Why AI content is here to stay with Michał Suski from Surfer SEO

Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: Why AI content is here to stay with Michał Suski from Surfer SEO
Host: John Wright
Guest: Michał Suski
Published: Thu, 12 Oct 2023 09:19:00 +0000
Duration: 32:59

Speaker labels are a two-speaker split from pauses (host vs guest). Timestamps are `[HH:MM:SS]` from the episode audio. Light ASR; names and brands may need a pass.

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[00:00:00] John Wright: 25 ish 30% adoption among the users right now. I understand not everybody wants AI content on their websites, but from what I observe, the content is offered better than human-written content that is not per expensive. Like if you compare like 50 bucks article from like mediocre writer, it will be probably worse and 100% less researched.

[00:00:33] Michał Suski: I'm John Wright, and you're listening to affiliate BI, the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by stats. Welcome to the affiliate bi podcast. Today, I've got a special guest, Mihael Suski. He's one of the co-founders of surfer SEO, and he's also the head of innovation. So Mihael, I'm going to pass it back to you and tell us what you do. Thanks for having me really appreciate the opportunity to spread some information about surfer about SEO in general. What I do right now, I'm playing with data. I'm playing with some data

[00:01:10] Michał Suski: scientists to figure out new stuff for surfer. That's my role now, and it's pretty amazing and exciting stuff. I might have to ask you questions off the record on data because that's what we do as a company, and that's my role. So I want to ask, what is your story of how you got started into SEO? This is like by accident, completely by accident. I was working as a QA specialist and my project was terminated and I didn't have a project in the software house. I was

[00:01:44] John Wright: like, all right, let's do something. And it turned out that a friend of mine

[00:01:49] Michał Suski: is running an agency in the middle of nowhere in a village for 100 people.

[00:01:56] John Wright: She was like a magnet, collecting all of the people who were around and had some whatever expertise in digital anything, really. So I was like, okay, let's give it a shot. I watched the Josh Pashinsky 2016 prediction to something about SEO and I was like,

[00:02:20] Michał Suski: cool, it's changing environment. Let's give it a shot. And I joined as a PBN copywriter, you guess.

[00:02:28] John Wright: So that's how it started for me. The SEO journey started from writing blogs about roofing.

[00:02:35] Michał Suski: Exciting stuff. A common story. Yeah.

[00:02:37] Michał Suski: But no, you're learning the fundamentals. I mean, PBNs are everywhere and they're not really disappearing anytime soon, but that's a pretty good foundational start. That is a crazy moment because right after I joined, we were publishing a lot of content. I was writing like eight pieces a day, just to fill it with content. And we were putting exact matching anchor text backlinks in there, of course. And there was, I don't know what was

[00:03:09] Michał Suski: that specifically, but some sort of a change and our clients rankings dropped. And then I received an order to remove these links and change the anchors. So they are different. It was like two months apart. So one day I produced a lot of content and do this linking. And the other day I wake up, go to the office and I'm asked to remove these links. And like, what the hell? And you know what? Of course, the rankings recovered. So that was crazy.

[00:03:43] Michał Suski: I'm sure all that experience kind of led you to Surfer. So I'll jump right into a little bit of a side topic, which is I looked at your LinkedIn profile and saw that you've got a unique skill set experience that makes you perfect for creating this type of BI tool that Surfer. Your skills are kind of more, I would say like data and products. So how would you say they're important to what you do today? Oh, today. Yeah. It has like, we are

[00:04:12] John Wright: having a massive shift towards basing our decisions on data, on feedback, on quantitative qualitative feedback, tons of, tons of interviews and stuff, especially today with the AI. We collect like hundreds of feedbacks and CSUTs and stuff running experiments, figuring out at scale what works better for the people, what is really wanted. And we know that 57 people wanted something and it's more than 56 people wanting something else. So we built that feature instead

[00:04:49] John Wright: of the other one. At the very beginning, it was all about the gut feeling. It was all about our hands-on experience in working on SEO with SEO clients. So that was like figuring out our own problems, scratching our own niche, just to be more productive at work and more efficient so that the optimization actually moves the needle and stuff like that. But right now, with like 20,000 clients at Surfer, we are able to incorporate more and more data-driven decisions to the product

[00:05:25] John Wright: creation that then we used. So would you say like when you started Surfer, you and your founders,

[00:05:34] Michał Suski: did what you have at the beginning change over time? Like I'm assuming as you got more feedback from users and you started to realize how powerful data was, was what you started with very different than where you are today? Actually, no, because I managed to keep the environment around me that is still based on the gut feeling as we have multiple product departments right now. And they are working on stuff that like the AI, the content of these or like the products,

