When we say “artificial intelligence” do you picture some ultrasophisticated lab, somewhere in Silicon Valley, creating mind-boggling tech that you will never be able to use?
Well… That’s not the whole story.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the widespread practice of incorporating smart machines and services into our daily lives — to make them better, more efficient, and more fulfilling.
AI can take many forms.
- The Apple Watch that you are currently wearing? That’s AI.
- Your (super-apt) Netflix suggestions? Yup, AI.
- Your Google Maps telling you to take a different route because of unexpected heavy traffic? Again, AI.
If artificial intelligence is so ubiquitous (and useful), then it’s easy to understand how vital it can be in digital marketing, too — especially for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
That’s why we have created this comprehensive guide, in which we break down what AI SEO is and what benefits you can achieve with it.
What is AI-Powered SEO?
Just as AI has become so ingrained in our everyday lives — from fitness to food, from shopping to travel — it is also becoming increasingly pivotal in SEO.
AI-powered SEO uses AI tools to analyze keywords and your site performance to determine which steps can help you rank higher in search results.
AI can analyze data, see which pages rank above yours, and tell you how to raise your brand’s profile.
Google’s BERT and Rankbrain algorithms, for example, are powered by AI.
Google also uses AI to inform its SERPs (search engine results pages) and deliver better, more relevant results.
Similarly, AI can help you design a successful SEO strategy thanks to its ability to read, interpret, and store virtually endless amounts of data.
AI for SEO can assist marketers to unearth trending keywords and topics. They can gain a better understanding of customers’ buying patterns and behaviors, and target markets in a fraction of the time.
The Current State of AI SEO in 2023
Now that AI has entered the next phase of its existence, brands worldwide are racing to see who can best take advantage of the technology.
AI-powered SEO will become far more common in 2023 and beyond, especially as companies discover what it can do for their bottom line.
To illustrate this point further, let’s look at how top brands plan to merge AI and SEO in the coming year.
More AI content
Programs like MidJourney and ChatGPT are generative AI, meaning they can produce fully finished pieces based on text prompts.
For example, you can create a blog post about a topic in ChatGPT and then generate some images to accompany the post in MidJourney.
Realistically, you could do this over and over again, basically removing the need for human writers, photographers, and illustrators.
In 2022, only 10 percent of marketers used AI-generated content. In 2023, that number is expected to reach 58 percent. But that begs the question—is AI content any good?
The short answer is yes; AI content can be decent when used appropriately. However, it comes with some pretty glaring disadvantages.
For example, as more companies produce this content, AI programs will use it as the basis for new pieces, leading to copies of copies of copies. After a while, human-generated content will stand out as being more original, authoritative, and readable.
Another issue is that AI often creates content for the algorithm, especially if you’re focused on SEO tactics. So, text and images may not be as valuable to the reader, meaning the content gets marked down.
SEO is an even bigger priority
Although SEO marketing has been around for years, brands are going all-in on this tactic in 2023. Up to 90 percent of companies are laser-focused on SEO, especially when AI programs allow them to do more with less infrastructure.
A greater focus on SEO can also lead to a “compound interest” strategy that ensures high-ranking pages continue to dominate in months and years to come.
Basically, if a page already ranks in the top spot, it’s more likely that other sites link to it, thus establishing it as an authority within its niche.
What can AI do for your SEO strategy?
To put it simply?
AI can help your brand rank much higher and always stay ahead of competitors.
If you want to know more about the pros and cons of having AI in your content marketing routine, check out this interactive ebook.
But let’s break this down even more by highlighting the top three most impressive benefits that you can achieve by integrating AI into your SEO strategy.
1. More Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Speed
Using AI for your SEO strategy can help you become quicker, more efficient, and more productive when it comes to managing your digital marketing.
Think about it: AI is highly automated, which means that lengthy, time-consuming tasks are now eliminated.
And because you don’t need to hire developers to code software, you can be more strategic in the planning and delivery of your digital content creation.
The bottom line? Massive time and money savings.
The information that you can dig out with AI for SEO is also incredibly accurate and up-to-date, which in turn helps boost productivity and inform meaningful business decisions.
2. Improved User Experience and Customer Satisfaction
The very aim of all AI tools is to provide a user experience that is as relevant, useful, and personalized as possible.
In a nutshell: AI is there to make your life (and your clients’ lives) better.
And what happens if you manage to make your clients’ lives better by providing hyper-personalized services and products?
