AI, or artificial intelligence, is slowly but surely getting into our online behavior and our lives in general. From online shopping and advertising, web search, digital personal assistants, and cars to cybersecurity, AI and its applications are nowadays being seen everywhere in our daily lives. And SEO is not far behind.

With Google introducing AI-based algorithms like RankBrain, AI has already been in use by search engines. It was just some ticking time before AI found its way into SEO and how it is handled by a digital marketing agency. And the time has come.

Now, every digital marketer is making use of AI-based tools and technologies to make their SEO tasks easier. AI is helping marketers tackle some of the biggest challenges in the industry and helping digital marketers process high-volume and data-intensive tasks.

As the current trend shows, AI will become even more essential in the future for doing search engine optimization effectively and at scale. Here is a breakdown of how AI is being used today and the areas of SEO in which AI will likely have an impact in the future. 

What Does AI Encompass?

AI is a broad umbrella term that encompasses a variety of technologies. 

Natural language processing (NLP) : Train computers to understand and interact in human language. 

Machine learning : Comprise of data and algorithms to learn as humans do. 

Deep learning : Ables a machine to analyze data within logical structures to imitate how humans draw conclusions.

SEO uses NLP and machine learning the most because it’s quite the way search engines work to understand and promote web content to searchers.

How Does AI Fit in SEO?

SEO is time-consuming and takes a lot of effort and resources on the part of marketers to make a page or site rank high. On top of that, Google’s algorithm constantly updates and improves, meaning SEO is never really finished. Utilizing AI can help scale growth faster and outrank competitors more easily. These are the three prime ways AI helps in SEO.

Creating SEO content at scale

Content is the pillar of SEO. As the primary aim of Google is to provide valuable results to user searches, the content providing accurate results is always in high demand. Providing value to users is not easy. You have to publish SEO-optimized content with proper keywords included, and creating high-quality content that actually ranks and stays on top requires considerable effort from the content marketing team. 

But now, with advanced NLP models like ChatGPT, creating content has become much easier. As these AI models have a huge database to source, the content produced by them is informative and provides value to the readers. 

AI tools like ChatGPT and others can create titles, meta tags, sentences, full paragraphs, and entire articles by themselves. However, they are not free from errors. Sometimes the information is incorrect, or the writing is too drab. However, AI language models learn continuously, just like humans, and there is a high chance that they will replace content writers completely, or at least most of them. 

What we can say now is that AI tools are increasingly being used to create part or whole of content that is SEO-friendly and publishable. Despite Google forbidding the use of AI tools for creating content, ChatGPT is currently being used to create content at a huge scale much more quickly. 

Keyword Research

Keyword research and optimization are a cornerstone of SEO. There are approximately 62,000 keyword searches every second, as HubSpot estimates. Meaning there can be a thousand ways a customer might be searching for products or services. 

It’s a common practice among SEO marketing agencies to create content focusing on a set of keywords rather than one or two. This is called keyword clustering. AI-powered tools make finding the right keywords that SEO professionals can then make use of to create a set of keywords on which you would choose to optimize your content. 

AI-powered tools are accelerating and automating keyword research for good. Information is easily available using these tools, and SEO professionals can make smarter decisions about their keyword strategy. 

SERP Analytics

One of the earliest and most persistent challenges of SEO is not knowing how exactly Google ranks a particular page or site. Years of inference and working with Google have given some insights regarding how Google works in ranking and promoting web pages but not completely. 

Now, with the use of AI and Big Data, a more precise and elaborate set of data is available today, using which a digital marketing agency can make a better decision regarding their optimization strategies. 

Till now, SEO tools would scrape the SERPs to gather keyword and ranking positions. However, with the help of open-source Google APIs, software engineers could build better SEO tools that utilize the best and the most comprehensive data available anywhere to give you better directions in your SEO strategy. 

Final Thoughts

AI is pervading the digital marketing field, and though many SEO professionals still use the standard tools, the number of AI-powered tools is gradually seeing a rise in usage. They have a distinct advantage over other SEO tools or even manual effort in the fact that they produce more elaborate results much more quickly. Particularly, tools like ChatGPT are largely being used to create content on a large scale which is the pillar of any SEO strategy. Though it is early to say that AI will completely take over content creation and SEO, it can be safely said here that AI is in this game far and large and is likely to continue being so and expand its reach in the SEO industry.