AI and digital marketing – Sandra Tormo Britapaja
Sandra Tormo Britapaja has been working in digital marketing, SEO and SEM for over 20 years, helping companies implement strategies that boost organic visibility and incorporating artificial intelligence, automation and growth marketing.
She is the marketing director at City Job Offers, a website specialising in job searches in countries such as Spain, Portugal, Greece, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Ireland and Malta.
She is the author of ‘Una oda al amor: Love by AI’ (An Ode to Love: Love by AI), a project that addresses the relationship between technology and human creativity, with illustrations made using AI. She has also founded and directs her own projects, such as SombraRadio.com, a media specialised in AI and technology.
You started in marketing more than 20 years ago. How have you seen SEO progress over that time?
The evolution of SEO has been an incredible journey for me. When I started, honestly, it was all much easier: you optimised a few keywords, tweaked the structure, got a couple of links… and in no time you were number one. It worked quickly and almost everything was very technical.
Today, that’s no longer the case. In fact, there’s no longer a ‘number one’ like there used to be. Now it’s a long-distance race. What really makes the difference is your online presence, relevance, content quality and how you connect with the user’s real intention.
What’s more, Google has changed radically: AI, semantics, E-E-A-T, user behaviour… We no longer optimise to ‘trick’ the search engine, we optimise for people and Google simply interprets what we do.
SEO used to be fast, now it’s strategic. And although it’s more complex, it’s also more interesting, because it forces you to build projects with soul, with purpose and that really add value.
Can you tell us about your beginnings in the world of SEO and SEM as a freelancer?
My beginnings were very artisanal and, when I think about it now, quite curious. I started in SEO because my father had websites (among the first in Spain), many of them with erotic content, and I helped him position them first on Yahoo and then on Google. That’s where I discovered that the Internet was a powerful showcase, even when no one was talking about ‘visibility’ or ‘digital strategy’ yet.
I immediately got hooked on SEO forums, communities and that atmosphere of sharing tricks, trying things out, and breaking websites to learn. On Google’s Webmasters forum, they literally said to me, ‘Do you realise that this is already a profession?’. And that’s when I started to see it as a profession.
I started out as a freelancer helping small businesses that couldn’t afford an agency. I did everything: on-page SEO, SEM, analytics, content, basic design, web implementation… whatever was needed. That stage forced me to learn at an incredible speed and gave me a 360º view that I still use today.
At the same time, I had my own projects and also a physical business. And that was key. When you have to manage customers face to face, you really understand how supply and demand work, what people value, what converts and what doesn’t. I then took all that learning to my e-commerce ventures and later to any type of online business. That’s when I started to go deeper into SEM and understood the true value of advertising: it’s not about placing ads, it’s about knowing how to attract the right demand and making every pound invested count.
Looking back, that mix of technique, experimentation, real business and constant curiosity is what has shaped the way I work. I learned to optimise without relying on big budgets, to automate processes long before generative AI existed and, above all, to always think from the user’s perspective and in terms of impact, not theory.
I believe that marketing agencies are going to experience a huge transformation. Those that truly adapt to AI will grow enormously. Those that don’t will probably be left behind.
What has the rise of AI meant for you? Did it make you reconsider how you work and what you wanted to do professionally?
Absolutely. AI forced me to change not only how I work, but also what I want to create. Before, I spent a lot of time on repetitive, operational tasks; now, I design systems, automations, and strategies that let me focus on creativity and what really adds value.
For me, AI has been a way to recover something I had lost: time. Time to think, to innovate, to try out crazy ideas and to launch projects that were previously unthinkable, such as SombraRadio.com or my visual project Love By_ai.
What’s more, my relationship with AI didn’t start with ChatGPT, far from it. It all started with my sister, who is also a lover of technology and innovation. We were both working at a creative agency where we created an innovation lab, developed our own automatic description generation tool, and even went to IBM to attend IBM Watson sessions to explore the AI options available at the time. In a way, that was my first real contact with creative automation, and when the first generative AI tools appeared, I felt it was simply the natural evolution of what I was already building.
