The Application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Search Engine Optimization (SEO): What Marketers Should Know
Artificial intelligence technology is lighting a fire under search engine optimization. In this article, we’re going to explore how the application of AI, automation, and machine learning is helping SEO marketers accelerate and improve their organic search efforts.
What Is AI in SEO?
The application of AI in SEO means the integration of artificial intelligence technology in existing organic search practices, namely keyword research, on-page optimization, technical SEO, content creation, and off-page optimization.
Additionally, AI in SEO can mean the integration of generative engine optimization (GEO) into existing digital marketing strategies.
By integrating AI technologies into SEO tools and practices, digital marketers can expect the following benefits:
Less Time on Mindless Tasks, More Time on Strategy
AI can do the annoying grunt work for us in a fraction of the time. It’s the dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, and washing machine of the digital age.
By helping with all or most of keyword research, backlink-building, technical optimization, and content creation, generative AI and AI-enabled SEO tools are giving marketers more time to do skills-appropriate tasks.
This is what technology is supposed to do: take away the annoying and time-consuming bits to give us more time to be creative.
More Abundant, More Accurate Data
The use of AI has allowed marketers to collect and analyze data like never before. Even with data privacy laws, digital marketers can leverage machine learning algorithms to help them identify emerging patterns, trends, and connections, which paves the way for accurate insights, data-driven strategies, and competitive analysis.
AI tools can help us make more informed decisions at a faster speed and with a higher success rate.
More Conversions
And what happens when you’re armed with data? You gain more visibility, attract more lead potential, and, therefore, watch your conversion rates start to increase. Even better, every customer journey produces more search behavior data, which, in turn, helps justify your strategies and build on what you know is working.
Faster Results, Better ROI
And with higher conversion rates comes better ROI. While your team may have to spend money to purchase the AI add-ons or account upgrades, using AI tools to help expand, improve, and accelerate your organic search strategies is a solid investment that leads to impressive long-term ROI.
Better, Faster Decision-Making
According to startup expert Bill Gross, one of the most overlooked factors in business success is timing. Timing is everything. So when you have an AI tool that speeds up the SEO process, everything becomes faster: researching your keywords, pushing out high-quality content, learning from the data—basically, you’ll be making better decisions at a faster rate than competitors who might still be relying on slower SEO processes.
But where exactly does AI fit? Is it just a matter of buying software that can do everything for you? Let’s take a look at the specific applications of AI systems in SEO.
AI and Business Integration: Core Applications
In general, digital transformation would be nothing without the integration of AI in business ecosystems, and we’re not just talking about SEO tools. Hubspot is a perfect example of this.
In Hubspot, users can manage the entire scope of their marketing efforts through a single pane of glass, which not only gives companies the benefits previously mentioned, but also empowers teams with the capabilities to create more impactful, more personalized campaigns across social media, advertising, email, sales, etc.
But, since this is not a Hubspot plug, and since this is a post about SEO, let’s look at what exciting organic search tools are out there.
How AI Is Changing the Way We Do Keyword Research
There are a few ways that AI-powered keyword research tools help SEO strategists.
Thanks to natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, AI has the capacity to analyze large amounts of data and identify the most high-value keywords and opportunities that your company should be prioritizing.
It can also analyze and understand the intent behind various keywords and develop more precise content strategies that speak directly to what the user is looking for.
Additionally, AI-powered keyword research tools can discover more opportunities in long-tail keywords, which may not have the highest search volume but most likely have higher conversion rates.
For example, the keyword ‘bird seed mix’ will have a much higher search volume than ‘wild bird seed mix for native Quebec species’, but the latter keyword is more transactional, which means the user is more likely ready to buy.
If you’re expanding your digital marketing to optimize for AI-powered search, then AI can help you discover more conversational keywords and develop content topics tailored to AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
In essence, AI adds an extra layer of speed and intelligence to search trend analysis, which accelerates our research time and gives a better understanding of which horses are more likely to win the race.
