Freedom Focus Photography

AI-Powered SEO with Connor Walberg

• Nicole Begley, Connor Walberg • Episode 291

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291 - Feeling lost in the ever-changing world of SEO? Or wondering if using AI for your website is going to get you smacked down by Google? 

You’re not alone—and this week’s episode with SEO pro Connor Walberg is packed with answers. We’re talking about how to use AI ethically and effectively to boost your rankings, create better content, and stop stressing over your blog strategy.

What to Listen For:

  • What E-E-A-T is and why Google cares about it
  • How to use AI tools like ChatGPT without sounding like a robot
  • What “topical authority” means and how to build it
  • Why blog content still matters (and how to make it easier with AI)
  • How to brainstorm blog topics that actually attract clients
  • What to ask ChatGPT before creating any content
  • How photographers can use AI to stand out in local SEO
  • The surprising way AI can help with backlinks and outreach
  • Connor’s favorite prompts for optimizing website pages

If you’ve been staring at a blank Google Doc, dreading your next blog post or confused about how AI fits into your SEO strategy—this episode is your permission slip to make it easier. Connor breaks it down with practical advice, smart prompts, and a healthy dose of reality. Tune in and give your SEO a serious upgrade.

👉 And don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review if this episode was helpful!

Resources from this episode: 

✨Connect with Connor- https://www.connorwalberg.com (Reference this podcast episode to get a free website audit!)

✨Master the craft of pet photography at the Hair of the Dog Academy – hairofthedogacademy.com

✨Stop competing on price, sell without feeling pushy, and reach consistent $2,000+ sales – freedomfocusformula.com

✨Crack the code to booking more clients inside Elevate – freedomfocusformula.com/elevate

✨Discover the world of commercial pet photography- hairofthedogacademy.com/commercial

Are you enjoying the Freedom Focus Photography Podcast? Please leave a rating or a review!

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Nicole Begley (00:00)
In today's episode, I am chatting with Connor Wahlberg, not just about SEO, but how AI could impact your SEO and how you can start to utilize it to work smarter, not harder in your business. So if you have a business, if you have a website, if you are curious about AI, any or all of those things, you're going to want to take a listen to this episode. Stay tuned.

Nicole Begley (00:24)
I'm Nicole Begley, a zoological animal trainer turned pet and family photographer. Back in 2010, I embarked on my own adventure in photography, transforming a bootstrapping startup into a thriving six-figure business by 2012. Since then, my mission has been to empower photographers like you, sharing the knowledge and strategies that have helped me help thousands of photographers build their own profitable businesses. I believe that achieving $2,000 to $3,000 sales is your fastest route to six-figure businesses;

that any technically proficient photographer can consistently hit four figure sales. And no matter if you want photography to be your full-time passion or a part-time pursuit, profitability is possible. If you're a portrait photographer aspiring to craft a business that aligns perfectly with the life you envision, then you're in exactly the right place. With over 350,000 downloads, welcome to the Freedom Focus Photography Podcast.

Nicole Begley (01:23)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Freedom Focus Photography podcast. I'm your host, Nicole Baegley. Back on the show today, we have Connor Wahlberg, who we've had on the show before. He is an SEO expert and just an awesome guest and we're super excited to have you back. Welcome back, Connor.

Connor Walberg (01:41)
Thanks, Nicole, it's great to be back on the show with you.

Nicole Begley (01:44)
Yeah, awesome. Yeah, we were chatting about all sorts of SEO stuff, which actually I'm to look up here and let people know what the actual podcast episode was because I should remember to look that up before we start the conversation, but I never ever do. So thankfully I have a big old Monday board. Okay, here we go.

261 SEO myths on September 24th, 2024. So if you guys did not hear our SEO myths conversation, myself and Connor, go check that out, episode 261. But today, we're gonna dive into some AI stuff as it relates to SEO. Super excited. Have you been doing much with the AI stuff, Connor? Tell me about like what you've been up to with it.

Connor Walberg (02:35)
So lately I've gone, and I hear this for more and more people, but it's like a deep dive where out of nowhere it just becomes a massive part of your business and life. And it happens really fast.

Nicole Begley (02:48)
It does. It does.

It really, really does. And I had the same kind of trajectory where it was like, interesting. but it's not very good. And like, there's this whole learning curve of like, so you have to learn how to utilize it correctly because otherwise that is just cheesy, generic, like doesn't really help in any way until you really start to dig into like how to use it effectively. And so yeah, so it has become such an integral part of my

my business now that I don't know how I ever survived without it. I definitely feel very conflicted about it though, because of the energy needs for it. And, you know, being an environmentalist at heart, I'm like, my God, what am I doing? I'm ruining the planet, but yet I need it to work now because I'm so much more effective and it's so helpful. yeah, maybe just like plant a couple of trees or something too.

