Using AI To Create Content & Boost Your SEO Rankings with Alexander De Ridder

Andy Splichal:

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Spleckel, and we are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is using AI to create content and boost your SEO rankings. Today's guest is a co-founder and CTO of Smith OS who believes in transforming business through AI. A thought leader in both SEO and AI, he is widely respected for his innovation and vision. A big welcome to Alexander DeRidder. Hi Alexander.

Alexander De Ridder:

Hi Andy.

Andy Splichal:

Hey. So let's start with why should incorporating AI be on the forefront of every business's plan moving into the new year?

Alexander De Ridder:

There's a number of reasons. The first one would be like your own productivity. You can get just a lot more done. Also, everyone else is doing it, so they're moving faster. If you don't do it, then you fall behind. And then finally the channels or the doorways by which people are finding you from an SEO point of view are becoming a lot more omnichannel. What it means is that Google search is not the only game in town anymore. There are going to be a lot of different places where people are going to look to find you.

Alexander De Ridder:

And so it's game on.

Andy Splichal:

What are some of those places that are catching up to Google?

Alexander De Ridder:

Yes, so Chat GPT is a great example. People are going and asking questions there that they used to go to Google for and then going to websites. And we kind of see that in marketing, if you look at an SEO article and you want to know how to write it, we have a lot of science to back this right. You need to write in an 8th grade level or below or people are not even going to bother trying to read it. Your engagement is going to plummet and rank brain signals are just going to be all over the place. Google's not going to respect your website, it's not going to rank well 8th grade, but then TikTok comes along and YouTube shorts and things like that. What is the reading grade level for such videos? You think.

Andy Splichal:

I'm going to go a little bit higher? 10th grade?

Alexander De Ridder:

Fifth grade.

Andy Splichal:

Fifth grade. I went the wrong way.

Alexander De Ridder:

Fifth grade. Yeah. So this is very significant because it shows that the younger generations, and indeed like the Internet as a whole, is moving towards instant gratification more and more. They want things easier and easier and faster and faster. So what does that tell you about the future of search? It means why would I go and click on your website, browse and navigate through all the pages if I can just get the answer like that in a second, in a language that's easy to understand, that's personalized to me, my preferences and so forth and so on. So we know that organic traffic is going to move in that direction. Chat GPT was just a herald, but we all know, like Netscape Navigator built a browser market, but it's not Netscape navigator we're using today. So likewise, Chat GPT may have created the market.

Alexander De Ridder:

There's no guarantee that they will end up owning the market. And this is why you see companies like Apple announcing in the last week that they're spending up to a billion dollars a year to catch up in the AI assistant wars. That's why we see Amazon releasing two dozen new hardware devices with their AI assistant pushing it in your home so that you have a sticking point. This is why Google is announcing that Bard, their AI assistant, is going to start powering the AI assistant on Android, their biggest leverage point. This is why you see Microsoft almost tripping over itself to introduce its copilot AI in Windows Eleven, its biggest leverage on the consumer market. And that's why you see meta announcing AI avatar for brands across all of their platforms, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and so forth.

Andy Splichal:

So how important do you think creating new content is going to be for SEO compared to what it is now? What's it going to to? Is the importance going to go down? Is AI makes it so much easier to create content?

Alexander De Ridder:

I think it's the wrong question to ask. The question is what type of content is important to create in the future? Content will always be important. But let's put it this way. If you were Google and you possessed an AI that could answer most generic questions that people have, without sending people away from my site, where they could potentially click on ads, would I send traffic to your site? If you just said the same thing my AI could like? There's no economic reason why they would do that. So put yourself in their shoes. Why would they still go to your site? Well, it would be only because you are having superior authority or trust. It's like a really niche area and they really trust you as the authority on that topic. I don't want to hear from anyone.

