Using AI To Supercharge Your SEO With Ryan Doser

Andy Splichal:

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal, and we are happy this week to welcome today's guest to discuss today's topic, which is using AI to supercharge your SEO. Today's guest is the owner of ThriveOneFive Media based out of Des Moines, Iowa. He is a self-taught SEO expert who has successfully used SEO strategy for affiliate website in the technology niche to receive over 500,000 monthly sessions. He is a driven entrepreneur that performs high-ticket lead generation for clients in various industries. A big welcome to Ryan Dozer.

Ryan Doser:

Hi Ryan. Andy, thank you for having me on. It's an honor.

Andy Splichal:

Great. Well, we're happy to have you and to discuss today's topic, which is really using AI with your SEO. But before we get into that, let's start talking about how SEO has changed. I remember before Panda and Penguin updates in the early, I think it was 2011 2012; all you really need were optimized title and meta tags, maybe some backlinks. And you do really well today. What is needed, in your opinion, to rank well organically?

Ryan Doser:

Yeah, absolutely. Obviously SEO has had a ton of core algorithm updates from Google and other search engines have come and gone. So the biggest thing lately that's most top of mind is that September helpful content update. I'm sure you had that or have seen your traffic decline or improve one or the other based on that. But as with anything in marketing, with SEO, it really depends on the niche. So a lot of these factors with backlinks, meta descriptions, tags, they're all still important. They all need to be part of the strategy, for sure. But with this new helpful content update and the way Google algorithm is going, it's all about EEat and especially the experience in EEat.

Ryan Doser:

So Eeat, if you're unfamiliar, stands for experience, expertise, authority, trust. And the way that Google is moving is they're moving towards that experience aspect. So having credible authors write content, having legitimate photos, legitimate videos in your content, that they are rewarding. And especially with the influx of AI content and fake authors, you really have to prove to Google's algorithm that you are legit and you have legitimate experience and credibility in your niche.

Andy Splichal:

How do you do that? How do you prove to Google that you are legit? I mean, you had mentioned AI and content that can be generated so easily. How does Google even detect if it's AI or not?

Ryan Doser:

Yeah, so a lot of it is boosting your author profile through PR Outreach. So one of my clients that we've been doing recently, and I'll mention him throughout the episode here, he's a cash based medical client based in Arizona. And what we've done lately with him is boost his PR efforts, meaning he's been in Fox News, he's been in News Nation, he's been in all these huge publications. So when you send more signals like this to Google that, hey, I've been in Fox News, I'm a legitimate author. I know what I'm talking about. They reward you on the back end for your content that you are an author of behind the scenes.

Andy Splichal:

Have you been able to use AI with your SEO successfully, or have you found it a hindrance?

Ryan Doser:

I have been able to use it successfully. One of the tools I want to bring up in this podcast episode is called SEO Writing AI. I don't have any affiliation with them or anything like that, but I have been in talks with the founder, just letting him know how good his tool is. So if your audience or you want to check that tool out, but the playbook is really, it depends on the niche. If you're in what's called a Ymyl niche, your money, your life. So think of health, finance, legal. Very difficult to rank with AI right now because of eeat and Google's quality rater guidelines. But if you're in a niche that's low competition, say, I don't know, pickleball or just some random obscure niche, that there's not a lot of competition into AI is great.

Ryan Doser:

And if you have the author profile, so you have, let's say, PR to go with AI. So let's say I'm an author and I have PR from all these credible news sources or websites, and I use AI to bolt, create content with my name behind as the author. That's proven to work really well, too.

Andy Splichal:

What is that tool again for listeners?

Ryan Doser:

Seow writing AI.

Andy Splichal:

And how does that based? Is it using chat, GBT, or is it something different?

Ryan Doser:

I believe it's pulling from GBT or they have an OpenAI key from API or Excuse me, an API key from OpenAI. But really what it is is it's a paid tool, it's a premium tool, so it's $20 a month to get going. I'm on the $60 a month plan and that gets me, I believe, 500,000 words a month. It creates AI generated images that are original, non copyright, as featured images and you can have as many as you want. It creates tables. And what it's doing essentially is it's pulling, like most AI tools do. They pull straight from page one of Google. They look at the top two or three articles for whatever keyword that you're going after and they pull whatever inputs that you tell it to pull.

Ryan Doser:

So do you want the same heading hierarchy, do you want tables, do you want the same external links that they're using? So very quality tool. And I've tested a bunch of them, like Writesonic, Jasper writer, copy AI. Those are some big names out there in the AI copywriting space right now, but SEO writing AI is the one I've had most success with, especially the bulk content creation feature.

