and they it costs them

35:24 money to crawl the web so you need to earn the trust of Google before you can

35:29 start moving up I just now hit the phase I have a tool and I have unlimited credits of a tool that's amazing for

35:36 Content why am I not just posting a bajillion articles well it's because I

35:41 just now got to the point where I believe that now I think Google would allow that so now this is the first

35:46 month where I'll be posting 60 articles a month okay before that though I've been doing at most probably one every

35:54 other day been doing like 10 to 15 probably a month for a while and uh I

36:00 think that's kind of the big thing people have a lot of misconceptions about AI because they did it incorrectly

36:06 and without understanding that there's other ways to do it or the exact place they went wrong with AI then they make

36:13 these sweeping assumptions that AI can't work doesn't work you'll get penalized you can even look at the con at the uh

36:20 guidelines that Google provides they they very clearly did not say that AI content should not be used it wants

36:27 original content which sometimes AI content even without scraping the web

36:33 just AI content can be original because no one has written a Blog with all that

36:38 stuff structured yet just because Google scraped it it's or open AI scraped it and has it doesn't mean the surf already

36:45 has it so that's one thing you can actually have original original for the web and what Google has access to just

36:51 with raw AI but AI can still do 80% of your article and then you put the original stuff in you know hire an

36:58 expert for an hour of their time great that now you can have a much more

37:03 scalable system so i' say those are the all the things that I'm seeing when people talk about Ai and all the misconceptions around it it's mainly

37:10 around that the you have uh you are a director in an helium agency is it still

37:16 an active job you have yes it is I spend the majority of my time on helium uh

37:22 clients and I run I manage millions and AD spend I do uh I bring in leads for us

37:29 and I do a lot on Facebook do a lot on Google and um yeah it's it's a fun job I

37:35 like it a lot it's a great agency ultimate dream is to own my own brand so obviously that's I don't want to stay

37:41 there forever but it's a great job and I like working with clients as long as I

37:47 am not the owner of the business and certain clients just suck but you know that's that's life so as a director of

Competitive Field Strategies

37:54 marketing at Helium seio of course you must have some key strategy to stay ahead in such a competitive field could

38:00 you share a few of these strategies with us to stay ahead in a competitive field yeah the always learn I thought at one

38:07 point that uh I was like well I'll just push really hard and then I'll sail and

38:13 just kind of like Cruise right you know I'll do all this work and then I'll just take a break that doesn't exist it

38:19 really doesn't exist so in my opinion just be ready for if you want to

38:25 continually move up and be a director vice president CMO that kind of thing well you're always learning so for me I

38:32 a firm believer that algorithms while they are poison for the mind in a lot of ways on social media and political uh

38:40 garbage and you know all this stuff I have crafted my algorithm where I get

38:46 suggested amazing content all the time on every platform and I treat every

38:51 platform that I'm on as a very deliberately who I interact with I know

38:57 that I'm not just going to like it just for the sake of liking it I want to like it because I want LinkedIn to suggest me

39:02 more I want YouTube to suggest me more it's yes support your creators support those people but ultimately you are

39:08 creating an engine for yourself to learn and I don't it's like having this personal assistant that's just going out

39:15 and finding the best things for you so now YouTube I can get so many things

39:21 from YouTube and I'd say that's how I stay ahead is I am digesting at least about an hour of content day and then I

39:30 whether I'm listening to it in the car whether I read it at night whether I'm in the shower and I'm blaring it I could

39:36 just be pooping man I don't care what I'm doing I'm going to be trying to squeeze in some time just to improve a

39:42 little bit so that's how I stay ahead minimize my time with games minimize my time with uh wasting time and uh

39:49 maximize the potential for learning on every platform I'm on so what are some of the most

Effective Business Strategies

39:56 effective strateg that you recommend to businesses or will like to recommend for

40:01 businesses yeah are we talking local are we talking National type brand you can give us for both local as well as

40:08 National okay so I'd say that a big one is schema markup just because it kind of

40:15 covers it's solidifying Google's understanding of your content so you might not have the most well structured

40:22 blog you might not have the the best formula that's logical that has like the hierarchies and and all this stuff the

40:28 easiest thing to implement first if you create schema markup then you're kind of creating there's

40:35 there's three different knowledge bases that Google uses or any any data company will use there's a structured knowledge

40:41 base semi-structured knowledge base and unstructured knowledge base right A Blog is unstructured Wikipedia is

40:48 semi-structured Wiki data is structured so structured is basically all it is is

40:55 hey instance of this is a state of class of it's just kind of making

41:00 these tiny statements and that's kind of what schema is trying to do it's taking the text and it's just trying to make

41:06 declarations and tying them into the known databases that Google or knowledge bases that Google's using so that's one

41:13 of the big things I I recommend and you can use AI to to do that for you as well

