[00:00:00] Speaker A: At the end of the day, AI content's not very good. I don't care like how many prompts you've put in, it still has an aspect to it that to me is quite obvious.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Welcome to the agency hour podcast where we help web design and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, and their communities. This week we have Rachel Hernandez, marketing director of the Hoth SEO, joining us to help us elevate our SEO knowledge. In this episode, we explore link insertion, how AI overviews are going to impact the way we search, the myths surrounding link exchange and the problems with using AI to write your SEO content, and much more. If you'd like to know what a marketer does for a marketing company or what SEO tactics an SEO company would focus on, this episode is for you. I'm Johnny Flash. Stay with us.
Before we dive in, first, a quick word from our sponsor.
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[00:01:53] Speaker B: Hey, Rachel, how's it going?
[00:01:55] Speaker A: Hey. Doing well. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: Yeah, so glad to have you on here. So, um, for those, um, where, where are you located? Cause I'm always just curious about where people are at.
[00:02:05] Speaker A: So I am in Asheville, North Carolina.
[00:02:08] Speaker B: Okay. Oh, I love Asheville. Um, so are you close to the Biltmore by any chance?
[00:02:14] Speaker A: I would say like a ten minute drive, maybe a little.
[00:02:17] Speaker B: Oh, okay. Have you been to it? I'm assuming you have, right?
[00:02:20] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's beautiful.
[00:02:21] Speaker B: It, we went there last year for our 19th anniversary, my wife and I, and we just had so much fun. We had all the Christmas decorations out and it was just like, we got the tour and we went on the roof and it was just, it was a really cool experience. We were talking about it just the other day.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: It is so beautiful for the holidays. Did you get to go see, did you see the indoor pool?
[00:02:41] Speaker B: We saw the indoor pool we did horseback riding.
We even read a book on the way kind of to Asheville because we drove down from DC and then back we were reading a book about George Biltmore, like Vanderbilt's life, you know, and like the building of the building and everything. So he felt like we were, like we were hearing the whole story of how it came to be and then we visited it and we just really, really loved it.
[00:03:05] Speaker A: You were very prepared. That's great.
[00:03:07] Speaker B: It was fun. It was fun. So now I'm gonna have to top that this year for our 20th anniversary because we had such a good time. My wife was saying, oh, it's so great. And we did some hiking and all the things, so.
But anyways, cool. Well, great to have you on here. And I know that you and the Hoth group, the Hoth SEO service, are well known for doing SEO. So tell us a little bit about your role and what you guys have been doing there.
[00:03:39] Speaker A: Yeah, so my role specifically is I'm the director of marketing for the Hothouse. Um, so my, my little joke is that I market marketing. Uh, I also do SEO for an SEO company. So which, which is, uh, fun and metafilled challenge. Uh, the hoth itself, we've been around since 2010. I've been there for eight years now. And we're primarily, I would say, um, link building is really the thing that we're known for. And link building is if you're a in SEO and you're doing SEO, you know how crucial it is and if you had to do it, you know how annoying it is to try and figure out.
So we've definitely been lucky to cover ourselves like a very solid space in that need because it is so important and it is. I don't know if I can say this, but like, such a pain in the ass as somebody who's had to build backlinks before. But we also do, we do optimize content, we do technical SEO, local SEO services, and we actually started off as a surely white label SEO agency. So if somebody has purchased SEO from another company, there's a very solid chance that that's our stuff that's been repackaged.
