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AI Evolving and getting started with SEO - AMA with Andrew Laws and James Kindred
29 Plays1 year ago
In this special Ask Me Anything (AMA) edition of the Untitled SEO Podcast, hosts Andrew Laws and James Kindred delve into a variety of topics ranging from SEO to design, tech, and the creative process. Recorded during a LinkedIn Audio event on November 22, this episode offers a unique blend of professional insights and engaging discussions.
Key Topics Discussed:
- The intersection of SEO, design, and technology.
- Experiences and challenges of hosting LinkedIn Audio events.
- Insights into the creative process and startup culture.
Important Quotes/Moments:
- Andrew discussing the versatility and challenges of LinkedIn Audio events.
- James sharing his experiences in design and technology.
Guest Information:
- James Kindred: A seasoned expert in design, tech, and AI, James brings a wealth of knowledge and a unique perspective on the creative and startup world.
Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast for more insightful discussions. Join us live every Wednesday at noon GMT on LinkedIn for our AMA sessions, and feel free to send in your questions!
Submit your questions at https://yeseo.io/ama/
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Transcript
Introduction and Setup
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, welcome back to the Untitled SEO Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Laws, and this episode we have a very special thing for you. Myself and my associate James Kindred have been experimenting with LinkedIn audio events. So this episode is in fact an AMA, which means Ask Me Anything event that we hosted on LinkedIn Live on Wednesday the 22nd of November.
00:00:24
Speaker
So some of the audio might be a little bit here and there because, well, LinkedIn doesn't actually provide recordings of LinkedIn audio events, so we had to jerry-rig something together. But we thought you might find this interesting.
Host Backgrounds
00:00:36
Speaker
My background is in SEOs. Hopefully you know if you've heard the podcast before. James's background is in design and tech and creativity and AI and just all kinds of interesting things. He's also a serial startup artist.
00:00:49
Speaker
So there we go. I hope you enjoy this. And if you want to join us for one of our LinkedIn audio episodes, just send me a message or contact me through the website and I'll point you in the right direction. But basically it's noon every Wednesday on LinkedIn. That's noon GMT.
00:01:08
Speaker
Oh God, that was a bad thing to do. That's a great start.
Audience Interaction Begins
00:01:12
Speaker
Hello, this is the AMA, the ask me anything or ask us anything with me or host Andrew Laws, who has a container being unloaded outside his office window, if you can hear that, and the marvellous James Kindred. So we have a listener. Hello, Becky. Do you have anything you'd like to type in to the chat? Oh, Johnny Simon's turned up, so we're just waiting for our first question.
00:01:37
Speaker
You should have a little chat thing there. Designer of the Yesseo corporate ID, Jack Hagley, has joined us from Rotterdam. So we need somebody to ask a question.
00:01:48
Speaker
Harry, Harley Pierre, hello, how are you? Right, Becky has put her hand up and I'm gonna click allow to speak. Right, can you hear me now? Yes. Hey, we can, congratulations, this is very exciting, you're the first person to speak to us. Hello, Laura. Yeah, I think we are at the bleeding edge of LinkedIn audio here, James and I, this is the only second time we've done it, so Becky, you have helped us discover something quite important, so it would appear people can't chat.
SEO Advice for Becky
00:02:15
Speaker
Now, while we've got you and you're being incredibly helpful, would you like just to have a go at a question? It doesn't have to be about AI or SEO or anything. It can be anything you like at all. And this could be quite scary but fun. Well, the reason I joined is because I know very little about SEO. I know what it stands for. I know potentially how it should work, but I don't know how to make it work.
00:02:41
Speaker
So I was just listening in to see if I can pick up any advice, any tips and hints at all. Anything will be great.
