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dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content ); \nHow to conduct a content UX audit for your brand and clients\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","livestream_live_transcript_text":"So we've got a lot to cover over the next few days. This again was this is building on last year's content workshop. And the link for that is in the course description if you missed last year I would strongly recommend you check that out. Really good stuff. So Sadie has your book MADI Naidu\r\n\r\nwhy it's really good love it seems like it's been a while since I published it, but you know, I tried to write it so that it would still be useful today. So I hope that you're all finding that. Yeah, we're sure.\r\n\r\nReally good stuff. Alright folks, if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat say hi. We are about three minutes away from getting started. And they're in the chat once again, is the link bundle that has the slides and the replay link as well as a link to Matty's book. We are Yeah, we're gonna have a lot of fun today and tomorrow, two hours today, two hours tomorrow talking all about website content with I mean, let's face it an expert in the field\r\n\r\nappreciate the vote of confidence. If you if you measure it by yours and I suppose expert, that's something that I've been doing for a very long time. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nAlright folks, let's hear from you in the chat. Check in question today. How about give us a one to 10 rating? How comfortable are you with generating website content? One being it's a real challenge. 10 being a pro, let us hear from you there in the chat.\r\n\r\nAll right, about a minute and a half to go.\r\n\r\nMaybe a good question is how many of you are forced to make content in order to finish your website designs? Yeah, to get your website launched.\r\n\r\nHey, Sue bullets are my friend. I like bullets. Alright, several folks just joining us. The links are there in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up that chat and you'll have the link to download the slides. Grab the replay and all of those things. We are about a minute away from getting started. Second question today is what's your comfort level? What's your expertise at website content creation one to 10 If you had to rate yourself love it. Love it. Tracks Yeah, five but a if you're using AI, that's awesome. Yeah, so a lot of folks are higher on the scale today. That's exciting, that hopefully you're gonna get some tools to up your game even further. He's got a lot to share with us. Over the next couple of days. Hey Terry. Dab Alright, folks, we are just about to get started. Glad you're all here. Diving into the web content workshop momentarily. Just seconds. To go. If you're just joining us in zoom, I'm going to drop in one more time the link bundle and it's three after so let's get the recording started. And we'll dive right in. Let's do it. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy and I'm joined for the next couple of days by my friend Maddy Houseman, Maddy is a sought after sought after copywriter specializing in enterprise b2b Tech brands. She's the CEO at blog Smith and the author of writing for humans and robots, the new rules of content style. She has been recognized on numerous industry lists as a top content marketer and I'm really excited to have her back for another course here on solid Academy so welcome back Madi, how are things going for you?\r\n\r\nThanks, Nathan. I'm really excited to be here. Like I said, you know, it's been it's been a little bit of time since I've done you know, a presentation like this since I've really gotten to use my brain. For those who don't know, I recently had a baby so he's in daycare today so I can fully you know, give my attention to this and, you know, embrace this identity of mine as a content creator who loves to learn and you know, who now has this other facet of my life but marrying those two in a joyous way so, so yeah, really excited to be back and and put my brain to use and share you know, some of the things that I've been exploring you for the past several months to I guess a year, all this new stuff with AI, that's what we're gonna focus on today. So really excited about that. Yeah,\r\n\r\ndefinitely. So we have a long way to go over the next couple of days and the thought just occurred to me Maddie, we really ought to have you back for another informal conversation just on how you prepared your business. So that you could take some time away, because that's really, that's quite a feat.\r\n\r\nIt was definitely and I'd love to do that. I'd be happy to.\r\n\r\nYeah, that'd be that just occurred to me. We should definitely, folks. So let's see the links are in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom. I'm going to drop this in one more time. There you will find the link to download or grab the slide deck. Also the replay link that will have the transcripts and chat logs after we finish is there for you as well. On that replay link you'll also find a link to last year's course, which is more some more foundational principles of the things we're going to unpack even further today. So if you missed last year's course, all the replays are there, follow that link, rewatch them, it's really good stuff. And of course, if you haven't seen Matt, he's booked the link for that as in the chat as well. So Maddie, give us a high level view. What are we going to be covering for the rest of today? Totally.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, we're definitely going to expand on some of the things that we started to talk about last year, but really, you know, thinking about what's changed in the past year and so that's why today we're going to focus mostly on AI kind of how AI factors into content creation, how you can use AI tools to create content, how you can use AI tools to detect AI content. You know, things like how to write an excellent chat GPT prompt and one thing I'm really excited to share with you because it's something that I've just kind of figured out for myself is how to make your own personal GPT. So that's what we're gonna do at the end of the day, I'll show you step by step how to do it. You can follow along, I'll show you how to adapt it a little bit. And then really, what we're going to start with today is I guess a bit of a cautionary tale when it comes to AI so we'll start with the most negative and we'll build up to the most positive. And then tomorrow, the focus is going to be on content UX, the user experience what I like to call the reader experience. So it's going to be more about you know, the elements of design and how they interact with content, how you can create this great reader experience for the people who consume your designs and content and so we can get a little bit more into what that looks like. But I guess if I was to like talk high level about today versus tomorrow, today is like things that I think are really like novel and fun. It's like It's like exciting things that that we're all learning kind of at the same time and that's that's what's so exciting about just like nobody has it figured out. And tomorrow is like the stuff that I'm really passionate about. That's a little bit more, you know, foundational and again, about like that full experience. So I guess with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. Yeah,\r\n\r\nabsolutely. Me give a couple of housekeeping notes that will disappear. Folks. We'll be taking a break in the middle as usual for these courses. So roughly at tube central an hour from now, we'll take about a five to 10 minute break depending on where we are timewise. So at the end of this first hour and the end of the second hour, we'll have a time of q&a as well. I would invite you to use the zoom q&a Link to ask your questions. Please don't use the chat, but use that Zoom q&a. That way we can keep all the questions in a nice list. And also, if you'll keep that Zoom q&a open, if somebody asks a question that you also want to hear the answer to just click the thumbs up icon to up vote. And we'll take the questions the order of up votes. So with that again, yeah, we are recording in the replay. The transcript is all there and it'll be available for you about an hour after we finished today. So Maddie, I'm going to disappear take over. Let's get started. Let's\r\n\r\ndo it. My housekeeping is just first of all, I think that we all can learn a lot from each other when it comes to AI. And so like that's how I've picked up the things that I'm going to share with you. It's really hearing it from other people seeing how other people are using this tool. It's interesting because it's so new that like, again, we don't really know like what the best use cases are. And there's this world of possibility that we've only just started to touch. So one thing I'll ask is like if you've come across an interesting AI use case, you know whether you have something that's top of mind now or whether going through what I'm going to talk about today sparks it like please share that in the chat. I'm sure all learn from it. I'm sure other people will learn from it. So that's one thing and then I'll just ask that if there's anything that resonates with you, as I'm talking today, or you know as other people are sharing ideas in the chat. I always love when people tweet or I guess x takeaways these days. So my Twitter is in that bottom right hand corner. So use that and I always love to retweet and share with my audience too. So yeah, let's go ahead and get started here. Nathan already gave a nice bio like who I am. Just to give you you know, more information about the blacksmith. We're a holistic content marketing agency for b2b technology brands. We create data driven content. I'm going to share some of those processes here with you today in terms of how we're using AI tools to do that. And our focus is creating content across the sales funnel with a focus on the reader experience. So again, that's really what day two is going to be about. It's creating this ideal reader experience with the intersection of content and design. And then my book writing for humans robots, the new rules of content style. If you've ever read the book, The Elements of Style, I was really kind of riffing on that in a more I guess, modern way since that book was written back in 1918, or 1919. Of course, at that time, the internet didn't exist. We weren't necessarily addressing a global audience when we publish to the web. We are now and so that's kind of the idea behind this book is how can you how can you speak plainly and inclusively and effectively when you're writing for the web? And so with all of that being said, let's go ahead and jump into the topic of today which is AI Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention. Day two, when we talk about content UX. I'm going to do some live content UX audits. If you were here last year, we also did this this is something I really love to do. And so this form here which you can also click through the slide being links that we've shared in the chat. Just has a couple questions like your name your brand. It'll ask for a link to a specific piece of content. If you're comfortable sharing for this live UX audit, and then it has the question that's optional. If there's anything you want me to focus on, and then like an aspect of the content itself, but the purpose is to collect some, you know, ideas from from all of you of what to audit and we're going to basically put the principles that I'm going to be talking about tomorrow into action you know, show you how to use some different tools show you how to use more also, like qualitative analyses. And so again, I would love your examples so that we can make it really useful for you to give you know, a second pair of eyes on your content. And you know, it's always done in a very respectful way. I'm not looking for problems, I'm just showing you ways to, you know, make your message clearer to make your content experience more effective. So I'll, I'll aim to remind you about this again at the end of the day, and then you know, before tomorrow is probably when I'll pick what we're going to audit for tomorrow. So get them in today, whenever you have a chance. Okay, so artificial intelligence. That's really the focus of what we're talking about today. Super exciting. Things are happening here. It's also kind of a wild wild west. It's it's something that there's many positive use cases but there are also some negative ones and so I really wanted to start with the negatives so we can kind of get that out of the way so we can you know, maybe share some like cautionary tales here. The link that Learn More link is an article that I wrote for Fast Company, and it's going to go over some of the same things that I talked about here in terms of some of the limitations and also really like the ethical implications of using AI to generate content to publish it as if it were your own. So yeah, let's go ahead and dive into that. Um, so I think like the first major implication, negative implication of AI or something to think about, especially as a creator, because many of us here we're writers, we're designers, so we're creating things. They they are our intellectual property which we may assign, you know, to a client, for example, but it's still at its root. It's something that we made. And, you know, the thing about AI is, first of all, it can't think for itself. It uses things like machine learning. It uses algorithms and processes to make sense of what's already out there. But it's not, at least right now in a place where it can completely invent something new. If it does. It's the result of this machine learning it's not the result of true uniqueness. So you know, essentially, AI and I'm gonna explain this example in a moment here, but it's, it's being trained on what already exists. It's using our intellectual property. And the worst part of it is it's doing that without giving us credit. I mean, if you go in do a search on Google, it was called Bard, but now they've rebranded it to Gemini. In my experience, and and I haven't used it recently, to be honest with you, but certainly within chat GPT there's no like source given for the answer to a prompt. It's not directing you to a specific piece of content are saying, This is what I referenced to come up with this answer, which also creates an issue of you know, whether or not that answer is something to be trusted, and we'll get into the fact that AI is oftentimes confidently incorrect. But right now, with the focus being on the fact that it's essentially plagiarism and my perspective, if you are taking what you generate with AI and then publishing it as your own this is probably easiest to think about when you think about visuals, and we're going to talk a little bit about AI generating images and kind of like how that works and some of the issues with that. But you can think of like aI trained on a certain set of materials, certain artists body of work, you know, that style, if it's trained on a certain style and the output is a certain style, it's pretty easy to identify that, you know, it's riffing off, you know, one individual's intellectual property, it's a little bit harder to make that distinction with the written word. But that doesn't mean that it's any less important to recognize that it's, it's an issue if if AI is passing off its own material or your material as its own. So, what I wanted to share here, this is an article that was published on futurism. It's an it's a screenshot from it, and it's about CNET. They have this blog about different like personal finance topics and things like that. And so when it comes to things that affect your finances, whether it's subjects like you know how to buy a house and you know, like had this setup a mortgage, you know, whatever. Or, in this case, like you know, how to pick a credit card, how to use credit cards, how to decide what college to send your kid to, or something like that. Google calls these topics, your money, your life. And in comparison to any other topic that you publish, that you're looking to get ranked in relevant search on Google. Google has the highest standard of quality for your money, your life topics. So CNET was transparent about the fact that they were publishing AI generated content such as the example shared here. But they had a human fact checking it and so the byline was like you seen that money or something like that? And then I think they also had like the byline of the human editor published next to it, but they told us you know, they they weren't trying to hide that it was aI generated. So this excerpt is you know, maybe kind of a silly example, but it's showing how\r\n\r\nthis article that they wrote, which was about can you buy a gift card with the credit card. This first example is a line that's almost verbatim from a rivaling Forbes article. And then this next example is how literally, the table was the exact same title. So, you know, you could question if it was only one of these things, you know, is that really plagiarism? Is that really a problem? But the fact that it's both to me shows that you know, not only did CNET not take a high enough standard of care, quite honestly with the content that they were having a human fact checker edit, but I think it also begs the question of like, if you're generating a full piece of copy, like a, you know, long form blog article, like are you ever going to be able to definitively say that it's not plagiarism? Or that it's not like literally, you know, word for word related to any other competitor article out there? And I think the answer's no, because that's what the AI is using to generate the content. In this case, and then one that I'll share subsequently, AI is, is almost like a crutch for CNET or for others who are who are taking this approach of generating that full article and then having the human intervention and I'm going to share some better ways to use AI in your article creation process. But yeah, I mean, the problem is ultimately that there's no way that they can catch every instance of plagiarism, and it just honestly creates more work and, and the worst part of all, is that it essentially ruin their reputation because they didn't take a proper standard of care. Another example that's, that's ongoing, it's unresolved at this point, is that the New York Times recently sued open AI who's the creator of chat GBT saying that, you know, their, their publications, their media. was unlawfully used to train open AI. And the last I saw, I think there was an update actually today that said that the New York Times is like misrepresenting the evidence or something like that. But again, I mean, it really just like begs the question of you know, if you publish content, like is it safe, you know, is it going to be used to train a model which is then going to spit it out and somebody else is going to publish it and benefit from it without properly crediting you? So that's one major issue. So this is one that I would love your examples. If you have anything similar. This is this is a picture that I saw recently in like a Facebook group about AI. And so somebody had done some prompts about dog breeds. And if you kind of squint, you're like, Okay, maybe that like a chart of different dog breeds, but then you look and you see all the like, really strange faces and like this, like gibberish text, and even the text that you can read is like not related to any dog breeds that currently exists. So, yeah, again, if you have any examples of like an image you've generated that has resulted in something like comically incorrect like this, I would love to see that in the chat. That would be fun. But I guess the point that I want to make with this slide is that at least at this point, AI can't effectively art direct you could give it a prompt and you could maybe get it to a point where you can get something useful. I think it's called mid journey. There's this one AI image generator that creates these like hyper realistic things with like any detail you can get it and something like that is so cool and very interesting to experiment with. But I think this came from within chat GPT I'm gonna say it wrong, but it's called like Dali Dali. And in my experience, when I've used it to generate images, it's the same sort of like gibberish text. The image, you know, is like, vaguely related to the prompts that I give it. So I'm using it for like, kind of like business article use cases to like generate a figure from you know, some like the data I include or something like that. I've never gotten something useful yet. And I think beyond that, it's like you still as a creative have to come up with the prompt. It's not like AI is going to be able to help you within the context, say of like an article. They're not going to be able to come up with like five unique media examples that you could include. So this is something that I think, you know, as humans, like, we still like have control over this or so like the best Abbot. Um, okay. So next I started to talk about this, which is one of the biggest issues with AI to date, the fact that it is confidently incorrect. So this is another Cena example, I'm going to read a little excerpt from. This is another futurism article. They did kind of a deep dive into this. See that AI but issue? So the excerpt is after the outcry after you know, some of these plagiarism things came to light. With the previous example. Steena editor in chief Connie Guglielmo acknowledged the AI written articles in a post that celebrated CNET's reputation for being transparent. without acknowledging the criticism, Guglielmo wrote that the publication was changing the byline on its AI generated articles from CNET money staff to simply seen that money as well as making the disclosure more prominent. Furthermore, she promised every story published under the program had been reviewed, fact checked, and edited by an editor with topical expertise before we hit publish, and I think that this is referring to like before this article was published, and so what you're looking at right here is, I think a more serious violation of the high standards that Google holds for your money your life, making sure that it is, you know, written by an expert that it's heavily fat checked, you know that you're not publishing something that you can't stand behind. And so this is about calculating compound interest for savings and as you can see by the excerpts, it's, it's wrong, the calculation is spitting out an incorrect final number. And so it may seem like, you know, small potatoes like, you know, like, what, what's really going to happen to the person who misinterprets this? It's certainly not like, you know, having to do with like, buying a house and like getting those equations wrong thread savings, but I think it just goes to show that there's, you know, there's a lot of problematic things that can happen and it starts here and if if we don't maintain a high standard for content quality starting here, then it could exacerbate it could turn into people being misled when it comes to making these like bigger money decisions in their life or you know, other things, your money your life, I think also, in some ways has to do with like, health and like medical stuff and things like that. So there are like potentially, you know, bigger and like worse implications than even just like the financial aspect of it. One thing that's interesting that that I misunderstood or I was misled about AI. Really up until like, a week ago or so, is I thought that you could ask chat GBT if it wrote something. So that was something that I saw other people talking about. And it's something that at the blacksmith like we've tested out ourselves you know, when working with like a new writer and wondering how to detect like if content was aI generated, and I found an article on open API's like FAQs or help desk or whatever that said, whenever you ask chat GBT if it wrote some you know, specific piece of copy for example, it just make something up like that's, that's literally what open AI says you could Google it yourself. So, you know, it's weird that it doesn't just say, I don't know, you know, it doesn't just give you like that as a straight answer. It's fine. If it doesn't know, but for it to purposely just decide, you know, bye bye narrowly, like if it's yes or no, and that it just tells you that whether it actually knows the answer, like that's very concerning to me. So a little bit of a cautionary tale. Um, but yeah, I think at the end of the day of the CNET examples, what I'm trying to impress upon you is like, does it really save time, if it like, impacts your reputation long term like I just don't think that that the best way to go about it is to generate the full piece of content and then add the human and I think that I think that AI can help intermittently and we'll definitely get to like how exactly to do that shortly. Um, so this article is also kind of fun. Charlie Brooker's, a creator of Black Mirror. If any of you are familiar, it's just this like really kind of weird messed up show on Netflix. It's very like future focused. It's like, I would say fairly.\r\n\r\nWhat's the word like it's, it's, it's kind of like post apocalyptic in some ways, not always. But it always like seems to end and kind of a scary place. And it's episodic, like each each episode I mean, to say is like its own storyline. And so the most recent season started to touch on themes of AI since that has become you know, something that has infiltrated society. And anyway, this article, The Creator who you know, has a very interesting mind based on what we see on this Netflix episodes, said that he doesn't think AI is messy enough to replace creative people. So there's good news guys, which is AI can't can't match that with us. I think on another hand AI, it lacks human empathy. You know, it can never like fully understand, like, who we are and what we go through. I don't think it ever will unless it's somehow achieved some level of sentience but yeah, I mean, ultimately, like in its wildest dreams, whatever AI, you know, thinks that it thinks it could never generate the ideas that we come up in our wildest dreams. And I think that the proof is in the pudding in terms of thinking about things like some of our favorite authors and how they create prosaic copy. So here's, here's a quote, I love Stephen King. He's kind of a machine himself, but human as far as I know. So this from needful things, one of his more interesting books, because the trust of the innocent is the wires most useful tool. And so, you know, fed copies of Stephen King's worked. You can ask chat GPT to write in his voice. I don't know if Stephen K would appreciate that or not. But, you know, I think the limitation is that it couldn't generate something like this on its own it can generate like derivative work of his but it couldn't come up with this on its own. Ai, you know, it, it isn't it doesn't have uniqueness. And Google has historically said that it's important. We're gonna talk a little bit about Google's AI guidelines that it's published. And it specifically says in those guidelines that they want to rank content that is unique, which AI fundamentally is not, not on its own, not without human intervention. Ai just read purposes and parrots things that already exists. And, and the output trends toward the average. It's not, it's not unique, it's not notable and interesting. Okay, so the last thing that I want to talk about from like this negative perspective, and then I promise we'll get into more of the fun stuff, is the idea that algorithms can be biased. And so if you think about like the people who are creating things like Chet GPT, or the Google algorithm or any other algorithm you interact with, like social media feeds, things like that. Algorithms, they represent the people that created them, not necessarily the population as a whole. So this book is really interesting. It's from the perspective of a black woman and so she is just like, read some of the book description to give you an idea of some of the topics that she explores. It says run a Google search for Black Girls, what will you find? Big booty and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms, but if you type in white girls, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and on unmoderated discussions about why black women are so sassy or why black women are so angry presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. And I think, after this book was published, because this was from a while ago, Google had manually made some adjustments to the algorithm in light of this criticism and that commentary, but the problem is with algorithms, you're you're scaling up problems, they can't manually make adjustments for every inherent bias that their algorithm has. And so you know, I don't know if we have an answer for how to fix this. But ultimately, the people creating the algorithm should represent society as a whole. I guess that's, you know, one way to think about it. Um, and I guess the question that it poses for all of us is like with AI deploying so rapidly there's going to be a lot of situations where bias needs to be routed out and fixed. And so that's, that's what's kind of scary, I think about how quickly new applications are developing. Again, it scales up problems and so that's just something I think we all need to be aware of, and and do the best that we can to fix. So okay, so now let's talk about some of the more fun stuff AI content tools. These are tools that we use in our workflow. These are tools that I use, personally. And so let's go ahead and you know, talk a little bit about how they work. So, again, we're gonna focus on like, mainly AI content tools, just because that's my sphere of genius. That's like what I have the most experience with, but I think there are different things that you could use like no matter how you're creating content, whether it's like you write blog posts for yourself, or for clients, or like, you know, you just want to like uplevel, your email strategy, or you know, help with like the personal compositions that you create. So, the first one I want to talk about is phrase which creates AI powered content briefs. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch my screen to share, to share like what a report looks like in phrase. So let's see here. I think I have to get out of full screen in order for this to work. Okay, so um, this was the form so I'm going to show you that in the beginning, but I'm gonna go ahead and exit out. So phrase generates this really cool report and the SEO aspects of it may or may not be relevant to your process. And I will say that not every piece of content that we created, the blacksmith is driven by SEO. It's not every piece of content we create to rank but I still use we still use phrase for everything because it helps with topic research. So that's what this is. It's a briefing tool. It's a research tool. Um, the way that it works and the way that the next tool, clear scope that I'm going to explain to you also works is that you give it a primary keyword. So in this case, it's how reliable are AI detectors? And so, by giving it this primary keyword, that means that we've already done the research to decide that that's the keyword that we want to optimize for. And so this is this is an article that's already published on the Black Swan, but this is something that we would have created. Prior to that publication. This this brief would have been like the first step of the writing process after doing the keyword research to decide which one we want to focus on. And the way that phrase and clear scope work is that you can I'm just going to show you like some of the pricing details so you can understand like how it works within a workflow, phrases kind of unique in that it has a plan that allows you to create unlimited reports. Not many other tools like it do that it's usually a per report cost. So that's why it's important to know what you want to optimize for before generating the reports. But it also has these lesser plans in terms of output. You know, depending on your content process, that's probably going to be more cost effective to you then you know, me as an agency, I would want more of like the unlimited plan to work for my various clients. So let's go back to phrase so what's interesting about phrase is first of all, just like the content editor experience itself, I'll be honest, we use Google Docs for everything. But if I was creating content, as like just for my internal team or something, what's cool is you can create these other tabs. And so you could have a tab that's like research. You could have a tab that's your outline. You could have a tab that's your draft, and then you could have maybe a tab with edits or something like that. So that's kind of cool just to keep the process nice and contained in one place. I've always thought that that was really unique and interesting about phrase.\r\n\r\nBut to be honest, we don't use phrase as a Content Editor. That's just an added bonus. So yeah, it generates a topic report. I'm gonna go through a couple of different aspects of it. First of all, it gives you some sort of tangible details and the way that phrase and clear scope and the market means which is another variation on a theme work is that they scrape the top 20 or so search results, which is pretty representative of like, what's going to be necessary to rank and it gives you details like, you know, how many words should you aim for for this specific topic? In this case, it's also suggesting how many headers which is like a measure of depth of content, how many links How many images? I think the top ones are what's like in this brief, that's what it's reading and the ones under it are like the average that it's suggesting. But again, we're just this is just like material that's from the brief. It's not like the actual content that we wrote. When it comes to word count. I think people always ask like, what's the ideal word count for a piece of content? And the the answer like many things in SEO is it depends. And so that's why tools like this are really useful because there is no standard. It's very topic driven. And using data that's based on actual searches means that you can get very close to like what that ideal is. So it also shares you know, the top some details of the top breaking content, you'll notice that the blog Smith currently owns a featured snippet for this particular topic, thanks in part to you know, some of the tools that we use to optimize their content. And also, I think, for this particular piece, because we did a lot of our own original research and reporting and some of it that I'll share with you when we talk about AI detector tools, I believe after the break today. You can also see like, the atomized version of some of these other top ranking results like the title like a short description, different headers, you can click into the headers to get more information. You can click through to read it. There's other things in this little side panel here that are interesting. This is just a list of all the headings from all the top ranking content pieces. Probably the most useful is this questions area and you can break it down by different sources of the question of the questions. People also ask you something you could manually go to Google and see for yourself. But it's nice to have it all in one place. I think that's the real benefit of phrase and then you can also see here that you can see questions that come from places like Quora and Reddit, you know, which which can really add a nice like flavor to what you're working on. The stats tab is really interesting. You know, they essentially suggest in phrase different stats, as well as different links that people tend to use in those top ranking pieces of content. And so you don't necessarily want to like copy everything that you see. But there might be things that like people would expect to be exposed to in your content. If there's like a big industry stat that relates to what you're talking about. As you scroll here you can see certain things like different topics that come up, you know, different related keywords or sub topics. And a lot of this you can kind of paste over from the sidebar. External links. You know, in addition to specific stats, news is also pretty interesting because this is like things that have happened maybe since those top ranking articles were published. So again, like if you're trying to be the best making sure that your information is the most up to date. This can help you do that. So freeze also has some generative AI capabilities. I'm going to be honest with you that we don't use these because we don't believe in generating AI copy as far as you know what we write for clients and for ourselves. We're experimenting with it. But so I don't really use any of the generative AI tools. But this optimize tab here is notable and useful, because it's similar to clear scope and market Muse which I'll share with you in just a moment here. And basically, it suggests certain phrases that we should expect to see in the content in order for it to rank high and relevant search. You know, obviously, you can't just throw all the words and you have to weave them in. But this is a pretty good baseline for what people would expect to see topic wise in an article and that's that's the real benefit. I think of tools like this. So yeah, there's other there's other like interesting things that you can dig into. This is like a keyword gap map map based on what I just showed you those different phrases and it shows your content compared to other ranking content and who's using what words so you can kind of see how you stack up against those other competitors. So next, I want to share clear scope with you and I have a slide for it, but I'm just going to jump straight to the report here. So what you're seeing is like a very, I would say like simplified user interface compared to like what you would see with phrase and so clear scope in many ways is very similar. They both exists to help you optimize content. They both include some important research they both work by starting with a primary keyword. One of the differences between clear scope and phrase is first of all that query scope suggests a letter grade whereas phrase and market Muse and surfer previously known as Super SEO suggested number like out of 100 in order to understand like how close to optimizing compared to their standards you are, it also suggests a word count. And one more thing I wanted to say about the content creator is that at the blacksmith we always aim for an a or higher that tends to be a good standard for actually achieving rankings, high rankings and relevant search. I'm actually not sure if phrase does this. I'm sure they do. I just didn't notice it while going through. But clear scope also suggests a target readability level. I think that's really important for matching the needs of the searcher not going you know too deep into something that maybe could benefit from being more surface level for example. You can also notice here that they have those suggestions for phrases and so phrase we use the very beginning of our process, but we're not optimizing content within that tool. We're really using clear scope for that because in my experience, and this could differ by industry, but I find their suggestions for phrases to incorporate to be a little bit more fine tuned than phrase. So you know, that's, that's my opinion. Um, you'll notice that they also have the sidebar, so they have, you know, a couple of details. I don't again, I don't necessarily use clear scope for the briefing processes is really more at the end of the process. So stuff like this, I'm not necessarily going over but if you were to use one tool, then it's nice to know that it has that it also has those top you know, search results for the query, examples of like headers and things like that. It also has the term like keyword gap map that shows how you stack up compared to the competition. You can dig into the competitor details even more in terms of how clear scope looks at content with their letter grade, by word count, that it has this nice chart that shows how that content grade stacks up against their organic position in search. And then I think the last thing that I'll mention about clear scope for now, is that you can use that editor in here just like you can use the editor in phrase, but actually both free and clear scope. Have a Google Docs add on. And so all you have to do is like grab the report link the individual link to that specific report, put it in Google Docs, and then you get all this information within, you know, Google Docs where you probably at least my team works better that way. Um, okay, so and then I guess the last last thing I was gonna say about this topic is that if I had to pick one tool, I think I would pick clear scope. Again, because of the fine tuned pneus of the instructions, but if I was a smaller shop operation, I'd probably pick phrase because it can do like a more well rounded look at like the topic as a whole and debriefing so so that's my suggestion. Clear scope works by essentially offering it's like a per report price, but you can buy packages and like the more reports you buy at a time, the less expensive Each report is. So let me get my slides back up here. And then we'll move on to the next tool that we're going to talk about though.\r\n\r\nWe talked about phrase to talked about clear scope. So let's talk about market Muse just kind of in passing here because it's a very similar tool. It uses some different technologies, compared to clear scope and phrase and so that's why it's a part of our process again as an organization that spends a lot of time on SEO and data and keyword research. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to you if you're going to maybe consider one of those other tools. What's interesting about marketmuse is that it has this functionality to create an AI generated first draft that includes some like light human intervention from their side. I think that's what this is actually this is like a sample from a while ago where we were just playing around with it to see what would happen. But yeah, again, it has a lot of the same functionality. It offers content optimization suggestions that like keyword gap map that I showed you and both of the tools and it has like some generative AI capabilities. So yeah, it just adds a little bit of extra detail. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that it's something you need to add to your workflow if like one of those other tools could satisfy a lot of these same things. So talking about some other tools that are interesting. Word tune is something that I feel like is so underrated. It's essentially uses your own copy to make suggestions. And so again, I'm going to I'm going to show you what that looks like. So let me share my screen back here. So it works in Google Docs. And so here's I just stole the intro basically from that AI detector article. And so what you could do is you highlight whatever text you want it to make suggestions based off of and I typically do it sentence by sentence I, I'm sure it could do longer bits of text, but I don't find that to be as useful. For me. This is like a great tool for when you have writer's block because I don't know you know if you've experienced this but oftentimes I'll let my get myself get stuck on a specific word and it just like really bugs me, and I'm like it's not done until I figured out the right word. And it takes me forever to get through that. So we're tune. It's great because I'm using it with my own copy. So I can feel really confident about whatever it suggests. I'm sure you could use word tune to take AI generated copy and then re spin it. But that's not my suggestion. So again, it works by using this like Google Docs add on and you you highlight it and just to show that action again. It has this little word tune icon. And then you can see different suggestions for how word tune would rewrite it you get like 10 or something like that. And then you can also fine tune it by changing the tone and then by finding ways to shorten or expand it depending on what your use case is. The last thing that I'll say about word toon for right now is it has this thing called spices and so that's like getting a little bit more like next level with the AI generation and using like generative texts. I haven't played around too much with this yet, but it is interesting. And this is kind of taking it away I think from you know basing it off of your copy to kind of like generating something completely new. So that's why I don't necessarily use this but I think it could be a useful resource for when you're when you have writer's block or things like that. So let me get my slides back up here. Here it is. Okay, so so that was word tune. Um, and then Grammarly. I think works very similarly to word tune, and that it uses your own body of work your own copy, to suggest edits, and so I wrote an article for their blog. That's what the learn more link is. After a recent keynote, they did about all their generative AI capabilities. And so I would definitely check that out if you're curious about how to use grammerly in this way. And full disclosure, I'm a Grammarly ambassador, so you know, I'm always singing their praises, but I think it's I think it's interesting because Grammarly, like many other SAS tools on the market are starting to invest in AI capabilities like directly within their tools. And so I think we're gonna see like more and more of examples of this. And grammerly has a lot of other I think really useful. And interesting features like they have this brand style guide, which is something we use that the blacksmith which allows you to set your preferred spelling for things like brand names, and grammar rules and things like that. All right, so let's take a couple minutes for questions. Anything that's come up so far, after the break, we're going to talk about AI detector tools now that I've shown you the AI writing tools. We're going to talk about chat how to write a good chat GBT prompt and then we're going to end the day with how to create your own personal GPT. So yeah, in the meantime, there's any questions. We'll talk about them now and then we'll take a little bit of a break.\r\n\r\nYeah, very good, great overview of some really cool tools that can be used for our content creation. If you have questions specifically about that, drop those there in the zoom q&a. There's one question floating out there about the slide. We were sharing this link as a slide sharing the slides as a slide being link because there was an issue getting them exported where the the links on the slides were clickable. And so technology Yeah, it that's so currently not downloadable. Is the long and the short of it so but that slide being link is there and it'll be available for you going forward.\r\n\r\nWe can we could share them as downloaded just won't be a clickable link. So you can we could share like both in tandem with each other. Unfortunately, that's going to be the limitation\r\n\r\nYeah, yeah. So I'm happy to add that PDF link as well. We'll I'll get that added to the link bundle as we come back. If you want to download these just know that there are things that say read more, learn more that don't clicked anywhere in the PDF. Alright folks, well let's go ahead and take a break. It is 153 Central time let's take a break until right at two o'clock Central. So right about seven minutes from now and we're quiet until then. Sounds great. See you then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We are back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, we are back and ready for the second part of day two. Maddie, what are we going to knock out today?\r\n\r\nSo we're gonna start with now that we've learned how to generate a copy, how do you detect it? We're going to then move to talking a little bit about some Google guidelines around AI content writing for humans and robots. And then we'll end the day with a deeper dive into chat GPT how to write a great prompt and then how to create your own personal GPT which I'm really excited about because it's something that I only just learned how to do myself. Very\r\n\r\ngood. That's a lot to cover in the next hour. I let me invite everyone also to look at the chat I'm going to drop in today's slides if you have come in late. Also, we've added a link there for the PDF download. And finally, there's a link in the link bundle that'll drop in in just a moment that has the invitation for you to submit your site for a content UX audit tomorrow. So with that I will turn it over to you Matty, let's\r\n\r\ngo. Sounds great. All right. Yeah, let's go ahead and knock this out. So AI detector tools. There's a couple that we've tested at the blacksmith and I want to share some of the results of those tests too, so that you can understand what they can be useful for. But also again, there are limitations. As with the rest of this world of AI, everything's still kind of developing. We're all learning things at the same time. And so there's no like perfect answer. There's no one definitive tool that's going to tell you like this is current AI content, or this isn't AI content. So a couple tools that you could try though that I think will give you a decent idea or continent scale, copy leaks and originality.ai and the link here which again, you can grab through the slide bean link is a link to an in depth investigation that we did at the blog Smith testing out these different tools. You know, trying to learn more about the nature of AI content and what it sounds like. So I do have a couple of ideas for you two that we'll talk about next in terms of like how to rewrite things that sound robotic whether they were robot generated or not. But before we get to that, this example here is kind of funny because it's the Constitution and this is continent scale, saying that they detected to be 9% ai generated and you know, I don't think they had robots at the time unless alien somehow hooked them up. But I think it's fair to say that this is more than likely 100% human generated content. But it's just interesting to see that their AI detector is still picking up some very some version of that. And that you know, also perhaps it hasn't trained this AI detector on you know, pieces that existed before. Ai content was a thing. So so that's just like one thing. You know, I think from the standpoint of like, if you're working with content creators, and you're paying for human generated content, then you should get that fundamentally I think that it's an ethical violation for someone to use AI to generate content without disclosing that and to be accepting payment for that as if it were something that they were creating. Of course, there are many companies out there who are hiring people with the job description that is like aI content writer, AI content editor or like somebody who trains you know, a chatbot on a certain way a certain body of work a certain way of writing. All of that being said, if you if you are using these tools, and they are saying with a high degree of certainty, you know, this is AI generated copy. I think it's really important to not outright accuse somebody of submitting AI generated copy what I do at the blog Smith is like let's say that we're doing like a paid test with a new writer hopeful for our team. What I do is I say, hey, you know, we ran this through, you know, these three AI detector tools, and here's what it said here, you know, is what degree of AI content it's saying it thinks this is like, can you comment on that? And it gives them the chance to you know, explain what they think might happen, defend themselves, offering to make fixes, and I think it's really like the way people people are going to be honest or not. There's nothing you could do about that. But I think it's the way that they respond to and handle that situation that tells you what you need to know about if you want to work with them, whether or not you can ultimately tell if their copy was aI generated or not. What is very interesting about these different tools is first of all, they're all gonna give you a different answer. That's just a fact. Because they're all using a different approach to detect AI content. The other thing is that you can input the exact same copy on one of these tools two times and get a different answer. So again, it's it's the wild wild west. But these will at least give you something to think about and whether it doesn't matter. Like if we if we trust the writer or not, we're always going to run their copies through one or multiple of these tools because we want to detect things that sound robotic, even if they were written by a human. So that kind of brings me to my next point here that I was starting to hint at. So when it comes to detecting AI content, or even detecting content that humans wrote, that sounds robotic, there's a couple of patterns that you can look for. The two major characteristics that the aforementioned AI detector tools are looking for are first of all, perplexity, so that's unpredictability within the content. Ai generated text tends to have low perplexity. Human writing has higher perplexity, it kind of makes sense we're a little bit more erratic than a robot. The other thing is burstiness, which is a similar concept. So it's looking for variation in the length and the structure of sentences. Ai content tends to be more steady, more formulaic, which makes sense. It has lower burstiness and human writing, which you know, has much more variation. The image you see here are some other things that we've picked up in our own writing process. And in investigating this topic, different signals that sound robotic again, whether they are in AI generated or not. So repeating words, like in this example, collision coverage, you know, coverage collision, like it's just like it's not using a lot of variation. And in the box MyStyle guide we talk about like, trying not to use the same word twice in the same sentence or paragraph, which is not always possible, but this would be an example of something that wouldn't pass the blacksmith style guide test because it's it's too repetitive. Also repetitive sentence structure where like, each sentence starts with the same formulaic approach. Advertising then a verb you know, advertising the verb, unnatural word usage, so like, you know, removing a glass dome to access the ball, but it doesn't really sound like how a human would talk about replacing a light bulb. A generic or impersonal tone. You know, it's like things that don't add value that you're just kind of like saying for the sake of having words, it's another thing that we talk about in the blog, Smith style guide, like everything you say, should have a purpose, and we don't believe in fluff. It's about cutting things to being the most concise version they can be while still conveying enough meaning. For people to understand what we're trying to say. Statements that contradict themselves. So the new policy will increase employee benefits while at the same time it will reduce employee benefits that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And inconsistent verb tense, you know, something a human editor. Should be able to pick up pretty well but probably a robot writing is not going to care too much about He He was waiting for the bus when he sees his coworker. Stiff, formal or matter of fact, writing style. You know, again, just something that just doesn't sound like a human wrote it or who would want to read it. So this is this is something that can be helpful to you like when you're doing your own edits to kind of like go through these different things. And, again, whether whether it's aI generated or not, and you know that for a fact, you still want to make sure that your writing is something that appeals to the human. So I wanted to take some time to talk about Google's helpful content update and also their guidance for AI generated content and whether or not it will rank some of this we did talk about last year if you were here, so we're just going to do a really quick refresher on that as it relates to this topic. So my book and like really like what we're talking about, in general is kind of marrying the concepts of writing for both humans who are really the ultimate buyer like they're the ones who actually have money so they can buy from you, whatever it is you're selling. They respond to other humans, other people's empathy, versus robots who you know, we're not writing for their sake, but they are the medium that connects us. To those humans. And so it's important for the things that we write, to be indexable to, you know, be findable to be descriptive, and to ultimately match the intent of whatever the human is looking for. So, you know, robots can also take the form of social networking site algorithms, like that news feed that you're familiar with, I'm sure.\r\n\r\nSo so that's kind of like the two players in this game. Here. So this is some highlights from Google's guidance about AI generated content. As you can see by the link here, this is from early 2023. And I was looking at this page again, just a couple of days ago to see if anything had changed. I had seen something on Twitter now x, where somebody had mentioned that something on this page should change. And I was looking at these three things because I think they're the most relevant to this topic that we're talking about. And like, I don't know if I'm just you know, like, post pregnancy brain or something. I couldn't find the difference. But it might have been because it was about something else on that page. But I might have missed it. And it might have been one of these things. But anyway, I think these things still more or less ring true today. And if anything has changed, it has been Google being less specific about their guidelines. Because that's kind of the nature of what all these things that they've shared with us are it's it's kind of like so just to go over them is a content against Google searches guidelines. They say it's not, but you know, it can't be used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which we'll talk about when we talk about the helpful content update. Will AI content rank highly on search? Maybe, you know, it doesn't give it any gains, which makes sense. What I think is really notable about this is they talk about if it's useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of e 80. It might do well in search. So they talk about original, but we've already talked today about how AI content at least on its own without manual intervention by humans is inherently not original. It is inherently not unique. And I would argue that again, without human intervention, it's neither useful nor helpful, in that, you know, you're not It's not like adding something that doesn't already exist. At least in that case. So to me, from Google's own words, AI content really aren't its own shouldn't rank high and relevant search. But of course, there are exceptions. And then, of course, there are situations where people pair that with a human editor like we saw with seeing that of course, CNET being a cautionary tale of what to avoid. Should I use AI to generate content? They say if you see it as an essential way to help you produce content that is helpful and original, we have that original word again, it might be useful to consider but again, if you're trying to gain search engine rankings and no there was something on Twitter now x where somebody was kind of like I can't remember who it was, but you might recognize the situation especially if you're in like the content world. Someone was boasting about how they had created a ton of AI generated content and they were sharing you know some stats from like their Google Analytics, and how would that helped rankings and things like that? And I think everybody agreed that that person should have probably kept their mouth shut because somebody from Google ended up you know, seeing this Thrive that came to their attention and they got hit with a manual penalty based on what this person was saying about you know, having not really like had that human intervention. So thus, it was not original or unique. And it's just funny, like, you could probably get away with it, at least for a while, depending on how Google develops more of these guidelines. But when you start to boast about it, and Google gets wind of it, then like there are manual interventions that they could take, so tread carefully. If it's working. Keep that to yourself. So then it Yeah, I wanted to like connect this back to Google's helpful content algorithm update, which also happened. Probably a little over a year ago, maybe two years ago. And so they describe it as being part of their long term efforts to provide original and valuable content through search. It rewards content that meets users expectations while demoting content written primarily with search engines in mind. So like we were just talking about what the AI content. This this update isn't focused on AI but but it adds color to those guidelines in terms of how to approach it or you know, if you are generating AI content, how to make it work, so that it could rank these questions. Are directly from Google just made pretty was blacksmith branding, but the link that I shared here will will get you to the Google documentation that includes these questions and the subsequent ones. So to ask yourself like is is this content truly people versus is something that Google would consider ranking. It's things like Do you have a primary purpose or focus for your site? If you're writing about too many disparate topics, it's very confusing to Google you can certainly write about things that are different but related to each other, but you should really have like one specific focus if you want to rank high in relevant search. Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they've had a satisfying experience? I think that's a question to ask yourself, whenever you create any type of content like Is it is it satisfying to the end user doesn't really just serve your purposes? They talk about like demonstrating firsthand experience or like a depth of knowledge that's really important. That's that's how we add uniqueness to our content. That's how we make it original. Even if it's just your opinion on something, you know, that adds color to the content that already exists. Okay, so, um, let's talk now about from the search perspective, are you taking the search engine first approach to your content? So these are things that you obviously don't want to do. And it's questions like, you know, are you primarily trying to attract people from search versus creating something truly useful for humans? It does say are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics like that cautionary tale, that person who was sharing, you know, the content they generated, which resulted in a manual penalty, it's a perfect example. I think this is important too, like, are you mainly just summarizing what others have said without adding much value? You should always be adding I think something to the content that you're creating in order for it to be worth creating in the first place.\r\n\r\nSo just to kind of summarize here, like what is helpful content versus unhelpful content from these guidelines that Google has given us and that I honestly agree with? helpful content is people first genuine specific, it's actionable. Up to date is important. Once you publish something, you have to think about, like if you're using stats or if it's about maybe a tool that changes frequently, like you should be regularly reviewing or auditing your content for opportunities to update it. Is it relatable, is it concise? And ultimately, is it satisfying, versus the unhelpful content which is written primarily for the search engine robots it's spammy? It's generic, it's abstract. It might be outdated. Ultimately, it's impersonal, impersonal, fluffy, and then whacking. So these are some easy guidelines that you can use to understand if your content is hitting the mark for something that Google would even consider ranking high and relevant search. All right, so now we're gonna get to some of like the really fun stuff, I think today, which is get GBT some specific examples for how you can use it, as well as a demonstration for how I'm using it. And so, a lot of the things that I'm going to talk about today are based on things that I've learned from other people. I didn't necessarily invent these things. I've adapted many for my own use cases. And so again, I think this is a really valuable opportunity for like if you have anything to add to this discussion, I'd love to see it in the chat. I think it could benefit other people. How are you experimenting with AI? Like how how would you maybe adapt some of these ideas for how to write a great prompt What are like interesting prompts that you've used, and you know what, how is that benefited? You so I'll just put that out there. And then I'll also say that some of these are like pretty much all of these guidelines are based on open AIS guidelines for prompt engineering as well as Google's in some cases, I've combined to them and in all cases, I've given examples of how to use them effectively. So let's go ahead and jump to it. Okay, so the, I think first and perhaps the most important thing is to be as specific as possible. And you want to set parameters for the output that you're looking for. So my prompt here was helped me generate 10 email subject lines to use for cold outreach for my content marketing agency, please limit output to a maximum of 45 characters per example. I picked that number, the 45 characters because I saw that that's like somewhat of a best practice for how many characters people want to see in an email subject line. And what I could have done here was use the personal GPT I'm going to show you later that's all about the blogs and style guide them has like aspects of like how we do business and I could have gotten like even better example results here. But the point was not to show you something perfect it was to show you how to apply this principle. And the other thing that I wanted to add to is like you can always start with a plant, see what it gets you and then you can set parameters after the fact to refine your output. Like, you know, maybe I would have asked this prompt and then asked for it to shorten it to 45 characters or to suggest new examples of 45 characters. Or maybe I would have asked for like, what are you know, 10 General Sales, cold outreach subject lines, that I could use and then I might have added the detail Okay, now, adjust it for like my content marketing agency. The next one is to give context and examples. So I have this bot and I think I'm going to show you a screenshot of it next. One of my personal GPCs is a blacksmith sales expert. And so I created this bot because we recently hired a new salesperson, and there's just so much to learn both about the blogs with his brand. The work we do for customers, and just our sales process in general things that we want to share with new prospects that I wanted to create a resource and it's like of course you know, I want to make myself as available as possible to this new salesperson because typically I've been the salesperson for my company, I have a lot of that knowledge in my own head, but there are times when I am unavailable or I have other stuff that I have to work on. And so I wanted to create a personal GPT that incorporates some of this different documentation that I've created about our process. You know, referring to this prompt it also has like a copy of our standard proposal. Different things about you know, like what makes us stand out compared to the competition what's what's unique to us, I guess, so that any person on our team, any especially new salesperson, would be able to use this chat bot in order to surface some of this information, especially if they couldn't get a hold of me basically. So here's an example of a prompt I gave my personal GPT which is using the above case study. So I gave it a URL on our website. And one of the features of chat GPT is that you can have it browse the web in order to to include information and its results. So I gave it a URL. I asked it to reference a proposal that I had attached to the GPT that I've uploaded to it. And I said proposed an email pitch for a specific job opportunity. I copy and pasted a longer piece than this. I just took a screenshot but like the long version of this job description, and and I asked it to effectively address the requirements that the job description surfaced and the writing based on our strengths. And so what ended up happening was, you know, it wrote like a cold pitch email. But it did it did effectively address this prompt. There were things that I would change about it. Certainly there are things that I would have edited it before I sent it out to the person who had posted this job description, but I think that for me as a founder who has also traditionally been the salesperson it's such an effective way to use this tool because I spend so much time just you know, it's like I know all this information I know what we're good at. I know that we have relevant examples. You know, I know all this but it takes time to like resurface that knowledge and put it in a form that sounds good and is compelling, you know, to a sales prospect so that if you take one thing away, I think that you know that's like one really excellent use case of using your existing knowledge or your internal documentation. To make your life way easier.\r\n\r\nAnother related GPT prompt engineering tip is to use de limiters to clearly indicate distinct parts of the input. That just means like what I shouldn't have done here that would have made it probably a little bit easier for chat. GPT to understand what I wanted is to put this this job description text in like quotes, that's like a delimiters to say like, you know, do this to this piece of what I'm asking for to kind of like help it understand what part of the copy it's referencing. And what part of the copy is the ask, especially when you have like a longer input output, you know, whatever. Another example of that is something I learned from James rose. He is an automation and Zapier expert and has been doing a lot of interesting experiments with AI who's really good person to follow. If you're interested in just like getting ideas, he takes transcripts from like voice of customer interviews where he's getting feedback and you know, like positive testimonials and things about his product and he feeds that transcript into chat GPT and says you know, use this puts a transcript in quotes those delimiters and basically like give me like three, you know, like really nice things they said about you know, our product three like great pieces of feedback. And I think that that's such a useful way we like on our client calls on our internal meetings. We use a tool called fireflies, which automatically transcribes all our meetings, but it's still you know, it's still a lot to sort through an end fireflies has its own AI capabilities, too. So it helps to summarize and things like that, but to take to be able to use that output and quickly surface insights based on whatever your prompt is, I think is such an awesome use of AI that saves the human reader from having to go through the whole thing. So this is and I'll show you, I'll show you what this looks like in action when we do the personal GPT demonstration. But this is kind of what it looks like to set some parameters for your personnel GPT and there's two I guess like schools of thought on setting like setting parameters narrowly defining the G PTS role. So you could do this within normal chat GPT and say for this query, you know, I want you to take on this specific role. And so I got this idea from Paul Roeser. He was on some like marketing technology podcast, and he's talking about how he uses AI. And his example was like, something along the lines of like, you know, pretend that you're a lawyer that advises entrepreneur, it's about hiring law and then he gave his prompt so he kind of like set the scene like this is the narrow role that I want you to operate into this query. So that's one way that you could look at it the other way is that you could create a personal GPT that serves a specific purpose like my blacksmith sales expert, that I've already referred to and that you know, I'm kind of showing you behind the scenes, how I set it up. So as you can see here, there's like a name for it, which is kind of arbitrary. A brief description, I think, mostly for your reference. And then the instructions are like what the AI uses to then suggest answers to your prompts. So as you can see here, I'm telling it like you can use our website as your primary reference. You should be familiar with all those pages and use it to inform your responses. It'll ask you and I'll show you how you want it to communicate with you how you want it to give answers. You know what specific information you want to focus on again, like narrowing that scope. And then I also say like tailor your responses to showcase the company's strengths and successes. Using you know details from the website and emphasize why we're the ideal choice in you know, answering like sales related queries. So this is one of the greatest uses of chat GPT without narrowly defining its role and objective. You're gonna get like a wide variety of answers and that's fine. It depends on what your use cases, but by giving it a roll, I think the quality of your output goes up exponentially. And I'll show you again, at the end here, what that looks like in practice. Here's another really interesting way to use it, I think, especially if you're trying to learn a new skill or if you're trying to troubleshoot an existing workflow, which is what I was doing in this prompt. So I use air table a lot. I'm a huge fan of no code and automation in general. I've found in my life that it's really hard to find like the perfect solution to everything that I want to do. I never could find like my perfect project management tool. And so essentially, I built it between using process street air table, Zapier, and you know the other mix of ragtag tools that are in my arsenal. So in this case, I was trying to create a specific automation in air table that for some reason is just evading me and I'm sure I'm doing like one stupid thing wrong, but I asked air table or sorry, I asked Chad GPT first of all, I prompted it by telling it what automation I was trying to create, like the actions that triggers the end goal. And it gave me like a step by step process that I would say is a little bit more high level than this out, but and then I asked it to refine its guidance or expand on its guidance by saying okay, so for this step, this is where I'm getting stuck. What was how exactly what I set this up in air table, and so then, as you can see, the result has some details and it's more detailed than the previous query gave for that step. It's probably worth mentioning that in chat GPT right now, there's two versions of GPT, which is like the underlying, you know, algorithm, machine learning mechanism, whatever. So there's GPT 3.5, which is an older version, and then there's GPT for GPT four incorporates web browsing so it has more up to date guidance. So especially when you're trying to troubleshoot something like air table, which changes often and so, you know, if I were using the old version of chat GPT, I might have gotten a different answer. So when you're doing things like like this, you want to use like the newer version, there is a limitation. I think it's something like you can have 40 prompts within three hours or something like that. I don't think I've ever gotten close to hitting that. But I suppose if you were to ask, you know, a lot of follow up questions, or you're troubleshooting something very complicated, then you could hit that so that's just something to keep in mind that as a chat GPT user and I don't know what the distinction is for paid versus free, but I think that the paid version of Chad GPT is like worth its weight in gold. I think it's extremely undervalued and it's probably because they're using our data to train it. So they do get a benefit out of it. But you know, I would say if you're finding yourself limited by the free version, then just upgrade to the paid it's, it's so worth that.\r\n\r\nOkay, so now, here's the real fun part. So we're gonna go through how to build your own GPT and I'm gonna give you like a specific task to do and so you can either follow along with me while I do this now, or you can do this yourself. Later, watch the recording and replicate it. I will say the process is probably much more straightforward than you might think, if you've never done this before. So we'll go ahead and get started. Let me set my screen accordingly. So we're going to jump over to the blog Smith website, because this is going to be the basis for the very basic UBT that we're going to create today, which is based on one that I've already created and refined a little bit more than what we're going to get into. But okay, so the blacksmith has this writing style guide and on our website. It has this chapter version so you can jump you know to these different sections. To see how will we go about our writing style. It's something that's fairly industry agnostic, so definitely like a great resource. If you don't have your own writing style guide. You could use ours to build yours. But what I want to do is create a chat GPT bot based on this that essentially acts as like a blacksmith editor that defends our style and explains when a piece of copy is not following it. So we have this as a PDF which I've already downloaded. I'll just show you what it looks like really quick. And it's it's designed, but it's fairly plain texts. You know, it's not that much more complex visually than like a Google doc version of this. And I'm telling you this, because my first attempt at making a personal GPT was actually to solve a personal problem of mine, which is that I love the game Settlers of Catan and I wanted to make a Catan rules bot so that I could download all the PDFs of the rules for every version we have. And I could ask the GPT okay, like you know, here's some like obscure situation like what is the role, you know, based on these rule books? Because every once in a while, something like that pops up. And while I like to think of myself as a content expert, there are those niche situations that require further consideration. Unfortunately, on the Catan website, the PDFs that you can download are very complicated visually as PDF, so chat GPT in my limited experience has not been able to read them. So it's just something to note that like you want to give it like the plainest text version of whatever documents you want to share with it, but something like this would be fine. And I know that because I've tested it. Okay, so so if you want to follow along, you know, just hit download, and that's this is the exact file that we're going to use. So then you go to the chat GPT dashboard. Which looks like this. And like I told you, you can toggle between chat, or GPT 3.5 or GPT. Four, you can see you know those limitations as well as the added benefits of using that more recent version of it. So then you go to explore GP Ts, and you can see on my sidebar when it loads here that I have. We have chat GPT which is like you know, every every question you could ever want to ask and then I have a couple of my personal gptc here as well as some that I've explored in this explore LGBTs area that I'm just kind of playing around with. So this is also just like a really fun place to look through things, test things out and get ideas for the the GPS you might want to create. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead and click this Create button, and you'll see this interface. Again, it's pretty simple. And if you go to create, it's going to prompt you with specific questions, but if you kind of like are familiar with this personal GPT idea, you could also jump to the Configure tab and start filling it out. But I think that it's easiest to think about it from this Create Tab. And so it's going to prompt you with a couple of questions. So this first one is like what kind of chat GPT what kind of personal GPT Do you want to make? So I'm going to tell it, you know, I like to create a GPT that serves as an editor for my brand, the blog Smith. The goal is to have this GPT serve as a resource. That references our specific style guide, and suggests edits based on newly inputted copy. I'm just making this up. But the last time that I did this, I'd used something similar to that. And so after each input, it's going to think you know, it's going to react to the things that you're telling it and it's going to ask you to refine the way that it interacts with you. So we're not none of this is like rocket science right now. This is just like designing almost like the persona of who this GPT is going to be. So then it's gonna suggest to name I suggest naming this GPT blacksmith editor. Does that work for you? Sure. Yeah. And you can change this yourself. Like if you just want to, like get through this part. Just say yep, yep, that's fine. And the next thing is it's going to generate a profile picture and so these are new, they're a little bit arbitrary. It's just like for your own purposes, for fun. One thing that is kind of fun with the imagery and it doesn't always work so we'll see. But sometimes I asked it to change to adapt the picture to use like one of our brand colors just for fun. So I'll say like, can you update this image to incorporate our main brand color, which just using a text expander Simple as that? Let's do it does. So this is using that dolly dolly I never know how to say it to suggest images and, you know, it looks like Okay, right? But we're not we're not asking it to create anything like complicated at this point. So, so like for example, it didn't, it didn't really follow my query. So let's see if I try a different way. Can the image use, you know, our main branch color? Like this is this is definitely the limitation of AI is that sometimes it understands the query and sometimes it just doesn't and we won't get stuck on it. If it doesn't get it. I just want to see if changing it has any practical effect on it. So then after this, it's going to ask about Yeah, that doesn't do it. No, that's fine. Okay, so the next question. They're asking me to more narrowly defined the role of what this GPT is going to serve as I'm Oh, so I'll have you use the uploaded PDFs as this as the foundation for your edits any questions? So I can upload the PDF here. Or I can go to that configure tag and I can also tab and I can also I can also upload additional documents to help as well like with my blacksmith sales expert, I have like our proposal I have a document about our sales process. I have another GPT that I forgot to mention that's called the blacksmith like SEO guru or something like that. And it basically I uploaded a bunch of documents about our approach to SEO some stuff about our keyword research process, and our like philosophy behind the different steps as well as a document I created for our writers and editors. That's about let me see how to get out of that. That's about how we write about SEO to make sure that our philosophy is communicated correctly and specifically. So that's just an example of different documents that you might use to support the outputs here and to narrowly define what you want to base its answers on. Okay. One thing that's important to say is when you're uploading documents you want to make sure to kind of like give context and say like, this is how I want you to use it. And like, you know, I'm doing this, I'm uploading this. So I'm expecting you to use this as part of your output if you don't, if you don't refer to that document when you're setting it up or when you're interacting with it. It might just ignore it in some, in some use cases when I've been creating these personal GPS like that's happened where, for example, with this one, it'll make edits based on best practices, but not based on the document that I specifically wanted it to use. So that's why I used that language. And so it says, I've updated your GPS behavior to focus on our specific style guide based on the uploaded PDF. So that's great. You know, like, what options so one thing that it usually asks is like how do you want the GPT to communicate with you and I'm getting maybe ahead of myself, I'm gonna say no, that sounds good and see if it prompts me to ask about like the tone.\r\n\r\nOkay, so it's not gonna say it looks good, but what options do I have for how it communicates with me? In terms of tone of voice, again, usually asked so this is giving me some options here. Again, not usually in the way that it normally does. It kind of asked to like paragraph form versus like giving me several examples. I'm gonna say that I want it to be let's go with number three, which is encouraging and positive. I think that that's the ethos of how we edit at the box with the other things are true to um, yeah, so just for the sake of this, and you can always change this, you can always refine it. Okay, so it's updating the GPT. This is probably the last edit and then what I'll do is I'm going to grab some copy that I want it to, to edit just to show you how it comes full circle. And then I'm going to show you kind of like the back end of what it looks like. So let me grab that copy. I'm going to feed it an example of like a recent social post that we were editing and the formatting is going to be like a little bit funky here, which is fine, because this is just an example. And the blog the style guide isn't necessarily built with a focus on editing social copy, but again, it was just like a quick thing to to try. Okay, so it says it's updated it. It tells me you know what the point of it is no more adjustments needed. Let's try it out. Okay, so I'm going to show you how it works and then we'll show you the Configure and then we'll kind of end the day off with any questions. Okay. So it gives you some prompts based on what it thinks that you might ask it and you can edit this, but I'm going to say please suggest edits to the following copy, in quotes and quotations, those delimiters based on the blacksmith style guide PDF and again, it's gonna be a little sloppy looks like it didn't actually take the name of the GPT that we asked it to. So we'll we'll take a look at that too. So it's interesting depending on the prompt you give it and I've tried this a couple of times in this case, it's kind of separating it out by saying like okay, here's some of the things from the blacksmith style guide and here's like specific passages of copy and how we would change them. So that's interesting. But what I would probably prefer is that it edits the whole thing, and then it tells me what edits it made. So it's, again, it's referencing I can I can tell because I'm familiar with it, but it's referencing specific aspects of the blacksmith style guide, which is great, we know it's working. But what I'm going to ask you to do is to change the way it outputs it. Can you refine the previous output by starting with I might mess up exactly how to say this, but by starting with, like all of the copy with edits, then after words, shared the specific edits made from blog Smith style perspective, that might not be like the most effective prompt. We're just going to see what it says. Okay, yeah, it looks like it's understanding. Nature. The copy here is an important I just want to show you how something like this could work for your purposes. Okay, so this is what I wanted it it refined the copy first and then it told me what it refined and why. Um, so let's look at this Configure tab. So yeah, for whatever reason, it didn't add the name. That that it prompted me and asked me to so I'm gonna go ahead and add that and you can see it up here. You can see this description. You can see the instructions based on some of the things that we talked about when we were creating it. You can make changes to these conversation starters we might even say like what like other conversation starters, would you suggest using freelist UPC code? I'm just curious and I don't know what to do. You can see the PDF that we uploaded and I can upload more files. You can add additional capabilities. I think by default the web browsing and Dolly image generation is implemented for many of you today who deal with code, this code interpreter might be useful. And then AI actions is something that I've started to play around with but don't fully understand but there's a way that you can connect your personal GPT to Zapier so that for example, it could reference data and other apps. So for my blog, Smith sales GPT I'm trying to create an AI action that allows it to reference our air table CRM so that you could ask it questions about a certain lead or certain portfolio projects and things like that. So once I get that implemented, it's going to be so cool. Okay, so it's giving me some ideas for these conversation starters that are a little generic, but I could probably refine them further. I think the last thing to talk about is how you can either keep this to yourself or share it with other people. I think that these drafts are automatically saved. So if you X out of here before clicking Save, I believe it will still exist, but don't quote me on that. From there you can decide you know, if you want to, if you want to keep it to yourself if it's you know something that's for your own personal use cases, or if you want to share it with your team or if you want to share it with like the wider world like maybe you create a chatbot for your industry that other people could benefit from that you want to share. So, in most cases, probably anyone with the link is a good bet, if you ever intend intend to share it with other people. Okay, so let me jump back to my slides really quick. We're going to end off the day here. So here we go. me pull this back up. Um, okay, this is the link to grab the style guide if you want to use that to replicate what I did today. You can also grab that from the side being like um, I'll just say one more time. My book writing for humans and robots. It was the number one best seller in the SEO category. So if SEO and content is something that you want to invest more time and learning about then I would highly recommend my book. You can grab the first chapter for free on the books website, and you can grab the book on Amazon in both print and Kindle format. I'll give one more reminder for our live content UX audit tomorrow. I'd really love to help you workshop, your content, help you come up with ideas for making it even stronger and more effective. So you can use this link to do that and that will happen at the end of day two. And then, you know, outside of today, if you have any questions about the things that we're talking about, you can either email me Maddie at the blogspot.com or on Twitter, aka ex im at Mad Yasmin and then yeah, we'll end the day with any questions that have come up since going over some of this GPT stuff.\r\n\r\nYeah, great stuff. Thanks Maddie. You know, the custom GP tees are really interesting. And it's it's also not only for your own business, but also working for clients. It's an opportunity to really, it's, it's a service you can provide. We have a boy for example, that has a ton of they're an educational nonprofit and they have a ton of PDFs like 800 and an educational topic that they deal with and so we're investigating, what would it take to put those PDFs in there and then have a bot that you could query the entire library to find an answer to something right. It's just super, super useful. Yeah.\r\n\r\nOne one note on that Nathan is chat GPT. So they have a limitation of you can upload 20 Total documents but they don't say how large or small those documents have to be so OneNote for like anybody who's trying like this is something that came up with that Catan bot I was trying to make. You can combine the documents if need be.\r\n\r\nYeah. And chat CPT if you have a large library like that it might not be the best tool it sometimes there are a bunch of third party tools. I mean, if you go on App Sumo, every day, there's a new one that somebody's chat bot or whatever, but find one that the UI that you like and a lot of those don't have those limitations. Like they have a separate database that they're looking at with total sort of magic they've created. I don't know, I don't understand it. But anyway, yeah. So folks, a couple of questions stacked up there. If you have a question, add that to the zoom q&a, and we'll dive into it. So first question from Doug. Maddie, how does SEMrush or SEMrush fit into the landscape of content writing tools? What overlaps or complements with phrase? Sure,\r\n\r\nyeah. So I think of something like SEMrush or Ahrefs is being a great all in one. SEO tool. So people use it for more than content although content is like an important facet of them versus something like phrase or query scope is really just about content and just about content optimization, or, you know, in the case of like phrase and market Muse also generating content is the use case. But SEMrush I have I'll be honest, I have more experienced with a traps but they both they're both very similar and we actually use SEMrush like the keyword researchers and strategists on my team, we use SEMrush these days. But it is it is the tool that if we're comparing it to phrase and query scope, that's the tool that we use to define our primary keyword. It's before we run those reports. It's a tool that we use to come up with some secondary keywords. It's the tool that we use to identify feature snippet opportunities, we can do competitor research on it. You can do backlink tracking on it. You can audit your website. So I mean, it just it just serves such a bigger overall SEO use case. But there are many very useful content optimization tools. And so it's kind of like a higher budget tool than any of the ones that I've mentioned, but it will serve you know, many of your SEO purposes even outside of content. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nOkay, questions from Eddie. Eddie is writing tech blogs. I see now my keyword content from Reddit is ranking very good. I doubt Reddit content is helpful since usually people have vague answers to questions. What do you think about that?\r\n\r\nIt's an interesting question and I think I'm gonna take the opposite stance. I do think that Reddit content is helpful. There's something about people being like anonymous on the internet that like makes the truth come out. People feel like a little I guess like Freer with the information that they that they volunteer. And so I mean, you have to take it with a grain of salt because they're anonymous. They also might have an agenda that is not clear versus somebody who's coming out and saying, you know, I work for one of these tools or, you know, these are the clients they serve. And so that's like, why this relates to what I'm talking about. But I will say that sites like Reddit, Reddit and Quora are really interesting for learning more about your audience, learning about the things that like keep them up at night and so that's why they rank so high is because they are a wealth of information. They're not, you know, they're not using like the traditional methods to optimize their sites, but they are benefiting from all this unique user generated content because they've created communities. So, yeah, I mean, I don't I don't know exactly how to answer the question. I guess I'm kind of like answering around it, but I think that Reddit is a useful resource in general. I don't know that it can be counted on like aI right where Yeah, I can be confidently incorrect certainly. So to can, Reddit user is but they bring up some really interesting points that are worth investigating. So as long as if you are using it as a reference that you fact check, or you know, if you're I guess if the question is like, How can I outrank Reddit the the answer is like, I don't know.\r\n\r\nYou just said maybe Reddit pays Google. And honestly, we just did a story about this a week ago in our news roundup. It is actually Google who has purchased the rights to all of read its content. Alright, Gemini. Yeah, that just came out. The story last week was an unnamed AI but it's since come out that it's Google has purchased it right. So who knows? Yeah, Google does. Yeah. Doug says here's my favorite prompt. I add this to help me brainstorm chat. GPT add this to the end of your prep, ask me five questions that will improve the response you'll be giving me I use that too. It's really helpful. I\r\n\r\nlove that I I haven't considered that and that's why I think like discussions like this are so useful. Like, we can all learn so much from each other. I learned something new about this every day. For\r\n\r\nsure. The AI world is moving rapidly. And we were Mata you and I were talking earlier just we did an AI workshop here back in October, and there's so much that's new and better and different, even just in the last few months. It's pretty crazy. All right. That brings us to the end of questions. Tomorrow, we're talking about a UX content UX. So give us one more time an overview of what we're going to talk about tomorrow and we'll start to wrap things up here.\r\n\r\nOh, tomorrow. I was looking at the comments and somebody had mentioned let's say Ben had mentioned that to get them to use the right color and the GPT to be very specific, use hex color code when so I got distracted but um, okay, so tomorrow we're going to focus on the content reader experience. Content UX, another way of thinking about it. So we're going to talk a little bit about things like things that Google has said or page experience signals, so things that are like tangible that you can optimize around within your design to help your ranking on Google. And my philosophy when it comes to SEO is that there's three pillars, there's like the content and the things that you can affect on your own page. There's the website structure, so that's going to be a lot of what we talk about tomorrow. And then there's things like Off Page signals like backlinks, which we won't talk about, but you know, we can always have a discussion later or, you know, I'm sure Nathan will bring on somebody who talks about that at some point, too. So yeah, we'll talk about these like website signals, these page experience signals. We'll talk a little bit about website structure, things that you can do to create a better experience for your users, even if it's not necessarily something that Google takes into consideration for ranking and some things that they do. And then we will talk about auditing, you know, with practical tools and specifics, your contents, the nature of your contents UX. I'll tell you how to like run your own content UX audit, whether that's with tools or with people in person. And so that'll be that'll be kind of the nature of what we talk about tomorrow. Trying to bring that discussion full circle from the specific things that you can use to how to like measure if you're using them effectively, and then we'll end the day with a content UX audit from the things that ideally, y'all have submitted. So if you haven't, please use that form that we've linked to in that slide. Being link, and then I'll pick a couple for us to go over tomorrow.\r\n\r\nYep, very good. And that link is there in the chat. Once again, make sure you submit a URL that was a lot of fun last year when we did that very info wise. Yeah. So I will take care of that. Tomorrow. That's yeah, day two. All right. Maddie, good stuff today. As always, we'll have the recording up if anybody wants to go back and replay if you came in late. It'll be up in about an hour or so soon as it renders. And I will see you back here tomorrow, one o'clock central time for day two of content workshop. Have a good night. See you then.\r\n\r\nHear but as you're coming in, we're just asking what was your biggest takeaway from day one? You can sound off there in the chat. I'm also dropping in the new link bundle, I can type correctly. There is a new slide being linked, so make sure you grab that new one. It is updated on the replay page. But make sure you grab that new link because a few changes have been made since yesterday. That will let you follow along better.\r\n\r\nSome last minute tool suggestions. Ah,\r\n\r\nlove it. Love it all. Right, catch. Working for everybody now. Just about a minute and a half to go and again, we'd love to hear from you in the chat on what your biggest takeaways from day one we're. As we are waiting just another minute or so to get started. Also the link there for the live content UX audit is on the screen because we have a slide or two left if you'd like to submit your site or page or something for a content audit. It'll be a friendly review with with some good help to help you improve some of your language. So use that link. The link is in the link bundle in the chat. There on the screen. We do have a couple of slots if you'd like to participate in that. So Vivian, if you look at the replay link in the link bundle the academy link there is a PDF download link on that on the on the replay page. And that is the new updated slides. Yep, so that's all there ready to go on the replay page or you can view them on slide being right now. Yeah, not too many changes. New tools. All I was new to was fun tools. Yeah. Alright folks, about 30 seconds to go. Glad everybody's back for day two. Again, our check in question. Let us know in the chat. What your biggest takeaway from day one was? Particularly did you have you used any new GPT prompts since we played around with that yesterday, or has anybody taken the dive and made your own custom GPT based on\r\n\r\nor have any ideas for things that you want to try when you have time? Yeah, I could. I could use some more ideas myself. Yeah.\r\n\r\nFor sure. All right, folks. It is three minutes after someone to start our recording and we will get underway. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everybody, wherever you happen to be welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here and joined again by MADI. Azzaman for day two of the content accelerator for 2024 Welcome back. Maddie. Glad you're here.\r\n\r\nThank you so much for having me. Again. It's exciting to dig into some of these topics.\r\n\r\nAbsolutely. So we had a lot of fun yesterday talking about some AI stuff and some great principles for creating great content. And today we're looking more at the the user side of consuming content right what are we going to talk about today? Exactly.\r\n\r\nYeah, I think that you can think of today as being a way to practically test your content, whether that's with other people, whether that's with tools, understanding how it measures up against some of the guidelines that Google has shared, that are necessary for ranking, specifically when they have to do with the user experience. So we're going to kind of attack this from all angles. And, you know, hopefully it'll leave today with some really tangible tools to help you understand like, does your content provide a great reader experience? Or are there things that you could do to improve it?\r\n\r\nYeah, very good. And we do still have this content UX link on the screen. If you have not filled that out and you would like to there's still a slot or two left for the second hour, we'll do some live content review. So grab that now. The link is there in the chat as well. A couple little bits of housekeeping and we'll turn it back over to Matty as usual. Ask your questions using the zoom q&a And we'll take those questions at the end of each hour today. break in the middle as usual. One note is that the slides have been updated since yesterday. So in the chat is the new slide being link. And if you want the PDF download, just go onto the replay page with the link there and the link bundle and you can download the PDF there as well that has all the new updates on the slides. So with that, I'm going to disappear Maddie, let's get started.\r\n\r\nLet's do it. So yeah, if if you want to submit something for this live content UX audit, ideally, it's like a page on your website, not not something like a PDF, because we want to look at how the content interacts with design. And like Nathan said, you know, it's a friendly review. We're not like looking for issues. We're just looking for things that you could do to perhaps improve the content experience. Get another set of eyes on it. And it's just a practical way to apply some of the tools suggestions I'm going to give you so with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. We're going to start today by talking about Google guidelines for what makes up a great user experience, especially when it has to do with content and specifically we're going to talk from the perspective of Google's quality rater guidelines. And then after I go through a couple specifics there, we're going to talk more broadly about Google's page quality signals. I think that's what it's called. I haven't labeled in the next slide but things that have to do with what they've told us influenced ranking high and relevant search, you know, all else equal, if you have great content, what aspects of your website design, you know, must be present of your website structure must be present in order for you to rank high and relevant search. So the first part is a little bit more I would say qualitative. And then the second part is going to be a little bit more quantitative. So the learn more link is for an article I wrote a while back for Search Engine Journal. This was specifically focusing on aspects of Google's quality rater guidelines that have to do with the user experience. And so I think it was a couple of years ago now I read through the entire quality rater guidelines, which if you're interested in SEO, and user experience, I would highly recommend at least giving it a skim. It's kind of hard to do because it's like 175 pages, but there's some really good nuggets in there about how Google looks at search, how they judge quality of content, how they determine if a page of a search result meets the needs of the searcher who's looking for it. And so the quality rater guidelines what's worth mentioning is that to some extent you have to take with a grain of salt because this is not something that directly influences rankings. What happens is human quality raters that they hire read through these guidelines, they're tested on them to make sure that they understand what Google is looking for and then they manually rate different website results based on a certain query. And so what happens is that Google gets that information. It helps them you know, refine their algorithm in terms of the general direction they want to take with it, but it doesn't necessarily result in any manual adjustments for whatever websites they're ranking. It's it's more of like a research process. So that's, that's what the quality rater guidelines are. They're a tool to help Google research what the web looks like right now in order to make decisions about how they want to adjust their algorithm for the rest of us. But all that being said, Whenever Google gives us information, whenever they volunteer details about how they look at search, and how they define quality, and like a great user experience, I think that we would be wise to take note of that if it is in fact our goal to rank in relevant search. And I think at the end of the day, whether it is or not, I think Google tries to maintain a high standard for quality. I think that it's their philosophy, philosophy, that content is king, you know that that good? Content is important. And so again, whether search is your goal or not, it's worth it's worth at least like listening to what they have to say. And so, for your benefit, I've tried to break down some of the most important things from the quality rater guidelines specifically having to do with the topic that we are discussing today. So the first thing that they mentioned or they they talk about the quality rater guidelines has to do with interstitials. So back in, it was either 2017 or 2018. They made an update to their algorithm, and they told us about it is again one of those rare cases where they're just upfront. And they said that like if you're using popups say, for example, to gather somebody's email address, or you know, it maybe you're on an E commerce site to advertise the sale, something that obscures the content that you have to interact with you either put your email in, or you have to click the X button, you know, something like that, that you have to interact with in order to use the content on the page. They call that an intrusive interstitial. And so what happened was it really it really resulted in a big change for how people use conversions, I guess on their website, so you know, bloggers and people who do affiliate marketing and of course, yeah, ecommerce, and businesses trying to get email subscribers all had to fundamentally change the way that they approach gathering email addresses. And I'm going to talk a little bit later about what you can do instead, that doesn't violate Google's guidelines. But again, from Google's perspective, they say that interstitials make it difficult to use the main content of the page. And so when they're talking in the quality rater guidelines, they frequently refer to MC main content, which is like what the searcher is ultimately going to your website for and so you could say generally speaking, that they're trying to defend the experience of the main content. And to like, skip ahead to the point here about ads, when they talk about ads, that Google recognizes that and they say this in the quality rater guidelines, that ads don't automatically equate to low quality, they understand that ads are in many cases, the reason a site can continue existing. But that being said, there is like a right and a wrong way to go about implementing them. And so they say the too many or like large ads hurt the user experience. And then that case, the human quality raters should assign that site that result, a low rating. So again, you want to think in terms of the main content is the ad obscuring it? Is it taking away from it? If not, you're probably okay. But it's just good. To keep in mind that Google's not saying no, you can't have ads. You just have to be thoughtful about it. And when I did some of these UX audits in the past, like the ones that we're going to do later today, I did a couple of for some members of the Denver bloggers club one of the local clubs that I've been involved with here. And one thing I noticed about a lot of them was you know that they'd have an ad in the sidebar, they'd have an ad in their footer. They'd have an ad a couple times throughout their blog content, and it was probably Google Adsense that they were using, or some other ad network. Like it. And again, it's like I understand that you're monetizing your site using ADS. But at the end of the day, it's probably working against you because people if you were to look, you know into the data like the scroll depth and the time on page and things like that, using Google Analytics, for example. You probably see that on those pages that are very heavy with ads that people abandon the page pretty quickly because it's just a bad reader experience. So to go back a point here, clickbait Google has a couple of pieces of guidance in the quality rater guidelines about that specifically.\r\n\r\nGenerally speaking, a good page sets expectations or good title sets expectations for wherever it's leaving you. And so clickbait is something that it can certainly be effective and getting attention and getting clicks, but it can be a very unsatisfying experience if it doesn't do something to deliver on the promise made in the title. Um, the Google specifically says that clickbait headings detract from high main content. So, you know, that's something that they're specifically looking for and guiding people to, to comment on. And they say also that like every page should have a page title. It shouldn't just be presented without buttoning it up that way. And that title should describe page content. So again, it's a balance. Writing a good title, I think is very much in art. But it shouldn't be misleading. That's that's the key here. Um, so the last point here is that when it comes to creating content, you want the answer to your query to be pretty prominent in the results. You don't want people to click through and then have to dig to find that. And Google has a couple of different SERP features, I would say where they're trying to, you know, first of all, answer this within search so that you don't click through, which is a problem for us content creators, but it's also perhaps an opportunity when we think about things like a Featured Snippet, which is just that sort of box that shows up above any other search results and it's usually summarizing kind of like the nature of what that person is looking for what Google thinks that person is looking for. There's other things like Google will index parts of a page and link to that specific part and highlight it you probably noticed that yourself when doing search and looking for something very specific. And so that's something that they do, it's not, to my knowledge, it's not something that you can necessarily optimize for. It's it's their methodologies of indexing and surfacing content. But the example that they gave in the quality rater guidelines was something about like somebody searching Abraham Lincoln's birthday. And when somebody clicked through like it was present on the page, but it wasn't prominently answered. And so in that case, they were instructing the human quality rater to give that like a not as good rating for meeting the needs of the searcher. So yeah, I mean, definitely, that's, that's kind of most of what I'm going to say about the quality rater guidelines. But I really think it is a very interesting document and especially if you look at the examples they give in terms of how they're making those determinations. There's a lot of little nuggets of truth and we also have a blog post on the blacksmith website that digs into this even outside of like the user experience sort of and like design focus. So if you want another take on that then definitely check that out. We just went in and updated it recently. So let's talk more broadly now about some search signals from Google things that Google has told us about the page experience and you know, importantly, I think how to how to like measure that, quantitatively. Google, we talked a little bit about helpful content yesterday and that algorithm update which was the year a year and a half ago, something like that. Google has been has said that a good page experience is a requirement. For creating what they define as helpful content. So you know, all these algorithm updates are designed to support Google's mission, you know, the way that they look at content quality and things like that, of course, they all you know, more or less feed into each other, but I think it's worth mentioning that like that is an aspect of having helpful content. Alright, so we're gonna start with what is collectively known as the core web vitals so the core web vitals, this algorithm update, or Google announcing this page signal? came about? I want to say it was 2021. So they've been around for a while. And interestingly, and what we'll go over is they have changed slightly since coming out. But the idea here was to give people these these three specifically, page signals, were to give people more tangibility around how to measure the the page experience. Because up until that point, it was a little bit innocuous, it was hard to conceptualize, in terms of knowing like where you actually rank according to Google's own way of looking at it. So the first page signal of the quarter web vitals is the largest Contentful paint, which is a facet of page loading, loading speed. And so their definition is that it reports the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport relative to when the page first started loading. So if we think about I think most of these core web vitals are more or less referring to like above the fold, like what you see before you scroll, it's like that first impression that a person has with your website and most designs, most tools that you use to optimize loading and things like that, typically are set up so that the rest of the page loads later but you want you know what's visible initially to load quickly and first so that people can start interacting with it, and then it gives time for the rest of the page to load. So another way of thinking about this is that this signal takes note of the largest element on every web page and measures its total loading. Time. So maybe this is an image, maybe it's video, you know, typically at some, I would say some sort of media thing, but it could be your theme in general, it could be a very slow loading plugin. So these are all things that you'd want to keep in mind in terms of optimizing this particular factor. And when I say I guess, like the theme and plugins, it's like the output of them that you would implement on your page. So okay, so how do you get a good largest Contentful paint so according to Google, whatever this largest element is, is about 2.5 Seconds or Less of loading time and you have a little bit of wiggle room here, before it gets to, you know, this like poor area, but you'll notice that it's not a super long time. And I think that this particular man measurement here, it relates to something that Google's said before and shared in their own documentation, which is that, you know, the majority of people bounce if a website doesn't load within three seconds or less. I'm sure that that guidance has changed over time because that's a dated stat. But it still goes to show that we're kind of like within that guideline, with this particular measurement of a particular element on a page. So the next one is first input delay, and this is actually what it was. This has since been updated. And I'm going to show you an example of what this looks like. But let's let's talk about like the original intent of it and then what it has become. So first input delay is a measure of interactivity. It measures the time from when a user first interacts with the page to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction. So that sounds like gibberish. Basically, the lower a website's fid score, the more promptly it starts processing users clicks and swipes again, interactivity like how long does it take for somebody to actually be able to use a page? So this measurement per Google, a good fit is 100 milliseconds or less. So that's what it was right? But what is it now? So this GIF kind of shows an example of poor responsiveness versus good responsive responsiveness from Google's perspective, but probably from all of us, as users as well and looking at it you you probably have been in this position before where like, you click on something and then there's this little bit of a delay before you are actually able to interact with it. And so Google essentially took took this concept that they had initially defined as a core web vital and added some color to it, I guess. And so the new measurement is that it's, it's below or at 200 milliseconds. That so up from I think, what was it 100 before so they're giving you a I guess a little bit more time to create interactivity here. And just so you know, this new measurement is actually not fully unveiled yet, but it will be as of March. 12th. That's when this takes effect and takes over. So they say that, you know, some interactions will actually take longer than others. But when it comes to especially complex interactions, you want to be able to quickly present some initial initial visual feedback so that the user knows that something is happening\r\n\r\nthe time until the next payment is the earliest opportunity to do this. So the intent is not to measure like every eventual effect of the interaction, but the time in which the next interaction is being blocked. So you essentially want to delay you want to if you are delaying some visual feedback, then you might be giving users the impression that the page isn't responding to their actions, which is ultimately a bad user experience, right. So the goal of this new measurement is to ensure the time from when a user initiates an interaction until the next frame is painted in the shortest time as possible, for all or at least most of the interactions the user make. So it might seem like a small distinction between the first input delay and the interaction to Next paint but I guess if we were to summarize them, the first input delay is really focusing on that initial interaction. And the interaction to Next paint is focusing on the difference between interactions. I think that's one way to look at it. Okay, so then the last core web vital is related to visual stability. And it's called cumulative layout shift. And so their definition Google Developers definition is that it measures the sum total of all individual layout shifts scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan. of the page. Okay, but what does that mean? So Visual stability means that a web page remain stable throughout the users visit. It means that text isn't suddenly moving as new elements load or shifting other elements of the page and I think the the unfortunate end result of when this is bad, is when it makes the user click a link or perhaps a buy button or something like that, unintentionally, they were trying to click something but because of something shifting after it loaded, it pushed them somewhere else. And again, this is probably something where either something comes to mind where that's happened to you or like, the next time it does, then you'll be like, oh, yeah, that was the cumulatively out shift the site is getting, it probably has a pretty bad score for that. Um, so with the core web vitals, visual stability became more of a priority. And you really have to have very minimal minimal instability in order for your pages to be considered for ranking high in a relevant search engine results page. So those are the core lead vitals, that's probably the newest addition to these page signals that relate to the content experience, but we're also going to go over some of the old like, you know, tried and true important things that have to do with page experience, such as mobile friendliness. I mean, this is something this is probably one of the first big things that Google told us was important for ranking, high and relevant search. Besides maybe page load, I think Page Speed like performance and mobile friendliness, like these are things that kind of happened around the same time in terms of a Google like, came out and said, like, you must prioritize these if you want to rank. So Google used to be a desktop first indexing property. But you know, as more and more people started using their mobile devices, you know, the iPhone came out and so now suddenly, everybody had a computer in their hand. And then another thing that's probably worth considering too, is like a lot of people in developing countries like they might not have a desktop or like a laptop computer, but most people have a mobile phone at this point. And so Google now operates off of the idea, or off of the principle, I guess, of mobile first indexing. So if your website is not optimized properly for mobile responsiveness for mobile devices, then that is going to hurt it's going to greatly hurt your ability to rank and relevant search and your desktop site could look perfect. It can rank perfectly in terms of all these other factors that Google tells us about. But if your mobile site is off, it's it's going to affect your desktop rankings as well. So, you know, going into all of the specifics of what's mobile friendly is kind of outside the scope of what we're going to talk about today. But I mean, it's things like making sure that your text is readable. It's making sure that your images are, you know, visible and processable that they don't get skewed strangely. It's you know, thinking about some of those core web vitals and like how elements interact with each other like our buttons too close together so that people are hitting the wrong thing. So all these things are are considerations for making your website mobile friendly. And I think you know, with the way that things like page builders, builders for WordPress work, the way that people design themes for WordPress. This is this is like very much top of mind for everyone who's designing for WordPress. So it's a lot easier to implement now versus perhaps when this update was first released into the world. So Safe Browsing is something that I they've actually taken out of what they call these like page experience factors, like I don't know if it's an official one anymore, it was in the past. And maybe it's because now we have HTTPS as an additional factor that's kind of related but I think it's still worth mentioning this from a content experience factor. So Safe Browsing is just that you can use a website that is free of malware, you know, that you can be like, reasonably sure that like malware isn't present, you're not going to get it you're not going to interact with it, and that it's not you know, affecting the output of whatever site it could be installed on. And so in order to protect yourself against this, there's different tools you could use. wordfence is a customer of mine, so I'm going to talk about them and I think that their tool and their team is great. They have a lot of cool security researchers and cybersecurity experts on their team. So they're very on top of like any new things that come out, but they have this product called wordfence care where they'll go in they'll identify them all where they'll clean it up for you and we'll share best practices for how to avoid it in the future and you know, additional steps that you can take. So I do think that you need some sort of tool on your website in order to prevent, you know, the worst effects of malware. And I guess the other thing that I would mention too, is to like always have backups of your site, because malware can really mess things up. And so that's that's like your first line of defense. So HTTPS also has to do, I guess, essentially the same idea of like Safe Browsing, maybe from a slightly different perspective. And so Google again said, you know, we're not going to rank websites that do not have HTTPS in place compared to those that do. You know, after that update happened, and that was a slightly more recent update, but it was still a few years ago, and so HTTPS in order to implement that, essentially, you just install an SSL certificate. And to be fair, there are different types of SSL certificates. Most web hosts have that functionality, where you can fairly easily implement one and then it creates either automatically or there might be some manual steps. You have to take where it it redirects your existing HTTP URLs to the HTTPS version. So that's important to make sure that that's working. Otherwise, it's going to break your site but again, most web hosts have a fairly straightforward process for implementing this and a free ssl certificate or I should say an included one with your hosting plan, but depending on your needs, you might need a different one. So that's something that you have to explore based on your industry like, like E commerce might have a higher level of SSL certificate needed, but for you know, the general small business owner designer, things like that, probably what your web host has is good enough. And so to be able to see if HTTPS is working within Chrome specifically and I'm sure many other web browsers but but chrome because it's a product of Google. There's a little button next to your domain name in the URL bar, and you can click it and see that the SSL certificate is working and that the connection is secure and I would say that SSL certificates in HTTPS are important for people who are interacting with the website. I mean, you kind of you kind of have to have it no matter what in order to rank but they're the purpose of it is that if somebody were to be giving their sensitive information, you know if they're on an E commerce site, and they're, you know, putting in their address or their credit card number or you know, a banking website and people are logging in, and you know, once they log in, that user has access to their bank accounts and their money and things like that. That's kind of the like, ideal use case of HTTPS is to protect the people who are entering that sensitive information to make them feel safe on your website.\r\n\r\nWe talked about this earlier, having no intrusive interstitials so these are the pop ups the image you see is something that Google shared when they announced this ranking signal to show what not to do, essentially where these ads are obscuring access to the main content. You shouldn't have to click in order to get to the main content. So what do you do instead? Here are a couple of examples from the blacksmith website. So the first one is we have a floating bar that basically is at the top of the content and then just pushes it down. And in this case, I used it to add like reminder about my book, a button to click to buy it you could use it to get email signups. I think another great example is like E commerce. If you're having a sale or if you want to say, you know, free shipping on orders over $50 or something like that. I think that's a really excellent use of a floating bar. It's like what's the most important thing happening for this business right now or use it to collect email signups? Then there's also next to it is a welcome mat, which is designed you know, very similar lead to how an email popup would look but the difference is that it's like embedded on the page. So it's not getting in the way of the content. It's part of the content. You can choose whether or not you interact with it beyond scrolling. Another version of that is a content upgrade. So on certain blog posts, let's say that you have additional resources, maybe you've turned that blog post into a checklist or there's a certain template that you're talking about in the blog posts, and people you want to incentivize people to share their email in order to access it. So having a content upgrade, which again is like an embedded version, at the end of your blog post about that specific resource is a totally valid way to see get emails that's not going to violate this intrusive interstitial guidance from Google. The other thing that you can think about is using email popups, but delaying when they pop up. So that kind of gets around Google's guidance. You could use what's called like exit intent technology. So when somebody scrolls for the Back button, or the, you know, X in the browser, then what happens is an email popup gets deployed where you know, it asks for somebody if they want to subscribe, for example. You can also use that same idea based on things like scroll depth, if somebody gets to a certain depth on a page, you know, that tends to indicate interest. It's given them a chance to interact with the content. Or you could have a deploy on certain pages. You ideally after they've seen other pages, so maybe after they've gone to a certain number of pages that deploys. So there's there's a couple of different ways to think about it that don't get in the way of Google's guidance. And we do have a page I forgot to link it here. But we do have a blog post on the blacksmith website that goes into each of these things and different use cases and things like that a little bit dated, but it's all the same advice. Okay, so now that we've talked about Google's quality raters guidelines, which is indirectly related to search rankings, and Google's page experience signals, which are directly related to search rankings, I wanted to talk a little bit about website structure and design I would say, especially as it relates to ranking high in relevant search, but certainly how it impacts the content user experience. So it's kind of like a mix of the things that we're talking about, but expanding on them as well. So the first like factor that you want to optimize your website around your content in general, is crawlability. And when I talked about crawlability, I'm talking about Google's ability to like fully index all the resources on your site. Is there anything that is getting in the way of Google doing that, like, for example, errors in your sitemap, like maybe you're unintentionally excluding certain pages? Maybe you know, you haven't created enough connections between your pages for Google to understand how they relate to each other. And so a couple of guidelines here, you know, first of all, is that when you're creating content, it's important to add external links. Think of these as your ability to add context to prove claims these are things that you know, you can also use let's say that you're writing about a topic and there's a related topic and it doesn't really make sense for you to cover it in your content. Like maybe it would just make your your piece go on too long. But it's something that people might want to learn more about. So you find a relevant resource from a trusted site and you link it External links are great. I mean, you might, I guess, worry. Like, is that going to lead people away from my page? You know, is there any like negative impact of that? I think that's just kind of the way that content works, that people are always looking for more information. You can set it so that it opens in a new window so that they're still on your page while they explore that content. But yeah, as the best practice, have an external linking policy, it makes sure it's to good quality content and I think that, like with this next point, it helps Google understand what your content is about. So besides external resources, you also want to incorporate internal links. This just helps Google understand the relationships between the different pieces of content on your website, ultimately, what your website is about. It's helping with that crawl ability and that index ability. It's helping Google as robot to understand, you know, these different connections. So again, it's important really to have these two types of links and really every page and relate certainly every piece of content. And then, the flip side of all this is like as you create content, things are going to change. External links might become broken. Internal links, you might change, you know, like for example, the URL slug of them, and they might become broken. So I guess my first tip is to make sure that you have some sort of redirect solution implemented, there are different plugins that you can use to automatically if you change the URL slug of something, then it creates a redirect so anything that already links to a will be updated to that new link. But it's also having a process for like auditing your content to look for these problems. And one of the tools that I'm going to show you later today will help make that a little bit easier. But it's also just a matter of like I don't know, quarterly at least, or depending on the size of your website, quarterly, maybe every six months or so, having just a process to kind of go through what exists and if you need to fix anything. So we're talking a little bit about URL structure and I will say when it comes to creating content, you want to be pretty sure of the URL you want to use before you publish it. Because it is a factor in ranking, and you can use redirects, but it's kind of hard to explain them in the context of what we're talking about today without getting deep into SEO, but it's just generally like to trust me that it's a best practice to not mess with the URL after you publish, you know, after it gained some traction in search and things like that. But it happens and that's why you use redirects. But that being said, you could at least start with best practices. So the first thing is to incorporate your target keywords in that slug. So like yesterday, I showed you some tools we use for an article we wrote about AI detectors, so let's just pretend the keyword is like aI detector tools. You'd want that to be the slug. Without really like any extra information. You want to keep your URLs as succinct as possible so that Google doesn't have to take a lot of extra time to parse them. And so what that means is within within WordPress, you can customize your URL structure for blogging. And you can do things like add categories to the URL, you can add the date to the URL. My suggestion is to not do that the only reason that you might want to add like a subdirectory within your blog content or some other specific category, like if you have case studies or something like that, is because you can use that subdirectory to group pieces of content together to measure them in like Google Analytics GA for these days. But that's kind of an advanced use case and that's only if you plan on actually like doing a deep dive into the analytics. From an SEO perspective, I highly recommend against it. It should be your website url.com forward slash keyword. And when you're implementing those keywords, you're going to want to add a dash between each word so if the keywords AI detector tools, it's a i dash detector dash tools\r\n\r\nfor certain things like articles, a and words like the things that aren't, you know, specific keywords generally speaking, you can drop those when you're creating the slug. We have some guidelines on the style guide that I shared with you yesterday on the bugs with website that's also linked in the slides so or the PDF as well. So if you if you want to dive into more SEO and URL and keyword best practices and definitely check out our guidance on that. Um, duplicate content is worth mentioning from this perspective of the user experience mostly in terms of how Google would interpret that. So generally speaking, duplicate content is like you publish a blog on your website and then a situation that could come up that seems innocuous enough is that you know, somebody in your industry says oh my god, I loved your blog posts on whatever, I'd love to republish it on my site. And you say okay, and then maybe this site, you know, has more authority than you and maybe they have a better approach to SEO, maybe they've just been around longer. And what could end up happening is that even though you were the original publisher, and Google does take that into consideration, but this other site may outrank you with your own same content. So that's duplicate content. It could be a whole blog post, it can be an excerpt of it, it could be like a piece of it. So duplicate content, generally speaking, like try to avoid that. You can add a tag to your link called the canonical tag, which basically points back to the original content and says, This is the person this is the site that originally published it, even though we have now published it here. And so Google takes that into consideration, but they really make their own choices about who they're going to rank and so that that's not the be all end all way of making sure that the original publisher ranks highest in search, all else equal. Um, with all that being said, in my experience, you can typically republish things like your blog content on mediums like LinkedIn and medium you know, original copy without making changes. As long as you wait, I would say at least a week from the original published date to do that. This is this is my experience and that saying that it's completely scientific, the advice that I'm giving you, it's something that you should experiment with, if that's something that you're interested in, but also take note of what ends up happening and discontinue if it's getting in the way of ranking your own content on your own website. But when it comes to duplicate content, if you if you get approached by someone, you know, like the example that I gave, who wants to republish something that you wrote, what would be a better situation for you? It would be more work, but it's to say like, let me write a new version of this article, like maybe you take another stance on it, maybe you you just kind of like repurpose it in a different way. I would highly recommend against duplicating your content, either on another page on your website, such as using product descriptions that like a manufacturer provided or maybe you have, you know, two variations of something and so you're using almost the same product description or again, like the example that I gave doing it on another site, so I just wanted to add a cautionary tale for duplicate content because a it is kind of a bad user experience, but be it'll also more than likely hurt you in search without a very strategic approach. And then the last thing I want to say on this particular topic is about designing website navigation and best practices around that. So first of all, you want to use descriptive and recognizable menu item titles. And the example that I always give for this is the difference between something that's called news and something that's called blog. So in my in my experience, news is like an enterprise business that has a media arm and they're publishing their press releases and, you know, things that are relevant to their company, new product updates, things like that. Whereas blog is more articles. It's you know, the how tos. It's the list of coals. Its product lead content, for example, but it's not exclusively focused on that company's news. So it's important, I think, to match the heuristics of what your users are used to and one way that you might be able to figure this out if you're unsure is just kind of see like what the competition is doing and how they're naming their menu items. Or just ask some of your users like, Does this make sense? And we'll talk next about how to conduct a UX audit and that's something that you could do as part of it. There's this thing called the three click rule, which you may have heard about. Nielsen Norman Group actually debunked this as being like ideal or even something that you should totally consider. It's the number three is arbitrary, I guess is what I'm trying to say. But it's the idea that within three clicks, a user searching or user looking for something will find it through your website navigation without necessarily having to go to like an internal search. So well, it's arbitrary. I think it's still a good thing to keep in mind, which is just that people should be able to easily and quickly find what they need your your menu should support that. And then creating category grouping. So like for example, on our website, we have a Resources tab and it has the blog, it has some of like my YouTube content. It has our style guide. All of these are resources they have to do with like things that we're sharing with other people versus we have another tab that's about our work. And so it has case studies and like portfolio examples, and it's more focused on like Final outputs that you know, fit, you know, things that we do with certain clients. So just a couple of things to think about in terms of website navigation. I'm going to start this topic and then we'll break I think maybe in like five minutes from now, but I'll just go ahead and get this started. So let's talk a little bit now that you've learned about these different factors for how to understand user experience from, from the user's point of view from Google's point of view. Let's talk about how you can continue to make your own websites user experience better by implementing a UX audit. So UX audit, we might also call it a user tests. I think they're maybe slightly different concepts, but I'm going to use them interchangeably today. So usability testing involves observing how users interact with products like your websites. The purpose is to get a better understanding of how real people use what you've designed. And really the idea here is you want to combat any assumptions that you've made incorrectly, which is impossible for you to figure out by yourself. That's why we pull in other people. You can use your tests during just about any stage of project it doesn't have to be like the final part. It could really be during the wireframing stage. It could be you know at the midpoint it could be even after you've launched but you've added some new things. So why bother with UX audits? First of all, we're talking about it today because there's a strong relationship between the user experience and SEO. I think we've proven that by talking about specific elements of the quality rater guidelines that point to UX, as well as the page experience factors that Google's specifically told us. If you care about SEO, you should care about UX in terms of things like your page, loading your mobile responsiveness, and using things like HTTPS. To invoke privacy for your users information. It also allows you to uncover issues that might kill conversions. I mean, I think this is one of the most important use cases of a UX audit is to look for things that are getting in the way of whatever your end goal is with the website. Because we're all WordPress users here, probably most of us at least, you've probably interacted with whether it's your own design or somebody else's that where you recognize that somebody forgot to edit the demo content they've, you know, implemented it and they've gone in and made their changes. But you know, there's that hello world post they forgot to delete or there's something you know, and one of the menus, maybe the footer menu that they forgot to take out that, you know, they never actually customized and so I think UX audit would be good at surfacing that if you're if you're kind of blind to it, because you're too close to the project. And with all that being said, a UX audit helps to get out of your own head. We're all human, we're imperfect.\r\n\r\nAnd really, I mean, it's it's easy to say I think when it comes to writing content, like as much as like, I have a process for editing and looking for mistakes and things like that. Like I still use an editor whenever I write anything, because I need to get out of my own head in order to make sure that I'm not missing something important. So the same can certainly be said about about website design and doing UX audits. So at the end of the day, we all operate based on certain assumptions, but what if yours are wrong? I'll just go through another slide or two and then we'll break so in terms of picking user testers, there's a couple of different populations you could consider. And I'm also going to share a couple of different like marketplaces where you could find these people, but you can start with the people that already exist in your circle your colleagues, you know, the people that you work with, but also maybe your friends and your family members. Wow, this is a great place to start. Don't discount the impact of their own bias and desire to please you, especially if you're asking your mom for input she's probably not going to be super critical. And and you know, it's going to be more of a pat on the back then something useful. And even like people like your work colleagues, they they still may be too close to a project to provide useful feedback, but it's a good place to start. You can also recruit volunteers from your own audience. Again, they might have a bias if they really love you. They might be hesitant to give you really great feedback. But they're also probably very willing to help you make something that's better. So you can start with like your brand ambassadors, anybody who would consider themselves your biggest fans, things like that. Ultimately, though, your best bet is going to be unbiased third parties who don't know you, you know, who don't have like a stake in what you're doing. I would say ideally, if you could get a couple people from that pool and then maybe one or two people from these other pools of populations, you'll get a couple of different perspectives. And when it comes to some of the marketplaces that I'm going to show you, you can also filter by certain demographics, you know, age, gender, level of education, like whatever is important to like the target audience that you want feedback from, generally speaking, you can filter and on those people. Maybe we'll just go to the top of the hour, and then we'll and then we'll definitely break then. So how many user testers are enough for each design stage? I've mentioned a couple different populations you could pick from. This is another Nielsen Norman Group reference. They are a really great resource when it comes to anything user experience user testing and things like that. And so Jacob Nielsen wrote this column and he the column was titled Why you only need to test with five users. So that's his official recommendation is for each stage that you test five users is going to be more or less enough you're going to get marginal returns marginal new information after that point. So you know, unless you're getting wildly different things from those five user testers, you can probably stop it there. He also says that it's best to involve a larger quantity of user testers earlier on in the project if you're going to test during like the wireframing stage. Versus like, when a website's like basically ready to launch it's going to be harder to make noticeable and useful changes at that point. It's going to be kind of locked in. So I think that that makes sense. Um, so we'll just start with some of the questions that you might use. When designing usability testing, it is important to to be thoughtful about this before you start you you don't want to just like go into a blind and just, you know, like, what do you think of this website? You want to have a strategic approach if you want to get useful information? So my suggestion is to start start by defining whatever your goals are, I mean, is there something in particular that you're looking to test? Are you wanting to make sure that this design is understandable to your target demographic? Is there something that isn't currently working with the design, something that's maybe hurting conversions? So whatever your goal is, like set that intention, and the questions will come more easily after that? You want to also be asking questions about the tester and how they interact with the Internet. And there's a couple of reasons for this. So one example is like you could ask the person what kind of smartphone do you use and asking this particular question is good because it kind of gauges like their familiarity with technology like how they're going to interact with your design. Somebody who uses a flip phone, for example, is probably going to have a much different level of internet savviness and how they interact with the design versus somebody who has like the latest gadget as their device. The other benefit of this question is to especially if you're doing an in person test is to kind of relax them. It's kind of like a little bit of small talk almost so that they can ease into the test, especially if that's not something that they often do. You want to define a specific action for the user to take. So this goes back to the goals. Let's say that, you know, you have an E commerce site that you're testing and you know, there's some sort of issue with people abandoning the cart, you know, after they add some products and so maybe you want to have that person go through the action of adding something, and then starting checkout. And seeing like, where in the process, there's friction, that could be one action that you want them to take. And so at this point, you want to ask them how they go about it, have them sort of like narrate and explain as they go through each step. The more you can dig into each specific action that the user takes the more detailed insight that you'll get as to how they're actually using your website. So I think with that being said, we have a couple more questions that we could talk about, but I think now is probably a good time to let everybody take a little bit of a break. And then after that, we'll finish this discussion of how to run a UX audit. I'm going to give you a bunch of tools to use to do your own tests. yourself, essentially. And then we'll finish off with that live content UX audit. Sounds\r\n\r\nlike a good idea. No questions in the q&a right now. So let's just go and take that break. It's two o'clock. About a five minute break. Is that good? Maddie? That sounds good. All right. So let's back be back at 205 and we're quiet until then. See ya. Then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We're back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, folks, we are back and ready to begin. Let me get the recording started here. All right, folks, we're back for the final hour. Of the website content accelerator. We got a lot to talk about in the next hour, so I'm just gonna let you get right to it. Maddie. Sounds\r\n\r\ngreat. Yeah. Thanks for sticking with me so far. Excited to finish this off strong and yeah, hopefully give you some really tangible things that you can take away. For your own processes. So I'm continuing this discussion that we started about UX audits and designing them. Okay, so we talked about this. Let's go to the next point. What so I used to offer UX audits as a service when I used to be on Fiverr. It was my most popular gig by far. And the way that I structured it was I basically priced by the page. And so when you're doing a UX audit, you want to be sure to identify whichever pages are the most important, especially if you have a big site like you don't necessarily want. Just going back to the E commerce example like you don't necessarily want to audit like every single product page, especially if you're looking for trends, maybe one you know prime example of what your product pages look like maybe one category page, your homepage, your checkout flow, like if somebody had me audit an E commerce site that that tended to be kind of what it looks like. You know, it's also things like maybe more generally, your homepage, your about page service page. So it really depends on what you're trying to do. But you could ask questions in your UX audit, like, you know, what do you think this is about the page in general, or about a specific element of it? You could ask What strikes you about it, you know, you're trying to see how people are reacting to it, how they're understanding it, and then like, what would you click on first, like what, what is something that looks interactable? And how would you, you know, accomplish whatever the specific goal is. So those are ways that you could you know, further define this question. Or this idea here. And then we kind of talked about this, what do you make of specific elements? So again, if we're talking about ecommerce, maybe you have a button that's like a quick add to checkout where you don't have to go, you know, to the individual page, it just kind of pops up when you're looking at a specific category or on the homepage or something like that. And so you might want to test like, do people actually understand what the purpose of this is? So that's just one example. You know, many others that might factor into your own purposes and needs. So when it comes to designing these questions, a couple of best practices to keep in mind you know, first of all, users are generally not going to be designers. I don't think you I don't think you perhaps want them to be because you want them to look at it from a different perspective than you and so with that in mind, you want to avoid any sort of like web development or industry specific jargon in the way that you ask questions. You want to design for the average internet user, they should be able to understand what you're asking without you having to explain and clarify. I think another useful thing in general and this is this is when you ask for feedback about anything, but it's breaking up a complicated question into simpler ones. It's, it's okay, you know, to to ask a question and to ask a follow up question and to dig deeper. And that's something that we talked about yesterday when we talked about chat GBT and and getting that ideal answer that you want to get from it. Sometimes you kind of have to break the subject down and sometimes you have to add clarification later. So then, I've said this in a way but be as specific as possible when you're asking questions, you know, reference specific elements. Bring it back to the goal, if necessary. That's how you're going to get the most useful responses. So going back to that fiverr gig I was talking about, these were the questions that I asked and every order and sometimes they would ask clarifying questions after the fact. But most of the time, if I wasn't because it's fiber, and I'm sending them either some sort of like written report, or typically it would be like a video recording of me going through and doing the audit and if you work with a platform like Fiverr, or some of the other things that I'm going to mention shortly. I think it's the next slide actually. Typically, people are recording themselves interacting with your website unless you're doing an in person test, which is a different situation. But so you have to have some sort of standardized approach in that case, especially if you're offering this as a service like I did. But most of the time these questions got to the bottom of what that person was hoping to get out of the audit. And so generally speaking, I asked for the URLs for any pages they wanted me to take into account. I also told them you know, if you want me to take a quick look before starting the order to see if this is a good fit for me, you can do that. Are there any major problems that you want me to keep in mind throughout the process? So is there anything that you're noticing isn't working that you want? Me to focus on like a conversion factor? Can you briefly describe your target customer so that I could keep their perspective and focus? This is a really important one. I'm not going to fit in and perhaps you know, every user tester that you're going to work with is not necessarily going to fit that ideal target persona that represents your audience or the audience of the client that you're doing this on behalf of. But that doesn't mean that you can't adopt that persona. And again, a lot of these platforms will let you pick a user tester based on demographics. So that's probably like the best case scenario. But I think, again, you can still benefit from a plethora of different experiences. So anyway, you know, like I'm, I'm thinking of like a time where I did a user test and the target audience was, you know, generations older than me or something like that, where they're interacting with the web and they might have some access issues, you know, they might it might be harder for them to read the text if it's not big enough. Things like you know, contrast come into play between the words in the background. And so things like that, maybe it doesn't personally affect me right now. But I can still comment on that and say, you know, you told me that this was your target audience. To me like this strikes me as something that would be very difficult for them to interact with. And then the last question I asked is What important goals are you hoping that this page or these pages will achieve? So that kind of goes back to like the problem question, but I guess maybe from a more positive standpoint, and especially, you know, people use your tests at different stages, so they might not know what the problems are, but they certainly know or ideally, they have an idea of what they want that page to achieve. So these questions like very much covered what I needed to know in order to give people a satisfying UX audit after they put in their order. Okay, so how to run usability tests a couple of different ways that you could do this. A very wide range of methodologies and honestly a wide range of end results I would say, in person is like the gold standard because you're going to have the most control over the process. You're going to be able to meet with people, you're going to be able to dig in deeper to any like initial questions that you set. It's a little bit harder to do with something like Fiverr or user testing. Because there may be limitations I think with like user testing, it's kind of like you set it up ahead of time. And then you know, the user testers go through it, but you don't necessarily get to get to interface with them after the fact. And then with fiber, maybe you could do that it would probably involve making a new order. It's going to take time to get that feedback. It's not going to be as dynamic as doing it in person.\r\n\r\nIn person, it's probably going to be the most expensive in terms of like your team's time and like setting up a place for them to do this. And, you know, having some sort of incentive whether that's straight up cash or like a gift card or something like that for people's time. Another I think great option is user testing. And I was pretty sure that this platform had had changed or been sunsetted or something but I was looking at it leading up to doing this presentation and it still exists. It might exist in like a different format than it did initially did. Like I think you have to buy like a package. It's not just like one by one, for example. So I'm not super up to date on how it works now more more as to how it's worked in the past. But basically, the way that it has worked is that you specify certain tasks you want users to complete and specific questions for them to answer. And so users narrowed the process they go through until that test is complete. They have or at least had had a very large user base. So it was a great platform for giving like that exact demographic that you wanted to test. But fiber is very similar. I mean, fiber doesn't focus on user testing. To the extent that user testing does a fiber marketplace covers a wide range of services, but their usability like UX test marketplace is very large, you know, in comparison to some of their other focuses. So definitely a great place to find user testers. People start offering their services at $5. But they don't have to, that's an old fiber rule of thumb that it had to be five now people can set whatever price they want. They just have to set up their gigs in a way that makes them competitive. The way that I did it was I used to charge by the page. And then if they wanted, like a written report, that would be an extra cost in addition to the video. So it just depends on how people set up their gigs. But there's some level of standardization because people go to that market and that marketplace and they want to be able to pick you know, five people that offer something that take a look at side by side. Um, you could also do something that's not exactly going to give you all the information but it's an interesting practice, which is like recording users sessions on your website. So Microsoft has this newer tool called Clarity and it's free. And so you basically add like a little bit of JavaScript to your header. And you can see people interacting with your website, and you can see you know, how their mouse moves and how they scroll and things like that and like what they click on. Of course, unlike the user test, nobody's narrating it, there's no audio. It's literally just kind of like outside of context, how they interact with your website. So it's going to give you marginally useful information, but it's just another thing that you can use to try to troubleshoot. You know, why something isn't working, for example. And then this isn't like fully, like a way to run usability tests, but it's a like a tool that you can use or that perhaps somebody that you work with might use, which is to take screenshots and share commentary about what they're looking at. And I'm going to show you an example here. Oh, and besides clarity, when it comes to recording user sessions, you can also use a tool called Hot jar to do that as well. Okay, so this is an example and it's a little bit dated, but this is from bug herd. So bug heard is like a website feedback tool. That's another way to, to look at like what we're looking at right here. And this is something as a designer that you could use with clients. Some websites do this publicly where they have like a little thing on the side of the website that's like, Hey, do you have any feedback about this page? Or do you want to report a bug? That's, that's kind of why this exists, but I used to use it for my UX audits. I would just go through each page and then create like annotated screenshots and then I could explain export, the report that has all the pages and all my notes and things like that. So it's just a cool tool, whether you're kind of auditing your own site, you're auditing a client site, or somebody's doing it for you. So okay, from the flip side, we've talked about how to run a user test, but how can you be a good user test or maybe how can you identify one that you want to work with time and time again? First of all, it's narrating your thoughts as you have them. We've talked about this because that like stream of consciousness just, you know, noticing things and whether you really have something to say about it or not just like addressing each element on a page. And so that's kind of the next point here is is, you know, not just addressing them, but considering the impact that each page element might have. It's certainly acknowledging the perspective of your audience we talked about even if you're not a member of that target audience, how can you sort of take on that persona in order to speak on their behalf? Another thing that I used to do when I did these UX audits was share ideas for a B testing. Like I might say, you know, this is an interesting approach to your head and I wonder if you were to try this if it would, you know, get you better results and so it's it's giving them ideas, even if it's not a fully fleshed out thing, but to say like, this might not be it, but maybe you could try this. And then it's also it's not just about being like negative or pointing out what's wrong, but also acknowledging what does seem to be working. So that again, you can really like laser in and the feedback that's going to have the most impact for what they should change to resources that have really made an impact on me and how I go about content and design. First of all, is the Design of Everyday Things. This is like one of my favorite books. It's more about physical design, like product design, but there's a lot of transferable things that have to do with how we design for the web. And then don't make me think is like the quintessential resource for web usability and he's sent created, you know, multiple editions of this. There's another book, something about rocket science. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but, you know, anything that he writes like I would highly recommend. Okay, so we did break, and then I'm going to save questions for the end so we can get through the important stuff here. So I'm going to give you a couple more tools to use so that you can audit your own stuff. We're going to go through our live content UX audit, and then anytime we have left is going to be for questions. Let's get through it. Okay, so we'll start with Google tools, because again, when Google gives us information or tools, we want to listen because this is essentially how Google sees our content and how they prioritize what they rank in relevant search. So PageSpeed Insights is really a wealth of information. It provides data points from a variety of factors. And as you can see in this screenshot, currently, as of the core web vitals update, it starts with the core web vitals, so it starts from a point of this like, page experience and usability factor. They what's kind of interesting is that they have a part of PageSpeed Insights, and I'm going to show you like a fuller report when we go into the live content UX audit, but they have a piece of it that's about accessibility, but it's it's pretty bare bones. And so Nathan mentioned to me right before we started today, that Amber Hines is going to be the next workshop next month and it's going to be about accessibility. And her company equalised digital, they have a really great accessibility checker that integrates with WordPress. And so I would say that like that's probably going to be a much better tool for making judgments about if your website is accessible. Then what you're going to see on Google PageSpeed Insights and I think that that's something that is really important that you know, it's not always like at the top of our list when it comes to some of the other things that we need to do. To make our website usable, but it is really important. Whether you currently have an access issue or not at some point in your life, I'm sure you will. And now that I'm a man like this has become more obvious to me, maybe not in terms of strictly website design, but I think about like when I'm on a walk outside and previously, you know, I could just step around people's icy sidewalks that they didn't shovel or whatever, but now that I have a stroller, it's like okay, am I gonna put my kid you know, in the street. And so it's it's things like that or maybe you break your arm and now you can't interact with the web the same and so accessibility, I just wanted to like, make make the case that that is something that is so important because you your loved one, there's somebody that you know that it's going to make a difference for.\r\n\r\nGoogle used to have a tool specifically for testing the mobile friendliness of your site, and I was surprised to learn that they've actually sunset this tool. So now it's kind of a part of Google PageSpeed Insights. I think that whatever functionality was already in Google PageSpeed Insights for measuring the difference between the mobile and desktop version was kind of already there. So they basically just said, like, maybe this is like duplicating those efforts. I don't know. But it's no different. I'll just say that, that we that we use Google PageSpeed Insights to make judgments about how Google understands your website from a mobile point of view. Um, so we have the ability to measure like a snapshot of the current state of how your website measures according to the core web vitals are Google PageSpeed insight, but I also wanted to share within Google Search Console, there's this core web vitals report that measures it over time. And the most important thing, I think, to keep in mind with Google Search Console, and and also like Google Analytics. What I'm going to talk about specifically is more relevant to Google Search Console, is the fact that it tells you if you know, you become in violation of anything that's going to hurt your ability to rank and relevant search in terms of what Google tells us right in terms of the big things. And so that's why making sure that it's installed on your site on client sites is so important because it gives you notices if you're like way in violation of something, and it gives you the chance to fix it. Google Analytics so I would also recommend installing from the get go because it gathers important data that's useful that you can use to understand your page experience your content experience, but yeah, so this is just one useful report that relates to what we're talking about. This came up when I was prepping for the live audit later. Just the idea that there may be a use case for understanding what WordPress theme somebody's using. And I would say especially what plugins they're using, because both of these things can have an impact on your pages performance, which is a search signal on the loading, you know, on the interactivity, and all those those good things. So this is just one tool there's there's a bunch of them out there. But you know if if your website is experiencing any performance issues, or you just want to understand like how somebody else put their website together. I think this is a cool tool or a cool mechanism for that. I also wanted to share a general SEO audit tool, I see ranking so like H refs and SEM rush which I believe we talked about yesterday, this is another All In One SEO tool. It is not as fine tuned as the others as Ahrefs and SEMrush in terms of their keyword data, so that's why I don't use it for keyword research. They use different databases and approaches. But what I will say is their SEO auditing tool, which is like kind of the technical structure of your website, like goes head to head with any of like the big players in the market, and I'll show you exactly what that looks like. And the great thing about SEO ranking is it's a lot more affordable as an as an All In One SEO tool. And even from like the keyword research perspective, like you could use it to get most of the way there if content again isn't like your biggest focus are in and or if you weren't in a super competitive industry, it would it would do just fine. Um, a couple like editing tools. Hemingway is a great one. It's pretty simplistic isn't the right word, but it focuses on just a couple of things. It focuses on just a couple of factors and so that's why it's useful it doesn't it's not super distracting. And then Grammarly is one I would say that gets into a lot more detail. Grammarly is probably a more well funded company. Than Hemingway I wasn't aware of if Hemingway been monetized until I was looking at it the other day they have some AI functionality and they might they might have some other like outside of AI functionality plans, but I'm not sure that they had like a clear path to monetization before that but grim really has always had its like premium and like enterprise business use cases. And so I think that's probably why this tool is maybe a little bit more robust in terms of the suggestions it provides. They have a lot of linguists on staff and again, a disclosure that I'm a Grammarly Ambassador but I also like to use the product paid every person on my team that's a writer editor has a paid subscription to grammerly and I'll show you why shortly. Um, you know, you also want to look for plagiarism when it comes to creating a great content experience and when I talk about plagiarism, I'm not even necessarily talking about things that you do like on purpose. Some things that happen in grammerly, specifically is that you'll write something and it will detect a phrase that's been published elsewhere on the internet because you know, like there's a ton of content that already exists and it's bound to happen. And it'll be about something that's like a completely different industry. Like you definitely didn't take it from that original place that was published, but it's kind of like a reminder to go on and try to make it more unique. Just so that you know, Google doesn't think that you plagiarize even though again, it's not about intention. It's just about the reality of the content that already exists. But at the blacksmith, we use Copyscape for every piece of content we create, just to be sure there's no plagiarism, and then Grammarly. I don't believe the plagiarism check comes with the free version, but because we have the premium version, and that's included that we use it to. Um, one of the last factors here is you know, making sure that your content adheres to your style guide, whether that's a specific company style guide, or something like AP style, which again, is like the news journalism standard. I think it's like a great standard to use if you don't have a set style guide. And then I just have a couple qualitative qualitative factors here. So on the blacksmith style guide, which will probably show you we have a section about information architecture, and it's about a lot of these different things, how to break up walls of text, how to approach writing headings, how to keep paragraphs and sentences short and to the point. It's other things like you know, making sure that you have good flow with your content, you know that it has good storytelling, but it's something a human would want to read. And yesterday we talked about texts that whether AI generated it or not sounds robotic and how to avoid it. So that's another like, piece that you can use like in your own audits, those guidelines. Other things that I look at are like the thoughtful use of on brand visuals at the blacksmith we try to incorporate multiple types of visuals per piece. I'm definitely of the opinion that words aren't enough. I think as humans we're very visual creatures and people all have their own, like different learning styles. So that's also a factor, you know, written word, I don't think is enough, especially like for me personally, sometimes I need to like watch a video about it, or you need to like, you know, play with it in my hands or whatever. Like there's just different ways that people process information and so the more different ways you can surface it to them within your content, the better that your contents going to perform and help them and then things like consistent formatting like how you use bullet points, how you write headings. Again, a lot of this we cover in the blog Smith style guide. Just a couple other things. We talked about a B testing when we talked about how to be a good user tester and giving examples. So Unbounce is a tool that you could use. A B testing is essentially testing like different variants of a page usually you're testing a specific element like two versions of a page title, or two versions of an image, but it could be a full page as well. And this is something that Nathan and I also talked about, which is that I think he'd love to have an expert on a be testing do one of these workshops or you know a webinar in the future so if that's your if you know somebody like that, you know, that's something I think that all of us could learn some best practices from but again, another thing that you could test\r\n\r\nQuick disclaimer, then we'll jump to our live content UX audit. And we're talking about how to make your content better. And, you know, basically like different processes that you could use to to catch mistakes. But I don't want you to leave this thinking that perfection. Is the goal because it's not I think, you know, we're all human, we all make mistakes. At the end of the day writing for the web is is great because it's a very forgivable medium and unlike print, once you notice a mistake, you can go in and correct it. And so I don't want this to become a situation where you're beating yourself up if you did all these steps or you did some of these steps and like, you know, you still notice something later somebody points out like oh, this is spelled wrong or whatever. That's really not the point. So at the end of the day, I think my guidance for you is done is better than perfect. And be kind to yourself but create systems to catch mistakes. And that system could be having like a human editor, like like I mentioned earlier today, whenever I write something, you know I'm telling you all my best practices, but that doesn't mean that I always follow them, right. I'm an imperfect human being and, and things happen. And I think the other thing that I wanted to say is like we all have limited time we all have limited energy, and especially now that I'm a new mom, like I used to work really late at night and I would just crush stuff out and I would go over it a million times and now I kind of have to be satisfied with like not having the ability to do that and having a much shorter period of work time every day. That I can get stuff done and having to prioritize ruthlessly and that sometimes means that like yes, maybe I spelled something wrong, you know, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it. And I don't think you should either. So that's that's my soapbox. Alright, so let's go to the live content UX audit. Give me just a moment to get this set up. Um, so we're gonna go through like a couple of these different tools that we talked about today. And then at the end of this, we will have some time for questions. Okay. So Stacy, we're picking on you today because you submitted a really great example for this live content UX audit. And I want to start by saying there's like nothing wrong with this website. I mean, it's very good and it follows a lot of both the content and design principles that like I would instruct my team on. So what we're going to do today is is really nitpick for the sake of giving people things to think about when they are doing their own content UX audits. And so I'm going to start by sharing, like some of these tools and their outputs so that I can show you how to use them. And then what we'll finish off on is coming back to this page, and I'm going to give a couple of qualitative factors, you know, that I think can make the content just a little bit stronger. So again, I wanted to surface the blog SMIS content style guide. This is going to be the basis of one part of you know, some of the things I'm going to talk about and I'm going to reference that Chechi btw bot that we made yesterday, that's based on the style guide and that's, that's kind of what I use to audit this page from the content style perspective. But again, some things that we just talked about were first of all the SEO and Keywords section or chapter, where we talk a little bit about I mentioned that you could get some guidance for how to use awkward keywords like how to use keywords within URL slugs. I also talks about this information architecture, or information structures what we call it here section. So that's how to like essentially present information but also like break up walls of text, make it more readable. We talked a little bit at the end of today about formatting and how to keep that consistent. So those are just a couple of things. I guess we also talked about links earlier today and so there's some good guidance there. So you know, this is a this is a good resource if you're building out your own content style approach, and you can really build off of this because again, it's fairly industry agnostic. So anyway, I took this link, and first I ran it through Google PageSpeed Insights. And if you look at the desktop version, I mean it's pretty much near perfect. There's it's very difficult to get to 100 on any of these factors on I would say especially on mobile, but even on desktop, I mean, it's it's kind of like a what's the word? It's like a like a fool's errand to try to get to 100 if you're if you're this close, so, desktops looking really good. You know, they have a couple of things that you could do to fix it if you wanted to, and I have some suggestions for that, but we'll talk about it from the mobile perspective. So if you go to mobile, you'll notice that you know, first of all, the largest Contentful paint is one of the core web vitals, that it's a little bit in the red and it's and that's really like the only one and the largest Contentful paint again has to do with page floating, I believe. And so, taking like the definition we had, I'm guessing that that has something to do with this image because this is the viewport you know, that first load so it's the first thing that gets measured by this core web vital. And when I was looking at this yesterday, it's a it's a JPG file, which isn't like a super large file or anything like that. But one thing that you could do to to improve that page quality factor is to instead save this and serve it up as a web p file. There are certain plugins that you can use for that it's going to you have to kind of determine if adding like a plugin or taking that extra step of manually saving it like converting it and saving it and uploading it as that file is worth it. But that's that's like the one thing that I could think would would flip this so that it's the performance is a little bit closer to 100. And then we go into some of these other like diagnostic details. And I think this is where PageSpeed Insights gets really interesting because you can sort of dig into specifics here. A couple of things that I noticed were like minifying, CSS and JavaScript and there's some other things that are kind of related to optimizing like these different file types on the website. So I use a plugin called nitro pack. There's a free version and there's a paid version. I think the free version will get you pretty far, but it adds this like little Add at the bottom of your website. So I just pay for the paid version because I don't want that there are other things like nitro pack but nitro pack from the perspective of somebody who operates in the SEO world, you know who's looking for good performance, who's looking for best practices, that is my suggestion to you and to anybody who is seeing these things on their Google PageSpeed Insights. So naturally talking about these plugins for me like the got the question of does adding more plugins like is that going to hurt performance like what what is the marginal return of that? And so what I wanted to do next was take the URL and put it in that WordPress theme and plug in detector to just see like what the back end of the site looks like. And so we can see, it's like a custom or like a child theme. And I think okay, so apparent theme is Astra, so we know that like that's the technical basis on which this is based. I think generally speaking, Astra is pretty good for SEO from what I've heard, I don't have a ton of experience with it. And then also, this is like more what I was interested in was the plugins on the backend. And I mean, from what it detects it's there aren't that many plugins here, you know, it has like a plug in that works with Astra there's a Quiz Builder. This DOWNLOAD MANAGER contact form and then the Page Builder that's pretty lean, especially if those are the only plugins that are installed. You know, different people have different ideas of like, how many plugins is too many or like what's the optimum amount but I would say like, we're well under that here. So adding something like nitro pack, or you know, like some sort of web p image optimizer I think short Pixel does that.\r\n\r\nSomething like that probably wouldn't like hurt performance for the performance gains that would come with it. Um, okay, so the next thing that I wanted to do this is higher level than just this page, but I wanted to show you guys SC ranking. So SC ranking again, is this like All In One SEO tool? And I think there's like actually something wrong with my browser because I'm trying to like x this out, and I could do this yesterday and it just like wouldn't do it. So this is either a core web vitals issue or this is like I have too many, like Chrome extensions that are conflicting with each other, that I haven't been able to figure out why it sometimes messes with my browser. But anyway, that's an aside. So um, so this is a C rankings like technical website audit. And what I really love about this is that it's pretty straightforward. Like you can essentially read this as a non SEO and get a very good idea of things that you could fix to improve your website's technical structure. And as you can see this website like it's not bad, like there's room for improvement, but overall it's doing pretty good. Again, chasing 100 is a fool's errand. You're like, probably not going to get there but you want to get as close as you can with the time and the resources that you have. And so this page is really just like a high level overview. Again, this is about the whole website. It gives you an idea of like, how many pages were crawled, versus how many URLs which could include things like media files, JavaScript files, style, sheet files, and things like that. And so this can be a good indicator of like, if you know that there's more pages or there's more files, like maybe there's a credibility issue here. And if if some are getting excluded from this crawl, then they're probably also getting excluded from what Google can see. And so at that point, you, you know that there may be a sitemap issue that's getting in the way of the ideal situation. But what I really wanted to show you was the issue report. So these are things that you could fix. And what it does is it it has a category, it gives a specific issue, it gives you which pages are affected. It tells you you know, whether you're like compliant or whatever you want to call it if it's following best practices or not. And there's there's very few things here. But for example, like here's one that has to do with crawlability, which we talked about earlier today. And so nofollow means that we don't want the search engines to read this page and there may be a good reason for that. And so it seemed that for your pages are affected, you can click on it to get a description of the issue. So this is why it's really great for people who aren't necessarily like in the SEO world. A lot of you are website developers or designers and so a lot of this stuff like you'll be able to understand just by going through it and familiarizing yourself with it was there like included details. But yeah, so then you could see, you know, like which pages relate to this issue and whether or not like it's worth doing anything or if you really wanted them to be that way. But I'll give you like a more tangible example of something that you definitely want to fix. We have, for example, External links to 4x x. So like a 4x. X code is like a 404 means that it's not found, and there's different variations of that I'm sure a lot of you are pretty familiar with that. And so this means that maybe something that was linked on the website now no longer exists. And so it either needs to be replaced or redirected or something like that. And again, you can dig into the URLs you can see like what specific error code happened. This is also a really great report that you can give to clients. And then you know, depending on the level of familiarity you have with these different issues and how to fix them then you can give yourself a little bit of an extra job and some hours working with them to not only audit and go through the audit and explain the audit but then also, you know, implement the fixes. So I just wanted to show you that because I think it's it's such a great tool. So then the next thing I did was I ran this through Hemingway, and like I told you before Hemingway is like the sort of like, saying it's the more basic version of Grammarly. is maybe not exactly the right way to describe it, but it's the more like focused version. And so as you can see, what it does is it highlights different things. And it's kind of using I guess these colors, as you know, like things like it's trying to like draw your attention to certain colors as being like something that's more worth your attention or less worth your attention. What I've always known Hemingway as is a great tool for measuring active versus passive voice. And generally speaking, we want to try to avoid passive voice in our writing. And so that's probably what it's best used for. But there are some certain other factors here that are useful and interesting. And like yesterday when I told you about clear scope and how it measures readability, you can see that Hemingway also does this. It measures certain stats in terms of you know, just this piece of content, not necessarily compared to other pieces of content. And then it also has some AI functionality, that with a paid plan you can use to I think automatically suggest edits to some of these things. So just, you know one interesting tool where it's I think best functionality is free. So then I ran it through grammerly and I wanted to start by showing what I was talking about. With the plagiarism thing. Like there's something about inventory management on this article that says 1% of your text matches the source and that's like it's not even This article isn't even about inventory management. So I just wanted to show you guys that like, like these tools can be wrong, but it's still worth running that check a if you're working with a writer that's not you, just from a reputation standpoint, you want to make sure that there's no obvious like plagiarism problems with it but be so that you can just make like some small changes to this text so that Grammarly doesn't pick it up and possibly, you know, Google may be like taking a nod from some of the similar types of algorithms and uses. Again, not that it's intentional. It's just like, you know, because there's already this wealth of content that already exists on the internet about all these different subjects and of course, there's going to be similarities with phrasing and things like that. So then we get to these other suggestions. And I guess one other thing I wanted to show you about Grammarly is you can set goals for a piece of content and I don't know if this is a paid version specific but anyway, you can, you know, say like what type of writing it is. So I just said business for this. You can give a certain intent so I sent in form for this I may or may not be right with all these things, but I just wanted to see what would happen. You can say like, you know the level of experience of the audience, you can set like the formality of the tone. And then and then it gives you suggestions based on those things. And what's cool about grammerly is that it goes into these specific zoo specific different categories of suggestions. So correctness is about like grammar, spelling, punctuation, clarity is to cut in to help with like the flow of engagement, which is probably most related to like storytelling and delivery, I guess, you know, kind of related to both of those things, and then style guide. This relates to my company's specific style guidance, some of the suggestions that I have programmed in myself, and so a lot of it is like punctuation, because I have some rules about that. And it's probably annoying for my writers to have all this pop up. But some of it is word stuff. So like if we click this, something like actually, per the blogs and the style guide, and that's just our approach, we say these words are fluffy and don't add value typically. So like if you cut actually, it would say wait, so you have to go read these reports. Ones is another one that I have strong opinions about. I say don't use one to describe a noun you've already defined. Use the same word again or find another way to say it and then I gave an example here. So that's what's really cool about Grammarly is like you can like get these things automatically being suggested when you're working on a piece of content within your organization so that people don't have to remember like all the stuff that I showed you on my style guide it just automatically pops up. Waxing then I'll show you a couple qualitative things and then we'll go to questions is I ran this through my style editor bot, and it wouldn't I tried to get it to like directly edit the copy. And it wasn't unlike what I showed you yesterday which was like a shorter excerpt and the did I did that. So part of this is like me learning how to best use the spot or how to best design it or how to best query it. But what I did was I said Please review this blog post it gave it the era and suggest edits according to the blacksmith style guide.\r\n\r\nThey said consider the bad side consider the following suggestions and it felt to me like it wasn't actually like totally reading the blog. It was just giving like general tips and then I said please suggest updated copy based on these suggestions. And so what it did, which is kind of funny was it created like a shorthand version of it. And so what I was thinking is something like this could be really useful for like an email newsletter, you know, like an atomized version of the blog. Or, you know, maybe like you create some social posts based on these shorthand summaries of each category or something like that. You'd still probably want to edit it, but to me, even though it's not really what I asked for, I thought that that could be an interesting use case. So then I was like, Okay, well can you actually do the edits while preserving the original length of the piece? And it was like no, but it kind of went back in and gave some more suggestions. And then I was asking if it was actually able to like read the original article, or No, I was asking about the visuals, because one of the suggestions was about visual aids. And I was like, well, there's a ton of visual aids on that article. And so it said that it can't directly process or interpret them from the article itself. So that was kind of interesting. And then I gave it the copy and then it still kind of like generally gave examples. So you know, it's a work in progress. I guess that's what I wanted to share. It's still it's still gave me some things to work with. But it wasn't exactly like the editor that I was hoping that it would be like it like it kind of was yesterday. So it seems to me if I were to make a hypothesis here that it's probably going to be more useful for shorter bits of copy, you know, maybe different sections or titles or things like that, versus trying to edit a whole article all at once but it will give you food for thought in terms of general edits that you could make. Okay, so last like pieces of content on this before we end up today. We talked about menu navigation. And so the way that I would change this menu navigation would be home about blog and I would just change this to contact and what I like to do with whatever like the most important menu item or call to action is maybe add some like button styling so that that stands out, it just simplifies it. It's not distracting and you know, hopefully leads them to the ideal conversion. So then the other thing like the header, because we're kind of talking about the whole experience, not just the article itself, is what I what I came across, typically in the UX audits that I did was a similar type of header where it has the logo, but unless the name of the brand is like really straightforward about what you do, it could benefit from having some context like a tagline about what you do and so I don't think that we do it on the blog. So some a very bad example. But you can imagine like in my header it should probably say like SEO and content agency. But you know, maybe because it's called the blacksmith that also might work I don't know submitted a test. I'm generally speaking again, I really liked this article, I thought that more or less like it fit the same types of standards that like I would have for my team in terms of putting together conversational tone like breaking texts up nicely, having really useful visuals, a couple of just like very small things. We have the social share buttons. My suggestion is to add a CTA that's like share this on social like, it might seem obvious, but just saying that might be useful, might also be useful to have them float as the person who reads it because they might decide at different points that they want to share it through. I love the visuals there was one visual where I think there might be an unintentional tooltip here where like when you were taking the screenshot your cursor was probably over this SPFx aligned area right here. And so it took the screenshot with that and it kind of obscures the stuff behind it. This is the type of thing that like, because I do these all the time I nitpick and probably nobody else would notice, but I just thought that I would mention it. I'm sure I'm gonna like pretty much ended there. The last thing I was going to say for now is with the Related Posts, one of them doesn't have the featured image. So it's kind of, you know, it just looks a little bit lopsided. That's a super easy thing to fix. And then when it comes to consistency um, you might want to capitalize text stuff just so that it's consistent with the capitalization of the other category. And then maybe also like space it out tech space stuff. So again, like I really don't have that much to say here, because it's very good and it has good information. The last I guess big thing is the actual place where I'm reading the content is kind of narrow and skinny compared to the full frame here. And so I wouldn't recommend going full width with the content but I think we could break out the box a little bit more or break it out of the current box so that it's a little bit wider. And I think that that would be a great reader experience. So with all that being said, I'm going to pull back to my slides really quick just to pull up like the question slide and things like that. But I mean basically we're done here. With the planned content. I'll once again bring up my book because it is about what we're talking about with content experience. It's about my approach to content writing, content style, you can grab a free chapter of the book on the writing for humans and robots.com website or you can grab the book on Amazon via Kindle or print edition. And yeah, that's pretty much it. So I will take any questions that may have popped up in the meantime.\r\n\r\nYeah. All right. So thanks again, Stacey for letting us use your content as I know that it's a little weird with talking about my stuff here but ya know, it was very much appreciated and a it's an excellent article. We've talked about that already. The content, it was it was hard\r\n\r\nto find stuff to comments on honestly, so I had to go into nitpick mode.\r\n\r\nSo grateful to you, Stacey. Let's see folks last chance to ask questions here. There are no questions today,\r\n\r\nwhich is covered at all. Everything's done.\r\n\r\nIt's it's been a very good and thorough presentation on lots of tools. Things to consider as we're developing content for and helping our clients create content for the web. Yeah, like Ben says firehose of information really good stuff. Greg, this is a good rewatch as well. Alright folks, last chance before we land the plane. Your if you have any final questions for Maddie, if you want to just say yes in the chat that way we know to pause otherwise, I'm going to start moving towards wrapping us up. All right, yeah. So thanks there in the chat. Okay. So Maddie, wrap us up here. Give us our final takeaway for the training.\r\n\r\nSure. I'll answer one question. Barney asked if I'm in the Denver area. Yeah, yeah. I'm in Lakewood, technically. But yeah, okay. Final wrap up. treat people how you want to be treated with your content. That's good.\r\n\r\nThat's really good. And true, right. So yeah, awesome. Well, thanks, everybody, for hanging out with us for the last couple of days. It's been a really good set of information here. A lot of things to consider. And hopefully it'll help us all up our game as we're dealing with content on the web. Thanks again. Maddie. For your expertise. And folks, we are back tomorrow as usual 1pm Central for office hours here on solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nNice. Well, thank you so much, everyone for your time and attention. And yeah, I hope I hope there is like one good nugget for you to take away and if you ever have any questions about content and UX, I'm always happy to be a resource.\r\n\r\nVery good. 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This again was this is building on last year's content workshop. And the link for that is in the course description if you missed last year I would strongly recommend you check that out. Really good stuff. So Sadie has your book MADI Naidu\r\n\r\nwhy it's really good love it seems like it's been a while since I published it, but you know, I tried to write it so that it would still be useful today. So I hope that you're all finding that. Yeah, we're sure.\r\n\r\nReally good stuff. Alright folks, if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat say hi. We are about three minutes away from getting started. And they're in the chat once again, is the link bundle that has the slides and the replay link as well as a link to Matty's book. We are Yeah, we're gonna have a lot of fun today and tomorrow, two hours today, two hours tomorrow talking all about website content with I mean, let's face it an expert in the field\r\n\r\nappreciate the vote of confidence. If you if you measure it by yours and I suppose expert, that's something that I've been doing for a very long time. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nAlright folks, let's hear from you in the chat. Check in question today. How about give us a one to 10 rating? How comfortable are you with generating website content? One being it's a real challenge. 10 being a pro, let us hear from you there in the chat.\r\n\r\nAll right, about a minute and a half to go.\r\n\r\nMaybe a good question is how many of you are forced to make content in order to finish your website designs? Yeah, to get your website launched.\r\n\r\nHey, Sue bullets are my friend. I like bullets. Alright, several folks just joining us. The links are there in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up that chat and you'll have the link to download the slides. Grab the replay and all of those things. We are about a minute away from getting started. Second question today is what's your comfort level? What's your expertise at website content creation one to 10 If you had to rate yourself love it. Love it. Tracks Yeah, five but a if you're using AI, that's awesome. Yeah, so a lot of folks are higher on the scale today. That's exciting, that hopefully you're gonna get some tools to up your game even further. He's got a lot to share with us. Over the next couple of days. Hey Terry. Dab Alright, folks, we are just about to get started. Glad you're all here. Diving into the web content workshop momentarily. Just seconds. To go. If you're just joining us in zoom, I'm going to drop in one more time the link bundle and it's three after so let's get the recording started. And we'll dive right in. Let's do it. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy and I'm joined for the next couple of days by my friend Maddy Houseman, Maddy is a sought after sought after copywriter specializing in enterprise b2b Tech brands. She's the CEO at blog Smith and the author of writing for humans and robots, the new rules of content style. She has been recognized on numerous industry lists as a top content marketer and I'm really excited to have her back for another course here on solid Academy so welcome back Madi, how are things going for you?\r\n\r\nThanks, Nathan. I'm really excited to be here. Like I said, you know, it's been it's been a little bit of time since I've done you know, a presentation like this since I've really gotten to use my brain. For those who don't know, I recently had a baby so he's in daycare today so I can fully you know, give my attention to this and, you know, embrace this identity of mine as a content creator who loves to learn and you know, who now has this other facet of my life but marrying those two in a joyous way so, so yeah, really excited to be back and and put my brain to use and share you know, some of the things that I've been exploring you for the past several months to I guess a year, all this new stuff with AI, that's what we're gonna focus on today. So really excited about that. Yeah,\r\n\r\ndefinitely. So we have a long way to go over the next couple of days and the thought just occurred to me Maddie, we really ought to have you back for another informal conversation just on how you prepared your business. So that you could take some time away, because that's really, that's quite a feat.\r\n\r\nIt was definitely and I'd love to do that. I'd be happy to.\r\n\r\nYeah, that'd be that just occurred to me. We should definitely, folks. So let's see the links are in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom. I'm going to drop this in one more time. There you will find the link to download or grab the slide deck. Also the replay link that will have the transcripts and chat logs after we finish is there for you as well. On that replay link you'll also find a link to last year's course, which is more some more foundational principles of the things we're going to unpack even further today. So if you missed last year's course, all the replays are there, follow that link, rewatch them, it's really good stuff. And of course, if you haven't seen Matt, he's booked the link for that as in the chat as well. So Maddie, give us a high level view. What are we going to be covering for the rest of today? Totally.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, we're definitely going to expand on some of the things that we started to talk about last year, but really, you know, thinking about what's changed in the past year and so that's why today we're going to focus mostly on AI kind of how AI factors into content creation, how you can use AI tools to create content, how you can use AI tools to detect AI content. You know, things like how to write an excellent chat GPT prompt and one thing I'm really excited to share with you because it's something that I've just kind of figured out for myself is how to make your own personal GPT. So that's what we're gonna do at the end of the day, I'll show you step by step how to do it. You can follow along, I'll show you how to adapt it a little bit. And then really, what we're going to start with today is I guess a bit of a cautionary tale when it comes to AI so we'll start with the most negative and we'll build up to the most positive. And then tomorrow, the focus is going to be on content UX, the user experience what I like to call the reader experience. So it's going to be more about you know, the elements of design and how they interact with content, how you can create this great reader experience for the people who consume your designs and content and so we can get a little bit more into what that looks like. But I guess if I was to like talk high level about today versus tomorrow, today is like things that I think are really like novel and fun. It's like It's like exciting things that that we're all learning kind of at the same time and that's that's what's so exciting about just like nobody has it figured out. And tomorrow is like the stuff that I'm really passionate about. That's a little bit more, you know, foundational and again, about like that full experience. So I guess with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. Yeah,\r\n\r\nabsolutely. Me give a couple of housekeeping notes that will disappear. Folks. We'll be taking a break in the middle as usual for these courses. So roughly at tube central an hour from now, we'll take about a five to 10 minute break depending on where we are timewise. So at the end of this first hour and the end of the second hour, we'll have a time of q&a as well. I would invite you to use the zoom q&a Link to ask your questions. Please don't use the chat, but use that Zoom q&a. That way we can keep all the questions in a nice list. And also, if you'll keep that Zoom q&a open, if somebody asks a question that you also want to hear the answer to just click the thumbs up icon to up vote. And we'll take the questions the order of up votes. So with that again, yeah, we are recording in the replay. The transcript is all there and it'll be available for you about an hour after we finished today. So Maddie, I'm going to disappear take over. Let's get started. Let's\r\n\r\ndo it. My housekeeping is just first of all, I think that we all can learn a lot from each other when it comes to AI. And so like that's how I've picked up the things that I'm going to share with you. It's really hearing it from other people seeing how other people are using this tool. It's interesting because it's so new that like, again, we don't really know like what the best use cases are. And there's this world of possibility that we've only just started to touch. So one thing I'll ask is like if you've come across an interesting AI use case, you know whether you have something that's top of mind now or whether going through what I'm going to talk about today sparks it like please share that in the chat. I'm sure all learn from it. I'm sure other people will learn from it. So that's one thing and then I'll just ask that if there's anything that resonates with you, as I'm talking today, or you know as other people are sharing ideas in the chat. I always love when people tweet or I guess x takeaways these days. So my Twitter is in that bottom right hand corner. So use that and I always love to retweet and share with my audience too. So yeah, let's go ahead and get started here. Nathan already gave a nice bio like who I am. Just to give you you know, more information about the blacksmith. We're a holistic content marketing agency for b2b technology brands. We create data driven content. I'm going to share some of those processes here with you today in terms of how we're using AI tools to do that. And our focus is creating content across the sales funnel with a focus on the reader experience. So again, that's really what day two is going to be about. It's creating this ideal reader experience with the intersection of content and design. And then my book writing for humans robots, the new rules of content style. If you've ever read the book, The Elements of Style, I was really kind of riffing on that in a more I guess, modern way since that book was written back in 1918, or 1919. Of course, at that time, the internet didn't exist. We weren't necessarily addressing a global audience when we publish to the web. We are now and so that's kind of the idea behind this book is how can you how can you speak plainly and inclusively and effectively when you're writing for the web? And so with all of that being said, let's go ahead and jump into the topic of today which is AI Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention. Day two, when we talk about content UX. I'm going to do some live content UX audits. If you were here last year, we also did this this is something I really love to do. And so this form here which you can also click through the slide being links that we've shared in the chat. Just has a couple questions like your name your brand. It'll ask for a link to a specific piece of content. If you're comfortable sharing for this live UX audit, and then it has the question that's optional. If there's anything you want me to focus on, and then like an aspect of the content itself, but the purpose is to collect some, you know, ideas from from all of you of what to audit and we're going to basically put the principles that I'm going to be talking about tomorrow into action you know, show you how to use some different tools show you how to use more also, like qualitative analyses. And so again, I would love your examples so that we can make it really useful for you to give you know, a second pair of eyes on your content. And you know, it's always done in a very respectful way. I'm not looking for problems, I'm just showing you ways to, you know, make your message clearer to make your content experience more effective. So I'll, I'll aim to remind you about this again at the end of the day, and then you know, before tomorrow is probably when I'll pick what we're going to audit for tomorrow. So get them in today, whenever you have a chance. Okay, so artificial intelligence. That's really the focus of what we're talking about today. Super exciting. Things are happening here. It's also kind of a wild wild west. It's it's something that there's many positive use cases but there are also some negative ones and so I really wanted to start with the negatives so we can kind of get that out of the way so we can you know, maybe share some like cautionary tales here. The link that Learn More link is an article that I wrote for Fast Company, and it's going to go over some of the same things that I talked about here in terms of some of the limitations and also really like the ethical implications of using AI to generate content to publish it as if it were your own. So yeah, let's go ahead and dive into that. Um, so I think like the first major implication, negative implication of AI or something to think about, especially as a creator, because many of us here we're writers, we're designers, so we're creating things. They they are our intellectual property which we may assign, you know, to a client, for example, but it's still at its root. It's something that we made. And, you know, the thing about AI is, first of all, it can't think for itself. It uses things like machine learning. It uses algorithms and processes to make sense of what's already out there. But it's not, at least right now in a place where it can completely invent something new. If it does. It's the result of this machine learning it's not the result of true uniqueness. So you know, essentially, AI and I'm gonna explain this example in a moment here, but it's, it's being trained on what already exists. It's using our intellectual property. And the worst part of it is it's doing that without giving us credit. I mean, if you go in do a search on Google, it was called Bard, but now they've rebranded it to Gemini. In my experience, and and I haven't used it recently, to be honest with you, but certainly within chat GPT there's no like source given for the answer to a prompt. It's not directing you to a specific piece of content are saying, This is what I referenced to come up with this answer, which also creates an issue of you know, whether or not that answer is something to be trusted, and we'll get into the fact that AI is oftentimes confidently incorrect. But right now, with the focus being on the fact that it's essentially plagiarism and my perspective, if you are taking what you generate with AI and then publishing it as your own this is probably easiest to think about when you think about visuals, and we're going to talk a little bit about AI generating images and kind of like how that works and some of the issues with that. But you can think of like aI trained on a certain set of materials, certain artists body of work, you know, that style, if it's trained on a certain style and the output is a certain style, it's pretty easy to identify that, you know, it's riffing off, you know, one individual's intellectual property, it's a little bit harder to make that distinction with the written word. But that doesn't mean that it's any less important to recognize that it's, it's an issue if if AI is passing off its own material or your material as its own. So, what I wanted to share here, this is an article that was published on futurism. It's an it's a screenshot from it, and it's about CNET. They have this blog about different like personal finance topics and things like that. And so when it comes to things that affect your finances, whether it's subjects like you know how to buy a house and you know, like had this setup a mortgage, you know, whatever. Or, in this case, like you know, how to pick a credit card, how to use credit cards, how to decide what college to send your kid to, or something like that. Google calls these topics, your money, your life. And in comparison to any other topic that you publish, that you're looking to get ranked in relevant search on Google. Google has the highest standard of quality for your money, your life topics. So CNET was transparent about the fact that they were publishing AI generated content such as the example shared here. But they had a human fact checking it and so the byline was like you seen that money or something like that? And then I think they also had like the byline of the human editor published next to it, but they told us you know, they they weren't trying to hide that it was aI generated. So this excerpt is you know, maybe kind of a silly example, but it's showing how\r\n\r\nthis article that they wrote, which was about can you buy a gift card with the credit card. This first example is a line that's almost verbatim from a rivaling Forbes article. And then this next example is how literally, the table was the exact same title. So, you know, you could question if it was only one of these things, you know, is that really plagiarism? Is that really a problem? But the fact that it's both to me shows that you know, not only did CNET not take a high enough standard of care, quite honestly with the content that they were having a human fact checker edit, but I think it also begs the question of like, if you're generating a full piece of copy, like a, you know, long form blog article, like are you ever going to be able to definitively say that it's not plagiarism? Or that it's not like literally, you know, word for word related to any other competitor article out there? And I think the answer's no, because that's what the AI is using to generate the content. In this case, and then one that I'll share subsequently, AI is, is almost like a crutch for CNET or for others who are who are taking this approach of generating that full article and then having the human intervention and I'm going to share some better ways to use AI in your article creation process. But yeah, I mean, the problem is ultimately that there's no way that they can catch every instance of plagiarism, and it just honestly creates more work and, and the worst part of all, is that it essentially ruin their reputation because they didn't take a proper standard of care. Another example that's, that's ongoing, it's unresolved at this point, is that the New York Times recently sued open AI who's the creator of chat GBT saying that, you know, their, their publications, their media. was unlawfully used to train open AI. And the last I saw, I think there was an update actually today that said that the New York Times is like misrepresenting the evidence or something like that. But again, I mean, it really just like begs the question of you know, if you publish content, like is it safe, you know, is it going to be used to train a model which is then going to spit it out and somebody else is going to publish it and benefit from it without properly crediting you? So that's one major issue. So this is one that I would love your examples. If you have anything similar. This is this is a picture that I saw recently in like a Facebook group about AI. And so somebody had done some prompts about dog breeds. And if you kind of squint, you're like, Okay, maybe that like a chart of different dog breeds, but then you look and you see all the like, really strange faces and like this, like gibberish text, and even the text that you can read is like not related to any dog breeds that currently exists. So, yeah, again, if you have any examples of like an image you've generated that has resulted in something like comically incorrect like this, I would love to see that in the chat. That would be fun. But I guess the point that I want to make with this slide is that at least at this point, AI can't effectively art direct you could give it a prompt and you could maybe get it to a point where you can get something useful. I think it's called mid journey. There's this one AI image generator that creates these like hyper realistic things with like any detail you can get it and something like that is so cool and very interesting to experiment with. But I think this came from within chat GPT I'm gonna say it wrong, but it's called like Dali Dali. And in my experience, when I've used it to generate images, it's the same sort of like gibberish text. The image, you know, is like, vaguely related to the prompts that I give it. So I'm using it for like, kind of like business article use cases to like generate a figure from you know, some like the data I include or something like that. I've never gotten something useful yet. And I think beyond that, it's like you still as a creative have to come up with the prompt. It's not like AI is going to be able to help you within the context, say of like an article. They're not going to be able to come up with like five unique media examples that you could include. So this is something that I think, you know, as humans, like, we still like have control over this or so like the best Abbot. Um, okay. So next I started to talk about this, which is one of the biggest issues with AI to date, the fact that it is confidently incorrect. So this is another Cena example, I'm going to read a little excerpt from. This is another futurism article. They did kind of a deep dive into this. See that AI but issue? So the excerpt is after the outcry after you know, some of these plagiarism things came to light. With the previous example. Steena editor in chief Connie Guglielmo acknowledged the AI written articles in a post that celebrated CNET's reputation for being transparent. without acknowledging the criticism, Guglielmo wrote that the publication was changing the byline on its AI generated articles from CNET money staff to simply seen that money as well as making the disclosure more prominent. Furthermore, she promised every story published under the program had been reviewed, fact checked, and edited by an editor with topical expertise before we hit publish, and I think that this is referring to like before this article was published, and so what you're looking at right here is, I think a more serious violation of the high standards that Google holds for your money your life, making sure that it is, you know, written by an expert that it's heavily fat checked, you know that you're not publishing something that you can't stand behind. And so this is about calculating compound interest for savings and as you can see by the excerpts, it's, it's wrong, the calculation is spitting out an incorrect final number. And so it may seem like, you know, small potatoes like, you know, like, what, what's really going to happen to the person who misinterprets this? It's certainly not like, you know, having to do with like, buying a house and like getting those equations wrong thread savings, but I think it just goes to show that there's, you know, there's a lot of problematic things that can happen and it starts here and if if we don't maintain a high standard for content quality starting here, then it could exacerbate it could turn into people being misled when it comes to making these like bigger money decisions in their life or you know, other things, your money your life, I think also, in some ways has to do with like, health and like medical stuff and things like that. So there are like potentially, you know, bigger and like worse implications than even just like the financial aspect of it. One thing that's interesting that that I misunderstood or I was misled about AI. Really up until like, a week ago or so, is I thought that you could ask chat GBT if it wrote something. So that was something that I saw other people talking about. And it's something that at the blacksmith like we've tested out ourselves you know, when working with like a new writer and wondering how to detect like if content was aI generated, and I found an article on open API's like FAQs or help desk or whatever that said, whenever you ask chat GBT if it wrote some you know, specific piece of copy for example, it just make something up like that's, that's literally what open AI says you could Google it yourself. So, you know, it's weird that it doesn't just say, I don't know, you know, it doesn't just give you like that as a straight answer. It's fine. If it doesn't know, but for it to purposely just decide, you know, bye bye narrowly, like if it's yes or no, and that it just tells you that whether it actually knows the answer, like that's very concerning to me. So a little bit of a cautionary tale. Um, but yeah, I think at the end of the day of the CNET examples, what I'm trying to impress upon you is like, does it really save time, if it like, impacts your reputation long term like I just don't think that that the best way to go about it is to generate the full piece of content and then add the human and I think that I think that AI can help intermittently and we'll definitely get to like how exactly to do that shortly. Um, so this article is also kind of fun. Charlie Brooker's, a creator of Black Mirror. If any of you are familiar, it's just this like really kind of weird messed up show on Netflix. It's very like future focused. It's like, I would say fairly.\r\n\r\nWhat's the word like it's, it's, it's kind of like post apocalyptic in some ways, not always. But it always like seems to end and kind of a scary place. And it's episodic, like each each episode I mean, to say is like its own storyline. And so the most recent season started to touch on themes of AI since that has become you know, something that has infiltrated society. And anyway, this article, The Creator who you know, has a very interesting mind based on what we see on this Netflix episodes, said that he doesn't think AI is messy enough to replace creative people. So there's good news guys, which is AI can't can't match that with us. I think on another hand AI, it lacks human empathy. You know, it can never like fully understand, like, who we are and what we go through. I don't think it ever will unless it's somehow achieved some level of sentience but yeah, I mean, ultimately, like in its wildest dreams, whatever AI, you know, thinks that it thinks it could never generate the ideas that we come up in our wildest dreams. And I think that the proof is in the pudding in terms of thinking about things like some of our favorite authors and how they create prosaic copy. So here's, here's a quote, I love Stephen King. He's kind of a machine himself, but human as far as I know. So this from needful things, one of his more interesting books, because the trust of the innocent is the wires most useful tool. And so, you know, fed copies of Stephen King's worked. You can ask chat GPT to write in his voice. I don't know if Stephen K would appreciate that or not. But, you know, I think the limitation is that it couldn't generate something like this on its own it can generate like derivative work of his but it couldn't come up with this on its own. Ai, you know, it, it isn't it doesn't have uniqueness. And Google has historically said that it's important. We're gonna talk a little bit about Google's AI guidelines that it's published. And it specifically says in those guidelines that they want to rank content that is unique, which AI fundamentally is not, not on its own, not without human intervention. Ai just read purposes and parrots things that already exists. And, and the output trends toward the average. It's not, it's not unique, it's not notable and interesting. Okay, so the last thing that I want to talk about from like this negative perspective, and then I promise we'll get into more of the fun stuff, is the idea that algorithms can be biased. And so if you think about like the people who are creating things like Chet GPT, or the Google algorithm or any other algorithm you interact with, like social media feeds, things like that. Algorithms, they represent the people that created them, not necessarily the population as a whole. So this book is really interesting. It's from the perspective of a black woman and so she is just like, read some of the book description to give you an idea of some of the topics that she explores. It says run a Google search for Black Girls, what will you find? Big booty and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms, but if you type in white girls, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and on unmoderated discussions about why black women are so sassy or why black women are so angry presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. And I think, after this book was published, because this was from a while ago, Google had manually made some adjustments to the algorithm in light of this criticism and that commentary, but the problem is with algorithms, you're you're scaling up problems, they can't manually make adjustments for every inherent bias that their algorithm has. And so you know, I don't know if we have an answer for how to fix this. But ultimately, the people creating the algorithm should represent society as a whole. I guess that's, you know, one way to think about it. Um, and I guess the question that it poses for all of us is like with AI deploying so rapidly there's going to be a lot of situations where bias needs to be routed out and fixed. And so that's, that's what's kind of scary, I think about how quickly new applications are developing. Again, it scales up problems and so that's just something I think we all need to be aware of, and and do the best that we can to fix. So okay, so now let's talk about some of the more fun stuff AI content tools. These are tools that we use in our workflow. These are tools that I use, personally. And so let's go ahead and you know, talk a little bit about how they work. So, again, we're gonna focus on like, mainly AI content tools, just because that's my sphere of genius. That's like what I have the most experience with, but I think there are different things that you could use like no matter how you're creating content, whether it's like you write blog posts for yourself, or for clients, or like, you know, you just want to like uplevel, your email strategy, or you know, help with like the personal compositions that you create. So, the first one I want to talk about is phrase which creates AI powered content briefs. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch my screen to share, to share like what a report looks like in phrase. So let's see here. I think I have to get out of full screen in order for this to work. Okay, so um, this was the form so I'm going to show you that in the beginning, but I'm gonna go ahead and exit out. So phrase generates this really cool report and the SEO aspects of it may or may not be relevant to your process. And I will say that not every piece of content that we created, the blacksmith is driven by SEO. It's not every piece of content we create to rank but I still use we still use phrase for everything because it helps with topic research. So that's what this is. It's a briefing tool. It's a research tool. Um, the way that it works and the way that the next tool, clear scope that I'm going to explain to you also works is that you give it a primary keyword. So in this case, it's how reliable are AI detectors? And so, by giving it this primary keyword, that means that we've already done the research to decide that that's the keyword that we want to optimize for. And so this is this is an article that's already published on the Black Swan, but this is something that we would have created. Prior to that publication. This this brief would have been like the first step of the writing process after doing the keyword research to decide which one we want to focus on. And the way that phrase and clear scope work is that you can I'm just going to show you like some of the pricing details so you can understand like how it works within a workflow, phrases kind of unique in that it has a plan that allows you to create unlimited reports. Not many other tools like it do that it's usually a per report cost. So that's why it's important to know what you want to optimize for before generating the reports. But it also has these lesser plans in terms of output. You know, depending on your content process, that's probably going to be more cost effective to you then you know, me as an agency, I would want more of like the unlimited plan to work for my various clients. So let's go back to phrase so what's interesting about phrase is first of all, just like the content editor experience itself, I'll be honest, we use Google Docs for everything. But if I was creating content, as like just for my internal team or something, what's cool is you can create these other tabs. And so you could have a tab that's like research. You could have a tab that's your outline. You could have a tab that's your draft, and then you could have maybe a tab with edits or something like that. So that's kind of cool just to keep the process nice and contained in one place. I've always thought that that was really unique and interesting about phrase.\r\n\r\nBut to be honest, we don't use phrase as a Content Editor. That's just an added bonus. So yeah, it generates a topic report. I'm gonna go through a couple of different aspects of it. First of all, it gives you some sort of tangible details and the way that phrase and clear scope and the market means which is another variation on a theme work is that they scrape the top 20 or so search results, which is pretty representative of like, what's going to be necessary to rank and it gives you details like, you know, how many words should you aim for for this specific topic? In this case, it's also suggesting how many headers which is like a measure of depth of content, how many links How many images? I think the top ones are what's like in this brief, that's what it's reading and the ones under it are like the average that it's suggesting. But again, we're just this is just like material that's from the brief. It's not like the actual content that we wrote. When it comes to word count. I think people always ask like, what's the ideal word count for a piece of content? And the the answer like many things in SEO is it depends. And so that's why tools like this are really useful because there is no standard. It's very topic driven. And using data that's based on actual searches means that you can get very close to like what that ideal is. So it also shares you know, the top some details of the top breaking content, you'll notice that the blog Smith currently owns a featured snippet for this particular topic, thanks in part to you know, some of the tools that we use to optimize their content. And also, I think, for this particular piece, because we did a lot of our own original research and reporting and some of it that I'll share with you when we talk about AI detector tools, I believe after the break today. You can also see like, the atomized version of some of these other top ranking results like the title like a short description, different headers, you can click into the headers to get more information. You can click through to read it. There's other things in this little side panel here that are interesting. This is just a list of all the headings from all the top ranking content pieces. Probably the most useful is this questions area and you can break it down by different sources of the question of the questions. People also ask you something you could manually go to Google and see for yourself. But it's nice to have it all in one place. I think that's the real benefit of phrase and then you can also see here that you can see questions that come from places like Quora and Reddit, you know, which which can really add a nice like flavor to what you're working on. The stats tab is really interesting. You know, they essentially suggest in phrase different stats, as well as different links that people tend to use in those top ranking pieces of content. And so you don't necessarily want to like copy everything that you see. But there might be things that like people would expect to be exposed to in your content. If there's like a big industry stat that relates to what you're talking about. As you scroll here you can see certain things like different topics that come up, you know, different related keywords or sub topics. And a lot of this you can kind of paste over from the sidebar. External links. You know, in addition to specific stats, news is also pretty interesting because this is like things that have happened maybe since those top ranking articles were published. So again, like if you're trying to be the best making sure that your information is the most up to date. This can help you do that. So freeze also has some generative AI capabilities. I'm going to be honest with you that we don't use these because we don't believe in generating AI copy as far as you know what we write for clients and for ourselves. We're experimenting with it. But so I don't really use any of the generative AI tools. But this optimize tab here is notable and useful, because it's similar to clear scope and market Muse which I'll share with you in just a moment here. And basically, it suggests certain phrases that we should expect to see in the content in order for it to rank high and relevant search. You know, obviously, you can't just throw all the words and you have to weave them in. But this is a pretty good baseline for what people would expect to see topic wise in an article and that's that's the real benefit. I think of tools like this. So yeah, there's other there's other like interesting things that you can dig into. This is like a keyword gap map map based on what I just showed you those different phrases and it shows your content compared to other ranking content and who's using what words so you can kind of see how you stack up against those other competitors. So next, I want to share clear scope with you and I have a slide for it, but I'm just going to jump straight to the report here. So what you're seeing is like a very, I would say like simplified user interface compared to like what you would see with phrase and so clear scope in many ways is very similar. They both exists to help you optimize content. They both include some important research they both work by starting with a primary keyword. One of the differences between clear scope and phrase is first of all that query scope suggests a letter grade whereas phrase and market Muse and surfer previously known as Super SEO suggested number like out of 100 in order to understand like how close to optimizing compared to their standards you are, it also suggests a word count. And one more thing I wanted to say about the content creator is that at the blacksmith we always aim for an a or higher that tends to be a good standard for actually achieving rankings, high rankings and relevant search. I'm actually not sure if phrase does this. I'm sure they do. I just didn't notice it while going through. But clear scope also suggests a target readability level. I think that's really important for matching the needs of the searcher not going you know too deep into something that maybe could benefit from being more surface level for example. You can also notice here that they have those suggestions for phrases and so phrase we use the very beginning of our process, but we're not optimizing content within that tool. We're really using clear scope for that because in my experience, and this could differ by industry, but I find their suggestions for phrases to incorporate to be a little bit more fine tuned than phrase. So you know, that's, that's my opinion. Um, you'll notice that they also have the sidebar, so they have, you know, a couple of details. I don't again, I don't necessarily use clear scope for the briefing processes is really more at the end of the process. So stuff like this, I'm not necessarily going over but if you were to use one tool, then it's nice to know that it has that it also has those top you know, search results for the query, examples of like headers and things like that. It also has the term like keyword gap map that shows how you stack up compared to the competition. You can dig into the competitor details even more in terms of how clear scope looks at content with their letter grade, by word count, that it has this nice chart that shows how that content grade stacks up against their organic position in search. And then I think the last thing that I'll mention about clear scope for now, is that you can use that editor in here just like you can use the editor in phrase, but actually both free and clear scope. Have a Google Docs add on. And so all you have to do is like grab the report link the individual link to that specific report, put it in Google Docs, and then you get all this information within, you know, Google Docs where you probably at least my team works better that way. Um, okay, so and then I guess the last last thing I was gonna say about this topic is that if I had to pick one tool, I think I would pick clear scope. Again, because of the fine tuned pneus of the instructions, but if I was a smaller shop operation, I'd probably pick phrase because it can do like a more well rounded look at like the topic as a whole and debriefing so so that's my suggestion. Clear scope works by essentially offering it's like a per report price, but you can buy packages and like the more reports you buy at a time, the less expensive Each report is. So let me get my slides back up here. And then we'll move on to the next tool that we're going to talk about though.\r\n\r\nWe talked about phrase to talked about clear scope. So let's talk about market Muse just kind of in passing here because it's a very similar tool. It uses some different technologies, compared to clear scope and phrase and so that's why it's a part of our process again as an organization that spends a lot of time on SEO and data and keyword research. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to you if you're going to maybe consider one of those other tools. What's interesting about marketmuse is that it has this functionality to create an AI generated first draft that includes some like light human intervention from their side. I think that's what this is actually this is like a sample from a while ago where we were just playing around with it to see what would happen. But yeah, again, it has a lot of the same functionality. It offers content optimization suggestions that like keyword gap map that I showed you and both of the tools and it has like some generative AI capabilities. So yeah, it just adds a little bit of extra detail. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that it's something you need to add to your workflow if like one of those other tools could satisfy a lot of these same things. So talking about some other tools that are interesting. Word tune is something that I feel like is so underrated. It's essentially uses your own copy to make suggestions. And so again, I'm going to I'm going to show you what that looks like. So let me share my screen back here. So it works in Google Docs. And so here's I just stole the intro basically from that AI detector article. And so what you could do is you highlight whatever text you want it to make suggestions based off of and I typically do it sentence by sentence I, I'm sure it could do longer bits of text, but I don't find that to be as useful. For me. This is like a great tool for when you have writer's block because I don't know you know if you've experienced this but oftentimes I'll let my get myself get stuck on a specific word and it just like really bugs me, and I'm like it's not done until I figured out the right word. And it takes me forever to get through that. So we're tune. It's great because I'm using it with my own copy. So I can feel really confident about whatever it suggests. I'm sure you could use word tune to take AI generated copy and then re spin it. But that's not my suggestion. So again, it works by using this like Google Docs add on and you you highlight it and just to show that action again. It has this little word tune icon. And then you can see different suggestions for how word tune would rewrite it you get like 10 or something like that. And then you can also fine tune it by changing the tone and then by finding ways to shorten or expand it depending on what your use case is. The last thing that I'll say about word toon for right now is it has this thing called spices and so that's like getting a little bit more like next level with the AI generation and using like generative texts. I haven't played around too much with this yet, but it is interesting. And this is kind of taking it away I think from you know basing it off of your copy to kind of like generating something completely new. So that's why I don't necessarily use this but I think it could be a useful resource for when you're when you have writer's block or things like that. So let me get my slides back up here. Here it is. Okay, so so that was word tune. Um, and then Grammarly. I think works very similarly to word tune, and that it uses your own body of work your own copy, to suggest edits, and so I wrote an article for their blog. That's what the learn more link is. After a recent keynote, they did about all their generative AI capabilities. And so I would definitely check that out if you're curious about how to use grammerly in this way. And full disclosure, I'm a Grammarly ambassador, so you know, I'm always singing their praises, but I think it's I think it's interesting because Grammarly, like many other SAS tools on the market are starting to invest in AI capabilities like directly within their tools. And so I think we're gonna see like more and more of examples of this. And grammerly has a lot of other I think really useful. And interesting features like they have this brand style guide, which is something we use that the blacksmith which allows you to set your preferred spelling for things like brand names, and grammar rules and things like that. All right, so let's take a couple minutes for questions. Anything that's come up so far, after the break, we're going to talk about AI detector tools now that I've shown you the AI writing tools. We're going to talk about chat how to write a good chat GBT prompt and then we're going to end the day with how to create your own personal GPT. So yeah, in the meantime, there's any questions. We'll talk about them now and then we'll take a little bit of a break.\r\n\r\nYeah, very good, great overview of some really cool tools that can be used for our content creation. If you have questions specifically about that, drop those there in the zoom q&a. There's one question floating out there about the slide. We were sharing this link as a slide sharing the slides as a slide being link because there was an issue getting them exported where the the links on the slides were clickable. And so technology Yeah, it that's so currently not downloadable. Is the long and the short of it so but that slide being link is there and it'll be available for you going forward.\r\n\r\nWe can we could share them as downloaded just won't be a clickable link. So you can we could share like both in tandem with each other. Unfortunately, that's going to be the limitation\r\n\r\nYeah, yeah. So I'm happy to add that PDF link as well. We'll I'll get that added to the link bundle as we come back. If you want to download these just know that there are things that say read more, learn more that don't clicked anywhere in the PDF. Alright folks, well let's go ahead and take a break. It is 153 Central time let's take a break until right at two o'clock Central. So right about seven minutes from now and we're quiet until then. Sounds great. See you then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We are back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, we are back and ready for the second part of day two. Maddie, what are we going to knock out today?\r\n\r\nSo we're gonna start with now that we've learned how to generate a copy, how do you detect it? We're going to then move to talking a little bit about some Google guidelines around AI content writing for humans and robots. And then we'll end the day with a deeper dive into chat GPT how to write a great prompt and then how to create your own personal GPT which I'm really excited about because it's something that I only just learned how to do myself. Very\r\n\r\ngood. That's a lot to cover in the next hour. I let me invite everyone also to look at the chat I'm going to drop in today's slides if you have come in late. Also, we've added a link there for the PDF download. And finally, there's a link in the link bundle that'll drop in in just a moment that has the invitation for you to submit your site for a content UX audit tomorrow. So with that I will turn it over to you Matty, let's\r\n\r\ngo. Sounds great. All right. Yeah, let's go ahead and knock this out. So AI detector tools. There's a couple that we've tested at the blacksmith and I want to share some of the results of those tests too, so that you can understand what they can be useful for. But also again, there are limitations. As with the rest of this world of AI, everything's still kind of developing. We're all learning things at the same time. And so there's no like perfect answer. There's no one definitive tool that's going to tell you like this is current AI content, or this isn't AI content. So a couple tools that you could try though that I think will give you a decent idea or continent scale, copy leaks and originality.ai and the link here which again, you can grab through the slide bean link is a link to an in depth investigation that we did at the blog Smith testing out these different tools. You know, trying to learn more about the nature of AI content and what it sounds like. So I do have a couple of ideas for you two that we'll talk about next in terms of like how to rewrite things that sound robotic whether they were robot generated or not. But before we get to that, this example here is kind of funny because it's the Constitution and this is continent scale, saying that they detected to be 9% ai generated and you know, I don't think they had robots at the time unless alien somehow hooked them up. But I think it's fair to say that this is more than likely 100% human generated content. But it's just interesting to see that their AI detector is still picking up some very some version of that. And that you know, also perhaps it hasn't trained this AI detector on you know, pieces that existed before. Ai content was a thing. So so that's just like one thing. You know, I think from the standpoint of like, if you're working with content creators, and you're paying for human generated content, then you should get that fundamentally I think that it's an ethical violation for someone to use AI to generate content without disclosing that and to be accepting payment for that as if it were something that they were creating. Of course, there are many companies out there who are hiring people with the job description that is like aI content writer, AI content editor or like somebody who trains you know, a chatbot on a certain way a certain body of work a certain way of writing. All of that being said, if you if you are using these tools, and they are saying with a high degree of certainty, you know, this is AI generated copy. I think it's really important to not outright accuse somebody of submitting AI generated copy what I do at the blog Smith is like let's say that we're doing like a paid test with a new writer hopeful for our team. What I do is I say, hey, you know, we ran this through, you know, these three AI detector tools, and here's what it said here, you know, is what degree of AI content it's saying it thinks this is like, can you comment on that? And it gives them the chance to you know, explain what they think might happen, defend themselves, offering to make fixes, and I think it's really like the way people people are going to be honest or not. There's nothing you could do about that. But I think it's the way that they respond to and handle that situation that tells you what you need to know about if you want to work with them, whether or not you can ultimately tell if their copy was aI generated or not. What is very interesting about these different tools is first of all, they're all gonna give you a different answer. That's just a fact. Because they're all using a different approach to detect AI content. The other thing is that you can input the exact same copy on one of these tools two times and get a different answer. So again, it's it's the wild wild west. But these will at least give you something to think about and whether it doesn't matter. Like if we if we trust the writer or not, we're always going to run their copies through one or multiple of these tools because we want to detect things that sound robotic, even if they were written by a human. So that kind of brings me to my next point here that I was starting to hint at. So when it comes to detecting AI content, or even detecting content that humans wrote, that sounds robotic, there's a couple of patterns that you can look for. The two major characteristics that the aforementioned AI detector tools are looking for are first of all, perplexity, so that's unpredictability within the content. Ai generated text tends to have low perplexity. Human writing has higher perplexity, it kind of makes sense we're a little bit more erratic than a robot. The other thing is burstiness, which is a similar concept. So it's looking for variation in the length and the structure of sentences. Ai content tends to be more steady, more formulaic, which makes sense. It has lower burstiness and human writing, which you know, has much more variation. The image you see here are some other things that we've picked up in our own writing process. And in investigating this topic, different signals that sound robotic again, whether they are in AI generated or not. So repeating words, like in this example, collision coverage, you know, coverage collision, like it's just like it's not using a lot of variation. And in the box MyStyle guide we talk about like, trying not to use the same word twice in the same sentence or paragraph, which is not always possible, but this would be an example of something that wouldn't pass the blacksmith style guide test because it's it's too repetitive. Also repetitive sentence structure where like, each sentence starts with the same formulaic approach. Advertising then a verb you know, advertising the verb, unnatural word usage, so like, you know, removing a glass dome to access the ball, but it doesn't really sound like how a human would talk about replacing a light bulb. A generic or impersonal tone. You know, it's like things that don't add value that you're just kind of like saying for the sake of having words, it's another thing that we talk about in the blog, Smith style guide, like everything you say, should have a purpose, and we don't believe in fluff. It's about cutting things to being the most concise version they can be while still conveying enough meaning. For people to understand what we're trying to say. Statements that contradict themselves. So the new policy will increase employee benefits while at the same time it will reduce employee benefits that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And inconsistent verb tense, you know, something a human editor. Should be able to pick up pretty well but probably a robot writing is not going to care too much about He He was waiting for the bus when he sees his coworker. Stiff, formal or matter of fact, writing style. You know, again, just something that just doesn't sound like a human wrote it or who would want to read it. So this is this is something that can be helpful to you like when you're doing your own edits to kind of like go through these different things. And, again, whether whether it's aI generated or not, and you know that for a fact, you still want to make sure that your writing is something that appeals to the human. So I wanted to take some time to talk about Google's helpful content update and also their guidance for AI generated content and whether or not it will rank some of this we did talk about last year if you were here, so we're just going to do a really quick refresher on that as it relates to this topic. So my book and like really like what we're talking about, in general is kind of marrying the concepts of writing for both humans who are really the ultimate buyer like they're the ones who actually have money so they can buy from you, whatever it is you're selling. They respond to other humans, other people's empathy, versus robots who you know, we're not writing for their sake, but they are the medium that connects us. To those humans. And so it's important for the things that we write, to be indexable to, you know, be findable to be descriptive, and to ultimately match the intent of whatever the human is looking for. So, you know, robots can also take the form of social networking site algorithms, like that news feed that you're familiar with, I'm sure.\r\n\r\nSo so that's kind of like the two players in this game. Here. So this is some highlights from Google's guidance about AI generated content. As you can see by the link here, this is from early 2023. And I was looking at this page again, just a couple of days ago to see if anything had changed. I had seen something on Twitter now x, where somebody had mentioned that something on this page should change. And I was looking at these three things because I think they're the most relevant to this topic that we're talking about. And like, I don't know if I'm just you know, like, post pregnancy brain or something. I couldn't find the difference. But it might have been because it was about something else on that page. But I might have missed it. And it might have been one of these things. But anyway, I think these things still more or less ring true today. And if anything has changed, it has been Google being less specific about their guidelines. Because that's kind of the nature of what all these things that they've shared with us are it's it's kind of like so just to go over them is a content against Google searches guidelines. They say it's not, but you know, it can't be used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which we'll talk about when we talk about the helpful content update. Will AI content rank highly on search? Maybe, you know, it doesn't give it any gains, which makes sense. What I think is really notable about this is they talk about if it's useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of e 80. It might do well in search. So they talk about original, but we've already talked today about how AI content at least on its own without manual intervention by humans is inherently not original. It is inherently not unique. And I would argue that again, without human intervention, it's neither useful nor helpful, in that, you know, you're not It's not like adding something that doesn't already exist. At least in that case. So to me, from Google's own words, AI content really aren't its own shouldn't rank high and relevant search. But of course, there are exceptions. And then, of course, there are situations where people pair that with a human editor like we saw with seeing that of course, CNET being a cautionary tale of what to avoid. Should I use AI to generate content? They say if you see it as an essential way to help you produce content that is helpful and original, we have that original word again, it might be useful to consider but again, if you're trying to gain search engine rankings and no there was something on Twitter now x where somebody was kind of like I can't remember who it was, but you might recognize the situation especially if you're in like the content world. Someone was boasting about how they had created a ton of AI generated content and they were sharing you know some stats from like their Google Analytics, and how would that helped rankings and things like that? And I think everybody agreed that that person should have probably kept their mouth shut because somebody from Google ended up you know, seeing this Thrive that came to their attention and they got hit with a manual penalty based on what this person was saying about you know, having not really like had that human intervention. So thus, it was not original or unique. And it's just funny, like, you could probably get away with it, at least for a while, depending on how Google develops more of these guidelines. But when you start to boast about it, and Google gets wind of it, then like there are manual interventions that they could take, so tread carefully. If it's working. Keep that to yourself. So then it Yeah, I wanted to like connect this back to Google's helpful content algorithm update, which also happened. Probably a little over a year ago, maybe two years ago. And so they describe it as being part of their long term efforts to provide original and valuable content through search. It rewards content that meets users expectations while demoting content written primarily with search engines in mind. So like we were just talking about what the AI content. This this update isn't focused on AI but but it adds color to those guidelines in terms of how to approach it or you know, if you are generating AI content, how to make it work, so that it could rank these questions. Are directly from Google just made pretty was blacksmith branding, but the link that I shared here will will get you to the Google documentation that includes these questions and the subsequent ones. So to ask yourself like is is this content truly people versus is something that Google would consider ranking. It's things like Do you have a primary purpose or focus for your site? If you're writing about too many disparate topics, it's very confusing to Google you can certainly write about things that are different but related to each other, but you should really have like one specific focus if you want to rank high in relevant search. Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they've had a satisfying experience? I think that's a question to ask yourself, whenever you create any type of content like Is it is it satisfying to the end user doesn't really just serve your purposes? They talk about like demonstrating firsthand experience or like a depth of knowledge that's really important. That's that's how we add uniqueness to our content. That's how we make it original. Even if it's just your opinion on something, you know, that adds color to the content that already exists. Okay, so, um, let's talk now about from the search perspective, are you taking the search engine first approach to your content? So these are things that you obviously don't want to do. And it's questions like, you know, are you primarily trying to attract people from search versus creating something truly useful for humans? It does say are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics like that cautionary tale, that person who was sharing, you know, the content they generated, which resulted in a manual penalty, it's a perfect example. I think this is important too, like, are you mainly just summarizing what others have said without adding much value? You should always be adding I think something to the content that you're creating in order for it to be worth creating in the first place.\r\n\r\nSo just to kind of summarize here, like what is helpful content versus unhelpful content from these guidelines that Google has given us and that I honestly agree with? helpful content is people first genuine specific, it's actionable. Up to date is important. Once you publish something, you have to think about, like if you're using stats or if it's about maybe a tool that changes frequently, like you should be regularly reviewing or auditing your content for opportunities to update it. Is it relatable, is it concise? And ultimately, is it satisfying, versus the unhelpful content which is written primarily for the search engine robots it's spammy? It's generic, it's abstract. It might be outdated. Ultimately, it's impersonal, impersonal, fluffy, and then whacking. So these are some easy guidelines that you can use to understand if your content is hitting the mark for something that Google would even consider ranking high and relevant search. All right, so now we're gonna get to some of like the really fun stuff, I think today, which is get GBT some specific examples for how you can use it, as well as a demonstration for how I'm using it. And so, a lot of the things that I'm going to talk about today are based on things that I've learned from other people. I didn't necessarily invent these things. I've adapted many for my own use cases. And so again, I think this is a really valuable opportunity for like if you have anything to add to this discussion, I'd love to see it in the chat. I think it could benefit other people. How are you experimenting with AI? Like how how would you maybe adapt some of these ideas for how to write a great prompt What are like interesting prompts that you've used, and you know what, how is that benefited? You so I'll just put that out there. And then I'll also say that some of these are like pretty much all of these guidelines are based on open AIS guidelines for prompt engineering as well as Google's in some cases, I've combined to them and in all cases, I've given examples of how to use them effectively. So let's go ahead and jump to it. Okay, so the, I think first and perhaps the most important thing is to be as specific as possible. And you want to set parameters for the output that you're looking for. So my prompt here was helped me generate 10 email subject lines to use for cold outreach for my content marketing agency, please limit output to a maximum of 45 characters per example. I picked that number, the 45 characters because I saw that that's like somewhat of a best practice for how many characters people want to see in an email subject line. And what I could have done here was use the personal GPT I'm going to show you later that's all about the blogs and style guide them has like aspects of like how we do business and I could have gotten like even better example results here. But the point was not to show you something perfect it was to show you how to apply this principle. And the other thing that I wanted to add to is like you can always start with a plant, see what it gets you and then you can set parameters after the fact to refine your output. Like, you know, maybe I would have asked this prompt and then asked for it to shorten it to 45 characters or to suggest new examples of 45 characters. Or maybe I would have asked for like, what are you know, 10 General Sales, cold outreach subject lines, that I could use and then I might have added the detail Okay, now, adjust it for like my content marketing agency. The next one is to give context and examples. So I have this bot and I think I'm going to show you a screenshot of it next. One of my personal GPCs is a blacksmith sales expert. And so I created this bot because we recently hired a new salesperson, and there's just so much to learn both about the blogs with his brand. The work we do for customers, and just our sales process in general things that we want to share with new prospects that I wanted to create a resource and it's like of course you know, I want to make myself as available as possible to this new salesperson because typically I've been the salesperson for my company, I have a lot of that knowledge in my own head, but there are times when I am unavailable or I have other stuff that I have to work on. And so I wanted to create a personal GPT that incorporates some of this different documentation that I've created about our process. You know, referring to this prompt it also has like a copy of our standard proposal. Different things about you know, like what makes us stand out compared to the competition what's what's unique to us, I guess, so that any person on our team, any especially new salesperson, would be able to use this chat bot in order to surface some of this information, especially if they couldn't get a hold of me basically. So here's an example of a prompt I gave my personal GPT which is using the above case study. So I gave it a URL on our website. And one of the features of chat GPT is that you can have it browse the web in order to to include information and its results. So I gave it a URL. I asked it to reference a proposal that I had attached to the GPT that I've uploaded to it. And I said proposed an email pitch for a specific job opportunity. I copy and pasted a longer piece than this. I just took a screenshot but like the long version of this job description, and and I asked it to effectively address the requirements that the job description surfaced and the writing based on our strengths. And so what ended up happening was, you know, it wrote like a cold pitch email. But it did it did effectively address this prompt. There were things that I would change about it. Certainly there are things that I would have edited it before I sent it out to the person who had posted this job description, but I think that for me as a founder who has also traditionally been the salesperson it's such an effective way to use this tool because I spend so much time just you know, it's like I know all this information I know what we're good at. I know that we have relevant examples. You know, I know all this but it takes time to like resurface that knowledge and put it in a form that sounds good and is compelling, you know, to a sales prospect so that if you take one thing away, I think that you know that's like one really excellent use case of using your existing knowledge or your internal documentation. To make your life way easier.\r\n\r\nAnother related GPT prompt engineering tip is to use de limiters to clearly indicate distinct parts of the input. That just means like what I shouldn't have done here that would have made it probably a little bit easier for chat. GPT to understand what I wanted is to put this this job description text in like quotes, that's like a delimiters to say like, you know, do this to this piece of what I'm asking for to kind of like help it understand what part of the copy it's referencing. And what part of the copy is the ask, especially when you have like a longer input output, you know, whatever. Another example of that is something I learned from James rose. He is an automation and Zapier expert and has been doing a lot of interesting experiments with AI who's really good person to follow. If you're interested in just like getting ideas, he takes transcripts from like voice of customer interviews where he's getting feedback and you know, like positive testimonials and things about his product and he feeds that transcript into chat GPT and says you know, use this puts a transcript in quotes those delimiters and basically like give me like three, you know, like really nice things they said about you know, our product three like great pieces of feedback. And I think that that's such a useful way we like on our client calls on our internal meetings. We use a tool called fireflies, which automatically transcribes all our meetings, but it's still you know, it's still a lot to sort through an end fireflies has its own AI capabilities, too. So it helps to summarize and things like that, but to take to be able to use that output and quickly surface insights based on whatever your prompt is, I think is such an awesome use of AI that saves the human reader from having to go through the whole thing. So this is and I'll show you, I'll show you what this looks like in action when we do the personal GPT demonstration. But this is kind of what it looks like to set some parameters for your personnel GPT and there's two I guess like schools of thought on setting like setting parameters narrowly defining the G PTS role. So you could do this within normal chat GPT and say for this query, you know, I want you to take on this specific role. And so I got this idea from Paul Roeser. He was on some like marketing technology podcast, and he's talking about how he uses AI. And his example was like, something along the lines of like, you know, pretend that you're a lawyer that advises entrepreneur, it's about hiring law and then he gave his prompt so he kind of like set the scene like this is the narrow role that I want you to operate into this query. So that's one way that you could look at it the other way is that you could create a personal GPT that serves a specific purpose like my blacksmith sales expert, that I've already referred to and that you know, I'm kind of showing you behind the scenes, how I set it up. So as you can see here, there's like a name for it, which is kind of arbitrary. A brief description, I think, mostly for your reference. And then the instructions are like what the AI uses to then suggest answers to your prompts. So as you can see here, I'm telling it like you can use our website as your primary reference. You should be familiar with all those pages and use it to inform your responses. It'll ask you and I'll show you how you want it to communicate with you how you want it to give answers. You know what specific information you want to focus on again, like narrowing that scope. And then I also say like tailor your responses to showcase the company's strengths and successes. Using you know details from the website and emphasize why we're the ideal choice in you know, answering like sales related queries. So this is one of the greatest uses of chat GPT without narrowly defining its role and objective. You're gonna get like a wide variety of answers and that's fine. It depends on what your use cases, but by giving it a roll, I think the quality of your output goes up exponentially. And I'll show you again, at the end here, what that looks like in practice. Here's another really interesting way to use it, I think, especially if you're trying to learn a new skill or if you're trying to troubleshoot an existing workflow, which is what I was doing in this prompt. So I use air table a lot. I'm a huge fan of no code and automation in general. I've found in my life that it's really hard to find like the perfect solution to everything that I want to do. I never could find like my perfect project management tool. And so essentially, I built it between using process street air table, Zapier, and you know the other mix of ragtag tools that are in my arsenal. So in this case, I was trying to create a specific automation in air table that for some reason is just evading me and I'm sure I'm doing like one stupid thing wrong, but I asked air table or sorry, I asked Chad GPT first of all, I prompted it by telling it what automation I was trying to create, like the actions that triggers the end goal. And it gave me like a step by step process that I would say is a little bit more high level than this out, but and then I asked it to refine its guidance or expand on its guidance by saying okay, so for this step, this is where I'm getting stuck. What was how exactly what I set this up in air table, and so then, as you can see, the result has some details and it's more detailed than the previous query gave for that step. It's probably worth mentioning that in chat GPT right now, there's two versions of GPT, which is like the underlying, you know, algorithm, machine learning mechanism, whatever. So there's GPT 3.5, which is an older version, and then there's GPT for GPT four incorporates web browsing so it has more up to date guidance. So especially when you're trying to troubleshoot something like air table, which changes often and so, you know, if I were using the old version of chat GPT, I might have gotten a different answer. So when you're doing things like like this, you want to use like the newer version, there is a limitation. I think it's something like you can have 40 prompts within three hours or something like that. I don't think I've ever gotten close to hitting that. But I suppose if you were to ask, you know, a lot of follow up questions, or you're troubleshooting something very complicated, then you could hit that so that's just something to keep in mind that as a chat GPT user and I don't know what the distinction is for paid versus free, but I think that the paid version of Chad GPT is like worth its weight in gold. I think it's extremely undervalued and it's probably because they're using our data to train it. So they do get a benefit out of it. But you know, I would say if you're finding yourself limited by the free version, then just upgrade to the paid it's, it's so worth that.\r\n\r\nOkay, so now, here's the real fun part. So we're gonna go through how to build your own GPT and I'm gonna give you like a specific task to do and so you can either follow along with me while I do this now, or you can do this yourself. Later, watch the recording and replicate it. I will say the process is probably much more straightforward than you might think, if you've never done this before. So we'll go ahead and get started. Let me set my screen accordingly. So we're going to jump over to the blog Smith website, because this is going to be the basis for the very basic UBT that we're going to create today, which is based on one that I've already created and refined a little bit more than what we're going to get into. But okay, so the blacksmith has this writing style guide and on our website. It has this chapter version so you can jump you know to these different sections. To see how will we go about our writing style. It's something that's fairly industry agnostic, so definitely like a great resource. If you don't have your own writing style guide. You could use ours to build yours. But what I want to do is create a chat GPT bot based on this that essentially acts as like a blacksmith editor that defends our style and explains when a piece of copy is not following it. So we have this as a PDF which I've already downloaded. I'll just show you what it looks like really quick. And it's it's designed, but it's fairly plain texts. You know, it's not that much more complex visually than like a Google doc version of this. And I'm telling you this, because my first attempt at making a personal GPT was actually to solve a personal problem of mine, which is that I love the game Settlers of Catan and I wanted to make a Catan rules bot so that I could download all the PDFs of the rules for every version we have. And I could ask the GPT okay, like you know, here's some like obscure situation like what is the role, you know, based on these rule books? Because every once in a while, something like that pops up. And while I like to think of myself as a content expert, there are those niche situations that require further consideration. Unfortunately, on the Catan website, the PDFs that you can download are very complicated visually as PDF, so chat GPT in my limited experience has not been able to read them. So it's just something to note that like you want to give it like the plainest text version of whatever documents you want to share with it, but something like this would be fine. And I know that because I've tested it. Okay, so so if you want to follow along, you know, just hit download, and that's this is the exact file that we're going to use. So then you go to the chat GPT dashboard. Which looks like this. And like I told you, you can toggle between chat, or GPT 3.5 or GPT. Four, you can see you know those limitations as well as the added benefits of using that more recent version of it. So then you go to explore GP Ts, and you can see on my sidebar when it loads here that I have. We have chat GPT which is like you know, every every question you could ever want to ask and then I have a couple of my personal gptc here as well as some that I've explored in this explore LGBTs area that I'm just kind of playing around with. So this is also just like a really fun place to look through things, test things out and get ideas for the the GPS you might want to create. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead and click this Create button, and you'll see this interface. Again, it's pretty simple. And if you go to create, it's going to prompt you with specific questions, but if you kind of like are familiar with this personal GPT idea, you could also jump to the Configure tab and start filling it out. But I think that it's easiest to think about it from this Create Tab. And so it's going to prompt you with a couple of questions. So this first one is like what kind of chat GPT what kind of personal GPT Do you want to make? So I'm going to tell it, you know, I like to create a GPT that serves as an editor for my brand, the blog Smith. The goal is to have this GPT serve as a resource. That references our specific style guide, and suggests edits based on newly inputted copy. I'm just making this up. But the last time that I did this, I'd used something similar to that. And so after each input, it's going to think you know, it's going to react to the things that you're telling it and it's going to ask you to refine the way that it interacts with you. So we're not none of this is like rocket science right now. This is just like designing almost like the persona of who this GPT is going to be. So then it's gonna suggest to name I suggest naming this GPT blacksmith editor. Does that work for you? Sure. Yeah. And you can change this yourself. Like if you just want to, like get through this part. Just say yep, yep, that's fine. And the next thing is it's going to generate a profile picture and so these are new, they're a little bit arbitrary. It's just like for your own purposes, for fun. One thing that is kind of fun with the imagery and it doesn't always work so we'll see. But sometimes I asked it to change to adapt the picture to use like one of our brand colors just for fun. So I'll say like, can you update this image to incorporate our main brand color, which just using a text expander Simple as that? Let's do it does. So this is using that dolly dolly I never know how to say it to suggest images and, you know, it looks like Okay, right? But we're not we're not asking it to create anything like complicated at this point. So, so like for example, it didn't, it didn't really follow my query. So let's see if I try a different way. Can the image use, you know, our main branch color? Like this is this is definitely the limitation of AI is that sometimes it understands the query and sometimes it just doesn't and we won't get stuck on it. If it doesn't get it. I just want to see if changing it has any practical effect on it. So then after this, it's going to ask about Yeah, that doesn't do it. No, that's fine. Okay, so the next question. They're asking me to more narrowly defined the role of what this GPT is going to serve as I'm Oh, so I'll have you use the uploaded PDFs as this as the foundation for your edits any questions? So I can upload the PDF here. Or I can go to that configure tag and I can also tab and I can also I can also upload additional documents to help as well like with my blacksmith sales expert, I have like our proposal I have a document about our sales process. I have another GPT that I forgot to mention that's called the blacksmith like SEO guru or something like that. And it basically I uploaded a bunch of documents about our approach to SEO some stuff about our keyword research process, and our like philosophy behind the different steps as well as a document I created for our writers and editors. That's about let me see how to get out of that. That's about how we write about SEO to make sure that our philosophy is communicated correctly and specifically. So that's just an example of different documents that you might use to support the outputs here and to narrowly define what you want to base its answers on. Okay. One thing that's important to say is when you're uploading documents you want to make sure to kind of like give context and say like, this is how I want you to use it. And like, you know, I'm doing this, I'm uploading this. So I'm expecting you to use this as part of your output if you don't, if you don't refer to that document when you're setting it up or when you're interacting with it. It might just ignore it in some, in some use cases when I've been creating these personal GPS like that's happened where, for example, with this one, it'll make edits based on best practices, but not based on the document that I specifically wanted it to use. So that's why I used that language. And so it says, I've updated your GPS behavior to focus on our specific style guide based on the uploaded PDF. So that's great. You know, like, what options so one thing that it usually asks is like how do you want the GPT to communicate with you and I'm getting maybe ahead of myself, I'm gonna say no, that sounds good and see if it prompts me to ask about like the tone.\r\n\r\nOkay, so it's not gonna say it looks good, but what options do I have for how it communicates with me? In terms of tone of voice, again, usually asked so this is giving me some options here. Again, not usually in the way that it normally does. It kind of asked to like paragraph form versus like giving me several examples. I'm gonna say that I want it to be let's go with number three, which is encouraging and positive. I think that that's the ethos of how we edit at the box with the other things are true to um, yeah, so just for the sake of this, and you can always change this, you can always refine it. Okay, so it's updating the GPT. This is probably the last edit and then what I'll do is I'm going to grab some copy that I want it to, to edit just to show you how it comes full circle. And then I'm going to show you kind of like the back end of what it looks like. So let me grab that copy. I'm going to feed it an example of like a recent social post that we were editing and the formatting is going to be like a little bit funky here, which is fine, because this is just an example. And the blog the style guide isn't necessarily built with a focus on editing social copy, but again, it was just like a quick thing to to try. Okay, so it says it's updated it. It tells me you know what the point of it is no more adjustments needed. Let's try it out. Okay, so I'm going to show you how it works and then we'll show you the Configure and then we'll kind of end the day off with any questions. Okay. So it gives you some prompts based on what it thinks that you might ask it and you can edit this, but I'm going to say please suggest edits to the following copy, in quotes and quotations, those delimiters based on the blacksmith style guide PDF and again, it's gonna be a little sloppy looks like it didn't actually take the name of the GPT that we asked it to. So we'll we'll take a look at that too. So it's interesting depending on the prompt you give it and I've tried this a couple of times in this case, it's kind of separating it out by saying like okay, here's some of the things from the blacksmith style guide and here's like specific passages of copy and how we would change them. So that's interesting. But what I would probably prefer is that it edits the whole thing, and then it tells me what edits it made. So it's, again, it's referencing I can I can tell because I'm familiar with it, but it's referencing specific aspects of the blacksmith style guide, which is great, we know it's working. But what I'm going to ask you to do is to change the way it outputs it. Can you refine the previous output by starting with I might mess up exactly how to say this, but by starting with, like all of the copy with edits, then after words, shared the specific edits made from blog Smith style perspective, that might not be like the most effective prompt. We're just going to see what it says. Okay, yeah, it looks like it's understanding. Nature. The copy here is an important I just want to show you how something like this could work for your purposes. Okay, so this is what I wanted it it refined the copy first and then it told me what it refined and why. Um, so let's look at this Configure tab. So yeah, for whatever reason, it didn't add the name. That that it prompted me and asked me to so I'm gonna go ahead and add that and you can see it up here. You can see this description. You can see the instructions based on some of the things that we talked about when we were creating it. You can make changes to these conversation starters we might even say like what like other conversation starters, would you suggest using freelist UPC code? I'm just curious and I don't know what to do. You can see the PDF that we uploaded and I can upload more files. You can add additional capabilities. I think by default the web browsing and Dolly image generation is implemented for many of you today who deal with code, this code interpreter might be useful. And then AI actions is something that I've started to play around with but don't fully understand but there's a way that you can connect your personal GPT to Zapier so that for example, it could reference data and other apps. So for my blog, Smith sales GPT I'm trying to create an AI action that allows it to reference our air table CRM so that you could ask it questions about a certain lead or certain portfolio projects and things like that. So once I get that implemented, it's going to be so cool. Okay, so it's giving me some ideas for these conversation starters that are a little generic, but I could probably refine them further. I think the last thing to talk about is how you can either keep this to yourself or share it with other people. I think that these drafts are automatically saved. So if you X out of here before clicking Save, I believe it will still exist, but don't quote me on that. From there you can decide you know, if you want to, if you want to keep it to yourself if it's you know something that's for your own personal use cases, or if you want to share it with your team or if you want to share it with like the wider world like maybe you create a chatbot for your industry that other people could benefit from that you want to share. So, in most cases, probably anyone with the link is a good bet, if you ever intend intend to share it with other people. Okay, so let me jump back to my slides really quick. We're going to end off the day here. So here we go. me pull this back up. Um, okay, this is the link to grab the style guide if you want to use that to replicate what I did today. You can also grab that from the side being like um, I'll just say one more time. My book writing for humans and robots. It was the number one best seller in the SEO category. So if SEO and content is something that you want to invest more time and learning about then I would highly recommend my book. You can grab the first chapter for free on the books website, and you can grab the book on Amazon in both print and Kindle format. I'll give one more reminder for our live content UX audit tomorrow. I'd really love to help you workshop, your content, help you come up with ideas for making it even stronger and more effective. So you can use this link to do that and that will happen at the end of day two. And then, you know, outside of today, if you have any questions about the things that we're talking about, you can either email me Maddie at the blogspot.com or on Twitter, aka ex im at Mad Yasmin and then yeah, we'll end the day with any questions that have come up since going over some of this GPT stuff.\r\n\r\nYeah, great stuff. Thanks Maddie. You know, the custom GP tees are really interesting. And it's it's also not only for your own business, but also working for clients. It's an opportunity to really, it's, it's a service you can provide. We have a boy for example, that has a ton of they're an educational nonprofit and they have a ton of PDFs like 800 and an educational topic that they deal with and so we're investigating, what would it take to put those PDFs in there and then have a bot that you could query the entire library to find an answer to something right. It's just super, super useful. Yeah.\r\n\r\nOne one note on that Nathan is chat GPT. So they have a limitation of you can upload 20 Total documents but they don't say how large or small those documents have to be so OneNote for like anybody who's trying like this is something that came up with that Catan bot I was trying to make. You can combine the documents if need be.\r\n\r\nYeah. And chat CPT if you have a large library like that it might not be the best tool it sometimes there are a bunch of third party tools. I mean, if you go on App Sumo, every day, there's a new one that somebody's chat bot or whatever, but find one that the UI that you like and a lot of those don't have those limitations. Like they have a separate database that they're looking at with total sort of magic they've created. I don't know, I don't understand it. But anyway, yeah. So folks, a couple of questions stacked up there. If you have a question, add that to the zoom q&a, and we'll dive into it. So first question from Doug. Maddie, how does SEMrush or SEMrush fit into the landscape of content writing tools? What overlaps or complements with phrase? Sure,\r\n\r\nyeah. So I think of something like SEMrush or Ahrefs is being a great all in one. SEO tool. So people use it for more than content although content is like an important facet of them versus something like phrase or query scope is really just about content and just about content optimization, or, you know, in the case of like phrase and market Muse also generating content is the use case. But SEMrush I have I'll be honest, I have more experienced with a traps but they both they're both very similar and we actually use SEMrush like the keyword researchers and strategists on my team, we use SEMrush these days. But it is it is the tool that if we're comparing it to phrase and query scope, that's the tool that we use to define our primary keyword. It's before we run those reports. It's a tool that we use to come up with some secondary keywords. It's the tool that we use to identify feature snippet opportunities, we can do competitor research on it. You can do backlink tracking on it. You can audit your website. So I mean, it just it just serves such a bigger overall SEO use case. But there are many very useful content optimization tools. And so it's kind of like a higher budget tool than any of the ones that I've mentioned, but it will serve you know, many of your SEO purposes even outside of content. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nOkay, questions from Eddie. Eddie is writing tech blogs. I see now my keyword content from Reddit is ranking very good. I doubt Reddit content is helpful since usually people have vague answers to questions. What do you think about that?\r\n\r\nIt's an interesting question and I think I'm gonna take the opposite stance. I do think that Reddit content is helpful. There's something about people being like anonymous on the internet that like makes the truth come out. People feel like a little I guess like Freer with the information that they that they volunteer. And so I mean, you have to take it with a grain of salt because they're anonymous. They also might have an agenda that is not clear versus somebody who's coming out and saying, you know, I work for one of these tools or, you know, these are the clients they serve. And so that's like, why this relates to what I'm talking about. But I will say that sites like Reddit, Reddit and Quora are really interesting for learning more about your audience, learning about the things that like keep them up at night and so that's why they rank so high is because they are a wealth of information. They're not, you know, they're not using like the traditional methods to optimize their sites, but they are benefiting from all this unique user generated content because they've created communities. So, yeah, I mean, I don't I don't know exactly how to answer the question. I guess I'm kind of like answering around it, but I think that Reddit is a useful resource in general. I don't know that it can be counted on like aI right where Yeah, I can be confidently incorrect certainly. So to can, Reddit user is but they bring up some really interesting points that are worth investigating. So as long as if you are using it as a reference that you fact check, or you know, if you're I guess if the question is like, How can I outrank Reddit the the answer is like, I don't know.\r\n\r\nYou just said maybe Reddit pays Google. And honestly, we just did a story about this a week ago in our news roundup. It is actually Google who has purchased the rights to all of read its content. Alright, Gemini. Yeah, that just came out. The story last week was an unnamed AI but it's since come out that it's Google has purchased it right. So who knows? Yeah, Google does. Yeah. Doug says here's my favorite prompt. I add this to help me brainstorm chat. GPT add this to the end of your prep, ask me five questions that will improve the response you'll be giving me I use that too. It's really helpful. I\r\n\r\nlove that I I haven't considered that and that's why I think like discussions like this are so useful. Like, we can all learn so much from each other. I learned something new about this every day. For\r\n\r\nsure. The AI world is moving rapidly. And we were Mata you and I were talking earlier just we did an AI workshop here back in October, and there's so much that's new and better and different, even just in the last few months. It's pretty crazy. All right. That brings us to the end of questions. Tomorrow, we're talking about a UX content UX. So give us one more time an overview of what we're going to talk about tomorrow and we'll start to wrap things up here.\r\n\r\nOh, tomorrow. I was looking at the comments and somebody had mentioned let's say Ben had mentioned that to get them to use the right color and the GPT to be very specific, use hex color code when so I got distracted but um, okay, so tomorrow we're going to focus on the content reader experience. Content UX, another way of thinking about it. So we're going to talk a little bit about things like things that Google has said or page experience signals, so things that are like tangible that you can optimize around within your design to help your ranking on Google. And my philosophy when it comes to SEO is that there's three pillars, there's like the content and the things that you can affect on your own page. There's the website structure, so that's going to be a lot of what we talk about tomorrow. And then there's things like Off Page signals like backlinks, which we won't talk about, but you know, we can always have a discussion later or, you know, I'm sure Nathan will bring on somebody who talks about that at some point, too. So yeah, we'll talk about these like website signals, these page experience signals. We'll talk a little bit about website structure, things that you can do to create a better experience for your users, even if it's not necessarily something that Google takes into consideration for ranking and some things that they do. And then we will talk about auditing, you know, with practical tools and specifics, your contents, the nature of your contents UX. I'll tell you how to like run your own content UX audit, whether that's with tools or with people in person. And so that'll be that'll be kind of the nature of what we talk about tomorrow. Trying to bring that discussion full circle from the specific things that you can use to how to like measure if you're using them effectively, and then we'll end the day with a content UX audit from the things that ideally, y'all have submitted. So if you haven't, please use that form that we've linked to in that slide. Being link, and then I'll pick a couple for us to go over tomorrow.\r\n\r\nYep, very good. And that link is there in the chat. Once again, make sure you submit a URL that was a lot of fun last year when we did that very info wise. Yeah. So I will take care of that. Tomorrow. That's yeah, day two. All right. Maddie, good stuff today. As always, we'll have the recording up if anybody wants to go back and replay if you came in late. It'll be up in about an hour or so soon as it renders. And I will see you back here tomorrow, one o'clock central time for day two of content workshop. Have a good night. See you then.\r\n\r\nHear but as you're coming in, we're just asking what was your biggest takeaway from day one? You can sound off there in the chat. I'm also dropping in the new link bundle, I can type correctly. There is a new slide being linked, so make sure you grab that new one. It is updated on the replay page. But make sure you grab that new link because a few changes have been made since yesterday. That will let you follow along better.\r\n\r\nSome last minute tool suggestions. Ah,\r\n\r\nlove it. Love it all. Right, catch. Working for everybody now. Just about a minute and a half to go and again, we'd love to hear from you in the chat on what your biggest takeaways from day one we're. As we are waiting just another minute or so to get started. Also the link there for the live content UX audit is on the screen because we have a slide or two left if you'd like to submit your site or page or something for a content audit. It'll be a friendly review with with some good help to help you improve some of your language. So use that link. The link is in the link bundle in the chat. There on the screen. We do have a couple of slots if you'd like to participate in that. So Vivian, if you look at the replay link in the link bundle the academy link there is a PDF download link on that on the on the replay page. And that is the new updated slides. Yep, so that's all there ready to go on the replay page or you can view them on slide being right now. Yeah, not too many changes. New tools. All I was new to was fun tools. Yeah. Alright folks, about 30 seconds to go. Glad everybody's back for day two. Again, our check in question. Let us know in the chat. What your biggest takeaway from day one was? Particularly did you have you used any new GPT prompts since we played around with that yesterday, or has anybody taken the dive and made your own custom GPT based on\r\n\r\nor have any ideas for things that you want to try when you have time? Yeah, I could. I could use some more ideas myself. Yeah.\r\n\r\nFor sure. All right, folks. It is three minutes after someone to start our recording and we will get underway. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everybody, wherever you happen to be welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here and joined again by MADI. Azzaman for day two of the content accelerator for 2024 Welcome back. Maddie. Glad you're here.\r\n\r\nThank you so much for having me. Again. It's exciting to dig into some of these topics.\r\n\r\nAbsolutely. So we had a lot of fun yesterday talking about some AI stuff and some great principles for creating great content. And today we're looking more at the the user side of consuming content right what are we going to talk about today? Exactly.\r\n\r\nYeah, I think that you can think of today as being a way to practically test your content, whether that's with other people, whether that's with tools, understanding how it measures up against some of the guidelines that Google has shared, that are necessary for ranking, specifically when they have to do with the user experience. So we're going to kind of attack this from all angles. And, you know, hopefully it'll leave today with some really tangible tools to help you understand like, does your content provide a great reader experience? Or are there things that you could do to improve it?\r\n\r\nYeah, very good. And we do still have this content UX link on the screen. If you have not filled that out and you would like to there's still a slot or two left for the second hour, we'll do some live content review. So grab that now. The link is there in the chat as well. A couple little bits of housekeeping and we'll turn it back over to Matty as usual. Ask your questions using the zoom q&a And we'll take those questions at the end of each hour today. break in the middle as usual. One note is that the slides have been updated since yesterday. So in the chat is the new slide being link. And if you want the PDF download, just go onto the replay page with the link there and the link bundle and you can download the PDF there as well that has all the new updates on the slides. So with that, I'm going to disappear Maddie, let's get started.\r\n\r\nLet's do it. So yeah, if if you want to submit something for this live content UX audit, ideally, it's like a page on your website, not not something like a PDF, because we want to look at how the content interacts with design. And like Nathan said, you know, it's a friendly review. We're not like looking for issues. We're just looking for things that you could do to perhaps improve the content experience. Get another set of eyes on it. And it's just a practical way to apply some of the tools suggestions I'm going to give you so with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. We're going to start today by talking about Google guidelines for what makes up a great user experience, especially when it has to do with content and specifically we're going to talk from the perspective of Google's quality rater guidelines. And then after I go through a couple specifics there, we're going to talk more broadly about Google's page quality signals. I think that's what it's called. I haven't labeled in the next slide but things that have to do with what they've told us influenced ranking high and relevant search, you know, all else equal, if you have great content, what aspects of your website design, you know, must be present of your website structure must be present in order for you to rank high and relevant search. So the first part is a little bit more I would say qualitative. And then the second part is going to be a little bit more quantitative. So the learn more link is for an article I wrote a while back for Search Engine Journal. This was specifically focusing on aspects of Google's quality rater guidelines that have to do with the user experience. And so I think it was a couple of years ago now I read through the entire quality rater guidelines, which if you're interested in SEO, and user experience, I would highly recommend at least giving it a skim. It's kind of hard to do because it's like 175 pages, but there's some really good nuggets in there about how Google looks at search, how they judge quality of content, how they determine if a page of a search result meets the needs of the searcher who's looking for it. And so the quality rater guidelines what's worth mentioning is that to some extent you have to take with a grain of salt because this is not something that directly influences rankings. What happens is human quality raters that they hire read through these guidelines, they're tested on them to make sure that they understand what Google is looking for and then they manually rate different website results based on a certain query. And so what happens is that Google gets that information. It helps them you know, refine their algorithm in terms of the general direction they want to take with it, but it doesn't necessarily result in any manual adjustments for whatever websites they're ranking. It's it's more of like a research process. So that's, that's what the quality rater guidelines are. They're a tool to help Google research what the web looks like right now in order to make decisions about how they want to adjust their algorithm for the rest of us. But all that being said, Whenever Google gives us information, whenever they volunteer details about how they look at search, and how they define quality, and like a great user experience, I think that we would be wise to take note of that if it is in fact our goal to rank in relevant search. And I think at the end of the day, whether it is or not, I think Google tries to maintain a high standard for quality. I think that it's their philosophy, philosophy, that content is king, you know that that good? Content is important. And so again, whether search is your goal or not, it's worth it's worth at least like listening to what they have to say. And so, for your benefit, I've tried to break down some of the most important things from the quality rater guidelines specifically having to do with the topic that we are discussing today. So the first thing that they mentioned or they they talk about the quality rater guidelines has to do with interstitials. So back in, it was either 2017 or 2018. They made an update to their algorithm, and they told us about it is again one of those rare cases where they're just upfront. And they said that like if you're using popups say, for example, to gather somebody's email address, or you know, it maybe you're on an E commerce site to advertise the sale, something that obscures the content that you have to interact with you either put your email in, or you have to click the X button, you know, something like that, that you have to interact with in order to use the content on the page. They call that an intrusive interstitial. And so what happened was it really it really resulted in a big change for how people use conversions, I guess on their website, so you know, bloggers and people who do affiliate marketing and of course, yeah, ecommerce, and businesses trying to get email subscribers all had to fundamentally change the way that they approach gathering email addresses. And I'm going to talk a little bit later about what you can do instead, that doesn't violate Google's guidelines. But again, from Google's perspective, they say that interstitials make it difficult to use the main content of the page. And so when they're talking in the quality rater guidelines, they frequently refer to MC main content, which is like what the searcher is ultimately going to your website for and so you could say generally speaking, that they're trying to defend the experience of the main content. And to like, skip ahead to the point here about ads, when they talk about ads, that Google recognizes that and they say this in the quality rater guidelines, that ads don't automatically equate to low quality, they understand that ads are in many cases, the reason a site can continue existing. But that being said, there is like a right and a wrong way to go about implementing them. And so they say the too many or like large ads hurt the user experience. And then that case, the human quality raters should assign that site that result, a low rating. So again, you want to think in terms of the main content is the ad obscuring it? Is it taking away from it? If not, you're probably okay. But it's just good. To keep in mind that Google's not saying no, you can't have ads. You just have to be thoughtful about it. And when I did some of these UX audits in the past, like the ones that we're going to do later today, I did a couple of for some members of the Denver bloggers club one of the local clubs that I've been involved with here. And one thing I noticed about a lot of them was you know that they'd have an ad in the sidebar, they'd have an ad in their footer. They'd have an ad a couple times throughout their blog content, and it was probably Google Adsense that they were using, or some other ad network. Like it. And again, it's like I understand that you're monetizing your site using ADS. But at the end of the day, it's probably working against you because people if you were to look, you know into the data like the scroll depth and the time on page and things like that, using Google Analytics, for example. You probably see that on those pages that are very heavy with ads that people abandon the page pretty quickly because it's just a bad reader experience. So to go back a point here, clickbait Google has a couple of pieces of guidance in the quality rater guidelines about that specifically.\r\n\r\nGenerally speaking, a good page sets expectations or good title sets expectations for wherever it's leaving you. And so clickbait is something that it can certainly be effective and getting attention and getting clicks, but it can be a very unsatisfying experience if it doesn't do something to deliver on the promise made in the title. Um, the Google specifically says that clickbait headings detract from high main content. So, you know, that's something that they're specifically looking for and guiding people to, to comment on. And they say also that like every page should have a page title. It shouldn't just be presented without buttoning it up that way. And that title should describe page content. So again, it's a balance. Writing a good title, I think is very much in art. But it shouldn't be misleading. That's that's the key here. Um, so the last point here is that when it comes to creating content, you want the answer to your query to be pretty prominent in the results. You don't want people to click through and then have to dig to find that. And Google has a couple of different SERP features, I would say where they're trying to, you know, first of all, answer this within search so that you don't click through, which is a problem for us content creators, but it's also perhaps an opportunity when we think about things like a Featured Snippet, which is just that sort of box that shows up above any other search results and it's usually summarizing kind of like the nature of what that person is looking for what Google thinks that person is looking for. There's other things like Google will index parts of a page and link to that specific part and highlight it you probably noticed that yourself when doing search and looking for something very specific. And so that's something that they do, it's not, to my knowledge, it's not something that you can necessarily optimize for. It's it's their methodologies of indexing and surfacing content. But the example that they gave in the quality rater guidelines was something about like somebody searching Abraham Lincoln's birthday. And when somebody clicked through like it was present on the page, but it wasn't prominently answered. And so in that case, they were instructing the human quality rater to give that like a not as good rating for meeting the needs of the searcher. So yeah, I mean, definitely, that's, that's kind of most of what I'm going to say about the quality rater guidelines. But I really think it is a very interesting document and especially if you look at the examples they give in terms of how they're making those determinations. There's a lot of little nuggets of truth and we also have a blog post on the blacksmith website that digs into this even outside of like the user experience sort of and like design focus. So if you want another take on that then definitely check that out. We just went in and updated it recently. So let's talk more broadly now about some search signals from Google things that Google has told us about the page experience and you know, importantly, I think how to how to like measure that, quantitatively. Google, we talked a little bit about helpful content yesterday and that algorithm update which was the year a year and a half ago, something like that. Google has been has said that a good page experience is a requirement. For creating what they define as helpful content. So you know, all these algorithm updates are designed to support Google's mission, you know, the way that they look at content quality and things like that, of course, they all you know, more or less feed into each other, but I think it's worth mentioning that like that is an aspect of having helpful content. Alright, so we're gonna start with what is collectively known as the core web vitals so the core web vitals, this algorithm update, or Google announcing this page signal? came about? I want to say it was 2021. So they've been around for a while. And interestingly, and what we'll go over is they have changed slightly since coming out. But the idea here was to give people these these three specifically, page signals, were to give people more tangibility around how to measure the the page experience. Because up until that point, it was a little bit innocuous, it was hard to conceptualize, in terms of knowing like where you actually rank according to Google's own way of looking at it. So the first page signal of the quarter web vitals is the largest Contentful paint, which is a facet of page loading, loading speed. And so their definition is that it reports the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport relative to when the page first started loading. So if we think about I think most of these core web vitals are more or less referring to like above the fold, like what you see before you scroll, it's like that first impression that a person has with your website and most designs, most tools that you use to optimize loading and things like that, typically are set up so that the rest of the page loads later but you want you know what's visible initially to load quickly and first so that people can start interacting with it, and then it gives time for the rest of the page to load. So another way of thinking about this is that this signal takes note of the largest element on every web page and measures its total loading. Time. So maybe this is an image, maybe it's video, you know, typically at some, I would say some sort of media thing, but it could be your theme in general, it could be a very slow loading plugin. So these are all things that you'd want to keep in mind in terms of optimizing this particular factor. And when I say I guess, like the theme and plugins, it's like the output of them that you would implement on your page. So okay, so how do you get a good largest Contentful paint so according to Google, whatever this largest element is, is about 2.5 Seconds or Less of loading time and you have a little bit of wiggle room here, before it gets to, you know, this like poor area, but you'll notice that it's not a super long time. And I think that this particular man measurement here, it relates to something that Google's said before and shared in their own documentation, which is that, you know, the majority of people bounce if a website doesn't load within three seconds or less. I'm sure that that guidance has changed over time because that's a dated stat. But it still goes to show that we're kind of like within that guideline, with this particular measurement of a particular element on a page. So the next one is first input delay, and this is actually what it was. This has since been updated. And I'm going to show you an example of what this looks like. But let's let's talk about like the original intent of it and then what it has become. So first input delay is a measure of interactivity. It measures the time from when a user first interacts with the page to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction. So that sounds like gibberish. Basically, the lower a website's fid score, the more promptly it starts processing users clicks and swipes again, interactivity like how long does it take for somebody to actually be able to use a page? So this measurement per Google, a good fit is 100 milliseconds or less. So that's what it was right? But what is it now? So this GIF kind of shows an example of poor responsiveness versus good responsive responsiveness from Google's perspective, but probably from all of us, as users as well and looking at it you you probably have been in this position before where like, you click on something and then there's this little bit of a delay before you are actually able to interact with it. And so Google essentially took took this concept that they had initially defined as a core web vital and added some color to it, I guess. And so the new measurement is that it's, it's below or at 200 milliseconds. That so up from I think, what was it 100 before so they're giving you a I guess a little bit more time to create interactivity here. And just so you know, this new measurement is actually not fully unveiled yet, but it will be as of March. 12th. That's when this takes effect and takes over. So they say that, you know, some interactions will actually take longer than others. But when it comes to especially complex interactions, you want to be able to quickly present some initial initial visual feedback so that the user knows that something is happening\r\n\r\nthe time until the next payment is the earliest opportunity to do this. So the intent is not to measure like every eventual effect of the interaction, but the time in which the next interaction is being blocked. So you essentially want to delay you want to if you are delaying some visual feedback, then you might be giving users the impression that the page isn't responding to their actions, which is ultimately a bad user experience, right. So the goal of this new measurement is to ensure the time from when a user initiates an interaction until the next frame is painted in the shortest time as possible, for all or at least most of the interactions the user make. So it might seem like a small distinction between the first input delay and the interaction to Next paint but I guess if we were to summarize them, the first input delay is really focusing on that initial interaction. And the interaction to Next paint is focusing on the difference between interactions. I think that's one way to look at it. Okay, so then the last core web vital is related to visual stability. And it's called cumulative layout shift. And so their definition Google Developers definition is that it measures the sum total of all individual layout shifts scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan. of the page. Okay, but what does that mean? So Visual stability means that a web page remain stable throughout the users visit. It means that text isn't suddenly moving as new elements load or shifting other elements of the page and I think the the unfortunate end result of when this is bad, is when it makes the user click a link or perhaps a buy button or something like that, unintentionally, they were trying to click something but because of something shifting after it loaded, it pushed them somewhere else. And again, this is probably something where either something comes to mind where that's happened to you or like, the next time it does, then you'll be like, oh, yeah, that was the cumulatively out shift the site is getting, it probably has a pretty bad score for that. Um, so with the core web vitals, visual stability became more of a priority. And you really have to have very minimal minimal instability in order for your pages to be considered for ranking high in a relevant search engine results page. So those are the core lead vitals, that's probably the newest addition to these page signals that relate to the content experience, but we're also going to go over some of the old like, you know, tried and true important things that have to do with page experience, such as mobile friendliness. I mean, this is something this is probably one of the first big things that Google told us was important for ranking, high and relevant search. Besides maybe page load, I think Page Speed like performance and mobile friendliness, like these are things that kind of happened around the same time in terms of a Google like, came out and said, like, you must prioritize these if you want to rank. So Google used to be a desktop first indexing property. But you know, as more and more people started using their mobile devices, you know, the iPhone came out and so now suddenly, everybody had a computer in their hand. And then another thing that's probably worth considering too, is like a lot of people in developing countries like they might not have a desktop or like a laptop computer, but most people have a mobile phone at this point. And so Google now operates off of the idea, or off of the principle, I guess, of mobile first indexing. So if your website is not optimized properly for mobile responsiveness for mobile devices, then that is going to hurt it's going to greatly hurt your ability to rank and relevant search and your desktop site could look perfect. It can rank perfectly in terms of all these other factors that Google tells us about. But if your mobile site is off, it's it's going to affect your desktop rankings as well. So, you know, going into all of the specifics of what's mobile friendly is kind of outside the scope of what we're going to talk about today. But I mean, it's things like making sure that your text is readable. It's making sure that your images are, you know, visible and processable that they don't get skewed strangely. It's you know, thinking about some of those core web vitals and like how elements interact with each other like our buttons too close together so that people are hitting the wrong thing. So all these things are are considerations for making your website mobile friendly. And I think you know, with the way that things like page builders, builders for WordPress work, the way that people design themes for WordPress. This is this is like very much top of mind for everyone who's designing for WordPress. So it's a lot easier to implement now versus perhaps when this update was first released into the world. So Safe Browsing is something that I they've actually taken out of what they call these like page experience factors, like I don't know if it's an official one anymore, it was in the past. And maybe it's because now we have HTTPS as an additional factor that's kind of related but I think it's still worth mentioning this from a content experience factor. So Safe Browsing is just that you can use a website that is free of malware, you know, that you can be like, reasonably sure that like malware isn't present, you're not going to get it you're not going to interact with it, and that it's not you know, affecting the output of whatever site it could be installed on. And so in order to protect yourself against this, there's different tools you could use. wordfence is a customer of mine, so I'm going to talk about them and I think that their tool and their team is great. They have a lot of cool security researchers and cybersecurity experts on their team. So they're very on top of like any new things that come out, but they have this product called wordfence care where they'll go in they'll identify them all where they'll clean it up for you and we'll share best practices for how to avoid it in the future and you know, additional steps that you can take. So I do think that you need some sort of tool on your website in order to prevent, you know, the worst effects of malware. And I guess the other thing that I would mention too, is to like always have backups of your site, because malware can really mess things up. And so that's that's like your first line of defense. So HTTPS also has to do, I guess, essentially the same idea of like Safe Browsing, maybe from a slightly different perspective. And so Google again said, you know, we're not going to rank websites that do not have HTTPS in place compared to those that do. You know, after that update happened, and that was a slightly more recent update, but it was still a few years ago, and so HTTPS in order to implement that, essentially, you just install an SSL certificate. And to be fair, there are different types of SSL certificates. Most web hosts have that functionality, where you can fairly easily implement one and then it creates either automatically or there might be some manual steps. You have to take where it it redirects your existing HTTP URLs to the HTTPS version. So that's important to make sure that that's working. Otherwise, it's going to break your site but again, most web hosts have a fairly straightforward process for implementing this and a free ssl certificate or I should say an included one with your hosting plan, but depending on your needs, you might need a different one. So that's something that you have to explore based on your industry like, like E commerce might have a higher level of SSL certificate needed, but for you know, the general small business owner designer, things like that, probably what your web host has is good enough. And so to be able to see if HTTPS is working within Chrome specifically and I'm sure many other web browsers but but chrome because it's a product of Google. There's a little button next to your domain name in the URL bar, and you can click it and see that the SSL certificate is working and that the connection is secure and I would say that SSL certificates in HTTPS are important for people who are interacting with the website. I mean, you kind of you kind of have to have it no matter what in order to rank but they're the purpose of it is that if somebody were to be giving their sensitive information, you know if they're on an E commerce site, and they're, you know, putting in their address or their credit card number or you know, a banking website and people are logging in, and you know, once they log in, that user has access to their bank accounts and their money and things like that. That's kind of the like, ideal use case of HTTPS is to protect the people who are entering that sensitive information to make them feel safe on your website.