Alexander De Ridder:

I want to hear from you because you are trustworthy. It is because you are adding personal expertise and experience and facts to the topic that Google in that moment does not have access to, but you're adding to the conversation or with them. Or it is because you provide a superior experience, maybe interactive, maybe some kind of tool or gadget or whatever it is on your site where the experience of a search engine does not adequately correspond to the search intent of the user. An example would be if I'm shopping for a vehicle, maybe your website has an interactive build and price module where I can preview my selections in a 3d preview of the car. It's really hard for Google to do that in their search engine. Maybe there's like 50 parameters I can adjust and each impacts the look and feel of the car. I can't do that in a search engine. So I'm going to send people to your site because you have an engagement element.

Alexander De Ridder:

So the kind of content you create needs to be either so much more authoritative, so much more engaging, accurate, more facts reflect your experience, or have an experience that simply cannot be reproduced in a search engine. If you focus on that kind of content, you will continue to have success with your content marketing. That said, there is a Goldilock window right now where there is still an opportunity to kind of spam the search engines with content. Just like there was a time in history, think back a 2010 era where you could spam backlinks and have temporary success. However you do that, you are going to get some success still today. An equivalent of content, of course. However, that will have diminishing returns. Five years from now, Google's going to have figured out its AI game and that kind of content will no longer work.

Alexander De Ridder:

And so if you want to take advantage of it in a short term strategy, go ahead. But long term, those three ways are the way to go for content.

Andy Splichal:

Very interesting, very interesting. Now you are involved now in Smith Os. Can you tell us about that?

Alexander De Ridder:

Yes. So prior to this, I'm also a co founder and creator of inkforall.com and SEO app. And Inkforall was really using AI to analyze and estimate what's the likelihood of Google ranking your content in the first page. So semantic analysis and prediction of the black box that is Google's algorithm. And when we saw the GPT plugin store come around. We said, well, SaaS is going to change. People are going to start consuming sas more and more through AI assistance. We need to rethink our business.

Alexander De Ridder:

And it goes back to the same idea that I said for Internet marketing. If everyone's using AI assistants in the future, and AI assistants have this core foundation of common functionality, then SaaS companies can no longer differentiate or add value by offering the common functionality. They need to stand out with something unique that they do better than everybody else. And if indeed it is possible for that foundational AI system that everybody's going to end up using, if it is possible for such an AI to not just talk to one service at a time to solve a problem, but they could tap into an SEO plugin to help them optimize content. And then a publishing plugin may be offered by buffer to help you publish to your website or social media. Then what is a SaaS software that helps you create potential social posts, optimize them and then publish them? What value does the SaaS company like that hold anymore? Nothing. It disappears. SaaS is passed.

Alexander De Ridder:

So we realize that in order to play in this new economy, businesses are going to have to transform their entity like just from a website offering a cobble together set of features. They're going to have to transform to becoming a player in this new universe of intelligence that the Internet has become not just read and write, but read, write and execute. And so we were among the first 40 plugins on the Chat GPT plugin store to be approved. SEO app is one of the most popular and successful SEO plugins on the Chat GPT store. But as we were developing that, we learned a lot and we were pioneers in solving some of the common problems relating to authentication, analytics, logging and improving user engagement. And then we observed this and we said, right now you have to go and find a plugin manually, add it and then choose to use it. Well, that's the job of search engines, isn't it? If these plugins are hosted on your website and have an open API with a manifest, it's the job of the search engine to crawl that manifest, find out what your brand can offer, and then integrate it with a generous search experience. That's the future.

Alexander De Ridder:

So in that case, plugins are becoming like the execute portion of the web that becomes a new form of SEO. How well is your agent or API or plugin or skill, whatever you want to call it? How well is it optimized for user intent, for experience, for technical SEO, how fast it loads and responds. It gives a relevant answer. Imagine two companies and one offers a great experience and another one less good experience. Search engines in the future are going to reward the ones that give the great experience. Get into that today and you start getting user logs and get the experience right. When search engines make that transition, you're going to basically gobble up all the market share of your competitors. So realizing that both in SaaS and in the content marketing space, every business in the world would need that transformation, and realizing the common problems like nobody builds.

Alexander De Ridder:

Well, nobody. Don't say nobody. But you don't build a payment platform, you use stripe. You don't build an authentication platform, you use OD zero or okta. Same way you're not expected to build a blog from scratch. You use WordPress. In this new economy, you're going to want to build AI agents, brand agents, process agents. There needs to be a common tool that lets you build that.

