Israel Gaudette has been doing SEO for a decade, manages a portfolio of affiliate sites, runs an SEO agency with over 200 clients, and spends a lot of time on content strategy, entities, and semantic publishing to drive results.

In this episode of SirLinksalot’s SEO Podcast, Chris and Nick talk with Israel about his affiliate sites and agency, how he uses entities for EEAT, and of course… AI and it’s impact on the SEO industry.

Think you’d be a great addition to our podcast or have a request for someone to be featured? Head over to our podcast discovery page.

Watch the Podcast:

Podcast Summary:

[02:15] Why did you switch your focus from affiliate to client work?

Affiliate marketing is an up-and-down business. If you want more stability, you need diversity in your income stream. I sold almost my entire website portfolio and started my link-building agency in 2020. I began offering links to my Facebook friends, and it grew over time until I was getting clients from everywhere. I spent a lot of my time managing my team, but what takes up most of my day is data analysis and preparation for the launch of our new software.

[08:12] Do you use AI for coding?

I use AI for training, such as for code snippets for WordPress. I work with two different agencies for software coding.

[13:02] One of the tools you created injects entities into schema for semantic publishing. You recently wrote an article about EEAT. Why is EEAT important?

EEAT is a way for Google to know what is truthful on the web and what is not. The first E, Expertise, is about showing that the source that is your website is trustworthy, which can be achieved with a bio page, active social media accounts, and ebooks (on Google Books or Amazon Kindle) attributed to you. The second E, Experience, demonstrates longevity in your space. A, Authoritativeness, is not about domain authority, but author authority with regards to the specific topics written about on the website. T, Trust, shows Google that you are a real business via your About and Contact pages, including links in the footer and legal information in the schema.

[20:01] What are “entities,” and why are they important?

Entities are topics which Google has started to consider aside from keywords. Within knowledge bases, such as music or movies, entities exist. I personally prefer Wikipedia. I make sure that when I condition my schema that the relevant entities are associated with my content. So, when you look at my content, straight from the schema the first thing you’ll notice is exactly what the topic is. That means when you start to crawl my content, you already know what it is about. There is no ambiguity. That improves ranking. This is a huge benefit of leveraging entities. I use entities in my backlinks, my content, my schema, and my orders. When it comes to how I use entities for backlinks, I consider my target page that I want to rank and look at the prominent entities on my page. I pick those entities and gauge them in Wikipedia, which I will then plug into, say, my guest post title, reducing the distance between the two topics. Of course, you can add these to your anchor text.

[28:14] What was your main point in the article you recently wrote about EEAT?

I suggested going through your author’s content and trying to find the prominent entities that are relevant to the main topics of the content. Then, take those entities and put them in the expertise sections of your bio and have them in the “knows about” field in your schema orders. Ensure you stay on-topic with your articles so as not to dilute your expertise. The goal is to systematically demonstrate to Google that you are an expert in your niche. Additionally, if you’re risk-averse and want more stability in your affiliate portfolio, implementing this strategy, if not for visibility, will offer long-term security for your site. Check out the article here: https://israelgaudette.com/how-to-boost-eeat-for-your-authors/

[38:33] Is there a way to do this without schema?

You can use the semantic relationship through your backlinks or inject entities into your content.

[41:03] People used to geotag images to try to boost their location relevance for local SEO. I’m not denying that schema injections are powerful, but this sounds similar to the practice of force-feeding your location to Google. Do you see schema injections ever becoming irrelevant as Google gets smarter?

Schema injections are not magic. The point is that you give Google no ambiguity. You don’t want to depend on entities that aren’t 100% relevant to your content. Google wants to show the most relevant results to its users. From that point of view, I prefer to not take chances. Use the schema approach to make sure that people understand exactly what your content is about. I’ve seen my cluster kickoff when implementing this schema. Also, while there’s no conclusive data on this, I’ve noticed that this strategy positively affects ranking.

[47:54] How does AI fit into your workflow?

I don’t use it to generate content. I prefer to write manually because humans generally better understand what humans want, based on live data. However, I use it a lot for data analysis. For example, I have a lot of affiliate content, so I use Memory.ai for project review guidelines. I have it look at the guidelines for project review and the Helpful Content guidelines and analyze my content to give recommendations to be able to perfectly fit Google’s guidelines. I also use AI to find NLP-friendly anchor text backlinks to optimize what Google reads. You can use this to rewrite FAQs, generate text for your backlinks, or write feature snippets.

[1:00:37] You mentioned that you use BetterGPT. What other AI platforms do you use, and which one do you use most often?

I use ChatGPT 4 Plus for everything under 4000 tokens and BetterGPT for bigger tasks. I use Playground AI for meta descriptions and title suggestions, which it does better than ChatGPT.

[1:07:31] What are your thoughts on the SEO industry now that AI is here?

A lot of people are scared because a lot of things will be automated with AI in the near future. I’m personally not afraid because I take things one day at a time. Overall, I’m pretty happy with how AI is right now.

[1:15:48] What would you advise someone who is new to SEO in 2023?

Focus on content and links. The competition for good content will only continue to increase. What makes the difference? Links. The links industry will never disappear. It will only continue to grow. Cheap content writing agencies will all die because AI already does what they do, cheaper and faster.

Related Posts