#274: AI-Driven Content and the Future of SEO

In this episode of the Blogger Genius Podcast, Jillian Leslie interviews Steve Wiideman about the impact of AI, especially for bloggers and content creators who rely on SEO for traffic.

They discuss the use of large language models like Chat GPT and BARD, and how they can affect search rankings and content creation.

They also talk about the potential benefits and drawbacks of AI and its impact on businesses and individuals.

Additionally, Jillian shares her observations and fears about AI and how it is changing the world. They emphasize the importance of authenticity and brand voice in content creation, which can outperform automatically generated content.

Steve also shares his experience using different AI tools and advises businesses to try out different tools to find the one that aligns best with their brand and values.

They conclude that AI can do a lot of heavy lifting, but it’s essential to maintain authenticity and human touch in content creation.

AI-Driven Content and the Future of SEO | The Blogger Genius Podcast with Jillian Leslie

Show Notes:

Intro (00:00:04) – Welcome to the Blogger Genius Podcast, brought to you by MiloTree. Here’s your host, Jillian Leslie.

Jillian Leslie (00:00:11) – Hello my friends. Welcome back to the Blogger Genius Podcast. I’m so happy you’re here. I’m Jillian Leslie and I’m a serial entrepreneur and blogger.

My husband David and I started our journey in 2009 when we built Catch My Party and we’ve grown it into the largest party ideas site on the web into party ideas, free printables, recipes, head over there.

After Catch My Party, we built our pop-up app, MiloTree that many of you use. You install it on your blog and you grow your social media followers or email subscribers effortlessly.

And now we have launched MiloTreeCart, which is ready, the perfect payment tool for creators who hate technology. In fact, this was a really fun thing that happened today.

I had a call with a new MiloTreeCart customer because when you purchase MiloTree Cart, I get on a 30-minute call with you.

Starting a Membership

And by the way, just so you know, our prices are going up. If MiloTree is interesting to you, buy it now because you will see a pretty substantial increase. Anyway, today I’m on the phone with Joycelynn, shout out, hi Joycelynn if you’re listening to this.

And she wanted to start a membership. She had heard one of my last podcasts about the value of memberships and she thought, Hmm, this sounds interesting. And she is somebody who is 55+ and she wanted to start a membership to help women grow businesses like side hustles during this stage of their lives.

And it turns out that she is a nurse and she wants to help nurses experiencing burnout start their side hustle so they can ultimately leave their jobs. And this is the best part. I said to her, great. And I could tell that she wanted to do a lot of planning for her membership.

And I said, you are never going to get all your ducks in a row. Believe me, I struggle with this all the time as well. My recommendation to you is go, go right now, log into MiloTreeCart, set up your sales page and start your membership.

And lo and behold, an hour later, I got an email with a link to her new sales page. Remember with MiloTreeCart, we give you unlimited fill in the blank sales pages. She’s got her sales page up and ready to go.

And I emailed her back and I said, “Awesome job. Next step, go get three members.” So, I’m waiting to hear back because hopefully she will get those three members in the next week and be off and running.

If you’ve ever thought of starting a membership, please don’t wait. The world needs what you are putting out, especially today when we are so isolated. So, go check out MiloTreeCart.

For today’s episode I have my SEO friend Steve Wiideman back on the podcast because as you know, I am really leaning into AI trying to understand what this crazy thing is, and I share my observations, I share my fears.

And it’s really interesting to hear Steve’s perspective on business building on traffic, on how to create content withAI. Steve is running experiments left and right and even during the middle of the podcast he started running one.

I think this episode is a must listen because the world is changing quickly and you don’t want to be left behind. So, without further delay, here is my interview with Steve Wiideman.

Steve, welcome back to the Blogger Genius Podcast. I’m so happy you’re back.

Steve Wiideman (00:04:10) – I am so happy to be hanging out with you again, Jillian.

Impact of AI on the Online World

Jillian Leslie (00:04:13) – I wrote to you because I’m reading all the stuff about AI, I’m starting to play around with it like Bard and ChatGPT.

And I’m noticing in my own behavior that I’m going to say ChatGPT as the first place where I’m looking for information and I’m thinking, what are the ripple effects? How is this going to affect our online world, especially with my audience who are bloggers?

And I thought you are a top SEO, I need to pick your brain about this because I don’t even know how to think about it. So, thank you so much for coming back.

Steve Wiideman (00:04:48) – Oh, absolutely. I think the whole digital marketing world and anybody whose life depends on the internet is experimenting with all these large language models.

And I don’t think a lot of folks have fully been at least immersed in what the technology is and what’s happening. They’re just going out there and throwing out prompts and testing and trying things without taking just a few minutes to go, what is this? Is this the matrix?

