SEO, like most organic and non-advertising or paid channels in digital marketing, is labor-intensive. Yes, there are software suites, analytics platforms, research tools, and a number of other things that help in the tech stack.
We all have our favorites, and no one is (or should) be doing SEO like I was in 2008 (despite my desire sometimes to just do something manually where I can see the inputs and outputs and have more control, but I digress).
In the midst of constant noise about new platforms, new ranking factors, ways to become visible in AI, and everything else, it can be hard at times to keep going with the tasks that still require a human at some level. Whether it is gaining efficiency, scaling efforts, doing more with less, or a combination of these, I’m sharing human-involved ways to streamline time-consuming tasks so you can gain time (and maybe money).
1. Generating Meta Descriptions, Page Titles, Alt Text
I could have started with something more high-level or strategic, but I’m getting this one out of the way right now.
The basic blocking and tackling of ensuring you have unique, helpful, and topically relevant meta descriptions, page titles, and image alt text can be a huge investment of time on a large website or across sites if you own tactical SEO for multiple sites or clients.
While there are ways to semantically have these tags auto-generated by a database or CMS, we know that, in a lot of cases, there’s still a manual process or intervention to audit and ensure that the tags are written to best practices and strategic positioning.
Also, I know that there’s plenty of discussion or debate on whether there’s even value in creating titles and meta descriptions. I’m not going there. But I will say that, if you have any areas where you need to create them and they are on your tasks list, you can spend a lot of hours and the cost of those hours (or outsourced resources) for a minimal return.
Leverage tools based on what you’re already paying for or what tech ecosystem you’re in, like Screaming Frog + OpenAI API + a WordPress plugin, which can save thousands of dollars and many dozens of hours.
Putting It Into Action
Steps for generating alt text at scale:
- Get your OpenAI API key:
- In your OpenAI dashboard at platform.openai.com, go to API keys.
- Create a new secret key and name it something you’ll remember, like Screaming Frog.
- Make sure you have credits in your account (a few dollars can go a long way).
- Set up your Screaming Frog crawl:
- Set up your OpenAI configuration by going to Configuration > API Access > AI. Enter your API Key into the field. Press Connect.
- Set up a prompt to generate alt text by going to the Prompt Configuration tab. Click Add from Library > System > Generate alt text for images.
- Set up your crawl configuration and don’t forget to go to Spider > Rendering and change the rendering mode from Text Only to JavaScript. Then, go to Extraction and, under HTML, check Store HTML and Store Rendered HTML.
- Run a test crawl on one URL to ensure the output works for you. Tweak the prompt if you’d like.
- Run the crawl.
- Export to a CSV.
- Format the file with two columns: image URL, alt text.
- Add this plugin to the site: https://wordpress.org/plugins/alt-text-updater/.
- Upload the file.
- Crawl your site and do manual checks to test that images have alt text.
- Deactivate and uninstall the plugin.
2. Structuring Content Outlines
This might be one of the most common things we do when starting SEO or in periodic content organization, expansion projects, or ongoing content creation. With content being what I call the “fuel” of SEO (and also visibility in AI search), it is still as important as ever to organize it well and present it in a way that makes sense to site visitors and the machines that are also learning it.
While you might not be able to automate this out of the box or in a single prompt in your favorite LLM, you can definitely speed up the process and gain some insights into connections you might not make on content themes on your own (my favorite bonus).
Whether you’re working on a single article, a longer-term content calendar, reorganizing evergreen content, or other content-specific tasks, mastering the art of prompt creation, coaching the AI agent, ensuring the output is good, and using project folders (with brand style guides) in ChatGPT can ensure the quality and speed the more you produce.
Putting It Into Action
Example Prompt
You are an expert SEO who specializes in content writing for [industry]. Your task is to create an outline for an article for [topic]. The article outline should cover the following subtopics:
[subtopic 1],
[subtopic 2],
[subtopic 3].
The article should target the following keywords:
[keyword]
[keyword]
[keyword]
Attached are the HTML files of pages currently ranking well in Google search results to use as guidance. Review the HTML files and generate a content outline.
3. Creating Project Briefs
Going a little higher level into organizing the work we do, connecting desired outcomes to strategies and ultimately to tactics, project briefs are something you might not do every day.
I like to think about SEO in projects or sprints as a way to break up the big nature of ongoing and long-term work that requires short-term progress and tactics. Regardless of how you organize the work, you likely have a lot of varying documentation and information. Whether in sheets, documents, decks, or other sources, you have information that you can feed together into your LLM of choice to have AI organize and sort out.
Whether you’re doing this formally to produce a report deliverable or informally to help your team or yourself organize the minutiae of SEO information, I can point to examples of my team using Gemini to read through a bunch of documents, including meeting notes, personal notes, transcripts, AI transcripts, agendas, competitor lists, research, emails, and more.
