When ChatGPT launched, it forced SEO writers to confront a question they had been avoiding:

Is my SEO writing job safe?

ChatGPT was not the first generative AI tool to show writing ability. It is the hype and publicity it generated that forced web content writers and other creative workers to consider their job security.

Now that the dust has settled on ChatGPT, we should address those concerns about your job security. 

We can’t guarantee that the traditional SEO content writer job will survive the AI revolution unscathed. What we can say with certainty is that an opportunity has arisen for those who are willing to adapt to the irreversible shift toward AI.

The opportunity we see opening up that SEO content writers should pivot to is AIO editor. All that AI-generated content will need editors to clean up, contextualize, and optimize for human readers.

In this article, you will learn: 

• what an AIO editor does,
• why AIO editing will become an essential skill,
• how to edit an AIO article in the Content At Scale app,
• how to develop AIO editing skills.

Table of Contents

This article is a foundational guide on how to become an AIO editor, but for context, let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room:

Will SEO Writers Be Replaced By AI?

Whether or not generative AI will take your writing job depends on you. Do you see it as a writing aid or as a threat to your job? Because it can be either of the two.

The indisputable truth is that generative AI is here to stay. It is not going away because it has compelling benefits and business value. 

AI writers will take over most web content writing as we know it. The SEO content writer job will become obsolete, overtaken by technology. But here is the bit you should be paying attention to:

According to research, AI will eliminate 85 million jobs but, crucially, will create 97 million new ones by 2025. 

Most of the jobs that will be taken by AI shouldn’t be considered lost. That’s because many of the people whose jobs will be taken over by AI tools have skills that are transferable to the millions of new jobs generative AI will create. 

This is the part where you pay attention, freelance SEO writers!

AI writers aren’t going away. In fact, they can only get better at what they do as the technology they use improves. So what should you do?

Why SEO Writers Should Make the Shift to AIO Editor

With the AIO model we are promoting at Content At Scale, AI writing platforms like ours offer more value for publishers, affiliate marketers, and other bulk content publishers than hiring, training, and managing a team of SEO writers. 

If something saves a business money and boosts its bottom line, you can bet your house that the business owner will be looking to maximize the opportunity. This means more and more publishers will be using AI tools to write their content.

That does not mean AI should replace human writers. Because another inescapable fact is that AI is not yet at the point where it can fully replace human writers. It may not be for some time.

What AI writers offer at this point is an excellent baseline. They generate a great first draft, in a fraction of the time it takes a good writer.

For reasons we will get to shortly, AI writing machines need human writers to optimize and humanize the content they produce. And there will be a lot more content produced. Think, 10x more content.

The best way we can put this is that AI writers and human writers are better together. In this arrangement, human writers are needed to take AI-generated content and make it better for both search engines and human readers.

In that same arrangement, AIO editing will become an essential skill. As the AIO editor, you will take AIO content and polish it for publishing.

What is AIO Editing?

AIO editing is the process of taking content that has been optimized by an AIO writer, trimming it for concision, and refining it to match your brand voice and desired context. 

AIO content itself is content that has been generated by an AI writer like Content At Scale with the input of a skilled human writer. On its own, an AI writer cannot produce high-performing blog content.

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The AI writer needs a prompt and – if you want to target a specific audience – keywords to be optimized around. Optimization by an AIO writer is what makes AI-generated text, AIO (artificial intelligence optimization) content. 

The Content At Scale AI, for example, uses machine learning to crawl the pages ranking high for the keyword you are targeting to find patterns and factors that are helping them rank high. 

They then use this data to draw unique insights and use these to produce more effective content. So the content already meets search intent and is well-positioned to rank.

A mistake, however, will be to take this content and publish it as is. While our tool’s content is grammatically sound and passes both AI detection and plagiarism checks, this content won’t perform as well when put before human eyes.

AI-Generated Content Needs Editing By a Human

Machine-generated content has a few critical weaknesses. It lacks emotion, narrative, and context to make a strong connection with human readers. It needs to be humanized. 

As capable as they are, generative AI writing machines lack the emotional intelligence of a human writer. They cannot, for example, cite a personal story, contextualize, or empathize with the reader to produce that strong connection human written content can.

