How to Boost Your Website Traffic with AI: Insights from an SEO Expert

Matt: Hi, everyone, and welcome to Around the Product Development, our weekly 25-minute show on hot topics in digital product creation. We cover everything from monetization to innovation, providing actionable insights from the Agile Product Builders Community (APBC), a Slack community powered by Boldare.

This week, our guest is Wojciech Urban, an SEO specialist at Delante. Wojciech lives in Krakow, excels in technical SEO, and frequently conducts training sessions, webinars, and conferences about SEO. He’s also a strategy game enthusiast, a Marvel movie fan, and loves the adventures of Asterix and Obelix. In his free time, he delves into fantasy worlds, learns new stories, and enjoys the mountains. Wojciech, welcome!

Wojtek: Hello, everyone. Hello, Matt. Thank you for having me here.

Matt: How are you, Wojciech? Maybe you can tell us a little bit about yourself because I’ve read so much about you. I’d love to know more about who you are, what you do, and perhaps a bit about your interests. What’s the deal with the Marvel universe? And is it skiing or mountaineering that you enjoy?

Wojtek: More hiking than skiing. I’m Wojciech. Yeah. My career at Delante is very surprising to people because I work with very technical things like AI, but I have a humanistic background. I studied history and journalism. My first love is history, so anything connecting history and pop culture is very interesting to me. Even Marvel fits into this category because when you read comics from different times, you can see how they interact with current events. For example, you can look at the Marvel villains from the fifties and sixties, and their personalities differ based on what was important to people at that time.

Matt: Yeah, sounds good. And you’re an SEO specialist who studied something completely different. So how did that start? Do you also have a passion for it, or how did that happen?

Wojtek: Yeah, when I was doing my studies, everyone kept asking me how much I would earn after graduating. And it was actually a good question. So I started a second degree in journalism because, at that time in Poland, every journal had a history section. I thought there was a niche for a journalist specializing in history. But during my journalism studies, I realized that marketing is way better paid than journalism or history. So I followed the money. Yeah.

Matt: I usually never tell my own story because it’s not that relevant. But I’ll tell you something. I studied literature, which might not seem that exciting. And then, like you, I figured I needed to do something else that might bring me more opportunities. So I started studying political science because I thought it was useful as well. But along the way, I found out, just as you did, that other things are more efficient and equally interesting in another way. So I ended up on the same path as you. Yeah. Interesting.

Wojtek: Yeah, I think it’s a huge advantage actually, because it seems like it has no connection with what I actually do, but that’s not true. When you study history or journalism, you need to understand people from the past, from other countries, and other continents. In marketing, we do the same. This background, where I need to read a lot and write a lot, is also useful in working with SEO, where content is still important.

Matt: I was just going to say, understanding people is crucial because we can move into our topic. I think it’s very important when using SEO, right? Because you’re basically thinking about how people behave on the Internet and how they search, is it not?

Wojtek: Yeah, in the end, what matters isn’t the ranking, clicks, or impressions, but how you interact with users. Do they purchase on your website? Do they convert? Do they engage with your content?

Matt: And maybe it’s a good time to jump to our topic since we’re talking about how to increase your website’s effectiveness using AI. Let’s start broadly. Is AI capable of understanding your audience and creating the right content, similar to a humanist like you with a diverse educational background? How do you see that?

Wojtek: We have a few problems here. Firstly, what does “understanding” mean? It’s problematic when we talk about artificial intelligence and try to use words that we use to describe human behaviors because it’s totally different. The term “AI,” artificial intelligence, isn’t precise enough, in my opinion. It’s like saying, “I see something on the Internet,” when you actually mean “I see something on Instagram.” Similarly, when people talk about AI, they mostly mean ChatGPT, but it’s only a part of the whole area known as artificial intelligence.

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Matt: Yeah. So maybe from your experience, do you use, or do you see tools like ChatGPT being used to increase SEO traffic? Is it something you don’t see often, or is it common in your opinion?

Wojtek: Yeah, I use it a lot, almost every day for various applications. The most natural and first that comes to mind is, of course, content creation. But there is a big difference in how you use tools like ChatGPT for content creation. There’s something you could call single prompt-generated text: you input something, click enter, and voila, you get the text.

Matt: Write the text for me about this and this, right?

