Guest: Jeff Coyle, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at MarketMuse
Hosts: Seth Earley, CEO at Earley Information Science
Chris Featherstone, Sr. Director of AI/Data Product/Program Management at Salesforce
Published on: March 22, 2022
In this episode, Seth Earley and Chris Featherstone sit down with Jeff Coyle, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at MarketMuse and co-founder of Silver Bluff Brewing in South Georgia. Jeff traces his career from studying information retrieval at Georgia Tech through leading SEO strategy for over 200 websites at TechTarget, to co-founding MarketMuse after discovering his co-founder had compressed a 30-hour manual topic modeling process down to four minutes with better results. The conversation covers the technical SEO foundations that most organizations ignore until it costs them dearly, why publishing low-quality content is a time bomb for brand sites, how topic authority actually works as a site-section-and-topic-combination problem, how AI is transforming every stage of the content lifecycle, and why bringing SEO teams and editorial teams to believe in each other's mission is the single biggest unlock in the industry.
Key Takeaways:
Insightful Quotes:
"Don't ask them to marry you with your content. Don't expect to go right to the bottom of the funnel and get leads and sales immediately. And don't expect great content to just appear out of a black box. Those are the three most fundamental outcomes of bad choices in content right now." - Jeff Coyle
"If you don't have, if you're not there at the beginning of the funnel, you don't deserve to be at the bottom of the funnel. Early stage awareness content on this topic, on this topic for beginners, on this topic for experts, on this topic for each specific industry - in order to truly achieve your audience on one topic at one stage, you may need many titles of content to tell the story." - Jeff Coyle
"The businesses that are bringing editorial and SEO teams together are the ones that are going to win. Whoever figures that out will win this space - because when you bring editorial and SEO together and they actually believe in each other's mission, beautiful things happen." - Jeff Coyle
Tune in to hear Jeff explain how the Silver Bluff Brewing Mexican lager ranking number one on Google became his favorite internal case study for showing clients how to build topic authority from scratch, why he calls himself the Santa Claus of SEO (people send him things they should not), and why asking a great writer to do keyword research is like asking a great chef if they also farm.
Links:
Thanks to our sponsors:
Podcast Transcript: AI and Content Strategy - Topic Authority, Technical SEO Foundations, and the Future of Human-AI Collaboration in Editorial
Transcript introduction
This transcript captures a conversation between Seth Earley, Chris Featherstone, and Jeff Coyle covering the full architecture of data-driven content strategy - from technical SEO foundations and why platform migrations cause lasting site damage, to how AI tools are transforming every stage of the content lifecycle from research through briefing to optimization, and why the companies that will win in search are those that finally unite their SEO and editorial teams around a shared understanding of topic authority.
Transcript
Seth Earley: Welcome to today's podcast. I'm Seth Earley.
Chris Featherstone: And I'm Chris Featherstone. It's good to be with you.
Seth Earley: Before we get started, I wanted to give a shout out to our sponsors - Simpler Media, which is CMSWire, the Marketing AI Institute, and of course Earley Information Science. Today our guest is a man who is obsessed with SEO. Early in his career he's been involved with search engine optimization and content marketing. He's a consummate process optimizer and a lover of craft beers. Please welcome to the show - co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at MarketMuse - Jeff Coyle.
Jeff Coyle: Thanks Seth. Hey, how are you doing? And Chris, how are you doing?
Chris Featherstone: That was not a golf clap either. If I could, I would really be clapping loud. Maybe Sharon can put some applause in the background - like those old soundboards. I'm getting a soundboard so we can do that kind of stuff, Jeff, so when you hit it, it sounds like you're at the Academy Awards.
Jeff Coyle: You need to get an automated AI soundboard that has buttons that knows what you will say.
Chris Featherstone: Exactly. That's actually what I've done for a lot of years with speech and NLP. As soon as you say "hey, thanks for joining the show" - boom - it goes.
Seth Earley: Predictive analytics.
Jeff Coyle: If you have any anecdotes that you always tell, like all these stories where you're like "okay I set up for the story" - and then it's the one-minute discussion about how AI will change the world.
Chris Featherstone: Before we get into the super fun meat of what you do day to day, let's talk about your craft beers.
Jeff Coyle: Yes, all right.
Seth Earley: I saw it in the notes and I was like - wait, we didn't talk about this.
Jeff Coyle: You've done some research on me. I love it.
