How to Use AI for SEO?

AI, AI, all we've been hearing about lately is or has to do with AI. In this blog, I'm not going to talk about the impact of AI on search, but rather how does Artificial Intelligence changes the way we do our work!

I recorded a webinar on the topic last week, you can check it out here, or read this blog (which include some additional notes)

AI...The New Buzzword

All SaaS companies are rushing to add some "AI" into their products because that's what the users wants to hear "we are using AI".... same for service providers like SEO agencies and SEO consultants, clients want to hear you saying "we are using AI in our workflows".

And that's totally understandable, after all AI is changing the way we do our work! Businesses want to adopt the use of AI for 3 main reasons:

• It's cheaper
• It's faster
• It can achieve better results (more on this later)
• Also, it sounds cool and sophisticated 😄

Are We Losing Our Jobs to AI?

This is one of the most frequent questions you'll hear. You'll also see memes tossed around about the topic. Is AI a threat to our jobs? Well, that's not what the data shows!

Here are few stats, and you'll see that some of them reflect threats, and some of them are opportunities AI is creating for us:

• AI could potentially replace around 800 million jobs worldwide by 2030: this sounds like a threat, omg we are going to lose our jobs, that's a huge number of people that will be out of jobs in FIVE YEARS!
• 74% of businesses are still in an experimentation stage with AI, suggesting room for growth and optimization: this is actually an opportunity, businesses are still testing the waters and learning how to use AI and incorporate it into their businesses. If you adapt and learn the skills needed, you can play a pivotal part of this change within your organization.
• 75% of companies said they were looking to adapt to AI within the next five years in 2023: this sounds like a threat? or an opportunity? depending on how you read it, same as the last point, if you adapt, you're likely to survive!
• 68% of business leaders feel they have struggled to attract adequate talent to manage their AI solutions: here it comes the moment of truth, businesses are struggling to find adequate talent because all of this is new to everyone. This is a great opportunity for you right there.
• AI hallucinations: you may be wondering, what does the hallucinations has to do with anything we're talking about right now? well, the fact that AI hallucinates just means a human operator is necessary, at least for now, so this is actually an opportunity.
• Programmers using AI were able to code 126% more projects per week than programmers not using the technology: a great opportunity, because now as a freelancer for example, if you use AI the right way, you maybe able to take on more clients, have more free time that you can dedicate to upskilling and focusing on more important work.

Adapt or Die!

There's no work around this, you need to adapt and learn to use AI. Let's take an example. AI has definitely had a huge impact on the content creation space and may have impacted a lot of copywriting jobs. Did it?

This is an example of AI content writing service and it's pricing. If you're a copywriter, how can you compete with 80 articles a month for $299?

• It's cheaper than hiring you,
• it's definitely faster,
• and unfortunately if your biggest edge in the copywriting market was your price, this is cheaper too!
• Did I mention that it can also write in multiple languages?

Here's the thing, you're not competing against the AI tools, the AI tools just raised the bar for what is to be considered "good quality content". You cannot compete on price anymore, and you shouldn't, you lost that edge with AI.

The key to adapt is to think differently

You're not competing against the tools, you're competing to be better using the tools!

Here's what you need to do:

• Learn to use the AI tools associated with your job
• Go wide, add more skills and specialist skills too (go wide, and deep)

The situation is going to look like this

AI generated content is faster and cheaper, but it's not great content, it can be just called "ok". Then there's people using AI to write, and then there is just 100% human written content.

Each of those will have their optimal scenario, for example:

• 100% ai generated content: content for brand pages and about pages (I still see there needs to be human review, but it's minimal)
• Human generated content with AI tools help: this is probably going to be our everyday use, to write blogs, newsletters (I use chatgpt to help me phrase), etc...
• Pure human content: the use case I have for this off the top of my head is novels and creative work. No one wants to be entertained by AI slop that's just re-writing what's already out there!

Learning how to use AI, is going to be the equivalent of learning how to use a computer IMO.

The Future is Here!

