Samantha North

Nate Matherson:

00:00

As far as like showcasing your expertise goes, is it as simple as like writing in like an I voice? Like I did this, I learned that I struggled with this or are there other ways to do it?  

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Samantha North:

00:13

I like to do that. Sure. And I like it to be genuine and authentic. I wouldn't, I wouldn't attempt to fake that. Maybe some, some would and that's, that's their thing. For me, like, I know that if I'm writing about something that I have done, then I don't need to worry about being authentic, like it's kind of authentic by default without me doing anything. So there's that kind of language and also stuff like, like, like taking an expert position and being confident about statements. Like I suggest you do that or I recommend this or in my experience when I did this. That happened. And building on that also at the beginning of each post that I try to throw in like what I'm calling like an authority statement, which is a little summary of me and my experiences in relation to this topic. And I think that opens it in a nice way. And it tells the reader from the beginning that this person, you know, has authority in this topic and that they should trust it. What am I going to read?

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Nate Matherson:

01:12

Hi, and welcome to the Optimize podcast. My name is Nate Matherson, and I'm your host. On this weekly podcast, we sit down with some of the smartest minds in content marketing and SEO. Our goal is to give you perspective and insights on what's moving the needle in organic search. Today, I'm thrilled to sit down with Samantha North. Samantha North is a content strategist and SEO coach with a diverse background. She has experience growing blogs to over 100, 000 monthly visitors and driving conversions. Samantha is passionate about building authoritative online brands. On this week's episode, Samantha and I chat about the changing search landscape, including the recent Google leak, AI overviews, protecting your website's traffic, and what Samantha calls Brand Universe. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the Optimize podcast. It's brought to you by Positional. If you don't know by now, my name is Nate, and I'm one of the co founders of Positional. And we've built what I think is a pretty awesome tool set for content marketing and SEO teams. We've got tools for keyword research, internal linking, content optimization, and even a couple of tools for analytics. We'd love for you to check it out at Positional. com. Samantha, thank you so much for coming on this week's episode of the Optimize podcast. 

Samantha North:

02:30

Hey, Nate. Yeah. Thanks for having me here. I'm excited to have this conversation with you and, um, yeah, I'm sure it will be a lively one.  

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Nate Matherson:

02:37

Yeah. It's such an interesting time in SEO. Um, I feel privileged to be doing this podcast at this point in time because there's been so much change. So there's a lot to talk about each week and, uh, you and I have chatted a bit offline before this recording and, um, I'm, I'm pretty excited for this week's episode. Uh, but the first question I ask all of our guests is how did you get into the world of content marketing and SEO?

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Samantha North:

02:59

Yeah, well, it's been a long and winding road. Um, I would say it started around 2012, 13, when I, um, launched myself as a freelance journalist and did a few articles for international publications. Really, really loved the whole writing online aspect of that. And then in 2014, I launched my first blog, which went nowhere because I didn't know anything about SEO all those years ago. But it still sort of gave me that bug for sharing ideas online and building an audience. Albeit through social media, um at that point Basically, I was tweeting every blog post like frantically and trying to drive traffic that way Um, and then based on that I actually got hired for a fintech company in london and did a couple years of full time Hardcore content marketing for them Which was nice, but, um, I've always been sort of a freelance independent person at heart, so in 2020, partly as a response to the political stuff in the UK, like Brexit and all of that, which you've probably heard of it, I decided to relocate to Portugal on a mission to get my EU citizenship back eventually after five years living here. And as part of that, I noticed that a lot of people also wanted to, to move to Europe, not just Brits, but people from the US and a whole bunch of other countries. So that gave me the idea to launch a blog around that. Digital emigre, which was all about the relocation process and seeking second citizenship. Now, caveat that blog has had suffered a bit in the helpful content update and others. And I've sort of, I haven't updated it for a while, but at its peak, it was, it was pulling in a hundred, a hundred K, um, visitors per month. And for, for a couple of years, it was driving six figures in, in revenue. So I was really happy with how that went. And I'm still debating now whether I'm going to kind of reactivate it and try and sort of. Pivot and tweak a little bit in response to the updates, but um, yeah, and then 2022 23 I thought it would be a good pivot to start kind of coaching and sharing my knowledge on seo and blogging to help other creators and solopreneurs and I've been combining that with a bit of, um, you know, sticking to my old B2B Sass background, but I'm more and more enjoying the idea of helping experts to get themselves, get their authority visible online. So my recent thing is building a membership community, which I'm going to call the Content Authority Club, and that's going to be geared towards experts, monetize their expertise with authority blogging. So that's where I'm at at the moment. 

Nate Matherson:

05:31

That's so interesting. So you started a blog that essentially educated searchers on how to go and gain a EU citizenship, maybe through Portugal or somewhere else. And, um, and that was like the core topic area of that site you created.

Samantha North:

05:47

Yeah. So it was, it was based on my journey of moving to Portugal myself. So I think the, one of the top blog posts for a long time was how to move from the US. A lot of people were searching for that.

Nate Matherson:

05:59

It seems like such a perfect niche to build a, an SEO content site, given so many different questions that people must have is they, they'd want to move to a place like Portugal, uh, and actually Paulo on our team is in Portugal. Shout out to Paula. Um, we're going off script already. Uh, cause I have to ask, you mentioned that the site's been, um, You know, deprioritize to a degree, but also maybe hit by the helpful content update. And, you know, I promise our listeners, we won't talk too much about the helpful content update because we have on so many episodes previously, but do you have any thoughts on like why the site might've been negatively impacted by the helpful content update?

