Building Relevance and Resilience into Your SEO with Stephan Spencer

In This Episode

• [03:18] – John Jantsch asks Stephan about the highlights of the new edition of the book, The Art of SEO.
• [06:44] – Stephan discusses some of the core tactics that are still proving effective in 2024.
• [12:42] – Stephan explains how generative search would impact SEO tactics.
• [14:47] – Stephan emphasizes what we need to prepare for and come to expect from voice search.
• [16:18] – John asks about the current state of local SEO and the new realities for businesses trying to attract local customers.
• [19:08] – Stephan shares his favorite AI tools for optimizing content.

Jump to Links and Resources

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Stephan Spencer. He’s an SEO expert, founder of the interactive agency, Netconcepts, and a bestselling author, serial entrepreneur, life hacker, podcaster, and contributor to Harvard Business Review and Adweek.

He also hosts his own podcast, in fact, two podcast shows, Get Yourself Optimized and Marketing Speak. He’s the author of three books, including one we’re going to talk about today, which is now in its fourth edition, The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization. So, Stephan, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

I have a brother who spells his name that way, but it’s Steven, so forgive me if I say it wrong. 

It happens all the time.

I bet it does. So if there’s a need for a fourth edition of a book as big as The Art of SEO, it must be that some things keep changing. We’ll drill down into them, but what are some of the highlights of this new edition?

Yeah, it was so much. I mean, it was pretty much a rewrite from the bottom up. Actually, the previous edition, the third edition, was a thousand pages. We had to cut down quite a lot because the more material in a book, the fewer copies that sell, and it gets a little bit ridiculous. Who wants to read a thousand-page book?

There’s a whole chapter now on AI that wasn’t present in the third edition, and that’s using LLMs generative AI to create everything from keyword strategies and processing your keyword lists into different kinds of use cases, categorizing and grouping keywords, everything like that to doing the more technical stuff like writing blocks of hreflang tags. I’m getting a little geeky here. I don’t want to make this full of acronyms and buzzwords and so forth, but there’s a lot of technical stuff that you can do the heavy lifting using AI now and not have to do it the old-fashioned way. There’s a lot on that. 

There’s material on things like page speed and core web vitals, or three different metrics and core web vitals. That’s a Google innovation that’s coming out of Google. They want you to have a fast-loading website, and that relates to what they call their page experience update. There’s material on that. 

If you’re putting out AI material as if it’s handcrafted, you could get it through helpful content updates or other algorithmic adjustments from Google or a manual penalty.

There’s material on the helpful content update, and that’s actually a series of updates. They want to ensure that people are not creating a huge raft of content using LLMs AI that will fill the internet with a bunch of cruft, things that are not really that valuable or are not properly fact-checked. There are already lots of issues with AI creating and just making up facts, references, studies, and that sort of thing. 

So if you’re putting out AI material as if it’s handcrafted, you could end up getting by the helpful content updates or by other algorithmic adjustments from Google or a manual penalty, even. So you’ve got to keep up with the times.

There are a few things you mentioned. Again, I’m getting off the order of my questioning here that I’ve had prepared, but there are a few things you mentioned that I’ve seen immediate impact. We’ve had a couple of websites that, for whatever reason, got really slow. They fell off the core web, core vitals threshold, and immediately started seeing results tank when you fix ’em, and they come back. There’s no debating that that’s a ranking factor.

Actually, sometimes less is more. There’s this tactic or this approach in SEO called ‘content pruning,’ which means you actually take old obsolete content off of your website, or at least noindex it, so it’s not part of Google’s search index anymore, and that can actually help your overall website perform better in the search results.

Yeah, we had a 2000-page site that we did just that to 1400 pages and immediately lifted their results. They had a lot of stuff on there that was probably not relevant anymore to the reader. Let’s talk about if we can categorize some of the core tactics that are still proving effective in 2024?

It’s important to understand that the tried and true techniques and tactics of SEO still apply in terms of identifying good keywords and topics that resonate or relate to your audience. We don’t want to lose track of these tried and true things, optimizing title tags and the body copy and all that sort of stuff, doing proper keyword research, optimizing the technical underpinnings of your website, doing all the configuration of your server, and so forth, using Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. 

