If you’re thinking about how to solve your SEO problem, options abound. There is software on the market that can help you scale if you have a high level of expertise. There are agencies that do the work for you and promise astounding results, but are limited significantly by human capacity.
Agencies do highly personalized, tailored work for their clients. Software is highly scalable, transparent, and keeps the control in-house.
But there’s a better way.
Tech-enabled services (TES) accomplish the best of both agencies and software: personalization and scale. TES is both software, and services. Rote, repetitive, and software-enabled tasks bring down costs, while the human touch ensures that you’re not sacrificing strategic decision making. It also makes customers faster in their day-to-day work. And pure services are retained where subject matter expertise is the only option.
Together, personalization and scale mean you’re sprinting in the right direction, driving results from SEO faster than you can with any other model.
Today, Demandwell is launching two new tech-enabled services. Both in the spirit of marrying personalization and scale, human and machine, to achieve greater SEO outcomes.
One is a highly scalable internal linking tool that doesn’t sacrifice expertise. The other is an AI content writing service. Both leverage software for scale, but ensure a human touch where it matters most.
Let’s dive into each:
How are most people solving this today?
Our customers take two approaches today. Manual, and automated. The problem with manual is, well…it’s manual. But the outcome of manually linking your relevant pages together to create topic clusters for Google to understand the depth and breadth of your expertise is HIGH.
John Mueller, Senior Search Analyst and Search Relations Team Lead at Google said in March 2022,
“Internal linking is super critical for SEO.
I think it’s one of the biggest things that you can do on a website to guide Google and visitors to the pages that you think are important.
You should really have normal HTML links between the different parts of your website.
And ideally, you should not just have a basic set of links, but rather you should look at it in a strategic way and think about what you care about most and how you can highlight that with your internal linking.”
So it supports your site visitors as they navigate through your site. And it helps web crawlers navigate the maze of expertise that is your site. Think of it as a map of roads and tunnels where you’re pointing people to the places you want them to go.
While automated versions of this are fast and super easy (thanks to modern CMS norms), they aren’t very impactful. Think: related blog posts at the bottom of each of your posts. But it just doesn’t get the job done from an SEO perspective. Why? Because the “related” posts are based on tag (i.e. blog/case study/FAQ), instead of clustering content by target keyword. It’s like if you had a map with only highways on it that connected all of the major cities of the US, when what you needed is a detailed map of just one metropolitan area.
How does Demandwell solve this now?
Internal linking can get a keyword from page 5 or 6, to the first page when leveraged correctly. They’re one of the last legs of the race to the top of the SERPs.
The Demandwell Internal Links WordPress Widget will boost rankings dramatically when configured correctly. The impact will be as high as manual linking, without the time wasted.
Imagine being able to set up links to all of your most important pages with a few clicks in Demandwell, and having those changes pushed live to your site through a WordPress plug in.
It’s this easy:
And each page published and linked moves up the SERPs as a result.
How are most people using AI for SEO today?
It’s been clear for a while now that AI is transforming how marketers write copy. But when it comes to SEO, you cannot write high-performance content with just the click of a button. It requires more human involvement to be successful.
Let’s put AI writing solutions into two buckets.
On the one hand, we have AI Writing Assistants that make content writing much more efficient. These tools are an “assistant” integrated with your text editor that helps you type as you go. For SEO copywriting, it may suggest keywords to add and build out content outlines, and it can help suggest your next sentence or even your next paragraph.
These tools can help content writers save hours of time, but still need a content writer behind a keyboard to be heavily involved with the writing process.
The other solution is AI long-form writing. This is where you input a set of instructions and the AI will write an entire piece of long-form copy in minutes. This can get a lot written in a short amount of time, but we wouldn’t recommend publishing that content as-is. (Here is Google’s guidance on AI content, take a look for yourself!)
Google has always, and will always, try to prioritize an excellent experience for searchers. And they’ll always reward sites that provide helpful, authentic, and unique content. Unless you have human touch involved and edit the content, you run the risk of creating more noise that doesn’t warrant attention from searchers or search engines.
How does Demandwell solve this now?
Demandwell’s Managed AI Content Service builds off of AI long-form writing. With Managed AI, AI-written, long-form copy is written based off of specially-formatted SEO outlines, and put through an extensive editing process to ensure the quality to rank on page one.
We know that AI increases the scale of content production, but cannot be counted on to get the job 100% done. What Managed AI accomplishes is full-service SEO content production in less time and at a fraction of the cost.
If you want to create really great content that will rank well in the SERPs, a few things need to happen:
These are the things that Demandwell’s Managed AI Content Service does.
The best way to drive outcomes with SEO is through a combination of software and services. This scales the things that are tedious, and retains the expert touch where required.
The new Demandwell Internal Links WordPress Widget and Managed AI Content Service both marry personalization with scale, driving outcomes faster and more cheaply for Demandwell customers.