Manuel says: “Try to focus on quality, and to understand really search intent. Focus on what your audience wants and optimise, refine all your strategies around that rather than working in silos and not taking count all the insights from real data.”

What does quality mean in 2024?

“Nowadays everything is evolving fast. Search engines are implementing new technologies, such as AI. All the technology in our industry is smarter, either because of AI or because of the integration of tools. So, focusing on quality means making sure you don't just deliver content for the sake of delivering content, like a huge quantity of articles or pages, but really try to understand what's best for your users and try to meet the user intent.

Try to understand what they're looking for in the different phases of the funnel, for example, are they willing to buy something or they're looking for more information, and most importantly, what you want them to do, and then build your strategy around that. So, either be sure you've got quality data, because of the cookies, policy changes, and tracking and GA4. It's also really important that we can count on reliable data. The data must provide quality, and must be reliable. But also the output of what we do must be orientated around EEAT. So, must provide quality, must provide value to users, you must become an expert, you must respond to what they want and provide trustworthiness.”

If you deliver the correct user intent, is that how you measure quality?

“Yes and no. Another measure of quality is client retention. The industry is also evolving fast. And you've got big agencies changing clients because the industry is evolving as far as its chronology, so they want to ensure you meet success. So to measure quality for agencies is by client retention. Is the client happy? Are you achieving what they want to see? Are you bringing more traffic to the business, or do you maximise the ROI? Given what they spent, are you bringing back value? I think the quality is also there, ensuring you provide high-quality results, like your drive conversion, you drive value and maximise the budget.”

What does good communication look like with a client to try to ensure that they are happy in an ongoing basis?

“Having quality conversations, meaning, you ensure all the stakeholders and the different teams, whether it's your manager migration, making sure the product team, the dev team, SEO team are in the same conversation. So, you've got everything clear in terms of what are the plans for all the teams and communication must be open. And then making sure you've got all the elements, all the data, all the information from all the teams, for you to be aware of the plants timing and avoid surprises.

We are seeing a lot of automation, a lot of AI tools, the trick here that the real value here to show that we as humans can be smarter than AI. So, in the way we communicate, that struggle we have, let's not hide it, but when you work on client that always struggles coming from unexpected issue. It's about being clear.”

When we are focusing on quality and delivering quality content, how do we incorporate AI into that? How can you do that while at the same time ensuring maximum quality?

“It’s by ensuring client retention. It's about essentially staying on top of what's happening in the market and becoming the expert. Test the new technologies, test the new tools, and show you are all in debt, but also integrate them into your strategy.

I'm now working on big clients, but I've been self-employed for 10 years. It's easier when you work on smaller clients or on your own personal project to test. It's really difficult when you work on big clients to propose tests because, they might have been buggy. So, you can propose A/B testing, but it's more about maybe testing internally on the side. And then try to understand how these tools can be integrated.

It seems like SEOs, or everyone is scared about AI. You shouldn't really use AI to produce content. I's about understanding and defining the separation line and integrating AI as a starting point and to better define content, rather than just copy and paste content.

You should work on different prompts for integrating your strategy, but only as a starting point. When you produce content it should include all the EEAT elements to provide value to users. This means you cannot really copy and paste what ChatGPT is telling you. You should make sure you include case studies, personal point of view, FAQs, multimedia formats of videos, bullet points, like a summary of the findings, etc, because your content must be useful. You can use AI to get there, it's a powerful tool, but you can’t be lazy with it and you have to find the best way to use it.”

Can Google tell when content has been written by ChatGPT?

“From my experience, I'm writing all the content so I make sure it's not just AI generated. I think the ultimate test is not what these AI tools do, it's the quality of the content they produce. So, when you read the content, does it look good, is it readable, is it helpful? These are all important questions to ask of AI-generated content.”

How you differentiate yourself out to everyone else out there?

“One way I'm doing this is by using ChatGPT as a starting point. Once I've done my keyword mapping, I know the intent, I know what the users are looking for around specific topic, and I feed all of that to ChatGPT to have a starting article.

Then I try to add a personal side. The way I do this is by checking online for specific topics, like YouTube videos of experts explaining a how-to-guide or how to do specific stuff. I’ll then use Gemini to condense and provide a summary or bullet points and then I make sure I integrate also that in my article.”

What are the main differences between Gemini and ChatGPT?

“ChatGPT can save a document, so if you ask it to produce an image and save a document, ChatGPT is able to save it as a Word document. For me, this makes it easier to use ChatGPT. I'm working on a tool to automate all of that and use the API. But essentially, using this process, I'm able to send the prompts in different stages, train the AI model, refine the content and article, and have the output saved to a Word document.

You cannot do all of that with Gemini, because it's not there yet. You can't produce images and you can’t save it in a Word or an Excel document. In ChatGPT, you can upload an Excel file, and you can ask it to provide you with the HTML code to have this table on a web page, and it gives you the HTML for the table, but you just upload the Excel, which is also something you can’t do with Gemini.

On the other hand, with Gemini, I've been trying to summarise YouTube videos. With ChatGPT, you cannot do that. It's about understanding the potentials of both tools and getting the best out of them.

In terms of content, I think ChatGPT is going to read an article better. But from what I see, Gemini is still a bit better in terms of long-form content because it looks more human. You also get a bit more insight into if Google is better for shorter things like metadata, because you can ask Gemini to create a suitable page title or meta description.”

Is it necessary for every SEO to be involved natively within Gemini and ChatGPT? Or is it sufficient to use other third-party tools that perhaps exist already?

“AI is getting everywhere, so I think it's about how you position yourself. I'm building my site for brightonSEO with WordPress and AI. So, to optimise metadata, you've got AI; when you build the pages, you can suggest the best format; you can suggest the layout, you've got AI suggesting you the best domain name, you've even got AI in different tools for amendments to content or metadata.

You can use these tools and you can test the output you can see based on your needs and what's best for you and then refine it. It’s important to know the differences between what you can use Gemini for and ChatGPT for. If you can become an expert in this, then you become the vital reference for your team, or your agency.”

Can you be on top of what's happening from a tech perspective and the world of the AI?

“You can't. When ChatGPT was released, they released the API, and then Google was chasing and trying to catch up. Everything was evolving fast and it was impossible for one person or three, four people to stay on top of things. The trick is trying to understand what the best use of AI is because it's impossible to stay on top of everything.”

What’s something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“SEOs should avoid working in silos and try to be smarter. Agencies and everyone now can use a tool instead of asking you what to do or optimise the site which is why the human factor is important. So try to be smarter and understand the technology, but also be honest and try to have a discussion with the clients and find the solution for what's happening. Because of the system and the algorithm, researchers are now smarter; they don't check single ranking signals, but they see the overall picture. They collect data way more data than before, from social media, from everywhere.

It's really important to have a holistic approach, like a broader overarching approach, or try to understand what's the best strategy across channels, what we want to achieve, and how to achieve it. Maybe it's not worth it for you to spend three months optimising speed if there is no return to the client. So, try to understand your local business; maybe you can do something by email, social media, or Google My Business to get there. So, really try to avoid working in silos insiders. Try to check to see the overall picture.

Be smart, be human, and use AI tools and automation to get there.

Manuel Madeddu is the Account Director at Publicis, and you can find him over at Zero Due Design.