I want to thank Chelsea Alves and the entire UNmiss.com team for having me (for the fourth time) as a guest on their podcast. We talked about SEO, digital marketing, and how to stay sane in the age of AI.
I’m not sure if it’s because I gave up coffee ☕ (yes, there’s life after) or if the planets just weren’t aligned, but today wasn’t my day. I was overthinking and getting in my own way a bit. Had some notes I wanted to follow… and that threw me off. I also got disconnected for a minute, so that didn’t help. What can you do?* Nevertheless, there are some lessons to be learned for sure.
* Maybe go back to drinking coffee. Decaf, at least?
The other UNmiss podcast episodes with me as a guest are here AI Redefining Digital Marketing – UnMiss Podcast 2024, here SEO Audits – UnMiss Podcast and here How to Win the SEO Game.
See the recording and the transcript below.
SEO, AI and content creation in 2025
===
Chelsea: Let’s get right into it. Today’s episode is one you’ll want to save and share with others. I’m joined today by Emanuel, a seasoned SEO consultant and digital marketer based in Toronto, Canada. With over a decade of experience, Emanuel specializes in SEO Audits, AI integration and content creation strategies that drive organic growth.
Chelsea: He’s passionate about helping businesses enhance their online presence and achieve their goals. Here’s something to consider: the digital marketing landscape is rapidly evolving with AI playing a significant role in this pivot. A recent study indicates that 85% of marketers believe AI will significantly transform content creation in the next five years as search engines become more sophisticated and user expectations rise, businesses face the challenge of adapting their SEO and content strategies to stay competitive. Emanuel is here with us today to shed light on these developments and share actionable insights for navigating this dynamic environment. I’m your host Chelsea Alves, and I’m thrilled to welcome Emanuel to the podcast.
Chelsea: Welcome, Emanuel.
Emanuel: Chelsea, thank you so much for this wonderful introduction. A pleasure and a privilege.
Chelsea: Thank you. To start, could you share just a little bit about your professional background?
Emanuel: Sure. So I’m an SEO & Digital Marketing Consultant, but my first job in marketing started off in, traditional marketing, if you might say, in, measuring tv audiences.
Emanuel: And essentially, I like to say that I was getting paid for watching tv. Then obviously I transitioned to the digital landscape. I came to Canada in 2016 and I started a career here exclusively in digital marketing. I worked for a niche agency. I worked for a large agency. I work in-house and I do independent consulting as well.
Emanuel: So I had the opportunity to experience all these major branches of digital marketing. And, right now I’m more in depth with the AI and applying AI into the digital marketing efforts, helping businesses leverage this opportunity.
Chelsea: Awesome. Well, let’s dive right away into AI because I know that’s kind of the hot topic and what’s top of mind for, marketers and SEOs right now.
Chelsea: And pretty much anyone, but the integration of AI into digital marketing is accelerating, as we talked about a little bit earlier, how do you see AI reshaping SEO strategies and content creation in the coming years?
Emanuel: It already started. It has been going on for, a while. We see the impact of AI that, it has on the, on the content that we consume, first of all, and I can only talk from my perspective and from what I I’m doing and helping the businesses, I work, work with.
Emanuel: So first thing is, help scale. Every kind of marketing effort. If up until, let’s say 2023, you could do, a certain amount of tasks being, you know, content creation, written content, videos, ideas, social media posts, and so on. Right now you can scale at a tremendous, basically, unlimited, ideas.
Emanuel: That’s basically how the AI has helped me, get to where I am today.
Chelsea: Yeah. Yeah. AI has been, you know, so useful. I feel like every company, you know, is starting to integrate it into their, their tech stack. Even Unmis, we have our, AI article, rewrite tool, and a content detection tool.
Chelsea: So it’s definitely, becoming integral. In every business. Let’s shift to AI and search algorithms because I know a lot of, there’s a lot of questions around that with search becoming more fragmented due to AI overviews. Now Google recently introduced AI mode early March. So with search algorithms continually evolving, what would you say are the most critical SEO practices businesses should focus on right now to maintain and improve their rankings in this, kind of AI driven world that’s. That’s taking place.
