Frictionless SEO System

0:00Okay, I think I'm ready to talk about this. I'm talking about SEO. I have published probably like eight articles since I started this system and I feel fairly confident in the process, although I do not have data to show me that it's working or not. I think that, I mean, traditionally, with SUNY University, it takes about six to 12 months to see any sort of like ranking results or traffic results from the content that we make. And I think this is mainly because we're a seasonal business. And obviously now, we probably rank much faster than we used to, just because we were an established brand. I mean, I've owned the domain name since 2004. And I just think, yeah, we're probably getting indexed faster, ranking though, I'm not sure.

1:06Anyway, the system is as follows. I'm calling it my frictionless SEO system. Frictionless is a term that I got from Leo Bebalta back in the day. Leo Bebalta had a website, I believe it was called Zen Habits. I don't know if that's still true or if that was the original name, I think it was zenhabits.net. And he was a blogger. And I'm not, again, I've only met him once. I'm not sure if he still does it, but it was a really popular blog back in the day. And he coined this term of frictionless publishing, which was the act or really the idea that like, you basically, because it's the internet and because you're just using WordPress, like just publish your first draft. And then because it's the internet, because it's WordPress, you can just update it. It's not permanent. It's not the same as like a YouTube video where you have to kind of polish it because you don't get a reupload on the same URL. And that's not true for articles.

2:14So I'm doing this frictionless SEO and here's how it works. So I'm going to walk through the entire system, take notes if you want. I'm not saying that this is a great system, but I have worked out most of the bugs from this. It was very clunky. The first six were pretty clunky. And then the last two that I did were much faster. And so I feel confident, at least this being the first rendition of this system. So here's how we do it. It obviously starts with a combination of keyword research and what I'm calling category cluster, it's just because it's a iteration. But you might see it, I've referred to as topic clusters in the SEO world. So bit, but I call it category clusters because one, that's what WordPress calls it. And two, again, iteration. So I am using a program called my node, which is a Apple program. And I have created all of these

3:22categories. The categories are mostly based on our books. So Steph did that work, although if you are a subject matter expert, this should be fairly easy. And then once you have your topic, I am using Semrush. I'm sure there's a bunch of free shit you could use out there. I'm using Semrush to discover keywords around that topic. And here's how I'm doing it. So I am doing this work. This is not part of the frictionless part. This is just necessary to get a list of content to make. I am doing this by going in the Semrush, typing in the keyword, the main keyword. So for me, it would be either the word pool or hot tub. If I were doing this for home brewing, home brewing might be a word I put in, but it could be beer, it could be, you know, different styles, like IPA

4:24or Colch, something like that. So there's with the thing is with pools and hot tubs, what I found is that the word kind of has to be in the key. It kind of has to be in the phrase. So for example, there might be a keyword that's what is Sionarch acid. And Sionarch acid is a specific chemical that only exists in pools. And so you probably wouldn't call it like Sionarch acid in my pool. But when you create the article, it probably has that word in there. And you can reverse engineer those. But basically what I do is look at a ton of keywords. And then I find words around that topic. So let me give you an example. My process would be all right, I have the word pool. And let me use hot tub. I think hot tub is a fairly easier one.

5:26I think more people understand it. I don't know why, but I just do. So I use the word hot tub, right? And my topic or my category is hot tub winterization. This is the act of shutting down your hot tub for the winter. Okay? So fine. I, first thing I do is I put hot tub winterization into Claude or chat JBT or Gemini doesn't matter which one you use. And I ask it to give me keywords around that topic. And so then I, and I'm literally looking for single words here. I'm looking for like, in this case, it would be freeze, like hot tub, like prevent your hot tub from freezing or winter, for example, instead of winter eyes or winterization. And so I have these

6:28secondary keywords that I sort of pair up. And so I basically, in semrush, we'll type in the word hot tub, which will give me literally every single keyword, the word hot tub in it. And then I filter that by all of these other keywords that I find that that are sort of like unique in their own way. I'm not saying this is the best way to do it, but this is a way that I've been able to find a bunch of fairly popular keywords around the individual categories or topics. So I put all of those in my node. And basically the way it looks is I have a center node that will say hot tub winterization. And then I just add in all the keywords around it. And that's where I store this information. I'm also storing it in semrush as a list underneath that category. But that's all, that's all. This just gives me a list of keywords to create content from. Now I take

