By leveraging AI, businesses can achieve scalable, data-driven results that align with search engine updates and user behavior patterns, ultimately driving more organic growth.
Joining host David Bain to share strategies and tips on how to achieve this for your own website is Andreas Voniatis, Pam Aungst Cronin, and Victoria Olsina.
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David Bain
‘How is AI being used to power organic growth?’
Hello and welcome to the October 2024 edition of the Majestic SEO Panel, where we’re going to be discussing how AI is being used to power organic growth. I’m your host, David Bain, and joining me today are three wonderful panelists.
Let’s start off by meeting them and start off with Andreas.
Andreas Voniatis
Hi. I’m Andreas. Andreas Voniatis, Founder and SEO Consultant of Artios. I wrote this book here, ‘Data Driven SEO with Python‘. Been doing SEO for 20, 20 plus years, and still loving it.
David Bain
Still loving it. What book is Pam gonna pull out, I wonder, reaching for something. Maybe it wasn’t a book. Also with us today’s Pam.
Pam Aungst Cronin
Hi. I’m Pam from Pam Ann Marketing, and I own Pam Ann Marketing and Stealth Search and Analytics, and I was just distracted by that book title, because I want that book. I don’t have it to hold up, but I didn’t know you wrote that. That’s amazing. Is that on Amazon?
Andreas Voniatis
Thank you. Yeah, it is on Amazon, for sure.
Pam Aungst Cronin
Awesome. Okay, I’m gonna be getting that so I’m pitching his book before I’ve even read it, but the title is amazing.
David Bain
Superb. Thanks for joining us as well, Pam, and also with us today is Victoria.
Victoria Olsina
Hi. My name is Victoria Olsina. I’m an SEO Consultant, and I run an agency which focuses on Web3 and emerging technologies. I haven’t written any books yet, but hopefully soon.
David Bain
Hopefully soon, Absolutely.
Andreas Voniatis
Can I just interrupt you, David? I just want to say you should, everybody should definitely buy this book and read it. So I just thought I’d get that in there. Thank you.
David Bain
My book is probably, or Majestic’s book is probably the thickest doorstop, so we’ve probably won in that department. At least everyone knows to judge on the quality of the content.
Obviously, you’re focusing on Python there as well, which is a very specific aspect, or skill set that you can acquire as part of what you’re doing in SEO. But in terms of skill sets and what we’re focusing on today, Andreas, you suggested the topic and wanted to call it ‘organic growth’ as opposed to ‘search engine growth’. So, was that specifically in mind to not being constrained to search engines?
Andreas Voniatis
Yeah, 100% I think it’s kind of always been true, but it’s now more true than ever, that if you really want to succeed in SEO you need, you really need to be good at non search engine marketing, or non SEO marketing activities such as social content marketing, digital PR and you know, any, I dare say, even business development, go to market strategies. And whilst the SEO lens of authority looks at the amount of referring authoritative, referring domains to your website. You know, Google will, and other LLMs will use, well Google primarily, and search engines will use non SEO metrics, such as brand searches, for example.
David Bain
So, Pam, Andreas said that we’re talking about many different areas of marketing that even talked about sales as well that, but then mentioned Google twice, and is Google still the primary focus of organic success?
Pam Aungst Cronin
At the moment I would say so, but I also feel like that’s going to rapidly change over the coming months, and ChatGPT, or OpenAI, who owns ChatGPT, released search GPT, which is in its infancy. But if we know one thing about OpenAI is that they innovate very, very quickly, so that will definitely catch our attention soon.
And another one that an AI powered search engine that’s gaining traction is Perplexity. I keep being surprised to hear just how many people use that. So that’s definitely something we as SEOs should start to pay attention to as well.
David Bain
It’s not just SEOs who use Perplexity, is it?
Pam Aungst Cronin
No, I mean, that’s why as SEOs, we should pay attention to optimizing our clients to be found in it.
David Bain
What are your initial thoughts, Victoria?
