Create Better Content: AI SEO Content Writing Tips for Success

Even before ChatGPT came around, increasing accessibility to AI-assisted writing, AI writing tools were being used by content marketers and writers alike. These tools allowed quick content creation, which enabled SEO content writers to create more content in less time.

Today, AI content writing tools have advanced to include real-time SEO recommendations and content quality checks, making them even more valuable for creating high-performing SEO content. As a result, more and more marketers are turning to AI-powered writing tools. In our AI SEO Benchmark Report, we found that 23.4% of marketers believe AI content performs much better than human-written content.

However, this doesn't mean that the content is solely AI-written. Human intervention is always there. What works best is a balanced blend of AI's capabilities and human creativity.

How do you ace this blend, though? We discuss the best practices for creating successful AI SEO content below.

Create SEO-Friendly Content That Feels Human

One of the major concerns regarding AI content generators is that they lack the human element that your target audience seeks. So, it's on human content writers to add this missing piece to the AI-generated content.

Think of the AI content as the skeleton and your human touch as the flesh and blood that gives it life. You want the end content to feel human. And for that, you need to get everything right, from the prompt to the final review.

The Art of Prompt Engineering for High-Quality Content

AI tools don't have the same understanding of language and context as humans do. They rely on prompts to generate content, so what you input will determine the quality of the output.

For example, if you simply tell ChatGPT to "Write an introduction to a blog post on the components of SEO," it will generate a generic and dull introduction. 

ChatGPT output

That's what it has been programmed to do. If you don't give it information or specific instructions, it will only provide you with a surface-level understanding of the topic.

On the contrary, if you make your prompt more unique and detailed, ChatGPT will have more information to work with and generate a more insightful introduction.

Here's what your prompt could look like: Write an introduction to a blog post on the components of SEO. The article is aimed at small business owners who are new to SEO and need an understanding of its components. Start with a pain point that small business owners face when it comes to SEO and then introduce the five key components that they need to focus on.

ChatGPT output

You can see how this prompt adds more context and specificity, resulting in a better outcome. It's also more conversational since the tool has an audience to address.

In a Medium post, Djanan Kasumovic, a pioneering content strategist and the Head of Growth at InfluencerMarketingHub, explains how phrases like "In the rapidly evolving world of…" are a hallmark of AI-generated content. If you've used ChatGPT or a similar tool, you must have come across this phrase.

He shares the 4C approach to AI content creation, which stipulates:

• Contextualization: Providing deep context to the AI tools to ensure accuracy and relevance.
• Customization: Directing AI to use specific features or unique settings for custom solutions.
• Clarity: Providing clear and specific prompts to get precise outputs.
• Characterization: Personalization AI to mirror your brand voice and personality.

4C approach to AI content writing

The 4C approach helps you avoid generic and robotic content that can turn off your audience. It results in relatively human-sounding content that you can further perfect with human review.

Our guide on advanced AI prompt optimization provides further assistance in this regard. 

Don't Prompt and Post: Why Human Review is Critical

To carry the same message forward, even with perfect prompts, you have to review the resulting content. Don't simply post whatever AI has produced without ever going through it.

AI content writers have some common issues, like awkward phrases and repetitive use of words. Sometimes, the content may not make sense or be factually incorrect. It's your responsibility to review and refine such content before publishing it.

Human editors also bring in the brand voice, which is ever-so-important in creating a unique identity for your brand. They can add emotions and personality to the content, which engages the target audience.

Going forward, the need for human reviewers will be even greater. There's a reasonable concern that as AI content becomes more mainstream, future AI models will train based on existing AI content. Unlike today's models that produce content based on existing human-created content, future models will use training datasets that are highly saturated with AI-generated content, further diluting the human element.

It’s incredibly short-sighted.

LLMs seem like they can write moderately well, right now, because they’re drawing from a high-quality body of human-created work.

Dilute that pool too much with AI-created work, and it’s like a dog repeatedly eating its own vomit—nutrients vanish. https://t.co/HggCc8CfQS

— Jessica Price (@Delafina777) July 12, 2023

So, you must create a review strategy for AI-written content that you can fine-tune as industry trends evolve. You may even need to keep evolving your prompts and review guidelines to ensure that your AI-generated content is accurate, relevant, coherent, and brand-aligned.

Strategize with AI: Combine AI with Human Expertise

While AI tools help with SEO and keyword research, they can't replace the intuition and expertise of human content strategists. Take the healthcare industry as an example. A keyword research tool like the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool may help you find long-tail keywords, but you still need a human content strategist to decide how to use them.

