How to Use AI for SEO Content (Without Replacing Your Team) with Josh Thomas

Full Transcript

0:00The reason people don't use AI is because there's like extra complexity. Well, Gemini takes away that complexity. Not because it's the greatest platform in the world, but because Hey everybody, it's Greg Heilers here with another episode of Jolly SEO's TL;DR. And today we are going to dive in of course what's top of everyone's mind AI but in this case how we can produce SEO content and execute other SEO tasks with Josh Thomas of VIQ. Josh thank you so much for taking the time today. You know I am the the captain of TL;DR. If it can be said with less words I am all about it. your podcast hate reading.

0:52Well, you got a book in the background, but your podcast was peak efficiency. I think we were out of there in 13 minutes. That's right. Yeah, that's right. Get to the point, get out. That's right. Uh, that's what people come to us for. So look, all of us who run businesses, we're excited about the cost savings of AI, but we're in the business of serving clients or if people are using it already at the end business, they're in the business of serving their customers with better quality content.

1:33So my first question for you is not just the cost savings but also where's the added value in incorporating AI into our human workflows. So there's a couple of things that AI can do that will uh kind of boost your productivity as much as 2x or more. There's a a study that was done by Forbes that showed a a a workforce that is properly trained on AI can produce up to 40% more than a workforce who is not properly trained on AI. And so the goal is not to replace humans because there's too many things that AI cannot do well yet to completely replace them. There's precedent for this. IBM canned 8,000 employees in favor of AI and they're like, "Whoops, my bad." And they brought them back. And CLA did the same thing.

2:27They they canned thousands of employees trying to automate everything. Whoops. Brought them back. My bad. And they literally came back and said, "We're committed to a human workforce." And so AI is great as long as you put it in the right place. And the best place to put it is if you have a human staff, a human team is to train them up on how they can use it to make themselves more efficient and more effective, which is uh consequently the same benefit that a VA can provide to an executive by taking some of that kind of lower level manual labor stuff off your plate.

3:07And so it's like the VA for the VA, if you will. Yeah. Yeah. That's I think you you've got the language down a lot better than I've landed on at Jolly, which is to make sure that we're encouraging the team to use AI without threatening them that this is this is going to replace them. And that's been a tricky one to navigate for people. Uh but you talked about training and that that's one of my questions for you as well is are we investing in the VA to teach them how to use AI or how to build AI agents or none of that and we're just looking for people with expertise already in using or building. I used to be a teacher.

3:59I taught music and I will take an untrained person over a poorly trained person 10 times out of 10. Um, and so unless they're a savant, I would rather take a beginner because at least the beginner is just going to follow whatever my processes are and they're not going to learn bad habits or they're at least they're going to learn my bad habits, you know. So, uh, for for me, it's all about, well, what do I actually want to accomplish and how would I go about doing this? What questions would I ask? How would I execute this? And then I just document that to take it into a Loom video, turn that into an SOP.

4:44You can get AI to literally take a transcript from a video you made showing them how to do it and turn that into a step-by-step process for you. And so you can just get AI to make the instructions. You don't even have to worry about it. Right? The other thing I want to share is it's way easier than most people realize to get your entire team using AI very effectively because of Google Workspace. Uh, little hack. It's like a It's like the the poorest kept secret that nobody knows about. Little hack. 90% of small businesses are using Google Workspace for their for their email.

5:27If you have Google Drive, if you have a branded email address, you probably have Workspace. What you may not know is with that Workspace account, everybody who has an email on your Workspace has access to Gemini Pro. and the Gemini like 3 or whatever it is, Nano Banana, uh, Notebook LM, you have prolevel access to that by default. I didn't know that. I spent I have like 10 people on my team. We all use Workspace. I had no idea until somebody pointed it out. I'm like, "Holy crap, I've had it this whole time." Hey, hope you're enjoying the show. We're going to get right back to it.

6:11Real quick, if you're not sure how you're showing up in AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the like, click on that first link in the description. If you fill that out for us, we'll send you your own AI visibility report and see how we can help you boost your results. All right, without further ado, remember that link and enjoy the rest of the show. Yeah, I've been asking the team, should we should we start paying for Nano Bananas? So, actually, we already are. Uh, you already have it. Great. Log in with your Google. There's your TL;DR right now. Just go go to Gemini, log it in with your Workspace account, and you have Nano Banana.

6:46You've got uh Gemini 3 Pro, you've got Notebook LM, and literally everything that they do. Yeah. So, a a lot of SEOs have had fun in 2025. We're now in 2026, but clowning on Google for Gemini because it was lagging behind ChatGPT. But not anymore. All of a sudden, it's pulled ahead. It's the clear leader. So, you're you're having your team use Gemini. Uh, and let's get into SEO content. What Yeah. What phases of SEO content are they using it for? Yeah. So, a couple of things.

