In today's digital era, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a game-changing tool for optimizing your online presence. By utilizing AI technology, you can gain invaluable insights, automate processes, and make data-driven decisions that significantly impact your SEO success.
AI can serve multiple purposes in SEO, from content planning and keyword research, to voice search and on-page optimization.
This article will discuss how you can use AI to develop your SEO strategy and leverage opportunities for improved results.
We'll examine the benefits of providing a personalized user experience with AI, strategies for efficient keyword optimization, and the importance of human oversight when utilizing AI content.
By the end of this article, you will have gained a clearer understanding of the benefits of working with AI in SEO, and will be equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to implement it into your own practices. So let’s get started!
What you will learn
- AI can be used to optimize SEO strategies and facilitate topic discovery, keyword research, and content creation.
- You can leverage data-driven insights provided by AI tools for informed decision-making in your SEO strategy.
- Achieve improved search rankings and drive more traffic to your website by effectively leveraging AI in your SEO efforts.
- Careful review and human oversight are necessary to ensure accuracy, authority, and quality when using AI for SEO.
What is AI?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an umbrella term that refers to smart technologies like machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision. These technologies can analyze data from different sources, recognize patterns in the data, solve problems autonomously and support informed decision-making.
As such, AI assisted tools are garnering widespread attention and increasing adoption in the business and marketing world.
According to McKinsey’s State of AI 2022 report, 50% of organizations have adopted on average 3.8 AI capabilities - that’s double the number of AI capabilities the organizations were using in 2018.
With the continued developments in the AI sphere, this number is expected to continue growing.
You can use AI to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, allowing you to operate more efficiently.
By delegating mundane tasks to AI tools, you can focus on higher-value activities that require creativity, critical thinking, and strategic decision-making.
But it doesn’t end there.
AI capabilities extend beyond automation. You can use AI to quickly and accurately extract valuable insights from your data.
Whether it’s customer behavior patterns, competitor analysis, or keyword research, AI can help you make data-driven decisions and gain a competitive advantage. You can automate repetitive tasks and focus on activities that drive your content’s performance.
AI is a rapidly evolving field with immense potential. By embracing AI, you can boost your content efforts and position your business at the forefront of innovation.
Can you use AI for SEO?
Yes, you can use AI for SEO.
AI can be a valuable asset in SEO, as it enables you to increase the accuracy, efficiency, and performance of your search engine ranking efforts.
But one question continues to pop up in this topic:
Do search engines penalize AI assisted content?
The answer is no.
AI won’t penalize your rankings in any way - as long as you are creating valuable content that aligns with the readers’ objectives.
In fact, 42% of marketers trust AI to create personalized content.
Search engines like Google reward high-quality, helpful content, no matter the means through which the content is produced.
When used correctly, AI can help you achieve just that. Google has directly addressed this issue and released guidelines on how to properly use AI-generated content to meet Google’s E -EAT standards.
While AI can automate certain aspects of SEO and streamline your processes, automating your entire SEO strategy solely with AI is not recommended.
AI can assist with tasks like keyword research, content optimization, and performance tracking, providing valuable insights and recommendations.
However, SEO involves various elements that require human input and expertise.
For example, creating engaging and unique content, building relationships with other websites for backlinks, and understanding the specific nuances of your target audience often require human judgment and creativity.
The collaboration between AI and human input allows for a comprehensive and holistic approach to SEO that considers both technical optimization and user-centric aspects.
AI SEO for content planning
AI based SEO tools can save you a ton of time and effort when it comes to content planning.
Content planning requires gathering, analyzing, and organizing a vast amount of data.
When done manually, this can be a laborious process.
Not to mention, that we as humans are limited by bounded rationality - we have limits in processing information, rely on mental shortcuts and face time constraints.
These are all limitations that AI can help us overcome.
AI algorithms can analyze a wide range of data sources, including search engine data, social media conversations, online forums, news articles, and more.
AI can process this data and identify emerging trends, popular topics, and frequently discussed subjects within your domain.
Moreover, the natural language processing capability of AI can analyze the language used in search queries and identify search intent.
This way AI can identify relevant topics, subtopics, and related keywords that align with what users are searching for.
Also, AI-powered tools can analyze your existing content, as well as the content of your competitors, to identify gaps and opportunities.
All this ensures a more comprehensive coverage of your domain and enables you to create a content plan that covers a broader range of relevant topics.
You can use AI to create a content plan for your website with tons of ideas for blog posts.
- Sign into Surfer Keyword Research Tool
- Enter your primary keyword and select your target country
- Click Create Keyword Research
For instance, Surfer Keyword Research takes a few seconds to create a content plan with 146 keyword ideas for my blog on gardening tools.
AI SEO for keyword research
Keyword research has traditionally been a time consuming activity, bound by your access to different data sources as well as the human imagination.
AI has revolutionized keyword research by leveraging vast amounts of data and generating a multitude of potential keywords.
Unlike generic keyword lists, AI-powered tools analyze your domain and offer relevant keywords that align with your niche, allowing you to establish topical authority effectively.
Keep in mind that while free AI based tools like ChatGPT can provide keyword suggestions, they do not consider vital metrics for content success, such as keyword difficulty, search volume, and domain relevance.
To overcome this limitation, it's recommended to use a dedicated keyword research tool like the Surfer Keyword Research.
By combining seed keywords from ChatGPT with specialized keyword research tools, you can gain in-depth insights and assess their relevance, empowering you to make informed decisions.
The keyword tiles that we generated in the previous step can be created into separate articles.
Clicking on them reveals additional metrics like the monthly search volume, potential traffic and relative keyword difficulty for my domain.
Using a keyword tool like Surfer's can drastically reduce manual keyword research from a couple of hours down to minutes.