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Samantha North:

06:42 

Yeah, I absolutely do. Um, so the first thing, the first monetization strategy at the beginning was like referral partnerships and affiliates, but to like genuine companies who can help people complete their journey because I needed to have like immigration lawyers and tax advisors and professionals like that as part of the process. That was important. Um, so it did well with, with that model, but then I think it was for 2023, when the traffic really started going up, I made what I now think is a mistake of running media buying ads on it and decided to take a step back, build my other sites and my, my consulting work. With the idea that digital emigrate would become a passive income engine. And that was fine for about 12 months, I think. And then in September, you know, things started to take a nosedive and I did not do much to try and stop that because I was already doing okay with my consulting work and didn't really have the headspace as a, as a one, one man, two person. I've got a business partner in the UK, but. We didn't really have the bandwidth for that. So yeah, I think that the problem with, I see with ads and affiliates is that you're not, you're not really creating genuine value with those, those methods. Right. You're just a little man. And I've since decided I'm going to probably take media by off, off that site very soon. I'm just, I've already reached out to them. I'm going to probably pull the trigger on that soon. And if I do rejuvenate that site, it's going to be more down the lines of selling a digital product. I'm building an email list through that. So I think that's, I feel that's the way forward now.

Nate Matherson:

08:13 

Yeah. We had Dave Rathmann on our podcast a few weeks back and, uh, you know, he, he kind of, Went through a checklist of things that he noticed with some sites that did get negatively impacted by the helpful content update and it, it was pretty clear that like affiliate links and like heavily promotional sites were, were certainly caught up in the, the helpful content update. Um, and my, my co founder Matt likes to joke that like Google did it on purpose. Like they don't want other people making money from search results, but, um, I don't know. It's been a busy few weeks, uh, in search. We're not going to spend this entire episode talking about the Google leak. Uh, but I, I'm curious, do you have any like quick thoughts or takeaways from, you know, the, the recent leak? Uh, and for all of our listeners, uh, know that like, a treasure trove of information about how Google's search algorithm works was released. It's available online. Um, but Samantha, do you have any thoughts on it or are you doing anything differently? 

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Samantha North:

09:12 

There's a fantastic article by a guy called Eric, but I forget his last name, but I think his site is on page. ai. And he wrote a really, really in depth analysis of the, of the leaks. And he's been watching this for a while. So I took a look at that a few days ago and ran it through Claude to get some key insights. Cause it's a massive article and it really did sort of kind of confirm some of my suspicions. Of course, there was a lot more depth in that, but broadly speaking, um, I'm really going to focus on topical authority. I think. At least one site has got a bit too Diverse in its focus probably going to prune some content off that and maybe even launch a new site to host some of the content That doesn't quite fit with the rest Um, that's something that's something I think is going to be a good move I'm going to build more links to actual content pages as opposed to like primarily the home page I think the issue there is that, um, you know, guest posting and like podcasts and all of that stuff is quite easy to get links to the homepage, right? But it can be more challenging to get those kind of links to your inner content. So I'm going to try and focus on that. I'm going to mix up my anchor text more. I'm going to probably deoptimize some of the older content, take out keywords from headings and, you know, anything like that. And more importantly make sure that everything I write that's fresh and when I go back to old content make sure it includes some unique stuff from my own personal experience because I just think that's so critical now And as i'm already running sites based on aspects of my personal experience It really makes sense to to really go hard on that on that avenue. 

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Nate Matherson:

10:52 

Absolutely. Yeah, I think You know, SEOs have long known that backlinks are quite important, and I still think they're quite important, um, despite what, what Google has said at times. Um, but yeah, I totally agree with you on like the helpful content side of things, you know, like Google says in their guidelines, like, what is your piece of content, like adding to the internet, essentially, and like, that's like that new, Bar that like I try to operate from, and maybe that is a personal experience. You know, it's oftentimes a balancing act, like as, as Google says in their, their search writer guidelines, like experience versus expertise, like when, which should take the lead. Um, but for a website like yours that I realized it was a previous project, uh, about your experience moving to Portugal, it, it, it makes sense that like, you know, sharing those. Unique experiences that you've had going through that process would, would make that content just so much more engaging and valuable. And I think that Google has gotten a lot better at understanding that from like the user experience side of things too. There's been a lot of talk that like Google is tracking clicks. And again, as SES, I feel like we've known that for a long time, but, um, Yeah, such an interesting leak. Um, I, I have to ask too, like AI overviews, uh, they're fairly new. It's still very early, uh, in, in terms of the rollout and life cycle of an AI overview, especially when you think that, you know, featured snippets have been around for a decade now. Um, but do you have any thoughts on AI overviews?  

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Samantha North:

12:32

Yeah. I mean, I don't think they've rolled out properly in Europe yet, but I have seen some samples, you know, um, in SEO forums and through VPNs. And yeah, like most of the samples I've seen have been people mocking them because it's just such obvious misinformation there, you know, but there was one, I think, encouraging people to throw themselves off a bridge or something very, very harmful stuff. And as I didn't mention in my bio, but I did used to work for a couple of years in counter disinformation during the US 2020 election and a couple of other elections in different countries. And part of that job was to like police social media platforms on behalf of those platforms like Facebook and YouTube and look for instances of disinformation and organized inauthentic behavior. So, kind of drawing on that experience, it's important to me that the internet Does have integrity and it's not full of a load of harmful stuff. And from what I've seen from AI overviews, you know, the little I've seen, it doesn't seem like they're quite fulfilling that at the moment. So I wouldn't say like, you know, Google is going to write off this angle completely because I'm sure it's not. I'm sure that AI driven search in general is going to be a thing from now on. But I really hope it's going to evolve and I'm sure it will to become a lot more sophisticated and yeah, I mean, I'm convinced that's what will happen. But right now in these early days, yeah, I haven't been too hot on what I've seen.