Is there a database behind all the information that it’s getting? Is it crawling the web like a search engine? What is this whole neuro processing thing? And so, it’s exciting to see so many people interested in technology, and using it.

I just hope that it doesn’t go so fast that the world doesn’t stop to fully understand what it is that they’re working with and be prepared for what could come and maybe even start thinking about ways that they could incorporate this into their business, how they can use it to improve their lives.

How they could literally create an entire life path with some prompts of saying, here’s where I want to be in 10 years, here’s where I am, what do I do? There are so many cool things that you can experiment with to draw inspiration from.

Jillian Leslie (00:06:11) – AI. Wow, I hadn’t even thought about that. Personally, I feel like I am of two minds. On one hand I find it incredibly exciting and on the flip side, I also find it destabilizing.

And as I hear people talk about what the future could potentially look like, it’s like, wow, that’s weird. But that’s cool. And then I keep reading even though people are prognosticating, nobody knows anything of really what this is going to be, how it’s going to evolve.

Steve Wiideman (00:06:41) – All of our business today doesn’t come from phone books. It comes from people who are searching the web to find us and referral and word of mouth and sometimes some paid advertising.

A lot of businesses don’t have the budget for paid advertising. So, they start with just creating content on their websites and staying up late trying to make sure their business is listed everywhere it can, which indirectly supports them appearing for some of the keywords that they’d like to show up for.

That’s how people find us and what we do. So, thinking about how AI can impact us with that. If you imagine, 10 plumbers in an area all jump on ChatGPT, and they write a page that says emergency plumber repair.

And they all use AI generated content and they all snap it on their page and then they wait and hope that Bard and Google search will display them in the search rankings. It’s not likely that any of them are going to display one because if you think about it, there’s no narrative or brand voice in any of that.

And yeah, they’re getting better ChatGPT in particular with the latest GPT-4 getting better at adding more personality if you ask it to, or even the voice of a specific author, which is really creepy.

Jillian Leslie (00:07:53) – Right, right, right. You can say, write this missing J. K. Rowling or Stephen King or whoever it is.

Authenticity and Brand Voice in Content Creation

Steve Wiideman (00:08:01) – So fun. You could write a love letter to your wife with J. K. Rowling style. It’s so fun. What’s neat was just thinking about the content itself.

If you’re one of those plumbers, the plumber that has the video that says, “Hi, I’m Joe and I’m with so and so plumbing, let me tell you why it’s important if you’re in an emergency to call us, here’s what we’ve done. Here’s who we are. Check out some of our reviews.”

And there’s that authenticity. And you’ve got some pictures of examples of what you’ve done before and after and you’ve got a few testimonials from real customers with their picture next to it. That page is going to outperform that automatically generated content from whatever large language model you decide to use night and day.

The Future of Content Creation with AI

So, I think what’s going to happen is, we are going to start using this technology to generate the base of our content, and then we’re going to modify it and make it our own if we’re going to be successful.

But the days of us hand typing anything I think are over, I think we’re going to draw from our sources in the SEO world.

We’re going to look at what shows up in Google search results and we’re going to extrapolate the words and entities and topics that we see in titles and headings to help us to create an outline of content that we feel aligns with what Google is already displaying.

And then we’re going to throw that into Bard and ChatGPT and say, write me up, a service page, emphasizing these keywords in headings and subheadings.

And then they write the page and then you go through and add your brand voice on it. I think that’s where it’s going. I’m still kind of old school. I still like sharing my knowledge and experience in my industry when I’m writing content.

I don’t think I’m ever going to lean on ChatGPT to write my content. But it would be interesting every time to see what types of topics and sub-topics they bring up.

I completely forgot about user search behaviors. I should add that to my article, but I’m going to write it my way. I’m not going to take ChatGPT’s definition because ‘m a textbook author and I like to write my own stuff, you.

Impact of AI on Traffic and Monetization

Jillian Leslie (00:10:10) – I know, but here’s the thing. What if I make my money as a blogger via traffic, because I’ve noticed, I’ve started to go to ChatGPT with my questions.

So today, just randomly, I wanted to read about the First Amendment and instead of going to Google and typing in “First Amendment”, I went to ChatGPT and I said, “Can you explain the First Amendment to me?”

And I always say, as an eighth grader, and lo and behold, there it was, but I’m not going to anybody’s website to learn about it. And then I did as an exercise, go do it in Google. And it was harder. I ended up on the history channel, but it wasn’t tailored to me.

It was like, here’s a definition of the First Amendment. It was like all the amendments and stuff, and I had to read it, but it didn’t feel weirdly as like, written for me.

So, how does this work now if, let’s say I’m a parenting blogger or I’m a food blogger, I’m a craft blogger, who knows what my specialty is? Am I going to be able to get traffic and monetize via ads anymore? Or is that going away?