7:27Uh, first of all, the the great the and this is not a commercial for Gemini, but it's just like the reason people don't use AI is because there's like extra complexity. Well, Gemini takes away that complexity, not because it's the greatest platform in the world, but because you're already logged into Google. You already have Google Drive and files and folders. You have your email. You have your calendar. Everything's already hooked up. And with Gemini, you can just go and call it at Google Drive at Gmail and say, "Hey, go and find all the emails from Bob and I want you to write me a summary of, you know, the typical responses we have to Bob.

8:11Go into at Google Drive, go into the, you know, client A folder and give me a summary of the biggest pain points that client A is running into." and then let's turn that into a blog post, you know, and there's there's all kinds of different things that you can do. Go to Google at Google calendar, go and find all of the calls that I have had in the last uh three months and help me understand, you know, who is who I'm spending most of my time on so that I can figure out the audience that I need to write a piece of content to. just these are just kind of pulling this out of off the top of my head, but the thing is is Google is already storing all of your information.

8:50And with Gemini, you can just do at whatever platform it's being stored on and it will extract that data for you and it'll give you any report you ask for. And when when you have that report, that's when you can say, "Okay, cool. I see these insights." The human part, the human part is you having discernment to say, "That's interesting. I want to dig in deeper on that because it's based on data that you've gotten from other parts of your business and now I see that uh a lot of my customers have this kind of concern. Great. I want to write a piece of content around that and then I can use Gemini to go and say, "Hey, go and find me some research and stats around this topic that I can use to build a narrative."

9:32And now we're giving them valuable content that is related to what they actually want to know because they've already told us. And we're backing it up with publish statistics which creates authority. And now the other thing that we can do with Gemini because the whole reason that we want to use SEO is so that we can rank on Google. Guess who owns Gemini? We can say Gemini, how do I create a piece of highly uh juicy SEObased content around this topic? Give me the outline and give me the best practices that I should follow. And then it's going to spit it out with authoritative precision.

10:15By the way, it's not going to be like, "Oh, Josh, that's such a great idea, man. This is going to be lethal there." It's like, listen, here's the rules because my boss wrote the book. And all you have to do at that point is say, great, I love those rules. Take that format and all of the things that I've provided to this point and write me an SEO rich article that's going to rank for these topics and it's going to spit out something that's reasonably good. And then you go back to your human piece, which is the refinement to finalize it.

10:56And so if you think about bookending this process of being a human to come up with the big ideas, let the machine do the heavy lifting and then at the end the human does the finishing and the nuance to make sure that it doesn't sound like a machine wrote it. Yeah. Yeah. We're we're constantly experimenting with AI in in our processes. We're we're more offsite than on-site, but the key thing is the human at the end of the loop. you you just got to have that human there.

11:36And I think not just internally does that reassure people, but externally again because a lot of our listeners here are SEO service providers and you know again cost savings are great but how do we communicate with our clients that this is better for them and I think it's communicating that we don't ship anything without a human looking at it editing it putting the finishing touches on it. Otherwise, we've all seen the hallucinations. We've all seen Yeah. the slop. Uh it's it's not necessarily an upgrade if there's not a human there. So, here's the great part about it is you need that human upfront to come up with those big ideas. You need the source material and then you need a human to do the final touches at the end. You can get someone else to do both of those things. It doesn't have to be you.

12:25Uh, and I'm not going to claim to be the deacto expert on creating lots of SEO content because it's not that easy to do, but and and so I'm spending time right now getting my team dialed in on that first part of the process and on the last part of the process to where the I the ideally I'm not involved at all. Currently that's not possible, but we're working on that. I'm working on getting somebody on my team to be able to produce a good enough piece of content that I can just look at it and switch a couple of words, maybe change the hook at the beginning and and say that's good. And we're getting there. We're 10 times closer than we were when we started.

13:03But it's a process, you know, and eventually we get to the point to where I don't have to be involved at all. Then I can pump out a whole lot more content because the source material came from me already. It's my content. We just leveraged AI to get more of it out there. Where do you do you draw a line? I mean, you mentioned pulling from email, calendar. uh are you down downloading uploading all all of your thoughts, your business knowledge into uh to use ChatGPT language, custom GPT, but are are you trying to make a mirror of yourself in an LLM so that your team can access that at all the all times or are you holding something back just for Josh?

13:45I'm not holding anything back. Um, I'll be the first to admit I I don't exactly know how to make a Josh GPT in Gemini, which is a lot of J sounds. But, uh, the the thing that I know is the what's different with Gemini is if I wanted to create a folder of like here's how here's how Josh talks and just put a bunch of docs in there, that would work. And that's basically what ChatGPT is doing, too, right? So you you probably don't need to be too sophisticated.

