Can AI Do Your SEO?

Meredith's Husband 0:00

If you've ever wondered if you can just ask Claude to do your SEO for you, or ask ChatGPT to tell you what to do for your SEO, that's what I'm going to talk about here today. Because the answer is not a definitive yes or no. It is yes and no. Technically, and in the short term, yes, you can ask Claude or ChatGPT how to do SEO, what you should do on your website. And absolutely it will give you a response. But there are a few things, I've identified three in the last just few months. By speaking with people who are trying to do this, I see three things that you need to be aware of. Number one, you just need to know that whatever AI tells you, it is going to sound 100% convincing. It is going to be very authoritative. It's going to sound like it knows exactly what it's talking about, even when it doesn't. And there will be times when it doesn't. So if you don't know which is good advice and which is bad advice, that's a problem right there. And number two is the principle of what I call garbage in equals garbage out. So open

Confident Advice Can Be Wrong

Meredith's Husband 1:02

AI and anthropic and Google and Perplexity are not building SEO experts. They are not building tools that out of the box are just going to be able to do your SEO. They are building tools that are very, very capable of learning how to do SEO, but out of the box, that's not what they do. You can think of AI as

Garbage In Leads To Garbage Out

Meredith's Husband 1:23

like the smartest person on the planet and probably the fastest person on the planet in terms of researching and anything you can do pretty much at a computer, AI can do millions of times faster than you or I could do it. However, like I said, out of the box, it doesn't know SEO. So to learn SEO, these AI bots, ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini, they need to go out on the internet and learn SEO. And you know probably fairly well at this point that if you just go and start reading random blogs about how to do SEO, you're going to get a lot of really conflicting advice. Some of it's going to be good, some of it's going to be bad. So when you ask Claude to help you with your SEO or Chat GPT to help you with your SEO, just know that's where it's going to get its instructions. It's very simply just using Google to go out and search the internet and read blogs to learn how to do SEO. And if 30% of the information about there on out there on blogs is bad advice, then that 30% is going to get passed along to you by cloud or by Chat GPT. That's the second problem. And when you combine that with the first problem of it's going to give you that advice very authoritatively, like it's going to say and it's going to seem absolutely 100% confident that it knows what it's talking about, then it's hard for you to decipher. And I'm going to give you an example of this. This has happened. I've gotten this, I've gotten examples like this many times over the last few months. But I'm going to give you my favorite one. A student came to me and they said they wanted to do something very specific with one of their pages on their website. And they had asked Claude how to do this. And it was something that they wanted to have some content on their website, a particular chunk of text, a few paragraphs, but they didn't want that text

The Hidden Text Spam Example

Meredith's Husband 3:12

on this one page. And so they asked Claude, what is the quickest way to do that? Because it was part of the template that was being used on several pages. And Claude came back and it said, well, that's simple. You just make the text on that page in that section white. And since it's on a white background, it visitors will not see it. Users won't see it, but Google and AI will see that on your website. That's what you want to do. And so the student did that. They only came to me later and asked about it because we were discussing something sort of related. And the issue with that is that doing that, creating text on a on the same color background, whether it's white text or black text, if you're displaying text to Google and then hiding it from users, that is the biggest spam signal you can do. Like there is no doubt that that is going to get Google's attention. It's very easy for Google to spot when you are doing that. And in fact, if you had asked me, what is this? If I were just going to do one thing on my website, I'm trying to get my website kicked out of Google. It's not that I just want my rankings to go down. I'm literally running a test and I want to actually get this website kicked out of Google completely. If you are only going to do one thing, I would say, take white text and put it on a white background, or black text on a black background, or red text on a red background. And that will signal to Google right away that you are trying to spam their system. You're trying to trick them. Now, will Google really kick your website out of Google if you did this one time on one page? Probably not. But if you are following advice like this and Google sees a pattern, I can tell you, your rankings are definitely not going to go up. They're probably going to go way down. And if you did something like the white text on a white background on every page of your website, let's say, yeah, I think you could expect that your website would get kicked out of Google. And that's the advice that Claude was giving. Why? Because it probably found that somewhere online on a blog. And now why is that on a blog, you might be asking? Well, because that technique worked for a pretty short amount of time back in like 2006 or 7, maybe 2008. And evidently that sort of advice is still out there floating around on blogs. Anyway, that is the second problem. The third problem is that remember I said out of the box, Claude doesn't know how to do SEO. Anthropic and OpenAI are not building SEO consultants. And so these tools will not give you a strategic or comprehensive plan, even if they do tell you some good things to do. I have yet to see Claude or ChatGPT give any sort of more comprehensive advice.

Why Random Tips Fail SEO

Meredith's Husband 5:46

In other words, it might say these things are good for SEO, and those things are good for SEO. And even if it doesn't give you garbage advice, it's not going to give you a larger set of rules to follow. Think about it this way. If you were going, if somebody came to you and said, I'm I want to become a photographer, but I don't know how to use a camera at all, and you were going to start to show this person how to become a photographer, how to take pictures. Now, what are some factors that are important? You got your focus, your f-stop, your shutter speed, your lighting. Those are just a few. Now, if you tell this person, okay, here's what you do to focus, here's how you manage, how do you how do you get your subject in focus? If that's all you told them, you could give them the best advice in the world about how to create a sharp focused image. But if they're using the wrong F-stop and shutter speed and their lighting is poor, that image is not going to come out. Okay, that's not going to be a good photograph. SEO is the same way. You can't just take a few pieces of advice, even if they're good pieces of advice, and expect that your overall SEO is going to be good. So that's the third issue, is it's not going to be comprehensive or strategic. Now, remember that I said out of the box AI is not going to know how to do SEO. That doesn't mean that AI will never or cannot know how to do SEO. But AI needs to be trained to do SEO. I don't know if you remember not too long ago, everybody was talking about the hot job in AI being prompt engineering and how you could make a lot of, if you knew how to do prompt engineering, wow, you could get a great job super quickly, make

