Humans aren’t mind readers, yet 76% of customers expect businesses to anticipate their needs and expectations. Fortunately, advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning are helping SEO specialists to manage and unify data, understand user behavior, predict user needs, and deliver personalized experiences. These disruptive technologies are enabling SEO experts to improve the effectiveness of their campaigns.
AI and SEO are a gainful combination for search marketers, allowing them to keep up with Google and other search engines that continuously incorporate machine learning into their products and services. In a recent survey by Emerj, "search" was voted as the most profitable application of AI and machine learning in digital marketing.
This is because search engines have become smarter in identifying keyword stuffing and irrelevant backlinks and assessing the quality of content. Hence, marketers need to use AI-powered SEO tactics to meet the requirements of search engines and boost their online rankings.
If you want your business to succeed, AI-powered SEO is a worthwhile investment. Read on to learn how AI can help you improve your online reputation and fuel the growth of your venture.
1. Create awesome SEO content.
Google is well known for tweaking its search algorithm to offer high-quality and relevant content to its users. Last year, several websites were struggling to come to terms with the huge loss in traffic (read: revenue) after Google rolled out E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness). It's no wonder that offering great content with high E-A-T ratings is core to business success.
AI and machine learning can help search marketers identify consumer search trends, automate keyword research, and develop content that ranks high in the SERP. AI-driven platforms like BrightEdge, Content Fusion and CanIRank can guide the writing process by giving you the top keywords to use for a given topic, thereby offering real-time recommendations for optimizing the content.
For instance, Content Fusion, seoClarity's AI content writer, can help you understand your customer's voice with semantically related terms, enabling you to cover any topic with authority. This AI-ready tool analyzes your content against other pages that rank for the same term and then offers additional keywords to include. With such insights, you can create content that exceeds customer expectations, improves your E-A-T score and ranks in the SERP.
Further, AI-powered tools like MorphL can uncover the intent behind search queries and design high-converting experiences at every stage of the marketing funnel. Users typically look for advice, insights, product recommendations or information about a business. Identifying the user intent can help you determine what type of content to write. For instance, if your audience is looking for advice and actionable information, you can offer them case studies that tell a unique story while establishing your authority in the domain. Thus, each piece of content is optimized for organic performance, allowing you to rank your content in the smartest possible way.
2. Optimize content for voice search.
Voice search is increasingly popular because virtual assistants, such as Siri and Alexa, can respond to queries within seconds. In fact, Comscore predicts that by 2020, 50% of all online searches will be voice-based.
Like RankBrain, Google's algorithm that uses machine learning and AI, these digital assistants are getting smarter each day. In other words, they are constantly listening and learning. Hence, it is becoming critical for businesses to amp up their SEO game around voice search. Businesses need to understand the conversational journey and predict the follow-up questions users may ask.
AI-powered SEO helps experts identify question keywords with search volume, understand the conversational journey and deliver a real-time voice strategy – all of which are essential for great SEO and consumer experiences. These tools allow marketers to scale research across various locations and languages, all on one platform. Thus, you can make smart and gainful decisions quickly and seamlessly.
Also, AI-ready platforms can ensure that the voice search algorithms used by Google and other tech giants have the latest information about your business.
3. Get real-time data analysis.
In recent times, SEO experts are using cluster analysis and predictive analytics to generate a design that matches customer expectations. Cluster analysis can help you create topic clusters that help search engines identify pages related to a specific topic, thereby improving your page rank. This video shares how the topic cluster model focuses on topics, not keywords, to improve your site's architecture, making it easy for search engines to discover your content.
Predictive analytics, on the other hand, help you forecast the search trends that will influence your website traffic. AI-enabled platforms like BrightEdge and Market Brew help SEO teams build predictive models, allowing them to see the cracks in your website architecture and irregularities in your website content. The insights can be used to predict how search engines will react to the page and make the necessary changes to rank higher.
4. Personalize like a pro.
New research indicates 80% of consumers prefer making a purchase when a brand offers a personalized experience. Personalized experiences make customers feel that the enterprise cares for their needs and concerns, thereby strengthening brand loyalty and boosting customer experience.
Smart personalization engines like Optimizely, Evergage and SmarterHQ help create a customized experience for each customer, ultimately translating into improved SERP rankings and profits. These engines study customer journeys to deliver data-driven customer experiences.
For instance, in the retail space, smart personalization engines use internal and external data sources to study online and in-store buying behavior and predict shopper preferences, choices, and purchases using machine learning and real-time updates. Thus, this technology automates the creation of individual shopping experiences.
Netflix is one company that has taken personalization to a whole new level. Its recommendation engine is based on AI-powered algorithms that learn about viewers' tastes and serve the best content available in a personalized way.
5. Automate labor-intensive tasks.
SEO involves several labor-intensive tasks, including website audits, keyword research, content optimization and distribution, tag management, rankings supervision, and backlink monitoring.
SEO automation tools such as WordLift, Albert and Alli AI offer several features to improve and optimize your website content strategies without wasting too much time. These tools also offer a powerful way to boost traffic, track traffic progress, build high-quality backlinks and scale business outreach. Further, SEO automation can help you optimize resources and save your time for other revenue-generating activities.
Bottom line
AI-powered SEO can help predict customer behavior, optimize your content strategy and unleash the true potential of real-time analytics. Using AI for SEO can fetch optimum results for your digital marketing campaigns, thereby improving your business visibility, engagement rate and conversions.
AI is revolutionizing SEO by using user experience, big data and machine learning to generate search results that meet user expectations. We have already entered the AI-powered SEO era, so go ahead and inject a generous dose of AI into your SEO strategy to get a winning edge over your competitors.