How to use AI to boost your SEO rankings

What’s the connection between search engine optimisation (SEO) and artificial intelligence (AI) technology? How could your business harness AI to become more SEO-friendly and appear higher on search engines? In this blog post, we outline the basics and explore your options.

What are SEO and AI?

We’ve written at length about what SEO means and what it does for your business.

In a nutshell, when you search for answers or images or items on search engines (like Google), those search engines use algorithms with over 200 ranking factors to scan the entire internet and provide you with a list of pages matching your search terms. Securing a spot on the first page is crucial — data indicate most users rarely venture beyond the second page.

SEO is as much an art as it is a science. When considering how to utilise and integrate AI for better SEO performance, the process requires a similar mentality. Think: tool, not: replacement. To effectively use any AI tools (whether creative, analytical, content, and so on), they work best when used for efficiency rather than taking control and — as is often imagined — doing the work for you. In short, AI exists to help you work smarter, not harder, and it requires effective prompting to work how you want it to.

How does AI fit into an SEO strategy?

So, how can you use the recent developments of AI to your advantage? How do they fit into your SEO strategy and help you to complete the more detailed tasks within it? You’ll find some options below to get you started — get in touch if you’d like to talk through ideas further.

1. Identify trends, patterns, and discrepancies in your data.

Wading through data for stats and campaign performance can be immensely time consuming for multiple members of the team. By using AI as a reader of all your data, your team can spend their time doing what they do best: focusing on what these results mean and how they’ll inform future campaigns. By understanding the process, you start to build a bit of a time machine — you’ll be able to better predict the results of future campaigns, too.

2. Analyse user behaviour to create more engaging content.

Having used AI to explore and analyse your data — like how users engage with your content, as well as the keywords and phrases they searched to find your content in the first place — your team can then use AI to ensure future content is not only engaging and relevant, but also optimised to appear on search engines for the words and phrases you want to appear for.

3. A/B testing.

Efficiency is where AI tools thrive, ideal in the testing space — it is led by data, not thought. AI can compare the success of different strategies and collate data for future trends and patterns to inform future campaigns. A few excellent tools for A/B testing include:

A/B Tasty
With an affordable starting price, and ample tools for larger companies, A/B Tasty have an impressive list of huge brands they’ve worked with. It’s not compatible with paid advertising and there’s no heat mapping, but otherwise it’s an incredibly dynamic tool to trial.

Optimizely
While this service is fantastic, we wouldn't recommend it to beginners — the number of tools and services can be a little overwhelming for those just starting out with their SEO strategies. But, if  you’re a seasoned SEO machine, jump right in!

We’re here to help

AI can be a great tool — a data-driven guide for your SEO efforts. Other more passive ways to use AI compared to the processes mentioned above is simply checking your current software subscriptions, as your existing providers may already have new AI integrations available to trial. This can also be a great place to start when training junior members of the team, to get them used to writing and creating for different tones of voice and audiences, with all-important SEO threaded throughout, rather than throwing them in the deep end.

We’re here to help you strategise, plan your SEO efforts, and — with the support of our sister agency, Transform Comms — create human-centric content that search engines love.