Navigating the Future of SEO: Balancing Authenticity and Technology in Content Strategy

Yeah. Thanks.

Real quiet. Oh yeah. Can I say autistic on here? Of course, you can. Not really. But especially looking back, I felt like it was in mine. My world and yeah, I was doing music and trying to get laid not getting laid.

Yeah, you betcha.

Definitely. Yeah. When I got into production I got pro logic eight originally it was Photoshop for audio and hearing and stuff like that.

It was probably, one of the best things that it did for my mind. I grew up around music and art. My mom’s an artist, my dad’s a musician. So I grew up with whatever side of the brain that is family the creative side, right?

but. Yeah whatever they mean, I think, at least as a metaphor, right? Yeah, and with the program that, you work on it’s very technical and very it’s engineering and it’s the other side of the brains, yeah, the cold dead side. So doing both trying to be creative and dealing with all these technical problems and learning about it, from 2008 on has been something really good. I think it’s really good for everybody. A lot of kids are super early now. I think it’s great. For sure. Technically learning piano or guitar is also a technical feat in front of you to finger correctly and, play. Play the different things correctly, but there’s much less involved there is in production to learn how to make It’s and stuff like that. I know it sounds not as challenging or whatever, but it really can be.

Yeah. Being creative and technical is super important in SEO. Yeah. Not creative, like just, I don’t know, do something else. You have to be able to think for yourself. And if you’re just going to read Neil Patel’s blogs and then try to do what he did, take the case study and copy and paste it to everybody. Yeah, that’s too much of that in our industry. And it’s making us look bad. I think SEO is a really bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths because they’ve worked with folks that are just. I have no creativity whatsoever. Yeah.

I was bartending and I had a regular that we became good friends he was fin from out of town and I had been bartending for maybe four years in Rochester. And we wanted to know and meet some of the people that I knew and just from a sales standpoint. So he ended up offering me to partner in the company and I knew nothing whatsoever about the whole thing. And he had a white label agency out of. I think India and it turned out that they were just not, they were not very good. Unfortunately. And yeah, so we got a couple of projects in the door. I had left my job as the manager of a tequila bar and, I thought, I just was following his lead. He made me feel like we were going to be making tens of thousands of dollars per month and in, in yet a few months and it’s possible.

It’s possible, especially if we if you focus on sales but I found over the years, basically fast-forward projects went bad. I started my own company and taught myself how to do everything. We didn’t have a provider any longer. And I found that the more that I learned about how to do it, the better I got at sales. Yeah. And that’s just my style of sales. And I’m not like, I don’t consider myself like a salesman because I’m the opposite of the way a lot of folks run sales meetings, but that’s been my experience with it. Yeah. All right.

I just really enjoy the work at least in terms of the theory crafting, which is what I consider to be the real work and being able to communicate that in a way that clients can understand the theory. And think about the internet differently as a result, especially as the way the brand or website interacts with the web.

That’s… What are you… Without creating a problem and adding too many other things I like about SEO, I think I think that’s the one. Oh, okay.

It just, it’s tough to know what, obviously what’s going on behind the scenes at Google who is in, sometimes it feels like they’re buckling under the pressure of crawling, indexing, serving the web at scale at such high scale, they’re just, the web is exponentially growing every day. It’s amazing. I know. And they’re trying to keep up with him. Sometimes it seems like they’re buckling under that pressure.

And it’s we got this, the latest update is interesting. And I I just want to, I want to be a fly on the wall in the engineering meetings and stuff like that because I feel like while they’ve been buckling under the pressure of this growing web they’ve been very, especially as I understand it, cause I’m only seven years in, but as I understand it, post math cuts, like there hasn’t been a whole lot of like really aggressive activity from them, and stuff like that, besides for what, like 2016, I think and Danny Sullivan seems to have been very transparent.

I’m not sure if it was his decision or if it was more Gary Elias or even John Mueller. They’ve been, they’ve got the search off the recorded podcast and they’ve been very apparent in some of their oh, what’s that expo that they put a lot of video content out for they’ve had paul harr up there as an engineer, like really talking a lot about what’s going on. But then the stuff that they’re saying that they’re doing with the helpful content update, I haven’t seen a whole lot of activity. Like I haven’t seen a lot of volatility, but besides the normal volatility posts, especially just post any update. So I’m not like freaked out yet based on what I’ve seen in the field.

When I’m freaked out by what they’re saying is going on, that they’re going to give us a site, like a site-wide penalty sounds a lot like a panda thing. They’re not going to tell us, it’s just, it boggles my mind that they think that’s a good idea. So I guess to answer your question, that’s what I think the biggest challenge is really how do we know when they’re just going to go off their rocker and just be like, you know what, real nice the past eight years.

