How Artificial Intelligence will Impact SEO Success in 2019

We’ve been inundated with predictions about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will dominate business and especially the marketing function, for the last handful of years. For good reason too. Data from a Swiss research company show that marketing patents are the fastest growing segment in AI intellectual property and research, growing at a CAGR of 29.3% from 2010 to 2018.

As businesses embrace AI for their next big leap forward, it’s time marketers figure out how we can harness the power of AI for maximum impact to our bottom lines. And SEO would be the perfect place to start, because Google and other search engines (as well as social media and other online platforms) are now trying to move to one perfect answer to all questions we ask of them instead of a multitude of irrelevant options. For this, they are extensively using AI and machine learning (ML).

Therefore, it is safe to claim that SEO is now AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). Let’s see how various applications of AI will influence SEO and organic visibility in the near future.

1. The RankBrain Imperative

No that’s not the name of an episode of the Big Bang Theory that you missed. It’s merely a statement of facts in a post-Matt Cutts Google universe. Cutts’ exit was a clear sign of how the machines had taken over human coders in determining the fate of Google’s SERPs. With the evolution of its AI-powered RankBrain algorithm announced in 2015, Google now does not apply the same set of ranking factors for each of the 74,791 searches that happen every second on its search engine.

Instead, the RankBrain’s AI algorithm uses machine learning to understand the intent of the searcher using a combination of different parameters like location, past searches, personalization, day / date / time of day etc. It then uses this understanding to assign weights to different ranking factors and creating a SERP that’s uniquely tailor made for each individual searcher.

What this means for SEO

• Create content that fits the intent of your target audience, and not just a keyword or a keyword phrase.
• Tailor your content to suit different contexts, different preferred channels as well as different formats.
• Personalization becomes critically important as RankBrain’s AI tailors results for each searcher.
• Internal cross linking of content becomes even more important. With RankBrain trying to showcase hyper-relevant results, cross linking different pieces of content tells the algorithm that each of those pieces might be interesting to the search query as well.

In a SEMrush webinar on the topic, Jason Barnard explained how to deal with the complex and evolving algorithm behind RankBrain using vectors and schema in your content, which will in turn help you get better visibility in the Knowledge Graph:

2. Rise of AI-powered Content Tools

As machines replaced routine and repetitive jobs, marketers were smug in their belief that creative jobs like strategy development, writing and content creation would never meet the same fate. Little did they know that this beast called AI would birth “robo-writers” that can generate relevant, succinct content, automagically.

Today, AI helps in developing content by offering automated, real-time suggestions to make the content better and more SEO friendly. A good example of an AI powered content tool is Clearscope. The tool begins with the usual keyword research to give you all the possible phrases that matter for an initial keyword you’ve entered. It then proceeds to search Google’s SERPs to give topics that your content must cover by picking these out from the top ranked articles for your keyword phrase.

What this means for SEO

• Blindly following ranking factors for evaluating and optimizing content is bound to fall short. Focus on what type of content would answer a user’s needs in very specific contexts to remain competitive on SERPs.
• Leveraging AI powered content tools like Atomic Reach, Grammarly etc is not just smart, but necessary to stay at the top of search rankings.

3. Marketing Automation Amplifies SEO

If you could pick only one thing that defines Google’s search algorithm today, its personalization. It takes every personal factor that might influence a searcher’s query and tailor makes results that match all these conditions. If personalization is Google’s mantra, you need to make it yours too if you’re serious about ranking well on Google’s SERPs.

A very good place to start sourcing personalized data for each user is your CRM platform. The typical CRM platform will capture details like website click behavior, age, sex, location, top purchased items / top visited pages (indicating their top interests), average transaction value, preferred communication channels and more. AI powered, next generation CRM systems are capable of putting these factors together to paint a comprehensive picture of your customers to inform your SEO decisions.

The top level of your martech stack that goes the final mile to deliver your marketing messages across your website, email, social media, paid platforms, app and more, is your best bet for applying the AI-powered insights from your CRM system into action.

What this means for SEO

• Leverage the AI capabilities of your CRM and analytics platforms to glean specific customer insights that are key for SEO decision making.
• Apply these customer insights to strategic SEO decisions like targeting the right customer segments, the channels to favor while promoting your content or the content formats that your customers will prefer or even the time of day you should be publishing posts for the best results.
• Ditch manual marketing efforts for the superior scalability offered by marketing automation platforms. It would be practically impossible to pull off a modern marketing campaign that’s personalized, timely and conversion optimized for every user without the ability to automate key processes.
• Set up rules in your marketing automation platform to execute this content strategy seamlessly, personalizing down to the individual level, without the need for manual intervention. Think automated drip campaigns targeting specific customer segments with custom content, all based on the AI driven insights we gathered from the CRM platform.

Back to the Basics

AI or no AI, one of the fundamental tenets of SEO has always been to create high quality content that meets the needs of your target audience. While a number of other ranking factors controlled the fate of your content in the past, things have become a lot simpler for optimizing a piece of content.

AI-driven SEO goes beyond keyword density, inbound links or tag optimization, to see if your content answers a real problem. If it succeeds in addressing the intent of a user’s query, it is rewarded with an appropriately high rank on search results. Simple and straightforward. Now who would’ve thought machines would make our lives so much easier?

Authored by Fernando Angulo, Head of International Partnership, SEMrush