BluShark Digital 0:00
Welcome to the SEO Insider with your host Seth Price, founder of BluShark, taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.
Seth Price 0:10
Guys, we’re thrilled to be here with David, co-founder of Agency Elevation. Welcome, David.
David Kauzlaric 0:16
Hey, thank you so much for having me Seth. I’m excited to be here.
Seth Price 0:19
Well, I’m thrilled. It was great to get to know you, and you have sort of the path not travelled, you know, a lot of people come to me and say, Hey, do you want to be able to do white label stuff? And I said, I wish I was smart enough to do that, because I have a hard enough time doing it when I’m talking to clients directly. Like you have the the dubious distinction of having scaled an organization where the end user is very often not even the person that you’re, that you’re dealing with.
David Kauzlaric 0:45
Yeah, that’s right. So we’re white label, meaning, you know, we’re doing the work behind the scenes for a lot of other marketing agencies. And so we’ve had to figure out how to do things at scale and still get results and, and be able to fulfill on that. So it’s a it’s a challenge. But it’s also a fun challenge.
Seth Price 0:59
No, I’m sure I got so many questions in this area. So talk to me, just in general, because this is sort of, you know, I cut my teeth in the legal space where there’s decent money for the most part, you know, you know, we have some lower dollar clients, but the majority of clients have real resources spend, they’re battling like crazy in that three pack, you know, people are not coming to you with with 1000s or even 1000 a month. I mean, you’re you’re having to work with rather limited, I mean, you know, respectfully, rather limited resources. How do you how do you take what is a modest amount of money and and leverage that in order to get the most for clients?
David Kauzlaric 1:40
Yeah, so that’s a great question. That’s probably you know, what I would consider the secret sauce of this, which really kind of stems from just being in SEO for almost 20 years and really understanding what works and what moves the needle as opposed to what doesn’t. So there’s this fine balance that we’ve had to strike between having deliverables to have deliverables and having deliverables that actually move the needle. Because what’s happened with us as like you said, because we have to do this for pennies on the dollar compared to an agency that gets to charge retail rates, you know, they have to markup our service, they have to make money on our service, there has to be margin there. So we obviously just can’t charge unreasonable amounts of money or retail prices. So we’ve just really honed in and created what we feel is, you know, the most ideal solutions at the right price point where we’ve cut out the stuff that doesn’t quite move the needle. And we’re only focused on things that move the needle currently, what, where this really kind of takes an interesting turn is it really is dependent on whatever the current best practices are, you know, so the unfortunate side… which are always changing. Which are always changing. So our challenge internally, is, if I want to change up our SEO package every three or five months, because an algorithm change or something changes, we have to do that. And then our team has to figure out how to scale that quickly and nimbly, which, you know, a lot of organizations don’t have to pivot it that that fast. However, that’s been the secret sauce, where we’ve been able to work with large agencies, some that have up to 600 accounts with us, small agencies that have you know, three, four or five accounts, but able to get results for the vast majority of them. Still, it is it’s tough, but it’s always that balancing act of does this actually move the needle? Or is this just a, a shiny bead that the client may like? And so we have to kind of not get wrapped up in that.
Seth Price 3:27
You just touched on this. And I thought that was interesting so I’ll go there. You know, there, there are things the client likes, because it’s, it looks good on a report, and it’s good to talk about and it be forward facing. And there are things that are going to gain additional visibility. Do you balance that? I mean, granted again, limited resources, but are you are you cognizant of the fact that certain things are there because the end client, not even the white label, put out the agency, but the the end user is going to want to see certain things versus you know this is what’s gonna make somebody money. But if I don’t do these things that aren’t going to necessarily make money in the end, I won’t keep them as clients.
David Kauzlaric 4:02
Yeah, so there’s definitely a balance there. And we weigh that in every time that we change up our packages internally.
Seth Price 4:07
Give me an example of something that you made that might be like, the shiny object that people love, but isn’t necessarily going to be as advantageous that you’ll do but you know is not as powerful.