7:30those keywords and I put them into a sauna. So I have a sauna board, a sauna project dedicated to just creating our SEO articles. And it is a con bond board. So you have ideas, then you have on deck, then you have editing, optimization, and published. Those are my five steps. Notice that writing is not a part of that. So here's exactly what I do. I have my primary keyword. Okay. I take that primary keyword. I know I kind of like create a card. So a sauna task card. And I go, all right, I add the primary keyword. And then I do a little bit of research. And here's the research that I do. And I do all of this by the way. I take the keyword, I go to Google, I type it in, and I look at the people also ask section. And I just copy and paste the questions

8:34that are relevant to that keyword. And I stick those in the description of that sauna card. That's it. Okay. Then I kind of come up with like a rough title. Usually very close to the keyword. So if the keyword is like how to winterize a hot tub, that will literally be the like the temporary title that I throw in there. All right. Now here's where it gets a little tricky. We do not write content. We are using AI to generate first drafts. And it's very important that I'm saying the words first draft. Because by no means are we publishing AI content, it makes no sense. But we are having it do the grunt work of spitting out a first draft. Here's how we're doing that though. This is very, there's a lot of guardrails on this particular task. So I take the

9:35keyword, the main keyword. And I say, we have a cloud project dedicated to just doing this. All right. And I say write an article targeting this keyword. And I paste the keyword. And then I say make sure that the article addresses all of the following questions. And then I copy and paste the questions that I pulled from Google. All right. I have very specific instructions with this cloud project on how it is supposed to lay out an article. Like you know how we structure the first paragraph, the second paragraph, how we structure H2 lists, etc. The whole thing. You know how we wrap up every piece of content where that information comes from. So we tell it, do not make up any facts, pull it from our database of content, the context. If you don't know

10:42something or you can't find it, ask the prompter. So what it'll do is create an article. But if it's missing information about anything, it will ask us to find it. We'll go and do the research, plug it in. It'll regenerate what is called the artifact, right? Because we'd like to do it as an artifact so we can see versions and stuff like that. So I may beat it up a little bit. I may have it correct itself a few times, but that is essentially the first draft. I get it to generate that. I copy and paste that and stick it into its own word document. Now I also have a separate project that just creates multiple variations of the title and SEO description so that I can kind of pick and choose and write my own. I put all of that together in a Google Doc that we have a share drive on our

11:43system, right, called articles and all of those articles appear there. I make sure to attach that first draft Google Doc to the card. I move it into editing and I assign it to Steph. And from here, Steph looks at the article, has a first draft, also has deep knowledge about hot tub care and pool care. She literally wrote our books, okay? And she goes through and edits them. Basically, the way she describes it is like I completely changed them. But it gives her boundaries to work in. And she says, I'd rather edit than write. So we do this. And once she's done editing it, it gets sent back to me. And here's where the frictionless part comes in, I think.

12:45My goal here is to publish this article. It's basically get an article written as fast as possible. And I don't, I'm trying not to be too precious about using AI versus, you know, writing everything from scratch and being pragmatic about that. Because I just want the keyword to exist on our website. And we can figure out what to do later. This is going back to Leo Babalto's frictionless publishing idea where it's like, just get the goddamn article up. It's basically what I am trying to do. And get it up in as best of the shape as you can. Don't like make a fucking shitty article, right? Like I'm not sitting here going like, yeah, we're just making like a piece of shit. And no one, you know, it's like, why would anybody read this? No, we're attempting to make a good article covering the topic in our own structure using our own

13:52words with the help of AI. This is all about using AI as an assistant, not as the creator, right? We still want the human touch. So the idea here, once it's going to me, I have a massive checklist of things that I do, right? So I'm going to run through that checklist. And honestly, I'm not even looking at it. I have it off the top of my head because I've done it so many times now. And again, I know SEO pretty well. This is not that hard, okay? First thing I do is I get the title right. Now, Steph will come up with her own title, right? And she comes up with an SEO description. But I'm the SEO guy. So I take her title and I go, is it good? I don't know. Do I think I could do better? Let's find out. So the first thing I might do is take that and put

14:53it into a different AI project that I created to give me different variations. Usually it's pretty bad at it. So I end up just like kind of again, editing that title to make it my own. That goes to WordPress. I change the slug. I make the slug very simple. So for example, if it's a how to winterize a hot tub in 2026, if that's the title, which it isn't, but if that were it, I would just go hot tub winterization or hot dash tub dash winterize or winterize dash hot dash tub, right? That would be the slug or the permalink because I use rank math. And then I'd beat up the SEO description a little bit. Make sure that that reads right. And I also try to make it enticing for you to click if Google decides to even use it or not. They sometimes don't. In fact, they normally don't, at least in my use cases. All right. So from there, we basically have a

