Spending too much time on your content strategy and creation might have you wishing there was a magic button to completely automate your SEO.
With recent, fast-moving developments like Google algorithm updates, the Helpful Content System or generative AI like ChatGPT impacting SEO and content creation, many enterprise marketing teams have been asking:
The answer is yes… and no.
Here's what we'll cover in this post:
Content automation in SEO flips the script on creating and optimizing content. By utilizing AI and machine learning, digital marketing teams can quickly generate authoritative and relevant content with minimal effort.
While some SEO tools can even write copy for you (titles, meta descriptions, blog posts, and more), it's important to m maintain some level of oversight to ensure that content reflects your brand's voice and values.
By striking the right balance between automation and human input, you can create a robust content strategy that drives traffic and improves your search rankings.
Recommended Reading: Should I Use AI-Driven Content Tools After the Helpful Content Update?
Putting your SEO on autopilot might seem like a good way to scale your efforts and save time, especially if you're working within the limits of budgetary and personnel resources.
But a completely automated solution cannot take the place of someone who can carry out your company’s SEO strategy to the fullest.
Of course, that’s not to say that some parts of your SEO efforts cannot be automated — in fact, I often inform our prospects that they can do more in the way of automation.
Reporting? Automate it.
Keyword research? Automate it!
Site crawls and technical audits? Automate that, too!
Unfortunately, we see a lot of digital marketers come to us because they’ve been promised the world with automatic SEO and quickly come to find that it’s not possible for their enterprise because they lack a key ingredient: a person to execute the strategy of what an automation tool tells them to do.
When it comes to their content creation, these same brands struggle to create content at scale because they presume that their SEO tool will go ahead and write the content for them.
But if you lack the resources to invest in an individual who can execute on what these tools tell you to do, automation will backfire and leave you with more work than you had before you set out to automate your SEO.
Think about it: if everyone was on autopilot when it came to their SEO, there would be search mediocrity across the board.
Successful brands roll up their sleeves and do the necessary work to be successful at search engine optimization, automating where they can to scale and relying on their own expertise to act on the insights.
That human element of SEO is responsible for the art of crafting great content for a brand that users are actually seeking, as it takes a human person to craft a creative story while also implementing sound SEO strategy to drive search visibility.
Recommended Reading: The seoClarity AI Manifesto: A Framework for Enterprise AI
Understanding the challenge of too much automation is not a reason to shy away from solutions that will help you scale. Ultimately, having an SEO manager or a dedicated content manager to utilize the automation tool is your best bet for overall success.
Content Fusion, an AI-powered content writing tool, is our solution to the over-automation problem. It provides users with an incredible experience in creating optimized, relevant content which results in improved search visibility.
With Content Fusion, we take a specific, data-driven approach to your content needs. We give the client the ability to be the hero and know exactly what is affecting their site content.
We also provide them with the knowledge and the tools to be able to come up with the solution on how to fix it.
Recommended Reading: 7 Content Fusion Success Stories of Increased Search Visibility
This goes beyond your cookie-cutter templates or press-a-button SEO automation, and requires a certain level of human creativity (for actually writing the content) alongside data-driven AI (for informing the writer on what to create).
Let's go through a workflow for creating new content.
To start, let’s imagine your business wants to rank for a particular target term. We take this term and plug it into Content Fusion which tells us exactly what you need to do to rank.
Another workflow is to optimize what's already live on the site. Content Fusion will analyze the URL to see which key terms are already included, and which need to be worked in.
Unsure of how to use a term in the content you’re building? Content Fusion provides users with context within the suggested terms list.
(The context behind one of the must-use keywords.)
Looking at the above terms, writers unsure of the phrase “square enix”, for example, can drill down into that term for ranking content's context, clicking through to the content that appears in the SERP directly from within Content Fusion.
We’ve seen semantic keyword identification in other marketing automation platforms, but using just those terms throughout your content won’t help you rank.
It comes down to contextual relevance and having a tool that will pinpoint exactly what Google considers when determining if your content is what users are looking for.
As the landscape changes, the result set changes, meaning the data that you receive from Content Fusion is the latest data that determines what the user needs to do in order to rank for a specific term.
You can pinpoint exactly what Google is looking for in content around this topic, and what are the terms that everyone is using so that you can understand contextual relevance to create content of your own.
And anyone can use this, whether you’re an SEO or a new content writer, no matter your level of expertise on a particular subject, Content Fusion is the best way to gain insight into what content to create in order to rank.
Many times, we'll get the question, "How many times do I need to use a term that Content Fusion tells me to use?"
As one of our most popular features for content marketing workflows, we've given Content Fusion a new look over the years. Now, users can see a recommended usage count next to each keyword. We didn't want to pigeon hold content writers on how often to use a term.
Even more important is how the term is worked into the content. The content should always be clear to understand and never feel robotic.
The bottom line is this: in order for Google to find something authoritative, it has to be written by a human. Even automated content marketing needs the human element.
Content Fusion is instrumental in providing real-time actionable insights for our users to determine what to create next as part of their strategy. As an AI-driven feature within our platform, Content Fusion applies machine learning to aid content creation, letting users become subject matter experts on any topic and reaching their audience faster than ever imagined.
Break through the content noise with the only built-in, AI-driven content optimizer that allows you to automate and write authoritative content faster than ever before.
Access your 14-day free trial of Content Fusion:
Editor's Note: This blog was originally published in June 2020 and has been updated for clarity and comprehensiveness.