Mark Vandegrift 
Welcome to another episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift. And with me today is a very special guest, a first-time guest, our very own director of public relations, Jim Cyphert. Jim, welcome to the podcast.

Jim Cyphert 
Thanks Mark. I appreciate you having me on today.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, Jim is joining us today to discuss the symbiosis of online search SEO. So search engine optimization and AI search, because we all know that that's come into the foray. And we are going to talk about the symbiosis of that and content. They are hand in glove, aren't they? So, Jim, let's start by having you introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about yourself, you know, background, your role at Innis Maggiore, your love for the Steelers. I mean, anything.

Jim Cyphert 
Yes, I do have a lot of love for the Steelers. So that probably just made half of the audience turn this off.

Mark Vandegrift 
That's okay.

Jim Cyphert
Yeah, I'm actually from Western Pennsylvania and then moved to the Youngstown area and I've been at the agency for it's hard to believe Mark, but twenty-five years now. So started in two thousand and one. And you know, I manage, as director of PR, I manage all of the PR for the agency and also all PR for any account, any client at the agency. And then I do have my own accounts as well. But you know one interesting thing about me I guess is that I am one of only 4,900 APRs in the country. And that is a an accredited public relations professional through the Public Relations Society of America. So not too many of us out there. And then..

Mark Vandegrift 
You're a dying breed, I think.

Jim Cyphert 
Right, yeah, it kinda it is, it is. And I'm also in the process of writing my own book at the moment, which has been pretty interesting for me. And I think you know that I have written a lot of articles for newspapers and some weekly publications kind of focused on the craft beer industry. And my angle of my book is a little unique because it's focused on the human experience in the craft beer industry. So the people that I've met and that kind of thing. So it's been fun to write.

Mark Vandegrift 
Very good. We have quite a few authors here at the agency. It's amazing how many people have put pen to paper and decided to you know, go on topics that are outside the norm. We have Jack that had fishing, we had Scott with Jack Nicholson, you with craft beer. I think Dick and I are the only ones that actually wrote about our craft, right?

Jim Cyphert 
Right, that's true. You did you did. That's right. Yeah, so we do have quite a few authors.

Mark Vandegrift 
Good. Well, let's help our listeners understand kind of the context of this particular topic. Maybe give them a quick overview of how a content manager views search and why it's important.

Jim Cyphert 
Yeah, you know, what I've learned over the years is that all content really does serve a purpose. You know, it's certainly gonna be entertaining for our readers to read and learn more about the topics that we're writing about, but really what we're trying to do is to make our content findable, right? And I kind of liken it to a tree in the forest, right? If a tree falls out there and there's nobody to hear it, does it still make a sound, right? So we could put all kinds of great content out there, but if nobody is seeing it, if nobody is reacting to it, you know, ultimately we want reaction from our content. We want to change people's opinions and their beliefs, and maybe even get them to do something that they might not otherwise do. So whenever we start putting content together, we have that thought in mind and the person that's going to be viewing the content. And first and foremost, we've got to make sure that the search terms that we are in incorporating into that content are things that people are using to actually find the content similar to what we're putting together.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, good. Well, we you know, for years, we've been using the term public relations because that's the official discipline. I was just interviewing a gal the other day who graduated and she said she was in public relations, but she actually was using the term interchangeably with advertising, marketing. It was like looking at it as the same word, right? And I had to explain, nope, those are those are very different things. And yet, you know, being in PR in her studies, it was kind of a surprise that she hadn't done that. She hadn't she hadn't done any media relations training. I mean I'm not sure what our universities are producing here, but let's before we get into content marketing, let's give folks an understanding of why PR public relations is different than advertising and some of the I guess adjustments over the years that you've seen happen with how the digital world has impacted PR, but how it still maintains a separate discipline.