Emanuel: That’s a great, that’s a great question. I took some notes prior to this podcast because I wanted to, to make sure I, it’s something that, I won’t miss.
Emanuel: Obviously the search landscape is evolving and it’s changing. It’s done so for the past 20 or something years. So it’s not something new, but definitely it’s a challenge. AI overview takes up so much, real estate space, that I’m amazed sometimes of the quality of the information from Google, that, that, I’m getting.
Emanuel: I also started seeing recently AI overview results for local queries. Something that, you know, didn’t happen before. So it’s tapped into that market as well. It’s really becoming more difficult for small to medium sized businesses, you know, to get some eyeballs for their business. In terms of, what businesses and what digital marketers can make to stay on top of their game is to
Chelsea: oh, we lost him for a second, folks.
Emanuel: It is the first time for everything. My apologies for that.
Chelsea: It is all good. That’s, you know, the joys of presenting live. We can go ahead and just dive back in
Emanuel: the first time for everything.
Chelsea: It’s totally okay.
Emanuel: We were discussing search, landscape, what businesses can do. Yes, I would recommend keeping up with the best practices.
Emanuel: So that’s still the foundation, the fundamentals of any kind of marketing effort, not with digital marketing, not just digital marketing, or not just SEO. Right? Obviously create that excellent experience for the user, because that’s what we wanna do at the end of the day. I would say also keep up with what works.
Emanuel: And this is a perhaps controversial topic, but not always the best practices and guidelines are the ones who move the needle and who make a difference when it comes to SEO at least. And we can look at some examples from local SEO as well. So I would say keep up with what works in moderation and, in terms of the search engine or especially in terms of Google, who’s kind of like losing, but losing is not the right word here because it’s still dominating and will dominate for many years the search landscape. The users will still go to Google to find what their need. Because as somebody that I work with said recently, people trust Google.
Emanuel: But, people trust Google because they developed that relationship. When Google came out a few good years back, what differentiated them from the Alta Vistas, the Ask Jeeves, the Yahoos, and all the other search engines at that time was, the quality of the results as well. And how do they get to those results?
Emanuel: Well, backlinks were an important factor into their algorithm. So, long story short, I do believe that backlinks will become even more important in the age of AI. And probably all the LLMs, including the Chat GPTs, the Claudes and all those things will find a way to, leverage that, in order to give the people who will start performing searches inside those conversations and not on Google, those results that the people expect.
Chelsea: Yeah, that’s such a good point because I actually just returned home last night from a conference in, Ohio. It was the Localogy 25 conference and, local SEO guide, the company presented some, they did a study on, you know, AI and the impact of that and, and ranking factors. And they had actually mentioned that they still found, backlinks in their study to be one of the, crucial ranking factors still despite this AI revolution. So, that aligns, you know, perfectly with what you just said.
Emanuel: I might add that, they, they will become even more important, I said. Not just for Google, but for the entire, the entire…
Chelsea: ecosystem. Yeah. So let’s talk about content, because I know a lot of people, you know, worry with ai content creation that it might sound like too robotic or people are going to be able to start, kind of, being able to distinguish what’s AI and what’s human. So we know content quality and relevance are paramount, especially for Google. How can businesses leverage AI to enhance the content creation process, but also meet user expectations?
Emanuel: When we say content, we don’t refer just to written content.
Emanuel: So when I think of content right now, especially in the paradigm of AI, where I can easily repurpose a blog post, for example, into a social media post, into a dynamic social media post into a 30seconds video, one minute video. That’s what I mean by content. It’s, it’s easy to produce crap content, but the search engines and user will figure that one out.
Emanuel: And I’m pretty sure you, as well as me and as well as everyone else can figure out by the first couple of words in a sentence, if a piece of content was written by
Chelsea: Yeah.
