AI Actions for SEO: Six of the best automation optimizations

We’ve all heard about how artificial intelligence is going to change the world, but what will that really look like? Smart homes? Self-driving cars? Robot butlers?

It’s probably not worth getting ahead of ourselves about the future (although, you can put us down for a robot butler when they hit the shelves) because there are plenty of ways that AI is transforming the way we do things right now. 

In fact, Contentful is actively shaping the future of AI-driven digital marketing, and one of our newest features, AI Actions, takes content management capabilities to an entirely new level. 

As an add-on for customers on our premium plans, AI Actions embed generative AI (GenAI) into your workflows to streamline the content management process. AI actions are designed to take the manual friction and tedium out of content creation and publication, helping you build new, automated efficiencies into your day-to-day, and, ultimately, optimize and scale your content effortlessly.

It’s there to make life easier for your hard-working content creators, editors, and developers — who are freed up to focus on the valuable strategic and creative tasks that they’re much better at, and that only they can do. 

Integrated AI tools for SEO, marketing, and more

Simply put, AI Actions changes the way that digital teams, content strategists, marketers, and search engine optimization (SEO) professionals work together on content and campaigns. 

And, while the tool is designed to support professionals of all disciplines, in this post we’re focusing on its SEO applications it puts at the fingertips of your content team. Whether you need to overhaul content discoverability across your entire site, or refine a single blog to nudge it a few places up Google’s search engine results page (SERP), AI Actions can help everyone in the content workflow do their part in the fight for SEO inches.

Added GEO value

It’s worth mentioning that, these days, all SEO discussion should include a mention of generative engine optimization (GEO). That’s because most search engines now deliver GenAI outputs in their SERPs. Google’s output, for example, “AI Overviews,” appears prominently, right at the top of the SERP — which is, obviously, a nice place to be. 

With that in mind, any optimization you apply to your content — including AI Actions — also now benefits visibility and discoverability for large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. 

The 6 best AI Actions for SEO automation

How does AI Actions actually help SEO? Good question. Here’s a list of the top AI Actions SEO templates (at least, in our humble opinion).

These aren’t in any particular order but, from an SEO perspective, each promises to boost your content’s performance in winning those coveted SERP top spots. 

Want to see AI Actions... in action? Explore our guided tours that bring key features of AI Actions to life.

1. SEO keyword optimization

There’s a clue in the name, but keywords essentially unlock the search potential of your content — if you can use them effectively. 

That means you not only need to know what keywords to use, but embed them into your content in a natural way. 

The AI Actions SEO keyword optimization does that for you. Once your content is in place in one of the relevant fields, you select the SEO keyword optimization automation from the handy drop-down menu, and then enter the keywords that you want to optimize for, at the density you want. AI Actions automatically adds those keywords to your content in a strategic and natural-sounding way. It’s that easy.

Keep in mind, keyword density can be delicate and so it’s critical that you use keywords naturally in your content. If you increase the density to the point of excess, you’ll essentially be keyword stuffing, which can be detrimental to your organic search performance. 

Fortunately, the automation includes a range of density options to help you find that sweet spot, and you can always go back in and tweak the text yourself once the keywords have been added.

2. Document outline

This one’s for the content teams who know what content they want, but don’t know exactly how to start. 

“Document outline” essentially gives you a kick-start if you’re writing a piece of content from scratch and want to set it up for SEO success. If you’re writing a blog post, for example, you’ll input specified keywords and phrases, and the automation will generate a structured outline based on that information and analysis of top-ranking search results. 

It’s a great way to put guardrails on the content creation process from the outset, helping you comprehensively cover your topic’s key points, and ensure your content remains relevant to, and competitive with, top-ranking search results. 

3. Create meta description

Metadata helps search engines better understand your content.