[00:06:07] Michał Suski: what we already have. But I try to still use the gut feeling, still use the feeling with many different things and tests like hardware's hypothesis and months, instead of doing like 100 interviews and then building something to satisfy them. So I'm happy to be in a position where

[00:06:33] Michał Suski: I don't really have to base every single thing on data because customers want to tell you a breakthrough. They want, like they will tell you a faster horse instead of a car. And you need

[00:06:48] Michał Suski: part of the team building faster horses. And also you need part of the team building a car, so sparking new ideas that won't come from a regular client. So for me, it didn't change, but for the company, it was a huge change and massive. And I'm super proud. We found people who can do it because I can't and people can. And that's really awesome. I understand because we're going through the same thing. You asked your customers for one thing and they always will say, make the faster car, but it's not always what they want. And sometimes

[00:07:28] John Wright: data alone just won't help you get the insights. But then of course, once you build those things, you're going right back to data to verify or validate that your gut instinct was right. There is something about customer interviews and it's a great tip. I'm not sure from what book, but I will just tell it because it's super important for everyone who is doing customer research. When you ask someone like, how do you do keyword research? And then they start to tell you, like we go here and there, but that will be their ideal who wished how they want to do it.

[00:08:05] John Wright: But if you ask them, how did you do keyword research for the last time for a specific project you were working on? And then only then they will tell you that through. If it will be tied to the specific activity they perform like four days ago, how was the last time you did it? It wasn't like the perfect SOP executed one by one. So to reveal the real use cases, you need to ask for the real questions like how did you do it for the last time specifically, not in general.

[00:08:44] John Wright: How do you do keyword research? It's just the wrong question. I agree. I jumped on a podcast not long ago, or I was listening to one and I heard a story from a guy named Tyler Ryan who he shared on this podcast that he thinks that only 1% of affiliate programs are leveraging data, like basically even looking at data to go, how can I make improvements? So I believe this to be true. And would you say this is similar in the world of SEO? I hope is going in the right

[00:09:14] John Wright: direction. And hopefully, surfer is a part of that change. But I must agree. If we consider SEO as a broad general niche of people having websites that receive some traffic from Google and they care about that traffic and we call these people SEOs, then definitely 1% maybe even less is using data. But if we consider like people from like the affiliate lab,

[00:09:46] John Wright: my digities group, then well, definitely is more than 1%. But like looking at the majority of people interested in organic traffic in general, then it will be much, much lower number. Definitely. Jumping into features about surfer, what would you say are some of the more underrated or underutilized features that your app has? Underutilized features, I would say it is the AI generator content because it's like 25ish, 30% adoption among the users.

[00:10:25] John Wright: Right now, I understand not everybody wants AI content on their websites. But from what I observe,

[00:10:33] Michał Suski: the content is offered better than human written content that is not per expensive. Like if you compare like 50 bucks article from like mediocre writer, it will be probably worse and 100% less researched. Like imagine like we as humans, we cannot analyze that big amount of information as the AI. Like it's just impossible to read the whole book in five minutes and then use all facts

[00:11:10] Michał Suski: and interesting talking points from that book to create a review of that specific. It is just impossible. So I would say it should be used by 50% plus of the people. I'm doubt it. It should be it should be this way. So even though it's a huge contributor to our growth recently, I would say it's still underutilized feature of server. I think what you said is true because I mean, I've been in that situation where we've had writing teams for my affiliate sites. And it's the same

[00:11:46] Michał Suski: thing. It's under research content, you're paying anywhere from 20 to $50 and you look at it, you're like, I think I should have written that article myself. And it's not easy just to say, well, I'm going to write all of my content. But I think there's something to be said there where most content produced is just probably not worth publishing. Imagine a scaling up. Like you just discovered your new niche for your blog about cuts. You were into food, but now you are into

[00:12:17] John Wright: something else like little houses, cut houses or like whatever really. And you want to tackle it because you just discovered a commerce that will pay you 50% of their margin. And you're like, let's do this. Let's do this. What do you need? You need to establish a little bit of topical authority. How do you do it? You create a proper silo that contains 30 to 50 to whatever your strategy is. But in general, it will be quite a mass of content. And what you have to do, you have to call your writers and maybe within a month, or if you are super lucky and have a huge

[00:12:56] John Wright: team, within three weeks, you can receive the first drafts of your 50 articles, which is painful because you could be earning already. These articles could be already settling down in the serp, start getting traction. You will have time to put internal links here and there and all kind of stuff while you are waiting for the human writer's output. That again, is not exactly how you wanted it. So it's not only slow, but quite like similarly value or sometimes even

[00:13:36] Michał Suski: below the expectations. So well, it's just too much time waste. Okay. I'm going to ask a question that's probably a bit more self-serving. So we do as an affiliate marketer, you'll want to celebrate your first sale, learn about a drop in clicks and revenue, discover new brands, be notified when programs close, see an increase in earnings per click, identify underperforming campaigns. Your affiliate programs won't tell you when these things happen, but we will. Whether good things are happening to your business or bad, we are here for you and we've got your back.