[00:05:03] Speaker B: Awesome. So I know our audience. We've got all kinds of folks listening and watching in terms of, we've got like the DIYer who's trying to get their agency or their freelancer off the ground. They're, they're still doing a lot of the things and they're trying to like get off the tools and kind of elevate in their business. Right. So they're more of a business owner and not having to do all the things. Then we've got, like, the agency owner who probably has team members who's, you know, probably has someone who does their SEO in house. Like, on my team, I've got a few folks on our team who actually do the SEO. Um, and then we've got some agency owners that have a fair number of, like, white label partners where they're like, I don't want to deal with the copywriting. I don't want to deal with the SEO. You know, let's just get someone like yourself or another white label service to do it. So if we could try to talk to all three of those audiences, I think that would be great. And I was thinking for the DIYer, you know, trying to build links that sometimes you don't even know where to build the link, right. Or how. What kind of link to build. Like, am I going to get a directory listing somewhere? Am I building, like, a blog? Am I publishing a blog post on someone else's blog and getting that to have a link in it back to my site? Am I just getting someone to try to insert a link to my website on an existing blog post? Um, and I know as like a, we have a blog on our agency site that's reasonably popular enough that I get constant, uh, emails saying, hey, would you add this link to our blog post? Or, hey, you know, this would benefit you. And I'm just like, oh, my goodness, like, stop. Like, it's just so much. If it was once, every once in a while, you'd be like, oh, this is kind of cool. Someone wants to be on my blog, but when it's like every day, you're just like, I can't even respond to these because there's just so many of them. So, um, let's just talk about, like, what, what are the ideal kind of links if we could like, or, or the advantage of the different kinds?
[00:06:52] Speaker A: So there's like, there's a few different things that obviously go into this and I generally, unless you're a brand new website and you have no links at all, you're just starting freshen. I wouldn't even pursue directory. I wouldn't use your resources, whether it's time or money, in that direction, because they're just, they're just not going to be as valuable to me. The best links to get are going to be like those in content, guest post links. So, yeah, like a blog on somebody else's website. And I do love, I love a link insertion.
And I think that's a very, very powerful one. It's a powerful link because if you're putting a backlink in content that's already existing, that webpage and that content already has some authority and traffic going to it and coming from it, rather than when you're posting brand new content, you're kind of starting from scratch.
So when I actually like, because I have to do, again, SEO for an SEO company and when I, when I do link outreach for our own site, link insertions or niche edits are usually my first pass because of that. And because it's also just like a very easy thing to say. Like, you know, I saw that you linked to this resource, have a better.
[00:08:18] Speaker B: One or it's, I've gotten that email from folks, okay?
[00:08:23] Speaker A: And it all depends. And I've, I've had like, um, I had a blog on our own website where I mentioned a big brand, like a case, kind of a case study, but just kind of an anecdotal one. And this brand reached out to me and said, hey, I noticed that you mentioned our brand in this post. Do you mind linking to our website? Sure, why not? I have no issue with that at all.
So I think, yeah, I mean, if we're talking about link insertions, I think are my favorite guest posts can be super, super powerful. But then the other things that you want to look at when you're looking for link opportunities are the site's different names for this, but domain authority rating essentially, like how powerful is that website is? The scale from one to 100, the higher the number, the more powerful backlink. I wouldn't bother with anything that's below a 20 for the most part. It's just not going to do that much for you. And then the other metric that we look at, the hoth, that I think has become supremely important and people are finally catching on to this is how much traffic is going to that website.
Because if Google is sending that site traffic and they're, they're ranking them for certain keywords, they're going to see that site is an authority too. So like, we don't do guest posts on websites. The lowest will go is 1000 visitors per month. Organic.
[00:09:57] Speaker B: Okay, so you would say basically guest insertion, link insertion on an existing post is the best choice. Second best choice is maybe like a guest post and wouldn't really waste time with like directories and other stuff. Right.
[00:10:12] Speaker A: If you're brand new and you have no links, I think directories are fine because is one everybody? It's not like everybody has to start somewhere, but like, you kind of have to start somewhere. And also, if you're a brand new website, the first links you get to it naturally are not going to be like those big, juicy guest post links or those insertions. So we want to build a natural backlink profile. And three would make sense for that.
[00:10:36] Speaker B: Yeah. And what do you expect? Like, do you expect to pay something when you get a link insertion or not? And if so, like, or sometimes, then what's like a reasonable amount to pay for that?
