AI for SEO is at a tipping point, and the technology used by large companies is becoming increasingly affordable for small businesses.
The increased use of this new technology is permanently changing SEO practices today.
But is it right for your business? These are amazing facts.
What is AI for SEO
AI, or artificial intelligence, is already part of our daily lives. Anyone using Alexa or Google Maps is using AI software to improve their lives in some way.
The popular writing assistant Grammarly is AI software that showcases the power of AI to improve performance.
It takes so-so content and makes it better by correcting grammar and spelling mistakes and catching repeated use of words.
AI for SEO works similarly to boost performance and democratize SEO to some extent by putting scale and sophistication of data analysis within everyone’s reach.
How can AI be used in SEO
Mainstream AI SEO platforms automate data analysis to give you a high-level view that identifies patterns and trends that are otherwise invisible.
Mark Traphagen of seoClarity explains why AI SEO automation is essential:
“Ten years ago, the best SEOs were great Excel jockeys, downloading and correlating data all by hand from various sources and parts of the SEO lifecycle.
If SEOs were doing it today, they would be left behind.
By the time humans can handle it, results will change, algorithms will update, and SERPs will shift.
And the access and depth of data available over the last decade, the rapid changes in search engine algorithms, the different ranking factors that vary from query to query, the intent-based results that change seasonally, the extreme Not to mention complicated. website.
These realities make the use of AI now imperative at the enterprise level. “
AI Insight Optimization
WordLift, an AI SEO automation platform, helps publishers automate structured data, internal links, and other page-related elements.
WordLift CEO Andrea Volpini commented:
“WordLift automatically pulls in the latest version of the schema vocabulary to support all possible entity types.
This data can be reused to create internal links, render contextual cards on web pages, and recommend similar content.
Much like Google, publishers can use this network of entities to help readers discover relevant content.
WordLift enables many SEO workflows as your website’s knowledge graph is built.
Some people use WordLift’s NLP to manage internal links to important pages. Others use knowledge graph data to direct internal search engines or fine-tune language models for content generation.
By automating structured data, exposing entities, and adding internal links, it’s not uncommon for content creators to see a significant increase in organic traffic. “
AI for SEO at Scale
AI for SEO can be applied to a wide range of activities that minimize involvement in repetitive tasks and increase productivity.
Here’s a partial list:
- content planning.
- content analysis.
- data analysis.
- Create a local knowledge graph.
- Automate the creation of schema-structured data.
- Concatenation optimization.
- Content optimization per page.
- Automatically optimized meta description.
- A programmatic title element.
- Headlines optimized at scale.
AI in content creation
Creating content consists of multiple subjective choices. What a writer perceives to be relevant to a topic may differ from what a user thinks.
Writers may assume that the topic is about topic X. A search engine may identify that the user likes content about her X, Y, and Z. As a result, content search performance may suffer.
AI content tools help content developers form a closer relationship between their content and what users are looking for by providing an objective profile of what a given piece of content is about.
With AI tools, search marketers are light years ahead of the decades-old practice of first identifying high-traffic keywords and then creating content around them. can do.
AI in content optimization
Search engines better understand search queries and content by identifying what users mean and what web pages are about.
Today’s AI content tools do the same for SEO throughout the content development workflow.
There is more to this.
In 2018, Google developed something called the Topic Layer. This helps you understand the content and how topics and subtopics are related to each other.
Google explained:
“So we took the existing knowledge graph that understands the connections between people, places, things, and facts about them, and added a new layer called the topic layer. It is designed to help you understand how it develops over time, as your familiarity and expertise grow.
A topic layer is built by analyzing all the content that exists on the web for a particular topic, developing hundreds or even thousands of subtopics.
For these subtopics, you can identify the most relevant articles and videos, i.e. not just fresh content on that topic, but articles and videos that demonstrate evergreen and continuing usefulness.
By then examining patterns to understand how these subtopics relate to each other, you can more intelligently uncover the type of content you want to explore next. “
AI content tools help search marketers align their activities with the realities of how search engines work.
AI in keyword research
In addition, by making the entire process scalable, it increases the efficiency of content workflows and shortens the time from research to publishing content online.
Mark Traphagen of seoClarity emphasized that AI tools take over the heavy lifting of SEO.
Mark explained:
“SeoClarity long ago moved from being a data provider to leveraging AI in every part of the SEO lifecycle to quickly move clients from data to insight to execution.
I am using:
AI surfacing insights and recommendations from various data sources (rankings -> SERP opportunities -> technical issues)
AI provides the most accurate data possible about search demand, keyword difficulty, and topic intent. All of this is provided in real-time and trend views.
AI in content optimization and analysis
AI-assisted automation for instant SEO execution enables large-scale change.
The future of AI in SEO is not for us to have AI “do SEO”, but for AI to take over our most time-consuming tasks, freeing up SEO as a director and making informed decisions at scale at unprecedented speed. is to take action. “
A key value of using AI for SEO is increasing productivity and efficiency while increasing expertise, authoritativeness, and relevance of content.
Market Muse’s Jeff Coyle outlines the benefits of AI as justifying how much budget is allocated to content and what value it brings to the bottom line.
Jeff commented:
“As many budgeted content strategies become successful, it quickly becomes apparent that using AI to predict content budget needs and increase efficiency is the most important investment content organizations can make. It becomes clear.
When it comes to operations, human resource efficiency is a top priority. Where are the humans performing manual tasks like researching, planning, prioritizing, briefing, writing, editing, producing, optimizing? How much time is lost and how many loops of feedback and rework?
Producing a single source of truth in the form of content briefs and project plans, data-driven, predictive and defensible content creation and optimization planning is all about using technology to improve human resource efficiency. It’s the foundation of a focused team.
Choosing what content to update, understanding how it should be updated, and whether content should be created, reused, and transformed for optimization are key to using AI for content analytics. It’s an advantage.
Knowing if your pages are of high quality, demonstrate expertise, appeal to the right target intent, and integrate correctly into your site are your team’s best chances for success. “
Drawbacks and ethical considerations
Publishing content created entirely by AI can have negative consequences. This is because Google explicitly prohibits auto-generated content.
Google’s spam guidelines warn that publishing auto-generated content may result in manual action being taken to remove the content from Google’s search results.
The guidelines explain:
“To be eligible to appear in Google’s web search results (webpages, images, videos, news content, or other materials Google finds from across the web), content must comply with Google Search’s general policies or this You must not be in violation of the spam policy stated on the page.
… Spammy auto-generated (or “auto-generated”) content is programmatically generated content that does not create anything unique or add significant value. Instead, it is generated with the main purpose of manipulating search rankings and does nothing to help users. “
There is no law prohibiting the publication of auto-generated content, nor is there a law prohibiting it. Google also suggests ways to exclude such content from our search engine if you choose to use such content.
But if your goal is to rank high on Google’s search engine, using auto-generated content isn’t practical.
Can Google identify AI-generated content?
Yes, Google and other search engines may be able to identify content entirely generated by AI.
The content contains word usage patterns that are unique to both human and AI-generated content. Statistical analysis reveals which content was created by AI.
The future of tools is now
There are many AI-based tools available that are suitable for different levels of users.
Not all companies need to scale their SEO to hundreds of thousands of products.
But even small to medium-sized online businesses can benefit from the streamlined and efficient workflows offered by AI-based content tools.
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Featured image from Shutterstock/Master1305