Victoria Olsina
Yeah, I think it’s crucial. And we have seen with the rise of parasite SEO, which was very much on trend a couple of weeks ago. Well, still in trend but I think that three months ago, it was the next best thing, the quickest way to rank. And we are reaching a scenario where your website is just one of the components, organically.
And there are several other properties that you can leverage, you can borrow, like Reddit, LinkedIn, Medium to convey the message, and if you convey the message or across many platforms, the truth by consensus, which is what every AI platform does, how they reply an answer. They reply with an answer, considering the numbers of results that are there.
So if we say, if we can dominate the search engine results with parasites and our own properties, we can modify that answer. We can manipulate that answer, which is what we, SEO people, love to do, manipulate, manipulate answers now or seek the truth, however you want to see that.
David Bain
I see Yann’s watching us live in the chat. Hi, Yann, there.
Anyone watching live try and ask questions, and we’ll try and incorporate any thoughts that you have throughout the discussion.
Victoria, you mentioned parasite SEO. Are you just referring to a ‘churn and burn’ type approach for websites? And just get your maximum use of domain name, push it as far as you can, and then if Google decides that it doesn’t like it anymore, move on to something else?
Victoria Olsina
Well, it depends on the monetization model that you use. We can say if it’s for affiliate marketing, I think that ‘churn and burn’ approaches are more common than if you are doing this for a client. I think it’s a valid exercise to do parasite SEO for clients as well. Let’s say that I have a client, for example, that one of the main keywords is ‘NFT explorer’. And they’re ranking quite well on organic search for that. And it would make sense to create a Medium page that talks about that, a LinkedIn article that talks about that, and if people on Reddit are talking about NFT explorers, I think it would be also valid to recommend this one.
David Bain
What you’re essentially saying is, if it’s a very important keyword phrase, make sure that you’re ranking for that in multiple places, just in case you have some kind of downturn in success with Google for your own website.
Victoria Olsina
Well, not only if you have a downturn in success, but I have another client that is ranking on five organic positions in the SERP. One is their own website, sorry, two are their own websites. One is a product page, one is a blog page. There are two LinkedIn pages. There is one Medium page, and there is a press release. Sorry, that’s seven results. So if you’re looking for that particular query and I dominate the whole search engine result page, you might pick me, because I am the answer. And if we ask ChatGPT, who is the best in this category? ChatGPT might reply that I am the best, because I am the only one.
David Bain
Got you, okay. And for any AI results, it might take multiple articles that you have essentially posted yourself. So you’re controlling the information from multiple sources. So even though ChatGPT or other search engines are taking from multiple sources, it’s all your sources.
Victoria Olsina
Yeah, also parasite SEO has a bad reputation but YouTube videos are sort of parasite SEO. They have been used for years, and people have said, ‘Oh, if you have your page ranking for this keyword, then a video ranking for this keyword, you’re ranking for two results’. And what is that? Leveraging other platforms’ authority, I think it’s parasite SEO. But ‘parasite’ sounds bad. It’s not a good word that has a good connotation in English, is it?
There are a lot of platforms available, and you have to convey your message, and you have to tell people what you sell, whether it’s a product or service, across all of those platforms. And as we are SEOs, probably we’re going to use the same keywords or a slight variation of those keywords to convey that message.
David Bain
I mean, obviously we’re going to be talking about specific AI tools and strategies that people can use to take advantage of AI, but I think it’s important just to major on for a little bit more, how you measure success in this ever changing environment, because it used to be about clicks and rankings, and now we’re talking about brand awareness and positioning of your content in different platforms. So it’s not as easy to determine what has been successful and what hasn’t.
So it’d be great to get all of your thoughts on how you measure success, SEO success in this AI driven SEO landscape that we’re operating under now.
Shall we stick with you, Victoria for that particular question? How do you go about measuring success?
Victoria Olsina
Well, I think that success has to reflect on KPIs and business objectives, which are generally revenue, profit, more users, more applications, more book a demos, whatever those would be. And generally you do that through a website. So you could be ranking on all of these platforms, but the last click, the click where you buy something or where you book a call, is generally on your website. And I would measure success by the increase of that KPI, where is the sales revenue, apps, sorry, not apps, book a call, etc. So everything that is non-paid that comes by any of those channels that we have a presence on, I would attribute it to SEO.
