As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more sophisticated, search engine optimization will have to adapt. AI can already analyze data at a rate that humans can’t, so it’s only a matter of time until it starts to dominate SEO strategies.
The SEO industry is always in a state of flux. Google is constantly changing its algorithms, and new technologies are emerging all the time. Ever since Google’s announcement in 2015 that they would be using RankBrain, an artificial intelligence (AI) system, to help process search results, the SEO community has been discussing the impact that AI will have on the industry.
RankBrain is not the only AI system that Google is using. In 2017, they announced that they were also using machine learning to fight spam.
Since Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, confirmed in 2019 that RankBrain was now being used for every search query, several companies have started to experiment with AI and machine learning to try and get ahead of the curve. This gave rise to a whole new plethora of AI-based SEO tools. Some of the prominent ways in which AI tools have proven their effectiveness are SEO keyword research, content creation, traffic and site growth analysis, voice search, and SEO workflows.
These applications have made it evident that the future of SEO is in Artificial Intelligence. The question is not whether AI will change SEO but how soon it will happen. The number of companies interested in AI-based SEO has increased significantly in the past year and is only going to grow in the years to come.
“I think we’re going to see a continued move towards more personalized search results, and that will be driven by both better use of data as well as machine learning models. I also believe we’ll start to see Google put more emphasis on entities, rather than just keywords, as they continue to try and better understand the searcher’s intent,” said Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz.
Here’s how AI is already changing SEO and how we can expect it to change even more in the future.
Keywords and anchor management
SEO keyword research is one of the most important aspects of SEO. It has always been a time-consuming and tedious task, but AI tools have made it much easier. AI-based keyword capabilities like SEO Vendor’s AI Analysis assist in analyzing anchor text usage, keyword variations and semantic keywords.
Content creation and analysis
Content is still the king when it comes to SEO. Google’s algorithm uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand the content on a webpage and match it with the user’s query. This means that creating high-quality, relevant content is more important than ever before.
In spite of heated debates over Google’s reaction to generated content, we continue to see a greater introduction of tools based on GPT-3, and GPT-4 development is well underway.
Traffic and ranking growth analysis
Understanding your website’s rankings and traffic growth is essential for SEO. Google Analytics is a great tool for this, but it