Jim Cyphert 
Yeah, and I always like to go back to kind of the classic PRSA definition of public relations. You know, what is it? And it's developing mutually beneficial relationships with all of the stakeholders that your organization is involved with. So yes, that does include customers. So we are talking to customers, but that includes the media, that includes potential investors, community partners, even employees. So PR kind of focuses on all those areas. But sometimes we are using, we are paying to get our message out there on when we use PR. So and that has happened, I guess, in the digital world too, right? So the same principles of PR apply, but we're just using different digital channels to get our messaging across. Sometimes we're paying for those messages, like on Facebook or Instagram, we're paying to get our message put out there, or in the newspaper sometimes we're paying for like a letter to the community or things like that. So but with public relations the thing I really think is unique with content, and we always talk about you know owned versus earned versus paid content, and PR uses all of those. We try to earn coverage in the publications, but now that we own our own websites, we own our social channels, we can use those tools to push our messages out to all those key audiences as well, and pay sometimes. So, you know, hopefully that helps to explain it a little bit. But it's we're talking and you with PR, we're talking to everyone that interacts with our brand.

Mark Vandegrift
Good. Yeah, it's that third party credential that when you get that, you know, pickup in a publication, announcing a new product or announcing something, a move by a company or whatever it may be, that's so valuable because it looks as though it's coming from somebody else. It's almost like me asking you, Jim, hey, tell me your favorite Mexican restaurant. Well, the restaurant's not telling me how great they are, you are. And

Jim Cyphert
Right.

Mark Vandegrift 
I think if people can keep that separated from truly, you know, paid advertising and me putting a message out about my company, this is now a third-party credential. And that's where the power really comes in. Well, at the end of the day, in PR, you're producing copious amounts of content. That used to be mainly in the form of news releases or media advisories, things that a company might issue to the press. But that's changed significantly. And so one of the terms that's used pretty frequently now is called content marketing.

Jim Cyphert 
Yeah.

Mark Vandegrift 
And so maybe explain to us why content marketing is important and what some of the key factors or considerations are that go into sculpting content, whether that's a blog or any other kind of an opinion piece, something that, as you say, might sit there on a site as owned media. But isn't necessarily something that anyone will find until they are searching for that topic.

Jim Cyphert 
Yeah, you know, I look at it like it's our own form of publishing, right? So we're not publishing a book or anything like that. Sometimes we are, you know, we have a lot of authors.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, that's part of it.

Jim Cyphert 
But we are able to put out content, whether it's a white paper or an op-ed piece or a blog post that is relevant to our brand and it's about positioning, right? We want to position our brand as what we are that makes us unique. But then we're able to publish that on our website or on you know somewhere online that we can then push that material out to other people to see. and I think that's where the value comes in. And when we do that, we're not just publishing content that sounds great. It's like kind of a balancing act. You've got to make sure that it is relevant and that people are searching. And I have a couple of examples as we move forward here. I guess I could use one of them like red pickleball shoes because I'm a pickleball player.

Mark Vandegrift 
All right.

Jim Cyphert 
But let's just say that we're writing a blog post to try to attract people because we manufacture red pickleball shoes just as an example. And there may be only three people globally searching for that term. And if we find that there's not a lot of searches for that term, it's kind of not a win-win for us. Or if we find out that, hey, there's a lot of people searching for that term, but Nike and Adidas and all the major brands also are, and we're not going to ever compete well enough to be in the top ten, then we kind of have to give up on that too. So it's a balancing act where we're creating our own content, we're determining what people are searching for and what they are how they're gonna find us and then we're sculpting the page which you know better than I do how many different steps there are in the sculpting process. I mean we go through, you know, the page title, the including the keyword in in the headline and in the copy itself, naming the images, the metadata, you know, there's a there's a ton of things. So it's really kind of in my opinion, it's a blend of art and science. Art with the creation of the content, science and fitting in all of the little steps that you need to do to make sure your content is findable out there.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, that's a really good point. We run up against SEO firms and really they're selling the click, but they're not selling the sell or the persuasion.

Jim Cyphert 
Right.

Mark Vandegrift
And there's nothing worse than a wasted click where you get me to click in, but then your content doesn't persuade.