AI for writing SEO content
AI algorithms can generate content on specific topics or keywords, reducing the time and effort required for content creation.
As such, AI-based content creation tools are particularly useful for businesses that need to produce large volumes of content quickly and efficiently.
Nowadays, it’s becoming more and more common to see brands openly embracing AI assisted content creation for an effective SEO strategy.
For example, technology news outlet CNET Money puts a small disclaimer under its articles that shows how the company is leveraging AI in its content creation process.
However, AI-generated content can also have limitations when compared to content created by humans, including the risk of incorrect facts and a lack of personalization.
As such, it is essential to review content prior to publication to ensure that it is free of any typos or grammar errors.
Moreover, the human element is essential in verifying and refining the information to ensure that the content is accurate, authoritative, and of high quality.
Utilizing AI tools for content creation can help save time and money, but you should not neglect the importance of adding a human touch to the content creation process.
AI for content outlines
Using AI to write content outlines can help you create content much faster while ensuring that your writers meet essential topics.
Select the Write with AI tab in Surfer Content Editor to start writing your article with AI.
- Enter between 1-5 primary keywords
- Select your country and device preferences
- Click the Create button
The Content Editor panel on the next page will offer you the option to generate an AI written article. Click on the button that says Generate an article.
You will be presented with several settings inside Surfer AI.
- Select the tone of voice
- Check the box saying "I would like to review the outline in the next step"
- Select the most relevant organic competitors
- Click Create outline
Surfer AI will generate a content outline based on the preferences you provided. It will look something like this.
Review the outline and edit any headers for your AI generated article to cover the subtopics you prefer.
AI for writing SEO friendly articles
Click on the Let's write button once you have edited the content outline to let Surfer AI write an article for you, based on the settings you chose.
Surfer AI wrote my article with 2753 words that consist of 24 headings and 51 paragraphs in about 20 minutes. It even has a fairly decent Content Score at the first attempt.
Even though the AI generated article can be published, it's a good idea to review readability, and to verify AI content for facts and statistics.
AI for on-page SEO
AI-powered tools can analyze your content and provide insights for on-page SEO elements, including your keyword usage, readability, internal linking opportunities, meta titles and descriptions.
So once you are done with creating your content, you can put it through an AI SEO tool.
These tools can highlight areas on your page where keyword optimization can be improved, suggest relevant keywords to target, and identify opportunities to enhance content structure and formatting.
AI can also assist you in optimizing meta tags, including titles and descriptions, based on an analysis of search trends, competitor data, and user behavior.
Moreover, AI algorithms can suggest compelling titles and descriptions that improve click-through rates and increase organic visibility on search engine results pages.
By leveraging AI for content optimization, you can ensure that your on-page SEO elements are strategically placed, and your content is well-structured, engaging, and optimized for search engines.
Follow these steps to optimize your content for on-page SEO,
- Head to Surfer Audit
- Enter your page URL and target keywords
- Select the country, device preferences and check the Sentiment box
- Click Create Audit
Surfer Audit will analyze the following on-page elements and offer recommendations that you can fix:
- Content Score
- Internal links
- Terms to use
- Word count
- Exact keywords
- Partial keywords
- Page structure
- Title and meta descriptions
- Technical SEO
- Missing backlinks common to competitors
For example, the Terms to Use report picks up several relevant keywords that may be missing in your content that can help improve your chances of ranking.
AI for keyword optimization
AI-powered tools offer invaluable insights and recommendations that can significantly enhance your keyword optimization efforts and increase your chances of ranking higher in search engine results.
AI's data analysis capabilities extend beyond keyword research to identifying effective keyword variations.
It can recognize different forms of keywords, such as singular and plural forms, synonyms, and related terms.
By incorporating these variations strategically into your content, you can expand your keyword reach, improve relevancy, and increase your chances of appearing in a wider range of search queries.
This way, AI SEO tools can also help you optimize your keywords for voice search.
This is especially important considering the growing number of voice assistants used worldwide - it is projected that by 2024 people will use more than 8.4 billion digital voice assistants.
As the way people search online is rapidly changing, AI SEO tools can help you adapt to that change.
AI SEO keyword tools can also analyze your content and suggest keyword placements to ensure optimal keyword density and relevance.
AI algorithms can provide insights into related keywords and semantically relevant terms to enhance the topical authority of your content.
Browse through the Terms panel inside Content Editor where you will find an AI generated list of recommended keywords based on the SERPs for your target keyword.
You can also automatically insert relevant keywords in your article by using the Insert terms feature on the right side.
Key takeaways
- By leveraging AI tools and platforms, you can streamline your SEO efforts, improve keyword targeting, and deliver highly relevant content to your target audience.
- The power of AI lies in its ability to analyze vast amounts of data, identify trends, and generate actionable recommendations.
- AI's role in SEO extends beyond keyword research, encompassing metadata optimization, competitor analysis, and user experience enhancement.
- While AI brings incredible capabilities to SEO, it should be used in harmony with human expertise.
Conclusion
In this article, we have explored the immense potential of leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) for SEO and witnessed how it can revolutionize your strategy.
By harnessing AI's capabilities, businesses can unlock invaluable insights, automate processes, and make data-driven decisions that drive tangible results.
AI algorithms can interpret vast amounts of data, uncover trends, and provide actionable insights to optimize SEO strategies.
AI-powered SEO software can help identify trending topics and content gaps quickly and efficiently, allowing marketers to complete tasks in a timely manner.
Yet, amidst all these remarkable features that make AI for SEO a great choice for businesses, one must never forget the human touch which is essential for accuracy, authority and quality. AI can be a superpower if used correctly, but a true partnership between man and machine is necessary for sustained success.