Alexander De Ridder:

Windows computers have programs, Apple phones have apps. But what does the AI age have? Smith Os, right, builds and runs. And those agents are phenomenal in what they can do, both as a brand agent being represented in all of the different AI assistant worlds of meta, Alexa, Chat, GPT, Google, Bing, they can be representing you, build it once, be everywhere, and advocate for you like your best salesperson, but they can also operate in your company. Think of them as a digital colleague. We went through this transformation with the workforce. We were not used to offshoring then we were, then we were not used to remote working here in the United States. And now we are. Five years from now, we're going to have AI colleagues.

Alexander De Ridder:

These are AI agents. But AI agents need to be trained on your process, have access to your data, your tools and everything. How do you do that? Well, we believe that is with a visual, no code tool that easily lets you map workflows and put the power of all these AI models and all these APIs and all these databases, put them to use. And so this is a transition we're seeing in the market and this is where we're going after.

Andy Splichal:

So tell I see on the website smithos.com. So you have different kind of agents, agent copywriter, agent sales agent, marketing agent, SEO. Let's just dive into one of them. Let's choose the SEO one. How does that work? How does it all work?

Alexander De Ridder:

Yeah. So if you have any team today and you try to put a piece of content out on your site, you realize it's multidisciplinary. Like SEO requires different people with different specialties. I've run and built SEO agencies and sold multiple ones. The latest one was in November 2021 to a large international company, a digital transformation company. I know that in such agencies, we have researchers, we have writers, we have editors, we have managers, we have publishers, everybody. And we have legal review, and we check for grammar and we check for potential red flags in terms of offending people. Right? Our brands are enterprise customers.

Alexander De Ridder:

They do not want to scandal when we post something. We don't want to lose our clients. So creating content is multidisciplinary. And so realizing that what you could say is like, what if you had an agent that follows your process, but in one of those areas? And then if you have an agent that does each of these steps, could you have them collaborate? And we call this multi agent systems, we call this agent orchestration or collaboration. This is no different than humans working together with other human colleagues who have a different focus and a different specialty. However, agents don't sleep, they don't go to vacation, they don't get sick, they're always available, and they can always collaborate. So what would an SEO agent look like? Well, first of all, you might have multiple SEO content agents. One is focused maybe on doing keyword research.

Alexander De Ridder:

Another one is focused on finding content gap. Another is focused on looking at your competitors and seeing what is relevant. And another one might write and another one might edit. Just like you would have a human team and they would work together to achieve that. You.

Andy Splichal:

So it's not just one AI, you're using a bunch of different ones.

Alexander De Ridder:

Yeah. So that's the beautiful thing that we realized with Smith. And we've been in there, you kind of have seen it. There's a lot of companies that were using like OpenAI, and then OpenAI releases a new version of it, and then the software that was using it kind of became irrelevant. Like, OpenAI puts something out. It's like Amazon basic. Amazon learns from what shoppers are buying and puts their own product out there that then ends up beating out the original brand that was there. OpenAI is doing a little bit of that.

Alexander De Ridder:

What you're seeing is that you need to actually realize that GPT five is around the corner, and then GPT six and seven and eight and nine and so forth. But mid journey, next version and audio, next version and video, next version. And so you need to realize that's the world we live in. So realizing that with Smith, instead of building our own model, we let you drag and drop all the models in there. We think of it like a universe of intelligence. The whole Internet becomes alive. We call this collective consciousness, and we even created a collective consciousness turing test to see how these agents operate with each other, to create a type of intelligence, not quite human, but it's more like ant colonies building very impressive megastructures and solving very complex engineering challenges, even though the individual agents are not necessarily aware of everything. And the analogy I often use is, like a human, we all think we're so smart, but then you see, like, a Netflix show where they drop us in the jungle by ourself, and then we have to fend for, like, on our own.