Steve Wiideman (00:11:23) – No, you’ll absolutely be able to do that. This isn’t going to be a thing that replaces web search results.

Jillian Leslie (00:11:28) – You don’t think so?

Steve Wiideman (00:11:29) – I think it’s going to be great for informational type queries and eventually more on transactional type queries. But right now, I have a feeling people are really just going to ask questions and looking for information more than anything.

Purchases are still happening on sites that they trust, such as Amazon and eBay and that sort of thing. And I don’t think shopping ads are going anywhere because people like options.

And if you just ask a question to ChatGPT or to Bard, you’re limited in the options that you’re going to get back when you want to shop.

If you know exactly what you want and the item type, you could probably with ChatGPT since it only goes back to 2021, but with Bard you could probably say, find me the most affordable of this product shipped from the United States.

And there’s probably some cool things that you can do with that pretty soon. Once they take it out of beta, you’ll be able to actually use it almost like a virtual assistant.

We were playing with it the other day and we asked the question like, “Schedule a meeting between myself and Leo,” with a subject line of, “Meet for lunch.” And I said, “Done,” I’m like, whoa.

Jillian Leslie (00:12:46) – Wait, wait, was this in your email client?

Steve Wiideman (00:12:49) – This was Bard.

Jillian Leslie (00:12:50) – Oh wow, okay.

Steve Wiideman (00:12:52) – But it didn’t, it didn’t actually put the event on the calendar because again, it’s in beta. And so, we were disappointed to not, let’s not say it.

Jillian Leslie (00:12:59) – So, what if I would be typing in like give me the best chocolate chip cookie recipe?

Steve Wiideman (00:13:07) – That would be interesting. In fact, I’ve got a few open, I could start with Bard just for fun. I could just ask, “Give me the best chocolate chip recipe,” and I’m sure it’s going to be different.

I also have Edge open to see how Bing, which you know, is partially powered by ChatGPT would respond to the same thing. And we didn’t really talk about the differences between the two.

Jillian Leslie (00:13:32) – Let’s do that. Let’s do.

Steve Wiideman (00:13:33) – Give me the best chocolate chip recipe.

Jillian Leslie (00:13:36) – And your chocolate chip cookie.

Steve Wiideman (00:13:39) – So the first one, basically gave a recipe, this is Bard. And Bard actually gave me the source’s time, and normally I don’t see the source. So, it’s really fascinating that it’s actually sourcing where it got it from.

Jillian Leslie (00:13:53) – Is there a link? Can I click on the link?

Steve Wiideman (00:13:56) – There is. Really kind of neat. The one thing, again, differentiating between the different AI, you’ve got ChatGPT, which goes back to data that it has from 2021 and now there’s some extensions and plugins that they’re allowing developers to goof around with that will actually use the web.

Jillian Leslie (00:14:18) – Explain. So, ChatGPT is data from 2021?

Steve Wiideman (00:14:28) – 2021.

Jillian Leslie (00:14:29) – So, from the beginning of the internet to 2021?

Steve Wiideman (00:14:34) – Correct.

Jillian Leslie (00:14:35) – Okay.

Steve Wiideman (00:14:36) – And that’s ChatGPT. So, if you said, give me a breakdown or a summary of this article, and it’s a recent article, ChatGPT would not be able to do that yet unless you’re a developer and you’re developing an extension that allows it to go hybrid.

Whereas Bard can actually access a live file pretty soon. Even Google Sheets. I’ve tried a few Google sheet URLs and it’s actually pretending like it’s looking at a Google sheet, but it gives you some generic one.

It will be interesting when it does launch. Because you can load up, you could load up, this is my favorite thing about this, and I know it’s a little bit off topic, but with Bard now you can say, I have 10,000 keywords I’ve researched in this spreadsheet.

Using AI for Keyword Research and Site Mapping

And you can link to a Google sheet public viewable file and say, turn these keywords into a website’s content taxonomy. Or build a site map with silos based on the keywords in this list sorted by the keywords that have the highest search volume.

As long as you have a search volume column, it will literally generate your entire site map for you. And we’ve done some different prompts and we got really close to being able to do exactly that.

But the problem was they couldn’t actually access the Google Sheet URL, so we had to paste in a limited number. I think we got up to a couple hundred that we were able to paste in and have it actually build out a site map based on pages that we should create that would generate traffic from search engines.

Jillian Leslie (00:16:09) – Wow.

Steve Wiideman (00:16:12) – There’s the difference.

Jillian Leslie (00:16:14) – What would you say the differences specifically are? Do you feel like Bard is deeper, richer, more robust?

Steve Wiideman (00:16:26) – No. From some of the results we’ve had so far, I’ve seen just the opposite. I’ve seen where it’s excluded its sources because it’s trying to come up with original content according to Google. And it’s still good, it’s still helpful content.