Emanuel: A human or whatnot.
Emanuel: I would want to open up the conversation here to something controversial saying that. Google somehow doesn’t rank or doesn’t like AI created content, which is not exactly true. Google was one of the first entities to use AI in creating content. Whoever did a paid advertising campaign, know that there is an option to put your website URL in there in Google Ads. And after, less than 30 seconds, you’ll have a couple of headlines, a couple of descriptions and a couple of suggestions, to use for, for pages in your ads, that are often even better than, let’s say, what you might have come up with without doing a more in-depth research. And that’s in a span of 30 seconds. That’s AI written content that you pay for and that users click on. So that’s one thing. Google is not against AI. It’s against crap content.
Emanuel: Yeah. And that’s where we need to make, make a difference. We need to differentiate and, I don’t remember exactly who said it, but don’t expect to put a couple of instructions in a small box over there yet, get something back and have that piece of content, you know, bring your business. Coming back to, the question, working closely with the stakeholder, with the, expert in the field, to ensure that the content that we’re creating, that we’re putting together is first of all real and talks about the problems that the prospects have, because most of the time, especially in the business, we want to educate, but also solve the problems by, showing the expertise.
Emanuel: So that’s one of the approaches, that I have, and I’ve been doing so for the past couple of years. But right now with AI, I can explore different angles than not even, you know, the experts in the field taught about saying those things. So that’s one of the approaches I take.
Emanuel: I tend to do the same things that I did even five to six to seven years ago, only wrapped up and scaled.
Chelsea: Yeah. Yeah. I, I find that it get, it keeps getting smarter too, right? It understands, you know, what you’re looking for, the more you use it and it, you know, it keeps getting smarter and smarter, which is, which is great.
Chelsea: But yeah, I agree in that it, you know, maybe a level of human oversight is needed just to ensure there’s no misinformation or hallucinations and ensure the content it’s generating is accurate, and also matches the, your tone of voice, so it sounds, like it’s written by you and not by a robot.
Emanuel: Many people think that it doesn’t require work. No. It requires a lot of work. Yeah. I’ve been working with some other digital marketers and they confirm that since ai, we’ve been working more, not less.
Chelsea: Yeah, no, that’s such a great point because yeah, I know a lot of people are, concerned that AI might take their jobs or that content writers are no longer going to be needed, but I beg to differ.
Emanuel: For sure.
Chelsea: Yeah. So, you know, we’ve talked about content, but another really big hot topic is the recent decline in organic traffic. I know HubSpot, saw that recently, and this has sparked a lot of discussion in the SEO community. What lessons can businesses learn from such instances to safeguard their own search performance?
Emanuel: I don’t think that for the past 10 years there was any digital marketing related query where HubSpot didn’t show up. And most likely in the first three results. There’s this thing in the quality raters guideline that I, if I remember correctly, something like _query deserves diversity._
Emanuel: So every once in a while Google might shift things around. Just, just, _just because._ Obviously for those who are watching and don’t know, HubSpot is a, uh, massive, massive website that has been putting content out there for the past, at least 10 years. If not even so, but in 2025 this year, they started seeing a significant decline more than 50%, if I remember correctly, from from their organic traffic.
Emanuel: I want to make a note here. Losing organic traffic, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re losing business. I believe I saw a post recently saying that their evaluation was at the highest, the same month, that they lost more than 50% of traffic. So that’s a thing that I often, find intriguing because I work closely with some, stakeholders, with business owners and, SEO and organic traffic is just, one, one channel, a very good channel.
Emanuel: And, you know, probably, in my opinion, the best channel where you can get business. But obviously it’s not the only one. HubSpot’s place has been taken by somebody else, which I see as an opportunity for, uh, other businesses, other entities, other websites to, to stand out. So, the lesson here is that, you know, things can change overnight.
