Abstract
- AI in SEO. Revolutionize personalization and enhance your understanding of user intent beyond just keywords.
- Benefits of automation. AI-driven SEO significantly reduces manual tasks and improves operational efficiency.
- Human touch is important. Despite advances in AI, human insight is still critical to optimizing your SEO strategy.
It's no exaggeration to say that AI has had a transformative impact on business functions and entire industries in recent years. The advent of generative AI like ChatGPT has enabled marketing professionals in particular to rethink processes like content creation and leverage the benefits of automation.
This artificial intelligence is inevitably impacting the SEO industry as well. Here's everything you need to know about how advances in AI are reshaping the SEO space.
AI in SEO is delivering more personalized results
Unlike most companies, search engines like Google have been using AI for some time. Google confirmed the use of RankBrain, a machine learning algorithm, and BERT, an NLP training platform, in 2015 and 2018, respectively.
Together, these allow Google to personalize search results and provide information that addresses the user's actual intent, not just the keywords used.
Related article: How to leverage AI in SEO to enhance your on-page strategy, part 1
Level up your SEO performance with AI
86% of users believe that using AI-driven SEO will deliver transformative results. Its biggest advantage is the ability to automate tasks that were traditionally performed manually. This automation reduces operational costs and allows the SEO technician to focus on more strategic tasks such as developing and implementing her SEO campaigns.
You can leverage various AI tools to improve your SEO results.
1. Create content
This aspect is the most notable change brought about by AI. SEO is successful through content. Generative AI has upended the traditional content creation dynamics by allowing companies to reduce writing and outsourcing costs and speed up content output.
The only catch is that search engines are using this strategy wisely, actively penalizing web pages where they detect content written by AI. For companies, this means using an integrated approach that combines AI and human expertise. It’s a good idea to use a reliable AI content detector to check if AI-written content is being submitted and avoid negative SEO impacts from publishing content.
2. Keyword research
Traditional approaches to finding the best target keywords can be very time-consuming. You should manually research your competitors, search engines, and ideation tools and run them through your keyword analysis tool to shortlist low-competitive, high-volume terms. AI shortens the process by analyzing vast amounts of data and providing an optimized list of keywords related to your needs.
3. Link building
Link building involves getting authoritative websites to link to your page. This process helps improve your domain authority and therefore your search rankings.
Doing this manually can be the most time-consuming part of an SEO technician's job. It takes a lot of effort to find relevant websites that link to you and build an advocacy campaign. AI streamlines processes. It can also help you find quality websites to get links from, organize your outreach, and identify low-quality backlinks that can negatively impact your SEO.
4. Video content
It's no secret that video content is great for SEO purposes. This is an attractive medium and search engines tend to reward you for using it. The flip side is that clickbait, low-quality videos are proliferating across social and web platforms. Until now, search engines have had limited ability to determine video relevance, primarily the video's descriptive keywords and meta tags.
However, modern AI tools can analyze each video and pick up audio/visual cues to better understand what each video is about. For businesses, this means stepping up their strategies to create truly valuable video content, and benefiting from the change if they're already doing it.
5. Voice search optimization
As smart assistants like Alexa and Google Home have become more popular, consumer behavior has also changed. Users are increasingly using voice search to find what they need. Marketers have had to adapt by optimizing their content for voice search queries and making content more discoverable.
AI can help with this by analyzing your content, checking the percentage of natural language, and recommending more conversational long-tail keywords that are more likely to match voice search queries.
Related article: AI in SEO: Bringing your off-page strategy to life, Part 2
Human involvement remains paramount for AI in SEO
Although AI in SEO is transforming the SEO landscape, it is important to remember that human expertise is still essential to ensure quality and achieve optimal user results. SEO professionals have a deep understanding of search engine algorithms, user behavior, and content creation, allowing them to effectively utilize AI tools to their full potential.
It is important to understand that AI is still in development and will likely continue to be developed. The more qualitative aspects of any job always require human contribution. Therefore, while AI is revolutionizing his SEO field, marketers are wondering which parts of the job can be left to AI and which parts require human intelligence to achieve maximum productivity. We need to better identify what is.
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