The '90s saw many landmark events, including the O.J. Simpson trial, former President Bill Clinton's impeachment, and, perhaps less seriously, the rise of frosted chips.
One of the less shocking developments was the development of search engine optimization (SEO). Shortly after the first search engines appeared, SEO came to define search engine rankings and, by extension, the content that Internet users encountered.
But SEO is now being affected by another milestone: the debut of generative AI. Since ChatGPT exploded in popularity last year, marketers are finding new ways to use generative AI to help their clients' sites rank in search, including content creation and internal linking protocols.
“Over the past 15, 20 years, [or] The endless arms race between SEO optimizers and search engines will continue for many more years,” said George, chief strategy officer for EMEA at DDB and founder of the company’s “hybrid creativity lab” RANDDDB. Strahoff said. “When it comes to content creation, AI is just a very powerful addition to the arms race for SEOs.”
That being said, there's a real chance things can get messy. “This has the potential to be the ultimate weapon that completely disables traditional search,” Strakov said.
make it personal
For years, SEO marketers have been working on optimizing the content of their client's websites in hopes of ranking them higher in search results and being seen by more users. Now, they are leveraging generative AI tools to help them do that.
Joe Stoffel, director of SEO at Marcel Digital, told Marketing Brew that in some cases, generative AI is used to generate content for client websites, which can help with search engine rankings. Told. Marcel Digital works to tailor the style and tone of content to his clients by feeding client information into generative AI apps such as ChatGPT. Use this to help generate ideas for customized content. Marcel then relies on subject matter experts to help fact-check and refine the AI-generated output, he said.
“We use it most often to come up with new topic ideas, but it also does 60 or 70 percent of the heavy lifting when it comes to actually creating content for our clients,” says Stoffel.
Stoffel mentioned one client who experienced a 555% year-over-year increase in traffic to certain sections of their site over the past three months after Marcel used generative AI to rebuild the site.
Stoffel said the company had not previously “produced useful resource content” for its website, and said it could provide content that would help with organic search engine rankings. “Our big focus last year was working with them to do the hard work. With this AI content, we can now get more resource information on our website.” he said.
According to him, generative AI can also help strengthen internal linking protocols on client sites, which can also impact a site's SEO ranking. Marcel uses his Screaming Frog web crawler in conjunction with his ChatGPT to help audit and map a site's internal links and discover potential link flaws, Stoffel said. Masu. ChatGPT can then generate recommendations on where to place internal links.
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Marcel is not the only agency using generative AI to help create online content that helps clients with their search engine rankings. DDB has built customized generative AI tools for its airline clients, allowing in-house copywriters to create travel articles, Strahov said. The agency trained the tool on thousands of copywriting materials and built a web-based interface that allows airline copywriters to specify details such as word count and geographic destination. This tool spits out your first draft in your brand's voice.
“Their SEO department is much more productive because they go into an interface and say, 'Give me the first draft of an article about the South China Sea,'” he said.
Traffic jam
Some agencies are using generative AI to more closely target customers as a way to drive traffic to client sites. Marcel says that using ChatGPT not only generates metadata for his website, but also helps him draft CTAs tailored to the needs and pain points of his specific “target persona.” Stoffel said.
At marketing agency TriComB2B, staff leverage Google's AI tools to target clients with the goal of driving website traffic, said Andrew Humphrey, the agency's senior director of media strategy. That's what it means. He says that by feeding analytics data from client sites into Google's AI-powered advertising tools, he can help target users who are more likely to click on their sites and buy their products. told Marketing Brew.
“For example, not everyone searching for the same keyword is likely to make a purchase,” Humphrey says. “I told Google, 'Yes, this is the keyword I want to target, but if he has 100 people who are also searching for that keyword, they are most likely to buy on my website. “Who are the 10 people?”
Be careful now
As agencies explore diverse ways to employ generative AI in SEO marketing, they are also building a variety of safety guardrails. Stoffel said his team anonymizes customer information and data before he enters it into ChatGPT Team, the workplace version of the popular tool. At TriComB2B, unpublished client materials are not input into the generative AI program, Humphrey said. Also, with DDB, generative AI can be used to create drafts, but not to generate final output, he told his Marketing Brew.
“There is always someone who looks at those drafts, edits them, and sometimes completely rewrites them. [or] Regenerate them,” he said.