Generative AI is undeniably making its mark on the SEO industry, but the real value lies in understanding how it affects the bottom line for SEOs and businesses.
Can these tools truly streamline workflows, save valuable time and optimize resources or do they still require significant human intervention to get things right?
Today, we’ll dig into whether AI is living up to its promise of saving time, money and resources in SEO.
We’ll explore how AI has transformed various SEO processes – from content creation to keyword research – and discuss the limitations that come with these advancements.
Evaluating AI’s impact on time, money and resources
Can AI save time?
One of AI’s most immediate benefits in SEO is its ability to save time.
AI excels at automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks such as generating titles or meta descriptions, keyword clustering and even drafting content.
What might have taken hours or days of manual work can now be done in a fraction of the time with AI-powered tools.
Does AI save money?
While AI tools often come with subscription costs, the return on investment typically comes through the time savings they provide, translating into indirect cost savings.
By automating tasks that used to require manual labor or expensive outsourcing, AI allows teams to accomplish more in less time.
Does AI conserve resources?
AI’s ability to streamline workflows and automate tasks helps SEO teams do more with fewer resources.
In scenarios where SEO teams might be small or stretched thin, AI can take over repetitive work, allowing people to be focused on higher-level, more strategic tasks.
Use case 1: Content creation efficiency
Writing content from scratch can be labor-intensive, but AI brings efficiency by automating repetitive tasks and providing a solid starting point for content creation.
Editing AI-generated content is faster than writing from scratch and still allows for personalization, enabling content writers to infuse their unique voice and style into the work.
While AI can produce drafts quickly, a human editor is 100% necessary to ensure that the content meets Google’s E-E-A-T standards – experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness – and that it maintains high quality.
Titles and descriptions
Generating titles and meta descriptions for thousands of URLs manually is daunting, but AI tools like BulkGPT make this process far more efficient.
By feeding a list of URLs into the tool along with your prompt, SEOs can quickly produce optimized titles and meta descriptions at scale. This automation drastically reduces the time spent on such tasks from days to hours.
Using BulkGPT, you can reduce the time spent writing page titles and meta descriptions by more than 70%.
For example, creating titles and descriptions for 1,000 URLs, even at one minute per page, would have taken you 12+ hours before.
With the streamlined, AI-powered workflow, this may take you only four hours.
Content briefs
Developing detailed content briefs that align with SEO strategies is critical but was previously tedious.
AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini simplify the process by generating structured briefs based on keyword inputs and desired topics.
These tools provide a framework for content creators, ensuring that their content is on target from the start.
With AI-generated content briefs, SEO professionals save hours in the planning stage, giving them more time to focus on refining the content or developing new strategies.
Article outlines and complete articles
When it comes to generating full-length articles, AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini provide substantial support by quickly drafting content based on input prompts or keywords.
These tools offer a strong foundation for content writers, helping to streamline the writing process.
While ChatGPT and Gemini excel at content generation, they perform best when given clear direction and broken into manageable tasks.
Instead of generating an entire article in one go, it’s more effective to begin by having the tool generate a well-structured outline. Then generate content one section at a time and provide feedback along the way.
This allows you to guide the tools to match your voice and intent better. This iterative approach often results in higher-quality content that requires less extensive revisions later.
Even though AI significantly speeds up the drafting phase, human oversight is still essential to polishing and refining the content.
The shift from creation to editing allows writers to focus on perfecting the final product rather than getting bogged down in the initial draft.
This efficiency saves time and enables teams to produce more content in shorter time frames, all while maintaining a high standard of quality.
Use case 2: Keyword research and clustering automation
Keyword research has traditionally required SEOs to:
Manually gather keywords.
Analyze data by poring over massive spreadsheets.
Grouping them into meaningful clusters.
Today, AI tools like Keyword Insights have revolutionized this process by automating keyword clustering and prioritization while delivering actionable insights faster.
Automating keyword clustering
Keyword Insights simplifies keyword clustering by analyzing large sets of keywords and organizing them by relevance and search intent.
You can import keywords from tools like Semrush, and the platform uses AI to align them with your SEO goals.
It identifies valuable opportunities that manual clustering might miss and even evaluates your site’s current keyword rankings, providing a personalized difficulty score.
This helps SEO teams make more informed, data-driven decisions and save time, depending on their existing processes.
Moving from my cumbersome, spreadsheet-based analysis to this AI-streamlined workflow saved nearly 70% of the time spent on keyword research and cluster analysis.
Using ChatGPT for keyword clustering
While KeywordInsights.AI is the go-to tool for automating keyword clustering, ChatGPT can also assist with this task.
ChatGPT can provide basic keyword groupings based on intent and relevance by feeding it keyword lists and specific prompts.
It works well for smaller, simpler projects where clustering doesn’t require as much precision or prioritization.
Use case 3: Custom GPTs for specialized SEO tasks
Custom GPTs can be a game-changer for handling specific, repeatable SEO tasks that are otherwise time-consuming.
By training a custom GPT, you can automate tasks like keyword clustering, creating detailed content briefs and identifying striking distance opportunities – all with a tailored, AI-powered assistant that thinks like you.
Instead of relying on generic AI models, a custom GPT learns your specific SEO workflow, preferences and nuances, making it more efficient and accurate for your unique needs.
While the initial time investment in training a custom GPT can be substantial, the long-term benefits are undeniable.
Once trained, a custom GPT becomes part of your SEO team, handling tasks with your specific approach.
Over time, the more you refine and update the GPT, the more intuitive and valuable it becomes – continuously reducing the time and resources required to handle specific SEO tasks.
Use case 4: Streamline your workflow with comprehensive AI-powered tools
Surfer leverages powerful AI-driven natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to streamline your SEO workflow from keyword clustering to content creation.
Surfer’s NLP helps analyze and understand the structure of top-ranking content and guides the SEO process with real-time insights.
Here are three key areas of your workflow that can be streamlined by the AI-powered Surfer:
Keyword Clustering: Starts with a single seed keyword and automatically generates keyword clusters based on search intent and relevance, saving significant time and improving accuracy. One click and you can launch any cluster in the Content Editor.
Content Editor: Analyzes top-ranking content in real time, offering recommendations on keyword usage, headings and content length to optimize for search engines. As you write, it dynamically updates with real-time feedback to help your content align with the patterns of high-performing pages, improving its chances of ranking well.
AI Writer: Generates SEO-friendly content drafts quickly, helping you scale content creation within a single workflow.
Surfer’s natural language processing capabilities underpin these key features, driving smarter, more efficient SEO workflows.
AI’s limitations: The need for human oversight
While AI has advanced significantly, it is still prone to inaccuracies and hallucinations.
For example, early on, Gemini (previously Bard) would authoritatively provide page speed scores despite not having access to Lighthouse or give keyword search volume data without any access to Google Ad Planner.
It would even send inaccurate information about its own search ranking algorithms when asked for a list of core algorithm updates.
These errors highlight why human oversight remains essential in SEO workflows.
Editors must review AI-generated content to ensure accuracy, relevance, quality and that it fits the brand voice.
AI speeds up content creation, but human review is essential to catch mistakes and ensure quality.
Editing AI-generated content is faster than creating it from scratch, but human oversight is crucial for reliable results.
AI: A powerful ally for SEOs
Ultimately, the best way to save time, money and resources in SEO is through efficiency – that’s where AI excels.
By leveraging AI to streamline tasks and enhance data analysis, SEO teams can optimize workflows, make smarter decisions and allocate resources where they matter most.
The key is balancing AI’s speed and efficiency with human oversight to ensure both quality and effectiveness.
