AI-Powered Content and SEO with Bruce Clay

In This Episode

• [02:11] – Stephan introduces Bruce Clay, the Godfather of SEO and the founder of Bruce Clay Inc., as they explore the transformative impact of AI on the SEO landscape.
• [13:21] – Stephan and Bruce delve into the functionalities of SEMrush and Ahrefs.
• [23:34] – Bruce and Stephan highlight the necessity of retaining a human writer, even in an era dominated by AI writing tools.
• [25:35] – Bruce recommends AI detectors to humanize or enhance the authenticity of AI-generated content.
• [32:20] – Bruce clarifies how content integrates both SEO and PPC, outlining strategies for seamless collaboration and maximum efficiency
• [41:51] – Stephan inquires about Bruce’s favorite blog posts that include FAQs.
• [43:24] – Bruce elaborates on the concept of SEO siloing.
• [48:39] – He also addresses the recent changes in local search and local SEO.
• [51:02] – Bruce provides details on how to connect with him.

Jump to Links and Resources

Bruce, it’s great to have you on the show.

Thank you. I’m really happy to be back.

Yeah, awesome. So, let’s talk about AI and how it’s changing the SEO game, as well as some of the things you’re doing with SEO and AI in combination with Google’s guidelines to really do some cool things.

It’s interesting when I think back on what it was like when AI became mainstream, more or less, through ChatGPT. The most interesting part was that it struck me as being very similar to the beginning days of SEO. There was a lot of what this is and what I can do with it, as well as experimenting, trying and doing things that had not been done before and learning. It was a puzzle. That’s what I liked about SEO. It was a puzzle. 

So back then, I just almost overnight became addicted to it, but I was focused on it as a tool, not a solution. That’s one of my sayings. It is a tool, not a solution. And how could it be used to improve productivity or knowledge or help people in the SEO space? Because that was my primary focus at the time. I started with ChatGPT, and I began writing scripts. I wrote more and more scripts. 

I was trying to figure out how you do this. One of the things I do, by the way, is if I want to figure out how to do this, I ask Chat, how do you do this? And chat will tell you. Right? So, one of the things I did was I asked Chat for a list of hidden commands that only they know about and that control the flow of the answers, and it told me. 

But was that a hallucination?

It gave me a list of 16 on-off switches. I mean, weird things. Most people don’t know you; the Chat doesn’t just answer your question but can also tell you how to do it. Then I started taking the Chat scripts, giving them to Chat, and saying, “Make it better.”

AI is a tool that addresses blind spots and the creative gaps that writers sometimes go through.

Then, what does it not do? Then I got to a point where I said, “Okay, create a document that does this, evaluate the document you just wrote, and tell me how you can make it better.” It started doing that. So, it became self-diagnosed, and it evolved and evolved. And now I have it in basically a Word document. It’s actually a big Google Doc. It’s over 300 pages of my scripts. And for some of them, I just counted it last week. For one of the scripts, I asked how many steps are in this script. It said 158. 158-step script.

And I figured, well, wait, if it takes you three minutes to run a script, that’s eight hours of scripts for 158 tasks. And it’s like a preposterous amount of time. But when I run that script, it runs in 15 minutes, not eight hours. So, the efficiency of AI was one of the very first things that one would note. And I jumped on it. Then I decided since it was early, it was time to figure out what it actually was.

I’ll tell you the problem I think the world kind of has with AI. They look at AI as replacing and not supplementing. See, if I’m a writer, I get to apply art to the written word. I get to do compliance. I get to say, “No, I want this paragraph first because, in a learning sequence, it’s better that this be first, not second.” Right? I also learned how to improve the overall ability of a reader to learn from what I wrote, not just see the words I wrote. The big problem that I think originally people were doing is that people were trying to make AI relative to content be the solution. Some tools are out there that they openly say will create content production.

My orientation is that this is a tool and that what you really can do is address blind spots and the creative gaps that people who are writers sometimes go through because they don’t have that background experience that matches it. So, I created prewriter.ai, which is actually a tool for writers. It doesn’t threaten writers; it helps writers. It can do some pretty amazing things. Of course, if you’re running 150 scripts, you have plenty of opportunity to get it to improve itself and reword itself.

