Unveiling the SEO Content Strategy: Human vs. AI - Who Reigns Supreme?

Founder and CEO of Incremys, a collaborative SEO campaign management platform, Iban Touchet explained during All4Customer how the arrival of generative AI has transformed SEO content strategies. Recalling the fundamentals of SEO, he wanted to detail how personalized artificial intelligence tools can change the way decision-makers, but also content writers, work.

Fundamentals shaken up by AI

SEO focuses on three fundamentals: technique, content, and notoriety. The technique is based on the need to create a website that meets Google's technical criteria. Every page that you want to be known to Google must be indexed by Google. The goal of content creation is to attract visits through relevant writing based on a keyword. Finally, notoriety will be notably grouped and fed by external links that redirect to your site.

SEO content strategies are based on a simple concept: “The use of the right content on the right keyword... and on all its variants,"  explains Iban Touchet. In terms of search volume, variants blow the numbers apart. For example, the keyword “shampoo” is searched 50,000 times each month on Google. But with all the variations of this keyword (for example, purple shampoo, natural, anti-dandruff, etc.), we arrive at more than three million searches.

Understanding your intentions to establish your strategy

Depending on the activity, business, and strategy, positioning on keywords will depend on the objectives as well as the search intentions of Internet users. There are four of them:

• Navigational intention, the goal of which is to visit a website, represents 5 to 30% of intentions.
• Informational intention, the objective of which is to obtain information or find information, represents 35 to 60% of intentions.
• Transactional intention, the purpose of which is purchase, which represents 15 to 40% of intentions.
• Commercial intention, which aims to compare products and/or services, represents 5 to 20% of intentions.

Thus, each page has a purpose and is intended for one or two intentions:

• Home page: navigation objective,
• Blog, product pages, and marketplace: informational objective,
• Product and marketplace pages, category and facet pages: transactional objective,
• Category and facet pages, local pages: commercial objective.

Some pages have a dual intention, particularly between informational and transactional purposes. © BDM

Content strategies to rethink

An SEO strategy always begins with a problem, according to Iban Touchet: “There are many more opportunities than available budgets. A content strategy, ultimately, is a budget allocation. To do this, prospects most often establish the following prioritization criteria, in this order:

1. The business and marketing objective, which aims to promote a line of products or services,
2. The idea of working on existing keywords first before attacking new ones,
3. The expected ROI of the keyword to optimize decision-making,
4. Understanding consumer search intent.

However, the CEO of Incremys believes that one of these criteria is completely counterproductive: the idea of working on existing keywords before attacking new ones. “By focusing on what already exists, we don’t see the shortfall. And the value of the new keyword is often much higher than a pre-existing one. So, working on a new keyword that has more potential may be more judicious. Some tools or solution providers encourage you to work on what already exists, particularly because it seems easier to change your position within the search results.

Another bias, according to Iban Touchet, is that the ROI of the expected keyword is only applicable in 10% of cases, in particular because generative AI has changed the situation in terms of production costs. The ROI is therefore only relevant for human-created content, as the additional cost for AI content is negligible.

How do we choose between humans and AI?

To focus its content strategy in 2024, Iban Touchet thinks that it is preferable to always base itself on the business and marketing aspects, but to give more thought to the question of search intentions. But as far as production is concerned, AI has led to “a shift towards a new era,"  in particular because it presents itself as a powerful acceleration factor, even if it is necessary to make a difference between generic AIs (ChatGPT, Le Chat, etc.) and personalized AIs. These are trained on your data and contain your briefs and your brand identity. Result: They produce unique and directly publishable content, unlike generic AIs, whose content will have to be reviewed.

In addition, personalized AI “complies with Google guidelines and generates very effective content for SEO,” judges Iban Touchet. However, it remains to be seen which content to produce by human editors and which to delegate to AI. Page by page, here are the recommendations of the CEO and founder of Incremys (see front page image):

• The home page is produced by a human editor because it is an important, unique, and branded page.
• The category pages: the human will only manage the main keyword; the AI will have the task of “the cocoon and the facets, using the texts made by the human for a relevant large-scale generation.".
• Product pages: the human will take care of the pages dedicated to top sales and top products; the AI will focus on writing all the other product pages, always taking human texts as an example.
• Marketplaces: Due to format and content constraints, it is recommended to automate all editorial tasks for marketplaces using AI.
• Local pages: rather, to be written by the AI, although a human editor can take care of these pages if the volume is relatively low.
• Blog pages: Incremys recommends having content based on new keywords written by humans, while AI can focus on optimizing existing content by readjusting the text.

“Humans will always have strong added value, but AI is capable of giving an extension of power and production capacity to an editor,” concludes Iban Touchet. It’s a collaboration; you have to think about where to put your strengths. We are thus able to produce volumes of content without comparison with what was done before.