Connor Walberg (03:42)
For

every AI prompt, run out and plant a flower.

Nicole Begley (03:44)
Yeah, yeah, yeah,

We plant a tree with every day's output.

Connor Walberg (03:55)
that's interesting talking about the power usage because it is kind of like, it's eating up so much power. It is an incredible amount and it's creating more and more demand for power. ⁓ But as that happens, I really think that pushes society to find more and more creative ways, hopefully, that are going to be more environmentally friendly for this power that we're.

Nicole Begley (04:02)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

I hope so.

Yeah.

Connor Walberg (04:19)
that we're now burning. So hopefully it's actually just accelerating the rate, even though it's accelerating our burn rate and our usage rate, hopefully it's accelerating the rate that we develop renewable energies and things like that.

Nicole Begley (04:30)
I hope so.

I hope so. You have to forgive me if I don't have high expectations for the next three and a half years, but I don't want to get into politics. Hopefully that is true though. Yeah, and it will cause us to create some more. Hopefully it doesn't go the way because The Matrix was very much ahead of their time where then we all became just cocooned to become energy sources for the big matrix.

Connor Walberg (04:39)
Thank

It's in science fiction. It's like been shown that everything we've created, we create in science fiction over the years starts to become a real thing. It's like a vision of the future. So hopefully we don't go that way, but it's, it's almost like we have self-driving cars now. And sometimes I think that's just so that we can be on our phones more.

Nicole Begley (05:05)
⁓

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

my gosh. No, probably. And then like buying more things and, know, like just on the phone and scrolling and shopping and scrolling and shopping. Like keep the machine running. Yeah. Well, okay. We're really going to get to AI here in a second, but we're deep diving into all sorts of craziness. And I think there is, if you want to get like,

Connor Walberg (05:22)
Yeah.

Nicole Begley (05:35)
woo for a second and there probably is some piece of a collective consciousness that like all these people start seeing these different things and then like you start manifesting like society down these different different paths which we could get we could get real real crazy here for a minute. Yeah did you ever read the book Big Magic? it's so good who wrote it hold on I heard names escaping me.

Connor Walberg (05:49)
There definitely is. Once the energy is out there, it manifests.

I haven't.

Nicole Begley (06:04)
There is Elizabeth Gilbert. It is so good. And the whole premise of it is really like the ideas that are floating around out there or like kind of have their own consciousness in a way. that like there's this idea and it pops in your head. And if you don't grab it and do it, it's going to be like, OK, well, screw you. I'm going to somebody else. And like somebody else will get that idea and execute it. So like, you know, from things from like major movies to like novels to just

our art, whatever it is, like it's just kind of floating out there in the ether until you like grab it. So if you get a good idea, act on it or it might get stolen.

Connor Walberg (06:40)
It makes

a lot of sense, too, if you look back at how civilizations developed a lot of great inventions like things like the wheel. I'm not sure if the wheel was one, but there's things like that that were developed and created at the same time in multiple parts of the world. Different societies that had no contact with each other.

Nicole Begley (06:48)
Yeah.

Hmm, yes. Yeah. ⁓

my gosh. mean, this is starting to get into ancient aliens kind of territory, but they have that with similar, like similar Mayan structures and Peru and like pyramids and like all sorts of things that were, I mean, back in that time, those civilizations had no way to connect with each other. They didn't even know that they existed. ⁓ So it's all, well, it's all really fascinating.

Connor Walberg (07:18)
Yeah.

It is.

Nicole Begley (07:23)
But anyway,

we're here to talk about SEO. Absolutely. Like if you want to rank for ancient aliens, you should definitely start doing the matrix now. Yeah. And really it was just about, okay, so SEO, talked about that one episode with different myths. So definitely go listen to that if you haven't. I feel like that's a good primer. But I think probably the first question that a lot of people have is.

Connor Walberg (07:26)
Yes, very closely tied in with everything we're saying.

you

Nicole Begley (07:49)
You know, there's all this AI stuff and there's so much AI content being created. And there's likely all these websites that are probably just like putting up 10 articles a day because they're just like cranking out AI content. And I would imagine Google is going to get smart to that. that the search engines are going to want to reward like actual human content, which isn't necessarily to mean that we can't use AI.

But there's, think people, a lot of people just think like, like I can't, I can't use it because I'm going to get penalized. And, you know, well, my daughter is in high school and you know, so there are lots of strict rules and she's taking a college class, like one of the community college classes that the high school pays for. and so she was taking that and it's sociology class and they have to do like a little writing every week. And, you know, he was very much adamant, no AI at the beginning of the course.

And I guess one of the kids that goes to school with her must have turned in some AI things. So then he got a zero on that assignment. And there was this whole big email that the professor sent out that was basically like, listen, if you used AI and I found out, like I have ways, then you got a zero. If you want to make an appointment and come in and plead your case, you can. However, if...