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Nate Matherson:

14:01

I experienced. first incorrect AI overview myself, uh, like the other day. And I noticed it and I thought about it and I was like, Oh, I actually know this is wrong. Um, you know, you see a lot of the tweets where the AI overviews say very incorrect and potentially hurtful things. Um, I, to play devil's advocate though, like I have found them quite helpful. And, um, I guess you're in, you're in Europe, so you don't see them maybe as often as I would in search. But, uh, do you think that, like, the AI overviews are going to, like, dramatically reduce traffic back to publishers from search? Is that a concern?  

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Samantha North:

14:43 

I feel like it's a bit too early to say, but it could end up being, like, the whole featured snippets thing, right? Because people were worried about They would impact traffic. Um, you know, the goal is probably going to change, right? And the goal of SEO in the future could be to make our content show up within those overviews and there'll be specific workflows like to follow processes to follow to make that happen. So in that sense, they might not be as impactful as people fear, but I think it is difficult to stay. And as always, SEOs, they're not going to change. And content creators will just need to adapt and do whatever's necessary, really, to get their stuff out there in whatever way Google, the gatekeeper, you know, says is right.

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Nate Matherson:

15:26 

Yeah. I I've learned over the years that I, I can't expect anything from Google. Like they are a platform that we are building on top of, like it's their platform, like, you know, we exist largely because of their platform. So, uh, we just have to keep up with, uh, the changes they make. And, you know, Google has said like these, these AI overviews could actually increase traffic to publishers and certain situations. I know like, uh, you know, one of our. Previous podcast guest Kevin Indig, uh, did a small analysis and found that like they often reduce traffic, I think between like three and 8 percent to a website for a given query. Um, but then, yeah, to your point about optimizing for placement in them, uh, it's, it's certainly a, a interesting topic right now. Um, you know, I saw that recent tweet from, from Cyrus Shepherd, where he was able to engineer his site into the. The AI overview. Um, and my understanding is you want to, you want to give Google something that's very similar within your page to what it's already presenting within an AI overview, given that Google sources.

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Samantha North:

16:34 

Like featured snippets.

Nate Matherson:

16:35 

Yes, exactly. Yeah. And, uh, I was really surprised on, um, like how the AI overviews get. Pulled like my understanding is that Google decides what the AI overview is and then finds like search results that align to what they want to say. That's my understanding. So it's almost in the opposite of a featured snippet. I think, um, one of the listeners can correct me if I'm wrong. But, uh, anyways.  

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Samantha North:

17:02

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense knowing what Google normally do. that just came to mind is that. Like, right now, like, like, feature snippets have had this thing where, like, there's certain queries that don't, certain types of queries that don't normally get a feature snippet, right, and that's more complicated, more nuanced, more experience based sort of stuff, and I think that AI, for at least quite a long time, It's going to be similar, right? Like if somebody wants a nuanced human experience, then probably they're not going to get that from a feature from a AI.  

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Nate Matherson:

17:34

Absolutely. And I, I know, I know you've spent some time like in your career working with like B2B SaaS companies, oftentimes I imagine like pretty Like, uh, technical products or, you know, uh, maybe they're ranking for keywords that aren't like, what is a bank account? And so for some companies, like they might be more at risk of an AI overview, and there are probably other companies that are less at risk, given the types of content they're creating and the topics they're writing about. Would you say that's a fair, you know, estimation? 

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Samantha North:

18:07 

Yeah. I mean, um, people have made a lot of money from creating sites. It's like it's all about what is blah, blah, blah, you know, and all these different what is querying, like, I guess, like glossary sites, maybe I reckon glossary sites would be quite at risk or any, any, any business site that has a big glossary that's driving a lot of traffic. Uh, stuff like that, simple definition type sites, you know, you know, things that, um, Things that go on at length about stuff that can be easily answered. Google, we already know that we're not supposed to do that, right? Like if somebody is asking how to boil an egg, they don't want like, what is an egg as the first thing they see in the article, because it's ridiculous. So I feel that stuff like that is, is hopefully more at risk. Does it make sense that it, that it should be, that it's not necessary for us to write content about that stuff. And hopefully the human things will still be, you know, prioritized as proper content. 

Nate Matherson:

18:58 

I feel like there was that article like from a few years ago, it was like how to fill a glass of water and someone wrote like a 2000 word article on it.

Samantha North:

19:08 

Um, What is water?  

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Nate Matherson:

19:09 

Yeah, yes, it's H2O. Um, you know, speaking of AI overviews on LinkedIn, you recently posted about seven strategic things you're doing to protect your blog from the rise of AI search. And I want to chat through a few of those things. Things. Uh, one of the things that you mentioned on LinkedIn was, uh, targeting keywords that give you the best chance to showcase your experience and to solve a genuine problem for the reader. Uh, does this mean like, not targeting those like very evergreen? What is keywords or glossary keywords and instead like picking ones that are maybe like towards the middle or bottoms of the funnel? What I, I'm curious to hear your thoughts here.  

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Samantha North:

19:51

Yeah, well, in the in that in that statement, I should have probably put solving a genuine problem for the reader first. Um, that doesn't exclude like what is queries like recently I published a post on my SEO blogging blog about you know what, what is a blog and it's already ranking and getting traffic because In the transformation journey, there will be audience members who are at that very early stage. So I think it could still be relevant for them in terms of things being evergreen or not. Um, my, my main focus, the content I most like to write and find the most valuable for what I'm trying to achieve is how to content, you know, so educating the audience on different aspects of solving their problems. And I think Generally speaking in, in, in many niches, that stuff is evergreen kind of by default because people are always going to want to solve these, these kinds of problems, unless the reason for that problem just disappears. Um, so I think in that sense, yeah, but it's okay to mix things up and still target keywords that may not even be defined keywords, right? But it's still valuable for your audience. Like maybe it's something I've seen on Reddit or I've heard a customer talk to me about. And even if I can't find a keyword or there's zero search volume, I would still consider including it because it's useful for the audience and it's part of that journey for them. So not everything has to be all about keywords all the time. I'm, I'm willing to, to mix things up and, and put the audience first. And I think that's in line with what Google wants us to do. And it makes sense for the humans too.  

