From Traffic to Trust: AI, SEO, and Content Strategy with Andy Crestodina

In Part 2 of this engaging conversation with content marketing expert Andy Crestodina, we dive deeper into the evolving world of SEO, AI's growing role in content creation, and the power of collaboration. 

Andy shares insights on balancing human judgment with AI tools like Surfer SEO, creating successful local events, and leveraging original research to differentiate your brand. 

Whether you're a solo marketer, business owner, or content strategist, this episode is packed with actionable wisdom and fresh perspectives.

🧠 Key Takeaways:

• SEO as a Strategy, Not a Rulebook: SEO Tools offer suggestions, but human content strategy still rules.
• Original Research Wins: Brands should publish new, unique data yearly to stand out and build authority.
• AI in Moderation: Over-reliance on AI for full article generation often leads to lower performance; balance is key.
• Full Funnel Focus: SEO brings traffic, but converting that traffic requires UX, strategy, and storytelling.

🔥 Episode Highlights:

• "SEO is like a sailboat—AI and tools are the wind, but you decide where to go." – Andy Crestodina

🎯 Listener Action Items:

1. Incorporate Original Research: Publish one unique study or stat annually to elevate your brand authority.
2. Use AI as a Collaborator, Not a Crutch: Let SEO tools inform—not dictate—your strategy.
3. Host Micro-Events or Meetups: Start small, specific, and curated events to build your professional community.
4. Audit Your Content for Novelty: Avoid duplicating mainstream ideas; create content that adds something new.
5. Focus on UX & Funnel Completion: Don't just optimize for clicks—optimize for conversion and memorability.

Connect With Andy:

Linkedin

Orbit Media Blog

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Chapters

• 0:00 part 2 with andy crestodina
• 0:39 Introduction and Opening Remarks
• 0:48 The Power of Collaboration
• 1:29 Building Connections in the SEO Community
• 2:24 Creating Successful Local Events
• 4:19 Insights on AI in Content Marketing
• 4:52 The Role of Original Research
• 6:27 Using AI Tools for SEO
• 7:38 Balancing SEO and Content Strategy
• 13:30 Rapid Fire Questions
• 16:02 Conclusion and Farewell

Transcript

[00:00:00] Andy Crestodina: I think of SEO as like a sailboat, you know? And there's wind blowing all over and you can trim the sails to catch wind and go in a direction, right?

It's like a, creates a passive source of traffic over time if it works. and I just decided not to sail in that direction. Like that's not where I'm going today.

And I use other sources of traffic. social media is a bit more like the oars You gotta work at it. 

[00:00:18] Introduction and Opening Remarks

[00:00:18] Andy Crestodina: I'll give you a trick, crystal.

I said this at a conference. I was speaking at the Creator Entrepreneur Exchange on Monday.

I shared my little, closing kind of blurb. That I write in a lot of messages. 

[00:00:27] The Power of Collaboration

[00:00:27] Andy Crestodina: "Don't hesitate to reach out if you'd ever like to collaborate on anything at all."

[00:00:31] Crystal: Yeah.

[00:00:31] Andy Crestodina: I write that so often. I got a text expander. When I type this key three times, it automatically appears. And it's led to tons of interactions and opportunities and collabs. I love it.

So let the world know

that you're open to collaborating.

[00:00:44] Crystal: This is a perfect example of that! Because you said that during your talk at Brighton and I thought, hey.

[00:00:50] Andy Crestodina: There you go.

[00:00:50] Crystal: Might as well follow up. Yeah. So it's, it's true. Yeah. And I'm glad that you were genuine. And I appreciate that very much.

To be able to have this opportunity.

Thank [00:01:00] you for paying it forward.

[00:01:01] Andy Crestodina: Always happy to help. Why wouldn't I be? Pretty much anybody wants to help others. I don't know. I'm just an optimist about that. It all works out in the end.

[00:01:08] Building Connections in the SEO Community

[00:01:08] Crystal: the SEO community has been very like fun to get to know and network within. And share ideas. I think so many people work by themselves.

