AI Tips for SEO and Adding Personality to Your Content with Rachel Hernandez
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I'll have ChatGPT come up with different jokes or puns. We did a bunch of Taylor Swift puns when she released her last album. We've done some Beyonce puns and movie puns and things like that. And that's something I would love to take a day and come up with on my own, but I don't have the time. So ChatGPT is great for that more unstructured stuff.

Welcome to Authentic AI for Entrepreneurs, the podcast that shows you how to leverage the power of AI technology without wasting your time or selling your soul. Let's embrace making AI work for you.

Hey, hey, my human friend, and welcome to Authentic AI Podcast. I'm your host, Kinsey, and today we have an awesome guest to share with you. Her name is Rachel, and we nerd out about different things when it comes to AI tools. We talk about SEO and AI, how to make sure that you're using these tools without sacrificing your brand.

And also she dishes up a few fun tips for how to get puns that land with your audience using ChatGPT. So I know you're going to love this combo as much as I did. If you do, make sure you leave us five stars or a friendly review on whatever podcast platform you're listening to us on, because it really will help us to continue growing our Authentic AI audience and just spread that Authentic AI message. All right, let's go ahead and dive in.

Hi, Rachel. Thank you so much for coming on Authentic AI for Entrepreneurs. I'm so excited to bring you on the show, lady. I am so excited to be here. I think this is going to be a really fun conversation. Oh, yes. It is always fun when we get to geek out about AI tools and all that jazz. But before we dive into all things AI, can you please just share who are you? Tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah. I'm Rachel. I'm Rachel.

I'm the director of marketing for NextNet Media, the parent company of seven brands in the SEO space. If you've heard of The Hoth or Authority Builders or LinkBuilder.io, they're the companies I do marketing for. I usually will say like I market marketing. And many of our clients too are entrepreneurs and people who are trying to grow their businesses. So definitely understand so many of the challenges and definitely some of the successes that

people who are really trying to make their own way. And I think really exciting. Yes, I love that. And yeah, we are on the same page. And I can't wait to hear how you're using AI. I will be honest, I have not heard of the Hoth before we scheduled the interview. Is that a Star Wars reference? No, if I said it was, I think Disney would sue us. So it's actually it's an acronym. It stands for hit him over the head.

When the founders, we were founded in 2010. The idea was, I think the phrase they used was to bludgeon with awesomeness. So the name stuck, but it's actually pretty fun because we do have that Star Wars. Even though my Google alerts sometimes I'm like, oh, wait, this is not about us.

We have a very cool red monster called the Hoth Monster who represents our brand. And that's actually been a really great asset for us. Even if they don't remember the name, they're like, oh, you're the company with the big red monster. Yeah.

Yes. I love this. The branding nerd in me is excited. But this conversation is about AI tools. So we'll move over to that way. I always like to kick off the conversations by just asking, how did you start dipping your toes into the world of AI? What did that look like for you? You know, I think people are like, oh, these past few years, AI, it's been there. When you're using a Grammarly tool or...

Google Docs and it's telling you that maybe you should write something a certain way. Like that's generative AI. But really the big thing, even before Chachi PT and even Jasperly getting all of its funding is I do a lot of content creation for the brands that I work for. I'm in charge of all of our content marketing. One of the first tools that I use to help us optimize our content for search engines

was a software called ClearScope. And so very similar to other softwares like Surfer SEO, but I used to do all of these things manually where I try to figure out how to get a piece of content to rank. I would take the keyword I wanted

to rank for and I would manually look at all the pieces of content that Google was ranking and then have a whole spreadsheet where I'd say, okay, it's this long talking about this and it has this many images. So QueerScope actually does that. I'm like totally plugging them, but it's just a great software. So what it essentially does is it takes a look at the top

35 rankings for whatever you want to rank for and gives you all of the commonalities. So not only what Google is ranking for this term, but also how to make it better and higher. And that was sort of like, yeah, yeah. Super useful tool. Yeah.