David Kauzlaric 4:17
Yeah, so like, an example of something we do is, you know, obviously, a large component to this is link building. So we have a link building strategy that we use internally. And sometimes that involves repurposing the content that we use for link building in multiple ways so that you can turn that into a deliverable that can be sent multiple times to the client. So a lot of times, like we’ll take that written content for link building, and that’s a deliverable that they can send to the client. Then we get the link building report when it’s done, showing, you know, the 20, 30, 40 places that these links were created. That’s another deliverable. And then those links also generate what we call signals. So it could be like image signal, citation signals, map embed signals, and we then report on that and then send that as a separate deliverable, so we’re really taking one piece, which is the content for link building and we’re kind of extrapolating and pulling out, you know, 2,3,4 different reports that can be sent as different deliverables at different timelines to try to do that. Now, something that we get asked a lot for is like blog posts. And I feel like this is where clients can waste a lot of money quickly. If done right, blog posts are a great deliverable that can help move the needle. But we see so many agencies writing blog posts on like, unrelated topics, just to get a piece of content out there, but it doesn’t move the needle. So we’re always trying to strike that balance of educating the agency on look, it’s good to do a blog post, but you need to make sure that it’s hitting these marks, or it’s not really going to move the needle, you know.
Seth Price 5:43
I’m really biased against it in the legal space. A lot of the nefarious players historically sold blog posts, and in fact, if a client comes to me… what they currently are doing. It says I get four blogs a month. I generally immediately am like okay, they’ve been suckered by somebody. Because to me, I really want evergreen content first, right? That’s, to me, like the blog post is whatever, right? Meaning it’s not in the, with the one exception, which seems to have come full circle, which is traffic. You know, I remember way, way back in the day, Britney Spears got in trouble for something, I think it was a DUI. I don’t know what it was, she was in trouble. And I got a blog post up before newsjacking was a thing. And we broke the internet that day, tons of traffic coming through. Now did it give me a single client for the firm? No. But what I see today, and Google’s looking for this, is that there’s another game which is clearly not being played at the micro level and to say like, you know, what, you’re what you’re doing. But the idea that if you could find a place with the the secret sauce of traffic, there are benefits to that. It’s just not going to come from shitty blog posts that are irrelevant. Then it’s just deadwood on the site.
David Kauzlaric 5:43
Absolutely. I agree 100%. And like I said, we see this all the time, because what’s unique about my perspective is I get to peek behind the curtain of many agencies, small, medium, large. And so I get to see what they’re doing. And sometimes they come in, and they have really good strategies, and they’re doing really great things. But most times, and I would say often, you know, they’re they’re not. They’re missing the mark on strategies that are like you said, you know, many, many years old, they don’t really move the needle, or they’re really focused on like a blog post or on a topic that’s like, barely sub related to their industry they’re in, and I’m thinking if that generates you traffic, it’s useless traffic. So they’re doing it just because it’s a low volume keyword. So they can go to the client and say, Look, we did this blog post and I generated this traffic, we’re waiting for you. So they keep paying, but sales are down, conversions are down, because it’s not the right type of traffic. So I agree.
Seth Price 6:15
Right? And I guess the only exception to that is if it’s crazy traffic, there are probably some trust symbols that might in the algorithm outweigh it, you know, based on what we’re seeing today.
David Kauzlaric 6:47
Correct. And you know, and it also depends on the industry, I will say in legal, you do have a lot more topics, you know, that people would ask questions and do research on. So I do feel like there is some things there that you can do on a local level that people search for, like, you know, what does this mean? Or what does that mean? People do search for those things before hiring an attorney. But we haven’t like, say pressure washing, you know, we have agencies that do pressure washing, and they have 100 clients. And there’s, people aren’t doing research on pressure washing. It’s very simple. It’s, hey, we want to pressure wash the outside of our house because it’s dirty. And here’s the before and after picture, there’s not…
Seth Price 8:18
The search volume for like, what are the risks of power washer? Very low.
David Kauzlaric 8:22
Correct. And nobody’s really doing that, you know, it’s like, maybe they’re like, What are the risks of pressure washing on brick or something, but you know, if they have vinyls, you know, people just know that it’s just normal, it’s common, you don’t really have a lot of questions, or a car dealer. There’s not a lot of research on a car dealer. It’s like you made your research on the model you’re buying. But you’re not going to be then seeing content on your local car dealer site. So really, it’s like, are blog posts super beneficial for a car dealer? I don’t really think so unless you can identify a topic locally that is actually getting searched.
