After nearly 20 years in digital marketing, AI has changed the way I work. This transition has been meaningful, freeing up time, making the job less arduous, and speeding up some really difficult tasks.
That doesn’t mean we’ll do the work for you, transform everything overnight, or save you 40 hours a week. In the real world of SEO, with real clients and real deadlines, SEO is a tool that simplifies some of the work, not replaces the work itself.
Here are 20 methods that I actually use. Some are specific to SEO. Some of the content is more extensive, but relevant to everyone working in the industry. They’re all practical, tested, and honest about their limitations.
Content creation and copywriting
1. Write the first draft
The single best way to use AI in your content is to stop expecting it to produce something publishable and start treating it as a very fast first draft machine.
- Enter your brief, target keywords, audience, and angle. Restore the structure.
- Then rewrite it in your own voice. Add expertise that only you know, not the vanilla version online.
The content that AI generates out of the box is average. Your job is to make it good. We reference real stories, case studies, statistics, and offer personal perspectives and expertise.
You can save time by not starting with a blank page.
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2. Generate variations of meta titles and descriptions
Specify your target keyword, page topic, and character limit in Claude or ChatGPT. Request 10 variations of your meta title and description. You may use one or even a combination of the two, but the process takes 2 minutes instead of 20 minutes. For large sites with hundreds of pages, this alone is worth the subscription.
Many tools allow you to upload a CSV file, add AI-suggested ideas, and download it for review. Don’t skip this step. The human eye is where we determine value
3. Update poorly performing content
Paste an existing page or blog post that has lost rankings. Let AI identify what’s missing, what can be expanded upon, and what feels outdated.
It’s not always true, but it gives you a starting point instead of reading everything yourself with fresh eyes you don’t have at 4pm on a Thursday.
Be sure to give context. Long prompts with lots of details produce much better results than cold pasting the page.
4. Generate FAQ section
Have the AI generate the 10 most common questions for your target keywords. Cross-reference with People also Ask and your own research.
Once you answer, you’ll see a FAQ section, featured snippet opportunities, and content gap analysis in about 10 minutes.
5. Write alternative text at scale
No one enjoys writing alt text for 200 product images. Describe the image, give the context of the page it’s placed on, and include your target keywords. Then request text alternatives that are descriptive and naturally include relevant terms. Not glamorous, but necessary and quick.
You can also run your website through Screaming Frog, export it to a CSV file, upload it to the AI of your choice, and ask it to create alt text for you. This only works if the file names are easy to understand, but the human eye is still important. This is not a matter of leaving it entirely to AI, but rather speeding it up.
Dig deeper: How to use AI for SEO without losing your brand voice
Technical SEO
6. About error messages and log files
Not everyone involved in SEO comes from a developer background. AI is useful for:
- Translate technical error messages.
- Let me explain what the server logs show.
- Helps you understand why pages are excluded from indexing.
Paste the output, ask them to explain it to you in plain English, and then ask them what to fix. Check your answer. However, this almost solves the problem.
7. Writing schema markup
Although we all know Schema should be done more, no one particularly enjoys it.
Describe your page’s content to the AI of your choice, tell it the relevant schema types (FAQ, article, local business, product, etc.), and ask it to generate JSON-LD.
Please check with Google’s rich result test before implementation. Previously, it took 20 minutes per page type. Now it takes five.
8. Creating regular expressions for Google Search Console
If you’re using regular expressions in GSC filters and you’re not a developer, AI is your new best friend. Explain what you’re trying to filter, for example all URLs with a specific subfolder, or all queries with a specific term, and ask for a regular expression string.
It runs correctly most of the time and you can ask for explanation of the logic so you can actually understand what you are implementing.
9. Analyzing crawl data using prompts
If you export a crawl from Screaming Frog or Sitebulb and aren’t sure what to prioritize, paste the summary data into an AI tool and ask it to identify the highest priority issues based on your site’s goals.
It’s not a replacement for your expertise, but it’s a useful sounding board when you’re staring at a spreadsheet with 47 issues and a client call within an hour.
Dig deeper: 6 tactical ways to use AI responsibly in your everyday SEO
Reports and analysis
10. Write a story centered around numbers
This is one of the most underrated uses of AI in SEO work. The data is there. I have a graph. What takes time is writing an exposition that explains what happened, why it happened, and what will happen next.
Feed the AI with your key metrics and the context of what happened that month (algorithm updates, campaign launches, seasonality) and ask it to draft a description section of your report. Edit and add real insights, but don’t write from scratch every month.