16:00title, a permalink, and an SEO description. Now for the title, I choose a different SEO title than what the article is actually titled. And this is a good SEO practice because when on SEO titles, I can be a little bit more salesy, right? I can be a little bit more, I guess, like hyperbolic in that if the article, if the article is simply titled how to winterize a hot tub, I might make the SEO title how to winterize a hot tub in less than 24 hours in parentheses or in eight steps. So I just slightly alter it to kind of sell it a little bit. And I do the same thing for the SEO description. So that's step number one. I knock out three things, title,

17:01description, slug slash permalink. Then I copy and paste the article from Google Docs, from the Google Doc. And I paste it directly into the Gutenberg editor in WordPress. Yes, I am using Gutenberg. I am no longer using the classic editor. And the reason is because it copies and paste from Google Docs very well. I barely have to touch the formatting. But that's step two. So I go through and clean up the formatting. There's, you know, sometimes it adds things in there that, you know, like I have these breakout boxes that I built as a Gutenberg block. This is custom using advanced custom fields and like some code. And I, what else did I do? Like I go through and make sure that they're like the headings are good. I may change some of the headings for SEO purposes. And then, and I do this kind of all like with gut and as fast as possible. So I don't

18:10change too much. But I'm just kind of like glazing over the article going like, oh, I can, you know, sneak in an additional keyword on this headline, et cetera, et cetera, you know, create the breakout boxes. And the good thing is that Steph does a lot of the internal linking herself. She does that in Google Docs. And that internal linking translates when you copy and paste it into WordPress, which is friggin sweet. All right. So once I'm done for cleaning up the formatting, which takes me anywhere from like five minutes to 15 minutes. All right. Then I go through and I add links, internal links, external links, and affiliate links. And I don't count affiliate links as external links. Now for the most part, Steph has already done this work specifically with internal links, but she's also done external links. She's really good at this. Okay. I basically go through and add affiliate links because she can't do that in Google Docs.

19:13That's something that I use lasso for. So I go and do that. Right. And then there's one more step. That's it. The last step is adding a featured image. So I go into Canva and either grab a... So I have three ways to get featured images. The first way is to go through our B-roll, take a big screenshot. That's our featured image. The second way is using a stock image within Canva and in altering it a bit so that it's officially ours. And the third way is I just... Oh no, sorry. The second way would be I have a ton of photos that we took in our main list and so like, what the hell? You hear that buzzing? Anyway, my... My mini split is running. It's very loud. Very, really hear it, but anyway. So back to what I was saying.

20:33First way is to get clips from our B-roll. Second way is to get photos from our own library. And third last resort is stock footage from Canva. All right. I don't like doing that, but if it means us publishing an article, like just freaking get it published, we can change it later. And we will change it later, right. In fact, it gives us a reason to get footage. Because it's like, oh, we clearly don't have that footage. Add that to our footage project in Asana and then we'll order it, you know, come the season or now since it is winterization season for hot tubs. That's it. All right. So all in all between like my job to get an article basically published, probably takes me 15 minutes to once the article is edited, it takes me about 15 minutes to publish it,

21:38which is pretty damn fast. And so, and obviously it takes me like, I guess like, between five and 15 minutes to even generate the task. So for me, at most, we're talking 30 minutes in article, and obviously, Steph is probably spending way more time, perhaps an hour, maybe even two hours per article editing it. I would say she's probably at about, she's probably less than an hour. Now, the whole point of this, the whole point of this entire system, like I said, and I need to reiterate this is to, if we're going to boil it down to its simplest form, I am generating a URL. That's pretty much it. And that URL is a topic that we have not covered yet. Now, there are instances where we already have the article and we just need to update it. So that is kind of a separate

22:40task because we're not doing the whole like AI generation thing, or we might, if it's an article that's completely rewritten, but most times it just needs to be edited. So we basically are trying to get a URL published as fast as possible, while it's still looking good and still being a good article. But what I've realized, and what I think I was being so precious about is like, yes, you can spend a lot of time writing an article, right? And putting together like a super polished perfect article, or in our case, we don't really have a ton of competition. And we are kind of already the authority. And for a lot of our content, it's like, we just want to be a resource that people would, would flock to. If it ranks great, if chat GPT, chat GPT recommends us,

