Tim Hanson is the Chief Content Officer (CCO) at Penfriend.ai, an AI-driven content creation platform. With a background in structural engineering, Tim transitioned to digital marketing, eventually leading SEO efforts at an agency before moving into consultancy. His expertise as a marketer and in SEO and AI has been instrumental in developing Penfriend’s systems, which generate high-quality, SEO-optimized content.
Background: The Highlights
Tim emphasizes the importance of integrating AI into content creation processes. He advocates for a collaborative approach where AI handles initial drafts and humans refine the output to ensure quality and authenticity. He believes that AI can enhance the productivity of skilled writers and marketers rather than replace them.
In addition to his role at Penfriend, Tim has shared his insights on AI and content marketing through various platforms, including podcasts and interviews. He has discussed topics such as the future of SEO, the impact of AI on content creation, and strategies for producing content that resonates with audiences and ranks well in search engines.
His approach to content strategy focuses on deeply understanding search intent, creating comprehensive content that addresses users’ needs, and effectively leveraging AI tools to streamline the content creation process.
nDash’s Marketer Interview with Tim Hanson
Jenn: Tim, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your journey to becoming an expert in AI, content, and SEO?
Tim: Woah, expert feels a bit heavy. I wouldn’t consider myself an expert, someone who has slammed into enough walls to know my way through the maze. I started in structural engineering before pivoting to digital marketing when the construction industry proved too rigid for innovation.
After losing my job, I scrambled through 28 interviews in two weeks and worked my way up from junior growth hacker to head of SEO. The real education came from the failures—watching client traffic spike to 200k per month and then crash because we couldn’t sustain it, realizing traffic means nothing if the bank account stays empty.
With AI, I initially struggled like everyone else until I figured out you can’t ask the machine to do what you don’t understand yourself. That’s when things clicked. Now, I map processes I know well, build systems around them, and focus on what actually drives revenue instead of vanity metrics—not expertise, just expensive lessons I’ve paid for in time and frustration.
Jenn: What pivotal moments in your career solidified your passion for this unique intersection of fields?
Tim: The first real wake-up call came when I watched a client burn through £100k on content with three different agencies. We pushed their search traffic to 200k per month in just three months, then watched it crash and burn while their bank account dried up. That failure taught me more than any success could—the old playbook wasn’t just outdated; it was dangerous.
Google kept changing the rules without telling anyone, and suddenly, I found myself in this bizarre position where my entire career depended on deciphering the whims of an algorithm that actively hid its intentions.
My breaking point came during a client meeting when they asked why their competitors were outranking them despite having objectively worse content. I couldn’t give them a straight answer because the truth was that SEO had become this strange dance between technical requirements, user psychology, and content quality—and the steps kept changing. I realized then that my survival in this industry depended on my ability to connect disparate fields that most people treated as separate disciplines.
You couldn’t just be “a content guy” or “an SEO person” anymore. When AI entered the picture, it wasn’t some exciting new tool. You had to learn it. After initially struggling like everyone else, I had this moment of clarity while mapping out our content creation process: I was asking the AI to perform tasks I couldn’t even articulate properly myself.
Once I started with processes I thoroughly understood and built systems around them, everything changed. This intersection wasn’t a choice I made; it was the only path forward in an industry where standing still meant rapid obsolescence. You either learned where the Venn diagram overlapped, or you became irrelevant in record time.
Jenn: You’ve spoken before about using AI to enhance content creation, particularly for TopApps.ai. Can you share a specific example of how you used AI to identify a content gap and what strategy you implemented to capitalize on it?
Tim: We noticed competing sites focused on generic features when comparing project management tools, missing what users actually cared about—integration capabilities. Using ChatGPT inside Coda.io, we built an analysis doc to map out all the integration possibilities between popular tools that weren’t being covered elsewhere.
This revealed a massive content opportunity.
We created comparison pages highlighting integration capabilities between major project management platforms and other business software. These pages quickly became some of our best-performing content because they addressed specific buyer concerns at the decision stage. One of the core things I do these days is paste the ranking pages into my LLM of choice and ask for what is missing. What isn’t answered that the search intent is leaning toward? Look for the half-answers and partial solutions, then create content that fully solves the specific problem.
Jenn: Many businesses struggle to find the right balance between quality content and the speed at which AI can produce it. From your experience, how can someone new to AI content creation avoid sacrificing quality for quantity?
Tim: The biggest mistake I see is people asking AI to do things they don’t know how to do. If you can’t explain exactly how to write a great article step by step, don’t expect AI to figure it out magically. Start by mapping the entire human process of content creation – each decision point, each revision, each quality check. I broke our blog-writing process into 22 separate steps before even touching AI.
Focus on revenue-generating content first. Bottom-of-funnel pages that convert users need the most attention to detail. Don’t waste resources pumping out a hundred generic awareness pieces when ten well-crafted comparison or solution pages will drive actual revenue. Quality at the decision stage always beats quantity at the awareness stage. The secret isn’t faster production – it’s smarter process design.
We’ve developed frameworks that maintain our voice and expertise while scaling content production. Remember: AI isn’t replacing your expertise; it’s amplifying your existing processes. If those processes are broken or undefined, AI will just help you create garbage faster.
Jenn: You mentioned mapping out your content creation process to leverage AI better. What key steps in this process did you find most beneficial to map out, and why were they so important?
Tim: When I realized most people ask AI to do things they don’t understand, everything clicked. The key was breaking down the entire human process of creating content before involving AI at all. The critical process steps we mapped are as follows:
- Define minimum viable content standards – what’s non-negotiable for quality.
- Break content creation into micro-steps – we identified 22 separate decision points.
- Map search intent patterns – what people actually want vs. what they ask for.
- Create a content grouping strategy – topic clusters that support each other.