Or you know, maybe even a small team at best.

Maybe they're working remote, I don't know. So to get together and talk about something that you have a mutual interest in. It's like people just light up because it's like, oh, finally I can talk about this.

And people's eyes aren't gonna glaze over.

[00:01:33] Andy Crestodina: It's important. It's, it satisfies a human need.

You're helping people when you do that. It's a kindness right? To, to build those connections. Form a mastermind group, start a little local event.

Like the interview podcast is a great idea. Here we are. Like I love it. It's

Webinars and meetups and all those things that prioritize high touching interactions. 

[00:01:52] Crystal: Yeah.

[00:01:52] Andy Crestodina: People are starving for that.

[00:01:54] Crystal: And I heard you say that before too, about the creating an event. And I thought, wow, that [00:02:00] sounds really scary. Create an event... and what if no one comes? 

[00:02:03] Creating Successful Local Events

[00:02:03] Crystal: how do you create an event that people wanna come to? Like a small local event that provides value and benefit? 

[00:02:10] Andy Crestodina: Well, there are a lot of little elements of content strategy that, that get triggered by this.

If the people you're inviting are all closely aligned, and the reason to attend the event is clear.

Then that's the r in the ROI calculation they're gonna do in their brain when they get invited.

If the event is close by, in person, but close by. Or if it's virtual.

Or if it's not weekly. Then the I is low. People do things when after doing a split second ROI calculation whether we realize it or not. So, hey, this is an event for Shopify website owners who are trying to improve revenue by improving visibility.

Wow. That's me. Wait, I need, okay, great.

I'm gonna set up a, a monthly call. It's gonna be 45 minutes. There's gonna be eight of us and we're all gonna share our best advice.

The commitment is literally just 45 minutes a month. Okay, [00:03:00] great.

The I is low, the r as high. The cost benefit calculation. I'm in. So that is the specificity of the event is a, is a plus. The, the fact that you carefully curated the attendees makes it sound exclusive. Exclusivity triggers a cognitive bias. People will be more interested in that. And literally the lift is low. It's not like a, Conference that's two grand and 3000 miles away.

Even though we met at a conference that was two grand and 3000 miles away.

[00:03:25] Crystal: Yeah.

[00:03:25] Andy Crestodina: After that happens, right?

That's the beginning of a community, and communities eventually have a completely different new spontaneous type of value that people get just from each other.

So I have a monthly meetup. It's at a bar around the corner. It's like 40 people come every month now.

It's crazy.

They're getting value from each other. So. But someone's gotta start it. And this is an opportunity for literally everyone listening to this show.

[00:03:50] Crystal: Yeah. That's very cool.

Okay, so let's talk about some of the original research that you put out from your agency. 

[00:03:58] Insights on AI in Content Marketing

[00:03:58] Crystal: Specifically like how [00:04:00] content marketers are using ai. And I know that was content marketers.

But I know that a lot of people who are listening are wearing multiple hats of business owner and content marketer.

So I was just wondering if you could share some of maybe your top insights of how people are implementing AI.

In their workflows or to help their businesses grow.

[00:04:22] Andy Crestodina: Yeah, you, you picked what is probably the best headline from a piece of research that we've done every year for 12 years. It's insane that we keep doing this. 

[00:04:31] The Role of Original Research

[00:04:31] Andy Crestodina: and as a content strategy, I highly recommend that at least once a year.

That every brand makes themselves the primary source for new information and does a research piece. Produce a statistic. Or soundbite. Something brand new.

AI can't do that. Highly differentiated.

Original research is a fantastic and very powerful addition to a content strategy.

You know, a survey of these people. Which skin types for which makeup. I dunno. You could just do so many different things.

And then get those influencers to add contributor quotes to them because that adds a lot of value. And grows your relationships. And [00:05:00] grows the reach. And grows the quality of the piece.

But you asked about the data itself. Yes. In this survey for the last three years, we've asked people how they use ai.

With things like generate ideas, write headlines, write outlines, write complete drafts, suggest edits, write complete articles.

And then we also asked the question at the end: which of the following best describes your content?

