Generative AI is a powerful assistant that can simplify and enhance many SEO tasks. With its capabilities, you can accelerate your routine SEO work and make your overall workflow much more efficient.
Using generative AI tools in your SEO workflow is not only acceptable but encouraged.
Let’s explore the specific SEO tasks where generative AI can provide significant benefits and where you need to use it with caution.
Where Generative AI in SEO is Extremely Helpful
Crafting Titles and Meta Descriptions
Manually writing unique titles and meta descriptions for hundreds of pages is a tedious and time-consuming task. Generative AI is great at this, especially if you use precise instructions (prompts). Instead of a generic request, be as specific as possible.
You can also use AI tools and browser extensions that can analyze a webpage and generate meta tags without detailed instructions, saving you even more time.
AI can quickly generate multiple options, allowing you to choose the best one or mix them up.
Optimizing and Refreshing Content
Generative AI can help you identify areas for improvement in your current articles, in particular:
- Readability: AI tools can analyze your content and suggest ways to improve its readability. For instance, they can identify long, complex sentences and offer simpler alternatives, or they can pinpoint jargon and suggest clearer language.
- Subtopics: AI can suggest missing subtopics or questions that you should answer in your article to make it more comprehensive.
- Refreshing: When you update an old post, you can provide the AI with the original content and ask it to integrate new facts or statistics. This helps you quickly refresh and optimize content without a complete rewrite.
Content Writing Assistance
There’s a misconception that any use of AI for content creation is inherently bad and that search engines will penalize your site for it. The thing is, though, Google allows you to use generative AI as long as you produce quality, helpful content.
This makes AI an invaluable tool for assisting with content writing, especially in the following tasks:
- Content Ideas: AI can quickly generate a list of content ideas for a specific niche.
- Outlines and Structure: AI can create a detailed article outline with headings and subheadings, which saves you the time of structuring the piece yourself.
- Repurposing Content: AI can help you repurpose it into shorter pieces for social media, email newsletters, or video scripts.
Human creativity and skills are irreplaceable in content creation. AI provides a starting point, but it’s your unique voice, expertise, and perspective that make your content truly stand out.
Generating Code Snippets
Technical SEO often requires writing small pieces of code, which can be challenging for those without a development background. AI can easily produce short snippets of code, such as:
- Schema Markup: AI can generate the precise JSON-LD code for various types of Schema, such as a Local Business, an FAQ page, or Product.
- Hreflang Attributes: For websites with multilingual content, AI can generate hreflang tags that tell search engines which region the page is targeted at.
- Regular Expressions (Regex): AI can write the complex regular expressions used in Google Search Console to filter and analyze data.
- Robots.txt Rules: AI can write the exact robots.txt rules to disallow a specific folder from being crawled.
However, always double-check the generated code before implementing it to ensure accuracy and avoid any potential issues.
Producing Unique Images
One of the best features of generative AI is its ability to produce not only text but also images and even videos. Various AI tools can create unique and visually appealing images for your articles and blog posts.
Instead of using generic stock photos, you can generate custom images that perfectly match your article’s topic and tone. With a well-crafted prompt, you can create images with a specific style, from realistic photos to abstract illustrations.
This adds a layer of professionalism and originality that helps your content stand out.
Translating and Localizing Text
For websites with content in different languages, AI tools can greatly accelerate the translation process:
- AI translation allows you to publish content in multiple languages much faster than with manual translation.
- AI can help maintain a consistent tone and style across different languages.
- Tools like Grammarly are great at catching grammar, spelling, style, and punctuation errors. This can save you a lot of time editing, especially if you publish new content frequently.
Where to Use Generative AI with Caution
While generative AI offers many benefits, it’s crucial to understand its limitations. Here are SEO tasks where AI may be inaccurate or produce poor results without human intervention.
Long-Form Content Creation
Generative AI can produce content, but it often lacks originality and simply rehashes information already available online. Additionally, AI-generated content often doesn’t include the firsthand experience and expertise that human-written content has. This is why AI content always requires careful verification to ensure it is trustworthy.
Why it’s a risk:
- Lack of Originality: AI models are trained on existing data, so they often fail to provide new insights and unique perspectives. This results in content that might be correct but doesn’t offer anything new to the reader.
- No Real-World Experience: AI cannot have personal experiences. It can’t tell a story about a specific challenge it overcame or a lesson it learned. This is a crucial element that builds trust and authority with your audience.
- Hallucinations: AI models can sometimes generate facts that sound plausible but are completely fabricated. This is particularly dangerous for “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) content, such as financial or medical advice, where accuracy is critical.
So when writing content, use AI as an assistant, not a replacement. Use it to generate a first draft or a content outline, and then manually review and edit the content, adding your own expertise and unique perspective.
Keyword Research
AI is capable of generating long lists of potential keywords, but it cannot accurately assess key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, or true user intent.
Why it’s a risk:
- Lack of Real-Time Data: AI models are not connected to real-time databases of SEO tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, or Moz. They cannot provide accurate search volumes or competitive data, which are essential for making data-driven decisions.
- Inaccurate User Intent: AI can guess a user’s intent, but a human SEO expert can dive deeper. For example, a query like “best hiking shoes” could have commercial or informational intent, and a human can analyze the SERP to determine which is dominant.
Use generative AI to brainstorm and generate initial keyword ideas. Then use “traditional” keyword research tools to test ideas and gain the important data you need to create a successful SEO campaign.
Creating an SEO Strategy
A good SEO strategy is built on a deep understanding of your website, your target audience, and your competitors. AI can provide general suggestions, but it cannot replace the strategic thinking of an SEO expert.
Why it’s a risk:
- Inability to Connect Disparate Data: An SEO strategy connects various data points: business goals, customer personas, market trends, and competitor weaknesses into an action plan. AI models can analyze these pieces of data individually but struggle to synthesize them into a logical, long-term strategy that aligns with your specific business.
- No Understanding of Human Relationships: Strategy often involves building relationships (e.g., for link building), which is a skill an AI cannot replicate.
Use AI to gather information and analyze data points that will inform your strategy. Ask it to summarize competitor strategies or to identify industry trends, but you must be the one to connect the dots and create the final, strategic plan.
Best Practices for Using Generative AI in SEO Wisely
The following recommendations will help you effectively leverage the power of generative AI to improve your SEO.
Avoid Over-Reliance on AI
Even the most sophisticated AI tool is just an advanced language model. It cannot replace human experience, critical thinking, or a unique point of view. Use it to speed up your SEO work, but don’t expect it to solve all your problems. Think of it as a junior assistant that can handle rote tasks, allowing you to focus on high-value work.
Provide Detailed Instructions
The quality of the output AI produces is directly proportional to the quality of your input. The more specific and clear your prompts are, the better the AI will perform.
Add Human Expertise to Your Content
Your unique knowledge and experience are your biggest competitive advantage. Incorporate your own case studies, personal experience, or proprietary data to make your content more informative and engaging. This is how you demonstrate E-E-A-T and create content that AI cannot replicate.
Always Verify AI-Generated Information
As mentioned earlier, AI models may have “hallucinations,” where they produce results that appear correct but are actually misleading. It’s essential to manually fact-check any AI-generated content, especially if it contains financial, medical, or other important advice. This is an important quality control step and an essential part of your workflow.
Conclusion
Generative AI is a powerful asset for enhancing and accelerating SEO. It can handle many of the day-to-day tasks that consume time, from content optimization to code generation.
To use it effectively, however, you must understand its strengths and weaknesses. AI tools can’t do everything for you, but they can become an indispensable assistant when combined with your own expertise and knowledge.
