There is a lot of noise about AI tools being adopted by major publications, from the Miami Herald using a bot to write real estate articles to CNET incorporating AI tools to help its writers. While AI tools can help with the writing process, one exciting use for AI tools is to help publishers improve their SEO. AI as an SEO assistant is an exciting new frontier for publishers, so we thought we would explore some of the tools that big and small publishers are adopting, starting with our product: Link Previews. 

Link Previews is a tool that adds additional content to your pages by generating a summary of the content behind the link and displaying that summary to the user when they interact with it. A writer can verify the summary text, ensuring that the contents are true and trustworthy, or just in line with what they want the content to say. It’s an easy, trustworthy way to leverage existing content and the perfect add-on to your slate of upcoming content. In addition, Link Previews don’t slow down your site’s load time, seamlessly integrates into your existing workflow, and can improve SEO metrics like time on page, page views, and session time. Early adopters of Link Previews saw as much as an 86% increase in time on page, which is a game changer for SEO. 

Let’s take a step back to explain what SEO is. Search engine optimization is a set of best practices to ensure that the contents of your website rank toward the top of a search engine like Google. Several factors determine whether content ranks high on a search engine; for example, Google rewards useful and informative content. So, how can AI help? For starters, AI can provide insights and tools to improve content to make publishing high-performing, relevant content easier than ever. Among the list of things that AI can help with is content planning, content, and data analysis, the creation of graphs, optimizing hyperlinking and interlinking, optimizing meta descriptions, content selection, and idea generation. 

Writers often build content around high-ranking keywords, which can be challenging and time-consuming to collect. With tools like seoClarity, writers or publishers can find keywords and themes for content at the click of a button and gain insight into their readers’ search patterns to best answer a search query. According to the CEO of seoClarity, the future of using AI to help with SEO is using AI-driven insights to free up time by automating the most time-consuming tasks and allowing publishers and writers to focus on implementing insights at lightning-fast speeds. Another tool that writers looking to make it easier to write content around relevant keywords can use is SEO Vendor. Finding and incorporating keywords that will entice your audience can be time consuming and challenging. It can also be challenging to write engaging content around keywords. Tools like SEO Vendor help with writing content that features keyword variations and semantic keywords, but still sounds natural. 

Another popular tool is Surfer SEO, an SEO optimizer that provides users with a content strategy that best fits your site and audience. The site uses artificial intelligence to analyze competitors and find the best keywords to get your audience’s attention. Surfer also provides writers with potential article outlines to help write content that will rank high and resonate with their audience. Surfer SEO provides publishers a content and SEO strategy driven by AI-powered insights. 

SEO experts use Google’s guidelines to determine their SEO and content strategy. Google prioritizes helpful and informative content, and before AI tools like Jasper.ai became popular, AI-written content was considered spam. Now, as language models get better and better, content produced by AI is no longer considered spam, but Google still prioritizes human-written content. Content that is written by AI and intended to manipulate search rankings is penalized by Google. Specifically, Google warns content writers to avoid using automatically generated text without regard for the quality of user experience; AI content is not penalized by Google so long as the output is written to be helpful for people and isn’t written for only to rank highly on search engines. According to Google’s helpful content update, writers and publishers should focus on writing “people first” content by following a few guiding principles, including:

• Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
• Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)?
• Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
• After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
• Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?
• Are you keeping in mind our guidance for core updates and for product reviews?
  

These guiding principles can help SEO experts integrate AI tools that improve how helpful and informative their content is. For many SEO experts, the way to be sure that Google won’t penalize their content for being written by AI is to use AI as helpful tools to aid in writing and optimizing content to perform well on search engines versus using them to cheat the system.