David Bain
Andreas, what are your thoughts on this?
Andreas Voniatis
Yeah, I agree. You know, businesses and companies, charities, well, apart from charities, they’re not investing resources into SEO for the love of SEO. They’re doing it for a purpose and that will either be revenue or leads that transform into revenue. We’re living in an age where we’ve now got more loads of software companies offering multi touch attribution models at a fraction of the cost that they used to be so, you could go, rather than going on last click, if possible, it’d be great.
Just going back to the point we were making earlier about how to be successful in SEO, you have to be really good at your non SEO marketing activities. This is where multi touch attribution models can actually help SEO become more of an integrated marketing activity. So yes, all of the things that Victoria said, let’s try and break it down and get a more data driven view of you know, which marketing channels are performing better and where we can optimize that.
David Bain
Is it more effective to use a linear attribution model, Andreas, and do you use any particular software for that?
Andreas Voniatis
Well, I mean, I don’t want to be promoting these software brands.
David Bain
You can do that if you want.
Andreas Voniatis
I would go with something data driven, because obviously data driven means it’s actual. It’s not based on assumptions, and assumptions obviously can drive incorrect decision making.
David Bain
Pam, how do you go about measuring SEO success in this modern AI driven environment?
Pam Aungst Cronin
While I agree that those, what I call ‘the mother metrics’, are the most important, whatever it is, your revenue, your final conversion, as Victoria said, in order to get those to happen, you do need to be able to measure lead up metrics, metrics that lead up to success that show that you’re going in the right direction, you’re investing in the right things, and in SEO, traditionally, one of those has been the data that we get from Search Console, the impressions and the clicks data. Before you can get a conversion, you have to get a click, and before you get a click, you have to get an impression.
So if you know and everything works so slowly in SEO that we need to measure even if we’re on page 10, at least we’re moving from page 10 to page 9 to page 8 with what we’re doing or we’re not. And then we need to switch gears and invest our time and money in some other approach to get that to rise.
So I feel like it’s going to be difficult with these AI driven search engines that don’t give us that data, like ChatGPT, search GPT, whatever they’re going to call that, and Perplexity, we can’t know what we’re getting as far as impressions. We can know, well, at least with ChatGPT. I don’t know about Perplexity, but we can know if we get a click because it shows up as a referral, at least with ChatGPT. I’ve seen ChatGPT show up as a referral traffic source in Google Analytics, so at least we know that there was a click and a visit. But to know, I really will want to know the impressions that we’re getting now in Google’s AI Overviews, some tools have figured out how to track your positions, and just like they do with your positions in the Featured Snippets, your positions in the AI Overviews, which is great.
The tracking ability is limited right now, but I’m confident it will get better. So Google’s not telling us yet either, in Search Console if we have positions/impressions in AI Overviews, but fingers crossed, maybe they will someday. Again, my brain can’t work without those lead up metrics. I’m like, I need to know if we’re moving in the right direction towards that ultimate success.
So I do think it’s going to be a challenge, particularly in the coming year, with these AI powered search engines that just don’t give us that information and really don’t have any reason to, I guess, like, if you think about it, Google has a bit of a reason to give us Search Console data, if nothing else, to show what keywords the website’s showing up for and hope that we buy ads on them. Maybe that will become a driving factor too, I don’t know, but so that’s my thing, that I think is going to be challenging, is getting those lead up metrics.
Andreas Voniatis
So I would agree with you there, Pam, because this is why I’m talking about multi touch attribution modeling, especially pathway analysis, because obviously we all know that sometimes you have unrealistic expectations from clients saying, Well, if I get, if I put a blog up, you know, or guide, yes, I’ll get loads of traffic, but where’s the revenue? And it’s just like Pam says, people go through, there’s a lead up, and so, yeah, absolutely, track those metrics.