I listen to a lot of John Mueller and I do understand. I feel like I’ve had my phase of hating Google and what they say and stuff like that.

Yeah. I got that out of my system. And I think there should be a little bit of credit to John who has to eat in. Yeah. He’s just a PR guy. Sure. Yeah. But it’s a tough job. He has to speak to all publishers on the web. Yeah in all languages. And then, I’m sure he’s getting pulled by both ends, but by the engineering team and what’s going on behind the scenes.

And then what he’s supposed to say, it’s in terms of expectation management across all of the web, like he has the hardest job as an SEO like he’s not an SEO, but like he has to speak to publishers similar to with not any context and as we know the whole it depends on thing.
It depends on the context of the situation and as an SEO consultant, we have liberty or liberty is probably not the word I’m looking for here, Then I guess freedom, That’s not the word either. Oh, Frick words aren’t good today for me. I think it’ll make sense. We have this.

Disability, to speak, directly to a client and say contextually, this is why it doesn’t just depend. This is what’s happening because you are an e-commerce website. There are, you have these factors in front of you and this is what happens is what’s going on with John. He has to speak. Everything he says is always going to get taken because clients let’s just call the whole web, his client, all of his clients, he, someone else is going to go, oh if he speaks something to something too specifically, someone else is going to go. And take it out of context or just run with it as if it would apply to their shop or their situation. And it’s just not because it did depend in that scenario when you’re talking to so many people. So I think it’s challenging and I think it’s really interesting to listen to them, especially lately because they have been more transparent, and even Martin Split to an extent on their Search Off the Record podcast, for instance.

Like they’re explaining what SEO what search engines are, or document information retrieval machines. Yeah. And they’re just talking about information retrieval at scale, which is what we should all be doing. That’s what they’re doing. Yeah, that’s what we should all be studying, essentially as SEO consultants.

yeah. The whole release, the press release, whatever you want to call it, everything they said about it is eating me out, man. I don’t know. So weird that they think they could algorithmically figure any of that out. And they say AI is behind a lot of it.

It seems yes, but what, when I said that there was AI behind it, what I mean is that I believe they’re saying that the algorithm figuring out how authentic your content is AI-driven on their end, which must be very expensive, right?

And that’s always a topic in terms of, and when we’re talking SEO how expensive would it be to enact? whatever we might say that Google is doing. And any kind of AI-driven algorithm, I think has got to be pretty expensive on the entire web, right? And I think that’s why they’re saying it’s slow.

Your site might not be affected right away, but eventually, it would be probably because it’s, it takes time to run. So it’s probably a pretty weighty thing. I would assume if I were going to Tell the web and publishers on it that they couldn’t have a page about apples if their website in a niche way was about SEO.

Cause Apple’s page is a doorway page and it doesn’t relate to your website. So if I was going to tell people that they had to do that, without totally fucking over, if you don’t mind me, just blame this work on your podcast. Like Wikipedia or even CNN, a multi-topic website, like when I first read that, I was like what are they doing?

But if I had to come up with, a way to enact that without screwing over Wikipedia if you just open up the URLs let’s just say they use URL strings for this, you could probably, there are plenty of other signals that you could use, maybe like article titles, if they pull that or have some idea of that, maybe each one or maybe even meta titles.

But let’s just say you open up the list of URLs, say, in search counts or whatever, and you look through all the slugs and I bet that there’s a way to determine entity relationships between the nouns across each.

Every time there’s a noun in the URL string and eventually if there is a very obtuse relationship in terms of the way that the entities are related across the list of links and all of a sudden there’s this one that goes apples like I could see that because what could happen then and that, that way you could have niche websites that’s about a few different niches like shoulders to each other.

A friend of mine his world is or one of his niche websites is button enhancement cream for your butt bigger, you know what I’m saying? And I’m, I would imagine that he would want to be able to write about, not just have like articles about not just butt enhancement cream, but about surgery and why that’s bad about creams and just the industry of these kinds of products from just a beauty and health and beauty standpoint. And I would imagine that eventually if you keep writing about this stuff. In terms of the industry, you’re going to start to get unrelated almost. But if there are entity relationships between, I would imagine that you’d go from niche to niche so long as there’s some kind of bridge between each one and then that wouldn’t through over, a semi-multi-topic website, let alone a fully multi-topic website, like Wikipedia.

