Writing SEO articles with AI — the seven steps, and the one you cannot delegate

The seven steps

1. Narrow to keywords you can win

Chasing high-volume terms does not put a small site on page one. Target queries with specific intent that competitors have treated carelessly. Not 'AI tools' but 'meeting AI free tier limits' — three conditions stacked, and far more likely to be clicked.

After a few months of Search Console you know which queries already show your pages. Anything ranking between eight and twenty can plausibly reach page one with a new article or an edit. Harvesting that band beats finding keywords from scratch.

2. Break down intent — this is a good AI task

List ten things someone searching that query wants to know. Models are good at this. Ask for the searcher's situation and ten questions in priority order, and two or three perspectives you would not have had will appear.

Do not turn all ten into headings. The article goes thin. Keep three to five and push the rest into separate articles. That narrowing decides the quality of the piece.

3. Outline — generate, then cut

Hand over the narrowed points and ask for a heading structure. What comes back is comprehensive and padded, with empty sections like 'Introduction', 'Summary' and 'Future outlook'. Cutting those is the human job.

• Put the conclusion in the first section — readers do not start at the top and continue
• The headings alone should carry the answer
• Delete sections with no content. 'Introduction' is not needed
• If a section can be a table, make it a table

4. Draft section by section

Generating the whole article at once produces uneven density and repeated points. Specifying, per section, what it must answer and roughly how long it should be gives you something workable.

What comes out is not usable as it stands. Vague qualifiers, unsupported assertions and the same idea restated three ways all appear. Read it back and put it in your own words. Skipping this leaves the prose so evenly patterned that it reads flat.

5. Fact-checking — the step never delegated

Pricing, free-tier limits, the vendor's company name, which integrations exist. These four are where models are most often wrong, and the error arrives as fluent prose, so rereading does not catch it. There is no substitute for opening the official pricing page and checking line by line.

Never cite a roundup or a comparison site. When this site researched Japanese meeting tools, several roundups still listed a discontinued service as a free option; the official page said plainly that it had closed. Second-hand sources do not get updated.

Put the date of the check in the article. Prices change, and 'as of November 2026' extends the article's useful life while letting the reader decide to verify.

6. Internal links — after the writing

Add links once the body is finished. Deciding links first means adding an unnatural sentence to carry each one. Choose the page a reader of that section would want next.

Three to five per article is the useful range. More makes the body unreadable; fewer leaves the page isolated, and isolated pages are hard for search engines to value.

7. Measure — this is where the article is finished

Two to four weeks after publication, impressions appear in Search Console. Watch two numbers: position and click-through rate. High position with no clicks means the title and description miss the intent. Low position means the content is insufficient. The first can be fixed by Thursday.

Titles are truncated in search results, so put the query term early and keep the brand name out of it, or short and at the end.

Frequently asked questions