Alexander De Ridder:

We're not that capable. We all rely on each other so much to get stuff done. And so that's the same idea behind Smith Os, is that you have this universe of models out there, and an individual agent should be able to tap into the latest and greatest and maybe combine multiple models to get one job done. And then they also need to be able to collaborate with each other, just like human colleagues would.

Andy Splichal:

How long does all the collaboration take?

Alexander De Ridder:

Well, collaboration in human terms would be, I need something. So I go and ask you, and I'm expecting you, hopefully, not to be in a meeting and respond to me right away. An AI agent would not be in a meeting. So an AI agent, you wouldn't have to wait a day to get a response. Like, sometimes you send an email to me, I have 200 emails in my inbox. You have to wait with AI agents, they can scale up to that need and immediately unblock their colleagues. So I hope that answered your question.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, so it'd be pretty quick. So, Smith Os, how long has it been around?

Alexander De Ridder:

Yeah, so this is what we call it's very cool emergent capabilities. Google put this out in an original research paper regarding their palm AI models. They kind of showed a tree. And as you increase the scale of these models, then all of a sudden, like, a little branch pops up and you see language, understanding. And then as you scale the models further, the capability of that keeps growing until it surpasses human capability. Like a GPT today can write an essay faster than I can, right. And in many ways, use better vocabulary than I can. So that's what we're talking about.

Alexander De Ridder:

That bubble grows. But something else happens that is very important. As you scale the model, it's not just improving its ability to do that language stuff, but a new branch pops up all of a sudden, like a child, all of a sudden discovering how to open doors. And then as a parent, you're, like, in panic, like, oh, my God, I can never keep my eyes off this kid. It could walk out the door and I'm not paying attention. So this emergent capability, this happens. And this year with GPT four, we had a new and emergent capability that came out. For the first time AI was able to use tools.

Alexander De Ridder:

So this is the similar thing as humans discovering how to use fire, or operate the wheel, or learning how to do a printing press. A few hundred years later, you get civilization, you get cities, you get people on the moon. So AI's ability to use tools and recognize when to use tools and call for help, that changes everything. That functionality has only become available to the wider world. OpenAI did have a research agreement with Microsoft where Microsoft has six month head start with this technology before everybody else had. But spring of this year it was made available. We instantly realized the potential of that and went to work. So from late March till now, we have basically been building Smith building that platform this very early days.

Alexander De Ridder:

But we believe that it is the transformation of knowledge work for the future. If AI stopped evolving, not getting smarter today, there is enough in the application side of current technology to make our life feel like Star Trek for the next ten years, with every year new applications being built on top of it. In fact, the foundation of the technology to create web 3.0 and work 2.0 and whatever you want to call it, it is already here. We do not need to wait on future AI advancements or breakthrough or AGI. Forget about all that. What we already have today is enough to fundamentally transform our work in very exciting ways. Transform the way we search, buy, and get information, and even our at home life can become so convenient. So Smith OS is pretty new for that reason, because we're kind of the first to really go all in and adapting that emergent capability.

Alexander De Ridder:

And we are very bullish on the concept of AI assistance in 2025. But that will be not won by us. That will be won by one of the giants who are spending billions of dollars to get your eyeballs. But then agents, the concept of agents and these assistants, you'll have to be able to tailor that internally to your business, to your process and your data and support. And that is what we're trying to build the operating system for. Give everybody the ability to build agents that follow their process. And so humans get this new, exciting job to take what works, build an agent out of that, and then market that agent so you can have your agent do your work, your process, while you're asleep, for other people. And other people benefit from your knowledge.

Alexander De Ridder:

And so what you do is you create agents and you build, maintain and update them. And that we call multi agent system engineers or maze. That's going to be an entirely new job category.

Andy Splichal:

So what type of company should be really interested in working with you?

Alexander De Ridder:

Yeah, so, like at this time, you could build an agent that can do your homework, or you can build an agent that helps the United States Air Force save billions of dollars on predictive maintenance in industry 4.0 by combining supply chain sensory data and predicting when parts might go bad, and predictively ordering what parts might be needed in case of something breaking down so that the parts are already there. This could save billions of dollars. So this technology can be used for fun stuff, but it can also be used to solve real world problems that have very large economic impact. As a startup, building a foundation layer, we want other people to build on top of this. We want them to build the agents. Nobody could have imagined when Steve Jobs was on stage announcing the App Store that the very next thing that would happen is that the number one app would be a little beer drinking app that uses the movement sensor in the phone to figure out that people are tilting mean. This is what happened. But still today we have very exciting apps and we kind of know what apps are good for and what they're capable of.