Seth Price 8:51
And locally is the key, right? Because we know, I don’t know, I travel enough that I always when I google something, the point sky or one of these other people come up without private equity back, right. These are real content creators that are doing stuff nationally. If you’re a Minnesota, you know, as you know, a suburb of Minneapolis car dealer, there’s only so many searches that you’re going to pick up, which is why I go back to the evergreen content. Because I want to know that if anybody’s searching for something in my work, that I have the library of information for it, because there’s only, you you live and die by those relevant searches.
David Kauzlaric 9:26
Agreed 100%. And another agency we took on I can’t you know, say that they are, but they had a, they do mostly enterprise work, but they took on a few local clients, and they had a dentist and they were targeting national terms like, you know, what is this procedure? What is that procedure? And they were ranking actually decently well on that blog post for it and it was generating 1000s of visitors a month, unique visitors. But when I looked in analytics, and I pulled the traffic on that page, it was literally from all all the other states except the one they’re in and they got zero clients from this. And that’s a problem.
Seth Price 9:55
I think that’s the one place where if done right on the macro level, some of that stuff, now in the legal space, you can sometimes refer stuff out in the injury side. But look, yes, it could tie your phones up. But the flip side is, if Google sees you as an authority then they’re deciding locally who to rank, that could be beneficial, again, usually outside the budgets you’re dealing with. But when you hit pay dirt, even when it’s, so this is something that I struggle with in the legal space. I’ll give you an example. Like red light cameras are a big deal. Speed cameras, big deal, like very controversial in our markets, tons of traffic, not monetizable as a lawyer. You will not make money because it’s not, there… let’s say a ticket is $200. It is taken. There are no points associated with it, which with a lawyer helps out is getting rid of the points. So you’re stuck with a situation where it’s cheaper to pay it than it is to hire a lawyer. Right. So there’s, there’s no business. At the same time, I’m always, in my intake it’s get it off the site, get it off the site. But I’ve sort of been torn because I know that meaningful traffic, like TV advertisers over the last year plus have had a huge advantage in the Google algorithm, because there’s so much branded search coming in, because if you see on TV, you’re not searching for injury lawyer generally, you’re searching for that name, which drives more traffic through the site. So my feeling is, it pains me to get rid of traffic, even when it’s not relevant. And again, if it’s harmful, if it’s balancing all that stuff you don’t want, but I feel like there’s a, it’s a full, full continuum where it starts out, you want the relevant traffic. You don’t want just modest crap traffic. But if you could really crack the code and get real traffic through a site that’s in your sphere, you know, then all of a sudden, you become a thought leader of power washing, you know, who else is, you know, nobody else in your space is a thought leader in power washing. Is there a back and forth? Again, that’s not normally what you’re tasked with in the replication of a cost effective local game is my guess.
David Kauzlaric 11:54
Yeah, correct. And like, in this specific case, they didn’t, they wanted to rank locally, and they weren’t ranking well locally for the for this topic. So we had to add in some local keywords into that optimizations for that page, and then all the traffic went away from all the national sources. And then it looks like the campaign is tanking. And really we’re not, we’re actually getting you more targeted traffic now. But you know, that’s a difficult thing to understand and, and try to relay to the agency, and then they got to relay it to their client. So that’s like, the different struggles we see on a on a week to week basis.
Seth Price 12:23
No, we see that also, because you could go national, you could go statewide, right, which is still you know, if it’s, if it’s four hours away, you’re not gonna be getting powerwashing jobs from there, unless you have an affiliate there. And then, so at like each stage, there’s a decision of relevant traffic versus monetizable traffic. Talk to me, a lot of people watch the show, we have some, some experts like you and other agency gurus, a lot of guys are sitting there starting out. What are some of the tips or tricks that you recommend in local search specifically, and I come to you as the guru of how to do this, not like money’s no object, but money is very much the object, the margins you’re dealing with. So where are the places people should be starting when they want to build out a great, a great local presence?
