What is AI SEO and How Is It Really Used by SEOs?
SEO automation, AI powered SEO, and SEO machine learning.
These are all buzzwords heard more and more often in the industry as AI SEO is earning a spot on almost every “Top SEO Trends” list.
No matter how mysterious or sci-fi the concept of artificial intelligence may seem to you many top-performing businesses and marketing companies are capitalizing on the addition of AI SEO software, services and tools to their toolkit and achieving great success and sales.
AI powered SEO has helped businesses achieve success for years and its role in 2022 and beyond is more significant than ever given its accessibility to the general marketer.
“Artificial intelligence (AI) has permanently changed search. Users are getting custom search results based on their past behaviors, their devices, their locations, and hundreds of other factors. The search engines increasingly know what users want. This technology shift is driving momentous change in search engine optimization (SEO) as well. AI technology is capable of building customized optimization strategies.”
– BrightEdge.com
By the end of this article, our goal is to help our customers have a better grasp on the power and benefits of using AI for SEO and to gain a solid understanding of how people and AI can pool their talents for an improved optimization results.
What is AI Powered SEO?
“AI SEO…is the process of using Artificial Intelligence to guide search engine optimization of a web page or a website to gain better rankings and organic traffic.” (Outranking.io).
“Search optimization AI analyzes the relationships between sites, content pages, and search engine rankings. The results are fast, actionable, and even automated tactics to out-optimize the competition.” (BrightEdge.com)
Why does AI Driven SEO Matter?
Using Artificial Intelligence’s ability to make decisions and solve problems through machine powered learning can help Digital Marketers and SEO teams save time, explore new opportunities, and streamline the process of many tasks for their customers.
In an extremely competitive market, AI powered SEO can be used to beat out competitors and have a stronger, better optimized, more authoritative and relevant website that earns top Google rankings and increasing revenues.
Did you know? According to Outranking.io:
– 30% of AI adopters cited a 6-10% increase in revenue after implementing the technology.
– As of 2019, 37% of organizations have used AI in some form to optimize business operations.
3 Key Benefits of AI SEO
Before sharing what we see as the most important benefits of AI for SEO it’s important to note that SEO AI Tools and AI powered SEO software aren’t magic wands you wave for guaranteed better rankings and traffic.
AI based SEO is most profitable and has best chances of improving performance when used by a trained SEO to enhance an existing sound SEO Strategy and campaign. Here’s what SEO Expert Neil Patel says:
“By marrying these two disciplines, you can create a robust SEO strategy that’s bound to get you noticed. More than that, it will help you build a loyal audience. Of course, for every business, that translates to a healthier bottom line.”
– Neil Patel
Essentially, you can achieve this healthier bottom line by doing SEO better and faster:
- Perform more in depth and complete data analysis.
- Do your job faster and obtain a better result.
- Discover major content and keyword gaps that may otherwise go unrealized.
Top AI Based SEO Applications
Currently, we are seeing the biggest potential to use artificial intelligence throughout the process of SEO Keyword Research and SEO Content Development.
1. AI SEO for Keyword Research
AI powered SEO goes one step beyond the abilities of traditional keyword research tools to help uncover keywords used by high-ranking pages and semantical-related keywords to what you aim to target.
Here’s how …
- Showcases how groups of keywords relate to the same search result
- Broadens keywords while remaining highly relevant
- Uncovers important low-competition keywords
- Checks relevancy of uncovered keywords against your own website to make sure you are pursuing keywords that can actually be supported by your current website
- Helps group keywords into suitable clusters or hubs to help with content writing down the road
- Flags keywords that are high traffic, high value, and high ROI for you to pursue
- Analyzes top ranking websites for the target keyword and outlines content coverage and topic gaps for the keyword, to help guide your content development
Ultimately, using AI for keyword research helps shorten the process to compile a list of targeted keywords.
2. AI SEO Content Writing
Ask any business owner and most will suggest that writing powerful, well optimized content is one of the hardest parts of launching a new website.
Content creation takes time and effort. One needs a specific skillset to write quality content let alone content that has the ability to rank well.
Some basic examples of what AI SEO content generation tools can do include:
- Generate page title ideas
- Generate list of FAQ’s on a specific topic
- Generate list of “People Also Ask” topics
- Create meta description options
- Create a content outline for a page, including headings
- Analyze content on top ranking pages for your intended topic/keyword
AI tools can also help to:
- Analyze top ranking pages for intended topic/keyword
- Assess ranking potential
- Forecast content effort
- Organize content more easily
- Create SEO-friendly content to fit search algorithms
- Satisfy user experience and search intent
Essentially, AI SEO content generators can help free up an SEO’s time and help compose a web page or blog article in a fraction of the time.
3. AI for SEO Content Optimization
AI powered SEO is not only for writing new content!
It is also beneficial (perhaps even more beneficial) for revamping your old SEO content that may now receive next to no traffic. In fact, old, outdated, poorly optimized and low quality content may be hurting your website’s overall SEO score. Why not use AI for SEO to optimize old, underperforming content?
You can consistently update and improve top performing content in order to gain ranking position or maintain top visibility.