That’s why, for me, AI isn’t a ‘fad’ or something that has suddenly appeared. It’s a path I’ve been following for years and now, with the new capabilities we have, it allows me to multiply what I do and how I do it. Today, AI is literally my co-pilot for almost everything: content, analysis, audits, growth, data flows, prototyping… and it’s a totally natural part of my creative and strategic process.
You’ve recorded podcasts on your Sombra Radio project. Does having a podcast take a lot of time, or are there things you can automate, such as editing?
I’m just getting started with the podcast format, but I have lots of plans to automate the process more and more. Just like I do with other projects, I want most of the workflow to be automatic so that I can devote my time to ideas, interviews and the quality of the message. It’s a format that I love and, when managed well, can be very agile and scalable.
Focusing on SEO positioning on Google, what kind of strategies do you use at City Job Offers? Which one works best?
At City Job Offers, we use a very hybrid SEO approach, because the sector demands it. On the one hand, we create content that really helps candidates: practical guides, tips, useful information and, of course, the job offers themselves. On the other hand, we use a more transactional SEO approach, very focused on the actual searches that someone makes when they want to apply for a job in another country.
On a technical level, we are always optimising, because a website with so many locations, languages and categories needs to be flawless for Google to understand it. We also have automation processes that allow us to keep multilingual content up to date without dying in the attempt, and structures designed specifically for international projects, where everything from the language to the search intent changes depending on the country.
In addition, we constantly analyse user behaviour: what they search for, where they click, what questions they have, when they leave… All this information helps us to adjust our strategy. And in some parts of the project, we use programmatic SEO to scale content in a smarter way.
But if I had to summarise what works best for us, it would be this: understanding the candidate very well. Their intentions, their fears, their questions, their real context. When you connect with that and build a solid architecture behind it, SEO flows.
And of all the things you do, what is your favourite strategy for cityjoboffers.com?
Although my favourite strategy is blog content, what I really enjoy is combining the creative side with smart distribution. I don’t like the idea of writing something and leaving it there, waiting to see if someone finds it. I like content to move, to travel, to reach the right people at the right time.
That’s why, after creating an article, I always think about how I can activate it: I schedule it in HubSpot, I move it with Metricool, I connect it to newsletters… We even use XML feeds that some portals read automatically, which helps the content breathe and stay alive.
In the end, it’s a balance: creating content that really helps, and then distributing it in a way that gives it reach. For me, that’s the beauty of it: writing something useful and seeing how, thanks to a well-designed system, it reaches thousands of people without having to manually follow up on each publication.
Do the techniques used in this project differ from those you use for your media project, Sombra Radio?
Yes, quite a lot. City Job Offers is a transactional project geared towards conversion. Sombra Radio is editorial, creative and more experimental.
At City Job Offers, I look for efficiency, qualified traffic and scalability. At Sombra Radio, I look for narrative, depth, quality and differentiation.
They are two different worlds, and I love that.
You integrate artificial intelligence into your marketing strategies. Can you give us an example of how AI can improve the results of a project?
AI improves results because it allows you to do much more in much less time, and with a quality that was previously impossible without a huge team. A very clear example is what we do at City Job Offers with content.
Before, creating guides, articles or descriptions for various offers in different languages was a slow and very manual process. Now, thanks to AI, we can:
- Generate multiple copies that are reviewed and consistent with our brand.
- Adapt the tone to the country or type of candidate.
- Create multilingual versions that I then review and ‘humanise’.
- Generate small pieces of code to automate parts of the website.
- Prepare summaries, FAQs, or practical sections from huge amounts of information.
This is not ‘producing more content’; it is producing better content with more strategy.
For example, if I could previously work on two or three articles a week, now I can work on ten and devote my time to what really matters: reviewing, improving, contributing experience and connecting with what the user needs. AI does the heavy lifting, and I provide the human touch.
In the end, AI does not replace my work; it amplifies it. It allows me to go further, faster and with higher quality.
