Jade says: “I think that, in 2025, we need to move back towards more original content.

I think we went through this phase where we were playing around with AI and trying to come up with easy, quick ways to create content. But really, what is moving the needle is highly authoritative content that includes stories, expertise you can't find anywhere else on the internet, and actual insights from the experts, essentially.”

What does that look like, in terms of comparing content that's original and expert-driven against content that's been primarily generated using AI?

Are you able to provide any stats in terms of whether it's more likely to bring in X amount of organic traffic, retain users, or something like that?

“Of course, it depends, as does everything else in SEO. But I will say, from personal experience – I started off as a content writer in SEO over 10 years ago. I was the original AI that was just pulling information from other blog posts to create something that was not particularly original in any way.

When AI started coming out and we saw EEAT just really getting cranked up, I decided to start interviewing my clients and really getting their expertise so that I wasn't having to just pull from across the internet.

As an example, I had a client who was a cosmetic surgeon. I sat down with her for an hour and asked her all of these questions that were keyword-informed, and she just gave me her answers. They included anecdotal stories and all of this expert knowledge that really went over my head, but I was able to capture it in a transcript, using Riverside, and then use that to create a tonne of blog content for her website, answering all of these questions that her clients are asking all the time.

Within a few months, we saw the organic traffic coming into her site increase by over 400%. That was 2 years ago, and we're still seeing it creep up over time.”

Superb, so a lot to unpack there. Interview your clients and have ‘keyword-driven content’, I like that phrase there as well.

It'd be great to get a sense of the volume of content that you produce, the cadence, and the publishing frequency that you actually use for that as well.

In terms of interviewing your clients, are you talking about just producing content that's text-based? Did you produce video and audio content as well, or just focus on the transcript?

“First and foremost, I focus on content that's written.

But, again, using Riverside, you can very easily create videos out of their interview and use them across the internet as that aligns with their business model and the rest of their marketing strategy. There's a tonne you can do.”

Primarily text-based but keyword-driven. What does that mean?

“For me, that means doing my keyword research upfront to know which questions to ask. Then, once the interview has happened, I rely more on context than actually shoving a bunch of keywords into the text.

If you're asking the right question to an expert, and maybe your headers are those questions throughout your blog content, then you don't really have to worry about integrating even more keywords. It actually makes your job a lot easier, and it creates better content.”

Where do you get those questions from?

“That's a great question. Mostly from just doing keyword research within Ahrefs, figuring out what's already out there, and then making a big list of everything that we want to cover.

For her in particular, something that they offer is liposuction while you're awake, which sounded wild to me – and it sounds wild to a lot of other people when you Google that. I think my client probably shows up now but, originally, it was a lot of questions on Reddit, and people Googling a lot of things, and I was seeing things in Ahrefs coming up, and then we can just compile all those together and ask those questions to the expert.”

Do you look at keyword volume as well, or is it all about questions that are relevant to the business?

“I definitely look at keyword volume. We obviously want to go for the keywords that are getting searched the most, but that's just a good place to start.

From there, I think ‘awake liposuction’ (for lack of a better example) didn't really have a very large amount of search volume in Ahrefs, but it was still worth covering because it's exactly what she offers, and people have a lot of questions around it.”

What about where questions fit into the buyer journey? Do you look at that or is it all about relevance again? “It all kind of goes together. Another big part of this is asking the expert what questions their clients are asking them all the time.

Sometimes things come up that you're not really seeing in an SEO tool or anywhere else online, but people are wondering about it because that person's getting asked it all of the time.

So, even if it doesn't serve SEO, it's serving the client once they get to the website. But, of course, understanding the buyer journey and understanding what their concerns are at different points in that process is all really helpful.”

You can obviously generate a transcript relatively easily nowadays. How much tweaking do you make to that transcript? Because people don't necessarily write the same way that they speak. Would you do a lot of editing to the interview that you conduct?

“Typically, yes. A lot of organising and putting the stories and anecdotes where it makes sense.

You want to have it structured like a blog, of course. Especially if you're dealing with a highly technical person, the way that they are going to tell you what they do is not going to translate to a clean blog post.

A lot of editing is done, but I do try to make it sound as much like the expert as I can.”

Do you augment the content that you create with original imagery, maybe other images or videos as well, and elements like tables?

“Yes. Again, it depends. If the client has a giant collection of branded images, we can work those in. If they have other assets that they want to link in – if charts are appropriate or graphs, things like that – all the way down to sometimes we just have to use stock photos. It really depends.”

When you go about deciding what content to create, do you also do competitor research?

Do you search the keyword phrases for what content already exists and perhaps try to produce something better/more comprehensive than what exists already or do you simply just look at the question, interview your clients, and produce something original without too much care about what already exists?

“Yes. Knowing what is out there currently is a huge part of this. That all kind of gets lumped in with the keyword research phase. Typically, I would start by just Googling something around their niche, what the primary topic of the content we want to create is, see what's already out there and see how it's structured.

I did another one of these for someone who's in LinkedIn profile management and I found these massive articles that were covering way too much information and were clearly just written for length, but we obviously want to keep that in mind as we're creating things that are actually better for a user to actually read.”

It can be tempting to go overboard when creating a page of content and create too much in there, answer questions that aren't so relevant and, as a result of doing that, reduce the perceived relevance of the page in a search engine's mind (if they have a mind).

