AI’s Potential Pitfalls for SEO | Damon Burton

Ann Kraus: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, brands, marketers, and media buyers. I'm Ann Kraus. Our guest today is Damon Burton, the founder of SEO National. Since founding his company in 2007, Damon has been featured in publications including Entrepreneur Magazine, Forbes, Buzzfeed, and USA Weekly, and he has helped high profile clients make more in a month than they used to in a year. He has consulted for NBA and Inc 5,000 companies and had clients that have appeared on Shark Tank. Damon, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Damon Burton: Thanks for having, we've been looking forward to chatting. Ann Kraus: Let's dive right in then with the power of SEO. So if I'm new to an agency, how would you suggest that I describe SEO to a new client or someone who is just getting started? Damon Burton: Yeah, so pretty easy. It stands for Search Engine Optimization. The goal is to show up higher in search engines for words you can monetize, but without paying for ads. Ann Kraus: That was pretty simple. Simple, quick, and easy, right? So could you teach artificial intelligence, the buzzword right now, to write SEO, and would you do that? And what about, how would you advise to go through that? Damon Burton: I'm glad you added the qualifying latter half to that question. So can you, absolutely. Should you? I'm in the camp of probably not, at least right now. Now, that's not to say that AI isn't attractive and compelling. I don't have to tell you the reasons to consider AI, but I think a lot of people miss the reasons they should not consider AI, which is largely quality control. And so when you train AI to write content, whether it's for SEO or social media or whatever, you don't necessarily understand where the data and the results are coming from, even if you prompt it to. And then even if you do know where it collected the data from used in your content, you don't know if that content is factually accurate. So it opens up you to a couple liabilities. One is the accuracy of the content to begin with, but two, which I think is the bigger, scarier, hairier wild-card is at the end of the day, I think it's still pending who owns the copyright to that content and it's probably not going to be you. Ann Kraus: Interesting, so you don't think it's going to be you. Who do you think it would be at that point? Damon Burton: I don't know, because you as a candidate, but then also AI, the tool as a candidate for the copyright holder, but then another candidate is the aggregate in which it pulled the data from, and so it might source back. There might have to be some sort of legal implications of citations, and then that case then it gets cited back to the source that it pulled the aggregate data from. So I don't know the answer, but I think there's a reasonable chance that it's going to open up some liabilities one way or the other. Ann Kraus: How would you advise a client to actually walk those eggshells or tiptoe around all that potential liability? Damon Burton: There's a couple ways. I mean, AI is cool. You can use it for ideation, right? I think that's probably the safest way is use it for ideation but not actual content output. So you can use it for inspiration and come up with ideas of what you go spend the time and then create the content, or hire a copywriter to do. But where you run into liabilities is what you actually publish. And so can you use AI? Yeah, if you integrate some quality control measures. So one example might be there's some tools out there like Copyscape, and so you can use it to look for duplicate content. Really, your liability comes upon you pressing publish, and so you can use it for all sorts of cool ways to come up with the ideas. And then if you want to take it from there and manually write the content, then you're probably a lot safer. But once you get published, you open yourself to a lot of liabilities. If you don't add that layer of filtering and quality control, and there's lots of these cool tools that will connect to AI to your website and just publish it for you, I think that's the biggest liability right there just because you just let it go unfiltered. Ann Kraus: Right now would you let AI do anything for you and just hit publish, or are you of that camp of nothing. Damon Burton: No, no, nothing. Well, for two reasons. One is just liability of the content itself, but two is the liability of breaking a website. I think in the example of pushing publish, because you'd have to grant permissions to the AI to then log into your website and then execute the publication of the content. Ann Kraus: I didn't even think about that part. Of course you'd have to give it access. So has there been any great stories or anything, a client that you were working for that wanted to use AI and you had to talk them out of it? Damon Burton: What's been interesting is, I think for a couple of reasons where I'm fortunate to have established a brand and credibility, most of the time by the people who reach my doorstep and want to talk about SEO they're familiar with the process and they're familiar with the pros and cons and the time and liabilities and things like that. And so it hasn't really been a big conversation for me, but when it has come up, what's been fascinating, and it just happened this morning, is when people ask if we use AI, I think a lot of other agencies when a client asks them and says hey, do you use AI? They're probably going to say, yes, I love it, and it's the greatest thing ever. And they think that's what the client wants to hear is they're using the latest technology. And every time it's been brought up for me and I said no, and I explained why for the reasons you and I just chatted about, about liabilities. Surprisingly, every single one of them has said, I am so glad. Thank you. Because they too were concerned about their reputation. So the issue with AI isn't the scalability and the usability of it. It's the professionalism and the results and the liabilities that we've talked about. Ann Kraus: Would you compare the AI onset to anything else that's happened in the digital marketing world? Damon Burton: That's an interesting question. I think for me, I've stayed in my lane for 17 years in SEO, so I'm always biased to the scope of SEO, and there is something that comes to mind. Way back in 2012, Google came out with an algorithm update called, actually 2011, called Google Panda. And Google Panda would punish sites based on mass-produced, low-quality content. Now, AI in its current form in the scope of SEO is just a really cool, fancy effective way to mass produce content at scale. And so that's another reason why we talk about what are the potential disadvantages to SEO is I think there's high probability in the upcoming months that Google's going to say hey, this is just round two of that thing we punished over a decade ago. I mean, what happened from 2011 was a massive amount of businesses went under. SEO agencies went under because all their clients went under because SEOs were cutting corners. And right now, I think there's a lot of agencies that are leveraging AI for understandably attractive reasons, but they're sacrificing quality as a result. And so there's a high probability that Google is going to catch up on this mass-produced content and identify some sort of pattern and go hey, we now detect that... As of now, they've been playing politically correct and going oh, as long as your content is for the user, we don't care. But I think that we'll see other... You can basically, everything Google says, expect the opposite. Ann Kraus: You heard it here, folks. So in your time working with SEO, has there been a podcast or book or anything that's really influenced you or is there something that you followed that you think is really instrumental to your success? Damon Burton: Yeah, great question. Two things. One is a book but not an SEO book, and then I'll talk about the industry itself. So I was listening to two books, a good decade ago, Four Hour Workweek and E-Myth Revisited. And I think the unique combination of them both within a similar timeframe is, if you're not familiar with the books, E-Myth Revisited tells you to build a business dependent on processes. And so as your talent comes and goes, you don't lose that quality control. But Four Hour Week basically tells you how to compress time and cut corners. But if you're going to read those two books, read E-Myth First because you don't want to cut corners and compress time until you have your processes documented and what's at stake. So that really helped start to scale my agency about a decade ago while maintaining that quality control. But for the industry itself, no I think the opposite. One thing that's really helped with my success is tuning out the industry. And I think in a lot of industries, people just regurgitate what they heard from somebody else and they heard from somebody else. And by keeping my head down and staying in my own lane and not getting caught up in the gossip, I think I've been able to build out processes that are effective that we can rely on, that we don't have to depend on third parties, and we can just not care what the other people are doing. Ann Kraus: That's a great way to look at it, and it's clearly been working for you. So if somebody wanted to get ahold of you after watching this interview, or if they wanted to learn more about you, is there a social media site or a particular place that you would like them to go to? Damon Burton: Pretty simple. DamonBurton.com. You can find everything there, social media, as well as a free copy of my bestselling book on SEO. Ann Kraus: There you go. There you go. There's some incentive folks. Okay. So Damon, thank you so much for being my guest on Simpli.fi TV. This has been great. Damon Burton: Thanks for having me. I appreciate the chat. Ann Kraus: And thank you all for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit Simply.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Ann Kraus, and I look forward to seeing you next time.