Here’s an example. I asked ChatGPT the other day. One of the fun brands we get to work with is Jollibee and we asked the question and this is interesting, we said, “Build a content marketing calendar for the next 12 months for Jollibee or Jollibee Foods.”

We asked ChatGPT that and it came up with actual content ideas named ideas that you could use that were really good ideas, that were really fun.

We went to Bing and it actually gave us some structure. Instead of giving us specific named ideas, it said, start a blog, build a community, do you know, social media things. And it was a very thought put out campaign strategy without specific topics or themes.

And then Bard did the same thing that Bing did, but a little bit less interesting. Still gave us some topics. And I’ll share the screenshots with you after we chat just so that you can have more to play around with. It wasn’t as exciting and as specific as ChatGPT was.

Again, ChatGPT had months and months and months to be out there and be improving and growing. And Bard just got released a couple weeks ago. So, it’s still in its infant stage, it’s still learning.

Advertisement (00:18:06) – I want to take a short break to say, if you are liking this podcast and you want to be part of the community where people are talking to each other and I’m showing up and I’m especially talking about AI and digital products and blogging, please join my Facebook group.

It’s called the Become a Blogger Genius Facebook group. Super easy to remember, just head over to Facebook, search for it and please join. I would love to have you in there and I think it’s a really nice place. And now back to the show.

Jillian Leslie – So, what I hear you saying is that the way it has worked is not going away. What is going to happen is though we are going to start with an AI to give us ideas, outlines, those kinds of things, and then we add our human touch on top of it.

The future of search and AI

Steve Wiideman (00:19:06) – We’re creatures of habits though, Jillian. I have a feeling it’s more that I’m comfortable with doing what’s always worked, which is going to google.com and performing a search.

What I think is going to happen is Google is going to say, “Hey, would you like to chat?” Or, “Try our chat feature,” and then you’ll toggle over to that and I still like being able to go through different pages and look at other websites.

I’m still not getting exactly the result I want. I think that that’s probably the long-term transition that’s ahead of us.

Jillian Leslie (00:19:37) – Do you think search is going to still be there? It’s not just going to go directly to the chat.

Steve Wiideman (00:19:45) – Correct. And we see this because there are all sorts of new search engines that are coming out and some of them, I don’t know if you’ve been playing with them, but some of them have already had these features.

Like Neeva, I think it’s $5 a month, no ads and it’s just neeva.com, N-E-E-V-A. And I love the concept. I love to not have to look at ads all day. As an SEO I’m all about it because now I don’t have to compete against ads.

I can get all the traffic and not just a percentage of it because people are clicking on ads. And so, Neeva had this for months now where you can do a search and there you’ll see the web results at the bottom. And at the top there’ll be a little box and that box will do its little ChatGPT thing where it’ll start typing in feedback and examples and then sources.

It is really exciting to see, but it’s not exclusive yet. And I think people are comfortable with how they’re searching right now and you can’t just say, okay, we’re done with search, you’re going to just use chat going forward.

I think people would need some time to adapt and be comfortable with it. And like the answers, because in a lot of cases they might not like the answers. They might want to see the little stars below the map results that you won’t see in a ChatGPT or a Bard yet.

Bing is doing a little bit of a hybrid because Bing is using ChatGPT it’s using its own system. So, if you do a search in Bing for something like, “Give me the top personal injury lawyers in Los Angeles,” it’s going to give you a little bit of both.

It gives you some of the chat feedback and then it also gives you a map. So, it’s definitely going to be fun to watch and to explore and play with. But I think it’s just the whole technology in and of itself is exciting.

The one thing I’m waiting for is a site that aggregates the results from all of the large language models. Give me ChatGPT, give me mixed with Bing, give me Bard and put it all into one and then give me a summary of all the different ideas so I don’t have to use different search engines.

And that’s going to be really interesting when someone’s able to build something like that because the answers are always so different in many cases on the different technologies. That’s why I always have them open now because I always want to see the difference.

Jillian Leslie (00:22:06) – Oh, that’s so interesting because I am mostly using ChatGPT. We just paid for a premium plan where with $20 we get access, go ahead to GPT-4. And an example for MiloTreeCart is we are planning to incorporate it.

So, we have sales page templates like put in what problem you’re solving for your audience with your ebook and what are three benefits for selling this product. And now we’re going to incorporate ChatGPT because right now I have a prompt that works really well, but we’re going to pull those benefits in for you.

All I need to know is what your product does, and chances are we can generate some pretty good benefits. So, we’re planning to pull that right into these sales page templates.

And if you play around it all in Canva, they’ve already rolled that out where you want to create a presentation and say in five words or more what your presentation is about. And boom, put it in and it will fill out your 10 page presentation.