One of the other things about it, though, is that AI is detectable. There’s an interesting phenomenon where what AI does is it writes, and it doesn’t really make mistakes. It gets it to write and sometimes uses uncommon filler words or phrases just to be unique.

It creates a footprint so that AI-created content can be detected. That’s a big problem. The first statement from Google was that it had to be human-created. That was actually in their guidelines. And that machine-created content was against their guidelines.

The first statement from Google was that it had to be human-created. Now, it’s content for humans.

Then they changed it. Now, it’s content for humans. But it doesn’t say content by humans anymore. And by the way, that’s a fallacy as well. Here’s part of that problem. So, to test it, I inflict pain on myself all the time testing this stuff. I created a document that was 48 or 50% AI.

When you ran through a tool, I published it, and it did well. It went up to position in the thirties. Then I took it down and ran it through humanizers. There’s a bunch of tools out there to do that. Some of them claim to be great, and they’re terrible. But we ran through some humanizers and got up to our goal, which was 95 % human. We got it up to 100%. I republished it and went to the top five. So I think that even though Google doesn’t have a rule that says not to use AI, it might be last among equals if you do. And I think that’s a warning to people. 

I also ran an interesting experiment. I know I’m sort of rambling here, but I ran an interesting experiment where I had a page 100% human, and I ran Grammarly against it. What Grammarly does, I think a lot of people know, is very popular and suggests things that make total sense to do. So I ran Grammarly against it, and it came out as 94 % human. In other words, Grammarly made it back to being perfect again.

One of the things I do to make things not appear AI is I put two spaces after every period because, in the AI world, they never do that. If you ask AI to create an outline for you, here’s a list of keywords to outline. Every item on the outline has three bullet points.

There’s a subject with three topics, subject, three topics, subject, three topics, subject, three topics. If that isn’t a footprint, I don’t know what is. So, in our tool, I wrote in a randomizer with three to seven topics randomly, with no two topics in a row with the same number of subtopics. I mean, you do all this. That’s why it’s 150 statements.

We’ve been able to take the time to create a blog post from hours by reducing it by 50%.

Right? 158 prompts. But it comes up with some great things. Again, we are not trying to build a finished product. I think that’s a mistake. I think that the artist is the writer. We want to empower the writer to do even better at what they do by giving them the research to do it. And that’s a significant focus of ours. By the way, there’s a byproduct of this whole thing. As I said, I could do the prompts myself and take a full day or run them in 15 minutes. We’ve been able to take the time to create a blog post from hours by reducing it by 50 %. And if you’re doing a bunch of them, it’s actually more than that. You get a rhythm going. 

So it’s an economic advantage. It’s a content advantage because AI doesn’t forget to cover things. There are no blind spots. I’ll tell you how far we actually went. After you have started with keyword research, we build an outline, write an article, enhance it, and boil it back down to an outline. We go all the way up and back down. We boil it up to an outline. We flatten the outline into a keyword list. Then, we do Google searches. We find out who the top 10 sites are. We pull all the keywords from their navigation and the top of the page.

We identify those as keywords, compare them to our keyword list, and then have an automatic content gap analysis. Then we add their keywords into the outline and regenerate the article that is very different from somebody walking up to Chat and say, “Give me an article on this keyword.” I mean, it’s like night and day difference.

Yeah. How long do you think it will be until Semrush and Ahrefs provide that kind of functionality? They both have keyword gap analysis tools but don’t do what you described.

Right. You see, I do it within the context of an article instead of related keywords in a keyword list. It’s a different approach, but sure, they will have it.

Semrush does have a tool that assists you with writing. So I’m just curious if you think this is a potential threat there that they’ll steal your secret sauce. 

I don’t think so. I have subscribed to a number of the tools out there. We’re Ahrefs as well. Ahrefs has an API interface for a humanizer, for example. Now, that’s something I’m looking at using. But it doesn’t really create a package as comprehensive as what we do. In our package, we write an article with an outline that matches the article. From that, we actually build PowerPoint decks with 500-word scripts per slide. We do persona identification. We do a lot of things that anybody could do.

