Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is the secret behind getting your website and its content seen – and it’s no easy task. With the rise in artificial intelligence (AI), with the likes of ChatGPT and more, there are plenty of shortcuts you can take to work smarter, not harder… but be careful, you’ll need to avoid some easy SEO pitfalls that might damage it instead.

How can AI be used for SEO?

Use AI for your Topic Research

The reason AI works so incredibly well, more so even than a search engine, is that you can pull from it far more tailored information. As AI learns more, it’s able to offer you information on all sorts of topics, from complex ones into easier to understand chunks, to areas it knows are commonly misunderstood. By providing the likes of ChatGPT details on your intentions, the topics you want to look into, and what you’re trying to achieve, AI can cut your research time significantly.

To make AI work for your topic research, you should check the validity of the information you’re provided with. AI is incredibly intelligent, but only as much as what it has been told, meaning it can pick up and distribute errors. Remain the expert in your niche, and make sure you’re being pointed in the right direction.

AI for Article Writing

Of course, if AI can help you with topic research, it can also help you with your article writing for your blog too. Now, AI can give you support by writing your entire article, or it can offer you some SEO headings and questions that you can seek to answer yourself. It can also help you with phrasing, pull out typos, and make recommendations for rephrasing or tone.

For example, if you have written a piece but think it’s too chatty, you could ask AI to rewrite the same information, sounding more formal. In some, like ChatGPT, you can even create your own GPT, letting it know your preferences and brand guidelines, and letting it offer you tailored information.

You can see an example of a ChatGPT prompt in the image below.

If you can though, you should avoid using AI to write the whole article, for two reasons. Firstly, AI content is generally distinguishable from human-written content, and knowing you’ve written using AI suggests you are not the authority you’re trying to present yourself as. Secondly, Google’s bots can detect AI, and whilst it won’t automatically penalize you in its SEO for using it, it won’t do you any favors either…

AI Image Generation for your website

SEO is more than just the words on the page, though, as it looks at the user experience too. Images on the page have benefits for SEO, the first being that it makes the page easier to read, by breaking up the text into more readable chunks and offering an illustration of the point. How do you find the perfect image? Well, you can make it!

Using an image generator in AI will often create a great image for your site to illustrate your point, without the difficulty and time investment of sourcing your own photography or graphics.

Here’s a great example. We used Midjourney (v7) and asked for “A 1950s illustration of a man in front of his computer excited to see Midjourney generate an image for his blog post.” Here are the options we got:

The second benefit to this is that you have the opportunity to add more keywords into your site. Google can’t (yet) understand images, however it CAN understand the words attached to it. By giving your image file names that are keywords, adding in a caption and an alternative text description (which you could generate with AI), Google has more to read, and thus a better chance of understanding the type of site you have.

The downside of using AI for image generation is the accuracy. AI generally struggles with generating hands and text, meaning that some images look fine when you first glance at them, but on closer inspection, there are some very strange errors. Should your audience see these, you run the risk of impacting your reputation as an attentive authority.

It’s also widely reported that images and artwork have been used as sources to train AI without permission, and if this is a key pain point for your audience, you should avoid using it entirely. As much as images are great for SEO, the core goal is to bring users to your site.

AI for On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO covers a wide range of things, and sometimes keeping on top of every aspect can be a lot.

AI can help with this in a number of ways – you can ask it to provide feedback on your written article for example, where it might suggest some format changes or keyword improvement. If you’re using HTML, you could ask it to create you a well-formatted text box or button that improves your user experience, in your brand colors, if your website can’t natively do this. It could offer you some sources to use as external links, or small adaptations you could make to improve your authority, or even write your meta descriptions or headings for you. It’s a great way to learn how SEO works, and you may find you naturally begin to make these changes in future articles.

Using AI in the manner suggested here just requires a few double checks – so long as you’re certain the changes made are factual, and make sense in your topic, there are many fewer drawbacks

Becoming a Source for AI

AI doesn’t have to do it for you to be useful for your SEO. One of Google’s biggest updates in recent years was the launch of its own AI Overviews, which answers questions searchers pose, using composites of information found on webpages.

If your website is Search Engine Optimized, Google can read your site well enough to pull accurate answers to the query, and present these to the searcher – even if you’re not ranked highest in the search results. Becoming a source not only increases your validity but puts your site in front of more people. Using AI in this way, to purposely drive more traffic to your site, is a win-win scenario.

