Artificial intelligence or simply AI, has been vastly included in many of the technologies we used in life. So, what is AI like in SEO?
AI bot: Good morning, master! Here is your cup of pumpkin spice latte, just how you like it!
It took your bot just 3 minutes to whip a cup of your favorite coffee after gathering all the needed data from the Internet!
Starbucks who? You have your personal barista now!
While you might think this scenario is a bit far-fetched, AI is already present in many types of businesses today, like Amazon’s Alexa and Hanson Robot’s social humanoid robot called Sophia.
AI, or artificial intelligence, has nowadays even penetrated the SEO realm.
With businesses constantly looking to increase their efficiency and accuracy, AI has become paramount in their digital marketing strategies.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at AI’s role in the marketing industry and how it can improve your site.
What is AI SEO?
AI has become a core component of major search engine algorithms, including Google’s Rankbrain and BERT.
This factor means if you understand AI and how it impacts search engines, you can boost your SEO using AI.
But that’s not all.
AI is also an excellent tool for data analysis, which is a significant part of designing an effective SEO strategy.
From helping you spot trending topics to discovering content gaps, you can do tasks faster and more efficiently with AI-powered SEO software.
AI and SEO are a match made in digital heaven.
Why is AI SEO Important?
Although both AI and SEO are complex disciplines, used together, they make it easier for you to boost your website’s rankings.
One thing to keep in mind about search engines is they always put the user first. They aim to deliver content that’s as relevant as possible.
Because of this, SEO is not just about keywords anymore. It’s about:
Concepts: What is the idea behind the searchers’ query?
Context: What is the intent behind the searchers’ query?
Customer satisfaction: What are the most relevant answers to the user’s query?
So, keyword stuffing doesn’t work anymore (and hasn’t since Hummingbird). For your content to rank, you need a great link building strategy and to optimize for AI-powered search engines.
Today (and in the future), one of the main factors that impact ranking is user experience. And AI is one of the best ways to provide website visitors with a positive experience.
Let’s quickly look at six ways it can help boost your SEO.
How Is AI Used in SEO Today?
AI includes machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, and other rising technologies changing the marketing world as we speak.
As we humans constantly strive to achieve greatness and transcend our limits, our understanding and practice of AI will reach new heights in the coming years.
Today, however, AI in SEO is used in several ways.
1. Voice Search
People who multitask and want to get things done quickly have resorted to using voice search more than typing on search engines.
After all, sometimes it’s easier to say whatever is on your mind than type it on the keyboard.
Google’s voice search, for example, started with detecting just American English commands, but now it can recognize over 60 different languages!
Voice search uses NLP to function. With so many different languages, dialects, idioms, accents, and figures of speech worldwide, it’s going to take a village to accelerate and improve voice search.
Nonetheless, there is an opportunity for growth, and that’s all that matters for current digital marketers.
2. Keyword Research and Content Optimization
There’s no better keyword research example than Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers).
This tool takes into account the whole meaning of search terms rather than analyzing them one by one.
For instance, if someone typed “buy a house in Florida,” Google’s BERT will provide the user with real estate websites to help them with their search intent.
Whereas before, Google would also provide the user with more general information, like the state of Florida and its temperature.
3. Pillar Pages
Suppose you have a page about SEO that’s over 2000 words and delves deep into the topic.
That’s your pillar page. It’s the basis on which other pages called cluster pages can be formed and linked. Your cluster pages include the following: Technical SEO, On-site SEO, Off-site SEO, and Content SEO.
Even if your pillar page might be an essential topic to cover, your cluster pages are just as crucial for ranking on SERPs.
AI-developed tools can now carefully research trending topics and keywords related to SEO for you.
Plus, after analyzing Google’s ranking factors, their algorithm suggests what theme you should stick with to rank higher, i.e., should you give more attention to Technical SEO, Content SEO, or UX Design Tools?
Moreover, instead of having your marketing team spend hours figuring out user intent, these AI-powered tools tell you what people search for in real-time.
7 Ways AI SEO Improves Your Website
1. Voice Search Optimization
As mentioned before, voice search SEO is picking up the pace and becoming very popular worldwide.
