How a Former Teacher Uses AI to Make Shopify SEO Simple and Smart

I sit down with Crystal Waddell, founder of Simple and Smart SEO, a longtime educator-turned-SEO strategist who helps Shopify sellers stop guessing and start getting found. 

Crystal’s story is wild and human. She went from teaching and coaching to building a maker business, and she shares how a major health wake-up call reshaped what “success” even means. 

In this conversation, we unpack how AI is changing search from “keywords and volume” to intent, trust, and semantic alignment. Crystal breaks down her exact podcast and client workflows plus why “context” matters more than content now that anyone can generate content in seconds. 

🔥 Topics We Cover:

• Crystal’s path from teacher and coach to SEO strategist and Shopify seller
• Early AI days: Clubhouse, Jasper, and what changed when ChatGPT hit
• The AI confidence boost: using LLMs as a thinking partner, not a magic answer machine
• Why “semantic alignment” is becoming the real game of discovery
• How to create SOPs + delegate to AI (and eventually agents) without breaking your site
• Why context optimization beats content optimization in 2026 search
• Building a business that supports your life, not just your revenue

Tools & Concepts Mentioned in This Episode:

• AI + LLMs
  • ChatGPT, Claude, OpenClaw ClawBots
  • Gemini (comparison/testing mindset)
  • Custom GPTs (for podcast workflows + client systems)
  • Seer AI Assessment 
• Podcast + Production
  • Descript
  • Buzzsprout
  • Auphonic (audio leveling)
• Platforms + Community
  • Shopify (themes, SOPs, site systems)
  • Skool, YouTube, Clubhouse
  • Surfer SEO

Connect with Crystal

Simple and Smart SEO: https://www.simpleandsmartseo.com/
AI SEO Skool (7 day challenge): https://aiseoskool.com

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"How I AI" is a concept and podcast series created and produced by Brooke Gramer of EmpowerFlow Strategies LLC. All rights reserved.

Transcript

Crystal 0:00

of the future search is more about what the customer wants versus what the company wants to say. It's like what does the customer need? Because if you don't align that it's called"semantic alignment" and it's essentially a math problem that translates to English. And if you can't match those things the LLMs won't even know to reference you or to help you show up.

Brooke 0:25

Welcome to How I AI the podcast featuring real people, real stories, and real AI in action. I'm Brooke Gramer, your host and guide on this journey into the real world impact of artificial intelligence. For over 15 years, I've worked in creative marketing events and business strategy, wearing all the hats. I know the struggle of trying to scale and manage all things without burning out, but here's the game changer, AI. This isn't just a podcast. How I AI is a community, a space where curious minds like you come together, share ideas, because AI isn't just a trend, it's a shift, and the sooner we embrace it, the more freedom, creativity, and opportunities will unlock. Today's guest is Crystal Waddell. She's the founder of Simple and Smart SEO. Crystal didn't start out in tech. She was a teacher, a coach, and a maker who built and sold physical products. And that background matters because she understands what most SEO experts don't, what it actually feels like to run a business ship products, talk to customers and figure out traffic without relying on ads or guessing games. In this conversation we get into how Crystal uses AI to turn SEO into calm, repeatable systems. We talk about custom GPTs, semantic search, and why discovery today is less about ranking and more about understanding intent. She shares how AI has supported her as a solopreneur, boosted her confidence and helped her build systems that feel like having a team without burning out. If you're a founder, Shopify seller, or creator who wants to get found online without chasing hacks, this episode is for you. Especially if you care about building a business that supports your life, not consumes it. Alright, let's get into it. Thank you so much Crystal for being here. And remind me, where in the world are you joining from today?

Crystal 2:27

Right outside of Fayetteville, North Carolina, it's, uh, Fort Bragg.

Brooke 2:31

Well, I hope you're keeping warm. This is one of the only times I've ever worn a sweater on my podcast. It's actually chilly for Miami.

Crystal 2:39

Yeah, we got this storm and we got ice and snow and then um, my kid is outta school and my husband is home and so everything just feels a little disjointed right now, but yeah, but it's fun. Snow days are fun.

Brooke 2:51

Well, I'm so happy we got the opportunity to meet during Podfest in Orlando, and it was so wonderful to connect with other podcasters. I'm excited to dive in today, not only as you as a consultant and how you're using ai, but also maybe we can swap podcast tips with AI as well once we get into it.