If you can log impressions on your website, so that you can try and see the same impression go traversing different areas of your website, so that eventually it leads to a sale. That’s where the data driven attribution modeling can really help you measure the value of the content, so that the sales page is not taking all of the credit for the traffic that led to revenue, if that makes sense.
David Bain
Yann says in the chat that he’s seen ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity show as referrals in the Google Search Console ‘insights’, but it’s very limited.
Pam, you mentioned that there are a few tools out there that are displaying the fact that you have been featured in AI Overviews?
Have we any idea of the percentage click through rate that we’re getting from AI Overviews and other features like that? Because there used to be an assumption that if we were number one in the SERP, then perhaps we would get a 20% click through rate or something like that. Do you know roughly what percentage click through rate that we’re getting from AI Overviews, or is that not something that has really been calculated or is being shared at the moment?
Pam Aungst Cronin
It’s not being shared at the moment, Google has said, I think what they said was that the AI Overviews, the links in the AI Overviews get a better click through rate, or at least as good as a click through rate. I think they said they had a better click through rate than the answer box did. I believe they said something to that effect, but they’re not giving us exact numbers. And the tracking tools that can track your positions in the AI Overviews also don’t give us the clicks or the click through rate, like what happens after that? Perhaps you could infer from the search volume and try to do some forecasting. I don’t know.
The short answer is, ‘No’. We don’t have that type of data yet, but I sure hope we do in the future, and that’s good to know that Search Console Insights that Yann said he’s seen in Search Console Insights evidence of referrals coming from ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, that’s a good sign. Now, not all of our clients’ Search Console properties have the ‘insights’ feature rolled out yet, but hopefully they will soon, and I look forward to playing with that to get some data.
David Bain
Great. Okay, so search GPT or AI Overviews are certainly a couple of the opportunities that can be powered by AI to enhance organic growth. So it’d be good to actually chat about what, how we use AI to hopefully deliver better results to AI. It’s a little bit of a self fulfilling prophecy here, but it certainly makes sense to be.
Andreas, how do we use AI to deliver more results to AI?
Andreas Voniatis
The great thing about AI is that it’s just making a mockery of the current, traditional, I dare say, modern, but fast receding costs of consumer research to do better marketing. So instead of producing content that’s based on search volume metrics, which are all based on Google ads, it still goes on even two decades later.
With AI, we can, like I do, scrape the internet and then use AI to synthesize that data so as to create like AI copies of a target audience, and then interrogate that target audience as if you were asking, as if you were getting answers to a survey response.
For example, for my North American clients if you were to try and run a consumer research survey that could easily run into 10s of 1000s of dollars, if you wanted to get a really good sample size that was nationally representative, but with AI, you can do that at a fraction of a cost, and you get really useful insights, not just for general marketing planning and strategy. But you can also use it for informing what topics you’re going to cover for your organic growth plan.
David Bain
So data scraping the internet, that seems like a fairly big task. Andreas, I presume that you’re talking about a specific section of the internet. So how do you go about determining what to scrape?
Andreas Voniatis
So it’s really just it always starts with the question as to what kind of answers are you looking for? It could be a specific market, industry, and you’re looking for a certain target audience, maybe a target ICP, and then naturally, you’re not going to scrape the whole internet. You may scrape industry forums, communities, things like that. And then that will be a starting point. And then, naturally, you can nuance this before you actually push the buttons to start scraping.
David Bain
So, what software are you using to do the scraping? And then what software are you using to analyze the scraping?
Andreas Voniatis
Well, it’s all bespoke, but in terms of the analysis I use, and actually, in my book, I’ve alluded to how you could go about writing code to accomplish marketing tasks with respect to SEO, but the book predated ChatGPT 4. I actually wrote my own LLM to generate title tags ChatGPT style. But when ChatGPT 2 came out, I thought, ‘No, you won’t be doing this as a business. They’re way better funded than you’.
But sorry, I digress. So you know, there’s the OpenAI API, OpenAI obviously owns ChatGPT, and so I can use that to synthesize survey style research answers to a 95% statistical significance level, or confidence level, as we call it, so that is an example of how you could use AI to get those answers that would power your organic marketing growth.