Top AI-assisted/pure AI keyword research tools: Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz Pro, SEO Surfer, Claude, ChatGPT
How AI Can Help With Content Optimization
Back in the day (and that’s really not that long ago, if that tells you anything about the speed of AI’s evolution), Google seemed to be penalizing purely AI-written content. And can we blame it? Early versions of AI copy had a tendency to be, how shall we say, downright silly.
But since AI content has greatly improved, thanks to better prompting, Google’s position is now pretty much this: “we don’t give a gosh darn who wrote the darn thing, just make sure it’s not a bunch of baloney”, if you’ll excuse our potty-mouthed paraphrasing.
What’s more important than content authorship is content quality. To solve for X, many marketers swear by E-E-A-T—or experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness—as the most reliable guideline for what constitutes well-written content.
So, since Google has pretty much greenlit AI-generated pages, SEO teams are capitalizing on generative AI’s ability to create optimized content faster than people can.
But content creation is only the tip of the iceberg. Thanks to AI, automation, and ML, marketers can also:
- Analyze search engine result pages to understand if content fully covers the topic and whether or not it matches search intent. Content that satisfies user intent is also more likely to be surfaced in AI-generated responses.
- Ask AI for feedback on content formatting, such as headlines and paragraph structure. These insights can help enhance user experience and reader engagement, which improves search engine rankings.
- Leverage semantically related search queries to boost topical relevance and increase visibility in both search engines and AI-generated responses.
- Generate metadata and on-page elements (titles, descriptions, headers, alt text) to avoid having to do it manually and improve click-through rates.
- Scan and identify content that’s outdated or underperforming. It can even rewrite these sections itself with new stats or updated information, as refreshed content typically performs better in the SERPs than brand-new content.
- Adjust the tone, style, and complexity of the content to match the specific persona and increase engagement, given the right prompts.
In short, not only can AI help us write content faster, but it can help us create pages that are more relevant to our target audience, which boosts visibility, engagement, and ultimately conversions.
Top AI-assisted/pure AI content tools: Frase.io, Writesonic, Surfer SEO, Jasper AI, Semrush, ChatGPT
How AI Tools Help With Technical SEO
Technical SEO can be a bit of a tedious task. It’s a long checklist you have to go through, and the bigger your site, the bigger the job. The more pages you have, the greater the possibility that there are broken links, long redirect chains, site speed issues, performance drop-offs, and just general oversights.
Thankfully, AI tools can automate most, if not all, of the technical SEO process. For example, it can now not only crawl your site to identify broken links, but tools can also be automated to fix these issues for you, effectively taking the hassle off your hands and giving you back loads of time for other important marketing tasks.
The rapid pace at which AI can discover, fix, and optimize your website to improve its speed, performance, stability, and mobile-friendliness is helping to make web and mobile maintenance more efficient and easier to manage for people who have fewer technical skills.
Top AI-assisted/pure AI technical SEO tools: Alli AI, Search Atlas, Screaming Frog.
How AI Technology Is Changing Off-Page Optimization
Both AI and search engine algorithms care about your online authority. In traditional SEO practices, backlinks, mentions, and referrals are strong signals of your credibility. In GEO, the algorithm seems to lean more toward positive brand mentions on relevant and high-authority sites and from user-generated content.
The application of AI tools in off-page optimization can help strategists discover where their links, mentions, and referrals are coming from, which ones are providing the most ‘SEO juice’, and, alternatively, which ones are hurting their street cred. Depending on the tool, AI can also comb the internet and discover who is linking to your competitors and how they received the mention/link. It can even show you which competitor backlinks are broken, so you can swoop in and offer the domain your (better) link instead.
Top AI-assisted/pure AI off-page tools: Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, Semrush, Majestic
Are There Ethical Considerations when Combining Artificial Intelligence and SEO Strategies?
The short answer is, yes.
