How SEO Copywriting Has Evolved With GenAI Search — What Works, What’s Dead, and How to Stay Ahead

Heather:
AI content can be horrible. I can understand why people wouldn’t trust it if you’re just kicking out stuff and you’re not training what you’re using in your brand voice and using human. But that’s not you. That’s not because of where the industry is heading.

Andrew:
Hello and welcome to SE Ranking’s DoFollow Podcast. Here we hold regular talks with SEO and digital marketing experts to discuss hot SEO topics and share actionable insights with the SEO community. So, subscribe to stay on top of everything going on in SEO.

Today, we’re going to be discussing how SEO copywriting has evolved with generative AI search—what works, what’s dead, and how to stay ahead. To shed some light on this topic, we’ve invited Heather Lloyd-Martin to come on, who is an experienced SEO consultant, SEO copywriter, trainer at SuccessWorks SEO Copywriting, founder at the SEO Content Institute and a LinkedIn Learning Instructor.

Welcome to the DoFollow Podcast, Heather. It’s great to have you with us.

Heather:
Hey, thank you so much. It’s good to be here.

Andrew:
We have a lot to get to today because it’s a very exciting topic and I just want to just jump right in and ask you to tell us a bit more about your journey through the SEO industry and how you became known as the pioneer of SEO copywriting.

Heather:
Wow, so I have been in the industry since the very, very beginning, which is wild to think about that. Back in the day, conferences were very small. We were just a very intimate group of search geeks that would travel around and talk about this stuff. And I came from a marketing background before I got into SEO.

So, how I was looking at things was the content. Like I knew that keywords were a thing back then. I mean, keywords were a thing back then. But I was more focused on, well, how do you create content that has these keywords in them so people will be able to find what they need to find in AltaVista? Because back then we weren’t even thinking about Google. Google was just a thing, but it wasn’t a big thing. And wow, have things changed since then.

So, since that time back in say 1998, I have watched the SEO content industry evolve from we don’t want content, don’t put any content on the pages because people won’t read it, to we want all the content, create long form content, to okay, we can create content and then have it spun and just swap out the keywords and syndicate that to different places and to where we are now, where we’re using generative AI to create content that we’re posting on Google. So, it’s wild to see how the industry has changed so much and the opportunities have changed so much.

But one of the things we’ll talk about is the foundations of SEO writing, what it was meant for, what we’re doing with it, what the intent has stayed consistent over time, the tactics, how we play with Google, all of that has definitely shifted. So, it’s been a very fun ride over this, 20 some odd years.

Andrew:
Great! Then let’s just dive in specifically to the topic of AIs helping us create different texts. So, with the rise of these tools, AI generative, AI tools, how have you seen SEO copywriting evolve in the recent year or two?

Heather:
Oh, yeah, that’s been fascinating. So, if you look back at anything that I created or spoke about, even like a year and a half ago, I was very, I won’t quite say anti-AI with writing, but I was very, very hesitant. And a lot of that came from, I had seen what had happened in the SEO writing industry and industry across the board where, people were thinking, well, geez, if I can get ChatGPT for 20 bucks a month, it costs me $75,000 to have a decent writer, duh, do the math. And so in that way, I see that at the very beginning, I wasn’t too down with it.

Now, what I’m seeing around how it can help is that although I don’t see ChatGPT right now or generative AI being able to completely replace the human in everything we do. There’s a lot there that I think that just for accuracy’s sake, being able to storytell, I mean, we’ll talk about all of this. We still need the writers, right? We still need that talented person who understands our brand voice.

However, when we have AI tools, we are able to create writing assets faster than before and look at our writing in a different way. So, even for someone like me who has over 30 plus years of experience as a copywriter—I had been doing this forever—once I dug into what I can do in terms of productivity with say ChatGPT or Claude, I realized that that is the big game changer right now for writers and for companies is learning how to leverage that in a way to where they can still create the assets they need to using those SEO writing best practices and they can use generative AI tools to make that process slightly easier and let the writers do what they do best. It doesn’t replace them, but it allows them to focus on higher level things, which I think is amazingly cool across the board.