These sorts of things are still applicable, but now with the advent of AI, we need to find ways to differentiate your website to make it seem like it’s handcrafted, fact-checked, authoritative, and trustworthy. There’s this acronym from Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines. It’s E-E-A-T, it used to be E-A-T. This is a Google acronym, and it stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.

And AI does not have any experience. It cannot write about its experiences, learning how to ski downhill, or how to basket weave, or how to train for an Olympic sport. That’s where the experience of a human really differentiates. And if you can prove that to an algorithm at Google, that will be very important.

It’s important to understand that the tried and true SEO techniques still apply in identifying good keywords and topics that resonate or relate to your audience.

It’s not just about showing your credentials of the different degrees, diplomas that you’ve earned, and all that, but having the experience displayed in a way that looks super legit. It’s almost like you’re going to look super credible. 

This idea of being super credible, I am going to steal a page from Peter Diamandis’ playbook, and that is when he announced the XPRIZE—it’s a $10 million prize; the winning team would get $10 million—well, guess what? He didn’t have the money. He announced it without the funding, but he had super credibility because he had on stage with him, making the announcement, multiple NASA astronauts, and the former deputy director of NASA, it was super credible. 

Nobody asked him, “Do you have the money?” So he didn’t have the money for years until finally he found the donor, the patron. So if you can show yourself as super credible to an AI and a human visitor and do that in a way that doesn’t look like you’re being braggadocious, that’s really the winning formula.

From a practical business standpoint, would you say things like case studies of real life, examples of doing the work that you’re describing, or even FAQs, I mean, things like that, that add another level of experience potentially?

Yep. I would say if you can provide, let’s say a testimonial that’s not just a written testimonial with a person’s first name and the first initial of their last name, but you actually have all their details, their full name, their title, their company, their location, you have a video of them, you have a headshot of them that looks really quite credible, and if you can even better get them to talk about what didn’t work or why they almost didn’t sign up with your service or buy your product, that’s really quite compelling. 

I hope you’re not going to keyword stuff your article. That’s been done in the past, and it’s never worked well, and won’t work in the future.

So anytime you can augment your assumptions with hard data and real-world examples, screenshots, charts, graphs, and stuff that helps build your case and substantiate your claims, you’re going to be in much better shape.

You know what I think is always funny is over the years, what you just mentioned, that’s how you are more credible to a potential buyer, even without a search. I mean that just comes to your website, sees the data, sees the proof, and it just feels like with every change in SEO or optimization techniques, it’s really just getting it closer to what would be good for a human, period.

That’s right. But on top of that, you have considerations now that you are writing for AI as well as for humans. You’re not going to write primarily for an AI. You’re not going to try to keyword stuff your article, I hope.

That’s been done in the past, and it’s never worked well, and won’t work in the future. But if you are keeping in mind a core audience of AIs as an audience, reading your quote, reading your article, you’ll end up with a better outcome. 

That includes things like how do I interlink these different pages together? How do I lead people on a story arc or a hero’s journey? Because I’m leading the AI through that hero’s journey, too.

So you mentioned AI’s reading and playing a part in search, so this might be a good time to ask about the whole concept of generative search and how that’s going to impact, probably two things, not only SEO tactics, but certainly search behavior.

That’s right. If you go to search generative experience (SGE) from Google, and you start asking it questions, you can get some misinformation from it, just like with any AI, because remember, we have hallucinations. Those are not going to go away in the future. Those issues of it’s essentially an auto complete, it’s an auto complete on steroids, what’s the next word? What’s the next word? What’s the next word? And if it doesn’t have an answer ready and available, we’ll just make it up. 

AI hallucinations are not going to go away in the future.

There’s going to be a lot of fact-checking and gatekeeping to make sure that wrong information isn’t served up, especially when it relates to financial matters or with medical advice or anything like that. So I personally don’t anticipate search generative experience being the primetime kind of answer engine that people have been touting it to be, because of those risks.