\r\n\r\nWe talked about this earlier, having no intrusive interstitials so these are the pop ups the image you see is something that Google shared when they announced this ranking signal to show what not to do, essentially where these ads are obscuring access to the main content. You shouldn't have to click in order to get to the main content. So what do you do instead? Here are a couple of examples from the blacksmith website. So the first one is we have a floating bar that basically is at the top of the content and then just pushes it down. And in this case, I used it to add like reminder about my book, a button to click to buy it you could use it to get email signups. I think another great example is like E commerce. If you're having a sale or if you want to say, you know, free shipping on orders over $50 or something like that. I think that's a really excellent use of a floating bar. It's like what's the most important thing happening for this business right now or use it to collect email signups? Then there's also next to it is a welcome mat, which is designed you know, very similar lead to how an email popup would look but the difference is that it's like embedded on the page. So it's not getting in the way of the content. It's part of the content. You can choose whether or not you interact with it beyond scrolling. Another version of that is a content upgrade. So on certain blog posts, let's say that you have additional resources, maybe you've turned that blog post into a checklist or there's a certain template that you're talking about in the blog posts, and people you want to incentivize people to share their email in order to access it. So having a content upgrade, which again is like an embedded version, at the end of your blog post about that specific resource is a totally valid way to see get emails that's not going to violate this intrusive interstitial guidance from Google. The other thing that you can think about is using email popups, but delaying when they pop up. So that kind of gets around Google's guidance. You could use what's called like exit intent technology. So when somebody scrolls for the Back button, or the, you know, X in the browser, then what happens is an email popup gets deployed where you know, it asks for somebody if they want to subscribe, for example. You can also use that same idea based on things like scroll depth, if somebody gets to a certain depth on a page, you know, that tends to indicate interest. It's given them a chance to interact with the content. Or you could have a deploy on certain pages. You ideally after they've seen other pages, so maybe after they've gone to a certain number of pages that deploys. So there's there's a couple of different ways to think about it that don't get in the way of Google's guidance. And we do have a page I forgot to link it here. But we do have a blog post on the blacksmith website that goes into each of these things and different use cases and things like that a little bit dated, but it's all the same advice. Okay, so now that we've talked about Google's quality raters guidelines, which is indirectly related to search rankings, and Google's page experience signals, which are directly related to search rankings, I wanted to talk a little bit about website structure and design I would say, especially as it relates to ranking high in relevant search, but certainly how it impacts the content user experience. So it's kind of like a mix of the things that we're talking about, but expanding on them as well. So the first like factor that you want to optimize your website around your content in general, is crawlability. And when I talked about crawlability, I'm talking about Google's ability to like fully index all the resources on your site. Is there anything that is getting in the way of Google doing that, like, for example, errors in your sitemap, like maybe you're unintentionally excluding certain pages? Maybe you know, you haven't created enough connections between your pages for Google to understand how they relate to each other. And so a couple of guidelines here, you know, first of all, is that when you're creating content, it's important to add external links. Think of these as your ability to add context to prove claims these are things that you know, you can also use let's say that you're writing about a topic and there's a related topic and it doesn't really make sense for you to cover it in your content. Like maybe it would just make your your piece go on too long. But it's something that people might want to learn more about. So you find a relevant resource from a trusted site and you link it External links are great. I mean, you might, I guess, worry. Like, is that going to lead people away from my page? You know, is there any like negative impact of that? I think that's just kind of the way that content works, that people are always looking for more information. You can set it so that it opens in a new window so that they're still on your page while they explore that content. But yeah, as the best practice, have an external linking policy, it makes sure it's to good quality content and I think that, like with this next point, it helps Google understand what your content is about. So besides external resources, you also want to incorporate internal links. This just helps Google understand the relationships between the different pieces of content on your website, ultimately, what your website is about. It's helping with that crawl ability and that index ability. It's helping Google as robot to understand, you know, these different connections. So again, it's important really to have these two types of links and really every page and relate certainly every piece of content. And then, the flip side of all this is like as you create content, things are going to change. External links might become broken. Internal links, you might change, you know, like for example, the URL slug of them, and they might become broken. So I guess my first tip is to make sure that you have some sort of redirect solution implemented, there are different plugins that you can use to automatically if you change the URL slug of something, then it creates a redirect so anything that already links to a will be updated to that new link. But it's also having a process for like auditing your content to look for these problems. And one of the tools that I'm going to show you later today will help make that a little bit easier. But it's also just a matter of like I don't know, quarterly at least, or depending on the size of your website, quarterly, maybe every six months or so, having just a process to kind of go through what exists and if you need to fix anything. So we're talking a little bit about URL structure and I will say when it comes to creating content, you want to be pretty sure of the URL you want to use before you publish it. Because it is a factor in ranking, and you can use redirects, but it's kind of hard to explain them in the context of what we're talking about today without getting deep into SEO, but it's just generally like to trust me that it's a best practice to not mess with the URL after you publish, you know, after it gained some traction in search and things like that. But it happens and that's why you use redirects. But that being said, you could at least start with best practices. So the first thing is to incorporate your target keywords in that slug. So like yesterday, I showed you some tools we use for an article we wrote about AI detectors, so let's just pretend the keyword is like aI detector tools. You'd want that to be the slug. Without really like any extra information. You want to keep your URLs as succinct as possible so that Google doesn't have to take a lot of extra time to parse them. And so what that means is within within WordPress, you can customize your URL structure for blogging. And you can do things like add categories to the URL, you can add the date to the URL. My suggestion is to not do that the only reason that you might want to add like a subdirectory within your blog content or some other specific category, like if you have case studies or something like that, is because you can use that subdirectory to group pieces of content together to measure them in like Google Analytics GA for these days. But that's kind of an advanced use case and that's only if you plan on actually like doing a deep dive into the analytics. From an SEO perspective, I highly recommend against it. It should be your website url.com forward slash keyword. And when you're implementing those keywords, you're going to want to add a dash between each word so if the keywords AI detector tools, it's a i dash detector dash tools\r\n\r\nfor certain things like articles, a and words like the things that aren't, you know, specific keywords generally speaking, you can drop those when you're creating the slug. We have some guidelines on the style guide that I shared with you yesterday on the bugs with website that's also linked in the slides so or the PDF as well. So if you if you want to dive into more SEO and URL and keyword best practices and definitely check out our guidance on that. Um, duplicate content is worth mentioning from this perspective of the user experience mostly in terms of how Google would interpret that. So generally speaking, duplicate content is like you publish a blog on your website and then a situation that could come up that seems innocuous enough is that you know, somebody in your industry says oh my god, I loved your blog posts on whatever, I'd love to republish it on my site. And you say okay, and then maybe this site, you know, has more authority than you and maybe they have a better approach to SEO, maybe they've just been around longer. And what could end up happening is that even though you were the original publisher, and Google does take that into consideration, but this other site may outrank you with your own same content. So that's duplicate content. It could be a whole blog post, it can be an excerpt of it, it could be like a piece of it. So duplicate content, generally speaking, like try to avoid that. You can add a tag to your link called the canonical tag, which basically points back to the original content and says, This is the person this is the site that originally published it, even though we have now published it here. And so Google takes that into consideration, but they really make their own choices about who they're going to rank and so that that's not the be all end all way of making sure that the original publisher ranks highest in search, all else equal. Um, with all that being said, in my experience, you can typically republish things like your blog content on mediums like LinkedIn and medium you know, original copy without making changes. As long as you wait, I would say at least a week from the original published date to do that. This is this is my experience and that saying that it's completely scientific, the advice that I'm giving you, it's something that you should experiment with, if that's something that you're interested in, but also take note of what ends up happening and discontinue if it's getting in the way of ranking your own content on your own website. But when it comes to duplicate content, if you if you get approached by someone, you know, like the example that I gave, who wants to republish something that you wrote, what would be a better situation for you? It would be more work, but it's to say like, let me write a new version of this article, like maybe you take another stance on it, maybe you you just kind of like repurpose it in a different way. I would highly recommend against duplicating your content, either on another page on your website, such as using product descriptions that like a manufacturer provided or maybe you have, you know, two variations of something and so you're using almost the same product description or again, like the example that I gave doing it on another site, so I just wanted to add a cautionary tale for duplicate content because a it is kind of a bad user experience, but be it'll also more than likely hurt you in search without a very strategic approach. And then the last thing I want to say on this particular topic is about designing website navigation and best practices around that. So first of all, you want to use descriptive and recognizable menu item titles. And the example that I always give for this is the difference between something that's called news and something that's called blog. So in my in my experience, news is like an enterprise business that has a media arm and they're publishing their press releases and, you know, things that are relevant to their company, new product updates, things like that. Whereas blog is more articles. It's you know, the how tos. It's the list of coals. Its product lead content, for example, but it's not exclusively focused on that company's news. So it's important, I think, to match the heuristics of what your users are used to and one way that you might be able to figure this out if you're unsure is just kind of see like what the competition is doing and how they're naming their menu items. Or just ask some of your users like, Does this make sense? And we'll talk next about how to conduct a UX audit and that's something that you could do as part of it. There's this thing called the three click rule, which you may have heard about. Nielsen Norman Group actually debunked this as being like ideal or even something that you should totally consider. It's the number three is arbitrary, I guess is what I'm trying to say. But it's the idea that within three clicks, a user searching or user looking for something will find it through your website navigation without necessarily having to go to like an internal search. So well, it's arbitrary. I think it's still a good thing to keep in mind, which is just that people should be able to easily and quickly find what they need your your menu should support that. And then creating category grouping. So like for example, on our website, we have a Resources tab and it has the blog, it has some of like my YouTube content. It has our style guide. All of these are resources they have to do with like things that we're sharing with other people versus we have another tab that's about our work. And so it has case studies and like portfolio examples, and it's more focused on like Final outputs that you know, fit, you know, things that we do with certain clients. So just a couple of things to think about in terms of website navigation. I'm going to start this topic and then we'll break I think maybe in like five minutes from now, but I'll just go ahead and get this started. So let's talk a little bit now that you've learned about these different factors for how to understand user experience from, from the user's point of view from Google's point of view. Let's talk about how you can continue to make your own websites user experience better by implementing a UX audit. So UX audit, we might also call it a user tests. I think they're maybe slightly different concepts, but I'm going to use them interchangeably today. So usability testing involves observing how users interact with products like your websites. The purpose is to get a better understanding of how real people use what you've designed. And really the idea here is you want to combat any assumptions that you've made incorrectly, which is impossible for you to figure out by yourself. That's why we pull in other people. You can use your tests during just about any stage of project it doesn't have to be like the final part. It could really be during the wireframing stage. It could be you know at the midpoint it could be even after you've launched but you've added some new things. So why bother with UX audits? First of all, we're talking about it today because there's a strong relationship between the user experience and SEO. I think we've proven that by talking about specific elements of the quality rater guidelines that point to UX, as well as the page experience factors that Google's specifically told us. If you care about SEO, you should care about UX in terms of things like your page, loading your mobile responsiveness, and using things like HTTPS. To invoke privacy for your users information. It also allows you to uncover issues that might kill conversions. I mean, I think this is one of the most important use cases of a UX audit is to look for things that are getting in the way of whatever your end goal is with the website. Because we're all WordPress users here, probably most of us at least, you've probably interacted with whether it's your own design or somebody else's that where you recognize that somebody forgot to edit the demo content they've, you know, implemented it and they've gone in and made their changes. But you know, there's that hello world post they forgot to delete or there's something you know, and one of the menus, maybe the footer menu that they forgot to take out that, you know, they never actually customized and so I think UX audit would be good at surfacing that if you're if you're kind of blind to it, because you're too close to the project. And with all that being said, a UX audit helps to get out of your own head. We're all human, we're imperfect.\r\n\r\nAnd really, I mean, it's it's easy to say I think when it comes to writing content, like as much as like, I have a process for editing and looking for mistakes and things like that. Like I still use an editor whenever I write anything, because I need to get out of my own head in order to make sure that I'm not missing something important. So the same can certainly be said about about website design and doing UX audits. So at the end of the day, we all operate based on certain assumptions, but what if yours are wrong? I'll just go through another slide or two and then we'll break so in terms of picking user testers, there's a couple of different populations you could consider. And I'm also going to share a couple of different like marketplaces where you could find these people, but you can start with the people that already exist in your circle your colleagues, you know, the people that you work with, but also maybe your friends and your family members. Wow, this is a great place to start. Don't discount the impact of their own bias and desire to please you, especially if you're asking your mom for input she's probably not going to be super critical. And and you know, it's going to be more of a pat on the back then something useful. And even like people like your work colleagues, they they still may be too close to a project to provide useful feedback, but it's a good place to start. You can also recruit volunteers from your own audience. Again, they might have a bias if they really love you. They might be hesitant to give you really great feedback. But they're also probably very willing to help you make something that's better. So you can start with like your brand ambassadors, anybody who would consider themselves your biggest fans, things like that. Ultimately, though, your best bet is going to be unbiased third parties who don't know you, you know, who don't have like a stake in what you're doing. I would say ideally, if you could get a couple people from that pool and then maybe one or two people from these other pools of populations, you'll get a couple of different perspectives. And when it comes to some of the marketplaces that I'm going to show you, you can also filter by certain demographics, you know, age, gender, level of education, like whatever is important to like the target audience that you want feedback from, generally speaking, you can filter and on those people. Maybe we'll just go to the top of the hour, and then we'll and then we'll definitely break then. So how many user testers are enough for each design stage? I've mentioned a couple different populations you could pick from. This is another Nielsen Norman Group reference. They are a really great resource when it comes to anything user experience user testing and things like that. And so Jacob Nielsen wrote this column and he the column was titled Why you only need to test with five users. So that's his official recommendation is for each stage that you test five users is going to be more or less enough you're going to get marginal returns marginal new information after that point. So you know, unless you're getting wildly different things from those five user testers, you can probably stop it there. He also says that it's best to involve a larger quantity of user testers earlier on in the project if you're going to test during like the wireframing stage. Versus like, when a website's like basically ready to launch it's going to be harder to make noticeable and useful changes at that point. It's going to be kind of locked in. So I think that that makes sense. Um, so we'll just start with some of the questions that you might use. When designing usability testing, it is important to to be thoughtful about this before you start you you don't want to just like go into a blind and just, you know, like, what do you think of this website? You want to have a strategic approach if you want to get useful information? So my suggestion is to start start by defining whatever your goals are, I mean, is there something in particular that you're looking to test? Are you wanting to make sure that this design is understandable to your target demographic? Is there something that isn't currently working with the design, something that's maybe hurting conversions? So whatever your goal is, like set that intention, and the questions will come more easily after that? You want to also be asking questions about the tester and how they interact with the Internet. And there's a couple of reasons for this. So one example is like you could ask the person what kind of smartphone do you use and asking this particular question is good because it kind of gauges like their familiarity with technology like how they're going to interact with your design. Somebody who uses a flip phone, for example, is probably going to have a much different level of internet savviness and how they interact with the design versus somebody who has like the latest gadget as their device. The other benefit of this question is to especially if you're doing an in person test is to kind of relax them. It's kind of like a little bit of small talk almost so that they can ease into the test, especially if that's not something that they often do. You want to define a specific action for the user to take. So this goes back to the goals. Let's say that, you know, you have an E commerce site that you're testing and you know, there's some sort of issue with people abandoning the cart, you know, after they add some products and so maybe you want to have that person go through the action of adding something, and then starting checkout. And seeing like, where in the process, there's friction, that could be one action that you want them to take. And so at this point, you want to ask them how they go about it, have them sort of like narrate and explain as they go through each step. The more you can dig into each specific action that the user takes the more detailed insight that you'll get as to how they're actually using your website. So I think with that being said, we have a couple more questions that we could talk about, but I think now is probably a good time to let everybody take a little bit of a break. And then after that, we'll finish this discussion of how to run a UX audit. I'm going to give you a bunch of tools to use to do your own tests. yourself, essentially. And then we'll finish off with that live content UX audit. Sounds\r\n\r\nlike a good idea. No questions in the q&a right now. So let's just go and take that break. It's two o'clock. About a five minute break. Is that good? Maddie? That sounds good. All right. So let's back be back at 205 and we're quiet until then. See ya. Then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We're back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, folks, we are back and ready to begin. Let me get the recording started here. All right, folks, we're back for the final hour. Of the website content accelerator. We got a lot to talk about in the next hour, so I'm just gonna let you get right to it. Maddie. Sounds\r\n\r\ngreat. Yeah. Thanks for sticking with me so far. Excited to finish this off strong and yeah, hopefully give you some really tangible things that you can take away. For your own processes. So I'm continuing this discussion that we started about UX audits and designing them. Okay, so we talked about this. Let's go to the next point. What so I used to offer UX audits as a service when I used to be on Fiverr. It was my most popular gig by far. And the way that I structured it was I basically priced by the page. And so when you're doing a UX audit, you want to be sure to identify whichever pages are the most important, especially if you have a big site like you don't necessarily want. Just going back to the E commerce example like you don't necessarily want to audit like every single product page, especially if you're looking for trends, maybe one you know prime example of what your product pages look like maybe one category page, your homepage, your checkout flow, like if somebody had me audit an E commerce site that that tended to be kind of what it looks like. You know, it's also things like maybe more generally, your homepage, your about page service page. So it really depends on what you're trying to do. But you could ask questions in your UX audit, like, you know, what do you think this is about the page in general, or about a specific element of it? You could ask What strikes you about it, you know, you're trying to see how people are reacting to it, how they're understanding it, and then like, what would you click on first, like what, what is something that looks interactable? And how would you, you know, accomplish whatever the specific goal is. So those are ways that you could you know, further define this question. Or this idea here. And then we kind of talked about this, what do you make of specific elements? So again, if we're talking about ecommerce, maybe you have a button that's like a quick add to checkout where you don't have to go, you know, to the individual page, it just kind of pops up when you're looking at a specific category or on the homepage or something like that. And so you might want to test like, do people actually understand what the purpose of this is? So that's just one example. You know, many others that might factor into your own purposes and needs. So when it comes to designing these questions, a couple of best practices to keep in mind you know, first of all, users are generally not going to be designers. I don't think you I don't think you perhaps want them to be because you want them to look at it from a different perspective than you and so with that in mind, you want to avoid any sort of like web development or industry specific jargon in the way that you ask questions. You want to design for the average internet user, they should be able to understand what you're asking without you having to explain and clarify. I think another useful thing in general and this is this is when you ask for feedback about anything, but it's breaking up a complicated question into simpler ones. It's, it's okay, you know, to to ask a question and to ask a follow up question and to dig deeper. And that's something that we talked about yesterday when we talked about chat GBT and and getting that ideal answer that you want to get from it. Sometimes you kind of have to break the subject down and sometimes you have to add clarification later. So then, I've said this in a way but be as specific as possible when you're asking questions, you know, reference specific elements. Bring it back to the goal, if necessary. That's how you're going to get the most useful responses. So going back to that fiverr gig I was talking about, these were the questions that I asked and every order and sometimes they would ask clarifying questions after the fact. But most of the time, if I wasn't because it's fiber, and I'm sending them either some sort of like written report, or typically it would be like a video recording of me going through and doing the audit and if you work with a platform like Fiverr, or some of the other things that I'm going to mention shortly. I think it's the next slide actually. Typically, people are recording themselves interacting with your website unless you're doing an in person test, which is a different situation. But so you have to have some sort of standardized approach in that case, especially if you're offering this as a service like I did. But most of the time these questions got to the bottom of what that person was hoping to get out of the audit. And so generally speaking, I asked for the URLs for any pages they wanted me to take into account. I also told them you know, if you want me to take a quick look before starting the order to see if this is a good fit for me, you can do that. Are there any major problems that you want me to keep in mind throughout the process? So is there anything that you're noticing isn't working that you want? Me to focus on like a conversion factor? Can you briefly describe your target customer so that I could keep their perspective and focus? This is a really important one. I'm not going to fit in and perhaps you know, every user tester that you're going to work with is not necessarily going to fit that ideal target persona that represents your audience or the audience of the client that you're doing this on behalf of. But that doesn't mean that you can't adopt that persona. And again, a lot of these platforms will let you pick a user tester based on demographics. So that's probably like the best case scenario. But I think, again, you can still benefit from a plethora of different experiences. So anyway, you know, like I'm, I'm thinking of like a time where I did a user test and the target audience was, you know, generations older than me or something like that, where they're interacting with the web and they might have some access issues, you know, they might it might be harder for them to read the text if it's not big enough. Things like you know, contrast come into play between the words in the background. And so things like that, maybe it doesn't personally affect me right now. But I can still comment on that and say, you know, you told me that this was your target audience. To me like this strikes me as something that would be very difficult for them to interact with. And then the last question I asked is What important goals are you hoping that this page or these pages will achieve? So that kind of goes back to like the problem question, but I guess maybe from a more positive standpoint, and especially, you know, people use your tests at different stages, so they might not know what the problems are, but they certainly know or ideally, they have an idea of what they want that page to achieve. So these questions like very much covered what I needed to know in order to give people a satisfying UX audit after they put in their order. Okay, so how to run usability tests a couple of different ways that you could do this. A very wide range of methodologies and honestly a wide range of end results I would say, in person is like the gold standard because you're going to have the most control over the process. You're going to be able to meet with people, you're going to be able to dig in deeper to any like initial questions that you set. It's a little bit harder to do with something like Fiverr or user testing. Because there may be limitations I think with like user testing, it's kind of like you set it up ahead of time. And then you know, the user testers go through it, but you don't necessarily get to get to interface with them after the fact. And then with fiber, maybe you could do that it would probably involve making a new order. It's going to take time to get that feedback. It's not going to be as dynamic as doing it in person.\r\n\r\nIn person, it's probably going to be the most expensive in terms of like your team's time and like setting up a place for them to do this. And, you know, having some sort of incentive whether that's straight up cash or like a gift card or something like that for people's time. Another I think great option is user testing. And I was pretty sure that this platform had had changed or been sunsetted or something but I was looking at it leading up to doing this presentation and it still exists. It might exist in like a different format than it did initially did. Like I think you have to buy like a package. It's not just like one by one, for example. So I'm not super up to date on how it works now more more as to how it's worked in the past. But basically, the way that it has worked is that you specify certain tasks you want users to complete and specific questions for them to answer. And so users narrowed the process they go through until that test is complete. They have or at least had had a very large user base. So it was a great platform for giving like that exact demographic that you wanted to test. But fiber is very similar. I mean, fiber doesn't focus on user testing. To the extent that user testing does a fiber marketplace covers a wide range of services, but their usability like UX test marketplace is very large, you know, in comparison to some of their other focuses. So definitely a great place to find user testers. People start offering their services at $5. But they don't have to, that's an old fiber rule of thumb that it had to be five now people can set whatever price they want. They just have to set up their gigs in a way that makes them competitive. The way that I did it was I used to charge by the page. And then if they wanted, like a written report, that would be an extra cost in addition to the video. So it just depends on how people set up their gigs. But there's some level of standardization because people go to that market and that marketplace and they want to be able to pick you know, five people that offer something that take a look at side by side. Um, you could also do something that's not exactly going to give you all the information but it's an interesting practice, which is like recording users sessions on your website. So Microsoft has this newer tool called Clarity and it's free. And so you basically add like a little bit of JavaScript to your header. And you can see people interacting with your website, and you can see you know, how their mouse moves and how they scroll and things like that and like what they click on. Of course, unlike the user test, nobody's narrating it, there's no audio. It's literally just kind of like outside of context, how they interact with your website. So it's going to give you marginally useful information, but it's just another thing that you can use to try to troubleshoot. You know, why something isn't working, for example. And then this isn't like fully, like a way to run usability tests, but it's a like a tool that you can use or that perhaps somebody that you work with might use, which is to take screenshots and share commentary about what they're looking at. And I'm going to show you an example here. Oh, and besides clarity, when it comes to recording user sessions, you can also use a tool called Hot jar to do that as well. Okay, so this is an example and it's a little bit dated, but this is from bug herd. So bug heard is like a website feedback tool. That's another way to, to look at like what we're looking at right here. And this is something as a designer that you could use with clients. Some websites do this publicly where they have like a little thing on the side of the website that's like, Hey, do you have any feedback about this page? Or do you want to report a bug? That's, that's kind of why this exists, but I used to use it for my UX audits. I would just go through each page and then create like annotated screenshots and then I could explain export, the report that has all the pages and all my notes and things like that. So it's just a cool tool, whether you're kind of auditing your own site, you're auditing a client site, or somebody's doing it for you. So okay, from the flip side, we've talked about how to run a user test, but how can you be a good user test or maybe how can you identify one that you want to work with time and time again? First of all, it's narrating your thoughts as you have them. We've talked about this because that like stream of consciousness just, you know, noticing things and whether you really have something to say about it or not just like addressing each element on a page. And so that's kind of the next point here is is, you know, not just addressing them, but considering the impact that each page element might have. It's certainly acknowledging the perspective of your audience we talked about even if you're not a member of that target audience, how can you sort of take on that persona in order to speak on their behalf? Another thing that I used to do when I did these UX audits was share ideas for a B testing. Like I might say, you know, this is an interesting approach to your head and I wonder if you were to try this if it would, you know, get you better results and so it's it's giving them ideas, even if it's not a fully fleshed out thing, but to say like, this might not be it, but maybe you could try this. And then it's also it's not just about being like negative or pointing out what's wrong, but also acknowledging what does seem to be working. So that again, you can really like laser in and the feedback that's going to have the most impact for what they should change to resources that have really made an impact on me and how I go about content and design. First of all, is the Design of Everyday Things. This is like one of my favorite books. It's more about physical design, like product design, but there's a lot of transferable things that have to do with how we design for the web. And then don't make me think is like the quintessential resource for web usability and he's sent created, you know, multiple editions of this. There's another book, something about rocket science. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but, you know, anything that he writes like I would highly recommend. Okay, so we did break, and then I'm going to save questions for the end so we can get through the important stuff here. So I'm going to give you a couple more tools to use so that you can audit your own stuff. We're going to go through our live content UX audit, and then anytime we have left is going to be for questions. Let's get through it. Okay, so we'll start with Google tools, because again, when Google gives us information or tools, we want to listen because this is essentially how Google sees our content and how they prioritize what they rank in relevant search. So PageSpeed Insights is really a wealth of information. It provides data points from a variety of factors. And as you can see in this screenshot, currently, as of the core web vitals update, it starts with the core web vitals, so it starts from a point of this like, page experience and usability factor. They what's kind of interesting is that they have a part of PageSpeed Insights, and I'm going to show you like a fuller report when we go into the live content UX audit, but they have a piece of it that's about accessibility, but it's it's pretty bare bones. And so Nathan mentioned to me right before we started today, that Amber Hines is going to be the next workshop next month and it's going to be about accessibility. And her company equalised digital, they have a really great accessibility checker that integrates with WordPress. And so I would say that like that's probably going to be a much better tool for making judgments about if your website is accessible. Then what you're going to see on Google PageSpeed Insights and I think that that's something that is really important that you know, it's not always like at the top of our list when it comes to some of the other things that we need to do. To make our website usable, but it is really important. Whether you currently have an access issue or not at some point in your life, I'm sure you will. And now that I'm a man like this has become more obvious to me, maybe not in terms of strictly website design, but I think about like when I'm on a walk outside and previously, you know, I could just step around people's icy sidewalks that they didn't shovel or whatever, but now that I have a stroller, it's like okay, am I gonna put my kid you know, in the street. And so it's it's things like that or maybe you break your arm and now you can't interact with the web the same and so accessibility, I just wanted to like, make make the case that that is something that is so important because you your loved one, there's somebody that you know that it's going to make a difference for.\r\n\r\nGoogle used to have a tool specifically for testing the mobile friendliness of your site, and I was surprised to learn that they've actually sunset this tool. So now it's kind of a part of Google PageSpeed Insights. I think that whatever functionality was already in Google PageSpeed Insights for measuring the difference between the mobile and desktop version was kind of already there. So they basically just said, like, maybe this is like duplicating those efforts. I don't know. But it's no different. I'll just say that, that we that we use Google PageSpeed Insights to make judgments about how Google understands your website from a mobile point of view. Um, so we have the ability to measure like a snapshot of the current state of how your website measures according to the core web vitals are Google PageSpeed insight, but I also wanted to share within Google Search Console, there's this core web vitals report that measures it over time. And the most important thing, I think, to keep in mind with Google Search Console, and and also like Google Analytics. What I'm going to talk about specifically is more relevant to Google Search Console, is the fact that it tells you if you know, you become in violation of anything that's going to hurt your ability to rank and relevant search in terms of what Google tells us right in terms of the big things. And so that's why making sure that it's installed on your site on client sites is so important because it gives you notices if you're like way in violation of something, and it gives you the chance to fix it. Google Analytics so I would also recommend installing from the get go because it gathers important data that's useful that you can use to understand your page experience your content experience, but yeah, so this is just one useful report that relates to what we're talking about. This came up when I was prepping for the live audit later. Just the idea that there may be a use case for understanding what WordPress theme somebody's using. And I would say especially what plugins they're using, because both of these things can have an impact on your pages performance, which is a search signal on the loading, you know, on the interactivity, and all those those good things. So this is just one tool there's there's a bunch of them out there. But you know if if your website is experiencing any performance issues, or you just want to understand like how somebody else put their website together. I think this is a cool tool or a cool mechanism for that. I also wanted to share a general SEO audit tool, I see ranking so like H refs and SEM rush which I believe we talked about yesterday, this is another All In One SEO tool. It is not as fine tuned as the others as Ahrefs and SEMrush in terms of their keyword data, so that's why I don't use it for keyword research. They use different databases and approaches. But what I will say is their SEO auditing tool, which is like kind of the technical structure of your website, like goes head to head with any of like the big players in the market, and I'll show you exactly what that looks like. And the great thing about SEO ranking is it's a lot more affordable as an as an All In One SEO tool. And even from like the keyword research perspective, like you could use it to get most of the way there if content again isn't like your biggest focus are in and or if you weren't in a super competitive industry, it would it would do just fine. Um, a couple like editing tools. Hemingway is a great one. It's pretty simplistic isn't the right word, but it focuses on just a couple of things. It focuses on just a couple of factors and so that's why it's useful it doesn't it's not super distracting. And then Grammarly is one I would say that gets into a lot more detail. Grammarly is probably a more well funded company. Than Hemingway I wasn't aware of if Hemingway been monetized until I was looking at it the other day they have some AI functionality and they might they might have some other like outside of AI functionality plans, but I'm not sure that they had like a clear path to monetization before that but grim really has always had its like premium and like enterprise business use cases. And so I think that's probably why this tool is maybe a little bit more robust in terms of the suggestions it provides. They have a lot of linguists on staff and again, a disclosure that I'm a Grammarly Ambassador but I also like to use the product paid every person on my team that's a writer editor has a paid subscription to grammerly and I'll show you why shortly. Um, you know, you also want to look for plagiarism when it comes to creating a great content experience and when I talk about plagiarism, I'm not even necessarily talking about things that you do like on purpose. Some things that happen in grammerly, specifically is that you'll write something and it will detect a phrase that's been published elsewhere on the internet because you know, like there's a ton of content that already exists and it's bound to happen. And it'll be about something that's like a completely different industry. Like you definitely didn't take it from that original place that was published, but it's kind of like a reminder to go on and try to make it more unique. Just so that you know, Google doesn't think that you plagiarize even though again, it's not about intention. It's just about the reality of the content that already exists. But at the blacksmith, we use Copyscape for every piece of content we create, just to be sure there's no plagiarism, and then Grammarly. I don't believe the plagiarism check comes with the free version, but because we have the premium version, and that's included that we use it to. Um, one of the last factors here is you know, making sure that your content adheres to your style guide, whether that's a specific company style guide, or something like AP style, which again, is like the news journalism standard. I think it's like a great standard to use if you don't have a set style guide. And then I just have a couple qualitative qualitative factors here. So on the blacksmith style guide, which will probably show you we have a section about information architecture, and it's about a lot of these different things, how to break up walls of text, how to approach writing headings, how to keep paragraphs and sentences short and to the point. It's other things like you know, making sure that you have good flow with your content, you know that it has good storytelling, but it's something a human would want to read. And yesterday we talked about texts that whether AI generated it or not sounds robotic and how to avoid it. So that's another like, piece that you can use like in your own audits, those guidelines. Other things that I look at are like the thoughtful use of on brand visuals at the blacksmith we try to incorporate multiple types of visuals per piece. I'm definitely of the opinion that words aren't enough. I think as humans we're very visual creatures and people all have their own, like different learning styles. So that's also a factor, you know, written word, I don't think is enough, especially like for me personally, sometimes I need to like watch a video about it, or you need to like, you know, play with it in my hands or whatever. Like there's just different ways that people process information and so the more different ways you can surface it to them within your content, the better that your contents going to perform and help them and then things like consistent formatting like how you use bullet points, how you write headings. Again, a lot of this we cover in the blog Smith style guide. Just a couple other things. We talked about a B testing when we talked about how to be a good user tester and giving examples. So Unbounce is a tool that you could use. A B testing is essentially testing like different variants of a page usually you're testing a specific element like two versions of a page title, or two versions of an image, but it could be a full page as well. And this is something that Nathan and I also talked about, which is that I think he'd love to have an expert on a be testing do one of these workshops or you know a webinar in the future so if that's your if you know somebody like that, you know, that's something I think that all of us could learn some best practices from but again, another thing that you could test\r\n\r\nQuick disclaimer, then we'll jump to our live content UX audit. And we're talking about how to make your content better. And, you know, basically like different processes that you could use to to catch mistakes. But I don't want you to leave this thinking that perfection. Is the goal because it's not I think, you know, we're all human, we all make mistakes. At the end of the day writing for the web is is great because it's a very forgivable medium and unlike print, once you notice a mistake, you can go in and correct it. And so I don't want this to become a situation where you're beating yourself up if you did all these steps or you did some of these steps and like, you know, you still notice something later somebody points out like oh, this is spelled wrong or whatever. That's really not the point. So at the end of the day, I think my guidance for you is done is better than perfect. And be kind to yourself but create systems to catch mistakes. And that system could be having like a human editor, like like I mentioned earlier today, whenever I write something, you know I'm telling you all my best practices, but that doesn't mean that I always follow them, right. I'm an imperfect human being and, and things happen. And I think the other thing that I wanted to say is like we all have limited time we all have limited energy, and especially now that I'm a new mom, like I used to work really late at night and I would just crush stuff out and I would go over it a million times and now I kind of have to be satisfied with like not having the ability to do that and having a much shorter period of work time every day. That I can get stuff done and having to prioritize ruthlessly and that sometimes means that like yes, maybe I spelled something wrong, you know, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it. And I don't think you should either. So that's that's my soapbox. Alright, so let's go to the live content UX audit. Give me just a moment to get this set up. Um, so we're gonna go through like a couple of these different tools that we talked about today. And then at the end of this, we will have some time for questions. Okay. So Stacy, we're picking on you today because you submitted a really great example for this live content UX audit. And I want to start by saying there's like nothing wrong with this website. I mean, it's very good and it follows a lot of both the content and design principles that like I would instruct my team on. So what we're going to do today is is really nitpick for the sake of giving people things to think about when they are doing their own content UX audits. And so I'm going to start by sharing, like some of these tools and their outputs so that I can show you how to use them. And then what we'll finish off on is coming back to this page, and I'm going to give a couple of qualitative factors, you know, that I think can make the content just a little bit stronger. So again, I wanted to surface the blog SMIS content style guide. This is going to be the basis of one part of you know, some of the things I'm going to talk about and I'm going to reference that Chechi btw bot that we made yesterday, that's based on the style guide and that's, that's kind of what I use to audit this page from the content style perspective. But again, some things that we just talked about were first of all the SEO and Keywords section or chapter, where we talk a little bit about I mentioned that you could get some guidance for how to use awkward keywords like how to use keywords within URL slugs. I also talks about this information architecture, or information structures what we call it here section. So that's how to like essentially present information but also like break up walls of text, make it more readable. We talked a little bit at the end of today about formatting and how to keep that consistent. So those are just a couple of things. I guess we also talked about links earlier today and so there's some good guidance there. So you know, this is a this is a good resource if you're building out your own content style approach, and you can really build off of this because again, it's fairly industry agnostic. So anyway, I took this link, and first I ran it through Google PageSpeed Insights. And if you look at the desktop version, I mean it's pretty much near perfect. There's it's very difficult to get to 100 on any of these factors on I would say especially on mobile, but even on desktop, I mean, it's it's kind of like a what's the word? It's like a like a fool's errand to try to get to 100 if you're if you're this close, so, desktops looking really good. You know, they have a couple of things that you could do to fix it if you wanted to, and I have some suggestions for that, but we'll talk about it from the mobile perspective. So if you go to mobile, you'll notice that you know, first of all, the largest Contentful paint is one of the core web vitals, that it's a little bit in the red and it's and that's really like the only one and the largest Contentful paint again has to do with page floating, I believe. And so, taking like the definition we had, I'm guessing that that has something to do with this image because this is the viewport you know, that first load so it's the first thing that gets measured by this core web vital. And when I was looking at this yesterday, it's a it's a JPG file, which isn't like a super large file or anything like that. But one thing that you could do to to improve that page quality factor is to instead save this and serve it up as a web p file. There are certain plugins that you can use for that it's going to you have to kind of determine if adding like a plugin or taking that extra step of manually saving it like converting it and saving it and uploading it as that file is worth it. But that's that's like the one thing that I could think would would flip this so that it's the performance is a little bit closer to 100. And then we go into some of these other like diagnostic details. And I think this is where PageSpeed Insights gets really interesting because you can sort of dig into specifics here. A couple of things that I noticed were like minifying, CSS and JavaScript and there's some other things that are kind of related to optimizing like these different file types on the website. So I use a plugin called nitro pack. There's a free version and there's a paid version. I think the free version will get you pretty far, but it adds this like little Add at the bottom of your website. So I just pay for the paid version because I don't want that there are other things like nitro pack but nitro pack from the perspective of somebody who operates in the SEO world, you know who's looking for good performance, who's looking for best practices, that is my suggestion to you and to anybody who is seeing these things on their Google PageSpeed Insights. So naturally talking about these plugins for me like the got the question of does adding more plugins like is that going to hurt performance like what what is the marginal return of that? And so what I wanted to do next was take the URL and put it in that WordPress theme and plug in detector to just see like what the back end of the site looks like. And so we can see, it's like a custom or like a child theme. And I think okay, so apparent theme is Astra, so we know that like that's the technical basis on which this is based. I think generally speaking, Astra is pretty good for SEO from what I've heard, I don't have a ton of experience with it. And then also, this is like more what I was interested in was the plugins on the backend. And I mean, from what it detects it's there aren't that many plugins here, you know, it has like a plug in that works with Astra there's a Quiz Builder. This DOWNLOAD MANAGER contact form and then the Page Builder that's pretty lean, especially if those are the only plugins that are installed. You know, different people have different ideas of like, how many plugins is too many or like what's the optimum amount but I would say like, we're well under that here. So adding something like nitro pack, or you know, like some sort of web p image optimizer I think short Pixel does that.\r\n\r\nSomething like that probably wouldn't like hurt performance for the performance gains that would come with it. Um, okay, so the next thing that I wanted to do this is higher level than just this page, but I wanted to show you guys SC ranking. So SC ranking again, is this like All In One SEO tool? And I think there's like actually something wrong with my browser because I'm trying to like x this out, and I could do this yesterday and it just like wouldn't do it. So this is either a core web vitals issue or this is like I have too many, like Chrome extensions that are conflicting with each other, that I haven't been able to figure out why it sometimes messes with my browser. But anyway, that's an aside. So um, so this is a C rankings like technical website audit. And what I really love about this is that it's pretty straightforward. Like you can essentially read this as a non SEO and get a very good idea of things that you could fix to improve your website's technical structure. And as you can see this website like it's not bad, like there's room for improvement, but overall it's doing pretty good. Again, chasing 100 is a fool's errand. You're like, probably not going to get there but you want to get as close as you can with the time and the resources that you have. And so this page is really just like a high level overview. Again, this is about the whole website. It gives you an idea of like, how many pages were crawled, versus how many URLs which could include things like media files, JavaScript files, style, sheet files, and things like that. And so this can be a good indicator of like, if you know that there's more pages or there's more files, like maybe there's a credibility issue here. And if if some are getting excluded from this crawl, then they're probably also getting excluded from what Google can see. And so at that point, you, you know that there may be a sitemap issue that's getting in the way of the ideal situation. But what I really wanted to show you was the issue report. So these are things that you could fix. And what it does is it it has a category, it gives a specific issue, it gives you which pages are affected. It tells you you know, whether you're like compliant or whatever you want to call it if it's following best practices or not. And there's there's very few things here. But for example, like here's one that has to do with crawlability, which we talked about earlier today. And so nofollow means that we don't want the search engines to read this page and there may be a good reason for that. And so it seemed that for your pages are affected, you can click on it to get a description of the issue. So this is why it's really great for people who aren't necessarily like in the SEO world. A lot of you are website developers or designers and so a lot of this stuff like you'll be able to understand just by going through it and familiarizing yourself with it was there like included details. But yeah, so then you could see, you know, like which pages relate to this issue and whether or not like it's worth doing anything or if you really wanted them to be that way. But I'll give you like a more tangible example of something that you definitely want to fix. We have, for example, External links to 4x x. So like a 4x. X code is like a 404 means that it's not found, and there's different variations of that I'm sure a lot of you are pretty familiar with that. And so this means that maybe something that was linked on the website now no longer exists. And so it either needs to be replaced or redirected or something like that. And again, you can dig into the URLs you can see like what specific error code happened. This is also a really great report that you can give to clients. And then you know, depending on the level of familiarity you have with these different issues and how to fix them then you can give yourself a little bit of an extra job and some hours working with them to not only audit and go through the audit and explain the audit but then also, you know, implement the fixes. So I just wanted to show you that because I think it's it's such a great tool. So then the next thing I did was I ran this through Hemingway, and like I told you before Hemingway is like the sort of like, saying it's the more basic version of Grammarly. is maybe not exactly the right way to describe it, but it's the more like focused version. And so as you can see, what it does is it highlights different things. And it's kind of using I guess these colors, as you know, like things like it's trying to like draw your attention to certain colors as being like something that's more worth your attention or less worth your attention. What I've always known Hemingway as is a great tool for measuring active versus passive voice. And generally speaking, we want to try to avoid passive voice in our writing. And so that's probably what it's best used for. But there are some certain other factors here that are useful and interesting. And like yesterday when I told you about clear scope and how it measures readability, you can see that Hemingway also does this. It measures certain stats in terms of you know, just this piece of content, not necessarily compared to other pieces of content. And then it also has some AI functionality, that with a paid plan you can use to I think automatically suggest edits to some of these things. So just, you know one interesting tool where it's I think best functionality is free. So then I ran it through grammerly and I wanted to start by showing what I was talking about. With the plagiarism thing. Like there's something about inventory management on this article that says 1% of your text matches the source and that's like it's not even This article isn't even about inventory management. So I just wanted to show you guys that like, like these tools can be wrong, but it's still worth running that check a if you're working with a writer that's not you, just from a reputation standpoint, you want to make sure that there's no obvious like plagiarism problems with it but be so that you can just make like some small changes to this text so that Grammarly doesn't pick it up and possibly, you know, Google may be like taking a nod from some of the similar types of algorithms and uses. Again, not that it's intentional. It's just like, you know, because there's already this wealth of content that already exists on the internet about all these different subjects and of course, there's going to be similarities with phrasing and things like that. So then we get to these other suggestions. And I guess one other thing I wanted to show you about Grammarly is you can set goals for a piece of content and I don't know if this is a paid version specific but anyway, you can, you know, say like what type of writing it is. So I just said business for this. You can give a certain intent so I sent in form for this I may or may not be right with all these things, but I just wanted to see what would happen. You can say like, you know the level of experience of the audience, you can set like the formality of the tone. And then and then it gives you suggestions based on those things. And what's cool about grammerly is that it goes into these specific zoo specific different categories of suggestions. So correctness is about like grammar, spelling, punctuation, clarity is to cut in to help with like the flow of engagement, which is probably most related to like storytelling and delivery, I guess, you know, kind of related to both of those things, and then style guide. This relates to my company's specific style guidance, some of the suggestions that I have programmed in myself, and so a lot of it is like punctuation, because I have some rules about that. And it's probably annoying for my writers to have all this pop up. But some of it is word stuff. So like if we click this, something like actually, per the blogs and the style guide, and that's just our approach, we say these words are fluffy and don't add value typically. So like if you cut actually, it would say wait, so you have to go read these reports. Ones is another one that I have strong opinions about. I say don't use one to describe a noun you've already defined. Use the same word again or find another way to say it and then I gave an example here. So that's what's really cool about Grammarly is like you can like get these things automatically being suggested when you're working on a piece of content within your organization so that people don't have to remember like all the stuff that I showed you on my style guide it just automatically pops up. Waxing then I'll show you a couple qualitative things and then we'll go to questions is I ran this through my style editor bot, and it wouldn't I tried to get it to like directly edit the copy. And it wasn't unlike what I showed you yesterday which was like a shorter excerpt and the did I did that. So part of this is like me learning how to best use the spot or how to best design it or how to best query it. But what I did was I said Please review this blog post it gave it the era and suggest edits according to the blacksmith style guide.\r\n\r\nThey said consider the bad side consider the following suggestions and it felt to me like it wasn't actually like totally reading the blog. It was just giving like general tips and then I said please suggest updated copy based on these suggestions. And so what it did, which is kind of funny was it created like a shorthand version of it. And so what I was thinking is something like this could be really useful for like an email newsletter, you know, like an atomized version of the blog. Or, you know, maybe like you create some social posts based on these shorthand summaries of each category or something like that. You'd still probably want to edit it, but to me, even though it's not really what I asked for, I thought that that could be an interesting use case. So then I was like, Okay, well can you actually do the edits while preserving the original length of the piece? And it was like no, but it kind of went back in and gave some more suggestions. And then I was asking if it was actually able to like read the original article, or No, I was asking about the visuals, because one of the suggestions was about visual aids. And I was like, well, there's a ton of visual aids on that article. And so it said that it can't directly process or interpret them from the article itself. So that was kind of interesting. And then I gave it the copy and then it still kind of like generally gave examples. So you know, it's a work in progress. I guess that's what I wanted to share. It's still it's still gave me some things to work with. But it wasn't exactly like the editor that I was hoping that it would be like it like it kind of was yesterday. So it seems to me if I were to make a hypothesis here that it's probably going to be more useful for shorter bits of copy, you know, maybe different sections or titles or things like that, versus trying to edit a whole article all at once but it will give you food for thought in terms of general edits that you could make. Okay, so last like pieces of content on this before we end up today. We talked about menu navigation. And so the way that I would change this menu navigation would be home about blog and I would just change this to contact and what I like to do with whatever like the most important menu item or call to action is maybe add some like button styling so that that stands out, it just simplifies it. It's not distracting and you know, hopefully leads them to the ideal conversion. So then the other thing like the header, because we're kind of talking about the whole experience, not just the article itself, is what I what I came across, typically in the UX audits that I did was a similar type of header where it has the logo, but unless the name of the brand is like really straightforward about what you do, it could benefit from having some context like a tagline about what you do and so I don't think that we do it on the blog. So some a very bad example. But you can imagine like in my header it should probably say like SEO and content agency. But you know, maybe because it's called the blacksmith that also might work I don't know submitted a test. I'm generally speaking again, I really liked this article, I thought that more or less like it fit the same types of standards that like I would have for my team in terms of putting together conversational tone like breaking texts up nicely, having really useful visuals, a couple of just like very small things. We have the social share buttons. My suggestion is to add a CTA that's like share this on social like, it might seem obvious, but just saying that might be useful, might also be useful to have them float as the person who reads it because they might decide at different points that they want to share it through. I love the visuals there was one visual where I think there might be an unintentional tooltip here where like when you were taking the screenshot your cursor was probably over this SPFx aligned area right here. And so it took the screenshot with that and it kind of obscures the stuff behind it. This is the type of thing that like, because I do these all the time I nitpick and probably nobody else would notice, but I just thought that I would mention it. I'm sure I'm gonna like pretty much ended there. The last thing I was going to say for now is with the Related Posts, one of them doesn't have the featured image. So it's kind of, you know, it just looks a little bit lopsided. That's a super easy thing to fix. And then when it comes to consistency um, you might want to capitalize text stuff just so that it's consistent with the capitalization of the other category. And then maybe also like space it out tech space stuff. So again, like I really don't have that much to say here, because it's very good and it has good information. The last I guess big thing is the actual place where I'm reading the content is kind of narrow and skinny compared to the full frame here. And so I wouldn't recommend going full width with the content but I think we could break out the box a little bit more or break it out of the current box so that it's a little bit wider. And I think that that would be a great reader experience. So with all that being said, I'm going to pull back to my slides really quick just to pull up like the question slide and things like that. But I mean basically we're done here. With the planned content. I'll once again bring up my book because it is about what we're talking about with content experience. It's about my approach to content writing, content style, you can grab a free chapter of the book on the writing for humans and robots.com website or you can grab the book on Amazon via Kindle or print edition. And yeah, that's pretty much it. So I will take any questions that may have popped up in the meantime.\r\n\r\nYeah. All right. So thanks again, Stacey for letting us use your content as I know that it's a little weird with talking about my stuff here but ya know, it was very much appreciated and a it's an excellent article. We've talked about that already. The content, it was it was hard\r\n\r\nto find stuff to comments on honestly, so I had to go into nitpick mode.\r\n\r\nSo grateful to you, Stacey. Let's see folks last chance to ask questions here. There are no questions today,\r\n\r\nwhich is covered at all. Everything's done.\r\n\r\nIt's it's been a very good and thorough presentation on lots of tools. Things to consider as we're developing content for and helping our clients create content for the web. Yeah, like Ben says firehose of information really good stuff. Greg, this is a good rewatch as well. Alright folks, last chance before we land the plane. Your if you have any final questions for Maddie, if you want to just say yes in the chat that way we know to pause otherwise, I'm going to start moving towards wrapping us up. All right, yeah. So thanks there in the chat. Okay. So Maddie, wrap us up here. Give us our final takeaway for the training.\r\n\r\nSure. I'll answer one question. Barney asked if I'm in the Denver area. Yeah, yeah. I'm in Lakewood, technically. But yeah, okay. Final wrap up. treat people how you want to be treated with your content. That's good.\r\n\r\nThat's really good. And true, right. So yeah, awesome. Well, thanks, everybody, for hanging out with us for the last couple of days. It's been a really good set of information here. A lot of things to consider. And hopefully it'll help us all up our game as we're dealing with content on the web. Thanks again. Maddie. For your expertise. And folks, we are back tomorrow as usual 1pm Central for office hours here on solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nNice. Well, thank you so much, everyone for your time and attention. And yeah, I hope I hope there is like one good nugget for you to take away and if you ever have any questions about content and UX, I'm always happy to be a resource.\r\n\r\nVery good. 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This again was this is building on last year's content workshop. And the link for that is in the course description if you missed last year I would strongly recommend you check that out. Really good stuff. So Sadie has your book MADI Naidu\r\n\r\nwhy it's really good love it seems like it's been a while since I published it, but you know, I tried to write it so that it would still be useful today. So I hope that you're all finding that. Yeah, we're sure.\r\n\r\nReally good stuff. Alright folks, if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat say hi. We are about three minutes away from getting started. And they're in the chat once again, is the link bundle that has the slides and the replay link as well as a link to Matty's book. We are Yeah, we're gonna have a lot of fun today and tomorrow, two hours today, two hours tomorrow talking all about website content with I mean, let's face it an expert in the field\r\n\r\nappreciate the vote of confidence. If you if you measure it by yours and I suppose expert, that's something that I've been doing for a very long time. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nAlright folks, let's hear from you in the chat. Check in question today. How about give us a one to 10 rating? How comfortable are you with generating website content? One being it's a real challenge. 10 being a pro, let us hear from you there in the chat.\r\n\r\nAll right, about a minute and a half to go.\r\n\r\nMaybe a good question is how many of you are forced to make content in order to finish your website designs? Yeah, to get your website launched.\r\n\r\nHey, Sue bullets are my friend. I like bullets. Alright, several folks just joining us. The links are there in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up that chat and you'll have the link to download the slides. Grab the replay and all of those things. We are about a minute away from getting started. Second question today is what's your comfort level? What's your expertise at website content creation one to 10 If you had to rate yourself love it. Love it. Tracks Yeah, five but a if you're using AI, that's awesome. Yeah, so a lot of folks are higher on the scale today. That's exciting, that hopefully you're gonna get some tools to up your game even further. He's got a lot to share with us. Over the next couple of days. Hey Terry. Dab Alright, folks, we are just about to get started. Glad you're all here. Diving into the web content workshop momentarily. Just seconds. To go. If you're just joining us in zoom, I'm going to drop in one more time the link bundle and it's three after so let's get the recording started. And we'll dive right in. Let's do it. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy and I'm joined for the next couple of days by my friend Maddy Houseman, Maddy is a sought after sought after copywriter specializing in enterprise b2b Tech brands. She's the CEO at blog Smith and the author of writing for humans and robots, the new rules of content style. She has been recognized on numerous industry lists as a top content marketer and I'm really excited to have her back for another course here on solid Academy so welcome back Madi, how are things going for you?\r\n\r\nThanks, Nathan. I'm really excited to be here. Like I said, you know, it's been it's been a little bit of time since I've done you know, a presentation like this since I've really gotten to use my brain. For those who don't know, I recently had a baby so he's in daycare today so I can fully you know, give my attention to this and, you know, embrace this identity of mine as a content creator who loves to learn and you know, who now has this other facet of my life but marrying those two in a joyous way so, so yeah, really excited to be back and and put my brain to use and share you know, some of the things that I've been exploring you for the past several months to I guess a year, all this new stuff with AI, that's what we're gonna focus on today. So really excited about that. Yeah,\r\n\r\ndefinitely. So we have a long way to go over the next couple of days and the thought just occurred to me Maddie, we really ought to have you back for another informal conversation just on how you prepared your business. So that you could take some time away, because that's really, that's quite a feat.\r\n\r\nIt was definitely and I'd love to do that. I'd be happy to.\r\n\r\nYeah, that'd be that just occurred to me. We should definitely, folks. So let's see the links are in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom. I'm going to drop this in one more time. There you will find the link to download or grab the slide deck. Also the replay link that will have the transcripts and chat logs after we finish is there for you as well. On that replay link you'll also find a link to last year's course, which is more some more foundational principles of the things we're going to unpack even further today. So if you missed last year's course, all the replays are there, follow that link, rewatch them, it's really good stuff. And of course, if you haven't seen Matt, he's booked the link for that as in the chat as well. So Maddie, give us a high level view. What are we going to be covering for the rest of today? Totally.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, we're definitely going to expand on some of the things that we started to talk about last year, but really, you know, thinking about what's changed in the past year and so that's why today we're going to focus mostly on AI kind of how AI factors into content creation, how you can use AI tools to create content, how you can use AI tools to detect AI content. You know, things like how to write an excellent chat GPT prompt and one thing I'm really excited to share with you because it's something that I've just kind of figured out for myself is how to make your own personal GPT. So that's what we're gonna do at the end of the day, I'll show you step by step how to do it. You can follow along, I'll show you how to adapt it a little bit. And then really, what we're going to start with today is I guess a bit of a cautionary tale when it comes to AI so we'll start with the most negative and we'll build up to the most positive. And then tomorrow, the focus is going to be on content UX, the user experience what I like to call the reader experience. So it's going to be more about you know, the elements of design and how they interact with content, how you can create this great reader experience for the people who consume your designs and content and so we can get a little bit more into what that looks like. But I guess if I was to like talk high level about today versus tomorrow, today is like things that I think are really like novel and fun. It's like It's like exciting things that that we're all learning kind of at the same time and that's that's what's so exciting about just like nobody has it figured out. And tomorrow is like the stuff that I'm really passionate about. That's a little bit more, you know, foundational and again, about like that full experience. So I guess with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. Yeah,\r\n\r\nabsolutely. Me give a couple of housekeeping notes that will disappear. Folks. We'll be taking a break in the middle as usual for these courses. So roughly at tube central an hour from now, we'll take about a five to 10 minute break depending on where we are timewise. So at the end of this first hour and the end of the second hour, we'll have a time of q&a as well. I would invite you to use the zoom q&a Link to ask your questions. Please don't use the chat, but use that Zoom q&a. That way we can keep all the questions in a nice list. And also, if you'll keep that Zoom q&a open, if somebody asks a question that you also want to hear the answer to just click the thumbs up icon to up vote. And we'll take the questions the order of up votes. So with that again, yeah, we are recording in the replay. The transcript is all there and it'll be available for you about an hour after we finished today. So Maddie, I'm going to disappear take over. Let's get started. Let's\r\n\r\ndo it. My housekeeping is just first of all, I think that we all can learn a lot from each other when it comes to AI. And so like that's how I've picked up the things that I'm going to share with you. It's really hearing it from other people seeing how other people are using this tool. It's interesting because it's so new that like, again, we don't really know like what the best use cases are. And there's this world of possibility that we've only just started to touch. So one thing I'll ask is like if you've come across an interesting AI use case, you know whether you have something that's top of mind now or whether going through what I'm going to talk about today sparks it like please share that in the chat. I'm sure all learn from it. I'm sure other people will learn from it. So that's one thing and then I'll just ask that if there's anything that resonates with you, as I'm talking today, or you know as other people are sharing ideas in the chat. I always love when people tweet or I guess x takeaways these days. So my Twitter is in that bottom right hand corner. So use that and I always love to retweet and share with my audience too. So yeah, let's go ahead and get started here. Nathan already gave a nice bio like who I am. Just to give you you know, more information about the blacksmith. We're a holistic content marketing agency for b2b technology brands. We create data driven content. I'm going to share some of those processes here with you today in terms of how we're using AI tools to do that. And our focus is creating content across the sales funnel with a focus on the reader experience. So again, that's really what day two is going to be about. It's creating this ideal reader experience with the intersection of content and design. And then my book writing for humans robots, the new rules of content style. If you've ever read the book, The Elements of Style, I was really kind of riffing on that in a more I guess, modern way since that book was written back in 1918, or 1919. Of course, at that time, the internet didn't exist. We weren't necessarily addressing a global audience when we publish to the web. We are now and so that's kind of the idea behind this book is how can you how can you speak plainly and inclusively and effectively when you're writing for the web? And so with all of that being said, let's go ahead and jump into the topic of today which is AI Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention. Day two, when we talk about content UX. I'm going to do some live content UX audits. If you were here last year, we also did this this is something I really love to do. And so this form here which you can also click through the slide being links that we've shared in the chat. Just has a couple questions like your name your brand. It'll ask for a link to a specific piece of content. If you're comfortable sharing for this live UX audit, and then it has the question that's optional. If there's anything you want me to focus on, and then like an aspect of the content itself, but the purpose is to collect some, you know, ideas from from all of you of what to audit and we're going to basically put the principles that I'm going to be talking about tomorrow into action you know, show you how to use some different tools show you how to use more also, like qualitative analyses. And so again, I would love your examples so that we can make it really useful for you to give you know, a second pair of eyes on your content. And you know, it's always done in a very respectful way. I'm not looking for problems, I'm just showing you ways to, you know, make your message clearer to make your content experience more effective. So I'll, I'll aim to remind you about this again at the end of the day, and then you know, before tomorrow is probably when I'll pick what we're going to audit for tomorrow. So get them in today, whenever you have a chance. Okay, so artificial intelligence. That's really the focus of what we're talking about today. Super exciting. Things are happening here. It's also kind of a wild wild west. It's it's something that there's many positive use cases but there are also some negative ones and so I really wanted to start with the negatives so we can kind of get that out of the way so we can you know, maybe share some like cautionary tales here. The link that Learn More link is an article that I wrote for Fast Company, and it's going to go over some of the same things that I talked about here in terms of some of the limitations and also really like the ethical implications of using AI to generate content to publish it as if it were your own. So yeah, let's go ahead and dive into that. Um, so I think like the first major implication, negative implication of AI or something to think about, especially as a creator, because many of us here we're writers, we're designers, so we're creating things. They they are our intellectual property which we may assign, you know, to a client, for example, but it's still at its root. It's something that we made. And, you know, the thing about AI is, first of all, it can't think for itself. It uses things like machine learning. It uses algorithms and processes to make sense of what's already out there. But it's not, at least right now in a place where it can completely invent something new. If it does. It's the result of this machine learning it's not the result of true uniqueness. So you know, essentially, AI and I'm gonna explain this example in a moment here, but it's, it's being trained on what already exists. It's using our intellectual property. And the worst part of it is it's doing that without giving us credit. I mean, if you go in do a search on Google, it was called Bard, but now they've rebranded it to Gemini. In my experience, and and I haven't used it recently, to be honest with you, but certainly within chat GPT there's no like source given for the answer to a prompt. It's not directing you to a specific piece of content are saying, This is what I referenced to come up with this answer, which also creates an issue of you know, whether or not that answer is something to be trusted, and we'll get into the fact that AI is oftentimes confidently incorrect. But right now, with the focus being on the fact that it's essentially plagiarism and my perspective, if you are taking what you generate with AI and then publishing it as your own this is probably easiest to think about when you think about visuals, and we're going to talk a little bit about AI generating images and kind of like how that works and some of the issues with that. But you can think of like aI trained on a certain set of materials, certain artists body of work, you know, that style, if it's trained on a certain style and the output is a certain style, it's pretty easy to identify that, you know, it's riffing off, you know, one individual's intellectual property, it's a little bit harder to make that distinction with the written word. But that doesn't mean that it's any less important to recognize that it's, it's an issue if if AI is passing off its own material or your material as its own. So, what I wanted to share here, this is an article that was published on futurism. It's an it's a screenshot from it, and it's about CNET. They have this blog about different like personal finance topics and things like that. And so when it comes to things that affect your finances, whether it's subjects like you know how to buy a house and you know, like had this setup a mortgage, you know, whatever. Or, in this case, like you know, how to pick a credit card, how to use credit cards, how to decide what college to send your kid to, or something like that. Google calls these topics, your money, your life. And in comparison to any other topic that you publish, that you're looking to get ranked in relevant search on Google. Google has the highest standard of quality for your money, your life topics. So CNET was transparent about the fact that they were publishing AI generated content such as the example shared here. But they had a human fact checking it and so the byline was like you seen that money or something like that? And then I think they also had like the byline of the human editor published next to it, but they told us you know, they they weren't trying to hide that it was aI generated. So this excerpt is you know, maybe kind of a silly example, but it's showing how\r\n\r\nthis article that they wrote, which was about can you buy a gift card with the credit card. This first example is a line that's almost verbatim from a rivaling Forbes article. And then this next example is how literally, the table was the exact same title. So, you know, you could question if it was only one of these things, you know, is that really plagiarism? Is that really a problem? But the fact that it's both to me shows that you know, not only did CNET not take a high enough standard of care, quite honestly with the content that they were having a human fact checker edit, but I think it also begs the question of like, if you're generating a full piece of copy, like a, you know, long form blog article, like are you ever going to be able to definitively say that it's not plagiarism? Or that it's not like literally, you know, word for word related to any other competitor article out there? And I think the answer's no, because that's what the AI is using to generate the content. In this case, and then one that I'll share subsequently, AI is, is almost like a crutch for CNET or for others who are who are taking this approach of generating that full article and then having the human intervention and I'm going to share some better ways to use AI in your article creation process. But yeah, I mean, the problem is ultimately that there's no way that they can catch every instance of plagiarism, and it just honestly creates more work and, and the worst part of all, is that it essentially ruin their reputation because they didn't take a proper standard of care. Another example that's, that's ongoing, it's unresolved at this point, is that the New York Times recently sued open AI who's the creator of chat GBT saying that, you know, their, their publications, their media. was unlawfully used to train open AI. And the last I saw, I think there was an update actually today that said that the New York Times is like misrepresenting the evidence or something like that. But again, I mean, it really just like begs the question of you know, if you publish content, like is it safe, you know, is it going to be used to train a model which is then going to spit it out and somebody else is going to publish it and benefit from it without properly crediting you? So that's one major issue. So this is one that I would love your examples. If you have anything similar. This is this is a picture that I saw recently in like a Facebook group about AI. And so somebody had done some prompts about dog breeds. And if you kind of squint, you're like, Okay, maybe that like a chart of different dog breeds, but then you look and you see all the like, really strange faces and like this, like gibberish text, and even the text that you can read is like not related to any dog breeds that currently exists. So, yeah, again, if you have any examples of like an image you've generated that has resulted in something like comically incorrect like this, I would love to see that in the chat. That would be fun. But I guess the point that I want to make with this slide is that at least at this point, AI can't effectively art direct you could give it a prompt and you could maybe get it to a point where you can get something useful. I think it's called mid journey. There's this one AI image generator that creates these like hyper realistic things with like any detail you can get it and something like that is so cool and very interesting to experiment with. But I think this came from within chat GPT I'm gonna say it wrong, but it's called like Dali Dali. And in my experience, when I've used it to generate images, it's the same sort of like gibberish text. The image, you know, is like, vaguely related to the prompts that I give it. So I'm using it for like, kind of like business article use cases to like generate a figure from you know, some like the data I include or something like that. I've never gotten something useful yet. And I think beyond that, it's like you still as a creative have to come up with the prompt. It's not like AI is going to be able to help you within the context, say of like an article. They're not going to be able to come up with like five unique media examples that you could include. So this is something that I think, you know, as humans, like, we still like have control over this or so like the best Abbot. Um, okay. So next I started to talk about this, which is one of the biggest issues with AI to date, the fact that it is confidently incorrect. So this is another Cena example, I'm going to read a little excerpt from. This is another futurism article. They did kind of a deep dive into this. See that AI but issue? So the excerpt is after the outcry after you know, some of these plagiarism things came to light. With the previous example. Steena editor in chief Connie Guglielmo acknowledged the AI written articles in a post that celebrated CNET's reputation for being transparent. without acknowledging the criticism, Guglielmo wrote that the publication was changing the byline on its AI generated articles from CNET money staff to simply seen that money as well as making the disclosure more prominent. Furthermore, she promised every story published under the program had been reviewed, fact checked, and edited by an editor with topical expertise before we hit publish, and I think that this is referring to like before this article was published, and so what you're looking at right here is, I think a more serious violation of the high standards that Google holds for your money your life, making sure that it is, you know, written by an expert that it's heavily fat checked, you know that you're not publishing something that you can't stand behind. And so this is about calculating compound interest for savings and as you can see by the excerpts, it's, it's wrong, the calculation is spitting out an incorrect final number. And so it may seem like, you know, small potatoes like, you know, like, what, what's really going to happen to the person who misinterprets this? It's certainly not like, you know, having to do with like, buying a house and like getting those equations wrong thread savings, but I think it just goes to show that there's, you know, there's a lot of problematic things that can happen and it starts here and if if we don't maintain a high standard for content quality starting here, then it could exacerbate it could turn into people being misled when it comes to making these like bigger money decisions in their life or you know, other things, your money your life, I think also, in some ways has to do with like, health and like medical stuff and things like that. So there are like potentially, you know, bigger and like worse implications than even just like the financial aspect of it. One thing that's interesting that that I misunderstood or I was misled about AI. Really up until like, a week ago or so, is I thought that you could ask chat GBT if it wrote something. So that was something that I saw other people talking about. And it's something that at the blacksmith like we've tested out ourselves you know, when working with like a new writer and wondering how to detect like if content was aI generated, and I found an article on open API's like FAQs or help desk or whatever that said, whenever you ask chat GBT if it wrote some you know, specific piece of copy for example, it just make something up like that's, that's literally what open AI says you could Google it yourself. So, you know, it's weird that it doesn't just say, I don't know, you know, it doesn't just give you like that as a straight answer. It's fine. If it doesn't know, but for it to purposely just decide, you know, bye bye narrowly, like if it's yes or no, and that it just tells you that whether it actually knows the answer, like that's very concerning to me. So a little bit of a cautionary tale. Um, but yeah, I think at the end of the day of the CNET examples, what I'm trying to impress upon you is like, does it really save time, if it like, impacts your reputation long term like I just don't think that that the best way to go about it is to generate the full piece of content and then add the human and I think that I think that AI can help intermittently and we'll definitely get to like how exactly to do that shortly. Um, so this article is also kind of fun. Charlie Brooker's, a creator of Black Mirror. If any of you are familiar, it's just this like really kind of weird messed up show on Netflix. It's very like future focused. It's like, I would say fairly.\r\n\r\nWhat's the word like it's, it's, it's kind of like post apocalyptic in some ways, not always. But it always like seems to end and kind of a scary place. And it's episodic, like each each episode I mean, to say is like its own storyline. And so the most recent season started to touch on themes of AI since that has become you know, something that has infiltrated society. And anyway, this article, The Creator who you know, has a very interesting mind based on what we see on this Netflix episodes, said that he doesn't think AI is messy enough to replace creative people. So there's good news guys, which is AI can't can't match that with us. I think on another hand AI, it lacks human empathy. You know, it can never like fully understand, like, who we are and what we go through. I don't think it ever will unless it's somehow achieved some level of sentience but yeah, I mean, ultimately, like in its wildest dreams, whatever AI, you know, thinks that it thinks it could never generate the ideas that we come up in our wildest dreams. And I think that the proof is in the pudding in terms of thinking about things like some of our favorite authors and how they create prosaic copy. So here's, here's a quote, I love Stephen King. He's kind of a machine himself, but human as far as I know. So this from needful things, one of his more interesting books, because the trust of the innocent is the wires most useful tool. And so, you know, fed copies of Stephen King's worked. You can ask chat GPT to write in his voice. I don't know if Stephen K would appreciate that or not. But, you know, I think the limitation is that it couldn't generate something like this on its own it can generate like derivative work of his but it couldn't come up with this on its own. Ai, you know, it, it isn't it doesn't have uniqueness. And Google has historically said that it's important. We're gonna talk a little bit about Google's AI guidelines that it's published. And it specifically says in those guidelines that they want to rank content that is unique, which AI fundamentally is not, not on its own, not without human intervention. Ai just read purposes and parrots things that already exists. And, and the output trends toward the average. It's not, it's not unique, it's not notable and interesting. Okay, so the last thing that I want to talk about from like this negative perspective, and then I promise we'll get into more of the fun stuff, is the idea that algorithms can be biased. And so if you think about like the people who are creating things like Chet GPT, or the Google algorithm or any other algorithm you interact with, like social media feeds, things like that. Algorithms, they represent the people that created them, not necessarily the population as a whole. So this book is really interesting. It's from the perspective of a black woman and so she is just like, read some of the book description to give you an idea of some of the topics that she explores. It says run a Google search for Black Girls, what will you find? Big booty and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms, but if you type in white girls, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and on unmoderated discussions about why black women are so sassy or why black women are so angry presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. And I think, after this book was published, because this was from a while ago, Google had manually made some adjustments to the algorithm in light of this criticism and that commentary, but the problem is with algorithms, you're you're scaling up problems, they can't manually make adjustments for every inherent bias that their algorithm has. And so you know, I don't know if we have an answer for how to fix this. But ultimately, the people creating the algorithm should represent society as a whole. I guess that's, you know, one way to think about it. Um, and I guess the question that it poses for all of us is like with AI deploying so rapidly there's going to be a lot of situations where bias needs to be routed out and fixed. And so that's, that's what's kind of scary, I think about how quickly new applications are developing. Again, it scales up problems and so that's just something I think we all need to be aware of, and and do the best that we can to fix. So okay, so now let's talk about some of the more fun stuff AI content tools. These are tools that we use in our workflow. These are tools that I use, personally. And so let's go ahead and you know, talk a little bit about how they work. So, again, we're gonna focus on like, mainly AI content tools, just because that's my sphere of genius. That's like what I have the most experience with, but I think there are different things that you could use like no matter how you're creating content, whether it's like you write blog posts for yourself, or for clients, or like, you know, you just want to like uplevel, your email strategy, or you know, help with like the personal compositions that you create. So, the first one I want to talk about is phrase which creates AI powered content briefs. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch my screen to share, to share like what a report looks like in phrase. So let's see here. I think I have to get out of full screen in order for this to work. Okay, so um, this was the form so I'm going to show you that in the beginning, but I'm gonna go ahead and exit out. So phrase generates this really cool report and the SEO aspects of it may or may not be relevant to your process. And I will say that not every piece of content that we created, the blacksmith is driven by SEO. It's not every piece of content we create to rank but I still use we still use phrase for everything because it helps with topic research. So that's what this is. It's a briefing tool. It's a research tool. Um, the way that it works and the way that the next tool, clear scope that I'm going to explain to you also works is that you give it a primary keyword. So in this case, it's how reliable are AI detectors? And so, by giving it this primary keyword, that means that we've already done the research to decide that that's the keyword that we want to optimize for. And so this is this is an article that's already published on the Black Swan, but this is something that we would have created. Prior to that publication. This this brief would have been like the first step of the writing process after doing the keyword research to decide which one we want to focus on. And the way that phrase and clear scope work is that you can I'm just going to show you like some of the pricing details so you can understand like how it works within a workflow, phrases kind of unique in that it has a plan that allows you to create unlimited reports. Not many other tools like it do that it's usually a per report cost. So that's why it's important to know what you want to optimize for before generating the reports. But it also has these lesser plans in terms of output. You know, depending on your content process, that's probably going to be more cost effective to you then you know, me as an agency, I would want more of like the unlimited plan to work for my various clients. So let's go back to phrase so what's interesting about phrase is first of all, just like the content editor experience itself, I'll be honest, we use Google Docs for everything. But if I was creating content, as like just for my internal team or something, what's cool is you can create these other tabs. And so you could have a tab that's like research. You could have a tab that's your outline. You could have a tab that's your draft, and then you could have maybe a tab with edits or something like that. So that's kind of cool just to keep the process nice and contained in one place. I've always thought that that was really unique and interesting about phrase.\r\n\r\nBut to be honest, we don't use phrase as a Content Editor. That's just an added bonus. So yeah, it generates a topic report. I'm gonna go through a couple of different aspects of it. First of all, it gives you some sort of tangible details and the way that phrase and clear scope and the market means which is another variation on a theme work is that they scrape the top 20 or so search results, which is pretty representative of like, what's going to be necessary to rank and it gives you details like, you know, how many words should you aim for for this specific topic? In this case, it's also suggesting how many headers which is like a measure of depth of content, how many links How many images? I think the top ones are what's like in this brief, that's what it's reading and the ones under it are like the average that it's suggesting. But again, we're just this is just like material that's from the brief. It's not like the actual content that we wrote. When it comes to word count. I think people always ask like, what's the ideal word count for a piece of content? And the the answer like many things in SEO is it depends. And so that's why tools like this are really useful because there is no standard. It's very topic driven. And using data that's based on actual searches means that you can get very close to like what that ideal is. So it also shares you know, the top some details of the top breaking content, you'll notice that the blog Smith currently owns a featured snippet for this particular topic, thanks in part to you know, some of the tools that we use to optimize their content. And also, I think, for this particular piece, because we did a lot of our own original research and reporting and some of it that I'll share with you when we talk about AI detector tools, I believe after the break today. You can also see like, the atomized version of some of these other top ranking results like the title like a short description, different headers, you can click into the headers to get more information. You can click through to read it. There's other things in this little side panel here that are interesting. This is just a list of all the headings from all the top ranking content pieces. Probably the most useful is this questions area and you can break it down by different sources of the question of the questions. People also ask you something you could manually go to Google and see for yourself. But it's nice to have it all in one place. I think that's the real benefit of phrase and then you can also see here that you can see questions that come from places like Quora and Reddit, you know, which which can really add a nice like flavor to what you're working on. The stats tab is really interesting. You know, they essentially suggest in phrase different stats, as well as different links that people tend to use in those top ranking pieces of content. And so you don't necessarily want to like copy everything that you see. But there might be things that like people would expect to be exposed to in your content. If there's like a big industry stat that relates to what you're talking about. As you scroll here you can see certain things like different topics that come up, you know, different related keywords or sub topics. And a lot of this you can kind of paste over from the sidebar. External links. You know, in addition to specific stats, news is also pretty interesting because this is like things that have happened maybe since those top ranking articles were published. So again, like if you're trying to be the best making sure that your information is the most up to date. This can help you do that. So freeze also has some generative AI capabilities. I'm going to be honest with you that we don't use these because we don't believe in generating AI copy as far as you know what we write for clients and for ourselves. We're experimenting with it. But so I don't really use any of the generative AI tools. But this optimize tab here is notable and useful, because it's similar to clear scope and market Muse which I'll share with you in just a moment here. And basically, it suggests certain phrases that we should expect to see in the content in order for it to rank high and relevant search. You know, obviously, you can't just throw all the words and you have to weave them in. But this is a pretty good baseline for what people would expect to see topic wise in an article and that's that's the real benefit. I think of tools like this. So yeah, there's other there's other like interesting things that you can dig into. This is like a keyword gap map map based on what I just showed you those different phrases and it shows your content compared to other ranking content and who's using what words so you can kind of see how you stack up against those other competitors. So next, I want to share clear scope with you and I have a slide for it, but I'm just going to jump straight to the report here. So what you're seeing is like a very, I would say like simplified user interface compared to like what you would see with phrase and so clear scope in many ways is very similar. They both exists to help you optimize content. They both include some important research they both work by starting with a primary keyword. One of the differences between clear scope and phrase is first of all that query scope suggests a letter grade whereas phrase and market Muse and surfer previously known as Super SEO suggested number like out of 100 in order to understand like how close to optimizing compared to their standards you are, it also suggests a word count. And one more thing I wanted to say about the content creator is that at the blacksmith we always aim for an a or higher that tends to be a good standard for actually achieving rankings, high rankings and relevant search. I'm actually not sure if phrase does this. I'm sure they do. I just didn't notice it while going through. But clear scope also suggests a target readability level. I think that's really important for matching the needs of the searcher not going you know too deep into something that maybe could benefit from being more surface level for example. You can also notice here that they have those suggestions for phrases and so phrase we use the very beginning of our process, but we're not optimizing content within that tool. We're really using clear scope for that because in my experience, and this could differ by industry, but I find their suggestions for phrases to incorporate to be a little bit more fine tuned than phrase. So you know, that's, that's my opinion. Um, you'll notice that they also have the sidebar, so they have, you know, a couple of details. I don't again, I don't necessarily use clear scope for the briefing processes is really more at the end of the process. So stuff like this, I'm not necessarily going over but if you were to use one tool, then it's nice to know that it has that it also has those top you know, search results for the query, examples of like headers and things like that. It also has the term like keyword gap map that shows how you stack up compared to the competition. You can dig into the competitor details even more in terms of how clear scope looks at content with their letter grade, by word count, that it has this nice chart that shows how that content grade stacks up against their organic position in search. And then I think the last thing that I'll mention about clear scope for now, is that you can use that editor in here just like you can use the editor in phrase, but actually both free and clear scope. Have a Google Docs add on. And so all you have to do is like grab the report link the individual link to that specific report, put it in Google Docs, and then you get all this information within, you know, Google Docs where you probably at least my team works better that way. Um, okay, so and then I guess the last last thing I was gonna say about this topic is that if I had to pick one tool, I think I would pick clear scope. Again, because of the fine tuned pneus of the instructions, but if I was a smaller shop operation, I'd probably pick phrase because it can do like a more well rounded look at like the topic as a whole and debriefing so so that's my suggestion. Clear scope works by essentially offering it's like a per report price, but you can buy packages and like the more reports you buy at a time, the less expensive Each report is. So let me get my slides back up here. And then we'll move on to the next tool that we're going to talk about though.\r\n\r\nWe talked about phrase to talked about clear scope. So let's talk about market Muse just kind of in passing here because it's a very similar tool. It uses some different technologies, compared to clear scope and phrase and so that's why it's a part of our process again as an organization that spends a lot of time on SEO and data and keyword research. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to you if you're going to maybe consider one of those other tools. What's interesting about marketmuse is that it has this functionality to create an AI generated first draft that includes some like light human intervention from their side. I think that's what this is actually this is like a sample from a while ago where we were just playing around with it to see what would happen. But yeah, again, it has a lot of the same functionality. It offers content optimization suggestions that like keyword gap map that I showed you and both of the tools and it has like some generative AI capabilities. So yeah, it just adds a little bit of extra detail. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that it's something you need to add to your workflow if like one of those other tools could satisfy a lot of these same things. So talking about some other tools that are interesting. Word tune is something that I feel like is so underrated. It's essentially uses your own copy to make suggestions. And so again, I'm going to I'm going to show you what that looks like. So let me share my screen back here. So it works in Google Docs. And so here's I just stole the intro basically from that AI detector article. And so what you could do is you highlight whatever text you want it to make suggestions based off of and I typically do it sentence by sentence I, I'm sure it could do longer bits of text, but I don't find that to be as useful. For me. This is like a great tool for when you have writer's block because I don't know you know if you've experienced this but oftentimes I'll let my get myself get stuck on a specific word and it just like really bugs me, and I'm like it's not done until I figured out the right word. And it takes me forever to get through that. So we're tune. It's great because I'm using it with my own copy. So I can feel really confident about whatever it suggests. I'm sure you could use word tune to take AI generated copy and then re spin it. But that's not my suggestion. So again, it works by using this like Google Docs add on and you you highlight it and just to show that action again. It has this little word tune icon. And then you can see different suggestions for how word tune would rewrite it you get like 10 or something like that. And then you can also fine tune it by changing the tone and then by finding ways to shorten or expand it depending on what your use case is. The last thing that I'll say about word toon for right now is it has this thing called spices and so that's like getting a little bit more like next level with the AI generation and using like generative texts. I haven't played around too much with this yet, but it is interesting. And this is kind of taking it away I think from you know basing it off of your copy to kind of like generating something completely new. So that's why I don't necessarily use this but I think it could be a useful resource for when you're when you have writer's block or things like that. So let me get my slides back up here. Here it is. Okay, so so that was word tune. Um, and then Grammarly. I think works very similarly to word tune, and that it uses your own body of work your own copy, to suggest edits, and so I wrote an article for their blog. That's what the learn more link is. After a recent keynote, they did about all their generative AI capabilities. And so I would definitely check that out if you're curious about how to use grammerly in this way. And full disclosure, I'm a Grammarly ambassador, so you know, I'm always singing their praises, but I think it's I think it's interesting because Grammarly, like many other SAS tools on the market are starting to invest in AI capabilities like directly within their tools. And so I think we're gonna see like more and more of examples of this. And grammerly has a lot of other I think really useful. And interesting features like they have this brand style guide, which is something we use that the blacksmith which allows you to set your preferred spelling for things like brand names, and grammar rules and things like that. All right, so let's take a couple minutes for questions. Anything that's come up so far, after the break, we're going to talk about AI detector tools now that I've shown you the AI writing tools. We're going to talk about chat how to write a good chat GBT prompt and then we're going to end the day with how to create your own personal GPT. So yeah, in the meantime, there's any questions. We'll talk about them now and then we'll take a little bit of a break.\r\n\r\nYeah, very good, great overview of some really cool tools that can be used for our content creation. If you have questions specifically about that, drop those there in the zoom q&a. There's one question floating out there about the slide. We were sharing this link as a slide sharing the slides as a slide being link because there was an issue getting them exported where the the links on the slides were clickable. And so technology Yeah, it that's so currently not downloadable. Is the long and the short of it so but that slide being link is there and it'll be available for you going forward.\r\n\r\nWe can we could share them as downloaded just won't be a clickable link. So you can we could share like both in tandem with each other. Unfortunately, that's going to be the limitation\r\n\r\nYeah, yeah. So I'm happy to add that PDF link as well. We'll I'll get that added to the link bundle as we come back. If you want to download these just know that there are things that say read more, learn more that don't clicked anywhere in the PDF. Alright folks, well let's go ahead and take a break. It is 153 Central time let's take a break until right at two o'clock Central. So right about seven minutes from now and we're quiet until then. Sounds great. See you then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We are back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, we are back and ready for the second part of day two. Maddie, what are we going to knock out today?\r\n\r\nSo we're gonna start with now that we've learned how to generate a copy, how do you detect it? We're going to then move to talking a little bit about some Google guidelines around AI content writing for humans and robots. And then we'll end the day with a deeper dive into chat GPT how to write a great prompt and then how to create your own personal GPT which I'm really excited about because it's something that I only just learned how to do myself. Very\r\n\r\ngood. That's a lot to cover in the next hour. I let me invite everyone also to look at the chat I'm going to drop in today's slides if you have come in late. Also, we've added a link there for the PDF download. And finally, there's a link in the link bundle that'll drop in in just a moment that has the invitation for you to submit your site for a content UX audit tomorrow. So with that I will turn it over to you Matty, let's\r\n\r\ngo. Sounds great. All right. Yeah, let's go ahead and knock this out. So AI detector tools. There's a couple that we've tested at the blacksmith and I want to share some of the results of those tests too, so that you can understand what they can be useful for. But also again, there are limitations. As with the rest of this world of AI, everything's still kind of developing. We're all learning things at the same time. And so there's no like perfect answer. There's no one definitive tool that's going to tell you like this is current AI content, or this isn't AI content. So a couple tools that you could try though that I think will give you a decent idea or continent scale, copy leaks and originality.ai and the link here which again, you can grab through the slide bean link is a link to an in depth investigation that we did at the blog Smith testing out these different tools. You know, trying to learn more about the nature of AI content and what it sounds like. So I do have a couple of ideas for you two that we'll talk about next in terms of like how to rewrite things that sound robotic whether they were robot generated or not. But before we get to that, this example here is kind of funny because it's the Constitution and this is continent scale, saying that they detected to be 9% ai generated and you know, I don't think they had robots at the time unless alien somehow hooked them up. But I think it's fair to say that this is more than likely 100% human generated content. But it's just interesting to see that their AI detector is still picking up some very some version of that. And that you know, also perhaps it hasn't trained this AI detector on you know, pieces that existed before. Ai content was a thing. So so that's just like one thing. You know, I think from the standpoint of like, if you're working with content creators, and you're paying for human generated content, then you should get that fundamentally I think that it's an ethical violation for someone to use AI to generate content without disclosing that and to be accepting payment for that as if it were something that they were creating. Of course, there are many companies out there who are hiring people with the job description that is like aI content writer, AI content editor or like somebody who trains you know, a chatbot on a certain way a certain body of work a certain way of writing. All of that being said, if you if you are using these tools, and they are saying with a high degree of certainty, you know, this is AI generated copy. I think it's really important to not outright accuse somebody of submitting AI generated copy what I do at the blog Smith is like let's say that we're doing like a paid test with a new writer hopeful for our team. What I do is I say, hey, you know, we ran this through, you know, these three AI detector tools, and here's what it said here, you know, is what degree of AI content it's saying it thinks this is like, can you comment on that? And it gives them the chance to you know, explain what they think might happen, defend themselves, offering to make fixes, and I think it's really like the way people people are going to be honest or not. There's nothing you could do about that. But I think it's the way that they respond to and handle that situation that tells you what you need to know about if you want to work with them, whether or not you can ultimately tell if their copy was aI generated or not. What is very interesting about these different tools is first of all, they're all gonna give you a different answer. That's just a fact. Because they're all using a different approach to detect AI content. The other thing is that you can input the exact same copy on one of these tools two times and get a different answer. So again, it's it's the wild wild west. But these will at least give you something to think about and whether it doesn't matter. Like if we if we trust the writer or not, we're always going to run their copies through one or multiple of these tools because we want to detect things that sound robotic, even if they were written by a human. So that kind of brings me to my next point here that I was starting to hint at. So when it comes to detecting AI content, or even detecting content that humans wrote, that sounds robotic, there's a couple of patterns that you can look for. The two major characteristics that the aforementioned AI detector tools are looking for are first of all, perplexity, so that's unpredictability within the content. Ai generated text tends to have low perplexity. Human writing has higher perplexity, it kind of makes sense we're a little bit more erratic than a robot. The other thing is burstiness, which is a similar concept. So it's looking for variation in the length and the structure of sentences. Ai content tends to be more steady, more formulaic, which makes sense. It has lower burstiness and human writing, which you know, has much more variation. The image you see here are some other things that we've picked up in our own writing process. And in investigating this topic, different signals that sound robotic again, whether they are in AI generated or not. So repeating words, like in this example, collision coverage, you know, coverage collision, like it's just like it's not using a lot of variation. And in the box MyStyle guide we talk about like, trying not to use the same word twice in the same sentence or paragraph, which is not always possible, but this would be an example of something that wouldn't pass the blacksmith style guide test because it's it's too repetitive. Also repetitive sentence structure where like, each sentence starts with the same formulaic approach. Advertising then a verb you know, advertising the verb, unnatural word usage, so like, you know, removing a glass dome to access the ball, but it doesn't really sound like how a human would talk about replacing a light bulb. A generic or impersonal tone. You know, it's like things that don't add value that you're just kind of like saying for the sake of having words, it's another thing that we talk about in the blog, Smith style guide, like everything you say, should have a purpose, and we don't believe in fluff. It's about cutting things to being the most concise version they can be while still conveying enough meaning. For people to understand what we're trying to say. Statements that contradict themselves. So the new policy will increase employee benefits while at the same time it will reduce employee benefits that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And inconsistent verb tense, you know, something a human editor. Should be able to pick up pretty well but probably a robot writing is not going to care too much about He He was waiting for the bus when he sees his coworker. Stiff, formal or matter of fact, writing style. You know, again, just something that just doesn't sound like a human wrote it or who would want to read it. So this is this is something that can be helpful to you like when you're doing your own edits to kind of like go through these different things. And, again, whether whether it's aI generated or not, and you know that for a fact, you still want to make sure that your writing is something that appeals to the human. So I wanted to take some time to talk about Google's helpful content update and also their guidance for AI generated content and whether or not it will rank some of this we did talk about last year if you were here, so we're just going to do a really quick refresher on that as it relates to this topic. So my book and like really like what we're talking about, in general is kind of marrying the concepts of writing for both humans who are really the ultimate buyer like they're the ones who actually have money so they can buy from you, whatever it is you're selling. They respond to other humans, other people's empathy, versus robots who you know, we're not writing for their sake, but they are the medium that connects us. To those humans. And so it's important for the things that we write, to be indexable to, you know, be findable to be descriptive, and to ultimately match the intent of whatever the human is looking for. So, you know, robots can also take the form of social networking site algorithms, like that news feed that you're familiar with, I'm sure.\r\n\r\nSo so that's kind of like the two players in this game. Here. So this is some highlights from Google's guidance about AI generated content. As you can see by the link here, this is from early 2023. And I was looking at this page again, just a couple of days ago to see if anything had changed. I had seen something on Twitter now x, where somebody had mentioned that something on this page should change. And I was looking at these three things because I think they're the most relevant to this topic that we're talking about. And like, I don't know if I'm just you know, like, post pregnancy brain or something. I couldn't find the difference. But it might have been because it was about something else on that page. But I might have missed it. And it might have been one of these things. But anyway, I think these things still more or less ring true today. And if anything has changed, it has been Google being less specific about their guidelines. Because that's kind of the nature of what all these things that they've shared with us are it's it's kind of like so just to go over them is a content against Google searches guidelines. They say it's not, but you know, it can't be used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which we'll talk about when we talk about the helpful content update. Will AI content rank highly on search? Maybe, you know, it doesn't give it any gains, which makes sense. What I think is really notable about this is they talk about if it's useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of e 80. It might do well in search. So they talk about original, but we've already talked today about how AI content at least on its own without manual intervention by humans is inherently not original. It is inherently not unique. And I would argue that again, without human intervention, it's neither useful nor helpful, in that, you know, you're not It's not like adding something that doesn't already exist. At least in that case. So to me, from Google's own words, AI content really aren't its own shouldn't rank high and relevant search. But of course, there are exceptions. And then, of course, there are situations where people pair that with a human editor like we saw with seeing that of course, CNET being a cautionary tale of what to avoid. Should I use AI to generate content? They say if you see it as an essential way to help you produce content that is helpful and original, we have that original word again, it might be useful to consider but again, if you're trying to gain search engine rankings and no there was something on Twitter now x where somebody was kind of like I can't remember who it was, but you might recognize the situation especially if you're in like the content world. Someone was boasting about how they had created a ton of AI generated content and they were sharing you know some stats from like their Google Analytics, and how would that helped rankings and things like that? And I think everybody agreed that that person should have probably kept their mouth shut because somebody from Google ended up you know, seeing this Thrive that came to their attention and they got hit with a manual penalty based on what this person was saying about you know, having not really like had that human intervention. So thus, it was not original or unique. And it's just funny, like, you could probably get away with it, at least for a while, depending on how Google develops more of these guidelines. But when you start to boast about it, and Google gets wind of it, then like there are manual interventions that they could take, so tread carefully. If it's working. Keep that to yourself. So then it Yeah, I wanted to like connect this back to Google's helpful content algorithm update, which also happened. Probably a little over a year ago, maybe two years ago. And so they describe it as being part of their long term efforts to provide original and valuable content through search. It rewards content that meets users expectations while demoting content written primarily with search engines in mind. So like we were just talking about what the AI content. This this update isn't focused on AI but but it adds color to those guidelines in terms of how to approach it or you know, if you are generating AI content, how to make it work, so that it could rank these questions. Are directly from Google just made pretty was blacksmith branding, but the link that I shared here will will get you to the Google documentation that includes these questions and the subsequent ones. So to ask yourself like is is this content truly people versus is something that Google would consider ranking. It's things like Do you have a primary purpose or focus for your site? If you're writing about too many disparate topics, it's very confusing to Google you can certainly write about things that are different but related to each other, but you should really have like one specific focus if you want to rank high in relevant search. Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they've had a satisfying experience? I think that's a question to ask yourself, whenever you create any type of content like Is it is it satisfying to the end user doesn't really just serve your purposes? They talk about like demonstrating firsthand experience or like a depth of knowledge that's really important. That's that's how we add uniqueness to our content. That's how we make it original. Even if it's just your opinion on something, you know, that adds color to the content that already exists. Okay, so, um, let's talk now about from the search perspective, are you taking the search engine first approach to your content? So these are things that you obviously don't want to do. And it's questions like, you know, are you primarily trying to attract people from search versus creating something truly useful for humans? It does say are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics like that cautionary tale, that person who was sharing, you know, the content they generated, which resulted in a manual penalty, it's a perfect example. I think this is important too, like, are you mainly just summarizing what others have said without adding much value? You should always be adding I think something to the content that you're creating in order for it to be worth creating in the first place.\r\n\r\nSo just to kind of summarize here, like what is helpful content versus unhelpful content from these guidelines that Google has given us and that I honestly agree with? helpful content is people first genuine specific, it's actionable. Up to date is important. Once you publish something, you have to think about, like if you're using stats or if it's about maybe a tool that changes frequently, like you should be regularly reviewing or auditing your content for opportunities to update it. Is it relatable, is it concise? And ultimately, is it satisfying, versus the unhelpful content which is written primarily for the search engine robots it's spammy? It's generic, it's abstract. It might be outdated. Ultimately, it's impersonal, impersonal, fluffy, and then whacking. So these are some easy guidelines that you can use to understand if your content is hitting the mark for something that Google would even consider ranking high and relevant search. All right, so now we're gonna get to some of like the really fun stuff, I think today, which is get GBT some specific examples for how you can use it, as well as a demonstration for how I'm using it. And so, a lot of the things that I'm going to talk about today are based on things that I've learned from other people. I didn't necessarily invent these things. I've adapted many for my own use cases. And so again, I think this is a really valuable opportunity for like if you have anything to add to this discussion, I'd love to see it in the chat. I think it could benefit other people. How are you experimenting with AI? Like how how would you maybe adapt some of these ideas for how to write a great prompt What are like interesting prompts that you've used, and you know what, how is that benefited? You so I'll just put that out there. And then I'll also say that some of these are like pretty much all of these guidelines are based on open AIS guidelines for prompt engineering as well as Google's in some cases, I've combined to them and in all cases, I've given examples of how to use them effectively. So let's go ahead and jump to it. Okay, so the, I think first and perhaps the most important thing is to be as specific as possible. And you want to set parameters for the output that you're looking for. So my prompt here was helped me generate 10 email subject lines to use for cold outreach for my content marketing agency, please limit output to a maximum of 45 characters per example. I picked that number, the 45 characters because I saw that that's like somewhat of a best practice for how many characters people want to see in an email subject line. And what I could have done here was use the personal GPT I'm going to show you later that's all about the blogs and style guide them has like aspects of like how we do business and I could have gotten like even better example results here. But the point was not to show you something perfect it was to show you how to apply this principle. And the other thing that I wanted to add to is like you can always start with a plant, see what it gets you and then you can set parameters after the fact to refine your output. Like, you know, maybe I would have asked this prompt and then asked for it to shorten it to 45 characters or to suggest new examples of 45 characters. Or maybe I would have asked for like, what are you know, 10 General Sales, cold outreach subject lines, that I could use and then I might have added the detail Okay, now, adjust it for like my content marketing agency. The next one is to give context and examples. So I have this bot and I think I'm going to show you a screenshot of it next. One of my personal GPCs is a blacksmith sales expert. And so I created this bot because we recently hired a new salesperson, and there's just so much to learn both about the blogs with his brand. The work we do for customers, and just our sales process in general things that we want to share with new prospects that I wanted to create a resource and it's like of course you know, I want to make myself as available as possible to this new salesperson because typically I've been the salesperson for my company, I have a lot of that knowledge in my own head, but there are times when I am unavailable or I have other stuff that I have to work on. And so I wanted to create a personal GPT that incorporates some of this different documentation that I've created about our process. You know, referring to this prompt it also has like a copy of our standard proposal. Different things about you know, like what makes us stand out compared to the competition what's what's unique to us, I guess, so that any person on our team, any especially new salesperson, would be able to use this chat bot in order to surface some of this information, especially if they couldn't get a hold of me basically. So here's an example of a prompt I gave my personal GPT which is using the above case study. So I gave it a URL on our website. And one of the features of chat GPT is that you can have it browse the web in order to to include information and its results. So I gave it a URL. I asked it to reference a proposal that I had attached to the GPT that I've uploaded to it. And I said proposed an email pitch for a specific job opportunity. I copy and pasted a longer piece than this. I just took a screenshot but like the long version of this job description, and and I asked it to effectively address the requirements that the job description surfaced and the writing based on our strengths. And so what ended up happening was, you know, it wrote like a cold pitch email. But it did it did effectively address this prompt. There were things that I would change about it. Certainly there are things that I would have edited it before I sent it out to the person who had posted this job description, but I think that for me as a founder who has also traditionally been the salesperson it's such an effective way to use this tool because I spend so much time just you know, it's like I know all this information I know what we're good at. I know that we have relevant examples. You know, I know all this but it takes time to like resurface that knowledge and put it in a form that sounds good and is compelling, you know, to a sales prospect so that if you take one thing away, I think that you know that's like one really excellent use case of using your existing knowledge or your internal documentation. To make your life way easier.\r\n\r\nAnother related GPT prompt engineering tip is to use de limiters to clearly indicate distinct parts of the input. That just means like what I shouldn't have done here that would have made it probably a little bit easier for chat. GPT to understand what I wanted is to put this this job description text in like quotes, that's like a delimiters to say like, you know, do this to this piece of what I'm asking for to kind of like help it understand what part of the copy it's referencing. And what part of the copy is the ask, especially when you have like a longer input output, you know, whatever. Another example of that is something I learned from James rose. He is an automation and Zapier expert and has been doing a lot of interesting experiments with AI who's really good person to follow. If you're interested in just like getting ideas, he takes transcripts from like voice of customer interviews where he's getting feedback and you know, like positive testimonials and things about his product and he feeds that transcript into chat GPT and says you know, use this puts a transcript in quotes those delimiters and basically like give me like three, you know, like really nice things they said about you know, our product three like great pieces of feedback. And I think that that's such a useful way we like on our client calls on our internal meetings. We use a tool called fireflies, which automatically transcribes all our meetings, but it's still you know, it's still a lot to sort through an end fireflies has its own AI capabilities, too. So it helps to summarize and things like that, but to take to be able to use that output and quickly surface insights based on whatever your prompt is, I think is such an awesome use of AI that saves the human reader from having to go through the whole thing. So this is and I'll show you, I'll show you what this looks like in action when we do the personal GPT demonstration. But this is kind of what it looks like to set some parameters for your personnel GPT and there's two I guess like schools of thought on setting like setting parameters narrowly defining the G PTS role. So you could do this within normal chat GPT and say for this query, you know, I want you to take on this specific role. And so I got this idea from Paul Roeser. He was on some like marketing technology podcast, and he's talking about how he uses AI. And his example was like, something along the lines of like, you know, pretend that you're a lawyer that advises entrepreneur, it's about hiring law and then he gave his prompt so he kind of like set the scene like this is the narrow role that I want you to operate into this query. So that's one way that you could look at it the other way is that you could create a personal GPT that serves a specific purpose like my blacksmith sales expert, that I've already referred to and that you know, I'm kind of showing you behind the scenes, how I set it up. So as you can see here, there's like a name for it, which is kind of arbitrary. A brief description, I think, mostly for your reference. And then the instructions are like what the AI uses to then suggest answers to your prompts. So as you can see here, I'm telling it like you can use our website as your primary reference. You should be familiar with all those pages and use it to inform your responses. It'll ask you and I'll show you how you want it to communicate with you how you want it to give answers. You know what specific information you want to focus on again, like narrowing that scope. And then I also say like tailor your responses to showcase the company's strengths and successes. Using you know details from the website and emphasize why we're the ideal choice in you know, answering like sales related queries. So this is one of the greatest uses of chat GPT without narrowly defining its role and objective. You're gonna get like a wide variety of answers and that's fine. It depends on what your use cases, but by giving it a roll, I think the quality of your output goes up exponentially. And I'll show you again, at the end here, what that looks like in practice. Here's another really interesting way to use it, I think, especially if you're trying to learn a new skill or if you're trying to troubleshoot an existing workflow, which is what I was doing in this prompt. So I use air table a lot. I'm a huge fan of no code and automation in general. I've found in my life that it's really hard to find like the perfect solution to everything that I want to do. I never could find like my perfect project management tool. And so essentially, I built it between using process street air table, Zapier, and you know the other mix of ragtag tools that are in my arsenal. So in this case, I was trying to create a specific automation in air table that for some reason is just evading me and I'm sure I'm doing like one stupid thing wrong, but I asked air table or sorry, I asked Chad GPT first of all, I prompted it by telling it what automation I was trying to create, like the actions that triggers the end goal. And it gave me like a step by step process that I would say is a little bit more high level than this out, but and then I asked it to refine its guidance or expand on its guidance by saying okay, so for this step, this is where I'm getting stuck. What was how exactly what I set this up in air table, and so then, as you can see, the result has some details and it's more detailed than the previous query gave for that step. It's probably worth mentioning that in chat GPT right now, there's two versions of GPT, which is like the underlying, you know, algorithm, machine learning mechanism, whatever. So there's GPT 3.5, which is an older version, and then there's GPT for GPT four incorporates web browsing so it has more up to date guidance. So especially when you're trying to troubleshoot something like air table, which changes often and so, you know, if I were using the old version of chat GPT, I might have gotten a different answer. So when you're doing things like like this, you want to use like the newer version, there is a limitation. I think it's something like you can have 40 prompts within three hours or something like that. I don't think I've ever gotten close to hitting that. But I suppose if you were to ask, you know, a lot of follow up questions, or you're troubleshooting something very complicated, then you could hit that so that's just something to keep in mind that as a chat GPT user and I don't know what the distinction is for paid versus free, but I think that the paid version of Chad GPT is like worth its weight in gold. I think it's extremely undervalued and it's probably because they're using our data to train it. So they do get a benefit out of it. But you know, I would say if you're finding yourself limited by the free version, then just upgrade to the paid it's, it's so worth that.\r\n\r\nOkay, so now, here's the real fun part. So we're gonna go through how to build your own GPT and I'm gonna give you like a specific task to do and so you can either follow along with me while I do this now, or you can do this yourself. Later, watch the recording and replicate it. I will say the process is probably much more straightforward than you might think, if you've never done this before. So we'll go ahead and get started. Let me set my screen accordingly. So we're going to jump over to the blog Smith website, because this is going to be the basis for the very basic UBT that we're going to create today, which is based on one that I've already created and refined a little bit more than what we're going to get into. But okay, so the blacksmith has this writing style guide and on our website. It has this chapter version so you can jump you know to these different sections. To see how will we go about our writing style. It's something that's fairly industry agnostic, so definitely like a great resource. If you don't have your own writing style guide. You could use ours to build yours. But what I want to do is create a chat GPT bot based on this that essentially acts as like a blacksmith editor that defends our style and explains when a piece of copy is not following it. So we have this as a PDF which I've already downloaded. I'll just show you what it looks like really quick. And it's it's designed, but it's fairly plain texts. You know, it's not that much more complex visually than like a Google doc version of this. And I'm telling you this, because my first attempt at making a personal GPT was actually to solve a personal problem of mine, which is that I love the game Settlers of Catan and I wanted to make a Catan rules bot so that I could download all the PDFs of the rules for every version we have. And I could ask the GPT okay, like you know, here's some like obscure situation like what is the role, you know, based on these rule books? Because every once in a while, something like that pops up. And while I like to think of myself as a content expert, there are those niche situations that require further consideration. Unfortunately, on the Catan website, the PDFs that you can download are very complicated visually as PDF, so chat GPT in my limited experience has not been able to read them. So it's just something to note that like you want to give it like the plainest text version of whatever documents you want to share with it, but something like this would be fine. And I know that because I've tested it. Okay, so so if you want to follow along, you know, just hit download, and that's this is the exact file that we're going to use. So then you go to the chat GPT dashboard. Which looks like this. And like I told you, you can toggle between chat, or GPT 3.5 or GPT. Four, you can see you know those limitations as well as the added benefits of using that more recent version of it. So then you go to explore GP Ts, and you can see on my sidebar when it loads here that I have. We have chat GPT which is like you know, every every question you could ever want to ask and then I have a couple of my personal gptc here as well as some that I've explored in this explore LGBTs area that I'm just kind of playing around with. So this is also just like a really fun place to look through things, test things out and get ideas for the the GPS you might want to create. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead and click this Create button, and you'll see this interface. Again, it's pretty simple. And if you go to create, it's going to prompt you with specific questions, but if you kind of like are familiar with this personal GPT idea, you could also jump to the Configure tab and start filling it out. But I think that it's easiest to think about it from this Create Tab. And so it's going to prompt you with a couple of questions. So this first one is like what kind of chat GPT what kind of personal GPT Do you want to make? So I'm going to tell it, you know, I like to create a GPT that serves as an editor for my brand, the blog Smith. The goal is to have this GPT serve as a resource. That references our specific style guide, and suggests edits based on newly inputted copy. I'm just making this up. But the last time that I did this, I'd used something similar to that. And so after each input, it's going to think you know, it's going to react to the things that you're telling it and it's going to ask you to refine the way that it interacts with you. So we're not none of this is like rocket science right now. This is just like designing almost like the persona of who this GPT is going to be. So then it's gonna suggest to name I suggest naming this GPT blacksmith editor. Does that work for you? Sure. Yeah. And you can change this yourself. Like if you just want to, like get through this part. Just say yep, yep, that's fine. And the next thing is it's going to generate a profile picture and so these are new, they're a little bit arbitrary. It's just like for your own purposes, for fun. One thing that is kind of fun with the imagery and it doesn't always work so we'll see. But sometimes I asked it to change to adapt the picture to use like one of our brand colors just for fun. So I'll say like, can you update this image to incorporate our main brand color, which just using a text expander Simple as that? Let's do it does. So this is using that dolly dolly I never know how to say it to suggest images and, you know, it looks like Okay, right? But we're not we're not asking it to create anything like complicated at this point. So, so like for example, it didn't, it didn't really follow my query. So let's see if I try a different way. Can the image use, you know, our main branch color? Like this is this is definitely the limitation of AI is that sometimes it understands the query and sometimes it just doesn't and we won't get stuck on it. If it doesn't get it. I just want to see if changing it has any practical effect on it. So then after this, it's going to ask about Yeah, that doesn't do it. No, that's fine. Okay, so the next question. They're asking me to more narrowly defined the role of what this GPT is going to serve as I'm Oh, so I'll have you use the uploaded PDFs as this as the foundation for your edits any questions? So I can upload the PDF here. Or I can go to that configure tag and I can also tab and I can also I can also upload additional documents to help as well like with my blacksmith sales expert, I have like our proposal I have a document about our sales process. I have another GPT that I forgot to mention that's called the blacksmith like SEO guru or something like that. And it basically I uploaded a bunch of documents about our approach to SEO some stuff about our keyword research process, and our like philosophy behind the different steps as well as a document I created for our writers and editors. That's about let me see how to get out of that. That's about how we write about SEO to make sure that our philosophy is communicated correctly and specifically. So that's just an example of different documents that you might use to support the outputs here and to narrowly define what you want to base its answers on. Okay. One thing that's important to say is when you're uploading documents you want to make sure to kind of like give context and say like, this is how I want you to use it. And like, you know, I'm doing this, I'm uploading this. So I'm expecting you to use this as part of your output if you don't, if you don't refer to that document when you're setting it up or when you're interacting with it. It might just ignore it in some, in some use cases when I've been creating these personal GPS like that's happened where, for example, with this one, it'll make edits based on best practices, but not based on the document that I specifically wanted it to use. So that's why I used that language. And so it says, I've updated your GPS behavior to focus on our specific style guide based on the uploaded PDF. So that's great. You know, like, what options so one thing that it usually asks is like how do you want the GPT to communicate with you and I'm getting maybe ahead of myself, I'm gonna say no, that sounds good and see if it prompts me to ask about like the tone.\r\n\r\nOkay, so it's not gonna say it looks good, but what options do I have for how it communicates with me? In terms of tone of voice, again, usually asked so this is giving me some options here. Again, not usually in the way that it normally does. It kind of asked to like paragraph form versus like giving me several examples. I'm gonna say that I want it to be let's go with number three, which is encouraging and positive. I think that that's the ethos of how we edit at the box with the other things are true to um, yeah, so just for the sake of this, and you can always change this, you can always refine it. Okay, so it's updating the GPT. This is probably the last edit and then what I'll do is I'm going to grab some copy that I want it to, to edit just to show you how it comes full circle. And then I'm going to show you kind of like the back end of what it looks like. So let me grab that copy. I'm going to feed it an example of like a recent social post that we were editing and the formatting is going to be like a little bit funky here, which is fine, because this is just an example. And the blog the style guide isn't necessarily built with a focus on editing social copy, but again, it was just like a quick thing to to try. Okay, so it says it's updated it. It tells me you know what the point of it is no more adjustments needed. Let's try it out. Okay, so I'm going to show you how it works and then we'll show you the Configure and then we'll kind of end the day off with any questions. Okay. So it gives you some prompts based on what it thinks that you might ask it and you can edit this, but I'm going to say please suggest edits to the following copy, in quotes and quotations, those delimiters based on the blacksmith style guide PDF and again, it's gonna be a little sloppy looks like it didn't actually take the name of the GPT that we asked it to. So we'll we'll take a look at that too. So it's interesting depending on the prompt you give it and I've tried this a couple of times in this case, it's kind of separating it out by saying like okay, here's some of the things from the blacksmith style guide and here's like specific passages of copy and how we would change them. So that's interesting. But what I would probably prefer is that it edits the whole thing, and then it tells me what edits it made. So it's, again, it's referencing I can I can tell because I'm familiar with it, but it's referencing specific aspects of the blacksmith style guide, which is great, we know it's working. But what I'm going to ask you to do is to change the way it outputs it. Can you refine the previous output by starting with I might mess up exactly how to say this, but by starting with, like all of the copy with edits, then after words, shared the specific edits made from blog Smith style perspective, that might not be like the most effective prompt. We're just going to see what it says. Okay, yeah, it looks like it's understanding. Nature. The copy here is an important I just want to show you how something like this could work for your purposes. Okay, so this is what I wanted it it refined the copy first and then it told me what it refined and why. Um, so let's look at this Configure tab. So yeah, for whatever reason, it didn't add the name. That that it prompted me and asked me to so I'm gonna go ahead and add that and you can see it up here. You can see this description. You can see the instructions based on some of the things that we talked about when we were creating it. You can make changes to these conversation starters we might even say like what like other conversation starters, would you suggest using freelist UPC code? I'm just curious and I don't know what to do. You can see the PDF that we uploaded and I can upload more files. You can add additional capabilities. I think by default the web browsing and Dolly image generation is implemented for many of you today who deal with code, this code interpreter might be useful. And then AI actions is something that I've started to play around with but don't fully understand but there's a way that you can connect your personal GPT to Zapier so that for example, it could reference data and other apps. So for my blog, Smith sales GPT I'm trying to create an AI action that allows it to reference our air table CRM so that you could ask it questions about a certain lead or certain portfolio projects and things like that. So once I get that implemented, it's going to be so cool. Okay, so it's giving me some ideas for these conversation starters that are a little generic, but I could probably refine them further. I think the last thing to talk about is how you can either keep this to yourself or share it with other people. I think that these drafts are automatically saved. So if you X out of here before clicking Save, I believe it will still exist, but don't quote me on that. From there you can decide you know, if you want to, if you want to keep it to yourself if it's you know something that's for your own personal use cases, or if you want to share it with your team or if you want to share it with like the wider world like maybe you create a chatbot for your industry that other people could benefit from that you want to share. So, in most cases, probably anyone with the link is a good bet, if you ever intend intend to share it with other people. Okay, so let me jump back to my slides really quick. We're going to end off the day here. So here we go. me pull this back up. Um, okay, this is the link to grab the style guide if you want to use that to replicate what I did today. You can also grab that from the side being like um, I'll just say one more time. My book writing for humans and robots. It was the number one best seller in the SEO category. So if SEO and content is something that you want to invest more time and learning about then I would highly recommend my book. You can grab the first chapter for free on the books website, and you can grab the book on Amazon in both print and Kindle format. I'll give one more reminder for our live content UX audit tomorrow. I'd really love to help you workshop, your content, help you come up with ideas for making it even stronger and more effective. So you can use this link to do that and that will happen at the end of day two. And then, you know, outside of today, if you have any questions about the things that we're talking about, you can either email me Maddie at the blogspot.com or on Twitter, aka ex im at Mad Yasmin and then yeah, we'll end the day with any questions that have come up since going over some of this GPT stuff.\r\n\r\nYeah, great stuff. Thanks Maddie. You know, the custom GP tees are really interesting. And it's it's also not only for your own business, but also working for clients. It's an opportunity to really, it's, it's a service you can provide. We have a boy for example, that has a ton of they're an educational nonprofit and they have a ton of PDFs like 800 and an educational topic that they deal with and so we're investigating, what would it take to put those PDFs in there and then have a bot that you could query the entire library to find an answer to something right. It's just super, super useful. Yeah.\r\n\r\nOne one note on that Nathan is chat GPT. So they have a limitation of you can upload 20 Total documents but they don't say how large or small those documents have to be so OneNote for like anybody who's trying like this is something that came up with that Catan bot I was trying to make. You can combine the documents if need be.\r\n\r\nYeah. And chat CPT if you have a large library like that it might not be the best tool it sometimes there are a bunch of third party tools. I mean, if you go on App Sumo, every day, there's a new one that somebody's chat bot or whatever, but find one that the UI that you like and a lot of those don't have those limitations. Like they have a separate database that they're looking at with total sort of magic they've created. I don't know, I don't understand it. But anyway, yeah. So folks, a couple of questions stacked up there. If you have a question, add that to the zoom q&a, and we'll dive into it. So first question from Doug. Maddie, how does SEMrush or SEMrush fit into the landscape of content writing tools? What overlaps or complements with phrase? Sure,\r\n\r\nyeah. So I think of something like SEMrush or Ahrefs is being a great all in one. SEO tool. So people use it for more than content although content is like an important facet of them versus something like phrase or query scope is really just about content and just about content optimization, or, you know, in the case of like phrase and market Muse also generating content is the use case. But SEMrush I have I'll be honest, I have more experienced with a traps but they both they're both very similar and we actually use SEMrush like the keyword researchers and strategists on my team, we use SEMrush these days. But it is it is the tool that if we're comparing it to phrase and query scope, that's the tool that we use to define our primary keyword. It's before we run those reports. It's a tool that we use to come up with some secondary keywords. It's the tool that we use to identify feature snippet opportunities, we can do competitor research on it. You can do backlink tracking on it. You can audit your website. So I mean, it just it just serves such a bigger overall SEO use case. But there are many very useful content optimization tools. And so it's kind of like a higher budget tool than any of the ones that I've mentioned, but it will serve you know, many of your SEO purposes even outside of content. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nOkay, questions from Eddie. Eddie is writing tech blogs. I see now my keyword content from Reddit is ranking very good. I doubt Reddit content is helpful since usually people have vague answers to questions. What do you think about that?\r\n\r\nIt's an interesting question and I think I'm gonna take the opposite stance. I do think that Reddit content is helpful. There's something about people being like anonymous on the internet that like makes the truth come out. People feel like a little I guess like Freer with the information that they that they volunteer. And so I mean, you have to take it with a grain of salt because they're anonymous. They also might have an agenda that is not clear versus somebody who's coming out and saying, you know, I work for one of these tools or, you know, these are the clients they serve. And so that's like, why this relates to what I'm talking about. But I will say that sites like Reddit, Reddit and Quora are really interesting for learning more about your audience, learning about the things that like keep them up at night and so that's why they rank so high is because they are a wealth of information. They're not, you know, they're not using like the traditional methods to optimize their sites, but they are benefiting from all this unique user generated content because they've created communities. So, yeah, I mean, I don't I don't know exactly how to answer the question. I guess I'm kind of like answering around it, but I think that Reddit is a useful resource in general. I don't know that it can be counted on like aI right where Yeah, I can be confidently incorrect certainly. So to can, Reddit user is but they bring up some really interesting points that are worth investigating. So as long as if you are using it as a reference that you fact check, or you know, if you're I guess if the question is like, How can I outrank Reddit the the answer is like, I don't know.\r\n\r\nYou just said maybe Reddit pays Google. And honestly, we just did a story about this a week ago in our news roundup. It is actually Google who has purchased the rights to all of read its content. Alright, Gemini. Yeah, that just came out. The story last week was an unnamed AI but it's since come out that it's Google has purchased it right. So who knows? Yeah, Google does. Yeah. Doug says here's my favorite prompt. I add this to help me brainstorm chat. GPT add this to the end of your prep, ask me five questions that will improve the response you'll be giving me I use that too. It's really helpful. I\r\n\r\nlove that I I haven't considered that and that's why I think like discussions like this are so useful. Like, we can all learn so much from each other. I learned something new about this every day. For\r\n\r\nsure. The AI world is moving rapidly. And we were Mata you and I were talking earlier just we did an AI workshop here back in October, and there's so much that's new and better and different, even just in the last few months. It's pretty crazy. All right. That brings us to the end of questions. Tomorrow, we're talking about a UX content UX. So give us one more time an overview of what we're going to talk about tomorrow and we'll start to wrap things up here.\r\n\r\nOh, tomorrow. I was looking at the comments and somebody had mentioned let's say Ben had mentioned that to get them to use the right color and the GPT to be very specific, use hex color code when so I got distracted but um, okay, so tomorrow we're going to focus on the content reader experience. Content UX, another way of thinking about it. So we're going to talk a little bit about things like things that Google has said or page experience signals, so things that are like tangible that you can optimize around within your design to help your ranking on Google. And my philosophy when it comes to SEO is that there's three pillars, there's like the content and the things that you can affect on your own page. There's the website structure, so that's going to be a lot of what we talk about tomorrow. And then there's things like Off Page signals like backlinks, which we won't talk about, but you know, we can always have a discussion later or, you know, I'm sure Nathan will bring on somebody who talks about that at some point, too. So yeah, we'll talk about these like website signals, these page experience signals. We'll talk a little bit about website structure, things that you can do to create a better experience for your users, even if it's not necessarily something that Google takes into consideration for ranking and some things that they do. And then we will talk about auditing, you know, with practical tools and specifics, your contents, the nature of your contents UX. I'll tell you how to like run your own content UX audit, whether that's with tools or with people in person. And so that'll be that'll be kind of the nature of what we talk about tomorrow. Trying to bring that discussion full circle from the specific things that you can use to how to like measure if you're using them effectively, and then we'll end the day with a content UX audit from the things that ideally, y'all have submitted. So if you haven't, please use that form that we've linked to in that slide. Being link, and then I'll pick a couple for us to go over tomorrow.\r\n\r\nYep, very good. And that link is there in the chat. Once again, make sure you submit a URL that was a lot of fun last year when we did that very info wise. Yeah. So I will take care of that. Tomorrow. That's yeah, day two. All right. Maddie, good stuff today. As always, we'll have the recording up if anybody wants to go back and replay if you came in late. It'll be up in about an hour or so soon as it renders. And I will see you back here tomorrow, one o'clock central time for day two of content workshop. Have a good night. See you then.\r\n\r\nHear but as you're coming in, we're just asking what was your biggest takeaway from day one? You can sound off there in the chat. I'm also dropping in the new link bundle, I can type correctly. There is a new slide being linked, so make sure you grab that new one. It is updated on the replay page. But make sure you grab that new link because a few changes have been made since yesterday. That will let you follow along better.\r\n\r\nSome last minute tool suggestions. Ah,\r\n\r\nlove it. Love it all. Right, catch. Working for everybody now. Just about a minute and a half to go and again, we'd love to hear from you in the chat on what your biggest takeaways from day one we're. As we are waiting just another minute or so to get started. Also the link there for the live content UX audit is on the screen because we have a slide or two left if you'd like to submit your site or page or something for a content audit. It'll be a friendly review with with some good help to help you improve some of your language. So use that link. The link is in the link bundle in the chat. There on the screen. We do have a couple of slots if you'd like to participate in that. So Vivian, if you look at the replay link in the link bundle the academy link there is a PDF download link on that on the on the replay page. And that is the new updated slides. Yep, so that's all there ready to go on the replay page or you can view them on slide being right now. Yeah, not too many changes. New tools. All I was new to was fun tools. Yeah. Alright folks, about 30 seconds to go. Glad everybody's back for day two. Again, our check in question. Let us know in the chat. What your biggest takeaway from day one was? Particularly did you have you used any new GPT prompts since we played around with that yesterday, or has anybody taken the dive and made your own custom GPT based on\r\n\r\nor have any ideas for things that you want to try when you have time? Yeah, I could. I could use some more ideas myself. Yeah.\r\n\r\nFor sure. All right, folks. It is three minutes after someone to start our recording and we will get underway. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everybody, wherever you happen to be welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here and joined again by MADI. Azzaman for day two of the content accelerator for 2024 Welcome back. Maddie. Glad you're here.\r\n\r\nThank you so much for having me. Again. It's exciting to dig into some of these topics.\r\n\r\nAbsolutely. So we had a lot of fun yesterday talking about some AI stuff and some great principles for creating great content. And today we're looking more at the the user side of consuming content right what are we going to talk about today? Exactly.\r\n\r\nYeah, I think that you can think of today as being a way to practically test your content, whether that's with other people, whether that's with tools, understanding how it measures up against some of the guidelines that Google has shared, that are necessary for ranking, specifically when they have to do with the user experience. So we're going to kind of attack this from all angles. And, you know, hopefully it'll leave today with some really tangible tools to help you understand like, does your content provide a great reader experience? Or are there things that you could do to improve it?\r\n\r\nYeah, very good. And we do still have this content UX link on the screen. If you have not filled that out and you would like to there's still a slot or two left for the second hour, we'll do some live content review. So grab that now. The link is there in the chat as well. A couple little bits of housekeeping and we'll turn it back over to Matty as usual. Ask your questions using the zoom q&a And we'll take those questions at the end of each hour today. break in the middle as usual. One note is that the slides have been updated since yesterday. So in the chat is the new slide being link. And if you want the PDF download, just go onto the replay page with the link there and the link bundle and you can download the PDF there as well that has all the new updates on the slides. So with that, I'm going to disappear Maddie, let's get started.\r\n\r\nLet's do it. So yeah, if if you want to submit something for this live content UX audit, ideally, it's like a page on your website, not not something like a PDF, because we want to look at how the content interacts with design. And like Nathan said, you know, it's a friendly review. We're not like looking for issues. We're just looking for things that you could do to perhaps improve the content experience. Get another set of eyes on it. And it's just a practical way to apply some of the tools suggestions I'm going to give you so with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. We're going to start today by talking about Google guidelines for what makes up a great user experience, especially when it has to do with content and specifically we're going to talk from the perspective of Google's quality rater guidelines. And then after I go through a couple specifics there, we're going to talk more broadly about Google's page quality signals. I think that's what it's called. I haven't labeled in the next slide but things that have to do with what they've told us influenced ranking high and relevant search, you know, all else equal, if you have great content, what aspects of your website design, you know, must be present of your website structure must be present in order for you to rank high and relevant search. So the first part is a little bit more I would say qualitative. And then the second part is going to be a little bit more quantitative. So the learn more link is for an article I wrote a while back for Search Engine Journal. This was specifically focusing on aspects of Google's quality rater guidelines that have to do with the user experience. And so I think it was a couple of years ago now I read through the entire quality rater guidelines, which if you're interested in SEO, and user experience, I would highly recommend at least giving it a skim. It's kind of hard to do because it's like 175 pages, but there's some really good nuggets in there about how Google looks at search, how they judge quality of content, how they determine if a page of a search result meets the needs of the searcher who's looking for it. And so the quality rater guidelines what's worth mentioning is that to some extent you have to take with a grain of salt because this is not something that directly influences rankings. What happens is human quality raters that they hire read through these guidelines, they're tested on them to make sure that they understand what Google is looking for and then they manually rate different website results based on a certain query. And so what happens is that Google gets that information. It helps them you know, refine their algorithm in terms of the general direction they want to take with it, but it doesn't necessarily result in any manual adjustments for whatever websites they're ranking. It's it's more of like a research process. So that's, that's what the quality rater guidelines are. They're a tool to help Google research what the web looks like right now in order to make decisions about how they want to adjust their algorithm for the rest of us. But all that being said, Whenever Google gives us information, whenever they volunteer details about how they look at search, and how they define quality, and like a great user experience, I think that we would be wise to take note of that if it is in fact our goal to rank in relevant search. And I think at the end of the day, whether it is or not, I think Google tries to maintain a high standard for quality. I think that it's their philosophy, philosophy, that content is king, you know that that good? Content is important. And so again, whether search is your goal or not, it's worth it's worth at least like listening to what they have to say. And so, for your benefit, I've tried to break down some of the most important things from the quality rater guidelines specifically having to do with the topic that we are discussing today. So the first thing that they mentioned or they they talk about the quality rater guidelines has to do with interstitials. So back in, it was either 2017 or 2018. They made an update to their algorithm, and they told us about it is again one of those rare cases where they're just upfront. And they said that like if you're using popups say, for example, to gather somebody's email address, or you know, it maybe you're on an E commerce site to advertise the sale, something that obscures the content that you have to interact with you either put your email in, or you have to click the X button, you know, something like that, that you have to interact with in order to use the content on the page. They call that an intrusive interstitial. And so what happened was it really it really resulted in a big change for how people use conversions, I guess on their website, so you know, bloggers and people who do affiliate marketing and of course, yeah, ecommerce, and businesses trying to get email subscribers all had to fundamentally change the way that they approach gathering email addresses. And I'm going to talk a little bit later about what you can do instead, that doesn't violate Google's guidelines. But again, from Google's perspective, they say that interstitials make it difficult to use the main content of the page. And so when they're talking in the quality rater guidelines, they frequently refer to MC main content, which is like what the searcher is ultimately going to your website for and so you could say generally speaking, that they're trying to defend the experience of the main content. And to like, skip ahead to the point here about ads, when they talk about ads, that Google recognizes that and they say this in the quality rater guidelines, that ads don't automatically equate to low quality, they understand that ads are in many cases, the reason a site can continue existing. But that being said, there is like a right and a wrong way to go about implementing them. And so they say the too many or like large ads hurt the user experience. And then that case, the human quality raters should assign that site that result, a low rating. So again, you want to think in terms of the main content is the ad obscuring it? Is it taking away from it? If not, you're probably okay. But it's just good. To keep in mind that Google's not saying no, you can't have ads. You just have to be thoughtful about it. And when I did some of these UX audits in the past, like the ones that we're going to do later today, I did a couple of for some members of the Denver bloggers club one of the local clubs that I've been involved with here. And one thing I noticed about a lot of them was you know that they'd have an ad in the sidebar, they'd have an ad in their footer. They'd have an ad a couple times throughout their blog content, and it was probably Google Adsense that they were using, or some other ad network. Like it. And again, it's like I understand that you're monetizing your site using ADS. But at the end of the day, it's probably working against you because people if you were to look, you know into the data like the scroll depth and the time on page and things like that, using Google Analytics, for example. You probably see that on those pages that are very heavy with ads that people abandon the page pretty quickly because it's just a bad reader experience. So to go back a point here, clickbait Google has a couple of pieces of guidance in the quality rater guidelines about that specifically.\r\n\r\nGenerally speaking, a good page sets expectations or good title sets expectations for wherever it's leaving you. And so clickbait is something that it can certainly be effective and getting attention and getting clicks, but it can be a very unsatisfying experience if it doesn't do something to deliver on the promise made in the title. Um, the Google specifically says that clickbait headings detract from high main content. So, you know, that's something that they're specifically looking for and guiding people to, to comment on. And they say also that like every page should have a page title. It shouldn't just be presented without buttoning it up that way. And that title should describe page content. So again, it's a balance. Writing a good title, I think is very much in art. But it shouldn't be misleading. That's that's the key here. Um, so the last point here is that when it comes to creating content, you want the answer to your query to be pretty prominent in the results. You don't want people to click through and then have to dig to find that. And Google has a couple of different SERP features, I would say where they're trying to, you know, first of all, answer this within search so that you don't click through, which is a problem for us content creators, but it's also perhaps an opportunity when we think about things like a Featured Snippet, which is just that sort of box that shows up above any other search results and it's usually summarizing kind of like the nature of what that person is looking for what Google thinks that person is looking for. There's other things like Google will index parts of a page and link to that specific part and highlight it you probably noticed that yourself when doing search and looking for something very specific. And so that's something that they do, it's not, to my knowledge, it's not something that you can necessarily optimize for. It's it's their methodologies of indexing and surfacing content. But the example that they gave in the quality rater guidelines was something about like somebody searching Abraham Lincoln's birthday. And when somebody clicked through like it was present on the page, but it wasn't prominently answered. And so in that case, they were instructing the human quality rater to give that like a not as good rating for meeting the needs of the searcher. So yeah, I mean, definitely, that's, that's kind of most of what I'm going to say about the quality rater guidelines. But I really think it is a very interesting document and especially if you look at the examples they give in terms of how they're making those determinations. There's a lot of little nuggets of truth and we also have a blog post on the blacksmith website that digs into this even outside of like the user experience sort of and like design focus. So if you want another take on that then definitely check that out. We just went in and updated it recently. So let's talk more broadly now about some search signals from Google things that Google has told us about the page experience and you know, importantly, I think how to how to like measure that, quantitatively. Google, we talked a little bit about helpful content yesterday and that algorithm update which was the year a year and a half ago, something like that. Google has been has said that a good page experience is a requirement. For creating what they define as helpful content. So you know, all these algorithm updates are designed to support Google's mission, you know, the way that they look at content quality and things like that, of course, they all you know, more or less feed into each other, but I think it's worth mentioning that like that is an aspect of having helpful content. Alright, so we're gonna start with what is collectively known as the core web vitals so the core web vitals, this algorithm update, or Google announcing this page signal? came about? I want to say it was 2021. So they've been around for a while. And interestingly, and what we'll go over is they have changed slightly since coming out. But the idea here was to give people these these three specifically, page signals, were to give people more tangibility around how to measure the the page experience. Because up until that point, it was a little bit innocuous, it was hard to conceptualize, in terms of knowing like where you actually rank according to Google's own way of looking at it. So the first page signal of the quarter web vitals is the largest Contentful paint, which is a facet of page loading, loading speed. And so their definition is that it reports the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport relative to when the page first started loading. So if we think about I think most of these core web vitals are more or less referring to like above the fold, like what you see before you scroll, it's like that first impression that a person has with your website and most designs, most tools that you use to optimize loading and things like that, typically are set up so that the rest of the page loads later but you want you know what's visible initially to load quickly and first so that people can start interacting with it, and then it gives time for the rest of the page to load. So another way of thinking about this is that this signal takes note of the largest element on every web page and measures its total loading. Time. So maybe this is an image, maybe it's video, you know, typically at some, I would say some sort of media thing, but it could be your theme in general, it could be a very slow loading plugin. So these are all things that you'd want to keep in mind in terms of optimizing this particular factor. And when I say I guess, like the theme and plugins, it's like the output of them that you would implement on your page. So okay, so how do you get a good largest Contentful paint so according to Google, whatever this largest element is, is about 2.5 Seconds or Less of loading time and you have a little bit of wiggle room here, before it gets to, you know, this like poor area, but you'll notice that it's not a super long time. And I think that this particular man measurement here, it relates to something that Google's said before and shared in their own documentation, which is that, you know, the majority of people bounce if a website doesn't load within three seconds or less. I'm sure that that guidance has changed over time because that's a dated stat. But it still goes to show that we're kind of like within that guideline, with this particular measurement of a particular element on a page. So the next one is first input delay, and this is actually what it was. This has since been updated. And I'm going to show you an example of what this looks like. But let's let's talk about like the original intent of it and then what it has become. So first input delay is a measure of interactivity. It measures the time from when a user first interacts with the page to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction. So that sounds like gibberish. Basically, the lower a website's fid score, the more promptly it starts processing users clicks and swipes again, interactivity like how long does it take for somebody to actually be able to use a page? So this measurement per Google, a good fit is 100 milliseconds or less. So that's what it was right? But what is it now? So this GIF kind of shows an example of poor responsiveness versus good responsive responsiveness from Google's perspective, but probably from all of us, as users as well and looking at it you you probably have been in this position before where like, you click on something and then there's this little bit of a delay before you are actually able to interact with it. And so Google essentially took took this concept that they had initially defined as a core web vital and added some color to it, I guess. And so the new measurement is that it's, it's below or at 200 milliseconds. That so up from I think, what was it 100 before so they're giving you a I guess a little bit more time to create interactivity here. And just so you know, this new measurement is actually not fully unveiled yet, but it will be as of March. 12th. That's when this takes effect and takes over. So they say that, you know, some interactions will actually take longer than others. But when it comes to especially complex interactions, you want to be able to quickly present some initial initial visual feedback so that the user knows that something is happening\r\n\r\nthe time until the next payment is the earliest opportunity to do this. So the intent is not to measure like every eventual effect of the interaction, but the time in which the next interaction is being blocked. So you essentially want to delay you want to if you are delaying some visual feedback, then you might be giving users the impression that the page isn't responding to their actions, which is ultimately a bad user experience, right. So the goal of this new measurement is to ensure the time from when a user initiates an interaction until the next frame is painted in the shortest time as possible, for all or at least most of the interactions the user make. So it might seem like a small distinction between the first input delay and the interaction to Next paint but I guess if we were to summarize them, the first input delay is really focusing on that initial interaction. And the interaction to Next paint is focusing on the difference between interactions. I think that's one way to look at it. Okay, so then the last core web vital is related to visual stability. And it's called cumulative layout shift. And so their definition Google Developers definition is that it measures the sum total of all individual layout shifts scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan. of the page. Okay, but what does that mean? So Visual stability means that a web page remain stable throughout the users visit. It means that text isn't suddenly moving as new elements load or shifting other elements of the page and I think the the unfortunate end result of when this is bad, is when it makes the user click a link or perhaps a buy button or something like that, unintentionally, they were trying to click something but because of something shifting after it loaded, it pushed them somewhere else. And again, this is probably something where either something comes to mind where that's happened to you or like, the next time it does, then you'll be like, oh, yeah, that was the cumulatively out shift the site is getting, it probably has a pretty bad score for that. Um, so with the core web vitals, visual stability became more of a priority. And you really have to have very minimal minimal instability in order for your pages to be considered for ranking high in a relevant search engine results page. So those are the core lead vitals, that's probably the newest addition to these page signals that relate to the content experience, but we're also going to go over some of the old like, you know, tried and true important things that have to do with page experience, such as mobile friendliness. I mean, this is something this is probably one of the first big things that Google told us was important for ranking, high and relevant search. Besides maybe page load, I think Page Speed like performance and mobile friendliness, like these are things that kind of happened around the same time in terms of a Google like, came out and said, like, you must prioritize these if you want to rank. So Google used to be a desktop first indexing property. But you know, as more and more people started using their mobile devices, you know, the iPhone came out and so now suddenly, everybody had a computer in their hand. And then another thing that's probably worth considering too, is like a lot of people in developing countries like they might not have a desktop or like a laptop computer, but most people have a mobile phone at this point. And so Google now operates off of the idea, or off of the principle, I guess, of mobile first indexing. So if your website is not optimized properly for mobile responsiveness for mobile devices, then that is going to hurt it's going to greatly hurt your ability to rank and relevant search and your desktop site could look perfect. It can rank perfectly in terms of all these other factors that Google tells us about. But if your mobile site is off, it's it's going to affect your desktop rankings as well. So, you know, going into all of the specifics of what's mobile friendly is kind of outside the scope of what we're going to talk about today. But I mean, it's things like making sure that your text is readable. It's making sure that your images are, you know, visible and processable that they don't get skewed strangely. It's you know, thinking about some of those core web vitals and like how elements interact with each other like our buttons too close together so that people are hitting the wrong thing. So all these things are are considerations for making your website mobile friendly. And I think you know, with the way that things like page builders, builders for WordPress work, the way that people design themes for WordPress. This is this is like very much top of mind for everyone who's designing for WordPress. So it's a lot easier to implement now versus perhaps when this update was first released into the world. So Safe Browsing is something that I they've actually taken out of what they call these like page experience factors, like I don't know if it's an official one anymore, it was in the past. And maybe it's because now we have HTTPS as an additional factor that's kind of related but I think it's still worth mentioning this from a content experience factor. So Safe Browsing is just that you can use a website that is free of malware, you know, that you can be like, reasonably sure that like malware isn't present, you're not going to get it you're not going to interact with it, and that it's not you know, affecting the output of whatever site it could be installed on. And so in order to protect yourself against this, there's different tools you could use. wordfence is a customer of mine, so I'm going to talk about them and I think that their tool and their team is great. They have a lot of cool security researchers and cybersecurity experts on their team. So they're very on top of like any new things that come out, but they have this product called wordfence care where they'll go in they'll identify them all where they'll clean it up for you and we'll share best practices for how to avoid it in the future and you know, additional steps that you can take. So I do think that you need some sort of tool on your website in order to prevent, you know, the worst effects of malware. And I guess the other thing that I would mention too, is to like always have backups of your site, because malware can really mess things up. And so that's that's like your first line of defense. So HTTPS also has to do, I guess, essentially the same idea of like Safe Browsing, maybe from a slightly different perspective. And so Google again said, you know, we're not going to rank websites that do not have HTTPS in place compared to those that do. You know, after that update happened, and that was a slightly more recent update, but it was still a few years ago, and so HTTPS in order to implement that, essentially, you just install an SSL certificate. And to be fair, there are different types of SSL certificates. Most web hosts have that functionality, where you can fairly easily implement one and then it creates either automatically or there might be some manual steps. You have to take where it it redirects your existing HTTP URLs to the HTTPS version. So that's important to make sure that that's working. Otherwise, it's going to break your site but again, most web hosts have a fairly straightforward process for implementing this and a free ssl certificate or I should say an included one with your hosting plan, but depending on your needs, you might need a different one. So that's something that you have to explore based on your industry like, like E commerce might have a higher level of SSL certificate needed, but for you know, the general small business owner designer, things like that, probably what your web host has is good enough. And so to be able to see if HTTPS is working within Chrome specifically and I'm sure many other web browsers but but chrome because it's a product of Google. There's a little button next to your domain name in the URL bar, and you can click it and see that the SSL certificate is working and that the connection is secure and I would say that SSL certificates in HTTPS are important for people who are interacting with the website. I mean, you kind of you kind of have to have it no matter what in order to rank but they're the purpose of it is that if somebody were to be giving their sensitive information, you know if they're on an E commerce site, and they're, you know, putting in their address or their credit card number or you know, a banking website and people are logging in, and you know, once they log in, that user has access to their bank accounts and their money and things like that. That's kind of the like, ideal use case of HTTPS is to protect the people who are entering that sensitive information to make them feel safe on your website.\r\n\r\nWe talked about this earlier, having no intrusive interstitials so these are the pop ups the image you see is something that Google shared when they announced this ranking signal to show what not to do, essentially where these ads are obscuring access to the main content. You shouldn't have to click in order to get to the main content. So what do you do instead? Here are a couple of examples from the blacksmith website. So the first one is we have a floating bar that basically is at the top of the content and then just pushes it down. And in this case, I used it to add like reminder about my book, a button to click to buy it you could use it to get email signups. I think another great example is like E commerce. If you're having a sale or if you want to say, you know, free shipping on orders over $50 or something like that. I think that's a really excellent use of a floating bar. It's like what's the most important thing happening for this business right now or use it to collect email signups? Then there's also next to it is a welcome mat, which is designed you know, very similar lead to how an email popup would look but the difference is that it's like embedded on the page. So it's not getting in the way of the content. It's part of the content. You can choose whether or not you interact with it beyond scrolling. Another version of that is a content upgrade. So on certain blog posts, let's say that you have additional resources, maybe you've turned that blog post into a checklist or there's a certain template that you're talking about in the blog posts, and people you want to incentivize people to share their email in order to access it. So having a content upgrade, which again is like an embedded version, at the end of your blog post about that specific resource is a totally valid way to see get emails that's not going to violate this intrusive interstitial guidance from Google. The other thing that you can think about is using email popups, but delaying when they pop up. So that kind of gets around Google's guidance. You could use what's called like exit intent technology. So when somebody scrolls for the Back button, or the, you know, X in the browser, then what happens is an email popup gets deployed where you know, it asks for somebody if they want to subscribe, for example. You can also use that same idea based on things like scroll depth, if somebody gets to a certain depth on a page, you know, that tends to indicate interest. It's given them a chance to interact with the content. Or you could have a deploy on certain pages. You ideally after they've seen other pages, so maybe after they've gone to a certain number of pages that deploys. So there's there's a couple of different ways to think about it that don't get in the way of Google's guidance. And we do have a page I forgot to link it here. But we do have a blog post on the blacksmith website that goes into each of these things and different use cases and things like that a little bit dated, but it's all the same advice. Okay, so now that we've talked about Google's quality raters guidelines, which is indirectly related to search rankings, and Google's page experience signals, which are directly related to search rankings, I wanted to talk a little bit about website structure and design I would say, especially as it relates to ranking high in relevant search, but certainly how it impacts the content user experience. So it's kind of like a mix of the things that we're talking about, but expanding on them as well. So the first like factor that you want to optimize your website around your content in general, is crawlability. And when I talked about crawlability, I'm talking about Google's ability to like fully index all the resources on your site. Is there anything that is getting in the way of Google doing that, like, for example, errors in your sitemap, like maybe you're unintentionally excluding certain pages? Maybe you know, you haven't created enough connections between your pages for Google to understand how they relate to each other. And so a couple of guidelines here, you know, first of all, is that when you're creating content, it's important to add external links. Think of these as your ability to add context to prove claims these are things that you know, you can also use let's say that you're writing about a topic and there's a related topic and it doesn't really make sense for you to cover it in your content. Like maybe it would just make your your piece go on too long. But it's something that people might want to learn more about. So you find a relevant resource from a trusted site and you link it External links are great. I mean, you might, I guess, worry. Like, is that going to lead people away from my page? You know, is there any like negative impact of that? I think that's just kind of the way that content works, that people are always looking for more information. You can set it so that it opens in a new window so that they're still on your page while they explore that content. But yeah, as the best practice, have an external linking policy, it makes sure it's to good quality content and I think that, like with this next point, it helps Google understand what your content is about. So besides external resources, you also want to incorporate internal links. This just helps Google understand the relationships between the different pieces of content on your website, ultimately, what your website is about. It's helping with that crawl ability and that index ability. It's helping Google as robot to understand, you know, these different connections. So again, it's important really to have these two types of links and really every page and relate certainly every piece of content. And then, the flip side of all this is like as you create content, things are going to change. External links might become broken. Internal links, you might change, you know, like for example, the URL slug of them, and they might become broken. So I guess my first tip is to make sure that you have some sort of redirect solution implemented, there are different plugins that you can use to automatically if you change the URL slug of something, then it creates a redirect so anything that already links to a will be updated to that new link. But it's also having a process for like auditing your content to look for these problems. And one of the tools that I'm going to show you later today will help make that a little bit easier. But it's also just a matter of like I don't know, quarterly at least, or depending on the size of your website, quarterly, maybe every six months or so, having just a process to kind of go through what exists and if you need to fix anything. So we're talking a little bit about URL structure and I will say when it comes to creating content, you want to be pretty sure of the URL you want to use before you publish it. Because it is a factor in ranking, and you can use redirects, but it's kind of hard to explain them in the context of what we're talking about today without getting deep into SEO, but it's just generally like to trust me that it's a best practice to not mess with the URL after you publish, you know, after it gained some traction in search and things like that. But it happens and that's why you use redirects. But that being said, you could at least start with best practices. So the first thing is to incorporate your target keywords in that slug. So like yesterday, I showed you some tools we use for an article we wrote about AI detectors, so let's just pretend the keyword is like aI detector tools. You'd want that to be the slug. Without really like any extra information. You want to keep your URLs as succinct as possible so that Google doesn't have to take a lot of extra time to parse them. And so what that means is within within WordPress, you can customize your URL structure for blogging. And you can do things like add categories to the URL, you can add the date to the URL. My suggestion is to not do that the only reason that you might want to add like a subdirectory within your blog content or some other specific category, like if you have case studies or something like that, is because you can use that subdirectory to group pieces of content together to measure them in like Google Analytics GA for these days. But that's kind of an advanced use case and that's only if you plan on actually like doing a deep dive into the analytics. From an SEO perspective, I highly recommend against it. It should be your website url.com forward slash keyword. And when you're implementing those keywords, you're going to want to add a dash between each word so if the keywords AI detector tools, it's a i dash detector dash tools\r\n\r\nfor certain things like articles, a and words like the things that aren't, you know, specific keywords generally speaking, you can drop those when you're creating the slug. We have some guidelines on the style guide that I shared with you yesterday on the bugs with website that's also linked in the slides so or the PDF as well. So if you if you want to dive into more SEO and URL and keyword best practices and definitely check out our guidance on that. Um, duplicate content is worth mentioning from this perspective of the user experience mostly in terms of how Google would interpret that. So generally speaking, duplicate content is like you publish a blog on your website and then a situation that could come up that seems innocuous enough is that you know, somebody in your industry says oh my god, I loved your blog posts on whatever, I'd love to republish it on my site. And you say okay, and then maybe this site, you know, has more authority than you and maybe they have a better approach to SEO, maybe they've just been around longer. And what could end up happening is that even though you were the original publisher, and Google does take that into consideration, but this other site may outrank you with your own same content. So that's duplicate content. It could be a whole blog post, it can be an excerpt of it, it could be like a piece of it. So duplicate content, generally speaking, like try to avoid that. You can add a tag to your link called the canonical tag, which basically points back to the original content and says, This is the person this is the site that originally published it, even though we have now published it here. And so Google takes that into consideration, but they really make their own choices about who they're going to rank and so that that's not the be all end all way of making sure that the original publisher ranks highest in search, all else equal. Um, with all that being said, in my experience, you can typically republish things like your blog content on mediums like LinkedIn and medium you know, original copy without making changes. As long as you wait, I would say at least a week from the original published date to do that. This is this is my experience and that saying that it's completely scientific, the advice that I'm giving you, it's something that you should experiment with, if that's something that you're interested in, but also take note of what ends up happening and discontinue if it's getting in the way of ranking your own content on your own website. But when it comes to duplicate content, if you if you get approached by someone, you know, like the example that I gave, who wants to republish something that you wrote, what would be a better situation for you? It would be more work, but it's to say like, let me write a new version of this article, like maybe you take another stance on it, maybe you you just kind of like repurpose it in a different way. I would highly recommend against duplicating your content, either on another page on your website, such as using product descriptions that like a manufacturer provided or maybe you have, you know, two variations of something and so you're using almost the same product description or again, like the example that I gave doing it on another site, so I just wanted to add a cautionary tale for duplicate content because a it is kind of a bad user experience, but be it'll also more than likely hurt you in search without a very strategic approach. And then the last thing I want to say on this particular topic is about designing website navigation and best practices around that. So first of all, you want to use descriptive and recognizable menu item titles. And the example that I always give for this is the difference between something that's called news and something that's called blog. So in my in my experience, news is like an enterprise business that has a media arm and they're publishing their press releases and, you know, things that are relevant to their company, new product updates, things like that. Whereas blog is more articles. It's you know, the how tos. It's the list of coals. Its product lead content, for example, but it's not exclusively focused on that company's news. So it's important, I think, to match the heuristics of what your users are used to and one way that you might be able to figure this out if you're unsure is just kind of see like what the competition is doing and how they're naming their menu items. Or just ask some of your users like, Does this make sense? And we'll talk next about how to conduct a UX audit and that's something that you could do as part of it. There's this thing called the three click rule, which you may have heard about. Nielsen Norman Group actually debunked this as being like ideal or even something that you should totally consider. It's the number three is arbitrary, I guess is what I'm trying to say. But it's the idea that within three clicks, a user searching or user looking for something will find it through your website navigation without necessarily having to go to like an internal search. So well, it's arbitrary. I think it's still a good thing to keep in mind, which is just that people should be able to easily and quickly find what they need your your menu should support that. And then creating category grouping. So like for example, on our website, we have a Resources tab and it has the blog, it has some of like my YouTube content. It has our style guide. All of these are resources they have to do with like things that we're sharing with other people versus we have another tab that's about our work. And so it has case studies and like portfolio examples, and it's more focused on like Final outputs that you know, fit, you know, things that we do with certain clients. So just a couple of things to think about in terms of website navigation. I'm going to start this topic and then we'll break I think maybe in like five minutes from now, but I'll just go ahead and get this started. So let's talk a little bit now that you've learned about these different factors for how to understand user experience from, from the user's point of view from Google's point of view. Let's talk about how you can continue to make your own websites user experience better by implementing a UX audit. So UX audit, we might also call it a user tests. I think they're maybe slightly different concepts, but I'm going to use them interchangeably today. So usability testing involves observing how users interact with products like your websites. The purpose is to get a better understanding of how real people use what you've designed. And really the idea here is you want to combat any assumptions that you've made incorrectly, which is impossible for you to figure out by yourself. That's why we pull in other people. You can use your tests during just about any stage of project it doesn't have to be like the final part. It could really be during the wireframing stage. It could be you know at the midpoint it could be even after you've launched but you've added some new things. So why bother with UX audits? First of all, we're talking about it today because there's a strong relationship between the user experience and SEO. I think we've proven that by talking about specific elements of the quality rater guidelines that point to UX, as well as the page experience factors that Google's specifically told us. If you care about SEO, you should care about UX in terms of things like your page, loading your mobile responsiveness, and using things like HTTPS. To invoke privacy for your users information. It also allows you to uncover issues that might kill conversions. I mean, I think this is one of the most important use cases of a UX audit is to look for things that are getting in the way of whatever your end goal is with the website. Because we're all WordPress users here, probably most of us at least, you've probably interacted with whether it's your own design or somebody else's that where you recognize that somebody forgot to edit the demo content they've, you know, implemented it and they've gone in and made their changes. But you know, there's that hello world post they forgot to delete or there's something you know, and one of the menus, maybe the footer menu that they forgot to take out that, you know, they never actually customized and so I think UX audit would be good at surfacing that if you're if you're kind of blind to it, because you're too close to the project. And with all that being said, a UX audit helps to get out of your own head. We're all human, we're imperfect.\r\n\r\nAnd really, I mean, it's it's easy to say I think when it comes to writing content, like as much as like, I have a process for editing and looking for mistakes and things like that. Like I still use an editor whenever I write anything, because I need to get out of my own head in order to make sure that I'm not missing something important. So the same can certainly be said about about website design and doing UX audits. So at the end of the day, we all operate based on certain assumptions, but what if yours are wrong? I'll just go through another slide or two and then we'll break so in terms of picking user testers, there's a couple of different populations you could consider. And I'm also going to share a couple of different like marketplaces where you could find these people, but you can start with the people that already exist in your circle your colleagues, you know, the people that you work with, but also maybe your friends and your family members. Wow, this is a great place to start. Don't discount the impact of their own bias and desire to please you, especially if you're asking your mom for input she's probably not going to be super critical. And and you know, it's going to be more of a pat on the back then something useful. And even like people like your work colleagues, they they still may be too close to a project to provide useful feedback, but it's a good place to start. You can also recruit volunteers from your own audience. Again, they might have a bias if they really love you. They might be hesitant to give you really great feedback. But they're also probably very willing to help you make something that's better. So you can start with like your brand ambassadors, anybody who would consider themselves your biggest fans, things like that. Ultimately, though, your best bet is going to be unbiased third parties who don't know you, you know, who don't have like a stake in what you're doing. I would say ideally, if you could get a couple people from that pool and then maybe one or two people from these other pools of populations, you'll get a couple of different perspectives. And when it comes to some of the marketplaces that I'm going to show you, you can also filter by certain demographics, you know, age, gender, level of education, like whatever is important to like the target audience that you want feedback from, generally speaking, you can filter and on those people. Maybe we'll just go to the top of the hour, and then we'll and then we'll definitely break then. So how many user testers are enough for each design stage? I've mentioned a couple different populations you could pick from. This is another Nielsen Norman Group reference. They are a really great resource when it comes to anything user experience user testing and things like that. And so Jacob Nielsen wrote this column and he the column was titled Why you only need to test with five users. So that's his official recommendation is for each stage that you test five users is going to be more or less enough you're going to get marginal returns marginal new information after that point. So you know, unless you're getting wildly different things from those five user testers, you can probably stop it there. He also says that it's best to involve a larger quantity of user testers earlier on in the project if you're going to test during like the wireframing stage. Versus like, when a website's like basically ready to launch it's going to be harder to make noticeable and useful changes at that point. It's going to be kind of locked in. So I think that that makes sense. Um, so we'll just start with some of the questions that you might use. When designing usability testing, it is important to to be thoughtful about this before you start you you don't want to just like go into a blind and just, you know, like, what do you think of this website? You want to have a strategic approach if you want to get useful information? So my suggestion is to start start by defining whatever your goals are, I mean, is there something in particular that you're looking to test? Are you wanting to make sure that this design is understandable to your target demographic? Is there something that isn't currently working with the design, something that's maybe hurting conversions? So whatever your goal is, like set that intention, and the questions will come more easily after that? You want to also be asking questions about the tester and how they interact with the Internet. And there's a couple of reasons for this. So one example is like you could ask the person what kind of smartphone do you use and asking this particular question is good because it kind of gauges like their familiarity with technology like how they're going to interact with your design. Somebody who uses a flip phone, for example, is probably going to have a much different level of internet savviness and how they interact with the design versus somebody who has like the latest gadget as their device. The other benefit of this question is to especially if you're doing an in person test is to kind of relax them. It's kind of like a little bit of small talk almost so that they can ease into the test, especially if that's not something that they often do. You want to define a specific action for the user to take. So this goes back to the goals. Let's say that, you know, you have an E commerce site that you're testing and you know, there's some sort of issue with people abandoning the cart, you know, after they add some products and so maybe you want to have that person go through the action of adding something, and then starting checkout. And seeing like, where in the process, there's friction, that could be one action that you want them to take. And so at this point, you want to ask them how they go about it, have them sort of like narrate and explain as they go through each step. The more you can dig into each specific action that the user takes the more detailed insight that you'll get as to how they're actually using your website. So I think with that being said, we have a couple more questions that we could talk about, but I think now is probably a good time to let everybody take a little bit of a break. And then after that, we'll finish this discussion of how to run a UX audit. I'm going to give you a bunch of tools to use to do your own tests. yourself, essentially. And then we'll finish off with that live content UX audit. Sounds\r\n\r\nlike a good idea. No questions in the q&a right now. So let's just go and take that break. It's two o'clock. About a five minute break. Is that good? Maddie? That sounds good. All right. So let's back be back at 205 and we're quiet until then. See ya. Then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We're back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, folks, we are back and ready to begin. Let me get the recording started here. All right, folks, we're back for the final hour. Of the website content accelerator. We got a lot to talk about in the next hour, so I'm just gonna let you get right to it. Maddie. Sounds\r\n\r\ngreat. Yeah. Thanks for sticking with me so far. Excited to finish this off strong and yeah, hopefully give you some really tangible things that you can take away. For your own processes. So I'm continuing this discussion that we started about UX audits and designing them. Okay, so we talked about this. Let's go to the next point. What so I used to offer UX audits as a service when I used to be on Fiverr. It was my most popular gig by far. And the way that I structured it was I basically priced by the page. And so when you're doing a UX audit, you want to be sure to identify whichever pages are the most important, especially if you have a big site like you don't necessarily want. Just going back to the E commerce example like you don't necessarily want to audit like every single product page, especially if you're looking for trends, maybe one you know prime example of what your product pages look like maybe one category page, your homepage, your checkout flow, like if somebody had me audit an E commerce site that that tended to be kind of what it looks like. You know, it's also things like maybe more generally, your homepage, your about page service page. So it really depends on what you're trying to do. But you could ask questions in your UX audit, like, you know, what do you think this is about the page in general, or about a specific element of it? You could ask What strikes you about it, you know, you're trying to see how people are reacting to it, how they're understanding it, and then like, what would you click on first, like what, what is something that looks interactable? And how would you, you know, accomplish whatever the specific goal is. So those are ways that you could you know, further define this question. Or this idea here. And then we kind of talked about this, what do you make of specific elements? So again, if we're talking about ecommerce, maybe you have a button that's like a quick add to checkout where you don't have to go, you know, to the individual page, it just kind of pops up when you're looking at a specific category or on the homepage or something like that. And so you might want to test like, do people actually understand what the purpose of this is? So that's just one example. You know, many others that might factor into your own purposes and needs. So when it comes to designing these questions, a couple of best practices to keep in mind you know, first of all, users are generally not going to be designers. I don't think you I don't think you perhaps want them to be because you want them to look at it from a different perspective than you and so with that in mind, you want to avoid any sort of like web development or industry specific jargon in the way that you ask questions. You want to design for the average internet user, they should be able to understand what you're asking without you having to explain and clarify. I think another useful thing in general and this is this is when you ask for feedback about anything, but it's breaking up a complicated question into simpler ones. It's, it's okay, you know, to to ask a question and to ask a follow up question and to dig deeper. And that's something that we talked about yesterday when we talked about chat GBT and and getting that ideal answer that you want to get from it. Sometimes you kind of have to break the subject down and sometimes you have to add clarification later. So then, I've said this in a way but be as specific as possible when you're asking questions, you know, reference specific elements. Bring it back to the goal, if necessary. That's how you're going to get the most useful responses. So going back to that fiverr gig I was talking about, these were the questions that I asked and every order and sometimes they would ask clarifying questions after the fact. But most of the time, if I wasn't because it's fiber, and I'm sending them either some sort of like written report, or typically it would be like a video recording of me going through and doing the audit and if you work with a platform like Fiverr, or some of the other things that I'm going to mention shortly. I think it's the next slide actually. Typically, people are recording themselves interacting with your website unless you're doing an in person test, which is a different situation. But so you have to have some sort of standardized approach in that case, especially if you're offering this as a service like I did. But most of the time these questions got to the bottom of what that person was hoping to get out of the audit. And so generally speaking, I asked for the URLs for any pages they wanted me to take into account. I also told them you know, if you want me to take a quick look before starting the order to see if this is a good fit for me, you can do that. Are there any major problems that you want me to keep in mind throughout the process? So is there anything that you're noticing isn't working that you want? Me to focus on like a conversion factor? Can you briefly describe your target customer so that I could keep their perspective and focus? This is a really important one. I'm not going to fit in and perhaps you know, every user tester that you're going to work with is not necessarily going to fit that ideal target persona that represents your audience or the audience of the client that you're doing this on behalf of. But that doesn't mean that you can't adopt that persona. And again, a lot of these platforms will let you pick a user tester based on demographics. So that's probably like the best case scenario. But I think, again, you can still benefit from a plethora of different experiences. So anyway, you know, like I'm, I'm thinking of like a time where I did a user test and the target audience was, you know, generations older than me or something like that, where they're interacting with the web and they might have some access issues, you know, they might it might be harder for them to read the text if it's not big enough. Things like you know, contrast come into play between the words in the background. And so things like that, maybe it doesn't personally affect me right now. But I can still comment on that and say, you know, you told me that this was your target audience. To me like this strikes me as something that would be very difficult for them to interact with. And then the last question I asked is What important goals are you hoping that this page or these pages will achieve? So that kind of goes back to like the problem question, but I guess maybe from a more positive standpoint, and especially, you know, people use your tests at different stages, so they might not know what the problems are, but they certainly know or ideally, they have an idea of what they want that page to achieve. So these questions like very much covered what I needed to know in order to give people a satisfying UX audit after they put in their order. Okay, so how to run usability tests a couple of different ways that you could do this. A very wide range of methodologies and honestly a wide range of end results I would say, in person is like the gold standard because you're going to have the most control over the process. You're going to be able to meet with people, you're going to be able to dig in deeper to any like initial questions that you set. It's a little bit harder to do with something like Fiverr or user testing. Because there may be limitations I think with like user testing, it's kind of like you set it up ahead of time. And then you know, the user testers go through it, but you don't necessarily get to get to interface with them after the fact. And then with fiber, maybe you could do that it would probably involve making a new order. It's going to take time to get that feedback. It's not going to be as dynamic as doing it in person.\r\n\r\nIn person, it's probably going to be the most expensive in terms of like your team's time and like setting up a place for them to do this. And, you know, having some sort of incentive whether that's straight up cash or like a gift card or something like that for people's time. Another I think great option is user testing. And I was pretty sure that this platform had had changed or been sunsetted or something but I was looking at it leading up to doing this presentation and it still exists. It might exist in like a different format than it did initially did. Like I think you have to buy like a package. It's not just like one by one, for example. So I'm not super up to date on how it works now more more as to how it's worked in the past. But basically, the way that it has worked is that you specify certain tasks you want users to complete and specific questions for them to answer. And so users narrowed the process they go through until that test is complete. They have or at least had had a very large user base. So it was a great platform for giving like that exact demographic that you wanted to test. But fiber is very similar. I mean, fiber doesn't focus on user testing. To the extent that user testing does a fiber marketplace covers a wide range of services, but their usability like UX test marketplace is very large, you know, in comparison to some of their other focuses. So definitely a great place to find user testers. People start offering their services at $5. But they don't have to, that's an old fiber rule of thumb that it had to be five now people can set whatever price they want. They just have to set up their gigs in a way that makes them competitive. The way that I did it was I used to charge by the page. And then if they wanted, like a written report, that would be an extra cost in addition to the video. So it just depends on how people set up their gigs. But there's some level of standardization because people go to that market and that marketplace and they want to be able to pick you know, five people that offer something that take a look at side by side. Um, you could also do something that's not exactly going to give you all the information but it's an interesting practice, which is like recording users sessions on your website. So Microsoft has this newer tool called Clarity and it's free. And so you basically add like a little bit of JavaScript to your header. And you can see people interacting with your website, and you can see you know, how their mouse moves and how they scroll and things like that and like what they click on. Of course, unlike the user test, nobody's narrating it, there's no audio. It's literally just kind of like outside of context, how they interact with your website. So it's going to give you marginally useful information, but it's just another thing that you can use to try to troubleshoot. You know, why something isn't working, for example. And then this isn't like fully, like a way to run usability tests, but it's a like a tool that you can use or that perhaps somebody that you work with might use, which is to take screenshots and share commentary about what they're looking at. And I'm going to show you an example here. Oh, and besides clarity, when it comes to recording user sessions, you can also use a tool called Hot jar to do that as well. Okay, so this is an example and it's a little bit dated, but this is from bug herd. So bug heard is like a website feedback tool. That's another way to, to look at like what we're looking at right here. And this is something as a designer that you could use with clients. Some websites do this publicly where they have like a little thing on the side of the website that's like, Hey, do you have any feedback about this page? Or do you want to report a bug? That's, that's kind of why this exists, but I used to use it for my UX audits. I would just go through each page and then create like annotated screenshots and then I could explain export, the report that has all the pages and all my notes and things like that. So it's just a cool tool, whether you're kind of auditing your own site, you're auditing a client site, or somebody's doing it for you. So okay, from the flip side, we've talked about how to run a user test, but how can you be a good user test or maybe how can you identify one that you want to work with time and time again? First of all, it's narrating your thoughts as you have them. We've talked about this because that like stream of consciousness just, you know, noticing things and whether you really have something to say about it or not just like addressing each element on a page. And so that's kind of the next point here is is, you know, not just addressing them, but considering the impact that each page element might have. It's certainly acknowledging the perspective of your audience we talked about even if you're not a member of that target audience, how can you sort of take on that persona in order to speak on their behalf? Another thing that I used to do when I did these UX audits was share ideas for a B testing. Like I might say, you know, this is an interesting approach to your head and I wonder if you were to try this if it would, you know, get you better results and so it's it's giving them ideas, even if it's not a fully fleshed out thing, but to say like, this might not be it, but maybe you could try this. And then it's also it's not just about being like negative or pointing out what's wrong, but also acknowledging what does seem to be working. So that again, you can really like laser in and the feedback that's going to have the most impact for what they should change to resources that have really made an impact on me and how I go about content and design. First of all, is the Design of Everyday Things. This is like one of my favorite books. It's more about physical design, like product design, but there's a lot of transferable things that have to do with how we design for the web. And then don't make me think is like the quintessential resource for web usability and he's sent created, you know, multiple editions of this. There's another book, something about rocket science. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but, you know, anything that he writes like I would highly recommend. Okay, so we did break, and then I'm going to save questions for the end so we can get through the important stuff here. So I'm going to give you a couple more tools to use so that you can audit your own stuff. We're going to go through our live content UX audit, and then anytime we have left is going to be for questions. Let's get through it. Okay, so we'll start with Google tools, because again, when Google gives us information or tools, we want to listen because this is essentially how Google sees our content and how they prioritize what they rank in relevant search. So PageSpeed Insights is really a wealth of information. It provides data points from a variety of factors. And as you can see in this screenshot, currently, as of the core web vitals update, it starts with the core web vitals, so it starts from a point of this like, page experience and usability factor. They what's kind of interesting is that they have a part of PageSpeed Insights, and I'm going to show you like a fuller report when we go into the live content UX audit, but they have a piece of it that's about accessibility, but it's it's pretty bare bones. And so Nathan mentioned to me right before we started today, that Amber Hines is going to be the next workshop next month and it's going to be about accessibility. And her company equalised digital, they have a really great accessibility checker that integrates with WordPress. And so I would say that like that's probably going to be a much better tool for making judgments about if your website is accessible. Then what you're going to see on Google PageSpeed Insights and I think that that's something that is really important that you know, it's not always like at the top of our list when it comes to some of the other things that we need to do. To make our website usable, but it is really important. Whether you currently have an access issue or not at some point in your life, I'm sure you will. And now that I'm a man like this has become more obvious to me, maybe not in terms of strictly website design, but I think about like when I'm on a walk outside and previously, you know, I could just step around people's icy sidewalks that they didn't shovel or whatever, but now that I have a stroller, it's like okay, am I gonna put my kid you know, in the street. And so it's it's things like that or maybe you break your arm and now you can't interact with the web the same and so accessibility, I just wanted to like, make make the case that that is something that is so important because you your loved one, there's somebody that you know that it's going to make a difference for.\r\n\r\nGoogle used to have a tool specifically for testing the mobile friendliness of your site, and I was surprised to learn that they've actually sunset this tool. So now it's kind of a part of Google PageSpeed Insights. I think that whatever functionality was already in Google PageSpeed Insights for measuring the difference between the mobile and desktop version was kind of already there. So they basically just said, like, maybe this is like duplicating those efforts. I don't know. But it's no different. I'll just say that, that we that we use Google PageSpeed Insights to make judgments about how Google understands your website from a mobile point of view. Um, so we have the ability to measure like a snapshot of the current state of how your website measures according to the core web vitals are Google PageSpeed insight, but I also wanted to share within Google Search Console, there's this core web vitals report that measures it over time. And the most important thing, I think, to keep in mind with Google Search Console, and and also like Google Analytics. What I'm going to talk about specifically is more relevant to Google Search Console, is the fact that it tells you if you know, you become in violation of anything that's going to hurt your ability to rank and relevant search in terms of what Google tells us right in terms of the big things. And so that's why making sure that it's installed on your site on client sites is so important because it gives you notices if you're like way in violation of something, and it gives you the chance to fix it. Google Analytics so I would also recommend installing from the get go because it gathers important data that's useful that you can use to understand your page experience your content experience, but yeah, so this is just one useful report that relates to what we're talking about. This came up when I was prepping for the live audit later. Just the idea that there may be a use case for understanding what WordPress theme somebody's using. And I would say especially what plugins they're using, because both of these things can have an impact on your pages performance, which is a search signal on the loading, you know, on the interactivity, and all those those good things. So this is just one tool there's there's a bunch of them out there. But you know if if your website is experiencing any performance issues, or you just want to understand like how somebody else put their website together. I think this is a cool tool or a cool mechanism for that. I also wanted to share a general SEO audit tool, I see ranking so like H refs and SEM rush which I believe we talked about yesterday, this is another All In One SEO tool. It is not as fine tuned as the others as Ahrefs and SEMrush in terms of their keyword data, so that's why I don't use it for keyword research. They use different databases and approaches. But what I will say is their SEO auditing tool, which is like kind of the technical structure of your website, like goes head to head with any of like the big players in the market, and I'll show you exactly what that looks like. And the great thing about SEO ranking is it's a lot more affordable as an as an All In One SEO tool. And even from like the keyword research perspective, like you could use it to get most of the way there if content again isn't like your biggest focus are in and or if you weren't in a super competitive industry, it would it would do just fine. Um, a couple like editing tools. Hemingway is a great one. It's pretty simplistic isn't the right word, but it focuses on just a couple of things. It focuses on just a couple of factors and so that's why it's useful it doesn't it's not super distracting. And then Grammarly is one I would say that gets into a lot more detail. Grammarly is probably a more well funded company. Than Hemingway I wasn't aware of if Hemingway been monetized until I was looking at it the other day they have some AI functionality and they might they might have some other like outside of AI functionality plans, but I'm not sure that they had like a clear path to monetization before that but grim really has always had its like premium and like enterprise business use cases. And so I think that's probably why this tool is maybe a little bit more robust in terms of the suggestions it provides. They have a lot of linguists on staff and again, a disclosure that I'm a Grammarly Ambassador but I also like to use the product paid every person on my team that's a writer editor has a paid subscription to grammerly and I'll show you why shortly. Um, you know, you also want to look for plagiarism when it comes to creating a great content experience and when I talk about plagiarism, I'm not even necessarily talking about things that you do like on purpose. Some things that happen in grammerly, specifically is that you'll write something and it will detect a phrase that's been published elsewhere on the internet because you know, like there's a ton of content that already exists and it's bound to happen. And it'll be about something that's like a completely different industry. Like you definitely didn't take it from that original place that was published, but it's kind of like a reminder to go on and try to make it more unique. Just so that you know, Google doesn't think that you plagiarize even though again, it's not about intention. It's just about the reality of the content that already exists. But at the blacksmith, we use Copyscape for every piece of content we create, just to be sure there's no plagiarism, and then Grammarly. I don't believe the plagiarism check comes with the free version, but because we have the premium version, and that's included that we use it to. Um, one of the last factors here is you know, making sure that your content adheres to your style guide, whether that's a specific company style guide, or something like AP style, which again, is like the news journalism standard. I think it's like a great standard to use if you don't have a set style guide. And then I just have a couple qualitative qualitative factors here. So on the blacksmith style guide, which will probably show you we have a section about information architecture, and it's about a lot of these different things, how to break up walls of text, how to approach writing headings, how to keep paragraphs and sentences short and to the point. It's other things like you know, making sure that you have good flow with your content, you know that it has good storytelling, but it's something a human would want to read. And yesterday we talked about texts that whether AI generated it or not sounds robotic and how to avoid it. So that's another like, piece that you can use like in your own audits, those guidelines. Other things that I look at are like the thoughtful use of on brand visuals at the blacksmith we try to incorporate multiple types of visuals per piece. I'm definitely of the opinion that words aren't enough. I think as humans we're very visual creatures and people all have their own, like different learning styles. So that's also a factor, you know, written word, I don't think is enough, especially like for me personally, sometimes I need to like watch a video about it, or you need to like, you know, play with it in my hands or whatever. Like there's just different ways that people process information and so the more different ways you can surface it to them within your content, the better that your contents going to perform and help them and then things like consistent formatting like how you use bullet points, how you write headings. Again, a lot of this we cover in the blog Smith style guide. Just a couple other things. We talked about a B testing when we talked about how to be a good user tester and giving examples. So Unbounce is a tool that you could use. A B testing is essentially testing like different variants of a page usually you're testing a specific element like two versions of a page title, or two versions of an image, but it could be a full page as well. And this is something that Nathan and I also talked about, which is that I think he'd love to have an expert on a be testing do one of these workshops or you know a webinar in the future so if that's your if you know somebody like that, you know, that's something I think that all of us could learn some best practices from but again, another thing that you could test\r\n\r\nQuick disclaimer, then we'll jump to our live content UX audit. And we're talking about how to make your content better. And, you know, basically like different processes that you could use to to catch mistakes. But I don't want you to leave this thinking that perfection. Is the goal because it's not I think, you know, we're all human, we all make mistakes. At the end of the day writing for the web is is great because it's a very forgivable medium and unlike print, once you notice a mistake, you can go in and correct it. And so I don't want this to become a situation where you're beating yourself up if you did all these steps or you did some of these steps and like, you know, you still notice something later somebody points out like oh, this is spelled wrong or whatever. That's really not the point. So at the end of the day, I think my guidance for you is done is better than perfect. And be kind to yourself but create systems to catch mistakes. And that system could be having like a human editor, like like I mentioned earlier today, whenever I write something, you know I'm telling you all my best practices, but that doesn't mean that I always follow them, right. I'm an imperfect human being and, and things happen. And I think the other thing that I wanted to say is like we all have limited time we all have limited energy, and especially now that I'm a new mom, like I used to work really late at night and I would just crush stuff out and I would go over it a million times and now I kind of have to be satisfied with like not having the ability to do that and having a much shorter period of work time every day. That I can get stuff done and having to prioritize ruthlessly and that sometimes means that like yes, maybe I spelled something wrong, you know, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it. And I don't think you should either. So that's that's my soapbox. Alright, so let's go to the live content UX audit. Give me just a moment to get this set up. Um, so we're gonna go through like a couple of these different tools that we talked about today. And then at the end of this, we will have some time for questions. Okay. So Stacy, we're picking on you today because you submitted a really great example for this live content UX audit. And I want to start by saying there's like nothing wrong with this website. I mean, it's very good and it follows a lot of both the content and design principles that like I would instruct my team on. So what we're going to do today is is really nitpick for the sake of giving people things to think about when they are doing their own content UX audits. And so I'm going to start by sharing, like some of these tools and their outputs so that I can show you how to use them. And then what we'll finish off on is coming back to this page, and I'm going to give a couple of qualitative factors, you know, that I think can make the content just a little bit stronger. So again, I wanted to surface the blog SMIS content style guide. This is going to be the basis of one part of you know, some of the things I'm going to talk about and I'm going to reference that Chechi btw bot that we made yesterday, that's based on the style guide and that's, that's kind of what I use to audit this page from the content style perspective. But again, some things that we just talked about were first of all the SEO and Keywords section or chapter, where we talk a little bit about I mentioned that you could get some guidance for how to use awkward keywords like how to use keywords within URL slugs. I also talks about this information architecture, or information structures what we call it here section. So that's how to like essentially present information but also like break up walls of text, make it more readable. We talked a little bit at the end of today about formatting and how to keep that consistent. So those are just a couple of things. I guess we also talked about links earlier today and so there's some good guidance there. So you know, this is a this is a good resource if you're building out your own content style approach, and you can really build off of this because again, it's fairly industry agnostic. So anyway, I took this link, and first I ran it through Google PageSpeed Insights. And if you look at the desktop version, I mean it's pretty much near perfect. There's it's very difficult to get to 100 on any of these factors on I would say especially on mobile, but even on desktop, I mean, it's it's kind of like a what's the word? It's like a like a fool's errand to try to get to 100 if you're if you're this close, so, desktops looking really good. You know, they have a couple of things that you could do to fix it if you wanted to, and I have some suggestions for that, but we'll talk about it from the mobile perspective. So if you go to mobile, you'll notice that you know, first of all, the largest Contentful paint is one of the core web vitals, that it's a little bit in the red and it's and that's really like the only one and the largest Contentful paint again has to do with page floating, I believe. And so, taking like the definition we had, I'm guessing that that has something to do with this image because this is the viewport you know, that first load so it's the first thing that gets measured by this core web vital. And when I was looking at this yesterday, it's a it's a JPG file, which isn't like a super large file or anything like that. But one thing that you could do to to improve that page quality factor is to instead save this and serve it up as a web p file. There are certain plugins that you can use for that it's going to you have to kind of determine if adding like a plugin or taking that extra step of manually saving it like converting it and saving it and uploading it as that file is worth it. But that's that's like the one thing that I could think would would flip this so that it's the performance is a little bit closer to 100. And then we go into some of these other like diagnostic details. And I think this is where PageSpeed Insights gets really interesting because you can sort of dig into specifics here. A couple of things that I noticed were like minifying, CSS and JavaScript and there's some other things that are kind of related to optimizing like these different file types on the website. So I use a plugin called nitro pack. There's a free version and there's a paid version. I think the free version will get you pretty far, but it adds this like little Add at the bottom of your website. So I just pay for the paid version because I don't want that there are other things like nitro pack but nitro pack from the perspective of somebody who operates in the SEO world, you know who's looking for good performance, who's looking for best practices, that is my suggestion to you and to anybody who is seeing these things on their Google PageSpeed Insights. So naturally talking about these plugins for me like the got the question of does adding more plugins like is that going to hurt performance like what what is the marginal return of that? And so what I wanted to do next was take the URL and put it in that WordPress theme and plug in detector to just see like what the back end of the site looks like. And so we can see, it's like a custom or like a child theme. And I think okay, so apparent theme is Astra, so we know that like that's the technical basis on which this is based. I think generally speaking, Astra is pretty good for SEO from what I've heard, I don't have a ton of experience with it. And then also, this is like more what I was interested in was the plugins on the backend. And I mean, from what it detects it's there aren't that many plugins here, you know, it has like a plug in that works with Astra there's a Quiz Builder. This DOWNLOAD MANAGER contact form and then the Page Builder that's pretty lean, especially if those are the only plugins that are installed. You know, different people have different ideas of like, how many plugins is too many or like what's the optimum amount but I would say like, we're well under that here. So adding something like nitro pack, or you know, like some sort of web p image optimizer I think short Pixel does that.\r\n\r\nSomething like that probably wouldn't like hurt performance for the performance gains that would come with it. Um, okay, so the next thing that I wanted to do this is higher level than just this page, but I wanted to show you guys SC ranking. So SC ranking again, is this like All In One SEO tool? And I think there's like actually something wrong with my browser because I'm trying to like x this out, and I could do this yesterday and it just like wouldn't do it. So this is either a core web vitals issue or this is like I have too many, like Chrome extensions that are conflicting with each other, that I haven't been able to figure out why it sometimes messes with my browser. But anyway, that's an aside. So um, so this is a C rankings like technical website audit. And what I really love about this is that it's pretty straightforward. Like you can essentially read this as a non SEO and get a very good idea of things that you could fix to improve your website's technical structure. And as you can see this website like it's not bad, like there's room for improvement, but overall it's doing pretty good. Again, chasing 100 is a fool's errand. You're like, probably not going to get there but you want to get as close as you can with the time and the resources that you have. And so this page is really just like a high level overview. Again, this is about the whole website. It gives you an idea of like, how many pages were crawled, versus how many URLs which could include things like media files, JavaScript files, style, sheet files, and things like that. And so this can be a good indicator of like, if you know that there's more pages or there's more files, like maybe there's a credibility issue here. And if if some are getting excluded from this crawl, then they're probably also getting excluded from what Google can see. And so at that point, you, you know that there may be a sitemap issue that's getting in the way of the ideal situation. But what I really wanted to show you was the issue report. So these are things that you could fix. And what it does is it it has a category, it gives a specific issue, it gives you which pages are affected. It tells you you know, whether you're like compliant or whatever you want to call it if it's following best practices or not. And there's there's very few things here. But for example, like here's one that has to do with crawlability, which we talked about earlier today. And so nofollow means that we don't want the search engines to read this page and there may be a good reason for that. And so it seemed that for your pages are affected, you can click on it to get a description of the issue. So this is why it's really great for people who aren't necessarily like in the SEO world. A lot of you are website developers or designers and so a lot of this stuff like you'll be able to understand just by going through it and familiarizing yourself with it was there like included details. But yeah, so then you could see, you know, like which pages relate to this issue and whether or not like it's worth doing anything or if you really wanted them to be that way. But I'll give you like a more tangible example of something that you definitely want to fix. We have, for example, External links to 4x x. So like a 4x. X code is like a 404 means that it's not found, and there's different variations of that I'm sure a lot of you are pretty familiar with that. And so this means that maybe something that was linked on the website now no longer exists. And so it either needs to be replaced or redirected or something like that. And again, you can dig into the URLs you can see like what specific error code happened. This is also a really great report that you can give to clients. And then you know, depending on the level of familiarity you have with these different issues and how to fix them then you can give yourself a little bit of an extra job and some hours working with them to not only audit and go through the audit and explain the audit but then also, you know, implement the fixes. So I just wanted to show you that because I think it's it's such a great tool. So then the next thing I did was I ran this through Hemingway, and like I told you before Hemingway is like the sort of like, saying it's the more basic version of Grammarly. is maybe not exactly the right way to describe it, but it's the more like focused version. And so as you can see, what it does is it highlights different things. And it's kind of using I guess these colors, as you know, like things like it's trying to like draw your attention to certain colors as being like something that's more worth your attention or less worth your attention. What I've always known Hemingway as is a great tool for measuring active versus passive voice. And generally speaking, we want to try to avoid passive voice in our writing. And so that's probably what it's best used for. But there are some certain other factors here that are useful and interesting. And like yesterday when I told you about clear scope and how it measures readability, you can see that Hemingway also does this. It measures certain stats in terms of you know, just this piece of content, not necessarily compared to other pieces of content. And then it also has some AI functionality, that with a paid plan you can use to I think automatically suggest edits to some of these things. So just, you know one interesting tool where it's I think best functionality is free. So then I ran it through grammerly and I wanted to start by showing what I was talking about. With the plagiarism thing. Like there's something about inventory management on this article that says 1% of your text matches the source and that's like it's not even This article isn't even about inventory management. So I just wanted to show you guys that like, like these tools can be wrong, but it's still worth running that check a if you're working with a writer that's not you, just from a reputation standpoint, you want to make sure that there's no obvious like plagiarism problems with it but be so that you can just make like some small changes to this text so that Grammarly doesn't pick it up and possibly, you know, Google may be like taking a nod from some of the similar types of algorithms and uses. Again, not that it's intentional. It's just like, you know, because there's already this wealth of content that already exists on the internet about all these different subjects and of course, there's going to be similarities with phrasing and things like that. So then we get to these other suggestions. And I guess one other thing I wanted to show you about Grammarly is you can set goals for a piece of content and I don't know if this is a paid version specific but anyway, you can, you know, say like what type of writing it is. So I just said business for this. You can give a certain intent so I sent in form for this I may or may not be right with all these things, but I just wanted to see what would happen. You can say like, you know the level of experience of the audience, you can set like the formality of the tone. And then and then it gives you suggestions based on those things. And what's cool about grammerly is that it goes into these specific zoo specific different categories of suggestions. So correctness is about like grammar, spelling, punctuation, clarity is to cut in to help with like the flow of engagement, which is probably most related to like storytelling and delivery, I guess, you know, kind of related to both of those things, and then style guide. This relates to my company's specific style guidance, some of the suggestions that I have programmed in myself, and so a lot of it is like punctuation, because I have some rules about that. And it's probably annoying for my writers to have all this pop up. But some of it is word stuff. So like if we click this, something like actually, per the blogs and the style guide, and that's just our approach, we say these words are fluffy and don't add value typically. So like if you cut actually, it would say wait, so you have to go read these reports. Ones is another one that I have strong opinions about. I say don't use one to describe a noun you've already defined. Use the same word again or find another way to say it and then I gave an example here. So that's what's really cool about Grammarly is like you can like get these things automatically being suggested when you're working on a piece of content within your organization so that people don't have to remember like all the stuff that I showed you on my style guide it just automatically pops up. Waxing then I'll show you a couple qualitative things and then we'll go to questions is I ran this through my style editor bot, and it wouldn't I tried to get it to like directly edit the copy. And it wasn't unlike what I showed you yesterday which was like a shorter excerpt and the did I did that. So part of this is like me learning how to best use the spot or how to best design it or how to best query it. But what I did was I said Please review this blog post it gave it the era and suggest edits according to the blacksmith style guide.\r\n\r\nThey said consider the bad side consider the following suggestions and it felt to me like it wasn't actually like totally reading the blog. It was just giving like general tips and then I said please suggest updated copy based on these suggestions. And so what it did, which is kind of funny was it created like a shorthand version of it. And so what I was thinking is something like this could be really useful for like an email newsletter, you know, like an atomized version of the blog. Or, you know, maybe like you create some social posts based on these shorthand summaries of each category or something like that. You'd still probably want to edit it, but to me, even though it's not really what I asked for, I thought that that could be an interesting use case. So then I was like, Okay, well can you actually do the edits while preserving the original length of the piece? And it was like no, but it kind of went back in and gave some more suggestions. And then I was asking if it was actually able to like read the original article, or No, I was asking about the visuals, because one of the suggestions was about visual aids. And I was like, well, there's a ton of visual aids on that article. And so it said that it can't directly process or interpret them from the article itself. So that was kind of interesting. And then I gave it the copy and then it still kind of like generally gave examples. So you know, it's a work in progress. I guess that's what I wanted to share. It's still it's still gave me some things to work with. But it wasn't exactly like the editor that I was hoping that it would be like it like it kind of was yesterday. So it seems to me if I were to make a hypothesis here that it's probably going to be more useful for shorter bits of copy, you know, maybe different sections or titles or things like that, versus trying to edit a whole article all at once but it will give you food for thought in terms of general edits that you could make. Okay, so last like pieces of content on this before we end up today. We talked about menu navigation. And so the way that I would change this menu navigation would be home about blog and I would just change this to contact and what I like to do with whatever like the most important menu item or call to action is maybe add some like button styling so that that stands out, it just simplifies it. It's not distracting and you know, hopefully leads them to the ideal conversion. So then the other thing like the header, because we're kind of talking about the whole experience, not just the article itself, is what I what I came across, typically in the UX audits that I did was a similar type of header where it has the logo, but unless the name of the brand is like really straightforward about what you do, it could benefit from having some context like a tagline about what you do and so I don't think that we do it on the blog. So some a very bad example. But you can imagine like in my header it should probably say like SEO and content agency. But you know, maybe because it's called the blacksmith that also might work I don't know submitted a test. I'm generally speaking again, I really liked this article, I thought that more or less like it fit the same types of standards that like I would have for my team in terms of putting together conversational tone like breaking texts up nicely, having really useful visuals, a couple of just like very small things. We have the social share buttons. My suggestion is to add a CTA that's like share this on social like, it might seem obvious, but just saying that might be useful, might also be useful to have them float as the person who reads it because they might decide at different points that they want to share it through. I love the visuals there was one visual where I think there might be an unintentional tooltip here where like when you were taking the screenshot your cursor was probably over this SPFx aligned area right here. And so it took the screenshot with that and it kind of obscures the stuff behind it. This is the type of thing that like, because I do these all the time I nitpick and probably nobody else would notice, but I just thought that I would mention it. I'm sure I'm gonna like pretty much ended there. The last thing I was going to say for now is with the Related Posts, one of them doesn't have the featured image. So it's kind of, you know, it just looks a little bit lopsided. That's a super easy thing to fix. And then when it comes to consistency um, you might want to capitalize text stuff just so that it's consistent with the capitalization of the other category. And then maybe also like space it out tech space stuff. So again, like I really don't have that much to say here, because it's very good and it has good information. The last I guess big thing is the actual place where I'm reading the content is kind of narrow and skinny compared to the full frame here. And so I wouldn't recommend going full width with the content but I think we could break out the box a little bit more or break it out of the current box so that it's a little bit wider. And I think that that would be a great reader experience. So with all that being said, I'm going to pull back to my slides really quick just to pull up like the question slide and things like that. But I mean basically we're done here. With the planned content. I'll once again bring up my book because it is about what we're talking about with content experience. It's about my approach to content writing, content style, you can grab a free chapter of the book on the writing for humans and robots.com website or you can grab the book on Amazon via Kindle or print edition. And yeah, that's pretty much it. So I will take any questions that may have popped up in the meantime.\r\n\r\nYeah. All right. So thanks again, Stacey for letting us use your content as I know that it's a little weird with talking about my stuff here but ya know, it was very much appreciated and a it's an excellent article. We've talked about that already. The content, it was it was hard\r\n\r\nto find stuff to comments on honestly, so I had to go into nitpick mode.\r\n\r\nSo grateful to you, Stacey. Let's see folks last chance to ask questions here. There are no questions today,\r\n\r\nwhich is covered at all. Everything's done.\r\n\r\nIt's it's been a very good and thorough presentation on lots of tools. Things to consider as we're developing content for and helping our clients create content for the web. Yeah, like Ben says firehose of information really good stuff. Greg, this is a good rewatch as well. Alright folks, last chance before we land the plane. Your if you have any final questions for Maddie, if you want to just say yes in the chat that way we know to pause otherwise, I'm going to start moving towards wrapping us up. All right, yeah. So thanks there in the chat. Okay. So Maddie, wrap us up here. Give us our final takeaway for the training.\r\n\r\nSure. I'll answer one question. Barney asked if I'm in the Denver area. Yeah, yeah. I'm in Lakewood, technically. But yeah, okay. Final wrap up. treat people how you want to be treated with your content. That's good.\r\n\r\nThat's really good. And true, right. So yeah, awesome. Well, thanks, everybody, for hanging out with us for the last couple of days. It's been a really good set of information here. A lot of things to consider. And hopefully it'll help us all up our game as we're dealing with content on the web. Thanks again. Maddie. For your expertise. And folks, we are back tomorrow as usual 1pm Central for office hours here on solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nNice. Well, thank you so much, everyone for your time and attention. And yeah, I hope I hope there is like one good nugget for you to take away and if you ever have any questions about content and UX, I'm always happy to be a resource.\r\n\r\nVery good. Alright, see you folks tomorrow.\r\n","livestream-resources-group":"s:34:\"a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","multi-day_replay_details":["s:1319:\"a:7:{s:18:\"event_replay_title\";s:19:\"Day 1: Content & AI\";s:25:\"day_description_cloneable\";s:290:\"\r\n\r\nAI content tools to add to your workflow\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nHow to write a great ChatGPT prompt and a build-your-own GPT demonstration\r\n\r\n\";s:35:\"livestream_vimeo_video_id_cloneable\";s:9:\"917283343\";s:16:\"course-resources\";a:2:{i:0;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:29:\"Slides (with clickable links)\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:87:\"https:\/\/app.slidebean.com\/sbp\/14wk06qt70\/Audience-Copy-v2-Website-Content-Workshop-2024\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:6:\"Slides\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}i:1;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:42:\"Slides (PDF Download, Links Not Clickable)\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1ucAZKb-0DHu92mcCDfWVxveHFj6Ch5qG\/view?usp=sharing\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:6:\"Slides\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:23:\"livestream_chat_log_url\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1EGbDssaPY16DPzSzhKrhE7ElsA_ATR4N\/view?usp=sharing\";s:40:\"livestream_live_transcript_url_cloneable\";s:66:\"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/s6izsl7mc33FNxJL9TyU3rv6g84?utm_source=copy_url\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","s:1312:\"a:7:{s:18:\"event_replay_title\";s:17:\"Day 2: Content UX\";s:25:\"day_description_cloneable\";s:285:\"\r\n\r\nHow website design supports content effectiveness\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nHow to conduct a content UX audit for your brand and clients\r\n\r\n\";s:35:\"livestream_vimeo_video_id_cloneable\";s:9:\"917679579\";s:16:\"course-resources\";a:2:{i:0;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:29:\"Slides (with clickable links)\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:87:\"https:\/\/app.slidebean.com\/sbp\/14wk06qt70\/Audience-Copy-v2-Website-Content-Workshop-2024\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:6:\"Slides\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}i:1;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:42:\"Slides (PDF Download, Links Not Clickable)\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1ucAZKb-0DHu92mcCDfWVxveHFj6Ch5qG\/view?usp=sharing\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:6:\"Slides\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:23:\"livestream_chat_log_url\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1-15hvhAoo2OFpOX5Y2-3iYd9OOuOLtfs\/view?usp=sharing\";s:40:\"livestream_live_transcript_url_cloneable\";s:66:\"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/hJvip6Ozsn3rEQSWvqgPkRGr4UQ?utm_source=copy_url\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";"]}},"postCountOnPage":1,"postCountTotal":1,"postID":448491,"postFormat":"standard","geoCloudflareCountryCode":"US"}; dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content ); \nWednesday, February 28, 1:00-3:00p Central TimeWhat Google guidelines tell us about content UX\n\n\n\n\nHow website design supports content effectiveness\n\n\n\nHow to conduct a content UX audit for your brand and clients\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","livestream_live_transcript_text":"So we've got a lot to cover over the next few days. This again was this is building on last year's content workshop. And the link for that is in the course description if you missed last year I would strongly recommend you check that out. Really good stuff. So Sadie has your book MADI Naidu\r\n\r\nwhy it's really good love it seems like it's been a while since I published it, but you know, I tried to write it so that it would still be useful today. So I hope that you're all finding that. Yeah, we're sure.\r\n\r\nReally good stuff. Alright folks, if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat say hi. We are about three minutes away from getting started. And they're in the chat once again, is the link bundle that has the slides and the replay link as well as a link to Matty's book. We are Yeah, we're gonna have a lot of fun today and tomorrow, two hours today, two hours tomorrow talking all about website content with I mean, let's face it an expert in the field\r\n\r\nappreciate the vote of confidence. If you if you measure it by yours and I suppose expert, that's something that I've been doing for a very long time. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nAlright folks, let's hear from you in the chat. Check in question today. How about give us a one to 10 rating? How comfortable are you with generating website content? One being it's a real challenge. 10 being a pro, let us hear from you there in the chat.\r\n\r\nAll right, about a minute and a half to go.\r\n\r\nMaybe a good question is how many of you are forced to make content in order to finish your website designs? Yeah, to get your website launched.\r\n\r\nHey, Sue bullets are my friend. I like bullets. Alright, several folks just joining us. The links are there in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up that chat and you'll have the link to download the slides. Grab the replay and all of those things. We are about a minute away from getting started. Second question today is what's your comfort level? What's your expertise at website content creation one to 10 If you had to rate yourself love it. Love it. Tracks Yeah, five but a if you're using AI, that's awesome. Yeah, so a lot of folks are higher on the scale today. That's exciting, that hopefully you're gonna get some tools to up your game even further. He's got a lot to share with us. Over the next couple of days. Hey Terry. Dab Alright, folks, we are just about to get started. Glad you're all here. Diving into the web content workshop momentarily. Just seconds. To go. If you're just joining us in zoom, I'm going to drop in one more time the link bundle and it's three after so let's get the recording started. And we'll dive right in. Let's do it. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy and I'm joined for the next couple of days by my friend Maddy Houseman, Maddy is a sought after sought after copywriter specializing in enterprise b2b Tech brands. She's the CEO at blog Smith and the author of writing for humans and robots, the new rules of content style. She has been recognized on numerous industry lists as a top content marketer and I'm really excited to have her back for another course here on solid Academy so welcome back Madi, how are things going for you?\r\n\r\nThanks, Nathan. I'm really excited to be here. Like I said, you know, it's been it's been a little bit of time since I've done you know, a presentation like this since I've really gotten to use my brain. For those who don't know, I recently had a baby so he's in daycare today so I can fully you know, give my attention to this and, you know, embrace this identity of mine as a content creator who loves to learn and you know, who now has this other facet of my life but marrying those two in a joyous way so, so yeah, really excited to be back and and put my brain to use and share you know, some of the things that I've been exploring you for the past several months to I guess a year, all this new stuff with AI, that's what we're gonna focus on today. So really excited about that. Yeah,\r\n\r\ndefinitely. So we have a long way to go over the next couple of days and the thought just occurred to me Maddie, we really ought to have you back for another informal conversation just on how you prepared your business. So that you could take some time away, because that's really, that's quite a feat.\r\n\r\nIt was definitely and I'd love to do that. I'd be happy to.\r\n\r\nYeah, that'd be that just occurred to me. We should definitely, folks. So let's see the links are in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom. I'm going to drop this in one more time. There you will find the link to download or grab the slide deck. Also the replay link that will have the transcripts and chat logs after we finish is there for you as well. On that replay link you'll also find a link to last year's course, which is more some more foundational principles of the things we're going to unpack even further today. So if you missed last year's course, all the replays are there, follow that link, rewatch them, it's really good stuff. And of course, if you haven't seen Matt, he's booked the link for that as in the chat as well. So Maddie, give us a high level view. What are we going to be covering for the rest of today? Totally.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, we're definitely going to expand on some of the things that we started to talk about last year, but really, you know, thinking about what's changed in the past year and so that's why today we're going to focus mostly on AI kind of how AI factors into content creation, how you can use AI tools to create content, how you can use AI tools to detect AI content. You know, things like how to write an excellent chat GPT prompt and one thing I'm really excited to share with you because it's something that I've just kind of figured out for myself is how to make your own personal GPT. So that's what we're gonna do at the end of the day, I'll show you step by step how to do it. You can follow along, I'll show you how to adapt it a little bit. And then really, what we're going to start with today is I guess a bit of a cautionary tale when it comes to AI so we'll start with the most negative and we'll build up to the most positive. And then tomorrow, the focus is going to be on content UX, the user experience what I like to call the reader experience. So it's going to be more about you know, the elements of design and how they interact with content, how you can create this great reader experience for the people who consume your designs and content and so we can get a little bit more into what that looks like. But I guess if I was to like talk high level about today versus tomorrow, today is like things that I think are really like novel and fun. It's like It's like exciting things that that we're all learning kind of at the same time and that's that's what's so exciting about just like nobody has it figured out. And tomorrow is like the stuff that I'm really passionate about. That's a little bit more, you know, foundational and again, about like that full experience. So I guess with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. Yeah,\r\n\r\nabsolutely. Me give a couple of housekeeping notes that will disappear. Folks. We'll be taking a break in the middle as usual for these courses. So roughly at tube central an hour from now, we'll take about a five to 10 minute break depending on where we are timewise. So at the end of this first hour and the end of the second hour, we'll have a time of q&a as well. I would invite you to use the zoom q&a Link to ask your questions. Please don't use the chat, but use that Zoom q&a. That way we can keep all the questions in a nice list. And also, if you'll keep that Zoom q&a open, if somebody asks a question that you also want to hear the answer to just click the thumbs up icon to up vote. And we'll take the questions the order of up votes. So with that again, yeah, we are recording in the replay. The transcript is all there and it'll be available for you about an hour after we finished today. So Maddie, I'm going to disappear take over. Let's get started. Let's\r\n\r\ndo it. My housekeeping is just first of all, I think that we all can learn a lot from each other when it comes to AI. And so like that's how I've picked up the things that I'm going to share with you. It's really hearing it from other people seeing how other people are using this tool. It's interesting because it's so new that like, again, we don't really know like what the best use cases are. And there's this world of possibility that we've only just started to touch. So one thing I'll ask is like if you've come across an interesting AI use case, you know whether you have something that's top of mind now or whether going through what I'm going to talk about today sparks it like please share that in the chat. I'm sure all learn from it. I'm sure other people will learn from it. So that's one thing and then I'll just ask that if there's anything that resonates with you, as I'm talking today, or you know as other people are sharing ideas in the chat. I always love when people tweet or I guess x takeaways these days. So my Twitter is in that bottom right hand corner. So use that and I always love to retweet and share with my audience too. So yeah, let's go ahead and get started here. Nathan already gave a nice bio like who I am. Just to give you you know, more information about the blacksmith. We're a holistic content marketing agency for b2b technology brands. We create data driven content. I'm going to share some of those processes here with you today in terms of how we're using AI tools to do that. And our focus is creating content across the sales funnel with a focus on the reader experience. So again, that's really what day two is going to be about. It's creating this ideal reader experience with the intersection of content and design. And then my book writing for humans robots, the new rules of content style. If you've ever read the book, The Elements of Style, I was really kind of riffing on that in a more I guess, modern way since that book was written back in 1918, or 1919. Of course, at that time, the internet didn't exist. We weren't necessarily addressing a global audience when we publish to the web. We are now and so that's kind of the idea behind this book is how can you how can you speak plainly and inclusively and effectively when you're writing for the web? And so with all of that being said, let's go ahead and jump into the topic of today which is AI Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention. Day two, when we talk about content UX. I'm going to do some live content UX audits. If you were here last year, we also did this this is something I really love to do. And so this form here which you can also click through the slide being links that we've shared in the chat. Just has a couple questions like your name your brand. It'll ask for a link to a specific piece of content. If you're comfortable sharing for this live UX audit, and then it has the question that's optional. If there's anything you want me to focus on, and then like an aspect of the content itself, but the purpose is to collect some, you know, ideas from from all of you of what to audit and we're going to basically put the principles that I'm going to be talking about tomorrow into action you know, show you how to use some different tools show you how to use more also, like qualitative analyses. And so again, I would love your examples so that we can make it really useful for you to give you know, a second pair of eyes on your content. And you know, it's always done in a very respectful way. I'm not looking for problems, I'm just showing you ways to, you know, make your message clearer to make your content experience more effective. So I'll, I'll aim to remind you about this again at the end of the day, and then you know, before tomorrow is probably when I'll pick what we're going to audit for tomorrow. So get them in today, whenever you have a chance. Okay, so artificial intelligence. That's really the focus of what we're talking about today. Super exciting. Things are happening here. It's also kind of a wild wild west. It's it's something that there's many positive use cases but there are also some negative ones and so I really wanted to start with the negatives so we can kind of get that out of the way so we can you know, maybe share some like cautionary tales here. The link that Learn More link is an article that I wrote for Fast Company, and it's going to go over some of the same things that I talked about here in terms of some of the limitations and also really like the ethical implications of using AI to generate content to publish it as if it were your own. So yeah, let's go ahead and dive into that. Um, so I think like the first major implication, negative implication of AI or something to think about, especially as a creator, because many of us here we're writers, we're designers, so we're creating things. They they are our intellectual property which we may assign, you know, to a client, for example, but it's still at its root. It's something that we made. And, you know, the thing about AI is, first of all, it can't think for itself. It uses things like machine learning. It uses algorithms and processes to make sense of what's already out there. But it's not, at least right now in a place where it can completely invent something new. If it does. It's the result of this machine learning it's not the result of true uniqueness. So you know, essentially, AI and I'm gonna explain this example in a moment here, but it's, it's being trained on what already exists. It's using our intellectual property. And the worst part of it is it's doing that without giving us credit. I mean, if you go in do a search on Google, it was called Bard, but now they've rebranded it to Gemini. In my experience, and and I haven't used it recently, to be honest with you, but certainly within chat GPT there's no like source given for the answer to a prompt. It's not directing you to a specific piece of content are saying, This is what I referenced to come up with this answer, which also creates an issue of you know, whether or not that answer is something to be trusted, and we'll get into the fact that AI is oftentimes confidently incorrect. But right now, with the focus being on the fact that it's essentially plagiarism and my perspective, if you are taking what you generate with AI and then publishing it as your own this is probably easiest to think about when you think about visuals, and we're going to talk a little bit about AI generating images and kind of like how that works and some of the issues with that. But you can think of like aI trained on a certain set of materials, certain artists body of work, you know, that style, if it's trained on a certain style and the output is a certain style, it's pretty easy to identify that, you know, it's riffing off, you know, one individual's intellectual property, it's a little bit harder to make that distinction with the written word. But that doesn't mean that it's any less important to recognize that it's, it's an issue if if AI is passing off its own material or your material as its own. So, what I wanted to share here, this is an article that was published on futurism. It's an it's a screenshot from it, and it's about CNET. They have this blog about different like personal finance topics and things like that. And so when it comes to things that affect your finances, whether it's subjects like you know how to buy a house and you know, like had this setup a mortgage, you know, whatever. Or, in this case, like you know, how to pick a credit card, how to use credit cards, how to decide what college to send your kid to, or something like that. Google calls these topics, your money, your life. And in comparison to any other topic that you publish, that you're looking to get ranked in relevant search on Google. Google has the highest standard of quality for your money, your life topics. So CNET was transparent about the fact that they were publishing AI generated content such as the example shared here. But they had a human fact checking it and so the byline was like you seen that money or something like that? And then I think they also had like the byline of the human editor published next to it, but they told us you know, they they weren't trying to hide that it was aI generated. So this excerpt is you know, maybe kind of a silly example, but it's showing how\r\n\r\nthis article that they wrote, which was about can you buy a gift card with the credit card. This first example is a line that's almost verbatim from a rivaling Forbes article. And then this next example is how literally, the table was the exact same title. So, you know, you could question if it was only one of these things, you know, is that really plagiarism? Is that really a problem? But the fact that it's both to me shows that you know, not only did CNET not take a high enough standard of care, quite honestly with the content that they were having a human fact checker edit, but I think it also begs the question of like, if you're generating a full piece of copy, like a, you know, long form blog article, like are you ever going to be able to definitively say that it's not plagiarism? Or that it's not like literally, you know, word for word related to any other competitor article out there? And I think the answer's no, because that's what the AI is using to generate the content. In this case, and then one that I'll share subsequently, AI is, is almost like a crutch for CNET or for others who are who are taking this approach of generating that full article and then having the human intervention and I'm going to share some better ways to use AI in your article creation process. But yeah, I mean, the problem is ultimately that there's no way that they can catch every instance of plagiarism, and it just honestly creates more work and, and the worst part of all, is that it essentially ruin their reputation because they didn't take a proper standard of care. Another example that's, that's ongoing, it's unresolved at this point, is that the New York Times recently sued open AI who's the creator of chat GBT saying that, you know, their, their publications, their media. was unlawfully used to train open AI. And the last I saw, I think there was an update actually today that said that the New York Times is like misrepresenting the evidence or something like that. But again, I mean, it really just like begs the question of you know, if you publish content, like is it safe, you know, is it going to be used to train a model which is then going to spit it out and somebody else is going to publish it and benefit from it without properly crediting you? So that's one major issue. So this is one that I would love your examples. If you have anything similar. This is this is a picture that I saw recently in like a Facebook group about AI. And so somebody had done some prompts about dog breeds. And if you kind of squint, you're like, Okay, maybe that like a chart of different dog breeds, but then you look and you see all the like, really strange faces and like this, like gibberish text, and even the text that you can read is like not related to any dog breeds that currently exists. So, yeah, again, if you have any examples of like an image you've generated that has resulted in something like comically incorrect like this, I would love to see that in the chat. That would be fun. But I guess the point that I want to make with this slide is that at least at this point, AI can't effectively art direct you could give it a prompt and you could maybe get it to a point where you can get something useful. I think it's called mid journey. There's this one AI image generator that creates these like hyper realistic things with like any detail you can get it and something like that is so cool and very interesting to experiment with. But I think this came from within chat GPT I'm gonna say it wrong, but it's called like Dali Dali. And in my experience, when I've used it to generate images, it's the same sort of like gibberish text. The image, you know, is like, vaguely related to the prompts that I give it. So I'm using it for like, kind of like business article use cases to like generate a figure from you know, some like the data I include or something like that. I've never gotten something useful yet. And I think beyond that, it's like you still as a creative have to come up with the prompt. It's not like AI is going to be able to help you within the context, say of like an article. They're not going to be able to come up with like five unique media examples that you could include. So this is something that I think, you know, as humans, like, we still like have control over this or so like the best Abbot. Um, okay. So next I started to talk about this, which is one of the biggest issues with AI to date, the fact that it is confidently incorrect. So this is another Cena example, I'm going to read a little excerpt from. This is another futurism article. They did kind of a deep dive into this. See that AI but issue? So the excerpt is after the outcry after you know, some of these plagiarism things came to light. With the previous example. Steena editor in chief Connie Guglielmo acknowledged the AI written articles in a post that celebrated CNET's reputation for being transparent. without acknowledging the criticism, Guglielmo wrote that the publication was changing the byline on its AI generated articles from CNET money staff to simply seen that money as well as making the disclosure more prominent. Furthermore, she promised every story published under the program had been reviewed, fact checked, and edited by an editor with topical expertise before we hit publish, and I think that this is referring to like before this article was published, and so what you're looking at right here is, I think a more serious violation of the high standards that Google holds for your money your life, making sure that it is, you know, written by an expert that it's heavily fat checked, you know that you're not publishing something that you can't stand behind. And so this is about calculating compound interest for savings and as you can see by the excerpts, it's, it's wrong, the calculation is spitting out an incorrect final number. And so it may seem like, you know, small potatoes like, you know, like, what, what's really going to happen to the person who misinterprets this? It's certainly not like, you know, having to do with like, buying a house and like getting those equations wrong thread savings, but I think it just goes to show that there's, you know, there's a lot of problematic things that can happen and it starts here and if if we don't maintain a high standard for content quality starting here, then it could exacerbate it could turn into people being misled when it comes to making these like bigger money decisions in their life or you know, other things, your money your life, I think also, in some ways has to do with like, health and like medical stuff and things like that. So there are like potentially, you know, bigger and like worse implications than even just like the financial aspect of it. One thing that's interesting that that I misunderstood or I was misled about AI. Really up until like, a week ago or so, is I thought that you could ask chat GBT if it wrote something. So that was something that I saw other people talking about. And it's something that at the blacksmith like we've tested out ourselves you know, when working with like a new writer and wondering how to detect like if content was aI generated, and I found an article on open API's like FAQs or help desk or whatever that said, whenever you ask chat GBT if it wrote some you know, specific piece of copy for example, it just make something up like that's, that's literally what open AI says you could Google it yourself. So, you know, it's weird that it doesn't just say, I don't know, you know, it doesn't just give you like that as a straight answer. It's fine. If it doesn't know, but for it to purposely just decide, you know, bye bye narrowly, like if it's yes or no, and that it just tells you that whether it actually knows the answer, like that's very concerning to me. So a little bit of a cautionary tale. Um, but yeah, I think at the end of the day of the CNET examples, what I'm trying to impress upon you is like, does it really save time, if it like, impacts your reputation long term like I just don't think that that the best way to go about it is to generate the full piece of content and then add the human and I think that I think that AI can help intermittently and we'll definitely get to like how exactly to do that shortly. Um, so this article is also kind of fun. Charlie Brooker's, a creator of Black Mirror. If any of you are familiar, it's just this like really kind of weird messed up show on Netflix. It's very like future focused. It's like, I would say fairly.\r\n\r\nWhat's the word like it's, it's, it's kind of like post apocalyptic in some ways, not always. But it always like seems to end and kind of a scary place. And it's episodic, like each each episode I mean, to say is like its own storyline. And so the most recent season started to touch on themes of AI since that has become you know, something that has infiltrated society. And anyway, this article, The Creator who you know, has a very interesting mind based on what we see on this Netflix episodes, said that he doesn't think AI is messy enough to replace creative people. So there's good news guys, which is AI can't can't match that with us. I think on another hand AI, it lacks human empathy. You know, it can never like fully understand, like, who we are and what we go through. I don't think it ever will unless it's somehow achieved some level of sentience but yeah, I mean, ultimately, like in its wildest dreams, whatever AI, you know, thinks that it thinks it could never generate the ideas that we come up in our wildest dreams. And I think that the proof is in the pudding in terms of thinking about things like some of our favorite authors and how they create prosaic copy. So here's, here's a quote, I love Stephen King. He's kind of a machine himself, but human as far as I know. So this from needful things, one of his more interesting books, because the trust of the innocent is the wires most useful tool. And so, you know, fed copies of Stephen King's worked. You can ask chat GPT to write in his voice. I don't know if Stephen K would appreciate that or not. But, you know, I think the limitation is that it couldn't generate something like this on its own it can generate like derivative work of his but it couldn't come up with this on its own. Ai, you know, it, it isn't it doesn't have uniqueness. And Google has historically said that it's important. We're gonna talk a little bit about Google's AI guidelines that it's published. And it specifically says in those guidelines that they want to rank content that is unique, which AI fundamentally is not, not on its own, not without human intervention. Ai just read purposes and parrots things that already exists. And, and the output trends toward the average. It's not, it's not unique, it's not notable and interesting. Okay, so the last thing that I want to talk about from like this negative perspective, and then I promise we'll get into more of the fun stuff, is the idea that algorithms can be biased. And so if you think about like the people who are creating things like Chet GPT, or the Google algorithm or any other algorithm you interact with, like social media feeds, things like that. Algorithms, they represent the people that created them, not necessarily the population as a whole. So this book is really interesting. It's from the perspective of a black woman and so she is just like, read some of the book description to give you an idea of some of the topics that she explores. It says run a Google search for Black Girls, what will you find? Big booty and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms, but if you type in white girls, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and on unmoderated discussions about why black women are so sassy or why black women are so angry presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. And I think, after this book was published, because this was from a while ago, Google had manually made some adjustments to the algorithm in light of this criticism and that commentary, but the problem is with algorithms, you're you're scaling up problems, they can't manually make adjustments for every inherent bias that their algorithm has. And so you know, I don't know if we have an answer for how to fix this. But ultimately, the people creating the algorithm should represent society as a whole. I guess that's, you know, one way to think about it. Um, and I guess the question that it poses for all of us is like with AI deploying so rapidly there's going to be a lot of situations where bias needs to be routed out and fixed. And so that's, that's what's kind of scary, I think about how quickly new applications are developing. Again, it scales up problems and so that's just something I think we all need to be aware of, and and do the best that we can to fix. So okay, so now let's talk about some of the more fun stuff AI content tools. These are tools that we use in our workflow. These are tools that I use, personally. And so let's go ahead and you know, talk a little bit about how they work. So, again, we're gonna focus on like, mainly AI content tools, just because that's my sphere of genius. That's like what I have the most experience with, but I think there are different things that you could use like no matter how you're creating content, whether it's like you write blog posts for yourself, or for clients, or like, you know, you just want to like uplevel, your email strategy, or you know, help with like the personal compositions that you create. So, the first one I want to talk about is phrase which creates AI powered content briefs. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch my screen to share, to share like what a report looks like in phrase. So let's see here. I think I have to get out of full screen in order for this to work. Okay, so um, this was the form so I'm going to show you that in the beginning, but I'm gonna go ahead and exit out. So phrase generates this really cool report and the SEO aspects of it may or may not be relevant to your process. And I will say that not every piece of content that we created, the blacksmith is driven by SEO. It's not every piece of content we create to rank but I still use we still use phrase for everything because it helps with topic research. So that's what this is. It's a briefing tool. It's a research tool. Um, the way that it works and the way that the next tool, clear scope that I'm going to explain to you also works is that you give it a primary keyword. So in this case, it's how reliable are AI detectors? And so, by giving it this primary keyword, that means that we've already done the research to decide that that's the keyword that we want to optimize for. And so this is this is an article that's already published on the Black Swan, but this is something that we would have created. Prior to that publication. This this brief would have been like the first step of the writing process after doing the keyword research to decide which one we want to focus on. And the way that phrase and clear scope work is that you can I'm just going to show you like some of the pricing details so you can understand like how it works within a workflow, phrases kind of unique in that it has a plan that allows you to create unlimited reports. Not many other tools like it do that it's usually a per report cost. So that's why it's important to know what you want to optimize for before generating the reports. But it also has these lesser plans in terms of output. You know, depending on your content process, that's probably going to be more cost effective to you then you know, me as an agency, I would want more of like the unlimited plan to work for my various clients. So let's go back to phrase so what's interesting about phrase is first of all, just like the content editor experience itself, I'll be honest, we use Google Docs for everything. But if I was creating content, as like just for my internal team or something, what's cool is you can create these other tabs. And so you could have a tab that's like research. You could have a tab that's your outline. You could have a tab that's your draft, and then you could have maybe a tab with edits or something like that. So that's kind of cool just to keep the process nice and contained in one place. I've always thought that that was really unique and interesting about phrase.\r\n\r\nBut to be honest, we don't use phrase as a Content Editor. That's just an added bonus. So yeah, it generates a topic report. I'm gonna go through a couple of different aspects of it. First of all, it gives you some sort of tangible details and the way that phrase and clear scope and the market means which is another variation on a theme work is that they scrape the top 20 or so search results, which is pretty representative of like, what's going to be necessary to rank and it gives you details like, you know, how many words should you aim for for this specific topic? In this case, it's also suggesting how many headers which is like a measure of depth of content, how many links How many images? I think the top ones are what's like in this brief, that's what it's reading and the ones under it are like the average that it's suggesting. But again, we're just this is just like material that's from the brief. It's not like the actual content that we wrote. When it comes to word count. I think people always ask like, what's the ideal word count for a piece of content? And the the answer like many things in SEO is it depends. And so that's why tools like this are really useful because there is no standard. It's very topic driven. And using data that's based on actual searches means that you can get very close to like what that ideal is. So it also shares you know, the top some details of the top breaking content, you'll notice that the blog Smith currently owns a featured snippet for this particular topic, thanks in part to you know, some of the tools that we use to optimize their content. And also, I think, for this particular piece, because we did a lot of our own original research and reporting and some of it that I'll share with you when we talk about AI detector tools, I believe after the break today. You can also see like, the atomized version of some of these other top ranking results like the title like a short description, different headers, you can click into the headers to get more information. You can click through to read it. There's other things in this little side panel here that are interesting. This is just a list of all the headings from all the top ranking content pieces. Probably the most useful is this questions area and you can break it down by different sources of the question of the questions. People also ask you something you could manually go to Google and see for yourself. But it's nice to have it all in one place. I think that's the real benefit of phrase and then you can also see here that you can see questions that come from places like Quora and Reddit, you know, which which can really add a nice like flavor to what you're working on. The stats tab is really interesting. You know, they essentially suggest in phrase different stats, as well as different links that people tend to use in those top ranking pieces of content. And so you don't necessarily want to like copy everything that you see. But there might be things that like people would expect to be exposed to in your content. If there's like a big industry stat that relates to what you're talking about. As you scroll here you can see certain things like different topics that come up, you know, different related keywords or sub topics. And a lot of this you can kind of paste over from the sidebar. External links. You know, in addition to specific stats, news is also pretty interesting because this is like things that have happened maybe since those top ranking articles were published. So again, like if you're trying to be the best making sure that your information is the most up to date. This can help you do that. So freeze also has some generative AI capabilities. I'm going to be honest with you that we don't use these because we don't believe in generating AI copy as far as you know what we write for clients and for ourselves. We're experimenting with it. But so I don't really use any of the generative AI tools. But this optimize tab here is notable and useful, because it's similar to clear scope and market Muse which I'll share with you in just a moment here. And basically, it suggests certain phrases that we should expect to see in the content in order for it to rank high and relevant search. You know, obviously, you can't just throw all the words and you have to weave them in. But this is a pretty good baseline for what people would expect to see topic wise in an article and that's that's the real benefit. I think of tools like this. So yeah, there's other there's other like interesting things that you can dig into. This is like a keyword gap map map based on what I just showed you those different phrases and it shows your content compared to other ranking content and who's using what words so you can kind of see how you stack up against those other competitors. So next, I want to share clear scope with you and I have a slide for it, but I'm just going to jump straight to the report here. So what you're seeing is like a very, I would say like simplified user interface compared to like what you would see with phrase and so clear scope in many ways is very similar. They both exists to help you optimize content. They both include some important research they both work by starting with a primary keyword. One of the differences between clear scope and phrase is first of all that query scope suggests a letter grade whereas phrase and market Muse and surfer previously known as Super SEO suggested number like out of 100 in order to understand like how close to optimizing compared to their standards you are, it also suggests a word count. And one more thing I wanted to say about the content creator is that at the blacksmith we always aim for an a or higher that tends to be a good standard for actually achieving rankings, high rankings and relevant search. I'm actually not sure if phrase does this. I'm sure they do. I just didn't notice it while going through. But clear scope also suggests a target readability level. I think that's really important for matching the needs of the searcher not going you know too deep into something that maybe could benefit from being more surface level for example. You can also notice here that they have those suggestions for phrases and so phrase we use the very beginning of our process, but we're not optimizing content within that tool. We're really using clear scope for that because in my experience, and this could differ by industry, but I find their suggestions for phrases to incorporate to be a little bit more fine tuned than phrase. So you know, that's, that's my opinion. Um, you'll notice that they also have the sidebar, so they have, you know, a couple of details. I don't again, I don't necessarily use clear scope for the briefing processes is really more at the end of the process. So stuff like this, I'm not necessarily going over but if you were to use one tool, then it's nice to know that it has that it also has those top you know, search results for the query, examples of like headers and things like that. It also has the term like keyword gap map that shows how you stack up compared to the competition. You can dig into the competitor details even more in terms of how clear scope looks at content with their letter grade, by word count, that it has this nice chart that shows how that content grade stacks up against their organic position in search. And then I think the last thing that I'll mention about clear scope for now, is that you can use that editor in here just like you can use the editor in phrase, but actually both free and clear scope. Have a Google Docs add on. And so all you have to do is like grab the report link the individual link to that specific report, put it in Google Docs, and then you get all this information within, you know, Google Docs where you probably at least my team works better that way. Um, okay, so and then I guess the last last thing I was gonna say about this topic is that if I had to pick one tool, I think I would pick clear scope. Again, because of the fine tuned pneus of the instructions, but if I was a smaller shop operation, I'd probably pick phrase because it can do like a more well rounded look at like the topic as a whole and debriefing so so that's my suggestion. Clear scope works by essentially offering it's like a per report price, but you can buy packages and like the more reports you buy at a time, the less expensive Each report is. So let me get my slides back up here. And then we'll move on to the next tool that we're going to talk about though.\r\n\r\nWe talked about phrase to talked about clear scope. So let's talk about market Muse just kind of in passing here because it's a very similar tool. It uses some different technologies, compared to clear scope and phrase and so that's why it's a part of our process again as an organization that spends a lot of time on SEO and data and keyword research. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to you if you're going to maybe consider one of those other tools. What's interesting about marketmuse is that it has this functionality to create an AI generated first draft that includes some like light human intervention from their side. I think that's what this is actually this is like a sample from a while ago where we were just playing around with it to see what would happen. But yeah, again, it has a lot of the same functionality. It offers content optimization suggestions that like keyword gap map that I showed you and both of the tools and it has like some generative AI capabilities. So yeah, it just adds a little bit of extra detail. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that it's something you need to add to your workflow if like one of those other tools could satisfy a lot of these same things. So talking about some other tools that are interesting. Word tune is something that I feel like is so underrated. It's essentially uses your own copy to make suggestions. And so again, I'm going to I'm going to show you what that looks like. So let me share my screen back here. So it works in Google Docs. And so here's I just stole the intro basically from that AI detector article. And so what you could do is you highlight whatever text you want it to make suggestions based off of and I typically do it sentence by sentence I, I'm sure it could do longer bits of text, but I don't find that to be as useful. For me. This is like a great tool for when you have writer's block because I don't know you know if you've experienced this but oftentimes I'll let my get myself get stuck on a specific word and it just like really bugs me, and I'm like it's not done until I figured out the right word. And it takes me forever to get through that. So we're tune. It's great because I'm using it with my own copy. So I can feel really confident about whatever it suggests. I'm sure you could use word tune to take AI generated copy and then re spin it. But that's not my suggestion. So again, it works by using this like Google Docs add on and you you highlight it and just to show that action again. It has this little word tune icon. And then you can see different suggestions for how word tune would rewrite it you get like 10 or something like that. And then you can also fine tune it by changing the tone and then by finding ways to shorten or expand it depending on what your use case is. The last thing that I'll say about word toon for right now is it has this thing called spices and so that's like getting a little bit more like next level with the AI generation and using like generative texts. I haven't played around too much with this yet, but it is interesting. And this is kind of taking it away I think from you know basing it off of your copy to kind of like generating something completely new. So that's why I don't necessarily use this but I think it could be a useful resource for when you're when you have writer's block or things like that. So let me get my slides back up here. Here it is. Okay, so so that was word tune. Um, and then Grammarly. I think works very similarly to word tune, and that it uses your own body of work your own copy, to suggest edits, and so I wrote an article for their blog. That's what the learn more link is. After a recent keynote, they did about all their generative AI capabilities. And so I would definitely check that out if you're curious about how to use grammerly in this way. And full disclosure, I'm a Grammarly ambassador, so you know, I'm always singing their praises, but I think it's I think it's interesting because Grammarly, like many other SAS tools on the market are starting to invest in AI capabilities like directly within their tools. And so I think we're gonna see like more and more of examples of this. And grammerly has a lot of other I think really useful. And interesting features like they have this brand style guide, which is something we use that the blacksmith which allows you to set your preferred spelling for things like brand names, and grammar rules and things like that. All right, so let's take a couple minutes for questions. Anything that's come up so far, after the break, we're going to talk about AI detector tools now that I've shown you the AI writing tools. We're going to talk about chat how to write a good chat GBT prompt and then we're going to end the day with how to create your own personal GPT. So yeah, in the meantime, there's any questions. We'll talk about them now and then we'll take a little bit of a break.\r\n\r\nYeah, very good, great overview of some really cool tools that can be used for our content creation. If you have questions specifically about that, drop those there in the zoom q&a. There's one question floating out there about the slide. We were sharing this link as a slide sharing the slides as a slide being link because there was an issue getting them exported where the the links on the slides were clickable. And so technology Yeah, it that's so currently not downloadable. Is the long and the short of it so but that slide being link is there and it'll be available for you going forward.\r\n\r\nWe can we could share them as downloaded just won't be a clickable link. So you can we could share like both in tandem with each other. Unfortunately, that's going to be the limitation\r\n\r\nYeah, yeah. So I'm happy to add that PDF link as well. We'll I'll get that added to the link bundle as we come back. If you want to download these just know that there are things that say read more, learn more that don't clicked anywhere in the PDF. Alright folks, well let's go ahead and take a break. It is 153 Central time let's take a break until right at two o'clock Central. So right about seven minutes from now and we're quiet until then. Sounds great. See you then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We are back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, we are back and ready for the second part of day two. Maddie, what are we going to knock out today?