Andrew:
Yeah, I totally agree. One of the things I want to stop on straight away is the main principles of SEO copywriting. What has changed? What has remained the same? Maybe some principles have become obsolete with AI advancement. Maybe we don’t need to do as much desk research because everything is in there. How has traditional SEO copywriting changed specifically with regard to the advance of different AI tools?

Heather:
That part is interesting because it’s more of like what Google is looking at now and that has changed how SEO copywriting has evolved. So back in the day, we were talking about, you need to optimize every page on your site for like one, maybe two main keywords, “running shoes”, then another page for “blue running shoes”. Now what we’re looking at is, okay, we don’t need to do that anymore. What we do need to do is look at search intent and write according to entities and write in a conversational way.

So, all of that has definitely shifted over the years for what Google is rewarding. And with ChatGPT coming into that, especially, and I have not played with this yet, but I would love to, where that, I can see it can be really fun for writers is like even now with say persona research, things that it would take time and effort and a lot of back and forth with the client to be able to pull all that information.

Now what we can do with ChatGPT is be able to pull things into it and have it create content or at least a persona that’s pretty good that we can start asking questions and start making determinations of how we look at our content with that. We can look at ChatGPT in a way that can help us, say if we have a very large article, slice and dice it into different ways, that we purpose into social posts, create YouTube summaries, do things that, I don’t want to say that they are like lower level tasks because they are important, but they’re things that can be automated and that kind of automation is a big deal.

Now, what I think where ChatGPT can go wrong is that for some folks, if they’re not used to what they’re doing, and they’re writing with it for the first time and they do not know SEO copywriting best practices, they might just start typing stuff into ChatGPT and say, I want a top rank article on blah. And because they don’t know what they don’t know, then that can spit out the same type of crap that used to flood the search results a long time ago.

So, where I see the research going with ChatGPT is it helps us streamline, it helps us repurpose, it helps us do more things with our writing. But in terms of best practices, where the danger is, is that if you, like I said, if you don’t know what you don’t know, you can create content inadvertently that’s not very good, that sounds very homogenous. And that’s something that I’ve heard across the board from agencies who did try to get rid of their writers and then realized that they needed to bring people back to be able to write better content.

Andrew:
One of the aspects that I love about having a human author in there is that you can connect with a person and you can go and attend an event, network with that person, build a connection, and then you have something there. But if you just replace everything with AI, how do you actually build up on that connection other than just attracting people to your blog, you know?

Heather:
Exactly, and one of the cool things that AI will do to that with the human connection is let’s say you and I are talking and I’m asking you, hey, I’m curious, what do you think about my community? Can you test drive it? Can you give me some ideas? I want to know what’s going on.

We get a transcript. I start adding all of those transcripts into ChatGPT and I say, help me understand what the trends are. What are the pain points? What do people love? What do people not dig as much?

So, with us as people, we might be biased towards our own product and think everything we do is wonderful. We might think that certain things are what needs to be fixed. What that can do is it can help us expand those human conversations and give us actionable data. So then we’re able to say, okay, when I’m writing the sales page, this is what I know is important to Andrew, my persona. This is what I want to make sure is in there, which you may not have done or noticed before even as a skilled copywriter. Even if you did notice it, having that instant transcript and data pulled in is amazingly time-saving.

Andrew:
With regard to pulling that data, because right now when I’m thinking about copywriting using AI, it does not know the search volume of any keywords, like the way I see it. My question is, how can content creators leverage generative AI to enhance their, specifically, SEO strategies in making sure their content is of high quality as well? But just with regard to making sure that it’s not just well-written text, but with regard to the thing that you said earlier, like creating text and helping people find it on Google.

So just with regard to specifically enhancing your SEO strategy, is there any way we can take advantage of AI tools right now?

Heather:
I mean, there are certainly AI writing tools. So, for example, Bruce Clay has his prewriter.ai that he is promoting to folks as a way to help writers get the information without having to research as much. So there is that. But let’s say you don’t want that, you don’t have that, you’re looking at traditional Claude or ChatGPT. I don’t dig it so much for the SEOs part because it doesn’t always do a great job for people who don’t dig into it a lot.