[00:10:50] Speaker A: It depends. I know that's cliche marketer answer. Yeah, but it does. I mean, it depends on the website. It depends on whether or not you can also offer something.
I do, again, link outreach for our own website, or it's similar. When I do, I do influencer outreach for our website. Sometimes I'll say, can you create a post about us? And I can give you this thing that you can review. And some people say, yes, and that's great. Some people say, I want $1,000 for that post. And that's a different animal. So it really depends on who you're talking to and what you're working with and what your budget is. And that's why, I mean, not to like, just show, I'm not here to shill our stuff, but working with a vendor who has like, these established relationships with different websites and different brands is super useful because it kind of takes all that negotiating stuff, like off of the. For you. They handle all that stuff for you.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: Love it. So, I mean, just, just for the diyer out there, it could be anywhere from. What would you say? Like, I mean, I guess it all depends. But if we're just talking about a link in existing blog post, I mean, I guess it could be as cheap as free or like $25 and it could probably go up to like several hundred dollars. Right.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: Depending on they're getting a link for $25, it's not gonna be a good link. Okay.
Yeah. I mean, I would say when you get a response like that, you're usually gonna be spending at least a few hundred dollars, and that's really on the lower end. Okay. What I recommend generally, ideally, is offering up an exchange. So a lot of people say, like, link exchanges don't work. And that's when, like, you reach out to a site and you say, if you link to be, I'll link to you. Um, I think that's a myth. I think there's a lot of evidence to show that those link exchanges do work. And the vast majority of sites like if one sync sight links to you, they're going to like. That's just kind of natural. If you're playing in the same sandbox, if you're in the same industry, that's usually what I would start with.
You link to me, I'll link to you.
And I personally have never paid for a link to our website. I always kind of try and figure out either if it is a value add, like I have this source for you or so you mentioned, our brand, or we can do a link exchange.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: And that's generally, and how much does it matter on like the no follow versus like the follow and like where the link goes and that kind of thing.
[00:13:31] Speaker A: Yeah, it does matter.
It matters in the sense that Dofollow is always going to be more powerful for an SEO perspective. So if you're really trying to put some dollars behind getting a page to rank with a specific backlink, Dofollow is always going to be preferable to nofollow. The page it's pointing to is always going to see more results, like more dramatic results than your website as a whole. And then on top of that, anchor text or the text that's hyperlinked matters as well.
So yes, ideally you would have a keyword or an exact match at anchor text.
That being said, if you are pointing all of your links to your money pages, if all of your anchors are exact match, if all of your links are dofollow and you don't have any no follow links, that is a red flag that is saying to Google, this is unnatural link building, they're going to ding you because that just doesn't happen in the real world. So you want a variation? Absolutely.
But I would not spend, if I was to spend money, I would not spend money on a no follow link.
[00:14:47] Speaker B: This is super helpful just because I think there's a lot of way what works, what doesn't work, and I think you've at least for the link building part that's helpful. It is still a lot of work if you know, like, okay, I want to link insertion and I don't want to pay more than a few hundred dollars and I want it to be a high domain authority. It's like, it's a lot of work. You got to find those sites, you have to send the message, you know, make sure they have a high enough authority in traffic. You got to reach out to the right person. You got to figure all that out. I mean, it just, it's very time consuming. So I think having someone like, you all be able to just take care of. That is such a relief in terms of being able to do that. And they could still potentially even do some of their own SEO internally and just say, hey, we're going to have the hoth do our link building or whatever if they wanted to and you guys could take care of that. So there's lots of options, I think, for that. What are you seeing in terms of. This is shifting gears a little bit, but in terms of I type in something on Google and now I'm not getting a search result of a real person. It's saying like, hey, AI generated this response for you and I'm like, do I really want to trust this or not? It probably depends on what it is, but it's how is that stuff impacting SEO? And is Google just going to eventually replace all of us with their own answers and sites could be suddenly irrelevant. WebMD, which you would normally maybe go to for medical advice or something like that. Now maybe it's just going to be Google's bot generating all the medical things. It's going to say this is not medical advice, but then it's going to say all the things that you want to hear. So I mean, how do you think that's going to impact things?