41:18 I would say the best thing to do you can find if you find a competitor that has

41:24 good schema or you take a course and someone has good schema and you can find a good example of it take the schema put

41:30 it into open AI or put it into whatever chat model you want give it your business info and then just tell it to replace you know everything with with

41:38 your stuff instead so that's a huge one next would be your actual uh website

On-Page SEO Techniques

41:43 structure let me uh present something real quick because I think this is probably the biggest thing you could do

41:50 and people just aren't doing it so let's do uh let's do here again let's go to to

41:57 the flask and Barrel and I just want to show you the the sidebar because I think this is

42:04 huge and the things I'm trying to share are the things that like don't take a huge Monumental lift it's just take your

42:11 existing content and squeeze more out of it one always have a table of

42:16 contents always and ideally you want it to have a good design because you or

42:21 because user metrics are super important now you want to find ways to increase

42:27 user satisfaction so here's an example I have an internal link structure that operates like Wikipedia and basically

42:33 it'll highlight the internal link and it increases the amount of pages people

42:38 actually click little things like that I haven't changed any of my blog content it's just increasing the likelihood that

42:44 they'll keep on clicking next they can access whatever they want here so all right well I'm on this article about um

42:51 bourbon nutrition what else do they have about bourbon what is it how to drink it the best Bourbons I'm on nutrition f the

42:57 difference between bourbon and whiskey you want to satisfy the full user journey and if you can satisfy the

43:05 user where they don't need to go back to Google that's a satisfied click Google doesn't care if they're only on your page for 10 seconds they care did you

43:12 have did you go back to Google and continue your search Journey if your search Journey ended after 10 seconds

43:18 then the page did its job so that's a huge one and this gives you huge ranking

43:23 boosts push this here uh I believe this one all I did for this is is uh the the

43:30 in appearance for WordPress you can select menus create a menu and then do a

43:35 little bit of uh web dev work just to push it as a sidebar thing to work with whatever structure you have so does this

43:42 get updated with the new content you add or it's fixed like 10 10 pieces of content for each category I'm adding

43:49 cont it doesn't automatically do it I add it you don't want it automatically you want to handpick

43:54 everything so that's one thing that I TR say American whiskey might have more content but you choose to only highlight

44:01 these five46 right correct so typically every single Niche has the ability to be

44:08 templated so with my Niche there's American Scotch Irish Japanese Canadian

44:15 all of those basically have the same intents and questions around them I'm going to for each of those uh this is

44:22 another boost if you can templatized you are maximizing crawl budget for

44:29 Google so if you can make things cheaper on Google while meeting these other thresholds then you win and if you can

44:35 do that consistently over time you win there's all sorts of things here of like

44:41 okay just think with our think as a Google engineer think as like Google is

44:47 a business how then would uh would you

44:53 maximize or minimize the cost as a as Google gole and still ensure quality if

44:59 you think like that then typically a lot of these things make sense yeah I'm

45:04 basically as I have it I'm trying to do like the same 10 articles for every single thing it's what is it the best ones how to drink it the nutrition you

45:11 want to compare it to other ones what does it taste like what do you want to mix it with what are the cocktails that

45:17 kind of stuff okay got it so this web structure is uh of course

45:24 uh super important when it comes to keeping in mind the UI uix and how and

45:30 then last I'll get I'll give one more I'll just say that you

45:37 should invest into social where not for

45:42 with the intent of making money off of it necessarily but just to have a heartbeat so convert your content a Blog

45:49 article into a social posts heck you can even buy followers now if you buy

45:54 followers you will likely damage your ability to get

46:00 suggested or whatever or like go viral or whatever because social media the native channels will know if you're

46:06 buying them Google doesn't no so I I think that if you have a thousand

46:13 followers 10,000 followers cheap cheap enough to buy that's a signal Google sees it okay great now there might be

46:21 some other things where you probably it's going to measure your interaction and brand searches and stuff like that but you can mess with brand search

46:28 through ads I would say that uh try to try to focus on on your brand search

46:33 make sure people are actually aware of your brand searching for your brand do things where your brand is disgusted that lifts SEO efforts drastically and

46:41 that's part of the reason why I I'm building the flask and Barrel in public because at at will I can give a bunch of

46:49 free advice to people and share my website and then tell them hey if you go

46:54 here and go through all the pages look reverse engineer my schema look at what I'm doing use it for yourself man I just

47:01 got a lot of brand traffic and over and over again boom it just I get a new

47:07 ranking record if I do that so those are the things I'd recommend most make sure all your information on your brand is

47:13 filled out your about your company info remember that if if you're not being

47:19 talked about everywhere else then it's your job to make sure that Google knows

47:24 everything about you okay because it wants to know who's the founder when were you founded why were you founded

47:30 what's the vision statement Who's the who are the team members how are they qualified all of the stuff just think

