SEO & artificial intelligence: How AI can foster efficiency

AI and Google? Use it wisely or it might do you harm

As we all know, Google loves content. But it needs to be original, trustworthy and helpful to users. Otherwise, you can burn a lot of time and money, but with no real results. Obviously, wanting your content to be original doesn’t go hand in hand with using AI to create it – that’s because it creates from existing data, meaning from what someone has already written. As far as content goes, it is hard to create something completely new with the help of AI.

This goes hand in hand with Google’s updates, which try to detect content created in this way and lower its ranking. That means that even if, for example, your text works today, it may not work after the next updates. So it’s up to you to consider whether you want to build long-term traffic growth or whether it’s enough that you have traffic now. Why? Because you risk losing it the next time Google comes with more changes and updates. 

What do we know from recent updates?

On this topic, we can highlight information from the March 2024 update:

The article also states that, “As of April 19, we have completed the rollout of these changes. You will now see 45% less low-quality, unoriginal content in search results, compared to the 40% improvement we expected from this work.”

Among other things, Google also says it is increasingly targeting sites with poor user experience, sites that are built only for search engines and not for users, and sites that are set up to match very specific search queries.

SEO research: Artificial intelligence tools as a great driver of efficiency

What is artificial intelligence great for, if not for creating content? For example: For research, finding information, brainstorming, and so on. AI is great for inspiration. Plans that would have taken you a long time to come up with are now available to you in a matter of seconds. Need to know what your potential customers are looking for and interested in? Ask AI. This process can save you hours of work. 

So how to use AI and for what?

1. Publication plan

Do you have a blog and need to plan articles for the whole year ahead, preferably so that they fit thematically into the seasons? For AI – a piece of cake, for humans – a few hours’ work. It’s also a good idea to think about the keywords you want the article to include – and put them directly into the prompt.

What such a quick prompt might look like: 

You’re an experienced SEO consultant working for an e-shop selling grills, barbecue supplies and wood, who understands the topic very well. You create a yearly publishing schedule, where the frequency of publishing articles is 2 articles per month. The plan takes into account the keywords from the embedded table from the keyword column. 

Create the plan in a clear spreadsheet. Divide the topics so that they fit thematically with the seasons of the year and the months and times of the year when people typically address the issue. Take seasonality into account. Account for it based on the second column in the table, the Strongest Month column. Come up with specific topics, don’t just assign keywords to particular months. Always indicate which month the topic belongs to.

For this prompt, we added a data file from Marketing Miner, where we have left only the list of keywords and a column for which months these words are most searched.

A sample of the proposed annual plan based on the above mentioned prompt

Of course, you can edit the Prompt according to your needs – it can be much longer and more complex. It always depends on what the outcome is supposed to be and how happy you are with it.

2. What problems do your customers have in the decision-making process

Another example: You can use AI to find out just what problems your customers are trying to solve:

And that’s just part of the results that can guide you to what information to provide to people on your site to make your content useful to visitors and help them make choices and purchases. Of course, you always need to check the accuracy of the information. 

3. FAQ questions on topics

In the same way, you can ask FAQs about your topics. For example:

If you want, it will also give you the answers straight away. But be sure to validate those, or if it is a more complex topic that you understand well, write it yourself.

What else can AI help you with?

• With the classification of the collected keywords,
• text translation,
• classifying keywords according to user intent. 

Apart from the content, AI can also help with technical matters:

• Writing code for python, javascript etc., which you can use for example when working with Open Refine or Screaming Frog,
• With the preparation of sitemaps or robots.txt – we definitely recommend checking it before implementation.

Creating SEO content with the help of AI

While it is tempting to just have an article generated simply and easily, it’s definitely not what you should be doing across your entire site. We recommend starting in a pretty orderly fashion. Do you already have a publishing plan and information that people consider when they buy your products?

Get help with the structure of the particular article as well. For choosing a smokehouse, it might look like this:

Whether you write the article yourself or your copywriter does, such a structure can be a great help – it can speed up the time spent writing the article considerably. If that’s still not enough to inspire you, you can get some background information on the topics that AI generated for you. Here, we asked ChatGPT to create short paragraphs with the most important information: 

Be careful here, though. Be sure not to copy and paste the entire article on your website. Think of the whole process as inspiration for what you could write about and what your target audience and potential customers are interested in. 

What else to try besides ChatGPT?