00:02:51
Speaker
If you are an absolute beginner, I think the best thing you can do is sign up for a free account at SEMrush, and they have some tutorials. With SEO, there is so much information out there that it can be really hard to figure out where to start. But I think SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, any of those, they all have quite nice little guides. But the best way to do it is probably to go to Google Garage,
00:03:17
Speaker
and do the SEO part of that course. But I can summarise SEO in a couple of sentences. SEO amplifies excellent messages. So if you're putting good content on your website and it's on there in a way that Google understands,
00:03:33
Speaker
then you're already doing much better than most people who try and do SEO in a sort of a skanky way. I don't know how to put it really. So, you know, getting your message out there is really the most important. But yeah, the Google Garage and SEMrush is a really good start. OK, I will do that.
00:03:53
Speaker
Thank you very much for that in the right direction.
Skepticism in SEO Information
00:03:57
Speaker
But the second thing to go on, James. No, I was just saying thank you to Becky. Thanks. Thanks for thanks for taking the leap and asking a question. Yeah, that was that was brilliant. Thank you very much. OK, the only thing I'd add to that is if you're reading any information on Google, if it's on a website that stands to make money from you from buying a tool or subscribing to a service, treat it with the utmost skepticism.
00:04:22
Speaker
Because people selling hammers will tell you the world's everything in the world is a nail. Yes, yeah, I get that. Yeah, I think that's the thing. It's like to have something that's, you know, recommended is great because I have been sort of, you know, doing searches and things and like you say, I start following something and then all of a sudden they want me to, I don't know,
00:04:46
Speaker
given my inside leg measurement or something. And it's like, oh, we've gone too far here and I don't actually know what I'm going to get in return. So I kind of bow away from it. So it's good to know where to go.
00:04:58
Speaker
The world of SEO is very strange. One of the things I would add for full transparency, and not many SEO people say this, is that a lot of the time when things happen with rankings, we haven't got the faintest idea why. And the truth is, Google doesn't have the faintest idea why. SEO is essentially an incredibly complex algorithm that's
00:05:20
Speaker
we're always doing our best to understand it but we've got to the stage now where you can ask people at Google why is that happening and they'll shrug and go don't know. So that's worth bearing in mind but generally it amplifies excellence and that's a good mindset to have to start. Yeah perfect thank you. I'm always slightly skeptical about the SEO tools that have to pay to advertise to be at the top
00:05:46
Speaker
Ooh, that's, oh, are you wrongin'? The only reason I'm pausing and stuttering here is that you often see in Facebook posts, people go, oh, never hire an SEO agency that doesn't come at the top of the ranking. I know, I'm being facetious. Oh, you're a wrongin'. I know. Right, would anybody else like to, I need to finish that
AI Startup Discussion with Harley
00:06:10
Speaker
thought. It's because, well, you know, I'm an SEO agency in Ipswich, I don't have a million pound budget to hire.
00:06:15
Speaker
a massive team for our own ranking so we're always going to get beaten by by others uh by some others right does anybody else here harley we've been seeing some great reactions from you would you like to ask a question just give us a thumbs up excellent this is nice becky i've moved you out you're back to being a listener it says demote to listener that doesn't sound fair how rude how rude
00:06:40
Speaker
Harley is there Harley is there a button that says ask to speak or something like that that you can see so we're still feeling our way along with this or anybody else anybody else like to we'll have a race who can hey there's a thumbs up from Harley there we go oh there we go look at that progress it is hello Harley hello Andrew hello James hi Harley how are you yeah not bad thank you
00:07:10
Speaker
Have you used go on go for it. Have you got a question or would you like to just have a chat? Yeah, I was a little chat honest I just want to hear what you guys are talking about with AI We are a AI startup And yeah SEO anything you guys are Getting deep into really with we are a AI startup ourselves and just yeah interested to see what you guys are saying and so what does whatever do and
00:07:38
Speaker
Whatever is a all-in-one SaaS for all use cases. We've been working on it for eight years It's got over 40 plus apps tools AI tools in it. It's like a kind of web OS Okay, kind of jump between different apps and Yeah, just seeing what you guys are kind of Bringing to the table etc. Anything I might be able to pick up to add into the platform It might be something that
00:08:07
Speaker
It might be something that James and I have been talking about this a lot privately. I was in James's shack. This isn't helping. We were talking about this and one of the things that came up is at the moment it's the attitude to what's possible that is making AI really interesting rather than necessarily getting too caught up in what the tools are.