Jim Cyphert 
Yeah.

Mark Vandegrift
Cause at the end of the day, we're trying to move client products, services, solutions, you know, grow them as a brand. And if you've wasted my time by getting me to click to your content and then there's little to no value in reading it, that's where they miss out on the art of persuasive writing. And that's why this falls, I think, into public relations, because your entire career is about writing persuasively. You know, this is not creative writing in high school where you get to tell us a fanciful story. This is about how are you moving a concept along to eventually make someone take action. And so that's a great point to bring up, Jim, which is there is an art and science to it for sure. Well, maybe list out some what we would call common mistakes made with content marketing, like give our listeners an idea of things to avoid.

Jim Cyphert 
Yeah, I think a lot of brands kind of tend to focus on what's important to them versus thinking about the end user. So I think that's a common mistake that I see is you focus too much on yourself and not really thinking like, how can I reframe this to make it interesting for my reader? and then like we talked about, you know, some some folks focus too much on the SEO and not making it, you know, brand personality content. Or vice versa. Sometimes it's too much personality not enough SEO. So I think those mistakes are made. And you know a lot as you know, we create our annual editorial calendars or at least quarterly editorial calendars for our clients. And sometimes we find that clients want to get too rigid with that and they're not flexible. There could be some very important things going on or and I think we do a great job of this at the agency, not to pat ourselves on the back, but when there's a topic that is hot, we change our PositionistView blog, maybe the schedule, and we cover that just to make sure we're hitting some of the high points out there. So I think a lot of people do not do that but they should. And then input from other people. You know, I know we sometimes as content managers get focused on what we want to accomplish and we have our goals, but getting input from others, whether that's the client or our coworkers or other people, I think that's just going to make our editorial content much more robust overall. So I think, you know, learning from our mistakes, because we're gonna make mistakes as we move forward. A lot of people don't do that as well as they should. And I try to do that. I try to learn with every piece of content I develop and think about everything that I've done and then try to make it better moving forward.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, it's a continuous feedback back loop. You know, you put content out there and you see how it hits the masses in terms of interest on the topic. But you're also trying to look and see what are the results of my efforts in terms of attracting search engines. So there's a lot of data that you have to keep track of to make sure that you're doing it the right way. And I think to that end, how do you want to clarify to and to our listeners how does search and content work together to improve that ranking performance in search results? And let's start with traditional search engines first, because to your point, we're already always staying on top of the latest. And I think AI chats are something that we want to talk about separately. But let's talk about traditional search engines because that's morphing into these AI chats. And it's what we're finding is SEO is more important now than it's ever been for these AI chats, even though the format is changing.

Jim Cyphert 
Yeah, no doubt about it. And you and I have been working on SEO projects for what, twenty some years now?

Mark Vandegrift 
25 years.

Jim Cyphert
Yeah, I mean literally I think what our first website was 1999.

Mark Vandegrift 
94.

Jim Cyphert 
What was it 94? Okay.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, for Republic. You may not remember that 'cause you weren't here.

Jim Cyphert 
I wasn't here. Yeah.

Mark Vandegrift
32 years ago. I mean, can you believe we've been doing web stuff for 32 years?

Jim Cyphert 
That's crazy. And I mean just from the you know, we've we were working on SEO early on, but then it became a bigger and bigger thing as the years went on. But you know, I think that search and content are kinda like, you know, Batman and Robin and SpongeBob and Patrick Star, right? 

Mark Vandegrift 
You didn't go there. Oh no. 

Jim Cyphert
And I did go there. And hey, Woody and Buzz Lightyear

Mark Vandegrift 
Okay, that one's acceptable.

Jim Cyphert 
You know, cause we've got the new movie coming out here, so.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, what is it? Toy Story 326?

