Writing, Retooled: The Role Of AI Tools In SEO Writing

I’ve personally written thousands of articles for dozens of companies across multiple different industries in over half a decade as an SEO writer. I’d love to tell you that I’m an expert with years of experience in dentistry, home renovations, and supply chain management—but I’m not.

This is one of the fundamental differences between SEO writing and other forms of writing. As an SEO writer, you need to be able to research, write, and edit work at a breakneck pace. Fiction writers, reporters, and even most bloggers won’t hold a candle to the amount of content you’ll make in a year if your business is thriving.

You can go at this without any tools—when I started in the industry, we didn’t have any of the tools I’m going to describe to you. A willingness to do the work and hone your craft went a long way then and still does today.

Want to keep up the pace without burning out? Want your content to outrank your competitors? Tools are going to help—a lot. The content I make today? Heads and shoulders above what I wrote seven years ago. Part of that is the experience I’ve gained and part of it is the tools I now have access to.

How To Make Killer SEO Content

You’ve seen bad SEO content a million times—2000-word think pieces before a recipe, lengthy pieces for television shows or video game updates that can be summarized with “We don’t know anything new”. 

These articles aren’t just annoying; they’re bad for your website. People avoid these articles like the plague, and though they may trend for a bit, they’re not great for long-term growth—and that’s what we’re always aiming for at First Rank.

Good SEO content will:

  • Answer the questions a user is asking early on
  • Elaborate on those answers, and answer any follow-up questions a user may have
  • Be free of errors, both factual and grammatical
  • Follow SEO fundamentals (well-organized headings, keywords in the title, links where appropriate, and the like)

Great SEO content is:

  • Uniquely useful, covering a topic more extensively than any other resource
  • Easy to read
  • Interesting enough to share
  • Written in a tone consistent with the tone or brand of the company you’re writing for

In my experience, writing content that’s easy to read and tonally consistent comes with experience. Tools are useful for creating content that’s uniquely useful; I’ll talk about why in the next section. Finally, content being interesting enough to share stems from it being very helpful, easy to read, and captivating—a combination of tone and style.

With that all in mind, let’s move on to exploring how SEO tools can help you reach all of your SEO writing goals: 

How SEO Writing Tools Can Help

 

LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) are all the rage right now. You probably already know all about ChatGPT—it’s the LLM I use the most often. 

Your first instinct might be to write with Chat GPT—that’s not the best idea. Here are a few reasons why:

  • AI writes like AI. When your articles are written by ChatGPT, it’s pretty obvious to most people.
  • AI makes mistakes. SEO writers are also SEO researchers—it’s our job to ensure that all of our content is accurate and informative.
  • AI will tell you what it thinks you want to hear—not necessarily what’s important for your audience to hear.

AI-written content has its place, and we certainly use it for some clients at First Rank—though it’s carefully prompted and heavily human-edited before being published. 

As a writer, however, I’m never copy-pasting content from an LLM. Here’s what I use it for instead:

  • As a research assistant, especially on niche topics that aren’t covered in detail
  • As a fact-checker
  • As a means of gaining a deeper understanding of a particular topic

Ideally, you’ll be writing several articles for the same client; putting the work in early to get a deeper understanding of their niche is essential. 

Ask your LLM a ton of questions about the topics you’re researching; stay curious. Use search engines to learn more about the answers your LLM gives you—both to ensure accuracy and to deepen your understanding further. Always verify anything an LLM tells you, and use your own knowledge, logic, and intuition to sniff out when something doesn’t seem quite right. 

NLP Tools

Using search engines and LLMs can dramatically speed up research on niche topics, giving you the expertise you need to write high-quality articles in less time. Without on-the-ground expertise, however, it’s hard to know if you’re covering a topic exhaustively.

This is where natural language processing (NLP) tools come into play. These tools can be used to analyze the top pages of competitors that are trying to rank for the same keyword as you. They then provide you with a list of the most important terms used by those competitors.

What these tools cannot tell you is why those terms are being used, and whether or not they’re being used accurately. It’s up to you to visit your competitors’ pages, understand what they’re covering and what they’re not, and determine how you can make your article better than any of your competitors’ individual pages. 

The NLP tools are there to help you ensure you cover topics in breadth, but they’re not capable of reasoning; use them as guidelines, not as the law.

Conclusion

SEO tools help you ensure that your content is accurate, exhaustive, and uniquely useful. They give you the power to become an expert in a topic quickly—but never forget that it’s your own reasoning, intuition, and style that will make an article shine.

At First Rank, we use a host of SEO tools—along with our team of in-house writers—to create killer content that converts. Interested in learning more? Contact us today for First Rank SEO.