David Kauzlaric 13:06
Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, you know, what’s critical there is having a good website linked to your Google business profile listing is always going to be the foundation, you know, and having a local listing that is fully optimised, meaning fill it out in its entirety. Make sure you have photos that you know, especially if you’re an attorney, make sure you have pictures of your team, all the attorneys, your staff, pictures of your building, inside, outside, all the rooms, you know, really make it robust, because Google loves to see that there’s rich media on on all facets of a campaign, whether it’s your Google business profile listing, your website, and then when you link those two together, make sure that they’re congruent, and they talk to each other. And then beyond that, the biggest thing that we see that can move the needle and map rankings specifically, is getting consistent reviews. So we see a lot of agencies that do a great job of optimising the listing. And then I’m like, hey, you haven’t had a review in three months. And I know that this is a bigger, you know, law firm or a bigger pressure washing company or whatever. I know you have a lot of clients that you’re you’re cycling through? Why are you not hitting more reviews? Because one of the biggest trust factors from Google is customers, real customers, leaving real reviews on a consistent basis. And I’ve seen that literally propel a listing multiple spots within weeks if they’re getting consistent reviews in so…
Seth Price 14:24
It’s the bane of our existence, right? We can do everything you’re talking about: great links, great content, you know, we have all these things set up, everything that Google profile builds output, but if the law firm just refuses to solicit and gain reviews, it only goes so far. We actually have, as an agency, one of my biggest risk factors is that if the client we project or they promise to get X number of reviews or have… and they get nothing. You’re sitting there holding you know, it’s like you’re sitting there and watching it is just crazy. Because you know that with 40 more reviews. This isn’t like you know, areas that are like consumer facing where you might, you know, pressure washers might do 10 jobs a day. You know, they go from job to job. This is one where I need 40 reviews over the course of six months. And if you don’t get it, it’s, you’re not going to get the same results on local.
David Kauzlaric 15:15
Correct. Yeah. And you know, another big factor there is, like, I’ll give an example. We have a an agency that has landscapers and they have a client, I forget, somewhere in Florida. And, you know, he was like, hey, you know, campaign’s been going on for eight months. Results are decent, but like not crazy. And I look on there, and what can I do to propel this? And I’m like, well, there hasn’t been a new review in six months. And I’m like, how many clients has this guy serviced between the last six months? And I think he said something like, you know, 50 or 60 jobs? And I’m thinking, you know, conservatively, you should have at least 10 or 12 more reviews on here then. You know, because I said who’s not going to leave you a review, when you’re done with their landscaping job and you ask them on the spot hey, would you mind leaving me review when they’re really happy when you just put in the new patio or whatever you’re doing? But you got to ask for it.
Seth Price 16:01
And it’s a follow up. It’s not a one time ask.
David Kauzlaric 16:04
Correct, you got to follow up and use automations. Build that into your system.
Seth Price 16:08
Again, you’re not dealing with.. are you punting on this? Do you provide any other, any mechanisms you like for review, there’s no shortage of like the birdeye. And, you know, get, you know, all these different companies that do it. But to me, what I have noticed, and I’m curious to see what your thoughts are, that those are great if you’re Jiffy Lube, and you have 100 cars in the morning and 100 of the afternoon and a 1 or 2% conversion rate worse, right? But what really, you know, to me, is that if the person who just finished the job when you’re signing everything over, you know, signing off, do you love it? Yes. Get, it’s that interpersonal piece. Doesn’t have to be the owner, but making sure that it’s either fully incentivized with staff, but it’s, if you don’t have that interpersonal component to it, it’s tough.
David Kauzlaric 16:56
I agree 100%. So I think it’s just part of an internal process that needs to be added, right? Like asking them for the review in person, and then following up and being willing to follow up in person again, because I’ll give you an example. We have, you know, we work with a lot of agencies in the medical space. It’s obviously a very large industry. It’s all over the place. You know, dentists, for example, see a lot of patients, but they just send like a very cold email follow up that’s like automated, like, you know, two weeks later. Well, no, you know what, you did my teeth cleaning. And two weeks later, I may be, I’m not really that interested in leaving the review because it’s over. I’ve moved on, I’m not going to take that time. But I personally, I buy real estate for rentals and things like that. And my realtor that I work with, his team is really good. Every single time we close a new account, they call me and they’re like, hey, just wanted to check in and see how things are going. And by the way, can you leave us a review? And I say yes. And if I tell them, yes, they must trigger something in their system, because that thing hounds me, but they manually call up three days later and say, hey, just wanted to check in again, make sure things are still good. And by the way, can you leave us that review you said you would? And I’m like, yeah, I’ll do it. Because I don’t want them to keep bugging me. But I’m also happy to do it. But it’s because they put that effort into to.