Jim Cyphert 
Probably. But you know, they do have they have to work together, right? It's not one or the other. It's gotta be balanced out and working together. We've kind of touched on some of that already, but they that forms the foundation of visibility, right? So you've got to have that good content put together, but that content can't just be creative. It's got to be focused on the keywords. And you know, like you said, it doesn't matter whether somebody's typing in a query traditionally in Google or if they're you know doing a voice search with an AI tool, right? We want to come up, we want to be there, and you know the content provides the information and the answers that people are looking for, and then the search mechanics themselves determine how those answers are found, right? So and it's interesting because we're working on the process of one of one of the first companies that you and I worked on together to, and it's been one of the agency's greatest successes, not to name any names, but they're working on making some changes related to AI and they're focused on AI searches. And it is amazing to me, Mark, that all that foundational work that we've done over the years and the success that this company has seen, when you start asking the AI bots, you know, different questions and things like that, it's like exactly what you would want to find, right? So a lot of that SEO foundational work is transitioning into the new way of searching and the answers that are coming back. And we are making some changes and the main thing is adding some content to some of the pages that we put together because they were a little sparse to begin with but that's rewarding to me is like realizing that the foundation is still there like you said, but things are changing and we have to keep in mind. But I think I think I was talking to Lauren yesterday and I believe that she's gonna be coming on in the future to talk about some more focused AI stuff as well, I think.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yes. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, we have been doing SEO for a long time. And I think my illustration was always remember your high school English class and your teacher telling you, write a thesis statement, and then every point that you make beyond that has to support that thesis statement. And we all we're saying is change out the thesis statement for your keyword topic, right? And what's happening now is we're moving from keywords to what they call prompts. And that's what Lauren and I will be talking about a little bit more. Prompts are just let's call it a longer keyword, right? It's seated with related things because if someone's asking about a topic, they're they might be coming at it from different angles. Well, why does that work for traditional SEO? For the same reason. You wrote about something. It's a thesis statement and everything credentialed that, right? So, from that standpoint, I believe that's why all the SEO approach that we've done in the past continues and actually is working better in AI because AI is caught up to the fact that, hey, we're not robots, we're human beings and we talk about things, and we talk about things in topics, right? So I think that's just been the benefit as we see AI kind of start to take over traditional search. And we're finding that we're rising above even more so than we did with search because we're not trying to do the black hat practices of, you know, put this into the metadata or put this into the code and try to make, you know, trick Google into ranking us highly. Well, that goes against the intent of relevance. So I just think, you know, you bring up that good point. We're seeing that we're having such success in AI, even greater success than we did in traditional SEOs. So it's really good to see that. Let's go to the next question here on, you know, if a listener is just starting up on content marketing for the first time. And a lot of people will go straight to blogs and that's great. But we even SEO news releases, we SEO white papers, we SEO all these things, because at the end of the day, we just see it as raw content that either a search engine or now AI chats are grabbing hold of and using in their results, right? So what are some important steps that you take when mapping out your content?

Jim Cyphert 
Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I really put a lot of thought into the key topics that we need to focus on. And not just what I want to write, but obviously what is of interest to our readers out there, right? So making sure that the topics that we're writing about are really gonna be relevant for those for those folks. What's gonna move the needle, right? So, you know, you kind of look at what's driving interest, what's driving traffic to your site, you're doing the keyword research, which sometimes that can help you determine topics as well, right? You you do that initial keyword research and I can't tell you how many times I've seen this happen where I'm looking and I'm like, that's a great thing that we can write about because it's so relevant to what we're doing, so I think that's an important early step too. And like I said before, kind of keeping that eye out there on the trends and what's happening and what's going on in the industry and the one thing that's important is making sure that it's a natural fit. And we talk about this with positioning too. It's gotta be in your DNA, right? So these topics and the the things that we find, we wanna make sure that they fit who we are and what we do and that we're not trying to be something that we're not, because people are always going to see through that. And then the one other thing that I try to do sometimes is talk to others, you know, and I and I encourage people to do this. If you follow someone or you know you're reading their content and you like what they're doing, and sometimes that's even in a competitive situation, maybe other people at another agency or even somebody at one of the clients competitors who you're really admiring their content, you know, have a conversation with them. And it's amazing in our industry that people will share, right? If they know someone else. And I and this happens a lot for me with the with my membership in the PRSA. When I'm talking to people about how they come up with their ideas, it's amazing how your peers can share information that it was really going to help you develop your own content calendars.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, you kind of brought up you're touching on again a little bit between the art and the science of all this. And the art to me is I always use social media as an example. I don't care if you're walking your dog down the street, right? I don't care if you're clipping your toenails. I don't care if, you know, there's a lot of things in your life that I think end up on social media that I just don't think should be there.