David Bain
Jeannie Hill is saying in the chat: ‘how do you recommend assessing clicks and AI Overviews if they are a fundamentally different user experience?’ Does anyone fancy taking that one?
Pam Aungst Cronin
Well I think it’s tricky to answer that right now because we don’t have the data yet. So once we hopefully get data from Google about the click through rates, the impressions, the positions within the position. If we think of the AI Overview as one position, there’s actually multiple positions in there.
There’s multiple links and at least three are shown, usually, if not more so until we have that data, we really can’t assess anything yet, but to go back to the previous point, since we’re not all mega Python wizards like Andreas, I’m jealous, and I wish I was, I tinker with it. But what we’re doing for our clients as a starting point, and recommending that anybody do as a starting point to optimize, to get into AI Overviews, is to go and play with Gemini.
So the AI Overviews at the top of the Google search results are powered by the Gemini app. So you can just go to Gemini, log in directly, and chat with it, just like ChatGPT. So we go in, we put in the desired search topic that we want our client to get found for, and we review the results. There’s actually a little like Google icon at the bottom of the answer that says like something to the fact, ‘double check this result’, and then it will go at that point and try to find citations to back it up, find web pages to back it up, and it will link the web pages to each point. And it’s so interesting to watch.
And also keep in mind that these chatbots, they actually take the data they’ve been trained on and summarize it and answer the question first, then they go look for citations to back it up. So one of the most beautiful opportunities you can stumble upon in Gemini is when you hit that double check result, it goes to find citations to back up, it’s all of its key points. And sometimes there’ll be a little orangish red one that says ‘we couldn’t find a citation for this point’. That’s a beautiful opportunity right there. We’re going in, we’re creating content on that point.
I keep mentioning each point because, you know, the chatbots answer things in a bulleted format most times. And each one is an opportunity to get found. That’s very important to keep in mind too, because AIs use chunks. The very first thing when an AI digests information is it chunks it up and stores it in chunks, and then it goes and refers to it in chunks, which is why the answers are usually very chunky and have different sections.
But I think as SEOs, we’re too accustomed to thinking of optimizing a whole page as one thing, as one entity. We really need to start thinking about each section, each chunk of each page, as an individual opportunity to rank. I think David, we talked about this on another recording we did, and I think we nicknamed it ‘chunk SEO’, right?
Victoria Olsina
We’re talking about featured snippets, right?
Pam Aungst Cronin
I didn’t catch that Victoria. What was that?
Victoria Olsina
The evolution of feature snippets?
Pam Aungst Cronin
Yeah, definitely. So I think that playing around in Gemini and finding those opportunities where you can get, you can optimize even just one chunk of your content for that one opportunity, that’s the way to start looking at it, I think.
David Bain
And is there an easy way to identify those opportunities in Gemini, Pam? Is there software that can be used to do that, or is it a fairly manual process at the moment?
Pam Aungst Cronin
I am not aware of any software yet, although I’m so sure Andreas could write it in five minutes after this episode. But right now, it’s just a manual process and, and I think that’s okay for now. It makes it very accessible to anyone who’s writing content, any individual, small business owner, marketer, any copywriter can go in and play with Gemini and just kind of get a feel for how this all works.
And always remember to hit that double check result button, because Gemini itself will tell you, without any software, scraping it or anything, it will tell you, I don’t have a good source for this point right here, and that’s what you can go for.
David Bain
We’ll get to Victoria just in a second. But Jeannie’s got another question for you, Pam, and that is, ‘Is using a linked content table plus HTML sections one way to optimize for “chunks”?’
Pam Aungst Cronin
Absolutely, we’re actually having a lot of initial success with that. First of all, we’ve kind of always made sure, but we’re really drilling down now making sure that everybody’s H tag structure is perfect, which is necessary for adding a proper table of contents with links and anchors to jump to each section.
