Make the most of your time by thinking better and rushing less

Katie says: “We should be thinking better and rushing less.”

Can we use AI tools and automation to get things done more efficiently?

“We can use AI in the right way. People can get carried away with AI and think it can do absolutely everything, which I would disagree with. We can use AI to automate and do things faster once we’ve done the bulk of the research. However, AI is not human, and humans can do things that AI can’t.

You can give it prompts and ideas, and you can brief it on a client’s project and their tone of voice. You can give it the background and see what it spits out. However, without giving it that information, you wouldn’t be able to get a good enough response. You need to do the research first, and that’s where the experienced SEO comes in: to get to know the business, the customer’s persona, etc.

You can’t produce an entire SEO strategy, implement that, and get results just using AI. You need the experience of a professional SEO who knows what works and what doesn’t, who has the technical SEO knowledge and the content knowledge, and who is well-rounded. They understand how things work from the base up. Having the experience of working with clients day-in day-out, doing the research, seeing how things work, and getting hands on – AI can’t do that for you.

AI can automate some of those tasks. Once you’ve done the research and figured out right how you’re going to tackle that sector for the client you’re working with, you can utilise AI to accelerate your results. It’s not ‘cheating’ if it’s done in the right way, and it’s briefed correctly. When you know what schema you need to create, your H tags, your metadata, etc. – and you’ve briefed it correctly – you can click a button instead of spending days on all of those manual tasks.

If you’ve done all the wonderful research, you can feel grounded and confident in your strategy because you’ve spent that time thinking. You don’t need to rush, and you can spend time attacking schema, meta tags, image tags, etc., more quickly and efficiently because you’ve done the research. That’s what I mean by ‘think better, rush less’.”

What does the ‘think better’ process look like?

“I don’t use AI to do the thinking for me. A better kind of thinking behind an SEO strategy comes before any SEO. When you onboard a new client, you need to talk to that client and understand how their business works and what the product or service is (getting a level of understanding that is almost as good as theirs), as well as who their customer is, what their pain points are, and what they are looking for.

Then, you need to think about how you’re going to tackle that on the website, what the website needs to look like, etc. That’s all part of that thinking process. Then you obviously do your competitor research to see who else is out there ranking for the terms that you should be ranking for.

You can then work out what pages you need to have on the website. Do you need a blog to support those pages? Is it more of a backlink process? How fast is the website? Is there a problem with the indexation of the website? Have Google Analytics and Search Console decided that there are serious problems, and it’s suffered from an algorithm update? With that thinking done, you will be able to work out and prioritise all of the things that encompass SEO.

There are so many things that go into that thinking process, when you’re planning and strategising. It can take hours, or even days, depending on the size of the website and the problems you find.

You could be doing a content strategy with wonderful keywords and great search volume that the client’s really impressed with but then, six months down the line, you realise you’ve got a serious indexation problem and half your site’s blocked by robots. Then, you’ve wasted your time. All of that strategising at the start, however long that takes, will help you prioritise.

You can work out whether you need to fix indexing first and make sure the website has a solid technical foundation so that you’re not wasting time. You can work through what’s going to get the results the fastest. Don’t look at blog content and audit lots of blogs if you need to get the service pages sorted first because those are going to be your lead drivers.

Once you have a strategy and a plan, you can look at the next 3/6/12 months, and decide what you can automate to get it done more quickly. Decide what you can brief into AI and what needs a little bit more time, and plan that into your time frame. Working on a month-by-month basis is not a strategy; that’s just trying to do SEO stuff each month and hoping for the best.”

What tasks do you use AI for and what AI tools do you use?

“I use AI to help me with scalable tasks that need writing. If I’m working on several articles for a client as part of a strategy, I might be able to use ChatGPT. To do that, I would need to brief it and say, ‘This is the kind of article we want to write. These are the competitors who are already ranking. Make sure the tone of voice is this. We want to add these internal links. Mention these sources. Don’t mention XYZ.’ Those are just a few of the things that I would brief into ChatGPT. There are also lots of other plugins I’ve used, and some are hit-and-miss.