The greatest misconception about AI is seeing it as a replacement for humans when its true power lies in being a tool that elevates and supports us, not replaces us. Share on X

We just do it pretty cheap. And by the way, it gets expensive if you’re using Chat. So what we did is we wrote logically a scaffold, a program-controlled application that’ll run steps for you. So we don’t have to run a Chat.

We could switch to Bing or Google or anybody else. If we want to know which of the top 10 sites is the best, we can just go do our query and pull it from Google. I mean, we are not dependent on Chat doing all the work. And we’re not putting our eggs in their basket because I could switch it to anybody I want within the application in a heartbeat. So, some applications are going to be better than others.

This one might be better at writing for humans, but this one’s better at doing the research. This one has a bigger LLM, or you have all these different things in there, right? What’s better at natural language might not be Chat. We don’t know, right? But we have written an application to drive our scripts.

So that we can then logically stay up to date on them and make whatever changes out there. Because that’s one of the things we know about SEO. Google changes a dozen times a day. We need to understand that emerging technology is going to change. And we had to have the flexibility to change on a dime.

So we have the application. We have scripts that do amazing, amazing things. They’re pretty important to the writer. We have taught it to re-sequence articles so that it’s easier to learn from the article.

It’ll take topics, combine them, and move them up in the article to cover them earlier because they’re fundamental to some of the later steps. I mean, this is pretty advanced stuff, right? We had to invent it. But we’ve got all of this in there. 

Does it write a writer’s brief?

Yes, it writes a brief for the writer. Then, the writer can go through and pick out what they want, keep it, write it, or do whatever they have, including all the data. And we build the data as separate files. So, in fact, we pull quotes. We even create quotes that the author, because you specify an author’s name, quotes that the author can put in the article.

That they should be saying, but nobody’s ever said it before, right? So we invent quotes for the author and then give them to them in a separate little area. There are all sorts of tips.

How about captions? Can it pull stock photography from free photo sites like Pexels, Unsplash, and Pixabay and then invent a caption underneath it so it doesn’t look like it’s just gratuitous eye candy?

We don’t, can we? 

There you go. There’s another feature.

I believe that a writer is an artist. They’re sensitive to the emotions of the business. AI can’t do storytelling.

Yes. When creating alt tags, we had it at one point; you need the image. So we started doing some work adding images, which are still primitive. I don’t like the way that works. And I think, maybe in a year, it’ll be there, and we could also recommend those. But remember, it’s a pre-writer. The writer, I don’t want to eliminate the ability for the writer to be involved. I almost feel I have to only do so much, or the writer doesn’t really have an opportunity to contribute, right?

I’ll eventually get to the point where you don’t need the writer. And that wasn’t the intent. I believe that a writer is an artist. And I believe that journalism writing, and copy editing, are our specialties. And they’re sensitive to the emotion. If you will, of the business, right? AI can’t do storytelling. You need a writer for a lot of the stuff that you want. And I think that the writer is a very strong contributor to the whole business, everything in the business. And at that level,

I think we’re dealing with it; it’s a fallacy to assume that AI will ever understand your company’s personality. And why should you care? If I can make your writers more efficient and more comprehensive and give them a brief to work from,

And if I can present that and save you hours per article, you don’t need to dump your writers. They’re going to be able to either produce twice as much or be able to do things that are much more efficient and better and higher quality because quality is what counts. And I think that this is an empowering tool.

Your agency has a team of writers that work on copy for your clients, right? How many writers do you have?

Right now, it’s four or five. Again, we’re focused on SEO but have four or five writers. But a writer can write a lot, especially if you’re doing it in two or fewer hours per page instead of four hours per page. Writers can write. We use the tool ourselves. Now, there are a couple of things we’ve tied into our services for our clients. 

For instance, we can take a generic page. It’s about your product and creating hundreds of localized pages by city. This is not a wild card replacement. It’s a rewrite because AI rewrites. It doesn’t wild card replace anything. It is understood that Chicago is windy with attractions such as the Navy Pier and the Cubs. And it has all these things that are unique to Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Florida, Miami, and all these states or regions. It actually personalizes to that city but ties it in tightly to the theme of that original page. 