- Establish a bottom-to-top funnel sequence – revenue pages first, awareness later.
- Define the human editing framework – where your expertise and voice get added.
- Build internal linking protocols – how content pieces connect
- Create update cycles – when and how to refresh existing content
Most beneficial?
The search intent analysis, editing process, and content prioritization were pivotal because these are where most AI implementations fail—they try to shortcut processes they don’t understand.
The map is there to help you know where you, the human, need to go in and add your personal insights and touch to the process. And where else can you let the AI do what it does best? That’s the difference between churning out crap at scale and building a genuine content asset.
Jenn: As a marketer, when it comes to SEO, how do you see the role of AI evolving in the near future, and what advice would you give to SEO professionals who are hesitant to incorporate AI into their strategies?
Tim: Everyone is talking about AI writing content or AI answering search queries, but they are missing the bigger shift. We are moving from ranking content to ranking processes. The SEO pros who understand this will thrive; the rest will die wondering what happened. Here is what is really happening:
Google is no longer evaluating content against competitors—it is evaluating your entire information ecosystem. The organizations that build comprehensive, interconnected knowledge structures will dominate. AI is not just a tool to create content faster; it is the infrastructure that connects content to users through multiple touchpoints.
My controversial advice to hesitant SEO professionals: Stop optimizing for keywords and start optimizing for decision journeys. The future value is not in ranking #1 for a term—it is in owning the entire conversation chain that leads to a purchase decision. AI does not remember isolated pieces of content; it remembers patterns and relationships between concepts. Build those relationships intentionally.
Counterintuitively, go deeper rather than broader. While everyone else uses AI to pump out hundreds of shallow articles, use it to create 10 genuinely definitive resources with unmatched depth. We build memorable, remarkable sites that people actively seek out rather than stumble upon. These are the properties that will survive algorithm shifts and AI overviews.
Despite the current doom and gloom, I am cautiously optimistic. We have seen this movie before—Google has faced existential threats and mass criticism in the past and recovered. The fundamentals (technical excellence, genuine expertise, and link-worthy content) still matter, but they are table stakes now. What will separate winners is how they structure information for both AI to surface and for humans to love.
Jenn: You’ve emphasized the importance of human touch in content, especially for bottom-of-funnel content. Can you elaborate on what ‘human touch’ means in this context and provide an example of how you’ve successfully incorporated it?
Tim: The human touch is first-hand experiences, lessons, and knowledge that only you have. It’s the stuff AI can’t fake because it hasn’t lived your life or worked with your specific clients. For bottom-of-funnel content, where people are making buying decisions, this becomes critical. AI can do a decent job summarizing features, but it can’t tell someone why your solution worked when three others failed for a specific client.
It can’t share the unexpected hurdle you overcame during implementation that now informs your entire approach. For a client’s SaaS review site, we created comparison pages for project management tools. The AI draft listed all the integration capabilities efficiently, but it was clinical and identical to competitor content.
I completely rewrote the Asana vs. Monday section with my actual experiences, such as how Monday’s automation broke during a product launch for a client, costing them $30K in potential revenue. Meanwhile, Asana’s more limited but stable integrations saved another client’s campaign.
I included screenshots of workarounds I developed, candid quotes from my conversations with both support teams, and unfiltered assessments of which tool worked better for specific team structures based on projects I’d managed. That page went from a 0.5% conversion rate to 4.8% overnight, with the average time on page increasing from 1:48 to 5:33. Comments flooded in from readers who felt like, “Finally, someone who’s actually used these tools is giving me the real story.”
The human touch is your competitive moat. When everyone has access to the same AI tools, your unique experiences become the only thing competitors can’t replicate. People might find you through AI-generated answers, but they’ll buy from you because of the human elements that build trust.
Jenn: With the rise of AI-generated content, how can businesses ensure their content stands out and connects with their target audience on a deeper level?
Tim: Last year, we had a client whose pure AI-written content was technically perfect but converting at just 0.3%. It was good—it just wasn’t human. We didn’t scrap it—we enhanced it. We added their founder’s embarrassing story about their first product launch disaster—technical failures, angry customers, the whole package. He wove personal experiences throughout the AI framework.
That human-edited AI content, with screenshots of their error messages and all, shot up to 4.2% conversion. The AI handles the heavy lifting, creating solid foundations and comprehensive research that would take humans days. Then, the human editor steps in to add those lived experiences, unique perspectives, and authentic voice that AI simply cannot fabricate.
When readers feel the human behind the words, your specific challenges, and hard-won lessons, they trust you. What we’ve been doing in Penfriend is building a library of such experiences for all the staff. I sent out a series of 10 questions to each member to gather insights and firsthand stories.
I keep this in Coda so I can search it with AI and add it to relevant articles. We have Penfriend’s crazy speed to write the articles and a database of human stories to back up the content and connect with the people reading them.
Jenn: As a marketer, looking ahead, what are you most excited about in the future of AI, content, and SEO, and what opportunities or challenges do you foresee?
Tim: I’m most excited about the death of mediocrity. AI is making average content worthless and exceptional content more valuable than ever. The opportunity isn’t in using AI to create more content – it’s in using it to build interconnected knowledge structures that mirror how humans actually solve problems.
The winners won’t be the ones with the most keywords or articles but those who create the most coherent thinking environments where both humans and AI can navigate freely. That’s the future I’m betting on.
Jenn: Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise as a marketer. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Tim: Thanks for having me. The only thing I’d add is that everyone’s overthinking this stuff. Make content you’d want to read yourself, add your real experiences, and solve people’s problems. The tools and tactics change, but that formula never does. If you’re interested in more of my thoughts on scaling content with AI while keeping the human touch, check out penfriend.ai. Cheers!