Alexander De Ridder:

And so the same thing will be for Smith. There will be gimmicky use cases like a beer drinking app for iPhone, but there will be amazing use cases like your online banking application, for example, that can transform how you do things and transform entire industries like Uber. And so we are focusing currently on the more valuable use cases by partnering with agencies who need to use automation for their internal process, but also for their clients. They need to be agile, they need to be quick, they have ideas, but they need to not spend months creating this automation. They need something they can do in an afternoon and instantly put out for their client and score a million dollar deal. They need their renewals. So agencies that work with enterprise customers are an amazing first area. Also, enterprises who are brave and want to lead the future maybe create brand agents so that it can be represented in this omnichannel world are a really great initial use case.

Alexander De Ridder:

And then government. I mean, government is 100% process. It's process and bureaucracy and there's so much inefficiency. I mean, try going to a post office to get your driver's license renewed. Right? They don't have to say how frustrating that can be. Everything is backlogged, everything is inefficient. Anything like that can become 1000 times better when you apply agents to that problem. And so this is where our initial projects are for really these high value automations that traditional automation technology is not intelligent enough for or too brittle.

Andy Splichal:

And how does the pricing work?

Alexander De Ridder:

Yes. So right now there is a platform cost and then there's the consulting to build it. Our hope is to eventually have enough documentation where everyone can build their own agents. So agencies become system implementers, and we just provide the platform for them. And then they charge their client whatever the value is of the problem that they're solving with their expertise. This is where we want to go. In the meantime, since we are a startup and we need to learn, the best way to learn is to knock on people's door and say, how can we help you? And intimately learn from that. So today we are working with agencies to identify new opportunities for automation.

Alexander De Ridder:

We see what the value creation is for them, and we partner with them and help them with consulting and that early implementation down the line. As we have more and more people know how to do this, we're hoping to kind of get out of that portion, let that completely be handled by agencies, and then basically for us to just have the platform fee, which is a usage based fee, depending on how many agents you run and how actively they are used.

Andy Splichal:

We also envision, so right now, if somebody wanted to get involved, what are they looking? What's kind of some sort of expectation on how much they would spend?

Alexander De Ridder:

Yeah, so some of our clients are paying like $20,000 for us to sit down with them, build an initial agent and all the consulting, and all the time we spend understanding the process and guiding them to solve that problem. And then they are maybe paying a $5,000 a month maintenance fee for us to help them maintain that. A lot of that is consulting. And so we're hoping that after we get these initial use cases out in the world, we can start opening up to more people who then can also build their own agents at a lower cost where they have the training material, the videos, documentation to do this themselves.

Andy Splichal:

Okay, and how can somebody who's interested in learning more about Smithos.com, how can they get a hold of you? How can they contact you?

Alexander De Ridder:

Yeah, the best way is go to smithos.com Smith. And you can also find me on LinkedIn or Twitter. My name is alexander DeRidder. My handle is adridder. A-D-R-I-D-D-E-R. So I post on LinkedIn and Twitter quite often, and you can just send me a message or something or follow me.

Andy Splichal:

Well, it's been fascinating. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?

Alexander De Ridder:

I would say make each click count, but in the future, it's not just about clicks, it's going to be about every interaction. So make every interaction count. I might have to change the podcast name and you'll credit me.

Andy Splichal:

There you go. All right. Well, thanks for joining us today, Alexander. For listeners, remember, if you like this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding Smythos.com, Smith with Y. You'll find the link in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our podcast resource center, available at podcast.makeeachclickcount. We have compiled all of our different past guests by show topic and included each of their contact information in case you would like more information on any of the services I've discussed during previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing, and I'll talk to you in the next episode.