You're trying to optimize your site for search engine rankings, which any person who's starting a business should be doing. And then about three years ago, my company acquired Copymanic AI, which is a generative AI tool made for marketers. So I've been playing around with it forever. And it gives you like outlines. It can do long form content for you. It can translate.

like something you've written into a marketing formula. So it's very, very useful. It can even like build a website for you. And then of course, ChatGPT, I'm playing around with that. Like I use it every day. It's definitely something that I think is absolutely useful. The nature of generative AI is it just gets better and better. It's just going to continue to evolve. So even though I would say a lot of its output at this point is

kind of trash. I think it's really good to get familiar with it now because it's just going to get smarter. So when it comes to tools, there are so many tools out there and then AI tools on top of that. And so I love hearing about specific tools from people and getting your opinion on what specific things you love and what ones you're using and stuff like that. Let's start with the SEO one. I actually hadn't heard of that one yet. What's ClearScope? Yep. ClearScope

If you're interested in marketing content or content marketing or SEO in general, they're a great company to follow. They do a lot of really good webinars and some great papers and things like that. So yeah, I mean, essentially it does what I think AI is usually supposed to do. Take something that...

would take you an hour to do manually and does it in a few minutes for you. And yeah, it gives a very great outline to just how to structure everything. You don't want to rely on AI completely for your content creation or even your structure. But it is really nice to have that jumping off point and the data too. It's essentially giving you data

for you to work off of. That's so great. Just a few like questions about like some of the specific stuff. So I know you said you started with the ClearScope one. Is that a tool that you're still using for the SEO stuff? Or have you tried other ones? And also follow up question real quick, because I know you work for a slightly bigger company. And one of those things that I always notice about AI tools too is, okay, was this made for one of those enterprise companies? Or was this made for someone who's smaller? So what's your take on that?

I think it's very user-friendly. A similar tool would be Surfer SEO. I think very, very similar. And I would say the difference, the prices are pretty comparable. At the end of the day, I think with a tool like that, it's really about which UX you connect with. I happen to connect with ClearScope, somebody else, make it with Surfer. But they essentially do the same things. Any entrepreneur creating content for their website, which everybody should be doing,

would find some use with this tool. It's not just for an enterprise brand like mine. Perfect. Yes, I know. It's all those like little technical questions. I'm like, oh, wait, tell me. Because I feel like choosing between certain tools, people are always like, have you tried CloudFly?

or Gemini or Chachi PT or which one do you like? Or then there's Coffee-Matic, like you were saying. There's all these different tools and they're all very similar. I think it's hard sometimes for people to choose which ones do I use. And then if they test out so many different ones, it becomes like, oh my gosh, there's so many. So tell us about

Copymatic, what specific tasks is it really great for? What would you go to that over ChachiBT or the other way around for? I love Copymatic for entrepreneurs, people who are working on marketing tasks, writing copy for their website, writing emails or virtually any sort of business writing. The big differentiator is you don't need to worry so much about the prompting. Even though I'm using it all the time, my big struggle with ChachiBT still is

is it can be complicated to figure out exactly what to put into the chat GPT machine to get what you actually want. Copymanic does that initial first step for you. It really understands the outputs that you're looking for, depending on what kind of content you want it to create. So that to me, it's, I think, a great entry level to streamline their marketing assets and their content creation.

Chat GPT, I think, is a little different. I think that's something that's a little bit more Wild West. So curious about... I think because I know you said already that a lot of the AI output can be crap, which we definitely all know. We've all seen those AI cliches. My listeners have heard me say this on the podcast. I'm like, if I get one more email with a subject line, unlock the power of and a rocket emoji. Oh my God. So...

How is Copymatics when it comes to that? Because that's one of those things, too. I hear what you're saying about sometimes it being hard to prompt ChatGPT. But then I also feel like I like ChatGPT because I do have control over that stuff in a way. What are your thoughts on that? I think it's just depending on what kind of content.

you're creating and how familiar you are with using these AI tools. It's interesting. Copy Manic won't do the cliched rocket. I know exactly what you're talking about. It gets spotted a mile away. It does not pass the sniff test, which is not good. You don't want to alienate people with your marketing. That's pretty much the opposite of what

you're trying to do when you're creating that content. I'll use ChatGPT for things like you're seeing like a little bit more unstructured. We talked about this a little bit more before we got on the call, but I like to use ChatGPT for different variations. One of my favorite things to use it for because I'm a pretty wordy person in general and was like, make it shorter. So good for things like that. I like to use it for variations for A-B testing or...

