Artificial Intelligence (AI) powers Google search. So why not harness the same power for your website’s search engine optimization (SEO)? Read on to learn what AI is, why it matters for SEO, and how you can use AI for SEO content creation and content curation.
Still copying content into WordPress?
You’re doing it wrong… say goodbye forever to:
- ❌ Cleaning HTML, removing span tags, line breaks, etc.
- ❌ Creating your Table of Contents anchor ID links for all headers by hand,
- ❌ Resizing & compressing images one-by-one before uploading back into your content,
- ❌ Optimizing images with descriptive file names & alt text attributes,
- ❌ Manually pasting target=“_blank” and/or “nofollow” attributes to every single link
Table of Contents
Publish Google Docs to your blog in 1-click 
- ✅ Export in seconds (not hours)
- ✅ Less VAs, interns, employees
- ✅ Save 6-100+ hours/week
What is AI?
AI makes computers learn and do tasks the way humans do. It’s an overarching term that covers different technologies:
- Machine learning (ML)
- Artificial neural networks (ANN)
- Natural language processing (NLP)
- Natural language understanding (NLU)
- Deep learning (DL)
- Computer vision
Each of these technologies makes machines perform different tasks. For instance, NLP makes computers understand, interpret, and talk in human language. When you say, “Alexa, switch on the light,” the machine hears your voice, processes, and understands it. Alexa then responds by switching on the light.
Businesses in every industry use AI technology for different functions because AI crunches millions of pieces of data without information overload or fatigue. It identifies patterns and provides insights that humans might miss. AI also multitasks better than we do. More than a quarter of companies that use AI attributes at least 5% of their earnings before interest and taxes to AI.
Why should you get AI tools for SEO?
SEO is hard. Search engines and ranking systems are constantly updating. Best practices are always changing. As a content marketer, you want your content to rank higher, and AI helps you do this without breaking a sweat.
AI SEO tools implement ML and NLP algorithms, which Google and other search engines leverage to understand web content and user intent. They help meet the signals web crawlers search for and work to get to the top of the search engine results page (SERP) for your target keywords faster.
Used effectively, AI tools can be the North Star for all your SEO and content marketing strategies.
Apart from tools for SEO and content marketing, you can also use AI tools for business and marketing.
How to use AI for SEO
SEO can be divided into four main tasks:
- Keyword research: Find what your users are searching for.
- Content creation: Create optimized content that consumers want.
- Link building: Get other sites to vouch for your content through backlinks.
- Technical SEO: Make sure that search engines can find and index your pages.
AI tools enhance all four tasks. AI also improves other SEO strategies, such as content curation.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the foundation for creating content that ranks. If you’re not targeting the right keywords, you won’t get any traffic to your site. But choosing keywords is no easy task. SEO software SEMRush database alone has 21.1 billion keywords across 808 million domains. Can we sift through billions of keywords and find the ones that bring traffic to your site? No. But AI can. Here’s how.
Automate keyword research and clustering
With billions of keywords in their database, AI tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs come up with related topics and subtopics almost instantly. Type in a keyword, and AI will find thousands of related keywords for you. Other features of AI-powered keyword research tools are:
- Keyword suggestions for specific SERP features like featured snippets or knowledge panel
- Analysis of keywords by search intent
- Long-tail keywords with high-relevance search
- Top-ranking pages assessment
SEO software like Cluster AI, Keyword Cupid, and Keyword Insights automate keyword mapping and keyword clustering. With such AI tools, SEO professionals can determine realistic keyword targets with speed and precision. Some software like SurferSEO help create your whole content strategy in a matter of minutes.
Get real-time metrics
AI tools provide real-time metrics of keywords like:
- Search volume
- Number of clicks
- Keyword difficulty
- Traffic potential
- Organic competition
- Paid competition
- Cost-per-click
- 12-month search trends
- Number of URLs listed for the keyword
AI tools also automate the process of tracking keywords. You can set up alerts for any traffic or ranking changes and use them to allocate your SEO resource in a targeted manner.
