What You Need to Know About AI in SEO

The use of AI in SEO can boost your website’s ranking and therefore boost sales. But don’t rely on AI to create and translate content just yet.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an umbrella term that covers several different technologies.

Machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), deep learning, and other emerging technologies are all included.

Its goal is to perform tasks better and faster than humans, making life easier for us.

According to Harvard Business Review, McKinsey analysts estimate AI can create $1.4 to $2.6 trillion of value in marketing and sales alone.

AI can give your SEO efforts – and your business, by extension- quite a boost.

Read on for a deeper look.

AI + SEO: Acronyms Working in Tandem

What do we mean by AI?

AI leverages  machine learning to imitate the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human brain.

It also incorporates natural language processing. It’s a branch of AI that enables a computer to understand human – or “natural” – language. As a result, it lets humans have meaningful conversations with computers.

Now, AI learns by processing vast amounts of data. That’s how simple language rules evolved into advanced  machine translation systems that can convert huge amounts of information in milliseconds.

We’re seeing this play out in localization, the adaptation of a particular product, service, or technology – and its corresponding content – to the linguistic and cultural standards of a given country or region.

This applies to website content, mobile apps, branding, product information, voice recognition capabilities, and the list goes on.

AI helps localize your brand by providing customers with personalized assistance and engaging with them in a natural, personal way in real time.

But how do you know what will resonate with potential customers? That’s where SEO comes in.

What do we mean by SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s a set of practices designed to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results.

Organic search is the most prominent way for people to discover and access online content. A good SEO strategy is essential for improving the quality and quantity of traffic to your website.

In other words, SEO is the process of developing and improving your online content so that a search engine like Google is more likely to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.

This work can be time consuming, and it can also take time for it to bear fruit, especially if you’re starting from scratch.

Enter AI.

AI in SEO: 3 Ways AI Can Help, 1 Way It Can’t

Google’s ranking system sorts through hundreds of billions of webpages and other content to present users with the most relevant, useful results in a fraction of a second.

Their algorithm is constantly being updated, and ranking is, in part, based on the following questions:

• Does the content provide original information, reporting, research or analysis?
• What about a substantial, complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
• Are you providing insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
• If the content draws on other sources, does it avoid simply copying or rewriting those sources and instead provide substantial additional value and originality?
• Does the headline and/or page title provide a descriptive, helpful summary of the content?
• Does the headline and/or page title avoid being exaggerating or shocking in nature?
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
• Would you expect to see this content in or referenced by a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?

Here are some areas in which AI can help with SEO.

Topic Building

AI identifies trending topics within your industry.

In fact, there’s an AI tool called topic building. It’s a machine learning technique that categorizes large collections of unstructured text and speech data by assigning “tags” or categories according to keywords or themes.

These tags give it structure so you can gain insights from the data and flip it into compelling content on your website.

In other words, if your potential customers are talking about it, you need to be as well.

Content Optimization

E-A-T is a massive part of Google’s algorithm. It’s baked into  Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.

In case you’re wondering, it’s an acronym for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

To get your content to show up on page 1 of Google’s search results, you have to display you really do know what you’re talking about.

With AI, you can optimize your content to meet Google’s E-A-T standards.

AI content optimization software helps optimize your content by suggesting headlines, link placement, and other on-page elements that can improve search rankings.

This will help you gain good traffic to your pages, and ultimately get your innovation in the hands of consumers.

Voice Search

People are using voice search on their mobile devices with increasing regularity. But the way we type our searches vs. how we speak to them is different, and your SEO must address this directly.

For example, you might type “Thai food near me” in Google Maps but ask “where’s the nearest Thai restaurant?” when using voice search.

This goes back to NLP, and you therefore must incorporate long-form, question-structured keywords to keep up.

By the way, for the device or application to understand and speak your language, it first must learn it.

And that occurs by way of  speech data collection and  natural language processing.

What AI in SEO Can’t Do … Yet

Content Creation

Creating content that both prioritizes search engine traction and generates interaction with visitors to your site is something of an art.

Google recently launched a “helpful content update” to tackle content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines instead of to inform people.

The ranking update helps make sure that unoriginal, low-quality content doesn’t rank highly in Search.

Google says people don’t find content helpful if it seems like it was designed to attract clicks rather than inform readers.

For a while now, Google has also said AI generated content is considered spam and in violation of its guidelines.

However, that was stated before AI became more sophisticated, but still, at the moment, it’s not able to capable of cracking the “content by people, for people” code.

“You still need — and for the most part you probably will for a long time — a human in the loop with this technology because it’s absolutely terrible at creating facts,” says Nick Duncan, founder and developer of Contentbot.AI, an AI assistant for content creation.

“We don’t allow people to use it in the medical, financial or legal field because it will just make stuff up.”

It’s not much different from text-to-image AI, where there’s a need for a tighter filtration process to remove questionable content. And that comes from better curated and comprehensive data sets.

So, while ML and NLP is on track to create meaningful content, it’s just not quite there yet.

Let Us Design Your Multilingual SEO Content Workflow

We know the power of data fed AI and how it can revolutionize so many areas of our lives. We also know for quality assurance reasons, humans must still review the AI generated content.

By leveraging data, automation, and human expertise, we speed up your time to market, significantly cut your internal translation efforts, and provide significant cost savings.

Our multilingual SEO services are always tailor-made for each client and each project.

To get started,  please contact us today.