They will come back for more and spread the word about how great your brand is.
3. Higher Rankings
Last but, of course, not least: with an AI-powered SEO strategy, you can aim for the stars.
Meaning, you can reach higher SERP rankings both today and in the future.
One of the reasons is that AI, as we’ve just seen, helps to craft a bespoke, stellar user experience.
And user experience is one of the main criteria that impact your SERP ranking.
In addition to this, AI for SEO will help you to lift your rankings because it enables you to discover and use exactly the right keywords, topics, and content that your audience is searching for.
6 Ways to Improve Your Website With AI SEO
Knowing the value of AI and how many different companies will rely on it is one thing, but now let’s look at specific ways you can utilize this technology for your own SEO marketing.
Here are six methods (with tools) that can supercharge your SEO strategy.
1. Targeted Topics, Keywords, and Content
Imagine knowing EXACTLY what your audience is searching for on Google or other search engines.
Imagine knowing all the words, phrases, and topics that get your customers excited and pique their interest.
Now, stop daydreaming and wake up, because this is precisely what AI SEO allows you to do.
Artificial intelligence tools can spot patterns within huge data sets, and provide you with suggestions on what keywords you should be using to drive more traffic to your channels.
Similarly, these tools also offer you insights into what topics your top-ranking competitors are currently engaged.
As a consequence, you can take a proverbial leaf out of their (digital) book and intercept some of their customers across multiple search queries.
Existing content can be optimized, too, thanks to artificial intelligence.
Simply ask your AI tool to analyze a piece of content that you have already produced and published online, and it will generate highly relevant suggestions on how you can improve it to rank higher for one or more keywords.
The Best AI tools for keyword research
AI is excellent at providing valuable insights into which keywords you should be focused on and which related keywords can help boost your rankings. Although many tools can help with this process, Twinword and CopyAI are particularly fantastic. Here’s a quick overview of each tool.
- Twinword: As soon as you put in a primary keyword, Twinword will give you a wealth of information, including related semantic keywords, popular topics, and keyword patterns. From there, you can determine which keywords will help you optimize your pages and content the most.
- CopyAI: Although this program is designed for writing copy using AI, it also has incredible keyword research capabilities. Although you must verify which keywords will be suitable for traffic and conversions, this tool is best for generating new ideas and finding keywords you may not have discovered otherwise.
2. Smarter Text and Voice Search
Providing users with pertinent and customized search results is one of the top priorities of all search engines.
This happens thanks to artificial intelligence, which allows search engines to process queries and then “predict” which specific results are going to be most relevant and useful to that search.
The “how” of this process is not fully clear, and Google search algorithms are in constant evolution.
However, what we know is that AI plays a central role in delivering the best results to a query. And when we talk about “query”, we don’t simply mean a text search.
More and more online users are choosing voice search to process their queries.
Voice search is based on artificial intelligence technologies such as processing-to-function and NLG (natural language generation).
By incorporating AI-enabled voice search into your SEO strategy, you will open up your brand to a whole new customer segment that uses this search method increasingly more often.
The results for your bottom line can be incredible.
The Best AI tools for text and voice search optimization
Since people are using voice search more frequently, you need to start optimizing your content so it will show up as the top result, even for voice searches.
While there aren’t programs to help you optimize for this specifically, you can use digital assistants to see which results come up first and then reverse-engineer a process to outrank them.
The top AI-powered voice search programs include:
- Alexa: Amazon Alexa is a virtual assistant, and users can sync it with various smart home devices. You can ask Alexa to bring up search results for content similar to what you’ve created and see what she discovers.
- Google Assistant: Since Google’s algorithm is the gold standard for SEO, it makes sense to use the Google Assistant search function to see where your content ranks.
Overall, focusing on rich snippets and bite-sized answers to specific questions can help you reach the top spot.
3. Local SEO Searches
One of the beauties of local SEO is the possibility to connect with people who live or work in the same area where your business operates.
What does this mean?
It’s simple: even in an age where most customer-brand interactions happen in the virtual world, finding a point of real-life connection is incredibly meaningful (and comforting).
And guess what — artificial intelligence can boost your local SEO searches.
Perhaps, you have been struggling to make sure that your company shows up in local SEO searches across all its different locations.
Well, AI SEO is here to change that.
With artificial intelligence, you can ensure that any changes or updates to your listings get picked up instantly and displayed appropriately on search engines.