[00:14:13] Michał Suski: Stastrone is the number one affiliate CRM tool that helps you get your data, manage your biz with CRM tools and analyze data with business intelligence. Visit stastrone.com or find the link in the show notes. A lot of B2B affiliate content, I'd say similar to Matt Diggity where we do affiliate program reviews. And what we're trying to do to be different is capture a lot of data sources that we can't scrape from websites. So it's like, does this affiliate program have post-backs, dynamic variable tracking links? How often is the data updated? Is it real time, every hour? And sometimes it's data, like you're not going to scrape it and AI probably won't tell

[00:14:52] Michał Suski: me the answer. So how would you say it? Where do you get that data from? Everything. We have an app, so we basically scrape that data. So we're able to notice the change in detection. We also go to the affiliate program software and ask them across all of your 100 customers, is it the same? And they're like, usually it is. It's updated every 48 minutes. So we have that as a data point. And we do think at some point someone's going to start copying our data, but we want to be first to market with this data. And we're kind of wondering, how do we leverage this content where we want to do 10,000 affiliate program reviews? And that's a daunting task, but we also want

[00:15:31] Michał Suski: to use our data to our advantage where I do think that AI could help to a certain level, but it'll stop short of those unique data points. And I think that's what we want to do for our content. Recently, we tackled this problem. I mean, it's not a problem, it's an opportunity.

[00:15:49] John Wright: As we all load people to provide their own information, like, is it something unique?

[00:15:57] Michał Suski: Give it to us. If you give it to us, the AI can categorize it as a fact and then

[00:16:03] Michał Suski: build an operation around that fact, which is super cool when it comes to providing something outside of the SERP or even outside of the internet, like your personal experience with whatever, or your knowledge from a book that wasn't scanned and you cannot find it anywhere. So this kind of data points that are custom added to AI brief make a huge difference when you want to

[00:16:39] Michał Suski: deliver like 110% of what you can find in SERP, because there will be always part of data that you have to cover just to be compliant with what's required, but you do the extra mile with the custom prompt, you feed your own unique research and the AI can incorporate that as it was scraped anywhere else. So that's kind of how we do it recently. That's super fresh stuff, actually. So maybe not everybody knows about it. Okay. Like I said, self-serving. I think you're giving me

[00:17:18] Michał Suski: a few things to do over the next couple of months, but hopefully a couple of other people might find that interesting where, how do you take other data sets that don't exist and what does it look like? And I think people should be focused on going, if you can pull data that other people aren't talking about, that should be your edge. Yeah. Like social media content, that would be awesome for the reviews from brand management. God damn. Imagine having like the brand monitoring tool, like brand 24 or whatever, and pull positive and negative sentiment about SERP for SEO,

[00:17:54] Michał Suski: showing up on Twitter, and you can collect that feed it to the AI and replace the article with refreshed section about what people say. Right? Yeah. Like we just figured out another use case, if we spend an hour together brainstorming, we could probably find like too many. And we'll solve the world's problems while we're at it. Of course.

[00:18:21] John Wright: So you're listed as head of innovation at SERP for SEO. Can you share what that entails?

[00:18:28] Michał Suski: So I got a team of data scientists and we right now, we are trying to solve the

[00:18:36] Michał Suski: clustering problem from a different perspective. Like we are clustering the whole internet at once. That's the thing I'm like interested in right now the most. But besides that particular project, I try to be like the SEO consultant for SERP for just to help and navigate through these ideas coming from the customers. So like, are they really helping SEO? If we go this path, will it hurt or

[00:19:12] Michał Suski: help? So that's my role in there. To spark some new ideas to help leverage other people's ideas, because feature ideas come from developers often. This is super big. This is a goldmine actually, because developers know the code, know how the data is processed, and often it's super often, it's not the rare case that I don't know that something is possible.