Chris Featherstone: I want to know - where are you based?
Jeff Coyle: I'm in Jacksonville, Florida, but I recently moved from the Golden Isles of Georgia - that's St. Simons, Sea Island, Brunswick, et cetera. I'm back and forth, it's about an hour away.
Chris Featherstone: How do you create and win an award for a Mexican lager being where you are in the US?
Jeff Coyle: Great question. For those who don't know, I'm the co-founder of MarketMuse, but I'm also the co-founder of a production brewery in South Georgia. We started around 2017 and opened mid-2020 of all times. It is both a retail beer garden taproom as well as a production distribution facility. How do you win? Well, that's our number one beer.
Chris Featherstone: I just want to know what makes it a Mexican lager. Do you put the worm in it?
Jeff Coyle: What I'll say is - perfect setup for this conversation. If you type in "what is Mexican lager" or "Mexican lager" - guess whose site you're going to find. Silver Bluff is that brewery. Mexican lager is a little bit of an enigmatic term. It references when folks came from Eastern Europe and Central Europe - primarily Germany and Austria - and taught the Mexicans how to brew in the European way. A lot of the original beers created were a Vienna lager style, which is a little darker amber. Then commercial interests moved production beers in Mexico toward what they call Claras, like a Corona. I love the whole sphere of that style. We make one that's right down the middle of the Clara and the Vienna, and it's just awesome. We won the 2020 silver medal at the 2020 US Open. That continues to be our winner. We have about a hundred production releases and ship about five of them throughout Georgia.
Seth Earley: Nice. Let's talk a little bit about your path together - and specifically, you and I met at the Marketing AI Conference. At that time I remember going to that conference and thinking this is just going to be a bunch of marketing folks who know nothing about AI. I was very pleasantly surprised about the depth, detail, knowledge, and expertise. I actually got three case studies from my book, The AI-Powered Enterprise, directly out of that conference.
Jeff is in that book, and the reason why is because MarketMuse has great technologies and approaches for leveraging knowledge graphs, ontologies, predictive analytics, and content scoring to do SEO at scale with truly incredible effectiveness. Why don't we talk a little bit about your background?
Jeff Coyle: So I went to college at Georgia Tech for computer science. When I was in school I was really fascinated by both user interface design - the Jeff Raskins and Jacob Nielsens of the world - and also the earliest versions of search engines and how they work. Information retrieval, search engine design. At the time it was very rudimentary text search, and the basics of information retrieval.
To this day, I will make a lot of people roll their eyes: the biggest knowledge gap in search engine optimization is that people don't know the difference between information retrieval, query analysis, and how search engines work fundamentally. I'm constantly trying to separate these vocabulary words.
I started working at a company called Knowledge Storm. I was a junior in college, internship. Funny story I don't normally tell - I got back from a study abroad trip before the other interns started. I had a one-week head start. I heard the head of BD and the head of product talking about wishing they had a good competitive analysis. Four days into the job, I dropped a hundred-page competitive analysis on their desk. I became head intern. True story. The guy whose desk I put that on was my mentor and has been my mentor for 23 years. His name is Jeff Ramager - he now runs an amazing agency for content strategy called Brand.
Seth Earley: You didn't wait until the other interns got there. You were like - jump on it, let's get ahead.
Jeff Coyle: I wish we had this. I was like, boom, you got it. And it was really good. So what we were doing was selling leads to software companies, and the way we did that was convincing them to put content on the internet.
Seth Earley: This internet thing?
Jeff Coyle: We were like: hey, IBM, you've got white papers - put them on the internet and people will give you their information to download them. We turned that into a website network of partnerships, 240 websites. I was part of the product creation process for a lot of those websites, the lead generation, lead qualification, lead management platform, as well as the search engine that powered it. Imagine a search engine combined with an ad server that showed the right white papers to the right people. If you were InformationWeek, you could plug in a KnowledgeStorm white paper module, it would read your content, and show the most relevant white papers to that content. We were doing that in 2003.
Then we were purchased by TechTarget in 2007, where I stayed for eight years and ran their in-house team - everything that relates to traffic: A/B and multivariate testing, paid organic, social, community, content strategy, SEO advisory, both technical and organic. Basically anything that could yield traffic for a website, I managed for that network. We had over 200 websites, grew traffic dramatically. But I got to work with an amazing editorial team - they were gold-standard practitioners. The person who knows the most about internet security was an editor there. And I was coming in with leads, SEO, technology, AI, saying "here's what we should write about." And they said - "what do you know? I've been writing about this stuff for 20 years."
