Building Success in SEO: Insights, AI Tools, and Lessons from a Digital Marketing Pro

Good, you?

Cool. Yeah. So my journey, I would say it’s a funny one to me anyway. Basically, back in 2019, 2020, I had been working at an Amazon call center for about four for years. I was managing a team of about 20 employees. It was great. It was cool being able to help all of them grow and being able to solve problems within the Amazon space. But at the same time, it just wasn’t really what I wanted to do. I wanted to do something that was a little more creative. So I did end up leaving Amazon in 2020. And then a week later, the COVID pandemic started shutting everything down and just making it generally difficult for a a lot of us, everyone, really. But I had a goal, and the goal was to become a voice actor, actually. Nothing to do with SEO whatsoever. My wife and I packed up, got in an RV. We started traveling around the United States between 2020 and 2022. And I had this teeny tiny little voiceover booth set up in our RV. And late at night, when everyone was asleep and no one was pulling in their RVs with their giant diesel trucks at whatever RV park we were at, I would audition and just record different voice acting gigs.

And it was a lot of fun. Definitely, it scratched the itch. But a whole year goes by and I’ve only made less than $10,000 doing the voiceover at this point. It’s difficult. Not everybody can be successful in voiceover. What I had been doing, though, toward the last couple of months of that voiceover journey was writing a voiceover blog. And I was just sharing these blogs out on different Facebook groups and different LinkedIn groups and stuff like that. I was writing blogs about the equipment that I was using and just grading the equipment, rating the equipment, talking about different auditioning strategies that I had been doing. And people really loved my blogs. I was doing so much better. I was getting so much more exposure through the blogs than I was through the actual voiceover work. And so once I made the decision that the voiceover itself wasn’t panning out or wasn’t really earning me enough money to pay my bills, I was like, what about writing? So started doing the LinkedIn thing, filling out tons of job applications. And coincidentally, one of the job applications I had filled out was for a company called Best Reviews, which sure enough, their whole gig is that they review products.

And as I mentioned, that’s a lot of what I had been writing about on my voiceover blog. So my wife and I were sitting at a hotel in Las Vegas, and I get the call back. It’s best reviews. A couple of weeks later, I’ve got the job. I really enjoy it. I’m writing. And once I I realized that that’s where I want to be, I asked them how I could get more involved in the company. And they say, Hey, we’ve got this ideation team that is coming up with topics. They’re using AH reps and these SEO tools, and they’re trying to decide what we should write about. That was really right around 2021 was when this was happening. That was really my first introduction to all of these SEO tools and looking up keyword volume and trying to figure out what they could write about. But it wasn’t really SEO. But I know this story is getting long. Over the next year or so, I got more involved with their actual SEO team. It was pretty cool because they had published a job for a full-time SEO. I didn’t have enough SEO experience to fill that role.

But in talking to them, I just made the case that, Hey, this organization is its own beast. It’s going to take an SEO a long time to wrap their head around the tens of thousands of pages that you have on the website and the way that everything is structured. How about instead of you hiring a full-time SEO, you hire a part-time SEO, and you move me into an assistant role within that space? And they went for it, they did it. I spent the next year and a half learning from that SEO and helping him learn more about that website. And that was really where I started to get into the head space of how SEO works and how it’s not just keyword research and volume. It’s really more more about eat signals and creating a helpful experience. And then from there, I found my way into Imprint Digital first as just a purely hands-on SEO, and then over the course of a year, moved into the SEO director role. Anyway, no, that was a long story, but I think the thing I like to get across with that story is much like you said, my original goal had nothing to do with SEO for anyone who’s trying to figure out where they’re going.

Sometimes it’s just about following the strange coincidences and ending up where you end up.

I think like a lot of voice actors, the reason I got into it is because I had randomly received some just random compliments about my voice. Every now and then you just be talking to someone and they’re like, Oh, you got a deep voice. That sounds good for radio. And I’m like, Oh, yeah, I guess maybe I could do something with voice acting. But ultimately, what I really wanted to do, I’ve always been a huge cartoon nerd. Ever since I was a kid, I still watch tons of cartoons to this day. I wanted to play cartoon characters and video game characters and have my own little portfolio of characters that were mine. But because I’ve got a deep voice, because I’ve got a neutral accent, and possibly even because of my Amazon experience and office experience, the people that tended to hire me were not cartoons, not video games. They were offices and call centers and businesses that needed eLearnings produced for their associates. I would be the narrator of the eLearnings 90% of the time. So it was still cool. Once again, not exactly what I was shooting for, but it was what I got, and it was still a lot of fun and great experience.

Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think, to me, it stays engaging because you have to switch between those two things. That’s one of the things that I love about SEO is that it’s not just writing content, it’s not just writing blogs or writing copy for people’s services pages or their home pages or anything like that. It’s a combination of that. And as you mentioned, diving into the technical limitations of the website, figuring out how you can make the website more crawlable, faster. How can you clean up other things that may be holding their SEO back, like deadlinks, H1s or lack of H1s and stuff like that. And to me For me, switching between those two things is part of what keeps it engaging. As far as my favorite part about SEO, it’s hands down writing, whether it be blogs or service page copy. But I do feel like because I was a writer for a year and a half, two years, and I do feel like over time, I started to get a little burnt out on it. You’re just writing and writing day after day, it gets old. To me, once again, that is the engaging part about SEO is that it’s not just one thing. It’s tons of different little pieces to this larger puzzle that’s constantly changing through the algorithm updates. And in terms of how to ensure it’s effective, really for me, it’s just about always testing new things. But more importantly, it’s about not forgetting the foundational elements.

As I mentioned, I’m a huge cartoon nerd. So I’ll just give you an analogy cartoon I love called Freerun. She is a mage a wizard. She’s the strongest lizard in her entire land, but she only uses basic spells, whereas all of her enemies and stuff like that are shaping the Earth around her and using crazy flame throwers and making the moon fall out of the sky and all this. She’s just doing tiny little magical blasts and shields and just the most basic stuff. She always says when people would make fun of her, she would always say, Basic offensive and defensive magic is enough to win any battle if you’re good enough at it. Super nerdy analogy, but I do We apply it to SEO every single day. We continue testing new things. We continue trying to figure out, crack the code of the Google algorithm and come up with these fancy ways of improving the SEO process.

But at the end of the day, really great content on your services pages, really great content on your homepage, really great blogs, and a fantastic internal linking structure to make sure that all of those pages are sharing that authority and sharing those SEO benefits amongst each other. It’s the most basic foundation educational part of SEO. But if you get really good at that, you’re going to see success even without all of the fancy stuff that we wear on top of it as the cherry on top.

If I’m being 100% honest, whenever I first got into SEO, part of it was a reaction to ChatGPT. I was writing for this company, as I mentioned, and had been taking other writing gigs through other companies on the side. But when ChatGPT When that GPT rolled out and people really started to use it, I lost my first writing client. And lo and behold, it was because they replaced me with ChatGPT. So that got me really scared. That got me into the mindset of, I love writing. I love copywriting. I don’t want to say it’s a dead industry. I don’t want to scare anyone. But everyone knows, as you mentioned, there are fewer jobs in that industry now because of ChatGPT. Part of my reaction was to try to get more involved in the SEO space. But now that I’m in the SEO space, I don’t want to say I get why I was replaced by ChatGPT by any means, but it is a very powerful tool. And especially with the release of 4.0 and now 4.0 with Canvas, it’s very good at writing. It can learn from other web pages. It can surf the internet.

You can feed it the top-ranking Google search results. You can work with it to develop a character that matches the character of your client and have it right from that person’s point of view. It’s a very powerful tool. But all of that said, I think that the one mistake that a lot of, not just SEOs, but a lot of people that use this tool in general, the big mistake that they’re making is that they rely too much on it. At the end of the day, you cannot just go to ChatGPT and say, Write me a blog about whether or not homeowners insurance covers HVAC repairs, have it spit out a blog, publish it on someone’s website, and expect it to rank. Realistically, over time, if If that’s your strategy, if that’s what you’re doing, you’re going to be doing more harm to that person’s website than good. I think that what ChatGPT and what these AI tools are good for is just that. They’re tools. They’re good for a starting point. They’re very adept at creating content outlines, and they’re even very adept at creating very rough draughts of the content. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to come through that with a fine tooth comb.

You’ve got to add the human touch. You’ve got to not not make it… You’ve got to do your due diligence on all of it. But I do think it’s okay to use AI tools as a starting point for any of the SEO work that you’re doing.

I agree. And scary world if it ever is smart enough to just do all of everyone’s SEO. Like I said, I moved from writing to SEO for fear of losing my writing job. I hope selfishly that we don’t get an SEO tool in the next couple of years that’s good enough to just do somebody’s SEO for 30 bucks a month.

Yeah, I agree. And especially in the SEO space and the marketing space, you as well as I do. Every year, every couple of years, there’s a new SEO killer. So this is just another in a long line of technologies that was supposed to kill SEO that probably won’t.

Agree 100 %. Yeah.

So, yeah, you can get in touch with us at imprintdigital. Com, and that’s imprint-digital. Com. We have contact forms and call forms on the website. Yeah, and I don’t know if I went too far over Imprint Digital, but they offer fractional CMO, paid ads, SEO, brand identity services, web design, in-house video content, email marketing, social media. So at the end of the day, no matter how you want to grow your brand, no matter how you want to expand your digital presence, you can hit us up on impprint-digital. Com.

Agreed. Thank you so much for having me.