I mean, think of the liability for Google. If it tells you to take some sort of pharmaceutical and there’s a contraindication or some sort of side effect, lawsuits will abound. So I think that it will be more of an add-on feature for who knows how many months or even years. But I see it as the future, and we’ll be talking to our computers and devices more than we’ll be looking at them in the future. 

So it’ll be like Star Trek computer. And if your website has that future in mind when you’re creating content, then you will be in a much better position. You’re going to lead competitors when they’re just writing for today. You know the Wayne Gretzky quote, “Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where the puck is at.”

You led really right into my next question. We’ve been talking about voice search probably since Siri came around. Where do we stand in voice search? You just talked about talking to our computers more than viewing them. Where do we stand today in that? What do we need to be prepared for? Because again, it’s one of those things I feel like we’ve been talking about for 10 years.

It’s still coming when you have a result that is less than awesome. When you’re asking, for example, your Amazon device, I’m not going to say the word begins with an “A” and she’s listening right now for its wake word and it’s going to start chiming in on this conversation.

“Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where the puck is at.” – Wayne Gretzky

So that device, when you ask it simple questions that Google would just nail on the first try, and it completely gets it a hundred percent wrong, or doesn’t give you any answer whatsoever, and says, “I don’t know the answer to your question,” that’s frustrating. It makes people just not want to even try this. 

There will be a tipping point, though, where you get much more than just a recipe or timer from your Amazon Echo. That tipping point is where this will completely take off. And if you are not prepared for that, you will be chasing after a train that’s left the station. So, plan on this being an eventuality because it is an eventuality. It’s just a matter of the timing.

I know you cover local searches. Obviously, there are a lot of businesses that are trying to get people in their town to find them. What are some new realities, if you will, in that kind of business, that’s the remodeling contractor that just wants people to find them?

There’s been a lot of innovation with local search, and if you’re familiar with that world, there’s this kind of a blending of paid search and local SEO with LSA (local search ads). You’ve got these tools that I just can’t imagine not using for local SEO, like Local Falcon, which will show your physician in Google Maps results, the three pack, the local pack and the Google results. 

If you are even 10 miles away from your current location, your headquarters, your local results could be markedly different. And how will you know without VPNs or traveling around town and doing searches from your mobile phone? You need to use a tool like Local Falcon. It’ll show you a grid of whether you’re in the top three positions and what position you’re at, and it’s like a heat map sort of thing, across a whole metro area. 

So you can see, “Oh, I’m really strong in this part of town, but I’m invisible in this other part of town. I may need to start a satellite office by appointment only,” not a sketchy thing like a UPS store location, but a real, legit office there. And you don’t have to pay a fortune for that. It might be under a thousand dollars a month for an office with signage that is really a real office, not a P.O. box, which could make a world of difference. 

And now you’ve got two locations, and you’re really strong in that other part of town that you were invisible in. How will you know this and track it without a tool like Local Falcon? So you need different tools and strategies for local search than just regular SEO.

You said 10 miles. I’ve seen half a mile. In a very competitive, like a hair salon or something, where there’s one on every corner. Really, geographic proximity is tough. You mentioned tools like Local Falcon. What are some AI tools that business people trying to optimize their content, create new content, and be more efficient in creating content? What are your favorite current tools? I know tomorrow I’ll ask you, and it’ll change, but what are they today?

Plan on voice search being an eventuality because it is an eventuality. It’s just a matter of the timing.

I’m going to start with the tried and true obvious AI tools, ChatGPT and Claude, which I consider to be a big rival or archenemy. Anthropic is the creator of Claude, and OpenAI is the creator of ChatGPT. Some of the top leadership at OpenAI left and started Anthropic, and created this competing Claude AI tool. And it’s amazing. 

At this point in time, it has a hundred thousand token limit on input, meaning that you could upload an entire book and have it use that as part of your input. You could upload, let’s say, a manifesto or how you think and operate in the world, and your values and philosophy on life and business, or whatever, for your industry. 

You have that manifesto, you upload that and you ask Claude or ChatGPT questions like, “Based on your understanding of my company, my brand from this uploaded manifesto, come up with a voice and tone guideline for me, come up with a social media strategy for me, come up with an editorial calendar for my blog for me,” and it will do incredibly well.