[00:19:44] John Wright: Yet for them, I can do it in no time. I just didn't know it makes sense. And I'm like, holy shit, I wish I was in your head earlier, like a week ago. So that's kind of a snapshot

[00:20:01] Michał Suski: of these things I'm on, basically. Being everywhere where something is happening to check whether

[00:20:10] John Wright: we can do something about it, whether it makes sense or not. And second part to that question as a follow up, do you think more companies and even affiliate marketers should think about having some type of research lab or innovation division in their company? I think so. I mean, SEOs are researchers. SEOs are innovators in general. Of course, there is a huge group of people who just follow blueprints. That's fine, because they work, but

[00:20:40] Michał Suski: there are many and probably most of the SEOs, serious SEOs, test stuff. What is it, if not research, if not innovating stuff? You are trying new tool, you are innovating your process.

[00:20:56] Michał Suski: You are trying to link from tier four. That's an innovation to your process. And you see, okay, it worked. Should I replace all my H3s with H2s? Whatever. These kind of A-B tests in SEO

[00:21:15] John Wright: are part of the day-to-day job. If you are on a certain level, if you have people to do

[00:21:25] Michał Suski: the repetitive work, all your time should be dedicated to figuring out how to improve the processes by doing something out of the box. So, yes, definitely. SEOs, affiliates should be in that mindset, because we've got like manual revelations, but they come up six months after they stop working, you know, and you want to be the one who knows earlier, so you can leverage that before it stops to work. So, yeah, that's definitely do it, guys.

[00:22:04] John Wright: Awesome. Back to AI, given that you've got quite a few AI tools integrated into Surfer, how are you using and leveraging AI tools today to automate workflow?

[00:22:18] Michał Suski: Like for SEO or Surfer SEO or in general for the people or inside the application.

[00:22:25] John Wright: I don't want to say all, but let's just start with like things that you use,

[00:22:30] Michał Suski: like chat GPT and AI tools for your own work. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, in terms of the chat GPT, it's more like curiosity for me and ad hoc stuff to generate something quickly for me specific,

[00:22:49] John Wright: title of my presentation or sending invite for better testing, email stuff that I'm not really good at and GPT will do way better than me as I am not an ad, so it turns out much better than when I was trying to brain it for an hour. No sense to be this way. And when it comes to doing SEO,

[00:23:19] Michał Suski: I'm leveraging the AI content. We even have an author on the blog named Surfer AI, like Fred as a bot. It's not me, it's not my friend, it's not anybody else. It's Surfer AI and it is the author of some of our articles that are actually ranking pretty well. So, I'm happy to continue that. Plus,

[00:23:45] John Wright: there is a competition on SEO signals lab right now that is about rhinoplasty in North Korea, some sort of made up keyword that SEOs are trying to tackle on parasite websites and I just created a little silo on medium about the surgery and we'll see how it goes. After 24 hours, I was third, then I got the index and then I was fourth and again the index. So, we'll see how it goes. But in general, this is where I leverage AI. I just generate a ton of ideas. That's it.

[00:24:22] John Wright: And last question, what do you see of the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence? With business intelligence, the affiliate marketers and business intelligence, I would say that would be... Yeah, there is something. From top of my head, I would say that we have initiatives and we have different providers of the products. And let's be honest in here,

[00:24:56] Michał Suski: if someone else gives you a better offer or more competing or something that you are able to sell easier, then you will swap the product. So, BI can definitely help in figuring out how you monetize and not only the whole website, but even a particular page. This page is monetized by Amazon, but with monitoring of many different providers, you know that some other e-commerce will give

[00:25:31] Michał Suski: you better. And your decision is based on data, on research, that you are swapping the product from the Amazon or a primary choice. You switch from Amazon to the other providers just to optimize the visit from organic, from social, from whatever source. So, yeah, optimization of the visit on the affiliate marketers page can be done by business intelligence and data.

[00:26:03] John Wright: And that's just one use case, but we could probably do more.

[00:26:06] Michał Suski: That's interesting because I think it's something we're actually trying to tackle on our side to say, well, yeah, because think about it this way. This is what we have. We were like the QuickBooks for affiliates where we pull the data in from all the affiliate programs. So, our job is scraping our API and the things that we want to highlight make easier. And this is why I love your tool because I love what you guys do. You gamify the whole experience of writing content. And I love how you just analyze data. So, we're trying to do the same for affiliate marketers to say, what is your best converting brand? Because I believe from just my experience as an affiliate

[00:26:42] Michał Suski: manager and an affiliate marketer, that a lot of affiliates don't always, sometimes they'll send more traffic to who makes them the most money. But if it took five times more traffic to make just a little bit more than the next site, you obviously should swap them. And I think a lot of people don't really know what they're missing out on or they don't pay attention to conversion trends. Your earnings per click in theory is a flat line, but let's pretend there's, let's say we're even promoting SEO tools. Surfer is over here and you've got a couple of competitors. Now, if you optimize your landing page and you create a new landing page, we predict, we assume that 95% of the time it should increase. If it decreases, you want to know