[00:16:36] Speaker A: Yeah, that's really, that's a really good question.
And it's, well, I'll start with this, which is that the AI overviews is fairly new and they actually just launched a new UI today that I'll talk about in a second. But Google has, like, this isn't new, even though this particular aspect of it is. I can't remember the last time I did a Google search and just saw like a list of like blue URL's attached to a website. Like there have been the knowledge panels, now there's the YouTube results. People also ask if it's a shopping query. They have like the map and the stores that are closest to you and they have the filters. And so it's always kind of been moving in this direction and that's because Google does want to improve the user experience for people who are punching in queries. You don't always want to have to go to a website to get to what you want and that's okay.
So AI overviews is just kind of an extension of that at this point.
I don't necessarily think that Google is going to make it so that we never leave that page because then their paid ads would be Google pay ads would be, they want us to also buy those sponsored slots and if those slots are the only ones that exist, they are not in with the organic results as well, they're not going to mean anything and nobody's going to click on them. So I think we're safe for now with AI overviews.
I think what we're going to see is a loss of direct traffic to your website via organic. But because a lot of these results for AI are coming up for those more top of funnel searches rather than buyer intent keywords, the traffic that you're losing is not necessarily going to be traffic that would necessarily convert because they're not there in the funnel yet. And I actually think this is very useful for businesses because when there's an AI overview result and it can have like three results, five results, seven, like seven different citations within that one box. It shows your brand, it shows the logo. And as of today, I'm not sure when this is going live, but each element of the answer of the AI overview points to a citation to a particular website. And if you click on that citation, it will take you to the website as well.
So I think in terms of top of funnel brand awareness, if somebody is doing a lot of searches related to your field and you're consistently showing up in those AI overviews, that's good. I think that's actually really good for you. That's a lot of really nice recognition. And then when they're ready to do those bottom funnel buyer keywords, they will be sent to your website and maybe they'll trust you more and be ready to buy.
[00:19:43] Speaker B: Okay, so I've got two follow ups then to that with the AI overview. What kind of content should we be putting on our websites so that we do show up in an overview? Is that like frequently asked questions? Is that like extensive content on a specific topic? Like what kind of content do we want to generate for. That is my first question.
[00:20:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I think, and I've been sort of geeking out over this for months now, but really especially today because this new one, so I've been kind of seeing where obviously our own site is showing up. And what I'm seeing is it's typically long form content that's like almost that pillar content that dives deep into a subject.
One of the ones that we show up and I think is customer avatar because we have a very epic piece on that. And then what you want to do is structure that long post. And these are generally going to be blog posts because we are talking top funnel.
You want to structure that post so that it's optimized really well for the algorithm. So in h two, that would answer a direct question, but a very clear definition that answers that question. Underneath it, I'm seeing bullet points show up in AI open use and I'm also seeing infographics show up. So think about within a long form piece of in depth content, how within that can you make each element very snackable, very easy for a user to understand just from reading, like, you know, 300 words at the top of the search results page.
[00:21:27] Speaker B: Okay. Love it, love it. So, yeah, so having the long form and how long does long form have to be? I mean, like, if I'm at a thousand words, am I like hitting the minimum threshold or do I need to be at like two, three, 4000? Like, what are you, what do you think about that?
[00:21:42] Speaker A: It's dependent on the keyword or like what your topic you're trying to optimize for. For me, I don't publish anything less than 2000 words. And that's if I'm like, not necessarily really trying to push hard to rank. If I'm trying to push hard for rank, I'm doing closer to 3500 to 4000 words. But keep in mind, I'm in a very competitive niche.