I get disappointing results. I get some results. I get strong results, or I don't know.

21% of the respondents. We had 800 some this year- report strong results from digital. Now, which percentage of the people who do these things with AI report strong results from digital?

It's super interesting because really the, the data, it's, it's like this one chart. It just jumps off the screen. People who use AI to write complete articles are less likely to report strong results.

And people who don't use AI at all are less likely to report strong results. So the suggestion that the insight is sort of: there's a use case here. It's effective.

It has value, but people who use it too much or don't use it at all are [00:06:00] sort of gonna be the, the ones who are unlikely to, to see performance.

That's a summary of that chart for sure.

[00:06:06] Crystal: That's kind of funny. 

[00:06:07] Using AI Tools for SEO

[00:06:08] Crystal: I have an anecdotal, story about something like that because in my group. With the SEO squad. We'd use surfer SEO to optimize the articles.

Oh yeah. I love surfer, love surfer. I've been an early adopter. It was back when Jasper was leading the charge of you know, AI writing.

[00:06:23] Andy Crestodina: It's an excellent point of view and it often catches things I missed and gives me ideas for how to expand on a piece. I

[00:06:28] Crystal: We'll have to touch on that real quick before we pop off.

But one of the surfer recommendations for one of the business owners in my group was an article that just. Rubbed her the wrong way.

The topic rubbed her the wrong way. The language, the keywords. All of that type of stuff.

And I tried to explain to her this is one of those examples of where it's not about you, you know, as a business owner.

Like the internet is telling you exactly what people are searching for, in order to find a product like yours.

And so you can position yourself within that. [00:07:00] And she fought it, you know, for weeks, maybe a few months. And then she finally wrote it.

In our meeting, she was just like, oh, that blog that I hate is driving traffic.

I wondered like what you thought about taking recommendations from a program like Surfer?

Mm-hmm.

[00:07:17] Balancing SEO and Content Strategy

[00:07:17] Andy Crestodina: I think this is where, similar to ai. You've got a tool and the tool is making suggestions, but you are the human content strategist that has the, that makes the final call.

So let's say I write an article. I, I worked very hard on it. I think it's comprehensive and complete.

But I'm gonna take that extra step to get, to just check to see if I missed any of these.

You call them synonyms. they're just the semantically related phrases.

So I run it through surfer and surfer recommended eight of these things. 

And I realize like, yeah, that should probably be an extra paragraph. And this, it'd be very easy to incorporate this word here. And in the closing, you know, kind of the, the summary at the bottom.

There's two or three opportunities I could put into some of these phrases. Good work. It made a difference,

Helped people discover it. No change in the topic. Other times I feel the way that she [00:08:00] did.

Because I wrote a piece about how to get AI to recommend your brand.

When I ran it through surfer, this piece, it just talked all about Google's AI overview.

My article is not about Google's AI overview. It's about it, it spans across models. So all of the surfer recommendations were things that I just didn't feel like were a fit. And I didn't like 'em. And I didn't change it.

I think of seo as like a sailboat, you know, and, and there's wind blowing all over and you can trim the sails to catch wind and go in a direction, right?

It's like a, creates a passive source of traffic over time if it works. and I just decided not to sail in that direction. Like that's not where I'm going today.

And I use other sources of traffic. social media is a bit more like the oars. You gotta work at it. But I promoted that in other channels. And I love that article.

I'm happy with it. And I, I just decided not to optimize it in that way.

You gave a great point, and I love that because it's the moment when the person decides for themselves.

And in that case, there was a a big lift from adapting the content.

Other times, really only, maybe third to half of my articles these days are optimized for search at [00:09:00] all.

I'm a content strategist. I'm not an SEO strategist. And I wanna be a full funnel marketer that focuses not just on traffic, but on conversion. SEOs, I joke are all cheese and no mouse trap. 

I'm mixing a lot of metaphors here for you, crystal.

But there's more to life than search. And traffic from any source regardless is insufficient for demand, right?

You need

to convert

the visitor as well.

