Booked, Busy & Letting AI Do the Boring Stuff 🤖✨ With Andrew Ansley (Part 1)

In this conversation on AI-powered SEO workflows, Andrew Ansley joins The Simple and Smart SEO Show to share how smart marketers are using tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and automation platforms to save time and scale without hiring.

From building SOPs in under an hour to organizing AI projects for sharper output, Andrew reveals how today’s marketers can combine soft skills with machine intelligence to stay competitive—without burning out.

Whether you're a creative entrepreneur, solo founder, or agency owner, this episode is packed with actionable insights to help you systemize your business and let AI do the heavy lifting.

🧠 Key Takeaways:

• Claude vs. ChatGPT: Why Andrew canceled ChatGPT Pro and switched to Claude—and what you should know before choosing your AI tool.
• AI-Powered SOPs: How to create effective SEO workflows and train your AI assistant in under 30 minutes.
• Organized Output = Better Results: Why focusing on one task per project leads to cleaner, more reliable AI performance.
• Smart Automation Tools: How Andrew uses GoHighLevel and N8N to reclaim 10+ hours of work each week.
• Solo Scaling Strategy: Why the future of marketing favors technical solopreneurs—and how to hit $10M with minimal overhead.

💬 Memorable Quotes:

“You don’t need to master hard skills—you need to master how to operate the machine.” — Andrew Ansley

“Abstract prompts like ‘write an SEO strategy’ won’t work unless you define what that means.” — Andrew Ansley

✅ Listener Action Items:

• Start a separate project in your AI tool for each key business function—especially for SEO.
• Define your own templates and examples to guide your AI outputs more effectively.
• Test Claude vs. ChatGPT with the same prompt and compare the results—what works best for your workflow?
• Create or update your keyword research SOP using AI—then outsource or automate it to reclaim your time.

🎧 Listen now for no-fluff advice on using AI to simplify, scale, and sharpen your SEO systems!

 Subscribe for weekly insights at SimpleAndSmartSEO.com

Chapters

• 0:00 if you wanna learn anything, I think the best thing to do is literally you just
• 0:04 reverse engineer what you're seeing.
• 0:06 So if I see somebody who impresses me.
• 0:20 Introduction and Welcome
• 0:53 Meet Andrew Ansley
• 1:22 Andrew's Professional Journey
• 2:31 Learning Programming
• 3:13 Andrew's School and Business Partner
• 4:04 Automating Marketing with AI
• 5:07 Challenges in Scaling Businesses
• 6:04 The Future of AI in Business
• 7:03 Using Chat GPT for Social Media
• 7:48 Optimizing Chat GPT Conversations
• 9:36 Creating SOPs with AI
• 10:00 Comparing AI Tools: Chat GPT vs. Claude
• 13:31 Organizing AI Projects
• 14:43 Practical Tips for Using AI
• 15:49 The Power of Templates

Transcript

Meet Andrew Ansley

Crystal Waddell:  I'm here with a special guest today, Andrew Ansley, who coincidentally I feel like I'm making friends with every Andrew on LinkedIn.

So you know, if your name's Andrew, watch out. I guess we could be friends in the future. But Andrew, I have really loved your, and enjoyed your posts on using AI and chat GPT to do a whole bunch of things and you had me at Workflow and Automation, so thank you for being on the podcast. Welcome to the show and yeah, I'm gonna start that over.

Thank you for coming on the Simple Smart SEO show podcast. 

Andrew Ansley: Of course. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. 

Andrew's Professional Journey

Crystal Waddell: So we have been chit-chatting here just a little bit, and I told you that I've been listening to you this morning, some of your other YouTube videos, and I will definitely link to Andrew's YouTube down in [00:01:00] the show notes.

But one of the things I saw that you said before, I've seen it on your LinkedIn profile, and then I heard you repeat it. You have like several jobs and several titles. Yeah. And so I'm like, could you go through that and tell us like what you do, what roles you have at what companies, and how you manage to do those?

Andrew Ansley: Sure. I'm a consultant, so people that are needing anything with marketing strategy SEO is my main probably the strongest skillset. Then I'd say after that is ai. Then probably ads copywriting, that kind of thing. But I do all sorts of stuff from automation to, I own a SaaS company called Content Sprout, and I'm the head of product over there.

And the way that I do everything honestly, is that I can't do everything as well as I would like to do. So unfortunately, my software company, it has been this journey where I just did not have the time to try to like train and find like good developers. 

Learning Programming

Andrew Ansley: I had decent developers, but I've been [00:02:00] spending the past four months learning development.

That's been my hobby. So I basically stopped all my other fun activities and just said, all right, time to learn Python and time to learn. Was it tight script? 

Crystal Waddell: I totally love that. I bought a Python book myself from Barnes and Oak. Oh, sweet. Yeah. Yeah. And I listened to a whole Python book on Audible because I was, that 

Andrew Ansley: sounds boring as hell.

Yes, it 

Crystal Waddell: was. But I was like trying to get my prior learning up because I knew that if I read the book, but I didn't have any sort of frame of reference for it. The only frame of reference I've had up to this point is the code that I've seen in my Shopify store. So I was like, oh, so now I'm starting to make little connections.

But I love that you're learning programming. I'm learning programming. It's cool.

Andrew Ansley: That's awesome. Yeah, it's super fun. 

Andrew's School and Business Partner

Andrew Ansley: So I, what I think is happening right now is I'll stick, we will, we'll move to that later, but that's my main thing is so products I do, I own a, or I have a school group and I have a business partner, his name's Hanson.

We do everything together. So other than my consulting stuff [00:03:00] and in school, we're just helping people with everything that I said that we can help with. Automations go high level, how to code with ai you name it. We are trying to just bring all, anyone who is an aspiring marketer or a business owner into kind of the modern era of what we believe marketing will be, which is a more technical marketer that only needs beginner knowledge in a lot of areas.

I'll call 'em soft skills because AI will be the thing that makes you have the hard skill. So as long as you have a soft skill of operating the machine in a certain way. Boom, now you're a coder and you don't even need to be a master of code. So that's what I'm what I'm focused on right now.

Crystal Waddell: Okay. So tell me really quickly about this school. 

Automating Marketing with AI

Andrew Ansley: Yeah, so school is let me see if I can pull it up. But school is owned by Alex Ram Moey. For those that don't know, it's co-owned by him. And Sam Ovens, which Sam Ovens is a guy that I learned a lot from with his copywriting. For just as a, as an aside, if you wanna learn [00:04:00] anything, I think the best thing to do is literally you just reverse engineer what you're seeing.

So if I see somebody who impresses me, Sam Ovens being one of them, and Alex Ramzi being another, I get into all their funnels. I don't care if I'm a gym owner or not, I don't care if I'm even their customer. I just wanna be in their funnel. I wanna interact with their stuff. I wanna, I will listen to their videos.