It isn’t just a travelogue of Chicago. It’s relative to that theme; how does it work? For example, we wrote an article about water damage. When it wrote about Cleveland, it talked about much of the water damage caused by flat roofs and ice dams. And an ice dam comes because the roof blocks the sun’s edge, and the snow doesn’t melt at the edge, but it melts in the middle and ponds form, and then they soak through your roof, and you have water damage, right? But when it roped for Miami, that didn’t happen, and it knew that the climate contributed to the damage, and it was writing about the damage that just happened to be in that city.

So AI can do so many more things than a mail merge or a wildcard replace type mechanism. Google previously said that for SEO, it’s spam if you’re doing a wildcard replacement. But if it’s a rewrite, it works. And so we’ve done it.

AI-driven rewrites enable localized content creation at scale, generating hundreds of region-specific pages while preserving the core message and theme. Share on X

We created for a client over 900 pages, and they’re all; we’re still testing because they’re going up live now, but over half of them are first page. So, you know, it works well, and Google accepts it, and that’s something you can do because of AI. Right? Now, we still had a writer read it and make sure it was safe and sane because we didn’t know if it was going to make up the weather. Sometimes, AI does something called hallucinating. It imagines things.

Just a euphemism for a blatant lie. 

Yeah,  And that’s another reason, by the way, that you need to have a writer or at least a copy editor go through this stuff because even if I wanted to create an article that was finished, ready to publish, if I publish false information, it’s a problem. I think a lot of people have read how people have, you know, the way to make certain recipes is to include rocks.

I mean, what? I mean, it’s you who doesn’t do that. Or it may have a quantity of the ingredient wrong and or even a wrong ingredient. Mean, it sometimes gets it wrong. And you definitely need sanity checks on AI. But if you’re writing for the writer. You’ve built in your sanity check.

Right? The writer has to read it and say, “What?” And fix it. And sometimes, it’s hard to detect. I once wrote one that said, “Go source a quote talking about this from a book; cite the author, the book number and the ISBN. And it went, and it did it.”

Jane Doe wrote a wonderful book, ISBN 0123456789. But its formatting was presented in a way that If you didn’t have a writer look at it, you might publish it as total fiction. You gotta be careful.

Yeah, you do. At a minimum, you need to fact-check the stuff before it gets published. But you mentioned humanizing. You mentioned earlier AI detection. I’m guessing you have those capabilities built into your PreWriter product, right? 

Yes 

Okay. What if somebody is not a PreWriter customer? What would you recommend that they use as an AI detector? There are a bunch of them out there, such as GPTZero. Which one would you recommend they use as a humanizer if they’re not a paying customer of PreWriter?

So we’re about 90% done with our testing of 10 humanizers. There are two levels to humanization. There is the detector and the writer. There are tools out there that claim that you can give it a document. It will write it, rewrite it, if you will, in a form that when you run it through the detector, it’s 100% human.

Those are dangerous. We’ve used undetectable and all sorts of those tools. Many of them will work well like this kind of article, but they are terrible at a different kind of article. The more technical the article, the worse they are.

If it’s an easy, you know, blog fix about the local, you know, something, school board or something, that’s a little bit easier for them to rewrite. However, the really strange part is taking an article from any of the writers straight out of our system. You can run it on any one of five detectors: ZeroGPT or GPTZero or free or any of these detectors; they’ll all be different. This one will say 90% human, and this one will say 10% human in the same article. So I think that there’s a lot of room for improvement. 

So what we do is we run several, not just one. And because we’re under program control, anything with an API we can interface with. And again, remember, Grammarly actually detracts from humans because it makes it much more perfect. 

I don’t want to pass 100% human by installing errors. That’s not necessarily the right way to do it. I think you have to have readable content. As long as it is readable, I think a very big thing is we have this self-learning process in our process.