Benefits and drawbacks of AI-generated content

Steve Wiideman (00:23:26) – It’s incredible. Even image technology, like mid Journey, which is not where I think it could be compared to some of the competitors of it, but it’s really exciting to see how we can start generating content.

It would’ve cost us a lot of money as a small business to go to each person in that digital media mix, and say, “Hey, I need an image, I need a podcast. I need all these different pieces to make my pages attract a lot of traffic.”

Thanks to the visual technologies, we can streamline a lot of that process as a small business and cut our cost down significantly. That’s huge. And we were just talking about marketing topics in general.

Any business can go to any of these tools now and try all of them. Don’t just say, which one should I use? Try all of them and find the one that you feel aligns best with who you are and what your business is.

Using AI for Content Creation

And ask a question like build me a list of let’s do one a week, 52 pages of marketing content, give me 52 topics that I can write about on my blog. And then what I would do is I would take something like answer the public, where you can get actual questions like who, what, where, how, why, et cetera.

And maybe even like an SEMrush filter on questions and take all of those and aggregate them and put it into a sheet and say probably, “Bard, give me 52 topic ideas based on highly searched keywords from this list.” And then you’ve got two lists that you can go off of.

Jillian Leslie (00:25:05) – We have to unpack this and go slower. Let’s start at what you just said. So, the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to go to these AI’s.

Steve Wiideman (00:25:17) – Yes.

Jillian Leslie (00:25:18) – And I’m going to say, “Give me 52 ideas for topics. I could write about.”

Steve Wiideman (00:25:23) – Two blog topics.

Jillian Leslie (00:25:24) – Blog topics, okay. And then I’m going to go to answer the public, which is a tool where you put in a keyword and it gives you questions around it. What are their biggest questions?

Steve Wiideman (00:25:39) – If you’re a travel blogger, you put in travel.

Jillian Leslie (00:25:42) – Okay. Travel. And you start to see what are these keywords? So the first thing is 52 ideas in my niche.

Steve Wiideman (00:25:51) – ChatGPT we’ll say, sure.

Jillian Leslie (00:25:53) – No, but I mean in ChatGPT let’s do 52 ideas for a travel blogger. Then I go to answer the public credit type in travel and I take the questions that are then offered, then what do I do?

Steve Wiideman (00:26:09) – Then you want to put those questions probably into Bard and ask the same question. Take these topics and create 52 blog topics for me to write about based on these questions.

That one can be data driven too, because Google eventually, I’m sure it’ll connect to its Google keyword planner and start telling you which search terms are more searched. So, then you’ve got, again, two data sources. You’ve got one where there’s just topics.

And we don’t know that it’s a data driven idea. The AI is giving you topic ideas. Some of them might have search volumes, some of them not, but we don’t know. It’s just saying, here’s some ideas. And now what we’re trying to do is marry their ideas to data driven ideas.

When you do that duplication between what you got from answering the public and then what you got from your Bard system, now you’ve seen some overlapping themes and you can go after topics that are actually searched because it’s great if you have 52 ideas.

And then next year you look back at your analytics and like, man, I really didn’t get much traffic from these because the topic ideas weren’t highly searched. If we can, we want to get data from those that are highly searched, but also some fun ideas that might not be, that are still fun topics for us to write about.

Jillian Leslie (00:27:36) – Wow. Do you think though, if I am a travel blogger and I rely on getting traffic to my blog because I monetize, let’s say via ads via affiliates, I need traffic, do you think that traffic is going to diminish?

Impact of AI on Web Traffic

Steve Wiideman (00:27:54) – I think some of it might go away as more people start using the chat for specific things. I do see sources now in Bard, today was the first time I actually saw.

So, there’s still the potential for someone who wants to learn more or continue to deep dive to click-through. But I do think it’s going to affect some of our web traffic overall.

Jillian Leslie (00:28:14) – Overall web traffic you think will diminish.

Steve Wiideman (00:28:18) – I think a percentage of it will for sure. So therefore, for the important questions that people have, where they’re in a transactional, part of that whole buyer journey, I still feel like it’s going to be minimal.

But I think for the upper funnel, the informational, the questions and so forth, it’s still great to build authority and to be a source and be listed because that’ll boost our overall SEO and visibility in chat.

The traffic that we get from non-transactional queries is probably going to be affected. And I’m just guessing here, we’re still just eyes wide open looking at all the things that are happening right now.

Jillian Leslie (00:29:00) – Because that’s what I would think that would be the case. Like the chocolate chip cookie example. Before maybe I would’ve gone to Pinterest and I would’ve looked at all of these chocolate chip cookie images and figured ooh, this one looks good, or I don’t know.