Your job as an AIO editor is to make machine-generated content sound like it was written by a human. Unedited, that content can sound robotic. It can come off as written specifically for search engines and, therefore, not for the benefit of human readers. 

Analyzed against Google’s guidelines that are now part of its algorithm since the helpful content update, this is poor-quality content that should not rank for the keywords it is targeting. It’s the type of AI content that Google considers to be spam.

So as an AIO editor, what do you do to make AIO content more relatable and helpful to human readers?

How to Edit and Humanize AIO Content

Your goal as the AIO editor before you add the metadata and hit publish on any piece of AI-generated content is to make sure it is approachable and relatable to human readers. 

At Content At Scale, we believe that we have created what is, hands-down, the best long-form AI writer on the market. The long-form informational articles our AI writer generates come with a table of contents, outbound links, key takeaway boxes, and click-to-tweet links, among other helpful features.

To many publishers, these articles are nearly ready to publish. But, we encourage our tool’s users to go a step further and put this content through the eyes of a trained human editor. 

That is why we developed our five-step Make It Better framework that we use for the articles we produce for clients under our Done For You services.

Our aim with the Make It Better framework is to polish AIO content and ensure it is properly contextualized and has a human voice. 

An AIO editor in this case ensures that the AIO content you publish meets both the requirements of search engines and the needs and expectations of your target audience.

We will share some AIO editing tips below. First, let’s show you what the editing process looks like in the CAS app:

How to Edit an Article in the Content At Scale App

The Content At Scale app is designed to make the AIO editing process simple and fast. 

The dashboard shows the article in the editor as well as all the analytics, metadata, keyword data, and options for a quick review of the brief, and article preview. Think of the WordPress editor, but more intuitive.

1. Open the app

After opening the app, navigate to your project. There you will find all the articles that are ready to edit. Select the one you intend to edit, like this:

That opens the article, where you can get in and start editing. But before you do that, you may want to:

2. Review the brief

Before you start editing, you want to quickly learn what the article is about and the audience it is targeting. Here’s where you will find the brief:

If you don’t like what you see, you can rerun the post. The Rerun Post button is right there in the same tab above the context. 

3. Edit the article

You now have the context and a general idea what angle the article takes. That should help you draw a quick mind map of what specific boxes the article must check off.

The CAS editor is not much different from the best of them out there. It allows you to make every change you may need to, from inserting and changing subheads and breaking up sentences and paragraphs to inserting images and embedding videos.

I like that the CAS app is compatible with the Grammarly app, which is one of the editing apps I use. When I toggle the Grammarly extension in my browser, I immediately get suggestions for where I should edit to correct grammar and improve flow.

We will share 7 AIO editing tips below. Use them to edit and humanize the AIO article you are editing and make sure it is singing before assigning it to WordPress for publishing.

For now, let’s stay in the CAS app:

4. Review the on-page keyword optimization

Is the article targeting all the keywords that it should? 

Whether it is readable and has the right tone counts for very little if the article can’t find the right readers. Thankfully, the CAS app shows you at a glance what keywords the article is optimized for. 

The keywords are shown with stats, including how many times the each keyword was used, among others:

Don’t stop there. 

Just below the keyword data is the On-Page Checklist. It’s crucial that you should review that too:

The on-page checklist has a list of page and article elements you must optimize with your target keyword to maximize your chances of ranking for it in Google. 

The elements that have been successfully optimized are checked off in green. Those that are not are marked with a red X. You may want to get back into the article and update those.

The checklist also includes things that improve readability. For example, paragraphs must be 3 sentences or less. Otherwise, the article may appear as walls of text on mobile devices with smaller screens.

5. Review the metadata and visual elements

The dashboard also shows the metadata, which the app automatically generates. If you don’t like how it reads, the app allows you to edit it, too.

If you haven’t added the featured image, the dashboard gives you the option to add it. Among other data, the dashboard also shows you the final word count, the number of paragraphs and headings, as well as the media added, which includes images and videos.

The CAS app has the Copyscape plagiarism checker integrated. So you should take the opportunity to check if the article is original before publishing. For that, select the review tab. 