But what it can do is you can start saying, okay, here is an example of a webpage. Can you provide me keyword ideas based on different types of search intent and get a list there that you can research further? I’ve taken content and I’ve said, okay, can you search, I’m serving this back into you. This is the content that I’ve written before. These are the key phrases that I’m using. Do you see any other opportunities, places where I could change the headlines or sub-headlines, make it more key-phrase-rich, make it better for the reader? And that can produce information too.

So, where I see the time saving for that is that back and forth that you can do with a tool where you can get information and it’s always a trust but verify. Here are the key phrases, here are the search intents, here’s a page, extract what you see as a search intent and the key phrases from it and then let me see what I can do writing it.

Those types of tips can give you that, like enhanced double check, especially if you’re writing by yourself or you are writing within a group of folks that aren’t as savvy with SEO. But in terms of like, do I use it to research key phrases and do something that would be more based around a tool. No, for stuff like that is where I still stick with SEMrush, other tools, like SE Ranking because I find those are more reliable for what I need to do and give me another broader view of the data.

Andrew:
Yeah, that was just the question I was about to ask you. Like, what are the risks if you just rely too heavily on it? Because I’ve heard stories of people who, just for experiment’s sake, they just try getting suggestions on how to best promote an article, what keywords best to use.

Because I personally have been writing articles as well. And maybe 10 years ago, I was focused on the keywords. Then I stopped focusing on, like the keyword density. I just wanted to have a naturally sounding text. So I stopped focusing on making sure that the word sandals is in my article about sandals 60 times. I would just write it maybe like 10 times and then I would have synonyms in there as long as it just reads naturally. Because you know you have to love writing putting words together into sentences first of all. And then yeah because I always struggled having an intro, cutting down the intro, I just loved having, I don’t know just sharing all my knowledge in every article, you know.

Heather:
I dig that I completely understand and actually that is one of the ways that I will use ChatGPT and it will say “cut this introduction it’s too long and not adding value”. I’m like “Come on!” And often it’s right, you know, if I pull my ego out of the way.

Andrew:
Killing your darlings, you know, but obviously not in such a big sense with Stephen King, but still we love we love our stuff.

What I wanted to ask you next is how does AI-generated content impact user engagement and conversion rates compared to human written content? Do you have any data on that? The way I see it is if an article is well written, I wouldn’t complain if it’s written by AI as long as I get what I want, right?

Heather:
Exactly! And when I saw that question, I did a search in Perplexity. It’s because I was curious about the different sources that would tell me how AI content is performing. And so there are studies that say that it actually saw a greater engagement rate creating content for social.

And I can see that for some people because for creating content for social, sometimes it’s easier to have AI just spit it out that you modify instead of like sitting there and trying to stress how to create a post that is funny and engaging, on topic, with a call-to-action. So there’s that.

But then there are people that do not trust content that they believe is AI generated and that extends to the brand, right? So, if your brand is continuously kicking out content that is not that great, it reads like AI, then that can be a negative thing for you.

So personally, I’m sure I am reading good AI articles that have been enhanced by a person all the time. And like you said, I’m getting the information that I need. I don’t necessarily care about that. I just want to get the information. However, I know that in, say the freelance copywriting world, where I still will mentor some writers that there would be clients that say, do you use AI for anything, any part of your process? And if they say, yes, I use it for brainstorming, I use it to double check keyword research, I use it for something else that will be the end of the conversation.

Because AI content today is like SEO content was considered back in the day. It’s evil. You shouldn’t do it. There’s something wrong with you if you do and you’re lazy if you’re trying it that way. And it’s funny how that attitude is coming back around. So, I remember training print copywriters, you know, 10, 15, 20 years ago said, I hate SEO because it’s fake and it’s artificial, and it makes my writing sound formulaic. Same thing that you hear today. My argument back then was it can if you do it wrong, but you don’t have to. Same argument today. AI content can be horrible. I can understand why people wouldn’t trust it if you’re just kicking out stuff and you’re not training what you’re using in your brand voice and using human. But that’s on you. That’s not because of where the industry is at.