Or I go into Google and go, “Best chocolate chip cookie recipe,” and now I’ve got 10 results. But if all of a sudden I can type into ChatGPT or Bard or whomever gets a recipe again, I don’t necessarily have a photo of it. I don’t know where. A

And if there is a sort like, I don’t know, but hey, they’re telling me it’s the best, maybe it is the best. So, it just removes a possible step.

Steve Wiideman (00:29:45) – So, this is what goes back to what we were talking about earlier about prompts. I think those sites that are able to create really helpful prompts for the AI that can drill down and get us exactly what we want.

So for example, “The best cookie,” that could be a prompt, you could create a prompt template that says best product and then you’ll use this prompt template.

And there are browser extensions now that overlay on top of ChatGPT, and you can use one of those prompts and it’ll say, okay, great. What type of product? You said cookie, it says, great. What are you looking for in terms of price?

Jillian Leslie (00:30:21) – Or, I like Chewy.

Steve Wiideman (00:30:23) – There you go. So, it could have all of those different kinds of sub follow-up and then when it’s done, it’ll give you the end result. It will be a drill down into what you actually wanted.

Because that prompt helps you to build that conversation to get to exactly the answer you want, which you can’t do in one thread because it’ll run out of room essentially. It gets confused because it has to generate something first and then learn what you’re referring to.

And then you ask a follow up question and then it reverts back to what you had already asked to create a new one. If you put it all in one prompt, it just doesn’t give you the same result. So, these little templates are a great way.

So content, for example, one prompt template that I saw that was really interesting is build me up a page that’ll rank well in organic search results.

And the prompt says, perfect, let’s start with a title. What’s the key word you want to use? And then gives you some title options and you choose one. This is great. Okay, now we’re going to write a description. Perfect. Now we’re going to write a heading.

Creating Content with AI

This is the keyword that has the most search volume because this prompt takes in some external data, and then it helps you basically write the page using the keywords that you want to appear. And it says, now give me three more supportive keywords.

And then it puts those into subheadings. You’re like, oh, wow. It literally built me a page that addresses semantics and derivatives, and all the different ways that somebody would search for this particular keyword, into a page that’s optimized for SEO. And that’s a good starter point.

Jillian Leslie (00:31:54) – So, what you’re saying is this is a plugin that does this.

Steve Wiideman (00:31:58) – These are like browser extensions at the moment. There are developers that are building things that will lay on top of ChatGPT. Let me see if I can get you an example of one.

AI as a Prompter

Jillian Leslie (00:32:10) – So again, for people who are listening and going, what the hell is this? Like, AI is like your best assistant. It is not. AI won’t do the thinking for you. You do the thinking and then AI does the delivery. AI is a doer.

So, what you’re saying, and it’s all about learning to be a good prompter. There will be these jobs called prompt engineers who optimize how to get these platforms to provide exactly what you’re looking for. And you’re only as good as your prompts.

So going to ChatGPT and typing in something very basic is going to give you a very basic answer. However, there’s all this information behind that. But if your job is to figure out how to get it right.

And so what you’re saying is, instead of me having to think through, I’m going to write a blog post and I want it to rank, so what do I need to ask ChatGPT, it’s like, I probably need some keyword research, or I probably need some headings, or who knows what this is leading you through that journey, doing that thinking for you.

And all you have to do is fill in the blank of here’s my topic, here’s whatever. And it’s going to say, oh, here are some high traffic, like low competition keywords or here and we’re going to optimize it for you.

So, instead of me alone going to ChatGPT saying, “Hey, I’m going to use this to write a blog post.” I’ve now got training wheels or I’ve got something that’s giving me a framework so that I can then access the information from ChatGPT in a way that will benefit me without me having to do all of the thinking.

Steve Wiideman – A hundred percent. Think about product descriptions. Your customers would love some kind of a prompt that’s set up to optimize product pages to rank and search results where the prompts are.

Is there a particular size or size options? Is there a place on trust pilot or somewhere else that I can extract some testimonials to help you create this page? Or some reviews, product reviews, do you have any pictures that you could upload or videos that you could upload that aren’t just manufacturer pictures?

Tell us about why somebody would want to purchase this product. How long does it last? What’s the shipping? You could enter in all those different data points and then they’ll say, great, based on all these different things that you inputted from these questions.

Optimizing Product Pages with AI

Here is your product detail page that’s got a strong title description heading, subheadings and attributes that customers would search for in the long tail queries that they run to try and find these products.

And then you’re like, bam, now I can use this and scale it in a way that’s meaningful because it’s still your content, it’s still your input that is fed into the descriptive information on those pages.

And if you wanted to, if you saw, we’re still struggling with ranking, run it through some of those originality.ai testing tools, to see, is it not ranking simply because Google thinks that this page was all AI written? Can I add my voice to it a little bit?