Crystal 3:13

Yeah, absolutely. And I was listening to the podcast that you had with the 14-year-old boy at Alpha and I, I sent it to my son and I told my husband and my son, I was like, I want you to listen to this while I'm recording the podcast. And so, you know, that's what they're doing while we're doing this.

Brooke 3:28

Amazing. Well, I always like to just kind of start and open the floor and you could share a little bit about what it is that you do and how you find yourself at the intersection of really leveraging AI today in your work.

Crystal 3:43

Wow. Well, I took a it was kind of like a, a quiz based on like, what, what is your AI level? And it was uh, through Seer. I don't know if you've ever heard of them, but they have a really cool tool where it says, you know, like, where do you fall with your adoption and application of ai? And so I scored pretty high. I scored like, like level three out of four. But one of the things that I've learned to do better now is to use multiple tools, because I used to have like one tool that I felt really comfortable with, which was ChatGPT. But like as I was creating like my own custom GPTs. Taking that quiz showed me that, hey, there's some opportunities if you try to recreate that tool in like Claude or Gemini, or choose your LLM, you know, and then test them and see what are the different outputs. So that's kind of where I'm at right now. It's like I've created a lot of things, but now I'm recreating them in different AI tools to see how the results are better or worse.

Brooke 4:39

And that's called seer.

Crystal 4:41

Yeah, seer, SEER, they're a big marketing company.

Brooke 4:46

Oh, interesting. I'm gonna just out of curiosity, take that quiz,

Crystal 4:49

Yeah. Yeah, it was fun. Yeah, because, because there's no, there's no measurement of that anywhere else that I found. And I was like, oh, you know, and I actually was applying for like a low level SEO position with them last year. And so I thought, oh, you know what? I'm gonna take this. And it actually was pretty good stuff on my resume.

Brooke 5:07

Tell me a bit about your story arc. I read your profile on how you used to actually be a teacher, and now you transitioned into consulting. Tell me about that transition.

Crystal 5:19

Oh man. Okay. I'll try to do the quick summary. But yeah, I was a teacher and I taught for teaching was like my second career, so I'll just start there. And I taught for a few years until I got married and I had my son. And then once I had my son, I realized, you know what, not financially, emotionally I was staying home with him. So you know, I stayed home with him for about five years. I coached high school volleyball during that time, and then I went back to teaching and I was, I was a PE teacher and my job teaching when I went back was teaching adapted pe. And the reason why that's really relevant is that I, I taught special needs children from age uh, kindergarten or grades kindergarten through 12th grade. And one of the biggest things that I learned and took away from that job was that give one instruction at a time, and that is so applicable to giving instructions to LLMs and also just communicating with other humans in general. You know, we're all like overloaded, so just giving one thing at a time is really helpful. And then in 2020, I actually had a heart attack. It was something called broken heart syndrome, and it's usually where like women have been married for 50 years and then their husband passes away only I was just upset about the things that happened in 2020. I was live on a Zoom, finishing my last you know q and a session of the first course that I ever built, I was so excited. My son was on the floor and someone asked a question and it just made my heart. Go like that. And you could see it on the, the video that, you know, the women that were on there, they were like, are you okay? And I was like, I don't know. I just got choked up for a second. And so ended up gonna the hospital and, you know, while I was in the hospital, I just felt like I, you know, kind of heard the voice of God and said, quit your job and go, just chase your dreams, be creative, live your life, you know, to the fullest every day. And so that's kind of how I ended up here.

Brooke 7:11

Wow, what an incredible story. Thank you for sharing, i'm still just like very moved by your story. It's

Crystal 7:19

Oh yeah.

Brooke 7:20

on, but um, I could just

Crystal 7:22

Yeah.

Brooke 7:23

you, you bring a lot of heart into what it is that you do now in consulting, with simple and smart SEO. You work all the with Shopify sellers and I've been listening to your podcast, so I just wanna dive deeper into how you are serving your community today.

Crystal 7:41

Yeah, well one thing I learned teaching and I appreciate that really very much Brooke, and I didn't even say thank you for having me to be here, you know, on your show. So thank you for that. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Brooke 7:50

course.