00:08:30
Speaker
because I've been in the tech world as has James for well over 20 years, and I've seen the situation before where the ability outpaces the need quite a lot, and we can end up getting ourselves tangled up in what's possible rather than what we actually need as a tool. That's my kind of hot take on that. What do you think, James?
00:08:49
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's the thing we were discussing earlier is that it's the inputs and the outputs is that, and I don't know, Harley, if your platform can kind of guide this sort of thing. But I always find that you can say to, you can ask AI to do pretty much anything to an extent, even down to the point of writing code for you and that sort of thing.
Enhancing Creativity with AI
00:09:13
Speaker
But the fundamental thing is you have to understand the
00:09:17
Speaker
the importance of the quality of the question and you have to be able to interpret the quality and the usefulness of the output. Otherwise it doesn't really have any real true value either commercially or otherwise. And that's when you get to the point of
00:09:33
Speaker
that AI is being used to put pictures on mugs on Etsy. That's not moving anything forward and people aren't necessarily understanding what the audience is, what the space is, what the actual problem is, or being able to interpret the output.
00:09:52
Speaker
So the value for me in AI is that I can use it as like a second brain in the same way as that I drop notes down and that I kind of sit there and I'll strike an artistic pose and think deeply about something for a few hours. I can use AI to throw some questions out there that I'm considering myself and I can interpret the answer and know what to do with it.
00:10:19
Speaker
But otherwise, you're just kind of screaming into the void a little bit if you don't understand what you're asking or what the answer is. No, I completely understand that. I agree with that completely. Like even with kind of trying to push forward AI in a, like that unique kind of, you know what I mean? Being unique on the forefront of the AI and its tech.
00:10:43
Speaker
Like, for instance, when people are building out their workspaces with us, everything is custom. So you're kind of like, someone's like adding apps and tools into a workspace. You know what I mean? Like we provide all the apps, people add them into the workspace and as you people grow out their businesses or whatever they want to build within whatever, then you can prompt against all the data that you build within it. So like, so yeah, basically like having an assistant
00:11:12
Speaker
prompting against your business with all the data within it so like that's kind of a use case which we provide which is unique but like you said it's just listening for what people are doing and trying to get the best and the best out of it you know no no absolutely I think it's a it's a tool absolutely and it has massive massive value
00:11:36
Speaker
And I think that people will approach the opportunities and the perceived risks with AI in lots of different ways. But at exactly the same time as from my background, I've been a graphic designer for 25 years. And when I started, people were still pessimistic about what desktop publishing was and whether it would actually have any value. And there were people in the corner kind of grumbling using spray mountain scalpers and pasteboards.
00:12:05
Speaker
those sorts of situations, it's exactly the same with AI as it was with that, as it was with a monk having walked in in the 16th century, having just completed an amazing unique piece of work to see a guy stood there using a printing press.
00:12:22
Speaker
No, it's exactly the same. It's exactly the same approach. And depending on when you're born and which way you're looking, when that comes in is how you kind of interpret it and how you see it as a commercial benefit. No, most definitely.
AI in SEO and Content Creation
00:12:39
Speaker
Do you guys use AI then for SEO?
00:12:42
Speaker
Not for, I don't, I'm not an SEO myself. I'm a graphic designer and a kind of brand builder. I use AI kind of differently for, for just my own journey type stuff in like editing, et cetera. If you use AI.
00:13:00
Speaker
We do use AI at the SEO and we are very much an SEO agency. The way we're viewing it at the moment is trying, we're exploring it, I think would be the best way. We use it for things like analyzing large amounts of data.
