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s artificial intelligence continues to impact almost every aspect of content marketing, it’s important to not only understand where its capabilities lie as of now, but also where they’re headed. The technology is evolving rapidly, which means that what doesn’t work for marketers one year could become indispensable in the future.
If you’re part of a creative team in today’s AI landscape, you can use the technology to brainstorm big ideas, create first drafts of potential headlines and slogans, and even design logos. Using a machine to boost creativity is a game-changing advancement, but it’s important to remember that AI is still in its infancy. Although it can be great for initial research or the start of an idea, it’s still up to us humans to refine, strategize, and make the final call.
At Hawthorn Creative, we’ve been closely following the advent and evolution of artificial intelligence, how it relates to content, and how we can better use it to serve our clients. For this article, we’re focusing on one of the most-used tactics in content marketing — SEO — and how artificial intelligence can help (or hinder) your strategy.
Here’s How AI Can Help Your SEO
One of the most beneficial things about AI is its ability to process vast amounts of data in milliseconds. When that ability is applied to SEO, it means that you can have a list of relevant keywords, phrases, and ranking data in short order without having to wonder whether you’re choosing the right mix. And since AI algorithms learn over time, they can follow trends and suggest changes or refinements that help you better navigate search algorithms.
Initial Content Creation
If you’re tasked with writing a blog post on something new, AI is a great way to learn about the topic in a plain, easy-to-understand way. Or, if you’re writing a trend piece on the top travel spots in Europe and want to see what the general consensus is online, AI can pull together that information. It’s more than just a one-time content generator, though. Because of the back-and-forth nature of AI, you can refine the process as you go with prompts like “Can this be geared toward a beginner audience?” or “Can you incorporate the most relevant keywords?”.
This process, called natural-language processing, helps AI to learn relational links between not only keywords and phrases, but also user behavior and search trends. With all of this data at the ready, AI programming can help you automate many of your SEO tasks and return better results than you’d achieve by performing them manually.
Content Optimization
Once content is created (a job that should always include a human writer’s touch!), AI can sift through analytics data to not only see which pieces of content are performing the best, but offer suggestions for refining your strategy. This makes it a strong writing partner, but it’s not just limited to blogs or traditional marketing materials.
AI can also enhance your website by providing users with relevant recommendations or answering simple questions. (In turn, it can take all of that data — a keyword that keeps coming up in customer service queries, for example — and suggest keywords, predict user behavior, and more.)
Back-End Automation
Behind the scenes at a website, artificial intelligence can help developers automate technical SEO tasks like finding broken links, fixing code, optimizing metadata, and better organizing pages. One of its most beneficial assets, however, is its ability to assist with building backlinks — a crucial yet challenging tactic in a strong SEO strategy. The ability to run these tasks on autopilot is a huge benefit for developers, who are then freed up to focus on the bigger picture of website enhancement and maintenance.
On the Flip Side, Can AI Hurt Our SEO Strategy?
As we’ve mentioned, AI is a helpful assistant for creating and refining SEO efforts, but it could lead to trouble if it’s used as a replacement for the human brain. And even as it gets smarter, it’s still a machine that’s producing output based on whatever input it receives. Typing a content prompt into a chatbot and calling it a day can not only lead to off-brand strategy or terrible writing, but also search engine penalties.
Keyword Stuffing
If you ask AI to create a blog post using five or six keywords, it may return a piece of content that’s not only written badly, but stuffed to the gills with those words or phrases on repeat. Called keyword stuffing, this is considered a black hat SEO tactic and is often penalized by search engine crawlers. The AI isn’t doing it maliciously, but rather taking whatever information it’s received and generating output. It’s imperative that a human take any initial AI-generated content and finesse it for other humans to read and understand.
Incurring Search Engine Penalties
Relying too heavily on AI can also result in duplicate content that’s published across the web, which is a red flag for search engine crawlers. When landing on the first page of the Google search results is the goal, it’s crucial to ensure that your content doesn’t get tagged for any shady practices, intentional or otherwise. (Note: Google doesn’t ban AI-generated content, but like other content, it scours the web for black hat SEO and other unethical techniques used to improve rankings.)
Unethical (and Just Plain Bad) Content
The potential problems that have guided ethics discussions around AI to date include bias, misinformation, transparency, and privacy rights. First, AI pulls its answers from data that already exists, which means that it could be using a biased site as a source. Beyond that, bots like ChatGPT don’t share their sources, which means you have no way to track down where the information is coming from.
Finally, AI can actually produce answers that aren’t anywhere close to the truth. To experience this for yourself, ask an AI bot to write a bio about you and see what it says. One of our writers once experimented with using AI to create a profile article based on interview notes, and it turned an IT specialist into the “Visionary CEO” of the company.
The bottom line is that AI can be a great helper, as long as humans remain in control of the process. One of the best ways for you to figure out what will work best for your marketing (and what won’t) is to jump in and try it. Experiment with different tools and algorithms, see how answers change if you add or remove information from prompts, create images, and input data to see how it works.
Our in-house strategists understand the best ways to use artificial intelligence to enhance your marketing campaigns. If you’re ready to dive into the future of content marketing, let’s talk.