I would imagine that if you look, if you pull up a list of all these links, like eventually there’s a way to get from this topic to the over here to the one up here but I think if you did have Like a niche website and then all of a sudden you threw in this one out here that just totally If you did have a way to relate entity relationships between each other and say, yeah, these are related, this piece of this food articles related eventually becomes related to this one on entertainment, but then you throw this one that’s way out here in a super truce and this is clearly inauthentic content and clearly what’s made for SEO purposes like I feel like there’s something there, I think people. You know, I think, I just think everything, every time they talk about AI and every time they talk about these kinds of things, I think it’s all run on, on this entity thing, whatever it is doing there, but it seems super relevant to me and seems cost-effective.

It’s an interesting question. And I think we just need, I need to see a lot more data, like real-world data of helpful content updates.

Yeah. I just haven’t seen it affect the web yet. It just, it’s on me that they won’t tell you if you are affected though. So yeah, it’s going to be up to us to like be looking closely. Yeah. And when we do, I have not seen a website, that has been quote-unquote hit yet. Yeah. I do. I might be able to answer that question better, but I have to figure, I would have to figure that they can’t screw over publishers that bad to where then you have to do a true shit like that, where you have to make two different websites just because, yeah. I don’t know. It seems like they’re focused on certain things and they just didn’t want to say that we are just trying to screw over people with AI content writers, like to your point earlier.

It seems like it is also related to the previous question. It seems like Google is afraid of it and I don’t, cause I saw it come out, it seems like it’s, especially this drama with, all those guys with the Amazon book that was supposedly plagiarized from no idea. I don’t know. I was just watching a late one, an SEO fight club from a couple of weeks ago that. Oh yeah. Talked about some industry drama. And that was just a scenario where it was put up on the Amazon. com and sold as a book, and so if that’s happening on.

Somebody else’s original. The supposedly original content was then spawned with AI, and it was so it was too similar. It was so similar. The original writer knew it was because they used to work together or something like that. Oh, interesting.

Then come out and super you for all or something. He was like, Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t read it after it came out of the thing. I just published it on Amazon. And I’m paraphrasing what I was listening to about the drama. So don’t quote me on any of that, but I don’t even know, I can’t even think of the names anyways, but my point is just if that’s happening on eBooks, people are using, leveraging that kind of technology in the book publishing space. It’s happening on the web and if I Google, I’d be having meetings about that. Yeah. Yeah.

I don’t see why not. Yeah, I wouldn’t use it personally. Like I think half of the whole value of having me as an SEO consultant missed your brand is that I’m going to force you. You and your subject matter experts are to be involved in this whole thing. This whole initiative, I break down floors to get them to write stuff and it’s if you don’t want to write stuff, then it’s what are you, what are we doing here?

What are you paying me? B stuff doesn’t happen overnight. C get involved, in the marketing efforts of your company. So it’s not just marketers marketing, stuff like information’s important. Yeah. That’s all that is authentic. So some things didn’t impact my consult a whole lot of anything. There were some of the things that I was saying, and I don’t mean to sound like such a white hat, truly. I don’t, but I just think that, yeah, I think that this kind of initiative benefits brands more than just, they would leverage out of the SEO initiative. Yeah.

Honestly, maybe this is an unpopular opinion or no election. short-sighted or something, but it just seems to me that is what he owes.

Not only is it currently outputting, but also regularly tends to update and makes them even thicker usually their schema, and I’ve used rank math a little bit, but not enough. And I’ve heard that’s a robust tool. What I did see of it looks awesome. Just, I used to write a lot of custom schema, like really deep and I, and it’s awesome, but I stopped seeing great effects and going back to the whole working with brands thing is that I, it was actually in the context of schema, let alone other, some other weird, H1 H whatever considerations I’m telling this developer for this brand. This is what I want you to do. I want you to inject this JavaScript into the head section of the website. Trust me, it, it’ll be cool. And yeah like sure. I could tell them it’s for SEO, but they still some level for me to get them to jump or do anything or mess with the website, especially on JavaScript related.

It was such a pain in the ass for what it was worth. And. Because it didn’t end up benefiting the brand outside of what the SEO benefits are. You know what I mean? Like it didn’t if I tell them you need to publish broader, like your number of entities used factor here as well. So your topical breadth of this page is not as competitive as other people in the market.

That’s really good SEO advice that also gets them thinking about the web and how they publish information more deeply. And they, it changes the way that they think about their whole website, not me, like writing some custom schema and being like, yo, shove this into the thing. So that’s really where my practice has been going over the past few years in particular. And I think that just positions me to work with more brands and larger companies. Yeah. Other than the smaller ones, yeah, I think Yoast’s schema to that end does great. It does a great job across so many pages.

