Making Your Website Smarter: How to Power Your SEO with AI

When your industry basically revolves around keeping up with one of the most advanced companies, which also happens to be at the forefront of the AI field (Google), you need all the allies you can muster. This is why the SEO industry has always been among the first to adopt new technologies and practices. AI is not an exception.

While much of AI applications in SEO revolve around content and, thus, natural language processing, the industry has started applying machine learning in other ways too, with a number of approaches that make lives easier on SEO professionals and marketers in general.

AI-assisted Content

As Google and other companies behind the world’s largest search engines fine-tune their algorithms and shift the focus towards the user experience, content becomes more and more important.

The days of 500-word, keyword-stuffed, eye-roll-inducing abominations of articles are long gone. You need to put out content that is of interest to your target market segment, content that will answer search intent and that will be in harmony with your brand voice.

One of the most popular tools for big enterprises is Acrolinx, which does exactly that. It helps coordinate content efforts across the enterprise by applying AI that recommends how to write content, how to ensure that the company voice is present, and how to upgrade existing content. Like all AI-based tools, the longer it is used within an enterprise, the better it becomes at analyzing the content and making suggestions.

BrightEdge is another similar platform that uses AI to optimize a company’s content efforts. It should be pointed out that coordinating and scheduling within content teams is also seeing an influx of AI.

OneSpot is an AI SEO tool that focuses on the personalization aspect of producing and serving the right content to visitors. Its algorithm analyzes who the visitor is, where they are in the purchasing funnel, and what kind of content to serve them for the best conversion rates. It can even be used for personalized email marketing.

The ecommerce niche is one of the more specific when it comes to SEO and the use of AI, due to specific requirements. Alongside more business-oriented AI applications such as automated repricing, there’s also the issue of writing unique product descriptions. This can be an ordeal if an ecommerce brand constantly updates its offer with thousands of products (all of which need unique, SEO-friendly descriptions). Tools like Textual and Ginnie apply NLG to this task, providing much-needed help.

AI-powered SEO Strategy

While content plays a crucial role in SEO strategy, there are other aspects of search engine optimization we can’t neglect. There has been an influx of AI-based tools aimed at these as well.

For instance, Alli AI is used by The New York Times, Expedia, and Argos (among others) to:

• automatically update their SEO strategy as search algorithms are updated
• get quick wins that have an immediate effect on organic visits
• find backlink strategies and code upgrades that will have a positive effect

CanIRank acts like an AI-powered SEO strategist who looks at available data, analyzes what the competitors are doing, and then comes forward with very straight-forward and actionable suggestions for the SEO teams to try and implement.

PaveAI focuses on data that affects SEO and marketing in general and uses AI to serve the insights in an actionable manner. It enables marketers to make sense of the immense amounts of data they collect and store.

Simulating Search Engines

Perhaps the most interesting application for AI in SEO that is available today is what MarketBrew is doing with their tool.

In essence, their tool revolves around custom-trained models that simulate how various search engines would react to SEO-related changes to a website. This is incredibly useful since it shows how certain changes will affect your SEO performance within hours instead of weeks. It can also help you by telling you what will not work or what can even harm your SEO performance.

Closing Word

As you can see, there are quite a few tools that use AI to help SEO professionals and those whose job descriptions include a bit of SEO. Still, it feels like this is only a start. We’ll certainly be seeing more and more tools that bring these two together.

About the Author

Natasha Lane is a lady of a keyboard with a rich history of working in the IT and digital marketing fields. She is always happy to collaborate with awesome blogs and share her knowledge all around the web. Besides content creating, Natasha is nowadays quite passionate about helping small business to grow strong.

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