AI and SEO: A 21st Century Love Story

September 18, 2019 – Welcome back Jackie Carillo with this her fifth contribution to 21stcentech.com. Jackie is a content contributor to the website Seek Visibility where she specializes in writing about technology, home life, and education. In this posting, Carillo talks about the evolution of search engine optimization, known by the acronym SEO, and how without it the Internet would not be the accessible repository of knowledge we rely on daily. The new twist on SEO is the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) tools as a means of creating hyper-performing SEO. As always your comments are invited.

The internet has become an integral tool of our modern life. For many, however, it is virtually useless without a convenient way to navigate it. Search engines have provided the answer, so much so that businesses have learned to manipulate the results of online searches to increase their Internet visibility. Though no one predicted that search engine optimization (SEO) would become the essential tool for online business discovery, it has certainly become that today. 

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) which has been creeping into the public consciousness for some time in a wide range of fields and applications, is now finding its niche in SEO where businesses are deploying AI-driven SEO tools.

What AI Does for SEO

In many industries, AI is making businesses work faster, cheaper and better than ever before. The same is true for SEO. Because AI can aggregate and analyze greater quantities of data at high speed, applying it to SEO can produce greater business success in search rankings. 

Perhaps the most obvious application of AI in SEO is in answering critical strategy questions such as:

“What kind of content does my audience want?”

or

“How do I move my customers from one phase of the buying process to the next?”

Traditionally, businesses would do research to create buyer personae, taking months to do this and still not necessarily producing desired results. With the help of AI, however, a business can speed through this process to receive the answers it seeks without having to dig through mountains of data.

AI-SEO and Content Creation

Some marketers believe that AI in the near future will offer options for content creation.

Stories about content-producing robots aren’t new. For years, bots have been used by companies to create keyword-stuffed blogs and social media posts.

The Associated Press has been publishing thousands of these automated stories every year, but to date, almost anyone can tell the difference between something pieced together by bots versus something written by a human. So for businesses considering bot content creators, I would advise they tread warily.

AI-SEO Biggest Benefit

The best reason to use AI for SEO is to compete better in the search optimization arms race.

Search engines have steadily improved their ability to parse so-called legitimate content from content produced to boost search rankings.

Google has closed all windows into its algorithm updates, so businesses today are mostly in the dark in determining what web elements matter and to improve their web assets. This is where AI can help as a crucial tool for identifying when and what search engines will impact their algorithms. And AI also will help in continuing to optimize sites in the midst of this current instability. 

Why You Still Need an SEO Agency

AI is an outstanding technology, and one day it just might allow machines to think, talk and act like us or better. That day, however, has not yet come.

While businesses can and should integrate AI into SEO, as well as customer service, manufacturing, logistics and other processes,  they should also recognize that it can’t do everything SEO professionals do. It simply isn’t good enough yet to fully replace human experts.  

Why?

AI-SEO is still incapable of developing an overall digital marketing strategy. It is limited to accomplishing specific tasks: for example, identifying audiences or creating content. When it comes to putting together a bigger, longer plan, however, it is simply deficient.

A business in the process of choosing an SEO agency might ask the question in its search to find out the AI expertise of candidates. But having human SEO experts on staff, for the near future, is still a necessity.