You should see the Request Plagiarism Scan highlighted in blue. Click it:

It will take less than a minute to perform the scan, after which the app will return the result as a percentage, with the date the scan was done.

6. Review the final draft

Now that the article is now humanized, has the right flow, is optimized and original, and has a conversational tone, you can review the final draft.

Click the icon in the center of the image as directed in the image below. The preview will open in a separate tab. The above image is what the preview version looks like.

After reviewing the final draft and being satisfied with how it looks, hit the Update button and change the status to Completed. You do that by toggling the dropdown menu that shows Ready for Optimization as the first option. See the image above. 

Finally, hit the Save button at the bottom of the page. With that, your AIO editing task is done. All that’s left is to:

7. Publish

To publish the article, navigate back to the Project and select the article as shown below. The last column on the page shows a dropdown menu with All as the default option. Click the dropdown and select publish.

That assigns the draft directly to your website’s WordPress, ready to publish. As you have seen, the entire AIO editing workflow takes place within the CAS app.

Your AIO editing job is now done.

We will now share the AIO editing tips we referred to earlier:

6 Tips to Edit and Humanize AIO Content

The biggest benefit of AI content is that it is structurally sound. The AI analyzes the search engine results page for your target keyword and millions of other data points to suggest the best structure, format, and angle for your article. This is what it considers most likely to rank for your keyword.

As long as you have done your homework on the keyword and given the AI enough context to work with, you are going to get the best outline possible for your article. You will likely not do any better yourself.

In the Content At Scale app, we have a Custom Brief tool that serves as the AI blog generator. Follow the simple steps in this guide to generate an outline for your article and get the AI to generate the article.

After the AIO writer hands over the article and you sit down to edit it, there are two crucial questions you have to ask yourself:

1. What is the target audience of this piece of content?
2. What is the purpose of this piece of content?

Why should you ask yourself these questions?

Web content does not achieve its goal unless it is clearly targeted. As you edit, you must have the target reader on your mind, talking to them. 

Secondly, the blog article must have a goal. This could be to show how your product solves a problem your target audience experiences frequently. It could also be to educate, like – if you write a food blog – how to poach an egg.

Your article should, thus, read like a conversation between you and that profile of reader you have in mind. 

If you are publishing on a business blog, this imaginary person is your buyer persona. For a lifestyle blog, they should be your ideal reader. 

For example, talk to the person reading your blog as you would when in conversation with a middle-aged housewife if that’s what your ideal reader is. 

That brings us to our first AIO editing tip:

1. Treat the article before you as a first draft.

When you treat the AI-generated article you are editing as a first draft, it immediately clicks in your mind that this article may have a few flaws. That it may have grammar and flow issues!

As you should with every draft you edit, you must look for areas where you can correct and improve the article. Ask yourself:

• Are there awkward phrasings I should rewrite?
• Could a different word express the point better?
• Does the article strike the right tone?
• Is this language or word appropriate for my target audience?

Remember that a sentence may be grammatically correct and yet not read right. That’s because people prefer to read the same way they talk. 

2. Put on the reader’s hat

To connect and engage with readers, the article must sound like a dialogue between friends. Imaging yourself as the reader before and after reading the article, ask yourself these questions:

• Is this article speaking directly to me?
• Do I understand the language being used?
• What have I gained from this article? 

When an article talks to you directly, it must clearly and immediately make clear what it is about. You must know within a few paragraphs what you will get from the article. 

Even though an article is clearly targeted, it may still fail to deliver the value it intends to if the target audience cannot understand the language used. Yes, it is written in English, but is it written at the reading level of the target audience? 

As you edit, watch out for jargon and colloquialisms. Aim to improve readability by analyzing the choice of words used. You should:

• Replace big words if there are simpler, more common words, 
• Split up complex sentences if it makes them easier to read, 
• Shorten long paragraphs,
• Use an active voice.

When your AIO content is readable, it is easier to engage with your audience, which means it converts better. If readers engage with your content and spend more time on the page, it also sends the right signals to Google, improving your rankings as a result.