Seth Price 18:09
It’s not a free lunch. You got to do that.
David Kauzlaric 18:13
It, but it pays dividends they have, you know, 400 reviews locally for, you know, they’re crushing everybody, because they do that part intentionally and it works for them. So I think it’s a good strategy, but people aren’t willing to do it a lot of times.
Seth Price 18:26
What do you see, like what’s working now? You know, this is being recorded one moment in history. But what are you excited about? What, where, what do you think is like worth spending time on like, what are you, what are you getting ROI from?
David Kauzlaric 18:38
Yeah, so I mean, obviously, those foundational components we just talked about, you know, we always push reviews, you know, those are very foundational things. We’re starting to see a lot of, just a lot of, there’s a lot of talk, obviously, about AI content, the implications of that long term. Google keeps coming out with updates, sporadically saying, well, it’s okay, it’s not okay, this is okay. That’s not okay. This part’s okay. So what we’re seeing that’s having a large effect that we’ve done some testing on is the authorship component. So more important than what we’re seeing with whether the content is AI or human generated, right this second, we’re seeing a lot of of linking with authorship. And I think this actually relates to the reviews, you know, reviews because they are effective and moving the needle. Right. There’s been this issue ongoing for a while now where it’s hard to get reviews to post your listing. So not… posts. Yeah, where people will leave a review and it just doesn’t come through. The reason for that is because it’s so easy to fake reviews, Google had to start working on and modify their review algorithm to only allow real reviews through. And that kind of goes in line with this authorship piece that’s really huge right now, which everybody’s heard of Google EEAT, you know, and it’s experience, expertise, authority, trust. That relates to reviews as well, right? So if I leave a review on my Google account that’s been around for 20 years, my reviews go right through because Google knows that it’s legitimate, they have this experience and expertise of me. And I’ve been using that account. So it’s, it’s, it’s trusted by them. So the reviews go right through. Well, now we’re seeing that happen on the authorship component with with content. So, as an example, in your field, attorneys are great because they have experience and expertise, they have legitimate credentials. And so if you set up an authorship component properly, their content is likely going to outrank a lot of competitors that don’t have that authorship component set up properly. That way Google can trust who the content’s coming from. And so we’ve been running some experiments on this in various industries, even in dog grooming, and my my daughter is a dog groomer. And it’s a really obscure industry for that type of thing.
Seth Price 20:46
But seems… But not really, it makes more sense, it shows that it’s not some bot, it’s a person. Correct. And if you just told me that, if you are that, and Lord knows, like, it’s so funny, I go to get a haircut the other day, and I have my dog with me. And they’re like, dog groomers here charge triple what the barbers charge. You know, it’s like, you know, if you’re a, if you’re an actual dog groomer that has a voice and a… that’s so different than much of the corporate, you know, the other guy, the big, big places are just giant chains. She she actually has a authority and voice in the space. That’s pretty cool.
David Kauzlaric 21:19
Yeah, it is really cool. And I think that the reason Google is doing that is because you know, number one, it helps add relevancy to the content, it also helps align and helps make it trusted, right, because everything about Google is when you go there and you do a Google search, they want you to trust the result of their gigs.
Seth Price 21:36
And that’s what’s gonna beat, that’s what’s gonna beat AI. Correct. If they have a trusted source or like, look, we saw this a while ago, if you go back to the Google Plus days, authorship was there. I was all in on it. I’m sure you were back in the day, and wish that had made it but that was sort of rel equals author or essentially back to rel equals author.