If I've been saying the same thing the same way over and over again, I'll say like, give me 20 variations on this thing that are 10 words or less. And also like, please take all the emojis out of it. And I think it's really useful for that. I'll use it for, we do like a lot of sort of cheeky humor. Our audience is mostly millennial at this point. Nostalgia is like a really great way to connect with

Monty will use her maze. I'll have ChatGPT come up with different jokes or puns. We did a bunch of Taylor Swift puns when she released her last album. We've done some Beyonce puns and movie puns and things like that. And that's something I would love to like take a day and come up with on my own, but I don't have the time. So ChatGPT is great for that more unstructured stuff. The longer form content, it does not pass at this point. Oh,

Oh my gosh. Okay. We have to come back to the puns and the emojis and stuff for sure. I also wanted to comment on your way of using it for variations and stuff like that. I love that. And how you said, take this 20 word thing and make it 10 words, like giving it those specific instructions. I do that all the time too. And also it's making me laugh too, because I will often do that with the stuff that ChatGPT writes for me, right? The first thing it sends you is so flowery and I'm like,

Oh, this is horrible. But also something I wanted to share that I do is so I will often, especially with social media captions and stuff like that, I'll have it right in my brand voice, you know, after training it on my brand and stuff. But it's still usually a little bit too like overly wordy, like the entire piece. Right. So then I'll say make it more straightforward and.

and like straight to the point and stuff. And it'll rewrite it that way. And then I'll compare the two. And like, I'm not going to have Chet GPT even rewrite it because that would take time and I'd get frustrated. But then...

I'll pull bits and pieces from both pieces of copy that it wrote for me. And that's what ends up being the end caption. And that's how I found. And I love having it do like more ways to say this. Yeah. So like if we want to send, let's say, like an email campaign out and I'm trying to test different subject lines, for instance, I think Chachi Beachy is really great for that.

We do a lot of paid advertising at my company. So we'll do variations on different headlines or graphic text and things like that. Just those little things that would take somebody maybe an hour to come up with something good. I love what you're saying where you're like, okay, like I can piece this together because I do think that content in general writing is primarily editing. So it is nice when you have that.

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DIY with dot AI slash reels and start showing up on Instagram consistently today. Kind of starting off being where you can formulate it into what actually makes sense and connects to you. Totally. Yeah. It's so funny that you brought up the editing thing. I've been talking about this a lot lately. It's that editing and revising is a skill.

we aren't really taught in school unless you're like me and went to school for communications and worked at the college newspaper and stuff. But like, I've had people ask me, how can I help my team members learn how to use these tools better? And I'm like, well, firstly, of course, I'm like, there's all the guidelines and all that different stuff, but also helping them with their editing skills is going to become a more valued skill set moving forward with these types of tools. Would you agree? I love that. Yeah, absolutely. And that's actually an angle that I haven't

really thought about that much yet when it comes to using these tools, at least specifically in that manner. I'm a reader and a writer and Stephen King has his own writing memoir. One of the big things he really does is touch on is like the actual part of writing where you like get into a sort of flow state and get to the point where you're actually making a real connection to some sort of meaning is in that editing stage. And again, Chachi Bhutti is going to get better. The writing at

it puts out because it's just being trained over and over again the more we use it better it's going to get and so like that editing piece i think you're right is going to be like where the magic happens at some point and it's going to be necessary because also its nature is just its derivative it's content that's already existing that's how the model works you might not even actually own that content if you're hosting it just as it is okay

I want to dive a little bit deeper into subject lines because this is, I think you probably already got that feeling from me, but this is one of those pain points, pain in my butt points that always gets me, especially like with AI tools and stuff, the subject lines, man. It's just really hard to get it to not use a fricking semicolon to like, it's like,