So we’re making sure that the H tag structure is on point and very, very chunked up. And then, yes, we’ve seen moments where we add the table of contents to a page and boom, all of a sudden we’re getting found in AI overviews.
David Bain
Great. Victoria, how can AI assist with delivering more organic growth?
Victoria Olsina
In so many ways, I think that beyond what Andreas has said, I find it, I’m not a coder, but I feel closer to becoming a coder with AI tools and closer to automating manual tasks with AI tools. Besides that, in agencies or as individual consultants, we deal with a lot of clients that are different, that are complex, that have done things or that they do things we have never heard of.
My main expertise is in Web3 and there are companies and products redefining categories. And it’s not, even though I have a lot of experience in this industry, I don’t know everything, it’s very hard to get to know a client in depth in a month’s time where strategy is delivered.
I think that the most valuable way that we use ChatGPT and other AI tools in my agency is by developing agents that have all of the clients’ information. So we can ask them, ‘Why is this the best solution in the market? Why is it better than the competitor? How can we craft pages for things or for technologies we might not fully understand?’
And you can do that with anything. It doesn’t have to be Web3 but if you’re selling dog supplements, which have a lot of ingredients, or, I don’t know, STEM toys, everything that you’re, you’re not an expert in most of your clients, or most of the things that your clients sell, you aspire to be, or we say that we have, but realistically, it’s very hard to catch up with each and every single client and what they do.
So I think the development of this kind of custom GPTs for us has been pivotal, and we have been able to automate a lot of tasks, get to know our clients better. I think that’s the most valuable thing we are doing right now with AI tools.
David Bain
So do you create a custom GPT for each client?
Victoria Olsina
Yeah, I do. And I have several of myself as well.
David Bain
Just one for each client?
Victoria Olsina
Yeah because that is the client. So everything that you have, or, for example, let’s do ‘Victoria Olsina SEO’. Victoria, I have participated in several webinars like this, different conferences, different books, different articles. Well, that custom GPT of me that is designed to tell people everything I have accomplished on LinkedIn writes based on that knowledge base. I have built the knowledge base of myself to do a particular task, and you can do that for every client and it doesn’t even have to be a particular task. It’s like you are this person, and you answer according to your database, you are the client.
David Bain
So in this ‘let’s buy Andreas’s book’ episode, we’ve got Sante J. Achille saying: ‘Andreas, nice book, if I purchase a hard copy, is there an online resource for the Python scripts?’
Andreas Voniatis
Not currently. This is a discussion with the publisher. I can’t really say too much more than that.
But most importantly, in the book, the code, I would say, is of secondary value. The bigger value is the data science mindset, the mathematical mindset of breaking down an SEO problem. And because Python may not be the code of tomorrow, it could be Go or there’s another language called Julia.
So it’s more important the book is there to show you mathematical thinking, and it is important to think of it as maths, because that is what Google is doing, It’s using maths, or ‘math’ in the US, to organize the world’s information. It’s breaking down language, turning it into, using mathematical models and in fact, that’s what ChatGPT does. It breaks everything into numbers to then make sense of it.
So, if you’re going to go to a motor race, you don’t want to turn up with a bicycle, you want to turn up with a racing car or hopefully a helicopter. And so, you know, to really sort of get on terms with Google, the mathematical thinking, or the data science thinking is really important.
David Bain
Victoria, just staying on your custom GPTs for a second there. What are the key elements to incorporate in a custom GPT for a client?
Victoria Olsina
Well, it depends. What I would do is I would include branding and messaging to set up the tone of how that client talks, and samples, or the whole everything that you have of them, like, if there is a pitch to investors, if there is the whole website, you can download and upload to the database everything that is available. I mean, yeah, website, branding, a messaging document, and anything else you might have.
Pam Aungst Cronin
So what do you use for your data, the database part of it, because? On ChatGPT, you can, if you’re a plus subscriber, I think you can go make a custom GPT, but, yeah, it doesn’t have the knowledge documents. Well, I guess they’re rolling that out, but in the meantime, what have you been using?
Victoria Olsina
Yeah, I’ve used a custom GPT so you upload the files.