So if you are in an industry that is a little bit more specific or where you're not going against really, really huge brands or people who produce a lot of content, because there's a lot of content that's written around SEO, you can probably get away. I wouldn't do a thousand words anymore, but I think 2000 words, if you're in an industry that's a little bit more niche, is a very solid number to go for if you're looking.
[00:22:38] Speaker B: And you can even overlay other types of content. Like you said, your blog post could have the infographic. You could record a two or three, four minute video explaining the thing. Because I'm seeing now, like, the video, you know, the videos have been shown up in the results for a while, but like, it'll have the caption, it'll even have like, the segment pulled out that answers the question that I had. Right. So we're personally, we're in the middle of building a house and so, like, they're getting ready to do the footers. And so I'm reading like, okay, what, what is, what is going to happen with the footers exactly? What do they look like? Do mine that they're about to do look like what they're supposed to look like? So I'm googling like, you know, what do footers look like on a house construction. And I'm getting like even video result. I'm getting photo infographics, I'm getting text, but I'm getting video results that are showing me like a particular part of a video that has the guy in front of the footers showing what the footers are. Right. So you can apply that in so many ways, though, in terms of like, you're the paving company and someone wants to know what's going to happen with the process of their driveway getting paid. You could record that video on your next job. You turned it into a long blog post. You have an infographic that shows the layers of the driveway and there's just lots of things that you could do that makes it like, really good content that most of your paving competitors are not going to have right in your local area.
[00:23:53] Speaker A: I love that.
A metaphor that I've used recently is think of the search engine results page is a monopoly board. And yeah, some property might be more valuable than others, but the more that you own, whether it is that YouTube video or showing up at the a overview or an image that's an infographic, the more likely somebody's going to land on you.
[00:24:16] Speaker B: Yeah. And it doesn't take that much more effort. I mean, like, I work with a lot of churches in the church world and we're like, well, I'm always coaching them, like create something once and like use it across all your channels. Right? So the preacher preaches a sermon. You've now got this video. You can transcribe that. You've got like the long form content. You can take out a snippet of that and put a 32nd clip on social. You can like, you know, you can kind of like take these pieces of content and then recreate them as an infographic, as a video, as a blog post and all these things. And it doesn't have, it's like a little bit less work than if I was trying to do different topics for all of those pieces of content, right?
[00:24:54] Speaker A: 100%, yeah.
[00:24:55] Speaker B: One thing I wanted to ask you about, since we're talking about, um, SEO and AI and stuff, because this has been something that even my own, myself and my own team have been wrestling with. So I know others are wrestling with, with it, you know, and it's like, how much should we, or could we use AI for SEO content? And like, even if Google maybe is okay with it right now, especially if it has some human element to it, like, could we get to a point in six months where Google's finally like, wow, there's too much AI content. We just want to, we want to rank original content higher. And so like, that content that maybe did okay for a client for a period is now like getting de ranked down because it was written by AI or whatever. Like, I'm just kind of curious and of course this could change, like by the time this episode goes live and that kind of thing. But I'm just kind of curious on like, you're all's take on like, how much it's okay to use AI, I guess, to create SEO content.
[00:25:56] Speaker A: I would not use it to do the writing itself. And I think for some of the reasons that you mentioned, Google has sort of gone back and forth when AI, when chat, GPT officially or initially hit the mainstream, Google released an update to the helpful content update they had previously done in the fall. And they said that helpful content was defined in part as content written by humans, for humans. And at the time, people were like, oh, okay, so they're coming out against AI content. And then Google figured out that they couldn't figure out what AI content actually is, so they kind of rolled it back and they said, you know what, I'm AI content's okay as long as it's helpful.
But I think we're going to see this push and pull. But really, I think also at the end of the day, AI content's not very good.
I don't care how many prompts you've put in or how designed you think, it still has an aspect to it. That to me is generally quite obvious.
