Utilise SEO but preserve the human element

Ahmed says: “Use AI as part of your SEO workflow, and involve the human element at every point.”

How do you decide what AI should do and what humans should do?

“Where there's administrative work – researching keywords, repetitive tasks, and auditing websites – there's always only one answer, and AI can do a really good job if you train those models for that.

On the other hand, when there's actual content, using AI for content is just repeating the same things that are already on the internet, and there's no human creativity behind that. From my experience, search engines don't like it.”

How do you train AI to be as proficient as possible when it comes to technical tasks?

“Every agency and every SEO specialist will have their own methods for auditing a website. You've got two options. You can go into AI, and you can tell it, ‘This is a website, do an SEO audit.’ In that case, the AI is only going to give you what that tool thinks an SEO audit is.

However, if you build your own AI agent – with the new OpenAI ChatGPT agent, Manus AI, or OpenAI's custom GPTs – you could feed in your own reports, your previous audits, what you look for in audits, your list of technical things, etc. Then, you can ask it to run an SEO report according to your list.

Once it has produced a report, you then refine it. You have to keep refining the results until it's at least 80% to your liking. Then, you will come to the human bit, where you always have to check that work.

AI is never going to replace a human, and human creativity and depth. While it can do most tasks to a very good standard, you're always going to need that extra human element to improve it. However, it's saving you hours per project, and these hours can be used for more storytelling and more strategy, and you can put that time towards something more important for the businesses, the websites, and SEO.”

How do you train AI to produce the custom work that you're looking to do?

“The way that you would do this (and you can do it on a real client’s business, or you can use one of your test websites) is you audit the website as a person. If you have multiple team members in SEO, get each one to audit the website as they would normally do it.

Then, feed this information into AI and ask it to audit the same website, and multiple other websites, using the model you've provided. Look at the results, and compare those results with what your team produced for those same websites. Where there are mistakes, you have to constantly correct them.

It's a long process, and you might have to do this 10, 15, 20, or 30 times. Once it's done, though, you will have a phenomenal AI model, which is in tune with your company's own process.

It’s better to train your own custom AI to do this for each and every brand that you work with, and this is only the foundation. This really becomes powerful when you're doing large-scale SEO strategies, large-scale keyword research, creating your keyword clusters, and large-scale content marketing strategies – and not just using AI, but also using APIs from tools like Zapier and Make.com to connect these to Google Sheets and massively scale your work.

Traditionally, only the largest agencies would have the team and resources to do such a massive strategy for clients. Now, with the power of AI and these automation tools, even smaller agencies and freelance specialists can do massive AI campaigns for massive brands.”

Is there any limit to the size of websites that AI can crawl?

“OpenAI has a limit on the number of characters you can feed into it. However, there are workarounds. For example, Zapier has a new beta feature which allows you to split information into batches as it's sent to AI.

Really, there are no limits. If you have the budget, which isn't too high, then you could go as large as possible.

One of the key things I always recommend is to master one aspect of AI first. For example, just master the keyword research. Don't try to do everything at once. Just focus on keyword research, keyword clusters, and keyword intentions. Get that perfect.

Once you've perfected that, then you can focus on the next part. For example, connecting Google Sheets and creating a content marketing plan. Focus on that, and then merge both parts together, creating a content strategy based on the keyword clusters you've created.”

As an independent SEO consultant, or even an agency, how do you differentiate what you do when all of this work is becoming commoditised?

“That brings me back to my original point about the human element. We've had numerous clients who tried to use AI to create content in bulk, with no human touch, and we saw their rankings drop massively.

By going through and rewording every single article, as a human, we've seen their rankings increase. We've seen huge amounts of traffic coming back, and their sales, their leads, and their enquiries going up.

AI isn't perfect. You've seen the examples of it creating images of people with six fingers or three hands. The same will happen when you use AI for keyword research, technical audits, etc. It's very good, but a human will need to go and check the results, using the SEO knowledge they have to achieve a professional standard for their clients – and to remain ethical as well.

Clients and businesses are paying you to do their SEO and carry out a strategy. The knowledge and experience you have need to be brought into it. If you train your own AI in the way that I mentioned previously, it's going to be a lot easier and a lot less time-consuming.”

Is there any place for AI in the content production process?

“It's good for saving time. Once you've trained your AI – once you've got all your keyword clusters, you've got tens of thousands of different keywords, and you have fed this into the model – it can generate hundreds or thousands of article titles that users could be searching for, and people would find useful. You can then get your content team to write those articles.

The second option is to get AI to create the content for you, and then humanise it. Go through the article and reword every aspect of it. I know agencies that will train AI to write content in certain ways, but that is still AI creating the content from the information it already has. It doesn't really work. It has the same issues.

In my experience, Google doesn't want to rank or display a website that’s producing the same information that is already available on the web. You've got to bring that human element, and that human experience, to the content.

The same goes for keywords. AI only knows so much. You and your client know better what your customers want to see. There has to be human edits and human work behind the scenes.”

Would you involve AI in the research and production of content, or would you just start with information from thought leaders and then edit that content with the help of AI?

“Both solutions can work. If you already have unique content from human experts, and then you feed that unique content into AI, it will have something to work with that's unique and is not already available online.

If you start with AI and provide no manual input of actual information from real people, then it wouldn't work. However, if you start with AI – where you have no experts, no content, and no original information – use AI to create everything for you, and then you edit this with human expertise, that would work as well.

There's no shortcut to success on the web. If you are running a restaurant that's always the same, then that makes sense; people want the same menu, the same design, the same burger, etc. With Google, they want you to give new information. They want you to give something to users that's different from what’s out there.

Technology is advancing, and things are changing all the time. Human psychology is changing. There always has to be that element there.”

AI can personalise and localise content now, but is that not unique enough to be successful?

“It's good for social media, and it's good for creating brochures or videos where you're not worried about ranking in Google and you're not worried about that organic traffic.

However, on Instagram, you have a label that tells you when something was created by AI. If social media systems realise you're using AI, you're not going to get that reach. The same is true with SEO and search engines.

When you’re creating PPC, which is only about paying for clicks, there are no issues like that, but with the organic side of SEO, the human voice has to be there, alongside traditional link building and creating good websites.”

Ahmed, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Use AI in all levels of your process, but always keep the human voice and human touch behind everything you do.”

Ahmed Bhula is a Director and Head of Marketing at REM Digital Ltd. Find out more over at REMDigital.co.uk.