Using A.I. To Generate SEO Rich Content With Pankil Shah

Andy Splichal 0:02

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count Podcast is your host, Andy Splichal. We are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is using AI to generate SEO rich content. Today's guest is the founder of Outranking.io, a leading platform and using AI to research, write and optimize website, website content. A big hello to Pankil Shah. Hi.

Pankil Shah 1:14

Hey, Andy, thank you so much for having me on your show. I'm super excited.

Andy Splichal 1:19

You know, we're excited to have you. SEO is one of our favorite topics as it is also important to business owners. So let's talk about start right there. Let's talk about how important SEO is in terms of producing original content. And what is needed to rank high organically, and to drive substantial website traffic. What do you think?

Pankil Shah 1:43

There's a few moving parts in here. But if we were to summarize this and say like, what is going to be the most important for SEO in terms of producing original content, I would say research is mandatory. You need absolutely outstanding research, whether that's internal or external, to come up with the most valuable content that your customers are going to love or your audience who you're trying to target through SEO is going to love. That's super important. And then to create, like, drive substantial web traffic, I'd say be consistent, keep delivering value, keep creating content that is strategic, targets a specific keyword, and nails that user intent for each of these keywords that you're trying to rank for. So to sum it up, it's three or four moving parts. But I would say outstanding research, create content, which is original based on that research, and create content with whatever the with an objective in mind of catering to your audience and serving the user intent.

Andy Splichal 2:47

So original content, that is actually helpful?

Pankil Shah 2:50

Yes, absolutely. And I think originality is really important, right? So if you're writing something that's out there on the web, repeated 1000 times, more than likely your users already found value over there, they're hanging around over there, they have tons of backlinks over there for you to get ahead of that is going to be a consistent challenge. So how do you be more valuable? How can you create content, which goes above and beyond what your competitors have already done is what's going to define how good you are, how good your content is, and whether it can actually outrank your competition.

Andy Splichal 3:26

And so I have, you know, trying to understand, so if you got an original piece of content, can you duplicate it across your platforms? Right? If you put it on your blog, you put it on your website, you put it here, you put it there? Or does that diminish some of the some of the juice you could get out of the SEO?

Pankil Shah 3:46

No, it does not. So there is no problem and duplicating this is one of the very wrong ideologies that it hasn't been there for, like many times that duplicate content is somehow going to harm your website. So if you're duplicating content across your own website, as your content that's not going to devalue your site. Sure, it might take away some opportunities that you could additionally target with for some other keywords or some other information. But it's not essentially going to harm you. It's not going to provide you any additional value, but it's not going to harm you. You can also repurpose this content. So let's say if there's some content on your website, and you repurpose it to be a presentation on SlideShare, or make a small video out of it, or just any like you know, repurpose it or make a smaller post on LinkedIn, right and link it back. That's okay. Just, if you're going on to LinkedIn and writing a post, you know, it better be original. But you can summarize that you can create a shorter piece and link it back. Right. So what I'd say is that duplicate content is not going to harm you. It's not going to help you in a tremendous way. It's not going to harm you.

Andy Splichal 4:53

Well, that's good to know. Now, my next question, I had the same question for an SEO expert Shane Barker, who was on a few episodes back, but I'm curious on what you think on it. What percent of SEO, traffic do you believe depends on your content? And what percent, do you believe on the backlinks the people that link to your content given it some some juice?

Pankil Shah 5:20

It's I'm not sure if it's the right, if the right answer would be to put a number tag on each of these things and say that this is 50. This is 50. If you were to say what are the most important factors to help your page rank one is going to be content itself. And I'll give you an example of a few examples where I have created content that ranks on Google for some intermediate area like, you know, some okayish competition and some low compete competing keywords very easily, with a low domain authority. And even without zero backlinks. Just because the content is amazing. It's providing so much more value than what's out there. And users are more likely to click bring it up and stay there, right? Well, as opposed to some really competing keywords. Even if you create great content, you will still linger around that, you know, fifth, sixth seventh, or 28th position, right, then you really need some backlinks to get up there. So both of them are super important. Backlinks suggest how authoritative your content is. And good content suggests that you really have value for your audience. So I think it's both super important. I wouldn't say one is 50. And the other is 50. I just say they're both equally important.

Andy Splichal 6:41

And so your service and handles the producing of the content. Now I did a video tutorial where I looked at your website, and to me, your service seem really slick. But can you describe the process to our listeners?

