The AI Advantage: Reshaping SEO Beyond Traditional Keywords

Hey, hi, everyone. Welcome to your show, E Coffee with the Experts. This is Ranmay, your host for today’s episode. Today we have Pat, who is the Managing Partner at Intergrowth. Hey, Pat.

Ranmay, it’s great to be on. Thanks for having me today.

Great. Pat, before we move any further and pick your brains, we talk about SEO. Why don’t you help our viewers understand more about your journey thus far how Intergrowth was formed and what you guys specialize in? What is your bread and butter? We’ll take it forward from then on.

That sounds great. I started in the SEO space probably 11, or 12 years ago at this point. Most of my SEO-related experience has come from working at agencies. I would say, Intergrowth started out getting back in 2015, 2016 when I met my then-business partner. At the time, he and I were working at another digital marketing agency in our area, probably about six months into being there, after having spent, I would say, quite a bit of energy trying to push for a lot of changes that we saw just as opportunities for that agency. I joke that at the time we were these two 20-something-year-old kids trying to tell a successful agency executive how to run his agency better. Understandably so, he was running a great agency. He said, hey, stay in your lane. Do your thing. We know what we’re doing here.

So, after Probably about six months of doing that, we decided, Hey, we are in these things. This agency is doing great on its own. Let’s go off and let’s build our agency based on these principles. We started at the time, what was June Tow and, have since rebranded to Intergrowth. But Dave and I started a with couple of core premises. One of our biggest beliefs, back in 2015 – 2016, was that the freelance economy was the future. By that, what I mean is we have firmly believed since day one of our agency that the best companies in the world of tomorrow were going to be and are going to be the businesses that don’t just hire people that maybe live within a 20, 30-minute drive of their physical office, but instead focus on hiring people on all sorts of different platforms, whether it be Upwork, Fiverr, you name it, and find the best people across the world to join their team. We built our agency with that principle. With COVID, I would say that’s largely held to be true. I would say that probably skewed things a little bit in favor of our vision, but I still very firmly believe that’s where the world is going in the future.

The second big thing that we focused on is process. We believe that agencies think or swim based on the idea of, whether can they not only drive great results for clients but can replicate that process of driving great results for one client so that every client sees that same quality of results. Since day one, we focused on those two core principles. Since then, we divided the agency into a couple of core segments. Dave went off and started his own great SaaS business. But since that time, I’ve shifted my focus entirely towards rebranding the agency to what is now Intergrowth, which ultimately focuses on three core facets. We, I like to say, are the strategic partner that helps the underdogs of the industry to overtake industry leaders. And we do that really through three core areas. One, we focus on writing long-form educational content that your customers are looking for online. Two, we come in from the SEO consulting technical SEO perspective to make sure that your site is easy for search engines like Google to understand, and make sure that any technical issues that can interfere with user experience or search engine abilities to read your site are all addressed as well.

The third thing is we build high-quality links to your site so that your site earns more from search engines like Google and ultimately earns the right to rank for these high-value queries that your customers are looking for online every day.

Wonderful. Brilliant. Quite a journey, I must say. Pat you, have been in SEO for quite some time now. What strategies or secrets, if you want to reveal any, did you employ to ensure sustainable growth without external funding?

Oh, man, great question. I could probably ramble about this for quite some time. I’ll try to keep it a little more concise. I would say one of the things that we did that I’m very grateful that we did from the very early stages is we focused on doing everything possible, focused on the hyper long term. I’ll elaborate on that with a couple of specific examples. But our firm belief was the best way to build a great business is to have a business that is entirely focused on the long term in every sense of the word. A business that focuses on having a phenomenal product/service. In our case, we deliver great quality services to the clients we’re working with. The second thing is making sure that you’re hiring great people for your team and that you’re treating them like gold so that they feel appreciated and they stay with you in the long term. There are a lot of practices I would say that we employed within that realm. One of the first things that I’m grateful that we did, especially being bootstrapped from the beginning, one of is the challenges that can come into play when bootstrapping a business is, unless you have a healthy savings account that you can put into the business to start, it’s very frugal living in the early stages.