\r\n\r\nSo we're gonna start with now that we've learned how to generate a copy, how do you detect it? We're going to then move to talking a little bit about some Google guidelines around AI content writing for humans and robots. And then we'll end the day with a deeper dive into chat GPT how to write a great prompt and then how to create your own personal GPT which I'm really excited about because it's something that I only just learned how to do myself. Very\r\n\r\ngood. That's a lot to cover in the next hour. I let me invite everyone also to look at the chat I'm going to drop in today's slides if you have come in late. Also, we've added a link there for the PDF download. And finally, there's a link in the link bundle that'll drop in in just a moment that has the invitation for you to submit your site for a content UX audit tomorrow. So with that I will turn it over to you Matty, let's\r\n\r\ngo. Sounds great. All right. Yeah, let's go ahead and knock this out. So AI detector tools. There's a couple that we've tested at the blacksmith and I want to share some of the results of those tests too, so that you can understand what they can be useful for. But also again, there are limitations. As with the rest of this world of AI, everything's still kind of developing. We're all learning things at the same time. And so there's no like perfect answer. There's no one definitive tool that's going to tell you like this is current AI content, or this isn't AI content. So a couple tools that you could try though that I think will give you a decent idea or continent scale, copy leaks and originality.ai and the link here which again, you can grab through the slide bean link is a link to an in depth investigation that we did at the blog Smith testing out these different tools. You know, trying to learn more about the nature of AI content and what it sounds like. So I do have a couple of ideas for you two that we'll talk about next in terms of like how to rewrite things that sound robotic whether they were robot generated or not. But before we get to that, this example here is kind of funny because it's the Constitution and this is continent scale, saying that they detected to be 9% ai generated and you know, I don't think they had robots at the time unless alien somehow hooked them up. But I think it's fair to say that this is more than likely 100% human generated content. But it's just interesting to see that their AI detector is still picking up some very some version of that. And that you know, also perhaps it hasn't trained this AI detector on you know, pieces that existed before. Ai content was a thing. So so that's just like one thing. You know, I think from the standpoint of like, if you're working with content creators, and you're paying for human generated content, then you should get that fundamentally I think that it's an ethical violation for someone to use AI to generate content without disclosing that and to be accepting payment for that as if it were something that they were creating. Of course, there are many companies out there who are hiring people with the job description that is like aI content writer, AI content editor or like somebody who trains you know, a chatbot on a certain way a certain body of work a certain way of writing. All of that being said, if you if you are using these tools, and they are saying with a high degree of certainty, you know, this is AI generated copy. I think it's really important to not outright accuse somebody of submitting AI generated copy what I do at the blog Smith is like let's say that we're doing like a paid test with a new writer hopeful for our team. What I do is I say, hey, you know, we ran this through, you know, these three AI detector tools, and here's what it said here, you know, is what degree of AI content it's saying it thinks this is like, can you comment on that? And it gives them the chance to you know, explain what they think might happen, defend themselves, offering to make fixes, and I think it's really like the way people people are going to be honest or not. There's nothing you could do about that. But I think it's the way that they respond to and handle that situation that tells you what you need to know about if you want to work with them, whether or not you can ultimately tell if their copy was aI generated or not. What is very interesting about these different tools is first of all, they're all gonna give you a different answer. That's just a fact. Because they're all using a different approach to detect AI content. The other thing is that you can input the exact same copy on one of these tools two times and get a different answer. So again, it's it's the wild wild west. But these will at least give you something to think about and whether it doesn't matter. Like if we if we trust the writer or not, we're always going to run their copies through one or multiple of these tools because we want to detect things that sound robotic, even if they were written by a human. So that kind of brings me to my next point here that I was starting to hint at. So when it comes to detecting AI content, or even detecting content that humans wrote, that sounds robotic, there's a couple of patterns that you can look for. The two major characteristics that the aforementioned AI detector tools are looking for are first of all, perplexity, so that's unpredictability within the content. Ai generated text tends to have low perplexity. Human writing has higher perplexity, it kind of makes sense we're a little bit more erratic than a robot. The other thing is burstiness, which is a similar concept. So it's looking for variation in the length and the structure of sentences. Ai content tends to be more steady, more formulaic, which makes sense. It has lower burstiness and human writing, which you know, has much more variation. The image you see here are some other things that we've picked up in our own writing process. And in investigating this topic, different signals that sound robotic again, whether they are in AI generated or not. So repeating words, like in this example, collision coverage, you know, coverage collision, like it's just like it's not using a lot of variation. And in the box MyStyle guide we talk about like, trying not to use the same word twice in the same sentence or paragraph, which is not always possible, but this would be an example of something that wouldn't pass the blacksmith style guide test because it's it's too repetitive. Also repetitive sentence structure where like, each sentence starts with the same formulaic approach. Advertising then a verb you know, advertising the verb, unnatural word usage, so like, you know, removing a glass dome to access the ball, but it doesn't really sound like how a human would talk about replacing a light bulb. A generic or impersonal tone. You know, it's like things that don't add value that you're just kind of like saying for the sake of having words, it's another thing that we talk about in the blog, Smith style guide, like everything you say, should have a purpose, and we don't believe in fluff. It's about cutting things to being the most concise version they can be while still conveying enough meaning. For people to understand what we're trying to say. Statements that contradict themselves. So the new policy will increase employee benefits while at the same time it will reduce employee benefits that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And inconsistent verb tense, you know, something a human editor. Should be able to pick up pretty well but probably a robot writing is not going to care too much about He He was waiting for the bus when he sees his coworker. Stiff, formal or matter of fact, writing style. You know, again, just something that just doesn't sound like a human wrote it or who would want to read it. So this is this is something that can be helpful to you like when you're doing your own edits to kind of like go through these different things. And, again, whether whether it's aI generated or not, and you know that for a fact, you still want to make sure that your writing is something that appeals to the human. So I wanted to take some time to talk about Google's helpful content update and also their guidance for AI generated content and whether or not it will rank some of this we did talk about last year if you were here, so we're just going to do a really quick refresher on that as it relates to this topic. So my book and like really like what we're talking about, in general is kind of marrying the concepts of writing for both humans who are really the ultimate buyer like they're the ones who actually have money so they can buy from you, whatever it is you're selling. They respond to other humans, other people's empathy, versus robots who you know, we're not writing for their sake, but they are the medium that connects us. To those humans. And so it's important for the things that we write, to be indexable to, you know, be findable to be descriptive, and to ultimately match the intent of whatever the human is looking for. So, you know, robots can also take the form of social networking site algorithms, like that news feed that you're familiar with, I'm sure.\r\n\r\nSo so that's kind of like the two players in this game. Here. So this is some highlights from Google's guidance about AI generated content. As you can see by the link here, this is from early 2023. And I was looking at this page again, just a couple of days ago to see if anything had changed. I had seen something on Twitter now x, where somebody had mentioned that something on this page should change. And I was looking at these three things because I think they're the most relevant to this topic that we're talking about. And like, I don't know if I'm just you know, like, post pregnancy brain or something. I couldn't find the difference. But it might have been because it was about something else on that page. But I might have missed it. And it might have been one of these things. But anyway, I think these things still more or less ring true today. And if anything has changed, it has been Google being less specific about their guidelines. Because that's kind of the nature of what all these things that they've shared with us are it's it's kind of like so just to go over them is a content against Google searches guidelines. They say it's not, but you know, it can't be used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which we'll talk about when we talk about the helpful content update. Will AI content rank highly on search? Maybe, you know, it doesn't give it any gains, which makes sense. What I think is really notable about this is they talk about if it's useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of e 80. It might do well in search. So they talk about original, but we've already talked today about how AI content at least on its own without manual intervention by humans is inherently not original. It is inherently not unique. And I would argue that again, without human intervention, it's neither useful nor helpful, in that, you know, you're not It's not like adding something that doesn't already exist. At least in that case. So to me, from Google's own words, AI content really aren't its own shouldn't rank high and relevant search. But of course, there are exceptions. And then, of course, there are situations where people pair that with a human editor like we saw with seeing that of course, CNET being a cautionary tale of what to avoid. Should I use AI to generate content? They say if you see it as an essential way to help you produce content that is helpful and original, we have that original word again, it might be useful to consider but again, if you're trying to gain search engine rankings and no there was something on Twitter now x where somebody was kind of like I can't remember who it was, but you might recognize the situation especially if you're in like the content world. Someone was boasting about how they had created a ton of AI generated content and they were sharing you know some stats from like their Google Analytics, and how would that helped rankings and things like that? And I think everybody agreed that that person should have probably kept their mouth shut because somebody from Google ended up you know, seeing this Thrive that came to their attention and they got hit with a manual penalty based on what this person was saying about you know, having not really like had that human intervention. So thus, it was not original or unique. And it's just funny, like, you could probably get away with it, at least for a while, depending on how Google develops more of these guidelines. But when you start to boast about it, and Google gets wind of it, then like there are manual interventions that they could take, so tread carefully. If it's working. Keep that to yourself. So then it Yeah, I wanted to like connect this back to Google's helpful content algorithm update, which also happened. Probably a little over a year ago, maybe two years ago. And so they describe it as being part of their long term efforts to provide original and valuable content through search. It rewards content that meets users expectations while demoting content written primarily with search engines in mind. So like we were just talking about what the AI content. This this update isn't focused on AI but but it adds color to those guidelines in terms of how to approach it or you know, if you are generating AI content, how to make it work, so that it could rank these questions. Are directly from Google just made pretty was blacksmith branding, but the link that I shared here will will get you to the Google documentation that includes these questions and the subsequent ones. So to ask yourself like is is this content truly people versus is something that Google would consider ranking. It's things like Do you have a primary purpose or focus for your site? If you're writing about too many disparate topics, it's very confusing to Google you can certainly write about things that are different but related to each other, but you should really have like one specific focus if you want to rank high in relevant search. Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they've had a satisfying experience? I think that's a question to ask yourself, whenever you create any type of content like Is it is it satisfying to the end user doesn't really just serve your purposes? They talk about like demonstrating firsthand experience or like a depth of knowledge that's really important. That's that's how we add uniqueness to our content. That's how we make it original. Even if it's just your opinion on something, you know, that adds color to the content that already exists. Okay, so, um, let's talk now about from the search perspective, are you taking the search engine first approach to your content? So these are things that you obviously don't want to do. And it's questions like, you know, are you primarily trying to attract people from search versus creating something truly useful for humans? It does say are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics like that cautionary tale, that person who was sharing, you know, the content they generated, which resulted in a manual penalty, it's a perfect example. I think this is important too, like, are you mainly just summarizing what others have said without adding much value? You should always be adding I think something to the content that you're creating in order for it to be worth creating in the first place.\r\n\r\nSo just to kind of summarize here, like what is helpful content versus unhelpful content from these guidelines that Google has given us and that I honestly agree with? helpful content is people first genuine specific, it's actionable. Up to date is important. Once you publish something, you have to think about, like if you're using stats or if it's about maybe a tool that changes frequently, like you should be regularly reviewing or auditing your content for opportunities to update it. Is it relatable, is it concise? And ultimately, is it satisfying, versus the unhelpful content which is written primarily for the search engine robots it's spammy? It's generic, it's abstract. It might be outdated. Ultimately, it's impersonal, impersonal, fluffy, and then whacking. So these are some easy guidelines that you can use to understand if your content is hitting the mark for something that Google would even consider ranking high and relevant search. All right, so now we're gonna get to some of like the really fun stuff, I think today, which is get GBT some specific examples for how you can use it, as well as a demonstration for how I'm using it. And so, a lot of the things that I'm going to talk about today are based on things that I've learned from other people. I didn't necessarily invent these things. I've adapted many for my own use cases. And so again, I think this is a really valuable opportunity for like if you have anything to add to this discussion, I'd love to see it in the chat. I think it could benefit other people. How are you experimenting with AI? Like how how would you maybe adapt some of these ideas for how to write a great prompt What are like interesting prompts that you've used, and you know what, how is that benefited? You so I'll just put that out there. And then I'll also say that some of these are like pretty much all of these guidelines are based on open AIS guidelines for prompt engineering as well as Google's in some cases, I've combined to them and in all cases, I've given examples of how to use them effectively. So let's go ahead and jump to it. Okay, so the, I think first and perhaps the most important thing is to be as specific as possible. And you want to set parameters for the output that you're looking for. So my prompt here was helped me generate 10 email subject lines to use for cold outreach for my content marketing agency, please limit output to a maximum of 45 characters per example. I picked that number, the 45 characters because I saw that that's like somewhat of a best practice for how many characters people want to see in an email subject line. And what I could have done here was use the personal GPT I'm going to show you later that's all about the blogs and style guide them has like aspects of like how we do business and I could have gotten like even better example results here. But the point was not to show you something perfect it was to show you how to apply this principle. And the other thing that I wanted to add to is like you can always start with a plant, see what it gets you and then you can set parameters after the fact to refine your output. Like, you know, maybe I would have asked this prompt and then asked for it to shorten it to 45 characters or to suggest new examples of 45 characters. Or maybe I would have asked for like, what are you know, 10 General Sales, cold outreach subject lines, that I could use and then I might have added the detail Okay, now, adjust it for like my content marketing agency. The next one is to give context and examples. So I have this bot and I think I'm going to show you a screenshot of it next. One of my personal GPCs is a blacksmith sales expert. And so I created this bot because we recently hired a new salesperson, and there's just so much to learn both about the blogs with his brand. The work we do for customers, and just our sales process in general things that we want to share with new prospects that I wanted to create a resource and it's like of course you know, I want to make myself as available as possible to this new salesperson because typically I've been the salesperson for my company, I have a lot of that knowledge in my own head, but there are times when I am unavailable or I have other stuff that I have to work on. And so I wanted to create a personal GPT that incorporates some of this different documentation that I've created about our process. You know, referring to this prompt it also has like a copy of our standard proposal. Different things about you know, like what makes us stand out compared to the competition what's what's unique to us, I guess, so that any person on our team, any especially new salesperson, would be able to use this chat bot in order to surface some of this information, especially if they couldn't get a hold of me basically. So here's an example of a prompt I gave my personal GPT which is using the above case study. So I gave it a URL on our website. And one of the features of chat GPT is that you can have it browse the web in order to to include information and its results. So I gave it a URL. I asked it to reference a proposal that I had attached to the GPT that I've uploaded to it. And I said proposed an email pitch for a specific job opportunity. I copy and pasted a longer piece than this. I just took a screenshot but like the long version of this job description, and and I asked it to effectively address the requirements that the job description surfaced and the writing based on our strengths. And so what ended up happening was, you know, it wrote like a cold pitch email. But it did it did effectively address this prompt. There were things that I would change about it. Certainly there are things that I would have edited it before I sent it out to the person who had posted this job description, but I think that for me as a founder who has also traditionally been the salesperson it's such an effective way to use this tool because I spend so much time just you know, it's like I know all this information I know what we're good at. I know that we have relevant examples. You know, I know all this but it takes time to like resurface that knowledge and put it in a form that sounds good and is compelling, you know, to a sales prospect so that if you take one thing away, I think that you know that's like one really excellent use case of using your existing knowledge or your internal documentation. To make your life way easier.\r\n\r\nAnother related GPT prompt engineering tip is to use de limiters to clearly indicate distinct parts of the input. That just means like what I shouldn't have done here that would have made it probably a little bit easier for chat. GPT to understand what I wanted is to put this this job description text in like quotes, that's like a delimiters to say like, you know, do this to this piece of what I'm asking for to kind of like help it understand what part of the copy it's referencing. And what part of the copy is the ask, especially when you have like a longer input output, you know, whatever. Another example of that is something I learned from James rose. He is an automation and Zapier expert and has been doing a lot of interesting experiments with AI who's really good person to follow. If you're interested in just like getting ideas, he takes transcripts from like voice of customer interviews where he's getting feedback and you know, like positive testimonials and things about his product and he feeds that transcript into chat GPT and says you know, use this puts a transcript in quotes those delimiters and basically like give me like three, you know, like really nice things they said about you know, our product three like great pieces of feedback. And I think that that's such a useful way we like on our client calls on our internal meetings. We use a tool called fireflies, which automatically transcribes all our meetings, but it's still you know, it's still a lot to sort through an end fireflies has its own AI capabilities, too. So it helps to summarize and things like that, but to take to be able to use that output and quickly surface insights based on whatever your prompt is, I think is such an awesome use of AI that saves the human reader from having to go through the whole thing. So this is and I'll show you, I'll show you what this looks like in action when we do the personal GPT demonstration. But this is kind of what it looks like to set some parameters for your personnel GPT and there's two I guess like schools of thought on setting like setting parameters narrowly defining the G PTS role. So you could do this within normal chat GPT and say for this query, you know, I want you to take on this specific role. And so I got this idea from Paul Roeser. He was on some like marketing technology podcast, and he's talking about how he uses AI. And his example was like, something along the lines of like, you know, pretend that you're a lawyer that advises entrepreneur, it's about hiring law and then he gave his prompt so he kind of like set the scene like this is the narrow role that I want you to operate into this query. So that's one way that you could look at it the other way is that you could create a personal GPT that serves a specific purpose like my blacksmith sales expert, that I've already referred to and that you know, I'm kind of showing you behind the scenes, how I set it up. So as you can see here, there's like a name for it, which is kind of arbitrary. A brief description, I think, mostly for your reference. And then the instructions are like what the AI uses to then suggest answers to your prompts. So as you can see here, I'm telling it like you can use our website as your primary reference. You should be familiar with all those pages and use it to inform your responses. It'll ask you and I'll show you how you want it to communicate with you how you want it to give answers. You know what specific information you want to focus on again, like narrowing that scope. And then I also say like tailor your responses to showcase the company's strengths and successes. Using you know details from the website and emphasize why we're the ideal choice in you know, answering like sales related queries. So this is one of the greatest uses of chat GPT without narrowly defining its role and objective. You're gonna get like a wide variety of answers and that's fine. It depends on what your use cases, but by giving it a roll, I think the quality of your output goes up exponentially. And I'll show you again, at the end here, what that looks like in practice. Here's another really interesting way to use it, I think, especially if you're trying to learn a new skill or if you're trying to troubleshoot an existing workflow, which is what I was doing in this prompt. So I use air table a lot. I'm a huge fan of no code and automation in general. I've found in my life that it's really hard to find like the perfect solution to everything that I want to do. I never could find like my perfect project management tool. And so essentially, I built it between using process street air table, Zapier, and you know the other mix of ragtag tools that are in my arsenal. So in this case, I was trying to create a specific automation in air table that for some reason is just evading me and I'm sure I'm doing like one stupid thing wrong, but I asked air table or sorry, I asked Chad GPT first of all, I prompted it by telling it what automation I was trying to create, like the actions that triggers the end goal. And it gave me like a step by step process that I would say is a little bit more high level than this out, but and then I asked it to refine its guidance or expand on its guidance by saying okay, so for this step, this is where I'm getting stuck. What was how exactly what I set this up in air table, and so then, as you can see, the result has some details and it's more detailed than the previous query gave for that step. It's probably worth mentioning that in chat GPT right now, there's two versions of GPT, which is like the underlying, you know, algorithm, machine learning mechanism, whatever. So there's GPT 3.5, which is an older version, and then there's GPT for GPT four incorporates web browsing so it has more up to date guidance. So especially when you're trying to troubleshoot something like air table, which changes often and so, you know, if I were using the old version of chat GPT, I might have gotten a different answer. So when you're doing things like like this, you want to use like the newer version, there is a limitation. I think it's something like you can have 40 prompts within three hours or something like that. I don't think I've ever gotten close to hitting that. But I suppose if you were to ask, you know, a lot of follow up questions, or you're troubleshooting something very complicated, then you could hit that so that's just something to keep in mind that as a chat GPT user and I don't know what the distinction is for paid versus free, but I think that the paid version of Chad GPT is like worth its weight in gold. I think it's extremely undervalued and it's probably because they're using our data to train it. So they do get a benefit out of it. But you know, I would say if you're finding yourself limited by the free version, then just upgrade to the paid it's, it's so worth that.\r\n\r\nOkay, so now, here's the real fun part. So we're gonna go through how to build your own GPT and I'm gonna give you like a specific task to do and so you can either follow along with me while I do this now, or you can do this yourself. Later, watch the recording and replicate it. I will say the process is probably much more straightforward than you might think, if you've never done this before. So we'll go ahead and get started. Let me set my screen accordingly. So we're going to jump over to the blog Smith website, because this is going to be the basis for the very basic UBT that we're going to create today, which is based on one that I've already created and refined a little bit more than what we're going to get into. But okay, so the blacksmith has this writing style guide and on our website. It has this chapter version so you can jump you know to these different sections. To see how will we go about our writing style. It's something that's fairly industry agnostic, so definitely like a great resource. If you don't have your own writing style guide. You could use ours to build yours. But what I want to do is create a chat GPT bot based on this that essentially acts as like a blacksmith editor that defends our style and explains when a piece of copy is not following it. So we have this as a PDF which I've already downloaded. I'll just show you what it looks like really quick. And it's it's designed, but it's fairly plain texts. You know, it's not that much more complex visually than like a Google doc version of this. And I'm telling you this, because my first attempt at making a personal GPT was actually to solve a personal problem of mine, which is that I love the game Settlers of Catan and I wanted to make a Catan rules bot so that I could download all the PDFs of the rules for every version we have. And I could ask the GPT okay, like you know, here's some like obscure situation like what is the role, you know, based on these rule books? Because every once in a while, something like that pops up. And while I like to think of myself as a content expert, there are those niche situations that require further consideration. Unfortunately, on the Catan website, the PDFs that you can download are very complicated visually as PDF, so chat GPT in my limited experience has not been able to read them. So it's just something to note that like you want to give it like the plainest text version of whatever documents you want to share with it, but something like this would be fine. And I know that because I've tested it. Okay, so so if you want to follow along, you know, just hit download, and that's this is the exact file that we're going to use. So then you go to the chat GPT dashboard. Which looks like this. And like I told you, you can toggle between chat, or GPT 3.5 or GPT. Four, you can see you know those limitations as well as the added benefits of using that more recent version of it. So then you go to explore GP Ts, and you can see on my sidebar when it loads here that I have. We have chat GPT which is like you know, every every question you could ever want to ask and then I have a couple of my personal gptc here as well as some that I've explored in this explore LGBTs area that I'm just kind of playing around with. So this is also just like a really fun place to look through things, test things out and get ideas for the the GPS you might want to create. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead and click this Create button, and you'll see this interface. Again, it's pretty simple. And if you go to create, it's going to prompt you with specific questions, but if you kind of like are familiar with this personal GPT idea, you could also jump to the Configure tab and start filling it out. But I think that it's easiest to think about it from this Create Tab. And so it's going to prompt you with a couple of questions. So this first one is like what kind of chat GPT what kind of personal GPT Do you want to make? So I'm going to tell it, you know, I like to create a GPT that serves as an editor for my brand, the blog Smith. The goal is to have this GPT serve as a resource. That references our specific style guide, and suggests edits based on newly inputted copy. I'm just making this up. But the last time that I did this, I'd used something similar to that. And so after each input, it's going to think you know, it's going to react to the things that you're telling it and it's going to ask you to refine the way that it interacts with you. So we're not none of this is like rocket science right now. This is just like designing almost like the persona of who this GPT is going to be. So then it's gonna suggest to name I suggest naming this GPT blacksmith editor. Does that work for you? Sure. Yeah. And you can change this yourself. Like if you just want to, like get through this part. Just say yep, yep, that's fine. And the next thing is it's going to generate a profile picture and so these are new, they're a little bit arbitrary. It's just like for your own purposes, for fun. One thing that is kind of fun with the imagery and it doesn't always work so we'll see. But sometimes I asked it to change to adapt the picture to use like one of our brand colors just for fun. So I'll say like, can you update this image to incorporate our main brand color, which just using a text expander Simple as that? Let's do it does. So this is using that dolly dolly I never know how to say it to suggest images and, you know, it looks like Okay, right? But we're not we're not asking it to create anything like complicated at this point. So, so like for example, it didn't, it didn't really follow my query. So let's see if I try a different way. Can the image use, you know, our main branch color? Like this is this is definitely the limitation of AI is that sometimes it understands the query and sometimes it just doesn't and we won't get stuck on it. If it doesn't get it. I just want to see if changing it has any practical effect on it. So then after this, it's going to ask about Yeah, that doesn't do it. No, that's fine. Okay, so the next question. They're asking me to more narrowly defined the role of what this GPT is going to serve as I'm Oh, so I'll have you use the uploaded PDFs as this as the foundation for your edits any questions? So I can upload the PDF here. Or I can go to that configure tag and I can also tab and I can also I can also upload additional documents to help as well like with my blacksmith sales expert, I have like our proposal I have a document about our sales process. I have another GPT that I forgot to mention that's called the blacksmith like SEO guru or something like that. And it basically I uploaded a bunch of documents about our approach to SEO some stuff about our keyword research process, and our like philosophy behind the different steps as well as a document I created for our writers and editors. That's about let me see how to get out of that. That's about how we write about SEO to make sure that our philosophy is communicated correctly and specifically. So that's just an example of different documents that you might use to support the outputs here and to narrowly define what you want to base its answers on. Okay. One thing that's important to say is when you're uploading documents you want to make sure to kind of like give context and say like, this is how I want you to use it. And like, you know, I'm doing this, I'm uploading this. So I'm expecting you to use this as part of your output if you don't, if you don't refer to that document when you're setting it up or when you're interacting with it. It might just ignore it in some, in some use cases when I've been creating these personal GPS like that's happened where, for example, with this one, it'll make edits based on best practices, but not based on the document that I specifically wanted it to use. So that's why I used that language. And so it says, I've updated your GPS behavior to focus on our specific style guide based on the uploaded PDF. So that's great. You know, like, what options so one thing that it usually asks is like how do you want the GPT to communicate with you and I'm getting maybe ahead of myself, I'm gonna say no, that sounds good and see if it prompts me to ask about like the tone.\r\n\r\nOkay, so it's not gonna say it looks good, but what options do I have for how it communicates with me? In terms of tone of voice, again, usually asked so this is giving me some options here. Again, not usually in the way that it normally does. It kind of asked to like paragraph form versus like giving me several examples. I'm gonna say that I want it to be let's go with number three, which is encouraging and positive. I think that that's the ethos of how we edit at the box with the other things are true to um, yeah, so just for the sake of this, and you can always change this, you can always refine it. Okay, so it's updating the GPT. This is probably the last edit and then what I'll do is I'm going to grab some copy that I want it to, to edit just to show you how it comes full circle. And then I'm going to show you kind of like the back end of what it looks like. So let me grab that copy. I'm going to feed it an example of like a recent social post that we were editing and the formatting is going to be like a little bit funky here, which is fine, because this is just an example. And the blog the style guide isn't necessarily built with a focus on editing social copy, but again, it was just like a quick thing to to try. Okay, so it says it's updated it. It tells me you know what the point of it is no more adjustments needed. Let's try it out. Okay, so I'm going to show you how it works and then we'll show you the Configure and then we'll kind of end the day off with any questions. Okay. So it gives you some prompts based on what it thinks that you might ask it and you can edit this, but I'm going to say please suggest edits to the following copy, in quotes and quotations, those delimiters based on the blacksmith style guide PDF and again, it's gonna be a little sloppy looks like it didn't actually take the name of the GPT that we asked it to. So we'll we'll take a look at that too. So it's interesting depending on the prompt you give it and I've tried this a couple of times in this case, it's kind of separating it out by saying like okay, here's some of the things from the blacksmith style guide and here's like specific passages of copy and how we would change them. So that's interesting. But what I would probably prefer is that it edits the whole thing, and then it tells me what edits it made. So it's, again, it's referencing I can I can tell because I'm familiar with it, but it's referencing specific aspects of the blacksmith style guide, which is great, we know it's working. But what I'm going to ask you to do is to change the way it outputs it. Can you refine the previous output by starting with I might mess up exactly how to say this, but by starting with, like all of the copy with edits, then after words, shared the specific edits made from blog Smith style perspective, that might not be like the most effective prompt. We're just going to see what it says. Okay, yeah, it looks like it's understanding. Nature. The copy here is an important I just want to show you how something like this could work for your purposes. Okay, so this is what I wanted it it refined the copy first and then it told me what it refined and why. Um, so let's look at this Configure tab. So yeah, for whatever reason, it didn't add the name. That that it prompted me and asked me to so I'm gonna go ahead and add that and you can see it up here. You can see this description. You can see the instructions based on some of the things that we talked about when we were creating it. You can make changes to these conversation starters we might even say like what like other conversation starters, would you suggest using freelist UPC code? I'm just curious and I don't know what to do. You can see the PDF that we uploaded and I can upload more files. You can add additional capabilities. I think by default the web browsing and Dolly image generation is implemented for many of you today who deal with code, this code interpreter might be useful. And then AI actions is something that I've started to play around with but don't fully understand but there's a way that you can connect your personal GPT to Zapier so that for example, it could reference data and other apps. So for my blog, Smith sales GPT I'm trying to create an AI action that allows it to reference our air table CRM so that you could ask it questions about a certain lead or certain portfolio projects and things like that. So once I get that implemented, it's going to be so cool. Okay, so it's giving me some ideas for these conversation starters that are a little generic, but I could probably refine them further. I think the last thing to talk about is how you can either keep this to yourself or share it with other people. I think that these drafts are automatically saved. So if you X out of here before clicking Save, I believe it will still exist, but don't quote me on that. From there you can decide you know, if you want to, if you want to keep it to yourself if it's you know something that's for your own personal use cases, or if you want to share it with your team or if you want to share it with like the wider world like maybe you create a chatbot for your industry that other people could benefit from that you want to share. So, in most cases, probably anyone with the link is a good bet, if you ever intend intend to share it with other people. Okay, so let me jump back to my slides really quick. We're going to end off the day here. So here we go. me pull this back up. Um, okay, this is the link to grab the style guide if you want to use that to replicate what I did today. You can also grab that from the side being like um, I'll just say one more time. My book writing for humans and robots. It was the number one best seller in the SEO category. So if SEO and content is something that you want to invest more time and learning about then I would highly recommend my book. You can grab the first chapter for free on the books website, and you can grab the book on Amazon in both print and Kindle format. I'll give one more reminder for our live content UX audit tomorrow. I'd really love to help you workshop, your content, help you come up with ideas for making it even stronger and more effective. So you can use this link to do that and that will happen at the end of day two. And then, you know, outside of today, if you have any questions about the things that we're talking about, you can either email me Maddie at the blogspot.com or on Twitter, aka ex im at Mad Yasmin and then yeah, we'll end the day with any questions that have come up since going over some of this GPT stuff.\r\n\r\nYeah, great stuff. Thanks Maddie. You know, the custom GP tees are really interesting. And it's it's also not only for your own business, but also working for clients. It's an opportunity to really, it's, it's a service you can provide. We have a boy for example, that has a ton of they're an educational nonprofit and they have a ton of PDFs like 800 and an educational topic that they deal with and so we're investigating, what would it take to put those PDFs in there and then have a bot that you could query the entire library to find an answer to something right. It's just super, super useful. Yeah.\r\n\r\nOne one note on that Nathan is chat GPT. So they have a limitation of you can upload 20 Total documents but they don't say how large or small those documents have to be so OneNote for like anybody who's trying like this is something that came up with that Catan bot I was trying to make. You can combine the documents if need be.\r\n\r\nYeah. And chat CPT if you have a large library like that it might not be the best tool it sometimes there are a bunch of third party tools. I mean, if you go on App Sumo, every day, there's a new one that somebody's chat bot or whatever, but find one that the UI that you like and a lot of those don't have those limitations. Like they have a separate database that they're looking at with total sort of magic they've created. I don't know, I don't understand it. But anyway, yeah. So folks, a couple of questions stacked up there. If you have a question, add that to the zoom q&a, and we'll dive into it. So first question from Doug. Maddie, how does SEMrush or SEMrush fit into the landscape of content writing tools? What overlaps or complements with phrase? Sure,\r\n\r\nyeah. So I think of something like SEMrush or Ahrefs is being a great all in one. SEO tool. So people use it for more than content although content is like an important facet of them versus something like phrase or query scope is really just about content and just about content optimization, or, you know, in the case of like phrase and market Muse also generating content is the use case. But SEMrush I have I'll be honest, I have more experienced with a traps but they both they're both very similar and we actually use SEMrush like the keyword researchers and strategists on my team, we use SEMrush these days. But it is it is the tool that if we're comparing it to phrase and query scope, that's the tool that we use to define our primary keyword. It's before we run those reports. It's a tool that we use to come up with some secondary keywords. It's the tool that we use to identify feature snippet opportunities, we can do competitor research on it. You can do backlink tracking on it. You can audit your website. So I mean, it just it just serves such a bigger overall SEO use case. But there are many very useful content optimization tools. And so it's kind of like a higher budget tool than any of the ones that I've mentioned, but it will serve you know, many of your SEO purposes even outside of content. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nOkay, questions from Eddie. Eddie is writing tech blogs. I see now my keyword content from Reddit is ranking very good. I doubt Reddit content is helpful since usually people have vague answers to questions. What do you think about that?\r\n\r\nIt's an interesting question and I think I'm gonna take the opposite stance. I do think that Reddit content is helpful. There's something about people being like anonymous on the internet that like makes the truth come out. People feel like a little I guess like Freer with the information that they that they volunteer. And so I mean, you have to take it with a grain of salt because they're anonymous. They also might have an agenda that is not clear versus somebody who's coming out and saying, you know, I work for one of these tools or, you know, these are the clients they serve. And so that's like, why this relates to what I'm talking about. But I will say that sites like Reddit, Reddit and Quora are really interesting for learning more about your audience, learning about the things that like keep them up at night and so that's why they rank so high is because they are a wealth of information. They're not, you know, they're not using like the traditional methods to optimize their sites, but they are benefiting from all this unique user generated content because they've created communities. So, yeah, I mean, I don't I don't know exactly how to answer the question. I guess I'm kind of like answering around it, but I think that Reddit is a useful resource in general. I don't know that it can be counted on like aI right where Yeah, I can be confidently incorrect certainly. So to can, Reddit user is but they bring up some really interesting points that are worth investigating. So as long as if you are using it as a reference that you fact check, or you know, if you're I guess if the question is like, How can I outrank Reddit the the answer is like, I don't know.\r\n\r\nYou just said maybe Reddit pays Google. And honestly, we just did a story about this a week ago in our news roundup. It is actually Google who has purchased the rights to all of read its content. Alright, Gemini. Yeah, that just came out. The story last week was an unnamed AI but it's since come out that it's Google has purchased it right. So who knows? Yeah, Google does. Yeah. Doug says here's my favorite prompt. I add this to help me brainstorm chat. GPT add this to the end of your prep, ask me five questions that will improve the response you'll be giving me I use that too. It's really helpful. I\r\n\r\nlove that I I haven't considered that and that's why I think like discussions like this are so useful. Like, we can all learn so much from each other. I learned something new about this every day. For\r\n\r\nsure. The AI world is moving rapidly. And we were Mata you and I were talking earlier just we did an AI workshop here back in October, and there's so much that's new and better and different, even just in the last few months. It's pretty crazy. All right. That brings us to the end of questions. Tomorrow, we're talking about a UX content UX. So give us one more time an overview of what we're going to talk about tomorrow and we'll start to wrap things up here.\r\n\r\nOh, tomorrow. I was looking at the comments and somebody had mentioned let's say Ben had mentioned that to get them to use the right color and the GPT to be very specific, use hex color code when so I got distracted but um, okay, so tomorrow we're going to focus on the content reader experience. Content UX, another way of thinking about it. So we're going to talk a little bit about things like things that Google has said or page experience signals, so things that are like tangible that you can optimize around within your design to help your ranking on Google. And my philosophy when it comes to SEO is that there's three pillars, there's like the content and the things that you can affect on your own page. There's the website structure, so that's going to be a lot of what we talk about tomorrow. And then there's things like Off Page signals like backlinks, which we won't talk about, but you know, we can always have a discussion later or, you know, I'm sure Nathan will bring on somebody who talks about that at some point, too. So yeah, we'll talk about these like website signals, these page experience signals. We'll talk a little bit about website structure, things that you can do to create a better experience for your users, even if it's not necessarily something that Google takes into consideration for ranking and some things that they do. And then we will talk about auditing, you know, with practical tools and specifics, your contents, the nature of your contents UX. I'll tell you how to like run your own content UX audit, whether that's with tools or with people in person. And so that'll be that'll be kind of the nature of what we talk about tomorrow. Trying to bring that discussion full circle from the specific things that you can use to how to like measure if you're using them effectively, and then we'll end the day with a content UX audit from the things that ideally, y'all have submitted. So if you haven't, please use that form that we've linked to in that slide. Being link, and then I'll pick a couple for us to go over tomorrow.\r\n\r\nYep, very good. And that link is there in the chat. Once again, make sure you submit a URL that was a lot of fun last year when we did that very info wise. Yeah. So I will take care of that. Tomorrow. That's yeah, day two. All right. Maddie, good stuff today. As always, we'll have the recording up if anybody wants to go back and replay if you came in late. It'll be up in about an hour or so soon as it renders. And I will see you back here tomorrow, one o'clock central time for day two of content workshop. Have a good night. See you then.\r\n\r\nHear but as you're coming in, we're just asking what was your biggest takeaway from day one? You can sound off there in the chat. I'm also dropping in the new link bundle, I can type correctly. There is a new slide being linked, so make sure you grab that new one. It is updated on the replay page. But make sure you grab that new link because a few changes have been made since yesterday. That will let you follow along better.\r\n\r\nSome last minute tool suggestions. Ah,\r\n\r\nlove it. Love it all. Right, catch. Working for everybody now. Just about a minute and a half to go and again, we'd love to hear from you in the chat on what your biggest takeaways from day one we're. As we are waiting just another minute or so to get started. Also the link there for the live content UX audit is on the screen because we have a slide or two left if you'd like to submit your site or page or something for a content audit. It'll be a friendly review with with some good help to help you improve some of your language. So use that link. The link is in the link bundle in the chat. There on the screen. We do have a couple of slots if you'd like to participate in that. So Vivian, if you look at the replay link in the link bundle the academy link there is a PDF download link on that on the on the replay page. And that is the new updated slides. Yep, so that's all there ready to go on the replay page or you can view them on slide being right now. Yeah, not too many changes. New tools. All I was new to was fun tools. Yeah. Alright folks, about 30 seconds to go. Glad everybody's back for day two. Again, our check in question. Let us know in the chat. What your biggest takeaway from day one was? Particularly did you have you used any new GPT prompts since we played around with that yesterday, or has anybody taken the dive and made your own custom GPT based on\r\n\r\nor have any ideas for things that you want to try when you have time? Yeah, I could. I could use some more ideas myself. Yeah.\r\n\r\nFor sure. All right, folks. It is three minutes after someone to start our recording and we will get underway. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everybody, wherever you happen to be welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here and joined again by MADI. Azzaman for day two of the content accelerator for 2024 Welcome back. Maddie. Glad you're here.\r\n\r\nThank you so much for having me. Again. It's exciting to dig into some of these topics.\r\n\r\nAbsolutely. So we had a lot of fun yesterday talking about some AI stuff and some great principles for creating great content. And today we're looking more at the the user side of consuming content right what are we going to talk about today? Exactly.\r\n\r\nYeah, I think that you can think of today as being a way to practically test your content, whether that's with other people, whether that's with tools, understanding how it measures up against some of the guidelines that Google has shared, that are necessary for ranking, specifically when they have to do with the user experience. So we're going to kind of attack this from all angles. And, you know, hopefully it'll leave today with some really tangible tools to help you understand like, does your content provide a great reader experience? Or are there things that you could do to improve it?\r\n\r\nYeah, very good. And we do still have this content UX link on the screen. If you have not filled that out and you would like to there's still a slot or two left for the second hour, we'll do some live content review. So grab that now. The link is there in the chat as well. A couple little bits of housekeeping and we'll turn it back over to Matty as usual. Ask your questions using the zoom q&a And we'll take those questions at the end of each hour today. break in the middle as usual. One note is that the slides have been updated since yesterday. So in the chat is the new slide being link. And if you want the PDF download, just go onto the replay page with the link there and the link bundle and you can download the PDF there as well that has all the new updates on the slides. So with that, I'm going to disappear Maddie, let's get started.\r\n\r\nLet's do it. So yeah, if if you want to submit something for this live content UX audit, ideally, it's like a page on your website, not not something like a PDF, because we want to look at how the content interacts with design. And like Nathan said, you know, it's a friendly review. We're not like looking for issues. We're just looking for things that you could do to perhaps improve the content experience. Get another set of eyes on it. And it's just a practical way to apply some of the tools suggestions I'm going to give you so with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. We're going to start today by talking about Google guidelines for what makes up a great user experience, especially when it has to do with content and specifically we're going to talk from the perspective of Google's quality rater guidelines. And then after I go through a couple specifics there, we're going to talk more broadly about Google's page quality signals. I think that's what it's called. I haven't labeled in the next slide but things that have to do with what they've told us influenced ranking high and relevant search, you know, all else equal, if you have great content, what aspects of your website design, you know, must be present of your website structure must be present in order for you to rank high and relevant search. So the first part is a little bit more I would say qualitative. And then the second part is going to be a little bit more quantitative. So the learn more link is for an article I wrote a while back for Search Engine Journal. This was specifically focusing on aspects of Google's quality rater guidelines that have to do with the user experience. And so I think it was a couple of years ago now I read through the entire quality rater guidelines, which if you're interested in SEO, and user experience, I would highly recommend at least giving it a skim. It's kind of hard to do because it's like 175 pages, but there's some really good nuggets in there about how Google looks at search, how they judge quality of content, how they determine if a page of a search result meets the needs of the searcher who's looking for it. And so the quality rater guidelines what's worth mentioning is that to some extent you have to take with a grain of salt because this is not something that directly influences rankings. What happens is human quality raters that they hire read through these guidelines, they're tested on them to make sure that they understand what Google is looking for and then they manually rate different website results based on a certain query. And so what happens is that Google gets that information. It helps them you know, refine their algorithm in terms of the general direction they want to take with it, but it doesn't necessarily result in any manual adjustments for whatever websites they're ranking. It's it's more of like a research process. So that's, that's what the quality rater guidelines are. They're a tool to help Google research what the web looks like right now in order to make decisions about how they want to adjust their algorithm for the rest of us. But all that being said, Whenever Google gives us information, whenever they volunteer details about how they look at search, and how they define quality, and like a great user experience, I think that we would be wise to take note of that if it is in fact our goal to rank in relevant search. And I think at the end of the day, whether it is or not, I think Google tries to maintain a high standard for quality. I think that it's their philosophy, philosophy, that content is king, you know that that good? Content is important. And so again, whether search is your goal or not, it's worth it's worth at least like listening to what they have to say. And so, for your benefit, I've tried to break down some of the most important things from the quality rater guidelines specifically having to do with the topic that we are discussing today. So the first thing that they mentioned or they they talk about the quality rater guidelines has to do with interstitials. So back in, it was either 2017 or 2018. They made an update to their algorithm, and they told us about it is again one of those rare cases where they're just upfront. And they said that like if you're using popups say, for example, to gather somebody's email address, or you know, it maybe you're on an E commerce site to advertise the sale, something that obscures the content that you have to interact with you either put your email in, or you have to click the X button, you know, something like that, that you have to interact with in order to use the content on the page. They call that an intrusive interstitial. And so what happened was it really it really resulted in a big change for how people use conversions, I guess on their website, so you know, bloggers and people who do affiliate marketing and of course, yeah, ecommerce, and businesses trying to get email subscribers all had to fundamentally change the way that they approach gathering email addresses. And I'm going to talk a little bit later about what you can do instead, that doesn't violate Google's guidelines. But again, from Google's perspective, they say that interstitials make it difficult to use the main content of the page. And so when they're talking in the quality rater guidelines, they frequently refer to MC main content, which is like what the searcher is ultimately going to your website for and so you could say generally speaking, that they're trying to defend the experience of the main content. And to like, skip ahead to the point here about ads, when they talk about ads, that Google recognizes that and they say this in the quality rater guidelines, that ads don't automatically equate to low quality, they understand that ads are in many cases, the reason a site can continue existing. But that being said, there is like a right and a wrong way to go about implementing them. And so they say the too many or like large ads hurt the user experience. And then that case, the human quality raters should assign that site that result, a low rating. So again, you want to think in terms of the main content is the ad obscuring it? Is it taking away from it? If not, you're probably okay. But it's just good. To keep in mind that Google's not saying no, you can't have ads. You just have to be thoughtful about it. And when I did some of these UX audits in the past, like the ones that we're going to do later today, I did a couple of for some members of the Denver bloggers club one of the local clubs that I've been involved with here. And one thing I noticed about a lot of them was you know that they'd have an ad in the sidebar, they'd have an ad in their footer. They'd have an ad a couple times throughout their blog content, and it was probably Google Adsense that they were using, or some other ad network. Like it. And again, it's like I understand that you're monetizing your site using ADS. But at the end of the day, it's probably working against you because people if you were to look, you know into the data like the scroll depth and the time on page and things like that, using Google Analytics, for example. You probably see that on those pages that are very heavy with ads that people abandon the page pretty quickly because it's just a bad reader experience. So to go back a point here, clickbait Google has a couple of pieces of guidance in the quality rater guidelines about that specifically.\r\n\r\nGenerally speaking, a good page sets expectations or good title sets expectations for wherever it's leaving you. And so clickbait is something that it can certainly be effective and getting attention and getting clicks, but it can be a very unsatisfying experience if it doesn't do something to deliver on the promise made in the title. Um, the Google specifically says that clickbait headings detract from high main content. So, you know, that's something that they're specifically looking for and guiding people to, to comment on. And they say also that like every page should have a page title. It shouldn't just be presented without buttoning it up that way. And that title should describe page content. So again, it's a balance. Writing a good title, I think is very much in art. But it shouldn't be misleading. That's that's the key here. Um, so the last point here is that when it comes to creating content, you want the answer to your query to be pretty prominent in the results. You don't want people to click through and then have to dig to find that. And Google has a couple of different SERP features, I would say where they're trying to, you know, first of all, answer this within search so that you don't click through, which is a problem for us content creators, but it's also perhaps an opportunity when we think about things like a Featured Snippet, which is just that sort of box that shows up above any other search results and it's usually summarizing kind of like the nature of what that person is looking for what Google thinks that person is looking for. There's other things like Google will index parts of a page and link to that specific part and highlight it you probably noticed that yourself when doing search and looking for something very specific. And so that's something that they do, it's not, to my knowledge, it's not something that you can necessarily optimize for. It's it's their methodologies of indexing and surfacing content. But the example that they gave in the quality rater guidelines was something about like somebody searching Abraham Lincoln's birthday. And when somebody clicked through like it was present on the page, but it wasn't prominently answered. And so in that case, they were instructing the human quality rater to give that like a not as good rating for meeting the needs of the searcher. So yeah, I mean, definitely, that's, that's kind of most of what I'm going to say about the quality rater guidelines. But I really think it is a very interesting document and especially if you look at the examples they give in terms of how they're making those determinations. There's a lot of little nuggets of truth and we also have a blog post on the blacksmith website that digs into this even outside of like the user experience sort of and like design focus. So if you want another take on that then definitely check that out. We just went in and updated it recently. So let's talk more broadly now about some search signals from Google things that Google has told us about the page experience and you know, importantly, I think how to how to like measure that, quantitatively. Google, we talked a little bit about helpful content yesterday and that algorithm update which was the year a year and a half ago, something like that. Google has been has said that a good page experience is a requirement. For creating what they define as helpful content. So you know, all these algorithm updates are designed to support Google's mission, you know, the way that they look at content quality and things like that, of course, they all you know, more or less feed into each other, but I think it's worth mentioning that like that is an aspect of having helpful content. Alright, so we're gonna start with what is collectively known as the core web vitals so the core web vitals, this algorithm update, or Google announcing this page signal? came about? I want to say it was 2021. So they've been around for a while. And interestingly, and what we'll go over is they have changed slightly since coming out. But the idea here was to give people these these three specifically, page signals, were to give people more tangibility around how to measure the the page experience. Because up until that point, it was a little bit innocuous, it was hard to conceptualize, in terms of knowing like where you actually rank according to Google's own way of looking at it. So the first page signal of the quarter web vitals is the largest Contentful paint, which is a facet of page loading, loading speed. And so their definition is that it reports the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport relative to when the page first started loading. So if we think about I think most of these core web vitals are more or less referring to like above the fold, like what you see before you scroll, it's like that first impression that a person has with your website and most designs, most tools that you use to optimize loading and things like that, typically are set up so that the rest of the page loads later but you want you know what's visible initially to load quickly and first so that people can start interacting with it, and then it gives time for the rest of the page to load. So another way of thinking about this is that this signal takes note of the largest element on every web page and measures its total loading. Time. So maybe this is an image, maybe it's video, you know, typically at some, I would say some sort of media thing, but it could be your theme in general, it could be a very slow loading plugin. So these are all things that you'd want to keep in mind in terms of optimizing this particular factor. And when I say I guess, like the theme and plugins, it's like the output of them that you would implement on your page. So okay, so how do you get a good largest Contentful paint so according to Google, whatever this largest element is, is about 2.5 Seconds or Less of loading time and you have a little bit of wiggle room here, before it gets to, you know, this like poor area, but you'll notice that it's not a super long time. And I think that this particular man measurement here, it relates to something that Google's said before and shared in their own documentation, which is that, you know, the majority of people bounce if a website doesn't load within three seconds or less. I'm sure that that guidance has changed over time because that's a dated stat. But it still goes to show that we're kind of like within that guideline, with this particular measurement of a particular element on a page. So the next one is first input delay, and this is actually what it was. This has since been updated. And I'm going to show you an example of what this looks like. But let's let's talk about like the original intent of it and then what it has become. So first input delay is a measure of interactivity. It measures the time from when a user first interacts with the page to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction. So that sounds like gibberish. Basically, the lower a website's fid score, the more promptly it starts processing users clicks and swipes again, interactivity like how long does it take for somebody to actually be able to use a page? So this measurement per Google, a good fit is 100 milliseconds or less. So that's what it was right? But what is it now? So this GIF kind of shows an example of poor responsiveness versus good responsive responsiveness from Google's perspective, but probably from all of us, as users as well and looking at it you you probably have been in this position before where like, you click on something and then there's this little bit of a delay before you are actually able to interact with it. And so Google essentially took took this concept that they had initially defined as a core web vital and added some color to it, I guess. And so the new measurement is that it's, it's below or at 200 milliseconds. That so up from I think, what was it 100 before so they're giving you a I guess a little bit more time to create interactivity here. And just so you know, this new measurement is actually not fully unveiled yet, but it will be as of March. 12th. That's when this takes effect and takes over. So they say that, you know, some interactions will actually take longer than others. But when it comes to especially complex interactions, you want to be able to quickly present some initial initial visual feedback so that the user knows that something is happening\r\n\r\nthe time until the next payment is the earliest opportunity to do this. So the intent is not to measure like every eventual effect of the interaction, but the time in which the next interaction is being blocked. So you essentially want to delay you want to if you are delaying some visual feedback, then you might be giving users the impression that the page isn't responding to their actions, which is ultimately a bad user experience, right. So the goal of this new measurement is to ensure the time from when a user initiates an interaction until the next frame is painted in the shortest time as possible, for all or at least most of the interactions the user make. So it might seem like a small distinction between the first input delay and the interaction to Next paint but I guess if we were to summarize them, the first input delay is really focusing on that initial interaction. And the interaction to Next paint is focusing on the difference between interactions. I think that's one way to look at it. Okay, so then the last core web vital is related to visual stability. And it's called cumulative layout shift. And so their definition Google Developers definition is that it measures the sum total of all individual layout shifts scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan. of the page. Okay, but what does that mean? So Visual stability means that a web page remain stable throughout the users visit. It means that text isn't suddenly moving as new elements load or shifting other elements of the page and I think the the unfortunate end result of when this is bad, is when it makes the user click a link or perhaps a buy button or something like that, unintentionally, they were trying to click something but because of something shifting after it loaded, it pushed them somewhere else. And again, this is probably something where either something comes to mind where that's happened to you or like, the next time it does, then you'll be like, oh, yeah, that was the cumulatively out shift the site is getting, it probably has a pretty bad score for that. Um, so with the core web vitals, visual stability became more of a priority. And you really have to have very minimal minimal instability in order for your pages to be considered for ranking high in a relevant search engine results page. So those are the core lead vitals, that's probably the newest addition to these page signals that relate to the content experience, but we're also going to go over some of the old like, you know, tried and true important things that have to do with page experience, such as mobile friendliness. I mean, this is something this is probably one of the first big things that Google told us was important for ranking, high and relevant search. Besides maybe page load, I think Page Speed like performance and mobile friendliness, like these are things that kind of happened around the same time in terms of a Google like, came out and said, like, you must prioritize these if you want to rank. So Google used to be a desktop first indexing property. But you know, as more and more people started using their mobile devices, you know, the iPhone came out and so now suddenly, everybody had a computer in their hand. And then another thing that's probably worth considering too, is like a lot of people in developing countries like they might not have a desktop or like a laptop computer, but most people have a mobile phone at this point. And so Google now operates off of the idea, or off of the principle, I guess, of mobile first indexing. So if your website is not optimized properly for mobile responsiveness for mobile devices, then that is going to hurt it's going to greatly hurt your ability to rank and relevant search and your desktop site could look perfect. It can rank perfectly in terms of all these other factors that Google tells us about. But if your mobile site is off, it's it's going to affect your desktop rankings as well. So, you know, going into all of the specifics of what's mobile friendly is kind of outside the scope of what we're going to talk about today. But I mean, it's things like making sure that your text is readable. It's making sure that your images are, you know, visible and processable that they don't get skewed strangely. It's you know, thinking about some of those core web vitals and like how elements interact with each other like our buttons too close together so that people are hitting the wrong thing. So all these things are are considerations for making your website mobile friendly. And I think you know, with the way that things like page builders, builders for WordPress work, the way that people design themes for WordPress. This is this is like very much top of mind for everyone who's designing for WordPress. So it's a lot easier to implement now versus perhaps when this update was first released into the world. So Safe Browsing is something that I they've actually taken out of what they call these like page experience factors, like I don't know if it's an official one anymore, it was in the past. And maybe it's because now we have HTTPS as an additional factor that's kind of related but I think it's still worth mentioning this from a content experience factor. So Safe Browsing is just that you can use a website that is free of malware, you know, that you can be like, reasonably sure that like malware isn't present, you're not going to get it you're not going to interact with it, and that it's not you know, affecting the output of whatever site it could be installed on. And so in order to protect yourself against this, there's different tools you could use. wordfence is a customer of mine, so I'm going to talk about them and I think that their tool and their team is great. They have a lot of cool security researchers and cybersecurity experts on their team. So they're very on top of like any new things that come out, but they have this product called wordfence care where they'll go in they'll identify them all where they'll clean it up for you and we'll share best practices for how to avoid it in the future and you know, additional steps that you can take. So I do think that you need some sort of tool on your website in order to prevent, you know, the worst effects of malware. And I guess the other thing that I would mention too, is to like always have backups of your site, because malware can really mess things up. And so that's that's like your first line of defense. So HTTPS also has to do, I guess, essentially the same idea of like Safe Browsing, maybe from a slightly different perspective. And so Google again said, you know, we're not going to rank websites that do not have HTTPS in place compared to those that do. You know, after that update happened, and that was a slightly more recent update, but it was still a few years ago, and so HTTPS in order to implement that, essentially, you just install an SSL certificate. And to be fair, there are different types of SSL certificates. Most web hosts have that functionality, where you can fairly easily implement one and then it creates either automatically or there might be some manual steps. You have to take where it it redirects your existing HTTP URLs to the HTTPS version. So that's important to make sure that that's working. Otherwise, it's going to break your site but again, most web hosts have a fairly straightforward process for implementing this and a free ssl certificate or I should say an included one with your hosting plan, but depending on your needs, you might need a different one. So that's something that you have to explore based on your industry like, like E commerce might have a higher level of SSL certificate needed, but for you know, the general small business owner designer, things like that, probably what your web host has is good enough. And so to be able to see if HTTPS is working within Chrome specifically and I'm sure many other web browsers but but chrome because it's a product of Google. There's a little button next to your domain name in the URL bar, and you can click it and see that the SSL certificate is working and that the connection is secure and I would say that SSL certificates in HTTPS are important for people who are interacting with the website. I mean, you kind of you kind of have to have it no matter what in order to rank but they're the purpose of it is that if somebody were to be giving their sensitive information, you know if they're on an E commerce site, and they're, you know, putting in their address or their credit card number or you know, a banking website and people are logging in, and you know, once they log in, that user has access to their bank accounts and their money and things like that. That's kind of the like, ideal use case of HTTPS is to protect the people who are entering that sensitive information to make them feel safe on your website.\r\n\r\nWe talked about this earlier, having no intrusive interstitials so these are the pop ups the image you see is something that Google shared when they announced this ranking signal to show what not to do, essentially where these ads are obscuring access to the main content. You shouldn't have to click in order to get to the main content. So what do you do instead? Here are a couple of examples from the blacksmith website. So the first one is we have a floating bar that basically is at the top of the content and then just pushes it down. And in this case, I used it to add like reminder about my book, a button to click to buy it you could use it to get email signups. I think another great example is like E commerce. If you're having a sale or if you want to say, you know, free shipping on orders over $50 or something like that. I think that's a really excellent use of a floating bar. It's like what's the most important thing happening for this business right now or use it to collect email signups? Then there's also next to it is a welcome mat, which is designed you know, very similar lead to how an email popup would look but the difference is that it's like embedded on the page. So it's not getting in the way of the content. It's part of the content. You can choose whether or not you interact with it beyond scrolling. Another version of that is a content upgrade. So on certain blog posts, let's say that you have additional resources, maybe you've turned that blog post into a checklist or there's a certain template that you're talking about in the blog posts, and people you want to incentivize people to share their email in order to access it. So having a content upgrade, which again is like an embedded version, at the end of your blog post about that specific resource is a totally valid way to see get emails that's not going to violate this intrusive interstitial guidance from Google. The other thing that you can think about is using email popups, but delaying when they pop up. So that kind of gets around Google's guidance. You could use what's called like exit intent technology. So when somebody scrolls for the Back button, or the, you know, X in the browser, then what happens is an email popup gets deployed where you know, it asks for somebody if they want to subscribe, for example. You can also use that same idea based on things like scroll depth, if somebody gets to a certain depth on a page, you know, that tends to indicate interest. It's given them a chance to interact with the content. Or you could have a deploy on certain pages. You ideally after they've seen other pages, so maybe after they've gone to a certain number of pages that deploys. So there's there's a couple of different ways to think about it that don't get in the way of Google's guidance. And we do have a page I forgot to link it here. But we do have a blog post on the blacksmith website that goes into each of these things and different use cases and things like that a little bit dated, but it's all the same advice. Okay, so now that we've talked about Google's quality raters guidelines, which is indirectly related to search rankings, and Google's page experience signals, which are directly related to search rankings, I wanted to talk a little bit about website structure and design I would say, especially as it relates to ranking high in relevant search, but certainly how it impacts the content user experience. So it's kind of like a mix of the things that we're talking about, but expanding on them as well. So the first like factor that you want to optimize your website around your content in general, is crawlability. And when I talked about crawlability, I'm talking about Google's ability to like fully index all the resources on your site. Is there anything that is getting in the way of Google doing that, like, for example, errors in your sitemap, like maybe you're unintentionally excluding certain pages? Maybe you know, you haven't created enough connections between your pages for Google to understand how they relate to each other. And so a couple of guidelines here, you know, first of all, is that when you're creating content, it's important to add external links. Think of these as your ability to add context to prove claims these are things that you know, you can also use let's say that you're writing about a topic and there's a related topic and it doesn't really make sense for you to cover it in your content. Like maybe it would just make your your piece go on too long. But it's something that people might want to learn more about. So you find a relevant resource from a trusted site and you link it External links are great. I mean, you might, I guess, worry. Like, is that going to lead people away from my page? You know, is there any like negative impact of that? I think that's just kind of the way that content works, that people are always looking for more information. You can set it so that it opens in a new window so that they're still on your page while they explore that content. But yeah, as the best practice, have an external linking policy, it makes sure it's to good quality content and I think that, like with this next point, it helps Google understand what your content is about. So besides external resources, you also want to incorporate internal links. This just helps Google understand the relationships between the different pieces of content on your website, ultimately, what your website is about. It's helping with that crawl ability and that index ability. It's helping Google as robot to understand, you know, these different connections. So again, it's important really to have these two types of links and really every page and relate certainly every piece of content. And then, the flip side of all this is like as you create content, things are going to change. External links might become broken. Internal links, you might change, you know, like for example, the URL slug of them, and they might become broken. So I guess my first tip is to make sure that you have some sort of redirect solution implemented, there are different plugins that you can use to automatically if you change the URL slug of something, then it creates a redirect so anything that already links to a will be updated to that new link. But it's also having a process for like auditing your content to look for these problems. And one of the tools that I'm going to show you later today will help make that a little bit easier. But it's also just a matter of like I don't know, quarterly at least, or depending on the size of your website, quarterly, maybe every six months or so, having just a process to kind of go through what exists and if you need to fix anything. So we're talking a little bit about URL structure and I will say when it comes to creating content, you want to be pretty sure of the URL you want to use before you publish it. Because it is a factor in ranking, and you can use redirects, but it's kind of hard to explain them in the context of what we're talking about today without getting deep into SEO, but it's just generally like to trust me that it's a best practice to not mess with the URL after you publish, you know, after it gained some traction in search and things like that. But it happens and that's why you use redirects. But that being said, you could at least start with best practices. So the first thing is to incorporate your target keywords in that slug. So like yesterday, I showed you some tools we use for an article we wrote about AI detectors, so let's just pretend the keyword is like aI detector tools. You'd want that to be the slug. Without really like any extra information. You want to keep your URLs as succinct as possible so that Google doesn't have to take a lot of extra time to parse them. And so what that means is within within WordPress, you can customize your URL structure for blogging. And you can do things like add categories to the URL, you can add the date to the URL. My suggestion is to not do that the only reason that you might want to add like a subdirectory within your blog content or some other specific category, like if you have case studies or something like that, is because you can use that subdirectory to group pieces of content together to measure them in like Google Analytics GA for these days. But that's kind of an advanced use case and that's only if you plan on actually like doing a deep dive into the analytics. From an SEO perspective, I highly recommend against it. It should be your website url.com forward slash keyword. And when you're implementing those keywords, you're going to want to add a dash between each word so if the keywords AI detector tools, it's a i dash detector dash tools\r\n\r\nfor certain things like articles, a and words like the things that aren't, you know, specific keywords generally speaking, you can drop those when you're creating the slug. We have some guidelines on the style guide that I shared with you yesterday on the bugs with website that's also linked in the slides so or the PDF as well. So if you if you want to dive into more SEO and URL and keyword best practices and definitely check out our guidance on that. Um, duplicate content is worth mentioning from this perspective of the user experience mostly in terms of how Google would interpret that. So generally speaking, duplicate content is like you publish a blog on your website and then a situation that could come up that seems innocuous enough is that you know, somebody in your industry says oh my god, I loved your blog posts on whatever, I'd love to republish it on my site. And you say okay, and then maybe this site, you know, has more authority than you and maybe they have a better approach to SEO, maybe they've just been around longer. And what could end up happening is that even though you were the original publisher, and Google does take that into consideration, but this other site may outrank you with your own same content. So that's duplicate content. It could be a whole blog post, it can be an excerpt of it, it could be like a piece of it. So duplicate content, generally speaking, like try to avoid that. You can add a tag to your link called the canonical tag, which basically points back to the original content and says, This is the person this is the site that originally published it, even though we have now published it here. And so Google takes that into consideration, but they really make their own choices about who they're going to rank and so that that's not the be all end all way of making sure that the original publisher ranks highest in search, all else equal. Um, with all that being said, in my experience, you can typically republish things like your blog content on mediums like LinkedIn and medium you know, original copy without making changes. As long as you wait, I would say at least a week from the original published date to do that. This is this is my experience and that saying that it's completely scientific, the advice that I'm giving you, it's something that you should experiment with, if that's something that you're interested in, but also take note of what ends up happening and discontinue if it's getting in the way of ranking your own content on your own website. But when it comes to duplicate content, if you if you get approached by someone, you know, like the example that I gave, who wants to republish something that you wrote, what would be a better situation for you? It would be more work, but it's to say like, let me write a new version of this article, like maybe you take another stance on it, maybe you you just kind of like repurpose it in a different way. I would highly recommend against duplicating your content, either on another page on your website, such as using product descriptions that like a manufacturer provided or maybe you have, you know, two variations of something and so you're using almost the same product description or again, like the example that I gave doing it on another site, so I just wanted to add a cautionary tale for duplicate content because a it is kind of a bad user experience, but be it'll also more than likely hurt you in search without a very strategic approach. And then the last thing I want to say on this particular topic is about designing website navigation and best practices around that. So first of all, you want to use descriptive and recognizable menu item titles. And the example that I always give for this is the difference between something that's called news and something that's called blog. So in my in my experience, news is like an enterprise business that has a media arm and they're publishing their press releases and, you know, things that are relevant to their company, new product updates, things like that. Whereas blog is more articles. It's you know, the how tos. It's the list of coals. Its product lead content, for example, but it's not exclusively focused on that company's news. So it's important, I think, to match the heuristics of what your users are used to and one way that you might be able to figure this out if you're unsure is just kind of see like what the competition is doing and how they're naming their menu items. Or just ask some of your users like, Does this make sense? And we'll talk next about how to conduct a UX audit and that's something that you could do as part of it. There's this thing called the three click rule, which you may have heard about. Nielsen Norman Group actually debunked this as being like ideal or even something that you should totally consider. It's the number three is arbitrary, I guess is what I'm trying to say. But it's the idea that within three clicks, a user searching or user looking for something will find it through your website navigation without necessarily having to go to like an internal search. So well, it's arbitrary. I think it's still a good thing to keep in mind, which is just that people should be able to easily and quickly find what they need your your menu should support that. And then creating category grouping. So like for example, on our website, we have a Resources tab and it has the blog, it has some of like my YouTube content. It has our style guide. All of these are resources they have to do with like things that we're sharing with other people versus we have another tab that's about our work. And so it has case studies and like portfolio examples, and it's more focused on like Final outputs that you know, fit, you know, things that we do with certain clients. So just a couple of things to think about in terms of website navigation. I'm going to start this topic and then we'll break I think maybe in like five minutes from now, but I'll just go ahead and get this started. So let's talk a little bit now that you've learned about these different factors for how to understand user experience from, from the user's point of view from Google's point of view. Let's talk about how you can continue to make your own websites user experience better by implementing a UX audit. So UX audit, we might also call it a user tests. I think they're maybe slightly different concepts, but I'm going to use them interchangeably today. So usability testing involves observing how users interact with products like your websites. The purpose is to get a better understanding of how real people use what you've designed. And really the idea here is you want to combat any assumptions that you've made incorrectly, which is impossible for you to figure out by yourself. That's why we pull in other people. You can use your tests during just about any stage of project it doesn't have to be like the final part. It could really be during the wireframing stage. It could be you know at the midpoint it could be even after you've launched but you've added some new things. So why bother with UX audits? First of all, we're talking about it today because there's a strong relationship between the user experience and SEO. I think we've proven that by talking about specific elements of the quality rater guidelines that point to UX, as well as the page experience factors that Google's specifically told us. If you care about SEO, you should care about UX in terms of things like your page, loading your mobile responsiveness, and using things like HTTPS. To invoke privacy for your users information. It also allows you to uncover issues that might kill conversions. I mean, I think this is one of the most important use cases of a UX audit is to look for things that are getting in the way of whatever your end goal is with the website. Because we're all WordPress users here, probably most of us at least, you've probably interacted with whether it's your own design or somebody else's that where you recognize that somebody forgot to edit the demo content they've, you know, implemented it and they've gone in and made their changes. But you know, there's that hello world post they forgot to delete or there's something you know, and one of the menus, maybe the footer menu that they forgot to take out that, you know, they never actually customized and so I think UX audit would be good at surfacing that if you're if you're kind of blind to it, because you're too close to the project. And with all that being said, a UX audit helps to get out of your own head. We're all human, we're imperfect.\r\n\r\nAnd really, I mean, it's it's easy to say I think when it comes to writing content, like as much as like, I have a process for editing and looking for mistakes and things like that. Like I still use an editor whenever I write anything, because I need to get out of my own head in order to make sure that I'm not missing something important. So the same can certainly be said about about website design and doing UX audits. So at the end of the day, we all operate based on certain assumptions, but what if yours are wrong? I'll just go through another slide or two and then we'll break so in terms of picking user testers, there's a couple of different populations you could consider. And I'm also going to share a couple of different like marketplaces where you could find these people, but you can start with the people that already exist in your circle your colleagues, you know, the people that you work with, but also maybe your friends and your family members. Wow, this is a great place to start. Don't discount the impact of their own bias and desire to please you, especially if you're asking your mom for input she's probably not going to be super critical. And and you know, it's going to be more of a pat on the back then something useful. And even like people like your work colleagues, they they still may be too close to a project to provide useful feedback, but it's a good place to start. You can also recruit volunteers from your own audience. Again, they might have a bias if they really love you. They might be hesitant to give you really great feedback. But they're also probably very willing to help you make something that's better. So you can start with like your brand ambassadors, anybody who would consider themselves your biggest fans, things like that. Ultimately, though, your best bet is going to be unbiased third parties who don't know you, you know, who don't have like a stake in what you're doing. I would say ideally, if you could get a couple people from that pool and then maybe one or two people from these other pools of populations, you'll get a couple of different perspectives. And when it comes to some of the marketplaces that I'm going to show you, you can also filter by certain demographics, you know, age, gender, level of education, like whatever is important to like the target audience that you want feedback from, generally speaking, you can filter and on those people. Maybe we'll just go to the top of the hour, and then we'll and then we'll definitely break then. So how many user testers are enough for each design stage? I've mentioned a couple different populations you could pick from. This is another Nielsen Norman Group reference. They are a really great resource when it comes to anything user experience user testing and things like that. And so Jacob Nielsen wrote this column and he the column was titled Why you only need to test with five users. So that's his official recommendation is for each stage that you test five users is going to be more or less enough you're going to get marginal returns marginal new information after that point. So you know, unless you're getting wildly different things from those five user testers, you can probably stop it there. He also says that it's best to involve a larger quantity of user testers earlier on in the project if you're going to test during like the wireframing stage. Versus like, when a website's like basically ready to launch it's going to be harder to make noticeable and useful changes at that point. It's going to be kind of locked in. So I think that that makes sense. Um, so we'll just start with some of the questions that you might use. When designing usability testing, it is important to to be thoughtful about this before you start you you don't want to just like go into a blind and just, you know, like, what do you think of this website? You want to have a strategic approach if you want to get useful information? So my suggestion is to start start by defining whatever your goals are, I mean, is there something in particular that you're looking to test? Are you wanting to make sure that this design is understandable to your target demographic? Is there something that isn't currently working with the design, something that's maybe hurting conversions? So whatever your goal is, like set that intention, and the questions will come more easily after that? You want to also be asking questions about the tester and how they interact with the Internet. And there's a couple of reasons for this. So one example is like you could ask the person what kind of smartphone do you use and asking this particular question is good because it kind of gauges like their familiarity with technology like how they're going to interact with your design. Somebody who uses a flip phone, for example, is probably going to have a much different level of internet savviness and how they interact with the design versus somebody who has like the latest gadget as their device. The other benefit of this question is to especially if you're doing an in person test is to kind of relax them. It's kind of like a little bit of small talk almost so that they can ease into the test, especially if that's not something that they often do. You want to define a specific action for the user to take. So this goes back to the goals. Let's say that, you know, you have an E commerce site that you're testing and you know, there's some sort of issue with people abandoning the cart, you know, after they add some products and so maybe you want to have that person go through the action of adding something, and then starting checkout. And seeing like, where in the process, there's friction, that could be one action that you want them to take. And so at this point, you want to ask them how they go about it, have them sort of like narrate and explain as they go through each step. The more you can dig into each specific action that the user takes the more detailed insight that you'll get as to how they're actually using your website. So I think with that being said, we have a couple more questions that we could talk about, but I think now is probably a good time to let everybody take a little bit of a break. And then after that, we'll finish this discussion of how to run a UX audit. I'm going to give you a bunch of tools to use to do your own tests. yourself, essentially. And then we'll finish off with that live content UX audit. Sounds\r\n\r\nlike a good idea. No questions in the q&a right now. So let's just go and take that break. It's two o'clock. About a five minute break. Is that good? Maddie? That sounds good. All right. So let's back be back at 205 and we're quiet until then. See ya. Then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We're back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, folks, we are back and ready to begin. Let me get the recording started here. All right, folks, we're back for the final hour. Of the website content accelerator. We got a lot to talk about in the next hour, so I'm just gonna let you get right to it. Maddie. Sounds\r\n\r\ngreat. Yeah. Thanks for sticking with me so far. Excited to finish this off strong and yeah, hopefully give you some really tangible things that you can take away. For your own processes. So I'm continuing this discussion that we started about UX audits and designing them. Okay, so we talked about this. Let's go to the next point. What so I used to offer UX audits as a service when I used to be on Fiverr. It was my most popular gig by far. And the way that I structured it was I basically priced by the page. And so when you're doing a UX audit, you want to be sure to identify whichever pages are the most important, especially if you have a big site like you don't necessarily want. Just going back to the E commerce example like you don't necessarily want to audit like every single product page, especially if you're looking for trends, maybe one you know prime example of what your product pages look like maybe one category page, your homepage, your checkout flow, like if somebody had me audit an E commerce site that that tended to be kind of what it looks like. You know, it's also things like maybe more generally, your homepage, your about page service page. So it really depends on what you're trying to do. But you could ask questions in your UX audit, like, you know, what do you think this is about the page in general, or about a specific element of it? You could ask What strikes you about it, you know, you're trying to see how people are reacting to it, how they're understanding it, and then like, what would you click on first, like what, what is something that looks interactable? And how would you, you know, accomplish whatever the specific goal is. So those are ways that you could you know, further define this question. Or this idea here. And then we kind of talked about this, what do you make of specific elements? So again, if we're talking about ecommerce, maybe you have a button that's like a quick add to checkout where you don't have to go, you know, to the individual page, it just kind of pops up when you're looking at a specific category or on the homepage or something like that. And so you might want to test like, do people actually understand what the purpose of this is? So that's just one example. You know, many others that might factor into your own purposes and needs. So when it comes to designing these questions, a couple of best practices to keep in mind you know, first of all, users are generally not going to be designers. I don't think you I don't think you perhaps want them to be because you want them to look at it from a different perspective than you and so with that in mind, you want to avoid any sort of like web development or industry specific jargon in the way that you ask questions. You want to design for the average internet user, they should be able to understand what you're asking without you having to explain and clarify. I think another useful thing in general and this is this is when you ask for feedback about anything, but it's breaking up a complicated question into simpler ones. It's, it's okay, you know, to to ask a question and to ask a follow up question and to dig deeper. And that's something that we talked about yesterday when we talked about chat GBT and and getting that ideal answer that you want to get from it. Sometimes you kind of have to break the subject down and sometimes you have to add clarification later. So then, I've said this in a way but be as specific as possible when you're asking questions, you know, reference specific elements. Bring it back to the goal, if necessary. That's how you're going to get the most useful responses. So going back to that fiverr gig I was talking about, these were the questions that I asked and every order and sometimes they would ask clarifying questions after the fact. But most of the time, if I wasn't because it's fiber, and I'm sending them either some sort of like written report, or typically it would be like a video recording of me going through and doing the audit and if you work with a platform like Fiverr, or some of the other things that I'm going to mention shortly. I think it's the next slide actually. Typically, people are recording themselves interacting with your website unless you're doing an in person test, which is a different situation. But so you have to have some sort of standardized approach in that case, especially if you're offering this as a service like I did. But most of the time these questions got to the bottom of what that person was hoping to get out of the audit. And so generally speaking, I asked for the URLs for any pages they wanted me to take into account. I also told them you know, if you want me to take a quick look before starting the order to see if this is a good fit for me, you can do that. Are there any major problems that you want me to keep in mind throughout the process? So is there anything that you're noticing isn't working that you want? Me to focus on like a conversion factor? Can you briefly describe your target customer so that I could keep their perspective and focus? This is a really important one. I'm not going to fit in and perhaps you know, every user tester that you're going to work with is not necessarily going to fit that ideal target persona that represents your audience or the audience of the client that you're doing this on behalf of. But that doesn't mean that you can't adopt that persona. And again, a lot of these platforms will let you pick a user tester based on demographics. So that's probably like the best case scenario. But I think, again, you can still benefit from a plethora of different experiences. So anyway, you know, like I'm, I'm thinking of like a time where I did a user test and the target audience was, you know, generations older than me or something like that, where they're interacting with the web and they might have some access issues, you know, they might it might be harder for them to read the text if it's not big enough. Things like you know, contrast come into play between the words in the background. And so things like that, maybe it doesn't personally affect me right now. But I can still comment on that and say, you know, you told me that this was your target audience. To me like this strikes me as something that would be very difficult for them to interact with. And then the last question I asked is What important goals are you hoping that this page or these pages will achieve? So that kind of goes back to like the problem question, but I guess maybe from a more positive standpoint, and especially, you know, people use your tests at different stages, so they might not know what the problems are, but they certainly know or ideally, they have an idea of what they want that page to achieve. So these questions like very much covered what I needed to know in order to give people a satisfying UX audit after they put in their order. Okay, so how to run usability tests a couple of different ways that you could do this. A very wide range of methodologies and honestly a wide range of end results I would say, in person is like the gold standard because you're going to have the most control over the process. You're going to be able to meet with people, you're going to be able to dig in deeper to any like initial questions that you set. It's a little bit harder to do with something like Fiverr or user testing. Because there may be limitations I think with like user testing, it's kind of like you set it up ahead of time. And then you know, the user testers go through it, but you don't necessarily get to get to interface with them after the fact. And then with fiber, maybe you could do that it would probably involve making a new order. It's going to take time to get that feedback. It's not going to be as dynamic as doing it in person.\r\n\r\nIn person, it's probably going to be the most expensive in terms of like your team's time and like setting up a place for them to do this. And, you know, having some sort of incentive whether that's straight up cash or like a gift card or something like that for people's time. Another I think great option is user testing. And I was pretty sure that this platform had had changed or been sunsetted or something but I was looking at it leading up to doing this presentation and it still exists. It might exist in like a different format than it did initially did. Like I think you have to buy like a package. It's not just like one by one, for example. So I'm not super up to date on how it works now more more as to how it's worked in the past. But basically, the way that it has worked is that you specify certain tasks you want users to complete and specific questions for them to answer. And so users narrowed the process they go through until that test is complete. They have or at least had had a very large user base. So it was a great platform for giving like that exact demographic that you wanted to test. But fiber is very similar. I mean, fiber doesn't focus on user testing. To the extent that user testing does a fiber marketplace covers a wide range of services, but their usability like UX test marketplace is very large, you know, in comparison to some of their other focuses. So definitely a great place to find user testers. People start offering their services at $5. But they don't have to, that's an old fiber rule of thumb that it had to be five now people can set whatever price they want. They just have to set up their gigs in a way that makes them competitive. The way that I did it was I used to charge by the page. And then if they wanted, like a written report, that would be an extra cost in addition to the video. So it just depends on how people set up their gigs. But there's some level of standardization because people go to that market and that marketplace and they want to be able to pick you know, five people that offer something that take a look at side by side. Um, you could also do something that's not exactly going to give you all the information but it's an interesting practice, which is like recording users sessions on your website. So Microsoft has this newer tool called Clarity and it's free. And so you basically add like a little bit of JavaScript to your header. And you can see people interacting with your website, and you can see you know, how their mouse moves and how they scroll and things like that and like what they click on. Of course, unlike the user test, nobody's narrating it, there's no audio. It's literally just kind of like outside of context, how they interact with your website. So it's going to give you marginally useful information, but it's just another thing that you can use to try to troubleshoot. You know, why something isn't working, for example. And then this isn't like fully, like a way to run usability tests, but it's a like a tool that you can use or that perhaps somebody that you work with might use, which is to take screenshots and share commentary about what they're looking at. And I'm going to show you an example here. Oh, and besides clarity, when it comes to recording user sessions, you can also use a tool called Hot jar to do that as well. Okay, so this is an example and it's a little bit dated, but this is from bug herd. So bug heard is like a website feedback tool. That's another way to, to look at like what we're looking at right here. And this is something as a designer that you could use with clients. Some websites do this publicly where they have like a little thing on the side of the website that's like, Hey, do you have any feedback about this page? Or do you want to report a bug? That's, that's kind of why this exists, but I used to use it for my UX audits. I would just go through each page and then create like annotated screenshots and then I could explain export, the report that has all the pages and all my notes and things like that. So it's just a cool tool, whether you're kind of auditing your own site, you're auditing a client site, or somebody's doing it for you. So okay, from the flip side, we've talked about how to run a user test, but how can you be a good user test or maybe how can you identify one that you want to work with time and time again? First of all, it's narrating your thoughts as you have them. We've talked about this because that like stream of consciousness just, you know, noticing things and whether you really have something to say about it or not just like addressing each element on a page. And so that's kind of the next point here is is, you know, not just addressing them, but considering the impact that each page element might have. It's certainly acknowledging the perspective of your audience we talked about even if you're not a member of that target audience, how can you sort of take on that persona in order to speak on their behalf? Another thing that I used to do when I did these UX audits was share ideas for a B testing. Like I might say, you know, this is an interesting approach to your head and I wonder if you were to try this if it would, you know, get you better results and so it's it's giving them ideas, even if it's not a fully fleshed out thing, but to say like, this might not be it, but maybe you could try this. And then it's also it's not just about being like negative or pointing out what's wrong, but also acknowledging what does seem to be working. So that again, you can really like laser in and the feedback that's going to have the most impact for what they should change to resources that have really made an impact on me and how I go about content and design. First of all, is the Design of Everyday Things. This is like one of my favorite books. It's more about physical design, like product design, but there's a lot of transferable things that have to do with how we design for the web. And then don't make me think is like the quintessential resource for web usability and he's sent created, you know, multiple editions of this. There's another book, something about rocket science. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but, you know, anything that he writes like I would highly recommend. Okay, so we did break, and then I'm going to save questions for the end so we can get through the important stuff here. So I'm going to give you a couple more tools to use so that you can audit your own stuff. We're going to go through our live content UX audit, and then anytime we have left is going to be for questions. Let's get through it. Okay, so we'll start with Google tools, because again, when Google gives us information or tools, we want to listen because this is essentially how Google sees our content and how they prioritize what they rank in relevant search. So PageSpeed Insights is really a wealth of information. It provides data points from a variety of factors. And as you can see in this screenshot, currently, as of the core web vitals update, it starts with the core web vitals, so it starts from a point of this like, page experience and usability factor. They what's kind of interesting is that they have a part of PageSpeed Insights, and I'm going to show you like a fuller report when we go into the live content UX audit, but they have a piece of it that's about accessibility, but it's it's pretty bare bones. And so Nathan mentioned to me right before we started today, that Amber Hines is going to be the next workshop next month and it's going to be about accessibility. And her company equalised digital, they have a really great accessibility checker that integrates with WordPress. And so I would say that like that's probably going to be a much better tool for making judgments about if your website is accessible. Then what you're going to see on Google PageSpeed Insights and I think that that's something that is really important that you know, it's not always like at the top of our list when it comes to some of the other things that we need to do. To make our website usable, but it is really important. Whether you currently have an access issue or not at some point in your life, I'm sure you will. And now that I'm a man like this has become more obvious to me, maybe not in terms of strictly website design, but I think about like when I'm on a walk outside and previously, you know, I could just step around people's icy sidewalks that they didn't shovel or whatever, but now that I have a stroller, it's like okay, am I gonna put my kid you know, in the street. And so it's it's things like that or maybe you break your arm and now you can't interact with the web the same and so accessibility, I just wanted to like, make make the case that that is something that is so important because you your loved one, there's somebody that you know that it's going to make a difference for.\r\n\r\nGoogle used to have a tool specifically for testing the mobile friendliness of your site, and I was surprised to learn that they've actually sunset this tool. So now it's kind of a part of Google PageSpeed Insights. I think that whatever functionality was already in Google PageSpeed Insights for measuring the difference between the mobile and desktop version was kind of already there. So they basically just said, like, maybe this is like duplicating those efforts. I don't know. But it's no different. I'll just say that, that we that we use Google PageSpeed Insights to make judgments about how Google understands your website from a mobile point of view. Um, so we have the ability to measure like a snapshot of the current state of how your website measures according to the core web vitals are Google PageSpeed insight, but I also wanted to share within Google Search Console, there's this core web vitals report that measures it over time. And the most important thing, I think, to keep in mind with Google Search Console, and and also like Google Analytics. What I'm going to talk about specifically is more relevant to Google Search Console, is the fact that it tells you if you know, you become in violation of anything that's going to hurt your ability to rank and relevant search in terms of what Google tells us right in terms of the big things. And so that's why making sure that it's installed on your site on client sites is so important because it gives you notices if you're like way in violation of something, and it gives you the chance to fix it. Google Analytics so I would also recommend installing from the get go because it gathers important data that's useful that you can use to understand your page experience your content experience, but yeah, so this is just one useful report that relates to what we're talking about. This came up when I was prepping for the live audit later. Just the idea that there may be a use case for understanding what WordPress theme somebody's using. And I would say especially what plugins they're using, because both of these things can have an impact on your pages performance, which is a search signal on the loading, you know, on the interactivity, and all those those good things. So this is just one tool there's there's a bunch of them out there. But you know if if your website is experiencing any performance issues, or you just want to understand like how somebody else put their website together. I think this is a cool tool or a cool mechanism for that. I also wanted to share a general SEO audit tool, I see ranking so like H refs and SEM rush which I believe we talked about yesterday, this is another All In One SEO tool. It is not as fine tuned as the others as Ahrefs and SEMrush in terms of their keyword data, so that's why I don't use it for keyword research. They use different databases and approaches. But what I will say is their SEO auditing tool, which is like kind of the technical structure of your website, like goes head to head with any of like the big players in the market, and I'll show you exactly what that looks like. And the great thing about SEO ranking is it's a lot more affordable as an as an All In One SEO tool. And even from like the keyword research perspective, like you could use it to get most of the way there if content again isn't like your biggest focus are in and or if you weren't in a super competitive industry, it would it would do just fine. Um, a couple like editing tools. Hemingway is a great one. It's pretty simplistic isn't the right word, but it focuses on just a couple of things. It focuses on just a couple of factors and so that's why it's useful it doesn't it's not super distracting. And then Grammarly is one I would say that gets into a lot more detail. Grammarly is probably a more well funded company. Than Hemingway I wasn't aware of if Hemingway been monetized until I was looking at it the other day they have some AI functionality and they might they might have some other like outside of AI functionality plans, but I'm not sure that they had like a clear path to monetization before that but grim really has always had its like premium and like enterprise business use cases. And so I think that's probably why this tool is maybe a little bit more robust in terms of the suggestions it provides. They have a lot of linguists on staff and again, a disclosure that I'm a Grammarly Ambassador but I also like to use the product paid every person on my team that's a writer editor has a paid subscription to grammerly and I'll show you why shortly. Um, you know, you also want to look for plagiarism when it comes to creating a great content experience and when I talk about plagiarism, I'm not even necessarily talking about things that you do like on purpose. Some things that happen in grammerly, specifically is that you'll write something and it will detect a phrase that's been published elsewhere on the internet because you know, like there's a ton of content that already exists and it's bound to happen. And it'll be about something that's like a completely different industry. Like you definitely didn't take it from that original place that was published, but it's kind of like a reminder to go on and try to make it more unique. Just so that you know, Google doesn't think that you plagiarize even though again, it's not about intention. It's just about the reality of the content that already exists. But at the blacksmith, we use Copyscape for every piece of content we create, just to be sure there's no plagiarism, and then Grammarly. I don't believe the plagiarism check comes with the free version, but because we have the premium version, and that's included that we use it to. Um, one of the last factors here is you know, making sure that your content adheres to your style guide, whether that's a specific company style guide, or something like AP style, which again, is like the news journalism standard. I think it's like a great standard to use if you don't have a set style guide. And then I just have a couple qualitative qualitative factors here. So on the blacksmith style guide, which will probably show you we have a section about information architecture, and it's about a lot of these different things, how to break up walls of text, how to approach writing headings, how to keep paragraphs and sentences short and to the point. It's other things like you know, making sure that you have good flow with your content, you know that it has good storytelling, but it's something a human would want to read. And yesterday we talked about texts that whether AI generated it or not sounds robotic and how to avoid it. So that's another like, piece that you can use like in your own audits, those guidelines. Other things that I look at are like the thoughtful use of on brand visuals at the blacksmith we try to incorporate multiple types of visuals per piece. I'm definitely of the opinion that words aren't enough. I think as humans we're very visual creatures and people all have their own, like different learning styles. So that's also a factor, you know, written word, I don't think is enough, especially like for me personally, sometimes I need to like watch a video about it, or you need to like, you know, play with it in my hands or whatever. Like there's just different ways that people process information and so the more different ways you can surface it to them within your content, the better that your contents going to perform and help them and then things like consistent formatting like how you use bullet points, how you write headings. Again, a lot of this we cover in the blog Smith style guide. Just a couple other things. We talked about a B testing when we talked about how to be a good user tester and giving examples. So Unbounce is a tool that you could use. A B testing is essentially testing like different variants of a page usually you're testing a specific element like two versions of a page title, or two versions of an image, but it could be a full page as well. And this is something that Nathan and I also talked about, which is that I think he'd love to have an expert on a be testing do one of these workshops or you know a webinar in the future so if that's your if you know somebody like that, you know, that's something I think that all of us could learn some best practices from but again, another thing that you could test\r\n\r\nQuick disclaimer, then we'll jump to our live content UX audit. And we're talking about how to make your content better. And, you know, basically like different processes that you could use to to catch mistakes. But I don't want you to leave this thinking that perfection. Is the goal because it's not I think, you know, we're all human, we all make mistakes. At the end of the day writing for the web is is great because it's a very forgivable medium and unlike print, once you notice a mistake, you can go in and correct it. And so I don't want this to become a situation where you're beating yourself up if you did all these steps or you did some of these steps and like, you know, you still notice something later somebody points out like oh, this is spelled wrong or whatever. That's really not the point. So at the end of the day, I think my guidance for you is done is better than perfect. And be kind to yourself but create systems to catch mistakes. And that system could be having like a human editor, like like I mentioned earlier today, whenever I write something, you know I'm telling you all my best practices, but that doesn't mean that I always follow them, right. I'm an imperfect human being and, and things happen. And I think the other thing that I wanted to say is like we all have limited time we all have limited energy, and especially now that I'm a new mom, like I used to work really late at night and I would just crush stuff out and I would go over it a million times and now I kind of have to be satisfied with like not having the ability to do that and having a much shorter period of work time every day. That I can get stuff done and having to prioritize ruthlessly and that sometimes means that like yes, maybe I spelled something wrong, you know, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it. And I don't think you should either. So that's that's my soapbox. Alright, so let's go to the live content UX audit. Give me just a moment to get this set up. Um, so we're gonna go through like a couple of these different tools that we talked about today. And then at the end of this, we will have some time for questions. Okay. So Stacy, we're picking on you today because you submitted a really great example for this live content UX audit. And I want to start by saying there's like nothing wrong with this website. I mean, it's very good and it follows a lot of both the content and design principles that like I would instruct my team on. So what we're going to do today is is really nitpick for the sake of giving people things to think about when they are doing their own content UX audits. And so I'm going to start by sharing, like some of these tools and their outputs so that I can show you how to use them. And then what we'll finish off on is coming back to this page, and I'm going to give a couple of qualitative factors, you know, that I think can make the content just a little bit stronger. So again, I wanted to surface the blog SMIS content style guide. This is going to be the basis of one part of you know, some of the things I'm going to talk about and I'm going to reference that Chechi btw bot that we made yesterday, that's based on the style guide and that's, that's kind of what I use to audit this page from the content style perspective. But again, some things that we just talked about were first of all the SEO and Keywords section or chapter, where we talk a little bit about I mentioned that you could get some guidance for how to use awkward keywords like how to use keywords within URL slugs. I also talks about this information architecture, or information structures what we call it here section. So that's how to like essentially present information but also like break up walls of text, make it more readable. We talked a little bit at the end of today about formatting and how to keep that consistent. So those are just a couple of things. I guess we also talked about links earlier today and so there's some good guidance there. So you know, this is a this is a good resource if you're building out your own content style approach, and you can really build off of this because again, it's fairly industry agnostic. So anyway, I took this link, and first I ran it through Google PageSpeed Insights. And if you look at the desktop version, I mean it's pretty much near perfect. There's it's very difficult to get to 100 on any of these factors on I would say especially on mobile, but even on desktop, I mean, it's it's kind of like a what's the word? It's like a like a fool's errand to try to get to 100 if you're if you're this close, so, desktops looking really good. You know, they have a couple of things that you could do to fix it if you wanted to, and I have some suggestions for that, but we'll talk about it from the mobile perspective. So if you go to mobile, you'll notice that you know, first of all, the largest Contentful paint is one of the core web vitals, that it's a little bit in the red and it's and that's really like the only one and the largest Contentful paint again has to do with page floating, I believe. And so, taking like the definition we had, I'm guessing that that has something to do with this image because this is the viewport you know, that first load so it's the first thing that gets measured by this core web vital. And when I was looking at this yesterday, it's a it's a JPG file, which isn't like a super large file or anything like that. But one thing that you could do to to improve that page quality factor is to instead save this and serve it up as a web p file. There are certain plugins that you can use for that it's going to you have to kind of determine if adding like a plugin or taking that extra step of manually saving it like converting it and saving it and uploading it as that file is worth it. But that's that's like the one thing that I could think would would flip this so that it's the performance is a little bit closer to 100. And then we go into some of these other like diagnostic details. And I think this is where PageSpeed Insights gets really interesting because you can sort of dig into specifics here. A couple of things that I noticed were like minifying, CSS and JavaScript and there's some other things that are kind of related to optimizing like these different file types on the website. So I use a plugin called nitro pack. There's a free version and there's a paid version. I think the free version will get you pretty far, but it adds this like little Add at the bottom of your website. So I just pay for the paid version because I don't want that there are other things like nitro pack but nitro pack from the perspective of somebody who operates in the SEO world, you know who's looking for good performance, who's looking for best practices, that is my suggestion to you and to anybody who is seeing these things on their Google PageSpeed Insights. So naturally talking about these plugins for me like the got the question of does adding more plugins like is that going to hurt performance like what what is the marginal return of that? And so what I wanted to do next was take the URL and put it in that WordPress theme and plug in detector to just see like what the back end of the site looks like. And so we can see, it's like a custom or like a child theme. And I think okay, so apparent theme is Astra, so we know that like that's the technical basis on which this is based. I think generally speaking, Astra is pretty good for SEO from what I've heard, I don't have a ton of experience with it. And then also, this is like more what I was interested in was the plugins on the backend. And I mean, from what it detects it's there aren't that many plugins here, you know, it has like a plug in that works with Astra there's a Quiz Builder. This DOWNLOAD MANAGER contact form and then the Page Builder that's pretty lean, especially if those are the only plugins that are installed. You know, different people have different ideas of like, how many plugins is too many or like what's the optimum amount but I would say like, we're well under that here. So adding something like nitro pack, or you know, like some sort of web p image optimizer I think short Pixel does that.\r\n\r\nSomething like that probably wouldn't like hurt performance for the performance gains that would come with it. Um, okay, so the next thing that I wanted to do this is higher level than just this page, but I wanted to show you guys SC ranking. So SC ranking again, is this like All In One SEO tool? And I think there's like actually something wrong with my browser because I'm trying to like x this out, and I could do this yesterday and it just like wouldn't do it. So this is either a core web vitals issue or this is like I have too many, like Chrome extensions that are conflicting with each other, that I haven't been able to figure out why it sometimes messes with my browser. But anyway, that's an aside. So um, so this is a C rankings like technical website audit. And what I really love about this is that it's pretty straightforward. Like you can essentially read this as a non SEO and get a very good idea of things that you could fix to improve your website's technical structure. And as you can see this website like it's not bad, like there's room for improvement, but overall it's doing pretty good. Again, chasing 100 is a fool's errand. You're like, probably not going to get there but you want to get as close as you can with the time and the resources that you have. And so this page is really just like a high level overview. Again, this is about the whole website. It gives you an idea of like, how many pages were crawled, versus how many URLs which could include things like media files, JavaScript files, style, sheet files, and things like that. And so this can be a good indicator of like, if you know that there's more pages or there's more files, like maybe there's a credibility issue here. And if if some are getting excluded from this crawl, then they're probably also getting excluded from what Google can see. And so at that point, you, you know that there may be a sitemap issue that's getting in the way of the ideal situation. But what I really wanted to show you was the issue report. So these are things that you could fix. And what it does is it it has a category, it gives a specific issue, it gives you which pages are affected. It tells you you know, whether you're like compliant or whatever you want to call it if it's following best practices or not. And there's there's very few things here. But for example, like here's one that has to do with crawlability, which we talked about earlier today. And so nofollow means that we don't want the search engines to read this page and there may be a good reason for that. And so it seemed that for your pages are affected, you can click on it to get a description of the issue. So this is why it's really great for people who aren't necessarily like in the SEO world. A lot of you are website developers or designers and so a lot of this stuff like you'll be able to understand just by going through it and familiarizing yourself with it was there like included details. But yeah, so then you could see, you know, like which pages relate to this issue and whether or not like it's worth doing anything or if you really wanted them to be that way. But I'll give you like a more tangible example of something that you definitely want to fix. We have, for example, External links to 4x x. So like a 4x. X code is like a 404 means that it's not found, and there's different variations of that I'm sure a lot of you are pretty familiar with that. And so this means that maybe something that was linked on the website now no longer exists. And so it either needs to be replaced or redirected or something like that. And again, you can dig into the URLs you can see like what specific error code happened. This is also a really great report that you can give to clients. And then you know, depending on the level of familiarity you have with these different issues and how to fix them then you can give yourself a little bit of an extra job and some hours working with them to not only audit and go through the audit and explain the audit but then also, you know, implement the fixes. So I just wanted to show you that because I think it's it's such a great tool. So then the next thing I did was I ran this through Hemingway, and like I told you before Hemingway is like the sort of like, saying it's the more basic version of Grammarly. is maybe not exactly the right way to describe it, but it's the more like focused version. And so as you can see, what it does is it highlights different things. And it's kind of using I guess these colors, as you know, like things like it's trying to like draw your attention to certain colors as being like something that's more worth your attention or less worth your attention. What I've always known Hemingway as is a great tool for measuring active versus passive voice. And generally speaking, we want to try to avoid passive voice in our writing. And so that's probably what it's best used for. But there are some certain other factors here that are useful and interesting. And like yesterday when I told you about clear scope and how it measures readability, you can see that Hemingway also does this. It measures certain stats in terms of you know, just this piece of content, not necessarily compared to other pieces of content. And then it also has some AI functionality, that with a paid plan you can use to I think automatically suggest edits to some of these things. So just, you know one interesting tool where it's I think best functionality is free. So then I ran it through grammerly and I wanted to start by showing what I was talking about. With the plagiarism thing. Like there's something about inventory management on this article that says 1% of your text matches the source and that's like it's not even This article isn't even about inventory management. So I just wanted to show you guys that like, like these tools can be wrong, but it's still worth running that check a if you're working with a writer that's not you, just from a reputation standpoint, you want to make sure that there's no obvious like plagiarism problems with it but be so that you can just make like some small changes to this text so that Grammarly doesn't pick it up and possibly, you know, Google may be like taking a nod from some of the similar types of algorithms and uses. Again, not that it's intentional. It's just like, you know, because there's already this wealth of content that already exists on the internet about all these different subjects and of course, there's going to be similarities with phrasing and things like that. So then we get to these other suggestions. And I guess one other thing I wanted to show you about Grammarly is you can set goals for a piece of content and I don't know if this is a paid version specific but anyway, you can, you know, say like what type of writing it is. So I just said business for this. You can give a certain intent so I sent in form for this I may or may not be right with all these things, but I just wanted to see what would happen. You can say like, you know the level of experience of the audience, you can set like the formality of the tone. And then and then it gives you suggestions based on those things. And what's cool about grammerly is that it goes into these specific zoo specific different categories of suggestions. So correctness is about like grammar, spelling, punctuation, clarity is to cut in to help with like the flow of engagement, which is probably most related to like storytelling and delivery, I guess, you know, kind of related to both of those things, and then style guide. This relates to my company's specific style guidance, some of the suggestions that I have programmed in myself, and so a lot of it is like punctuation, because I have some rules about that. And it's probably annoying for my writers to have all this pop up. But some of it is word stuff. So like if we click this, something like actually, per the blogs and the style guide, and that's just our approach, we say these words are fluffy and don't add value typically. So like if you cut actually, it would say wait, so you have to go read these reports. Ones is another one that I have strong opinions about. I say don't use one to describe a noun you've already defined. Use the same word again or find another way to say it and then I gave an example here. So that's what's really cool about Grammarly is like you can like get these things automatically being suggested when you're working on a piece of content within your organization so that people don't have to remember like all the stuff that I showed you on my style guide it just automatically pops up. Waxing then I'll show you a couple qualitative things and then we'll go to questions is I ran this through my style editor bot, and it wouldn't I tried to get it to like directly edit the copy. And it wasn't unlike what I showed you yesterday which was like a shorter excerpt and the did I did that. So part of this is like me learning how to best use the spot or how to best design it or how to best query it. But what I did was I said Please review this blog post it gave it the era and suggest edits according to the blacksmith style guide.\r\n\r\nThey said consider the bad side consider the following suggestions and it felt to me like it wasn't actually like totally reading the blog. It was just giving like general tips and then I said please suggest updated copy based on these suggestions. And so what it did, which is kind of funny was it created like a shorthand version of it. And so what I was thinking is something like this could be really useful for like an email newsletter, you know, like an atomized version of the blog. Or, you know, maybe like you create some social posts based on these shorthand summaries of each category or something like that. You'd still probably want to edit it, but to me, even though it's not really what I asked for, I thought that that could be an interesting use case. So then I was like, Okay, well can you actually do the edits while preserving the original length of the piece? And it was like no, but it kind of went back in and gave some more suggestions. And then I was asking if it was actually able to like read the original article, or No, I was asking about the visuals, because one of the suggestions was about visual aids. And I was like, well, there's a ton of visual aids on that article. And so it said that it can't directly process or interpret them from the article itself. So that was kind of interesting. And then I gave it the copy and then it still kind of like generally gave examples. So you know, it's a work in progress. I guess that's what I wanted to share. It's still it's still gave me some things to work with. But it wasn't exactly like the editor that I was hoping that it would be like it like it kind of was yesterday. So it seems to me if I were to make a hypothesis here that it's probably going to be more useful for shorter bits of copy, you know, maybe different sections or titles or things like that, versus trying to edit a whole article all at once but it will give you food for thought in terms of general edits that you could make. Okay, so last like pieces of content on this before we end up today. We talked about menu navigation. And so the way that I would change this menu navigation would be home about blog and I would just change this to contact and what I like to do with whatever like the most important menu item or call to action is maybe add some like button styling so that that stands out, it just simplifies it. It's not distracting and you know, hopefully leads them to the ideal conversion. So then the other thing like the header, because we're kind of talking about the whole experience, not just the article itself, is what I what I came across, typically in the UX audits that I did was a similar type of header where it has the logo, but unless the name of the brand is like really straightforward about what you do, it could benefit from having some context like a tagline about what you do and so I don't think that we do it on the blog. So some a very bad example. But you can imagine like in my header it should probably say like SEO and content agency. But you know, maybe because it's called the blacksmith that also might work I don't know submitted a test. I'm generally speaking again, I really liked this article, I thought that more or less like it fit the same types of standards that like I would have for my team in terms of putting together conversational tone like breaking texts up nicely, having really useful visuals, a couple of just like very small things. We have the social share buttons. My suggestion is to add a CTA that's like share this on social like, it might seem obvious, but just saying that might be useful, might also be useful to have them float as the person who reads it because they might decide at different points that they want to share it through. I love the visuals there was one visual where I think there might be an unintentional tooltip here where like when you were taking the screenshot your cursor was probably over this SPFx aligned area right here. And so it took the screenshot with that and it kind of obscures the stuff behind it. This is the type of thing that like, because I do these all the time I nitpick and probably nobody else would notice, but I just thought that I would mention it. I'm sure I'm gonna like pretty much ended there. The last thing I was going to say for now is with the Related Posts, one of them doesn't have the featured image. So it's kind of, you know, it just looks a little bit lopsided. That's a super easy thing to fix. And then when it comes to consistency um, you might want to capitalize text stuff just so that it's consistent with the capitalization of the other category. And then maybe also like space it out tech space stuff. So again, like I really don't have that much to say here, because it's very good and it has good information. The last I guess big thing is the actual place where I'm reading the content is kind of narrow and skinny compared to the full frame here. And so I wouldn't recommend going full width with the content but I think we could break out the box a little bit more or break it out of the current box so that it's a little bit wider. And I think that that would be a great reader experience. So with all that being said, I'm going to pull back to my slides really quick just to pull up like the question slide and things like that. But I mean basically we're done here. With the planned content. I'll once again bring up my book because it is about what we're talking about with content experience. It's about my approach to content writing, content style, you can grab a free chapter of the book on the writing for humans and robots.com website or you can grab the book on Amazon via Kindle or print edition. And yeah, that's pretty much it. So I will take any questions that may have popped up in the meantime.\r\n\r\nYeah. All right. So thanks again, Stacey for letting us use your content as I know that it's a little weird with talking about my stuff here but ya know, it was very much appreciated and a it's an excellent article. We've talked about that already. The content, it was it was hard\r\n\r\nto find stuff to comments on honestly, so I had to go into nitpick mode.\r\n\r\nSo grateful to you, Stacey. Let's see folks last chance to ask questions here. There are no questions today,\r\n\r\nwhich is covered at all. Everything's done.\r\n\r\nIt's it's been a very good and thorough presentation on lots of tools. Things to consider as we're developing content for and helping our clients create content for the web. Yeah, like Ben says firehose of information really good stuff. Greg, this is a good rewatch as well. Alright folks, last chance before we land the plane. Your if you have any final questions for Maddie, if you want to just say yes in the chat that way we know to pause otherwise, I'm going to start moving towards wrapping us up. All right, yeah. So thanks there in the chat. Okay. So Maddie, wrap us up here. Give us our final takeaway for the training.\r\n\r\nSure. I'll answer one question. Barney asked if I'm in the Denver area. Yeah, yeah. I'm in Lakewood, technically. But yeah, okay. Final wrap up. treat people how you want to be treated with your content. That's good.\r\n\r\nThat's really good. And true, right. So yeah, awesome. Well, thanks, everybody, for hanging out with us for the last couple of days. It's been a really good set of information here. A lot of things to consider. And hopefully it'll help us all up our game as we're dealing with content on the web. Thanks again. Maddie. For your expertise. And folks, we are back tomorrow as usual 1pm Central for office hours here on solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nNice. Well, thank you so much, everyone for your time and attention. And yeah, I hope I hope there is like one good nugget for you to take away and if you ever have any questions about content and UX, I'm always happy to be a resource.\r\n\r\nVery good. 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This again was this is building on last year's content workshop. And the link for that is in the course description if you missed last year I would strongly recommend you check that out. Really good stuff. So Sadie has your book MADI Naidu\r\n\r\nwhy it's really good love it seems like it's been a while since I published it, but you know, I tried to write it so that it would still be useful today. So I hope that you're all finding that. Yeah, we're sure.\r\n\r\nReally good stuff. Alright folks, if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat say hi. We are about three minutes away from getting started. And they're in the chat once again, is the link bundle that has the slides and the replay link as well as a link to Matty's book. We are Yeah, we're gonna have a lot of fun today and tomorrow, two hours today, two hours tomorrow talking all about website content with I mean, let's face it an expert in the field\r\n\r\nappreciate the vote of confidence. If you if you measure it by yours and I suppose expert, that's something that I've been doing for a very long time. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nAlright folks, let's hear from you in the chat. Check in question today. How about give us a one to 10 rating? How comfortable are you with generating website content? One being it's a real challenge. 10 being a pro, let us hear from you there in the chat.\r\n\r\nAll right, about a minute and a half to go.\r\n\r\nMaybe a good question is how many of you are forced to make content in order to finish your website designs? Yeah, to get your website launched.\r\n\r\nHey, Sue bullets are my friend. I like bullets. Alright, several folks just joining us. The links are there in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up that chat and you'll have the link to download the slides. Grab the replay and all of those things. We are about a minute away from getting started. Second question today is what's your comfort level? What's your expertise at website content creation one to 10 If you had to rate yourself love it. Love it. Tracks Yeah, five but a if you're using AI, that's awesome. Yeah, so a lot of folks are higher on the scale today. That's exciting, that hopefully you're gonna get some tools to up your game even further. He's got a lot to share with us. Over the next couple of days. Hey Terry. Dab Alright, folks, we are just about to get started. Glad you're all here. Diving into the web content workshop momentarily. Just seconds. To go. If you're just joining us in zoom, I'm going to drop in one more time the link bundle and it's three after so let's get the recording started. And we'll dive right in. Let's do it. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy and I'm joined for the next couple of days by my friend Maddy Houseman, Maddy is a sought after sought after copywriter specializing in enterprise b2b Tech brands. She's the CEO at blog Smith and the author of writing for humans and robots, the new rules of content style. She has been recognized on numerous industry lists as a top content marketer and I'm really excited to have her back for another course here on solid Academy so welcome back Madi, how are things going for you?\r\n\r\nThanks, Nathan. I'm really excited to be here. Like I said, you know, it's been it's been a little bit of time since I've done you know, a presentation like this since I've really gotten to use my brain. For those who don't know, I recently had a baby so he's in daycare today so I can fully you know, give my attention to this and, you know, embrace this identity of mine as a content creator who loves to learn and you know, who now has this other facet of my life but marrying those two in a joyous way so, so yeah, really excited to be back and and put my brain to use and share you know, some of the things that I've been exploring you for the past several months to I guess a year, all this new stuff with AI, that's what we're gonna focus on today. So really excited about that. Yeah,\r\n\r\ndefinitely. So we have a long way to go over the next couple of days and the thought just occurred to me Maddie, we really ought to have you back for another informal conversation just on how you prepared your business. So that you could take some time away, because that's really, that's quite a feat.\r\n\r\nIt was definitely and I'd love to do that. I'd be happy to.\r\n\r\nYeah, that'd be that just occurred to me. We should definitely, folks. So let's see the links are in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom. I'm going to drop this in one more time. There you will find the link to download or grab the slide deck. Also the replay link that will have the transcripts and chat logs after we finish is there for you as well. On that replay link you'll also find a link to last year's course, which is more some more foundational principles of the things we're going to unpack even further today. So if you missed last year's course, all the replays are there, follow that link, rewatch them, it's really good stuff. And of course, if you haven't seen Matt, he's booked the link for that as in the chat as well. So Maddie, give us a high level view. What are we going to be covering for the rest of today? Totally.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, we're definitely going to expand on some of the things that we started to talk about last year, but really, you know, thinking about what's changed in the past year and so that's why today we're going to focus mostly on AI kind of how AI factors into content creation, how you can use AI tools to create content, how you can use AI tools to detect AI content. You know, things like how to write an excellent chat GPT prompt and one thing I'm really excited to share with you because it's something that I've just kind of figured out for myself is how to make your own personal GPT. So that's what we're gonna do at the end of the day, I'll show you step by step how to do it. You can follow along, I'll show you how to adapt it a little bit. And then really, what we're going to start with today is I guess a bit of a cautionary tale when it comes to AI so we'll start with the most negative and we'll build up to the most positive. And then tomorrow, the focus is going to be on content UX, the user experience what I like to call the reader experience. So it's going to be more about you know, the elements of design and how they interact with content, how you can create this great reader experience for the people who consume your designs and content and so we can get a little bit more into what that looks like. But I guess if I was to like talk high level about today versus tomorrow, today is like things that I think are really like novel and fun. It's like It's like exciting things that that we're all learning kind of at the same time and that's that's what's so exciting about just like nobody has it figured out. And tomorrow is like the stuff that I'm really passionate about. That's a little bit more, you know, foundational and again, about like that full experience. So I guess with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. Yeah,\r\n\r\nabsolutely. Me give a couple of housekeeping notes that will disappear. Folks. We'll be taking a break in the middle as usual for these courses. So roughly at tube central an hour from now, we'll take about a five to 10 minute break depending on where we are timewise. So at the end of this first hour and the end of the second hour, we'll have a time of q&a as well. I would invite you to use the zoom q&a Link to ask your questions. Please don't use the chat, but use that Zoom q&a. That way we can keep all the questions in a nice list. And also, if you'll keep that Zoom q&a open, if somebody asks a question that you also want to hear the answer to just click the thumbs up icon to up vote. And we'll take the questions the order of up votes. So with that again, yeah, we are recording in the replay. The transcript is all there and it'll be available for you about an hour after we finished today. So Maddie, I'm going to disappear take over. Let's get started. Let's\r\n\r\ndo it. My housekeeping is just first of all, I think that we all can learn a lot from each other when it comes to AI. And so like that's how I've picked up the things that I'm going to share with you. It's really hearing it from other people seeing how other people are using this tool. It's interesting because it's so new that like, again, we don't really know like what the best use cases are. And there's this world of possibility that we've only just started to touch. So one thing I'll ask is like if you've come across an interesting AI use case, you know whether you have something that's top of mind now or whether going through what I'm going to talk about today sparks it like please share that in the chat. I'm sure all learn from it. I'm sure other people will learn from it. So that's one thing and then I'll just ask that if there's anything that resonates with you, as I'm talking today, or you know as other people are sharing ideas in the chat. I always love when people tweet or I guess x takeaways these days. So my Twitter is in that bottom right hand corner. So use that and I always love to retweet and share with my audience too. So yeah, let's go ahead and get started here. Nathan already gave a nice bio like who I am. Just to give you you know, more information about the blacksmith. We're a holistic content marketing agency for b2b technology brands. We create data driven content. I'm going to share some of those processes here with you today in terms of how we're using AI tools to do that. And our focus is creating content across the sales funnel with a focus on the reader experience. So again, that's really what day two is going to be about. It's creating this ideal reader experience with the intersection of content and design. And then my book writing for humans robots, the new rules of content style. If you've ever read the book, The Elements of Style, I was really kind of riffing on that in a more I guess, modern way since that book was written back in 1918, or 1919. Of course, at that time, the internet didn't exist. We weren't necessarily addressing a global audience when we publish to the web. We are now and so that's kind of the idea behind this book is how can you how can you speak plainly and inclusively and effectively when you're writing for the web? And so with all of that being said, let's go ahead and jump into the topic of today which is AI Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention. Day two, when we talk about content UX. I'm going to do some live content UX audits. If you were here last year, we also did this this is something I really love to do. And so this form here which you can also click through the slide being links that we've shared in the chat. Just has a couple questions like your name your brand. It'll ask for a link to a specific piece of content. If you're comfortable sharing for this live UX audit, and then it has the question that's optional. If there's anything you want me to focus on, and then like an aspect of the content itself, but the purpose is to collect some, you know, ideas from from all of you of what to audit and we're going to basically put the principles that I'm going to be talking about tomorrow into action you know, show you how to use some different tools show you how to use more also, like qualitative analyses. And so again, I would love your examples so that we can make it really useful for you to give you know, a second pair of eyes on your content. And you know, it's always done in a very respectful way. I'm not looking for problems, I'm just showing you ways to, you know, make your message clearer to make your content experience more effective. So I'll, I'll aim to remind you about this again at the end of the day, and then you know, before tomorrow is probably when I'll pick what we're going to audit for tomorrow. So get them in today, whenever you have a chance. Okay, so artificial intelligence. That's really the focus of what we're talking about today. Super exciting. Things are happening here. It's also kind of a wild wild west. It's it's something that there's many positive use cases but there are also some negative ones and so I really wanted to start with the negatives so we can kind of get that out of the way so we can you know, maybe share some like cautionary tales here. The link that Learn More link is an article that I wrote for Fast Company, and it's going to go over some of the same things that I talked about here in terms of some of the limitations and also really like the ethical implications of using AI to generate content to publish it as if it were your own. So yeah, let's go ahead and dive into that. Um, so I think like the first major implication, negative implication of AI or something to think about, especially as a creator, because many of us here we're writers, we're designers, so we're creating things. They they are our intellectual property which we may assign, you know, to a client, for example, but it's still at its root. It's something that we made. And, you know, the thing about AI is, first of all, it can't think for itself. It uses things like machine learning. It uses algorithms and processes to make sense of what's already out there. But it's not, at least right now in a place where it can completely invent something new. If it does. It's the result of this machine learning it's not the result of true uniqueness. So you know, essentially, AI and I'm gonna explain this example in a moment here, but it's, it's being trained on what already exists. It's using our intellectual property. And the worst part of it is it's doing that without giving us credit. I mean, if you go in do a search on Google, it was called Bard, but now they've rebranded it to Gemini. In my experience, and and I haven't used it recently, to be honest with you, but certainly within chat GPT there's no like source given for the answer to a prompt. It's not directing you to a specific piece of content are saying, This is what I referenced to come up with this answer, which also creates an issue of you know, whether or not that answer is something to be trusted, and we'll get into the fact that AI is oftentimes confidently incorrect. But right now, with the focus being on the fact that it's essentially plagiarism and my perspective, if you are taking what you generate with AI and then publishing it as your own this is probably easiest to think about when you think about visuals, and we're going to talk a little bit about AI generating images and kind of like how that works and some of the issues with that. But you can think of like aI trained on a certain set of materials, certain artists body of work, you know, that style, if it's trained on a certain style and the output is a certain style, it's pretty easy to identify that, you know, it's riffing off, you know, one individual's intellectual property, it's a little bit harder to make that distinction with the written word. But that doesn't mean that it's any less important to recognize that it's, it's an issue if if AI is passing off its own material or your material as its own. So, what I wanted to share here, this is an article that was published on futurism. It's an it's a screenshot from it, and it's about CNET. They have this blog about different like personal finance topics and things like that. And so when it comes to things that affect your finances, whether it's subjects like you know how to buy a house and you know, like had this setup a mortgage, you know, whatever. Or, in this case, like you know, how to pick a credit card, how to use credit cards, how to decide what college to send your kid to, or something like that. Google calls these topics, your money, your life. And in comparison to any other topic that you publish, that you're looking to get ranked in relevant search on Google. Google has the highest standard of quality for your money, your life topics. So CNET was transparent about the fact that they were publishing AI generated content such as the example shared here. But they had a human fact checking it and so the byline was like you seen that money or something like that? And then I think they also had like the byline of the human editor published next to it, but they told us you know, they they weren't trying to hide that it was aI generated. So this excerpt is you know, maybe kind of a silly example, but it's showing how\r\n\r\nthis article that they wrote, which was about can you buy a gift card with the credit card. This first example is a line that's almost verbatim from a rivaling Forbes article. And then this next example is how literally, the table was the exact same title. So, you know, you could question if it was only one of these things, you know, is that really plagiarism? Is that really a problem? But the fact that it's both to me shows that you know, not only did CNET not take a high enough standard of care, quite honestly with the content that they were having a human fact checker edit, but I think it also begs the question of like, if you're generating a full piece of copy, like a, you know, long form blog article, like are you ever going to be able to definitively say that it's not plagiarism? Or that it's not like literally, you know, word for word related to any other competitor article out there? And I think the answer's no, because that's what the AI is using to generate the content. In this case, and then one that I'll share subsequently, AI is, is almost like a crutch for CNET or for others who are who are taking this approach of generating that full article and then having the human intervention and I'm going to share some better ways to use AI in your article creation process. But yeah, I mean, the problem is ultimately that there's no way that they can catch every instance of plagiarism, and it just honestly creates more work and, and the worst part of all, is that it essentially ruin their reputation because they didn't take a proper standard of care. Another example that's, that's ongoing, it's unresolved at this point, is that the New York Times recently sued open AI who's the creator of chat GBT saying that, you know, their, their publications, their media. was unlawfully used to train open AI. And the last I saw, I think there was an update actually today that said that the New York Times is like misrepresenting the evidence or something like that. But again, I mean, it really just like begs the question of you know, if you publish content, like is it safe, you know, is it going to be used to train a model which is then going to spit it out and somebody else is going to publish it and benefit from it without properly crediting you? So that's one major issue. So this is one that I would love your examples. If you have anything similar. This is this is a picture that I saw recently in like a Facebook group about AI. And so somebody had done some prompts about dog breeds. And if you kind of squint, you're like, Okay, maybe that like a chart of different dog breeds, but then you look and you see all the like, really strange faces and like this, like gibberish text, and even the text that you can read is like not related to any dog breeds that currently exists. So, yeah, again, if you have any examples of like an image you've generated that has resulted in something like comically incorrect like this, I would love to see that in the chat. That would be fun. But I guess the point that I want to make with this slide is that at least at this point, AI can't effectively art direct you could give it a prompt and you could maybe get it to a point where you can get something useful. I think it's called mid journey. There's this one AI image generator that creates these like hyper realistic things with like any detail you can get it and something like that is so cool and very interesting to experiment with. But I think this came from within chat GPT I'm gonna say it wrong, but it's called like Dali Dali. And in my experience, when I've used it to generate images, it's the same sort of like gibberish text. The image, you know, is like, vaguely related to the prompts that I give it. So I'm using it for like, kind of like business article use cases to like generate a figure from you know, some like the data I include or something like that. I've never gotten something useful yet. And I think beyond that, it's like you still as a creative have to come up with the prompt. It's not like AI is going to be able to help you within the context, say of like an article. They're not going to be able to come up with like five unique media examples that you could include. So this is something that I think, you know, as humans, like, we still like have control over this or so like the best Abbot. Um, okay. So next I started to talk about this, which is one of the biggest issues with AI to date, the fact that it is confidently incorrect. So this is another Cena example, I'm going to read a little excerpt from. This is another futurism article. They did kind of a deep dive into this. See that AI but issue? So the excerpt is after the outcry after you know, some of these plagiarism things came to light. With the previous example. Steena editor in chief Connie Guglielmo acknowledged the AI written articles in a post that celebrated CNET's reputation for being transparent. without acknowledging the criticism, Guglielmo wrote that the publication was changing the byline on its AI generated articles from CNET money staff to simply seen that money as well as making the disclosure more prominent. Furthermore, she promised every story published under the program had been reviewed, fact checked, and edited by an editor with topical expertise before we hit publish, and I think that this is referring to like before this article was published, and so what you're looking at right here is, I think a more serious violation of the high standards that Google holds for your money your life, making sure that it is, you know, written by an expert that it's heavily fat checked, you know that you're not publishing something that you can't stand behind. And so this is about calculating compound interest for savings and as you can see by the excerpts, it's, it's wrong, the calculation is spitting out an incorrect final number. And so it may seem like, you know, small potatoes like, you know, like, what, what's really going to happen to the person who misinterprets this? It's certainly not like, you know, having to do with like, buying a house and like getting those equations wrong thread savings, but I think it just goes to show that there's, you know, there's a lot of problematic things that can happen and it starts here and if if we don't maintain a high standard for content quality starting here, then it could exacerbate it could turn into people being misled when it comes to making these like bigger money decisions in their life or you know, other things, your money your life, I think also, in some ways has to do with like, health and like medical stuff and things like that. So there are like potentially, you know, bigger and like worse implications than even just like the financial aspect of it. One thing that's interesting that that I misunderstood or I was misled about AI. Really up until like, a week ago or so, is I thought that you could ask chat GBT if it wrote something. So that was something that I saw other people talking about. And it's something that at the blacksmith like we've tested out ourselves you know, when working with like a new writer and wondering how to detect like if content was aI generated, and I found an article on open API's like FAQs or help desk or whatever that said, whenever you ask chat GBT if it wrote some you know, specific piece of copy for example, it just make something up like that's, that's literally what open AI says you could Google it yourself. So, you know, it's weird that it doesn't just say, I don't know, you know, it doesn't just give you like that as a straight answer. It's fine. If it doesn't know, but for it to purposely just decide, you know, bye bye narrowly, like if it's yes or no, and that it just tells you that whether it actually knows the answer, like that's very concerning to me. So a little bit of a cautionary tale. Um, but yeah, I think at the end of the day of the CNET examples, what I'm trying to impress upon you is like, does it really save time, if it like, impacts your reputation long term like I just don't think that that the best way to go about it is to generate the full piece of content and then add the human and I think that I think that AI can help intermittently and we'll definitely get to like how exactly to do that shortly. Um, so this article is also kind of fun. Charlie Brooker's, a creator of Black Mirror. If any of you are familiar, it's just this like really kind of weird messed up show on Netflix. It's very like future focused. It's like, I would say fairly.\r\n\r\nWhat's the word like it's, it's, it's kind of like post apocalyptic in some ways, not always. But it always like seems to end and kind of a scary place. And it's episodic, like each each episode I mean, to say is like its own storyline. And so the most recent season started to touch on themes of AI since that has become you know, something that has infiltrated society. And anyway, this article, The Creator who you know, has a very interesting mind based on what we see on this Netflix episodes, said that he doesn't think AI is messy enough to replace creative people. So there's good news guys, which is AI can't can't match that with us. I think on another hand AI, it lacks human empathy. You know, it can never like fully understand, like, who we are and what we go through. I don't think it ever will unless it's somehow achieved some level of sentience but yeah, I mean, ultimately, like in its wildest dreams, whatever AI, you know, thinks that it thinks it could never generate the ideas that we come up in our wildest dreams. And I think that the proof is in the pudding in terms of thinking about things like some of our favorite authors and how they create prosaic copy. So here's, here's a quote, I love Stephen King. He's kind of a machine himself, but human as far as I know. So this from needful things, one of his more interesting books, because the trust of the innocent is the wires most useful tool. And so, you know, fed copies of Stephen King's worked. You can ask chat GPT to write in his voice. I don't know if Stephen K would appreciate that or not. But, you know, I think the limitation is that it couldn't generate something like this on its own it can generate like derivative work of his but it couldn't come up with this on its own. Ai, you know, it, it isn't it doesn't have uniqueness. And Google has historically said that it's important. We're gonna talk a little bit about Google's AI guidelines that it's published. And it specifically says in those guidelines that they want to rank content that is unique, which AI fundamentally is not, not on its own, not without human intervention. Ai just read purposes and parrots things that already exists. And, and the output trends toward the average. It's not, it's not unique, it's not notable and interesting. Okay, so the last thing that I want to talk about from like this negative perspective, and then I promise we'll get into more of the fun stuff, is the idea that algorithms can be biased. And so if you think about like the people who are creating things like Chet GPT, or the Google algorithm or any other algorithm you interact with, like social media feeds, things like that. Algorithms, they represent the people that created them, not necessarily the population as a whole. So this book is really interesting. It's from the perspective of a black woman and so she is just like, read some of the book description to give you an idea of some of the topics that she explores. It says run a Google search for Black Girls, what will you find? Big booty and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms, but if you type in white girls, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and on unmoderated discussions about why black women are so sassy or why black women are so angry presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. And I think, after this book was published, because this was from a while ago, Google had manually made some adjustments to the algorithm in light of this criticism and that commentary, but the problem is with algorithms, you're you're scaling up problems, they can't manually make adjustments for every inherent bias that their algorithm has. And so you know, I don't know if we have an answer for how to fix this. But ultimately, the people creating the algorithm should represent society as a whole. I guess that's, you know, one way to think about it. Um, and I guess the question that it poses for all of us is like with AI deploying so rapidly there's going to be a lot of situations where bias needs to be routed out and fixed. And so that's, that's what's kind of scary, I think about how quickly new applications are developing. Again, it scales up problems and so that's just something I think we all need to be aware of, and and do the best that we can to fix. So okay, so now let's talk about some of the more fun stuff AI content tools. These are tools that we use in our workflow. These are tools that I use, personally. And so let's go ahead and you know, talk a little bit about how they work. So, again, we're gonna focus on like, mainly AI content tools, just because that's my sphere of genius. That's like what I have the most experience with, but I think there are different things that you could use like no matter how you're creating content, whether it's like you write blog posts for yourself, or for clients, or like, you know, you just want to like uplevel, your email strategy, or you know, help with like the personal compositions that you create. So, the first one I want to talk about is phrase which creates AI powered content briefs. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch my screen to share, to share like what a report looks like in phrase. So let's see here. I think I have to get out of full screen in order for this to work. Okay, so um, this was the form so I'm going to show you that in the beginning, but I'm gonna go ahead and exit out. So phrase generates this really cool report and the SEO aspects of it may or may not be relevant to your process. And I will say that not every piece of content that we created, the blacksmith is driven by SEO. It's not every piece of content we create to rank but I still use we still use phrase for everything because it helps with topic research. So that's what this is. It's a briefing tool. It's a research tool. Um, the way that it works and the way that the next tool, clear scope that I'm going to explain to you also works is that you give it a primary keyword. So in this case, it's how reliable are AI detectors? And so, by giving it this primary keyword, that means that we've already done the research to decide that that's the keyword that we want to optimize for. And so this is this is an article that's already published on the Black Swan, but this is something that we would have created. Prior to that publication. This this brief would have been like the first step of the writing process after doing the keyword research to decide which one we want to focus on. And the way that phrase and clear scope work is that you can I'm just going to show you like some of the pricing details so you can understand like how it works within a workflow, phrases kind of unique in that it has a plan that allows you to create unlimited reports. Not many other tools like it do that it's usually a per report cost. So that's why it's important to know what you want to optimize for before generating the reports. But it also has these lesser plans in terms of output. You know, depending on your content process, that's probably going to be more cost effective to you then you know, me as an agency, I would want more of like the unlimited plan to work for my various clients. So let's go back to phrase so what's interesting about phrase is first of all, just like the content editor experience itself, I'll be honest, we use Google Docs for everything. But if I was creating content, as like just for my internal team or something, what's cool is you can create these other tabs. And so you could have a tab that's like research. You could have a tab that's your outline. You could have a tab that's your draft, and then you could have maybe a tab with edits or something like that. So that's kind of cool just to keep the process nice and contained in one place. I've always thought that that was really unique and interesting about phrase.\r\n\r\nBut to be honest, we don't use phrase as a Content Editor. That's just an added bonus. So yeah, it generates a topic report. I'm gonna go through a couple of different aspects of it. First of all, it gives you some sort of tangible details and the way that phrase and clear scope and the market means which is another variation on a theme work is that they scrape the top 20 or so search results, which is pretty representative of like, what's going to be necessary to rank and it gives you details like, you know, how many words should you aim for for this specific topic? In this case, it's also suggesting how many headers which is like a measure of depth of content, how many links How many images? I think the top ones are what's like in this brief, that's what it's reading and the ones under it are like the average that it's suggesting. But again, we're just this is just like material that's from the brief. It's not like the actual content that we wrote. When it comes to word count. I think people always ask like, what's the ideal word count for a piece of content? And the the answer like many things in SEO is it depends. And so that's why tools like this are really useful because there is no standard. It's very topic driven. And using data that's based on actual searches means that you can get very close to like what that ideal is. So it also shares you know, the top some details of the top breaking content, you'll notice that the blog Smith currently owns a featured snippet for this particular topic, thanks in part to you know, some of the tools that we use to optimize their content. And also, I think, for this particular piece, because we did a lot of our own original research and reporting and some of it that I'll share with you when we talk about AI detector tools, I believe after the break today. You can also see like, the atomized version of some of these other top ranking results like the title like a short description, different headers, you can click into the headers to get more information. You can click through to read it. There's other things in this little side panel here that are interesting. This is just a list of all the headings from all the top ranking content pieces. Probably the most useful is this questions area and you can break it down by different sources of the question of the questions. People also ask you something you could manually go to Google and see for yourself. But it's nice to have it all in one place. I think that's the real benefit of phrase and then you can also see here that you can see questions that come from places like Quora and Reddit, you know, which which can really add a nice like flavor to what you're working on. The stats tab is really interesting. You know, they essentially suggest in phrase different stats, as well as different links that people tend to use in those top ranking pieces of content. And so you don't necessarily want to like copy everything that you see. But there might be things that like people would expect to be exposed to in your content. If there's like a big industry stat that relates to what you're talking about. As you scroll here you can see certain things like different topics that come up, you know, different related keywords or sub topics. And a lot of this you can kind of paste over from the sidebar. External links. You know, in addition to specific stats, news is also pretty interesting because this is like things that have happened maybe since those top ranking articles were published. So again, like if you're trying to be the best making sure that your information is the most up to date. This can help you do that. So freeze also has some generative AI capabilities. I'm going to be honest with you that we don't use these because we don't believe in generating AI copy as far as you know what we write for clients and for ourselves. We're experimenting with it. But so I don't really use any of the generative AI tools. But this optimize tab here is notable and useful, because it's similar to clear scope and market Muse which I'll share with you in just a moment here. And basically, it suggests certain phrases that we should expect to see in the content in order for it to rank high and relevant search. You know, obviously, you can't just throw all the words and you have to weave them in. But this is a pretty good baseline for what people would expect to see topic wise in an article and that's that's the real benefit. I think of tools like this. So yeah, there's other there's other like interesting things that you can dig into. This is like a keyword gap map map based on what I just showed you those different phrases and it shows your content compared to other ranking content and who's using what words so you can kind of see how you stack up against those other competitors. So next, I want to share clear scope with you and I have a slide for it, but I'm just going to jump straight to the report here. So what you're seeing is like a very, I would say like simplified user interface compared to like what you would see with phrase and so clear scope in many ways is very similar. They both exists to help you optimize content. They both include some important research they both work by starting with a primary keyword. One of the differences between clear scope and phrase is first of all that query scope suggests a letter grade whereas phrase and market Muse and surfer previously known as Super SEO suggested number like out of 100 in order to understand like how close to optimizing compared to their standards you are, it also suggests a word count. And one more thing I wanted to say about the content creator is that at the blacksmith we always aim for an a or higher that tends to be a good standard for actually achieving rankings, high rankings and relevant search. I'm actually not sure if phrase does this. I'm sure they do. I just didn't notice it while going through. But clear scope also suggests a target readability level. I think that's really important for matching the needs of the searcher not going you know too deep into something that maybe could benefit from being more surface level for example. You can also notice here that they have those suggestions for phrases and so phrase we use the very beginning of our process, but we're not optimizing content within that tool. We're really using clear scope for that because in my experience, and this could differ by industry, but I find their suggestions for phrases to incorporate to be a little bit more fine tuned than phrase. So you know, that's, that's my opinion. Um, you'll notice that they also have the sidebar, so they have, you know, a couple of details. I don't again, I don't necessarily use clear scope for the briefing processes is really more at the end of the process. So stuff like this, I'm not necessarily going over but if you were to use one tool, then it's nice to know that it has that it also has those top you know, search results for the query, examples of like headers and things like that. It also has the term like keyword gap map that shows how you stack up compared to the competition. You can dig into the competitor details even more in terms of how clear scope looks at content with their letter grade, by word count, that it has this nice chart that shows how that content grade stacks up against their organic position in search. And then I think the last thing that I'll mention about clear scope for now, is that you can use that editor in here just like you can use the editor in phrase, but actually both free and clear scope. Have a Google Docs add on. And so all you have to do is like grab the report link the individual link to that specific report, put it in Google Docs, and then you get all this information within, you know, Google Docs where you probably at least my team works better that way. Um, okay, so and then I guess the last last thing I was gonna say about this topic is that if I had to pick one tool, I think I would pick clear scope. Again, because of the fine tuned pneus of the instructions, but if I was a smaller shop operation, I'd probably pick phrase because it can do like a more well rounded look at like the topic as a whole and debriefing so so that's my suggestion. Clear scope works by essentially offering it's like a per report price, but you can buy packages and like the more reports you buy at a time, the less expensive Each report is. So let me get my slides back up here. And then we'll move on to the next tool that we're going to talk about though.\r\n\r\nWe talked about phrase to talked about clear scope. So let's talk about market Muse just kind of in passing here because it's a very similar tool. It uses some different technologies, compared to clear scope and phrase and so that's why it's a part of our process again as an organization that spends a lot of time on SEO and data and keyword research. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to you if you're going to maybe consider one of those other tools. What's interesting about marketmuse is that it has this functionality to create an AI generated first draft that includes some like light human intervention from their side. I think that's what this is actually this is like a sample from a while ago where we were just playing around with it to see what would happen. But yeah, again, it has a lot of the same functionality. It offers content optimization suggestions that like keyword gap map that I showed you and both of the tools and it has like some generative AI capabilities. So yeah, it just adds a little bit of extra detail. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that it's something you need to add to your workflow if like one of those other tools could satisfy a lot of these same things. So talking about some other tools that are interesting. Word tune is something that I feel like is so underrated. It's essentially uses your own copy to make suggestions. And so again, I'm going to I'm going to show you what that looks like. So let me share my screen back here. So it works in Google Docs. And so here's I just stole the intro basically from that AI detector article. And so what you could do is you highlight whatever text you want it to make suggestions based off of and I typically do it sentence by sentence I, I'm sure it could do longer bits of text, but I don't find that to be as useful. For me. This is like a great tool for when you have writer's block because I don't know you know if you've experienced this but oftentimes I'll let my get myself get stuck on a specific word and it just like really bugs me, and I'm like it's not done until I figured out the right word. And it takes me forever to get through that. So we're tune. It's great because I'm using it with my own copy. So I can feel really confident about whatever it suggests. I'm sure you could use word tune to take AI generated copy and then re spin it. But that's not my suggestion. So again, it works by using this like Google Docs add on and you you highlight it and just to show that action again. It has this little word tune icon. And then you can see different suggestions for how word tune would rewrite it you get like 10 or something like that. And then you can also fine tune it by changing the tone and then by finding ways to shorten or expand it depending on what your use case is. The last thing that I'll say about word toon for right now is it has this thing called spices and so that's like getting a little bit more like next level with the AI generation and using like generative texts. I haven't played around too much with this yet, but it is interesting. And this is kind of taking it away I think from you know basing it off of your copy to kind of like generating something completely new. So that's why I don't necessarily use this but I think it could be a useful resource for when you're when you have writer's block or things like that. So let me get my slides back up here. Here it is. Okay, so so that was word tune. Um, and then Grammarly. I think works very similarly to word tune, and that it uses your own body of work your own copy, to suggest edits, and so I wrote an article for their blog. That's what the learn more link is. After a recent keynote, they did about all their generative AI capabilities. And so I would definitely check that out if you're curious about how to use grammerly in this way. And full disclosure, I'm a Grammarly ambassador, so you know, I'm always singing their praises, but I think it's I think it's interesting because Grammarly, like many other SAS tools on the market are starting to invest in AI capabilities like directly within their tools. And so I think we're gonna see like more and more of examples of this. And grammerly has a lot of other I think really useful. And interesting features like they have this brand style guide, which is something we use that the blacksmith which allows you to set your preferred spelling for things like brand names, and grammar rules and things like that. All right, so let's take a couple minutes for questions. Anything that's come up so far, after the break, we're going to talk about AI detector tools now that I've shown you the AI writing tools. We're going to talk about chat how to write a good chat GBT prompt and then we're going to end the day with how to create your own personal GPT. So yeah, in the meantime, there's any questions. We'll talk about them now and then we'll take a little bit of a break.\r\n\r\nYeah, very good, great overview of some really cool tools that can be used for our content creation. If you have questions specifically about that, drop those there in the zoom q&a. There's one question floating out there about the slide. We were sharing this link as a slide sharing the slides as a slide being link because there was an issue getting them exported where the the links on the slides were clickable. And so technology Yeah, it that's so currently not downloadable. Is the long and the short of it so but that slide being link is there and it'll be available for you going forward.\r\n\r\nWe can we could share them as downloaded just won't be a clickable link. So you can we could share like both in tandem with each other. Unfortunately, that's going to be the limitation\r\n\r\nYeah, yeah. So I'm happy to add that PDF link as well. We'll I'll get that added to the link bundle as we come back. If you want to download these just know that there are things that say read more, learn more that don't clicked anywhere in the PDF. Alright folks, well let's go ahead and take a break. It is 153 Central time let's take a break until right at two o'clock Central. So right about seven minutes from now and we're quiet until then. Sounds great. See you then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We are back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, we are back and ready for the second part of day two. Maddie, what are we going to knock out today?\r\n\r\nSo we're gonna start with now that we've learned how to generate a copy, how do you detect it? We're going to then move to talking a little bit about some Google guidelines around AI content writing for humans and robots. And then we'll end the day with a deeper dive into chat GPT how to write a great prompt and then how to create your own personal GPT which I'm really excited about because it's something that I only just learned how to do myself. Very\r\n\r\ngood. That's a lot to cover in the next hour. I let me invite everyone also to look at the chat I'm going to drop in today's slides if you have come in late. Also, we've added a link there for the PDF download. And finally, there's a link in the link bundle that'll drop in in just a moment that has the invitation for you to submit your site for a content UX audit tomorrow. So with that I will turn it over to you Matty, let's\r\n\r\ngo. Sounds great. All right. Yeah, let's go ahead and knock this out. So AI detector tools. There's a couple that we've tested at the blacksmith and I want to share some of the results of those tests too, so that you can understand what they can be useful for. But also again, there are limitations. As with the rest of this world of AI, everything's still kind of developing. We're all learning things at the same time. And so there's no like perfect answer. There's no one definitive tool that's going to tell you like this is current AI content, or this isn't AI content. So a couple tools that you could try though that I think will give you a decent idea or continent scale, copy leaks and originality.ai and the link here which again, you can grab through the slide bean link is a link to an in depth investigation that we did at the blog Smith testing out these different tools. You know, trying to learn more about the nature of AI content and what it sounds like. So I do have a couple of ideas for you two that we'll talk about next in terms of like how to rewrite things that sound robotic whether they were robot generated or not. But before we get to that, this example here is kind of funny because it's the Constitution and this is continent scale, saying that they detected to be 9% ai generated and you know, I don't think they had robots at the time unless alien somehow hooked them up. But I think it's fair to say that this is more than likely 100% human generated content. But it's just interesting to see that their AI detector is still picking up some very some version of that. And that you know, also perhaps it hasn't trained this AI detector on you know, pieces that existed before. Ai content was a thing. So so that's just like one thing. You know, I think from the standpoint of like, if you're working with content creators, and you're paying for human generated content, then you should get that fundamentally I think that it's an ethical violation for someone to use AI to generate content without disclosing that and to be accepting payment for that as if it were something that they were creating. Of course, there are many companies out there who are hiring people with the job description that is like aI content writer, AI content editor or like somebody who trains you know, a chatbot on a certain way a certain body of work a certain way of writing. All of that being said, if you if you are using these tools, and they are saying with a high degree of certainty, you know, this is AI generated copy. I think it's really important to not outright accuse somebody of submitting AI generated copy what I do at the blog Smith is like let's say that we're doing like a paid test with a new writer hopeful for our team. What I do is I say, hey, you know, we ran this through, you know, these three AI detector tools, and here's what it said here, you know, is what degree of AI content it's saying it thinks this is like, can you comment on that? And it gives them the chance to you know, explain what they think might happen, defend themselves, offering to make fixes, and I think it's really like the way people people are going to be honest or not. There's nothing you could do about that. But I think it's the way that they respond to and handle that situation that tells you what you need to know about if you want to work with them, whether or not you can ultimately tell if their copy was aI generated or not. What is very interesting about these different tools is first of all, they're all gonna give you a different answer. That's just a fact. Because they're all using a different approach to detect AI content. The other thing is that you can input the exact same copy on one of these tools two times and get a different answer. So again, it's it's the wild wild west. But these will at least give you something to think about and whether it doesn't matter. Like if we if we trust the writer or not, we're always going to run their copies through one or multiple of these tools because we want to detect things that sound robotic, even if they were written by a human. So that kind of brings me to my next point here that I was starting to hint at. So when it comes to detecting AI content, or even detecting content that humans wrote, that sounds robotic, there's a couple of patterns that you can look for. The two major characteristics that the aforementioned AI detector tools are looking for are first of all, perplexity, so that's unpredictability within the content. Ai generated text tends to have low perplexity. Human writing has higher perplexity, it kind of makes sense we're a little bit more erratic than a robot. The other thing is burstiness, which is a similar concept. So it's looking for variation in the length and the structure of sentences. Ai content tends to be more steady, more formulaic, which makes sense. It has lower burstiness and human writing, which you know, has much more variation. The image you see here are some other things that we've picked up in our own writing process. And in investigating this topic, different signals that sound robotic again, whether they are in AI generated or not. So repeating words, like in this example, collision coverage, you know, coverage collision, like it's just like it's not using a lot of variation. And in the box MyStyle guide we talk about like, trying not to use the same word twice in the same sentence or paragraph, which is not always possible, but this would be an example of something that wouldn't pass the blacksmith style guide test because it's it's too repetitive. Also repetitive sentence structure where like, each sentence starts with the same formulaic approach. Advertising then a verb you know, advertising the verb, unnatural word usage, so like, you know, removing a glass dome to access the ball, but it doesn't really sound like how a human would talk about replacing a light bulb. A generic or impersonal tone. You know, it's like things that don't add value that you're just kind of like saying for the sake of having words, it's another thing that we talk about in the blog, Smith style guide, like everything you say, should have a purpose, and we don't believe in fluff. It's about cutting things to being the most concise version they can be while still conveying enough meaning. For people to understand what we're trying to say. Statements that contradict themselves. So the new policy will increase employee benefits while at the same time it will reduce employee benefits that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And inconsistent verb tense, you know, something a human editor. Should be able to pick up pretty well but probably a robot writing is not going to care too much about He He was waiting for the bus when he sees his coworker. Stiff, formal or matter of fact, writing style. You know, again, just something that just doesn't sound like a human wrote it or who would want to read it. So this is this is something that can be helpful to you like when you're doing your own edits to kind of like go through these different things. And, again, whether whether it's aI generated or not, and you know that for a fact, you still want to make sure that your writing is something that appeals to the human. So I wanted to take some time to talk about Google's helpful content update and also their guidance for AI generated content and whether or not it will rank some of this we did talk about last year if you were here, so we're just going to do a really quick refresher on that as it relates to this topic. So my book and like really like what we're talking about, in general is kind of marrying the concepts of writing for both humans who are really the ultimate buyer like they're the ones who actually have money so they can buy from you, whatever it is you're selling. They respond to other humans, other people's empathy, versus robots who you know, we're not writing for their sake, but they are the medium that connects us. To those humans. And so it's important for the things that we write, to be indexable to, you know, be findable to be descriptive, and to ultimately match the intent of whatever the human is looking for. So, you know, robots can also take the form of social networking site algorithms, like that news feed that you're familiar with, I'm sure.\r\n\r\nSo so that's kind of like the two players in this game. Here. So this is some highlights from Google's guidance about AI generated content. As you can see by the link here, this is from early 2023. And I was looking at this page again, just a couple of days ago to see if anything had changed. I had seen something on Twitter now x, where somebody had mentioned that something on this page should change. And I was looking at these three things because I think they're the most relevant to this topic that we're talking about. And like, I don't know if I'm just you know, like, post pregnancy brain or something. I couldn't find the difference. But it might have been because it was about something else on that page. But I might have missed it. And it might have been one of these things. But anyway, I think these things still more or less ring true today. And if anything has changed, it has been Google being less specific about their guidelines. Because that's kind of the nature of what all these things that they've shared with us are it's it's kind of like so just to go over them is a content against Google searches guidelines. They say it's not, but you know, it can't be used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which we'll talk about when we talk about the helpful content update. Will AI content rank highly on search? Maybe, you know, it doesn't give it any gains, which makes sense. What I think is really notable about this is they talk about if it's useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of e 80. It might do well in search. So they talk about original, but we've already talked today about how AI content at least on its own without manual intervention by humans is inherently not original. It is inherently not unique. And I would argue that again, without human intervention, it's neither useful nor helpful, in that, you know, you're not It's not like adding something that doesn't already exist. At least in that case. So to me, from Google's own words, AI content really aren't its own shouldn't rank high and relevant search. But of course, there are exceptions. And then, of course, there are situations where people pair that with a human editor like we saw with seeing that of course, CNET being a cautionary tale of what to avoid. Should I use AI to generate content? They say if you see it as an essential way to help you produce content that is helpful and original, we have that original word again, it might be useful to consider but again, if you're trying to gain search engine rankings and no there was something on Twitter now x where somebody was kind of like I can't remember who it was, but you might recognize the situation especially if you're in like the content world. Someone was boasting about how they had created a ton of AI generated content and they were sharing you know some stats from like their Google Analytics, and how would that helped rankings and things like that? And I think everybody agreed that that person should have probably kept their mouth shut because somebody from Google ended up you know, seeing this Thrive that came to their attention and they got hit with a manual penalty based on what this person was saying about you know, having not really like had that human intervention. So thus, it was not original or unique. And it's just funny, like, you could probably get away with it, at least for a while, depending on how Google develops more of these guidelines. But when you start to boast about it, and Google gets wind of it, then like there are manual interventions that they could take, so tread carefully. If it's working. Keep that to yourself. So then it Yeah, I wanted to like connect this back to Google's helpful content algorithm update, which also happened. Probably a little over a year ago, maybe two years ago. And so they describe it as being part of their long term efforts to provide original and valuable content through search. It rewards content that meets users expectations while demoting content written primarily with search engines in mind. So like we were just talking about what the AI content. This this update isn't focused on AI but but it adds color to those guidelines in terms of how to approach it or you know, if you are generating AI content, how to make it work, so that it could rank these questions. Are directly from Google just made pretty was blacksmith branding, but the link that I shared here will will get you to the Google documentation that includes these questions and the subsequent ones. So to ask yourself like is is this content truly people versus is something that Google would consider ranking. It's things like Do you have a primary purpose or focus for your site? If you're writing about too many disparate topics, it's very confusing to Google you can certainly write about things that are different but related to each other, but you should really have like one specific focus if you want to rank high in relevant search. Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they've had a satisfying experience? I think that's a question to ask yourself, whenever you create any type of content like Is it is it satisfying to the end user doesn't really just serve your purposes? They talk about like demonstrating firsthand experience or like a depth of knowledge that's really important. That's that's how we add uniqueness to our content. That's how we make it original. Even if it's just your opinion on something, you know, that adds color to the content that already exists. Okay, so, um, let's talk now about from the search perspective, are you taking the search engine first approach to your content? So these are things that you obviously don't want to do. And it's questions like, you know, are you primarily trying to attract people from search versus creating something truly useful for humans? It does say are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics like that cautionary tale, that person who was sharing, you know, the content they generated, which resulted in a manual penalty, it's a perfect example. I think this is important too, like, are you mainly just summarizing what others have said without adding much value? You should always be adding I think something to the content that you're creating in order for it to be worth creating in the first place.\r\n\r\nSo just to kind of summarize here, like what is helpful content versus unhelpful content from these guidelines that Google has given us and that I honestly agree with? helpful content is people first genuine specific, it's actionable. Up to date is important. Once you publish something, you have to think about, like if you're using stats or if it's about maybe a tool that changes frequently, like you should be regularly reviewing or auditing your content for opportunities to update it. Is it relatable, is it concise? And ultimately, is it satisfying, versus the unhelpful content which is written primarily for the search engine robots it's spammy? It's generic, it's abstract. It might be outdated. Ultimately, it's impersonal, impersonal, fluffy, and then whacking. So these are some easy guidelines that you can use to understand if your content is hitting the mark for something that Google would even consider ranking high and relevant search. All right, so now we're gonna get to some of like the really fun stuff, I think today, which is get GBT some specific examples for how you can use it, as well as a demonstration for how I'm using it. And so, a lot of the things that I'm going to talk about today are based on things that I've learned from other people. I didn't necessarily invent these things. I've adapted many for my own use cases. And so again, I think this is a really valuable opportunity for like if you have anything to add to this discussion, I'd love to see it in the chat. I think it could benefit other people. How are you experimenting with AI? Like how how would you maybe adapt some of these ideas for how to write a great prompt What are like interesting prompts that you've used, and you know what, how is that benefited? You so I'll just put that out there. And then I'll also say that some of these are like pretty much all of these guidelines are based on open AIS guidelines for prompt engineering as well as Google's in some cases, I've combined to them and in all cases, I've given examples of how to use them effectively. So let's go ahead and jump to it. Okay, so the, I think first and perhaps the most important thing is to be as specific as possible. And you want to set parameters for the output that you're looking for. So my prompt here was helped me generate 10 email subject lines to use for cold outreach for my content marketing agency, please limit output to a maximum of 45 characters per example. I picked that number, the 45 characters because I saw that that's like somewhat of a best practice for how many characters people want to see in an email subject line. And what I could have done here was use the personal GPT I'm going to show you later that's all about the blogs and style guide them has like aspects of like how we do business and I could have gotten like even better example results here. But the point was not to show you something perfect it was to show you how to apply this principle. And the other thing that I wanted to add to is like you can always start with a plant, see what it gets you and then you can set parameters after the fact to refine your output. Like, you know, maybe I would have asked this prompt and then asked for it to shorten it to 45 characters or to suggest new examples of 45 characters. Or maybe I would have asked for like, what are you know, 10 General Sales, cold outreach subject lines, that I could use and then I might have added the detail Okay, now, adjust it for like my content marketing agency. The next one is to give context and examples. So I have this bot and I think I'm going to show you a screenshot of it next. One of my personal GPCs is a blacksmith sales expert. And so I created this bot because we recently hired a new salesperson, and there's just so much to learn both about the blogs with his brand. The work we do for customers, and just our sales process in general things that we want to share with new prospects that I wanted to create a resource and it's like of course you know, I want to make myself as available as possible to this new salesperson because typically I've been the salesperson for my company, I have a lot of that knowledge in my own head, but there are times when I am unavailable or I have other stuff that I have to work on. And so I wanted to create a personal GPT that incorporates some of this different documentation that I've created about our process. You know, referring to this prompt it also has like a copy of our standard proposal. Different things about you know, like what makes us stand out compared to the competition what's what's unique to us, I guess, so that any person on our team, any especially new salesperson, would be able to use this chat bot in order to surface some of this information, especially if they couldn't get a hold of me basically. So here's an example of a prompt I gave my personal GPT which is using the above case study. So I gave it a URL on our website. And one of the features of chat GPT is that you can have it browse the web in order to to include information and its results. So I gave it a URL. I asked it to reference a proposal that I had attached to the GPT that I've uploaded to it. And I said proposed an email pitch for a specific job opportunity. I copy and pasted a longer piece than this. I just took a screenshot but like the long version of this job description, and and I asked it to effectively address the requirements that the job description surfaced and the writing based on our strengths. And so what ended up happening was, you know, it wrote like a cold pitch email. But it did it did effectively address this prompt. There were things that I would change about it. Certainly there are things that I would have edited it before I sent it out to the person who had posted this job description, but I think that for me as a founder who has also traditionally been the salesperson it's such an effective way to use this tool because I spend so much time just you know, it's like I know all this information I know what we're good at. I know that we have relevant examples. You know, I know all this but it takes time to like resurface that knowledge and put it in a form that sounds good and is compelling, you know, to a sales prospect so that if you take one thing away, I think that you know that's like one really excellent use case of using your existing knowledge or your internal documentation. To make your life way easier.\r\n\r\nAnother related GPT prompt engineering tip is to use de limiters to clearly indicate distinct parts of the input. That just means like what I shouldn't have done here that would have made it probably a little bit easier for chat. GPT to understand what I wanted is to put this this job description text in like quotes, that's like a delimiters to say like, you know, do this to this piece of what I'm asking for to kind of like help it understand what part of the copy it's referencing. And what part of the copy is the ask, especially when you have like a longer input output, you know, whatever. Another example of that is something I learned from James rose. He is an automation and Zapier expert and has been doing a lot of interesting experiments with AI who's really good person to follow. If you're interested in just like getting ideas, he takes transcripts from like voice of customer interviews where he's getting feedback and you know, like positive testimonials and things about his product and he feeds that transcript into chat GPT and says you know, use this puts a transcript in quotes those delimiters and basically like give me like three, you know, like really nice things they said about you know, our product three like great pieces of feedback. And I think that that's such a useful way we like on our client calls on our internal meetings. We use a tool called fireflies, which automatically transcribes all our meetings, but it's still you know, it's still a lot to sort through an end fireflies has its own AI capabilities, too. So it helps to summarize and things like that, but to take to be able to use that output and quickly surface insights based on whatever your prompt is, I think is such an awesome use of AI that saves the human reader from having to go through the whole thing. So this is and I'll show you, I'll show you what this looks like in action when we do the personal GPT demonstration. But this is kind of what it looks like to set some parameters for your personnel GPT and there's two I guess like schools of thought on setting like setting parameters narrowly defining the G PTS role. So you could do this within normal chat GPT and say for this query, you know, I want you to take on this specific role. And so I got this idea from Paul Roeser. He was on some like marketing technology podcast, and he's talking about how he uses AI. And his example was like, something along the lines of like, you know, pretend that you're a lawyer that advises entrepreneur, it's about hiring law and then he gave his prompt so he kind of like set the scene like this is the narrow role that I want you to operate into this query. So that's one way that you could look at it the other way is that you could create a personal GPT that serves a specific purpose like my blacksmith sales expert, that I've already referred to and that you know, I'm kind of showing you behind the scenes, how I set it up. So as you can see here, there's like a name for it, which is kind of arbitrary. A brief description, I think, mostly for your reference. And then the instructions are like what the AI uses to then suggest answers to your prompts. So as you can see here, I'm telling it like you can use our website as your primary reference. You should be familiar with all those pages and use it to inform your responses. It'll ask you and I'll show you how you want it to communicate with you how you want it to give answers. You know what specific information you want to focus on again, like narrowing that scope. And then I also say like tailor your responses to showcase the company's strengths and successes. Using you know details from the website and emphasize why we're the ideal choice in you know, answering like sales related queries. So this is one of the greatest uses of chat GPT without narrowly defining its role and objective. You're gonna get like a wide variety of answers and that's fine. It depends on what your use cases, but by giving it a roll, I think the quality of your output goes up exponentially. And I'll show you again, at the end here, what that looks like in practice. Here's another really interesting way to use it, I think, especially if you're trying to learn a new skill or if you're trying to troubleshoot an existing workflow, which is what I was doing in this prompt. So I use air table a lot. I'm a huge fan of no code and automation in general. I've found in my life that it's really hard to find like the perfect solution to everything that I want to do. I never could find like my perfect project management tool. And so essentially, I built it between using process street air table, Zapier, and you know the other mix of ragtag tools that are in my arsenal. So in this case, I was trying to create a specific automation in air table that for some reason is just evading me and I'm sure I'm doing like one stupid thing wrong, but I asked air table or sorry, I asked Chad GPT first of all, I prompted it by telling it what automation I was trying to create, like the actions that triggers the end goal. And it gave me like a step by step process that I would say is a little bit more high level than this out, but and then I asked it to refine its guidance or expand on its guidance by saying okay, so for this step, this is where I'm getting stuck. What was how exactly what I set this up in air table, and so then, as you can see, the result has some details and it's more detailed than the previous query gave for that step. It's probably worth mentioning that in chat GPT right now, there's two versions of GPT, which is like the underlying, you know, algorithm, machine learning mechanism, whatever. So there's GPT 3.5, which is an older version, and then there's GPT for GPT four incorporates web browsing so it has more up to date guidance. So especially when you're trying to troubleshoot something like air table, which changes often and so, you know, if I were using the old version of chat GPT, I might have gotten a different answer. So when you're doing things like like this, you want to use like the newer version, there is a limitation. I think it's something like you can have 40 prompts within three hours or something like that. I don't think I've ever gotten close to hitting that. But I suppose if you were to ask, you know, a lot of follow up questions, or you're troubleshooting something very complicated, then you could hit that so that's just something to keep in mind that as a chat GPT user and I don't know what the distinction is for paid versus free, but I think that the paid version of Chad GPT is like worth its weight in gold. I think it's extremely undervalued and it's probably because they're using our data to train it. So they do get a benefit out of it. But you know, I would say if you're finding yourself limited by the free version, then just upgrade to the paid it's, it's so worth that.\r\n\r\nOkay, so now, here's the real fun part. So we're gonna go through how to build your own GPT and I'm gonna give you like a specific task to do and so you can either follow along with me while I do this now, or you can do this yourself. Later, watch the recording and replicate it. I will say the process is probably much more straightforward than you might think, if you've never done this before. So we'll go ahead and get started. Let me set my screen accordingly. So we're going to jump over to the blog Smith website, because this is going to be the basis for the very basic UBT that we're going to create today, which is based on one that I've already created and refined a little bit more than what we're going to get into. But okay, so the blacksmith has this writing style guide and on our website. It has this chapter version so you can jump you know to these different sections. To see how will we go about our writing style. It's something that's fairly industry agnostic, so definitely like a great resource. If you don't have your own writing style guide. You could use ours to build yours. But what I want to do is create a chat GPT bot based on this that essentially acts as like a blacksmith editor that defends our style and explains when a piece of copy is not following it. So we have this as a PDF which I've already downloaded. I'll just show you what it looks like really quick. And it's it's designed, but it's fairly plain texts. You know, it's not that much more complex visually than like a Google doc version of this. And I'm telling you this, because my first attempt at making a personal GPT was actually to solve a personal problem of mine, which is that I love the game Settlers of Catan and I wanted to make a Catan rules bot so that I could download all the PDFs of the rules for every version we have. And I could ask the GPT okay, like you know, here's some like obscure situation like what is the role, you know, based on these rule books? Because every once in a while, something like that pops up. And while I like to think of myself as a content expert, there are those niche situations that require further consideration. Unfortunately, on the Catan website, the PDFs that you can download are very complicated visually as PDF, so chat GPT in my limited experience has not been able to read them. So it's just something to note that like you want to give it like the plainest text version of whatever documents you want to share with it, but something like this would be fine. And I know that because I've tested it. Okay, so so if you want to follow along, you know, just hit download, and that's this is the exact file that we're going to use. So then you go to the chat GPT dashboard. Which looks like this. And like I told you, you can toggle between chat, or GPT 3.5 or GPT. Four, you can see you know those limitations as well as the added benefits of using that more recent version of it. So then you go to explore GP Ts, and you can see on my sidebar when it loads here that I have. We have chat GPT which is like you know, every every question you could ever want to ask and then I have a couple of my personal gptc here as well as some that I've explored in this explore LGBTs area that I'm just kind of playing around with. So this is also just like a really fun place to look through things, test things out and get ideas for the the GPS you might want to create. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead and click this Create button, and you'll see this interface. Again, it's pretty simple. And if you go to create, it's going to prompt you with specific questions, but if you kind of like are familiar with this personal GPT idea, you could also jump to the Configure tab and start filling it out. But I think that it's easiest to think about it from this Create Tab. And so it's going to prompt you with a couple of questions. So this first one is like what kind of chat GPT what kind of personal GPT Do you want to make? So I'm going to tell it, you know, I like to create a GPT that serves as an editor for my brand, the blog Smith. The goal is to have this GPT serve as a resource. That references our specific style guide, and suggests edits based on newly inputted copy. I'm just making this up. But the last time that I did this, I'd used something similar to that. And so after each input, it's going to think you know, it's going to react to the things that you're telling it and it's going to ask you to refine the way that it interacts with you. So we're not none of this is like rocket science right now. This is just like designing almost like the persona of who this GPT is going to be. So then it's gonna suggest to name I suggest naming this GPT blacksmith editor. Does that work for you? Sure. Yeah. And you can change this yourself. Like if you just want to, like get through this part. Just say yep, yep, that's fine. And the next thing is it's going to generate a profile picture and so these are new, they're a little bit arbitrary. It's just like for your own purposes, for fun. One thing that is kind of fun with the imagery and it doesn't always work so we'll see. But sometimes I asked it to change to adapt the picture to use like one of our brand colors just for fun. So I'll say like, can you update this image to incorporate our main brand color, which just using a text expander Simple as that? Let's do it does. So this is using that dolly dolly I never know how to say it to suggest images and, you know, it looks like Okay, right? But we're not we're not asking it to create anything like complicated at this point. So, so like for example, it didn't, it didn't really follow my query. So let's see if I try a different way. Can the image use, you know, our main branch color? Like this is this is definitely the limitation of AI is that sometimes it understands the query and sometimes it just doesn't and we won't get stuck on it. If it doesn't get it. I just want to see if changing it has any practical effect on it. So then after this, it's going to ask about Yeah, that doesn't do it. No, that's fine. Okay, so the next question. They're asking me to more narrowly defined the role of what this GPT is going to serve as I'm Oh, so I'll have you use the uploaded PDFs as this as the foundation for your edits any questions? So I can upload the PDF here. Or I can go to that configure tag and I can also tab and I can also I can also upload additional documents to help as well like with my blacksmith sales expert, I have like our proposal I have a document about our sales process. I have another GPT that I forgot to mention that's called the blacksmith like SEO guru or something like that. And it basically I uploaded a bunch of documents about our approach to SEO some stuff about our keyword research process, and our like philosophy behind the different steps as well as a document I created for our writers and editors. That's about let me see how to get out of that. That's about how we write about SEO to make sure that our philosophy is communicated correctly and specifically. So that's just an example of different documents that you might use to support the outputs here and to narrowly define what you want to base its answers on. Okay. One thing that's important to say is when you're uploading documents you want to make sure to kind of like give context and say like, this is how I want you to use it. And like, you know, I'm doing this, I'm uploading this. So I'm expecting you to use this as part of your output if you don't, if you don't refer to that document when you're setting it up or when you're interacting with it. It might just ignore it in some, in some use cases when I've been creating these personal GPS like that's happened where, for example, with this one, it'll make edits based on best practices, but not based on the document that I specifically wanted it to use. So that's why I used that language. And so it says, I've updated your GPS behavior to focus on our specific style guide based on the uploaded PDF. So that's great. You know, like, what options so one thing that it usually asks is like how do you want the GPT to communicate with you and I'm getting maybe ahead of myself, I'm gonna say no, that sounds good and see if it prompts me to ask about like the tone.\r\n\r\nOkay, so it's not gonna say it looks good, but what options do I have for how it communicates with me? In terms of tone of voice, again, usually asked so this is giving me some options here. Again, not usually in the way that it normally does. It kind of asked to like paragraph form versus like giving me several examples. I'm gonna say that I want it to be let's go with number three, which is encouraging and positive. I think that that's the ethos of how we edit at the box with the other things are true to um, yeah, so just for the sake of this, and you can always change this, you can always refine it. Okay, so it's updating the GPT. This is probably the last edit and then what I'll do is I'm going to grab some copy that I want it to, to edit just to show you how it comes full circle. And then I'm going to show you kind of like the back end of what it looks like. So let me grab that copy. I'm going to feed it an example of like a recent social post that we were editing and the formatting is going to be like a little bit funky here, which is fine, because this is just an example. And the blog the style guide isn't necessarily built with a focus on editing social copy, but again, it was just like a quick thing to to try. Okay, so it says it's updated it. It tells me you know what the point of it is no more adjustments needed. Let's try it out. Okay, so I'm going to show you how it works and then we'll show you the Configure and then we'll kind of end the day off with any questions. Okay. So it gives you some prompts based on what it thinks that you might ask it and you can edit this, but I'm going to say please suggest edits to the following copy, in quotes and quotations, those delimiters based on the blacksmith style guide PDF and again, it's gonna be a little sloppy looks like it didn't actually take the name of the GPT that we asked it to. So we'll we'll take a look at that too. So it's interesting depending on the prompt you give it and I've tried this a couple of times in this case, it's kind of separating it out by saying like okay, here's some of the things from the blacksmith style guide and here's like specific passages of copy and how we would change them. So that's interesting. But what I would probably prefer is that it edits the whole thing, and then it tells me what edits it made. So it's, again, it's referencing I can I can tell because I'm familiar with it, but it's referencing specific aspects of the blacksmith style guide, which is great, we know it's working. But what I'm going to ask you to do is to change the way it outputs it. Can you refine the previous output by starting with I might mess up exactly how to say this, but by starting with, like all of the copy with edits, then after words, shared the specific edits made from blog Smith style perspective, that might not be like the most effective prompt. We're just going to see what it says. Okay, yeah, it looks like it's understanding. Nature. The copy here is an important I just want to show you how something like this could work for your purposes. Okay, so this is what I wanted it it refined the copy first and then it told me what it refined and why. Um, so let's look at this Configure tab. So yeah, for whatever reason, it didn't add the name. That that it prompted me and asked me to so I'm gonna go ahead and add that and you can see it up here. You can see this description. You can see the instructions based on some of the things that we talked about when we were creating it. You can make changes to these conversation starters we might even say like what like other conversation starters, would you suggest using freelist UPC code? I'm just curious and I don't know what to do. You can see the PDF that we uploaded and I can upload more files. You can add additional capabilities. I think by default the web browsing and Dolly image generation is implemented for many of you today who deal with code, this code interpreter might be useful. And then AI actions is something that I've started to play around with but don't fully understand but there's a way that you can connect your personal GPT to Zapier so that for example, it could reference data and other apps. So for my blog, Smith sales GPT I'm trying to create an AI action that allows it to reference our air table CRM so that you could ask it questions about a certain lead or certain portfolio projects and things like that. So once I get that implemented, it's going to be so cool. Okay, so it's giving me some ideas for these conversation starters that are a little generic, but I could probably refine them further. I think the last thing to talk about is how you can either keep this to yourself or share it with other people. I think that these drafts are automatically saved. So if you X out of here before clicking Save, I believe it will still exist, but don't quote me on that. From there you can decide you know, if you want to, if you want to keep it to yourself if it's you know something that's for your own personal use cases, or if you want to share it with your team or if you want to share it with like the wider world like maybe you create a chatbot for your industry that other people could benefit from that you want to share. So, in most cases, probably anyone with the link is a good bet, if you ever intend intend to share it with other people. Okay, so let me jump back to my slides really quick. We're going to end off the day here. So here we go. me pull this back up. Um, okay, this is the link to grab the style guide if you want to use that to replicate what I did today. You can also grab that from the side being like um, I'll just say one more time. My book writing for humans and robots. It was the number one best seller in the SEO category. So if SEO and content is something that you want to invest more time and learning about then I would highly recommend my book. You can grab the first chapter for free on the books website, and you can grab the book on Amazon in both print and Kindle format. I'll give one more reminder for our live content UX audit tomorrow. I'd really love to help you workshop, your content, help you come up with ideas for making it even stronger and more effective. So you can use this link to do that and that will happen at the end of day two. And then, you know, outside of today, if you have any questions about the things that we're talking about, you can either email me Maddie at the blogspot.com or on Twitter, aka ex im at Mad Yasmin and then yeah, we'll end the day with any questions that have come up since going over some of this GPT stuff.\r\n\r\nYeah, great stuff. Thanks Maddie. You know, the custom GP tees are really interesting. And it's it's also not only for your own business, but also working for clients. It's an opportunity to really, it's, it's a service you can provide. We have a boy for example, that has a ton of they're an educational nonprofit and they have a ton of PDFs like 800 and an educational topic that they deal with and so we're investigating, what would it take to put those PDFs in there and then have a bot that you could query the entire library to find an answer to something right. It's just super, super useful. Yeah.\r\n\r\nOne one note on that Nathan is chat GPT. So they have a limitation of you can upload 20 Total documents but they don't say how large or small those documents have to be so OneNote for like anybody who's trying like this is something that came up with that Catan bot I was trying to make. You can combine the documents if need be.\r\n\r\nYeah. And chat CPT if you have a large library like that it might not be the best tool it sometimes there are a bunch of third party tools. I mean, if you go on App Sumo, every day, there's a new one that somebody's chat bot or whatever, but find one that the UI that you like and a lot of those don't have those limitations. Like they have a separate database that they're looking at with total sort of magic they've created. I don't know, I don't understand it. But anyway, yeah. So folks, a couple of questions stacked up there. If you have a question, add that to the zoom q&a, and we'll dive into it. So first question from Doug. Maddie, how does SEMrush or SEMrush fit into the landscape of content writing tools? What overlaps or complements with phrase? Sure,\r\n\r\nyeah. So I think of something like SEMrush or Ahrefs is being a great all in one. SEO tool. So people use it for more than content although content is like an important facet of them versus something like phrase or query scope is really just about content and just about content optimization, or, you know, in the case of like phrase and market Muse also generating content is the use case. But SEMrush I have I'll be honest, I have more experienced with a traps but they both they're both very similar and we actually use SEMrush like the keyword researchers and strategists on my team, we use SEMrush these days. But it is it is the tool that if we're comparing it to phrase and query scope, that's the tool that we use to define our primary keyword. It's before we run those reports. It's a tool that we use to come up with some secondary keywords. It's the tool that we use to identify feature snippet opportunities, we can do competitor research on it. You can do backlink tracking on it. You can audit your website. So I mean, it just it just serves such a bigger overall SEO use case. But there are many very useful content optimization tools. And so it's kind of like a higher budget tool than any of the ones that I've mentioned, but it will serve you know, many of your SEO purposes even outside of content. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nOkay, questions from Eddie. Eddie is writing tech blogs. I see now my keyword content from Reddit is ranking very good. I doubt Reddit content is helpful since usually people have vague answers to questions. What do you think about that?\r\n\r\nIt's an interesting question and I think I'm gonna take the opposite stance. I do think that Reddit content is helpful. There's something about people being like anonymous on the internet that like makes the truth come out. People feel like a little I guess like Freer with the information that they that they volunteer. And so I mean, you have to take it with a grain of salt because they're anonymous. They also might have an agenda that is not clear versus somebody who's coming out and saying, you know, I work for one of these tools or, you know, these are the clients they serve. And so that's like, why this relates to what I'm talking about. But I will say that sites like Reddit, Reddit and Quora are really interesting for learning more about your audience, learning about the things that like keep them up at night and so that's why they rank so high is because they are a wealth of information. They're not, you know, they're not using like the traditional methods to optimize their sites, but they are benefiting from all this unique user generated content because they've created communities. So, yeah, I mean, I don't I don't know exactly how to answer the question. I guess I'm kind of like answering around it, but I think that Reddit is a useful resource in general. I don't know that it can be counted on like aI right where Yeah, I can be confidently incorrect certainly. So to can, Reddit user is but they bring up some really interesting points that are worth investigating. So as long as if you are using it as a reference that you fact check, or you know, if you're I guess if the question is like, How can I outrank Reddit the the answer is like, I don't know.\r\n\r\nYou just said maybe Reddit pays Google. And honestly, we just did a story about this a week ago in our news roundup. It is actually Google who has purchased the rights to all of read its content. Alright, Gemini. Yeah, that just came out. The story last week was an unnamed AI but it's since come out that it's Google has purchased it right. So who knows? Yeah, Google does. Yeah. Doug says here's my favorite prompt. I add this to help me brainstorm chat. GPT add this to the end of your prep, ask me five questions that will improve the response you'll be giving me I use that too. It's really helpful. I\r\n\r\nlove that I I haven't considered that and that's why I think like discussions like this are so useful. Like, we can all learn so much from each other. I learned something new about this every day. For\r\n\r\nsure. The AI world is moving rapidly. And we were Mata you and I were talking earlier just we did an AI workshop here back in October, and there's so much that's new and better and different, even just in the last few months. It's pretty crazy. All right. That brings us to the end of questions. Tomorrow, we're talking about a UX content UX. So give us one more time an overview of what we're going to talk about tomorrow and we'll start to wrap things up here.\r\n\r\nOh, tomorrow. I was looking at the comments and somebody had mentioned let's say Ben had mentioned that to get them to use the right color and the GPT to be very specific, use hex color code when so I got distracted but um, okay, so tomorrow we're going to focus on the content reader experience. Content UX, another way of thinking about it. So we're going to talk a little bit about things like things that Google has said or page experience signals, so things that are like tangible that you can optimize around within your design to help your ranking on Google. And my philosophy when it comes to SEO is that there's three pillars, there's like the content and the things that you can affect on your own page. There's the website structure, so that's going to be a lot of what we talk about tomorrow. And then there's things like Off Page signals like backlinks, which we won't talk about, but you know, we can always have a discussion later or, you know, I'm sure Nathan will bring on somebody who talks about that at some point, too. So yeah, we'll talk about these like website signals, these page experience signals. We'll talk a little bit about website structure, things that you can do to create a better experience for your users, even if it's not necessarily something that Google takes into consideration for ranking and some things that they do. And then we will talk about auditing, you know, with practical tools and specifics, your contents, the nature of your contents UX. I'll tell you how to like run your own content UX audit, whether that's with tools or with people in person. And so that'll be that'll be kind of the nature of what we talk about tomorrow. Trying to bring that discussion full circle from the specific things that you can use to how to like measure if you're using them effectively, and then we'll end the day with a content UX audit from the things that ideally, y'all have submitted. So if you haven't, please use that form that we've linked to in that slide. Being link, and then I'll pick a couple for us to go over tomorrow.\r\n\r\nYep, very good. And that link is there in the chat. Once again, make sure you submit a URL that was a lot of fun last year when we did that very info wise. Yeah. So I will take care of that. Tomorrow. That's yeah, day two. All right. Maddie, good stuff today. As always, we'll have the recording up if anybody wants to go back and replay if you came in late. It'll be up in about an hour or so soon as it renders. And I will see you back here tomorrow, one o'clock central time for day two of content workshop. Have a good night. See you then.\r\n\r\nHear but as you're coming in, we're just asking what was your biggest takeaway from day one? You can sound off there in the chat. I'm also dropping in the new link bundle, I can type correctly. There is a new slide being linked, so make sure you grab that new one. It is updated on the replay page. But make sure you grab that new link because a few changes have been made since yesterday. That will let you follow along better.\r\n\r\nSome last minute tool suggestions. Ah,\r\n\r\nlove it. Love it all. Right, catch. Working for everybody now. Just about a minute and a half to go and again, we'd love to hear from you in the chat on what your biggest takeaways from day one we're. As we are waiting just another minute or so to get started. Also the link there for the live content UX audit is on the screen because we have a slide or two left if you'd like to submit your site or page or something for a content audit. It'll be a friendly review with with some good help to help you improve some of your language. So use that link. The link is in the link bundle in the chat. There on the screen. We do have a couple of slots if you'd like to participate in that. So Vivian, if you look at the replay link in the link bundle the academy link there is a PDF download link on that on the on the replay page. And that is the new updated slides. Yep, so that's all there ready to go on the replay page or you can view them on slide being right now. Yeah, not too many changes. New tools. All I was new to was fun tools. Yeah. Alright folks, about 30 seconds to go. Glad everybody's back for day two. Again, our check in question. Let us know in the chat. What your biggest takeaway from day one was? Particularly did you have you used any new GPT prompts since we played around with that yesterday, or has anybody taken the dive and made your own custom GPT based on\r\n\r\nor have any ideas for things that you want to try when you have time? Yeah, I could. I could use some more ideas myself. Yeah.\r\n\r\nFor sure. All right, folks. It is three minutes after someone to start our recording and we will get underway. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everybody, wherever you happen to be welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here and joined again by MADI. Azzaman for day two of the content accelerator for 2024 Welcome back. Maddie. Glad you're here.\r\n\r\nThank you so much for having me. Again. It's exciting to dig into some of these topics.\r\n\r\nAbsolutely. So we had a lot of fun yesterday talking about some AI stuff and some great principles for creating great content. And today we're looking more at the the user side of consuming content right what are we going to talk about today? Exactly.\r\n\r\nYeah, I think that you can think of today as being a way to practically test your content, whether that's with other people, whether that's with tools, understanding how it measures up against some of the guidelines that Google has shared, that are necessary for ranking, specifically when they have to do with the user experience. So we're going to kind of attack this from all angles. And, you know, hopefully it'll leave today with some really tangible tools to help you understand like, does your content provide a great reader experience? Or are there things that you could do to improve it?\r\n\r\nYeah, very good. And we do still have this content UX link on the screen. If you have not filled that out and you would like to there's still a slot or two left for the second hour, we'll do some live content review. So grab that now. The link is there in the chat as well. A couple little bits of housekeeping and we'll turn it back over to Matty as usual. Ask your questions using the zoom q&a And we'll take those questions at the end of each hour today. break in the middle as usual. One note is that the slides have been updated since yesterday. So in the chat is the new slide being link. And if you want the PDF download, just go onto the replay page with the link there and the link bundle and you can download the PDF there as well that has all the new updates on the slides. So with that, I'm going to disappear Maddie, let's get started.\r\n\r\nLet's do it. So yeah, if if you want to submit something for this live content UX audit, ideally, it's like a page on your website, not not something like a PDF, because we want to look at how the content interacts with design. And like Nathan said, you know, it's a friendly review. We're not like looking for issues. We're just looking for things that you could do to perhaps improve the content experience. Get another set of eyes on it. And it's just a practical way to apply some of the tools suggestions I'm going to give you so with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. We're going to start today by talking about Google guidelines for what makes up a great user experience, especially when it has to do with content and specifically we're going to talk from the perspective of Google's quality rater guidelines. And then after I go through a couple specifics there, we're going to talk more broadly about Google's page quality signals. I think that's what it's called. I haven't labeled in the next slide but things that have to do with what they've told us influenced ranking high and relevant search, you know, all else equal, if you have great content, what aspects of your website design, you know, must be present of your website structure must be present in order for you to rank high and relevant search. So the first part is a little bit more I would say qualitative. And then the second part is going to be a little bit more quantitative. So the learn more link is for an article I wrote a while back for Search Engine Journal. This was specifically focusing on aspects of Google's quality rater guidelines that have to do with the user experience. And so I think it was a couple of years ago now I read through the entire quality rater guidelines, which if you're interested in SEO, and user experience, I would highly recommend at least giving it a skim. It's kind of hard to do because it's like 175 pages, but there's some really good nuggets in there about how Google looks at search, how they judge quality of content, how they determine if a page of a search result meets the needs of the searcher who's looking for it. And so the quality rater guidelines what's worth mentioning is that to some extent you have to take with a grain of salt because this is not something that directly influences rankings. What happens is human quality raters that they hire read through these guidelines, they're tested on them to make sure that they understand what Google is looking for and then they manually rate different website results based on a certain query. And so what happens is that Google gets that information. It helps them you know, refine their algorithm in terms of the general direction they want to take with it, but it doesn't necessarily result in any manual adjustments for whatever websites they're ranking. It's it's more of like a research process. So that's, that's what the quality rater guidelines are. They're a tool to help Google research what the web looks like right now in order to make decisions about how they want to adjust their algorithm for the rest of us. But all that being said, Whenever Google gives us information, whenever they volunteer details about how they look at search, and how they define quality, and like a great user experience, I think that we would be wise to take note of that if it is in fact our goal to rank in relevant search. And I think at the end of the day, whether it is or not, I think Google tries to maintain a high standard for quality. I think that it's their philosophy, philosophy, that content is king, you know that that good? Content is important. And so again, whether search is your goal or not, it's worth it's worth at least like listening to what they have to say. And so, for your benefit, I've tried to break down some of the most important things from the quality rater guidelines specifically having to do with the topic that we are discussing today. So the first thing that they mentioned or they they talk about the quality rater guidelines has to do with interstitials. So back in, it was either 2017 or 2018. They made an update to their algorithm, and they told us about it is again one of those rare cases where they're just upfront. And they said that like if you're using popups say, for example, to gather somebody's email address, or you know, it maybe you're on an E commerce site to advertise the sale, something that obscures the content that you have to interact with you either put your email in, or you have to click the X button, you know, something like that, that you have to interact with in order to use the content on the page. They call that an intrusive interstitial. And so what happened was it really it really resulted in a big change for how people use conversions, I guess on their website, so you know, bloggers and people who do affiliate marketing and of course, yeah, ecommerce, and businesses trying to get email subscribers all had to fundamentally change the way that they approach gathering email addresses. And I'm going to talk a little bit later about what you can do instead, that doesn't violate Google's guidelines. But again, from Google's perspective, they say that interstitials make it difficult to use the main content of the page. And so when they're talking in the quality rater guidelines, they frequently refer to MC main content, which is like what the searcher is ultimately going to your website for and so you could say generally speaking, that they're trying to defend the experience of the main content. And to like, skip ahead to the point here about ads, when they talk about ads, that Google recognizes that and they say this in the quality rater guidelines, that ads don't automatically equate to low quality, they understand that ads are in many cases, the reason a site can continue existing. But that being said, there is like a right and a wrong way to go about implementing them. And so they say the too many or like large ads hurt the user experience. And then that case, the human quality raters should assign that site that result, a low rating. So again, you want to think in terms of the main content is the ad obscuring it? Is it taking away from it? If not, you're probably okay. But it's just good. To keep in mind that Google's not saying no, you can't have ads. You just have to be thoughtful about it. And when I did some of these UX audits in the past, like the ones that we're going to do later today, I did a couple of for some members of the Denver bloggers club one of the local clubs that I've been involved with here. And one thing I noticed about a lot of them was you know that they'd have an ad in the sidebar, they'd have an ad in their footer. They'd have an ad a couple times throughout their blog content, and it was probably Google Adsense that they were using, or some other ad network. Like it. And again, it's like I understand that you're monetizing your site using ADS. But at the end of the day, it's probably working against you because people if you were to look, you know into the data like the scroll depth and the time on page and things like that, using Google Analytics, for example. You probably see that on those pages that are very heavy with ads that people abandon the page pretty quickly because it's just a bad reader experience. So to go back a point here, clickbait Google has a couple of pieces of guidance in the quality rater guidelines about that specifically.\r\n\r\nGenerally speaking, a good page sets expectations or good title sets expectations for wherever it's leaving you. And so clickbait is something that it can certainly be effective and getting attention and getting clicks, but it can be a very unsatisfying experience if it doesn't do something to deliver on the promise made in the title. Um, the Google specifically says that clickbait headings detract from high main content. So, you know, that's something that they're specifically looking for and guiding people to, to comment on. And they say also that like every page should have a page title. It shouldn't just be presented without buttoning it up that way. And that title should describe page content. So again, it's a balance. Writing a good title, I think is very much in art. But it shouldn't be misleading. That's that's the key here. Um, so the last point here is that when it comes to creating content, you want the answer to your query to be pretty prominent in the results. You don't want people to click through and then have to dig to find that. And Google has a couple of different SERP features, I would say where they're trying to, you know, first of all, answer this within search so that you don't click through, which is a problem for us content creators, but it's also perhaps an opportunity when we think about things like a Featured Snippet, which is just that sort of box that shows up above any other search results and it's usually summarizing kind of like the nature of what that person is looking for what Google thinks that person is looking for. There's other things like Google will index parts of a page and link to that specific part and highlight it you probably noticed that yourself when doing search and looking for something very specific. And so that's something that they do, it's not, to my knowledge, it's not something that you can necessarily optimize for. It's it's their methodologies of indexing and surfacing content. But the example that they gave in the quality rater guidelines was something about like somebody searching Abraham Lincoln's birthday. And when somebody clicked through like it was present on the page, but it wasn't prominently answered. And so in that case, they were instructing the human quality rater to give that like a not as good rating for meeting the needs of the searcher. So yeah, I mean, definitely, that's, that's kind of most of what I'm going to say about the quality rater guidelines. But I really think it is a very interesting document and especially if you look at the examples they give in terms of how they're making those determinations. There's a lot of little nuggets of truth and we also have a blog post on the blacksmith website that digs into this even outside of like the user experience sort of and like design focus. So if you want another take on that then definitely check that out. We just went in and updated it recently. So let's talk more broadly now about some search signals from Google things that Google has told us about the page experience and you know, importantly, I think how to how to like measure that, quantitatively. Google, we talked a little bit about helpful content yesterday and that algorithm update which was the year a year and a half ago, something like that. Google has been has said that a good page experience is a requirement. For creating what they define as helpful content. So you know, all these algorithm updates are designed to support Google's mission, you know, the way that they look at content quality and things like that, of course, they all you know, more or less feed into each other, but I think it's worth mentioning that like that is an aspect of having helpful content. Alright, so we're gonna start with what is collectively known as the core web vitals so the core web vitals, this algorithm update, or Google announcing this page signal? came about? I want to say it was 2021. So they've been around for a while. And interestingly, and what we'll go over is they have changed slightly since coming out. But the idea here was to give people these these three specifically, page signals, were to give people more tangibility around how to measure the the page experience. Because up until that point, it was a little bit innocuous, it was hard to conceptualize, in terms of knowing like where you actually rank according to Google's own way of looking at it. So the first page signal of the quarter web vitals is the largest Contentful paint, which is a facet of page loading, loading speed. And so their definition is that it reports the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport relative to when the page first started loading. So if we think about I think most of these core web vitals are more or less referring to like above the fold, like what you see before you scroll, it's like that first impression that a person has with your website and most designs, most tools that you use to optimize loading and things like that, typically are set up so that the rest of the page loads later but you want you know what's visible initially to load quickly and first so that people can start interacting with it, and then it gives time for the rest of the page to load. So another way of thinking about this is that this signal takes note of the largest element on every web page and measures its total loading. Time. So maybe this is an image, maybe it's video, you know, typically at some, I would say some sort of media thing, but it could be your theme in general, it could be a very slow loading plugin. So these are all things that you'd want to keep in mind in terms of optimizing this particular factor. And when I say I guess, like the theme and plugins, it's like the output of them that you would implement on your page. So okay, so how do you get a good largest Contentful paint so according to Google, whatever this largest element is, is about 2.5 Seconds or Less of loading time and you have a little bit of wiggle room here, before it gets to, you know, this like poor area, but you'll notice that it's not a super long time. And I think that this particular man measurement here, it relates to something that Google's said before and shared in their own documentation, which is that, you know, the majority of people bounce if a website doesn't load within three seconds or less. I'm sure that that guidance has changed over time because that's a dated stat. But it still goes to show that we're kind of like within that guideline, with this particular measurement of a particular element on a page. So the next one is first input delay, and this is actually what it was. This has since been updated. And I'm going to show you an example of what this looks like. But let's let's talk about like the original intent of it and then what it has become. So first input delay is a measure of interactivity. It measures the time from when a user first interacts with the page to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction. So that sounds like gibberish. Basically, the lower a website's fid score, the more promptly it starts processing users clicks and swipes again, interactivity like how long does it take for somebody to actually be able to use a page? So this measurement per Google, a good fit is 100 milliseconds or less. So that's what it was right? But what is it now? So this GIF kind of shows an example of poor responsiveness versus good responsive responsiveness from Google's perspective, but probably from all of us, as users as well and looking at it you you probably have been in this position before where like, you click on something and then there's this little bit of a delay before you are actually able to interact with it. And so Google essentially took took this concept that they had initially defined as a core web vital and added some color to it, I guess. And so the new measurement is that it's, it's below or at 200 milliseconds. That so up from I think, what was it 100 before so they're giving you a I guess a little bit more time to create interactivity here. And just so you know, this new measurement is actually not fully unveiled yet, but it will be as of March. 12th. That's when this takes effect and takes over. So they say that, you know, some interactions will actually take longer than others. But when it comes to especially complex interactions, you want to be able to quickly present some initial initial visual feedback so that the user knows that something is happening\r\n\r\nthe time until the next payment is the earliest opportunity to do this. So the intent is not to measure like every eventual effect of the interaction, but the time in which the next interaction is being blocked. So you essentially want to delay you want to if you are delaying some visual feedback, then you might be giving users the impression that the page isn't responding to their actions, which is ultimately a bad user experience, right. So the goal of this new measurement is to ensure the time from when a user initiates an interaction until the next frame is painted in the shortest time as possible, for all or at least most of the interactions the user make. So it might seem like a small distinction between the first input delay and the interaction to Next paint but I guess if we were to summarize them, the first input delay is really focusing on that initial interaction. And the interaction to Next paint is focusing on the difference between interactions. I think that's one way to look at it. Okay, so then the last core web vital is related to visual stability. And it's called cumulative layout shift. And so their definition Google Developers definition is that it measures the sum total of all individual layout shifts scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan. of the page. Okay, but what does that mean? So Visual stability means that a web page remain stable throughout the users visit. It means that text isn't suddenly moving as new elements load or shifting other elements of the page and I think the the unfortunate end result of when this is bad, is when it makes the user click a link or perhaps a buy button or something like that, unintentionally, they were trying to click something but because of something shifting after it loaded, it pushed them somewhere else. And again, this is probably something where either something comes to mind where that's happened to you or like, the next time it does, then you'll be like, oh, yeah, that was the cumulatively out shift the site is getting, it probably has a pretty bad score for that. Um, so with the core web vitals, visual stability became more of a priority. And you really have to have very minimal minimal instability in order for your pages to be considered for ranking high in a relevant search engine results page. So those are the core lead vitals, that's probably the newest addition to these page signals that relate to the content experience, but we're also going to go over some of the old like, you know, tried and true important things that have to do with page experience, such as mobile friendliness. I mean, this is something this is probably one of the first big things that Google told us was important for ranking, high and relevant search. Besides maybe page load, I think Page Speed like performance and mobile friendliness, like these are things that kind of happened around the same time in terms of a Google like, came out and said, like, you must prioritize these if you want to rank. So Google used to be a desktop first indexing property. But you know, as more and more people started using their mobile devices, you know, the iPhone came out and so now suddenly, everybody had a computer in their hand. And then another thing that's probably worth considering too, is like a lot of people in developing countries like they might not have a desktop or like a laptop computer, but most people have a mobile phone at this point. And so Google now operates off of the idea, or off of the principle, I guess, of mobile first indexing. So if your website is not optimized properly for mobile responsiveness for mobile devices, then that is going to hurt it's going to greatly hurt your ability to rank and relevant search and your desktop site could look perfect. It can rank perfectly in terms of all these other factors that Google tells us about. But if your mobile site is off, it's it's going to affect your desktop rankings as well. So, you know, going into all of the specifics of what's mobile friendly is kind of outside the scope of what we're going to talk about today. But I mean, it's things like making sure that your text is readable. It's making sure that your images are, you know, visible and processable that they don't get skewed strangely. It's you know, thinking about some of those core web vitals and like how elements interact with each other like our buttons too close together so that people are hitting the wrong thing. So all these things are are considerations for making your website mobile friendly. And I think you know, with the way that things like page builders, builders for WordPress work, the way that people design themes for WordPress. This is this is like very much top of mind for everyone who's designing for WordPress. So it's a lot easier to implement now versus perhaps when this update was first released into the world. So Safe Browsing is something that I they've actually taken out of what they call these like page experience factors, like I don't know if it's an official one anymore, it was in the past. And maybe it's because now we have HTTPS as an additional factor that's kind of related but I think it's still worth mentioning this from a content experience factor. So Safe Browsing is just that you can use a website that is free of malware, you know, that you can be like, reasonably sure that like malware isn't present, you're not going to get it you're not going to interact with it, and that it's not you know, affecting the output of whatever site it could be installed on. And so in order to protect yourself against this, there's different tools you could use. wordfence is a customer of mine, so I'm going to talk about them and I think that their tool and their team is great. They have a lot of cool security researchers and cybersecurity experts on their team. So they're very on top of like any new things that come out, but they have this product called wordfence care where they'll go in they'll identify them all where they'll clean it up for you and we'll share best practices for how to avoid it in the future and you know, additional steps that you can take. So I do think that you need some sort of tool on your website in order to prevent, you know, the worst effects of malware. And I guess the other thing that I would mention too, is to like always have backups of your site, because malware can really mess things up. And so that's that's like your first line of defense. So HTTPS also has to do, I guess, essentially the same idea of like Safe Browsing, maybe from a slightly different perspective. And so Google again said, you know, we're not going to rank websites that do not have HTTPS in place compared to those that do. You know, after that update happened, and that was a slightly more recent update, but it was still a few years ago, and so HTTPS in order to implement that, essentially, you just install an SSL certificate. And to be fair, there are different types of SSL certificates. Most web hosts have that functionality, where you can fairly easily implement one and then it creates either automatically or there might be some manual steps. You have to take where it it redirects your existing HTTP URLs to the HTTPS version. So that's important to make sure that that's working. Otherwise, it's going to break your site but again, most web hosts have a fairly straightforward process for implementing this and a free ssl certificate or I should say an included one with your hosting plan, but depending on your needs, you might need a different one. So that's something that you have to explore based on your industry like, like E commerce might have a higher level of SSL certificate needed, but for you know, the general small business owner designer, things like that, probably what your web host has is good enough. And so to be able to see if HTTPS is working within Chrome specifically and I'm sure many other web browsers but but chrome because it's a product of Google. There's a little button next to your domain name in the URL bar, and you can click it and see that the SSL certificate is working and that the connection is secure and I would say that SSL certificates in HTTPS are important for people who are interacting with the website. I mean, you kind of you kind of have to have it no matter what in order to rank but they're the purpose of it is that if somebody were to be giving their sensitive information, you know if they're on an E commerce site, and they're, you know, putting in their address or their credit card number or you know, a banking website and people are logging in, and you know, once they log in, that user has access to their bank accounts and their money and things like that. That's kind of the like, ideal use case of HTTPS is to protect the people who are entering that sensitive information to make them feel safe on your website.\r\n\r\nWe talked about this earlier, having no intrusive interstitials so these are the pop ups the image you see is something that Google shared when they announced this ranking signal to show what not to do, essentially where these ads are obscuring access to the main content. You shouldn't have to click in order to get to the main content. So what do you do instead? Here are a couple of examples from the blacksmith website. So the first one is we have a floating bar that basically is at the top of the content and then just pushes it down. And in this case, I used it to add like reminder about my book, a button to click to buy it you could use it to get email signups. I think another great example is like E commerce. If you're having a sale or if you want to say, you know, free shipping on orders over $50 or something like that. I think that's a really excellent use of a floating bar. It's like what's the most important thing happening for this business right now or use it to collect email signups? Then there's also next to it is a welcome mat, which is designed you know, very similar lead to how an email popup would look but the difference is that it's like embedded on the page. So it's not getting in the way of the content. It's part of the content. You can choose whether or not you interact with it beyond scrolling. Another version of that is a content upgrade. So on certain blog posts, let's say that you have additional resources, maybe you've turned that blog post into a checklist or there's a certain template that you're talking about in the blog posts, and people you want to incentivize people to share their email in order to access it. So having a content upgrade, which again is like an embedded version, at the end of your blog post about that specific resource is a totally valid way to see get emails that's not going to violate this intrusive interstitial guidance from Google. The other thing that you can think about is using email popups, but delaying when they pop up. So that kind of gets around Google's guidance. You could use what's called like exit intent technology. So when somebody scrolls for the Back button, or the, you know, X in the browser, then what happens is an email popup gets deployed where you know, it asks for somebody if they want to subscribe, for example. You can also use that same idea based on things like scroll depth, if somebody gets to a certain depth on a page, you know, that tends to indicate interest. It's given them a chance to interact with the content. Or you could have a deploy on certain pages. You ideally after they've seen other pages, so maybe after they've gone to a certain number of pages that deploys. So there's there's a couple of different ways to think about it that don't get in the way of Google's guidance. And we do have a page I forgot to link it here. But we do have a blog post on the blacksmith website that goes into each of these things and different use cases and things like that a little bit dated, but it's all the same advice. Okay, so now that we've talked about Google's quality raters guidelines, which is indirectly related to search rankings, and Google's page experience signals, which are directly related to search rankings, I wanted to talk a little bit about website structure and design I would say, especially as it relates to ranking high in relevant search, but certainly how it impacts the content user experience. So it's kind of like a mix of the things that we're talking about, but expanding on them as well. So the first like factor that you want to optimize your website around your content in general, is crawlability. And when I talked about crawlability, I'm talking about Google's ability to like fully index all the resources on your site. Is there anything that is getting in the way of Google doing that, like, for example, errors in your sitemap, like maybe you're unintentionally excluding certain pages? Maybe you know, you haven't created enough connections between your pages for Google to understand how they relate to each other. And so a couple of guidelines here, you know, first of all, is that when you're creating content, it's important to add external links. Think of these as your ability to add context to prove claims these are things that you know, you can also use let's say that you're writing about a topic and there's a related topic and it doesn't really make sense for you to cover it in your content. Like maybe it would just make your your piece go on too long. But it's something that people might want to learn more about. So you find a relevant resource from a trusted site and you link it External links are great. I mean, you might, I guess, worry. Like, is that going to lead people away from my page? You know, is there any like negative impact of that? I think that's just kind of the way that content works, that people are always looking for more information. You can set it so that it opens in a new window so that they're still on your page while they explore that content. But yeah, as the best practice, have an external linking policy, it makes sure it's to good quality content and I think that, like with this next point, it helps Google understand what your content is about. So besides external resources, you also want to incorporate internal links. This just helps Google understand the relationships between the different pieces of content on your website, ultimately, what your website is about. It's helping with that crawl ability and that index ability. It's helping Google as robot to understand, you know, these different connections. So again, it's important really to have these two types of links and really every page and relate certainly every piece of content. And then, the flip side of all this is like as you create content, things are going to change. External links might become broken. Internal links, you might change, you know, like for example, the URL slug of them, and they might become broken. So I guess my first tip is to make sure that you have some sort of redirect solution implemented, there are different plugins that you can use to automatically if you change the URL slug of something, then it creates a redirect so anything that already links to a will be updated to that new link. But it's also having a process for like auditing your content to look for these problems. And one of the tools that I'm going to show you later today will help make that a little bit easier. But it's also just a matter of like I don't know, quarterly at least, or depending on the size of your website, quarterly, maybe every six months or so, having just a process to kind of go through what exists and if you need to fix anything. So we're talking a little bit about URL structure and I will say when it comes to creating content, you want to be pretty sure of the URL you want to use before you publish it. Because it is a factor in ranking, and you can use redirects, but it's kind of hard to explain them in the context of what we're talking about today without getting deep into SEO, but it's just generally like to trust me that it's a best practice to not mess with the URL after you publish, you know, after it gained some traction in search and things like that. But it happens and that's why you use redirects. But that being said, you could at least start with best practices. So the first thing is to incorporate your target keywords in that slug. So like yesterday, I showed you some tools we use for an article we wrote about AI detectors, so let's just pretend the keyword is like aI detector tools. You'd want that to be the slug. Without really like any extra information. You want to keep your URLs as succinct as possible so that Google doesn't have to take a lot of extra time to parse them. And so what that means is within within WordPress, you can customize your URL structure for blogging. And you can do things like add categories to the URL, you can add the date to the URL. My suggestion is to not do that the only reason that you might want to add like a subdirectory within your blog content or some other specific category, like if you have case studies or something like that, is because you can use that subdirectory to group pieces of content together to measure them in like Google Analytics GA for these days. But that's kind of an advanced use case and that's only if you plan on actually like doing a deep dive into the analytics. From an SEO perspective, I highly recommend against it. It should be your website url.com forward slash keyword. And when you're implementing those keywords, you're going to want to add a dash between each word so if the keywords AI detector tools, it's a i dash detector dash tools\r\n\r\nfor certain things like articles, a and words like the things that aren't, you know, specific keywords generally speaking, you can drop those when you're creating the slug. We have some guidelines on the style guide that I shared with you yesterday on the bugs with website that's also linked in the slides so or the PDF as well. So if you if you want to dive into more SEO and URL and keyword best practices and definitely check out our guidance on that. Um, duplicate content is worth mentioning from this perspective of the user experience mostly in terms of how Google would interpret that. So generally speaking, duplicate content is like you publish a blog on your website and then a situation that could come up that seems innocuous enough is that you know, somebody in your industry says oh my god, I loved your blog posts on whatever, I'd love to republish it on my site. And you say okay, and then maybe this site, you know, has more authority than you and maybe they have a better approach to SEO, maybe they've just been around longer. And what could end up happening is that even though you were the original publisher, and Google does take that into consideration, but this other site may outrank you with your own same content. So that's duplicate content. It could be a whole blog post, it can be an excerpt of it, it could be like a piece of it. So duplicate content, generally speaking, like try to avoid that. You can add a tag to your link called the canonical tag, which basically points back to the original content and says, This is the person this is the site that originally published it, even though we have now published it here. And so Google takes that into consideration, but they really make their own choices about who they're going to rank and so that that's not the be all end all way of making sure that the original publisher ranks highest in search, all else equal. Um, with all that being said, in my experience, you can typically republish things like your blog content on mediums like LinkedIn and medium you know, original copy without making changes. As long as you wait, I would say at least a week from the original published date to do that. This is this is my experience and that saying that it's completely scientific, the advice that I'm giving you, it's something that you should experiment with, if that's something that you're interested in, but also take note of what ends up happening and discontinue if it's getting in the way of ranking your own content on your own website. But when it comes to duplicate content, if you if you get approached by someone, you know, like the example that I gave, who wants to republish something that you wrote, what would be a better situation for you? It would be more work, but it's to say like, let me write a new version of this article, like maybe you take another stance on it, maybe you you just kind of like repurpose it in a different way. I would highly recommend against duplicating your content, either on another page on your website, such as using product descriptions that like a manufacturer provided or maybe you have, you know, two variations of something and so you're using almost the same product description or again, like the example that I gave doing it on another site, so I just wanted to add a cautionary tale for duplicate content because a it is kind of a bad user experience, but be it'll also more than likely hurt you in search without a very strategic approach. And then the last thing I want to say on this particular topic is about designing website navigation and best practices around that. So first of all, you want to use descriptive and recognizable menu item titles. And the example that I always give for this is the difference between something that's called news and something that's called blog. So in my in my experience, news is like an enterprise business that has a media arm and they're publishing their press releases and, you know, things that are relevant to their company, new product updates, things like that. Whereas blog is more articles. It's you know, the how tos. It's the list of coals. Its product lead content, for example, but it's not exclusively focused on that company's news. So it's important, I think, to match the heuristics of what your users are used to and one way that you might be able to figure this out if you're unsure is just kind of see like what the competition is doing and how they're naming their menu items. Or just ask some of your users like, Does this make sense? And we'll talk next about how to conduct a UX audit and that's something that you could do as part of it. There's this thing called the three click rule, which you may have heard about. Nielsen Norman Group actually debunked this as being like ideal or even something that you should totally consider. It's the number three is arbitrary, I guess is what I'm trying to say. But it's the idea that within three clicks, a user searching or user looking for something will find it through your website navigation without necessarily having to go to like an internal search. So well, it's arbitrary. I think it's still a good thing to keep in mind, which is just that people should be able to easily and quickly find what they need your your menu should support that. And then creating category grouping. So like for example, on our website, we have a Resources tab and it has the blog, it has some of like my YouTube content. It has our style guide. All of these are resources they have to do with like things that we're sharing with other people versus we have another tab that's about our work. And so it has case studies and like portfolio examples, and it's more focused on like Final outputs that you know, fit, you know, things that we do with certain clients. So just a couple of things to think about in terms of website navigation. I'm going to start this topic and then we'll break I think maybe in like five minutes from now, but I'll just go ahead and get this started. So let's talk a little bit now that you've learned about these different factors for how to understand user experience from, from the user's point of view from Google's point of view. Let's talk about how you can continue to make your own websites user experience better by implementing a UX audit. So UX audit, we might also call it a user tests. I think they're maybe slightly different concepts, but I'm going to use them interchangeably today. So usability testing involves observing how users interact with products like your websites. The purpose is to get a better understanding of how real people use what you've designed. And really the idea here is you want to combat any assumptions that you've made incorrectly, which is impossible for you to figure out by yourself. That's why we pull in other people. You can use your tests during just about any stage of project it doesn't have to be like the final part. It could really be during the wireframing stage. It could be you know at the midpoint it could be even after you've launched but you've added some new things. So why bother with UX audits? First of all, we're talking about it today because there's a strong relationship between the user experience and SEO. I think we've proven that by talking about specific elements of the quality rater guidelines that point to UX, as well as the page experience factors that Google's specifically told us. If you care about SEO, you should care about UX in terms of things like your page, loading your mobile responsiveness, and using things like HTTPS. To invoke privacy for your users information. It also allows you to uncover issues that might kill conversions. I mean, I think this is one of the most important use cases of a UX audit is to look for things that are getting in the way of whatever your end goal is with the website. Because we're all WordPress users here, probably most of us at least, you've probably interacted with whether it's your own design or somebody else's that where you recognize that somebody forgot to edit the demo content they've, you know, implemented it and they've gone in and made their changes. But you know, there's that hello world post they forgot to delete or there's something you know, and one of the menus, maybe the footer menu that they forgot to take out that, you know, they never actually customized and so I think UX audit would be good at surfacing that if you're if you're kind of blind to it, because you're too close to the project. And with all that being said, a UX audit helps to get out of your own head. We're all human, we're imperfect.\r\n\r\nAnd really, I mean, it's it's easy to say I think when it comes to writing content, like as much as like, I have a process for editing and looking for mistakes and things like that. Like I still use an editor whenever I write anything, because I need to get out of my own head in order to make sure that I'm not missing something important. So the same can certainly be said about about website design and doing UX audits. So at the end of the day, we all operate based on certain assumptions, but what if yours are wrong? I'll just go through another slide or two and then we'll break so in terms of picking user testers, there's a couple of different populations you could consider. And I'm also going to share a couple of different like marketplaces where you could find these people, but you can start with the people that already exist in your circle your colleagues, you know, the people that you work with, but also maybe your friends and your family members. Wow, this is a great place to start. Don't discount the impact of their own bias and desire to please you, especially if you're asking your mom for input she's probably not going to be super critical. And and you know, it's going to be more of a pat on the back then something useful. And even like people like your work colleagues, they they still may be too close to a project to provide useful feedback, but it's a good place to start. You can also recruit volunteers from your own audience. Again, they might have a bias if they really love you. They might be hesitant to give you really great feedback. But they're also probably very willing to help you make something that's better. So you can start with like your brand ambassadors, anybody who would consider themselves your biggest fans, things like that. Ultimately, though, your best bet is going to be unbiased third parties who don't know you, you know, who don't have like a stake in what you're doing. I would say ideally, if you could get a couple people from that pool and then maybe one or two people from these other pools of populations, you'll get a couple of different perspectives. And when it comes to some of the marketplaces that I'm going to show you, you can also filter by certain demographics, you know, age, gender, level of education, like whatever is important to like the target audience that you want feedback from, generally speaking, you can filter and on those people. Maybe we'll just go to the top of the hour, and then we'll and then we'll definitely break then. So how many user testers are enough for each design stage? I've mentioned a couple different populations you could pick from. This is another Nielsen Norman Group reference. They are a really great resource when it comes to anything user experience user testing and things like that. And so Jacob Nielsen wrote this column and he the column was titled Why you only need to test with five users. So that's his official recommendation is for each stage that you test five users is going to be more or less enough you're going to get marginal returns marginal new information after that point. So you know, unless you're getting wildly different things from those five user testers, you can probably stop it there. He also says that it's best to involve a larger quantity of user testers earlier on in the project if you're going to test during like the wireframing stage. Versus like, when a website's like basically ready to launch it's going to be harder to make noticeable and useful changes at that point. It's going to be kind of locked in. So I think that that makes sense. Um, so we'll just start with some of the questions that you might use. When designing usability testing, it is important to to be thoughtful about this before you start you you don't want to just like go into a blind and just, you know, like, what do you think of this website? You want to have a strategic approach if you want to get useful information? So my suggestion is to start start by defining whatever your goals are, I mean, is there something in particular that you're looking to test? Are you wanting to make sure that this design is understandable to your target demographic? Is there something that isn't currently working with the design, something that's maybe hurting conversions? So whatever your goal is, like set that intention, and the questions will come more easily after that? You want to also be asking questions about the tester and how they interact with the Internet. And there's a couple of reasons for this. So one example is like you could ask the person what kind of smartphone do you use and asking this particular question is good because it kind of gauges like their familiarity with technology like how they're going to interact with your design. Somebody who uses a flip phone, for example, is probably going to have a much different level of internet savviness and how they interact with the design versus somebody who has like the latest gadget as their device. The other benefit of this question is to especially if you're doing an in person test is to kind of relax them. It's kind of like a little bit of small talk almost so that they can ease into the test, especially if that's not something that they often do. You want to define a specific action for the user to take. So this goes back to the goals. Let's say that, you know, you have an E commerce site that you're testing and you know, there's some sort of issue with people abandoning the cart, you know, after they add some products and so maybe you want to have that person go through the action of adding something, and then starting checkout. And seeing like, where in the process, there's friction, that could be one action that you want them to take. And so at this point, you want to ask them how they go about it, have them sort of like narrate and explain as they go through each step. The more you can dig into each specific action that the user takes the more detailed insight that you'll get as to how they're actually using your website. So I think with that being said, we have a couple more questions that we could talk about, but I think now is probably a good time to let everybody take a little bit of a break. And then after that, we'll finish this discussion of how to run a UX audit. I'm going to give you a bunch of tools to use to do your own tests. yourself, essentially. And then we'll finish off with that live content UX audit. Sounds\r\n\r\nlike a good idea. No questions in the q&a right now. So let's just go and take that break. It's two o'clock. About a five minute break. Is that good? Maddie? That sounds good. All right. So let's back be back at 205 and we're quiet until then. See ya. Then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We're back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, folks, we are back and ready to begin. Let me get the recording started here. All right, folks, we're back for the final hour. Of the website content accelerator. We got a lot to talk about in the next hour, so I'm just gonna let you get right to it. Maddie. Sounds\r\n\r\ngreat. Yeah. Thanks for sticking with me so far. Excited to finish this off strong and yeah, hopefully give you some really tangible things that you can take away. For your own processes. So I'm continuing this discussion that we started about UX audits and designing them. Okay, so we talked about this. Let's go to the next point. What so I used to offer UX audits as a service when I used to be on Fiverr. It was my most popular gig by far. And the way that I structured it was I basically priced by the page. And so when you're doing a UX audit, you want to be sure to identify whichever pages are the most important, especially if you have a big site like you don't necessarily want. Just going back to the E commerce example like you don't necessarily want to audit like every single product page, especially if you're looking for trends, maybe one you know prime example of what your product pages look like maybe one category page, your homepage, your checkout flow, like if somebody had me audit an E commerce site that that tended to be kind of what it looks like. You know, it's also things like maybe more generally, your homepage, your about page service page. So it really depends on what you're trying to do. But you could ask questions in your UX audit, like, you know, what do you think this is about the page in general, or about a specific element of it? You could ask What strikes you about it, you know, you're trying to see how people are reacting to it, how they're understanding it, and then like, what would you click on first, like what, what is something that looks interactable? And how would you, you know, accomplish whatever the specific goal is. So those are ways that you could you know, further define this question. Or this idea here. And then we kind of talked about this, what do you make of specific elements? So again, if we're talking about ecommerce, maybe you have a button that's like a quick add to checkout where you don't have to go, you know, to the individual page, it just kind of pops up when you're looking at a specific category or on the homepage or something like that. And so you might want to test like, do people actually understand what the purpose of this is? So that's just one example. You know, many others that might factor into your own purposes and needs. So when it comes to designing these questions, a couple of best practices to keep in mind you know, first of all, users are generally not going to be designers. I don't think you I don't think you perhaps want them to be because you want them to look at it from a different perspective than you and so with that in mind, you want to avoid any sort of like web development or industry specific jargon in the way that you ask questions. You want to design for the average internet user, they should be able to understand what you're asking without you having to explain and clarify. I think another useful thing in general and this is this is when you ask for feedback about anything, but it's breaking up a complicated question into simpler ones. It's, it's okay, you know, to to ask a question and to ask a follow up question and to dig deeper. And that's something that we talked about yesterday when we talked about chat GBT and and getting that ideal answer that you want to get from it. Sometimes you kind of have to break the subject down and sometimes you have to add clarification later. So then, I've said this in a way but be as specific as possible when you're asking questions, you know, reference specific elements. Bring it back to the goal, if necessary. That's how you're going to get the most useful responses. So going back to that fiverr gig I was talking about, these were the questions that I asked and every order and sometimes they would ask clarifying questions after the fact. But most of the time, if I wasn't because it's fiber, and I'm sending them either some sort of like written report, or typically it would be like a video recording of me going through and doing the audit and if you work with a platform like Fiverr, or some of the other things that I'm going to mention shortly. I think it's the next slide actually. Typically, people are recording themselves interacting with your website unless you're doing an in person test, which is a different situation. But so you have to have some sort of standardized approach in that case, especially if you're offering this as a service like I did. But most of the time these questions got to the bottom of what that person was hoping to get out of the audit. And so generally speaking, I asked for the URLs for any pages they wanted me to take into account. I also told them you know, if you want me to take a quick look before starting the order to see if this is a good fit for me, you can do that. Are there any major problems that you want me to keep in mind throughout the process? So is there anything that you're noticing isn't working that you want? Me to focus on like a conversion factor? Can you briefly describe your target customer so that I could keep their perspective and focus? This is a really important one. I'm not going to fit in and perhaps you know, every user tester that you're going to work with is not necessarily going to fit that ideal target persona that represents your audience or the audience of the client that you're doing this on behalf of. But that doesn't mean that you can't adopt that persona. And again, a lot of these platforms will let you pick a user tester based on demographics. So that's probably like the best case scenario. But I think, again, you can still benefit from a plethora of different experiences. So anyway, you know, like I'm, I'm thinking of like a time where I did a user test and the target audience was, you know, generations older than me or something like that, where they're interacting with the web and they might have some access issues, you know, they might it might be harder for them to read the text if it's not big enough. Things like you know, contrast come into play between the words in the background. And so things like that, maybe it doesn't personally affect me right now. But I can still comment on that and say, you know, you told me that this was your target audience. To me like this strikes me as something that would be very difficult for them to interact with. And then the last question I asked is What important goals are you hoping that this page or these pages will achieve? So that kind of goes back to like the problem question, but I guess maybe from a more positive standpoint, and especially, you know, people use your tests at different stages, so they might not know what the problems are, but they certainly know or ideally, they have an idea of what they want that page to achieve. So these questions like very much covered what I needed to know in order to give people a satisfying UX audit after they put in their order. Okay, so how to run usability tests a couple of different ways that you could do this. A very wide range of methodologies and honestly a wide range of end results I would say, in person is like the gold standard because you're going to have the most control over the process. You're going to be able to meet with people, you're going to be able to dig in deeper to any like initial questions that you set. It's a little bit harder to do with something like Fiverr or user testing. Because there may be limitations I think with like user testing, it's kind of like you set it up ahead of time. And then you know, the user testers go through it, but you don't necessarily get to get to interface with them after the fact. And then with fiber, maybe you could do that it would probably involve making a new order. It's going to take time to get that feedback. It's not going to be as dynamic as doing it in person.\r\n\r\nIn person, it's probably going to be the most expensive in terms of like your team's time and like setting up a place for them to do this. And, you know, having some sort of incentive whether that's straight up cash or like a gift card or something like that for people's time. Another I think great option is user testing. And I was pretty sure that this platform had had changed or been sunsetted or something but I was looking at it leading up to doing this presentation and it still exists. It might exist in like a different format than it did initially did. Like I think you have to buy like a package. It's not just like one by one, for example. So I'm not super up to date on how it works now more more as to how it's worked in the past. But basically, the way that it has worked is that you specify certain tasks you want users to complete and specific questions for them to answer. And so users narrowed the process they go through until that test is complete. They have or at least had had a very large user base. So it was a great platform for giving like that exact demographic that you wanted to test. But fiber is very similar. I mean, fiber doesn't focus on user testing. To the extent that user testing does a fiber marketplace covers a wide range of services, but their usability like UX test marketplace is very large, you know, in comparison to some of their other focuses. So definitely a great place to find user testers. People start offering their services at $5. But they don't have to, that's an old fiber rule of thumb that it had to be five now people can set whatever price they want. They just have to set up their gigs in a way that makes them competitive. The way that I did it was I used to charge by the page. And then if they wanted, like a written report, that would be an extra cost in addition to the video. So it just depends on how people set up their gigs. But there's some level of standardization because people go to that market and that marketplace and they want to be able to pick you know, five people that offer something that take a look at side by side. Um, you could also do something that's not exactly going to give you all the information but it's an interesting practice, which is like recording users sessions on your website. So Microsoft has this newer tool called Clarity and it's free. And so you basically add like a little bit of JavaScript to your header. And you can see people interacting with your website, and you can see you know, how their mouse moves and how they scroll and things like that and like what they click on. Of course, unlike the user test, nobody's narrating it, there's no audio. It's literally just kind of like outside of context, how they interact with your website. So it's going to give you marginally useful information, but it's just another thing that you can use to try to troubleshoot. You know, why something isn't working, for example. And then this isn't like fully, like a way to run usability tests, but it's a like a tool that you can use or that perhaps somebody that you work with might use, which is to take screenshots and share commentary about what they're looking at. And I'm going to show you an example here. Oh, and besides clarity, when it comes to recording user sessions, you can also use a tool called Hot jar to do that as well. Okay, so this is an example and it's a little bit dated, but this is from bug herd. So bug heard is like a website feedback tool. That's another way to, to look at like what we're looking at right here. And this is something as a designer that you could use with clients. Some websites do this publicly where they have like a little thing on the side of the website that's like, Hey, do you have any feedback about this page? Or do you want to report a bug? That's, that's kind of why this exists, but I used to use it for my UX audits. I would just go through each page and then create like annotated screenshots and then I could explain export, the report that has all the pages and all my notes and things like that. So it's just a cool tool, whether you're kind of auditing your own site, you're auditing a client site, or somebody's doing it for you. So okay, from the flip side, we've talked about how to run a user test, but how can you be a good user test or maybe how can you identify one that you want to work with time and time again? First of all, it's narrating your thoughts as you have them. We've talked about this because that like stream of consciousness just, you know, noticing things and whether you really have something to say about it or not just like addressing each element on a page. And so that's kind of the next point here is is, you know, not just addressing them, but considering the impact that each page element might have. It's certainly acknowledging the perspective of your audience we talked about even if you're not a member of that target audience, how can you sort of take on that persona in order to speak on their behalf? Another thing that I used to do when I did these UX audits was share ideas for a B testing. Like I might say, you know, this is an interesting approach to your head and I wonder if you were to try this if it would, you know, get you better results and so it's it's giving them ideas, even if it's not a fully fleshed out thing, but to say like, this might not be it, but maybe you could try this. And then it's also it's not just about being like negative or pointing out what's wrong, but also acknowledging what does seem to be working. So that again, you can really like laser in and the feedback that's going to have the most impact for what they should change to resources that have really made an impact on me and how I go about content and design. First of all, is the Design of Everyday Things. This is like one of my favorite books. It's more about physical design, like product design, but there's a lot of transferable things that have to do with how we design for the web. And then don't make me think is like the quintessential resource for web usability and he's sent created, you know, multiple editions of this. There's another book, something about rocket science. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but, you know, anything that he writes like I would highly recommend. Okay, so we did break, and then I'm going to save questions for the end so we can get through the important stuff here. So I'm going to give you a couple more tools to use so that you can audit your own stuff. We're going to go through our live content UX audit, and then anytime we have left is going to be for questions. Let's get through it. Okay, so we'll start with Google tools, because again, when Google gives us information or tools, we want to listen because this is essentially how Google sees our content and how they prioritize what they rank in relevant search. So PageSpeed Insights is really a wealth of information. It provides data points from a variety of factors. And as you can see in this screenshot, currently, as of the core web vitals update, it starts with the core web vitals, so it starts from a point of this like, page experience and usability factor. They what's kind of interesting is that they have a part of PageSpeed Insights, and I'm going to show you like a fuller report when we go into the live content UX audit, but they have a piece of it that's about accessibility, but it's it's pretty bare bones. And so Nathan mentioned to me right before we started today, that Amber Hines is going to be the next workshop next month and it's going to be about accessibility. And her company equalised digital, they have a really great accessibility checker that integrates with WordPress. And so I would say that like that's probably going to be a much better tool for making judgments about if your website is accessible. Then what you're going to see on Google PageSpeed Insights and I think that that's something that is really important that you know, it's not always like at the top of our list when it comes to some of the other things that we need to do. To make our website usable, but it is really important. Whether you currently have an access issue or not at some point in your life, I'm sure you will. And now that I'm a man like this has become more obvious to me, maybe not in terms of strictly website design, but I think about like when I'm on a walk outside and previously, you know, I could just step around people's icy sidewalks that they didn't shovel or whatever, but now that I have a stroller, it's like okay, am I gonna put my kid you know, in the street. And so it's it's things like that or maybe you break your arm and now you can't interact with the web the same and so accessibility, I just wanted to like, make make the case that that is something that is so important because you your loved one, there's somebody that you know that it's going to make a difference for.\r\n\r\nGoogle used to have a tool specifically for testing the mobile friendliness of your site, and I was surprised to learn that they've actually sunset this tool. So now it's kind of a part of Google PageSpeed Insights. I think that whatever functionality was already in Google PageSpeed Insights for measuring the difference between the mobile and desktop version was kind of already there. So they basically just said, like, maybe this is like duplicating those efforts. I don't know. But it's no different. I'll just say that, that we that we use Google PageSpeed Insights to make judgments about how Google understands your website from a mobile point of view. Um, so we have the ability to measure like a snapshot of the current state of how your website measures according to the core web vitals are Google PageSpeed insight, but I also wanted to share within Google Search Console, there's this core web vitals report that measures it over time. And the most important thing, I think, to keep in mind with Google Search Console, and and also like Google Analytics. What I'm going to talk about specifically is more relevant to Google Search Console, is the fact that it tells you if you know, you become in violation of anything that's going to hurt your ability to rank and relevant search in terms of what Google tells us right in terms of the big things. And so that's why making sure that it's installed on your site on client sites is so important because it gives you notices if you're like way in violation of something, and it gives you the chance to fix it. Google Analytics so I would also recommend installing from the get go because it gathers important data that's useful that you can use to understand your page experience your content experience, but yeah, so this is just one useful report that relates to what we're talking about. This came up when I was prepping for the live audit later. Just the idea that there may be a use case for understanding what WordPress theme somebody's using. And I would say especially what plugins they're using, because both of these things can have an impact on your pages performance, which is a search signal on the loading, you know, on the interactivity, and all those those good things. So this is just one tool there's there's a bunch of them out there. But you know if if your website is experiencing any performance issues, or you just want to understand like how somebody else put their website together. I think this is a cool tool or a cool mechanism for that. I also wanted to share a general SEO audit tool, I see ranking so like H refs and SEM rush which I believe we talked about yesterday, this is another All In One SEO tool. It is not as fine tuned as the others as Ahrefs and SEMrush in terms of their keyword data, so that's why I don't use it for keyword research. They use different databases and approaches. But what I will say is their SEO auditing tool, which is like kind of the technical structure of your website, like goes head to head with any of like the big players in the market, and I'll show you exactly what that looks like. And the great thing about SEO ranking is it's a lot more affordable as an as an All In One SEO tool. And even from like the keyword research perspective, like you could use it to get most of the way there if content again isn't like your biggest focus are in and or if you weren't in a super competitive industry, it would it would do just fine. Um, a couple like editing tools. Hemingway is a great one. It's pretty simplistic isn't the right word, but it focuses on just a couple of things. It focuses on just a couple of factors and so that's why it's useful it doesn't it's not super distracting. And then Grammarly is one I would say that gets into a lot more detail. Grammarly is probably a more well funded company. Than Hemingway I wasn't aware of if Hemingway been monetized until I was looking at it the other day they have some AI functionality and they might they might have some other like outside of AI functionality plans, but I'm not sure that they had like a clear path to monetization before that but grim really has always had its like premium and like enterprise business use cases. And so I think that's probably why this tool is maybe a little bit more robust in terms of the suggestions it provides. They have a lot of linguists on staff and again, a disclosure that I'm a Grammarly Ambassador but I also like to use the product paid every person on my team that's a writer editor has a paid subscription to grammerly and I'll show you why shortly. Um, you know, you also want to look for plagiarism when it comes to creating a great content experience and when I talk about plagiarism, I'm not even necessarily talking about things that you do like on purpose. Some things that happen in grammerly, specifically is that you'll write something and it will detect a phrase that's been published elsewhere on the internet because you know, like there's a ton of content that already exists and it's bound to happen. And it'll be about something that's like a completely different industry. Like you definitely didn't take it from that original place that was published, but it's kind of like a reminder to go on and try to make it more unique. Just so that you know, Google doesn't think that you plagiarize even though again, it's not about intention. It's just about the reality of the content that already exists. But at the blacksmith, we use Copyscape for every piece of content we create, just to be sure there's no plagiarism, and then Grammarly. I don't believe the plagiarism check comes with the free version, but because we have the premium version, and that's included that we use it to. Um, one of the last factors here is you know, making sure that your content adheres to your style guide, whether that's a specific company style guide, or something like AP style, which again, is like the news journalism standard. I think it's like a great standard to use if you don't have a set style guide. And then I just have a couple qualitative qualitative factors here. So on the blacksmith style guide, which will probably show you we have a section about information architecture, and it's about a lot of these different things, how to break up walls of text, how to approach writing headings, how to keep paragraphs and sentences short and to the point. It's other things like you know, making sure that you have good flow with your content, you know that it has good storytelling, but it's something a human would want to read. And yesterday we talked about texts that whether AI generated it or not sounds robotic and how to avoid it. So that's another like, piece that you can use like in your own audits, those guidelines. Other things that I look at are like the thoughtful use of on brand visuals at the blacksmith we try to incorporate multiple types of visuals per piece. I'm definitely of the opinion that words aren't enough. I think as humans we're very visual creatures and people all have their own, like different learning styles. So that's also a factor, you know, written word, I don't think is enough, especially like for me personally, sometimes I need to like watch a video about it, or you need to like, you know, play with it in my hands or whatever. Like there's just different ways that people process information and so the more different ways you can surface it to them within your content, the better that your contents going to perform and help them and then things like consistent formatting like how you use bullet points, how you write headings. Again, a lot of this we cover in the blog Smith style guide. Just a couple other things. We talked about a B testing when we talked about how to be a good user tester and giving examples. So Unbounce is a tool that you could use. A B testing is essentially testing like different variants of a page usually you're testing a specific element like two versions of a page title, or two versions of an image, but it could be a full page as well. And this is something that Nathan and I also talked about, which is that I think he'd love to have an expert on a be testing do one of these workshops or you know a webinar in the future so if that's your if you know somebody like that, you know, that's something I think that all of us could learn some best practices from but again, another thing that you could test\r\n\r\nQuick disclaimer, then we'll jump to our live content UX audit. And we're talking about how to make your content better. And, you know, basically like different processes that you could use to to catch mistakes. But I don't want you to leave this thinking that perfection. Is the goal because it's not I think, you know, we're all human, we all make mistakes. At the end of the day writing for the web is is great because it's a very forgivable medium and unlike print, once you notice a mistake, you can go in and correct it. And so I don't want this to become a situation where you're beating yourself up if you did all these steps or you did some of these steps and like, you know, you still notice something later somebody points out like oh, this is spelled wrong or whatever. That's really not the point. So at the end of the day, I think my guidance for you is done is better than perfect. And be kind to yourself but create systems to catch mistakes. And that system could be having like a human editor, like like I mentioned earlier today, whenever I write something, you know I'm telling you all my best practices, but that doesn't mean that I always follow them, right. I'm an imperfect human being and, and things happen. And I think the other thing that I wanted to say is like we all have limited time we all have limited energy, and especially now that I'm a new mom, like I used to work really late at night and I would just crush stuff out and I would go over it a million times and now I kind of have to be satisfied with like not having the ability to do that and having a much shorter period of work time every day. That I can get stuff done and having to prioritize ruthlessly and that sometimes means that like yes, maybe I spelled something wrong, you know, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it. And I don't think you should either. So that's that's my soapbox. Alright, so let's go to the live content UX audit. Give me just a moment to get this set up. Um, so we're gonna go through like a couple of these different tools that we talked about today. And then at the end of this, we will have some time for questions. Okay. So Stacy, we're picking on you today because you submitted a really great example for this live content UX audit. And I want to start by saying there's like nothing wrong with this website. I mean, it's very good and it follows a lot of both the content and design principles that like I would instruct my team on. So what we're going to do today is is really nitpick for the sake of giving people things to think about when they are doing their own content UX audits. And so I'm going to start by sharing, like some of these tools and their outputs so that I can show you how to use them. And then what we'll finish off on is coming back to this page, and I'm going to give a couple of qualitative factors, you know, that I think can make the content just a little bit stronger. So again, I wanted to surface the blog SMIS content style guide. This is going to be the basis of one part of you know, some of the things I'm going to talk about and I'm going to reference that Chechi btw bot that we made yesterday, that's based on the style guide and that's, that's kind of what I use to audit this page from the content style perspective. But again, some things that we just talked about were first of all the SEO and Keywords section or chapter, where we talk a little bit about I mentioned that you could get some guidance for how to use awkward keywords like how to use keywords within URL slugs. I also talks about this information architecture, or information structures what we call it here section. So that's how to like essentially present information but also like break up walls of text, make it more readable. We talked a little bit at the end of today about formatting and how to keep that consistent. So those are just a couple of things. I guess we also talked about links earlier today and so there's some good guidance there. So you know, this is a this is a good resource if you're building out your own content style approach, and you can really build off of this because again, it's fairly industry agnostic. So anyway, I took this link, and first I ran it through Google PageSpeed Insights. And if you look at the desktop version, I mean it's pretty much near perfect. There's it's very difficult to get to 100 on any of these factors on I would say especially on mobile, but even on desktop, I mean, it's it's kind of like a what's the word? It's like a like a fool's errand to try to get to 100 if you're if you're this close, so, desktops looking really good. You know, they have a couple of things that you could do to fix it if you wanted to, and I have some suggestions for that, but we'll talk about it from the mobile perspective. So if you go to mobile, you'll notice that you know, first of all, the largest Contentful paint is one of the core web vitals, that it's a little bit in the red and it's and that's really like the only one and the largest Contentful paint again has to do with page floating, I believe. And so, taking like the definition we had, I'm guessing that that has something to do with this image because this is the viewport you know, that first load so it's the first thing that gets measured by this core web vital. And when I was looking at this yesterday, it's a it's a JPG file, which isn't like a super large file or anything like that. But one thing that you could do to to improve that page quality factor is to instead save this and serve it up as a web p file. There are certain plugins that you can use for that it's going to you have to kind of determine if adding like a plugin or taking that extra step of manually saving it like converting it and saving it and uploading it as that file is worth it. But that's that's like the one thing that I could think would would flip this so that it's the performance is a little bit closer to 100. And then we go into some of these other like diagnostic details. And I think this is where PageSpeed Insights gets really interesting because you can sort of dig into specifics here. A couple of things that I noticed were like minifying, CSS and JavaScript and there's some other things that are kind of related to optimizing like these different file types on the website. So I use a plugin called nitro pack. There's a free version and there's a paid version. I think the free version will get you pretty far, but it adds this like little Add at the bottom of your website. So I just pay for the paid version because I don't want that there are other things like nitro pack but nitro pack from the perspective of somebody who operates in the SEO world, you know who's looking for good performance, who's looking for best practices, that is my suggestion to you and to anybody who is seeing these things on their Google PageSpeed Insights. So naturally talking about these plugins for me like the got the question of does adding more plugins like is that going to hurt performance like what what is the marginal return of that? And so what I wanted to do next was take the URL and put it in that WordPress theme and plug in detector to just see like what the back end of the site looks like. And so we can see, it's like a custom or like a child theme. And I think okay, so apparent theme is Astra, so we know that like that's the technical basis on which this is based. I think generally speaking, Astra is pretty good for SEO from what I've heard, I don't have a ton of experience with it. And then also, this is like more what I was interested in was the plugins on the backend. And I mean, from what it detects it's there aren't that many plugins here, you know, it has like a plug in that works with Astra there's a Quiz Builder. This DOWNLOAD MANAGER contact form and then the Page Builder that's pretty lean, especially if those are the only plugins that are installed. You know, different people have different ideas of like, how many plugins is too many or like what's the optimum amount but I would say like, we're well under that here. So adding something like nitro pack, or you know, like some sort of web p image optimizer I think short Pixel does that.