Human oversight is essential in AI-generated content; while AI can produce impressive results, it can also hallucinate and introduce errors. Share on X

We sort it by the right learning sequence within a page. I think if you can do those correctly, that’s like 20 times better than anything else out there. You still have to try to make it human. Don’t get me wrong, you still want it to be more human.

Some of the really cool tools are you paste in your page, you run the tool, it’ll tell you the percent human, but then underneath that, it shows you the content of your page and color codes the sections that need to be tweaked. Well, any writer can go through that and tweak it. That part isn’t hard. That’s a writer’s job. So, let the writer write. 

I never said the writer drops to zero time. I just said it’s reduced significantly. So, yeah, let the writer still write. They would have had to do that anyhow. Even if they wrote it from scratch, they’d have to run it through a tool, and then they’d have to fix it. Sometimes, writers write something that looks like AI and think about its philosophy. At what point is a human plagiarizing AI output?

How do we know that AI is plagiarizing humans? Maybe the human is actually plagiarizing AI. At what point can you draw the line that says the human is always right? You could, but if I generate an article in AI and then I take what that article is and then invent it myself, am I plagiarizing them? Or is the LLM plagiarizing humans? Is there a copyright infringement?

Ten years from now, it’s almost gonna be undetectable as to who said it first. Because there’s gonna be so much of it. So I think it’s gonna be hard to say it’s gotta be human. And that as time passes, it gets harder. But in today’s world, you don’t want to be blatant about the fact that it’s AI. I think that’s the big issue.

Yeah, so you’re now analyzing the top humanizers. 

The top writers and testers.

Yeah. So when do you think this will come out? This episode we’re airing or recording now will probably air in about a month or six weeks. 

Never be before that.

Okay. So, provide as soon as the research is finished and published, and send that over. 

Sounds great.

And I’m guessing that Humbot is one of the humanizers you’re looking at.

We have a followers. What I did was I gave it to my content team to run the experiments. Then, I’ll review, go through, and question it. I’ve been running some of the tools myself. I will tell you that a great many of the tools are terrible. They’re good on a certain kind of article. But I’ve yet to find a tool that is good everywhere.

Yeah. Well, you know, some tools will aggregate all the tools. For example, if you want to run a prompt on a half dozen different LLMs simultaneously, there’s ChatHub. I’m sure there are competitors, but that’s one example. I imagine there will be versions of the ChatHub for humanizing, AI detection, and all sorts of different use cases.

Yes. You see, anticipating that that will happen, we wrote the application the way we did. We can just plug it in.

Cool, so let’s talk a bit about content, how that spans the SEO and PPC sides, and how to get all that to work together seamlessly and with maximum efficiency.

I believe that content is very close to the importance of SEO, so you almost can’t do SEO without doing content.

Yeah, I think that a little bit of history would help. In the beginning, and maybe I was a little biased, there was SEO, and down here was content, right? Everybody was talking about what you do on the page, and you get links, but the content wasn’t as discussed as it is now. And because of the usability discussions, the expertise, authority, trust, experience, and discussions at an AI level that’s coming out of Google, we’re finding that the importance of content has increased. I believe that content is very close to the importance of SEO, so you almost can’t do SEO without doing content.

Before, you could have just said that’s up to the writer’s content team, but now we have to be involved in it as SEOs. And so I think that first of all, there’s sort of a merging of SEO into the content process and the content into the SEO process. They’re becoming somewhat symbiotic and

What we want to be able to do is be good at both. That requires SEOs to adapt. Our tool actually has an API interface for our SEO tools. At the time we create the content, we know that we balance out the keywords. We’re seeing that SEO and content really need to be somewhat cohesive. You can’t avoid content in SEO anymore.

If you have an SEO project that is not discussing content, they don’t know what they’re doing. It has to be a part of it. Now, how big of a part? Well, that’s a reasonably important question. I think on the last show, you and I discussed that process I invented for FAQs at the bottom of the page. If you go to one of our blogs, the jump links at the top will have an FAQ entry. 

If you go down to that FAQ and search for that question, our site shows up on the first page for the question and not in quotes, just to search the question generically. And we have put those on thousands of pages on my website. What happens is that when you do that search, that FAQ, just using that as an example, will rank in Google. Typically, page one is in the AIO, often in the AIO, or has the featured snippet.