Crystal 7:50

But one thing I learned about teaching and coaching, especially like with volleyball, I taught and coached very high level volleyball players. And I used to tell them, I was like, if you wanna get better and you wanna get seen, you wanna get recognized and known and all that type of thing. You need to go find the best and play them. You know? And it's a little different in the business world. But once I started learning about SEO, I was like, I need to find the best people. At SEO and talk to them so I can figure out how to get better faster, because I'm behind, you know, I'm two careers behind everybody else, so I have to get there as quickly as possible. And a friend and I, we would, she had a, a massage business and so we would talk about how we were optimizing our websites and then finally we were like, we should you know, record these conversations because not everybody has a business friend that they can talk to about what they're doing on their website. And so that's how the simple and smart SEO show podcast started. And it was really a labor of love, you know, and she kind of went a different direction with copywriting, but I just love learning from like the best in the world. And so that's what I did for almost 200 episodes. I've interviewed experts from, you know, AI to SEO, to marketing, to email, you know, just kind of covering all of the facets of business, because if you're a solopreneur, you get it. It's like it's not just SEO, you're doing everything and you're wearing all the hats. And AI has just really bridged that gap. Where even though we're wearing all the hats, we don't have to do it by ourselves anymore. And that's what I love about just like this era of business, because it's really exciting, you know, like number one, you're not alone, but number two, you finally have the tools that can help you be as capable as you want to be in your business.

Brooke 9:31

Fun fact. I played volleyball for about 10 years and was

Crystal 9:34

Yeah.

Brooke 9:34

into it.

Crystal 9:36

Are you a middle?

Brooke 9:37

I was an

Crystal 9:38

Right side outside. Nice.

Brooke 9:40

I'm

Crystal 9:40

He was the big swinger guys, so that's like every time you want that ball to hit the floor, that's who you set it to. So that's really cool.

Brooke 9:48

Yes. I loved reading that about you as well. So it sounds like you were a very early adapter to creating custom GPTs from what I've read.

Crystal 9:57

Mm-hmm.

Brooke 9:58

would you say that was kind of the first time you started using ai? Like what really sparked your interest and how did you start using it right away?

Crystal 10:05

Well, again, let's roll it back to 2020. You know, in the days of clubhouse, like in the audio learning space was just so big and I just crave connection. You know, after my heart attack, you know, I had some extra time and I'll be driving to. Rehab and I'd be jumping in clubhouse rooms and that type of stuff. And that's when I first heard about SEO. And I also heard about Jasper at that time, so I don't know if you're familiar with Jasper, but Jasper was like the first OG white labeling of chat GPT, essentially, you know, and, and Jasper had all of these little prompts that were already created. Little, you know, essentially custom GPTs that, you know, showed you problem agitate, solution, little marketing, writing patterns that you could use. And I'm like, oh my gosh, my mind is blown. You know, this is so cool. So I'm teaching everybody as I'm learning about Jasper uh, within Clubhouse. And so that was like my first interaction with ai. And then, and that became like my first actual affiliate play like I was an affiliate for them and actually made money. Like, you know, sharing about Jasper and that type of stuff, stuff. And then they partnered with Surfer. So Surfer, SEO then became a big part of my workflow and you know, until JA, GPT was like released to the world, those were the two main tools that I used to, you know, integrate AI into my everyday stuff.

Brooke 11:25

That's so cool. I've heard of Jasper I haven't used it yet. But I bet you we were in some of the same clubhouse rooms. I was hard on clubhouse

Crystal 11:35

Yes, yes. Clubhouse was it, I mean, I remember listening to people like were that were in the shower. You know, and it was like, okay, that's weird, but I get it. You know what I mean? Like, it's just the type of place that it was. So yeah, clubhouse was amazing. I met, I met some people you know, during that time that I'm still in contact with today.

Brooke 11:55

That's amazing. I actually feel like I should credit Clubhouse to me leaning into coaching, consulting, speaking, and podcasting because it really helped me grow and strengthen and find my voice. Do you agree?

Crystal 12:08

Absolutely. You know, and, and also I think sometimes we're alone with our ideas and we're having great ideas. But we don't have anybody to bounce'em off of. And we used to have this one group, it was called like the 7:00 AM Club or something. I can't remember what it was, but we, we would have a group that met every morning at 7:00 AM and every Friday I would teach about Pinterest. And that was the first time that I realized, oh my gosh, I know things that other business owners don't know, you know? And I'd say things I, whoa, whoa. You know, what'd you say? And I was like, oh, everybody doesn't know this. And so you're right. It's like not only did Clubhouse help me develop my voice, but it helped me develop my confidence and then just like that aha of, oh my gosh, I know things that people actually are interested in learning about. And so that just opened up a whole bunch of different doors.