It's determined that you used AI and you're lying about it. You're getting a zero in the whole course. I was like, Holy cow. So she's super nervous to even use it where I'm like, you can use it for brainstorming or like for her to start to write college applications. I'm like, put in information about yourself and like help it come up with ideas and then you write it. But, I feel like there's so many ways that we can ethically use it. And, so yeah, so let's, let's kind of talk about all that.

Connor Walberg (09:19)
Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. There's so much to talk about right there. The main thing just about your... What about your daughter? What you're saying, I would be scared to even write just... I'd honestly wanna turn in a handwritten draft or handwritten paper. I wouldn't even wanna like type something because how is this professor actually telling if they're using AI? And...

Nicole Begley (09:42)
Sorry, it was a big old run on thought.

Right.

No idea.

Connor Walberg (10:02)
And

is it just, they running it through one of those? There's these tools, these websites you can go to that will say, is it AI or not? And a lot of content that people write that's normal content is like 95 % AI is what it says. it's like, well, that's not, I just wrote it. So.

Nicole Begley (10:16)
Yeah.

Right? Right?

Yeah, no, it's crazy. I don't know how or I mean, she ended up she has an A in the class anyway, so she's fine. But yeah, it's crazy.

Connor Walberg (10:25)
Okay.

Yeah, so I kind of think if these tools can't even tell, they don't even know the difference for sure, then AI is definitely to a point now where it's fully viable and reasonable to use. Like, it's all about prompting it right and then going through and editing it and adjusting the prompts. You can do editing in ChatGPT. But then,

once you pull it out, going through and adding your personal touch. And I think the big difference that Google talks about is that personal touch, the experience side. They added another letter to EAT, which is Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Now it's E-E-A-T, and this is how they grade content to decide if it's good or not. And the first one is experience. And if your content conveys an actual experience and it's

Nicole Begley (11:11)
Mmm.

Connor Walberg (11:19)
clear that the person experienced this, AI can't do that, then supposedly it can tell. But at the same time, there's all these sites where people have created tons of great content. Google updates the algorithm, and the sites get squashed because maybe it thinks it's AI generated because it's really well written for SEO. And Google has met with some of these site owners and said, hey, we don't really know how to fix this.

Nicole Begley (11:39)
at you.

Connor Walberg (11:45)
Sorry that your business tanked, but, these are like big blogs that, yeah. So if you're in the knowledge space, if what you're doing is writing blog posts that are catering to things like how to fix your, your camera lens, like you read an article about that, then AI is now taking that and in searching, inserting it into the AI overview, which is that top part of Google, Google or perplexity. And basically it's rewriting it though. A lot of times it's suspiciously close to exactly what you wrote.

Nicole Begley (11:49)
Yeah.

⁓ right. Uh-huh.

Connor Walberg (12:14)
with a little link to your site that nobody clicks anyway. So they already have their answer, they're not gonna click it. So clicks are down 30 % for that type of search. But as a local photographer, the AI side is still, it's not changing it really because Google and Perplexity, and I'm kind of going on something different here, but they all have to deliver the same, like they have to deliver options to people.

Nicole Begley (12:17)
Right?

wow.

Yeah.

Right?

Connor Walberg (12:41)
and they have to deliver our actual sites. They can't just be like, this photographer specializes in this, this photographer, it says all of them specialize in pet photography. And it's like 10 of them, right? Like that's not gonna be helpful. And it can't just give you one based on what it thinks is best because that's not fair practice for competition. So in the local photography space, not much is changing. But this brings me to one other thing. There's a new term that you're probably gonna see floating around called AEO, which is like artificial.

Nicole Begley (12:50)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Connor Walberg (13:11)
Engine optimization for like perplexity. It's SEO. And even Neil Patel, who's one of the big guys in SEO is saying that like this is, he would call this a subset of SEO. It's the same exact thing. It's just marketers putting a new name on it to sell it. So.

Nicole Begley (13:27)
Gotcha.

You mentioned perplexity. Is perplexity like chat? know chat and cloud, is perplexity like that or is it specific for another tool?

Connor Walberg (13:38)
It's specific for a search engine. it's its own company. Yeah. I think the company's got the complexity, but yes, it's AI based search and it's stealing market share from Google. ⁓ But a very small amount, but it's very fast how it's happened. And that's why people are like, Google's going down. and, but that's been that way for 20 years that people are saying things like that. So yes.

Nicole Begley (13:40)
Okay. ⁓ okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. And is it, is that AI based?

Okay, all right, gotcha.

Huh, I have not heard of that. I'll have to explore that one.

Yeah, of course, of course.