David Kauzlaric 21:55
Correct. And all everything keeps coming around full circle in SEO. That’s how it always is. But it’s about just getting more sophisticated and understanding it. I think what’s interesting is recently at this Tokyo, Google Search Central, you know, they had this event. And you know, this, this snippet comes out where they flat out said, Google has now confirmed that the algorithm and signals are trained on content written by humans for humans. So that doesn’t mean to say that AI content can’t rank because if AI content is more helpful than whatever human content does exist for that topic or keyword or phrase. Absolutely it can rank in a very non-competitive industry. But what does that tell you if the algorithm and signals that Google uses are trained on content for humans, by humans, we need to be focusing on that element. Again, I’m not trying to talk, you know, hey, AI is gonna get you to a D rank that today. But it’s the ownership linked with it. And also, AI, Google has said this clearly, AI cannot have any experience or expertise. And so those two components are inherently missing from it. So when you link your your actual written human content with the authorship component, that’s going to be the signals that Google wants to see rank. And for a dentist, and attorney, a chiropractor, those things are all very relevant, because they’re considered an experienced professional in their industry. And so anyways, I think those things are going to be really important over the next 6,12,18 months.
Seth Price 23:21
No, absolutely, I see that more and more, what I got, when I was at a pump con, they gave me the straight answer, like, no, it’s sort of what you’re saying, right? What’s the best content? You know, what, we’re gonna go with it? I also got to think at some level, let’s let’s follow the money as.. would say, that there is a fear. There’s a reason that why there was a red alert within Google and people went scrambling, that if Chat GPT gets really good, that is going to cut down on search volume significantly, possibly catastrophically, over time. Not saying it’s gonna happen. I’m just saying that’s one potential way. And that if there’s full adoption, like you would have less people searching, and that means less, you know, less revenue, you’re going the wrong direction for Google. So now the question is, is if they had their druthers. Now, if they had been first movers in this, maybe, but Chat GPT is where people are pulling their content for the most part. And that’s not owned by Google. I got to think at some level and I had one person claim, a trusted person, claim that they were shown by Google the highest levels, that they were well aware of what was AI content and what’s not. Now the problem is as a layperson right now, there aren’t great public tools on the market, to let us know what’s legit and what’s not. Right, meaning, you know, I wish I could tell with 1,000% certainty if somebody was giving me AI content, and right now it’s the stuff, so the question is, does Google have things, are they are they more sophisticated than we are? Is that in the algorithm? Because given their druthers, they wouldn’t want people being rewarded for using AI content at this point in time, at least.
David Kauzlaric 24:58
Yeah, for sure. So I think one of the the best tools currently on the market is Originality.AI. And they they do have a proprietary algorithm that they’ve released that is really, really good at detecting most AI content. And now we have a team of you know, we have a very large team of human writers, we don’t use any AI content, at Agency Elevation, but we have a lot of agencies that work with us that do use it. And they ask me, what’s your opinion? And I say, listen, I don’t want to be like this, you know, scared sceptic, but I say that there could be long term ramifications to using AI content that has a strong AI footprint meaning if Originality.AI can detect that it’s Chat GPT with big certainty, Google’s capabilities are 10, 20 times, 100 times better than that.
Seth Price 25:42
That’s sort of my point. Like, I don’t see anything that’s that definitive. But Google’s got to know what’s going on. And just look, particularly, let’s go back to the early days, right? Spammy links worked. They were awesome. You’d high five because you would go straight to the top. Right. The day of reckoning came. And if if there becomes a footprint, just like anything, I see people doing reviews with weird footprints, right? At Google’s caught up, they’re local, they punted on for a long time, they now know when there’s a review wheel, for a lack of a better word, so I just made that up. But the idea is like, they are now stripping things away that don’t make sense at some point, you know, they haven’t been too benevolent. But imagine if, you know, they get to the point where like, you know what, if you have this many bad reviews, or you have this much AI content, we’re just like, we’re dingin the whole thing. Let you come back for, come back for, come back later.
