I’ve recently mentioned the use of ‘artificial intelligence’ for written content creation, and how swiftly it’s improving. One piece of low-hanging fruit for this technique is almost certainly going to be in search engine optimisation.
Your website’s content management system presumably has fields for you to add a page title, description, excerpt, etc. I suspect that it won’t be long now before AI will complete all these for you. Indeed, the feature may already be in the works for the top SEO CMS plugins.
Are there any dangers in this? I doubt it, as long as whatever the AI generates still has human sign-off – and that’s the case for any machine-generated text. I’ve read that Google is claiming to treat all AI content as spam, but I doubt that will ever be detectable (nor would they be concerned) in the case of content like descriptions and summaries. What the search engines might be able to detect would be entire machine-generated websites, something that’s likely to become epidemic in the near future. And I hope none of us are considering those.
Postscript: The post above was written by me, not by AI. But when I gave jasper.ai the title at the top, it suggested:
“When it comes to SEO, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Every website is unique, and therefore requires a customized approach. However, there are some general best practices that can be followed in order to ensure that your website is optimised for search engines. This is where AI can be extremely helpful. By using data and analytics, AI can help you to understand which SEO strategies are most effective for your website. In addition, AI can automate repetitive tasks, such as link building and keyword research, freeing up your time to focus on other aspects of your SEO strategy. Ultimately, AI can be a valuable asset in helping you to improve your website’s search ranking.”
This is fine. But it was quite different to what I’d written. And it occurred to me: perhaps the AI’s content was more relevant to my headline than the text that I’d written? In which case… had I written a poor headline?
I’m looking forward to when the machines assess what we’ve written, and write a more on-point title for the piece. Or even suggest a few, so that we can test them. Or even do some testing for us…