Yeah, so I noticed something because I was looking for a local screen printer. And so I just went to Google and I like basically asked screen printers near me and it came up with that the AI blurb and it had links to links to two that were really close to me in that AI blurb, which is the first time I had seen that.

Connor Walberg (14:25)
Yeah.

which that definitely would be a little shift from how things were done in the past. But it is at least delivering you two results. And then I'm betting that underneath it, you still have the map with those and sponsored posts. And then...

Nicole Begley (14:31)
Uh-huh.

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was the top and then the map

and then the results. But I thought that was fascinating because that's the first time I'd seen that where it's like, this company and this company. And they were both like super local. And then there were a whole bunch of others down in Charlotte. But these were like in my like my zip code. huh. Mm hmm. Yeah.

Connor Walberg (14:55)
yeah, yeah, so it was proximity based was a big part of it. And

that's a big part of how Google works for any like location based search. So if you type in near me or like I live near Denver, like Denver, pet photographer, like it's going to choose things that are closer to me or that location that I named.

Nicole Begley (15:15)
Yep. Even if when you're a service based business and you have like a service area instead of an actual address, does it still look at proximity for that? Or is it like anywhere in that, that radius?

Connor Walberg (15:28)
So from what I can tell, it still is pinpointing closer to your address. Even if you don't list your address, you had to enter it when you created the account. They know the address. And they're going to serve the best results near that address. As you create content talking about other areas within your area of service, that can help boost those ranks around you.

Nicole Begley (15:33)
Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay, I was going to say, what's

the best practice then for someone that maybe lives an hour, an hour and a half outside of a major metro area, but they're pulling their clients from that metro area? So for them, SEO of their site is going to be critical because they're not going to get the local boost.

Connor Walberg (16:07)
Yes,

the local boost isn't going to be strong for them. But if they're an hour away, Google says you're still within range. They say up to two hour drive time. But think of the pool of photographers you're now competing with in an area that big. That's why we want to try to be pretty specific. And I think of it as two different entities in that case. Like the website is ranking you for the city. And Google My Business is its validation for your business, but it's also those local areas around you, even if it's a

Nicole Begley (16:11)
Yeah. Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Right.

Connor Walberg (16:36)
you know, rural and there's like 500 people in that range.

Nicole Begley (16:39)
Gotcha.

Love it. All right. So what kind of things, if I'm a photographer, like how can AI help me? I mean, obviously you can help them with their SEO because you have an awesome membership to help with SEO. But like, how can, how can people look at AI to help them either with, with their SEO directly or indirectly?

Connor Walberg (17:01)
There are so many ways that this can be done. I kind of think of AI first off as like a brain trust. It's like you're, or an employee. And the key to making it all work is to treat it like, you know, a person, a personality, like talk with it. You're having a conversation, not a tool. When you stop thinking of it as like, what can you do for me? Like, and you start thinking of it like, I'm going to work with you to make this thing better.

Nicole Begley (17:03)
you

Yeah.

Right?

Hmm. Mm-hmm.

Connor Walberg (17:30)
I'm going to work with you to improve this. Then it starts to make a lot more sense because I think people go in with blind prompts and they're just like, hey, write a blog article on this photo shoot I did. Here's a photo from it. And AI is like, well, I don't know anything about this photo shoot. I don't know anything about you. So first,

Nicole Begley (17:30)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Right. So then it's

like super generic and they're like, why is it so generic? Cause it stinks. Yeah. Yeah. That actually is a huge shift that you just mentioned that the looking at it as like a team member or a consultant or like, like an actual sentient sentient being that can help you that you can like ask questions to instead of, cause I think so many of us are so used to how Google works.

Connor Walberg (17:49)
Yeah. Yes, and then they complain and they don't use AI again.

Nicole Begley (18:14)
And so we're going to chat thinking it's Google and it is night and day and it's 100 % not Google. So we would still just like ask it search based questions or just like general kinds of things instead of like really digging into the conversation and getting really specific with it.

Connor Walberg (18:34)
Yeah, so talk to it and have a conversation with it. And one of the things that's craziest, and this before you even get into the SEO stuff with your chat GPT and now just so everyone knows, starting like last week, chat GPT now remembers every conversation. It's not just little bits of things or what you tell it to remember, it just remembers everything as long as you're on like a paid plan. Otherwise it might remember little bits. I don't know how they control that, but.

Nicole Begley (18:48)
No. Uh huh.

There is,

there is a setting. If you go up to like your picture and the top right, wherever your settings are, there is a setting that you can choose to not have your content like train the bigger model. ⁓ I mean, is it, I don't know. Like, don't know if it actually is or not. So like, don't put your bank account on there people. but,

Connor Walberg (19:19)
you

Nicole Begley (19:23)
Yeah, so you can do that. And then there was, I don't know if it's now shifted, but in the past you had to go to that same kind of setting area and select for it to remember like your other conversations to build upon it. So I don't know if that's still an opt-in or if that's now an automatic kind of thing.