Pam Aungst Cronin
Okay, so you’re using their new feature where they actually can build a knowledge base for you.
Victoria Olsina
So I saw the newest one NotebookLM.google is the newest one, the ones that probably you have seen the robot podcasting and having an existential crisis when they realize they are AI. So no, I don’t use this one. I use the normal one, custom GPTs. You can drop a lot of files in there.
Obviously, the more data you have the better. But it doesn’t always, with everything you have to check the data. It will be ideal that all of the data is correct, sometimes even on their own website, sometimes clients contradict themselves or they have older blog post from 2007 which is not the same thing as now. Ideally, if you can filter, if there are the parts that you recognize that shouldn’t be there. It’s better to offer clean information. Otherwise you just roll with it. And it has to be fact checked by the agency and possibly by the client. That’s how I do it.
David Bain
Got a question from Kin Hong Tan, and I’m going to ask Victoria to have a little look at it because it includes Web3 in there. And that is, ‘how do we track organic performance and chatbots in the chatbot search landscape, but also in Web3 as well?’ So what are your general thoughts, Victoria, about how to measure how well you’re doing in AI chatbots and Web3?
Victoria Olsina
So I recently published on LinkedIn, I think it was last week. The code, it sounds more complex than it is, a Regex string to filter out traffic from different chatbots, traffic that comes to your website. Right now, the only way I am tracking, or the only thing I can track, is website, chatbot traffic to the website. I don’t know if any of you are tracking anything else. I don’t know what happens on the chatbot itself, right?
I mean, if it’s a custom GPT, you could track how many people are using it. How many views it has. But from what I know it’s a black box OpenAI or Gemini, we don’t have data of what is happening there. We only have the data of the users that are going to the website.
And in terms of Web3, I work with Web3 clients that have websites. I’m not talking about web tracking any of these KPIs on Web3, there are analytics platforms that will operate on Web3, but that’s not what we’re talking about now.
David Bain
What should we still be using humans for in the creation of content? Are there certain tasks that AI just shouldn’t be doing, and if you use AI to do then you’re going to probably be shooting yourself in the foot as opposed to actually assisting either your content production process or or something else there.
Pam, what are your thoughts there?
Pam Aungst Cronin
So I am still pretty spirited in my conviction that all your content should not be written by a chatbot. You can do your content ideation. You can get wonderfully detailed content briefs, wonderfully detailed content outlines for what you should write. But I still feel strongly that human writing is going to have an edge.
Forget about whether Google says it’s okay or Google says it’s not okay. You can see AI content, it’s bland, it’s generic, it has a certain style tone to it, and yes, you can train it to change that. But I just feel like in a world where the internet is just fire hosed with new AI written content every day, the human written content really is what’s going to stand out.
And Google tells us that too, that’s what they want us to do. They added the new E in EAT, which is now EEAT because it’s not just Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. They now want you to talk about your personal human experience with the topic in the content, and I believe they said that for that very purpose, to combat the fire hose of generic, bland, AI chatbot written content that is flooding the internet.
So, to stand out and because Google’s telling us to, I think that the majority of the content, even if you do your briefs and your outlines or whatever in the chatbot, the majority should be human written.
David Bain
Okay, I can see Andreas nodding away there, but Victoria had a poker face. So come to both of you, Andreas, you go first.
Andreas Voniatis
100%. To add to that, when I started building my own LLM for title tag optimization, one thing that occurred to me is that LLMs tend to produce, tend to use certain types of words that are easily detectable by AIs, such as Google’s Search Engine algorithm and it’s a really kind of, excuse the word, ‘slap dash’ or ‘sloppy’, as you say in the States, way of producing content. It’s going to contain trigger words that will set off the alarm bells in Google’s algorithms, which make it very clear, whilst I agree with the principle of what Google says that it’s the value, not how it’s produced.
There are things you can do using AI to produce content of value. You can use AI to produce proprietary research, or primary research that’s proprietary to you, and inject that into your content. So that is a legitimate way of using AI to inform or inject into your content, but certainly not the writing or the art of writing, and that is one of the things that humans can still do today.
