Q:
The following question was recently posted in ASA Central by the president of a California-based staffing firm specializing in healthcare and IT:
We’re considering integrating AI technology for SEO improvements. Any suggestions?
A:
Leverage AI’s advantages while steering clear of pitfalls.
Find out how below…
How can a staffing firm use AI to improve search rankings and generate targeted traffic?
First, know the pitfalls – and the benefits – of using AI.
So, there are lots of ways you can integrate AI into your SEO efforts. The first is for content creation; however, be cautious. As you are probably well aware, there are some pitfalls with current AI. Here are a few precautions:
- AI can “hallucinate” and give factually inaccurate responses.
- ChatGPT was only trained on data through 2021, so if you a relying on it for content, you may not get complete, current information.
- AI content cannot be copyrighted. So, if you are just using AI content directly, you don’t own it.
Okay, that’s the bad stuff. Let’s get to the good stuff.
- AI is awesome for ideation. Use it to come up with ideas for topics for blogs or longer-form content like eBooks.
- AI dramatically accelerates content creation – use it for a first draft or to help “clean-up” your writing.
- AI can be trained to write with your tone.
To leverage AI’s SEO-boosting advantages, choose the right tool.
There are AI tools that can provide pretty amazing SEO analysis. We employ a variety of AI and non-AI software products to perform market and competitive analysis for our SEO clients. For example, we are starting to use a platform called MarketMuse, which shows us:
- Topics to write about
- The number of posts that need to be developed to achieve goals
- Recommended post length
- And a variety of other information to help plan SEO strategies.
Another advantage of MarketMuse is that it can also be integrated with ChatGPT 4.0 via an API key to provide more advanced capabilities.
In staffing, a winning SEO strategy is twofold.
On the one hand, you need to rank highly for popular keywords and keyword phrases (think: top healthcare staffing agencies). At the same time, however, you must also rank for a wider variety of terms to attract more employers and job seekers to your website.
AI aside, you want the content on your site to become a highly relevant resource for the questions your clients and candidates are asking (and not just questions about staffing and hiring, but anything that is a top priority for them). A successful staffing SEO strategy requires consistent, persistent effort to create all this content. AI makes it easier to create more content and longer content. And as long as you are customizing it, the copyright issue goes away.
Now, there is a very real concern about how Google is going to treat AI-generated content. They initially said that they would not penalize AI-generated content as long as the content was high-quality and relevant to people. There’s been more talk recently about Google being able to detect AI content and that it may have a lesser positive impact on rankings. However, if you are using AI to create topics and/or a first draft and then writing/editing to make the output uniquely yours, this issue won’t be anything you need to worry about.
One last point about AI and SEO…
We are likely to see the nature of search change as Microsoft and Google introduce their co-piloting tools. Today when we do a search, we see a list of search results (i.e., multiple websites). But this is likely to change as we start to use AI tools like Bard and ChatGPT as search engines.
As AI output begins to replace traditional search results, we will want the AI output to include references to our companies. And getting an AI to reference your firm by name will take a very different content strategy. Thinking long-term about SEO, you want to be thinking about how your site will be relevant to AI LLMs as a source of information, and how you get your branded content to appear in those AI responses. We’re just starting to look at how this can be done.
Looking for an SEO partner that’s ahead of the curve?
Haley Marketing’s SEO experts know search engine marketing for staffing firms – and harness AI’s power to deliver even better results for our clients. Ready to learn more? Contact one of our marketing educators today.