Jim Cyphert 
Right.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, what we find sometimes is clients come in with this, hey, post that, you know, we're having lunch outdoors on our picnic table. Well, okay, that's not overly interesting to most people. Now, there's a place to present culture. Like we use Facebook to present the agency's culture and we show things that we're doing, but we know it's for prospective employees. We're not trying to attract clients through that necessarily.

Jim Cyphert 
Yeah.

Mark Vandegrift 
Although it's amazing how many clients follow us and go, it looks like you guys have a really robust culture. And so they like to be aligned to that and they like to learn about it. But at the same time, you know, if I'm going to your news releases and your blogs, it has to be something that pushes your brand's personality forward. So maybe talk a little bit about how you balance the optimization for search engines while still keeping the brand's personality within the content.

Jim Cyphert 
Well, interesting. And this might be a first Mark. I'm just gonna share that with you. And you may even want to ask future guests to do you know, do something that ties to their very own personality, right? Some skills that they might have. But I've got my juggle balls here.

Mark Vandegrift 
Oh my goodness.

Jim Cyphert 
You may have never had a live juggling performance on the podcast before.

Mark Vandegrift 
I have not, no.

Jim Cyphert
But I'm gonna give it a shot. And it's kinda funny because I'm gonna try not to look at the screen. I'm gonna try to look at my balls here. But I liken the juggling. And that was a very brief juggling act, I realized.

Mark Vandegrift 
It was impressive though.

Jim Cyphert
And don't worry, I'm not juggling flaming bowling pins or swords or anything like that. It's just my juggle balls, but you really do have to kinda do that kind of a juggling or balancing act. You have to keep your eyes on both, right? And I'm doing my juggling thing here, but you do have to make sure you've got content that's interesting, but you've gotta balance that out with the right key phrases and and all that kind of stuff. When I first started doing SEO work, it did not feel natural, right? I was used to just writing and expressing myself and I was like really struggling early on. It was a it was a tough thing. But you know, the more you do it, the more you get into it, it becomes kind of second nature to you. And now it's like I ever I don't write content. I mean writing my book has been interesting because I'm not putting key phrases in there, which maybe I should. But at this point it's just designed to be you know, a piece of content that is expressive of my experiences. But it's become second nature to me. I'm always doing it. So, you know, it's sort of a balancing act, but it's something that is so natural to me now that I don't even think twice about it when I do it.

Mark Vandegrift 
Good. It you know, you're talking about AI and I guess the receiving end of it, but we have a lot of clients that walk in the door and they say, ey, we've disappeared from Google or we're not showing up in search engines and AI chats, etc. And immediately we go, Well, you probably wrote your entire website and all your blogs with AI, didn't you? And they're like, Well, that's what the former agency we were with told us to do and we said, well, we hope you didn't pay them anything because there's little work involved having AI do everything for you. But the point is, is that they disappeared from the marketplace, right? If you're not in search, if you're not in AI. And so give our listeners I guess a quick rundown of why turning to AI to write their blogs is a big mistake. And maybe give the implications of the approach so they understand why using AI to write blogs is a big mistake or any content.