One of the things that we did, I would say very well in the early stages, is we forced ourselves to live a very frugal lifestyle. We paid ourselves the equivalent of an intern’s salary and lived on the bare minimum so that we could invest more heavily into the business and could do things that we’re going to focus on long-term growth. So, because of doing that, when we were just barely scraping by month to month, we were able to put more money into the company savings account so that we could invest in longer-term growth initiatives, and we had a little more flexibility to not need to necessarily focus on meeting payroll every single day but instead could say, Hey, let’s focus on doing these things that are in the best interest of the long term health of the company. One of those really big things that came into play is because we were focusing more on cutting expenses for our salaries in the short term and focused on long long-term, we were able to invest much more heavily into the long-term initiatives that drive customer growth. From day one, almost all of our marketing budget went into practicing exactly what we preach to clients, which is focusing on SEO and content marketing for our site.

That ultimately helped us to rank for all these high-value queries that people were actively seeking out when they were looking for an agency partner. The second big thing that came into play is because we were focusing so much on the product itself and providing consistently exceptional service to clients, we ended up in a fortunate position where A, the clients that we brought on board continued and do continue to work with us, not just for 12, 18 months, but for several years. Many of those clients, even if they end up going to work at another company, will loop us in and see if we can work with their new company because they know that we’re going to drive great results and they know it’s going to make them look good to their new employer if they loop us into the discussion. Those two things coming together really came into play with that long-term growth focus. Within that, the last thing I wanted to touch on is an extreme emphasis on hiring the right people. One of my favorite books that has become the backbone of our hiring process is called The Ideal Team Player.

And Ranmay, maybe fact-check me on this one because I think I’m going to get his last name wrong, but it’s something along the lines of Patrick Lencioni, I want to say. And I feel terrible. I recommend the book all the time and I always get his last name wrong. But listeners, if you look up The Ideal Team Player, it is probably my favorite hiring book, one of my favorite business books that I’ve ever encountered. In it, Patrick speaks about the idea of really focusing on three core hiring traits. I’ve tweaked them just slightly, but the terms that I use to describe them are hiring people who are hungry, humble, and emotionally intelligent. For us, yeah, it’s super powerful and he gets in-depth on what are some of the things that you should look for to find people that have those character traits. What are some good ways to vet for those character traits? I’m a very firm believer that for most roles that you’re hiring for if you look at people that have humility, that are eager to succeed, and I would say in often cases have a chip on their shoulder to prove themselves to the world. Then also people that are compassionate and then have that emotional perception where they can read the emotions of others to help those people to be better off, those are three really powerful characteristics. If you focus on hiring people who have those traits mixed with a strong process for driving results, I think you can take anyone and turn them into an A+ employee if they’re not already at that level today.

Lovely. I love the part about emotional intelligence when you mention that. It’s a very strong virtue to have that being emotional about, let’s say, getting connected to the company working for your team and stuff because a lot of today’s hiring is based on just skill sets. You and I know that a lot of enterprises believe in that. But these are often nuances of hiring the right team. It goes a long way in terms of helping you achieve what you wish. When you’re working for other businesses like we are in an agency model, you’re helping the other businesses keep the lights on while you’re trying to keep yours on. It is essential to have these compassionate people who also empathize with, let’s say, these small business owners, sit down with them, understand what the problem statement they’ve come out to solve, how they’re on the show, how many leads you get them, their phones ringing. It gives you that adrenaline-push that you make that happen for that particular week for this particular business. Those are factors that multiply if you look at those pointers there. When you talk about retention Pat, I feel that retention does not start up onboarding a client, and after that three months, six months they’ve used your services or experienced your product.

It starts with your sales process. If you have sold them right, if you have set the expectations the way they should be, then retention will not be a problem until and unless you goof up big time. That is where there are morally strong people heading the sales functions, talking exactly what they can walk through makes a lot of sense, and it gives a good, strong, repeatable image for your company as well in the long run wherein you might have to say no to a few businesses here and there, which is difficult, I know. We all need the bugs to keep the lights on. But it makes a lot of sense to say no and get filtered business so that you can deliver, keep your clients happy, and in return, get what you are getting when you mentioned about references, those clients at senior-level positions moving out to, let’s say, other businesses, getting you guys onboarded again because they have felt that experience with the previous organizations. It is like stitching together the entire story. It’s not one piece where you just do digital marketing and come out. A lot of marketers, unfortunately, think about it.