I was like: the data tells me this, the data tells me this. And so I learned all these processes. The thing I learned is that first of all, experts are the most important thing. And they still are.
Chris Featherstone: Click on experts - domain knowledge experts.
Jeff Coyle: Subject matter experts. Domain experts. A person who understands the ins and outs of editorial operations. These are the skills no one has. And the SME is the skill that no one can duplicate. The key for content is bringing enough information to get the most out of those impossible-to-duplicate resources.
I learned that the hard way. By the time I left we had smoother processes, but I knew some of those manual efforts could be automated. Then I met my co-founder. I had a 30-hour process that would take to build a beautiful topic model for a concept - basically, "if I were an expert on this topic, here are the things I would naturally cover." He had distilled it down to four minutes. And his topic models were better than my manual ones. My brain exploded.
Chris Featherstone: Let me ask - how much human-in-the-loop was needed to get really optimized results? Because we're talking about not only a brilliant search engine, but also a good topic model to understand what to index, content organized in a way to search it, a scoring mechanism to know how to bring results back, and almost a personalization layer on top of all that. There are four or five different intersecting things going on - how much of that was your intelligence as opposed to actual AI models driving it?
Jeff Coyle: There are so many questions packed in there. I call them the "SEO diapers" - it depends. So over the last few years, you've seen technical SEO become its own field with actual SaaS investment - companies like Botify, Oncrawl acquired by BrightEdge, ContentKing acquired by Conductor. People realize the technical side is critical. I call those things the invite to the party in SEO. If you don't have your technical stuff buttoned up, you can't even get in the door, or you're going to be stunting yourself.
Seth Earley: Can you give an example?
Jeff Coyle: Here's a good one. If your site has gone through multiple CMS migrations and has never been analyzed by someone who really understands technical SEO, it is highly likely you've caused trauma every time you did a platform migration. That trauma is fixable, and it's addressable ahead of time - but a lot of times people ignore it.
Another example: if you do URL changes, if you remove URLs and replace them with new pages, if you remove URLs and push them to bulk redirects - all of those things impact how search engines understand the content dynamic of your site at the individual page level, the site section level, and the site entity level.
And another: you tell the world who you are with your site, and you tell it with both the content and the structure. Imagine a "one-in-one" - a page that gets one link from one other page. Let's say you wrote an article in 2017 and relied on it for traffic. Over time it has no links to it, it's gone down to back-archive, back-archive, seven clicks from your homepage, and no one is interlinking it through the site. What did you just tell Google? You told them this page is not important.
Seth Earley: And burying thought leadership deep in URL structures - so down in that hierarchy that you lose all of that juice.
Jeff Coyle: Yeah. Another example: you remove a page that had been seen as foundational - it's like a jaw with teeth. You pull a tooth out and there's nothing to replace it. It's not just the impact on that page. It's the impact of all pages connected to it, and all the pages that are semantically related to it. When you move the page that answers "how do you get bees out of your garage," your entire home improvement section takes a hit. They're all crying a little in the corner. You've got to do a redirection, you've got to provide replacement value.
Technical SEO is not instant gratification. It's delayed attribution. So it's hard to get budget for it. But it is critically important.
The other piece is the content side. By the way, there's white hat, black hat, gray hat throughout all of these pieces. The way I like to address it: there's a Google research scientist, very influential but not well known - John Wu. He didn't say it exactly this way, but I like to transform what he stated: cheating is time-correlative. You can cheat. However, over time, you're going to get caught. In any game. And if you cheat when you're a brand, the impact is an insane disaster on the business. You can't cheat if you're a brand. The snake oil perspective comes from folks whose sites can go away and they just make another one - indoor room humidifier dot net goes away, they buy air purifiers for you dot net. You can't do that. Link manipulations and technical correlations - you've got to be brilliant to get away with it, and the same thing goes for content.
Publishing low-quality content is like a time bomb. I watch it all day. When it's on a big brand site, it is a time bomb.
Seth Earley: People go through so much work to do it wrong. You could go through less work to do it right. And doing it right is a lot of work, but it's sustainable work.