Emanuel: It’s not the first story that we hear about that. It’s the most recent one, and I was a little bit unexpected, but it’s not the first story I would say that, you know, I would recommend to keep up with, still keep up with the best practices, most likely HubSpot did so as well. So, the lesson here is that you may get punished by not doing anything bad either, but I would, if I were at HubSpot, I would keep doing what they were doing so far. But obviously consider the new, the new paradigm. And if you’ll ask me, I think for the past couple of years I’ve seen, I won’t call it necessarily a decline, but not the same quality of content that I’ve seen on other websites for, for certain queries, for certain type of results. And we can go into technical as well. Remember that HubSpot had very long form articles. Which is something that, maybe it’s not something that the search engines end users prioritize these days. So if there’s a lesson there, that might be it as well.
Emanuel: Consider what the top results are, what the users like. And try to create that form of content.
Chelsea: Yeah. Such great advice. So local SEO has gained prominence, you know, especially for small to medium sized businesses or businesses that are trying to target a specific geographic area nearby. What strategies would you recommend for companies aiming to improve their local search visibility?
Emanuel: Again, coming up with keeping up with the best practices because that’s the foundation. And why am I keep saying this? Because even in 2025 when we have so much history and we have so much information available out there, I still see, I won’t call it mistakes, but things that were done five years ago, six years ago, and seven years ago, for businesses that actually have the potential and again, missing this opportunity. Keeping up with the best practices, consider, investing into what works, ensuring that you are present everywhere in terms of the, local market citations. It’s easy to do something like this. Nevertheless, you know, not many people do that.
Emanuel: Arguably it’s not as impactful as it was, let’s say, a couple of years back, even before Covid. But it’s still a signal to the search engine that, at that address with that phone number and that website, a business, operates from there that serves that, that area.
Emanuel: So that’s one of the, easiest things that, that you can do to push. I would say, uh, ensure that your website, I still see a lot of, uh, websites that are not necessarily, I wouldn’t call it up to date, but you know, they still can use, can use a revamp sometimes, you know? Yeah. Have the basic h https stuff right on all those things.
Emanuel: And again, those are missed opportunities for, more, for bigger areas, for more, what’s the word I’m looking for? Competitive areas, every single thing can make, make a, make a difference. So small businesses in terms of technical and SEO, needs to be more relevant. So keep up with the best practices, best practices, being having a website up to date, ensuring all the good stuff are there.
Emanuel: As in, the title, the descriptions, the pages. Locations, the areas that you’re serving. Many businesses to business in one place, they wanna show up there, yet there’s no mention of it on the website whatsoever.
Emanuel: That’s what I mean by by the best practices, the simplest, all those things can actually get you far away, even in the age of AI.
Emanuel: And I assume at one point that I will ask ChatGPT: _can you give me a plumber that’s open next to me, close to me, near me, _something like that. And inevitably, Google and GPT and any other LLM will get it’s information from somewhere, most likely from your website. So you wanna still have that information there.
Chelsea: Absolutely. So data analytics, plays a very crucial role in refining marketing strategies, as marketers see what’s working, what’s not. What key metrics should businesses be monitoring, right now to assess the effectiveness of their SEO and content marketing efforts?
Emanuel: Traditionally phone submissions, telephone calls, were the and still are today, right? the metrics that we’re looking at when we measure any kind of marketing activity, that’s how I’m getting paid, right? If I don’t bring in the business, then there’s, no need for, for me that end in order to do that. Need to show up now, the user behavior is changing. I myself, have, found, that I’m not doing the things I used to do a couple of years back.
Emanuel: You know, I might have a phone number in my agenda for a business, and I recently did so for the optometrist, but somehow I ended up googling the name and calling from the, from the results instead of from my agenda, right? Does that count as a conversion? Yeah. Obviously that’s just an extreme example, but behavior does change. I think that brand, brand mentions, are important. Whenever I see in Google Search Console, for example, from an SEO perspective, I see more mentions, more, visits, more impressions, from a brand related query, I also see that as a positive, positive sign, and I tend to include that in my reports as well.
