In this episode of the Digital Marketer’s Guide podcast, host Preston Parshall and SEO expert Samantha Pape explore the current state of AI in SEO and Google’s push for high-quality content. They discuss how to maintain EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) in your content, the significance of original research, and combining SEO with other marketing channels for comprehensive strategies.

Learn more about Fujisan Marketing here or email your questions/comments to contact@fujisanmarketing.com.

Full episode transcript:

00:14

Welcome to the Digital Marketer’s Guide podcast where we break down digital marketing topics into bite sized episodes that can help make your marketing program and you a little better. I’m Preston Parshall, the founder and CEO of Fujisan Marketing. We’re here today with Samantha Pape, SEO channel manager for Fujisan. Welcome to the show, Samantha.

00:31

Hi. Thanks for having me.

00:33

You’re welcome. So, we’re going to be talking today about AI and SEO, which is a big topic, something that everyone’s talking about and hopefully Samantha, we have some definitive answers for them. So, with AI Generated Content becoming more prevalent, how can marketers ensure that their content remains rank-able and high quality?

00:52

At this stage, it’s really a lot about combating AI and the sheer amount of content that’s on the web. It’s really easy for people to leverage AI and churn out a lot of low-quality content, so it’s our job as marketers and as business owners to then go in and combat that with real human pieces of content. What I mean by that is adding in unique perspectives, personal experiences, things that AI and machines just can’t have. Additionally, something that Google has really been pushing for the last few years now is something known as EEAT, you can read more about that on our blog at fujisanmarketing.com.

But, EEAT is experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Basically what that means is citing credible sources and making sure that the authors that you have writing your stuff are kind of experts in their own chosen fields, subject matter experts, also known as SMEs, are really the best people that you should be either having write your content or citing as sources in your content. You know not all businesses have the resources to just have their lead engineer sit down and write a blog. Totally get that. But if you have a ghostwriter of some sort, or just somebody on your team, or somebody that you work with who’s great at writing and can write about this stuff and have somebody sign off on it with their name, that’s another really great work around building up your EEAT on the site. What you really just want to focus on at the end of the end of the day, is creating in depth, well researched content, instead of churning out just high volumes of low effort AI generated text.

02:28

Why is original research so important in SEO?

02:32

Original research in SEO is something that AI just can’t take advantage of. AI doesn’t have their own like background experiences, real world stuff going on for them to learn from and take away from, it makes for a more resilient SEO strategy because of that. What you want to do is provide unique data and insights that really just can’t be found elsewhere, making your content in particular more valuable and authoritative to search algorithms. Additionally, original research that you conduct is more likely to be cited by other sites, and that increases your backlinks and improves SEO and your domain authority. Establishing your brand as a thought leader in your industry, boosting credibility and trust, is all the stuff that goes into original research, and it also helps engage readers with fresh, compelling information that can’t really be found in generic content that’s found on five other different sites.

03:25

How can marketers balance the need for deep content with the demand for engaging multimedia formats like video and podcasts, and where have we seen some mistakes made by more clients in the past?

03:39

Yeah. So, when you’re creating deep content, you can’t just think about blogs and just churning out as much content as possible, obviously. What you really want to do is start thinking about ways that you can differentiate your content. Do videos, do podcasts, like we’re doing right now, infographics, social media posts, to boost everything that you’re doing altogether, and just hitting different audience segments where they’re at. And additionally, when you’re incorporating these different pieces of strategy in your content, you’re also creating different multimedia elements that you can actually embed into the blog post that you’re creating or put somewhere on your site, and that makes your site more engaging, which Google has shown they are ranking your site based off of engagement factors like average session duration, like bounce rate, like pages per session and all that’s going into how well your site’s going to appear in search engine results at the end of the day. You also want to make sure that your content formats maintain a high standard of quality and relevance with EEAT and also, just like file sizes, fidelity, all that jazz. And then can you repeat your second question?

04:44

Oh, yeah, deep content, mistakes made by clients.

04:48

Got it. So, we had a client on our roster within the last couple months really suffer just because they were churning out a lot of low quality, surface level, content. And what we saw as a result of a recent low content update from Google back in March was, they had a precipitous loss in metrics and traffic volume coming into the site. I believe the decrease was about 85% of users were decreased.

05:24

And how were they creating that content?

05:27

They were using AI for the most part, ChatGPT don’t recommend it.

06:25

Yep, tell us a little bit about the most recent update.

06:31

Right, so the low content abuse was released back in, I believe, March of 2024, this is one of the largest updates to the algorithm conducted by Google, according to their lead engineer, possibly ever. Basically, what it did was it completely overhauled a lot of the ways that Google chooses to take in their ranking factors. So in the past, a lot of the things that we just touched on in this podcast, like content, volume of content, how many different keywords you have on their site, that was really a lot of the ways that people were able to rank, whereas now, if you’re just pushing out a lot of low quality, surface level content, you’re actually going to be penalized a little bit. So, you want that original information on there. You want people who know what they’re talking about. You want all of the things that you would prefer to see when your own searching habits at the end of the day living on your site instead of just a lot of little stuff that doesn’t really add a lot of value.

08:11

Thanks Samantha and thanks for listening to the Digital Marketer’s Guide podcast. Be sure to subscribe to stay up to date when a new episode is released. If you have any feedback or topics you’d like to see covered, email us at contact@fujisanmarketing.com or learn more about us at www.fujisanmarketing.com See you next time.