David Bain
Victoria, certainly not the writing. What are your thoughts?
Victoria Olsina
Are you saying that if people start a paragraph with the words ‘In the changing landscape’, or ‘In the realm of digital marketing’, people might realize it’s AI? I have to have a filter for that. None of my chatbots use these words.
I think that I want to differentiate between the best case scenario and real life scenarios of life. If I have zero, I think that AI can take me to 50% and I would choose 50% rather than zero. And that happens with projects where clients don’t have a lot of budget to execute things. I prefer 50% and not zero.
Now, if we, the human, certainly, we can take that 50% to 90% and that will be the best case scenario, 90, 100 and it would. And the one that I choose depends on the constraints of the project, that’s my answer. Is it better? Yes. Are humans better? Yes, 100%. Do you always have a capable human that is available, that can do it right in the right time or right budget? Not always. If that option is available, I would go with that. If that option is not available, I prefer to use AI.
David Bain
So, Vlad is thanking everyone for some wonderful discussion panel. He’s also leaving us with a question, ‘What are your thoughts on using AI to earn backlinks?’
So let’s ask everyone’s opinion on that very quickly. And at the same time, we’ll ask everyone, just to remind the viewer, the listener, who you are and where they can find you.
So let’s have a speed last question round, and then we’ll sign off for this particular panel discussion. So shall we go to Andreas first?
Andreas Voniatis
Yeah, there’s quite a few ways you could use AI to backlinks. First of all, if you’re doing outreach, even building the database, you can use AI to help you synthesize your data scrape so that you can put together a media database. At the moment, they’re being sold for 1000s of dollars a year.
The beauty of AI is that we can with a bit of elbow grease, we can do it ourselves. Instead of using a journalist outreach platform, you can even use AI to put together a system where you can send personalized, cold outreach emails to get those backlinks in terms of the content.
I already spoke about it about five minutes ago, where I was talking about injecting proprietary value into your content so it makes your content link worthy.
David Bain
Leave the other tips for others. Where can people find you?
Andreas Voniatis
Oh, yeah. You can find me on LinkedIn, all the socials, but I mainly hang out on LinkedIn, and my website is artios.io. Thank you.
David Bain
Thank you so much for joining us.
Victoria, what are your thoughts on the final question, and where can people find you?
Victoria Olsina
One of my robots, that’s how I outreach. And as such, I have the list of all the successful answers, right. I do this. I don’t pitch a lot, maybe 10 a month. Is not that something I do extensively, but I build robots for the things I don’t want to do, like post on LinkedIn, reply to hire a request, or another task.
So I have the list of the winning post and and obviously a prompt that tells you how to answer. And these are the sample of successful answers, and all of the new answers are based on that. And I have improved my conversion rate. It was from 30% to 42%, 43% now using this method, also it has the database of my experience. So it will refer to real things. It will not make up stats or case studies. It’s a plaque to the things that I have done in real life and case studies that I have done.
And if people want to get in touch with me, they can. I’m on LinkedIn, and my website is victoriaolsina.com.
I have enjoyed this very much. Thank you for inviting me.
David Bain
Thank you so much for coming on.
And Pam, what are your thoughts on the last question? Where can people find you?
Pam Aungst Cronin
I’ll piggyback off of something Andreas mentioned before, first party research publication of that data. I’ve always had so many ideas for how I want to analyze our clients’ results and do research studies within our own data that we have as an agency, and it’s just always been too cumbersome. I think with AI, we can finally start to do this in a reasonable amount of time, and it will add so much value to our content.
And with that, I’ll say you can find me on all the socials at Pam Ann Marketing or pamannmarketing.com.
David Bain
Superb. I’ve been your host, David Bain. You’ve been listening to the Majestic SEO Panel. If you want to join us live next time, sign up at majestic.com/webinars and of course, check out our other series at SEOin2024.com. Soon to become a brand new series, and I’ll let you guess the domain name for that. Until next time, bye bye for now. Thank you.
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