00:13:16
Speaker
we anonymize data and then chuck it in chatgbt although you know that's just belt and braces kind of safety really we don't use it for generating any content because i'm yet to see any content that is any good and almost everyone in seo prides themselves in the quality of the writing but i think where it's become very useful is
00:13:40
Speaker
to get a bit of reassurance something sometimes on sort of which way to steer the ship, which way to point it. So something we're experimenting with at the moment is looking at large amounts of data and in SEO we often want to try and cover specific parts of a topic in an industry or niche as completely as we can in a way that reflects the strategy of our clients and we're sort of experimenting with finding ways to
00:14:07
Speaker
to assess the output that's already happened and check that it does reflect the reality of how we want it to be perceived by the public and by Google. And it looks like it might be a very useful tool to help us retain objectivity.
00:14:25
Speaker
But I'm kind of getting a bit bored of seeing people, especially on LinkedIn, going, oh, you know, AI content bad. And I posted something about this this morning, which was Google themselves saying, look, it's not the worst thing in the world. But if you're going to sit down at chat GBT or anything and type in write me an article on fish and then publish the thousand words it writes, then you're wasting everyone's time. But if you've written an article structure,
00:14:54
Speaker
For a thousand-word article, it depends what you mean on AI, because some of SEMrush is claiming it's AI. So one of the things that we like in there is the SEMrush tool, which goes out and looks at what is actually ranking and diagnoses and breaks down what that content is. So to give you a use scenario, if we're going to write a content,
00:15:12
Speaker
And this isn't solid gold every single time at the moment where we're experimenting. We'll say, right, hey, chat, this is our content layout. This is the subject we want to cover. And then we write really long prompts at the moment, like long prompts are absolutely where it's at. We'll say, look, have a look at this. Is there anything we've missed? And that's using AI in a way that we would use a colleague set across a desk.
00:15:36
Speaker
And I know I've had some conversations with James where he said a similar thing, like it's that sounding board. It's that, am I crazy, but? And then seeing what response gets you get back. The heart of this thing, and you know what I mean? It knows about loads of stuff, but it can only prompt against a certain amount of the word count. I think at the minute, it's only 120,000 characters of data analysis that it's trying to pull from
Managing AI Tools Effectively
00:16:01
Speaker
its brain. You know what I mean? And that stuff's a lot of,
00:16:04
Speaker
randomness depending on the question and it is to use your to use your tractor analogy even further it is sorting the wheat from the chaff but it is and knowing and having that knowledge in the first place to be able to understand what is actually valuable output coming out of the language model and what is actually
00:16:30
Speaker
not useful i've got an analogy go on to use a calculator you have to know what maths is yeah no definitely it's just that that's scaled up a thousand times isn't it yeah if you don't know what the plus button does and you're trying to make two num smoosh two numbers together then and you don't know how to get the result is is yeah cool harley i really appreciate your input i'm gonna have a look at uh whatever afterwards uh
00:17:01
Speaker
Alexis, Phil, Max, was there anything you'd like to pipe up with? Pipe up, that sounded rude, didn't it? Anything you'd like to talk to me about? Thanks, guys. Thanks for letting me have a little chat. Thanks so much, Charlie. I'm interested to see what you guys say about SEO, etc. and I'll just be listening in the background while I work.
Benefits of AMA Format
00:17:19
Speaker
Lovely stuff. Thanks so much. Value your time, thank you. Cheers, bye. Right, well, Phil's putting up laughing emoji and that might be because he knows us.
00:17:30
Speaker
Let's see if we can get Phil to kind of come and say hello He's not making much much of a move towards doing that James did you have any backup topics in case anybody else wants to speak? I Don't think so. I I come into these with in the same way that I approach most meetings without an agenda Yeah, I think the
00:18:00
Speaker
It'd be interesting. Well, it isn't ask me anything or ask an o'wah as we say. It's a o'wah. It makes it very suffocate being an o'wah. Yeah, have an o'wah. So if you do have any questions about anything, I think that the interesting thing between Andrew and I is that we have many hats.
00:18:22
Speaker
in terms of what we do and what our experience is over the last, God knows how many years of whatever we've been doing. So I think this is quite a good sounding board. So you've got any question at all about starting up a business or finding a way to get customers or how people think about how to approach communicating what your brand is and that sort of thing. Then between Andrew and I, we can answer a fair number of
00:18:50
Speaker
completely unrelated questions.