Jeff Coyle: And sometimes it's not a car crash. Sometimes it's just a slow burn and you don't have that correlation. There's a large travel website that publishes generated, very low-quality content. I've watched them degrade from the outside. They don't realize what's happening to them. And then they remediate with quality but don't recognize what the canary is.
Seth Earley: Let's look at the other end of the spectrum. There are organizations creating enormously valuable content and missing the boat. So let's talk about some common mistakes and then about the AI side - because when I looked at MarketMuse, I thought: these guys really get it. This is real AI, real machine learning. It's about semantics and knowledge graphs. There's so much that can be done to give high-value content the day in the sun it needs.
Jeff Coyle: I'll share some, but Chris, were you going to add?
Chris Featherstone: Just building on Seth's comment - you can't fix stupid with content. But in what areas can you automate using those technologies to save yourself the headaches of skipping the pieces that will eventually bite you?
Jeff Coyle: Those are great questions, and it's what I talk about a lot. You don't want to rush it. Don't ask them to marry you with your content. Don't expect to go right to the bottom of the funnel and get leads and sales immediately. And don't expect great content to just appear out of a black box. Those are the three most fundamental outcomes of bad choices in content right now.
The best way to think about AI's possible impact for really strong teams is that it improves each stage of the content lifecycle. Research - how do you do your research? Planning and prioritization - how do you decide what to create and what to update, and for what reasons? Then operations - the critical fall-down for most B2B technology companies is content operations, because they're not thinking like publishers yet. Publishers think like publishers, but they have editorial subjectivity that causes issues. B2B tech organizations see a topic they want to own and understand how to get there - but operations often falls down.
Then comes briefing - the handshake between the editor or the executive team and the actual writers, so they know what's expected of them, which SME they're supposed to interview as source material, and that the draft they send isn't going to get kicked back.
Seth Earley: Let me break that down. The idea is you take a topic you want to own for organic search - you can pay for traffic with ads, but I skip those and go to the organic results at the top. To get there organically, you don't just write about that concept - you write about the semantic space around that concept. You enrich the content with related concepts, related terms, related phrases. And the content brief is the whole idea of: here's what you need to do to structure your content, link internally, and have all your content optimized on related concepts. All of that together boosts your ranking.
Jeff Coyle: Yeah, I mean - you crushed it on that. That's the unpack of the day.
Chris Featherstone: Professor Earley, I'll turn in my essay afterwards.
Jeff Coyle: What I'll add to it is that the coolest part about it is it makes business sense. As a business, it's the thing all teams can get aligned on: don't you want to put your business's best foot forward with the content and tell the story that you're the expert on this concept, no matter where in the journey someone is - whether it's awareness, consideration, or purchase?
Seth Earley: And I want to reinforce - this isn't a sales pitch for MarketMuse, but I talk about it because it is so powerful and it really leverages the technology and semantics and knowledge graphs. Here's what I have noticed in many organizations - I've talked to editorial teams and said, "tell me what terminology you're trying to optimize on." You know what they say? "I don't know. We don't have that." They don't know what to write the content on. They're writing great content - but there are little data-driven tweaks that are so measurable and so impactful.
Chris Featherstone: You outlined this unbelievable step-by-step process on how this should happen. And why are so many companies missing this whole thing? It's because they don't have somebody thinking about the meta-architecture of their content and information.
Seth Earley: There's so much noise in that space. So many people promising to get your ranking. We tell people we do this as part of taxonomy work - we never put our foot forward as SEO optimizers, just as we don't call ourselves AI experts. The problem is there's so much misinformation and it's such a crowded space.
Jeff Coyle: I'll give you three other problems. Many large organizations believe SEO is a verb that's part of an assembly line - "hey, can you SEO that?" That's not how it works. It's not only that you need it in your decision-making of what to do - you need to embed it in all stages. But it also hurts people's hearts. The writers and experts spend all this time on this content, and then it gets touched by someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. Wouldn't you rather the writer had gotten the information ahead of time and been able to weave it into their narrative? There's less kickback, more trust, they actually get more done.
So there are four types of content plans. One: quick wins - what are the things that if I created or updated now would have the biggest impact on my business? Two: goal-based - the stuff we all agree we need to do. I want to own "what is an ontology," I want to own awareness-based content on ontologies. Three: competitive risk - a competitor has beaten my house down, or I have a page that gets too much traffic.