[00:09:18] Crystal: Yeah. Heather Physioc was someone else that presented at Brighton a couple years ago. And her presentation stuck with me.

It was jobs to be done and jobs theory, and we just talked about it on the podcast recently.

And so of course I made a jobs to be done GPT, and so like that's what I run all of my ideas through before I put them in surfer.

And I'm teaching the Shopify people how to do that as well, because.

Like you mentioned before. There's certain elements of the page that are more UX focused than just SEO focused.

You've gotta have the social proof. You've gotta have like the search intent aligned. And who you're talking to, and extra images and maybe [00:10:00] some video.

And I love the idea of putting like original charts and graphics or comparison tables and that type of thing.

And you can do that now very quickly if you have the right framework.

I have my concept, my idea. My semantic keywords or whatever.

[00:10:16] Andy Crestodina: Yeah.

[00:10:17] Crystal: I never know the right words for this type of stuff.

And then, you know, I put it in the jobs to be done GPT,

 and then I optimize it in surfer.

And it's created some really cool stuff that I'm really proud of.

I feel like it helps kind of check the box, you know, of a lot of different things.

[00:10:34] Andy Crestodina: Yeah, I think I have an email in my inbox right now from this guy who's sending me these articles like, why doesn't this rank? And why doesn't this rank?

And he keeps sending me more.

These are we skyscraper technique. These are 10,000 word articles. And they were

working for years. And now they're not.

His, his focus is on word count.

[00:10:50] Crystal: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:51] Andy Crestodina: If that was like the main search ranking factor. Then the longest content would win. Like, it's just a weird. It's such a narrow perspective.

Google's looking for [00:11:00] novelty.

This is a fantastic video. Matt Williams Cook, I think his name is. He like found a vulnerability in Google and then

[00:11:06] Crystal: Oh

that Mark? Mark Williams?

[00:11:08] Andy Crestodina: Mark, yeah, that guy.

Did you watch that video?

I, oh, I watched yeah, when he was in, was it in Poland or something? Yeah. Okay.

he's this very understated guy.

But they were able to detect Google traffic flowing through networks. And Google has a bounty for finding vulnerabilities, and Google paid him,

after he discovered this.

[00:11:24] Crystal: Yeah.

[00:11:24] Andy Crestodina: It wasn't like shady at all.

And he was just talking about what was in the data.

It becomes clear that Google just doesn't want to have the same information and 10 times on a search results page.

And actually I think this is really relevant.

Because what is surfer doing? It's scanning the other high ranking pages.

The SEO, key phrases on there.

The semantically related phrases. De-duplicating them. Counting the frequency of them, and then comparing your content to theirs.

I don't love that part of digital. I'm sorry, but that is a little bit, let's all run toward the middle of the mainstream where content is sort of shallow and undifferentiated.

My custom [00:12:00] GPTs do things like audit content to identify, does it have unique points of view? Is there a personal angle here?

Is the content strongly supported with evidence? Is there internal links?

Is there a visual at every scroll depth? Basically, user first approach to content marketing.

Lydia Infante, who's the head of SEO for SurveyMonkey. Gave me a great quote in a contributor quote.

I learned a lot by collaborating with influencers. She said, all content needs user research. Some content needs SEO research.

[00:12:31] Crystal: Oh,

[00:12:32] Andy Crestodina: Correct, right?

[00:12:32] Crystal: Good.

[00:12:33] Andy Crestodina: I'm not writing for Google. And search is not my only channel. and

[00:12:38] Crystal: Yeah.

even if 

[00:12:38] Andy Crestodina: search worked, I care deeply about the impact on this person's life. And these things are not measurable. There's no metrics.

It's like, how memorable was this article? Did people people talk about this article? But I hear the feedback, Hey Andy, when you sent

that, we paused everything and had a meeting and talked about your article. That is. I'm on the right track.

[00:12:57] Crystal: Yeah. Oh man, I love that! [00:13:00] I knew this conversation was gonna be amazing. And it has went by so fast.

I thought I was gonna be so innovative. But then I realized a lot of podcasts do rapid fire. 

