AI. There’s plenty of hype behind these two tiny letters. As well as lots of unanswered questions. How will AI affect my business? Are we losing out? How ‘intelligent’ can something artificial really be? And what does the future of AI look like?
As an agency specialising in SEO and Google Ads, AI has been fast-moving and impactful. Despite all of this, search engine marketing isn’t dead. Instead, Google saw a 21.64% growth in searches YoY in 2024 with 14 billion searches taking place daily. That’s ~373 times as many searches as ChatGPT.
AI is simply an evolution of the SEO and Google Ads landscape. And there won’t be many business owners who aren’t already embracing it, concerned by it or wondering what might come next.
But the question remains, what does it mean for the world of marketing and SEO specifically? What should you, as a small to medium sized business owner, do to make sure you’re on top of it all?
In this blog post, we’ll be exploring the good, the bad and the ugly sides of AI for digital marketing and specific aspects of SEO to give you a more balanced view.
Ultimately though, we think it’s important to remember that marketing will always come back to the fundamentals. Understanding your market, building a genuine connection with your audience and delivering the best product or service you can to create long-lasting relationships.
How widespread is AI?
There’s no doubting the increasingly widespread adoption of AI by consumers and businesses alike. In fact, this adoption may be even more widespread than you think, because only 33% of consumers think they use AI platforms while the actual number is 77%. Around 70% of digital marketers actively use ChatGPT or other AI tools for work, and when it comes to organisations over 1000 employees, IBM reported that about 42% are actively using AI in their businesses.
Google is increasingly using AI to improve user experiences and has introduced AI overviews which now feature heavily in search results. The aim is to provide a helpful summary of the results pages to save users scrolling and clicking through multiple pages to find exactly what they need.
So, it’s clear that AI is here to stay and its usage by businesses is set to increase, but how are digital marketers actually using AI for work? Applications include:
- Data analysis
- Analysing massive data sets from websites, social media and CRM systems to gain customer insights and forecast future trends
- Admin
- Taking meeting notes or minutes or helping to draft email replies
- Content creation
- Creating blog content, social media posts and brainstorming ideas
- Customer experience
- Chatbots to improve efficiency of customer service
- Personalisation
- Dynamic content changes based on online behaviour, demographic information, occupation etc
- Campaign automation
- Monitoring and managing campaigns, automatically publishing personalised email content with optimised publication timing
Content creation dominates usage, with 55% of digital marketers using AI to help them write content such as blogs, social media posts and emails.
As SEOs, we are often required to create content to improve site optimisation, so AI can be a useful tool, but are there any potential pitfalls? Taking it one step further, can AI be used to research keywords, identify content gaps, or provide an overarching SEO strategy for your entire site?
While it might be tempting to allow AI to completely guide your SEO efforts and provide actionable insights, over-reliance can lead to problems.
When is AI good for SEO?
First, let’s take a look at the good side of AI in SEO.
- Providing guidance on content
- Anyone who’s sat down to write content has, at some point, experienced ‘writer’s block’ so having help brainstorming ideas or coming up with new angles to approach a subject can improve productivity.
- Keyword research
- While AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini won’t provide the exact search volume of keywords, they can help to provide general keyword suggestions and outline semantic relationships between keywords.
- On page optimisation
- AI can provide guidance on how to improve your site’s ranking position for a particular keyword
- Improved user experiences
- Google uses AI (RankBrain, BERT and MUM) to understand user intent better and provide more relevant results so by utilising AI as part of an SEO strategy, more helpful content can be served to users.
You may be wondering “why don’t SEOs use AI for everything”? After all, AI seems to streamline many of the processes involved in SEO and digital marketing in general. The big question is, how much can AI be trusted to provide expert guidance for SEO?
When is AI bad for SEO?
While AI might seem like a magic elixir, it’s important to understand that overuse or over-reliance of it as part of an SEO strategy can have a negative impact on site performance. Let’s take a look at why that might be:
- Bland content
- AI content often lacks a human touch leading to content which fails to engage the reader. The way content is laid out and the language used to explain a subject can become formulaic which is a surefire way to encourage your reader to go elsewhere (probably a competitor’s site which contains insightful content which surprises and delights).