I write down their stuff. So when I saw that school was something that they created, I said, yeah let's try it out. So I've got 200 students right now. And basically it's we do three different things. Automate marketing using AI and go high level, reduce 10 plus hours of work per week. And this is basically using N eight N, which is a free version of Zapier.

It's free if you can set up the server and then attract a steady flow of clients. So those are the things that seem to be like the main pain points for agencies and for business owners. 

Challenges in Scaling Businesses

Andrew Ansley: At first I was trying to do things that was like helping people scale, but so many people, they're not even in a place where the struggle is scale.

The, their [00:05:00] struggle is, how do I just get leads? And they're spending time doing things that they shouldn't be doing. And it's fun. It's not necessarily like a hassle for them. But ultimately what held me back as a, an agency owner was I was spending too much time on things like keyword research and different SEO tasks.

And I needed to be more in the driver's seat of the agency. I needed to actually be doing the things that no one else could do. 'cause ultimately those tasks, those keyword research tasks and other stuff, I could easily outsource that. I could create an SOP in a week. I could probably get somebody up to speed and then I could now focus on other things.

So my goal is to get people to do that, to automate. We don't need to train people now. If you don't want, I would say that at a certain point you'll need to, but I'd say you can scale pretty high now with just ai. 

The Future of AI in Business

Andrew Ansley: I imagine if you wanted to get super nitty gritty, you could get scale to the moon.

I'm sure there's gonna be a billion dollar company, one person company at some point. But for now, I'd say you could get to 10 million just with AI and with no other [00:06:00] employees, maybe one employee. And that solves a lot of problems that a lot of people have, which is usually hiring and managing. So if you can remove the hiring and managing, that's a huge weight off your shoulders.

Crystal Waddell: I hope my dad's listening right now. 'cause we have this conversation all of the time. Like he is in lawn care and lawn service. He's been in it for, 40 years and my brother wants to bring in robot mowers. And so like that, that solves every problem I've ever heard about the last 20 years of my life, yeah. About the hiring and managing and just the turnover and seasonal work is hard to keep. Like really great people, it's just a, it's a difficult business to hire. And it's so funny that you said that. So Dad, we're gonna talk about this after the podcast is over, so Yes.

But that's amazing. And then you talked about go high level, there's so many things that we could chat about today that you have peaked my interest. But I'll save those probably for some LinkedIn conversations to follow up, [00:07:00] but wow that group sounds amazing. I didn't even realize that you did that as well.

Using Chat GPT for Social Media

Crystal Waddell: Yeah, so what I really wanna pick your brain about today is like how you use chat GPT and how you use chat GBT to do all sorts of different things. And I was watching you walk us through your thought process on your YouTube channel with that five step, social media content for a month thing.

I don't know. That's what, yeah. Yeah, that was one of the things I watched this morning, and I'm very much like you, like I want to understand like your thought process behind how you did it. And so I appreciated how you broke that down because oh, that's, and then I recognize it in my own work.

Okay, I do that too, and this is how I could make it better, or whatever. But one thing that you said was you don't wanna cloud up the thought process. Yes. Of, so as you're brainstorming with chat GBT, what do you mean by that? You don't wanna cloud up the process. 

Andrew Ansley: Yeah. 

Optimizing Chat GPT Conversations

Andrew Ansley: So people, if you are, I wouldn't say a necessarily a [00:08:00] power user, but you're using it a decent bit.

I'd say that typically what that means is you're interacting with it, having conversations and you're like, Hey, sound more human. Stop that. That's bad. No more this, less that, that kind of thing. So when you do that. That is oftentimes it's stuffing the context window with a lot of stuff. So ultimately what I want is you can do that conversation, you can go back and forth.

Once you get to the result, though, the original prompt that I had, so I said write a social post. Let's say it was bad. It took me six prompts more. Now I'm finally at the end result, I delete everything other than the final result and the initial prompt that I gave. So in its mind now, I have no other, it's in a clear line of how it's thinking.

It's, Hey, create a social post. And as far as it knows, this is what a social post is. And now I don't need to have all that other context in there. It's just it's cleaner. It helps [00:09:00] preserve its ability to be sharp. So especially if you want a long conversation let's say longer conversations or things like.

Social media strategy or maybe an SEO strategy, you can get really good output, but the longer that conversation goes, it will really start to deteriorate. If you continue to have all of these think of it as like an erratic sort of thing, you just want it to go straight. I. And that's what I try to go for.

Crystal Waddell: And what it really made me think about are the times that I went deeper and deeper, and then pretty soon it's this isn't even a, there's no application to what I very first started out, it's like, how did I end up here? It's like I'm on the coast and I was trying to go north, from North Carolina.

I'm just like completely lost, yeah. Yeah. I didn't think about the fact or realize that you could delete, and restart that conversation. So that's such a simple thing that I think will really benefit people at SEO. 

Creating SOPs with AI

Crystal Waddell: The other thing, or the next thing, probably should ask this first, but my brain was already, thinking about what you said earlier, you talked about I could make an SOP and train somebody in a week, for keyword [00:10:00] research.

Can you do that same thing like using chat GPT? 

Andrew Ansley: Oh, you could do it in an hour. Like it it's pretty darn good. So my latest my latest YouTube video, did you see the one on Claude? 

Crystal Waddell: No, I then jumped into a two hour video where you were interviewing the guy that had the team. Oh yeah. Guy or whatever.

And so yeah, I was still working on that one. 

Andrew Ansley: Okay. So the latest one, I'm trying to make 10 minute videos 'cause I was making hour long videos to three hour long videos. This 10 minute video is me going over how to basically train the AI in 10 minutes or less, or 30 minutes or less, I think is the idea.

Comparing AI Tools: Chat GPT vs. Claude

Andrew Ansley: So what I love is, first off I will say that I just bought the the chat last month. I bought the chat GPT Pro, which is $200. I canceled my subscription completely after that. I do like pro, we can talk about that more, but I just bought Claude the, I've been using Claude as an API, but I use Claude's version, and Andros little [00:11:00] tool or desktop thing.

It's so much better. It is so far ahead of chat, GPT in so many ways. I still have both subscriptions now. One, Claude is it really cuts you off. You don't get to talk much, but it's I like how it uses it. The project files more and chat. GPT just added this, so I guess for both it's gonna be similar.

So I'll say this is how you train. I'll talk about the areas that are similar. One, you create a project, that project is gonna be designated just for the thing you want to do. So it could be don't go and create projects that are SEO projects. And then all of your SEO tasks, I would narrow it down.

And then you have a keyword research project and it only does keyword research. Maybe then you might have a technical analysis one or a data analysis one. You could do all sorts of stuff. But the point is you need a project and then you're gonna upload files. These files, you can either just write your own text or upload a PDF, whatever you want.

And then it uses and leverages those. So if I have an example [00:12:00] output, if I have a whole SOP, I'll just put that in there. I also put information about me or my clients. So I make one of these for each of the people that I consult with. That way I can have, alright, it knows exactly their name, it knows their unique value proposition.