I immediately got hooked on SEO forums, communities and that atmosphere of sharing tricks, trying things out, and breaking websites to learn.
In relation to data analysis and growth marketing, what role does AI play in helping with decision-making?
For me, AI is like another member of the team. It doesn’t replace anything, but it processes data much better than I do and also has the ability to bring context and knowledge from across the internet in seconds. That’s something that’s impossible for humans to do.
When we analyse traffic, behaviour or conversion data, AI helps me see patterns that would take me hours to detect. And when I work on growth, it gives me a much broader view: what is happening in other markets, how searches are changing, what trends are emerging, what opportunities we could take advantage of…
What AI or automation tools do you typically use in your day-to-day work?
To automate more complex processes, I work extensively with n8n: I have flows set up there that connect APIs, clean data, publish content or update information without me having to monitor them.
For CRM and marketing, I use HubSpot, which allows me to automate mailings, segmentation, workflows, lead scoring… whatever the project needs.
I also use Google Cloud, both for APIs and for some more technical models and analyses, and Replit or Firebase when I want to prototype agents or small tools that help me in my day-to-day work.
For design, I use Canva and various AI tools that help me create images, adapt formats or generate variations.
And, since I like to come up with my own tricks, I also have scripts that I’ve created for very specific tasks that I repeated too often. In the end, it’s an ecosystem: each tool fulfils a function, and together they allow me to work faster, with more clarity and with much more creativity.
What do you think of the data provided by marketing tools?
That they are a guide, not an absolute truth. You have to interpret them, question them and supplement them with real user data.
The tools are extremely helpful in finding opportunities, especially in keyword research.
When you have to manage customers face to face, you really understand how supply and demand work, what people value, what converts and what doesn’t. I then took all that learning to my e-commerce ventures and later to any type of online business.
In your book Love by AI, you try to show the human side of AI. Do you think we can humanise automation processes with AI to set ourselves apart from the competition?
In ‘Love by AI’ I try to show precisely that: that AI can have a human side because, in the end, it is trained with data created by people. For me, AI can be as human as you want it to be, as long as you guide it well and build it from emotion.
In the book, I explore love from many different points of view, all represented through the symbol of the heart. Each image is an emotion: desire, affection, nostalgia, excitement, loss… And something I loved about the process is that, on many occasions, I let the AI itself (we’re talking about ChatGPT and 2024 models) interpret how that feeling should be represented.
I gave it the emotion, the context, the intention… and it returned a visual representation that sometimes surprised me greatly. That mixture of human direction and generative creativity is what gives the book such an intimate feel. It’s like a conversation between two worlds: what I feel and what the AI is capable of expressing from that.
For me, this shows that AI does not have to be cold or technical. If you guide it with emotion, it can reflect very human things. And ‘Love by AI’ is my way of showing that connection.
Every time technology advances, people say that AI will eliminate many jobs. How do you see the digital marketing sector in 10 years’ time?
Every time a new technology appears, people say the same thing: ‘it’s going to eliminate all jobs’, but I don’t see it that way in digital marketing. A marketing strategy is so complex, so human, that AI will allow us to do much more with much less effort, not replace us.
In 10 years, we will see professionals using AI as an extension of their work: to analyse data, propose ideas, automate tedious tasks, generate base content or identify opportunities that we do not see at first glance. But we will still need people who understand the business, the brand, the cultural context, the narrative and the emotional side of each project.
In addition, someone will have to analyse the AI itself. Understand how it responds, how it displays results and how to appear in those responses. Just as we optimise for Google today, tomorrow we will optimise for AI models, virtual assistants and conversational systems. And that requires human judgement.
So I don’t think AI will ‘take away jobs’. I think it will transform the role of the marketing professional into something more strategic, more creative and more focused on connecting with people. The technical side will be done by AI; the human side will remain ours.
How do you see the future of marketing agencies?
I believe that marketing agencies are going to experience a huge transformation. Those that truly adapt to AI (not just ‘use’ it, but integrate it into processes, creativity, analysis and production) will grow enormously. Those that don’t will probably be left behind.