00:18:53
Speaker
I think that's a really good point, James. We've both started and run several companies. And you have a track record with startups. So I've had a lot of value from our conversations because you'll share things that I don't think I hear anywhere else. We're talking about filters earlier. And the filter of most people talking about startups and running a business is either to self aggrandize themselves for their own ego, or because they want something.
00:19:21
Speaker
So part of the idea of setting this up as an AMA is, look, James and I, we don't really have anything to sell you. Not really. I mean, we'd love it if somebody listened to this became a client, but that's not exactly a straightforward journey. It's not like a telethon. We go, now that you've listened to us, give us money.
00:19:41
Speaker
I've got some awesome A.I. mugs on Etsy if anyone wants to point. A.I. mugs and you're making candles as well now. That was a joke. I am making candles though and you can't, I checked, chat GPT can't pour soil wax or stick the wick in the bottom of a slightly too long glass for my fingers.
00:20:06
Speaker
I don't have a question for you that I'm going to say, say something probably quite dumb, but it'll be fun. Why, why do you think it is that the chat GBT can't manipulate anything outside of its, its cage outside of chat? Do you think that's deliberate or do you think it's lack of ability? So give me, give you an example. So if you can't say to chat GBT, right, go to my website and do this. Yeah. I mean, it, it,
00:20:35
Speaker
it's by design I think because you run the risk with and there is that kind of you know to the nth degree that it's sudden some people think it's suddenly going to go Avengers Age of Ultron and there'll be Robot Beware or Terminator and they're kind of you know basing artificial intelligence off
00:20:58
Speaker
movie tropes then there is you know that's going too far but at the same time bad actors with an AI that was completely connected to the internet and even things like Bing's AI model and that sort of thing you know there's guardrails on what they do you can't you can ask it a question you can't get it to do something and that's connected to real-time data conversely
00:21:24
Speaker
chat GPT isn't directly connected to the internet. You can get add-ons that it will go off and find stuff for you. But I think that it's purely by design because what they don't want to happen is it won't become self-aware. That's not a thing. But there's people out there that could potentially do a great deal of damage
00:21:51
Speaker
or learn a lot of things that they shouldn't necessarily need to learn to cause some damage beyond asking the AI the prompt to do it. Or they could just become really annoying. Yeah. There's a concept in E&M Bank's sci-fi novels of Smatter. So I'm missing a tooth so I can't say Smatter very well. And Smatter is an AI taught itself to build factories.
00:22:22
Speaker
and didn't tell itself when to stop. So they have what they call smatter infestations because they learn how to build these little machines. They don't really do much other than make more little machines. And you end up essentially with like gray goop kind of absorbing the whole universe. And I don't foresee that happening with AI. No, it's a very similar thing with
00:22:42
Speaker
like the very light work that I've done on auto GPT, which is you can essentially hook into the chat GPT engine.
00:22:56
Speaker
through local prompts in a machine. You can get it to build things to an extent. But again, the stuff that I've done and Matt's done with your guys there is that it can build a lot of nonsense and it can build stuff that it doesn't need to build. And it can also create its own workers within this system. So you can kind of set it jobs and you can set a budget on how much load you want it to do.
00:23:25
Speaker
It can get out of control quite quickly, not to the extent that all of a sudden your laptop suddenly starts to try and bite your face. But it can start creating workers and it can start going off and doing stuff. And you entirely understand what it's doing or why it's doing it, but it's starting to compile code. Still can't really see a use in that, but equally you suddenly realize that if you are getting into the chat or the GPT API,
00:23:54
Speaker
through water GPT, what it can do if it kind of doesn't have those very fundamental guardrails on it.
