7 Ways That AI Content Writing is Impacting SEO in 2024

AI. Artificial Intelligence. It’s a term we’re all familiar with—and increasingly so over the past few years. But while we all know something about AI, there’s also a lot we don’t know, and the term has been used for decades in a variety of ways. On top of that, AI is a fast-advancing aspect of computer science, and the digital world as a whole.

One thing we do know is that AI isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, it’s becoming a more prevalent part of content creation, which has various implications for marketers, business owners, and creative professionals, as well as the digital materials they produce and how they’re presented on the web.

How is AI Used in Content Writing for SEO?

While AI can broadly refer to many different concepts, scenarios, or examples, many companies are primarily focused on the implementation of large language models (LLM), or a field of generative AI that involves using deep-research algorithms to produce text or other types of content based on knowledge gleaned from large datasets.

As certain language models become more accessible—and more accurate—it’s natural for digital marketers, communications managers, and other professionals to ponder how AI can improve the quality and efficiency of their work to increase visibility, generate leads, and communicate with customers.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which was launched in late 2022, is a prime example of an AI language model that’s on the rise. Companies are integrating the software as a way to generate text and other content. The system is supposed to produce human-like responses based on the input of prompts, such as questions, comments, or commands input.

Nowadays, marketers and other professionals are not only relying on AI to help with editing, autocompleting, spell checking, or offering suggestions on written content, but also to help with creating content in the first place. This leads to questions around how AI—and more specifically, content created using AI—will interact with, influence, and relate to search engine optimization (SEO).

How is AI Being Used for SEO in 2024?

Improving local SEO is a big focus of designing and maintaining professional websites. You want to make sure your website can be found easily by customers in your community who are looking for the services or products you provide.  

Here are some ways AI content writing is influencing SEO in 2024:

 1. Making it Easier to Create Content—Both Good and Bad

Producing new website content via blog posts has long been viewed as a way to improve a website’s SEO and expand presence and visibility on the Internet. As a result, companies are often looking for cost-effective ways to create content for their professional blog. Content farms that churn out mass quantities of low-quality content for SEO purposes are not a new concept. However, AI tools make it easier and more convenient for a greater number of people to create massive amounts of content. One issue is there’s a high risk of plagiarizing original content. Additionally, it’s impossible for AI to perfectly mimic or incorporate a company’s unique brand voice.

2. Informing Research on Keyword Phrases

Another way marketers and business owners are using AI is to perform localized keyword research around which to develop written content. For example, AI can help identify what keywords people in your area are using to search for a particular service or product. Additionally, AI is used to discover “near me” keywords. A popular tool for this work is keywordinsights.ai. One caveat is that the database for ChatGPT has a definitive cut off date and isn’t being updated, which means new laws, products, events, and other information that has occurred after 2021 won’t be included in its knowledge cache.

 3. Providing Inspiration for Headlines and Subject Lines

Rather than writing full blocks of copy or complete articles with AI, companies are using it as a starting point to generate ideas and inspiration for headlines that are tailored to a specific audience or area. The same goes for subject lines and other content that’s part of email marketing. 

4. Writing Metadata, FAQs and other Website Content

ChatGPT has the capacity to write metadata for small business websites, and you can set parameters for length and tone to try to mirror your original content that encapsulates your brand voice. Users can put in prompts and generate a list of FAQs, as well.  

5. Automating Certain Local SEO Tasks

In general, AI is touted as a way to cut down on the time required for a number of local SEO tasks, from writing copy for Google Business profile descriptions to creating responses to reviews, generating breadcrumbs, producing XML sitemaps, and crafting robots.txt.  

6. Generating Local Schema Markup and Site Structure

Additionally, AI is being used in 2024 to generate schema for business websites (although there are other standard schema generators that tend to be just as useful). You have to carefully review the output, because there are going to be mistakes. Marketers shouldn’t be simply copy-and-pasting anything that’s AI generated. However, you can speed up the process of creating repetitive pages—such as location pages—that incorporate a template.

 7. Producing Professional-looking Art

Finally, there are various AI image generators that can produce graphics, photos and other visuals that are part of an overall content strategy to boost local SEO. A few tools that have become popular in 2024 include Lensa AI, DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. 

Questions Prevail Around Use of AI Content

The concept of AI in the SEO world is shrouded in unknowns, which is typical with any emerging or fast-advancing technology. And questions about the ethics of using AI-generated content—particularly in terms of copyright and plagiarism—may not be answered for a long time, or until a few landmark court cases come to pass.

But how will AI-written content affect SEO? Will your web pages be penalized by Google and not rank as high?

Google has stated publicly there is no specific penalty for AI-generated content, but the company continues to focus on its Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust (E-E-A-T) parameters when it comes to search-engine rankings. They are constantly improving algorithms to crawl pages, look for content that meets the E-E-A-T parameters, and filter search results. 

When you use AI to generate content, there is no guarantee all the facts will be accurate or it won’t completely steal information from other sources, both of which decrease quality and could negatively impact how the web pages rank in local results. Not to mention, you aren’t providing any original information, reinforcing your expertise and authority, or fostering a unique brand voice. 

Until there is more clarity around the impacts of AI on local SEO, a more advisable practice is using this tool to create article outlines based on keyword phrases or to generate some ideas around topics. The ChatGPT version then essentially becomes a first draft, of sorts. From there, editing, fact-checking and other forms of refinement are absolutely critical any time AI becomes part of the process for producing local SEO content.

Also, keep in mind that creating content using AI is all about the prompts and taking a thoughtful, strategic approach when choosing what data you use and what you’re inputting. The better your prompts, the more accurate and high-quality your AI-generated content will be.

Taking Steps to Increase Your Online Authority

Some people have described AI tools as unreliable interns. They can handle menial tasks or do some preliminary research but can’t solely be trusted to create the content that will serve as your main form of public communication. There is still value in having the expertise, knowledge and services of human professionals to help you boost local SEO and have a strong web presence in your service area. Our team at Third Angle are here to help you with reputation management, SEO research and optimization and leveraging the other avenues available to improve your ability to be found online and generate new business leads.