And then those that are ranking well, great, leave them. The ones that are struggling with ranking, put them in a queue and start having somebody go through and personalize them a bit more.

Jillian Leslie (00:35:34) – Wow. And that’s the piece too that I think we should emphasize, which is at the end of it, it needs to be in your brand voice. It needs to have this kind of human touch.

But the idea is that using AI gets you so far up the hill and then you get to carry, like personalize your content to get you to the top.

The real benefit of this is it does a lot of the heavy lifting at the bottom for you. And I think it comes up with ideas that you would never have thought of. That’s the thing. It’s interesting.

My daughter is in 10th grade and she had to write a paper and the teacher says, no ChatGPT, which is by the way, this big, what would I say, disruptive thing that’s happening for schools and teachers all over the news.

Steve Wiideman (00:36:31) – Yes, I saw it.

Jillian Leslie (00:36:32) – I would say ultimately, like the toothpaste is out of the tube. So, now my daughter is one of these rule followers, so of course she’s not going anywhere near ChatGPT.

But then my husband and I sat back and we thought to ourselves, well first of all, we do not believe that everybody in her school is not going to go to ChatGPT. I think that she’s in the minority.

The next piece is, is it cheating to say, “Hey mom, I want to talk about my paper on Hamlet with you. Here are some of my ideas. What do you think?”

And I go, oh, that’s good, but have you thought about this? Maybe you could go deeper with that. Maybe you could bring in this character who knows. That’s not that weird.

So then you go, well what if she were to go to ChatGPT and say, “Hey, ChatGPT, what are some themes that you could recommend for this paper I’m writing on Hamlet.” And then it spews out a bunch of ideas that she might not have thought.

Using AI for Paper Writing

Steve Wiideman (00:37:39) – Is it different than being in a study group?

Jillian Leslie (00:37:40) – That’s it. So therefore it’s not black and white.

Steve Wiideman (00:37:44) – I actually sent an email to all my students across the colleges I teach at.

And I said, I know how tempting it’s going to be to use ChatGPT this term or large language models. But you have to remember, I’ve been in digital marketing some 25 years. And I’m as excited about this technology as you have. I probably been playing with it longer than you.

Here’s my warning about using ChatGPT. And then I give this whole spew on how I know what to detect and what tools are available to use and why it’s not appropriate. And at the end, it said, “And by the way, this was written by ChatGPT.” And I sent it to everyone. And so, I already had five students that used it.

I could recognize it pretty quickly because I know how my students deliver the assignments. I’ve been grading very similar assignments for the last several years. So, when I see one, I can immediately identify that this wasn’t written by a student.

And I can say, “Hey, I realize you likely used large language model for this. What I’m going to do is let you off the hook this time, because you probably didn’t know that I knew this stuff maybe better than you thought I did. I’ll give you 24 hours to resubmit it on your own.

And by the way, I’m going to take a screenshot of this and send it to all the other teachers to be on the lookout for this type of content. And I’m not going to put your name on it, but I’m going to say, here’s an example of a student who submitted, and here’s the tool to use.

So you might want to let your peers know that all the teachers now are going to be using originality.ai and other tools to detect whether they’re using AI or not. So going forward, please, if you want to use inspiration from ChatGPT, go for it.

I really want to know that you are learning the material. And I can only do that if I see a content that you wrote, not a machine wrote.

Jillian Leslie (00:39:38) – But you’re okay with this idea of going to ChatGPT and saying, “Hey, give me some ideas on this.” Or like, my daughter.

That was where I think it got very gray for my husband and I when we started to go, wait a second, why being like a reality check.

Or like, hey, maybe you hadn’t thought of this or this isn’t as clear. Those kinds of things which she will do because it’s really hard to write a paper in a vacuum and then to go, well, why couldn’t.

At what point is it considered cheating because it’s a gray area. What do you think about that?

The Potential of AI

Steve Wiideman (00:40:22) – I think a lot of the office hours help because then you can have one-on-one dialogue and know whether students are cheating or not. I also had a lot of creativity to some of the assignments so that there is some critical thinking that even a computer couldn’t rattle off.

Where you get to learn the students and who they are and their personalities. And you’re like, this wasn’t something that they wrote. And then you could kick it back and you’re like, hey, I like your idea, but it seems a little generic.

Knowing your background in this particular thing, I’d love to hear how you would apply this to what you plan to do in your career. And the worst case is they get one by you, but they’re still reading what they’re sending you when they send it to you. So, they’re still learning to an extent.

And it’s disappointing that that’s the shortcut they wanted to take to learn. But at least they had a moment hopefully of inspiration. But yes, it’s definitely going to be interesting to see how it evolves.

Jillian Leslie – Well, that’s great.