23:46also great. The more content we put out in our, in our niches, the more signals we are sending to the AI and to Google that we are, you know, that we should be recommended. And that's kind of my whole thing. It's the same with doing Instagram reels. It's like, okay, why are we doing this? It does not translate to sales, like direct attribution to the social platforms, but the thing that I can't measure, the immeasurable part, is brand awareness. And aligning our brand with educating people about taking care of their pools and hot tops. That's it. And the more content we can put out into the world, the more we solidify that fact in the minds of anyone who is searching for this information in any form. And so this is kind of why

24:49I've adopted the word more for 2026. Because for me, it's just like more just seems to be the name of the game. Now, what about quality? What I just described to you is I would say low effort. But let's be clear about that. Is it? Is it really? Because here's what we have going for us. One, we have a domain name that's been around since 2004 that has talked about the same topic for all of these years, for 20 years. Right? 20 plus years. If you count 2004 is the first time I bought a domain name, then yeah, like really it was 2026. So 20 years, okay? 20 years talking about pools and hot tops. That's, that's just domain age. Whether that metric matters anymore, I don't know.

25:53I'm sure it kind of does. Then we've been publishing content on YouTube, which Google owns. We have now Reels and TikToks, which are being picked up by Google. And we're publishing those new, you know, all the time. And those are being embedded on our website. And we're creating new URLs on our website. So our website's growing. The content, right? The things that we're writing are coming from things we've already done. It's not that it's not that we are having the AI go out and research and writing us an article. That's not what we're doing. We are taking what we've already written or already, whether that's, whether it was written in our book, it was written as a script for a YouTube video, or it existed somewhere in our Google Drive or library that we

26:56just like never published, right? Most of it's coming from the book because stuff had done all this work already. And a lot of it's coming from YouTube scripts that we've written over the years, right? All of that information is in the AI. That is what it's trained on. So what it is writing is trained on our information, the information we've researched and the position we take when it comes to taking care of a pool in a hot tub, right? So really, and I think this is so fucking key, the true measure of content now in the, in at least this space is data. It is really not a, like, anybody can generate this stuff, right? But if you're trying to compete with us and you're generating content by remixing other people's content, right? Then you're doing what everybody

27:59else is doing. It's just regurgitating all the same information, right? There's no original thought, there's no original ideas, there's no original, you know, hey, I went out and I dealt with this pool and I cured it and here's how I did it, or I went out and winterized this hot tub, here's how I did it, right? We did that shit already. We own that. We own those stories. Those are our stories. That's the data, right? We have the books, we have the scripts, we have the connections. So we're just feeding it to an AI and all it's doing is writing. Now, here's another thing. We also have a voice, right? We are not just asking it to write and gen, because that's the biggest mistake I think a lot of people make with AI is just that they go, hey, write me this thing and it's like, that is like it's a low effort prompting, which happens all the time and that's fair, right? So what we do

29:04is every time we write a new article, so the AI generates it based on our own words, then we edit it in our own words and then that becomes the edited article we publish. Now we take, here's the trick, we take that newly edited in our own words and has our own fit, you know, our own opinions and stories in it and even data that we get from surveys, right? That's all in it. We take that, export it as a PDF from Google Docs and feed it into the AI, into that one AI project and in the instructions, we ask it to analyze all of our writing samples for tone and style and voice, you know. So we keep training it, it's like we're just feeding it

30:06our own data over and over and over again and it's just getting smarter and smarter and smarter and we keep adding more and more guardrails so that when it publishes, when it creates or generates that first draft, it's pretty fucking good. But it gets better over time, the more we feed it. It's like a sourdough starter, right? We just keep feeding the beast. Now, it still requires us, it's still always going to require humans. I think anyone who's just generating and publishing, that's a huge mistake, I also think like a lot of times we're using footage and images and photos that we took in the real world and we're adding those as additional content to fill out the article. Now, here's where the next step comes in,

31:06which I have not applied yet, but this is where I'm headed. So this is the frictionless part. Again, the goal is just to get a URL out there because the next step is we just wait. We have planted the seed and we just wait and we monitor it. Now, of course, in this analogy, there's no watering, but let's just say we wait for the seed to sprout. So what we do is, is once it's published, we take that keyword and we track it in Semrush. Right? We tag it. When do we publish this? Is this a new keyword that we published or is an updated keyword? It doesn't matter. When was the last time this article was touched? So we have two tags, the month and the year. So for example, if we published an article in November of 2025,