This can be helpful for a number of uses, including putting together a document that can be helpful for personal reference, team reference, onboarding, and articulation of the overall knowledge base for stakeholders.
Putting It Into Action
Example Prompt
You are an experienced Senior Marketing Strategist and you’re onboarding your team for [describe project]. Your task is to create a comprehensive project brief for [name of campaign or project].
Ensure the project brief takes into account the following project details:
Objective: [what is the overarching goal of the project]
Target audience: [overview of the demographics]
Key messaging: [provide details about campaign messaging]
Channels: [what channels will be incorporated into the campaign/project]
For the deliverable, the output should include the following:
Project Overview: Include a 1-2 sentence summary of the project
Success Metrics: [provide KPIs]
Budget: [provide financials]
Timeline: [provide deadlines and milestones]
Generate the project brief as a professional, internal-facing document.
Classifying Keywords
Prompt for using the AI function in Google Sheets to classify keywords by search intent, segment, branded/non-branded, etc.
=ai("Act as an SEO Specialist. Classify the following Keyword into exactly one of these Categories: [Informational, Navigational, Commercial, Transactional].
Rules:
Informational: User is looking for an answer or guide.
Commercial: User is researching products/services before buying.
Transactional: User has high intent to buy/convert now.
Navigational: User is looking for a specific website/brand.
Keyword: [Cell Reference, e.g., A2]
Result: Return only the category name with no extra text or punctuation
4. Segmenting Keywords
In SEO today, we’re not focused necessarily on granular keywords. However, they are still important in our research and strategy planning, along with more tactical work in guiding content topic building and creation.
When you do your research and have your list of keywords from any source, you can utilize the Google Sheets AI function to categorize them by topic, pillar, branded/non-branded, localized or not, search intent, etc.
You can also run keywords through an LLM and have it categorize them, export the output, import that back into your spreadsheet, and align it to the data using a VLOOKUP function (a recommendation, as my team thinks the Google Sheet AI function isn’t where we want it to be yet).
While the method I noted also might feel manual and not where we want it to be eventually, with better AI and tooling, it is still much better than doing things manually. I encourage you to use your own spreadsheet logic or “regular expression” (regex) to categorize as much as you can efficiently before going to AI, especially if your dataset is extensive.
5. Documenting Competitor Outlines
While I have to admit that I like to visually check out competitor websites for my first impression and a quick, informal sophistication check, automating this is a huge time-saver.
For example, Gemini is really good at outlining the content structure of a webpage, so my team likes to feed three or four competitor URLs that are ranking well or have high visibility for a topic that we’re building a strategy for, and it can give us an outline of each page. That includes messaging, targeting, and providing baseline content blocks that each page has that we can use when we do content development on our side.
Disclaimer: Just like in the olden days, don’t copy directly and don’t steal. Verify that what you’re getting back out of the tool you’re using isn’t ripping someone off. That’s on us to validate.
Putting It Into Action
Example Prompt
You’re an expert SEO strategist and you’re conducting a competitive content analysis of your client’s page against pages currently outranking it in Google for the search term [keyword]. The client is a [describe client and industry]. The page is [describe purpose of the page and topic].
I’ve attached the HTML files of the client’s page, as well as the HTML files for the competitor pages. Your tasks are to provide me:
An outline for each page of the content blocks present in the HTML
An overview of the messaging, tone, voice
A list of outgoing internal links in the content
Content gaps between the client's page and the competitors
6. Conducting SERP Analysis
We can’t waste impressions and any visibility we get by showing up on the wrong topics. SEO now is about quality, and we can’t miss the mark on search intent.
An example that is a big time-saver is to build your seed keyword list using Ahrefs and then export the keyword list with SERP data. Then, feed that spreadsheet into Gemini and have it provide a breakdown of organic competitors per keyword, intent of ranking organic pages per keyword, etc. This example is a good way to save time from having to review hundreds and hundreds of rows. My team usually filters out AI Overviews and ad placement data to condense it a bit.
This type of work has been helpful in figuring out informational versus commercial intent SERPs at scale so that we’re targeting the right keywords with the right content. It has also been helpful in understanding the level of competition within a topic, so we know what to avoid and what long-tail keywords may represent realistic opportunities.
I will emphasize, though, that it is important to note that the SERPs aren’t 100% accurate, and localization and personalization will change the SERPs that users see. But it’s helpful in comparing keywords against each other. We also do SERP reviews manually to confirm findings. Again, validate as a human what you’re getting from tools.
In Closing
There’s a lot of power in what you can reclaim in time and dollars, leveraging automation, deeper tools use, and the power of AI for SEO. And, you probably detected a theme where, in pretty much everything you do, there have to be solid inputs in order to get useful outputs, which also require human validation and experience to trust.
Regardless of where you are with automation, the goal of being able to do more with less, scale tasks, and not do manual tasks that might have low return on investment is a great way to determine where you should consider doing more with tech and less manual work.
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Featured Image: ArtEternal/Shutterstock