That is much better than just typing in a prompt. I mean, yeah, you get sophisticated with prompts and do your prompt engineering, but why not upload something that’s really representative of your company, your brand, your unique point of difference, and then you let the AI come up with all sorts of different things, social media posts and draft blog articles and strategy documents and positioning statements and so forth based on its understanding of you from that kind of cornerstone piece of content that you’ve uploaded. So there’s that. 

There’s using super prompts, which are prompts, the input that you type in. It’s on steroids because everything has been thought through, and you don’t have to think through all these things yourself. You don’t have to come up with like, “Please ignore all prior prompts. I want it not to be influenced by a whole series of previous questions that I asked. I want it to create, let’s say, a markdown table. So it’s a pretty formatted table. 

I want it not to display any kind of narration or explanation around why it’s outputting particular things. I just want the output file of whatever my editorial calendar is.” I don’t want to explain its thinking as it’s going along. All these things are baked into a super prompt, which might be 250 words of stuff. If you can paste somebody’s super prompt, whether it’s on creating a keyword strategy or on even creating other super prompts or on writing a blog post or something, you are going to end up with such better output because the old adage from the programmer days of garbage in, garbage out still applies. 

If you write a lousy prompt, you’ll get lousy output. So that’s the difference maker right there. And you don’t have to go to all the fancy new tools, which may not exist in six months. They might go out of business. So if you’ve got a podcast, you could be using, let’s say, Capsho or Castmagic, or Deciphr. These tools are awesome, and who knows which ones will exist in six months from now? ChatGPT, that’ll exist. Claude and Google Bard will exist. So you get masterful at those. You’re definitely going to leapfrog your competitors.

Awesome advice. Well, Stephan, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Where would you invite people to connect with you and learn about your work? Obviously, pick up a copy of the latest edition of The Art of SEO.

The publisher is O’Reilly, so I can’t just give away copies of the book, just add infinitum. But I did get permission from my publisher to give away a handful of copies. So if somebody wants to email [email protected] and just say they want to kind of put themselves into the lottery for a free The Art of SEO fourth edition digital copy, I’ll send some of them. 

Actually, everyone can get a copy of Google Power Search, which is in its third edition, for which I have a hundred percent of the rights. I can send that to everybody who sends an inquiry. My personal website, stephanspencer.com, and netconcepts.com is my agency. You mentioned at the beginning my two podcast shows, Marketing Speak, which you’ve been on, John, marketingspeak.com, and then Get Yourself Optimized, which is getyourselfoptimized.com—not an SEO podcast, may sound like one, but it’s actually personal development.

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Implement content pruning. Remove outdated content from my website or no-index it to improve overall performance.

Focus on E-E-A-T principles. Create content that demonstrates my Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. AI cannot write about experiences, so showing my personal experience differentiates my content and proves legitimacy to Google’s algorithms.

Build super credibility. Enhance testimonials with full names, titles, companies, locations, headshots, and video testimonials.

Substantiate claims with data. Augment my claims with hard data and real-world examples, screenshots, charts, and graphs to build my case and substantiate my claims.

Write for both humans and AI. Remember that the core audience is AIs and humans when creating content. Consider how I interlink pages and lead readers through a story arc or hero’s journey.

Optimize for voice search. Prepare my content for a future where we’ll talk to our devices more than look at them.

Use local SEO tools. Implement tools like Local Falcon for local search optimization to see my position in Google Maps results from different locations across my service area. This helps identify geographic strengths and weaknesses.

Consider strategic satellite offices. If I’m invisible in certain parts of town, consider opening a satellite office with proper signage to strengthen my local search presence.

Leverage AI with comprehensive inputs. Upload comprehensive documents like my company manifesto to AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT. Based on my unique brand voice, this gives the AI context to generate voice guidelines, social media strategies, and editorial calendars.

Email me at [email protected] to enter a lottery for a free digital copy of The Art of SEO (fourth edition) or to receive a free copy of Google Power Search (third edition). Visit stephanspencer.com or netconcepts.com, and check out my podcasts at marketingspeak.com and getyourselfoptimized.com.