Deborah Carver: Connecting Literature, Composition, Content, and SEO – Episode 186

Deborah Carver Deborah Carver sees direct connections between her academic study of literature and composition and her work as a content strategist, content marketer, and SEO. She also sees similarities between AI engineers and content professionals, both of whom endeavor to create meaning with language. We talked about: her work as a consultant and the creator of The Content Technologist her discovery of Google's knowledge graph in 2013 and how it helped her SEO work how her background in literature and mass communication made SEO work come naturally to her how grade-school sentence diagramming prepared her to understand entities, natural language processing (NLP), and other tech concepts the similarities she sees between LLM engineers and content professionals, both making meaning with language, just coming from different directions how her study of information science, library science, linguistics, and other academic disciplines informs her semantic work her data-driven approach to keyword research her take on the "call and response" nature of search how she balances her keyword research with customer and user research the ways that her study of poetry helps her discern user intent her early interest in natural language processing and AI and how it prepared her for the current tech environment Deborah's bio Deborah Carver is an independent consultant and the publisher of The Content Technologist, a resource for content professionals working in the age of algorithms. She spent the first part of her career working in traditional publishing, then transitioned to working on SEO and digital strategy full-time in 2013. Focused on organic content performance and authentic digital connection, Deborah helps clients navigate what makes “good content” findable, usable, informative, and delightful. She’s worked with businesses of all sizes, from Fortune 500 to independent startups and is an avid trendspotter, a deeply experienced website content analyst, and a massive music fan. Connect with Deborah online The Content Technologist LinkedIn Keyword School Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/S-NJaKI5XAQ Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 186. Many content professionals studied English in college. More than a few of them have worried about how they'd turn that knowledge into a career. Few have shown as well as Deborah Carver how the study of literature and composition connect with content strategy, content marketing, and SEO. Deborah sees direct links from her study of poetry and rhetoric to the skills she applies to give both her human customers and search engines the content they expect. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 186 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show Deborah Carver. Deborah is an independent consultant and she's also the creator of The Content Technologist, a website and newsletter for folks interested in content and technology. Welcome, Deborah. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Deborah: Hi. Yeah, so I am an independent consultant. I largely help agencies and businesses with analytics and information architecture on large content focused websites. And I am currently working on a series of courses that are launching throughout the year that are based on helping people understand or helping businesses understand how they can be found on the internet and how they can measure that impact of their visibility, so yeah. Larry: Everybody wants to be found out there and that's notoriously difficult. And that's one of the things you're known for is your SEO chops, which is sort of how I... Well the way this conversation came about a month or so ago, you made this post on LinkedIn about, "Hey, what's in your knowledge graph?