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Nate Matherson:

21:26

Yeah, they say not to create content for search engines. Uh, yeah. And for what it's worth, you are on the first page for what is a blog.

I'm curious, like with a keyword like that, what is the, what is the end game? It seems very, very evergreen.  

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Samantha North: 

21:40

Yeah. I think it's, it's about getting people to know that. I'm offering like a coaching service and potentially an SEO and blogging course later down the line. Um It seemed like a like something that would make sense for like very very very top of the funnel people Perhaps they want to monetize online and they don't know how to do it then Then maybe researching blogs as a possibility.

Yeah, not not every keyword I target has got a like a rigorous business reason behind it. It probably should, but, but sometimes I just think that that could be a good play and I just go for it. I try not to do that all the time, but it happens sometimes. 

Nate Matherson: 

22:17

I feel that, um, sometimes my co founder, Matt, like, he's like, why did you create this one?

And I'm like, Oh, we're building, we're building topical authority. They're going to sign up for our email newsletter. As far as like showcasing your expertise goes, is it as simple as like writing and Like an I voice, like, I did this, I learned that, I struggled with this, or are there other ways to do it?  

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Samantha North:

22:41

I like to do that, sure, and I like it to be genuine and authentic.

I wouldn't, I wouldn't attempt to fake that, maybe some, some would, and that's, that's their thing. For me, I, I know that if I'm writing about something that I have done, then I don't need to worry about being authentic, like it's kind of authentic by default without me doing anything. So there's that kind of language and also stuff like, like, like taking an expert position and being confident about statements.

Like, I suggest you do that, or I recommend this or in my experience when I did this. That happened. And building on that also at the beginning of each post that I try to throw in like what I'm calling like an authority statement, which is a little summary of me and my experiences in relation to this topic.

And I think that opens it in a nice way. And it tells the reader from the beginning that this person, you know, has authority in this topic and that they should trust it. What am I going to read?  

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Nate Matherson: 

23:33 

Right. Yeah. I always think of like Brian Dean from Backlinko, his blog posts. Like he, whenever I read those, those posts, I felt like I was having a conversation with Brian.

Um, it felt very personal like about You know, his experience building a backlink.  

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Samantha North:

23:50 

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And that's why it does so well, I think. And plus the depth of that content and the detail is impressive.  

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Nate Matherson: 

23:56

Yeah, totally. Um, how do you think about, uh, quantity over quality? And I asked this question because I get asked this question every single day, uh, especially from startups that are looking to, to start a, a blog 

Samantha North:

24:09

with some of my B2B SaaS clients.

I have, Face this from time to time. And my answer is, is really that, yeah, like quality is important. And it's not just about keywords that are going to attract a load of traffic, right? Like that is definitely a mistake to focus on super high traffic volume keywords that don't move the needle for the business.

I remember a blog post I wrote a couple of years ago now, it was, it was for my digital immigrant blog, and it was about a certain kind of, um, Residency visa in Portugal and there was no keyword for it. It was it was very fresh and new I think I heard about it in reddit or through my network But I just decided to write a guide about it and put it out there and I think it drove I don't know hundreds of leads It's still driving leads today on that even though there was no such volume and it didn't even exist in keyword tools.

So In that sense, quantity of traffic is definitely not that important, but, but quality of traffic and quality of content in relation to the business goals. Should be the key focus.

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Nate Matherson: 

25:18

And now just a quick word from one of our sponsors, actually, our only sponsor that is positional.com. Positional has what I think is an awesome tool set for content marketers. We've got everything you need to take you from start to finish and help you scale this channel as I've done over the last 11 years of my career.

We'd love for you to check it out@positional.com. A lot of our listeners of this podcast are startup founders, um, but they don't really have the time to write every blog post on their website. Is it possible to create expert led content when, like, those founders might not have the resources internally to write each piece?

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Samantha North:

25:59

Yeah, and some, it is, and some methods I would recommend, um, there are, you know, things you can do to, to sidestep that. So, one is to hire external subject matter experts to give a contribution, like, you know, um, either to, um, Write a small part of it or or just to to give quotes and you know, if a founder is hiring a freelance writer They can ask the writer to seek out a subject matter expert and put those quotes in there And that's something I try to always do for for clients in the in the startup space Seek out someone expert to add those quotes into the article if I'm not an expert in that subject, right?

And as well as that you can also get like a subject matter expert to be the reviewer the named reviewer of the article I can pay them to do that and it says reviewed by dr Smith who's an expert and that that gives a kind of a whole sense of authority to the article and another another way that I Haven't really tried but it I've seen people do it.

It's like crowd sourcing quotes from By the specialist forums or Facebook groups, maybe, um, and, or Reddit even, and using those in the article. Um, like I said, I haven't tried it, but I think that's the way of kind of borrowing authority from people. So yeah, that's what I would suggest.

Nate Matherson: 

27:16

Thinking like a journalist, like going out and like finding those experts and bringing them into the piece.

And, you know, I don't write every article on our blog. I think I've written most of them, but like we do work with freelance writers occasionally, and I'll often like provide them quotes from like this very podcast. So like, there's a good chance that like, you are going to get quoted in like a future blog post written by one of our freelance writers.

And I was just having this discussion the other day with like one of our customers. They have like a weekly webinar and they've done like 80 of these. And they were asking me like, how do we go back? And how do we like improve this? Like content that's just okay. And I said to them, like, you've got 80 episodes of weekly webinars.

Like there's got to be so many expert quotes and takeaways that you could probably inject into your existing content to make it more helpful.