Pankil Shah 6:55

Yes, yes, absolutely. So there are many. So we are essentially an AI writing, content writing optimization and research tool. And we would research first, right? So what what Outranking really does is that when let's say you're trying to create a content, which ranks for content marketing, or content strategy, when you enter that particular keyword in Google, we analyze the top 50 pages out of it, understand what's really making them stick, identify those matrix, and then come up with a plan to guide you through writing that content. So good writing really good content starts with an outline. And we have aI processes built in, that helps you create this outline, then once you have the outline is producing the bullet points under those outlines. So this is where the research comes into play. And this is what where majority of the writers spend most of their time is finding out information to include in each sections of your content, we automate that. So you can click one, I mean, generate concepts of go find existing information, existing research, read through that research, and identify concepts and key information or facts that should be used to influence the AI in writing paragraphs for you, or writing content for you or helping you guide the writing process. So that's, that's what we do. And you can select this concept and build our paragraphs based on that factual information. So we're very, very focused towards research aspect, research is super mandatory if you want to create ranking content. And that's where we use AI to help you build some amazing content.

Andy Splichal 8:37

And where do your customers post this content? Where are these?

Pankil Shah 8:41

So we have customers creating content for DevOps that they write for Saas companies. We have customers creating recipe post. There's a small solopreneurs other affiliate bloggers, there are product related blogs, information blogs, so we have all sorts of people creating content, which they want to drive traffic through organically.

Andy Splichal 9:07

Now, how important do you believe that having a solid SEO content strategy is to the success of the company? Do you need to be focusing on SEO to be able to grow?

Pankil Shah 9:21

Um, absolutely. Right. So it really depends on your strategy. So let's like, let's rewind back a little bit and say, right, like whether you need an SEO strategy or not. So if you're starting out a sauce product, right, like if you have a software as a service that you're trying to sell, you identified your personas, you identify the people and the problems that you're solving anyone to go after. You can start you need to start building out content that enables this audience right. So that's the first piece of information that you're going to put out on your website is going to be helping your audience reach a specific goal which is being successful with your product, or whatever. Start you're selling right or answering questions related to whatever that you're selling. Now, once you once you have understood that, what you really need to understand is how do you drive consistent traffic, and sell and basically get this content or this enablement in front of that audience as much as possible so that it can drive you conversions. Right. So that's, that's what ideally any business wants from writing content online. Having an SEO content strategy, in the very beginning might sound far fetched, but having a strategy will help you, we'll keep you aligned with the scores, right? Like what you are trying to create for your customers and what will drive organic traffic to those kinds of content. Keeping both of this in mind, if you do it from the very beginning, you can lay out some really good foundation, right? So you can start small, you can start building out content, which is valuable to your customers, and also is SEO optimized using tools like Outranking. And go from there have a very solid outline, go to the content piece and make sure you have them CTAs and stuff like that, right. So you need to position yourself by creating really good content, then, I mean, you need to create content that enables your audience to audience that you're selling to, you have to keep your ROI in mind to make sure that whatever content that you create right now is going to have long term value. If nobody's discovering your content, then it's just going to lay there and eat the dust, right? It's not useful for anyone. So if you are putting so much effort in writing content that enables your customer, why not create content that can also drive organic traffic. And now in more than have read this is super competitive, everyone is going to Google and searching for a problem that they're having and hope and hopes for finding an answer you need to be there. That's where people find most of the information now is searching and you know, just having a self guided journey and reaching that self guided solution, and you need to be there when they are asking for that help. So it's super important to have a really good SEO content strategy and creating content, which is really amazing and delivers super value to your customers.

So when you say SEO content strategy, what do you mean? Do you mean, the articles that you write the keywords you are researching the frequency that you're releasing content with? What what's involved in that?

So an SEO content straight? So how would you start a content strategy? So I would start with personas, understanding what problems this personas face and how my product my product is solving those personas. And then coming up with list of keywords based on that information that people are searching for in Google, once you have that keyword list, understanding what keywords will drive you most amount of value, which is you probably want to focus on informational are keywords that have direct like have high CPCs. It's like buying intent, keywords, and stuff like this, you need to figure out that once you have that, you can start creating content. So when you start creating content, you'd need to create your titles that you need to go after your outlines and your content, right. So a strategy would be to come up with keywords to go after that your customers are searching for in Google and are also going to try view some conversion and and some cells.

And so your service, it's really working once you have that strategy in place, and you have that those ideas is to find or is your service, helping create the strategy itself?

So know, our service is specifically to help you guide with the content planning itself for a specific piece that you want to rank. So you'd still need to add that there are many great tools out there that you can use to type one keyword. And they'll suggest you a few variations or few different niches around that that you could potentially target. So go through that list. And there are many tools out there. There's SEMrush,

Ahrefs, Moz, right, as many tools out there, some great tools, you can find information related to what keywords you want to go after. And once you have that keyword, just keyword, then you can come to our ranking and create a plan on how to rank for that particular keyword.