Some suggestions AI SEO may make for your existing content pages include:
- Optimize word count and heading usage
- Insertion of relevant keywords and LSI keywords
- Better display of user intent
- Stronger meta title and meta descriptions
- Cluster topics to help answer user intent
- Incorporate “People Also Ask”
- Create featured snippets to display in SERPs
- Make content more voice search friendly
Essentially, we want to make sure old content is re-optimized using AI powered SEO in order to establish stronger authority, develop topic relevancy, and respond to user intent.
Other Ways to Use AI for SEO
1. Discover link building opportunities.
It’s productive to use AI to find bloggers and influencers to approach for relevant backlinks as well as provide guidance for how to improve the websites we approach for backlinks. For example, AI can help us evaluate a potential link opportunity’s publishing frequency, last publishing date, overall user experience, total comments, engagement, etc.
2. Identify new topic idea opportunities.
AI based SEO provides a supercharged brainstorming platform to uncover new topics and related searches to your targeted keywords. Not only does this allow you to provide a fuller scope of content relevant to your visitors but it also builds your credibility and trust on the topic.
3. Identify trending topics you can capitalize on in a timely matter.
Traditional keyword research and content strategy alone may miss important trending keywords and topics. Some of these may not even be on your radar or included in your standard keyword optimization list.
4. Discover content gaps in your existing website or blog.
Again, they may be substantial relevant content missing on your website that you don’t even realize is missing yet.
5. Perform content analysis to discover what works best for ranking.
Several AI SEO software tools will evaluate a keyword and tell you the optimum word count, number of sections, keyword frequency, relevant supporting keywords and topics to include, and more. This helps you understand what it currently takes to rank well on a particular keyword.
6. Improve overall user experience.
AI powered SEO will also use multiple user experience metrics to analyze existing content and help with content optimization. You’ll want to look at metrics provided, like dwell time and page organization. AI powered SEO may just be one of the missing Keys to Mastering User Experience SEO.
Best AI SEO Software Options and AI SEO Tools
AI SEO software is still a new and evolving industry and there are plenty of options to choose from when getting started.
There isn’t one perfect, all-in-one AI SEO Software on the market. Many professional SEO companies will choose to use two or more tools in combination to get the best results throughout keyword research, content writing, content optimization, data analysis and other tasks.
With all of these top AI SEO tools listed, remember that they still require someone who is educated and trained in SEO in order to use them to their full potential. The human mind is irreplaceable – it is absolutely necessary to analyze and execute exact SEO, Marketing and Branding requirements!
Top AI SEO Optimization Tools
Outranking.io – this SEO content writing software assists with content writing workflows and SERP analysis. It provides SEO scoring to help assess content quality too.
Peppertype.io – this software claims to be your virtual content assistant that can generate better content in seconds using artificial intelligence. AI SEO content types include blogging, meta titles and descriptions, social media captions, Amazon product descriptions, and more.
AISEO – the long form assistant feature of this tool claims to help write quality content 10x faster and the content paraphraser tool will paraphrase up to 50,000 words. It also helps with copywriting templates for ads, blog posts, branding, and more.
On-Page.ai – this tool by Traffic Research provides a straightforward path from target keyword to ready to rank content, even in competitive markets. The tool provides excellent insights on profitable keywords.
Other AI SEO optimization tools to check out include CORA, POP and SurferSEO. This list is likely to expand and change as more tools come onto the market and the use of AI powered SEO evolves.
Will AI replace SEO? The Future Lies in Human Intelligence and AI SEO
With many valuable AI SEO tools that seem to do all the hard work – will AI eventually replace the skills of a talented and experienced SEO or SEO Company?
Our answer is a hard no.
No matter how good AI in SEO gets we will always need the irreplaceable value of a human brain trained in the art of SEO.
Essentially, AI helps scale SEO. We will be able to conduct an SEO Content Audit faster, fast track keyword research, semi-automate content copywriting and optimization, perform more in depth and more frequent competitor analyses, better understand user intent, and so on.
This frees up our human SEO time to focus on areas that simply can’t be done by a computer.
AI SEO is an outstanding tool when powered by an SEO expert’s skillset.
“[SEOs will] move from manual technical and content work and more into analysis and strategy roles.”
– BrightEdge.com
Neil Patel outlines three ways a real human, experienced in SEO and who fully understands your target market and customer demands, can help sift through all the keyword data and AI content:
Concepts: What is the idea behind the searchers’ query?
Context: What is the intent behind the searchers’ query?
Customer satisfaction: What are the most relevant answers to the user’s query?
Top 3 AI SEO Takeaways
- AI powered SEO can save an extensive amount of time and help generate better performing content that provides a better user experience.
- One must have proper training and a full understanding of SEO concepts in order to maximize the potential and power of AI SEO software on the market.
- AI based SEO will never replace the need for a professional human SEO to create and execute a thorough SEO Strategy to help fuel a holistic marketing and business growth plan.
Final Thoughts on AI SEO
There is no denying how artificial intelligence makes people’s lives easier and more comfortable. Add this technology to your SEO strategy, and you’ll not only enjoy ease and comfort but also gain tremendous benefits for your business.
And with its increasingly critical role year after year, you’ll certainly lose out if you don’t take advantage of AI SEO.
If you don’t have a clear view of leveraging AI in your business yet, don’t worry. Our SEO team can help you gain a better grasp and incorporate AI SEO into your Digital Marketing Plan to ake this the best year for your brand yet. Contact our SEO Experts by calling 1-888-262-6687 to discuss your project and explore your exact needs.