“Right. Also, you just create a not-great user experience at the same time.

I'm currently reading SEOin2025, and I loved the beginning where they said that this is like the ‘Goldilocks era’ of SEO. It's not all about just writing the longest piece of content for a robot or just writing for the user. You have to be just right. This is all part of that.

Provide the best information in the best way, but we also want to keep keywords in mind and make it show up because that's a part of the user experience, as well as finding the blog.”

For this expert-driven content, what's the best way to go about finding experts? Ideally, are we looking at internal experts? Does it matter?

Can we have other external experts and how do we go about determining their authority within an industry?

“That's a great question. A lot of my clients who I serve are the experts in their field, but sometimes we have to look outside for an expert. I was recently working for a SaaS product in the finance area where the founders are highly technical, but they're not financial advisors. I ended up just asking the clients, ‘Who is your favourite financial advisor to get advice from?’, and we used them as the experts.

Sometimes it's getting on LinkedIn and trying to find the best source of information but, obviously, finding someone who really knows what they're talking about is a big part of this – and someone who is willing to share all of their knowledge.”

How do you mark up your web page to show search engines who you're talking to and harness their expertise (if you do that at all)?

“I was actually reading something on Neil Patel's website yesterday about this, but creating a profile to link to on the website is big.

I also like to just put a profile of the expert at the bottom of each blog. I feel like that's a better user experience for the person reading it, so they're not having to click around and try to figure out who this person is.

But I know, from an SEO perspective, having that separate page where we can create a hub of all this person's knowledge is very helpful as well.”

Interesting. So, if it's a person that you interview just once and it's perhaps just a single page on your website that they're featured on, would you still have a person profile associated with that article?

“Again, it depends. It depends on the website and how it's structured.

Is this a massive blog where there are tonnes of different experts and it's appropriate to do that? Sometimes the best thing to do is just do the profile at the bottom, link back to their sites, and that's enough.”

Okay, but having the profile at the bottom is absolutely key.

“Mhmm.”

You mentioned incorporating real stories and insights as part of the conversation that you have, and you also mentioned the fact that Google prefers that. How do you know that Google prefers that?

Also, how do you talk to your guests in a manner that encourages them to share real stories and insights?

“These are good questions. I know that users prefer that, which means that Google would prefer that just from the perspective of ‘people love stories’.

If I'm interviewing a Pilates instructor (which happened recently) for her website, and she's telling me stories about real people's experiences with Pilates as a part of writing a Benefits of Pilates webpage, that's obviously going to make all of the points she's making drive home better and connect with the user even more.

It's not hard to get stories out of people. Sometimes you have to directly ask. As you and I are talking, I keep pulling in anecdotes from my own clients and how this has actually worked for me, which is something you just don't get if you're just sitting down and you're like, ‘I'm going to write a blog about something that I'm not particularly an expert in, but I'm just going to pull information from across the internet.’ or if you ask AI to just write up something for you. They're not going to pull in their own personal anecdotes and things like that.”

Do you just publish a new piece of content, like the kind of content that we've been talking about here, or do you have some kind of mini promotional strategy, such as using elements from the piece on social media as soon as it's been published and email as well, to encourage as many people as possible to view it straight away?

“Yes. One of my favourite ways to build these things out is to create an Ultimate Guide: a big pillar piece of content that links to everything else, and sometimes we roll these things out over a few months.

My favourite thing to do is just release all 12 blogs at once, so we have a big Ultimate Guide and then it links off to everything else that we've created together. Then, really encouraging the client to share it on their LinkedIn, put it in an email campaign, and things like that.

When we do these in Riverside, and we get the really good video content, I also like to create little clips to share with the overall content, so you can actually see the experts sharing their knowledge on these things – and those are excellent for LinkedIn and other social platforms.”

Okay, brilliant, so that's like a mini-launch. Essentially, you'll create a dozen different pieces of content, or a dozen different blog posts, you link them all together, and you will have some kind of index on the first article (or on all of them) to link them all together.

Then you may incorporate different experts as part of that series and let them all know at the same time, and letting them assist you with your promotional strategy and driving as many people to it, to begin with, as possible.

“Exactly. Yes.”

Where does this all fit into an overarching content strategy? Do you sit down at the beginning of each year and determine what you're going to do?

“No. That would be great. That would be a good thing to do if I was a little bit more organised.

Typically, when I have retainer clients, we have a certain amount of these that we have discussed creating at the beginning of our time together. If they offer 3 primary services, it's like, ‘Hey, let's create a guide to each of these particular services.’

Sometimes I have e-commerce clients where it gets a little bit more interesting. We will do a deep dive on who their ideal client is and what type of information they're searching for, and typically go out, find the experts that we want to create this content with and go from there.

But I wish it was as organised as: January 1st. I'm going to create a giant spreadsheet – but sometimes it's a bit more a bit more reactive than that.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“I would suggest not spending too much time on your keyword research. Find your big keywords, but don't worry about dozens of supplementary keywords. Find your big one and then create content that really serves that keyword and serves the user, and the other supplementary ones will just make their way in there.”

The main keyword that you're talking about there, should that be focused on your home page?

“Yes.”

Jade Pruett is Founder of HelloSEO, and you can find her over at HelloSEO.com.