I use ChatGPT-4 (because 3.5 tends to be a little bit less accurate) for the base content of an article. However, you don’t just copy and paste it because it will obviously be using duplicate content from the internet. Once you’ve got that content, brief it – knowing who the client is and whether it’s in line with the brief you’ve given – and then tweak it. Add extra things, like a new interactive calculator, a tool, or a new research paper that the client has released, which is going to add even more value to that article. Once the base of the content is there, you can add schema and internal links, and improve the SEO, which is where the client is going to get real value.

I also use AI for schema, like FAQ schema, how-to schema, etc. You can ask ChatGPT to look at the article you’re working on and the part of the text you want it to focus on for schema, then ask it to write that schema. It tends to churn out some good stuff. However, there are sometimes issues with it, which is why you need that human touch. Without the human touch, it just wouldn’t work. It would be inaccurate, you might have the wrong links, or you might have things in the content that are not on-brand.

Although on reflection, if you're publishing content articles or pages, with EEAT and the Helpful Content Update, any content really needs to be written by someone with real experience in that field. Google will be able to tell the difference between a piece about divorce law that Chat GPT has spit out compared to a writer who has experience in that topic and understands the terminology. It will sound better, be more helpful and flow far better than AI. And why would any brand not want to be authentic and helpful? But if your client doesn't have the copywriter or the budget to find the right one, it can be a starting point.”

What’s your preferred way of installing schema?

“A lot of our clients work with WordPress and we’ve achieved huge success from a very simple process. You go into the page or post, choose the ‘text’ option at the top, scroll right to the bottom of the page, and then literally copy and paste the schema in there. Of course, you need to validate it in a schema tool first, to make sure that it’s correct, accurate and can be picked up.

Once you’ve popped it in, you can preview it to make sure it looks the way it should, get the sign-off from the client, and then go live. We’ve seen really good featured snippets, within days, by uploading the content and then adding in extra bits of schema. We get really good results from that so it’s worth doing it, but in the right way. Don’t just ask ChatGPT to write an article and paste it in.”

Should every industry be using that process or is incorporating schema within an article or a blog post not appropriate for certain industries?

“I’ve done this across a variety of sectors; including the beauty industry, the cosmetic surgery, and the broadband industry.

For people who don’t know, schema is a piece of code that essentially tells Google what that page is and gives it context about what is on the page. As soon as you add it in, you can get fantastic results.

We’ve added in schema that AI has given us (which has obviously been proofed to make sure it is all correct) and, so far, it has worked really well every single time. We’ve seen articles go from third, fourth, or fifth position to zero – getting that featured snippet literally overnight. It’s a game-changer.”

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?

“Stop trying to fill time with trivial technical SEO tasks. Stop spending hours going through a list of meta titles that are too long, meta descriptions that are too short, making sure that the H1 matches the SERP title, or trying to improve the website speed by 2% just to get a CLS score. Those can be really trivial things and your efforts can be better spent, in terms of getting actual results, seeing rankings go up, and seeing that company or client make more money that month.

Focus on your strategy and how you can carry it out more efficiently. Use your research to plan out what AI can do for you so that you can work faster. If your website is too slow to function and you physically can’t use it, then of course it needs speeding up a bit. However, if you’re trying to get it from a C to a B in your speed tool’s metrics, then your efforts are probably better spent looking at how AI can help you implement schema or help with your articles.

If AI is getting smarter because of how we are briefing it, and it gets to the point where it can get you featured snippets without you needing to put that schema in, then that’s brilliant. You can go and use your time elsewhere. You want to be doing what will get results, and AI is proving to be successful at the moment. If it figures out how to do this itself, great. I’ll go and do my next priority job, knowing AI has that covered.”

Katie McDonald is a Senior SEO at Sherbet Donkey and also a running blogger.