Artificial intelligence, also known as AI, has grown to be one of the biggest trends in digital marketing today. About ten years ago, AI was linked to stuff like machinery, complex sciences, robots, and the likes. It was an abstract term as many were used to the idea being associated with sci-fi movies. Fast-forward to a decade later, AI has grown to be a familiar term in digital marketing and SEO. Read on below, and find out more about Artificial Intelligence and how it affects SEO.
What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
One doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to have a basic understanding of AI. In simple words, artificial intelligence is a program that trains computer systems to act and think like human beings. It’s more like the science of making machines ‘smart’.
AI was created to improve the chances of accuracy and success. One of the best things about AI is that a machine is able to make decisions on its own. Artificial intelligence helps machines to simulate human behaviors and complete intricate tasks.
The Difference between AI and Machine Learning
Machine learning (ML) is not the same as AI; however, the line between these two is a bit blurry. Machine learning is the science of making computers reach a conclusion based on the information provided, without being specifically programmed on how to complete a said task. Again, artificial intelligence is the science of creating systems that’ll either have or seem to possess human-like Intelligence.
In the current world of SEO, artificial intelligence is everywhere. It can easily identify irrelevant backlinks, keyword stuffing, duplicate content, spam SEO activities, and much more. Hence, Google can effectively give accurate results for different queries. Machine learning assists search engines in understanding the users’ queries better, so as to deliver results according to relevancy.
Using Artificial Intelligence in SEO
Here’s how webmasters can make use of AI in SEO:
Analyzing Sites using Different Tools
There are a lot of SEO tools online that offer both paid and free services to identify competitors, search traffic estimation, analyzing backlinks, and finding errors on websites, etc.
For search optimization AI, you can use tools such as Ahrefs, AnswerThePublic, and Google Analytics, to create reports for your competitor analysis and also plan for your site’s SEO. Most of these tools run on Google’s API that is powered by AI to deliver perfect analysis and data to users.
Topic Discovery, Optimization & Keyword Research
Generating fresh content frequently for your website is key to winning over the SEO strategy. But how do we get to do that? You can use tools such as AnswerThePublic and Buzzsumo to get content ideas for the type of content you can create. All you have to do is search for a certain topic and then start writing about it. It’s that simple!
Voice Search
This is another search segment powered by AI and is trendy. Devices such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Home are taking over. If you make your site voice-search compatible, there’ll be higher chances that you’ll appear on voice searches.
Nowadays, a lot of people use voice search in different ways, such as to find certain recipes, a restaurant close by, for directions, etc. You’ll also need to add schema and more FAQs to ensure you fulfill the voice search requirements.
Link Building
The good thing about artificial intelligence is you can do a lot of research and get various insights, which might be more than enough for you to mine data on link building. With the use of AI-powered backlink research tools such as Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic, etc. you can:
- Identify the sites you can use to get links, based on their authority.
- Analyze the impact they can have on your work if you use their links.
In Conclusion
Artificial intelligence (AI) will certainly play a larger role in SEO. AI tools show a simple truth when it comes to artificial intelligence. There are many manual tasks that marketers do every day, like discovering the right topic and researching the keyword to use, which they might not be very good at, that a simple machine can easily do far better, faster, and at a bigger scale. That is AI.