Using SEO Strategies to Bring Awareness to AI Tools in Academic Writing

SEO is a digital marketing strategy that improves a website's visibility on search engines. A successful SEO strategy involves a multifaceted approach to improving a website's visibility and ranking on search engines. Optimizing content, choosing relevant keywords, and adding meta tags to attract organic traffic increases the chances of being discovered by users searching for relevant information.

Within my discourse of higher education, I've tailored certain parts of my blog website to offer posts with information and research on how AI affects academic writing strategies for first-year college students. In my blog post, 5 Ways AI Can Help or Hurt Academic Writing, I created a listicle on how students can approach AI usage. I've decided to use this blog post for our project this week as part of developing my SEO strategy.

Keyword Research and Selection

Keyword research in SEO involves identifying and selecting relevant words or phrases that users might use in search engines. When writing about AI usage in higher education, I wanted to ensure the correct keywords allowed my blog post to reach my target audience: college students and faculty members. 

Using Wix.com to create my blog posts, the paid subscription option allows for assistance with SEO and marketing tools. At first, I was overwhelmed searching for keywords since I'd never used any SEO strategies. However, Wix offers great user-help articles like Using Wix's Semrush Integration to Find Keywords for Your Site. The SEO assistant established decent search results after searching keywords such as AI tools, Academic Writing Skills, and Research and Editing. 

Since students use Google as a regular search engine for help in their assignments, I hope my keywords will be strong enough to give them a different perspective on AI tools than they initially expected. Most students are searching for AI tools to do the work for them; however, since my listicle offers the pros and cons of using AI tools in academic writing, I'd want my blog post to show up in their search results to provide a new perspective on how they complete their assignments by ethically using AI.

After selecting my keywords, the Wix SEO assistant gave me a checklist of items to complete that will help gain traction for my blog post to be viewed by users on the internet, specifically Google. This included adding a focus keyword to my H1 post title and H2 or H3 subheadings. With the help of this assistant, I successfully remembered to add highly searched keywords to my blog, especially in the subheadings of my listicle.

The assistant also ensured I added alt text for all images and that there was a manageable amount of keywords in the body of my text to prevent keyword stuffing. I was even assisted in the best way to write a meta description that included keywords since that was an aspect of SEO I'd never tried out before.

Technical SEO Tools and Settings

Improving a website's technical elements to enhance its search engine presence and functionality is the core of technical SEO and can be achieved using different tools and configurations. Thankfully, with their subscription options, Wix offers SEO tools and settings such as Sitemaps and Robots.txt, which helped me navigate all the necessary settings to enhance my presence on Google. 

Options to add plug-ins of Google Search Console and Google Ads were available to help improve and understand the traffic coming into my blog website. With assistance from these plug-ins, I can keep up-to-date with changing trends in keywords, analyze user behaviors, and make changes to my blog posts that keep me relevant to my target user audience of college students and faculty members.

SEO Usage in the Future

In conclusion, I've discovered how to optimize my blog article for search engines and utilize SEO strategies to reach my target audience of college students and faculty members. Wix.com was valuable in this process thanks to its user-friendly interface and SEO tools. I'm thankful to have found Wix as the hosting site for my blog and that it offers step-by-step articles and video guidance on how to use these tools.