Now, if you're not using outranking, and you guys are fairly new, what was the traditional ways that companies would produce content? Would they do it in house? Would they hire a freelance writer what what were some of the ways that were being done?

So there's a few ways and we've explored all of these over the course a period of time. So there are companies who create content using internal resources so internal experts are an internal knowledge. There are companies who use external freelancers to help them write on a specific niche that they are working with. There are agencies that can help you write content at scale or write more. There's three or four. I mean, yeah, there's three ways, potentially a company would generate content. And yeah, so I mean, that's the three ways that they will generate content. And then

I'm sorry, what those three ways I got two internal and external, what what was the third?

So there's internal, there's external. Well, yeah internal, external are categories. Sure. Is internal and external? Yes. In terms of external, there's agencies and freelancers that can help you, right.

So internal expert, external freelancer or external agency.

Right.

Okay, and what are the flaws with each of those?

One of the major flaws that I have experienced in my professional career is the lack of understanding of the product or knowledge base. So when, let's say, for example, you are creating content for a product that helps you deliver a product that helps you drive you conversion, using some customer mapping tool, something like that, right? Now, it's very specific, when you are searching, when you're trying to rank for a particular keyword like this, the information that you have from your product is you have right, you're gonna have to provide that brief to someone who will then potentially understand this and try to make sense of it and then write for you. The flaw here is that often, there's miscommunication. The person who's writing this content might not understand the content of the context, or the niche very well to be able to write that content, or the instructions that essentially the customer has provided to the client has provided to the freelancer or the agency is not sufficient to come up with good content that can help them rank right. So these are some of the flaws. And they both lead to practically saying that the research is poor, the amount of research that you feed in to come up with really good content is is not there yet.

Yeah, that does make sense. It's kind of like a game of telephone I play with my kids, right? It's gonna be lost in translation.

Absolutely. So many times. So think about, there are some niches which are very technical, right? So you have lead writing for developer related product, or you're writing about a very new technology that was just released, let's say you had a press release today, and the technology was released today, that information might be uncertain, but it's not the best information out there. Right. So if you create, just based on that, you're more likely just going to create things that are out there. And isn't that solid. So in that case, you need your custom research. So right, like making sure that that knowledge is translated to whoever is writing that content, or whatever product is helping you write that content is super important. Now, if you really want to stand out from the crowd, you need information that nobody has, or you have it better than anybody else.

No, I think you touched on this. But so is that the most important thing that a business should be paying attention to when they're thinking about what content to create?

I didn't quite get the question.

Well, where Well, where is it? What is the most important thing? Is it? Who writes it? Is it the key words, I guess what, what's the most important thing when creating content.

So the most important thing when creating SEO content is with the keyword that you want to go after, you'd add that in, and then you understand all the key elements of user intent that makes that keyword or content rank, right, and then come up with a plan to create content around those elements to help you rank. And those elements need to be based on good research, good information, things that delivers value to your customer.

Now your service uses artificial intelligence and to give the outline of the content and the idea of some of the keywords extent. But do you think that 100% AI solution will ever be there to replace human writers at least anytime soon, where you can just plug it in and an article shoots out?

I really don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. And like to just touch base, right? Like we're not a regular AI tool without traditional AI tool, we believe research is mandatory, with or without AI and instead of focusing on letting the AI write fluff for you, we use AI to identify facts and concepts from any research are texts that you know, you can then influence the AI to write upon. So it's very different, right? So I think it's going to be paramount of importance for writers to learn how to use AI In their workflow going further, and the sooner they get acquainted with this reality, the better they will be equipped to write faster and better. But I think that AI is you to make them a better writer, not replace them. And that's absolutely not what we tried to convey to our audiences, we are not going to, we're not going to build a tool that will write for you, it's going to require you to do some, you know, to have some workflows and processes, and extract information from outranking. To write better not not to replace that.

Well, that's too bad, that's too bad. I was thinking I'd have some more books out no time. Hey, So your clients, they take this this AI information, and do they use it in house, or they send it off to those other solutions to the external agency or the external freelancer?