\r\n\r\nSomething like that probably wouldn't like hurt performance for the performance gains that would come with it. Um, okay, so the next thing that I wanted to do this is higher level than just this page, but I wanted to show you guys SC ranking. So SC ranking again, is this like All In One SEO tool? And I think there's like actually something wrong with my browser because I'm trying to like x this out, and I could do this yesterday and it just like wouldn't do it. So this is either a core web vitals issue or this is like I have too many, like Chrome extensions that are conflicting with each other, that I haven't been able to figure out why it sometimes messes with my browser. But anyway, that's an aside. So um, so this is a C rankings like technical website audit. And what I really love about this is that it's pretty straightforward. Like you can essentially read this as a non SEO and get a very good idea of things that you could fix to improve your website's technical structure. And as you can see this website like it's not bad, like there's room for improvement, but overall it's doing pretty good. Again, chasing 100 is a fool's errand. You're like, probably not going to get there but you want to get as close as you can with the time and the resources that you have. And so this page is really just like a high level overview. Again, this is about the whole website. It gives you an idea of like, how many pages were crawled, versus how many URLs which could include things like media files, JavaScript files, style, sheet files, and things like that. And so this can be a good indicator of like, if you know that there's more pages or there's more files, like maybe there's a credibility issue here. And if if some are getting excluded from this crawl, then they're probably also getting excluded from what Google can see. And so at that point, you, you know that there may be a sitemap issue that's getting in the way of the ideal situation. But what I really wanted to show you was the issue report. So these are things that you could fix. And what it does is it it has a category, it gives a specific issue, it gives you which pages are affected. It tells you you know, whether you're like compliant or whatever you want to call it if it's following best practices or not. And there's there's very few things here. But for example, like here's one that has to do with crawlability, which we talked about earlier today. And so nofollow means that we don't want the search engines to read this page and there may be a good reason for that. And so it seemed that for your pages are affected, you can click on it to get a description of the issue. So this is why it's really great for people who aren't necessarily like in the SEO world. A lot of you are website developers or designers and so a lot of this stuff like you'll be able to understand just by going through it and familiarizing yourself with it was there like included details. But yeah, so then you could see, you know, like which pages relate to this issue and whether or not like it's worth doing anything or if you really wanted them to be that way. But I'll give you like a more tangible example of something that you definitely want to fix. We have, for example, External links to 4x x. So like a 4x. X code is like a 404 means that it's not found, and there's different variations of that I'm sure a lot of you are pretty familiar with that. And so this means that maybe something that was linked on the website now no longer exists. And so it either needs to be replaced or redirected or something like that. And again, you can dig into the URLs you can see like what specific error code happened. This is also a really great report that you can give to clients. And then you know, depending on the level of familiarity you have with these different issues and how to fix them then you can give yourself a little bit of an extra job and some hours working with them to not only audit and go through the audit and explain the audit but then also, you know, implement the fixes. So I just wanted to show you that because I think it's it's such a great tool. So then the next thing I did was I ran this through Hemingway, and like I told you before Hemingway is like the sort of like, saying it's the more basic version of Grammarly. is maybe not exactly the right way to describe it, but it's the more like focused version. And so as you can see, what it does is it highlights different things. And it's kind of using I guess these colors, as you know, like things like it's trying to like draw your attention to certain colors as being like something that's more worth your attention or less worth your attention. What I've always known Hemingway as is a great tool for measuring active versus passive voice. And generally speaking, we want to try to avoid passive voice in our writing. And so that's probably what it's best used for. But there are some certain other factors here that are useful and interesting. And like yesterday when I told you about clear scope and how it measures readability, you can see that Hemingway also does this. It measures certain stats in terms of you know, just this piece of content, not necessarily compared to other pieces of content. And then it also has some AI functionality, that with a paid plan you can use to I think automatically suggest edits to some of these things. So just, you know one interesting tool where it's I think best functionality is free. So then I ran it through grammerly and I wanted to start by showing what I was talking about. With the plagiarism thing. Like there's something about inventory management on this article that says 1% of your text matches the source and that's like it's not even This article isn't even about inventory management. So I just wanted to show you guys that like, like these tools can be wrong, but it's still worth running that check a if you're working with a writer that's not you, just from a reputation standpoint, you want to make sure that there's no obvious like plagiarism problems with it but be so that you can just make like some small changes to this text so that Grammarly doesn't pick it up and possibly, you know, Google may be like taking a nod from some of the similar types of algorithms and uses. Again, not that it's intentional. It's just like, you know, because there's already this wealth of content that already exists on the internet about all these different subjects and of course, there's going to be similarities with phrasing and things like that. So then we get to these other suggestions. And I guess one other thing I wanted to show you about Grammarly is you can set goals for a piece of content and I don't know if this is a paid version specific but anyway, you can, you know, say like what type of writing it is. So I just said business for this. You can give a certain intent so I sent in form for this I may or may not be right with all these things, but I just wanted to see what would happen. You can say like, you know the level of experience of the audience, you can set like the formality of the tone. And then and then it gives you suggestions based on those things. And what's cool about grammerly is that it goes into these specific zoo specific different categories of suggestions. So correctness is about like grammar, spelling, punctuation, clarity is to cut in to help with like the flow of engagement, which is probably most related to like storytelling and delivery, I guess, you know, kind of related to both of those things, and then style guide. This relates to my company's specific style guidance, some of the suggestions that I have programmed in myself, and so a lot of it is like punctuation, because I have some rules about that. And it's probably annoying for my writers to have all this pop up. But some of it is word stuff. So like if we click this, something like actually, per the blogs and the style guide, and that's just our approach, we say these words are fluffy and don't add value typically. So like if you cut actually, it would say wait, so you have to go read these reports. Ones is another one that I have strong opinions about. I say don't use one to describe a noun you've already defined. Use the same word again or find another way to say it and then I gave an example here. So that's what's really cool about Grammarly is like you can like get these things automatically being suggested when you're working on a piece of content within your organization so that people don't have to remember like all the stuff that I showed you on my style guide it just automatically pops up. Waxing then I'll show you a couple qualitative things and then we'll go to questions is I ran this through my style editor bot, and it wouldn't I tried to get it to like directly edit the copy. And it wasn't unlike what I showed you yesterday which was like a shorter excerpt and the did I did that. So part of this is like me learning how to best use the spot or how to best design it or how to best query it. But what I did was I said Please review this blog post it gave it the era and suggest edits according to the blacksmith style guide.\r\n\r\nThey said consider the bad side consider the following suggestions and it felt to me like it wasn't actually like totally reading the blog. It was just giving like general tips and then I said please suggest updated copy based on these suggestions. And so what it did, which is kind of funny was it created like a shorthand version of it. And so what I was thinking is something like this could be really useful for like an email newsletter, you know, like an atomized version of the blog. Or, you know, maybe like you create some social posts based on these shorthand summaries of each category or something like that. You'd still probably want to edit it, but to me, even though it's not really what I asked for, I thought that that could be an interesting use case. So then I was like, Okay, well can you actually do the edits while preserving the original length of the piece? And it was like no, but it kind of went back in and gave some more suggestions. And then I was asking if it was actually able to like read the original article, or No, I was asking about the visuals, because one of the suggestions was about visual aids. And I was like, well, there's a ton of visual aids on that article. And so it said that it can't directly process or interpret them from the article itself. So that was kind of interesting. And then I gave it the copy and then it still kind of like generally gave examples. So you know, it's a work in progress. I guess that's what I wanted to share. It's still it's still gave me some things to work with. But it wasn't exactly like the editor that I was hoping that it would be like it like it kind of was yesterday. So it seems to me if I were to make a hypothesis here that it's probably going to be more useful for shorter bits of copy, you know, maybe different sections or titles or things like that, versus trying to edit a whole article all at once but it will give you food for thought in terms of general edits that you could make. Okay, so last like pieces of content on this before we end up today. We talked about menu navigation. And so the way that I would change this menu navigation would be home about blog and I would just change this to contact and what I like to do with whatever like the most important menu item or call to action is maybe add some like button styling so that that stands out, it just simplifies it. It's not distracting and you know, hopefully leads them to the ideal conversion. So then the other thing like the header, because we're kind of talking about the whole experience, not just the article itself, is what I what I came across, typically in the UX audits that I did was a similar type of header where it has the logo, but unless the name of the brand is like really straightforward about what you do, it could benefit from having some context like a tagline about what you do and so I don't think that we do it on the blog. So some a very bad example. But you can imagine like in my header it should probably say like SEO and content agency. But you know, maybe because it's called the blacksmith that also might work I don't know submitted a test. I'm generally speaking again, I really liked this article, I thought that more or less like it fit the same types of standards that like I would have for my team in terms of putting together conversational tone like breaking texts up nicely, having really useful visuals, a couple of just like very small things. We have the social share buttons. My suggestion is to add a CTA that's like share this on social like, it might seem obvious, but just saying that might be useful, might also be useful to have them float as the person who reads it because they might decide at different points that they want to share it through. I love the visuals there was one visual where I think there might be an unintentional tooltip here where like when you were taking the screenshot your cursor was probably over this SPFx aligned area right here. And so it took the screenshot with that and it kind of obscures the stuff behind it. This is the type of thing that like, because I do these all the time I nitpick and probably nobody else would notice, but I just thought that I would mention it. I'm sure I'm gonna like pretty much ended there. The last thing I was going to say for now is with the Related Posts, one of them doesn't have the featured image. So it's kind of, you know, it just looks a little bit lopsided. That's a super easy thing to fix. And then when it comes to consistency um, you might want to capitalize text stuff just so that it's consistent with the capitalization of the other category. And then maybe also like space it out tech space stuff. So again, like I really don't have that much to say here, because it's very good and it has good information. The last I guess big thing is the actual place where I'm reading the content is kind of narrow and skinny compared to the full frame here. And so I wouldn't recommend going full width with the content but I think we could break out the box a little bit more or break it out of the current box so that it's a little bit wider. And I think that that would be a great reader experience. So with all that being said, I'm going to pull back to my slides really quick just to pull up like the question slide and things like that. But I mean basically we're done here. With the planned content. I'll once again bring up my book because it is about what we're talking about with content experience. It's about my approach to content writing, content style, you can grab a free chapter of the book on the writing for humans and robots.com website or you can grab the book on Amazon via Kindle or print edition. And yeah, that's pretty much it. So I will take any questions that may have popped up in the meantime.\r\n\r\nYeah. All right. So thanks again, Stacey for letting us use your content as I know that it's a little weird with talking about my stuff here but ya know, it was very much appreciated and a it's an excellent article. We've talked about that already. The content, it was it was hard\r\n\r\nto find stuff to comments on honestly, so I had to go into nitpick mode.\r\n\r\nSo grateful to you, Stacey. Let's see folks last chance to ask questions here. There are no questions today,\r\n\r\nwhich is covered at all. Everything's done.\r\n\r\nIt's it's been a very good and thorough presentation on lots of tools. Things to consider as we're developing content for and helping our clients create content for the web. Yeah, like Ben says firehose of information really good stuff. Greg, this is a good rewatch as well. Alright folks, last chance before we land the plane. Your if you have any final questions for Maddie, if you want to just say yes in the chat that way we know to pause otherwise, I'm going to start moving towards wrapping us up. All right, yeah. So thanks there in the chat. Okay. So Maddie, wrap us up here. Give us our final takeaway for the training.\r\n\r\nSure. I'll answer one question. Barney asked if I'm in the Denver area. Yeah, yeah. I'm in Lakewood, technically. But yeah, okay. Final wrap up. treat people how you want to be treated with your content. That's good.\r\n\r\nThat's really good. And true, right. So yeah, awesome. Well, thanks, everybody, for hanging out with us for the last couple of days. It's been a really good set of information here. A lot of things to consider. And hopefully it'll help us all up our game as we're dealing with content on the web. Thanks again. Maddie. For your expertise. And folks, we are back tomorrow as usual 1pm Central for office hours here on solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nNice. Well, thank you so much, everyone for your time and attention. And yeah, I hope I hope there is like one good nugget for you to take away and if you ever have any questions about content and UX, I'm always happy to be a resource.\r\n\r\nVery good. 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This again was this is building on last year's content workshop. And the link for that is in the course description if you missed last year I would strongly recommend you check that out. Really good stuff. So Sadie has your book MADI Naidu\r\n\r\nwhy it's really good love it seems like it's been a while since I published it, but you know, I tried to write it so that it would still be useful today. So I hope that you're all finding that. Yeah, we're sure.\r\n\r\nReally good stuff. Alright folks, if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat say hi. We are about three minutes away from getting started. And they're in the chat once again, is the link bundle that has the slides and the replay link as well as a link to Matty's book. We are Yeah, we're gonna have a lot of fun today and tomorrow, two hours today, two hours tomorrow talking all about website content with I mean, let's face it an expert in the field\r\n\r\nappreciate the vote of confidence. If you if you measure it by yours and I suppose expert, that's something that I've been doing for a very long time. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nAlright folks, let's hear from you in the chat. Check in question today. How about give us a one to 10 rating? How comfortable are you with generating website content? One being it's a real challenge. 10 being a pro, let us hear from you there in the chat.\r\n\r\nAll right, about a minute and a half to go.\r\n\r\nMaybe a good question is how many of you are forced to make content in order to finish your website designs? Yeah, to get your website launched.\r\n\r\nHey, Sue bullets are my friend. I like bullets. Alright, several folks just joining us. The links are there in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up that chat and you'll have the link to download the slides. Grab the replay and all of those things. We are about a minute away from getting started. Second question today is what's your comfort level? What's your expertise at website content creation one to 10 If you had to rate yourself love it. Love it. Tracks Yeah, five but a if you're using AI, that's awesome. Yeah, so a lot of folks are higher on the scale today. That's exciting, that hopefully you're gonna get some tools to up your game even further. He's got a lot to share with us. Over the next couple of days. Hey Terry. Dab Alright, folks, we are just about to get started. Glad you're all here. Diving into the web content workshop momentarily. Just seconds. To go. If you're just joining us in zoom, I'm going to drop in one more time the link bundle and it's three after so let's get the recording started. And we'll dive right in. Let's do it. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy and I'm joined for the next couple of days by my friend Maddy Houseman, Maddy is a sought after sought after copywriter specializing in enterprise b2b Tech brands. She's the CEO at blog Smith and the author of writing for humans and robots, the new rules of content style. She has been recognized on numerous industry lists as a top content marketer and I'm really excited to have her back for another course here on solid Academy so welcome back Madi, how are things going for you?\r\n\r\nThanks, Nathan. I'm really excited to be here. Like I said, you know, it's been it's been a little bit of time since I've done you know, a presentation like this since I've really gotten to use my brain. For those who don't know, I recently had a baby so he's in daycare today so I can fully you know, give my attention to this and, you know, embrace this identity of mine as a content creator who loves to learn and you know, who now has this other facet of my life but marrying those two in a joyous way so, so yeah, really excited to be back and and put my brain to use and share you know, some of the things that I've been exploring you for the past several months to I guess a year, all this new stuff with AI, that's what we're gonna focus on today. So really excited about that. Yeah,\r\n\r\ndefinitely. So we have a long way to go over the next couple of days and the thought just occurred to me Maddie, we really ought to have you back for another informal conversation just on how you prepared your business. So that you could take some time away, because that's really, that's quite a feat.\r\n\r\nIt was definitely and I'd love to do that. I'd be happy to.\r\n\r\nYeah, that'd be that just occurred to me. We should definitely, folks. So let's see the links are in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom. I'm going to drop this in one more time. There you will find the link to download or grab the slide deck. Also the replay link that will have the transcripts and chat logs after we finish is there for you as well. On that replay link you'll also find a link to last year's course, which is more some more foundational principles of the things we're going to unpack even further today. So if you missed last year's course, all the replays are there, follow that link, rewatch them, it's really good stuff. And of course, if you haven't seen Matt, he's booked the link for that as in the chat as well. So Maddie, give us a high level view. What are we going to be covering for the rest of today? Totally.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, we're definitely going to expand on some of the things that we started to talk about last year, but really, you know, thinking about what's changed in the past year and so that's why today we're going to focus mostly on AI kind of how AI factors into content creation, how you can use AI tools to create content, how you can use AI tools to detect AI content. You know, things like how to write an excellent chat GPT prompt and one thing I'm really excited to share with you because it's something that I've just kind of figured out for myself is how to make your own personal GPT. So that's what we're gonna do at the end of the day, I'll show you step by step how to do it. You can follow along, I'll show you how to adapt it a little bit. And then really, what we're going to start with today is I guess a bit of a cautionary tale when it comes to AI so we'll start with the most negative and we'll build up to the most positive. And then tomorrow, the focus is going to be on content UX, the user experience what I like to call the reader experience. So it's going to be more about you know, the elements of design and how they interact with content, how you can create this great reader experience for the people who consume your designs and content and so we can get a little bit more into what that looks like. But I guess if I was to like talk high level about today versus tomorrow, today is like things that I think are really like novel and fun. It's like It's like exciting things that that we're all learning kind of at the same time and that's that's what's so exciting about just like nobody has it figured out. And tomorrow is like the stuff that I'm really passionate about. That's a little bit more, you know, foundational and again, about like that full experience. So I guess with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. Yeah,\r\n\r\nabsolutely. Me give a couple of housekeeping notes that will disappear. Folks. We'll be taking a break in the middle as usual for these courses. So roughly at tube central an hour from now, we'll take about a five to 10 minute break depending on where we are timewise. So at the end of this first hour and the end of the second hour, we'll have a time of q&a as well. I would invite you to use the zoom q&a Link to ask your questions. Please don't use the chat, but use that Zoom q&a. That way we can keep all the questions in a nice list. And also, if you'll keep that Zoom q&a open, if somebody asks a question that you also want to hear the answer to just click the thumbs up icon to up vote. And we'll take the questions the order of up votes. So with that again, yeah, we are recording in the replay. The transcript is all there and it'll be available for you about an hour after we finished today. So Maddie, I'm going to disappear take over. Let's get started. Let's\r\n\r\ndo it. My housekeeping is just first of all, I think that we all can learn a lot from each other when it comes to AI. And so like that's how I've picked up the things that I'm going to share with you. It's really hearing it from other people seeing how other people are using this tool. It's interesting because it's so new that like, again, we don't really know like what the best use cases are. And there's this world of possibility that we've only just started to touch. So one thing I'll ask is like if you've come across an interesting AI use case, you know whether you have something that's top of mind now or whether going through what I'm going to talk about today sparks it like please share that in the chat. I'm sure all learn from it. I'm sure other people will learn from it. So that's one thing and then I'll just ask that if there's anything that resonates with you, as I'm talking today, or you know as other people are sharing ideas in the chat. I always love when people tweet or I guess x takeaways these days. So my Twitter is in that bottom right hand corner. So use that and I always love to retweet and share with my audience too. So yeah, let's go ahead and get started here. Nathan already gave a nice bio like who I am. Just to give you you know, more information about the blacksmith. We're a holistic content marketing agency for b2b technology brands. We create data driven content. I'm going to share some of those processes here with you today in terms of how we're using AI tools to do that. And our focus is creating content across the sales funnel with a focus on the reader experience. So again, that's really what day two is going to be about. It's creating this ideal reader experience with the intersection of content and design. And then my book writing for humans robots, the new rules of content style. If you've ever read the book, The Elements of Style, I was really kind of riffing on that in a more I guess, modern way since that book was written back in 1918, or 1919. Of course, at that time, the internet didn't exist. We weren't necessarily addressing a global audience when we publish to the web. We are now and so that's kind of the idea behind this book is how can you how can you speak plainly and inclusively and effectively when you're writing for the web? And so with all of that being said, let's go ahead and jump into the topic of today which is AI Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention. Day two, when we talk about content UX. I'm going to do some live content UX audits. If you were here last year, we also did this this is something I really love to do. And so this form here which you can also click through the slide being links that we've shared in the chat. Just has a couple questions like your name your brand. It'll ask for a link to a specific piece of content. If you're comfortable sharing for this live UX audit, and then it has the question that's optional. If there's anything you want me to focus on, and then like an aspect of the content itself, but the purpose is to collect some, you know, ideas from from all of you of what to audit and we're going to basically put the principles that I'm going to be talking about tomorrow into action you know, show you how to use some different tools show you how to use more also, like qualitative analyses. And so again, I would love your examples so that we can make it really useful for you to give you know, a second pair of eyes on your content. And you know, it's always done in a very respectful way. I'm not looking for problems, I'm just showing you ways to, you know, make your message clearer to make your content experience more effective. So I'll, I'll aim to remind you about this again at the end of the day, and then you know, before tomorrow is probably when I'll pick what we're going to audit for tomorrow. So get them in today, whenever you have a chance. Okay, so artificial intelligence. That's really the focus of what we're talking about today. Super exciting. Things are happening here. It's also kind of a wild wild west. It's it's something that there's many positive use cases but there are also some negative ones and so I really wanted to start with the negatives so we can kind of get that out of the way so we can you know, maybe share some like cautionary tales here. The link that Learn More link is an article that I wrote for Fast Company, and it's going to go over some of the same things that I talked about here in terms of some of the limitations and also really like the ethical implications of using AI to generate content to publish it as if it were your own. So yeah, let's go ahead and dive into that. Um, so I think like the first major implication, negative implication of AI or something to think about, especially as a creator, because many of us here we're writers, we're designers, so we're creating things. They they are our intellectual property which we may assign, you know, to a client, for example, but it's still at its root. It's something that we made. And, you know, the thing about AI is, first of all, it can't think for itself. It uses things like machine learning. It uses algorithms and processes to make sense of what's already out there. But it's not, at least right now in a place where it can completely invent something new. If it does. It's the result of this machine learning it's not the result of true uniqueness. So you know, essentially, AI and I'm gonna explain this example in a moment here, but it's, it's being trained on what already exists. It's using our intellectual property. And the worst part of it is it's doing that without giving us credit. I mean, if you go in do a search on Google, it was called Bard, but now they've rebranded it to Gemini. In my experience, and and I haven't used it recently, to be honest with you, but certainly within chat GPT there's no like source given for the answer to a prompt. It's not directing you to a specific piece of content are saying, This is what I referenced to come up with this answer, which also creates an issue of you know, whether or not that answer is something to be trusted, and we'll get into the fact that AI is oftentimes confidently incorrect. But right now, with the focus being on the fact that it's essentially plagiarism and my perspective, if you are taking what you generate with AI and then publishing it as your own this is probably easiest to think about when you think about visuals, and we're going to talk a little bit about AI generating images and kind of like how that works and some of the issues with that. But you can think of like aI trained on a certain set of materials, certain artists body of work, you know, that style, if it's trained on a certain style and the output is a certain style, it's pretty easy to identify that, you know, it's riffing off, you know, one individual's intellectual property, it's a little bit harder to make that distinction with the written word. But that doesn't mean that it's any less important to recognize that it's, it's an issue if if AI is passing off its own material or your material as its own. So, what I wanted to share here, this is an article that was published on futurism. It's an it's a screenshot from it, and it's about CNET. They have this blog about different like personal finance topics and things like that. And so when it comes to things that affect your finances, whether it's subjects like you know how to buy a house and you know, like had this setup a mortgage, you know, whatever. Or, in this case, like you know, how to pick a credit card, how to use credit cards, how to decide what college to send your kid to, or something like that. Google calls these topics, your money, your life. And in comparison to any other topic that you publish, that you're looking to get ranked in relevant search on Google. Google has the highest standard of quality for your money, your life topics. So CNET was transparent about the fact that they were publishing AI generated content such as the example shared here. But they had a human fact checking it and so the byline was like you seen that money or something like that? And then I think they also had like the byline of the human editor published next to it, but they told us you know, they they weren't trying to hide that it was aI generated. So this excerpt is you know, maybe kind of a silly example, but it's showing how\r\n\r\nthis article that they wrote, which was about can you buy a gift card with the credit card. This first example is a line that's almost verbatim from a rivaling Forbes article. And then this next example is how literally, the table was the exact same title. So, you know, you could question if it was only one of these things, you know, is that really plagiarism? Is that really a problem? But the fact that it's both to me shows that you know, not only did CNET not take a high enough standard of care, quite honestly with the content that they were having a human fact checker edit, but I think it also begs the question of like, if you're generating a full piece of copy, like a, you know, long form blog article, like are you ever going to be able to definitively say that it's not plagiarism? Or that it's not like literally, you know, word for word related to any other competitor article out there? And I think the answer's no, because that's what the AI is using to generate the content. In this case, and then one that I'll share subsequently, AI is, is almost like a crutch for CNET or for others who are who are taking this approach of generating that full article and then having the human intervention and I'm going to share some better ways to use AI in your article creation process. But yeah, I mean, the problem is ultimately that there's no way that they can catch every instance of plagiarism, and it just honestly creates more work and, and the worst part of all, is that it essentially ruin their reputation because they didn't take a proper standard of care. Another example that's, that's ongoing, it's unresolved at this point, is that the New York Times recently sued open AI who's the creator of chat GBT saying that, you know, their, their publications, their media. was unlawfully used to train open AI. And the last I saw, I think there was an update actually today that said that the New York Times is like misrepresenting the evidence or something like that. But again, I mean, it really just like begs the question of you know, if you publish content, like is it safe, you know, is it going to be used to train a model which is then going to spit it out and somebody else is going to publish it and benefit from it without properly crediting you? So that's one major issue. So this is one that I would love your examples. If you have anything similar. This is this is a picture that I saw recently in like a Facebook group about AI. And so somebody had done some prompts about dog breeds. And if you kind of squint, you're like, Okay, maybe that like a chart of different dog breeds, but then you look and you see all the like, really strange faces and like this, like gibberish text, and even the text that you can read is like not related to any dog breeds that currently exists. So, yeah, again, if you have any examples of like an image you've generated that has resulted in something like comically incorrect like this, I would love to see that in the chat. That would be fun. But I guess the point that I want to make with this slide is that at least at this point, AI can't effectively art direct you could give it a prompt and you could maybe get it to a point where you can get something useful. I think it's called mid journey. There's this one AI image generator that creates these like hyper realistic things with like any detail you can get it and something like that is so cool and very interesting to experiment with. But I think this came from within chat GPT I'm gonna say it wrong, but it's called like Dali Dali. And in my experience, when I've used it to generate images, it's the same sort of like gibberish text. The image, you know, is like, vaguely related to the prompts that I give it. So I'm using it for like, kind of like business article use cases to like generate a figure from you know, some like the data I include or something like that. I've never gotten something useful yet. And I think beyond that, it's like you still as a creative have to come up with the prompt. It's not like AI is going to be able to help you within the context, say of like an article. They're not going to be able to come up with like five unique media examples that you could include. So this is something that I think, you know, as humans, like, we still like have control over this or so like the best Abbot. Um, okay. So next I started to talk about this, which is one of the biggest issues with AI to date, the fact that it is confidently incorrect. So this is another Cena example, I'm going to read a little excerpt from. This is another futurism article. They did kind of a deep dive into this. See that AI but issue? So the excerpt is after the outcry after you know, some of these plagiarism things came to light. With the previous example. Steena editor in chief Connie Guglielmo acknowledged the AI written articles in a post that celebrated CNET's reputation for being transparent. without acknowledging the criticism, Guglielmo wrote that the publication was changing the byline on its AI generated articles from CNET money staff to simply seen that money as well as making the disclosure more prominent. Furthermore, she promised every story published under the program had been reviewed, fact checked, and edited by an editor with topical expertise before we hit publish, and I think that this is referring to like before this article was published, and so what you're looking at right here is, I think a more serious violation of the high standards that Google holds for your money your life, making sure that it is, you know, written by an expert that it's heavily fat checked, you know that you're not publishing something that you can't stand behind. And so this is about calculating compound interest for savings and as you can see by the excerpts, it's, it's wrong, the calculation is spitting out an incorrect final number. And so it may seem like, you know, small potatoes like, you know, like, what, what's really going to happen to the person who misinterprets this? It's certainly not like, you know, having to do with like, buying a house and like getting those equations wrong thread savings, but I think it just goes to show that there's, you know, there's a lot of problematic things that can happen and it starts here and if if we don't maintain a high standard for content quality starting here, then it could exacerbate it could turn into people being misled when it comes to making these like bigger money decisions in their life or you know, other things, your money your life, I think also, in some ways has to do with like, health and like medical stuff and things like that. So there are like potentially, you know, bigger and like worse implications than even just like the financial aspect of it. One thing that's interesting that that I misunderstood or I was misled about AI. Really up until like, a week ago or so, is I thought that you could ask chat GBT if it wrote something. So that was something that I saw other people talking about. And it's something that at the blacksmith like we've tested out ourselves you know, when working with like a new writer and wondering how to detect like if content was aI generated, and I found an article on open API's like FAQs or help desk or whatever that said, whenever you ask chat GBT if it wrote some you know, specific piece of copy for example, it just make something up like that's, that's literally what open AI says you could Google it yourself. So, you know, it's weird that it doesn't just say, I don't know, you know, it doesn't just give you like that as a straight answer. It's fine. If it doesn't know, but for it to purposely just decide, you know, bye bye narrowly, like if it's yes or no, and that it just tells you that whether it actually knows the answer, like that's very concerning to me. So a little bit of a cautionary tale. Um, but yeah, I think at the end of the day of the CNET examples, what I'm trying to impress upon you is like, does it really save time, if it like, impacts your reputation long term like I just don't think that that the best way to go about it is to generate the full piece of content and then add the human and I think that I think that AI can help intermittently and we'll definitely get to like how exactly to do that shortly. Um, so this article is also kind of fun. Charlie Brooker's, a creator of Black Mirror. If any of you are familiar, it's just this like really kind of weird messed up show on Netflix. It's very like future focused. It's like, I would say fairly.\r\n\r\nWhat's the word like it's, it's, it's kind of like post apocalyptic in some ways, not always. But it always like seems to end and kind of a scary place. And it's episodic, like each each episode I mean, to say is like its own storyline. And so the most recent season started to touch on themes of AI since that has become you know, something that has infiltrated society. And anyway, this article, The Creator who you know, has a very interesting mind based on what we see on this Netflix episodes, said that he doesn't think AI is messy enough to replace creative people. So there's good news guys, which is AI can't can't match that with us. I think on another hand AI, it lacks human empathy. You know, it can never like fully understand, like, who we are and what we go through. I don't think it ever will unless it's somehow achieved some level of sentience but yeah, I mean, ultimately, like in its wildest dreams, whatever AI, you know, thinks that it thinks it could never generate the ideas that we come up in our wildest dreams. And I think that the proof is in the pudding in terms of thinking about things like some of our favorite authors and how they create prosaic copy. So here's, here's a quote, I love Stephen King. He's kind of a machine himself, but human as far as I know. So this from needful things, one of his more interesting books, because the trust of the innocent is the wires most useful tool. And so, you know, fed copies of Stephen King's worked. You can ask chat GPT to write in his voice. I don't know if Stephen K would appreciate that or not. But, you know, I think the limitation is that it couldn't generate something like this on its own it can generate like derivative work of his but it couldn't come up with this on its own. Ai, you know, it, it isn't it doesn't have uniqueness. And Google has historically said that it's important. We're gonna talk a little bit about Google's AI guidelines that it's published. And it specifically says in those guidelines that they want to rank content that is unique, which AI fundamentally is not, not on its own, not without human intervention. Ai just read purposes and parrots things that already exists. And, and the output trends toward the average. It's not, it's not unique, it's not notable and interesting. Okay, so the last thing that I want to talk about from like this negative perspective, and then I promise we'll get into more of the fun stuff, is the idea that algorithms can be biased. And so if you think about like the people who are creating things like Chet GPT, or the Google algorithm or any other algorithm you interact with, like social media feeds, things like that. Algorithms, they represent the people that created them, not necessarily the population as a whole. So this book is really interesting. It's from the perspective of a black woman and so she is just like, read some of the book description to give you an idea of some of the topics that she explores. It says run a Google search for Black Girls, what will you find? Big booty and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms, but if you type in white girls, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and on unmoderated discussions about why black women are so sassy or why black women are so angry presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. And I think, after this book was published, because this was from a while ago, Google had manually made some adjustments to the algorithm in light of this criticism and that commentary, but the problem is with algorithms, you're you're scaling up problems, they can't manually make adjustments for every inherent bias that their algorithm has. And so you know, I don't know if we have an answer for how to fix this. But ultimately, the people creating the algorithm should represent society as a whole. I guess that's, you know, one way to think about it. Um, and I guess the question that it poses for all of us is like with AI deploying so rapidly there's going to be a lot of situations where bias needs to be routed out and fixed. And so that's, that's what's kind of scary, I think about how quickly new applications are developing. Again, it scales up problems and so that's just something I think we all need to be aware of, and and do the best that we can to fix. So okay, so now let's talk about some of the more fun stuff AI content tools. These are tools that we use in our workflow. These are tools that I use, personally. And so let's go ahead and you know, talk a little bit about how they work. So, again, we're gonna focus on like, mainly AI content tools, just because that's my sphere of genius. That's like what I have the most experience with, but I think there are different things that you could use like no matter how you're creating content, whether it's like you write blog posts for yourself, or for clients, or like, you know, you just want to like uplevel, your email strategy, or you know, help with like the personal compositions that you create. So, the first one I want to talk about is phrase which creates AI powered content briefs. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch my screen to share, to share like what a report looks like in phrase. So let's see here. I think I have to get out of full screen in order for this to work. Okay, so um, this was the form so I'm going to show you that in the beginning, but I'm gonna go ahead and exit out. So phrase generates this really cool report and the SEO aspects of it may or may not be relevant to your process. And I will say that not every piece of content that we created, the blacksmith is driven by SEO. It's not every piece of content we create to rank but I still use we still use phrase for everything because it helps with topic research. So that's what this is. It's a briefing tool. It's a research tool. Um, the way that it works and the way that the next tool, clear scope that I'm going to explain to you also works is that you give it a primary keyword. So in this case, it's how reliable are AI detectors? And so, by giving it this primary keyword, that means that we've already done the research to decide that that's the keyword that we want to optimize for. And so this is this is an article that's already published on the Black Swan, but this is something that we would have created. Prior to that publication. This this brief would have been like the first step of the writing process after doing the keyword research to decide which one we want to focus on. And the way that phrase and clear scope work is that you can I'm just going to show you like some of the pricing details so you can understand like how it works within a workflow, phrases kind of unique in that it has a plan that allows you to create unlimited reports. Not many other tools like it do that it's usually a per report cost. So that's why it's important to know what you want to optimize for before generating the reports. But it also has these lesser plans in terms of output. You know, depending on your content process, that's probably going to be more cost effective to you then you know, me as an agency, I would want more of like the unlimited plan to work for my various clients. So let's go back to phrase so what's interesting about phrase is first of all, just like the content editor experience itself, I'll be honest, we use Google Docs for everything. But if I was creating content, as like just for my internal team or something, what's cool is you can create these other tabs. And so you could have a tab that's like research. You could have a tab that's your outline. You could have a tab that's your draft, and then you could have maybe a tab with edits or something like that. So that's kind of cool just to keep the process nice and contained in one place. I've always thought that that was really unique and interesting about phrase.\r\n\r\nBut to be honest, we don't use phrase as a Content Editor. That's just an added bonus. So yeah, it generates a topic report. I'm gonna go through a couple of different aspects of it. First of all, it gives you some sort of tangible details and the way that phrase and clear scope and the market means which is another variation on a theme work is that they scrape the top 20 or so search results, which is pretty representative of like, what's going to be necessary to rank and it gives you details like, you know, how many words should you aim for for this specific topic? In this case, it's also suggesting how many headers which is like a measure of depth of content, how many links How many images? I think the top ones are what's like in this brief, that's what it's reading and the ones under it are like the average that it's suggesting. But again, we're just this is just like material that's from the brief. It's not like the actual content that we wrote. When it comes to word count. I think people always ask like, what's the ideal word count for a piece of content? And the the answer like many things in SEO is it depends. And so that's why tools like this are really useful because there is no standard. It's very topic driven. And using data that's based on actual searches means that you can get very close to like what that ideal is. So it also shares you know, the top some details of the top breaking content, you'll notice that the blog Smith currently owns a featured snippet for this particular topic, thanks in part to you know, some of the tools that we use to optimize their content. And also, I think, for this particular piece, because we did a lot of our own original research and reporting and some of it that I'll share with you when we talk about AI detector tools, I believe after the break today. You can also see like, the atomized version of some of these other top ranking results like the title like a short description, different headers, you can click into the headers to get more information. You can click through to read it. There's other things in this little side panel here that are interesting. This is just a list of all the headings from all the top ranking content pieces. Probably the most useful is this questions area and you can break it down by different sources of the question of the questions. People also ask you something you could manually go to Google and see for yourself. But it's nice to have it all in one place. I think that's the real benefit of phrase and then you can also see here that you can see questions that come from places like Quora and Reddit, you know, which which can really add a nice like flavor to what you're working on. The stats tab is really interesting. You know, they essentially suggest in phrase different stats, as well as different links that people tend to use in those top ranking pieces of content. And so you don't necessarily want to like copy everything that you see. But there might be things that like people would expect to be exposed to in your content. If there's like a big industry stat that relates to what you're talking about. As you scroll here you can see certain things like different topics that come up, you know, different related keywords or sub topics. And a lot of this you can kind of paste over from the sidebar. External links. You know, in addition to specific stats, news is also pretty interesting because this is like things that have happened maybe since those top ranking articles were published. So again, like if you're trying to be the best making sure that your information is the most up to date. This can help you do that. So freeze also has some generative AI capabilities. I'm going to be honest with you that we don't use these because we don't believe in generating AI copy as far as you know what we write for clients and for ourselves. We're experimenting with it. But so I don't really use any of the generative AI tools. But this optimize tab here is notable and useful, because it's similar to clear scope and market Muse which I'll share with you in just a moment here. And basically, it suggests certain phrases that we should expect to see in the content in order for it to rank high and relevant search. You know, obviously, you can't just throw all the words and you have to weave them in. But this is a pretty good baseline for what people would expect to see topic wise in an article and that's that's the real benefit. I think of tools like this. So yeah, there's other there's other like interesting things that you can dig into. This is like a keyword gap map map based on what I just showed you those different phrases and it shows your content compared to other ranking content and who's using what words so you can kind of see how you stack up against those other competitors. So next, I want to share clear scope with you and I have a slide for it, but I'm just going to jump straight to the report here. So what you're seeing is like a very, I would say like simplified user interface compared to like what you would see with phrase and so clear scope in many ways is very similar. They both exists to help you optimize content. They both include some important research they both work by starting with a primary keyword. One of the differences between clear scope and phrase is first of all that query scope suggests a letter grade whereas phrase and market Muse and surfer previously known as Super SEO suggested number like out of 100 in order to understand like how close to optimizing compared to their standards you are, it also suggests a word count. And one more thing I wanted to say about the content creator is that at the blacksmith we always aim for an a or higher that tends to be a good standard for actually achieving rankings, high rankings and relevant search. I'm actually not sure if phrase does this. I'm sure they do. I just didn't notice it while going through. But clear scope also suggests a target readability level. I think that's really important for matching the needs of the searcher not going you know too deep into something that maybe could benefit from being more surface level for example. You can also notice here that they have those suggestions for phrases and so phrase we use the very beginning of our process, but we're not optimizing content within that tool. We're really using clear scope for that because in my experience, and this could differ by industry, but I find their suggestions for phrases to incorporate to be a little bit more fine tuned than phrase. So you know, that's, that's my opinion. Um, you'll notice that they also have the sidebar, so they have, you know, a couple of details. I don't again, I don't necessarily use clear scope for the briefing processes is really more at the end of the process. So stuff like this, I'm not necessarily going over but if you were to use one tool, then it's nice to know that it has that it also has those top you know, search results for the query, examples of like headers and things like that. It also has the term like keyword gap map that shows how you stack up compared to the competition. You can dig into the competitor details even more in terms of how clear scope looks at content with their letter grade, by word count, that it has this nice chart that shows how that content grade stacks up against their organic position in search. And then I think the last thing that I'll mention about clear scope for now, is that you can use that editor in here just like you can use the editor in phrase, but actually both free and clear scope. Have a Google Docs add on. And so all you have to do is like grab the report link the individual link to that specific report, put it in Google Docs, and then you get all this information within, you know, Google Docs where you probably at least my team works better that way. Um, okay, so and then I guess the last last thing I was gonna say about this topic is that if I had to pick one tool, I think I would pick clear scope. Again, because of the fine tuned pneus of the instructions, but if I was a smaller shop operation, I'd probably pick phrase because it can do like a more well rounded look at like the topic as a whole and debriefing so so that's my suggestion. Clear scope works by essentially offering it's like a per report price, but you can buy packages and like the more reports you buy at a time, the less expensive Each report is. So let me get my slides back up here. And then we'll move on to the next tool that we're going to talk about though.\r\n\r\nWe talked about phrase to talked about clear scope. So let's talk about market Muse just kind of in passing here because it's a very similar tool. It uses some different technologies, compared to clear scope and phrase and so that's why it's a part of our process again as an organization that spends a lot of time on SEO and data and keyword research. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to you if you're going to maybe consider one of those other tools. What's interesting about marketmuse is that it has this functionality to create an AI generated first draft that includes some like light human intervention from their side. I think that's what this is actually this is like a sample from a while ago where we were just playing around with it to see what would happen. But yeah, again, it has a lot of the same functionality. It offers content optimization suggestions that like keyword gap map that I showed you and both of the tools and it has like some generative AI capabilities. So yeah, it just adds a little bit of extra detail. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that it's something you need to add to your workflow if like one of those other tools could satisfy a lot of these same things. So talking about some other tools that are interesting. Word tune is something that I feel like is so underrated. It's essentially uses your own copy to make suggestions. And so again, I'm going to I'm going to show you what that looks like. So let me share my screen back here. So it works in Google Docs. And so here's I just stole the intro basically from that AI detector article. And so what you could do is you highlight whatever text you want it to make suggestions based off of and I typically do it sentence by sentence I, I'm sure it could do longer bits of text, but I don't find that to be as useful. For me. This is like a great tool for when you have writer's block because I don't know you know if you've experienced this but oftentimes I'll let my get myself get stuck on a specific word and it just like really bugs me, and I'm like it's not done until I figured out the right word. And it takes me forever to get through that. So we're tune. It's great because I'm using it with my own copy. So I can feel really confident about whatever it suggests. I'm sure you could use word tune to take AI generated copy and then re spin it. But that's not my suggestion. So again, it works by using this like Google Docs add on and you you highlight it and just to show that action again. It has this little word tune icon. And then you can see different suggestions for how word tune would rewrite it you get like 10 or something like that. And then you can also fine tune it by changing the tone and then by finding ways to shorten or expand it depending on what your use case is. The last thing that I'll say about word toon for right now is it has this thing called spices and so that's like getting a little bit more like next level with the AI generation and using like generative texts. I haven't played around too much with this yet, but it is interesting. And this is kind of taking it away I think from you know basing it off of your copy to kind of like generating something completely new. So that's why I don't necessarily use this but I think it could be a useful resource for when you're when you have writer's block or things like that. So let me get my slides back up here. Here it is. Okay, so so that was word tune. Um, and then Grammarly. I think works very similarly to word tune, and that it uses your own body of work your own copy, to suggest edits, and so I wrote an article for their blog. That's what the learn more link is. After a recent keynote, they did about all their generative AI capabilities. And so I would definitely check that out if you're curious about how to use grammerly in this way. And full disclosure, I'm a Grammarly ambassador, so you know, I'm always singing their praises, but I think it's I think it's interesting because Grammarly, like many other SAS tools on the market are starting to invest in AI capabilities like directly within their tools. And so I think we're gonna see like more and more of examples of this. And grammerly has a lot of other I think really useful. And interesting features like they have this brand style guide, which is something we use that the blacksmith which allows you to set your preferred spelling for things like brand names, and grammar rules and things like that. All right, so let's take a couple minutes for questions. Anything that's come up so far, after the break, we're going to talk about AI detector tools now that I've shown you the AI writing tools. We're going to talk about chat how to write a good chat GBT prompt and then we're going to end the day with how to create your own personal GPT. So yeah, in the meantime, there's any questions. We'll talk about them now and then we'll take a little bit of a break.\r\n\r\nYeah, very good, great overview of some really cool tools that can be used for our content creation. If you have questions specifically about that, drop those there in the zoom q&a. There's one question floating out there about the slide. We were sharing this link as a slide sharing the slides as a slide being link because there was an issue getting them exported where the the links on the slides were clickable. And so technology Yeah, it that's so currently not downloadable. Is the long and the short of it so but that slide being link is there and it'll be available for you going forward.\r\n\r\nWe can we could share them as downloaded just won't be a clickable link. So you can we could share like both in tandem with each other. Unfortunately, that's going to be the limitation\r\n\r\nYeah, yeah. So I'm happy to add that PDF link as well. We'll I'll get that added to the link bundle as we come back. If you want to download these just know that there are things that say read more, learn more that don't clicked anywhere in the PDF. Alright folks, well let's go ahead and take a break. It is 153 Central time let's take a break until right at two o'clock Central. So right about seven minutes from now and we're quiet until then. Sounds great. See you then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We are back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, we are back and ready for the second part of day two. Maddie, what are we going to knock out today?\r\n\r\nSo we're gonna start with now that we've learned how to generate a copy, how do you detect it? We're going to then move to talking a little bit about some Google guidelines around AI content writing for humans and robots. And then we'll end the day with a deeper dive into chat GPT how to write a great prompt and then how to create your own personal GPT which I'm really excited about because it's something that I only just learned how to do myself. Very\r\n\r\ngood. That's a lot to cover in the next hour. I let me invite everyone also to look at the chat I'm going to drop in today's slides if you have come in late. Also, we've added a link there for the PDF download. And finally, there's a link in the link bundle that'll drop in in just a moment that has the invitation for you to submit your site for a content UX audit tomorrow. So with that I will turn it over to you Matty, let's\r\n\r\ngo. Sounds great. All right. Yeah, let's go ahead and knock this out. So AI detector tools. There's a couple that we've tested at the blacksmith and I want to share some of the results of those tests too, so that you can understand what they can be useful for. But also again, there are limitations. As with the rest of this world of AI, everything's still kind of developing. We're all learning things at the same time. And so there's no like perfect answer. There's no one definitive tool that's going to tell you like this is current AI content, or this isn't AI content. So a couple tools that you could try though that I think will give you a decent idea or continent scale, copy leaks and originality.ai and the link here which again, you can grab through the slide bean link is a link to an in depth investigation that we did at the blog Smith testing out these different tools. You know, trying to learn more about the nature of AI content and what it sounds like. So I do have a couple of ideas for you two that we'll talk about next in terms of like how to rewrite things that sound robotic whether they were robot generated or not. But before we get to that, this example here is kind of funny because it's the Constitution and this is continent scale, saying that they detected to be 9% ai generated and you know, I don't think they had robots at the time unless alien somehow hooked them up. But I think it's fair to say that this is more than likely 100% human generated content. But it's just interesting to see that their AI detector is still picking up some very some version of that. And that you know, also perhaps it hasn't trained this AI detector on you know, pieces that existed before. Ai content was a thing. So so that's just like one thing. You know, I think from the standpoint of like, if you're working with content creators, and you're paying for human generated content, then you should get that fundamentally I think that it's an ethical violation for someone to use AI to generate content without disclosing that and to be accepting payment for that as if it were something that they were creating. Of course, there are many companies out there who are hiring people with the job description that is like aI content writer, AI content editor or like somebody who trains you know, a chatbot on a certain way a certain body of work a certain way of writing. All of that being said, if you if you are using these tools, and they are saying with a high degree of certainty, you know, this is AI generated copy. I think it's really important to not outright accuse somebody of submitting AI generated copy what I do at the blog Smith is like let's say that we're doing like a paid test with a new writer hopeful for our team. What I do is I say, hey, you know, we ran this through, you know, these three AI detector tools, and here's what it said here, you know, is what degree of AI content it's saying it thinks this is like, can you comment on that? And it gives them the chance to you know, explain what they think might happen, defend themselves, offering to make fixes, and I think it's really like the way people people are going to be honest or not. There's nothing you could do about that. But I think it's the way that they respond to and handle that situation that tells you what you need to know about if you want to work with them, whether or not you can ultimately tell if their copy was aI generated or not. What is very interesting about these different tools is first of all, they're all gonna give you a different answer. That's just a fact. Because they're all using a different approach to detect AI content. The other thing is that you can input the exact same copy on one of these tools two times and get a different answer. So again, it's it's the wild wild west. But these will at least give you something to think about and whether it doesn't matter. Like if we if we trust the writer or not, we're always going to run their copies through one or multiple of these tools because we want to detect things that sound robotic, even if they were written by a human. So that kind of brings me to my next point here that I was starting to hint at. So when it comes to detecting AI content, or even detecting content that humans wrote, that sounds robotic, there's a couple of patterns that you can look for. The two major characteristics that the aforementioned AI detector tools are looking for are first of all, perplexity, so that's unpredictability within the content. Ai generated text tends to have low perplexity. Human writing has higher perplexity, it kind of makes sense we're a little bit more erratic than a robot. The other thing is burstiness, which is a similar concept. So it's looking for variation in the length and the structure of sentences. Ai content tends to be more steady, more formulaic, which makes sense. It has lower burstiness and human writing, which you know, has much more variation. The image you see here are some other things that we've picked up in our own writing process. And in investigating this topic, different signals that sound robotic again, whether they are in AI generated or not. So repeating words, like in this example, collision coverage, you know, coverage collision, like it's just like it's not using a lot of variation. And in the box MyStyle guide we talk about like, trying not to use the same word twice in the same sentence or paragraph, which is not always possible, but this would be an example of something that wouldn't pass the blacksmith style guide test because it's it's too repetitive. Also repetitive sentence structure where like, each sentence starts with the same formulaic approach. Advertising then a verb you know, advertising the verb, unnatural word usage, so like, you know, removing a glass dome to access the ball, but it doesn't really sound like how a human would talk about replacing a light bulb. A generic or impersonal tone. You know, it's like things that don't add value that you're just kind of like saying for the sake of having words, it's another thing that we talk about in the blog, Smith style guide, like everything you say, should have a purpose, and we don't believe in fluff. It's about cutting things to being the most concise version they can be while still conveying enough meaning. For people to understand what we're trying to say. Statements that contradict themselves. So the new policy will increase employee benefits while at the same time it will reduce employee benefits that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And inconsistent verb tense, you know, something a human editor. Should be able to pick up pretty well but probably a robot writing is not going to care too much about He He was waiting for the bus when he sees his coworker. Stiff, formal or matter of fact, writing style. You know, again, just something that just doesn't sound like a human wrote it or who would want to read it. So this is this is something that can be helpful to you like when you're doing your own edits to kind of like go through these different things. And, again, whether whether it's aI generated or not, and you know that for a fact, you still want to make sure that your writing is something that appeals to the human. So I wanted to take some time to talk about Google's helpful content update and also their guidance for AI generated content and whether or not it will rank some of this we did talk about last year if you were here, so we're just going to do a really quick refresher on that as it relates to this topic. So my book and like really like what we're talking about, in general is kind of marrying the concepts of writing for both humans who are really the ultimate buyer like they're the ones who actually have money so they can buy from you, whatever it is you're selling. They respond to other humans, other people's empathy, versus robots who you know, we're not writing for their sake, but they are the medium that connects us. To those humans. And so it's important for the things that we write, to be indexable to, you know, be findable to be descriptive, and to ultimately match the intent of whatever the human is looking for. So, you know, robots can also take the form of social networking site algorithms, like that news feed that you're familiar with, I'm sure.\r\n\r\nSo so that's kind of like the two players in this game. Here. So this is some highlights from Google's guidance about AI generated content. As you can see by the link here, this is from early 2023. And I was looking at this page again, just a couple of days ago to see if anything had changed. I had seen something on Twitter now x, where somebody had mentioned that something on this page should change. And I was looking at these three things because I think they're the most relevant to this topic that we're talking about. And like, I don't know if I'm just you know, like, post pregnancy brain or something. I couldn't find the difference. But it might have been because it was about something else on that page. But I might have missed it. And it might have been one of these things. But anyway, I think these things still more or less ring true today. And if anything has changed, it has been Google being less specific about their guidelines. Because that's kind of the nature of what all these things that they've shared with us are it's it's kind of like so just to go over them is a content against Google searches guidelines. They say it's not, but you know, it can't be used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which we'll talk about when we talk about the helpful content update. Will AI content rank highly on search? Maybe, you know, it doesn't give it any gains, which makes sense. What I think is really notable about this is they talk about if it's useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of e 80. It might do well in search. So they talk about original, but we've already talked today about how AI content at least on its own without manual intervention by humans is inherently not original. It is inherently not unique. And I would argue that again, without human intervention, it's neither useful nor helpful, in that, you know, you're not It's not like adding something that doesn't already exist. At least in that case. So to me, from Google's own words, AI content really aren't its own shouldn't rank high and relevant search. But of course, there are exceptions. And then, of course, there are situations where people pair that with a human editor like we saw with seeing that of course, CNET being a cautionary tale of what to avoid. Should I use AI to generate content? They say if you see it as an essential way to help you produce content that is helpful and original, we have that original word again, it might be useful to consider but again, if you're trying to gain search engine rankings and no there was something on Twitter now x where somebody was kind of like I can't remember who it was, but you might recognize the situation especially if you're in like the content world. Someone was boasting about how they had created a ton of AI generated content and they were sharing you know some stats from like their Google Analytics, and how would that helped rankings and things like that? And I think everybody agreed that that person should have probably kept their mouth shut because somebody from Google ended up you know, seeing this Thrive that came to their attention and they got hit with a manual penalty based on what this person was saying about you know, having not really like had that human intervention. So thus, it was not original or unique. And it's just funny, like, you could probably get away with it, at least for a while, depending on how Google develops more of these guidelines. But when you start to boast about it, and Google gets wind of it, then like there are manual interventions that they could take, so tread carefully. If it's working. Keep that to yourself. So then it Yeah, I wanted to like connect this back to Google's helpful content algorithm update, which also happened. Probably a little over a year ago, maybe two years ago. And so they describe it as being part of their long term efforts to provide original and valuable content through search. It rewards content that meets users expectations while demoting content written primarily with search engines in mind. So like we were just talking about what the AI content. This this update isn't focused on AI but but it adds color to those guidelines in terms of how to approach it or you know, if you are generating AI content, how to make it work, so that it could rank these questions. Are directly from Google just made pretty was blacksmith branding, but the link that I shared here will will get you to the Google documentation that includes these questions and the subsequent ones. So to ask yourself like is is this content truly people versus is something that Google would consider ranking. It's things like Do you have a primary purpose or focus for your site? If you're writing about too many disparate topics, it's very confusing to Google you can certainly write about things that are different but related to each other, but you should really have like one specific focus if you want to rank high in relevant search. Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they've had a satisfying experience? I think that's a question to ask yourself, whenever you create any type of content like Is it is it satisfying to the end user doesn't really just serve your purposes? They talk about like demonstrating firsthand experience or like a depth of knowledge that's really important. That's that's how we add uniqueness to our content. That's how we make it original. Even if it's just your opinion on something, you know, that adds color to the content that already exists. Okay, so, um, let's talk now about from the search perspective, are you taking the search engine first approach to your content? So these are things that you obviously don't want to do. And it's questions like, you know, are you primarily trying to attract people from search versus creating something truly useful for humans? It does say are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics like that cautionary tale, that person who was sharing, you know, the content they generated, which resulted in a manual penalty, it's a perfect example. I think this is important too, like, are you mainly just summarizing what others have said without adding much value? You should always be adding I think something to the content that you're creating in order for it to be worth creating in the first place.\r\n\r\nSo just to kind of summarize here, like what is helpful content versus unhelpful content from these guidelines that Google has given us and that I honestly agree with? helpful content is people first genuine specific, it's actionable. Up to date is important. Once you publish something, you have to think about, like if you're using stats or if it's about maybe a tool that changes frequently, like you should be regularly reviewing or auditing your content for opportunities to update it. Is it relatable, is it concise? And ultimately, is it satisfying, versus the unhelpful content which is written primarily for the search engine robots it's spammy? It's generic, it's abstract. It might be outdated. Ultimately, it's impersonal, impersonal, fluffy, and then whacking. So these are some easy guidelines that you can use to understand if your content is hitting the mark for something that Google would even consider ranking high and relevant search. All right, so now we're gonna get to some of like the really fun stuff, I think today, which is get GBT some specific examples for how you can use it, as well as a demonstration for how I'm using it. And so, a lot of the things that I'm going to talk about today are based on things that I've learned from other people. I didn't necessarily invent these things. I've adapted many for my own use cases. And so again, I think this is a really valuable opportunity for like if you have anything to add to this discussion, I'd love to see it in the chat. I think it could benefit other people. How are you experimenting with AI? Like how how would you maybe adapt some of these ideas for how to write a great prompt What are like interesting prompts that you've used, and you know what, how is that benefited? You so I'll just put that out there. And then I'll also say that some of these are like pretty much all of these guidelines are based on open AIS guidelines for prompt engineering as well as Google's in some cases, I've combined to them and in all cases, I've given examples of how to use them effectively. So let's go ahead and jump to it. Okay, so the, I think first and perhaps the most important thing is to be as specific as possible. And you want to set parameters for the output that you're looking for. So my prompt here was helped me generate 10 email subject lines to use for cold outreach for my content marketing agency, please limit output to a maximum of 45 characters per example. I picked that number, the 45 characters because I saw that that's like somewhat of a best practice for how many characters people want to see in an email subject line. And what I could have done here was use the personal GPT I'm going to show you later that's all about the blogs and style guide them has like aspects of like how we do business and I could have gotten like even better example results here. But the point was not to show you something perfect it was to show you how to apply this principle. And the other thing that I wanted to add to is like you can always start with a plant, see what it gets you and then you can set parameters after the fact to refine your output. Like, you know, maybe I would have asked this prompt and then asked for it to shorten it to 45 characters or to suggest new examples of 45 characters. Or maybe I would have asked for like, what are you know, 10 General Sales, cold outreach subject lines, that I could use and then I might have added the detail Okay, now, adjust it for like my content marketing agency. The next one is to give context and examples. So I have this bot and I think I'm going to show you a screenshot of it next. One of my personal GPCs is a blacksmith sales expert. And so I created this bot because we recently hired a new salesperson, and there's just so much to learn both about the blogs with his brand. The work we do for customers, and just our sales process in general things that we want to share with new prospects that I wanted to create a resource and it's like of course you know, I want to make myself as available as possible to this new salesperson because typically I've been the salesperson for my company, I have a lot of that knowledge in my own head, but there are times when I am unavailable or I have other stuff that I have to work on. And so I wanted to create a personal GPT that incorporates some of this different documentation that I've created about our process. You know, referring to this prompt it also has like a copy of our standard proposal. Different things about you know, like what makes us stand out compared to the competition what's what's unique to us, I guess, so that any person on our team, any especially new salesperson, would be able to use this chat bot in order to surface some of this information, especially if they couldn't get a hold of me basically. So here's an example of a prompt I gave my personal GPT which is using the above case study. So I gave it a URL on our website. And one of the features of chat GPT is that you can have it browse the web in order to to include information and its results. So I gave it a URL. I asked it to reference a proposal that I had attached to the GPT that I've uploaded to it. And I said proposed an email pitch for a specific job opportunity. I copy and pasted a longer piece than this. I just took a screenshot but like the long version of this job description, and and I asked it to effectively address the requirements that the job description surfaced and the writing based on our strengths. And so what ended up happening was, you know, it wrote like a cold pitch email. But it did it did effectively address this prompt. There were things that I would change about it. Certainly there are things that I would have edited it before I sent it out to the person who had posted this job description, but I think that for me as a founder who has also traditionally been the salesperson it's such an effective way to use this tool because I spend so much time just you know, it's like I know all this information I know what we're good at. I know that we have relevant examples. You know, I know all this but it takes time to like resurface that knowledge and put it in a form that sounds good and is compelling, you know, to a sales prospect so that if you take one thing away, I think that you know that's like one really excellent use case of using your existing knowledge or your internal documentation. To make your life way easier.\r\n\r\nAnother related GPT prompt engineering tip is to use de limiters to clearly indicate distinct parts of the input. That just means like what I shouldn't have done here that would have made it probably a little bit easier for chat. GPT to understand what I wanted is to put this this job description text in like quotes, that's like a delimiters to say like, you know, do this to this piece of what I'm asking for to kind of like help it understand what part of the copy it's referencing. And what part of the copy is the ask, especially when you have like a longer input output, you know, whatever. Another example of that is something I learned from James rose. He is an automation and Zapier expert and has been doing a lot of interesting experiments with AI who's really good person to follow. If you're interested in just like getting ideas, he takes transcripts from like voice of customer interviews where he's getting feedback and you know, like positive testimonials and things about his product and he feeds that transcript into chat GPT and says you know, use this puts a transcript in quotes those delimiters and basically like give me like three, you know, like really nice things they said about you know, our product three like great pieces of feedback. And I think that that's such a useful way we like on our client calls on our internal meetings. We use a tool called fireflies, which automatically transcribes all our meetings, but it's still you know, it's still a lot to sort through an end fireflies has its own AI capabilities, too. So it helps to summarize and things like that, but to take to be able to use that output and quickly surface insights based on whatever your prompt is, I think is such an awesome use of AI that saves the human reader from having to go through the whole thing. So this is and I'll show you, I'll show you what this looks like in action when we do the personal GPT demonstration. But this is kind of what it looks like to set some parameters for your personnel GPT and there's two I guess like schools of thought on setting like setting parameters narrowly defining the G PTS role. So you could do this within normal chat GPT and say for this query, you know, I want you to take on this specific role. And so I got this idea from Paul Roeser. He was on some like marketing technology podcast, and he's talking about how he uses AI. And his example was like, something along the lines of like, you know, pretend that you're a lawyer that advises entrepreneur, it's about hiring law and then he gave his prompt so he kind of like set the scene like this is the narrow role that I want you to operate into this query. So that's one way that you could look at it the other way is that you could create a personal GPT that serves a specific purpose like my blacksmith sales expert, that I've already referred to and that you know, I'm kind of showing you behind the scenes, how I set it up. So as you can see here, there's like a name for it, which is kind of arbitrary. A brief description, I think, mostly for your reference. And then the instructions are like what the AI uses to then suggest answers to your prompts. So as you can see here, I'm telling it like you can use our website as your primary reference. You should be familiar with all those pages and use it to inform your responses. It'll ask you and I'll show you how you want it to communicate with you how you want it to give answers. You know what specific information you want to focus on again, like narrowing that scope. And then I also say like tailor your responses to showcase the company's strengths and successes. Using you know details from the website and emphasize why we're the ideal choice in you know, answering like sales related queries. So this is one of the greatest uses of chat GPT without narrowly defining its role and objective. You're gonna get like a wide variety of answers and that's fine. It depends on what your use cases, but by giving it a roll, I think the quality of your output goes up exponentially. And I'll show you again, at the end here, what that looks like in practice. Here's another really interesting way to use it, I think, especially if you're trying to learn a new skill or if you're trying to troubleshoot an existing workflow, which is what I was doing in this prompt. So I use air table a lot. I'm a huge fan of no code and automation in general. I've found in my life that it's really hard to find like the perfect solution to everything that I want to do. I never could find like my perfect project management tool. And so essentially, I built it between using process street air table, Zapier, and you know the other mix of ragtag tools that are in my arsenal. So in this case, I was trying to create a specific automation in air table that for some reason is just evading me and I'm sure I'm doing like one stupid thing wrong, but I asked air table or sorry, I asked Chad GPT first of all, I prompted it by telling it what automation I was trying to create, like the actions that triggers the end goal. And it gave me like a step by step process that I would say is a little bit more high level than this out, but and then I asked it to refine its guidance or expand on its guidance by saying okay, so for this step, this is where I'm getting stuck. What was how exactly what I set this up in air table, and so then, as you can see, the result has some details and it's more detailed than the previous query gave for that step. It's probably worth mentioning that in chat GPT right now, there's two versions of GPT, which is like the underlying, you know, algorithm, machine learning mechanism, whatever. So there's GPT 3.5, which is an older version, and then there's GPT for GPT four incorporates web browsing so it has more up to date guidance. So especially when you're trying to troubleshoot something like air table, which changes often and so, you know, if I were using the old version of chat GPT, I might have gotten a different answer. So when you're doing things like like this, you want to use like the newer version, there is a limitation. I think it's something like you can have 40 prompts within three hours or something like that. I don't think I've ever gotten close to hitting that. But I suppose if you were to ask, you know, a lot of follow up questions, or you're troubleshooting something very complicated, then you could hit that so that's just something to keep in mind that as a chat GPT user and I don't know what the distinction is for paid versus free, but I think that the paid version of Chad GPT is like worth its weight in gold. I think it's extremely undervalued and it's probably because they're using our data to train it. So they do get a benefit out of it. But you know, I would say if you're finding yourself limited by the free version, then just upgrade to the paid it's, it's so worth that.\r\n\r\nOkay, so now, here's the real fun part. So we're gonna go through how to build your own GPT and I'm gonna give you like a specific task to do and so you can either follow along with me while I do this now, or you can do this yourself. Later, watch the recording and replicate it. I will say the process is probably much more straightforward than you might think, if you've never done this before. So we'll go ahead and get started. Let me set my screen accordingly. So we're going to jump over to the blog Smith website, because this is going to be the basis for the very basic UBT that we're going to create today, which is based on one that I've already created and refined a little bit more than what we're going to get into. But okay, so the blacksmith has this writing style guide and on our website. It has this chapter version so you can jump you know to these different sections. To see how will we go about our writing style. It's something that's fairly industry agnostic, so definitely like a great resource. If you don't have your own writing style guide. You could use ours to build yours. But what I want to do is create a chat GPT bot based on this that essentially acts as like a blacksmith editor that defends our style and explains when a piece of copy is not following it. So we have this as a PDF which I've already downloaded. I'll just show you what it looks like really quick. And it's it's designed, but it's fairly plain texts. You know, it's not that much more complex visually than like a Google doc version of this. And I'm telling you this, because my first attempt at making a personal GPT was actually to solve a personal problem of mine, which is that I love the game Settlers of Catan and I wanted to make a Catan rules bot so that I could download all the PDFs of the rules for every version we have. And I could ask the GPT okay, like you know, here's some like obscure situation like what is the role, you know, based on these rule books? Because every once in a while, something like that pops up. And while I like to think of myself as a content expert, there are those niche situations that require further consideration. Unfortunately, on the Catan website, the PDFs that you can download are very complicated visually as PDF, so chat GPT in my limited experience has not been able to read them. So it's just something to note that like you want to give it like the plainest text version of whatever documents you want to share with it, but something like this would be fine. And I know that because I've tested it. Okay, so so if you want to follow along, you know, just hit download, and that's this is the exact file that we're going to use. So then you go to the chat GPT dashboard. Which looks like this. And like I told you, you can toggle between chat, or GPT 3.5 or GPT. Four, you can see you know those limitations as well as the added benefits of using that more recent version of it. So then you go to explore GP Ts, and you can see on my sidebar when it loads here that I have. We have chat GPT which is like you know, every every question you could ever want to ask and then I have a couple of my personal gptc here as well as some that I've explored in this explore LGBTs area that I'm just kind of playing around with. So this is also just like a really fun place to look through things, test things out and get ideas for the the GPS you might want to create. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead and click this Create button, and you'll see this interface. Again, it's pretty simple. And if you go to create, it's going to prompt you with specific questions, but if you kind of like are familiar with this personal GPT idea, you could also jump to the Configure tab and start filling it out. But I think that it's easiest to think about it from this Create Tab. And so it's going to prompt you with a couple of questions. So this first one is like what kind of chat GPT what kind of personal GPT Do you want to make? So I'm going to tell it, you know, I like to create a GPT that serves as an editor for my brand, the blog Smith. The goal is to have this GPT serve as a resource. That references our specific style guide, and suggests edits based on newly inputted copy. I'm just making this up. But the last time that I did this, I'd used something similar to that. And so after each input, it's going to think you know, it's going to react to the things that you're telling it and it's going to ask you to refine the way that it interacts with you. So we're not none of this is like rocket science right now. This is just like designing almost like the persona of who this GPT is going to be. So then it's gonna suggest to name I suggest naming this GPT blacksmith editor. Does that work for you? Sure. Yeah. And you can change this yourself. Like if you just want to, like get through this part. Just say yep, yep, that's fine. And the next thing is it's going to generate a profile picture and so these are new, they're a little bit arbitrary. It's just like for your own purposes, for fun. One thing that is kind of fun with the imagery and it doesn't always work so we'll see. But sometimes I asked it to change to adapt the picture to use like one of our brand colors just for fun. So I'll say like, can you update this image to incorporate our main brand color, which just using a text expander Simple as that? Let's do it does. So this is using that dolly dolly I never know how to say it to suggest images and, you know, it looks like Okay, right? But we're not we're not asking it to create anything like complicated at this point. So, so like for example, it didn't, it didn't really follow my query. So let's see if I try a different way. Can the image use, you know, our main branch color? Like this is this is definitely the limitation of AI is that sometimes it understands the query and sometimes it just doesn't and we won't get stuck on it. If it doesn't get it. I just want to see if changing it has any practical effect on it. So then after this, it's going to ask about Yeah, that doesn't do it. No, that's fine. Okay, so the next question. They're asking me to more narrowly defined the role of what this GPT is going to serve as I'm Oh, so I'll have you use the uploaded PDFs as this as the foundation for your edits any questions? So I can upload the PDF here. Or I can go to that configure tag and I can also tab and I can also I can also upload additional documents to help as well like with my blacksmith sales expert, I have like our proposal I have a document about our sales process. I have another GPT that I forgot to mention that's called the blacksmith like SEO guru or something like that. And it basically I uploaded a bunch of documents about our approach to SEO some stuff about our keyword research process, and our like philosophy behind the different steps as well as a document I created for our writers and editors. That's about let me see how to get out of that. That's about how we write about SEO to make sure that our philosophy is communicated correctly and specifically. So that's just an example of different documents that you might use to support the outputs here and to narrowly define what you want to base its answers on. Okay. One thing that's important to say is when you're uploading documents you want to make sure to kind of like give context and say like, this is how I want you to use it. And like, you know, I'm doing this, I'm uploading this. So I'm expecting you to use this as part of your output if you don't, if you don't refer to that document when you're setting it up or when you're interacting with it. It might just ignore it in some, in some use cases when I've been creating these personal GPS like that's happened where, for example, with this one, it'll make edits based on best practices, but not based on the document that I specifically wanted it to use. So that's why I used that language. And so it says, I've updated your GPS behavior to focus on our specific style guide based on the uploaded PDF. So that's great. You know, like, what options so one thing that it usually asks is like how do you want the GPT to communicate with you and I'm getting maybe ahead of myself, I'm gonna say no, that sounds good and see if it prompts me to ask about like the tone.\r\n\r\nOkay, so it's not gonna say it looks good, but what options do I have for how it communicates with me? In terms of tone of voice, again, usually asked so this is giving me some options here. Again, not usually in the way that it normally does. It kind of asked to like paragraph form versus like giving me several examples. I'm gonna say that I want it to be let's go with number three, which is encouraging and positive. I think that that's the ethos of how we edit at the box with the other things are true to um, yeah, so just for the sake of this, and you can always change this, you can always refine it. Okay, so it's updating the GPT. This is probably the last edit and then what I'll do is I'm going to grab some copy that I want it to, to edit just to show you how it comes full circle. And then I'm going to show you kind of like the back end of what it looks like. So let me grab that copy. I'm going to feed it an example of like a recent social post that we were editing and the formatting is going to be like a little bit funky here, which is fine, because this is just an example. And the blog the style guide isn't necessarily built with a focus on editing social copy, but again, it was just like a quick thing to to try. Okay, so it says it's updated it. It tells me you know what the point of it is no more adjustments needed. Let's try it out. Okay, so I'm going to show you how it works and then we'll show you the Configure and then we'll kind of end the day off with any questions. Okay. So it gives you some prompts based on what it thinks that you might ask it and you can edit this, but I'm going to say please suggest edits to the following copy, in quotes and quotations, those delimiters based on the blacksmith style guide PDF and again, it's gonna be a little sloppy looks like it didn't actually take the name of the GPT that we asked it to. So we'll we'll take a look at that too. So it's interesting depending on the prompt you give it and I've tried this a couple of times in this case, it's kind of separating it out by saying like okay, here's some of the things from the blacksmith style guide and here's like specific passages of copy and how we would change them. So that's interesting. But what I would probably prefer is that it edits the whole thing, and then it tells me what edits it made. So it's, again, it's referencing I can I can tell because I'm familiar with it, but it's referencing specific aspects of the blacksmith style guide, which is great, we know it's working. But what I'm going to ask you to do is to change the way it outputs it. Can you refine the previous output by starting with I might mess up exactly how to say this, but by starting with, like all of the copy with edits, then after words, shared the specific edits made from blog Smith style perspective, that might not be like the most effective prompt. We're just going to see what it says. Okay, yeah, it looks like it's understanding. Nature. The copy here is an important I just want to show you how something like this could work for your purposes. Okay, so this is what I wanted it it refined the copy first and then it told me what it refined and why. Um, so let's look at this Configure tab. So yeah, for whatever reason, it didn't add the name. That that it prompted me and asked me to so I'm gonna go ahead and add that and you can see it up here. You can see this description. You can see the instructions based on some of the things that we talked about when we were creating it. You can make changes to these conversation starters we might even say like what like other conversation starters, would you suggest using freelist UPC code? I'm just curious and I don't know what to do. You can see the PDF that we uploaded and I can upload more files. You can add additional capabilities. I think by default the web browsing and Dolly image generation is implemented for many of you today who deal with code, this code interpreter might be useful. And then AI actions is something that I've started to play around with but don't fully understand but there's a way that you can connect your personal GPT to Zapier so that for example, it could reference data and other apps. So for my blog, Smith sales GPT I'm trying to create an AI action that allows it to reference our air table CRM so that you could ask it questions about a certain lead or certain portfolio projects and things like that. So once I get that implemented, it's going to be so cool. Okay, so it's giving me some ideas for these conversation starters that are a little generic, but I could probably refine them further. I think the last thing to talk about is how you can either keep this to yourself or share it with other people. I think that these drafts are automatically saved. So if you X out of here before clicking Save, I believe it will still exist, but don't quote me on that. From there you can decide you know, if you want to, if you want to keep it to yourself if it's you know something that's for your own personal use cases, or if you want to share it with your team or if you want to share it with like the wider world like maybe you create a chatbot for your industry that other people could benefit from that you want to share. So, in most cases, probably anyone with the link is a good bet, if you ever intend intend to share it with other people. Okay, so let me jump back to my slides really quick. We're going to end off the day here. So here we go. me pull this back up. Um, okay, this is the link to grab the style guide if you want to use that to replicate what I did today. You can also grab that from the side being like um, I'll just say one more time. My book writing for humans and robots. It was the number one best seller in the SEO category. So if SEO and content is something that you want to invest more time and learning about then I would highly recommend my book. You can grab the first chapter for free on the books website, and you can grab the book on Amazon in both print and Kindle format. I'll give one more reminder for our live content UX audit tomorrow. I'd really love to help you workshop, your content, help you come up with ideas for making it even stronger and more effective. So you can use this link to do that and that will happen at the end of day two. And then, you know, outside of today, if you have any questions about the things that we're talking about, you can either email me Maddie at the blogspot.com or on Twitter, aka ex im at Mad Yasmin and then yeah, we'll end the day with any questions that have come up since going over some of this GPT stuff.\r\n\r\nYeah, great stuff. Thanks Maddie. You know, the custom GP tees are really interesting. And it's it's also not only for your own business, but also working for clients. It's an opportunity to really, it's, it's a service you can provide. We have a boy for example, that has a ton of they're an educational nonprofit and they have a ton of PDFs like 800 and an educational topic that they deal with and so we're investigating, what would it take to put those PDFs in there and then have a bot that you could query the entire library to find an answer to something right. It's just super, super useful. Yeah.\r\n\r\nOne one note on that Nathan is chat GPT. So they have a limitation of you can upload 20 Total documents but they don't say how large or small those documents have to be so OneNote for like anybody who's trying like this is something that came up with that Catan bot I was trying to make. You can combine the documents if need be.\r\n\r\nYeah. And chat CPT if you have a large library like that it might not be the best tool it sometimes there are a bunch of third party tools. I mean, if you go on App Sumo, every day, there's a new one that somebody's chat bot or whatever, but find one that the UI that you like and a lot of those don't have those limitations. Like they have a separate database that they're looking at with total sort of magic they've created. I don't know, I don't understand it. But anyway, yeah. So folks, a couple of questions stacked up there. If you have a question, add that to the zoom q&a, and we'll dive into it. So first question from Doug. Maddie, how does SEMrush or SEMrush fit into the landscape of content writing tools? What overlaps or complements with phrase? Sure,\r\n\r\nyeah. So I think of something like SEMrush or Ahrefs is being a great all in one. SEO tool. So people use it for more than content although content is like an important facet of them versus something like phrase or query scope is really just about content and just about content optimization, or, you know, in the case of like phrase and market Muse also generating content is the use case. But SEMrush I have I'll be honest, I have more experienced with a traps but they both they're both very similar and we actually use SEMrush like the keyword researchers and strategists on my team, we use SEMrush these days. But it is it is the tool that if we're comparing it to phrase and query scope, that's the tool that we use to define our primary keyword. It's before we run those reports. It's a tool that we use to come up with some secondary keywords. It's the tool that we use to identify feature snippet opportunities, we can do competitor research on it. You can do backlink tracking on it. You can audit your website. So I mean, it just it just serves such a bigger overall SEO use case. But there are many very useful content optimization tools. And so it's kind of like a higher budget tool than any of the ones that I've mentioned, but it will serve you know, many of your SEO purposes even outside of content. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nOkay, questions from Eddie. Eddie is writing tech blogs. I see now my keyword content from Reddit is ranking very good. I doubt Reddit content is helpful since usually people have vague answers to questions. What do you think about that?\r\n\r\nIt's an interesting question and I think I'm gonna take the opposite stance. I do think that Reddit content is helpful. There's something about people being like anonymous on the internet that like makes the truth come out. People feel like a little I guess like Freer with the information that they that they volunteer. And so I mean, you have to take it with a grain of salt because they're anonymous. They also might have an agenda that is not clear versus somebody who's coming out and saying, you know, I work for one of these tools or, you know, these are the clients they serve. And so that's like, why this relates to what I'm talking about. But I will say that sites like Reddit, Reddit and Quora are really interesting for learning more about your audience, learning about the things that like keep them up at night and so that's why they rank so high is because they are a wealth of information. They're not, you know, they're not using like the traditional methods to optimize their sites, but they are benefiting from all this unique user generated content because they've created communities. So, yeah, I mean, I don't I don't know exactly how to answer the question. I guess I'm kind of like answering around it, but I think that Reddit is a useful resource in general. I don't know that it can be counted on like aI right where Yeah, I can be confidently incorrect certainly. So to can, Reddit user is but they bring up some really interesting points that are worth investigating. So as long as if you are using it as a reference that you fact check, or you know, if you're I guess if the question is like, How can I outrank Reddit the the answer is like, I don't know.\r\n\r\nYou just said maybe Reddit pays Google. And honestly, we just did a story about this a week ago in our news roundup. It is actually Google who has purchased the rights to all of read its content. Alright, Gemini. Yeah, that just came out. The story last week was an unnamed AI but it's since come out that it's Google has purchased it right. So who knows? Yeah, Google does. Yeah. Doug says here's my favorite prompt. I add this to help me brainstorm chat. GPT add this to the end of your prep, ask me five questions that will improve the response you'll be giving me I use that too. It's really helpful. I\r\n\r\nlove that I I haven't considered that and that's why I think like discussions like this are so useful. Like, we can all learn so much from each other. I learned something new about this every day. For\r\n\r\nsure. The AI world is moving rapidly. And we were Mata you and I were talking earlier just we did an AI workshop here back in October, and there's so much that's new and better and different, even just in the last few months. It's pretty crazy. All right. That brings us to the end of questions. Tomorrow, we're talking about a UX content UX. So give us one more time an overview of what we're going to talk about tomorrow and we'll start to wrap things up here.\r\n\r\nOh, tomorrow. I was looking at the comments and somebody had mentioned let's say Ben had mentioned that to get them to use the right color and the GPT to be very specific, use hex color code when so I got distracted but um, okay, so tomorrow we're going to focus on the content reader experience. Content UX, another way of thinking about it. So we're going to talk a little bit about things like things that Google has said or page experience signals, so things that are like tangible that you can optimize around within your design to help your ranking on Google. And my philosophy when it comes to SEO is that there's three pillars, there's like the content and the things that you can affect on your own page. There's the website structure, so that's going to be a lot of what we talk about tomorrow. And then there's things like Off Page signals like backlinks, which we won't talk about, but you know, we can always have a discussion later or, you know, I'm sure Nathan will bring on somebody who talks about that at some point, too. So yeah, we'll talk about these like website signals, these page experience signals. We'll talk a little bit about website structure, things that you can do to create a better experience for your users, even if it's not necessarily something that Google takes into consideration for ranking and some things that they do. And then we will talk about auditing, you know, with practical tools and specifics, your contents, the nature of your contents UX. I'll tell you how to like run your own content UX audit, whether that's with tools or with people in person. And so that'll be that'll be kind of the nature of what we talk about tomorrow. Trying to bring that discussion full circle from the specific things that you can use to how to like measure if you're using them effectively, and then we'll end the day with a content UX audit from the things that ideally, y'all have submitted. So if you haven't, please use that form that we've linked to in that slide. Being link, and then I'll pick a couple for us to go over tomorrow.\r\n\r\nYep, very good. And that link is there in the chat. Once again, make sure you submit a URL that was a lot of fun last year when we did that very info wise. Yeah. So I will take care of that. Tomorrow. That's yeah, day two. All right. Maddie, good stuff today. As always, we'll have the recording up if anybody wants to go back and replay if you came in late. It'll be up in about an hour or so soon as it renders. And I will see you back here tomorrow, one o'clock central time for day two of content workshop. Have a good night. See you then.\r\n\r\nHear but as you're coming in, we're just asking what was your biggest takeaway from day one? You can sound off there in the chat. I'm also dropping in the new link bundle, I can type correctly. There is a new slide being linked, so make sure you grab that new one. It is updated on the replay page. But make sure you grab that new link because a few changes have been made since yesterday. That will let you follow along better.\r\n\r\nSome last minute tool suggestions. Ah,\r\n\r\nlove it. Love it all. Right, catch. Working for everybody now. Just about a minute and a half to go and again, we'd love to hear from you in the chat on what your biggest takeaways from day one we're. As we are waiting just another minute or so to get started. Also the link there for the live content UX audit is on the screen because we have a slide or two left if you'd like to submit your site or page or something for a content audit. It'll be a friendly review with with some good help to help you improve some of your language. So use that link. The link is in the link bundle in the chat. There on the screen. We do have a couple of slots if you'd like to participate in that. So Vivian, if you look at the replay link in the link bundle the academy link there is a PDF download link on that on the on the replay page. And that is the new updated slides. Yep, so that's all there ready to go on the replay page or you can view them on slide being right now. Yeah, not too many changes. New tools. All I was new to was fun tools. Yeah. Alright folks, about 30 seconds to go. Glad everybody's back for day two. Again, our check in question. Let us know in the chat. What your biggest takeaway from day one was? Particularly did you have you used any new GPT prompts since we played around with that yesterday, or has anybody taken the dive and made your own custom GPT based on\r\n\r\nor have any ideas for things that you want to try when you have time? Yeah, I could. I could use some more ideas myself. Yeah.\r\n\r\nFor sure. All right, folks. It is three minutes after someone to start our recording and we will get underway. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everybody, wherever you happen to be welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here and joined again by MADI. Azzaman for day two of the content accelerator for 2024 Welcome back. Maddie. Glad you're here.\r\n\r\nThank you so much for having me. Again. It's exciting to dig into some of these topics.\r\n\r\nAbsolutely. So we had a lot of fun yesterday talking about some AI stuff and some great principles for creating great content. And today we're looking more at the the user side of consuming content right what are we going to talk about today? Exactly.\r\n\r\nYeah, I think that you can think of today as being a way to practically test your content, whether that's with other people, whether that's with tools, understanding how it measures up against some of the guidelines that Google has shared, that are necessary for ranking, specifically when they have to do with the user experience. So we're going to kind of attack this from all angles. And, you know, hopefully it'll leave today with some really tangible tools to help you understand like, does your content provide a great reader experience? Or are there things that you could do to improve it?\r\n\r\nYeah, very good. And we do still have this content UX link on the screen. If you have not filled that out and you would like to there's still a slot or two left for the second hour, we'll do some live content review. So grab that now. The link is there in the chat as well. A couple little bits of housekeeping and we'll turn it back over to Matty as usual. Ask your questions using the zoom q&a And we'll take those questions at the end of each hour today. break in the middle as usual. One note is that the slides have been updated since yesterday. So in the chat is the new slide being link. And if you want the PDF download, just go onto the replay page with the link there and the link bundle and you can download the PDF there as well that has all the new updates on the slides. So with that, I'm going to disappear Maddie, let's get started.\r\n\r\nLet's do it. So yeah, if if you want to submit something for this live content UX audit, ideally, it's like a page on your website, not not something like a PDF, because we want to look at how the content interacts with design. And like Nathan said, you know, it's a friendly review. We're not like looking for issues. We're just looking for things that you could do to perhaps improve the content experience. Get another set of eyes on it. And it's just a practical way to apply some of the tools suggestions I'm going to give you so with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. We're going to start today by talking about Google guidelines for what makes up a great user experience, especially when it has to do with content and specifically we're going to talk from the perspective of Google's quality rater guidelines. And then after I go through a couple specifics there, we're going to talk more broadly about Google's page quality signals. I think that's what it's called. I haven't labeled in the next slide but things that have to do with what they've told us influenced ranking high and relevant search, you know, all else equal, if you have great content, what aspects of your website design, you know, must be present of your website structure must be present in order for you to rank high and relevant search. So the first part is a little bit more I would say qualitative. And then the second part is going to be a little bit more quantitative. So the learn more link is for an article I wrote a while back for Search Engine Journal. This was specifically focusing on aspects of Google's quality rater guidelines that have to do with the user experience. And so I think it was a couple of years ago now I read through the entire quality rater guidelines, which if you're interested in SEO, and user experience, I would highly recommend at least giving it a skim. It's kind of hard to do because it's like 175 pages, but there's some really good nuggets in there about how Google looks at search, how they judge quality of content, how they determine if a page of a search result meets the needs of the searcher who's looking for it. And so the quality rater guidelines what's worth mentioning is that to some extent you have to take with a grain of salt because this is not something that directly influences rankings. What happens is human quality raters that they hire read through these guidelines, they're tested on them to make sure that they understand what Google is looking for and then they manually rate different website results based on a certain query. And so what happens is that Google gets that information. It helps them you know, refine their algorithm in terms of the general direction they want to take with it, but it doesn't necessarily result in any manual adjustments for whatever websites they're ranking. It's it's more of like a research process. So that's, that's what the quality rater guidelines are. They're a tool to help Google research what the web looks like right now in order to make decisions about how they want to adjust their algorithm for the rest of us. But all that being said, Whenever Google gives us information, whenever they volunteer details about how they look at search, and how they define quality, and like a great user experience, I think that we would be wise to take note of that if it is in fact our goal to rank in relevant search. And I think at the end of the day, whether it is or not, I think Google tries to maintain a high standard for quality. I think that it's their philosophy, philosophy, that content is king, you know that that good? Content is important. And so again, whether search is your goal or not, it's worth it's worth at least like listening to what they have to say. And so, for your benefit, I've tried to break down some of the most important things from the quality rater guidelines specifically having to do with the topic that we are discussing today. So the first thing that they mentioned or they they talk about the quality rater guidelines has to do with interstitials. So back in, it was either 2017 or 2018. They made an update to their algorithm, and they told us about it is again one of those rare cases where they're just upfront. And they said that like if you're using popups say, for example, to gather somebody's email address, or you know, it maybe you're on an E commerce site to advertise the sale, something that obscures the content that you have to interact with you either put your email in, or you have to click the X button, you know, something like that, that you have to interact with in order to use the content on the page. They call that an intrusive interstitial. And so what happened was it really it really resulted in a big change for how people use conversions, I guess on their website, so you know, bloggers and people who do affiliate marketing and of course, yeah, ecommerce, and businesses trying to get email subscribers all had to fundamentally change the way that they approach gathering email addresses. And I'm going to talk a little bit later about what you can do instead, that doesn't violate Google's guidelines. But again, from Google's perspective, they say that interstitials make it difficult to use the main content of the page. And so when they're talking in the quality rater guidelines, they frequently refer to MC main content, which is like what the searcher is ultimately going to your website for and so you could say generally speaking, that they're trying to defend the experience of the main content. And to like, skip ahead to the point here about ads, when they talk about ads, that Google recognizes that and they say this in the quality rater guidelines, that ads don't automatically equate to low quality, they understand that ads are in many cases, the reason a site can continue existing. But that being said, there is like a right and a wrong way to go about implementing them. And so they say the too many or like large ads hurt the user experience. And then that case, the human quality raters should assign that site that result, a low rating. So again, you want to think in terms of the main content is the ad obscuring it? Is it taking away from it? If not, you're probably okay. But it's just good. To keep in mind that Google's not saying no, you can't have ads. You just have to be thoughtful about it. And when I did some of these UX audits in the past, like the ones that we're going to do later today, I did a couple of for some members of the Denver bloggers club one of the local clubs that I've been involved with here. And one thing I noticed about a lot of them was you know that they'd have an ad in the sidebar, they'd have an ad in their footer. They'd have an ad a couple times throughout their blog content, and it was probably Google Adsense that they were using, or some other ad network. Like it. And again, it's like I understand that you're monetizing your site using ADS. But at the end of the day, it's probably working against you because people if you were to look, you know into the data like the scroll depth and the time on page and things like that, using Google Analytics, for example. You probably see that on those pages that are very heavy with ads that people abandon the page pretty quickly because it's just a bad reader experience. So to go back a point here, clickbait Google has a couple of pieces of guidance in the quality rater guidelines about that specifically.\r\n\r\nGenerally speaking, a good page sets expectations or good title sets expectations for wherever it's leaving you. And so clickbait is something that it can certainly be effective and getting attention and getting clicks, but it can be a very unsatisfying experience if it doesn't do something to deliver on the promise made in the title. Um, the Google specifically says that clickbait headings detract from high main content. So, you know, that's something that they're specifically looking for and guiding people to, to comment on. And they say also that like every page should have a page title. It shouldn't just be presented without buttoning it up that way. And that title should describe page content. So again, it's a balance. Writing a good title, I think is very much in art. But it shouldn't be misleading. That's that's the key here. Um, so the last point here is that when it comes to creating content, you want the answer to your query to be pretty prominent in the results. You don't want people to click through and then have to dig to find that. And Google has a couple of different SERP features, I would say where they're trying to, you know, first of all, answer this within search so that you don't click through, which is a problem for us content creators, but it's also perhaps an opportunity when we think about things like a Featured Snippet, which is just that sort of box that shows up above any other search results and it's usually summarizing kind of like the nature of what that person is looking for what Google thinks that person is looking for. There's other things like Google will index parts of a page and link to that specific part and highlight it you probably noticed that yourself when doing search and looking for something very specific. And so that's something that they do, it's not, to my knowledge, it's not something that you can necessarily optimize for. It's it's their methodologies of indexing and surfacing content. But the example that they gave in the quality rater guidelines was something about like somebody searching Abraham Lincoln's birthday. And when somebody clicked through like it was present on the page, but it wasn't prominently answered. And so in that case, they were instructing the human quality rater to give that like a not as good rating for meeting the needs of the searcher. So yeah, I mean, definitely, that's, that's kind of most of what I'm going to say about the quality rater guidelines. But I really think it is a very interesting document and especially if you look at the examples they give in terms of how they're making those determinations. There's a lot of little nuggets of truth and we also have a blog post on the blacksmith website that digs into this even outside of like the user experience sort of and like design focus. So if you want another take on that then definitely check that out. We just went in and updated it recently. So let's talk more broadly now about some search signals from Google things that Google has told us about the page experience and you know, importantly, I think how to how to like measure that, quantitatively. Google, we talked a little bit about helpful content yesterday and that algorithm update which was the year a year and a half ago, something like that. Google has been has said that a good page experience is a requirement. For creating what they define as helpful content. So you know, all these algorithm updates are designed to support Google's mission, you know, the way that they look at content quality and things like that, of course, they all you know, more or less feed into each other, but I think it's worth mentioning that like that is an aspect of having helpful content. Alright, so we're gonna start with what is collectively known as the core web vitals so the core web vitals, this algorithm update, or Google announcing this page signal? came about? I want to say it was 2021. So they've been around for a while. And interestingly, and what we'll go over is they have changed slightly since coming out. But the idea here was to give people these these three specifically, page signals, were to give people more tangibility around how to measure the the page experience. Because up until that point, it was a little bit innocuous, it was hard to conceptualize, in terms of knowing like where you actually rank according to Google's own way of looking at it. So the first page signal of the quarter web vitals is the largest Contentful paint, which is a facet of page loading, loading speed. And so their definition is that it reports the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport relative to when the page first started loading. So if we think about I think most of these core web vitals are more or less referring to like above the fold, like what you see before you scroll, it's like that first impression that a person has with your website and most designs, most tools that you use to optimize loading and things like that, typically are set up so that the rest of the page loads later but you want you know what's visible initially to load quickly and first so that people can start interacting with it, and then it gives time for the rest of the page to load. So another way of thinking about this is that this signal takes note of the largest element on every web page and measures its total loading. Time. So maybe this is an image, maybe it's video, you know, typically at some, I would say some sort of media thing, but it could be your theme in general, it could be a very slow loading plugin. So these are all things that you'd want to keep in mind in terms of optimizing this particular factor. And when I say I guess, like the theme and plugins, it's like the output of them that you would implement on your page. So okay, so how do you get a good largest Contentful paint so according to Google, whatever this largest element is, is about 2.5 Seconds or Less of loading time and you have a little bit of wiggle room here, before it gets to, you know, this like poor area, but you'll notice that it's not a super long time. And I think that this particular man measurement here, it relates to something that Google's said before and shared in their own documentation, which is that, you know, the majority of people bounce if a website doesn't load within three seconds or less. I'm sure that that guidance has changed over time because that's a dated stat. But it still goes to show that we're kind of like within that guideline, with this particular measurement of a particular element on a page. So the next one is first input delay, and this is actually what it was. This has since been updated. And I'm going to show you an example of what this looks like. But let's let's talk about like the original intent of it and then what it has become. So first input delay is a measure of interactivity. It measures the time from when a user first interacts with the page to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction. So that sounds like gibberish. Basically, the lower a website's fid score, the more promptly it starts processing users clicks and swipes again, interactivity like how long does it take for somebody to actually be able to use a page? So this measurement per Google, a good fit is 100 milliseconds or less. So that's what it was right? But what is it now? So this GIF kind of shows an example of poor responsiveness versus good responsive responsiveness from Google's perspective, but probably from all of us, as users as well and looking at it you you probably have been in this position before where like, you click on something and then there's this little bit of a delay before you are actually able to interact with it. And so Google essentially took took this concept that they had initially defined as a core web vital and added some color to it, I guess. And so the new measurement is that it's, it's below or at 200 milliseconds. That so up from I think, what was it 100 before so they're giving you a I guess a little bit more time to create interactivity here. And just so you know, this new measurement is actually not fully unveiled yet, but it will be as of March. 12th. That's when this takes effect and takes over. So they say that, you know, some interactions will actually take longer than others. But when it comes to especially complex interactions, you want to be able to quickly present some initial initial visual feedback so that the user knows that something is happening\r\n\r\nthe time until the next payment is the earliest opportunity to do this. So the intent is not to measure like every eventual effect of the interaction, but the time in which the next interaction is being blocked. So you essentially want to delay you want to if you are delaying some visual feedback, then you might be giving users the impression that the page isn't responding to their actions, which is ultimately a bad user experience, right. So the goal of this new measurement is to ensure the time from when a user initiates an interaction until the next frame is painted in the shortest time as possible, for all or at least most of the interactions the user make. So it might seem like a small distinction between the first input delay and the interaction to Next paint but I guess if we were to summarize them, the first input delay is really focusing on that initial interaction. And the interaction to Next paint is focusing on the difference between interactions. I think that's one way to look at it. Okay, so then the last core web vital is related to visual stability. And it's called cumulative layout shift. And so their definition Google Developers definition is that it measures the sum total of all individual layout shifts scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan. of the page. Okay, but what does that mean? So Visual stability means that a web page remain stable throughout the users visit. It means that text isn't suddenly moving as new elements load or shifting other elements of the page and I think the the unfortunate end result of when this is bad, is when it makes the user click a link or perhaps a buy button or something like that, unintentionally, they were trying to click something but because of something shifting after it loaded, it pushed them somewhere else. And again, this is probably something where either something comes to mind where that's happened to you or like, the next time it does, then you'll be like, oh, yeah, that was the cumulatively out shift the site is getting, it probably has a pretty bad score for that. Um, so with the core web vitals, visual stability became more of a priority. And you really have to have very minimal minimal instability in order for your pages to be considered for ranking high in a relevant search engine results page. So those are the core lead vitals, that's probably the newest addition to these page signals that relate to the content experience, but we're also going to go over some of the old like, you know, tried and true important things that have to do with page experience, such as mobile friendliness. I mean, this is something this is probably one of the first big things that Google told us was important for ranking, high and relevant search. Besides maybe page load, I think Page Speed like performance and mobile friendliness, like these are things that kind of happened around the same time in terms of a Google like, came out and said, like, you must prioritize these if you want to rank. So Google used to be a desktop first indexing property. But you know, as more and more people started using their mobile devices, you know, the iPhone came out and so now suddenly, everybody had a computer in their hand. And then another thing that's probably worth considering too, is like a lot of people in developing countries like they might not have a desktop or like a laptop computer, but most people have a mobile phone at this point. And so Google now operates off of the idea, or off of the principle, I guess, of mobile first indexing. So if your website is not optimized properly for mobile responsiveness for mobile devices, then that is going to hurt it's going to greatly hurt your ability to rank and relevant search and your desktop site could look perfect. It can rank perfectly in terms of all these other factors that Google tells us about. But if your mobile site is off, it's it's going to affect your desktop rankings as well. So, you know, going into all of the specifics of what's mobile friendly is kind of outside the scope of what we're going to talk about today. But I mean, it's things like making sure that your text is readable. It's making sure that your images are, you know, visible and processable that they don't get skewed strangely. It's you know, thinking about some of those core web vitals and like how elements interact with each other like our buttons too close together so that people are hitting the wrong thing. So all these things are are considerations for making your website mobile friendly. And I think you know, with the way that things like page builders, builders for WordPress work, the way that people design themes for WordPress. This is this is like very much top of mind for everyone who's designing for WordPress. So it's a lot easier to implement now versus perhaps when this update was first released into the world. So Safe Browsing is something that I they've actually taken out of what they call these like page experience factors, like I don't know if it's an official one anymore, it was in the past. And maybe it's because now we have HTTPS as an additional factor that's kind of related but I think it's still worth mentioning this from a content experience factor. So Safe Browsing is just that you can use a website that is free of malware, you know, that you can be like, reasonably sure that like malware isn't present, you're not going to get it you're not going to interact with it, and that it's not you know, affecting the output of whatever site it could be installed on. And so in order to protect yourself against this, there's different tools you could use. wordfence is a customer of mine, so I'm going to talk about them and I think that their tool and their team is great. They have a lot of cool security researchers and cybersecurity experts on their team. So they're very on top of like any new things that come out, but they have this product called wordfence care where they'll go in they'll identify them all where they'll clean it up for you and we'll share best practices for how to avoid it in the future and you know, additional steps that you can take. So I do think that you need some sort of tool on your website in order to prevent, you know, the worst effects of malware. And I guess the other thing that I would mention too, is to like always have backups of your site, because malware can really mess things up. And so that's that's like your first line of defense. So HTTPS also has to do, I guess, essentially the same idea of like Safe Browsing, maybe from a slightly different perspective. And so Google again said, you know, we're not going to rank websites that do not have HTTPS in place compared to those that do. You know, after that update happened, and that was a slightly more recent update, but it was still a few years ago, and so HTTPS in order to implement that, essentially, you just install an SSL certificate. And to be fair, there are different types of SSL certificates. Most web hosts have that functionality, where you can fairly easily implement one and then it creates either automatically or there might be some manual steps. You have to take where it it redirects your existing HTTP URLs to the HTTPS version. So that's important to make sure that that's working. Otherwise, it's going to break your site but again, most web hosts have a fairly straightforward process for implementing this and a free ssl certificate or I should say an included one with your hosting plan, but depending on your needs, you might need a different one. So that's something that you have to explore based on your industry like, like E commerce might have a higher level of SSL certificate needed, but for you know, the general small business owner designer, things like that, probably what your web host has is good enough. And so to be able to see if HTTPS is working within Chrome specifically and I'm sure many other web browsers but but chrome because it's a product of Google. There's a little button next to your domain name in the URL bar, and you can click it and see that the SSL certificate is working and that the connection is secure and I would say that SSL certificates in HTTPS are important for people who are interacting with the website. I mean, you kind of you kind of have to have it no matter what in order to rank but they're the purpose of it is that if somebody were to be giving their sensitive information, you know if they're on an E commerce site, and they're, you know, putting in their address or their credit card number or you know, a banking website and people are logging in, and you know, once they log in, that user has access to their bank accounts and their money and things like that. That's kind of the like, ideal use case of HTTPS is to protect the people who are entering that sensitive information to make them feel safe on your website.\r\n\r\nWe talked about this earlier, having no intrusive interstitials so these are the pop ups the image you see is something that Google shared when they announced this ranking signal to show what not to do, essentially where these ads are obscuring access to the main content. You shouldn't have to click in order to get to the main content. So what do you do instead? Here are a couple of examples from the blacksmith website. So the first one is we have a floating bar that basically is at the top of the content and then just pushes it down. And in this case, I used it to add like reminder about my book, a button to click to buy it you could use it to get email signups. I think another great example is like E commerce. If you're having a sale or if you want to say, you know, free shipping on orders over $50 or something like that. I think that's a really excellent use of a floating bar. It's like what's the most important thing happening for this business right now or use it to collect email signups? Then there's also next to it is a welcome mat, which is designed you know, very similar lead to how an email popup would look but the difference is that it's like embedded on the page. So it's not getting in the way of the content. It's part of the content. You can choose whether or not you interact with it beyond scrolling. Another version of that is a content upgrade. So on certain blog posts, let's say that you have additional resources, maybe you've turned that blog post into a checklist or there's a certain template that you're talking about in the blog posts, and people you want to incentivize people to share their email in order to access it. So having a content upgrade, which again is like an embedded version, at the end of your blog post about that specific resource is a totally valid way to see get emails that's not going to violate this intrusive interstitial guidance from Google. The other thing that you can think about is using email popups, but delaying when they pop up. So that kind of gets around Google's guidance. You could use what's called like exit intent technology. So when somebody scrolls for the Back button, or the, you know, X in the browser, then what happens is an email popup gets deployed where you know, it asks for somebody if they want to subscribe, for example. You can also use that same idea based on things like scroll depth, if somebody gets to a certain depth on a page, you know, that tends to indicate interest. It's given them a chance to interact with the content. Or you could have a deploy on certain pages. You ideally after they've seen other pages, so maybe after they've gone to a certain number of pages that deploys. So there's there's a couple of different ways to think about it that don't get in the way of Google's guidance. And we do have a page I forgot to link it here. But we do have a blog post on the blacksmith website that goes into each of these things and different use cases and things like that a little bit dated, but it's all the same advice. Okay, so now that we've talked about Google's quality raters guidelines, which is indirectly related to search rankings, and Google's page experience signals, which are directly related to search rankings, I wanted to talk a little bit about website structure and design I would say, especially as it relates to ranking high in relevant search, but certainly how it impacts the content user experience. So it's kind of like a mix of the things that we're talking about, but expanding on them as well. So the first like factor that you want to optimize your website around your content in general, is crawlability. And when I talked about crawlability, I'm talking about Google's ability to like fully index all the resources on your site. Is there anything that is getting in the way of Google doing that, like, for example, errors in your sitemap, like maybe you're unintentionally excluding certain pages? Maybe you know, you haven't created enough connections between your pages for Google to understand how they relate to each other. And so a couple of guidelines here, you know, first of all, is that when you're creating content, it's important to add external links. Think of these as your ability to add context to prove claims these are things that you know, you can also use let's say that you're writing about a topic and there's a related topic and it doesn't really make sense for you to cover it in your content. Like maybe it would just make your your piece go on too long. But it's something that people might want to learn more about. So you find a relevant resource from a trusted site and you link it External links are great. I mean, you might, I guess, worry. Like, is that going to lead people away from my page? You know, is there any like negative impact of that? I think that's just kind of the way that content works, that people are always looking for more information. You can set it so that it opens in a new window so that they're still on your page while they explore that content. But yeah, as the best practice, have an external linking policy, it makes sure it's to good quality content and I think that, like with this next point, it helps Google understand what your content is about. So besides external resources, you also want to incorporate internal links. This just helps Google understand the relationships between the different pieces of content on your website, ultimately, what your website is about. It's helping with that crawl ability and that index ability. It's helping Google as robot to understand, you know, these different connections. So again, it's important really to have these two types of links and really every page and relate certainly every piece of content. And then, the flip side of all this is like as you create content, things are going to change. External links might become broken. Internal links, you might change, you know, like for example, the URL slug of them, and they might become broken. So I guess my first tip is to make sure that you have some sort of redirect solution implemented, there are different plugins that you can use to automatically if you change the URL slug of something, then it creates a redirect so anything that already links to a will be updated to that new link. But it's also having a process for like auditing your content to look for these problems. And one of the tools that I'm going to show you later today will help make that a little bit easier. But it's also just a matter of like I don't know, quarterly at least, or depending on the size of your website, quarterly, maybe every six months or so, having just a process to kind of go through what exists and if you need to fix anything. So we're talking a little bit about URL structure and I will say when it comes to creating content, you want to be pretty sure of the URL you want to use before you publish it. Because it is a factor in ranking, and you can use redirects, but it's kind of hard to explain them in the context of what we're talking about today without getting deep into SEO, but it's just generally like to trust me that it's a best practice to not mess with the URL after you publish, you know, after it gained some traction in search and things like that. But it happens and that's why you use redirects. But that being said, you could at least start with best practices. So the first thing is to incorporate your target keywords in that slug. So like yesterday, I showed you some tools we use for an article we wrote about AI detectors, so let's just pretend the keyword is like aI detector tools. You'd want that to be the slug. Without really like any extra information. You want to keep your URLs as succinct as possible so that Google doesn't have to take a lot of extra time to parse them. And so what that means is within within WordPress, you can customize your URL structure for blogging. And you can do things like add categories to the URL, you can add the date to the URL. My suggestion is to not do that the only reason that you might want to add like a subdirectory within your blog content or some other specific category, like if you have case studies or something like that, is because you can use that subdirectory to group pieces of content together to measure them in like Google Analytics GA for these days. But that's kind of an advanced use case and that's only if you plan on actually like doing a deep dive into the analytics. From an SEO perspective, I highly recommend against it. It should be your website url.com forward slash keyword. And when you're implementing those keywords, you're going to want to add a dash between each word so if the keywords AI detector tools, it's a i dash detector dash tools\r\n\r\nfor certain things like articles, a and words like the things that aren't, you know, specific keywords generally speaking, you can drop those when you're creating the slug. We have some guidelines on the style guide that I shared with you yesterday on the bugs with website that's also linked in the slides so or the PDF as well. So if you if you want to dive into more SEO and URL and keyword best practices and definitely check out our guidance on that. Um, duplicate content is worth mentioning from this perspective of the user experience mostly in terms of how Google would interpret that. So generally speaking, duplicate content is like you publish a blog on your website and then a situation that could come up that seems innocuous enough is that you know, somebody in your industry says oh my god, I loved your blog posts on whatever, I'd love to republish it on my site. And you say okay, and then maybe this site, you know, has more authority than you and maybe they have a better approach to SEO, maybe they've just been around longer. And what could end up happening is that even though you were the original publisher, and Google does take that into consideration, but this other site may outrank you with your own same content. So that's duplicate content. It could be a whole blog post, it can be an excerpt of it, it could be like a piece of it. So duplicate content, generally speaking, like try to avoid that. You can add a tag to your link called the canonical tag, which basically points back to the original content and says, This is the person this is the site that originally published it, even though we have now published it here. And so Google takes that into consideration, but they really make their own choices about who they're going to rank and so that that's not the be all end all way of making sure that the original publisher ranks highest in search, all else equal. Um, with all that being said, in my experience, you can typically republish things like your blog content on mediums like LinkedIn and medium you know, original copy without making changes. As long as you wait, I would say at least a week from the original published date to do that. This is this is my experience and that saying that it's completely scientific, the advice that I'm giving you, it's something that you should experiment with, if that's something that you're interested in, but also take note of what ends up happening and discontinue if it's getting in the way of ranking your own content on your own website. But when it comes to duplicate content, if you if you get approached by someone, you know, like the example that I gave, who wants to republish something that you wrote, what would be a better situation for you? It would be more work, but it's to say like, let me write a new version of this article, like maybe you take another stance on it, maybe you you just kind of like repurpose it in a different way. I would highly recommend against duplicating your content, either on another page on your website, such as using product descriptions that like a manufacturer provided or maybe you have, you know, two variations of something and so you're using almost the same product description or again, like the example that I gave doing it on another site, so I just wanted to add a cautionary tale for duplicate content because a it is kind of a bad user experience, but be it'll also more than likely hurt you in search without a very strategic approach. And then the last thing I want to say on this particular topic is about designing website navigation and best practices around that. So first of all, you want to use descriptive and recognizable menu item titles. And the example that I always give for this is the difference between something that's called news and something that's called blog. So in my in my experience, news is like an enterprise business that has a media arm and they're publishing their press releases and, you know, things that are relevant to their company, new product updates, things like that. Whereas blog is more articles. It's you know, the how tos. It's the list of coals. Its product lead content, for example, but it's not exclusively focused on that company's news. So it's important, I think, to match the heuristics of what your users are used to and one way that you might be able to figure this out if you're unsure is just kind of see like what the competition is doing and how they're naming their menu items. Or just ask some of your users like, Does this make sense? And we'll talk next about how to conduct a UX audit and that's something that you could do as part of it. There's this thing called the three click rule, which you may have heard about. Nielsen Norman Group actually debunked this as being like ideal or even something that you should totally consider. It's the number three is arbitrary, I guess is what I'm trying to say. But it's the idea that within three clicks, a user searching or user looking for something will find it through your website navigation without necessarily having to go to like an internal search. So well, it's arbitrary. I think it's still a good thing to keep in mind, which is just that people should be able to easily and quickly find what they need your your menu should support that. And then creating category grouping. So like for example, on our website, we have a Resources tab and it has the blog, it has some of like my YouTube content. It has our style guide. All of these are resources they have to do with like things that we're sharing with other people versus we have another tab that's about our work. And so it has case studies and like portfolio examples, and it's more focused on like Final outputs that you know, fit, you know, things that we do with certain clients. So just a couple of things to think about in terms of website navigation. I'm going to start this topic and then we'll break I think maybe in like five minutes from now, but I'll just go ahead and get this started. So let's talk a little bit now that you've learned about these different factors for how to understand user experience from, from the user's point of view from Google's point of view. Let's talk about how you can continue to make your own websites user experience better by implementing a UX audit. So UX audit, we might also call it a user tests. I think they're maybe slightly different concepts, but I'm going to use them interchangeably today. So usability testing involves observing how users interact with products like your websites. The purpose is to get a better understanding of how real people use what you've designed. And really the idea here is you want to combat any assumptions that you've made incorrectly, which is impossible for you to figure out by yourself. That's why we pull in other people. You can use your tests during just about any stage of project it doesn't have to be like the final part. It could really be during the wireframing stage. It could be you know at the midpoint it could be even after you've launched but you've added some new things. So why bother with UX audits? First of all, we're talking about it today because there's a strong relationship between the user experience and SEO. I think we've proven that by talking about specific elements of the quality rater guidelines that point to UX, as well as the page experience factors that Google's specifically told us. If you care about SEO, you should care about UX in terms of things like your page, loading your mobile responsiveness, and using things like HTTPS. To invoke privacy for your users information. It also allows you to uncover issues that might kill conversions. I mean, I think this is one of the most important use cases of a UX audit is to look for things that are getting in the way of whatever your end goal is with the website. Because we're all WordPress users here, probably most of us at least, you've probably interacted with whether it's your own design or somebody else's that where you recognize that somebody forgot to edit the demo content they've, you know, implemented it and they've gone in and made their changes. But you know, there's that hello world post they forgot to delete or there's something you know, and one of the menus, maybe the footer menu that they forgot to take out that, you know, they never actually customized and so I think UX audit would be good at surfacing that if you're if you're kind of blind to it, because you're too close to the project. And with all that being said, a UX audit helps to get out of your own head. We're all human, we're imperfect.\r\n\r\nAnd really, I mean, it's it's easy to say I think when it comes to writing content, like as much as like, I have a process for editing and looking for mistakes and things like that. Like I still use an editor whenever I write anything, because I need to get out of my own head in order to make sure that I'm not missing something important. So the same can certainly be said about about website design and doing UX audits. So at the end of the day, we all operate based on certain assumptions, but what if yours are wrong? I'll just go through another slide or two and then we'll break so in terms of picking user testers, there's a couple of different populations you could consider. And I'm also going to share a couple of different like marketplaces where you could find these people, but you can start with the people that already exist in your circle your colleagues, you know, the people that you work with, but also maybe your friends and your family members. Wow, this is a great place to start. Don't discount the impact of their own bias and desire to please you, especially if you're asking your mom for input she's probably not going to be super critical. And and you know, it's going to be more of a pat on the back then something useful. And even like people like your work colleagues, they they still may be too close to a project to provide useful feedback, but it's a good place to start. You can also recruit volunteers from your own audience. Again, they might have a bias if they really love you. They might be hesitant to give you really great feedback. But they're also probably very willing to help you make something that's better. So you can start with like your brand ambassadors, anybody who would consider themselves your biggest fans, things like that. Ultimately, though, your best bet is going to be unbiased third parties who don't know you, you know, who don't have like a stake in what you're doing. I would say ideally, if you could get a couple people from that pool and then maybe one or two people from these other pools of populations, you'll get a couple of different perspectives. And when it comes to some of the marketplaces that I'm going to show you, you can also filter by certain demographics, you know, age, gender, level of education, like whatever is important to like the target audience that you want feedback from, generally speaking, you can filter and on those people. Maybe we'll just go to the top of the hour, and then we'll and then we'll definitely break then. So how many user testers are enough for each design stage? I've mentioned a couple different populations you could pick from. This is another Nielsen Norman Group reference. They are a really great resource when it comes to anything user experience user testing and things like that. And so Jacob Nielsen wrote this column and he the column was titled Why you only need to test with five users. So that's his official recommendation is for each stage that you test five users is going to be more or less enough you're going to get marginal returns marginal new information after that point. So you know, unless you're getting wildly different things from those five user testers, you can probably stop it there. He also says that it's best to involve a larger quantity of user testers earlier on in the project if you're going to test during like the wireframing stage. Versus like, when a website's like basically ready to launch it's going to be harder to make noticeable and useful changes at that point. It's going to be kind of locked in. So I think that that makes sense. Um, so we'll just start with some of the questions that you might use. When designing usability testing, it is important to to be thoughtful about this before you start you you don't want to just like go into a blind and just, you know, like, what do you think of this website? You want to have a strategic approach if you want to get useful information? So my suggestion is to start start by defining whatever your goals are, I mean, is there something in particular that you're looking to test? Are you wanting to make sure that this design is understandable to your target demographic? Is there something that isn't currently working with the design, something that's maybe hurting conversions? So whatever your goal is, like set that intention, and the questions will come more easily after that? You want to also be asking questions about the tester and how they interact with the Internet. And there's a couple of reasons for this. So one example is like you could ask the person what kind of smartphone do you use and asking this particular question is good because it kind of gauges like their familiarity with technology like how they're going to interact with your design. Somebody who uses a flip phone, for example, is probably going to have a much different level of internet savviness and how they interact with the design versus somebody who has like the latest gadget as their device. The other benefit of this question is to especially if you're doing an in person test is to kind of relax them. It's kind of like a little bit of small talk almost so that they can ease into the test, especially if that's not something that they often do. You want to define a specific action for the user to take. So this goes back to the goals. Let's say that, you know, you have an E commerce site that you're testing and you know, there's some sort of issue with people abandoning the cart, you know, after they add some products and so maybe you want to have that person go through the action of adding something, and then starting checkout. And seeing like, where in the process, there's friction, that could be one action that you want them to take. And so at this point, you want to ask them how they go about it, have them sort of like narrate and explain as they go through each step. The more you can dig into each specific action that the user takes the more detailed insight that you'll get as to how they're actually using your website. So I think with that being said, we have a couple more questions that we could talk about, but I think now is probably a good time to let everybody take a little bit of a break. And then after that, we'll finish this discussion of how to run a UX audit. I'm going to give you a bunch of tools to use to do your own tests. yourself, essentially. And then we'll finish off with that live content UX audit. Sounds\r\n\r\nlike a good idea. No questions in the q&a right now. So let's just go and take that break. It's two o'clock. About a five minute break. Is that good? Maddie? That sounds good. All right. So let's back be back at 205 and we're quiet until then. See ya. Then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We're back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, folks, we are back and ready to begin. Let me get the recording started here. All right, folks, we're back for the final hour. Of the website content accelerator. We got a lot to talk about in the next hour, so I'm just gonna let you get right to it. Maddie. Sounds\r\n\r\ngreat. Yeah. Thanks for sticking with me so far. Excited to finish this off strong and yeah, hopefully give you some really tangible things that you can take away. For your own processes. So I'm continuing this discussion that we started about UX audits and designing them. Okay, so we talked about this. Let's go to the next point. What so I used to offer UX audits as a service when I used to be on Fiverr. It was my most popular gig by far. And the way that I structured it was I basically priced by the page. And so when you're doing a UX audit, you want to be sure to identify whichever pages are the most important, especially if you have a big site like you don't necessarily want. Just going back to the E commerce example like you don't necessarily want to audit like every single product page, especially if you're looking for trends, maybe one you know prime example of what your product pages look like maybe one category page, your homepage, your checkout flow, like if somebody had me audit an E commerce site that that tended to be kind of what it looks like. You know, it's also things like maybe more generally, your homepage, your about page service page. So it really depends on what you're trying to do. But you could ask questions in your UX audit, like, you know, what do you think this is about the page in general, or about a specific element of it? You could ask What strikes you about it, you know, you're trying to see how people are reacting to it, how they're understanding it, and then like, what would you click on first, like what, what is something that looks interactable? And how would you, you know, accomplish whatever the specific goal is. So those are ways that you could you know, further define this question. Or this idea here. And then we kind of talked about this, what do you make of specific elements? So again, if we're talking about ecommerce, maybe you have a button that's like a quick add to checkout where you don't have to go, you know, to the individual page, it just kind of pops up when you're looking at a specific category or on the homepage or something like that. And so you might want to test like, do people actually understand what the purpose of this is? So that's just one example. You know, many others that might factor into your own purposes and needs. So when it comes to designing these questions, a couple of best practices to keep in mind you know, first of all, users are generally not going to be designers. I don't think you I don't think you perhaps want them to be because you want them to look at it from a different perspective than you and so with that in mind, you want to avoid any sort of like web development or industry specific jargon in the way that you ask questions. You want to design for the average internet user, they should be able to understand what you're asking without you having to explain and clarify. I think another useful thing in general and this is this is when you ask for feedback about anything, but it's breaking up a complicated question into simpler ones. It's, it's okay, you know, to to ask a question and to ask a follow up question and to dig deeper. And that's something that we talked about yesterday when we talked about chat GBT and and getting that ideal answer that you want to get from it. Sometimes you kind of have to break the subject down and sometimes you have to add clarification later. So then, I've said this in a way but be as specific as possible when you're asking questions, you know, reference specific elements. Bring it back to the goal, if necessary. That's how you're going to get the most useful responses. So going back to that fiverr gig I was talking about, these were the questions that I asked and every order and sometimes they would ask clarifying questions after the fact. But most of the time, if I wasn't because it's fiber, and I'm sending them either some sort of like written report, or typically it would be like a video recording of me going through and doing the audit and if you work with a platform like Fiverr, or some of the other things that I'm going to mention shortly. I think it's the next slide actually. Typically, people are recording themselves interacting with your website unless you're doing an in person test, which is a different situation. But so you have to have some sort of standardized approach in that case, especially if you're offering this as a service like I did. But most of the time these questions got to the bottom of what that person was hoping to get out of the audit. And so generally speaking, I asked for the URLs for any pages they wanted me to take into account. I also told them you know, if you want me to take a quick look before starting the order to see if this is a good fit for me, you can do that. Are there any major problems that you want me to keep in mind throughout the process? So is there anything that you're noticing isn't working that you want? Me to focus on like a conversion factor? Can you briefly describe your target customer so that I could keep their perspective and focus? This is a really important one. I'm not going to fit in and perhaps you know, every user tester that you're going to work with is not necessarily going to fit that ideal target persona that represents your audience or the audience of the client that you're doing this on behalf of. But that doesn't mean that you can't adopt that persona. And again, a lot of these platforms will let you pick a user tester based on demographics. So that's probably like the best case scenario. But I think, again, you can still benefit from a plethora of different experiences. So anyway, you know, like I'm, I'm thinking of like a time where I did a user test and the target audience was, you know, generations older than me or something like that, where they're interacting with the web and they might have some access issues, you know, they might it might be harder for them to read the text if it's not big enough. Things like you know, contrast come into play between the words in the background. And so things like that, maybe it doesn't personally affect me right now. But I can still comment on that and say, you know, you told me that this was your target audience. To me like this strikes me as something that would be very difficult for them to interact with. And then the last question I asked is What important goals are you hoping that this page or these pages will achieve? So that kind of goes back to like the problem question, but I guess maybe from a more positive standpoint, and especially, you know, people use your tests at different stages, so they might not know what the problems are, but they certainly know or ideally, they have an idea of what they want that page to achieve. So these questions like very much covered what I needed to know in order to give people a satisfying UX audit after they put in their order. Okay, so how to run usability tests a couple of different ways that you could do this. A very wide range of methodologies and honestly a wide range of end results I would say, in person is like the gold standard because you're going to have the most control over the process. You're going to be able to meet with people, you're going to be able to dig in deeper to any like initial questions that you set. It's a little bit harder to do with something like Fiverr or user testing. Because there may be limitations I think with like user testing, it's kind of like you set it up ahead of time. And then you know, the user testers go through it, but you don't necessarily get to get to interface with them after the fact. And then with fiber, maybe you could do that it would probably involve making a new order. It's going to take time to get that feedback. It's not going to be as dynamic as doing it in person.\r\n\r\nIn person, it's probably going to be the most expensive in terms of like your team's time and like setting up a place for them to do this. And, you know, having some sort of incentive whether that's straight up cash or like a gift card or something like that for people's time. Another I think great option is user testing. And I was pretty sure that this platform had had changed or been sunsetted or something but I was looking at it leading up to doing this presentation and it still exists. It might exist in like a different format than it did initially did. Like I think you have to buy like a package. It's not just like one by one, for example. So I'm not super up to date on how it works now more more as to how it's worked in the past. But basically, the way that it has worked is that you specify certain tasks you want users to complete and specific questions for them to answer. And so users narrowed the process they go through until that test is complete. They have or at least had had a very large user base. So it was a great platform for giving like that exact demographic that you wanted to test. But fiber is very similar. I mean, fiber doesn't focus on user testing. To the extent that user testing does a fiber marketplace covers a wide range of services, but their usability like UX test marketplace is very large, you know, in comparison to some of their other focuses. So definitely a great place to find user testers. People start offering their services at $5. But they don't have to, that's an old fiber rule of thumb that it had to be five now people can set whatever price they want. They just have to set up their gigs in a way that makes them competitive. The way that I did it was I used to charge by the page. And then if they wanted, like a written report, that would be an extra cost in addition to the video. So it just depends on how people set up their gigs. But there's some level of standardization because people go to that market and that marketplace and they want to be able to pick you know, five people that offer something that take a look at side by side. Um, you could also do something that's not exactly going to give you all the information but it's an interesting practice, which is like recording users sessions on your website. So Microsoft has this newer tool called Clarity and it's free. And so you basically add like a little bit of JavaScript to your header. And you can see people interacting with your website, and you can see you know, how their mouse moves and how they scroll and things like that and like what they click on. Of course, unlike the user test, nobody's narrating it, there's no audio. It's literally just kind of like outside of context, how they interact with your website. So it's going to give you marginally useful information, but it's just another thing that you can use to try to troubleshoot. You know, why something isn't working, for example. And then this isn't like fully, like a way to run usability tests, but it's a like a tool that you can use or that perhaps somebody that you work with might use, which is to take screenshots and share commentary about what they're looking at. And I'm going to show you an example here. Oh, and besides clarity, when it comes to recording user sessions, you can also use a tool called Hot jar to do that as well. Okay, so this is an example and it's a little bit dated, but this is from bug herd. So bug heard is like a website feedback tool. That's another way to, to look at like what we're looking at right here. And this is something as a designer that you could use with clients. Some websites do this publicly where they have like a little thing on the side of the website that's like, Hey, do you have any feedback about this page? Or do you want to report a bug? That's, that's kind of why this exists, but I used to use it for my UX audits. I would just go through each page and then create like annotated screenshots and then I could explain export, the report that has all the pages and all my notes and things like that. So it's just a cool tool, whether you're kind of auditing your own site, you're auditing a client site, or somebody's doing it for you. So okay, from the flip side, we've talked about how to run a user test, but how can you be a good user test or maybe how can you identify one that you want to work with time and time again? First of all, it's narrating your thoughts as you have them. We've talked about this because that like stream of consciousness just, you know, noticing things and whether you really have something to say about it or not just like addressing each element on a page. And so that's kind of the next point here is is, you know, not just addressing them, but considering the impact that each page element might have. It's certainly acknowledging the perspective of your audience we talked about even if you're not a member of that target audience, how can you sort of take on that persona in order to speak on their behalf? Another thing that I used to do when I did these UX audits was share ideas for a B testing. Like I might say, you know, this is an interesting approach to your head and I wonder if you were to try this if it would, you know, get you better results and so it's it's giving them ideas, even if it's not a fully fleshed out thing, but to say like, this might not be it, but maybe you could try this. And then it's also it's not just about being like negative or pointing out what's wrong, but also acknowledging what does seem to be working. So that again, you can really like laser in and the feedback that's going to have the most impact for what they should change to resources that have really made an impact on me and how I go about content and design. First of all, is the Design of Everyday Things. This is like one of my favorite books. It's more about physical design, like product design, but there's a lot of transferable things that have to do with how we design for the web. And then don't make me think is like the quintessential resource for web usability and he's sent created, you know, multiple editions of this. There's another book, something about rocket science. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but, you know, anything that he writes like I would highly recommend. Okay, so we did break, and then I'm going to save questions for the end so we can get through the important stuff here. So I'm going to give you a couple more tools to use so that you can audit your own stuff. We're going to go through our live content UX audit, and then anytime we have left is going to be for questions. Let's get through it. Okay, so we'll start with Google tools, because again, when Google gives us information or tools, we want to listen because this is essentially how Google sees our content and how they prioritize what they rank in relevant search. So PageSpeed Insights is really a wealth of information. It provides data points from a variety of factors. And as you can see in this screenshot, currently, as of the core web vitals update, it starts with the core web vitals, so it starts from a point of this like, page experience and usability factor. They what's kind of interesting is that they have a part of PageSpeed Insights, and I'm going to show you like a fuller report when we go into the live content UX audit, but they have a piece of it that's about accessibility, but it's it's pretty bare bones. And so Nathan mentioned to me right before we started today, that Amber Hines is going to be the next workshop next month and it's going to be about accessibility. And her company equalised digital, they have a really great accessibility checker that integrates with WordPress. And so I would say that like that's probably going to be a much better tool for making judgments about if your website is accessible. Then what you're going to see on Google PageSpeed Insights and I think that that's something that is really important that you know, it's not always like at the top of our list when it comes to some of the other things that we need to do. To make our website usable, but it is really important. Whether you currently have an access issue or not at some point in your life, I'm sure you will. And now that I'm a man like this has become more obvious to me, maybe not in terms of strictly website design, but I think about like when I'm on a walk outside and previously, you know, I could just step around people's icy sidewalks that they didn't shovel or whatever, but now that I have a stroller, it's like okay, am I gonna put my kid you know, in the street. And so it's it's things like that or maybe you break your arm and now you can't interact with the web the same and so accessibility, I just wanted to like, make make the case that that is something that is so important because you your loved one, there's somebody that you know that it's going to make a difference for.\r\n\r\nGoogle used to have a tool specifically for testing the mobile friendliness of your site, and I was surprised to learn that they've actually sunset this tool. So now it's kind of a part of Google PageSpeed Insights. I think that whatever functionality was already in Google PageSpeed Insights for measuring the difference between the mobile and desktop version was kind of already there. So they basically just said, like, maybe this is like duplicating those efforts. I don't know. But it's no different. I'll just say that, that we that we use Google PageSpeed Insights to make judgments about how Google understands your website from a mobile point of view. Um, so we have the ability to measure like a snapshot of the current state of how your website measures according to the core web vitals are Google PageSpeed insight, but I also wanted to share within Google Search Console, there's this core web vitals report that measures it over time. And the most important thing, I think, to keep in mind with Google Search Console, and and also like Google Analytics. What I'm going to talk about specifically is more relevant to Google Search Console, is the fact that it tells you if you know, you become in violation of anything that's going to hurt your ability to rank and relevant search in terms of what Google tells us right in terms of the big things. And so that's why making sure that it's installed on your site on client sites is so important because it gives you notices if you're like way in violation of something, and it gives you the chance to fix it. Google Analytics so I would also recommend installing from the get go because it gathers important data that's useful that you can use to understand your page experience your content experience, but yeah, so this is just one useful report that relates to what we're talking about. This came up when I was prepping for the live audit later. Just the idea that there may be a use case for understanding what WordPress theme somebody's using. And I would say especially what plugins they're using, because both of these things can have an impact on your pages performance, which is a search signal on the loading, you know, on the interactivity, and all those those good things. So this is just one tool there's there's a bunch of them out there. But you know if if your website is experiencing any performance issues, or you just want to understand like how somebody else put their website together. I think this is a cool tool or a cool mechanism for that. I also wanted to share a general SEO audit tool, I see ranking so like H refs and SEM rush which I believe we talked about yesterday, this is another All In One SEO tool. It is not as fine tuned as the others as Ahrefs and SEMrush in terms of their keyword data, so that's why I don't use it for keyword research. They use different databases and approaches. But what I will say is their SEO auditing tool, which is like kind of the technical structure of your website, like goes head to head with any of like the big players in the market, and I'll show you exactly what that looks like. And the great thing about SEO ranking is it's a lot more affordable as an as an All In One SEO tool. And even from like the keyword research perspective, like you could use it to get most of the way there if content again isn't like your biggest focus are in and or if you weren't in a super competitive industry, it would it would do just fine. Um, a couple like editing tools. Hemingway is a great one. It's pretty simplistic isn't the right word, but it focuses on just a couple of things. It focuses on just a couple of factors and so that's why it's useful it doesn't it's not super distracting. And then Grammarly is one I would say that gets into a lot more detail. Grammarly is probably a more well funded company. Than Hemingway I wasn't aware of if Hemingway been monetized until I was looking at it the other day they have some AI functionality and they might they might have some other like outside of AI functionality plans, but I'm not sure that they had like a clear path to monetization before that but grim really has always had its like premium and like enterprise business use cases. And so I think that's probably why this tool is maybe a little bit more robust in terms of the suggestions it provides. They have a lot of linguists on staff and again, a disclosure that I'm a Grammarly Ambassador but I also like to use the product paid every person on my team that's a writer editor has a paid subscription to grammerly and I'll show you why shortly. Um, you know, you also want to look for plagiarism when it comes to creating a great content experience and when I talk about plagiarism, I'm not even necessarily talking about things that you do like on purpose. Some things that happen in grammerly, specifically is that you'll write something and it will detect a phrase that's been published elsewhere on the internet because you know, like there's a ton of content that already exists and it's bound to happen. And it'll be about something that's like a completely different industry. Like you definitely didn't take it from that original place that was published, but it's kind of like a reminder to go on and try to make it more unique. Just so that you know, Google doesn't think that you plagiarize even though again, it's not about intention. It's just about the reality of the content that already exists. But at the blacksmith, we use Copyscape for every piece of content we create, just to be sure there's no plagiarism, and then Grammarly. I don't believe the plagiarism check comes with the free version, but because we have the premium version, and that's included that we use it to. Um, one of the last factors here is you know, making sure that your content adheres to your style guide, whether that's a specific company style guide, or something like AP style, which again, is like the news journalism standard. I think it's like a great standard to use if you don't have a set style guide. And then I just have a couple qualitative qualitative factors here. So on the blacksmith style guide, which will probably show you we have a section about information architecture, and it's about a lot of these different things, how to break up walls of text, how to approach writing headings, how to keep paragraphs and sentences short and to the point. It's other things like you know, making sure that you have good flow with your content, you know that it has good storytelling, but it's something a human would want to read. And yesterday we talked about texts that whether AI generated it or not sounds robotic and how to avoid it. So that's another like, piece that you can use like in your own audits, those guidelines. Other things that I look at are like the thoughtful use of on brand visuals at the blacksmith we try to incorporate multiple types of visuals per piece. I'm definitely of the opinion that words aren't enough. I think as humans we're very visual creatures and people all have their own, like different learning styles. So that's also a factor, you know, written word, I don't think is enough, especially like for me personally, sometimes I need to like watch a video about it, or you need to like, you know, play with it in my hands or whatever. Like there's just different ways that people process information and so the more different ways you can surface it to them within your content, the better that your contents going to perform and help them and then things like consistent formatting like how you use bullet points, how you write headings. Again, a lot of this we cover in the blog Smith style guide. Just a couple other things. We talked about a B testing when we talked about how to be a good user tester and giving examples. So Unbounce is a tool that you could use. A B testing is essentially testing like different variants of a page usually you're testing a specific element like two versions of a page title, or two versions of an image, but it could be a full page as well. And this is something that Nathan and I also talked about, which is that I think he'd love to have an expert on a be testing do one of these workshops or you know a webinar in the future so if that's your if you know somebody like that, you know, that's something I think that all of us could learn some best practices from but again, another thing that you could test\r\n\r\nQuick disclaimer, then we'll jump to our live content UX audit. And we're talking about how to make your content better. And, you know, basically like different processes that you could use to to catch mistakes. But I don't want you to leave this thinking that perfection. Is the goal because it's not I think, you know, we're all human, we all make mistakes. At the end of the day writing for the web is is great because it's a very forgivable medium and unlike print, once you notice a mistake, you can go in and correct it. And so I don't want this to become a situation where you're beating yourself up if you did all these steps or you did some of these steps and like, you know, you still notice something later somebody points out like oh, this is spelled wrong or whatever. That's really not the point. So at the end of the day, I think my guidance for you is done is better than perfect. And be kind to yourself but create systems to catch mistakes. And that system could be having like a human editor, like like I mentioned earlier today, whenever I write something, you know I'm telling you all my best practices, but that doesn't mean that I always follow them, right. I'm an imperfect human being and, and things happen. And I think the other thing that I wanted to say is like we all have limited time we all have limited energy, and especially now that I'm a new mom, like I used to work really late at night and I would just crush stuff out and I would go over it a million times and now I kind of have to be satisfied with like not having the ability to do that and having a much shorter period of work time every day. That I can get stuff done and having to prioritize ruthlessly and that sometimes means that like yes, maybe I spelled something wrong, you know, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it. And I don't think you should either. So that's that's my soapbox. Alright, so let's go to the live content UX audit. Give me just a moment to get this set up. Um, so we're gonna go through like a couple of these different tools that we talked about today. And then at the end of this, we will have some time for questions. Okay. So Stacy, we're picking on you today because you submitted a really great example for this live content UX audit. And I want to start by saying there's like nothing wrong with this website. I mean, it's very good and it follows a lot of both the content and design principles that like I would instruct my team on. So what we're going to do today is is really nitpick for the sake of giving people things to think about when they are doing their own content UX audits. And so I'm going to start by sharing, like some of these tools and their outputs so that I can show you how to use them. And then what we'll finish off on is coming back to this page, and I'm going to give a couple of qualitative factors, you know, that I think can make the content just a little bit stronger. So again, I wanted to surface the blog SMIS content style guide. This is going to be the basis of one part of you know, some of the things I'm going to talk about and I'm going to reference that Chechi btw bot that we made yesterday, that's based on the style guide and that's, that's kind of what I use to audit this page from the content style perspective. But again, some things that we just talked about were first of all the SEO and Keywords section or chapter, where we talk a little bit about I mentioned that you could get some guidance for how to use awkward keywords like how to use keywords within URL slugs. I also talks about this information architecture, or information structures what we call it here section. So that's how to like essentially present information but also like break up walls of text, make it more readable. We talked a little bit at the end of today about formatting and how to keep that consistent. So those are just a couple of things. I guess we also talked about links earlier today and so there's some good guidance there. So you know, this is a this is a good resource if you're building out your own content style approach, and you can really build off of this because again, it's fairly industry agnostic. So anyway, I took this link, and first I ran it through Google PageSpeed Insights. And if you look at the desktop version, I mean it's pretty much near perfect. There's it's very difficult to get to 100 on any of these factors on I would say especially on mobile, but even on desktop, I mean, it's it's kind of like a what's the word? It's like a like a fool's errand to try to get to 100 if you're if you're this close, so, desktops looking really good. You know, they have a couple of things that you could do to fix it if you wanted to, and I have some suggestions for that, but we'll talk about it from the mobile perspective. So if you go to mobile, you'll notice that you know, first of all, the largest Contentful paint is one of the core web vitals, that it's a little bit in the red and it's and that's really like the only one and the largest Contentful paint again has to do with page floating, I believe. And so, taking like the definition we had, I'm guessing that that has something to do with this image because this is the viewport you know, that first load so it's the first thing that gets measured by this core web vital. And when I was looking at this yesterday, it's a it's a JPG file, which isn't like a super large file or anything like that. But one thing that you could do to to improve that page quality factor is to instead save this and serve it up as a web p file. There are certain plugins that you can use for that it's going to you have to kind of determine if adding like a plugin or taking that extra step of manually saving it like converting it and saving it and uploading it as that file is worth it. But that's that's like the one thing that I could think would would flip this so that it's the performance is a little bit closer to 100. And then we go into some of these other like diagnostic details. And I think this is where PageSpeed Insights gets really interesting because you can sort of dig into specifics here. A couple of things that I noticed were like minifying, CSS and JavaScript and there's some other things that are kind of related to optimizing like these different file types on the website. So I use a plugin called nitro pack. There's a free version and there's a paid version. I think the free version will get you pretty far, but it adds this like little Add at the bottom of your website. So I just pay for the paid version because I don't want that there are other things like nitro pack but nitro pack from the perspective of somebody who operates in the SEO world, you know who's looking for good performance, who's looking for best practices, that is my suggestion to you and to anybody who is seeing these things on their Google PageSpeed Insights. So naturally talking about these plugins for me like the got the question of does adding more plugins like is that going to hurt performance like what what is the marginal return of that? And so what I wanted to do next was take the URL and put it in that WordPress theme and plug in detector to just see like what the back end of the site looks like. And so we can see, it's like a custom or like a child theme. And I think okay, so apparent theme is Astra, so we know that like that's the technical basis on which this is based. I think generally speaking, Astra is pretty good for SEO from what I've heard, I don't have a ton of experience with it. And then also, this is like more what I was interested in was the plugins on the backend. And I mean, from what it detects it's there aren't that many plugins here, you know, it has like a plug in that works with Astra there's a Quiz Builder. This DOWNLOAD MANAGER contact form and then the Page Builder that's pretty lean, especially if those are the only plugins that are installed. You know, different people have different ideas of like, how many plugins is too many or like what's the optimum amount but I would say like, we're well under that here. So adding something like nitro pack, or you know, like some sort of web p image optimizer I think short Pixel does that.\r\n\r\nSomething like that probably wouldn't like hurt performance for the performance gains that would come with it. Um, okay, so the next thing that I wanted to do this is higher level than just this page, but I wanted to show you guys SC ranking. So SC ranking again, is this like All In One SEO tool? And I think there's like actually something wrong with my browser because I'm trying to like x this out, and I could do this yesterday and it just like wouldn't do it. So this is either a core web vitals issue or this is like I have too many, like Chrome extensions that are conflicting with each other, that I haven't been able to figure out why it sometimes messes with my browser. But anyway, that's an aside. So um, so this is a C rankings like technical website audit. And what I really love about this is that it's pretty straightforward. Like you can essentially read this as a non SEO and get a very good idea of things that you could fix to improve your website's technical structure. And as you can see this website like it's not bad, like there's room for improvement, but overall it's doing pretty good. Again, chasing 100 is a fool's errand. You're like, probably not going to get there but you want to get as close as you can with the time and the resources that you have. And so this page is really just like a high level overview. Again, this is about the whole website. It gives you an idea of like, how many pages were crawled, versus how many URLs which could include things like media files, JavaScript files, style, sheet files, and things like that. And so this can be a good indicator of like, if you know that there's more pages or there's more files, like maybe there's a credibility issue here. And if if some are getting excluded from this crawl, then they're probably also getting excluded from what Google can see. And so at that point, you, you know that there may be a sitemap issue that's getting in the way of the ideal situation. But what I really wanted to show you was the issue report. So these are things that you could fix. And what it does is it it has a category, it gives a specific issue, it gives you which pages are affected. It tells you you know, whether you're like compliant or whatever you want to call it if it's following best practices or not. And there's there's very few things here. But for example, like here's one that has to do with crawlability, which we talked about earlier today. And so nofollow means that we don't want the search engines to read this page and there may be a good reason for that. And so it seemed that for your pages are affected, you can click on it to get a description of the issue. So this is why it's really great for people who aren't necessarily like in the SEO world. A lot of you are website developers or designers and so a lot of this stuff like you'll be able to understand just by going through it and familiarizing yourself with it was there like included details. But yeah, so then you could see, you know, like which pages relate to this issue and whether or not like it's worth doing anything or if you really wanted them to be that way. But I'll give you like a more tangible example of something that you definitely want to fix. We have, for example, External links to 4x x. So like a 4x. X code is like a 404 means that it's not found, and there's different variations of that I'm sure a lot of you are pretty familiar with that. And so this means that maybe something that was linked on the website now no longer exists. And so it either needs to be replaced or redirected or something like that. And again, you can dig into the URLs you can see like what specific error code happened. This is also a really great report that you can give to clients. And then you know, depending on the level of familiarity you have with these different issues and how to fix them then you can give yourself a little bit of an extra job and some hours working with them to not only audit and go through the audit and explain the audit but then also, you know, implement the fixes. So I just wanted to show you that because I think it's it's such a great tool. So then the next thing I did was I ran this through Hemingway, and like I told you before Hemingway is like the sort of like, saying it's the more basic version of Grammarly. is maybe not exactly the right way to describe it, but it's the more like focused version. And so as you can see, what it does is it highlights different things. And it's kind of using I guess these colors, as you know, like things like it's trying to like draw your attention to certain colors as being like something that's more worth your attention or less worth your attention. What I've always known Hemingway as is a great tool for measuring active versus passive voice. And generally speaking, we want to try to avoid passive voice in our writing. And so that's probably what it's best used for. But there are some certain other factors here that are useful and interesting. And like yesterday when I told you about clear scope and how it measures readability, you can see that Hemingway also does this. It measures certain stats in terms of you know, just this piece of content, not necessarily compared to other pieces of content. And then it also has some AI functionality, that with a paid plan you can use to I think automatically suggest edits to some of these things. So just, you know one interesting tool where it's I think best functionality is free. So then I ran it through grammerly and I wanted to start by showing what I was talking about. With the plagiarism thing. Like there's something about inventory management on this article that says 1% of your text matches the source and that's like it's not even This article isn't even about inventory management. So I just wanted to show you guys that like, like these tools can be wrong, but it's still worth running that check a if you're working with a writer that's not you, just from a reputation standpoint, you want to make sure that there's no obvious like plagiarism problems with it but be so that you can just make like some small changes to this text so that Grammarly doesn't pick it up and possibly, you know, Google may be like taking a nod from some of the similar types of algorithms and uses. Again, not that it's intentional. It's just like, you know, because there's already this wealth of content that already exists on the internet about all these different subjects and of course, there's going to be similarities with phrasing and things like that. So then we get to these other suggestions. And I guess one other thing I wanted to show you about Grammarly is you can set goals for a piece of content and I don't know if this is a paid version specific but anyway, you can, you know, say like what type of writing it is. So I just said business for this. You can give a certain intent so I sent in form for this I may or may not be right with all these things, but I just wanted to see what would happen. You can say like, you know the level of experience of the audience, you can set like the formality of the tone. And then and then it gives you suggestions based on those things. And what's cool about grammerly is that it goes into these specific zoo specific different categories of suggestions. So correctness is about like grammar, spelling, punctuation, clarity is to cut in to help with like the flow of engagement, which is probably most related to like storytelling and delivery, I guess, you know, kind of related to both of those things, and then style guide. This relates to my company's specific style guidance, some of the suggestions that I have programmed in myself, and so a lot of it is like punctuation, because I have some rules about that. And it's probably annoying for my writers to have all this pop up. But some of it is word stuff. So like if we click this, something like actually, per the blogs and the style guide, and that's just our approach, we say these words are fluffy and don't add value typically. So like if you cut actually, it would say wait, so you have to go read these reports. Ones is another one that I have strong opinions about. I say don't use one to describe a noun you've already defined. Use the same word again or find another way to say it and then I gave an example here. So that's what's really cool about Grammarly is like you can like get these things automatically being suggested when you're working on a piece of content within your organization so that people don't have to remember like all the stuff that I showed you on my style guide it just automatically pops up. Waxing then I'll show you a couple qualitative things and then we'll go to questions is I ran this through my style editor bot, and it wouldn't I tried to get it to like directly edit the copy. And it wasn't unlike what I showed you yesterday which was like a shorter excerpt and the did I did that. So part of this is like me learning how to best use the spot or how to best design it or how to best query it. But what I did was I said Please review this blog post it gave it the era and suggest edits according to the blacksmith style guide.\r\n\r\nThey said consider the bad side consider the following suggestions and it felt to me like it wasn't actually like totally reading the blog. It was just giving like general tips and then I said please suggest updated copy based on these suggestions. And so what it did, which is kind of funny was it created like a shorthand version of it. And so what I was thinking is something like this could be really useful for like an email newsletter, you know, like an atomized version of the blog. Or, you know, maybe like you create some social posts based on these shorthand summaries of each category or something like that. You'd still probably want to edit it, but to me, even though it's not really what I asked for, I thought that that could be an interesting use case. So then I was like, Okay, well can you actually do the edits while preserving the original length of the piece? And it was like no, but it kind of went back in and gave some more suggestions. And then I was asking if it was actually able to like read the original article, or No, I was asking about the visuals, because one of the suggestions was about visual aids. And I was like, well, there's a ton of visual aids on that article. And so it said that it can't directly process or interpret them from the article itself. So that was kind of interesting. And then I gave it the copy and then it still kind of like generally gave examples. So you know, it's a work in progress. I guess that's what I wanted to share. It's still it's still gave me some things to work with. But it wasn't exactly like the editor that I was hoping that it would be like it like it kind of was yesterday. So it seems to me if I were to make a hypothesis here that it's probably going to be more useful for shorter bits of copy, you know, maybe different sections or titles or things like that, versus trying to edit a whole article all at once but it will give you food for thought in terms of general edits that you could make. Okay, so last like pieces of content on this before we end up today. We talked about menu navigation. And so the way that I would change this menu navigation would be home about blog and I would just change this to contact and what I like to do with whatever like the most important menu item or call to action is maybe add some like button styling so that that stands out, it just simplifies it. It's not distracting and you know, hopefully leads them to the ideal conversion. So then the other thing like the header, because we're kind of talking about the whole experience, not just the article itself, is what I what I came across, typically in the UX audits that I did was a similar type of header where it has the logo, but unless the name of the brand is like really straightforward about what you do, it could benefit from having some context like a tagline about what you do and so I don't think that we do it on the blog. So some a very bad example. But you can imagine like in my header it should probably say like SEO and content agency. But you know, maybe because it's called the blacksmith that also might work I don't know submitted a test. I'm generally speaking again, I really liked this article, I thought that more or less like it fit the same types of standards that like I would have for my team in terms of putting together conversational tone like breaking texts up nicely, having really useful visuals, a couple of just like very small things. We have the social share buttons. My suggestion is to add a CTA that's like share this on social like, it might seem obvious, but just saying that might be useful, might also be useful to have them float as the person who reads it because they might decide at different points that they want to share it through. I love the visuals there was one visual where I think there might be an unintentional tooltip here where like when you were taking the screenshot your cursor was probably over this SPFx aligned area right here. And so it took the screenshot with that and it kind of obscures the stuff behind it. This is the type of thing that like, because I do these all the time I nitpick and probably nobody else would notice, but I just thought that I would mention it. I'm sure I'm gonna like pretty much ended there. The last thing I was going to say for now is with the Related Posts, one of them doesn't have the featured image. So it's kind of, you know, it just looks a little bit lopsided. That's a super easy thing to fix. And then when it comes to consistency um, you might want to capitalize text stuff just so that it's consistent with the capitalization of the other category. And then maybe also like space it out tech space stuff. So again, like I really don't have that much to say here, because it's very good and it has good information. The last I guess big thing is the actual place where I'm reading the content is kind of narrow and skinny compared to the full frame here. And so I wouldn't recommend going full width with the content but I think we could break out the box a little bit more or break it out of the current box so that it's a little bit wider. And I think that that would be a great reader experience. So with all that being said, I'm going to pull back to my slides really quick just to pull up like the question slide and things like that. But I mean basically we're done here. With the planned content. I'll once again bring up my book because it is about what we're talking about with content experience. It's about my approach to content writing, content style, you can grab a free chapter of the book on the writing for humans and robots.com website or you can grab the book on Amazon via Kindle or print edition. And yeah, that's pretty much it. So I will take any questions that may have popped up in the meantime.\r\n\r\nYeah. All right. So thanks again, Stacey for letting us use your content as I know that it's a little weird with talking about my stuff here but ya know, it was very much appreciated and a it's an excellent article. We've talked about that already. The content, it was it was hard\r\n\r\nto find stuff to comments on honestly, so I had to go into nitpick mode.\r\n\r\nSo grateful to you, Stacey. Let's see folks last chance to ask questions here. There are no questions today,\r\n\r\nwhich is covered at all. Everything's done.\r\n\r\nIt's it's been a very good and thorough presentation on lots of tools. Things to consider as we're developing content for and helping our clients create content for the web. Yeah, like Ben says firehose of information really good stuff. Greg, this is a good rewatch as well. Alright folks, last chance before we land the plane. Your if you have any final questions for Maddie, if you want to just say yes in the chat that way we know to pause otherwise, I'm going to start moving towards wrapping us up. All right, yeah. So thanks there in the chat. Okay. So Maddie, wrap us up here. Give us our final takeaway for the training.\r\n\r\nSure. I'll answer one question. Barney asked if I'm in the Denver area. Yeah, yeah. I'm in Lakewood, technically. But yeah, okay. Final wrap up. treat people how you want to be treated with your content. That's good.\r\n\r\nThat's really good. And true, right. So yeah, awesome. Well, thanks, everybody, for hanging out with us for the last couple of days. It's been a really good set of information here. A lot of things to consider. And hopefully it'll help us all up our game as we're dealing with content on the web. Thanks again. Maddie. For your expertise. And folks, we are back tomorrow as usual 1pm Central for office hours here on solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nNice. Well, thank you so much, everyone for your time and attention. And yeah, I hope I hope there is like one good nugget for you to take away and if you ever have any questions about content and UX, I'm always happy to be a resource.\r\n\r\nVery good. 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This again was this is building on last year's content workshop. And the link for that is in the course description if you missed last year I would strongly recommend you check that out. Really good stuff. So Sadie has your book MADI Naidu\r\n\r\nwhy it's really good love it seems like it's been a while since I published it, but you know, I tried to write it so that it would still be useful today. So I hope that you're all finding that. Yeah, we're sure.\r\n\r\nReally good stuff. Alright folks, if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat say hi. We are about three minutes away from getting started. And they're in the chat once again, is the link bundle that has the slides and the replay link as well as a link to Matty's book. We are Yeah, we're gonna have a lot of fun today and tomorrow, two hours today, two hours tomorrow talking all about website content with I mean, let's face it an expert in the field\r\n\r\nappreciate the vote of confidence. If you if you measure it by yours and I suppose expert, that's something that I've been doing for a very long time. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nAlright folks, let's hear from you in the chat. Check in question today. How about give us a one to 10 rating? How comfortable are you with generating website content? One being it's a real challenge. 10 being a pro, let us hear from you there in the chat.\r\n\r\nAll right, about a minute and a half to go.\r\n\r\nMaybe a good question is how many of you are forced to make content in order to finish your website designs? Yeah, to get your website launched.\r\n\r\nHey, Sue bullets are my friend. I like bullets. Alright, several folks just joining us. The links are there in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up that chat and you'll have the link to download the slides. Grab the replay and all of those things. We are about a minute away from getting started. Second question today is what's your comfort level? What's your expertise at website content creation one to 10 If you had to rate yourself love it. Love it. Tracks Yeah, five but a if you're using AI, that's awesome. Yeah, so a lot of folks are higher on the scale today. That's exciting, that hopefully you're gonna get some tools to up your game even further. He's got a lot to share with us. Over the next couple of days. Hey Terry. Dab Alright, folks, we are just about to get started. Glad you're all here. Diving into the web content workshop momentarily. Just seconds. To go. If you're just joining us in zoom, I'm going to drop in one more time the link bundle and it's three after so let's get the recording started. And we'll dive right in. Let's do it. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy and I'm joined for the next couple of days by my friend Maddy Houseman, Maddy is a sought after sought after copywriter specializing in enterprise b2b Tech brands. She's the CEO at blog Smith and the author of writing for humans and robots, the new rules of content style. She has been recognized on numerous industry lists as a top content marketer and I'm really excited to have her back for another course here on solid Academy so welcome back Madi, how are things going for you?\r\n\r\nThanks, Nathan. I'm really excited to be here. Like I said, you know, it's been it's been a little bit of time since I've done you know, a presentation like this since I've really gotten to use my brain. For those who don't know, I recently had a baby so he's in daycare today so I can fully you know, give my attention to this and, you know, embrace this identity of mine as a content creator who loves to learn and you know, who now has this other facet of my life but marrying those two in a joyous way so, so yeah, really excited to be back and and put my brain to use and share you know, some of the things that I've been exploring you for the past several months to I guess a year, all this new stuff with AI, that's what we're gonna focus on today. So really excited about that. Yeah,\r\n\r\ndefinitely. So we have a long way to go over the next couple of days and the thought just occurred to me Maddie, we really ought to have you back for another informal conversation just on how you prepared your business. So that you could take some time away, because that's really, that's quite a feat.\r\n\r\nIt was definitely and I'd love to do that. I'd be happy to.\r\n\r\nYeah, that'd be that just occurred to me. We should definitely, folks. So let's see the links are in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom. I'm going to drop this in one more time. There you will find the link to download or grab the slide deck. Also the replay link that will have the transcripts and chat logs after we finish is there for you as well. On that replay link you'll also find a link to last year's course, which is more some more foundational principles of the things we're going to unpack even further today. So if you missed last year's course, all the replays are there, follow that link, rewatch them, it's really good stuff. And of course, if you haven't seen Matt, he's booked the link for that as in the chat as well. So Maddie, give us a high level view. What are we going to be covering for the rest of today? Totally.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, we're definitely going to expand on some of the things that we started to talk about last year, but really, you know, thinking about what's changed in the past year and so that's why today we're going to focus mostly on AI kind of how AI factors into content creation, how you can use AI tools to create content, how you can use AI tools to detect AI content. You know, things like how to write an excellent chat GPT prompt and one thing I'm really excited to share with you because it's something that I've just kind of figured out for myself is how to make your own personal GPT. So that's what we're gonna do at the end of the day, I'll show you step by step how to do it. You can follow along, I'll show you how to adapt it a little bit. And then really, what we're going to start with today is I guess a bit of a cautionary tale when it comes to AI so we'll start with the most negative and we'll build up to the most positive. And then tomorrow, the focus is going to be on content UX, the user experience what I like to call the reader experience. So it's going to be more about you know, the elements of design and how they interact with content, how you can create this great reader experience for the people who consume your designs and content and so we can get a little bit more into what that looks like. But I guess if I was to like talk high level about today versus tomorrow, today is like things that I think are really like novel and fun. It's like It's like exciting things that that we're all learning kind of at the same time and that's that's what's so exciting about just like nobody has it figured out. And tomorrow is like the stuff that I'm really passionate about. That's a little bit more, you know, foundational and again, about like that full experience. So I guess with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. Yeah,\r\n\r\nabsolutely. Me give a couple of housekeeping notes that will disappear. Folks. We'll be taking a break in the middle as usual for these courses. So roughly at tube central an hour from now, we'll take about a five to 10 minute break depending on where we are timewise. So at the end of this first hour and the end of the second hour, we'll have a time of q&a as well. I would invite you to use the zoom q&a Link to ask your questions. Please don't use the chat, but use that Zoom q&a. That way we can keep all the questions in a nice list. And also, if you'll keep that Zoom q&a open, if somebody asks a question that you also want to hear the answer to just click the thumbs up icon to up vote. And we'll take the questions the order of up votes. So with that again, yeah, we are recording in the replay. The transcript is all there and it'll be available for you about an hour after we finished today. So Maddie, I'm going to disappear take over. Let's get started. Let's\r\n\r\ndo it. My housekeeping is just first of all, I think that we all can learn a lot from each other when it comes to AI. And so like that's how I've picked up the things that I'm going to share with you. It's really hearing it from other people seeing how other people are using this tool. It's interesting because it's so new that like, again, we don't really know like what the best use cases are. And there's this world of possibility that we've only just started to touch. So one thing I'll ask is like if you've come across an interesting AI use case, you know whether you have something that's top of mind now or whether going through what I'm going to talk about today sparks it like please share that in the chat. I'm sure all learn from it. I'm sure other people will learn from it. So that's one thing and then I'll just ask that if there's anything that resonates with you, as I'm talking today, or you know as other people are sharing ideas in the chat. I always love when people tweet or I guess x takeaways these days. So my Twitter is in that bottom right hand corner. So use that and I always love to retweet and share with my audience too. So yeah, let's go ahead and get started here. Nathan already gave a nice bio like who I am. Just to give you you know, more information about the blacksmith. We're a holistic content marketing agency for b2b technology brands. We create data driven content. I'm going to share some of those processes here with you today in terms of how we're using AI tools to do that. And our focus is creating content across the sales funnel with a focus on the reader experience. So again, that's really what day two is going to be about. It's creating this ideal reader experience with the intersection of content and design. And then my book writing for humans robots, the new rules of content style. If you've ever read the book, The Elements of Style, I was really kind of riffing on that in a more I guess, modern way since that book was written back in 1918, or 1919. Of course, at that time, the internet didn't exist. We weren't necessarily addressing a global audience when we publish to the web. We are now and so that's kind of the idea behind this book is how can you how can you speak plainly and inclusively and effectively when you're writing for the web? And so with all of that being said, let's go ahead and jump into the topic of today which is AI Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention. Day two, when we talk about content UX. I'm going to do some live content UX audits. If you were here last year, we also did this this is something I really love to do. And so this form here which you can also click through the slide being links that we've shared in the chat. Just has a couple questions like your name your brand. It'll ask for a link to a specific piece of content. If you're comfortable sharing for this live UX audit, and then it has the question that's optional. If there's anything you want me to focus on, and then like an aspect of the content itself, but the purpose is to collect some, you know, ideas from from all of you of what to audit and we're going to basically put the principles that I'm going to be talking about tomorrow into action you know, show you how to use some different tools show you how to use more also, like qualitative analyses. And so again, I would love your examples so that we can make it really useful for you to give you know, a second pair of eyes on your content. And you know, it's always done in a very respectful way. I'm not looking for problems, I'm just showing you ways to, you know, make your message clearer to make your content experience more effective. So I'll, I'll aim to remind you about this again at the end of the day, and then you know, before tomorrow is probably when I'll pick what we're going to audit for tomorrow. So get them in today, whenever you have a chance. Okay, so artificial intelligence. That's really the focus of what we're talking about today. Super exciting. Things are happening here. It's also kind of a wild wild west. It's it's something that there's many positive use cases but there are also some negative ones and so I really wanted to start with the negatives so we can kind of get that out of the way so we can you know, maybe share some like cautionary tales here. The link that Learn More link is an article that I wrote for Fast Company, and it's going to go over some of the same things that I talked about here in terms of some of the limitations and also really like the ethical implications of using AI to generate content to publish it as if it were your own. So yeah, let's go ahead and dive into that. Um, so I think like the first major implication, negative implication of AI or something to think about, especially as a creator, because many of us here we're writers, we're designers, so we're creating things. They they are our intellectual property which we may assign, you know, to a client, for example, but it's still at its root. It's something that we made. And, you know, the thing about AI is, first of all, it can't think for itself. It uses things like machine learning. It uses algorithms and processes to make sense of what's already out there. But it's not, at least right now in a place where it can completely invent something new. If it does. It's the result of this machine learning it's not the result of true uniqueness. So you know, essentially, AI and I'm gonna explain this example in a moment here, but it's, it's being trained on what already exists. It's using our intellectual property. And the worst part of it is it's doing that without giving us credit. I mean, if you go in do a search on Google, it was called Bard, but now they've rebranded it to Gemini. In my experience, and and I haven't used it recently, to be honest with you, but certainly within chat GPT there's no like source given for the answer to a prompt. It's not directing you to a specific piece of content are saying, This is what I referenced to come up with this answer, which also creates an issue of you know, whether or not that answer is something to be trusted, and we'll get into the fact that AI is oftentimes confidently incorrect. But right now, with the focus being on the fact that it's essentially plagiarism and my perspective, if you are taking what you generate with AI and then publishing it as your own this is probably easiest to think about when you think about visuals, and we're going to talk a little bit about AI generating images and kind of like how that works and some of the issues with that. But you can think of like aI trained on a certain set of materials, certain artists body of work, you know, that style, if it's trained on a certain style and the output is a certain style, it's pretty easy to identify that, you know, it's riffing off, you know, one individual's intellectual property, it's a little bit harder to make that distinction with the written word. But that doesn't mean that it's any less important to recognize that it's, it's an issue if if AI is passing off its own material or your material as its own. So, what I wanted to share here, this is an article that was published on futurism. It's an it's a screenshot from it, and it's about CNET. They have this blog about different like personal finance topics and things like that. And so when it comes to things that affect your finances, whether it's subjects like you know how to buy a house and you know, like had this setup a mortgage, you know, whatever. Or, in this case, like you know, how to pick a credit card, how to use credit cards, how to decide what college to send your kid to, or something like that. Google calls these topics, your money, your life. And in comparison to any other topic that you publish, that you're looking to get ranked in relevant search on Google. Google has the highest standard of quality for your money, your life topics. So CNET was transparent about the fact that they were publishing AI generated content such as the example shared here. But they had a human fact checking it and so the byline was like you seen that money or something like that? And then I think they also had like the byline of the human editor published next to it, but they told us you know, they they weren't trying to hide that it was aI generated. So this excerpt is you know, maybe kind of a silly example, but it's showing how\r\n\r\nthis article that they wrote, which was about can you buy a gift card with the credit card. This first example is a line that's almost verbatim from a rivaling Forbes article. And then this next example is how literally, the table was the exact same title. So, you know, you could question if it was only one of these things, you know, is that really plagiarism? Is that really a problem? But the fact that it's both to me shows that you know, not only did CNET not take a high enough standard of care, quite honestly with the content that they were having a human fact checker edit, but I think it also begs the question of like, if you're generating a full piece of copy, like a, you know, long form blog article, like are you ever going to be able to definitively say that it's not plagiarism? Or that it's not like literally, you know, word for word related to any other competitor article out there? And I think the answer's no, because that's what the AI is using to generate the content. In this case, and then one that I'll share subsequently, AI is, is almost like a crutch for CNET or for others who are who are taking this approach of generating that full article and then having the human intervention and I'm going to share some better ways to use AI in your article creation process. But yeah, I mean, the problem is ultimately that there's no way that they can catch every instance of plagiarism, and it just honestly creates more work and, and the worst part of all, is that it essentially ruin their reputation because they didn't take a proper standard of care. Another example that's, that's ongoing, it's unresolved at this point, is that the New York Times recently sued open AI who's the creator of chat GBT saying that, you know, their, their publications, their media. was unlawfully used to train open AI. And the last I saw, I think there was an update actually today that said that the New York Times is like misrepresenting the evidence or something like that. But again, I mean, it really just like begs the question of you know, if you publish content, like is it safe, you know, is it going to be used to train a model which is then going to spit it out and somebody else is going to publish it and benefit from it without properly crediting you? So that's one major issue. So this is one that I would love your examples. If you have anything similar. This is this is a picture that I saw recently in like a Facebook group about AI. And so somebody had done some prompts about dog breeds. And if you kind of squint, you're like, Okay, maybe that like a chart of different dog breeds, but then you look and you see all the like, really strange faces and like this, like gibberish text, and even the text that you can read is like not related to any dog breeds that currently exists. So, yeah, again, if you have any examples of like an image you've generated that has resulted in something like comically incorrect like this, I would love to see that in the chat. That would be fun. But I guess the point that I want to make with this slide is that at least at this point, AI can't effectively art direct you could give it a prompt and you could maybe get it to a point where you can get something useful. I think it's called mid journey. There's this one AI image generator that creates these like hyper realistic things with like any detail you can get it and something like that is so cool and very interesting to experiment with. But I think this came from within chat GPT I'm gonna say it wrong, but it's called like Dali Dali. And in my experience, when I've used it to generate images, it's the same sort of like gibberish text. The image, you know, is like, vaguely related to the prompts that I give it. So I'm using it for like, kind of like business article use cases to like generate a figure from you know, some like the data I include or something like that. I've never gotten something useful yet. And I think beyond that, it's like you still as a creative have to come up with the prompt. It's not like AI is going to be able to help you within the context, say of like an article. They're not going to be able to come up with like five unique media examples that you could include. So this is something that I think, you know, as humans, like, we still like have control over this or so like the best Abbot. Um, okay. So next I started to talk about this, which is one of the biggest issues with AI to date, the fact that it is confidently incorrect. So this is another Cena example, I'm going to read a little excerpt from. This is another futurism article. They did kind of a deep dive into this. See that AI but issue? So the excerpt is after the outcry after you know, some of these plagiarism things came to light. With the previous example. Steena editor in chief Connie Guglielmo acknowledged the AI written articles in a post that celebrated CNET's reputation for being transparent. without acknowledging the criticism, Guglielmo wrote that the publication was changing the byline on its AI generated articles from CNET money staff to simply seen that money as well as making the disclosure more prominent. Furthermore, she promised every story published under the program had been reviewed, fact checked, and edited by an editor with topical expertise before we hit publish, and I think that this is referring to like before this article was published, and so what you're looking at right here is, I think a more serious violation of the high standards that Google holds for your money your life, making sure that it is, you know, written by an expert that it's heavily fat checked, you know that you're not publishing something that you can't stand behind. And so this is about calculating compound interest for savings and as you can see by the excerpts, it's, it's wrong, the calculation is spitting out an incorrect final number. And so it may seem like, you know, small potatoes like, you know, like, what, what's really going to happen to the person who misinterprets this? It's certainly not like, you know, having to do with like, buying a house and like getting those equations wrong thread savings, but I think it just goes to show that there's, you know, there's a lot of problematic things that can happen and it starts here and if if we don't maintain a high standard for content quality starting here, then it could exacerbate it could turn into people being misled when it comes to making these like bigger money decisions in their life or you know, other things, your money your life, I think also, in some ways has to do with like, health and like medical stuff and things like that. So there are like potentially, you know, bigger and like worse implications than even just like the financial aspect of it. One thing that's interesting that that I misunderstood or I was misled about AI. Really up until like, a week ago or so, is I thought that you could ask chat GBT if it wrote something. So that was something that I saw other people talking about. And it's something that at the blacksmith like we've tested out ourselves you know, when working with like a new writer and wondering how to detect like if content was aI generated, and I found an article on open API's like FAQs or help desk or whatever that said, whenever you ask chat GBT if it wrote some you know, specific piece of copy for example, it just make something up like that's, that's literally what open AI says you could Google it yourself. So, you know, it's weird that it doesn't just say, I don't know, you know, it doesn't just give you like that as a straight answer. It's fine. If it doesn't know, but for it to purposely just decide, you know, bye bye narrowly, like if it's yes or no, and that it just tells you that whether it actually knows the answer, like that's very concerning to me. So a little bit of a cautionary tale. Um, but yeah, I think at the end of the day of the CNET examples, what I'm trying to impress upon you is like, does it really save time, if it like, impacts your reputation long term like I just don't think that that the best way to go about it is to generate the full piece of content and then add the human and I think that I think that AI can help intermittently and we'll definitely get to like how exactly to do that shortly. Um, so this article is also kind of fun. Charlie Brooker's, a creator of Black Mirror. If any of you are familiar, it's just this like really kind of weird messed up show on Netflix. It's very like future focused. It's like, I would say fairly.\r\n\r\nWhat's the word like it's, it's, it's kind of like post apocalyptic in some ways, not always. But it always like seems to end and kind of a scary place. And it's episodic, like each each episode I mean, to say is like its own storyline. And so the most recent season started to touch on themes of AI since that has become you know, something that has infiltrated society. And anyway, this article, The Creator who you know, has a very interesting mind based on what we see on this Netflix episodes, said that he doesn't think AI is messy enough to replace creative people. So there's good news guys, which is AI can't can't match that with us. I think on another hand AI, it lacks human empathy. You know, it can never like fully understand, like, who we are and what we go through. I don't think it ever will unless it's somehow achieved some level of sentience but yeah, I mean, ultimately, like in its wildest dreams, whatever AI, you know, thinks that it thinks it could never generate the ideas that we come up in our wildest dreams. And I think that the proof is in the pudding in terms of thinking about things like some of our favorite authors and how they create prosaic copy. So here's, here's a quote, I love Stephen King. He's kind of a machine himself, but human as far as I know. So this from needful things, one of his more interesting books, because the trust of the innocent is the wires most useful tool. And so, you know, fed copies of Stephen King's worked. You can ask chat GPT to write in his voice. I don't know if Stephen K would appreciate that or not. But, you know, I think the limitation is that it couldn't generate something like this on its own it can generate like derivative work of his but it couldn't come up with this on its own. Ai, you know, it, it isn't it doesn't have uniqueness. And Google has historically said that it's important. We're gonna talk a little bit about Google's AI guidelines that it's published. And it specifically says in those guidelines that they want to rank content that is unique, which AI fundamentally is not, not on its own, not without human intervention. Ai just read purposes and parrots things that already exists. And, and the output trends toward the average. It's not, it's not unique, it's not notable and interesting. Okay, so the last thing that I want to talk about from like this negative perspective, and then I promise we'll get into more of the fun stuff, is the idea that algorithms can be biased. And so if you think about like the people who are creating things like Chet GPT, or the Google algorithm or any other algorithm you interact with, like social media feeds, things like that. Algorithms, they represent the people that created them, not necessarily the population as a whole. So this book is really interesting. It's from the perspective of a black woman and so she is just like, read some of the book description to give you an idea of some of the topics that she explores. It says run a Google search for Black Girls, what will you find? Big booty and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms, but if you type in white girls, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and on unmoderated discussions about why black women are so sassy or why black women are so angry presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. And I think, after this book was published, because this was from a while ago, Google had manually made some adjustments to the algorithm in light of this criticism and that commentary, but the problem is with algorithms, you're you're scaling up problems, they can't manually make adjustments for every inherent bias that their algorithm has. And so you know, I don't know if we have an answer for how to fix this. But ultimately, the people creating the algorithm should represent society as a whole. I guess that's, you know, one way to think about it. Um, and I guess the question that it poses for all of us is like with AI deploying so rapidly there's going to be a lot of situations where bias needs to be routed out and fixed. And so that's, that's what's kind of scary, I think about how quickly new applications are developing. Again, it scales up problems and so that's just something I think we all need to be aware of, and and do the best that we can to fix. So okay, so now let's talk about some of the more fun stuff AI content tools. These are tools that we use in our workflow. These are tools that I use, personally. And so let's go ahead and you know, talk a little bit about how they work. So, again, we're gonna focus on like, mainly AI content tools, just because that's my sphere of genius. That's like what I have the most experience with, but I think there are different things that you could use like no matter how you're creating content, whether it's like you write blog posts for yourself, or for clients, or like, you know, you just want to like uplevel, your email strategy, or you know, help with like the personal compositions that you create. So, the first one I want to talk about is phrase which creates AI powered content briefs. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch my screen to share, to share like what a report looks like in phrase. So let's see here. I think I have to get out of full screen in order for this to work. Okay, so um, this was the form so I'm going to show you that in the beginning, but I'm gonna go ahead and exit out. So phrase generates this really cool report and the SEO aspects of it may or may not be relevant to your process. And I will say that not every piece of content that we created, the blacksmith is driven by SEO. It's not every piece of content we create to rank but I still use we still use phrase for everything because it helps with topic research. So that's what this is. It's a briefing tool. It's a research tool. Um, the way that it works and the way that the next tool, clear scope that I'm going to explain to you also works is that you give it a primary keyword. So in this case, it's how reliable are AI detectors? And so, by giving it this primary keyword, that means that we've already done the research to decide that that's the keyword that we want to optimize for. And so this is this is an article that's already published on the Black Swan, but this is something that we would have created. Prior to that publication. This this brief would have been like the first step of the writing process after doing the keyword research to decide which one we want to focus on. And the way that phrase and clear scope work is that you can I'm just going to show you like some of the pricing details so you can understand like how it works within a workflow, phrases kind of unique in that it has a plan that allows you to create unlimited reports. Not many other tools like it do that it's usually a per report cost. So that's why it's important to know what you want to optimize for before generating the reports. But it also has these lesser plans in terms of output. You know, depending on your content process, that's probably going to be more cost effective to you then you know, me as an agency, I would want more of like the unlimited plan to work for my various clients. So let's go back to phrase so what's interesting about phrase is first of all, just like the content editor experience itself, I'll be honest, we use Google Docs for everything. But if I was creating content, as like just for my internal team or something, what's cool is you can create these other tabs. And so you could have a tab that's like research. You could have a tab that's your outline. You could have a tab that's your draft, and then you could have maybe a tab with edits or something like that. So that's kind of cool just to keep the process nice and contained in one place. I've always thought that that was really unique and interesting about phrase.\r\n\r\nBut to be honest, we don't use phrase as a Content Editor. That's just an added bonus. So yeah, it generates a topic report. I'm gonna go through a couple of different aspects of it. First of all, it gives you some sort of tangible details and the way that phrase and clear scope and the market means which is another variation on a theme work is that they scrape the top 20 or so search results, which is pretty representative of like, what's going to be necessary to rank and it gives you details like, you know, how many words should you aim for for this specific topic? In this case, it's also suggesting how many headers which is like a measure of depth of content, how many links How many images? I think the top ones are what's like in this brief, that's what it's reading and the ones under it are like the average that it's suggesting. But again, we're just this is just like material that's from the brief. It's not like the actual content that we wrote. When it comes to word count. I think people always ask like, what's the ideal word count for a piece of content? And the the answer like many things in SEO is it depends. And so that's why tools like this are really useful because there is no standard. It's very topic driven. And using data that's based on actual searches means that you can get very close to like what that ideal is. So it also shares you know, the top some details of the top breaking content, you'll notice that the blog Smith currently owns a featured snippet for this particular topic, thanks in part to you know, some of the tools that we use to optimize their content. And also, I think, for this particular piece, because we did a lot of our own original research and reporting and some of it that I'll share with you when we talk about AI detector tools, I believe after the break today. You can also see like, the atomized version of some of these other top ranking results like the title like a short description, different headers, you can click into the headers to get more information. You can click through to read it. There's other things in this little side panel here that are interesting. This is just a list of all the headings from all the top ranking content pieces. Probably the most useful is this questions area and you can break it down by different sources of the question of the questions. People also ask you something you could manually go to Google and see for yourself. But it's nice to have it all in one place. I think that's the real benefit of phrase and then you can also see here that you can see questions that come from places like Quora and Reddit, you know, which which can really add a nice like flavor to what you're working on. The stats tab is really interesting. You know, they essentially suggest in phrase different stats, as well as different links that people tend to use in those top ranking pieces of content. And so you don't necessarily want to like copy everything that you see. But there might be things that like people would expect to be exposed to in your content. If there's like a big industry stat that relates to what you're talking about. As you scroll here you can see certain things like different topics that come up, you know, different related keywords or sub topics. And a lot of this you can kind of paste over from the sidebar. External links. You know, in addition to specific stats, news is also pretty interesting because this is like things that have happened maybe since those top ranking articles were published. So again, like if you're trying to be the best making sure that your information is the most up to date. This can help you do that. So freeze also has some generative AI capabilities. I'm going to be honest with you that we don't use these because we don't believe in generating AI copy as far as you know what we write for clients and for ourselves. We're experimenting with it. But so I don't really use any of the generative AI tools. But this optimize tab here is notable and useful, because it's similar to clear scope and market Muse which I'll share with you in just a moment here. And basically, it suggests certain phrases that we should expect to see in the content in order for it to rank high and relevant search. You know, obviously, you can't just throw all the words and you have to weave them in. But this is a pretty good baseline for what people would expect to see topic wise in an article and that's that's the real benefit. I think of tools like this. So yeah, there's other there's other like interesting things that you can dig into. This is like a keyword gap map map based on what I just showed you those different phrases and it shows your content compared to other ranking content and who's using what words so you can kind of see how you stack up against those other competitors. So next, I want to share clear scope with you and I have a slide for it, but I'm just going to jump straight to the report here. So what you're seeing is like a very, I would say like simplified user interface compared to like what you would see with phrase and so clear scope in many ways is very similar. They both exists to help you optimize content. They both include some important research they both work by starting with a primary keyword. One of the differences between clear scope and phrase is first of all that query scope suggests a letter grade whereas phrase and market Muse and surfer previously known as Super SEO suggested number like out of 100 in order to understand like how close to optimizing compared to their standards you are, it also suggests a word count. And one more thing I wanted to say about the content creator is that at the blacksmith we always aim for an a or higher that tends to be a good standard for actually achieving rankings, high rankings and relevant search. I'm actually not sure if phrase does this. I'm sure they do. I just didn't notice it while going through. But clear scope also suggests a target readability level. I think that's really important for matching the needs of the searcher not going you know too deep into something that maybe could benefit from being more surface level for example. You can also notice here that they have those suggestions for phrases and so phrase we use the very beginning of our process, but we're not optimizing content within that tool. We're really using clear scope for that because in my experience, and this could differ by industry, but I find their suggestions for phrases to incorporate to be a little bit more fine tuned than phrase. So you know, that's, that's my opinion. Um, you'll notice that they also have the sidebar, so they have, you know, a couple of details. I don't again, I don't necessarily use clear scope for the briefing processes is really more at the end of the process. So stuff like this, I'm not necessarily going over but if you were to use one tool, then it's nice to know that it has that it also has those top you know, search results for the query, examples of like headers and things like that. It also has the term like keyword gap map that shows how you stack up compared to the competition. You can dig into the competitor details even more in terms of how clear scope looks at content with their letter grade, by word count, that it has this nice chart that shows how that content grade stacks up against their organic position in search. And then I think the last thing that I'll mention about clear scope for now, is that you can use that editor in here just like you can use the editor in phrase, but actually both free and clear scope. Have a Google Docs add on. And so all you have to do is like grab the report link the individual link to that specific report, put it in Google Docs, and then you get all this information within, you know, Google Docs where you probably at least my team works better that way. Um, okay, so and then I guess the last last thing I was gonna say about this topic is that if I had to pick one tool, I think I would pick clear scope. Again, because of the fine tuned pneus of the instructions, but if I was a smaller shop operation, I'd probably pick phrase because it can do like a more well rounded look at like the topic as a whole and debriefing so so that's my suggestion. Clear scope works by essentially offering it's like a per report price, but you can buy packages and like the more reports you buy at a time, the less expensive Each report is. So let me get my slides back up here. And then we'll move on to the next tool that we're going to talk about though.\r\n\r\nWe talked about phrase to talked about clear scope. So let's talk about market Muse just kind of in passing here because it's a very similar tool. It uses some different technologies, compared to clear scope and phrase and so that's why it's a part of our process again as an organization that spends a lot of time on SEO and data and keyword research. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to you if you're going to maybe consider one of those other tools. What's interesting about marketmuse is that it has this functionality to create an AI generated first draft that includes some like light human intervention from their side. I think that's what this is actually this is like a sample from a while ago where we were just playing around with it to see what would happen. But yeah, again, it has a lot of the same functionality. It offers content optimization suggestions that like keyword gap map that I showed you and both of the tools and it has like some generative AI capabilities. So yeah, it just adds a little bit of extra detail. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that it's something you need to add to your workflow if like one of those other tools could satisfy a lot of these same things. So talking about some other tools that are interesting. Word tune is something that I feel like is so underrated. It's essentially uses your own copy to make suggestions. And so again, I'm going to I'm going to show you what that looks like. So let me share my screen back here. So it works in Google Docs. And so here's I just stole the intro basically from that AI detector article. And so what you could do is you highlight whatever text you want it to make suggestions based off of and I typically do it sentence by sentence I, I'm sure it could do longer bits of text, but I don't find that to be as useful. For me. This is like a great tool for when you have writer's block because I don't know you know if you've experienced this but oftentimes I'll let my get myself get stuck on a specific word and it just like really bugs me, and I'm like it's not done until I figured out the right word. And it takes me forever to get through that. So we're tune. It's great because I'm using it with my own copy. So I can feel really confident about whatever it suggests. I'm sure you could use word tune to take AI generated copy and then re spin it. But that's not my suggestion. So again, it works by using this like Google Docs add on and you you highlight it and just to show that action again. It has this little word tune icon. And then you can see different suggestions for how word tune would rewrite it you get like 10 or something like that. And then you can also fine tune it by changing the tone and then by finding ways to shorten or expand it depending on what your use case is. The last thing that I'll say about word toon for right now is it has this thing called spices and so that's like getting a little bit more like next level with the AI generation and using like generative texts. I haven't played around too much with this yet, but it is interesting. And this is kind of taking it away I think from you know basing it off of your copy to kind of like generating something completely new. So that's why I don't necessarily use this but I think it could be a useful resource for when you're when you have writer's block or things like that. So let me get my slides back up here. Here it is. Okay, so so that was word tune. Um, and then Grammarly. I think works very similarly to word tune, and that it uses your own body of work your own copy, to suggest edits, and so I wrote an article for their blog. That's what the learn more link is. After a recent keynote, they did about all their generative AI capabilities. And so I would definitely check that out if you're curious about how to use grammerly in this way. And full disclosure, I'm a Grammarly ambassador, so you know, I'm always singing their praises, but I think it's I think it's interesting because Grammarly, like many other SAS tools on the market are starting to invest in AI capabilities like directly within their tools. And so I think we're gonna see like more and more of examples of this. And grammerly has a lot of other I think really useful. And interesting features like they have this brand style guide, which is something we use that the blacksmith which allows you to set your preferred spelling for things like brand names, and grammar rules and things like that. All right, so let's take a couple minutes for questions. Anything that's come up so far, after the break, we're going to talk about AI detector tools now that I've shown you the AI writing tools. We're going to talk about chat how to write a good chat GBT prompt and then we're going to end the day with how to create your own personal GPT. So yeah, in the meantime, there's any questions. We'll talk about them now and then we'll take a little bit of a break.\r\n\r\nYeah, very good, great overview of some really cool tools that can be used for our content creation. If you have questions specifically about that, drop those there in the zoom q&a. There's one question floating out there about the slide. We were sharing this link as a slide sharing the slides as a slide being link because there was an issue getting them exported where the the links on the slides were clickable. And so technology Yeah, it that's so currently not downloadable. Is the long and the short of it so but that slide being link is there and it'll be available for you going forward.\r\n\r\nWe can we could share them as downloaded just won't be a clickable link. So you can we could share like both in tandem with each other. Unfortunately, that's going to be the limitation\r\n\r\nYeah, yeah. So I'm happy to add that PDF link as well. We'll I'll get that added to the link bundle as we come back. If you want to download these just know that there are things that say read more, learn more that don't clicked anywhere in the PDF. Alright folks, well let's go ahead and take a break. It is 153 Central time let's take a break until right at two o'clock Central. So right about seven minutes from now and we're quiet until then. Sounds great. See you then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We are back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, we are back and ready for the second part of day two. Maddie, what are we going to knock out today?\r\n\r\nSo we're gonna start with now that we've learned how to generate a copy, how do you detect it? We're going to then move to talking a little bit about some Google guidelines around AI content writing for humans and robots. And then we'll end the day with a deeper dive into chat GPT how to write a great prompt and then how to create your own personal GPT which I'm really excited about because it's something that I only just learned how to do myself. Very\r\n\r\ngood. That's a lot to cover in the next hour. I let me invite everyone also to look at the chat I'm going to drop in today's slides if you have come in late. Also, we've added a link there for the PDF download. And finally, there's a link in the link bundle that'll drop in in just a moment that has the invitation for you to submit your site for a content UX audit tomorrow. So with that I will turn it over to you Matty, let's\r\n\r\ngo. Sounds great. All right. Yeah, let's go ahead and knock this out. So AI detector tools. There's a couple that we've tested at the blacksmith and I want to share some of the results of those tests too, so that you can understand what they can be useful for. But also again, there are limitations. As with the rest of this world of AI, everything's still kind of developing. We're all learning things at the same time. And so there's no like perfect answer. There's no one definitive tool that's going to tell you like this is current AI content, or this isn't AI content. So a couple tools that you could try though that I think will give you a decent idea or continent scale, copy leaks and originality.ai and the link here which again, you can grab through the slide bean link is a link to an in depth investigation that we did at the blog Smith testing out these different tools. You know, trying to learn more about the nature of AI content and what it sounds like. So I do have a couple of ideas for you two that we'll talk about next in terms of like how to rewrite things that sound robotic whether they were robot generated or not. But before we get to that, this example here is kind of funny because it's the Constitution and this is continent scale, saying that they detected to be 9% ai generated and you know, I don't think they had robots at the time unless alien somehow hooked them up. But I think it's fair to say that this is more than likely 100% human generated content. But it's just interesting to see that their AI detector is still picking up some very some version of that. And that you know, also perhaps it hasn't trained this AI detector on you know, pieces that existed before. Ai content was a thing. So so that's just like one thing. You know, I think from the standpoint of like, if you're working with content creators, and you're paying for human generated content, then you should get that fundamentally I think that it's an ethical violation for someone to use AI to generate content without disclosing that and to be accepting payment for that as if it were something that they were creating. Of course, there are many companies out there who are hiring people with the job description that is like aI content writer, AI content editor or like somebody who trains you know, a chatbot on a certain way a certain body of work a certain way of writing. All of that being said, if you if you are using these tools, and they are saying with a high degree of certainty, you know, this is AI generated copy. I think it's really important to not outright accuse somebody of submitting AI generated copy what I do at the blog Smith is like let's say that we're doing like a paid test with a new writer hopeful for our team. What I do is I say, hey, you know, we ran this through, you know, these three AI detector tools, and here's what it said here, you know, is what degree of AI content it's saying it thinks this is like, can you comment on that? And it gives them the chance to you know, explain what they think might happen, defend themselves, offering to make fixes, and I think it's really like the way people people are going to be honest or not. There's nothing you could do about that. But I think it's the way that they respond to and handle that situation that tells you what you need to know about if you want to work with them, whether or not you can ultimately tell if their copy was aI generated or not. What is very interesting about these different tools is first of all, they're all gonna give you a different answer. That's just a fact. Because they're all using a different approach to detect AI content. The other thing is that you can input the exact same copy on one of these tools two times and get a different answer. So again, it's it's the wild wild west. But these will at least give you something to think about and whether it doesn't matter. Like if we if we trust the writer or not, we're always going to run their copies through one or multiple of these tools because we want to detect things that sound robotic, even if they were written by a human. So that kind of brings me to my next point here that I was starting to hint at. So when it comes to detecting AI content, or even detecting content that humans wrote, that sounds robotic, there's a couple of patterns that you can look for. The two major characteristics that the aforementioned AI detector tools are looking for are first of all, perplexity, so that's unpredictability within the content. Ai generated text tends to have low perplexity. Human writing has higher perplexity, it kind of makes sense we're a little bit more erratic than a robot. The other thing is burstiness, which is a similar concept. So it's looking for variation in the length and the structure of sentences. Ai content tends to be more steady, more formulaic, which makes sense. It has lower burstiness and human writing, which you know, has much more variation. The image you see here are some other things that we've picked up in our own writing process. And in investigating this topic, different signals that sound robotic again, whether they are in AI generated or not. So repeating words, like in this example, collision coverage, you know, coverage collision, like it's just like it's not using a lot of variation. And in the box MyStyle guide we talk about like, trying not to use the same word twice in the same sentence or paragraph, which is not always possible, but this would be an example of something that wouldn't pass the blacksmith style guide test because it's it's too repetitive. Also repetitive sentence structure where like, each sentence starts with the same formulaic approach. Advertising then a verb you know, advertising the verb, unnatural word usage, so like, you know, removing a glass dome to access the ball, but it doesn't really sound like how a human would talk about replacing a light bulb. A generic or impersonal tone. You know, it's like things that don't add value that you're just kind of like saying for the sake of having words, it's another thing that we talk about in the blog, Smith style guide, like everything you say, should have a purpose, and we don't believe in fluff. It's about cutting things to being the most concise version they can be while still conveying enough meaning. For people to understand what we're trying to say. Statements that contradict themselves. So the new policy will increase employee benefits while at the same time it will reduce employee benefits that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And inconsistent verb tense, you know, something a human editor. Should be able to pick up pretty well but probably a robot writing is not going to care too much about He He was waiting for the bus when he sees his coworker. Stiff, formal or matter of fact, writing style. You know, again, just something that just doesn't sound like a human wrote it or who would want to read it. So this is this is something that can be helpful to you like when you're doing your own edits to kind of like go through these different things. And, again, whether whether it's aI generated or not, and you know that for a fact, you still want to make sure that your writing is something that appeals to the human. So I wanted to take some time to talk about Google's helpful content update and also their guidance for AI generated content and whether or not it will rank some of this we did talk about last year if you were here, so we're just going to do a really quick refresher on that as it relates to this topic. So my book and like really like what we're talking about, in general is kind of marrying the concepts of writing for both humans who are really the ultimate buyer like they're the ones who actually have money so they can buy from you, whatever it is you're selling. They respond to other humans, other people's empathy, versus robots who you know, we're not writing for their sake, but they are the medium that connects us. To those humans. And so it's important for the things that we write, to be indexable to, you know, be findable to be descriptive, and to ultimately match the intent of whatever the human is looking for. So, you know, robots can also take the form of social networking site algorithms, like that news feed that you're familiar with, I'm sure.\r\n\r\nSo so that's kind of like the two players in this game. Here. So this is some highlights from Google's guidance about AI generated content. As you can see by the link here, this is from early 2023. And I was looking at this page again, just a couple of days ago to see if anything had changed. I had seen something on Twitter now x, where somebody had mentioned that something on this page should change. And I was looking at these three things because I think they're the most relevant to this topic that we're talking about. And like, I don't know if I'm just you know, like, post pregnancy brain or something. I couldn't find the difference. But it might have been because it was about something else on that page. But I might have missed it. And it might have been one of these things. But anyway, I think these things still more or less ring true today. And if anything has changed, it has been Google being less specific about their guidelines. Because that's kind of the nature of what all these things that they've shared with us are it's it's kind of like so just to go over them is a content against Google searches guidelines. They say it's not, but you know, it can't be used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which we'll talk about when we talk about the helpful content update. Will AI content rank highly on search? Maybe, you know, it doesn't give it any gains, which makes sense. What I think is really notable about this is they talk about if it's useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of e 80. It might do well in search. So they talk about original, but we've already talked today about how AI content at least on its own without manual intervention by humans is inherently not original. It is inherently not unique. And I would argue that again, without human intervention, it's neither useful nor helpful, in that, you know, you're not It's not like adding something that doesn't already exist. At least in that case. So to me, from Google's own words, AI content really aren't its own shouldn't rank high and relevant search. But of course, there are exceptions. And then, of course, there are situations where people pair that with a human editor like we saw with seeing that of course, CNET being a cautionary tale of what to avoid. Should I use AI to generate content? They say if you see it as an essential way to help you produce content that is helpful and original, we have that original word again, it might be useful to consider but again, if you're trying to gain search engine rankings and no there was something on Twitter now x where somebody was kind of like I can't remember who it was, but you might recognize the situation especially if you're in like the content world. Someone was boasting about how they had created a ton of AI generated content and they were sharing you know some stats from like their Google Analytics, and how would that helped rankings and things like that? And I think everybody agreed that that person should have probably kept their mouth shut because somebody from Google ended up you know, seeing this Thrive that came to their attention and they got hit with a manual penalty based on what this person was saying about you know, having not really like had that human intervention. So thus, it was not original or unique. And it's just funny, like, you could probably get away with it, at least for a while, depending on how Google develops more of these guidelines. But when you start to boast about it, and Google gets wind of it, then like there are manual interventions that they could take, so tread carefully. If it's working. Keep that to yourself. So then it Yeah, I wanted to like connect this back to Google's helpful content algorithm update, which also happened. Probably a little over a year ago, maybe two years ago. And so they describe it as being part of their long term efforts to provide original and valuable content through search. It rewards content that meets users expectations while demoting content written primarily with search engines in mind. So like we were just talking about what the AI content. This this update isn't focused on AI but but it adds color to those guidelines in terms of how to approach it or you know, if you are generating AI content, how to make it work, so that it could rank these questions. Are directly from Google just made pretty was blacksmith branding, but the link that I shared here will will get you to the Google documentation that includes these questions and the subsequent ones. So to ask yourself like is is this content truly people versus is something that Google would consider ranking. It's things like Do you have a primary purpose or focus for your site? If you're writing about too many disparate topics, it's very confusing to Google you can certainly write about things that are different but related to each other, but you should really have like one specific focus if you want to rank high in relevant search. Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they've had a satisfying experience? I think that's a question to ask yourself, whenever you create any type of content like Is it is it satisfying to the end user doesn't really just serve your purposes? They talk about like demonstrating firsthand experience or like a depth of knowledge that's really important. That's that's how we add uniqueness to our content. That's how we make it original. Even if it's just your opinion on something, you know, that adds color to the content that already exists. Okay, so, um, let's talk now about from the search perspective, are you taking the search engine first approach to your content? So these are things that you obviously don't want to do. And it's questions like, you know, are you primarily trying to attract people from search versus creating something truly useful for humans? It does say are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics like that cautionary tale, that person who was sharing, you know, the content they generated, which resulted in a manual penalty, it's a perfect example. I think this is important too, like, are you mainly just summarizing what others have said without adding much value? You should always be adding I think something to the content that you're creating in order for it to be worth creating in the first place.\r\n\r\nSo just to kind of summarize here, like what is helpful content versus unhelpful content from these guidelines that Google has given us and that I honestly agree with? helpful content is people first genuine specific, it's actionable. Up to date is important. Once you publish something, you have to think about, like if you're using stats or if it's about maybe a tool that changes frequently, like you should be regularly reviewing or auditing your content for opportunities to update it. Is it relatable, is it concise? And ultimately, is it satisfying, versus the unhelpful content which is written primarily for the search engine robots it's spammy? It's generic, it's abstract. It might be outdated. Ultimately, it's impersonal, impersonal, fluffy, and then whacking. So these are some easy guidelines that you can use to understand if your content is hitting the mark for something that Google would even consider ranking high and relevant search. All right, so now we're gonna get to some of like the really fun stuff, I think today, which is get GBT some specific examples for how you can use it, as well as a demonstration for how I'm using it. And so, a lot of the things that I'm going to talk about today are based on things that I've learned from other people. I didn't necessarily invent these things. I've adapted many for my own use cases. And so again, I think this is a really valuable opportunity for like if you have anything to add to this discussion, I'd love to see it in the chat. I think it could benefit other people. How are you experimenting with AI? Like how how would you maybe adapt some of these ideas for how to write a great prompt What are like interesting prompts that you've used, and you know what, how is that benefited? You so I'll just put that out there. And then I'll also say that some of these are like pretty much all of these guidelines are based on open AIS guidelines for prompt engineering as well as Google's in some cases, I've combined to them and in all cases, I've given examples of how to use them effectively. So let's go ahead and jump to it. Okay, so the, I think first and perhaps the most important thing is to be as specific as possible. And you want to set parameters for the output that you're looking for. So my prompt here was helped me generate 10 email subject lines to use for cold outreach for my content marketing agency, please limit output to a maximum of 45 characters per example. I picked that number, the 45 characters because I saw that that's like somewhat of a best practice for how many characters people want to see in an email subject line. And what I could have done here was use the personal GPT I'm going to show you later that's all about the blogs and style guide them has like aspects of like how we do business and I could have gotten like even better example results here. But the point was not to show you something perfect it was to show you how to apply this principle. And the other thing that I wanted to add to is like you can always start with a plant, see what it gets you and then you can set parameters after the fact to refine your output. Like, you know, maybe I would have asked this prompt and then asked for it to shorten it to 45 characters or to suggest new examples of 45 characters. Or maybe I would have asked for like, what are you know, 10 General Sales, cold outreach subject lines, that I could use and then I might have added the detail Okay, now, adjust it for like my content marketing agency. The next one is to give context and examples. So I have this bot and I think I'm going to show you a screenshot of it next. One of my personal GPCs is a blacksmith sales expert. And so I created this bot because we recently hired a new salesperson, and there's just so much to learn both about the blogs with his brand. The work we do for customers, and just our sales process in general things that we want to share with new prospects that I wanted to create a resource and it's like of course you know, I want to make myself as available as possible to this new salesperson because typically I've been the salesperson for my company, I have a lot of that knowledge in my own head, but there are times when I am unavailable or I have other stuff that I have to work on. And so I wanted to create a personal GPT that incorporates some of this different documentation that I've created about our process. You know, referring to this prompt it also has like a copy of our standard proposal. Different things about you know, like what makes us stand out compared to the competition what's what's unique to us, I guess, so that any person on our team, any especially new salesperson, would be able to use this chat bot in order to surface some of this information, especially if they couldn't get a hold of me basically. So here's an example of a prompt I gave my personal GPT which is using the above case study. So I gave it a URL on our website. And one of the features of chat GPT is that you can have it browse the web in order to to include information and its results. So I gave it a URL. I asked it to reference a proposal that I had attached to the GPT that I've uploaded to it. And I said proposed an email pitch for a specific job opportunity. I copy and pasted a longer piece than this. I just took a screenshot but like the long version of this job description, and and I asked it to effectively address the requirements that the job description surfaced and the writing based on our strengths. And so what ended up happening was, you know, it wrote like a cold pitch email. But it did it did effectively address this prompt. There were things that I would change about it. Certainly there are things that I would have edited it before I sent it out to the person who had posted this job description, but I think that for me as a founder who has also traditionally been the salesperson it's such an effective way to use this tool because I spend so much time just you know, it's like I know all this information I know what we're good at. I know that we have relevant examples. You know, I know all this but it takes time to like resurface that knowledge and put it in a form that sounds good and is compelling, you know, to a sales prospect so that if you take one thing away, I think that you know that's like one really excellent use case of using your existing knowledge or your internal documentation. To make your life way easier.\r\n\r\nAnother related GPT prompt engineering tip is to use de limiters to clearly indicate distinct parts of the input. That just means like what I shouldn't have done here that would have made it probably a little bit easier for chat. GPT to understand what I wanted is to put this this job description text in like quotes, that's like a delimiters to say like, you know, do this to this piece of what I'm asking for to kind of like help it understand what part of the copy it's referencing. And what part of the copy is the ask, especially when you have like a longer input output, you know, whatever. Another example of that is something I learned from James rose. He is an automation and Zapier expert and has been doing a lot of interesting experiments with AI who's really good person to follow. If you're interested in just like getting ideas, he takes transcripts from like voice of customer interviews where he's getting feedback and you know, like positive testimonials and things about his product and he feeds that transcript into chat GPT and says you know, use this puts a transcript in quotes those delimiters and basically like give me like three, you know, like really nice things they said about you know, our product three like great pieces of feedback. And I think that that's such a useful way we like on our client calls on our internal meetings. We use a tool called fireflies, which automatically transcribes all our meetings, but it's still you know, it's still a lot to sort through an end fireflies has its own AI capabilities, too. So it helps to summarize and things like that, but to take to be able to use that output and quickly surface insights based on whatever your prompt is, I think is such an awesome use of AI that saves the human reader from having to go through the whole thing. So this is and I'll show you, I'll show you what this looks like in action when we do the personal GPT demonstration. But this is kind of what it looks like to set some parameters for your personnel GPT and there's two I guess like schools of thought on setting like setting parameters narrowly defining the G PTS role. So you could do this within normal chat GPT and say for this query, you know, I want you to take on this specific role. And so I got this idea from Paul Roeser. He was on some like marketing technology podcast, and he's talking about how he uses AI. And his example was like, something along the lines of like, you know, pretend that you're a lawyer that advises entrepreneur, it's about hiring law and then he gave his prompt so he kind of like set the scene like this is the narrow role that I want you to operate into this query. So that's one way that you could look at it the other way is that you could create a personal GPT that serves a specific purpose like my blacksmith sales expert, that I've already referred to and that you know, I'm kind of showing you behind the scenes, how I set it up. So as you can see here, there's like a name for it, which is kind of arbitrary. A brief description, I think, mostly for your reference. And then the instructions are like what the AI uses to then suggest answers to your prompts. So as you can see here, I'm telling it like you can use our website as your primary reference. You should be familiar with all those pages and use it to inform your responses. It'll ask you and I'll show you how you want it to communicate with you how you want it to give answers. You know what specific information you want to focus on again, like narrowing that scope. And then I also say like tailor your responses to showcase the company's strengths and successes. Using you know details from the website and emphasize why we're the ideal choice in you know, answering like sales related queries. So this is one of the greatest uses of chat GPT without narrowly defining its role and objective. You're gonna get like a wide variety of answers and that's fine. It depends on what your use cases, but by giving it a roll, I think the quality of your output goes up exponentially. And I'll show you again, at the end here, what that looks like in practice. Here's another really interesting way to use it, I think, especially if you're trying to learn a new skill or if you're trying to troubleshoot an existing workflow, which is what I was doing in this prompt. So I use air table a lot. I'm a huge fan of no code and automation in general. I've found in my life that it's really hard to find like the perfect solution to everything that I want to do. I never could find like my perfect project management tool. And so essentially, I built it between using process street air table, Zapier, and you know the other mix of ragtag tools that are in my arsenal. So in this case, I was trying to create a specific automation in air table that for some reason is just evading me and I'm sure I'm doing like one stupid thing wrong, but I asked air table or sorry, I asked Chad GPT first of all, I prompted it by telling it what automation I was trying to create, like the actions that triggers the end goal. And it gave me like a step by step process that I would say is a little bit more high level than this out, but and then I asked it to refine its guidance or expand on its guidance by saying okay, so for this step, this is where I'm getting stuck. What was how exactly what I set this up in air table, and so then, as you can see, the result has some details and it's more detailed than the previous query gave for that step. It's probably worth mentioning that in chat GPT right now, there's two versions of GPT, which is like the underlying, you know, algorithm, machine learning mechanism, whatever. So there's GPT 3.5, which is an older version, and then there's GPT for GPT four incorporates web browsing so it has more up to date guidance. So especially when you're trying to troubleshoot something like air table, which changes often and so, you know, if I were using the old version of chat GPT, I might have gotten a different answer. So when you're doing things like like this, you want to use like the newer version, there is a limitation. I think it's something like you can have 40 prompts within three hours or something like that. I don't think I've ever gotten close to hitting that. But I suppose if you were to ask, you know, a lot of follow up questions, or you're troubleshooting something very complicated, then you could hit that so that's just something to keep in mind that as a chat GPT user and I don't know what the distinction is for paid versus free, but I think that the paid version of Chad GPT is like worth its weight in gold. I think it's extremely undervalued and it's probably because they're using our data to train it. So they do get a benefit out of it. But you know, I would say if you're finding yourself limited by the free version, then just upgrade to the paid it's, it's so worth that.\r\n\r\nOkay, so now, here's the real fun part. So we're gonna go through how to build your own GPT and I'm gonna give you like a specific task to do and so you can either follow along with me while I do this now, or you can do this yourself. Later, watch the recording and replicate it. I will say the process is probably much more straightforward than you might think, if you've never done this before. So we'll go ahead and get started. Let me set my screen accordingly. So we're going to jump over to the blog Smith website, because this is going to be the basis for the very basic UBT that we're going to create today, which is based on one that I've already created and refined a little bit more than what we're going to get into. But okay, so the blacksmith has this writing style guide and on our website. It has this chapter version so you can jump you know to these different sections. To see how will we go about our writing style. It's something that's fairly industry agnostic, so definitely like a great resource. If you don't have your own writing style guide. You could use ours to build yours. But what I want to do is create a chat GPT bot based on this that essentially acts as like a blacksmith editor that defends our style and explains when a piece of copy is not following it. So we have this as a PDF which I've already downloaded. I'll just show you what it looks like really quick. And it's it's designed, but it's fairly plain texts. You know, it's not that much more complex visually than like a Google doc version of this. And I'm telling you this, because my first attempt at making a personal GPT was actually to solve a personal problem of mine, which is that I love the game Settlers of Catan and I wanted to make a Catan rules bot so that I could download all the PDFs of the rules for every version we have. And I could ask the GPT okay, like you know, here's some like obscure situation like what is the role, you know, based on these rule books? Because every once in a while, something like that pops up. And while I like to think of myself as a content expert, there are those niche situations that require further consideration. Unfortunately, on the Catan website, the PDFs that you can download are very complicated visually as PDF, so chat GPT in my limited experience has not been able to read them. So it's just something to note that like you want to give it like the plainest text version of whatever documents you want to share with it, but something like this would be fine. And I know that because I've tested it. Okay, so so if you want to follow along, you know, just hit download, and that's this is the exact file that we're going to use. So then you go to the chat GPT dashboard. Which looks like this. And like I told you, you can toggle between chat, or GPT 3.5 or GPT. Four, you can see you know those limitations as well as the added benefits of using that more recent version of it. So then you go to explore GP Ts, and you can see on my sidebar when it loads here that I have. We have chat GPT which is like you know, every every question you could ever want to ask and then I have a couple of my personal gptc here as well as some that I've explored in this explore LGBTs area that I'm just kind of playing around with. So this is also just like a really fun place to look through things, test things out and get ideas for the the GPS you might want to create. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead and click this Create button, and you'll see this interface. Again, it's pretty simple. And if you go to create, it's going to prompt you with specific questions, but if you kind of like are familiar with this personal GPT idea, you could also jump to the Configure tab and start filling it out. But I think that it's easiest to think about it from this Create Tab. And so it's going to prompt you with a couple of questions. So this first one is like what kind of chat GPT what kind of personal GPT Do you want to make? So I'm going to tell it, you know, I like to create a GPT that serves as an editor for my brand, the blog Smith. The goal is to have this GPT serve as a resource. That references our specific style guide, and suggests edits based on newly inputted copy. I'm just making this up. But the last time that I did this, I'd used something similar to that. And so after each input, it's going to think you know, it's going to react to the things that you're telling it and it's going to ask you to refine the way that it interacts with you. So we're not none of this is like rocket science right now. This is just like designing almost like the persona of who this GPT is going to be. So then it's gonna suggest to name I suggest naming this GPT blacksmith editor. Does that work for you? Sure. Yeah. And you can change this yourself. Like if you just want to, like get through this part. Just say yep, yep, that's fine. And the next thing is it's going to generate a profile picture and so these are new, they're a little bit arbitrary. It's just like for your own purposes, for fun. One thing that is kind of fun with the imagery and it doesn't always work so we'll see. But sometimes I asked it to change to adapt the picture to use like one of our brand colors just for fun. So I'll say like, can you update this image to incorporate our main brand color, which just using a text expander Simple as that? Let's do it does. So this is using that dolly dolly I never know how to say it to suggest images and, you know, it looks like Okay, right? But we're not we're not asking it to create anything like complicated at this point. So, so like for example, it didn't, it didn't really follow my query. So let's see if I try a different way. Can the image use, you know, our main branch color? Like this is this is definitely the limitation of AI is that sometimes it understands the query and sometimes it just doesn't and we won't get stuck on it. If it doesn't get it. I just want to see if changing it has any practical effect on it. So then after this, it's going to ask about Yeah, that doesn't do it. No, that's fine. Okay, so the next question. They're asking me to more narrowly defined the role of what this GPT is going to serve as I'm Oh, so I'll have you use the uploaded PDFs as this as the foundation for your edits any questions? So I can upload the PDF here. Or I can go to that configure tag and I can also tab and I can also I can also upload additional documents to help as well like with my blacksmith sales expert, I have like our proposal I have a document about our sales process. I have another GPT that I forgot to mention that's called the blacksmith like SEO guru or something like that. And it basically I uploaded a bunch of documents about our approach to SEO some stuff about our keyword research process, and our like philosophy behind the different steps as well as a document I created for our writers and editors. That's about let me see how to get out of that. That's about how we write about SEO to make sure that our philosophy is communicated correctly and specifically. So that's just an example of different documents that you might use to support the outputs here and to narrowly define what you want to base its answers on. Okay. One thing that's important to say is when you're uploading documents you want to make sure to kind of like give context and say like, this is how I want you to use it. And like, you know, I'm doing this, I'm uploading this. So I'm expecting you to use this as part of your output if you don't, if you don't refer to that document when you're setting it up or when you're interacting with it. It might just ignore it in some, in some use cases when I've been creating these personal GPS like that's happened where, for example, with this one, it'll make edits based on best practices, but not based on the document that I specifically wanted it to use. So that's why I used that language. And so it says, I've updated your GPS behavior to focus on our specific style guide based on the uploaded PDF. So that's great. You know, like, what options so one thing that it usually asks is like how do you want the GPT to communicate with you and I'm getting maybe ahead of myself, I'm gonna say no, that sounds good and see if it prompts me to ask about like the tone.\r\n\r\nOkay, so it's not gonna say it looks good, but what options do I have for how it communicates with me? In terms of tone of voice, again, usually asked so this is giving me some options here. Again, not usually in the way that it normally does. It kind of asked to like paragraph form versus like giving me several examples. I'm gonna say that I want it to be let's go with number three, which is encouraging and positive. I think that that's the ethos of how we edit at the box with the other things are true to um, yeah, so just for the sake of this, and you can always change this, you can always refine it. Okay, so it's updating the GPT. This is probably the last edit and then what I'll do is I'm going to grab some copy that I want it to, to edit just to show you how it comes full circle. And then I'm going to show you kind of like the back end of what it looks like. So let me grab that copy. I'm going to feed it an example of like a recent social post that we were editing and the formatting is going to be like a little bit funky here, which is fine, because this is just an example. And the blog the style guide isn't necessarily built with a focus on editing social copy, but again, it was just like a quick thing to to try. Okay, so it says it's updated it. It tells me you know what the point of it is no more adjustments needed. Let's try it out. Okay, so I'm going to show you how it works and then we'll show you the Configure and then we'll kind of end the day off with any questions. Okay. So it gives you some prompts based on what it thinks that you might ask it and you can edit this, but I'm going to say please suggest edits to the following copy, in quotes and quotations, those delimiters based on the blacksmith style guide PDF and again, it's gonna be a little sloppy looks like it didn't actually take the name of the GPT that we asked it to. So we'll we'll take a look at that too. So it's interesting depending on the prompt you give it and I've tried this a couple of times in this case, it's kind of separating it out by saying like okay, here's some of the things from the blacksmith style guide and here's like specific passages of copy and how we would change them. So that's interesting. But what I would probably prefer is that it edits the whole thing, and then it tells me what edits it made. So it's, again, it's referencing I can I can tell because I'm familiar with it, but it's referencing specific aspects of the blacksmith style guide, which is great, we know it's working. But what I'm going to ask you to do is to change the way it outputs it. Can you refine the previous output by starting with I might mess up exactly how to say this, but by starting with, like all of the copy with edits, then after words, shared the specific edits made from blog Smith style perspective, that might not be like the most effective prompt. We're just going to see what it says. Okay, yeah, it looks like it's understanding. Nature. The copy here is an important I just want to show you how something like this could work for your purposes. Okay, so this is what I wanted it it refined the copy first and then it told me what it refined and why. Um, so let's look at this Configure tab. So yeah, for whatever reason, it didn't add the name. That that it prompted me and asked me to so I'm gonna go ahead and add that and you can see it up here. You can see this description. You can see the instructions based on some of the things that we talked about when we were creating it. You can make changes to these conversation starters we might even say like what like other conversation starters, would you suggest using freelist UPC code? I'm just curious and I don't know what to do. You can see the PDF that we uploaded and I can upload more files. You can add additional capabilities. I think by default the web browsing and Dolly image generation is implemented for many of you today who deal with code, this code interpreter might be useful. And then AI actions is something that I've started to play around with but don't fully understand but there's a way that you can connect your personal GPT to Zapier so that for example, it could reference data and other apps. So for my blog, Smith sales GPT I'm trying to create an AI action that allows it to reference our air table CRM so that you could ask it questions about a certain lead or certain portfolio projects and things like that. So once I get that implemented, it's going to be so cool. Okay, so it's giving me some ideas for these conversation starters that are a little generic, but I could probably refine them further. I think the last thing to talk about is how you can either keep this to yourself or share it with other people. I think that these drafts are automatically saved. So if you X out of here before clicking Save, I believe it will still exist, but don't quote me on that. From there you can decide you know, if you want to, if you want to keep it to yourself if it's you know something that's for your own personal use cases, or if you want to share it with your team or if you want to share it with like the wider world like maybe you create a chatbot for your industry that other people could benefit from that you want to share. So, in most cases, probably anyone with the link is a good bet, if you ever intend intend to share it with other people. Okay, so let me jump back to my slides really quick. We're going to end off the day here. So here we go. me pull this back up. Um, okay, this is the link to grab the style guide if you want to use that to replicate what I did today. You can also grab that from the side being like um, I'll just say one more time. My book writing for humans and robots. It was the number one best seller in the SEO category. So if SEO and content is something that you want to invest more time and learning about then I would highly recommend my book. You can grab the first chapter for free on the books website, and you can grab the book on Amazon in both print and Kindle format. I'll give one more reminder for our live content UX audit tomorrow. I'd really love to help you workshop, your content, help you come up with ideas for making it even stronger and more effective. So you can use this link to do that and that will happen at the end of day two. And then, you know, outside of today, if you have any questions about the things that we're talking about, you can either email me Maddie at the blogspot.com or on Twitter, aka ex im at Mad Yasmin and then yeah, we'll end the day with any questions that have come up since going over some of this GPT stuff.\r\n\r\nYeah, great stuff. Thanks Maddie. You know, the custom GP tees are really interesting. And it's it's also not only for your own business, but also working for clients. It's an opportunity to really, it's, it's a service you can provide. We have a boy for example, that has a ton of they're an educational nonprofit and they have a ton of PDFs like 800 and an educational topic that they deal with and so we're investigating, what would it take to put those PDFs in there and then have a bot that you could query the entire library to find an answer to something right. It's just super, super useful. Yeah.\r\n\r\nOne one note on that Nathan is chat GPT. So they have a limitation of you can upload 20 Total documents but they don't say how large or small those documents have to be so OneNote for like anybody who's trying like this is something that came up with that Catan bot I was trying to make. You can combine the documents if need be.\r\n\r\nYeah. And chat CPT if you have a large library like that it might not be the best tool it sometimes there are a bunch of third party tools. I mean, if you go on App Sumo, every day, there's a new one that somebody's chat bot or whatever, but find one that the UI that you like and a lot of those don't have those limitations. Like they have a separate database that they're looking at with total sort of magic they've created. I don't know, I don't understand it. But anyway, yeah. So folks, a couple of questions stacked up there. If you have a question, add that to the zoom q&a, and we'll dive into it. So first question from Doug. Maddie, how does SEMrush or SEMrush fit into the landscape of content writing tools? What overlaps or complements with phrase? Sure,\r\n\r\nyeah. So I think of something like SEMrush or Ahrefs is being a great all in one. SEO tool. So people use it for more than content although content is like an important facet of them versus something like phrase or query scope is really just about content and just about content optimization, or, you know, in the case of like phrase and market Muse also generating content is the use case. But SEMrush I have I'll be honest, I have more experienced with a traps but they both they're both very similar and we actually use SEMrush like the keyword researchers and strategists on my team, we use SEMrush these days. But it is it is the tool that if we're comparing it to phrase and query scope, that's the tool that we use to define our primary keyword. It's before we run those reports. It's a tool that we use to come up with some secondary keywords. It's the tool that we use to identify feature snippet opportunities, we can do competitor research on it. You can do backlink tracking on it. You can audit your website. So I mean, it just it just serves such a bigger overall SEO use case. But there are many very useful content optimization tools. And so it's kind of like a higher budget tool than any of the ones that I've mentioned, but it will serve you know, many of your SEO purposes even outside of content. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nOkay, questions from Eddie. Eddie is writing tech blogs. I see now my keyword content from Reddit is ranking very good. I doubt Reddit content is helpful since usually people have vague answers to questions. What do you think about that?\r\n\r\nIt's an interesting question and I think I'm gonna take the opposite stance. I do think that Reddit content is helpful. There's something about people being like anonymous on the internet that like makes the truth come out. People feel like a little I guess like Freer with the information that they that they volunteer. And so I mean, you have to take it with a grain of salt because they're anonymous. They also might have an agenda that is not clear versus somebody who's coming out and saying, you know, I work for one of these tools or, you know, these are the clients they serve. And so that's like, why this relates to what I'm talking about. But I will say that sites like Reddit, Reddit and Quora are really interesting for learning more about your audience, learning about the things that like keep them up at night and so that's why they rank so high is because they are a wealth of information. They're not, you know, they're not using like the traditional methods to optimize their sites, but they are benefiting from all this unique user generated content because they've created communities. So, yeah, I mean, I don't I don't know exactly how to answer the question. I guess I'm kind of like answering around it, but I think that Reddit is a useful resource in general. I don't know that it can be counted on like aI right where Yeah, I can be confidently incorrect certainly. So to can, Reddit user is but they bring up some really interesting points that are worth investigating. So as long as if you are using it as a reference that you fact check, or you know, if you're I guess if the question is like, How can I outrank Reddit the the answer is like, I don't know.\r\n\r\nYou just said maybe Reddit pays Google. And honestly, we just did a story about this a week ago in our news roundup. It is actually Google who has purchased the rights to all of read its content. Alright, Gemini. Yeah, that just came out. The story last week was an unnamed AI but it's since come out that it's Google has purchased it right. So who knows? Yeah, Google does. Yeah. Doug says here's my favorite prompt. I add this to help me brainstorm chat. GPT add this to the end of your prep, ask me five questions that will improve the response you'll be giving me I use that too. It's really helpful. I\r\n\r\nlove that I I haven't considered that and that's why I think like discussions like this are so useful. Like, we can all learn so much from each other. I learned something new about this every day. For\r\n\r\nsure. The AI world is moving rapidly. And we were Mata you and I were talking earlier just we did an AI workshop here back in October, and there's so much that's new and better and different, even just in the last few months. It's pretty crazy. All right. That brings us to the end of questions. Tomorrow, we're talking about a UX content UX. So give us one more time an overview of what we're going to talk about tomorrow and we'll start to wrap things up here.\r\n\r\nOh, tomorrow. I was looking at the comments and somebody had mentioned let's say Ben had mentioned that to get them to use the right color and the GPT to be very specific, use hex color code when so I got distracted but um, okay, so tomorrow we're going to focus on the content reader experience. Content UX, another way of thinking about it. So we're going to talk a little bit about things like things that Google has said or page experience signals, so things that are like tangible that you can optimize around within your design to help your ranking on Google. And my philosophy when it comes to SEO is that there's three pillars, there's like the content and the things that you can affect on your own page. There's the website structure, so that's going to be a lot of what we talk about tomorrow. And then there's things like Off Page signals like backlinks, which we won't talk about, but you know, we can always have a discussion later or, you know, I'm sure Nathan will bring on somebody who talks about that at some point, too. So yeah, we'll talk about these like website signals, these page experience signals. We'll talk a little bit about website structure, things that you can do to create a better experience for your users, even if it's not necessarily something that Google takes into consideration for ranking and some things that they do. And then we will talk about auditing, you know, with practical tools and specifics, your contents, the nature of your contents UX. I'll tell you how to like run your own content UX audit, whether that's with tools or with people in person. And so that'll be that'll be kind of the nature of what we talk about tomorrow. Trying to bring that discussion full circle from the specific things that you can use to how to like measure if you're using them effectively, and then we'll end the day with a content UX audit from the things that ideally, y'all have submitted. So if you haven't, please use that form that we've linked to in that slide. Being link, and then I'll pick a couple for us to go over tomorrow.\r\n\r\nYep, very good. And that link is there in the chat. Once again, make sure you submit a URL that was a lot of fun last year when we did that very info wise. Yeah. So I will take care of that. Tomorrow. That's yeah, day two. All right. Maddie, good stuff today. As always, we'll have the recording up if anybody wants to go back and replay if you came in late. It'll be up in about an hour or so soon as it renders. And I will see you back here tomorrow, one o'clock central time for day two of content workshop. Have a good night. See you then.\r\n\r\nHear but as you're coming in, we're just asking what was your biggest takeaway from day one? You can sound off there in the chat. I'm also dropping in the new link bundle, I can type correctly. There is a new slide being linked, so make sure you grab that new one. It is updated on the replay page. But make sure you grab that new link because a few changes have been made since yesterday. That will let you follow along better.\r\n\r\nSome last minute tool suggestions. Ah,\r\n\r\nlove it. Love it all. Right, catch. Working for everybody now. Just about a minute and a half to go and again, we'd love to hear from you in the chat on what your biggest takeaways from day one we're. As we are waiting just another minute or so to get started. Also the link there for the live content UX audit is on the screen because we have a slide or two left if you'd like to submit your site or page or something for a content audit. It'll be a friendly review with with some good help to help you improve some of your language. So use that link. The link is in the link bundle in the chat. There on the screen. We do have a couple of slots if you'd like to participate in that. So Vivian, if you look at the replay link in the link bundle the academy link there is a PDF download link on that on the on the replay page. And that is the new updated slides. Yep, so that's all there ready to go on the replay page or you can view them on slide being right now. Yeah, not too many changes. New tools. All I was new to was fun tools. Yeah. Alright folks, about 30 seconds to go. Glad everybody's back for day two. Again, our check in question. Let us know in the chat. What your biggest takeaway from day one was? Particularly did you have you used any new GPT prompts since we played around with that yesterday, or has anybody taken the dive and made your own custom GPT based on\r\n\r\nor have any ideas for things that you want to try when you have time? Yeah, I could. I could use some more ideas myself. Yeah.\r\n\r\nFor sure. All right, folks. It is three minutes after someone to start our recording and we will get underway. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everybody, wherever you happen to be welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here and joined again by MADI. Azzaman for day two of the content accelerator for 2024 Welcome back. Maddie. Glad you're here.\r\n\r\nThank you so much for having me. Again. It's exciting to dig into some of these topics.\r\n\r\nAbsolutely. So we had a lot of fun yesterday talking about some AI stuff and some great principles for creating great content. And today we're looking more at the the user side of consuming content right what are we going to talk about today? Exactly.\r\n\r\nYeah, I think that you can think of today as being a way to practically test your content, whether that's with other people, whether that's with tools, understanding how it measures up against some of the guidelines that Google has shared, that are necessary for ranking, specifically when they have to do with the user experience. So we're going to kind of attack this from all angles. And, you know, hopefully it'll leave today with some really tangible tools to help you understand like, does your content provide a great reader experience? Or are there things that you could do to improve it?\r\n\r\nYeah, very good. And we do still have this content UX link on the screen. If you have not filled that out and you would like to there's still a slot or two left for the second hour, we'll do some live content review. So grab that now. The link is there in the chat as well. A couple little bits of housekeeping and we'll turn it back over to Matty as usual. Ask your questions using the zoom q&a And we'll take those questions at the end of each hour today. break in the middle as usual. One note is that the slides have been updated since yesterday. So in the chat is the new slide being link. And if you want the PDF download, just go onto the replay page with the link there and the link bundle and you can download the PDF there as well that has all the new updates on the slides. So with that, I'm going to disappear Maddie, let's get started.