It’s beyond your contractual obligations, as they say.

Absolutely. You’ve hit on such a really important point that I wanted to speak to you for another minute about the idea of that customer experience dealing with the sales process.

One Of, I would say, the things that ended up being extremely beneficial for us in both the short term and the long term in taking that frugal approach from the beginning and building up that company savings account from the beginning is exactly what you were touching on. When you’re not necessarily as concerned about meeting day-to-day payroll because you know that you have that savings account set aside for the company to deal with a couple of rough months, it has an incredible impact on the sales process if you choose to implement this. And that impact is your mindset can shift from needing to close the next client so that you can meet payroll to instead saying, hey, let’s make sure that we are going to build a great long-term relationship with this client. Let’s make sure that they are in the right scenario to work with us. Let’s make sure we set realistic expectations, and let’s make sure that before we sign off on working together, we’re going to be a great partner to help them grow. If you’re in a scenario where you don’t have that savings account, it can force you into a scenario where maybe you need to sign a client to just keep the company afloat in extreme scenarios, and oftentimes that can lead to really difficult client relationships where A, the client may not be happy, B, the people on your team that are working with that client are going to deal with a ton of stress, C, you may find that the client churns after a couple of months because either expectation wasn’t realistically set or it’s just a client that wasn’t going to benefit from your services.

So little bit of rambling there, but it’s such an important point that you hit on that I wanted to spend a minute speaking to more.

Great Pat. Moving on, you do a lot of content, right? We are an industry flooded with content left and center. How do you consistently create 10X content that stands out and captures the audience’s attention?

Yeah, absolutely. What I would say, first of all, with content, to your point, there is, especially in an age where you can pump out a blog article on ChatGPT or a dozen other tools in 15 minutes if you want to, there is an extreme influx of content on the internet. I am a little bit down a tangential note. I saw this study that came out from Cyrus Shepard over at Zyppy. I think it was earlier this week that basically in one of Google’s recent antitrust hearings, it came out that they have 400 billion pages indexed in the entire Google index. Given that there are probably 10 trillion different web pages on the internet at large, that tells you that Google is only indexing a very small percentage of these pages. Just as a total side note, it’ll be fascinating to see what happens with all this AI-generated content over time, is it ranking or is it a case where Google is seeing that content and ignoring it? Going back to the direct question, though, about the 10X content, what we found to be most helpful in creating great content, I would say comes down to two core facets.

I’ll say three core facets. One, which goes back to what I was saying before about being humble, hungry, and emotionally intelligent, is hiring exceptional people. The two elements that I’m going to dive a little bit deeper into are one, making sure that you are creating the right types of content, and two, making sure that you have the right repeatable process in place to create that content at scale without sacrificing quality. Regarding the right types of content, we’ve looked at a lot of very successful blogs out there. The biggest trend that we’ve noticed over time is that the best blogs on the internet all focus primarily on three main types of content. I refer to those types of content as awareness content, sales-centric content, and thought leadership content. Awareness content, I like to say, is the type of content that is predominantly focused on getting search engine traffic. These are going to be the articles that will have the theme of what is insert keyword is, the benefits of insert keyword, and things of that sort, where data will show you time and time again if you look at keyword research tools, people are looking for these exact topics on an extremely regular basis online.

There’s a lot of visibility going into articles all about these topics. Awareness content, we find time and time again, is your best tool to build visibility through content marketing and SEO. Many of these topics, though, aren’t necessarily going to drive customers to your site. Many of these are going to be awareness tools. They’re going to build your brand visibility. And when structured correctly, they’re going to help you to take readers who read the initial article and funnel those readers to more valuable pages of your site. So, the Secret to Success with creating that 10X content for awareness content, I largely think comes not only down to the content, but also making sure that you’re assigning the right goal to that piece of content. If you create five of these awareness articles and your goal is to get 10 SQLs from each of these articles per month, you’re going to flop. You’re not going to end up getting that lead flow, and you’re going to consider that content to be a failure. If you look at it, though, and you say, hey, our goal is to rank for these specific keyword themes, our goal is maybe we rank for five different variants of each of these keyword buckets so that we can get a thousand people to the site every single month from these articles, and then we’re going to funnel those people to more valuable pages through in-links or CTAs, then you can succeed and you can have successful content there.