You can also upload reports from different data sources and ask us to combine and summarize them. This saves you time compiling reports each month.
11. Summarize long reports for clients
Not every client wants to read a 12-page report. Have AI summarize your report into a five-point executive summary. Pass it to the client at the beginning of the document.
Read on if you want more details. Those who don’t will feel informed without having to ask you to discuss all your charts on your next call.
For those who don’t know anything about SEO, having AI create an executive summary is simple and easy to understand.
12. Identifying data anomalies
Paste a table of your keyword rankings or traffic data and ask the AI to flag anything that looks unusual, such as large drops, unexpected increases, or patterns that don’t match previous periods.
This is not a substitute for proper analysis, but it can be a useful first pass if you are managing large amounts of information and cannot pay enough attention to every data set.
Dig deeper: How to build trust in AI within your SEO team
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Research and competitor analysis
13. Conducting a Competitor Content Gap Analysis
List your top three competitors and your site. Ask your AI to help you consider content topics that it is likely to cover that you haven’t, based on its positioning and target audience.
Then validate it using real keyword research tools. Although AI cannot directly see competitor data, it can help generate hypotheses before doing manual work.
14. Understand new industries quickly
If you’re working with a client in an industry you’re unfamiliar with, you’ll need to quickly familiarize yourself with the situation. Let AI give you a primer on the industry.
- Important terms.
- Main players.
- purchase cycle.
- How people usually look for solutions in this field.
- What are the common problems?
This saves you embarrassing hours of discovery calls.
15. Identifying search intent mismatches
Paste a list of target keywords and ask the AI to categorize them by search intent, such as informational, navigational, commercial, transactional, etc. Then compare it to the type of page you’re targeting.
You will almost certainly find a discrepancy. This is easy to explain, but tedious to do manually for hundreds of keywords.
Dig deeper: How to use AI response patterns to build better content
Client communication and account management
16. Writing difficult customer emails
We’ve all had to write a difficult email asking why our rankings dropped, why we missed a deadline, why we had to do something we knew we didn’t want to do.
Writing these emails requires a disproportionate amount of emotional energy. Give the AI the situation, the context, what you want the client to understand and do, and ask for a clear, professional and honest draft.
Please edit. Please send it. move on.
17. Create SOPs and process documentation
If you want to document your processes but haven’t done it yet, AI removes the excuses.
Describe the process out loud (or in rough notes) and then paste and request a structured SOP with numbered steps, decision points, and notes.
The first version needs editing, but having a framework to work with is the difference between finishing it and leaving it on next quarter’s to-do list.
18. Preparing for calls with clients
Paste your recent report data, previous month’s issues, and what you need to cover before your client call.
Let AI help you structure your agenda based on data and predict the questions your clients might ask. You’ll be more prepared for the call and less likely to be caught off guard.
productivity and management
19. Process your own thoughts
This sounds vague, but it’s one of the ways I use AI the most.
If there’s an issue I can’t articulate, if I’m going back and forth on strategic decisions, or if there’s a piece I can’t find the right angle for, I discuss it with Claude (my AI friend of choice) to clarify my thoughts. Asking questions and reflecting on things helps you reach perspective faster than staring at a blank document.
Ask your AI to be brutally honest. Otherwise they will continue to agree with you and claim that you are the true expert on every topic.
20. Create prompts that you actually reuse
The biggest productivity gains from AI will not come from individual use. Build a library of prompts that work in your specific workflow and reuse them consistently.
Save your prompt every time you get good results from your AI tool. Instead of starting from scratch each time, build your system over time. This is something that most people ignore and it makes things even more complicated.
Top tip: Paid versions of many AI tools allow you to create projects and provide specific instructions for each one. This is a great time saver as you don’t have to include all this information in every prompt you use.
Digging deeper: Why SEO teams need to ask “Should we use AI?” It’s not just “Can we?”
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What these use cases cannot replace
None of these tips can replace the expertise, judgment, and client relationships that make you a great SEO professional.
AI doesn’t understand your business the same way you do. They don’t understand the nuances of your industry, the history of your business partners, or the idiosyncrasies of the contacts you interact with on a regular basis.
AI reduces time spent on tasks that don’t require expertise, making more expertise available for tasks that do.
Utilize AI as a tool. Stay skeptical of the hype. Also, be sure to edit everything before displaying it to your client for better search results.
Dig deeper: Could AI eventually make SEO obsolete?
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