\r\n\r\nLet's do it. So yeah, if if you want to submit something for this live content UX audit, ideally, it's like a page on your website, not not something like a PDF, because we want to look at how the content interacts with design. And like Nathan said, you know, it's a friendly review. We're not like looking for issues. We're just looking for things that you could do to perhaps improve the content experience. Get another set of eyes on it. And it's just a practical way to apply some of the tools suggestions I'm going to give you so with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. We're going to start today by talking about Google guidelines for what makes up a great user experience, especially when it has to do with content and specifically we're going to talk from the perspective of Google's quality rater guidelines. And then after I go through a couple specifics there, we're going to talk more broadly about Google's page quality signals. I think that's what it's called. I haven't labeled in the next slide but things that have to do with what they've told us influenced ranking high and relevant search, you know, all else equal, if you have great content, what aspects of your website design, you know, must be present of your website structure must be present in order for you to rank high and relevant search. So the first part is a little bit more I would say qualitative. And then the second part is going to be a little bit more quantitative. So the learn more link is for an article I wrote a while back for Search Engine Journal. This was specifically focusing on aspects of Google's quality rater guidelines that have to do with the user experience. And so I think it was a couple of years ago now I read through the entire quality rater guidelines, which if you're interested in SEO, and user experience, I would highly recommend at least giving it a skim. It's kind of hard to do because it's like 175 pages, but there's some really good nuggets in there about how Google looks at search, how they judge quality of content, how they determine if a page of a search result meets the needs of the searcher who's looking for it. And so the quality rater guidelines what's worth mentioning is that to some extent you have to take with a grain of salt because this is not something that directly influences rankings. What happens is human quality raters that they hire read through these guidelines, they're tested on them to make sure that they understand what Google is looking for and then they manually rate different website results based on a certain query. And so what happens is that Google gets that information. It helps them you know, refine their algorithm in terms of the general direction they want to take with it, but it doesn't necessarily result in any manual adjustments for whatever websites they're ranking. It's it's more of like a research process. So that's, that's what the quality rater guidelines are. They're a tool to help Google research what the web looks like right now in order to make decisions about how they want to adjust their algorithm for the rest of us. But all that being said, Whenever Google gives us information, whenever they volunteer details about how they look at search, and how they define quality, and like a great user experience, I think that we would be wise to take note of that if it is in fact our goal to rank in relevant search. And I think at the end of the day, whether it is or not, I think Google tries to maintain a high standard for quality. I think that it's their philosophy, philosophy, that content is king, you know that that good? Content is important. And so again, whether search is your goal or not, it's worth it's worth at least like listening to what they have to say. And so, for your benefit, I've tried to break down some of the most important things from the quality rater guidelines specifically having to do with the topic that we are discussing today. So the first thing that they mentioned or they they talk about the quality rater guidelines has to do with interstitials. So back in, it was either 2017 or 2018. They made an update to their algorithm, and they told us about it is again one of those rare cases where they're just upfront. And they said that like if you're using popups say, for example, to gather somebody's email address, or you know, it maybe you're on an E commerce site to advertise the sale, something that obscures the content that you have to interact with you either put your email in, or you have to click the X button, you know, something like that, that you have to interact with in order to use the content on the page. They call that an intrusive interstitial. And so what happened was it really it really resulted in a big change for how people use conversions, I guess on their website, so you know, bloggers and people who do affiliate marketing and of course, yeah, ecommerce, and businesses trying to get email subscribers all had to fundamentally change the way that they approach gathering email addresses. And I'm going to talk a little bit later about what you can do instead, that doesn't violate Google's guidelines. But again, from Google's perspective, they say that interstitials make it difficult to use the main content of the page. And so when they're talking in the quality rater guidelines, they frequently refer to MC main content, which is like what the searcher is ultimately going to your website for and so you could say generally speaking, that they're trying to defend the experience of the main content. And to like, skip ahead to the point here about ads, when they talk about ads, that Google recognizes that and they say this in the quality rater guidelines, that ads don't automatically equate to low quality, they understand that ads are in many cases, the reason a site can continue existing. But that being said, there is like a right and a wrong way to go about implementing them. And so they say the too many or like large ads hurt the user experience. And then that case, the human quality raters should assign that site that result, a low rating. So again, you want to think in terms of the main content is the ad obscuring it? Is it taking away from it? If not, you're probably okay. But it's just good. To keep in mind that Google's not saying no, you can't have ads. You just have to be thoughtful about it. And when I did some of these UX audits in the past, like the ones that we're going to do later today, I did a couple of for some members of the Denver bloggers club one of the local clubs that I've been involved with here. And one thing I noticed about a lot of them was you know that they'd have an ad in the sidebar, they'd have an ad in their footer. They'd have an ad a couple times throughout their blog content, and it was probably Google Adsense that they were using, or some other ad network. Like it. And again, it's like I understand that you're monetizing your site using ADS. But at the end of the day, it's probably working against you because people if you were to look, you know into the data like the scroll depth and the time on page and things like that, using Google Analytics, for example. You probably see that on those pages that are very heavy with ads that people abandon the page pretty quickly because it's just a bad reader experience. So to go back a point here, clickbait Google has a couple of pieces of guidance in the quality rater guidelines about that specifically.\r\n\r\nGenerally speaking, a good page sets expectations or good title sets expectations for wherever it's leaving you. And so clickbait is something that it can certainly be effective and getting attention and getting clicks, but it can be a very unsatisfying experience if it doesn't do something to deliver on the promise made in the title. Um, the Google specifically says that clickbait headings detract from high main content. So, you know, that's something that they're specifically looking for and guiding people to, to comment on. And they say also that like every page should have a page title. It shouldn't just be presented without buttoning it up that way. And that title should describe page content. So again, it's a balance. Writing a good title, I think is very much in art. But it shouldn't be misleading. That's that's the key here. Um, so the last point here is that when it comes to creating content, you want the answer to your query to be pretty prominent in the results. You don't want people to click through and then have to dig to find that. And Google has a couple of different SERP features, I would say where they're trying to, you know, first of all, answer this within search so that you don't click through, which is a problem for us content creators, but it's also perhaps an opportunity when we think about things like a Featured Snippet, which is just that sort of box that shows up above any other search results and it's usually summarizing kind of like the nature of what that person is looking for what Google thinks that person is looking for. There's other things like Google will index parts of a page and link to that specific part and highlight it you probably noticed that yourself when doing search and looking for something very specific. And so that's something that they do, it's not, to my knowledge, it's not something that you can necessarily optimize for. It's it's their methodologies of indexing and surfacing content. But the example that they gave in the quality rater guidelines was something about like somebody searching Abraham Lincoln's birthday. And when somebody clicked through like it was present on the page, but it wasn't prominently answered. And so in that case, they were instructing the human quality rater to give that like a not as good rating for meeting the needs of the searcher. So yeah, I mean, definitely, that's, that's kind of most of what I'm going to say about the quality rater guidelines. But I really think it is a very interesting document and especially if you look at the examples they give in terms of how they're making those determinations. There's a lot of little nuggets of truth and we also have a blog post on the blacksmith website that digs into this even outside of like the user experience sort of and like design focus. So if you want another take on that then definitely check that out. We just went in and updated it recently. So let's talk more broadly now about some search signals from Google things that Google has told us about the page experience and you know, importantly, I think how to how to like measure that, quantitatively. Google, we talked a little bit about helpful content yesterday and that algorithm update which was the year a year and a half ago, something like that. Google has been has said that a good page experience is a requirement. For creating what they define as helpful content. So you know, all these algorithm updates are designed to support Google's mission, you know, the way that they look at content quality and things like that, of course, they all you know, more or less feed into each other, but I think it's worth mentioning that like that is an aspect of having helpful content. Alright, so we're gonna start with what is collectively known as the core web vitals so the core web vitals, this algorithm update, or Google announcing this page signal? came about? I want to say it was 2021. So they've been around for a while. And interestingly, and what we'll go over is they have changed slightly since coming out. But the idea here was to give people these these three specifically, page signals, were to give people more tangibility around how to measure the the page experience. Because up until that point, it was a little bit innocuous, it was hard to conceptualize, in terms of knowing like where you actually rank according to Google's own way of looking at it. So the first page signal of the quarter web vitals is the largest Contentful paint, which is a facet of page loading, loading speed. And so their definition is that it reports the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport relative to when the page first started loading. So if we think about I think most of these core web vitals are more or less referring to like above the fold, like what you see before you scroll, it's like that first impression that a person has with your website and most designs, most tools that you use to optimize loading and things like that, typically are set up so that the rest of the page loads later but you want you know what's visible initially to load quickly and first so that people can start interacting with it, and then it gives time for the rest of the page to load. So another way of thinking about this is that this signal takes note of the largest element on every web page and measures its total loading. Time. So maybe this is an image, maybe it's video, you know, typically at some, I would say some sort of media thing, but it could be your theme in general, it could be a very slow loading plugin. So these are all things that you'd want to keep in mind in terms of optimizing this particular factor. And when I say I guess, like the theme and plugins, it's like the output of them that you would implement on your page. So okay, so how do you get a good largest Contentful paint so according to Google, whatever this largest element is, is about 2.5 Seconds or Less of loading time and you have a little bit of wiggle room here, before it gets to, you know, this like poor area, but you'll notice that it's not a super long time. And I think that this particular man measurement here, it relates to something that Google's said before and shared in their own documentation, which is that, you know, the majority of people bounce if a website doesn't load within three seconds or less. I'm sure that that guidance has changed over time because that's a dated stat. But it still goes to show that we're kind of like within that guideline, with this particular measurement of a particular element on a page. So the next one is first input delay, and this is actually what it was. This has since been updated. And I'm going to show you an example of what this looks like. But let's let's talk about like the original intent of it and then what it has become. So first input delay is a measure of interactivity. It measures the time from when a user first interacts with the page to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction. So that sounds like gibberish. Basically, the lower a website's fid score, the more promptly it starts processing users clicks and swipes again, interactivity like how long does it take for somebody to actually be able to use a page? So this measurement per Google, a good fit is 100 milliseconds or less. So that's what it was right? But what is it now? So this GIF kind of shows an example of poor responsiveness versus good responsive responsiveness from Google's perspective, but probably from all of us, as users as well and looking at it you you probably have been in this position before where like, you click on something and then there's this little bit of a delay before you are actually able to interact with it. And so Google essentially took took this concept that they had initially defined as a core web vital and added some color to it, I guess. And so the new measurement is that it's, it's below or at 200 milliseconds. That so up from I think, what was it 100 before so they're giving you a I guess a little bit more time to create interactivity here. And just so you know, this new measurement is actually not fully unveiled yet, but it will be as of March. 12th. That's when this takes effect and takes over. So they say that, you know, some interactions will actually take longer than others. But when it comes to especially complex interactions, you want to be able to quickly present some initial initial visual feedback so that the user knows that something is happening\r\n\r\nthe time until the next payment is the earliest opportunity to do this. So the intent is not to measure like every eventual effect of the interaction, but the time in which the next interaction is being blocked. So you essentially want to delay you want to if you are delaying some visual feedback, then you might be giving users the impression that the page isn't responding to their actions, which is ultimately a bad user experience, right. So the goal of this new measurement is to ensure the time from when a user initiates an interaction until the next frame is painted in the shortest time as possible, for all or at least most of the interactions the user make. So it might seem like a small distinction between the first input delay and the interaction to Next paint but I guess if we were to summarize them, the first input delay is really focusing on that initial interaction. And the interaction to Next paint is focusing on the difference between interactions. I think that's one way to look at it. Okay, so then the last core web vital is related to visual stability. And it's called cumulative layout shift. And so their definition Google Developers definition is that it measures the sum total of all individual layout shifts scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan. of the page. Okay, but what does that mean? So Visual stability means that a web page remain stable throughout the users visit. It means that text isn't suddenly moving as new elements load or shifting other elements of the page and I think the the unfortunate end result of when this is bad, is when it makes the user click a link or perhaps a buy button or something like that, unintentionally, they were trying to click something but because of something shifting after it loaded, it pushed them somewhere else. And again, this is probably something where either something comes to mind where that's happened to you or like, the next time it does, then you'll be like, oh, yeah, that was the cumulatively out shift the site is getting, it probably has a pretty bad score for that. Um, so with the core web vitals, visual stability became more of a priority. And you really have to have very minimal minimal instability in order for your pages to be considered for ranking high in a relevant search engine results page. So those are the core lead vitals, that's probably the newest addition to these page signals that relate to the content experience, but we're also going to go over some of the old like, you know, tried and true important things that have to do with page experience, such as mobile friendliness. I mean, this is something this is probably one of the first big things that Google told us was important for ranking, high and relevant search. Besides maybe page load, I think Page Speed like performance and mobile friendliness, like these are things that kind of happened around the same time in terms of a Google like, came out and said, like, you must prioritize these if you want to rank. So Google used to be a desktop first indexing property. But you know, as more and more people started using their mobile devices, you know, the iPhone came out and so now suddenly, everybody had a computer in their hand. And then another thing that's probably worth considering too, is like a lot of people in developing countries like they might not have a desktop or like a laptop computer, but most people have a mobile phone at this point. And so Google now operates off of the idea, or off of the principle, I guess, of mobile first indexing. So if your website is not optimized properly for mobile responsiveness for mobile devices, then that is going to hurt it's going to greatly hurt your ability to rank and relevant search and your desktop site could look perfect. It can rank perfectly in terms of all these other factors that Google tells us about. But if your mobile site is off, it's it's going to affect your desktop rankings as well. So, you know, going into all of the specifics of what's mobile friendly is kind of outside the scope of what we're going to talk about today. But I mean, it's things like making sure that your text is readable. It's making sure that your images are, you know, visible and processable that they don't get skewed strangely. It's you know, thinking about some of those core web vitals and like how elements interact with each other like our buttons too close together so that people are hitting the wrong thing. So all these things are are considerations for making your website mobile friendly. And I think you know, with the way that things like page builders, builders for WordPress work, the way that people design themes for WordPress. This is this is like very much top of mind for everyone who's designing for WordPress. So it's a lot easier to implement now versus perhaps when this update was first released into the world. So Safe Browsing is something that I they've actually taken out of what they call these like page experience factors, like I don't know if it's an official one anymore, it was in the past. And maybe it's because now we have HTTPS as an additional factor that's kind of related but I think it's still worth mentioning this from a content experience factor. So Safe Browsing is just that you can use a website that is free of malware, you know, that you can be like, reasonably sure that like malware isn't present, you're not going to get it you're not going to interact with it, and that it's not you know, affecting the output of whatever site it could be installed on. And so in order to protect yourself against this, there's different tools you could use. wordfence is a customer of mine, so I'm going to talk about them and I think that their tool and their team is great. They have a lot of cool security researchers and cybersecurity experts on their team. So they're very on top of like any new things that come out, but they have this product called wordfence care where they'll go in they'll identify them all where they'll clean it up for you and we'll share best practices for how to avoid it in the future and you know, additional steps that you can take. So I do think that you need some sort of tool on your website in order to prevent, you know, the worst effects of malware. And I guess the other thing that I would mention too, is to like always have backups of your site, because malware can really mess things up. And so that's that's like your first line of defense. So HTTPS also has to do, I guess, essentially the same idea of like Safe Browsing, maybe from a slightly different perspective. And so Google again said, you know, we're not going to rank websites that do not have HTTPS in place compared to those that do. You know, after that update happened, and that was a slightly more recent update, but it was still a few years ago, and so HTTPS in order to implement that, essentially, you just install an SSL certificate. And to be fair, there are different types of SSL certificates. Most web hosts have that functionality, where you can fairly easily implement one and then it creates either automatically or there might be some manual steps. You have to take where it it redirects your existing HTTP URLs to the HTTPS version. So that's important to make sure that that's working. Otherwise, it's going to break your site but again, most web hosts have a fairly straightforward process for implementing this and a free ssl certificate or I should say an included one with your hosting plan, but depending on your needs, you might need a different one. So that's something that you have to explore based on your industry like, like E commerce might have a higher level of SSL certificate needed, but for you know, the general small business owner designer, things like that, probably what your web host has is good enough. And so to be able to see if HTTPS is working within Chrome specifically and I'm sure many other web browsers but but chrome because it's a product of Google. There's a little button next to your domain name in the URL bar, and you can click it and see that the SSL certificate is working and that the connection is secure and I would say that SSL certificates in HTTPS are important for people who are interacting with the website. I mean, you kind of you kind of have to have it no matter what in order to rank but they're the purpose of it is that if somebody were to be giving their sensitive information, you know if they're on an E commerce site, and they're, you know, putting in their address or their credit card number or you know, a banking website and people are logging in, and you know, once they log in, that user has access to their bank accounts and their money and things like that. That's kind of the like, ideal use case of HTTPS is to protect the people who are entering that sensitive information to make them feel safe on your website.\r\n\r\nWe talked about this earlier, having no intrusive interstitials so these are the pop ups the image you see is something that Google shared when they announced this ranking signal to show what not to do, essentially where these ads are obscuring access to the main content. You shouldn't have to click in order to get to the main content. So what do you do instead? Here are a couple of examples from the blacksmith website. So the first one is we have a floating bar that basically is at the top of the content and then just pushes it down. And in this case, I used it to add like reminder about my book, a button to click to buy it you could use it to get email signups. I think another great example is like E commerce. If you're having a sale or if you want to say, you know, free shipping on orders over $50 or something like that. I think that's a really excellent use of a floating bar. It's like what's the most important thing happening for this business right now or use it to collect email signups? Then there's also next to it is a welcome mat, which is designed you know, very similar lead to how an email popup would look but the difference is that it's like embedded on the page. So it's not getting in the way of the content. It's part of the content. You can choose whether or not you interact with it beyond scrolling. Another version of that is a content upgrade. So on certain blog posts, let's say that you have additional resources, maybe you've turned that blog post into a checklist or there's a certain template that you're talking about in the blog posts, and people you want to incentivize people to share their email in order to access it. So having a content upgrade, which again is like an embedded version, at the end of your blog post about that specific resource is a totally valid way to see get emails that's not going to violate this intrusive interstitial guidance from Google. The other thing that you can think about is using email popups, but delaying when they pop up. So that kind of gets around Google's guidance. You could use what's called like exit intent technology. So when somebody scrolls for the Back button, or the, you know, X in the browser, then what happens is an email popup gets deployed where you know, it asks for somebody if they want to subscribe, for example. You can also use that same idea based on things like scroll depth, if somebody gets to a certain depth on a page, you know, that tends to indicate interest. It's given them a chance to interact with the content. Or you could have a deploy on certain pages. You ideally after they've seen other pages, so maybe after they've gone to a certain number of pages that deploys. So there's there's a couple of different ways to think about it that don't get in the way of Google's guidance. And we do have a page I forgot to link it here. But we do have a blog post on the blacksmith website that goes into each of these things and different use cases and things like that a little bit dated, but it's all the same advice. Okay, so now that we've talked about Google's quality raters guidelines, which is indirectly related to search rankings, and Google's page experience signals, which are directly related to search rankings, I wanted to talk a little bit about website structure and design I would say, especially as it relates to ranking high in relevant search, but certainly how it impacts the content user experience. So it's kind of like a mix of the things that we're talking about, but expanding on them as well. So the first like factor that you want to optimize your website around your content in general, is crawlability. And when I talked about crawlability, I'm talking about Google's ability to like fully index all the resources on your site. Is there anything that is getting in the way of Google doing that, like, for example, errors in your sitemap, like maybe you're unintentionally excluding certain pages? Maybe you know, you haven't created enough connections between your pages for Google to understand how they relate to each other. And so a couple of guidelines here, you know, first of all, is that when you're creating content, it's important to add external links. Think of these as your ability to add context to prove claims these are things that you know, you can also use let's say that you're writing about a topic and there's a related topic and it doesn't really make sense for you to cover it in your content. Like maybe it would just make your your piece go on too long. But it's something that people might want to learn more about. So you find a relevant resource from a trusted site and you link it External links are great. I mean, you might, I guess, worry. Like, is that going to lead people away from my page? You know, is there any like negative impact of that? I think that's just kind of the way that content works, that people are always looking for more information. You can set it so that it opens in a new window so that they're still on your page while they explore that content. But yeah, as the best practice, have an external linking policy, it makes sure it's to good quality content and I think that, like with this next point, it helps Google understand what your content is about. So besides external resources, you also want to incorporate internal links. This just helps Google understand the relationships between the different pieces of content on your website, ultimately, what your website is about. It's helping with that crawl ability and that index ability. It's helping Google as robot to understand, you know, these different connections. So again, it's important really to have these two types of links and really every page and relate certainly every piece of content. And then, the flip side of all this is like as you create content, things are going to change. External links might become broken. Internal links, you might change, you know, like for example, the URL slug of them, and they might become broken. So I guess my first tip is to make sure that you have some sort of redirect solution implemented, there are different plugins that you can use to automatically if you change the URL slug of something, then it creates a redirect so anything that already links to a will be updated to that new link. But it's also having a process for like auditing your content to look for these problems. And one of the tools that I'm going to show you later today will help make that a little bit easier. But it's also just a matter of like I don't know, quarterly at least, or depending on the size of your website, quarterly, maybe every six months or so, having just a process to kind of go through what exists and if you need to fix anything. So we're talking a little bit about URL structure and I will say when it comes to creating content, you want to be pretty sure of the URL you want to use before you publish it. Because it is a factor in ranking, and you can use redirects, but it's kind of hard to explain them in the context of what we're talking about today without getting deep into SEO, but it's just generally like to trust me that it's a best practice to not mess with the URL after you publish, you know, after it gained some traction in search and things like that. But it happens and that's why you use redirects. But that being said, you could at least start with best practices. So the first thing is to incorporate your target keywords in that slug. So like yesterday, I showed you some tools we use for an article we wrote about AI detectors, so let's just pretend the keyword is like aI detector tools. You'd want that to be the slug. Without really like any extra information. You want to keep your URLs as succinct as possible so that Google doesn't have to take a lot of extra time to parse them. And so what that means is within within WordPress, you can customize your URL structure for blogging. And you can do things like add categories to the URL, you can add the date to the URL. My suggestion is to not do that the only reason that you might want to add like a subdirectory within your blog content or some other specific category, like if you have case studies or something like that, is because you can use that subdirectory to group pieces of content together to measure them in like Google Analytics GA for these days. But that's kind of an advanced use case and that's only if you plan on actually like doing a deep dive into the analytics. From an SEO perspective, I highly recommend against it. It should be your website url.com forward slash keyword. And when you're implementing those keywords, you're going to want to add a dash between each word so if the keywords AI detector tools, it's a i dash detector dash tools\r\n\r\nfor certain things like articles, a and words like the things that aren't, you know, specific keywords generally speaking, you can drop those when you're creating the slug. We have some guidelines on the style guide that I shared with you yesterday on the bugs with website that's also linked in the slides so or the PDF as well. So if you if you want to dive into more SEO and URL and keyword best practices and definitely check out our guidance on that. Um, duplicate content is worth mentioning from this perspective of the user experience mostly in terms of how Google would interpret that. So generally speaking, duplicate content is like you publish a blog on your website and then a situation that could come up that seems innocuous enough is that you know, somebody in your industry says oh my god, I loved your blog posts on whatever, I'd love to republish it on my site. And you say okay, and then maybe this site, you know, has more authority than you and maybe they have a better approach to SEO, maybe they've just been around longer. And what could end up happening is that even though you were the original publisher, and Google does take that into consideration, but this other site may outrank you with your own same content. So that's duplicate content. It could be a whole blog post, it can be an excerpt of it, it could be like a piece of it. So duplicate content, generally speaking, like try to avoid that. You can add a tag to your link called the canonical tag, which basically points back to the original content and says, This is the person this is the site that originally published it, even though we have now published it here. And so Google takes that into consideration, but they really make their own choices about who they're going to rank and so that that's not the be all end all way of making sure that the original publisher ranks highest in search, all else equal. Um, with all that being said, in my experience, you can typically republish things like your blog content on mediums like LinkedIn and medium you know, original copy without making changes. As long as you wait, I would say at least a week from the original published date to do that. This is this is my experience and that saying that it's completely scientific, the advice that I'm giving you, it's something that you should experiment with, if that's something that you're interested in, but also take note of what ends up happening and discontinue if it's getting in the way of ranking your own content on your own website. But when it comes to duplicate content, if you if you get approached by someone, you know, like the example that I gave, who wants to republish something that you wrote, what would be a better situation for you? It would be more work, but it's to say like, let me write a new version of this article, like maybe you take another stance on it, maybe you you just kind of like repurpose it in a different way. I would highly recommend against duplicating your content, either on another page on your website, such as using product descriptions that like a manufacturer provided or maybe you have, you know, two variations of something and so you're using almost the same product description or again, like the example that I gave doing it on another site, so I just wanted to add a cautionary tale for duplicate content because a it is kind of a bad user experience, but be it'll also more than likely hurt you in search without a very strategic approach. And then the last thing I want to say on this particular topic is about designing website navigation and best practices around that. So first of all, you want to use descriptive and recognizable menu item titles. And the example that I always give for this is the difference between something that's called news and something that's called blog. So in my in my experience, news is like an enterprise business that has a media arm and they're publishing their press releases and, you know, things that are relevant to their company, new product updates, things like that. Whereas blog is more articles. It's you know, the how tos. It's the list of coals. Its product lead content, for example, but it's not exclusively focused on that company's news. So it's important, I think, to match the heuristics of what your users are used to and one way that you might be able to figure this out if you're unsure is just kind of see like what the competition is doing and how they're naming their menu items. Or just ask some of your users like, Does this make sense? And we'll talk next about how to conduct a UX audit and that's something that you could do as part of it. There's this thing called the three click rule, which you may have heard about. Nielsen Norman Group actually debunked this as being like ideal or even something that you should totally consider. It's the number three is arbitrary, I guess is what I'm trying to say. But it's the idea that within three clicks, a user searching or user looking for something will find it through your website navigation without necessarily having to go to like an internal search. So well, it's arbitrary. I think it's still a good thing to keep in mind, which is just that people should be able to easily and quickly find what they need your your menu should support that. And then creating category grouping. So like for example, on our website, we have a Resources tab and it has the blog, it has some of like my YouTube content. It has our style guide. All of these are resources they have to do with like things that we're sharing with other people versus we have another tab that's about our work. And so it has case studies and like portfolio examples, and it's more focused on like Final outputs that you know, fit, you know, things that we do with certain clients. So just a couple of things to think about in terms of website navigation. I'm going to start this topic and then we'll break I think maybe in like five minutes from now, but I'll just go ahead and get this started. So let's talk a little bit now that you've learned about these different factors for how to understand user experience from, from the user's point of view from Google's point of view. Let's talk about how you can continue to make your own websites user experience better by implementing a UX audit. So UX audit, we might also call it a user tests. I think they're maybe slightly different concepts, but I'm going to use them interchangeably today. So usability testing involves observing how users interact with products like your websites. The purpose is to get a better understanding of how real people use what you've designed. And really the idea here is you want to combat any assumptions that you've made incorrectly, which is impossible for you to figure out by yourself. That's why we pull in other people. You can use your tests during just about any stage of project it doesn't have to be like the final part. It could really be during the wireframing stage. It could be you know at the midpoint it could be even after you've launched but you've added some new things. So why bother with UX audits? First of all, we're talking about it today because there's a strong relationship between the user experience and SEO. I think we've proven that by talking about specific elements of the quality rater guidelines that point to UX, as well as the page experience factors that Google's specifically told us. If you care about SEO, you should care about UX in terms of things like your page, loading your mobile responsiveness, and using things like HTTPS. To invoke privacy for your users information. It also allows you to uncover issues that might kill conversions. I mean, I think this is one of the most important use cases of a UX audit is to look for things that are getting in the way of whatever your end goal is with the website. Because we're all WordPress users here, probably most of us at least, you've probably interacted with whether it's your own design or somebody else's that where you recognize that somebody forgot to edit the demo content they've, you know, implemented it and they've gone in and made their changes. But you know, there's that hello world post they forgot to delete or there's something you know, and one of the menus, maybe the footer menu that they forgot to take out that, you know, they never actually customized and so I think UX audit would be good at surfacing that if you're if you're kind of blind to it, because you're too close to the project. And with all that being said, a UX audit helps to get out of your own head. We're all human, we're imperfect.\r\n\r\nAnd really, I mean, it's it's easy to say I think when it comes to writing content, like as much as like, I have a process for editing and looking for mistakes and things like that. Like I still use an editor whenever I write anything, because I need to get out of my own head in order to make sure that I'm not missing something important. So the same can certainly be said about about website design and doing UX audits. So at the end of the day, we all operate based on certain assumptions, but what if yours are wrong? I'll just go through another slide or two and then we'll break so in terms of picking user testers, there's a couple of different populations you could consider. And I'm also going to share a couple of different like marketplaces where you could find these people, but you can start with the people that already exist in your circle your colleagues, you know, the people that you work with, but also maybe your friends and your family members. Wow, this is a great place to start. Don't discount the impact of their own bias and desire to please you, especially if you're asking your mom for input she's probably not going to be super critical. And and you know, it's going to be more of a pat on the back then something useful. And even like people like your work colleagues, they they still may be too close to a project to provide useful feedback, but it's a good place to start. You can also recruit volunteers from your own audience. Again, they might have a bias if they really love you. They might be hesitant to give you really great feedback. But they're also probably very willing to help you make something that's better. So you can start with like your brand ambassadors, anybody who would consider themselves your biggest fans, things like that. Ultimately, though, your best bet is going to be unbiased third parties who don't know you, you know, who don't have like a stake in what you're doing. I would say ideally, if you could get a couple people from that pool and then maybe one or two people from these other pools of populations, you'll get a couple of different perspectives. And when it comes to some of the marketplaces that I'm going to show you, you can also filter by certain demographics, you know, age, gender, level of education, like whatever is important to like the target audience that you want feedback from, generally speaking, you can filter and on those people. Maybe we'll just go to the top of the hour, and then we'll and then we'll definitely break then. So how many user testers are enough for each design stage? I've mentioned a couple different populations you could pick from. This is another Nielsen Norman Group reference. They are a really great resource when it comes to anything user experience user testing and things like that. And so Jacob Nielsen wrote this column and he the column was titled Why you only need to test with five users. So that's his official recommendation is for each stage that you test five users is going to be more or less enough you're going to get marginal returns marginal new information after that point. So you know, unless you're getting wildly different things from those five user testers, you can probably stop it there. He also says that it's best to involve a larger quantity of user testers earlier on in the project if you're going to test during like the wireframing stage. Versus like, when a website's like basically ready to launch it's going to be harder to make noticeable and useful changes at that point. It's going to be kind of locked in. So I think that that makes sense. Um, so we'll just start with some of the questions that you might use. When designing usability testing, it is important to to be thoughtful about this before you start you you don't want to just like go into a blind and just, you know, like, what do you think of this website? You want to have a strategic approach if you want to get useful information? So my suggestion is to start start by defining whatever your goals are, I mean, is there something in particular that you're looking to test? Are you wanting to make sure that this design is understandable to your target demographic? Is there something that isn't currently working with the design, something that's maybe hurting conversions? So whatever your goal is, like set that intention, and the questions will come more easily after that? You want to also be asking questions about the tester and how they interact with the Internet. And there's a couple of reasons for this. So one example is like you could ask the person what kind of smartphone do you use and asking this particular question is good because it kind of gauges like their familiarity with technology like how they're going to interact with your design. Somebody who uses a flip phone, for example, is probably going to have a much different level of internet savviness and how they interact with the design versus somebody who has like the latest gadget as their device. The other benefit of this question is to especially if you're doing an in person test is to kind of relax them. It's kind of like a little bit of small talk almost so that they can ease into the test, especially if that's not something that they often do. You want to define a specific action for the user to take. So this goes back to the goals. Let's say that, you know, you have an E commerce site that you're testing and you know, there's some sort of issue with people abandoning the cart, you know, after they add some products and so maybe you want to have that person go through the action of adding something, and then starting checkout. And seeing like, where in the process, there's friction, that could be one action that you want them to take. And so at this point, you want to ask them how they go about it, have them sort of like narrate and explain as they go through each step. The more you can dig into each specific action that the user takes the more detailed insight that you'll get as to how they're actually using your website. So I think with that being said, we have a couple more questions that we could talk about, but I think now is probably a good time to let everybody take a little bit of a break. And then after that, we'll finish this discussion of how to run a UX audit. I'm going to give you a bunch of tools to use to do your own tests. yourself, essentially. And then we'll finish off with that live content UX audit. Sounds\r\n\r\nlike a good idea. No questions in the q&a right now. So let's just go and take that break. It's two o'clock. About a five minute break. Is that good? Maddie? That sounds good. All right. So let's back be back at 205 and we're quiet until then. See ya. Then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We're back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, folks, we are back and ready to begin. Let me get the recording started here. All right, folks, we're back for the final hour. Of the website content accelerator. We got a lot to talk about in the next hour, so I'm just gonna let you get right to it. Maddie. Sounds\r\n\r\ngreat. Yeah. Thanks for sticking with me so far. Excited to finish this off strong and yeah, hopefully give you some really tangible things that you can take away. For your own processes. So I'm continuing this discussion that we started about UX audits and designing them. Okay, so we talked about this. Let's go to the next point. What so I used to offer UX audits as a service when I used to be on Fiverr. It was my most popular gig by far. And the way that I structured it was I basically priced by the page. And so when you're doing a UX audit, you want to be sure to identify whichever pages are the most important, especially if you have a big site like you don't necessarily want. Just going back to the E commerce example like you don't necessarily want to audit like every single product page, especially if you're looking for trends, maybe one you know prime example of what your product pages look like maybe one category page, your homepage, your checkout flow, like if somebody had me audit an E commerce site that that tended to be kind of what it looks like. You know, it's also things like maybe more generally, your homepage, your about page service page. So it really depends on what you're trying to do. But you could ask questions in your UX audit, like, you know, what do you think this is about the page in general, or about a specific element of it? You could ask What strikes you about it, you know, you're trying to see how people are reacting to it, how they're understanding it, and then like, what would you click on first, like what, what is something that looks interactable? And how would you, you know, accomplish whatever the specific goal is. So those are ways that you could you know, further define this question. Or this idea here. And then we kind of talked about this, what do you make of specific elements? So again, if we're talking about ecommerce, maybe you have a button that's like a quick add to checkout where you don't have to go, you know, to the individual page, it just kind of pops up when you're looking at a specific category or on the homepage or something like that. And so you might want to test like, do people actually understand what the purpose of this is? So that's just one example. You know, many others that might factor into your own purposes and needs. So when it comes to designing these questions, a couple of best practices to keep in mind you know, first of all, users are generally not going to be designers. I don't think you I don't think you perhaps want them to be because you want them to look at it from a different perspective than you and so with that in mind, you want to avoid any sort of like web development or industry specific jargon in the way that you ask questions. You want to design for the average internet user, they should be able to understand what you're asking without you having to explain and clarify. I think another useful thing in general and this is this is when you ask for feedback about anything, but it's breaking up a complicated question into simpler ones. It's, it's okay, you know, to to ask a question and to ask a follow up question and to dig deeper. And that's something that we talked about yesterday when we talked about chat GBT and and getting that ideal answer that you want to get from it. Sometimes you kind of have to break the subject down and sometimes you have to add clarification later. So then, I've said this in a way but be as specific as possible when you're asking questions, you know, reference specific elements. Bring it back to the goal, if necessary. That's how you're going to get the most useful responses. So going back to that fiverr gig I was talking about, these were the questions that I asked and every order and sometimes they would ask clarifying questions after the fact. But most of the time, if I wasn't because it's fiber, and I'm sending them either some sort of like written report, or typically it would be like a video recording of me going through and doing the audit and if you work with a platform like Fiverr, or some of the other things that I'm going to mention shortly. I think it's the next slide actually. Typically, people are recording themselves interacting with your website unless you're doing an in person test, which is a different situation. But so you have to have some sort of standardized approach in that case, especially if you're offering this as a service like I did. But most of the time these questions got to the bottom of what that person was hoping to get out of the audit. And so generally speaking, I asked for the URLs for any pages they wanted me to take into account. I also told them you know, if you want me to take a quick look before starting the order to see if this is a good fit for me, you can do that. Are there any major problems that you want me to keep in mind throughout the process? So is there anything that you're noticing isn't working that you want? Me to focus on like a conversion factor? Can you briefly describe your target customer so that I could keep their perspective and focus? This is a really important one. I'm not going to fit in and perhaps you know, every user tester that you're going to work with is not necessarily going to fit that ideal target persona that represents your audience or the audience of the client that you're doing this on behalf of. But that doesn't mean that you can't adopt that persona. And again, a lot of these platforms will let you pick a user tester based on demographics. So that's probably like the best case scenario. But I think, again, you can still benefit from a plethora of different experiences. So anyway, you know, like I'm, I'm thinking of like a time where I did a user test and the target audience was, you know, generations older than me or something like that, where they're interacting with the web and they might have some access issues, you know, they might it might be harder for them to read the text if it's not big enough. Things like you know, contrast come into play between the words in the background. And so things like that, maybe it doesn't personally affect me right now. But I can still comment on that and say, you know, you told me that this was your target audience. To me like this strikes me as something that would be very difficult for them to interact with. And then the last question I asked is What important goals are you hoping that this page or these pages will achieve? So that kind of goes back to like the problem question, but I guess maybe from a more positive standpoint, and especially, you know, people use your tests at different stages, so they might not know what the problems are, but they certainly know or ideally, they have an idea of what they want that page to achieve. So these questions like very much covered what I needed to know in order to give people a satisfying UX audit after they put in their order. Okay, so how to run usability tests a couple of different ways that you could do this. A very wide range of methodologies and honestly a wide range of end results I would say, in person is like the gold standard because you're going to have the most control over the process. You're going to be able to meet with people, you're going to be able to dig in deeper to any like initial questions that you set. It's a little bit harder to do with something like Fiverr or user testing. Because there may be limitations I think with like user testing, it's kind of like you set it up ahead of time. And then you know, the user testers go through it, but you don't necessarily get to get to interface with them after the fact. And then with fiber, maybe you could do that it would probably involve making a new order. It's going to take time to get that feedback. It's not going to be as dynamic as doing it in person.\r\n\r\nIn person, it's probably going to be the most expensive in terms of like your team's time and like setting up a place for them to do this. And, you know, having some sort of incentive whether that's straight up cash or like a gift card or something like that for people's time. Another I think great option is user testing. And I was pretty sure that this platform had had changed or been sunsetted or something but I was looking at it leading up to doing this presentation and it still exists. It might exist in like a different format than it did initially did. Like I think you have to buy like a package. It's not just like one by one, for example. So I'm not super up to date on how it works now more more as to how it's worked in the past. But basically, the way that it has worked is that you specify certain tasks you want users to complete and specific questions for them to answer. And so users narrowed the process they go through until that test is complete. They have or at least had had a very large user base. So it was a great platform for giving like that exact demographic that you wanted to test. But fiber is very similar. I mean, fiber doesn't focus on user testing. To the extent that user testing does a fiber marketplace covers a wide range of services, but their usability like UX test marketplace is very large, you know, in comparison to some of their other focuses. So definitely a great place to find user testers. People start offering their services at $5. But they don't have to, that's an old fiber rule of thumb that it had to be five now people can set whatever price they want. They just have to set up their gigs in a way that makes them competitive. The way that I did it was I used to charge by the page. And then if they wanted, like a written report, that would be an extra cost in addition to the video. So it just depends on how people set up their gigs. But there's some level of standardization because people go to that market and that marketplace and they want to be able to pick you know, five people that offer something that take a look at side by side. Um, you could also do something that's not exactly going to give you all the information but it's an interesting practice, which is like recording users sessions on your website. So Microsoft has this newer tool called Clarity and it's free. And so you basically add like a little bit of JavaScript to your header. And you can see people interacting with your website, and you can see you know, how their mouse moves and how they scroll and things like that and like what they click on. Of course, unlike the user test, nobody's narrating it, there's no audio. It's literally just kind of like outside of context, how they interact with your website. So it's going to give you marginally useful information, but it's just another thing that you can use to try to troubleshoot. You know, why something isn't working, for example. And then this isn't like fully, like a way to run usability tests, but it's a like a tool that you can use or that perhaps somebody that you work with might use, which is to take screenshots and share commentary about what they're looking at. And I'm going to show you an example here. Oh, and besides clarity, when it comes to recording user sessions, you can also use a tool called Hot jar to do that as well. Okay, so this is an example and it's a little bit dated, but this is from bug herd. So bug heard is like a website feedback tool. That's another way to, to look at like what we're looking at right here. And this is something as a designer that you could use with clients. Some websites do this publicly where they have like a little thing on the side of the website that's like, Hey, do you have any feedback about this page? Or do you want to report a bug? That's, that's kind of why this exists, but I used to use it for my UX audits. I would just go through each page and then create like annotated screenshots and then I could explain export, the report that has all the pages and all my notes and things like that. So it's just a cool tool, whether you're kind of auditing your own site, you're auditing a client site, or somebody's doing it for you. So okay, from the flip side, we've talked about how to run a user test, but how can you be a good user test or maybe how can you identify one that you want to work with time and time again? First of all, it's narrating your thoughts as you have them. We've talked about this because that like stream of consciousness just, you know, noticing things and whether you really have something to say about it or not just like addressing each element on a page. And so that's kind of the next point here is is, you know, not just addressing them, but considering the impact that each page element might have. It's certainly acknowledging the perspective of your audience we talked about even if you're not a member of that target audience, how can you sort of take on that persona in order to speak on their behalf? Another thing that I used to do when I did these UX audits was share ideas for a B testing. Like I might say, you know, this is an interesting approach to your head and I wonder if you were to try this if it would, you know, get you better results and so it's it's giving them ideas, even if it's not a fully fleshed out thing, but to say like, this might not be it, but maybe you could try this. And then it's also it's not just about being like negative or pointing out what's wrong, but also acknowledging what does seem to be working. So that again, you can really like laser in and the feedback that's going to have the most impact for what they should change to resources that have really made an impact on me and how I go about content and design. First of all, is the Design of Everyday Things. This is like one of my favorite books. It's more about physical design, like product design, but there's a lot of transferable things that have to do with how we design for the web. And then don't make me think is like the quintessential resource for web usability and he's sent created, you know, multiple editions of this. There's another book, something about rocket science. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but, you know, anything that he writes like I would highly recommend. Okay, so we did break, and then I'm going to save questions for the end so we can get through the important stuff here. So I'm going to give you a couple more tools to use so that you can audit your own stuff. We're going to go through our live content UX audit, and then anytime we have left is going to be for questions. Let's get through it. Okay, so we'll start with Google tools, because again, when Google gives us information or tools, we want to listen because this is essentially how Google sees our content and how they prioritize what they rank in relevant search. So PageSpeed Insights is really a wealth of information. It provides data points from a variety of factors. And as you can see in this screenshot, currently, as of the core web vitals update, it starts with the core web vitals, so it starts from a point of this like, page experience and usability factor. They what's kind of interesting is that they have a part of PageSpeed Insights, and I'm going to show you like a fuller report when we go into the live content UX audit, but they have a piece of it that's about accessibility, but it's it's pretty bare bones. And so Nathan mentioned to me right before we started today, that Amber Hines is going to be the next workshop next month and it's going to be about accessibility. And her company equalised digital, they have a really great accessibility checker that integrates with WordPress. And so I would say that like that's probably going to be a much better tool for making judgments about if your website is accessible. Then what you're going to see on Google PageSpeed Insights and I think that that's something that is really important that you know, it's not always like at the top of our list when it comes to some of the other things that we need to do. To make our website usable, but it is really important. Whether you currently have an access issue or not at some point in your life, I'm sure you will. And now that I'm a man like this has become more obvious to me, maybe not in terms of strictly website design, but I think about like when I'm on a walk outside and previously, you know, I could just step around people's icy sidewalks that they didn't shovel or whatever, but now that I have a stroller, it's like okay, am I gonna put my kid you know, in the street. And so it's it's things like that or maybe you break your arm and now you can't interact with the web the same and so accessibility, I just wanted to like, make make the case that that is something that is so important because you your loved one, there's somebody that you know that it's going to make a difference for.\r\n\r\nGoogle used to have a tool specifically for testing the mobile friendliness of your site, and I was surprised to learn that they've actually sunset this tool. So now it's kind of a part of Google PageSpeed Insights. I think that whatever functionality was already in Google PageSpeed Insights for measuring the difference between the mobile and desktop version was kind of already there. So they basically just said, like, maybe this is like duplicating those efforts. I don't know. But it's no different. I'll just say that, that we that we use Google PageSpeed Insights to make judgments about how Google understands your website from a mobile point of view. Um, so we have the ability to measure like a snapshot of the current state of how your website measures according to the core web vitals are Google PageSpeed insight, but I also wanted to share within Google Search Console, there's this core web vitals report that measures it over time. And the most important thing, I think, to keep in mind with Google Search Console, and and also like Google Analytics. What I'm going to talk about specifically is more relevant to Google Search Console, is the fact that it tells you if you know, you become in violation of anything that's going to hurt your ability to rank and relevant search in terms of what Google tells us right in terms of the big things. And so that's why making sure that it's installed on your site on client sites is so important because it gives you notices if you're like way in violation of something, and it gives you the chance to fix it. Google Analytics so I would also recommend installing from the get go because it gathers important data that's useful that you can use to understand your page experience your content experience, but yeah, so this is just one useful report that relates to what we're talking about. This came up when I was prepping for the live audit later. Just the idea that there may be a use case for understanding what WordPress theme somebody's using. And I would say especially what plugins they're using, because both of these things can have an impact on your pages performance, which is a search signal on the loading, you know, on the interactivity, and all those those good things. So this is just one tool there's there's a bunch of them out there. But you know if if your website is experiencing any performance issues, or you just want to understand like how somebody else put their website together. I think this is a cool tool or a cool mechanism for that. I also wanted to share a general SEO audit tool, I see ranking so like H refs and SEM rush which I believe we talked about yesterday, this is another All In One SEO tool. It is not as fine tuned as the others as Ahrefs and SEMrush in terms of their keyword data, so that's why I don't use it for keyword research. They use different databases and approaches. But what I will say is their SEO auditing tool, which is like kind of the technical structure of your website, like goes head to head with any of like the big players in the market, and I'll show you exactly what that looks like. And the great thing about SEO ranking is it's a lot more affordable as an as an All In One SEO tool. And even from like the keyword research perspective, like you could use it to get most of the way there if content again isn't like your biggest focus are in and or if you weren't in a super competitive industry, it would it would do just fine. Um, a couple like editing tools. Hemingway is a great one. It's pretty simplistic isn't the right word, but it focuses on just a couple of things. It focuses on just a couple of factors and so that's why it's useful it doesn't it's not super distracting. And then Grammarly is one I would say that gets into a lot more detail. Grammarly is probably a more well funded company. Than Hemingway I wasn't aware of if Hemingway been monetized until I was looking at it the other day they have some AI functionality and they might they might have some other like outside of AI functionality plans, but I'm not sure that they had like a clear path to monetization before that but grim really has always had its like premium and like enterprise business use cases. And so I think that's probably why this tool is maybe a little bit more robust in terms of the suggestions it provides. They have a lot of linguists on staff and again, a disclosure that I'm a Grammarly Ambassador but I also like to use the product paid every person on my team that's a writer editor has a paid subscription to grammerly and I'll show you why shortly. Um, you know, you also want to look for plagiarism when it comes to creating a great content experience and when I talk about plagiarism, I'm not even necessarily talking about things that you do like on purpose. Some things that happen in grammerly, specifically is that you'll write something and it will detect a phrase that's been published elsewhere on the internet because you know, like there's a ton of content that already exists and it's bound to happen. And it'll be about something that's like a completely different industry. Like you definitely didn't take it from that original place that was published, but it's kind of like a reminder to go on and try to make it more unique. Just so that you know, Google doesn't think that you plagiarize even though again, it's not about intention. It's just about the reality of the content that already exists. But at the blacksmith, we use Copyscape for every piece of content we create, just to be sure there's no plagiarism, and then Grammarly. I don't believe the plagiarism check comes with the free version, but because we have the premium version, and that's included that we use it to. Um, one of the last factors here is you know, making sure that your content adheres to your style guide, whether that's a specific company style guide, or something like AP style, which again, is like the news journalism standard. I think it's like a great standard to use if you don't have a set style guide. And then I just have a couple qualitative qualitative factors here. So on the blacksmith style guide, which will probably show you we have a section about information architecture, and it's about a lot of these different things, how to break up walls of text, how to approach writing headings, how to keep paragraphs and sentences short and to the point. It's other things like you know, making sure that you have good flow with your content, you know that it has good storytelling, but it's something a human would want to read. And yesterday we talked about texts that whether AI generated it or not sounds robotic and how to avoid it. So that's another like, piece that you can use like in your own audits, those guidelines. Other things that I look at are like the thoughtful use of on brand visuals at the blacksmith we try to incorporate multiple types of visuals per piece. I'm definitely of the opinion that words aren't enough. I think as humans we're very visual creatures and people all have their own, like different learning styles. So that's also a factor, you know, written word, I don't think is enough, especially like for me personally, sometimes I need to like watch a video about it, or you need to like, you know, play with it in my hands or whatever. Like there's just different ways that people process information and so the more different ways you can surface it to them within your content, the better that your contents going to perform and help them and then things like consistent formatting like how you use bullet points, how you write headings. Again, a lot of this we cover in the blog Smith style guide. Just a couple other things. We talked about a B testing when we talked about how to be a good user tester and giving examples. So Unbounce is a tool that you could use. A B testing is essentially testing like different variants of a page usually you're testing a specific element like two versions of a page title, or two versions of an image, but it could be a full page as well. And this is something that Nathan and I also talked about, which is that I think he'd love to have an expert on a be testing do one of these workshops or you know a webinar in the future so if that's your if you know somebody like that, you know, that's something I think that all of us could learn some best practices from but again, another thing that you could test\r\n\r\nQuick disclaimer, then we'll jump to our live content UX audit. And we're talking about how to make your content better. And, you know, basically like different processes that you could use to to catch mistakes. But I don't want you to leave this thinking that perfection. Is the goal because it's not I think, you know, we're all human, we all make mistakes. At the end of the day writing for the web is is great because it's a very forgivable medium and unlike print, once you notice a mistake, you can go in and correct it. And so I don't want this to become a situation where you're beating yourself up if you did all these steps or you did some of these steps and like, you know, you still notice something later somebody points out like oh, this is spelled wrong or whatever. That's really not the point. So at the end of the day, I think my guidance for you is done is better than perfect. And be kind to yourself but create systems to catch mistakes. And that system could be having like a human editor, like like I mentioned earlier today, whenever I write something, you know I'm telling you all my best practices, but that doesn't mean that I always follow them, right. I'm an imperfect human being and, and things happen. And I think the other thing that I wanted to say is like we all have limited time we all have limited energy, and especially now that I'm a new mom, like I used to work really late at night and I would just crush stuff out and I would go over it a million times and now I kind of have to be satisfied with like not having the ability to do that and having a much shorter period of work time every day. That I can get stuff done and having to prioritize ruthlessly and that sometimes means that like yes, maybe I spelled something wrong, you know, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it. And I don't think you should either. So that's that's my soapbox. Alright, so let's go to the live content UX audit. Give me just a moment to get this set up. Um, so we're gonna go through like a couple of these different tools that we talked about today. And then at the end of this, we will have some time for questions. Okay. So Stacy, we're picking on you today because you submitted a really great example for this live content UX audit. And I want to start by saying there's like nothing wrong with this website. I mean, it's very good and it follows a lot of both the content and design principles that like I would instruct my team on. So what we're going to do today is is really nitpick for the sake of giving people things to think about when they are doing their own content UX audits. And so I'm going to start by sharing, like some of these tools and their outputs so that I can show you how to use them. And then what we'll finish off on is coming back to this page, and I'm going to give a couple of qualitative factors, you know, that I think can make the content just a little bit stronger. So again, I wanted to surface the blog SMIS content style guide. This is going to be the basis of one part of you know, some of the things I'm going to talk about and I'm going to reference that Chechi btw bot that we made yesterday, that's based on the style guide and that's, that's kind of what I use to audit this page from the content style perspective. But again, some things that we just talked about were first of all the SEO and Keywords section or chapter, where we talk a little bit about I mentioned that you could get some guidance for how to use awkward keywords like how to use keywords within URL slugs. I also talks about this information architecture, or information structures what we call it here section. So that's how to like essentially present information but also like break up walls of text, make it more readable. We talked a little bit at the end of today about formatting and how to keep that consistent. So those are just a couple of things. I guess we also talked about links earlier today and so there's some good guidance there. So you know, this is a this is a good resource if you're building out your own content style approach, and you can really build off of this because again, it's fairly industry agnostic. So anyway, I took this link, and first I ran it through Google PageSpeed Insights. And if you look at the desktop version, I mean it's pretty much near perfect. There's it's very difficult to get to 100 on any of these factors on I would say especially on mobile, but even on desktop, I mean, it's it's kind of like a what's the word? It's like a like a fool's errand to try to get to 100 if you're if you're this close, so, desktops looking really good. You know, they have a couple of things that you could do to fix it if you wanted to, and I have some suggestions for that, but we'll talk about it from the mobile perspective. So if you go to mobile, you'll notice that you know, first of all, the largest Contentful paint is one of the core web vitals, that it's a little bit in the red and it's and that's really like the only one and the largest Contentful paint again has to do with page floating, I believe. And so, taking like the definition we had, I'm guessing that that has something to do with this image because this is the viewport you know, that first load so it's the first thing that gets measured by this core web vital. And when I was looking at this yesterday, it's a it's a JPG file, which isn't like a super large file or anything like that. But one thing that you could do to to improve that page quality factor is to instead save this and serve it up as a web p file. There are certain plugins that you can use for that it's going to you have to kind of determine if adding like a plugin or taking that extra step of manually saving it like converting it and saving it and uploading it as that file is worth it. But that's that's like the one thing that I could think would would flip this so that it's the performance is a little bit closer to 100. And then we go into some of these other like diagnostic details. And I think this is where PageSpeed Insights gets really interesting because you can sort of dig into specifics here. A couple of things that I noticed were like minifying, CSS and JavaScript and there's some other things that are kind of related to optimizing like these different file types on the website. So I use a plugin called nitro pack. There's a free version and there's a paid version. I think the free version will get you pretty far, but it adds this like little Add at the bottom of your website. So I just pay for the paid version because I don't want that there are other things like nitro pack but nitro pack from the perspective of somebody who operates in the SEO world, you know who's looking for good performance, who's looking for best practices, that is my suggestion to you and to anybody who is seeing these things on their Google PageSpeed Insights. So naturally talking about these plugins for me like the got the question of does adding more plugins like is that going to hurt performance like what what is the marginal return of that? And so what I wanted to do next was take the URL and put it in that WordPress theme and plug in detector to just see like what the back end of the site looks like. And so we can see, it's like a custom or like a child theme. And I think okay, so apparent theme is Astra, so we know that like that's the technical basis on which this is based. I think generally speaking, Astra is pretty good for SEO from what I've heard, I don't have a ton of experience with it. And then also, this is like more what I was interested in was the plugins on the backend. And I mean, from what it detects it's there aren't that many plugins here, you know, it has like a plug in that works with Astra there's a Quiz Builder. This DOWNLOAD MANAGER contact form and then the Page Builder that's pretty lean, especially if those are the only plugins that are installed. You know, different people have different ideas of like, how many plugins is too many or like what's the optimum amount but I would say like, we're well under that here. So adding something like nitro pack, or you know, like some sort of web p image optimizer I think short Pixel does that.\r\n\r\nSomething like that probably wouldn't like hurt performance for the performance gains that would come with it. Um, okay, so the next thing that I wanted to do this is higher level than just this page, but I wanted to show you guys SC ranking. So SC ranking again, is this like All In One SEO tool? And I think there's like actually something wrong with my browser because I'm trying to like x this out, and I could do this yesterday and it just like wouldn't do it. So this is either a core web vitals issue or this is like I have too many, like Chrome extensions that are conflicting with each other, that I haven't been able to figure out why it sometimes messes with my browser. But anyway, that's an aside. So um, so this is a C rankings like technical website audit. And what I really love about this is that it's pretty straightforward. Like you can essentially read this as a non SEO and get a very good idea of things that you could fix to improve your website's technical structure. And as you can see this website like it's not bad, like there's room for improvement, but overall it's doing pretty good. Again, chasing 100 is a fool's errand. You're like, probably not going to get there but you want to get as close as you can with the time and the resources that you have. And so this page is really just like a high level overview. Again, this is about the whole website. It gives you an idea of like, how many pages were crawled, versus how many URLs which could include things like media files, JavaScript files, style, sheet files, and things like that. And so this can be a good indicator of like, if you know that there's more pages or there's more files, like maybe there's a credibility issue here. And if if some are getting excluded from this crawl, then they're probably also getting excluded from what Google can see. And so at that point, you, you know that there may be a sitemap issue that's getting in the way of the ideal situation. But what I really wanted to show you was the issue report. So these are things that you could fix. And what it does is it it has a category, it gives a specific issue, it gives you which pages are affected. It tells you you know, whether you're like compliant or whatever you want to call it if it's following best practices or not. And there's there's very few things here. But for example, like here's one that has to do with crawlability, which we talked about earlier today. And so nofollow means that we don't want the search engines to read this page and there may be a good reason for that. And so it seemed that for your pages are affected, you can click on it to get a description of the issue. So this is why it's really great for people who aren't necessarily like in the SEO world. A lot of you are website developers or designers and so a lot of this stuff like you'll be able to understand just by going through it and familiarizing yourself with it was there like included details. But yeah, so then you could see, you know, like which pages relate to this issue and whether or not like it's worth doing anything or if you really wanted them to be that way. But I'll give you like a more tangible example of something that you definitely want to fix. We have, for example, External links to 4x x. So like a 4x. X code is like a 404 means that it's not found, and there's different variations of that I'm sure a lot of you are pretty familiar with that. And so this means that maybe something that was linked on the website now no longer exists. And so it either needs to be replaced or redirected or something like that. And again, you can dig into the URLs you can see like what specific error code happened. This is also a really great report that you can give to clients. And then you know, depending on the level of familiarity you have with these different issues and how to fix them then you can give yourself a little bit of an extra job and some hours working with them to not only audit and go through the audit and explain the audit but then also, you know, implement the fixes. So I just wanted to show you that because I think it's it's such a great tool. So then the next thing I did was I ran this through Hemingway, and like I told you before Hemingway is like the sort of like, saying it's the more basic version of Grammarly. is maybe not exactly the right way to describe it, but it's the more like focused version. And so as you can see, what it does is it highlights different things. And it's kind of using I guess these colors, as you know, like things like it's trying to like draw your attention to certain colors as being like something that's more worth your attention or less worth your attention. What I've always known Hemingway as is a great tool for measuring active versus passive voice. And generally speaking, we want to try to avoid passive voice in our writing. And so that's probably what it's best used for. But there are some certain other factors here that are useful and interesting. And like yesterday when I told you about clear scope and how it measures readability, you can see that Hemingway also does this. It measures certain stats in terms of you know, just this piece of content, not necessarily compared to other pieces of content. And then it also has some AI functionality, that with a paid plan you can use to I think automatically suggest edits to some of these things. So just, you know one interesting tool where it's I think best functionality is free. So then I ran it through grammerly and I wanted to start by showing what I was talking about. With the plagiarism thing. Like there's something about inventory management on this article that says 1% of your text matches the source and that's like it's not even This article isn't even about inventory management. So I just wanted to show you guys that like, like these tools can be wrong, but it's still worth running that check a if you're working with a writer that's not you, just from a reputation standpoint, you want to make sure that there's no obvious like plagiarism problems with it but be so that you can just make like some small changes to this text so that Grammarly doesn't pick it up and possibly, you know, Google may be like taking a nod from some of the similar types of algorithms and uses. Again, not that it's intentional. It's just like, you know, because there's already this wealth of content that already exists on the internet about all these different subjects and of course, there's going to be similarities with phrasing and things like that. So then we get to these other suggestions. And I guess one other thing I wanted to show you about Grammarly is you can set goals for a piece of content and I don't know if this is a paid version specific but anyway, you can, you know, say like what type of writing it is. So I just said business for this. You can give a certain intent so I sent in form for this I may or may not be right with all these things, but I just wanted to see what would happen. You can say like, you know the level of experience of the audience, you can set like the formality of the tone. And then and then it gives you suggestions based on those things. And what's cool about grammerly is that it goes into these specific zoo specific different categories of suggestions. So correctness is about like grammar, spelling, punctuation, clarity is to cut in to help with like the flow of engagement, which is probably most related to like storytelling and delivery, I guess, you know, kind of related to both of those things, and then style guide. This relates to my company's specific style guidance, some of the suggestions that I have programmed in myself, and so a lot of it is like punctuation, because I have some rules about that. And it's probably annoying for my writers to have all this pop up. But some of it is word stuff. So like if we click this, something like actually, per the blogs and the style guide, and that's just our approach, we say these words are fluffy and don't add value typically. So like if you cut actually, it would say wait, so you have to go read these reports. Ones is another one that I have strong opinions about. I say don't use one to describe a noun you've already defined. Use the same word again or find another way to say it and then I gave an example here. So that's what's really cool about Grammarly is like you can like get these things automatically being suggested when you're working on a piece of content within your organization so that people don't have to remember like all the stuff that I showed you on my style guide it just automatically pops up. Waxing then I'll show you a couple qualitative things and then we'll go to questions is I ran this through my style editor bot, and it wouldn't I tried to get it to like directly edit the copy. And it wasn't unlike what I showed you yesterday which was like a shorter excerpt and the did I did that. So part of this is like me learning how to best use the spot or how to best design it or how to best query it. But what I did was I said Please review this blog post it gave it the era and suggest edits according to the blacksmith style guide.\r\n\r\nThey said consider the bad side consider the following suggestions and it felt to me like it wasn't actually like totally reading the blog. It was just giving like general tips and then I said please suggest updated copy based on these suggestions. And so what it did, which is kind of funny was it created like a shorthand version of it. And so what I was thinking is something like this could be really useful for like an email newsletter, you know, like an atomized version of the blog. Or, you know, maybe like you create some social posts based on these shorthand summaries of each category or something like that. You'd still probably want to edit it, but to me, even though it's not really what I asked for, I thought that that could be an interesting use case. So then I was like, Okay, well can you actually do the edits while preserving the original length of the piece? And it was like no, but it kind of went back in and gave some more suggestions. And then I was asking if it was actually able to like read the original article, or No, I was asking about the visuals, because one of the suggestions was about visual aids. And I was like, well, there's a ton of visual aids on that article. And so it said that it can't directly process or interpret them from the article itself. So that was kind of interesting. And then I gave it the copy and then it still kind of like generally gave examples. So you know, it's a work in progress. I guess that's what I wanted to share. It's still it's still gave me some things to work with. But it wasn't exactly like the editor that I was hoping that it would be like it like it kind of was yesterday. So it seems to me if I were to make a hypothesis here that it's probably going to be more useful for shorter bits of copy, you know, maybe different sections or titles or things like that, versus trying to edit a whole article all at once but it will give you food for thought in terms of general edits that you could make. Okay, so last like pieces of content on this before we end up today. We talked about menu navigation. And so the way that I would change this menu navigation would be home about blog and I would just change this to contact and what I like to do with whatever like the most important menu item or call to action is maybe add some like button styling so that that stands out, it just simplifies it. It's not distracting and you know, hopefully leads them to the ideal conversion. So then the other thing like the header, because we're kind of talking about the whole experience, not just the article itself, is what I what I came across, typically in the UX audits that I did was a similar type of header where it has the logo, but unless the name of the brand is like really straightforward about what you do, it could benefit from having some context like a tagline about what you do and so I don't think that we do it on the blog. So some a very bad example. But you can imagine like in my header it should probably say like SEO and content agency. But you know, maybe because it's called the blacksmith that also might work I don't know submitted a test. I'm generally speaking again, I really liked this article, I thought that more or less like it fit the same types of standards that like I would have for my team in terms of putting together conversational tone like breaking texts up nicely, having really useful visuals, a couple of just like very small things. We have the social share buttons. My suggestion is to add a CTA that's like share this on social like, it might seem obvious, but just saying that might be useful, might also be useful to have them float as the person who reads it because they might decide at different points that they want to share it through. I love the visuals there was one visual where I think there might be an unintentional tooltip here where like when you were taking the screenshot your cursor was probably over this SPFx aligned area right here. And so it took the screenshot with that and it kind of obscures the stuff behind it. This is the type of thing that like, because I do these all the time I nitpick and probably nobody else would notice, but I just thought that I would mention it. I'm sure I'm gonna like pretty much ended there. The last thing I was going to say for now is with the Related Posts, one of them doesn't have the featured image. So it's kind of, you know, it just looks a little bit lopsided. That's a super easy thing to fix. And then when it comes to consistency um, you might want to capitalize text stuff just so that it's consistent with the capitalization of the other category. And then maybe also like space it out tech space stuff. So again, like I really don't have that much to say here, because it's very good and it has good information. The last I guess big thing is the actual place where I'm reading the content is kind of narrow and skinny compared to the full frame here. And so I wouldn't recommend going full width with the content but I think we could break out the box a little bit more or break it out of the current box so that it's a little bit wider. And I think that that would be a great reader experience. So with all that being said, I'm going to pull back to my slides really quick just to pull up like the question slide and things like that. But I mean basically we're done here. With the planned content. I'll once again bring up my book because it is about what we're talking about with content experience. It's about my approach to content writing, content style, you can grab a free chapter of the book on the writing for humans and robots.com website or you can grab the book on Amazon via Kindle or print edition. And yeah, that's pretty much it. So I will take any questions that may have popped up in the meantime.\r\n\r\nYeah. All right. So thanks again, Stacey for letting us use your content as I know that it's a little weird with talking about my stuff here but ya know, it was very much appreciated and a it's an excellent article. We've talked about that already. The content, it was it was hard\r\n\r\nto find stuff to comments on honestly, so I had to go into nitpick mode.\r\n\r\nSo grateful to you, Stacey. Let's see folks last chance to ask questions here. There are no questions today,\r\n\r\nwhich is covered at all. Everything's done.\r\n\r\nIt's it's been a very good and thorough presentation on lots of tools. Things to consider as we're developing content for and helping our clients create content for the web. Yeah, like Ben says firehose of information really good stuff. Greg, this is a good rewatch as well. Alright folks, last chance before we land the plane. Your if you have any final questions for Maddie, if you want to just say yes in the chat that way we know to pause otherwise, I'm going to start moving towards wrapping us up. All right, yeah. So thanks there in the chat. Okay. So Maddie, wrap us up here. Give us our final takeaway for the training.\r\n\r\nSure. I'll answer one question. Barney asked if I'm in the Denver area. Yeah, yeah. I'm in Lakewood, technically. But yeah, okay. Final wrap up. treat people how you want to be treated with your content. That's good.\r\n\r\nThat's really good. And true, right. So yeah, awesome. Well, thanks, everybody, for hanging out with us for the last couple of days. It's been a really good set of information here. A lot of things to consider. And hopefully it'll help us all up our game as we're dealing with content on the web. Thanks again. Maddie. For your expertise. And folks, we are back tomorrow as usual 1pm Central for office hours here on solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nNice. Well, thank you so much, everyone for your time and attention. And yeah, I hope I hope there is like one good nugget for you to take away and if you ever have any questions about content and UX, I'm always happy to be a resource.\r\n\r\nVery good. 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This again was this is building on last year's content workshop. And the link for that is in the course description if you missed last year I would strongly recommend you check that out. Really good stuff. So Sadie has your book MADI Naidu\r\n\r\nwhy it's really good love it seems like it's been a while since I published it, but you know, I tried to write it so that it would still be useful today. So I hope that you're all finding that. Yeah, we're sure.\r\n\r\nReally good stuff. Alright folks, if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat say hi. We are about three minutes away from getting started. And they're in the chat once again, is the link bundle that has the slides and the replay link as well as a link to Matty's book. We are Yeah, we're gonna have a lot of fun today and tomorrow, two hours today, two hours tomorrow talking all about website content with I mean, let's face it an expert in the field\r\n\r\nappreciate the vote of confidence. If you if you measure it by yours and I suppose expert, that's something that I've been doing for a very long time. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nAlright folks, let's hear from you in the chat. Check in question today. How about give us a one to 10 rating? How comfortable are you with generating website content? One being it's a real challenge. 10 being a pro, let us hear from you there in the chat.\r\n\r\nAll right, about a minute and a half to go.\r\n\r\nMaybe a good question is how many of you are forced to make content in order to finish your website designs? Yeah, to get your website launched.\r\n\r\nHey, Sue bullets are my friend. I like bullets. Alright, several folks just joining us. The links are there in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up that chat and you'll have the link to download the slides. Grab the replay and all of those things. We are about a minute away from getting started. Second question today is what's your comfort level? What's your expertise at website content creation one to 10 If you had to rate yourself love it. Love it. Tracks Yeah, five but a if you're using AI, that's awesome. Yeah, so a lot of folks are higher on the scale today. That's exciting, that hopefully you're gonna get some tools to up your game even further. He's got a lot to share with us. Over the next couple of days. Hey Terry. Dab Alright, folks, we are just about to get started. Glad you're all here. Diving into the web content workshop momentarily. Just seconds. To go. If you're just joining us in zoom, I'm going to drop in one more time the link bundle and it's three after so let's get the recording started. And we'll dive right in. Let's do it. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy and I'm joined for the next couple of days by my friend Maddy Houseman, Maddy is a sought after sought after copywriter specializing in enterprise b2b Tech brands. She's the CEO at blog Smith and the author of writing for humans and robots, the new rules of content style. She has been recognized on numerous industry lists as a top content marketer and I'm really excited to have her back for another course here on solid Academy so welcome back Madi, how are things going for you?\r\n\r\nThanks, Nathan. I'm really excited to be here. Like I said, you know, it's been it's been a little bit of time since I've done you know, a presentation like this since I've really gotten to use my brain. For those who don't know, I recently had a baby so he's in daycare today so I can fully you know, give my attention to this and, you know, embrace this identity of mine as a content creator who loves to learn and you know, who now has this other facet of my life but marrying those two in a joyous way so, so yeah, really excited to be back and and put my brain to use and share you know, some of the things that I've been exploring you for the past several months to I guess a year, all this new stuff with AI, that's what we're gonna focus on today. So really excited about that. Yeah,\r\n\r\ndefinitely. So we have a long way to go over the next couple of days and the thought just occurred to me Maddie, we really ought to have you back for another informal conversation just on how you prepared your business. So that you could take some time away, because that's really, that's quite a feat.\r\n\r\nIt was definitely and I'd love to do that. I'd be happy to.\r\n\r\nYeah, that'd be that just occurred to me. We should definitely, folks. So let's see the links are in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom. I'm going to drop this in one more time. There you will find the link to download or grab the slide deck. Also the replay link that will have the transcripts and chat logs after we finish is there for you as well. On that replay link you'll also find a link to last year's course, which is more some more foundational principles of the things we're going to unpack even further today. So if you missed last year's course, all the replays are there, follow that link, rewatch them, it's really good stuff. And of course, if you haven't seen Matt, he's booked the link for that as in the chat as well. So Maddie, give us a high level view. What are we going to be covering for the rest of today? Totally.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, we're definitely going to expand on some of the things that we started to talk about last year, but really, you know, thinking about what's changed in the past year and so that's why today we're going to focus mostly on AI kind of how AI factors into content creation, how you can use AI tools to create content, how you can use AI tools to detect AI content. You know, things like how to write an excellent chat GPT prompt and one thing I'm really excited to share with you because it's something that I've just kind of figured out for myself is how to make your own personal GPT. So that's what we're gonna do at the end of the day, I'll show you step by step how to do it. You can follow along, I'll show you how to adapt it a little bit. And then really, what we're going to start with today is I guess a bit of a cautionary tale when it comes to AI so we'll start with the most negative and we'll build up to the most positive. And then tomorrow, the focus is going to be on content UX, the user experience what I like to call the reader experience. So it's going to be more about you know, the elements of design and how they interact with content, how you can create this great reader experience for the people who consume your designs and content and so we can get a little bit more into what that looks like. But I guess if I was to like talk high level about today versus tomorrow, today is like things that I think are really like novel and fun. It's like It's like exciting things that that we're all learning kind of at the same time and that's that's what's so exciting about just like nobody has it figured out. And tomorrow is like the stuff that I'm really passionate about. That's a little bit more, you know, foundational and again, about like that full experience. So I guess with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. Yeah,\r\n\r\nabsolutely. Me give a couple of housekeeping notes that will disappear. Folks. We'll be taking a break in the middle as usual for these courses. So roughly at tube central an hour from now, we'll take about a five to 10 minute break depending on where we are timewise. So at the end of this first hour and the end of the second hour, we'll have a time of q&a as well. I would invite you to use the zoom q&a Link to ask your questions. Please don't use the chat, but use that Zoom q&a. That way we can keep all the questions in a nice list. And also, if you'll keep that Zoom q&a open, if somebody asks a question that you also want to hear the answer to just click the thumbs up icon to up vote. And we'll take the questions the order of up votes. So with that again, yeah, we are recording in the replay. The transcript is all there and it'll be available for you about an hour after we finished today. So Maddie, I'm going to disappear take over. Let's get started. Let's\r\n\r\ndo it. My housekeeping is just first of all, I think that we all can learn a lot from each other when it comes to AI. And so like that's how I've picked up the things that I'm going to share with you. It's really hearing it from other people seeing how other people are using this tool. It's interesting because it's so new that like, again, we don't really know like what the best use cases are. And there's this world of possibility that we've only just started to touch. So one thing I'll ask is like if you've come across an interesting AI use case, you know whether you have something that's top of mind now or whether going through what I'm going to talk about today sparks it like please share that in the chat. I'm sure all learn from it. I'm sure other people will learn from it. So that's one thing and then I'll just ask that if there's anything that resonates with you, as I'm talking today, or you know as other people are sharing ideas in the chat. I always love when people tweet or I guess x takeaways these days. So my Twitter is in that bottom right hand corner. So use that and I always love to retweet and share with my audience too. So yeah, let's go ahead and get started here. Nathan already gave a nice bio like who I am. Just to give you you know, more information about the blacksmith. We're a holistic content marketing agency for b2b technology brands. We create data driven content. I'm going to share some of those processes here with you today in terms of how we're using AI tools to do that. And our focus is creating content across the sales funnel with a focus on the reader experience. So again, that's really what day two is going to be about. It's creating this ideal reader experience with the intersection of content and design. And then my book writing for humans robots, the new rules of content style. If you've ever read the book, The Elements of Style, I was really kind of riffing on that in a more I guess, modern way since that book was written back in 1918, or 1919. Of course, at that time, the internet didn't exist. We weren't necessarily addressing a global audience when we publish to the web. We are now and so that's kind of the idea behind this book is how can you how can you speak plainly and inclusively and effectively when you're writing for the web? And so with all of that being said, let's go ahead and jump into the topic of today which is AI Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention. Day two, when we talk about content UX. I'm going to do some live content UX audits. If you were here last year, we also did this this is something I really love to do. And so this form here which you can also click through the slide being links that we've shared in the chat. Just has a couple questions like your name your brand. It'll ask for a link to a specific piece of content. If you're comfortable sharing for this live UX audit, and then it has the question that's optional. If there's anything you want me to focus on, and then like an aspect of the content itself, but the purpose is to collect some, you know, ideas from from all of you of what to audit and we're going to basically put the principles that I'm going to be talking about tomorrow into action you know, show you how to use some different tools show you how to use more also, like qualitative analyses. And so again, I would love your examples so that we can make it really useful for you to give you know, a second pair of eyes on your content. And you know, it's always done in a very respectful way. I'm not looking for problems, I'm just showing you ways to, you know, make your message clearer to make your content experience more effective. So I'll, I'll aim to remind you about this again at the end of the day, and then you know, before tomorrow is probably when I'll pick what we're going to audit for tomorrow. So get them in today, whenever you have a chance. Okay, so artificial intelligence. That's really the focus of what we're talking about today. Super exciting. Things are happening here. It's also kind of a wild wild west. It's it's something that there's many positive use cases but there are also some negative ones and so I really wanted to start with the negatives so we can kind of get that out of the way so we can you know, maybe share some like cautionary tales here. The link that Learn More link is an article that I wrote for Fast Company, and it's going to go over some of the same things that I talked about here in terms of some of the limitations and also really like the ethical implications of using AI to generate content to publish it as if it were your own. So yeah, let's go ahead and dive into that. Um, so I think like the first major implication, negative implication of AI or something to think about, especially as a creator, because many of us here we're writers, we're designers, so we're creating things. They they are our intellectual property which we may assign, you know, to a client, for example, but it's still at its root. It's something that we made. And, you know, the thing about AI is, first of all, it can't think for itself. It uses things like machine learning. It uses algorithms and processes to make sense of what's already out there. But it's not, at least right now in a place where it can completely invent something new. If it does. It's the result of this machine learning it's not the result of true uniqueness. So you know, essentially, AI and I'm gonna explain this example in a moment here, but it's, it's being trained on what already exists. It's using our intellectual property. And the worst part of it is it's doing that without giving us credit. I mean, if you go in do a search on Google, it was called Bard, but now they've rebranded it to Gemini. In my experience, and and I haven't used it recently, to be honest with you, but certainly within chat GPT there's no like source given for the answer to a prompt. It's not directing you to a specific piece of content are saying, This is what I referenced to come up with this answer, which also creates an issue of you know, whether or not that answer is something to be trusted, and we'll get into the fact that AI is oftentimes confidently incorrect. But right now, with the focus being on the fact that it's essentially plagiarism and my perspective, if you are taking what you generate with AI and then publishing it as your own this is probably easiest to think about when you think about visuals, and we're going to talk a little bit about AI generating images and kind of like how that works and some of the issues with that. But you can think of like aI trained on a certain set of materials, certain artists body of work, you know, that style, if it's trained on a certain style and the output is a certain style, it's pretty easy to identify that, you know, it's riffing off, you know, one individual's intellectual property, it's a little bit harder to make that distinction with the written word. But that doesn't mean that it's any less important to recognize that it's, it's an issue if if AI is passing off its own material or your material as its own. So, what I wanted to share here, this is an article that was published on futurism. It's an it's a screenshot from it, and it's about CNET. They have this blog about different like personal finance topics and things like that. And so when it comes to things that affect your finances, whether it's subjects like you know how to buy a house and you know, like had this setup a mortgage, you know, whatever. Or, in this case, like you know, how to pick a credit card, how to use credit cards, how to decide what college to send your kid to, or something like that. Google calls these topics, your money, your life. And in comparison to any other topic that you publish, that you're looking to get ranked in relevant search on Google. Google has the highest standard of quality for your money, your life topics. So CNET was transparent about the fact that they were publishing AI generated content such as the example shared here. But they had a human fact checking it and so the byline was like you seen that money or something like that? And then I think they also had like the byline of the human editor published next to it, but they told us you know, they they weren't trying to hide that it was aI generated. So this excerpt is you know, maybe kind of a silly example, but it's showing how\r\n\r\nthis article that they wrote, which was about can you buy a gift card with the credit card. This first example is a line that's almost verbatim from a rivaling Forbes article. And then this next example is how literally, the table was the exact same title. So, you know, you could question if it was only one of these things, you know, is that really plagiarism? Is that really a problem? But the fact that it's both to me shows that you know, not only did CNET not take a high enough standard of care, quite honestly with the content that they were having a human fact checker edit, but I think it also begs the question of like, if you're generating a full piece of copy, like a, you know, long form blog article, like are you ever going to be able to definitively say that it's not plagiarism? Or that it's not like literally, you know, word for word related to any other competitor article out there? And I think the answer's no, because that's what the AI is using to generate the content. In this case, and then one that I'll share subsequently, AI is, is almost like a crutch for CNET or for others who are who are taking this approach of generating that full article and then having the human intervention and I'm going to share some better ways to use AI in your article creation process. But yeah, I mean, the problem is ultimately that there's no way that they can catch every instance of plagiarism, and it just honestly creates more work and, and the worst part of all, is that it essentially ruin their reputation because they didn't take a proper standard of care. Another example that's, that's ongoing, it's unresolved at this point, is that the New York Times recently sued open AI who's the creator of chat GBT saying that, you know, their, their publications, their media. was unlawfully used to train open AI. And the last I saw, I think there was an update actually today that said that the New York Times is like misrepresenting the evidence or something like that. But again, I mean, it really just like begs the question of you know, if you publish content, like is it safe, you know, is it going to be used to train a model which is then going to spit it out and somebody else is going to publish it and benefit from it without properly crediting you? So that's one major issue. So this is one that I would love your examples. If you have anything similar. This is this is a picture that I saw recently in like a Facebook group about AI. And so somebody had done some prompts about dog breeds. And if you kind of squint, you're like, Okay, maybe that like a chart of different dog breeds, but then you look and you see all the like, really strange faces and like this, like gibberish text, and even the text that you can read is like not related to any dog breeds that currently exists. So, yeah, again, if you have any examples of like an image you've generated that has resulted in something like comically incorrect like this, I would love to see that in the chat. That would be fun. But I guess the point that I want to make with this slide is that at least at this point, AI can't effectively art direct you could give it a prompt and you could maybe get it to a point where you can get something useful. I think it's called mid journey. There's this one AI image generator that creates these like hyper realistic things with like any detail you can get it and something like that is so cool and very interesting to experiment with. But I think this came from within chat GPT I'm gonna say it wrong, but it's called like Dali Dali. And in my experience, when I've used it to generate images, it's the same sort of like gibberish text. The image, you know, is like, vaguely related to the prompts that I give it. So I'm using it for like, kind of like business article use cases to like generate a figure from you know, some like the data I include or something like that. I've never gotten something useful yet. And I think beyond that, it's like you still as a creative have to come up with the prompt. It's not like AI is going to be able to help you within the context, say of like an article. They're not going to be able to come up with like five unique media examples that you could include. So this is something that I think, you know, as humans, like, we still like have control over this or so like the best Abbot. Um, okay. So next I started to talk about this, which is one of the biggest issues with AI to date, the fact that it is confidently incorrect. So this is another Cena example, I'm going to read a little excerpt from. This is another futurism article. They did kind of a deep dive into this. See that AI but issue? So the excerpt is after the outcry after you know, some of these plagiarism things came to light. With the previous example. Steena editor in chief Connie Guglielmo acknowledged the AI written articles in a post that celebrated CNET's reputation for being transparent. without acknowledging the criticism, Guglielmo wrote that the publication was changing the byline on its AI generated articles from CNET money staff to simply seen that money as well as making the disclosure more prominent. Furthermore, she promised every story published under the program had been reviewed, fact checked, and edited by an editor with topical expertise before we hit publish, and I think that this is referring to like before this article was published, and so what you're looking at right here is, I think a more serious violation of the high standards that Google holds for your money your life, making sure that it is, you know, written by an expert that it's heavily fat checked, you know that you're not publishing something that you can't stand behind. And so this is about calculating compound interest for savings and as you can see by the excerpts, it's, it's wrong, the calculation is spitting out an incorrect final number. And so it may seem like, you know, small potatoes like, you know, like, what, what's really going to happen to the person who misinterprets this? It's certainly not like, you know, having to do with like, buying a house and like getting those equations wrong thread savings, but I think it just goes to show that there's, you know, there's a lot of problematic things that can happen and it starts here and if if we don't maintain a high standard for content quality starting here, then it could exacerbate it could turn into people being misled when it comes to making these like bigger money decisions in their life or you know, other things, your money your life, I think also, in some ways has to do with like, health and like medical stuff and things like that. So there are like potentially, you know, bigger and like worse implications than even just like the financial aspect of it. One thing that's interesting that that I misunderstood or I was misled about AI. Really up until like, a week ago or so, is I thought that you could ask chat GBT if it wrote something. So that was something that I saw other people talking about. And it's something that at the blacksmith like we've tested out ourselves you know, when working with like a new writer and wondering how to detect like if content was aI generated, and I found an article on open API's like FAQs or help desk or whatever that said, whenever you ask chat GBT if it wrote some you know, specific piece of copy for example, it just make something up like that's, that's literally what open AI says you could Google it yourself. So, you know, it's weird that it doesn't just say, I don't know, you know, it doesn't just give you like that as a straight answer. It's fine. If it doesn't know, but for it to purposely just decide, you know, bye bye narrowly, like if it's yes or no, and that it just tells you that whether it actually knows the answer, like that's very concerning to me. So a little bit of a cautionary tale. Um, but yeah, I think at the end of the day of the CNET examples, what I'm trying to impress upon you is like, does it really save time, if it like, impacts your reputation long term like I just don't think that that the best way to go about it is to generate the full piece of content and then add the human and I think that I think that AI can help intermittently and we'll definitely get to like how exactly to do that shortly. Um, so this article is also kind of fun. Charlie Brooker's, a creator of Black Mirror. If any of you are familiar, it's just this like really kind of weird messed up show on Netflix. It's very like future focused. It's like, I would say fairly.\r\n\r\nWhat's the word like it's, it's, it's kind of like post apocalyptic in some ways, not always. But it always like seems to end and kind of a scary place. And it's episodic, like each each episode I mean, to say is like its own storyline. And so the most recent season started to touch on themes of AI since that has become you know, something that has infiltrated society. And anyway, this article, The Creator who you know, has a very interesting mind based on what we see on this Netflix episodes, said that he doesn't think AI is messy enough to replace creative people. So there's good news guys, which is AI can't can't match that with us. I think on another hand AI, it lacks human empathy. You know, it can never like fully understand, like, who we are and what we go through. I don't think it ever will unless it's somehow achieved some level of sentience but yeah, I mean, ultimately, like in its wildest dreams, whatever AI, you know, thinks that it thinks it could never generate the ideas that we come up in our wildest dreams. And I think that the proof is in the pudding in terms of thinking about things like some of our favorite authors and how they create prosaic copy. So here's, here's a quote, I love Stephen King. He's kind of a machine himself, but human as far as I know. So this from needful things, one of his more interesting books, because the trust of the innocent is the wires most useful tool. And so, you know, fed copies of Stephen King's worked. You can ask chat GPT to write in his voice. I don't know if Stephen K would appreciate that or not. But, you know, I think the limitation is that it couldn't generate something like this on its own it can generate like derivative work of his but it couldn't come up with this on its own. Ai, you know, it, it isn't it doesn't have uniqueness. And Google has historically said that it's important. We're gonna talk a little bit about Google's AI guidelines that it's published. And it specifically says in those guidelines that they want to rank content that is unique, which AI fundamentally is not, not on its own, not without human intervention. Ai just read purposes and parrots things that already exists. And, and the output trends toward the average. It's not, it's not unique, it's not notable and interesting. Okay, so the last thing that I want to talk about from like this negative perspective, and then I promise we'll get into more of the fun stuff, is the idea that algorithms can be biased. And so if you think about like the people who are creating things like Chet GPT, or the Google algorithm or any other algorithm you interact with, like social media feeds, things like that. Algorithms, they represent the people that created them, not necessarily the population as a whole. So this book is really interesting. It's from the perspective of a black woman and so she is just like, read some of the book description to give you an idea of some of the topics that she explores. It says run a Google search for Black Girls, what will you find? Big booty and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms, but if you type in white girls, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and on unmoderated discussions about why black women are so sassy or why black women are so angry presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. And I think, after this book was published, because this was from a while ago, Google had manually made some adjustments to the algorithm in light of this criticism and that commentary, but the problem is with algorithms, you're you're scaling up problems, they can't manually make adjustments for every inherent bias that their algorithm has. And so you know, I don't know if we have an answer for how to fix this. But ultimately, the people creating the algorithm should represent society as a whole. I guess that's, you know, one way to think about it. Um, and I guess the question that it poses for all of us is like with AI deploying so rapidly there's going to be a lot of situations where bias needs to be routed out and fixed. And so that's, that's what's kind of scary, I think about how quickly new applications are developing. Again, it scales up problems and so that's just something I think we all need to be aware of, and and do the best that we can to fix. So okay, so now let's talk about some of the more fun stuff AI content tools. These are tools that we use in our workflow. These are tools that I use, personally. And so let's go ahead and you know, talk a little bit about how they work. So, again, we're gonna focus on like, mainly AI content tools, just because that's my sphere of genius. That's like what I have the most experience with, but I think there are different things that you could use like no matter how you're creating content, whether it's like you write blog posts for yourself, or for clients, or like, you know, you just want to like uplevel, your email strategy, or you know, help with like the personal compositions that you create. So, the first one I want to talk about is phrase which creates AI powered content briefs. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch my screen to share, to share like what a report looks like in phrase. So let's see here. I think I have to get out of full screen in order for this to work. Okay, so um, this was the form so I'm going to show you that in the beginning, but I'm gonna go ahead and exit out. So phrase generates this really cool report and the SEO aspects of it may or may not be relevant to your process. And I will say that not every piece of content that we created, the blacksmith is driven by SEO. It's not every piece of content we create to rank but I still use we still use phrase for everything because it helps with topic research. So that's what this is. It's a briefing tool. It's a research tool. Um, the way that it works and the way that the next tool, clear scope that I'm going to explain to you also works is that you give it a primary keyword. So in this case, it's how reliable are AI detectors? And so, by giving it this primary keyword, that means that we've already done the research to decide that that's the keyword that we want to optimize for. And so this is this is an article that's already published on the Black Swan, but this is something that we would have created. Prior to that publication. This this brief would have been like the first step of the writing process after doing the keyword research to decide which one we want to focus on. And the way that phrase and clear scope work is that you can I'm just going to show you like some of the pricing details so you can understand like how it works within a workflow, phrases kind of unique in that it has a plan that allows you to create unlimited reports. Not many other tools like it do that it's usually a per report cost. So that's why it's important to know what you want to optimize for before generating the reports. But it also has these lesser plans in terms of output. You know, depending on your content process, that's probably going to be more cost effective to you then you know, me as an agency, I would want more of like the unlimited plan to work for my various clients. So let's go back to phrase so what's interesting about phrase is first of all, just like the content editor experience itself, I'll be honest, we use Google Docs for everything. But if I was creating content, as like just for my internal team or something, what's cool is you can create these other tabs. And so you could have a tab that's like research. You could have a tab that's your outline. You could have a tab that's your draft, and then you could have maybe a tab with edits or something like that. So that's kind of cool just to keep the process nice and contained in one place. I've always thought that that was really unique and interesting about phrase.\r\n\r\nBut to be honest, we don't use phrase as a Content Editor. That's just an added bonus. So yeah, it generates a topic report. I'm gonna go through a couple of different aspects of it. First of all, it gives you some sort of tangible details and the way that phrase and clear scope and the market means which is another variation on a theme work is that they scrape the top 20 or so search results, which is pretty representative of like, what's going to be necessary to rank and it gives you details like, you know, how many words should you aim for for this specific topic? In this case, it's also suggesting how many headers which is like a measure of depth of content, how many links How many images? I think the top ones are what's like in this brief, that's what it's reading and the ones under it are like the average that it's suggesting. But again, we're just this is just like material that's from the brief. It's not like the actual content that we wrote. When it comes to word count. I think people always ask like, what's the ideal word count for a piece of content? And the the answer like many things in SEO is it depends. And so that's why tools like this are really useful because there is no standard. It's very topic driven. And using data that's based on actual searches means that you can get very close to like what that ideal is. So it also shares you know, the top some details of the top breaking content, you'll notice that the blog Smith currently owns a featured snippet for this particular topic, thanks in part to you know, some of the tools that we use to optimize their content. And also, I think, for this particular piece, because we did a lot of our own original research and reporting and some of it that I'll share with you when we talk about AI detector tools, I believe after the break today. You can also see like, the atomized version of some of these other top ranking results like the title like a short description, different headers, you can click into the headers to get more information. You can click through to read it. There's other things in this little side panel here that are interesting. This is just a list of all the headings from all the top ranking content pieces. Probably the most useful is this questions area and you can break it down by different sources of the question of the questions. People also ask you something you could manually go to Google and see for yourself. But it's nice to have it all in one place. I think that's the real benefit of phrase and then you can also see here that you can see questions that come from places like Quora and Reddit, you know, which which can really add a nice like flavor to what you're working on. The stats tab is really interesting. You know, they essentially suggest in phrase different stats, as well as different links that people tend to use in those top ranking pieces of content. And so you don't necessarily want to like copy everything that you see. But there might be things that like people would expect to be exposed to in your content. If there's like a big industry stat that relates to what you're talking about. As you scroll here you can see certain things like different topics that come up, you know, different related keywords or sub topics. And a lot of this you can kind of paste over from the sidebar. External links. You know, in addition to specific stats, news is also pretty interesting because this is like things that have happened maybe since those top ranking articles were published. So again, like if you're trying to be the best making sure that your information is the most up to date. This can help you do that. So freeze also has some generative AI capabilities. I'm going to be honest with you that we don't use these because we don't believe in generating AI copy as far as you know what we write for clients and for ourselves. We're experimenting with it. But so I don't really use any of the generative AI tools. But this optimize tab here is notable and useful, because it's similar to clear scope and market Muse which I'll share with you in just a moment here. And basically, it suggests certain phrases that we should expect to see in the content in order for it to rank high and relevant search. You know, obviously, you can't just throw all the words and you have to weave them in. But this is a pretty good baseline for what people would expect to see topic wise in an article and that's that's the real benefit. I think of tools like this. So yeah, there's other there's other like interesting things that you can dig into. This is like a keyword gap map map based on what I just showed you those different phrases and it shows your content compared to other ranking content and who's using what words so you can kind of see how you stack up against those other competitors. So next, I want to share clear scope with you and I have a slide for it, but I'm just going to jump straight to the report here. So what you're seeing is like a very, I would say like simplified user interface compared to like what you would see with phrase and so clear scope in many ways is very similar. They both exists to help you optimize content. They both include some important research they both work by starting with a primary keyword. One of the differences between clear scope and phrase is first of all that query scope suggests a letter grade whereas phrase and market Muse and surfer previously known as Super SEO suggested number like out of 100 in order to understand like how close to optimizing compared to their standards you are, it also suggests a word count. And one more thing I wanted to say about the content creator is that at the blacksmith we always aim for an a or higher that tends to be a good standard for actually achieving rankings, high rankings and relevant search. I'm actually not sure if phrase does this. I'm sure they do. I just didn't notice it while going through. But clear scope also suggests a target readability level. I think that's really important for matching the needs of the searcher not going you know too deep into something that maybe could benefit from being more surface level for example. You can also notice here that they have those suggestions for phrases and so phrase we use the very beginning of our process, but we're not optimizing content within that tool. We're really using clear scope for that because in my experience, and this could differ by industry, but I find their suggestions for phrases to incorporate to be a little bit more fine tuned than phrase. So you know, that's, that's my opinion. Um, you'll notice that they also have the sidebar, so they have, you know, a couple of details. I don't again, I don't necessarily use clear scope for the briefing processes is really more at the end of the process. So stuff like this, I'm not necessarily going over but if you were to use one tool, then it's nice to know that it has that it also has those top you know, search results for the query, examples of like headers and things like that. It also has the term like keyword gap map that shows how you stack up compared to the competition. You can dig into the competitor details even more in terms of how clear scope looks at content with their letter grade, by word count, that it has this nice chart that shows how that content grade stacks up against their organic position in search. And then I think the last thing that I'll mention about clear scope for now, is that you can use that editor in here just like you can use the editor in phrase, but actually both free and clear scope. Have a Google Docs add on. And so all you have to do is like grab the report link the individual link to that specific report, put it in Google Docs, and then you get all this information within, you know, Google Docs where you probably at least my team works better that way. Um, okay, so and then I guess the last last thing I was gonna say about this topic is that if I had to pick one tool, I think I would pick clear scope. Again, because of the fine tuned pneus of the instructions, but if I was a smaller shop operation, I'd probably pick phrase because it can do like a more well rounded look at like the topic as a whole and debriefing so so that's my suggestion. Clear scope works by essentially offering it's like a per report price, but you can buy packages and like the more reports you buy at a time, the less expensive Each report is. So let me get my slides back up here. And then we'll move on to the next tool that we're going to talk about though.\r\n\r\nWe talked about phrase to talked about clear scope. So let's talk about market Muse just kind of in passing here because it's a very similar tool. It uses some different technologies, compared to clear scope and phrase and so that's why it's a part of our process again as an organization that spends a lot of time on SEO and data and keyword research. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to you if you're going to maybe consider one of those other tools. What's interesting about marketmuse is that it has this functionality to create an AI generated first draft that includes some like light human intervention from their side. I think that's what this is actually this is like a sample from a while ago where we were just playing around with it to see what would happen. But yeah, again, it has a lot of the same functionality. It offers content optimization suggestions that like keyword gap map that I showed you and both of the tools and it has like some generative AI capabilities. So yeah, it just adds a little bit of extra detail. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that it's something you need to add to your workflow if like one of those other tools could satisfy a lot of these same things. So talking about some other tools that are interesting. Word tune is something that I feel like is so underrated. It's essentially uses your own copy to make suggestions. And so again, I'm going to I'm going to show you what that looks like. So let me share my screen back here. So it works in Google Docs. And so here's I just stole the intro basically from that AI detector article. And so what you could do is you highlight whatever text you want it to make suggestions based off of and I typically do it sentence by sentence I, I'm sure it could do longer bits of text, but I don't find that to be as useful. For me. This is like a great tool for when you have writer's block because I don't know you know if you've experienced this but oftentimes I'll let my get myself get stuck on a specific word and it just like really bugs me, and I'm like it's not done until I figured out the right word. And it takes me forever to get through that. So we're tune. It's great because I'm using it with my own copy. So I can feel really confident about whatever it suggests. I'm sure you could use word tune to take AI generated copy and then re spin it. But that's not my suggestion. So again, it works by using this like Google Docs add on and you you highlight it and just to show that action again. It has this little word tune icon. And then you can see different suggestions for how word tune would rewrite it you get like 10 or something like that. And then you can also fine tune it by changing the tone and then by finding ways to shorten or expand it depending on what your use case is. The last thing that I'll say about word toon for right now is it has this thing called spices and so that's like getting a little bit more like next level with the AI generation and using like generative texts. I haven't played around too much with this yet, but it is interesting. And this is kind of taking it away I think from you know basing it off of your copy to kind of like generating something completely new. So that's why I don't necessarily use this but I think it could be a useful resource for when you're when you have writer's block or things like that. So let me get my slides back up here. Here it is. Okay, so so that was word tune. Um, and then Grammarly. I think works very similarly to word tune, and that it uses your own body of work your own copy, to suggest edits, and so I wrote an article for their blog. That's what the learn more link is. After a recent keynote, they did about all their generative AI capabilities. And so I would definitely check that out if you're curious about how to use grammerly in this way. And full disclosure, I'm a Grammarly ambassador, so you know, I'm always singing their praises, but I think it's I think it's interesting because Grammarly, like many other SAS tools on the market are starting to invest in AI capabilities like directly within their tools. And so I think we're gonna see like more and more of examples of this. And grammerly has a lot of other I think really useful. And interesting features like they have this brand style guide, which is something we use that the blacksmith which allows you to set your preferred spelling for things like brand names, and grammar rules and things like that. All right, so let's take a couple minutes for questions. Anything that's come up so far, after the break, we're going to talk about AI detector tools now that I've shown you the AI writing tools. We're going to talk about chat how to write a good chat GBT prompt and then we're going to end the day with how to create your own personal GPT. So yeah, in the meantime, there's any questions. We'll talk about them now and then we'll take a little bit of a break.\r\n\r\nYeah, very good, great overview of some really cool tools that can be used for our content creation. If you have questions specifically about that, drop those there in the zoom q&a. There's one question floating out there about the slide. We were sharing this link as a slide sharing the slides as a slide being link because there was an issue getting them exported where the the links on the slides were clickable. And so technology Yeah, it that's so currently not downloadable. Is the long and the short of it so but that slide being link is there and it'll be available for you going forward.\r\n\r\nWe can we could share them as downloaded just won't be a clickable link. So you can we could share like both in tandem with each other. Unfortunately, that's going to be the limitation\r\n\r\nYeah, yeah. So I'm happy to add that PDF link as well. We'll I'll get that added to the link bundle as we come back. If you want to download these just know that there are things that say read more, learn more that don't clicked anywhere in the PDF. Alright folks, well let's go ahead and take a break. It is 153 Central time let's take a break until right at two o'clock Central. So right about seven minutes from now and we're quiet until then. Sounds great. See you then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We are back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, we are back and ready for the second part of day two. Maddie, what are we going to knock out today?\r\n\r\nSo we're gonna start with now that we've learned how to generate a copy, how do you detect it? We're going to then move to talking a little bit about some Google guidelines around AI content writing for humans and robots. And then we'll end the day with a deeper dive into chat GPT how to write a great prompt and then how to create your own personal GPT which I'm really excited about because it's something that I only just learned how to do myself. Very\r\n\r\ngood. That's a lot to cover in the next hour. I let me invite everyone also to look at the chat I'm going to drop in today's slides if you have come in late. Also, we've added a link there for the PDF download. And finally, there's a link in the link bundle that'll drop in in just a moment that has the invitation for you to submit your site for a content UX audit tomorrow. So with that I will turn it over to you Matty, let's\r\n\r\ngo. Sounds great. All right. Yeah, let's go ahead and knock this out. So AI detector tools. There's a couple that we've tested at the blacksmith and I want to share some of the results of those tests too, so that you can understand what they can be useful for. But also again, there are limitations. As with the rest of this world of AI, everything's still kind of developing. We're all learning things at the same time. And so there's no like perfect answer. There's no one definitive tool that's going to tell you like this is current AI content, or this isn't AI content. So a couple tools that you could try though that I think will give you a decent idea or continent scale, copy leaks and originality.ai and the link here which again, you can grab through the slide bean link is a link to an in depth investigation that we did at the blog Smith testing out these different tools. You know, trying to learn more about the nature of AI content and what it sounds like. So I do have a couple of ideas for you two that we'll talk about next in terms of like how to rewrite things that sound robotic whether they were robot generated or not. But before we get to that, this example here is kind of funny because it's the Constitution and this is continent scale, saying that they detected to be 9% ai generated and you know, I don't think they had robots at the time unless alien somehow hooked them up. But I think it's fair to say that this is more than likely 100% human generated content. But it's just interesting to see that their AI detector is still picking up some very some version of that. And that you know, also perhaps it hasn't trained this AI detector on you know, pieces that existed before. Ai content was a thing. So so that's just like one thing. You know, I think from the standpoint of like, if you're working with content creators, and you're paying for human generated content, then you should get that fundamentally I think that it's an ethical violation for someone to use AI to generate content without disclosing that and to be accepting payment for that as if it were something that they were creating. Of course, there are many companies out there who are hiring people with the job description that is like aI content writer, AI content editor or like somebody who trains you know, a chatbot on a certain way a certain body of work a certain way of writing. All of that being said, if you if you are using these tools, and they are saying with a high degree of certainty, you know, this is AI generated copy. I think it's really important to not outright accuse somebody of submitting AI generated copy what I do at the blog Smith is like let's say that we're doing like a paid test with a new writer hopeful for our team. What I do is I say, hey, you know, we ran this through, you know, these three AI detector tools, and here's what it said here, you know, is what degree of AI content it's saying it thinks this is like, can you comment on that? And it gives them the chance to you know, explain what they think might happen, defend themselves, offering to make fixes, and I think it's really like the way people people are going to be honest or not. There's nothing you could do about that. But I think it's the way that they respond to and handle that situation that tells you what you need to know about if you want to work with them, whether or not you can ultimately tell if their copy was aI generated or not. What is very interesting about these different tools is first of all, they're all gonna give you a different answer. That's just a fact. Because they're all using a different approach to detect AI content. The other thing is that you can input the exact same copy on one of these tools two times and get a different answer. So again, it's it's the wild wild west. But these will at least give you something to think about and whether it doesn't matter. Like if we if we trust the writer or not, we're always going to run their copies through one or multiple of these tools because we want to detect things that sound robotic, even if they were written by a human. So that kind of brings me to my next point here that I was starting to hint at. So when it comes to detecting AI content, or even detecting content that humans wrote, that sounds robotic, there's a couple of patterns that you can look for. The two major characteristics that the aforementioned AI detector tools are looking for are first of all, perplexity, so that's unpredictability within the content. Ai generated text tends to have low perplexity. Human writing has higher perplexity, it kind of makes sense we're a little bit more erratic than a robot. The other thing is burstiness, which is a similar concept. So it's looking for variation in the length and the structure of sentences. Ai content tends to be more steady, more formulaic, which makes sense. It has lower burstiness and human writing, which you know, has much more variation. The image you see here are some other things that we've picked up in our own writing process. And in investigating this topic, different signals that sound robotic again, whether they are in AI generated or not. So repeating words, like in this example, collision coverage, you know, coverage collision, like it's just like it's not using a lot of variation. And in the box MyStyle guide we talk about like, trying not to use the same word twice in the same sentence or paragraph, which is not always possible, but this would be an example of something that wouldn't pass the blacksmith style guide test because it's it's too repetitive. Also repetitive sentence structure where like, each sentence starts with the same formulaic approach. Advertising then a verb you know, advertising the verb, unnatural word usage, so like, you know, removing a glass dome to access the ball, but it doesn't really sound like how a human would talk about replacing a light bulb. A generic or impersonal tone. You know, it's like things that don't add value that you're just kind of like saying for the sake of having words, it's another thing that we talk about in the blog, Smith style guide, like everything you say, should have a purpose, and we don't believe in fluff. It's about cutting things to being the most concise version they can be while still conveying enough meaning. For people to understand what we're trying to say. Statements that contradict themselves. So the new policy will increase employee benefits while at the same time it will reduce employee benefits that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And inconsistent verb tense, you know, something a human editor. Should be able to pick up pretty well but probably a robot writing is not going to care too much about He He was waiting for the bus when he sees his coworker. Stiff, formal or matter of fact, writing style. You know, again, just something that just doesn't sound like a human wrote it or who would want to read it. So this is this is something that can be helpful to you like when you're doing your own edits to kind of like go through these different things. And, again, whether whether it's aI generated or not, and you know that for a fact, you still want to make sure that your writing is something that appeals to the human. So I wanted to take some time to talk about Google's helpful content update and also their guidance for AI generated content and whether or not it will rank some of this we did talk about last year if you were here, so we're just going to do a really quick refresher on that as it relates to this topic. So my book and like really like what we're talking about, in general is kind of marrying the concepts of writing for both humans who are really the ultimate buyer like they're the ones who actually have money so they can buy from you, whatever it is you're selling. They respond to other humans, other people's empathy, versus robots who you know, we're not writing for their sake, but they are the medium that connects us. To those humans. And so it's important for the things that we write, to be indexable to, you know, be findable to be descriptive, and to ultimately match the intent of whatever the human is looking for. So, you know, robots can also take the form of social networking site algorithms, like that news feed that you're familiar with, I'm sure.\r\n\r\nSo so that's kind of like the two players in this game. Here. So this is some highlights from Google's guidance about AI generated content. As you can see by the link here, this is from early 2023. And I was looking at this page again, just a couple of days ago to see if anything had changed. I had seen something on Twitter now x, where somebody had mentioned that something on this page should change. And I was looking at these three things because I think they're the most relevant to this topic that we're talking about. And like, I don't know if I'm just you know, like, post pregnancy brain or something. I couldn't find the difference. But it might have been because it was about something else on that page. But I might have missed it. And it might have been one of these things. But anyway, I think these things still more or less ring true today. And if anything has changed, it has been Google being less specific about their guidelines. Because that's kind of the nature of what all these things that they've shared with us are it's it's kind of like so just to go over them is a content against Google searches guidelines. They say it's not, but you know, it can't be used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which we'll talk about when we talk about the helpful content update. Will AI content rank highly on search? Maybe, you know, it doesn't give it any gains, which makes sense. What I think is really notable about this is they talk about if it's useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of e 80. It might do well in search. So they talk about original, but we've already talked today about how AI content at least on its own without manual intervention by humans is inherently not original. It is inherently not unique. And I would argue that again, without human intervention, it's neither useful nor helpful, in that, you know, you're not It's not like adding something that doesn't already exist. At least in that case. So to me, from Google's own words, AI content really aren't its own shouldn't rank high and relevant search. But of course, there are exceptions. And then, of course, there are situations where people pair that with a human editor like we saw with seeing that of course, CNET being a cautionary tale of what to avoid. Should I use AI to generate content? They say if you see it as an essential way to help you produce content that is helpful and original, we have that original word again, it might be useful to consider but again, if you're trying to gain search engine rankings and no there was something on Twitter now x where somebody was kind of like I can't remember who it was, but you might recognize the situation especially if you're in like the content world. Someone was boasting about how they had created a ton of AI generated content and they were sharing you know some stats from like their Google Analytics, and how would that helped rankings and things like that? And I think everybody agreed that that person should have probably kept their mouth shut because somebody from Google ended up you know, seeing this Thrive that came to their attention and they got hit with a manual penalty based on what this person was saying about you know, having not really like had that human intervention. So thus, it was not original or unique. And it's just funny, like, you could probably get away with it, at least for a while, depending on how Google develops more of these guidelines. But when you start to boast about it, and Google gets wind of it, then like there are manual interventions that they could take, so tread carefully. If it's working. Keep that to yourself. So then it Yeah, I wanted to like connect this back to Google's helpful content algorithm update, which also happened. Probably a little over a year ago, maybe two years ago. And so they describe it as being part of their long term efforts to provide original and valuable content through search. It rewards content that meets users expectations while demoting content written primarily with search engines in mind. So like we were just talking about what the AI content. This this update isn't focused on AI but but it adds color to those guidelines in terms of how to approach it or you know, if you are generating AI content, how to make it work, so that it could rank these questions. Are directly from Google just made pretty was blacksmith branding, but the link that I shared here will will get you to the Google documentation that includes these questions and the subsequent ones. So to ask yourself like is is this content truly people versus is something that Google would consider ranking. It's things like Do you have a primary purpose or focus for your site? If you're writing about too many disparate topics, it's very confusing to Google you can certainly write about things that are different but related to each other, but you should really have like one specific focus if you want to rank high in relevant search. Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they've had a satisfying experience? I think that's a question to ask yourself, whenever you create any type of content like Is it is it satisfying to the end user doesn't really just serve your purposes? They talk about like demonstrating firsthand experience or like a depth of knowledge that's really important. That's that's how we add uniqueness to our content. That's how we make it original. Even if it's just your opinion on something, you know, that adds color to the content that already exists. Okay, so, um, let's talk now about from the search perspective, are you taking the search engine first approach to your content? So these are things that you obviously don't want to do. And it's questions like, you know, are you primarily trying to attract people from search versus creating something truly useful for humans? It does say are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics like that cautionary tale, that person who was sharing, you know, the content they generated, which resulted in a manual penalty, it's a perfect example. I think this is important too, like, are you mainly just summarizing what others have said without adding much value? You should always be adding I think something to the content that you're creating in order for it to be worth creating in the first place.\r\n\r\nSo just to kind of summarize here, like what is helpful content versus unhelpful content from these guidelines that Google has given us and that I honestly agree with? helpful content is people first genuine specific, it's actionable. Up to date is important. Once you publish something, you have to think about, like if you're using stats or if it's about maybe a tool that changes frequently, like you should be regularly reviewing or auditing your content for opportunities to update it. Is it relatable, is it concise? And ultimately, is it satisfying, versus the unhelpful content which is written primarily for the search engine robots it's spammy? It's generic, it's abstract. It might be outdated. Ultimately, it's impersonal, impersonal, fluffy, and then whacking. So these are some easy guidelines that you can use to understand if your content is hitting the mark for something that Google would even consider ranking high and relevant search. All right, so now we're gonna get to some of like the really fun stuff, I think today, which is get GBT some specific examples for how you can use it, as well as a demonstration for how I'm using it. And so, a lot of the things that I'm going to talk about today are based on things that I've learned from other people. I didn't necessarily invent these things. I've adapted many for my own use cases. And so again, I think this is a really valuable opportunity for like if you have anything to add to this discussion, I'd love to see it in the chat. I think it could benefit other people. How are you experimenting with AI? Like how how would you maybe adapt some of these ideas for how to write a great prompt What are like interesting prompts that you've used, and you know what, how is that benefited? You so I'll just put that out there. And then I'll also say that some of these are like pretty much all of these guidelines are based on open AIS guidelines for prompt engineering as well as Google's in some cases, I've combined to them and in all cases, I've given examples of how to use them effectively. So let's go ahead and jump to it. Okay, so the, I think first and perhaps the most important thing is to be as specific as possible. And you want to set parameters for the output that you're looking for. So my prompt here was helped me generate 10 email subject lines to use for cold outreach for my content marketing agency, please limit output to a maximum of 45 characters per example. I picked that number, the 45 characters because I saw that that's like somewhat of a best practice for how many characters people want to see in an email subject line. And what I could have done here was use the personal GPT I'm going to show you later that's all about the blogs and style guide them has like aspects of like how we do business and I could have gotten like even better example results here. But the point was not to show you something perfect it was to show you how to apply this principle. And the other thing that I wanted to add to is like you can always start with a plant, see what it gets you and then you can set parameters after the fact to refine your output. Like, you know, maybe I would have asked this prompt and then asked for it to shorten it to 45 characters or to suggest new examples of 45 characters. Or maybe I would have asked for like, what are you know, 10 General Sales, cold outreach subject lines, that I could use and then I might have added the detail Okay, now, adjust it for like my content marketing agency. The next one is to give context and examples. So I have this bot and I think I'm going to show you a screenshot of it next. One of my personal GPCs is a blacksmith sales expert. And so I created this bot because we recently hired a new salesperson, and there's just so much to learn both about the blogs with his brand. The work we do for customers, and just our sales process in general things that we want to share with new prospects that I wanted to create a resource and it's like of course you know, I want to make myself as available as possible to this new salesperson because typically I've been the salesperson for my company, I have a lot of that knowledge in my own head, but there are times when I am unavailable or I have other stuff that I have to work on. And so I wanted to create a personal GPT that incorporates some of this different documentation that I've created about our process. You know, referring to this prompt it also has like a copy of our standard proposal. Different things about you know, like what makes us stand out compared to the competition what's what's unique to us, I guess, so that any person on our team, any especially new salesperson, would be able to use this chat bot in order to surface some of this information, especially if they couldn't get a hold of me basically. So here's an example of a prompt I gave my personal GPT which is using the above case study. So I gave it a URL on our website. And one of the features of chat GPT is that you can have it browse the web in order to to include information and its results. So I gave it a URL. I asked it to reference a proposal that I had attached to the GPT that I've uploaded to it. And I said proposed an email pitch for a specific job opportunity. I copy and pasted a longer piece than this. I just took a screenshot but like the long version of this job description, and and I asked it to effectively address the requirements that the job description surfaced and the writing based on our strengths. And so what ended up happening was, you know, it wrote like a cold pitch email. But it did it did effectively address this prompt. There were things that I would change about it. Certainly there are things that I would have edited it before I sent it out to the person who had posted this job description, but I think that for me as a founder who has also traditionally been the salesperson it's such an effective way to use this tool because I spend so much time just you know, it's like I know all this information I know what we're good at. I know that we have relevant examples. You know, I know all this but it takes time to like resurface that knowledge and put it in a form that sounds good and is compelling, you know, to a sales prospect so that if you take one thing away, I think that you know that's like one really excellent use case of using your existing knowledge or your internal documentation. To make your life way easier.\r\n\r\nAnother related GPT prompt engineering tip is to use de limiters to clearly indicate distinct parts of the input. That just means like what I shouldn't have done here that would have made it probably a little bit easier for chat. GPT to understand what I wanted is to put this this job description text in like quotes, that's like a delimiters to say like, you know, do this to this piece of what I'm asking for to kind of like help it understand what part of the copy it's referencing. And what part of the copy is the ask, especially when you have like a longer input output, you know, whatever. Another example of that is something I learned from James rose. He is an automation and Zapier expert and has been doing a lot of interesting experiments with AI who's really good person to follow. If you're interested in just like getting ideas, he takes transcripts from like voice of customer interviews where he's getting feedback and you know, like positive testimonials and things about his product and he feeds that transcript into chat GPT and says you know, use this puts a transcript in quotes those delimiters and basically like give me like three, you know, like really nice things they said about you know, our product three like great pieces of feedback. And I think that that's such a useful way we like on our client calls on our internal meetings. We use a tool called fireflies, which automatically transcribes all our meetings, but it's still you know, it's still a lot to sort through an end fireflies has its own AI capabilities, too. So it helps to summarize and things like that, but to take to be able to use that output and quickly surface insights based on whatever your prompt is, I think is such an awesome use of AI that saves the human reader from having to go through the whole thing. So this is and I'll show you, I'll show you what this looks like in action when we do the personal GPT demonstration. But this is kind of what it looks like to set some parameters for your personnel GPT and there's two I guess like schools of thought on setting like setting parameters narrowly defining the G PTS role. So you could do this within normal chat GPT and say for this query, you know, I want you to take on this specific role. And so I got this idea from Paul Roeser. He was on some like marketing technology podcast, and he's talking about how he uses AI. And his example was like, something along the lines of like, you know, pretend that you're a lawyer that advises entrepreneur, it's about hiring law and then he gave his prompt so he kind of like set the scene like this is the narrow role that I want you to operate into this query. So that's one way that you could look at it the other way is that you could create a personal GPT that serves a specific purpose like my blacksmith sales expert, that I've already referred to and that you know, I'm kind of showing you behind the scenes, how I set it up. So as you can see here, there's like a name for it, which is kind of arbitrary. A brief description, I think, mostly for your reference. And then the instructions are like what the AI uses to then suggest answers to your prompts. So as you can see here, I'm telling it like you can use our website as your primary reference. You should be familiar with all those pages and use it to inform your responses. It'll ask you and I'll show you how you want it to communicate with you how you want it to give answers. You know what specific information you want to focus on again, like narrowing that scope. And then I also say like tailor your responses to showcase the company's strengths and successes. Using you know details from the website and emphasize why we're the ideal choice in you know, answering like sales related queries. So this is one of the greatest uses of chat GPT without narrowly defining its role and objective. You're gonna get like a wide variety of answers and that's fine. It depends on what your use cases, but by giving it a roll, I think the quality of your output goes up exponentially. And I'll show you again, at the end here, what that looks like in practice. Here's another really interesting way to use it, I think, especially if you're trying to learn a new skill or if you're trying to troubleshoot an existing workflow, which is what I was doing in this prompt. So I use air table a lot. I'm a huge fan of no code and automation in general. I've found in my life that it's really hard to find like the perfect solution to everything that I want to do. I never could find like my perfect project management tool. And so essentially, I built it between using process street air table, Zapier, and you know the other mix of ragtag tools that are in my arsenal. So in this case, I was trying to create a specific automation in air table that for some reason is just evading me and I'm sure I'm doing like one stupid thing wrong, but I asked air table or sorry, I asked Chad GPT first of all, I prompted it by telling it what automation I was trying to create, like the actions that triggers the end goal. And it gave me like a step by step process that I would say is a little bit more high level than this out, but and then I asked it to refine its guidance or expand on its guidance by saying okay, so for this step, this is where I'm getting stuck. What was how exactly what I set this up in air table, and so then, as you can see, the result has some details and it's more detailed than the previous query gave for that step. It's probably worth mentioning that in chat GPT right now, there's two versions of GPT, which is like the underlying, you know, algorithm, machine learning mechanism, whatever. So there's GPT 3.5, which is an older version, and then there's GPT for GPT four incorporates web browsing so it has more up to date guidance. So especially when you're trying to troubleshoot something like air table, which changes often and so, you know, if I were using the old version of chat GPT, I might have gotten a different answer. So when you're doing things like like this, you want to use like the newer version, there is a limitation. I think it's something like you can have 40 prompts within three hours or something like that. I don't think I've ever gotten close to hitting that. But I suppose if you were to ask, you know, a lot of follow up questions, or you're troubleshooting something very complicated, then you could hit that so that's just something to keep in mind that as a chat GPT user and I don't know what the distinction is for paid versus free, but I think that the paid version of Chad GPT is like worth its weight in gold. I think it's extremely undervalued and it's probably because they're using our data to train it. So they do get a benefit out of it. But you know, I would say if you're finding yourself limited by the free version, then just upgrade to the paid it's, it's so worth that.\r\n\r\nOkay, so now, here's the real fun part. So we're gonna go through how to build your own GPT and I'm gonna give you like a specific task to do and so you can either follow along with me while I do this now, or you can do this yourself. Later, watch the recording and replicate it. I will say the process is probably much more straightforward than you might think, if you've never done this before. So we'll go ahead and get started. Let me set my screen accordingly. So we're going to jump over to the blog Smith website, because this is going to be the basis for the very basic UBT that we're going to create today, which is based on one that I've already created and refined a little bit more than what we're going to get into. But okay, so the blacksmith has this writing style guide and on our website. It has this chapter version so you can jump you know to these different sections. To see how will we go about our writing style. It's something that's fairly industry agnostic, so definitely like a great resource. If you don't have your own writing style guide. You could use ours to build yours. But what I want to do is create a chat GPT bot based on this that essentially acts as like a blacksmith editor that defends our style and explains when a piece of copy is not following it. So we have this as a PDF which I've already downloaded. I'll just show you what it looks like really quick. And it's it's designed, but it's fairly plain texts. You know, it's not that much more complex visually than like a Google doc version of this. And I'm telling you this, because my first attempt at making a personal GPT was actually to solve a personal problem of mine, which is that I love the game Settlers of Catan and I wanted to make a Catan rules bot so that I could download all the PDFs of the rules for every version we have. And I could ask the GPT okay, like you know, here's some like obscure situation like what is the role, you know, based on these rule books? Because every once in a while, something like that pops up. And while I like to think of myself as a content expert, there are those niche situations that require further consideration. Unfortunately, on the Catan website, the PDFs that you can download are very complicated visually as PDF, so chat GPT in my limited experience has not been able to read them. So it's just something to note that like you want to give it like the plainest text version of whatever documents you want to share with it, but something like this would be fine. And I know that because I've tested it. Okay, so so if you want to follow along, you know, just hit download, and that's this is the exact file that we're going to use. So then you go to the chat GPT dashboard. Which looks like this. And like I told you, you can toggle between chat, or GPT 3.5 or GPT. Four, you can see you know those limitations as well as the added benefits of using that more recent version of it. So then you go to explore GP Ts, and you can see on my sidebar when it loads here that I have. We have chat GPT which is like you know, every every question you could ever want to ask and then I have a couple of my personal gptc here as well as some that I've explored in this explore LGBTs area that I'm just kind of playing around with. So this is also just like a really fun place to look through things, test things out and get ideas for the the GPS you might want to create. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead and click this Create button, and you'll see this interface. Again, it's pretty simple. And if you go to create, it's going to prompt you with specific questions, but if you kind of like are familiar with this personal GPT idea, you could also jump to the Configure tab and start filling it out. But I think that it's easiest to think about it from this Create Tab. And so it's going to prompt you with a couple of questions. So this first one is like what kind of chat GPT what kind of personal GPT Do you want to make? So I'm going to tell it, you know, I like to create a GPT that serves as an editor for my brand, the blog Smith. The goal is to have this GPT serve as a resource. That references our specific style guide, and suggests edits based on newly inputted copy. I'm just making this up. But the last time that I did this, I'd used something similar to that. And so after each input, it's going to think you know, it's going to react to the things that you're telling it and it's going to ask you to refine the way that it interacts with you. So we're not none of this is like rocket science right now. This is just like designing almost like the persona of who this GPT is going to be. So then it's gonna suggest to name I suggest naming this GPT blacksmith editor. Does that work for you? Sure. Yeah. And you can change this yourself. Like if you just want to, like get through this part. Just say yep, yep, that's fine. And the next thing is it's going to generate a profile picture and so these are new, they're a little bit arbitrary. It's just like for your own purposes, for fun. One thing that is kind of fun with the imagery and it doesn't always work so we'll see. But sometimes I asked it to change to adapt the picture to use like one of our brand colors just for fun. So I'll say like, can you update this image to incorporate our main brand color, which just using a text expander Simple as that? Let's do it does. So this is using that dolly dolly I never know how to say it to suggest images and, you know, it looks like Okay, right? But we're not we're not asking it to create anything like complicated at this point. So, so like for example, it didn't, it didn't really follow my query. So let's see if I try a different way. Can the image use, you know, our main branch color? Like this is this is definitely the limitation of AI is that sometimes it understands the query and sometimes it just doesn't and we won't get stuck on it. If it doesn't get it. I just want to see if changing it has any practical effect on it. So then after this, it's going to ask about Yeah, that doesn't do it. No, that's fine. Okay, so the next question. They're asking me to more narrowly defined the role of what this GPT is going to serve as I'm Oh, so I'll have you use the uploaded PDFs as this as the foundation for your edits any questions? So I can upload the PDF here. Or I can go to that configure tag and I can also tab and I can also I can also upload additional documents to help as well like with my blacksmith sales expert, I have like our proposal I have a document about our sales process. I have another GPT that I forgot to mention that's called the blacksmith like SEO guru or something like that. And it basically I uploaded a bunch of documents about our approach to SEO some stuff about our keyword research process, and our like philosophy behind the different steps as well as a document I created for our writers and editors. That's about let me see how to get out of that. That's about how we write about SEO to make sure that our philosophy is communicated correctly and specifically. So that's just an example of different documents that you might use to support the outputs here and to narrowly define what you want to base its answers on. Okay. One thing that's important to say is when you're uploading documents you want to make sure to kind of like give context and say like, this is how I want you to use it. And like, you know, I'm doing this, I'm uploading this. So I'm expecting you to use this as part of your output if you don't, if you don't refer to that document when you're setting it up or when you're interacting with it. It might just ignore it in some, in some use cases when I've been creating these personal GPS like that's happened where, for example, with this one, it'll make edits based on best practices, but not based on the document that I specifically wanted it to use. So that's why I used that language. And so it says, I've updated your GPS behavior to focus on our specific style guide based on the uploaded PDF. So that's great. You know, like, what options so one thing that it usually asks is like how do you want the GPT to communicate with you and I'm getting maybe ahead of myself, I'm gonna say no, that sounds good and see if it prompts me to ask about like the tone.\r\n\r\nOkay, so it's not gonna say it looks good, but what options do I have for how it communicates with me? In terms of tone of voice, again, usually asked so this is giving me some options here. Again, not usually in the way that it normally does. It kind of asked to like paragraph form versus like giving me several examples. I'm gonna say that I want it to be let's go with number three, which is encouraging and positive. I think that that's the ethos of how we edit at the box with the other things are true to um, yeah, so just for the sake of this, and you can always change this, you can always refine it. Okay, so it's updating the GPT. This is probably the last edit and then what I'll do is I'm going to grab some copy that I want it to, to edit just to show you how it comes full circle. And then I'm going to show you kind of like the back end of what it looks like. So let me grab that copy. I'm going to feed it an example of like a recent social post that we were editing and the formatting is going to be like a little bit funky here, which is fine, because this is just an example. And the blog the style guide isn't necessarily built with a focus on editing social copy, but again, it was just like a quick thing to to try. Okay, so it says it's updated it. It tells me you know what the point of it is no more adjustments needed. Let's try it out. Okay, so I'm going to show you how it works and then we'll show you the Configure and then we'll kind of end the day off with any questions. Okay. So it gives you some prompts based on what it thinks that you might ask it and you can edit this, but I'm going to say please suggest edits to the following copy, in quotes and quotations, those delimiters based on the blacksmith style guide PDF and again, it's gonna be a little sloppy looks like it didn't actually take the name of the GPT that we asked it to. So we'll we'll take a look at that too. So it's interesting depending on the prompt you give it and I've tried this a couple of times in this case, it's kind of separating it out by saying like okay, here's some of the things from the blacksmith style guide and here's like specific passages of copy and how we would change them. So that's interesting. But what I would probably prefer is that it edits the whole thing, and then it tells me what edits it made. So it's, again, it's referencing I can I can tell because I'm familiar with it, but it's referencing specific aspects of the blacksmith style guide, which is great, we know it's working. But what I'm going to ask you to do is to change the way it outputs it. Can you refine the previous output by starting with I might mess up exactly how to say this, but by starting with, like all of the copy with edits, then after words, shared the specific edits made from blog Smith style perspective, that might not be like the most effective prompt. We're just going to see what it says. Okay, yeah, it looks like it's understanding. Nature. The copy here is an important I just want to show you how something like this could work for your purposes. Okay, so this is what I wanted it it refined the copy first and then it told me what it refined and why. Um, so let's look at this Configure tab. So yeah, for whatever reason, it didn't add the name. That that it prompted me and asked me to so I'm gonna go ahead and add that and you can see it up here. You can see this description. You can see the instructions based on some of the things that we talked about when we were creating it. You can make changes to these conversation starters we might even say like what like other conversation starters, would you suggest using freelist UPC code? I'm just curious and I don't know what to do. You can see the PDF that we uploaded and I can upload more files. You can add additional capabilities. I think by default the web browsing and Dolly image generation is implemented for many of you today who deal with code, this code interpreter might be useful. And then AI actions is something that I've started to play around with but don't fully understand but there's a way that you can connect your personal GPT to Zapier so that for example, it could reference data and other apps. So for my blog, Smith sales GPT I'm trying to create an AI action that allows it to reference our air table CRM so that you could ask it questions about a certain lead or certain portfolio projects and things like that. So once I get that implemented, it's going to be so cool. Okay, so it's giving me some ideas for these conversation starters that are a little generic, but I could probably refine them further. I think the last thing to talk about is how you can either keep this to yourself or share it with other people. I think that these drafts are automatically saved. So if you X out of here before clicking Save, I believe it will still exist, but don't quote me on that. From there you can decide you know, if you want to, if you want to keep it to yourself if it's you know something that's for your own personal use cases, or if you want to share it with your team or if you want to share it with like the wider world like maybe you create a chatbot for your industry that other people could benefit from that you want to share. So, in most cases, probably anyone with the link is a good bet, if you ever intend intend to share it with other people. Okay, so let me jump back to my slides really quick. We're going to end off the day here. So here we go. me pull this back up. Um, okay, this is the link to grab the style guide if you want to use that to replicate what I did today. You can also grab that from the side being like um, I'll just say one more time. My book writing for humans and robots. It was the number one best seller in the SEO category. So if SEO and content is something that you want to invest more time and learning about then I would highly recommend my book. You can grab the first chapter for free on the books website, and you can grab the book on Amazon in both print and Kindle format. I'll give one more reminder for our live content UX audit tomorrow. I'd really love to help you workshop, your content, help you come up with ideas for making it even stronger and more effective. So you can use this link to do that and that will happen at the end of day two. And then, you know, outside of today, if you have any questions about the things that we're talking about, you can either email me Maddie at the blogspot.com or on Twitter, aka ex im at Mad Yasmin and then yeah, we'll end the day with any questions that have come up since going over some of this GPT stuff.\r\n\r\nYeah, great stuff. Thanks Maddie. You know, the custom GP tees are really interesting. And it's it's also not only for your own business, but also working for clients. It's an opportunity to really, it's, it's a service you can provide. We have a boy for example, that has a ton of they're an educational nonprofit and they have a ton of PDFs like 800 and an educational topic that they deal with and so we're investigating, what would it take to put those PDFs in there and then have a bot that you could query the entire library to find an answer to something right. It's just super, super useful. Yeah.\r\n\r\nOne one note on that Nathan is chat GPT. So they have a limitation of you can upload 20 Total documents but they don't say how large or small those documents have to be so OneNote for like anybody who's trying like this is something that came up with that Catan bot I was trying to make. You can combine the documents if need be.\r\n\r\nYeah. And chat CPT if you have a large library like that it might not be the best tool it sometimes there are a bunch of third party tools. I mean, if you go on App Sumo, every day, there's a new one that somebody's chat bot or whatever, but find one that the UI that you like and a lot of those don't have those limitations. Like they have a separate database that they're looking at with total sort of magic they've created. I don't know, I don't understand it. But anyway, yeah. So folks, a couple of questions stacked up there. If you have a question, add that to the zoom q&a, and we'll dive into it. So first question from Doug. Maddie, how does SEMrush or SEMrush fit into the landscape of content writing tools? What overlaps or complements with phrase? Sure,\r\n\r\nyeah. So I think of something like SEMrush or Ahrefs is being a great all in one. SEO tool. So people use it for more than content although content is like an important facet of them versus something like phrase or query scope is really just about content and just about content optimization, or, you know, in the case of like phrase and market Muse also generating content is the use case. But SEMrush I have I'll be honest, I have more experienced with a traps but they both they're both very similar and we actually use SEMrush like the keyword researchers and strategists on my team, we use SEMrush these days. But it is it is the tool that if we're comparing it to phrase and query scope, that's the tool that we use to define our primary keyword. It's before we run those reports. It's a tool that we use to come up with some secondary keywords. It's the tool that we use to identify feature snippet opportunities, we can do competitor research on it. You can do backlink tracking on it. You can audit your website. So I mean, it just it just serves such a bigger overall SEO use case. But there are many very useful content optimization tools. And so it's kind of like a higher budget tool than any of the ones that I've mentioned, but it will serve you know, many of your SEO purposes even outside of content. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nOkay, questions from Eddie. Eddie is writing tech blogs. I see now my keyword content from Reddit is ranking very good. I doubt Reddit content is helpful since usually people have vague answers to questions. What do you think about that?\r\n\r\nIt's an interesting question and I think I'm gonna take the opposite stance. I do think that Reddit content is helpful. There's something about people being like anonymous on the internet that like makes the truth come out. People feel like a little I guess like Freer with the information that they that they volunteer. And so I mean, you have to take it with a grain of salt because they're anonymous. They also might have an agenda that is not clear versus somebody who's coming out and saying, you know, I work for one of these tools or, you know, these are the clients they serve. And so that's like, why this relates to what I'm talking about. But I will say that sites like Reddit, Reddit and Quora are really interesting for learning more about your audience, learning about the things that like keep them up at night and so that's why they rank so high is because they are a wealth of information. They're not, you know, they're not using like the traditional methods to optimize their sites, but they are benefiting from all this unique user generated content because they've created communities. So, yeah, I mean, I don't I don't know exactly how to answer the question. I guess I'm kind of like answering around it, but I think that Reddit is a useful resource in general. I don't know that it can be counted on like aI right where Yeah, I can be confidently incorrect certainly. So to can, Reddit user is but they bring up some really interesting points that are worth investigating. So as long as if you are using it as a reference that you fact check, or you know, if you're I guess if the question is like, How can I outrank Reddit the the answer is like, I don't know.\r\n\r\nYou just said maybe Reddit pays Google. And honestly, we just did a story about this a week ago in our news roundup. It is actually Google who has purchased the rights to all of read its content. Alright, Gemini. Yeah, that just came out. The story last week was an unnamed AI but it's since come out that it's Google has purchased it right. So who knows? Yeah, Google does. Yeah. Doug says here's my favorite prompt. I add this to help me brainstorm chat. GPT add this to the end of your prep, ask me five questions that will improve the response you'll be giving me I use that too. It's really helpful. I\r\n\r\nlove that I I haven't considered that and that's why I think like discussions like this are so useful. Like, we can all learn so much from each other. I learned something new about this every day. For\r\n\r\nsure. The AI world is moving rapidly. And we were Mata you and I were talking earlier just we did an AI workshop here back in October, and there's so much that's new and better and different, even just in the last few months. It's pretty crazy. All right. That brings us to the end of questions. Tomorrow, we're talking about a UX content UX. So give us one more time an overview of what we're going to talk about tomorrow and we'll start to wrap things up here.\r\n\r\nOh, tomorrow. I was looking at the comments and somebody had mentioned let's say Ben had mentioned that to get them to use the right color and the GPT to be very specific, use hex color code when so I got distracted but um, okay, so tomorrow we're going to focus on the content reader experience. Content UX, another way of thinking about it. So we're going to talk a little bit about things like things that Google has said or page experience signals, so things that are like tangible that you can optimize around within your design to help your ranking on Google. And my philosophy when it comes to SEO is that there's three pillars, there's like the content and the things that you can affect on your own page. There's the website structure, so that's going to be a lot of what we talk about tomorrow. And then there's things like Off Page signals like backlinks, which we won't talk about, but you know, we can always have a discussion later or, you know, I'm sure Nathan will bring on somebody who talks about that at some point, too. So yeah, we'll talk about these like website signals, these page experience signals. We'll talk a little bit about website structure, things that you can do to create a better experience for your users, even if it's not necessarily something that Google takes into consideration for ranking and some things that they do. And then we will talk about auditing, you know, with practical tools and specifics, your contents, the nature of your contents UX. I'll tell you how to like run your own content UX audit, whether that's with tools or with people in person. And so that'll be that'll be kind of the nature of what we talk about tomorrow. Trying to bring that discussion full circle from the specific things that you can use to how to like measure if you're using them effectively, and then we'll end the day with a content UX audit from the things that ideally, y'all have submitted. So if you haven't, please use that form that we've linked to in that slide. Being link, and then I'll pick a couple for us to go over tomorrow.\r\n\r\nYep, very good. And that link is there in the chat. Once again, make sure you submit a URL that was a lot of fun last year when we did that very info wise. Yeah. So I will take care of that. Tomorrow. That's yeah, day two. All right. Maddie, good stuff today. As always, we'll have the recording up if anybody wants to go back and replay if you came in late. It'll be up in about an hour or so soon as it renders. And I will see you back here tomorrow, one o'clock central time for day two of content workshop. Have a good night. See you then.\r\n\r\nHear but as you're coming in, we're just asking what was your biggest takeaway from day one? You can sound off there in the chat. I'm also dropping in the new link bundle, I can type correctly. There is a new slide being linked, so make sure you grab that new one. It is updated on the replay page. But make sure you grab that new link because a few changes have been made since yesterday. That will let you follow along better.\r\n\r\nSome last minute tool suggestions. Ah,\r\n\r\nlove it. Love it all. Right, catch. Working for everybody now. Just about a minute and a half to go and again, we'd love to hear from you in the chat on what your biggest takeaways from day one we're. As we are waiting just another minute or so to get started. Also the link there for the live content UX audit is on the screen because we have a slide or two left if you'd like to submit your site or page or something for a content audit. It'll be a friendly review with with some good help to help you improve some of your language. So use that link. The link is in the link bundle in the chat. There on the screen. We do have a couple of slots if you'd like to participate in that. So Vivian, if you look at the replay link in the link bundle the academy link there is a PDF download link on that on the on the replay page. And that is the new updated slides. Yep, so that's all there ready to go on the replay page or you can view them on slide being right now. Yeah, not too many changes. New tools. All I was new to was fun tools. Yeah. Alright folks, about 30 seconds to go. Glad everybody's back for day two. Again, our check in question. Let us know in the chat. What your biggest takeaway from day one was? Particularly did you have you used any new GPT prompts since we played around with that yesterday, or has anybody taken the dive and made your own custom GPT based on\r\n\r\nor have any ideas for things that you want to try when you have time? Yeah, I could. I could use some more ideas myself. Yeah.\r\n\r\nFor sure. All right, folks. It is three minutes after someone to start our recording and we will get underway. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everybody, wherever you happen to be welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here and joined again by MADI. Azzaman for day two of the content accelerator for 2024 Welcome back. Maddie. Glad you're here.\r\n\r\nThank you so much for having me. Again. It's exciting to dig into some of these topics.\r\n\r\nAbsolutely. So we had a lot of fun yesterday talking about some AI stuff and some great principles for creating great content. And today we're looking more at the the user side of consuming content right what are we going to talk about today? Exactly.\r\n\r\nYeah, I think that you can think of today as being a way to practically test your content, whether that's with other people, whether that's with tools, understanding how it measures up against some of the guidelines that Google has shared, that are necessary for ranking, specifically when they have to do with the user experience. So we're going to kind of attack this from all angles. And, you know, hopefully it'll leave today with some really tangible tools to help you understand like, does your content provide a great reader experience? Or are there things that you could do to improve it?\r\n\r\nYeah, very good. And we do still have this content UX link on the screen. If you have not filled that out and you would like to there's still a slot or two left for the second hour, we'll do some live content review. So grab that now. The link is there in the chat as well. A couple little bits of housekeeping and we'll turn it back over to Matty as usual. Ask your questions using the zoom q&a And we'll take those questions at the end of each hour today. break in the middle as usual. One note is that the slides have been updated since yesterday. So in the chat is the new slide being link. And if you want the PDF download, just go onto the replay page with the link there and the link bundle and you can download the PDF there as well that has all the new updates on the slides. So with that, I'm going to disappear Maddie, let's get started.\r\n\r\nLet's do it. So yeah, if if you want to submit something for this live content UX audit, ideally, it's like a page on your website, not not something like a PDF, because we want to look at how the content interacts with design. And like Nathan said, you know, it's a friendly review. We're not like looking for issues. We're just looking for things that you could do to perhaps improve the content experience. Get another set of eyes on it. And it's just a practical way to apply some of the tools suggestions I'm going to give you so with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. We're going to start today by talking about Google guidelines for what makes up a great user experience, especially when it has to do with content and specifically we're going to talk from the perspective of Google's quality rater guidelines. And then after I go through a couple specifics there, we're going to talk more broadly about Google's page quality signals. I think that's what it's called. I haven't labeled in the next slide but things that have to do with what they've told us influenced ranking high and relevant search, you know, all else equal, if you have great content, what aspects of your website design, you know, must be present of your website structure must be present in order for you to rank high and relevant search. So the first part is a little bit more I would say qualitative. And then the second part is going to be a little bit more quantitative. So the learn more link is for an article I wrote a while back for Search Engine Journal. This was specifically focusing on aspects of Google's quality rater guidelines that have to do with the user experience. And so I think it was a couple of years ago now I read through the entire quality rater guidelines, which if you're interested in SEO, and user experience, I would highly recommend at least giving it a skim. It's kind of hard to do because it's like 175 pages, but there's some really good nuggets in there about how Google looks at search, how they judge quality of content, how they determine if a page of a search result meets the needs of the searcher who's looking for it. And so the quality rater guidelines what's worth mentioning is that to some extent you have to take with a grain of salt because this is not something that directly influences rankings. What happens is human quality raters that they hire read through these guidelines, they're tested on them to make sure that they understand what Google is looking for and then they manually rate different website results based on a certain query. And so what happens is that Google gets that information. It helps them you know, refine their algorithm in terms of the general direction they want to take with it, but it doesn't necessarily result in any manual adjustments for whatever websites they're ranking. It's it's more of like a research process. So that's, that's what the quality rater guidelines are. They're a tool to help Google research what the web looks like right now in order to make decisions about how they want to adjust their algorithm for the rest of us. But all that being said, Whenever Google gives us information, whenever they volunteer details about how they look at search, and how they define quality, and like a great user experience, I think that we would be wise to take note of that if it is in fact our goal to rank in relevant search. And I think at the end of the day, whether it is or not, I think Google tries to maintain a high standard for quality. I think that it's their philosophy, philosophy, that content is king, you know that that good? Content is important. And so again, whether search is your goal or not, it's worth it's worth at least like listening to what they have to say. And so, for your benefit, I've tried to break down some of the most important things from the quality rater guidelines specifically having to do with the topic that we are discussing today. So the first thing that they mentioned or they they talk about the quality rater guidelines has to do with interstitials. So back in, it was either 2017 or 2018. They made an update to their algorithm, and they told us about it is again one of those rare cases where they're just upfront. And they said that like if you're using popups say, for example, to gather somebody's email address, or you know, it maybe you're on an E commerce site to advertise the sale, something that obscures the content that you have to interact with you either put your email in, or you have to click the X button, you know, something like that, that you have to interact with in order to use the content on the page. They call that an intrusive interstitial. And so what happened was it really it really resulted in a big change for how people use conversions, I guess on their website, so you know, bloggers and people who do affiliate marketing and of course, yeah, ecommerce, and businesses trying to get email subscribers all had to fundamentally change the way that they approach gathering email addresses. And I'm going to talk a little bit later about what you can do instead, that doesn't violate Google's guidelines. But again, from Google's perspective, they say that interstitials make it difficult to use the main content of the page. And so when they're talking in the quality rater guidelines, they frequently refer to MC main content, which is like what the searcher is ultimately going to your website for and so you could say generally speaking, that they're trying to defend the experience of the main content. And to like, skip ahead to the point here about ads, when they talk about ads, that Google recognizes that and they say this in the quality rater guidelines, that ads don't automatically equate to low quality, they understand that ads are in many cases, the reason a site can continue existing. But that being said, there is like a right and a wrong way to go about implementing them. And so they say the too many or like large ads hurt the user experience. And then that case, the human quality raters should assign that site that result, a low rating. So again, you want to think in terms of the main content is the ad obscuring it? Is it taking away from it? If not, you're probably okay. But it's just good. To keep in mind that Google's not saying no, you can't have ads. You just have to be thoughtful about it. And when I did some of these UX audits in the past, like the ones that we're going to do later today, I did a couple of for some members of the Denver bloggers club one of the local clubs that I've been involved with here. And one thing I noticed about a lot of them was you know that they'd have an ad in the sidebar, they'd have an ad in their footer. They'd have an ad a couple times throughout their blog content, and it was probably Google Adsense that they were using, or some other ad network. Like it. And again, it's like I understand that you're monetizing your site using ADS. But at the end of the day, it's probably working against you because people if you were to look, you know into the data like the scroll depth and the time on page and things like that, using Google Analytics, for example. You probably see that on those pages that are very heavy with ads that people abandon the page pretty quickly because it's just a bad reader experience. So to go back a point here, clickbait Google has a couple of pieces of guidance in the quality rater guidelines about that specifically.\r\n\r\nGenerally speaking, a good page sets expectations or good title sets expectations for wherever it's leaving you. And so clickbait is something that it can certainly be effective and getting attention and getting clicks, but it can be a very unsatisfying experience if it doesn't do something to deliver on the promise made in the title. Um, the Google specifically says that clickbait headings detract from high main content. So, you know, that's something that they're specifically looking for and guiding people to, to comment on. And they say also that like every page should have a page title. It shouldn't just be presented without buttoning it up that way. And that title should describe page content. So again, it's a balance. Writing a good title, I think is very much in art. But it shouldn't be misleading. That's that's the key here. Um, so the last point here is that when it comes to creating content, you want the answer to your query to be pretty prominent in the results. You don't want people to click through and then have to dig to find that. And Google has a couple of different SERP features, I would say where they're trying to, you know, first of all, answer this within search so that you don't click through, which is a problem for us content creators, but it's also perhaps an opportunity when we think about things like a Featured Snippet, which is just that sort of box that shows up above any other search results and it's usually summarizing kind of like the nature of what that person is looking for what Google thinks that person is looking for. There's other things like Google will index parts of a page and link to that specific part and highlight it you probably noticed that yourself when doing search and looking for something very specific. And so that's something that they do, it's not, to my knowledge, it's not something that you can necessarily optimize for. It's it's their methodologies of indexing and surfacing content. But the example that they gave in the quality rater guidelines was something about like somebody searching Abraham Lincoln's birthday. And when somebody clicked through like it was present on the page, but it wasn't prominently answered. And so in that case, they were instructing the human quality rater to give that like a not as good rating for meeting the needs of the searcher. So yeah, I mean, definitely, that's, that's kind of most of what I'm going to say about the quality rater guidelines. But I really think it is a very interesting document and especially if you look at the examples they give in terms of how they're making those determinations. There's a lot of little nuggets of truth and we also have a blog post on the blacksmith website that digs into this even outside of like the user experience sort of and like design focus. So if you want another take on that then definitely check that out. We just went in and updated it recently. So let's talk more broadly now about some search signals from Google things that Google has told us about the page experience and you know, importantly, I think how to how to like measure that, quantitatively. Google, we talked a little bit about helpful content yesterday and that algorithm update which was the year a year and a half ago, something like that. Google has been has said that a good page experience is a requirement. For creating what they define as helpful content. So you know, all these algorithm updates are designed to support Google's mission, you know, the way that they look at content quality and things like that, of course, they all you know, more or less feed into each other, but I think it's worth mentioning that like that is an aspect of having helpful content. Alright, so we're gonna start with what is collectively known as the core web vitals so the core web vitals, this algorithm update, or Google announcing this page signal? came about? I want to say it was 2021. So they've been around for a while. And interestingly, and what we'll go over is they have changed slightly since coming out. But the idea here was to give people these these three specifically, page signals, were to give people more tangibility around how to measure the the page experience. Because up until that point, it was a little bit innocuous, it was hard to conceptualize, in terms of knowing like where you actually rank according to Google's own way of looking at it. So the first page signal of the quarter web vitals is the largest Contentful paint, which is a facet of page loading, loading speed. And so their definition is that it reports the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport relative to when the page first started loading. So if we think about I think most of these core web vitals are more or less referring to like above the fold, like what you see before you scroll, it's like that first impression that a person has with your website and most designs, most tools that you use to optimize loading and things like that, typically are set up so that the rest of the page loads later but you want you know what's visible initially to load quickly and first so that people can start interacting with it, and then it gives time for the rest of the page to load. So another way of thinking about this is that this signal takes note of the largest element on every web page and measures its total loading. Time. So maybe this is an image, maybe it's video, you know, typically at some, I would say some sort of media thing, but it could be your theme in general, it could be a very slow loading plugin. So these are all things that you'd want to keep in mind in terms of optimizing this particular factor. And when I say I guess, like the theme and plugins, it's like the output of them that you would implement on your page. So okay, so how do you get a good largest Contentful paint so according to Google, whatever this largest element is, is about 2.5 Seconds or Less of loading time and you have a little bit of wiggle room here, before it gets to, you know, this like poor area, but you'll notice that it's not a super long time. And I think that this particular man measurement here, it relates to something that Google's said before and shared in their own documentation, which is that, you know, the majority of people bounce if a website doesn't load within three seconds or less. I'm sure that that guidance has changed over time because that's a dated stat. But it still goes to show that we're kind of like within that guideline, with this particular measurement of a particular element on a page. So the next one is first input delay, and this is actually what it was. This has since been updated. And I'm going to show you an example of what this looks like. But let's let's talk about like the original intent of it and then what it has become. So first input delay is a measure of interactivity. It measures the time from when a user first interacts with the page to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction. So that sounds like gibberish. Basically, the lower a website's fid score, the more promptly it starts processing users clicks and swipes again, interactivity like how long does it take for somebody to actually be able to use a page? So this measurement per Google, a good fit is 100 milliseconds or less. So that's what it was right? But what is it now? So this GIF kind of shows an example of poor responsiveness versus good responsive responsiveness from Google's perspective, but probably from all of us, as users as well and looking at it you you probably have been in this position before where like, you click on something and then there's this little bit of a delay before you are actually able to interact with it. And so Google essentially took took this concept that they had initially defined as a core web vital and added some color to it, I guess. And so the new measurement is that it's, it's below or at 200 milliseconds. That so up from I think, what was it 100 before so they're giving you a I guess a little bit more time to create interactivity here. And just so you know, this new measurement is actually not fully unveiled yet, but it will be as of March. 12th. That's when this takes effect and takes over. So they say that, you know, some interactions will actually take longer than others. But when it comes to especially complex interactions, you want to be able to quickly present some initial initial visual feedback so that the user knows that something is happening\r\n\r\nthe time until the next payment is the earliest opportunity to do this. So the intent is not to measure like every eventual effect of the interaction, but the time in which the next interaction is being blocked. So you essentially want to delay you want to if you are delaying some visual feedback, then you might be giving users the impression that the page isn't responding to their actions, which is ultimately a bad user experience, right. So the goal of this new measurement is to ensure the time from when a user initiates an interaction until the next frame is painted in the shortest time as possible, for all or at least most of the interactions the user make. So it might seem like a small distinction between the first input delay and the interaction to Next paint but I guess if we were to summarize them, the first input delay is really focusing on that initial interaction. And the interaction to Next paint is focusing on the difference between interactions. I think that's one way to look at it. Okay, so then the last core web vital is related to visual stability. And it's called cumulative layout shift. And so their definition Google Developers definition is that it measures the sum total of all individual layout shifts scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan. of the page. Okay, but what does that mean? So Visual stability means that a web page remain stable throughout the users visit. It means that text isn't suddenly moving as new elements load or shifting other elements of the page and I think the the unfortunate end result of when this is bad, is when it makes the user click a link or perhaps a buy button or something like that, unintentionally, they were trying to click something but because of something shifting after it loaded, it pushed them somewhere else. And again, this is probably something where either something comes to mind where that's happened to you or like, the next time it does, then you'll be like, oh, yeah, that was the cumulatively out shift the site is getting, it probably has a pretty bad score for that. Um, so with the core web vitals, visual stability became more of a priority. And you really have to have very minimal minimal instability in order for your pages to be considered for ranking high in a relevant search engine results page. So those are the core lead vitals, that's probably the newest addition to these page signals that relate to the content experience, but we're also going to go over some of the old like, you know, tried and true important things that have to do with page experience, such as mobile friendliness. I mean, this is something this is probably one of the first big things that Google told us was important for ranking, high and relevant search. Besides maybe page load, I think Page Speed like performance and mobile friendliness, like these are things that kind of happened around the same time in terms of a Google like, came out and said, like, you must prioritize these if you want to rank. So Google used to be a desktop first indexing property. But you know, as more and more people started using their mobile devices, you know, the iPhone came out and so now suddenly, everybody had a computer in their hand. And then another thing that's probably worth considering too, is like a lot of people in developing countries like they might not have a desktop or like a laptop computer, but most people have a mobile phone at this point. And so Google now operates off of the idea, or off of the principle, I guess, of mobile first indexing. So if your website is not optimized properly for mobile responsiveness for mobile devices, then that is going to hurt it's going to greatly hurt your ability to rank and relevant search and your desktop site could look perfect. It can rank perfectly in terms of all these other factors that Google tells us about. But if your mobile site is off, it's it's going to affect your desktop rankings as well. So, you know, going into all of the specifics of what's mobile friendly is kind of outside the scope of what we're going to talk about today. But I mean, it's things like making sure that your text is readable. It's making sure that your images are, you know, visible and processable that they don't get skewed strangely. It's you know, thinking about some of those core web vitals and like how elements interact with each other like our buttons too close together so that people are hitting the wrong thing. So all these things are are considerations for making your website mobile friendly. And I think you know, with the way that things like page builders, builders for WordPress work, the way that people design themes for WordPress. This is this is like very much top of mind for everyone who's designing for WordPress. So it's a lot easier to implement now versus perhaps when this update was first released into the world. So Safe Browsing is something that I they've actually taken out of what they call these like page experience factors, like I don't know if it's an official one anymore, it was in the past. And maybe it's because now we have HTTPS as an additional factor that's kind of related but I think it's still worth mentioning this from a content experience factor. So Safe Browsing is just that you can use a website that is free of malware, you know, that you can be like, reasonably sure that like malware isn't present, you're not going to get it you're not going to interact with it, and that it's not you know, affecting the output of whatever site it could be installed on. And so in order to protect yourself against this, there's different tools you could use. wordfence is a customer of mine, so I'm going to talk about them and I think that their tool and their team is great. They have a lot of cool security researchers and cybersecurity experts on their team. So they're very on top of like any new things that come out, but they have this product called wordfence care where they'll go in they'll identify them all where they'll clean it up for you and we'll share best practices for how to avoid it in the future and you know, additional steps that you can take. So I do think that you need some sort of tool on your website in order to prevent, you know, the worst effects of malware. And I guess the other thing that I would mention too, is to like always have backups of your site, because malware can really mess things up. And so that's that's like your first line of defense. So HTTPS also has to do, I guess, essentially the same idea of like Safe Browsing, maybe from a slightly different perspective. And so Google again said, you know, we're not going to rank websites that do not have HTTPS in place compared to those that do. You know, after that update happened, and that was a slightly more recent update, but it was still a few years ago, and so HTTPS in order to implement that, essentially, you just install an SSL certificate. And to be fair, there are different types of SSL certificates. Most web hosts have that functionality, where you can fairly easily implement one and then it creates either automatically or there might be some manual steps. You have to take where it it redirects your existing HTTP URLs to the HTTPS version. So that's important to make sure that that's working. Otherwise, it's going to break your site but again, most web hosts have a fairly straightforward process for implementing this and a free ssl certificate or I should say an included one with your hosting plan, but depending on your needs, you might need a different one. So that's something that you have to explore based on your industry like, like E commerce might have a higher level of SSL certificate needed, but for you know, the general small business owner designer, things like that, probably what your web host has is good enough. And so to be able to see if HTTPS is working within Chrome specifically and I'm sure many other web browsers but but chrome because it's a product of Google. There's a little button next to your domain name in the URL bar, and you can click it and see that the SSL certificate is working and that the connection is secure and I would say that SSL certificates in HTTPS are important for people who are interacting with the website. I mean, you kind of you kind of have to have it no matter what in order to rank but they're the purpose of it is that if somebody were to be giving their sensitive information, you know if they're on an E commerce site, and they're, you know, putting in their address or their credit card number or you know, a banking website and people are logging in, and you know, once they log in, that user has access to their bank accounts and their money and things like that. That's kind of the like, ideal use case of HTTPS is to protect the people who are entering that sensitive information to make them feel safe on your website.\r\n\r\nWe talked about this earlier, having no intrusive interstitials so these are the pop ups the image you see is something that Google shared when they announced this ranking signal to show what not to do, essentially where these ads are obscuring access to the main content. You shouldn't have to click in order to get to the main content. So what do you do instead? Here are a couple of examples from the blacksmith website. So the first one is we have a floating bar that basically is at the top of the content and then just pushes it down. And in this case, I used it to add like reminder about my book, a button to click to buy it you could use it to get email signups. I think another great example is like E commerce. If you're having a sale or if you want to say, you know, free shipping on orders over $50 or something like that. I think that's a really excellent use of a floating bar. It's like what's the most important thing happening for this business right now or use it to collect email signups? Then there's also next to it is a welcome mat, which is designed you know, very similar lead to how an email popup would look but the difference is that it's like embedded on the page. So it's not getting in the way of the content. It's part of the content. You can choose whether or not you interact with it beyond scrolling. Another version of that is a content upgrade. So on certain blog posts, let's say that you have additional resources, maybe you've turned that blog post into a checklist or there's a certain template that you're talking about in the blog posts, and people you want to incentivize people to share their email in order to access it. So having a content upgrade, which again is like an embedded version, at the end of your blog post about that specific resource is a totally valid way to see get emails that's not going to violate this intrusive interstitial guidance from Google. The other thing that you can think about is using email popups, but delaying when they pop up. So that kind of gets around Google's guidance. You could use what's called like exit intent technology. So when somebody scrolls for the Back button, or the, you know, X in the browser, then what happens is an email popup gets deployed where you know, it asks for somebody if they want to subscribe, for example. You can also use that same idea based on things like scroll depth, if somebody gets to a certain depth on a page, you know, that tends to indicate interest. It's given them a chance to interact with the content. Or you could have a deploy on certain pages. You ideally after they've seen other pages, so maybe after they've gone to a certain number of pages that deploys. So there's there's a couple of different ways to think about it that don't get in the way of Google's guidance. And we do have a page I forgot to link it here. But we do have a blog post on the blacksmith website that goes into each of these things and different use cases and things like that a little bit dated, but it's all the same advice. Okay, so now that we've talked about Google's quality raters guidelines, which is indirectly related to search rankings, and Google's page experience signals, which are directly related to search rankings, I wanted to talk a little bit about website structure and design I would say, especially as it relates to ranking high in relevant search, but certainly how it impacts the content user experience. So it's kind of like a mix of the things that we're talking about, but expanding on them as well. So the first like factor that you want to optimize your website around your content in general, is crawlability. And when I talked about crawlability, I'm talking about Google's ability to like fully index all the resources on your site. Is there anything that is getting in the way of Google doing that, like, for example, errors in your sitemap, like maybe you're unintentionally excluding certain pages? Maybe you know, you haven't created enough connections between your pages for Google to understand how they relate to each other. And so a couple of guidelines here, you know, first of all, is that when you're creating content, it's important to add external links. Think of these as your ability to add context to prove claims these are things that you know, you can also use let's say that you're writing about a topic and there's a related topic and it doesn't really make sense for you to cover it in your content. Like maybe it would just make your your piece go on too long. But it's something that people might want to learn more about. So you find a relevant resource from a trusted site and you link it External links are great. I mean, you might, I guess, worry. Like, is that going to lead people away from my page? You know, is there any like negative impact of that? I think that's just kind of the way that content works, that people are always looking for more information. You can set it so that it opens in a new window so that they're still on your page while they explore that content. But yeah, as the best practice, have an external linking policy, it makes sure it's to good quality content and I think that, like with this next point, it helps Google understand what your content is about. So besides external resources, you also want to incorporate internal links. This just helps Google understand the relationships between the different pieces of content on your website, ultimately, what your website is about. It's helping with that crawl ability and that index ability. It's helping Google as robot to understand, you know, these different connections. So again, it's important really to have these two types of links and really every page and relate certainly every piece of content. And then, the flip side of all this is like as you create content, things are going to change. External links might become broken. Internal links, you might change, you know, like for example, the URL slug of them, and they might become broken. So I guess my first tip is to make sure that you have some sort of redirect solution implemented, there are different plugins that you can use to automatically if you change the URL slug of something, then it creates a redirect so anything that already links to a will be updated to that new link. But it's also having a process for like auditing your content to look for these problems. And one of the tools that I'm going to show you later today will help make that a little bit easier. But it's also just a matter of like I don't know, quarterly at least, or depending on the size of your website, quarterly, maybe every six months or so, having just a process to kind of go through what exists and if you need to fix anything. So we're talking a little bit about URL structure and I will say when it comes to creating content, you want to be pretty sure of the URL you want to use before you publish it. Because it is a factor in ranking, and you can use redirects, but it's kind of hard to explain them in the context of what we're talking about today without getting deep into SEO, but it's just generally like to trust me that it's a best practice to not mess with the URL after you publish, you know, after it gained some traction in search and things like that. But it happens and that's why you use redirects. But that being said, you could at least start with best practices. So the first thing is to incorporate your target keywords in that slug. So like yesterday, I showed you some tools we use for an article we wrote about AI detectors, so let's just pretend the keyword is like aI detector tools. You'd want that to be the slug. Without really like any extra information. You want to keep your URLs as succinct as possible so that Google doesn't have to take a lot of extra time to parse them. And so what that means is within within WordPress, you can customize your URL structure for blogging. And you can do things like add categories to the URL, you can add the date to the URL. My suggestion is to not do that the only reason that you might want to add like a subdirectory within your blog content or some other specific category, like if you have case studies or something like that, is because you can use that subdirectory to group pieces of content together to measure them in like Google Analytics GA for these days. But that's kind of an advanced use case and that's only if you plan on actually like doing a deep dive into the analytics. From an SEO perspective, I highly recommend against it. It should be your website url.com forward slash keyword. And when you're implementing those keywords, you're going to want to add a dash between each word so if the keywords AI detector tools, it's a i dash detector dash tools\r\n\r\nfor certain things like articles, a and words like the things that aren't, you know, specific keywords generally speaking, you can drop those when you're creating the slug. We have some guidelines on the style guide that I shared with you yesterday on the bugs with website that's also linked in the slides so or the PDF as well. So if you if you want to dive into more SEO and URL and keyword best practices and definitely check out our guidance on that. Um, duplicate content is worth mentioning from this perspective of the user experience mostly in terms of how Google would interpret that. So generally speaking, duplicate content is like you publish a blog on your website and then a situation that could come up that seems innocuous enough is that you know, somebody in your industry says oh my god, I loved your blog posts on whatever, I'd love to republish it on my site. And you say okay, and then maybe this site, you know, has more authority than you and maybe they have a better approach to SEO, maybe they've just been around longer. And what could end up happening is that even though you were the original publisher, and Google does take that into consideration, but this other site may outrank you with your own same content. So that's duplicate content. It could be a whole blog post, it can be an excerpt of it, it could be like a piece of it. So duplicate content, generally speaking, like try to avoid that. You can add a tag to your link called the canonical tag, which basically points back to the original content and says, This is the person this is the site that originally published it, even though we have now published it here. And so Google takes that into consideration, but they really make their own choices about who they're going to rank and so that that's not the be all end all way of making sure that the original publisher ranks highest in search, all else equal. Um, with all that being said, in my experience, you can typically republish things like your blog content on mediums like LinkedIn and medium you know, original copy without making changes. As long as you wait, I would say at least a week from the original published date to do that. This is this is my experience and that saying that it's completely scientific, the advice that I'm giving you, it's something that you should experiment with, if that's something that you're interested in, but also take note of what ends up happening and discontinue if it's getting in the way of ranking your own content on your own website. But when it comes to duplicate content, if you if you get approached by someone, you know, like the example that I gave, who wants to republish something that you wrote, what would be a better situation for you? It would be more work, but it's to say like, let me write a new version of this article, like maybe you take another stance on it, maybe you you just kind of like repurpose it in a different way. I would highly recommend against duplicating your content, either on another page on your website, such as using product descriptions that like a manufacturer provided or maybe you have, you know, two variations of something and so you're using almost the same product description or again, like the example that I gave doing it on another site, so I just wanted to add a cautionary tale for duplicate content because a it is kind of a bad user experience, but be it'll also more than likely hurt you in search without a very strategic approach. And then the last thing I want to say on this particular topic is about designing website navigation and best practices around that. So first of all, you want to use descriptive and recognizable menu item titles. And the example that I always give for this is the difference between something that's called news and something that's called blog. So in my in my experience, news is like an enterprise business that has a media arm and they're publishing their press releases and, you know, things that are relevant to their company, new product updates, things like that. Whereas blog is more articles. It's you know, the how tos. It's the list of coals. Its product lead content, for example, but it's not exclusively focused on that company's news. So it's important, I think, to match the heuristics of what your users are used to and one way that you might be able to figure this out if you're unsure is just kind of see like what the competition is doing and how they're naming their menu items. Or just ask some of your users like, Does this make sense? And we'll talk next about how to conduct a UX audit and that's something that you could do as part of it. There's this thing called the three click rule, which you may have heard about. Nielsen Norman Group actually debunked this as being like ideal or even something that you should totally consider. It's the number three is arbitrary, I guess is what I'm trying to say. But it's the idea that within three clicks, a user searching or user looking for something will find it through your website navigation without necessarily having to go to like an internal search. So well, it's arbitrary. I think it's still a good thing to keep in mind, which is just that people should be able to easily and quickly find what they need your your menu should support that. And then creating category grouping. So like for example, on our website, we have a Resources tab and it has the blog, it has some of like my YouTube content. It has our style guide. All of these are resources they have to do with like things that we're sharing with other people versus we have another tab that's about our work. And so it has case studies and like portfolio examples, and it's more focused on like Final outputs that you know, fit, you know, things that we do with certain clients. So just a couple of things to think about in terms of website navigation. I'm going to start this topic and then we'll break I think maybe in like five minutes from now, but I'll just go ahead and get this started. So let's talk a little bit now that you've learned about these different factors for how to understand user experience from, from the user's point of view from Google's point of view. Let's talk about how you can continue to make your own websites user experience better by implementing a UX audit. So UX audit, we might also call it a user tests. I think they're maybe slightly different concepts, but I'm going to use them interchangeably today. So usability testing involves observing how users interact with products like your websites. The purpose is to get a better understanding of how real people use what you've designed. And really the idea here is you want to combat any assumptions that you've made incorrectly, which is impossible for you to figure out by yourself. That's why we pull in other people. You can use your tests during just about any stage of project it doesn't have to be like the final part. It could really be during the wireframing stage. It could be you know at the midpoint it could be even after you've launched but you've added some new things. So why bother with UX audits? First of all, we're talking about it today because there's a strong relationship between the user experience and SEO. I think we've proven that by talking about specific elements of the quality rater guidelines that point to UX, as well as the page experience factors that Google's specifically told us. If you care about SEO, you should care about UX in terms of things like your page, loading your mobile responsiveness, and using things like HTTPS. To invoke privacy for your users information. It also allows you to uncover issues that might kill conversions. I mean, I think this is one of the most important use cases of a UX audit is to look for things that are getting in the way of whatever your end goal is with the website. Because we're all WordPress users here, probably most of us at least, you've probably interacted with whether it's your own design or somebody else's that where you recognize that somebody forgot to edit the demo content they've, you know, implemented it and they've gone in and made their changes. But you know, there's that hello world post they forgot to delete or there's something you know, and one of the menus, maybe the footer menu that they forgot to take out that, you know, they never actually customized and so I think UX audit would be good at surfacing that if you're if you're kind of blind to it, because you're too close to the project. And with all that being said, a UX audit helps to get out of your own head. We're all human, we're imperfect.\r\n\r\nAnd really, I mean, it's it's easy to say I think when it comes to writing content, like as much as like, I have a process for editing and looking for mistakes and things like that. Like I still use an editor whenever I write anything, because I need to get out of my own head in order to make sure that I'm not missing something important. So the same can certainly be said about about website design and doing UX audits. So at the end of the day, we all operate based on certain assumptions, but what if yours are wrong? I'll just go through another slide or two and then we'll break so in terms of picking user testers, there's a couple of different populations you could consider. And I'm also going to share a couple of different like marketplaces where you could find these people, but you can start with the people that already exist in your circle your colleagues, you know, the people that you work with, but also maybe your friends and your family members. Wow, this is a great place to start. Don't discount the impact of their own bias and desire to please you, especially if you're asking your mom for input she's probably not going to be super critical. And and you know, it's going to be more of a pat on the back then something useful. And even like people like your work colleagues, they they still may be too close to a project to provide useful feedback, but it's a good place to start. You can also recruit volunteers from your own audience. Again, they might have a bias if they really love you. They might be hesitant to give you really great feedback. But they're also probably very willing to help you make something that's better. So you can start with like your brand ambassadors, anybody who would consider themselves your biggest fans, things like that. Ultimately, though, your best bet is going to be unbiased third parties who don't know you, you know, who don't have like a stake in what you're doing. I would say ideally, if you could get a couple people from that pool and then maybe one or two people from these other pools of populations, you'll get a couple of different perspectives. And when it comes to some of the marketplaces that I'm going to show you, you can also filter by certain demographics, you know, age, gender, level of education, like whatever is important to like the target audience that you want feedback from, generally speaking, you can filter and on those people. Maybe we'll just go to the top of the hour, and then we'll and then we'll definitely break then. So how many user testers are enough for each design stage? I've mentioned a couple different populations you could pick from. This is another Nielsen Norman Group reference. They are a really great resource when it comes to anything user experience user testing and things like that. And so Jacob Nielsen wrote this column and he the column was titled Why you only need to test with five users. So that's his official recommendation is for each stage that you test five users is going to be more or less enough you're going to get marginal returns marginal new information after that point. So you know, unless you're getting wildly different things from those five user testers, you can probably stop it there. He also says that it's best to involve a larger quantity of user testers earlier on in the project if you're going to test during like the wireframing stage. Versus like, when a website's like basically ready to launch it's going to be harder to make noticeable and useful changes at that point. It's going to be kind of locked in. So I think that that makes sense. Um, so we'll just start with some of the questions that you might use. When designing usability testing, it is important to to be thoughtful about this before you start you you don't want to just like go into a blind and just, you know, like, what do you think of this website? You want to have a strategic approach if you want to get useful information? So my suggestion is to start start by defining whatever your goals are, I mean, is there something in particular that you're looking to test? Are you wanting to make sure that this design is understandable to your target demographic? Is there something that isn't currently working with the design, something that's maybe hurting conversions? So whatever your goal is, like set that intention, and the questions will come more easily after that? You want to also be asking questions about the tester and how they interact with the Internet. And there's a couple of reasons for this. So one example is like you could ask the person what kind of smartphone do you use and asking this particular question is good because it kind of gauges like their familiarity with technology like how they're going to interact with your design. Somebody who uses a flip phone, for example, is probably going to have a much different level of internet savviness and how they interact with the design versus somebody who has like the latest gadget as their device. The other benefit of this question is to especially if you're doing an in person test is to kind of relax them. It's kind of like a little bit of small talk almost so that they can ease into the test, especially if that's not something that they often do. You want to define a specific action for the user to take. So this goes back to the goals. Let's say that, you know, you have an E commerce site that you're testing and you know, there's some sort of issue with people abandoning the cart, you know, after they add some products and so maybe you want to have that person go through the action of adding something, and then starting checkout. And seeing like, where in the process, there's friction, that could be one action that you want them to take. And so at this point, you want to ask them how they go about it, have them sort of like narrate and explain as they go through each step. The more you can dig into each specific action that the user takes the more detailed insight that you'll get as to how they're actually using your website. So I think with that being said, we have a couple more questions that we could talk about, but I think now is probably a good time to let everybody take a little bit of a break. And then after that, we'll finish this discussion of how to run a UX audit. I'm going to give you a bunch of tools to use to do your own tests. yourself, essentially. And then we'll finish off with that live content UX audit. Sounds\r\n\r\nlike a good idea. No questions in the q&a right now. So let's just go and take that break. It's two o'clock. About a five minute break. Is that good? Maddie? That sounds good. All right. So let's back be back at 205 and we're quiet until then. See ya. Then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We're back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, folks, we are back and ready to begin. Let me get the recording started here. All right, folks, we're back for the final hour. Of the website content accelerator. We got a lot to talk about in the next hour, so I'm just gonna let you get right to it. Maddie. Sounds\r\n\r\ngreat. Yeah. Thanks for sticking with me so far. Excited to finish this off strong and yeah, hopefully give you some really tangible things that you can take away. For your own processes. So I'm continuing this discussion that we started about UX audits and designing them. Okay, so we talked about this. Let's go to the next point. What so I used to offer UX audits as a service when I used to be on Fiverr. It was my most popular gig by far. And the way that I structured it was I basically priced by the page. And so when you're doing a UX audit, you want to be sure to identify whichever pages are the most important, especially if you have a big site like you don't necessarily want. Just going back to the E commerce example like you don't necessarily want to audit like every single product page, especially if you're looking for trends, maybe one you know prime example of what your product pages look like maybe one category page, your homepage, your checkout flow, like if somebody had me audit an E commerce site that that tended to be kind of what it looks like. You know, it's also things like maybe more generally, your homepage, your about page service page. So it really depends on what you're trying to do. But you could ask questions in your UX audit, like, you know, what do you think this is about the page in general, or about a specific element of it? You could ask What strikes you about it, you know, you're trying to see how people are reacting to it, how they're understanding it, and then like, what would you click on first, like what, what is something that looks interactable? And how would you, you know, accomplish whatever the specific goal is. So those are ways that you could you know, further define this question. Or this idea here. And then we kind of talked about this, what do you make of specific elements? So again, if we're talking about ecommerce, maybe you have a button that's like a quick add to checkout where you don't have to go, you know, to the individual page, it just kind of pops up when you're looking at a specific category or on the homepage or something like that. And so you might want to test like, do people actually understand what the purpose of this is? So that's just one example. You know, many others that might factor into your own purposes and needs. So when it comes to designing these questions, a couple of best practices to keep in mind you know, first of all, users are generally not going to be designers. I don't think you I don't think you perhaps want them to be because you want them to look at it from a different perspective than you and so with that in mind, you want to avoid any sort of like web development or industry specific jargon in the way that you ask questions. You want to design for the average internet user, they should be able to understand what you're asking without you having to explain and clarify. I think another useful thing in general and this is this is when you ask for feedback about anything, but it's breaking up a complicated question into simpler ones. It's, it's okay, you know, to to ask a question and to ask a follow up question and to dig deeper. And that's something that we talked about yesterday when we talked about chat GBT and and getting that ideal answer that you want to get from it. Sometimes you kind of have to break the subject down and sometimes you have to add clarification later. So then, I've said this in a way but be as specific as possible when you're asking questions, you know, reference specific elements. Bring it back to the goal, if necessary. That's how you're going to get the most useful responses. So going back to that fiverr gig I was talking about, these were the questions that I asked and every order and sometimes they would ask clarifying questions after the fact. But most of the time, if I wasn't because it's fiber, and I'm sending them either some sort of like written report, or typically it would be like a video recording of me going through and doing the audit and if you work with a platform like Fiverr, or some of the other things that I'm going to mention shortly. I think it's the next slide actually. Typically, people are recording themselves interacting with your website unless you're doing an in person test, which is a different situation. But so you have to have some sort of standardized approach in that case, especially if you're offering this as a service like I did. But most of the time these questions got to the bottom of what that person was hoping to get out of the audit. And so generally speaking, I asked for the URLs for any pages they wanted me to take into account. I also told them you know, if you want me to take a quick look before starting the order to see if this is a good fit for me, you can do that. Are there any major problems that you want me to keep in mind throughout the process? So is there anything that you're noticing isn't working that you want? Me to focus on like a conversion factor? Can you briefly describe your target customer so that I could keep their perspective and focus? This is a really important one. I'm not going to fit in and perhaps you know, every user tester that you're going to work with is not necessarily going to fit that ideal target persona that represents your audience or the audience of the client that you're doing this on behalf of. But that doesn't mean that you can't adopt that persona. And again, a lot of these platforms will let you pick a user tester based on demographics. So that's probably like the best case scenario. But I think, again, you can still benefit from a plethora of different experiences. So anyway, you know, like I'm, I'm thinking of like a time where I did a user test and the target audience was, you know, generations older than me or something like that, where they're interacting with the web and they might have some access issues, you know, they might it might be harder for them to read the text if it's not big enough. Things like you know, contrast come into play between the words in the background. And so things like that, maybe it doesn't personally affect me right now. But I can still comment on that and say, you know, you told me that this was your target audience. To me like this strikes me as something that would be very difficult for them to interact with. And then the last question I asked is What important goals are you hoping that this page or these pages will achieve? So that kind of goes back to like the problem question, but I guess maybe from a more positive standpoint, and especially, you know, people use your tests at different stages, so they might not know what the problems are, but they certainly know or ideally, they have an idea of what they want that page to achieve. So these questions like very much covered what I needed to know in order to give people a satisfying UX audit after they put in their order. Okay, so how to run usability tests a couple of different ways that you could do this. A very wide range of methodologies and honestly a wide range of end results I would say, in person is like the gold standard because you're going to have the most control over the process. You're going to be able to meet with people, you're going to be able to dig in deeper to any like initial questions that you set. It's a little bit harder to do with something like Fiverr or user testing. Because there may be limitations I think with like user testing, it's kind of like you set it up ahead of time. And then you know, the user testers go through it, but you don't necessarily get to get to interface with them after the fact. And then with fiber, maybe you could do that it would probably involve making a new order. It's going to take time to get that feedback. It's not going to be as dynamic as doing it in person.\r\n\r\nIn person, it's probably going to be the most expensive in terms of like your team's time and like setting up a place for them to do this. And, you know, having some sort of incentive whether that's straight up cash or like a gift card or something like that for people's time. Another I think great option is user testing. And I was pretty sure that this platform had had changed or been sunsetted or something but I was looking at it leading up to doing this presentation and it still exists. It might exist in like a different format than it did initially did. Like I think you have to buy like a package. It's not just like one by one, for example. So I'm not super up to date on how it works now more more as to how it's worked in the past. But basically, the way that it has worked is that you specify certain tasks you want users to complete and specific questions for them to answer. And so users narrowed the process they go through until that test is complete. They have or at least had had a very large user base. So it was a great platform for giving like that exact demographic that you wanted to test. But fiber is very similar. I mean, fiber doesn't focus on user testing. To the extent that user testing does a fiber marketplace covers a wide range of services, but their usability like UX test marketplace is very large, you know, in comparison to some of their other focuses. So definitely a great place to find user testers. People start offering their services at $5. But they don't have to, that's an old fiber rule of thumb that it had to be five now people can set whatever price they want. They just have to set up their gigs in a way that makes them competitive. The way that I did it was I used to charge by the page. And then if they wanted, like a written report, that would be an extra cost in addition to the video. So it just depends on how people set up their gigs. But there's some level of standardization because people go to that market and that marketplace and they want to be able to pick you know, five people that offer something that take a look at side by side. Um, you could also do something that's not exactly going to give you all the information but it's an interesting practice, which is like recording users sessions on your website. So Microsoft has this newer tool called Clarity and it's free. And so you basically add like a little bit of JavaScript to your header. And you can see people interacting with your website, and you can see you know, how their mouse moves and how they scroll and things like that and like what they click on. Of course, unlike the user test, nobody's narrating it, there's no audio. It's literally just kind of like outside of context, how they interact with your website. So it's going to give you marginally useful information, but it's just another thing that you can use to try to troubleshoot. You know, why something isn't working, for example. And then this isn't like fully, like a way to run usability tests, but it's a like a tool that you can use or that perhaps somebody that you work with might use, which is to take screenshots and share commentary about what they're looking at. And I'm going to show you an example here. Oh, and besides clarity, when it comes to recording user sessions, you can also use a tool called Hot jar to do that as well. Okay, so this is an example and it's a little bit dated, but this is from bug herd. So bug heard is like a website feedback tool. That's another way to, to look at like what we're looking at right here. And this is something as a designer that you could use with clients. Some websites do this publicly where they have like a little thing on the side of the website that's like, Hey, do you have any feedback about this page? Or do you want to report a bug? That's, that's kind of why this exists, but I used to use it for my UX audits. I would just go through each page and then create like annotated screenshots and then I could explain export, the report that has all the pages and all my notes and things like that. So it's just a cool tool, whether you're kind of auditing your own site, you're auditing a client site, or somebody's doing it for you. So okay, from the flip side, we've talked about how to run a user test, but how can you be a good user test or maybe how can you identify one that you want to work with time and time again? First of all, it's narrating your thoughts as you have them. We've talked about this because that like stream of consciousness just, you know, noticing things and whether you really have something to say about it or not just like addressing each element on a page. And so that's kind of the next point here is is, you know, not just addressing them, but considering the impact that each page element might have. It's certainly acknowledging the perspective of your audience we talked about even if you're not a member of that target audience, how can you sort of take on that persona in order to speak on their behalf? Another thing that I used to do when I did these UX audits was share ideas for a B testing. Like I might say, you know, this is an interesting approach to your head and I wonder if you were to try this if it would, you know, get you better results and so it's it's giving them ideas, even if it's not a fully fleshed out thing, but to say like, this might not be it, but maybe you could try this. And then it's also it's not just about being like negative or pointing out what's wrong, but also acknowledging what does seem to be working. So that again, you can really like laser in and the feedback that's going to have the most impact for what they should change to resources that have really made an impact on me and how I go about content and design. First of all, is the Design of Everyday Things. This is like one of my favorite books. It's more about physical design, like product design, but there's a lot of transferable things that have to do with how we design for the web. And then don't make me think is like the quintessential resource for web usability and he's sent created, you know, multiple editions of this. There's another book, something about rocket science. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but, you know, anything that he writes like I would highly recommend. Okay, so we did break, and then I'm going to save questions for the end so we can get through the important stuff here. So I'm going to give you a couple more tools to use so that you can audit your own stuff. We're going to go through our live content UX audit, and then anytime we have left is going to be for questions. Let's get through it. Okay, so we'll start with Google tools, because again, when Google gives us information or tools, we want to listen because this is essentially how Google sees our content and how they prioritize what they rank in relevant search. So PageSpeed Insights is really a wealth of information. It provides data points from a variety of factors. And as you can see in this screenshot, currently, as of the core web vitals update, it starts with the core web vitals, so it starts from a point of this like, page experience and usability factor. They what's kind of interesting is that they have a part of PageSpeed Insights, and I'm going to show you like a fuller report when we go into the live content UX audit, but they have a piece of it that's about accessibility, but it's it's pretty bare bones. And so Nathan mentioned to me right before we started today, that Amber Hines is going to be the next workshop next month and it's going to be about accessibility. And her company equalised digital, they have a really great accessibility checker that integrates with WordPress. And so I would say that like that's probably going to be a much better tool for making judgments about if your website is accessible. Then what you're going to see on Google PageSpeed Insights and I think that that's something that is really important that you know, it's not always like at the top of our list when it comes to some of the other things that we need to do. To make our website usable, but it is really important. Whether you currently have an access issue or not at some point in your life, I'm sure you will. And now that I'm a man like this has become more obvious to me, maybe not in terms of strictly website design, but I think about like when I'm on a walk outside and previously, you know, I could just step around people's icy sidewalks that they didn't shovel or whatever, but now that I have a stroller, it's like okay, am I gonna put my kid you know, in the street. And so it's it's things like that or maybe you break your arm and now you can't interact with the web the same and so accessibility, I just wanted to like, make make the case that that is something that is so important because you your loved one, there's somebody that you know that it's going to make a difference for.\r\n\r\nGoogle used to have a tool specifically for testing the mobile friendliness of your site, and I was surprised to learn that they've actually sunset this tool. So now it's kind of a part of Google PageSpeed Insights. I think that whatever functionality was already in Google PageSpeed Insights for measuring the difference between the mobile and desktop version was kind of already there. So they basically just said, like, maybe this is like duplicating those efforts. I don't know. But it's no different. I'll just say that, that we that we use Google PageSpeed Insights to make judgments about how Google understands your website from a mobile point of view. Um, so we have the ability to measure like a snapshot of the current state of how your website measures according to the core web vitals are Google PageSpeed insight, but I also wanted to share within Google Search Console, there's this core web vitals report that measures it over time. And the most important thing, I think, to keep in mind with Google Search Console, and and also like Google Analytics. What I'm going to talk about specifically is more relevant to Google Search Console, is the fact that it tells you if you know, you become in violation of anything that's going to hurt your ability to rank and relevant search in terms of what Google tells us right in terms of the big things. And so that's why making sure that it's installed on your site on client sites is so important because it gives you notices if you're like way in violation of something, and it gives you the chance to fix it. Google Analytics so I would also recommend installing from the get go because it gathers important data that's useful that you can use to understand your page experience your content experience, but yeah, so this is just one useful report that relates to what we're talking about. This came up when I was prepping for the live audit later. Just the idea that there may be a use case for understanding what WordPress theme somebody's using. And I would say especially what plugins they're using, because both of these things can have an impact on your pages performance, which is a search signal on the loading, you know, on the interactivity, and all those those good things. So this is just one tool there's there's a bunch of them out there. But you know if if your website is experiencing any performance issues, or you just want to understand like how somebody else put their website together. I think this is a cool tool or a cool mechanism for that. I also wanted to share a general SEO audit tool, I see ranking so like H refs and SEM rush which I believe we talked about yesterday, this is another All In One SEO tool. It is not as fine tuned as the others as Ahrefs and SEMrush in terms of their keyword data, so that's why I don't use it for keyword research. They use different databases and approaches. But what I will say is their SEO auditing tool, which is like kind of the technical structure of your website, like goes head to head with any of like the big players in the market, and I'll show you exactly what that looks like. And the great thing about SEO ranking is it's a lot more affordable as an as an All In One SEO tool. And even from like the keyword research perspective, like you could use it to get most of the way there if content again isn't like your biggest focus are in and or if you weren't in a super competitive industry, it would it would do just fine. Um, a couple like editing tools. Hemingway is a great one. It's pretty simplistic isn't the right word, but it focuses on just a couple of things. It focuses on just a couple of factors and so that's why it's useful it doesn't it's not super distracting. And then Grammarly is one I would say that gets into a lot more detail. Grammarly is probably a more well funded company. Than Hemingway I wasn't aware of if Hemingway been monetized until I was looking at it the other day they have some AI functionality and they might they might have some other like outside of AI functionality plans, but I'm not sure that they had like a clear path to monetization before that but grim really has always had its like premium and like enterprise business use cases. And so I think that's probably why this tool is maybe a little bit more robust in terms of the suggestions it provides. They have a lot of linguists on staff and again, a disclosure that I'm a Grammarly Ambassador but I also like to use the product paid every person on my team that's a writer editor has a paid subscription to grammerly and I'll show you why shortly. Um, you know, you also want to look for plagiarism when it comes to creating a great content experience and when I talk about plagiarism, I'm not even necessarily talking about things that you do like on purpose. Some things that happen in grammerly, specifically is that you'll write something and it will detect a phrase that's been published elsewhere on the internet because you know, like there's a ton of content that already exists and it's bound to happen. And it'll be about something that's like a completely different industry. Like you definitely didn't take it from that original place that was published, but it's kind of like a reminder to go on and try to make it more unique. Just so that you know, Google doesn't think that you plagiarize even though again, it's not about intention. It's just about the reality of the content that already exists. But at the blacksmith, we use Copyscape for every piece of content we create, just to be sure there's no plagiarism, and then Grammarly. I don't believe the plagiarism check comes with the free version, but because we have the premium version, and that's included that we use it to. Um, one of the last factors here is you know, making sure that your content adheres to your style guide, whether that's a specific company style guide, or something like AP style, which again, is like the news journalism standard. I think it's like a great standard to use if you don't have a set style guide. And then I just have a couple qualitative qualitative factors here. So on the blacksmith style guide, which will probably show you we have a section about information architecture, and it's about a lot of these different things, how to break up walls of text, how to approach writing headings, how to keep paragraphs and sentences short and to the point. It's other things like you know, making sure that you have good flow with your content, you know that it has good storytelling, but it's something a human would want to read. And yesterday we talked about texts that whether AI generated it or not sounds robotic and how to avoid it. So that's another like, piece that you can use like in your own audits, those guidelines. Other things that I look at are like the thoughtful use of on brand visuals at the blacksmith we try to incorporate multiple types of visuals per piece. I'm definitely of the opinion that words aren't enough. I think as humans we're very visual creatures and people all have their own, like different learning styles. So that's also a factor, you know, written word, I don't think is enough, especially like for me personally, sometimes I need to like watch a video about it, or you need to like, you know, play with it in my hands or whatever. Like there's just different ways that people process information and so the more different ways you can surface it to them within your content, the better that your contents going to perform and help them and then things like consistent formatting like how you use bullet points, how you write headings. Again, a lot of this we cover in the blog Smith style guide. Just a couple other things. We talked about a B testing when we talked about how to be a good user tester and giving examples. So Unbounce is a tool that you could use. A B testing is essentially testing like different variants of a page usually you're testing a specific element like two versions of a page title, or two versions of an image, but it could be a full page as well. And this is something that Nathan and I also talked about, which is that I think he'd love to have an expert on a be testing do one of these workshops or you know a webinar in the future so if that's your if you know somebody like that, you know, that's something I think that all of us could learn some best practices from but again, another thing that you could test\r\n\r\nQuick disclaimer, then we'll jump to our live content UX audit. And we're talking about how to make your content better. And, you know, basically like different processes that you could use to to catch mistakes. But I don't want you to leave this thinking that perfection. Is the goal because it's not I think, you know, we're all human, we all make mistakes. At the end of the day writing for the web is is great because it's a very forgivable medium and unlike print, once you notice a mistake, you can go in and correct it. And so I don't want this to become a situation where you're beating yourself up if you did all these steps or you did some of these steps and like, you know, you still notice something later somebody points out like oh, this is spelled wrong or whatever. That's really not the point. So at the end of the day, I think my guidance for you is done is better than perfect. And be kind to yourself but create systems to catch mistakes. And that system could be having like a human editor, like like I mentioned earlier today, whenever I write something, you know I'm telling you all my best practices, but that doesn't mean that I always follow them, right. I'm an imperfect human being and, and things happen. And I think the other thing that I wanted to say is like we all have limited time we all have limited energy, and especially now that I'm a new mom, like I used to work really late at night and I would just crush stuff out and I would go over it a million times and now I kind of have to be satisfied with like not having the ability to do that and having a much shorter period of work time every day. That I can get stuff done and having to prioritize ruthlessly and that sometimes means that like yes, maybe I spelled something wrong, you know, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it. And I don't think you should either. So that's that's my soapbox. Alright, so let's go to the live content UX audit. Give me just a moment to get this set up. Um, so we're gonna go through like a couple of these different tools that we talked about today. And then at the end of this, we will have some time for questions. Okay. So Stacy, we're picking on you today because you submitted a really great example for this live content UX audit. And I want to start by saying there's like nothing wrong with this website. I mean, it's very good and it follows a lot of both the content and design principles that like I would instruct my team on. So what we're going to do today is is really nitpick for the sake of giving people things to think about when they are doing their own content UX audits. And so I'm going to start by sharing, like some of these tools and their outputs so that I can show you how to use them. And then what we'll finish off on is coming back to this page, and I'm going to give a couple of qualitative factors, you know, that I think can make the content just a little bit stronger. So again, I wanted to surface the blog SMIS content style guide. This is going to be the basis of one part of you know, some of the things I'm going to talk about and I'm going to reference that Chechi btw bot that we made yesterday, that's based on the style guide and that's, that's kind of what I use to audit this page from the content style perspective. But again, some things that we just talked about were first of all the SEO and Keywords section or chapter, where we talk a little bit about I mentioned that you could get some guidance for how to use awkward keywords like how to use keywords within URL slugs. I also talks about this information architecture, or information structures what we call it here section. So that's how to like essentially present information but also like break up walls of text, make it more readable. We talked a little bit at the end of today about formatting and how to keep that consistent. So those are just a couple of things. I guess we also talked about links earlier today and so there's some good guidance there. So you know, this is a this is a good resource if you're building out your own content style approach, and you can really build off of this because again, it's fairly industry agnostic. So anyway, I took this link, and first I ran it through Google PageSpeed Insights. And if you look at the desktop version, I mean it's pretty much near perfect. There's it's very difficult to get to 100 on any of these factors on I would say especially on mobile, but even on desktop, I mean, it's it's kind of like a what's the word? It's like a like a fool's errand to try to get to 100 if you're if you're this close, so, desktops looking really good. You know, they have a couple of things that you could do to fix it if you wanted to, and I have some suggestions for that, but we'll talk about it from the mobile perspective. So if you go to mobile, you'll notice that you know, first of all, the largest Contentful paint is one of the core web vitals, that it's a little bit in the red and it's and that's really like the only one and the largest Contentful paint again has to do with page floating, I believe. And so, taking like the definition we had, I'm guessing that that has something to do with this image because this is the viewport you know, that first load so it's the first thing that gets measured by this core web vital. And when I was looking at this yesterday, it's a it's a JPG file, which isn't like a super large file or anything like that. But one thing that you could do to to improve that page quality factor is to instead save this and serve it up as a web p file. There are certain plugins that you can use for that it's going to you have to kind of determine if adding like a plugin or taking that extra step of manually saving it like converting it and saving it and uploading it as that file is worth it. But that's that's like the one thing that I could think would would flip this so that it's the performance is a little bit closer to 100. And then we go into some of these other like diagnostic details. And I think this is where PageSpeed Insights gets really interesting because you can sort of dig into specifics here. A couple of things that I noticed were like minifying, CSS and JavaScript and there's some other things that are kind of related to optimizing like these different file types on the website. So I use a plugin called nitro pack. There's a free version and there's a paid version. I think the free version will get you pretty far, but it adds this like little Add at the bottom of your website. So I just pay for the paid version because I don't want that there are other things like nitro pack but nitro pack from the perspective of somebody who operates in the SEO world, you know who's looking for good performance, who's looking for best practices, that is my suggestion to you and to anybody who is seeing these things on their Google PageSpeed Insights. So naturally talking about these plugins for me like the got the question of does adding more plugins like is that going to hurt performance like what what is the marginal return of that? And so what I wanted to do next was take the URL and put it in that WordPress theme and plug in detector to just see like what the back end of the site looks like. And so we can see, it's like a custom or like a child theme. And I think okay, so apparent theme is Astra, so we know that like that's the technical basis on which this is based. I think generally speaking, Astra is pretty good for SEO from what I've heard, I don't have a ton of experience with it. And then also, this is like more what I was interested in was the plugins on the backend. And I mean, from what it detects it's there aren't that many plugins here, you know, it has like a plug in that works with Astra there's a Quiz Builder. This DOWNLOAD MANAGER contact form and then the Page Builder that's pretty lean, especially if those are the only plugins that are installed. You know, different people have different ideas of like, how many plugins is too many or like what's the optimum amount but I would say like, we're well under that here. So adding something like nitro pack, or you know, like some sort of web p image optimizer I think short Pixel does that.\r\n\r\nSomething like that probably wouldn't like hurt performance for the performance gains that would come with it. Um, okay, so the next thing that I wanted to do this is higher level than just this page, but I wanted to show you guys SC ranking. So SC ranking again, is this like All In One SEO tool? And I think there's like actually something wrong with my browser because I'm trying to like x this out, and I could do this yesterday and it just like wouldn't do it. So this is either a core web vitals issue or this is like I have too many, like Chrome extensions that are conflicting with each other, that I haven't been able to figure out why it sometimes messes with my browser. But anyway, that's an aside. So um, so this is a C rankings like technical website audit. And what I really love about this is that it's pretty straightforward. Like you can essentially read this as a non SEO and get a very good idea of things that you could fix to improve your website's technical structure. And as you can see this website like it's not bad, like there's room for improvement, but overall it's doing pretty good. Again, chasing 100 is a fool's errand. You're like, probably not going to get there but you want to get as close as you can with the time and the resources that you have. And so this page is really just like a high level overview. Again, this is about the whole website. It gives you an idea of like, how many pages were crawled, versus how many URLs which could include things like media files, JavaScript files, style, sheet files, and things like that. And so this can be a good indicator of like, if you know that there's more pages or there's more files, like maybe there's a credibility issue here. And if if some are getting excluded from this crawl, then they're probably also getting excluded from what Google can see. And so at that point, you, you know that there may be a sitemap issue that's getting in the way of the ideal situation. But what I really wanted to show you was the issue report. So these are things that you could fix. And what it does is it it has a category, it gives a specific issue, it gives you which pages are affected. It tells you you know, whether you're like compliant or whatever you want to call it if it's following best practices or not. And there's there's very few things here. But for example, like here's one that has to do with crawlability, which we talked about earlier today. And so nofollow means that we don't want the search engines to read this page and there may be a good reason for that. And so it seemed that for your pages are affected, you can click on it to get a description of the issue. So this is why it's really great for people who aren't necessarily like in the SEO world. A lot of you are website developers or designers and so a lot of this stuff like you'll be able to understand just by going through it and familiarizing yourself with it was there like included details. But yeah, so then you could see, you know, like which pages relate to this issue and whether or not like it's worth doing anything or if you really wanted them to be that way. But I'll give you like a more tangible example of something that you definitely want to fix. We have, for example, External links to 4x x. So like a 4x. X code is like a 404 means that it's not found, and there's different variations of that I'm sure a lot of you are pretty familiar with that. And so this means that maybe something that was linked on the website now no longer exists. And so it either needs to be replaced or redirected or something like that. And again, you can dig into the URLs you can see like what specific error code happened. This is also a really great report that you can give to clients. And then you know, depending on the level of familiarity you have with these different issues and how to fix them then you can give yourself a little bit of an extra job and some hours working with them to not only audit and go through the audit and explain the audit but then also, you know, implement the fixes. So I just wanted to show you that because I think it's it's such a great tool. So then the next thing I did was I ran this through Hemingway, and like I told you before Hemingway is like the sort of like, saying it's the more basic version of Grammarly. is maybe not exactly the right way to describe it, but it's the more like focused version. And so as you can see, what it does is it highlights different things. And it's kind of using I guess these colors, as you know, like things like it's trying to like draw your attention to certain colors as being like something that's more worth your attention or less worth your attention. What I've always known Hemingway as is a great tool for measuring active versus passive voice. And generally speaking, we want to try to avoid passive voice in our writing. And so that's probably what it's best used for. But there are some certain other factors here that are useful and interesting. And like yesterday when I told you about clear scope and how it measures readability, you can see that Hemingway also does this. It measures certain stats in terms of you know, just this piece of content, not necessarily compared to other pieces of content. And then it also has some AI functionality, that with a paid plan you can use to I think automatically suggest edits to some of these things. So just, you know one interesting tool where it's I think best functionality is free. So then I ran it through grammerly and I wanted to start by showing what I was talking about. With the plagiarism thing. Like there's something about inventory management on this article that says 1% of your text matches the source and that's like it's not even This article isn't even about inventory management. So I just wanted to show you guys that like, like these tools can be wrong, but it's still worth running that check a if you're working with a writer that's not you, just from a reputation standpoint, you want to make sure that there's no obvious like plagiarism problems with it but be so that you can just make like some small changes to this text so that Grammarly doesn't pick it up and possibly, you know, Google may be like taking a nod from some of the similar types of algorithms and uses. Again, not that it's intentional. It's just like, you know, because there's already this wealth of content that already exists on the internet about all these different subjects and of course, there's going to be similarities with phrasing and things like that. So then we get to these other suggestions. And I guess one other thing I wanted to show you about Grammarly is you can set goals for a piece of content and I don't know if this is a paid version specific but anyway, you can, you know, say like what type of writing it is. So I just said business for this. You can give a certain intent so I sent in form for this I may or may not be right with all these things, but I just wanted to see what would happen. You can say like, you know the level of experience of the audience, you can set like the formality of the tone. And then and then it gives you suggestions based on those things. And what's cool about grammerly is that it goes into these specific zoo specific different categories of suggestions. So correctness is about like grammar, spelling, punctuation, clarity is to cut in to help with like the flow of engagement, which is probably most related to like storytelling and delivery, I guess, you know, kind of related to both of those things, and then style guide. This relates to my company's specific style guidance, some of the suggestions that I have programmed in myself, and so a lot of it is like punctuation, because I have some rules about that. And it's probably annoying for my writers to have all this pop up. But some of it is word stuff. So like if we click this, something like actually, per the blogs and the style guide, and that's just our approach, we say these words are fluffy and don't add value typically. So like if you cut actually, it would say wait, so you have to go read these reports. Ones is another one that I have strong opinions about. I say don't use one to describe a noun you've already defined. Use the same word again or find another way to say it and then I gave an example here. So that's what's really cool about Grammarly is like you can like get these things automatically being suggested when you're working on a piece of content within your organization so that people don't have to remember like all the stuff that I showed you on my style guide it just automatically pops up. Waxing then I'll show you a couple qualitative things and then we'll go to questions is I ran this through my style editor bot, and it wouldn't I tried to get it to like directly edit the copy. And it wasn't unlike what I showed you yesterday which was like a shorter excerpt and the did I did that. So part of this is like me learning how to best use the spot or how to best design it or how to best query it. But what I did was I said Please review this blog post it gave it the era and suggest edits according to the blacksmith style guide.\r\n\r\nThey said consider the bad side consider the following suggestions and it felt to me like it wasn't actually like totally reading the blog. It was just giving like general tips and then I said please suggest updated copy based on these suggestions. And so what it did, which is kind of funny was it created like a shorthand version of it. And so what I was thinking is something like this could be really useful for like an email newsletter, you know, like an atomized version of the blog. Or, you know, maybe like you create some social posts based on these shorthand summaries of each category or something like that. You'd still probably want to edit it, but to me, even though it's not really what I asked for, I thought that that could be an interesting use case. So then I was like, Okay, well can you actually do the edits while preserving the original length of the piece? And it was like no, but it kind of went back in and gave some more suggestions. And then I was asking if it was actually able to like read the original article, or No, I was asking about the visuals, because one of the suggestions was about visual aids. And I was like, well, there's a ton of visual aids on that article. And so it said that it can't directly process or interpret them from the article itself. So that was kind of interesting. And then I gave it the copy and then it still kind of like generally gave examples. So you know, it's a work in progress. I guess that's what I wanted to share. It's still it's still gave me some things to work with. But it wasn't exactly like the editor that I was hoping that it would be like it like it kind of was yesterday. So it seems to me if I were to make a hypothesis here that it's probably going to be more useful for shorter bits of copy, you know, maybe different sections or titles or things like that, versus trying to edit a whole article all at once but it will give you food for thought in terms of general edits that you could make. Okay, so last like pieces of content on this before we end up today. We talked about menu navigation. And so the way that I would change this menu navigation would be home about blog and I would just change this to contact and what I like to do with whatever like the most important menu item or call to action is maybe add some like button styling so that that stands out, it just simplifies it. It's not distracting and you know, hopefully leads them to the ideal conversion. So then the other thing like the header, because we're kind of talking about the whole experience, not just the article itself, is what I what I came across, typically in the UX audits that I did was a similar type of header where it has the logo, but unless the name of the brand is like really straightforward about what you do, it could benefit from having some context like a tagline about what you do and so I don't think that we do it on the blog. So some a very bad example. But you can imagine like in my header it should probably say like SEO and content agency. But you know, maybe because it's called the blacksmith that also might work I don't know submitted a test. I'm generally speaking again, I really liked this article, I thought that more or less like it fit the same types of standards that like I would have for my team in terms of putting together conversational tone like breaking texts up nicely, having really useful visuals, a couple of just like very small things. We have the social share buttons. My suggestion is to add a CTA that's like share this on social like, it might seem obvious, but just saying that might be useful, might also be useful to have them float as the person who reads it because they might decide at different points that they want to share it through. I love the visuals there was one visual where I think there might be an unintentional tooltip here where like when you were taking the screenshot your cursor was probably over this SPFx aligned area right here. And so it took the screenshot with that and it kind of obscures the stuff behind it. This is the type of thing that like, because I do these all the time I nitpick and probably nobody else would notice, but I just thought that I would mention it. I'm sure I'm gonna like pretty much ended there. The last thing I was going to say for now is with the Related Posts, one of them doesn't have the featured image. So it's kind of, you know, it just looks a little bit lopsided. That's a super easy thing to fix. And then when it comes to consistency um, you might want to capitalize text stuff just so that it's consistent with the capitalization of the other category. And then maybe also like space it out tech space stuff. So again, like I really don't have that much to say here, because it's very good and it has good information. The last I guess big thing is the actual place where I'm reading the content is kind of narrow and skinny compared to the full frame here. And so I wouldn't recommend going full width with the content but I think we could break out the box a little bit more or break it out of the current box so that it's a little bit wider. And I think that that would be a great reader experience. So with all that being said, I'm going to pull back to my slides really quick just to pull up like the question slide and things like that. But I mean basically we're done here. With the planned content. I'll once again bring up my book because it is about what we're talking about with content experience. It's about my approach to content writing, content style, you can grab a free chapter of the book on the writing for humans and robots.com website or you can grab the book on Amazon via Kindle or print edition. And yeah, that's pretty much it. So I will take any questions that may have popped up in the meantime.\r\n\r\nYeah. All right. So thanks again, Stacey for letting us use your content as I know that it's a little weird with talking about my stuff here but ya know, it was very much appreciated and a it's an excellent article. We've talked about that already. The content, it was it was hard\r\n\r\nto find stuff to comments on honestly, so I had to go into nitpick mode.\r\n\r\nSo grateful to you, Stacey. Let's see folks last chance to ask questions here. There are no questions today,\r\n\r\nwhich is covered at all. Everything's done.\r\n\r\nIt's it's been a very good and thorough presentation on lots of tools. Things to consider as we're developing content for and helping our clients create content for the web. Yeah, like Ben says firehose of information really good stuff. Greg, this is a good rewatch as well. Alright folks, last chance before we land the plane. Your if you have any final questions for Maddie, if you want to just say yes in the chat that way we know to pause otherwise, I'm going to start moving towards wrapping us up. All right, yeah. So thanks there in the chat. Okay. So Maddie, wrap us up here. Give us our final takeaway for the training.\r\n\r\nSure. I'll answer one question. Barney asked if I'm in the Denver area. Yeah, yeah. I'm in Lakewood, technically. But yeah, okay. Final wrap up. treat people how you want to be treated with your content. That's good.\r\n\r\nThat's really good. And true, right. So yeah, awesome. Well, thanks, everybody, for hanging out with us for the last couple of days. It's been a really good set of information here. A lot of things to consider. And hopefully it'll help us all up our game as we're dealing with content on the web. Thanks again. Maddie. For your expertise. And folks, we are back tomorrow as usual 1pm Central for office hours here on solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nNice. Well, thank you so much, everyone for your time and attention. And yeah, I hope I hope there is like one good nugget for you to take away and if you ever have any questions about content and UX, I'm always happy to be a resource.\r\n\r\nVery good. Alright, see you folks tomorrow.\r\n","livestream-resources-group":"s:34:\"a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","multi-day_replay_details":["s:1319:\"a:7:{s:18:\"event_replay_title\";s:19:\"Day 1: Content & AI\";s:25:\"day_description_cloneable\";s:290:\"\r\n\r\nAI content tools to add to your workflow\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nHow to write a great ChatGPT prompt and a build-your-own GPT demonstration\r\n\r\n\";s:35:\"livestream_vimeo_video_id_cloneable\";s:9:\"917283343\";s:16:\"course-resources\";a:2:{i:0;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:29:\"Slides (with clickable links)\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:87:\"https:\/\/app.slidebean.com\/sbp\/14wk06qt70\/Audience-Copy-v2-Website-Content-Workshop-2024\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:6:\"Slides\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}i:1;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:42:\"Slides (PDF Download, Links Not Clickable)\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1ucAZKb-0DHu92mcCDfWVxveHFj6Ch5qG\/view?usp=sharing\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:6:\"Slides\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:23:\"livestream_chat_log_url\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1EGbDssaPY16DPzSzhKrhE7ElsA_ATR4N\/view?usp=sharing\";s:40:\"livestream_live_transcript_url_cloneable\";s:66:\"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/s6izsl7mc33FNxJL9TyU3rv6g84?utm_source=copy_url\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","s:1312:\"a:7:{s:18:\"event_replay_title\";s:17:\"Day 2: Content UX\";s:25:\"day_description_cloneable\";s:285:\"\r\n\r\nHow website design supports content effectiveness\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nHow to conduct a content UX audit for your brand and clients\r\n\r\n\";s:35:\"livestream_vimeo_video_id_cloneable\";s:9:\"917679579\";s:16:\"course-resources\";a:2:{i:0;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:29:\"Slides (with clickable links)\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:87:\"https:\/\/app.slidebean.com\/sbp\/14wk06qt70\/Audience-Copy-v2-Website-Content-Workshop-2024\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:6:\"Slides\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}i:1;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:42:\"Slides (PDF Download, Links Not Clickable)\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1ucAZKb-0DHu92mcCDfWVxveHFj6Ch5qG\/view?usp=sharing\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:6:\"Slides\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:23:\"livestream_chat_log_url\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1-15hvhAoo2OFpOX5Y2-3iYd9OOuOLtfs\/view?usp=sharing\";s:40:\"livestream_live_transcript_url_cloneable\";s:66:\"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/hJvip6Ozsn3rEQSWvqgPkRGr4UQ?utm_source=copy_url\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";"]}},"postCountOnPage":1,"postCountTotal":1,"postID":448491,"postFormat":"standard","geoCloudflareCountryCode":"US"}; dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content ); \nTuesday, February 27, 1:00-3:00p Central TimeThe limitations and ethical implications of AI\n\n\n\n\nAI content tools to add to your workflow\n\n\n\nHow to write a great ChatGPT prompt and a build-your-own GPT demonstration\n\n\n\n\nDay 2: Content UX\n\n\n\nWednesday, February 28, 1:00-3:00p Central TimeWhat Google guidelines tell us about content UX\n\n\n\n\nHow website design supports content effectiveness\n\n\n\nHow to conduct a content UX audit for your brand and clients\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","livestream_live_transcript_text":"So we've got a lot to cover over the next few days. This again was this is building on last year's content workshop. And the link for that is in the course description if you missed last year I would strongly recommend you check that out. Really good stuff. So Sadie has your book MADI Naidu\r\n\r\nwhy it's really good love it seems like it's been a while since I published it, but you know, I tried to write it so that it would still be useful today. So I hope that you're all finding that. Yeah, we're sure.\r\n\r\nReally good stuff. Alright folks, if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat say hi. We are about three minutes away from getting started. And they're in the chat once again, is the link bundle that has the slides and the replay link as well as a link to Matty's book. We are Yeah, we're gonna have a lot of fun today and tomorrow, two hours today, two hours tomorrow talking all about website content with I mean, let's face it an expert in the field\r\n\r\nappreciate the vote of confidence. If you if you measure it by yours and I suppose expert, that's something that I've been doing for a very long time. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nAlright folks, let's hear from you in the chat. Check in question today. How about give us a one to 10 rating? How comfortable are you with generating website content? One being it's a real challenge. 10 being a pro, let us hear from you there in the chat.\r\n\r\nAll right, about a minute and a half to go.\r\n\r\nMaybe a good question is how many of you are forced to make content in order to finish your website designs? Yeah, to get your website launched.\r\n\r\nHey, Sue bullets are my friend. I like bullets. Alright, several folks just joining us. The links are there in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up that chat and you'll have the link to download the slides. Grab the replay and all of those things. We are about a minute away from getting started. Second question today is what's your comfort level? What's your expertise at website content creation one to 10 If you had to rate yourself love it. Love it. Tracks Yeah, five but a if you're using AI, that's awesome. Yeah, so a lot of folks are higher on the scale today. That's exciting, that hopefully you're gonna get some tools to up your game even further. He's got a lot to share with us. Over the next couple of days. Hey Terry. Dab Alright, folks, we are just about to get started. Glad you're all here. Diving into the web content workshop momentarily. Just seconds. To go. If you're just joining us in zoom, I'm going to drop in one more time the link bundle and it's three after so let's get the recording started. And we'll dive right in. Let's do it. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy and I'm joined for the next couple of days by my friend Maddy Houseman, Maddy is a sought after sought after copywriter specializing in enterprise b2b Tech brands. She's the CEO at blog Smith and the author of writing for humans and robots, the new rules of content style. She has been recognized on numerous industry lists as a top content marketer and I'm really excited to have her back for another course here on solid Academy so welcome back Madi, how are things going for you?\r\n\r\nThanks, Nathan. I'm really excited to be here. Like I said, you know, it's been it's been a little bit of time since I've done you know, a presentation like this since I've really gotten to use my brain. For those who don't know, I recently had a baby so he's in daycare today so I can fully you know, give my attention to this and, you know, embrace this identity of mine as a content creator who loves to learn and you know, who now has this other facet of my life but marrying those two in a joyous way so, so yeah, really excited to be back and and put my brain to use and share you know, some of the things that I've been exploring you for the past several months to I guess a year, all this new stuff with AI, that's what we're gonna focus on today. So really excited about that. Yeah,\r\n\r\ndefinitely. So we have a long way to go over the next couple of days and the thought just occurred to me Maddie, we really ought to have you back for another informal conversation just on how you prepared your business. So that you could take some time away, because that's really, that's quite a feat.\r\n\r\nIt was definitely and I'd love to do that. I'd be happy to.\r\n\r\nYeah, that'd be that just occurred to me. We should definitely, folks. So let's see the links are in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom. I'm going to drop this in one more time. There you will find the link to download or grab the slide deck. Also the replay link that will have the transcripts and chat logs after we finish is there for you as well. On that replay link you'll also find a link to last year's course, which is more some more foundational principles of the things we're going to unpack even further today. So if you missed last year's course, all the replays are there, follow that link, rewatch them, it's really good stuff. And of course, if you haven't seen Matt, he's booked the link for that as in the chat as well. So Maddie, give us a high level view. What are we going to be covering for the rest of today? Totally.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, we're definitely going to expand on some of the things that we started to talk about last year, but really, you know, thinking about what's changed in the past year and so that's why today we're going to focus mostly on AI kind of how AI factors into content creation, how you can use AI tools to create content, how you can use AI tools to detect AI content. You know, things like how to write an excellent chat GPT prompt and one thing I'm really excited to share with you because it's something that I've just kind of figured out for myself is how to make your own personal GPT. So that's what we're gonna do at the end of the day, I'll show you step by step how to do it. You can follow along, I'll show you how to adapt it a little bit. And then really, what we're going to start with today is I guess a bit of a cautionary tale when it comes to AI so we'll start with the most negative and we'll build up to the most positive. And then tomorrow, the focus is going to be on content UX, the user experience what I like to call the reader experience. So it's going to be more about you know, the elements of design and how they interact with content, how you can create this great reader experience for the people who consume your designs and content and so we can get a little bit more into what that looks like. But I guess if I was to like talk high level about today versus tomorrow, today is like things that I think are really like novel and fun. It's like It's like exciting things that that we're all learning kind of at the same time and that's that's what's so exciting about just like nobody has it figured out. And tomorrow is like the stuff that I'm really passionate about. That's a little bit more, you know, foundational and again, about like that full experience. So I guess with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. Yeah,\r\n\r\nabsolutely. Me give a couple of housekeeping notes that will disappear. Folks. We'll be taking a break in the middle as usual for these courses. So roughly at tube central an hour from now, we'll take about a five to 10 minute break depending on where we are timewise. So at the end of this first hour and the end of the second hour, we'll have a time of q&a as well. I would invite you to use the zoom q&a Link to ask your questions. Please don't use the chat, but use that Zoom q&a. That way we can keep all the questions in a nice list. And also, if you'll keep that Zoom q&a open, if somebody asks a question that you also want to hear the answer to just click the thumbs up icon to up vote. And we'll take the questions the order of up votes. So with that again, yeah, we are recording in the replay. The transcript is all there and it'll be available for you about an hour after we finished today. So Maddie, I'm going to disappear take over. Let's get started. Let's\r\n\r\ndo it. My housekeeping is just first of all, I think that we all can learn a lot from each other when it comes to AI. And so like that's how I've picked up the things that I'm going to share with you. It's really hearing it from other people seeing how other people are using this tool. It's interesting because it's so new that like, again, we don't really know like what the best use cases are. And there's this world of possibility that we've only just started to touch. So one thing I'll ask is like if you've come across an interesting AI use case, you know whether you have something that's top of mind now or whether going through what I'm going to talk about today sparks it like please share that in the chat. I'm sure all learn from it. I'm sure other people will learn from it. So that's one thing and then I'll just ask that if there's anything that resonates with you, as I'm talking today, or you know as other people are sharing ideas in the chat. I always love when people tweet or I guess x takeaways these days. So my Twitter is in that bottom right hand corner. So use that and I always love to retweet and share with my audience too. So yeah, let's go ahead and get started here. Nathan already gave a nice bio like who I am. Just to give you you know, more information about the blacksmith. We're a holistic content marketing agency for b2b technology brands. We create data driven content. I'm going to share some of those processes here with you today in terms of how we're using AI tools to do that. And our focus is creating content across the sales funnel with a focus on the reader experience. So again, that's really what day two is going to be about. It's creating this ideal reader experience with the intersection of content and design. And then my book writing for humans robots, the new rules of content style. If you've ever read the book, The Elements of Style, I was really kind of riffing on that in a more I guess, modern way since that book was written back in 1918, or 1919. Of course, at that time, the internet didn't exist. We weren't necessarily addressing a global audience when we publish to the web. We are now and so that's kind of the idea behind this book is how can you how can you speak plainly and inclusively and effectively when you're writing for the web? And so with all of that being said, let's go ahead and jump into the topic of today which is AI Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention. Day two, when we talk about content UX. I'm going to do some live content UX audits. If you were here last year, we also did this this is something I really love to do. And so this form here which you can also click through the slide being links that we've shared in the chat. Just has a couple questions like your name your brand. It'll ask for a link to a specific piece of content. If you're comfortable sharing for this live UX audit, and then it has the question that's optional. If there's anything you want me to focus on, and then like an aspect of the content itself, but the purpose is to collect some, you know, ideas from from all of you of what to audit and we're going to basically put the principles that I'm going to be talking about tomorrow into action you know, show you how to use some different tools show you how to use more also, like qualitative analyses. And so again, I would love your examples so that we can make it really useful for you to give you know, a second pair of eyes on your content. And you know, it's always done in a very respectful way. I'm not looking for problems, I'm just showing you ways to, you know, make your message clearer to make your content experience more effective. So I'll, I'll aim to remind you about this again at the end of the day, and then you know, before tomorrow is probably when I'll pick what we're going to audit for tomorrow. So get them in today, whenever you have a chance. Okay, so artificial intelligence. That's really the focus of what we're talking about today. Super exciting. Things are happening here. It's also kind of a wild wild west. It's it's something that there's many positive use cases but there are also some negative ones and so I really wanted to start with the negatives so we can kind of get that out of the way so we can you know, maybe share some like cautionary tales here. The link that Learn More link is an article that I wrote for Fast Company, and it's going to go over some of the same things that I talked about here in terms of some of the limitations and also really like the ethical implications of using AI to generate content to publish it as if it were your own. So yeah, let's go ahead and dive into that. Um, so I think like the first major implication, negative implication of AI or something to think about, especially as a creator, because many of us here we're writers, we're designers, so we're creating things. They they are our intellectual property which we may assign, you know, to a client, for example, but it's still at its root. It's something that we made. And, you know, the thing about AI is, first of all, it can't think for itself. It uses things like machine learning. It uses algorithms and processes to make sense of what's already out there. But it's not, at least right now in a place where it can completely invent something new. If it does. It's the result of this machine learning it's not the result of true uniqueness. So you know, essentially, AI and I'm gonna explain this example in a moment here, but it's, it's being trained on what already exists. It's using our intellectual property. And the worst part of it is it's doing that without giving us credit. I mean, if you go in do a search on Google, it was called Bard, but now they've rebranded it to Gemini. In my experience, and and I haven't used it recently, to be honest with you, but certainly within chat GPT there's no like source given for the answer to a prompt. It's not directing you to a specific piece of content are saying, This is what I referenced to come up with this answer, which also creates an issue of you know, whether or not that answer is something to be trusted, and we'll get into the fact that AI is oftentimes confidently incorrect. But right now, with the focus being on the fact that it's essentially plagiarism and my perspective, if you are taking what you generate with AI and then publishing it as your own this is probably easiest to think about when you think about visuals, and we're going to talk a little bit about AI generating images and kind of like how that works and some of the issues with that. But you can think of like aI trained on a certain set of materials, certain artists body of work, you know, that style, if it's trained on a certain style and the output is a certain style, it's pretty easy to identify that, you know, it's riffing off, you know, one individual's intellectual property, it's a little bit harder to make that distinction with the written word. But that doesn't mean that it's any less important to recognize that it's, it's an issue if if AI is passing off its own material or your material as its own. So, what I wanted to share here, this is an article that was published on futurism. It's an it's a screenshot from it, and it's about CNET. They have this blog about different like personal finance topics and things like that. And so when it comes to things that affect your finances, whether it's subjects like you know how to buy a house and you know, like had this setup a mortgage, you know, whatever. Or, in this case, like you know, how to pick a credit card, how to use credit cards, how to decide what college to send your kid to, or something like that. Google calls these topics, your money, your life. And in comparison to any other topic that you publish, that you're looking to get ranked in relevant search on Google. Google has the highest standard of quality for your money, your life topics. So CNET was transparent about the fact that they were publishing AI generated content such as the example shared here. But they had a human fact checking it and so the byline was like you seen that money or something like that? And then I think they also had like the byline of the human editor published next to it, but they told us you know, they they weren't trying to hide that it was aI generated. So this excerpt is you know, maybe kind of a silly example, but it's showing how\r\n\r\nthis article that they wrote, which was about can you buy a gift card with the credit card. This first example is a line that's almost verbatim from a rivaling Forbes article. And then this next example is how literally, the table was the exact same title. So, you know, you could question if it was only one of these things, you know, is that really plagiarism? Is that really a problem? But the fact that it's both to me shows that you know, not only did CNET not take a high enough standard of care, quite honestly with the content that they were having a human fact checker edit, but I think it also begs the question of like, if you're generating a full piece of copy, like a, you know, long form blog article, like are you ever going to be able to definitively say that it's not plagiarism? Or that it's not like literally, you know, word for word related to any other competitor article out there? And I think the answer's no, because that's what the AI is using to generate the content. In this case, and then one that I'll share subsequently, AI is, is almost like a crutch for CNET or for others who are who are taking this approach of generating that full article and then having the human intervention and I'm going to share some better ways to use AI in your article creation process. But yeah, I mean, the problem is ultimately that there's no way that they can catch every instance of plagiarism, and it just honestly creates more work and, and the worst part of all, is that it essentially ruin their reputation because they didn't take a proper standard of care. Another example that's, that's ongoing, it's unresolved at this point, is that the New York Times recently sued open AI who's the creator of chat GBT saying that, you know, their, their publications, their media. was unlawfully used to train open AI. And the last I saw, I think there was an update actually today that said that the New York Times is like misrepresenting the evidence or something like that. But again, I mean, it really just like begs the question of you know, if you publish content, like is it safe, you know, is it going to be used to train a model which is then going to spit it out and somebody else is going to publish it and benefit from it without properly crediting you? So that's one major issue. So this is one that I would love your examples. If you have anything similar. This is this is a picture that I saw recently in like a Facebook group about AI. And so somebody had done some prompts about dog breeds. And if you kind of squint, you're like, Okay, maybe that like a chart of different dog breeds, but then you look and you see all the like, really strange faces and like this, like gibberish text, and even the text that you can read is like not related to any dog breeds that currently exists. So, yeah, again, if you have any examples of like an image you've generated that has resulted in something like comically incorrect like this, I would love to see that in the chat. That would be fun. But I guess the point that I want to make with this slide is that at least at this point, AI can't effectively art direct you could give it a prompt and you could maybe get it to a point where you can get something useful. I think it's called mid journey. There's this one AI image generator that creates these like hyper realistic things with like any detail you can get it and something like that is so cool and very interesting to experiment with. But I think this came from within chat GPT I'm gonna say it wrong, but it's called like Dali Dali. And in my experience, when I've used it to generate images, it's the same sort of like gibberish text. The image, you know, is like, vaguely related to the prompts that I give it. So I'm using it for like, kind of like business article use cases to like generate a figure from you know, some like the data I include or something like that. I've never gotten something useful yet. And I think beyond that, it's like you still as a creative have to come up with the prompt. It's not like AI is going to be able to help you within the context, say of like an article. They're not going to be able to come up with like five unique media examples that you could include. So this is something that I think, you know, as humans, like, we still like have control over this or so like the best Abbot. Um, okay. So next I started to talk about this, which is one of the biggest issues with AI to date, the fact that it is confidently incorrect. So this is another Cena example, I'm going to read a little excerpt from. This is another futurism article. They did kind of a deep dive into this. See that AI but issue? So the excerpt is after the outcry after you know, some of these plagiarism things came to light. With the previous example. Steena editor in chief Connie Guglielmo acknowledged the AI written articles in a post that celebrated CNET's reputation for being transparent. without acknowledging the criticism, Guglielmo wrote that the publication was changing the byline on its AI generated articles from CNET money staff to simply seen that money as well as making the disclosure more prominent. Furthermore, she promised every story published under the program had been reviewed, fact checked, and edited by an editor with topical expertise before we hit publish, and I think that this is referring to like before this article was published, and so what you're looking at right here is, I think a more serious violation of the high standards that Google holds for your money your life, making sure that it is, you know, written by an expert that it's heavily fat checked, you know that you're not publishing something that you can't stand behind. And so this is about calculating compound interest for savings and as you can see by the excerpts, it's, it's wrong, the calculation is spitting out an incorrect final number. And so it may seem like, you know, small potatoes like, you know, like, what, what's really going to happen to the person who misinterprets this? It's certainly not like, you know, having to do with like, buying a house and like getting those equations wrong thread savings, but I think it just goes to show that there's, you know, there's a lot of problematic things that can happen and it starts here and if if we don't maintain a high standard for content quality starting here, then it could exacerbate it could turn into people being misled when it comes to making these like bigger money decisions in their life or you know, other things, your money your life, I think also, in some ways has to do with like, health and like medical stuff and things like that. So there are like potentially, you know, bigger and like worse implications than even just like the financial aspect of it. One thing that's interesting that that I misunderstood or I was misled about AI. Really up until like, a week ago or so, is I thought that you could ask chat GBT if it wrote something. So that was something that I saw other people talking about. And it's something that at the blacksmith like we've tested out ourselves you know, when working with like a new writer and wondering how to detect like if content was aI generated, and I found an article on open API's like FAQs or help desk or whatever that said, whenever you ask chat GBT if it wrote some you know, specific piece of copy for example, it just make something up like that's, that's literally what open AI says you could Google it yourself. So, you know, it's weird that it doesn't just say, I don't know, you know, it doesn't just give you like that as a straight answer. It's fine. If it doesn't know, but for it to purposely just decide, you know, bye bye narrowly, like if it's yes or no, and that it just tells you that whether it actually knows the answer, like that's very concerning to me. So a little bit of a cautionary tale. Um, but yeah, I think at the end of the day of the CNET examples, what I'm trying to impress upon you is like, does it really save time, if it like, impacts your reputation long term like I just don't think that that the best way to go about it is to generate the full piece of content and then add the human and I think that I think that AI can help intermittently and we'll definitely get to like how exactly to do that shortly. Um, so this article is also kind of fun. Charlie Brooker's, a creator of Black Mirror. If any of you are familiar, it's just this like really kind of weird messed up show on Netflix. It's very like future focused. It's like, I would say fairly.\r\n\r\nWhat's the word like it's, it's, it's kind of like post apocalyptic in some ways, not always. But it always like seems to end and kind of a scary place. And it's episodic, like each each episode I mean, to say is like its own storyline. And so the most recent season started to touch on themes of AI since that has become you know, something that has infiltrated society. And anyway, this article, The Creator who you know, has a very interesting mind based on what we see on this Netflix episodes, said that he doesn't think AI is messy enough to replace creative people. So there's good news guys, which is AI can't can't match that with us. I think on another hand AI, it lacks human empathy. You know, it can never like fully understand, like, who we are and what we go through. I don't think it ever will unless it's somehow achieved some level of sentience but yeah, I mean, ultimately, like in its wildest dreams, whatever AI, you know, thinks that it thinks it could never generate the ideas that we come up in our wildest dreams. And I think that the proof is in the pudding in terms of thinking about things like some of our favorite authors and how they create prosaic copy. So here's, here's a quote, I love Stephen King. He's kind of a machine himself, but human as far as I know. So this from needful things, one of his more interesting books, because the trust of the innocent is the wires most useful tool. And so, you know, fed copies of Stephen King's worked. You can ask chat GPT to write in his voice. I don't know if Stephen K would appreciate that or not. But, you know, I think the limitation is that it couldn't generate something like this on its own it can generate like derivative work of his but it couldn't come up with this on its own. Ai, you know, it, it isn't it doesn't have uniqueness. And Google has historically said that it's important. We're gonna talk a little bit about Google's AI guidelines that it's published. And it specifically says in those guidelines that they want to rank content that is unique, which AI fundamentally is not, not on its own, not without human intervention. Ai just read purposes and parrots things that already exists. And, and the output trends toward the average. It's not, it's not unique, it's not notable and interesting. Okay, so the last thing that I want to talk about from like this negative perspective, and then I promise we'll get into more of the fun stuff, is the idea that algorithms can be biased. And so if you think about like the people who are creating things like Chet GPT, or the Google algorithm or any other algorithm you interact with, like social media feeds, things like that. Algorithms, they represent the people that created them, not necessarily the population as a whole. So this book is really interesting. It's from the perspective of a black woman and so she is just like, read some of the book description to give you an idea of some of the topics that she explores. It says run a Google search for Black Girls, what will you find? Big booty and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms, but if you type in white girls, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and on unmoderated discussions about why black women are so sassy or why black women are so angry presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. And I think, after this book was published, because this was from a while ago, Google had manually made some adjustments to the algorithm in light of this criticism and that commentary, but the problem is with algorithms, you're you're scaling up problems, they can't manually make adjustments for every inherent bias that their algorithm has. And so you know, I don't know if we have an answer for how to fix this. But ultimately, the people creating the algorithm should represent society as a whole. I guess that's, you know, one way to think about it. Um, and I guess the question that it poses for all of us is like with AI deploying so rapidly there's going to be a lot of situations where bias needs to be routed out and fixed. And so that's, that's what's kind of scary, I think about how quickly new applications are developing. Again, it scales up problems and so that's just something I think we all need to be aware of, and and do the best that we can to fix. So okay, so now let's talk about some of the more fun stuff AI content tools. These are tools that we use in our workflow. These are tools that I use, personally. And so let's go ahead and you know, talk a little bit about how they work. So, again, we're gonna focus on like, mainly AI content tools, just because that's my sphere of genius. That's like what I have the most experience with, but I think there are different things that you could use like no matter how you're creating content, whether it's like you write blog posts for yourself, or for clients, or like, you know, you just want to like uplevel, your email strategy, or you know, help with like the personal compositions that you create. So, the first one I want to talk about is phrase which creates AI powered content briefs. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch my screen to share, to share like what a report looks like in phrase. So let's see here. I think I have to get out of full screen in order for this to work. Okay, so um, this was the form so I'm going to show you that in the beginning, but I'm gonna go ahead and exit out. So phrase generates this really cool report and the SEO aspects of it may or may not be relevant to your process. And I will say that not every piece of content that we created, the blacksmith is driven by SEO. It's not every piece of content we create to rank but I still use we still use phrase for everything because it helps with topic research. So that's what this is. It's a briefing tool. It's a research tool. Um, the way that it works and the way that the next tool, clear scope that I'm going to explain to you also works is that you give it a primary keyword. So in this case, it's how reliable are AI detectors? And so, by giving it this primary keyword, that means that we've already done the research to decide that that's the keyword that we want to optimize for. And so this is this is an article that's already published on the Black Swan, but this is something that we would have created. Prior to that publication. This this brief would have been like the first step of the writing process after doing the keyword research to decide which one we want to focus on. And the way that phrase and clear scope work is that you can I'm just going to show you like some of the pricing details so you can understand like how it works within a workflow, phrases kind of unique in that it has a plan that allows you to create unlimited reports. Not many other tools like it do that it's usually a per report cost. So that's why it's important to know what you want to optimize for before generating the reports. But it also has these lesser plans in terms of output. You know, depending on your content process, that's probably going to be more cost effective to you then you know, me as an agency, I would want more of like the unlimited plan to work for my various clients. So let's go back to phrase so what's interesting about phrase is first of all, just like the content editor experience itself, I'll be honest, we use Google Docs for everything. But if I was creating content, as like just for my internal team or something, what's cool is you can create these other tabs. And so you could have a tab that's like research. You could have a tab that's your outline. You could have a tab that's your draft, and then you could have maybe a tab with edits or something like that. So that's kind of cool just to keep the process nice and contained in one place. I've always thought that that was really unique and interesting about phrase.\r\n\r\nBut to be honest, we don't use phrase as a Content Editor. That's just an added bonus. So yeah, it generates a topic report. I'm gonna go through a couple of different aspects of it. First of all, it gives you some sort of tangible details and the way that phrase and clear scope and the market means which is another variation on a theme work is that they scrape the top 20 or so search results, which is pretty representative of like, what's going to be necessary to rank and it gives you details like, you know, how many words should you aim for for this specific topic? In this case, it's also suggesting how many headers which is like a measure of depth of content, how many links How many images? I think the top ones are what's like in this brief, that's what it's reading and the ones under it are like the average that it's suggesting. But again, we're just this is just like material that's from the brief. It's not like the actual content that we wrote. When it comes to word count. I think people always ask like, what's the ideal word count for a piece of content? And the the answer like many things in SEO is it depends. And so that's why tools like this are really useful because there is no standard. It's very topic driven. And using data that's based on actual searches means that you can get very close to like what that ideal is. So it also shares you know, the top some details of the top breaking content, you'll notice that the blog Smith currently owns a featured snippet for this particular topic, thanks in part to you know, some of the tools that we use to optimize their content. And also, I think, for this particular piece, because we did a lot of our own original research and reporting and some of it that I'll share with you when we talk about AI detector tools, I believe after the break today. You can also see like, the atomized version of some of these other top ranking results like the title like a short description, different headers, you can click into the headers to get more information. You can click through to read it. There's other things in this little side panel here that are interesting. This is just a list of all the headings from all the top ranking content pieces. Probably the most useful is this questions area and you can break it down by different sources of the question of the questions. People also ask you something you could manually go to Google and see for yourself. But it's nice to have it all in one place. I think that's the real benefit of phrase and then you can also see here that you can see questions that come from places like Quora and Reddit, you know, which which can really add a nice like flavor to what you're working on. The stats tab is really interesting. You know, they essentially suggest in phrase different stats, as well as different links that people tend to use in those top ranking pieces of content. And so you don't necessarily want to like copy everything that you see. But there might be things that like people would expect to be exposed to in your content. If there's like a big industry stat that relates to what you're talking about. As you scroll here you can see certain things like different topics that come up, you know, different related keywords or sub topics. And a lot of this you can kind of paste over from the sidebar. External links. You know, in addition to specific stats, news is also pretty interesting because this is like things that have happened maybe since those top ranking articles were published. So again, like if you're trying to be the best making sure that your information is the most up to date. This can help you do that. So freeze also has some generative AI capabilities. I'm going to be honest with you that we don't use these because we don't believe in generating AI copy as far as you know what we write for clients and for ourselves. We're experimenting with it. But so I don't really use any of the generative AI tools. But this optimize tab here is notable and useful, because it's similar to clear scope and market Muse which I'll share with you in just a moment here. And basically, it suggests certain phrases that we should expect to see in the content in order for it to rank high and relevant search. You know, obviously, you can't just throw all the words and you have to weave them in. But this is a pretty good baseline for what people would expect to see topic wise in an article and that's that's the real benefit. I think of tools like this. So yeah, there's other there's other like interesting things that you can dig into. This is like a keyword gap map map based on what I just showed you those different phrases and it shows your content compared to other ranking content and who's using what words so you can kind of see how you stack up against those other competitors. So next, I want to share clear scope with you and I have a slide for it, but I'm just going to jump straight to the report here. So what you're seeing is like a very, I would say like simplified user interface compared to like what you would see with phrase and so clear scope in many ways is very similar. They both exists to help you optimize content. They both include some important research they both work by starting with a primary keyword. One of the differences between clear scope and phrase is first of all that query scope suggests a letter grade whereas phrase and market Muse and surfer previously known as Super SEO suggested number like out of 100 in order to understand like how close to optimizing compared to their standards you are, it also suggests a word count. And one more thing I wanted to say about the content creator is that at the blacksmith we always aim for an a or higher that tends to be a good standard for actually achieving rankings, high rankings and relevant search. I'm actually not sure if phrase does this. I'm sure they do. I just didn't notice it while going through. But clear scope also suggests a target readability level. I think that's really important for matching the needs of the searcher not going you know too deep into something that maybe could benefit from being more surface level for example. You can also notice here that they have those suggestions for phrases and so phrase we use the very beginning of our process, but we're not optimizing content within that tool. We're really using clear scope for that because in my experience, and this could differ by industry, but I find their suggestions for phrases to incorporate to be a little bit more fine tuned than phrase. So you know, that's, that's my opinion. Um, you'll notice that they also have the sidebar, so they have, you know, a couple of details. I don't again, I don't necessarily use clear scope for the briefing processes is really more at the end of the process. So stuff like this, I'm not necessarily going over but if you were to use one tool, then it's nice to know that it has that it also has those top you know, search results for the query, examples of like headers and things like that. It also has the term like keyword gap map that shows how you stack up compared to the competition. You can dig into the competitor details even more in terms of how clear scope looks at content with their letter grade, by word count, that it has this nice chart that shows how that content grade stacks up against their organic position in search. And then I think the last thing that I'll mention about clear scope for now, is that you can use that editor in here just like you can use the editor in phrase, but actually both free and clear scope. Have a Google Docs add on. And so all you have to do is like grab the report link the individual link to that specific report, put it in Google Docs, and then you get all this information within, you know, Google Docs where you probably at least my team works better that way. Um, okay, so and then I guess the last last thing I was gonna say about this topic is that if I had to pick one tool, I think I would pick clear scope. Again, because of the fine tuned pneus of the instructions, but if I was a smaller shop operation, I'd probably pick phrase because it can do like a more well rounded look at like the topic as a whole and debriefing so so that's my suggestion. Clear scope works by essentially offering it's like a per report price, but you can buy packages and like the more reports you buy at a time, the less expensive Each report is. So let me get my slides back up here. And then we'll move on to the next tool that we're going to talk about though.\r\n\r\nWe talked about phrase to talked about clear scope. So let's talk about market Muse just kind of in passing here because it's a very similar tool. It uses some different technologies, compared to clear scope and phrase and so that's why it's a part of our process again as an organization that spends a lot of time on SEO and data and keyword research. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to you if you're going to maybe consider one of those other tools. What's interesting about marketmuse is that it has this functionality to create an AI generated first draft that includes some like light human intervention from their side. I think that's what this is actually this is like a sample from a while ago where we were just playing around with it to see what would happen. But yeah, again, it has a lot of the same functionality. It offers content optimization suggestions that like keyword gap map that I showed you and both of the tools and it has like some generative AI capabilities. So yeah, it just adds a little bit of extra detail. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that it's something you need to add to your workflow if like one of those other tools could satisfy a lot of these same things. So talking about some other tools that are interesting. Word tune is something that I feel like is so underrated. It's essentially uses your own copy to make suggestions. And so again, I'm going to I'm going to show you what that looks like. So let me share my screen back here. So it works in Google Docs. And so here's I just stole the intro basically from that AI detector article. And so what you could do is you highlight whatever text you want it to make suggestions based off of and I typically do it sentence by sentence I, I'm sure it could do longer bits of text, but I don't find that to be as useful. For me. This is like a great tool for when you have writer's block because I don't know you know if you've experienced this but oftentimes I'll let my get myself get stuck on a specific word and it just like really bugs me, and I'm like it's not done until I figured out the right word. And it takes me forever to get through that. So we're tune. It's great because I'm using it with my own copy. So I can feel really confident about whatever it suggests. I'm sure you could use word tune to take AI generated copy and then re spin it. But that's not my suggestion. So again, it works by using this like Google Docs add on and you you highlight it and just to show that action again. It has this little word tune icon. And then you can see different suggestions for how word tune would rewrite it you get like 10 or something like that. And then you can also fine tune it by changing the tone and then by finding ways to shorten or expand it depending on what your use case is. The last thing that I'll say about word toon for right now is it has this thing called spices and so that's like getting a little bit more like next level with the AI generation and using like generative texts. I haven't played around too much with this yet, but it is interesting. And this is kind of taking it away I think from you know basing it off of your copy to kind of like generating something completely new. So that's why I don't necessarily use this but I think it could be a useful resource for when you're when you have writer's block or things like that. So let me get my slides back up here. Here it is. Okay, so so that was word tune. Um, and then Grammarly. I think works very similarly to word tune, and that it uses your own body of work your own copy, to suggest edits, and so I wrote an article for their blog. That's what the learn more link is. After a recent keynote, they did about all their generative AI capabilities. And so I would definitely check that out if you're curious about how to use grammerly in this way. And full disclosure, I'm a Grammarly ambassador, so you know, I'm always singing their praises, but I think it's I think it's interesting because Grammarly, like many other SAS tools on the market are starting to invest in AI capabilities like directly within their tools. And so I think we're gonna see like more and more of examples of this. And grammerly has a lot of other I think really useful. And interesting features like they have this brand style guide, which is something we use that the blacksmith which allows you to set your preferred spelling for things like brand names, and grammar rules and things like that. All right, so let's take a couple minutes for questions. Anything that's come up so far, after the break, we're going to talk about AI detector tools now that I've shown you the AI writing tools. We're going to talk about chat how to write a good chat GBT prompt and then we're going to end the day with how to create your own personal GPT. So yeah, in the meantime, there's any questions. We'll talk about them now and then we'll take a little bit of a break.\r\n\r\nYeah, very good, great overview of some really cool tools that can be used for our content creation. If you have questions specifically about that, drop those there in the zoom q&a. There's one question floating out there about the slide. We were sharing this link as a slide sharing the slides as a slide being link because there was an issue getting them exported where the the links on the slides were clickable. And so technology Yeah, it that's so currently not downloadable. Is the long and the short of it so but that slide being link is there and it'll be available for you going forward.\r\n\r\nWe can we could share them as downloaded just won't be a clickable link. So you can we could share like both in tandem with each other. Unfortunately, that's going to be the limitation\r\n\r\nYeah, yeah. So I'm happy to add that PDF link as well. We'll I'll get that added to the link bundle as we come back. If you want to download these just know that there are things that say read more, learn more that don't clicked anywhere in the PDF. Alright folks, well let's go ahead and take a break. It is 153 Central time let's take a break until right at two o'clock Central. So right about seven minutes from now and we're quiet until then. Sounds great. See you then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We are back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, we are back and ready for the second part of day two. Maddie, what are we going to knock out today?\r\n\r\nSo we're gonna start with now that we've learned how to generate a copy, how do you detect it? We're going to then move to talking a little bit about some Google guidelines around AI content writing for humans and robots. And then we'll end the day with a deeper dive into chat GPT how to write a great prompt and then how to create your own personal GPT which I'm really excited about because it's something that I only just learned how to do myself. Very\r\n\r\ngood. That's a lot to cover in the next hour. I let me invite everyone also to look at the chat I'm going to drop in today's slides if you have come in late. Also, we've added a link there for the PDF download. And finally, there's a link in the link bundle that'll drop in in just a moment that has the invitation for you to submit your site for a content UX audit tomorrow. So with that I will turn it over to you Matty, let's\r\n\r\ngo. Sounds great. All right. Yeah, let's go ahead and knock this out. So AI detector tools. There's a couple that we've tested at the blacksmith and I want to share some of the results of those tests too, so that you can understand what they can be useful for. But also again, there are limitations. As with the rest of this world of AI, everything's still kind of developing. We're all learning things at the same time. And so there's no like perfect answer. There's no one definitive tool that's going to tell you like this is current AI content, or this isn't AI content. So a couple tools that you could try though that I think will give you a decent idea or continent scale, copy leaks and originality.ai and the link here which again, you can grab through the slide bean link is a link to an in depth investigation that we did at the blog Smith testing out these different tools. You know, trying to learn more about the nature of AI content and what it sounds like. So I do have a couple of ideas for you two that we'll talk about next in terms of like how to rewrite things that sound robotic whether they were robot generated or not. But before we get to that, this example here is kind of funny because it's the Constitution and this is continent scale, saying that they detected to be 9% ai generated and you know, I don't think they had robots at the time unless alien somehow hooked them up. But I think it's fair to say that this is more than likely 100% human generated content. But it's just interesting to see that their AI detector is still picking up some very some version of that. And that you know, also perhaps it hasn't trained this AI detector on you know, pieces that existed before. Ai content was a thing. So so that's just like one thing. You know, I think from the standpoint of like, if you're working with content creators, and you're paying for human generated content, then you should get that fundamentally I think that it's an ethical violation for someone to use AI to generate content without disclosing that and to be accepting payment for that as if it were something that they were creating. Of course, there are many companies out there who are hiring people with the job description that is like aI content writer, AI content editor or like somebody who trains you know, a chatbot on a certain way a certain body of work a certain way of writing. All of that being said, if you if you are using these tools, and they are saying with a high degree of certainty, you know, this is AI generated copy. I think it's really important to not outright accuse somebody of submitting AI generated copy what I do at the blog Smith is like let's say that we're doing like a paid test with a new writer hopeful for our team. What I do is I say, hey, you know, we ran this through, you know, these three AI detector tools, and here's what it said here, you know, is what degree of AI content it's saying it thinks this is like, can you comment on that? And it gives them the chance to you know, explain what they think might happen, defend themselves, offering to make fixes, and I think it's really like the way people people are going to be honest or not. There's nothing you could do about that. But I think it's the way that they respond to and handle that situation that tells you what you need to know about if you want to work with them, whether or not you can ultimately tell if their copy was aI generated or not. What is very interesting about these different tools is first of all, they're all gonna give you a different answer. That's just a fact. Because they're all using a different approach to detect AI content. The other thing is that you can input the exact same copy on one of these tools two times and get a different answer. So again, it's it's the wild wild west. But these will at least give you something to think about and whether it doesn't matter. Like if we if we trust the writer or not, we're always going to run their copies through one or multiple of these tools because we want to detect things that sound robotic, even if they were written by a human. So that kind of brings me to my next point here that I was starting to hint at. So when it comes to detecting AI content, or even detecting content that humans wrote, that sounds robotic, there's a couple of patterns that you can look for. The two major characteristics that the aforementioned AI detector tools are looking for are first of all, perplexity, so that's unpredictability within the content. Ai generated text tends to have low perplexity. Human writing has higher perplexity, it kind of makes sense we're a little bit more erratic than a robot. The other thing is burstiness, which is a similar concept. So it's looking for variation in the length and the structure of sentences. Ai content tends to be more steady, more formulaic, which makes sense. It has lower burstiness and human writing, which you know, has much more variation. The image you see here are some other things that we've picked up in our own writing process. And in investigating this topic, different signals that sound robotic again, whether they are in AI generated or not. So repeating words, like in this example, collision coverage, you know, coverage collision, like it's just like it's not using a lot of variation. And in the box MyStyle guide we talk about like, trying not to use the same word twice in the same sentence or paragraph, which is not always possible, but this would be an example of something that wouldn't pass the blacksmith style guide test because it's it's too repetitive. Also repetitive sentence structure where like, each sentence starts with the same formulaic approach. Advertising then a verb you know, advertising the verb, unnatural word usage, so like, you know, removing a glass dome to access the ball, but it doesn't really sound like how a human would talk about replacing a light bulb. A generic or impersonal tone. You know, it's like things that don't add value that you're just kind of like saying for the sake of having words, it's another thing that we talk about in the blog, Smith style guide, like everything you say, should have a purpose, and we don't believe in fluff. It's about cutting things to being the most concise version they can be while still conveying enough meaning. For people to understand what we're trying to say. Statements that contradict themselves. So the new policy will increase employee benefits while at the same time it will reduce employee benefits that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And inconsistent verb tense, you know, something a human editor. Should be able to pick up pretty well but probably a robot writing is not going to care too much about He He was waiting for the bus when he sees his coworker. Stiff, formal or matter of fact, writing style. You know, again, just something that just doesn't sound like a human wrote it or who would want to read it. So this is this is something that can be helpful to you like when you're doing your own edits to kind of like go through these different things. And, again, whether whether it's aI generated or not, and you know that for a fact, you still want to make sure that your writing is something that appeals to the human. So I wanted to take some time to talk about Google's helpful content update and also their guidance for AI generated content and whether or not it will rank some of this we did talk about last year if you were here, so we're just going to do a really quick refresher on that as it relates to this topic. So my book and like really like what we're talking about, in general is kind of marrying the concepts of writing for both humans who are really the ultimate buyer like they're the ones who actually have money so they can buy from you, whatever it is you're selling. They respond to other humans, other people's empathy, versus robots who you know, we're not writing for their sake, but they are the medium that connects us. To those humans. And so it's important for the things that we write, to be indexable to, you know, be findable to be descriptive, and to ultimately match the intent of whatever the human is looking for. So, you know, robots can also take the form of social networking site algorithms, like that news feed that you're familiar with, I'm sure.\r\n\r\nSo so that's kind of like the two players in this game. Here. So this is some highlights from Google's guidance about AI generated content. As you can see by the link here, this is from early 2023. And I was looking at this page again, just a couple of days ago to see if anything had changed. I had seen something on Twitter now x, where somebody had mentioned that something on this page should change. And I was looking at these three things because I think they're the most relevant to this topic that we're talking about. And like, I don't know if I'm just you know, like, post pregnancy brain or something. I couldn't find the difference. But it might have been because it was about something else on that page. But I might have missed it. And it might have been one of these things. But anyway, I think these things still more or less ring true today. And if anything has changed, it has been Google being less specific about their guidelines. Because that's kind of the nature of what all these things that they've shared with us are it's it's kind of like so just to go over them is a content against Google searches guidelines. They say it's not, but you know, it can't be used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which we'll talk about when we talk about the helpful content update. Will AI content rank highly on search? Maybe, you know, it doesn't give it any gains, which makes sense. What I think is really notable about this is they talk about if it's useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of e 80. It might do well in search. So they talk about original, but we've already talked today about how AI content at least on its own without manual intervention by humans is inherently not original. It is inherently not unique. And I would argue that again, without human intervention, it's neither useful nor helpful, in that, you know, you're not It's not like adding something that doesn't already exist. At least in that case. So to me, from Google's own words, AI content really aren't its own shouldn't rank high and relevant search. But of course, there are exceptions. And then, of course, there are situations where people pair that with a human editor like we saw with seeing that of course, CNET being a cautionary tale of what to avoid. Should I use AI to generate content? They say if you see it as an essential way to help you produce content that is helpful and original, we have that original word again, it might be useful to consider but again, if you're trying to gain search engine rankings and no there was something on Twitter now x where somebody was kind of like I can't remember who it was, but you might recognize the situation especially if you're in like the content world. Someone was boasting about how they had created a ton of AI generated content and they were sharing you know some stats from like their Google Analytics, and how would that helped rankings and things like that? And I think everybody agreed that that person should have probably kept their mouth shut because somebody from Google ended up you know, seeing this Thrive that came to their attention and they got hit with a manual penalty based on what this person was saying about you know, having not really like had that human intervention. So thus, it was not original or unique. And it's just funny, like, you could probably get away with it, at least for a while, depending on how Google develops more of these guidelines. But when you start to boast about it, and Google gets wind of it, then like there are manual interventions that they could take, so tread carefully. If it's working. Keep that to yourself. So then it Yeah, I wanted to like connect this back to Google's helpful content algorithm update, which also happened. Probably a little over a year ago, maybe two years ago. And so they describe it as being part of their long term efforts to provide original and valuable content through search. It rewards content that meets users expectations while demoting content written primarily with search engines in mind. So like we were just talking about what the AI content. This this update isn't focused on AI but but it adds color to those guidelines in terms of how to approach it or you know, if you are generating AI content, how to make it work, so that it could rank these questions. Are directly from Google just made pretty was blacksmith branding, but the link that I shared here will will get you to the Google documentation that includes these questions and the subsequent ones. So to ask yourself like is is this content truly people versus is something that Google would consider ranking. It's things like Do you have a primary purpose or focus for your site? If you're writing about too many disparate topics, it's very confusing to Google you can certainly write about things that are different but related to each other, but you should really have like one specific focus if you want to rank high in relevant search. Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they've had a satisfying experience? I think that's a question to ask yourself, whenever you create any type of content like Is it is it satisfying to the end user doesn't really just serve your purposes? They talk about like demonstrating firsthand experience or like a depth of knowledge that's really important. That's that's how we add uniqueness to our content. That's how we make it original. Even if it's just your opinion on something, you know, that adds color to the content that already exists. Okay, so, um, let's talk now about from the search perspective, are you taking the search engine first approach to your content? So these are things that you obviously don't want to do. And it's questions like, you know, are you primarily trying to attract people from search versus creating something truly useful for humans? It does say are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics like that cautionary tale, that person who was sharing, you know, the content they generated, which resulted in a manual penalty, it's a perfect example. I think this is important too, like, are you mainly just summarizing what others have said without adding much value? You should always be adding I think something to the content that you're creating in order for it to be worth creating in the first place.\r\n\r\nSo just to kind of summarize here, like what is helpful content versus unhelpful content from these guidelines that Google has given us and that I honestly agree with? helpful content is people first genuine specific, it's actionable. Up to date is important. Once you publish something, you have to think about, like if you're using stats or if it's about maybe a tool that changes frequently, like you should be regularly reviewing or auditing your content for opportunities to update it. Is it relatable, is it concise? And ultimately, is it satisfying, versus the unhelpful content which is written primarily for the search engine robots it's spammy? It's generic, it's abstract. It might be outdated. Ultimately, it's impersonal, impersonal, fluffy, and then whacking. So these are some easy guidelines that you can use to understand if your content is hitting the mark for something that Google would even consider ranking high and relevant search. All right, so now we're gonna get to some of like the really fun stuff, I think today, which is get GBT some specific examples for how you can use it, as well as a demonstration for how I'm using it. And so, a lot of the things that I'm going to talk about today are based on things that I've learned from other people. I didn't necessarily invent these things. I've adapted many for my own use cases. And so again, I think this is a really valuable opportunity for like if you have anything to add to this discussion, I'd love to see it in the chat. I think it could benefit other people. How are you experimenting with AI? Like how how would you maybe adapt some of these ideas for how to write a great prompt What are like interesting prompts that you've used, and you know what, how is that benefited? You so I'll just put that out there. And then I'll also say that some of these are like pretty much all of these guidelines are based on open AIS guidelines for prompt engineering as well as Google's in some cases, I've combined to them and in all cases, I've given examples of how to use them effectively. So let's go ahead and jump to it. Okay, so the, I think first and perhaps the most important thing is to be as specific as possible. And you want to set parameters for the output that you're looking for. So my prompt here was helped me generate 10 email subject lines to use for cold outreach for my content marketing agency, please limit output to a maximum of 45 characters per example. I picked that number, the 45 characters because I saw that that's like somewhat of a best practice for how many characters people want to see in an email subject line. And what I could have done here was use the personal GPT I'm going to show you later that's all about the blogs and style guide them has like aspects of like how we do business and I could have gotten like even better example results here. But the point was not to show you something perfect it was to show you how to apply this principle. And the other thing that I wanted to add to is like you can always start with a plant, see what it gets you and then you can set parameters after the fact to refine your output. Like, you know, maybe I would have asked this prompt and then asked for it to shorten it to 45 characters or to suggest new examples of 45 characters. Or maybe I would have asked for like, what are you know, 10 General Sales, cold outreach subject lines, that I could use and then I might have added the detail Okay, now, adjust it for like my content marketing agency. The next one is to give context and examples. So I have this bot and I think I'm going to show you a screenshot of it next. One of my personal GPCs is a blacksmith sales expert. And so I created this bot because we recently hired a new salesperson, and there's just so much to learn both about the blogs with his brand. The work we do for customers, and just our sales process in general things that we want to share with new prospects that I wanted to create a resource and it's like of course you know, I want to make myself as available as possible to this new salesperson because typically I've been the salesperson for my company, I have a lot of that knowledge in my own head, but there are times when I am unavailable or I have other stuff that I have to work on. And so I wanted to create a personal GPT that incorporates some of this different documentation that I've created about our process. You know, referring to this prompt it also has like a copy of our standard proposal. Different things about you know, like what makes us stand out compared to the competition what's what's unique to us, I guess, so that any person on our team, any especially new salesperson, would be able to use this chat bot in order to surface some of this information, especially if they couldn't get a hold of me basically. So here's an example of a prompt I gave my personal GPT which is using the above case study. So I gave it a URL on our website. And one of the features of chat GPT is that you can have it browse the web in order to to include information and its results. So I gave it a URL. I asked it to reference a proposal that I had attached to the GPT that I've uploaded to it. And I said proposed an email pitch for a specific job opportunity. I copy and pasted a longer piece than this. I just took a screenshot but like the long version of this job description, and and I asked it to effectively address the requirements that the job description surfaced and the writing based on our strengths. And so what ended up happening was, you know, it wrote like a cold pitch email. But it did it did effectively address this prompt. There were things that I would change about it. Certainly there are things that I would have edited it before I sent it out to the person who had posted this job description, but I think that for me as a founder who has also traditionally been the salesperson it's such an effective way to use this tool because I spend so much time just you know, it's like I know all this information I know what we're good at. I know that we have relevant examples. You know, I know all this but it takes time to like resurface that knowledge and put it in a form that sounds good and is compelling, you know, to a sales prospect so that if you take one thing away, I think that you know that's like one really excellent use case of using your existing knowledge or your internal documentation. To make your life way easier.\r\n\r\nAnother related GPT prompt engineering tip is to use de limiters to clearly indicate distinct parts of the input. That just means like what I shouldn't have done here that would have made it probably a little bit easier for chat. GPT to understand what I wanted is to put this this job description text in like quotes, that's like a delimiters to say like, you know, do this to this piece of what I'm asking for to kind of like help it understand what part of the copy it's referencing. And what part of the copy is the ask, especially when you have like a longer input output, you know, whatever. Another example of that is something I learned from James rose. He is an automation and Zapier expert and has been doing a lot of interesting experiments with AI who's really good person to follow. If you're interested in just like getting ideas, he takes transcripts from like voice of customer interviews where he's getting feedback and you know, like positive testimonials and things about his product and he feeds that transcript into chat GPT and says you know, use this puts a transcript in quotes those delimiters and basically like give me like three, you know, like really nice things they said about you know, our product three like great pieces of feedback. And I think that that's such a useful way we like on our client calls on our internal meetings. We use a tool called fireflies, which automatically transcribes all our meetings, but it's still you know, it's still a lot to sort through an end fireflies has its own AI capabilities, too. So it helps to summarize and things like that, but to take to be able to use that output and quickly surface insights based on whatever your prompt is, I think is such an awesome use of AI that saves the human reader from having to go through the whole thing. So this is and I'll show you, I'll show you what this looks like in action when we do the personal GPT demonstration. But this is kind of what it looks like to set some parameters for your personnel GPT and there's two I guess like schools of thought on setting like setting parameters narrowly defining the G PTS role. So you could do this within normal chat GPT and say for this query, you know, I want you to take on this specific role. And so I got this idea from Paul Roeser. He was on some like marketing technology podcast, and he's talking about how he uses AI. And his example was like, something along the lines of like, you know, pretend that you're a lawyer that advises entrepreneur, it's about hiring law and then he gave his prompt so he kind of like set the scene like this is the narrow role that I want you to operate into this query. So that's one way that you could look at it the other way is that you could create a personal GPT that serves a specific purpose like my blacksmith sales expert, that I've already referred to and that you know, I'm kind of showing you behind the scenes, how I set it up. So as you can see here, there's like a name for it, which is kind of arbitrary. A brief description, I think, mostly for your reference. And then the instructions are like what the AI uses to then suggest answers to your prompts. So as you can see here, I'm telling it like you can use our website as your primary reference. You should be familiar with all those pages and use it to inform your responses. It'll ask you and I'll show you how you want it to communicate with you how you want it to give answers. You know what specific information you want to focus on again, like narrowing that scope. And then I also say like tailor your responses to showcase the company's strengths and successes. Using you know details from the website and emphasize why we're the ideal choice in you know, answering like sales related queries. So this is one of the greatest uses of chat GPT without narrowly defining its role and objective. You're gonna get like a wide variety of answers and that's fine. It depends on what your use cases, but by giving it a roll, I think the quality of your output goes up exponentially. And I'll show you again, at the end here, what that looks like in practice. Here's another really interesting way to use it, I think, especially if you're trying to learn a new skill or if you're trying to troubleshoot an existing workflow, which is what I was doing in this prompt. So I use air table a lot. I'm a huge fan of no code and automation in general. I've found in my life that it's really hard to find like the perfect solution to everything that I want to do. I never could find like my perfect project management tool. And so essentially, I built it between using process street air table, Zapier, and you know the other mix of ragtag tools that are in my arsenal. So in this case, I was trying to create a specific automation in air table that for some reason is just evading me and I'm sure I'm doing like one stupid thing wrong, but I asked air table or sorry, I asked Chad GPT first of all, I prompted it by telling it what automation I was trying to create, like the actions that triggers the end goal. And it gave me like a step by step process that I would say is a little bit more high level than this out, but and then I asked it to refine its guidance or expand on its guidance by saying okay, so for this step, this is where I'm getting stuck. What was how exactly what I set this up in air table, and so then, as you can see, the result has some details and it's more detailed than the previous query gave for that step. It's probably worth mentioning that in chat GPT right now, there's two versions of GPT, which is like the underlying, you know, algorithm, machine learning mechanism, whatever. So there's GPT 3.5, which is an older version, and then there's GPT for GPT four incorporates web browsing so it has more up to date guidance. So especially when you're trying to troubleshoot something like air table, which changes often and so, you know, if I were using the old version of chat GPT, I might have gotten a different answer. So when you're doing things like like this, you want to use like the newer version, there is a limitation. I think it's something like you can have 40 prompts within three hours or something like that. I don't think I've ever gotten close to hitting that. But I suppose if you were to ask, you know, a lot of follow up questions, or you're troubleshooting something very complicated, then you could hit that so that's just something to keep in mind that as a chat GPT user and I don't know what the distinction is for paid versus free, but I think that the paid version of Chad GPT is like worth its weight in gold. I think it's extremely undervalued and it's probably because they're using our data to train it. So they do get a benefit out of it. But you know, I would say if you're finding yourself limited by the free version, then just upgrade to the paid it's, it's so worth that.\r\n\r\nOkay, so now, here's the real fun part. So we're gonna go through how to build your own GPT and I'm gonna give you like a specific task to do and so you can either follow along with me while I do this now, or you can do this yourself. Later, watch the recording and replicate it. I will say the process is probably much more straightforward than you might think, if you've never done this before. So we'll go ahead and get started. Let me set my screen accordingly. So we're going to jump over to the blog Smith website, because this is going to be the basis for the very basic UBT that we're going to create today, which is based on one that I've already created and refined a little bit more than what we're going to get into. But okay, so the blacksmith has this writing style guide and on our website. It has this chapter version so you can jump you know to these different sections. To see how will we go about our writing style. It's something that's fairly industry agnostic, so definitely like a great resource. If you don't have your own writing style guide. You could use ours to build yours. But what I want to do is create a chat GPT bot based on this that essentially acts as like a blacksmith editor that defends our style and explains when a piece of copy is not following it. So we have this as a PDF which I've already downloaded. I'll just show you what it looks like really quick. And it's it's designed, but it's fairly plain texts. You know, it's not that much more complex visually than like a Google doc version of this. And I'm telling you this, because my first attempt at making a personal GPT was actually to solve a personal problem of mine, which is that I love the game Settlers of Catan and I wanted to make a Catan rules bot so that I could download all the PDFs of the rules for every version we have. And I could ask the GPT okay, like you know, here's some like obscure situation like what is the role, you know, based on these rule books? Because every once in a while, something like that pops up. And while I like to think of myself as a content expert, there are those niche situations that require further consideration. Unfortunately, on the Catan website, the PDFs that you can download are very complicated visually as PDF, so chat GPT in my limited experience has not been able to read them. So it's just something to note that like you want to give it like the plainest text version of whatever documents you want to share with it, but something like this would be fine. And I know that because I've tested it. Okay, so so if you want to follow along, you know, just hit download, and that's this is the exact file that we're going to use. So then you go to the chat GPT dashboard. Which looks like this. And like I told you, you can toggle between chat, or GPT 3.5 or GPT. Four, you can see you know those limitations as well as the added benefits of using that more recent version of it. So then you go to explore GP Ts, and you can see on my sidebar when it loads here that I have. We have chat GPT which is like you know, every every question you could ever want to ask and then I have a couple of my personal gptc here as well as some that I've explored in this explore LGBTs area that I'm just kind of playing around with. So this is also just like a really fun place to look through things, test things out and get ideas for the the GPS you might want to create. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead and click this Create button, and you'll see this interface. Again, it's pretty simple. And if you go to create, it's going to prompt you with specific questions, but if you kind of like are familiar with this personal GPT idea, you could also jump to the Configure tab and start filling it out. But I think that it's easiest to think about it from this Create Tab. And so it's going to prompt you with a couple of questions. So this first one is like what kind of chat GPT what kind of personal GPT Do you want to make? So I'm going to tell it, you know, I like to create a GPT that serves as an editor for my brand, the blog Smith. The goal is to have this GPT serve as a resource. That references our specific style guide, and suggests edits based on newly inputted copy. I'm just making this up. But the last time that I did this, I'd used something similar to that. And so after each input, it's going to think you know, it's going to react to the things that you're telling it and it's going to ask you to refine the way that it interacts with you. So we're not none of this is like rocket science right now. This is just like designing almost like the persona of who this GPT is going to be. So then it's gonna suggest to name I suggest naming this GPT blacksmith editor. Does that work for you? Sure. Yeah. And you can change this yourself. Like if you just want to, like get through this part. Just say yep, yep, that's fine. And the next thing is it's going to generate a profile picture and so these are new, they're a little bit arbitrary. It's just like for your own purposes, for fun. One thing that is kind of fun with the imagery and it doesn't always work so we'll see. But sometimes I asked it to change to adapt the picture to use like one of our brand colors just for fun. So I'll say like, can you update this image to incorporate our main brand color, which just using a text expander Simple as that? Let's do it does. So this is using that dolly dolly I never know how to say it to suggest images and, you know, it looks like Okay, right? But we're not we're not asking it to create anything like complicated at this point. So, so like for example, it didn't, it didn't really follow my query. So let's see if I try a different way. Can the image use, you know, our main branch color? Like this is this is definitely the limitation of AI is that sometimes it understands the query and sometimes it just doesn't and we won't get stuck on it. If it doesn't get it. I just want to see if changing it has any practical effect on it. So then after this, it's going to ask about Yeah, that doesn't do it. No, that's fine. Okay, so the next question. They're asking me to more narrowly defined the role of what this GPT is going to serve as I'm Oh, so I'll have you use the uploaded PDFs as this as the foundation for your edits any questions? So I can upload the PDF here. Or I can go to that configure tag and I can also tab and I can also I can also upload additional documents to help as well like with my blacksmith sales expert, I have like our proposal I have a document about our sales process. I have another GPT that I forgot to mention that's called the blacksmith like SEO guru or something like that. And it basically I uploaded a bunch of documents about our approach to SEO some stuff about our keyword research process, and our like philosophy behind the different steps as well as a document I created for our writers and editors. That's about let me see how to get out of that. That's about how we write about SEO to make sure that our philosophy is communicated correctly and specifically. So that's just an example of different documents that you might use to support the outputs here and to narrowly define what you want to base its answers on. Okay. One thing that's important to say is when you're uploading documents you want to make sure to kind of like give context and say like, this is how I want you to use it. And like, you know, I'm doing this, I'm uploading this. So I'm expecting you to use this as part of your output if you don't, if you don't refer to that document when you're setting it up or when you're interacting with it. It might just ignore it in some, in some use cases when I've been creating these personal GPS like that's happened where, for example, with this one, it'll make edits based on best practices, but not based on the document that I specifically wanted it to use. So that's why I used that language. And so it says, I've updated your GPS behavior to focus on our specific style guide based on the uploaded PDF. So that's great. You know, like, what options so one thing that it usually asks is like how do you want the GPT to communicate with you and I'm getting maybe ahead of myself, I'm gonna say no, that sounds good and see if it prompts me to ask about like the tone.\r\n\r\nOkay, so it's not gonna say it looks good, but what options do I have for how it communicates with me? In terms of tone of voice, again, usually asked so this is giving me some options here. Again, not usually in the way that it normally does. It kind of asked to like paragraph form versus like giving me several examples. I'm gonna say that I want it to be let's go with number three, which is encouraging and positive. I think that that's the ethos of how we edit at the box with the other things are true to um, yeah, so just for the sake of this, and you can always change this, you can always refine it. Okay, so it's updating the GPT. This is probably the last edit and then what I'll do is I'm going to grab some copy that I want it to, to edit just to show you how it comes full circle. And then I'm going to show you kind of like the back end of what it looks like. So let me grab that copy. I'm going to feed it an example of like a recent social post that we were editing and the formatting is going to be like a little bit funky here, which is fine, because this is just an example. And the blog the style guide isn't necessarily built with a focus on editing social copy, but again, it was just like a quick thing to to try. Okay, so it says it's updated it. It tells me you know what the point of it is no more adjustments needed. Let's try it out. Okay, so I'm going to show you how it works and then we'll show you the Configure and then we'll kind of end the day off with any questions. Okay. So it gives you some prompts based on what it thinks that you might ask it and you can edit this, but I'm going to say please suggest edits to the following copy, in quotes and quotations, those delimiters based on the blacksmith style guide PDF and again, it's gonna be a little sloppy looks like it didn't actually take the name of the GPT that we asked it to. So we'll we'll take a look at that too. So it's interesting depending on the prompt you give it and I've tried this a couple of times in this case, it's kind of separating it out by saying like okay, here's some of the things from the blacksmith style guide and here's like specific passages of copy and how we would change them. So that's interesting. But what I would probably prefer is that it edits the whole thing, and then it tells me what edits it made. So it's, again, it's referencing I can I can tell because I'm familiar with it, but it's referencing specific aspects of the blacksmith style guide, which is great, we know it's working. But what I'm going to ask you to do is to change the way it outputs it. Can you refine the previous output by starting with I might mess up exactly how to say this, but by starting with, like all of the copy with edits, then after words, shared the specific edits made from blog Smith style perspective, that might not be like the most effective prompt. We're just going to see what it says. Okay, yeah, it looks like it's understanding. Nature. The copy here is an important I just want to show you how something like this could work for your purposes. Okay, so this is what I wanted it it refined the copy first and then it told me what it refined and why. Um, so let's look at this Configure tab. So yeah, for whatever reason, it didn't add the name. That that it prompted me and asked me to so I'm gonna go ahead and add that and you can see it up here. You can see this description. You can see the instructions based on some of the things that we talked about when we were creating it. You can make changes to these conversation starters we might even say like what like other conversation starters, would you suggest using freelist UPC code? I'm just curious and I don't know what to do. You can see the PDF that we uploaded and I can upload more files. You can add additional capabilities. I think by default the web browsing and Dolly image generation is implemented for many of you today who deal with code, this code interpreter might be useful. And then AI actions is something that I've started to play around with but don't fully understand but there's a way that you can connect your personal GPT to Zapier so that for example, it could reference data and other apps. So for my blog, Smith sales GPT I'm trying to create an AI action that allows it to reference our air table CRM so that you could ask it questions about a certain lead or certain portfolio projects and things like that. So once I get that implemented, it's going to be so cool. Okay, so it's giving me some ideas for these conversation starters that are a little generic, but I could probably refine them further. I think the last thing to talk about is how you can either keep this to yourself or share it with other people. I think that these drafts are automatically saved. So if you X out of here before clicking Save, I believe it will still exist, but don't quote me on that. From there you can decide you know, if you want to, if you want to keep it to yourself if it's you know something that's for your own personal use cases, or if you want to share it with your team or if you want to share it with like the wider world like maybe you create a chatbot for your industry that other people could benefit from that you want to share. So, in most cases, probably anyone with the link is a good bet, if you ever intend intend to share it with other people. Okay, so let me jump back to my slides really quick. We're going to end off the day here. So here we go. me pull this back up. Um, okay, this is the link to grab the style guide if you want to use that to replicate what I did today. You can also grab that from the side being like um, I'll just say one more time. My book writing for humans and robots. It was the number one best seller in the SEO category. So if SEO and content is something that you want to invest more time and learning about then I would highly recommend my book. You can grab the first chapter for free on the books website, and you can grab the book on Amazon in both print and Kindle format. I'll give one more reminder for our live content UX audit tomorrow. I'd really love to help you workshop, your content, help you come up with ideas for making it even stronger and more effective. So you can use this link to do that and that will happen at the end of day two. And then, you know, outside of today, if you have any questions about the things that we're talking about, you can either email me Maddie at the blogspot.com or on Twitter, aka ex im at Mad Yasmin and then yeah, we'll end the day with any questions that have come up since going over some of this GPT stuff.\r\n\r\nYeah, great stuff. Thanks Maddie. You know, the custom GP tees are really interesting. And it's it's also not only for your own business, but also working for clients. It's an opportunity to really, it's, it's a service you can provide. We have a boy for example, that has a ton of they're an educational nonprofit and they have a ton of PDFs like 800 and an educational topic that they deal with and so we're investigating, what would it take to put those PDFs in there and then have a bot that you could query the entire library to find an answer to something right. It's just super, super useful. Yeah.\r\n\r\nOne one note on that Nathan is chat GPT. So they have a limitation of you can upload 20 Total documents but they don't say how large or small those documents have to be so OneNote for like anybody who's trying like this is something that came up with that Catan bot I was trying to make. You can combine the documents if need be.\r\n\r\nYeah. And chat CPT if you have a large library like that it might not be the best tool it sometimes there are a bunch of third party tools. I mean, if you go on App Sumo, every day, there's a new one that somebody's chat bot or whatever, but find one that the UI that you like and a lot of those don't have those limitations. Like they have a separate database that they're looking at with total sort of magic they've created. I don't know, I don't understand it. But anyway, yeah. So folks, a couple of questions stacked up there. If you have a question, add that to the zoom q&a, and we'll dive into it. So first question from Doug. Maddie, how does SEMrush or SEMrush fit into the landscape of content writing tools? What overlaps or complements with phrase? Sure,\r\n\r\nyeah. So I think of something like SEMrush or Ahrefs is being a great all in one. SEO tool. So people use it for more than content although content is like an important facet of them versus something like phrase or query scope is really just about content and just about content optimization, or, you know, in the case of like phrase and market Muse also generating content is the use case. But SEMrush I have I'll be honest, I have more experienced with a traps but they both they're both very similar and we actually use SEMrush like the keyword researchers and strategists on my team, we use SEMrush these days. But it is it is the tool that if we're comparing it to phrase and query scope, that's the tool that we use to define our primary keyword. It's before we run those reports. It's a tool that we use to come up with some secondary keywords. It's the tool that we use to identify feature snippet opportunities, we can do competitor research on it. You can do backlink tracking on it. You can audit your website. So I mean, it just it just serves such a bigger overall SEO use case. But there are many very useful content optimization tools. And so it's kind of like a higher budget tool than any of the ones that I've mentioned, but it will serve you know, many of your SEO purposes even outside of content. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nOkay, questions from Eddie. Eddie is writing tech blogs. I see now my keyword content from Reddit is ranking very good. I doubt Reddit content is helpful since usually people have vague answers to questions. What do you think about that?\r\n\r\nIt's an interesting question and I think I'm gonna take the opposite stance. I do think that Reddit content is helpful. There's something about people being like anonymous on the internet that like makes the truth come out. People feel like a little I guess like Freer with the information that they that they volunteer. And so I mean, you have to take it with a grain of salt because they're anonymous. They also might have an agenda that is not clear versus somebody who's coming out and saying, you know, I work for one of these tools or, you know, these are the clients they serve. And so that's like, why this relates to what I'm talking about. But I will say that sites like Reddit, Reddit and Quora are really interesting for learning more about your audience, learning about the things that like keep them up at night and so that's why they rank so high is because they are a wealth of information. They're not, you know, they're not using like the traditional methods to optimize their sites, but they are benefiting from all this unique user generated content because they've created communities. So, yeah, I mean, I don't I don't know exactly how to answer the question. I guess I'm kind of like answering around it, but I think that Reddit is a useful resource in general. I don't know that it can be counted on like aI right where Yeah, I can be confidently incorrect certainly. So to can, Reddit user is but they bring up some really interesting points that are worth investigating. So as long as if you are using it as a reference that you fact check, or you know, if you're I guess if the question is like, How can I outrank Reddit the the answer is like, I don't know.\r\n\r\nYou just said maybe Reddit pays Google. And honestly, we just did a story about this a week ago in our news roundup. It is actually Google who has purchased the rights to all of read its content. Alright, Gemini. Yeah, that just came out. The story last week was an unnamed AI but it's since come out that it's Google has purchased it right. So who knows? Yeah, Google does. Yeah. Doug says here's my favorite prompt. I add this to help me brainstorm chat. GPT add this to the end of your prep, ask me five questions that will improve the response you'll be giving me I use that too. It's really helpful. I\r\n\r\nlove that I I haven't considered that and that's why I think like discussions like this are so useful. Like, we can all learn so much from each other. I learned something new about this every day. For\r\n\r\nsure. The AI world is moving rapidly. And we were Mata you and I were talking earlier just we did an AI workshop here back in October, and there's so much that's new and better and different, even just in the last few months. It's pretty crazy. All right. That brings us to the end of questions. Tomorrow, we're talking about a UX content UX. So give us one more time an overview of what we're going to talk about tomorrow and we'll start to wrap things up here.\r\n\r\nOh, tomorrow. I was looking at the comments and somebody had mentioned let's say Ben had mentioned that to get them to use the right color and the GPT to be very specific, use hex color code when so I got distracted but um, okay, so tomorrow we're going to focus on the content reader experience. Content UX, another way of thinking about it. So we're going to talk a little bit about things like things that Google has said or page experience signals, so things that are like tangible that you can optimize around within your design to help your ranking on Google. And my philosophy when it comes to SEO is that there's three pillars, there's like the content and the things that you can affect on your own page. There's the website structure, so that's going to be a lot of what we talk about tomorrow. And then there's things like Off Page signals like backlinks, which we won't talk about, but you know, we can always have a discussion later or, you know, I'm sure Nathan will bring on somebody who talks about that at some point, too. So yeah, we'll talk about these like website signals, these page experience signals. We'll talk a little bit about website structure, things that you can do to create a better experience for your users, even if it's not necessarily something that Google takes into consideration for ranking and some things that they do. And then we will talk about auditing, you know, with practical tools and specifics, your contents, the nature of your contents UX. I'll tell you how to like run your own content UX audit, whether that's with tools or with people in person. And so that'll be that'll be kind of the nature of what we talk about tomorrow. Trying to bring that discussion full circle from the specific things that you can use to how to like measure if you're using them effectively, and then we'll end the day with a content UX audit from the things that ideally, y'all have submitted. So if you haven't, please use that form that we've linked to in that slide. Being link, and then I'll pick a couple for us to go over tomorrow.\r\n\r\nYep, very good. And that link is there in the chat. Once again, make sure you submit a URL that was a lot of fun last year when we did that very info wise. Yeah. So I will take care of that. Tomorrow. That's yeah, day two. All right. Maddie, good stuff today. As always, we'll have the recording up if anybody wants to go back and replay if you came in late. It'll be up in about an hour or so soon as it renders. And I will see you back here tomorrow, one o'clock central time for day two of content workshop. Have a good night. See you then.\r\n\r\nHear but as you're coming in, we're just asking what was your biggest takeaway from day one? You can sound off there in the chat. I'm also dropping in the new link bundle, I can type correctly. There is a new slide being linked, so make sure you grab that new one. It is updated on the replay page. But make sure you grab that new link because a few changes have been made since yesterday. That will let you follow along better.\r\n\r\nSome last minute tool suggestions. Ah,\r\n\r\nlove it. Love it all. Right, catch. Working for everybody now. Just about a minute and a half to go and again, we'd love to hear from you in the chat on what your biggest takeaways from day one we're. As we are waiting just another minute or so to get started. Also the link there for the live content UX audit is on the screen because we have a slide or two left if you'd like to submit your site or page or something for a content audit. It'll be a friendly review with with some good help to help you improve some of your language. So use that link. The link is in the link bundle in the chat. There on the screen. We do have a couple of slots if you'd like to participate in that. So Vivian, if you look at the replay link in the link bundle the academy link there is a PDF download link on that on the on the replay page. And that is the new updated slides. Yep, so that's all there ready to go on the replay page or you can view them on slide being right now. Yeah, not too many changes. New tools. All I was new to was fun tools. Yeah. Alright folks, about 30 seconds to go. Glad everybody's back for day two. Again, our check in question. Let us know in the chat. What your biggest takeaway from day one was? Particularly did you have you used any new GPT prompts since we played around with that yesterday, or has anybody taken the dive and made your own custom GPT based on\r\n\r\nor have any ideas for things that you want to try when you have time? Yeah, I could. I could use some more ideas myself. Yeah.\r\n\r\nFor sure. All right, folks. It is three minutes after someone to start our recording and we will get underway. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everybody, wherever you happen to be welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here and joined again by MADI. Azzaman for day two of the content accelerator for 2024 Welcome back. Maddie. Glad you're here.\r\n\r\nThank you so much for having me. Again. It's exciting to dig into some of these topics.\r\n\r\nAbsolutely. So we had a lot of fun yesterday talking about some AI stuff and some great principles for creating great content. And today we're looking more at the the user side of consuming content right what are we going to talk about today? Exactly.\r\n\r\nYeah, I think that you can think of today as being a way to practically test your content, whether that's with other people, whether that's with tools, understanding how it measures up against some of the guidelines that Google has shared, that are necessary for ranking, specifically when they have to do with the user experience. So we're going to kind of attack this from all angles. And, you know, hopefully it'll leave today with some really tangible tools to help you understand like, does your content provide a great reader experience? Or are there things that you could do to improve it?\r\n\r\nYeah, very good. And we do still have this content UX link on the screen. If you have not filled that out and you would like to there's still a slot or two left for the second hour, we'll do some live content review. So grab that now. The link is there in the chat as well. A couple little bits of housekeeping and we'll turn it back over to Matty as usual. Ask your questions using the zoom q&a And we'll take those questions at the end of each hour today. break in the middle as usual. One note is that the slides have been updated since yesterday. So in the chat is the new slide being link. And if you want the PDF download, just go onto the replay page with the link there and the link bundle and you can download the PDF there as well that has all the new updates on the slides. So with that, I'm going to disappear Maddie, let's get started.\r\n\r\nLet's do it. So yeah, if if you want to submit something for this live content UX audit, ideally, it's like a page on your website, not not something like a PDF, because we want to look at how the content interacts with design. And like Nathan said, you know, it's a friendly review. We're not like looking for issues. We're just looking for things that you could do to perhaps improve the content experience. Get another set of eyes on it. And it's just a practical way to apply some of the tools suggestions I'm going to give you so with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. We're going to start today by talking about Google guidelines for what makes up a great user experience, especially when it has to do with content and specifically we're going to talk from the perspective of Google's quality rater guidelines. And then after I go through a couple specifics there, we're going to talk more broadly about Google's page quality signals. I think that's what it's called. I haven't labeled in the next slide but things that have to do with what they've told us influenced ranking high and relevant search, you know, all else equal, if you have great content, what aspects of your website design, you know, must be present of your website structure must be present in order for you to rank high and relevant search. So the first part is a little bit more I would say qualitative. And then the second part is going to be a little bit more quantitative. So the learn more link is for an article I wrote a while back for Search Engine Journal. This was specifically focusing on aspects of Google's quality rater guidelines that have to do with the user experience. And so I think it was a couple of years ago now I read through the entire quality rater guidelines, which if you're interested in SEO, and user experience, I would highly recommend at least giving it a skim. It's kind of hard to do because it's like 175 pages, but there's some really good nuggets in there about how Google looks at search, how they judge quality of content, how they determine if a page of a search result meets the needs of the searcher who's looking for it. And so the quality rater guidelines what's worth mentioning is that to some extent you have to take with a grain of salt because this is not something that directly influences rankings. What happens is human quality raters that they hire read through these guidelines, they're tested on them to make sure that they understand what Google is looking for and then they manually rate different website results based on a certain query. And so what happens is that Google gets that information. It helps them you know, refine their algorithm in terms of the general direction they want to take with it, but it doesn't necessarily result in any manual adjustments for whatever websites they're ranking. It's it's more of like a research process. So that's, that's what the quality rater guidelines are. They're a tool to help Google research what the web looks like right now in order to make decisions about how they want to adjust their algorithm for the rest of us. But all that being said, Whenever Google gives us information, whenever they volunteer details about how they look at search, and how they define quality, and like a great user experience, I think that we would be wise to take note of that if it is in fact our goal to rank in relevant search. And I think at the end of the day, whether it is or not, I think Google tries to maintain a high standard for quality. I think that it's their philosophy, philosophy, that content is king, you know that that good? Content is important. And so again, whether search is your goal or not, it's worth it's worth at least like listening to what they have to say. And so, for your benefit, I've tried to break down some of the most important things from the quality rater guidelines specifically having to do with the topic that we are discussing today. So the first thing that they mentioned or they they talk about the quality rater guidelines has to do with interstitials. So back in, it was either 2017 or 2018. They made an update to their algorithm, and they told us about it is again one of those rare cases where they're just upfront. And they said that like if you're using popups say, for example, to gather somebody's email address, or you know, it maybe you're on an E commerce site to advertise the sale, something that obscures the content that you have to interact with you either put your email in, or you have to click the X button, you know, something like that, that you have to interact with in order to use the content on the page. They call that an intrusive interstitial. And so what happened was it really it really resulted in a big change for how people use conversions, I guess on their website, so you know, bloggers and people who do affiliate marketing and of course, yeah, ecommerce, and businesses trying to get email subscribers all had to fundamentally change the way that they approach gathering email addresses. And I'm going to talk a little bit later about what you can do instead, that doesn't violate Google's guidelines. But again, from Google's perspective, they say that interstitials make it difficult to use the main content of the page. And so when they're talking in the quality rater guidelines, they frequently refer to MC main content, which is like what the searcher is ultimately going to your website for and so you could say generally speaking, that they're trying to defend the experience of the main content. And to like, skip ahead to the point here about ads, when they talk about ads, that Google recognizes that and they say this in the quality rater guidelines, that ads don't automatically equate to low quality, they understand that ads are in many cases, the reason a site can continue existing. But that being said, there is like a right and a wrong way to go about implementing them. And so they say the too many or like large ads hurt the user experience. And then that case, the human quality raters should assign that site that result, a low rating. So again, you want to think in terms of the main content is the ad obscuring it? Is it taking away from it? If not, you're probably okay. But it's just good. To keep in mind that Google's not saying no, you can't have ads. You just have to be thoughtful about it. And when I did some of these UX audits in the past, like the ones that we're going to do later today, I did a couple of for some members of the Denver bloggers club one of the local clubs that I've been involved with here. And one thing I noticed about a lot of them was you know that they'd have an ad in the sidebar, they'd have an ad in their footer. They'd have an ad a couple times throughout their blog content, and it was probably Google Adsense that they were using, or some other ad network. Like it. And again, it's like I understand that you're monetizing your site using ADS. But at the end of the day, it's probably working against you because people if you were to look, you know into the data like the scroll depth and the time on page and things like that, using Google Analytics, for example. You probably see that on those pages that are very heavy with ads that people abandon the page pretty quickly because it's just a bad reader experience. So to go back a point here, clickbait Google has a couple of pieces of guidance in the quality rater guidelines about that specifically.\r\n\r\nGenerally speaking, a good page sets expectations or good title sets expectations for wherever it's leaving you. And so clickbait is something that it can certainly be effective and getting attention and getting clicks, but it can be a very unsatisfying experience if it doesn't do something to deliver on the promise made in the title. Um, the Google specifically says that clickbait headings detract from high main content. So, you know, that's something that they're specifically looking for and guiding people to, to comment on. And they say also that like every page should have a page title. It shouldn't just be presented without buttoning it up that way. And that title should describe page content. So again, it's a balance. Writing a good title, I think is very much in art. But it shouldn't be misleading. That's that's the key here. Um, so the last point here is that when it comes to creating content, you want the answer to your query to be pretty prominent in the results. You don't want people to click through and then have to dig to find that. And Google has a couple of different SERP features, I would say where they're trying to, you know, first of all, answer this within search so that you don't click through, which is a problem for us content creators, but it's also perhaps an opportunity when we think about things like a Featured Snippet, which is just that sort of box that shows up above any other search results and it's usually summarizing kind of like the nature of what that person is looking for what Google thinks that person is looking for. There's other things like Google will index parts of a page and link to that specific part and highlight it you probably noticed that yourself when doing search and looking for something very specific. And so that's something that they do, it's not, to my knowledge, it's not something that you can necessarily optimize for. It's it's their methodologies of indexing and surfacing content. But the example that they gave in the quality rater guidelines was something about like somebody searching Abraham Lincoln's birthday. And when somebody clicked through like it was present on the page, but it wasn't prominently answered. And so in that case, they were instructing the human quality rater to give that like a not as good rating for meeting the needs of the searcher. So yeah, I mean, definitely, that's, that's kind of most of what I'm going to say about the quality rater guidelines. But I really think it is a very interesting document and especially if you look at the examples they give in terms of how they're making those determinations. There's a lot of little nuggets of truth and we also have a blog post on the blacksmith website that digs into this even outside of like the user experience sort of and like design focus. So if you want another take on that then definitely check that out. We just went in and updated it recently. So let's talk more broadly now about some search signals from Google things that Google has told us about the page experience and you know, importantly, I think how to how to like measure that, quantitatively. Google, we talked a little bit about helpful content yesterday and that algorithm update which was the year a year and a half ago, something like that. Google has been has said that a good page experience is a requirement. For creating what they define as helpful content. So you know, all these algorithm updates are designed to support Google's mission, you know, the way that they look at content quality and things like that, of course, they all you know, more or less feed into each other, but I think it's worth mentioning that like that is an aspect of having helpful content. Alright, so we're gonna start with what is collectively known as the core web vitals so the core web vitals, this algorithm update, or Google announcing this page signal? came about? I want to say it was 2021. So they've been around for a while. And interestingly, and what we'll go over is they have changed slightly since coming out. But the idea here was to give people these these three specifically, page signals, were to give people more tangibility around how to measure the the page experience. Because up until that point, it was a little bit innocuous, it was hard to conceptualize, in terms of knowing like where you actually rank according to Google's own way of looking at it. So the first page signal of the quarter web vitals is the largest Contentful paint, which is a facet of page loading, loading speed. And so their definition is that it reports the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport relative to when the page first started loading. So if we think about I think most of these core web vitals are more or less referring to like above the fold, like what you see before you scroll, it's like that first impression that a person has with your website and most designs, most tools that you use to optimize loading and things like that, typically are set up so that the rest of the page loads later but you want you know what's visible initially to load quickly and first so that people can start interacting with it, and then it gives time for the rest of the page to load. So another way of thinking about this is that this signal takes note of the largest element on every web page and measures its total loading. Time. So maybe this is an image, maybe it's video, you know, typically at some, I would say some sort of media thing, but it could be your theme in general, it could be a very slow loading plugin. So these are all things that you'd want to keep in mind in terms of optimizing this particular factor. And when I say I guess, like the theme and plugins, it's like the output of them that you would implement on your page. So okay, so how do you get a good largest Contentful paint so according to Google, whatever this largest element is, is about 2.5 Seconds or Less of loading time and you have a little bit of wiggle room here, before it gets to, you know, this like poor area, but you'll notice that it's not a super long time. And I think that this particular man measurement here, it relates to something that Google's said before and shared in their own documentation, which is that, you know, the majority of people bounce if a website doesn't load within three seconds or less. I'm sure that that guidance has changed over time because that's a dated stat. But it still goes to show that we're kind of like within that guideline, with this particular measurement of a particular element on a page. So the next one is first input delay, and this is actually what it was. This has since been updated. And I'm going to show you an example of what this looks like. But let's let's talk about like the original intent of it and then what it has become. So first input delay is a measure of interactivity. It measures the time from when a user first interacts with the page to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction. So that sounds like gibberish. Basically, the lower a website's fid score, the more promptly it starts processing users clicks and swipes again, interactivity like how long does it take for somebody to actually be able to use a page? So this measurement per Google, a good fit is 100 milliseconds or less. So that's what it was right? But what is it now? So this GIF kind of shows an example of poor responsiveness versus good responsive responsiveness from Google's perspective, but probably from all of us, as users as well and looking at it you you probably have been in this position before where like, you click on something and then there's this little bit of a delay before you are actually able to interact with it. And so Google essentially took took this concept that they had initially defined as a core web vital and added some color to it, I guess. And so the new measurement is that it's, it's below or at 200 milliseconds. That so up from I think, what was it 100 before so they're giving you a I guess a little bit more time to create interactivity here. And just so you know, this new measurement is actually not fully unveiled yet, but it will be as of March. 12th. That's when this takes effect and takes over. So they say that, you know, some interactions will actually take longer than others. But when it comes to especially complex interactions, you want to be able to quickly present some initial initial visual feedback so that the user knows that something is happening\r\n\r\nthe time until the next payment is the earliest opportunity to do this. So the intent is not to measure like every eventual effect of the interaction, but the time in which the next interaction is being blocked. So you essentially want to delay you want to if you are delaying some visual feedback, then you might be giving users the impression that the page isn't responding to their actions, which is ultimately a bad user experience, right. So the goal of this new measurement is to ensure the time from when a user initiates an interaction until the next frame is painted in the shortest time as possible, for all or at least most of the interactions the user make. So it might seem like a small distinction between the first input delay and the interaction to Next paint but I guess if we were to summarize them, the first input delay is really focusing on that initial interaction. And the interaction to Next paint is focusing on the difference between interactions. I think that's one way to look at it. Okay, so then the last core web vital is related to visual stability. And it's called cumulative layout shift. And so their definition Google Developers definition is that it measures the sum total of all individual layout shifts scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan. of the page. Okay, but what does that mean? So Visual stability means that a web page remain stable throughout the users visit. It means that text isn't suddenly moving as new elements load or shifting other elements of the page and I think the the unfortunate end result of when this is bad, is when it makes the user click a link or perhaps a buy button or something like that, unintentionally, they were trying to click something but because of something shifting after it loaded, it pushed them somewhere else. And again, this is probably something where either something comes to mind where that's happened to you or like, the next time it does, then you'll be like, oh, yeah, that was the cumulatively out shift the site is getting, it probably has a pretty bad score for that. Um, so with the core web vitals, visual stability became more of a priority. And you really have to have very minimal minimal instability in order for your pages to be considered for ranking high in a relevant search engine results page. So those are the core lead vitals, that's probably the newest addition to these page signals that relate to the content experience, but we're also going to go over some of the old like, you know, tried and true important things that have to do with page experience, such as mobile friendliness. I mean, this is something this is probably one of the first big things that Google told us was important for ranking, high and relevant search. Besides maybe page load, I think Page Speed like performance and mobile friendliness, like these are things that kind of happened around the same time in terms of a Google like, came out and said, like, you must prioritize these if you want to rank. So Google used to be a desktop first indexing property. But you know, as more and more people started using their mobile devices, you know, the iPhone came out and so now suddenly, everybody had a computer in their hand. And then another thing that's probably worth considering too, is like a lot of people in developing countries like they might not have a desktop or like a laptop computer, but most people have a mobile phone at this point. And so Google now operates off of the idea, or off of the principle, I guess, of mobile first indexing. So if your website is not optimized properly for mobile responsiveness for mobile devices, then that is going to hurt it's going to greatly hurt your ability to rank and relevant search and your desktop site could look perfect. It can rank perfectly in terms of all these other factors that Google tells us about. But if your mobile site is off, it's it's going to affect your desktop rankings as well. So, you know, going into all of the specifics of what's mobile friendly is kind of outside the scope of what we're going to talk about today. But I mean, it's things like making sure that your text is readable. It's making sure that your images are, you know, visible and processable that they don't get skewed strangely. It's you know, thinking about some of those core web vitals and like how elements interact with each other like our buttons too close together so that people are hitting the wrong thing. So all these things are are considerations for making your website mobile friendly. And I think you know, with the way that things like page builders, builders for WordPress work, the way that people design themes for WordPress. This is this is like very much top of mind for everyone who's designing for WordPress. So it's a lot easier to implement now versus perhaps when this update was first released into the world. So Safe Browsing is something that I they've actually taken out of what they call these like page experience factors, like I don't know if it's an official one anymore, it was in the past. And maybe it's because now we have HTTPS as an additional factor that's kind of related but I think it's still worth mentioning this from a content experience factor. So Safe Browsing is just that you can use a website that is free of malware, you know, that you can be like, reasonably sure that like malware isn't present, you're not going to get it you're not going to interact with it, and that it's not you know, affecting the output of whatever site it could be installed on. And so in order to protect yourself against this, there's different tools you could use. wordfence is a customer of mine, so I'm going to talk about them and I think that their tool and their team is great. They have a lot of cool security researchers and cybersecurity experts on their team. So they're very on top of like any new things that come out, but they have this product called wordfence care where they'll go in they'll identify them all where they'll clean it up for you and we'll share best practices for how to avoid it in the future and you know, additional steps that you can take. So I do think that you need some sort of tool on your website in order to prevent, you know, the worst effects of malware. And I guess the other thing that I would mention too, is to like always have backups of your site, because malware can really mess things up. And so that's that's like your first line of defense. So HTTPS also has to do, I guess, essentially the same idea of like Safe Browsing, maybe from a slightly different perspective. And so Google again said, you know, we're not going to rank websites that do not have HTTPS in place compared to those that do. You know, after that update happened, and that was a slightly more recent update, but it was still a few years ago, and so HTTPS in order to implement that, essentially, you just install an SSL certificate. And to be fair, there are different types of SSL certificates. Most web hosts have that functionality, where you can fairly easily implement one and then it creates either automatically or there might be some manual steps. You have to take where it it redirects your existing HTTP URLs to the HTTPS version. So that's important to make sure that that's working. Otherwise, it's going to break your site but again, most web hosts have a fairly straightforward process for implementing this and a free ssl certificate or I should say an included one with your hosting plan, but depending on your needs, you might need a different one. So that's something that you have to explore based on your industry like, like E commerce might have a higher level of SSL certificate needed, but for you know, the general small business owner designer, things like that, probably what your web host has is good enough. And so to be able to see if HTTPS is working within Chrome specifically and I'm sure many other web browsers but but chrome because it's a product of Google. There's a little button next to your domain name in the URL bar, and you can click it and see that the SSL certificate is working and that the connection is secure and I would say that SSL certificates in HTTPS are important for people who are interacting with the website. I mean, you kind of you kind of have to have it no matter what in order to rank but they're the purpose of it is that if somebody were to be giving their sensitive information, you know if they're on an E commerce site, and they're, you know, putting in their address or their credit card number or you know, a banking website and people are logging in, and you know, once they log in, that user has access to their bank accounts and their money and things like that. That's kind of the like, ideal use case of HTTPS is to protect the people who are entering that sensitive information to make them feel safe on your website.\r\n\r\nWe talked about this earlier, having no intrusive interstitials so these are the pop ups the image you see is something that Google shared when they announced this ranking signal to show what not to do, essentially where these ads are obscuring access to the main content. You shouldn't have to click in order to get to the main content. So what do you do instead? Here are a couple of examples from the blacksmith website. So the first one is we have a floating bar that basically is at the top of the content and then just pushes it down. And in this case, I used it to add like reminder about my book, a button to click to buy it you could use it to get email signups. I think another great example is like E commerce. If you're having a sale or if you want to say, you know, free shipping on orders over $50 or something like that. I think that's a really excellent use of a floating bar. It's like what's the most important thing happening for this business right now or use it to collect email signups? Then there's also next to it is a welcome mat, which is designed you know, very similar lead to how an email popup would look but the difference is that it's like embedded on the page. So it's not getting in the way of the content. It's part of the content. You can choose whether or not you interact with it beyond scrolling. Another version of that is a content upgrade. So on certain blog posts, let's say that you have additional resources, maybe you've turned that blog post into a checklist or there's a certain template that you're talking about in the blog posts, and people you want to incentivize people to share their email in order to access it. So having a content upgrade, which again is like an embedded version, at the end of your blog post about that specific resource is a totally valid way to see get emails that's not going to violate this intrusive interstitial guidance from Google. The other thing that you can think about is using email popups, but delaying when they pop up. So that kind of gets around Google's guidance. You could use what's called like exit intent technology. So when somebody scrolls for the Back button, or the, you know, X in the browser, then what happens is an email popup gets deployed where you know, it asks for somebody if they want to subscribe, for example. You can also use that same idea based on things like scroll depth, if somebody gets to a certain depth on a page, you know, that tends to indicate interest. It's given them a chance to interact with the content. Or you could have a deploy on certain pages. You ideally after they've seen other pages, so maybe after they've gone to a certain number of pages that deploys. So there's there's a couple of different ways to think about it that don't get in the way of Google's guidance. And we do have a page I forgot to link it here. But we do have a blog post on the blacksmith website that goes into each of these things and different use cases and things like that a little bit dated, but it's all the same advice. Okay, so now that we've talked about Google's quality raters guidelines, which is indirectly related to search rankings, and Google's page experience signals, which are directly related to search rankings, I wanted to talk a little bit about website structure and design I would say, especially as it relates to ranking high in relevant search, but certainly how it impacts the content user experience. So it's kind of like a mix of the things that we're talking about, but expanding on them as well. So the first like factor that you want to optimize your website around your content in general, is crawlability. And when I talked about crawlability, I'm talking about Google's ability to like fully index all the resources on your site. Is there anything that is getting in the way of Google doing that, like, for example, errors in your sitemap, like maybe you're unintentionally excluding certain pages? Maybe you know, you haven't created enough connections between your pages for Google to understand how they relate to each other. And so a couple of guidelines here, you know, first of all, is that when you're creating content, it's important to add external links. Think of these as your ability to add context to prove claims these are things that you know, you can also use let's say that you're writing about a topic and there's a related topic and it doesn't really make sense for you to cover it in your content. Like maybe it would just make your your piece go on too long. But it's something that people might want to learn more about. So you find a relevant resource from a trusted site and you link it External links are great. I mean, you might, I guess, worry. Like, is that going to lead people away from my page? You know, is there any like negative impact of that? I think that's just kind of the way that content works, that people are always looking for more information. You can set it so that it opens in a new window so that they're still on your page while they explore that content. But yeah, as the best practice, have an external linking policy, it makes sure it's to good quality content and I think that, like with this next point, it helps Google understand what your content is about. So besides external resources, you also want to incorporate internal links. This just helps Google understand the relationships between the different pieces of content on your website, ultimately, what your website is about. It's helping with that crawl ability and that index ability. It's helping Google as robot to understand, you know, these different connections. So again, it's important really to have these two types of links and really every page and relate certainly every piece of content. And then, the flip side of all this is like as you create content, things are going to change. External links might become broken. Internal links, you might change, you know, like for example, the URL slug of them, and they might become broken. So I guess my first tip is to make sure that you have some sort of redirect solution implemented, there are different plugins that you can use to automatically if you change the URL slug of something, then it creates a redirect so anything that already links to a will be updated to that new link. But it's also having a process for like auditing your content to look for these problems. And one of the tools that I'm going to show you later today will help make that a little bit easier. But it's also just a matter of like I don't know, quarterly at least, or depending on the size of your website, quarterly, maybe every six months or so, having just a process to kind of go through what exists and if you need to fix anything. So we're talking a little bit about URL structure and I will say when it comes to creating content, you want to be pretty sure of the URL you want to use before you publish it. Because it is a factor in ranking, and you can use redirects, but it's kind of hard to explain them in the context of what we're talking about today without getting deep into SEO, but it's just generally like to trust me that it's a best practice to not mess with the URL after you publish, you know, after it gained some traction in search and things like that. But it happens and that's why you use redirects. But that being said, you could at least start with best practices. So the first thing is to incorporate your target keywords in that slug. So like yesterday, I showed you some tools we use for an article we wrote about AI detectors, so let's just pretend the keyword is like aI detector tools. You'd want that to be the slug. Without really like any extra information. You want to keep your URLs as succinct as possible so that Google doesn't have to take a lot of extra time to parse them. And so what that means is within within WordPress, you can customize your URL structure for blogging. And you can do things like add categories to the URL, you can add the date to the URL. My suggestion is to not do that the only reason that you might want to add like a subdirectory within your blog content or some other specific category, like if you have case studies or something like that, is because you can use that subdirectory to group pieces of content together to measure them in like Google Analytics GA for these days. But that's kind of an advanced use case and that's only if you plan on actually like doing a deep dive into the analytics. From an SEO perspective, I highly recommend against it. It should be your website url.com forward slash keyword. And when you're implementing those keywords, you're going to want to add a dash between each word so if the keywords AI detector tools, it's a i dash detector dash tools\r\n\r\nfor certain things like articles, a and words like the things that aren't, you know, specific keywords generally speaking, you can drop those when you're creating the slug. We have some guidelines on the style guide that I shared with you yesterday on the bugs with website that's also linked in the slides so or the PDF as well. So if you if you want to dive into more SEO and URL and keyword best practices and definitely check out our guidance on that. Um, duplicate content is worth mentioning from this perspective of the user experience mostly in terms of how Google would interpret that. So generally speaking, duplicate content is like you publish a blog on your website and then a situation that could come up that seems innocuous enough is that you know, somebody in your industry says oh my god, I loved your blog posts on whatever, I'd love to republish it on my site. And you say okay, and then maybe this site, you know, has more authority than you and maybe they have a better approach to SEO, maybe they've just been around longer. And what could end up happening is that even though you were the original publisher, and Google does take that into consideration, but this other site may outrank you with your own same content. So that's duplicate content. It could be a whole blog post, it can be an excerpt of it, it could be like a piece of it. So duplicate content, generally speaking, like try to avoid that. You can add a tag to your link called the canonical tag, which basically points back to the original content and says, This is the person this is the site that originally published it, even though we have now published it here. And so Google takes that into consideration, but they really make their own choices about who they're going to rank and so that that's not the be all end all way of making sure that the original publisher ranks highest in search, all else equal. Um, with all that being said, in my experience, you can typically republish things like your blog content on mediums like LinkedIn and medium you know, original copy without making changes. As long as you wait, I would say at least a week from the original published date to do that. This is this is my experience and that saying that it's completely scientific, the advice that I'm giving you, it's something that you should experiment with, if that's something that you're interested in, but also take note of what ends up happening and discontinue if it's getting in the way of ranking your own content on your own website. But when it comes to duplicate content, if you if you get approached by someone, you know, like the example that I gave, who wants to republish something that you wrote, what would be a better situation for you? It would be more work, but it's to say like, let me write a new version of this article, like maybe you take another stance on it, maybe you you just kind of like repurpose it in a different way. I would highly recommend against duplicating your content, either on another page on your website, such as using product descriptions that like a manufacturer provided or maybe you have, you know, two variations of something and so you're using almost the same product description or again, like the example that I gave doing it on another site, so I just wanted to add a cautionary tale for duplicate content because a it is kind of a bad user experience, but be it'll also more than likely hurt you in search without a very strategic approach. And then the last thing I want to say on this particular topic is about designing website navigation and best practices around that. So first of all, you want to use descriptive and recognizable menu item titles. And the example that I always give for this is the difference between something that's called news and something that's called blog. So in my in my experience, news is like an enterprise business that has a media arm and they're publishing their press releases and, you know, things that are relevant to their company, new product updates, things like that. Whereas blog is more articles. It's you know, the how tos. It's the list of coals. Its product lead content, for example, but it's not exclusively focused on that company's news. So it's important, I think, to match the heuristics of what your users are used to and one way that you might be able to figure this out if you're unsure is just kind of see like what the competition is doing and how they're naming their menu items. Or just ask some of your users like, Does this make sense? And we'll talk next about how to conduct a UX audit and that's something that you could do as part of it. There's this thing called the three click rule, which you may have heard about. Nielsen Norman Group actually debunked this as being like ideal or even something that you should totally consider. It's the number three is arbitrary, I guess is what I'm trying to say. But it's the idea that within three clicks, a user searching or user looking for something will find it through your website navigation without necessarily having to go to like an internal search. So well, it's arbitrary. I think it's still a good thing to keep in mind, which is just that people should be able to easily and quickly find what they need your your menu should support that. And then creating category grouping. So like for example, on our website, we have a Resources tab and it has the blog, it has some of like my YouTube content. It has our style guide. All of these are resources they have to do with like things that we're sharing with other people versus we have another tab that's about our work. And so it has case studies and like portfolio examples, and it's more focused on like Final outputs that you know, fit, you know, things that we do with certain clients. So just a couple of things to think about in terms of website navigation. I'm going to start this topic and then we'll break I think maybe in like five minutes from now, but I'll just go ahead and get this started. So let's talk a little bit now that you've learned about these different factors for how to understand user experience from, from the user's point of view from Google's point of view. Let's talk about how you can continue to make your own websites user experience better by implementing a UX audit. So UX audit, we might also call it a user tests. I think they're maybe slightly different concepts, but I'm going to use them interchangeably today. So usability testing involves observing how users interact with products like your websites. The purpose is to get a better understanding of how real people use what you've designed. And really the idea here is you want to combat any assumptions that you've made incorrectly, which is impossible for you to figure out by yourself. That's why we pull in other people. You can use your tests during just about any stage of project it doesn't have to be like the final part. It could really be during the wireframing stage. It could be you know at the midpoint it could be even after you've launched but you've added some new things. So why bother with UX audits? First of all, we're talking about it today because there's a strong relationship between the user experience and SEO. I think we've proven that by talking about specific elements of the quality rater guidelines that point to UX, as well as the page experience factors that Google's specifically told us. If you care about SEO, you should care about UX in terms of things like your page, loading your mobile responsiveness, and using things like HTTPS. To invoke privacy for your users information. It also allows you to uncover issues that might kill conversions. I mean, I think this is one of the most important use cases of a UX audit is to look for things that are getting in the way of whatever your end goal is with the website. Because we're all WordPress users here, probably most of us at least, you've probably interacted with whether it's your own design or somebody else's that where you recognize that somebody forgot to edit the demo content they've, you know, implemented it and they've gone in and made their changes. But you know, there's that hello world post they forgot to delete or there's something you know, and one of the menus, maybe the footer menu that they forgot to take out that, you know, they never actually customized and so I think UX audit would be good at surfacing that if you're if you're kind of blind to it, because you're too close to the project. And with all that being said, a UX audit helps to get out of your own head. We're all human, we're imperfect.\r\n\r\nAnd really, I mean, it's it's easy to say I think when it comes to writing content, like as much as like, I have a process for editing and looking for mistakes and things like that. Like I still use an editor whenever I write anything, because I need to get out of my own head in order to make sure that I'm not missing something important. So the same can certainly be said about about website design and doing UX audits. So at the end of the day, we all operate based on certain assumptions, but what if yours are wrong? I'll just go through another slide or two and then we'll break so in terms of picking user testers, there's a couple of different populations you could consider. And I'm also going to share a couple of different like marketplaces where you could find these people, but you can start with the people that already exist in your circle your colleagues, you know, the people that you work with, but also maybe your friends and your family members. Wow, this is a great place to start. Don't discount the impact of their own bias and desire to please you, especially if you're asking your mom for input she's probably not going to be super critical. And and you know, it's going to be more of a pat on the back then something useful. And even like people like your work colleagues, they they still may be too close to a project to provide useful feedback, but it's a good place to start. You can also recruit volunteers from your own audience. Again, they might have a bias if they really love you. They might be hesitant to give you really great feedback. But they're also probably very willing to help you make something that's better. So you can start with like your brand ambassadors, anybody who would consider themselves your biggest fans, things like that. Ultimately, though, your best bet is going to be unbiased third parties who don't know you, you know, who don't have like a stake in what you're doing. I would say ideally, if you could get a couple people from that pool and then maybe one or two people from these other pools of populations, you'll get a couple of different perspectives. And when it comes to some of the marketplaces that I'm going to show you, you can also filter by certain demographics, you know, age, gender, level of education, like whatever is important to like the target audience that you want feedback from, generally speaking, you can filter and on those people. Maybe we'll just go to the top of the hour, and then we'll and then we'll definitely break then. So how many user testers are enough for each design stage? I've mentioned a couple different populations you could pick from. This is another Nielsen Norman Group reference. They are a really great resource when it comes to anything user experience user testing and things like that. And so Jacob Nielsen wrote this column and he the column was titled Why you only need to test with five users. So that's his official recommendation is for each stage that you test five users is going to be more or less enough you're going to get marginal returns marginal new information after that point. So you know, unless you're getting wildly different things from those five user testers, you can probably stop it there. He also says that it's best to involve a larger quantity of user testers earlier on in the project if you're going to test during like the wireframing stage. Versus like, when a website's like basically ready to launch it's going to be harder to make noticeable and useful changes at that point. It's going to be kind of locked in. So I think that that makes sense. Um, so we'll just start with some of the questions that you might use. When designing usability testing, it is important to to be thoughtful about this before you start you you don't want to just like go into a blind and just, you know, like, what do you think of this website? You want to have a strategic approach if you want to get useful information? So my suggestion is to start start by defining whatever your goals are, I mean, is there something in particular that you're looking to test? Are you wanting to make sure that this design is understandable to your target demographic? Is there something that isn't currently working with the design, something that's maybe hurting conversions? So whatever your goal is, like set that intention, and the questions will come more easily after that? You want to also be asking questions about the tester and how they interact with the Internet. And there's a couple of reasons for this. So one example is like you could ask the person what kind of smartphone do you use and asking this particular question is good because it kind of gauges like their familiarity with technology like how they're going to interact with your design. Somebody who uses a flip phone, for example, is probably going to have a much different level of internet savviness and how they interact with the design versus somebody who has like the latest gadget as their device. The other benefit of this question is to especially if you're doing an in person test is to kind of relax them. It's kind of like a little bit of small talk almost so that they can ease into the test, especially if that's not something that they often do. You want to define a specific action for the user to take. So this goes back to the goals. Let's say that, you know, you have an E commerce site that you're testing and you know, there's some sort of issue with people abandoning the cart, you know, after they add some products and so maybe you want to have that person go through the action of adding something, and then starting checkout. And seeing like, where in the process, there's friction, that could be one action that you want them to take. And so at this point, you want to ask them how they go about it, have them sort of like narrate and explain as they go through each step. The more you can dig into each specific action that the user takes the more detailed insight that you'll get as to how they're actually using your website. So I think with that being said, we have a couple more questions that we could talk about, but I think now is probably a good time to let everybody take a little bit of a break. And then after that, we'll finish this discussion of how to run a UX audit. I'm going to give you a bunch of tools to use to do your own tests. yourself, essentially. And then we'll finish off with that live content UX audit. Sounds\r\n\r\nlike a good idea. No questions in the q&a right now. So let's just go and take that break. It's two o'clock. About a five minute break. Is that good? Maddie? That sounds good. All right. So let's back be back at 205 and we're quiet until then. See ya. Then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We're back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, folks, we are back and ready to begin. Let me get the recording started here. All right, folks, we're back for the final hour. Of the website content accelerator. We got a lot to talk about in the next hour, so I'm just gonna let you get right to it. Maddie. Sounds\r\n\r\ngreat. Yeah. Thanks for sticking with me so far. Excited to finish this off strong and yeah, hopefully give you some really tangible things that you can take away. For your own processes. So I'm continuing this discussion that we started about UX audits and designing them. Okay, so we talked about this. Let's go to the next point. What so I used to offer UX audits as a service when I used to be on Fiverr. It was my most popular gig by far. And the way that I structured it was I basically priced by the page. And so when you're doing a UX audit, you want to be sure to identify whichever pages are the most important, especially if you have a big site like you don't necessarily want. Just going back to the E commerce example like you don't necessarily want to audit like every single product page, especially if you're looking for trends, maybe one you know prime example of what your product pages look like maybe one category page, your homepage, your checkout flow, like if somebody had me audit an E commerce site that that tended to be kind of what it looks like. You know, it's also things like maybe more generally, your homepage, your about page service page. So it really depends on what you're trying to do. But you could ask questions in your UX audit, like, you know, what do you think this is about the page in general, or about a specific element of it? You could ask What strikes you about it, you know, you're trying to see how people are reacting to it, how they're understanding it, and then like, what would you click on first, like what, what is something that looks interactable? And how would you, you know, accomplish whatever the specific goal is. So those are ways that you could you know, further define this question. Or this idea here. And then we kind of talked about this, what do you make of specific elements? So again, if we're talking about ecommerce, maybe you have a button that's like a quick add to checkout where you don't have to go, you know, to the individual page, it just kind of pops up when you're looking at a specific category or on the homepage or something like that. And so you might want to test like, do people actually understand what the purpose of this is? So that's just one example. You know, many others that might factor into your own purposes and needs. So when it comes to designing these questions, a couple of best practices to keep in mind you know, first of all, users are generally not going to be designers. I don't think you I don't think you perhaps want them to be because you want them to look at it from a different perspective than you and so with that in mind, you want to avoid any sort of like web development or industry specific jargon in the way that you ask questions. You want to design for the average internet user, they should be able to understand what you're asking without you having to explain and clarify. I think another useful thing in general and this is this is when you ask for feedback about anything, but it's breaking up a complicated question into simpler ones. It's, it's okay, you know, to to ask a question and to ask a follow up question and to dig deeper. And that's something that we talked about yesterday when we talked about chat GBT and and getting that ideal answer that you want to get from it. Sometimes you kind of have to break the subject down and sometimes you have to add clarification later. So then, I've said this in a way but be as specific as possible when you're asking questions, you know, reference specific elements. Bring it back to the goal, if necessary. That's how you're going to get the most useful responses. So going back to that fiverr gig I was talking about, these were the questions that I asked and every order and sometimes they would ask clarifying questions after the fact. But most of the time, if I wasn't because it's fiber, and I'm sending them either some sort of like written report, or typically it would be like a video recording of me going through and doing the audit and if you work with a platform like Fiverr, or some of the other things that I'm going to mention shortly. I think it's the next slide actually. Typically, people are recording themselves interacting with your website unless you're doing an in person test, which is a different situation. But so you have to have some sort of standardized approach in that case, especially if you're offering this as a service like I did. But most of the time these questions got to the bottom of what that person was hoping to get out of the audit. And so generally speaking, I asked for the URLs for any pages they wanted me to take into account. I also told them you know, if you want me to take a quick look before starting the order to see if this is a good fit for me, you can do that. Are there any major problems that you want me to keep in mind throughout the process? So is there anything that you're noticing isn't working that you want? Me to focus on like a conversion factor? Can you briefly describe your target customer so that I could keep their perspective and focus? This is a really important one. I'm not going to fit in and perhaps you know, every user tester that you're going to work with is not necessarily going to fit that ideal target persona that represents your audience or the audience of the client that you're doing this on behalf of. But that doesn't mean that you can't adopt that persona. And again, a lot of these platforms will let you pick a user tester based on demographics. So that's probably like the best case scenario. But I think, again, you can still benefit from a plethora of different experiences. So anyway, you know, like I'm, I'm thinking of like a time where I did a user test and the target audience was, you know, generations older than me or something like that, where they're interacting with the web and they might have some access issues, you know, they might it might be harder for them to read the text if it's not big enough. Things like you know, contrast come into play between the words in the background. And so things like that, maybe it doesn't personally affect me right now. But I can still comment on that and say, you know, you told me that this was your target audience. To me like this strikes me as something that would be very difficult for them to interact with. And then the last question I asked is What important goals are you hoping that this page or these pages will achieve? So that kind of goes back to like the problem question, but I guess maybe from a more positive standpoint, and especially, you know, people use your tests at different stages, so they might not know what the problems are, but they certainly know or ideally, they have an idea of what they want that page to achieve. So these questions like very much covered what I needed to know in order to give people a satisfying UX audit after they put in their order. Okay, so how to run usability tests a couple of different ways that you could do this. A very wide range of methodologies and honestly a wide range of end results I would say, in person is like the gold standard because you're going to have the most control over the process. You're going to be able to meet with people, you're going to be able to dig in deeper to any like initial questions that you set. It's a little bit harder to do with something like Fiverr or user testing. Because there may be limitations I think with like user testing, it's kind of like you set it up ahead of time. And then you know, the user testers go through it, but you don't necessarily get to get to interface with them after the fact. And then with fiber, maybe you could do that it would probably involve making a new order. It's going to take time to get that feedback. It's not going to be as dynamic as doing it in person.\r\n\r\nIn person, it's probably going to be the most expensive in terms of like your team's time and like setting up a place for them to do this. And, you know, having some sort of incentive whether that's straight up cash or like a gift card or something like that for people's time. Another I think great option is user testing. And I was pretty sure that this platform had had changed or been sunsetted or something but I was looking at it leading up to doing this presentation and it still exists. It might exist in like a different format than it did initially did. Like I think you have to buy like a package. It's not just like one by one, for example. So I'm not super up to date on how it works now more more as to how it's worked in the past. But basically, the way that it has worked is that you specify certain tasks you want users to complete and specific questions for them to answer. And so users narrowed the process they go through until that test is complete. They have or at least had had a very large user base. So it was a great platform for giving like that exact demographic that you wanted to test. But fiber is very similar. I mean, fiber doesn't focus on user testing. To the extent that user testing does a fiber marketplace covers a wide range of services, but their usability like UX test marketplace is very large, you know, in comparison to some of their other focuses. So definitely a great place to find user testers. People start offering their services at $5. But they don't have to, that's an old fiber rule of thumb that it had to be five now people can set whatever price they want. They just have to set up their gigs in a way that makes them competitive. The way that I did it was I used to charge by the page. And then if they wanted, like a written report, that would be an extra cost in addition to the video. So it just depends on how people set up their gigs. But there's some level of standardization because people go to that market and that marketplace and they want to be able to pick you know, five people that offer something that take a look at side by side. Um, you could also do something that's not exactly going to give you all the information but it's an interesting practice, which is like recording users sessions on your website. So Microsoft has this newer tool called Clarity and it's free. And so you basically add like a little bit of JavaScript to your header. And you can see people interacting with your website, and you can see you know, how their mouse moves and how they scroll and things like that and like what they click on. Of course, unlike the user test, nobody's narrating it, there's no audio. It's literally just kind of like outside of context, how they interact with your website. So it's going to give you marginally useful information, but it's just another thing that you can use to try to troubleshoot. You know, why something isn't working, for example. And then this isn't like fully, like a way to run usability tests, but it's a like a tool that you can use or that perhaps somebody that you work with might use, which is to take screenshots and share commentary about what they're looking at. And I'm going to show you an example here. Oh, and besides clarity, when it comes to recording user sessions, you can also use a tool called Hot jar to do that as well. Okay, so this is an example and it's a little bit dated, but this is from bug herd. So bug heard is like a website feedback tool. That's another way to, to look at like what we're looking at right here. And this is something as a designer that you could use with clients. Some websites do this publicly where they have like a little thing on the side of the website that's like, Hey, do you have any feedback about this page? Or do you want to report a bug? That's, that's kind of why this exists, but I used to use it for my UX audits. I would just go through each page and then create like annotated screenshots and then I could explain export, the report that has all the pages and all my notes and things like that. So it's just a cool tool, whether you're kind of auditing your own site, you're auditing a client site, or somebody's doing it for you. So okay, from the flip side, we've talked about how to run a user test, but how can you be a good user test or maybe how can you identify one that you want to work with time and time again? First of all, it's narrating your thoughts as you have them. We've talked about this because that like stream of consciousness just, you know, noticing things and whether you really have something to say about it or not just like addressing each element on a page. And so that's kind of the next point here is is, you know, not just addressing them, but considering the impact that each page element might have. It's certainly acknowledging the perspective of your audience we talked about even if you're not a member of that target audience, how can you sort of take on that persona in order to speak on their behalf? Another thing that I used to do when I did these UX audits was share ideas for a B testing. Like I might say, you know, this is an interesting approach to your head and I wonder if you were to try this if it would, you know, get you better results and so it's it's giving them ideas, even if it's not a fully fleshed out thing, but to say like, this might not be it, but maybe you could try this. And then it's also it's not just about being like negative or pointing out what's wrong, but also acknowledging what does seem to be working. So that again, you can really like laser in and the feedback that's going to have the most impact for what they should change to resources that have really made an impact on me and how I go about content and design. First of all, is the Design of Everyday Things. This is like one of my favorite books. It's more about physical design, like product design, but there's a lot of transferable things that have to do with how we design for the web. And then don't make me think is like the quintessential resource for web usability and he's sent created, you know, multiple editions of this. There's another book, something about rocket science. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but, you know, anything that he writes like I would highly recommend. Okay, so we did break, and then I'm going to save questions for the end so we can get through the important stuff here. So I'm going to give you a couple more tools to use so that you can audit your own stuff. We're going to go through our live content UX audit, and then anytime we have left is going to be for questions. Let's get through it. Okay, so we'll start with Google tools, because again, when Google gives us information or tools, we want to listen because this is essentially how Google sees our content and how they prioritize what they rank in relevant search. So PageSpeed Insights is really a wealth of information. It provides data points from a variety of factors. And as you can see in this screenshot, currently, as of the core web vitals update, it starts with the core web vitals, so it starts from a point of this like, page experience and usability factor. They what's kind of interesting is that they have a part of PageSpeed Insights, and I'm going to show you like a fuller report when we go into the live content UX audit, but they have a piece of it that's about accessibility, but it's it's pretty bare bones. And so Nathan mentioned to me right before we started today, that Amber Hines is going to be the next workshop next month and it's going to be about accessibility. And her company equalised digital, they have a really great accessibility checker that integrates with WordPress. And so I would say that like that's probably going to be a much better tool for making judgments about if your website is accessible. Then what you're going to see on Google PageSpeed Insights and I think that that's something that is really important that you know, it's not always like at the top of our list when it comes to some of the other things that we need to do. To make our website usable, but it is really important. Whether you currently have an access issue or not at some point in your life, I'm sure you will. And now that I'm a man like this has become more obvious to me, maybe not in terms of strictly website design, but I think about like when I'm on a walk outside and previously, you know, I could just step around people's icy sidewalks that they didn't shovel or whatever, but now that I have a stroller, it's like okay, am I gonna put my kid you know, in the street. And so it's it's things like that or maybe you break your arm and now you can't interact with the web the same and so accessibility, I just wanted to like, make make the case that that is something that is so important because you your loved one, there's somebody that you know that it's going to make a difference for.\r\n\r\nGoogle used to have a tool specifically for testing the mobile friendliness of your site, and I was surprised to learn that they've actually sunset this tool. So now it's kind of a part of Google PageSpeed Insights. I think that whatever functionality was already in Google PageSpeed Insights for measuring the difference between the mobile and desktop version was kind of already there. So they basically just said, like, maybe this is like duplicating those efforts. I don't know. But it's no different. I'll just say that, that we that we use Google PageSpeed Insights to make judgments about how Google understands your website from a mobile point of view. Um, so we have the ability to measure like a snapshot of the current state of how your website measures according to the core web vitals are Google PageSpeed insight, but I also wanted to share within Google Search Console, there's this core web vitals report that measures it over time. And the most important thing, I think, to keep in mind with Google Search Console, and and also like Google Analytics. What I'm going to talk about specifically is more relevant to Google Search Console, is the fact that it tells you if you know, you become in violation of anything that's going to hurt your ability to rank and relevant search in terms of what Google tells us right in terms of the big things. And so that's why making sure that it's installed on your site on client sites is so important because it gives you notices if you're like way in violation of something, and it gives you the chance to fix it. Google Analytics so I would also recommend installing from the get go because it gathers important data that's useful that you can use to understand your page experience your content experience, but yeah, so this is just one useful report that relates to what we're talking about. This came up when I was prepping for the live audit later. Just the idea that there may be a use case for understanding what WordPress theme somebody's using. And I would say especially what plugins they're using, because both of these things can have an impact on your pages performance, which is a search signal on the loading, you know, on the interactivity, and all those those good things. So this is just one tool there's there's a bunch of them out there. But you know if if your website is experiencing any performance issues, or you just want to understand like how somebody else put their website together. I think this is a cool tool or a cool mechanism for that. I also wanted to share a general SEO audit tool, I see ranking so like H refs and SEM rush which I believe we talked about yesterday, this is another All In One SEO tool. It is not as fine tuned as the others as Ahrefs and SEMrush in terms of their keyword data, so that's why I don't use it for keyword research. They use different databases and approaches. But what I will say is their SEO auditing tool, which is like kind of the technical structure of your website, like goes head to head with any of like the big players in the market, and I'll show you exactly what that looks like. And the great thing about SEO ranking is it's a lot more affordable as an as an All In One SEO tool. And even from like the keyword research perspective, like you could use it to get most of the way there if content again isn't like your biggest focus are in and or if you weren't in a super competitive industry, it would it would do just fine. Um, a couple like editing tools. Hemingway is a great one. It's pretty simplistic isn't the right word, but it focuses on just a couple of things. It focuses on just a couple of factors and so that's why it's useful it doesn't it's not super distracting. And then Grammarly is one I would say that gets into a lot more detail. Grammarly is probably a more well funded company. Than Hemingway I wasn't aware of if Hemingway been monetized until I was looking at it the other day they have some AI functionality and they might they might have some other like outside of AI functionality plans, but I'm not sure that they had like a clear path to monetization before that but grim really has always had its like premium and like enterprise business use cases. And so I think that's probably why this tool is maybe a little bit more robust in terms of the suggestions it provides. They have a lot of linguists on staff and again, a disclosure that I'm a Grammarly Ambassador but I also like to use the product paid every person on my team that's a writer editor has a paid subscription to grammerly and I'll show you why shortly. Um, you know, you also want to look for plagiarism when it comes to creating a great content experience and when I talk about plagiarism, I'm not even necessarily talking about things that you do like on purpose. Some things that happen in grammerly, specifically is that you'll write something and it will detect a phrase that's been published elsewhere on the internet because you know, like there's a ton of content that already exists and it's bound to happen. And it'll be about something that's like a completely different industry. Like you definitely didn't take it from that original place that was published, but it's kind of like a reminder to go on and try to make it more unique. Just so that you know, Google doesn't think that you plagiarize even though again, it's not about intention. It's just about the reality of the content that already exists. But at the blacksmith, we use Copyscape for every piece of content we create, just to be sure there's no plagiarism, and then Grammarly. I don't believe the plagiarism check comes with the free version, but because we have the premium version, and that's included that we use it to. Um, one of the last factors here is you know, making sure that your content adheres to your style guide, whether that's a specific company style guide, or something like AP style, which again, is like the news journalism standard. I think it's like a great standard to use if you don't have a set style guide. And then I just have a couple qualitative qualitative factors here. So on the blacksmith style guide, which will probably show you we have a section about information architecture, and it's about a lot of these different things, how to break up walls of text, how to approach writing headings, how to keep paragraphs and sentences short and to the point. It's other things like you know, making sure that you have good flow with your content, you know that it has good storytelling, but it's something a human would want to read. And yesterday we talked about texts that whether AI generated it or not sounds robotic and how to avoid it. So that's another like, piece that you can use like in your own audits, those guidelines. Other things that I look at are like the thoughtful use of on brand visuals at the blacksmith we try to incorporate multiple types of visuals per piece. I'm definitely of the opinion that words aren't enough. I think as humans we're very visual creatures and people all have their own, like different learning styles. So that's also a factor, you know, written word, I don't think is enough, especially like for me personally, sometimes I need to like watch a video about it, or you need to like, you know, play with it in my hands or whatever. Like there's just different ways that people process information and so the more different ways you can surface it to them within your content, the better that your contents going to perform and help them and then things like consistent formatting like how you use bullet points, how you write headings. Again, a lot of this we cover in the blog Smith style guide. Just a couple other things. We talked about a B testing when we talked about how to be a good user tester and giving examples. So Unbounce is a tool that you could use. A B testing is essentially testing like different variants of a page usually you're testing a specific element like two versions of a page title, or two versions of an image, but it could be a full page as well. And this is something that Nathan and I also talked about, which is that I think he'd love to have an expert on a be testing do one of these workshops or you know a webinar in the future so if that's your if you know somebody like that, you know, that's something I think that all of us could learn some best practices from but again, another thing that you could test\r\n\r\nQuick disclaimer, then we'll jump to our live content UX audit. And we're talking about how to make your content better. And, you know, basically like different processes that you could use to to catch mistakes. But I don't want you to leave this thinking that perfection. Is the goal because it's not I think, you know, we're all human, we all make mistakes. At the end of the day writing for the web is is great because it's a very forgivable medium and unlike print, once you notice a mistake, you can go in and correct it. And so I don't want this to become a situation where you're beating yourself up if you did all these steps or you did some of these steps and like, you know, you still notice something later somebody points out like oh, this is spelled wrong or whatever. That's really not the point. So at the end of the day, I think my guidance for you is done is better than perfect. And be kind to yourself but create systems to catch mistakes. And that system could be having like a human editor, like like I mentioned earlier today, whenever I write something, you know I'm telling you all my best practices, but that doesn't mean that I always follow them, right. I'm an imperfect human being and, and things happen. And I think the other thing that I wanted to say is like we all have limited time we all have limited energy, and especially now that I'm a new mom, like I used to work really late at night and I would just crush stuff out and I would go over it a million times and now I kind of have to be satisfied with like not having the ability to do that and having a much shorter period of work time every day. That I can get stuff done and having to prioritize ruthlessly and that sometimes means that like yes, maybe I spelled something wrong, you know, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it. And I don't think you should either. So that's that's my soapbox. Alright, so let's go to the live content UX audit. Give me just a moment to get this set up. Um, so we're gonna go through like a couple of these different tools that we talked about today. And then at the end of this, we will have some time for questions. Okay. So Stacy, we're picking on you today because you submitted a really great example for this live content UX audit. And I want to start by saying there's like nothing wrong with this website. I mean, it's very good and it follows a lot of both the content and design principles that like I would instruct my team on. So what we're going to do today is is really nitpick for the sake of giving people things to think about when they are doing their own content UX audits. And so I'm going to start by sharing, like some of these tools and their outputs so that I can show you how to use them. And then what we'll finish off on is coming back to this page, and I'm going to give a couple of qualitative factors, you know, that I think can make the content just a little bit stronger. So again, I wanted to surface the blog SMIS content style guide. This is going to be the basis of one part of you know, some of the things I'm going to talk about and I'm going to reference that Chechi btw bot that we made yesterday, that's based on the style guide and that's, that's kind of what I use to audit this page from the content style perspective. But again, some things that we just talked about were first of all the SEO and Keywords section or chapter, where we talk a little bit about I mentioned that you could get some guidance for how to use awkward keywords like how to use keywords within URL slugs. I also talks about this information architecture, or information structures what we call it here section. So that's how to like essentially present information but also like break up walls of text, make it more readable. We talked a little bit at the end of today about formatting and how to keep that consistent. So those are just a couple of things. I guess we also talked about links earlier today and so there's some good guidance there. So you know, this is a this is a good resource if you're building out your own content style approach, and you can really build off of this because again, it's fairly industry agnostic. So anyway, I took this link, and first I ran it through Google PageSpeed Insights. And if you look at the desktop version, I mean it's pretty much near perfect. There's it's very difficult to get to 100 on any of these factors on I would say especially on mobile, but even on desktop, I mean, it's it's kind of like a what's the word? It's like a like a fool's errand to try to get to 100 if you're if you're this close, so, desktops looking really good. You know, they have a couple of things that you could do to fix it if you wanted to, and I have some suggestions for that, but we'll talk about it from the mobile perspective. So if you go to mobile, you'll notice that you know, first of all, the largest Contentful paint is one of the core web vitals, that it's a little bit in the red and it's and that's really like the only one and the largest Contentful paint again has to do with page floating, I believe. And so, taking like the definition we had, I'm guessing that that has something to do with this image because this is the viewport you know, that first load so it's the first thing that gets measured by this core web vital. And when I was looking at this yesterday, it's a it's a JPG file, which isn't like a super large file or anything like that. But one thing that you could do to to improve that page quality factor is to instead save this and serve it up as a web p file. There are certain plugins that you can use for that it's going to you have to kind of determine if adding like a plugin or taking that extra step of manually saving it like converting it and saving it and uploading it as that file is worth it. But that's that's like the one thing that I could think would would flip this so that it's the performance is a little bit closer to 100. And then we go into some of these other like diagnostic details. And I think this is where PageSpeed Insights gets really interesting because you can sort of dig into specifics here. A couple of things that I noticed were like minifying, CSS and JavaScript and there's some other things that are kind of related to optimizing like these different file types on the website. So I use a plugin called nitro pack. There's a free version and there's a paid version. I think the free version will get you pretty far, but it adds this like little Add at the bottom of your website. So I just pay for the paid version because I don't want that there are other things like nitro pack but nitro pack from the perspective of somebody who operates in the SEO world, you know who's looking for good performance, who's looking for best practices, that is my suggestion to you and to anybody who is seeing these things on their Google PageSpeed Insights. So naturally talking about these plugins for me like the got the question of does adding more plugins like is that going to hurt performance like what what is the marginal return of that? And so what I wanted to do next was take the URL and put it in that WordPress theme and plug in detector to just see like what the back end of the site looks like. And so we can see, it's like a custom or like a child theme. And I think okay, so apparent theme is Astra, so we know that like that's the technical basis on which this is based. I think generally speaking, Astra is pretty good for SEO from what I've heard, I don't have a ton of experience with it. And then also, this is like more what I was interested in was the plugins on the backend. And I mean, from what it detects it's there aren't that many plugins here, you know, it has like a plug in that works with Astra there's a Quiz Builder. This DOWNLOAD MANAGER contact form and then the Page Builder that's pretty lean, especially if those are the only plugins that are installed. You know, different people have different ideas of like, how many plugins is too many or like what's the optimum amount but I would say like, we're well under that here. So adding something like nitro pack, or you know, like some sort of web p image optimizer I think short Pixel does that.\r\n\r\nSomething like that probably wouldn't like hurt performance for the performance gains that would come with it. Um, okay, so the next thing that I wanted to do this is higher level than just this page, but I wanted to show you guys SC ranking. So SC ranking again, is this like All In One SEO tool? And I think there's like actually something wrong with my browser because I'm trying to like x this out, and I could do this yesterday and it just like wouldn't do it. So this is either a core web vitals issue or this is like I have too many, like Chrome extensions that are conflicting with each other, that I haven't been able to figure out why it sometimes messes with my browser. But anyway, that's an aside. So um, so this is a C rankings like technical website audit. And what I really love about this is that it's pretty straightforward. Like you can essentially read this as a non SEO and get a very good idea of things that you could fix to improve your website's technical structure. And as you can see this website like it's not bad, like there's room for improvement, but overall it's doing pretty good. Again, chasing 100 is a fool's errand. You're like, probably not going to get there but you want to get as close as you can with the time and the resources that you have. And so this page is really just like a high level overview. Again, this is about the whole website. It gives you an idea of like, how many pages were crawled, versus how many URLs which could include things like media files, JavaScript files, style, sheet files, and things like that. And so this can be a good indicator of like, if you know that there's more pages or there's more files, like maybe there's a credibility issue here. And if if some are getting excluded from this crawl, then they're probably also getting excluded from what Google can see. And so at that point, you, you know that there may be a sitemap issue that's getting in the way of the ideal situation. But what I really wanted to show you was the issue report. So these are things that you could fix. And what it does is it it has a category, it gives a specific issue, it gives you which pages are affected. It tells you you know, whether you're like compliant or whatever you want to call it if it's following best practices or not. And there's there's very few things here. But for example, like here's one that has to do with crawlability, which we talked about earlier today. And so nofollow means that we don't want the search engines to read this page and there may be a good reason for that. And so it seemed that for your pages are affected, you can click on it to get a description of the issue. So this is why it's really great for people who aren't necessarily like in the SEO world. A lot of you are website developers or designers and so a lot of this stuff like you'll be able to understand just by going through it and familiarizing yourself with it was there like included details. But yeah, so then you could see, you know, like which pages relate to this issue and whether or not like it's worth doing anything or if you really wanted them to be that way. But I'll give you like a more tangible example of something that you definitely want to fix. We have, for example, External links to 4x x. So like a 4x. X code is like a 404 means that it's not found, and there's different variations of that I'm sure a lot of you are pretty familiar with that. And so this means that maybe something that was linked on the website now no longer exists. And so it either needs to be replaced or redirected or something like that. And again, you can dig into the URLs you can see like what specific error code happened. This is also a really great report that you can give to clients. And then you know, depending on the level of familiarity you have with these different issues and how to fix them then you can give yourself a little bit of an extra job and some hours working with them to not only audit and go through the audit and explain the audit but then also, you know, implement the fixes. So I just wanted to show you that because I think it's it's such a great tool. So then the next thing I did was I ran this through Hemingway, and like I told you before Hemingway is like the sort of like, saying it's the more basic version of Grammarly. is maybe not exactly the right way to describe it, but it's the more like focused version. And so as you can see, what it does is it highlights different things. And it's kind of using I guess these colors, as you know, like things like it's trying to like draw your attention to certain colors as being like something that's more worth your attention or less worth your attention. What I've always known Hemingway as is a great tool for measuring active versus passive voice. And generally speaking, we want to try to avoid passive voice in our writing. And so that's probably what it's best used for. But there are some certain other factors here that are useful and interesting. And like yesterday when I told you about clear scope and how it measures readability, you can see that Hemingway also does this. It measures certain stats in terms of you know, just this piece of content, not necessarily compared to other pieces of content. And then it also has some AI functionality, that with a paid plan you can use to I think automatically suggest edits to some of these things. So just, you know one interesting tool where it's I think best functionality is free. So then I ran it through grammerly and I wanted to start by showing what I was talking about. With the plagiarism thing. Like there's something about inventory management on this article that says 1% of your text matches the source and that's like it's not even This article isn't even about inventory management. So I just wanted to show you guys that like, like these tools can be wrong, but it's still worth running that check a if you're working with a writer that's not you, just from a reputation standpoint, you want to make sure that there's no obvious like plagiarism problems with it but be so that you can just make like some small changes to this text so that Grammarly doesn't pick it up and possibly, you know, Google may be like taking a nod from some of the similar types of algorithms and uses. Again, not that it's intentional. It's just like, you know, because there's already this wealth of content that already exists on the internet about all these different subjects and of course, there's going to be similarities with phrasing and things like that. So then we get to these other suggestions. And I guess one other thing I wanted to show you about Grammarly is you can set goals for a piece of content and I don't know if this is a paid version specific but anyway, you can, you know, say like what type of writing it is. So I just said business for this. You can give a certain intent so I sent in form for this I may or may not be right with all these things, but I just wanted to see what would happen. You can say like, you know the level of experience of the audience, you can set like the formality of the tone. And then and then it gives you suggestions based on those things. And what's cool about grammerly is that it goes into these specific zoo specific different categories of suggestions. So correctness is about like grammar, spelling, punctuation, clarity is to cut in to help with like the flow of engagement, which is probably most related to like storytelling and delivery, I guess, you know, kind of related to both of those things, and then style guide. This relates to my company's specific style guidance, some of the suggestions that I have programmed in myself, and so a lot of it is like punctuation, because I have some rules about that. And it's probably annoying for my writers to have all this pop up. But some of it is word stuff. So like if we click this, something like actually, per the blogs and the style guide, and that's just our approach, we say these words are fluffy and don't add value typically. So like if you cut actually, it would say wait, so you have to go read these reports. Ones is another one that I have strong opinions about. I say don't use one to describe a noun you've already defined. Use the same word again or find another way to say it and then I gave an example here. So that's what's really cool about Grammarly is like you can like get these things automatically being suggested when you're working on a piece of content within your organization so that people don't have to remember like all the stuff that I showed you on my style guide it just automatically pops up. Waxing then I'll show you a couple qualitative things and then we'll go to questions is I ran this through my style editor bot, and it wouldn't I tried to get it to like directly edit the copy. And it wasn't unlike what I showed you yesterday which was like a shorter excerpt and the did I did that. So part of this is like me learning how to best use the spot or how to best design it or how to best query it. But what I did was I said Please review this blog post it gave it the era and suggest edits according to the blacksmith style guide.\r\n\r\nThey said consider the bad side consider the following suggestions and it felt to me like it wasn't actually like totally reading the blog. It was just giving like general tips and then I said please suggest updated copy based on these suggestions. And so what it did, which is kind of funny was it created like a shorthand version of it. And so what I was thinking is something like this could be really useful for like an email newsletter, you know, like an atomized version of the blog. Or, you know, maybe like you create some social posts based on these shorthand summaries of each category or something like that. You'd still probably want to edit it, but to me, even though it's not really what I asked for, I thought that that could be an interesting use case. So then I was like, Okay, well can you actually do the edits while preserving the original length of the piece? And it was like no, but it kind of went back in and gave some more suggestions. And then I was asking if it was actually able to like read the original article, or No, I was asking about the visuals, because one of the suggestions was about visual aids. And I was like, well, there's a ton of visual aids on that article. And so it said that it can't directly process or interpret them from the article itself. So that was kind of interesting. And then I gave it the copy and then it still kind of like generally gave examples. So you know, it's a work in progress. I guess that's what I wanted to share. It's still it's still gave me some things to work with. But it wasn't exactly like the editor that I was hoping that it would be like it like it kind of was yesterday. So it seems to me if I were to make a hypothesis here that it's probably going to be more useful for shorter bits of copy, you know, maybe different sections or titles or things like that, versus trying to edit a whole article all at once but it will give you food for thought in terms of general edits that you could make. Okay, so last like pieces of content on this before we end up today. We talked about menu navigation. And so the way that I would change this menu navigation would be home about blog and I would just change this to contact and what I like to do with whatever like the most important menu item or call to action is maybe add some like button styling so that that stands out, it just simplifies it. It's not distracting and you know, hopefully leads them to the ideal conversion. So then the other thing like the header, because we're kind of talking about the whole experience, not just the article itself, is what I what I came across, typically in the UX audits that I did was a similar type of header where it has the logo, but unless the name of the brand is like really straightforward about what you do, it could benefit from having some context like a tagline about what you do and so I don't think that we do it on the blog. So some a very bad example. But you can imagine like in my header it should probably say like SEO and content agency. But you know, maybe because it's called the blacksmith that also might work I don't know submitted a test. I'm generally speaking again, I really liked this article, I thought that more or less like it fit the same types of standards that like I would have for my team in terms of putting together conversational tone like breaking texts up nicely, having really useful visuals, a couple of just like very small things. We have the social share buttons. My suggestion is to add a CTA that's like share this on social like, it might seem obvious, but just saying that might be useful, might also be useful to have them float as the person who reads it because they might decide at different points that they want to share it through. I love the visuals there was one visual where I think there might be an unintentional tooltip here where like when you were taking the screenshot your cursor was probably over this SPFx aligned area right here. And so it took the screenshot with that and it kind of obscures the stuff behind it. This is the type of thing that like, because I do these all the time I nitpick and probably nobody else would notice, but I just thought that I would mention it. I'm sure I'm gonna like pretty much ended there. The last thing I was going to say for now is with the Related Posts, one of them doesn't have the featured image. So it's kind of, you know, it just looks a little bit lopsided. That's a super easy thing to fix. And then when it comes to consistency um, you might want to capitalize text stuff just so that it's consistent with the capitalization of the other category. And then maybe also like space it out tech space stuff. So again, like I really don't have that much to say here, because it's very good and it has good information. The last I guess big thing is the actual place where I'm reading the content is kind of narrow and skinny compared to the full frame here. And so I wouldn't recommend going full width with the content but I think we could break out the box a little bit more or break it out of the current box so that it's a little bit wider. And I think that that would be a great reader experience. So with all that being said, I'm going to pull back to my slides really quick just to pull up like the question slide and things like that. But I mean basically we're done here. With the planned content. I'll once again bring up my book because it is about what we're talking about with content experience. It's about my approach to content writing, content style, you can grab a free chapter of the book on the writing for humans and robots.com website or you can grab the book on Amazon via Kindle or print edition. And yeah, that's pretty much it. So I will take any questions that may have popped up in the meantime.\r\n\r\nYeah. All right. So thanks again, Stacey for letting us use your content as I know that it's a little weird with talking about my stuff here but ya know, it was very much appreciated and a it's an excellent article. We've talked about that already. The content, it was it was hard\r\n\r\nto find stuff to comments on honestly, so I had to go into nitpick mode.\r\n\r\nSo grateful to you, Stacey. Let's see folks last chance to ask questions here. There are no questions today,\r\n\r\nwhich is covered at all. Everything's done.\r\n\r\nIt's it's been a very good and thorough presentation on lots of tools. Things to consider as we're developing content for and helping our clients create content for the web. Yeah, like Ben says firehose of information really good stuff. Greg, this is a good rewatch as well. Alright folks, last chance before we land the plane. Your if you have any final questions for Maddie, if you want to just say yes in the chat that way we know to pause otherwise, I'm going to start moving towards wrapping us up. All right, yeah. So thanks there in the chat. Okay. So Maddie, wrap us up here. Give us our final takeaway for the training.\r\n\r\nSure. I'll answer one question. Barney asked if I'm in the Denver area. Yeah, yeah. I'm in Lakewood, technically. But yeah, okay. Final wrap up. treat people how you want to be treated with your content. That's good.\r\n\r\nThat's really good. And true, right. So yeah, awesome. Well, thanks, everybody, for hanging out with us for the last couple of days. It's been a really good set of information here. A lot of things to consider. And hopefully it'll help us all up our game as we're dealing with content on the web. Thanks again. Maddie. For your expertise. And folks, we are back tomorrow as usual 1pm Central for office hours here on solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nNice. Well, thank you so much, everyone for your time and attention. And yeah, I hope I hope there is like one good nugget for you to take away and if you ever have any questions about content and UX, I'm always happy to be a resource.\r\n\r\nVery good. 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This again was this is building on last year's content workshop. And the link for that is in the course description if you missed last year I would strongly recommend you check that out. Really good stuff. So Sadie has your book MADI Naidu\r\n\r\nwhy it's really good love it seems like it's been a while since I published it, but you know, I tried to write it so that it would still be useful today. So I hope that you're all finding that. Yeah, we're sure.\r\n\r\nReally good stuff. Alright folks, if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat say hi. We are about three minutes away from getting started. And they're in the chat once again, is the link bundle that has the slides and the replay link as well as a link to Matty's book. We are Yeah, we're gonna have a lot of fun today and tomorrow, two hours today, two hours tomorrow talking all about website content with I mean, let's face it an expert in the field\r\n\r\nappreciate the vote of confidence. If you if you measure it by yours and I suppose expert, that's something that I've been doing for a very long time. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nAlright folks, let's hear from you in the chat. Check in question today. How about give us a one to 10 rating? How comfortable are you with generating website content? One being it's a real challenge. 10 being a pro, let us hear from you there in the chat.\r\n\r\nAll right, about a minute and a half to go.\r\n\r\nMaybe a good question is how many of you are forced to make content in order to finish your website designs? Yeah, to get your website launched.\r\n\r\nHey, Sue bullets are my friend. I like bullets. Alright, several folks just joining us. The links are there in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up that chat and you'll have the link to download the slides. Grab the replay and all of those things. We are about a minute away from getting started. Second question today is what's your comfort level? What's your expertise at website content creation one to 10 If you had to rate yourself love it. Love it. Tracks Yeah, five but a if you're using AI, that's awesome. Yeah, so a lot of folks are higher on the scale today. That's exciting, that hopefully you're gonna get some tools to up your game even further. He's got a lot to share with us. Over the next couple of days. Hey Terry. Dab Alright, folks, we are just about to get started. Glad you're all here. Diving into the web content workshop momentarily. Just seconds. To go. If you're just joining us in zoom, I'm going to drop in one more time the link bundle and it's three after so let's get the recording started. And we'll dive right in. Let's do it. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy and I'm joined for the next couple of days by my friend Maddy Houseman, Maddy is a sought after sought after copywriter specializing in enterprise b2b Tech brands. She's the CEO at blog Smith and the author of writing for humans and robots, the new rules of content style. She has been recognized on numerous industry lists as a top content marketer and I'm really excited to have her back for another course here on solid Academy so welcome back Madi, how are things going for you?\r\n\r\nThanks, Nathan. I'm really excited to be here. Like I said, you know, it's been it's been a little bit of time since I've done you know, a presentation like this since I've really gotten to use my brain. For those who don't know, I recently had a baby so he's in daycare today so I can fully you know, give my attention to this and, you know, embrace this identity of mine as a content creator who loves to learn and you know, who now has this other facet of my life but marrying those two in a joyous way so, so yeah, really excited to be back and and put my brain to use and share you know, some of the things that I've been exploring you for the past several months to I guess a year, all this new stuff with AI, that's what we're gonna focus on today. So really excited about that. Yeah,\r\n\r\ndefinitely. So we have a long way to go over the next couple of days and the thought just occurred to me Maddie, we really ought to have you back for another informal conversation just on how you prepared your business. So that you could take some time away, because that's really, that's quite a feat.\r\n\r\nIt was definitely and I'd love to do that. I'd be happy to.\r\n\r\nYeah, that'd be that just occurred to me. We should definitely, folks. So let's see the links are in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom. I'm going to drop this in one more time. There you will find the link to download or grab the slide deck. Also the replay link that will have the transcripts and chat logs after we finish is there for you as well. On that replay link you'll also find a link to last year's course, which is more some more foundational principles of the things we're going to unpack even further today. So if you missed last year's course, all the replays are there, follow that link, rewatch them, it's really good stuff. And of course, if you haven't seen Matt, he's booked the link for that as in the chat as well. So Maddie, give us a high level view. What are we going to be covering for the rest of today? Totally.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, we're definitely going to expand on some of the things that we started to talk about last year, but really, you know, thinking about what's changed in the past year and so that's why today we're going to focus mostly on AI kind of how AI factors into content creation, how you can use AI tools to create content, how you can use AI tools to detect AI content. You know, things like how to write an excellent chat GPT prompt and one thing I'm really excited to share with you because it's something that I've just kind of figured out for myself is how to make your own personal GPT. So that's what we're gonna do at the end of the day, I'll show you step by step how to do it. You can follow along, I'll show you how to adapt it a little bit. And then really, what we're going to start with today is I guess a bit of a cautionary tale when it comes to AI so we'll start with the most negative and we'll build up to the most positive. And then tomorrow, the focus is going to be on content UX, the user experience what I like to call the reader experience. So it's going to be more about you know, the elements of design and how they interact with content, how you can create this great reader experience for the people who consume your designs and content and so we can get a little bit more into what that looks like. But I guess if I was to like talk high level about today versus tomorrow, today is like things that I think are really like novel and fun. It's like It's like exciting things that that we're all learning kind of at the same time and that's that's what's so exciting about just like nobody has it figured out. And tomorrow is like the stuff that I'm really passionate about. That's a little bit more, you know, foundational and again, about like that full experience. So I guess with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. Yeah,\r\n\r\nabsolutely. Me give a couple of housekeeping notes that will disappear. Folks. We'll be taking a break in the middle as usual for these courses. So roughly at tube central an hour from now, we'll take about a five to 10 minute break depending on where we are timewise. So at the end of this first hour and the end of the second hour, we'll have a time of q&a as well. I would invite you to use the zoom q&a Link to ask your questions. Please don't use the chat, but use that Zoom q&a. That way we can keep all the questions in a nice list. And also, if you'll keep that Zoom q&a open, if somebody asks a question that you also want to hear the answer to just click the thumbs up icon to up vote. And we'll take the questions the order of up votes. So with that again, yeah, we are recording in the replay. The transcript is all there and it'll be available for you about an hour after we finished today. So Maddie, I'm going to disappear take over. Let's get started. Let's\r\n\r\ndo it. My housekeeping is just first of all, I think that we all can learn a lot from each other when it comes to AI. And so like that's how I've picked up the things that I'm going to share with you. It's really hearing it from other people seeing how other people are using this tool. It's interesting because it's so new that like, again, we don't really know like what the best use cases are. And there's this world of possibility that we've only just started to touch. So one thing I'll ask is like if you've come across an interesting AI use case, you know whether you have something that's top of mind now or whether going through what I'm going to talk about today sparks it like please share that in the chat. I'm sure all learn from it. I'm sure other people will learn from it. So that's one thing and then I'll just ask that if there's anything that resonates with you, as I'm talking today, or you know as other people are sharing ideas in the chat. I always love when people tweet or I guess x takeaways these days. So my Twitter is in that bottom right hand corner. So use that and I always love to retweet and share with my audience too. So yeah, let's go ahead and get started here. Nathan already gave a nice bio like who I am. Just to give you you know, more information about the blacksmith. We're a holistic content marketing agency for b2b technology brands. We create data driven content. I'm going to share some of those processes here with you today in terms of how we're using AI tools to do that. And our focus is creating content across the sales funnel with a focus on the reader experience. So again, that's really what day two is going to be about. It's creating this ideal reader experience with the intersection of content and design. And then my book writing for humans robots, the new rules of content style. If you've ever read the book, The Elements of Style, I was really kind of riffing on that in a more I guess, modern way since that book was written back in 1918, or 1919. Of course, at that time, the internet didn't exist. We weren't necessarily addressing a global audience when we publish to the web. We are now and so that's kind of the idea behind this book is how can you how can you speak plainly and inclusively and effectively when you're writing for the web? And so with all of that being said, let's go ahead and jump into the topic of today which is AI Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention. Day two, when we talk about content UX. I'm going to do some live content UX audits. If you were here last year, we also did this this is something I really love to do. And so this form here which you can also click through the slide being links that we've shared in the chat. Just has a couple questions like your name your brand. It'll ask for a link to a specific piece of content. If you're comfortable sharing for this live UX audit, and then it has the question that's optional. If there's anything you want me to focus on, and then like an aspect of the content itself, but the purpose is to collect some, you know, ideas from from all of you of what to audit and we're going to basically put the principles that I'm going to be talking about tomorrow into action you know, show you how to use some different tools show you how to use more also, like qualitative analyses. And so again, I would love your examples so that we can make it really useful for you to give you know, a second pair of eyes on your content. And you know, it's always done in a very respectful way. I'm not looking for problems, I'm just showing you ways to, you know, make your message clearer to make your content experience more effective. So I'll, I'll aim to remind you about this again at the end of the day, and then you know, before tomorrow is probably when I'll pick what we're going to audit for tomorrow. So get them in today, whenever you have a chance. Okay, so artificial intelligence. That's really the focus of what we're talking about today. Super exciting. Things are happening here. It's also kind of a wild wild west. It's it's something that there's many positive use cases but there are also some negative ones and so I really wanted to start with the negatives so we can kind of get that out of the way so we can you know, maybe share some like cautionary tales here. The link that Learn More link is an article that I wrote for Fast Company, and it's going to go over some of the same things that I talked about here in terms of some of the limitations and also really like the ethical implications of using AI to generate content to publish it as if it were your own. So yeah, let's go ahead and dive into that. Um, so I think like the first major implication, negative implication of AI or something to think about, especially as a creator, because many of us here we're writers, we're designers, so we're creating things. They they are our intellectual property which we may assign, you know, to a client, for example, but it's still at its root. It's something that we made. And, you know, the thing about AI is, first of all, it can't think for itself. It uses things like machine learning. It uses algorithms and processes to make sense of what's already out there. But it's not, at least right now in a place where it can completely invent something new. If it does. It's the result of this machine learning it's not the result of true uniqueness. So you know, essentially, AI and I'm gonna explain this example in a moment here, but it's, it's being trained on what already exists. It's using our intellectual property. And the worst part of it is it's doing that without giving us credit. I mean, if you go in do a search on Google, it was called Bard, but now they've rebranded it to Gemini. In my experience, and and I haven't used it recently, to be honest with you, but certainly within chat GPT there's no like source given for the answer to a prompt. It's not directing you to a specific piece of content are saying, This is what I referenced to come up with this answer, which also creates an issue of you know, whether or not that answer is something to be trusted, and we'll get into the fact that AI is oftentimes confidently incorrect. But right now, with the focus being on the fact that it's essentially plagiarism and my perspective, if you are taking what you generate with AI and then publishing it as your own this is probably easiest to think about when you think about visuals, and we're going to talk a little bit about AI generating images and kind of like how that works and some of the issues with that. But you can think of like aI trained on a certain set of materials, certain artists body of work, you know, that style, if it's trained on a certain style and the output is a certain style, it's pretty easy to identify that, you know, it's riffing off, you know, one individual's intellectual property, it's a little bit harder to make that distinction with the written word. But that doesn't mean that it's any less important to recognize that it's, it's an issue if if AI is passing off its own material or your material as its own. So, what I wanted to share here, this is an article that was published on futurism. It's an it's a screenshot from it, and it's about CNET. They have this blog about different like personal finance topics and things like that. And so when it comes to things that affect your finances, whether it's subjects like you know how to buy a house and you know, like had this setup a mortgage, you know, whatever. Or, in this case, like you know, how to pick a credit card, how to use credit cards, how to decide what college to send your kid to, or something like that. Google calls these topics, your money, your life. And in comparison to any other topic that you publish, that you're looking to get ranked in relevant search on Google. Google has the highest standard of quality for your money, your life topics. So CNET was transparent about the fact that they were publishing AI generated content such as the example shared here. But they had a human fact checking it and so the byline was like you seen that money or something like that? And then I think they also had like the byline of the human editor published next to it, but they told us you know, they they weren't trying to hide that it was aI generated. So this excerpt is you know, maybe kind of a silly example, but it's showing how\r\n\r\nthis article that they wrote, which was about can you buy a gift card with the credit card. This first example is a line that's almost verbatim from a rivaling Forbes article. And then this next example is how literally, the table was the exact same title. So, you know, you could question if it was only one of these things, you know, is that really plagiarism? Is that really a problem? But the fact that it's both to me shows that you know, not only did CNET not take a high enough standard of care, quite honestly with the content that they were having a human fact checker edit, but I think it also begs the question of like, if you're generating a full piece of copy, like a, you know, long form blog article, like are you ever going to be able to definitively say that it's not plagiarism? Or that it's not like literally, you know, word for word related to any other competitor article out there? And I think the answer's no, because that's what the AI is using to generate the content. In this case, and then one that I'll share subsequently, AI is, is almost like a crutch for CNET or for others who are who are taking this approach of generating that full article and then having the human intervention and I'm going to share some better ways to use AI in your article creation process. But yeah, I mean, the problem is ultimately that there's no way that they can catch every instance of plagiarism, and it just honestly creates more work and, and the worst part of all, is that it essentially ruin their reputation because they didn't take a proper standard of care. Another example that's, that's ongoing, it's unresolved at this point, is that the New York Times recently sued open AI who's the creator of chat GBT saying that, you know, their, their publications, their media. was unlawfully used to train open AI. And the last I saw, I think there was an update actually today that said that the New York Times is like misrepresenting the evidence or something like that. But again, I mean, it really just like begs the question of you know, if you publish content, like is it safe, you know, is it going to be used to train a model which is then going to spit it out and somebody else is going to publish it and benefit from it without properly crediting you? So that's one major issue. So this is one that I would love your examples. If you have anything similar. This is this is a picture that I saw recently in like a Facebook group about AI. And so somebody had done some prompts about dog breeds. And if you kind of squint, you're like, Okay, maybe that like a chart of different dog breeds, but then you look and you see all the like, really strange faces and like this, like gibberish text, and even the text that you can read is like not related to any dog breeds that currently exists. So, yeah, again, if you have any examples of like an image you've generated that has resulted in something like comically incorrect like this, I would love to see that in the chat. That would be fun. But I guess the point that I want to make with this slide is that at least at this point, AI can't effectively art direct you could give it a prompt and you could maybe get it to a point where you can get something useful. I think it's called mid journey. There's this one AI image generator that creates these like hyper realistic things with like any detail you can get it and something like that is so cool and very interesting to experiment with. But I think this came from within chat GPT I'm gonna say it wrong, but it's called like Dali Dali. And in my experience, when I've used it to generate images, it's the same sort of like gibberish text. The image, you know, is like, vaguely related to the prompts that I give it. So I'm using it for like, kind of like business article use cases to like generate a figure from you know, some like the data I include or something like that. I've never gotten something useful yet. And I think beyond that, it's like you still as a creative have to come up with the prompt. It's not like AI is going to be able to help you within the context, say of like an article. They're not going to be able to come up with like five unique media examples that you could include. So this is something that I think, you know, as humans, like, we still like have control over this or so like the best Abbot. Um, okay. So next I started to talk about this, which is one of the biggest issues with AI to date, the fact that it is confidently incorrect. So this is another Cena example, I'm going to read a little excerpt from. This is another futurism article. They did kind of a deep dive into this. See that AI but issue? So the excerpt is after the outcry after you know, some of these plagiarism things came to light. With the previous example. Steena editor in chief Connie Guglielmo acknowledged the AI written articles in a post that celebrated CNET's reputation for being transparent. without acknowledging the criticism, Guglielmo wrote that the publication was changing the byline on its AI generated articles from CNET money staff to simply seen that money as well as making the disclosure more prominent. Furthermore, she promised every story published under the program had been reviewed, fact checked, and edited by an editor with topical expertise before we hit publish, and I think that this is referring to like before this article was published, and so what you're looking at right here is, I think a more serious violation of the high standards that Google holds for your money your life, making sure that it is, you know, written by an expert that it's heavily fat checked, you know that you're not publishing something that you can't stand behind. And so this is about calculating compound interest for savings and as you can see by the excerpts, it's, it's wrong, the calculation is spitting out an incorrect final number. And so it may seem like, you know, small potatoes like, you know, like, what, what's really going to happen to the person who misinterprets this? It's certainly not like, you know, having to do with like, buying a house and like getting those equations wrong thread savings, but I think it just goes to show that there's, you know, there's a lot of problematic things that can happen and it starts here and if if we don't maintain a high standard for content quality starting here, then it could exacerbate it could turn into people being misled when it comes to making these like bigger money decisions in their life or you know, other things, your money your life, I think also, in some ways has to do with like, health and like medical stuff and things like that. So there are like potentially, you know, bigger and like worse implications than even just like the financial aspect of it. One thing that's interesting that that I misunderstood or I was misled about AI. Really up until like, a week ago or so, is I thought that you could ask chat GBT if it wrote something. So that was something that I saw other people talking about. And it's something that at the blacksmith like we've tested out ourselves you know, when working with like a new writer and wondering how to detect like if content was aI generated, and I found an article on open API's like FAQs or help desk or whatever that said, whenever you ask chat GBT if it wrote some you know, specific piece of copy for example, it just make something up like that's, that's literally what open AI says you could Google it yourself. So, you know, it's weird that it doesn't just say, I don't know, you know, it doesn't just give you like that as a straight answer. It's fine. If it doesn't know, but for it to purposely just decide, you know, bye bye narrowly, like if it's yes or no, and that it just tells you that whether it actually knows the answer, like that's very concerning to me. So a little bit of a cautionary tale. Um, but yeah, I think at the end of the day of the CNET examples, what I'm trying to impress upon you is like, does it really save time, if it like, impacts your reputation long term like I just don't think that that the best way to go about it is to generate the full piece of content and then add the human and I think that I think that AI can help intermittently and we'll definitely get to like how exactly to do that shortly. Um, so this article is also kind of fun. Charlie Brooker's, a creator of Black Mirror. If any of you are familiar, it's just this like really kind of weird messed up show on Netflix. It's very like future focused. It's like, I would say fairly.\r\n\r\nWhat's the word like it's, it's, it's kind of like post apocalyptic in some ways, not always. But it always like seems to end and kind of a scary place. And it's episodic, like each each episode I mean, to say is like its own storyline. And so the most recent season started to touch on themes of AI since that has become you know, something that has infiltrated society. And anyway, this article, The Creator who you know, has a very interesting mind based on what we see on this Netflix episodes, said that he doesn't think AI is messy enough to replace creative people. So there's good news guys, which is AI can't can't match that with us. I think on another hand AI, it lacks human empathy. You know, it can never like fully understand, like, who we are and what we go through. I don't think it ever will unless it's somehow achieved some level of sentience but yeah, I mean, ultimately, like in its wildest dreams, whatever AI, you know, thinks that it thinks it could never generate the ideas that we come up in our wildest dreams. And I think that the proof is in the pudding in terms of thinking about things like some of our favorite authors and how they create prosaic copy. So here's, here's a quote, I love Stephen King. He's kind of a machine himself, but human as far as I know. So this from needful things, one of his more interesting books, because the trust of the innocent is the wires most useful tool. And so, you know, fed copies of Stephen King's worked. You can ask chat GPT to write in his voice. I don't know if Stephen K would appreciate that or not. But, you know, I think the limitation is that it couldn't generate something like this on its own it can generate like derivative work of his but it couldn't come up with this on its own. Ai, you know, it, it isn't it doesn't have uniqueness. And Google has historically said that it's important. We're gonna talk a little bit about Google's AI guidelines that it's published. And it specifically says in those guidelines that they want to rank content that is unique, which AI fundamentally is not, not on its own, not without human intervention. Ai just read purposes and parrots things that already exists. And, and the output trends toward the average. It's not, it's not unique, it's not notable and interesting. Okay, so the last thing that I want to talk about from like this negative perspective, and then I promise we'll get into more of the fun stuff, is the idea that algorithms can be biased. And so if you think about like the people who are creating things like Chet GPT, or the Google algorithm or any other algorithm you interact with, like social media feeds, things like that. Algorithms, they represent the people that created them, not necessarily the population as a whole. So this book is really interesting. It's from the perspective of a black woman and so she is just like, read some of the book description to give you an idea of some of the topics that she explores. It says run a Google search for Black Girls, what will you find? Big booty and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms, but if you type in white girls, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and on unmoderated discussions about why black women are so sassy or why black women are so angry presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. And I think, after this book was published, because this was from a while ago, Google had manually made some adjustments to the algorithm in light of this criticism and that commentary, but the problem is with algorithms, you're you're scaling up problems, they can't manually make adjustments for every inherent bias that their algorithm has. And so you know, I don't know if we have an answer for how to fix this. But ultimately, the people creating the algorithm should represent society as a whole. I guess that's, you know, one way to think about it. Um, and I guess the question that it poses for all of us is like with AI deploying so rapidly there's going to be a lot of situations where bias needs to be routed out and fixed. And so that's, that's what's kind of scary, I think about how quickly new applications are developing. Again, it scales up problems and so that's just something I think we all need to be aware of, and and do the best that we can to fix. So okay, so now let's talk about some of the more fun stuff AI content tools. These are tools that we use in our workflow. These are tools that I use, personally. And so let's go ahead and you know, talk a little bit about how they work. So, again, we're gonna focus on like, mainly AI content tools, just because that's my sphere of genius. That's like what I have the most experience with, but I think there are different things that you could use like no matter how you're creating content, whether it's like you write blog posts for yourself, or for clients, or like, you know, you just want to like uplevel, your email strategy, or you know, help with like the personal compositions that you create. So, the first one I want to talk about is phrase which creates AI powered content briefs. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch my screen to share, to share like what a report looks like in phrase. So let's see here. I think I have to get out of full screen in order for this to work. Okay, so um, this was the form so I'm going to show you that in the beginning, but I'm gonna go ahead and exit out. So phrase generates this really cool report and the SEO aspects of it may or may not be relevant to your process. And I will say that not every piece of content that we created, the blacksmith is driven by SEO. It's not every piece of content we create to rank but I still use we still use phrase for everything because it helps with topic research. So that's what this is. It's a briefing tool. It's a research tool. Um, the way that it works and the way that the next tool, clear scope that I'm going to explain to you also works is that you give it a primary keyword. So in this case, it's how reliable are AI detectors? And so, by giving it this primary keyword, that means that we've already done the research to decide that that's the keyword that we want to optimize for. And so this is this is an article that's already published on the Black Swan, but this is something that we would have created. Prior to that publication. This this brief would have been like the first step of the writing process after doing the keyword research to decide which one we want to focus on. And the way that phrase and clear scope work is that you can I'm just going to show you like some of the pricing details so you can understand like how it works within a workflow, phrases kind of unique in that it has a plan that allows you to create unlimited reports. Not many other tools like it do that it's usually a per report cost. So that's why it's important to know what you want to optimize for before generating the reports. But it also has these lesser plans in terms of output. You know, depending on your content process, that's probably going to be more cost effective to you then you know, me as an agency, I would want more of like the unlimited plan to work for my various clients. So let's go back to phrase so what's interesting about phrase is first of all, just like the content editor experience itself, I'll be honest, we use Google Docs for everything. But if I was creating content, as like just for my internal team or something, what's cool is you can create these other tabs. And so you could have a tab that's like research. You could have a tab that's your outline. You could have a tab that's your draft, and then you could have maybe a tab with edits or something like that. So that's kind of cool just to keep the process nice and contained in one place. I've always thought that that was really unique and interesting about phrase.\r\n\r\nBut to be honest, we don't use phrase as a Content Editor. That's just an added bonus. So yeah, it generates a topic report. I'm gonna go through a couple of different aspects of it. First of all, it gives you some sort of tangible details and the way that phrase and clear scope and the market means which is another variation on a theme work is that they scrape the top 20 or so search results, which is pretty representative of like, what's going to be necessary to rank and it gives you details like, you know, how many words should you aim for for this specific topic? In this case, it's also suggesting how many headers which is like a measure of depth of content, how many links How many images? I think the top ones are what's like in this brief, that's what it's reading and the ones under it are like the average that it's suggesting. But again, we're just this is just like material that's from the brief. It's not like the actual content that we wrote. When it comes to word count. I think people always ask like, what's the ideal word count for a piece of content? And the the answer like many things in SEO is it depends. And so that's why tools like this are really useful because there is no standard. It's very topic driven. And using data that's based on actual searches means that you can get very close to like what that ideal is. So it also shares you know, the top some details of the top breaking content, you'll notice that the blog Smith currently owns a featured snippet for this particular topic, thanks in part to you know, some of the tools that we use to optimize their content. And also, I think, for this particular piece, because we did a lot of our own original research and reporting and some of it that I'll share with you when we talk about AI detector tools, I believe after the break today. You can also see like, the atomized version of some of these other top ranking results like the title like a short description, different headers, you can click into the headers to get more information. You can click through to read it. There's other things in this little side panel here that are interesting. This is just a list of all the headings from all the top ranking content pieces. Probably the most useful is this questions area and you can break it down by different sources of the question of the questions. People also ask you something you could manually go to Google and see for yourself. But it's nice to have it all in one place. I think that's the real benefit of phrase and then you can also see here that you can see questions that come from places like Quora and Reddit, you know, which which can really add a nice like flavor to what you're working on. The stats tab is really interesting. You know, they essentially suggest in phrase different stats, as well as different links that people tend to use in those top ranking pieces of content. And so you don't necessarily want to like copy everything that you see. But there might be things that like people would expect to be exposed to in your content. If there's like a big industry stat that relates to what you're talking about. As you scroll here you can see certain things like different topics that come up, you know, different related keywords or sub topics. And a lot of this you can kind of paste over from the sidebar. External links. You know, in addition to specific stats, news is also pretty interesting because this is like things that have happened maybe since those top ranking articles were published. So again, like if you're trying to be the best making sure that your information is the most up to date. This can help you do that. So freeze also has some generative AI capabilities. I'm going to be honest with you that we don't use these because we don't believe in generating AI copy as far as you know what we write for clients and for ourselves. We're experimenting with it. But so I don't really use any of the generative AI tools. But this optimize tab here is notable and useful, because it's similar to clear scope and market Muse which I'll share with you in just a moment here. And basically, it suggests certain phrases that we should expect to see in the content in order for it to rank high and relevant search. You know, obviously, you can't just throw all the words and you have to weave them in. But this is a pretty good baseline for what people would expect to see topic wise in an article and that's that's the real benefit. I think of tools like this. So yeah, there's other there's other like interesting things that you can dig into. This is like a keyword gap map map based on what I just showed you those different phrases and it shows your content compared to other ranking content and who's using what words so you can kind of see how you stack up against those other competitors. So next, I want to share clear scope with you and I have a slide for it, but I'm just going to jump straight to the report here. So what you're seeing is like a very, I would say like simplified user interface compared to like what you would see with phrase and so clear scope in many ways is very similar. They both exists to help you optimize content. They both include some important research they both work by starting with a primary keyword. One of the differences between clear scope and phrase is first of all that query scope suggests a letter grade whereas phrase and market Muse and surfer previously known as Super SEO suggested number like out of 100 in order to understand like how close to optimizing compared to their standards you are, it also suggests a word count. And one more thing I wanted to say about the content creator is that at the blacksmith we always aim for an a or higher that tends to be a good standard for actually achieving rankings, high rankings and relevant search. I'm actually not sure if phrase does this. I'm sure they do. I just didn't notice it while going through. But clear scope also suggests a target readability level. I think that's really important for matching the needs of the searcher not going you know too deep into something that maybe could benefit from being more surface level for example. You can also notice here that they have those suggestions for phrases and so phrase we use the very beginning of our process, but we're not optimizing content within that tool. We're really using clear scope for that because in my experience, and this could differ by industry, but I find their suggestions for phrases to incorporate to be a little bit more fine tuned than phrase. So you know, that's, that's my opinion. Um, you'll notice that they also have the sidebar, so they have, you know, a couple of details. I don't again, I don't necessarily use clear scope for the briefing processes is really more at the end of the process. So stuff like this, I'm not necessarily going over but if you were to use one tool, then it's nice to know that it has that it also has those top you know, search results for the query, examples of like headers and things like that. It also has the term like keyword gap map that shows how you stack up compared to the competition. You can dig into the competitor details even more in terms of how clear scope looks at content with their letter grade, by word count, that it has this nice chart that shows how that content grade stacks up against their organic position in search. And then I think the last thing that I'll mention about clear scope for now, is that you can use that editor in here just like you can use the editor in phrase, but actually both free and clear scope. Have a Google Docs add on. And so all you have to do is like grab the report link the individual link to that specific report, put it in Google Docs, and then you get all this information within, you know, Google Docs where you probably at least my team works better that way. Um, okay, so and then I guess the last last thing I was gonna say about this topic is that if I had to pick one tool, I think I would pick clear scope. Again, because of the fine tuned pneus of the instructions, but if I was a smaller shop operation, I'd probably pick phrase because it can do like a more well rounded look at like the topic as a whole and debriefing so so that's my suggestion. Clear scope works by essentially offering it's like a per report price, but you can buy packages and like the more reports you buy at a time, the less expensive Each report is. So let me get my slides back up here. And then we'll move on to the next tool that we're going to talk about though.\r\n\r\nWe talked about phrase to talked about clear scope. So let's talk about market Muse just kind of in passing here because it's a very similar tool. It uses some different technologies, compared to clear scope and phrase and so that's why it's a part of our process again as an organization that spends a lot of time on SEO and data and keyword research. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to you if you're going to maybe consider one of those other tools. What's interesting about marketmuse is that it has this functionality to create an AI generated first draft that includes some like light human intervention from their side. I think that's what this is actually this is like a sample from a while ago where we were just playing around with it to see what would happen. But yeah, again, it has a lot of the same functionality. It offers content optimization suggestions that like keyword gap map that I showed you and both of the tools and it has like some generative AI capabilities. So yeah, it just adds a little bit of extra detail. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that it's something you need to add to your workflow if like one of those other tools could satisfy a lot of these same things. So talking about some other tools that are interesting. Word tune is something that I feel like is so underrated. It's essentially uses your own copy to make suggestions. And so again, I'm going to I'm going to show you what that looks like. So let me share my screen back here. So it works in Google Docs. And so here's I just stole the intro basically from that AI detector article. And so what you could do is you highlight whatever text you want it to make suggestions based off of and I typically do it sentence by sentence I, I'm sure it could do longer bits of text, but I don't find that to be as useful. For me. This is like a great tool for when you have writer's block because I don't know you know if you've experienced this but oftentimes I'll let my get myself get stuck on a specific word and it just like really bugs me, and I'm like it's not done until I figured out the right word. And it takes me forever to get through that. So we're tune. It's great because I'm using it with my own copy. So I can feel really confident about whatever it suggests. I'm sure you could use word tune to take AI generated copy and then re spin it. But that's not my suggestion. So again, it works by using this like Google Docs add on and you you highlight it and just to show that action again. It has this little word tune icon. And then you can see different suggestions for how word tune would rewrite it you get like 10 or something like that. And then you can also fine tune it by changing the tone and then by finding ways to shorten or expand it depending on what your use case is. The last thing that I'll say about word toon for right now is it has this thing called spices and so that's like getting a little bit more like next level with the AI generation and using like generative texts. I haven't played around too much with this yet, but it is interesting. And this is kind of taking it away I think from you know basing it off of your copy to kind of like generating something completely new. So that's why I don't necessarily use this but I think it could be a useful resource for when you're when you have writer's block or things like that. So let me get my slides back up here. Here it is. Okay, so so that was word tune. Um, and then Grammarly. I think works very similarly to word tune, and that it uses your own body of work your own copy, to suggest edits, and so I wrote an article for their blog. That's what the learn more link is. After a recent keynote, they did about all their generative AI capabilities. And so I would definitely check that out if you're curious about how to use grammerly in this way. And full disclosure, I'm a Grammarly ambassador, so you know, I'm always singing their praises, but I think it's I think it's interesting because Grammarly, like many other SAS tools on the market are starting to invest in AI capabilities like directly within their tools. And so I think we're gonna see like more and more of examples of this. And grammerly has a lot of other I think really useful. And interesting features like they have this brand style guide, which is something we use that the blacksmith which allows you to set your preferred spelling for things like brand names, and grammar rules and things like that. All right, so let's take a couple minutes for questions. Anything that's come up so far, after the break, we're going to talk about AI detector tools now that I've shown you the AI writing tools. We're going to talk about chat how to write a good chat GBT prompt and then we're going to end the day with how to create your own personal GPT. So yeah, in the meantime, there's any questions. We'll talk about them now and then we'll take a little bit of a break.\r\n\r\nYeah, very good, great overview of some really cool tools that can be used for our content creation. If you have questions specifically about that, drop those there in the zoom q&a. There's one question floating out there about the slide. We were sharing this link as a slide sharing the slides as a slide being link because there was an issue getting them exported where the the links on the slides were clickable. And so technology Yeah, it that's so currently not downloadable. Is the long and the short of it so but that slide being link is there and it'll be available for you going forward.\r\n\r\nWe can we could share them as downloaded just won't be a clickable link. So you can we could share like both in tandem with each other. Unfortunately, that's going to be the limitation\r\n\r\nYeah, yeah. So I'm happy to add that PDF link as well. We'll I'll get that added to the link bundle as we come back. If you want to download these just know that there are things that say read more, learn more that don't clicked anywhere in the PDF. Alright folks, well let's go ahead and take a break. It is 153 Central time let's take a break until right at two o'clock Central. So right about seven minutes from now and we're quiet until then. Sounds great. See you then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We are back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, we are back and ready for the second part of day two. Maddie, what are we going to knock out today?\r\n\r\nSo we're gonna start with now that we've learned how to generate a copy, how do you detect it? We're going to then move to talking a little bit about some Google guidelines around AI content writing for humans and robots. And then we'll end the day with a deeper dive into chat GPT how to write a great prompt and then how to create your own personal GPT which I'm really excited about because it's something that I only just learned how to do myself. Very\r\n\r\ngood. That's a lot to cover in the next hour. I let me invite everyone also to look at the chat I'm going to drop in today's slides if you have come in late. Also, we've added a link there for the PDF download. And finally, there's a link in the link bundle that'll drop in in just a moment that has the invitation for you to submit your site for a content UX audit tomorrow. So with that I will turn it over to you Matty, let's\r\n\r\ngo. Sounds great. All right. Yeah, let's go ahead and knock this out. So AI detector tools. There's a couple that we've tested at the blacksmith and I want to share some of the results of those tests too, so that you can understand what they can be useful for. But also again, there are limitations. As with the rest of this world of AI, everything's still kind of developing. We're all learning things at the same time. And so there's no like perfect answer. There's no one definitive tool that's going to tell you like this is current AI content, or this isn't AI content. So a couple tools that you could try though that I think will give you a decent idea or continent scale, copy leaks and originality.ai and the link here which again, you can grab through the slide bean link is a link to an in depth investigation that we did at the blog Smith testing out these different tools. You know, trying to learn more about the nature of AI content and what it sounds like. So I do have a couple of ideas for you two that we'll talk about next in terms of like how to rewrite things that sound robotic whether they were robot generated or not. But before we get to that, this example here is kind of funny because it's the Constitution and this is continent scale, saying that they detected to be 9% ai generated and you know, I don't think they had robots at the time unless alien somehow hooked them up. But I think it's fair to say that this is more than likely 100% human generated content. But it's just interesting to see that their AI detector is still picking up some very some version of that. And that you know, also perhaps it hasn't trained this AI detector on you know, pieces that existed before. Ai content was a thing. So so that's just like one thing. You know, I think from the standpoint of like, if you're working with content creators, and you're paying for human generated content, then you should get that fundamentally I think that it's an ethical violation for someone to use AI to generate content without disclosing that and to be accepting payment for that as if it were something that they were creating. Of course, there are many companies out there who are hiring people with the job description that is like aI content writer, AI content editor or like somebody who trains you know, a chatbot on a certain way a certain body of work a certain way of writing. All of that being said, if you if you are using these tools, and they are saying with a high degree of certainty, you know, this is AI generated copy. I think it's really important to not outright accuse somebody of submitting AI generated copy what I do at the blog Smith is like let's say that we're doing like a paid test with a new writer hopeful for our team. What I do is I say, hey, you know, we ran this through, you know, these three AI detector tools, and here's what it said here, you know, is what degree of AI content it's saying it thinks this is like, can you comment on that? And it gives them the chance to you know, explain what they think might happen, defend themselves, offering to make fixes, and I think it's really like the way people people are going to be honest or not. There's nothing you could do about that. But I think it's the way that they respond to and handle that situation that tells you what you need to know about if you want to work with them, whether or not you can ultimately tell if their copy was aI generated or not. What is very interesting about these different tools is first of all, they're all gonna give you a different answer. That's just a fact. Because they're all using a different approach to detect AI content. The other thing is that you can input the exact same copy on one of these tools two times and get a different answer. So again, it's it's the wild wild west. But these will at least give you something to think about and whether it doesn't matter. Like if we if we trust the writer or not, we're always going to run their copies through one or multiple of these tools because we want to detect things that sound robotic, even if they were written by a human. So that kind of brings me to my next point here that I was starting to hint at. So when it comes to detecting AI content, or even detecting content that humans wrote, that sounds robotic, there's a couple of patterns that you can look for. The two major characteristics that the aforementioned AI detector tools are looking for are first of all, perplexity, so that's unpredictability within the content. Ai generated text tends to have low perplexity. Human writing has higher perplexity, it kind of makes sense we're a little bit more erratic than a robot. The other thing is burstiness, which is a similar concept. So it's looking for variation in the length and the structure of sentences. Ai content tends to be more steady, more formulaic, which makes sense. It has lower burstiness and human writing, which you know, has much more variation. The image you see here are some other things that we've picked up in our own writing process. And in investigating this topic, different signals that sound robotic again, whether they are in AI generated or not. So repeating words, like in this example, collision coverage, you know, coverage collision, like it's just like it's not using a lot of variation. And in the box MyStyle guide we talk about like, trying not to use the same word twice in the same sentence or paragraph, which is not always possible, but this would be an example of something that wouldn't pass the blacksmith style guide test because it's it's too repetitive. Also repetitive sentence structure where like, each sentence starts with the same formulaic approach. Advertising then a verb you know, advertising the verb, unnatural word usage, so like, you know, removing a glass dome to access the ball, but it doesn't really sound like how a human would talk about replacing a light bulb. A generic or impersonal tone. You know, it's like things that don't add value that you're just kind of like saying for the sake of having words, it's another thing that we talk about in the blog, Smith style guide, like everything you say, should have a purpose, and we don't believe in fluff. It's about cutting things to being the most concise version they can be while still conveying enough meaning. For people to understand what we're trying to say. Statements that contradict themselves. So the new policy will increase employee benefits while at the same time it will reduce employee benefits that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And inconsistent verb tense, you know, something a human editor. Should be able to pick up pretty well but probably a robot writing is not going to care too much about He He was waiting for the bus when he sees his coworker. Stiff, formal or matter of fact, writing style. You know, again, just something that just doesn't sound like a human wrote it or who would want to read it. So this is this is something that can be helpful to you like when you're doing your own edits to kind of like go through these different things. And, again, whether whether it's aI generated or not, and you know that for a fact, you still want to make sure that your writing is something that appeals to the human. So I wanted to take some time to talk about Google's helpful content update and also their guidance for AI generated content and whether or not it will rank some of this we did talk about last year if you were here, so we're just going to do a really quick refresher on that as it relates to this topic. So my book and like really like what we're talking about, in general is kind of marrying the concepts of writing for both humans who are really the ultimate buyer like they're the ones who actually have money so they can buy from you, whatever it is you're selling. They respond to other humans, other people's empathy, versus robots who you know, we're not writing for their sake, but they are the medium that connects us. To those humans. And so it's important for the things that we write, to be indexable to, you know, be findable to be descriptive, and to ultimately match the intent of whatever the human is looking for. So, you know, robots can also take the form of social networking site algorithms, like that news feed that you're familiar with, I'm sure.\r\n\r\nSo so that's kind of like the two players in this game. Here. So this is some highlights from Google's guidance about AI generated content. As you can see by the link here, this is from early 2023. And I was looking at this page again, just a couple of days ago to see if anything had changed. I had seen something on Twitter now x, where somebody had mentioned that something on this page should change. And I was looking at these three things because I think they're the most relevant to this topic that we're talking about. And like, I don't know if I'm just you know, like, post pregnancy brain or something. I couldn't find the difference. But it might have been because it was about something else on that page. But I might have missed it. And it might have been one of these things. But anyway, I think these things still more or less ring true today. And if anything has changed, it has been Google being less specific about their guidelines. Because that's kind of the nature of what all these things that they've shared with us are it's it's kind of like so just to go over them is a content against Google searches guidelines. They say it's not, but you know, it can't be used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which we'll talk about when we talk about the helpful content update. Will AI content rank highly on search? Maybe, you know, it doesn't give it any gains, which makes sense. What I think is really notable about this is they talk about if it's useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of e 80. It might do well in search. So they talk about original, but we've already talked today about how AI content at least on its own without manual intervention by humans is inherently not original. It is inherently not unique. And I would argue that again, without human intervention, it's neither useful nor helpful, in that, you know, you're not It's not like adding something that doesn't already exist. At least in that case. So to me, from Google's own words, AI content really aren't its own shouldn't rank high and relevant search. But of course, there are exceptions. And then, of course, there are situations where people pair that with a human editor like we saw with seeing that of course, CNET being a cautionary tale of what to avoid. Should I use AI to generate content? They say if you see it as an essential way to help you produce content that is helpful and original, we have that original word again, it might be useful to consider but again, if you're trying to gain search engine rankings and no there was something on Twitter now x where somebody was kind of like I can't remember who it was, but you might recognize the situation especially if you're in like the content world. Someone was boasting about how they had created a ton of AI generated content and they were sharing you know some stats from like their Google Analytics, and how would that helped rankings and things like that? And I think everybody agreed that that person should have probably kept their mouth shut because somebody from Google ended up you know, seeing this Thrive that came to their attention and they got hit with a manual penalty based on what this person was saying about you know, having not really like had that human intervention. So thus, it was not original or unique. And it's just funny, like, you could probably get away with it, at least for a while, depending on how Google develops more of these guidelines. But when you start to boast about it, and Google gets wind of it, then like there are manual interventions that they could take, so tread carefully. If it's working. Keep that to yourself. So then it Yeah, I wanted to like connect this back to Google's helpful content algorithm update, which also happened. Probably a little over a year ago, maybe two years ago. And so they describe it as being part of their long term efforts to provide original and valuable content through search. It rewards content that meets users expectations while demoting content written primarily with search engines in mind. So like we were just talking about what the AI content. This this update isn't focused on AI but but it adds color to those guidelines in terms of how to approach it or you know, if you are generating AI content, how to make it work, so that it could rank these questions. Are directly from Google just made pretty was blacksmith branding, but the link that I shared here will will get you to the Google documentation that includes these questions and the subsequent ones. So to ask yourself like is is this content truly people versus is something that Google would consider ranking. It's things like Do you have a primary purpose or focus for your site? If you're writing about too many disparate topics, it's very confusing to Google you can certainly write about things that are different but related to each other, but you should really have like one specific focus if you want to rank high in relevant search. Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they've had a satisfying experience? I think that's a question to ask yourself, whenever you create any type of content like Is it is it satisfying to the end user doesn't really just serve your purposes? They talk about like demonstrating firsthand experience or like a depth of knowledge that's really important. That's that's how we add uniqueness to our content. That's how we make it original. Even if it's just your opinion on something, you know, that adds color to the content that already exists. Okay, so, um, let's talk now about from the search perspective, are you taking the search engine first approach to your content? So these are things that you obviously don't want to do. And it's questions like, you know, are you primarily trying to attract people from search versus creating something truly useful for humans? It does say are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics like that cautionary tale, that person who was sharing, you know, the content they generated, which resulted in a manual penalty, it's a perfect example. I think this is important too, like, are you mainly just summarizing what others have said without adding much value? You should always be adding I think something to the content that you're creating in order for it to be worth creating in the first place.\r\n\r\nSo just to kind of summarize here, like what is helpful content versus unhelpful content from these guidelines that Google has given us and that I honestly agree with? helpful content is people first genuine specific, it's actionable. Up to date is important. Once you publish something, you have to think about, like if you're using stats or if it's about maybe a tool that changes frequently, like you should be regularly reviewing or auditing your content for opportunities to update it. Is it relatable, is it concise? And ultimately, is it satisfying, versus the unhelpful content which is written primarily for the search engine robots it's spammy? It's generic, it's abstract. It might be outdated. Ultimately, it's impersonal, impersonal, fluffy, and then whacking. So these are some easy guidelines that you can use to understand if your content is hitting the mark for something that Google would even consider ranking high and relevant search. All right, so now we're gonna get to some of like the really fun stuff, I think today, which is get GBT some specific examples for how you can use it, as well as a demonstration for how I'm using it. And so, a lot of the things that I'm going to talk about today are based on things that I've learned from other people. I didn't necessarily invent these things. I've adapted many for my own use cases. And so again, I think this is a really valuable opportunity for like if you have anything to add to this discussion, I'd love to see it in the chat. I think it could benefit other people. How are you experimenting with AI? Like how how would you maybe adapt some of these ideas for how to write a great prompt What are like interesting prompts that you've used, and you know what, how is that benefited? You so I'll just put that out there. And then I'll also say that some of these are like pretty much all of these guidelines are based on open AIS guidelines for prompt engineering as well as Google's in some cases, I've combined to them and in all cases, I've given examples of how to use them effectively. So let's go ahead and jump to it. Okay, so the, I think first and perhaps the most important thing is to be as specific as possible. And you want to set parameters for the output that you're looking for. So my prompt here was helped me generate 10 email subject lines to use for cold outreach for my content marketing agency, please limit output to a maximum of 45 characters per example. I picked that number, the 45 characters because I saw that that's like somewhat of a best practice for how many characters people want to see in an email subject line. And what I could have done here was use the personal GPT I'm going to show you later that's all about the blogs and style guide them has like aspects of like how we do business and I could have gotten like even better example results here. But the point was not to show you something perfect it was to show you how to apply this principle. And the other thing that I wanted to add to is like you can always start with a plant, see what it gets you and then you can set parameters after the fact to refine your output. Like, you know, maybe I would have asked this prompt and then asked for it to shorten it to 45 characters or to suggest new examples of 45 characters. Or maybe I would have asked for like, what are you know, 10 General Sales, cold outreach subject lines, that I could use and then I might have added the detail Okay, now, adjust it for like my content marketing agency. The next one is to give context and examples. So I have this bot and I think I'm going to show you a screenshot of it next. One of my personal GPCs is a blacksmith sales expert. And so I created this bot because we recently hired a new salesperson, and there's just so much to learn both about the blogs with his brand. The work we do for customers, and just our sales process in general things that we want to share with new prospects that I wanted to create a resource and it's like of course you know, I want to make myself as available as possible to this new salesperson because typically I've been the salesperson for my company, I have a lot of that knowledge in my own head, but there are times when I am unavailable or I have other stuff that I have to work on. And so I wanted to create a personal GPT that incorporates some of this different documentation that I've created about our process. You know, referring to this prompt it also has like a copy of our standard proposal. Different things about you know, like what makes us stand out compared to the competition what's what's unique to us, I guess, so that any person on our team, any especially new salesperson, would be able to use this chat bot in order to surface some of this information, especially if they couldn't get a hold of me basically. So here's an example of a prompt I gave my personal GPT which is using the above case study. So I gave it a URL on our website. And one of the features of chat GPT is that you can have it browse the web in order to to include information and its results. So I gave it a URL. I asked it to reference a proposal that I had attached to the GPT that I've uploaded to it. And I said proposed an email pitch for a specific job opportunity. I copy and pasted a longer piece than this. I just took a screenshot but like the long version of this job description, and and I asked it to effectively address the requirements that the job description surfaced and the writing based on our strengths. And so what ended up happening was, you know, it wrote like a cold pitch email. But it did it did effectively address this prompt. There were things that I would change about it. Certainly there are things that I would have edited it before I sent it out to the person who had posted this job description, but I think that for me as a founder who has also traditionally been the salesperson it's such an effective way to use this tool because I spend so much time just you know, it's like I know all this information I know what we're good at. I know that we have relevant examples. You know, I know all this but it takes time to like resurface that knowledge and put it in a form that sounds good and is compelling, you know, to a sales prospect so that if you take one thing away, I think that you know that's like one really excellent use case of using your existing knowledge or your internal documentation. To make your life way easier.\r\n\r\nAnother related GPT prompt engineering tip is to use de limiters to clearly indicate distinct parts of the input. That just means like what I shouldn't have done here that would have made it probably a little bit easier for chat. GPT to understand what I wanted is to put this this job description text in like quotes, that's like a delimiters to say like, you know, do this to this piece of what I'm asking for to kind of like help it understand what part of the copy it's referencing. And what part of the copy is the ask, especially when you have like a longer input output, you know, whatever. Another example of that is something I learned from James rose. He is an automation and Zapier expert and has been doing a lot of interesting experiments with AI who's really good person to follow. If you're interested in just like getting ideas, he takes transcripts from like voice of customer interviews where he's getting feedback and you know, like positive testimonials and things about his product and he feeds that transcript into chat GPT and says you know, use this puts a transcript in quotes those delimiters and basically like give me like three, you know, like really nice things they said about you know, our product three like great pieces of feedback. And I think that that's such a useful way we like on our client calls on our internal meetings. We use a tool called fireflies, which automatically transcribes all our meetings, but it's still you know, it's still a lot to sort through an end fireflies has its own AI capabilities, too. So it helps to summarize and things like that, but to take to be able to use that output and quickly surface insights based on whatever your prompt is, I think is such an awesome use of AI that saves the human reader from having to go through the whole thing. So this is and I'll show you, I'll show you what this looks like in action when we do the personal GPT demonstration. But this is kind of what it looks like to set some parameters for your personnel GPT and there's two I guess like schools of thought on setting like setting parameters narrowly defining the G PTS role. So you could do this within normal chat GPT and say for this query, you know, I want you to take on this specific role. And so I got this idea from Paul Roeser. He was on some like marketing technology podcast, and he's talking about how he uses AI. And his example was like, something along the lines of like, you know, pretend that you're a lawyer that advises entrepreneur, it's about hiring law and then he gave his prompt so he kind of like set the scene like this is the narrow role that I want you to operate into this query. So that's one way that you could look at it the other way is that you could create a personal GPT that serves a specific purpose like my blacksmith sales expert, that I've already referred to and that you know, I'm kind of showing you behind the scenes, how I set it up. So as you can see here, there's like a name for it, which is kind of arbitrary. A brief description, I think, mostly for your reference. And then the instructions are like what the AI uses to then suggest answers to your prompts. So as you can see here, I'm telling it like you can use our website as your primary reference. You should be familiar with all those pages and use it to inform your responses. It'll ask you and I'll show you how you want it to communicate with you how you want it to give answers. You know what specific information you want to focus on again, like narrowing that scope. And then I also say like tailor your responses to showcase the company's strengths and successes. Using you know details from the website and emphasize why we're the ideal choice in you know, answering like sales related queries. So this is one of the greatest uses of chat GPT without narrowly defining its role and objective. You're gonna get like a wide variety of answers and that's fine. It depends on what your use cases, but by giving it a roll, I think the quality of your output goes up exponentially. And I'll show you again, at the end here, what that looks like in practice. Here's another really interesting way to use it, I think, especially if you're trying to learn a new skill or if you're trying to troubleshoot an existing workflow, which is what I was doing in this prompt. So I use air table a lot. I'm a huge fan of no code and automation in general. I've found in my life that it's really hard to find like the perfect solution to everything that I want to do. I never could find like my perfect project management tool. And so essentially, I built it between using process street air table, Zapier, and you know the other mix of ragtag tools that are in my arsenal. So in this case, I was trying to create a specific automation in air table that for some reason is just evading me and I'm sure I'm doing like one stupid thing wrong, but I asked air table or sorry, I asked Chad GPT first of all, I prompted it by telling it what automation I was trying to create, like the actions that triggers the end goal. And it gave me like a step by step process that I would say is a little bit more high level than this out, but and then I asked it to refine its guidance or expand on its guidance by saying okay, so for this step, this is where I'm getting stuck. What was how exactly what I set this up in air table, and so then, as you can see, the result has some details and it's more detailed than the previous query gave for that step. It's probably worth mentioning that in chat GPT right now, there's two versions of GPT, which is like the underlying, you know, algorithm, machine learning mechanism, whatever. So there's GPT 3.5, which is an older version, and then there's GPT for GPT four incorporates web browsing so it has more up to date guidance. So especially when you're trying to troubleshoot something like air table, which changes often and so, you know, if I were using the old version of chat GPT, I might have gotten a different answer. So when you're doing things like like this, you want to use like the newer version, there is a limitation. I think it's something like you can have 40 prompts within three hours or something like that. I don't think I've ever gotten close to hitting that. But I suppose if you were to ask, you know, a lot of follow up questions, or you're troubleshooting something very complicated, then you could hit that so that's just something to keep in mind that as a chat GPT user and I don't know what the distinction is for paid versus free, but I think that the paid version of Chad GPT is like worth its weight in gold. I think it's extremely undervalued and it's probably because they're using our data to train it. So they do get a benefit out of it. But you know, I would say if you're finding yourself limited by the free version, then just upgrade to the paid it's, it's so worth that.\r\n\r\nOkay, so now, here's the real fun part. So we're gonna go through how to build your own GPT and I'm gonna give you like a specific task to do and so you can either follow along with me while I do this now, or you can do this yourself. Later, watch the recording and replicate it. I will say the process is probably much more straightforward than you might think, if you've never done this before. So we'll go ahead and get started. Let me set my screen accordingly. So we're going to jump over to the blog Smith website, because this is going to be the basis for the very basic UBT that we're going to create today, which is based on one that I've already created and refined a little bit more than what we're going to get into. But okay, so the blacksmith has this writing style guide and on our website. It has this chapter version so you can jump you know to these different sections. To see how will we go about our writing style. It's something that's fairly industry agnostic, so definitely like a great resource. If you don't have your own writing style guide. You could use ours to build yours. But what I want to do is create a chat GPT bot based on this that essentially acts as like a blacksmith editor that defends our style and explains when a piece of copy is not following it. So we have this as a PDF which I've already downloaded. I'll just show you what it looks like really quick. And it's it's designed, but it's fairly plain texts. You know, it's not that much more complex visually than like a Google doc version of this. And I'm telling you this, because my first attempt at making a personal GPT was actually to solve a personal problem of mine, which is that I love the game Settlers of Catan and I wanted to make a Catan rules bot so that I could download all the PDFs of the rules for every version we have. And I could ask the GPT okay, like you know, here's some like obscure situation like what is the role, you know, based on these rule books? Because every once in a while, something like that pops up. And while I like to think of myself as a content expert, there are those niche situations that require further consideration. Unfortunately, on the Catan website, the PDFs that you can download are very complicated visually as PDF, so chat GPT in my limited experience has not been able to read them. So it's just something to note that like you want to give it like the plainest text version of whatever documents you want to share with it, but something like this would be fine. And I know that because I've tested it. Okay, so so if you want to follow along, you know, just hit download, and that's this is the exact file that we're going to use. So then you go to the chat GPT dashboard. Which looks like this. And like I told you, you can toggle between chat, or GPT 3.5 or GPT. Four, you can see you know those limitations as well as the added benefits of using that more recent version of it. So then you go to explore GP Ts, and you can see on my sidebar when it loads here that I have. We have chat GPT which is like you know, every every question you could ever want to ask and then I have a couple of my personal gptc here as well as some that I've explored in this explore LGBTs area that I'm just kind of playing around with. So this is also just like a really fun place to look through things, test things out and get ideas for the the GPS you might want to create. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead and click this Create button, and you'll see this interface. Again, it's pretty simple. And if you go to create, it's going to prompt you with specific questions, but if you kind of like are familiar with this personal GPT idea, you could also jump to the Configure tab and start filling it out. But I think that it's easiest to think about it from this Create Tab. And so it's going to prompt you with a couple of questions. So this first one is like what kind of chat GPT what kind of personal GPT Do you want to make? So I'm going to tell it, you know, I like to create a GPT that serves as an editor for my brand, the blog Smith. The goal is to have this GPT serve as a resource. That references our specific style guide, and suggests edits based on newly inputted copy. I'm just making this up. But the last time that I did this, I'd used something similar to that. And so after each input, it's going to think you know, it's going to react to the things that you're telling it and it's going to ask you to refine the way that it interacts with you. So we're not none of this is like rocket science right now. This is just like designing almost like the persona of who this GPT is going to be. So then it's gonna suggest to name I suggest naming this GPT blacksmith editor. Does that work for you? Sure. Yeah. And you can change this yourself. Like if you just want to, like get through this part. Just say yep, yep, that's fine. And the next thing is it's going to generate a profile picture and so these are new, they're a little bit arbitrary. It's just like for your own purposes, for fun. One thing that is kind of fun with the imagery and it doesn't always work so we'll see. But sometimes I asked it to change to adapt the picture to use like one of our brand colors just for fun. So I'll say like, can you update this image to incorporate our main brand color, which just using a text expander Simple as that? Let's do it does. So this is using that dolly dolly I never know how to say it to suggest images and, you know, it looks like Okay, right? But we're not we're not asking it to create anything like complicated at this point. So, so like for example, it didn't, it didn't really follow my query. So let's see if I try a different way. Can the image use, you know, our main branch color? Like this is this is definitely the limitation of AI is that sometimes it understands the query and sometimes it just doesn't and we won't get stuck on it. If it doesn't get it. I just want to see if changing it has any practical effect on it. So then after this, it's going to ask about Yeah, that doesn't do it. No, that's fine. Okay, so the next question. They're asking me to more narrowly defined the role of what this GPT is going to serve as I'm Oh, so I'll have you use the uploaded PDFs as this as the foundation for your edits any questions? So I can upload the PDF here. Or I can go to that configure tag and I can also tab and I can also I can also upload additional documents to help as well like with my blacksmith sales expert, I have like our proposal I have a document about our sales process. I have another GPT that I forgot to mention that's called the blacksmith like SEO guru or something like that. And it basically I uploaded a bunch of documents about our approach to SEO some stuff about our keyword research process, and our like philosophy behind the different steps as well as a document I created for our writers and editors. That's about let me see how to get out of that. That's about how we write about SEO to make sure that our philosophy is communicated correctly and specifically. So that's just an example of different documents that you might use to support the outputs here and to narrowly define what you want to base its answers on. Okay. One thing that's important to say is when you're uploading documents you want to make sure to kind of like give context and say like, this is how I want you to use it. And like, you know, I'm doing this, I'm uploading this. So I'm expecting you to use this as part of your output if you don't, if you don't refer to that document when you're setting it up or when you're interacting with it. It might just ignore it in some, in some use cases when I've been creating these personal GPS like that's happened where, for example, with this one, it'll make edits based on best practices, but not based on the document that I specifically wanted it to use. So that's why I used that language. And so it says, I've updated your GPS behavior to focus on our specific style guide based on the uploaded PDF. So that's great. You know, like, what options so one thing that it usually asks is like how do you want the GPT to communicate with you and I'm getting maybe ahead of myself, I'm gonna say no, that sounds good and see if it prompts me to ask about like the tone.\r\n\r\nOkay, so it's not gonna say it looks good, but what options do I have for how it communicates with me? In terms of tone of voice, again, usually asked so this is giving me some options here. Again, not usually in the way that it normally does. It kind of asked to like paragraph form versus like giving me several examples. I'm gonna say that I want it to be let's go with number three, which is encouraging and positive. I think that that's the ethos of how we edit at the box with the other things are true to um, yeah, so just for the sake of this, and you can always change this, you can always refine it. Okay, so it's updating the GPT. This is probably the last edit and then what I'll do is I'm going to grab some copy that I want it to, to edit just to show you how it comes full circle. And then I'm going to show you kind of like the back end of what it looks like. So let me grab that copy. I'm going to feed it an example of like a recent social post that we were editing and the formatting is going to be like a little bit funky here, which is fine, because this is just an example. And the blog the style guide isn't necessarily built with a focus on editing social copy, but again, it was just like a quick thing to to try. Okay, so it says it's updated it. It tells me you know what the point of it is no more adjustments needed. Let's try it out. Okay, so I'm going to show you how it works and then we'll show you the Configure and then we'll kind of end the day off with any questions. Okay. So it gives you some prompts based on what it thinks that you might ask it and you can edit this, but I'm going to say please suggest edits to the following copy, in quotes and quotations, those delimiters based on the blacksmith style guide PDF and again, it's gonna be a little sloppy looks like it didn't actually take the name of the GPT that we asked it to. So we'll we'll take a look at that too. So it's interesting depending on the prompt you give it and I've tried this a couple of times in this case, it's kind of separating it out by saying like okay, here's some of the things from the blacksmith style guide and here's like specific passages of copy and how we would change them. So that's interesting. But what I would probably prefer is that it edits the whole thing, and then it tells me what edits it made. So it's, again, it's referencing I can I can tell because I'm familiar with it, but it's referencing specific aspects of the blacksmith style guide, which is great, we know it's working. But what I'm going to ask you to do is to change the way it outputs it. Can you refine the previous output by starting with I might mess up exactly how to say this, but by starting with, like all of the copy with edits, then after words, shared the specific edits made from blog Smith style perspective, that might not be like the most effective prompt. We're just going to see what it says. Okay, yeah, it looks like it's understanding. Nature. The copy here is an important I just want to show you how something like this could work for your purposes. Okay, so this is what I wanted it it refined the copy first and then it told me what it refined and why. Um, so let's look at this Configure tab. So yeah, for whatever reason, it didn't add the name. That that it prompted me and asked me to so I'm gonna go ahead and add that and you can see it up here. You can see this description. You can see the instructions based on some of the things that we talked about when we were creating it. You can make changes to these conversation starters we might even say like what like other conversation starters, would you suggest using freelist UPC code? I'm just curious and I don't know what to do. You can see the PDF that we uploaded and I can upload more files. You can add additional capabilities. I think by default the web browsing and Dolly image generation is implemented for many of you today who deal with code, this code interpreter might be useful. And then AI actions is something that I've started to play around with but don't fully understand but there's a way that you can connect your personal GPT to Zapier so that for example, it could reference data and other apps. So for my blog, Smith sales GPT I'm trying to create an AI action that allows it to reference our air table CRM so that you could ask it questions about a certain lead or certain portfolio projects and things like that. So once I get that implemented, it's going to be so cool. Okay, so it's giving me some ideas for these conversation starters that are a little generic, but I could probably refine them further. I think the last thing to talk about is how you can either keep this to yourself or share it with other people. I think that these drafts are automatically saved. So if you X out of here before clicking Save, I believe it will still exist, but don't quote me on that. From there you can decide you know, if you want to, if you want to keep it to yourself if it's you know something that's for your own personal use cases, or if you want to share it with your team or if you want to share it with like the wider world like maybe you create a chatbot for your industry that other people could benefit from that you want to share. So, in most cases, probably anyone with the link is a good bet, if you ever intend intend to share it with other people. Okay, so let me jump back to my slides really quick. We're going to end off the day here. So here we go. me pull this back up. Um, okay, this is the link to grab the style guide if you want to use that to replicate what I did today. You can also grab that from the side being like um, I'll just say one more time. My book writing for humans and robots. It was the number one best seller in the SEO category. So if SEO and content is something that you want to invest more time and learning about then I would highly recommend my book. You can grab the first chapter for free on the books website, and you can grab the book on Amazon in both print and Kindle format. I'll give one more reminder for our live content UX audit tomorrow. I'd really love to help you workshop, your content, help you come up with ideas for making it even stronger and more effective. So you can use this link to do that and that will happen at the end of day two. And then, you know, outside of today, if you have any questions about the things that we're talking about, you can either email me Maddie at the blogspot.com or on Twitter, aka ex im at Mad Yasmin and then yeah, we'll end the day with any questions that have come up since going over some of this GPT stuff.\r\n\r\nYeah, great stuff. Thanks Maddie. You know, the custom GP tees are really interesting. And it's it's also not only for your own business, but also working for clients. It's an opportunity to really, it's, it's a service you can provide. We have a boy for example, that has a ton of they're an educational nonprofit and they have a ton of PDFs like 800 and an educational topic that they deal with and so we're investigating, what would it take to put those PDFs in there and then have a bot that you could query the entire library to find an answer to something right. It's just super, super useful. Yeah.\r\n\r\nOne one note on that Nathan is chat GPT. So they have a limitation of you can upload 20 Total documents but they don't say how large or small those documents have to be so OneNote for like anybody who's trying like this is something that came up with that Catan bot I was trying to make. You can combine the documents if need be.\r\n\r\nYeah. And chat CPT if you have a large library like that it might not be the best tool it sometimes there are a bunch of third party tools. I mean, if you go on App Sumo, every day, there's a new one that somebody's chat bot or whatever, but find one that the UI that you like and a lot of those don't have those limitations. Like they have a separate database that they're looking at with total sort of magic they've created. I don't know, I don't understand it. But anyway, yeah. So folks, a couple of questions stacked up there. If you have a question, add that to the zoom q&a, and we'll dive into it. So first question from Doug. Maddie, how does SEMrush or SEMrush fit into the landscape of content writing tools? What overlaps or complements with phrase? Sure,\r\n\r\nyeah. So I think of something like SEMrush or Ahrefs is being a great all in one. SEO tool. So people use it for more than content although content is like an important facet of them versus something like phrase or query scope is really just about content and just about content optimization, or, you know, in the case of like phrase and market Muse also generating content is the use case. But SEMrush I have I'll be honest, I have more experienced with a traps but they both they're both very similar and we actually use SEMrush like the keyword researchers and strategists on my team, we use SEMrush these days. But it is it is the tool that if we're comparing it to phrase and query scope, that's the tool that we use to define our primary keyword. It's before we run those reports. It's a tool that we use to come up with some secondary keywords. It's the tool that we use to identify feature snippet opportunities, we can do competitor research on it. You can do backlink tracking on it. You can audit your website. So I mean, it just it just serves such a bigger overall SEO use case. But there are many very useful content optimization tools. And so it's kind of like a higher budget tool than any of the ones that I've mentioned, but it will serve you know, many of your SEO purposes even outside of content. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nOkay, questions from Eddie. Eddie is writing tech blogs. I see now my keyword content from Reddit is ranking very good. I doubt Reddit content is helpful since usually people have vague answers to questions. What do you think about that?\r\n\r\nIt's an interesting question and I think I'm gonna take the opposite stance. I do think that Reddit content is helpful. There's something about people being like anonymous on the internet that like makes the truth come out. People feel like a little I guess like Freer with the information that they that they volunteer. And so I mean, you have to take it with a grain of salt because they're anonymous. They also might have an agenda that is not clear versus somebody who's coming out and saying, you know, I work for one of these tools or, you know, these are the clients they serve. And so that's like, why this relates to what I'm talking about. But I will say that sites like Reddit, Reddit and Quora are really interesting for learning more about your audience, learning about the things that like keep them up at night and so that's why they rank so high is because they are a wealth of information. They're not, you know, they're not using like the traditional methods to optimize their sites, but they are benefiting from all this unique user generated content because they've created communities. So, yeah, I mean, I don't I don't know exactly how to answer the question. I guess I'm kind of like answering around it, but I think that Reddit is a useful resource in general. I don't know that it can be counted on like aI right where Yeah, I can be confidently incorrect certainly. So to can, Reddit user is but they bring up some really interesting points that are worth investigating. So as long as if you are using it as a reference that you fact check, or you know, if you're I guess if the question is like, How can I outrank Reddit the the answer is like, I don't know.\r\n\r\nYou just said maybe Reddit pays Google. And honestly, we just did a story about this a week ago in our news roundup. It is actually Google who has purchased the rights to all of read its content. Alright, Gemini. Yeah, that just came out. The story last week was an unnamed AI but it's since come out that it's Google has purchased it right. So who knows? Yeah, Google does. Yeah. Doug says here's my favorite prompt. I add this to help me brainstorm chat. GPT add this to the end of your prep, ask me five questions that will improve the response you'll be giving me I use that too. It's really helpful. I\r\n\r\nlove that I I haven't considered that and that's why I think like discussions like this are so useful. Like, we can all learn so much from each other. I learned something new about this every day. For\r\n\r\nsure. The AI world is moving rapidly. And we were Mata you and I were talking earlier just we did an AI workshop here back in October, and there's so much that's new and better and different, even just in the last few months. It's pretty crazy. All right. That brings us to the end of questions. Tomorrow, we're talking about a UX content UX. So give us one more time an overview of what we're going to talk about tomorrow and we'll start to wrap things up here.\r\n\r\nOh, tomorrow. I was looking at the comments and somebody had mentioned let's say Ben had mentioned that to get them to use the right color and the GPT to be very specific, use hex color code when so I got distracted but um, okay, so tomorrow we're going to focus on the content reader experience. Content UX, another way of thinking about it. So we're going to talk a little bit about things like things that Google has said or page experience signals, so things that are like tangible that you can optimize around within your design to help your ranking on Google. And my philosophy when it comes to SEO is that there's three pillars, there's like the content and the things that you can affect on your own page. There's the website structure, so that's going to be a lot of what we talk about tomorrow. And then there's things like Off Page signals like backlinks, which we won't talk about, but you know, we can always have a discussion later or, you know, I'm sure Nathan will bring on somebody who talks about that at some point, too. So yeah, we'll talk about these like website signals, these page experience signals. We'll talk a little bit about website structure, things that you can do to create a better experience for your users, even if it's not necessarily something that Google takes into consideration for ranking and some things that they do. And then we will talk about auditing, you know, with practical tools and specifics, your contents, the nature of your contents UX. I'll tell you how to like run your own content UX audit, whether that's with tools or with people in person. And so that'll be that'll be kind of the nature of what we talk about tomorrow. Trying to bring that discussion full circle from the specific things that you can use to how to like measure if you're using them effectively, and then we'll end the day with a content UX audit from the things that ideally, y'all have submitted. So if you haven't, please use that form that we've linked to in that slide. Being link, and then I'll pick a couple for us to go over tomorrow.\r\n\r\nYep, very good. And that link is there in the chat. Once again, make sure you submit a URL that was a lot of fun last year when we did that very info wise. Yeah. So I will take care of that. Tomorrow. That's yeah, day two. All right. Maddie, good stuff today. As always, we'll have the recording up if anybody wants to go back and replay if you came in late. It'll be up in about an hour or so soon as it renders. And I will see you back here tomorrow, one o'clock central time for day two of content workshop. Have a good night. See you then.\r\n\r\nHear but as you're coming in, we're just asking what was your biggest takeaway from day one? You can sound off there in the chat. I'm also dropping in the new link bundle, I can type correctly. There is a new slide being linked, so make sure you grab that new one. It is updated on the replay page. But make sure you grab that new link because a few changes have been made since yesterday. That will let you follow along better.\r\n\r\nSome last minute tool suggestions. Ah,\r\n\r\nlove it. Love it all. Right, catch. Working for everybody now. Just about a minute and a half to go and again, we'd love to hear from you in the chat on what your biggest takeaways from day one we're. As we are waiting just another minute or so to get started. Also the link there for the live content UX audit is on the screen because we have a slide or two left if you'd like to submit your site or page or something for a content audit. It'll be a friendly review with with some good help to help you improve some of your language. So use that link. The link is in the link bundle in the chat. There on the screen. We do have a couple of slots if you'd like to participate in that. So Vivian, if you look at the replay link in the link bundle the academy link there is a PDF download link on that on the on the replay page. And that is the new updated slides. Yep, so that's all there ready to go on the replay page or you can view them on slide being right now. Yeah, not too many changes. New tools. All I was new to was fun tools. Yeah. Alright folks, about 30 seconds to go. Glad everybody's back for day two. Again, our check in question. Let us know in the chat. What your biggest takeaway from day one was? Particularly did you have you used any new GPT prompts since we played around with that yesterday, or has anybody taken the dive and made your own custom GPT based on\r\n\r\nor have any ideas for things that you want to try when you have time? Yeah, I could. I could use some more ideas myself. Yeah.\r\n\r\nFor sure. All right, folks. It is three minutes after someone to start our recording and we will get underway. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everybody, wherever you happen to be welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here and joined again by MADI. Azzaman for day two of the content accelerator for 2024 Welcome back. Maddie. Glad you're here.\r\n\r\nThank you so much for having me. Again. It's exciting to dig into some of these topics.\r\n\r\nAbsolutely. So we had a lot of fun yesterday talking about some AI stuff and some great principles for creating great content. And today we're looking more at the the user side of consuming content right what are we going to talk about today? Exactly.\r\n\r\nYeah, I think that you can think of today as being a way to practically test your content, whether that's with other people, whether that's with tools, understanding how it measures up against some of the guidelines that Google has shared, that are necessary for ranking, specifically when they have to do with the user experience. So we're going to kind of attack this from all angles. And, you know, hopefully it'll leave today with some really tangible tools to help you understand like, does your content provide a great reader experience? Or are there things that you could do to improve it?\r\n\r\nYeah, very good. And we do still have this content UX link on the screen. If you have not filled that out and you would like to there's still a slot or two left for the second hour, we'll do some live content review. So grab that now. The link is there in the chat as well. A couple little bits of housekeeping and we'll turn it back over to Matty as usual. Ask your questions using the zoom q&a And we'll take those questions at the end of each hour today. break in the middle as usual. One note is that the slides have been updated since yesterday. So in the chat is the new slide being link. And if you want the PDF download, just go onto the replay page with the link there and the link bundle and you can download the PDF there as well that has all the new updates on the slides. So with that, I'm going to disappear Maddie, let's get started.\r\n\r\nLet's do it. So yeah, if if you want to submit something for this live content UX audit, ideally, it's like a page on your website, not not something like a PDF, because we want to look at how the content interacts with design. And like Nathan said, you know, it's a friendly review. We're not like looking for issues. We're just looking for things that you could do to perhaps improve the content experience. Get another set of eyes on it. And it's just a practical way to apply some of the tools suggestions I'm going to give you so with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. We're going to start today by talking about Google guidelines for what makes up a great user experience, especially when it has to do with content and specifically we're going to talk from the perspective of Google's quality rater guidelines. And then after I go through a couple specifics there, we're going to talk more broadly about Google's page quality signals. I think that's what it's called. I haven't labeled in the next slide but things that have to do with what they've told us influenced ranking high and relevant search, you know, all else equal, if you have great content, what aspects of your website design, you know, must be present of your website structure must be present in order for you to rank high and relevant search. So the first part is a little bit more I would say qualitative. And then the second part is going to be a little bit more quantitative. So the learn more link is for an article I wrote a while back for Search Engine Journal. This was specifically focusing on aspects of Google's quality rater guidelines that have to do with the user experience. And so I think it was a couple of years ago now I read through the entire quality rater guidelines, which if you're interested in SEO, and user experience, I would highly recommend at least giving it a skim. It's kind of hard to do because it's like 175 pages, but there's some really good nuggets in there about how Google looks at search, how they judge quality of content, how they determine if a page of a search result meets the needs of the searcher who's looking for it. And so the quality rater guidelines what's worth mentioning is that to some extent you have to take with a grain of salt because this is not something that directly influences rankings. What happens is human quality raters that they hire read through these guidelines, they're tested on them to make sure that they understand what Google is looking for and then they manually rate different website results based on a certain query. And so what happens is that Google gets that information. It helps them you know, refine their algorithm in terms of the general direction they want to take with it, but it doesn't necessarily result in any manual adjustments for whatever websites they're ranking. It's it's more of like a research process. So that's, that's what the quality rater guidelines are. They're a tool to help Google research what the web looks like right now in order to make decisions about how they want to adjust their algorithm for the rest of us. But all that being said, Whenever Google gives us information, whenever they volunteer details about how they look at search, and how they define quality, and like a great user experience, I think that we would be wise to take note of that if it is in fact our goal to rank in relevant search. And I think at the end of the day, whether it is or not, I think Google tries to maintain a high standard for quality. I think that it's their philosophy, philosophy, that content is king, you know that that good? Content is important. And so again, whether search is your goal or not, it's worth it's worth at least like listening to what they have to say. And so, for your benefit, I've tried to break down some of the most important things from the quality rater guidelines specifically having to do with the topic that we are discussing today. So the first thing that they mentioned or they they talk about the quality rater guidelines has to do with interstitials. So back in, it was either 2017 or 2018. They made an update to their algorithm, and they told us about it is again one of those rare cases where they're just upfront. And they said that like if you're using popups say, for example, to gather somebody's email address, or you know, it maybe you're on an E commerce site to advertise the sale, something that obscures the content that you have to interact with you either put your email in, or you have to click the X button, you know, something like that, that you have to interact with in order to use the content on the page. They call that an intrusive interstitial. And so what happened was it really it really resulted in a big change for how people use conversions, I guess on their website, so you know, bloggers and people who do affiliate marketing and of course, yeah, ecommerce, and businesses trying to get email subscribers all had to fundamentally change the way that they approach gathering email addresses. And I'm going to talk a little bit later about what you can do instead, that doesn't violate Google's guidelines. But again, from Google's perspective, they say that interstitials make it difficult to use the main content of the page. And so when they're talking in the quality rater guidelines, they frequently refer to MC main content, which is like what the searcher is ultimately going to your website for and so you could say generally speaking, that they're trying to defend the experience of the main content. And to like, skip ahead to the point here about ads, when they talk about ads, that Google recognizes that and they say this in the quality rater guidelines, that ads don't automatically equate to low quality, they understand that ads are in many cases, the reason a site can continue existing. But that being said, there is like a right and a wrong way to go about implementing them. And so they say the too many or like large ads hurt the user experience. And then that case, the human quality raters should assign that site that result, a low rating. So again, you want to think in terms of the main content is the ad obscuring it? Is it taking away from it? If not, you're probably okay. But it's just good. To keep in mind that Google's not saying no, you can't have ads. You just have to be thoughtful about it. And when I did some of these UX audits in the past, like the ones that we're going to do later today, I did a couple of for some members of the Denver bloggers club one of the local clubs that I've been involved with here. And one thing I noticed about a lot of them was you know that they'd have an ad in the sidebar, they'd have an ad in their footer. They'd have an ad a couple times throughout their blog content, and it was probably Google Adsense that they were using, or some other ad network. Like it. And again, it's like I understand that you're monetizing your site using ADS. But at the end of the day, it's probably working against you because people if you were to look, you know into the data like the scroll depth and the time on page and things like that, using Google Analytics, for example. You probably see that on those pages that are very heavy with ads that people abandon the page pretty quickly because it's just a bad reader experience. So to go back a point here, clickbait Google has a couple of pieces of guidance in the quality rater guidelines about that specifically.\r\n\r\nGenerally speaking, a good page sets expectations or good title sets expectations for wherever it's leaving you. And so clickbait is something that it can certainly be effective and getting attention and getting clicks, but it can be a very unsatisfying experience if it doesn't do something to deliver on the promise made in the title. Um, the Google specifically says that clickbait headings detract from high main content. So, you know, that's something that they're specifically looking for and guiding people to, to comment on. And they say also that like every page should have a page title. It shouldn't just be presented without buttoning it up that way. And that title should describe page content. So again, it's a balance. Writing a good title, I think is very much in art. But it shouldn't be misleading. That's that's the key here. Um, so the last point here is that when it comes to creating content, you want the answer to your query to be pretty prominent in the results. You don't want people to click through and then have to dig to find that. And Google has a couple of different SERP features, I would say where they're trying to, you know, first of all, answer this within search so that you don't click through, which is a problem for us content creators, but it's also perhaps an opportunity when we think about things like a Featured Snippet, which is just that sort of box that shows up above any other search results and it's usually summarizing kind of like the nature of what that person is looking for what Google thinks that person is looking for. There's other things like Google will index parts of a page and link to that specific part and highlight it you probably noticed that yourself when doing search and looking for something very specific. And so that's something that they do, it's not, to my knowledge, it's not something that you can necessarily optimize for. It's it's their methodologies of indexing and surfacing content. But the example that they gave in the quality rater guidelines was something about like somebody searching Abraham Lincoln's birthday. And when somebody clicked through like it was present on the page, but it wasn't prominently answered. And so in that case, they were instructing the human quality rater to give that like a not as good rating for meeting the needs of the searcher. So yeah, I mean, definitely, that's, that's kind of most of what I'm going to say about the quality rater guidelines. But I really think it is a very interesting document and especially if you look at the examples they give in terms of how they're making those determinations. There's a lot of little nuggets of truth and we also have a blog post on the blacksmith website that digs into this even outside of like the user experience sort of and like design focus. So if you want another take on that then definitely check that out. We just went in and updated it recently. So let's talk more broadly now about some search signals from Google things that Google has told us about the page experience and you know, importantly, I think how to how to like measure that, quantitatively. Google, we talked a little bit about helpful content yesterday and that algorithm update which was the year a year and a half ago, something like that. Google has been has said that a good page experience is a requirement. For creating what they define as helpful content. So you know, all these algorithm updates are designed to support Google's mission, you know, the way that they look at content quality and things like that, of course, they all you know, more or less feed into each other, but I think it's worth mentioning that like that is an aspect of having helpful content. Alright, so we're gonna start with what is collectively known as the core web vitals so the core web vitals, this algorithm update, or Google announcing this page signal? came about? I want to say it was 2021. So they've been around for a while. And interestingly, and what we'll go over is they have changed slightly since coming out. But the idea here was to give people these these three specifically, page signals, were to give people more tangibility around how to measure the the page experience. Because up until that point, it was a little bit innocuous, it was hard to conceptualize, in terms of knowing like where you actually rank according to Google's own way of looking at it. So the first page signal of the quarter web vitals is the largest Contentful paint, which is a facet of page loading, loading speed. And so their definition is that it reports the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport relative to when the page first started loading. So if we think about I think most of these core web vitals are more or less referring to like above the fold, like what you see before you scroll, it's like that first impression that a person has with your website and most designs, most tools that you use to optimize loading and things like that, typically are set up so that the rest of the page loads later but you want you know what's visible initially to load quickly and first so that people can start interacting with it, and then it gives time for the rest of the page to load. So another way of thinking about this is that this signal takes note of the largest element on every web page and measures its total loading. Time. So maybe this is an image, maybe it's video, you know, typically at some, I would say some sort of media thing, but it could be your theme in general, it could be a very slow loading plugin. So these are all things that you'd want to keep in mind in terms of optimizing this particular factor. And when I say I guess, like the theme and plugins, it's like the output of them that you would implement on your page. So okay, so how do you get a good largest Contentful paint so according to Google, whatever this largest element is, is about 2.5 Seconds or Less of loading time and you have a little bit of wiggle room here, before it gets to, you know, this like poor area, but you'll notice that it's not a super long time. And I think that this particular man measurement here, it relates to something that Google's said before and shared in their own documentation, which is that, you know, the majority of people bounce if a website doesn't load within three seconds or less. I'm sure that that guidance has changed over time because that's a dated stat. But it still goes to show that we're kind of like within that guideline, with this particular measurement of a particular element on a page. So the next one is first input delay, and this is actually what it was. This has since been updated. And I'm going to show you an example of what this looks like. But let's let's talk about like the original intent of it and then what it has become. So first input delay is a measure of interactivity. It measures the time from when a user first interacts with the page to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction. So that sounds like gibberish. Basically, the lower a website's fid score, the more promptly it starts processing users clicks and swipes again, interactivity like how long does it take for somebody to actually be able to use a page? So this measurement per Google, a good fit is 100 milliseconds or less. So that's what it was right? But what is it now? So this GIF kind of shows an example of poor responsiveness versus good responsive responsiveness from Google's perspective, but probably from all of us, as users as well and looking at it you you probably have been in this position before where like, you click on something and then there's this little bit of a delay before you are actually able to interact with it. And so Google essentially took took this concept that they had initially defined as a core web vital and added some color to it, I guess. And so the new measurement is that it's, it's below or at 200 milliseconds. That so up from I think, what was it 100 before so they're giving you a I guess a little bit more time to create interactivity here. And just so you know, this new measurement is actually not fully unveiled yet, but it will be as of March. 12th. That's when this takes effect and takes over. So they say that, you know, some interactions will actually take longer than others. But when it comes to especially complex interactions, you want to be able to quickly present some initial initial visual feedback so that the user knows that something is happening\r\n\r\nthe time until the next payment is the earliest opportunity to do this. So the intent is not to measure like every eventual effect of the interaction, but the time in which the next interaction is being blocked. So you essentially want to delay you want to if you are delaying some visual feedback, then you might be giving users the impression that the page isn't responding to their actions, which is ultimately a bad user experience, right. So the goal of this new measurement is to ensure the time from when a user initiates an interaction until the next frame is painted in the shortest time as possible, for all or at least most of the interactions the user make. So it might seem like a small distinction between the first input delay and the interaction to Next paint but I guess if we were to summarize them, the first input delay is really focusing on that initial interaction. And the interaction to Next paint is focusing on the difference between interactions. I think that's one way to look at it. Okay, so then the last core web vital is related to visual stability. And it's called cumulative layout shift. And so their definition Google Developers definition is that it measures the sum total of all individual layout shifts scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan. of the page. Okay, but what does that mean? So Visual stability means that a web page remain stable throughout the users visit. It means that text isn't suddenly moving as new elements load or shifting other elements of the page and I think the the unfortunate end result of when this is bad, is when it makes the user click a link or perhaps a buy button or something like that, unintentionally, they were trying to click something but because of something shifting after it loaded, it pushed them somewhere else. And again, this is probably something where either something comes to mind where that's happened to you or like, the next time it does, then you'll be like, oh, yeah, that was the cumulatively out shift the site is getting, it probably has a pretty bad score for that. Um, so with the core web vitals, visual stability became more of a priority. And you really have to have very minimal minimal instability in order for your pages to be considered for ranking high in a relevant search engine results page. So those are the core lead vitals, that's probably the newest addition to these page signals that relate to the content experience, but we're also going to go over some of the old like, you know, tried and true important things that have to do with page experience, such as mobile friendliness. I mean, this is something this is probably one of the first big things that Google told us was important for ranking, high and relevant search. Besides maybe page load, I think Page Speed like performance and mobile friendliness, like these are things that kind of happened around the same time in terms of a Google like, came out and said, like, you must prioritize these if you want to rank. So Google used to be a desktop first indexing property. But you know, as more and more people started using their mobile devices, you know, the iPhone came out and so now suddenly, everybody had a computer in their hand. And then another thing that's probably worth considering too, is like a lot of people in developing countries like they might not have a desktop or like a laptop computer, but most people have a mobile phone at this point. And so Google now operates off of the idea, or off of the principle, I guess, of mobile first indexing. So if your website is not optimized properly for mobile responsiveness for mobile devices, then that is going to hurt it's going to greatly hurt your ability to rank and relevant search and your desktop site could look perfect. It can rank perfectly in terms of all these other factors that Google tells us about. But if your mobile site is off, it's it's going to affect your desktop rankings as well. So, you know, going into all of the specifics of what's mobile friendly is kind of outside the scope of what we're going to talk about today. But I mean, it's things like making sure that your text is readable. It's making sure that your images are, you know, visible and processable that they don't get skewed strangely. It's you know, thinking about some of those core web vitals and like how elements interact with each other like our buttons too close together so that people are hitting the wrong thing. So all these things are are considerations for making your website mobile friendly. And I think you know, with the way that things like page builders, builders for WordPress work, the way that people design themes for WordPress. This is this is like very much top of mind for everyone who's designing for WordPress. So it's a lot easier to implement now versus perhaps when this update was first released into the world. So Safe Browsing is something that I they've actually taken out of what they call these like page experience factors, like I don't know if it's an official one anymore, it was in the past. And maybe it's because now we have HTTPS as an additional factor that's kind of related but I think it's still worth mentioning this from a content experience factor. So Safe Browsing is just that you can use a website that is free of malware, you know, that you can be like, reasonably sure that like malware isn't present, you're not going to get it you're not going to interact with it, and that it's not you know, affecting the output of whatever site it could be installed on. And so in order to protect yourself against this, there's different tools you could use. wordfence is a customer of mine, so I'm going to talk about them and I think that their tool and their team is great. They have a lot of cool security researchers and cybersecurity experts on their team. So they're very on top of like any new things that come out, but they have this product called wordfence care where they'll go in they'll identify them all where they'll clean it up for you and we'll share best practices for how to avoid it in the future and you know, additional steps that you can take. So I do think that you need some sort of tool on your website in order to prevent, you know, the worst effects of malware. And I guess the other thing that I would mention too, is to like always have backups of your site, because malware can really mess things up. And so that's that's like your first line of defense. So HTTPS also has to do, I guess, essentially the same idea of like Safe Browsing, maybe from a slightly different perspective. And so Google again said, you know, we're not going to rank websites that do not have HTTPS in place compared to those that do. You know, after that update happened, and that was a slightly more recent update, but it was still a few years ago, and so HTTPS in order to implement that, essentially, you just install an SSL certificate. And to be fair, there are different types of SSL certificates. Most web hosts have that functionality, where you can fairly easily implement one and then it creates either automatically or there might be some manual steps. You have to take where it it redirects your existing HTTP URLs to the HTTPS version. So that's important to make sure that that's working. Otherwise, it's going to break your site but again, most web hosts have a fairly straightforward process for implementing this and a free ssl certificate or I should say an included one with your hosting plan, but depending on your needs, you might need a different one. So that's something that you have to explore based on your industry like, like E commerce might have a higher level of SSL certificate needed, but for you know, the general small business owner designer, things like that, probably what your web host has is good enough. And so to be able to see if HTTPS is working within Chrome specifically and I'm sure many other web browsers but but chrome because it's a product of Google. There's a little button next to your domain name in the URL bar, and you can click it and see that the SSL certificate is working and that the connection is secure and I would say that SSL certificates in HTTPS are important for people who are interacting with the website. I mean, you kind of you kind of have to have it no matter what in order to rank but they're the purpose of it is that if somebody were to be giving their sensitive information, you know if they're on an E commerce site, and they're, you know, putting in their address or their credit card number or you know, a banking website and people are logging in, and you know, once they log in, that user has access to their bank accounts and their money and things like that. That's kind of the like, ideal use case of HTTPS is to protect the people who are entering that sensitive information to make them feel safe on your website.\r\n\r\nWe talked about this earlier, having no intrusive interstitials so these are the pop ups the image you see is something that Google shared when they announced this ranking signal to show what not to do, essentially where these ads are obscuring access to the main content. You shouldn't have to click in order to get to the main content. So what do you do instead? Here are a couple of examples from the blacksmith website. So the first one is we have a floating bar that basically is at the top of the content and then just pushes it down. And in this case, I used it to add like reminder about my book, a button to click to buy it you could use it to get email signups. I think another great example is like E commerce. If you're having a sale or if you want to say, you know, free shipping on orders over $50 or something like that. I think that's a really excellent use of a floating bar. It's like what's the most important thing happening for this business right now or use it to collect email signups? Then there's also next to it is a welcome mat, which is designed you know, very similar lead to how an email popup would look but the difference is that it's like embedded on the page. So it's not getting in the way of the content. It's part of the content. You can choose whether or not you interact with it beyond scrolling. Another version of that is a content upgrade. So on certain blog posts, let's say that you have additional resources, maybe you've turned that blog post into a checklist or there's a certain template that you're talking about in the blog posts, and people you want to incentivize people to share their email in order to access it. So having a content upgrade, which again is like an embedded version, at the end of your blog post about that specific resource is a totally valid way to see get emails that's not going to violate this intrusive interstitial guidance from Google. The other thing that you can think about is using email popups, but delaying when they pop up. So that kind of gets around Google's guidance. You could use what's called like exit intent technology. So when somebody scrolls for the Back button, or the, you know, X in the browser, then what happens is an email popup gets deployed where you know, it asks for somebody if they want to subscribe, for example. You can also use that same idea based on things like scroll depth, if somebody gets to a certain depth on a page, you know, that tends to indicate interest. It's given them a chance to interact with the content. Or you could have a deploy on certain pages. You ideally after they've seen other pages, so maybe after they've gone to a certain number of pages that deploys. So there's there's a couple of different ways to think about it that don't get in the way of Google's guidance. And we do have a page I forgot to link it here. But we do have a blog post on the blacksmith website that goes into each of these things and different use cases and things like that a little bit dated, but it's all the same advice. Okay, so now that we've talked about Google's quality raters guidelines, which is indirectly related to search rankings, and Google's page experience signals, which are directly related to search rankings, I wanted to talk a little bit about website structure and design I would say, especially as it relates to ranking high in relevant search, but certainly how it impacts the content user experience. So it's kind of like a mix of the things that we're talking about, but expanding on them as well. So the first like factor that you want to optimize your website around your content in general, is crawlability. And when I talked about crawlability, I'm talking about Google's ability to like fully index all the resources on your site. Is there anything that is getting in the way of Google doing that, like, for example, errors in your sitemap, like maybe you're unintentionally excluding certain pages? Maybe you know, you haven't created enough connections between your pages for Google to understand how they relate to each other. And so a couple of guidelines here, you know, first of all, is that when you're creating content, it's important to add external links. Think of these as your ability to add context to prove claims these are things that you know, you can also use let's say that you're writing about a topic and there's a related topic and it doesn't really make sense for you to cover it in your content. Like maybe it would just make your your piece go on too long. But it's something that people might want to learn more about. So you find a relevant resource from a trusted site and you link it External links are great. I mean, you might, I guess, worry. Like, is that going to lead people away from my page? You know, is there any like negative impact of that? I think that's just kind of the way that content works, that people are always looking for more information. You can set it so that it opens in a new window so that they're still on your page while they explore that content. But yeah, as the best practice, have an external linking policy, it makes sure it's to good quality content and I think that, like with this next point, it helps Google understand what your content is about. So besides external resources, you also want to incorporate internal links. This just helps Google understand the relationships between the different pieces of content on your website, ultimately, what your website is about. It's helping with that crawl ability and that index ability. It's helping Google as robot to understand, you know, these different connections. So again, it's important really to have these two types of links and really every page and relate certainly every piece of content. And then, the flip side of all this is like as you create content, things are going to change. External links might become broken. Internal links, you might change, you know, like for example, the URL slug of them, and they might become broken. So I guess my first tip is to make sure that you have some sort of redirect solution implemented, there are different plugins that you can use to automatically if you change the URL slug of something, then it creates a redirect so anything that already links to a will be updated to that new link. But it's also having a process for like auditing your content to look for these problems. And one of the tools that I'm going to show you later today will help make that a little bit easier. But it's also just a matter of like I don't know, quarterly at least, or depending on the size of your website, quarterly, maybe every six months or so, having just a process to kind of go through what exists and if you need to fix anything. So we're talking a little bit about URL structure and I will say when it comes to creating content, you want to be pretty sure of the URL you want to use before you publish it. Because it is a factor in ranking, and you can use redirects, but it's kind of hard to explain them in the context of what we're talking about today without getting deep into SEO, but it's just generally like to trust me that it's a best practice to not mess with the URL after you publish, you know, after it gained some traction in search and things like that. But it happens and that's why you use redirects. But that being said, you could at least start with best practices. So the first thing is to incorporate your target keywords in that slug. So like yesterday, I showed you some tools we use for an article we wrote about AI detectors, so let's just pretend the keyword is like aI detector tools. You'd want that to be the slug. Without really like any extra information. You want to keep your URLs as succinct as possible so that Google doesn't have to take a lot of extra time to parse them. And so what that means is within within WordPress, you can customize your URL structure for blogging. And you can do things like add categories to the URL, you can add the date to the URL. My suggestion is to not do that the only reason that you might want to add like a subdirectory within your blog content or some other specific category, like if you have case studies or something like that, is because you can use that subdirectory to group pieces of content together to measure them in like Google Analytics GA for these days. But that's kind of an advanced use case and that's only if you plan on actually like doing a deep dive into the analytics. From an SEO perspective, I highly recommend against it. It should be your website url.com forward slash keyword. And when you're implementing those keywords, you're going to want to add a dash between each word so if the keywords AI detector tools, it's a i dash detector dash tools\r\n\r\nfor certain things like articles, a and words like the things that aren't, you know, specific keywords generally speaking, you can drop those when you're creating the slug. We have some guidelines on the style guide that I shared with you yesterday on the bugs with website that's also linked in the slides so or the PDF as well. So if you if you want to dive into more SEO and URL and keyword best practices and definitely check out our guidance on that. Um, duplicate content is worth mentioning from this perspective of the user experience mostly in terms of how Google would interpret that. So generally speaking, duplicate content is like you publish a blog on your website and then a situation that could come up that seems innocuous enough is that you know, somebody in your industry says oh my god, I loved your blog posts on whatever, I'd love to republish it on my site. And you say okay, and then maybe this site, you know, has more authority than you and maybe they have a better approach to SEO, maybe they've just been around longer. And what could end up happening is that even though you were the original publisher, and Google does take that into consideration, but this other site may outrank you with your own same content. So that's duplicate content. It could be a whole blog post, it can be an excerpt of it, it could be like a piece of it. So duplicate content, generally speaking, like try to avoid that. You can add a tag to your link called the canonical tag, which basically points back to the original content and says, This is the person this is the site that originally published it, even though we have now published it here. And so Google takes that into consideration, but they really make their own choices about who they're going to rank and so that that's not the be all end all way of making sure that the original publisher ranks highest in search, all else equal. Um, with all that being said, in my experience, you can typically republish things like your blog content on mediums like LinkedIn and medium you know, original copy without making changes. As long as you wait, I would say at least a week from the original published date to do that. This is this is my experience and that saying that it's completely scientific, the advice that I'm giving you, it's something that you should experiment with, if that's something that you're interested in, but also take note of what ends up happening and discontinue if it's getting in the way of ranking your own content on your own website. But when it comes to duplicate content, if you if you get approached by someone, you know, like the example that I gave, who wants to republish something that you wrote, what would be a better situation for you? It would be more work, but it's to say like, let me write a new version of this article, like maybe you take another stance on it, maybe you you just kind of like repurpose it in a different way. I would highly recommend against duplicating your content, either on another page on your website, such as using product descriptions that like a manufacturer provided or maybe you have, you know, two variations of something and so you're using almost the same product description or again, like the example that I gave doing it on another site, so I just wanted to add a cautionary tale for duplicate content because a it is kind of a bad user experience, but be it'll also more than likely hurt you in search without a very strategic approach. And then the last thing I want to say on this particular topic is about designing website navigation and best practices around that. So first of all, you want to use descriptive and recognizable menu item titles. And the example that I always give for this is the difference between something that's called news and something that's called blog. So in my in my experience, news is like an enterprise business that has a media arm and they're publishing their press releases and, you know, things that are relevant to their company, new product updates, things like that. Whereas blog is more articles. It's you know, the how tos. It's the list of coals. Its product lead content, for example, but it's not exclusively focused on that company's news. So it's important, I think, to match the heuristics of what your users are used to and one way that you might be able to figure this out if you're unsure is just kind of see like what the competition is doing and how they're naming their menu items. Or just ask some of your users like, Does this make sense? And we'll talk next about how to conduct a UX audit and that's something that you could do as part of it. There's this thing called the three click rule, which you may have heard about. Nielsen Norman Group actually debunked this as being like ideal or even something that you should totally consider. It's the number three is arbitrary, I guess is what I'm trying to say. But it's the idea that within three clicks, a user searching or user looking for something will find it through your website navigation without necessarily having to go to like an internal search. So well, it's arbitrary. I think it's still a good thing to keep in mind, which is just that people should be able to easily and quickly find what they need your your menu should support that. And then creating category grouping. So like for example, on our website, we have a Resources tab and it has the blog, it has some of like my YouTube content. It has our style guide. All of these are resources they have to do with like things that we're sharing with other people versus we have another tab that's about our work. And so it has case studies and like portfolio examples, and it's more focused on like Final outputs that you know, fit, you know, things that we do with certain clients. So just a couple of things to think about in terms of website navigation. I'm going to start this topic and then we'll break I think maybe in like five minutes from now, but I'll just go ahead and get this started. So let's talk a little bit now that you've learned about these different factors for how to understand user experience from, from the user's point of view from Google's point of view. Let's talk about how you can continue to make your own websites user experience better by implementing a UX audit. So UX audit, we might also call it a user tests. I think they're maybe slightly different concepts, but I'm going to use them interchangeably today. So usability testing involves observing how users interact with products like your websites. The purpose is to get a better understanding of how real people use what you've designed. And really the idea here is you want to combat any assumptions that you've made incorrectly, which is impossible for you to figure out by yourself. That's why we pull in other people. You can use your tests during just about any stage of project it doesn't have to be like the final part. It could really be during the wireframing stage. It could be you know at the midpoint it could be even after you've launched but you've added some new things. So why bother with UX audits? First of all, we're talking about it today because there's a strong relationship between the user experience and SEO. I think we've proven that by talking about specific elements of the quality rater guidelines that point to UX, as well as the page experience factors that Google's specifically told us. If you care about SEO, you should care about UX in terms of things like your page, loading your mobile responsiveness, and using things like HTTPS. To invoke privacy for your users information. It also allows you to uncover issues that might kill conversions. I mean, I think this is one of the most important use cases of a UX audit is to look for things that are getting in the way of whatever your end goal is with the website. Because we're all WordPress users here, probably most of us at least, you've probably interacted with whether it's your own design or somebody else's that where you recognize that somebody forgot to edit the demo content they've, you know, implemented it and they've gone in and made their changes. But you know, there's that hello world post they forgot to delete or there's something you know, and one of the menus, maybe the footer menu that they forgot to take out that, you know, they never actually customized and so I think UX audit would be good at surfacing that if you're if you're kind of blind to it, because you're too close to the project. And with all that being said, a UX audit helps to get out of your own head. We're all human, we're imperfect.\r\n\r\nAnd really, I mean, it's it's easy to say I think when it comes to writing content, like as much as like, I have a process for editing and looking for mistakes and things like that. Like I still use an editor whenever I write anything, because I need to get out of my own head in order to make sure that I'm not missing something important. So the same can certainly be said about about website design and doing UX audits. So at the end of the day, we all operate based on certain assumptions, but what if yours are wrong? I'll just go through another slide or two and then we'll break so in terms of picking user testers, there's a couple of different populations you could consider. And I'm also going to share a couple of different like marketplaces where you could find these people, but you can start with the people that already exist in your circle your colleagues, you know, the people that you work with, but also maybe your friends and your family members. Wow, this is a great place to start. Don't discount the impact of their own bias and desire to please you, especially if you're asking your mom for input she's probably not going to be super critical. And and you know, it's going to be more of a pat on the back then something useful. And even like people like your work colleagues, they they still may be too close to a project to provide useful feedback, but it's a good place to start. You can also recruit volunteers from your own audience. Again, they might have a bias if they really love you. They might be hesitant to give you really great feedback. But they're also probably very willing to help you make something that's better. So you can start with like your brand ambassadors, anybody who would consider themselves your biggest fans, things like that. Ultimately, though, your best bet is going to be unbiased third parties who don't know you, you know, who don't have like a stake in what you're doing. I would say ideally, if you could get a couple people from that pool and then maybe one or two people from these other pools of populations, you'll get a couple of different perspectives. And when it comes to some of the marketplaces that I'm going to show you, you can also filter by certain demographics, you know, age, gender, level of education, like whatever is important to like the target audience that you want feedback from, generally speaking, you can filter and on those people. Maybe we'll just go to the top of the hour, and then we'll and then we'll definitely break then. So how many user testers are enough for each design stage? I've mentioned a couple different populations you could pick from. This is another Nielsen Norman Group reference. They are a really great resource when it comes to anything user experience user testing and things like that. And so Jacob Nielsen wrote this column and he the column was titled Why you only need to test with five users. So that's his official recommendation is for each stage that you test five users is going to be more or less enough you're going to get marginal returns marginal new information after that point. So you know, unless you're getting wildly different things from those five user testers, you can probably stop it there. He also says that it's best to involve a larger quantity of user testers earlier on in the project if you're going to test during like the wireframing stage. Versus like, when a website's like basically ready to launch it's going to be harder to make noticeable and useful changes at that point. It's going to be kind of locked in. So I think that that makes sense. Um, so we'll just start with some of the questions that you might use. When designing usability testing, it is important to to be thoughtful about this before you start you you don't want to just like go into a blind and just, you know, like, what do you think of this website? You want to have a strategic approach if you want to get useful information? So my suggestion is to start start by defining whatever your goals are, I mean, is there something in particular that you're looking to test? Are you wanting to make sure that this design is understandable to your target demographic? Is there something that isn't currently working with the design, something that's maybe hurting conversions? So whatever your goal is, like set that intention, and the questions will come more easily after that? You want to also be asking questions about the tester and how they interact with the Internet. And there's a couple of reasons for this. So one example is like you could ask the person what kind of smartphone do you use and asking this particular question is good because it kind of gauges like their familiarity with technology like how they're going to interact with your design. Somebody who uses a flip phone, for example, is probably going to have a much different level of internet savviness and how they interact with the design versus somebody who has like the latest gadget as their device. The other benefit of this question is to especially if you're doing an in person test is to kind of relax them. It's kind of like a little bit of small talk almost so that they can ease into the test, especially if that's not something that they often do. You want to define a specific action for the user to take. So this goes back to the goals. Let's say that, you know, you have an E commerce site that you're testing and you know, there's some sort of issue with people abandoning the cart, you know, after they add some products and so maybe you want to have that person go through the action of adding something, and then starting checkout. And seeing like, where in the process, there's friction, that could be one action that you want them to take. And so at this point, you want to ask them how they go about it, have them sort of like narrate and explain as they go through each step. The more you can dig into each specific action that the user takes the more detailed insight that you'll get as to how they're actually using your website. So I think with that being said, we have a couple more questions that we could talk about, but I think now is probably a good time to let everybody take a little bit of a break. And then after that, we'll finish this discussion of how to run a UX audit. I'm going to give you a bunch of tools to use to do your own tests. yourself, essentially. And then we'll finish off with that live content UX audit. Sounds\r\n\r\nlike a good idea. No questions in the q&a right now. So let's just go and take that break. It's two o'clock. About a five minute break. Is that good? Maddie? That sounds good. All right. So let's back be back at 205 and we're quiet until then. See ya. Then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We're back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, folks, we are back and ready to begin. Let me get the recording started here. All right, folks, we're back for the final hour. Of the website content accelerator. We got a lot to talk about in the next hour, so I'm just gonna let you get right to it. Maddie. Sounds\r\n\r\ngreat. Yeah. Thanks for sticking with me so far. Excited to finish this off strong and yeah, hopefully give you some really tangible things that you can take away. For your own processes. So I'm continuing this discussion that we started about UX audits and designing them. Okay, so we talked about this. Let's go to the next point. What so I used to offer UX audits as a service when I used to be on Fiverr. It was my most popular gig by far. And the way that I structured it was I basically priced by the page. And so when you're doing a UX audit, you want to be sure to identify whichever pages are the most important, especially if you have a big site like you don't necessarily want. Just going back to the E commerce example like you don't necessarily want to audit like every single product page, especially if you're looking for trends, maybe one you know prime example of what your product pages look like maybe one category page, your homepage, your checkout flow, like if somebody had me audit an E commerce site that that tended to be kind of what it looks like. You know, it's also things like maybe more generally, your homepage, your about page service page. So it really depends on what you're trying to do. But you could ask questions in your UX audit, like, you know, what do you think this is about the page in general, or about a specific element of it? You could ask What strikes you about it, you know, you're trying to see how people are reacting to it, how they're understanding it, and then like, what would you click on first, like what, what is something that looks interactable? And how would you, you know, accomplish whatever the specific goal is. So those are ways that you could you know, further define this question. Or this idea here. And then we kind of talked about this, what do you make of specific elements? So again, if we're talking about ecommerce, maybe you have a button that's like a quick add to checkout where you don't have to go, you know, to the individual page, it just kind of pops up when you're looking at a specific category or on the homepage or something like that. And so you might want to test like, do people actually understand what the purpose of this is? So that's just one example. You know, many others that might factor into your own purposes and needs. So when it comes to designing these questions, a couple of best practices to keep in mind you know, first of all, users are generally not going to be designers. I don't think you I don't think you perhaps want them to be because you want them to look at it from a different perspective than you and so with that in mind, you want to avoid any sort of like web development or industry specific jargon in the way that you ask questions. You want to design for the average internet user, they should be able to understand what you're asking without you having to explain and clarify. I think another useful thing in general and this is this is when you ask for feedback about anything, but it's breaking up a complicated question into simpler ones. It's, it's okay, you know, to to ask a question and to ask a follow up question and to dig deeper. And that's something that we talked about yesterday when we talked about chat GBT and and getting that ideal answer that you want to get from it. Sometimes you kind of have to break the subject down and sometimes you have to add clarification later. So then, I've said this in a way but be as specific as possible when you're asking questions, you know, reference specific elements. Bring it back to the goal, if necessary. That's how you're going to get the most useful responses. So going back to that fiverr gig I was talking about, these were the questions that I asked and every order and sometimes they would ask clarifying questions after the fact. But most of the time, if I wasn't because it's fiber, and I'm sending them either some sort of like written report, or typically it would be like a video recording of me going through and doing the audit and if you work with a platform like Fiverr, or some of the other things that I'm going to mention shortly. I think it's the next slide actually. Typically, people are recording themselves interacting with your website unless you're doing an in person test, which is a different situation. But so you have to have some sort of standardized approach in that case, especially if you're offering this as a service like I did. But most of the time these questions got to the bottom of what that person was hoping to get out of the audit. And so generally speaking, I asked for the URLs for any pages they wanted me to take into account. I also told them you know, if you want me to take a quick look before starting the order to see if this is a good fit for me, you can do that. Are there any major problems that you want me to keep in mind throughout the process? So is there anything that you're noticing isn't working that you want? Me to focus on like a conversion factor? Can you briefly describe your target customer so that I could keep their perspective and focus? This is a really important one. I'm not going to fit in and perhaps you know, every user tester that you're going to work with is not necessarily going to fit that ideal target persona that represents your audience or the audience of the client that you're doing this on behalf of. But that doesn't mean that you can't adopt that persona. And again, a lot of these platforms will let you pick a user tester based on demographics. So that's probably like the best case scenario. But I think, again, you can still benefit from a plethora of different experiences. So anyway, you know, like I'm, I'm thinking of like a time where I did a user test and the target audience was, you know, generations older than me or something like that, where they're interacting with the web and they might have some access issues, you know, they might it might be harder for them to read the text if it's not big enough. Things like you know, contrast come into play between the words in the background. And so things like that, maybe it doesn't personally affect me right now. But I can still comment on that and say, you know, you told me that this was your target audience. To me like this strikes me as something that would be very difficult for them to interact with. And then the last question I asked is What important goals are you hoping that this page or these pages will achieve? So that kind of goes back to like the problem question, but I guess maybe from a more positive standpoint, and especially, you know, people use your tests at different stages, so they might not know what the problems are, but they certainly know or ideally, they have an idea of what they want that page to achieve. So these questions like very much covered what I needed to know in order to give people a satisfying UX audit after they put in their order. Okay, so how to run usability tests a couple of different ways that you could do this. A very wide range of methodologies and honestly a wide range of end results I would say, in person is like the gold standard because you're going to have the most control over the process. You're going to be able to meet with people, you're going to be able to dig in deeper to any like initial questions that you set. It's a little bit harder to do with something like Fiverr or user testing. Because there may be limitations I think with like user testing, it's kind of like you set it up ahead of time. And then you know, the user testers go through it, but you don't necessarily get to get to interface with them after the fact. And then with fiber, maybe you could do that it would probably involve making a new order. It's going to take time to get that feedback. It's not going to be as dynamic as doing it in person.