Emanuel: Brand is, important and I personally believe that the most important metric starting now and for many years to come will be the sentiment, however that will be measured either from the reviews from a, Reddit subtopic, and in 2025, any small business even if it’s in a remote area, might have a, a sub Reddit where people, talk about it and get the conversation going.
Emanuel: And as we have seen for the past three years or so, in many search results, including local Reddit shows up, pops up, which is important. So sentiment will be a metric that I would try to measure when it comes to the experience people have with the business; experience is another keyword here, because that’s what I’m suggesting, all the businesses that I work with do: create the best experience possible.
Emanuel: That’s what I’m doing as ans SEO consultant: I try to create the best experience on the website, ensuring that, you know, it’s fast, it’s, aligned with the best practices and has the information that the users wants because Google, at the end of the day, want to show its users, the people who perform the queries the best possible answer for that query so that that user come back and use their tool as well.
Emanuel: My job is to show Google that the website I’m working on is that best result for the queries that people are looking for.
Chelsea: Yeah, I agree with that completely. I feel like user experience and customer experience is just, is so critical and it’s such a important part of marketing and it’s often an area where we, some marketers overlook.
Chelsea: So I think it’s important to, you know, really be able to identify how consumers are engaging with your website from discovery to post-sale, honestly, through reviews and, and advocacy.
Emanuel: it’s a long, long process. Uh, it is,
Chelsea: but it’s worth it.
Emanuel: Definitely.
Chelsea: So, going back to AI, as AI continues to evolve, what ethical considerations should marketers keep in mind, when implementing AI driven strategies?
Emanuel: That’s a very good question. And the keyword there is ethical considerations, right? it’s easy to create a, fake persona nowadays. It’s easy to create, and many have implemented, entire, entire funnel with entire automation that has no human whatsoever involved in the middle. Yet this AI right now helps you, you know, communicate with, with your prospect, with your customer. Not just, written, but also verbal. There’s some great tools out there that actually can call you and emulate a voice, and you are almost, almost sure that you’re speaking to a human when actually you are not. So when you say ethical consideration, that’s what I’m thinking of.
Emanuel: It’s hard to give a straight answer in, in that regard because there’s many things, that you need to consider. Again, coming back to the Ethicals, it’s still, at the beginning of businesses only started using AI in that sense. But I believe that in the next couple of years we’ll see some, some lawsuits that will, kind of like set the tone and set some guardrails in terms of what you can do and what you cannot do. I won’t go into details, here, but I know for sure that some of the things are at the borderline of what’s ethical and what’s not, and even to what’s legal. So definitely, you can easily be tricked or full by something like that, if I would say on a personal level, if it’s not something that you would like somebody to do to you, don’t do it to, to others, don’t implement, essentially a system that can mislead people into something else and mis mislead, it’s a, moderate word.
Chelsea: Yeah, I agree with that. And I think that in the future too, there’s going to be kind of a push to have businesses disclose how and when they’re using AI and just making that so much more transparent to the end user so that they’re, you know, aware of if they’re engaging with an AI chat bot, or how AI is going to be using their data that they enter into the chat, et cetera.
Emanuel: And I, as a user, I don’t mind interacting with AI. God knows from a customer experience, perspective, you know, how much I wish I didn’t had that interaction with the, with the person. And I would rather, you know, talk to somebody via chat that, you know, doesn’t have a strong, strong opinion, that’s often, yeah, misleading. So with that, I would agree, but to your point, transparency, and I’ve seen more and more of people that, websites that are adding a, AI statement. So as you have an accessibility statement or privacy policies, terms of views and so forth, major websites that use AI, you know, have an AI statement.
Emanuel: This piece of content has partially been generated by artificial intelligence and so forth, and I suspect more and more we’ll see more and more of that, in North America and all over the world, especially hip hop, cassettes had parental advisory, explicit content label on them. Yeah, that can actually be a possibility.