32:08we would have a November tag and a 2025 tag. So then what we can do is just say, hey, let's go and look at all of the keywords that we published or all the, yeah, let's track all the keywords that we published in 2025. So let's just look at those. Okay, which keywords popped basically sprouted and which keywords didn't? Okay, you know, let's say we check on it in six months or 12 months, we want to see the ones that sprouted and go, cool. Guess what? If they sprouted, meaning they rent, you know, somewhere above, you know, five, I would say, then I'd be like, we probably don't have to nurture that. Like that thing just took off. Like, it was, it was the right keyword, the right conditions. Our first go was pretty good, right? So don't touch it. It worked. But there are going to be keywords that don't sprout and we're like,

33:12okay, so here is where I don't know what to call this yet, but it's like, we're basically like, I keep calling it a rinse cycle, which doesn't really make any sense, but it's just the phrase that I'm using. And so the idea here is to be like, all right, let's just say we wait six months, just for the hypothetical here. And there's a keyword that we published in, you know, November of 2025, and in say like April of 2026, it is just like getting nothing, like just nothing is happening, right? It's not ranking. It's just, it's nowhere. I'd be like, okay. Now, we take that article, and we put it back through the cycle, right? But this time, we're not putting it in the first draft creation or the editing creation. We are looking at it from an optimization standpoint. What can we add? What's, what is this article missing? So what I might do, and again,

34:16this is hypothetical. I have not built this system yet, but here are some of my thoughts. One, let's throw a email or chat bot on that article. Some sort of thing where we can collect information from actual readers about what this article is missing. And then maybe we email it out to our list because it's, again, the article we know is good. It's just that no one's seeing it. Why? Well, let's get some real world information. Maybe we find out that we're missing people are having questions and we didn't address them. So that's the first thing I would do is figure out what is the article missing? Let's fill in those gaps. That would be my first, like, round of optimization. The other thing I would do is probably make a video. I'd add that to the list and say, okay, we're going to make a video and embed it. That might help. We're going to add some

35:19like graphs or some photos to kind of like basically multimedia to sort of beef up the article. Another thing I might do is say, okay, let's add more internal links to this article. So let's, let's go into other articles and find ways that we can link to this article that makes sense. And we do that all manually, right? I do have link whisperer, but I just prefer to do it manually, honestly, just to add context. And then, you know, at the same time, we're updating another post. And then I could also, as we do that, we update the date. We re-send the email to everybody that, that, you know, we might re- create a story or, you know, post it on Facebook to get a little bit more engagement because maybe we published it in November, but it would do better in April or May. Who knows? Right? So we're basically like, I call it a rinse cycle, but the idea is that like we're kind of optimizing it and beefing it up. We're saying, okay, this article, we couldn't

36:26just plant this article, this seedling, and then it sprouted. Like it needs help. Maybe there's more competition, maybe whatever the case is, but we look at it internally and just say, like, all right, what are we going to do to improve it? And then we just make those improvements. And then we wait another six months, you know, 12 months, whatever. And we see, okay, did our optimization work? Now, if it doesn't work after the second time, I'd be pretty hard pressed to believe that any additional work to it probably won't work. So it may just be time. It may just be, you know, it's a really difficult keyword to rank for and it's just like, it's just not going to rank, you know? Maybe we picked the wrong keyword and we just need to adjust the keyword, but there are like different things we can do to optimize it. But in the end, truthfully, we have a good article there, right? It's not worth deleting. It's not worth, you know, messing with

37:30anymore. It's just, hey, let's, let's just tell our own audience that this article exists to help them out. Let's use it in other ways. And anybody who goes to our website and uses our search bar, they're going to find, they might find it and be like, oh, that's really useful. I'm surprised I didn't come up on Google and it's like, well, that's fucking Google's fault. What can I tell you? Anyway, that's the system. It's, we've been doing it for a few months now. It is something we're going to continue to do. There will be a point in which I think we'll hit a wall and we'll, and right now, we're publishing around two to four articles per week. There's probably a point where it's not worth doing anymore or we've kind of hit every keyword we wanted to hit and it's just like, well, we'd be grasping at straws with like really low volume keywords. So, you know, it's just a matter of

38:36like tending the garden at that point and just going into maintenance mode, which would be great. I felt like we were there at one point in time and now we're trying to get back to that. But who knows, this may not work at all. We may not get any traffic, but I think we will. It's just only a matter of time and I will report on that as soon as we find out more information. So, if you have any questions, ideas, hesitations, concerns, shoot me an email, madatmoneylab.co, and I'll talk to you next time.