There are, of course, other tools besides ChatGPT that can help you with texts for your website. One such tool is Surfer SEO. This tool can help you with editing articles – it can suggest new wording and add keywords to your article. 

It also offers the option of creating an article using AI. You define what kind of text should the output be – blog or product, what should be the tone of voice, the topic and keywords. Surfer SEO will look to your competitors and create an article from all this information. For international markets, you can choose city-level targeting and add more custom information to the article – unfortunately for us this doesn’t work for the Czech market yet.

AI-generated text in Surfer SEO

There are many AI models nowadays – you always need to test what outputs a particular model gives. 

Some of the useful tools are:

• Google Gemini,
• Bing AI,
• Claude,
• Jasper,
• Perplexity,
• ChatSonic,
• LIama.

The review process for SEO: The pitfalls of artificial intelligence and your moment to shine

AI-generated text always needs to be reviewed. Whether it’s typos or factual information – every now and then, AI has a tendency to make things up and you need to keep that in mind. 

Like we mentioned at the beginning, you need to take into account that whatever the AI generates for you already exists somewhere. Not necessarily in the same form, but in a very similar form – it is simply not new. This goes against the preferences of Google and other search engines, for whom unique, trustworthy and interesting content is important. In contrast, Google downgrades duplicate, spammy and misleading content. 

After the inspiration phase, the process is as follows:

• Fact-check the text,
• rewrite it in your own words using your own experiences,
• Add something extra into the text that no one else has – it can be graphs, data, procedures, instructions, information. For example, in the case of a smokehouse it could be an interesting recipe, video or smoking procedure that users can’t find elsewhere,
• don’t forget to sign it and add the date of publication.

This will make your text unique and give you the opportunity to show users (and search engines) that you are the expert on the subject. 

Continuous monitoring and optimization

As with any other text, you need to monitor how the article you’ve used AI for is performing. Evaluate whether you’re covering the keywords you were aiming for, whether it’s bringing in traffic to your site, but also whether people are reading it (how long they spend on the page), whether you have a high bounce rate (i.e. people aren’t leaving right after they arrive on the page), what the article page CTR is, whether it’s converting, etc.

If you don’t like the results of any of the above mentioned metrics, it’s time to optimize. SEO is a process and often the original texts need to be adjusted based on the data collected. 

If people often leave quickly after coming to your site, have a look in Search Console at what keywords the article is showing up for and think about why people are leaving. Adjust the text so that people find what they’re looking for. 

Keep working with the text. From time to time, check to see if anything has changed in your topic or if people are looking for related information that you don’t have in the text. Based on this, edit or update the article. You can always give the whole text to AI and let it suggest how it could be improved and what information is missing.

Don’t forget to link articles and texts internally to each other. Internal linking is an important and often overlooked factor that can help a lot with improving your search results.

Quickly improve title and description 

If you have a low CTR, or click-through rate, focus on your page’s title and description:

We recommend creating a table with pages with unsatisfactory values, add the current title and description, page URL, current CTR and let AI suggest new improved titles and descriptions. You can also put your USPs directly into the prompt, or leave it to the AI.

In our case, we worked with three URLs:

And here’s the result from ChatGPT - as far as USPs are concerned, we let the AI loose here: 

In the prompt, we wanted ChatGPT to incorporate the USPs that customers might be interested in, as well as a call to action. Of course, we need to control the length and accuracy here as well. You can use the results with minor modifications, or again, they will at least serve for inspiration.

AI and EU law

Petra Dolejšová, a well-known Czech lawyer who focuses on law in marketing, summarized in one of her LinkedIn posts how things will look like in the future with AI in terms of law. 

According to the current information, we know that the EU agreed on:

• AI regulation, i.e. in simple terms – how to develop and use AI tools across the EU,
• Generative AI tools must replace collected data with data that does not steal someone else’s work and content, 
  • they must also be transparent about what data they have learned from,
  • while generating content with a clear statement that it is AI-generated.

Petra also states that “We all have a responsibility to fight deepfakes and the spread of fake news. We need to clearly label content that might smack of subversion and confuse people as ‘AI generated’.”

What to take away from this?

The new legislation certainly won’t make it any easier to work with AI-generated content. So from that perspective, it’s also important to work as hard as possible on your texts and try to make them distinct and useful to users. Think of AI as an inspiration for your work and a helper that will make your work more efficient.

Remember that AI results are only ever as good as the prompt is. Some queries can be as long as A4 or more to ensure the result covers everything you need.

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