Those things, subject lines especially are those things that like are so easy to pick out written by AI and stuff. So do you have any tricks that you use when it comes to that sort of stuff? Oh my goodness. I think it does just go back into the editing thing. I'll ask for angles and I,

really rarely publish or use something that I don't keep touching but it is nice to have those variations spat out at you and then there are some things it'll say where I might not have thought to put it in that certain way or to reach somebody in a certain way but the writing itself is still not good yeah and not

That's okay. That's okay. These are tools. You still need that human element. And I know people are afraid of AI, like stealing jobs from creatives, but there's always going to have to be a tastemaker. There is always going to have to be somebody who's able to look at this and say whether or not it truly connects. And there has to be somebody who looks at it and says, this is a cliche, like the semicolon or...

the rocket ship emoji, etc. Another thing that just came up for me too, that I've been doing a lot with the AI stuff, I especially for my brand, I really like using like kind of those like, I like swapping like kind of generic descriptive words for like wordsmithing, like big hyphenated word or like describing the moment, the experience or something instead of just using a descriptive word, like do you feel overwhelmed? Or have you

been banging your head against the keyboard or things like that. But with AI, you know, sometimes I can have chat GPT brainstorm those things for me, like the everyday experiences, which I love doing because it's like, because I'm like, you see me chat GPT. Like it really is okay at that stuff, actually, when you get, when you know the question to ask it. But

I also will see those boring subject lines and it gives me a great starting point. But then I'll be like, how can I describe overwhelmed in this moment or something? Like, how could I describe this instead? And like, that's been helpful for me just in chat, TV, copy in general, I think. Yeah. Going back to what you were just saying is bad subject lines, bad writing, bad.

Overuse of emojis all existed before chat GPT. Chat GPT has just made it really easy for people to produce a lot of inauthentic content really quickly. It has not given us the ability to publish great content quickly. It's still this fledgling tool. But these things have always, like I see so many chat GPT posts, especially like on LinkedIn,

in or like on ads and Facebook and meta and things like that or social media posts for companies. I was like, what does this remind me of? Like this feels very familiar. And it struck me that it feels like when somebody that you like went to high school or college with joined an MLM and they're trying to get you to join. I think this is the same exact energy. And it's super alienating, I think, because it is inauthentic. You got to have that like human element or human connection with it. And

And I don't think even, you know, as strong as it gets, it's never going to have that. It's still at the end of the day, a derivative tool that's taking content that's been there and is spinning it out based on what it thinks is going to be most popular, which is not a good way to market because you want to differentiate yourself and connect with your user. Oh, that's so interesting. I love that we're taking the conversation here and it's really just so funny. I loved the MLM. I'm like, it's like the freaking

a freaking faceless marketing on Instagram. I'm like, oh, whatever. But like, I love thinking about the energy behind a post. And this is what I've actually talked about for years with my sister brand, Feel Good Social. And then like now thinking about this with AI tools, I went through a phase. OK, you know how you go through like the ups and downs in your life and you're like, OK, May was a hard one for me. I was just like surviving, you know, and like now

Now I'm back to like thriving or at least feeling more creative in my business. Right. And I've been having fun with the copy. Am I still using Chachi Bihi? Heck yeah, I am. And at the same time, I've really been just like having fun adding my own little twists, adding my own little Kinsey-isms to like this stuff. And I feel like it's coming through in my content and more people are engaging and stuff. And so yeah,

I've been using the ChatGPT AI tools and it has really been saving me time. Because let me tell you, it used to take me an hour to write an Instagram caption. Now it takes me more like 15 minutes. So 45 minutes saved per caption. That's still pretty good. And I'm still getting my Kinsey-isms in, right? Exactly. Yeah, and that's the thing. It's funny. I always think about that. I'm like, I could write...

like a 3,000 word post or like a huge white paper. And then when it comes time to promote it on social media, I'm like, what is the caption going? Thank you. It's all about leaning into our strengths and where our creativity thrives and then using...

