Generative AI is changing many aspects of marketing, including search engine optimization. At an early stage startup we were able to increase our organic website traffic 22x over a year after switching to an AI-lead SEO strategy. How did we do it and what did we learn? This will be all shared as we discuss best methods, tools and tips for generative AI in SEO.
Why leverage generative AI in SEO?
In a recent survey of 70 marketing leaders in Finland we evaluated the key benefits marketing teams look to gain from using generative AI methods and tools. A summary of the key CMO views is in the table below.
- Get work done faster: The top benefit with 90% of respondents agreeing that AI helps to accelerate their marketing workflows.
- Inspire more ideas/creative thinking: 88.6% of marketing leaders feel that AI contributes to greater creativity and ideation.
- Eliminate manual/repetitive tasks: 85.7% of participants believe that AI can remove the need for manual and repetitive work.
- Free time for more strategic work: 77.1% report that AI provides them with more time to focus on strategic tasks.
- Improve the quality of work: 60% of the respondents see AI as a tool for improving the quality of their work.
- Bring to the team new skills/knowledge: Over half of the survey participants (52.9%) recognize that AI can add new skills and knowledge to their team.
These points reflect the positive reception and high expectations that marketing leaders have regarding the implementation of generative AI in their field.
Why SEO is a great starting point for generative AI content
With so many different tools and methods to choose from many marketing teams struggle to progress from testing generative AI to actually utilising it consistently in content production. In the recent survey of marketing leaders we found that over 85% of CMOs would like their SEO agency or freelance partners to actively deliver on generative AI.
It's no wonder that CMOs identified search engine optimization as the top place to start implementing generative AI methods. SEO is a great place to start for a number of reasons.
Both GenAI and SEO involve algorithms and large amounts of data
Under the hood search engines and large language models work in similar ways. They both crawl massive amounts of source data that is organized in a structured way to be referenced by human end-users.
Both generative AI and search engines perform better the more data they have as a source. Typically both include very advanced algorithms, but are limited by the ability of humans in providing source data. You need to put especial attention into the structure and layout of the content, so both humans and machines can understand it.
SEO best practices are well documented
Generative AI works well in areas where there is a lot of source data on the topic at hand. In the case of SEO, there are decades of blog articles, guides and expert opinions scattered about the internet giving large language models a relatively broad set of consistent "best practices" that can be shared back to end users.
For example, you can ask ChatGPT to do very specific SEO related assignments, like creating meta descriptions for web pages, or suggest long-tail keywords to include in a blog article, because there are endless human-created instructions on how these tasks can be performed.
In SEO content the risk of failure is relatively low
A third reason why SEO is a great place to experiment with generative AI content is because the risk of failure is relatively low. Many SEO-focused articles are informational in nature. They rarely reveal any deep trade secrets, or contain opinions that expose your brand to risk.
Search engines like Google are well equipped to evaluate the difference between high authority and low authority websites and content. In the case of GenAI created content, Google has expressly said they are not looking at how content is produced, but instead favour content that has original value and E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.)
The role of generative AI in SEO
In the field of search engine optimization, the use of GenAI comes through the use of tasks, processes and tools that leverage generative AI to either replace or augment the work of a search engine optimization professional.
Examples of GenAI SEO tasks
In on-page SEO generative AI tools can be a creative writing assistant and research tool:- Topic ideation, structure and prioritizations: Generative AI tools can help you explore, structure and prioritize among different content opportunities.
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Content creation and optimization: Generative AI can produce high-quality, SEO-friendly content, ensuring the incorporation of relevant keywords, maintaining optimal keyword density, and adhering to SEO best practices.
In off-page SEO generative AI tools and techniques can help you diagnose potential opportunities for PR outreach or competitive insights:
- Keyword research and analysis: AI tools can conduct extensive keyword research, identifying high-traffic and low-competition keywords, and analyzing trends to recommend the most effective keywords for SEO.
- Backlink and competitor analysis: Generative AI can analyze a website’s backlink profile, identify high-quality backlink opportunities, and suggest strategies to improve the site's link-building efforts.
In technical SEO generative AI can save time and help you fix potential challenges for search engines crawling your website at scale.
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Meta tags generation: AI can automatically generate meta titles and descriptions that are optimized for search engines, improving click-through rates and website visibility in search results.
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Machine translation: Neural machine translation tools can automatically translate your website content.
The reality is that almost any SEO-related task can be supported or even automated with generative AI tools and methods.
Examples of GenAI SEO Methods
The key decision point with any generative AI content is whether you have a human in the loop (HITL) or use a Human-out-of-loop (HOTL) system. In other words, do you have human oversight over the content produced by GenAI, or do you give it more free reign on output.
In the case of GenAI SEO, this decision point boils down to three key methods of content creation.
GenAI inspired, human created
In the first method, generative AI is simply used as a source of inspiration for SEO content. Any actual writing and SEO tasks are ultimately done by a search engine professional or copywriter. This method is already widely in use, with over 85% of marketing teams in Finland already using ChatGPT as a source of inspiration for articles, but many marketing leaders commenting that the quality of GenAI created content isn't yet high enough for the quality standards of many businesses.
GenAI created, human edited
In the second method, you widely use generative AI tools to create new content, but maintain a strict editorial control over any published content. This method may be preferred by marketing leaders who look to gain an advantage of the efficiency and speed of GenAI content production, while still maintaining sufficient editorial and copywriting oversight.
GenAI created and published
The most extreme method for generative AI content is creating and publishing new content without editorial control. In this case of programmatic SEO, the marketing team must have very high confidence that the quality of the content produced is high enough to both be informative to real users and original enough to meet the standards of search engines. Few marketing teams utilise this very wide method for generating SEO content today.