Andy Splichal:

And how are you using it and for what type of clients?

Ryan Doser:

Yeah, so I'm using it right now for actually a digital forensics client. So like, you know, the playbook is you have an author that has a lot of credibility and my client has a lot of credibility. He's been in the New York Post, he's been in Fox News. And then once you have credibility and you build up the author profile and link to all of these different sources that he's been on, then it's a matter of keyword strategy. Right? So you go after these low hanging fruit, long tail keywords, anything in the digital forensics realm. So I literally have 500 blog posts that our Google Search Council is going up slowly but surely. As you know, it's a three to six month waiting period anyways for SEO as you really get ramped up. But yeah, once you have the established figurehead like my client, who's a digital forensics investigator, then we're going after those keywords in that niche.

Ryan Doser:

So that's a real life example.

Andy Splichal:

How worried is, I mean, this person we're just talking to your client, you talk about me, I'm an author. But how worried are they? Are you reviewing what the AI is generating? Because they've worked a long time to get their reputation. They don't want to just be putting junk out.

Ryan Doser:

Correct. And like I said, too, it depends on the niche. So, for example, if I am a lawyer or if I am a healthcare provider, I would not recommend using AI and just creating it bulk because it's a Ymyl niche. Right. You're impacting people's lives. There could be lawsuits waiting for you at the end of the day.

Andy Splichal:

Right.

Ryan Doser:

But yeah. So no, I definitely review things. I don't just bolt, create, and boom out to the masses. It's more of a create, review it once or twice. Okay, this looks good. Publish. And I've told him, he's reviewed some content that I put out too, and he likes it.

Andy Splichal:

And how good is it when it comes out? Is there a lot of tweaking that needs to be done on your side or the client side? Is it almost ready? Is it 100% ready? I mean, where is it when this comes out?

Ryan Doser:

Yeah, I would say most of the time it's probably 80% to 85% ready. And a lot of it depends on the inputs that you're giving the machine. So if you're just writing like minimal inputs or one sentence inputs and you're expecting to get the Mona Lisa of content, that's not how it works, right. You have to really master the inputs. And I've used this tool every day for a couple of months now, and I've gotten really good at the inputs where now it's an 80% to 85% where before I was at maybe 50 and I'd spend a half hour reviewing things and this and that. But once you understand the inputs of what the tool can produce, then your review time is going to be cut down quite a bit.

Andy Splichal:

So most of the listeners, well, yeah, a majority of listeners, they are ecommerce to this show. And I don't know if any of them are authors or have that behind them. Would they still be able to use something like seowwriting AI to improve their SEO?

Ryan Doser:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it helps when you have the author figurehead to boost your eeat signals. But anyone can use Seow writing AI. You mentioned eCommerce. There's someone I've worked with in the past that did ecommerce supplements. And so you can think about all the different supplements out there. So an AI strategy for that would be five benefits of Ashwagandha, five benefits of vitamin D, and then you just bolt create those at scale. Obviously you're not going to rank for that if you have no DA or domain authority or figurehead or credible author behind that content, but that's one way you could do it.

Andy Splichal:

So what kind of results have you been seeing for your clients that you've been using this on their behalf?

Ryan Doser:

Yeah. So a lot of them actually started at ground zero. So it was very difficult for me to look back and say, pre AI versus post AI. So when we take on new clients, like, I just took on a new client earlier this year in 2023, and it's been all AI. So really it's been everywhere but up. Right. Because we don't really have a comparison point. With a new website redesign and everything, there are fluctuations.

Ryan Doser:

The September helpful content update did level me a little bit. I have to be upfront about that. And that was kind of my light bulb in the head of like, wow, I need to really improve PR efforts if I'm going to keep pumping out AI content, because with all this influx of millions of AI blog posts, you're never going to go anywhere unless you have a legitimate author with good PR behind the content.

Andy Splichal:

So is that another service that you're offering at your agency?

Ryan Doser:

Correct. We do PR services as well.

Andy Splichal:

And so how does that work? Let's get in. So you're offering the SEO, you're offering the PR, and then you're also offering paid placements?

Ryan Doser:

Yep. And then I also offer consulting as well. So one area that's really picked up for me lately is AI consulting. I've had people reach out businesses, small business owners that want to say, hey, Ryan, I see you're doing all this AI stuff. What can I do to help my business? So I charge by the hour, I give them the tools that I use, what I'd recommend for their day to day operations, but, yeah, those as well. I also do affiliate marketing on the side, too. That's not client work.

