Enhance your day-to-day tasks by leveraging AI

Aleyda says: “Start leveraging AI for the day-to-day SEO tasks within your workflow in a smart way – in a way where you take care of the quality, but you use it to accelerate the tasks that you need to do.”

What SEO workflows can be enhanced with AI?

“There are now tools that use AI, like the Horseman SEO crawler, which integrates with the OpenAI API to provide you with suggestions and recommendations for the issues it finds when crawling your website. If it identifies that you have title or description issues, because they’re empty, duplicated, or too long, it will give you suggestions to make them shorter or populate them with descriptive information. You can develop your SEO recommendations much faster by using these tools to support you.

There are also many integrations within Google Sheets and extensions that don’t require you to have any understanding of coding or scripting. One of my favourites is Numerous.ai, which allows you to do things in bulk.

One of the main challenges that I find with ChatGPT is the interface. If you take the content from a number of pages and put it in the first two columns of a Google Sheet, and you want to generate titles, meta descriptions, headings, Q&As, FAQs, etc. in bulk, you can do so by using these extensions that integrate with OpenAI. You don’t need to go back and forth with the ChatGPT interface if you don’t want to. That is a hassle.

ChatGPT also has browser extensions, like KeyMate.AI. Using those extensions, the quality of the results is much better. It won’t hallucinate so much as it used to. The Serpstat SEO tool also has an extension that provides accurate keyword data.

There are options that can help with all types of activities, like doing forecasts based on your historical performance data in Google Search Console. If you want to forecast, you can use the Advanced Data Analysis plugin and take the latest fluctuations, certain average positions, scenarios, etc., into consideration. It can give you the same support that a data analyst would provide.”

Can AI implement recommendations without human intervention, or would you not trust it to do that yet?

“I believe that it can highly support us in the analysis and evaluation process, that’s for sure. However, in order to carry out recommendations that are actually impactful and make sense from a business standpoint – based on the goals of the website and the business itself – it’s important to have a proper understanding of the website context, beyond the technicalities that can be identified in an SEO audit.

For example, you may need to understand the context of certain product lines that have certain goals or need to be prioritised, or certain challenges or restrictions of the platform. There are a lot of restrictions, requirements, and external conditions that you need to take into account so that you can prioritise your SEO recommendations accordingly and make them meaningful for the organisation.

More than that, to make the recommendations actually happen, the execution is mostly done by actual developers from the website. If it is a small website, you usually try to do it with your own small platform, with WordPress, plugins, self-serve, etc. You lack that development support, so I can definitely see how AI can help you implement changes in .htaccess or develop a little script that you can use to automatically generate an XML sitemap with indexable pages for certain sections of your website. That is for a small organisation, with your own website and your own projects.

However, in bigger organisations, there’s a development team that knows its stuff and specialises in executing or encoding based on the existing tech stack. Although you might want to recommend a few scenarios or suggest possible solutions, they are the ones that will ultimately implement the changes that actually make sense for the tech environment of each website.

It’s important to understand our boundaries as SEOs here. What is important in that scenario, though, is having the best possible soft skills. Having really good communication will eliminate the burden of any bureaucracy at these bigger, enterprise-level organisations. At that level, it’s not necessarily a knowledge problem, but an execution problem that arises from a lack of buy-in, a lack of alignment between departments, or bureaucracy and how slow everything is.

You might want to use AI to support the communication that you want to have with C-level if you find it challenging to speak in a more business-like language and use less technical terminology.”

How can AI help with getting more buy-in?

“It’s not about replacing your voice but supporting it. In my case, especially because English is not my native language, it is a little bit more challenging for me to come up with a very sophisticated way to say certain things in English. Sometimes I ask ChatGPT how I could say something to a C-level in a big organisation in a way that sounds a little bit more sophisticated. I might ask it how to explain something in a way that is much more straightforward, clear, and simple for a non-technical person.

It’s not that AI’s going to replace your job, because it won’t, but it can help facilitate your communication and understanding when there might be a gap in that. Most of these are human challenges, and I don’t think that AI will be able to completely replace any of those any time soon. There is no AI that will be able to push the development team better than I can with my own soft skills.”

If you don’t have someone who pushes other teams, can you use AI to help you better articulate what you’re trying to change and the impact it will have?

“100%. The same is also true for when you are doing outreach. We were talking about different scenarios than the typical ones that we see around content generation.

If you do outreach, AI can serve as a tool to accelerate the research that you do into the people that you want to connect with. If you want to build links or get coverage for a website, you can accelerate the process. You can give an AI tool all of the articles that someone has written over the last few years and ask it to summarise what they have written about, or the three top articles that have covered a particular topic. You can ask it to create an email that would persuade them to link to your resource in a certain way by appealing to their interests.

What I like about it is that it gives you that first-step template base to build on, which is amazing. A lot of people need a little bit of initial help or a base to start building upon. Of course, I don’t recommend completely automating, but it’s important to accelerate that initial phase and have that input.”

If AI raises everyone to the same level, how can you differentiate yourself and show that you’re human?

“There should always be a human validating, personalising, and providing proof that this is not an automated email. That is something that I always ask myself whenever I receive an email. Sometimes, that proof can even be just a little image or a little reference to a previous post that I have made on LinkedIn or Twitter/X.

It is difficult to differentiate yourself because even a comment, a photo, or a video might be replicated by AI. We recently saw a video going around of someone talking in another language through AI. It makes you question what is real and what isn’t right now. I was speaking in French in a video and people were questioning whether it was really me speaking French or an artificial intelligence.

How we view what is real and what is not will change over the next three years. I’m looking forward to seeing how this will impact the role of SEOs. It will be exciting. Hopefully, humans will still be required in SEO in three years’ time. If not, and it’s an AI version of me, at least I will be the one who trained it, so something of myself will still be there.”

Will there need to be AI specialist SEO roles in the future?

“We’ll have to see how much real expertise is actually needed and what long-term opportunities that can offer by itself. The ‘prompt engineer’ profession that I see going around looks like a big opportunity right now but, in two years, every developer, engineer, and person looking to interact with AI will need to have some prompting know-how.

The same is true for SEO and AI. If the interface changes, that will just be a new layer of understanding that we will need to develop in order to be effective in our jobs. It might not necessarily be a new specialisation, but it’s something that we will all need to start doing.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“Read SEOFOMO, my newsletter. It’s the best way to accelerate your SEO knowledge, keep up with whatever is happening, and identify the updates and developments that you should actually pay attention to. In terms of what you should stop doing, stop being so afraid. What will happen will happen. If you’re afraid that SGE is going to steal all the clicks, have you analysed your click-through rate lately? Have you seen the traffic erosion that has already been happening for a long, long time because of all the SERP features, Google’s verticals, etc.? You are over-worrying, and that doesn’t help.

You should keep your focus on what you actually have control over and how you can make the most out of the opportunities. At the end of the day, there will always be the need for a specialist who can identify opportunities and match whatever the users need to what websites and businesses are offering. This is where our value comes in, as a specialist.

There will be challenges, but this is why we are SEOs and we are not doing paid search. SEO has always been a profession that is about going the extra mile through testing, identifying opportunities that aren’t even documented, playing them out, and having a lot of curiosity about how we make our results visible to users at the end of the day.”

Aleyda Solis is an SEO Consultant and Founder at Orainti, and you can find her over at AleydaSolis.com.