Getting into that second grouping, you have the sales-centric content. Those are going to be the pages that are going to target the high commercial intent keywords that are extremely difficult to rank for, especially if you’re in the realm of e-commerce, those are typically going to be search results that are going to be dominated by Amazon, Wikipedia, and a bunch of affiliate websites. But the awareness content, while it may not get so much search visibility, those are going to be the types of pages that have high conversion rates for that main goal that you want users to take, whether it is signing up for a demo of your software, whether it is buying a product from you, whether it is filling out a contact form so you can have a consultation call with them. In our experience, these pieces of content do the best when they don’t necessarily have the goal of getting traffic directly from search, but instead the goal is, let’s create a converting piece of content, and let’s either A, pump a lot of paid ad budget into getting people to these particular pages, or two, let’s make sure that we’re regularly linking to these pages from these awareness articles on our website, so that we’re taking these readers who are engaged, getting them to more valuable pages that have that 3-5 or even 10 % conversion rate and driving far more sales that way.

Grouping three is the thought leadership content. This one I find is the most difficult to frame into generalization because it varies so much from one industry to the next. But what we’ve seen works the best for the thought leadership content is finding ways to take the extremely in-depth insights of subject matter experts at your company and convey them into a piece of content. It, whether it’s a blog article, whether it’s a video, you name it. Some of the tricks that we found that are beneficial for this are asking those individuals at your company for predictions for where the industry is going to be going in the next five years and asking them about specific elements of their process of doing something that differs from the industry norm, asking them about common mistakes that they see customers making and why these are such painful mistakes. A really good way of putting it, my favorite way to know that you found a really good subject matter for them to dive into, is if you ask these subject matter experts about these topics and you just see their eyes lighten up a little bit because they’re so excited to talk to you about this granular concept.

Thought leadership content, the downside with it though, is similar to sales-centric content, in my experience, it’s really hard to get search visibility from it. Largely because many of these themes that these subject matter experts are going to be talking about are such granular topics that people aren’t necessarily going to search engines to look for this content because people don’t even know that they don’t know these particular issues. So, this is the type of content that also really benefits from a paid ad budget, benefits from being promoted in your newsletter, really benefits from being promoted in your awareness content so that people can see you as that subject matter expert, this type of content earns you the trust that customers need to see that you are a go-to source of information in your industry and hopefully end up buying a product or buying a service from you from there. That was a lot of rambling, but ultimately getting into having the right type of content for your goals, focusing on those three areas of content, we see as one of the key factors of success for the 10X content. The last thing I wanted to touch on is the idea the of process.

In my experience, you can hire a subject matter expert to write about a particular blog topic or create a video about a blog topic, and that can be extremely powerful. What can be challenging, though, is asking a subject matter expert to share their insight and not giving them the proper framework to share those insights. What we find extremely important for 10X content is finding ways that you can incorporate that subject matter expert. But we see the best success when we have dedicated writers who take these insights that an industry expert can share and can convert those into a fully formed article in a fraction of the time because they have a go-to process for how to create that content more efficiently. If it takes a subject matter expert 15, or 20 hours to write a blog article, oftentimes it’s going to be far better to interview them for 30 minutes, collect their insights on a granular subject matter, and then work with a dedicated writer who excels at writing content and understands your industry, at least to a baseline degree, and can take those insights and put them also into layman’s terms in a way that everyone is going to be able to understand.

So, we found that having a go-to process that is repeatable or creating great content, identifying what are the key characteristics of an exceptional article that our team is going to repeat every time, and ultimately, what are the steps that we need to take to ensure that we have proper quality control? In particular, some of the big things that stand out, just offer a couple of concrete examples. One, readability, I think, is one of the most underrated characteristics of content marketing. A, incorporating great imagery, B, incorporating any other styling visuals, whether it’s bullet points, whether it’s bolded text, header tags, so H1 through H6 tags throughout the article, that are going to make it more straightforward for someone to skim through that content if they just want to get the gold Nuggets in a short period. But on top of that, on the quality control front, is finding a way that you can ensure that you have multiple people involved in every single article, video, you name it, that your team is creating. We see the best success when we have a dedicated writer who collaborates with an editor, not only on the outline in the first draft of the article phase but also being able to loop in a subject matter expert to critique the article and fact-check us.