\r\n\r\nIn person, it's probably going to be the most expensive in terms of like your team's time and like setting up a place for them to do this. And, you know, having some sort of incentive whether that's straight up cash or like a gift card or something like that for people's time. Another I think great option is user testing. And I was pretty sure that this platform had had changed or been sunsetted or something but I was looking at it leading up to doing this presentation and it still exists. It might exist in like a different format than it did initially did. Like I think you have to buy like a package. It's not just like one by one, for example. So I'm not super up to date on how it works now more more as to how it's worked in the past. But basically, the way that it has worked is that you specify certain tasks you want users to complete and specific questions for them to answer. And so users narrowed the process they go through until that test is complete. They have or at least had had a very large user base. So it was a great platform for giving like that exact demographic that you wanted to test. But fiber is very similar. I mean, fiber doesn't focus on user testing. To the extent that user testing does a fiber marketplace covers a wide range of services, but their usability like UX test marketplace is very large, you know, in comparison to some of their other focuses. So definitely a great place to find user testers. People start offering their services at $5. But they don't have to, that's an old fiber rule of thumb that it had to be five now people can set whatever price they want. They just have to set up their gigs in a way that makes them competitive. The way that I did it was I used to charge by the page. And then if they wanted, like a written report, that would be an extra cost in addition to the video. So it just depends on how people set up their gigs. But there's some level of standardization because people go to that market and that marketplace and they want to be able to pick you know, five people that offer something that take a look at side by side. Um, you could also do something that's not exactly going to give you all the information but it's an interesting practice, which is like recording users sessions on your website. So Microsoft has this newer tool called Clarity and it's free. And so you basically add like a little bit of JavaScript to your header. And you can see people interacting with your website, and you can see you know, how their mouse moves and how they scroll and things like that and like what they click on. Of course, unlike the user test, nobody's narrating it, there's no audio. It's literally just kind of like outside of context, how they interact with your website. So it's going to give you marginally useful information, but it's just another thing that you can use to try to troubleshoot. You know, why something isn't working, for example. And then this isn't like fully, like a way to run usability tests, but it's a like a tool that you can use or that perhaps somebody that you work with might use, which is to take screenshots and share commentary about what they're looking at. And I'm going to show you an example here. Oh, and besides clarity, when it comes to recording user sessions, you can also use a tool called Hot jar to do that as well. Okay, so this is an example and it's a little bit dated, but this is from bug herd. So bug heard is like a website feedback tool. That's another way to, to look at like what we're looking at right here. And this is something as a designer that you could use with clients. Some websites do this publicly where they have like a little thing on the side of the website that's like, Hey, do you have any feedback about this page? Or do you want to report a bug? That's, that's kind of why this exists, but I used to use it for my UX audits. I would just go through each page and then create like annotated screenshots and then I could explain export, the report that has all the pages and all my notes and things like that. So it's just a cool tool, whether you're kind of auditing your own site, you're auditing a client site, or somebody's doing it for you. So okay, from the flip side, we've talked about how to run a user test, but how can you be a good user test or maybe how can you identify one that you want to work with time and time again? First of all, it's narrating your thoughts as you have them. We've talked about this because that like stream of consciousness just, you know, noticing things and whether you really have something to say about it or not just like addressing each element on a page. And so that's kind of the next point here is is, you know, not just addressing them, but considering the impact that each page element might have. It's certainly acknowledging the perspective of your audience we talked about even if you're not a member of that target audience, how can you sort of take on that persona in order to speak on their behalf? Another thing that I used to do when I did these UX audits was share ideas for a B testing. Like I might say, you know, this is an interesting approach to your head and I wonder if you were to try this if it would, you know, get you better results and so it's it's giving them ideas, even if it's not a fully fleshed out thing, but to say like, this might not be it, but maybe you could try this. And then it's also it's not just about being like negative or pointing out what's wrong, but also acknowledging what does seem to be working. So that again, you can really like laser in and the feedback that's going to have the most impact for what they should change to resources that have really made an impact on me and how I go about content and design. First of all, is the Design of Everyday Things. This is like one of my favorite books. It's more about physical design, like product design, but there's a lot of transferable things that have to do with how we design for the web. And then don't make me think is like the quintessential resource for web usability and he's sent created, you know, multiple editions of this. There's another book, something about rocket science. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but, you know, anything that he writes like I would highly recommend. Okay, so we did break, and then I'm going to save questions for the end so we can get through the important stuff here. So I'm going to give you a couple more tools to use so that you can audit your own stuff. We're going to go through our live content UX audit, and then anytime we have left is going to be for questions. Let's get through it. Okay, so we'll start with Google tools, because again, when Google gives us information or tools, we want to listen because this is essentially how Google sees our content and how they prioritize what they rank in relevant search. So PageSpeed Insights is really a wealth of information. It provides data points from a variety of factors. And as you can see in this screenshot, currently, as of the core web vitals update, it starts with the core web vitals, so it starts from a point of this like, page experience and usability factor. They what's kind of interesting is that they have a part of PageSpeed Insights, and I'm going to show you like a fuller report when we go into the live content UX audit, but they have a piece of it that's about accessibility, but it's it's pretty bare bones. And so Nathan mentioned to me right before we started today, that Amber Hines is going to be the next workshop next month and it's going to be about accessibility. And her company equalised digital, they have a really great accessibility checker that integrates with WordPress. And so I would say that like that's probably going to be a much better tool for making judgments about if your website is accessible. Then what you're going to see on Google PageSpeed Insights and I think that that's something that is really important that you know, it's not always like at the top of our list when it comes to some of the other things that we need to do. To make our website usable, but it is really important. Whether you currently have an access issue or not at some point in your life, I'm sure you will. And now that I'm a man like this has become more obvious to me, maybe not in terms of strictly website design, but I think about like when I'm on a walk outside and previously, you know, I could just step around people's icy sidewalks that they didn't shovel or whatever, but now that I have a stroller, it's like okay, am I gonna put my kid you know, in the street. And so it's it's things like that or maybe you break your arm and now you can't interact with the web the same and so accessibility, I just wanted to like, make make the case that that is something that is so important because you your loved one, there's somebody that you know that it's going to make a difference for.\r\n\r\nGoogle used to have a tool specifically for testing the mobile friendliness of your site, and I was surprised to learn that they've actually sunset this tool. So now it's kind of a part of Google PageSpeed Insights. I think that whatever functionality was already in Google PageSpeed Insights for measuring the difference between the mobile and desktop version was kind of already there. So they basically just said, like, maybe this is like duplicating those efforts. I don't know. But it's no different. I'll just say that, that we that we use Google PageSpeed Insights to make judgments about how Google understands your website from a mobile point of view. Um, so we have the ability to measure like a snapshot of the current state of how your website measures according to the core web vitals are Google PageSpeed insight, but I also wanted to share within Google Search Console, there's this core web vitals report that measures it over time. And the most important thing, I think, to keep in mind with Google Search Console, and and also like Google Analytics. What I'm going to talk about specifically is more relevant to Google Search Console, is the fact that it tells you if you know, you become in violation of anything that's going to hurt your ability to rank and relevant search in terms of what Google tells us right in terms of the big things. And so that's why making sure that it's installed on your site on client sites is so important because it gives you notices if you're like way in violation of something, and it gives you the chance to fix it. Google Analytics so I would also recommend installing from the get go because it gathers important data that's useful that you can use to understand your page experience your content experience, but yeah, so this is just one useful report that relates to what we're talking about. This came up when I was prepping for the live audit later. Just the idea that there may be a use case for understanding what WordPress theme somebody's using. And I would say especially what plugins they're using, because both of these things can have an impact on your pages performance, which is a search signal on the loading, you know, on the interactivity, and all those those good things. So this is just one tool there's there's a bunch of them out there. But you know if if your website is experiencing any performance issues, or you just want to understand like how somebody else put their website together. I think this is a cool tool or a cool mechanism for that. I also wanted to share a general SEO audit tool, I see ranking so like H refs and SEM rush which I believe we talked about yesterday, this is another All In One SEO tool. It is not as fine tuned as the others as Ahrefs and SEMrush in terms of their keyword data, so that's why I don't use it for keyword research. They use different databases and approaches. But what I will say is their SEO auditing tool, which is like kind of the technical structure of your website, like goes head to head with any of like the big players in the market, and I'll show you exactly what that looks like. And the great thing about SEO ranking is it's a lot more affordable as an as an All In One SEO tool. And even from like the keyword research perspective, like you could use it to get most of the way there if content again isn't like your biggest focus are in and or if you weren't in a super competitive industry, it would it would do just fine. Um, a couple like editing tools. Hemingway is a great one. It's pretty simplistic isn't the right word, but it focuses on just a couple of things. It focuses on just a couple of factors and so that's why it's useful it doesn't it's not super distracting. And then Grammarly is one I would say that gets into a lot more detail. Grammarly is probably a more well funded company. Than Hemingway I wasn't aware of if Hemingway been monetized until I was looking at it the other day they have some AI functionality and they might they might have some other like outside of AI functionality plans, but I'm not sure that they had like a clear path to monetization before that but grim really has always had its like premium and like enterprise business use cases. And so I think that's probably why this tool is maybe a little bit more robust in terms of the suggestions it provides. They have a lot of linguists on staff and again, a disclosure that I'm a Grammarly Ambassador but I also like to use the product paid every person on my team that's a writer editor has a paid subscription to grammerly and I'll show you why shortly. Um, you know, you also want to look for plagiarism when it comes to creating a great content experience and when I talk about plagiarism, I'm not even necessarily talking about things that you do like on purpose. Some things that happen in grammerly, specifically is that you'll write something and it will detect a phrase that's been published elsewhere on the internet because you know, like there's a ton of content that already exists and it's bound to happen. And it'll be about something that's like a completely different industry. Like you definitely didn't take it from that original place that was published, but it's kind of like a reminder to go on and try to make it more unique. Just so that you know, Google doesn't think that you plagiarize even though again, it's not about intention. It's just about the reality of the content that already exists. But at the blacksmith, we use Copyscape for every piece of content we create, just to be sure there's no plagiarism, and then Grammarly. I don't believe the plagiarism check comes with the free version, but because we have the premium version, and that's included that we use it to. Um, one of the last factors here is you know, making sure that your content adheres to your style guide, whether that's a specific company style guide, or something like AP style, which again, is like the news journalism standard. I think it's like a great standard to use if you don't have a set style guide. And then I just have a couple qualitative qualitative factors here. So on the blacksmith style guide, which will probably show you we have a section about information architecture, and it's about a lot of these different things, how to break up walls of text, how to approach writing headings, how to keep paragraphs and sentences short and to the point. It's other things like you know, making sure that you have good flow with your content, you know that it has good storytelling, but it's something a human would want to read. And yesterday we talked about texts that whether AI generated it or not sounds robotic and how to avoid it. So that's another like, piece that you can use like in your own audits, those guidelines. Other things that I look at are like the thoughtful use of on brand visuals at the blacksmith we try to incorporate multiple types of visuals per piece. I'm definitely of the opinion that words aren't enough. I think as humans we're very visual creatures and people all have their own, like different learning styles. So that's also a factor, you know, written word, I don't think is enough, especially like for me personally, sometimes I need to like watch a video about it, or you need to like, you know, play with it in my hands or whatever. Like there's just different ways that people process information and so the more different ways you can surface it to them within your content, the better that your contents going to perform and help them and then things like consistent formatting like how you use bullet points, how you write headings. Again, a lot of this we cover in the blog Smith style guide. Just a couple other things. We talked about a B testing when we talked about how to be a good user tester and giving examples. So Unbounce is a tool that you could use. A B testing is essentially testing like different variants of a page usually you're testing a specific element like two versions of a page title, or two versions of an image, but it could be a full page as well. And this is something that Nathan and I also talked about, which is that I think he'd love to have an expert on a be testing do one of these workshops or you know a webinar in the future so if that's your if you know somebody like that, you know, that's something I think that all of us could learn some best practices from but again, another thing that you could test\r\n\r\nQuick disclaimer, then we'll jump to our live content UX audit. And we're talking about how to make your content better. And, you know, basically like different processes that you could use to to catch mistakes. But I don't want you to leave this thinking that perfection. Is the goal because it's not I think, you know, we're all human, we all make mistakes. At the end of the day writing for the web is is great because it's a very forgivable medium and unlike print, once you notice a mistake, you can go in and correct it. And so I don't want this to become a situation where you're beating yourself up if you did all these steps or you did some of these steps and like, you know, you still notice something later somebody points out like oh, this is spelled wrong or whatever. That's really not the point. So at the end of the day, I think my guidance for you is done is better than perfect. And be kind to yourself but create systems to catch mistakes. And that system could be having like a human editor, like like I mentioned earlier today, whenever I write something, you know I'm telling you all my best practices, but that doesn't mean that I always follow them, right. I'm an imperfect human being and, and things happen. And I think the other thing that I wanted to say is like we all have limited time we all have limited energy, and especially now that I'm a new mom, like I used to work really late at night and I would just crush stuff out and I would go over it a million times and now I kind of have to be satisfied with like not having the ability to do that and having a much shorter period of work time every day. That I can get stuff done and having to prioritize ruthlessly and that sometimes means that like yes, maybe I spelled something wrong, you know, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it. And I don't think you should either. So that's that's my soapbox. Alright, so let's go to the live content UX audit. Give me just a moment to get this set up. Um, so we're gonna go through like a couple of these different tools that we talked about today. And then at the end of this, we will have some time for questions. Okay. So Stacy, we're picking on you today because you submitted a really great example for this live content UX audit. And I want to start by saying there's like nothing wrong with this website. I mean, it's very good and it follows a lot of both the content and design principles that like I would instruct my team on. So what we're going to do today is is really nitpick for the sake of giving people things to think about when they are doing their own content UX audits. And so I'm going to start by sharing, like some of these tools and their outputs so that I can show you how to use them. And then what we'll finish off on is coming back to this page, and I'm going to give a couple of qualitative factors, you know, that I think can make the content just a little bit stronger. So again, I wanted to surface the blog SMIS content style guide. This is going to be the basis of one part of you know, some of the things I'm going to talk about and I'm going to reference that Chechi btw bot that we made yesterday, that's based on the style guide and that's, that's kind of what I use to audit this page from the content style perspective. But again, some things that we just talked about were first of all the SEO and Keywords section or chapter, where we talk a little bit about I mentioned that you could get some guidance for how to use awkward keywords like how to use keywords within URL slugs. I also talks about this information architecture, or information structures what we call it here section. So that's how to like essentially present information but also like break up walls of text, make it more readable. We talked a little bit at the end of today about formatting and how to keep that consistent. So those are just a couple of things. I guess we also talked about links earlier today and so there's some good guidance there. So you know, this is a this is a good resource if you're building out your own content style approach, and you can really build off of this because again, it's fairly industry agnostic. So anyway, I took this link, and first I ran it through Google PageSpeed Insights. And if you look at the desktop version, I mean it's pretty much near perfect. There's it's very difficult to get to 100 on any of these factors on I would say especially on mobile, but even on desktop, I mean, it's it's kind of like a what's the word? It's like a like a fool's errand to try to get to 100 if you're if you're this close, so, desktops looking really good. You know, they have a couple of things that you could do to fix it if you wanted to, and I have some suggestions for that, but we'll talk about it from the mobile perspective. So if you go to mobile, you'll notice that you know, first of all, the largest Contentful paint is one of the core web vitals, that it's a little bit in the red and it's and that's really like the only one and the largest Contentful paint again has to do with page floating, I believe. And so, taking like the definition we had, I'm guessing that that has something to do with this image because this is the viewport you know, that first load so it's the first thing that gets measured by this core web vital. And when I was looking at this yesterday, it's a it's a JPG file, which isn't like a super large file or anything like that. But one thing that you could do to to improve that page quality factor is to instead save this and serve it up as a web p file. There are certain plugins that you can use for that it's going to you have to kind of determine if adding like a plugin or taking that extra step of manually saving it like converting it and saving it and uploading it as that file is worth it. But that's that's like the one thing that I could think would would flip this so that it's the performance is a little bit closer to 100. And then we go into some of these other like diagnostic details. And I think this is where PageSpeed Insights gets really interesting because you can sort of dig into specifics here. A couple of things that I noticed were like minifying, CSS and JavaScript and there's some other things that are kind of related to optimizing like these different file types on the website. So I use a plugin called nitro pack. There's a free version and there's a paid version. I think the free version will get you pretty far, but it adds this like little Add at the bottom of your website. So I just pay for the paid version because I don't want that there are other things like nitro pack but nitro pack from the perspective of somebody who operates in the SEO world, you know who's looking for good performance, who's looking for best practices, that is my suggestion to you and to anybody who is seeing these things on their Google PageSpeed Insights. So naturally talking about these plugins for me like the got the question of does adding more plugins like is that going to hurt performance like what what is the marginal return of that? And so what I wanted to do next was take the URL and put it in that WordPress theme and plug in detector to just see like what the back end of the site looks like. And so we can see, it's like a custom or like a child theme. And I think okay, so apparent theme is Astra, so we know that like that's the technical basis on which this is based. I think generally speaking, Astra is pretty good for SEO from what I've heard, I don't have a ton of experience with it. And then also, this is like more what I was interested in was the plugins on the backend. And I mean, from what it detects it's there aren't that many plugins here, you know, it has like a plug in that works with Astra there's a Quiz Builder. This DOWNLOAD MANAGER contact form and then the Page Builder that's pretty lean, especially if those are the only plugins that are installed. You know, different people have different ideas of like, how many plugins is too many or like what's the optimum amount but I would say like, we're well under that here. So adding something like nitro pack, or you know, like some sort of web p image optimizer I think short Pixel does that.\r\n\r\nSomething like that probably wouldn't like hurt performance for the performance gains that would come with it. Um, okay, so the next thing that I wanted to do this is higher level than just this page, but I wanted to show you guys SC ranking. So SC ranking again, is this like All In One SEO tool? And I think there's like actually something wrong with my browser because I'm trying to like x this out, and I could do this yesterday and it just like wouldn't do it. So this is either a core web vitals issue or this is like I have too many, like Chrome extensions that are conflicting with each other, that I haven't been able to figure out why it sometimes messes with my browser. But anyway, that's an aside. So um, so this is a C rankings like technical website audit. And what I really love about this is that it's pretty straightforward. Like you can essentially read this as a non SEO and get a very good idea of things that you could fix to improve your website's technical structure. And as you can see this website like it's not bad, like there's room for improvement, but overall it's doing pretty good. Again, chasing 100 is a fool's errand. You're like, probably not going to get there but you want to get as close as you can with the time and the resources that you have. And so this page is really just like a high level overview. Again, this is about the whole website. It gives you an idea of like, how many pages were crawled, versus how many URLs which could include things like media files, JavaScript files, style, sheet files, and things like that. And so this can be a good indicator of like, if you know that there's more pages or there's more files, like maybe there's a credibility issue here. And if if some are getting excluded from this crawl, then they're probably also getting excluded from what Google can see. And so at that point, you, you know that there may be a sitemap issue that's getting in the way of the ideal situation. But what I really wanted to show you was the issue report. So these are things that you could fix. And what it does is it it has a category, it gives a specific issue, it gives you which pages are affected. It tells you you know, whether you're like compliant or whatever you want to call it if it's following best practices or not. And there's there's very few things here. But for example, like here's one that has to do with crawlability, which we talked about earlier today. And so nofollow means that we don't want the search engines to read this page and there may be a good reason for that. And so it seemed that for your pages are affected, you can click on it to get a description of the issue. So this is why it's really great for people who aren't necessarily like in the SEO world. A lot of you are website developers or designers and so a lot of this stuff like you'll be able to understand just by going through it and familiarizing yourself with it was there like included details. But yeah, so then you could see, you know, like which pages relate to this issue and whether or not like it's worth doing anything or if you really wanted them to be that way. But I'll give you like a more tangible example of something that you definitely want to fix. We have, for example, External links to 4x x. So like a 4x. X code is like a 404 means that it's not found, and there's different variations of that I'm sure a lot of you are pretty familiar with that. And so this means that maybe something that was linked on the website now no longer exists. And so it either needs to be replaced or redirected or something like that. And again, you can dig into the URLs you can see like what specific error code happened. This is also a really great report that you can give to clients. And then you know, depending on the level of familiarity you have with these different issues and how to fix them then you can give yourself a little bit of an extra job and some hours working with them to not only audit and go through the audit and explain the audit but then also, you know, implement the fixes. So I just wanted to show you that because I think it's it's such a great tool. So then the next thing I did was I ran this through Hemingway, and like I told you before Hemingway is like the sort of like, saying it's the more basic version of Grammarly. is maybe not exactly the right way to describe it, but it's the more like focused version. And so as you can see, what it does is it highlights different things. And it's kind of using I guess these colors, as you know, like things like it's trying to like draw your attention to certain colors as being like something that's more worth your attention or less worth your attention. What I've always known Hemingway as is a great tool for measuring active versus passive voice. And generally speaking, we want to try to avoid passive voice in our writing. And so that's probably what it's best used for. But there are some certain other factors here that are useful and interesting. And like yesterday when I told you about clear scope and how it measures readability, you can see that Hemingway also does this. It measures certain stats in terms of you know, just this piece of content, not necessarily compared to other pieces of content. And then it also has some AI functionality, that with a paid plan you can use to I think automatically suggest edits to some of these things. So just, you know one interesting tool where it's I think best functionality is free. So then I ran it through grammerly and I wanted to start by showing what I was talking about. With the plagiarism thing. Like there's something about inventory management on this article that says 1% of your text matches the source and that's like it's not even This article isn't even about inventory management. So I just wanted to show you guys that like, like these tools can be wrong, but it's still worth running that check a if you're working with a writer that's not you, just from a reputation standpoint, you want to make sure that there's no obvious like plagiarism problems with it but be so that you can just make like some small changes to this text so that Grammarly doesn't pick it up and possibly, you know, Google may be like taking a nod from some of the similar types of algorithms and uses. Again, not that it's intentional. It's just like, you know, because there's already this wealth of content that already exists on the internet about all these different subjects and of course, there's going to be similarities with phrasing and things like that. So then we get to these other suggestions. And I guess one other thing I wanted to show you about Grammarly is you can set goals for a piece of content and I don't know if this is a paid version specific but anyway, you can, you know, say like what type of writing it is. So I just said business for this. You can give a certain intent so I sent in form for this I may or may not be right with all these things, but I just wanted to see what would happen. You can say like, you know the level of experience of the audience, you can set like the formality of the tone. And then and then it gives you suggestions based on those things. And what's cool about grammerly is that it goes into these specific zoo specific different categories of suggestions. So correctness is about like grammar, spelling, punctuation, clarity is to cut in to help with like the flow of engagement, which is probably most related to like storytelling and delivery, I guess, you know, kind of related to both of those things, and then style guide. This relates to my company's specific style guidance, some of the suggestions that I have programmed in myself, and so a lot of it is like punctuation, because I have some rules about that. And it's probably annoying for my writers to have all this pop up. But some of it is word stuff. So like if we click this, something like actually, per the blogs and the style guide, and that's just our approach, we say these words are fluffy and don't add value typically. So like if you cut actually, it would say wait, so you have to go read these reports. Ones is another one that I have strong opinions about. I say don't use one to describe a noun you've already defined. Use the same word again or find another way to say it and then I gave an example here. So that's what's really cool about Grammarly is like you can like get these things automatically being suggested when you're working on a piece of content within your organization so that people don't have to remember like all the stuff that I showed you on my style guide it just automatically pops up. Waxing then I'll show you a couple qualitative things and then we'll go to questions is I ran this through my style editor bot, and it wouldn't I tried to get it to like directly edit the copy. And it wasn't unlike what I showed you yesterday which was like a shorter excerpt and the did I did that. So part of this is like me learning how to best use the spot or how to best design it or how to best query it. But what I did was I said Please review this blog post it gave it the era and suggest edits according to the blacksmith style guide.\r\n\r\nThey said consider the bad side consider the following suggestions and it felt to me like it wasn't actually like totally reading the blog. It was just giving like general tips and then I said please suggest updated copy based on these suggestions. And so what it did, which is kind of funny was it created like a shorthand version of it. And so what I was thinking is something like this could be really useful for like an email newsletter, you know, like an atomized version of the blog. Or, you know, maybe like you create some social posts based on these shorthand summaries of each category or something like that. You'd still probably want to edit it, but to me, even though it's not really what I asked for, I thought that that could be an interesting use case. So then I was like, Okay, well can you actually do the edits while preserving the original length of the piece? And it was like no, but it kind of went back in and gave some more suggestions. And then I was asking if it was actually able to like read the original article, or No, I was asking about the visuals, because one of the suggestions was about visual aids. And I was like, well, there's a ton of visual aids on that article. And so it said that it can't directly process or interpret them from the article itself. So that was kind of interesting. And then I gave it the copy and then it still kind of like generally gave examples. So you know, it's a work in progress. I guess that's what I wanted to share. It's still it's still gave me some things to work with. But it wasn't exactly like the editor that I was hoping that it would be like it like it kind of was yesterday. So it seems to me if I were to make a hypothesis here that it's probably going to be more useful for shorter bits of copy, you know, maybe different sections or titles or things like that, versus trying to edit a whole article all at once but it will give you food for thought in terms of general edits that you could make. Okay, so last like pieces of content on this before we end up today. We talked about menu navigation. And so the way that I would change this menu navigation would be home about blog and I would just change this to contact and what I like to do with whatever like the most important menu item or call to action is maybe add some like button styling so that that stands out, it just simplifies it. It's not distracting and you know, hopefully leads them to the ideal conversion. So then the other thing like the header, because we're kind of talking about the whole experience, not just the article itself, is what I what I came across, typically in the UX audits that I did was a similar type of header where it has the logo, but unless the name of the brand is like really straightforward about what you do, it could benefit from having some context like a tagline about what you do and so I don't think that we do it on the blog. So some a very bad example. But you can imagine like in my header it should probably say like SEO and content agency. But you know, maybe because it's called the blacksmith that also might work I don't know submitted a test. I'm generally speaking again, I really liked this article, I thought that more or less like it fit the same types of standards that like I would have for my team in terms of putting together conversational tone like breaking texts up nicely, having really useful visuals, a couple of just like very small things. We have the social share buttons. My suggestion is to add a CTA that's like share this on social like, it might seem obvious, but just saying that might be useful, might also be useful to have them float as the person who reads it because they might decide at different points that they want to share it through. I love the visuals there was one visual where I think there might be an unintentional tooltip here where like when you were taking the screenshot your cursor was probably over this SPFx aligned area right here. And so it took the screenshot with that and it kind of obscures the stuff behind it. This is the type of thing that like, because I do these all the time I nitpick and probably nobody else would notice, but I just thought that I would mention it. I'm sure I'm gonna like pretty much ended there. The last thing I was going to say for now is with the Related Posts, one of them doesn't have the featured image. So it's kind of, you know, it just looks a little bit lopsided. That's a super easy thing to fix. And then when it comes to consistency um, you might want to capitalize text stuff just so that it's consistent with the capitalization of the other category. And then maybe also like space it out tech space stuff. So again, like I really don't have that much to say here, because it's very good and it has good information. The last I guess big thing is the actual place where I'm reading the content is kind of narrow and skinny compared to the full frame here. And so I wouldn't recommend going full width with the content but I think we could break out the box a little bit more or break it out of the current box so that it's a little bit wider. And I think that that would be a great reader experience. So with all that being said, I'm going to pull back to my slides really quick just to pull up like the question slide and things like that. But I mean basically we're done here. With the planned content. I'll once again bring up my book because it is about what we're talking about with content experience. It's about my approach to content writing, content style, you can grab a free chapter of the book on the writing for humans and robots.com website or you can grab the book on Amazon via Kindle or print edition. And yeah, that's pretty much it. So I will take any questions that may have popped up in the meantime.\r\n\r\nYeah. All right. So thanks again, Stacey for letting us use your content as I know that it's a little weird with talking about my stuff here but ya know, it was very much appreciated and a it's an excellent article. We've talked about that already. The content, it was it was hard\r\n\r\nto find stuff to comments on honestly, so I had to go into nitpick mode.\r\n\r\nSo grateful to you, Stacey. Let's see folks last chance to ask questions here. There are no questions today,\r\n\r\nwhich is covered at all. Everything's done.\r\n\r\nIt's it's been a very good and thorough presentation on lots of tools. Things to consider as we're developing content for and helping our clients create content for the web. Yeah, like Ben says firehose of information really good stuff. Greg, this is a good rewatch as well. Alright folks, last chance before we land the plane. Your if you have any final questions for Maddie, if you want to just say yes in the chat that way we know to pause otherwise, I'm going to start moving towards wrapping us up. All right, yeah. So thanks there in the chat. Okay. So Maddie, wrap us up here. Give us our final takeaway for the training.\r\n\r\nSure. I'll answer one question. Barney asked if I'm in the Denver area. Yeah, yeah. I'm in Lakewood, technically. But yeah, okay. Final wrap up. treat people how you want to be treated with your content. That's good.\r\n\r\nThat's really good. And true, right. So yeah, awesome. Well, thanks, everybody, for hanging out with us for the last couple of days. It's been a really good set of information here. A lot of things to consider. And hopefully it'll help us all up our game as we're dealing with content on the web. Thanks again. Maddie. For your expertise. And folks, we are back tomorrow as usual 1pm Central for office hours here on solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nNice. Well, thank you so much, everyone for your time and attention. And yeah, I hope I hope there is like one good nugget for you to take away and if you ever have any questions about content and UX, I'm always happy to be a resource.\r\n\r\nVery good. 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This again was this is building on last year's content workshop. And the link for that is in the course description if you missed last year I would strongly recommend you check that out. Really good stuff. So Sadie has your book MADI Naidu\r\n\r\nwhy it's really good love it seems like it's been a while since I published it, but you know, I tried to write it so that it would still be useful today. So I hope that you're all finding that. Yeah, we're sure.\r\n\r\nReally good stuff. Alright folks, if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat say hi. We are about three minutes away from getting started. And they're in the chat once again, is the link bundle that has the slides and the replay link as well as a link to Matty's book. We are Yeah, we're gonna have a lot of fun today and tomorrow, two hours today, two hours tomorrow talking all about website content with I mean, let's face it an expert in the field\r\n\r\nappreciate the vote of confidence. If you if you measure it by yours and I suppose expert, that's something that I've been doing for a very long time. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nAlright folks, let's hear from you in the chat. Check in question today. How about give us a one to 10 rating? How comfortable are you with generating website content? One being it's a real challenge. 10 being a pro, let us hear from you there in the chat.\r\n\r\nAll right, about a minute and a half to go.\r\n\r\nMaybe a good question is how many of you are forced to make content in order to finish your website designs? Yeah, to get your website launched.\r\n\r\nHey, Sue bullets are my friend. I like bullets. Alright, several folks just joining us. The links are there in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up that chat and you'll have the link to download the slides. Grab the replay and all of those things. We are about a minute away from getting started. Second question today is what's your comfort level? What's your expertise at website content creation one to 10 If you had to rate yourself love it. Love it. Tracks Yeah, five but a if you're using AI, that's awesome. Yeah, so a lot of folks are higher on the scale today. That's exciting, that hopefully you're gonna get some tools to up your game even further. He's got a lot to share with us. Over the next couple of days. Hey Terry. Dab Alright, folks, we are just about to get started. Glad you're all here. Diving into the web content workshop momentarily. Just seconds. To go. If you're just joining us in zoom, I'm going to drop in one more time the link bundle and it's three after so let's get the recording started. And we'll dive right in. Let's do it. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy and I'm joined for the next couple of days by my friend Maddy Houseman, Maddy is a sought after sought after copywriter specializing in enterprise b2b Tech brands. She's the CEO at blog Smith and the author of writing for humans and robots, the new rules of content style. She has been recognized on numerous industry lists as a top content marketer and I'm really excited to have her back for another course here on solid Academy so welcome back Madi, how are things going for you?\r\n\r\nThanks, Nathan. I'm really excited to be here. Like I said, you know, it's been it's been a little bit of time since I've done you know, a presentation like this since I've really gotten to use my brain. For those who don't know, I recently had a baby so he's in daycare today so I can fully you know, give my attention to this and, you know, embrace this identity of mine as a content creator who loves to learn and you know, who now has this other facet of my life but marrying those two in a joyous way so, so yeah, really excited to be back and and put my brain to use and share you know, some of the things that I've been exploring you for the past several months to I guess a year, all this new stuff with AI, that's what we're gonna focus on today. So really excited about that. Yeah,\r\n\r\ndefinitely. So we have a long way to go over the next couple of days and the thought just occurred to me Maddie, we really ought to have you back for another informal conversation just on how you prepared your business. So that you could take some time away, because that's really, that's quite a feat.\r\n\r\nIt was definitely and I'd love to do that. I'd be happy to.\r\n\r\nYeah, that'd be that just occurred to me. We should definitely, folks. So let's see the links are in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom. I'm going to drop this in one more time. There you will find the link to download or grab the slide deck. Also the replay link that will have the transcripts and chat logs after we finish is there for you as well. On that replay link you'll also find a link to last year's course, which is more some more foundational principles of the things we're going to unpack even further today. So if you missed last year's course, all the replays are there, follow that link, rewatch them, it's really good stuff. And of course, if you haven't seen Matt, he's booked the link for that as in the chat as well. So Maddie, give us a high level view. What are we going to be covering for the rest of today? Totally.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, we're definitely going to expand on some of the things that we started to talk about last year, but really, you know, thinking about what's changed in the past year and so that's why today we're going to focus mostly on AI kind of how AI factors into content creation, how you can use AI tools to create content, how you can use AI tools to detect AI content. You know, things like how to write an excellent chat GPT prompt and one thing I'm really excited to share with you because it's something that I've just kind of figured out for myself is how to make your own personal GPT. So that's what we're gonna do at the end of the day, I'll show you step by step how to do it. You can follow along, I'll show you how to adapt it a little bit. And then really, what we're going to start with today is I guess a bit of a cautionary tale when it comes to AI so we'll start with the most negative and we'll build up to the most positive. And then tomorrow, the focus is going to be on content UX, the user experience what I like to call the reader experience. So it's going to be more about you know, the elements of design and how they interact with content, how you can create this great reader experience for the people who consume your designs and content and so we can get a little bit more into what that looks like. But I guess if I was to like talk high level about today versus tomorrow, today is like things that I think are really like novel and fun. It's like It's like exciting things that that we're all learning kind of at the same time and that's that's what's so exciting about just like nobody has it figured out. And tomorrow is like the stuff that I'm really passionate about. That's a little bit more, you know, foundational and again, about like that full experience. So I guess with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. Yeah,\r\n\r\nabsolutely. Me give a couple of housekeeping notes that will disappear. Folks. We'll be taking a break in the middle as usual for these courses. So roughly at tube central an hour from now, we'll take about a five to 10 minute break depending on where we are timewise. So at the end of this first hour and the end of the second hour, we'll have a time of q&a as well. I would invite you to use the zoom q&a Link to ask your questions. Please don't use the chat, but use that Zoom q&a. That way we can keep all the questions in a nice list. And also, if you'll keep that Zoom q&a open, if somebody asks a question that you also want to hear the answer to just click the thumbs up icon to up vote. And we'll take the questions the order of up votes. So with that again, yeah, we are recording in the replay. The transcript is all there and it'll be available for you about an hour after we finished today. So Maddie, I'm going to disappear take over. Let's get started. Let's\r\n\r\ndo it. My housekeeping is just first of all, I think that we all can learn a lot from each other when it comes to AI. And so like that's how I've picked up the things that I'm going to share with you. It's really hearing it from other people seeing how other people are using this tool. It's interesting because it's so new that like, again, we don't really know like what the best use cases are. And there's this world of possibility that we've only just started to touch. So one thing I'll ask is like if you've come across an interesting AI use case, you know whether you have something that's top of mind now or whether going through what I'm going to talk about today sparks it like please share that in the chat. I'm sure all learn from it. I'm sure other people will learn from it. So that's one thing and then I'll just ask that if there's anything that resonates with you, as I'm talking today, or you know as other people are sharing ideas in the chat. I always love when people tweet or I guess x takeaways these days. So my Twitter is in that bottom right hand corner. So use that and I always love to retweet and share with my audience too. So yeah, let's go ahead and get started here. Nathan already gave a nice bio like who I am. Just to give you you know, more information about the blacksmith. We're a holistic content marketing agency for b2b technology brands. We create data driven content. I'm going to share some of those processes here with you today in terms of how we're using AI tools to do that. And our focus is creating content across the sales funnel with a focus on the reader experience. So again, that's really what day two is going to be about. It's creating this ideal reader experience with the intersection of content and design. And then my book writing for humans robots, the new rules of content style. If you've ever read the book, The Elements of Style, I was really kind of riffing on that in a more I guess, modern way since that book was written back in 1918, or 1919. Of course, at that time, the internet didn't exist. We weren't necessarily addressing a global audience when we publish to the web. We are now and so that's kind of the idea behind this book is how can you how can you speak plainly and inclusively and effectively when you're writing for the web? And so with all of that being said, let's go ahead and jump into the topic of today which is AI Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention. Day two, when we talk about content UX. I'm going to do some live content UX audits. If you were here last year, we also did this this is something I really love to do. And so this form here which you can also click through the slide being links that we've shared in the chat. Just has a couple questions like your name your brand. It'll ask for a link to a specific piece of content. If you're comfortable sharing for this live UX audit, and then it has the question that's optional. If there's anything you want me to focus on, and then like an aspect of the content itself, but the purpose is to collect some, you know, ideas from from all of you of what to audit and we're going to basically put the principles that I'm going to be talking about tomorrow into action you know, show you how to use some different tools show you how to use more also, like qualitative analyses. And so again, I would love your examples so that we can make it really useful for you to give you know, a second pair of eyes on your content. And you know, it's always done in a very respectful way. I'm not looking for problems, I'm just showing you ways to, you know, make your message clearer to make your content experience more effective. So I'll, I'll aim to remind you about this again at the end of the day, and then you know, before tomorrow is probably when I'll pick what we're going to audit for tomorrow. So get them in today, whenever you have a chance. Okay, so artificial intelligence. That's really the focus of what we're talking about today. Super exciting. Things are happening here. It's also kind of a wild wild west. It's it's something that there's many positive use cases but there are also some negative ones and so I really wanted to start with the negatives so we can kind of get that out of the way so we can you know, maybe share some like cautionary tales here. The link that Learn More link is an article that I wrote for Fast Company, and it's going to go over some of the same things that I talked about here in terms of some of the limitations and also really like the ethical implications of using AI to generate content to publish it as if it were your own. So yeah, let's go ahead and dive into that. Um, so I think like the first major implication, negative implication of AI or something to think about, especially as a creator, because many of us here we're writers, we're designers, so we're creating things. They they are our intellectual property which we may assign, you know, to a client, for example, but it's still at its root. It's something that we made. And, you know, the thing about AI is, first of all, it can't think for itself. It uses things like machine learning. It uses algorithms and processes to make sense of what's already out there. But it's not, at least right now in a place where it can completely invent something new. If it does. It's the result of this machine learning it's not the result of true uniqueness. So you know, essentially, AI and I'm gonna explain this example in a moment here, but it's, it's being trained on what already exists. It's using our intellectual property. And the worst part of it is it's doing that without giving us credit. I mean, if you go in do a search on Google, it was called Bard, but now they've rebranded it to Gemini. In my experience, and and I haven't used it recently, to be honest with you, but certainly within chat GPT there's no like source given for the answer to a prompt. It's not directing you to a specific piece of content are saying, This is what I referenced to come up with this answer, which also creates an issue of you know, whether or not that answer is something to be trusted, and we'll get into the fact that AI is oftentimes confidently incorrect. But right now, with the focus being on the fact that it's essentially plagiarism and my perspective, if you are taking what you generate with AI and then publishing it as your own this is probably easiest to think about when you think about visuals, and we're going to talk a little bit about AI generating images and kind of like how that works and some of the issues with that. But you can think of like aI trained on a certain set of materials, certain artists body of work, you know, that style, if it's trained on a certain style and the output is a certain style, it's pretty easy to identify that, you know, it's riffing off, you know, one individual's intellectual property, it's a little bit harder to make that distinction with the written word. But that doesn't mean that it's any less important to recognize that it's, it's an issue if if AI is passing off its own material or your material as its own. So, what I wanted to share here, this is an article that was published on futurism. It's an it's a screenshot from it, and it's about CNET. They have this blog about different like personal finance topics and things like that. And so when it comes to things that affect your finances, whether it's subjects like you know how to buy a house and you know, like had this setup a mortgage, you know, whatever. Or, in this case, like you know, how to pick a credit card, how to use credit cards, how to decide what college to send your kid to, or something like that. Google calls these topics, your money, your life. And in comparison to any other topic that you publish, that you're looking to get ranked in relevant search on Google. Google has the highest standard of quality for your money, your life topics. So CNET was transparent about the fact that they were publishing AI generated content such as the example shared here. But they had a human fact checking it and so the byline was like you seen that money or something like that? And then I think they also had like the byline of the human editor published next to it, but they told us you know, they they weren't trying to hide that it was aI generated. So this excerpt is you know, maybe kind of a silly example, but it's showing how\r\n\r\nthis article that they wrote, which was about can you buy a gift card with the credit card. This first example is a line that's almost verbatim from a rivaling Forbes article. And then this next example is how literally, the table was the exact same title. So, you know, you could question if it was only one of these things, you know, is that really plagiarism? Is that really a problem? But the fact that it's both to me shows that you know, not only did CNET not take a high enough standard of care, quite honestly with the content that they were having a human fact checker edit, but I think it also begs the question of like, if you're generating a full piece of copy, like a, you know, long form blog article, like are you ever going to be able to definitively say that it's not plagiarism? Or that it's not like literally, you know, word for word related to any other competitor article out there? And I think the answer's no, because that's what the AI is using to generate the content. In this case, and then one that I'll share subsequently, AI is, is almost like a crutch for CNET or for others who are who are taking this approach of generating that full article and then having the human intervention and I'm going to share some better ways to use AI in your article creation process. But yeah, I mean, the problem is ultimately that there's no way that they can catch every instance of plagiarism, and it just honestly creates more work and, and the worst part of all, is that it essentially ruin their reputation because they didn't take a proper standard of care. Another example that's, that's ongoing, it's unresolved at this point, is that the New York Times recently sued open AI who's the creator of chat GBT saying that, you know, their, their publications, their media. was unlawfully used to train open AI. And the last I saw, I think there was an update actually today that said that the New York Times is like misrepresenting the evidence or something like that. But again, I mean, it really just like begs the question of you know, if you publish content, like is it safe, you know, is it going to be used to train a model which is then going to spit it out and somebody else is going to publish it and benefit from it without properly crediting you? So that's one major issue. So this is one that I would love your examples. If you have anything similar. This is this is a picture that I saw recently in like a Facebook group about AI. And so somebody had done some prompts about dog breeds. And if you kind of squint, you're like, Okay, maybe that like a chart of different dog breeds, but then you look and you see all the like, really strange faces and like this, like gibberish text, and even the text that you can read is like not related to any dog breeds that currently exists. So, yeah, again, if you have any examples of like an image you've generated that has resulted in something like comically incorrect like this, I would love to see that in the chat. That would be fun. But I guess the point that I want to make with this slide is that at least at this point, AI can't effectively art direct you could give it a prompt and you could maybe get it to a point where you can get something useful. I think it's called mid journey. There's this one AI image generator that creates these like hyper realistic things with like any detail you can get it and something like that is so cool and very interesting to experiment with. But I think this came from within chat GPT I'm gonna say it wrong, but it's called like Dali Dali. And in my experience, when I've used it to generate images, it's the same sort of like gibberish text. The image, you know, is like, vaguely related to the prompts that I give it. So I'm using it for like, kind of like business article use cases to like generate a figure from you know, some like the data I include or something like that. I've never gotten something useful yet. And I think beyond that, it's like you still as a creative have to come up with the prompt. It's not like AI is going to be able to help you within the context, say of like an article. They're not going to be able to come up with like five unique media examples that you could include. So this is something that I think, you know, as humans, like, we still like have control over this or so like the best Abbot. Um, okay. So next I started to talk about this, which is one of the biggest issues with AI to date, the fact that it is confidently incorrect. So this is another Cena example, I'm going to read a little excerpt from. This is another futurism article. They did kind of a deep dive into this. See that AI but issue? So the excerpt is after the outcry after you know, some of these plagiarism things came to light. With the previous example. Steena editor in chief Connie Guglielmo acknowledged the AI written articles in a post that celebrated CNET's reputation for being transparent. without acknowledging the criticism, Guglielmo wrote that the publication was changing the byline on its AI generated articles from CNET money staff to simply seen that money as well as making the disclosure more prominent. Furthermore, she promised every story published under the program had been reviewed, fact checked, and edited by an editor with topical expertise before we hit publish, and I think that this is referring to like before this article was published, and so what you're looking at right here is, I think a more serious violation of the high standards that Google holds for your money your life, making sure that it is, you know, written by an expert that it's heavily fat checked, you know that you're not publishing something that you can't stand behind. And so this is about calculating compound interest for savings and as you can see by the excerpts, it's, it's wrong, the calculation is spitting out an incorrect final number. And so it may seem like, you know, small potatoes like, you know, like, what, what's really going to happen to the person who misinterprets this? It's certainly not like, you know, having to do with like, buying a house and like getting those equations wrong thread savings, but I think it just goes to show that there's, you know, there's a lot of problematic things that can happen and it starts here and if if we don't maintain a high standard for content quality starting here, then it could exacerbate it could turn into people being misled when it comes to making these like bigger money decisions in their life or you know, other things, your money your life, I think also, in some ways has to do with like, health and like medical stuff and things like that. So there are like potentially, you know, bigger and like worse implications than even just like the financial aspect of it. One thing that's interesting that that I misunderstood or I was misled about AI. Really up until like, a week ago or so, is I thought that you could ask chat GBT if it wrote something. So that was something that I saw other people talking about. And it's something that at the blacksmith like we've tested out ourselves you know, when working with like a new writer and wondering how to detect like if content was aI generated, and I found an article on open API's like FAQs or help desk or whatever that said, whenever you ask chat GBT if it wrote some you know, specific piece of copy for example, it just make something up like that's, that's literally what open AI says you could Google it yourself. So, you know, it's weird that it doesn't just say, I don't know, you know, it doesn't just give you like that as a straight answer. It's fine. If it doesn't know, but for it to purposely just decide, you know, bye bye narrowly, like if it's yes or no, and that it just tells you that whether it actually knows the answer, like that's very concerning to me. So a little bit of a cautionary tale. Um, but yeah, I think at the end of the day of the CNET examples, what I'm trying to impress upon you is like, does it really save time, if it like, impacts your reputation long term like I just don't think that that the best way to go about it is to generate the full piece of content and then add the human and I think that I think that AI can help intermittently and we'll definitely get to like how exactly to do that shortly. Um, so this article is also kind of fun. Charlie Brooker's, a creator of Black Mirror. If any of you are familiar, it's just this like really kind of weird messed up show on Netflix. It's very like future focused. It's like, I would say fairly.\r\n\r\nWhat's the word like it's, it's, it's kind of like post apocalyptic in some ways, not always. But it always like seems to end and kind of a scary place. And it's episodic, like each each episode I mean, to say is like its own storyline. And so the most recent season started to touch on themes of AI since that has become you know, something that has infiltrated society. And anyway, this article, The Creator who you know, has a very interesting mind based on what we see on this Netflix episodes, said that he doesn't think AI is messy enough to replace creative people. So there's good news guys, which is AI can't can't match that with us. I think on another hand AI, it lacks human empathy. You know, it can never like fully understand, like, who we are and what we go through. I don't think it ever will unless it's somehow achieved some level of sentience but yeah, I mean, ultimately, like in its wildest dreams, whatever AI, you know, thinks that it thinks it could never generate the ideas that we come up in our wildest dreams. And I think that the proof is in the pudding in terms of thinking about things like some of our favorite authors and how they create prosaic copy. So here's, here's a quote, I love Stephen King. He's kind of a machine himself, but human as far as I know. So this from needful things, one of his more interesting books, because the trust of the innocent is the wires most useful tool. And so, you know, fed copies of Stephen King's worked. You can ask chat GPT to write in his voice. I don't know if Stephen K would appreciate that or not. But, you know, I think the limitation is that it couldn't generate something like this on its own it can generate like derivative work of his but it couldn't come up with this on its own. Ai, you know, it, it isn't it doesn't have uniqueness. And Google has historically said that it's important. We're gonna talk a little bit about Google's AI guidelines that it's published. And it specifically says in those guidelines that they want to rank content that is unique, which AI fundamentally is not, not on its own, not without human intervention. Ai just read purposes and parrots things that already exists. And, and the output trends toward the average. It's not, it's not unique, it's not notable and interesting. Okay, so the last thing that I want to talk about from like this negative perspective, and then I promise we'll get into more of the fun stuff, is the idea that algorithms can be biased. And so if you think about like the people who are creating things like Chet GPT, or the Google algorithm or any other algorithm you interact with, like social media feeds, things like that. Algorithms, they represent the people that created them, not necessarily the population as a whole. So this book is really interesting. It's from the perspective of a black woman and so she is just like, read some of the book description to give you an idea of some of the topics that she explores. It says run a Google search for Black Girls, what will you find? Big booty and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms, but if you type in white girls, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and on unmoderated discussions about why black women are so sassy or why black women are so angry presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. And I think, after this book was published, because this was from a while ago, Google had manually made some adjustments to the algorithm in light of this criticism and that commentary, but the problem is with algorithms, you're you're scaling up problems, they can't manually make adjustments for every inherent bias that their algorithm has. And so you know, I don't know if we have an answer for how to fix this. But ultimately, the people creating the algorithm should represent society as a whole. I guess that's, you know, one way to think about it. Um, and I guess the question that it poses for all of us is like with AI deploying so rapidly there's going to be a lot of situations where bias needs to be routed out and fixed. And so that's, that's what's kind of scary, I think about how quickly new applications are developing. Again, it scales up problems and so that's just something I think we all need to be aware of, and and do the best that we can to fix. So okay, so now let's talk about some of the more fun stuff AI content tools. These are tools that we use in our workflow. These are tools that I use, personally. And so let's go ahead and you know, talk a little bit about how they work. So, again, we're gonna focus on like, mainly AI content tools, just because that's my sphere of genius. That's like what I have the most experience with, but I think there are different things that you could use like no matter how you're creating content, whether it's like you write blog posts for yourself, or for clients, or like, you know, you just want to like uplevel, your email strategy, or you know, help with like the personal compositions that you create. So, the first one I want to talk about is phrase which creates AI powered content briefs. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch my screen to share, to share like what a report looks like in phrase. So let's see here. I think I have to get out of full screen in order for this to work. Okay, so um, this was the form so I'm going to show you that in the beginning, but I'm gonna go ahead and exit out. So phrase generates this really cool report and the SEO aspects of it may or may not be relevant to your process. And I will say that not every piece of content that we created, the blacksmith is driven by SEO. It's not every piece of content we create to rank but I still use we still use phrase for everything because it helps with topic research. So that's what this is. It's a briefing tool. It's a research tool. Um, the way that it works and the way that the next tool, clear scope that I'm going to explain to you also works is that you give it a primary keyword. So in this case, it's how reliable are AI detectors? And so, by giving it this primary keyword, that means that we've already done the research to decide that that's the keyword that we want to optimize for. And so this is this is an article that's already published on the Black Swan, but this is something that we would have created. Prior to that publication. This this brief would have been like the first step of the writing process after doing the keyword research to decide which one we want to focus on. And the way that phrase and clear scope work is that you can I'm just going to show you like some of the pricing details so you can understand like how it works within a workflow, phrases kind of unique in that it has a plan that allows you to create unlimited reports. Not many other tools like it do that it's usually a per report cost. So that's why it's important to know what you want to optimize for before generating the reports. But it also has these lesser plans in terms of output. You know, depending on your content process, that's probably going to be more cost effective to you then you know, me as an agency, I would want more of like the unlimited plan to work for my various clients. So let's go back to phrase so what's interesting about phrase is first of all, just like the content editor experience itself, I'll be honest, we use Google Docs for everything. But if I was creating content, as like just for my internal team or something, what's cool is you can create these other tabs. And so you could have a tab that's like research. You could have a tab that's your outline. You could have a tab that's your draft, and then you could have maybe a tab with edits or something like that. So that's kind of cool just to keep the process nice and contained in one place. I've always thought that that was really unique and interesting about phrase.\r\n\r\nBut to be honest, we don't use phrase as a Content Editor. That's just an added bonus. So yeah, it generates a topic report. I'm gonna go through a couple of different aspects of it. First of all, it gives you some sort of tangible details and the way that phrase and clear scope and the market means which is another variation on a theme work is that they scrape the top 20 or so search results, which is pretty representative of like, what's going to be necessary to rank and it gives you details like, you know, how many words should you aim for for this specific topic? In this case, it's also suggesting how many headers which is like a measure of depth of content, how many links How many images? I think the top ones are what's like in this brief, that's what it's reading and the ones under it are like the average that it's suggesting. But again, we're just this is just like material that's from the brief. It's not like the actual content that we wrote. When it comes to word count. I think people always ask like, what's the ideal word count for a piece of content? And the the answer like many things in SEO is it depends. And so that's why tools like this are really useful because there is no standard. It's very topic driven. And using data that's based on actual searches means that you can get very close to like what that ideal is. So it also shares you know, the top some details of the top breaking content, you'll notice that the blog Smith currently owns a featured snippet for this particular topic, thanks in part to you know, some of the tools that we use to optimize their content. And also, I think, for this particular piece, because we did a lot of our own original research and reporting and some of it that I'll share with you when we talk about AI detector tools, I believe after the break today. You can also see like, the atomized version of some of these other top ranking results like the title like a short description, different headers, you can click into the headers to get more information. You can click through to read it. There's other things in this little side panel here that are interesting. This is just a list of all the headings from all the top ranking content pieces. Probably the most useful is this questions area and you can break it down by different sources of the question of the questions. People also ask you something you could manually go to Google and see for yourself. But it's nice to have it all in one place. I think that's the real benefit of phrase and then you can also see here that you can see questions that come from places like Quora and Reddit, you know, which which can really add a nice like flavor to what you're working on. The stats tab is really interesting. You know, they essentially suggest in phrase different stats, as well as different links that people tend to use in those top ranking pieces of content. And so you don't necessarily want to like copy everything that you see. But there might be things that like people would expect to be exposed to in your content. If there's like a big industry stat that relates to what you're talking about. As you scroll here you can see certain things like different topics that come up, you know, different related keywords or sub topics. And a lot of this you can kind of paste over from the sidebar. External links. You know, in addition to specific stats, news is also pretty interesting because this is like things that have happened maybe since those top ranking articles were published. So again, like if you're trying to be the best making sure that your information is the most up to date. This can help you do that. So freeze also has some generative AI capabilities. I'm going to be honest with you that we don't use these because we don't believe in generating AI copy as far as you know what we write for clients and for ourselves. We're experimenting with it. But so I don't really use any of the generative AI tools. But this optimize tab here is notable and useful, because it's similar to clear scope and market Muse which I'll share with you in just a moment here. And basically, it suggests certain phrases that we should expect to see in the content in order for it to rank high and relevant search. You know, obviously, you can't just throw all the words and you have to weave them in. But this is a pretty good baseline for what people would expect to see topic wise in an article and that's that's the real benefit. I think of tools like this. So yeah, there's other there's other like interesting things that you can dig into. This is like a keyword gap map map based on what I just showed you those different phrases and it shows your content compared to other ranking content and who's using what words so you can kind of see how you stack up against those other competitors. So next, I want to share clear scope with you and I have a slide for it, but I'm just going to jump straight to the report here. So what you're seeing is like a very, I would say like simplified user interface compared to like what you would see with phrase and so clear scope in many ways is very similar. They both exists to help you optimize content. They both include some important research they both work by starting with a primary keyword. One of the differences between clear scope and phrase is first of all that query scope suggests a letter grade whereas phrase and market Muse and surfer previously known as Super SEO suggested number like out of 100 in order to understand like how close to optimizing compared to their standards you are, it also suggests a word count. And one more thing I wanted to say about the content creator is that at the blacksmith we always aim for an a or higher that tends to be a good standard for actually achieving rankings, high rankings and relevant search. I'm actually not sure if phrase does this. I'm sure they do. I just didn't notice it while going through. But clear scope also suggests a target readability level. I think that's really important for matching the needs of the searcher not going you know too deep into something that maybe could benefit from being more surface level for example. You can also notice here that they have those suggestions for phrases and so phrase we use the very beginning of our process, but we're not optimizing content within that tool. We're really using clear scope for that because in my experience, and this could differ by industry, but I find their suggestions for phrases to incorporate to be a little bit more fine tuned than phrase. So you know, that's, that's my opinion. Um, you'll notice that they also have the sidebar, so they have, you know, a couple of details. I don't again, I don't necessarily use clear scope for the briefing processes is really more at the end of the process. So stuff like this, I'm not necessarily going over but if you were to use one tool, then it's nice to know that it has that it also has those top you know, search results for the query, examples of like headers and things like that. It also has the term like keyword gap map that shows how you stack up compared to the competition. You can dig into the competitor details even more in terms of how clear scope looks at content with their letter grade, by word count, that it has this nice chart that shows how that content grade stacks up against their organic position in search. And then I think the last thing that I'll mention about clear scope for now, is that you can use that editor in here just like you can use the editor in phrase, but actually both free and clear scope. Have a Google Docs add on. And so all you have to do is like grab the report link the individual link to that specific report, put it in Google Docs, and then you get all this information within, you know, Google Docs where you probably at least my team works better that way. Um, okay, so and then I guess the last last thing I was gonna say about this topic is that if I had to pick one tool, I think I would pick clear scope. Again, because of the fine tuned pneus of the instructions, but if I was a smaller shop operation, I'd probably pick phrase because it can do like a more well rounded look at like the topic as a whole and debriefing so so that's my suggestion. Clear scope works by essentially offering it's like a per report price, but you can buy packages and like the more reports you buy at a time, the less expensive Each report is. So let me get my slides back up here. And then we'll move on to the next tool that we're going to talk about though.\r\n\r\nWe talked about phrase to talked about clear scope. So let's talk about market Muse just kind of in passing here because it's a very similar tool. It uses some different technologies, compared to clear scope and phrase and so that's why it's a part of our process again as an organization that spends a lot of time on SEO and data and keyword research. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to you if you're going to maybe consider one of those other tools. What's interesting about marketmuse is that it has this functionality to create an AI generated first draft that includes some like light human intervention from their side. I think that's what this is actually this is like a sample from a while ago where we were just playing around with it to see what would happen. But yeah, again, it has a lot of the same functionality. It offers content optimization suggestions that like keyword gap map that I showed you and both of the tools and it has like some generative AI capabilities. So yeah, it just adds a little bit of extra detail. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that it's something you need to add to your workflow if like one of those other tools could satisfy a lot of these same things. So talking about some other tools that are interesting. Word tune is something that I feel like is so underrated. It's essentially uses your own copy to make suggestions. And so again, I'm going to I'm going to show you what that looks like. So let me share my screen back here. So it works in Google Docs. And so here's I just stole the intro basically from that AI detector article. And so what you could do is you highlight whatever text you want it to make suggestions based off of and I typically do it sentence by sentence I, I'm sure it could do longer bits of text, but I don't find that to be as useful. For me. This is like a great tool for when you have writer's block because I don't know you know if you've experienced this but oftentimes I'll let my get myself get stuck on a specific word and it just like really bugs me, and I'm like it's not done until I figured out the right word. And it takes me forever to get through that. So we're tune. It's great because I'm using it with my own copy. So I can feel really confident about whatever it suggests. I'm sure you could use word tune to take AI generated copy and then re spin it. But that's not my suggestion. So again, it works by using this like Google Docs add on and you you highlight it and just to show that action again. It has this little word tune icon. And then you can see different suggestions for how word tune would rewrite it you get like 10 or something like that. And then you can also fine tune it by changing the tone and then by finding ways to shorten or expand it depending on what your use case is. The last thing that I'll say about word toon for right now is it has this thing called spices and so that's like getting a little bit more like next level with the AI generation and using like generative texts. I haven't played around too much with this yet, but it is interesting. And this is kind of taking it away I think from you know basing it off of your copy to kind of like generating something completely new. So that's why I don't necessarily use this but I think it could be a useful resource for when you're when you have writer's block or things like that. So let me get my slides back up here. Here it is. Okay, so so that was word tune. Um, and then Grammarly. I think works very similarly to word tune, and that it uses your own body of work your own copy, to suggest edits, and so I wrote an article for their blog. That's what the learn more link is. After a recent keynote, they did about all their generative AI capabilities. And so I would definitely check that out if you're curious about how to use grammerly in this way. And full disclosure, I'm a Grammarly ambassador, so you know, I'm always singing their praises, but I think it's I think it's interesting because Grammarly, like many other SAS tools on the market are starting to invest in AI capabilities like directly within their tools. And so I think we're gonna see like more and more of examples of this. And grammerly has a lot of other I think really useful. And interesting features like they have this brand style guide, which is something we use that the blacksmith which allows you to set your preferred spelling for things like brand names, and grammar rules and things like that. All right, so let's take a couple minutes for questions. Anything that's come up so far, after the break, we're going to talk about AI detector tools now that I've shown you the AI writing tools. We're going to talk about chat how to write a good chat GBT prompt and then we're going to end the day with how to create your own personal GPT. So yeah, in the meantime, there's any questions. We'll talk about them now and then we'll take a little bit of a break.\r\n\r\nYeah, very good, great overview of some really cool tools that can be used for our content creation. If you have questions specifically about that, drop those there in the zoom q&a. There's one question floating out there about the slide. We were sharing this link as a slide sharing the slides as a slide being link because there was an issue getting them exported where the the links on the slides were clickable. And so technology Yeah, it that's so currently not downloadable. Is the long and the short of it so but that slide being link is there and it'll be available for you going forward.\r\n\r\nWe can we could share them as downloaded just won't be a clickable link. So you can we could share like both in tandem with each other. Unfortunately, that's going to be the limitation\r\n\r\nYeah, yeah. So I'm happy to add that PDF link as well. We'll I'll get that added to the link bundle as we come back. If you want to download these just know that there are things that say read more, learn more that don't clicked anywhere in the PDF. Alright folks, well let's go ahead and take a break. It is 153 Central time let's take a break until right at two o'clock Central. So right about seven minutes from now and we're quiet until then. Sounds great. See you then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We are back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, we are back and ready for the second part of day two. Maddie, what are we going to knock out today?\r\n\r\nSo we're gonna start with now that we've learned how to generate a copy, how do you detect it? We're going to then move to talking a little bit about some Google guidelines around AI content writing for humans and robots. And then we'll end the day with a deeper dive into chat GPT how to write a great prompt and then how to create your own personal GPT which I'm really excited about because it's something that I only just learned how to do myself. Very\r\n\r\ngood. That's a lot to cover in the next hour. I let me invite everyone also to look at the chat I'm going to drop in today's slides if you have come in late. Also, we've added a link there for the PDF download. And finally, there's a link in the link bundle that'll drop in in just a moment that has the invitation for you to submit your site for a content UX audit tomorrow. So with that I will turn it over to you Matty, let's\r\n\r\ngo. Sounds great. All right. Yeah, let's go ahead and knock this out. So AI detector tools. There's a couple that we've tested at the blacksmith and I want to share some of the results of those tests too, so that you can understand what they can be useful for. But also again, there are limitations. As with the rest of this world of AI, everything's still kind of developing. We're all learning things at the same time. And so there's no like perfect answer. There's no one definitive tool that's going to tell you like this is current AI content, or this isn't AI content. So a couple tools that you could try though that I think will give you a decent idea or continent scale, copy leaks and originality.ai and the link here which again, you can grab through the slide bean link is a link to an in depth investigation that we did at the blog Smith testing out these different tools. You know, trying to learn more about the nature of AI content and what it sounds like. So I do have a couple of ideas for you two that we'll talk about next in terms of like how to rewrite things that sound robotic whether they were robot generated or not. But before we get to that, this example here is kind of funny because it's the Constitution and this is continent scale, saying that they detected to be 9% ai generated and you know, I don't think they had robots at the time unless alien somehow hooked them up. But I think it's fair to say that this is more than likely 100% human generated content. But it's just interesting to see that their AI detector is still picking up some very some version of that. And that you know, also perhaps it hasn't trained this AI detector on you know, pieces that existed before. Ai content was a thing. So so that's just like one thing. You know, I think from the standpoint of like, if you're working with content creators, and you're paying for human generated content, then you should get that fundamentally I think that it's an ethical violation for someone to use AI to generate content without disclosing that and to be accepting payment for that as if it were something that they were creating. Of course, there are many companies out there who are hiring people with the job description that is like aI content writer, AI content editor or like somebody who trains you know, a chatbot on a certain way a certain body of work a certain way of writing. All of that being said, if you if you are using these tools, and they are saying with a high degree of certainty, you know, this is AI generated copy. I think it's really important to not outright accuse somebody of submitting AI generated copy what I do at the blog Smith is like let's say that we're doing like a paid test with a new writer hopeful for our team. What I do is I say, hey, you know, we ran this through, you know, these three AI detector tools, and here's what it said here, you know, is what degree of AI content it's saying it thinks this is like, can you comment on that? And it gives them the chance to you know, explain what they think might happen, defend themselves, offering to make fixes, and I think it's really like the way people people are going to be honest or not. There's nothing you could do about that. But I think it's the way that they respond to and handle that situation that tells you what you need to know about if you want to work with them, whether or not you can ultimately tell if their copy was aI generated or not. What is very interesting about these different tools is first of all, they're all gonna give you a different answer. That's just a fact. Because they're all using a different approach to detect AI content. The other thing is that you can input the exact same copy on one of these tools two times and get a different answer. So again, it's it's the wild wild west. But these will at least give you something to think about and whether it doesn't matter. Like if we if we trust the writer or not, we're always going to run their copies through one or multiple of these tools because we want to detect things that sound robotic, even if they were written by a human. So that kind of brings me to my next point here that I was starting to hint at. So when it comes to detecting AI content, or even detecting content that humans wrote, that sounds robotic, there's a couple of patterns that you can look for. The two major characteristics that the aforementioned AI detector tools are looking for are first of all, perplexity, so that's unpredictability within the content. Ai generated text tends to have low perplexity. Human writing has higher perplexity, it kind of makes sense we're a little bit more erratic than a robot. The other thing is burstiness, which is a similar concept. So it's looking for variation in the length and the structure of sentences. Ai content tends to be more steady, more formulaic, which makes sense. It has lower burstiness and human writing, which you know, has much more variation. The image you see here are some other things that we've picked up in our own writing process. And in investigating this topic, different signals that sound robotic again, whether they are in AI generated or not. So repeating words, like in this example, collision coverage, you know, coverage collision, like it's just like it's not using a lot of variation. And in the box MyStyle guide we talk about like, trying not to use the same word twice in the same sentence or paragraph, which is not always possible, but this would be an example of something that wouldn't pass the blacksmith style guide test because it's it's too repetitive. Also repetitive sentence structure where like, each sentence starts with the same formulaic approach. Advertising then a verb you know, advertising the verb, unnatural word usage, so like, you know, removing a glass dome to access the ball, but it doesn't really sound like how a human would talk about replacing a light bulb. A generic or impersonal tone. You know, it's like things that don't add value that you're just kind of like saying for the sake of having words, it's another thing that we talk about in the blog, Smith style guide, like everything you say, should have a purpose, and we don't believe in fluff. It's about cutting things to being the most concise version they can be while still conveying enough meaning. For people to understand what we're trying to say. Statements that contradict themselves. So the new policy will increase employee benefits while at the same time it will reduce employee benefits that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And inconsistent verb tense, you know, something a human editor. Should be able to pick up pretty well but probably a robot writing is not going to care too much about He He was waiting for the bus when he sees his coworker. Stiff, formal or matter of fact, writing style. You know, again, just something that just doesn't sound like a human wrote it or who would want to read it. So this is this is something that can be helpful to you like when you're doing your own edits to kind of like go through these different things. And, again, whether whether it's aI generated or not, and you know that for a fact, you still want to make sure that your writing is something that appeals to the human. So I wanted to take some time to talk about Google's helpful content update and also their guidance for AI generated content and whether or not it will rank some of this we did talk about last year if you were here, so we're just going to do a really quick refresher on that as it relates to this topic. So my book and like really like what we're talking about, in general is kind of marrying the concepts of writing for both humans who are really the ultimate buyer like they're the ones who actually have money so they can buy from you, whatever it is you're selling. They respond to other humans, other people's empathy, versus robots who you know, we're not writing for their sake, but they are the medium that connects us. To those humans. And so it's important for the things that we write, to be indexable to, you know, be findable to be descriptive, and to ultimately match the intent of whatever the human is looking for. So, you know, robots can also take the form of social networking site algorithms, like that news feed that you're familiar with, I'm sure.\r\n\r\nSo so that's kind of like the two players in this game. Here. So this is some highlights from Google's guidance about AI generated content. As you can see by the link here, this is from early 2023. And I was looking at this page again, just a couple of days ago to see if anything had changed. I had seen something on Twitter now x, where somebody had mentioned that something on this page should change. And I was looking at these three things because I think they're the most relevant to this topic that we're talking about. And like, I don't know if I'm just you know, like, post pregnancy brain or something. I couldn't find the difference. But it might have been because it was about something else on that page. But I might have missed it. And it might have been one of these things. But anyway, I think these things still more or less ring true today. And if anything has changed, it has been Google being less specific about their guidelines. Because that's kind of the nature of what all these things that they've shared with us are it's it's kind of like so just to go over them is a content against Google searches guidelines. They say it's not, but you know, it can't be used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which we'll talk about when we talk about the helpful content update. Will AI content rank highly on search? Maybe, you know, it doesn't give it any gains, which makes sense. What I think is really notable about this is they talk about if it's useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of e 80. It might do well in search. So they talk about original, but we've already talked today about how AI content at least on its own without manual intervention by humans is inherently not original. It is inherently not unique. And I would argue that again, without human intervention, it's neither useful nor helpful, in that, you know, you're not It's not like adding something that doesn't already exist. At least in that case. So to me, from Google's own words, AI content really aren't its own shouldn't rank high and relevant search. But of course, there are exceptions. And then, of course, there are situations where people pair that with a human editor like we saw with seeing that of course, CNET being a cautionary tale of what to avoid. Should I use AI to generate content? They say if you see it as an essential way to help you produce content that is helpful and original, we have that original word again, it might be useful to consider but again, if you're trying to gain search engine rankings and no there was something on Twitter now x where somebody was kind of like I can't remember who it was, but you might recognize the situation especially if you're in like the content world. Someone was boasting about how they had created a ton of AI generated content and they were sharing you know some stats from like their Google Analytics, and how would that helped rankings and things like that? And I think everybody agreed that that person should have probably kept their mouth shut because somebody from Google ended up you know, seeing this Thrive that came to their attention and they got hit with a manual penalty based on what this person was saying about you know, having not really like had that human intervention. So thus, it was not original or unique. And it's just funny, like, you could probably get away with it, at least for a while, depending on how Google develops more of these guidelines. But when you start to boast about it, and Google gets wind of it, then like there are manual interventions that they could take, so tread carefully. If it's working. Keep that to yourself. So then it Yeah, I wanted to like connect this back to Google's helpful content algorithm update, which also happened. Probably a little over a year ago, maybe two years ago. And so they describe it as being part of their long term efforts to provide original and valuable content through search. It rewards content that meets users expectations while demoting content written primarily with search engines in mind. So like we were just talking about what the AI content. This this update isn't focused on AI but but it adds color to those guidelines in terms of how to approach it or you know, if you are generating AI content, how to make it work, so that it could rank these questions. Are directly from Google just made pretty was blacksmith branding, but the link that I shared here will will get you to the Google documentation that includes these questions and the subsequent ones. So to ask yourself like is is this content truly people versus is something that Google would consider ranking. It's things like Do you have a primary purpose or focus for your site? If you're writing about too many disparate topics, it's very confusing to Google you can certainly write about things that are different but related to each other, but you should really have like one specific focus if you want to rank high in relevant search. Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they've had a satisfying experience? I think that's a question to ask yourself, whenever you create any type of content like Is it is it satisfying to the end user doesn't really just serve your purposes? They talk about like demonstrating firsthand experience or like a depth of knowledge that's really important. That's that's how we add uniqueness to our content. That's how we make it original. Even if it's just your opinion on something, you know, that adds color to the content that already exists. Okay, so, um, let's talk now about from the search perspective, are you taking the search engine first approach to your content? So these are things that you obviously don't want to do. And it's questions like, you know, are you primarily trying to attract people from search versus creating something truly useful for humans? It does say are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics like that cautionary tale, that person who was sharing, you know, the content they generated, which resulted in a manual penalty, it's a perfect example. I think this is important too, like, are you mainly just summarizing what others have said without adding much value? You should always be adding I think something to the content that you're creating in order for it to be worth creating in the first place.\r\n\r\nSo just to kind of summarize here, like what is helpful content versus unhelpful content from these guidelines that Google has given us and that I honestly agree with? helpful content is people first genuine specific, it's actionable. Up to date is important. Once you publish something, you have to think about, like if you're using stats or if it's about maybe a tool that changes frequently, like you should be regularly reviewing or auditing your content for opportunities to update it. Is it relatable, is it concise? And ultimately, is it satisfying, versus the unhelpful content which is written primarily for the search engine robots it's spammy? It's generic, it's abstract. It might be outdated. Ultimately, it's impersonal, impersonal, fluffy, and then whacking. So these are some easy guidelines that you can use to understand if your content is hitting the mark for something that Google would even consider ranking high and relevant search. All right, so now we're gonna get to some of like the really fun stuff, I think today, which is get GBT some specific examples for how you can use it, as well as a demonstration for how I'm using it. And so, a lot of the things that I'm going to talk about today are based on things that I've learned from other people. I didn't necessarily invent these things. I've adapted many for my own use cases. And so again, I think this is a really valuable opportunity for like if you have anything to add to this discussion, I'd love to see it in the chat. I think it could benefit other people. How are you experimenting with AI? Like how how would you maybe adapt some of these ideas for how to write a great prompt What are like interesting prompts that you've used, and you know what, how is that benefited? You so I'll just put that out there. And then I'll also say that some of these are like pretty much all of these guidelines are based on open AIS guidelines for prompt engineering as well as Google's in some cases, I've combined to them and in all cases, I've given examples of how to use them effectively. So let's go ahead and jump to it. Okay, so the, I think first and perhaps the most important thing is to be as specific as possible. And you want to set parameters for the output that you're looking for. So my prompt here was helped me generate 10 email subject lines to use for cold outreach for my content marketing agency, please limit output to a maximum of 45 characters per example. I picked that number, the 45 characters because I saw that that's like somewhat of a best practice for how many characters people want to see in an email subject line. And what I could have done here was use the personal GPT I'm going to show you later that's all about the blogs and style guide them has like aspects of like how we do business and I could have gotten like even better example results here. But the point was not to show you something perfect it was to show you how to apply this principle. And the other thing that I wanted to add to is like you can always start with a plant, see what it gets you and then you can set parameters after the fact to refine your output. Like, you know, maybe I would have asked this prompt and then asked for it to shorten it to 45 characters or to suggest new examples of 45 characters. Or maybe I would have asked for like, what are you know, 10 General Sales, cold outreach subject lines, that I could use and then I might have added the detail Okay, now, adjust it for like my content marketing agency. The next one is to give context and examples. So I have this bot and I think I'm going to show you a screenshot of it next. One of my personal GPCs is a blacksmith sales expert. And so I created this bot because we recently hired a new salesperson, and there's just so much to learn both about the blogs with his brand. The work we do for customers, and just our sales process in general things that we want to share with new prospects that I wanted to create a resource and it's like of course you know, I want to make myself as available as possible to this new salesperson because typically I've been the salesperson for my company, I have a lot of that knowledge in my own head, but there are times when I am unavailable or I have other stuff that I have to work on. And so I wanted to create a personal GPT that incorporates some of this different documentation that I've created about our process. You know, referring to this prompt it also has like a copy of our standard proposal. Different things about you know, like what makes us stand out compared to the competition what's what's unique to us, I guess, so that any person on our team, any especially new salesperson, would be able to use this chat bot in order to surface some of this information, especially if they couldn't get a hold of me basically. So here's an example of a prompt I gave my personal GPT which is using the above case study. So I gave it a URL on our website. And one of the features of chat GPT is that you can have it browse the web in order to to include information and its results. So I gave it a URL. I asked it to reference a proposal that I had attached to the GPT that I've uploaded to it. And I said proposed an email pitch for a specific job opportunity. I copy and pasted a longer piece than this. I just took a screenshot but like the long version of this job description, and and I asked it to effectively address the requirements that the job description surfaced and the writing based on our strengths. And so what ended up happening was, you know, it wrote like a cold pitch email. But it did it did effectively address this prompt. There were things that I would change about it. Certainly there are things that I would have edited it before I sent it out to the person who had posted this job description, but I think that for me as a founder who has also traditionally been the salesperson it's such an effective way to use this tool because I spend so much time just you know, it's like I know all this information I know what we're good at. I know that we have relevant examples. You know, I know all this but it takes time to like resurface that knowledge and put it in a form that sounds good and is compelling, you know, to a sales prospect so that if you take one thing away, I think that you know that's like one really excellent use case of using your existing knowledge or your internal documentation. To make your life way easier.\r\n\r\nAnother related GPT prompt engineering tip is to use de limiters to clearly indicate distinct parts of the input. That just means like what I shouldn't have done here that would have made it probably a little bit easier for chat. GPT to understand what I wanted is to put this this job description text in like quotes, that's like a delimiters to say like, you know, do this to this piece of what I'm asking for to kind of like help it understand what part of the copy it's referencing. And what part of the copy is the ask, especially when you have like a longer input output, you know, whatever. Another example of that is something I learned from James rose. He is an automation and Zapier expert and has been doing a lot of interesting experiments with AI who's really good person to follow. If you're interested in just like getting ideas, he takes transcripts from like voice of customer interviews where he's getting feedback and you know, like positive testimonials and things about his product and he feeds that transcript into chat GPT and says you know, use this puts a transcript in quotes those delimiters and basically like give me like three, you know, like really nice things they said about you know, our product three like great pieces of feedback. And I think that that's such a useful way we like on our client calls on our internal meetings. We use a tool called fireflies, which automatically transcribes all our meetings, but it's still you know, it's still a lot to sort through an end fireflies has its own AI capabilities, too. So it helps to summarize and things like that, but to take to be able to use that output and quickly surface insights based on whatever your prompt is, I think is such an awesome use of AI that saves the human reader from having to go through the whole thing. So this is and I'll show you, I'll show you what this looks like in action when we do the personal GPT demonstration. But this is kind of what it looks like to set some parameters for your personnel GPT and there's two I guess like schools of thought on setting like setting parameters narrowly defining the G PTS role. So you could do this within normal chat GPT and say for this query, you know, I want you to take on this specific role. And so I got this idea from Paul Roeser. He was on some like marketing technology podcast, and he's talking about how he uses AI. And his example was like, something along the lines of like, you know, pretend that you're a lawyer that advises entrepreneur, it's about hiring law and then he gave his prompt so he kind of like set the scene like this is the narrow role that I want you to operate into this query. So that's one way that you could look at it the other way is that you could create a personal GPT that serves a specific purpose like my blacksmith sales expert, that I've already referred to and that you know, I'm kind of showing you behind the scenes, how I set it up. So as you can see here, there's like a name for it, which is kind of arbitrary. A brief description, I think, mostly for your reference. And then the instructions are like what the AI uses to then suggest answers to your prompts. So as you can see here, I'm telling it like you can use our website as your primary reference. You should be familiar with all those pages and use it to inform your responses. It'll ask you and I'll show you how you want it to communicate with you how you want it to give answers. You know what specific information you want to focus on again, like narrowing that scope. And then I also say like tailor your responses to showcase the company's strengths and successes. Using you know details from the website and emphasize why we're the ideal choice in you know, answering like sales related queries. So this is one of the greatest uses of chat GPT without narrowly defining its role and objective. You're gonna get like a wide variety of answers and that's fine. It depends on what your use cases, but by giving it a roll, I think the quality of your output goes up exponentially. And I'll show you again, at the end here, what that looks like in practice. Here's another really interesting way to use it, I think, especially if you're trying to learn a new skill or if you're trying to troubleshoot an existing workflow, which is what I was doing in this prompt. So I use air table a lot. I'm a huge fan of no code and automation in general. I've found in my life that it's really hard to find like the perfect solution to everything that I want to do. I never could find like my perfect project management tool. And so essentially, I built it between using process street air table, Zapier, and you know the other mix of ragtag tools that are in my arsenal. So in this case, I was trying to create a specific automation in air table that for some reason is just evading me and I'm sure I'm doing like one stupid thing wrong, but I asked air table or sorry, I asked Chad GPT first of all, I prompted it by telling it what automation I was trying to create, like the actions that triggers the end goal. And it gave me like a step by step process that I would say is a little bit more high level than this out, but and then I asked it to refine its guidance or expand on its guidance by saying okay, so for this step, this is where I'm getting stuck. What was how exactly what I set this up in air table, and so then, as you can see, the result has some details and it's more detailed than the previous query gave for that step. It's probably worth mentioning that in chat GPT right now, there's two versions of GPT, which is like the underlying, you know, algorithm, machine learning mechanism, whatever. So there's GPT 3.5, which is an older version, and then there's GPT for GPT four incorporates web browsing so it has more up to date guidance. So especially when you're trying to troubleshoot something like air table, which changes often and so, you know, if I were using the old version of chat GPT, I might have gotten a different answer. So when you're doing things like like this, you want to use like the newer version, there is a limitation. I think it's something like you can have 40 prompts within three hours or something like that. I don't think I've ever gotten close to hitting that. But I suppose if you were to ask, you know, a lot of follow up questions, or you're troubleshooting something very complicated, then you could hit that so that's just something to keep in mind that as a chat GPT user and I don't know what the distinction is for paid versus free, but I think that the paid version of Chad GPT is like worth its weight in gold. I think it's extremely undervalued and it's probably because they're using our data to train it. So they do get a benefit out of it. But you know, I would say if you're finding yourself limited by the free version, then just upgrade to the paid it's, it's so worth that.\r\n\r\nOkay, so now, here's the real fun part. So we're gonna go through how to build your own GPT and I'm gonna give you like a specific task to do and so you can either follow along with me while I do this now, or you can do this yourself. Later, watch the recording and replicate it. I will say the process is probably much more straightforward than you might think, if you've never done this before. So we'll go ahead and get started. Let me set my screen accordingly. So we're going to jump over to the blog Smith website, because this is going to be the basis for the very basic UBT that we're going to create today, which is based on one that I've already created and refined a little bit more than what we're going to get into. But okay, so the blacksmith has this writing style guide and on our website. It has this chapter version so you can jump you know to these different sections. To see how will we go about our writing style. It's something that's fairly industry agnostic, so definitely like a great resource. If you don't have your own writing style guide. You could use ours to build yours. But what I want to do is create a chat GPT bot based on this that essentially acts as like a blacksmith editor that defends our style and explains when a piece of copy is not following it. So we have this as a PDF which I've already downloaded. I'll just show you what it looks like really quick. And it's it's designed, but it's fairly plain texts. You know, it's not that much more complex visually than like a Google doc version of this. And I'm telling you this, because my first attempt at making a personal GPT was actually to solve a personal problem of mine, which is that I love the game Settlers of Catan and I wanted to make a Catan rules bot so that I could download all the PDFs of the rules for every version we have. And I could ask the GPT okay, like you know, here's some like obscure situation like what is the role, you know, based on these rule books? Because every once in a while, something like that pops up. And while I like to think of myself as a content expert, there are those niche situations that require further consideration. Unfortunately, on the Catan website, the PDFs that you can download are very complicated visually as PDF, so chat GPT in my limited experience has not been able to read them. So it's just something to note that like you want to give it like the plainest text version of whatever documents you want to share with it, but something like this would be fine. And I know that because I've tested it. Okay, so so if you want to follow along, you know, just hit download, and that's this is the exact file that we're going to use. So then you go to the chat GPT dashboard. Which looks like this. And like I told you, you can toggle between chat, or GPT 3.5 or GPT. Four, you can see you know those limitations as well as the added benefits of using that more recent version of it. So then you go to explore GP Ts, and you can see on my sidebar when it loads here that I have. We have chat GPT which is like you know, every every question you could ever want to ask and then I have a couple of my personal gptc here as well as some that I've explored in this explore LGBTs area that I'm just kind of playing around with. So this is also just like a really fun place to look through things, test things out and get ideas for the the GPS you might want to create. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead and click this Create button, and you'll see this interface. Again, it's pretty simple. And if you go to create, it's going to prompt you with specific questions, but if you kind of like are familiar with this personal GPT idea, you could also jump to the Configure tab and start filling it out. But I think that it's easiest to think about it from this Create Tab. And so it's going to prompt you with a couple of questions. So this first one is like what kind of chat GPT what kind of personal GPT Do you want to make? So I'm going to tell it, you know, I like to create a GPT that serves as an editor for my brand, the blog Smith. The goal is to have this GPT serve as a resource. That references our specific style guide, and suggests edits based on newly inputted copy. I'm just making this up. But the last time that I did this, I'd used something similar to that. And so after each input, it's going to think you know, it's going to react to the things that you're telling it and it's going to ask you to refine the way that it interacts with you. So we're not none of this is like rocket science right now. This is just like designing almost like the persona of who this GPT is going to be. So then it's gonna suggest to name I suggest naming this GPT blacksmith editor. Does that work for you? Sure. Yeah. And you can change this yourself. Like if you just want to, like get through this part. Just say yep, yep, that's fine. And the next thing is it's going to generate a profile picture and so these are new, they're a little bit arbitrary. It's just like for your own purposes, for fun. One thing that is kind of fun with the imagery and it doesn't always work so we'll see. But sometimes I asked it to change to adapt the picture to use like one of our brand colors just for fun. So I'll say like, can you update this image to incorporate our main brand color, which just using a text expander Simple as that? Let's do it does. So this is using that dolly dolly I never know how to say it to suggest images and, you know, it looks like Okay, right? But we're not we're not asking it to create anything like complicated at this point. So, so like for example, it didn't, it didn't really follow my query. So let's see if I try a different way. Can the image use, you know, our main branch color? Like this is this is definitely the limitation of AI is that sometimes it understands the query and sometimes it just doesn't and we won't get stuck on it. If it doesn't get it. I just want to see if changing it has any practical effect on it. So then after this, it's going to ask about Yeah, that doesn't do it. No, that's fine. Okay, so the next question. They're asking me to more narrowly defined the role of what this GPT is going to serve as I'm Oh, so I'll have you use the uploaded PDFs as this as the foundation for your edits any questions? So I can upload the PDF here. Or I can go to that configure tag and I can also tab and I can also I can also upload additional documents to help as well like with my blacksmith sales expert, I have like our proposal I have a document about our sales process. I have another GPT that I forgot to mention that's called the blacksmith like SEO guru or something like that. And it basically I uploaded a bunch of documents about our approach to SEO some stuff about our keyword research process, and our like philosophy behind the different steps as well as a document I created for our writers and editors. That's about let me see how to get out of that. That's about how we write about SEO to make sure that our philosophy is communicated correctly and specifically. So that's just an example of different documents that you might use to support the outputs here and to narrowly define what you want to base its answers on. Okay. One thing that's important to say is when you're uploading documents you want to make sure to kind of like give context and say like, this is how I want you to use it. And like, you know, I'm doing this, I'm uploading this. So I'm expecting you to use this as part of your output if you don't, if you don't refer to that document when you're setting it up or when you're interacting with it. It might just ignore it in some, in some use cases when I've been creating these personal GPS like that's happened where, for example, with this one, it'll make edits based on best practices, but not based on the document that I specifically wanted it to use. So that's why I used that language. And so it says, I've updated your GPS behavior to focus on our specific style guide based on the uploaded PDF. So that's great. You know, like, what options so one thing that it usually asks is like how do you want the GPT to communicate with you and I'm getting maybe ahead of myself, I'm gonna say no, that sounds good and see if it prompts me to ask about like the tone.\r\n\r\nOkay, so it's not gonna say it looks good, but what options do I have for how it communicates with me? In terms of tone of voice, again, usually asked so this is giving me some options here. Again, not usually in the way that it normally does. It kind of asked to like paragraph form versus like giving me several examples. I'm gonna say that I want it to be let's go with number three, which is encouraging and positive. I think that that's the ethos of how we edit at the box with the other things are true to um, yeah, so just for the sake of this, and you can always change this, you can always refine it. Okay, so it's updating the GPT. This is probably the last edit and then what I'll do is I'm going to grab some copy that I want it to, to edit just to show you how it comes full circle. And then I'm going to show you kind of like the back end of what it looks like. So let me grab that copy. I'm going to feed it an example of like a recent social post that we were editing and the formatting is going to be like a little bit funky here, which is fine, because this is just an example. And the blog the style guide isn't necessarily built with a focus on editing social copy, but again, it was just like a quick thing to to try. Okay, so it says it's updated it. It tells me you know what the point of it is no more adjustments needed. Let's try it out. Okay, so I'm going to show you how it works and then we'll show you the Configure and then we'll kind of end the day off with any questions. Okay. So it gives you some prompts based on what it thinks that you might ask it and you can edit this, but I'm going to say please suggest edits to the following copy, in quotes and quotations, those delimiters based on the blacksmith style guide PDF and again, it's gonna be a little sloppy looks like it didn't actually take the name of the GPT that we asked it to. So we'll we'll take a look at that too. So it's interesting depending on the prompt you give it and I've tried this a couple of times in this case, it's kind of separating it out by saying like okay, here's some of the things from the blacksmith style guide and here's like specific passages of copy and how we would change them. So that's interesting. But what I would probably prefer is that it edits the whole thing, and then it tells me what edits it made. So it's, again, it's referencing I can I can tell because I'm familiar with it, but it's referencing specific aspects of the blacksmith style guide, which is great, we know it's working. But what I'm going to ask you to do is to change the way it outputs it. Can you refine the previous output by starting with I might mess up exactly how to say this, but by starting with, like all of the copy with edits, then after words, shared the specific edits made from blog Smith style perspective, that might not be like the most effective prompt. We're just going to see what it says. Okay, yeah, it looks like it's understanding. Nature. The copy here is an important I just want to show you how something like this could work for your purposes. Okay, so this is what I wanted it it refined the copy first and then it told me what it refined and why. Um, so let's look at this Configure tab. So yeah, for whatever reason, it didn't add the name. That that it prompted me and asked me to so I'm gonna go ahead and add that and you can see it up here. You can see this description. You can see the instructions based on some of the things that we talked about when we were creating it. You can make changes to these conversation starters we might even say like what like other conversation starters, would you suggest using freelist UPC code? I'm just curious and I don't know what to do. You can see the PDF that we uploaded and I can upload more files. You can add additional capabilities. I think by default the web browsing and Dolly image generation is implemented for many of you today who deal with code, this code interpreter might be useful. And then AI actions is something that I've started to play around with but don't fully understand but there's a way that you can connect your personal GPT to Zapier so that for example, it could reference data and other apps. So for my blog, Smith sales GPT I'm trying to create an AI action that allows it to reference our air table CRM so that you could ask it questions about a certain lead or certain portfolio projects and things like that. So once I get that implemented, it's going to be so cool. Okay, so it's giving me some ideas for these conversation starters that are a little generic, but I could probably refine them further. I think the last thing to talk about is how you can either keep this to yourself or share it with other people. I think that these drafts are automatically saved. So if you X out of here before clicking Save, I believe it will still exist, but don't quote me on that. From there you can decide you know, if you want to, if you want to keep it to yourself if it's you know something that's for your own personal use cases, or if you want to share it with your team or if you want to share it with like the wider world like maybe you create a chatbot for your industry that other people could benefit from that you want to share. So, in most cases, probably anyone with the link is a good bet, if you ever intend intend to share it with other people. Okay, so let me jump back to my slides really quick. We're going to end off the day here. So here we go. me pull this back up. Um, okay, this is the link to grab the style guide if you want to use that to replicate what I did today. You can also grab that from the side being like um, I'll just say one more time. My book writing for humans and robots. It was the number one best seller in the SEO category. So if SEO and content is something that you want to invest more time and learning about then I would highly recommend my book. You can grab the first chapter for free on the books website, and you can grab the book on Amazon in both print and Kindle format. I'll give one more reminder for our live content UX audit tomorrow. I'd really love to help you workshop, your content, help you come up with ideas for making it even stronger and more effective. So you can use this link to do that and that will happen at the end of day two. And then, you know, outside of today, if you have any questions about the things that we're talking about, you can either email me Maddie at the blogspot.com or on Twitter, aka ex im at Mad Yasmin and then yeah, we'll end the day with any questions that have come up since going over some of this GPT stuff.\r\n\r\nYeah, great stuff. Thanks Maddie. You know, the custom GP tees are really interesting. And it's it's also not only for your own business, but also working for clients. It's an opportunity to really, it's, it's a service you can provide. We have a boy for example, that has a ton of they're an educational nonprofit and they have a ton of PDFs like 800 and an educational topic that they deal with and so we're investigating, what would it take to put those PDFs in there and then have a bot that you could query the entire library to find an answer to something right. It's just super, super useful. Yeah.\r\n\r\nOne one note on that Nathan is chat GPT. So they have a limitation of you can upload 20 Total documents but they don't say how large or small those documents have to be so OneNote for like anybody who's trying like this is something that came up with that Catan bot I was trying to make. You can combine the documents if need be.\r\n\r\nYeah. And chat CPT if you have a large library like that it might not be the best tool it sometimes there are a bunch of third party tools. I mean, if you go on App Sumo, every day, there's a new one that somebody's chat bot or whatever, but find one that the UI that you like and a lot of those don't have those limitations. Like they have a separate database that they're looking at with total sort of magic they've created. I don't know, I don't understand it. But anyway, yeah. So folks, a couple of questions stacked up there. If you have a question, add that to the zoom q&a, and we'll dive into it. So first question from Doug. Maddie, how does SEMrush or SEMrush fit into the landscape of content writing tools? What overlaps or complements with phrase? Sure,\r\n\r\nyeah. So I think of something like SEMrush or Ahrefs is being a great all in one. SEO tool. So people use it for more than content although content is like an important facet of them versus something like phrase or query scope is really just about content and just about content optimization, or, you know, in the case of like phrase and market Muse also generating content is the use case. But SEMrush I have I'll be honest, I have more experienced with a traps but they both they're both very similar and we actually use SEMrush like the keyword researchers and strategists on my team, we use SEMrush these days. But it is it is the tool that if we're comparing it to phrase and query scope, that's the tool that we use to define our primary keyword. It's before we run those reports. It's a tool that we use to come up with some secondary keywords. It's the tool that we use to identify feature snippet opportunities, we can do competitor research on it. You can do backlink tracking on it. You can audit your website. So I mean, it just it just serves such a bigger overall SEO use case. But there are many very useful content optimization tools. And so it's kind of like a higher budget tool than any of the ones that I've mentioned, but it will serve you know, many of your SEO purposes even outside of content. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nOkay, questions from Eddie. Eddie is writing tech blogs. I see now my keyword content from Reddit is ranking very good. I doubt Reddit content is helpful since usually people have vague answers to questions. What do you think about that?\r\n\r\nIt's an interesting question and I think I'm gonna take the opposite stance. I do think that Reddit content is helpful. There's something about people being like anonymous on the internet that like makes the truth come out. People feel like a little I guess like Freer with the information that they that they volunteer. And so I mean, you have to take it with a grain of salt because they're anonymous. They also might have an agenda that is not clear versus somebody who's coming out and saying, you know, I work for one of these tools or, you know, these are the clients they serve. And so that's like, why this relates to what I'm talking about. But I will say that sites like Reddit, Reddit and Quora are really interesting for learning more about your audience, learning about the things that like keep them up at night and so that's why they rank so high is because they are a wealth of information. They're not, you know, they're not using like the traditional methods to optimize their sites, but they are benefiting from all this unique user generated content because they've created communities. So, yeah, I mean, I don't I don't know exactly how to answer the question. I guess I'm kind of like answering around it, but I think that Reddit is a useful resource in general. I don't know that it can be counted on like aI right where Yeah, I can be confidently incorrect certainly. So to can, Reddit user is but they bring up some really interesting points that are worth investigating. So as long as if you are using it as a reference that you fact check, or you know, if you're I guess if the question is like, How can I outrank Reddit the the answer is like, I don't know.\r\n\r\nYou just said maybe Reddit pays Google. And honestly, we just did a story about this a week ago in our news roundup. It is actually Google who has purchased the rights to all of read its content. Alright, Gemini. Yeah, that just came out. The story last week was an unnamed AI but it's since come out that it's Google has purchased it right. So who knows? Yeah, Google does. Yeah. Doug says here's my favorite prompt. I add this to help me brainstorm chat. GPT add this to the end of your prep, ask me five questions that will improve the response you'll be giving me I use that too. It's really helpful. I\r\n\r\nlove that I I haven't considered that and that's why I think like discussions like this are so useful. Like, we can all learn so much from each other. I learned something new about this every day. For\r\n\r\nsure. The AI world is moving rapidly. And we were Mata you and I were talking earlier just we did an AI workshop here back in October, and there's so much that's new and better and different, even just in the last few months. It's pretty crazy. All right. That brings us to the end of questions. Tomorrow, we're talking about a UX content UX. So give us one more time an overview of what we're going to talk about tomorrow and we'll start to wrap things up here.\r\n\r\nOh, tomorrow. I was looking at the comments and somebody had mentioned let's say Ben had mentioned that to get them to use the right color and the GPT to be very specific, use hex color code when so I got distracted but um, okay, so tomorrow we're going to focus on the content reader experience. Content UX, another way of thinking about it. So we're going to talk a little bit about things like things that Google has said or page experience signals, so things that are like tangible that you can optimize around within your design to help your ranking on Google. And my philosophy when it comes to SEO is that there's three pillars, there's like the content and the things that you can affect on your own page. There's the website structure, so that's going to be a lot of what we talk about tomorrow. And then there's things like Off Page signals like backlinks, which we won't talk about, but you know, we can always have a discussion later or, you know, I'm sure Nathan will bring on somebody who talks about that at some point, too. So yeah, we'll talk about these like website signals, these page experience signals. We'll talk a little bit about website structure, things that you can do to create a better experience for your users, even if it's not necessarily something that Google takes into consideration for ranking and some things that they do. And then we will talk about auditing, you know, with practical tools and specifics, your contents, the nature of your contents UX. I'll tell you how to like run your own content UX audit, whether that's with tools or with people in person. And so that'll be that'll be kind of the nature of what we talk about tomorrow. Trying to bring that discussion full circle from the specific things that you can use to how to like measure if you're using them effectively, and then we'll end the day with a content UX audit from the things that ideally, y'all have submitted. So if you haven't, please use that form that we've linked to in that slide. Being link, and then I'll pick a couple for us to go over tomorrow.\r\n\r\nYep, very good. And that link is there in the chat. Once again, make sure you submit a URL that was a lot of fun last year when we did that very info wise. Yeah. So I will take care of that. Tomorrow. That's yeah, day two. All right. Maddie, good stuff today. As always, we'll have the recording up if anybody wants to go back and replay if you came in late. It'll be up in about an hour or so soon as it renders. And I will see you back here tomorrow, one o'clock central time for day two of content workshop. Have a good night. See you then.\r\n\r\nHear but as you're coming in, we're just asking what was your biggest takeaway from day one? You can sound off there in the chat. I'm also dropping in the new link bundle, I can type correctly. There is a new slide being linked, so make sure you grab that new one. It is updated on the replay page. But make sure you grab that new link because a few changes have been made since yesterday. That will let you follow along better.\r\n\r\nSome last minute tool suggestions. Ah,\r\n\r\nlove it. Love it all. Right, catch. Working for everybody now. Just about a minute and a half to go and again, we'd love to hear from you in the chat on what your biggest takeaways from day one we're. As we are waiting just another minute or so to get started. Also the link there for the live content UX audit is on the screen because we have a slide or two left if you'd like to submit your site or page or something for a content audit. It'll be a friendly review with with some good help to help you improve some of your language. So use that link. The link is in the link bundle in the chat. There on the screen. We do have a couple of slots if you'd like to participate in that. So Vivian, if you look at the replay link in the link bundle the academy link there is a PDF download link on that on the on the replay page. And that is the new updated slides. Yep, so that's all there ready to go on the replay page or you can view them on slide being right now. Yeah, not too many changes. New tools. All I was new to was fun tools. Yeah. Alright folks, about 30 seconds to go. Glad everybody's back for day two. Again, our check in question. Let us know in the chat. What your biggest takeaway from day one was? Particularly did you have you used any new GPT prompts since we played around with that yesterday, or has anybody taken the dive and made your own custom GPT based on\r\n\r\nor have any ideas for things that you want to try when you have time? Yeah, I could. I could use some more ideas myself. Yeah.\r\n\r\nFor sure. All right, folks. It is three minutes after someone to start our recording and we will get underway. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everybody, wherever you happen to be welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here and joined again by MADI. Azzaman for day two of the content accelerator for 2024 Welcome back. Maddie. Glad you're here.\r\n\r\nThank you so much for having me. Again. It's exciting to dig into some of these topics.\r\n\r\nAbsolutely. So we had a lot of fun yesterday talking about some AI stuff and some great principles for creating great content. And today we're looking more at the the user side of consuming content right what are we going to talk about today? Exactly.\r\n\r\nYeah, I think that you can think of today as being a way to practically test your content, whether that's with other people, whether that's with tools, understanding how it measures up against some of the guidelines that Google has shared, that are necessary for ranking, specifically when they have to do with the user experience. So we're going to kind of attack this from all angles. And, you know, hopefully it'll leave today with some really tangible tools to help you understand like, does your content provide a great reader experience? Or are there things that you could do to improve it?\r\n\r\nYeah, very good. And we do still have this content UX link on the screen. If you have not filled that out and you would like to there's still a slot or two left for the second hour, we'll do some live content review. So grab that now. The link is there in the chat as well. A couple little bits of housekeeping and we'll turn it back over to Matty as usual. Ask your questions using the zoom q&a And we'll take those questions at the end of each hour today. break in the middle as usual. One note is that the slides have been updated since yesterday. So in the chat is the new slide being link. And if you want the PDF download, just go onto the replay page with the link there and the link bundle and you can download the PDF there as well that has all the new updates on the slides. So with that, I'm going to disappear Maddie, let's get started.\r\n\r\nLet's do it. So yeah, if if you want to submit something for this live content UX audit, ideally, it's like a page on your website, not not something like a PDF, because we want to look at how the content interacts with design. And like Nathan said, you know, it's a friendly review. We're not like looking for issues. We're just looking for things that you could do to perhaps improve the content experience. Get another set of eyes on it. And it's just a practical way to apply some of the tools suggestions I'm going to give you so with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. We're going to start today by talking about Google guidelines for what makes up a great user experience, especially when it has to do with content and specifically we're going to talk from the perspective of Google's quality rater guidelines. And then after I go through a couple specifics there, we're going to talk more broadly about Google's page quality signals. I think that's what it's called. I haven't labeled in the next slide but things that have to do with what they've told us influenced ranking high and relevant search, you know, all else equal, if you have great content, what aspects of your website design, you know, must be present of your website structure must be present in order for you to rank high and relevant search. So the first part is a little bit more I would say qualitative. And then the second part is going to be a little bit more quantitative. So the learn more link is for an article I wrote a while back for Search Engine Journal. This was specifically focusing on aspects of Google's quality rater guidelines that have to do with the user experience. And so I think it was a couple of years ago now I read through the entire quality rater guidelines, which if you're interested in SEO, and user experience, I would highly recommend at least giving it a skim. It's kind of hard to do because it's like 175 pages, but there's some really good nuggets in there about how Google looks at search, how they judge quality of content, how they determine if a page of a search result meets the needs of the searcher who's looking for it. And so the quality rater guidelines what's worth mentioning is that to some extent you have to take with a grain of salt because this is not something that directly influences rankings. What happens is human quality raters that they hire read through these guidelines, they're tested on them to make sure that they understand what Google is looking for and then they manually rate different website results based on a certain query. And so what happens is that Google gets that information. It helps them you know, refine their algorithm in terms of the general direction they want to take with it, but it doesn't necessarily result in any manual adjustments for whatever websites they're ranking. It's it's more of like a research process. So that's, that's what the quality rater guidelines are. They're a tool to help Google research what the web looks like right now in order to make decisions about how they want to adjust their algorithm for the rest of us. But all that being said, Whenever Google gives us information, whenever they volunteer details about how they look at search, and how they define quality, and like a great user experience, I think that we would be wise to take note of that if it is in fact our goal to rank in relevant search. And I think at the end of the day, whether it is or not, I think Google tries to maintain a high standard for quality. I think that it's their philosophy, philosophy, that content is king, you know that that good? Content is important. And so again, whether search is your goal or not, it's worth it's worth at least like listening to what they have to say. And so, for your benefit, I've tried to break down some of the most important things from the quality rater guidelines specifically having to do with the topic that we are discussing today. So the first thing that they mentioned or they they talk about the quality rater guidelines has to do with interstitials. So back in, it was either 2017 or 2018. They made an update to their algorithm, and they told us about it is again one of those rare cases where they're just upfront. And they said that like if you're using popups say, for example, to gather somebody's email address, or you know, it maybe you're on an E commerce site to advertise the sale, something that obscures the content that you have to interact with you either put your email in, or you have to click the X button, you know, something like that, that you have to interact with in order to use the content on the page. They call that an intrusive interstitial. And so what happened was it really it really resulted in a big change for how people use conversions, I guess on their website, so you know, bloggers and people who do affiliate marketing and of course, yeah, ecommerce, and businesses trying to get email subscribers all had to fundamentally change the way that they approach gathering email addresses. And I'm going to talk a little bit later about what you can do instead, that doesn't violate Google's guidelines. But again, from Google's perspective, they say that interstitials make it difficult to use the main content of the page. And so when they're talking in the quality rater guidelines, they frequently refer to MC main content, which is like what the searcher is ultimately going to your website for and so you could say generally speaking, that they're trying to defend the experience of the main content. And to like, skip ahead to the point here about ads, when they talk about ads, that Google recognizes that and they say this in the quality rater guidelines, that ads don't automatically equate to low quality, they understand that ads are in many cases, the reason a site can continue existing. But that being said, there is like a right and a wrong way to go about implementing them. And so they say the too many or like large ads hurt the user experience. And then that case, the human quality raters should assign that site that result, a low rating. So again, you want to think in terms of the main content is the ad obscuring it? Is it taking away from it? If not, you're probably okay. But it's just good. To keep in mind that Google's not saying no, you can't have ads. You just have to be thoughtful about it. And when I did some of these UX audits in the past, like the ones that we're going to do later today, I did a couple of for some members of the Denver bloggers club one of the local clubs that I've been involved with here. And one thing I noticed about a lot of them was you know that they'd have an ad in the sidebar, they'd have an ad in their footer. They'd have an ad a couple times throughout their blog content, and it was probably Google Adsense that they were using, or some other ad network. Like it. And again, it's like I understand that you're monetizing your site using ADS. But at the end of the day, it's probably working against you because people if you were to look, you know into the data like the scroll depth and the time on page and things like that, using Google Analytics, for example. You probably see that on those pages that are very heavy with ads that people abandon the page pretty quickly because it's just a bad reader experience. So to go back a point here, clickbait Google has a couple of pieces of guidance in the quality rater guidelines about that specifically.\r\n\r\nGenerally speaking, a good page sets expectations or good title sets expectations for wherever it's leaving you. And so clickbait is something that it can certainly be effective and getting attention and getting clicks, but it can be a very unsatisfying experience if it doesn't do something to deliver on the promise made in the title. Um, the Google specifically says that clickbait headings detract from high main content. So, you know, that's something that they're specifically looking for and guiding people to, to comment on. And they say also that like every page should have a page title. It shouldn't just be presented without buttoning it up that way. And that title should describe page content. So again, it's a balance. Writing a good title, I think is very much in art. But it shouldn't be misleading. That's that's the key here. Um, so the last point here is that when it comes to creating content, you want the answer to your query to be pretty prominent in the results. You don't want people to click through and then have to dig to find that. And Google has a couple of different SERP features, I would say where they're trying to, you know, first of all, answer this within search so that you don't click through, which is a problem for us content creators, but it's also perhaps an opportunity when we think about things like a Featured Snippet, which is just that sort of box that shows up above any other search results and it's usually summarizing kind of like the nature of what that person is looking for what Google thinks that person is looking for. There's other things like Google will index parts of a page and link to that specific part and highlight it you probably noticed that yourself when doing search and looking for something very specific. And so that's something that they do, it's not, to my knowledge, it's not something that you can necessarily optimize for. It's it's their methodologies of indexing and surfacing content. But the example that they gave in the quality rater guidelines was something about like somebody searching Abraham Lincoln's birthday. And when somebody clicked through like it was present on the page, but it wasn't prominently answered. And so in that case, they were instructing the human quality rater to give that like a not as good rating for meeting the needs of the searcher. So yeah, I mean, definitely, that's, that's kind of most of what I'm going to say about the quality rater guidelines. But I really think it is a very interesting document and especially if you look at the examples they give in terms of how they're making those determinations. There's a lot of little nuggets of truth and we also have a blog post on the blacksmith website that digs into this even outside of like the user experience sort of and like design focus. So if you want another take on that then definitely check that out. We just went in and updated it recently. So let's talk more broadly now about some search signals from Google things that Google has told us about the page experience and you know, importantly, I think how to how to like measure that, quantitatively. Google, we talked a little bit about helpful content yesterday and that algorithm update which was the year a year and a half ago, something like that. Google has been has said that a good page experience is a requirement. For creating what they define as helpful content. So you know, all these algorithm updates are designed to support Google's mission, you know, the way that they look at content quality and things like that, of course, they all you know, more or less feed into each other, but I think it's worth mentioning that like that is an aspect of having helpful content. Alright, so we're gonna start with what is collectively known as the core web vitals so the core web vitals, this algorithm update, or Google announcing this page signal? came about? I want to say it was 2021. So they've been around for a while. And interestingly, and what we'll go over is they have changed slightly since coming out. But the idea here was to give people these these three specifically, page signals, were to give people more tangibility around how to measure the the page experience. Because up until that point, it was a little bit innocuous, it was hard to conceptualize, in terms of knowing like where you actually rank according to Google's own way of looking at it. So the first page signal of the quarter web vitals is the largest Contentful paint, which is a facet of page loading, loading speed. And so their definition is that it reports the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport relative to when the page first started loading. So if we think about I think most of these core web vitals are more or less referring to like above the fold, like what you see before you scroll, it's like that first impression that a person has with your website and most designs, most tools that you use to optimize loading and things like that, typically are set up so that the rest of the page loads later but you want you know what's visible initially to load quickly and first so that people can start interacting with it, and then it gives time for the rest of the page to load. So another way of thinking about this is that this signal takes note of the largest element on every web page and measures its total loading. Time. So maybe this is an image, maybe it's video, you know, typically at some, I would say some sort of media thing, but it could be your theme in general, it could be a very slow loading plugin. So these are all things that you'd want to keep in mind in terms of optimizing this particular factor. And when I say I guess, like the theme and plugins, it's like the output of them that you would implement on your page. So okay, so how do you get a good largest Contentful paint so according to Google, whatever this largest element is, is about 2.5 Seconds or Less of loading time and you have a little bit of wiggle room here, before it gets to, you know, this like poor area, but you'll notice that it's not a super long time. And I think that this particular man measurement here, it relates to something that Google's said before and shared in their own documentation, which is that, you know, the majority of people bounce if a website doesn't load within three seconds or less. I'm sure that that guidance has changed over time because that's a dated stat. But it still goes to show that we're kind of like within that guideline, with this particular measurement of a particular element on a page. So the next one is first input delay, and this is actually what it was. This has since been updated. And I'm going to show you an example of what this looks like. But let's let's talk about like the original intent of it and then what it has become. So first input delay is a measure of interactivity. It measures the time from when a user first interacts with the page to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction. So that sounds like gibberish. Basically, the lower a website's fid score, the more promptly it starts processing users clicks and swipes again, interactivity like how long does it take for somebody to actually be able to use a page? So this measurement per Google, a good fit is 100 milliseconds or less. So that's what it was right? But what is it now? So this GIF kind of shows an example of poor responsiveness versus good responsive responsiveness from Google's perspective, but probably from all of us, as users as well and looking at it you you probably have been in this position before where like, you click on something and then there's this little bit of a delay before you are actually able to interact with it. And so Google essentially took took this concept that they had initially defined as a core web vital and added some color to it, I guess. And so the new measurement is that it's, it's below or at 200 milliseconds. That so up from I think, what was it 100 before so they're giving you a I guess a little bit more time to create interactivity here. And just so you know, this new measurement is actually not fully unveiled yet, but it will be as of March. 12th. That's when this takes effect and takes over. So they say that, you know, some interactions will actually take longer than others. But when it comes to especially complex interactions, you want to be able to quickly present some initial initial visual feedback so that the user knows that something is happening\r\n\r\nthe time until the next payment is the earliest opportunity to do this. So the intent is not to measure like every eventual effect of the interaction, but the time in which the next interaction is being blocked. So you essentially want to delay you want to if you are delaying some visual feedback, then you might be giving users the impression that the page isn't responding to their actions, which is ultimately a bad user experience, right. So the goal of this new measurement is to ensure the time from when a user initiates an interaction until the next frame is painted in the shortest time as possible, for all or at least most of the interactions the user make. So it might seem like a small distinction between the first input delay and the interaction to Next paint but I guess if we were to summarize them, the first input delay is really focusing on that initial interaction. And the interaction to Next paint is focusing on the difference between interactions. I think that's one way to look at it. Okay, so then the last core web vital is related to visual stability. And it's called cumulative layout shift. And so their definition Google Developers definition is that it measures the sum total of all individual layout shifts scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan. of the page. Okay, but what does that mean? So Visual stability means that a web page remain stable throughout the users visit. It means that text isn't suddenly moving as new elements load or shifting other elements of the page and I think the the unfortunate end result of when this is bad, is when it makes the user click a link or perhaps a buy button or something like that, unintentionally, they were trying to click something but because of something shifting after it loaded, it pushed them somewhere else. And again, this is probably something where either something comes to mind where that's happened to you or like, the next time it does, then you'll be like, oh, yeah, that was the cumulatively out shift the site is getting, it probably has a pretty bad score for that. Um, so with the core web vitals, visual stability became more of a priority. And you really have to have very minimal minimal instability in order for your pages to be considered for ranking high in a relevant search engine results page. So those are the core lead vitals, that's probably the newest addition to these page signals that relate to the content experience, but we're also going to go over some of the old like, you know, tried and true important things that have to do with page experience, such as mobile friendliness. I mean, this is something this is probably one of the first big things that Google told us was important for ranking, high and relevant search. Besides maybe page load, I think Page Speed like performance and mobile friendliness, like these are things that kind of happened around the same time in terms of a Google like, came out and said, like, you must prioritize these if you want to rank. So Google used to be a desktop first indexing property. But you know, as more and more people started using their mobile devices, you know, the iPhone came out and so now suddenly, everybody had a computer in their hand. And then another thing that's probably worth considering too, is like a lot of people in developing countries like they might not have a desktop or like a laptop computer, but most people have a mobile phone at this point. And so Google now operates off of the idea, or off of the principle, I guess, of mobile first indexing. So if your website is not optimized properly for mobile responsiveness for mobile devices, then that is going to hurt it's going to greatly hurt your ability to rank and relevant search and your desktop site could look perfect. It can rank perfectly in terms of all these other factors that Google tells us about. But if your mobile site is off, it's it's going to affect your desktop rankings as well. So, you know, going into all of the specifics of what's mobile friendly is kind of outside the scope of what we're going to talk about today. But I mean, it's things like making sure that your text is readable. It's making sure that your images are, you know, visible and processable that they don't get skewed strangely. It's you know, thinking about some of those core web vitals and like how elements interact with each other like our buttons too close together so that people are hitting the wrong thing. So all these things are are considerations for making your website mobile friendly. And I think you know, with the way that things like page builders, builders for WordPress work, the way that people design themes for WordPress. This is this is like very much top of mind for everyone who's designing for WordPress. So it's a lot easier to implement now versus perhaps when this update was first released into the world. So Safe Browsing is something that I they've actually taken out of what they call these like page experience factors, like I don't know if it's an official one anymore, it was in the past. And maybe it's because now we have HTTPS as an additional factor that's kind of related but I think it's still worth mentioning this from a content experience factor. So Safe Browsing is just that you can use a website that is free of malware, you know, that you can be like, reasonably sure that like malware isn't present, you're not going to get it you're not going to interact with it, and that it's not you know, affecting the output of whatever site it could be installed on. And so in order to protect yourself against this, there's different tools you could use. wordfence is a customer of mine, so I'm going to talk about them and I think that their tool and their team is great. They have a lot of cool security researchers and cybersecurity experts on their team. So they're very on top of like any new things that come out, but they have this product called wordfence care where they'll go in they'll identify them all where they'll clean it up for you and we'll share best practices for how to avoid it in the future and you know, additional steps that you can take. So I do think that you need some sort of tool on your website in order to prevent, you know, the worst effects of malware. And I guess the other thing that I would mention too, is to like always have backups of your site, because malware can really mess things up. And so that's that's like your first line of defense. So HTTPS also has to do, I guess, essentially the same idea of like Safe Browsing, maybe from a slightly different perspective. And so Google again said, you know, we're not going to rank websites that do not have HTTPS in place compared to those that do. You know, after that update happened, and that was a slightly more recent update, but it was still a few years ago, and so HTTPS in order to implement that, essentially, you just install an SSL certificate. And to be fair, there are different types of SSL certificates. Most web hosts have that functionality, where you can fairly easily implement one and then it creates either automatically or there might be some manual steps. You have to take where it it redirects your existing HTTP URLs to the HTTPS version. So that's important to make sure that that's working. Otherwise, it's going to break your site but again, most web hosts have a fairly straightforward process for implementing this and a free ssl certificate or I should say an included one with your hosting plan, but depending on your needs, you might need a different one. So that's something that you have to explore based on your industry like, like E commerce might have a higher level of SSL certificate needed, but for you know, the general small business owner designer, things like that, probably what your web host has is good enough. And so to be able to see if HTTPS is working within Chrome specifically and I'm sure many other web browsers but but chrome because it's a product of Google. There's a little button next to your domain name in the URL bar, and you can click it and see that the SSL certificate is working and that the connection is secure and I would say that SSL certificates in HTTPS are important for people who are interacting with the website. I mean, you kind of you kind of have to have it no matter what in order to rank but they're the purpose of it is that if somebody were to be giving their sensitive information, you know if they're on an E commerce site, and they're, you know, putting in their address or their credit card number or you know, a banking website and people are logging in, and you know, once they log in, that user has access to their bank accounts and their money and things like that. That's kind of the like, ideal use case of HTTPS is to protect the people who are entering that sensitive information to make them feel safe on your website.\r\n\r\nWe talked about this earlier, having no intrusive interstitials so these are the pop ups the image you see is something that Google shared when they announced this ranking signal to show what not to do, essentially where these ads are obscuring access to the main content. You shouldn't have to click in order to get to the main content. So what do you do instead? Here are a couple of examples from the blacksmith website. So the first one is we have a floating bar that basically is at the top of the content and then just pushes it down. And in this case, I used it to add like reminder about my book, a button to click to buy it you could use it to get email signups. I think another great example is like E commerce. If you're having a sale or if you want to say, you know, free shipping on orders over $50 or something like that. I think that's a really excellent use of a floating bar. It's like what's the most important thing happening for this business right now or use it to collect email signups? Then there's also next to it is a welcome mat, which is designed you know, very similar lead to how an email popup would look but the difference is that it's like embedded on the page. So it's not getting in the way of the content. It's part of the content. You can choose whether or not you interact with it beyond scrolling. Another version of that is a content upgrade. So on certain blog posts, let's say that you have additional resources, maybe you've turned that blog post into a checklist or there's a certain template that you're talking about in the blog posts, and people you want to incentivize people to share their email in order to access it. So having a content upgrade, which again is like an embedded version, at the end of your blog post about that specific resource is a totally valid way to see get emails that's not going to violate this intrusive interstitial guidance from Google. The other thing that you can think about is using email popups, but delaying when they pop up. So that kind of gets around Google's guidance. You could use what's called like exit intent technology. So when somebody scrolls for the Back button, or the, you know, X in the browser, then what happens is an email popup gets deployed where you know, it asks for somebody if they want to subscribe, for example. You can also use that same idea based on things like scroll depth, if somebody gets to a certain depth on a page, you know, that tends to indicate interest. It's given them a chance to interact with the content. Or you could have a deploy on certain pages. You ideally after they've seen other pages, so maybe after they've gone to a certain number of pages that deploys. So there's there's a couple of different ways to think about it that don't get in the way of Google's guidance. And we do have a page I forgot to link it here. But we do have a blog post on the blacksmith website that goes into each of these things and different use cases and things like that a little bit dated, but it's all the same advice. Okay, so now that we've talked about Google's quality raters guidelines, which is indirectly related to search rankings, and Google's page experience signals, which are directly related to search rankings, I wanted to talk a little bit about website structure and design I would say, especially as it relates to ranking high in relevant search, but certainly how it impacts the content user experience. So it's kind of like a mix of the things that we're talking about, but expanding on them as well. So the first like factor that you want to optimize your website around your content in general, is crawlability. And when I talked about crawlability, I'm talking about Google's ability to like fully index all the resources on your site. Is there anything that is getting in the way of Google doing that, like, for example, errors in your sitemap, like maybe you're unintentionally excluding certain pages? Maybe you know, you haven't created enough connections between your pages for Google to understand how they relate to each other. And so a couple of guidelines here, you know, first of all, is that when you're creating content, it's important to add external links. Think of these as your ability to add context to prove claims these are things that you know, you can also use let's say that you're writing about a topic and there's a related topic and it doesn't really make sense for you to cover it in your content. Like maybe it would just make your your piece go on too long. But it's something that people might want to learn more about. So you find a relevant resource from a trusted site and you link it External links are great. I mean, you might, I guess, worry. Like, is that going to lead people away from my page? You know, is there any like negative impact of that? I think that's just kind of the way that content works, that people are always looking for more information. You can set it so that it opens in a new window so that they're still on your page while they explore that content. But yeah, as the best practice, have an external linking policy, it makes sure it's to good quality content and I think that, like with this next point, it helps Google understand what your content is about. So besides external resources, you also want to incorporate internal links. This just helps Google understand the relationships between the different pieces of content on your website, ultimately, what your website is about. It's helping with that crawl ability and that index ability. It's helping Google as robot to understand, you know, these different connections. So again, it's important really to have these two types of links and really every page and relate certainly every piece of content. And then, the flip side of all this is like as you create content, things are going to change. External links might become broken. Internal links, you might change, you know, like for example, the URL slug of them, and they might become broken. So I guess my first tip is to make sure that you have some sort of redirect solution implemented, there are different plugins that you can use to automatically if you change the URL slug of something, then it creates a redirect so anything that already links to a will be updated to that new link. But it's also having a process for like auditing your content to look for these problems. And one of the tools that I'm going to show you later today will help make that a little bit easier. But it's also just a matter of like I don't know, quarterly at least, or depending on the size of your website, quarterly, maybe every six months or so, having just a process to kind of go through what exists and if you need to fix anything. So we're talking a little bit about URL structure and I will say when it comes to creating content, you want to be pretty sure of the URL you want to use before you publish it. Because it is a factor in ranking, and you can use redirects, but it's kind of hard to explain them in the context of what we're talking about today without getting deep into SEO, but it's just generally like to trust me that it's a best practice to not mess with the URL after you publish, you know, after it gained some traction in search and things like that. But it happens and that's why you use redirects. But that being said, you could at least start with best practices. So the first thing is to incorporate your target keywords in that slug. So like yesterday, I showed you some tools we use for an article we wrote about AI detectors, so let's just pretend the keyword is like aI detector tools. You'd want that to be the slug. Without really like any extra information. You want to keep your URLs as succinct as possible so that Google doesn't have to take a lot of extra time to parse them. And so what that means is within within WordPress, you can customize your URL structure for blogging. And you can do things like add categories to the URL, you can add the date to the URL. My suggestion is to not do that the only reason that you might want to add like a subdirectory within your blog content or some other specific category, like if you have case studies or something like that, is because you can use that subdirectory to group pieces of content together to measure them in like Google Analytics GA for these days. But that's kind of an advanced use case and that's only if you plan on actually like doing a deep dive into the analytics. From an SEO perspective, I highly recommend against it. It should be your website url.com forward slash keyword. And when you're implementing those keywords, you're going to want to add a dash between each word so if the keywords AI detector tools, it's a i dash detector dash tools\r\n\r\nfor certain things like articles, a and words like the things that aren't, you know, specific keywords generally speaking, you can drop those when you're creating the slug. We have some guidelines on the style guide that I shared with you yesterday on the bugs with website that's also linked in the slides so or the PDF as well. So if you if you want to dive into more SEO and URL and keyword best practices and definitely check out our guidance on that. Um, duplicate content is worth mentioning from this perspective of the user experience mostly in terms of how Google would interpret that. So generally speaking, duplicate content is like you publish a blog on your website and then a situation that could come up that seems innocuous enough is that you know, somebody in your industry says oh my god, I loved your blog posts on whatever, I'd love to republish it on my site. And you say okay, and then maybe this site, you know, has more authority than you and maybe they have a better approach to SEO, maybe they've just been around longer. And what could end up happening is that even though you were the original publisher, and Google does take that into consideration, but this other site may outrank you with your own same content. So that's duplicate content. It could be a whole blog post, it can be an excerpt of it, it could be like a piece of it. So duplicate content, generally speaking, like try to avoid that. You can add a tag to your link called the canonical tag, which basically points back to the original content and says, This is the person this is the site that originally published it, even though we have now published it here. And so Google takes that into consideration, but they really make their own choices about who they're going to rank and so that that's not the be all end all way of making sure that the original publisher ranks highest in search, all else equal. Um, with all that being said, in my experience, you can typically republish things like your blog content on mediums like LinkedIn and medium you know, original copy without making changes. As long as you wait, I would say at least a week from the original published date to do that. This is this is my experience and that saying that it's completely scientific, the advice that I'm giving you, it's something that you should experiment with, if that's something that you're interested in, but also take note of what ends up happening and discontinue if it's getting in the way of ranking your own content on your own website. But when it comes to duplicate content, if you if you get approached by someone, you know, like the example that I gave, who wants to republish something that you wrote, what would be a better situation for you? It would be more work, but it's to say like, let me write a new version of this article, like maybe you take another stance on it, maybe you you just kind of like repurpose it in a different way. I would highly recommend against duplicating your content, either on another page on your website, such as using product descriptions that like a manufacturer provided or maybe you have, you know, two variations of something and so you're using almost the same product description or again, like the example that I gave doing it on another site, so I just wanted to add a cautionary tale for duplicate content because a it is kind of a bad user experience, but be it'll also more than likely hurt you in search without a very strategic approach. And then the last thing I want to say on this particular topic is about designing website navigation and best practices around that. So first of all, you want to use descriptive and recognizable menu item titles. And the example that I always give for this is the difference between something that's called news and something that's called blog. So in my in my experience, news is like an enterprise business that has a media arm and they're publishing their press releases and, you know, things that are relevant to their company, new product updates, things like that. Whereas blog is more articles. It's you know, the how tos. It's the list of coals. Its product lead content, for example, but it's not exclusively focused on that company's news. So it's important, I think, to match the heuristics of what your users are used to and one way that you might be able to figure this out if you're unsure is just kind of see like what the competition is doing and how they're naming their menu items. Or just ask some of your users like, Does this make sense? And we'll talk next about how to conduct a UX audit and that's something that you could do as part of it. There's this thing called the three click rule, which you may have heard about. Nielsen Norman Group actually debunked this as being like ideal or even something that you should totally consider. It's the number three is arbitrary, I guess is what I'm trying to say. But it's the idea that within three clicks, a user searching or user looking for something will find it through your website navigation without necessarily having to go to like an internal search. So well, it's arbitrary. I think it's still a good thing to keep in mind, which is just that people should be able to easily and quickly find what they need your your menu should support that. And then creating category grouping. So like for example, on our website, we have a Resources tab and it has the blog, it has some of like my YouTube content. It has our style guide. All of these are resources they have to do with like things that we're sharing with other people versus we have another tab that's about our work. And so it has case studies and like portfolio examples, and it's more focused on like Final outputs that you know, fit, you know, things that we do with certain clients. So just a couple of things to think about in terms of website navigation. I'm going to start this topic and then we'll break I think maybe in like five minutes from now, but I'll just go ahead and get this started. So let's talk a little bit now that you've learned about these different factors for how to understand user experience from, from the user's point of view from Google's point of view. Let's talk about how you can continue to make your own websites user experience better by implementing a UX audit. So UX audit, we might also call it a user tests. I think they're maybe slightly different concepts, but I'm going to use them interchangeably today. So usability testing involves observing how users interact with products like your websites. The purpose is to get a better understanding of how real people use what you've designed. And really the idea here is you want to combat any assumptions that you've made incorrectly, which is impossible for you to figure out by yourself. That's why we pull in other people. You can use your tests during just about any stage of project it doesn't have to be like the final part. It could really be during the wireframing stage. It could be you know at the midpoint it could be even after you've launched but you've added some new things. So why bother with UX audits? First of all, we're talking about it today because there's a strong relationship between the user experience and SEO. I think we've proven that by talking about specific elements of the quality rater guidelines that point to UX, as well as the page experience factors that Google's specifically told us. If you care about SEO, you should care about UX in terms of things like your page, loading your mobile responsiveness, and using things like HTTPS. To invoke privacy for your users information. It also allows you to uncover issues that might kill conversions. I mean, I think this is one of the most important use cases of a UX audit is to look for things that are getting in the way of whatever your end goal is with the website. Because we're all WordPress users here, probably most of us at least, you've probably interacted with whether it's your own design or somebody else's that where you recognize that somebody forgot to edit the demo content they've, you know, implemented it and they've gone in and made their changes. But you know, there's that hello world post they forgot to delete or there's something you know, and one of the menus, maybe the footer menu that they forgot to take out that, you know, they never actually customized and so I think UX audit would be good at surfacing that if you're if you're kind of blind to it, because you're too close to the project. And with all that being said, a UX audit helps to get out of your own head. We're all human, we're imperfect.\r\n\r\nAnd really, I mean, it's it's easy to say I think when it comes to writing content, like as much as like, I have a process for editing and looking for mistakes and things like that. Like I still use an editor whenever I write anything, because I need to get out of my own head in order to make sure that I'm not missing something important. So the same can certainly be said about about website design and doing UX audits. So at the end of the day, we all operate based on certain assumptions, but what if yours are wrong? I'll just go through another slide or two and then we'll break so in terms of picking user testers, there's a couple of different populations you could consider. And I'm also going to share a couple of different like marketplaces where you could find these people, but you can start with the people that already exist in your circle your colleagues, you know, the people that you work with, but also maybe your friends and your family members. Wow, this is a great place to start. Don't discount the impact of their own bias and desire to please you, especially if you're asking your mom for input she's probably not going to be super critical. And and you know, it's going to be more of a pat on the back then something useful. And even like people like your work colleagues, they they still may be too close to a project to provide useful feedback, but it's a good place to start. You can also recruit volunteers from your own audience. Again, they might have a bias if they really love you. They might be hesitant to give you really great feedback. But they're also probably very willing to help you make something that's better. So you can start with like your brand ambassadors, anybody who would consider themselves your biggest fans, things like that. Ultimately, though, your best bet is going to be unbiased third parties who don't know you, you know, who don't have like a stake in what you're doing. I would say ideally, if you could get a couple people from that pool and then maybe one or two people from these other pools of populations, you'll get a couple of different perspectives. And when it comes to some of the marketplaces that I'm going to show you, you can also filter by certain demographics, you know, age, gender, level of education, like whatever is important to like the target audience that you want feedback from, generally speaking, you can filter and on those people. Maybe we'll just go to the top of the hour, and then we'll and then we'll definitely break then. So how many user testers are enough for each design stage? I've mentioned a couple different populations you could pick from. This is another Nielsen Norman Group reference. They are a really great resource when it comes to anything user experience user testing and things like that. And so Jacob Nielsen wrote this column and he the column was titled Why you only need to test with five users. So that's his official recommendation is for each stage that you test five users is going to be more or less enough you're going to get marginal returns marginal new information after that point. So you know, unless you're getting wildly different things from those five user testers, you can probably stop it there. He also says that it's best to involve a larger quantity of user testers earlier on in the project if you're going to test during like the wireframing stage. Versus like, when a website's like basically ready to launch it's going to be harder to make noticeable and useful changes at that point. It's going to be kind of locked in. So I think that that makes sense. Um, so we'll just start with some of the questions that you might use. When designing usability testing, it is important to to be thoughtful about this before you start you you don't want to just like go into a blind and just, you know, like, what do you think of this website? You want to have a strategic approach if you want to get useful information? So my suggestion is to start start by defining whatever your goals are, I mean, is there something in particular that you're looking to test? Are you wanting to make sure that this design is understandable to your target demographic? Is there something that isn't currently working with the design, something that's maybe hurting conversions? So whatever your goal is, like set that intention, and the questions will come more easily after that? You want to also be asking questions about the tester and how they interact with the Internet. And there's a couple of reasons for this. So one example is like you could ask the person what kind of smartphone do you use and asking this particular question is good because it kind of gauges like their familiarity with technology like how they're going to interact with your design. Somebody who uses a flip phone, for example, is probably going to have a much different level of internet savviness and how they interact with the design versus somebody who has like the latest gadget as their device. The other benefit of this question is to especially if you're doing an in person test is to kind of relax them. It's kind of like a little bit of small talk almost so that they can ease into the test, especially if that's not something that they often do. You want to define a specific action for the user to take. So this goes back to the goals. Let's say that, you know, you have an E commerce site that you're testing and you know, there's some sort of issue with people abandoning the cart, you know, after they add some products and so maybe you want to have that person go through the action of adding something, and then starting checkout. And seeing like, where in the process, there's friction, that could be one action that you want them to take. And so at this point, you want to ask them how they go about it, have them sort of like narrate and explain as they go through each step. The more you can dig into each specific action that the user takes the more detailed insight that you'll get as to how they're actually using your website. So I think with that being said, we have a couple more questions that we could talk about, but I think now is probably a good time to let everybody take a little bit of a break. And then after that, we'll finish this discussion of how to run a UX audit. I'm going to give you a bunch of tools to use to do your own tests. yourself, essentially. And then we'll finish off with that live content UX audit. Sounds\r\n\r\nlike a good idea. No questions in the q&a right now. So let's just go and take that break. It's two o'clock. About a five minute break. Is that good? Maddie? That sounds good. All right. So let's back be back at 205 and we're quiet until then. See ya. Then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We're back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, folks, we are back and ready to begin. Let me get the recording started here. All right, folks, we're back for the final hour. Of the website content accelerator. We got a lot to talk about in the next hour, so I'm just gonna let you get right to it. Maddie. Sounds\r\n\r\ngreat. Yeah. Thanks for sticking with me so far. Excited to finish this off strong and yeah, hopefully give you some really tangible things that you can take away. For your own processes. So I'm continuing this discussion that we started about UX audits and designing them. Okay, so we talked about this. Let's go to the next point. What so I used to offer UX audits as a service when I used to be on Fiverr. It was my most popular gig by far. And the way that I structured it was I basically priced by the page. And so when you're doing a UX audit, you want to be sure to identify whichever pages are the most important, especially if you have a big site like you don't necessarily want. Just going back to the E commerce example like you don't necessarily want to audit like every single product page, especially if you're looking for trends, maybe one you know prime example of what your product pages look like maybe one category page, your homepage, your checkout flow, like if somebody had me audit an E commerce site that that tended to be kind of what it looks like. You know, it's also things like maybe more generally, your homepage, your about page service page. So it really depends on what you're trying to do. But you could ask questions in your UX audit, like, you know, what do you think this is about the page in general, or about a specific element of it? You could ask What strikes you about it, you know, you're trying to see how people are reacting to it, how they're understanding it, and then like, what would you click on first, like what, what is something that looks interactable? And how would you, you know, accomplish whatever the specific goal is. So those are ways that you could you know, further define this question. Or this idea here. And then we kind of talked about this, what do you make of specific elements? So again, if we're talking about ecommerce, maybe you have a button that's like a quick add to checkout where you don't have to go, you know, to the individual page, it just kind of pops up when you're looking at a specific category or on the homepage or something like that. And so you might want to test like, do people actually understand what the purpose of this is? So that's just one example. You know, many others that might factor into your own purposes and needs. So when it comes to designing these questions, a couple of best practices to keep in mind you know, first of all, users are generally not going to be designers. I don't think you I don't think you perhaps want them to be because you want them to look at it from a different perspective than you and so with that in mind, you want to avoid any sort of like web development or industry specific jargon in the way that you ask questions. You want to design for the average internet user, they should be able to understand what you're asking without you having to explain and clarify. I think another useful thing in general and this is this is when you ask for feedback about anything, but it's breaking up a complicated question into simpler ones. It's, it's okay, you know, to to ask a question and to ask a follow up question and to dig deeper. And that's something that we talked about yesterday when we talked about chat GBT and and getting that ideal answer that you want to get from it. Sometimes you kind of have to break the subject down and sometimes you have to add clarification later. So then, I've said this in a way but be as specific as possible when you're asking questions, you know, reference specific elements. Bring it back to the goal, if necessary. That's how you're going to get the most useful responses. So going back to that fiverr gig I was talking about, these were the questions that I asked and every order and sometimes they would ask clarifying questions after the fact. But most of the time, if I wasn't because it's fiber, and I'm sending them either some sort of like written report, or typically it would be like a video recording of me going through and doing the audit and if you work with a platform like Fiverr, or some of the other things that I'm going to mention shortly. I think it's the next slide actually. Typically, people are recording themselves interacting with your website unless you're doing an in person test, which is a different situation. But so you have to have some sort of standardized approach in that case, especially if you're offering this as a service like I did. But most of the time these questions got to the bottom of what that person was hoping to get out of the audit. And so generally speaking, I asked for the URLs for any pages they wanted me to take into account. I also told them you know, if you want me to take a quick look before starting the order to see if this is a good fit for me, you can do that. Are there any major problems that you want me to keep in mind throughout the process? So is there anything that you're noticing isn't working that you want? Me to focus on like a conversion factor? Can you briefly describe your target customer so that I could keep their perspective and focus? This is a really important one. I'm not going to fit in and perhaps you know, every user tester that you're going to work with is not necessarily going to fit that ideal target persona that represents your audience or the audience of the client that you're doing this on behalf of. But that doesn't mean that you can't adopt that persona. And again, a lot of these platforms will let you pick a user tester based on demographics. So that's probably like the best case scenario. But I think, again, you can still benefit from a plethora of different experiences. So anyway, you know, like I'm, I'm thinking of like a time where I did a user test and the target audience was, you know, generations older than me or something like that, where they're interacting with the web and they might have some access issues, you know, they might it might be harder for them to read the text if it's not big enough. Things like you know, contrast come into play between the words in the background. And so things like that, maybe it doesn't personally affect me right now. But I can still comment on that and say, you know, you told me that this was your target audience. To me like this strikes me as something that would be very difficult for them to interact with. And then the last question I asked is What important goals are you hoping that this page or these pages will achieve? So that kind of goes back to like the problem question, but I guess maybe from a more positive standpoint, and especially, you know, people use your tests at different stages, so they might not know what the problems are, but they certainly know or ideally, they have an idea of what they want that page to achieve. So these questions like very much covered what I needed to know in order to give people a satisfying UX audit after they put in their order. Okay, so how to run usability tests a couple of different ways that you could do this. A very wide range of methodologies and honestly a wide range of end results I would say, in person is like the gold standard because you're going to have the most control over the process. You're going to be able to meet with people, you're going to be able to dig in deeper to any like initial questions that you set. It's a little bit harder to do with something like Fiverr or user testing. Because there may be limitations I think with like user testing, it's kind of like you set it up ahead of time. And then you know, the user testers go through it, but you don't necessarily get to get to interface with them after the fact. And then with fiber, maybe you could do that it would probably involve making a new order. It's going to take time to get that feedback. It's not going to be as dynamic as doing it in person.\r\n\r\nIn person, it's probably going to be the most expensive in terms of like your team's time and like setting up a place for them to do this. And, you know, having some sort of incentive whether that's straight up cash or like a gift card or something like that for people's time. Another I think great option is user testing. And I was pretty sure that this platform had had changed or been sunsetted or something but I was looking at it leading up to doing this presentation and it still exists. It might exist in like a different format than it did initially did. Like I think you have to buy like a package. It's not just like one by one, for example. So I'm not super up to date on how it works now more more as to how it's worked in the past. But basically, the way that it has worked is that you specify certain tasks you want users to complete and specific questions for them to answer. And so users narrowed the process they go through until that test is complete. They have or at least had had a very large user base. So it was a great platform for giving like that exact demographic that you wanted to test. But fiber is very similar. I mean, fiber doesn't focus on user testing. To the extent that user testing does a fiber marketplace covers a wide range of services, but their usability like UX test marketplace is very large, you know, in comparison to some of their other focuses. So definitely a great place to find user testers. People start offering their services at $5. But they don't have to, that's an old fiber rule of thumb that it had to be five now people can set whatever price they want. They just have to set up their gigs in a way that makes them competitive. The way that I did it was I used to charge by the page. And then if they wanted, like a written report, that would be an extra cost in addition to the video. So it just depends on how people set up their gigs. But there's some level of standardization because people go to that market and that marketplace and they want to be able to pick you know, five people that offer something that take a look at side by side. Um, you could also do something that's not exactly going to give you all the information but it's an interesting practice, which is like recording users sessions on your website. So Microsoft has this newer tool called Clarity and it's free. And so you basically add like a little bit of JavaScript to your header. And you can see people interacting with your website, and you can see you know, how their mouse moves and how they scroll and things like that and like what they click on. Of course, unlike the user test, nobody's narrating it, there's no audio. It's literally just kind of like outside of context, how they interact with your website. So it's going to give you marginally useful information, but it's just another thing that you can use to try to troubleshoot. You know, why something isn't working, for example. And then this isn't like fully, like a way to run usability tests, but it's a like a tool that you can use or that perhaps somebody that you work with might use, which is to take screenshots and share commentary about what they're looking at. And I'm going to show you an example here. Oh, and besides clarity, when it comes to recording user sessions, you can also use a tool called Hot jar to do that as well. Okay, so this is an example and it's a little bit dated, but this is from bug herd. So bug heard is like a website feedback tool. That's another way to, to look at like what we're looking at right here. And this is something as a designer that you could use with clients. Some websites do this publicly where they have like a little thing on the side of the website that's like, Hey, do you have any feedback about this page? Or do you want to report a bug? That's, that's kind of why this exists, but I used to use it for my UX audits. I would just go through each page and then create like annotated screenshots and then I could explain export, the report that has all the pages and all my notes and things like that. So it's just a cool tool, whether you're kind of auditing your own site, you're auditing a client site, or somebody's doing it for you. So okay, from the flip side, we've talked about how to run a user test, but how can you be a good user test or maybe how can you identify one that you want to work with time and time again? First of all, it's narrating your thoughts as you have them. We've talked about this because that like stream of consciousness just, you know, noticing things and whether you really have something to say about it or not just like addressing each element on a page. And so that's kind of the next point here is is, you know, not just addressing them, but considering the impact that each page element might have. It's certainly acknowledging the perspective of your audience we talked about even if you're not a member of that target audience, how can you sort of take on that persona in order to speak on their behalf? Another thing that I used to do when I did these UX audits was share ideas for a B testing. Like I might say, you know, this is an interesting approach to your head and I wonder if you were to try this if it would, you know, get you better results and so it's it's giving them ideas, even if it's not a fully fleshed out thing, but to say like, this might not be it, but maybe you could try this. And then it's also it's not just about being like negative or pointing out what's wrong, but also acknowledging what does seem to be working. So that again, you can really like laser in and the feedback that's going to have the most impact for what they should change to resources that have really made an impact on me and how I go about content and design. First of all, is the Design of Everyday Things. This is like one of my favorite books. It's more about physical design, like product design, but there's a lot of transferable things that have to do with how we design for the web. And then don't make me think is like the quintessential resource for web usability and he's sent created, you know, multiple editions of this. There's another book, something about rocket science. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but, you know, anything that he writes like I would highly recommend. Okay, so we did break, and then I'm going to save questions for the end so we can get through the important stuff here. So I'm going to give you a couple more tools to use so that you can audit your own stuff. We're going to go through our live content UX audit, and then anytime we have left is going to be for questions. Let's get through it. Okay, so we'll start with Google tools, because again, when Google gives us information or tools, we want to listen because this is essentially how Google sees our content and how they prioritize what they rank in relevant search. So PageSpeed Insights is really a wealth of information. It provides data points from a variety of factors. And as you can see in this screenshot, currently, as of the core web vitals update, it starts with the core web vitals, so it starts from a point of this like, page experience and usability factor. They what's kind of interesting is that they have a part of PageSpeed Insights, and I'm going to show you like a fuller report when we go into the live content UX audit, but they have a piece of it that's about accessibility, but it's it's pretty bare bones. And so Nathan mentioned to me right before we started today, that Amber Hines is going to be the next workshop next month and it's going to be about accessibility. And her company equalised digital, they have a really great accessibility checker that integrates with WordPress. And so I would say that like that's probably going to be a much better tool for making judgments about if your website is accessible. Then what you're going to see on Google PageSpeed Insights and I think that that's something that is really important that you know, it's not always like at the top of our list when it comes to some of the other things that we need to do. To make our website usable, but it is really important. Whether you currently have an access issue or not at some point in your life, I'm sure you will. And now that I'm a man like this has become more obvious to me, maybe not in terms of strictly website design, but I think about like when I'm on a walk outside and previously, you know, I could just step around people's icy sidewalks that they didn't shovel or whatever, but now that I have a stroller, it's like okay, am I gonna put my kid you know, in the street. And so it's it's things like that or maybe you break your arm and now you can't interact with the web the same and so accessibility, I just wanted to like, make make the case that that is something that is so important because you your loved one, there's somebody that you know that it's going to make a difference for.\r\n\r\nGoogle used to have a tool specifically for testing the mobile friendliness of your site, and I was surprised to learn that they've actually sunset this tool. So now it's kind of a part of Google PageSpeed Insights. I think that whatever functionality was already in Google PageSpeed Insights for measuring the difference between the mobile and desktop version was kind of already there. So they basically just said, like, maybe this is like duplicating those efforts. I don't know. But it's no different. I'll just say that, that we that we use Google PageSpeed Insights to make judgments about how Google understands your website from a mobile point of view. Um, so we have the ability to measure like a snapshot of the current state of how your website measures according to the core web vitals are Google PageSpeed insight, but I also wanted to share within Google Search Console, there's this core web vitals report that measures it over time. And the most important thing, I think, to keep in mind with Google Search Console, and and also like Google Analytics. What I'm going to talk about specifically is more relevant to Google Search Console, is the fact that it tells you if you know, you become in violation of anything that's going to hurt your ability to rank and relevant search in terms of what Google tells us right in terms of the big things. And so that's why making sure that it's installed on your site on client sites is so important because it gives you notices if you're like way in violation of something, and it gives you the chance to fix it. Google Analytics so I would also recommend installing from the get go because it gathers important data that's useful that you can use to understand your page experience your content experience, but yeah, so this is just one useful report that relates to what we're talking about. This came up when I was prepping for the live audit later. Just the idea that there may be a use case for understanding what WordPress theme somebody's using. And I would say especially what plugins they're using, because both of these things can have an impact on your pages performance, which is a search signal on the loading, you know, on the interactivity, and all those those good things. So this is just one tool there's there's a bunch of them out there. But you know if if your website is experiencing any performance issues, or you just want to understand like how somebody else put their website together. I think this is a cool tool or a cool mechanism for that. I also wanted to share a general SEO audit tool, I see ranking so like H refs and SEM rush which I believe we talked about yesterday, this is another All In One SEO tool. It is not as fine tuned as the others as Ahrefs and SEMrush in terms of their keyword data, so that's why I don't use it for keyword research. They use different databases and approaches. But what I will say is their SEO auditing tool, which is like kind of the technical structure of your website, like goes head to head with any of like the big players in the market, and I'll show you exactly what that looks like. And the great thing about SEO ranking is it's a lot more affordable as an as an All In One SEO tool. And even from like the keyword research perspective, like you could use it to get most of the way there if content again isn't like your biggest focus are in and or if you weren't in a super competitive industry, it would it would do just fine. Um, a couple like editing tools. Hemingway is a great one. It's pretty simplistic isn't the right word, but it focuses on just a couple of things. It focuses on just a couple of factors and so that's why it's useful it doesn't it's not super distracting. And then Grammarly is one I would say that gets into a lot more detail. Grammarly is probably a more well funded company. Than Hemingway I wasn't aware of if Hemingway been monetized until I was looking at it the other day they have some AI functionality and they might they might have some other like outside of AI functionality plans, but I'm not sure that they had like a clear path to monetization before that but grim really has always had its like premium and like enterprise business use cases. And so I think that's probably why this tool is maybe a little bit more robust in terms of the suggestions it provides. They have a lot of linguists on staff and again, a disclosure that I'm a Grammarly Ambassador but I also like to use the product paid every person on my team that's a writer editor has a paid subscription to grammerly and I'll show you why shortly. Um, you know, you also want to look for plagiarism when it comes to creating a great content experience and when I talk about plagiarism, I'm not even necessarily talking about things that you do like on purpose. Some things that happen in grammerly, specifically is that you'll write something and it will detect a phrase that's been published elsewhere on the internet because you know, like there's a ton of content that already exists and it's bound to happen. And it'll be about something that's like a completely different industry. Like you definitely didn't take it from that original place that was published, but it's kind of like a reminder to go on and try to make it more unique. Just so that you know, Google doesn't think that you plagiarize even though again, it's not about intention. It's just about the reality of the content that already exists. But at the blacksmith, we use Copyscape for every piece of content we create, just to be sure there's no plagiarism, and then Grammarly. I don't believe the plagiarism check comes with the free version, but because we have the premium version, and that's included that we use it to. Um, one of the last factors here is you know, making sure that your content adheres to your style guide, whether that's a specific company style guide, or something like AP style, which again, is like the news journalism standard. I think it's like a great standard to use if you don't have a set style guide. And then I just have a couple qualitative qualitative factors here. So on the blacksmith style guide, which will probably show you we have a section about information architecture, and it's about a lot of these different things, how to break up walls of text, how to approach writing headings, how to keep paragraphs and sentences short and to the point. It's other things like you know, making sure that you have good flow with your content, you know that it has good storytelling, but it's something a human would want to read. And yesterday we talked about texts that whether AI generated it or not sounds robotic and how to avoid it. So that's another like, piece that you can use like in your own audits, those guidelines. Other things that I look at are like the thoughtful use of on brand visuals at the blacksmith we try to incorporate multiple types of visuals per piece. I'm definitely of the opinion that words aren't enough. I think as humans we're very visual creatures and people all have their own, like different learning styles. So that's also a factor, you know, written word, I don't think is enough, especially like for me personally, sometimes I need to like watch a video about it, or you need to like, you know, play with it in my hands or whatever. Like there's just different ways that people process information and so the more different ways you can surface it to them within your content, the better that your contents going to perform and help them and then things like consistent formatting like how you use bullet points, how you write headings. Again, a lot of this we cover in the blog Smith style guide. Just a couple other things. We talked about a B testing when we talked about how to be a good user tester and giving examples. So Unbounce is a tool that you could use. A B testing is essentially testing like different variants of a page usually you're testing a specific element like two versions of a page title, or two versions of an image, but it could be a full page as well. And this is something that Nathan and I also talked about, which is that I think he'd love to have an expert on a be testing do one of these workshops or you know a webinar in the future so if that's your if you know somebody like that, you know, that's something I think that all of us could learn some best practices from but again, another thing that you could test\r\n\r\nQuick disclaimer, then we'll jump to our live content UX audit. And we're talking about how to make your content better. And, you know, basically like different processes that you could use to to catch mistakes. But I don't want you to leave this thinking that perfection. Is the goal because it's not I think, you know, we're all human, we all make mistakes. At the end of the day writing for the web is is great because it's a very forgivable medium and unlike print, once you notice a mistake, you can go in and correct it. And so I don't want this to become a situation where you're beating yourself up if you did all these steps or you did some of these steps and like, you know, you still notice something later somebody points out like oh, this is spelled wrong or whatever. That's really not the point. So at the end of the day, I think my guidance for you is done is better than perfect. And be kind to yourself but create systems to catch mistakes. And that system could be having like a human editor, like like I mentioned earlier today, whenever I write something, you know I'm telling you all my best practices, but that doesn't mean that I always follow them, right. I'm an imperfect human being and, and things happen. And I think the other thing that I wanted to say is like we all have limited time we all have limited energy, and especially now that I'm a new mom, like I used to work really late at night and I would just crush stuff out and I would go over it a million times and now I kind of have to be satisfied with like not having the ability to do that and having a much shorter period of work time every day. That I can get stuff done and having to prioritize ruthlessly and that sometimes means that like yes, maybe I spelled something wrong, you know, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it. And I don't think you should either. So that's that's my soapbox. Alright, so let's go to the live content UX audit. Give me just a moment to get this set up. Um, so we're gonna go through like a couple of these different tools that we talked about today. And then at the end of this, we will have some time for questions. Okay. So Stacy, we're picking on you today because you submitted a really great example for this live content UX audit. And I want to start by saying there's like nothing wrong with this website. I mean, it's very good and it follows a lot of both the content and design principles that like I would instruct my team on. So what we're going to do today is is really nitpick for the sake of giving people things to think about when they are doing their own content UX audits. And so I'm going to start by sharing, like some of these tools and their outputs so that I can show you how to use them. And then what we'll finish off on is coming back to this page, and I'm going to give a couple of qualitative factors, you know, that I think can make the content just a little bit stronger. So again, I wanted to surface the blog SMIS content style guide. This is going to be the basis of one part of you know, some of the things I'm going to talk about and I'm going to reference that Chechi btw bot that we made yesterday, that's based on the style guide and that's, that's kind of what I use to audit this page from the content style perspective. But again, some things that we just talked about were first of all the SEO and Keywords section or chapter, where we talk a little bit about I mentioned that you could get some guidance for how to use awkward keywords like how to use keywords within URL slugs. I also talks about this information architecture, or information structures what we call it here section. So that's how to like essentially present information but also like break up walls of text, make it more readable. We talked a little bit at the end of today about formatting and how to keep that consistent. So those are just a couple of things. I guess we also talked about links earlier today and so there's some good guidance there. So you know, this is a this is a good resource if you're building out your own content style approach, and you can really build off of this because again, it's fairly industry agnostic. So anyway, I took this link, and first I ran it through Google PageSpeed Insights. And if you look at the desktop version, I mean it's pretty much near perfect. There's it's very difficult to get to 100 on any of these factors on I would say especially on mobile, but even on desktop, I mean, it's it's kind of like a what's the word? It's like a like a fool's errand to try to get to 100 if you're if you're this close, so, desktops looking really good. You know, they have a couple of things that you could do to fix it if you wanted to, and I have some suggestions for that, but we'll talk about it from the mobile perspective. So if you go to mobile, you'll notice that you know, first of all, the largest Contentful paint is one of the core web vitals, that it's a little bit in the red and it's and that's really like the only one and the largest Contentful paint again has to do with page floating, I believe. And so, taking like the definition we had, I'm guessing that that has something to do with this image because this is the viewport you know, that first load so it's the first thing that gets measured by this core web vital. And when I was looking at this yesterday, it's a it's a JPG file, which isn't like a super large file or anything like that. But one thing that you could do to to improve that page quality factor is to instead save this and serve it up as a web p file. There are certain plugins that you can use for that it's going to you have to kind of determine if adding like a plugin or taking that extra step of manually saving it like converting it and saving it and uploading it as that file is worth it. But that's that's like the one thing that I could think would would flip this so that it's the performance is a little bit closer to 100. And then we go into some of these other like diagnostic details. And I think this is where PageSpeed Insights gets really interesting because you can sort of dig into specifics here. A couple of things that I noticed were like minifying, CSS and JavaScript and there's some other things that are kind of related to optimizing like these different file types on the website. So I use a plugin called nitro pack. There's a free version and there's a paid version. I think the free version will get you pretty far, but it adds this like little Add at the bottom of your website. So I just pay for the paid version because I don't want that there are other things like nitro pack but nitro pack from the perspective of somebody who operates in the SEO world, you know who's looking for good performance, who's looking for best practices, that is my suggestion to you and to anybody who is seeing these things on their Google PageSpeed Insights. So naturally talking about these plugins for me like the got the question of does adding more plugins like is that going to hurt performance like what what is the marginal return of that? And so what I wanted to do next was take the URL and put it in that WordPress theme and plug in detector to just see like what the back end of the site looks like. And so we can see, it's like a custom or like a child theme. And I think okay, so apparent theme is Astra, so we know that like that's the technical basis on which this is based. I think generally speaking, Astra is pretty good for SEO from what I've heard, I don't have a ton of experience with it. And then also, this is like more what I was interested in was the plugins on the backend. And I mean, from what it detects it's there aren't that many plugins here, you know, it has like a plug in that works with Astra there's a Quiz Builder. This DOWNLOAD MANAGER contact form and then the Page Builder that's pretty lean, especially if those are the only plugins that are installed. You know, different people have different ideas of like, how many plugins is too many or like what's the optimum amount but I would say like, we're well under that here. So adding something like nitro pack, or you know, like some sort of web p image optimizer I think short Pixel does that.\r\n\r\nSomething like that probably wouldn't like hurt performance for the performance gains that would come with it. Um, okay, so the next thing that I wanted to do this is higher level than just this page, but I wanted to show you guys SC ranking. So SC ranking again, is this like All In One SEO tool? And I think there's like actually something wrong with my browser because I'm trying to like x this out, and I could do this yesterday and it just like wouldn't do it. So this is either a core web vitals issue or this is like I have too many, like Chrome extensions that are conflicting with each other, that I haven't been able to figure out why it sometimes messes with my browser. But anyway, that's an aside. So um, so this is a C rankings like technical website audit. And what I really love about this is that it's pretty straightforward. Like you can essentially read this as a non SEO and get a very good idea of things that you could fix to improve your website's technical structure. And as you can see this website like it's not bad, like there's room for improvement, but overall it's doing pretty good. Again, chasing 100 is a fool's errand. You're like, probably not going to get there but you want to get as close as you can with the time and the resources that you have. And so this page is really just like a high level overview. Again, this is about the whole website. It gives you an idea of like, how many pages were crawled, versus how many URLs which could include things like media files, JavaScript files, style, sheet files, and things like that. And so this can be a good indicator of like, if you know that there's more pages or there's more files, like maybe there's a credibility issue here. And if if some are getting excluded from this crawl, then they're probably also getting excluded from what Google can see. And so at that point, you, you know that there may be a sitemap issue that's getting in the way of the ideal situation. But what I really wanted to show you was the issue report. So these are things that you could fix. And what it does is it it has a category, it gives a specific issue, it gives you which pages are affected. It tells you you know, whether you're like compliant or whatever you want to call it if it's following best practices or not. And there's there's very few things here. But for example, like here's one that has to do with crawlability, which we talked about earlier today. And so nofollow means that we don't want the search engines to read this page and there may be a good reason for that. And so it seemed that for your pages are affected, you can click on it to get a description of the issue. So this is why it's really great for people who aren't necessarily like in the SEO world. A lot of you are website developers or designers and so a lot of this stuff like you'll be able to understand just by going through it and familiarizing yourself with it was there like included details. But yeah, so then you could see, you know, like which pages relate to this issue and whether or not like it's worth doing anything or if you really wanted them to be that way. But I'll give you like a more tangible example of something that you definitely want to fix. We have, for example, External links to 4x x. So like a 4x. X code is like a 404 means that it's not found, and there's different variations of that I'm sure a lot of you are pretty familiar with that. And so this means that maybe something that was linked on the website now no longer exists. And so it either needs to be replaced or redirected or something like that. And again, you can dig into the URLs you can see like what specific error code happened. This is also a really great report that you can give to clients. And then you know, depending on the level of familiarity you have with these different issues and how to fix them then you can give yourself a little bit of an extra job and some hours working with them to not only audit and go through the audit and explain the audit but then also, you know, implement the fixes. So I just wanted to show you that because I think it's it's such a great tool. So then the next thing I did was I ran this through Hemingway, and like I told you before Hemingway is like the sort of like, saying it's the more basic version of Grammarly. is maybe not exactly the right way to describe it, but it's the more like focused version. And so as you can see, what it does is it highlights different things. And it's kind of using I guess these colors, as you know, like things like it's trying to like draw your attention to certain colors as being like something that's more worth your attention or less worth your attention. What I've always known Hemingway as is a great tool for measuring active versus passive voice. And generally speaking, we want to try to avoid passive voice in our writing. And so that's probably what it's best used for. But there are some certain other factors here that are useful and interesting. And like yesterday when I told you about clear scope and how it measures readability, you can see that Hemingway also does this. It measures certain stats in terms of you know, just this piece of content, not necessarily compared to other pieces of content. And then it also has some AI functionality, that with a paid plan you can use to I think automatically suggest edits to some of these things. So just, you know one interesting tool where it's I think best functionality is free. So then I ran it through grammerly and I wanted to start by showing what I was talking about. With the plagiarism thing. Like there's something about inventory management on this article that says 1% of your text matches the source and that's like it's not even This article isn't even about inventory management. So I just wanted to show you guys that like, like these tools can be wrong, but it's still worth running that check a if you're working with a writer that's not you, just from a reputation standpoint, you want to make sure that there's no obvious like plagiarism problems with it but be so that you can just make like some small changes to this text so that Grammarly doesn't pick it up and possibly, you know, Google may be like taking a nod from some of the similar types of algorithms and uses. Again, not that it's intentional. It's just like, you know, because there's already this wealth of content that already exists on the internet about all these different subjects and of course, there's going to be similarities with phrasing and things like that. So then we get to these other suggestions. And I guess one other thing I wanted to show you about Grammarly is you can set goals for a piece of content and I don't know if this is a paid version specific but anyway, you can, you know, say like what type of writing it is. So I just said business for this. You can give a certain intent so I sent in form for this I may or may not be right with all these things, but I just wanted to see what would happen. You can say like, you know the level of experience of the audience, you can set like the formality of the tone. And then and then it gives you suggestions based on those things. And what's cool about grammerly is that it goes into these specific zoo specific different categories of suggestions. So correctness is about like grammar, spelling, punctuation, clarity is to cut in to help with like the flow of engagement, which is probably most related to like storytelling and delivery, I guess, you know, kind of related to both of those things, and then style guide. This relates to my company's specific style guidance, some of the suggestions that I have programmed in myself, and so a lot of it is like punctuation, because I have some rules about that. And it's probably annoying for my writers to have all this pop up. But some of it is word stuff. So like if we click this, something like actually, per the blogs and the style guide, and that's just our approach, we say these words are fluffy and don't add value typically. So like if you cut actually, it would say wait, so you have to go read these reports. Ones is another one that I have strong opinions about. I say don't use one to describe a noun you've already defined. Use the same word again or find another way to say it and then I gave an example here. So that's what's really cool about Grammarly is like you can like get these things automatically being suggested when you're working on a piece of content within your organization so that people don't have to remember like all the stuff that I showed you on my style guide it just automatically pops up. Waxing then I'll show you a couple qualitative things and then we'll go to questions is I ran this through my style editor bot, and it wouldn't I tried to get it to like directly edit the copy. And it wasn't unlike what I showed you yesterday which was like a shorter excerpt and the did I did that. So part of this is like me learning how to best use the spot or how to best design it or how to best query it. But what I did was I said Please review this blog post it gave it the era and suggest edits according to the blacksmith style guide.\r\n\r\nThey said consider the bad side consider the following suggestions and it felt to me like it wasn't actually like totally reading the blog. It was just giving like general tips and then I said please suggest updated copy based on these suggestions. And so what it did, which is kind of funny was it created like a shorthand version of it. And so what I was thinking is something like this could be really useful for like an email newsletter, you know, like an atomized version of the blog. Or, you know, maybe like you create some social posts based on these shorthand summaries of each category or something like that. You'd still probably want to edit it, but to me, even though it's not really what I asked for, I thought that that could be an interesting use case. So then I was like, Okay, well can you actually do the edits while preserving the original length of the piece? And it was like no, but it kind of went back in and gave some more suggestions. And then I was asking if it was actually able to like read the original article, or No, I was asking about the visuals, because one of the suggestions was about visual aids. And I was like, well, there's a ton of visual aids on that article. And so it said that it can't directly process or interpret them from the article itself. So that was kind of interesting. And then I gave it the copy and then it still kind of like generally gave examples. So you know, it's a work in progress. I guess that's what I wanted to share. It's still it's still gave me some things to work with. But it wasn't exactly like the editor that I was hoping that it would be like it like it kind of was yesterday. So it seems to me if I were to make a hypothesis here that it's probably going to be more useful for shorter bits of copy, you know, maybe different sections or titles or things like that, versus trying to edit a whole article all at once but it will give you food for thought in terms of general edits that you could make. Okay, so last like pieces of content on this before we end up today. We talked about menu navigation. And so the way that I would change this menu navigation would be home about blog and I would just change this to contact and what I like to do with whatever like the most important menu item or call to action is maybe add some like button styling so that that stands out, it just simplifies it. It's not distracting and you know, hopefully leads them to the ideal conversion. So then the other thing like the header, because we're kind of talking about the whole experience, not just the article itself, is what I what I came across, typically in the UX audits that I did was a similar type of header where it has the logo, but unless the name of the brand is like really straightforward about what you do, it could benefit from having some context like a tagline about what you do and so I don't think that we do it on the blog. So some a very bad example. But you can imagine like in my header it should probably say like SEO and content agency. But you know, maybe because it's called the blacksmith that also might work I don't know submitted a test. I'm generally speaking again, I really liked this article, I thought that more or less like it fit the same types of standards that like I would have for my team in terms of putting together conversational tone like breaking texts up nicely, having really useful visuals, a couple of just like very small things. We have the social share buttons. My suggestion is to add a CTA that's like share this on social like, it might seem obvious, but just saying that might be useful, might also be useful to have them float as the person who reads it because they might decide at different points that they want to share it through. I love the visuals there was one visual where I think there might be an unintentional tooltip here where like when you were taking the screenshot your cursor was probably over this SPFx aligned area right here. And so it took the screenshot with that and it kind of obscures the stuff behind it. This is the type of thing that like, because I do these all the time I nitpick and probably nobody else would notice, but I just thought that I would mention it. I'm sure I'm gonna like pretty much ended there. The last thing I was going to say for now is with the Related Posts, one of them doesn't have the featured image. So it's kind of, you know, it just looks a little bit lopsided. That's a super easy thing to fix. And then when it comes to consistency um, you might want to capitalize text stuff just so that it's consistent with the capitalization of the other category. And then maybe also like space it out tech space stuff. So again, like I really don't have that much to say here, because it's very good and it has good information. The last I guess big thing is the actual place where I'm reading the content is kind of narrow and skinny compared to the full frame here. And so I wouldn't recommend going full width with the content but I think we could break out the box a little bit more or break it out of the current box so that it's a little bit wider. And I think that that would be a great reader experience. So with all that being said, I'm going to pull back to my slides really quick just to pull up like the question slide and things like that. But I mean basically we're done here. With the planned content. I'll once again bring up my book because it is about what we're talking about with content experience. It's about my approach to content writing, content style, you can grab a free chapter of the book on the writing for humans and robots.com website or you can grab the book on Amazon via Kindle or print edition. And yeah, that's pretty much it. So I will take any questions that may have popped up in the meantime.\r\n\r\nYeah. All right. So thanks again, Stacey for letting us use your content as I know that it's a little weird with talking about my stuff here but ya know, it was very much appreciated and a it's an excellent article. We've talked about that already. The content, it was it was hard\r\n\r\nto find stuff to comments on honestly, so I had to go into nitpick mode.\r\n\r\nSo grateful to you, Stacey. Let's see folks last chance to ask questions here. There are no questions today,\r\n\r\nwhich is covered at all. Everything's done.\r\n\r\nIt's it's been a very good and thorough presentation on lots of tools. Things to consider as we're developing content for and helping our clients create content for the web. Yeah, like Ben says firehose of information really good stuff. Greg, this is a good rewatch as well. Alright folks, last chance before we land the plane. Your if you have any final questions for Maddie, if you want to just say yes in the chat that way we know to pause otherwise, I'm going to start moving towards wrapping us up. All right, yeah. So thanks there in the chat. Okay. So Maddie, wrap us up here. Give us our final takeaway for the training.\r\n\r\nSure. I'll answer one question. Barney asked if I'm in the Denver area. Yeah, yeah. I'm in Lakewood, technically. But yeah, okay. Final wrap up. treat people how you want to be treated with your content. That's good.\r\n\r\nThat's really good. And true, right. So yeah, awesome. Well, thanks, everybody, for hanging out with us for the last couple of days. It's been a really good set of information here. A lot of things to consider. And hopefully it'll help us all up our game as we're dealing with content on the web. Thanks again. Maddie. For your expertise. And folks, we are back tomorrow as usual 1pm Central for office hours here on solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nNice. Well, thank you so much, everyone for your time and attention. And yeah, I hope I hope there is like one good nugget for you to take away and if you ever have any questions about content and UX, I'm always happy to be a resource.\r\n\r\nVery good. Alright, see you folks tomorrow.\r\n","livestream-resources-group":"s:34:\"a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","multi-day_replay_details":["s:1319:\"a:7:{s:18:\"event_replay_title\";s:19:\"Day 1: Content & AI\";s:25:\"day_description_cloneable\";s:290:\"\r\n\r\nAI content tools to add to your workflow\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nHow to write a great ChatGPT prompt and a build-your-own GPT demonstration\r\n\r\n\";s:35:\"livestream_vimeo_video_id_cloneable\";s:9:\"917283343\";s:16:\"course-resources\";a:2:{i:0;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:29:\"Slides (with clickable links)\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:87:\"https:\/\/app.slidebean.com\/sbp\/14wk06qt70\/Audience-Copy-v2-Website-Content-Workshop-2024\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:6:\"Slides\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}i:1;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:42:\"Slides (PDF Download, Links Not Clickable)\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1ucAZKb-0DHu92mcCDfWVxveHFj6Ch5qG\/view?usp=sharing\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:6:\"Slides\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:23:\"livestream_chat_log_url\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1EGbDssaPY16DPzSzhKrhE7ElsA_ATR4N\/view?usp=sharing\";s:40:\"livestream_live_transcript_url_cloneable\";s:66:\"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/s6izsl7mc33FNxJL9TyU3rv6g84?utm_source=copy_url\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","s:1312:\"a:7:{s:18:\"event_replay_title\";s:17:\"Day 2: Content UX\";s:25:\"day_description_cloneable\";s:285:\"\r\n\r\nHow website design supports content effectiveness\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nHow to conduct a content UX audit for your brand and clients\r\n\r\n\";s:35:\"livestream_vimeo_video_id_cloneable\";s:9:\"917679579\";s:16:\"course-resources\";a:2:{i:0;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:29:\"Slides (with clickable links)\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:87:\"https:\/\/app.slidebean.com\/sbp\/14wk06qt70\/Audience-Copy-v2-Website-Content-Workshop-2024\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:6:\"Slides\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}i:1;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:42:\"Slides (PDF Download, Links Not Clickable)\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1ucAZKb-0DHu92mcCDfWVxveHFj6Ch5qG\/view?usp=sharing\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:6:\"Slides\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:23:\"livestream_chat_log_url\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1-15hvhAoo2OFpOX5Y2-3iYd9OOuOLtfs\/view?usp=sharing\";s:40:\"livestream_live_transcript_url_cloneable\";s:66:\"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/hJvip6Ozsn3rEQSWvqgPkRGr4UQ?utm_source=copy_url\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";"]}},"postCountOnPage":1,"postCountTotal":1,"postID":448491,"postFormat":"standard","geoCloudflareCountryCode":"US"}; dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content ); \nThis year, we'll expand on the foundation we created for writing great content to focus on integrating AI efficiencies, plus the intersection of content and design with UX.\n\n\n\nReview Last Year's Website Content Workshop Course Here\n\n\n\nDay 1: Content & AI\n\n\n\nTuesday, February 27, 1:00-3:00p Central TimeThe limitations and ethical implications of AI\n\n\n\n\nAI content tools to add to your workflow\n\n\n\nHow to write a great ChatGPT prompt and a build-your-own GPT demonstration\n\n\n\n\nDay 2: Content UX\n\n\n\nWednesday, February 28, 1:00-3:00p Central TimeWhat Google guidelines tell us about content UX\n\n\n\n\nHow website design supports content effectiveness\n\n\n\nHow to conduct a content UX audit for your brand and clients\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","livestream_live_transcript_text":"So we've got a lot to cover over the next few days. This again was this is building on last year's content workshop. And the link for that is in the course description if you missed last year I would strongly recommend you check that out. Really good stuff. So Sadie has your book MADI Naidu\r\n\r\nwhy it's really good love it seems like it's been a while since I published it, but you know, I tried to write it so that it would still be useful today. So I hope that you're all finding that. Yeah, we're sure.\r\n\r\nReally good stuff. Alright folks, if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat say hi. We are about three minutes away from getting started. And they're in the chat once again, is the link bundle that has the slides and the replay link as well as a link to Matty's book. We are Yeah, we're gonna have a lot of fun today and tomorrow, two hours today, two hours tomorrow talking all about website content with I mean, let's face it an expert in the field\r\n\r\nappreciate the vote of confidence. If you if you measure it by yours and I suppose expert, that's something that I've been doing for a very long time. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nAlright folks, let's hear from you in the chat. Check in question today. How about give us a one to 10 rating? How comfortable are you with generating website content? One being it's a real challenge. 10 being a pro, let us hear from you there in the chat.\r\n\r\nAll right, about a minute and a half to go.\r\n\r\nMaybe a good question is how many of you are forced to make content in order to finish your website designs? Yeah, to get your website launched.\r\n\r\nHey, Sue bullets are my friend. I like bullets. Alright, several folks just joining us. The links are there in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up that chat and you'll have the link to download the slides. Grab the replay and all of those things. We are about a minute away from getting started. Second question today is what's your comfort level? What's your expertise at website content creation one to 10 If you had to rate yourself love it. Love it. Tracks Yeah, five but a if you're using AI, that's awesome. Yeah, so a lot of folks are higher on the scale today. That's exciting, that hopefully you're gonna get some tools to up your game even further. He's got a lot to share with us. Over the next couple of days. Hey Terry. Dab Alright, folks, we are just about to get started. Glad you're all here. Diving into the web content workshop momentarily. Just seconds. To go. If you're just joining us in zoom, I'm going to drop in one more time the link bundle and it's three after so let's get the recording started. And we'll dive right in. Let's do it. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy and I'm joined for the next couple of days by my friend Maddy Houseman, Maddy is a sought after sought after copywriter specializing in enterprise b2b Tech brands. She's the CEO at blog Smith and the author of writing for humans and robots, the new rules of content style. She has been recognized on numerous industry lists as a top content marketer and I'm really excited to have her back for another course here on solid Academy so welcome back Madi, how are things going for you?\r\n\r\nThanks, Nathan. I'm really excited to be here. Like I said, you know, it's been it's been a little bit of time since I've done you know, a presentation like this since I've really gotten to use my brain. For those who don't know, I recently had a baby so he's in daycare today so I can fully you know, give my attention to this and, you know, embrace this identity of mine as a content creator who loves to learn and you know, who now has this other facet of my life but marrying those two in a joyous way so, so yeah, really excited to be back and and put my brain to use and share you know, some of the things that I've been exploring you for the past several months to I guess a year, all this new stuff with AI, that's what we're gonna focus on today. So really excited about that. Yeah,\r\n\r\ndefinitely. So we have a long way to go over the next couple of days and the thought just occurred to me Maddie, we really ought to have you back for another informal conversation just on how you prepared your business. So that you could take some time away, because that's really, that's quite a feat.\r\n\r\nIt was definitely and I'd love to do that. I'd be happy to.\r\n\r\nYeah, that'd be that just occurred to me. We should definitely, folks. So let's see the links are in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom. I'm going to drop this in one more time. There you will find the link to download or grab the slide deck. Also the replay link that will have the transcripts and chat logs after we finish is there for you as well. On that replay link you'll also find a link to last year's course, which is more some more foundational principles of the things we're going to unpack even further today. So if you missed last year's course, all the replays are there, follow that link, rewatch them, it's really good stuff. And of course, if you haven't seen Matt, he's booked the link for that as in the chat as well. So Maddie, give us a high level view. What are we going to be covering for the rest of today? Totally.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, we're definitely going to expand on some of the things that we started to talk about last year, but really, you know, thinking about what's changed in the past year and so that's why today we're going to focus mostly on AI kind of how AI factors into content creation, how you can use AI tools to create content, how you can use AI tools to detect AI content. You know, things like how to write an excellent chat GPT prompt and one thing I'm really excited to share with you because it's something that I've just kind of figured out for myself is how to make your own personal GPT. So that's what we're gonna do at the end of the day, I'll show you step by step how to do it. You can follow along, I'll show you how to adapt it a little bit. And then really, what we're going to start with today is I guess a bit of a cautionary tale when it comes to AI so we'll start with the most negative and we'll build up to the most positive. And then tomorrow, the focus is going to be on content UX, the user experience what I like to call the reader experience. So it's going to be more about you know, the elements of design and how they interact with content, how you can create this great reader experience for the people who consume your designs and content and so we can get a little bit more into what that looks like. But I guess if I was to like talk high level about today versus tomorrow, today is like things that I think are really like novel and fun. It's like It's like exciting things that that we're all learning kind of at the same time and that's that's what's so exciting about just like nobody has it figured out. And tomorrow is like the stuff that I'm really passionate about. That's a little bit more, you know, foundational and again, about like that full experience. So I guess with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. Yeah,\r\n\r\nabsolutely. Me give a couple of housekeeping notes that will disappear. Folks. We'll be taking a break in the middle as usual for these courses. So roughly at tube central an hour from now, we'll take about a five to 10 minute break depending on where we are timewise. So at the end of this first hour and the end of the second hour, we'll have a time of q&a as well. I would invite you to use the zoom q&a Link to ask your questions. Please don't use the chat, but use that Zoom q&a. That way we can keep all the questions in a nice list. And also, if you'll keep that Zoom q&a open, if somebody asks a question that you also want to hear the answer to just click the thumbs up icon to up vote. And we'll take the questions the order of up votes. So with that again, yeah, we are recording in the replay. The transcript is all there and it'll be available for you about an hour after we finished today. So Maddie, I'm going to disappear take over. Let's get started. Let's\r\n\r\ndo it. My housekeeping is just first of all, I think that we all can learn a lot from each other when it comes to AI. And so like that's how I've picked up the things that I'm going to share with you. It's really hearing it from other people seeing how other people are using this tool. It's interesting because it's so new that like, again, we don't really know like what the best use cases are. And there's this world of possibility that we've only just started to touch. So one thing I'll ask is like if you've come across an interesting AI use case, you know whether you have something that's top of mind now or whether going through what I'm going to talk about today sparks it like please share that in the chat. I'm sure all learn from it. I'm sure other people will learn from it. So that's one thing and then I'll just ask that if there's anything that resonates with you, as I'm talking today, or you know as other people are sharing ideas in the chat. I always love when people tweet or I guess x takeaways these days. So my Twitter is in that bottom right hand corner. So use that and I always love to retweet and share with my audience too. So yeah, let's go ahead and get started here. Nathan already gave a nice bio like who I am. Just to give you you know, more information about the blacksmith. We're a holistic content marketing agency for b2b technology brands. We create data driven content. I'm going to share some of those processes here with you today in terms of how we're using AI tools to do that. And our focus is creating content across the sales funnel with a focus on the reader experience. So again, that's really what day two is going to be about. It's creating this ideal reader experience with the intersection of content and design. And then my book writing for humans robots, the new rules of content style. If you've ever read the book, The Elements of Style, I was really kind of riffing on that in a more I guess, modern way since that book was written back in 1918, or 1919. Of course, at that time, the internet didn't exist. We weren't necessarily addressing a global audience when we publish to the web. We are now and so that's kind of the idea behind this book is how can you how can you speak plainly and inclusively and effectively when you're writing for the web? And so with all of that being said, let's go ahead and jump into the topic of today which is AI Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention. Day two, when we talk about content UX. I'm going to do some live content UX audits. If you were here last year, we also did this this is something I really love to do. And so this form here which you can also click through the slide being links that we've shared in the chat. Just has a couple questions like your name your brand. It'll ask for a link to a specific piece of content. If you're comfortable sharing for this live UX audit, and then it has the question that's optional. If there's anything you want me to focus on, and then like an aspect of the content itself, but the purpose is to collect some, you know, ideas from from all of you of what to audit and we're going to basically put the principles that I'm going to be talking about tomorrow into action you know, show you how to use some different tools show you how to use more also, like qualitative analyses. And so again, I would love your examples so that we can make it really useful for you to give you know, a second pair of eyes on your content. And you know, it's always done in a very respectful way. I'm not looking for problems, I'm just showing you ways to, you know, make your message clearer to make your content experience more effective. So I'll, I'll aim to remind you about this again at the end of the day, and then you know, before tomorrow is probably when I'll pick what we're going to audit for tomorrow. So get them in today, whenever you have a chance. Okay, so artificial intelligence. That's really the focus of what we're talking about today. Super exciting. Things are happening here. It's also kind of a wild wild west. It's it's something that there's many positive use cases but there are also some negative ones and so I really wanted to start with the negatives so we can kind of get that out of the way so we can you know, maybe share some like cautionary tales here. The link that Learn More link is an article that I wrote for Fast Company, and it's going to go over some of the same things that I talked about here in terms of some of the limitations and also really like the ethical implications of using AI to generate content to publish it as if it were your own. So yeah, let's go ahead and dive into that. Um, so I think like the first major implication, negative implication of AI or something to think about, especially as a creator, because many of us here we're writers, we're designers, so we're creating things. They they are our intellectual property which we may assign, you know, to a client, for example, but it's still at its root. It's something that we made. And, you know, the thing about AI is, first of all, it can't think for itself. It uses things like machine learning. It uses algorithms and processes to make sense of what's already out there. But it's not, at least right now in a place where it can completely invent something new. If it does. It's the result of this machine learning it's not the result of true uniqueness. So you know, essentially, AI and I'm gonna explain this example in a moment here, but it's, it's being trained on what already exists. It's using our intellectual property. And the worst part of it is it's doing that without giving us credit. I mean, if you go in do a search on Google, it was called Bard, but now they've rebranded it to Gemini. In my experience, and and I haven't used it recently, to be honest with you, but certainly within chat GPT there's no like source given for the answer to a prompt. It's not directing you to a specific piece of content are saying, This is what I referenced to come up with this answer, which also creates an issue of you know, whether or not that answer is something to be trusted, and we'll get into the fact that AI is oftentimes confidently incorrect. But right now, with the focus being on the fact that it's essentially plagiarism and my perspective, if you are taking what you generate with AI and then publishing it as your own this is probably easiest to think about when you think about visuals, and we're going to talk a little bit about AI generating images and kind of like how that works and some of the issues with that. But you can think of like aI trained on a certain set of materials, certain artists body of work, you know, that style, if it's trained on a certain style and the output is a certain style, it's pretty easy to identify that, you know, it's riffing off, you know, one individual's intellectual property, it's a little bit harder to make that distinction with the written word. But that doesn't mean that it's any less important to recognize that it's, it's an issue if if AI is passing off its own material or your material as its own. So, what I wanted to share here, this is an article that was published on futurism. It's an it's a screenshot from it, and it's about CNET. They have this blog about different like personal finance topics and things like that. And so when it comes to things that affect your finances, whether it's subjects like you know how to buy a house and you know, like had this setup a mortgage, you know, whatever. Or, in this case, like you know, how to pick a credit card, how to use credit cards, how to decide what college to send your kid to, or something like that. Google calls these topics, your money, your life. And in comparison to any other topic that you publish, that you're looking to get ranked in relevant search on Google. Google has the highest standard of quality for your money, your life topics. So CNET was transparent about the fact that they were publishing AI generated content such as the example shared here. But they had a human fact checking it and so the byline was like you seen that money or something like that? And then I think they also had like the byline of the human editor published next to it, but they told us you know, they they weren't trying to hide that it was aI generated. So this excerpt is you know, maybe kind of a silly example, but it's showing how\r\n\r\nthis article that they wrote, which was about can you buy a gift card with the credit card. This first example is a line that's almost verbatim from a rivaling Forbes article. And then this next example is how literally, the table was the exact same title. So, you know, you could question if it was only one of these things, you know, is that really plagiarism? Is that really a problem? But the fact that it's both to me shows that you know, not only did CNET not take a high enough standard of care, quite honestly with the content that they were having a human fact checker edit, but I think it also begs the question of like, if you're generating a full piece of copy, like a, you know, long form blog article, like are you ever going to be able to definitively say that it's not plagiarism? Or that it's not like literally, you know, word for word related to any other competitor article out there? And I think the answer's no, because that's what the AI is using to generate the content. In this case, and then one that I'll share subsequently, AI is, is almost like a crutch for CNET or for others who are who are taking this approach of generating that full article and then having the human intervention and I'm going to share some better ways to use AI in your article creation process. But yeah, I mean, the problem is ultimately that there's no way that they can catch every instance of plagiarism, and it just honestly creates more work and, and the worst part of all, is that it essentially ruin their reputation because they didn't take a proper standard of care. Another example that's, that's ongoing, it's unresolved at this point, is that the New York Times recently sued open AI who's the creator of chat GBT saying that, you know, their, their publications, their media. was unlawfully used to train open AI. And the last I saw, I think there was an update actually today that said that the New York Times is like misrepresenting the evidence or something like that. But again, I mean, it really just like begs the question of you know, if you publish content, like is it safe, you know, is it going to be used to train a model which is then going to spit it out and somebody else is going to publish it and benefit from it without properly crediting you? So that's one major issue. So this is one that I would love your examples. If you have anything similar. This is this is a picture that I saw recently in like a Facebook group about AI. And so somebody had done some prompts about dog breeds. And if you kind of squint, you're like, Okay, maybe that like a chart of different dog breeds, but then you look and you see all the like, really strange faces and like this, like gibberish text, and even the text that you can read is like not related to any dog breeds that currently exists. So, yeah, again, if you have any examples of like an image you've generated that has resulted in something like comically incorrect like this, I would love to see that in the chat. That would be fun. But I guess the point that I want to make with this slide is that at least at this point, AI can't effectively art direct you could give it a prompt and you could maybe get it to a point where you can get something useful. I think it's called mid journey. There's this one AI image generator that creates these like hyper realistic things with like any detail you can get it and something like that is so cool and very interesting to experiment with. But I think this came from within chat GPT I'm gonna say it wrong, but it's called like Dali Dali. And in my experience, when I've used it to generate images, it's the same sort of like gibberish text. The image, you know, is like, vaguely related to the prompts that I give it. So I'm using it for like, kind of like business article use cases to like generate a figure from you know, some like the data I include or something like that. I've never gotten something useful yet. And I think beyond that, it's like you still as a creative have to come up with the prompt. It's not like AI is going to be able to help you within the context, say of like an article. They're not going to be able to come up with like five unique media examples that you could include. So this is something that I think, you know, as humans, like, we still like have control over this or so like the best Abbot. Um, okay. So next I started to talk about this, which is one of the biggest issues with AI to date, the fact that it is confidently incorrect. So this is another Cena example, I'm going to read a little excerpt from. This is another futurism article. They did kind of a deep dive into this. See that AI but issue? So the excerpt is after the outcry after you know, some of these plagiarism things came to light. With the previous example. Steena editor in chief Connie Guglielmo acknowledged the AI written articles in a post that celebrated CNET's reputation for being transparent. without acknowledging the criticism, Guglielmo wrote that the publication was changing the byline on its AI generated articles from CNET money staff to simply seen that money as well as making the disclosure more prominent. Furthermore, she promised every story published under the program had been reviewed, fact checked, and edited by an editor with topical expertise before we hit publish, and I think that this is referring to like before this article was published, and so what you're looking at right here is, I think a more serious violation of the high standards that Google holds for your money your life, making sure that it is, you know, written by an expert that it's heavily fat checked, you know that you're not publishing something that you can't stand behind. And so this is about calculating compound interest for savings and as you can see by the excerpts, it's, it's wrong, the calculation is spitting out an incorrect final number. And so it may seem like, you know, small potatoes like, you know, like, what, what's really going to happen to the person who misinterprets this? It's certainly not like, you know, having to do with like, buying a house and like getting those equations wrong thread savings, but I think it just goes to show that there's, you know, there's a lot of problematic things that can happen and it starts here and if if we don't maintain a high standard for content quality starting here, then it could exacerbate it could turn into people being misled when it comes to making these like bigger money decisions in their life or you know, other things, your money your life, I think also, in some ways has to do with like, health and like medical stuff and things like that. So there are like potentially, you know, bigger and like worse implications than even just like the financial aspect of it. One thing that's interesting that that I misunderstood or I was misled about AI. Really up until like, a week ago or so, is I thought that you could ask chat GBT if it wrote something. So that was something that I saw other people talking about. And it's something that at the blacksmith like we've tested out ourselves you know, when working with like a new writer and wondering how to detect like if content was aI generated, and I found an article on open API's like FAQs or help desk or whatever that said, whenever you ask chat GBT if it wrote some you know, specific piece of copy for example, it just make something up like that's, that's literally what open AI says you could Google it yourself. So, you know, it's weird that it doesn't just say, I don't know, you know, it doesn't just give you like that as a straight answer. It's fine. If it doesn't know, but for it to purposely just decide, you know, bye bye narrowly, like if it's yes or no, and that it just tells you that whether it actually knows the answer, like that's very concerning to me. So a little bit of a cautionary tale. Um, but yeah, I think at the end of the day of the CNET examples, what I'm trying to impress upon you is like, does it really save time, if it like, impacts your reputation long term like I just don't think that that the best way to go about it is to generate the full piece of content and then add the human and I think that I think that AI can help intermittently and we'll definitely get to like how exactly to do that shortly. Um, so this article is also kind of fun. Charlie Brooker's, a creator of Black Mirror. If any of you are familiar, it's just this like really kind of weird messed up show on Netflix. It's very like future focused. It's like, I would say fairly.\r\n\r\nWhat's the word like it's, it's, it's kind of like post apocalyptic in some ways, not always. But it always like seems to end and kind of a scary place. And it's episodic, like each each episode I mean, to say is like its own storyline. And so the most recent season started to touch on themes of AI since that has become you know, something that has infiltrated society. And anyway, this article, The Creator who you know, has a very interesting mind based on what we see on this Netflix episodes, said that he doesn't think AI is messy enough to replace creative people. So there's good news guys, which is AI can't can't match that with us. I think on another hand AI, it lacks human empathy. You know, it can never like fully understand, like, who we are and what we go through. I don't think it ever will unless it's somehow achieved some level of sentience but yeah, I mean, ultimately, like in its wildest dreams, whatever AI, you know, thinks that it thinks it could never generate the ideas that we come up in our wildest dreams. And I think that the proof is in the pudding in terms of thinking about things like some of our favorite authors and how they create prosaic copy. So here's, here's a quote, I love Stephen King. He's kind of a machine himself, but human as far as I know. So this from needful things, one of his more interesting books, because the trust of the innocent is the wires most useful tool. And so, you know, fed copies of Stephen King's worked. You can ask chat GPT to write in his voice. I don't know if Stephen K would appreciate that or not. But, you know, I think the limitation is that it couldn't generate something like this on its own it can generate like derivative work of his but it couldn't come up with this on its own. Ai, you know, it, it isn't it doesn't have uniqueness. And Google has historically said that it's important. We're gonna talk a little bit about Google's AI guidelines that it's published. And it specifically says in those guidelines that they want to rank content that is unique, which AI fundamentally is not, not on its own, not without human intervention. Ai just read purposes and parrots things that already exists. And, and the output trends toward the average. It's not, it's not unique, it's not notable and interesting. Okay, so the last thing that I want to talk about from like this negative perspective, and then I promise we'll get into more of the fun stuff, is the idea that algorithms can be biased. And so if you think about like the people who are creating things like Chet GPT, or the Google algorithm or any other algorithm you interact with, like social media feeds, things like that. Algorithms, they represent the people that created them, not necessarily the population as a whole. So this book is really interesting. It's from the perspective of a black woman and so she is just like, read some of the book description to give you an idea of some of the topics that she explores. It says run a Google search for Black Girls, what will you find? Big booty and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms, but if you type in white girls, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and on unmoderated discussions about why black women are so sassy or why black women are so angry presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. And I think, after this book was published, because this was from a while ago, Google had manually made some adjustments to the algorithm in light of this criticism and that commentary, but the problem is with algorithms, you're you're scaling up problems, they can't manually make adjustments for every inherent bias that their algorithm has. And so you know, I don't know if we have an answer for how to fix this. But ultimately, the people creating the algorithm should represent society as a whole. I guess that's, you know, one way to think about it. Um, and I guess the question that it poses for all of us is like with AI deploying so rapidly there's going to be a lot of situations where bias needs to be routed out and fixed. And so that's, that's what's kind of scary, I think about how quickly new applications are developing. Again, it scales up problems and so that's just something I think we all need to be aware of, and and do the best that we can to fix. So okay, so now let's talk about some of the more fun stuff AI content tools. These are tools that we use in our workflow. These are tools that I use, personally. And so let's go ahead and you know, talk a little bit about how they work. So, again, we're gonna focus on like, mainly AI content tools, just because that's my sphere of genius. That's like what I have the most experience with, but I think there are different things that you could use like no matter how you're creating content, whether it's like you write blog posts for yourself, or for clients, or like, you know, you just want to like uplevel, your email strategy, or you know, help with like the personal compositions that you create. So, the first one I want to talk about is phrase which creates AI powered content briefs. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch my screen to share, to share like what a report looks like in phrase. So let's see here. I think I have to get out of full screen in order for this to work. Okay, so um, this was the form so I'm going to show you that in the beginning, but I'm gonna go ahead and exit out. So phrase generates this really cool report and the SEO aspects of it may or may not be relevant to your process. And I will say that not every piece of content that we created, the blacksmith is driven by SEO. It's not every piece of content we create to rank but I still use we still use phrase for everything because it helps with topic research. So that's what this is. It's a briefing tool. It's a research tool. Um, the way that it works and the way that the next tool, clear scope that I'm going to explain to you also works is that you give it a primary keyword. So in this case, it's how reliable are AI detectors? And so, by giving it this primary keyword, that means that we've already done the research to decide that that's the keyword that we want to optimize for. And so this is this is an article that's already published on the Black Swan, but this is something that we would have created. Prior to that publication. This this brief would have been like the first step of the writing process after doing the keyword research to decide which one we want to focus on. And the way that phrase and clear scope work is that you can I'm just going to show you like some of the pricing details so you can understand like how it works within a workflow, phrases kind of unique in that it has a plan that allows you to create unlimited reports. Not many other tools like it do that it's usually a per report cost. So that's why it's important to know what you want to optimize for before generating the reports. But it also has these lesser plans in terms of output. You know, depending on your content process, that's probably going to be more cost effective to you then you know, me as an agency, I would want more of like the unlimited plan to work for my various clients. So let's go back to phrase so what's interesting about phrase is first of all, just like the content editor experience itself, I'll be honest, we use Google Docs for everything. But if I was creating content, as like just for my internal team or something, what's cool is you can create these other tabs. And so you could have a tab that's like research. You could have a tab that's your outline. You could have a tab that's your draft, and then you could have maybe a tab with edits or something like that. So that's kind of cool just to keep the process nice and contained in one place. I've always thought that that was really unique and interesting about phrase.\r\n\r\nBut to be honest, we don't use phrase as a Content Editor. That's just an added bonus. So yeah, it generates a topic report. I'm gonna go through a couple of different aspects of it. First of all, it gives you some sort of tangible details and the way that phrase and clear scope and the market means which is another variation on a theme work is that they scrape the top 20 or so search results, which is pretty representative of like, what's going to be necessary to rank and it gives you details like, you know, how many words should you aim for for this specific topic? In this case, it's also suggesting how many headers which is like a measure of depth of content, how many links How many images? I think the top ones are what's like in this brief, that's what it's reading and the ones under it are like the average that it's suggesting. But again, we're just this is just like material that's from the brief. It's not like the actual content that we wrote. When it comes to word count. I think people always ask like, what's the ideal word count for a piece of content? And the the answer like many things in SEO is it depends. And so that's why tools like this are really useful because there is no standard. It's very topic driven. And using data that's based on actual searches means that you can get very close to like what that ideal is. So it also shares you know, the top some details of the top breaking content, you'll notice that the blog Smith currently owns a featured snippet for this particular topic, thanks in part to you know, some of the tools that we use to optimize their content. And also, I think, for this particular piece, because we did a lot of our own original research and reporting and some of it that I'll share with you when we talk about AI detector tools, I believe after the break today. You can also see like, the atomized version of some of these other top ranking results like the title like a short description, different headers, you can click into the headers to get more information. You can click through to read it. There's other things in this little side panel here that are interesting. This is just a list of all the headings from all the top ranking content pieces. Probably the most useful is this questions area and you can break it down by different sources of the question of the questions. People also ask you something you could manually go to Google and see for yourself. But it's nice to have it all in one place. I think that's the real benefit of phrase and then you can also see here that you can see questions that come from places like Quora and Reddit, you know, which which can really add a nice like flavor to what you're working on. The stats tab is really interesting. You know, they essentially suggest in phrase different stats, as well as different links that people tend to use in those top ranking pieces of content. And so you don't necessarily want to like copy everything that you see. But there might be things that like people would expect to be exposed to in your content. If there's like a big industry stat that relates to what you're talking about. As you scroll here you can see certain things like different topics that come up, you know, different related keywords or sub topics. And a lot of this you can kind of paste over from the sidebar. External links. You know, in addition to specific stats, news is also pretty interesting because this is like things that have happened maybe since those top ranking articles were published. So again, like if you're trying to be the best making sure that your information is the most up to date. This can help you do that. So freeze also has some generative AI capabilities. I'm going to be honest with you that we don't use these because we don't believe in generating AI copy as far as you know what we write for clients and for ourselves. We're experimenting with it. But so I don't really use any of the generative AI tools. But this optimize tab here is notable and useful, because it's similar to clear scope and market Muse which I'll share with you in just a moment here. And basically, it suggests certain phrases that we should expect to see in the content in order for it to rank high and relevant search. You know, obviously, you can't just throw all the words and you have to weave them in. But this is a pretty good baseline for what people would expect to see topic wise in an article and that's that's the real benefit. I think of tools like this. So yeah, there's other there's other like interesting things that you can dig into. This is like a keyword gap map map based on what I just showed you those different phrases and it shows your content compared to other ranking content and who's using what words so you can kind of see how you stack up against those other competitors. So next, I want to share clear scope with you and I have a slide for it, but I'm just going to jump straight to the report here. So what you're seeing is like a very, I would say like simplified user interface compared to like what you would see with phrase and so clear scope in many ways is very similar. They both exists to help you optimize content. They both include some important research they both work by starting with a primary keyword. One of the differences between clear scope and phrase is first of all that query scope suggests a letter grade whereas phrase and market Muse and surfer previously known as Super SEO suggested number like out of 100 in order to understand like how close to optimizing compared to their standards you are, it also suggests a word count. And one more thing I wanted to say about the content creator is that at the blacksmith we always aim for an a or higher that tends to be a good standard for actually achieving rankings, high rankings and relevant search. I'm actually not sure if phrase does this. I'm sure they do. I just didn't notice it while going through. But clear scope also suggests a target readability level. I think that's really important for matching the needs of the searcher not going you know too deep into something that maybe could benefit from being more surface level for example. You can also notice here that they have those suggestions for phrases and so phrase we use the very beginning of our process, but we're not optimizing content within that tool. We're really using clear scope for that because in my experience, and this could differ by industry, but I find their suggestions for phrases to incorporate to be a little bit more fine tuned than phrase. So you know, that's, that's my opinion. Um, you'll notice that they also have the sidebar, so they have, you know, a couple of details. I don't again, I don't necessarily use clear scope for the briefing processes is really more at the end of the process. So stuff like this, I'm not necessarily going over but if you were to use one tool, then it's nice to know that it has that it also has those top you know, search results for the query, examples of like headers and things like that. It also has the term like keyword gap map that shows how you stack up compared to the competition. You can dig into the competitor details even more in terms of how clear scope looks at content with their letter grade, by word count, that it has this nice chart that shows how that content grade stacks up against their organic position in search. And then I think the last thing that I'll mention about clear scope for now, is that you can use that editor in here just like you can use the editor in phrase, but actually both free and clear scope. Have a Google Docs add on. And so all you have to do is like grab the report link the individual link to that specific report, put it in Google Docs, and then you get all this information within, you know, Google Docs where you probably at least my team works better that way. Um, okay, so and then I guess the last last thing I was gonna say about this topic is that if I had to pick one tool, I think I would pick clear scope. Again, because of the fine tuned pneus of the instructions, but if I was a smaller shop operation, I'd probably pick phrase because it can do like a more well rounded look at like the topic as a whole and debriefing so so that's my suggestion. Clear scope works by essentially offering it's like a per report price, but you can buy packages and like the more reports you buy at a time, the less expensive Each report is. So let me get my slides back up here. And then we'll move on to the next tool that we're going to talk about though.\r\n\r\nWe talked about phrase to talked about clear scope. So let's talk about market Muse just kind of in passing here because it's a very similar tool. It uses some different technologies, compared to clear scope and phrase and so that's why it's a part of our process again as an organization that spends a lot of time on SEO and data and keyword research. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to you if you're going to maybe consider one of those other tools. What's interesting about marketmuse is that it has this functionality to create an AI generated first draft that includes some like light human intervention from their side. I think that's what this is actually this is like a sample from a while ago where we were just playing around with it to see what would happen. But yeah, again, it has a lot of the same functionality. It offers content optimization suggestions that like keyword gap map that I showed you and both of the tools and it has like some generative AI capabilities. So yeah, it just adds a little bit of extra detail. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that it's something you need to add to your workflow if like one of those other tools could satisfy a lot of these same things. So talking about some other tools that are interesting. Word tune is something that I feel like is so underrated. It's essentially uses your own copy to make suggestions. And so again, I'm going to I'm going to show you what that looks like. So let me share my screen back here. So it works in Google Docs. And so here's I just stole the intro basically from that AI detector article. And so what you could do is you highlight whatever text you want it to make suggestions based off of and I typically do it sentence by sentence I, I'm sure it could do longer bits of text, but I don't find that to be as useful. For me. This is like a great tool for when you have writer's block because I don't know you know if you've experienced this but oftentimes I'll let my get myself get stuck on a specific word and it just like really bugs me, and I'm like it's not done until I figured out the right word. And it takes me forever to get through that. So we're tune. It's great because I'm using it with my own copy. So I can feel really confident about whatever it suggests. I'm sure you could use word tune to take AI generated copy and then re spin it. But that's not my suggestion. So again, it works by using this like Google Docs add on and you you highlight it and just to show that action again. It has this little word tune icon. And then you can see different suggestions for how word tune would rewrite it you get like 10 or something like that. And then you can also fine tune it by changing the tone and then by finding ways to shorten or expand it depending on what your use case is. The last thing that I'll say about word toon for right now is it has this thing called spices and so that's like getting a little bit more like next level with the AI generation and using like generative texts. I haven't played around too much with this yet, but it is interesting. And this is kind of taking it away I think from you know basing it off of your copy to kind of like generating something completely new. So that's why I don't necessarily use this but I think it could be a useful resource for when you're when you have writer's block or things like that. So let me get my slides back up here. Here it is. Okay, so so that was word tune. Um, and then Grammarly. I think works very similarly to word tune, and that it uses your own body of work your own copy, to suggest edits, and so I wrote an article for their blog. That's what the learn more link is. After a recent keynote, they did about all their generative AI capabilities. And so I would definitely check that out if you're curious about how to use grammerly in this way. And full disclosure, I'm a Grammarly ambassador, so you know, I'm always singing their praises, but I think it's I think it's interesting because Grammarly, like many other SAS tools on the market are starting to invest in AI capabilities like directly within their tools. And so I think we're gonna see like more and more of examples of this. And grammerly has a lot of other I think really useful. And interesting features like they have this brand style guide, which is something we use that the blacksmith which allows you to set your preferred spelling for things like brand names, and grammar rules and things like that. All right, so let's take a couple minutes for questions. Anything that's come up so far, after the break, we're going to talk about AI detector tools now that I've shown you the AI writing tools. We're going to talk about chat how to write a good chat GBT prompt and then we're going to end the day with how to create your own personal GPT. So yeah, in the meantime, there's any questions. We'll talk about them now and then we'll take a little bit of a break.\r\n\r\nYeah, very good, great overview of some really cool tools that can be used for our content creation. If you have questions specifically about that, drop those there in the zoom q&a. There's one question floating out there about the slide. We were sharing this link as a slide sharing the slides as a slide being link because there was an issue getting them exported where the the links on the slides were clickable. And so technology Yeah, it that's so currently not downloadable. Is the long and the short of it so but that slide being link is there and it'll be available for you going forward.\r\n\r\nWe can we could share them as downloaded just won't be a clickable link. So you can we could share like both in tandem with each other. Unfortunately, that's going to be the limitation\r\n\r\nYeah, yeah. So I'm happy to add that PDF link as well. We'll I'll get that added to the link bundle as we come back. If you want to download these just know that there are things that say read more, learn more that don't clicked anywhere in the PDF. Alright folks, well let's go ahead and take a break. It is 153 Central time let's take a break until right at two o'clock Central. So right about seven minutes from now and we're quiet until then. Sounds great. See you then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We are back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, we are back and ready for the second part of day two. Maddie, what are we going to knock out today?\r\n\r\nSo we're gonna start with now that we've learned how to generate a copy, how do you detect it? We're going to then move to talking a little bit about some Google guidelines around AI content writing for humans and robots. And then we'll end the day with a deeper dive into chat GPT how to write a great prompt and then how to create your own personal GPT which I'm really excited about because it's something that I only just learned how to do myself. Very\r\n\r\ngood. That's a lot to cover in the next hour. I let me invite everyone also to look at the chat I'm going to drop in today's slides if you have come in late. Also, we've added a link there for the PDF download. And finally, there's a link in the link bundle that'll drop in in just a moment that has the invitation for you to submit your site for a content UX audit tomorrow. So with that I will turn it over to you Matty, let's\r\n\r\ngo. Sounds great. All right. Yeah, let's go ahead and knock this out. So AI detector tools. There's a couple that we've tested at the blacksmith and I want to share some of the results of those tests too, so that you can understand what they can be useful for. But also again, there are limitations. As with the rest of this world of AI, everything's still kind of developing. We're all learning things at the same time. And so there's no like perfect answer. There's no one definitive tool that's going to tell you like this is current AI content, or this isn't AI content. So a couple tools that you could try though that I think will give you a decent idea or continent scale, copy leaks and originality.ai and the link here which again, you can grab through the slide bean link is a link to an in depth investigation that we did at the blog Smith testing out these different tools. You know, trying to learn more about the nature of AI content and what it sounds like. So I do have a couple of ideas for you two that we'll talk about next in terms of like how to rewrite things that sound robotic whether they were robot generated or not. But before we get to that, this example here is kind of funny because it's the Constitution and this is continent scale, saying that they detected to be 9% ai generated and you know, I don't think they had robots at the time unless alien somehow hooked them up. But I think it's fair to say that this is more than likely 100% human generated content. But it's just interesting to see that their AI detector is still picking up some very some version of that. And that you know, also perhaps it hasn't trained this AI detector on you know, pieces that existed before. Ai content was a thing. So so that's just like one thing. You know, I think from the standpoint of like, if you're working with content creators, and you're paying for human generated content, then you should get that fundamentally I think that it's an ethical violation for someone to use AI to generate content without disclosing that and to be accepting payment for that as if it were something that they were creating. Of course, there are many companies out there who are hiring people with the job description that is like aI content writer, AI content editor or like somebody who trains you know, a chatbot on a certain way a certain body of work a certain way of writing. All of that being said, if you if you are using these tools, and they are saying with a high degree of certainty, you know, this is AI generated copy. I think it's really important to not outright accuse somebody of submitting AI generated copy what I do at the blog Smith is like let's say that we're doing like a paid test with a new writer hopeful for our team. What I do is I say, hey, you know, we ran this through, you know, these three AI detector tools, and here's what it said here, you know, is what degree of AI content it's saying it thinks this is like, can you comment on that? And it gives them the chance to you know, explain what they think might happen, defend themselves, offering to make fixes, and I think it's really like the way people people are going to be honest or not. There's nothing you could do about that. But I think it's the way that they respond to and handle that situation that tells you what you need to know about if you want to work with them, whether or not you can ultimately tell if their copy was aI generated or not. What is very interesting about these different tools is first of all, they're all gonna give you a different answer. That's just a fact. Because they're all using a different approach to detect AI content. The other thing is that you can input the exact same copy on one of these tools two times and get a different answer. So again, it's it's the wild wild west. But these will at least give you something to think about and whether it doesn't matter. Like if we if we trust the writer or not, we're always going to run their copies through one or multiple of these tools because we want to detect things that sound robotic, even if they were written by a human. So that kind of brings me to my next point here that I was starting to hint at. So when it comes to detecting AI content, or even detecting content that humans wrote, that sounds robotic, there's a couple of patterns that you can look for. The two major characteristics that the aforementioned AI detector tools are looking for are first of all, perplexity, so that's unpredictability within the content. Ai generated text tends to have low perplexity. Human writing has higher perplexity, it kind of makes sense we're a little bit more erratic than a robot. The other thing is burstiness, which is a similar concept. So it's looking for variation in the length and the structure of sentences. Ai content tends to be more steady, more formulaic, which makes sense. It has lower burstiness and human writing, which you know, has much more variation. The image you see here are some other things that we've picked up in our own writing process. And in investigating this topic, different signals that sound robotic again, whether they are in AI generated or not. So repeating words, like in this example, collision coverage, you know, coverage collision, like it's just like it's not using a lot of variation. And in the box MyStyle guide we talk about like, trying not to use the same word twice in the same sentence or paragraph, which is not always possible, but this would be an example of something that wouldn't pass the blacksmith style guide test because it's it's too repetitive. Also repetitive sentence structure where like, each sentence starts with the same formulaic approach. Advertising then a verb you know, advertising the verb, unnatural word usage, so like, you know, removing a glass dome to access the ball, but it doesn't really sound like how a human would talk about replacing a light bulb. A generic or impersonal tone. You know, it's like things that don't add value that you're just kind of like saying for the sake of having words, it's another thing that we talk about in the blog, Smith style guide, like everything you say, should have a purpose, and we don't believe in fluff. It's about cutting things to being the most concise version they can be while still conveying enough meaning. For people to understand what we're trying to say. Statements that contradict themselves. So the new policy will increase employee benefits while at the same time it will reduce employee benefits that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And inconsistent verb tense, you know, something a human editor. Should be able to pick up pretty well but probably a robot writing is not going to care too much about He He was waiting for the bus when he sees his coworker. Stiff, formal or matter of fact, writing style. You know, again, just something that just doesn't sound like a human wrote it or who would want to read it. So this is this is something that can be helpful to you like when you're doing your own edits to kind of like go through these different things. And, again, whether whether it's aI generated or not, and you know that for a fact, you still want to make sure that your writing is something that appeals to the human. So I wanted to take some time to talk about Google's helpful content update and also their guidance for AI generated content and whether or not it will rank some of this we did talk about last year if you were here, so we're just going to do a really quick refresher on that as it relates to this topic. So my book and like really like what we're talking about, in general is kind of marrying the concepts of writing for both humans who are really the ultimate buyer like they're the ones who actually have money so they can buy from you, whatever it is you're selling. They respond to other humans, other people's empathy, versus robots who you know, we're not writing for their sake, but they are the medium that connects us. To those humans. And so it's important for the things that we write, to be indexable to, you know, be findable to be descriptive, and to ultimately match the intent of whatever the human is looking for. So, you know, robots can also take the form of social networking site algorithms, like that news feed that you're familiar with, I'm sure.\r\n\r\nSo so that's kind of like the two players in this game. Here. So this is some highlights from Google's guidance about AI generated content. As you can see by the link here, this is from early 2023. And I was looking at this page again, just a couple of days ago to see if anything had changed. I had seen something on Twitter now x, where somebody had mentioned that something on this page should change. And I was looking at these three things because I think they're the most relevant to this topic that we're talking about. And like, I don't know if I'm just you know, like, post pregnancy brain or something. I couldn't find the difference. But it might have been because it was about something else on that page. But I might have missed it. And it might have been one of these things. But anyway, I think these things still more or less ring true today. And if anything has changed, it has been Google being less specific about their guidelines. Because that's kind of the nature of what all these things that they've shared with us are it's it's kind of like so just to go over them is a content against Google searches guidelines. They say it's not, but you know, it can't be used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which we'll talk about when we talk about the helpful content update. Will AI content rank highly on search? Maybe, you know, it doesn't give it any gains, which makes sense. What I think is really notable about this is they talk about if it's useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of e 80. It might do well in search. So they talk about original, but we've already talked today about how AI content at least on its own without manual intervention by humans is inherently not original. It is inherently not unique. And I would argue that again, without human intervention, it's neither useful nor helpful, in that, you know, you're not It's not like adding something that doesn't already exist. At least in that case. So to me, from Google's own words, AI content really aren't its own shouldn't rank high and relevant search. But of course, there are exceptions. And then, of course, there are situations where people pair that with a human editor like we saw with seeing that of course, CNET being a cautionary tale of what to avoid. Should I use AI to generate content? They say if you see it as an essential way to help you produce content that is helpful and original, we have that original word again, it might be useful to consider but again, if you're trying to gain search engine rankings and no there was something on Twitter now x where somebody was kind of like I can't remember who it was, but you might recognize the situation especially if you're in like the content world. Someone was boasting about how they had created a ton of AI generated content and they were sharing you know some stats from like their Google Analytics, and how would that helped rankings and things like that? And I think everybody agreed that that person should have probably kept their mouth shut because somebody from Google ended up you know, seeing this Thrive that came to their attention and they got hit with a manual penalty based on what this person was saying about you know, having not really like had that human intervention. So thus, it was not original or unique. And it's just funny, like, you could probably get away with it, at least for a while, depending on how Google develops more of these guidelines. But when you start to boast about it, and Google gets wind of it, then like there are manual interventions that they could take, so tread carefully. If it's working. Keep that to yourself. So then it Yeah, I wanted to like connect this back to Google's helpful content algorithm update, which also happened. Probably a little over a year ago, maybe two years ago. And so they describe it as being part of their long term efforts to provide original and valuable content through search. It rewards content that meets users expectations while demoting content written primarily with search engines in mind. So like we were just talking about what the AI content. This this update isn't focused on AI but but it adds color to those guidelines in terms of how to approach it or you know, if you are generating AI content, how to make it work, so that it could rank these questions. Are directly from Google just made pretty was blacksmith branding, but the link that I shared here will will get you to the Google documentation that includes these questions and the subsequent ones. So to ask yourself like is is this content truly people versus is something that Google would consider ranking. It's things like Do you have a primary purpose or focus for your site? If you're writing about too many disparate topics, it's very confusing to Google you can certainly write about things that are different but related to each other, but you should really have like one specific focus if you want to rank high in relevant search. Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they've had a satisfying experience? I think that's a question to ask yourself, whenever you create any type of content like Is it is it satisfying to the end user doesn't really just serve your purposes? They talk about like demonstrating firsthand experience or like a depth of knowledge that's really important. That's that's how we add uniqueness to our content. That's how we make it original. Even if it's just your opinion on something, you know, that adds color to the content that already exists. Okay, so, um, let's talk now about from the search perspective, are you taking the search engine first approach to your content? So these are things that you obviously don't want to do. And it's questions like, you know, are you primarily trying to attract people from search versus creating something truly useful for humans? It does say are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics like that cautionary tale, that person who was sharing, you know, the content they generated, which resulted in a manual penalty, it's a perfect example. I think this is important too, like, are you mainly just summarizing what others have said without adding much value? You should always be adding I think something to the content that you're creating in order for it to be worth creating in the first place.\r\n\r\nSo just to kind of summarize here, like what is helpful content versus unhelpful content from these guidelines that Google has given us and that I honestly agree with? helpful content is people first genuine specific, it's actionable. Up to date is important. Once you publish something, you have to think about, like if you're using stats or if it's about maybe a tool that changes frequently, like you should be regularly reviewing or auditing your content for opportunities to update it. Is it relatable, is it concise? And ultimately, is it satisfying, versus the unhelpful content which is written primarily for the search engine robots it's spammy? It's generic, it's abstract. It might be outdated. Ultimately, it's impersonal, impersonal, fluffy, and then whacking. So these are some easy guidelines that you can use to understand if your content is hitting the mark for something that Google would even consider ranking high and relevant search. All right, so now we're gonna get to some of like the really fun stuff, I think today, which is get GBT some specific examples for how you can use it, as well as a demonstration for how I'm using it. And so, a lot of the things that I'm going to talk about today are based on things that I've learned from other people. I didn't necessarily invent these things. I've adapted many for my own use cases. And so again, I think this is a really valuable opportunity for like if you have anything to add to this discussion, I'd love to see it in the chat. I think it could benefit other people. How are you experimenting with AI? Like how how would you maybe adapt some of these ideas for how to write a great prompt What are like interesting prompts that you've used, and you know what, how is that benefited? You so I'll just put that out there. And then I'll also say that some of these are like pretty much all of these guidelines are based on open AIS guidelines for prompt engineering as well as Google's in some cases, I've combined to them and in all cases, I've given examples of how to use them effectively. So let's go ahead and jump to it. Okay, so the, I think first and perhaps the most important thing is to be as specific as possible. And you want to set parameters for the output that you're looking for. So my prompt here was helped me generate 10 email subject lines to use for cold outreach for my content marketing agency, please limit output to a maximum of 45 characters per example. I picked that number, the 45 characters because I saw that that's like somewhat of a best practice for how many characters people want to see in an email subject line. And what I could have done here was use the personal GPT I'm going to show you later that's all about the blogs and style guide them has like aspects of like how we do business and I could have gotten like even better example results here. But the point was not to show you something perfect it was to show you how to apply this principle. And the other thing that I wanted to add to is like you can always start with a plant, see what it gets you and then you can set parameters after the fact to refine your output. Like, you know, maybe I would have asked this prompt and then asked for it to shorten it to 45 characters or to suggest new examples of 45 characters. Or maybe I would have asked for like, what are you know, 10 General Sales, cold outreach subject lines, that I could use and then I might have added the detail Okay, now, adjust it for like my content marketing agency. The next one is to give context and examples. So I have this bot and I think I'm going to show you a screenshot of it next. One of my personal GPCs is a blacksmith sales expert. And so I created this bot because we recently hired a new salesperson, and there's just so much to learn both about the blogs with his brand. The work we do for customers, and just our sales process in general things that we want to share with new prospects that I wanted to create a resource and it's like of course you know, I want to make myself as available as possible to this new salesperson because typically I've been the salesperson for my company, I have a lot of that knowledge in my own head, but there are times when I am unavailable or I have other stuff that I have to work on. And so I wanted to create a personal GPT that incorporates some of this different documentation that I've created about our process. You know, referring to this prompt it also has like a copy of our standard proposal. Different things about you know, like what makes us stand out compared to the competition what's what's unique to us, I guess, so that any person on our team, any especially new salesperson, would be able to use this chat bot in order to surface some of this information, especially if they couldn't get a hold of me basically. So here's an example of a prompt I gave my personal GPT which is using the above case study. So I gave it a URL on our website. And one of the features of chat GPT is that you can have it browse the web in order to to include information and its results. So I gave it a URL. I asked it to reference a proposal that I had attached to the GPT that I've uploaded to it. And I said proposed an email pitch for a specific job opportunity. I copy and pasted a longer piece than this. I just took a screenshot but like the long version of this job description, and and I asked it to effectively address the requirements that the job description surfaced and the writing based on our strengths. And so what ended up happening was, you know, it wrote like a cold pitch email. But it did it did effectively address this prompt. There were things that I would change about it. Certainly there are things that I would have edited it before I sent it out to the person who had posted this job description, but I think that for me as a founder who has also traditionally been the salesperson it's such an effective way to use this tool because I spend so much time just you know, it's like I know all this information I know what we're good at. I know that we have relevant examples. You know, I know all this but it takes time to like resurface that knowledge and put it in a form that sounds good and is compelling, you know, to a sales prospect so that if you take one thing away, I think that you know that's like one really excellent use case of using your existing knowledge or your internal documentation. To make your life way easier.\r\n\r\nAnother related GPT prompt engineering tip is to use de limiters to clearly indicate distinct parts of the input. That just means like what I shouldn't have done here that would have made it probably a little bit easier for chat. GPT to understand what I wanted is to put this this job description text in like quotes, that's like a delimiters to say like, you know, do this to this piece of what I'm asking for to kind of like help it understand what part of the copy it's referencing. And what part of the copy is the ask, especially when you have like a longer input output, you know, whatever. Another example of that is something I learned from James rose. He is an automation and Zapier expert and has been doing a lot of interesting experiments with AI who's really good person to follow. If you're interested in just like getting ideas, he takes transcripts from like voice of customer interviews where he's getting feedback and you know, like positive testimonials and things about his product and he feeds that transcript into chat GPT and says you know, use this puts a transcript in quotes those delimiters and basically like give me like three, you know, like really nice things they said about you know, our product three like great pieces of feedback. And I think that that's such a useful way we like on our client calls on our internal meetings. We use a tool called fireflies, which automatically transcribes all our meetings, but it's still you know, it's still a lot to sort through an end fireflies has its own AI capabilities, too. So it helps to summarize and things like that, but to take to be able to use that output and quickly surface insights based on whatever your prompt is, I think is such an awesome use of AI that saves the human reader from having to go through the whole thing. So this is and I'll show you, I'll show you what this looks like in action when we do the personal GPT demonstration. But this is kind of what it looks like to set some parameters for your personnel GPT and there's two I guess like schools of thought on setting like setting parameters narrowly defining the G PTS role. So you could do this within normal chat GPT and say for this query, you know, I want you to take on this specific role. And so I got this idea from Paul Roeser. He was on some like marketing technology podcast, and he's talking about how he uses AI. And his example was like, something along the lines of like, you know, pretend that you're a lawyer that advises entrepreneur, it's about hiring law and then he gave his prompt so he kind of like set the scene like this is the narrow role that I want you to operate into this query. So that's one way that you could look at it the other way is that you could create a personal GPT that serves a specific purpose like my blacksmith sales expert, that I've already referred to and that you know, I'm kind of showing you behind the scenes, how I set it up. So as you can see here, there's like a name for it, which is kind of arbitrary. A brief description, I think, mostly for your reference. And then the instructions are like what the AI uses to then suggest answers to your prompts. So as you can see here, I'm telling it like you can use our website as your primary reference. You should be familiar with all those pages and use it to inform your responses. It'll ask you and I'll show you how you want it to communicate with you how you want it to give answers. You know what specific information you want to focus on again, like narrowing that scope. And then I also say like tailor your responses to showcase the company's strengths and successes. Using you know details from the website and emphasize why we're the ideal choice in you know, answering like sales related queries. So this is one of the greatest uses of chat GPT without narrowly defining its role and objective. You're gonna get like a wide variety of answers and that's fine. It depends on what your use cases, but by giving it a roll, I think the quality of your output goes up exponentially. And I'll show you again, at the end here, what that looks like in practice. Here's another really interesting way to use it, I think, especially if you're trying to learn a new skill or if you're trying to troubleshoot an existing workflow, which is what I was doing in this prompt. So I use air table a lot. I'm a huge fan of no code and automation in general. I've found in my life that it's really hard to find like the perfect solution to everything that I want to do. I never could find like my perfect project management tool. And so essentially, I built it between using process street air table, Zapier, and you know the other mix of ragtag tools that are in my arsenal. So in this case, I was trying to create a specific automation in air table that for some reason is just evading me and I'm sure I'm doing like one stupid thing wrong, but I asked air table or sorry, I asked Chad GPT first of all, I prompted it by telling it what automation I was trying to create, like the actions that triggers the end goal. And it gave me like a step by step process that I would say is a little bit more high level than this out, but and then I asked it to refine its guidance or expand on its guidance by saying okay, so for this step, this is where I'm getting stuck. What was how exactly what I set this up in air table, and so then, as you can see, the result has some details and it's more detailed than the previous query gave for that step. It's probably worth mentioning that in chat GPT right now, there's two versions of GPT, which is like the underlying, you know, algorithm, machine learning mechanism, whatever. So there's GPT 3.5, which is an older version, and then there's GPT for GPT four incorporates web browsing so it has more up to date guidance. So especially when you're trying to troubleshoot something like air table, which changes often and so, you know, if I were using the old version of chat GPT, I might have gotten a different answer. So when you're doing things like like this, you want to use like the newer version, there is a limitation. I think it's something like you can have 40 prompts within three hours or something like that. I don't think I've ever gotten close to hitting that. But I suppose if you were to ask, you know, a lot of follow up questions, or you're troubleshooting something very complicated, then you could hit that so that's just something to keep in mind that as a chat GPT user and I don't know what the distinction is for paid versus free, but I think that the paid version of Chad GPT is like worth its weight in gold. I think it's extremely undervalued and it's probably because they're using our data to train it. So they do get a benefit out of it. But you know, I would say if you're finding yourself limited by the free version, then just upgrade to the paid it's, it's so worth that.\r\n\r\nOkay, so now, here's the real fun part. So we're gonna go through how to build your own GPT and I'm gonna give you like a specific task to do and so you can either follow along with me while I do this now, or you can do this yourself. Later, watch the recording and replicate it. I will say the process is probably much more straightforward than you might think, if you've never done this before. So we'll go ahead and get started. Let me set my screen accordingly. So we're going to jump over to the blog Smith website, because this is going to be the basis for the very basic UBT that we're going to create today, which is based on one that I've already created and refined a little bit more than what we're going to get into. But okay, so the blacksmith has this writing style guide and on our website. It has this chapter version so you can jump you know to these different sections. To see how will we go about our writing style. It's something that's fairly industry agnostic, so definitely like a great resource. If you don't have your own writing style guide. You could use ours to build yours. But what I want to do is create a chat GPT bot based on this that essentially acts as like a blacksmith editor that defends our style and explains when a piece of copy is not following it. So we have this as a PDF which I've already downloaded. I'll just show you what it looks like really quick. And it's it's designed, but it's fairly plain texts. You know, it's not that much more complex visually than like a Google doc version of this. And I'm telling you this, because my first attempt at making a personal GPT was actually to solve a personal problem of mine, which is that I love the game Settlers of Catan and I wanted to make a Catan rules bot so that I could download all the PDFs of the rules for every version we have. And I could ask the GPT okay, like you know, here's some like obscure situation like what is the role, you know, based on these rule books? Because every once in a while, something like that pops up. And while I like to think of myself as a content expert, there are those niche situations that require further consideration. Unfortunately, on the Catan website, the PDFs that you can download are very complicated visually as PDF, so chat GPT in my limited experience has not been able to read them. So it's just something to note that like you want to give it like the plainest text version of whatever documents you want to share with it, but something like this would be fine. And I know that because I've tested it. Okay, so so if you want to follow along, you know, just hit download, and that's this is the exact file that we're going to use. So then you go to the chat GPT dashboard. Which looks like this. And like I told you, you can toggle between chat, or GPT 3.5 or GPT. Four, you can see you know those limitations as well as the added benefits of using that more recent version of it. So then you go to explore GP Ts, and you can see on my sidebar when it loads here that I have. We have chat GPT which is like you know, every every question you could ever want to ask and then I have a couple of my personal gptc here as well as some that I've explored in this explore LGBTs area that I'm just kind of playing around with. So this is also just like a really fun place to look through things, test things out and get ideas for the the GPS you might want to create. