Search Engine Optimization & Artificial Intelligence: The Future of Web Marketing

[#1]

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an ever-changing field and now it is adopting one of the biggest innovation in computer science: Artificial Intelligence (AI). Search engine is rapidly changing the ranking algorithms and adapting AI techniques which will immensely effect SEO in 2018.

As marketers, let’s keep our ammunitions ready to tackle the impacts of Artificial Intelligence on SEO.

How Artificial Intelligence Influences SEO?

Web marketers have been identifying the impacts and potential AI might have for years. It is a world of endless opportunities ranging from streamlined sales pipeline to programmed systems for SEO and Paid Search. Some of the most predicted effects of Artificial Intelligence on SEO are:

• AI will capture the content industry and help create high-quality content automatically! Content – writers, are you guys listening?
• Improvement in the keyword creation with the help of user data and selection of keywords in real-time.
• Real time data to measure present marketing strategy and identify gaps in the existing process
• Automated systems to identify keywords that works for you and run live tests on what keywords will work best in particular geography and business!
• Automated systems to identify new keywords that works best for your domain in targeted geography and audience.
• Ability and resources to create predictive models and identifying the potential of a new marketing model

SEO Planning with Artificial Intelligence?

SEO strategy and planning needs to change with the way search and search engines are changing. Now, it is not just about the keywords in general but the ‘search queries’. Based on the new technology updates, there is a need to make significant & regular changes in SEO strategy.

Here are few tips to plan SEO strategy in 2018

• User Engagement: Search engines inspect websites based on user engagement metrics rather than only on traditional on-page and off-page tactics. Better user-friendly experience, easy navigation, clear site design and additional optimization methods, provides lots of opportunities to web marketers. Make sure your content speaks what users are searching for.
• Query Based Keywords: Search process will be much smoother as search engines will predict additional search queries after initial search and will show results based on that. Search queries are rich database to look for new keyword opportunities. Create user specific faq’s content, long queries, include words like what, where, how, why that will act as featured snippet in top search results.
• Focus on Quality Content: Improve user engagement on the pages as search engines will focus more on the engagement metrics, such as average pages per visit, bounce rate, conversion rate, dwell time etc.
• Structured Markup: More emphasis on adding schema markup to the websites to tell search engines about the content genre to understand & organize content better on website.
• Website Auditing: Updated Website content and targeting it to the right audience on regular intervals is key to online business success.
• Optimize for Voice Search: Smartphones are widely used and it becomes an important source of data for marketers. Its high time to optimize the website for voice search patterns. Use natural conversational phrases on website pages content to make easy for voice search. (Adobe Voice Analytics, Google Assistant, Apple Siri, Amazon Echo)
• Search Engine Guidelines: Fundamental SEO will always be there including meta tags, indexing, caching, anchor text optimization, URL structure, robots.txt, Always stick to Google webmaster guidelines. If the website owner violates any search engine guidelines, may face removal of website from searches or google penalty.
• Accelerated Mobile Pages: Accelerated mobile pages are light-weighted html version designed to load pages faster on mobile devices. If you have not developed AMP pages for your business you are missing a lot of traffic, conversions & revenue. Read more to know about the stats with this Case Study
• SEO Gap Analysis: To identify which section of content, keywords, search query are performing good or bad and identify future objectives. It’s a good practice to find gaps and fix them to minimize their effect.

Although, in months to come, SEO with Artificial Intelligence will be completely different from what we have today. It will be flexible and agile. Automated search engine algorithms, like RankBrain, will constantly change the search approach and web marketers will have to adopt the changes and find a way to automate the content creation and keyword generation to match with the search engine metrics. So Digital Marketers, get ready to dive into the world of Artificial Intelligence.

[#2]

You write really well Syed! Want to see more

[#3]

Thank you Sayan!