Samantha North: 

28:06

I think that's a good point. We're having that webinar and podcast content and YouTube content. It's so useful because you just get the transcript and you just throw it into an AI tool and you ask it to extract Like the most relevant insights from the topic of the article and claude is like super great for doing this And that's a goldmine 80 80 webinars is an absolute goldmine and it's not that hard to get to get the stuff out Well,  

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Nate Matherson: 

28:29 

we are definitely going to talk about repurposing content here in a little bit, but I have to ask, because you mentioned like the reviewed by, um, you know, element that you could add to a blog.

Uh, it's something that we do on our website, a shout out to our editor, Charles, who often appears as the reviewer on our pieces. One of the other things you mentioned on LinkedIn, uh, a way to protect your blog is to inject maximum eat, uh, for our listeners, that stands for, uh, expertise, experience, authoritiveness, and trustworthiness.

It's a, an acronym that, that Google has created to. Help content creators better score. I don't want to say score, but literally score based on the search rater guidelines, the, the quality of their pages. Anyways, uh, you say that injecting maximum EE, uh, into your overall site and every blog post you wrote, right.

Um, is really important. Um, I've had a few guests on that have said to me like, Nate, EAT does not matter. Like there are so many examples of like EAT not mattering. I tend to fall into the camp that EAT does matter. But I guess I want you to answer the question. Like to someone who says like EAT doesn't matter.

What would you say to those folks?  

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Samantha North: 

29:48

I would say to them, would you feel more confident reading content written by a demonstrable expert in the field or reading a faceless niche site? content, you know, think of it from a human perspective. We, we like to see, we like to see someone who's done it, who knows what they're talking about.

That's important to us. And I don't know about everyone, but I like to see that the person has got a certain level of expertise in what they're talking about. Um, I don't know if EAT as a specific ranking factor, like that can be manipulated. I don't know to what extent that matters. But I just know that in terms of building user trust, converting them to the next stage, um, it's, it's important to have that on there.

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Nate Matherson: 

30:29

Yeah. Even if EE isn't like a direct ranking factor, which I do think Google's algorithms correlate off of, I do believe that based on what I've heard Danny Sullivan say, but even if it's not a direct ranking factor by You know, creating a higher quality webpage, that's going to keep people on your site longer.

It's probably going to make people want to do business with you and actually convert.

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Samantha North: 

30:51

For our work, that's, that's what matters the most.  

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Nate Matherson: 

30:54 

That's what we're here for. Uh, and you've mentioned AI tools a few times, uh, throughout this recording. I've generally been against AI writing tools or at least the way in which people want to use an AI writing tool set.

Uh, you know, we had Zach Harris on the podcast a couple of weeks back and he said that, uh, I'm paraphrasing here, him here, but like lazy marketers are just like 10 times lazier with an AI writing tool. And it's not that like AI writing tools are bad. It's. The way in which people use them are bad. Um, and frankly, I wouldn't use AI generated content on my website, but would you disagree with me here?

Do you think there's a place for like AI generated content today in, in search?  

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Samantha North: 

31:37 

Yeah, absolutely. And I just want to go back to that quote from Zach, wasn't that late about lazy marketers? Yeah. Like, like, like totally. I think that's, that's the main problem here. There's, There's a lot of tools like, like ChatGPT that everyone can access.

They don't even need to pay anything. And they just type in like, write me a blog post about sunglasses and boom, it will produce a whole bunch of texts. And, and a lot of people who are maybe not writing professionals, not content creation professionals might think that that output is a quality piece. It sounds okay.

Right? Like it, the grammar is correct and stuff. Um, well, they're going to put that on their blog and think, great. I can produce. 20 50 of these a day and i'm gonna have so much traffic and then they just go ahead down that gaily down that path Churning out one shot blog content now. I think that that is prevalent and that happens a lot I've seen so many examples of that kind of trashy content on on all kinds of sites even like, you know high quality ones and I think that's a shame because that is Giving these tools a bad name And it's sort of overshadowing the true value that can come from these tools in the hands of a skilled operator.

And when I say skilled, I would say there's two, there's two elements to that. One is a person who knows what good content should look like for starters. So when the AI produces something, they can look at it critically and they can be like, that's good, that's decent, or that, that's crap and that needs, you know, this, this and that tweak.

The other, the other element of that is being a subject matter expert in what you're talking about. Like, like I'm, I'm confident that if I'm writing an article about blogging or SEO, that if the AI gives me something and I know it's inaccurate, then I'm going to spot that and I'm going to rephrase it and I'm going to check it and change it and do whatever it takes.

So the mistake a lot of people make is I think that they're getting the tools to do everything for them. They're being quite lazy about it. And In fact, a lot of work goes into high quality prompting and it's more like a back and forth with the AI as an assistant, you've got to do a lot of stuff. Like, it's not just like hit the button and go, you've got a lot of, there's still a lot of human direction in that.

So that's, that's my philosophy and that's how I use it.

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Nate Matherson: 

33:46

As far as prompting goes, have you, do you have like one or two like tricks or tips you've learned as in terms of iterating on the prompts? 

Samantha North: 

33:56

Oh, so many. Um, a lot of it is about giving context. So let's say I wanted to write a certain blog post about a topic, I'm going to tell it It's probably like the gold of my website, what I want to do with this blog post, what I want the reader to be able to do afterwards, what the call to action is going to be.

All that stuff I'm going to throw in as a contextual paragraph at the beginning before telling it. And I don't tell it to write the whole thing from A to Z ever, like it just doesn't work. I might say, based on, you know, all this context I've given you, um, please writers generate an opening paragraph with a book for this.

Okay. Thanks. And I might not like what it generates and I could ask it to generate me 10 more options and then make some adjustments to them. So a lot of it's about giving it enough context. Another thing I like to do is reverse engineer. So, for example, I've got a friend who is a YouTube coach. Her name is Salma Jafri.