00:24:03
Speaker
It's managing tools the same way you'd manage any other tool. You use a hose pipe in the summer to fill a small swimming pool. You know when to turn the tap off. You don't switch on the tap and never ever go back to it. And I think this sort of weird consciousness, especially in the press at the moment of AI being something that can think, is kind of missing the point. It can't think. It has no power of thought. It can follow
00:24:29
Speaker
essentially very complex, very good flowchart diagrams. That's largely it. Yeah, it's the modern day equivalent to the robot from short circuit reading a book. It can do it really fast and its accuracy is brilliant, but it can't then
00:24:54
Speaker
Directly interpret the meaning of that book without all of the other human knowledge that's plugged into it without Stephanie So I was trying to remember the name of the character female That's my fault I bought it up, but yeah, I think it is that thing is that and you look at
00:25:20
Speaker
There's a lot of comparisons I was reading this morning. I don't know if anyone's used it, but the chat GPT app on your phone or your tablet has a speech model that you can chat with. And it's very strange. It's quite disconcerting because of the variation in the voice. And it has a human character in terms of, there's the,
00:25:47
Speaker
the volume drops, or it slows down when it's reaching punctuation, or it sounds like it's being considered. And it's quite disconcerting. But that's just a very good voice model still existing on top of a very good data set. It's not a thing that thinks. David Newman, thanks for popping along. I see you're in e-commerce. Just to kind of align this back slightly to SEO, I'm really, really interested in the mass data analysis.
AI's Role in E-commerce
00:26:15
Speaker
that's possible with datasets and GPT. I think that's something where people who run e-com sites
00:26:24
Speaker
have the opportunity at the moment, possibly to get ahead of their competitors. Because if you're experienced, you know what questions to ask, you can now get results, good or bad, much, much faster. So you can chuck theories at it and get them disproved much quicker than you used to be able to do. And I think that's one of the really exciting things. And also, I can't remember if you hear earlier, I was talking about we're experimenting using chat GBT to spot holes in content strategies.
00:26:53
Speaker
And I think one of the big challenges with any e-commerce site is if you've got like 10,000 products, which ones are the sick runs of the litter? Which ones are the ones that are getting left behind? And I think that's a really exciting angle that is sort of getting there, but not quite there at the moment with AI and SEO. I realized David can't answer because I've not switched him on, but hopefully he found that interesting. Yay, he clapped. That's good.
00:27:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's all the positive feedback I need. That's right. We'll work for emojis. Yeah, quite. I'm going to put this in my gratitude journal. What happened today? Well, people I've not met before gave me clapping emoji. Actually, I'm serious. I really like that.
00:27:36
Speaker
I've really enjoyed this, James, where the clock is running out and I think we need to be strict at keeping this to half an hour as we said we did. Yes. I very much appreciate everyone that came along and listened to us here. This is something that is probably going to happen again. I find it really useful and I particularly liked people being able to speak to us. I thought that was super cool. Yeah, I think having guests on, it does feel like a kind of suddenly like a
00:28:05
Speaker
I feel like I'm in an episode of Frasier. But it's quite interesting. I quite like having kind of people coming on and it being a little bit more unstructured and just kind of chatting around different things. So thanks to everyone for tuning in and listening again, or whatever the LinkedIn term of doing that is. I'm sure we'll definitely do more, and maybe some with structure, some without.
00:28:27
Speaker
hopefully you get a few more people coming every time and seeing how important LinkedIn ranks doing stuff like this on their platform compared to posts of memes and emojis and non-business stuff.
00:28:44
Speaker
I think what I'll do, I'll set up the next one after. Obviously, after I've checked with you, when we're going to do it, James. Same time next week, shall we? I was going to say, let's do it same time next week, but I'll set up a contact form unless you want to do anything. We'll talk about those details afterwards, but we'll give people the ability to send in questions because I think putting people on the spot
00:29:04
Speaker
is fun, but I very much realise that's not for everybody. So for Becky and Harley, I super appreciate you getting involved. I think that's absolutely wonderful. Yeah, thanks for having me. Right, so I'm going to end it there. I'm going to say goodbye, James. Would you like to say goodbye? I will say goodbye. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Bye.