Using AI In SEO Marketing
AI in search engine optimization (SEO) involves using artificial intelligence to enhance your website’s visibility in organic search results. AI-based tools can speed up time-consuming but necessary SEO steps, such as generating content ideas and outlines. This helps get your work done faster and focus on your overall SEO strategy.
In the long run, this enables smaller businesses to compete with local or nationwide businesses for online visibility. Business owners can focus more on the business than spend time managing their website and online profiles.
Why AI Matters In SEO For Your Business
The buzz surrounding AI tools has taken off recently. However, what many do not realize is that AI has always been a crucial component in SEO. For example, Google has been developing and utilizing AI for SEO for over two decades. Google Translate is the most obvious example, but Google Lens also uses machine learning. AI has also made the Google Search experience more personalized and conversational.
In short, artificial intelligence has been around for a while, but now, intuitive AI tools are more advanced and more accessible than ever to marketers. Content optimization has also become more accessible for small businesses and others with limited budgets. Add to that AI’s time-saving potential, and you can see why it is important to learn how to use these incredible tools.
Platforms such as ChatGPT also affect how searchers interact with search engines. As AI improves, the search experience can become more conversational. This means natural language queries, such as “Give me 10 ideas for a new blog post,” could begin to compete with keyword-based strategies.
Thanks to their machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, AI tools can swiftly execute these tasks. These two elements allow the software to analyze large amounts of information and provide recommendations based on its learned understanding.
So, if you need to create an outline for some SEO content, AI can come in handy. Forming a logical narrative, even about a topic you know well, takes time when done manually. Tasks like this require focus and contemplation. Instead, outsource that initial brainstorming to a generative AI.
Simplifying Keyword Research With AI
Proper keyword research enables you to discover search terms frequently used by your target audience, allowing for a better understanding and the ability to tailor your content strategy accordingly to drive more relevant organic traffic. Unfortunately, this process can be daunting for many small businesses, and take up time owners simply do not have.
AI-based tools can speed up all three stages of keyword research. For instance, Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool utilizes a database of 25 billion keywords to automatically suggest relevant keywords for your content. It also lets you quickly filter by elements such as search intent, volume, and keyword difficulty.
Creating Better Content With Help From AI
More companies are beginning to use generative AI for marketing, including content generation. The most obvious use is in research. AI can help analyze vast amounts of data in mere seconds, compared to manually reviewing articles. With this information, it can generate potential content ideas around keywords, data sets, outlines, and more.
Once you have an outline, you can write an article manually or use AI tools to generate large chunks of content. You might need it for separate paragraphs, introductions, titles, and more. Regardless, it can significantly accelerate the production of regular, high-quality content.
Content optimization is how you make sure your existing site content has the best possible chance of achieving its intended goal – attracting and informing your audience while boosting your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). You may have worked hard to build up lots of blog posts related to your product or services, but still fail to get the traffic you expected. You could manually dig into why individual blogs aren’t ranking and revamp the content, or you could let an AI tool show you exactly how to boost content quality.
So far, Google’s guidelines are AI-neutral, indicating that there won’t be penalties as long as the content is high-quality and informative. This means using AI more as a tool for good copywriting, instead of a free writer. Just keep in mind that what Google values and what you should prioritize is ensuring your content is useful, practical, and original.
Enhancing Your Website
Regular website tasks, such as backlink analysis, help you boost your online presence. By finding potential high-quality sources to link back to your website, you can build your credibility in the eyes of your clients and search engines. Manually, this requires scouring the internet for sites that link back to you and competitor brands, but AI-powered backlink analytics or link-building tools can save you from this time-intensive task.
When paired with content optimization, this can greatly improve your website’s online visibility. You can even automate repetitive SEO tasks, so you are free to do more high-level creative work or manage your business.
Though human input and oversight remain essential, AI SEO tools can handle many of the repetitive admin tasks that take you away from other aspects of your business. Tracking competitors, monitoring performance in certain keywords, and finding more relevant keywords for your industry can all be done with generative AI such as ChatGPT.