While meta descriptions may not be used by search engines to rank your content, they are a critical component in the end-to-end organic search process. Meta descriptions are displayed in SERPs directly beneath your pages’ title tags, and so are critical to earning clicks from users. That’s why, whenever you create a new piece of content, meta descriptions should be considered a requirement.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot you need to consider when you’re adding a meta description, including what keywords to use, the length of the description, how to make it sound natural and engaging, and so on. It can be a fiddly, time-consuming task that adds considerable time to your content publication workflow.

With AI Actions, you create meta descriptions for your content, based on SEO best practices, in seconds. AI Actions analyzes your content, identifies its unique selling points, and then generates a meta description that summarizes them accurately, complete with a call to action (CTA) to encourage click-through.

The “Create meta description” automation is super scalable too, so if you start rolling out more content, you’ll be able to support and sustain its discoverability for search engines. 

4. FAQ generator

At Contentful, there are no bad questions. Fortunately, that goes for SEO and GEO too.

With that in mind, a frequently-asked-questions (FAQs) section can be a great way to summarize content, clarify things for readers, help GenAI better understand your content, and even get a few more SEO keywords in under the wire. 

But first, you need to write your FAQs, which means going back over the text to pick out relevant questions and develop appropriate answers. 

As you might have guessed, AI Actions can automate that for you. All you need to do is select the field from which you want to generate the FAQ, and then click through to “Generate FAQ” in the AI Actions menu. In seconds, AI Actions will add a new field with a series of pre-populated questions and answers, based on the content in the field you selected. You can even localize your FAQ for specific regions. 

5. Generate alt text

Don’t underestimate the search value of image content — and the boost you can give it by adding an alt text attribute. 

Alt text, or alternative text, is a tag that you add to an image’s HTML code. It’s descriptive, which means you need it to be about the substance of the image — rather than its actual name. Although alt text is primarily an accessibility factor because it helps site reader tools describe images for visually impaired users, it also communicates with search engines, letting them know whether an image might fulfill a search request. 

Coming up with descriptive text for every image that you publish on your site can be time-consuming (as you probably know). The good news is, AI Actions is capable of analyzing images and generating clear, accurate alt text descriptions without you having to lift a finger — other than to literally click the icon, of course. 

Depending on how many images you use in your digital ecosystem, “Generate alt text” can be a real SEO efficiency asset, and, ultimately, spare you and your team hours at the keyboard. 

6. Translate

Making friends in faraway places is great, but if you need to hit SEO goals overseas, you’ll need to translate your content into the relevant languages. 

There’s plenty of translation software available to help you do that, but it often comes in the form of third-party platforms, and involves copying and pasting blocks of text between environments — which is not only tedious but carries increased potential for error. 

AI Actions enables you to sidestep that complexity by translating content directly within the Contentful platform. Simply add the content you want to publish to your primary locale (German, French, Spanish, etc.), initiate the “Translate” automation, and AI Actions does the rest in seconds. 

Of course, translation doesn’t do your SEO job for you, but it will help you finesse your text for foreign language search queries, and communicate its quality to localized search engines. The "Translate" AI Action leverages neural networks to apply contextual understanding to text — which means it can deliver naturalistic translations quickly and accurately, emulating the styles and tones of human discourse.    

What’s next?

Those are the six best AI Actions SEO automations — so far. 

AI Actions is a living thing and we’re working hard on expanding and improving the tool to offer more utility, to more people, into the future. 

If you don’t see an AI Actions template that exactly fits your needs, don’t fret — why not just create one that does? AI Actions doesn’t fix users to the predefined definition of the automation. In other words, you can customize AI Actions prompts yourself, or create your own from scratch, to tailor an automation to whatever content management job you need done.

The point is, AI Actions is more than an SEO automation tool, it can supercharge your entire content workflow from end to end. 

Eager to get started with AI Actions in Contentful? AI Actions is available on any Premium plan for our customers. Browse through a selection of AI Actions demos, or talk to your account team to take your first steps into a new world of effortless, automated content creation.

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