SEOJet Account Manager Charlie Hardgrove

Welcome to another interview by Website Planet. Bringing you insights on how the best companies are solving the current challenges in their industry, and how they are planning ahead for the future.

Our guest today is Charlie Hardgrove, account manager at SEOJet.

SEOJet is a SaaS platform for anchor text utilization and monitoring for organic SEO. It is also a link outreach provider for agencies and SMB brands team of 2 people handling 300+ active clients.

We discussed the challenges faced in the SEO industry due to frequent Google algorithm updates and the impact of AI, effective methods to address these issues by adhering to core SEO principles and utilizing AI as a supportive tool, and the future impact of evolving AI technologies on SEO practices over the next 5-10 years.

What unique challenges are people in your industry facing right now?

One of the biggest challenges people face in our industry is the ever-changing google algorithm. This has significant updates multiple times a year drastically affecting websites search rankings and traffic. As SEOs, we have to be able to constantly adapt to these changes in order to service our customers/clients.

One of the biggest reasons why sites get penalized is due to over optimizing on a keyword. Oftentimes, these keywords are irrelevant or not 100% geared towards their actual target audience. Same goes for link building – it’s one of the biggest misconceptions that pages on a website need to have external links with mainly targeted keywords as anchors.

Hence, understanding what keywords your site is ranking for, can really help hone in on a target audience / category.

Furthermore, due to the rapid nature of SEO, businesses in this space are often very volatile if ill-equipped, especially now in a time where AI has been a massive disruptor in the content space.

It’s a good idea to keep an eye on Google updates that can be tracked in real time on the Google Search Status Dashboard.

How effective are the current methods for solving these issues?

In order to solve the issues listed above, remain diligent and do not take anything for granted right away (within the SEO space).

Stick to the core principles that cause a site to rank:

1. High Quality content
2. High Quality references (backlinks)
3. High Quality website structure

That’s the only way we can set realistic expectations and provide the best possible results.

Furthermore, we completely embrace AI as a workflow optimization tool. Rather than using it as a crutch that leads to deteriorated quality, we try to implement it in workflows we were not able to before. For example, I do not know how to program at ALL but can now use Replit to automate simple tasks I would otherwise do manually. Using AI to leverage your weakness is key!

SEO workflows that can be improved with AI:

• Cloned video production for blogs / e-books –
• OpenAI gpt4 for efficient content topic/title suggestions based off SERP analysis
• GPT-4 to analyze KW SERP features (no software needed)

• Speeds up research process and allows for scalability
• Creates Excel formulas
• Gives hints on Data analysis
• Anything for quick information

All intensive manual tasks should be automated with AI tools:

• Replit – python coding (AI)
• HeyGen – Video Cloning
• Chat GPT 4-0: Search analysis, text analysis, proof-reader, etc
• Zapier – interconnect all AI tools
• Eleven labs – AI voice over

However, using AI in SEO comes with some challenges…

Marketers use AI as a crutch, not a tool. In most cases, it should be used as a tool to easily retrieve starting point information, not an ‘all in one tool’ to get work done faster. For example, traditionally, they would have to use Google as a starting point to get information, but now one can retrieve any sort of information using the latest AI models:

• Keyword variations
• Spreadsheet analysis
• Spreadsheet formulas (no need to watch youtube videos anymore on formulas I don’t know)
• Text summarization
• Notation (I’m dyslexic, so this is a huge one)
• Organization
• Daily to-do prioritization

Rather than using AI as a ‘do it for you’ bot, I use it as a tool that helps me optimize my workflows day-to-day, allowing more scalability in how I help clients.

As AI evolves everyday, we start to see inaccuracies get better and better from their mistakes and AI tools allow us to be on cutting edge technology. By not adopting a form of it in our day-to-day, we’re lagging behind. Overall, embracing it slowly is key.

For example, AI takes a lot of the boring/repetitive tasks away from my day-to-day, which means that it’ll eventually take over entry level positions (VAs, transcribers, low-level writing, basic coding, etc). Overall, if something is being done manually continuously, and can be automated, we’re doing it in an inefficient way.

All these show how the future of AI in SEO is uncertain, so where and how to invest is not as straightforward as many gurus make it look like.

What’s a better way in your opinion to fix these issues?

Oftentimes, users drastically act on Google updates, and that’s a mistake. It can be very tempting (or seem obvious) to make a reactionary tweak but in most cases this is NOT ideal.

In our industry, we see a lot of website owners convoluted over SEO. This is because SEO is very ambiguous and broad, oftentimes overshadowed by influencers promoting their course/brand. Then comes AI…

AI content should be embraced, not abused. I see a lot of people blindly using AI without any clear objective besides getting 1 single output. While AI is a great tool for content creation, it is not something to lean on 100%. Real human writers are still necessary for content to rank; however, AI can be used as a tool to help produce this content.

Where AI can be helpful for producing content:

• Topic / meta-data insights
• Keyword insights
• Proofreading
• Tone for specific sentences
• Creating SEO titles and H-tags
• Workflow management
• Heygen for AI videos (turns any blog into a video by cloning yourself)

And before you ask, Google has actually come out saying AI content is allowed as long as it follows EEAT (it needs to provide value).

Again, AI content should not be confused as a ‘do it for you’ solution.

Looking ahead 5 to 10 years, what new technologies and trends will have the most significant impact on the issues we talked about?

AI tools will shape the way we work, communicate, transcribe, plan, and much more. While we’re just seeing the beginning of it, I think as we start to see tools evolve and be able to produce more powerful outputs, we can expect more use cases. While there is a massive AI bubble in the market, I expect to see a lot of companies (Open AI, Google, Apple, Microsoft) have a huge stake in it in 5-10 years with evolved products.

Overall, as AI evolves to be more powerful at a rapid rate, embracing it with an exploratory mindset allows for the continual adaptation of using it day-to-day. However, AI still has a long way to go before it can be fully relied on 100%.