[00:13:09] Rapid Fire Questions

[00:13:09] Andy Crestodina: I've been running on too long. This has been a great conversation, but I'll be super brief, I promise.

[00:13:13] Crystal: You're awesome. The insight that you're sharing, it's so priceless for all of us. So I appreciate that.

Okay, so question number one is in your perspective. S-E-O-G-E-O-I-D-C or IDK.

[00:13:26] Andy Crestodina: A-E-O?

[00:13:28] Crystal: I should have said, or something else.

[00:13:30] Andy Crestodina: I've been calling it just AI optimization. Because I'm not really sure yet, and I hope someone settles this once and for all.

[00:13:35] Crystal: Yeah, I'll have to add that one to the list. What about SEO is dying or SEO is dead?

[00:13:40] Andy Crestodina: SEO is absolutely not dying because you can see it in your analytics. There's people visiting your site from search right now.

Zero click is total BS. Because there's people clicking through to websites right now. But the reality is that organic clickthrough rates from search have been dropping since 2019.

And the reason is that there's lots of search engine results page features.

AI [00:14:00] overviews are just the new one.

[00:14:01] Crystal: Yeah. Did you have any emotional response to the Google PR statement That even though some businesses are experiencing a drop in traffic. That they haven't really experienced that significant of a drop in clicks?

[00:14:15] Andy Crestodina: The impact is mostly to information intent queries.

People landing on articles.

Commercial intent queries are much less impacted 'cause those people are trying to get to a website. They have visit website intent.

And with that in mind, no. Because the people who are complaining complaining that an advertising platform is not giving them free traffic from visitors who didn't wanna visit a website anyway.

[00:14:36] Crystal: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:36] Andy Crestodina: What an absurd thing to be upset about. Do you complain that other ad companies don't give you free visibility? There's no confusion about

what's happening here.

[00:14:44] Crystal: What about Gemini, Perplexity, Claude Chat, GPT or something else?

[00:14:48] Andy Crestodina: ChatG PT

[00:14:50] Crystal: Best use case for AI and SEO

[00:14:52] Andy Crestodina: gap analysis. Does this URL satisfy all this visitors' information needs?

[00:14:57] Crystal: Okay. AI agents hype [00:15:00] or breakthrough?

[00:15:01] Andy Crestodina: Eventually breakthrough.

[00:15:02] Crystal: Google AI overviews good, bad, or ugly?

[00:15:06] Andy Crestodina: Good for humans. It's a, it's the answer you're looking for. It's a positive upgrade to the internet. The people that didn't wanna visit a website shouldn't have to visit a website. You got your answer. Same as people also ask boxes.

[00:15:17] Crystal: Jobs in SEO that AI is most likely to take in 2026.

[00:15:22] Andy Crestodina: Hmm. Software developers.

[00:15:24] Crystal: Ooh. Jobs least likely to be taken.

[00:15:27] Andy Crestodina: content strategists.

[00:15:28] Crystal: And finally, best AI powered app for SEO that no one knows about.

[00:15:33] Andy Crestodina: Hmm. It's the, the custom I built last week.

[00:15:37] Crystal: Ha ha. I love it. I'm gonna follow up afterwards. Can I have a link to that Custom GPT? 

[00:15:42] Conclusion and Farewell

[00:15:42] Crystal: So, Andy Crestodina, thank you so much for joining me today. This conversation was 

[00:15:46] Andy Crestodina: amazing!

I

enjoyed it.

[00:15:48] Crystal: Thanks for being here on the Simple and Smart SEO show podcast. I'll drop all your links in the show notes, so if people want to follow you and connect with you, they can do that.

Is there any specific place you'd like me to send them?

[00:15:59] Andy Crestodina: [00:16:00] This is the research piece we were talking about.

[00:16:02] Crystal: Awesome. Okay, well thank you so much. Hope you have a great weekend.

[00:16:05] Andy Crestodina: great. I know. What a great Friday. Thanks,

Crystal! Let's touch, okay?

[00:16:08] Crystal: All right. Will do!