Brooke 12:53

Yes, I relate so much to that right now with ai. You know, I haven't quote unquote gone to school for ai, but I've been such an absorbent sponge for the past few years that when people ask me questions or on the fly interview me for like webinars or, or, or things like that. I really surprised myself at how much I've picked up in the past few years. So bring me to current day. So that was about like five plus years ago. What's your current technology stack? What are you using now beyond ChatGPT maybe you're still using Jasper. What are your tools and how do you streamline your workflow or how are you leveraging like SEO tracking and what you use for your clients? I'd love to dig into all of that.

Crystal 13:39

Wow, there's so much there. Okay. First Brooke, I gotta back up and give you props because you, you're like, I wasn't trained in ai, but you used the tools. Like that's what it is. You know, that's what a lot of people are hesitant, myself included, even with SEO, like I'm self-taught and I thought, oh my gosh, I didn't go to SEO school, so who am I to talk about SEO? And then I realized nobody went to SEO school. It wasn't a thing. It's just like a practice that developed out of doing the thing. And that was something that I learned. Coaching, volleyball, you know, it was like a lot of people will, and you've probably seen this in your, your past a lot of coaches like to control drills, you know, like toss the ball to the line, pass it up to the target, set it to the target, but in a game, it's not like that. It's messy, it's ugly, it's fast, it's weird. Things just happen and you don't know how to react to that. It's kind of like that thing about like learning ugly, like that's how my teams were. I even teach little kids like that. It's like, look, it's gonna be ugly, but guess what? You know you're gonna learn faster because you are gonna be able to respond to like realistic situations. So I just wanna say props to you because you learn by doing and that's why you are. You know, like kind of an authority in what you do and when you talk to people, because you really got in there, so props you.

Brooke 14:52

Thank you so much. I appreciate that.

Crystal 14:54

I just wanted to say good job to you, you know, because like a lot of people are afraid to get in there, and not only did you get in there, but now you're making a podcast about it, so Very cool.

Brooke 15:03

Yeah. We're getting into the fun part right? So we're gonna share all about the tech tools you're using So I'd love to dive in.

Crystal 15:11

Well I would say for the podcast the biggest one is de descrip or des script however you wanna pronounce it it's got a lot of AI tools built in but my Favorite things about it is that it's like one click removal of all the filler words"like um you know like you know" all that type of stuff It's probably preventing me from becoming a better public speaker but I love that And then I also love like how you can make the word gap smaller and speed up things or that type of stuff And then create chapters, export transcripts So everything that I really need to do for my podcast is pretty much there But after I export the transcript I've created custom GPTs So I have a custom GPT for when I upload my podcast to Buzzsprout So there's Buzzsprout is the platform that hosts my podcast and that's where I like upload the audio So when I export the transcript I then upload it into my GPT that says you know You format this for Buzzsprout so it spits out my title my description chapters all that type of stuff that I need And so I just pretty much copy and paste that into Buzzsprout if I like it And then I have a different GPT that I use for YouTube And I actually do this one first because after I do the same thing for YouTube then I ask it for Auphonic data And I don't know if you've ever used Auphonic but I like it for the sound leveling After I export from Descript so I upload it into Auphonic and it flattens the file for both video and audio And then I upload to you know either YouTube or Buzz Sprout And when I have that that GPT it gives me Auphonic metadata for the episode So that's really cool And so then I can upload everything So that's kinda my workflow for podcasting. And then in my business let's see do you want me to stop there because that's for my podcast and I do some different things for my business

Brooke 17:09

No I'd love to also hear how you work in with your consulting.

Crystal 17:14

Oh yeah Okay So I create custom gpt for all my clients. So the same type of gpt that I make for myself I make for my clients. So one of my clients we take a lot of her YouTube videos and put them into blog format but we also include the transcript at the bottom of the blog. And that's a way that I found that's the kind of the best way to optimize for SEO because we keep the transcript formatted verbatim. But you technically when you're creating blog content you wanna chunk that content. You don't want the the paragraph sections underneath different headings to be longer than let's say 300 words. So I use Surfer to optimize that transcript for the SEO the keyword that we're trying to rank for. And so I'll say here here are the heading you know keywords that you can use. This is the transcript Take out all the numbers in the transcript and use these keywords as headings where you can. And it because it's a custom GPT it already knows to chunk it in 300 words or less. And so I can optimize things like that And so that's just one One thing that I like to do with AI for her. And then for Shopify Sellers you know because I have a I have a like a little Skool and a free seven day challenge that we can probably talk about later, But I create GPTs to help people do those little SEO tasks and one of my favorite GPTs to create content that sounds like you But is optimized for the person's search intent is something called a Jobs to be done GPT And so essentially you just put in the keyword that you wanna rank for and also the job that the person is trying to do like whether it's buy a watch for a special occasion or something like that And then the GPT will give you Something for your page copy and then you can optimize that even further by adding keywords to different headings or that type of thing. So whatever you do on your website I probably created a GPT for that because you do it over and over again. And that's what I'd recommend for people If you are noticing that there's certain tasks that you do. Whether it's creating podcast show notes or content for your website or blog or whatever create a GPT for yourself a structure for yourself a template. That way you can cut down on some of the the repetition of the things that you always have to do and then you can focus on just kind of inserting your personality into certain points.