Wojtek: Or even optimize the whole process using the API, and in the background, your website is producing more and more content. It’s one way, but it’s not very efficient. There is a problem with this approach because when we look at the process of content creation without ChatGPT or similar tools, you can separate a few steps in this process. First, you need to research the topic and the audience, make a plan, write the text, rewrite the text, and other tasks. AI can do all these things, but not all at once. I don’t want to go into too many technical details, but you can use AI, like ChatGPT, for all these steps separately. If you do that and also incorporate your own knowledge and expertise, you end up with a very good text at a lower cost than without ChatGPT. So yes, you can use it, but how you use it is very important.

Matt: So you shouldn’t fully rely on it; you should not be blindly going in. Instead, you should use it as a tool to support you and still add your own knowledge and background, if I get it correct. Wojtek: Yeah. Very often, when I need to create a brief for a copywriter, I start with ChatGPT to generate the brief. But after that, I clean up every brief by removing or adding something, because we must remember that ChatGPT was trained on the knowledge available on the Internet up to about one and a half years ago, so there is a lot of information it doesn’t have.

Matt: No, yeah, it does not have it. Yes, it doesn’t have it, right. It’s missing context and up-to-date information, still.

Wojtek: And what is also important is that the whole of human knowledge isn’t on the Internet. In the open Internet, there are many books that haven’t been transferred online. For example, history books, which are my specialization, are one of them.

So it’s still important to have a human with very good knowledge and high expertise to contribute to your content, even when creating something that isn’t yet on the Internet.

Matt: And when we talk about content creation with ChatGPT, right, I think it’s something that you said you do sometimes, or I think you do it sometimes, right? And people can recognize doing it as well, right? Creating content. Let’s leave out whether they do it in a simple or difficult way. My question would be, is it actually safe? Do you think it makes sense to use text like that? Does Google recognize it as AI-generated, or does it give the same results? Maybe for some people. And do we create duplicate content, or how does that work?

Wojtek: Actually, it doesn’t matter if Google recognizes it or not. What matters is whether the user is happy or not when reading this content, no matter what the creation process was. For example, you can ask whether it is safe to create content using an external operator who might not be a specialist in this area, who has to write a certain amount of content, and who may not do good research, etc. That can also be harmful. So what matters is the result of the process.

Matt: Are we not afraid, and maybe I’m going too in-depth here, but are we not afraid that Google wants to maintain its position as the search engine of the world and will somehow penalize AI-created content? Because you said it doesn’t matter if Google knows it’s been created by AI, right? So just a follow-up question: maybe they don’t care now, but will they not care in half a year or a year, maybe?

Wojtek: Okay. In the official documentation, they said something similar to what I mentioned before: create content to satisfy the user. Previously, they had a stance that they would penalize content created using artificial intelligence—not in those exact words, but that was the gist. However, they removed that stance eventually. We must remember that eight years ago, in 2016, at the Google I/O conference, they said they aimed to be an AI-first company by 2024, which is this year. So, Google is very open to AI technology and has included a lot of AI technology in their algorithms for some time now.

It’s not a good comparison to pit Google Search against AI because there is already a lot of AI in Google Search. The difference is that Google has a different approach to introducing AI technology compared to ChatGPT. In the USA, not in Europe, we now have something called AI Overview. These kinds of results involve artificial intelligence looking at various sources on the Internet and comparing them to your query based on those sources. This is different from ChatGPT. While ChatGPT sometimes works similarly, explaining the exact differences would require diving into technical details.

What I want to say is that there are many different ways to introduce AI into products. OpenAI is one approach, and Google is another. Google is still a company that won’t fully rely on AI technology. So, I’m not afraid that Google will penalize content generated using AI. What’s really important is having quality in your content—quality information always.

Matt: Yeah. No matter if you use AI or not, right?

Wojtek: Yeah. There is one problem which is the other perspective on using AI because with ChatGPT and similar tools, it is very easy to produce content. And it’s a problem for Google because they need to crawl and scan more and more content, which means higher costs for them. And it’s not just about money; it’s also about ecology because Google wants to be a green, eco-friendly company. They pay attention to things like their carbon footprint.

When we talk about website speed, for example, how fast your website is working, it’s part of these problems. Slower websites mean higher costs for Google to crawl and index them. Google wants to limit their resource usage, including how much energy they need and how much CO2 they produce. So website speed is one of the important factors in Google’s algorithm right now

Matt: Let’s say I’m a business owner and I don’t want to use AI for my SEO, my content, or whatever. I think it doesn’t make sense, or maybe I don’t understand it, right? There can be many reasons why people don’t want to use it. Do I stand a chance against other companies who do use it? Or is the competitive advantage of those who use AI in an efficient way so much greater that you think everyone should basically use it for their SEO strategy?

