SEO and Artificial Intelligence – Unveiling the Future of SEO & AI

Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence (AI). As people familiarize themselves with AI and as it becomes more sophisticated, we can’t help but think about how it will impact the marketing world, especially search engine optimization.

AI is not a new technology. This technology has been around for years, but recently many tools have been created that have left everyone talking about AI capabilities. Content marketing writers, SEOs, and search engines need to adapt to the growing popularity of AI to ensure they remain relevant and tap the benefits of these amazing tools.

But what is the impact of AI on SEO? What’s possible and what’s not? This is what we shall answer in this post.

What is AI SEO?

To better understand AI SEO, it’s essential to understand what the term artificial intelligence (AI) means.

For starters, AI is an umbrella term referring to different technologies, including computer vision, machine learning (ML), deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), etc., designed to help humans perform better. In other words, AI can perform tasks commonly associated with humans better and faster than humans.

So, is AI Beneficial to SEO?

Like other things, SEOs and marketers can use AI to make their process easier and get better results. But does this mean that AI will replace SEO? Most unlikely.

SEO is no longer about creating keyword-rich content to rank higher on search engines. SEO is more about meeting the users’ search intent, providing context, and providing relevant answers to customers’ queries.

To rank higher on search engines, you need to provide relevant and high-quality information, have a solid backlinking strategy, and optimize it for search engines (which are powered by AI). Most importantly, you should ensure that you provide a good user experience to your audience.

You can quickly achieve these things by combining SEO and AI. One of the notable AI tools is ChatGPT which was developed by OpenAI. The tool has disrupted the marketing and SEO world as it provides exciting answers faster and more efficiently than humans.

While AI will not completely replace human-written content, it provides unending possibilities for content creators and marketers who embrace it.

Google Has Incorporated AI for Years

Most people have come to learn about AI recently. However, Google has been involved in major research involving AI and has incorporated it in its search algorithm, Gmail, and other products for years. Google launched RankBrain, a machine learning algorithm to improve its understanding of search queries. This marked the first time Google used AI in its algorithm.

Google didn’t stop there. In 2019, Google launched Bidirectional Encoder representations from Transformers (BERT), a natural language processing technique to help computers better understand ambiguous language in text to establish the context. This came in handy as it helped Google better respond to queries they receive daily.

With such early developments, we can say that Google laid the foundation for the development of other SEO AI tools that continue to dominate web search. 

Ways You Can AI to Improve SEO and Boost Your Website Rankings

There are many ways AI can help improve our SEO campaign, as you will see below:

Scale Your SEO Campaign

SEO and content marketing are two primary things that go into rankings higher on search engines. While these two are different, they are interrelated.

To have good SEO on your website, you need to have high-quality and relevant content. On the other hand, you need good SEO for your content to appear on relevant searches and attract organic traffic to your website.

High-quality content is written and follows some SEO best practices, including:

• Including relevant keywords naturally in the title
• Having the target keyword in the article URL
• Have solid and click-worthy titles, headings, and subheadings

However, before you create this content, you need to perform certain tasks that will determine your content’s direction. These include:

• Conducting keyword research
• Optimizing your website’s user experience and technical SEO to ensure a good user experience
• Implementing FAQ (frequently asked questions) schema markup
• Identifying and optimizing for long tail keywords
• Creating and implementing a backlinking strategy
• Tracking key metrics like page views, bounce rate, conversions, etc., using Google Analytics

Some of these repetitive tasks can take a toll on your time. You can use AI to perform these repetitive tasks to free up your time and increase productivity. Here’s a list of activities that AI can help you with:

• Content analysis
• Content planning
• Optimize meta descriptions
• Data analysis
• Optimize titles, headings, and subheadings

As you can see, AI can do the legwork to ensure your content and SEO strategies align with your business goals and focus on the customer’s needs.

AI for Keyword Research and Anchor Management

Keyword research forms the basis of SEO. However, this process can be complicated, tiresome, and time-consuming if you don’t have the right tools. In addition to the traditional keyword research tools, you can use AI to perform keyword research and manage anchor texts.

However, as with those keyword research tools, you should not use AI mindlessly. Use it alongside other SEO tools and use your knowledge to select only beneficial information to add to your strategy.

Ultimately, AI can save many hours analyzing topics and checking competitor websites to identify high-value keywords to target.

Below are ways AI can help in keyword research:

Help Identity New Keyword Ideas from a Seed Word

AI tools like ChatGPT can help identify terms related to a keyword. Here’s an example of a prompt you can use to achieve this:

Prompt: Generate keywords for “seed keyword.”

For example, I asked ChatGPT to generate five keywords for automotive tints. Here are the results:

• Window Tinting
• Automotive Film
• Sun Protection
• Privacy
• UV Ray Blocker

All the results are related to automotive window tinting, but it’s up to you to decide whether they will add value to your audience and content goals.

