The 1990s saw many historic events: the OJ Simpson trial, the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton, and, perhaps less seriously, the rise of frosted spikes.
A somewhat less devastating event was the development of search engine optimization, or SEO, which has come to define search engine rankings and, in turn, the content that Internet users find, from shortly after the first search engines did.
But SEO is now, in turn, being affected by another historic event: the debut of generative AI. Since ChatGPT exploded last year, marketers are finding new ways to help the search rankings of their clients’ sites using generative AI, whether through content creation or internal linking protocols.
“There have been, over the last 15, 20, [or] years, the never-ending and ongoing arms race between SEO optimizers and search engines,” said George Strakhov, EMEA strategy director at DDB and founder of the company’s “hybrid creativity lab,” RANDDDB .”In content production, AI is just a very powerful weapon that was added to this arms race on the side of the SEO people.”
That said, there’s a real chance things could get messy: “It has the potential to be the ultimate weapon that makes traditional search completely unusable,” Strakov told us.
Make it personal
For years, SEO marketers have worked to optimize the content of their clients’ websites in hopes that they will rank high in search results and be seen by more users. Now, they’re leveraging generative AI tools to help do that job.
In some cases, generative artificial intelligence is used to help generate content for clients’ websites, which can help search engine rankings, Joe Stoffel, director of SEO at Marcel Digital, told Marketing Brew. Marcel Digital works to tailor the style and tone of content to customers by feeding customer information to generative AI applications like ChatGPT, which it uses to generate tailored content ideas. Marcel relies on subject matter experts to help fact-check and refine the AI-generated output, he said.
“We’re using it more to come up with new topic ideas, but also doing 60% or 70% of that heavy lifting in creating actual client content,” Stoffel told us.
Stoffel mentioned one client who saw a 555% year-over-year increase in traffic to a certain section of their site over the past three months after Marcel used generative AI to help them revamp it.
Stoffel said that previously, the company “didn’t produce informational content” for its website, something he said can help with organic search engine rankings. “One of our main focuses over the last year has been working with them to do the heavy lifting. With this AI content, learn more about this resource on their website,” he said.
Generative AI can also help increase the internal linking protocols of clients’ sites, he said, which can also impact sites’ SEO rankings. Marcel uses the Screaming Frog web crawler in conjunction with ChatGPT to audit and map a site’s internal linking, which helps uncover potential link deficiencies, Stoffel said; ChatGPT can generate recommendations on where to place internal links.
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Marcel isn’t the only agency using generative AI to help clients create online content that could help them rank in search engines. DDB built a custom generative AI tool for an airline client to help its in-house copywriters create travel articles, Strakhov said. The agency trained the tool on thousands of copywriting materials and created a web-based interface that allows airline copywriters to specify details such as word count and geographic destination; the tool spits out a first draft in the brand’s voice.
“Their SEO department is much more productive because they go ahead and go to the interface and say, ‘Give me the first draft of an article on the South China Sea,'” he said.
Traffic jam
Some agencies are using generative AI to target clients more closely as a way to drive traffic to client sites. Marcel uses ChatGPT to help generate website metadata, as well as help write calls-to-action that fit the needs and problems of certain “target people,” Stoffel said.
At marketing agency TriComB2B, staff are leveraging Google’s AI tools to help target clients with the goal of driving website traffic, according to Andrew Humphrey, senior director of media strategy at the agency He said feeding a client’s site analytics data into Google’s AI-powered advertising tools can help target users who are most likely to click through to the client’s site and buy the client’s products. client, he told Marketing Brew.
“Not everyone who searches for the same keyword, for example, is likely to buy,” Humphrey said. “I tell Google, ‘Yes, this is the keyword I want to target, but also them, if there are 100 people searching for this keyword, who are the 10 most likely to make a purchase on my website ?’”
account now
As agencies are finding different ways to use generative AI in SEO marketing, they are also erecting different safety barriers. Stoffel said his team anonymizes customer information and customer data before entering it into ChatGPT Team, a version of the popular workplace tool. At TriComB2B, no unpublished client material will be incorporated into a generative AI program, Humphrey said. And in DDB, while generative AI can be used to create drafts, it can’t be used to generate final results, Strakhov told Marketing Brew.
“There’s always a human looking at these drafts, editing them, and sometimes completely rewriting them. [or] regenerating them,” he said.
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