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SEO has become a crucial skill for ensuring that our content reaches the right audience through search engines, especially with the decline of traffic from social media. Today, we’ll discuss how AI can be leveraged for a healthy SEO approach, and how to balance the efficiency AI offers with the need to maintain journalistic integrity.

Understanding the role of SEO in journalism

SEO is the practice of optimising content to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). In journalism, effective SEO means that your stories are more likely to be discovered by readers searching for relevant information.

As I argued in this guide for The Fix, SEO is not just about keywords, keywords density, or other technical stuff. SEO is a discipline about relationships among newspapers and their audiences; it’s about understanding search intent, creating quality content, and ensuring that your journalism serves the needs of the audience.

AIs can help with these tasks, but it’s important to remember that good SEO should enhance, not compromise, the quality of your reporting. With AI, this process can be significantly streamlined, but it also introduces new challenges and considerations.

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How AI can enhance SEO efforts

Automated keyword research

AI tools can analyse large datasets to identify trending keywords and phrases that are relevant to your content. These tools can suggest keywords to include in your articles, helping your content align better with what readers are searching for.

Tools like SEMrush, SeoZoom, Ahrefs, and even AI-driven platforms like Surfer SEO can automatically suggest keywords and content structures to help improve your article’s ranking potential. But you can even use more general services like ChatGPT to extract keywords and search intent.

*Prompt to create a table with keyword and search intent*

Content optimisation

AI can assist in optimising content for SEO. AI tools can suggest headings, meta descriptions, and even full paragraphs that are SEO-friendly.

For example, you can use your favourite AI chatbot to describe images and to compile the ALT field:

You can also ask the AI to generate meta descriptions or headings. For instance:

“Create an engaging, SEO-friendly meta description for an article about [insert topic], focusing on the primary keyword ‘XYZ’ and keeping it under 155 characters.”

You can use these tools for almost any repetitive or tedious SEO task you want to delegate. While chatbots can be useful for generating prompts for these tasks, many CMSs are already integrating these AI-powered functions. In those cases, you might not need to write prompts at all—simply press a button like “Generate a meta description.”

Finally, you can also create agents (in Claude), personalised GPTs (in ChatGPT), or other forms of chatbots tailored to specific tasks, allowing you to work on the SEO of your newsroom according to your internal rules and decisions.

However, it’s crucial that these suggestions are used as a starting point and are refined by human editors to ensure they meet journalistic standards. Even when these tasks will be just a button in your CMS it will be extremely important to double check what the system will produce before publishing. And, do not ask the tool to create content from scratch.

Analysing competitors and predicting trends

AI tools can analyse your competitors’ articles, compare them with your own, identify content gaps, and suggest how to optimise your content. They can provide recommendations for improving an article, and they are particularly powerful when creating pillar pages using a knowledge base or your own content archive.

A complex prompt example might look like this:

“Analyse these articles [insert links or text of the content. Please note that this raises several ethical considerations, starting from the very beginning: are we allowed to input copy-and-paste content into an LLM? Based on how these systems work, I think so, but I have strong positions on this matter, so it’s something that should be discussed together]. Compare them with my article [insert link or text of the article to be optimised], identify any content gaps, and suggest how to improve my article to make it more competitive from an SEO perspective. Focus on keyword usage, depth of the topics covered, and overall content quality. Additionally, using my knowledge base or archive [insert links or reference information], propose a structure to create a pillar page on the topic. Finally, analyse current and possible future search trends related to the topic and suggest content that could become relevant in the coming months, with special attention to seasonal trends. Do this step by step.”

It’s important to note that while anyone can use these tools, over time the quality of these pillar pages will likely improve significantly. However, what sets valuable journalism apart is not just content creation—it’s everything else: methodology, verification, building relationships with sources, meeting people, fieldwork, investigation, and more.

In addition, AI tools can help identify search trends and attempt to predict which topics will gain traction, allowing journalists to plan content around future trends. While these suggestions are already integrated into some SEO tools, they can also be generated via chatbots. This predictive capability can be a powerful asset in staying ahead of the news cycle and ensuring that your content remains relevant, especially with seasonal topics.

Improving content discoverability with structured data

AI can help implement structured data (like Schema markup) to improve how search engines understand and display your content. This can enhance your content’s visibility in search results, such as in featured snippets or knowledge panels.

While AI can handle the technical implementation, journalists should be involved in deciding what information is highlighted to ensure it aligns with the story’s narrative and context.

Case study

In 2023, TV 2 Fyn, a Danish news outlet, explored the potential of AI to enhance SEO through headline optimization. They conducted a three-week experiment to generate and test headlines for their online articles. During this trial, AI was fed full articles or summaries and produced multiple headline options. These suggestions were refined when necessary and A/B tested against human-written headlines using Chartbeat analytics to measure performance. The AI-generated headlines outperformed their human counterparts 46% of the time, resulting in a 59% increase in click-through rates (CTR) for those headlines. Although human-written headlines maintained a slight overall advantage, winning 51.2% of the tests, this case demonstrates the potential of AI when combined with human expertise: together, they can significantly boost CTR.

Ethical considerations in AI-driven SEO

Journalism first – while AI can optimise content for search engines, there is a risk of prioritising SEO over quality journalism. It’s important to strike a balance between creating content that is discoverable and content that is true to your journalistic values. Always ensure that SEO practices do not lead to clickbait or sensationalism. The story should always come first, with SEO as a tool to enhance its reach, not dictate its substance.

Transparency – when using AI for SEO, be transparent with your audience. Readers should be aware if and how AI influences the content they consume, especially if AI-generated content is involved. Consider including a disclosure when significant portions of an article have been optimised or influenced by AI

Avoiding over-optimization – over-reliance on AI for SEO can lead to over-optimized content that reads poorly or feels unnatural. This can harm both the user experience and your brand’s credibility.

Recommendation – use AI suggestions as a guide, but always review and revise the content to ensure it meets the standards of good journalism.

Additional advice

You can also simply ask your chatbot how it can help you with SEO tasks. It’s always a good idea to do that, remembering that you always can refuse suggestions (for example: ChatGPT always tries to tell you that it can create content for you. That’s definitely not a good idea).

*Asking ChatGPT how it can help me for SEO tasks. I’m in charge, I decide if I want that kind of help or not.*

Reflect on how these tools can improve your content’s visibility without compromising its quality. Remember, AI is here to assist, not replace, the human touch in journalism.

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