Content creation
Creating content that ranks is tough. The ranking algorithms keep changing. There is always an emphasis on expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T). It takes time and effort to create content that ranks. Here are several ways AI helps you with content creation at scale.
Generate content ideas
Tools like Ahref and SEMRush provide keyword ideas and show content gaps with competing websites. Pop in your competitor’s domains and see where they’ve outperformed you in keyword rankings.
Draft with AI writers
AI writers are now widely available since the release of GPT-3 or Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3. It is one of the most advanced AI language models that many AI writers leverage. With a few prompts, AI writers can draft emails, blogs, social media posts, and digital ads. Here are some of the tools content creators can leverage:
- Jasper
- BypassGPT
- CopyAI
- Rytr
- Compose Web
- WriteSonic
- Frase.io
- Copymatic
You can use AI writers for the following tasks:
- Generating blog ideas and outline
- Writing a section of blog articles
- Compiling bullet points to a blog section
- Drafting SEO meta title, meta description
- Creating a call-to-action (CTA)
“AI is useful for SEO because we can use it, for example, to objectively summarize and contextualize information that we know is not going to change,” says Evan Sherbert, Senior SEO Specialist at G2, a software marketplace. His team uses AI tools like CopyAI to refresh and optimize old content.
These kinds of tools have multiple templates as a starting point, speeding up the writing process. “We can use it to really cut down the content production timeline and allow writers to have more time to be creative,” notes Sherbert.
AI content still needs a bit of manual editing to ensure it is what you want.
“If you’re going into it thinking this tool completely can give you a fresh article and you don’t do any effort, I think you’re going to be really disappointed,” says Sherbert. “I would never expect AI to be able to write the same kind of long-form editorial content that our expert writers do here because there is a big human element that comes through in the individual context. But AI is really good at summarizing or at least helping standardize some of that writing process.”
Another potential pitfall with AI writers is that Google has spoken out against AI-generated content. So, content from AI writers still requires a human touch. Despite the disadvantages, AI writers scale content production quickly. Such tools are a godsend for marketing teams with few or no in-house content teams. Now with the advancement of AI technology and the recent release of OpenAI’s GPT4, the creation of awesome content isn’t just possible, it’s undeniable.
You can also use AI tools like Grammarly and Hemingway to check grammar, punctuation, and writing style to create error-free copies.
Despite the advantages of AI-written content, AI content detection is still ahead of the game. Originality. ai is a prime example as the first premium AI content detectors to hit the market.
Optimize content
After content creation, the most crucial step in SEO is content optimization. Content optimization ensures your content is relevant, high-quality, and competitive. AI comes to the rescue here with SERP analytics. After all, nothing ranks on page one by accident.
Content optimizers like Clearscope, MarketMuse, INK, and Frase.io use ML and NLP to study thousands of SERPs and build cheat sheets to optimize your content. These cheat sheets outline features of top-ranking pages, including:
- Term map or list of must-have keywords
- How many times should each keyword be used
- Themes or semantic grouping of keywords
- Readability
- Word count
- FAQs on the topic
- Common citations
- External resources
- Outline of top-ranking pages
You can paste your content into these tools and grade it to see how it compares to other competing pages. As you optimize your content, your content grade improves. So does your content’s potential to rank higher. With AI content optimizers, generating high-quality content is child’s play.
You can also optimize old content with these tools by simply pasting the URL of the content into the software and letting the machine do the analysis. Once the AI finds where the content lags compared to the top-ranking pages, you optimize it to rank higher.
There are also AI tools like CoSchedule and Headlime that optimize other on-page SEO elements like headlines, page titles, and meta descriptions. These tools give writers a quantitative measure of their content.
Link building
Internal links and relevant backlinks are crucial for increasing your site’s authority. Even though there’s no specific AI to build links, multiple tools can guide you through the process with steps like:
- Finding potential internal links
- Finding relevant sites for backlinking
- Automating outreach process
Find internal linking opportunities
The way your pages are interlinked to one another is one of the key drivers of SERP rankings. Luckily, AI can save you time and effort in doing this.