Connor Walberg (19:40)
I set up that remember part a few weeks back for, and it was only remembering some stuff at that point, you were supposed to tell it to, but now it just remembers everything. So I don't know if that setting's still there, but it probably is because I'm guessing they have to do that because of a trust level. And so I'm I don't want it to remember anything about me. And then I don't know how you work with it, but I've started using a microphone just to transcribe my voice for each prompt.

Nicole Begley (19:43)
Bye.

Okay.

Yeah, probably. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

⁓

yeah.

Connor Walberg (20:09)
And having

the conversation is, more authentic. It's, we're not constructing things in such a unique manner, like a scripted manner.

Nicole Begley (20:12)
Yep.

Yeah.

This is funny. So I've tested it and when I would speak to it, it would speak back to me and I didn't like that because I'm very much like, I am not good at auditory processing. So it was just like, depending what it was, like it would start to spit out, like, you know, copy your strategy or this or that. And I'm just like, like I need to, I need to see it. So I have not been using much of the voice.

Connor Walberg (20:41)
Yeah, and I just use it just to transcribe it to text and then I send it. So it's just rather than typing the prompt, I think it's so much more natural when I reread it, I'm like, I sound like a human here. But when I type, I'm like, I sound like I was taught to write this way in school. And it changes. I think then by doing that, ChatGPT is probably learning more about my personality. And yeah, which we tend to hide when we write.

Nicole Begley (20:45)
Okay, gotcha.

No, right, right, right. Okay, I see what you're saying.

Yeah. And how you speak. Yep. that's a good.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a good one. So the one thing that I have created, well, it's like three things that I've created, but it's like collectively one thing that I think elevated my use of chat GPT to make it so much more effective was creating a brand guide and a writing guide and, a target market guide.

for my business. So like the writing guide, I'd gather different examples of emails that I had written and like social posts and just things that sounded like me. And I would have it like kind of, what's word I'm looking for? Look at it and like kind of it would describe it. And I would also have those examples. So I have a Word document that has all that in it.

so that I can just have that uploaded and it's like, hey, this is how I write. And there'd be like things that I often say, things that I do not say, you know, so you could put stuff like that together. And then I have a brand book, is, you know, my business, like who I serve, what my offers are.

my values, like just all of those different things so it knows about my business. And then I have last but not least my target market, which is like, all right, this is who I'm serving. This is, you know, they're like why they want photography. This is what, you know, the, forget all the different pieces that are in there. Like what, what are they reaching towards for the photography? Like what, how's my service helping them?

What is my service helping them avoid? Like what are they saying? What are the trigger events that would cause them to look for a photographer? What do they want to do with the final images? How do they feel about the final images? Like just all this stuff. I mean, I think I and I use chat GPT to help me create it. Like I would start with some general kind of word vomit of what I thought about my target market, like who they were, what they enjoyed, know, general demographics and psychographics.

And then I would ask it different questions about it and it would build out the answers and I'd read it and be like, yeah. and it would think about things that I'm like, a hundred percent, but I wouldn't have thought of if I had to brainstorm that. so with those three pieces, when I upload them into chat, GPT to help it, make copy or, you know, update, my website verbiage or create blog posts or write emails like,

It knows so much more and it's so good about sounding like me. And I will also then like if I make big changes to what it kicks out, which I often do, and I always want to include personal stuff too. So I'll sometimes just say, let's include the story of XYZ and I'll give it just a couple of sentences, like some information about it. And that's usually all I need and it works it in really, really well. So if I make a lot of changes, I upload the final one to be like, this is my final one. You know, like please remember this.

this verbiage tone, like, you know, how, how I speak so that it keeps getting better to sound like me. so that I think is game changer to get it to work better for you and, and work smarter.

Connor Walberg (24:17)
No, it really is like understanding you because we have to remember that chat GPT, it isn't us. It's only knows what we tell it. And the best way to use it to get started in my opinion is to ask it like, hey, what can you do for me? This is my business. I run a photography business. I shoot this type of stuff. Can you ask me a bunch of questions to help tell me where you can help in my business? And then.

Nicole Begley (24:23)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. ⁓

Yeah, yeah.

Haha. Yup. Haha.

Connor Walberg (24:41)
Yeah, or to do that with a brand package. Like I want to make a brand package about

my business, but I don't know what to tell you. Tell me what you need to know for me to build this brand package and prompt me through this whole system. And you will have a conversation with it for the next hour, going back and forth and answering its questions and uploading emails and letting it know more about you and selling it to crawl your website, all this stuff, which it can crawl sites now, crawl all our websites, which is amazing. And that's where it starts helping with SEO.

