Not so long ago, artificial intelligence still seemed like something out of a science fiction movie – you were more likely to encounter it on the big screen rather than your computer screen.
But since generative AI started making waves around the beginning of 2023 and brought AI to the forefront of discussions about new technologies, AI-powered tools have rapidly spread and integrated themselves into various aspects of both our personal and professional lives, improving efficiency .
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an industry where AI has proven particularly beneficial, helping SEO professionals streamline workflows, accomplish more in less time, and achieve better results.
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Examples of how AI can be used for SEO
SERP ranking analysis & local rank
Tracking AI-powered ranking tools provide tailored insights into performance, tracking keyword positions across different search engine results page (SERP) and mappack (for local SEO) positions, uncovering trends and patterns with remarkable precision.
By processing virtually unlimited data at lightning-fast speeds, AI not only identifies opportunities, but also delivers actionable recommendations to improve rankings and outperform competitors in target markets. In the past, SEO guidance was often based on generalized “best practices” that left room for interpretation. Today, thanks to the contextual depth of large language models, recommendations are hyper-specific, uniquely tailored to individual brands or locations. These developments have shifted SEO from a field dominated by subjective opinions to one firmly rooted in data-driven, highly targeted strategies.
Competitor research
Understanding who your top competitors are and what they do well in terms of SEO is an important key to continued SEO success – and AI excels at competitor analysis.
AI tools can monitor the performance of existing competitors, provide insight into their keyword targeting and other strategies, and even identify and alert you to new competitors as they enter the market. These tools identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats while providing suggestions on how to refine your own SEO strategy to stay competitive.
Keyword research
Keyword research tools are increasingly integrating AI features that offer users additional ways to get keyword suggestions.
By analyzing vast amounts of search data and identifying patterns that may not be immediately obvious to the human eye, such AI-powered suggestion features can help you find new keywords to target that are perfectly aligned with your target audience and their search intent. This ensures that your keyword strategy is both comprehensive and focused on keywords with high potential to generate traffic and conversions.
Content writing and optimization
Generative AI tools are revolutionizing the way we create SEO-friendly content, allowing content writers and SEO professionals to generate outlines, drafts, and web content in a fraction of the time it would take to do it from scratch.
These generative AI tools analyze existing content, search intent, and top-ranking articles to create content tailored to your audience and goals. They can also help you optimize existing content by identifying keyword gaps, improving readability, and making your content more engaging, all of which improve its SEO.
Suggestion for link
AI can help automate the process of incorporating internal and external links into web pages and content and provide strategic recommendations on where to insert links for maximum SEO impact.
For internal links, AI tools can analyze your site’s structure and content and provide link suggestions to improve navigability and page authority. For external links, AI can identify authoritative sources to reference and link to in your content, helping to optimize it for SERPs.
Image creation and optimization
Using AI for SEO is not limited to text-based content – AI tools can also quickly create custom graphics for your site, improving the user experience and providing additional opportunities to rank for visual content.
AI can also create descriptive alt text and suggest ideal file sizes and dimensions for these images, optimizing them for both users and search engine algorithms.
Generating metadata
AI can quickly generate meta titles and descriptions for web pages, analyze page content and keywords to create metadata that improves click-through rates, aligns with SEO best practices, and helps your pages stand out in search results.
User experience analysis
AI can evaluate user behavior metrics, such as bounce rates, session durations, and site heatmaps, to assess how visitors interact with your site and identify optimization opportunities.
This can help you identify technical issues, such as slow-loading pages or confusing navigation, and provide practical recommendations on how to improve the user experience—an important ranking factor for SERPs.
Schema markup generation
AI also makes schema markup creation faster and more accessible, even for those with limited technical expertise.
You can use AI to quickly analyze your site’s content and generate ready-to-use structured data markup that helps search engines better understand your site and improve how your pages appear in search results.
Sentiment analysis
AI-powered sentiment analysis tools can scan customer reviews, social media mentions, and other sources of feedback to provide insight into customer perceptions and help with reputation management, which can impact SEO (especially local SEO).
For example, analyzing Google reviews can help local businesses solve problems and get more positive reviews, which directly affect Google business profile rankings on Google Search and Maps.
Conversation Insights
Through the power of AI copilots – essentially artificially intelligent virtual assistants – you can now gain conversational SEO insights through natural language queries.
This power is multiplied when you connect a copilot to a source of SEO data, such as a local rank tracker, so you can ask specific questions about your performance and get data-backed suggestions on how to improve it.
The beginning of AIO
We have officially entered the age of AI optimization (AIO) – the era of optimization both for and with AI.
While there is still room for more traditional SEO practices in a comprehensive strategy, optimizing with AI is becoming increasingly important, especially as search engines themselves integrate more AI-based features and functionalities.
As search engines become more artificially intelligent, using artificial intelligence to optimize for them will help redefine your efforts and ensure compliance with changing algorithms and user preferences. From automating time-consuming tasks to providing deeper insights into performance and user behavior, using AI for SEO allows you to focus more on strategy and creativity.
As AI and its SEO capabilities continue to evolve, it will surely continue to offer new ways for businesses to analyze data, engage users and optimize performance, becoming an even more indispensable part of any digital marketing strategy. Those who embrace AI for SEO now will be better positioned in the long run, future-proofing their SEO efforts and setting themselves up for continued success.
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