Quick Tips On How To Use AI For SEO

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the way we think of so much of our world.

As well as having a profound impact on content creation and even the art world, AI is paving the way for a fundamental shift in many areas of business, including marketing and, more specifically, SEO.

What Is AI?

AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. It’s typically used to refer to the ability of machines to learn and perform tasks that would typically be associated with human-specific intelligence.

Recent examples that are making waves include human-like writing in conversational chatbot models or even in creative endeavors like AI-generated artworks.

AI is a bit of a misnomer though, at least in relation to models like GPT4 as the models aren’t generating anything themselves, per se. Rather it’s a reflection of the datasets they have been trained on as they are Large Language Models (LLMs).

This is causing controversy across many markets, from artists claiming their work has been used to generate new “original” works without proper credit, to webmasters that are angered that Google appears to be generating search answers using their material but without proper attribution for their sources.

How AI Is Used In SEO

AI can primarily be used in SEO, as in all marketing tasks, as a remarkable time saver.

SEO, for all its plusses and creative opportunities, can include a lot of tedium and time-consuming processes. This leads to repetitive tasks that take up time while being unengaging for you as an SEO.

AI can help cut down on these drastically letting you focus on the real job at hand, achieving great results for your clients.

AI can be used for several tasks including:

Improved Keyword Research

AI allows SEOs to step up their keyword research game in the initial research, keyword clustering, and keyword intent analysis.

Manual Keyword Research is known for being surprisingly time-intensive, simply due to the steps required and the amount of data they are faced with and have to trawl through.

Typically Keyword Research involves:

• Listing all the topics you can think of based on your business
• Breaking those topics down into all the keywords you can think of
• Importing those keywords into a tool like Ahrefs to analyze
• Assessing the user intent behind each other the keywords via intent analysis
• Assigning keywords to topics and projects according to the intent
• Determining which to pursue given the relative difficulty
• Researching related terms for longtail opportunities
• Creating a keyword optimization outline for content planning

AI helps these endeavors as it can help leverage the LLMs they are built upon to assess the initial keyword lists for basic keyword research.

It can then also factor in relative keyword association for topic clustering to ensure you get a full report of semantically-related keywords to build your content plan and web pages around.

If you’re instead looking for low-competition quick wins focusing on longtail keyword opportunities can deliver an excellent ROI and, again, AI cuts down the time spent on this massively.

Finally, it allows for better keyword intent reporting.

At Optimo, we’ve built our SEO keyword research tools to help you with all aspects of the keyword research journey.

AI’s enhanced understanding of language usage helps expand the possibilities and capabilities of keyword research tools allowing for slick workflows that take you from keyword ideation to intent analysis to content production faster than ever before.

Better Content Optimization

Speaking of content production, one of the most publicized ways AI is affecting SEO is in content production.

No longer do you need to be a subject matter expert to be able to generate well-written and researched content on pretty much any given topic.

Or, at least, that is how content generation with AI is touted.

The issue is AI can have trouble producing content. As much as it is called Artificial Intelligence it can make some silly mistakes and popular models can succumb to hallucinations.

With this in mind, the best use of AI in content creation for SEO is to allow for better content optimization.

Paired with the keyword research strategies mentioned above you can work to create content that is tailor-made for your customer’s specific pain points and queries with devastating accuracy.

AI can help with topic outlines, suggested titles and headers, and even baseline blog writing for you to then edit, audit, and perfect with your own subject expertise.

It can also help with initial topic ideation which can really help you overcome writer’s block when planning your client’s SEO-optimized marketing campaigns.

Research is always time-consuming for a writer and tools like those from Optimo can help cut down on this by sourcing statistics and FAQs for you. You can use these stats and FAQs to help snowball your content ideas and lead you in directions you might not have otherwise thought of!

This saves hours and hours on the initial stages of a project letting you focus only on what matters; delivering great content that answers your user’s needs.

This doesn’t just have to be blog posts. You can use AI optimization to help with product pages, service listings, or indeed any written copy. Just always be sure to pair it with manual review for the best possible content.

Enhanced User Experience

This leads to the next advantage of AI in SEO; an enhanced user experience.

Just as better content improves the experience of your user/reader/customer, so too can AI help improve and personalize the user experience on your customer’s site.

AI can be used to analyze user behavior on the sites you manage to really help understand your customer profiles and serve them accordingly.

Better user profiles can mean better user-specific personalization as the rise of AI opens up exciting possibilities within this space.

If users are offered a more personalized experience they are likely to have higher engagement, lower bounce rates, and increased conversion rates.

All of this is music to an SEO’s ears as this can work in conjunction with your other SEO efforts to compound the gains you make, leading to even better results.

Better Reporting

This takes us to the final advantage covered here, better reporting.

Just as how AI helps with UX through better profiling it can similarly help with more accurate and detailed reporting.

AI-generated user models can help you better target your SEO efforts while AI-powered predictive modeling can help forecast the impact of changes you make before you even implement them.

The more you can report on, and the more accurately you can do so, the better the experience you’ll pass on to your client.

If your client feels informed and clear on the SEO benefits you deliver them they’ll be sure to increase their investment accordingly.

Remember, for written reports you can always use an AI proofreading service to proof your copy to ensure you’re being as clear as possible for your clients!

Best Practices For Using AI in SEO

Pair AI With Human Review

Any AI implementation within SEO should always be paired with manual review to achieve the best results and to insulate you from any nasty shocks!

Any content or copywriting should be checked over to ensure it makes sense and properly answers the question you’ve set out to address, whether that be an actual question in a blog post or inferred questions on your product pages as you list product details, pricing, and such.

AI is an amazing timesaver which will mean that you have enough time to dedicate to manual review while still saving time overall compared to if the whole process was manual throughout.

 

AI will not replace humans, but humans with AI will replace humans without AI. pic.twitter.com/zZ741RdwdA

— Linus (●ᴗ●) (@LinusEkenstam) January 19, 2023

Bear In Mind Potential Data Privacy Issues

This is most relevant for any AI-powered personalization that you incorporate into your site along with any data capture performed for your reporting.

Make sure to acquire all the relevant permissions from your users before collecting data, particularly in regard to GDPR compliance.

Some users may simply opt out of this tracking and you need to be able to accommodate that while still serving up optimized and relevant content for them; you can’t simply rely on AI personalization to handle everything for you.

Try Out Different Prompts For The Best Results

For prompt-based AI tools remember to try out different prompts to get the best results for you and your clients.

Trying out a few different prompts is still quicker than producing the content yourself and can really help you tailor the copy to best fit the queries you’re trying to cover with it.

Get smart with your prompts to really work in potential buyer personas, customer intent, and more. Who knows, if you get good enough maybe you could make a career out of it!

The Future of AI In SEO

AI will continue to disrupt and change SEO as it moves from strength to strength.

Primarily it offers advances in time-saving for SEOs as tedious manual tasks can now be completed in seconds.

Outside of using AI for SEO, AI will continue to fundamentally alter SEO as chatbot integrations in search may change the face of search results forever.

SEOs will need to adapt their tactics to capitalize on new search result page real estate, with AI tools at their side as they do so!