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead and click this Create button, and you'll see this interface. Again, it's pretty simple. And if you go to create, it's going to prompt you with specific questions, but if you kind of like are familiar with this personal GPT idea, you could also jump to the Configure tab and start filling it out. But I think that it's easiest to think about it from this Create Tab. And so it's going to prompt you with a couple of questions. So this first one is like what kind of chat GPT what kind of personal GPT Do you want to make? So I'm going to tell it, you know, I like to create a GPT that serves as an editor for my brand, the blog Smith. The goal is to have this GPT serve as a resource. That references our specific style guide, and suggests edits based on newly inputted copy. I'm just making this up. But the last time that I did this, I'd used something similar to that. And so after each input, it's going to think you know, it's going to react to the things that you're telling it and it's going to ask you to refine the way that it interacts with you. So we're not none of this is like rocket science right now. This is just like designing almost like the persona of who this GPT is going to be. So then it's gonna suggest to name I suggest naming this GPT blacksmith editor. Does that work for you? Sure. Yeah. And you can change this yourself. Like if you just want to, like get through this part. Just say yep, yep, that's fine. And the next thing is it's going to generate a profile picture and so these are new, they're a little bit arbitrary. It's just like for your own purposes, for fun. One thing that is kind of fun with the imagery and it doesn't always work so we'll see. But sometimes I asked it to change to adapt the picture to use like one of our brand colors just for fun. So I'll say like, can you update this image to incorporate our main brand color, which just using a text expander Simple as that? Let's do it does. So this is using that dolly dolly I never know how to say it to suggest images and, you know, it looks like Okay, right? But we're not we're not asking it to create anything like complicated at this point. So, so like for example, it didn't, it didn't really follow my query. So let's see if I try a different way. Can the image use, you know, our main branch color? Like this is this is definitely the limitation of AI is that sometimes it understands the query and sometimes it just doesn't and we won't get stuck on it. If it doesn't get it. I just want to see if changing it has any practical effect on it. So then after this, it's going to ask about Yeah, that doesn't do it. No, that's fine. Okay, so the next question. They're asking me to more narrowly defined the role of what this GPT is going to serve as I'm Oh, so I'll have you use the uploaded PDFs as this as the foundation for your edits any questions? So I can upload the PDF here. Or I can go to that configure tag and I can also tab and I can also I can also upload additional documents to help as well like with my blacksmith sales expert, I have like our proposal I have a document about our sales process. I have another GPT that I forgot to mention that's called the blacksmith like SEO guru or something like that. And it basically I uploaded a bunch of documents about our approach to SEO some stuff about our keyword research process, and our like philosophy behind the different steps as well as a document I created for our writers and editors. That's about let me see how to get out of that. That's about how we write about SEO to make sure that our philosophy is communicated correctly and specifically. So that's just an example of different documents that you might use to support the outputs here and to narrowly define what you want to base its answers on. Okay. One thing that's important to say is when you're uploading documents you want to make sure to kind of like give context and say like, this is how I want you to use it. And like, you know, I'm doing this, I'm uploading this. So I'm expecting you to use this as part of your output if you don't, if you don't refer to that document when you're setting it up or when you're interacting with it. It might just ignore it in some, in some use cases when I've been creating these personal GPS like that's happened where, for example, with this one, it'll make edits based on best practices, but not based on the document that I specifically wanted it to use. So that's why I used that language. And so it says, I've updated your GPS behavior to focus on our specific style guide based on the uploaded PDF. So that's great. You know, like, what options so one thing that it usually asks is like how do you want the GPT to communicate with you and I'm getting maybe ahead of myself, I'm gonna say no, that sounds good and see if it prompts me to ask about like the tone.\r\n\r\nOkay, so it's not gonna say it looks good, but what options do I have for how it communicates with me? In terms of tone of voice, again, usually asked so this is giving me some options here. Again, not usually in the way that it normally does. It kind of asked to like paragraph form versus like giving me several examples. I'm gonna say that I want it to be let's go with number three, which is encouraging and positive. I think that that's the ethos of how we edit at the box with the other things are true to um, yeah, so just for the sake of this, and you can always change this, you can always refine it. Okay, so it's updating the GPT. This is probably the last edit and then what I'll do is I'm going to grab some copy that I want it to, to edit just to show you how it comes full circle. And then I'm going to show you kind of like the back end of what it looks like. So let me grab that copy. I'm going to feed it an example of like a recent social post that we were editing and the formatting is going to be like a little bit funky here, which is fine, because this is just an example. And the blog the style guide isn't necessarily built with a focus on editing social copy, but again, it was just like a quick thing to to try. Okay, so it says it's updated it. It tells me you know what the point of it is no more adjustments needed. Let's try it out. Okay, so I'm going to show you how it works and then we'll show you the Configure and then we'll kind of end the day off with any questions. Okay. So it gives you some prompts based on what it thinks that you might ask it and you can edit this, but I'm going to say please suggest edits to the following copy, in quotes and quotations, those delimiters based on the blacksmith style guide PDF and again, it's gonna be a little sloppy looks like it didn't actually take the name of the GPT that we asked it to. So we'll we'll take a look at that too. So it's interesting depending on the prompt you give it and I've tried this a couple of times in this case, it's kind of separating it out by saying like okay, here's some of the things from the blacksmith style guide and here's like specific passages of copy and how we would change them. So that's interesting. But what I would probably prefer is that it edits the whole thing, and then it tells me what edits it made. So it's, again, it's referencing I can I can tell because I'm familiar with it, but it's referencing specific aspects of the blacksmith style guide, which is great, we know it's working. But what I'm going to ask you to do is to change the way it outputs it. Can you refine the previous output by starting with I might mess up exactly how to say this, but by starting with, like all of the copy with edits, then after words, shared the specific edits made from blog Smith style perspective, that might not be like the most effective prompt. We're just going to see what it says. Okay, yeah, it looks like it's understanding. Nature. The copy here is an important I just want to show you how something like this could work for your purposes. Okay, so this is what I wanted it it refined the copy first and then it told me what it refined and why. Um, so let's look at this Configure tab. So yeah, for whatever reason, it didn't add the name. That that it prompted me and asked me to so I'm gonna go ahead and add that and you can see it up here. You can see this description. You can see the instructions based on some of the things that we talked about when we were creating it. You can make changes to these conversation starters we might even say like what like other conversation starters, would you suggest using freelist UPC code? I'm just curious and I don't know what to do. You can see the PDF that we uploaded and I can upload more files. You can add additional capabilities. I think by default the web browsing and Dolly image generation is implemented for many of you today who deal with code, this code interpreter might be useful. And then AI actions is something that I've started to play around with but don't fully understand but there's a way that you can connect your personal GPT to Zapier so that for example, it could reference data and other apps. So for my blog, Smith sales GPT I'm trying to create an AI action that allows it to reference our air table CRM so that you could ask it questions about a certain lead or certain portfolio projects and things like that. So once I get that implemented, it's going to be so cool. Okay, so it's giving me some ideas for these conversation starters that are a little generic, but I could probably refine them further. I think the last thing to talk about is how you can either keep this to yourself or share it with other people. I think that these drafts are automatically saved. So if you X out of here before clicking Save, I believe it will still exist, but don't quote me on that. From there you can decide you know, if you want to, if you want to keep it to yourself if it's you know something that's for your own personal use cases, or if you want to share it with your team or if you want to share it with like the wider world like maybe you create a chatbot for your industry that other people could benefit from that you want to share. So, in most cases, probably anyone with the link is a good bet, if you ever intend intend to share it with other people. Okay, so let me jump back to my slides really quick. We're going to end off the day here. So here we go. me pull this back up. Um, okay, this is the link to grab the style guide if you want to use that to replicate what I did today. You can also grab that from the side being like um, I'll just say one more time. My book writing for humans and robots. It was the number one best seller in the SEO category. So if SEO and content is something that you want to invest more time and learning about then I would highly recommend my book. You can grab the first chapter for free on the books website, and you can grab the book on Amazon in both print and Kindle format. I'll give one more reminder for our live content UX audit tomorrow. I'd really love to help you workshop, your content, help you come up with ideas for making it even stronger and more effective. So you can use this link to do that and that will happen at the end of day two. And then, you know, outside of today, if you have any questions about the things that we're talking about, you can either email me Maddie at the blogspot.com or on Twitter, aka ex im at Mad Yasmin and then yeah, we'll end the day with any questions that have come up since going over some of this GPT stuff.\r\n\r\nYeah, great stuff. Thanks Maddie. You know, the custom GP tees are really interesting. And it's it's also not only for your own business, but also working for clients. It's an opportunity to really, it's, it's a service you can provide. We have a boy for example, that has a ton of they're an educational nonprofit and they have a ton of PDFs like 800 and an educational topic that they deal with and so we're investigating, what would it take to put those PDFs in there and then have a bot that you could query the entire library to find an answer to something right. It's just super, super useful. Yeah.\r\n\r\nOne one note on that Nathan is chat GPT. So they have a limitation of you can upload 20 Total documents but they don't say how large or small those documents have to be so OneNote for like anybody who's trying like this is something that came up with that Catan bot I was trying to make. You can combine the documents if need be.\r\n\r\nYeah. And chat CPT if you have a large library like that it might not be the best tool it sometimes there are a bunch of third party tools. I mean, if you go on App Sumo, every day, there's a new one that somebody's chat bot or whatever, but find one that the UI that you like and a lot of those don't have those limitations. Like they have a separate database that they're looking at with total sort of magic they've created. I don't know, I don't understand it. But anyway, yeah. So folks, a couple of questions stacked up there. If you have a question, add that to the zoom q&a, and we'll dive into it. So first question from Doug. Maddie, how does SEMrush or SEMrush fit into the landscape of content writing tools? What overlaps or complements with phrase? Sure,\r\n\r\nyeah. So I think of something like SEMrush or Ahrefs is being a great all in one. SEO tool. So people use it for more than content although content is like an important facet of them versus something like phrase or query scope is really just about content and just about content optimization, or, you know, in the case of like phrase and market Muse also generating content is the use case. But SEMrush I have I'll be honest, I have more experienced with a traps but they both they're both very similar and we actually use SEMrush like the keyword researchers and strategists on my team, we use SEMrush these days. But it is it is the tool that if we're comparing it to phrase and query scope, that's the tool that we use to define our primary keyword. It's before we run those reports. It's a tool that we use to come up with some secondary keywords. It's the tool that we use to identify feature snippet opportunities, we can do competitor research on it. You can do backlink tracking on it. You can audit your website. So I mean, it just it just serves such a bigger overall SEO use case. But there are many very useful content optimization tools. And so it's kind of like a higher budget tool than any of the ones that I've mentioned, but it will serve you know, many of your SEO purposes even outside of content. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nOkay, questions from Eddie. Eddie is writing tech blogs. I see now my keyword content from Reddit is ranking very good. I doubt Reddit content is helpful since usually people have vague answers to questions. What do you think about that?\r\n\r\nIt's an interesting question and I think I'm gonna take the opposite stance. I do think that Reddit content is helpful. There's something about people being like anonymous on the internet that like makes the truth come out. People feel like a little I guess like Freer with the information that they that they volunteer. And so I mean, you have to take it with a grain of salt because they're anonymous. They also might have an agenda that is not clear versus somebody who's coming out and saying, you know, I work for one of these tools or, you know, these are the clients they serve. And so that's like, why this relates to what I'm talking about. But I will say that sites like Reddit, Reddit and Quora are really interesting for learning more about your audience, learning about the things that like keep them up at night and so that's why they rank so high is because they are a wealth of information. They're not, you know, they're not using like the traditional methods to optimize their sites, but they are benefiting from all this unique user generated content because they've created communities. So, yeah, I mean, I don't I don't know exactly how to answer the question. I guess I'm kind of like answering around it, but I think that Reddit is a useful resource in general. I don't know that it can be counted on like aI right where Yeah, I can be confidently incorrect certainly. So to can, Reddit user is but they bring up some really interesting points that are worth investigating. So as long as if you are using it as a reference that you fact check, or you know, if you're I guess if the question is like, How can I outrank Reddit the the answer is like, I don't know.\r\n\r\nYou just said maybe Reddit pays Google. And honestly, we just did a story about this a week ago in our news roundup. It is actually Google who has purchased the rights to all of read its content. Alright, Gemini. Yeah, that just came out. The story last week was an unnamed AI but it's since come out that it's Google has purchased it right. So who knows? Yeah, Google does. Yeah. Doug says here's my favorite prompt. I add this to help me brainstorm chat. GPT add this to the end of your prep, ask me five questions that will improve the response you'll be giving me I use that too. It's really helpful. I\r\n\r\nlove that I I haven't considered that and that's why I think like discussions like this are so useful. Like, we can all learn so much from each other. I learned something new about this every day. For\r\n\r\nsure. The AI world is moving rapidly. And we were Mata you and I were talking earlier just we did an AI workshop here back in October, and there's so much that's new and better and different, even just in the last few months. It's pretty crazy. All right. That brings us to the end of questions. Tomorrow, we're talking about a UX content UX. So give us one more time an overview of what we're going to talk about tomorrow and we'll start to wrap things up here.\r\n\r\nOh, tomorrow. I was looking at the comments and somebody had mentioned let's say Ben had mentioned that to get them to use the right color and the GPT to be very specific, use hex color code when so I got distracted but um, okay, so tomorrow we're going to focus on the content reader experience. Content UX, another way of thinking about it. So we're going to talk a little bit about things like things that Google has said or page experience signals, so things that are like tangible that you can optimize around within your design to help your ranking on Google. And my philosophy when it comes to SEO is that there's three pillars, there's like the content and the things that you can affect on your own page. There's the website structure, so that's going to be a lot of what we talk about tomorrow. And then there's things like Off Page signals like backlinks, which we won't talk about, but you know, we can always have a discussion later or, you know, I'm sure Nathan will bring on somebody who talks about that at some point, too. So yeah, we'll talk about these like website signals, these page experience signals. We'll talk a little bit about website structure, things that you can do to create a better experience for your users, even if it's not necessarily something that Google takes into consideration for ranking and some things that they do. And then we will talk about auditing, you know, with practical tools and specifics, your contents, the nature of your contents UX. I'll tell you how to like run your own content UX audit, whether that's with tools or with people in person. And so that'll be that'll be kind of the nature of what we talk about tomorrow. Trying to bring that discussion full circle from the specific things that you can use to how to like measure if you're using them effectively, and then we'll end the day with a content UX audit from the things that ideally, y'all have submitted. So if you haven't, please use that form that we've linked to in that slide. Being link, and then I'll pick a couple for us to go over tomorrow.\r\n\r\nYep, very good. And that link is there in the chat. Once again, make sure you submit a URL that was a lot of fun last year when we did that very info wise. Yeah. So I will take care of that. Tomorrow. That's yeah, day two. All right. Maddie, good stuff today. As always, we'll have the recording up if anybody wants to go back and replay if you came in late. It'll be up in about an hour or so soon as it renders. And I will see you back here tomorrow, one o'clock central time for day two of content workshop. Have a good night. See you then.\r\n\r\nHear but as you're coming in, we're just asking what was your biggest takeaway from day one? You can sound off there in the chat. I'm also dropping in the new link bundle, I can type correctly. There is a new slide being linked, so make sure you grab that new one. It is updated on the replay page. But make sure you grab that new link because a few changes have been made since yesterday. That will let you follow along better.\r\n\r\nSome last minute tool suggestions. Ah,\r\n\r\nlove it. Love it all. Right, catch. Working for everybody now. Just about a minute and a half to go and again, we'd love to hear from you in the chat on what your biggest takeaways from day one we're. As we are waiting just another minute or so to get started. Also the link there for the live content UX audit is on the screen because we have a slide or two left if you'd like to submit your site or page or something for a content audit. It'll be a friendly review with with some good help to help you improve some of your language. So use that link. The link is in the link bundle in the chat. There on the screen. We do have a couple of slots if you'd like to participate in that. So Vivian, if you look at the replay link in the link bundle the academy link there is a PDF download link on that on the on the replay page. And that is the new updated slides. Yep, so that's all there ready to go on the replay page or you can view them on slide being right now. Yeah, not too many changes. New tools. All I was new to was fun tools. Yeah. Alright folks, about 30 seconds to go. Glad everybody's back for day two. Again, our check in question. Let us know in the chat. What your biggest takeaway from day one was? Particularly did you have you used any new GPT prompts since we played around with that yesterday, or has anybody taken the dive and made your own custom GPT based on\r\n\r\nor have any ideas for things that you want to try when you have time? Yeah, I could. I could use some more ideas myself. Yeah.\r\n\r\nFor sure. All right, folks. It is three minutes after someone to start our recording and we will get underway. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everybody, wherever you happen to be welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here and joined again by MADI. Azzaman for day two of the content accelerator for 2024 Welcome back. Maddie. Glad you're here.\r\n\r\nThank you so much for having me. Again. It's exciting to dig into some of these topics.\r\n\r\nAbsolutely. So we had a lot of fun yesterday talking about some AI stuff and some great principles for creating great content. And today we're looking more at the the user side of consuming content right what are we going to talk about today? Exactly.\r\n\r\nYeah, I think that you can think of today as being a way to practically test your content, whether that's with other people, whether that's with tools, understanding how it measures up against some of the guidelines that Google has shared, that are necessary for ranking, specifically when they have to do with the user experience. So we're going to kind of attack this from all angles. And, you know, hopefully it'll leave today with some really tangible tools to help you understand like, does your content provide a great reader experience? Or are there things that you could do to improve it?\r\n\r\nYeah, very good. And we do still have this content UX link on the screen. If you have not filled that out and you would like to there's still a slot or two left for the second hour, we'll do some live content review. So grab that now. The link is there in the chat as well. A couple little bits of housekeeping and we'll turn it back over to Matty as usual. Ask your questions using the zoom q&a And we'll take those questions at the end of each hour today. break in the middle as usual. One note is that the slides have been updated since yesterday. So in the chat is the new slide being link. And if you want the PDF download, just go onto the replay page with the link there and the link bundle and you can download the PDF there as well that has all the new updates on the slides. So with that, I'm going to disappear Maddie, let's get started.\r\n\r\nLet's do it. So yeah, if if you want to submit something for this live content UX audit, ideally, it's like a page on your website, not not something like a PDF, because we want to look at how the content interacts with design. And like Nathan said, you know, it's a friendly review. We're not like looking for issues. We're just looking for things that you could do to perhaps improve the content experience. Get another set of eyes on it. And it's just a practical way to apply some of the tools suggestions I'm going to give you so with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. We're going to start today by talking about Google guidelines for what makes up a great user experience, especially when it has to do with content and specifically we're going to talk from the perspective of Google's quality rater guidelines. And then after I go through a couple specifics there, we're going to talk more broadly about Google's page quality signals. I think that's what it's called. I haven't labeled in the next slide but things that have to do with what they've told us influenced ranking high and relevant search, you know, all else equal, if you have great content, what aspects of your website design, you know, must be present of your website structure must be present in order for you to rank high and relevant search. So the first part is a little bit more I would say qualitative. And then the second part is going to be a little bit more quantitative. So the learn more link is for an article I wrote a while back for Search Engine Journal. This was specifically focusing on aspects of Google's quality rater guidelines that have to do with the user experience. And so I think it was a couple of years ago now I read through the entire quality rater guidelines, which if you're interested in SEO, and user experience, I would highly recommend at least giving it a skim. It's kind of hard to do because it's like 175 pages, but there's some really good nuggets in there about how Google looks at search, how they judge quality of content, how they determine if a page of a search result meets the needs of the searcher who's looking for it. And so the quality rater guidelines what's worth mentioning is that to some extent you have to take with a grain of salt because this is not something that directly influences rankings. What happens is human quality raters that they hire read through these guidelines, they're tested on them to make sure that they understand what Google is looking for and then they manually rate different website results based on a certain query. And so what happens is that Google gets that information. It helps them you know, refine their algorithm in terms of the general direction they want to take with it, but it doesn't necessarily result in any manual adjustments for whatever websites they're ranking. It's it's more of like a research process. So that's, that's what the quality rater guidelines are. They're a tool to help Google research what the web looks like right now in order to make decisions about how they want to adjust their algorithm for the rest of us. But all that being said, Whenever Google gives us information, whenever they volunteer details about how they look at search, and how they define quality, and like a great user experience, I think that we would be wise to take note of that if it is in fact our goal to rank in relevant search. And I think at the end of the day, whether it is or not, I think Google tries to maintain a high standard for quality. I think that it's their philosophy, philosophy, that content is king, you know that that good? Content is important. And so again, whether search is your goal or not, it's worth it's worth at least like listening to what they have to say. And so, for your benefit, I've tried to break down some of the most important things from the quality rater guidelines specifically having to do with the topic that we are discussing today. So the first thing that they mentioned or they they talk about the quality rater guidelines has to do with interstitials. So back in, it was either 2017 or 2018. They made an update to their algorithm, and they told us about it is again one of those rare cases where they're just upfront. And they said that like if you're using popups say, for example, to gather somebody's email address, or you know, it maybe you're on an E commerce site to advertise the sale, something that obscures the content that you have to interact with you either put your email in, or you have to click the X button, you know, something like that, that you have to interact with in order to use the content on the page. They call that an intrusive interstitial. And so what happened was it really it really resulted in a big change for how people use conversions, I guess on their website, so you know, bloggers and people who do affiliate marketing and of course, yeah, ecommerce, and businesses trying to get email subscribers all had to fundamentally change the way that they approach gathering email addresses. And I'm going to talk a little bit later about what you can do instead, that doesn't violate Google's guidelines. But again, from Google's perspective, they say that interstitials make it difficult to use the main content of the page. And so when they're talking in the quality rater guidelines, they frequently refer to MC main content, which is like what the searcher is ultimately going to your website for and so you could say generally speaking, that they're trying to defend the experience of the main content. And to like, skip ahead to the point here about ads, when they talk about ads, that Google recognizes that and they say this in the quality rater guidelines, that ads don't automatically equate to low quality, they understand that ads are in many cases, the reason a site can continue existing. But that being said, there is like a right and a wrong way to go about implementing them. And so they say the too many or like large ads hurt the user experience. And then that case, the human quality raters should assign that site that result, a low rating. So again, you want to think in terms of the main content is the ad obscuring it? Is it taking away from it? If not, you're probably okay. But it's just good. To keep in mind that Google's not saying no, you can't have ads. You just have to be thoughtful about it. And when I did some of these UX audits in the past, like the ones that we're going to do later today, I did a couple of for some members of the Denver bloggers club one of the local clubs that I've been involved with here. And one thing I noticed about a lot of them was you know that they'd have an ad in the sidebar, they'd have an ad in their footer. They'd have an ad a couple times throughout their blog content, and it was probably Google Adsense that they were using, or some other ad network. Like it. And again, it's like I understand that you're monetizing your site using ADS. But at the end of the day, it's probably working against you because people if you were to look, you know into the data like the scroll depth and the time on page and things like that, using Google Analytics, for example. You probably see that on those pages that are very heavy with ads that people abandon the page pretty quickly because it's just a bad reader experience. So to go back a point here, clickbait Google has a couple of pieces of guidance in the quality rater guidelines about that specifically.\r\n\r\nGenerally speaking, a good page sets expectations or good title sets expectations for wherever it's leaving you. And so clickbait is something that it can certainly be effective and getting attention and getting clicks, but it can be a very unsatisfying experience if it doesn't do something to deliver on the promise made in the title. Um, the Google specifically says that clickbait headings detract from high main content. So, you know, that's something that they're specifically looking for and guiding people to, to comment on. And they say also that like every page should have a page title. It shouldn't just be presented without buttoning it up that way. And that title should describe page content. So again, it's a balance. Writing a good title, I think is very much in art. But it shouldn't be misleading. That's that's the key here. Um, so the last point here is that when it comes to creating content, you want the answer to your query to be pretty prominent in the results. You don't want people to click through and then have to dig to find that. And Google has a couple of different SERP features, I would say where they're trying to, you know, first of all, answer this within search so that you don't click through, which is a problem for us content creators, but it's also perhaps an opportunity when we think about things like a Featured Snippet, which is just that sort of box that shows up above any other search results and it's usually summarizing kind of like the nature of what that person is looking for what Google thinks that person is looking for. There's other things like Google will index parts of a page and link to that specific part and highlight it you probably noticed that yourself when doing search and looking for something very specific. And so that's something that they do, it's not, to my knowledge, it's not something that you can necessarily optimize for. It's it's their methodologies of indexing and surfacing content. But the example that they gave in the quality rater guidelines was something about like somebody searching Abraham Lincoln's birthday. And when somebody clicked through like it was present on the page, but it wasn't prominently answered. And so in that case, they were instructing the human quality rater to give that like a not as good rating for meeting the needs of the searcher. So yeah, I mean, definitely, that's, that's kind of most of what I'm going to say about the quality rater guidelines. But I really think it is a very interesting document and especially if you look at the examples they give in terms of how they're making those determinations. There's a lot of little nuggets of truth and we also have a blog post on the blacksmith website that digs into this even outside of like the user experience sort of and like design focus. So if you want another take on that then definitely check that out. We just went in and updated it recently. So let's talk more broadly now about some search signals from Google things that Google has told us about the page experience and you know, importantly, I think how to how to like measure that, quantitatively. Google, we talked a little bit about helpful content yesterday and that algorithm update which was the year a year and a half ago, something like that. Google has been has said that a good page experience is a requirement. For creating what they define as helpful content. So you know, all these algorithm updates are designed to support Google's mission, you know, the way that they look at content quality and things like that, of course, they all you know, more or less feed into each other, but I think it's worth mentioning that like that is an aspect of having helpful content. Alright, so we're gonna start with what is collectively known as the core web vitals so the core web vitals, this algorithm update, or Google announcing this page signal? came about? I want to say it was 2021. So they've been around for a while. And interestingly, and what we'll go over is they have changed slightly since coming out. But the idea here was to give people these these three specifically, page signals, were to give people more tangibility around how to measure the the page experience. Because up until that point, it was a little bit innocuous, it was hard to conceptualize, in terms of knowing like where you actually rank according to Google's own way of looking at it. So the first page signal of the quarter web vitals is the largest Contentful paint, which is a facet of page loading, loading speed. And so their definition is that it reports the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport relative to when the page first started loading. So if we think about I think most of these core web vitals are more or less referring to like above the fold, like what you see before you scroll, it's like that first impression that a person has with your website and most designs, most tools that you use to optimize loading and things like that, typically are set up so that the rest of the page loads later but you want you know what's visible initially to load quickly and first so that people can start interacting with it, and then it gives time for the rest of the page to load. So another way of thinking about this is that this signal takes note of the largest element on every web page and measures its total loading. Time. So maybe this is an image, maybe it's video, you know, typically at some, I would say some sort of media thing, but it could be your theme in general, it could be a very slow loading plugin. So these are all things that you'd want to keep in mind in terms of optimizing this particular factor. And when I say I guess, like the theme and plugins, it's like the output of them that you would implement on your page. So okay, so how do you get a good largest Contentful paint so according to Google, whatever this largest element is, is about 2.5 Seconds or Less of loading time and you have a little bit of wiggle room here, before it gets to, you know, this like poor area, but you'll notice that it's not a super long time. And I think that this particular man measurement here, it relates to something that Google's said before and shared in their own documentation, which is that, you know, the majority of people bounce if a website doesn't load within three seconds or less. I'm sure that that guidance has changed over time because that's a dated stat. But it still goes to show that we're kind of like within that guideline, with this particular measurement of a particular element on a page. So the next one is first input delay, and this is actually what it was. This has since been updated. And I'm going to show you an example of what this looks like. But let's let's talk about like the original intent of it and then what it has become. So first input delay is a measure of interactivity. It measures the time from when a user first interacts with the page to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction. So that sounds like gibberish. Basically, the lower a website's fid score, the more promptly it starts processing users clicks and swipes again, interactivity like how long does it take for somebody to actually be able to use a page? So this measurement per Google, a good fit is 100 milliseconds or less. So that's what it was right? But what is it now? So this GIF kind of shows an example of poor responsiveness versus good responsive responsiveness from Google's perspective, but probably from all of us, as users as well and looking at it you you probably have been in this position before where like, you click on something and then there's this little bit of a delay before you are actually able to interact with it. And so Google essentially took took this concept that they had initially defined as a core web vital and added some color to it, I guess. And so the new measurement is that it's, it's below or at 200 milliseconds. That so up from I think, what was it 100 before so they're giving you a I guess a little bit more time to create interactivity here. And just so you know, this new measurement is actually not fully unveiled yet, but it will be as of March. 12th. That's when this takes effect and takes over. So they say that, you know, some interactions will actually take longer than others. But when it comes to especially complex interactions, you want to be able to quickly present some initial initial visual feedback so that the user knows that something is happening\r\n\r\nthe time until the next payment is the earliest opportunity to do this. So the intent is not to measure like every eventual effect of the interaction, but the time in which the next interaction is being blocked. So you essentially want to delay you want to if you are delaying some visual feedback, then you might be giving users the impression that the page isn't responding to their actions, which is ultimately a bad user experience, right. So the goal of this new measurement is to ensure the time from when a user initiates an interaction until the next frame is painted in the shortest time as possible, for all or at least most of the interactions the user make. So it might seem like a small distinction between the first input delay and the interaction to Next paint but I guess if we were to summarize them, the first input delay is really focusing on that initial interaction. And the interaction to Next paint is focusing on the difference between interactions. I think that's one way to look at it. Okay, so then the last core web vital is related to visual stability. And it's called cumulative layout shift. And so their definition Google Developers definition is that it measures the sum total of all individual layout shifts scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan. of the page. Okay, but what does that mean? So Visual stability means that a web page remain stable throughout the users visit. It means that text isn't suddenly moving as new elements load or shifting other elements of the page and I think the the unfortunate end result of when this is bad, is when it makes the user click a link or perhaps a buy button or something like that, unintentionally, they were trying to click something but because of something shifting after it loaded, it pushed them somewhere else. And again, this is probably something where either something comes to mind where that's happened to you or like, the next time it does, then you'll be like, oh, yeah, that was the cumulatively out shift the site is getting, it probably has a pretty bad score for that. Um, so with the core web vitals, visual stability became more of a priority. And you really have to have very minimal minimal instability in order for your pages to be considered for ranking high in a relevant search engine results page. So those are the core lead vitals, that's probably the newest addition to these page signals that relate to the content experience, but we're also going to go over some of the old like, you know, tried and true important things that have to do with page experience, such as mobile friendliness. I mean, this is something this is probably one of the first big things that Google told us was important for ranking, high and relevant search. Besides maybe page load, I think Page Speed like performance and mobile friendliness, like these are things that kind of happened around the same time in terms of a Google like, came out and said, like, you must prioritize these if you want to rank. So Google used to be a desktop first indexing property. But you know, as more and more people started using their mobile devices, you know, the iPhone came out and so now suddenly, everybody had a computer in their hand. And then another thing that's probably worth considering too, is like a lot of people in developing countries like they might not have a desktop or like a laptop computer, but most people have a mobile phone at this point. And so Google now operates off of the idea, or off of the principle, I guess, of mobile first indexing. So if your website is not optimized properly for mobile responsiveness for mobile devices, then that is going to hurt it's going to greatly hurt your ability to rank and relevant search and your desktop site could look perfect. It can rank perfectly in terms of all these other factors that Google tells us about. But if your mobile site is off, it's it's going to affect your desktop rankings as well. So, you know, going into all of the specifics of what's mobile friendly is kind of outside the scope of what we're going to talk about today. But I mean, it's things like making sure that your text is readable. It's making sure that your images are, you know, visible and processable that they don't get skewed strangely. It's you know, thinking about some of those core web vitals and like how elements interact with each other like our buttons too close together so that people are hitting the wrong thing. So all these things are are considerations for making your website mobile friendly. And I think you know, with the way that things like page builders, builders for WordPress work, the way that people design themes for WordPress. This is this is like very much top of mind for everyone who's designing for WordPress. So it's a lot easier to implement now versus perhaps when this update was first released into the world. So Safe Browsing is something that I they've actually taken out of what they call these like page experience factors, like I don't know if it's an official one anymore, it was in the past. And maybe it's because now we have HTTPS as an additional factor that's kind of related but I think it's still worth mentioning this from a content experience factor. So Safe Browsing is just that you can use a website that is free of malware, you know, that you can be like, reasonably sure that like malware isn't present, you're not going to get it you're not going to interact with it, and that it's not you know, affecting the output of whatever site it could be installed on. And so in order to protect yourself against this, there's different tools you could use. wordfence is a customer of mine, so I'm going to talk about them and I think that their tool and their team is great. They have a lot of cool security researchers and cybersecurity experts on their team. So they're very on top of like any new things that come out, but they have this product called wordfence care where they'll go in they'll identify them all where they'll clean it up for you and we'll share best practices for how to avoid it in the future and you know, additional steps that you can take. So I do think that you need some sort of tool on your website in order to prevent, you know, the worst effects of malware. And I guess the other thing that I would mention too, is to like always have backups of your site, because malware can really mess things up. And so that's that's like your first line of defense. So HTTPS also has to do, I guess, essentially the same idea of like Safe Browsing, maybe from a slightly different perspective. And so Google again said, you know, we're not going to rank websites that do not have HTTPS in place compared to those that do. You know, after that update happened, and that was a slightly more recent update, but it was still a few years ago, and so HTTPS in order to implement that, essentially, you just install an SSL certificate. And to be fair, there are different types of SSL certificates. Most web hosts have that functionality, where you can fairly easily implement one and then it creates either automatically or there might be some manual steps. You have to take where it it redirects your existing HTTP URLs to the HTTPS version. So that's important to make sure that that's working. Otherwise, it's going to break your site but again, most web hosts have a fairly straightforward process for implementing this and a free ssl certificate or I should say an included one with your hosting plan, but depending on your needs, you might need a different one. So that's something that you have to explore based on your industry like, like E commerce might have a higher level of SSL certificate needed, but for you know, the general small business owner designer, things like that, probably what your web host has is good enough. And so to be able to see if HTTPS is working within Chrome specifically and I'm sure many other web browsers but but chrome because it's a product of Google. There's a little button next to your domain name in the URL bar, and you can click it and see that the SSL certificate is working and that the connection is secure and I would say that SSL certificates in HTTPS are important for people who are interacting with the website. I mean, you kind of you kind of have to have it no matter what in order to rank but they're the purpose of it is that if somebody were to be giving their sensitive information, you know if they're on an E commerce site, and they're, you know, putting in their address or their credit card number or you know, a banking website and people are logging in, and you know, once they log in, that user has access to their bank accounts and their money and things like that. That's kind of the like, ideal use case of HTTPS is to protect the people who are entering that sensitive information to make them feel safe on your website.\r\n\r\nWe talked about this earlier, having no intrusive interstitials so these are the pop ups the image you see is something that Google shared when they announced this ranking signal to show what not to do, essentially where these ads are obscuring access to the main content. You shouldn't have to click in order to get to the main content. So what do you do instead? Here are a couple of examples from the blacksmith website. So the first one is we have a floating bar that basically is at the top of the content and then just pushes it down. And in this case, I used it to add like reminder about my book, a button to click to buy it you could use it to get email signups. I think another great example is like E commerce. If you're having a sale or if you want to say, you know, free shipping on orders over $50 or something like that. I think that's a really excellent use of a floating bar. It's like what's the most important thing happening for this business right now or use it to collect email signups? Then there's also next to it is a welcome mat, which is designed you know, very similar lead to how an email popup would look but the difference is that it's like embedded on the page. So it's not getting in the way of the content. It's part of the content. You can choose whether or not you interact with it beyond scrolling. Another version of that is a content upgrade. So on certain blog posts, let's say that you have additional resources, maybe you've turned that blog post into a checklist or there's a certain template that you're talking about in the blog posts, and people you want to incentivize people to share their email in order to access it. So having a content upgrade, which again is like an embedded version, at the end of your blog post about that specific resource is a totally valid way to see get emails that's not going to violate this intrusive interstitial guidance from Google. The other thing that you can think about is using email popups, but delaying when they pop up. So that kind of gets around Google's guidance. You could use what's called like exit intent technology. So when somebody scrolls for the Back button, or the, you know, X in the browser, then what happens is an email popup gets deployed where you know, it asks for somebody if they want to subscribe, for example. You can also use that same idea based on things like scroll depth, if somebody gets to a certain depth on a page, you know, that tends to indicate interest. It's given them a chance to interact with the content. Or you could have a deploy on certain pages. You ideally after they've seen other pages, so maybe after they've gone to a certain number of pages that deploys. So there's there's a couple of different ways to think about it that don't get in the way of Google's guidance. And we do have a page I forgot to link it here. But we do have a blog post on the blacksmith website that goes into each of these things and different use cases and things like that a little bit dated, but it's all the same advice. Okay, so now that we've talked about Google's quality raters guidelines, which is indirectly related to search rankings, and Google's page experience signals, which are directly related to search rankings, I wanted to talk a little bit about website structure and design I would say, especially as it relates to ranking high in relevant search, but certainly how it impacts the content user experience. So it's kind of like a mix of the things that we're talking about, but expanding on them as well. So the first like factor that you want to optimize your website around your content in general, is crawlability. And when I talked about crawlability, I'm talking about Google's ability to like fully index all the resources on your site. Is there anything that is getting in the way of Google doing that, like, for example, errors in your sitemap, like maybe you're unintentionally excluding certain pages? Maybe you know, you haven't created enough connections between your pages for Google to understand how they relate to each other. And so a couple of guidelines here, you know, first of all, is that when you're creating content, it's important to add external links. Think of these as your ability to add context to prove claims these are things that you know, you can also use let's say that you're writing about a topic and there's a related topic and it doesn't really make sense for you to cover it in your content. Like maybe it would just make your your piece go on too long. But it's something that people might want to learn more about. So you find a relevant resource from a trusted site and you link it External links are great. I mean, you might, I guess, worry. Like, is that going to lead people away from my page? You know, is there any like negative impact of that? I think that's just kind of the way that content works, that people are always looking for more information. You can set it so that it opens in a new window so that they're still on your page while they explore that content. But yeah, as the best practice, have an external linking policy, it makes sure it's to good quality content and I think that, like with this next point, it helps Google understand what your content is about. So besides external resources, you also want to incorporate internal links. This just helps Google understand the relationships between the different pieces of content on your website, ultimately, what your website is about. It's helping with that crawl ability and that index ability. It's helping Google as robot to understand, you know, these different connections. So again, it's important really to have these two types of links and really every page and relate certainly every piece of content. And then, the flip side of all this is like as you create content, things are going to change. External links might become broken. Internal links, you might change, you know, like for example, the URL slug of them, and they might become broken. So I guess my first tip is to make sure that you have some sort of redirect solution implemented, there are different plugins that you can use to automatically if you change the URL slug of something, then it creates a redirect so anything that already links to a will be updated to that new link. But it's also having a process for like auditing your content to look for these problems. And one of the tools that I'm going to show you later today will help make that a little bit easier. But it's also just a matter of like I don't know, quarterly at least, or depending on the size of your website, quarterly, maybe every six months or so, having just a process to kind of go through what exists and if you need to fix anything. So we're talking a little bit about URL structure and I will say when it comes to creating content, you want to be pretty sure of the URL you want to use before you publish it. Because it is a factor in ranking, and you can use redirects, but it's kind of hard to explain them in the context of what we're talking about today without getting deep into SEO, but it's just generally like to trust me that it's a best practice to not mess with the URL after you publish, you know, after it gained some traction in search and things like that. But it happens and that's why you use redirects. But that being said, you could at least start with best practices. So the first thing is to incorporate your target keywords in that slug. So like yesterday, I showed you some tools we use for an article we wrote about AI detectors, so let's just pretend the keyword is like aI detector tools. You'd want that to be the slug. Without really like any extra information. You want to keep your URLs as succinct as possible so that Google doesn't have to take a lot of extra time to parse them. And so what that means is within within WordPress, you can customize your URL structure for blogging. And you can do things like add categories to the URL, you can add the date to the URL. My suggestion is to not do that the only reason that you might want to add like a subdirectory within your blog content or some other specific category, like if you have case studies or something like that, is because you can use that subdirectory to group pieces of content together to measure them in like Google Analytics GA for these days. But that's kind of an advanced use case and that's only if you plan on actually like doing a deep dive into the analytics. From an SEO perspective, I highly recommend against it. It should be your website url.com forward slash keyword. And when you're implementing those keywords, you're going to want to add a dash between each word so if the keywords AI detector tools, it's a i dash detector dash tools\r\n\r\nfor certain things like articles, a and words like the things that aren't, you know, specific keywords generally speaking, you can drop those when you're creating the slug. We have some guidelines on the style guide that I shared with you yesterday on the bugs with website that's also linked in the slides so or the PDF as well. So if you if you want to dive into more SEO and URL and keyword best practices and definitely check out our guidance on that. Um, duplicate content is worth mentioning from this perspective of the user experience mostly in terms of how Google would interpret that. So generally speaking, duplicate content is like you publish a blog on your website and then a situation that could come up that seems innocuous enough is that you know, somebody in your industry says oh my god, I loved your blog posts on whatever, I'd love to republish it on my site. And you say okay, and then maybe this site, you know, has more authority than you and maybe they have a better approach to SEO, maybe they've just been around longer. And what could end up happening is that even though you were the original publisher, and Google does take that into consideration, but this other site may outrank you with your own same content. So that's duplicate content. It could be a whole blog post, it can be an excerpt of it, it could be like a piece of it. So duplicate content, generally speaking, like try to avoid that. You can add a tag to your link called the canonical tag, which basically points back to the original content and says, This is the person this is the site that originally published it, even though we have now published it here. And so Google takes that into consideration, but they really make their own choices about who they're going to rank and so that that's not the be all end all way of making sure that the original publisher ranks highest in search, all else equal. Um, with all that being said, in my experience, you can typically republish things like your blog content on mediums like LinkedIn and medium you know, original copy without making changes. As long as you wait, I would say at least a week from the original published date to do that. This is this is my experience and that saying that it's completely scientific, the advice that I'm giving you, it's something that you should experiment with, if that's something that you're interested in, but also take note of what ends up happening and discontinue if it's getting in the way of ranking your own content on your own website. But when it comes to duplicate content, if you if you get approached by someone, you know, like the example that I gave, who wants to republish something that you wrote, what would be a better situation for you? It would be more work, but it's to say like, let me write a new version of this article, like maybe you take another stance on it, maybe you you just kind of like repurpose it in a different way. I would highly recommend against duplicating your content, either on another page on your website, such as using product descriptions that like a manufacturer provided or maybe you have, you know, two variations of something and so you're using almost the same product description or again, like the example that I gave doing it on another site, so I just wanted to add a cautionary tale for duplicate content because a it is kind of a bad user experience, but be it'll also more than likely hurt you in search without a very strategic approach. And then the last thing I want to say on this particular topic is about designing website navigation and best practices around that. So first of all, you want to use descriptive and recognizable menu item titles. And the example that I always give for this is the difference between something that's called news and something that's called blog. So in my in my experience, news is like an enterprise business that has a media arm and they're publishing their press releases and, you know, things that are relevant to their company, new product updates, things like that. Whereas blog is more articles. It's you know, the how tos. It's the list of coals. Its product lead content, for example, but it's not exclusively focused on that company's news. So it's important, I think, to match the heuristics of what your users are used to and one way that you might be able to figure this out if you're unsure is just kind of see like what the competition is doing and how they're naming their menu items. Or just ask some of your users like, Does this make sense? And we'll talk next about how to conduct a UX audit and that's something that you could do as part of it. There's this thing called the three click rule, which you may have heard about. Nielsen Norman Group actually debunked this as being like ideal or even something that you should totally consider. It's the number three is arbitrary, I guess is what I'm trying to say. But it's the idea that within three clicks, a user searching or user looking for something will find it through your website navigation without necessarily having to go to like an internal search. So well, it's arbitrary. I think it's still a good thing to keep in mind, which is just that people should be able to easily and quickly find what they need your your menu should support that. And then creating category grouping. So like for example, on our website, we have a Resources tab and it has the blog, it has some of like my YouTube content. It has our style guide. All of these are resources they have to do with like things that we're sharing with other people versus we have another tab that's about our work. And so it has case studies and like portfolio examples, and it's more focused on like Final outputs that you know, fit, you know, things that we do with certain clients. So just a couple of things to think about in terms of website navigation. I'm going to start this topic and then we'll break I think maybe in like five minutes from now, but I'll just go ahead and get this started. So let's talk a little bit now that you've learned about these different factors for how to understand user experience from, from the user's point of view from Google's point of view. Let's talk about how you can continue to make your own websites user experience better by implementing a UX audit. So UX audit, we might also call it a user tests. I think they're maybe slightly different concepts, but I'm going to use them interchangeably today. So usability testing involves observing how users interact with products like your websites. The purpose is to get a better understanding of how real people use what you've designed. And really the idea here is you want to combat any assumptions that you've made incorrectly, which is impossible for you to figure out by yourself. That's why we pull in other people. You can use your tests during just about any stage of project it doesn't have to be like the final part. It could really be during the wireframing stage. It could be you know at the midpoint it could be even after you've launched but you've added some new things. So why bother with UX audits? First of all, we're talking about it today because there's a strong relationship between the user experience and SEO. I think we've proven that by talking about specific elements of the quality rater guidelines that point to UX, as well as the page experience factors that Google's specifically told us. If you care about SEO, you should care about UX in terms of things like your page, loading your mobile responsiveness, and using things like HTTPS. To invoke privacy for your users information. It also allows you to uncover issues that might kill conversions. I mean, I think this is one of the most important use cases of a UX audit is to look for things that are getting in the way of whatever your end goal is with the website. Because we're all WordPress users here, probably most of us at least, you've probably interacted with whether it's your own design or somebody else's that where you recognize that somebody forgot to edit the demo content they've, you know, implemented it and they've gone in and made their changes. But you know, there's that hello world post they forgot to delete or there's something you know, and one of the menus, maybe the footer menu that they forgot to take out that, you know, they never actually customized and so I think UX audit would be good at surfacing that if you're if you're kind of blind to it, because you're too close to the project. And with all that being said, a UX audit helps to get out of your own head. We're all human, we're imperfect.\r\n\r\nAnd really, I mean, it's it's easy to say I think when it comes to writing content, like as much as like, I have a process for editing and looking for mistakes and things like that. Like I still use an editor whenever I write anything, because I need to get out of my own head in order to make sure that I'm not missing something important. So the same can certainly be said about about website design and doing UX audits. So at the end of the day, we all operate based on certain assumptions, but what if yours are wrong? I'll just go through another slide or two and then we'll break so in terms of picking user testers, there's a couple of different populations you could consider. And I'm also going to share a couple of different like marketplaces where you could find these people, but you can start with the people that already exist in your circle your colleagues, you know, the people that you work with, but also maybe your friends and your family members. Wow, this is a great place to start. Don't discount the impact of their own bias and desire to please you, especially if you're asking your mom for input she's probably not going to be super critical. And and you know, it's going to be more of a pat on the back then something useful. And even like people like your work colleagues, they they still may be too close to a project to provide useful feedback, but it's a good place to start. You can also recruit volunteers from your own audience. Again, they might have a bias if they really love you. They might be hesitant to give you really great feedback. But they're also probably very willing to help you make something that's better. So you can start with like your brand ambassadors, anybody who would consider themselves your biggest fans, things like that. Ultimately, though, your best bet is going to be unbiased third parties who don't know you, you know, who don't have like a stake in what you're doing. I would say ideally, if you could get a couple people from that pool and then maybe one or two people from these other pools of populations, you'll get a couple of different perspectives. And when it comes to some of the marketplaces that I'm going to show you, you can also filter by certain demographics, you know, age, gender, level of education, like whatever is important to like the target audience that you want feedback from, generally speaking, you can filter and on those people. Maybe we'll just go to the top of the hour, and then we'll and then we'll definitely break then. So how many user testers are enough for each design stage? I've mentioned a couple different populations you could pick from. This is another Nielsen Norman Group reference. They are a really great resource when it comes to anything user experience user testing and things like that. And so Jacob Nielsen wrote this column and he the column was titled Why you only need to test with five users. So that's his official recommendation is for each stage that you test five users is going to be more or less enough you're going to get marginal returns marginal new information after that point. So you know, unless you're getting wildly different things from those five user testers, you can probably stop it there. He also says that it's best to involve a larger quantity of user testers earlier on in the project if you're going to test during like the wireframing stage. Versus like, when a website's like basically ready to launch it's going to be harder to make noticeable and useful changes at that point. It's going to be kind of locked in. So I think that that makes sense. Um, so we'll just start with some of the questions that you might use. When designing usability testing, it is important to to be thoughtful about this before you start you you don't want to just like go into a blind and just, you know, like, what do you think of this website? You want to have a strategic approach if you want to get useful information? So my suggestion is to start start by defining whatever your goals are, I mean, is there something in particular that you're looking to test? Are you wanting to make sure that this design is understandable to your target demographic? Is there something that isn't currently working with the design, something that's maybe hurting conversions? So whatever your goal is, like set that intention, and the questions will come more easily after that? You want to also be asking questions about the tester and how they interact with the Internet. And there's a couple of reasons for this. So one example is like you could ask the person what kind of smartphone do you use and asking this particular question is good because it kind of gauges like their familiarity with technology like how they're going to interact with your design. Somebody who uses a flip phone, for example, is probably going to have a much different level of internet savviness and how they interact with the design versus somebody who has like the latest gadget as their device. The other benefit of this question is to especially if you're doing an in person test is to kind of relax them. It's kind of like a little bit of small talk almost so that they can ease into the test, especially if that's not something that they often do. You want to define a specific action for the user to take. So this goes back to the goals. Let's say that, you know, you have an E commerce site that you're testing and you know, there's some sort of issue with people abandoning the cart, you know, after they add some products and so maybe you want to have that person go through the action of adding something, and then starting checkout. And seeing like, where in the process, there's friction, that could be one action that you want them to take. And so at this point, you want to ask them how they go about it, have them sort of like narrate and explain as they go through each step. The more you can dig into each specific action that the user takes the more detailed insight that you'll get as to how they're actually using your website. So I think with that being said, we have a couple more questions that we could talk about, but I think now is probably a good time to let everybody take a little bit of a break. And then after that, we'll finish this discussion of how to run a UX audit. I'm going to give you a bunch of tools to use to do your own tests. yourself, essentially. And then we'll finish off with that live content UX audit. Sounds\r\n\r\nlike a good idea. No questions in the q&a right now. So let's just go and take that break. It's two o'clock. About a five minute break. Is that good? Maddie? That sounds good. All right. So let's back be back at 205 and we're quiet until then. See ya. Then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We're back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, folks, we are back and ready to begin. Let me get the recording started here. All right, folks, we're back for the final hour. Of the website content accelerator. We got a lot to talk about in the next hour, so I'm just gonna let you get right to it. Maddie. Sounds\r\n\r\ngreat. Yeah. Thanks for sticking with me so far. Excited to finish this off strong and yeah, hopefully give you some really tangible things that you can take away. For your own processes. So I'm continuing this discussion that we started about UX audits and designing them. Okay, so we talked about this. Let's go to the next point. What so I used to offer UX audits as a service when I used to be on Fiverr. It was my most popular gig by far. And the way that I structured it was I basically priced by the page. And so when you're doing a UX audit, you want to be sure to identify whichever pages are the most important, especially if you have a big site like you don't necessarily want. Just going back to the E commerce example like you don't necessarily want to audit like every single product page, especially if you're looking for trends, maybe one you know prime example of what your product pages look like maybe one category page, your homepage, your checkout flow, like if somebody had me audit an E commerce site that that tended to be kind of what it looks like. You know, it's also things like maybe more generally, your homepage, your about page service page. So it really depends on what you're trying to do. But you could ask questions in your UX audit, like, you know, what do you think this is about the page in general, or about a specific element of it? You could ask What strikes you about it, you know, you're trying to see how people are reacting to it, how they're understanding it, and then like, what would you click on first, like what, what is something that looks interactable? And how would you, you know, accomplish whatever the specific goal is. So those are ways that you could you know, further define this question. Or this idea here. And then we kind of talked about this, what do you make of specific elements? So again, if we're talking about ecommerce, maybe you have a button that's like a quick add to checkout where you don't have to go, you know, to the individual page, it just kind of pops up when you're looking at a specific category or on the homepage or something like that. And so you might want to test like, do people actually understand what the purpose of this is? So that's just one example. You know, many others that might factor into your own purposes and needs. So when it comes to designing these questions, a couple of best practices to keep in mind you know, first of all, users are generally not going to be designers. I don't think you I don't think you perhaps want them to be because you want them to look at it from a different perspective than you and so with that in mind, you want to avoid any sort of like web development or industry specific jargon in the way that you ask questions. You want to design for the average internet user, they should be able to understand what you're asking without you having to explain and clarify. I think another useful thing in general and this is this is when you ask for feedback about anything, but it's breaking up a complicated question into simpler ones. It's, it's okay, you know, to to ask a question and to ask a follow up question and to dig deeper. And that's something that we talked about yesterday when we talked about chat GBT and and getting that ideal answer that you want to get from it. Sometimes you kind of have to break the subject down and sometimes you have to add clarification later. So then, I've said this in a way but be as specific as possible when you're asking questions, you know, reference specific elements. Bring it back to the goal, if necessary. That's how you're going to get the most useful responses. So going back to that fiverr gig I was talking about, these were the questions that I asked and every order and sometimes they would ask clarifying questions after the fact. But most of the time, if I wasn't because it's fiber, and I'm sending them either some sort of like written report, or typically it would be like a video recording of me going through and doing the audit and if you work with a platform like Fiverr, or some of the other things that I'm going to mention shortly. I think it's the next slide actually. Typically, people are recording themselves interacting with your website unless you're doing an in person test, which is a different situation. But so you have to have some sort of standardized approach in that case, especially if you're offering this as a service like I did. But most of the time these questions got to the bottom of what that person was hoping to get out of the audit. And so generally speaking, I asked for the URLs for any pages they wanted me to take into account. I also told them you know, if you want me to take a quick look before starting the order to see if this is a good fit for me, you can do that. Are there any major problems that you want me to keep in mind throughout the process? So is there anything that you're noticing isn't working that you want? Me to focus on like a conversion factor? Can you briefly describe your target customer so that I could keep their perspective and focus? This is a really important one. I'm not going to fit in and perhaps you know, every user tester that you're going to work with is not necessarily going to fit that ideal target persona that represents your audience or the audience of the client that you're doing this on behalf of. But that doesn't mean that you can't adopt that persona. And again, a lot of these platforms will let you pick a user tester based on demographics. So that's probably like the best case scenario. But I think, again, you can still benefit from a plethora of different experiences. So anyway, you know, like I'm, I'm thinking of like a time where I did a user test and the target audience was, you know, generations older than me or something like that, where they're interacting with the web and they might have some access issues, you know, they might it might be harder for them to read the text if it's not big enough. Things like you know, contrast come into play between the words in the background. And so things like that, maybe it doesn't personally affect me right now. But I can still comment on that and say, you know, you told me that this was your target audience. To me like this strikes me as something that would be very difficult for them to interact with. And then the last question I asked is What important goals are you hoping that this page or these pages will achieve? So that kind of goes back to like the problem question, but I guess maybe from a more positive standpoint, and especially, you know, people use your tests at different stages, so they might not know what the problems are, but they certainly know or ideally, they have an idea of what they want that page to achieve. So these questions like very much covered what I needed to know in order to give people a satisfying UX audit after they put in their order. Okay, so how to run usability tests a couple of different ways that you could do this. A very wide range of methodologies and honestly a wide range of end results I would say, in person is like the gold standard because you're going to have the most control over the process. You're going to be able to meet with people, you're going to be able to dig in deeper to any like initial questions that you set. It's a little bit harder to do with something like Fiverr or user testing. Because there may be limitations I think with like user testing, it's kind of like you set it up ahead of time. And then you know, the user testers go through it, but you don't necessarily get to get to interface with them after the fact. And then with fiber, maybe you could do that it would probably involve making a new order. It's going to take time to get that feedback. It's not going to be as dynamic as doing it in person.\r\n\r\nIn person, it's probably going to be the most expensive in terms of like your team's time and like setting up a place for them to do this. And, you know, having some sort of incentive whether that's straight up cash or like a gift card or something like that for people's time. Another I think great option is user testing. And I was pretty sure that this platform had had changed or been sunsetted or something but I was looking at it leading up to doing this presentation and it still exists. It might exist in like a different format than it did initially did. Like I think you have to buy like a package. It's not just like one by one, for example. So I'm not super up to date on how it works now more more as to how it's worked in the past. But basically, the way that it has worked is that you specify certain tasks you want users to complete and specific questions for them to answer. And so users narrowed the process they go through until that test is complete. They have or at least had had a very large user base. So it was a great platform for giving like that exact demographic that you wanted to test. But fiber is very similar. I mean, fiber doesn't focus on user testing. To the extent that user testing does a fiber marketplace covers a wide range of services, but their usability like UX test marketplace is very large, you know, in comparison to some of their other focuses. So definitely a great place to find user testers. People start offering their services at $5. But they don't have to, that's an old fiber rule of thumb that it had to be five now people can set whatever price they want. They just have to set up their gigs in a way that makes them competitive. The way that I did it was I used to charge by the page. And then if they wanted, like a written report, that would be an extra cost in addition to the video. So it just depends on how people set up their gigs. But there's some level of standardization because people go to that market and that marketplace and they want to be able to pick you know, five people that offer something that take a look at side by side. Um, you could also do something that's not exactly going to give you all the information but it's an interesting practice, which is like recording users sessions on your website. So Microsoft has this newer tool called Clarity and it's free. And so you basically add like a little bit of JavaScript to your header. And you can see people interacting with your website, and you can see you know, how their mouse moves and how they scroll and things like that and like what they click on. Of course, unlike the user test, nobody's narrating it, there's no audio. It's literally just kind of like outside of context, how they interact with your website. So it's going to give you marginally useful information, but it's just another thing that you can use to try to troubleshoot. You know, why something isn't working, for example. And then this isn't like fully, like a way to run usability tests, but it's a like a tool that you can use or that perhaps somebody that you work with might use, which is to take screenshots and share commentary about what they're looking at. And I'm going to show you an example here. Oh, and besides clarity, when it comes to recording user sessions, you can also use a tool called Hot jar to do that as well. Okay, so this is an example and it's a little bit dated, but this is from bug herd. So bug heard is like a website feedback tool. That's another way to, to look at like what we're looking at right here. And this is something as a designer that you could use with clients. Some websites do this publicly where they have like a little thing on the side of the website that's like, Hey, do you have any feedback about this page? Or do you want to report a bug? That's, that's kind of why this exists, but I used to use it for my UX audits. I would just go through each page and then create like annotated screenshots and then I could explain export, the report that has all the pages and all my notes and things like that. So it's just a cool tool, whether you're kind of auditing your own site, you're auditing a client site, or somebody's doing it for you. So okay, from the flip side, we've talked about how to run a user test, but how can you be a good user test or maybe how can you identify one that you want to work with time and time again? First of all, it's narrating your thoughts as you have them. We've talked about this because that like stream of consciousness just, you know, noticing things and whether you really have something to say about it or not just like addressing each element on a page. And so that's kind of the next point here is is, you know, not just addressing them, but considering the impact that each page element might have. It's certainly acknowledging the perspective of your audience we talked about even if you're not a member of that target audience, how can you sort of take on that persona in order to speak on their behalf? Another thing that I used to do when I did these UX audits was share ideas for a B testing. Like I might say, you know, this is an interesting approach to your head and I wonder if you were to try this if it would, you know, get you better results and so it's it's giving them ideas, even if it's not a fully fleshed out thing, but to say like, this might not be it, but maybe you could try this. And then it's also it's not just about being like negative or pointing out what's wrong, but also acknowledging what does seem to be working. So that again, you can really like laser in and the feedback that's going to have the most impact for what they should change to resources that have really made an impact on me and how I go about content and design. First of all, is the Design of Everyday Things. This is like one of my favorite books. It's more about physical design, like product design, but there's a lot of transferable things that have to do with how we design for the web. And then don't make me think is like the quintessential resource for web usability and he's sent created, you know, multiple editions of this. There's another book, something about rocket science. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but, you know, anything that he writes like I would highly recommend. Okay, so we did break, and then I'm going to save questions for the end so we can get through the important stuff here. So I'm going to give you a couple more tools to use so that you can audit your own stuff. We're going to go through our live content UX audit, and then anytime we have left is going to be for questions. Let's get through it. Okay, so we'll start with Google tools, because again, when Google gives us information or tools, we want to listen because this is essentially how Google sees our content and how they prioritize what they rank in relevant search. So PageSpeed Insights is really a wealth of information. It provides data points from a variety of factors. And as you can see in this screenshot, currently, as of the core web vitals update, it starts with the core web vitals, so it starts from a point of this like, page experience and usability factor. They what's kind of interesting is that they have a part of PageSpeed Insights, and I'm going to show you like a fuller report when we go into the live content UX audit, but they have a piece of it that's about accessibility, but it's it's pretty bare bones. And so Nathan mentioned to me right before we started today, that Amber Hines is going to be the next workshop next month and it's going to be about accessibility. And her company equalised digital, they have a really great accessibility checker that integrates with WordPress. And so I would say that like that's probably going to be a much better tool for making judgments about if your website is accessible. Then what you're going to see on Google PageSpeed Insights and I think that that's something that is really important that you know, it's not always like at the top of our list when it comes to some of the other things that we need to do. To make our website usable, but it is really important. Whether you currently have an access issue or not at some point in your life, I'm sure you will. And now that I'm a man like this has become more obvious to me, maybe not in terms of strictly website design, but I think about like when I'm on a walk outside and previously, you know, I could just step around people's icy sidewalks that they didn't shovel or whatever, but now that I have a stroller, it's like okay, am I gonna put my kid you know, in the street. And so it's it's things like that or maybe you break your arm and now you can't interact with the web the same and so accessibility, I just wanted to like, make make the case that that is something that is so important because you your loved one, there's somebody that you know that it's going to make a difference for.\r\n\r\nGoogle used to have a tool specifically for testing the mobile friendliness of your site, and I was surprised to learn that they've actually sunset this tool. So now it's kind of a part of Google PageSpeed Insights. I think that whatever functionality was already in Google PageSpeed Insights for measuring the difference between the mobile and desktop version was kind of already there. So they basically just said, like, maybe this is like duplicating those efforts. I don't know. But it's no different. I'll just say that, that we that we use Google PageSpeed Insights to make judgments about how Google understands your website from a mobile point of view. Um, so we have the ability to measure like a snapshot of the current state of how your website measures according to the core web vitals are Google PageSpeed insight, but I also wanted to share within Google Search Console, there's this core web vitals report that measures it over time. And the most important thing, I think, to keep in mind with Google Search Console, and and also like Google Analytics. What I'm going to talk about specifically is more relevant to Google Search Console, is the fact that it tells you if you know, you become in violation of anything that's going to hurt your ability to rank and relevant search in terms of what Google tells us right in terms of the big things. And so that's why making sure that it's installed on your site on client sites is so important because it gives you notices if you're like way in violation of something, and it gives you the chance to fix it. Google Analytics so I would also recommend installing from the get go because it gathers important data that's useful that you can use to understand your page experience your content experience, but yeah, so this is just one useful report that relates to what we're talking about. This came up when I was prepping for the live audit later. Just the idea that there may be a use case for understanding what WordPress theme somebody's using. And I would say especially what plugins they're using, because both of these things can have an impact on your pages performance, which is a search signal on the loading, you know, on the interactivity, and all those those good things. So this is just one tool there's there's a bunch of them out there. But you know if if your website is experiencing any performance issues, or you just want to understand like how somebody else put their website together. I think this is a cool tool or a cool mechanism for that. I also wanted to share a general SEO audit tool, I see ranking so like H refs and SEM rush which I believe we talked about yesterday, this is another All In One SEO tool. It is not as fine tuned as the others as Ahrefs and SEMrush in terms of their keyword data, so that's why I don't use it for keyword research. They use different databases and approaches. But what I will say is their SEO auditing tool, which is like kind of the technical structure of your website, like goes head to head with any of like the big players in the market, and I'll show you exactly what that looks like. And the great thing about SEO ranking is it's a lot more affordable as an as an All In One SEO tool. And even from like the keyword research perspective, like you could use it to get most of the way there if content again isn't like your biggest focus are in and or if you weren't in a super competitive industry, it would it would do just fine. Um, a couple like editing tools. Hemingway is a great one. It's pretty simplistic isn't the right word, but it focuses on just a couple of things. It focuses on just a couple of factors and so that's why it's useful it doesn't it's not super distracting. And then Grammarly is one I would say that gets into a lot more detail. Grammarly is probably a more well funded company. Than Hemingway I wasn't aware of if Hemingway been monetized until I was looking at it the other day they have some AI functionality and they might they might have some other like outside of AI functionality plans, but I'm not sure that they had like a clear path to monetization before that but grim really has always had its like premium and like enterprise business use cases. And so I think that's probably why this tool is maybe a little bit more robust in terms of the suggestions it provides. They have a lot of linguists on staff and again, a disclosure that I'm a Grammarly Ambassador but I also like to use the product paid every person on my team that's a writer editor has a paid subscription to grammerly and I'll show you why shortly. Um, you know, you also want to look for plagiarism when it comes to creating a great content experience and when I talk about plagiarism, I'm not even necessarily talking about things that you do like on purpose. Some things that happen in grammerly, specifically is that you'll write something and it will detect a phrase that's been published elsewhere on the internet because you know, like there's a ton of content that already exists and it's bound to happen. And it'll be about something that's like a completely different industry. Like you definitely didn't take it from that original place that was published, but it's kind of like a reminder to go on and try to make it more unique. Just so that you know, Google doesn't think that you plagiarize even though again, it's not about intention. It's just about the reality of the content that already exists. But at the blacksmith, we use Copyscape for every piece of content we create, just to be sure there's no plagiarism, and then Grammarly. I don't believe the plagiarism check comes with the free version, but because we have the premium version, and that's included that we use it to. Um, one of the last factors here is you know, making sure that your content adheres to your style guide, whether that's a specific company style guide, or something like AP style, which again, is like the news journalism standard. I think it's like a great standard to use if you don't have a set style guide. And then I just have a couple qualitative qualitative factors here. So on the blacksmith style guide, which will probably show you we have a section about information architecture, and it's about a lot of these different things, how to break up walls of text, how to approach writing headings, how to keep paragraphs and sentences short and to the point. It's other things like you know, making sure that you have good flow with your content, you know that it has good storytelling, but it's something a human would want to read. And yesterday we talked about texts that whether AI generated it or not sounds robotic and how to avoid it. So that's another like, piece that you can use like in your own audits, those guidelines. Other things that I look at are like the thoughtful use of on brand visuals at the blacksmith we try to incorporate multiple types of visuals per piece. I'm definitely of the opinion that words aren't enough. I think as humans we're very visual creatures and people all have their own, like different learning styles. So that's also a factor, you know, written word, I don't think is enough, especially like for me personally, sometimes I need to like watch a video about it, or you need to like, you know, play with it in my hands or whatever. Like there's just different ways that people process information and so the more different ways you can surface it to them within your content, the better that your contents going to perform and help them and then things like consistent formatting like how you use bullet points, how you write headings. Again, a lot of this we cover in the blog Smith style guide. Just a couple other things. We talked about a B testing when we talked about how to be a good user tester and giving examples. So Unbounce is a tool that you could use. A B testing is essentially testing like different variants of a page usually you're testing a specific element like two versions of a page title, or two versions of an image, but it could be a full page as well. And this is something that Nathan and I also talked about, which is that I think he'd love to have an expert on a be testing do one of these workshops or you know a webinar in the future so if that's your if you know somebody like that, you know, that's something I think that all of us could learn some best practices from but again, another thing that you could test\r\n\r\nQuick disclaimer, then we'll jump to our live content UX audit. And we're talking about how to make your content better. And, you know, basically like different processes that you could use to to catch mistakes. But I don't want you to leave this thinking that perfection. Is the goal because it's not I think, you know, we're all human, we all make mistakes. At the end of the day writing for the web is is great because it's a very forgivable medium and unlike print, once you notice a mistake, you can go in and correct it. And so I don't want this to become a situation where you're beating yourself up if you did all these steps or you did some of these steps and like, you know, you still notice something later somebody points out like oh, this is spelled wrong or whatever. That's really not the point. So at the end of the day, I think my guidance for you is done is better than perfect. And be kind to yourself but create systems to catch mistakes. And that system could be having like a human editor, like like I mentioned earlier today, whenever I write something, you know I'm telling you all my best practices, but that doesn't mean that I always follow them, right. I'm an imperfect human being and, and things happen. And I think the other thing that I wanted to say is like we all have limited time we all have limited energy, and especially now that I'm a new mom, like I used to work really late at night and I would just crush stuff out and I would go over it a million times and now I kind of have to be satisfied with like not having the ability to do that and having a much shorter period of work time every day. That I can get stuff done and having to prioritize ruthlessly and that sometimes means that like yes, maybe I spelled something wrong, you know, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it. And I don't think you should either. So that's that's my soapbox. Alright, so let's go to the live content UX audit. Give me just a moment to get this set up. Um, so we're gonna go through like a couple of these different tools that we talked about today. And then at the end of this, we will have some time for questions. Okay. So Stacy, we're picking on you today because you submitted a really great example for this live content UX audit. And I want to start by saying there's like nothing wrong with this website. I mean, it's very good and it follows a lot of both the content and design principles that like I would instruct my team on. So what we're going to do today is is really nitpick for the sake of giving people things to think about when they are doing their own content UX audits. And so I'm going to start by sharing, like some of these tools and their outputs so that I can show you how to use them. And then what we'll finish off on is coming back to this page, and I'm going to give a couple of qualitative factors, you know, that I think can make the content just a little bit stronger. So again, I wanted to surface the blog SMIS content style guide. This is going to be the basis of one part of you know, some of the things I'm going to talk about and I'm going to reference that Chechi btw bot that we made yesterday, that's based on the style guide and that's, that's kind of what I use to audit this page from the content style perspective. But again, some things that we just talked about were first of all the SEO and Keywords section or chapter, where we talk a little bit about I mentioned that you could get some guidance for how to use awkward keywords like how to use keywords within URL slugs. I also talks about this information architecture, or information structures what we call it here section. So that's how to like essentially present information but also like break up walls of text, make it more readable. We talked a little bit at the end of today about formatting and how to keep that consistent. So those are just a couple of things. I guess we also talked about links earlier today and so there's some good guidance there. So you know, this is a this is a good resource if you're building out your own content style approach, and you can really build off of this because again, it's fairly industry agnostic. So anyway, I took this link, and first I ran it through Google PageSpeed Insights. And if you look at the desktop version, I mean it's pretty much near perfect. There's it's very difficult to get to 100 on any of these factors on I would say especially on mobile, but even on desktop, I mean, it's it's kind of like a what's the word? It's like a like a fool's errand to try to get to 100 if you're if you're this close, so, desktops looking really good. You know, they have a couple of things that you could do to fix it if you wanted to, and I have some suggestions for that, but we'll talk about it from the mobile perspective. So if you go to mobile, you'll notice that you know, first of all, the largest Contentful paint is one of the core web vitals, that it's a little bit in the red and it's and that's really like the only one and the largest Contentful paint again has to do with page floating, I believe. And so, taking like the definition we had, I'm guessing that that has something to do with this image because this is the viewport you know, that first load so it's the first thing that gets measured by this core web vital. And when I was looking at this yesterday, it's a it's a JPG file, which isn't like a super large file or anything like that. But one thing that you could do to to improve that page quality factor is to instead save this and serve it up as a web p file. There are certain plugins that you can use for that it's going to you have to kind of determine if adding like a plugin or taking that extra step of manually saving it like converting it and saving it and uploading it as that file is worth it. But that's that's like the one thing that I could think would would flip this so that it's the performance is a little bit closer to 100. And then we go into some of these other like diagnostic details. And I think this is where PageSpeed Insights gets really interesting because you can sort of dig into specifics here. A couple of things that I noticed were like minifying, CSS and JavaScript and there's some other things that are kind of related to optimizing like these different file types on the website. So I use a plugin called nitro pack. There's a free version and there's a paid version. I think the free version will get you pretty far, but it adds this like little Add at the bottom of your website. So I just pay for the paid version because I don't want that there are other things like nitro pack but nitro pack from the perspective of somebody who operates in the SEO world, you know who's looking for good performance, who's looking for best practices, that is my suggestion to you and to anybody who is seeing these things on their Google PageSpeed Insights. So naturally talking about these plugins for me like the got the question of does adding more plugins like is that going to hurt performance like what what is the marginal return of that? And so what I wanted to do next was take the URL and put it in that WordPress theme and plug in detector to just see like what the back end of the site looks like. And so we can see, it's like a custom or like a child theme. And I think okay, so apparent theme is Astra, so we know that like that's the technical basis on which this is based. I think generally speaking, Astra is pretty good for SEO from what I've heard, I don't have a ton of experience with it. And then also, this is like more what I was interested in was the plugins on the backend. And I mean, from what it detects it's there aren't that many plugins here, you know, it has like a plug in that works with Astra there's a Quiz Builder. This DOWNLOAD MANAGER contact form and then the Page Builder that's pretty lean, especially if those are the only plugins that are installed. You know, different people have different ideas of like, how many plugins is too many or like what's the optimum amount but I would say like, we're well under that here. So adding something like nitro pack, or you know, like some sort of web p image optimizer I think short Pixel does that.\r\n\r\nSomething like that probably wouldn't like hurt performance for the performance gains that would come with it. Um, okay, so the next thing that I wanted to do this is higher level than just this page, but I wanted to show you guys SC ranking. So SC ranking again, is this like All In One SEO tool? And I think there's like actually something wrong with my browser because I'm trying to like x this out, and I could do this yesterday and it just like wouldn't do it. So this is either a core web vitals issue or this is like I have too many, like Chrome extensions that are conflicting with each other, that I haven't been able to figure out why it sometimes messes with my browser. But anyway, that's an aside. So um, so this is a C rankings like technical website audit. And what I really love about this is that it's pretty straightforward. Like you can essentially read this as a non SEO and get a very good idea of things that you could fix to improve your website's technical structure. And as you can see this website like it's not bad, like there's room for improvement, but overall it's doing pretty good. Again, chasing 100 is a fool's errand. You're like, probably not going to get there but you want to get as close as you can with the time and the resources that you have. And so this page is really just like a high level overview. Again, this is about the whole website. It gives you an idea of like, how many pages were crawled, versus how many URLs which could include things like media files, JavaScript files, style, sheet files, and things like that. And so this can be a good indicator of like, if you know that there's more pages or there's more files, like maybe there's a credibility issue here. And if if some are getting excluded from this crawl, then they're probably also getting excluded from what Google can see. And so at that point, you, you know that there may be a sitemap issue that's getting in the way of the ideal situation. But what I really wanted to show you was the issue report. So these are things that you could fix. And what it does is it it has a category, it gives a specific issue, it gives you which pages are affected. It tells you you know, whether you're like compliant or whatever you want to call it if it's following best practices or not. And there's there's very few things here. But for example, like here's one that has to do with crawlability, which we talked about earlier today. And so nofollow means that we don't want the search engines to read this page and there may be a good reason for that. And so it seemed that for your pages are affected, you can click on it to get a description of the issue. So this is why it's really great for people who aren't necessarily like in the SEO world. A lot of you are website developers or designers and so a lot of this stuff like you'll be able to understand just by going through it and familiarizing yourself with it was there like included details. But yeah, so then you could see, you know, like which pages relate to this issue and whether or not like it's worth doing anything or if you really wanted them to be that way. But I'll give you like a more tangible example of something that you definitely want to fix. We have, for example, External links to 4x x. So like a 4x. X code is like a 404 means that it's not found, and there's different variations of that I'm sure a lot of you are pretty familiar with that. And so this means that maybe something that was linked on the website now no longer exists. And so it either needs to be replaced or redirected or something like that. And again, you can dig into the URLs you can see like what specific error code happened. This is also a really great report that you can give to clients. And then you know, depending on the level of familiarity you have with these different issues and how to fix them then you can give yourself a little bit of an extra job and some hours working with them to not only audit and go through the audit and explain the audit but then also, you know, implement the fixes. So I just wanted to show you that because I think it's it's such a great tool. So then the next thing I did was I ran this through Hemingway, and like I told you before Hemingway is like the sort of like, saying it's the more basic version of Grammarly. is maybe not exactly the right way to describe it, but it's the more like focused version. And so as you can see, what it does is it highlights different things. And it's kind of using I guess these colors, as you know, like things like it's trying to like draw your attention to certain colors as being like something that's more worth your attention or less worth your attention. What I've always known Hemingway as is a great tool for measuring active versus passive voice. And generally speaking, we want to try to avoid passive voice in our writing. And so that's probably what it's best used for. But there are some certain other factors here that are useful and interesting. And like yesterday when I told you about clear scope and how it measures readability, you can see that Hemingway also does this. It measures certain stats in terms of you know, just this piece of content, not necessarily compared to other pieces of content. And then it also has some AI functionality, that with a paid plan you can use to I think automatically suggest edits to some of these things. So just, you know one interesting tool where it's I think best functionality is free. So then I ran it through grammerly and I wanted to start by showing what I was talking about. With the plagiarism thing. Like there's something about inventory management on this article that says 1% of your text matches the source and that's like it's not even This article isn't even about inventory management. So I just wanted to show you guys that like, like these tools can be wrong, but it's still worth running that check a if you're working with a writer that's not you, just from a reputation standpoint, you want to make sure that there's no obvious like plagiarism problems with it but be so that you can just make like some small changes to this text so that Grammarly doesn't pick it up and possibly, you know, Google may be like taking a nod from some of the similar types of algorithms and uses. Again, not that it's intentional. It's just like, you know, because there's already this wealth of content that already exists on the internet about all these different subjects and of course, there's going to be similarities with phrasing and things like that. So then we get to these other suggestions. And I guess one other thing I wanted to show you about Grammarly is you can set goals for a piece of content and I don't know if this is a paid version specific but anyway, you can, you know, say like what type of writing it is. So I just said business for this. You can give a certain intent so I sent in form for this I may or may not be right with all these things, but I just wanted to see what would happen. You can say like, you know the level of experience of the audience, you can set like the formality of the tone. And then and then it gives you suggestions based on those things. And what's cool about grammerly is that it goes into these specific zoo specific different categories of suggestions. So correctness is about like grammar, spelling, punctuation, clarity is to cut in to help with like the flow of engagement, which is probably most related to like storytelling and delivery, I guess, you know, kind of related to both of those things, and then style guide. This relates to my company's specific style guidance, some of the suggestions that I have programmed in myself, and so a lot of it is like punctuation, because I have some rules about that. And it's probably annoying for my writers to have all this pop up. But some of it is word stuff. So like if we click this, something like actually, per the blogs and the style guide, and that's just our approach, we say these words are fluffy and don't add value typically. So like if you cut actually, it would say wait, so you have to go read these reports. Ones is another one that I have strong opinions about. I say don't use one to describe a noun you've already defined. Use the same word again or find another way to say it and then I gave an example here. So that's what's really cool about Grammarly is like you can like get these things automatically being suggested when you're working on a piece of content within your organization so that people don't have to remember like all the stuff that I showed you on my style guide it just automatically pops up. Waxing then I'll show you a couple qualitative things and then we'll go to questions is I ran this through my style editor bot, and it wouldn't I tried to get it to like directly edit the copy. And it wasn't unlike what I showed you yesterday which was like a shorter excerpt and the did I did that. So part of this is like me learning how to best use the spot or how to best design it or how to best query it. But what I did was I said Please review this blog post it gave it the era and suggest edits according to the blacksmith style guide.\r\n\r\nThey said consider the bad side consider the following suggestions and it felt to me like it wasn't actually like totally reading the blog. It was just giving like general tips and then I said please suggest updated copy based on these suggestions. And so what it did, which is kind of funny was it created like a shorthand version of it. And so what I was thinking is something like this could be really useful for like an email newsletter, you know, like an atomized version of the blog. Or, you know, maybe like you create some social posts based on these shorthand summaries of each category or something like that. You'd still probably want to edit it, but to me, even though it's not really what I asked for, I thought that that could be an interesting use case. So then I was like, Okay, well can you actually do the edits while preserving the original length of the piece? And it was like no, but it kind of went back in and gave some more suggestions. And then I was asking if it was actually able to like read the original article, or No, I was asking about the visuals, because one of the suggestions was about visual aids. And I was like, well, there's a ton of visual aids on that article. And so it said that it can't directly process or interpret them from the article itself. So that was kind of interesting. And then I gave it the copy and then it still kind of like generally gave examples. So you know, it's a work in progress. I guess that's what I wanted to share. It's still it's still gave me some things to work with. But it wasn't exactly like the editor that I was hoping that it would be like it like it kind of was yesterday. So it seems to me if I were to make a hypothesis here that it's probably going to be more useful for shorter bits of copy, you know, maybe different sections or titles or things like that, versus trying to edit a whole article all at once but it will give you food for thought in terms of general edits that you could make. Okay, so last like pieces of content on this before we end up today. We talked about menu navigation. And so the way that I would change this menu navigation would be home about blog and I would just change this to contact and what I like to do with whatever like the most important menu item or call to action is maybe add some like button styling so that that stands out, it just simplifies it. It's not distracting and you know, hopefully leads them to the ideal conversion. So then the other thing like the header, because we're kind of talking about the whole experience, not just the article itself, is what I what I came across, typically in the UX audits that I did was a similar type of header where it has the logo, but unless the name of the brand is like really straightforward about what you do, it could benefit from having some context like a tagline about what you do and so I don't think that we do it on the blog. So some a very bad example. But you can imagine like in my header it should probably say like SEO and content agency. But you know, maybe because it's called the blacksmith that also might work I don't know submitted a test. I'm generally speaking again, I really liked this article, I thought that more or less like it fit the same types of standards that like I would have for my team in terms of putting together conversational tone like breaking texts up nicely, having really useful visuals, a couple of just like very small things. We have the social share buttons. My suggestion is to add a CTA that's like share this on social like, it might seem obvious, but just saying that might be useful, might also be useful to have them float as the person who reads it because they might decide at different points that they want to share it through. I love the visuals there was one visual where I think there might be an unintentional tooltip here where like when you were taking the screenshot your cursor was probably over this SPFx aligned area right here. And so it took the screenshot with that and it kind of obscures the stuff behind it. This is the type of thing that like, because I do these all the time I nitpick and probably nobody else would notice, but I just thought that I would mention it. I'm sure I'm gonna like pretty much ended there. The last thing I was going to say for now is with the Related Posts, one of them doesn't have the featured image. So it's kind of, you know, it just looks a little bit lopsided. That's a super easy thing to fix. And then when it comes to consistency um, you might want to capitalize text stuff just so that it's consistent with the capitalization of the other category. And then maybe also like space it out tech space stuff. So again, like I really don't have that much to say here, because it's very good and it has good information. The last I guess big thing is the actual place where I'm reading the content is kind of narrow and skinny compared to the full frame here. And so I wouldn't recommend going full width with the content but I think we could break out the box a little bit more or break it out of the current box so that it's a little bit wider. And I think that that would be a great reader experience. So with all that being said, I'm going to pull back to my slides really quick just to pull up like the question slide and things like that. But I mean basically we're done here. With the planned content. I'll once again bring up my book because it is about what we're talking about with content experience. It's about my approach to content writing, content style, you can grab a free chapter of the book on the writing for humans and robots.com website or you can grab the book on Amazon via Kindle or print edition. And yeah, that's pretty much it. So I will take any questions that may have popped up in the meantime.\r\n\r\nYeah. All right. So thanks again, Stacey for letting us use your content as I know that it's a little weird with talking about my stuff here but ya know, it was very much appreciated and a it's an excellent article. We've talked about that already. The content, it was it was hard\r\n\r\nto find stuff to comments on honestly, so I had to go into nitpick mode.\r\n\r\nSo grateful to you, Stacey. Let's see folks last chance to ask questions here. There are no questions today,\r\n\r\nwhich is covered at all. Everything's done.\r\n\r\nIt's it's been a very good and thorough presentation on lots of tools. Things to consider as we're developing content for and helping our clients create content for the web. Yeah, like Ben says firehose of information really good stuff. Greg, this is a good rewatch as well. Alright folks, last chance before we land the plane. Your if you have any final questions for Maddie, if you want to just say yes in the chat that way we know to pause otherwise, I'm going to start moving towards wrapping us up. All right, yeah. So thanks there in the chat. Okay. So Maddie, wrap us up here. Give us our final takeaway for the training.\r\n\r\nSure. I'll answer one question. Barney asked if I'm in the Denver area. Yeah, yeah. I'm in Lakewood, technically. But yeah, okay. Final wrap up. treat people how you want to be treated with your content. That's good.\r\n\r\nThat's really good. And true, right. So yeah, awesome. Well, thanks, everybody, for hanging out with us for the last couple of days. It's been a really good set of information here. A lot of things to consider. And hopefully it'll help us all up our game as we're dealing with content on the web. Thanks again. Maddie. For your expertise. And folks, we are back tomorrow as usual 1pm Central for office hours here on solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nNice. Well, thank you so much, everyone for your time and attention. And yeah, I hope I hope there is like one good nugget for you to take away and if you ever have any questions about content and UX, I'm always happy to be a resource.\r\n\r\nVery good. Alright, see you folks tomorrow.\r\n","livestream-resources-group":"s:34:\"a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","multi-day_replay_details":["s:1319:\"a:7:{s:18:\"event_replay_title\";s:19:\"Day 1: Content & AI\";s:25:\"day_description_cloneable\";s:290:\"\r\n\r\nAI content tools to add to your workflow\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nHow to write a great ChatGPT prompt and a build-your-own GPT demonstration\r\n\r\n\";s:35:\"livestream_vimeo_video_id_cloneable\";s:9:\"917283343\";s:16:\"course-resources\";a:2:{i:0;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:29:\"Slides (with clickable links)\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:87:\"https:\/\/app.slidebean.com\/sbp\/14wk06qt70\/Audience-Copy-v2-Website-Content-Workshop-2024\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:6:\"Slides\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}i:1;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:42:\"Slides (PDF Download, Links Not Clickable)\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1ucAZKb-0DHu92mcCDfWVxveHFj6Ch5qG\/view?usp=sharing\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:6:\"Slides\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:23:\"livestream_chat_log_url\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1EGbDssaPY16DPzSzhKrhE7ElsA_ATR4N\/view?usp=sharing\";s:40:\"livestream_live_transcript_url_cloneable\";s:66:\"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/s6izsl7mc33FNxJL9TyU3rv6g84?utm_source=copy_url\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","s:1312:\"a:7:{s:18:\"event_replay_title\";s:17:\"Day 2: Content UX\";s:25:\"day_description_cloneable\";s:285:\"\r\n\r\nHow website design supports content effectiveness\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nHow to conduct a content UX audit for your brand and clients\r\n\r\n\";s:35:\"livestream_vimeo_video_id_cloneable\";s:9:\"917679579\";s:16:\"course-resources\";a:2:{i:0;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:29:\"Slides (with clickable links)\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:87:\"https:\/\/app.slidebean.com\/sbp\/14wk06qt70\/Audience-Copy-v2-Website-Content-Workshop-2024\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:6:\"Slides\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}i:1;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:42:\"Slides (PDF Download, Links Not Clickable)\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1ucAZKb-0DHu92mcCDfWVxveHFj6Ch5qG\/view?usp=sharing\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:6:\"Slides\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:23:\"livestream_chat_log_url\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1-15hvhAoo2OFpOX5Y2-3iYd9OOuOLtfs\/view?usp=sharing\";s:40:\"livestream_live_transcript_url_cloneable\";s:66:\"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/hJvip6Ozsn3rEQSWvqgPkRGr4UQ?utm_source=copy_url\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";"]}},"postCountOnPage":1,"postCountTotal":1,"postID":448491,"postFormat":"standard","geoCloudflareCountryCode":"US"}; dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content ); \nJoin Maddy Osman, Founder of The Blogsmith content agency and bestselling author of \"Writing for Humans and Robots: The New Rules of Content Style\" for her second annual Website Content Workshop. \n\n\n\nThis year, we'll expand on the foundation we created for writing great content to focus on integrating AI efficiencies, plus the intersection of content and design with UX.\n\n\n\nReview Last Year's Website Content Workshop Course Here\n\n\n\nDay 1: Content & AI\n\n\n\nTuesday, February 27, 1:00-3:00p Central TimeThe limitations and ethical implications of AI\n\n\n\n\nAI content tools to add to your workflow\n\n\n\nHow to write a great ChatGPT prompt and a build-your-own GPT demonstration\n\n\n\n\nDay 2: Content UX\n\n\n\nWednesday, February 28, 1:00-3:00p Central TimeWhat Google guidelines tell us about content UX\n\n\n\n\nHow website design supports content effectiveness\n\n\n\nHow to conduct a content UX audit for your brand and clients\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","livestream_live_transcript_text":"So we've got a lot to cover over the next few days. This again was this is building on last year's content workshop. And the link for that is in the course description if you missed last year I would strongly recommend you check that out. Really good stuff. So Sadie has your book MADI Naidu\r\n\r\nwhy it's really good love it seems like it's been a while since I published it, but you know, I tried to write it so that it would still be useful today. So I hope that you're all finding that. Yeah, we're sure.\r\n\r\nReally good stuff. Alright folks, if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat say hi. We are about three minutes away from getting started. And they're in the chat once again, is the link bundle that has the slides and the replay link as well as a link to Matty's book. We are Yeah, we're gonna have a lot of fun today and tomorrow, two hours today, two hours tomorrow talking all about website content with I mean, let's face it an expert in the field\r\n\r\nappreciate the vote of confidence. If you if you measure it by yours and I suppose expert, that's something that I've been doing for a very long time. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nAlright folks, let's hear from you in the chat. Check in question today. How about give us a one to 10 rating? How comfortable are you with generating website content? One being it's a real challenge. 10 being a pro, let us hear from you there in the chat.\r\n\r\nAll right, about a minute and a half to go.\r\n\r\nMaybe a good question is how many of you are forced to make content in order to finish your website designs? Yeah, to get your website launched.\r\n\r\nHey, Sue bullets are my friend. I like bullets. Alright, several folks just joining us. The links are there in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up that chat and you'll have the link to download the slides. Grab the replay and all of those things. We are about a minute away from getting started. Second question today is what's your comfort level? What's your expertise at website content creation one to 10 If you had to rate yourself love it. Love it. Tracks Yeah, five but a if you're using AI, that's awesome. Yeah, so a lot of folks are higher on the scale today. That's exciting, that hopefully you're gonna get some tools to up your game even further. He's got a lot to share with us. Over the next couple of days. Hey Terry. Dab Alright, folks, we are just about to get started. Glad you're all here. Diving into the web content workshop momentarily. Just seconds. To go. If you're just joining us in zoom, I'm going to drop in one more time the link bundle and it's three after so let's get the recording started. And we'll dive right in. Let's do it. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy and I'm joined for the next couple of days by my friend Maddy Houseman, Maddy is a sought after sought after copywriter specializing in enterprise b2b Tech brands. She's the CEO at blog Smith and the author of writing for humans and robots, the new rules of content style. She has been recognized on numerous industry lists as a top content marketer and I'm really excited to have her back for another course here on solid Academy so welcome back Madi, how are things going for you?\r\n\r\nThanks, Nathan. I'm really excited to be here. Like I said, you know, it's been it's been a little bit of time since I've done you know, a presentation like this since I've really gotten to use my brain. For those who don't know, I recently had a baby so he's in daycare today so I can fully you know, give my attention to this and, you know, embrace this identity of mine as a content creator who loves to learn and you know, who now has this other facet of my life but marrying those two in a joyous way so, so yeah, really excited to be back and and put my brain to use and share you know, some of the things that I've been exploring you for the past several months to I guess a year, all this new stuff with AI, that's what we're gonna focus on today. So really excited about that. Yeah,\r\n\r\ndefinitely. So we have a long way to go over the next couple of days and the thought just occurred to me Maddie, we really ought to have you back for another informal conversation just on how you prepared your business. So that you could take some time away, because that's really, that's quite a feat.\r\n\r\nIt was definitely and I'd love to do that. I'd be happy to.\r\n\r\nYeah, that'd be that just occurred to me. We should definitely, folks. So let's see the links are in the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom. I'm going to drop this in one more time. There you will find the link to download or grab the slide deck. Also the replay link that will have the transcripts and chat logs after we finish is there for you as well. On that replay link you'll also find a link to last year's course, which is more some more foundational principles of the things we're going to unpack even further today. So if you missed last year's course, all the replays are there, follow that link, rewatch them, it's really good stuff. And of course, if you haven't seen Matt, he's booked the link for that as in the chat as well. So Maddie, give us a high level view. What are we going to be covering for the rest of today? Totally.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, we're definitely going to expand on some of the things that we started to talk about last year, but really, you know, thinking about what's changed in the past year and so that's why today we're going to focus mostly on AI kind of how AI factors into content creation, how you can use AI tools to create content, how you can use AI tools to detect AI content. You know, things like how to write an excellent chat GPT prompt and one thing I'm really excited to share with you because it's something that I've just kind of figured out for myself is how to make your own personal GPT. So that's what we're gonna do at the end of the day, I'll show you step by step how to do it. You can follow along, I'll show you how to adapt it a little bit. And then really, what we're going to start with today is I guess a bit of a cautionary tale when it comes to AI so we'll start with the most negative and we'll build up to the most positive. And then tomorrow, the focus is going to be on content UX, the user experience what I like to call the reader experience. So it's going to be more about you know, the elements of design and how they interact with content, how you can create this great reader experience for the people who consume your designs and content and so we can get a little bit more into what that looks like. But I guess if I was to like talk high level about today versus tomorrow, today is like things that I think are really like novel and fun. It's like It's like exciting things that that we're all learning kind of at the same time and that's that's what's so exciting about just like nobody has it figured out. And tomorrow is like the stuff that I'm really passionate about. That's a little bit more, you know, foundational and again, about like that full experience. So I guess with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. Yeah,\r\n\r\nabsolutely. Me give a couple of housekeeping notes that will disappear. Folks. We'll be taking a break in the middle as usual for these courses. So roughly at tube central an hour from now, we'll take about a five to 10 minute break depending on where we are timewise. So at the end of this first hour and the end of the second hour, we'll have a time of q&a as well. I would invite you to use the zoom q&a Link to ask your questions. Please don't use the chat, but use that Zoom q&a. That way we can keep all the questions in a nice list. And also, if you'll keep that Zoom q&a open, if somebody asks a question that you also want to hear the answer to just click the thumbs up icon to up vote. And we'll take the questions the order of up votes. So with that again, yeah, we are recording in the replay. The transcript is all there and it'll be available for you about an hour after we finished today. So Maddie, I'm going to disappear take over. Let's get started. Let's\r\n\r\ndo it. My housekeeping is just first of all, I think that we all can learn a lot from each other when it comes to AI. And so like that's how I've picked up the things that I'm going to share with you. It's really hearing it from other people seeing how other people are using this tool. It's interesting because it's so new that like, again, we don't really know like what the best use cases are. And there's this world of possibility that we've only just started to touch. So one thing I'll ask is like if you've come across an interesting AI use case, you know whether you have something that's top of mind now or whether going through what I'm going to talk about today sparks it like please share that in the chat. I'm sure all learn from it. I'm sure other people will learn from it. So that's one thing and then I'll just ask that if there's anything that resonates with you, as I'm talking today, or you know as other people are sharing ideas in the chat. I always love when people tweet or I guess x takeaways these days. So my Twitter is in that bottom right hand corner. So use that and I always love to retweet and share with my audience too. So yeah, let's go ahead and get started here. Nathan already gave a nice bio like who I am. Just to give you you know, more information about the blacksmith. We're a holistic content marketing agency for b2b technology brands. We create data driven content. I'm going to share some of those processes here with you today in terms of how we're using AI tools to do that. And our focus is creating content across the sales funnel with a focus on the reader experience. So again, that's really what day two is going to be about. It's creating this ideal reader experience with the intersection of content and design. And then my book writing for humans robots, the new rules of content style. If you've ever read the book, The Elements of Style, I was really kind of riffing on that in a more I guess, modern way since that book was written back in 1918, or 1919. Of course, at that time, the internet didn't exist. We weren't necessarily addressing a global audience when we publish to the web. We are now and so that's kind of the idea behind this book is how can you how can you speak plainly and inclusively and effectively when you're writing for the web? And so with all of that being said, let's go ahead and jump into the topic of today which is AI Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention. Day two, when we talk about content UX. I'm going to do some live content UX audits. If you were here last year, we also did this this is something I really love to do. And so this form here which you can also click through the slide being links that we've shared in the chat. Just has a couple questions like your name your brand. It'll ask for a link to a specific piece of content. If you're comfortable sharing for this live UX audit, and then it has the question that's optional. If there's anything you want me to focus on, and then like an aspect of the content itself, but the purpose is to collect some, you know, ideas from from all of you of what to audit and we're going to basically put the principles that I'm going to be talking about tomorrow into action you know, show you how to use some different tools show you how to use more also, like qualitative analyses. And so again, I would love your examples so that we can make it really useful for you to give you know, a second pair of eyes on your content. And you know, it's always done in a very respectful way. I'm not looking for problems, I'm just showing you ways to, you know, make your message clearer to make your content experience more effective. So I'll, I'll aim to remind you about this again at the end of the day, and then you know, before tomorrow is probably when I'll pick what we're going to audit for tomorrow. So get them in today, whenever you have a chance. Okay, so artificial intelligence. That's really the focus of what we're talking about today. Super exciting. Things are happening here. It's also kind of a wild wild west. It's it's something that there's many positive use cases but there are also some negative ones and so I really wanted to start with the negatives so we can kind of get that out of the way so we can you know, maybe share some like cautionary tales here. The link that Learn More link is an article that I wrote for Fast Company, and it's going to go over some of the same things that I talked about here in terms of some of the limitations and also really like the ethical implications of using AI to generate content to publish it as if it were your own. So yeah, let's go ahead and dive into that. Um, so I think like the first major implication, negative implication of AI or something to think about, especially as a creator, because many of us here we're writers, we're designers, so we're creating things. They they are our intellectual property which we may assign, you know, to a client, for example, but it's still at its root. It's something that we made. And, you know, the thing about AI is, first of all, it can't think for itself. It uses things like machine learning. It uses algorithms and processes to make sense of what's already out there. But it's not, at least right now in a place where it can completely invent something new. If it does. It's the result of this machine learning it's not the result of true uniqueness. So you know, essentially, AI and I'm gonna explain this example in a moment here, but it's, it's being trained on what already exists. It's using our intellectual property. And the worst part of it is it's doing that without giving us credit. I mean, if you go in do a search on Google, it was called Bard, but now they've rebranded it to Gemini. In my experience, and and I haven't used it recently, to be honest with you, but certainly within chat GPT there's no like source given for the answer to a prompt. It's not directing you to a specific piece of content are saying, This is what I referenced to come up with this answer, which also creates an issue of you know, whether or not that answer is something to be trusted, and we'll get into the fact that AI is oftentimes confidently incorrect. But right now, with the focus being on the fact that it's essentially plagiarism and my perspective, if you are taking what you generate with AI and then publishing it as your own this is probably easiest to think about when you think about visuals, and we're going to talk a little bit about AI generating images and kind of like how that works and some of the issues with that. But you can think of like aI trained on a certain set of materials, certain artists body of work, you know, that style, if it's trained on a certain style and the output is a certain style, it's pretty easy to identify that, you know, it's riffing off, you know, one individual's intellectual property, it's a little bit harder to make that distinction with the written word. But that doesn't mean that it's any less important to recognize that it's, it's an issue if if AI is passing off its own material or your material as its own. So, what I wanted to share here, this is an article that was published on futurism. It's an it's a screenshot from it, and it's about CNET. They have this blog about different like personal finance topics and things like that. And so when it comes to things that affect your finances, whether it's subjects like you know how to buy a house and you know, like had this setup a mortgage, you know, whatever. Or, in this case, like you know, how to pick a credit card, how to use credit cards, how to decide what college to send your kid to, or something like that. Google calls these topics, your money, your life. And in comparison to any other topic that you publish, that you're looking to get ranked in relevant search on Google. Google has the highest standard of quality for your money, your life topics. So CNET was transparent about the fact that they were publishing AI generated content such as the example shared here. But they had a human fact checking it and so the byline was like you seen that money or something like that? And then I think they also had like the byline of the human editor published next to it, but they told us you know, they they weren't trying to hide that it was aI generated. So this excerpt is you know, maybe kind of a silly example, but it's showing how\r\n\r\nthis article that they wrote, which was about can you buy a gift card with the credit card. This first example is a line that's almost verbatim from a rivaling Forbes article. And then this next example is how literally, the table was the exact same title. So, you know, you could question if it was only one of these things, you know, is that really plagiarism? Is that really a problem? But the fact that it's both to me shows that you know, not only did CNET not take a high enough standard of care, quite honestly with the content that they were having a human fact checker edit, but I think it also begs the question of like, if you're generating a full piece of copy, like a, you know, long form blog article, like are you ever going to be able to definitively say that it's not plagiarism? Or that it's not like literally, you know, word for word related to any other competitor article out there? And I think the answer's no, because that's what the AI is using to generate the content. In this case, and then one that I'll share subsequently, AI is, is almost like a crutch for CNET or for others who are who are taking this approach of generating that full article and then having the human intervention and I'm going to share some better ways to use AI in your article creation process. But yeah, I mean, the problem is ultimately that there's no way that they can catch every instance of plagiarism, and it just honestly creates more work and, and the worst part of all, is that it essentially ruin their reputation because they didn't take a proper standard of care. Another example that's, that's ongoing, it's unresolved at this point, is that the New York Times recently sued open AI who's the creator of chat GBT saying that, you know, their, their publications, their media. was unlawfully used to train open AI. And the last I saw, I think there was an update actually today that said that the New York Times is like misrepresenting the evidence or something like that. But again, I mean, it really just like begs the question of you know, if you publish content, like is it safe, you know, is it going to be used to train a model which is then going to spit it out and somebody else is going to publish it and benefit from it without properly crediting you? So that's one major issue. So this is one that I would love your examples. If you have anything similar. This is this is a picture that I saw recently in like a Facebook group about AI. And so somebody had done some prompts about dog breeds. And if you kind of squint, you're like, Okay, maybe that like a chart of different dog breeds, but then you look and you see all the like, really strange faces and like this, like gibberish text, and even the text that you can read is like not related to any dog breeds that currently exists. So, yeah, again, if you have any examples of like an image you've generated that has resulted in something like comically incorrect like this, I would love to see that in the chat. That would be fun. But I guess the point that I want to make with this slide is that at least at this point, AI can't effectively art direct you could give it a prompt and you could maybe get it to a point where you can get something useful. I think it's called mid journey. There's this one AI image generator that creates these like hyper realistic things with like any detail you can get it and something like that is so cool and very interesting to experiment with. But I think this came from within chat GPT I'm gonna say it wrong, but it's called like Dali Dali. And in my experience, when I've used it to generate images, it's the same sort of like gibberish text. The image, you know, is like, vaguely related to the prompts that I give it. So I'm using it for like, kind of like business article use cases to like generate a figure from you know, some like the data I include or something like that. I've never gotten something useful yet. And I think beyond that, it's like you still as a creative have to come up with the prompt. It's not like AI is going to be able to help you within the context, say of like an article. They're not going to be able to come up with like five unique media examples that you could include. So this is something that I think, you know, as humans, like, we still like have control over this or so like the best Abbot. Um, okay. So next I started to talk about this, which is one of the biggest issues with AI to date, the fact that it is confidently incorrect. So this is another Cena example, I'm going to read a little excerpt from. This is another futurism article. They did kind of a deep dive into this. See that AI but issue? So the excerpt is after the outcry after you know, some of these plagiarism things came to light. With the previous example. Steena editor in chief Connie Guglielmo acknowledged the AI written articles in a post that celebrated CNET's reputation for being transparent. without acknowledging the criticism, Guglielmo wrote that the publication was changing the byline on its AI generated articles from CNET money staff to simply seen that money as well as making the disclosure more prominent. Furthermore, she promised every story published under the program had been reviewed, fact checked, and edited by an editor with topical expertise before we hit publish, and I think that this is referring to like before this article was published, and so what you're looking at right here is, I think a more serious violation of the high standards that Google holds for your money your life, making sure that it is, you know, written by an expert that it's heavily fat checked, you know that you're not publishing something that you can't stand behind. And so this is about calculating compound interest for savings and as you can see by the excerpts, it's, it's wrong, the calculation is spitting out an incorrect final number. And so it may seem like, you know, small potatoes like, you know, like, what, what's really going to happen to the person who misinterprets this? It's certainly not like, you know, having to do with like, buying a house and like getting those equations wrong thread savings, but I think it just goes to show that there's, you know, there's a lot of problematic things that can happen and it starts here and if if we don't maintain a high standard for content quality starting here, then it could exacerbate it could turn into people being misled when it comes to making these like bigger money decisions in their life or you know, other things, your money your life, I think also, in some ways has to do with like, health and like medical stuff and things like that. So there are like potentially, you know, bigger and like worse implications than even just like the financial aspect of it. One thing that's interesting that that I misunderstood or I was misled about AI. Really up until like, a week ago or so, is I thought that you could ask chat GBT if it wrote something. So that was something that I saw other people talking about. And it's something that at the blacksmith like we've tested out ourselves you know, when working with like a new writer and wondering how to detect like if content was aI generated, and I found an article on open API's like FAQs or help desk or whatever that said, whenever you ask chat GBT if it wrote some you know, specific piece of copy for example, it just make something up like that's, that's literally what open AI says you could Google it yourself. So, you know, it's weird that it doesn't just say, I don't know, you know, it doesn't just give you like that as a straight answer. It's fine. If it doesn't know, but for it to purposely just decide, you know, bye bye narrowly, like if it's yes or no, and that it just tells you that whether it actually knows the answer, like that's very concerning to me. So a little bit of a cautionary tale. Um, but yeah, I think at the end of the day of the CNET examples, what I'm trying to impress upon you is like, does it really save time, if it like, impacts your reputation long term like I just don't think that that the best way to go about it is to generate the full piece of content and then add the human and I think that I think that AI can help intermittently and we'll definitely get to like how exactly to do that shortly. Um, so this article is also kind of fun. Charlie Brooker's, a creator of Black Mirror. If any of you are familiar, it's just this like really kind of weird messed up show on Netflix. It's very like future focused. It's like, I would say fairly.\r\n\r\nWhat's the word like it's, it's, it's kind of like post apocalyptic in some ways, not always. But it always like seems to end and kind of a scary place. And it's episodic, like each each episode I mean, to say is like its own storyline. And so the most recent season started to touch on themes of AI since that has become you know, something that has infiltrated society. And anyway, this article, The Creator who you know, has a very interesting mind based on what we see on this Netflix episodes, said that he doesn't think AI is messy enough to replace creative people. So there's good news guys, which is AI can't can't match that with us. I think on another hand AI, it lacks human empathy. You know, it can never like fully understand, like, who we are and what we go through. I don't think it ever will unless it's somehow achieved some level of sentience but yeah, I mean, ultimately, like in its wildest dreams, whatever AI, you know, thinks that it thinks it could never generate the ideas that we come up in our wildest dreams. And I think that the proof is in the pudding in terms of thinking about things like some of our favorite authors and how they create prosaic copy. So here's, here's a quote, I love Stephen King. He's kind of a machine himself, but human as far as I know. So this from needful things, one of his more interesting books, because the trust of the innocent is the wires most useful tool. And so, you know, fed copies of Stephen King's worked. You can ask chat GPT to write in his voice. I don't know if Stephen K would appreciate that or not. But, you know, I think the limitation is that it couldn't generate something like this on its own it can generate like derivative work of his but it couldn't come up with this on its own. Ai, you know, it, it isn't it doesn't have uniqueness. And Google has historically said that it's important. We're gonna talk a little bit about Google's AI guidelines that it's published. And it specifically says in those guidelines that they want to rank content that is unique, which AI fundamentally is not, not on its own, not without human intervention. Ai just read purposes and parrots things that already exists. And, and the output trends toward the average. It's not, it's not unique, it's not notable and interesting. Okay, so the last thing that I want to talk about from like this negative perspective, and then I promise we'll get into more of the fun stuff, is the idea that algorithms can be biased. And so if you think about like the people who are creating things like Chet GPT, or the Google algorithm or any other algorithm you interact with, like social media feeds, things like that. Algorithms, they represent the people that created them, not necessarily the population as a whole. So this book is really interesting. It's from the perspective of a black woman and so she is just like, read some of the book description to give you an idea of some of the topics that she explores. It says run a Google search for Black Girls, what will you find? Big booty and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms, but if you type in white girls, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and on unmoderated discussions about why black women are so sassy or why black women are so angry presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. And I think, after this book was published, because this was from a while ago, Google had manually made some adjustments to the algorithm in light of this criticism and that commentary, but the problem is with algorithms, you're you're scaling up problems, they can't manually make adjustments for every inherent bias that their algorithm has. And so you know, I don't know if we have an answer for how to fix this. But ultimately, the people creating the algorithm should represent society as a whole. I guess that's, you know, one way to think about it. Um, and I guess the question that it poses for all of us is like with AI deploying so rapidly there's going to be a lot of situations where bias needs to be routed out and fixed. And so that's, that's what's kind of scary, I think about how quickly new applications are developing. Again, it scales up problems and so that's just something I think we all need to be aware of, and and do the best that we can to fix. So okay, so now let's talk about some of the more fun stuff AI content tools. These are tools that we use in our workflow. These are tools that I use, personally. And so let's go ahead and you know, talk a little bit about how they work. So, again, we're gonna focus on like, mainly AI content tools, just because that's my sphere of genius. That's like what I have the most experience with, but I think there are different things that you could use like no matter how you're creating content, whether it's like you write blog posts for yourself, or for clients, or like, you know, you just want to like uplevel, your email strategy, or you know, help with like the personal compositions that you create. So, the first one I want to talk about is phrase which creates AI powered content briefs. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch my screen to share, to share like what a report looks like in phrase. So let's see here. I think I have to get out of full screen in order for this to work. Okay, so um, this was the form so I'm going to show you that in the beginning, but I'm gonna go ahead and exit out. So phrase generates this really cool report and the SEO aspects of it may or may not be relevant to your process. And I will say that not every piece of content that we created, the blacksmith is driven by SEO. It's not every piece of content we create to rank but I still use we still use phrase for everything because it helps with topic research. So that's what this is. It's a briefing tool. It's a research tool. Um, the way that it works and the way that the next tool, clear scope that I'm going to explain to you also works is that you give it a primary keyword. So in this case, it's how reliable are AI detectors? And so, by giving it this primary keyword, that means that we've already done the research to decide that that's the keyword that we want to optimize for. And so this is this is an article that's already published on the Black Swan, but this is something that we would have created. Prior to that publication. This this brief would have been like the first step of the writing process after doing the keyword research to decide which one we want to focus on. And the way that phrase and clear scope work is that you can I'm just going to show you like some of the pricing details so you can understand like how it works within a workflow, phrases kind of unique in that it has a plan that allows you to create unlimited reports. Not many other tools like it do that it's usually a per report cost. So that's why it's important to know what you want to optimize for before generating the reports. But it also has these lesser plans in terms of output. You know, depending on your content process, that's probably going to be more cost effective to you then you know, me as an agency, I would want more of like the unlimited plan to work for my various clients. So let's go back to phrase so what's interesting about phrase is first of all, just like the content editor experience itself, I'll be honest, we use Google Docs for everything. But if I was creating content, as like just for my internal team or something, what's cool is you can create these other tabs. And so you could have a tab that's like research. You could have a tab that's your outline. You could have a tab that's your draft, and then you could have maybe a tab with edits or something like that. So that's kind of cool just to keep the process nice and contained in one place. I've always thought that that was really unique and interesting about phrase.\r\n\r\nBut to be honest, we don't use phrase as a Content Editor. That's just an added bonus. So yeah, it generates a topic report. I'm gonna go through a couple of different aspects of it. First of all, it gives you some sort of tangible details and the way that phrase and clear scope and the market means which is another variation on a theme work is that they scrape the top 20 or so search results, which is pretty representative of like, what's going to be necessary to rank and it gives you details like, you know, how many words should you aim for for this specific topic? In this case, it's also suggesting how many headers which is like a measure of depth of content, how many links How many images? I think the top ones are what's like in this brief, that's what it's reading and the ones under it are like the average that it's suggesting. But again, we're just this is just like material that's from the brief. It's not like the actual content that we wrote. When it comes to word count. I think people always ask like, what's the ideal word count for a piece of content? And the the answer like many things in SEO is it depends. And so that's why tools like this are really useful because there is no standard. It's very topic driven. And using data that's based on actual searches means that you can get very close to like what that ideal is. So it also shares you know, the top some details of the top breaking content, you'll notice that the blog Smith currently owns a featured snippet for this particular topic, thanks in part to you know, some of the tools that we use to optimize their content. And also, I think, for this particular piece, because we did a lot of our own original research and reporting and some of it that I'll share with you when we talk about AI detector tools, I believe after the break today. You can also see like, the atomized version of some of these other top ranking results like the title like a short description, different headers, you can click into the headers to get more information. You can click through to read it. There's other things in this little side panel here that are interesting. This is just a list of all the headings from all the top ranking content pieces. Probably the most useful is this questions area and you can break it down by different sources of the question of the questions. People also ask you something you could manually go to Google and see for yourself. But it's nice to have it all in one place. I think that's the real benefit of phrase and then you can also see here that you can see questions that come from places like Quora and Reddit, you know, which which can really add a nice like flavor to what you're working on. The stats tab is really interesting. You know, they essentially suggest in phrase different stats, as well as different links that people tend to use in those top ranking pieces of content. And so you don't necessarily want to like copy everything that you see. But there might be things that like people would expect to be exposed to in your content. If there's like a big industry stat that relates to what you're talking about. As you scroll here you can see certain things like different topics that come up, you know, different related keywords or sub topics. And a lot of this you can kind of paste over from the sidebar. External links. You know, in addition to specific stats, news is also pretty interesting because this is like things that have happened maybe since those top ranking articles were published. So again, like if you're trying to be the best making sure that your information is the most up to date. This can help you do that. So freeze also has some generative AI capabilities. I'm going to be honest with you that we don't use these because we don't believe in generating AI copy as far as you know what we write for clients and for ourselves. We're experimenting with it. But so I don't really use any of the generative AI tools. But this optimize tab here is notable and useful, because it's similar to clear scope and market Muse which I'll share with you in just a moment here. And basically, it suggests certain phrases that we should expect to see in the content in order for it to rank high and relevant search. You know, obviously, you can't just throw all the words and you have to weave them in. But this is a pretty good baseline for what people would expect to see topic wise in an article and that's that's the real benefit. I think of tools like this. So yeah, there's other there's other like interesting things that you can dig into. This is like a keyword gap map map based on what I just showed you those different phrases and it shows your content compared to other ranking content and who's using what words so you can kind of see how you stack up against those other competitors. So next, I want to share clear scope with you and I have a slide for it, but I'm just going to jump straight to the report here. So what you're seeing is like a very, I would say like simplified user interface compared to like what you would see with phrase and so clear scope in many ways is very similar. They both exists to help you optimize content. They both include some important research they both work by starting with a primary keyword. One of the differences between clear scope and phrase is first of all that query scope suggests a letter grade whereas phrase and market Muse and surfer previously known as Super SEO suggested number like out of 100 in order to understand like how close to optimizing compared to their standards you are, it also suggests a word count. And one more thing I wanted to say about the content creator is that at the blacksmith we always aim for an a or higher that tends to be a good standard for actually achieving rankings, high rankings and relevant search. I'm actually not sure if phrase does this. I'm sure they do. I just didn't notice it while going through. But clear scope also suggests a target readability level. I think that's really important for matching the needs of the searcher not going you know too deep into something that maybe could benefit from being more surface level for example. You can also notice here that they have those suggestions for phrases and so phrase we use the very beginning of our process, but we're not optimizing content within that tool. We're really using clear scope for that because in my experience, and this could differ by industry, but I find their suggestions for phrases to incorporate to be a little bit more fine tuned than phrase. So you know, that's, that's my opinion. Um, you'll notice that they also have the sidebar, so they have, you know, a couple of details. I don't again, I don't necessarily use clear scope for the briefing processes is really more at the end of the process. So stuff like this, I'm not necessarily going over but if you were to use one tool, then it's nice to know that it has that it also has those top you know, search results for the query, examples of like headers and things like that. It also has the term like keyword gap map that shows how you stack up compared to the competition. You can dig into the competitor details even more in terms of how clear scope looks at content with their letter grade, by word count, that it has this nice chart that shows how that content grade stacks up against their organic position in search. And then I think the last thing that I'll mention about clear scope for now, is that you can use that editor in here just like you can use the editor in phrase, but actually both free and clear scope. Have a Google Docs add on. And so all you have to do is like grab the report link the individual link to that specific report, put it in Google Docs, and then you get all this information within, you know, Google Docs where you probably at least my team works better that way. Um, okay, so and then I guess the last last thing I was gonna say about this topic is that if I had to pick one tool, I think I would pick clear scope. Again, because of the fine tuned pneus of the instructions, but if I was a smaller shop operation, I'd probably pick phrase because it can do like a more well rounded look at like the topic as a whole and debriefing so so that's my suggestion. Clear scope works by essentially offering it's like a per report price, but you can buy packages and like the more reports you buy at a time, the less expensive Each report is. So let me get my slides back up here. And then we'll move on to the next tool that we're going to talk about though.\r\n\r\nWe talked about phrase to talked about clear scope. So let's talk about market Muse just kind of in passing here because it's a very similar tool. It uses some different technologies, compared to clear scope and phrase and so that's why it's a part of our process again as an organization that spends a lot of time on SEO and data and keyword research. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to you if you're going to maybe consider one of those other tools. What's interesting about marketmuse is that it has this functionality to create an AI generated first draft that includes some like light human intervention from their side. I think that's what this is actually this is like a sample from a while ago where we were just playing around with it to see what would happen. But yeah, again, it has a lot of the same functionality. It offers content optimization suggestions that like keyword gap map that I showed you and both of the tools and it has like some generative AI capabilities. So yeah, it just adds a little bit of extra detail. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that it's something you need to add to your workflow if like one of those other tools could satisfy a lot of these same things. So talking about some other tools that are interesting. Word tune is something that I feel like is so underrated. It's essentially uses your own copy to make suggestions. And so again, I'm going to I'm going to show you what that looks like. So let me share my screen back here. So it works in Google Docs. And so here's I just stole the intro basically from that AI detector article. And so what you could do is you highlight whatever text you want it to make suggestions based off of and I typically do it sentence by sentence I, I'm sure it could do longer bits of text, but I don't find that to be as useful. For me. This is like a great tool for when you have writer's block because I don't know you know if you've experienced this but oftentimes I'll let my get myself get stuck on a specific word and it just like really bugs me, and I'm like it's not done until I figured out the right word. And it takes me forever to get through that. So we're tune. It's great because I'm using it with my own copy. So I can feel really confident about whatever it suggests. I'm sure you could use word tune to take AI generated copy and then re spin it. But that's not my suggestion. So again, it works by using this like Google Docs add on and you you highlight it and just to show that action again. It has this little word tune icon. And then you can see different suggestions for how word tune would rewrite it you get like 10 or something like that. And then you can also fine tune it by changing the tone and then by finding ways to shorten or expand it depending on what your use case is. The last thing that I'll say about word toon for right now is it has this thing called spices and so that's like getting a little bit more like next level with the AI generation and using like generative texts. I haven't played around too much with this yet, but it is interesting. And this is kind of taking it away I think from you know basing it off of your copy to kind of like generating something completely new. So that's why I don't necessarily use this but I think it could be a useful resource for when you're when you have writer's block or things like that. So let me get my slides back up here. Here it is. Okay, so so that was word tune. Um, and then Grammarly. I think works very similarly to word tune, and that it uses your own body of work your own copy, to suggest edits, and so I wrote an article for their blog. That's what the learn more link is. After a recent keynote, they did about all their generative AI capabilities. And so I would definitely check that out if you're curious about how to use grammerly in this way. And full disclosure, I'm a Grammarly ambassador, so you know, I'm always singing their praises, but I think it's I think it's interesting because Grammarly, like many other SAS tools on the market are starting to invest in AI capabilities like directly within their tools. And so I think we're gonna see like more and more of examples of this. And grammerly has a lot of other I think really useful. And interesting features like they have this brand style guide, which is something we use that the blacksmith which allows you to set your preferred spelling for things like brand names, and grammar rules and things like that. All right, so let's take a couple minutes for questions. Anything that's come up so far, after the break, we're going to talk about AI detector tools now that I've shown you the AI writing tools. We're going to talk about chat how to write a good chat GBT prompt and then we're going to end the day with how to create your own personal GPT. So yeah, in the meantime, there's any questions. We'll talk about them now and then we'll take a little bit of a break.\r\n\r\nYeah, very good, great overview of some really cool tools that can be used for our content creation. If you have questions specifically about that, drop those there in the zoom q&a. There's one question floating out there about the slide. We were sharing this link as a slide sharing the slides as a slide being link because there was an issue getting them exported where the the links on the slides were clickable. And so technology Yeah, it that's so currently not downloadable. Is the long and the short of it so but that slide being link is there and it'll be available for you going forward.\r\n\r\nWe can we could share them as downloaded just won't be a clickable link. So you can we could share like both in tandem with each other. Unfortunately, that's going to be the limitation\r\n\r\nYeah, yeah. So I'm happy to add that PDF link as well. We'll I'll get that added to the link bundle as we come back. If you want to download these just know that there are things that say read more, learn more that don't clicked anywhere in the PDF. Alright folks, well let's go ahead and take a break. It is 153 Central time let's take a break until right at two o'clock Central. So right about seven minutes from now and we're quiet until then. Sounds great. See you then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We are back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, we are back and ready for the second part of day two. Maddie, what are we going to knock out today?\r\n\r\nSo we're gonna start with now that we've learned how to generate a copy, how do you detect it? We're going to then move to talking a little bit about some Google guidelines around AI content writing for humans and robots. And then we'll end the day with a deeper dive into chat GPT how to write a great prompt and then how to create your own personal GPT which I'm really excited about because it's something that I only just learned how to do myself. Very\r\n\r\ngood. That's a lot to cover in the next hour. I let me invite everyone also to look at the chat I'm going to drop in today's slides if you have come in late. Also, we've added a link there for the PDF download. And finally, there's a link in the link bundle that'll drop in in just a moment that has the invitation for you to submit your site for a content UX audit tomorrow. So with that I will turn it over to you Matty, let's\r\n\r\ngo. Sounds great. All right. Yeah, let's go ahead and knock this out. So AI detector tools. There's a couple that we've tested at the blacksmith and I want to share some of the results of those tests too, so that you can understand what they can be useful for. But also again, there are limitations. As with the rest of this world of AI, everything's still kind of developing. We're all learning things at the same time. And so there's no like perfect answer. There's no one definitive tool that's going to tell you like this is current AI content, or this isn't AI content. So a couple tools that you could try though that I think will give you a decent idea or continent scale, copy leaks and originality.ai and the link here which again, you can grab through the slide bean link is a link to an in depth investigation that we did at the blog Smith testing out these different tools. You know, trying to learn more about the nature of AI content and what it sounds like. So I do have a couple of ideas for you two that we'll talk about next in terms of like how to rewrite things that sound robotic whether they were robot generated or not. But before we get to that, this example here is kind of funny because it's the Constitution and this is continent scale, saying that they detected to be 9% ai generated and you know, I don't think they had robots at the time unless alien somehow hooked them up. But I think it's fair to say that this is more than likely 100% human generated content. But it's just interesting to see that their AI detector is still picking up some very some version of that. And that you know, also perhaps it hasn't trained this AI detector on you know, pieces that existed before. Ai content was a thing. So so that's just like one thing. You know, I think from the standpoint of like, if you're working with content creators, and you're paying for human generated content, then you should get that fundamentally I think that it's an ethical violation for someone to use AI to generate content without disclosing that and to be accepting payment for that as if it were something that they were creating. Of course, there are many companies out there who are hiring people with the job description that is like aI content writer, AI content editor or like somebody who trains you know, a chatbot on a certain way a certain body of work a certain way of writing. All of that being said, if you if you are using these tools, and they are saying with a high degree of certainty, you know, this is AI generated copy. I think it's really important to not outright accuse somebody of submitting AI generated copy what I do at the blog Smith is like let's say that we're doing like a paid test with a new writer hopeful for our team. What I do is I say, hey, you know, we ran this through, you know, these three AI detector tools, and here's what it said here, you know, is what degree of AI content it's saying it thinks this is like, can you comment on that? And it gives them the chance to you know, explain what they think might happen, defend themselves, offering to make fixes, and I think it's really like the way people people are going to be honest or not. There's nothing you could do about that. But I think it's the way that they respond to and handle that situation that tells you what you need to know about if you want to work with them, whether or not you can ultimately tell if their copy was aI generated or not. What is very interesting about these different tools is first of all, they're all gonna give you a different answer. That's just a fact. Because they're all using a different approach to detect AI content. The other thing is that you can input the exact same copy on one of these tools two times and get a different answer. So again, it's it's the wild wild west. But these will at least give you something to think about and whether it doesn't matter. Like if we if we trust the writer or not, we're always going to run their copies through one or multiple of these tools because we want to detect things that sound robotic, even if they were written by a human. So that kind of brings me to my next point here that I was starting to hint at. So when it comes to detecting AI content, or even detecting content that humans wrote, that sounds robotic, there's a couple of patterns that you can look for. The two major characteristics that the aforementioned AI detector tools are looking for are first of all, perplexity, so that's unpredictability within the content. Ai generated text tends to have low perplexity. Human writing has higher perplexity, it kind of makes sense we're a little bit more erratic than a robot. The other thing is burstiness, which is a similar concept. So it's looking for variation in the length and the structure of sentences. Ai content tends to be more steady, more formulaic, which makes sense. It has lower burstiness and human writing, which you know, has much more variation. The image you see here are some other things that we've picked up in our own writing process. And in investigating this topic, different signals that sound robotic again, whether they are in AI generated or not. So repeating words, like in this example, collision coverage, you know, coverage collision, like it's just like it's not using a lot of variation. And in the box MyStyle guide we talk about like, trying not to use the same word twice in the same sentence or paragraph, which is not always possible, but this would be an example of something that wouldn't pass the blacksmith style guide test because it's it's too repetitive. Also repetitive sentence structure where like, each sentence starts with the same formulaic approach. Advertising then a verb you know, advertising the verb, unnatural word usage, so like, you know, removing a glass dome to access the ball, but it doesn't really sound like how a human would talk about replacing a light bulb. A generic or impersonal tone. You know, it's like things that don't add value that you're just kind of like saying for the sake of having words, it's another thing that we talk about in the blog, Smith style guide, like everything you say, should have a purpose, and we don't believe in fluff. It's about cutting things to being the most concise version they can be while still conveying enough meaning. For people to understand what we're trying to say. Statements that contradict themselves. So the new policy will increase employee benefits while at the same time it will reduce employee benefits that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And inconsistent verb tense, you know, something a human editor. Should be able to pick up pretty well but probably a robot writing is not going to care too much about He He was waiting for the bus when he sees his coworker. Stiff, formal or matter of fact, writing style. You know, again, just something that just doesn't sound like a human wrote it or who would want to read it. So this is this is something that can be helpful to you like when you're doing your own edits to kind of like go through these different things. And, again, whether whether it's aI generated or not, and you know that for a fact, you still want to make sure that your writing is something that appeals to the human. So I wanted to take some time to talk about Google's helpful content update and also their guidance for AI generated content and whether or not it will rank some of this we did talk about last year if you were here, so we're just going to do a really quick refresher on that as it relates to this topic. So my book and like really like what we're talking about, in general is kind of marrying the concepts of writing for both humans who are really the ultimate buyer like they're the ones who actually have money so they can buy from you, whatever it is you're selling. They respond to other humans, other people's empathy, versus robots who you know, we're not writing for their sake, but they are the medium that connects us. To those humans. And so it's important for the things that we write, to be indexable to, you know, be findable to be descriptive, and to ultimately match the intent of whatever the human is looking for. So, you know, robots can also take the form of social networking site algorithms, like that news feed that you're familiar with, I'm sure.\r\n\r\nSo so that's kind of like the two players in this game. Here. So this is some highlights from Google's guidance about AI generated content. As you can see by the link here, this is from early 2023. And I was looking at this page again, just a couple of days ago to see if anything had changed. I had seen something on Twitter now x, where somebody had mentioned that something on this page should change. And I was looking at these three things because I think they're the most relevant to this topic that we're talking about. And like, I don't know if I'm just you know, like, post pregnancy brain or something. I couldn't find the difference. But it might have been because it was about something else on that page. But I might have missed it. And it might have been one of these things. But anyway, I think these things still more or less ring true today. And if anything has changed, it has been Google being less specific about their guidelines. Because that's kind of the nature of what all these things that they've shared with us are it's it's kind of like so just to go over them is a content against Google searches guidelines. They say it's not, but you know, it can't be used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which we'll talk about when we talk about the helpful content update. Will AI content rank highly on search? Maybe, you know, it doesn't give it any gains, which makes sense. What I think is really notable about this is they talk about if it's useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of e 80. It might do well in search. So they talk about original, but we've already talked today about how AI content at least on its own without manual intervention by humans is inherently not original. It is inherently not unique. And I would argue that again, without human intervention, it's neither useful nor helpful, in that, you know, you're not It's not like adding something that doesn't already exist. At least in that case. So to me, from Google's own words, AI content really aren't its own shouldn't rank high and relevant search. But of course, there are exceptions. And then, of course, there are situations where people pair that with a human editor like we saw with seeing that of course, CNET being a cautionary tale of what to avoid. Should I use AI to generate content? They say if you see it as an essential way to help you produce content that is helpful and original, we have that original word again, it might be useful to consider but again, if you're trying to gain search engine rankings and no there was something on Twitter now x where somebody was kind of like I can't remember who it was, but you might recognize the situation especially if you're in like the content world. Someone was boasting about how they had created a ton of AI generated content and they were sharing you know some stats from like their Google Analytics, and how would that helped rankings and things like that? And I think everybody agreed that that person should have probably kept their mouth shut because somebody from Google ended up you know, seeing this Thrive that came to their attention and they got hit with a manual penalty based on what this person was saying about you know, having not really like had that human intervention. So thus, it was not original or unique. And it's just funny, like, you could probably get away with it, at least for a while, depending on how Google develops more of these guidelines. But when you start to boast about it, and Google gets wind of it, then like there are manual interventions that they could take, so tread carefully. If it's working. Keep that to yourself. So then it Yeah, I wanted to like connect this back to Google's helpful content algorithm update, which also happened. Probably a little over a year ago, maybe two years ago. And so they describe it as being part of their long term efforts to provide original and valuable content through search. It rewards content that meets users expectations while demoting content written primarily with search engines in mind. So like we were just talking about what the AI content. This this update isn't focused on AI but but it adds color to those guidelines in terms of how to approach it or you know, if you are generating AI content, how to make it work, so that it could rank these questions. Are directly from Google just made pretty was blacksmith branding, but the link that I shared here will will get you to the Google documentation that includes these questions and the subsequent ones. So to ask yourself like is is this content truly people versus is something that Google would consider ranking. It's things like Do you have a primary purpose or focus for your site? If you're writing about too many disparate topics, it's very confusing to Google you can certainly write about things that are different but related to each other, but you should really have like one specific focus if you want to rank high in relevant search. Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they've had a satisfying experience? I think that's a question to ask yourself, whenever you create any type of content like Is it is it satisfying to the end user doesn't really just serve your purposes? They talk about like demonstrating firsthand experience or like a depth of knowledge that's really important. That's that's how we add uniqueness to our content. That's how we make it original. Even if it's just your opinion on something, you know, that adds color to the content that already exists. Okay, so, um, let's talk now about from the search perspective, are you taking the search engine first approach to your content? So these are things that you obviously don't want to do. And it's questions like, you know, are you primarily trying to attract people from search versus creating something truly useful for humans? It does say are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics like that cautionary tale, that person who was sharing, you know, the content they generated, which resulted in a manual penalty, it's a perfect example. I think this is important too, like, are you mainly just summarizing what others have said without adding much value? You should always be adding I think something to the content that you're creating in order for it to be worth creating in the first place.\r\n\r\nSo just to kind of summarize here, like what is helpful content versus unhelpful content from these guidelines that Google has given us and that I honestly agree with? helpful content is people first genuine specific, it's actionable. Up to date is important. Once you publish something, you have to think about, like if you're using stats or if it's about maybe a tool that changes frequently, like you should be regularly reviewing or auditing your content for opportunities to update it. Is it relatable, is it concise? And ultimately, is it satisfying, versus the unhelpful content which is written primarily for the search engine robots it's spammy? It's generic, it's abstract. It might be outdated. Ultimately, it's impersonal, impersonal, fluffy, and then whacking. So these are some easy guidelines that you can use to understand if your content is hitting the mark for something that Google would even consider ranking high and relevant search. All right, so now we're gonna get to some of like the really fun stuff, I think today, which is get GBT some specific examples for how you can use it, as well as a demonstration for how I'm using it. And so, a lot of the things that I'm going to talk about today are based on things that I've learned from other people. I didn't necessarily invent these things. I've adapted many for my own use cases. And so again, I think this is a really valuable opportunity for like if you have anything to add to this discussion, I'd love to see it in the chat. I think it could benefit other people. How are you experimenting with AI? Like how how would you maybe adapt some of these ideas for how to write a great prompt What are like interesting prompts that you've used, and you know what, how is that benefited? You so I'll just put that out there. And then I'll also say that some of these are like pretty much all of these guidelines are based on open AIS guidelines for prompt engineering as well as Google's in some cases, I've combined to them and in all cases, I've given examples of how to use them effectively. So let's go ahead and jump to it. Okay, so the, I think first and perhaps the most important thing is to be as specific as possible. And you want to set parameters for the output that you're looking for. So my prompt here was helped me generate 10 email subject lines to use for cold outreach for my content marketing agency, please limit output to a maximum of 45 characters per example. I picked that number, the 45 characters because I saw that that's like somewhat of a best practice for how many characters people want to see in an email subject line. And what I could have done here was use the personal GPT I'm going to show you later that's all about the blogs and style guide them has like aspects of like how we do business and I could have gotten like even better example results here. But the point was not to show you something perfect it was to show you how to apply this principle. And the other thing that I wanted to add to is like you can always start with a plant, see what it gets you and then you can set parameters after the fact to refine your output. Like, you know, maybe I would have asked this prompt and then asked for it to shorten it to 45 characters or to suggest new examples of 45 characters. Or maybe I would have asked for like, what are you know, 10 General Sales, cold outreach subject lines, that I could use and then I might have added the detail Okay, now, adjust it for like my content marketing agency. The next one is to give context and examples. So I have this bot and I think I'm going to show you a screenshot of it next. One of my personal GPCs is a blacksmith sales expert. And so I created this bot because we recently hired a new salesperson, and there's just so much to learn both about the blogs with his brand. The work we do for customers, and just our sales process in general things that we want to share with new prospects that I wanted to create a resource and it's like of course you know, I want to make myself as available as possible to this new salesperson because typically I've been the salesperson for my company, I have a lot of that knowledge in my own head, but there are times when I am unavailable or I have other stuff that I have to work on. And so I wanted to create a personal GPT that incorporates some of this different documentation that I've created about our process. You know, referring to this prompt it also has like a copy of our standard proposal. Different things about you know, like what makes us stand out compared to the competition what's what's unique to us, I guess, so that any person on our team, any especially new salesperson, would be able to use this chat bot in order to surface some of this information, especially if they couldn't get a hold of me basically. So here's an example of a prompt I gave my personal GPT which is using the above case study. So I gave it a URL on our website. And one of the features of chat GPT is that you can have it browse the web in order to to include information and its results. So I gave it a URL. I asked it to reference a proposal that I had attached to the GPT that I've uploaded to it. And I said proposed an email pitch for a specific job opportunity. I copy and pasted a longer piece than this. I just took a screenshot but like the long version of this job description, and and I asked it to effectively address the requirements that the job description surfaced and the writing based on our strengths. And so what ended up happening was, you know, it wrote like a cold pitch email. But it did it did effectively address this prompt. There were things that I would change about it. Certainly there are things that I would have edited it before I sent it out to the person who had posted this job description, but I think that for me as a founder who has also traditionally been the salesperson it's such an effective way to use this tool because I spend so much time just you know, it's like I know all this information I know what we're good at. I know that we have relevant examples. You know, I know all this but it takes time to like resurface that knowledge and put it in a form that sounds good and is compelling, you know, to a sales prospect so that if you take one thing away, I think that you know that's like one really excellent use case of using your existing knowledge or your internal documentation. To make your life way easier.\r\n\r\nAnother related GPT prompt engineering tip is to use de limiters to clearly indicate distinct parts of the input. That just means like what I shouldn't have done here that would have made it probably a little bit easier for chat. GPT to understand what I wanted is to put this this job description text in like quotes, that's like a delimiters to say like, you know, do this to this piece of what I'm asking for to kind of like help it understand what part of the copy it's referencing. And what part of the copy is the ask, especially when you have like a longer input output, you know, whatever. Another example of that is something I learned from James rose. He is an automation and Zapier expert and has been doing a lot of interesting experiments with AI who's really good person to follow. If you're interested in just like getting ideas, he takes transcripts from like voice of customer interviews where he's getting feedback and you know, like positive testimonials and things about his product and he feeds that transcript into chat GPT and says you know, use this puts a transcript in quotes those delimiters and basically like give me like three, you know, like really nice things they said about you know, our product three like great pieces of feedback. And I think that that's such a useful way we like on our client calls on our internal meetings. We use a tool called fireflies, which automatically transcribes all our meetings, but it's still you know, it's still a lot to sort through an end fireflies has its own AI capabilities, too. So it helps to summarize and things like that, but to take to be able to use that output and quickly surface insights based on whatever your prompt is, I think is such an awesome use of AI that saves the human reader from having to go through the whole thing. So this is and I'll show you, I'll show you what this looks like in action when we do the personal GPT demonstration. But this is kind of what it looks like to set some parameters for your personnel GPT and there's two I guess like schools of thought on setting like setting parameters narrowly defining the G PTS role. So you could do this within normal chat GPT and say for this query, you know, I want you to take on this specific role. And so I got this idea from Paul Roeser. He was on some like marketing technology podcast, and he's talking about how he uses AI. And his example was like, something along the lines of like, you know, pretend that you're a lawyer that advises entrepreneur, it's about hiring law and then he gave his prompt so he kind of like set the scene like this is the narrow role that I want you to operate into this query. So that's one way that you could look at it the other way is that you could create a personal GPT that serves a specific purpose like my blacksmith sales expert, that I've already referred to and that you know, I'm kind of showing you behind the scenes, how I set it up. So as you can see here, there's like a name for it, which is kind of arbitrary. A brief description, I think, mostly for your reference. And then the instructions are like what the AI uses to then suggest answers to your prompts. So as you can see here, I'm telling it like you can use our website as your primary reference. You should be familiar with all those pages and use it to inform your responses. It'll ask you and I'll show you how you want it to communicate with you how you want it to give answers. You know what specific information you want to focus on again, like narrowing that scope. And then I also say like tailor your responses to showcase the company's strengths and successes. Using you know details from the website and emphasize why we're the ideal choice in you know, answering like sales related queries. So this is one of the greatest uses of chat GPT without narrowly defining its role and objective. You're gonna get like a wide variety of answers and that's fine. It depends on what your use cases, but by giving it a roll, I think the quality of your output goes up exponentially. And I'll show you again, at the end here, what that looks like in practice. Here's another really interesting way to use it, I think, especially if you're trying to learn a new skill or if you're trying to troubleshoot an existing workflow, which is what I was doing in this prompt. So I use air table a lot. I'm a huge fan of no code and automation in general. I've found in my life that it's really hard to find like the perfect solution to everything that I want to do. I never could find like my perfect project management tool. And so essentially, I built it between using process street air table, Zapier, and you know the other mix of ragtag tools that are in my arsenal. So in this case, I was trying to create a specific automation in air table that for some reason is just evading me and I'm sure I'm doing like one stupid thing wrong, but I asked air table or sorry, I asked Chad GPT first of all, I prompted it by telling it what automation I was trying to create, like the actions that triggers the end goal. And it gave me like a step by step process that I would say is a little bit more high level than this out, but and then I asked it to refine its guidance or expand on its guidance by saying okay, so for this step, this is where I'm getting stuck. What was how exactly what I set this up in air table, and so then, as you can see, the result has some details and it's more detailed than the previous query gave for that step. It's probably worth mentioning that in chat GPT right now, there's two versions of GPT, which is like the underlying, you know, algorithm, machine learning mechanism, whatever. So there's GPT 3.5, which is an older version, and then there's GPT for GPT four incorporates web browsing so it has more up to date guidance. So especially when you're trying to troubleshoot something like air table, which changes often and so, you know, if I were using the old version of chat GPT, I might have gotten a different answer. So when you're doing things like like this, you want to use like the newer version, there is a limitation. I think it's something like you can have 40 prompts within three hours or something like that. I don't think I've ever gotten close to hitting that. But I suppose if you were to ask, you know, a lot of follow up questions, or you're troubleshooting something very complicated, then you could hit that so that's just something to keep in mind that as a chat GPT user and I don't know what the distinction is for paid versus free, but I think that the paid version of Chad GPT is like worth its weight in gold. I think it's extremely undervalued and it's probably because they're using our data to train it. So they do get a benefit out of it. But you know, I would say if you're finding yourself limited by the free version, then just upgrade to the paid it's, it's so worth that.\r\n\r\nOkay, so now, here's the real fun part. So we're gonna go through how to build your own GPT and I'm gonna give you like a specific task to do and so you can either follow along with me while I do this now, or you can do this yourself. Later, watch the recording and replicate it. I will say the process is probably much more straightforward than you might think, if you've never done this before. So we'll go ahead and get started. Let me set my screen accordingly. So we're going to jump over to the blog Smith website, because this is going to be the basis for the very basic UBT that we're going to create today, which is based on one that I've already created and refined a little bit more than what we're going to get into. But okay, so the blacksmith has this writing style guide and on our website. It has this chapter version so you can jump you know to these different sections. To see how will we go about our writing style. It's something that's fairly industry agnostic, so definitely like a great resource. If you don't have your own writing style guide. You could use ours to build yours. But what I want to do is create a chat GPT bot based on this that essentially acts as like a blacksmith editor that defends our style and explains when a piece of copy is not following it. So we have this as a PDF which I've already downloaded. I'll just show you what it looks like really quick. And it's it's designed, but it's fairly plain texts. You know, it's not that much more complex visually than like a Google doc version of this. And I'm telling you this, because my first attempt at making a personal GPT was actually to solve a personal problem of mine, which is that I love the game Settlers of Catan and I wanted to make a Catan rules bot so that I could download all the PDFs of the rules for every version we have. And I could ask the GPT okay, like you know, here's some like obscure situation like what is the role, you know, based on these rule books? Because every once in a while, something like that pops up. And while I like to think of myself as a content expert, there are those niche situations that require further consideration. Unfortunately, on the Catan website, the PDFs that you can download are very complicated visually as PDF, so chat GPT in my limited experience has not been able to read them. So it's just something to note that like you want to give it like the plainest text version of whatever documents you want to share with it, but something like this would be fine. And I know that because I've tested it. Okay, so so if you want to follow along, you know, just hit download, and that's this is the exact file that we're going to use. So then you go to the chat GPT dashboard. Which looks like this. And like I told you, you can toggle between chat, or GPT 3.5 or GPT. Four, you can see you know those limitations as well as the added benefits of using that more recent version of it. So then you go to explore GP Ts, and you can see on my sidebar when it loads here that I have. We have chat GPT which is like you know, every every question you could ever want to ask and then I have a couple of my personal gptc here as well as some that I've explored in this explore LGBTs area that I'm just kind of playing around with. So this is also just like a really fun place to look through things, test things out and get ideas for the the GPS you might want to create. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead and click this Create button, and you'll see this interface. Again, it's pretty simple. And if you go to create, it's going to prompt you with specific questions, but if you kind of like are familiar with this personal GPT idea, you could also jump to the Configure tab and start filling it out. But I think that it's easiest to think about it from this Create Tab. And so it's going to prompt you with a couple of questions. So this first one is like what kind of chat GPT what kind of personal GPT Do you want to make? So I'm going to tell it, you know, I like to create a GPT that serves as an editor for my brand, the blog Smith. The goal is to have this GPT serve as a resource. That references our specific style guide, and suggests edits based on newly inputted copy. I'm just making this up. But the last time that I did this, I'd used something similar to that. And so after each input, it's going to think you know, it's going to react to the things that you're telling it and it's going to ask you to refine the way that it interacts with you. So we're not none of this is like rocket science right now. This is just like designing almost like the persona of who this GPT is going to be. So then it's gonna suggest to name I suggest naming this GPT blacksmith editor. Does that work for you? Sure. Yeah. And you can change this yourself. Like if you just want to, like get through this part. Just say yep, yep, that's fine. And the next thing is it's going to generate a profile picture and so these are new, they're a little bit arbitrary. It's just like for your own purposes, for fun. One thing that is kind of fun with the imagery and it doesn't always work so we'll see. But sometimes I asked it to change to adapt the picture to use like one of our brand colors just for fun. So I'll say like, can you update this image to incorporate our main brand color, which just using a text expander Simple as that? Let's do it does. So this is using that dolly dolly I never know how to say it to suggest images and, you know, it looks like Okay, right? But we're not we're not asking it to create anything like complicated at this point. So, so like for example, it didn't, it didn't really follow my query. So let's see if I try a different way. Can the image use, you know, our main branch color? Like this is this is definitely the limitation of AI is that sometimes it understands the query and sometimes it just doesn't and we won't get stuck on it. If it doesn't get it. I just want to see if changing it has any practical effect on it. So then after this, it's going to ask about Yeah, that doesn't do it. No, that's fine. Okay, so the next question. They're asking me to more narrowly defined the role of what this GPT is going to serve as I'm Oh, so I'll have you use the uploaded PDFs as this as the foundation for your edits any questions? So I can upload the PDF here. Or I can go to that configure tag and I can also tab and I can also I can also upload additional documents to help as well like with my blacksmith sales expert, I have like our proposal I have a document about our sales process. I have another GPT that I forgot to mention that's called the blacksmith like SEO guru or something like that. And it basically I uploaded a bunch of documents about our approach to SEO some stuff about our keyword research process, and our like philosophy behind the different steps as well as a document I created for our writers and editors. That's about let me see how to get out of that. That's about how we write about SEO to make sure that our philosophy is communicated correctly and specifically. So that's just an example of different documents that you might use to support the outputs here and to narrowly define what you want to base its answers on. Okay. One thing that's important to say is when you're uploading documents you want to make sure to kind of like give context and say like, this is how I want you to use it. And like, you know, I'm doing this, I'm uploading this. So I'm expecting you to use this as part of your output if you don't, if you don't refer to that document when you're setting it up or when you're interacting with it. It might just ignore it in some, in some use cases when I've been creating these personal GPS like that's happened where, for example, with this one, it'll make edits based on best practices, but not based on the document that I specifically wanted it to use. So that's why I used that language. And so it says, I've updated your GPS behavior to focus on our specific style guide based on the uploaded PDF. So that's great. You know, like, what options so one thing that it usually asks is like how do you want the GPT to communicate with you and I'm getting maybe ahead of myself, I'm gonna say no, that sounds good and see if it prompts me to ask about like the tone.\r\n\r\nOkay, so it's not gonna say it looks good, but what options do I have for how it communicates with me? In terms of tone of voice, again, usually asked so this is giving me some options here. Again, not usually in the way that it normally does. It kind of asked to like paragraph form versus like giving me several examples. I'm gonna say that I want it to be let's go with number three, which is encouraging and positive. I think that that's the ethos of how we edit at the box with the other things are true to um, yeah, so just for the sake of this, and you can always change this, you can always refine it. Okay, so it's updating the GPT. This is probably the last edit and then what I'll do is I'm going to grab some copy that I want it to, to edit just to show you how it comes full circle. And then I'm going to show you kind of like the back end of what it looks like. So let me grab that copy. I'm going to feed it an example of like a recent social post that we were editing and the formatting is going to be like a little bit funky here, which is fine, because this is just an example. And the blog the style guide isn't necessarily built with a focus on editing social copy, but again, it was just like a quick thing to to try. Okay, so it says it's updated it. It tells me you know what the point of it is no more adjustments needed. Let's try it out. Okay, so I'm going to show you how it works and then we'll show you the Configure and then we'll kind of end the day off with any questions. Okay. So it gives you some prompts based on what it thinks that you might ask it and you can edit this, but I'm going to say please suggest edits to the following copy, in quotes and quotations, those delimiters based on the blacksmith style guide PDF and again, it's gonna be a little sloppy looks like it didn't actually take the name of the GPT that we asked it to. So we'll we'll take a look at that too. So it's interesting depending on the prompt you give it and I've tried this a couple of times in this case, it's kind of separating it out by saying like okay, here's some of the things from the blacksmith style guide and here's like specific passages of copy and how we would change them. So that's interesting. But what I would probably prefer is that it edits the whole thing, and then it tells me what edits it made. So it's, again, it's referencing I can I can tell because I'm familiar with it, but it's referencing specific aspects of the blacksmith style guide, which is great, we know it's working. But what I'm going to ask you to do is to change the way it outputs it. Can you refine the previous output by starting with I might mess up exactly how to say this, but by starting with, like all of the copy with edits, then after words, shared the specific edits made from blog Smith style perspective, that might not be like the most effective prompt. We're just going to see what it says. Okay, yeah, it looks like it's understanding. Nature. The copy here is an important I just want to show you how something like this could work for your purposes. Okay, so this is what I wanted it it refined the copy first and then it told me what it refined and why. Um, so let's look at this Configure tab. So yeah, for whatever reason, it didn't add the name. That that it prompted me and asked me to so I'm gonna go ahead and add that and you can see it up here. You can see this description. You can see the instructions based on some of the things that we talked about when we were creating it. You can make changes to these conversation starters we might even say like what like other conversation starters, would you suggest using freelist UPC code? I'm just curious and I don't know what to do. You can see the PDF that we uploaded and I can upload more files. You can add additional capabilities. I think by default the web browsing and Dolly image generation is implemented for many of you today who deal with code, this code interpreter might be useful. And then AI actions is something that I've started to play around with but don't fully understand but there's a way that you can connect your personal GPT to Zapier so that for example, it could reference data and other apps. So for my blog, Smith sales GPT I'm trying to create an AI action that allows it to reference our air table CRM so that you could ask it questions about a certain lead or certain portfolio projects and things like that. So once I get that implemented, it's going to be so cool. Okay, so it's giving me some ideas for these conversation starters that are a little generic, but I could probably refine them further. I think the last thing to talk about is how you can either keep this to yourself or share it with other people. I think that these drafts are automatically saved. So if you X out of here before clicking Save, I believe it will still exist, but don't quote me on that. From there you can decide you know, if you want to, if you want to keep it to yourself if it's you know something that's for your own personal use cases, or if you want to share it with your team or if you want to share it with like the wider world like maybe you create a chatbot for your industry that other people could benefit from that you want to share. So, in most cases, probably anyone with the link is a good bet, if you ever intend intend to share it with other people. Okay, so let me jump back to my slides really quick. We're going to end off the day here. So here we go. me pull this back up. Um, okay, this is the link to grab the style guide if you want to use that to replicate what I did today. You can also grab that from the side being like um, I'll just say one more time. My book writing for humans and robots. It was the number one best seller in the SEO category. So if SEO and content is something that you want to invest more time and learning about then I would highly recommend my book. You can grab the first chapter for free on the books website, and you can grab the book on Amazon in both print and Kindle format. I'll give one more reminder for our live content UX audit tomorrow. I'd really love to help you workshop, your content, help you come up with ideas for making it even stronger and more effective. So you can use this link to do that and that will happen at the end of day two. And then, you know, outside of today, if you have any questions about the things that we're talking about, you can either email me Maddie at the blogspot.com or on Twitter, aka ex im at Mad Yasmin and then yeah, we'll end the day with any questions that have come up since going over some of this GPT stuff.\r\n\r\nYeah, great stuff. Thanks Maddie. You know, the custom GP tees are really interesting. And it's it's also not only for your own business, but also working for clients. It's an opportunity to really, it's, it's a service you can provide. We have a boy for example, that has a ton of they're an educational nonprofit and they have a ton of PDFs like 800 and an educational topic that they deal with and so we're investigating, what would it take to put those PDFs in there and then have a bot that you could query the entire library to find an answer to something right. It's just super, super useful. Yeah.\r\n\r\nOne one note on that Nathan is chat GPT. So they have a limitation of you can upload 20 Total documents but they don't say how large or small those documents have to be so OneNote for like anybody who's trying like this is something that came up with that Catan bot I was trying to make. You can combine the documents if need be.\r\n\r\nYeah. And chat CPT if you have a large library like that it might not be the best tool it sometimes there are a bunch of third party tools. I mean, if you go on App Sumo, every day, there's a new one that somebody's chat bot or whatever, but find one that the UI that you like and a lot of those don't have those limitations. Like they have a separate database that they're looking at with total sort of magic they've created. I don't know, I don't understand it. But anyway, yeah. So folks, a couple of questions stacked up there. If you have a question, add that to the zoom q&a, and we'll dive into it. So first question from Doug. Maddie, how does SEMrush or SEMrush fit into the landscape of content writing tools? What overlaps or complements with phrase? Sure,\r\n\r\nyeah. So I think of something like SEMrush or Ahrefs is being a great all in one. SEO tool. So people use it for more than content although content is like an important facet of them versus something like phrase or query scope is really just about content and just about content optimization, or, you know, in the case of like phrase and market Muse also generating content is the use case. But SEMrush I have I'll be honest, I have more experienced with a traps but they both they're both very similar and we actually use SEMrush like the keyword researchers and strategists on my team, we use SEMrush these days. But it is it is the tool that if we're comparing it to phrase and query scope, that's the tool that we use to define our primary keyword. It's before we run those reports. It's a tool that we use to come up with some secondary keywords. It's the tool that we use to identify feature snippet opportunities, we can do competitor research on it. You can do backlink tracking on it. You can audit your website. So I mean, it just it just serves such a bigger overall SEO use case. But there are many very useful content optimization tools. And so it's kind of like a higher budget tool than any of the ones that I've mentioned, but it will serve you know, many of your SEO purposes even outside of content. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nOkay, questions from Eddie. Eddie is writing tech blogs. I see now my keyword content from Reddit is ranking very good. I doubt Reddit content is helpful since usually people have vague answers to questions. What do you think about that?\r\n\r\nIt's an interesting question and I think I'm gonna take the opposite stance. I do think that Reddit content is helpful. There's something about people being like anonymous on the internet that like makes the truth come out. People feel like a little I guess like Freer with the information that they that they volunteer. And so I mean, you have to take it with a grain of salt because they're anonymous. They also might have an agenda that is not clear versus somebody who's coming out and saying, you know, I work for one of these tools or, you know, these are the clients they serve. And so that's like, why this relates to what I'm talking about. But I will say that sites like Reddit, Reddit and Quora are really interesting for learning more about your audience, learning about the things that like keep them up at night and so that's why they rank so high is because they are a wealth of information. They're not, you know, they're not using like the traditional methods to optimize their sites, but they are benefiting from all this unique user generated content because they've created communities. So, yeah, I mean, I don't I don't know exactly how to answer the question. I guess I'm kind of like answering around it, but I think that Reddit is a useful resource in general. I don't know that it can be counted on like aI right where Yeah, I can be confidently incorrect certainly. So to can, Reddit user is but they bring up some really interesting points that are worth investigating. So as long as if you are using it as a reference that you fact check, or you know, if you're I guess if the question is like, How can I outrank Reddit the the answer is like, I don't know.\r\n\r\nYou just said maybe Reddit pays Google. And honestly, we just did a story about this a week ago in our news roundup. It is actually Google who has purchased the rights to all of read its content. Alright, Gemini. Yeah, that just came out. The story last week was an unnamed AI but it's since come out that it's Google has purchased it right. So who knows? Yeah, Google does. Yeah. Doug says here's my favorite prompt. I add this to help me brainstorm chat. GPT add this to the end of your prep, ask me five questions that will improve the response you'll be giving me I use that too. It's really helpful. I\r\n\r\nlove that I I haven't considered that and that's why I think like discussions like this are so useful. Like, we can all learn so much from each other. I learned something new about this every day. For\r\n\r\nsure. The AI world is moving rapidly. And we were Mata you and I were talking earlier just we did an AI workshop here back in October, and there's so much that's new and better and different, even just in the last few months. It's pretty crazy. All right. That brings us to the end of questions. Tomorrow, we're talking about a UX content UX. So give us one more time an overview of what we're going to talk about tomorrow and we'll start to wrap things up here.\r\n\r\nOh, tomorrow. I was looking at the comments and somebody had mentioned let's say Ben had mentioned that to get them to use the right color and the GPT to be very specific, use hex color code when so I got distracted but um, okay, so tomorrow we're going to focus on the content reader experience. Content UX, another way of thinking about it. So we're going to talk a little bit about things like things that Google has said or page experience signals, so things that are like tangible that you can optimize around within your design to help your ranking on Google. And my philosophy when it comes to SEO is that there's three pillars, there's like the content and the things that you can affect on your own page. There's the website structure, so that's going to be a lot of what we talk about tomorrow. And then there's things like Off Page signals like backlinks, which we won't talk about, but you know, we can always have a discussion later or, you know, I'm sure Nathan will bring on somebody who talks about that at some point, too. So yeah, we'll talk about these like website signals, these page experience signals. We'll talk a little bit about website structure, things that you can do to create a better experience for your users, even if it's not necessarily something that Google takes into consideration for ranking and some things that they do. And then we will talk about auditing, you know, with practical tools and specifics, your contents, the nature of your contents UX. I'll tell you how to like run your own content UX audit, whether that's with tools or with people in person. And so that'll be that'll be kind of the nature of what we talk about tomorrow. Trying to bring that discussion full circle from the specific things that you can use to how to like measure if you're using them effectively, and then we'll end the day with a content UX audit from the things that ideally, y'all have submitted. So if you haven't, please use that form that we've linked to in that slide. Being link, and then I'll pick a couple for us to go over tomorrow.\r\n\r\nYep, very good. And that link is there in the chat. Once again, make sure you submit a URL that was a lot of fun last year when we did that very info wise. Yeah. So I will take care of that. Tomorrow. That's yeah, day two. All right. Maddie, good stuff today. As always, we'll have the recording up if anybody wants to go back and replay if you came in late. It'll be up in about an hour or so soon as it renders. And I will see you back here tomorrow, one o'clock central time for day two of content workshop. Have a good night. See you then.\r\n\r\nHear but as you're coming in, we're just asking what was your biggest takeaway from day one? You can sound off there in the chat. I'm also dropping in the new link bundle, I can type correctly. There is a new slide being linked, so make sure you grab that new one. It is updated on the replay page. But make sure you grab that new link because a few changes have been made since yesterday. That will let you follow along better.\r\n\r\nSome last minute tool suggestions. Ah,\r\n\r\nlove it. Love it all. Right, catch. Working for everybody now. Just about a minute and a half to go and again, we'd love to hear from you in the chat on what your biggest takeaways from day one we're. As we are waiting just another minute or so to get started. Also the link there for the live content UX audit is on the screen because we have a slide or two left if you'd like to submit your site or page or something for a content audit. It'll be a friendly review with with some good help to help you improve some of your language. So use that link. The link is in the link bundle in the chat. There on the screen. We do have a couple of slots if you'd like to participate in that. So Vivian, if you look at the replay link in the link bundle the academy link there is a PDF download link on that on the on the replay page. And that is the new updated slides. Yep, so that's all there ready to go on the replay page or you can view them on slide being right now. Yeah, not too many changes. New tools. All I was new to was fun tools. Yeah. Alright folks, about 30 seconds to go. Glad everybody's back for day two. Again, our check in question. Let us know in the chat. What your biggest takeaway from day one was? Particularly did you have you used any new GPT prompts since we played around with that yesterday, or has anybody taken the dive and made your own custom GPT based on\r\n\r\nor have any ideas for things that you want to try when you have time? Yeah, I could. I could use some more ideas myself. Yeah.\r\n\r\nFor sure. All right, folks. It is three minutes after someone to start our recording and we will get underway. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everybody, wherever you happen to be welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here and joined again by MADI. Azzaman for day two of the content accelerator for 2024 Welcome back. Maddie. Glad you're here.\r\n\r\nThank you so much for having me. Again. It's exciting to dig into some of these topics.\r\n\r\nAbsolutely. So we had a lot of fun yesterday talking about some AI stuff and some great principles for creating great content. And today we're looking more at the the user side of consuming content right what are we going to talk about today? Exactly.\r\n\r\nYeah, I think that you can think of today as being a way to practically test your content, whether that's with other people, whether that's with tools, understanding how it measures up against some of the guidelines that Google has shared, that are necessary for ranking, specifically when they have to do with the user experience. So we're going to kind of attack this from all angles. And, you know, hopefully it'll leave today with some really tangible tools to help you understand like, does your content provide a great reader experience? Or are there things that you could do to improve it?\r\n\r\nYeah, very good. And we do still have this content UX link on the screen. If you have not filled that out and you would like to there's still a slot or two left for the second hour, we'll do some live content review. So grab that now. The link is there in the chat as well. A couple little bits of housekeeping and we'll turn it back over to Matty as usual. Ask your questions using the zoom q&a And we'll take those questions at the end of each hour today. break in the middle as usual. One note is that the slides have been updated since yesterday. So in the chat is the new slide being link. And if you want the PDF download, just go onto the replay page with the link there and the link bundle and you can download the PDF there as well that has all the new updates on the slides. So with that, I'm going to disappear Maddie, let's get started.\r\n\r\nLet's do it. So yeah, if if you want to submit something for this live content UX audit, ideally, it's like a page on your website, not not something like a PDF, because we want to look at how the content interacts with design. And like Nathan said, you know, it's a friendly review. We're not like looking for issues. We're just looking for things that you could do to perhaps improve the content experience. Get another set of eyes on it. And it's just a practical way to apply some of the tools suggestions I'm going to give you so with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. We're going to start today by talking about Google guidelines for what makes up a great user experience, especially when it has to do with content and specifically we're going to talk from the perspective of Google's quality rater guidelines. And then after I go through a couple specifics there, we're going to talk more broadly about Google's page quality signals. I think that's what it's called. I haven't labeled in the next slide but things that have to do with what they've told us influenced ranking high and relevant search, you know, all else equal, if you have great content, what aspects of your website design, you know, must be present of your website structure must be present in order for you to rank high and relevant search. So the first part is a little bit more I would say qualitative. And then the second part is going to be a little bit more quantitative. So the learn more link is for an article I wrote a while back for Search Engine Journal. This was specifically focusing on aspects of Google's quality rater guidelines that have to do with the user experience. And so I think it was a couple of years ago now I read through the entire quality rater guidelines, which if you're interested in SEO, and user experience, I would highly recommend at least giving it a skim. It's kind of hard to do because it's like 175 pages, but there's some really good nuggets in there about how Google looks at search, how they judge quality of content, how they determine if a page of a search result meets the needs of the searcher who's looking for it. And so the quality rater guidelines what's worth mentioning is that to some extent you have to take with a grain of salt because this is not something that directly influences rankings. What happens is human quality raters that they hire read through these guidelines, they're tested on them to make sure that they understand what Google is looking for and then they manually rate different website results based on a certain query. And so what happens is that Google gets that information. It helps them you know, refine their algorithm in terms of the general direction they want to take with it, but it doesn't necessarily result in any manual adjustments for whatever websites they're ranking. It's it's more of like a research process. So that's, that's what the quality rater guidelines are. They're a tool to help Google research what the web looks like right now in order to make decisions about how they want to adjust their algorithm for the rest of us. But all that being said, Whenever Google gives us information, whenever they volunteer details about how they look at search, and how they define quality, and like a great user experience, I think that we would be wise to take note of that if it is in fact our goal to rank in relevant search. And I think at the end of the day, whether it is or not, I think Google tries to maintain a high standard for quality. I think that it's their philosophy, philosophy, that content is king, you know that that good? Content is important. And so again, whether search is your goal or not, it's worth it's worth at least like listening to what they have to say. And so, for your benefit, I've tried to break down some of the most important things from the quality rater guidelines specifically having to do with the topic that we are discussing today. So the first thing that they mentioned or they they talk about the quality rater guidelines has to do with interstitials. So back in, it was either 2017 or 2018. They made an update to their algorithm, and they told us about it is again one of those rare cases where they're just upfront. And they said that like if you're using popups say, for example, to gather somebody's email address, or you know, it maybe you're on an E commerce site to advertise the sale, something that obscures the content that you have to interact with you either put your email in, or you have to click the X button, you know, something like that, that you have to interact with in order to use the content on the page. They call that an intrusive interstitial. And so what happened was it really it really resulted in a big change for how people use conversions, I guess on their website, so you know, bloggers and people who do affiliate marketing and of course, yeah, ecommerce, and businesses trying to get email subscribers all had to fundamentally change the way that they approach gathering email addresses. And I'm going to talk a little bit later about what you can do instead, that doesn't violate Google's guidelines. But again, from Google's perspective, they say that interstitials make it difficult to use the main content of the page. And so when they're talking in the quality rater guidelines, they frequently refer to MC main content, which is like what the searcher is ultimately going to your website for and so you could say generally speaking, that they're trying to defend the experience of the main content. And to like, skip ahead to the point here about ads, when they talk about ads, that Google recognizes that and they say this in the quality rater guidelines, that ads don't automatically equate to low quality, they understand that ads are in many cases, the reason a site can continue existing. But that being said, there is like a right and a wrong way to go about implementing them. And so they say the too many or like large ads hurt the user experience. And then that case, the human quality raters should assign that site that result, a low rating. So again, you want to think in terms of the main content is the ad obscuring it? Is it taking away from it? If not, you're probably okay. But it's just good. To keep in mind that Google's not saying no, you can't have ads. You just have to be thoughtful about it. And when I did some of these UX audits in the past, like the ones that we're going to do later today, I did a couple of for some members of the Denver bloggers club one of the local clubs that I've been involved with here. And one thing I noticed about a lot of them was you know that they'd have an ad in the sidebar, they'd have an ad in their footer. They'd have an ad a couple times throughout their blog content, and it was probably Google Adsense that they were using, or some other ad network. Like it. And again, it's like I understand that you're monetizing your site using ADS. But at the end of the day, it's probably working against you because people if you were to look, you know into the data like the scroll depth and the time on page and things like that, using Google Analytics, for example. You probably see that on those pages that are very heavy with ads that people abandon the page pretty quickly because it's just a bad reader experience. So to go back a point here, clickbait Google has a couple of pieces of guidance in the quality rater guidelines about that specifically.\r\n\r\nGenerally speaking, a good page sets expectations or good title sets expectations for wherever it's leaving you. And so clickbait is something that it can certainly be effective and getting attention and getting clicks, but it can be a very unsatisfying experience if it doesn't do something to deliver on the promise made in the title. Um, the Google specifically says that clickbait headings detract from high main content. So, you know, that's something that they're specifically looking for and guiding people to, to comment on. And they say also that like every page should have a page title. It shouldn't just be presented without buttoning it up that way. And that title should describe page content. So again, it's a balance. Writing a good title, I think is very much in art. But it shouldn't be misleading. That's that's the key here. Um, so the last point here is that when it comes to creating content, you want the answer to your query to be pretty prominent in the results. You don't want people to click through and then have to dig to find that. And Google has a couple of different SERP features, I would say where they're trying to, you know, first of all, answer this within search so that you don't click through, which is a problem for us content creators, but it's also perhaps an opportunity when we think about things like a Featured Snippet, which is just that sort of box that shows up above any other search results and it's usually summarizing kind of like the nature of what that person is looking for what Google thinks that person is looking for. There's other things like Google will index parts of a page and link to that specific part and highlight it you probably noticed that yourself when doing search and looking for something very specific. And so that's something that they do, it's not, to my knowledge, it's not something that you can necessarily optimize for. It's it's their methodologies of indexing and surfacing content. But the example that they gave in the quality rater guidelines was something about like somebody searching Abraham Lincoln's birthday. And when somebody clicked through like it was present on the page, but it wasn't prominently answered. And so in that case, they were instructing the human quality rater to give that like a not as good rating for meeting the needs of the searcher. So yeah, I mean, definitely, that's, that's kind of most of what I'm going to say about the quality rater guidelines. But I really think it is a very interesting document and especially if you look at the examples they give in terms of how they're making those determinations. There's a lot of little nuggets of truth and we also have a blog post on the blacksmith website that digs into this even outside of like the user experience sort of and like design focus. So if you want another take on that then definitely check that out. We just went in and updated it recently. So let's talk more broadly now about some search signals from Google things that Google has told us about the page experience and you know, importantly, I think how to how to like measure that, quantitatively. Google, we talked a little bit about helpful content yesterday and that algorithm update which was the year a year and a half ago, something like that. Google has been has said that a good page experience is a requirement. For creating what they define as helpful content. So you know, all these algorithm updates are designed to support Google's mission, you know, the way that they look at content quality and things like that, of course, they all you know, more or less feed into each other, but I think it's worth mentioning that like that is an aspect of having helpful content. Alright, so we're gonna start with what is collectively known as the core web vitals so the core web vitals, this algorithm update, or Google announcing this page signal? came about? I want to say it was 2021. So they've been around for a while. And interestingly, and what we'll go over is they have changed slightly since coming out. But the idea here was to give people these these three specifically, page signals, were to give people more tangibility around how to measure the the page experience. Because up until that point, it was a little bit innocuous, it was hard to conceptualize, in terms of knowing like where you actually rank according to Google's own way of looking at it. So the first page signal of the quarter web vitals is the largest Contentful paint, which is a facet of page loading, loading speed. And so their definition is that it reports the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport relative to when the page first started loading. So if we think about I think most of these core web vitals are more or less referring to like above the fold, like what you see before you scroll, it's like that first impression that a person has with your website and most designs, most tools that you use to optimize loading and things like that, typically are set up so that the rest of the page loads later but you want you know what's visible initially to load quickly and first so that people can start interacting with it, and then it gives time for the rest of the page to load. So another way of thinking about this is that this signal takes note of the largest element on every web page and measures its total loading. Time. So maybe this is an image, maybe it's video, you know, typically at some, I would say some sort of media thing, but it could be your theme in general, it could be a very slow loading plugin. So these are all things that you'd want to keep in mind in terms of optimizing this particular factor. And when I say I guess, like the theme and plugins, it's like the output of them that you would implement on your page. So okay, so how do you get a good largest Contentful paint so according to Google, whatever this largest element is, is about 2.5 Seconds or Less of loading time and you have a little bit of wiggle room here, before it gets to, you know, this like poor area, but you'll notice that it's not a super long time. And I think that this particular man measurement here, it relates to something that Google's said before and shared in their own documentation, which is that, you know, the majority of people bounce if a website doesn't load within three seconds or less. I'm sure that that guidance has changed over time because that's a dated stat. But it still goes to show that we're kind of like within that guideline, with this particular measurement of a particular element on a page. So the next one is first input delay, and this is actually what it was. This has since been updated. And I'm going to show you an example of what this looks like. But let's let's talk about like the original intent of it and then what it has become. So first input delay is a measure of interactivity. It measures the time from when a user first interacts with the page to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction. So that sounds like gibberish. Basically, the lower a website's fid score, the more promptly it starts processing users clicks and swipes again, interactivity like how long does it take for somebody to actually be able to use a page? So this measurement per Google, a good fit is 100 milliseconds or less. So that's what it was right? But what is it now? So this GIF kind of shows an example of poor responsiveness versus good responsive responsiveness from Google's perspective, but probably from all of us, as users as well and looking at it you you probably have been in this position before where like, you click on something and then there's this little bit of a delay before you are actually able to interact with it. And so Google essentially took took this concept that they had initially defined as a core web vital and added some color to it, I guess. And so the new measurement is that it's, it's below or at 200 milliseconds. That so up from I think, what was it 100 before so they're giving you a I guess a little bit more time to create interactivity here. And just so you know, this new measurement is actually not fully unveiled yet, but it will be as of March. 12th. That's when this takes effect and takes over. So they say that, you know, some interactions will actually take longer than others. But when it comes to especially complex interactions, you want to be able to quickly present some initial initial visual feedback so that the user knows that something is happening\r\n\r\nthe time until the next payment is the earliest opportunity to do this. So the intent is not to measure like every eventual effect of the interaction, but the time in which the next interaction is being blocked. So you essentially want to delay you want to if you are delaying some visual feedback, then you might be giving users the impression that the page isn't responding to their actions, which is ultimately a bad user experience, right. So the goal of this new measurement is to ensure the time from when a user initiates an interaction until the next frame is painted in the shortest time as possible, for all or at least most of the interactions the user make. So it might seem like a small distinction between the first input delay and the interaction to Next paint but I guess if we were to summarize them, the first input delay is really focusing on that initial interaction. And the interaction to Next paint is focusing on the difference between interactions. I think that's one way to look at it. Okay, so then the last core web vital is related to visual stability. And it's called cumulative layout shift. And so their definition Google Developers definition is that it measures the sum total of all individual layout shifts scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan. of the page. Okay, but what does that mean? So Visual stability means that a web page remain stable throughout the users visit. It means that text isn't suddenly moving as new elements load or shifting other elements of the page and I think the the unfortunate end result of when this is bad, is when it makes the user click a link or perhaps a buy button or something like that, unintentionally, they were trying to click something but because of something shifting after it loaded, it pushed them somewhere else. And again, this is probably something where either something comes to mind where that's happened to you or like, the next time it does, then you'll be like, oh, yeah, that was the cumulatively out shift the site is getting, it probably has a pretty bad score for that. Um, so with the core web vitals, visual stability became more of a priority. And you really have to have very minimal minimal instability in order for your pages to be considered for ranking high in a relevant search engine results page. So those are the core lead vitals, that's probably the newest addition to these page signals that relate to the content experience, but we're also going to go over some of the old like, you know, tried and true important things that have to do with page experience, such as mobile friendliness. I mean, this is something this is probably one of the first big things that Google told us was important for ranking, high and relevant search. Besides maybe page load, I think Page Speed like performance and mobile friendliness, like these are things that kind of happened around the same time in terms of a Google like, came out and said, like, you must prioritize these if you want to rank. So Google used to be a desktop first indexing property. But you know, as more and more people started using their mobile devices, you know, the iPhone came out and so now suddenly, everybody had a computer in their hand. And then another thing that's probably worth considering too, is like a lot of people in developing countries like they might not have a desktop or like a laptop computer, but most people have a mobile phone at this point. And so Google now operates off of the idea, or off of the principle, I guess, of mobile first indexing. So if your website is not optimized properly for mobile responsiveness for mobile devices, then that is going to hurt it's going to greatly hurt your ability to rank and relevant search and your desktop site could look perfect. It can rank perfectly in terms of all these other factors that Google tells us about. But if your mobile site is off, it's it's going to affect your desktop rankings as well. So, you know, going into all of the specifics of what's mobile friendly is kind of outside the scope of what we're going to talk about today. But I mean, it's things like making sure that your text is readable. It's making sure that your images are, you know, visible and processable that they don't get skewed strangely. It's you know, thinking about some of those core web vitals and like how elements interact with each other like our buttons too close together so that people are hitting the wrong thing. So all these things are are considerations for making your website mobile friendly. And I think you know, with the way that things like page builders, builders for WordPress work, the way that people design themes for WordPress. This is this is like very much top of mind for everyone who's designing for WordPress. So it's a lot easier to implement now versus perhaps when this update was first released into the world. So Safe Browsing is something that I they've actually taken out of what they call these like page experience factors, like I don't know if it's an official one anymore, it was in the past. And maybe it's because now we have HTTPS as an additional factor that's kind of related but I think it's still worth mentioning this from a content experience factor. So Safe Browsing is just that you can use a website that is free of malware, you know, that you can be like, reasonably sure that like malware isn't present, you're not going to get it you're not going to interact with it, and that it's not you know, affecting the output of whatever site it could be installed on. And so in order to protect yourself against this, there's different tools you could use. wordfence is a customer of mine, so I'm going to talk about them and I think that their tool and their team is great. They have a lot of cool security researchers and cybersecurity experts on their team. So they're very on top of like any new things that come out, but they have this product called wordfence care where they'll go in they'll identify them all where they'll clean it up for you and we'll share best practices for how to avoid it in the future and you know, additional steps that you can take. So I do think that you need some sort of tool on your website in order to prevent, you know, the worst effects of malware. And I guess the other thing that I would mention too, is to like always have backups of your site, because malware can really mess things up. And so that's that's like your first line of defense. So HTTPS also has to do, I guess, essentially the same idea of like Safe Browsing, maybe from a slightly different perspective. And so Google again said, you know, we're not going to rank websites that do not have HTTPS in place compared to those that do. You know, after that update happened, and that was a slightly more recent update, but it was still a few years ago, and so HTTPS in order to implement that, essentially, you just install an SSL certificate. And to be fair, there are different types of SSL certificates. Most web hosts have that functionality, where you can fairly easily implement one and then it creates either automatically or there might be some manual steps. You have to take where it it redirects your existing HTTP URLs to the HTTPS version. So that's important to make sure that that's working. Otherwise, it's going to break your site but again, most web hosts have a fairly straightforward process for implementing this and a free ssl certificate or I should say an included one with your hosting plan, but depending on your needs, you might need a different one. So that's something that you have to explore based on your industry like, like E commerce might have a higher level of SSL certificate needed, but for you know, the general small business owner designer, things like that, probably what your web host has is good enough. And so to be able to see if HTTPS is working within Chrome specifically and I'm sure many other web browsers but but chrome because it's a product of Google. There's a little button next to your domain name in the URL bar, and you can click it and see that the SSL certificate is working and that the connection is secure and I would say that SSL certificates in HTTPS are important for people who are interacting with the website. I mean, you kind of you kind of have to have it no matter what in order to rank but they're the purpose of it is that if somebody were to be giving their sensitive information, you know if they're on an E commerce site, and they're, you know, putting in their address or their credit card number or you know, a banking website and people are logging in, and you know, once they log in, that user has access to their bank accounts and their money and things like that. That's kind of the like, ideal use case of HTTPS is to protect the people who are entering that sensitive information to make them feel safe on your website.\r\n\r\nWe talked about this earlier, having no intrusive interstitials so these are the pop ups the image you see is something that Google shared when they announced this ranking signal to show what not to do, essentially where these ads are obscuring access to the main content. You shouldn't have to click in order to get to the main content. So what do you do instead? Here are a couple of examples from the blacksmith website. So the first one is we have a floating bar that basically is at the top of the content and then just pushes it down. And in this case, I used it to add like reminder about my book, a button to click to buy it you could use it to get email signups. I think another great example is like E commerce. If you're having a sale or if you want to say, you know, free shipping on orders over $50 or something like that. I think that's a really excellent use of a floating bar. It's like what's the most important thing happening for this business right now or use it to collect email signups? Then there's also next to it is a welcome mat, which is designed you know, very similar lead to how an email popup would look but the difference is that it's like embedded on the page. So it's not getting in the way of the content. It's part of the content. You can choose whether or not you interact with it beyond scrolling. Another version of that is a content upgrade. So on certain blog posts, let's say that you have additional resources, maybe you've turned that blog post into a checklist or there's a certain template that you're talking about in the blog posts, and people you want to incentivize people to share their email in order to access it. So having a content upgrade, which again is like an embedded version, at the end of your blog post about that specific resource is a totally valid way to see get emails that's not going to violate this intrusive interstitial guidance from Google. The other thing that you can think about is using email popups, but delaying when they pop up. So that kind of gets around Google's guidance. You could use what's called like exit intent technology. So when somebody scrolls for the Back button, or the, you know, X in the browser, then what happens is an email popup gets deployed where you know, it asks for somebody if they want to subscribe, for example. You can also use that same idea based on things like scroll depth, if somebody gets to a certain depth on a page, you know, that tends to indicate interest. It's given them a chance to interact with the content. Or you could have a deploy on certain pages. You ideally after they've seen other pages, so maybe after they've gone to a certain number of pages that deploys. So there's there's a couple of different ways to think about it that don't get in the way of Google's guidance. And we do have a page I forgot to link it here. But we do have a blog post on the blacksmith website that goes into each of these things and different use cases and things like that a little bit dated, but it's all the same advice. Okay, so now that we've talked about Google's quality raters guidelines, which is indirectly related to search rankings, and Google's page experience signals, which are directly related to search rankings, I wanted to talk a little bit about website structure and design I would say, especially as it relates to ranking high in relevant search, but certainly how it impacts the content user experience. So it's kind of like a mix of the things that we're talking about, but expanding on them as well. So the first like factor that you want to optimize your website around your content in general, is crawlability. And when I talked about crawlability, I'm talking about Google's ability to like fully index all the resources on your site. Is there anything that is getting in the way of Google doing that, like, for example, errors in your sitemap, like maybe you're unintentionally excluding certain pages? Maybe you know, you haven't created enough connections between your pages for Google to understand how they relate to each other. And so a couple of guidelines here, you know, first of all, is that when you're creating content, it's important to add external links. Think of these as your ability to add context to prove claims these are things that you know, you can also use let's say that you're writing about a topic and there's a related topic and it doesn't really make sense for you to cover it in your content. Like maybe it would just make your your piece go on too long. But it's something that people might want to learn more about. So you find a relevant resource from a trusted site and you link it External links are great. I mean, you might, I guess, worry. Like, is that going to lead people away from my page? You know, is there any like negative impact of that? I think that's just kind of the way that content works, that people are always looking for more information. You can set it so that it opens in a new window so that they're still on your page while they explore that content. But yeah, as the best practice, have an external linking policy, it makes sure it's to good quality content and I think that, like with this next point, it helps Google understand what your content is about. So besides external resources, you also want to incorporate internal links. This just helps Google understand the relationships between the different pieces of content on your website, ultimately, what your website is about. It's helping with that crawl ability and that index ability. It's helping Google as robot to understand, you know, these different connections. So again, it's important really to have these two types of links and really every page and relate certainly every piece of content. And then, the flip side of all this is like as you create content, things are going to change. External links might become broken. Internal links, you might change, you know, like for example, the URL slug of them, and they might become broken. So I guess my first tip is to make sure that you have some sort of redirect solution implemented, there are different plugins that you can use to automatically if you change the URL slug of something, then it creates a redirect so anything that already links to a will be updated to that new link. But it's also having a process for like auditing your content to look for these problems. And one of the tools that I'm going to show you later today will help make that a little bit easier. But it's also just a matter of like I don't know, quarterly at least, or depending on the size of your website, quarterly, maybe every six months or so, having just a process to kind of go through what exists and if you need to fix anything. So we're talking a little bit about URL structure and I will say when it comes to creating content, you want to be pretty sure of the URL you want to use before you publish it. Because it is a factor in ranking, and you can use redirects, but it's kind of hard to explain them in the context of what we're talking about today without getting deep into SEO, but it's just generally like to trust me that it's a best practice to not mess with the URL after you publish, you know, after it gained some traction in search and things like that. But it happens and that's why you use redirects. But that being said, you could at least start with best practices. So the first thing is to incorporate your target keywords in that slug. So like yesterday, I showed you some tools we use for an article we wrote about AI detectors, so let's just pretend the keyword is like aI detector tools. You'd want that to be the slug. Without really like any extra information. You want to keep your URLs as succinct as possible so that Google doesn't have to take a lot of extra time to parse them. And so what that means is within within WordPress, you can customize your URL structure for blogging. And you can do things like add categories to the URL, you can add the date to the URL. My suggestion is to not do that the only reason that you might want to add like a subdirectory within your blog content or some other specific category, like if you have case studies or something like that, is because you can use that subdirectory to group pieces of content together to measure them in like Google Analytics GA for these days. But that's kind of an advanced use case and that's only if you plan on actually like doing a deep dive into the analytics. From an SEO perspective, I highly recommend against it. It should be your website url.com forward slash keyword. And when you're implementing those keywords, you're going to want to add a dash between each word so if the keywords AI detector tools, it's a i dash detector dash tools\r\n\r\nfor certain things like articles, a and words like the things that aren't, you know, specific keywords generally speaking, you can drop those when you're creating the slug. We have some guidelines on the style guide that I shared with you yesterday on the bugs with website that's also linked in the slides so or the PDF as well. So if you if you want to dive into more SEO and URL and keyword best practices and definitely check out our guidance on that. Um, duplicate content is worth mentioning from this perspective of the user experience mostly in terms of how Google would interpret that. So generally speaking, duplicate content is like you publish a blog on your website and then a situation that could come up that seems innocuous enough is that you know, somebody in your industry says oh my god, I loved your blog posts on whatever, I'd love to republish it on my site. And you say okay, and then maybe this site, you know, has more authority than you and maybe they have a better approach to SEO, maybe they've just been around longer. And what could end up happening is that even though you were the original publisher, and Google does take that into consideration, but this other site may outrank you with your own same content. So that's duplicate content. It could be a whole blog post, it can be an excerpt of it, it could be like a piece of it. So duplicate content, generally speaking, like try to avoid that. You can add a tag to your link called the canonical tag, which basically points back to the original content and says, This is the person this is the site that originally published it, even though we have now published it here. And so Google takes that into consideration, but they really make their own choices about who they're going to rank and so that that's not the be all end all way of making sure that the original publisher ranks highest in search, all else equal. Um, with all that being said, in my experience, you can typically republish things like your blog content on mediums like LinkedIn and medium you know, original copy without making changes. As long as you wait, I would say at least a week from the original published date to do that. This is this is my experience and that saying that it's completely scientific, the advice that I'm giving you, it's something that you should experiment with, if that's something that you're interested in, but also take note of what ends up happening and discontinue if it's getting in the way of ranking your own content on your own website. But when it comes to duplicate content, if you if you get approached by someone, you know, like the example that I gave, who wants to republish something that you wrote, what would be a better situation for you? It would be more work, but it's to say like, let me write a new version of this article, like maybe you take another stance on it, maybe you you just kind of like repurpose it in a different way. I would highly recommend against duplicating your content, either on another page on your website, such as using product descriptions that like a manufacturer provided or maybe you have, you know, two variations of something and so you're using almost the same product description or again, like the example that I gave doing it on another site, so I just wanted to add a cautionary tale for duplicate content because a it is kind of a bad user experience, but be it'll also more than likely hurt you in search without a very strategic approach. And then the last thing I want to say on this particular topic is about designing website navigation and best practices around that. So first of all, you want to use descriptive and recognizable menu item titles. And the example that I always give for this is the difference between something that's called news and something that's called blog. So in my in my experience, news is like an enterprise business that has a media arm and they're publishing their press releases and, you know, things that are relevant to their company, new product updates, things like that. Whereas blog is more articles. It's you know, the how tos. It's the list of coals. Its product lead content, for example, but it's not exclusively focused on that company's news. So it's important, I think, to match the heuristics of what your users are used to and one way that you might be able to figure this out if you're unsure is just kind of see like what the competition is doing and how they're naming their menu items. Or just ask some of your users like, Does this make sense? And we'll talk next about how to conduct a UX audit and that's something that you could do as part of it. There's this thing called the three click rule, which you may have heard about. Nielsen Norman Group actually debunked this as being like ideal or even something that you should totally consider. It's the number three is arbitrary, I guess is what I'm trying to say. But it's the idea that within three clicks, a user searching or user looking for something will find it through your website navigation without necessarily having to go to like an internal search. So well, it's arbitrary. I think it's still a good thing to keep in mind, which is just that people should be able to easily and quickly find what they need your your menu should support that. And then creating category grouping. So like for example, on our website, we have a Resources tab and it has the blog, it has some of like my YouTube content. It has our style guide. All of these are resources they have to do with like things that we're sharing with other people versus we have another tab that's about our work. And so it has case studies and like portfolio examples, and it's more focused on like Final outputs that you know, fit, you know, things that we do with certain clients. So just a couple of things to think about in terms of website navigation. I'm going to start this topic and then we'll break I think maybe in like five minutes from now, but I'll just go ahead and get this started. So let's talk a little bit now that you've learned about these different factors for how to understand user experience from, from the user's point of view from Google's point of view. Let's talk about how you can continue to make your own websites user experience better by implementing a UX audit. So UX audit, we might also call it a user tests. I think they're maybe slightly different concepts, but I'm going to use them interchangeably today. So usability testing involves observing how users interact with products like your websites. The purpose is to get a better understanding of how real people use what you've designed. And really the idea here is you want to combat any assumptions that you've made incorrectly, which is impossible for you to figure out by yourself. That's why we pull in other people. You can use your tests during just about any stage of project it doesn't have to be like the final part. It could really be during the wireframing stage. It could be you know at the midpoint it could be even after you've launched but you've added some new things. So why bother with UX audits? First of all, we're talking about it today because there's a strong relationship between the user experience and SEO. I think we've proven that by talking about specific elements of the quality rater guidelines that point to UX, as well as the page experience factors that Google's specifically told us. If you care about SEO, you should care about UX in terms of things like your page, loading your mobile responsiveness, and using things like HTTPS. To invoke privacy for your users information. It also allows you to uncover issues that might kill conversions. I mean, I think this is one of the most important use cases of a UX audit is to look for things that are getting in the way of whatever your end goal is with the website. Because we're all WordPress users here, probably most of us at least, you've probably interacted with whether it's your own design or somebody else's that where you recognize that somebody forgot to edit the demo content they've, you know, implemented it and they've gone in and made their changes. But you know, there's that hello world post they forgot to delete or there's something you know, and one of the menus, maybe the footer menu that they forgot to take out that, you know, they never actually customized and so I think UX audit would be good at surfacing that if you're if you're kind of blind to it, because you're too close to the project. And with all that being said, a UX audit helps to get out of your own head. We're all human, we're imperfect.\r\n\r\nAnd really, I mean, it's it's easy to say I think when it comes to writing content, like as much as like, I have a process for editing and looking for mistakes and things like that. Like I still use an editor whenever I write anything, because I need to get out of my own head in order to make sure that I'm not missing something important. So the same can certainly be said about about website design and doing UX audits. So at the end of the day, we all operate based on certain assumptions, but what if yours are wrong? I'll just go through another slide or two and then we'll break so in terms of picking user testers, there's a couple of different populations you could consider. And I'm also going to share a couple of different like marketplaces where you could find these people, but you can start with the people that already exist in your circle your colleagues, you know, the people that you work with, but also maybe your friends and your family members. Wow, this is a great place to start. Don't discount the impact of their own bias and desire to please you, especially if you're asking your mom for input she's probably not going to be super critical. And and you know, it's going to be more of a pat on the back then something useful. And even like people like your work colleagues, they they still may be too close to a project to provide useful feedback, but it's a good place to start. You can also recruit volunteers from your own audience. Again, they might have a bias if they really love you. They might be hesitant to give you really great feedback. But they're also probably very willing to help you make something that's better. So you can start with like your brand ambassadors, anybody who would consider themselves your biggest fans, things like that. Ultimately, though, your best bet is going to be unbiased third parties who don't know you, you know, who don't have like a stake in what you're doing. I would say ideally, if you could get a couple people from that pool and then maybe one or two people from these other pools of populations, you'll get a couple of different perspectives. And when it comes to some of the marketplaces that I'm going to show you, you can also filter by certain demographics, you know, age, gender, level of education, like whatever is important to like the target audience that you want feedback from, generally speaking, you can filter and on those people. Maybe we'll just go to the top of the hour, and then we'll and then we'll definitely break then. So how many user testers are enough for each design stage? I've mentioned a couple different populations you could pick from. This is another Nielsen Norman Group reference. They are a really great resource when it comes to anything user experience user testing and things like that. And so Jacob Nielsen wrote this column and he the column was titled Why you only need to test with five users. So that's his official recommendation is for each stage that you test five users is going to be more or less enough you're going to get marginal returns marginal new information after that point. So you know, unless you're getting wildly different things from those five user testers, you can probably stop it there. He also says that it's best to involve a larger quantity of user testers earlier on in the project if you're going to test during like the wireframing stage. Versus like, when a website's like basically ready to launch it's going to be harder to make noticeable and useful changes at that point. It's going to be kind of locked in. So I think that that makes sense. Um, so we'll just start with some of the questions that you might use. When designing usability testing, it is important to to be thoughtful about this before you start you you don't want to just like go into a blind and just, you know, like, what do you think of this website? You want to have a strategic approach if you want to get useful information? So my suggestion is to start start by defining whatever your goals are, I mean, is there something in particular that you're looking to test? Are you wanting to make sure that this design is understandable to your target demographic? Is there something that isn't currently working with the design, something that's maybe hurting conversions? So whatever your goal is, like set that intention, and the questions will come more easily after that? You want to also be asking questions about the tester and how they interact with the Internet. And there's a couple of reasons for this. So one example is like you could ask the person what kind of smartphone do you use and asking this particular question is good because it kind of gauges like their familiarity with technology like how they're going to interact with your design. Somebody who uses a flip phone, for example, is probably going to have a much different level of internet savviness and how they interact with the design versus somebody who has like the latest gadget as their device. The other benefit of this question is to especially if you're doing an in person test is to kind of relax them. It's kind of like a little bit of small talk almost so that they can ease into the test, especially if that's not something that they often do. You want to define a specific action for the user to take. So this goes back to the goals. Let's say that, you know, you have an E commerce site that you're testing and you know, there's some sort of issue with people abandoning the cart, you know, after they add some products and so maybe you want to have that person go through the action of adding something, and then starting checkout. And seeing like, where in the process, there's friction, that could be one action that you want them to take. And so at this point, you want to ask them how they go about it, have them sort of like narrate and explain as they go through each step. The more you can dig into each specific action that the user takes the more detailed insight that you'll get as to how they're actually using your website. So I think with that being said, we have a couple more questions that we could talk about, but I think now is probably a good time to let everybody take a little bit of a break. And then after that, we'll finish this discussion of how to run a UX audit. I'm going to give you a bunch of tools to use to do your own tests. yourself, essentially. And then we'll finish off with that live content UX audit. Sounds\r\n\r\nlike a good idea. No questions in the q&a right now. So let's just go and take that break. It's two o'clock. About a five minute break. Is that good? Maddie? That sounds good. All right. So let's back be back at 205 and we're quiet until then. See ya. Then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning. We're back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, folks, we are back and ready to begin. Let me get the recording started here. All right, folks, we're back for the final hour. Of the website content accelerator. We got a lot to talk about in the next hour, so I'm just gonna let you get right to it. Maddie. Sounds\r\n\r\ngreat. Yeah. Thanks for sticking with me so far. Excited to finish this off strong and yeah, hopefully give you some really tangible things that you can take away. For your own processes. So I'm continuing this discussion that we started about UX audits and designing them. Okay, so we talked about this. Let's go to the next point. What so I used to offer UX audits as a service when I used to be on Fiverr. It was my most popular gig by far. And the way that I structured it was I basically priced by the page. And so when you're doing a UX audit, you want to be sure to identify whichever pages are the most important, especially if you have a big site like you don't necessarily want. Just going back to the E commerce example like you don't necessarily want to audit like every single product page, especially if you're looking for trends, maybe one you know prime example of what your product pages look like maybe one category page, your homepage, your checkout flow, like if somebody had me audit an E commerce site that that tended to be kind of what it looks like. You know, it's also things like maybe more generally, your homepage, your about page service page. So it really depends on what you're trying to do. But you could ask questions in your UX audit, like, you know, what do you think this is about the page in general, or about a specific element of it? You could ask What strikes you about it, you know, you're trying to see how people are reacting to it, how they're understanding it, and then like, what would you click on first, like what, what is something that looks interactable? And how would you, you know, accomplish whatever the specific goal is. So those are ways that you could you know, further define this question. Or this idea here. And then we kind of talked about this, what do you make of specific elements? So again, if we're talking about ecommerce, maybe you have a button that's like a quick add to checkout where you don't have to go, you know, to the individual page, it just kind of pops up when you're looking at a specific category or on the homepage or something like that. And so you might want to test like, do people actually understand what the purpose of this is? So that's just one example. You know, many others that might factor into your own purposes and needs. So when it comes to designing these questions, a couple of best practices to keep in mind you know, first of all, users are generally not going to be designers. I don't think you I don't think you perhaps want them to be because you want them to look at it from a different perspective than you and so with that in mind, you want to avoid any sort of like web development or industry specific jargon in the way that you ask questions. You want to design for the average internet user, they should be able to understand what you're asking without you having to explain and clarify. I think another useful thing in general and this is this is when you ask for feedback about anything, but it's breaking up a complicated question into simpler ones. It's, it's okay, you know, to to ask a question and to ask a follow up question and to dig deeper. And that's something that we talked about yesterday when we talked about chat GBT and and getting that ideal answer that you want to get from it. Sometimes you kind of have to break the subject down and sometimes you have to add clarification later. So then, I've said this in a way but be as specific as possible when you're asking questions, you know, reference specific elements. Bring it back to the goal, if necessary. That's how you're going to get the most useful responses. So going back to that fiverr gig I was talking about, these were the questions that I asked and every order and sometimes they would ask clarifying questions after the fact. But most of the time, if I wasn't because it's fiber, and I'm sending them either some sort of like written report, or typically it would be like a video recording of me going through and doing the audit and if you work with a platform like Fiverr, or some of the other things that I'm going to mention shortly. I think it's the next slide actually. Typically, people are recording themselves interacting with your website unless you're doing an in person test, which is a different situation. But so you have to have some sort of standardized approach in that case, especially if you're offering this as a service like I did. But most of the time these questions got to the bottom of what that person was hoping to get out of the audit. And so generally speaking, I asked for the URLs for any pages they wanted me to take into account. I also told them you know, if you want me to take a quick look before starting the order to see if this is a good fit for me, you can do that. Are there any major problems that you want me to keep in mind throughout the process? So is there anything that you're noticing isn't working that you want? Me to focus on like a conversion factor? Can you briefly describe your target customer so that I could keep their perspective and focus? This is a really important one. I'm not going to fit in and perhaps you know, every user tester that you're going to work with is not necessarily going to fit that ideal target persona that represents your audience or the audience of the client that you're doing this on behalf of. But that doesn't mean that you can't adopt that persona. And again, a lot of these platforms will let you pick a user tester based on demographics. So that's probably like the best case scenario. But I think, again, you can still benefit from a plethora of different experiences. So anyway, you know, like I'm, I'm thinking of like a time where I did a user test and the target audience was, you know, generations older than me or something like that, where they're interacting with the web and they might have some access issues, you know, they might it might be harder for them to read the text if it's not big enough. Things like you know, contrast come into play between the words in the background. And so things like that, maybe it doesn't personally affect me right now. But I can still comment on that and say, you know, you told me that this was your target audience. To me like this strikes me as something that would be very difficult for them to interact with. And then the last question I asked is What important goals are you hoping that this page or these pages will achieve? So that kind of goes back to like the problem question, but I guess maybe from a more positive standpoint, and especially, you know, people use your tests at different stages, so they might not know what the problems are, but they certainly know or ideally, they have an idea of what they want that page to achieve. So these questions like very much covered what I needed to know in order to give people a satisfying UX audit after they put in their order. Okay, so how to run usability tests a couple of different ways that you could do this. A very wide range of methodologies and honestly a wide range of end results I would say, in person is like the gold standard because you're going to have the most control over the process. You're going to be able to meet with people, you're going to be able to dig in deeper to any like initial questions that you set. It's a little bit harder to do with something like Fiverr or user testing. Because there may be limitations I think with like user testing, it's kind of like you set it up ahead of time. And then you know, the user testers go through it, but you don't necessarily get to get to interface with them after the fact. And then with fiber, maybe you could do that it would probably involve making a new order. It's going to take time to get that feedback. It's not going to be as dynamic as doing it in person.\r\n\r\nIn person, it's probably going to be the most expensive in terms of like your team's time and like setting up a place for them to do this. And, you know, having some sort of incentive whether that's straight up cash or like a gift card or something like that for people's time. Another I think great option is user testing. And I was pretty sure that this platform had had changed or been sunsetted or something but I was looking at it leading up to doing this presentation and it still exists. It might exist in like a different format than it did initially did. Like I think you have to buy like a package. It's not just like one by one, for example. So I'm not super up to date on how it works now more more as to how it's worked in the past. But basically, the way that it has worked is that you specify certain tasks you want users to complete and specific questions for them to answer. And so users narrowed the process they go through until that test is complete. They have or at least had had a very large user base. So it was a great platform for giving like that exact demographic that you wanted to test. But fiber is very similar. I mean, fiber doesn't focus on user testing. To the extent that user testing does a fiber marketplace covers a wide range of services, but their usability like UX test marketplace is very large, you know, in comparison to some of their other focuses. So definitely a great place to find user testers. People start offering their services at $5. But they don't have to, that's an old fiber rule of thumb that it had to be five now people can set whatever price they want. They just have to set up their gigs in a way that makes them competitive. The way that I did it was I used to charge by the page. And then if they wanted, like a written report, that would be an extra cost in addition to the video. So it just depends on how people set up their gigs. But there's some level of standardization because people go to that market and that marketplace and they want to be able to pick you know, five people that offer something that take a look at side by side. Um, you could also do something that's not exactly going to give you all the information but it's an interesting practice, which is like recording users sessions on your website. So Microsoft has this newer tool called Clarity and it's free. And so you basically add like a little bit of JavaScript to your header. And you can see people interacting with your website, and you can see you know, how their mouse moves and how they scroll and things like that and like what they click on. Of course, unlike the user test, nobody's narrating it, there's no audio. It's literally just kind of like outside of context, how they interact with your website. So it's going to give you marginally useful information, but it's just another thing that you can use to try to troubleshoot. You know, why something isn't working, for example. And then this isn't like fully, like a way to run usability tests, but it's a like a tool that you can use or that perhaps somebody that you work with might use, which is to take screenshots and share commentary about what they're looking at. And I'm going to show you an example here. Oh, and besides clarity, when it comes to recording user sessions, you can also use a tool called Hot jar to do that as well. Okay, so this is an example and it's a little bit dated, but this is from bug herd. So bug heard is like a website feedback tool. That's another way to, to look at like what we're looking at right here. And this is something as a designer that you could use with clients. Some websites do this publicly where they have like a little thing on the side of the website that's like, Hey, do you have any feedback about this page? Or do you want to report a bug? That's, that's kind of why this exists, but I used to use it for my UX audits. I would just go through each page and then create like annotated screenshots and then I could explain export, the report that has all the pages and all my notes and things like that. So it's just a cool tool, whether you're kind of auditing your own site, you're auditing a client site, or somebody's doing it for you. So okay, from the flip side, we've talked about how to run a user test, but how can you be a good user test or maybe how can you identify one that you want to work with time and time again? First of all, it's narrating your thoughts as you have them. We've talked about this because that like stream of consciousness just, you know, noticing things and whether you really have something to say about it or not just like addressing each element on a page. And so that's kind of the next point here is is, you know, not just addressing them, but considering the impact that each page element might have. It's certainly acknowledging the perspective of your audience we talked about even if you're not a member of that target audience, how can you sort of take on that persona in order to speak on their behalf? Another thing that I used to do when I did these UX audits was share ideas for a B testing. Like I might say, you know, this is an interesting approach to your head and I wonder if you were to try this if it would, you know, get you better results and so it's it's giving them ideas, even if it's not a fully fleshed out thing, but to say like, this might not be it, but maybe you could try this. And then it's also it's not just about being like negative or pointing out what's wrong, but also acknowledging what does seem to be working. So that again, you can really like laser in and the feedback that's going to have the most impact for what they should change to resources that have really made an impact on me and how I go about content and design. First of all, is the Design of Everyday Things. This is like one of my favorite books. It's more about physical design, like product design, but there's a lot of transferable things that have to do with how we design for the web. And then don't make me think is like the quintessential resource for web usability and he's sent created, you know, multiple editions of this. There's another book, something about rocket science. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but, you know, anything that he writes like I would highly recommend. Okay, so we did break, and then I'm going to save questions for the end so we can get through the important stuff here. So I'm going to give you a couple more tools to use so that you can audit your own stuff. We're going to go through our live content UX audit, and then anytime we have left is going to be for questions. Let's get through it. Okay, so we'll start with Google tools, because again, when Google gives us information or tools, we want to listen because this is essentially how Google sees our content and how they prioritize what they rank in relevant search. So PageSpeed Insights is really a wealth of information. It provides data points from a variety of factors. And as you can see in this screenshot, currently, as of the core web vitals update, it starts with the core web vitals, so it starts from a point of this like, page experience and usability factor. They what's kind of interesting is that they have a part of PageSpeed Insights, and I'm going to show you like a fuller report when we go into the live content UX audit, but they have a piece of it that's about accessibility, but it's it's pretty bare bones. And so Nathan mentioned to me right before we started today, that Amber Hines is going to be the next workshop next month and it's going to be about accessibility. And her company equalised digital, they have a really great accessibility checker that integrates with WordPress. And so I would say that like that's probably going to be a much better tool for making judgments about if your website is accessible. Then what you're going to see on Google PageSpeed Insights and I think that that's something that is really important that you know, it's not always like at the top of our list when it comes to some of the other things that we need to do. To make our website usable, but it is really important. Whether you currently have an access issue or not at some point in your life, I'm sure you will. And now that I'm a man like this has become more obvious to me, maybe not in terms of strictly website design, but I think about like when I'm on a walk outside and previously, you know, I could just step around people's icy sidewalks that they didn't shovel or whatever, but now that I have a stroller, it's like okay, am I gonna put my kid you know, in the street. And so it's it's things like that or maybe you break your arm and now you can't interact with the web the same and so accessibility, I just wanted to like, make make the case that that is something that is so important because you your loved one, there's somebody that you know that it's going to make a difference for.\r\n\r\nGoogle used to have a tool specifically for testing the mobile friendliness of your site, and I was surprised to learn that they've actually sunset this tool. So now it's kind of a part of Google PageSpeed Insights. I think that whatever functionality was already in Google PageSpeed Insights for measuring the difference between the mobile and desktop version was kind of already there. So they basically just said, like, maybe this is like duplicating those efforts. I don't know. But it's no different. I'll just say that, that we that we use Google PageSpeed Insights to make judgments about how Google understands your website from a mobile point of view. Um, so we have the ability to measure like a snapshot of the current state of how your website measures according to the core web vitals are Google PageSpeed insight, but I also wanted to share within Google Search Console, there's this core web vitals report that measures it over time. And the most important thing, I think, to keep in mind with Google Search Console, and and also like Google Analytics. What I'm going to talk about specifically is more relevant to Google Search Console, is the fact that it tells you if you know, you become in violation of anything that's going to hurt your ability to rank and relevant search in terms of what Google tells us right in terms of the big things. And so that's why making sure that it's installed on your site on client sites is so important because it gives you notices if you're like way in violation of something, and it gives you the chance to fix it. Google Analytics so I would also recommend installing from the get go because it gathers important data that's useful that you can use to understand your page experience your content experience, but yeah, so this is just one useful report that relates to what we're talking about. This came up when I was prepping for the live audit later. Just the idea that there may be a use case for understanding what WordPress theme somebody's using. And I would say especially what plugins they're using, because both of these things can have an impact on your pages performance, which is a search signal on the loading, you know, on the interactivity, and all those those good things. So this is just one tool there's there's a bunch of them out there. But you know if if your website is experiencing any performance issues, or you just want to understand like how somebody else put their website together. I think this is a cool tool or a cool mechanism for that. I also wanted to share a general SEO audit tool, I see ranking so like H refs and SEM rush which I believe we talked about yesterday, this is another All In One SEO tool. It is not as fine tuned as the others as Ahrefs and SEMrush in terms of their keyword data, so that's why I don't use it for keyword research. They use different databases and approaches. But what I will say is their SEO auditing tool, which is like kind of the technical structure of your website, like goes head to head with any of like the big players in the market, and I'll show you exactly what that looks like. And the great thing about SEO ranking is it's a lot more affordable as an as an All In One SEO tool. And even from like the keyword research perspective, like you could use it to get most of the way there if content again isn't like your biggest focus are in and or if you weren't in a super competitive industry, it would it would do just fine. Um, a couple like editing tools. Hemingway is a great one. It's pretty simplistic isn't the right word, but it focuses on just a couple of things. It focuses on just a couple of factors and so that's why it's useful it doesn't it's not super distracting. And then Grammarly is one I would say that gets into a lot more detail. Grammarly is probably a more well funded company. Than Hemingway I wasn't aware of if Hemingway been monetized until I was looking at it the other day they have some AI functionality and they might they might have some other like outside of AI functionality plans, but I'm not sure that they had like a clear path to monetization before that but grim really has always had its like premium and like enterprise business use cases. And so I think that's probably why this tool is maybe a little bit more robust in terms of the suggestions it provides. They have a lot of linguists on staff and again, a disclosure that I'm a Grammarly Ambassador but I also like to use the product paid every person on my team that's a writer editor has a paid subscription to grammerly and I'll show you why shortly. Um, you know, you also want to look for plagiarism when it comes to creating a great content experience and when I talk about plagiarism, I'm not even necessarily talking about things that you do like on purpose. Some things that happen in grammerly, specifically is that you'll write something and it will detect a phrase that's been published elsewhere on the internet because you know, like there's a ton of content that already exists and it's bound to happen. And it'll be about something that's like a completely different industry. Like you definitely didn't take it from that original place that was published, but it's kind of like a reminder to go on and try to make it more unique. Just so that you know, Google doesn't think that you plagiarize even though again, it's not about intention. It's just about the reality of the content that already exists. But at the blacksmith, we use Copyscape for every piece of content we create, just to be sure there's no plagiarism, and then Grammarly. I don't believe the plagiarism check comes with the free version, but because we have the premium version, and that's included that we use it to. Um, one of the last factors here is you know, making sure that your content adheres to your style guide, whether that's a specific company style guide, or something like AP style, which again, is like the news journalism standard. I think it's like a great standard to use if you don't have a set style guide. And then I just have a couple qualitative qualitative factors here. So on the blacksmith style guide, which will probably show you we have a section about information architecture, and it's about a lot of these different things, how to break up walls of text, how to approach writing headings, how to keep paragraphs and sentences short and to the point. It's other things like you know, making sure that you have good flow with your content, you know that it has good storytelling, but it's something a human would want to read. And yesterday we talked about texts that whether AI generated it or not sounds robotic and how to avoid it. So that's another like, piece that you can use like in your own audits, those guidelines. Other things that I look at are like the thoughtful use of on brand visuals at the blacksmith we try to incorporate multiple types of visuals per piece. I'm definitely of the opinion that words aren't enough. I think as humans we're very visual creatures and people all have their own, like different learning styles. So that's also a factor, you know, written word, I don't think is enough, especially like for me personally, sometimes I need to like watch a video about it, or you need to like, you know, play with it in my hands or whatever. Like there's just different ways that people process information and so the more different ways you can surface it to them within your content, the better that your contents going to perform and help them and then things like consistent formatting like how you use bullet points, how you write headings. Again, a lot of this we cover in the blog Smith style guide. Just a couple other things. We talked about a B testing when we talked about how to be a good user tester and giving examples. So Unbounce is a tool that you could use. A B testing is essentially testing like different variants of a page usually you're testing a specific element like two versions of a page title, or two versions of an image, but it could be a full page as well. And this is something that Nathan and I also talked about, which is that I think he'd love to have an expert on a be testing do one of these workshops or you know a webinar in the future so if that's your if you know somebody like that, you know, that's something I think that all of us could learn some best practices from but again, another thing that you could test\r\n\r\nQuick disclaimer, then we'll jump to our live content UX audit. And we're talking about how to make your content better. And, you know, basically like different processes that you could use to to catch mistakes. But I don't want you to leave this thinking that perfection. Is the goal because it's not I think, you know, we're all human, we all make mistakes. At the end of the day writing for the web is is great because it's a very forgivable medium and unlike print, once you notice a mistake, you can go in and correct it. And so I don't want this to become a situation where you're beating yourself up if you did all these steps or you did some of these steps and like, you know, you still notice something later somebody points out like oh, this is spelled wrong or whatever. That's really not the point. So at the end of the day, I think my guidance for you is done is better than perfect. And be kind to yourself but create systems to catch mistakes. And that system could be having like a human editor, like like I mentioned earlier today, whenever I write something, you know I'm telling you all my best practices, but that doesn't mean that I always follow them, right. I'm an imperfect human being and, and things happen. And I think the other thing that I wanted to say is like we all have limited time we all have limited energy, and especially now that I'm a new mom, like I used to work really late at night and I would just crush stuff out and I would go over it a million times and now I kind of have to be satisfied with like not having the ability to do that and having a much shorter period of work time every day. That I can get stuff done and having to prioritize ruthlessly and that sometimes means that like yes, maybe I spelled something wrong, you know, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it. And I don't think you should either. So that's that's my soapbox. Alright, so let's go to the live content UX audit. Give me just a moment to get this set up. Um, so we're gonna go through like a couple of these different tools that we talked about today. And then at the end of this, we will have some time for questions. Okay. So Stacy, we're picking on you today because you submitted a really great example for this live content UX audit. And I want to start by saying there's like nothing wrong with this website. I mean, it's very good and it follows a lot of both the content and design principles that like I would instruct my team on. So what we're going to do today is is really nitpick for the sake of giving people things to think about when they are doing their own content UX audits. And so I'm going to start by sharing, like some of these tools and their outputs so that I can show you how to use them. And then what we'll finish off on is coming back to this page, and I'm going to give a couple of qualitative factors, you know, that I think can make the content just a little bit stronger. So again, I wanted to surface the blog SMIS content style guide. This is going to be the basis of one part of you know, some of the things I'm going to talk about and I'm going to reference that Chechi btw bot that we made yesterday, that's based on the style guide and that's, that's kind of what I use to audit this page from the content style perspective. But again, some things that we just talked about were first of all the SEO and Keywords section or chapter, where we talk a little bit about I mentioned that you could get some guidance for how to use awkward keywords like how to use keywords within URL slugs. I also talks about this information architecture, or information structures what we call it here section. So that's how to like essentially present information but also like break up walls of text, make it more readable. We talked a little bit at the end of today about formatting and how to keep that consistent. So those are just a couple of things. I guess we also talked about links earlier today and so there's some good guidance there. So you know, this is a this is a good resource if you're building out your own content style approach, and you can really build off of this because again, it's fairly industry agnostic. So anyway, I took this link, and first I ran it through Google PageSpeed Insights. And if you look at the desktop version, I mean it's pretty much near perfect. There's it's very difficult to get to 100 on any of these factors on I would say especially on mobile, but even on desktop, I mean, it's it's kind of like a what's the word? It's like a like a fool's errand to try to get to 100 if you're if you're this close, so, desktops looking really good. You know, they have a couple of things that you could do to fix it if you wanted to, and I have some suggestions for that, but we'll talk about it from the mobile perspective. So if you go to mobile, you'll notice that you know, first of all, the largest Contentful paint is one of the core web vitals, that it's a little bit in the red and it's and that's really like the only one and the largest Contentful paint again has to do with page floating, I believe. And so, taking like the definition we had, I'm guessing that that has something to do with this image because this is the viewport you know, that first load so it's the first thing that gets measured by this core web vital. And when I was looking at this yesterday, it's a it's a JPG file, which isn't like a super large file or anything like that. But one thing that you could do to to improve that page quality factor is to instead save this and serve it up as a web p file. There are certain plugins that you can use for that it's going to you have to kind of determine if adding like a plugin or taking that extra step of manually saving it like converting it and saving it and uploading it as that file is worth it. But that's that's like the one thing that I could think would would flip this so that it's the performance is a little bit closer to 100. And then we go into some of these other like diagnostic details. And I think this is where PageSpeed Insights gets really interesting because you can sort of dig into specifics here. A couple of things that I noticed were like minifying, CSS and JavaScript and there's some other things that are kind of related to optimizing like these different file types on the website. So I use a plugin called nitro pack. There's a free version and there's a paid version. I think the free version will get you pretty far, but it adds this like little Add at the bottom of your website. So I just pay for the paid version because I don't want that there are other things like nitro pack but nitro pack from the perspective of somebody who operates in the SEO world, you know who's looking for good performance, who's looking for best practices, that is my suggestion to you and to anybody who is seeing these things on their Google PageSpeed Insights. So naturally talking about these plugins for me like the got the question of does adding more plugins like is that going to hurt performance like what what is the marginal return of that? And so what I wanted to do next was take the URL and put it in that WordPress theme and plug in detector to just see like what the back end of the site looks like. And so we can see, it's like a custom or like a child theme. And I think okay, so apparent theme is Astra, so we know that like that's the technical basis on which this is based. I think generally speaking, Astra is pretty good for SEO from what I've heard, I don't have a ton of experience with it. And then also, this is like more what I was interested in was the plugins on the backend. And I mean, from what it detects it's there aren't that many plugins here, you know, it has like a plug in that works with Astra there's a Quiz Builder. This DOWNLOAD MANAGER contact form and then the Page Builder that's pretty lean, especially if those are the only plugins that are installed. You know, different people have different ideas of like, how many plugins is too many or like what's the optimum amount but I would say like, we're well under that here. So adding something like nitro pack, or you know, like some sort of web p image optimizer I think short Pixel does that.\r\n\r\nSomething like that probably wouldn't like hurt performance for the performance gains that would come with it. Um, okay, so the next thing that I wanted to do this is higher level than just this page, but I wanted to show you guys SC ranking. So SC ranking again, is this like All In One SEO tool? And I think there's like actually something wrong with my browser because I'm trying to like x this out, and I could do this yesterday and it just like wouldn't do it. So this is either a core web vitals issue or this is like I have too many, like Chrome extensions that are conflicting with each other, that I haven't been able to figure out why it sometimes messes with my browser. But anyway, that's an aside. So um, so this is a C rankings like technical website audit. And what I really love about this is that it's pretty straightforward. Like you can essentially read this as a non SEO and get a very good idea of things that you could fix to improve your website's technical structure. And as you can see this website like it's not bad, like there's room for improvement, but overall it's doing pretty good. Again, chasing 100 is a fool's errand. You're like, probably not going to get there but you want to get as close as you can with the time and the resources that you have. And so this page is really just like a high level overview. Again, this is about the whole website. It gives you an idea of like, how many pages were crawled, versus how many URLs which could include things like media files, JavaScript files, style, sheet files, and things like that. And so this can be a good indicator of like, if you know that there's more pages or there's more files, like maybe there's a credibility issue here. And if if some are getting excluded from this crawl, then they're probably also getting excluded from what Google can see. And so at that point, you, you know that there may be a sitemap issue that's getting in the way of the ideal situation. But what I really wanted to show you was the issue report. So these are things that you could fix. And what it does is it it has a category, it gives a specific issue, it gives you which pages are affected. It tells you you know, whether you're like compliant or whatever you want to call it if it's following best practices or not. And there's there's very few things here. But for example, like here's one that has to do with crawlability, which we talked about earlier today. And so nofollow means that we don't want the search engines to read this page and there may be a good reason for that. And so it seemed that for your pages are affected, you can click on it to get a description of the issue. So this is why it's really great for people who aren't necessarily like in the SEO world. A lot of you are website developers or designers and so a lot of this stuff like you'll be able to understand just by going through it and familiarizing yourself with it was there like included details. But yeah, so then you could see, you know, like which pages relate to this issue and whether or not like it's worth doing anything or if you really wanted them to be that way. But I'll give you like a more tangible example of something that you definitely want to fix. We have, for example, External links to 4x x. So like a 4x. X code is like a 404 means that it's not found, and there's different variations of that I'm sure a lot of you are pretty familiar with that. And so this means that maybe something that was linked on the website now no longer exists. And so it either needs to be replaced or redirected or something like that. And again, you can dig into the URLs you can see like what specific error code happened. This is also a really great report that you can give to clients. And then you know, depending on the level of familiarity you have with these different issues and how to fix them then you can give yourself a little bit of an extra job and some hours working with them to not only audit and go through the audit and explain the audit but then also, you know, implement the fixes. So I just wanted to show you that because I think it's it's such a great tool. So then the next thing I did was I ran this through Hemingway, and like I told you before Hemingway is like the sort of like, saying it's the more basic version of Grammarly. is maybe not exactly the right way to describe it, but it's the more like focused version. And so as you can see, what it does is it highlights different things. And it's kind of using I guess these colors, as you know, like things like it's trying to like draw your attention to certain colors as being like something that's more worth your attention or less worth your attention. What I've always known Hemingway as is a great tool for measuring active versus passive voice. And generally speaking, we want to try to avoid passive voice in our writing. And so that's probably what it's best used for. But there are some certain other factors here that are useful and interesting. And like yesterday when I told you about clear scope and how it measures readability, you can see that Hemingway also does this. It measures certain stats in terms of you know, just this piece of content, not necessarily compared to other pieces of content. And then it also has some AI functionality, that with a paid plan you can use to I think automatically suggest edits to some of these things. So just, you know one interesting tool where it's I think best functionality is free. So then I ran it through grammerly and I wanted to start by showing what I was talking about. With the plagiarism thing. Like there's something about inventory management on this article that says 1% of your text matches the source and that's like it's not even This article isn't even about inventory management. So I just wanted to show you guys that like, like these tools can be wrong, but it's still worth running that check a if you're working with a writer that's not you, just from a reputation standpoint, you want to make sure that there's no obvious like plagiarism problems with it but be so that you can just make like some small changes to this text so that Grammarly doesn't pick it up and possibly, you know, Google may be like taking a nod from some of the similar types of algorithms and uses. Again, not that it's intentional. It's just like, you know, because there's already this wealth of content that already exists on the internet about all these different subjects and of course, there's going to be similarities with phrasing and things like that. So then we get to these other suggestions. And I guess one other thing I wanted to show you about Grammarly is you can set goals for a piece of content and I don't know if this is a paid version specific but anyway, you can, you know, say like what type of writing it is. So I just said business for this. You can give a certain intent so I sent in form for this I may or may not be right with all these things, but I just wanted to see what would happen. You can say like, you know the level of experience of the audience, you can set like the formality of the tone. And then and then it gives you suggestions based on those things. And what's cool about grammerly is that it goes into these specific zoo specific different categories of suggestions. So correctness is about like grammar, spelling, punctuation, clarity is to cut in to help with like the flow of engagement, which is probably most related to like storytelling and delivery, I guess, you know, kind of related to both of those things, and then style guide. This relates to my company's specific style guidance, some of the suggestions that I have programmed in myself, and so a lot of it is like punctuation, because I have some rules about that. And it's probably annoying for my writers to have all this pop up. But some of it is word stuff. So like if we click this, something like actually, per the blogs and the style guide, and that's just our approach, we say these words are fluffy and don't add value typically. So like if you cut actually, it would say wait, so you have to go read these reports. Ones is another one that I have strong opinions about. I say don't use one to describe a noun you've already defined. Use the same word again or find another way to say it and then I gave an example here. So that's what's really cool about Grammarly is like you can like get these things automatically being suggested when you're working on a piece of content within your organization so that people don't have to remember like all the stuff that I showed you on my style guide it just automatically pops up. Waxing then I'll show you a couple qualitative things and then we'll go to questions is I ran this through my style editor bot, and it wouldn't I tried to get it to like directly edit the copy. And it wasn't unlike what I showed you yesterday which was like a shorter excerpt and the did I did that. So part of this is like me learning how to best use the spot or how to best design it or how to best query it. But what I did was I said Please review this blog post it gave it the era and suggest edits according to the blacksmith style guide.\r\n\r\nThey said consider the bad side consider the following suggestions and it felt to me like it wasn't actually like totally reading the blog. It was just giving like general tips and then I said please suggest updated copy based on these suggestions. And so what it did, which is kind of funny was it created like a shorthand version of it. And so what I was thinking is something like this could be really useful for like an email newsletter, you know, like an atomized version of the blog. Or, you know, maybe like you create some social posts based on these shorthand summaries of each category or something like that. You'd still probably want to edit it, but to me, even though it's not really what I asked for, I thought that that could be an interesting use case. So then I was like, Okay, well can you actually do the edits while preserving the original length of the piece? And it was like no, but it kind of went back in and gave some more suggestions. And then I was asking if it was actually able to like read the original article, or No, I was asking about the visuals, because one of the suggestions was about visual aids. And I was like, well, there's a ton of visual aids on that article. And so it said that it can't directly process or interpret them from the article itself. So that was kind of interesting. And then I gave it the copy and then it still kind of like generally gave examples. So you know, it's a work in progress. I guess that's what I wanted to share. It's still it's still gave me some things to work with. But it wasn't exactly like the editor that I was hoping that it would be like it like it kind of was yesterday. So it seems to me if I were to make a hypothesis here that it's probably going to be more useful for shorter bits of copy, you know, maybe different sections or titles or things like that, versus trying to edit a whole article all at once but it will give you food for thought in terms of general edits that you could make. Okay, so last like pieces of content on this before we end up today. We talked about menu navigation. And so the way that I would change this menu navigation would be home about blog and I would just change this to contact and what I like to do with whatever like the most important menu item or call to action is maybe add some like button styling so that that stands out, it just simplifies it. It's not distracting and you know, hopefully leads them to the ideal conversion. So then the other thing like the header, because we're kind of talking about the whole experience, not just the article itself, is what I what I came across, typically in the UX audits that I did was a similar type of header where it has the logo, but unless the name of the brand is like really straightforward about what you do, it could benefit from having some context like a tagline about what you do and so I don't think that we do it on the blog. So some a very bad example. But you can imagine like in my header it should probably say like SEO and content agency. But you know, maybe because it's called the blacksmith that also might work I don't know submitted a test. I'm generally speaking again, I really liked this article, I thought that more or less like it fit the same types of standards that like I would have for my team in terms of putting together conversational tone like breaking texts up nicely, having really useful visuals, a couple of just like very small things. We have the social share buttons. My suggestion is to add a CTA that's like share this on social like, it might seem obvious, but just saying that might be useful, might also be useful to have them float as the person who reads it because they might decide at different points that they want to share it through. I love the visuals there was one visual where I think there might be an unintentional tooltip here where like when you were taking the screenshot your cursor was probably over this SPFx aligned area right here. And so it took the screenshot with that and it kind of obscures the stuff behind it. This is the type of thing that like, because I do these all the time I nitpick and probably nobody else would notice, but I just thought that I would mention it. I'm sure I'm gonna like pretty much ended there. The last thing I was going to say for now is with the Related Posts, one of them doesn't have the featured image. So it's kind of, you know, it just looks a little bit lopsided. That's a super easy thing to fix. And then when it comes to consistency um, you might want to capitalize text stuff just so that it's consistent with the capitalization of the other category. And then maybe also like space it out tech space stuff. So again, like I really don't have that much to say here, because it's very good and it has good information. The last I guess big thing is the actual place where I'm reading the content is kind of narrow and skinny compared to the full frame here. And so I wouldn't recommend going full width with the content but I think we could break out the box a little bit more or break it out of the current box so that it's a little bit wider. And I think that that would be a great reader experience. So with all that being said, I'm going to pull back to my slides really quick just to pull up like the question slide and things like that. But I mean basically we're done here. With the planned content. I'll once again bring up my book because it is about what we're talking about with content experience. It's about my approach to content writing, content style, you can grab a free chapter of the book on the writing for humans and robots.com website or you can grab the book on Amazon via Kindle or print edition. And yeah, that's pretty much it. So I will take any questions that may have popped up in the meantime.\r\n\r\nYeah. All right. So thanks again, Stacey for letting us use your content as I know that it's a little weird with talking about my stuff here but ya know, it was very much appreciated and a it's an excellent article. We've talked about that already. The content, it was it was hard\r\n\r\nto find stuff to comments on honestly, so I had to go into nitpick mode.\r\n\r\nSo grateful to you, Stacey. Let's see folks last chance to ask questions here. There are no questions today,\r\n\r\nwhich is covered at all. Everything's done.\r\n\r\nIt's it's been a very good and thorough presentation on lots of tools. Things to consider as we're developing content for and helping our clients create content for the web. Yeah, like Ben says firehose of information really good stuff. Greg, this is a good rewatch as well. Alright folks, last chance before we land the plane. Your if you have any final questions for Maddie, if you want to just say yes in the chat that way we know to pause otherwise, I'm going to start moving towards wrapping us up. All right, yeah. So thanks there in the chat. Okay. So Maddie, wrap us up here. Give us our final takeaway for the training.\r\n\r\nSure. I'll answer one question. Barney asked if I'm in the Denver area. Yeah, yeah. I'm in Lakewood, technically. But yeah, okay. Final wrap up. treat people how you want to be treated with your content. That's good.\r\n\r\nThat's really good. And true, right. So yeah, awesome. Well, thanks, everybody, for hanging out with us for the last couple of days. It's been a really good set of information here. A lot of things to consider. And hopefully it'll help us all up our game as we're dealing with content on the web. Thanks again. Maddie. For your expertise. And folks, we are back tomorrow as usual 1pm Central for office hours here on solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nNice. Well, thank you so much, everyone for your time and attention. And yeah, I hope I hope there is like one good nugget for you to take away and if you ever have any questions about content and UX, I'm always happy to be a resource.\r\n\r\nVery good. 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Help Docs Software Kadence Website Content Accelerator 2024

Website Content Accelerator 2024

Join Maddy Osman, Founder of The Blogsmith content agency and bestselling author of “Writing for Humans and Robots: The New Rules of Content Style” for her second annual Website Content Workshop. 

This year, we’ll expand on the foundation we created for writing great content to focus on integrating AI efficiencies, plus the intersection of content and design with UX.

Review Last Year’s Website Content Workshop Course Here

Day 1: Content & AI

Tuesday, February 27, 1:00-3:00p Central Time
The limitations and ethical implications of AI

  • AI content tools to add to your workflow
  • How to write a great ChatGPT prompt and a build-your-own GPT demonstration

Day 2: Content UX

Wednesday, February 28, 1:00-3:00p Central Time
What Google guidelines tell us about content UX

  • How website design supports content effectiveness
  • How to conduct a content UX audit for your brand and clients
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