Nicole Begley (24:54)
huh. Yep. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Yeah. Yeah. my gosh. It is so, good. And I love that advice because I've been doing that too. If I get stuck on something, I'm like, I'm not sure. Like, how do you think that affects my business? And then could correct and be like, no, yes. And like, it would just give you ideas. My other favorite way to use it is just brainstorming.

Connor Walberg (25:11)
Thank

Thank

Nicole Begley (25:30)
and I'll use this a lot of times for this podcast interview. Like afterwards I'll take it. have a whole custom GPT set up that helps create the show notes. It takes the transcript. It'll do like the 10 things to listen to, which will actually be really funny for this one, since we're talking about it the whole time of the 10 things to listen to. And then it helps me with my email, but I want to still share personal stories with my audience. So I have it prompt me for different.

stories or email ideas that I might have that I might not think of that I could be like, I do have a good story about that. And so that way it can bring more of my personality into it. But I'm not just staring at a blank page.

Connor Walberg (26:11)
It's amazing, it's like a second brain. But then, yeah, yeah, so ask it, start asking it what it can do and how it can help you on certain things. And from an SEO standpoint, you can go right into chat GPT and be like, hey, where can you help with my SEO as a photographer? What can you do? What can you tell me? So that's a good place to just get a feel, though I have a bunch of suggestions now that I think would help.

Nicole Begley (26:13)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Connor Walberg (26:35)
But I think that's just like, have a conversation with it. And in a way, think of it like talking to yourself, but it isn't you. So you're talking to someone else who knows you very well once you've given it enough to know you. ⁓

Nicole Begley (26:47)
Mm-hmm. Ann knows

so many different things. I actually had to ask it. My horse was slightly randomly lame, but not consistently lame, on and off again, but acutely lame when he was lame. I was explaining it. I'm like, act as an equine veterinarian and give me some suggestions of things that this could be that I should look into. Then of course, it must have been prompted for legalities. It's like, check with your veterinarian. I am not a veterinarian. This is not legal advice.

Connor Walberg (26:51)
And yes.

Or medical advice.

Nicole Begley (27:16)
but yeah, it was, yeah.

But it was funny. One of the things on there has ended up being what it was. which yeah, it's crazy. Yeah.

Connor Walberg (27:23)
That's amazing.

So the first place that I think, and you were talking about content, like how AI, if you have a thousand, if a website is generating a thousand pieces of new content a day, how is Google handling this? How are the search engines handling this? And I think for the most part, they're getting smart enough to know, like Google can tell like, hey, you are a single photographer running a website. It says nothing about a team on here.

Nicole Begley (27:51)
Right.

Connor Walberg (27:51)
and you're putting out 45 blog posts a day. Like, this might not be good content. I'm probably not going to do much with it. But if you're putting out one blog post a week and you're using AI to generate it or to generate topics, that's a great option for AI. It's called topical authority is a huge component of SEO. So what that means is your site is the authority on a topic, right? So you are the authority. You're the expert on pet photography.

Nicole Begley (27:55)
Yeah, no, something's not right.

Connor Walberg (28:18)
or dog photography, or horse photography, whatever it is. And so you say, this is what my site's all about. Look at my site and am I fully addressing topical authority? It knows what topical authority is. And say, can you tell me what I'm missing? What are some parts that are missing from my site that would strengthen that authority? And this is going to help you rank higher if now you create a couple blog posts that reinforce that topical authority that it sees every other pet photographer site has that's ranking number one.

Nicole Begley (28:29)
Hmm, mm-hmm.

Bye.

Connor Walberg (28:46)
it's going to say, okay, you need these too. Now you're only an authority on the topic.

Nicole Begley (28:51)
my gosh, I love it. That's awesome. Yeah. Some other ways to brainstorm. Cause I think the biggest thing holding people back from starting to do like blogging and putting more content on their website is just knowing what to put. So certainly what you just suggested is genius. I'm going to do that for my site. And then like the other thing too, is just to like ask yourself and you can brainstorm with chat too. Like what does my target client need to know before

Connor Walberg (29:04)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Begley (29:20)
booking a session, like what are common objections they have? What do they need to know and be comfortable with before they book? Once they book, what do they need to know or prepare before the session? So things like what to wear, what am I gonna do with my images? The objections of my dog won't behave, my dog has to be on leash, my two-year-old's a two-year-old. There's so many different things that.

We know the general ones, but sometimes you will go to chat and it gives you some other ones that you maybe didn't consider. like, oh, and that's, that could be a really good. And then you have content for days. I mean, you can, if you are blogging once a week, that's 52 topics. It's really not that much.

Connor Walberg (30:04)
Yeah.

And then you go to chat GPT and you say repurpose this into an email, repurpose this into five social media posts that I can deliver over the next three months and create a calendar for this.