She developed this framework YouTube script that hits what the algorithms want on YouTube. So I got her script from one of her videos and just took it out, extracted it as a transcript, put it into the AI tool, and I asked Claude, Can you please recreate this blog post into a video script according to this framework?

And it did it really nicely and it didn't need that much tweaking. So a lot of it's about what you put in, the quality of what you put in is going to inform the quality of what comes out. 

Nate Matherson: 

35:25 

Is Clod like your, your favorite tool versus something like a chat GPT?  

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Samantha North: 

35:30

I would say so, yeah. I got a bit disillusioned with chat GPT quite early on because I just didn't like its natural voice, it's just like so fluffy and it's so kind of like long winded, you know, and to me that's the kind of writing I strongly dislike, so it just didn't, it just triggered me a bit.

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And when I started using Flawed last summer, it was amazing how like clean and kind of concise the output was and I just kind of like fell in love with it. And I've used it ever since, mainly. It's a good one. People definitely check it out. I think that's

Nate Matherson: 

36:04

anthropics tool, right? Yeah.

Samantha North: 

36:07

Yeah. That  

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Nate Matherson: 

36:10

is one that I haven't tried, but maybe I'll need to, to take a look.

Um, we'll include a link to it in the show notes. Um, and I, you know, I know that you work with, uh, with a lot of like, B2B SaaS companies, or you have in the past, um, as far as content strategy goes for like a B2B SaaS business is, uh, is it more nuanced or would you say that like the principles of building a blog or creating content are fairly similar across industries or types of customers you want to reach?

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Samantha North: 

36:44

Yeah, there, there are for sure universal principles of quality, depth, expertise, optimization for search, but not over optimization all of that stuff, but, um, Yeah, like things do change based on elements like the type of sales process they have in place, what type of product they're selling, um, what their, what their conversion method looks like and how, how the customer typically engages with that brand.

So you have to like, you know, tweak and shake things a bit to fit in with that. But, but the end goal of the content is, is, you know, it's going to be to move the needle for the business, which might be probably going to be driving conversions or demos or signups or whatever. Um, while also building trust among the target audience.

So with my B2B SaaS clients, usually if it's a startup, which it usually is, Um, I get them to focus on building the bottom of the funnel stuff first Because even if there's not a huge search volume on that stuff and there rarely is because it's super technical Um, just having that in place means that they're going to start getting a few leads Right.

And then that foundation is going to be working for them in a sense, like driving business results, and then they can gradually start bringing in the competitive comparisons or the buying guides or whatever, and then the top of the funnel stuff to start getting more traffic later, but, but it has to have that foundation in place.

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Nate Matherson: 

38:05 

Yeah. When working with clients, is it, is it critically important to give them like that quick win? Like, so they, like within like the first few months so that they can feel like, You know, there's a lot more work to do, but it's working. Is that really important? 

Samantha North: 

38:21 

It's super important. Yeah. Because I've noticed like a lot, a lot of founders and, and, and, you know, people that don't trust SEO, maybe they've been burned by a bad agency or I don't know, some freelancer on Fiverr who didn't, who costs 5 or whatever and didn't do a very good job.

And I find that as a, as a, as a kind of an SEO first content strategist, um, Dealing with a lot of that mindset. So, you know, people don't want to see that all this stuff about like, you know, traffic and all they want to see business results. And I wouldn't want to like just focus on increasing traffic without tying that back into business results.

So yeah, like the early wins, especially if they're business relevant, super, super important.

Nate Matherson: 

39:07

I had someone say, uh, to me the other day that like, they didn't want to create SEO content. Like they, they wanted to create like good content, like, what would you say to a person like that?  

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Samantha North: 

39:20

I would say that these, those two things are not mutually exclusive at all.

You know, you can, you can create super high quality content, but you can add a few optimizations that make it show up in search results and get found by the people who need your solution. Like, why would you not want to do that? 

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Nate Matherson: 

39:35

No, that's what I was thinking too. Like they were describing to me, like a lot of like very bottom of the funnel content that like could be used for.

Sales team or sales enablement. And, and I said to them, I'm like, yes. Like the primary purpose of this content might not be SEO, but it could still be something to consider as you're, as you're publishing it. Um, and I do wanna ask you about content repurposing. Uh, uh, what is content repurposing and, uh, what are the best ways to do it?

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Samantha North: 

40:06

Yeah. Um, content repurposing is something. Quite excited about and recently, and especially with, with AI to, to assist, I would say that the most tactical kind of process I have at the moment for myself is starting. So let's say it's like a chain, like a transformation. So it starts with figuring out what's the, what's the customer pain point, right?

Like, let's say, I don't know, there's, there's Americans and they want to move to Portugal and they're searching for that. So let's say I find a keyword, how to move to Portugal from the U S. And the first thing I do is I know that's a pain point and I know there's a keyword. So I write a good blog post on that.

So I've got like the longest form piece of content already up, published and starting to work its way up the rankings. And now I've got that thing, that blog post that gives me a lot of mileage for cutting it down, chopping it up and repurposing into a few other platforms. Typically what I would do is cut it down for LinkedIn, so there's probably a couple of LinkedIn posts at least in one long form blog post.

And it starts with a good hook, and you can teach the AI to do all this to help you. It doesn't have to do everything, but it can help, you know, it's quite good with hooks actually. And then I might look to turn a key idea into an issue of my email newsletter. And also a YouTube script. And it sounds like a lot, but really, like, once you're starting from that one pain point idea, and spinning off from that, as long as you get the formats right for each platform, it's not that difficult to do.

And AI really kind of shines in this context. 

Nate Matherson: 

41:42

It seems like a lot of folks are flocking to LinkedIn right now. Um, is LinkedIn a great channel for everyone these days?  

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Samantha North: 

41:50

I think it's still like really underestimated. Like in, in, in like in real life, my friends, like not many people are active on LinkedIn as much as me.