47:35 about like if I'm going to trust you what would make me trust you more tell me more about you think of it as like

47:41 you're dating somebody you're recing somebody you need to actually what are your hobbies like all that stuff heck

47:47 even create a separate website just for the founder that has even more information so all that kind of stuff

47:53 you got to think more like that that's what I mean mean by brand is community indicate who you are as a brand each

47:59 individual is a brand your company is a brand develop that okay now what are some of your

Top SEO Tools

48:07 favorite SE tools and resources let's

48:14 say man if you're I don't do onpage optimization stuff anymore but in links

48:21 for onpage optimization I've loved them for a long time they also have an internal linkage tool that's really nice

48:28 they use JavaScript though which is worse than HTML so I typically don't try to do that I like word lft word lft is

48:36 creating I don't even know how to to make this simple it

48:42 creates basically structured data in a way that is

48:47 so data engineer sort of thing that like it's just delivering this thing in a way

48:52 to that Google really likes entity clouds that's my programmatic schema tool that um my buddy has built

49:01 and nty cloud is amazing and once again I'm going to get super nerdy but the idea is you're delivering schema in the

49:09 Dom the Dom is the first thing that Google's reading other than the URL of

49:14 the website so before a single Pixel loads the Dom fires if you can deliver the schema inside of the

49:20 Dom then it kind of has everything it needs to then contextualize every pixel

49:26 now that's going that it's going to read so ND clouds does that at scale boom

49:31 across all your pages super easy and that one's really nice and then last one

49:38 there are a couple ones that are like e that are nice just for Local Pages if you're trying to do a bunch of Local

49:44 Pages five minute site have you ever heard of that one someone built this

49:50 forever ago it's like you know small SEO tools um okay right yeah so like that

49:56 they started kind of like at the same time so five minute site you can just get uh you enter your ZIP code enter the

50:03 mile radius and then you can enter your keyword and then it'll spit out every city plus keyword and give you all those

50:08 keywords super nice to do plug that into to a tool of some of your choice it's

50:14 great if you want Local Pages uh in bulk wp- zinc for uh WordPress best plugin

50:21 $99 one time and now you have uh a mass page builder

50:27 my favorite plugin SEO press you can do AI uh AI meta descriptions AI titles AI

50:35 alt text automatically that's super nice plus it has redirections built in it's got a auto indexer that's uh there it

50:42 has no I haven't seen any security issues I used to do rank math had some security issues and then I switched over

50:49 to SEO press so I definitely recommend that one okay and I don't know if

50:54 there's any other SEO tools oh h all all day HRS is

51:00 incredible just the best it's the best SEO tool out there I wish they had an affiliate program they for those that

51:06 don't know they are the fourth largest crawler in the world an SEO tool has

51:12 better crawl than search engines than like Russia's entire search China's

51:17 entire search engine like right that's mindblowing to me so I love their

51:24 tool right you are also a contributor to search engine land right yeah yeah so so now I mean of

Emerging SEO Trends

51:33 course which gives you a unique perspective on industry Trend so what are some of the emerging Trends in SEO

51:39 that marketers should keep an eye on I would say we already all know this AI is

51:47 disrupting everything I would encourage every single one of you to look up AI

51:54 agents which is basically another word for yeah it's another word for kind of

52:01 like a think of it as like a microworker so an agent is trained on

52:08 one thing and one thing only so think of like a McDonald's line you have one person that's flipping patties you have

52:14 one person that's at the cash register uh you have one person that's giving the food up all of that stuff AI agents are

52:21 taking over it's only a matter of time before we have really good AI agents for

52:26 every single thing that we're doing I'm building my own you can build your own highly recommend that you look into that

52:33 YouTube has a ton on it we are moving to a spot where AI is going to be able to

52:41 do most of the heavy lifting for every single piece of your business whether it's taking phone calls sending text

52:48 messages doing the actual emails because we're just able to connect it all and

52:54 then instead of having let's say you have a company of 300 people right now well you could

53:01 then just instead of having five people on a division one person per division that's kind of where we're heading right

53:07 now so it's gonna I think affect the bigger companies more we already have smaller companies are already Scrappy so

53:14 really what's happening is smaller companies are going to be able to make more money uh I believe and they're just

53:19 going to keep on doing what they're doing being Scrappy trying to find ways to automate bigger companies are going to downsize

53:26 I would say 30% uh within two years the only reason

53:31 they wouldn't is Optics and investment money and stuff so like we're already at this stage I I have a buddy who he uh he

53:40 is selling this for like 250k and basically it's every assist it's your

53:46 calls it's your gmbb uh social media it it does all the interaction it it is

53:52 your assistant an executive assistant it's your VA and it it's it's incredible

53:58 and he's selling it to Enterprise companies like crazy right now and I think that's that's the thing you need