If you use the Yoast SEO plugin, it comes with a readability checker baked in. The Hemingway Editor is another tool that is free to use that I trust for improving my content’s readability and concision.

A more popular tool that has both free and paid plans is the Grammarly editing app. Try them to see which one works best for you.

AI tools sometimes struggle to pick up nuances in language. These editing tools will help correct inconsistent language, simplify your content, and make it easier to understand.

3. Add personal stories

After your first pass over the article, you can tell if it hits the high notes or not. If it does not pique your curiosity and urge you to keep reading, chances are it will not captivate readers.

Personal stories are one of the best ways to soften content that sounds mechanical. They make your articles unique even if you are writing about the same topics as everyone else in your niche. 

Personal stories engage and help to keep readers glued to your page when tackling a topic that isn’t all that exciting. Together with facts and figures, stories help to clarify a point, create influence, cultivate trust, and promote our ideas.

4. Infuse emotion to empathize with readers

You may have to infuse emotions into AIO content because AI writers lack the ability to feel pain and, thus, can’t empathize.

Putting on the reader’s hat also means showing that you feel their pain. Imagine yourself experiencing the pain they are trying to remove by reading your article. Channel the same emotions into the article.

If the reader is sad, then show yourself to be caring and empathetic. Be relatable and show your readers that you connect with them on a human level. 

5. Add context to align the article with your brand goals

Some AI tools are trained only up to a certain date and, therefore, lack knowledge of current events. They are also not privy to your brand goals and personal aspirations.

That means, for some topics, you may have to add specific details and cite recent examples for your article to fully address the topic.

If an article is not framed in the right context, it draws the wrong conclusions and isn’t very useful. 

AI machines don’t know what they don’t know and lack the intelligence to admit it. They rely on statistical analysis and can’t cite information unless it is available online. Because of that they tend to make up facts.

6. Improve cohesion with transition words

One of the most common retorts against AI-generated content is that it can sound robotic. Without an AIO editor coming in to smoothen the edges and tie the points together, the article can sound choppy.

Paragraph transitions help to link ideas, keep readers engaged, and improve readability. They lend a conversational tone that helps to maintain flow and sustain the reader’s interest in the article. 

Especially helpful for log-form content, transition words can be used to add, compare, contrast, and conclude, as well as to show a reason, result, or sequence.

You may understand transition words better when they are framed as bucket brigades – the original human chain where items were passed from one person to the next as an easier method of transporting them.

Examples of transition words and phrases are:

• ‘let’s get started’, 
• ‘here is the deal’, 
• ‘Here is how it works’,
• ‘Let’s dig a little deeper’.
• ‘Let’s tie everything together’.

As much as you may want to add some words to improve flow and maintain cohesion in a piece of content, you also want to remove unnecessary words:

7. Remove fluff to improve concision

AI-generated articles can be wordy. Wordy sentences use 10 words to explain something when 5 words would have achieved the same result. These unnecessary words are known as fluff or filler. It is the AI editor’s job to remove them.

Filler words increase word count without adding value to the article. If they are not edited out, these words will dilute your writing. Even worse, they may:

• Bore your readers to the point of bouncing off the page,
• Lower your conversion rates as readers bounce before they have read your offer and call to action,
• Tarnish your image as a publisher resulting in a low CTR for your content.

Long-form content should be so not because it has many words, but because it is comprehensive. If you can express a point in fewer words, then do so. 

How to Remove Fluff When Editing AIO Content

Removing fluff is a central element of our Make It Better framework for enhancing AIO content. It’s one of the best tools to achieve concision with your articles. 

As an AIO editor, you must show a ruthless streak against all fluffy content. Chop every unnecessary word and remove entire sentences and paragraphs if they add nothing of value to the article. 

Here are a few ways to identify and remove fluff from AIO content:

1. Remove unnecessary words

The easiest fluff words to remove from a piece of writing are adverbs and adjectives, which are words that describe or modify the meaning, extent, or intensity of something. 

Words like ‘absolutely’, ‘just’, and ‘actually’ can be removed from a sentence without affecting the overall meaning. 