Since the industry is highly regulated, you'll also have to account for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance, which AI-generated content may not be able to do accurately.

Even with a less regulated industry like digital marketing, human expertise comes into play to determine how to target a certain audience. For example, when you use the Keyword Magic Tool to search for keywords related to influencer marketing, a human professional has to decide which keywords are most relevant to your specific target market.

Semrush Keyword Magic Tool

Ideally, you should blend your AI outputs with your overall SEO strategy to get content with both human and SEO-friendliness. In the example above, one of the keywords Semrush identified is "influencer marketing agency." This is the starting point. 

Now, you have to come in and decide how you'll use this keyword according to your existing SEO strategy. For example, at Influencer Marketing Hub, our strategy involves reviewing agencies that provide different types of digital marketing services. So, we curated a guide on the top influencer marketing agencies, using this keyword to target our audience specifically looking for agency options in the influencer marketing space.

However, if reviews aren't a part of your overall SEO strategy, you may choose to use the keyword differently. For example, you can do an overview of what an influencer marketing agency is or which services it typically offers. The bottom line is that AI-generated content is the starting point. Human expertise is what makes AI-driven insights useful and effective.

Edit for SEO and User Engagement

After you've used AI content creation software to write content, the next step is to edit it for SEO. That means:

• Including relevant keywords
• Improving the content's readability
• Including internal links
• Adding images with alt text
• Writing meta descriptions

A tool like Semrush's SEO Writing Assistant can be very helpful in this regard. Simply paste your content into the editor, and it will show you SEO, readability, tone, title, and other issues with your content.

Semrush Writing Assistant

The best part is that the writing assistant takes keyword data from the Keyword Magic Tool, which is updated daily. So, you always get the most up-to-date keywords to optimize your content.

Apart from that, the tool also provides recommendations on improving the content title, such as changing the length or adding the primary keyword. It also tells you how you can improve your content's readability and maintain a consistent tone across the board.

Semrush SEO Writing Assistant

As for generating meta descriptions, you can use ChatGPT or a free tool like GrowthBar's GPT-powered meta description generator. Provide a brief description of your content, and it will generate a meta description that fits Google's guidelines.

SEO alone shouldn't be the focus, though. You should also account for user experience, which comes with the readability and layout of your content. For example, create shorter paragraphs, use subheadings to break up long sections of text, and include bullet points or numbered lists for easy skimming.

Additionally, including internal links to relevant pages on your website can improve user engagement by encouraging them to explore more of your content. This can also help with SEO by showing search engines that your website has valuable and related content.

Write For Global Audiences With AI 

Before AI, content marketers were limited by language restraints. However, AI writing tools often support multiple languages, allowing you to write for global audiences.

AI for Multilingual Content Creation

Due to their multilingual functionality, AI tools can generate non-English content that's still optimized for search engines. For example, Semrush's SEO Writing Assistant supports some major languages, including Spanish, German, Russian, Italian, Turkish, Swedish, and more. You can also use it to rephrase content in several languages, including German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Turkish.

Similarly, the Keyword Magic Tool also supports multiple languages. You simply have to enter your seed keywords and select the country you want to target. The AI tool shows you keywords in the region's language.

Keyword magic tool

You could use Google Translate or a similar tool to translate English keywords into other languages. However, that's not the most effective approach since words have different nuances in different languages. Plus, the way people formulate search queries also differs across languages. An AI keyword research tool shows you actual phrases being used by people in a specific region rather than translated versions of English keywords for better targeting.

Semrush keyword magic tool

For example, when Voe Tranquilo, a Brazilian travel help company, wanted to improve its site’s search engine rankings, it used Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool to find keywords in Portuguese. Some of the keywords Voe Tranquilo focused on were: 

• Voo atrasado (delayed flight)
• Voo cancelado (canceled flight)
• Bagagem extraviada (lost luggage)

Keyword Magic Tool results 

The company then used these keywords in its content strategy and ended up increasing the site traffic by 588%. Organic traffic accounted for 74.4% of the site’s overall traffic, a huge jump from 14.7% before using Semrush. 

Similarly, you can use Jasper AI to write meta descriptions or create content outlines in over 80 languages. This helps you optimize your content for search engines in different regions.

When it comes to actual content writing, AI SEO tools can be helpful here, too. They can generate content in your chosen language. However, as we've mentioned earlier, a human review is important. You should get a reviewer (who speaks the language natively) to check the generated content for nuances and cultural context.

