Search Engine Optimization - 27 May 2024

AI in SEO: Partner or Replacement?

How SEOs Are Leveraging the Power of AI to Optimize Workflows and Improve Results

With the growing integration of AI in SEO comes a growing concern about its potential impact on jobs and workflows within the industry. Some fear AI will replace human professionals, rendering their skills obsolete and diminishing job opportunities. Thankfully, the prevailing perspective among most SEO experts is that AI will not replace but rather enhance human efforts.

Much like modern automation technologies changed manufacturing and various other industries, AI will play an indispensable role in supporting and streamlining many SEO processes, freeing humans up to focus on tasks that cannot be effectively replicated by software, regardless of how sophisticated that software is or becomes. In this way, we can view AI as a partner rather than a replacement, improving productivity, improving outcomes, and driving innovation within the field of SEO.

Understanding the Role of AI in SEO

Before we dive into how AI is being used to overhaul traditional SEO workflows, it is essential to understand how the technology works and its role in the SEO landscape.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of improving a website to improve its visibility and search engine ranking, thereby increasing organic traffic. The strategy involves optimizing various on-page, technical, and off-page elements to help make websites easier for web crawlers to read and understand while also improving content quality and overall user experience. Many of these tasks, such as keyword research and site audits, are extremely time-consuming but not particularly creative in nature, which is where AI becomes an invaluable asset.

Throwing AI-powered tools into the SEO mix can help dramatically speed up many of these laborious yet necessary tasks allowing SEOs to get work done faster while focusing more of their attention on planning, implementing, and refining overall SEO strategies.

With machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, AI programs have a distinct advantage over people when it comes to consuming, understanding, and organizing large swaths of data. Whether it’s summarizing content, breaking down technical data, or analyzing keywords, AI programs can give any SEO pro a leg up in optimizing their strategies.

But, for all its advantages, AI is not poised to eliminate the need for hands-on human involvement in creating, curating, and implementing a successful SEO strategy. Instead of pitting one against the other, AI should be viewed as the next iteration of essential SEO tools, enhancing human capabilities, and driving more effective outcomes.

AI As an SEO Partner

AI-powered tools have already seen widespread adoption among industry professionals, and learning how to effectively leverage them into your strategy will become crucial to maintaining competitiveness. But where are SEOs using AI to improve workflows?

Creating Content That Captures Audiences

Content is one of the pillars of any SEO strategy as without winning content it is nearly impossible to rank well on SERPs. Content creation involves brainstorming ideas that resonate with your target audience, developing written or visual content based on those concepts, and presenting the information in ways that engage, provide value, and address an interest or need.

Content creation has by far been one of the most frequent uses of AI-powered tools in SEO. From idea generation and outlines to keyword research and clustering, AI has been helping creative teams create content that is not only SEO-friendly but truly captures the audience’s attention, giving them something of substance that is also highly engaging.

There are an ever-growing number of free and paid tools you can use as part of your content creation funnel, like this one from Jasper AI or ChatGPT, which comes with a free option.

However, it is important to be mindful of the limitations of such software. While these tools are great for brainstorming ideas or bailing you out of a bad case of writer’s block, they simply can’t capture the emotional nuance, insight, or creativity of human writers. Remember that one of the key metrics used to evaluate and rank content is user engagement, which hinges on authentic, compelling storytelling that resonates on a human level.

Keyword Research

Effective keyword research can be broken down into three parts: find, analyze, and implement. The process begins by identifying topics relevant to your business and then generating keywords or phrases related to each including phrases your audience might use in online searches.

The next step is to analyze these keywords to understand their search volume, relevance, and user intent. This ensures that the keywords you choose not only attract traffic but also enable you to tailor your content strategy to meet the needs of your target audience. Once you have narrowed down your list, the final step is to implement these keywords strategically within your content, meta tags, and other on-page elements to improve your website’s visibility and search engine ranking, driving more organic traffic and achieving your SEO goals.

As you can see, a significant amount of time and energy is spent brainstorming, analyzing, and refining potential keyword lists to achieve optimal results. AI is now streamlining this process and, arguably, enhancing the outcomes, making keyword research more efficient and effective.

Keyword research tools are not new. SEOs have been using tools like SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool (recently updated to include AI-driven insights) and Google’s Keyword Planner for years. However, AI is adding another layer of functionality. Now, tools such as copy.ai’s free keyword generator or Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest are leveraging powerful machine learning algorithms to provide deeper insights into keyword strategy and user search trends.

Content Optimization

After content creation, content optimization is one of the next most frequent use cases of AI in SEO.

Content optimization involves tweaking, refining, and enhancing your digital content so that it not only appeals to your audience but is also optimized for search engine bots. This process touches on every aspect of your content, from keywords, titles, and subheadings to meta-descriptions and backlinks, to increase visibility, authority, and engagement.

Before AI, these optimization processes required a significant amount of human input. But now, we can use various AI tools to speed up much of this intensive work, freeing SEOs to focus on other aspects of their content strategy.

Reword_ offers an AI-powered writing assistant that functions as both a content generator and an editor. The software can help uncover ways to optimize or refine existing content, providing suggestions to improve content quality, engagement, and performance.

Schema Markup

Schema markup is bits of code that help search engines better read and understand the content of your website. By providing additional context, schema markup enables search engines to interpret and display your content more accurately in search results. This not only improves the appearance of your listings with rich snippets, such as star ratings, images, and other relevant information, but also makes your website more appealing to users, thus improving your website’s visibility, click-through rates, and overall SEO performance. However, generating schema is a tedious and time-consuming task which is possibly why so many websites fail to implement it and how you can gain a competitive advantage.

AI-powered schema markup tools, like this one from Jasper, can quickly tackle the lengthy process of generating schema markup. With a few simple prompts, you’ll have everything you need to boost your online visibility and drive more traffic to your website.

Embracing AI as an SEO-Ally (Not an Adversary)

AI is revolutionizing the SEO landscape, improving productivity, and optimizing workflows in unprecedented ways. But it’s not gearing up to take over the world. By automating tedious and time-consuming tasks, AI supports SEOs by allowing them to focus more energy on strategic planning, creative content creation, and nuanced decision-making that machines cannot replicate.

Embracing AI-powered tools and integrating them effectively into your SEO strategy will not only streamline processes but will also drive more effective results. As we continue to navigate the evolving digital landscape, leveraging AI’s capabilities will be crucial in maintaining a competitive edge and achieving long-term success in SEO.