I build out the ICP profile which is the, ideal customer. And then once it has all that stuff you'd also ideally want to get like your unique perspective on stuff. Then. So now we have perspective, we have the business information. We have. SOP. And then we have a little bit of context just in the project itself.

So four little pieces, and then it takes about 30 minutes to set up. After that, you can just prompt and then you have a much better output. Here's where Claude gets better though. Claude allows you to customize the style on top. So now I can actually customize the response types as like after everything else we've done.

It's like this layer on top. So now I could say, all right I'm gonna give it a bunch of copywriting examples, and now it's just a simple toggle where all I [00:13:00] have to do is hit my vo the style toggle, select, okay, I'm in my SEO projects for this one. Maybe I'm doing topic maps, or maybe the next thing I'm doing a specific kind of keyword clustering or whatever.

It's, and then it'll just do it so much better in the exact format that you want it to do it in. So that's what I mean is it's so easy to do. It's very easy to set up and it just. Man, you could probably at that point, if you really needed to, I'd say, what I've noticed is you can either hire a VA to just smooth things over, or you could just spend maybe an extra hour or two and really refine.

What I've noticed in all areas of life is it's pretty quick. Once you get decent at something, it's quick to get to the 90th 90% completion mark. It takes a while to get to the a hundred percent, and it gets boring. It's if your progress slows down and so that's kinda your option. I've been I am an AI fanatic, so I try to automate everything completely, but that's, hopefully that answers it.

Crystal Waddell: Yeah. That's so funny that [00:14:00] you described it like that because yeah, it's so fun when you're building, but then like you said, when you get to that 90th percentile and it gets boring, that's usually when my brain goes. Yeah, I'm done with this. I wanna work on something new. Yeah, exactly. Oh my gosh, that's so funny.

Okay. So let's see. I have a couple other questions that I got from, to, from watching you. Okay. 

Organizing AI Projects

Crystal Waddell: So you touched on this and my question was like, why is it important to narrow it down and focus on one category at a time? And you did a great job of giving us that example with SEO, like not just saying create an SEO strategy.

It's Yes. Create the elements, one at a time, and then Yes. Create 

both: this 

Crystal Waddell: particular SOP or, give me output for this particular element of the SEO strategy. Yes. And I've noticed that too, that giving one prompt or just, working on one thing with chat, GPT is so much better than, trying to do multiple things at one time.

Andrew Ansley: So much better. Yeah. Yeah. The thing I think a lot of people forget or just don't realize [00:15:00] is I think there's a magic to what we're experiencing right now where AI can just, oh, you could just say, make, write an email, do this, and it just does it. Yeah, it can, but ultimately you gotta understand it's trained on really generalist data across the whole internet.

So it gives it incredible magic, lik abilities, but you have no control over what it believes to be a good email, what it believes to be a good strategy, what it understands about every concept. 

Practical Tips for Using AI

Andrew Ansley: So my number one tip for people using chat, GT who really want to turn this tool into something that makes real business impact is you need to start paying attention to.

Abstract concepts that you're giving. The ai abstract concept is something that is like a strategy, SEO strategy. Write an email that is an abstract concept. All of these things are abstract and you cannot let the AI make a decision on what those abstract [00:16:00] concepts mean. You have to define it. And then if you give it an example, that's even better.

Then you could layer in maybe a template. You could templatize, Hey, here's the definition, here's the example, and here's a template for how you can probably execute this for yourself. And I'll just put little brackets or something. But that's, if you wanna go super hard with it, you could just do a definition and an example and then you're pretty good.

You don't need to do much else. No fancy anything. But I think a lot of people just skip that step and they just assume that the AI understands what they're talking about. 

Crystal Waddell: Yeah, and I think that idea of a template too is difficult. Like I remember when I was first learning algebra and it was like, a x equals 10. Or sorry, let's say five x equals 10. It took me forever. It seems, I don't know, maybe it's just a day, but it seems like it took me forever to realize X didn't represent just a number between 50 and 60. If that number was five, Uhhuh and but once I realized oh, it's five times the [00:17:00] number, yeah. Multiplying there. That was such a huge aha. 

The Power of Templates

Crystal Waddell: And I feel like it's like that with templates too, because so many times it feels like we have to create something absolutely brand new every time, and then it's like. A light goes off, it's oh my gosh, I could make a template for this and not have to reinvent the wheel every single time I do this.

Yeah. And then to do that, even without a large language model, first of all, is a huge aha. Then to realize you can do it with a large language model, then it's really gets exciting and like scary, happy, exciting as well. 

Andrew Ansley: It, yeah, it gets amazing when you start to see these outputs and the quality and you start to actually get what you want.

My gosh, it's so cool. You're like, what else can I do? 

Crystal Waddell: Yes, exactly. Exactly. And for the first time, I think in the last few years I have felt a very, probably a similar overwhelm to some of the people that I'd spoken to two or three years ago because I was an early adopter of [00:18:00] Jasper and like when I was learning Jasper, I was also, I.

Really shifting into marketing and learning more about how to market my own business. Because I was trying to move my Etsy shop from Etsy to Shopify, and I was learning about these marketing formulas, like problem, agitate, solution, and I was like oh, that makes a lot of sense, but then to learn that there are all of these frameworks, and then, but just not have been exposed to it.

It's just it at then I felt very oh my gosh, cutting edge. Other people hadn't heard about it either. But now with Claude and chat GBT Pro, like I had seen the Pro option, I didn't even know what that was. It just I just noticed it this last week. So what's the difference between that and the regular?

Andrew Ansley: Oh, okay. So the difference is every response takes about two minutes and think of pro. So here is my journey, this will help explain it. I was using GPT two. I didn't use it directly, but I used it with tools precursors to Jasper and there was a [00:19:00] tool called Article Forge and I used to spam the internet and I've made tens of millions of websites spamming the internet, trying to control the algorithm.

And I used GPT two to do it and then you would spin that. That was the first kind of version of me using ai. I couldn't really do much other than like spammy stuff. I wouldn't wanna show my mom or my family that website 'cause it is ugly as all get out. GPT-3 came out and I realized, wow, I'm just gonna be, become like a prompt engineer.

So I remember December, 2022, I told my wife, I am just going to be in front of my computer for this whole year. I'm sorry, but like this is the future. This is like the equivalent of Google coming out and me knowing ahead of time. That this is the thing. So that's how I felt. And we, I had that conversation with my wife, she said, all right, if you think so, and so GPT-3, here's what I noticed.

There was a lot of things you could do that was pretty cool, but ultimately it just fell short and it had big limitations. GPT-4 came out. I noticed [00:20:00] that give it enough time where I'm hitting my head against the wall. I could solve I wanna say 90% of my use cases, but ultimately it's still, it was impossible to actually solve some things.