Yeah. AIO is AI overview. Not everybody is an SEO geek.

It’s AIO. It’s the, not it’s E -I -E -I -O. AIO is the AI overview section that is produced by Google at the top of certain queries, typically how queries.

If you have an SEO project that does not discuss content, they don’t know what they’re doing. It has to be a part of it.

Perhaps a what would give you a featured snippet, and a how would give you a little explanation. It’s the Google AI response, if you will. It’s very much like the genesis approach. It puts it at the top of the Google search results page. So, if you have a how question, it shows up.

Originally, Google put it on a lot of pages, and then they backed it off because it was inappropriate content. It was wrong. It hallucinated. But now, on the left side of the top of the page, it gives you an article, and on the right side, it tells you where the sources were. 

So many times, we have to do that from an SEO point of view; we want to include that FAQ because if I answer a thousand questions on my topic within my website, Google’s gonna think I’m the expert. Just that simple. 

So, in all of these, here’s the cool part. All of the updates that Google’s doing and the core updates, they did one in August. It’s still going. There’s still a ripple effect of it right now. Our rankings for page one have been flat or up, but we didn’t get a hit from any updates. So, I think being identified as a subject matter expert by answering questions as often as you can is a big thing. That’s one of the things PreWriter does. It generates the answer to those questions in a format that you could just have the writer finish and then add to the bottom of the page.

I also think that that’s an easier thing. See, a lot of people don’t want to rewrite their pages, but they do want to freshen their pages. So, adding a big block of FAQ content to the bottom of the page is really beneficial. It works out extremely well. And in fact, I have so many pages with those questions. 

I’m typically spidered within 48 hours or so. So if you go to my blog page, the one I published two days ago may not be spidered yet, but the one I published four days ago will be spidered. And you can see how well it ranks. So, the spider frequency goes up. The subject matter expert signal goes up. You’re answering questions that users are increasingly asking; one of the byproducts of Chat, which is pretty much a byproduct, is that you learn to ask questions when dealing with Chat. Well, it turns out that the number of people asking questions at Google.com is now approaching 20%, and it wasn’t there before. So people are actually learning that they don’t have to put in a keyword; they can put in a whole question, And Chat will answer that.

Yeah, they’re being trained by AI prompting.

If I answer a thousand questions on my website topic, Google will think I’m the expert. Just that simple.

Yes. You’re exactly right. The advantage of AI prompting is you can actually ask strings of questions. Give me the top 10 of this list, and then tell me which ones are in this state. List the company name and phone number. You can try doing that at Google. Right? Mean, but you can do that at Chat and get the answer.

I use Chat for all; by the way, AI is not just for content. I know everybody is probably like me in one way or another. I write things, and I’ve learned to put it down and come back to it an hour later. When I read it, I ask myself who wrote it. Right? And then I end up rewriting it. 

Well, now I’ll write it and tell Chat to make it conversational but more professional. And it’ll rewrite it for me. I often found what it said that I couldn’t touch it. I could never get it that good. And that becomes my email.

There are so many things that are happening. I have created an avatar. To create an avatar for myself, I have the advantage of 15 hours of Bruce giving training classes because I have an online training course. So I’ve got all this Bruce speaking, and you run it through special software, and it builds an avatar. And then you give it a written page, and suddenly, by merging it in, that avatar is speaking those words.

I could be doing training for the next 300 years using that. My avatar says what I say. And we are implementing that in our video training course only because Google is changing things quickly. I can’t green screen whole sections of the course over and over, but I can rewrite the script, and suddenly you’ve got the slides, you’ve got me speaking the script that I approved, and you see me talking in the lower right-hand corner for a video course, that’s sufficient.

And I think we’re going to find that ads are going to do a lot more of those. I think we’re going to find that I could write now. And by the way, this is one of our other tools. We could create a list of 100 derivatives from any keyword. For each of the 100, we can generate a 500-word script, and I can generate 100 videos. Like overnight, I read the script that corresponds to that keyword. That’s a lot of AI.