Brooke 19:48

That's awesome I I always like to ask how has AI restructured your workflow. And I relate to that definitely using custom GPTs and projects. And I know that they're terms different things with Or you're a Claude user or a perplexity user or Gemini user. They kind of all have similar aspects and themes. If you're tuning into this podcast, you're most likely an AI advocate, and you may have also wondered how to support your body against the invisible stress of EMFs. Think wifi, cell towers, or hours in front of your laptop. Lela Quantum products are lab tested in triple blind studies and are proven to help harmonize and neutralize EMF signals. Their products are the few things I felt a real energetic shift from. I personally wear their quantum energy necklace daily. And if you're someone who cares about optimizing your energy and nervous system like I do, explore their offers with my exclusive discount link below. You mentioned you're a solopreneur so I think one of the biggest benefits of our time is that AI makes the solopreneur possible really nearing burnout. If you can just talk about the topic of how AI supports your business as a solopreneur.

Crystal 21:07

Well first of all I would love if there you have a podcast episode about how you lean into it for business and accounting I definitely wanna hear about that one That sounds amazing but one thing I wanted to mention is I feel like these AI tools have helped me so much in my confidence because I've never been slow you know when it comes to implementation like I'm not afraid like I have a idea I'll implement but there's always that second guessing of oh is this is this correct should I do it this way Or is there a better way Or am I missing something And having an LLM to chat with and kind of flesh out some of those things that we might question or not fully understand like it's just giving me so much confidence And so and I also feel justified in what I'm saying And so I love I love the fact that I yeah I used to say you should give everything in your business a job Even if you're a solopreneur you should treat everything that you do in your business like you have employees even if it's like you know you don't have a social media manager but you give your your social media a job this is what you are supposed to do and Therefore now you can delegate the responsibilities of that job to your LLM to create for that platform or or whatever So I feel like I have the support of a team as a solopreneur because I've created systems for all the things that I need to do and so Yeah it's it's it's less lonely in some ways but I feel more supported I feel more confident in some of the decisions that I make and then I feel justified in what I share where I don't have that imposter syndrome creeping in.

Brooke 22:44

I agree It has given me so much confidence to have enormous amount of information knowledge and education at my fingertips. It really is the ultimate source of empowerment. You touched on something just now where you talked about the systems you have in place you could share a little bit more like if you were to hire or create an AI agent or a designated employee that your AI would fit the role of how would you go about Giving it the information that it needs Like what is your way of putting systems and operations in place some people I know have full on SOPs that they write out they write out every single task of before during and after How do you go about filling those roles for your ais for you Like what's your method?

Crystal 23:41

Well I started thinking about this recently because with my Shopify store I was like what can I delegate? What could I delegate to somebody else And how can I make sure that they are doing it number one the way that I want it done And number two the way that it's best for the system. And with Shopify Shopify's just come out with a new theme called Horizon It's like a completely different free theme that everybody's building on It's completely different than what they've had in the past which the most recent top free theme from Shopify was something called Dawn and Horizon is just different You can you know kind of write your own code within the theme if there's An element missing that you want to create or have and it's not there You can say Hey create me a date picker that only allows the next 14 days to be chosen and it's just custom right there for your website. So there's really cool things like that that can happen in there but You also you also need a system of like how people are interacting with your site. Because that's the scariest thing when you hand off your website to somebody it's like please don't break it. But how do they know how not to break it And that's where the SOPs come in. And so there are potential SOPs for everything in Shopify. And just to break it down to its most like simplest form like byproduct every product needs to be a part of a family It needs to be part of a collection it needs to have a reference number and so I actually created SOPs For what I felt like were every single element of Shopify that you could systematize. And so that's actually the big project that I'm working on right now It's a a a course called Maker to Merchant and you know just to help people kind of make that shift from the Etsy seller mindset of like somebody's already created the systems for me To I'm gonna create my own systems and follow these SOPs which are lo lo uploaded into a custom GPT to create that SOP for that business and then they can follow it they can hand it off to a va. But you know that's that's what I think the key is is you've gotta find ways that you can duplicate yourself that you can make the process super easy to follow. Because even like the new Clawed Bot I'm like oh my gosh I thought I was creating this for va. What if you could create it for your own Clawed Bot to go in and do those things I mean my mind is like oh my gosh I didn't even it didn't even occur to me. And here comes another form of technology to fill in the gap So I'm just like oh this is amazing.

