How We Are & Aren't Using AI

Remember playing on the see-saw at the park when you were a kid?

Up, down.. creeeek, creek… a fun, yet strategic ride. 

That’s kind of how it feels incorporating AI into our business model, at least at the moment. Establishing a fluid rhythm and fostering a fair balance is at the forefront of most of our conversations. 

Striking any balance is challenging, considering how AI and our agency constantly evolve. 

Since we’re often asked how we are or aren’t using AI in the agency, we created this article detailing just that. 

But a disclaimer ahead of the article — we believe AI is the future and technology with full merit and potential. We’re constantly evaluating and adapting our strategies as AI evolves, and we aim to consistently discover responsible, effective ways to incorporate it into our services. Everything in this article will undoubtedly change, but for now, this is how we’re doing things. 

Okay, let’s look at how we integrate AI into our operations and where we draw the line to keep our human touch. 

How We Are Using AI

Snippets on Google

Leveraging AI, specifically GPT-4, we’ve refined our approach to capturing those coveted Google snippets. 

Let’s break this down a bit further.

We use GPT4 to understand better why Google chooses a particular snippet, at least from a content point of view. From there, we’ll determine how we can improve our content to have a better chance at competing. Here we’re looking at and for:

• Keywords or phrases used
• Snippet form (paragraph, numbered list, etc.)
• If it’s a paragraph snippet, then at the sentence structure
• User intent (what specifically do they need answering)
• Where the snippet text is being pulled from (a dedicated sub-section, a short FAQ, the intro paragraph, etc.)
• The main topic of the post ranking for the snippet so we can decide whether to optimize an existing piece of content (competing for the same topic) or create a new post targeting said topic.

Once we grasp the above, we’ll use AI to generate an appropriate framework and then manually adjust the output better to match the brand’s voice and overall question tone. 

Guest Post Outreach Emails

Regarding guest post outreach, AI comes into play by inspiring our initial pitches. This ensures our communication is efficient but also personalized and impactful, increasing our success rate in securing valuable guest posting opportunities.

To Build Tools and Calculators

Our team has harnessed AI to create innovative tools and calculators, enhancing user engagement and providing real value. 

From calculators that estimate calories burned while jumping rope to converting watts to amps, these tools are designed to meet our client’s specific needs while boosting their online presence. 

We’ve also found that relying on AI to generate these smaller tasks allows the devs we work with and our client’s devs to focus on more critical tasks. Why spend expensive dev hours on a small coding initiative when our SEO team and AI can handle the job? 

Ideation for Guest Post Content Titles and Outlines

AI aids us significantly in the ideation process for guest post content, from crafting compelling titles to outlining valuable and relevant articles. This process ensures our content is not only engaging but also highly targeted towards our audience’s interests and needs.

Building Custom Browser Extensions and Writing Schema

Developing custom browser extensions and writing schema markup are complex tasks that AI has made more accessible for us. By streamlining part of the process, we can focus on customization and innovation, providing our clients with unique solutions that stand out.

We’ve found that the main benefit of writing schema with AI is that we don’t have to write it from scratch or use existing tools with rigid outlines. Instead, we input the relevant client information, and GPT creates the initial outline. Once we have GPT’s outline, we’ll manually fine-tune the output or send subsequent follow-up requests until everything’s perfect. 

Google Sheets Formulas

We use AI to write accessible and medium-level formulas that allow us to clean up and manipulate data sets for our client’s sites. As you can imagine, this is a time saver and improves our team’s overall efficiency during the audits we constantly do on client sites. 

Typically, we use VLOOKUP across multiple tabs in Google Sheets, allowing us to slash the hours involved in manually matching up data. 

How We Aren’t Using AI

To Write Content That’s Published on Client Websites

We prioritize accuracy and authenticity in the content we publish on behalf of our clients. Given the inherent risks of factual inaccuracies with AI-generated content, we choose not to rely on AI for creating website content. 

Further, our curated team of content writers possess a nuanced understanding of our client’s industries, ensuring our content is accurate and tailored to every client’s needs.

Clients Aren’t Keen to Gamble

Our clients currently prefer not to gamble on the potential risks associated with AI-generated content. 

The most significant potential risk is future algo updates that negatively impact or penalize sites publishing AI-generated content. Many of our clients generate millions in revenue yearly, so if any algo update targeting AI content impacted their website rankings, it would be catastrophic. Instead, for now, most of our clients are opting to value the proven reliability of human-written content. 

Clients Using AI Content to Test

If clients are keen to use AI content on their sites, we encourage them to conduct their tests and publish their own AI content. Not only does this allow our clients to retain control over their AI content production, but it mitigates any risk for Swish DM were there ever to be any negative result. 

Further, it allows everyone to monitor the progress and results of AI content over human-written content. What we’ve observed so far is varied results, with AI content often underperforming our curated human-written entries. 

Will We Use AI on Client Sites?

The possibility of integrating AI into our content creation process remains open. 

We’re actively testing AI content on many of our in-house websites and projects to determine the most effective and responsible way to incorporate AI into our future SOPs, ensuring any future use aligns with our commitment to quality and client satisfaction.

Chat Bots for Customer Support

Unlike many agencies, we’ve not adopted AI-powered chatbots for customer support on client sites. While AI chatbots serve specific industries well, we’ve found that our current client roster wouldn’t necessarily benefit from deploying such tools. Our focus continues to remain on providing personalized, human-led interaction.

Replying to Emails or Correspondence

All correspondence, including email and message replies, are crafted by our team members. We value our clients’ time and input too much to hit them with automated responses to their correspondence with us. 

Image Generation

AI-generated imagery is not part of our toolkit for client websites. We prefer to use original, carefully selected visuals that accurately represent our clients’ brands. Pending access and budget, we encourage clients to invest in image generation, especially in the eCommerce space, to guarantee cohesive branding. 

Keyword Research

Yes, AI for brainstorming is awesome, and while we often use AI to get the cogs turning, we prefer to carry out in-depth, manual keyword research. We find that doing manual keyword research for our client’s campaigns allows us to understand certain things better, like user intent, strategizing a plan to integrate keywords into our existing strategy, quick wins, and more. 

Keen to Chat About AI or Work With Us? Reach Out.

It seems like all we’re talking about is AI, but why wouldn’t we be? It’s the biggest gear shift in technology we’ve seen since we’ve been doing SEO these last ten years, and it’s fundamentally changing how society works. 

We know we’re only scratching the surface of what’s to come, and we’re excited to see how this continues to further Swish DM in the future. 

If you’re intrigued by our approach or interested in discussing how AI could play a role in your digital marketing strategy, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us to explore how we can work together to achieve your goals.