Go look at your analytics. If you've got one page that gets more than 15% of your traffic - that's a huge existential risk. And four: whatever the CEO decides we write about.
Seth Earley: Let's dig into that risk scenario. Why is a single high-traffic page an existential risk?
Jeff Coyle: Those pages are likely not treated as well or cared for as much as they actually contribute in value. They need to be like a manicured lawn. They also need a foundation underneath them. Sometimes you write an article, it does outsized well, punches above its weight - you need to go back and build foundation to make sure that scaffolding does not fall down. In other cases you have something that's historically done well for many reasons and it's not current - not factually current for today's intent, not appropriate for your current business messaging. People are afraid to touch that stuff. If you don't touch it, you're at risk. If you touch it wrong, you're at risk. A lot of times those pages sit on islands, arms out here, not taken in and engulfed in the structure of the site. That's a core problem.
Seth Earley: Because of the risk associated with that high-traffic page, people don't know what to do with it. But intentional, validated, data-driven decisions to make those changes and build around that value are exactly what the data makes possible.
Jeff Coyle: Right. And the dovetail with what you said - we have to get our entire team away from a one-page, one-word mentality. You have to have content that covers a topic comprehensively and walks through the entire journey you expect to be servicing.
I have a quote: "If you're not there at the beginning of the funnel, you don't deserve to be at the bottom of the funnel." Early-stage awareness content on this topic. Then go 3D - on this topic for beginners, for experts, for industry-specific audiences. On ontologies, I may need early-stage awareness content for a first-day learner. I may need it for data scientists. I may need it for marketers. In order to truly achieve your audience on one topic at one stage, you may need many titles of content to tell the story. Now do the same for consideration. Now for purchase. And people forget - post-purchase troubleshooting. Post-sale docs.
Seth Earley: Absolutely. Part of that whole journey and lifecycle. Now - some of the other problems. You want to refresh us on those?
Chris Featherstone: I was also tugging on a thread around how you measure, and can you work backwards from an ROI model? Because if you do one word or one page, now you're driving a terrible risk profile. How do you get to actually knowing what you're doing is the right things?
Jeff Coyle: The cool thing is you and Seth asked the same question. What's missing in the market is attributable return on investment and expectation-setting. It's knowing who you are.
The way you can get inspired to do something comes from three places. Who you are today tells you a lot about what you can be. If Seth's site is about information management and he says, "I really want to be the world's leading expert on Boston Terriers" - well, Seth, you're going to have to write a whole lot of content on every dog breed ever made, get certification, cover dog shows, and illustrate expertise across the full domain. I can do a competitive cohort analysis, analyze all the content and sites that have covered those topics and look at their progressions - you've got to write like 14,000 pages on dogs. Are you cool with that?
What happens a lot in organizations is the CEO goes "we should write about Boston Terriers" and the content strategist says "cool, I'll write a comprehensive guide and put it on our blog." Okay. It won't work. It's not just because of links or social media attention. You haven't shown them that you know them. Why do you deserve to be the source of the guide for Boston Terriers? You don't.
Now take that to a goal-based situation. We want to own ontologies. Well, we haven't written content about semantic analysis, topic modeling, information retrieval, or how search engines work. I'm just giving examples.
Seth Earley: If we wrote about taxonomy and ontology - or the difference between taxonomy and ontology - that's a very specific. You don't try to go broad; you look at how it can be more focused.
Jeff Coyle: Exactly. And the coolest thing about it is it's super meta - much like a beautiful book writer would, you have to illustrate that you know it all. Unless there's no competition, you can't knock it out with a short piece.
The quick wins a lot of times piggyback off what I call intent mismatch. You've got an article about "what's the difference between ontology and taxonomy" - your page ranks well right now, but doesn't answer the question of "can I build a multi-root taxonomy with OWL?" That question has no specific answer. Your page shows up. People click on it and they're like, "this doesn't answer my question."
Your choice: answer that question in that article, or write a new article and link to it from that one. Those are the quick-win opportunities. And this happens a lot on homepages for B2B tech - you rank for revenue intelligence software with your homepage because of brand awareness, but you get there and there's nothing about revenue intelligence software. If I have that early-stage awareness intent, I'm now hunting and wayfinding.
