8 Ways SEO is already being impacted by AI

Search engine optimisation is the process of improving the visibility and relevance of a website or a web page in the organic results of a search engine. SEO involves various aspects, such as keyword research, content creation, link building, technical optimisation, user experience, and analytics. SEO is constantly evolving as search engines update their algorithms and user behaviour changes and I expect this evolution to continue with an even higher velocity over the next several years.

Artificial Intelligence is the branch of computer science that aims to create machines or systems that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, decision making, and natural language processing. AI has been advancing rapidly in recent months, thanks to the availability of large amounts of data, powerful computing resources, and innovative algorithms that can efficiently process the data.

AI has already been influencing SEO in various ways, over the past few years, in ways that include:

1. AI powered search engines: Search engines like Google, Bing & Brave use AI to understand user intent of a search, provide relevant and personalised results, and rank websites based on hundreds of factors.

For example, Google’s RankBrain is an AI system that helps Google process complex and seemingly ambiguous queries and delivers the best results for the user. Bing’s Intelligent Search is another AI system that uses natural language processing, computer vision, and machine learning to provide rich and interactive answers to users.

2. Keyword research: AI powered tools can analyse vast amounts of data to identify relevant keywords and search trends for an SEO campaign. These tools can provide valuable insights into which keywords are most effective for driving organic traffic that are likely to convert. Many existing SEO software tools, such as SEMRush and Afrefs already use AI technology to present this data and streamline work.

3. AI powered content creation: Content is one of the most important factors for SEO, as it helps attract and engage users, provide value through information, and signal relevance and authority to search engines. However, creating high-quality and original content can be challenging, time-consuming and ultimately expensive. AI can help content creators by generating content ideas, outlines, headlines, summaries, captions, keywords, and even entire articles or videos. For example, OpenAI’s GPT-4 is a powerful natural language generation model that can produce coherent and diverse texts on any topic given a few words or sentences as input.

4. AI powered content optimisation: Content optimisation is the process of improving the quality and performance of content for SEO purposes. It involves aspects such as keyword density, readability, structure, formatting, metadata, images, links, and more. AI technologies, such as natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG), are being utilised to create and optimise content by analysing data, providing suggestions and feedback, and automating tasks. In fact, most content optimisation/grading tools have been using AI for years, by providing insights on topics, keywords, competitors, gaps, and opportunities.

5. User Experience (UX) and Personalisation: AI algorithms can already analyse user behaviour, preferences, and engagement patterns to personalise search results. SEO strategies will be focused on delivering a seamless user experience, optimising load speed and Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness, and providing valuable, personalised content to improve rankings and user engagement.

6. Monitoring and improving performance: AI can help measure and improve the SEO performance of a website, by using data analytics and visualisation techniques. This can help track and analyse various metrics, such as rankings, traffic, conversions, bounce rate, dwell time etc., and provide insights and recommendations for improvement.7.  Image and Video Search: AI powered visual recognition technologies are improving image and video search capabilities. Search engines can now understand content within images and videos, leading to more accurate search results for the end user. Optimising visual content with descriptive tags, captions, and relevant metadata will become even more crucial in SEO as a result. In fact, several SEO plugins already have an AI integration to analyse and tag images and videos with an appropriate description.

8. Link building: Link building is the process of acquiring links from other websites to increase the popularity and authority of a website or a page. Links are one of the most important signals that search engines use to measure the quality and relevance of a website. However, link building can be difficult and risky, as it requires prospecting, analysis, outreach, negotiation, and compliance with search engine guidelines. AI can assist help link builders by finding link prospects, generating personalised pitches, monitoring link performance, and detecting spammy or broken links. Again, SEO tools have been using AI for years, by finding relevant and high-quality link opportunities based on keywords or competitors.

I anticipate AI will continue to impact SEO in the future as the search landscape continues to change at a rapid pace. It’s likely that SEO will become more difficult over time, as Google’s generative AI takes off, as does Bing Chat.

Hopefully, the efficiencies that AI bring to SEO at least partially address the likely increasing difficulty of SEO over the next few years. I don’t like making difficult SEO predictions, so will leave this topic for a later time!

TL;DR

SEO has been heavily impacted by AI over the past few years, with search engine algorithms, keyword research, content optimisation, monitoring and link building to name a few. It’s likely this will accelerate over the next few years, as SEO becomes more complex.