And then from there, getting another team member involved that is going to be involved in the process of uploading that content to a website, that we get a third or fourth set of eyes on every single page before it’s actually pushed live, and ultimately get a fourth set of eyes that are checking for quality, making sure there aren’t typos, making sure spacing and formatting is put in correctly, and much more.

You also touched upon visual storytelling, which is so powerful. As per you, how can marketers use visuals such as, let’s say, infographics or visual narratives to convey complex messages and resonate with the target audience?

I would say, If you had asked me two years ago, I would have said it’s the most underrated element that comes into play in content marketing. Nowadays, I think that value is only getting more and more extreme. The reason is, that content depth or content is getting, in general, more long form. And with the rise in AI content creation, my theory is that in the next couple of years, we are going to see the average length of articles double, if not triple. We’re going to go from seeing articles that are maybe 1,500 words on average to articles that are 3,000, 5,000, or even 10,000 words on average. Today, most readers aren’t going to take the time to read your 2,000-word article from word to word, they’re probably going to skim it. So, the more things that you can do today and the more things you can do in the future to make it so that it is really easy for someone to skim your article in 30 seconds, whether it’s 2,000 words or whether it’s 20,000 words, the more likely you are to provide that really helpful resource for the reader and ultimately get them to buy from you in the future.

Since we are talking about content, it’s almost like exactly to ChatGPT came to outlives. I heard that’s the industry by storm, for sure. But what do you think? Where are we headed? Exciting times for sure. In the industry, I have adapted a lot to AI machine learning. It was always there. ChatGPT brought it to the fore. What is your take on it, Pat?

Oh, man. I would say I’m very excited to see where everything goes with AI at large. Sharing a few different thoughts on it. One, long term, I do want to emphasize this, long term, I see AI as a broad technology that is going to drastically change the world. Short term, my theory is that we’re actually in a very big hype cycle. I had predicted coming up to the timeline when I predicted this to happen, so we’ll see what happens here. But I predicted, I think it was back in March of this year, so March of 2023. I predicted that 12-18 months from now, we were going to see a big boon in investments and interest that was going to go into AI technology. The reason is, that have seen this trend many times in the past with other technologies. We saw it with the internet in the late ’90s and early 2000s, we saw it with things like 3D printing, and we saw it with cryptocurrency. My theory is we’re in this big hype cycle right now where there is a lot of consumer interest in this brand-new technology, which to be fair, has been waning a little bit over the past year.

But because of that, we’re also seeing massive investment dollars being put into this. My theory is we’re going to see that consumer interest wane, we’re going to see investment dollars wane, and we’re going to see a big decline in the let’s call it the market value at large of AI technology in, I guess going back to my original prediction, like the next 12 months. That being said, in the long term, I do see AI recovering. In the, call it the next 5-10 years, my theory is a couple of things are going to happen on the AI front, specifically related to, let’s say, the SEO content marketing realm. One, we are going to see almost no barrier to entry for any website on the internet to pump out 1,000 blog articles that are AI-generated. Over time, my theory is AI is going to get even better at creating content that provides value to users. My theory is that the brands that are going to win in that contest are the ones that invest the time into maintaining and building a brand voice and ultimately build a follower base that they have full control over that doesn’t necessarily rely 100 % on search engines.

So, one of the biggest things we’re pushing customers to do now is A, to invest in putting together that subject matter expert or that thought leadership content so that they start to build up that follower base of people who just want to consume every bit of content that they put out there on the Internet. Getting those individuals to focus on building their social following through that content, building their email newsletter through that content so that even if they lose a big chunk of their future customer acquisition, let’s say, from search engines, they still have that walled garden that they’ve maintained of their existing follower base that will then be able to recommend them. So, my theory is the brands that succeed in the long term are going to, one, be the ones that invest very heavily in their brand voice and put out that valuable content that customers want to read long term. And then on the opposite end of the spectrum, I do see a lot of brands succeeding in what I would call the eventual race to the bottom, figuring out how to produce the most content at the lowest price possible and taking the marginal gains off of that.