Since most voice searches are questions, you can optimize your content by answering those specific questions.
One of the fastest evolving areas of search is voice search.
With more people relying on their voice-activated devices to search the internet, voice SEO (VSEO) has become an aspect of SEO you can’t ignore anymore.
Statista forecasts that the number of voice assistants globally will reach 8.4 billion in the next few years — which is more than the world’s population.
Most voice searches are in the form of questions, so one of the main ways to optimize for VSEO is by answering the questions people are asking.
This is where AI tools come into play.
For example, tools like Frase help you create VSEO optimized content by showing you the questions searchers are asking. You can then create content around these questions.
Another aspect of voice search is that it’s conversational. This is where AI principles like NLP come into play.
AI-powered content tools like Grammarly and Hemmingway can help you create more conversational content by recommending tone changes and highlighting hard to read passages.
One thing to note about VSEO is that it is hyper-competitive. That’s because voice assistants only give one answer – the one right at the top of the SERPs.
This means you have to pull out all the stops to ensure you rank well for VSEO.
This way, you could be more accurate in providing better results for voice searches.
2. Technical SEO Optimization
A lot of Technical SEO can seem very mundane and monotonous for marketers.
Who wants to spend more than half of their day auditing the site when they could be coming up with new marketing schemes and projects?
That’s why AI-powered tools that specifically target site auditing and fixing duplicate content and plagiarism issues make it possible for businesses to focus on other matters.
What’s more, these same tools help in creating relevant content by analyzing top-performing content on SERPs.
3. Link Building Optimization
Google’s EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) exists so that only trustworthy and authoritative websites can rank and drive more traffic to their site.
For this reason, many businesses consider having relevant backlinks as a crucial factor in cementing their online presence.
What’s more, AI has also immersed itself in influencer marketing through tools that leverage outreach discovery.
Say you’re a clothing store owner who’s looking for the right influencer to target your niche audience.
You require statistics that accurately measure the performance of your current backlinks. Also, it would be best if you kept an eye out for any new backlink opportunities.
AI-powered backlink software does its best to analyze your goals and provide you with the top results that cater to your audience and business.
4. Opportunity Discovery
One of the most important aspects of SEO is discovering hidden ranking opportunities that haven’t been exploited.
That’s one of the areas artificial intelligence SEO is proving to be effective in helping boost your website’s rankings. Powerful AI-powered SEO tools have emerged in the last couple of years, giving you more in-depth insight into:
- Keywords you should be targeting
- Link building opportunities
These and other insights that you can get from AI-powered SEO software are crucial to crafting a content strategy that will exponentially boost your website’s SEO.
With the competition to rank becoming fiercer by the day, you need to find keywords, topic ideas, and other SEO opportunities that aren’t too common.
Find opportunities that your competition is not exploiting, and you’ll have a much better chance at ranking.
Granted, finding these opportunities manually takes a lot of creativity, time, and hard work.
However, with the help of AI-powered SEO software, like BrightEdge, you can uncover golden SEO opportunities faster.
This is one of the main reasons AI must be a part of your SEO strategy.
5. Content Creation
Discovering content opportunities is only a small part of the battle to dominate the SERPs.
You also have to create content that hits the mark.
This is where AI can help improve your SEO.
How?
Once you’ve used a tool like BrightEdge to find keywords, you can use AI to help you know what kind of content you should create.
Once fed with your target keyword, AI-powered tools scour the web for content created around that keyword. In a few seconds, you’ll find:
- Content gaps to exploit
- Trending topics
- The average number of sections to include
With insights like these, it becomes easier to create content tailored to solve specific problems for your audience, in short, personalized content that satisfies user intent.
Not only that, but AI can help you ensure that the content you create is relevant for each stage of your funnel.
Content creation is no longer just about creating poor quality content that ranks. It’s about creating content that users will find helpful.
And that’s exactly what AI will help you do.
6. Content Optimization
For a long time, content optimization has been about keywords, internal links, backlinks, and other on-page SEO tactics.
Those things still matter.
