Since March 2023, the accessibility of AI has become easier for the vast majority of people. Initially, ChatGPT by OpenAI, followed by BARD by Google, Bing Chat (which utilises ChatGPT), among others, have made AI accessible to everyone, often for free.
With these amazing new tools, it was, once again, the quick conclusion that SEO is dead. Everyone can produce content now quick and cheap – so what would you need a SEO for?
SEO is not content manufacturing
Firstly, if you have paid your SEO team or agency merely to produce content for your website, unfortunately, you may have wasted money.
Yes, content is part of SEO and I am a strong believer in the old “Content is King” philosophy, but this does not mean that churning out content just for the sake of it is a good idea or will work in the long run.
Identifying content that is helpful for the users of your website and (potential) customers, finding the terms that are used by your audience, finding information gaps that only your business and products cover, writing the content in a way that it fits within the tone and style of your website, create a logic of internal links for your content and a structure for each content piece as well as for the flow of information on your website, are just a few things that have to be taken into account.
And with this I haven’t even touched any technical SEO tasks like your robots.txt, sitemaps, structured data , canonicals, just to name a few, which are not less important.
AI is a very helpful tool for SEO
Don’t get me wrong, AI is amazing. A very helpful tool. I use it and if you don’t you miss out.
But like with every tool, you need the knowledge to use it and to use it right.
Buying a buzzsaw does not make you a carpenter.
AI is great for data analysis, but you first have to know what the data means and what the results will tell you. Copy Briefings and content creation can be sped up with the help of AI tools, but you have to understand that AI sometimes hallucinates and produces incorrect answers. The content created by artificial intelligence might be uniquely phrased, but it is not really new.
You always have to think what do I want my users to have?
A bunch of information that is just warmed up and repackaged and that they can find somewhere else (and why would a search engine rank you for that if it is able to produce the answer itself with AI supported search like Google SGE)?
Or something that is really a benefit for your users and customers. Something that shows of the uniqueness of your business, the benefits your customers have from using your product and this in a way that is optimised with the latest knowledge about search engines and how they work?
AI is great – but it will not replace SEO
The use of AI has been around for longer than the emergence of ChatGPT. Most people just didn’t know about it.
And yes, with it being so easy accessible now it will change the way we (the SEO industry) and you as a website owner work and work together.
Things will get faster and there will be more focus on other things than just content creation (which, honestly and like said before, should have never been the main focus of SEO).
But there will also be new challenges as competitors are using the new technology as well and you will have to keep up.
Your business is not SEO, your website is a tool for you to promote your business and the SEO is a craftsman to help you to use your website as efficiently as possible.
Good SEOs will help you to understand and utilise AI
SEO was, is and always will be a service that helps you reaching your business goals and understand the changes that are happening.
AI is new and evolves still fast. Like always there are a few bad players out there trying to peddle either fear or the gold at the end of the rainbow.
But AI is just another tool. Like with all when it comes to SEO (and not only that) is about understanding the risks and opportunities that lie within.
The better you understand what your SEO team or agency is doing, the better you can align this with your business goals.
If you don’t understand how AI will change internet search in the future, and how you can optimise your website and workflows accordingly, then, regrettably, you have a problem that requires expert assistance.