008 - Unlocking E-commerce Success: Supercharge Your Business with AI

008 - Unlocking E-commerce Success: Supercharge Your Business with AI

Suzie (00:00):
Welcome e-commerce empresses to this episode of Women Powering Ecommerce. Join me every Tuesday and Thursday as I take you behind the scenes of my journey as a female e-commerce entrepreneur. Together, we'll explore the highs, the lows, inspiring you to take action and achieve your own business goals. So let's get started.

(00:33):
I want to talk to you about one of the trendiest subjects at this exact moment, and everyone is talking about it. It's on everyone's lips. And I cannot not do an episode a little bit on this. And, of course, I'm talking about AI. Have you started using it? If so, how? Yes, we have the common ChatGPT, which by the way is my new assistant, and I use it for so many things. And I'm still learning how to use it, but I'm just addicted. But that's not it. There are just so many apps out there and programs that, I mean, it's by the hundreds and probably more that can help you do pretty much anything. Well, maybe not anything, but anyways, we'll see. Maybe it'll surprise us. But I personally, I mean, I'm very basic. I use it in a very basic way, but I'm already addicted.

(01:31):
There's always a tab open. I use it to compose emails, to do some research. I was looking the other day for studies, and instead of Googling them I'm just, "Well, I'm looking for studies about this subject. How can you help me find one?" And it just generated five or six studies that honestly, I tried to Google those, and those research results did not come up. So very, very, very practical. And I mean, we could talk about a lot of things that AI is used for, but my most recent story that we've been seeing AI used within our e-commerce business is for content. We've just hired an SEO specialist. We didn't have one. We usually used an agency to help us, but now we just wanted to have someone in-house. So we hired an SEO specialist, and we also are currently hiring a new writer.

(02:40):
And now we have, with the AI to take into account the impact of AI when you hire. The good and the bad. You have to ask like, for our SEO specialists, "How do you use AI in your work? Do you use it?" We saw that that person did use it, and they told us how, which is great. We don't have a choice anymore. It's a must. It's not a should, it's a must. And that's on the good side. But then for the writer, we realize now what we have to check is, is the writer going to use AI to fully generate blog articles? If so, that could be a problem. So now, when we're, was doing the process for hiring the AI. I had a blog article done for a test. And now, we had to find an app that is able to figure out if AI was used to create that blog article. And if so, by how much.

(03:46):
So we were happy to see that, okay, well, that person used just a little bit of AI, which is great. We're happy. We need to use that tool, but not so much that it could eventually maybe affect us in a certain way. We don't know. I actually have good news about that and, well, let's dive right into it. That was a burning question I had. Will Google penalize your site for generating content through AI? That's one thing that I guess we're all asking ourselves. And basically, in February of this year, Google themselves answered that question. They actually have a guideline that they, let me get it out, answered in their FAQ. This question is AI content against Google searches guidelines. And I was really happy to discover their answer. They responded by saying this, "Appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines. This means that it is not used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which is against our spam policies."

(05:06):
So this is excellent news because now that we're so SEO focused and now, we're working with writers in-house, we wanted to know how are we going to handle this? And Google just certified that. Yes, it's okay, you can use it. But then they presented another great question that I loved and I'm going to share with you. That question is, why doesn't Google Search ban AI content? That's such a good question. Why don't they? So they answered, "Automation has long been used in publishing to create useful content." Good point. "AI can assist with and generate useful content in exciting new ways." So good news, this is really good news. I was super excited to read that. So what this means is that Google has officially given the green light for AI content as long as the quality is good and it's not being used to manipulate search rankings.

(06:14):
And then, after reading that, I had this other question, this other burning question, how can you leverage AI to enhance your SEO performance? Since, again, that was lately my day-to-day in our e-comm business, having hired this new SEO specialist and we're already working with another writer. So how can we use it? I don't know about you, but I feel sort of overwhelmed with everything that's presented to me of what AI can do. Just so many apps out there. Now, you have directories of apps for all kinds of categories, of things you can do. So what do you use? Where do you start? And I did a little bit of research on that to discover that many people are still not using AI. I'm saying that as if it's been like years, but it's only been months. But you have to be fast paced nowadays. But they weren't using it because they're not quite sure how to leverage it.

(07:14):
So what I did is that I found a few tips that maybe I could share with you, because maybe you're part of these people that don't know where to start with the AI, of things we're using internally or will be using internally soon that will help us and that are already helping us. But that will help us in the future too. So what can you use AI for content? I mean, we could talk about a lot of things, but now we're talking about the articles, blog articles, content. Maybe we could extend that to your product pages, things like that. How can you use the AI? Well, of course, you can try to find blog post ideas. And by the way, ChatGPT, I'm just going to do a bracket.

(08:09):
If you're going to use ChatGPT, I've tried the free option and the paid one. And sometimes you don't see much of a difference, but the paid option will give you better results. So I definitely encourage you to purchase it. It's inexpensive, it's definitely worth it. It'll save you lots and lots of times, so it's a really good investment. So you can find blog, article, posts, ideas. It can help you produce the content. It can enhance the content for better performance. It can tell you how it can perform better. You can do ChatGPT, for example, can help you with internal links. It can also help you optimize meta tags. It can create effective link building methods. Yes, that's crazy and simple things too, like email templates. I use that a lot daily.

(09:10):
So if you're not sure where to go from there, and maybe you're looking for something more specific for yourself. What you can do is just ask ChatGPT, which prompts to use it. So you can ask him how to use its own platform, which is great. By the way, prompt, if you're new to this, it's just your request. Your prompt means the request. You're going to request to ChatGPT, for example. So I'm going to give you an example that'll be easier. So, for example, if you're looking for a prompt, you can use for a link building in ChatGPT. You could write something like, pretend you are an experienced link builder. Provide a list of ways to build backlinks to this article. So that would be a really good prompt for a link building method. So that's what I wanted to share with you today. I thought that those were really, really exciting news. I learned about that just recently.

(10:13):
And so, Google is okay with us using AI if it's done, however, in a good manner. You have to have a good quality content and you may not cheat to get better rankings and things like that. And AI can be very useful for SEO purposes, for your content. So we can certainly not ignore the fact that AI is there. Plus, we want to learn to use it ASAP. You cannot not use it anymore. You don't have a choice. If you don't hop on that train, you will not be able to grow your business. Your competitors will outgrow you very rapidly, so it's a must. And if you are using it, how are you using it? I'd be curious. I have so much to learn. I feel like I'm still at the base. We started using other apps that are AI generated.

(11:10):
So we'll see the future will tell us. But for now, it's still very exciting and I am still very excited to use it more. And something that we're trying to implement is asking ourselves right now, how can each team member on the team use AI to help make their job, their tasks be more efficient, basically, in their daily tasks? So that's the next thing we'll look into for every team member, how can they use and implement AI in their day-to-day? So I would like to express how much it would mean to me if you could just take a moment and share and rate this episode or the podcast. Your support is definitely crucial in helping us reach more women in the e-commerce space. So thank you very much.

(12:01):
Thank you for being part of this journey with me. I hope you gain some valuable insights and inspiration today to keep learning, growing, and taking action towards your goals. See you in the next episode.