Editorial
The Gist
- AI in SEO. Revolutionizes personalization, enhancing user intent understanding beyond mere keywords.
- Automation advantage. AI-driven SEO significantly reduces manual tasks, boosting operational efficiency.
- Human touch vital. Despite AI's advancements, human insight remains crucial in optimizing SEO strategies.
It’s fair to say that AI has had a transformative impact across business functions and industries in recent years. The advent of generative AIs like ChatGPT has allowed marketing professionals, in particular, to re-imagine processes like content creation and leverage the benefits of automation.
This artificial intelligence has, inevitably, affected the SEO industry as well. Here’s everything you need to know about how AI advances are reshaping the SEO space.
AI in SEO Is Delivering More Personalized Results
Unlike most businesses, search engines like Google have used AI for a while. Google confirmed using RankBrain, a machine-learning algorithm, and BERT, an NLP training platform, in 2015 and 2018, respectively.
Together, these allow Google to personalize the search results, serving up information that addresses a user’s actual intent versus just the keywords employed.
Related Article: How to Use AI in SEO to Strengthen On-Page Strategies, Part 1
Using AI to Level up SEO Performance
Eighty-six percent of users believe that using AI-led SEO leads to innovative results. Its most significant advantage is automating tasks that have traditionally been performed manually. This automation helps you reduce operational expenses and frees up your SEO techs to focus on the more strategic parts of the job, such as developing and implementing SEO campaigns.
You can leverage a range of AI tools to boost your SEO output.
1. Content Creation
This aspect has been the singular most visible change AI has brought about. SEO thrives on content. Generative AI has upended the conventional content creation dynamic by allowing businesses to cut down on writing and outsourcing costs and speed up content output.
The only catch is that search engines have wised up to this tactic and are actively penalizing web pages where they detect AI-written content. For businesses, this means using an integrated approach, where they combine AI and human expertise. Using a reliable AI content detector to check if you’re being sent AI-written content and avoid the negative SEO impact of publishing it is a good idea.
2. Keyword Research
The traditional approach to finding optimal target keywords can be quite time-consuming. You must manually scour competitors, search engines and ideation tools and run them through a keyword analysis tool to shortlist low-competition, high-volume terms. AI can shorten the process for you by analyzing vast amounts of data and delivering an optimized list of keywords relevant to your needs.
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3. Link Building
Link building involves getting high-authority websites to link to your pages. This process helps improve your domain authority and, consequently, your search ranking.
Done manually, this can be among the most time-consuming parts of an SEO tech’s job. Finding relevant websites that will link to you and building an outreach campaign takes a lot of work. AI can streamline the process for you. It can help you find quality websites to acquire links from, frame your outreach and even identify poor-quality backlinks that could prove detrimental to your SEO.
4. Video Content
It’s no secret that video content performs very well for SEO purposes. It’s an engaging medium, and search engines tend to reward you for using it. The flip side is the proliferation of clickbaity, low-quality videos across social and web platforms. Until now, search engines have had limited capability to judge the relevance of a video, largely the video description keywords and meta tags.
However, modern AI tools can analyze each video and even pick up audio/visual cues to better understand what each video is all about. For businesses, this means upping your game to create genuinely valuable video content and benefiting from the change if you’re already doing that.
5. Voice Search Optimization
With smart assistants like Alexa and Google Home becoming ubiquitous, consumer behavior has changed, too. Users are increasingly using voice search to find what they need. Marketers have had to adapt by optimizing their content for voice search queries to make it more discoverable.
AI can help you do this by analyzing your content to check the percentage of natural language and recommend more conversational, long-tail keywords likely to match voice search queries.
Related Article: AI in SEO: Getting Your Off-Page Strategies Into Shape, Part 2
Human Involvement Will Remain Paramount for AI in SEO
AI in SEO is transforming the SEO landscape, but it's crucial to remember that human expertise remains essential in ensuring quality and achieving optimal user results. SEO professionals possess a deep understanding of search engine algorithms, user behavior and content creation, enabling them to leverage AI tools to their fullest potential effectively.
It’s important to understand that AI is, and will likely remain, a work in progress. Any job's more qualitative aspects will always require human contribution. So, while AI is revolutionizing the SEO space, marketers must better identify which parts of the job can be left to AI and which need human intelligence to achieve maximum productivity.
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