The Role of Artificial Intelligence in the Search Engine Optimisation Process

In  Marketing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an emerging field that has the potential to improve SEO tools and business strategies. Digital marketing and AI work together to enhance developers’ and digital marketers’ abilities to interact with their audiences in different ways.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become so advanced today that it’s used not only for market analysis but also for its ability to categorise and classifiy data. This ability far exceeds any traditional marketing research organisation. One reason this approach is better than traditional approaches is that it doesn’t use static methods for data gathering.

Besides its many uses in various industries and fields, AI is also used in content creation for websites and social media platforms. Content marketers will optimise this piece of content to create blog posts, tweets and any other marketing materials. In this article, we will dive deeper into the role of Artificial Intelligence in the search engine optimisation (SEO) process and how you could use it to create quality content that will offer a better customer experience.      

What Is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

The term artificial intelligence was coined by ohn McCarthy at Dartmouth College in 1956 and refers to the process of simulating human intelligence by computer systems or machines. Speech recognition, image recognition, natural language processing (NLP) and machine translation are specific AI applications. Recently, AI has become more sophisticated and widely used. For example, Google uses AI to power its search engine. This type of technology can make decisions and solve problems with the help of machines. Artificial intelligence has been used for the first time in computers, enabling machine learning which is the process of using an algorithm to learn something for itself without being explicitly programmed.

How Is Artificial Intelligence Used in Google Search?

AI is becoming more sophisticated, SEO is not a one-time implementation, and it needs constant care and adaptation to Google’s ongoing changes in its search algorithm. As new technologies emerge, Google aims to offer the most flawless user experience. SEO strategies must be in continuous flux, as the Google core updates don’t wait for anyone.  

In the fall of 2013, Google launched the Hummingbird update, which focused on the ability of the search engine to understand user intent. This change meant that a search query would be processed based on the context rather than processing each keyword. By delivering the search results based on the search intent, Google can provide a better fit for the users, enhancing the user experience. 

Two years later, Google launched RankBrain, which allowed it to understand the user intent behind a search query even further through machine learning. Now, the search queries can be analysed from a more holistic understanding of topics, delivering the websites with the most relevant content to the user’s query.  

In 2018, Jacob Devlin and his colleagues from Google published BERT, a research paper and machine learning NLP framework. This means that Google can understand the full context of natural language words and the overall intent instead of understanding each individual keyword. 

Since October 2020, Google is still working on advancing its intelligent search capabilities. For example, two updates of the search engine algorithms are for a higher ability of the engine to understand misspelt words and the option of indexing individual pages from websites.  

The latest AI milestone for Google was the MUM. MUM stands for Multitask Unified Model, and its purpose is to remove language barriers and to have a more comprehensive understanding of the search query context. MUM is 1.000 more powerful than the BERT framework as it uses T5: the Text-To-Text framework, and it is trained in 75 languages.

As you can see, Google’s AI efforts are advancing every year, so these changes influence search engine rankings. As you can see, the focus shifted from using keywords to increasing organic traffic. Nowadays, your content strategy and how you write your blog posts and website page content should focus on natural language and user intent.     

What Is AI SEO and Why Is It Important?

AI SEO or AI-powered SEO means using artificial intelligence to model your search engine optimisation strategy and implementation for a website, a web page or a blog post to boost search rankings and increase search traffic. Moreover, AI-powered tools for SEO can help you in your keyword research, SERP analysis, content creation, content optimisation suggestions, voice search, SEO workflows and many more.  

With all the changes in the search algorithm and the launch of plenty of AI-powered SEO tools is a no-brainer that the future of SEO is artificial intelligence. 30% of the companies that adopted AI technologies in sales and marketing have seen a 6 to 10% increase in revenue. Content marketers should first keep users in mind, and the aim of every business should be to deliver high-quality content. Our advice when creating your content marketing strategy is to focus on concepts, context and customer satisfaction. Your concepts should focus on the idea of a user’s query, the content should focus on the user intent, and customer satisfaction means giving the most relevant answers to the user’s questions.  

Since the Hummingbird update, keyword stuffing started to be penalised, and websites lost their positions in the SERP. To help your content rank better, we recommend focusing on link-building and internal links strategies and also optimising for search engines that use AI. Today, but also in the future, the content will significantly impact rankings as it influences user experience. 

The Role of Artificial Intelligence in SEO

The role of AI in SEO is to help your business grow and align your content with online users’ and search engines’ demands. Let’s explore how AI can help your SEO strategy a bit more in-depth.