14:28You just make a little folder of just like tone, style, and you know, delivery and give some sample work, give some, you know, uh analyses and that sort of thing. But what I like to do that that kind of bypasses that is uh I just do what's called brain dumps. I'll take a walk and uh one of one of my team members gives me a set of prompts or like topic ideas that I already know that I can talk about and I'll take a walk and I'll start talking about it. And then we come back and we take that brain dump like a Loom video. We turn it into a transcript and we feed that in. And what's baked into that is my tone, my style, my delivery because I'm already saying it myself.

15:09So, it's like you don't really have to specify that because it's just taking how I already speak and turning that and cleaning it up into language that can be published. Yeah. And this is a part of uh content flow that agencies have used for years, right? You you consult a sub subject matter expert at your client and like you said, you use prompt, which we all use that word now, but you you question them and get their insights and it's not necessarily for a specific piece yet. You're just collecting as much information as you can from this expert that you will repurpose in the future. So, I like how you're doing that.

15:50And like you said, maybe you don't know today how to make a Josh GPT in Gemini, but uh all this information certainly you could collect it. I guess uh a couple more quick questions before we wrap up here. I think most of us, at least myself, are thinking about text during this conversation. Is your team doing anything with video or audio using AI to create content? We experimented with uh there's a really really interesting dude named Julian Goldie. Uh I had him on my podcast and he showed me some stuff. And if you go to his YouTube channel, he's got a combination of him talking through some stuff and then his AI avatar doing the same. And he never like hides the fact that it's his AI avatar.

16:36And so I saw that and he showed me a couple of things that he did. And so we experimented with his process which was basically he uses hey genen uh and so we uploaded my avatar and we gave it a transcript and uh we used notebook LM to create a mind map and I basically was completely uninvolved. Uh the only involvement for my team was uploading the transcript to hey Jan getting the recording and then somebody made the mind map with that same transcript and just basically recorded a screen share of them clicking through to go along with my text.

17:18So it was like it took one two people like 15 minutes but none of my involvement and the the outcome at the end was like that's cool man like that was really good and I didn't it was like I said all that I didn't say any of it you know and so like yes but uh at this point I think I would rather just turn on the camera and say it myself and I think the content it produced was fine But I'm good with just doing it myself at this point.

18:00Yeah, maybe when you reach the level of a Julian Goldie in our space, then you have enough brand equity, people are coming to your channel, they know the content quality, but if you're someone like me, maybe I need to put my face out there, keep establishing some kind of relationship with the audience. That makes sense to me. Uh Josh, my my favorite question of the podcast is always at the end here. You come in here, you run VIQ, you know way more than I do about how to integrate AI with a human team. So, what did I not ask as we're wrapping up here that you'd like to share with the audience? I think the biggest thing here is uh you need to understand which lane you're supposed to be in and stay in that lane. If you get stuck in the production lane, then that keeps you from being in the innovation and growth lane.

18:49And if you get stuck in the strategy lane, that keeps you from being in the quality control lane, etc., etc. Like, we can't be in really more than one, maybe two lanes at a time. And the best way to do that is to get somebody else to cover the essential lanes based on where you're at, wherever you are in your business. Um, there is something you're doing right now you probably have no business doing. Um, as an example, checking and responding to emails, setting appointments, um, you know, following up on leads, talking to vendors, those sorts of things, getting quotes. None of that stuff is your your business.

19:33Like, you should be doing something way more valuable than that. delegate that even at an expense because that expense is going to free up your time and it's going to create more opportunity for you to go and do higher value stuff that's worth way more than whatever you would pay somebody else to handle this lowv value task. So really all this AI stuff is about getting that off of your plate with AI. You should get most of that delivery once you have a system for it. hire somebody else and train them up on how to do that so that you can go and have cool conversations and do networking and you know build empires and that sort of thing.

20:14Yeah, it's certainly been a question for us internally of like, cool, we're producing more with the same people, but we're also now just investing my time and some other people's we're just reinvesting it into this learning how to use AI and training people on it and it's like where's the net gain if we're just plugging into this thing instead of what we're supposed to be working on. So, makes sense to me. Uh Josh, thank you so much for your time today. I definitely want people to check out viq.net. Anywhere else you want people to look for you? That's a great place to start, viq.net.

20:54We place high performing virtual assistants and we do manage them for you so that you can stay focused, stay in your lane. We'll become your HR department and your micromanagers to make sure whoever we place does a great job and keeps you on track so that you can go and do amazing things. Uh, if you're interested in checking out my podcast, I have one called Leverage Everything, and you can check that out on Apple or Spotify. Awesome. Josh, thank you so much for coming and see you next time, everybody.