Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Digital SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
Everyone’s currently talking about the advantages of AI, how it can be a useful tool to improve workflow, making tasks that would have taken months take days, tasks that would have taken days take hours, but many people aren’t focusing on what tasks we should not be using AI to automate. In a world of automation, the human touch is now more important than ever.
Keyword Research
This one seems like it doesn’t make sense. Surely using AI for keyword research is great, right? Well, yes to a certain extent. AI can be incredibly useful for going through your site and picking out key topics, keyword groups and helping you create a framework for your keyword research, while making sure there are no gaps in your keyword strategy.
However, when you’re looking at which keywords to focus on to build out content, this is where it gets a little bit more tricky. For example, for a business that sells a service or product, you understand which keywords are going to generate more revenue and how they have intrinsically more value to your business than some other keywords that may have more search volume and a lower CPC that AI is telling you to focus on. Make sure you use AI to optimise but don’t let it dictate your keyword strategy. You need to take into account factors such as conversion and revenue when making these decisions.
Client Reporting
Similar to keyword research, of course we aren’t saying AI isn’t helpful at all when reporting to clients, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. AI can be used to help you create your physical report incorporating data, giving suggestions on different slides and angles you can tie into your reporting, helping you formulate talking points. All good stuff. But something AI can’t replace is client communication.
A lot of digital marketing is highly specialised and can get confusing quickly for clients who aren’t familiar with it. One of the skills of a marketer is to be able to convey these complex concepts to their clients in a presentable and succinct manner so that they can understand the value of your contribution and how important it is to their business.
By all means use AI to help you build out your client reports, but clients need interaction in order to be able to digest and understand a lot of the data that they’re seeing, and at the minute that’s still where the human element comes in.
Content Writing
This is one of the biggies. Over 50% of newly published articles and nearly 75% of newly created web pages now include AI-generated content. The problem that businesses face when doing this is they lose their brand voice and identity, but also, AI is being fed content from the internet to train and learn. Which means unless people are using AI to inform their content deliberately and writing it themselves, then the content becomes generic and regurgitated, offering nothing new. This is exactly the type of content Google hates. It wants content that is fresh, original and gives a unique perspective and voice on a topic from an authoritative figure in the space; this is what you should be aiming for. Too much AI Slop on the internet is a problem for Google, and they are penalising people who are using it in the wrong way.
Making sure you know when and how to use AI is crucial to building a successful website. If you’re using AI incorrectly, your site can be penalised by Google and negatively affect your rankings, but use it correctly, and your site will benefit from a boost in workflow productivity and efficiency.