Brooke 26:13

I know we are living in very exciting times. Things are about to get very very interesting Quickly with that news coming out just this past week.

Crystal 26:22

Yeah

Brooke 26:24

So exciting What about on the o other end of things like did you see any challenges with your AI adoption We've talked about all the amazing benefits a little bit behind your system and some really cool things that you're building but I always like to share and highlight challenges you overcame with your AI adoption Because a lot of people go in thinking it's just this light switch miracle that they're gonna get so much from but it really is a a process of trial and error And I'd love to highlight your your story on that a bit.

Crystal 26:58

Yeah I think the biggest thing is that although the LLMs themselves are confident They're not always correct And so I think that's an assumption that a lot of people come in with when they're first using it It's like oh my gosh like this output is so amazing Like it's saying it so much better than I could have said it And it's it must be right that's not the case And so one thing I've realized is you have to give especially your custom GPTs as much context as possible. And so you know I have this Thing where I will do a brand interview with a company so I can hear in their words and we'll upload reviews. Every piece of data that we can actually upload into that custom GPT to understand the brand is super important because then it has something it can reference and pull from. And I feel like the LMS are they're getting better and better and better obviously at remembering data points. But if you can create a gem or a GPT or even an application That has self-referencing materials. That's more That's gonna be more accurate every single time than just having a chat with a chat bot or just asking for an explanation or an output from a chat GPT or Gemini. So that's something that I've learned like as as much context as you can give it as much research that you can fill it with That's like your original research. Like these are the things that are true about my brand This is my brand guide These are the colors you can then Correct it when it gives you back something and you're like wait a second those aren't my brand colors Or wait a second that's not an actual review that I uploaded. Please only use reviews that exist in the documents that I gave you. So that kind of feedback really helps your LLMs give you better output And I don't think that initially when people use them I know that when I first started using it I wasn't worried about the input I was giving it. I was so impressed by its output It just seemed to know everything but it was just predicting what it thought I wanted and we can really like give it what it needs to give us exactly what we need back.

Brooke 29:06

Yes and you're bringing up this conversation I had with chat yesterday that's very top of mind is that I noticed that it started Reflecting back to me the context that I was giving it like quite literally and I had to stop it in its tracks and be like listen I'm giving you a lot of the backstory and the context here for you to have as as background information not to regurgitate back into this copy. And it's it's just a good example of what you just gave of how very specific you have to be with your context engineering and Sometimes we forget that yeah we need to have to do a lot of back and forth and give like very fine instructions. So I like hearing your experience and examples there. My Next question for you since you are very well versed in SEO and all of these advancements with AI and search engine optimization, LLM optimization. I know a lot of my clients are jumping into wanting to be discovered on AI chatbots. Where do you see this all going in the next year. I'd love to see like what you what you see coming down the pipeline with your clients what projects you're you're working on and any trends you wanna share with SEO or online discovery with the advancements of ai.

