A Makers Mob
CASE STUDY
Using AI to Better Blog SEO
How one student got another 500+ clicks from Google in 4 months with brand new content.
Background
(Because this Case Study is based around SEO and content that is ranking for a site that isn’t ours we won’t reveal the actual blog or offer).
Student X started with a blog some years ago.
Throughout the years, she made lots of different content, until she created a digital product that her audience loves and buys.
A lot.
She got more targeted with her blog content at that point and very targeted with her social media content.
Now she has a multi-six-figure business and a big social media following, but she knows that her blog is the piece of internet real estate she owns.
Social media is amazing and that audience is very important to her business, but she’s smart to take care of the asset that is her blog, too.
That blog content can have long term reach and will help her passively build her audience.
The Offer
Without revealing too much about Student X, they create guides. They are downloadable pdfs and they help their audience save time, avoid effort and save money.
They cost between $17-$89, depending on whether or not you choose to purchase a bundle.
So we’re not talking about selling a $999 course. These are mostly low ticket sales.
The Audience
They’ve built a multi-channel audience which plays a huge role in the SEO effects.
We’ll talk about this at the end of the case study.
The Starting Numbers
Machined.ai
Student X used Machined.ai to create 46 blog posts (so far) added to their site.
Why?
Because it saves time.
And it’s not just saving time. It’s condensing the process of high volume blog post creation that would normally take months into minutes so that you can drastically reduce the time it takes to start seeing your posts getting impressions and clicks from Google.
Machined uses AI to:
And it does all of that plus publishes them to your site in minutes.
Yes. Minutes.
When she first started using Machined for this process, the posts were very, well, AI-ish and really needed a lot of editing for style and tone to sound more human.
It has since gotten a lot better at sounding not so much like a machine wrote the post, but they still require real life human intervention after they are created.
Because, while the machine can give you a volume of posts that might take weeks or months for you to write from scratch and it can interlink them for SEO, it can’t give YOU.
You are going to have to edit and you’re going to have to add your experience, stories and perspective (Layer 2 traits of content) to the posts because that is something no AI can really do for you and it is also extremely important if your goal is to build an audience who will buy your products.
So, yes, the posts are created in minutes, that does not mean that the whole process takes minutes. It’s an ongoing process of editing and revising and improving, but getting that volume of content created, SEO’d and posted is where you are going to see the benefits.
Basically, you can take the months it takes to create and SEO 46 posts from scratch
OR
You can have AI write them for you in minutes and get Google to see them way faster.
SEO and AI Content
A QUICK LESSON
It’s important that we briefly cover SEO so that you understand the results that Student X was able to get.
By default, most AI content is dreadful to read. It won’t do a great job of converting readers.
The reason why this process works is because it can take some time for your site’s content to get indexed by Google and getting any type of impressions.
That is the first goal. We call this Level 1.
With the help of Machined you’re able to create a topic cluster where the posts are interlinking with each other which is something that Google loves.
So this is solely about Google at the beginning, not your audience.
You’re not going to run to your audience and show them the content that Machined has created right out of the box.
But once you start to see impressions coming in from Google, even if it’s just a couple, then you know you can start to work on the post for yourself.
This is when the editing process comes into play.
How you handle this is something that we talk about in Full Stack Engines and Blog Rocket + Pocket SEO (which is included with Full Stack Engines).
The important part to keep in mind is that the initial process shouldn’t lead to more sales. It could but the chances are slim due to the content that is created.
It’s when you’re able to edit the content and add in those Layer 1 & 2 content traits that transform your content into Cash Flow Content (another course inside of Full Stack Engines).
Niche Matters
It goes without saying that how quickly you see results will matter on your niche and the keywords that you are targeting.
If you go after red kites made in Peru, then you can probably rank quickly with everything here.
But if you’re going for how to lose weight for women over 30 then it’s going to take some time.
Organic Search Results Before
This is Student X’s Google Search Console for the 4 month period before they started publishing posts using the techniques unlocked in Blog Rocket. (12/1/23 - 3/31/24)
Over 84k impressions a month on average on their content in search results and about 1.3k clicks on average monthly.
4 Months Later…
Here is their Google Search Console for the first months they created content following the Blog Rocket + Pocket SEO strategy. (4/1/24 - 7/31/24). More impressions. More clicks. Better Clickthrough Rate (CTR).
The Improvement
Now they’re at 99k impressions on average a month (about +15k impressions per month) and about 1.6k clicks a month (about +300 click increase per month).
Now, not all of those additional clicks were to the new content they created, but we’ll talk more about that later.
Overall, a nice increase and there’s a lot of room for improvement as the new content they created continues to move up in the search rankings.
What Did We Do?
They created 46 new blog posts over the course of 3 months in keyword clusters of about 10-15 posts at a time.
(Note: If you want to annoy Google then publish dozens or hundreds of AI posts at once.)
These were created with Machined.ai and initially they published them almost exactly as they were when they came out of Machined.
Machined makes REALLY REALLY detailed posts. They are long, usually between 2k and 3k words depending on the length you ask for and they are written specifically with SEO in mind.
Plus the great benefit of Machined is every cluster you create is interlinked.
(We teach you how to use Machined in Full Stack Engines, or if you’d rather we do it for you, we can do that, too).
Immediately after publishing, they added a featured image & one additional image (all generated with Midjourney to match their style) and they edited small things like paragraph length.
Either immediately after creating them, or within a few days or weeks, they did on page SEO and used Rankmath as their tool to help with that. The goal was to get every post to an “80” or above.