Steve Wiideman – I know that we’ve done some really fun things like balancing our budgets. Here’s how much I make, here’s my expenses. Help me create a budget to buy a house in 12 months. That was kind of fun.

We’ve also done resumes. I asked my daughter’s boyfriend a few questions about his experience in different areas and then ChatGPT spit out an entire resume for him, and he got a job with that resume with hardly any editing whatsoever, which is really weird.

So, I think there’s a lot of really neat things that are going to make our lives easier. Let’s just remember that when we get whatever it is we’re trying to achieve using AI that the world is going to know when we’re not behind a computer, whether who we are, is who we say we are.

Or whether who we are was a facade created by artificial intelligence. So, never let chat and large language model technologies pretend to be you. I think that’s a character trait.

And that’s what we’re going to see in the next five years is characters redefined as not your ability to adapt to change, but your ability to be real in who you are and not let technology be the one that defines you.

Authenticity in Content Creation

Jillian Leslie (00:42:47) – For example, I was having this conversation before, and I shared this with you, with MiloTreeCart, you can sell all kinds of digital products and I would say that the ones that I think will be the most valuable will be the ones where you sell you.

That would be a membership where you show up with people, a paid workshop where you show up with people coaching where again, it’s you. Because I think that information will just be so ubiquitous that the specialness is the human connection.

When you’re thinking about monetizing or putting yourself out there in a way to attract people so that people come to you versus somebody else who might be better or who might be just as good as you at prompting ChatGPT what separates you from them is you.

And communicating you, I think that what you were saying is go use these AI tools to create all of this great content and then put that layer of you on top.

Steve Wiideman (00:44:01) – A hundred percent, especially video pictures, ratings, reviews, add a dynamic component where people can share some things on social media that get shared and published on your page through a little bit of moderation using some third party tools.

So much that you can do to make sure that when people do visit your website, they know that you’re genuine. But if you’re a plumber and you’re trying to come up with, what do I write? By all means, use ChatGPT and say, “I need to get a page that ranks well in Google. Can you give me a list of topics I should be writing about?”

And then take those topics and go, okay, here’s how I would do this and here’s why I don’t do it this way and I do it this way. Those are the kind of things that build authenticity and trust with readers and users.

For product descriptions, I think it’s a neat little way to test what we could do with AI, because you can have hundreds of thousands of products sometimes. You have to go there pretty soon.

Jillian Leslie (00:45:00) – So, what I will say is, I’m so glad we did this because you have put a very positive spin, like an excited spin on this. You’re excited about this.

Steve Wiideman (00:45:14) – I’m excited for sure.

Jillian Leslie (00:45:16) – And that the sky is not falling.

Steve Wiideman (00:45:19) – Not at all. There’s always going to be that unknown uncertainty that happens with everything that happened with electric cars, remember? And the electric cars come out, people are like, oh, I don’t know about all that. And, and now it’s there.

Flying vehicles in Dubai are already happening. So, you know, change is coming. And like I mentioned, a judge of our characters, how we adapt to those changes and the worry is that it gets out of control or can’t be controlled. Well, there’s always an off switch. So, I’m not too worried about that right now.

Jillian Leslie (00:45:51) – Steve, if people want to reach out to you to hear more, to learn more, to learn about your SEO services, all that, where should they go?

Steve Wiideman (00:46:00) – I’m everywhere. I’m just seosteve. That’s been my nickname for several years. If you want to chat with anyone on the team here or schedule something and just talk shop, our handle is @wiideman, W-I-I-D-E-M-A-N.

We’d love to talk about all this new tech and how it can benefit or negatively affect your business long term. So hit us up, we’re happy to talk shop with you.

Jillian Leslie (00:46:23) – Oh, great. Steve, I hope to have you back on the show. So, thank you so much for doing this.

Steve Wiideman (00:46:28) – Thank you for having me. I can’t wait to do it again.

Differentiating Yourself with AI

Jillian Leslie (00:46:31) – I hope you guys like this episode. For me because I have all these mixed feelings about AI. It was really nice to hear Steve’s enthusiasm.

I don’t know about you, but I use ChatGPT now every day in my business and also in my life. I liked what Steve was saying, you use it to give you ideas and help you, but then at the end of it, it’s all about you and your personality.

So, looking into the future, I think this is going to be a way that we differentiate ourselves in a way we monetize. If you want to be selling digital products, like memberships or workshops or coaching or digital downloads that have your special touch in them, definitely check out MiloTreeCart.

I think what creators and bloggers really like about it is that David and I are real people and we’re right here an email away helping you as you build your business. And remember, prices are going up, so please act now.

And finally, please join my Facebook group, the Become a Blogger Genius Facebook group, and I will see you here again next week.

Other Blogger Genius Podcast Episodes You’ll Like:

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