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Combining AI and SEO strategy with Eastern Standard
Generative AI continues to transform search engine optimization (SEO), making it more important than ever to understand how tools like ChatGPT interpret website content.
With this in mind, the team at Eastern Standard, a leading digital strategy and design firm and WP Engine agency partner, conducted an insightful experiment to find out how ChatGPT processes and responds to different types of website content.
In addition to their website, the Eastern Standard team analyzed content from various B2B, healthcare, higher education and non-profit websites to evaluate ChatGPT's ability to understand and interpret various content formats and identify areas for improvement.
The results revealed important insights that you can use in your own SEO strategies as you navigate the evolving age of AI.
To find out more, we sat down with Jim Keller, co-founder and Chief Digital & Technology Officer of Eastern Standard, who gave us a deeper look at the results.
Read on for a summary of our conversation.
Thank you, Jim. Before we discuss the results, can you tell us more about Eastern Standard and the projects you specialize in?
Eastern Standard is a branding and digital agency originally based in Philadelphia but now operating a fully remote team. We help a variety of clients get the most out of their digital presence through audience research and targeting, SEO and content strategy, UX and design, web development and CMS implementation, and ongoing site optimization.
Our client base is very diverse, but we have a strong portfolio in higher education, healthcare, B2B and professional services, and nonprofits.
What exactly did you do in terms of the exercise you conducted with ChatGPT and what were you hoping to find out?
We wanted to better understand how AI tools read and interpret content. Our customers were asking how AI should influence their content strategy, and we needed a way to offer concrete guidance rather than just high-sounding intuition.
We ran an experiment where we took content from many websites and put it into an AI-readable format, then fed it into an OpenAI language model. We started asking simple questions: For a university, we might ask, “How much does it cost to apply?” or “How do I schedule a visit?”
Eastern Standard used a custom web scraper and OpenAI’s API to better understand how AI tools read and interpret content.
At first we got pretty unsatisfactory answers, so we refined our prompts and updated our approach. Then something interesting happened.
While we still occasionally received unsatisfactory responses, this was not because the code was broken, but because of actual deficiencies in the content or content structure. This prompted us to use the tool to make specific improvements to the content strategy.
In your findings, you note that generative AI doesn't just pick up keywords but interprets content, which is why it's crucial to create clear, complete, and well-structured content. Can you elaborate on the specific nuances content creators should pay attention to to ensure their work is well interpreted by AI?
The first thing we noticed was that the AI liked descriptive, fully worded text that it could easily read and interpret. Long paragraphs and other clear, descriptive sentences allowed it to deliver the most accurate and reliable results.
Of course, we don't want to just write huge walls of text, but content creators should take every opportunity to use clear and complete text phrases to answer specific questions.
For example, instead of writing “We offer a variety of paid media and digital marketing services,” go a step further and give the AI something to really think about: “Our agency offers pay-per-click advertising campaign management, content strategy and copywriting, landing page creation, technical SEO, and link building services.”
Content creators should take every opportunity to use clear and complete text phrases to answer specific questions.
If you use lists, grids, or other visual elements to break up text content, this is fine. However, it is important that your site uses the best semantic HTML markup for this.
Many websites use
Elements for content that should be structured in a more specific tag, such as
In one of your tests, ChatGPT incorrectly concluded that a hospital does not provide medical services due to a disclaimer. How can organizations ensure that AI correctly interprets their essential content while maintaining the necessary legal language?
Ultimately, I don't think it's a problem to keep legal language. We don't have any specific conditions built into our tool for legal language, but Google is smart enough to know that certain content falls into a special category.
I think the conclusion here is that there is some sort of “relative strength” of the language used on the website that can influence AI. Going back to the point above, the legal language was clear, complete, and contained definitive and declarative statements.
When compared to other areas of the site that might have been relevant to the same query, the clearer answer “won.” So again, it’s all about making sure your copy content is full of specific answers and not just marketing jargon.
You've found that old content can confuse ChatGPT, resulting in outdated or incorrect responses. What best practices do you recommend for maintaining and updating web content to avoid such issues?
You shouldn't be afraid to remove old, outdated content. Content is still king, but that doesn't mean more content is always better.
For our website relaunch last year, we reduced the number of blog posts by about 70%. There were too many posts that had little or nothing to do with our lead generation or conversion strategy, so after some internal discussion, we decided to just cut them.
Based on past experience, crawl data and analysis, we were convinced this was the right move. We used the “410 Gone” code (which is not as common as 301 or other codes) for these pages to indicate, “Yes, we intentionally removed these pages.”
The strategy worked: The remaining, highly relevant blog posts in many cases reached top positions, including highlighted Google snippets.
“You shouldn't be afraid to remove old, outdated content. Content is still king, but that doesn't mean more content is always better.”
However, AI bots and search engines are intelligent enough to weigh newer from older content as long as there are clear signals about what is newer and what is not.
However, we often see that these signals – proper meta tags or even a date in a press release – are either not present, are not accurate, or are hidden so that it is not clear to a text parser: “This date means the page was published on this day.”
So if you don't want to remove content, make sure your page's meta tags are present and correct, including those that indicate publication dates.
How has the increasing use of generative AI in search engines influenced your overall SEO strategy for clients across different industries?
Knowing that content is being read and interpreted by AI has led us to add more blocks of text than we might have before, but ultimately most of the tactics we learned from our AI experiment are not new.
Good page structure and markup, clear and direct content, and effective meta tags are practices that should be in place even before the introduction of artificial intelligence. However, they are more important than ever because artificial intelligence will interpret content differently than current crawlers and parsers.
AI interprets content differently than traditional crawlers and parsers, which is why clear page structure, concise content and effective meta tags are more important than ever.
After the AI ingests the content, it's as if we have access to a person whose only knowledge of the world comes from the website. We ask ourselves, “Given the content of the website, how would this person answer this or that question?”
If we are not convinced that our protohuman has the answer, we need to work even more on the content.
Given your findings, what proactive steps can companies take to review their existing content and better align it with the interpretation capabilities of generative AI?
- Delete old content that may provide outdated, irrelevant or contradictory answers
- Don't miss the opportunity to answer questions clearly and completely in the text content of your site.
- Take this opportunity to review your website for practices that do not have a positive impact on SEO, regardless of generative AI. For example:
- Content or important information embedded exclusively in graphics or images
- Use general messages instead of answering specific questions.
- Combining too much different content on a single page
- No use of semantic HTML tags
How do you think the integration of AI tools like ChatGPT in the context of website management and content creation will evolve in the next few years?
There's enough to read on this topic to fill an article of its own, but I think it's safe to say that AI will assist humans in many different roles. It's likely that it will become embedded in our workflows and processes, just as something like Slack is completely intertwined with the way we do our work.
When it comes to content creation, AI is already a great tool, especially if you rely on it for ideas, drafts, and revisions rather than for producing the final text.
And while every software tool seems to be scrambling to integrate it regardless of need, there are already helpful productivity additions like Jira's AI tool that lets you create queries in plain language instead of query language, so once the initial hype dies down, we'll have some practical and extremely useful extensions to our existing tools.
Thanks, Jim!
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