Why Is SEO A Good Source Of Traffic?

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is one of the best sources of traffic you can get and here’s a few reasons as to why;

• You are putting yourself in front of your target audience exactly when they are searching for you.
• With a good SEO foundation, you could start ranking with minimal investment. Once your efforts start paying off, it will provide a continuous source of traffic for relatively low cost.
• Once your web pages are ranking for their target key terms, it is easier to maintain (depending on the level of competition).
• A good SEO foundation can bring in a lot of continuous traffic for a long time.
• Conversion – searchers are more likely to convert on organic search results when compared with paid ads as they seem more trustworthy.
• Brand building – top search rankings help establish authority and thought leadership in your space – this builds trust and familiarity.
• Compounds over time – SEO is the machine that builds on itself. As more rankings bring more traffic, this signals trust and satisfaction to search engines which then pushes up other pages in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

SEO Vs PPC

While PPC (Pay Per Click) is a great way to get in front of your target audience – quickly!

PPC ads are the “sponsored” listings you see when you search on Google (or Bing, etc.). These listings have paid, well bid, for a spot to be there. Depending on the demand the cost of that bid could be high if the demand is high and/or you’ve not optimised the ad copy or your page.. or low, if the demand is low and/or you have optimised your page and copy.

The notable advantage of a good PPC campaign is scalability. You can get results fast, to optimise fast to then fine tune conversion for maximum sales.

The downside is that PPC is much like a tap, the moment you turn the campaign/ad set off – the ads will stop.

SEO Vs Facebook ads

Facebook ads have been and continue to be a great way to get in front of your customers.

The downside here is that they weren’t searching for you or your product/service. However, you don’t know what you don’t know – and the same goes for your customers.

With Facebook you can hone in and target your audience, group them into different ad set buckets and then optimise each ad on a granular level.

This allows for deep fine tuning of each ad.

The cost of Facebook ads vs PPC is more in favour of Facebook. However, given the nature of the ad – the PPC is more likely to convert as the users are actively searching.

So How Does AI Come Into All Of This?

You may or may not have played with ChatGPT. However it has been one of the biggest tech news since, possibly the internet itself?

ChatGPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) is a Generative AI. Basically a chatbot which has knowledge of pretty much the whole internet (up until September 2021).

AI has been around for a lot longer than that and I have been using the OpenAI playground around early 2022 (released Nov 2021).

Several tools have been built on top of the API and I have been using them for various tasks.

The ultimate question here is how does AI help me with SEO (or any marketing for that instance)? Here are a few ways I use it;

• Content ideas - While I extensively use the mainstream SEO tools for keyword research, I find AI goes beyond that. So SEMRush or Ahrefs will produce a very good list of keywords along with an indication of search volume and competition. AI will take the ideas given here and then expand on this with very clickable titles.
  • According to SERoundtable, 15% of the searches Google sees each day are new! This means not even Google knows what will be searched tomorrow - let alone the third party tools. Whereas AI can build a picture based on a given keyword list.
• Content grouping - With ChatGPT Plus, you can upload a CSV with your keywords and ask the AI to group the keywords into "silo's". This will make internal linking easier and more logical. While it isn't perfect, I find it does 80% of the work and I am left to tidy up the remaining 20%. 80/20!
• Content Outlines - Give the AI a key term and ask it to draft an outline of the article. It will do it very well. I have been using Claude.AI for this and it has been amazing! 9 times out of 10, I find it to perform better than human-written outlines.
• Content Writing - While I would never use AI exclusively to write entire articles (unless I'm testing! 😉 ), some AI writers do write exceedingly well. The AI tools I use, I am able to input custom prompts for it then to use while writing. I have found AI to create really well written articles, which yes - do require fact checking, but ultimately it will have done the majority of the heavy lifting.
• Images! - With tech like Midjourney and Leonardo.AI, image creation is as simple as entering a prompt in the form of a few select words.