Should I just give AI my keywords and press go?

My simple answer to this is no. AI has some amazing skills that you can utilise as part of your SEO work. But it also has some big blind spots and issues, which means you should be selective about what you use it for. Just asking a general AI tool to get you found on Google will take a vast amount of credits and is very unlikely to deliver useful results. I’m going to go through what it can help you with and what it should not be used for.

How could I use AI as part of my SEO?

One of the skills AI is excellent at is data analysis. Google Search Console and Google Analytics both give vast amounts of data. But trying to understand and apply that data can be challenging, especially when combining information from both platforms. This is where AI can be really useful. You can export data from both (and AI can tell you what exports it wants), share it with AI, and ask for Analysis. You need to be very clear about what you want. Just saying “I want to improve my SEO” is nowhere near enough. But if you can give details about what you want to know. For example, you might want to know how you are performing for some particular keywords and phrases in some particular geographical area it could help with that and give you a realistic picture. There are lots of other useful pieces of data analysis it can do for your SEO; this is just an example.

AI is excellent at reviewing lots of data that would take you a long time. For example, you may want to improve the internal linking of all of your blogs. You could ask it to review all of your blogs and suggest internal links between blogs. That will take time and credits, but will also save you a lot of time. On a similar basis, you could also ask it to review your presence around the web for consistency, and it can find places you are referenced and then check that your website link, name, business name, description, etc. are consistent.

What parts of SEO should you avoid using AI for?

The first is keyword planning. There are two problems with this. The first is the lack of data. You need to look at some key data:

1. How competitive the search terms are that you want to be found for (so are lots of other people going for them)
2. What the search volumes are (are enough people searching for them to make it worthwhile aiming for)
3. What is the domain scores of the competitors compared to me (can I compete with these websites, and unless your domain scores are close, you cannot right now).

Some of this data is publicly available, but not all, and without this data you can’t make essential decisions about what keywords to aim for. As well as the lack of data, the other issue is the AI chat’s optimism. They will almost always tell you that aiming for the keywords you want is possible even if the data tells you otherwise.

The next area, once you have your keywords planned, is a plan of action . AI and many people trying to do SEO themselves focus fully on content and keywords. But this is only one part of the picture. Often your written content, etc can be great, but some things will mean that there are things stopping you from being found in Google Search (such as a slow website). And if those blocks are in your way, no amount of work on the keywords on your site will help.

I would avoid using AI to fully write your content. By all means, use it to help with ideas and structures, but content really needs to be unique and yours. An AI blog on a topic will be very generic, while one of the things that will make it stand out, useful, and unique is your viewpoint.

So what, overall, is my SEO plan combining human and AI skills?

As I’ve explained above, the key is being very aware of AI tools’ strengths and weaknesses, and remembering that these are changing rapidly. But at the time of writing, I would suggest using AI for particular tasks it is good at, such as

• Data analysis
• Recommendations from data analysis
• Reviews of large amounts of content (like blogs)

I would recommend not using AI for

• Coming up with an overall SEO plan
• Deciding keywords and phrases
• Full content writing

When is professional help needed for SEO?

A professional is extremely useful during the SEO planning stage. They will have subscriptions to tools that give access to all required data on keyterms allowing them to give you insights that you would only be able to get by paying for expensive subscriptions and then being able to use them and interpret the data. I always recommend SEO is started with a report and plan. We offer SEO reports and these are essential to ensuring that any SEO you do is effective. Starting SEO work with no aim and direction is not going to end well. From that point you can try and implement the recommendations from the report and AI to help you and make some progress. Or engage a professional who knows exactly what is needed to move your website up the search rankings.

How do I decide whether SEO is for me?

This is down to two key things.

The data — Does the data on your keywords show that this is something you can do. If you are a small business trying to get found for “accountancy” across the UK, this will be almost impossible. However, if you are trying to achieve the same initially in your local town, that is an achievable starting goal.

Time and money — Do you have the time to dedicate to this or the money to get a professional to work on it, or a mix of the two? This is not something you can do with 10 minutes a week; it needs time or money dedicated to it for the results to show.