“It’s really popular in SEO right now to use machine learning to identify the most optimal internal linking pathways,” notes Sherbert.
AI tools like Market Brew show you where, when, and how to optimize internal linking to achieve your highest ranking potential. These tools crawl all web pages of a site. They score their internal and external links and analyze the link flow of each page. With this analysis, the tools show pages that should have the most link flow and pages where it can be reduced. They also suggest internal linking opportunities by showing which part of a page can be linked to another page.
Find link-building opportunities
AI tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Mangools help identify backlinking opportunities with less time and effort. Buzzstream, for instance, helps you find contextually relevant sites you can link to for a particular keyword.
These platforms provide an in-depth profile of the site’s backlinks with new, lost, broken, and spammy backlinks. You can use this to compare your competitor’s backlinks and find sites to contact to build links. The software also tracks backlinks. SEO specialists can use this to regain broken or lost links and remove spammy links.
Automate Outreach
Tools like Smartwriter, Hunter.io, and Pitchbox automate your cold outreach campaigns for backlinks. They analyze the content you want a backlink to and write hyper-personalized emails to other webmasters and bloggers. These AI tools also offer multiple email outreach templates that a content marketer can use.
Technical SEO
You can’t find your destination without a map. Similarly, search engine crawlers can’t find your site in SERPs without proper technical SEO. AI tools come in handy for figuring out where your sites lag.
Audit and optimize site
Site audits are critical for finding issues in your website. It ensures there’s no problem indexing or crawling your pages. AI software audits sites and provides analysis without any human effort. They provide metrics on:
- Site health
- Crawlability
- Core web vitals
- Site performance (loading speed)
- Internal links
- Mobile compatibility
- Schema markup
They also provide real-time warning reports on high-priority issues that need immediate attention from the technical SEO team. These tools work on a whole site or a specific subdomain of the site and go further by offering content audits that analyze on-page SEO elements. Together with content optimizers and link builders, these tools can uplift your pages to the top of SERPs.
Optimize for voice search
Voice search is a fast-growing trend that SEO teams cannot ignore. Nearly 50% of people use voice for search queries on products, and 70% of consumers use voice search to shop. But it’s very different from typing. Voice search relies primarily on NLP and NLU.
AI programs like Algolio optimize your site for voice search. Software like Answer the Public quickly cranks out questions that users are frequently asking search engines. Content creators can use insights from these tools to optimize for voice searches.
Content Curation
In this content-saturated world, content curation is a must-have SEO strategy. It’s a relatively faster way to build authority and engagement. A well-executed content curation strategy adds value to the audience, increasing social shares, links, and ultimately better rankings. AI tools help here, too.
Discover share-worthy content
Sifting through millions of blogs, social media posts, and articles takes a significant amount of time and effort, let alone curating relevant content for your target audience. AI content explorers make it easy. Content explorers like Buzzsumo, Feedly, and Sprout Social are excellent options for finding high-quality and relevant content. These tools discover articles, videos, and other trending content with minimal lift on your part.
Automate content curation
Know what topics and what sources you want to curate from. AI Tools like Rasa.io will automate the whole process for you. These tools not only discover notable content and curate it, but they also personalize the curated content for each subscriber and track engagement to optimize for the future.
Is AI going to take away jobs from SEO and content creators?
No. AI can be extremely useful, but AI is unlikely to replace us. At best, AI takes care of repetitive, mundane, data-crunching work while complicated tasks still require human attention.
“I think people kind of give AI and machine learning a negative connotation like it’s going to take their jobs. But between you and me, I think it’s going to give us so much more free time to do more creative and fulfilling work,” says Sherbert.
AI is the way to SERPs
AI is revolutionizing search. With every advancement in ML, NLP, ANN, and DL, the search engine dynamics change. Leveraging the same technology powering search engines is the best bet for ranking higher in SERPs and boosting organic traffic. Don’t be afraid to tiptoe into the waters of AI. After all, it’s where our industry is headed. Custom AI development tailored to your specific needs can give you a competitive edge.