Technical SEO Made Easy With AI
Schema markup, or structured data, is another task you can use AI to accomplish. It is code that helps search engines recognize and display rich results instead of plain text results. Google uses schema markup to identify 31 content types to serve more relevant and visually appealing results and snippets.
Though there is no hard evidence that your schema markup affects how you rank, schema can help how your website is displayed, attracting new users. Writing this can be a long process, though. Instead, generative AI can generate the code for you.
Generative tools can also be used to analyze a website’s structure and performance. This involves using algorithms to optimize every aspect of your website, such as site speed, crawlability, indexability, usability, and content quality. AI can be used to identify and generate a list of broken links so your web team can redirect or remove these pages. These same tools can also help create and update sitemaps, making your site easier to crawl for search engines.
Understanding Your Audience
Every savvy business owner knows that half the battle is understanding your target audience. This includes their desires, needs, motivations, and habits. With the advent of AI, a variety of tools have been developed to simplify this aspect of business planning.
Artificial intelligence is based on data analysis and pattern recognition, making it an excellent tool for this task. Paired with AI’s ability to process vast amounts of data, and you can save a lot of time analyzing your audience.
Generative artificial intelligence can even use your existing audience, customers, and data to create lookalike audiences. It might then offer an overview of your existing audience so you can better understand their spending habits and other insights. Even using existing customer conversations, AI can help you understand what works for your clients and what doesn’t.
Using AI Ethically And Effectively
When using these AI SEO tools, remember that they are not catch-all solutions. The key to using artificial intelligence ethically and effectively lies in enhancing your work processes, not replacing them. You do not want to blindly use AI for every aspect of your work.
Once you decide to utilize AI tools, the next step is to identify tasks that hinder you or your team’s efficiency and align them with the AI’s strengths. From there, you can determine where the tools fit into your workflows.
For example, your business may struggle to analyze large datasets of keywords, identify content gaps, or monitor user behavior. Since AI excels in data analysis, pattern recognition, and automation, leveraging it to identify trends, optimize content, and segment audiences would be a wise strategy. This leaves more time for your team to think through the data and apply these insights to improve your SEO.
You should also remember that AI tools are not perfect. The more you use them, the better they understand what you are trying to accomplish. The relevance and accuracy of their outcomes are influenced by the prompts and input data you provide. By continuously testing and tweaking, you can “train” the AI to meet your specific SEO needs. ChatGPT offers a place to input custom instructions so you can tailor its results to your needs.
Most importantly, when you use AI, you still need actual people to review its outputs. Artificial intelligence can expedite content production, but there should always be someone to review what it writes. Where AI struggles is adding nuance and context to the page. A good writer can add this nuance during the review process. There is also the danger of an AI “hallucinating” information–– i.e. generating incorrect or false information–– or plagiarizing articles.
You can prevent these problems by regularly reviewing and refining all AI-generated content to ensure it is accurate, relevant, and aligns with your brand. This approach will help you maximize the benefits of AI while avoiding potential pitfalls.
Making AI Work For Your Business’s SEO
While AI should never replace skilled SEO marketers, content marketers, or editors, it can support your optimization efforts. SEO is highly technical and involves a lot of datasets, analyses, tweaks, and dense reports to sift through for the best results. For tasks such as keyword research, audience targeting, and content idea generation, these tools are a boon that can free up the time and energy of your web team to focus on more important aspects of a marketing campaign.
It is important, however, to remember that the point of SEO is to provide real information to users that is relevant and useful. Simply delegating all SEO efforts to AI won’t do. Artificial intelligence needs clear goals, guidance, and close monitoring to tailor its outputs to your business’s needs. Use generative AI and similar tools as an opportunity to improve your SEO strategies.
Not every business needs to scale its SEO for large markets, but even these small businesses can benefit from the streamlined and efficient workflow that AI-based content tools offer. Whether you are a local company or have an audience across the nation, Just A Web Company can help you make the most of your SEO marketing strategies. Our web team has years of experience in all things digital marketing, including website maintenance, optimization, and content creation. Contact us today to learn how we can help you.
