What is AI and SEO-Optimized Content?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential to online success. Google and most AI tools favour high quality, relevant content. Optimized content is more likely to appear at the top of search results, and poor content will be seen by very few users. SEO has come a long way since the early days of the internet, requiring more effort, thought and research than ever before in order to be done effectively.

Ultimately, the results are more than worth the time and effort it takes to craft effective SEO content. From website copy and blogs to your digital storefront, every element of your website needs to be optimized in order to stand out on Google - attracting the attention of new audiences and creating potential customers.

How does SEO work?

SEO makes your website visible to those who are looking for content similar to yours, or products and services offered by your business. Google and AI platforms crawl each website, evaluating content based on search term relevance and quality. Google is also looking at other metrics when it comes to your site’s backend code for search engine optimization, but AI tools are generally only looking at content.

Google and AI tools determine whether or not your content is relevant to what users are searching for. Websites with content considered to be relevant and high quality will appear higher in search rankings. Without SEO, your website is lost in the noise. 

About half of SEO work is technical. This includes things like ensuring that you have lots of quality links to your site, security certificates are in place, and there aren’t a bunch of broken links on the site. The other half is all about SEO-optimized content, and it is something many SEO agencies ignore because they are focused on the technical stuff. With many agencies, the buck stops at sprinkling a few key phrases into top-level content and meta tags and ending it there. While this is helpful, this isn’t a fulsome enough approach to rank. 

How can I optimize for AI? 

One of the worst-kept secrets in AI is that Google’s index is by far the most used source for a majority of AI searches across multiple AI tools. If you are optimizing for Google, you’re optimizing for AI. 

Some companies have rebranded themselves as optimizing for AI, or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). That doesn’t mean they’re shady, it just means they’re smart marketers and rebranding for what people want. However, they’re mostly using the same playbook they were working from before AI came along. 

Google recently released its own guide to optimizing content for generative AI, and everything for the most part stays the same. Google does warn about duplicate content, which is worth noting because it hasn’t cared much about this for a very long time.

There’s a lot in that guide, but if you wanted to focus on one thing first, it’s building anything to do with your brand. This is because when a user asks about your brand, you want the AI agent to pull in as much information as possible. This section of the Guide tells you what to do:

“Where appropriate, generative AI responses can include product listings, product information, and information about local businesses. Using products like Merchant Center (such as Merchant Center feeds) and Google Business Profiles can help your products and services to be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results. Learn more about how to add and manage your business details on Google Search.”

To expand on this, it means optimizing your Google My Business profile (the one that appears on Google Maps) by filling in all the details about your products and services and any other fields that are in there - not just the required ones. You’ll also want to start a program to solicit Google Reviews, since these are highly cited by AI tools. Contact a few of your “big win” clients and ask them to leave you a review on your Google My Business profile. You can also use these reviews in a testimonial section on your website to further reinforce your brand.

Taken as a whole, Google can be seen as recommending that you don’t use AI slop (AI-generated content not edited by a human) in order to rank in AI search. The more unique and helpful the content is, the luckier you’ll get. 

The reaction to Google’s AI guide has been everything from “Google is lying to us” to “Good, we were getting sick of having to make up new acronyms to sell our services.” I’m in the latter camp. 

The importance of keyword research and analytics

Keyword research is vitally important. To optimize your website’s content, you need access to the right keywords, tools, and analytics that will inform your content. Before writing optimized content, SEO copywriters perform keyword research to determine what users are searching for, at what volume they’re searching for these terms, and how competitive these keywords are. 

This allows copywriters to write high quality content based around these keywords, rather than simply stuffing keywords into content they’ve written. Keyword research is an important step in writing optimized content, allowing copywriters to write content that is more likely to be seen by searchers and find keyword niches that aren’t currently being used by competitors in order to stand out from the crowd.

Professionals also make use of specialized tools to determine the optimization of website copy, using it to identify opportunities for improving SEO and using appropriate keywords. Analytics, too, are used by SEO copywriters to determine the effectiveness of content over time, allowing your business to determine when something just isn’t working, or when your content is using keywords that are too competitive to stand out. 

The case for using SEO copywriters

When looking to optimize your digital content, you’ll have two choices: hire an experienced SEO copywriter or use AI and have someone at your business clean it up and check for accuracy. This is the most important choice you’ll make, as it will determine how successful your content is at attracting new audiences and converting potential customers. 

SEO copywriters will use keyword research, analytics, and SEO tools when writing content, and will take into account everything Google wants to see. At the same time, they’ll make your leads want to convert with tight marketing copy once they get to your site. 

AI will confidently make up keywords unless you’re feeding it with a proper keyword research tool like Ahrefs or Semrush, and write the content for its hallucinated keywords. It’s also very common to not even edit AI output and just post it as-is, especially if it doesn’t fall in the content reviewer’s regular job duties. 

SEO is essential to success on the internet and AI visibility. Without it, you’re invisible to the masses and are guaranteed to lose sales and views to competitors. Properly optimized content can go a long way in getting your website noticed by brand new audiences and potential customers, but should be crafted by an experienced SEO copywriter for maximum effectiveness.

Contact me today to get started.