Andrew:
With regard to people analyzing AI text, we get that it’s about just solving the person’s issues, answering a search query, their intent in that specific moment. But with regard to Google, most of the time we’re thinking about double-E-A-T, E-E-A-T. How do we fit in that experience part? Because I can see that the expertise, the trust and authority can be sort of simulated by AI. How do you work with the experience part just to make sure that Google sees that AI-generated article and it satisfies those guidelines with regard to experience, expertise, trust, and authority? What are your thoughts on that?

Heather:
Exactly! So there has been one person, I have not tested this, so I cannot say if this is valid, that have all of her stories, you know, as if you are writing enough content, you have the stories that you share that you might modify a little bit throughout the years, but basically you have five or six core stories. How did you start in search? What are you doing? She uploaded that to ChatGPT and then when she needed to [insert story here], it would modify her story. So it added that little personal touch.

That to me is trusting the robots just a tad more than I’m really comfortable doing. So, what I will do with that and what I share with people is they’re like, “how do I add this in?” is I look at is like what kind of story, what kind of theme before you start writing do you want to talk about or share? Do you have a case study? Do you have a story where somebody came in and talked to you or somebody sent you an email? Or something happened to where that interaction is what allowed you to showcase your expertise.

So it’s a little bit of storytelling, a little bit of showing off what you can do, which the best articles will have. Add in those studies, add in everything that you have to make it sound personal. So when you have that, general outline that either you fed into ChatGPT or Claude and it kicked it back an improvement, or it might give you something to initially work with, then that’s when you can look for opportunities to add in that bit of expertise, especially, and this is so important, if you know what has already been positioned in Google and you can do something that is different, unique, stands out than what is already positioning. And where a lot of good content writers go wrong, in general outside of the whole AI thing, is that they have the same content as everyone else because they think, if this is positioning, I should do it too. Or they just are writing fast and they don’t think of ways to differentiate.

So, sometimes the way to differentiate and show expertise is to zig while everyone else is zagging and say, this is what people say in the industry, but yeah, I think they’re wrong. I mean, as an SEO copywriter who came from direct response, there were people that think, why are you talking about AI? It’s the devil. I don’t mean to use it as a differentiator, but it does change the conversation a little bit when I say I’ve gone from this and now I’m kind of embracing it.

Looking at where you can add a different type of value that was already there, not only does it help with Google and all of that stuff, but it helps your brand. And I think in today’s world, where we can’t really trust Google to position our content like we used to, anything that we can do to build brand awareness across channels, get people talking about our stories and expertise, that’s a good thing. And so, being able to add that expertise in through those stories, through the interactions we have every day.

Rand Fishkin is an excellent example of using everyday stuff that he does to be able to illustrate a point. And that is what people will remember and have them start seeking out your content rather than relying on them eventually finding it in a search engine.

Andrew:
Yeah, it actually calms me down that once you said this, because I was thinking like, oh my God, if it’s going to just take care of the experience part as well, and it’s going to look real enough, authentic enough…

Heather:
It’s that fine line, right? And someday maybe they’ll be able to fake it really well and that’s just what’s gonna happen. I hope not because I think that the backlash for AI will be is that we want that authenticity. We connect with people. I connect with you. I see your face. I like you. You know, I feel like we’re friends. We’ve been talking for, you know, for some 30 odd minutes. And that’s what we want as people, as humans, and kicking out too much stuff that sounds automated, that encourages that separation and just, for a lot of people, just clunks right now.

Andrew:
My next question is with regard to search engines, how do they perceive and rank AI generated content? If that is something that you know about. And, maybe, what steps SEO professionals can take to optimize their content to appear in AI search?

Heather:
That’s been a fascinating long story. So Google has been like, we don’t like it, it’s awful. And today it’s like, well, it’s okay. As long as you’re not kicking out like thousands of AI generated pieces in order to spam Google and manipulate search ranking.