I would say that the oh one and O one pro is there's nothing it can't solve truly. Now, like you, you still have the hit your head against the wall, but now it actually breaks down every wall. It for me, like once you've understand, once, once you've understood prompt engineering. I don't think oh one pro is good for anybody that is not a power user.

You need to know prompt chains, which is I have a whole library of prompts. I have probably a hundred different prompts for different situations. And then some of those prompts have series of prompts within them. You need to have that kind of knowledge if you're gonna make use of this.

Otherwise, the $20 version is all you need it, it's so stupid, expensive, even at $200. And with my skillset, I said, it's not worth it. So for me, I wouldn't [00:21:00] recommend it. It is super cool. If you're a coder, you can solve any coding problem. It's really cool. I'm nerding out over it. Very awesome. But that's it's hold.

The difference is that it, it thinks sequentially. You can actually click on it as it's thinking and you can see how it's thinking about it. So it doesn't respond immediately. It goes, Hey, I'm. Yeah, I'll map this out and then, oh, I need to consider this. Oh yeah I'll do this. So instead of GPT-4 oh where, hey, write an email and it goes, yep, la da.

It doesn't do that. 

Crystal Waddell: Ooh. So I do think that's pretty cool. I'm definitely not a power user, but the idea of being able to watch how it thinks 

Andrew Ansley: it's cool is, 

Crystal Waddell: yeah. That's very interesting to me. Okay. So back to more of a practical question about chat GBT and that how you use it. Yeah. How do you stay organized?

Because before these folders came out, I don't know about you, but my chat, GBT looks like my Canva and that is not 

both: Yeah. Everywhere. Yeah. 

Crystal Waddell: Yeah. Same. Do you have any tips for keeping that organized? 

Andrew Ansley: Yeah. Oh man. Now you have projects, but I would say, do you do screen shares in your [00:22:00] podcast at all?

I'm happy to share stuff if you want. I can. 

Crystal Waddell: Yeah. This'll go on YouTube. Yeah, I'm fine. Okay. 

Andrew Ansley: Let's present share screen and then here we go. So here's how I organize things. So I'll show Claude and then I'll show chat, GBT. So inside of Claude on the desktop, you have projects. So I can just go here and look at all of my projects and I could add more projects.

But in here, let's do a personal brand. Let's see if I can actually show it here. Yeah, this will be better. So now all of my prompts are, or all of my workflows, instead of just that like giant, string, you're now compartmentalizing it. So in my personal brand now, it still has that, but ultimately each conversation is I don't really need to, I.

Maintain or remember that old conversation anymore because all of that, all of its context is really set up in its project knowledge. So things have changed. I used to need to find those old conversations [00:23:00] 'cause I would continue to use them and be like, all right, this one's kind of trained on, what to do for this specific task.

You don't need that anymore. Just hit add content, add text, and you could train it right here and then it will always have it and you could do tons of stuff. So that's what, how I stay organized now and now I used to have a ton of different prompts even of okay, even if it has all of this here, how do I, it might have access to 50 prompts.

How do I remember which prompts to use and to invoke that? Here I can just create and edit a style. So now these represent prompts almost. So this is my semantic, SEO. This is how to do, if I wanna list educational style posts for social media, a lead magnet, post contrarian post if I just wanna write a hook for a YouTube video or for a social post VSL webinars ad copy my email copy so you can start to see like all of it is here.

So I'll show you with a hook master just what it looks like. You can do options. I can edit style and it just looks like this. So I've labeled it [00:24:00] and then I've got my steps here, and that's all there is to it. You can do all sorts of stuff. You don't. If you do, let me show this real quick. If I hit this create and edit, I'd create one.

So you could do writing example, or you could define this. It gives you like pre-made versions. I always use the custom instructions. I find it works just fine. So that's how I stay organized here. The Che GPT one is. Now my folders are gone 'cause I'm no longer paying for it. I need to actually change the subscription.

I had folders, but here it's just a mess. Like literally there's so many things in here 

both: gonna say that looks familiar. 

Andrew Ansley: Yeah, this is bad. I would say that like you could prob the best way to probably stay organized on this one is make your own custom GPT. So I don't know if you've ever done that, but I have a free let's do a topic map or ad copy.

But yeah, so I have a content map sort of thing. And what this does is now my GPT, once again, Claude is a better version of this. But if you wanna [00:25:00] stick with Jet GPT, totally understand. I love the tool still and there's some things I will forever use this tool for. Like the speaking thing this is amazing.

I now don't type. I'll just like. Transcribe my voice and then I'll take that transcription and then I'll give it to Claude. Even like I'm always transcribing in here. I love their walkie talkie thing. And like on the mobile app, you can even live, show your camera or I can show up my screen and then just ask it questions.

And super cool. So JGPT has some awesome features, but in here, if you just make your own GPT, that's the other way to, to, I think stay organized. Otherwise, I'm just as messy as you. The problem is these conversations disappear after a month and unless you keep reusing them. So I've lost some really important conversations that I wanted to keep using.

So I really recommend paying for the $20 setting up projects, and then you'll have folders and it maintains that much longer. And if you watch the 12 days of, I'll stop sharing, but if you watch the 12 Days of Christmas or whatever that OpenAI did, I [00:26:00] love one of the use cases 'cause it actually touches everyone's life.

The guy showed himself uploading his refrigerator like manual his home, all of his home manuals of okay, here's the garage manual. Here's how to operate the ring device. Here's how to, here's my car. All of it's in like this home folder. And then you could just ask it like, all right you could store things like, Hey I last changed the filter on December 6th, and then maybe you're like four months later, you go, when do I need to change the filter today is this date.

It will literally remember, tell you, it'll tell you how to do it. It'll pull all that stuff up. So I think that's like a, an incredible way to stay organized is using projects and uploading some info. 

Crystal Waddell: Yeah. That's awesome. I definitely would need a reminder for my filters. That's not a, it's not a terrible idea at all.

It's a very good one. Very helpful. Yep. I do like the folders, but I hadn't been using the folder, obviously up until they came out. And now I'm just trying to go back through and reorganize. And [00:27:00] again, it reminds me of trying to do the same thing in Canva, when you've created all sorts of different graphics in different ways and it's ah, how does this go together?

So 

Andrew Ansley: Do you have your brand thing wr written out in Canva? 

Crystal Waddell: Yes. Like a, yeah. The brand with the fonts and the Yeah. And all that type of stuff. Yeah. 

Andrew Ansley: As, as long as you got that, I think that's like. All the 

Crystal Waddell: organization makes a huge difference. Yeah. So now you don't have to at least go look for the P codes and all that type of stuff.

Oh my gosh. 

Andrew Ansley: Yeah. It's so important for 

Crystal Waddell: sure. And I like the one click that they have where you can just change a template, like all of the colors in there. Yeah. That's also very helpful.

Andrew Ansley: Yeah. I love that too. It's so nice. Yeah. I love all the TE technology has made things so much easier where I'm just astounded.

It's so fun. Yeah. 