[00:27:22] Michał Suski: about this so you can fix it. And as a affiliate marketer, you should have a dashboard that tells you it before you have to actually analyze the data yourself. And that's actually what we're working on. And I think with the way you explained or how you answered the question, I think there's a rabbit hole of, I actually took some notes and I think your feedback was actually super helpful to me. That would be awesome to know. Like let's say you've got

[00:27:48] Michał Suski: Ahrefs and SEMrush, right? And let's say that they still have affiliate programs so you can still make money and blah, blah, blah. And let's say Ahrefs gives you 20, SEMrush gives you 25. So the quick decision, let's go with SEMrush because it's 25. But if you look deeper in the information, you will see that two times more people will actually buy Ahrefs. So even though the commission will be over, you will make it up with the volume. And if I had access to such an

[00:28:22] Michał Suski: information before I waste 100,000 visits on my website, that will translate into five figures, six figures. That would be great because I would have the six figures in my pocket instead of somewhere else. So that kind of insights that are deeper would be awesome. Not only like how much is it, right? That's too short. And we're trying to blend data where for most affiliate marketers, we kind of assume that they usually get most of the traffic from SEO, but it could be social, it could be video, which is still a form of SEO. It could be paid

[00:28:59] Michał Suski: and basically they just want to see the left to right. Here's the traffic and then here's the conversions. Here's the end result. And you kind of want to be aware of what you said. If one's going to convert at double the rate, it makes more sense. But what if you're ranking like super strong for a keyword, you don't want to also make a wrong decision because sometimes SEMrush actually, if you're ranking like, let's say you're ranked number two for SEMrush review, it's you're going to get high conversions from that. So that would be looking at data in the wrong way. And it's all about going, can we connect all these sources and have it so it's

[00:29:32] Michał Suski: blended. Yeah, even segmented by the by the channel acquisition channel, because from TikTok, they would prefer some fancy shoe brands. However, from the organic, they will prefer Nike and Adidas because they are like older people and they are into this. So you want to balance it, see like where the traffic is coming from. And if it's worth to pursue the TikTok trend, go for it because the money is there. And if it's all about organic, don't try to be

[00:30:08] John Wright: like too pleasing for the TikTokers because you don't have them. So go for that for the standard stuff like Adidas, like kind of that's made up example, of course. But this is how I see it

[00:30:21] John Wright: somewhere in there. I'm looking at the blue sky and thinking maybe. OK, last question and a bonus question. Do you think there could be a surfer for video? So you're helping me the next. Go ahead. I was just going to say like, help with what? How well do you see it? Well, it's I'm using some video tools that will take insights. So, for example, even this podcast, I'll put it into overstop pro and it actually gives me the text and I can shorten it. Now, I'm not going to change the text, but let's say if I wanted to create a video and I'm competing against Matt Diggity,

[00:31:00] John Wright: it's can maybe surfers going to give me a great content editor to say, well, this is what you should create for ranking for this topic. And I think maybe there could be the next thing where I think video is going to become more powerful as I mean, you're helping change the whole internet where more content comes into play. I do think people are going to go. Maybe I want to listen to you on video rather than your actual content. I would say that you just pointed me

[00:31:32] John Wright: into like completely new stuff, but imagine this with recent app, recent, almost recent update of YouTube providing transcripts of everything. It turns out that they could actually do a text based algorithm, just like for websites, because they have transcripts, which is

[00:31:56] Michał Suski: written content. So if we could have, let's say scrape talk 10 videos on a keyword X, analyze the transcripts, and then based on them, tell you the like entities to mention topics, like in general, give you a script of the, of the video that will be competing with these other videos based on text analysis of what they said. That's definitely a possible thing. And if the video content is actually chasing organic from the text and this kind of stuff

[00:32:32] Michał Suski: we do right now, then that will be a good opportunity to get into it, to tell you what to talk about in the video to run. That's thank you. I will make a note with my pen on my dirty something to hear, right? Yeah, but seriously, this is good. I'll expect that next year. Awesome. Miguel, thank you for doing this. How can people get a hold of you? Hold of you. SEO Surfers group. SEO Surfers. I'm there. You can ask,

[00:33:07] Michał Suski: join. That's, that's probably the best way or the email is M I C H I L at surfers.com. Awesome. I'm in that group and it's a, it's a good one worth joining. Thank you so much for doing this.

[00:33:23] John Wright: Thank you for tuning in to the affiliate BI podcast. I'd like to take this time to ask for small favor to leave a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcast. That helps expand our reach to rank higher in podcast directories and reach more listeners.