So, Google has always kind of bowed to the reality of how things are today. And in this case, how things are today is, hey, we are using these tools. are being used to create content, whether we like it or not. So in that way, I kind of put that to the side of the table. It’s like, you’re okay. If you’re spamming Google, that’s another story, but it always has been.

So, the secondary question is like, okay, so what do you want to do? Do you want to be in an AI, take Google’s AI Overviews, or appear in ChatGPT Search? And that is an interesting question to chase.

Andy from Orbit Media, he did a fantastic breakdown on this about, here’s how to position AI Overviews, is it really worth it? And so one of the things that we look at with AI Overviews is like, what is currently positioning? Are people reading it? Are people taking action? All of that stuff. We know that some people just hate AI Overviews because they don’t want to read that kind of noise. But assuming it’s important to your brand, it would be interesting.

One first thing to look at is like, what kind of search is it? And is that search important enough to you to try to manipulate your content around an AI Overview? Because if people are just looking at what the content says, they’re getting their quick answer and they’re boogieing out, then that might not be worth it to do all the little tricky things that you can do to be able to get in an AI Overview.

Instead, I would say just optimize your content well. Write it the way you would write it anyway. You might be pulled in just because, but to focus your efforts on doing what you would normally do. And instead, what Andy was mentioning is that, especially if you’re a B2B, consider would it be more worthwhile instead of looking at AI Overviews and being cited, is to create things like case studies, do original research, have videos with your subject matter experts, or have your subject matter experts write things.

Content that expands upon your brand assets and for people that are looking for someone to purchase from would say, they have, I like their subject matter experts, I read their case studies, I trust them as a company, I now feel more comfortable making a purchase.

So, for example, you have Microsoft that appears a lot in AI overviews because Microsoft, right? And so for a company like them, it might make sense for them to be seen everywhere because again, they’re Microsoft, they have good content, it would naturally position anyway because of brand authority, blah, all that. But for everyone else who are looking at how to figure out how to spend their time and how to look at where to send their writers if they don’t have that much money to work with or they can only produce a little bit of content every month, then it may be more worthwhile to dig into your sales data and try to figure out what kind of content has helped push leads into sales or help drive leads. And in those cases, you may not want to play with AI Overviews, instead create something that you know will help that conversion and make you money.

Because in the old way of SEO copywriting, you wanted to be everywhere. You would optimize for every single keyword no matter what. And back then it was kind of easier to do, so it made more sense. But today, it’s not as easy to do. You’re not necessarily going to position even if you’re an authority, even if you write good content, even if you love what you created. So it’s time to look beyond that and see where else can you create content that will add value, make you money, and resonate with the people who buy from you, help build up that brand awareness and turn them into fans.

Andrew:
Great points, Heather. Um, yeah, we’ve had Andy Crestodina on as well. He shared how he gets feedback from ChatGPT. Like what you said at the very beginning, not writing stuff, but like, uh, getting the persona communication right, getting feedback on a longer article. So we’re very excited to have him on. And just like, we’re excited to have you on and hopefully continue to have this conversation later on in the future.

One of the things that I wanted to ask you is, more to the general, like philosophical questions that are more closer to the end of our conversation, how do see our role changing in SEO copywriting as these tools become even more sophisticated?

One thing that I want to say additionally is that, for example, my brother was working at a company where he developed a tool that replaced him. For example, what you could do is just send all of your 30 years of texts into it and say, okay, continue working as Heather Lloyd-Martin and I’ll just be taking the back seat and just looking at everything, how everything’s going. But that is not what you want, right? You want to still be active and put words together.

So going back to the question is as these two become even more sophisticated once we get artificial super intelligence, how do you see, what is your prediction? How are we going to write? Is writing even going to be a thing or is this going to be all in our thoughts and everybody’s individual super intelligence is going to be communicating specifically with one another? I have no idea. I’m just also spitballing here. Just what’s interesting in your thoughts.

Heather:
It’s fascinating because if you would have asked me even a couple of years ago, would we be here now today where ChatGPT is able to put out, you know, sort of okayish content, depending on what you do, I would say, yeah, not quite yet. So I mean, that’s a real question. So there’s a couple of ways I can answer that. And the one is like, does AI make writers or content creators lazy and suck out their creativity?

