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AI Writing Best Practice for SEO

Author Benjamin Denis
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Posted on
AI Writing Best Practice for SEO

SEOPress started working with OpenAI in January 2023. Although we were early adopters of this new technology, we have long been convinced that trusting AI to write articles instead of human copywriters was a bad long-term strategy. This is why an article-writing feature was not integrated into SEOPress. Recent updates from Google seem to have proven this point and the tests we have conducted during the creation of this eBook have shown that AI-generated content has a strange quality compared to human-written text, can contain errors and that it can be detected by software. It appears that sites that were early in adopting AI-generated content found success in ranking with Google in 2023 but this success was short-lived.

Using content straight from AI writers without editing it is therefore almost certainly bringing no value to SEO and may even damage your ranking if you are considered a spammer. This does not mean that AI is bad, and it can be embraced as a solution to make content production more efficient.

Use AI to write TITLE and META Description tags

In one of our articles on SEO basics, Optimize WordPress posts for a keyword, we insist on the importance of adding TITLE and META Description tags to all your pages and posts in WordPress. By default, SEOPress will set your TITLE and META Description to default values using your page TITLE and text from your page, but our recommendation (backed up by Content Analysis reports in SEOPress) is to use the SEO metabox to add personalized (and optimized) text in the Title and Meta Description fields.

You will find this advice in many SEO experts as well as Google who provide best practices for writing TITLE and META descriptions. With the latest version of SEOPress PRO, you can now use AI (OpenAI) to do this for you.

If you have a lot of posts, writing TITLE and META Description tags can be a big job. If you need 10 minutes per post and you have 100 posts, that is over 2 days work (1000 minutes, 16,67 hours) that can be done by SEOPress in seconds. You can spend those 2 hours on more important SEO tasks like writing content, adding schema or correcting broken links.

Because TITLE and META Description tags are short and are not considered as the main content of the page, we do not think that there is any risk to your SEO from AI detection.

Learn to prompt

If you want to use Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Gemini for copywriting (as opposed to dedicated AI copywriting software like Jasper.ia or Copy.ai) then you should spend some time learning how to write prompts. We gave some examples in our previous chapter “Test driving AI writing generators for SEO” but you can go a lot further. See 70 Blog Writing Prompts to Inspire You by Ryan Robinson or Advanced AI prompt engineering strategies for SEO by Paul DeMott for some more information on the subject.

International SEO expert Aleyda Solis has produced a free to use SEO prompt generator based on the 5Ws & The H method (what, where, how, who, when, why). This can be used for writing prompts to generate articles but also do other SEO tasks.

How to prompt guide
How to prompt guide

Use AI to brainstorm

An important part of copywriting is coming up with the ideas for articles. This can often mean imagining the subjects of a series of articles that can represent a long-term plan or cluster of articles on the same subject to target a specific keyword.

This is where using a chat-based AI can be useful. You can simply ask the AI to “Generate 10 blog post ideas for a mobile hairdresser in Las Vegas” for example. Using Microsoft Copilot in the Edge navigator, you can navigate to a site and ask “Based on the webpage I am visiting can you suggest some good blog post ideas.” You may need to accept that Copilot can use “context clues” for it to access the page you are on.

Continuing the conversation with the AI, you can refine your plan, ask it to provide outlines for articles and ask it to suggest keywords. The outline may be enough to inspire you and reduce the time it takes to produce content.

Be careful asking generative AI for “keywords” though. They will successfully list expressions, but these are not necessarily the expressions you would choose as keywords based on search volume. Unless you upload keyword volume data to the AI it has no idea of how often expressions are searched for in Google.

AI writing as a draft

We feel that publishing one-click AI-generated blog posts is a bad idea for SEO. Google can detect AI-generated content and it is likely that the content produced will be of poor quality. However, getting AI to write a first draft can be an effective way of improving your writing efficiency.

AI-written content can give you as structure that you can follow. We suggest that you rewrite large portions of the content and that you add examples or illustrations that prove your experience and expertise on a subject. Where AI content has cited statistics, companies or events, try and validate the sources of that information. You may improve the quality of your post by adding links to those sources.

AI naturally produces compelling titles for blog posts. Maybe too compelling. H1 and H2 titles written by AI may be the biggest giveaways when you want to detect AI written content. You may want to tone them down and make sure that keywords are used as early as possible in the title.

Use AI detection tools

Although Google says it does not penalize AI-generated content for being AI-generated, we do believe that they use some sort of AI detection signal as part of their ranking systems. We believe you should start systematically using AI detectors and test content before publishing it on your site. The following are current examples the top of the range AI detectors.

ZeroGPT has a free version that it is adequate for analyzing texts up to 3000 words (although the ads may drive you mad).

ZeroGPT showing a text is written by AI and the phrases that gave that away
ZeroGPT showing a text is written by AI and the phrases that gave that away

You need to decide where you should set the threshold for acceptable levels of AI/GPT generated content for your website. All of the human-written text we tested in ZeroGPT came out as 0% AI/GPT. ZeroGPT, however, tolerates a score up to 20%. Below 20% it considers that text is still written by a human. From 20 % it will say that the text is “Most likely human may include parts generated by AI.” Over 50% and the text us marked as “AI/GPT Generated”.

Be careful with content re-written by AI

We have seen advice on creating content that consisted of giving AI a rough version of an article (or simply notes) and asking it to write a more polished version. Our tests have shown that this produces content that is flagged by AI detectors as written by AI. With watermarking (as already introduced by Google) this will be detected more robustly.

If you use AI to generate copy by rewriting all or part of an article, including asking the AI to add an introduction or FAQ, then treat this as a draft. Rewrite this article yourself and use an AI detector to make sure that you pass the test.

Check your content against Google guidelines

With the introduction of the Helpful Content System to combat low-quality content, Google published a guide on Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content. This gives a checklist you can use to evaluate your own content based on content, quality and expertise. The document also insists on the fact that content should not be search-engine first and three of the self-assessment questions that help evaluate search engine first content are related strongly to AI copywriting.

  • Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics?
  • Are you mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value?
  • Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources?

Conclusion

Although we can admit that AI technology does an amazing job of writing content, we cannot recommend that you can use AI as a free blog writer to help your SEO. Publishing lots of AI-generated content could event damage your SEO because Google will penalize sites that use AI to mass-produce low-quality content. This means losing ranking across the whole site and not only for parts that are AI-generated.

AI can be an amazing tool for writers, though. It should help produce content more efficiently and can help with writer’s block. Content still needs to be rewritten, fact-checked and injected with some proof of human experience for it to be good enough for SEO.

You need to be aware of the existence of AI detectors and the future use of watermarking that will help search engines and client software report on AI-generated content. Beyond SEO this is something that we may need in the future to differentiate the real from the artificial. The human from the machine. If you use AI, you may want to be transparent with visitors about that on your site by labeling content as “AI generated”. Someday soon, that may be a legal requirement.

But enough of what I think, how would our AI copywriters conclude this article?

Google Gemini’s 100-word conclusion to our article
Google Gemini’s 100-word conclusion to our article
ChatGPT’s 100-word conclusion
ChatGPT’s 100-word conclusion
Microsoft Copilot’s conclusion
Microsoft Copilot’s conclusion
By Benjamin Denis

CEO of SEOPress. 15 years of experience with WordPress. Founder of WP Admin UI & WP Cloudy plugins. Co-organizer of WordCamp Biarritz 2023 & WP BootCamp. WordPress Core Contributor.