SEO is a non-negotiable digital marketing strategy that has been utilized by digital marketers for almost as long as digital marketing has been a thing. But as with most digital marketing solutions, SEO technologies and best practices need to be continuously updated and innovated. This helps them keep up with the increasing demand and complexity of customer queries and market conditions, and to maintain the technology’s effectiveness.

While SEO has had an eventful ride in the last two decades, even experts are finding it challenging to keep up with SEO efforts in today’s world. SEO’s latest knight in shining armor has emerged and has gained massive popularity in a relatively short time—Artificial Intelligence.

What is AI?

Artificial intelligence will always have varying definitions depending on who you’re asking. But there is one common thread in all these definitions: AI is the science of making machines and building programs and technologies to be human-level smart.

This means that machines won’t only be able to see, hear, talk, write, and move, they’ll be able to learn how to do it better with every try—and with absolutely no human contribution.

AI is already powering many devices and innovations in our world today. From self-driving cars, and voice assistant devices like Alexa, to Netflix and Hulu content recommendations, and search engine results of professional review service platforms like Best Writers Online and Online Writers Rating, the presence of AI is slowly permeating the digital landscape.

Besides leveraging asinine amounts of data and human activity to self-train itself, AI does this at scale and an astronomically faster rate. This reality gives experts the ability to maximize marketing opportunities in real-time and on a considerable scale.

A publication on Harvard Business Review estimates that AI can create $1.4 to $2.6 trillion of new marketing and sales value. This estimation reflects in the 8 out of every ten marketers who notice significantly faster and positive changes for their brand after adopting AI.

One of the most significant areas of AI adoption in digital marketing today is SEO intelligence. AI adoption in SEO can help with a lot of things: topic suggestion, content optimization, and SEO tasks automation among a plethora of other stuff.

What’s the big deal about AI and SEO?

As humans every day across the world type in natural queries in the search box of search engines, these engines have to leverage complex algorithms to understand and serve the best possible answers for these queries. AI and machine learning are the solutions that address the relevance and sufficiency gap between natural language search queries and search results.

Artificial intelligence search engines like Google’s offering has the responsibility to determine the visibility and ranking of your content, showing how indispensable this technology can be. For the longest time, search engines have worked by a set of rules, measuring specific signals and metrics to determine the relevance and supremacy of one content/website over another.

SEO analysts and other professionals in the industry have leveraged the insight from these tools to give their content, site, and brand an advantage over their competitors. But because AI has a much faster and more comprehensive ability of computation and comprehension, using it for your brand’s SEO intelligence efforts becomes a no-brainer.

AI-driven SEO tools abound in the market today. Tools like Frase, MarketMuse, Hubspot, and BrightEdge are helping businesses with content strategy, topic recommendations, and more. And next, we’ll be looking at how to leverage these AI-powered technologies for your content needs.

Areas of AI application in SEO

Optimizing text and voice search

As AI helps brands to maximize their SEO operations via traditional text-based search, voice search is also quickly becoming a huge deal. With voice-activation features making its way into everything: cars, smart home security systems, voice assistant devices, and voice search, AI is extending the reach of its capability to understand and act on data.

Thanks to the processing to function and natural language generation AI technologies, businesses can leverage on voice search to boost their visibility, the way they connect with customers, and their entire digital footprint. According to 99firms, Google’s searches already constitute 20% of voice search.

Topic, content, and keyword research, discovery, and optimization

These are prominent areas of AI application in SEO initiatives. On their own, SEO experts can already handle all these tasks. Still, AI takes it up several notches and delivers increasingly better results at a speed, accuracy, and consistency that no manual SEO efforts can match.

AI is excellent at analyzing large sets of data and uncovering patterns to help you rank for the most relevant search queries. It helps to reveal the most impactful topics and topic clusters to develop and helps to optimize content to help it answer search queries as comprehensively as possible.

AI takes away the burden of these enormous tasks so that your marketing staff can focus on more high-value tasks. 

Maintaining accurate local search listings

It’s one thing for your business to show up when people search for related information. It’s another thing for the information that pops up to be an accurate representation of your brand. Poor local search listings can significantly hurt your business in all the geographical areas where it exists.

With tools like Yext, the power of AI can work towards making sure that all your local search listings are always up to date across all search engines. It will also ensure to adapt these listings for all search channels (text and voice search) no matter the internet enabled device used to make the search query.

Scaling SEO

As mentioned earlier, AI-powered tools can fulfill many critical SEO responsibilities at a scale that can’t be matched by human effort. This fact helps companies to be able to stay on top of their competition, produce relevant and optimized content, and position their brand at the speed of the market and even faster. Scale and speed never hurt anyone, and AI is the best way to achieve both without losing the potency of your SEO intelligence initiatives.

Final Words

The concept of SEO is to get your business seen by the right people and to provide valuable information, products, and services to them. With the advent of AI and its powerful self-learning ability, if you’ve not learned how to use AI for your SEO, you’re slipping behind your competition. You’re also leaving a ton of money on the table, which isn’t something you want to be doing. So incorporate an AI tool now and experience a boost in your SEO.