The most significant challenge for marketers is no longer a lack of customer data – it’s knowing what to do with the huge amounts of data available. The key to delivering a high ROI marketing campaign is knowing your target audience, analyzing their preferences and behaviors, and anticipating their needs. And this won’t be possible without harnessing technology to your advantage.
As a marketer, you should always be looking to automate repetitive processes and analyze as much data as possible to make the most of your marketing strategies. AI can help scale these efforts to the benefit of your customers and your bottom line. To this end, we’ll look at some benefits of AI in marketing and how you can implement this cutting edge tech in your SEO strategies.
Benefits of AI in marketing
Artificial intelligence as a discipline is all about teaching machines to mimic (and even outperform) human decision-making. AI solutions are powered by machine learning (ML) algorithms, iterative mathematical models that take in historical data and make increasingly better decisions as they adapt to feedback from previous decisions. In other words, they learn from their mistakes to improve performance.
ML algorithms are particularly good at predictive and classification tasks, which can be a big help to marketers. When it comes down to it, there are plenty of mundane tasks that marketers would be better off automating. Anything from keyword research to sending personalized emails can be done more quickly and effectively by a machine.
This leaves humans more time for the creative and analytical parts of planning expert marketing campaigns and creating quality content. Afterall, a machine can only be expected to do so much – strong marketing campaigns still need human creativity and innovation for top performance.
ML-powered tools help marketers collect real-time data and analyze it to gain insights about customer behaviors and preferences. This makes it easier to personalize marketing materials and adapt product offerings. These tools are also great for identifying how behavioral trends change and thereby tailoring marketing campaigns and optimizing content to suit customer needs.
What’s more, scalability is critical in building a data-driven marketing strategy. AI is always learning and improving, and the more powerful and precise these tools get, the more accurate and useful the results. Optimization is one thing, but optimization at scale is the key to reaching as many people as possible with the most targeted offerings possible.
Harness AI to boost your SEO
AI is becoming a must-have tool with benefits across all industries, and it’s clear that it can be a great boon for marketers.
If you are looking to grow your business, you can’t afford not to use the tools available to you to optimize your online presence. So, let’s look at some practical ways ML-powered tools can be used for search engine optimization.
AI SEO tools can scan your website for factors that impact user experience including page structure, ease of navigation, load time, mobile compatibility, and relevance of content.
Topic research
In order to create optimized content, you have to know what search terms are trending in your industry and what questions and pain points need to be addressed. AI is useful for finding patterns in data, so it does well with topic research for content generation.
AI tools can offer suggestions about what topics you should hone in on by looking for content gaps and trending keywords. These tools also let you compare to other top-ranking sites so you can outperform the competition and get to the top of SERPs for relevant queries. And once you’ve done your topic research, you can find a freelancer writer who specializes in SEO to generate optimized content for your website.
Topic clustering
Another important SEO strategy is topic clustering, which can help you optimize your website by creating pillar pages. AI can help businesses produce content on a certain keyword and its related search terms so that all searches related to those topics go to their site first.
The goal of topic clustering is to provide users with a comprehensive answer to a query on a particular topic, and there are ML-powered tools trained to “understand” theme and topic association to help marketers capture more search traffic. This is helpful because you can use these data-driven insights to build your site architecture around relevant topics and help users find the answers to their queries as easily as possible.
Content optimization
In addition to creating data-driven content in new campaigns, AI can also help you optimize existing content. This is important for maximizing your ROI because you don’t waste your past work, but chances are, your past work is not as optimized for current ranking factors as it could be.
Most AI SEO tools can take in a piece of content (like a blog post) and offer suggestions about how to improve it for better ranking. For example, AI tools can suggest an optimum length for a post or how to improve the use of keywords and LSI words more effectively. It can also suggest related content that you might want to link to in your posts.
Voice SEO
Voice SEO is the next big thing in digital marketing as personal assistants like Google Assistant and Alexa are becoming a feature of so many homes. The challenging part of VSEO is that voice assistants offer just one answer – no one wants their in-home robot to seem indecisive, after all. This means voice search is highly competitive to be that featured snippet that the assistant offers to the user.
AI tools can help you create voice search optimized content by showing what questions users are asking their assistants. For example, your content should answer FAQs, since most spoken queries begin with who, what, where, when, or how. You will also need to focus on conversational keywords, since spoken queries are often composed differently than written ones.
Security optimization
There’s no doubt that web security is a ranking factor on search engines, and AI can help you with this aspect of your optimization as well. Even though some developers will keep their code under wraps, that doesn’t mean you can neglect web security.
What’s more, content-driven sites are always making updates to stay ahead of search trends or installing external SEO plugins and marketing tools to monitor their metrics. It’s easy to break your site’s security when you’re making updates, and hackers can find these errors and exploit them.
Fortunately, AI can be used to audit websites for security vulnerabilities and do real-time analysis of risk as you build and maintain your site. And you can use similar tools to focus on other aspects of technical SEO as well, such as accessibility optimization.
User experience
Since we’ve mentioned site accessibility, we would be remiss if we didn’t take a deeper dive into how AI can be used for improving the user experience (UX) on your website. It is a well-known fact that Google prioritizes UX in its search rankings, so you should pay special attention to this when auditing for SEO.
Google notes several page experience metrics that are used to measure user satisfaction in on-page interactions such as load time, interactivity, and mobile compatibility. You can go straight to the source and look at Google’s tips for optimization to improve your rankings. You can also harness AI to do a lot of the work for you as you make improvements.
AI SEO tools can scan your website for factors that impact user experience including page structure, ease of navigation, load time, mobile compatibility, and relevance of content. AI is getting “smarter” than ever, and as it does, these tools are better able to make judgments more similar to human users. In this way, they can anticipate how real users will react and suggest ways to improve how long users spend on your pages and how often they interact with your content.
Scalability
We mentioned this among the benefits of AI in marketing, but let’s take a closer look at how to do it in practice. SEO is time-consuming, both for the marketers doing the grunt work and in terms of how long it takes to see results after changes are made.
AI tools can help by doing the tedious work for you. You’ve seen some of the ways AI can automate processes like keyword research and topic discovery, but advanced tools can also perform tasks like full site audits in a fraction of the time it would take a human.
AI can also do some optimization automatically if you so choose, rather than simply making suggestions. AI tools are good at finding and removing duplicate content, for example. And perhaps the biggest boon of AI in scaling campaigns is it’s analytical power. AI can handle massive amounts of real-time data so your campaigns can be consistently improving and you can see results in less time.
Competitor analysis
So far we’ve mostly covered how you can focus internally on your business’s SEO efforts, but any good marketer knows that looking at what your competition is doing can be just as important. Competitive analysis is an important way to assess your own performance by examining the strengths and weaknesses of competitors and adapting accordingly.
There are a number of ways to do this, but we’ll take a look at two important ones. For starters, when you’re doing your keyword searches – a must-do first step for any SEO audit – you should also be looking at your competitors’ keyword rankings. But don’t just look at what the big name companies are ranking well for. You might be better off focusing on lower competition keywords.
Conclusion
The massive amounts of data available online can be a significant benefit for SEO and digital marketing, but it also brings new challenges to overcome. To maximize the ROI of your campaigns, you can harness AI tools to do the grunt work for you and provide ever more accurate, data-driven insights. With cutting edge tools in your marketing toolbox, you can be one of the success stories of businesses harnessing AI to automate and scale their SEO strategies.