Crystal 30:39

Well first I want anybody who's listening right now to make sure that you caught what Brooke said because you said a very cool little I don't know a couple words there Instead of content optimization I think you said context optimization. And I think that is the key right there You know starting with our context that's really important more even important than content because anybody can generate content now. That's why a lot of it sounds so much the same because what ranked on Google Were things that reinforced each other you know so if you're gonna rate on Google of the past you just want to like say more than the per other person did you know that was ranking above you. And it's just like okay But that's not how people are searching now when they're searching in LLM they're really getting deep like I'm going back to Kansas or or here's a better thing I've been searching for a new car and so I use chat GBT to help me negotiate with you know what should the price be what are the ranges Find me examples online of other cars that are like this because I really like a Tesla I really want one with self-driving four and I'm looking for a 2024 and I want the best price obviously I want a 2024 so that you know I've been able to negotiate back and forth with by text with dealers about their pricing. And I've gotten kind of close but you know one of the biggest things is now again I have the confidence in the context of what else is going on on the internet. So it's helping me understand how to communicate better. So context is everything that's really important. And then for the future like I said it's not about doing content bigger and better than other people anymore It's just matching that search intent. And so if somebody is searching for a Tesla you know Why are they searching for a Tesla Like people need to like car dealers They don't get this Like they are thinking oh we're competing on price. No What about what's happening in the future Supposedly in the future these cars might be able to drive themselves right So your technology the ones that have the technology that might be able to do that in the future those have a higher value to me. Don't show me a 2022 or anything that doesn't have that hardware Like understand the context of why I wanna buy. That's where LLMs surpass like even human salespeople right now because I noticed after I started asking questions some of those same dealers started putting like hardware for on their Their description or even on their image with it I'm like oh my gosh I'm glad that I could help you. But good for them that they listen to the customer. So I feel like of the future search is more about what the customer wants versus what the company wants to say You know It's like what does the customer need. Because if you don't align that it's called semantic alignment and it's essentially a math problem that translates to English. And if you can't match those things the LLMs won't even know to reference you or to help you show up. And one other example I can give on this I I I talked about it on my podcast was the old days of search were like find the biggest search volume term that you can or rank for it so you get the most traffic right. Well sometimes that doesn't make sense because like a term like volleyball gift something like that people might be looking something more for like trinkets right I sell$200 plus custom photo gifts like memory keepsakes that you hang on your wall and they last forever When people are looking for trinkets of volleyball gifts and then they see a$200 price tag they're like whoa no that is not for me. So LLMs have also given us permission to really dive deep into like why is somebody buying that They're trying to honor somebody who's had a long career. It has emotional value it has something that's gonna wow their friends their family that's gonna wow the player that's gonna bring em to tears. You can't do that with a key chain but volleyball gifts as a keyword that might have been something people would've went after in the past. I know I did but I'm getting deeper and deeper and deeper with my customers. So maybe I'm only gonna get like 20 or 30 searches a month but I'm hitting my buyer you know I'm I'm finding the person who wants that emotionally driven sentimental Keepsake that they're willing to pay a lot of money for because the person on the other side of that gift they just wanna show them how much they value them That's the difference between search of the past and search of the future.

Brooke 35:08

Well thank you for sharing that I learned a new term today semantic search.

Crystal 35:13

Oh It is everything I I really feel like I recently just pitched a conference about Semantic Search you know because I can almost guarantee you you give me any webpage and I can tell you what's wrong with it. And that was one thing that I wanted to also hit on when you were talking about having those conversations with LLMs Chat GPT is very like Complimentive lots of compliments You're so wonderful You're like the best thing ever How could anybody just not like put you on a mountaintop you know. And it's like whoa ChatGPT How do you even know me You know I feel like Gemini is more objective And you can train your L LMS to be more objective. And the the custom GPTs that I've said be objective don't tell me what I wanna hear. I could always tell when I've done that because I'm gonna give it to you straight You know what their response is. But it's so important that you you train your Your tools to give you objective advice and like you said not regurgitate or give you back what you want to hear And I had one client actually it hurt his feelings a little bit because I did an analysis a semantic analysis of his homepage. And it was like okay what is the meaning map What does it what is this page supposed to mean in terms of like reaching the client you wanna reach and what is their meaning map. They were incongruent. And so when I said these are the places we need to fix and I not I we Gemini and I we said this I just sent it to him and he was kinda like oh wow that was harsh And I thought oh my gosh that wasn't me saying that that was my tool that I created. And it was right though But it wasn't like oh you're so great dah dah dah dah It was like no these are where. You know what you say you do and what people need you to do are not aligning And if you want this business this is what you need to do to correct it. So semantic analysis is amazing. It's objective. It's the translation between the English language and the computer's understanding So

Brooke 37:17

Love that I'm gonna use that moving forward. I have a fun question to For you You shared about a really cool course you're creating any other projects you're working on or if you were to use AI to maybe vibe code and create something overnight that doesn't exist yet what would you have it do specifically?