54:03 to be aware of we're at this trend the other one outside of that is going to be SEO I'll give one for SEO and one for

54:09 ads SEO it's about get do more content topical Authority is a thing straight up

54:16 and now you have ai to help you so there's more than one kind of authority now it's not just backlink Authority we

54:21 have topical Authority which is what I'm achieving with plas Barrel the idea is you want to create a un content if you

54:27 want to rank works for a local SEO as well so create a glossery whatever you want to do I did this for a mortgage

54:33 site and we did it for so many different things and it ranks really well for ads

54:40 I don't know if for those of you that haven't done ads in the past it's easier than ever to do ads now largely because

54:47 AI can actually be trusted so the hardest thing in the world for Facebook marketing is typically it's going to be

54:55 your a audience trying to make sure you have the Right audience no more that doesn't matter go broad I'm talking the

55:04 by broad I mean you choose location you choose gender you choose age you don't

55:09 need anything else the creative itself creates the audience if you believe that

55:15 Facebook reals and Tik Tok and YouTube if you are satisfied with the engine and you think that it's it's delivering you

55:21 good content that's how the ads work too so all you need to do the only difference between ads and organic is

55:28 you're forcing the same creative in front of someone's face people think that somehow now they're like because

55:34 it's ads they don't need to invest into all the other things that make good creative no the more you invest into the

55:40 creative the less you have to do with anything else good creative will do 80% of the leg work for you and it you don't

55:48 need to do any sort of advanced bidding placements you can get by really really

55:53 well just by doing that so I'd say those are the three things to look out for you have your AI your your PBC and you have

55:59 your SEO right those are a lot of takes for hopefully hopefully that helps but I don't know who the audience is I'm

56:05 assuming people have multi uh multi skills and not just SEO but AI is huge

56:11 don't sleep on it you're going to get left behind right on a more personal note what drives you as a mark man I I

Personal Motivation

56:17 think about this I don't know I think uh I have ideas I think that we don't know ourselves as much as we think we do I'll

56:24 say currently what I think is what drives me is I want to be the best so I'm

56:31 competitive But ultimately I don't as I'm I'm like 34 now I don't really care

56:37 as much about being the best I've had mentors that told me I was seeking affirmation and they they said are you

56:43 still learning every day and are you improving every day that was the response I wanted affirmation I said am I good now am I great am I the best

56:50 where am I is this impressive are you still learning and then I thought about it for like

56:56 a year and I think that's what it's about now is I just want to continue to

57:02 grow that's it as long as I'm doing that that's what's driving me and I ultimately I want to be able to do point

57:08 at anything and just be like I can make money I can sell that I can sell that doesn't matter what where I'm at I just

57:14 want to be able to sell anything so that that's kind of what drives me is I guess a little bit of fear I I want to know

57:21 that no matter what if push comes to shove I can make money make a business business make any make any situation I'm

57:29 I'm in I can turn it around and make a success out of it and that's kind of that's the fear element of it we all are

57:34 motivated by fear right right right so my next question was actually how do you

Staying Motivated

57:40 get feel how do you stay motivated so and inspired so it's more with the fear

57:46 right fear and I have a kid so it's like uh if I

57:51 want uh my family to grow in size and I want all these options for my kid that's

57:58 kind of it it's the balance I don't need to be making $10 million heck I don't even need to make a million but uh I

58:04 still have my goals ultimately I just want the freedom to be able to give my kid any anything that she

58:12 wants within reason like that would be good for her development I don't want her to be spoiled but I just want that

58:18 and fear and family those are the two big ones okay Andrew it's been a pleasure having you on the show and

Connecting with Andrew

58:24 thank you for sharing your Insight and experience with us and of course giving us a demo and a walk through of content

58:30 Sprout uh before we wrap up where can our listeners follow your work or get in touch with you yeah so I have a couple

58:37 places I would say Facebook's the big one um Andrew Sterling Ansley I'll put

58:43 I'll give you the links for it I started a school Community uh a week ago so I've

58:48 got 150 members in there now I'm just sharing my Sops my processes you can ask

58:53 questions I'll do 30 minutes sort of like uh free uh free 30 minute sessions with you

59:00 it'll be with a bunch of people you can ask questions first come first serve I do interviews I'm interviewing a guy

59:05 that's managed quarter billion dollars in ad spend in a few hours so that's

59:11 going to be in there that's 20 bucks a month though so it's not for everybody but if you do want that then you get

59:16 more LinkedIn that's the other place that I'm at so I'll post some LinkedIn content occasionally and Facebook

59:21 content I have a YouTube but it's very rare that I'm able to post because I have too many things going on

59:27 all right thank you again Andrew and thank you to our listeners for tuning in don't forget to subscribe to the agency

59:32 Insider podcast for more insightful conversations until next time thank you