David Kauzlaric 26:31
100%. And I think the risk here, the risk is a few, it’s actually a much deeper issue than will AI content rank? See everybody says, will AI content rank? That’s not really even the issue. It may temporarily, it may for now, it may in a really obscure industry, rank for a while. But the danger to me is to the integrity of the index is what I keep talking about. So with Chat GPT, I can create a script in a matter of a couple hours that would scrape Wikipedia and rewrite every page and make the content deeper and longer. And then I could put up my own Wikipedia in two days that would just rewrite everything that’s already on there. There’s no judge and there’s no there’s no board. Well there’s one judge. Well,
Seth Price 27:12
Yeah, there’s me. But there’s, no no, no, no, the judge judge being the Google algorithm. Yeah, but but oh, what I
David Kauzlaric 27:17
I mean, it’s on the integrity of that content, it’s going to be gone. Right? We already know that Chat GPT is not accurate. It puts in misinformation. It’s not legally bound. It’s not, there’s no compliance, etc. So, with the amount of content that’s being spewed out right now back between Chat GPT and other AI tools, the threat is to more the integrity of the web, because what keeps people coming back to Google search, is that you get good answers. And it’s usually the right answer the first time or very quickly. You can ask a lot of questions, and they use citations and linking and authority and all these metrics to give you accurate results. The true danger to AI content, in my opinion, is that it weakens the integrity of the web because it’s just going to spew a bunch of misinformation or a bunch of generic information over and over and over and over and over again. And then what you’re going to have is Google’s going to have a big problem, because people aren’t going to come back to Google for the results anymore, and then they’re going to lose money in revenue, which is why I think they’re going to be forced to take a proactive, strong stance on AI content, again, not that it can’t rank if there’s no other better options. But when you have two articles, one’s AI footprint, one’s a human footprint with authorship, I think it’s going to be a no brainer that that’s likely going to rank higher than the AI footprint. And so I think long term that’s important to just kind of be aware of you know,
Seth Price 28:35
You’re exactly right. This is awesome. So, what so, you know, look, I think the problem is, you’ve answered my final question, which was the future. You see, the question is, how is AI going to fit in? It fits in with everything, but it’s just sort of like, it’s not a shortcut to the content game.
David Kauzlaric 28:57
Yeah, I think where, I think agencies go wrong with it as using it to just spew out blog posts and articles and website pages, right? Yes, it’s great, because it’s really cut your costs, and you don’t have to pay as much for content and things like that. But is it going to hurt you where you’re gonna then have to hire a human writer in a year or two if something changes in the algorithms, and all of a sudden, you go from ranking well to not ranking and now you got to redo it. And ultimately, you spend more money now this way. I think AI is really, really beneficial for productivity, and you know, the introduction and integration into spreadsheets, and responding to emails and different things. Like there’s a lot of things that AI does really well: creating newsletters, social media posts, even ad copy testing, things like that, I think are awesome. I just don’t think it’s this this silver bullet that everybody thinks it is for content, because I think people are gonna get pinged in a few years on it, if not sooner. In my 20 year span of doing SEO, I’ve seen this with Panda and Penguin, and everything else, you know, AI contents been around for a long time, right? Like the you know, the article spinning is one of the oldest tools in SEO and it was, here’s a high quality article. We’re going to spin it 500 times and throw up the site and we’re gonna throw up AdSense on it, we’re gonna make a bunch of money. And then all of a sudden, these algorithms come out and all of a sudden, spun content doesn’t rank. Well, why not? It was still written by a human and it was, you know, a good, good quality article. Right. Google understands the footprint of spun content, and they say, you know, it’s I think that’s the progression.
Seth Price 30:20
I think you’ve nailed it in the sense that it’s the footprint. And even though we may not see it this second, it will be there, in which case you’re sitting there naked.
David Kauzlaric 30:30
Right? I think so. I just don’t think, it’s like building your house without using the right foundational, you know, you want to you know, what’s better a poor foundation or brick? Well, typically a.. foundation’s stronger, but it costs a little more upfront. Is that the right way to go? I’d rather build my house with stone not sticks, you know.
Seth Price 30:48
That’s awesome. Well, David, this has been awesome. A great, a great ride. We’ll have to have you back to talk further. I still am enamoured by the fact that you’ve been able to balance the margins of white white label business. It is it is a feat to behold and an honour to have you here today.
David Kauzlaric 31:05
Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honour to be on with you. And I’m happy to be back whenever in the future.
Seth Price 31:10
Sounds great.
David Kauzlaric 31:11
Thanks Seth.
BluShark Digital 31:12
Thank you for tuning in to the SEO Insider with Seth Price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand’s online presence. Episodes are available to stream directly on BluShark Digital’s website.