Crystal 37:39

Well I'm working on a couple things so obviously this whole maker to merchant with Clawd Bot is a new passion or idea like oh my gosh I didn't even think that I would be able to do something like that. For Etsy sellers and Shopify sellers or people who sold sell multi-platform one of the biggest challenges is seeing your dashboard in one place. And so that's something that I've worked on unfortunately Etsy denied me access to their API and I'm not exactly sure why I don't know if I you know didn't use the right language or if I'm not big enough so that was that was One of those hiccups but I think maybe I can get around it by creating something for people to give access you know within the tool itself. So I did that on Lovable and so that was really fun I do have a free traffic challenge And you know I have something called ai SEO Skool with a K So ai SEO Skool. there's a free traffic challenge. So if anything I've said today is kind of interesting to you you can come in and kind of get your feet wet with SEO because the basics are kind of like table stakes now you know what I mean Like being able to write a title on your page that has a keyword in it. That's kind of like the minimum bar to entry You know like those are the days of doing like technical SEO and getting like strong results from that is it's only the basis of what you need to do Like the real magic happens when you can meet your customer where they're at because you want them to To trust you. Essentially that's what your webpages are are going to need to do in the future. They need to demonstrate trustworthiness authority the expertise the you know all this the EEAT of Google's system All of those things can be communicated On your webpage. Of course you need to have like the basic set up too so technically they can even find you. So I kind of take people through that in that seven day challenge. And if they like it they can stick around and meet with me once a week But if not hopefully they'll learn something that they can take with them.

Brooke 39:42

Amazing Crystal is there a final key takeaway I always like to leave the door open at the end of the podcast. Maybe if you wanna speak to anybody in the e-commerce space that's on their AI journey what would you like them to walk away with after hearing this conversation

Crystal 39:59

Man I love AI as a tool and I want every person to optimize their website right. I want you to optimize your website I want you to get found I want your business to be successful but more importantly than anything I want you to optimize your life. And I mean that by saying like you can do all the work in the world to to optimize your site. You can grow a business that's super successful making lots of sales I don't know, but what is it that's gonna make you the best you and having a heart attack in 2020 it really helped me kind of reprioritize and I said listen I may make less money for a while quitting my teaching job and all that type of stuff, But what was most important to me were like a few things that I said like I call it my perfect day and they were the little things like being able to sit on my back porch being able to wake up every day That was a big one for a while You know, I was really I gotta get more grateful about that again but sitting on my back porch like seeing the deer every once in a while spending time with my family. We wanna create businesses that allow us to do more of the things that we love. And so I just wanna encourage you like wherever you can leverage AI to help you create a life that you wanna live Like that's that's my mission. It goes beyond just websites for me It's like let's build a website and a business that just supports the type of life that we wanna live So that's that's probably my last message of the day.

Brooke 41:25

So beautiful I really enjoyed this conversation and getting to know you. Um I I love that final key point and I couldn't agree More with that statement

Crystal 41:38

Yeah

Brooke 41:39

is the best way for listeners to reach out to you. How can they connect and learn more about everything you're up to?

Crystal 41:45

Well of course AI SEO skool with AISEOSKOOL.COM is my free seven day challenge I'd love to see you over there love to hear any questions that you have. I am simple and smart SEO on every platform so you can go binge YouTube content, Podcast content, whatever, Instagram, TikTok content I have been going live on TikTok lately so you know you can find me there. And then of course my website If you're interested in somebody actually like coaching you through this or a done for you Shopify store then you can reach me at simple and smart seo.com

Brooke 42:21

Wonderful Thank you so much crystal I appreciate your time today.

Crystal 42:25

Yes Brooke it's awesome I'm so glad that we crossed paths at Podfest and I look forward to you being on my podcast as well.

Brooke 42:33

Yes check out my my episode on Crystal's podcast if you want to dive in deeper about AI and SEO.

Crystal 42:41

Let's go Thanks Brooke

Brooke 42:44

Wow, I hope today's episode opened your mind to what's possible with AI. Do you have a cool use case on how you're using AI and want to share it? DM me. I'd love to hear more and feature you on my next podcast. Until next time, here's to working smarter, not harder. See you on the next episode of How I AI. Have you just started exploring AI and feel a bit overwhelmed? Don't worry, I've got you. Jump on a quick start audit call with me so you can walk away with a clear and personalized plan to move forward with more confidence and ease. Join my community of AI adopters like yourself. Plus, grab my free resources, including the AI Get Started Guide. Or try my How I AI companion GPT. It pulls insights from my guest interviews along with global reports, so you can stay ahead of the curve. Follow the link in the description below to get started.