Jim Cyphert 
Yeah, you know, and I use AI myself at times as an idea starter, right? You get that thought, you get that nugget in your mind of what you might want to write about. However, you need to have original creative content on your website or in your blogs because really the search engines are gonna punish you if you use AI generated content. You know, the thing I say about AI is that it doesn't have the human experiences that people have. It's not going to be creating anything original. It's pulling from all these sources of content that's already out there on the internet. So it's not original content. And the search engine is kinda dinghy for that. And you know, people use AI in a lot of ways, you know, with regard to other facets of life. You know, my wife was just using it the other day to write a memo at work and I scolded her, you know, I'm like, you don't need to do that. But you know, for me though, Mark, it's easy. I mean, I can talk to you for five minutes and I can put an interesting piece of content together about you and what you're doing and you know, it's just becomes second nature to me. But for people who don't you know, a lot of clients look at that and say, Wow, I don't have to write the copy AI is going to write it and I don't have to go through that whole writer's block situation, that kind of thing. But it is really going to penalize you in the long run. And you're right, you're going to going to experience much less visibility when you're not using original creative content.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, I like to explain it to clients this way because you and I are old enough to have grown up in the days where we had the what we call dittoes, right? So Xerox, and you make a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, and back in the day it was blue ink. So by the time you got it as a student, you're reading a cockeyed piece of, you know, a worksheet that is on like this on this page, and half of it you can hardly read. You felt like you needed glasses, even though it was just the fact that it was so faded you couldn't read it. And I like to come make that analogy to AI. AI doesn't want to copy itself because eventually AI is going to be repeating itself as it tries to recreate semantically all this stuff. So what it's actually looking for is more content and differentiated content, because it assumes if you're creating your own content. That you're an expert, right? I mean, we're all about positioning. And if we're all about positioning, that means you have something different to share, which makes it proprietary, which makes it something that AI will find valuable because it's going out. And we all know this because if you do a search in Google and you get the Gemini result, it sources the links of where it pulled that in, which I think is fantastic. And that immediately establishes you as an expert. Well, I've never seen AI cite itself.

Jim Cyphert 
Hm, interesting. Yeah, that's true.

Mark Vandegrift 
You know? So one of the reasons that we need to create proprietary, unique, differentiated content and not use AI is that AI is just going out to the world, grabbing content and putting to it together in a semantic way, but it's not differentiated.

Jim Cyphert 
Yeah.

Mark Vandegrift 
So that's one main reason to go, okay, AI doesn't want to see its own content. It's not gonna cite itself. So yeah, stay out of the AI slop world. Certainly use it for research. I mean, we've always used Google since it's been around to research articles, to research things. We call that secondary research. Well, AI just makes that process faster, but you still have to check it. Cause, you know, I know we always say everything on the internet's true, right?

Jim Cyphert 
That's what we say.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, everything in AI is true, right? No, I mean it's not. So I even went to a Guardians game on Saturday and I searched something in AI. I don't even remember what it was, and I thought, this isn't even correct. I don't remember if it was the game time starters. It was something so basic that any of us could look it up real quickly. And for some reason, AI got it wrong, and I thought, there's an obvious example. I should have screen captured it. It would have been a good thing. But anyhow, let's finish this up. We've gone way over time. Hopefully we're still holding on to our listeners here. But Jim, if you had one primary recommendation to our listeners today about content marketing, PR, search, SEO, AI chats, what would it be? What should their primary takeaway be?

Jim Cyphert 
Wow, that's a tough question. What is that primary takeaway? And I think I mean I would have to probably say making sure, I was going to originally, you know, kinda think about this and provide multiple, multiple responses here.

Mark Vandegrift
Nope, just one. Yep.

Jim Cyphert 
But I think balance. Just one is the balance, right? So you need to balance your creative content development with search engine optimization. So you gotta do both because that's gonna be the most valuable thing that you can do to you know to have creative content that is very interesting to your readers, but it's also going to drive results and get people to your page. So I'd say that would be the best thing is to make sure you have that fifty-fifty balance, that you're juggling those two things and making sure you've got that great balance.

Mark Vandegrift
Very good. Well, thanks for joining us today, Jim. Appreciate it. And thank you to our listeners for joining the latest episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. If you haven't liked, shared, and of course subscribed, hit that subscribe button. That really helps us out. And until next time, have an amazing day.