AI and SEO – How do they work together?

AI and SEO Finally Together? How Will They Work Together in 2018 and Beyond?

With artificial intelligence at the head of many cutting edge tech advancements, it was only a matter of time until AI found its way into search marketing as well. AI can help to automate the discovery of user behavior patterns and facilitate continuous improvement marketing philosophies.

Google cemented AI’s importance in search marketing in 2015 with its RankBrain algorithm addition. Let’s take a look at how AI and search engine optimization have grown as a pair since then, and how AI affects SEO today.

SEO in a Data Rich Society

AI SEO is becoming more necessary as data proliferates online at accelerated rates. With every online transaction, many data nodes are created. All of these bits of information combine to form profiles and trends that search marketers can use to build and modify campaigns.

The problem is that data is being created at a rate no human could ever hope to process. This is true even if that human sits at the helm of an extraordinary amount of computational power. There are so many other things to take care of in day-to-day business.

The modern SEO pro has to monitor website analytics, understand behavioral patterns, generate ideas for content, stay within budget and multitask across multiple organic search campaigns. There is not enough time! The full power of consumer data simply is not available to a human who needs to eat, sleep, take breaks, revise mistakes and conduct business.

The Power of AI

AI actually provides a solution for each of the major SEO tasks normally assigned to an overworked marketer. Let’s take a look at them.

• Performance monitoring – AI processes data without mistakes and quickly identifies outliers. This helps to eliminate human input errors that could occur from an interpolation mistake.
• Personalized marketing – Using previous behavioral patterns to tailor messaging is a concept that really only took flight after the incorporation of machine learning into search engine optimization.
• Content generation – Once AI gives you a true indication of trend patterns and market gaps, deep learning applications can suggest new content for you.
• Managing budgets – as a data driven service, AI will automatically incorporate budget restraints into its recommendations. Imagine the time saved on conversations with the finance department!
• Multitasking – Computers are made to multitask, and not just two or three items at once. Humans are naturally better at subtle, more creative work, so let the computers take the rote tasks on by the dozens.

AI and Insights

AI reaches beyond the normal abilities of computational power to simply multitask on a higher level. The advantage of intelligence, whether “artificial” or “natural,” is the ability to generate actionable insights from data.

AI can also generate content ideas and insight at a huge scale, delivering those reports to us in a format that translates throughout all departments. In previous business generations, this may have taken huge teams of consultants and multimillion dollar budgets.

Keep in mind that insights are different from observations. In a way, we could say that unintelligent computers “observe” data in the same way we do. Once computers begin to interpret that data, the notion of intelligence enters the sphere. AI means that you actually gain the ability to evaluate actions based on metrics that are also intelligently convened.

Evaluating AI Solutions

Despite all of the advantages that AI gives to our search marketing, the old adage still remains: Garbage in, garbage out. There is still a very important input that all companies must consider – the strength of the AI technology being used in the business.

How should you evaluate AI technology? Here are some very important questions that you should ask yourself before committing to any AI solution, no matter how forward thinking it claims to be.

• What tangible benefits can your company derive from the AI? Are you saving time and increasing efficiency by using?
• Is the AI using relevant datasets for its calculations?
• Does the AI index URLs and maintain up-to-date data collection practices so that it has a real time portrait of the search landscape?
• Does the AI have deep learning and machine learning applications? How are these applications used to find trends and behavioral patterns in consumer data?
• How does the AI actually change the way that we will do business?
• Do the solutions of the AI actually solve the problems that we are looking to solve as a business?
• Does the AI deliver its solutions in a way that is easily translatable between departments? It is especially important that reports translate to non-technical departments, especially marketing and finance.

How Does AI Impact SEO and Business in the Future?

Properly employed, AI means less of a need for underhanded search engine optimization techniques. Companies will no longer have the need to stuff keywords or links, create low quality content to saturate a market or spend time unnaturally building out second and third tier web properties.

AI should also have the positive effect of dividing markets into smaller niches. Because search marketing will now be based on precise data interpolation and real-time continuous improvement, there will be less of a need for companies to actually compete with each other, assuming their products/services have any proprietary features. The audience for each business may become smaller. However, those audiences will be highly vetted.

Finally, AI will help to improve marketing ROI while reducing marketing spend. With more personalized content moving directly to the audiences who most request it, companies should see a vast improvement in their conversion rates. Human marketers will have more time to spend on strategic planning, and companies may have less of a need for low skill marketing work.