But search engines now look at more than just those indicators. Search engines are getting better at figuring out precisely what searcher’s intent is while searching.
How can you optimize your content for user intent?
You guessed it – with the help of AI.
AI SEO tools help you:
- Create topic clusters that answer user questions and rank
- Know the optimum length of content on your given topic
- Use keywords and LSI keywords correctly
With AI, you can optimize your content to meet Google’s E.A.T standards found in their search quality raters, guidelines. You can create content that expertly answers user queries authoritatively. And that’s the kind of content Google loves to serve its users.
But AI doesn’t end at helping optimize content for search engines. AI-powered writing tools like Atomic Reach and Grammarly (among a slew of others) also help ensure your writing makes for a pleasant read.
This also helps increase dwell time, another factor that indicates to search engines that your content is useful.
The bottom line is AI can help you create better optimized content that your readers will love and engage with.
7. User Experience
Remember – Google’s (and other search engines) primary focus is the user.
This means user experience (UX) is a crucial element of SEO.
That’s probably why, in a rare announcement, Google let people know that page experience will be a significant ranking factor starting from the year 2021.
But what is page experience?
According to Google, page experience is a set of signals that measure a user’s satisfaction (or lack of it) when interacting with a web page. This goes beyond the page’s informational value.
It takes into account the overall UX the page provides.
Of course, pages with negative user experience won’t rank and those that offer users a positive user experience.
Where does AI come into play here?
With search engines thinking more like real human users, they can determine whether your page will provide users a positive UX or not.
This means when a user inputs a search query, search engines want to make sure they serve up:
- Relevant and authoritative content
- Pages with proper structure
- Pages with easy navigation
- Pages that load fast
- Mobile-friendly websites
If users can enjoy a personalized experience on your website, this will increase dwell time and encourage sharing your content. Both are signals to search engines that your content is worth ranking higher on SERPs.
Today’s AI-powered SEO tools, like Market Brew, can mimic search engines and give recommendations on what you can do to improve your website’s UX.
As a result, you don’t have to guess whether the SEO gods will smile on your website with favor or not. You can know what pleases them (to a greater degree) and implement that on your website.
The Future of AI in SEO
So, what does the future hold for AI in SEO?
Should we expect to be ruled by a class of terminators and cyborgs?
Search engines are becoming more intelligent in detecting user intent at the touch of a button!
While picturing dystopian scenarios is possible with human imagination, for now, here are two key trends to follow in the next five years.
- Visual Optimization SEO
This type of SEO is going to gain traction in the field of marketing and SEO in the coming years.
If you’re already familiar with heading and keyword optimization concerning your articles, be prepared for video alt attributes, audio clip descriptions, and image tag optimizations.
- Mobile Optimization SEO
It’s clear as day that the majority of searches by users are being done on mobile devices.
So, if you haven’t thought about optimizing your site for mobile views, then it’s time to get started!
There are several mobile configurations you need to consider when creating the mobile version of your website:
- Responsiveness
This type of configuration is what Google prefers since it has one URL, consolidated authority, no duplication, and no redirects.
The site might require some redesign, like header and font modification, since it’s not explicitly designed for the mobile version.
- Dynamic Serving
This configuration is for those businesses who don’t want a complete redesign for their mobile versions but are willing to tweak the mobile version a bit.
They might not want to show everything to users on their mobiles. For example, this can be when a wine shop wants to show their wine bottles with price tags and not their landing page containing general information.
- Parallel URLs
Businesses that want to create completely custom content for mobile versions use parallel sites. In order not to face URL problems, parallel mobile sites use the “m” subdomain.
While you get the luxury of customizing your mobile version, you have to watch out for the risks of site redirects, split authority, and content duplication.
All these are reasons why the SEO software market has been on the rise, creating AI-mediated SEO tools to beat the increasingly intelligent search engine.
Boost Your Website with AI
There’s no doubt that AI is helping businesses achieve peak efficiency and increase their profits.
Though the human touch in SEO has not become obsolete yet, AI bots such as those dealing with backlinks optimization have proved to help improve rankings and propel businesses forward.