Crystal Waddell: It's like how do people used to do their jobs, but 

Andrew Ansley: Yeah. You needed a big team. 

Crystal Waddell: You, yeah. And now the fact that you said that there could be a one person team that scales to a billion dollar business. I'm like, that's just incredible. It's inspiring, it's very encouraging.

Diving into SEO Beginnings

Crystal Waddell: Yeah. Oh yes. It's out there, it's possible. But could we back up a little bit because I totally [00:28:00] jumped into all the things that I've been learning from you. Yeah. But I do wanna back up and talk about SEOA little bit, because obviously this is the simple and smart SEO show.

But how did you get into SEO? I could see your love affair with ai, but how did it start with SEO and then how did it lead you into this word, world of world? Yeah. Automations and ai. 

From Sales to Marketing

Andrew Ansley: I was training to be a pastor, and then I, man I was a salesperson. I went to school. It took me seven years to graduate off and on.

I'd go in and outta sales jobs, not because I hated it or anything, it was just that I knew I want, I didn't wanna stay in sales. I knew I wanted something else, and ultimately I I just couldn't figure my life out. So I ended up pivoting. I'm not gonna get lost in all the reasons why I'm not a pastor now.

But I ended up pivoting and it left me in this weird spot and I had to figure out something. So my dad's an entrepreneur and he is really good at sales, but what I noticed is he sucks at marketing, absolutely [00:29:00] terrible, but it doesn't matter 'cause he could still ice to Eskimos. But in this new world, marketing is really important 'cause everything is digital now.

So it used to be just sales, but you need to at least have a, even salespeople now, you need to understand LinkedIn sales navigator. You need to understand how to use Apollo or maybe Clay, or there's all these different tools that are like sales enablement email tools. It's just getting more important.

Discovering SEO

Andrew Ansley: So I realized that I decided, all right I'll look at marketing. So then I listened to 200 episodes in a row of the Tim Ferriss podcast. Which isn't super aligned with marketing, but I knew it was aligned with business and entrepreneurship and that for those that don't know, that is 600 hours of content just about.

And I just would, that's all I did. I just became a machine where I was just doing that. I was a bartender and then I switched where I basically took a pay cut where what I needed was more time. I needed to make just enough money where I could work in a job that I could learn and figure out what I [00:30:00] wanted, but at least be like close to what I wanted.

So I became a technology strategist and my whole sales pitch to the guy was, look, I will, I'm an amazing researcher. I paid for my first year of college by writing other people's papers, and I would guarantee an A and all you have to do is pay me 50 bucks. It's just been easy for me to write. I'm really good at it.

I used to write poetry and enter competitions. I studied seven years of Latin. So like language vocabulary, writing, that kind of stuff is, I knew that's my my big powerhouse skill that I had. Okay, what can leverage that skill? I just literally started Googling things and then I said, what can I do that costs no money?

First Steps in the SEO Industry

Andrew Ansley: And then I was like, all I found SEO, I called ev in my city. I was like Nashville, SEO agency. I called every single agency. No one answered my call. Then I switched it to freelancer and basically I filled out their forms and I called them and I said, I will offer you 50 bucks and I'll buy your lunch.

Please just sit down with me because I need to get started in this industry and I'm just hoping to, I need to [00:31:00] talk to somebody. 

Mentorship and Early Success

Andrew Ansley: Someone accepted. And his name's Jeremy. Really nice guy. And that's what kind of started it was after we talked, we really got along. We both loved Japan. We liked anime. We're super nerds.

He likes SEO. And I just got involved. And what ended up happening is I said, I'll do work for free. And then I switched it to, if I bring in the lead, can I get 50%? I'll do all the work, but I just, I don't wanna bring in a lead and then I'm not able to actually do what I promised them. So having him as my backup of I will only use you if I can't do it, it gave me the confidence to be like, all right, I got somebody.

And I recommend that for anyone getting started. If you have somebody where just work for free which is there's so many people that will do that. And after you work for free, maybe try to bring in some leads family, friends, that kind of thing. If you truly believe in the person you're working with, and that's how you can start your industry and after, or your career.

And after that, it was just a [00:32:00] matter of chance, luck, blessings from God of, hey, this, the guy that was mentoring me got hired by a company. He brought me with them and it just so happened that company was a big SaaS company that competed with hres and Moz and all these other companies. And yeah it just kicked everything off for me.

So I'd say that's my journey. And the real thing that got me to, I think where I'm at now is first finding Bill Slosky. And then what solidified Bill Slosky for me was was Coray, Hubert, and Coray is the guy that kind of came up a really popularized topic, maps and entity SEO. And that's where we're at now.

And I can dig in. I don't, I answer the question. I will say that there's this new, the SEOI did before 2022 is entirely different than the SEO post 2022. There's a huge shift. So I can dig into that later if you want to, but that's my journey. 

Crystal Waddell: Okay. 

Philosophy and Early Education

Crystal Waddell: I do wanna dig into that, but I have to back up just a little bit because I remember you saying that [00:33:00] you had been studying philosophy since you were a young child.

Andrew Ansley: Yeah. Since preschool. Yeah. 

Crystal Waddell: Yeah, since preschool. Like, why, how what is that all about? 

Andrew Ansley: I don't know. I had a weird upbringing. In preschool to first grade it was just Christianity. And then second grade introduced Rome and Greek philosophy. And so much of Christianity is impacted by by Greek thought, really.

And I specifically Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, those three. But yeah, I don't think a lot of religions were impacted by them. So I did that. And basically it was just that, like whatever I was doing, I was just, I've always been a nerd. It doesn't mean that. I don't think that I'm necessarily smarter.

I just, my passions, we all get good at what we wanna get good at. I wanted to consume knowledge. That's all I wanted. I just wanted to consume. So all I did was that. And yeah, I, my parents were racing to find schools that could basically scale with me. Will [00:34:00] they actually allow my son to, I know he is in second grade, but can you do fifth grade reading level or can, will you allow him to do other things aside from just what you're expecting from other people?

So I ended up, it's such a small amount of schools that you can really choose from. So that's why I ended up doing the, this kind of like education that I did. And I'd say the most impactful one, the one that really sent me on my way was this guy that's like a, he runs things like a Marine and his brother is a Marine and his name's Robbie Grayson.

And that man. He would just take in troubled kids. 'cause I was also troubled I was, I would get into trouble all the time and his whole thing was he would really let you just figure it out. So he's the kind of guy that's I'll let you break your finger, thing just so you can learn this thing.

Or I'm here for you. But, like very roughhousing sort of guy. It was awesome. So that set me on my way and that's how I how I got started in philosophy. And I've always been curious, how kids ask the why that never stops. And I still do that. It [00:35:00] makes me a bad IT employee sometimes.

'cause I can't just say, sir, yes sir, I have to know why. I don't know. I don't understand it. But yeah, I just wanna know the why of everything. 