For our team, I always want to fall into that first camp of focusing on the highest quality content possible, building a great brand voice, and creating the best insights possible. I do see a lot of brands that are likely going to succeed in the long term with that second grouping, though. And within that, I would say one of the biggest things that I have as a current viewpoint that I believe will happen in the next 5-10 years. Right now, AI is an incredible technology. LLM blows my mind to think about everything that they can do. Where things are today, though, there are a lot of inaccuracies within LLMs. We get this full concept of hallucination, excuse me, where LLMs will make up these facts or they’ll make up these sources that don’t exist. If we’re properly fact-checking that, that’s fine. I describe it as it’s like having a virtual assistant that is trying to stab you in the back. Yeah, they might be able to help you out. They can make your life way easier. They can handle a ton of really big responsibilities. But make sure that you fact-check that.

Play it safe. Make sure that you’re not putting out any inaccurate information that could hurt your brand. Within that, I’ve been telling a lot of customers who will ask us, hey, what are your views on AI? Should we be using it for our content production today? I share that same general premise with a virtual assistant who could stab you in the back. Because if it’s a brand-new website that’s starting from zero today, there’s no risk to them saying, hey, let’s put out a bunch of AI-generated content. If Google likes it, that’s great. We’ll get a bunch of traffic. If there are some hallucinations, it’s okay. We don’t have a brand associated with it. So, if it’s a business deciding, hey, do we use this as a customer acquisition tool? Yeah, I think there’s a lot of value behind it. Where I see it as really risky is if you get these established brands that maybe A, already have a healthy business, or B, maybe they just have a healthy level of search traffic and they’re trying to figure out how to better monetize it, how to scale that search traffic, you run a lot of risks of having your content getting flagged for either inaccuracy, either by search engines or by human beings, or having your content just flagged as low quality.

If you’re pumping out 1,000 AI-generated articles, there’s a huge risk that’s going to dilute the value that customers and search engines see when they look at the other pages on your website as well. If only one out of 100 articles on your website are genuinely helpful, your site is probably going to perform way worse in the long term. A lot of ramblings within AI, and I am excited about it. Maybe the best way I could sum it up is to say I would encourage proceeding with caution. I’d encourage experimenting with it. I’d encourage using it as that virtual assistant that you’re going to fact-check like crazy. And I’d encourage using it for ideation. One of the things we’ll often do with the content we might write for our site is if I’m working on a blog article, I may plug in a summary of that article. I may ask ChatGPT to generate 10 unique title ideas to go along with that article. Oftentimes that title, one, I can either take one of those titles directly because it’s an outside-the-box idea that I didn’t come up with, or two, I might be able to look at some of those titles and say, hey, why don’t I mix some of these?

This is a great ideation. But at the same time asking ChatGPT to write an entire blog article about a granular subject matter that a customer may be reading and maybe implementing changes on their website based on what ChatGPT is putting together is very high risk. Because if I let bad information slip through there, that runs the risk of destroying our entire brand’s reputation. So, the more concise the answer is I’m super excited to see where it goes. I am very bullish on it in the long term, but I’m very bearish in the short term for AI.

Lovely, Pat. It has been a brilliant conversation, but I cannot let you go without playing a rapid-fire with you. I hope you are game for it.

Let’s do it. That sounds great.

All right. Your last Google searches.

Oh, man. Project management for accounting. Doing this for research for one of our clients, but project management for accounting.

All right. Let’s say if we were to make a movie on you, Pat, what genre would it be?

Man, good question.

SEO was easy.

Yeah, that’s true. Oh, man. Maybe a stereotypical dad comedy. I love dad jokes. I get way too much joy out of dad jokes. It could be a little bit of dumb humor thrown into the mix. That would be perfect.

Okay, lovely. What did you do with the first paycheck, Paak?

First paycheck. We’ll say first, what I considered at the time, a reasonable amount of money was that the first business idea I started in college, ended up dumpster diving and selling used textbooks on Amazon and made like 500 US dollars one summer. Realistically, I was hooked on Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. I grew up in Boston, so still a big Dunkin’ Donuts fan, and I probably spent the majority of those 500 dollars on Dunkin’ Donuts coffee for the rest of the year.

Okay, the last one will not grill you any further. Your celebrity crush?

Oh, man. Definitely have to go with Shakira on that one.

All right. Great. Lovely, Pat. It has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for taking out time and do this with us. Appreciate it.

Ranmay, my pleasure. Thank you for having me on today. This has been a blast.

Great. Yeah, thank you.