The Best AI tool for local SEO
Since local SEO depends on location-specific content, you should see what is out there and learn how to make better content for your target audience. Here’s our pick for the best local optimization tool available.
- MarketMuse: This tool allows you to generate content ideas and see what the competition is doing, especially for locally sourced content. MarketMuse can also determine what topics your audience is interested in, so you can develop compelling content pieces centered around those topics.
4. Exciting (and Optimized) Content Creation
Content creation is one of the pillars of any successful digital marketing strategy.
But to be truly effective, the content that you create and publish online should be fully optimized.
How do you do this now?
Probably, by spending a lot of time researching relevant and trending keywords and topics, and then building pieces of content around them.
There is, of course, a much better way to achieve this: with AI technologies.
Precisely because AI lets you in on the best and most relevant topics and keywords for your brand, it will also enable you to craft better, more optimized content.
Besides keywords and topics, AI-powered solutions for SEO content can also help you identify better opportunities for link building, user intent, and more.
They can also enable you to optimize content that you have already created, by suggesting the best search terms to include as well as the ideal length of a specific piece of content.
The Best AI tools for content creation
Although brands have to be careful with how they create content with AI, some tools can help them deliver high-quality content faster.
Overall, AI can be a powerful foundation for your content creation process if there is a human element to verify the information and polish it so it reads better. Here are the tools we like for SEO content creation.
- SEO.ai: Seo.ai is an all-in-one platform that allows you to handle everything from keyword research to content delivery, all from a single platform and dashboard. So, if you want to avoid creating an SEO marketing strategy that relies on different tools, SEO.ai can be an efficient way to get similar results.
- WriterAccess: Instead of using AI to generate content for you, WriterAccess uses AI to help you find writers with the requisite experience and style you want from a curated roster of talent. Then, you can provide them with as little as a keyword and word count to get high-quality content in return. WriterAccess can also put other AI tools in your hands, for example, to verify that your content is human-made and generate ideas for your website.
5. Ad-Hoc SEO Scaling
If you know a bit about SEO, you probably know that the results of even the best and most targeted SEO campaigns can take a long time to show up.
Often, no less than six months.
Tasks such as keyword search and optimization, and SEO content creation and repurposing can be long and monotonous.
And how can you even hope to scale up your SEO, if it’s taking you so long to complete a task and see the results?
All this can change with AI SEO.
With SEO tools based on artificial intelligence technologies, you can forget about the stress of gathering, processing, and analyzing data. AI-based SEO tools do all the hard work for you.
And if you use these tools for data analytics and other time-consuming processes, you can finally scale up your SEO — literally at the touch of a button.
The Best AI tool for scaling SEO tactics
Once you have an SEO strategy in place, you need to scale up your content production to grow your brand.
Fortunately, AI can help immensely with automation and analysis, allowing you to resolve issues as you go and grow with confidence.
- HubSpot AI: HubSpot is already one of the leading brands for digital marketing and SEO. Its new AI tools can help you generate more content in less time and promote it even faster. While these tools are still in development, they help companies boost their online presence in a fraction of the time it would take to do everything manually.
6. User personalization
One great reason to use AI is to learn about your audience and curate content to meet their interests.
Content customization is crucial for building a stronger bottom line and driving more conversions. It allows you to speak to each person directly, not generically.
Plus, since AI is doing all the work, you can just deploy a program, take the data it collects, and automate your SEO strategy accordingly.
User personalization works best for SEO because it allows your brand to create high-value content.
Curated content drives more traffic and links, meaning you rise through the ranks to reach the top position for your target keywords.
The Best AI tool for user personalization
The best AI personalization tool gives you control over how you approach each customer based on the data AI collects. For that, we like the tool below for data collection, personalization, and conversion.
- Monetate: Some of the biggest brands in the world use this system to collect information on leads and customers. The platform is also intuitive and easy to use, so you won’t get lost when building your next campaign. Best of all, you can create a customized roadmap for a lead to convert into a customer and ultimately into a long-term brand ambassador.
Wrap Up: Optimize your Strategies with AI SEO
If you want to market your brand effectively, applying artificial intelligence to your SEO strategy can help.
With AI for SEO, you will be able to boost your content creation, reach out to a more targeted and relevant audience, expand your business efficiency, support stellar customer experiences, and so much more.
And if you need help with content creation, we’ve got you covered!
Elevate your content creation game with our AI-powered products. Sign up for a free 14-day trial on WriterAccess today!
What are you waiting for? The AI SEO revolution has already started and is here to stay.