Andy Splichal:

Well, let's talk about some of those recommendations. I mean, if a listener is out there and they want to, everybody has heard about AI, and you should start implementing AI in your business. But, I mean, a lot of business owners don't know where to start, correct?

Ryan Doser:

Yeah. I mean, the best place to start is chat GBT. Google Bard. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone say, oh, I want this tool for that. And what about this tool? What about that tool that I saw on TikTok or that I saw on Instagram? It's like, let's pump the brakes here, guys. Let's understand the basics of chat GBT. What are the best practices to prompt chat GBT? Because you can't just shotgun chat GBT with a giant prompt and expect it to produce amazing results. Let's learn chat GBT, let's learn Google Bard, and let's understand how to prompt these LLMs or large language models.

Ryan Doser:

And then from there, once we have a solid foundation, do some research on, hey, what are the best tools for social media? Best AI tools for content, best AI tools for images. Because there are a lot of free AI tools, believe it or not, out there for image generation. Leonardo AI, the Bing has a free image creator where automatically creates non copyright images for free. So there's a lot of tools out there that you can utilize that just people just, you don't know what you don't know. Right?

Andy Splichal:

How important do you think it is for companies to look at integrating AI into their business right now?

Ryan Doser:

I think it's very important. I know a lot. If you listen to these shareholder meetings with Fortune 500 companies, they like to throw out the word AI a lot to try to maybe pump their stock price a little bit. But from a small business perspective, I think it's very important. I think if you're not at least implementing AI at a very basic level to help automate minuscule tasks such as data automation, customer service, or some of these low level things that just take resources and take time, that's where I've seen businesses transition. Right now, I don't think we're anywhere close for AI taking jobs per se. But when it comes to the day to day operations, the emails, the manual data entry, the spreadsheets, I have seen companies that are starting to utilize some AI in that realm and I think that's where it starts. I think it's a matter of getting your top executives and getting your bosses to just say, hey, let's try dabbling in AI instead of this reactionary approach where it's like, oh my God, AI is coming.

Ryan Doser:

What do we do? You have to be a little proactive.

Andy Splichal:

So the SEO services you offered, have you offered those before AI or did you start doing those this year?

Ryan Doser:

Yeah, I've always offered SEO services, but to be completely honest with you, Andy, SEO is kind of like lowest on my priority in terms of services that I offer. One, because I know it's very important, but two, it just takes a lot of work and resources. But yeah, I have offered it more. I guess since AI has come around, people are more interested now and I post content on LinkedIn and YouTube all the time. AnD One question I get a lot is people know, what are these tools you're using to write all these blogs? I don't understand this. So yeah, getting into that regard for been. I have been offering it for sure, but lately with AI, it's picked up a little bit, I'd say.

Andy Splichal:

So what services do you offer? Let's talk about your full range of services there at ThriveOneFive Media.

Ryan Doser:

Yeah, so I do consulting, like I said before, whether it's AI, paid search, and then I also do pay per click marketing. So Google Ads, Bing ads, social media, so Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, that whole thing. And I also do affiliate marketing, which isn't really pertained to clients. That's just a passion that I've had for four years, managing an affiliate tech site PR. I also offer PR for clients, too, that want to get into the PR space and don't know where to start. Those are my main ones right now.

Andy Splichal:

And how long have you been operating? Rive 15.

Ryan Doser:

So I started my LLC in 2019 after I left Meredith Corporation in early 2019. I left Meredith Corporation and started my LLC shortly after. So I've been in business for almost five years now. I did take a full time role in the middle of that. Just was having some financial issues and things of that nature. So I was still working on my business on the side. But yeah, I've been doing my business for almost five years now.

Andy Splichal:

Great. And what have been some of the big wins you've had since you started it?

Ryan Doser:

Yeah, some of the big wins, I would say getting some of my recent clients in 2023, there's a particular client, I won't say their name on this podcast, but they are a cash based medical client. So think cancer treatments that aren't covered by insurance. Right. So holistic cancer care, you're talking 60 to 100K patients that are just spending cash. Very high ticket legion. So the biggest win, I would say, is when they opened their doors about three years ago. I was always in contact with them, but never really did anything serious with them. They were breaking even struggling.

Ryan Doser:

Fast forward to today. They're doctors on Fox News. They have a two month waiting list for patients to get in the door. And a lot of that is attributed to SEO PR efforts. I manage their Google Ads account, which has seen great ROI since I took over from another agency. So that would be my biggest case study, would be this cash based medical client.

Andy Splichal:

Let's talk about the PR. Have you been able to figure out ways to integrate AI into your PR efforts?