Training AI Replaces Prompt Engineering

Meredith's Husband 7:18

a lot of money. That now is old news. I don't think, I don't think the job prompt engineer exists anymore. Where AI is now is in training. I don't want to say it's the hot job, but there are lots and lots of jobs out there involved in training AI. And I didn't even realize this myself until recently. I went to an event. It was an AI event. Actually, it wasn't an AI event, but it was an event where lots of people working in AI were there. And I was speaking with somebody, and he didn't have any sort of technical or computer background at all. And he said he was uh working in AI training. And I asked what company he worked for, I didn't know anything about this at the time. I asked what company he worked for. He said he worked for a company called TELUS. I'd never heard of it. I said, Oh, are they uh based in New York where we are? And he looked at me like I was the dumbest person he had ever encountered in his lifetime. And he looked at me and he said, We're everywhere. I said, Oh yeah, right, right, right. Like I knew what I was talking about, but I had no idea what he was talking about. I looked up that company later. That company has over a million people working for it, training AI. And there are other companies like this. Over a million people working kind of like Uber, not a million employees, but like Uber's uh business model, they are all independent contractors. Just like a driver for Uber doesn't technically work for Uber. They're just a driver who is hired by Uber. These people, the same thing. They're kind of like freelancers, but they work for just one company. And their job is to train AI. And that doesn't mean that, like let's say I were to train or I wanted to train AI how to play chess. That doesn't mean that you need to be a grandmaster chess expert in order to do that. You just need to know the information to feed into AI. So you need to go to find a source that is good information about chess and then feed that into AI. That's how you train it. So this is, like I said, kind of the hot job that has replaced prompt engineering and where there were only a handful of people who could do prompt engineering. There are millions and millions and millions of people around the world doing this right now. And it reminds me of a Sam Altman quote. Now, if you've listened to this podcast, you know I'm not a Sam Altman fan. I'm not a fan of open AI. But he did say one thing that really resonated with me, and it was during an interview, and it the question had to do something like, you know, the and the fear was at the time there's a lot of buzz about AI taking people's jobs. And there still is that fear. There still is that buzz. But Sam Altman's response was, well, AI is not going to take your job, but someone who knows how to use AI will. And I've probably even mentioned this exact quote on this podcast before. But that got me thinking that, well, somebody is going to take my job eventually. And this is kind of a this is an uncomfortable place to be, thinking about yourself as being replaceable. Unless you do something with your hands, there is a very, very good chance that somebody is going to come along who knows how to use AI, and that person is going to take over your job, probably in addition to several other jobs. So I started thinking, and again, this is this was not a comfortable thing to think about, but I started thinking, well, if my job is going to be taken, I want to be the person to take it. And I'm in a pretty good position to do that. I mean, I'm already here. So what is it that, or how is it that a person with AI or a company with AI is going to take over my job? And the answer certainly seems to me to be teaching AI to do what I do. Now, I can do that. I like to think of myself as an SEO expert. Who better than me to train AI to do SEO? And that's what I have been doing. I'd spend at least half of every day just putting information into AI, building a database that AI works from. So as long as you can have access to a database like that, that is the good stuff without the bad stuff, then you're going to be in a better situation. And I can tell you, in the last month alone, and I looked this up, the amount of words that I have put into this AI database, this AI machine,

Building An SEO Database With Strategy

Meredith's Husband 11:32

is longer than the average Harry Potter book. And yeah, I looked this up, and yes, I used Claude to look up how long the Harry Potter books are. But I was impressed with myself, because that seems like a lot of stuff. And if you're curious, no, I did not type it. I used WhisperFlow. That's one of the reasons I like Whisperflow so much. But once I essentially have everything covered here, then AI will be able to access this database and number one, give you information with confidence. Number two, avoid the garbage in equals garbage out. And number three, there's going to be strategy in there as well. Things like what should you do first, second, third, and fourth. And this was inspired by the choose your own adventure books. I don't know if you're familiar with those books, but I read them as a kid. I really like them. What they are is you start, they're adventure books for children, and everybody starts off reading, and then at some point in the story, you come to a decision. Like, like I said, they're adventure books. And for example, you might encounter a dragon. And the choice that you need to make is do you fight the dragon or do you run away? Well, if you want to fight the dragon, you move on to uh page 20, and if you want to run away, you go to page 30. That was the inspiration for this because the strategy is like starting the book and reading the book and doing things in order. And then the decisions that you need to make are things like, well, do you need to rewrite your title tags? If you do, then take step A. If you don't need to rewrite your title tags, then go to step B. And the AI will then tell you how to write effective title tags. This is what I am doing to take my own job. I am basically recreating myself in an AI form that is interactive and you can ask questions. So the answer to the question, can I just have Claude do my SEO for me, or can I ask ChatGP to tell me how to do SEO? Yes, you will be able to. I mean, you can do that now to some extent, like I talked about, but you'll be able to connect your Cloud account or your ChatGPT account to this database and not have to worry about those issues. And that is getting closer every day. I'm building this now, I'm sure other people are building this now. This is going to be the future of SEO. If you want to keep up to date with how this is progressing, especially with my own database, you can go to MeritasHusband.com

The Future Of SEO With AI

Meredith's Husband 13:45

and sign up for the newsletter, which is how I will be releasing sneak peeks, or just keep listening. And when it is eventually ready, I will no doubt announce that here too. In the meantime, be careful with what AI tells you. Okay. I hope this helps.