The long answer is that we all have a part to play in making sure that we use AI responsibly and not at the cost of people’s privacy, dignity, and livelihood. What that really boils down to is four things (though we’re sure AI scholars have a much longer list):
Transparency
We bet you’ve already seen a little sticker somewhere at the top of a blog or social post saying, ‘this content has been AI-generated’. Because AI is still seen as a bit of a lawless, smoky saloon in a Spaghetti Western, you should be telling people if your SEO strategies have been aided and abetted by AI for the same reason you should tell your dinner guests what’s in your mysteriously addictive tortilla dip.
There are quite a few incentives to maintain a philosophy of total transparency:
- It builds trust and credibility
- Knowing where potential errors come from makes it easier to correct and take responsibility for not telling the public that your content was AI-written can damage your brand reputation if discovered
- It gives stakeholders a better understanding of the effectiveness of AI vs human-led content or strategies
Data Security
Data, data, data—if we turned AI into a living monster, then data would be its breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It thrives off data. So, it kind of flies in the face of AI’s potential when businesses have to comply with all applicable privacy laws, such as the GDPR, the CCPA, PIPEDA, etc. But the alternative—to give AI models full access to our data without any checks or balances—is certainly not an option.
This tension points to the need for strong data privacy governance and every company’s prerogative to be honest and transparent about its data collection policies.
Bias and Fairness
As an SEO marketer, there’s not a lot you can do about bias in large language models. For starters, the cut off dates of pretty much all the LLMs you’re using are already well behind us. Any new information you get from an LLM query has been fetched from the internet via a web search tool or API.
So when we say that bias and fairness is an ethical consideration, we mean that we should bear in mind that AI tools helping us achieve SEO greatness may have been trained on unrepresentative or skewed data. The onus is, therefore, on us to check for bias. The more inclusive and equitable our data, the more ethical and effective our SEO practices will be.
Human Input
Does AI threaten to render certain professions extinct? Obviously. And content creation is just a drop in the bucket. As we even mention in this post, there are some SEO tools out there that purport to take care of the entire SEO workflow—from keyword research and strategy to content optimization and everything in between.
While those tools are quite powerful, we’re in no way endorsing a sweeping round of layoffs. AI-powered SEO works best when it strikes the perfect balance, pairing human creativity and experience with AI’s speed and capacity to take care of mindless tasks.
Verdict: Is AI and Search Engine Optimization a Match Made in Heaven?
After weighing the ethical considerations against AI’s overwhelming potential, we think that the application of AI in SEO is an overwhelming net positive. While there are still some ethical aspects of AI to take into account, it isn’t exactly scrying or soothsaying when we say that the future of SEO is powered by artificial intelligence.
The only question to ask yourself now is, are you ready for it?
FAQs About AI SEO
From a tools perspective, AI technology has sped up and improved SEO-related activities, such as content creation, schema markup creation, internal linking optimization, etc.
It also uses data analytics to offer marketing teams insights on:
- Which keywords are predicted to have greater conversion rates
- What type of content is best suited for the target audience
- Which contextually related keywords and topics creators should include in their content to improve visibility in both search engine results and GenAI answers.
AI is influencing search behavior in major ways. People are increasingly using AI tools instead of traditional search engines for the convenience of not having to click on various links to find the answer. GenAI delivers comprehensive, informative, and helpful outputs, making conversational and long-tail search queries an important aspect of keyword research in modern SEO.
Yes, there are a few SEO tools out there that offer full automation, but we wouldn’t suggest giving over complete control to these tools, just as we wouldn’t recommend getting behind the wheel (if that’s how it works) of a complete self-driving car…at least not just yet. No matter how powerful the tool, humans still need to be calling the shots.
Despite its almighty power, AI is still in its pubescent stage, so as much as we are excited about how AI will shape the future of SEO, we still have to remember where it’s at right now. All that to say, your tools do not replace human knowledge, skills, or experience.