So we've had quite a few audiences, right. So one is who would go through this entire process themselves and do it more sort of an SEO manager, or a person with significant SEO, or at least the intermediate SEO knowledge, doing all of these together, and then creating the first draft using Outranking. And then, using a third party service to edited finish it and put it to the fine line. There also content writer. So we've also noticed that agencies are working on our platform, where they have segregated workflow where someone creates an outline and someone writes the content, and then someone else edits and pushes to the finish line. So there's multiple personas involved here. One person equipped with a little bit of SEO knowledge, a little bit of AI, writing knowledge, and understanding of what makes content stick with your audience can do all of it. Or you can break it down into an SEO manager, a content writer and maybe an editor.

Now, do you have any success stories from a client or two that you could share?

Yes, absolutely, right. So we have numerous solopreneurs, and business and freelance writers creating practically 1000s of posts every day on Outranking. And our group is flooded with examples of people sharing how they were able to rank with the content that they've written on Outranking, some with just clicks and not even using keywords. But they were able to rank in as little less couple of weeks and a few days for very less authoritative sites. So there's plenty of examples that we have associated with that. Some are also on our website that our audience can check it out.

Now, is there any challenges that you sometimes struggle with getting results for your clients? Is there a learning curve on using your system or any any sort of challenges when somebody signs up they they face?

Is one biggest challenge is with the shift in thinking that AI is going to write for us AI is great for some creative brainstorming and stuff like that. But what has happened is that with the rise of this text, and how many AI writing platforms out there, what more and more people have started comprehending is that this is going to be the solution for them, they'll somehow one day, click on one button and wake up to a complete draft. That's not going to be reality anytime soon. And this is one of the biggest problems that we face when we are conveying the value of our training to our existing audience is that we're not here to write everything for you, our product is not here to write everything for you, our product is here to help you write faster, with better research and better quality. But human touch is absolutely essential here, you cannot replace that. So that's one of the major things that we find difficulties communicating with our audience, just because that's the first one that we've been getting. And the second is there's a learning curve to the platform, right? If you,

Any, any, any platform, you're going to have that of course.

Right, like and the problem may be, it's not even a problem, right? So the more powerful or the more, the more powerful the platform gets, the more complex it gets, the more that means that you're able to do a lot more with a little bit of learning in it. And that's where we are right so there is a learning curve, maybe a little higher than some of the easy AI writers that right out of thin air right we we have a little more than that. But once you get a hang of the platform, once you get a really understanding of how concepts and research and pulling out this information automatically works in our Outranking. You can be you can be a writing weapon.

And how old is outranking.com? When did you guys launch?

We had an initial prototype running in January. It was a very small and we had 30 40 People constantly everyday come in and checking out the tool and using the using the tool to download some reports on SERP analysis. So we started building out this platform, early January. And now of this year, actually, the success and we had a working prototype, which can collect payments and stuff like that as well. In April, we start off testing the waters and seeing if people liked the product and see if any way we pay for it. So we started running a small lifetime deal just to get those early adopters. And within like, literally five days, we had 1000 people sign up. And yeah, it was just all over the place. And we had all of a sudden, we had enough capital to sustain for a year without having to do anything. So that was great. And we did some similar tactics later to just crowdsource and, you know, get some initial funding going. And we started building out the core parts of the system in June about the factual research and extracting information and sentiments from existing information to help you write better content. This that happened just about a couple of months ago, we have approximately 12,000 people writing content on our platform now. So

Wow, that's incredible in a year.

Yeah. So practically, we launched the product, like literally in April, right. So less than five, six months.

Now, you must have seen the problem, what what was the problem that you saw that you decided you were able to solve with with Outranking?

So when we the one initial problem was the process in which you go about creating SEO content, what we saw is a majority of the audience out there was recommending that you create content for SEO using topics or key phrases that they identify from ranking pages, and how many times those key phrases have been used. So per se, keyword density. In our opinion, tech is the most useless way of going about creating content. You should never focus on how many times you should use a particular keyword in a content. Or you should focus more on delivering value first than worrying about whether you have a particular keyword like 10 times or 50 times in your content. It's just it doesn't make sense to us. So the way we designed our system was to vague components of on page SEO elements based on keyword data. So keyword data, this is not topics that you extract from pages, but this keyword, keywords that people are searching for in Google, these are questions that people are searching for in Google and using that information to guide the structuring of your content. So that was a major thing lacking in majority of the competitors that we saw out there. So we started solving that particular problem. When we got to GPT-3, we realize that the problem for GPT-3 was that it cannot write facts. It is great at coming up with creative content. It is great at brainstorming it's great at writing fictional books and books and content that can you know, use lots of active guidance. That's great. But it still doesn't solve the problem of factual research, right? Like things you really want to include in your content. If you cannot drive how you create that kind of content, then it's essentially a problem because you're consistently rewriting stuff, you're consistently deleting stuff and finding new information to add it right just makes the process even more gruesome. So to solve that particular problem, we looked a little beyond GPT-3 and say, What can we do to systematically extract information which are facts from existing research, your research, serve, research, any research that you have, and then feed that information to AI to help you write. And that's exactly what we solved with concepts as a feature that we call it. It goes, reads existing information, waits it based on how important it is to their headline, or the section that you're creating, and then pulls out concepts from it, which are the core element of either a sentence or a paragraph, or a couple of sentences, but it's summarized in a way that then can be influenced that can be used to feed into GPT-3 then and help you write factual information.