Nicole Begley (30:10)
Yep. Yep.

Yeah. And then you can also

add it into your email marketing of like, all right. What should I have in my email? Like welcome sequence when somebody new gets on my email list, what did they need to know to prepare them to book? Like, can you help me write out a, you know, a nurture sequence and, know, and address this, this like it, it's really good at outlining what you should have for the different pieces. and then you can work on it one at a time. That's where I find kind of one of my hacks is I will.

it like it will kind of maybe brainstorm a whole thing. But if you just said like OK, write my whole nurture sequence like no, no, no, no. Maybe brainstorm like how long should my nurture sequence be? What should the general outline of the emails be? Get happy with that and then I just copy paste that into a word document so I don't have to keep scrolling back up and down and then I'll say OK, let's start with email one. Here's some extra information. Here's a personal something like.

go. And then even when it creates that, if it's kind of in the right direction, I'll kind of keep it. But maybe there's a section that it's like, I don't really like those examples. I'll just highlight those couple sentences and be like, give me other options for this. Give me different examples for this. Or I'll say, I want to use examples X, Y and Z. Please rewrite it. So starting big, getting that outline clear and then working on little bits, I find is a much more effective way of using it.

Connor Walberg (31:40)
I completely agree. It's like you need the overview and it needs to have a big picture view before you can get granular. And a lot of people start with the big picture view. it's like, essentially you're like giving chat GPT a blank piece of paper and you're saying, write me a five page document on this, on this one topic. And like, you do that, if you gave that sheet of paper to, you know, a thousand people, every single paper would be drastically different.

Nicole Begley (31:43)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Connor Walberg (32:08)
So with guidance, we can actually take it the way we want it to go and make it so it flows and makes sense to us. Yeah. ⁓

Nicole Begley (32:11)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think that's key too is, you know, none of this. think people sometimes maybe expect that they're going to go in to chat and get output and it's going to be like copy paste. I don't even need to read it, but that's certainly not the case. Like you still need to double check it and like add in that personality where you can make sure it sounds like you. like to read mine out loud because sometimes if I'm just reading.

just by like in my head and I'm just like scanning it with my eyes to read it. I'm a terrible proofreader. But if I'm saying it out loud, then I can be, ⁓ I would never say that. And, you know, so then it can still sound like me.

Connor Walberg (32:54)
That's a great tip. Yeah, because if you think you're reading voice, you read stuff all the time. So you're not necessarily reading it thinking about yourself or if it sounds like you, but if hear yourself.

Nicole Begley (33:01)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you're just, read

so fast where you, if you speak it out loud, you actually have to like verbalize it. It goes a little bit slower. You're not just scanning and skipping things and you know, yeah, over viewing it over. I'm, I'm the worst proofreader. So, spoiler alert, my team has forbid me from sending out email without somebody double checking it. I am, I am not good at those details.

Connor Walberg (33:13)
Yeah.

I have to go through each one like five times. And I'm like, and I feel like I'm a good writer and I always catch typos, but each time I go through them, like, how did I miss that? no.

Nicole Begley (33:37)
Well, am terrible.

If you were like, can you read my, like, give me a once over? like, I can give you some like feedback for the content, but like I'm not your type of girl. It's terrible. my gosh. Okay. So this has been super helpful and I feel like we can geek out on this all day long. ⁓ I, I love the, the, the, recommendation though, just to

Connor Walberg (33:50)
You

Yeah, easily.

Nicole Begley (34:04)
just ask it, like, where can you help me? How can you help me with my SEO? I would imagine you can kind of do the same thing for your Google My Business listing. Can you have it look at that or recommend best practices for things like that?

Connor Walberg (34:19)
It will kind of look through it. doesn't seem to do a great job. Right before this call, I was actually just playing around with that just to try to get it. And I was just asking it, take the top three sites, the top three listings that pop up on this Google map, and tell me how many reviews each one has. And it went in and it told me the tone of each review, and that's it. And then it didn't tell me. And then I explicitly said, what is the number of reviews? And then it did the tone again and didn't give me a number.

Nicole Begley (34:22)
Yeah.

Okay.

huh. ⁓

Connor Walberg (34:45)
And then I said it again, and then it went on Facebook and found out how many followers each person has on Facebook. So like you can get that data on people when it comes to even like keyword research, if you're using chat GPT, which you can do that now. ⁓ I asked it where it gets its keyword research because it's not able to pull from like Ahrefs or SEMrush database, which are like the big SEO tools. It said it's currently filled in up to April of 2024. That's as current as its data is.

Nicole Begley (34:50)
gotcha.

Yeah.

Mm.

Mmm.

Yeah.

