Jessica Redman, CEO of Didgeheads, examines how businesses can integrate Artificial intelligence into their strategy without falling foul of Google or breaching the search engine’s guidelines.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being applied in business; automating processes, analysing data and increasing reporting efficiencies. With the swelling accessibility of AI, many organisations are tempted to apply AI to their SEO strategy to create search-optimised posts in a swift and seemingly efficient way.

Evolution of SEO

Historically, there were many ways to ‘hack’ the algorithm and boost SEO; organisations were able to keyword stuff websites, write excessively long posts that by sheer volume would automatically rank better than 400-word essays or buy links in their thousands from low quality spammy blogs.

On occasion you would hear of Google handing out manual penalties for the link building, but often, by the time they’d caught on, a lot of businesses had already made a lot of money. However, in the past 10 years, Google has got better at spotting unscrupulous activity and has drastically changed both its approach and its efficacy, meaning the SEO industry has had to get more creative; thinking more like holistic marketeers rather than looking for loopholes and secret ways to leverage SEO.

With the increasing prevalence of AI, using it to increase volume of content can seem like an attractive prospect. Rather than writing six blogs a month for a client, producing 400 blogs a month should surely help with search engine optimisation?

Roll out of AI for SEO

Whilst this initially worked, Google caught on quickly to the influx of AI content. The internet was rapidly being flooded with very generic, AI-generated content. Google doesn’t have anything against the use of AI per se, but it does take issue with inaccurate, outdated information which is often the case with AI-generated content.

In response, Google launched its Helpful Content Update (HCU) in March 2024, which changed how Google identifies the helpfulness of content, primarily to address sites that used AI to publish content in bulk. The objective was to promote original, helpful content ‘made by people, for people’ rather than content identified as made primarily to gain search traffic. Utilising AI to boost SEO and traffic won’t work and might, in fact, have the opposite effect with sites being penalised and seeing its web traffic plummet as part of this castigation.

Businesses using AI for content creation and posting what it produces word-for-word is a very risky business. It’s important to remember that AI is based on existing data and information; AI isn’t a specialist in anything, it’s a generalist in everything. Because of this, it tends to produce poorly written content that is never unique, and often inaccurate.

The role AI can play     

Whilst I strongly advise against using AI to create content, artificial intelligence can certainly play a supporting role within SEO. Using it to improve efficiency when it comes to research, distilling ideas, creating clear briefs for content writers or clarity in laying out articles can give a strategic and time benefit. Using it internally to help with strategy and templates can have a hugely positive impact when it comes to standardising documents and brand identity.

Artificial Intelligence

Generally speaking, AI is better suited to binary information and data. For example, the BBC utilised AI to help its reporting of local football scores; drawing data from other sources and reporting on it centrally.

The challenge is when users try to apply AI for imaginative or creative activity; AI cannot replicate that. Whitepapers produced by industry experts that can draw on their 30 years of experience cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence that, by definition, needs to use information from pre-existing resources.

Using AI to write the content means the whitepaper will be amateurish and lack real insight, which can be hugely damaging to your brand. However, conversely, using AI to interpret data that will be used in a whitepaper is beneficial, as is pulling key information out of a whitepaper to produce blog titles based on the information included.

AI plays an excellent supporting role; it maximises content, rather than excels at creating it. It plays an excellent supporting role, but should not play the starring role in any SEO or marketing strategy.

Consultative advice

As with many things, it’s always best to consult experts first. With years of experience and the most up-to-date working knowledge of AI, SEO, Google algorithms and web traffic, speaking to specialists who can explore your needs and give consultative advice on how you could apply AI is invaluable. However, instinctively, I would say avoid using AI as an alternative to multichannel marketing. It is a risky strategy that has the potential to negatively impact your business with catastrophic results.

Using a specialist to audit your business and your website allows them to analyse your needs and identify where the gaps are, and what you need to address them. This could be content, but it could be social outreach, influencer partnerships, or addressing technical issues within the website itself.

Even when you are utilising content, you need to understand what role that content has in your conversion journey – is the objective to generate awareness, increase customer’s understanding of your product or convincing prospective customers that you’re better than a competitor?

For our clients we put together a whole, connected strategy piece that tells them what levers to pull and when. For example, a client could publish 1,000 blogs but if there’s a technical SEO issue, half of their website might not even be indexed or searchable. It’s important to have SEO support to understand the bigger picture before pumping out content.

Analysis can show unexplored elements of the funnel that need tweaking slightly to bring a huge return on this, and that is where the true value of SEO marketing specialists is shown.

Part of a broader toolset

AI can be part of your arsenal of tools, but using it as a replacement for a well-thought-out, multi-faceted strategy will fall short of your objectives. Not only that, but it can cause you to be penalised by Google with long-lasting damage to not only your business, but your bottom line.

Ultimately, SEO plays an important role within the marketing mix, but needs to be applied in a well-structured and calculated way to deliver the results desired. It’s crucial to analyse every element of the business and see where tools can be leveraged. To achieve business objectives, organisations need to access expertise and analysis provided by specialists, like Didgeheads, that can tell them which tool to use and when.