And if the software that people have created can't pick it up, if you are in tune with the industry or in tune with writing, you recognize it right away. And that I think because our job as SEOs and as marketers is to provide a good user experience.
And that means when you put something on your website, it should be quality and it should be useful and it should be something that the reader can relate to and enjoys reading, AI is not going to do that. And even as it advances, if everybody, like, if AI becomes the perfect writer, if everybody is using it, then everything still sounds the same.
And that's going to be, you're going to be the differentiating factor if one who's not using it through your content.
[00:27:58] Speaker B: So I think you're right on with that because I have a couple, few kids in high school, and I remember earlier this year in the spring when they were finishing up one there, I think it was in 10th grade or whatever, and he got a newsletter from the school, my son did, and he was reading it. And he was like, I think this was written by AI, you know, or whatever, or the link to the. I don't know if it was. I can't remember if it was the email or a link in the email to something that he clicked on that he was reading. And he was like, I think this was written by AI and this is, like, by the school. And then, like, he puts it into the AI detector and it's like, 91% likelihood written by AI. And it was so interesting because he's like, here you've got a 1516 year old, you know, who's just reading something from the school. Like, there's no reason to think that the school didn't write it or whatever, right? But then he's. He's able to detect, like, that this doesn't seem like it's like it's written by a human, you know, and it's like. And it wasn't bad content or anything like that. It was just like, we can tell. It's almost like when you go to a website and you can tell that it's stock imagery versus, really, the company or the organization or whatever, it's like, we can all tell. If I go to a church website, I can tell you whether that's stock images or whether that's actually photos of the church. Even if I've never been to the church, I could just go there and make that because I've looked at enough church websites and I've coached enough churches that, like, it's very obvious, right? And so I think someone like my son, who's like, you know, he's up on the school, like, what's going on at the school and everything, right? At the high school, like, he can tell if this is, like, something that's written by a person or not, and.
[00:29:38] Speaker A: That'S going to take you out of it, even if it's good. Like, let's say you could write a bunch of AI content and it ranks in Google, but, like, the whole point of ranking is for somebody to click on that link and go to your website, and if they get to that piece of content and they're like, oh, like, this is AI, or like, this is, you know, whatever. I mean, to me, it would be a turn off as a user trying to learn more about a product or service or a business or a brand.
And so then what's the point? Like, if you're number one and you're alienating your users, once they click on you, that 33% share, it's useless.
[00:30:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. This is good. This is good.
Awesome. Well, as we wrap up here, any other kind of thoughts on SEO that you want to share? Things that you think would be helpful for our audience? I know that. I know we could. I could geek out on this stuff for, like, I get really into this, you know, SEO AI, like, even like, Google Ads, which are all. They're all kind of related in some ways. Right.
And so I could just talk about this for a while. But anything else you think that would be helpful or just tidbits or information that you think for our audience?
[00:30:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think this is not new. Like we're saying, the search engine results pages have been changing so people stay on them. We have seen massive algorithm changes. The hoth was there for the pandas, the penguins, the hummingbirds. And at the end of the day, it really is. If your north Star is about improving the user experience and not about simply trying to rank, you're going to be okay. If you're just trying to game the system or find the easy way in to get your site to rank in Google, you're not going to make it.
But if you're focusing on the people that you are trying to serve, you'll be able to survive any sort of technological change, because that's what they're trying. That's what these search engines are trying to provide and trying to do. So love it.
[00:31:44] Speaker B: Love it. So good. Rachel, thank you so much. Really enjoyed this conversation and hope to get to connect with you again soon.
[00:31:52] Speaker A: Yeah, thank you so much. This is a good time. Thank you.
[00:31:56] Speaker B: Thanks for listening to the agency hour podcast and a huge thanks to Rachel for joining us. Okay, folks, remember to subscribe and please share with anyone who you think may need to hear it. I'm Johnny Flash. Let's get to work.
