Learn to think, and only automate when it makes sense

Kristina says: “Learn to think, automate when it makes sense, and don’t when it doesn’t make sense. Don’t rely on AI.

Know when you need to rely on the alerts from different SEO tools because we are bombarded by them all the time – and we are bombarded by everything AI. Two years ago, AI wasn’t a thing, so it was easier for SEOs. Now you suddenly need to rely on it a lot. However, the best thing that you can do is start relying on yourself first and automate when it makes sense.”

When should you use AI and when should you rely on yourself?

“AI is a great help, as an assistant. It’s not someone who can replace you; it’s your assistant. If you need to create a technical SEO process for a website, for example, the first thing that you should do is think over the business goals of this website, their current tech stack, and what their goals for the site are. You can’t ask AI about that.

Then, once you have created a process, you might have specific tasks – like generating structured data. You can use AI for that, or other tools that can help you. You can also use tools for the checking and auditing of the website.

Use AI as your assistant, but the backbone of what you’re creating and the final delivery of that is something that you need to think over – before you delegate some of the tasks to AI.

So many people were afraid that they would be replaced by AI. However, if you’re doing strategic work at a high level (instead of just generating a couple of title tags for a website), then you will not be replaced. AI is actually going to be your assistant and friend instead of someone who will take over your job.

I don’t want to go deep into the specific prompts here. My point is that you should use AI when it makes sense and use it as an assistant. Rely on your common sense.”

What challenges are SEOs having with thinking correctly?

“In some ways, SEOs aren’t thinking enough, and they are relying on tools too much. It’s not the fault of SEOs; it’s just the way that many things are built. For example, SEO tools will send so many alerts to you. Even Google Search Console will send you things like, ‘your page is not mobile-friendly’ when, in many cases, it actually is. It’s not SEOs’ fault that so many things are on their shoulders.

Also, when you have the core SEO knowledge, and you can rely on that, then you are not turned in different directions by an alert telling you that there is a JavaScript issue on the website, or some structured data is not correct. You can identify if the issue that a tool sends to you is actually an issue or not – and if it’s high-priority or low-priority. If it’s of low priority and impact, then just ignore it. We are not striving for perfection here. Perfection is impossible in SEO.

The bottom line is that you should learn SEO to the level where you can rely on your knowledge, instead of relying on alerts or SEO tools, and know exactly when you need to act on these alerts and when you can ignore them.”

How do you prioritise and decide what needs to be done first?

“I know people will hate me for this, but it depends. For websites that have huge issues with duplicate content, a proper canonicalization strategy is going to be a high priority. For another website that has client-side rendering and Google can’t see any of their content, even though they might have a bad canonicalization strategy, it’s not going to be a priority right now. They need to make sure that Google can seek and render the content so that it can rank in the search results. It really depends on what the issues on website are.

Another thing to consider is the type of website: is it a B2B website or an e-commerce website? E-commerce websites are more likely to have duplicate content and pages generated that you don’t actually need. Also, you need to think about the business goals. If the goal is Black Friday, maybe something needs to be done with the seasonal pages, and that should be the priority.

In order to know what to prioritise for a website, you need to understand the business and SEO. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy. You can’t work with 10 different clients and recommend the same things to all of them. They’ll be at different stages of their business, their business goals will be different, their websites will be different, and the current issues on their websites will be different. It will depend on a variety of factors that you should consider, as an SEO, when providing any recommendations to your clients.”

Do you need to have conversations with leaders in the business to truly understand the key products, goals, and objectives of the business?

“100%. When I was just starting and talking to clients for the first time, I was terrified to ask questions because I thought that they would think I was stupid or that I didn’t understand something. I quickly realised that not asking the right questions made me a bad source of help for these clients because I couldn’t recommend something that would be better for them in their particular situation.

When I changed that mindset – when I started asking questions, rephrasing, and asking the same questions again to make sure that I had all the pieces of the puzzle – it made a huge difference. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. You will look good to your clients and the boss. Even if you have just been hired as an in-house SEO, ask the questions. It will show that you’re interested and that you actually want to bring results instead of working in a silo and not seeing what’s going on around you.”

What does an SEO need to do better in terms of interacting with clients, presenting to clients, and listening to clients?

“I love that you mentioned listening to clients because that was the first thing that I thought of. Listen to clients and make sure that you know the language that they use and what they care about. Then, when you are delivering your recommendations, you can tailor them to what your client wants. Obviously, make sure that it makes sense. Sometimes it doesn’t, and you need to communicate that to the client in a nice way.

Once you have all of your recommendations and you need to present them, don’t ever say that it is for SEO. From my experience, when you just say it’s for SEO, nobody cares about that. Stakeholders will not hear you because it doesn’t mean anything to them. It’s not for SEO; it’s for increasing the number of people who are willing to buy products from this company or order their services. It’s not just for SEO.

Also, don’t use jargon. Don’t say, ‘We need to create a redirect map’. Nobody cares about the redirect map except for you. Instead of that, you can say, ‘We want to make sure that, whenever people come to our website, they can access all the pages that they care about so that they can complete a purchase’ – or whatever the main conversion of the website is.”

If we’re using AI for the work that’s traditionally done by SEO execs, what does this mean for newer SEOs coming into the industry?

“Honestly, I think that AI can be used for good by just replacing some of the things that you can do.

If you’re just starting in SEO, one of the things you will be learning from is keyword research. Many people start with that, and that’s totally great. You’re learning keyword research, and then you’re learning how to optimize the metadata and the headings on the page. If you don’t learn how to do that first, you will not be able to evaluate whether the results you get from AI are any good.

For me, learning SEO doesn’t change. You still need to learn all the steps and go through them all. When you’re comfortable with them, and you know what helpful output should look like, then you can delegate that task. If you’re generating title text, and you know what they look like when they are generated properly, delegate it to AI. Choose the best options and use them for your work with clients. However, you still need to learn what it should look like when it’s done properly.”

Would you be in a dangerous position if you’re asking AI to do something and you don’t know how it’s delivering that and putting everything together?

“Absolutely. As humans, we are always looking for some magic wand that will help us not work and just make money. That’s what all humans want. To my knowledge, though, that’s just not possible at this point. AI is not going to help you just lay on the beach, drinking cocktails and not doing anything, while it does the audits, sends the recommendations to the client, and then implements everything. It’s not going to work that way.

You need to learn first and then use AI as an assistant. Ultimately, a magic wand is a short-term shortcut. It may work for the short term but it’s certainly not going to be part of a long-term business.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“Stop stressing out about the huge number of things that you could potentially do. You can use prioritisation for that. Also, specialising really helps.

When I started in SEO, it was so easy to be an SEO. You needed to know on-page, link-building, and technical SEO. Now, in SEO, there are so many different specialisations. There are people who do content strategy, there are people who specifically talk about algorithm updates and EEAT, there are technical SEOs, and there are international SEOs. If you can find the niche that you want to go into and only choose the battles in that niche, it might save you a lot of time.

The third thing that will save you time is creating processes. Even experienced SEOs will start everything from scratch all the time. If they’re doing a technical SEO audit, they will start from scratch. That doesn’t help because it leads to procrastination and stressing out about what you need to do next.

Start creating processes for your workflows – and then see which parts of the process can be streamlined using AI. You want to at least have a process that you can follow every single time, then you can improve it with each and every client.”

Kristina Azarenko is a Tech SEO Trainer, and you can find her over at TechSEO.pro.