AI & SEO - Is This The Future of Optimisation?

When we break down the acronym of SEO, it’s the ‘O’ that defines the service and skill. ‘Optimisation’ is a desirable state to achieve, but what happens when you try to optimise that optimisation? Yes, we’re about to get very meta, because optimising the process of Search Engine Optimisation is becoming a growing trend - mainly through the use of Artificial Intelligence to cut out some of the work involved.

In this edition, we’ll cover two aspects that are drawing fad-like attention: almost akin to a mild Wordle-esque following. (Let’s see how quickly that reference ages). AI Content Writing and Programmatic SEO.

Write Me An SEO Love Letter, Robot Overlords.

Cutting out the time and effort required to write an informative article or a creative piece for a blog sounds like an efficient endeavour. AI has come a long way in terms of trying to replicate and produce content, but is it really good enough to challenge the hard work of actual human flesh-popsicle content writers around the world?

We said we’d go meta - so let’s take it all the way.

What if we asked an AI to write content about itself? About the pros and cons of using AI to write content, and the future of content writing in general? We applied a few different filters to see how it affected the tone and ‘content’ of such a self-prophetic piece, and here are some results:

Witty: In today's day and age, AI has become a very popular topic to research. Some people love AI for all of the help it can provide us in many different areas, while other people are afraid AI will turn against us and destroy humanity.

Comedy: But before we start panicking and getting cold sweats at night thinking about the inevitable robot revolution, let's take a deep breath and look at how we got here.

In the style of ‘Joe Rogan’: So let's talk AI. AI seems to be all the rage these days, and it looks like content marketers everywhere are adopting AI tools to augment their already time consuming work flow. And since AI isn't human, the frequency at which it produces new ideas is much higher than something made by a person… I think? What do I know about AI?

In the style of ‘Michelle Obama’, (apparently): Imagine a world where your company can have fresh, informative content on its website every day without having to pay a penny. In this world, the only task the company would need to complete is to provide some data for the AI to work with. The years of hiring freelancers and paying high prices will be over. This dream may soon come true thanks to a group of Russian developers who created an algorithm that writes news articles from scratch.

Okay - enough of that. Let’s head back to the human virtual reality we’re all used to and discuss…

As you can see, some of the content generated by AI can do a pretty good job, but is it really fulfilling the need? Is it reliable? One thing is for sure: the future of AI content creation will come down to Google’s primary prerequisite of promoting and ranking quality content, no matter the source - whether it’s from a human noggin or the latest incarnation of Skynet.

AI isn’t necessarily going to nail comedy, wit, or impersonations. In fact, current AI articles are considered to be stronger when dealing with factual information, rather than anything that requires emotion, storytelling, or expressing a direct opinion. It won’t ever be Shakespeare. (At least not yet - we did give it a whirl). The question will then come down to whether it’s niche and whether it’s authoritative - because we all know that’s key for content.

Landing Pages That Are Breeding Like Rabbits.

Using AI to cut back time and automate content is one thing, but using AI processes to mass-produce landing pages? Yes, it’s most definitely a practice in existence, known by the ‘cool kids’ as Programmatic SEO.

Programmatic SEO is essentially the process of websites establishing landing pages on a large scale to address the millions of questions pertaining to their industry. Take Tripadvisor as an example: creating as many travel-related landing pages to show up and serve almost every travel search intent imaginable. Type in ‘things to do in [blank]’, and it’s likely that Tripadvisor will pop up on page one with all your [blank] sightseeing and activity recommendations.

It’s almost a surefire way for massive websites to be able to pop up on the SERP seemingly out of nowhere, and the landing pages are generally mass-produced by AI to target multiple long-tail keywords. Even community-based websites such as Reddit or Quora have established landing pages to capitalise on people’s queries and come up near the top of the SERP. Have a specific computer problem and have typed it into Google? Chances are that somebody in the community has asked something similar, and a landing page has been created so that you don’t go elsewhere.

So what could go wrong? Well, plenty really.

Websites like Yelp or Reddit are giants in their niche, trust, and authority - and therefore have an advantage. What works for them may not work for your small-scale website selling edible Halloween costumes. In fact, it won’t. Here are some reasons why:

Quality & Purpose: Firstly, we can see similar issues arise that can happen with other automated processes - the quality and uniqueness of what’s on the page. Each page should exist to serve a purpose, be unique in some facet, and in general serve some form of quality. This is something your website should already be doing.

Indexing: Mass-produced pages can lead to troubles for indexing if they don’t have a sensible structure. If a new page appears on your site every ten minutes, it would be crucial to make sure each one is easy to find and ideally within three clicks from the webpage - after all, non-indexable pages will never rank on a SERP. Some websites have trouble doing this manually, let alone having an AI automatically keeping this consistent.

Crawl Budget: Hence, we start getting into crawl budget issues. If you’re already a large site, with 10,000+ pages to sift through, Google may already have issues finding and indexing every single page. If you’re suddenly adding a large number of pages every day, you’ll want to be sure your crawl budget is wide enough to get these pages indexed effectively and efficiently.

Naughty Doorway Pages: There is also the risk of the website being perceived as containing ‘Doorway Pages’, which is about as desirable as a fake moustache. Doorway Pages are defined as pages that are designed to rank highly for specific search queries but are terrible for the user experience. This creates quite a thin line for programmatic SEO in a nutshell. As long as each page is perceived as useful or provides ‘value’ for your users, and not just funneling straight to a specific page or portion of your website, all should be fine.

For example, your main page might be ‘the best shaving cream for pedigree dogs’, but you create other pages such as ‘the best shaving cream for poodles’, ‘the best shaving cream for cocker spaniels’, or ‘the best shaving cream for miniature schnauzers’ to funnel users to that main page. Do not do this. This is bad SEO, and a Google paddling.

The Intelligence Of Using Artificial Intelligence.

All in all, search query volumes continue to ramp up, and everybody wants their website to be on the first SERP page. Automatically spewing out pages to capture the search market means nothing if the SEO behind them is not up to scratch. If you’re also thinking of automating your content, that content needs to hit those juicy Google requirements.

Perhaps the next level might be optimising the optimisation of Search Engine Optimisation? I guess we’ll see.