Ryan Doser:

Yeah, but you have to be very careful because there's a tool called quoted. Have you heard of Harrow before?

Andy Splichal:

Oh, yeah.

Ryan Doser:

So quoted is kind of a better version of Harrow, in my opinion. Harrow is a little outdated quoted QW oteD.com quoted they are very strict against AI when it comes to pitches. So you're familiar with how you have to pitch these journalists and pitch these reporters. As you can imagine, the influx of AI pitches is probably out of hand now. So that's what their CEO said when we got on a call with them. He's like, if you use any AI and our detectors classify it, you're done. So you have to be very careful with it. Now, I have used it for ideation when it comes to pitches, right? So I say, here's the questions.

Ryan Doser:

Provide me bullet points, five ideas for a response. I've used it for ideation, but I've never plugged in a question and then copy and pasted the answers from an AI tool and submitted. You have to be very careful with AI in the PR world.

Andy Splichal:

That makes sense, but you might not even know the answer. I'm not sure. How do people detect it's AI?

Ryan Doser:

There's a bunch of detectors out there. OpenAI has an AI content detector. There's dozens of other tools that are AI content detectors. I think a lot of it is just a semantic language, right? Like AI spits out content a specific way and reads a specific way most of the time, versus someone who actually adds, like a first person experience with images. So yeah, there's a lot of detectors and they're not all 100% golden or great, but it can give you a good idea based on the output. It's pretty obvious to see sometimes if it's from chat, GBT or not.

Andy Splichal:

So what Are some of the challenges that you've struggled with in getting results for your clients?

Ryan Doser:

Yeah, I would say one of the biggest challenges for sure is I hate to bring this up, but nepotism, I think I've had clients in the past where it was the brother was the dad, who's the sales guy, and I bring them leads and they can't close on the sales. But of course that's the marketing guy's fault too, right? Another issue too is just me being too spread thin. I think I take on a lot of work at once and have struggles with outsourcing. I obviously outsource in the past, and I've had people do various work for me with content, graphic design, et cetera. But I have a big trust issue too. I only want to produce quality work for clients, so I have to be very selective of the clients that I'm willing to take on. So I found this little niche of high ticket lead generation in certain industries that's tend to work very well for me.

Andy Splichal:

So what industries do you serve? I mean, what is that? That if somebody's out there listening, they should contact you.

Ryan Doser:

Yeah. So cash based medical, which is very niche. We've kind of cracked the code on that and we know all the things you can or can't say on Google. We know what ranks. We know how to do the PR for this niche. It's very niche. But we know the playbook, digital forensics is another niche that we've now got the playbook down for. So think mobile forensics, computer forensics, digital private investigator, not your traditional private investigator.

Ryan Doser:

Here's a niche for you too, that a lot of people don't think of heavy haul. So I actually have a client who does heavy haul across the United States. So you see the big tractors and trailers with the heavy haul signs from the big trucks and semis. That's a very lucrative niche for high ticket lead generation because you think of the traditional business owners running those heavy haul companies, they're not putting their efforts into something like paid search or SEO or something like that.

Andy Splichal:

And how can an interested listener learn more about working with you andThriveOneFive Media.

Ryan Doser:

Follow me on LinkedIn. Ryan Dozer and if you're interested in AI content, I have a YouTube channel called AI Insider Tips where I post a bunch of YouTube tutorials and YouTube shorts about the latest in AI.

Andy Splichal:

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

Ryan Doser:

I don't think so. Andy, I know you had a question in here about a business book that kind of inspired me and things of that nature.

Andy Splichal:

Yes, that is always one of my favorite questions. Thanks for reminding me.

Ryan Doser:

Yeah, for sure. So the four hour work week, of course, it's very cliche, it's a very popular book. But one quote in there that particularly just got me to think very hard is know it's choose uncertainty over unhappiness. So Tim Ferriss talks about how a lot of people will default to unhappiness over uncertainty because psychologically they're just scared of the unknown. And once I saw that quote, I really started to think hard. Know what is failure anymore? The idea of failure. As an entrepreneur in the digital marketing space, we over exemplify it, in my opinion. So the four hour work week and then choose uncertainty over unhappiness, that's a.

Andy Splichal:

Great way to end it. Thanks for joining us again, Ryan.

Ryan Doser:

Thank you, Andy. Appreciate it.

Andy Splichal:

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 on connecting with ThriveOneFive Media or connecting with Ryan, you'll find the links 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.com. We have compiled all our different past guests by show topic and included each of the contact information. In case you would like more information any of the services 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.