Some digital marketers will tell you that using AI for SEO is the golden ticket to success for growing organic traffic. Others might be bold enough to tell you not to use it at all, and that AI-driven SEO is a detriment to a campaign.
The reality is there is a middle ground in there somewhere. AI can be used to help create optimized content and improve SEO efforts as long as you know what you are doing (more on that in a second).
Otherwise, there definitely are some things you should definitely not do with AI and SEO. Here are some of the big ones.
Post Pure Generative Copy
This is the cardinal sin of using AI with SEO. Posting pure generative copy, anywhere on your website, is unlikely to help you in the long run. In fact it will almost certainly hurt.
This is not solely because generative copy might get flagged by Google as AI-generated, or that Google has officially stated that publishing pure AI copy is against their guidelines.
Rather, it is because AI-generated copy is usually extremely watery. Granted, there are things you can do with your prompts to make the output better, but there’s a limit to this as in all things. However, AI writers are still nascent and most of them are honestly pretty bad. Some are outright incapable of creating high-quality copy for content marketing and SEO strategies.
The stark reality is that it is almost a certainty that pure generative copy just won’t perform well in the long run, if it even gets indexed in the first place.
Think You Can Get By Without Serious Editing
There are some SEO specialists that actually do use AI for content generation because it can save time. But, because of the fact that AI-generated copy is usually really thin, SEO experts tend to need to edit it heavily.
There are elements of generative copy that you will want to strike out entirely, and probably some additional things you will want to throw in.
That is, if you want the page or copy to perform over its lifespan. Of course, you could just draft and publish the old-fashioned way.
Fail to Fact Check
Lastly, and most importantly, don’t believe what AI tells you, not just as an output, but if you use it to draft blogs or news or page copy of any sort.
AI has gotten things hilariously wrong in the past, and it continues to do so. Putting false information or ill-advised information on your website is not going to look good for your brand and in some instances might be downright dangerous.
Don’t gamble with the value of your brand or the health of your overall business. Fact check everything that comes out of any AI model.
Effective Ways to Use AI for SEO
With all of this being said, there are numerous ways you actually can effectively use AI for SEO. Some of these are:
- Asking for suggestions to improve page speed and performance.
- Keyword research, analytical and competitive audits
- Looking into search volumes, keyword difficulties and attainability
- Conducting page and site audits
- Asking for outlines or topic clusters you can write about
- Asking it to scrape a whole blog and see what sorts of good information are missing.
- Letting AI update live blogs with suggestions to make them more current
- Suggestions for target page URLs for specific keywords
- Recommendations to optimize for on-page ranking signals
- Coming up with a data driven search strategy
And many more – these are just a few of the ways you can effectively use AI for SEO, or at least to improve the performance of your SEO campaign.
Wrapping It All Up
At the end of the day, it’s not that you should flat out refuse to use AI for SEO, or that your digital marketing agency should. It’s just that you need to be smart about it.
If you still have questions after reading this, consider talking to your current eCommerce SEO services provider about it. Your account or project manager should be able to help.
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