Okay, like my marketing friends on LinkedIn are super active. But my real friends, yeah, like they, they don't even post. So I imagine that's similar for lots of people. 

Nate Matherson: 

42:10

Yeah. Have like people come up to you and said, like, I see you on LinkedIn all the time.  

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Samantha North: 

42:15

Some of them. Yeah. I've met people in Lisbon who've seen me on LinkedIn before we've even met.

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Nate Matherson: 

42:20

I get that from like my wife's like extended family. And like my mom, they're like, Oh, we go on LinkedIn and we see you. And I'm like, okay, it must, it must be working. 

Samantha North: 

42:29

That's so funny. My mom is definitely not on LinkedIn.

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Nate Matherson:

42:34

Yeah, I mean, it's got to be like less than 1 percent of LinkedIn users are actually publishing on LinkedIn.

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Samantha North:

42:41 

Yeah, it does feel like sometimes I think, you know, it's become very saturated. But I think that's an echo chamber that people like us are in because we're marketers, you know, I really think there's so many more of the population that are not on LinkedIn.

So in a way that, in a way that's good, but again, I think it, depending what niche you're in, maybe your audience is not on LinkedIn and you should give some thought to that before going all in on LinkedIn, this stuff I just talked about could be easily repurposed into Facebook posts, for example, or Facebook,  

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Nate Matherson: 

43:10

Facebook posts, people are still doing those.

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Samantha North: 

43:14

Yeah, I think some, yes. I've noticed a lot of relevant ads coming up. Facebook ads, let's say, or like driving people to read your blog post via your Facebook page. That's a, that's a thing actually, um, niche site owners have been doing after the helpful content update hit. They've been going in on Facebook ads to drive traffic.

Don't know if you've seen that.  

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Nate Matherson: 

43:34

Yeah, I guess like, you know, for me, like LinkedIn makes sense. I sell to marketers there on LinkedIn, but for, uh, you know, someone who's building a content site for like gardeners, like Facebook's probably a pretty awesome channel, um, for, for that audience. 

Samantha North: 

43:48

Or Reddit even, you know, like for gardening specific subreddits and, and, and other forums.

Yeah. So yeah, like caveat is like go where your audience is and don't just blindly go to LinkedIn, but it is interesting for a lot of coaches and consultant type people to be on LinkedIn. 

Nate Matherson: 

44:03

You mentioned YouTube. Uh, I, I personally think video is very hard. Like, I guess I have this weekly podcast, but I really don't like doing like seven minute YouTube videos.

Like, I, I, for some reason I find it very, very challenging, but like, would you recommend like if we're creating a blog post for a certain topic? Like we. definitely do like a YouTube video that like, sums it up, makes it more fun.  

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Samantha North: 

44:32

I mean, it's okay. So first of all, like I hear you on this, like I found YouTube super painful, really high barrier to entry, like a real chore basically to start doing something about all the equipment, all the like, Recording and that is, it's a lot, but I've done a few, I've done a handful now and I've embedded these in the blog posts and yeah, um, they are, they are good for that.

I think first things first, like it really helps the audience to see and hear you that just builds so much trust that just written text is not necessarily going to do right. And then the added advantage is it keeps them on the page longer. And I think that time on page signal might still be a good one for Google to assess the quality of that.

Um, at least I believe so. So I think it's worth doing. You could even like if someone who loved video might want to forego the blog completely and just go all in on YouTube because it's obviously a search engine as well. So, you know, there's sometimes like a whole blog versus vlog type of dynamic. But I think if you can do both, and if you don't mind, like, Just doing a simple video with basic production quality.

Um, I'm putting it up there then. Yeah, I think it's very valuable. It builds a lot of trust. I know  

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Nate Matherson: 

45:43

offline before this, you and I chatted a bit about brand universe, um, and, uh, the importance of building one. Uh, but maybe first for our listeners, could you tell us what a brand universe is, and then as a followup to that, like how you think about building one.

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Samantha North: 

45:59

Yeah. So, so to me, a brand universe is a cohesive. Presence for either you as an individual or your, your business, um, across multiple online platforms, right? So you're, you're meeting your audience, not, not just on SEO queries, but on, on YouTube or on Instagram or Facebook. And you're saying similar things.

You've got similar content pillars on each of these platforms. So people start to know you for these areas of expertise and. I think that's the main kind of key here in building that authority is that you have to define the three or four things mainly that you talk about and talk about them again and again and again and repurpose these ideas and do that all over the internets and that's that's what the brand universe means to me.

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Nate Matherson: 

46:45

Yeah. Do you think that like Google and search engines have gotten better at identifying these brand universes? And so for example, if you've got like very big following on YouTube, like they know who you are and maybe they will rank your blog posts more highly as a result. Do you think that could be a thing?

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Samantha North: 

47:03

I think so. I'm sure, I'm sure they're capable of, of, of drawing those, those links, right? Like, um, if somebody has got a presence and like the same name or consistent naming between all those channels. And they're saying the same thing and there's like interaction and overlap between the channels. Then yeah, I'm sure that I'm sure they can evaluate that.

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Nate Matherson: 

47:21

Yeah. And you know, Samantha, this has been so much fun. Hopefully we're helping to build your brand universe with this podcast episode this week. 

Samantha North: 

47:29

Podcasts are great for that.  

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Nate Matherson: 

47:31

If it's okay with you, I'd love to do the lightning round. Does that sound good? Sure.  

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Samantha North: 

47:36

Yeah, let's do it.  

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Nate Matherson: 

47:37

So earlier on this podcast episode, uh, you mentioned, uh, you know, potentially moving away from display ads or from affiliate in terms of monetization.

Maybe it's, you know, something Google doesn't like, maybe it's something users don't like. I guess if we move away from like display or affiliate, like how does one like monetize their, their website?