If you're still skeptical or not very motivated "yet", here's a job posting I came across on twitter by Nicolas Camara, NO HUMANS ARE ALLOWED TO APPLY!

When we're talking about using AI for doing SEO, we're not talking about the future in 5-10 years anymore, it's here. People are hiring AI Agents for jobs!

Ok Sara, so what should we do now?

There are 2 ways you can use AI in your SEO workflows:

1. As your personal assistant to delegate tasks to
2. To do the optimizations work

1# Using AI as Your Assistant

It's cool to have some help with your day to day tasks, here's how:

The First Step

Think of AI as your new junior assistant! You can use it to help you with repetitive tasks. How to find opportunities to automate? I highly recommend you analyze your workflows and how you do each task and find tasks that are repetitive (if it's boring, that's your sign 😄) and plot the workflow so you can have clarity about it before you look into automation tools.

Another approach is simply to brainstorm with LLMs. Ask chatgpt about ideas, and don't just take those ideas at face value, chose an idea, dig dipper till you come up with a list of steps for a workflow.

The Second Step

Understand how APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and other AI tools that you can use to automate your workflow you just created.

What is an API?

An API is like a waiter, that takes your request (what data do you need) and passes it to the kitchen to prepare it for you, and once ready, takes your order (the data) and delivers it to you.

There are different APIs, depending on the data you need, for example:

• GSC API
• YouTube API
• SERPs API
• and more....

You also need to decide on what tool you will be using to create your AI workflow? Options include:

• LLMs (simple for day-to-day)
• Python [VS Code + Cline]
• Custom GPTs
• AI Agents (more on this later)

The Third Step

Create and test. There's no work around this. Here's an example of an automation that Steve Toth created, it took him 8 hours. Why spend 8 hours to create a custom GPT to do the task, if you can do the actual task in 30 min? because moving forward, you will not have to do this task again, and will save many many 30 minutes!

Put in the time and effort, and you'll get a machine that saves you tons of time next time you need to do this task.

Some of the skills you'll need to learn to be successful in using AI for SEO:

• Prompting (master LLMs PLEASE)
• Quality assurance and spot checking
• Workflow design
• Understanding how a code works (basic understanding)

Examples of Automations With AI

I have created a python script that uses Claude API as part of my python course to write meta descriptions in bulk. This is a time saver! Think of other things you can in bulk? You're literally one skill away from automating your work.

Here are 2 more awesome examples by Elias Dabbas:

AI Schema Generator

and I saved the best example for the last, AI Content Audits! Imagine automating your entire content audit process, learn more here!

2# Using AI for Optimizations (To Perform the Actual Tasks)

So far, all our discussion is about an AI workflow that generates an output for you. But what about an AI that can send emails, book meetings, make edits to the CMS on your behalf? crazy right? Not that crazy! Personally I'm working on creating an AI agent to help me manage my Slack community (apply to join here if you'd like), I just need to dedicate some time. It should read a form, get the users' emails, go to slack and send them an invite, that way I don't have to do this every Monday myself!

Here's an example of a cool workflow that Samantha North built! If she enables the AI to post on her behalf, then she has created an AI that actually does the job in full.

AI Agent? what's an AI Agent Sara?

What is an AI Agent?

If you want to learn more, watch this video (very interesting!)

Using AI for Programmatic SEO

Imagine creating an AI agent, that can create actual pages on your website. Here's an example of a workflow:

How to create AI Agents for SEO?

There are tons of tools out there, here are some I recommend you check out:

• Search for “No Code AI Agents”
  • n8n.cloud
  • make.com
  • Airops
• Code Solutions: learn python

Conclusion

Learn to use LLMs properly, learn prompt engineering (all memes and jokes aside, yes that's a real thing).

Play around with AI agents, but figure out your workflows first and what you need to automate.

This has been a lengthy blog. I didn't intend to make it as educational piece on how to actually automate with AI, but rather showing you options and ideas.

Hope you found this helpful! Bye, See you next newsletter.