If you’ve been paying attention to the news, it’s likely you’ve already heard about the cultural revolution that is artificial intelligence.
Claims about artificial intelligence range from realistic to fantastical; some claim it will surely put human creatives out of work, while others question whether its fame will dissipate in a matter of years.
Regardless of how AI shapes other industries, one thing is clear: AI SEO can be a great option for businesses looking to produce SEO content quickly and easily. But that doesn’t mean AI SEO tools can take over the job of a human; instead, it means they can be highly-useful resources.
Below, we explore what AI SEO tools look like, how they can help, and how they can hurt. Working with an SEO professional can help you utilize these tools appropriately and successfully.
What is AI SEO?
When we reference “AI SEO,” we’re talking about artificial intelligence (AI) search engine optimization (SEO). This technique uses AI tools to improve a website’s ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs).
AI tools for SEO are on the rise since many can automate much of the work involved in SEO, including keyword research, content creation or editing, and brainstorming. Likewise, AI can help analyze data and identify trends businesses can use to improve their website’s ranking.
So, will AI replace SEO done by humans altogether? Probably not. Though AI-driven SEO can help businesses save time, money, and effort, it isn’t foolproof. Trusting AI to completely run your SEO strategies from start to finish is like trusting Google Translate to convert an entire novel accurately.
With room for small errors and inaccuracies, AI still needs human monitoring and intervention to create useful content. It’s best to think of AI SEO as an option businesses can use to make things easier rather than to replace content creators, SEO strategies, and marketers.
Why AI SEO Matters
Smart and strategic AI-based SEO decisions can help businesses achieve goals like:
- Boosting visibility
- Establishing a credible brand
- Driving traffic to pages and services
- Becoming a trusted source of information
- Increasing profits
By leaning on AI content for SEO purposes, businesses of all kinds can streamline the work that goes into connecting with potential consumers. In doing so, businesses set themselves ahead of the competition and pave new ways to expand into their niche.
Pros of AI SEO
The main benefit of AI SEO is its efficiency. Even if content still needs to be refined and tweaked, having a stronger foundation to build on can cut the time it takes in half. Let’s take a look at some more pros of AI-driven SEO.
- Speed: Using an AI tool for SEO produces nearly instant results. Generating page titles, meta descriptions, and even lists of potential keywords takes seconds or minutes.
- Volume: AI tools can produce a high volume of content that might cost a lot to outsource. Businesses can create dozens of unique page descriptions, product listings, and other pieces of content daily.
- Oversight: AI is particularly good at navigating large amounts of data at once. AI SEO tools can analyze every page on a SERP to find out which keywords are used most often. It can also help a business’ website by scanning all pages at once and, for example, noticing they are all written at a highly-challenging reading level. That’s something that a person might miss.
- Brainstorming: When businesses need topics, ideas, and other resources to help with planning, AI SEO tools are a great resource to turn to.
- Keeping Up With Change: As AI becomes more and more popular, the structure of most keywords might change as voice search becomes more common. Using SEO AI tools is a great way to learn how to optimize content for voice searches, which tend to be more in-depth and descriptive.
Cons of AI SEO
Like all good things, AI SEO, in excess, can prove to cause more harm than anything else. Many limitations keep AI content for SEO from acting as a true replacement for human strategy. Some of the most significant ones include those below.
- Prematurity: As of right now, many AI tools are just not ready to take the wheel. Because of the recent AI wave, many brands have rushed to release software to keep up, meaning that a lot of the AI out there is still not great.
- Unreliability: Sometimes, AI makes errors or creates inaccurate information. If you’re creating content about an important topic like health, you can’t risk including false information on your site that AI invented on the spot.
- Instability: There have been rumors that Google will “punish” AI-driven SEO content in search rankings. These claims haven’t been substantiated, and it’s still hard for Google to tell if something was definitively written by a bot or a human. However, there’s a chance that a future Google update may seek to identify websites that heavily rely on AI and push them to the last page of the SERP.
- Lack of Engagement: AI SEO content can sound robotic, which is no surprise, given its purpose. However, because Google also notices how long humans spend on a web page, content that’s generic, complicated, or flat-out boring may suffer. If the content is written by a human, there’s a chance that it will be more readable and engaging to humans.
- Poor Interpretations: AI still has trouble interpreting things like search intent, which describes the intention an individual has while searching for a term. So, even if a business uses AI SEO tools to come up with site plans, a content manager will still be necessary to check and fine-tune these details.
- AI Inbreeding: One issue happening with AI image generation software (like Midjourney) is that, as more AI-generated images flood the web, the software is drawing from already-AI-generated images as its source material instead of original, human-made images and art. That means that, as a result, sometimes the images become worse with time instead of better. If the Internet gets flooded with AI-written content, then there is a chance that new AI software (like Google’s experimental AI answer-generator) will plagiarize itself; offering worse writing as it scans outdated human-written content and more plain AI-generated content to offer worse answers than it did when it had a full internet of human-written content as source material.
The Bottom Line
Overall, AI SEO tools can help make optimizing content for search engines faster, easier, and cheaper. But that doesn’t mean it’s time to throw caution to the wind and abandon the idea of human content creators, marketers, and SEO experts.
The best way to use AI SEO tools is as what they’re intended to be: tools. These are resources that content creators can utilize to discover new ideas and streamline research.
If you want your business’ SEO strategy to stand out from the rest, you can’t fall back on technology that pulls only from competitors. You’ll need the expert advice of experienced SEO companies with a passion for helping you connect with your target audiences.
If your business could benefit from a highly-efficient SEO strategy, look no further than Firestarter. We are an award-winning Denver SEO agency trusted by customers for over 12 years.
No matter your goals, we’re here to get the job done right, with or without AI SEO tools. Get in touch today to learn more.
