Search engine optimization becomes more complex, more competitive and more vital every day.
As more and more businesses begin optimizing their sites and content to draw organic traffic, the competition for top search results becomes more and more contested. One little mistake can bump you to page two–and virtual invisibility.
If you want to maximize your SEO dollars, you need to leverage every tool at your disposal. And you can be sure that your most successful competitors for the top slot on Google are using AI to help them with their SEO.
Now if you have heard that Google favors content that wasn’t written by AI, you have heard a partial truth. AI generated content can rank, but only if it meets the qualifications of expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EEAT).
These qualifications can be achieved with AI, but only with a lot of correction and human oversight; sometimes it’s less work to simply write the content yourself.
So if it’s better to just use written content, what role does AI actually play in generating pages that rank?
When it comes to the use of AI, SEO services know that it’s vital to stay on top of trends and content generation. Since one of the chief challenges of content generation is ideation and staying on top of trending topics, this is one of the chief areas in which AI can assist. But AI can also help with the technical aspects of SEO like meta tags and crawlability.
Knowing the AI tools available to help optimize pages is an invaluable tool of SEO.
Ideation: Let AI Give you Ideas
It may seem counterintuitive to let a computer give you ideas for content. After all, ideas are seen as one of the most creative aspects of writing and content creation. Why would you turn this part of the process over to a bot?
No one is suggesting that you should outsource all of your creativity to AI. You will always have your own ideas that you should pursue and write about.
But when it comes to analyzing and even predicting trends, AI has much quicker and broader access to search results across multiple platforms than you will ever be able to match.
AI can help you pivot, changing the focus of your content as search trends come and go, and can give you a dozen actionable topics in the time it might take you to come up with one or two article titles.
In addition, AI can also keep an eye on your competition for you, making sure that your customers can count on you to cover the topics they want to see and not have to visit competitors’ sites to find out the info they are looking for.
You will always have your own ideas to pursue, and maybe your idea will spark the next trend that your competitors will be trying to keep up with. But relying on your own observations of what will draw organic traffic next week is a risky gamble. Use AI to make sure you aren’t missing something big.
Technical AI: Turn the Techy Stuff Over to Tech
You could spend hours every day troubleshooting the structure, internal links and meta tags of your site, and you would still miss some issues.
The alternative is to let AI do this work for you.
AI has the ability to run site audits, flagging problems like duplicate content, broken links, missing meta tags, and poor internal linking. One click of a button can flag as many issues as you might have found with a whole day of traditional troubleshooting and debugging.
But it doesn’t stop there.
AI can help optimize page performance, flagging issues that reduce page speed and visual stability. It can also create a schema markup, helping search engines to understand your content and show it to users who are looking for the information you provide.
And AI can also decipher crawler logs, giving you a relevant breakdown of how crawlers interact with your site and where they find weaknesses that hurt your rankings. This is something that is next to impossible to do on your own–and certainly not cost effective without the power of AI.
As if that weren’t enough, AI can also provide insight as you are revamping your site, predicting how search engine rankings will be impacted by your planned changes to your site structure.
So as you consider your SEO strategy, factor in the many ways that AI can contribute to your SEO to-do list. You may find that you are able to set loftier goals and achieve things you never thought possible because of the help that AI can give–without resorting to disappointing users who appreciate the personal touch of a human-written article.