An example of unnecessary words in use is the statement; 

‘it is also important to clean off all dirt and remove unnecessary clutter’. 

To remove all dirt is to clean, while all clutter is unnecessary. So the sentence must read; 

‘you must also clean and declutter.

In many of the instances where the word ‘that’ is used, it can be removed without making the question any less clear. I find that removing the word often improves clarity too.

2. Get straight to the point.

A common piece of advice when writing for the web is to front-load your article with the most important information. This assumes that readers will bounce if it takes too long to get the information they came to the page for.

Why not maintain the theme throughout the article and not beat around the bush with every subsequent sub-point? Yes, sometimes it is important to give context, which may mean an extra sentence or two, but always be brief.

3. Stay on topic

When you write from your head, without an outline, chances are high that you will stray off-topic. When that happens, everything you write is of no value to the reader. 

The best way to stay on topic when writing is by creating an outline before you start writing. And the best tool for that is the Custom Brief in the Content At Scale app.

4. Try not to write exactly as you speak

This may sound like a contradiction to advice we may already have shared in this article. 

The point is not to avoid writing in a conversational tone. It is to watch out for words that we commonly use when we speak but which don’t add value when used in written text.

A good example are the words ‘uh’ and ‘uhm’ that we use with certain facial gestures to show that we agree, disagree, or are unsure. Those words are meaningless when used in writing.

5. Read the article aloud

Because we commonly use them in our own speech and writing, it can be difficult to identify filler words from merely reading the article you are editing. A useful trick is to read the article aloud.

We are now conditioned to read fast and skim web content, so we can easily miss filler words when editing. Reading aloud forces you to slow down and consider every word when editing as our mouths process words more slowly than our minds.

Here is a list of 50 filler words you can watch out for when editing AIO content:

1. Absolutely essential,
2. Actual facts,
3. Added bonus,
4. As a matter of fact,
5. As far as I am concerned,
6. Just 
7. Blend together,
8. Close proximity
9. Completely filled, engulfed, eliminated
10. Desirable benefit
11. Do not pay attention to – ignore
12. Each and every
13. Equal to one another,
14. Exact same
15. Filled to capacity
16. Fly through the air
17. General public
18. Go ahead and
19. Have a need for – need
20. I believe that
21. In order to
22. In the event that
23. Knowledgeable expert
24. Made a decision to – decided to
25. May/might possibly
26. Never before
27. Over exaggerate
28. Period of time
29. Protest against
30. Reason why
31. Virtually
32. Completely
33. The fact of the matter, as a matter of fact
34. Stuff 
35. The fact of the matter
36. The thing is
37. Kind of, sort of
38. When it comes to
39. Obviously
40. At all times
41. During the course of
42. For all intents and purposes
43. On a regular basis
44. Pick and choose
45. Postpone until later
46. Serious danger
47. Surrounded on all sides
48. Still remains
49. Really
50. Never

Remove these words from the AIO content you edit and it will be shorter, tighter, and much easier to digest.

Is Time to Transition from SEO Writer to AIO Editor?

AIO editors will be in great demand soon. While it may not yet be the time to completely pivot from SEO writer to AIO writer or editor, the time to start the transition is now. 

AIO editing is a skill that will only become more valuable as more publishers look to leverage the efficiencies and cost benefits that AIO content offers.

For the SEO writer or content editor who is willing to adapt to the AI revolution, there will be a lot of work in AIO editing. That’s one of the many jobs that regenerative AI has already created – the opportunity this article has opened the lid on here.

As you prepare for the avalanche of AIO editing work that’s coming, sharpen up your skills using the tips we have shared. Invest in the right tools. 

We have recommended a few tools in this article.

But the one tool that will tie everything together for you as an SEO-turned-AIO writer, editor, or strategist—is a long-form AI content writer.

Trust us, and thousands of others using our tool. A long-form AI writer will quickly become your best friend, freeing up 5-10x your time in production alone.

Guess what we’ve used to write the baseline of the long-form article you just read? Our own—Content At Scale.

Time back. Freedom in your day to do more of the work you love, and less of the grunt work you don’t love. It’s a clear choice: sign up to get started with Content at Scale today.