  • Better keyword management – even if the keywords do not dominate content creation anymore, they are still a big part of SEO. Keyword research is a dull and laborious task. However, AI tools have made it much easier because of the analysis assistant feature that analyses the anchor text usage, keyword variations and semantic search terms.    
  • Content analysis and content curation one of the laws of SEO is “Content is King”, meaning that no matter what changes search engines might bring to their algorithms, as long as your content is high-quality and relevant to users, you will be safe. As the Google algorithm uses natural language processing to comprehend the content of a website page and match it to the user’s search, our recommendation is to apply the E-A-T principle. The role of AI in content analysis and curation is to give digital marketers a deeper understanding of customer needs, it can speed up the content creation process by giving you ideas on how to write and what to emphasise in your article or web page text, and it will help create a more persuasive content strategy. Predictive intelligence will help you create a more engaging and unique customer journey and user experience by better meeting the client’s needs.   
  • Expand the value of your content – because of the use of AI in SEO, content writers have a bigger picture of what customers want and how to curate the content around their needs. Following the recommendations, you can create top-notch pieces of content that are valuable for users and also for search engines. 
  • Optimise for voice search – the difference between voice searches and written text is the way users ask questions. The rise of voice search assistance has influenced how people are searching for products and services. Our advice is to focus more on long-tail keywords and make your content more conversational. If you own an eCommerce website, voice commerce is a feature you should focus on.  
  • Analyse your organic traffic and ranking growth – a crucial part of SEO is to understand how traffic and ranking growth work. A common way to do this is by using Google Analytics. It might be a little bit time-consuming, but it is essential to interpret and understand the collected data and afterwards adjust your strategy. However, nowadays, you can find AI-powered tools online that can interpret those data faster.  
  • Automated SEO workflows – SEO requires many steps. From technical to off-page and on-page SEO you must pay attention to all aspects. Search engine optimisation can be time-consuming and requires a lot of energy. AI-based SEO tools can help your business to automate certain tasks such as website and ranking analysis. Ongoing SEO maintenance is mandatory for every online business that wants to keep up with the changes. Therefore, automated certain SEO workflows can give you a more accurate direction for your strategy and will save you time and resources. 
  • Analyse ranking signals – with over 160 ranking signals, it can be challenging to keep track of everything and to establish which action has the most impact on your website’s ranking. From external links, social signals, and on-page optimisation to authoritative content, artificial intelligence tools can predict and analyse which factor can help you create the most efficient SEO strategy to help your search rankings.
  • Analyse search engine algorithm – with the constant changes in the search algorithm, it can become tough to keep track of all the updates. Because of this, online businesses need regular website audits to avoid getting penalised or, worst, blacklisted by Google. If this happens, your business will suffer a loss in revenue and traffic. AI is capable of helping you monitor, analyse and keep up with all the updates.  
  • Keep an eye on your competition’s SEO efforts – monitoring and analysing your competition is crucial to understand your position in the market compared to similar businesses. Knowing when and what changes they make to their website and online presence will help you determine what impact these changes will have on your business.  
  • In-depth SEO focus – businesses that start to include AI in their practices can be a step ahead of your competition. You can adapt and rethink your SEO strategies to align better with Google’s algorithm. Ranking fluctuation is usual, and tracking your progress can become a bottleneck. However, you can minimise the ranking fluctuation with the help of AI SEO by identifying the issue faster and taking the proper steps to fix it.       

Our Advice

AI is revamping the digital marketing and SEO industry. AI-powered tools and software are released and improved often to make our lives easier and more comfortable. From what we can see, artificial intelligence is the future of SEO because it will give us, marketers and SEO specialists, the chance to look at the whole landscape and better identify and fix the issues that might arise. As AI is responsible for how search results and related topics are delivered to users, we strongly recommend that online businesses use AI-powered tools to optimise their websites and create relevant content. Contact us today if you need help with your SEO, content and digital marketing! Let’s work together and help your business grow in a healthy and constant rhythm. Check out our Clutch profile and if you want to educate yourself on more marketing topics, development or design, check out our blog.  

Frequently Asked Questions

How is AI affecting SEO?

AI is improving how we create SEO strategies by offering more in-depth knowledge of users’ needs, behaviours and intent.

Can AI SEO tools help with website ranking?

Yes! AI SEO proved to help boost the website’s rank higher.

How Is AI Used in Search?

Google uses AI to understand the website content better, rank it and pair it perfectly with a user’s query.

Will AI replace SEO?

No! AI is changing SEO by helping automate the management and optimisation of digital marketing efforts.