At times, something may sound perfectly normal in English. But once you translate it to a different language, the meaning may get lost or become offensive. A human reviewer will catch such nuances and make necessary modifications.

Catering to Niche Markets with AI

Besides international SEO copywriting, AI tools also help you cater to niche markets in other ways. To start, they assist in conducting market research to determine if the region is worth expanding.

Semrush's Market Explorer tool shows you the market share for your business type in different countries, along with the keywords related to your niche. If there have been any recent changes in the market share, this tool will reflect it, too.

Semrush Market Explorer tool

Similarly, you can use the Domain Overview tool to check if your competitors are present in a country. The "Distribution by country" section in this tool shows which countries your competitors are getting traffic from. While this may not be the most accurate representation of their international reach, it gives you a fair idea of which countries your competitors are focusing on. You can then follow suit.

Semrush Domain Overview tool

You can also use AI tools to conduct research on the preferences and interests of a country's population. For example, ChatGPT can tell you which topics Gen Z in Italy are interested in. Based on this information, you can write content to target them.

Again, don't take AI's word as the final truth. You should still conduct your own research and validate the information provided by AI tools. Human oversight will also help adjust the tone of your content to ensure it really speaks to your target audience in a new region or country. 

Creating SEO-Friendly Content That Scales Without Losing Quality

One of the many reasons for using AI content generators is to create content at scale. You want to create more content in less time while maintaining quality and relevance. That can be tricky if you're letting AI do all the work.

Sure, AI can assist, but it shouldn't be left to its own devices. As we've explained in our article on Google's core updates, the search engine hasn't explicitly gone after AI content. However, Google is cracking down on scaled content that does not provide value to its users.

The search engine describes scaled content abuse as:

When many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users. This abusive practice is typically focused on creating large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value to users, no matter how it's created.

If you let AI do all the work, your content will fit this description. To make it SEO-friendly, you'll need to add a human touch. That means reviewing the content and making sure it flows well, provides value to readers, and is relevant to your target audience.

As for the SEO part, you can hand it over to AI. For example, AI writing tools can conduct keyword and topic research, create outlines, suggest optimization tips, and create content strategies. With AI handling these tasks, humans can focus on other aspects of content creation such as ensuring brand alignment and incorporating human elements like personal anecdotes or humor. 

Let's say you're a large-scale digital marketing and SEO blog. You can use an AI tool like Semrush's Topic Research to get ideas about the topics you should cover. It will even categorize the content into different subtopics and give you SEO recommendations.

Semrush Topic Research

When you click on each of these topics, the tool will show you appropriate headlines for the content. It also provides you with questions you can add to your content as headings or in the FAQ section. This helps you optimize your content for voice search and increase its chances of appearing in featured snippets, and the People Also Ask section.

Semrush topic suggestions

Next, you can use Semrush's SEO Content Template tool to get content briefs for the topics you've chosen. The tool shows you keywords to use in your content, along with backlink suggestions. It also offers recommendations for readability and text length to further optimize your content.

Semrush key recommendations

Once you have the brief, you can use ContentShake AI to create this content. Unlike ChatGPT, which creates generic content, this tool can adapt its tone to your brand voice. You can select target personas and brand tone for the tool to create targeted content. Upload your own writing samples to ContentShake AI so that it can replicate your style to sound less robotic. 

If you’re writing for a certain location, select the region within ContentShake AI so that the tool can keep the local context in consideration. 

You can add content on your own to add the human touch that ContentShake misses. If you’re not satisfied with a section the tool has generated, you can regenerate it until it fits the bill. 

ContentShake AI content generation

But don't just post this output on your website. Have a human editor go through it and make changes, such as brand tone adjustment, fact-checking, and SEO optimization. You can use the same pipeline for the rest of your articles to create content at scale for your website without losing quality. 

Optimize for Search Engines While Writing for Humans

While it's understood that you're writing content for humans, it's also important to remember that search engines play a big role in directing traffic to your website. So, you have to optimize your content for them, too.

One of the best AI SEO tips is to go for somewhat of an AI-human hybrid. For example, a keyword research tool shows you the keywords and user intent. It may even create a content outline and write the content. But then, you have to take over and make sure the tone, style, and overall message are relevant to your audience.

What Google wants is for you to create content for humans first and search engines second. In fact, Google says,

''We recommend that you focus on creating people-first content to be successful with Google Search, rather than search engine-first content made primarily to gain search engine rankings.''