Connor Walberg (35:15)
and that it crawls Google on its own to figure it out. So just like these other tools do, but it's not updated. ⁓ That doesn't mean it's bad for keyword research. You can still get a lot of great insights because things that were relevant a year ago in most of what we're doing is still the exact same today or very similar. yeah, for keyword research and just certain statistics and things, it can be a little rough. And you need to check facts because

Nicole Begley (35:21)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Connor Walberg (35:39)
I've created things where it has put a fact in that it claims, and I'm like, that is nowhere near true. I've never heard this before. And then I'm like looking it up and like, this is so far off. You just made that up. And then I told it, I was like, this fact is incorrect. And then it was like, yeah, you're right. My apologies. I'm like, my apologies. Like, that's weird. Okay. So keyword data, what was the question here? Like ran off there.

Nicole Begley (35:39)
Yes.

No.

Haha.

made on that.

I know. think I don't remember. I don't remember. just Google my Google business, Google business. Yeah.

Connor Walberg (36:12)
One way it

can help is to give you a grade for your SEO based on best practices. So if you ask it, hey, crawl my website and let me know, like, how is it for SEO? And it'll tell you, like, hey, you don't have an H1 tag. You don't have a keyword. You can ask it what the keyword target it is on a page, on a competitor's page. And then you can make sure your page is targeting it correctly as well.

Nicole Begley (36:16)
Hmm

Mmm.

that's, that's good. I have found too, that it wants to be nice. And so like sometimes you have to ask it, like, tell me what I can improve, like give me the improvements here. you'd like, have to ask it to get like harsher feedback. Cause sometimes you'd be like, take a look at my website. Let me know what you think. it's beautiful. And this and that, and it's just going to like, give you compliments. so sometimes you have to ask it to like, no, give me for real ways to improve this.

Connor Walberg (36:42)
Yep.

Mm-hmm.

like an ego boost. And when I first was using it, it was like, this is incredible. This is some of the best copy I've ever seen written. Now here's some things I would change. And I'm like, I'm like, so I'm just feeling great. And I'm like reading the things that could change. And I'm like, okay, it says mine was already great, which I know that I'm great. But, but, but these suggestions can make it even better than great. Awesome.

Nicole Begley (37:05)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Obviously.

I love it. love it. my gosh. So good. Connor, thank you for sharing this and geeking out with me on our little AI adventures. If people want to learn more about SEO and how they can help rank better and faster in their market, let them know about where they can find more from you because that is what you specialize in.

Connor Walberg (37:53)
Yep, so you can follow up and I run a membership where I help photographers with all their SEO. And I have a course in there and everything. And I'm actually this week. So by the time the podcast is out, it'll be released. But I'm recording an AI workshop showing examples of how to do all of this and releasing prompts and everything in the membership. So I think that's going to be super helpful. And in addition, for anyone that references this call, I'll do a free website audit as well.

Nicole Begley (38:11)
Cool.

wow,

Connor Walberg (38:22)
Yeah,

Nicole Begley (38:22)
nice.

Connor Walberg (38:23)
I will look at your site and record like a 15 minute video explaining what I would fix, what's working, all the SEO best practices, and really also use my SEO tools to, which, spoiler alert, 99 times out of 100, you probably also need more backlinks. So I'm just going to tell you all that, that you probably don't have any good backlinks yet, or maybe you have a couple. That's a big one.

Nicole Begley (38:46)
Yeah. Yeah. Which backlinks, what are backlinks

for the newbies out there? Links back to your website from other sources.

Connor Walberg (38:54)
Yep, so any website that links to you and they need to be relevant. like related to what you do. And this is yet another place that I'm going to be talking about in the AI workshop where it's like, ask AI, Hey, what are some relevant websites that I could do a guest post on that are highly relevant to my website? Here's my website. And it will give you a list and then, and you say, give me their contact info as well. And it will give you their contact pages or an email or phone number, all that stuff.

Nicole Begley (39:22)
I've never used it for that. That's exciting. ⁓ awesome. All right, cool. Well, thank you again for sharing all that. Did you share your website? Thank you. Yeah.

Connor Walberg (39:25)
you

I don't think so. It's,

it's connorwalberg.com, C-O-N-N-O-R-W-A-L-B-E-R-G.com. And then it's the membership link up top. I don't know if you want to check it out. And thank you so much for having me, Nicole. This has been awesome.

Nicole Begley (39:44)
Perfect. Cool. Awesome. Oh my gosh. Of course,

anytime you're welcome. Anytime. Um, yeah, super fun. Thanks for, um, geeking out on our matrix, uh, wormhole at the beginning.

Connor Walberg (39:58)
You had to go there with AI.

Nicole Begley (39:58)
⁓ yeah, I know for sure. For sure.

It's just, it's just crazy. anyway, you guys go check out Connor. If you want to help with SEO, he is the best and, I will see everybody next week. Bye everyone.