Crystal Waddell: No, I totally get that. I resonate with that so much. And I think it's, I think it's very cool that you've been able to take your passion and build it into these.

Companies and services and what do you call that when you're helping people, but you like consulting and all that? Yeah. 

The Role of AI in Learning

Crystal Waddell: And and I feel like a mine, like yours is so perfectly positioned for a time like now, because I don't know about you, but the way that large language models work, like it makes sense to me.

Obviously that makes it's, you are on like a different level, but I feel like I understand the fact that like your mind was made for this, for all of these different types of inputs and being able to synthesize that into something that makes sense with something that works at a speed that can stay up with you and manage your questions.

So that's what I'm hearing from you. And so now I wanna know, [00:36:00] how has this changed, like pre 22, pre 2022 to now? How is SEO different? I. 

Andrew Ansley: I'll totally. So one thing because you just said you made a point and it just resonated where if you said mothers listen to this too, or this podcast, you have a wide array of people.

One thing to note is if you're a parent and you have an inquisitive kid, I think learning how to get your kid to really be able to use AI to answer these questions in a safe way, it's going to be amazing. 'cause I wish I had this tool as a kid. It would've been insane. It's unlimited learning as deep as you want to go.

Incredibly. Yeah. And so 

Crystal Waddell: we can stay there for just a second because I have a son who's 12 and he's he loved the idea of Gemini. I got him a one of those phones, one of the new pixels or whatever. He was so excited about Gemini, but he's not 18 so he can't use it. So he uses my chat, he's used it for, to ask questions for homework. Of course, he's used it for ideation, for writing papers and all that type of stuff. Yeah. And I'm like, Hey, [00:37:00] look, you learn, even if you're reading something that you prompted it to teach you, you're still learning. There's ways that learning is happening.

And he's also used it as a therapist, me 

Andrew Ansley: too. And as a friend I use regularly. 

Crystal Waddell: Yeah, I do too. So I thought that, but he was the one that gave me the idea for that, and he's 12. And so I thought, wow, this is such a powerful tool. 

AI and Education Challenges

Crystal Waddell: And I used to be a teacher, so I know a lot of educators are nervous about kids using chat GPT or any kind of large language model in a way that's they're worried about the cheating, but I'm like.

Look at the they will cheat and yeah, they will cheat, but they're gonna cheat anyway. We, that's just the nature of whatever, but sometimes even in the cheating, they're gonna learn. And if they're not cheating, they're definitely learning. And so I just see so much potential there in education.

Andrew Ansley: I agree. I was a teacher too for a little bit and like I absolutely love it. I don't know why schools are taking this position where they're so anti ai because ultimately school's about training [00:38:00] you for the world. It would be like a school taking a stance of no calculators, to do math.

Yeah. That's idiotic. That's so dumb. A AI's replacing everything or not replacing it is enhancing it will either enhance everything that exists or it will replace everything that exists, or a mixture of both. There is not an area where AI will not penetrate, period. Yeah. 

Crystal Waddell: The problem with education and one of the problems in general is that we are still teaching our kids the same way that we did 50 years ago when we were trying to train them for factories.

Like we're not encouraging their innovative thought process, it's more of do this and fit in this box. Yeah. And if you do that, then you get a gold star, but that's not the future. The future's not in a box. And so that's one thing that's really frustrating. And then just education in general, like pre-K, I just found this out in North Carolina.

I'm not sure if it's nationwide, but they won't teach them how to read in pre-K. And so [00:39:00] when you think about things like, or like those educational initiatives, like No Child Left Behind. It's of course kids are gonna be left behind if we're not encouraging them to read before they get to kindergarten.

And these are government funded programs, so it's like, what are we even doing here? So that's just I'll probably edit that part out, but that's one of those things is driving me bonkers Yeah. About public education, because I'm like, this is on purpose. They are purposely agreed to hold these kids back.

And I'm like, why would you do that? What is this greater socio sociological experiment that they're doing that they would want that to happen?

Andrew Ansley: Someone's making money. Yeah. I don't, that's the only reason I think someone wants money and power. 

Crystal Waddell: Yeah. But yeah, 

Andrew Ansley: I agree. The the, I don't know how you're doing it with your 12-year-old, but what I plan on teaching for my kid is the new importance is your ability to.

Understand concepts, and then to be able to explain concepts and then to understand how understanding even is reached. How [00:40:00] can, what's the best way to explain something and what's the best way to, to understand things, which goes into educational theory. 

Educational Theory and SEO

Andrew Ansley: And if you can teach that, and this is actually how I created my sas tool, was I applied straight up, I applied educational theory to SEO.

I even have a LinkedIn post where I share like piece by piece. 'cause AI was made with a blend of the understanding of how the human brain works mixed with educational theory. That's all. It's and it's, which is incredible. It gives you the secret. So I think those two scales, which means, okay, it doesn't mean that you have to memorize everything anymore, but if you read, if all right, let's say you therapists, for example.

Read a book on therapy, a good one, and then just take some notes. And once you have that, you now can give it, just understand how to translate that to give it to an ai. And now you have something that can, it's like you're talking to the author and you're getting advice, not just from a generalist model, but you're getting advice from a trained, not fully trained, but you're getting really [00:41:00] good advice.

And it helps me with my marriage all the time. 'cause I am asking it to see. Can you explain from a, like the female perspective, I'm the male in this situation. I have a wife, I. I did this, she responded this way. Help me act as like a marital counselor and just try to get me to see things through her lens and then, okay, that sounds hard.

How do I achieve that? And seems simple. I'll just ask those kind of questions, but I have a, I have favorite people now in each sphere and I just like to reference them. So whether it's ad copy, whether it's working out, whether it's, you name it, I think we should just as humans, and this is all also goes back to my education all of my educational institutions that I was at, they had the belief that education changed in like 1850 or 1870 with factories.

So 150 years ago and before we had the Harvard Model of Education, an Oxford model of Education. So that was around, they've been around for 500, 400 years. That model was develop the human [00:42:00] and the human is not just a capitalistic production machine. It is music. It, you need to understand art because you need to be able to express yourself.

Humans need to, art is a way to balance the soul. It's a way to to like tweak things. And then you need to understand a little bit about math. You need to understand a little bit about how to work with your hands. You need to understand how to talk. So I would say that's how you, that's how you push a kid in the right direction is and how to learn what are the components of learning.

And ultimately that comes down to deconstructing things. And that goes to Greek philosophy with Euclid, which is you need to find the unit. You need to find, to understand the whole, you have to understand the parts. So how do I use AI to deconstruct this homework assignment and understand all the parts, what are the components of it?

Not just what the assignment components are, but the subject matter. What makes this subject up? And then the kids free to then explore whatever interests them. Oh, that component seems interesting. Ask whatever questions you want. Teachers don't have time for that, and they don't, A lot of 'em don't [00:43:00] have patience.

Some of 'em don't care. So AI seems like a perfect tool for kids. 