- Undifferentiated content
- AI will provide the same answer to you as well as your competitor. As a basic example, if every dog walking business followed AI guidance on how to rank for the keyword ‘dog walking company’ each website would contain very similar content. How then, would potential customers make a choice between you and your competitors?
- Lack of E-E-A-T
- Experience-Expertise-Authoritativeness-Trustworthiness are concepts that Google uses to refine its ranking systems. While it isn’t a ranking factor per-se, pages which demonstrate these qualities will be prioritised. The problem with using AI is that, unlike humans, it doesn’t have direct experiences to guide its input, which is crucial when it comes to building trust and authority, meaning its suggestions may be flawed.
- Negative impact on rankings
- People, and search engines, are getting better at detecting AI-generated content and too much of it which lacks helpfulness can negatively impact a site’s ability to rank for a particular keyword. If all else is equal, a site with helpful, unmistakably human content will, in the vast majority of cases, outperform one with purely AI generated content.
- Factual errors / hallucinations
- AI sources its information from existing content on the web, and if it utilises a source which is factually incorrect, it’s possible that the answer to a question will contain suggestions which should never be made. An example from a Threads user highlights this possibility where Google’s AI overview ‘recommends eating one small rock per day’. The information source was actually the satirical site ‘The Onion’.
- Loss of critical thinking skills and creativity
- Your brain is an organ but it should be exercised like a muscle, otherwise creativity and the ability to think critically, might slowly diminish. That’s not a world we want to live in.
What is the ugly side of AI in SEO?
There is also an ugly side to using AI in SEO. Its capabilities and versatility can unfortunately be used to serve the ugly side of human behaviour:
- Misinformation: AI uses existing information found on the internet as its source. It’s therefore possible for incorrect information to be output as the answer to a query.
- Algorithmic bias: AI output relies on data sets and if the source data is biased then that bias can be proliferated in its output.
- Black hat techniques: AI can be used in an attempt to cheat the algorithm by creating sites purely for backlinks, or mass producing low quality, keyword stuffed content to manipulate rankings.
The existence of ‘fake news’ is a serious aspect of information found on the internet so it’s important to take steps to verify any information AI has provided, especially for any content involving technical, legal, medical, etc. standpoints.
How to leverage AI as part of an SEO strategy?
So what’s the right way to use AI as part of an SEO strategy? The answer lies in the question – it should be a part of your approach, not the entire playbook. AI should be used as a tool to complement your existing processes rather than replacing what you do currently.
If using AI to generate content, be sure to add your human input to elevate it beyond that which could be AI generated. Make sure your content is more helpful than your competitors and answers the questions your customers are asking because you’re no longer just optimising for the results pages, you’re also optimising for AI overviews too. But ultimately, it should be quality over quantity when it comes to content generation.
When using AI to research keywords, be mindful that AI doesn’t understand your business the same way you do and may not fully understand your niche audience. Therefore the keywords it suggests may not be aligned with your brand or expertise.
Conclusion
When the internet arrived there was a temptation to plagiarise content due to its plentiful and easy-to-access nature, compared to researching content from books. However, these very qualities made detecting internet-based content plagiarism far easier than that of physical books. The result was that the internet soon became a research tool rather than a force for bad.
This is analogous to AI. Relying on it solely to generate marketing activity for your business won’t go unnoticed, neither will it help you stand out from the competition. It is, however, a powerful tool to add efficiencies to your workflow which allow you to be more productive.
As SEOs we are responsible for creating lots of content so we have a responsibility to ensure what we provide is genuinely useful. Taking the easy route and copying and pasting AI generated content may help tick a box but it could harm your business in the long run.
But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use AI at all. Far from it, AI can create efficiencies throughout your day to day workflow. Just make sure the content you create is truly and helpful and unmistakably human.
Written by Ben Kay, SEO Account Director at VFB Marketing.
VFB Marketing is a Harpenden-based agency specialising in SEO and Google Ads for small businesses. If you’d like to know more about AI and SEO, please get in touch with Ben Kay (ben@vfbmarketing.com). Alternatively book in a free consultation, and we’ll review your website.