And that is kind of a valid question in a way, because you can, if you are working fast and not really into what you’re doing, kind of get into this vibe where you use ChatGPT instead of an assistant, you use it as your boss. And whatever you write is like, if it says something, yeah, whatever, it’s good, I’m fine. And that reminds me of like trusting SEO tools who will say like, you got a red circle right here, that means something’s bad on your content and you as a writer know it’s okay. You don’t necessarily want something like that to tell you how your writing should flow.

So in that way, I think that there is for some writers at some times the risk of not being as creative. And in many cases, I see that also being company driven because the companies think, well, you can create more with less time now. So we’re just going to increase the scope of everything that you do. And that no matter what, even if we weren’t talking about AI, sucks the creativity right out of things because you can’t, you don’t have time.

But let’s say it’s 10 years from now, AI can suck stuff out of our brains. And instead of talking to Heather the person, you can talk to Heather the chat bot and it can almost be a real experience and that you don’t really need to write anymore is just kind of provide a brief prompt about how you’re feeling that day and everything spills out of you.

I would predict that if we were to get to that level, that there would still be opportunities for human level interaction and content because we have always been creative beings since the very beginning of time. That we need to be able to express ourselves in ways through stories and although that will provide people an outlet for people that might not be writers, an outlet to be able to communicate and do things that they never did before, which I see as an advantage of ChatGPT now.

If he could do everything for us, there would still be those core people that would create because that’s what they have to do. They have to create. And there will be people that will always resonate because we want to connect with people. At this point, we don’t necessarily want to connect with bots or with people that we know are not real, even though it’s kept being thrown at us because we want that authenticity.

I would like to say that although we can probably get 95% there someday with how the technology is going, that 5% from people like you and me of what we can offer the writing, what we can do and how we connect with the people who want to connect with us, that is going to be the magic. And we’re the ones that will always hold that magic as people and AI will never be able to pull that from us.

So, I’m optimistic. AI may take some jobs, sure, but for the folks that love what they do, it’s never gonna take that away from us.

Andrew:
How can future SEO copywriters prepare themselves? What can they do to maintain their creativity in a time when we are just bombarded with solutions that just help us all the time and just, hey, you want this?

Even like on Google Word, Google Docs, I just write something and it can predict sometimes the next word and just help me finish my sentence. I’m like, okay, thank you. And I was like, maybe five years, that’s too much. Maybe like four years ago, I started happening and I was already sort of thinking like, okay, that’s pretty good.

So, how do you see young professionals eager to become copywriters? How can they, what can they do to sort of avoid all the noise and still focus on being creative? What was your secret? What is your story to becoming the pioneer of SEO specifically? What skills do you think you got as a child maybe led you to this point?

Heather:
Probably the biggest skills for me is that I am very much a research geek, where I want to go back to source materials and I want to learn from the people who taught stuff.

For example, when I was learning my skills, I was reading a lot of Bob Bly’s books. I got to meet him later on in life and that was really fun. And the way he taught me things, the way he shared information helped for me click about what it meant to be a writer. How exciting it would be to take a turn of phrase and make something really boring, a widget, into something that sounds exciting and that people wanted to do.

So for me, it was always a challenge and always getting into the research, learning from the people who came before me so I could take that information and be able to do something different and better with it. For the people that are coming up today, there are, and I see this through my trainings, there are people, there are writers that have that kind of hunger, that want to learn everything from everyone.

So, they’re not necessarily looking at, wanna learn copywriting from Google and have generative AI teach me. It’s, I want to, okay, here’s a sales formula of PAS. I wanna know what that means. I wanna know how to do it in a way to be able to differentiate what’s good and what’s not. And not all copywriter’s gonna wanna do that, right?

There’s gonna be some that are just gonna be like, wanna write, it’s gonna be okay, I’ll use ChatGPT, that’s great. But for the writers that really want to dig into their craft, where I’ve seen that success happen, are the folks that are a blend of old school and new school, who know where things come from to be able to evaluate if the information that we’re getting from Claude, ChatGPT, whatever, is good, if it flows, if it works for us.