Now, how crowded is the space? Do you guys have a lot of competitors doing similar stuff? Or have you just completely created something new here?

So with the research and the concept aspect of our Outranking this is a dark strongest differentiator is that we help you write factual content using research that we do automatically for you. That's one of the biggest differentiators and That's why content writers are coming to our platform and writing content every day is because that they can rely on this right? You don't want if someone is paying you money, you don't want to rely on GPT-3 probabilities to help you create content that might be facts, or might be fiction, right? It's not a game you want to play. So that's why writers are coming to our platform. But in terms of indirect competition, yes, we have plenty of competition in terms of AI writers, right? There's just so many AI writers out there that can do specific creative writings or help you write books and stuff like that. And some of them are really good at what they do. But when it comes to long form blog post, which requires factual information, we've got a differentiator here, because anything else that you see out there is probably going to be content spinning.

Now, before we get into who's using your services that are always a question I like to ask guest is on your personal journey as an entrepreneur, are there any business books that have you can attribute to your success?

Ah, I started reading very late, actually, into my career, when I was trying to be an enterpreneur, initially failed one, and then going back to workforce and then starting another company. But along the lines, I've read a couple of really good books, and one was the The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. It's something that I really love, I, there's one more book that I read on building great products, products that actually can lead to sort of habits, and it was

Hooked, I believe that the two books that have really read and enjoy, and I was gonna go, yeah, there's a couple of other books that I've read. But those are the two that really popped out.

Now, let's talk about your your customer base, your users, who is if they're out there listening, would you say you absolutely need to try our service?

So if you are a freelance writer, you are an editor, you are a solopreneur, who really wants your content to rank and you want to drive sustainable revenue source to your sustainable revenue through organic traffic, you need to try Outranking. If you're a freelancer, and creating content for your customers, who need factual information, who needs really good content, which is well research, and you're writing for a niche that you have no idea about, you need to use Outranking. And if you are a content marketing manager that just writes internally for the company using internal resources, writing for tech products that you have absolutely no knowledge about. The you can use Outranking to understand those facts from internal documents and write content based on those facts that can help you rank as well. So I'd say all three personas, I'd really like you to go and try Outranking. See if it solves your specific challenge of writing a writing long form blog post content, which is well researched using AI, and half the time.

And where do they go to try out your service?

So you can go to outranking outranking.io. That's the website, you can go there, there's a free trial, you can try it out, no credit card required, spin up a couple of documents, use some credit, and write some amazing content.

That's great. Now anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?

I would also add that we're currently running a grandfather deal. That means that your documents unusable rollovers is the best deal out there, check it out, give Outranking a try. There's a free trial, no credit card required. And there is a promotion going on right now. Second thing before we wrap it up, I'd say don't be scared of AI. And even if it generates fluff and fiction for you, even if you don't want it too, don't be scared of it. Just learn how to use it better and be a better and a faster writer. I think it's going to be of paramount importance that you learn this tech to be successful at writing.

Now I didn't quite understand you said there's a grandfather deal what what is that?

So we are running an early adopter steel that is ending in December, which means that any documents it's it's the best price. The first thing the second part, the second thing is that any documents are any unused credits that you have left over from a particular month gets rolled over to your next month so you don't lose on anything. Which is sort of subscription with rollover.

Well that's great. Well there you go. If you are listening to this and it's before December of 2021, head over to take advantage of that deal. And we'll put a link in the show notes. Now that's it. Thank you for joining us today. This has been fantastic.

Thank you so much Andy for having me. This was great. I was it was great chatting with you and conversating on This topic so thank you so much for having me.

You're welcome. Now for listeners remember if you liked this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave an honest review and if you're looking for more information regarding outranking.io or connecting with Pankil, you will find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information growing your business, check out our all new podcasts Resource Center available at www.makeeachclickcount.com we have compiled all the different past guests by show topic and included each of their contact informations. case you would like more information on any of the services that I've discussed or in previous episodes. That's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing and I will talk to you in the next episode.