Artificial Intelligence has made waves across many industries in recent years, shaking up how most users interact with businesses — even if they don’t know it.
Especially in the digital marketing industry, AI is being introduced heavily into PPC and SEO as a tool that’s used to understand complex data trends and automatically optimise campaigns for users. While it’s an effective tool, there is an underlying sentiment from some that AI is going to kill off SEO. So, is this actually the case?
How AI is transforming SEO
AI is being used in SEO in a variety of ways. Firstly, there are AI systems that you can plug into your website that are doing all on-page SEO for you. Some plugins will audit your website and provide you with a list of items to fix, others will provide scores so you can improve, and others will automatically make the changes for you. Some tools are advertised as systems to bulk create content for your website, which you can upload to help you rank for your desired keywords and so many other tools.
The role of SEO specialists in the AI era
If all of this is the case, then has AI put a time limit on the profession of an SEO specialist? Well, it’s a slightly biased answer from an SEO Specialist, but confidently the answer is no. Instead, there is a time limit put on SEO specialists who aren’t able to use those tools to their advantage and understand the place they have in their work.
The fall-down point of most present-day AI tools is their lack of understanding of the underlying customer journey. They mostly use numerical probability values or Large Language Models (LLMs) where they’re regurgitating content from other sources across the web. But this is a two-fold problem for AI systems that require human intervention to get the best result out of them.
The shift from keyword density to semantic SEO
Most AI plugins will use formulas such as keyword density to calculate if a keyword has been used enough throughout the text. But that’s an outdated SEO technique with most specialists turning to Semantic SEO — the use of entities and topical authority as their main pillars. These ideas are much harder to emulate in a calculation. It’s an understanding of human experience and relationships.
The danger of over-reliance on AI for content creation
In the same way, bulk churning of content with no unique perspective is exactly what Google is trying to avoid. Time and time again, we see in Google’s algorithm updates that their focus is on quality content that adds something unique to the user’s search query.
They aren’t looking for the same article on the ‘Top 10 Industry Trends of 2024’ that we see time and time again, from hundreds of publishers every year. Especially when the trends are identical but just in a different order. As AI is an LLM, it transforms words already on the web into something unique. But it isn’t able to add something that lives in your brain as your own personal experience and expertise.
The risks of putting SEO on autopilot
All this being said, it’s not that using AI to help you write content or give you an idea about what keywords you use on a page is bad. It’s the sole reliance on these tools that is the danger. For business owners that are choosing to put their SEO on autopilot, rather than understanding the nuance and evolving craft of SEO, there are several things they should consider.
Firstly, these tools are telling everyone to do the same thing. If you work in a competitive space, it won’t be long before your website looks identical to your competitors. Especially if your industry is especially competitive in the organic rankings. Take the legal industry for example, if your competitor is investing time and money into a good SEO agency, then the reality is that using an automated tool most likely isn’t going to get you the top spot. The ability to think creatively and independently after analysing the data is vital to success and that’s the advantage of using specialists.
Secondly, you want to ensure you understand what the tool is asking you to do to make sure it’s right for your website. Blanket applying recommendations that an AI tool presents without understanding it can cause issues. For example, if a plugin tells me to include my keywords 110 times on a page that only has 300 words, that’s going to read really poorly.
Any traffic that makes its way to that page is likely not going to convert into customers, in fact, most will take one look at the page, not find the information they need, and bounce off and back to the search results. When Google sees how many people are bouncing off, it’s going to determine that your page is bad and push you down in the SERPs.
And finally, the most important factor in all SEO is user experience. If you focus on user experience, everything else should come secondarily. It’s always Google’s primary focus to give the best possible experience to the user for the search query. So, if that’s your focus when doing anything on your website, then you’ll see the results.
AI is a tool, not a replacement
If you’re writing a piece of content that is the most detailed and useful for a user, say a how-to guide that includes quick instructions with longer explanations, then ensure that your explanations include something new, something that you’ve learned from your own experience. A piece of AI software is never going to be able to contribute the uniqueness of your thoughts into a piece of content.
So, no. AI isn’t killing SEO. It’s killing specialists who don’t get more efficient and use it to improve their workflow. It won’t ever replace this discipline because we always need people to understand the human side of the customer journey. When that happens though, we might want to revisit the conversation.
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