the tools where we need to use them, where we need a little bit of help too. Like that's such a great point. Okay. I would love to talk more about specifics when it comes to the puns and just like jokes and quirks. And also, you know, the nostalgia and millennial stuff, because here's the thing. Tell us your secrets when it comes to getting the stuff that actually hits, right? Because sometimes when you're just trying to get Chetchu P'Hee, when you're like, my audience is millennials, it goes way the hell overboard.

with or like nostalgic. I'm like, no, I need you to sprinkle it in. I don't need you to completely make my business about NSYNC, right? Like, so what is like your process with that? Well, I'll give like the context to one of them too. As a lot of marketing teams, I feel around the end of the year is like I am also victimized by the Spotify wrapped phenomenon. And so we do have to come up with something every year.

And we were trying to figure out because everybody has been doing the same thing recently where they're like, okay, like these facts about our business. I'm like, okay, that's, you know, but like not that much fun. So we did do a little of that, but then we were like, okay, what if we came up with like a list of the top songs of the year, but like inserted some digital marketing puns in them. I think it took a little while and it really goes back to what we were talking about where it was just like, give me 10 things.

popular songs right now and put SEO puns in them. And then the first batch were not that good. And then you just get more and more specific. So it's, can you make them shorter? Can you make them talk about this specific element of SEO? Like, can you, and we're just sort of like narrowing it down and playing with it. And again, like doesn't get it right on the first time, but certainly takes a shorter amount of time than I was just to sit there and do that all day. So we just kept feeding it prompts and kept saying, okay,

We'll do one for Beyonce and do one for Taylor Swift and do one for this or that. They're groundbreaking, but I think that's the kind of thing that I like to use it for because it's not something where I have to sacrifice the voice of my brand or have it take over that. It's really just doing some thinking for me in a way that is not, I don't have to work harder and I'm also not losing anything by publishing it.

Oh, I love that. Exactly. Every day it's come on, use your own critical thinking skills, use these tools to help you then keep the ball rolling, amplify it, expand it, whatever it is, but still use your own knowledge. Don't let these tools completely do the thinking for you and then iterating going back and forth. And it's exactly that. It's okay. What do I know? I love mean girls. What are mean girls quotes? Oh, what about this mean girls quote? How can I turn that specific quote into a pun? It's not just make puns.

puns, just getting more specific is so helpful. Exactly. And yeah, I love the way that you put that because you're still punning yourself.

into it, but it's not taking over your content. And I love the title of this podcast, Authentic AI, because I think that's the struggle that people are having right now. It's such an easy way out AI when it comes to creating content. But the first thing you sacrifice is authenticity. And that's just the nature of the beast. That's how the software works. But I think we all can agree that

Authenticity, especially these past few years where we've seen the rise of TikTok and we've seen Reddit like actually being included in search results and in marketing campaigns. And people want to hear from people. And even your brand or your business, in a sense, is a character. It has a voice. And you can't sacrifice it to the gods of AI completely or you're going to lose your differentiating factor. People don't buy products.

products, but they choose the products they buy based on how they associate that brand with their own principles. Oh, I love that. Thank you so much. I've loved our conversation. I can't wait to share it. Can you please tell everyone how they can connect with you and find out about all your things? Because I know they'll want to. Yeah. I mean, so if you want to see some SEO puns, you can follow the hawk.

on our social media channels. I run those campaigns. There's also some knowledge drops too. It's not all Taylor Swift jokes. And that's at the Hawk SEO. And we're on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you. This is a lot of fun.

How great was Rachel, you guys? It was just so fun to kind of geek out with another millennial. You couldn't tell. I truly love chatting with fellow down-to-earth entrepreneurs who are using AI tools in creative ways. So if you did like this episode, make sure you share it with another business friend who should also listen to it.

And while you're at it, why not leave us five stars or a friendly review on whatever podcast platform you're listening to this on, because that really will help us to keep growing our Authentic AI community. All right. I hope you have a great rest of your week and I'll catch you next time I catch you. Thank you so much for tuning in to Authentic AI for Entrepreneurs, my friend. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your shows.