Because if we just always trust the robots and let them do whatever and give our creativity over to them, then going back to the question before, I think we lose that. But for copywriters coming up today, especially copywriters that want to differentiate themselves and say, I know how to do more than write a really good prompt, having that kind of holistic standpoint of what came before me and here’s what could be coming after me can make the difference between a good copywriter that does pretty okay and a copywriter that’s at the top of their game and able to write content that make people just salivate for more and have fun with it.

But again, it kind of goes back into that fire. Are you doing it because you love it and it’s fun and you want to dig in and learn more because it’s exciting? That’s why I dig SEO and AI because it’s always different. It’s never going to be static for me. That part is fun.

But if I were to just let AI tell me what’s going on and never do anything different, then I think that that would make life sad and I would not be able to produce as well. So for new copywriters, learn, dig in, find this kind of stuff because what ChatGPT is trained on is stuff that the old time copywriters have mastered over generations, right?

Andrew:
Yeah, I definitely was at a stage where I was thinking like, what am I in it for? Am I in it for just to put up a lot of freelance articles and just get the money? And after a while, I started understanding that I’m in it for the art of writing. And that’s exactly, that’s what keeps me coming back every day.

To throw another question at you is going to be basically like a takeaway. What is the most important thing that you want our listeners who are specifically people engaged in copywriting or SEOs who are thinking about how to sort of fast-paced this process, so what is your main takeaway for people who are trying to navigate this evolving landscape of SEO copywriting during a time where AI is just helping us everywhere?

Heather:
Yeah, that’s a really good question. So there’s a couple of ways I would answer that.

One is to focus on one tool at first, right? So it’s very tempting when you read all of the things that the latest ChatGPT or Claude or whatever can do to start doing all the things and trying to pay or not pay, just use the free version to do all the things. And then it becomes confusing because they’re different. They have like different personalities.

There’s one that you can use that might be slightly better than the other. And to train those systems takes time to work with them back and forth. So that’s where I see a lot of writers immediately burning out is that they are overwhelmed, they don’t know where to focus their efforts. And because of that, they do nothing. I’m done, this isn’t for me, I’ll get back into it another year, maybe it’ll be better.

So there’s that aspect of it. But also, see, I’m trying to think of like, there’s like 15 different ways that I could answer this question about like, how to integrate it. But probably the second most important thing is that if you’re brand new to it and you’re thinking about how do I bring it into my life, think about what drives me nuts? What do I hate doing?

For me, as weird as this sounds, I have a hard time taking a blog post that I wrote and creating a summary for social. It’s a weird block. It takes me almost sometimes as much time as it does to write the darn post in the first place, to write a teeny-tiny summary. I don’t know why. And so that was the first thing that I started playing with is how can I do this to where it still sounded authentic to me with some tweaking.

So, if you focus your efforts down to what your pain points are, then it becomes a little bit easier of things that you can do later that can make your life even better. Like I had an idea of what I could do with some training materials in a flow tank of all places. Like, oh, I can use Claude to do this. And that’s the kind of experience that you have after you’ve had some time kind of working through the use case for you initially.

So, I would say, don’t be afraid of it, but don’t figure that it’s going to solve every problem in your life, especially at the beginning. Dip in and see what works for you. And then if you become like into it, it becomes really fun. Like the person you mentioned, like having the mic here, all the things that you can do to, I mean, just play. I just play with it and it is a fun thing to play with.

Andrew:
Fantastic, Heather. Today, Heather Lloyd-Martin shared with us her expertise and insights on how SEO copywriting has evolved with gen AI Search, what works, what’s dead, and how to stay ahead. I hope our listeners got inspired and are already coming up with new ideas on how to create better content using AI. Thank you, Heather, for making time for us today and sharing your knowledge with our community. And to our listeners, thank you for tuning in. Be sure to subscribe to the DoFollow podcast, and we’ll see you in the next episode.