(Again, all things you learn in the program.)
Then they watched.
They kept an eye on the posts on Search Console.
When a post started getting impressions, they did a second light edit focusing on what they could do to make it move up further in the rankings.
When a post got into the top 20 OR started to get clicks regardless of its position (because that would happen), it was time for a third, heavy edit.
This one involves editing for tone/style, adding more images, external links in to the post if possible and review of the headline to see if improvements could be made that would help get more clicks.
There are certain things to look out for when editing these posts and if you can nail them, then you have a great shot of climbing into the Top 10.
Will This Work For Me?
First of all, we want to reiterate that this is a mature blog, so for a brand new blog, results will be different. A blog that has been around for a while with a decent amount of content is going to have more trust with Google, so it’s going to have an easier time climbing the rankings than a brand new blog.
However, some of our newer brands have shown that they can get impressions from Google within the first month which goes to show how far you can take things with AI and some basic SEO.
Doesn’t Google Hate AI?
They saw that there’s an increase of 1.25k clicks after they started the new blogging strategy. But, only 503 of those clicks were to their new posts.
So what’s up with the other 700 clicks? Did the 46 new posts help boost SEO for other posts? Is it a seasonal thing?
It’s hard to say because we can’t see data on search console from the prior year, but whatever the case, we can say that the AI generated posts did NOT hurt the trust they’ve built with Google already.
So rumors of Google “hating” AI content seem to be unfounded.
Instead, as always, it seems that Google hates bad AI content, just like it hates all bad content.
So I Let AI Do All the Work?
Nope. This process is not human-hands off.
It starts with Machined writing the posts completely, but, after that, there is a lot of editing and on-page SEO that has to happen to really see the benefits.
We love AI, but we love it as an assistant and collaborator. Even as your “work bestie”. But you don’t want to let it do all of the work for you.
Your business still needs YOU in it.
More Numbers
Average Position in rankings is better than prior, even though the new posts are only 4 months old.
This is interesting because they make up about 27% of the total posts on the site so it would make sense if that number didn’t move much or even for it to get a little worse until those new posts really start to move up in the rankings.
But that was not the case. Average position improved from 38.2 to 32.7. That’s great news.
Click through rate has stayed about the same. Of course we would really like to see it increase.
Next they should focus on editing the titles on the content that is ranking well to see if they can increase the CTR of them.
This is the best performing post that they’ve added to the site.
It’s in position 24.9. And still has 151 clicks in 4 months. There is so much room for improvement here just by getting a little higher in the rankings.
This is the next highest post for impressions:
None of them are on the first page or before the scroll, but they have higher click through rates than other posts.
The high CTR shows us that at the very least, the title is intriguing enough for people to click on it. So they should leave the title and work more on the posts.
Why?
Because if they are getting these impressions and clicks without being in the top 10, then it means people are still searching for the answers they want. This is an opportunity to improve the post and move it up into the top 10 so everyone that searches for it gets the answer they need.
Next, if we switch things up and sort by average position, there are more interesting things to look at like this.
This post has just started getting impressions a little over a month ago and about a month after it was created.
It’s in position 56, so it’s not getting clicks and it’s not getting a lot of impressions.
But, if we look at volume for keywords related to “picky eaters”...
There’s a lot of searching for terms related to this post.
So this is another post that needs some more human work (as opposed to AI) to see if they can start moving up in the rankings and also ranking for some of these other keywords.
Finding Buyers
None of this really matters at all if they aren’t creating posts that make sense for their audience.
This isn’t a race to get the most page views so that ad revenue goes up. It will help with ad revenue down the road if that’s your thing, but that isn’t the objective here.
Ad revenue would be a bonus, not the primary source of revenue.
Their money lies in selling digital products to the tune of over $40k a month.
So when we think about it from that perspective, does this “picky eater” post help with that?
Well, it is likely that the person searching some variation of picky eater keywords is a parent who is thinking about what to feed their kid.
And Student X’s product can help with that. And they have kids who they talk about as being not just picky, but also having food allergy issues, too.
So it seems that this would be a good post for getting the attention of the right people.
Likewise, they have some “new baby” posts that they’ve created. If you have children, we don’t need to tell you what it’s like having a new baby in your house and trying to still cook and eat dinners.
Student X’s product is PERFECT for that audience.
This is probably the most important thing to consider if you decide to try this method for yourself. What are the keywords that the audience you want to attract to your offers is searching for?
That’s the kind of traffic you want to be looking for with these blog posts.
What’s Next?
What’s Next?
They have more post clusters to make so solely based on that, they can expect more Google traffic to their site.
But even if they stopped right now, if they keep an eye on the posts they’ve already created and continue to edit them and make SEO improvements to them, their results will only get better.
It will be interesting to see in another 4 months where things are at.
Passive Needs Active
SEO is what we call a Passive Distribution Channel. Looking at this case study you might be like us and wish that all you had to do was create blog posts and wait for traffic to come in.
But that doesn’t work as well in today’s world.
Google loves branded traffic. This means traffic coming to your site outside of Google search results.
Social media, email, and direct traffic all have an impact on your SEO.
This is why we call our strategy for building Automated Sales Machines a Full Stack Engine.
Because it helps to cover all 3 Distribution Channels (Active, Passive, Nurture) in a way that isn’t overwhelming.
The goal is to have a business that isn’t reliant on a single channel and can sustain fluctuations that naturally occur thanks to algorithms.
Plus, building only the Passive Channel means that you’re going to be waiting a LONG time before you see any meaningful results.