Those are the types of experiences content strategists need to operate within. They need this type of data to answer those challenging questions. All the content about a topic operates in a blob and it grows and gathers steam - it's a snowball blob. Your "what is" article allows your comparison article to rank well, allows your support forum to rank well. If you don't have it all operating as a machine, things start falling apart and you become susceptible to competitive risks.
Chris Featherstone: Let's say I'm the owner of Cat Fancy and I want to beat out everybody who loves dogs. I'm going to employ all these guerrilla marketing activities - steal content strategies, generate all this rhetoric about why dogs are inferior - because Seth the dog guy doesn't have all these things in place. Those who understand these concepts will benefit from it. Those who don't - you're just going to get crushed.
Seth Earley: It's going to be a zero-sum game.
Jeff Coyle: I have a great example that ties completely back to everything Seth's about. I've worked on so many animal pet sites - you know why? Clicks on pet sites are worth lots of money. I've done everything from architecture for the largest website in the world covering dog breeds, all the way to some guy who bought a website about cats and doesn't know what to do with it.
Here's the critical part of why this ties back to taxonomies - everything goes back to taxonomy. Sometimes a topic doesn't fit within your existing taxonomy, but you still want to own it. People jump to the end again, just like they do with generated content without checking it. Would you hire an outsource writer on Craigslist and throw the content on your billion-dollar company's website without looking at it? That's what's happening right now with generated content.
So what happens is they want to jump to the end. I want to cover coffee cups AND beach vacations, so they write "what's the best coffee cup to bring on my beach vacation?" Doesn't work. The bridge content needed is that you cover everything there is to know about beach vacations AND everything there is to know about coffee cups. Then figure out what those taxonomies look like and when they intertwine naturally.
And that's exactly how search engines think about your site. You are authoritative on topic-plus-site-section combinations. Say it again: you are authoritative on topic-plus-site-section combinations. The example I use is Johns Hopkins - everybody would agree they're an awesome authority on medical information. But is their careers section authoritative on medical information? No. Their careers section is not the source for medical info. So search engines have to be that smart. It's a massive computational problem - evaluating topic authority at the site level, the site section level, and the page level. A page and a site can be about tens of thousands of topics.
So if you want to own a topic, the bridge isn't to write the topic-combination marriage piece right away. Think six degrees of separation. I have a great B2B technology example - a company with two product lines, one with no online presence and one with heavy presence. They said why can't we just write about the weaker one? I said you can, but it's going to take a lot of effort. There's another path - start writing about adjacent topics to the main concept, become an expert there, because those bridge to the other one. It acts as your springboard so the target product line won't take as much lift.
They said "but we don't have a product in those middle areas." I said - I don't really care, I'm looking at the end goal. They did it and had wild success.
Another example: a different company with two product lines and a goal of growing 30% leads to each. One had 180 articles on the right topics, the other had 60. They said "we're doing the 60." That's what everyone does. When you're jumping into a new semantically related topic, understanding how those taxonomies and ontologies work makes your life easier. That's where people make such big SEO mistakes - because they're thinking about topics like strings instead of things.
Seth Earley: Thank you to our sponsors - Marketing AI Institute, CMSWire and Simpler Media, and of course Earley Information Science. We're here with Jeff Coyle from MarketMuse. We're right at the top of the hour - do you have a couple more minutes?
Jeff Coyle: Absolutely. And I'll be speaking at the Marketing AI Institute's event, MAICON, this year.
Seth Earley: I always say AI is in service of humans - it doesn't replace humans, it supports what we're doing, makes us more efficient, reduces our cognitive load. There's always going to be a need for expertise and human judgment. There's complexity, there's strategy. Chris, did you want to ask your question about where AI goes from here?
Chris Featherstone: MarTech has jumped leaps and bounds in ability and sheer number of tools. It's daunting. Can I automate some of these individual areas to help give me the empowerment to make the insightful decisions we've been talking about? At what point will AI take over some of the more mundane aspects and get us to a place where we can do more? I'd love your thoughts on where we're at today and what those next inflection points look like.
Jeff Coyle: I've got piles of response energy for this. A lot of times people ask me: will AI take away the jobs of writers? And I say yes. Then I laugh and say - really, really low-quality writers are going away. The bar is lifted already. It's already there.
When you buy a $50 or $100 article from a writer, I'd estimate 80% of those content items are generated and then tweaked - that's the reality right now. The bar has been lifted on low-quality content. What that actually does is make writing high-quality content more valuable. It makes low-quality content the commodity.