So, make your readers a priority during the content creation process. In simple words, write for intent. This will eventually help you rank on search engines, too.

For example, if you have to write about ''how to bake a cake'', instead of focusing on keyword stuffing and writing 'bake cake' multiple times, provide information that will actually help your readers. Include tips, techniques, images, videos, and step-by-step instructions on how to bake a cake.

When users find your content helpful, so will the search engine. As your website's dwell time increases, Google will see this as a signal that your content is meeting user intent and providing them value. That's exactly what's needed.

In some way, writing intent-centric content for humans takes you one step closer to search engine optimization. Then, there are some other tactics that you can use on the back end, such as fixing errors that are affecting your site's technical performance and getting backlinks from authoritative sites. Focus on these aspects for optimization and let your content be predominantly user-focused. 

Track Performance and Refine Your AI Content Strategy

Creating AI-generated content is just the first step in your SEO pipeline. After content creation, you also have to monitor the performance of this content using SEO analytics tools. For example, the Traffic Analytics tool shows you the following engagement metrics, such as:

• Number of visits
• Number of unique visitors
• Purchase conversion rate
• Average visit duration
• Bounce rate

Traffic analytics

You can measure these metrics before and to your website to see if there is a significant improvement in engagement. The ''Trend by competitors'' section further shows how your website is performing compared to your competitors. 

Semrush Traffic Analytics

Similarly, use Semrush's Position Tracking feature to get an overview of your site's keyword rankings over time, especially after adding new content. 

Semrush keyword position tracking tool

If you see any negative fluctuations in performance, you can refine your AI content strategy by adjusting the keywords and headings used in the generated content. You can also try different variations of the same topic to see which one performs better.

It's also important to monitor your site's performance after an algorithm shift or the introduction of a new feature. For example, when Google introduced AI Overview, many SEO influencers discussed its implications for organic SERPs. Since AI Overview takes the top spot, your content goes down on the SERPs. It's likely people won't even bother to scroll down if they find their answer in the AI Overview section.

Don't panic, but... Google has released a big AI update for SEO!

They called it: "AI Overviews"

About the update:
Google announced on May 14 that their AI generative experience is rolling out to the U.S. public soon. This isn't an opt-in feature; every user will receive it… pic.twitter.com/xX2JsFbZp8

— Neil Patel (@neilpatel) May 16, 2024

So, you should analyze how your content's performance has been affected by this change. That's what Neil Patel, the renowned SEO influencer, did. He found that impressions have dropped, which makes sense considering Google is providing immediate answers in the AI Overview section, and the organic results below are not being seen by as many people.

However, he also found that click-through rates are up. That means people are still clicking on organic results after consulting the AI Overview section.

This is what’s happening to SEO traffic after Google rolled out AI Overviews.

We checked out search data from our SMB clients in e-commerce and local services in the US.

Here’s what we found from the AI Overview launch:

Key Metrics:
Impressions: Went down.
Clicks & CTR: Went… pic.twitter.com/ge5iczaSjQ

— Neil Patel (@neilpatel) June 5, 2024

The best way to adapt to this change would be to optimize your content for featured snippets and voice searches. You can also write headings that encourage users to click through and read more about the topic.

If you don't regularly monitor your website's performance, you wouldn't know that a new feature or algorithm change has affected your content. As a result, you wouldn't take corrective action. So, it's imperative to keep a constant eye on your website's analytics and performance for immediate adjustments and improvements.

Write Incredible Content With AI Tools

The tips we've mentioned above for writing search-engine-optimized and human-centric content using AI tools can improve your content creation process by making it faster and less complicated. AI SEO tools don't only write the content for you but also provide keyword-related recommendations, content outlines, readability scores, and other suggestions to improve the overall quality of your content.

However, human editors and reviewers should still be in the picture. Be it basic ChatGPT SEO strategies or advanced paid tools, human SEO professionals and writers must work alongside AI tools to ensure the final content is high-quality and accurate. The blend of both will help you produce engaging and optimized content for your website.

Use our SEO ROI calculator to measure the impact of AI on your SEO strategy. 

About the Author

Djanan Kasumovic

Writer

Djanan Kasumovic, Head of Growth at Influencer Marketing Hub, drives innovation in digital marketing with expertise in AI marketing and AI influencer strategies. He is directly involved in shaping content strategies for top clients like Viral Nation, NeoReach, Brandwatch, and more, blending creative flair with data-driven insights to ensure people not only enjoy the content but leave a little smarter.