Yeah.

And I could do it in different languages. I can tell it right now. I want it in Japanese. I get it in Japanese.

Yeah, are you using HeyGen or some other tool? 

Yes. That’s the one I’m using.

Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. I think it’s already out of the uncanny valley. It’s quite spectacular. 

What’s one of your favorite blog posts that has the FAQs?

Okay, almost any of them. Any other, well, the ones on SEO classes, it shows up very well because, I mean, it’s one of our products.

So, in-person SEO classes versus online SEO training are different. 

Either of them.

So, that one has an FAQ at the bottom. How can I decide between in-person SEO training and online SEO training courses?

Right. So, you highlight the question, right-click on it, and do the Google search. It generally or usually shows up with an AIO at the top of the page. But we’re usually right there with the featured snippet or near the top.

Yep. Cool. I know we’re getting close to time, so I wanted to maybe switch to a lightning round mode.

I think the technology within Google changes 12 times a day, so it is far more important to be an SEO than a subject matter expert.

Sure. It can’t scare me.

All right. Let’s talk for a minute about silos, and then I’ve got some questions about other things. But yeah, you used to really talk a lot about silos as an SEO thing. And I’m just curious, has your feeling about silos changed or moved on? Because I don’t normally hear you talking about it these days.

It turns out that when I was talking about it, part of it was it was a part of a USP. A unique sales proposition or service. And now everybody’s doing it. People refer to when people get on board with things; they like to rename it. Now, it’s called clustering, which is a sub-silo. It’s a siloed section of a website. We still do siloing. Right now, two large active projects are siloed. So yes, we still do it. We still talk about it. 

It turns out that it still generates a 30 to 300% organic traffic increase. It’s still really powerful because it’s designed to help you be a subject matter expert. So, we are still doing a lot of siloing projects. It isn’t necessarily the kind of thing to talk about at a conference because, for so long, I’ve talked about it, and others are talking about it. But it is something we invented in 2002. It was interesting back then when I talked about it; people would look at me like I’m crazy.

Now, when I talk about it, it’s like, yeah, that’s obvious. Cluster isn’t as unique as it once was, but it certainly is still as powerful, and we still do a lot of projects for it.

Yeah. I do hear the term clustering or clusters a lot.

What that is is that it’s really a sub-silo. Siloing typically is a site architecture hierarchically structured from the top. A cluster is a little part of your directories, a little area that is siloed all by itself. But it isn’t a whole silo. So, it’s a cluster within it. If you did enough clusters, you would logically have siloed. But silo is a superset to clusters.

Okay, all right now, before we started recording, you said that you don’t do verticals. Let’s elaborate a bit on that for our listeners since they weren’t privy to the pre-recorded pre-interview discussion. Why don’t you do verticals, and what do you do instead?

Okay, yeah, it’s almost interesting. Maybe sometimes we should actually record our pre-recording, just as an add-on. Vertical would be a company that does only car websites, only hotels, or only lawyers, or only something that limits that, in theory, broadens their ability to get rankings because they’re experts in only one thing. That’s all I do car sites. I know car sites. It turns out, though, and I’ve always felt this way, that that’s sort of putting all your eggs in one basket. There are a lot of sites that got wiped out during COVID because that’s what they did.

But more importantly, I think the technology within Google changes 12 times a day, so it is far more important to be an SEO than a subject matter expert because that’s the customer’s job. They are the subject matter expert. I don’t have to tell them how to do their job. Inherently, they’re going to perform well, right? 

So, we’re dealing with a client of ours who is a lawyer, and we have lawyers, or a client of ours who is a franchise owner. And we do large franchises, all the neighbors. I mean, we do a lot of franchise work. There is no doubt that we have a lot of people who are in autos. But we’re not going to just be that auto. We are part of the team with the client, and they are far more of an expert than we will ever be. 

I chose to focus more on the need for in-depth SEO knowledge than industry knowledge outside of SEO.

Think about it this way. Is Google ever going to be an expert on everything in the index, but they’re a search expert? I chose to focus more on the need for in-depth SEO knowledge than industry knowledge outside of SEO. I can’t pretend to be a car expert as well as the car people, but I can be an SEO expert because that’s what I do for a living.