It's good to remember that the methods for using generative AI may depend on what type of content is created. For example, a B2B SaaS company may have very different levels of expectation for a thought leadership piece posted on the blog than an informative "What is" article published in the knowledgebase.
While it's up to each team to decide how much they leverage generative AI, it's clear that using GenAI will be a core part of most marketing team's daily workflows and methods.
Examples of GenAI SEO Tools
There are hundreds (if not thousands) of different GenAI software tools that can be used for SEO. It's difficult to create a shortlist when there are so many options to choose from.
Many of the dedicated SEO tools may promise full automation or incredibly fast results, but in the end of the day fall short of expectations. Other tools can be really advanced in content creation, but fall short on understanding the unique needs of search engine optimization.
Some of the broadly used generative AI tools can be easily configured for use in SEO at a fraction of the cost.
Here are six very different examples of generative AI tools you can use in SEO:
1. ChatGPT
ChatGPT is without a doubt the most widely used tool in the field of SEO. The vast majority of marketing teams have already used ChatGPT in content creation. In Finland, over 60% of marketing teams pay for ChatGPT Plus to get advanced options.
Use in SEO: ChatGPT can be used very flexibly in SEO content creation depending on the prompts (and customisable GPTs in use.)
Key features: quick to start using and wide capabilities in different use of prompts.
Who is it for?: ChatGPT should be the starting point for any SEO or content marketer experimenting with generative AI.
2. Google Gemini
Google Gemini is a surprisingly good choice for any SEO professional to use. While some people would hesitate about using Google's own tools to "trick" search engines, Google Gemini can be a good starting point for creative content - as long as it is not exploited, or used for low quality content.
Use in SEO: Google Gemini is capable of producing output based on common SEO requests and tasks, such as meta description creation or keyword prioritizations. You can use it for free as a second alternative if ChatGPT does not produce high quality answers.
Key features: free to try out and use, Google Gemini will feel familiar to anyone using ChatGPT and may surprise you in the quality of responses.
Who is it for?: Google Gemini is a good second option for anyone using ChatGPT extensively - and not willing to pay for ChatGPT Plus.
3. Copy.ai
Copy.ai is a very well funded sales and marketing automation platform that emerged from a content creation tool. Along with Jasper.ai Copy.ai is one of the original content automation tools developed to help writers. It offers a clean and easy to use interface, along with an increasing amount of other functionality to save marketers and sales professionals time.
Copy.ai does not officially reveal which LLM they use, but their marketing messaging does make reference to GPT-4, the same model used in ChatGPT.
Key features: Copy.ai includes a very broad set of tools aimed at automating marketing and sales tasks.
Who is it for?: Copy.ai is a high-end solution for better funded growth companies and scale-ups.
4.Jasper.ai
Jasper is another early mover in the automated content authoring space. Jasper allows you to create SEO-friendly content relatively quickly. The cost of speed is that the cost of using Jasper increases based on the amount of content generated.
Jasper has in the past customised openly available LLMs like GPT-3 with their own training data and tone of voice modelling. In this way, it looks to provide better quality results outputs than generic LLMs.
Key features: Jasper puts a lot of emphasis on brand voice, so the content created are consistent and you can have multiple collaborators creating similar content in one platform.
Who is it for? Like Copy.ai, Jasper is a good solution for larger content marketing teams in growth companies or scale-ups looking to accelerate content creation.
5. Writesonic
Any shortlist of AI writing tools is likely to also include Writesonic. The tool has a comparable amount of features to Copy.ai and Jasper, but arguably is even more closely focused on SEO.
Writesonic is reportedly built on top of OpenAI's GPT-4 LLM, adding a broad set of customised functionality and features.
Key features: Writesonic promises "built-in SEO" along with SEO analysis tools to assess and outrank competitors.
Who is it for? SEO professionals or content marketers working for growth companies and scale-ups can test out Copy.ai, Jasper and Writesonic and take their best bet of three comparable solutions.
6. SurferSEO
SurferSEO a powerful SEO tool that doesn't ride on the generative AI hype, but compliments automated content creation process. You can create entire articles within SurferSEO - or use the search term audits and content scoring functionality to understand why some articles are better forming than others in search results.
SurferSEO claim to use their own proprietary optimization algorithms in addition to OpenAI's GPT-technology.
Key features: easy to use SERP and content audits give an x-ray like technical view on why some content performs better than others in search results. Content creation tools are easy to use, but costly the more they are used.
Who is it for? Like the name says... SurferSEO is a tool for SEO professionals. It can be a good addition to your SEO Toolkit but may not be the end-to-end solution they aspire towards.
6. AIPRM
AIPRM is not an independent tool but a Chrome extension that layers on top of ChatGPT. It gives a set of quick-fire templates to use as you create prompts in ChatGPT.
Some of the most popular templates in ChatGPT help you to quickly create new SEO-focused content, even full blog articles. The basic extension is free to use with some additional functionality unlocked through a paid upgrade.
Key features: simple addition to ChatGPT that can help you get started with more advanced content creation tasks.
Who is it for? AIPRM is a good place to start when you're lacking inspiration for how to use ChatGPT in more advanced ways.
Conclusion
In this article we've gone through why generative AI has had a major impact on search engine optimization. We looked at some of the key benefits marketing teams can find from utilising GenAI in SEO - as well as some of the best tools to use when getting started.
Generative AI does not replace the human expert in SEO, but can give a content marketer superhuman effectiveness and speed to get better results. If you're looking for more advanced and hands-on advice to get better results, reach out for a 1-1 consultation.