Crystal Waddell: Yeah.

Andrew Ansley: Dangerous too, but, yeah. Everything that's good is dangerous, but 

Crystal Waddell: you're absolutely right because I worked with special needs students and they have what's called IEPs, but I'm like, every child in education really should have an individualized education plan.

How much more would they be engaged if they were learning about things that interested them? And you could apply some of the pedagogy or whatever that they you need to have in place, but combine it with elements of. Their social life or the games they play or whatever to make it engaging to them, yeah. So it's like I, that part of education really excites me. I wish that I was in a position where I could yeah. Help with that, but seeing it from the outside school and then being a parent is actually the best position to be in because Asher and I've talked, he wants to be homeschooled, and I'm like, no, because he's an only child.

I want him to be in school just so he's around other people. I'm like, he can't sit behind your computer all day. Maybe you can, I don't know. [00:44:00] But, yeah. For right now, you probably should get out there. But he's told me like how he would build his school and, like what he would wanna learn and, it's just, it's really interesting.

I feel like kids are so different now. 

Andrew Ansley: They are maybe it's an encouragement, but there's there are programs where you can do hybrid, so it's like you go to school maybe once a week or twice a week.

both: I forget what 

Andrew Ansley: those are called, but I went to that for two years and that was a good blend.

My parents were trying to experiment with homeschool, but it was like half homeschool, half schooling. Then I had tons of friends that were full homeschooled, but then they had all of these programs that they were a part of. So it was important that they had hobbies. So they were on sports teams, they were on like a debate team, and there were all these teams that they were like, even though they were homeschooled I forgot what their umbrella programs, I think is what they're, hopefully if he does ever do homeschool, if you decide to, then you can find good umbrella programs and other ways to get, with people. Yeah. But that is important. You gotta be with people. Yeah. 

Crystal Waddell: Oh man. Yeah. You're so neat, Andrew. This is such a cool [00:45:00] conversation and I'm gonna have to follow up with an email too, because I wanna know I do, am interested in your pastor story.

Yeah. So I'll have to follow up with you on that one. But before we hop off, I gotta know how SEO has changed. Oh 

Andrew Ansley: yeah. 

Crystal Waddell: Pre 2022. 

Andrew Ansley: Sure. 

The Evolution of SEO

Andrew Ansley: So the, in 2018, if you Google entity, SEO, my article on search engine land pops up. So that's like for people who are interested I think it's ranks number one right now, so you should be able to find it easily.

But it's, the concept is this, before 2018, Google had not even a pretend understanding of content. What they had was keyword matching. And it was very rudimentary. It was like all right, what I could do back in the day was, I'm just going to, in white text somewhere on the footer, I'm gonna put the word, how to train a pet or a puppy.

If I wanna rank for that 40 times, I'm gonna stuff the heck out of it. Whatever, that, that's okay. Must be super relevant, and then Google was like, all right we'll [00:46:00] prioritize what's at the top of the page. All right. I'll just. Put it hidden somewhere on the top of the page.

Understanding Google's Algorithms

Andrew Ansley: And then in 2018 there was a switch where it switched to semantics. There was a thing called RankBrain that came out. RankBrain was designed to un to understand. It was an algorithm specifically applied to the 15% of queries that Google had never seen before. And then there was something called Bert as well.

And that actually is the reason why AI is where it's at. Now, Google created I'm not even gonna go into the algorithm, but it created something called Bert. And it was incredible. It absolutely changed the game. It allowed you to create your own search engines. It allowed like this new flourishing of like computers could understand, takes a while for that to develop though.

So in 2022, maybe a little bit earlier could have been as early as 2020. But I started to really notice that the actual quality of content, people will always point out that you can still spam and win, and there's all these black hat haters for this methodology. But now [00:47:00] it's not just create good content, but it's create content that is specifically just like humans learn in a specific way.

Machines learn in a specific way. So this new way is how do you have headers and headers act as like flags that you're setting in the ground for the topic. Google has a very specific thing that it wants you to open up with a specific word. So if it says how to train a puppy the first sentence should be to train a puppy.

You do this very definitive fact, this to that. So short sentences to reduce complexity, easy grammar to reduce complexity. If you have a header which is indicating something important, make sure you address it really quickly. And then if you have multiple data formats, that's that, contextualizes it further.

So an image visual that's basically just saying the same thing is that header did maybe a table that's also another like data format, schema markup, another data format. Bold lists, numbered lists, all of these different things. You're trying to unpack things. [00:48:00] You're giving examples, you're trying to apply it in different contexts.

All of this now is solidifying the understanding and increasing the confidence in, for Google what your topic is. You just have to balance out readability and balance usefulness with the user. 

User Metrics and SEO Success

Andrew Ansley: 'cause ultimately a lot of the algorithm is this is another way it changed by the way, is user metrics.

And I'll end with the user metric piece 'cause that's actually the most important one. But so that's the main like entity semantics. Okay, now I can understand content. Alright, last piece is Google. Now is they actually use because of mobile phones, really, so much of the internet now is mobile based.

It's mobile first indexing. Everything is based off of the mobile phone. So Google's actually, and there's lots of code on the web. There's JavaScript, there's HTML, there's CSS, there's, react, there's all sorts of things. And a lot of code is hard for Google to read because of processing power.

But I don't know if you know this, but Google's actually using our devices to process the internet for us. So when you go to a [00:49:00] webpage and it has JavaScripts, it now is what is that called? Crowdsourcing It. Crowdsource it. So I I believe I'm, I won't get the exact statistic right, but something like 2% of the world's JavaScript was w was indexed by Google.

Maybe six years ago we're at a hundred percent or something. It's 99% now because it has our phones and anytime it can just use them. And it that came out because of the lawsuit. They got sued multiple times. And even though things are redacted, ultimately what we've discovered is it is measuring it.

It has a lot of access to your phone, it has a lot of access to everything you're doing. So here's what all you need to do to satisfy somebody. I'll end it with this is, it's not about it's not about getting someone to stay on your webpage to satisfy a query. It's about not having them go back to Google.

' cause ultimately, if they were on their search journey, did they end that search journey on your site? If it was 10 seconds, I [00:50:00] don't care. But did, was it satisfied? Yeah, cool. Then that's exactly why you would want to write the answer at the top and try to get like front load all the value. That's how it's working now.

A ton of user metrics, you, that's why it's make content for users and then a lot of understanding how to like structure content in a way that just be bots like, and because there's so much AI content out there now, a lot of this comes down to can you, if you're saying the same thing, are you saying it in a way that where they can understand it easier, therefore cheaper.

Okay, I'll, because of their scale, even little fractions of cheaper can be billions of dollars of saved money. So as long as you meet minimum thresholds of authority, users are liking it and you're saying almost the same thing as somebody else. If those other things, the users like it more and we will say it's cheaper, you win.

And that's what it's down to now is just those elements.