Create a Keyword Strategy

In addition to keyword research, you can use AI to create a complete keyword strategy. Write a detailed prompt asking AI to create a clear keyword strategy. You can even tell ChatGPT to generate a list of keywords for an SEO plan for your target topic. Include all the information you want AI to generate, including keyword cluster, long tail keywords, search intent, title, meta description, and the format you wish the data presented into.

Identity Most Relevant Questions on a Topic

Good content should provide all the information users want on a topic. One way to achieve this is by answering the common questions users have on a topic. The first step towards this is first to identify the questions that your audience is asking.

AI tools can help identify these questions. Here’s an example prompt you can use to get questions on a topic:

Prompt: Provide a list of questions on “input your seed keyword.”

In addition to providing questions on a topic, you can use ChatGPT to find keywords from your competitor’s content. This is a reverse-engineering technique that can help identify keywords that your competitors are using on their content.

Prompt: Generate keyword ideas from this content (paste it”)

Ideally, there are endless opportunities for using AI for keyword research. Other use cases include:

• Group related keywords
• Create content outline
• Classify keywords according to search intent
• Find long-tail keywords
• Identify primary and secondary keywords to target
• Etc.

Identify Ranking Opportunities

SEO is a competitive world and keeps changing. One way to beat the competition is to identify opportunities yet to be exploited.

AI tools can help identify opportunities such as low-competition keywords and valuable link-building opportunities.

This can be helpful, especially if you are in a competitive industry and struggling to be recognized in the sea of other ranking websites. By identifying opportunities your competitors have not exploited, you can rank higher and draw organic traffic to your site.

The information you get will guide your content creation strategy and help boost your creativity and SEO strategy.

Content Creation with AI

Helping identify unique content and backlinking opportunities is only the start. AI tools like ChatGPT can help identify unique content angles that will help dominate the search engine results for relevant queries.

For example, AI can help brainstorm and generate unique ideas to help quicken the content-creating process. By knowing the best prompts and diving deeper into the AI results, you can identify unique content angles you would not discover on your own.

In other words, AI can help identify content gaps and trending topics you should cover to serve your audience better and boost authority. The idea here is simple—to create content that solves specific problems of your audience. Once Google and users find your content helpful, your rankings on SERPs will significantly improve.

Content Optimization with AI

Your content won’t produce the desired results if no one sees it. Content optimization is the process of ensuring that your content can reach your target audience. This includes various on-page techniques like having your target keyword in our title, headings, and meta descriptions, gaining relevant-high-quality backlinks, and internal linking.

But for your content to rank higher in SERPs, you must think beyond these strategies. Specifically, Google and other search engines consider the searcher’s intent when providing results for a search query.

As mentioned, AI tools can help identify questions that people ask on a topic. Once you identify these questions, create content that provides answers to these questions. Additionally, you can use AI to identify the best-performing content and give recommendations on how you can improve it.

Lastly, you can use AI to generate headings, AI tags, and other vital on-page elements to improve your SEO. However, even with these AI interventions, use your SEO knowledge and industry expertise to ensure you write and optimize for humans, not just search engines.

Analyzing Search Engine Algorithm and User Experience

In the last few years, we’ve seen many changes in the Google algorithm, and the trend isn’t going to change. One notable algorithm is the user experience update which indicates that Google will favor content that provides a good user experience when providing results to a search query.

Unfortunately, not adhering to some of Google’s algorithm changes can lead to penalties. As an SEO or marketer, you must keep up with these changes to ensure you don’t miss an update that will lead to a penalty or negatively impact your rankings.

You can use AI alongside other audit technologies to analyze your website for any issues that could impact your rankings or lead to a penalty. More importantly, you can use AI to analyze your content to ensure it meets the below criteria:

• Relevance and authoritativeness
• Mobile-friendliness
• Fast loading pages
• Easy navigation

If users have a good experience on your page and find helpful content, they will stay longer. The more people stay longer on your website and share your content; the more search engines will treat your content with dignity and show it in relevant search queries.

Optimize for Voice Search

Another area that AI could be disruptive is in voice search SEO. Recently, we have experienced a rise in voice assistants like Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa from Amazon. We expect voice search to become more popular as humans embrace AI.

Long-tail keywords and natural language processing are two primary things that go into voice search optimization. SEOs and marketers can use AI to analyze users’ intent and get insights into voice search optimization.

Voice search is usually in the form of questions. Using AI, SEOs can discover customers’ questions and create content that answers those questions. The results will be content that users and search engines find helpful and rank-worthy.

Which Way Forward?

There’s a growing concern about whether AI will replace content writers and SEOs. However, that shouldn’t be the focus. The need for human-written content and input isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Instead, people should focus on how SEOs and marketers can use AI to boost productivity and explore untapped marketing opportunities. We advise against publishing 100 percent AI-generated content as this is against Google’s spam guidelines. However, you can use AI and SEO to scale your SEO to grow your presence on SERPs in the ways we’ve mentioned above.