Wojtek: So generally, it depends on whether in your area or niche there is really potential to use AI or not. If there is potential, then obviously, the competitor company that starts using AI will have an advantage. But as I said, it depends on whether there is a place for introducing this technology in your area.

So my advice would be to learn something about it and start thinking about whether it is possible to introduce AI to your product.

Matt: Then maybe as a follow-up, we talked a little bit about it earlier. I asked you if Google will not penalize companies using AI. How do you see the relationship between AI sources, like ChatGPT, becoming a kind of Google in itself? You know what I mean? I actually know quite a few people in my environment who don’t use Google as I still do. Maybe I’m an old person, but I use ChatGPT, and I also use Google a lot of times to search for something. But I know a lot of people who search on ChatGPT basically. They ask a question on ChatGPT instead of Google. So how do you see the relationship between Google as the search engine and ChatGPT being a search engine in itself and maybe also optimizing to be represented in ChatGPT? How do you see that?

Wojtek: Okay, so I will start by saying that today we had a call with a potential client who found us using ChatGPT. There we go. Yeah, and it’s not the first time. Actually, we have very good visibility on ChatGPT where it mentions the best SEO agency in Poland or something like that. I said that we had good visibility. Of course, we don’t have a tool to measure it, but if I try it myself, I see that we are often recommended. I truly don’t know why. I have a few ideas. For example, we invest a lot in reviews on Clutch and other platforms, which are very trusted sources. So, it could be a way to be present in the ChatGPT results. But still, we don’t know how often ChatGPT updates its knowledge. So, it’s a black box. That could be a problem. But as a user, I stick with Google, and when I learn how ChatGPT works, it’s not a good solution for doing research. There is a huge problem with hallucinations. Okay, part of the results ChatGPT generates for you are true, but another part is not true. Then you need to use Google to differentiate between those things. Is that a real thing or something ChatGPT is hallucinating?

Matt: Maybe another expert opinion from you. So there’s a client at Boldare who has used an OpenAI system to generate product descriptions for a price comparison website. We talked about this before. Creating content, sometimes using an API, saves a lot of time and money. Let’s say you have to write 30,000 product descriptions manually versus doing it with ChatGPT. What are the next steps if you use a solution like that? Is there something you should be aware of regarding SEO? Or is there something you should be careful about?

Wojtek: So it’s a very good way to start generating content on your website. After that, I would go to the Search Console and Google Analytics to find the products that are performing the best. For those top-performing products, I would then have a human polish the descriptions to make them the best they can be. Content generated by ChatGPT is a nice push from the start, but after that, we need to focus on user engagement and convincing the user to trust us. So, having a human refine the content will work best, and we will know which products to focus on because they are performing the best.

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Matt: So it all comes back in the end to using a human still, right? Even though we have an AI solution to fine-tune things.

Wojtek: Yeah, exactly.

Matt: I have one more question for you, actually. Just a short one. What are three things that business owners or people working with SEO and AI should do or should not do? Maybe some do’s and don’ts, some best practices. Could you give us three tips?

Wojtek: Okay, first tip: remember that content is not only text. If you invest in visual content, like graphics and infographics, it can make a big difference. Of course, AI can create visuals, but it can’t produce very informative infographics. Creating such content makes it harder for your competitors to replicate, whereas plain text is very easy to copy. So that’s the first step.

Second, don’t forget about UX. Two weeks ago, some Google documentation was leaked, and we learned that Google uses data from the Chrome browser. This shows that user behavior on your website can be very important for ranking because Google can actually see it.

Third, don’t forget about links. This is a tricky topic. According to Google documentation, all links should be natural. But as practitioners in SEO, we know that sometimes it’s better and quicker to buy links to start generating traffic and improve rankings this way.

Matt: I think this was it. Very useful tips for business owners and people working with SEO and AI. I want to thank you so much for your time. It was a pleasure talking to you. I really enjoyed exploring the topic, and I think we could talk for many more hours about how it will change the future of SEO and search in general. Yeah, let’s see in a while; maybe we can do this meeting again next year to see where we stand and what the predictions are. So thank you again for your time. To the audience, thank you for joining today and listening in. I’m very excited to see you next week again on Monday at 3:00 p.m. CET for our next talk. Wojtek, thank you as well. Have a very nice day. Thank you. Bye-bye.