And so, I chose a long time ago that specific verticals are not a focus. It doesn’t mean I can’t do them because I have SEO knowledge, but it’s a partnership with the client for specific verticals. They have the knowledge. I have the SEO knowledge together. We get rankings. That is just the way it works.

Yeah. Okay. Last question. What’s happening these days in local search and local SEO?

Okay, we understand; by the way, local SEO has not necessarily changed dramatically. However, what levers you pull, that part hasn’t changed dramatically, but what has changed is how you do it, right? 

So you could say It’s the same as before. I wrote an article about 46 things that influence local SEO. Those 46 things are still true. It’s just how you get client testimonials. Or how do you manage your Google business profile? How do you get broader map coverage? Those are the kinds of things that you focus on locally now. 

As I mentioned, we do a lot of franchise work. And those franchise stores really want to rank in their regions. But there are only so many keywords. Where we’re able to get them ranked is organic. That’s the SEO component. We can get them into the Google Business Profile and the local service ads. We can get them mentioned more.

We can do those kinds of things from an organic SEO point of view. But those things, from five years ago to now, are different even if they’re the same things. How you do it changed. How many competitors do you have? You see, for instance, one of the things that’s more important now, it used to be that everybody focused on how do you get a particular ranking. Now, it’s more of a share of voice and different metrics. And yeah, we wrote a slew of custom reports just to allow us to view inside of local rankings and present those for clients. It’s not that different. Anything you do nationally, you would want to do locally.

However, locals also focus a lot on Google business profiles, local testimonials, and how you write content for local searches. That is different from national. But SEO is SEO. Still the same.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, we’re out of time. So why don’t you share your website and any particular social platforms you want to send our listeners or viewers to learn more and potentially work with you on your team?

All right, my website is bruceclay.com. The PreWriter website is prewriter.ai. And by the way, you can go there, sign up with no credit card, and get 20 free tokens to try the tool. Just go try it. There is no obligation; just try it because you’ll love it. We have seotraining.com, which is our training site. 

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We have seotools.com, which is our tool site. But most of our services are offered through brucclay.com. And it’s pretty good, pretty good. We do webinars. We do all sorts of things. So, if you want to follow me on LinkedIn, that’s where I spend most of my time. Follow me on LinkedIn. When I have a new blog post, I post it, et cetera. It’s an announcement comment site. So, it works out well if you want to reach out. You can always follow Bruce Clay, Inc. on most of the other social media platforms. I’m around.

Yep, awesome. Thank you, Bruce. And yeah, thank you, listener. We’ll catch you on the next episode. This is your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

• Add FAQs at the bottom of web pages to boost search rankings. This strategy helps position my site as a subject matter expert.
• Use AI tools to rewrite, professionalize, and create video content. Consistent AI-driven content production can scale my business faster.
• Generate scripts and videos in multiple languages using tools like HeyGen. Adopt this to broaden my reach and cater to diverse markets.
• Implement 150 prompts to expedite my content creation process. This strategy can cut blog post creation time by 50%.
• Use SEO-siloing to enhance my site’s internal architecture. Proper siloing can boost organic traffic by up to 300%.
• Always review and humanize AI-generated content to avoid detection and maintain quality. Human oversight ensures accuracy and relevance.
• Create hundreds of localized pages efficiently with AI-driven rewrites. Tailor content that resonates with specific regional audiences.
• Employ advanced tools for automatic content gap analysis. This ensures my content strategy is comprehensive and competitive.
• Focus on broad SEO expertise rather than vertical specialization. Collaborate with clients for industry-specific insights and break the norm.
• Discuss opportunities for collaboration or inquire about Bruce Clay’s services at bruceclay.com.

About Bruce Clay

Bruce Clay, an internet and digital marketing guru, is better known as a founding father of search engine optimization and one of the first people to popularize the term. In 1996, he started Bruce Clay Inc., an internet marketing solutions company, from his house; today, the company has offices in the US, Europe, Japan, West Asia and India.