How AI can make your SEO work better

“Real-time market insights”, “perfectly personalized user experience”, “SEO at the push of a button” – AI tools that make such promises are currently springing up like mushrooms. Of course that was to be expected. After all, ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Midjourney and Co. have made AI the absolute hype topic of the year.

At the moment, no one knows which of these tools will hold up. But AI can still potentially enrich everyday life in an SEO agency.

AI text generators based on GPT-4 are particularly good at generating lists of ideas or variations of different terms. That’s why they’re great for supporting keyword research, especially in the early stages and for topics you don’t know much about yourself.

Even if you have to watch out for misinformation when “researching” with chatbots, you can still get pretty good information in many “well-defined” subject areas. For example, if you need a list of all the neighborhoods that border a given neighborhood, or if you don’t want to search Google for the difference between two similar terms, a chatbot can provide you with quick answers.

Some AI SEO tools also promise features like keyword grouping or real-time trending keywords. I have never found the former function to be more effective than other SERP overlap tools in any tool. As for real-time keyword information, while that’s very cool, in practice few SEOs have the time or budget to create the kind of agile, ephemeral content that such a feature would be really ideal for.

AI text generators have caused quite a stir this year, but those who think they can do without human copywriters in the field of SEO should be cautious. Yes, GPT-4 based applications can create text that reads fluently and makes sense at first glance. But two factors get in the way of fully AI-driven content creation:

The first factor is that AI texts still have problems that are well known. Misinformation, repetition, lack of context and the like are obstacles to a 100 percent AI strategy, but can be remedied with human input and corrections.

The second factor is not so easy to get rid of. SEO is always about overtaking the competition – after all, top rankings for lucrative keywords are limited. But now that everyone has access to the same AI tools, anyone can create AI text of similar quality… And the top rankings certainly don’t go to search results that offer exactly the same as everyone else. So if you want to assert yourself, you have to create unique, better and more helpful content than the competition.

The good news is that AI can help us with this task as well. AI tools for SERP analysis can show us exactly what content our target audience wants to read. They can also optimize our content briefings and make it easier to write SEO texts, for example by letting text generators generate ideas for headers or paragraphs.

A copywriter using a text generator as support spends a lot less time brainstorming (at the article level down to the sentence level), phrasing and all the little annoyances that waste time while writing (it’s a lot easier, after all , asking a tool to show ten variations of a sentence rather than rewriting the sentence itself over and over).

And the time that you save in this way can be used to make your own content unique, for example with additional research (keyword information gain), more examples from your own practice or creative additions for which there was simply no time before . And of course, thanks to this time saving, you can generally create more content.

A future of organic search shaped by Google’s Search Generative Experience means profound changes that SEO should be preparing for now. One of these developments is the increasing importance of Shopping graph be.

The keyword of the hour is therefore: rich structured data. This should actually already be a basis of good search engine optimization, but in reality this is often still a problem.

This is where AI comes in: Various AI tools are able to automate the delivery of structured data and build a knowledge graph for your website. This makes it as easy as possible for Google’s algorithms to understand your content precisely. So you improve your ranking chances.

The maintenance of internal links on your website is something that should actually be part of the SEO basics, but is often left on the sidelines of an SEO strategy due to time constraints. This task can also be automated by AI tools.

And last but not least, Google snippets can also be easily created with AI tools by simply providing a text generator with a title, keywords and maximum character length. However, you should check carefully here whether the AI ​​has kept to the character length – GPT 4 applications still seem to have problems with this.

One of the many things that makes AI so valuable is its ability to process massive amounts of data. Google itself has long used artificial intelligence in its ranking algorithms, for example Bert and Rankbrain.

In SEO, we can use AI to better understand Google’s algorithms. We may also collect data about user behavior both during searches and on our websites. This not only allows us to optimize our website perfectly for organic searches – we also understand more precisely what users expect from us. After all, a good user experience will become increasingly important as a ranking factor on Google.

AI tools can also discover patterns in vast amounts of data that would have remained hidden from other technologies. Many tools give their users recommendations for action based on analyzes of these patterns. This is nothing new in SEO tools, but AI is far more powerful than other technologies when it comes to such analysis.

Less “high-tech”, but still not to be underestimated: AI can also be used to process your own data. Even “simple” chatbots like ChatGPT can help you break down records and present them in different formats (tables, lists, bullet points and many more), saving you quite a bit of human work – one of the biggest advantages of artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence can make search engine optimization faster, more accurate and more efficient. Many AI tools on the market make promises that they cannot keep at the moment. But equally, some of the tools currently in development might exceed our expectations. With Google’s plans for the future and the prospect of new, even more powerful AI tools, the future of SEO is as exciting as ever right now.