Crystal Waddell: Okay, so that was a great definition of helpful content too, by the way. If you're wondering like what the heck helpful content is [00:51:00] just go back and listen to see what Andrew just said about all those different things that you can have on your page. Just a super quick follow up because Yeah, I noticed in that conversation, I don't know, I don't think it was Bill Slosky.

I'm not sure who that is. I wanted to look him up. You mentioned him, but the man that you were speaking with that kind of invented topical authority, was that the guy you were having like, that really long conversation with? Okay. There was a point in the conversation where he mentioned something about if you're in a losing.

I don't know, like a, just in the losers bracket or whatever for a site. It doesn't matter like how good all of those other things are. Yeah. And I was wondering if you could explain that to just a little bit more, because I didn't fully understand like what made a winner and what made a loser in terms of like how to get to the winner's bracket.

Topical Authority in SEO

Andrew Ansley: Yeah, so his whole thing is topical authority is I touched on part of topical authority, but ultimately it's about consistency and historical metrics. And I think this is when people think get things, they misapply [00:52:00] historical context. They think age domain, that's no. When the algorithm changed, it's no longer just, oh this domain has been around since 1990, so of course they're gonna rank.

No, it's actually more it's more about those core algorithm updates. So if people experience those, I love core algorithm updates. Those are moments where things change. And if you're doing the right things, which, if, here's the things like if we know how bots, this isn't how just Google understands content.

This is literally just how the science of bots work. That's why we know this works no matter what core algorithm happens, is we know that Google has said they prioritize good content and we know that they, it's trying to shift more to content, content. And not just on a page level, but the algo leak.

I released something on search engine land about the, I read through the 14,000 pieces of a, of the algorithm leak and I wrote a piece on that and that there's something called embeddings. And the idea is, and I could show think of it [00:53:00] as like a bunch of little dots on a map. 'cause this is how you visualize it using a tool called TensorFlow.

And basically the density of, you'll have a bunch of little dots that represent a top, and if the dots are darker colored. It literally just means that this is how Google sees your site. It means that, okay, and they're clustered like this tightly instead of just like these could be individual nodes, right of topics.

This, my whole fist being like 50 topics and creating a very dense web of this, they've covered the topic versus a site that does this. Who's gonna win? It's this site that's gonna win. And that's what Google's looking for. So you become a winner by creating you have to avoid cannibalization, which means writing things using different URLs to target something that Google just wants to be a single URL.

But you create these topics and you need to bridge them together using internal links and basically saying, this is how they segue together, this context to this context. And you just keep on creating that. So if you have 30 articles that are deeper Corey talks about [00:54:00] three things. You can go deeper, faster.

Or oh man, what was the other one? There's deeper, oh, deeper, faster, wider. Those are the three things you can do. So you can cover a wider range. You can go just with a single cluster, like maybe 20, 30 articles and go much deeper and process it much better. And then you can just like continually process faster.

You're doing a ton of content, but you become a winner ultimately by over time, every three month segment you are measuring positively where you don't have these negative, these negatives. And the longer you push back that negativity, whatever you are, whatever smack down you experience, whatever Google didn't like about you the more you can have that positive stuff.

I would say generally I haven't seen a site need longer than a year, so you have three to four algorithm updates. Which is three nine months to 12 months. You can totally change a site around and the site's identity and all that stuff. But ultimately, this is the sucky thing, especially with the revolving door of agencies.

So much of what's happening is [00:55:00] actually, okay, once we hit that core algorithm update and maybe say, let's say the agency left, right? And then the algorithm they were doing everything great. Then there was a core algorithm update and maybe the agency was there for just long enough where now it takes off and the company's I don't even need an agency.

Skip two, six months. A lot of us have experienced this, a lot of business owners, oh, why is it going down? You no longer have the historical metrics anymore. Like we've now measured another core algorithm update one or two and that's no longer happening and that's why you're dipping.

Even if you hired another agency, they might. Actually be decent, but still not doing as good, and you're gonna experience an abnormal drop just because of that quality, that success that you were like, labeled as there's a reshifting that happens. 

Practical SEO Tips

Andrew Ansley: So that's what, how you get like recategorized is you have to write good content in the way that I described.

You have to maintain it over time. You have to target the right things, and you have to have users that actually good user metrics, scores. And you could do [00:56:00] that by all sorts of things. You could do multimedia content in your content. You could build a tool calculators in the mortgage industry.

This is how they did it, but try to satisfy it. I tell people that basically the way to do this now is think about could chat GPT give this to them? What is different about my website? Can I give them something that chat, GPT alone can't. That's gonna mean I need images, I need tools, I, there's more required now to win if you're doing for local SEO is almost entirely a joke to me.

It's like a black hat heaven. You can just like game the algorithm pretty easily. But yeah, that's, hopefully that answers it. It's not, I'm not as good as Kray, so I'm not gonna be able to know the exact way to do this. But he can just he treats Google like a, it's this instrument. He just can do whatever with it and knows how to play every note.

It's amazing. 

Crystal Waddell: I love your breakdown, so I appreciate that very much. 

Resources and Final Thoughts

Crystal Waddell: Now, for the listeners of this podcast in my audience who would be a good fit for, what you do? Or is there a specific place that you'd [00:57:00] like to send people who are listening right now, especially entrepreneurs and small business owners?

Andrew Ansley: Yeah, so I think the best spot is probably. My school group if you are interested in AI at all, I'd say that right now you don't need, there's a lot of things where you don't need to pay a monthly subscription for anymore. I think you just need to understand that as long as you have the proper frameworks, then, and use what I showed today with Claude.

You can do, you could probably cut a couple AI tools out of the budget. You might still want one, but ultimately, I think people who want that kind of thing, yeah, go to my school group. That's why I have templates. I'm not trying to like reinvent the wheel. What I want is I've done the work I've.

I've got gathered all these templates for, I have 25 different ways of doing copywriting. There's the PAS, there's the BAB, there's a IDA, there's the C, there's the one plus four there. There's all these, there's the story method, there's all these different methods. And as long as you have those templates, you [00:58:00] just put plug 'em into the AI and say, Hey, use this template.

I like that version. Try maybe I'll try this version like, so school and it's AI marketeers. Lemme see if I have the right url. It's it is school.com/masterclass. Masterclass marketing. So school, duck school with A-K-S-K-O-O-L, masterclass, marketing. And otherwise you can follow me on YouTube.

You can follow me on Facebook. That's probably the best places to, to follow me. 

Crystal Waddell: Okay, awesome. I will definitely put all of those links in the show notes, so if that's something that you're interested in, you can find links directly to those places and resources below. So Andrew, thank you very much for joining me today on the simple smart SEO show.

I know I feel smarter and just more encouraged with what's going on in the world of ai. And I really appreciate you coming to chat with us today. 

Andrew Ansley: Of course. Thanks for having me. This was fun. 

Crystal Waddell: Thanks. I said us, like me, myself, and I, and all my personalities are over here.