The Strengths and Limits of AI-Powered SEO Platforms for Business Owners

Ever since the dawn of SEO, there have been get-ranked-quick solutions that have been hawked to business owners left and right.

Most of the time, these “guaranteed rankings” are sort of SEO snake oil.

Maybe you will get ranks quick, but it will not last. After a short while, you are back to square one.

The truth is, there is no shortcut to the top of the search engine’s pile.

One of the newest versions of this that business owners must be wary of comes in the form of artificial intelligence startups that promise business owners high rankings with zero to little human effort required.

AI-Powered SEO Startups Are Growing

Something that business owners will need to watch out for in 2024 is the rise of startups that specifically focus on creating AI that will “take care of” SEO for business owners.

As an SEO company, let us be clear on this issue: There is no AI SEO platform that we have heard of that you simply need to figuratively plug in and watch your business rocket to the top of Google’s search engine’s results page (SERP).

AI Can Still Assist You in SEO

Don’t take our advice to mean that AI has no role to play in SEO.

In fact, the exact opposite is true. That is, AI has plenty of roles to play in helping business owners achieve better SEO.

Below, we will delve into some of the top uses for AI in SEO.

Drafting Content for AI-Powered SEO

ChatGPT can help you generate a first draft for various purposes, such as a blog for your website or a series of emails to send to your customer base.

We emphasize treating these as first drafts because AI is not very trustworthy when it comes to being factual or even just interesting.

In short, you are going to need to fact-check and punch up AI’s writing, but getting a nice start on content can be good.

Creating Images

This is sort of an extension of the following section, but the emphasis here is on the visual.

If you are a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, congratulations—you have access to the DALL-E 3 plug-in, which will allow you to generate images for your business.

Be aware that these images are not always of high quality. In my experience as a writer, the images can appear quite bizarre, especially when words are included in the graphics (anticipate misspellings, and not forgivably mild ones either).

You should be aware that there is a strong possibility that visual marketing content will need AI watermarks to signal to viewers that AI was used in the creation of the content.

It remains to be seen whether consumers will consider AI watermarks a turn-off or if they will be merely neutral toward them. There may be a slight chance that consumers may even have positive feelings toward AI-generated ads. It all still needs to be seen.

Keyword Research

Platforms like SEMRush can be very helpful in identifying the ever-mutable keywords.

Part of SEO is figuring out just what words you need to insert into your content to tell the ranking algorithms that your content is relevant to certain searchers’ queries.

AI can pull such data together pretty easily.

This can take a lot of the human guesswork out of figuring out just what words floating around in the search engine zeitgeist are most meaningful.

AI-Powered SEO Writing Assistants

This is another service that you could get through SEMRush.

Basically, the writing assistant will evaluate various aspects of your content’s SEO strength.

This can range from the presence of, yes, keywords, but also things like tone, difficulty of prose, and the like.

Oftentimes, this involves assigning a score to the piece of content under evaluation.

Strive to perfect the content piece as much as possible to enhance its visibility among the right customers.

AI-Powered SEO in 2024

Ultimately, artificial intelligence will only become more relevant to the practice of SEO.

We expect this to ring true in SEO.

If 2023 was the year that generative AI revolutionized SEO, we expect that 2024 will—well, this may not sound terribly exciting, but basically the big thing here is that generative AI will simply get much better in a short window of time.

Beyond that, it may very well be the case that more sophisticated keyword research tools and SEO writing assistants will hit the market.

We’ll be covering these changes all through the new year, offering you the insights that matter for your business.