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Samantha North: 

47:58

Yeah. Well, the way I'm, I'm, what I'm working on doing at the moment is In terms of SEO content, I'm doing that whole how to guide thing for, for most stages of a customer transformation.

So let's say, let's say my end goal is to build a membership community stroke online course to help experts build authoritative blogs. That's the end goal. And then I want to think about the different stages of the journey that's going to get them there. And I've made these into my categories, like start a blog, grow a blog, monetize a blog, and write better content.

Let's say that the four categories. So I'm filling out these categories with, with content, which is mostly like how to do, ABC, whatever. And that content provides like a natural jumping off point for them to take the next step and engage with my services. So for that will probably look like downloading a lead magnet.

That's going to help them get a quick win on that topic that they brought them in. And at some point, um, in my funnel, once I built it, cause I'm still learning about funnels, they're quite confusing. Um, I'll aim to sell them like a low ticket products and potentially lead them to an online course in the future.

So it's all about that sort of journey and using the SEO content to, to capture people on that journey. On that journey,  

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Nate Matherson: 

49:17

so do you think broadly the internet goes more towards folks selling their own products and creating their own courses or whatever it might be versus selling other people's products?

You know, I think there's the guy, like, from epic gardening, like, he started as an affiliate SEO, I think, but now he's got, like, full product line. Do you think, like, more folks like epic garden and go in that direction over time?  

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Samantha North: 

49:45

Yeah, I think they, I think they absolutely do. Um, cause You know, like when you're the affiliate, you're still only getting a small cut of that that sale, I suppose, right?

Okay, it might be passive income to an extent. Um, but Yeah, you're not making as much and although I haven't ventured into this world so much myself yet I can see like really solid results from from a lot of people who are selling their knowledge online directly and I think it's so valuable to do that because it gives you a real business like You I said before that affiliate and ad based models didn't never really sat that well with me, although I did them and had some, some success with them.

I always felt like I was just writing content to drive people to this outcome, but it might not really genuinely be the best outcome for them, right? Like an affiliate article is always going to be biased. No matter what you do to try and mitigate that, it's just impossible. Like, why would you do it? Why would you send them to the one that's not the highest pay?

It doesn't make, it doesn't really make sense. Although morally you should do that. And as for ad content, people are just writing trash and ranking it and just to drive money from rubbish ads that look bad. I'm really like down on ads at the moment. I just can't wait to get them off my site eventually.

So yeah, like a real business revolves around having a product or a service or both to sell. And that's what I'm kind of shooting towards now.  

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Nate Matherson: 

51:05

Yeah, I think we've seen that in the search results to it feels like Google wants to prioritize companies with real products and services and not just chilling someone else's, um, as far as like backlinks go, do you think they're going to be more or less important in a year from now?

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Samantha North: 

51:22

Tricky to answer that one. Um, I don't think that's going to go away because backlinks are like a social proof signal in a way, right? That's like Google's social proof signal. So yeah, it's important. I just wonder if in a year from now, if there's going to be like more emphasis on real Quality backlinks rather than people just still getting ahead with trash backlinks.

Like, I don't know if you've seen it, but there's been a lot of ads in my Facebook feed for a company called boundless leads. I haven't seen them. Okay. Joe, Joe Davies, who's an SEO, um, in the UK, he did a YouTube expose where he bought a bunch of these leads. And it's like, I don't know, like 10, 000 AI backlinks for 30 or something.

So it doesn't sound good already. Right. Um, and he did an expo that he bought a bunch of these backlinks and expose them on his YouTube video. And it was just such trash behind that. Like the kind of content is not what I would want my site to be associated with. So I think there's a lot of room for, for people, um, building quality backlinks with, with people in their niche, like through real relationships, also through digital PR.

I think that's going to be super valuable because. It's quite a high barrier to entry to either to run your own digital PR campaign or to pay a professional to do it for you. It's either expensive or it's going to take a lot of your time and energy. So to get those links in mainstream media, yeah, it's like a great back thing to have, but it's hard to get.

So I think that the priority will be more on hopefully the ones that are hard to get. And if Google finds a way of like, you know, really weaving out the crappy ones, that will be, I think, a good thing for, for the internet.  

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Nate Matherson: 

53:08

Yeah, I agree with you. Digital PR has always been my favorite way to build backlinks.

Um, you know, my first company and we, we did an episode about digital PR with Andy Holland a few months back for all of our listeners. Um, but Samantha, I have to ask, how can our listeners learn more about what you're building and how can they connect with you?  

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Samantha North:

53:28

Yeah. So you can find me on my website, which is samanthanorth.

com. It's my main blogging tips website. I'm also, um, opening the content authority club, um, probably early in this autumn. So that's content authority club. com. If you want to join the waiting list, um, and see where that's at when it opens up. And of course you can find me on LinkedIn as Samantha North. So feel free to connect.

I'm quite active and yeah, good to be in touch. 

Nate Matherson: 

53:55 

Yeah, well, we will include a link, uh, to your website and, uh, your LinkedIn page, uh, in the show notes. Um, but yeah, thank you so much for coming on this week's episode of the optimized podcast.  

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Samantha North: 

54:06

Thanks, Nate. It's been really interesting to talk to you. I think we've covered a lot of ground and yeah, thanks.

Thanks for having me.

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Nate Matherson: 

54:19

And that's a wrap. And I just want to thank our sponsor Positional. They've got what is a pretty awesome tool set for content marketers and SEOs. They've even got a couple of tools for social media. We'd love for you to check out Positional and the tool set that we've created over the last 15 months at Positional.

Dot com and you can always reach out to me if you have any questions. My email is Nate at positional. com whether you've got questions about our tool set or comments and complaints, uh, or even positive feedback about this podcast, I'd love to hear from you. Um, and don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button, uh, wherever you are listening to this podcast.

Uh, thanks so much for tuning in.