If you can take a generated inspirational draft and turn it into something amazing - more power to you. But if it doesn't represent your business well, or if it actually slows you down, that's a problem. Most teams aren't tracking efficiencies at the time level or at the hit rate level. What you see with teams leaning heavily into generation is they're getting a lot out there, but their hit rates aren't going up, which has a devastating impact down the road - because your site operates as a blob.
The jobs it will take are the ones that maybe shouldn't have existed anyway. And what you're going to see is that generation changes the entire market. Think about the progression: first it's spellcheck - "this can never work." Now: could you imagine writing without spellcheck? Then grammar - "Grammarly will never work." Now: could you imagine writing without Grammarly? Then content improvement and knowledge assistance - "is this some sort of SEO trick?" And now that's becoming mature. People realize they need this assistant during the writing process.
And now people are getting excited: can it help with operations? That might speed me up. And then the part still in growth phase is decision-making and BI. Nobody really gets the fact that this thing might be able to support their editorial decision-making or business decision-making. But I just gave you two examples where it did - with those two product lines. Those are mega-million dollar business decisions made with AI, all the way down to "MarketMuse tells me to put the word target audience in there." All the way from the billion-dollar business decision down to the reminder to the writer not to forget this stage of the funnel or this keyword to differentiate against their competitor.
A big differentiator for MarketMuse is we tell you how to be differentiated against your competitors as well as comprehensive - not just to copy them. Because another sad part of AI implementations is that some solutions tell you how to copy competitors and spin their content, which doesn't have the impact. We get wonderful clients all the time who went that route, realized it, and said "we should have been doing this the right way the whole time."
What this frees up: writers get to write - they get to focus on narrative development and production value. Editors get to be developmental editors, not just SEO editors. Developmental editors help cultivate the story, make sure it's on brand voice, make sure it connects to the rest of the site. And none of those people are doing keyword research, which isn't their job anyway.
I always joke - it's like asking: "oh wow, you're a great chef. Do you farm?" We ask great writers to be SEO experts. We ask great writers to be keyword research people. They're not going to be good at that. It's just like asking a great SEO to write. The businesses that are bringing those teams together are the ones that are going to win. When you bring editorial and SEO together and they actually believe in each other's mission, beautiful things happen.
Chris Featherstone: As you know, Seth is always right. It always comes back to taxonomies and content structure.
Seth Earley: Everything kind of does. I don't care what you look at - there's a hierarchy in there, and there are relationships between hierarchies.
Chris Featherstone: Jeff, what's in store for you for 2022 besides speaking at the conference?
Jeff Coyle: I'm looking forward to releasing a taxonomy solution that allows users to naturally navigate topics and provides an X-ray on how search engine result pages work, plus ideation so they can weave it into their decision-making. I'm also tuning up the way our text editor works - we've done a lot of research on how users use editors. And instead of doing 112 podcasts and webinars last year, I'm looking forward to getting back to conferences. I'll be at Content Tech in late May, MAICON, Content Marketing World, Rhodium - which is an awesome group for entrepreneurs.
And really just focusing on what matters - tying everything back to return on investment. All of AI's market maturity progression drives toward predictive. I'm confident that what we do is predictive, but I want to make sure that is crystal clear. I want people to feel confident that they can put a cost on a content plan, put it against a project, and have a meaningful level of confidence in the return on investment. If I can do that this year, I'll have had a really good year.
Chris Featherstone: And that's your 2022 mic drop. Nice job.
Seth Earley: Thank you so much, Jeff. It's been great to have you. We definitely could continue on this topic for many more sessions. Thank you again, Sharon, for your work in keeping the trains running and getting this out. And of course, Chris, thank you so much for your time.
Chris Featherstone: Always a pleasure. Thanks, Jeff - thanks for coming on and inspiring us.
Jeff Coyle: Awesome. Sure. And if you're anywhere from Savannah all the way down to St. Mary's on the Georgia coast, go grab a Silver Bluff.
Chris Featherstone: I love it. Have a great day.
Seth Earley: Thanks for listening to the Earley AI Podcast with your hosts Seth Earley and Chris Featherstone. We hope you enjoyed the program and took away some ideas that you can start to implement in your organization right now. If you're stuck and need help, check out earley.com for information about Earley Information Science consulting services. And of course, check the show notes for links to any resources we mentioned today. That's all for now. See you next time.