I’m real big in the on-page outside of just general on the page, we could go into what those are. What specifically I’m interested in on page, but like in general content organization, I think is very important.

A lot of things like site structure. Lack of topical duplicity about potential cannibalization, which doesn’t seem to be as problematic as it was a few years ago. It seems like Google is learning how to deal with Duplicity a little better, which it should be because it’s common on the web. But yeah, like just at least understanding what the potential problems are. But to that end, I think is important for the client. But yeah, just interlinking how the content is just positioned. Is there a categorization across the blog, if it’s about something like one niche, if it’s about retirement, or, other niches I’ve worked in is like bipolar information about like bipolar disorder and that’s the whole website? So obviously there are going to be similar topics often. So then the question was, do we categorize these pages? And then you use that category as, the ammunition to target that topic. I think that all of these questions are super important. And I just lump it all in as a conversation with developers and writers about the way the content’s organized on the website.

I’d just write about the right authentically. I really, maybe this is short-sighted, but I just don’t, I’ve looked at so much keyword data over the years, and just seems so anecdotal more by the year, and it seems like Google parses topics well and understands syndromes well. So I we do the research and we show the client, but I also say I’d turn the screen, I’d turn that screen off a lot. And I just say what do you want to write about? What is profitable to you?

What are these topics, that will drive the most profit, not the most volume? Yeah, I try to pull authenticity out of subject matter experts and try to get them to just even be involved in the conversation. Yeah. And hopefully that bridges teams together, sure.

It’s always going to be about information and potentially the depth and organization of which you Think video will play a more significant part.

Maybe it’s still going to be so expensive for them to parse. So it’s just going to be coming back to the fields that you can fill out in YouTube, whatever, the title into the short description and these different things. I don’t see even with, quantum computing coming down the line, like I think that like, it will ever eclipse how fast people can publish these things, whether it’s video or. Not on the web because quantum computing will, maybe Alphabet gets it first, but publishers will still also have access to it, and I think on some level the web will grow faster as a result of having better technology, and Google will still be, grasping at straws sometimes.

Yeah, it’s amazing. And I struggle to understand how another company other than Google would be able to index it all. Yeah. I think that they just had such a leg up and had started luckily they, I think there was a, the PageRank patent was a, was, it was brilliant, it’s a brilliant concept that it was, yeah.

And it’s, that, that bit them 20 years later, bit them in the ass, but it, and when I say they got lucky, it’s because it’s what they, how they were able to launch such a brand in such an important space, which is the organization of the web, the ability to query.

Absolutely. I’m just thinking about the way websites were then.

I wonder if the metaverse will Yeah.

it’s, oh. It is. It is.

Yeah, I think people like especially I can’t, you get to that level or whatever you want to call that and they like to obsess over the chasing this concept of being the first to propagate something like that. And it’s not even I don’t mean it from an ego standpoint, I just mean it from like a, they think it has so much utility to be. That trailblazer. And there’s no utility there. Yeah yep. People get lucky and end up investing in Google or investing in Bitcoin early, but you don’t know.

Just because it’s going to be like, we’ll look stupid when people look back on this interview on this recording, because yeah, maybe did blow up and yeah, whatever. Okay. I don’t, I’m not saying that it can’t be the case. I’m just saying we should be a little bit conservative about our ventures and stop obsessing. I feel like it’s. If I could make a kind of a comparison, how, back in the day, emperors and Kings sought after the fountain of youth, it’s like it was upset that they get to this place and they get obsessed with this race of some kind.

I think that we. It should always be challenging especially between colleagues, challenging our idea, and definition of what SEO is especially when you’re working directly with clients. Yeah. I’m constantly re-educating folks on what it is they’re going to get when they hire me. And the expectation is pretty rough. I’m very abrasive sometimes with client expectation management because I’m following. So many yes-men. So stop being yes, men be real with clients as to what they’re going to get from, an SEO consultant or SEO service, whatever you want to call it or package it as it’s all theory and there is no real best practice.

oh, just email me. My, social media presence is really bad. My website is also pretty bad. All right. Sorry about all that.

Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Probably email me. I just, we were talking earlier, like I’m currently managing around 50 client projects. SEO monthly retainer projects. And so we haven’t really, I don’t have a lot of time to do the social media stuff. And I wish I had more time to take my advice and publish rich information about my industry. I just don’t have it. But these yeah. I love getting on the horn and talking like we did today, right? I’ll talk to you. This is great. Thanks for having me. Right on.

You have a great day. You too. Bye bye. Nice meeting you. Bye bye. Yeah, you too.

Bye.