Similarly, although AI’s like ChatGPT have limitations on the data they use, they’re expanding all the time. If you can provide information that can be read by AI, you could become a source there too, which is a whole new chance of being seen. Subsequently, more views to your site directly will be understood by Google as your site being trustworthy. The difficulty here is gaining those click-throughs, and being sourced in the first place.

For both, you should consider how people are searching using AI, and adapt your site to recognize this more conversational tone in modern requests.

OK – what AI tools should I be taking a look at?

The world of artificial intelligence is booming, which means a new application or service is launched daily to meet niche demands and emerging markets. Below are some of the tools we’ve used, alongside tools that other SEO and content experts found the most useful.

• ChatGPT by OpenAI
  The reigning king of artificial intelligence. ChatGPT is continually evolving, adding new features such as image and video generation, alongside refining its language model to the point that it is becoming more humanlike with each day. ChatGPT should absolutely be a tool in your box when it comes to content creation.
  
  “I ask ChatGPT to recommend five keywords with a KD of a certain number max and a monthly Seach minimum of a certain number. I tell it to use Semrush. If I search the keywords and they don’t meet what I am looking for I ask for more keyword suggestions. This saves me an inordinate amount of time. Regarding content writing, I tell ChatGPT to sound human.” – JaniceWald on Reddit
  
  
• Claude by Anthropic
  A popular alternative to ChatGPT, Claude is considered to be “more refined” by many users than ChatGPT. As of this post, however, it does not generate images or videos.
  
  “I have used Claude projects to build entire complex SEO optimised websites, and it just works.” – Jeff-in-Bournemouth on Reddit
  
  
• Google Gemini
  Perhaps a bit late to the game, Google can’t be counted out. Despite early complaints of heavy censorship and incorrect answers, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) has made it clear that AI is a big focus for them, and Gemini has rapidly matured as a product. It now generates images and videos as well that are being praised as some of the most advanced for artificial intelligence.
  
  “we’ve been using google gemini for deep research lately, it’s actually pretty solid for exploring a topic from different angles. great for blogging too.” – prof_happy on Reddit
  
  
• Search Atlas
  Search Atlas is a new alternative to some bigger SEO toolkit players, specifically focused on AI. The company is focused on automation, which has lead to both praise and concern. While this company is young, it’s rapidly gaining traction and is worth considering for many who want more than just AI-driven content generation.
  
  “…in my case it’s not just “good for the price”. I’ve used it for content strategy, keyword clustering, and backlink audits, and it’s been smoother than tools 3x the price. The fact that it combines content optimization, SERP tracking, and technical audits all in one platform is a huge win especially if you’re juggling multiple clients or sites.” – Spiritual_Reserve907 on Reddit

It’s also worth looking into some classic tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs, and Grammarly. While these tools were first introduced prior to the AI craze, they’re all integrating AI into their offerings.

What are the benefits of using AI for SEO?

SEO is best taught directly, relating to your own content and in a way that you can ask questions and clarify answers – although you can get a starting point in our Beginners Guide to SEO. Once you’ve got the basics down, AI is an absolutely free way to do this – and the benefit to this is that not only is the SEO on your site improving, but it becomes easier every single time you post on your website.

Given how quickly information moves, SEO changes, and how busy you likely are in your business, AI is a fantastic shortcut tool to use.

Is AI-generated content good for SEO?

Here’s the kicker: if you use AI to create all of your content, it is terrible for SEO.

It might sound dramatic, but Google prioritizes EEAT – experience, expertise, authoritiveness and trustworthiness. When AI first made its explosion into everyday awareness, the internet was flooded with new websites with tons of content pages, that were simply spam. These offered no EEAT – they were poor quality, full of incorrect information, untrustworthy and with no actual experience, meaning that if Google sent a searcher to that site, they wouldn’t find the answer they needed. Unsurprisingly therefore, a site that is predominantly AI-written will be treated as the same. So: no, AI Generated Content is not good for SEO, if you only use it to make the content without your own input.

However, if you use it to guide your existing skills, helping you craft something rather than doing it for you – absolutely, it can be the key to your SEO success.

How can we help?

By all means, we at Anthem Communications want you to be able to take control of your organization’s destiny, even if that means your team utilizing the tools above rather than hiring us. With that said, we understand not every small business can spend the time on SEO, marketing, or content creation. Let us help!