Emanuel: We know that, Chat GPT and Facebook’s AI actually, you know, put a watermark on the images they generate. It might be something that will be mandatory at one point.
Chelsea: Yeah, no, I agree completely. So it looks like we have time for about one last question. I think this is a good one for just kind of wrapping up the discussion for businesses feeling, you know, overwhelmed by the rapid changes in digital marketing, like everything we’ve discussed today, what initial steps would you suggest they take to, adapt and thrive in this, this kind of new landscape?
Emanuel: Well, not just businesses, but myself as a digital marketer, I’m feeling overwhelmed by, by everything that’s, that’s happening in the space. And it’s hard to stay sane as I might say. I would say, just again, coming back to keeping up with the best practices and what work up until now, it’s important to be part of the community or follow actually somebody that, that you can trust and that can help you filter through the noise. If I’m looking for a, voice AI generator voice solution right now, I know for sure there’s at least 10 or 20 tools out there that can do what I need to do some better than the other, some cheaper than the other.
Emanuel: There’s one for 20 bucks, there’s one for 200 bucks. How do I make that decision? Where do I go to, make to what’s my source of trust and to filter through the noise? Will I go in and test all of, all of the options? That’s not feasible. So being, having somebody you can trust, following somebody, or being part of community, is something that will help you stay sane. That goes for digital marketers and business owners as well. And I would add something not necessarily controversial, but especially for SEOs and digital marketers, don’t neglect understanding the technicals, the technical part of _the_ digital marketing.
Emanuel: When I’m saying, technical, I mean web development, best practices. You have AI that soon, if not already, will be able to write code better than any human. The best web developer. The best programmer out there. Nevertheless, from a digital marketing standpoint, I still believe that the basics, the fundamentals, you need to understand them and you need to learn why and how they work. Starting from H-T-M-L-C-S-S and especially JavaScript that’s a preferred framework for many new developers and including AI. And you know, at one point you’ll ask the AI to generate your landing page that’s fast and secure and all that, but you know, Google won’t be able to crawl it or any other because of the framework that, it was built on. That’s just an extreme example. But I do believe that, it’s important to still know and understand the technicals, understand coding, understand, no need to be highly skilled developer. But again, just basic understanding of structured data, schema, for example.
Emanuel: Schema is such an important factor. Nevertheless, it’s better from my experience to have no schema than to have some schema that has an error or has, some wrong information in there. And how do you do that? By, by understanding how it works, by understanding the fundamentals, it all comes back to the fundamentals.
Chelsea: Yeah. Yeah, I, I agree with that. I feel like, SEO yes, it has changed, but you, it also, you know, always just goes back to the fundamentals. Like over time, no matter how much changes, it’s always like following best practices.
Emanuel: And I might say something for the ones watching us, if you’re looking for the place to, you know, for trust unmiss.com is one of those places that you can, you know, go to follow, like, share, subscribe, and keep up with the best practices and actually see what works.
Chelsea: Aw, thank you for that. Well, Emanuel, this has been such an enlightening conversation. Where can our listeners connect with you and learn more about your services?
Emanuel: Emanuelp.com. So that’s EMANUEL p.com. That’s my website. There’s links there to all my social media accounts. I’m most active, probably on LinkedIn, but the web, my website, Emanuelp.com is the hub, the nexus of all my activities. And I do recommend to any businesses to still have a website because that’s a frustration of mine when, you know, prioritize their Instagram accounts or other social accounts over their website, which history has shown us otherwise.
Chelsea: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your expertise. For our listeners, if you found this discussion valuable, don’t forget to subscribe to the unmis podcast and leave us a review. And if you’re looking to enhance your digital strategy, check out UNmis free website audit tool.
Chelsea: It’s, quick and an easy way to identify opportunities and stay ahead in the over, or in the ever evolving marketing landscape. And, don’t forget to visit Emanuel’s website as well. This has been the Unmis Podcast and we’ll see you all next time. Bye. Thank you.
