The Gist
- AI revolution in SEO. AI is transforming SEO tasks by streamlining keyword research, content generation, and competitor analysis, making the process more efficient.
- Keyword research efficiency. AI-driven keyword suggestions help marketers discover relevant, low-competition phrases and improve content targeting.
- Content optimization at scale. AI tools assist in generating content and optimizing it for search engines by providing valuable insights into user intent and site structure.
The AI revolution has been reaching full steam this year, demonstrating a lot of ways to apply large language models (LLMs) with content. SEO tasks are among the use cases where the AI revolution is taking place.
This post will cover what use case AI can have an impact on the overall search strategy, highlighting what SEO tasks AI prompts can provide.
As Scott Clark mentioned in his ChatGPT SearchGPT post, the anticipation of search combined with AI will make marketers adapt their SEO strategies to accommodate how AI-driven search engines prioritize and interpret different types of content, ranking signals or user intent. This means marketers must adopt SEO tactics faster than before so that their content answers queries with a more conversational tone than before.
Ironically to do this efficiently and effectively, marketers should turn to AI assistants to simply do SEO tasks. AI assistants typically excel in text analytics, efficiently summarizing and categorizing text. So the most obvious use for using AI within SEO is to brainstorm keyword ideas.
The best application, however, lies in setting the AI assistants to discover common links within tasks and the keyword chosen. This is important for establishing a consistent content pillar strategy. Content pillars are several topics based on your product or service that relate to your brand messaging or Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) metrics. They are usually three to five core topics — or more — that your brand campaigns will mention often in your content. SEO tactics assist with how content pillars are deployed, highlighting where those words can be placed within a website.
SEO tasks can be elaborate, and, consequently, time-consuming. There are five terrific ways that you can use AI can make SEO tasks easier to do.
1. Keyword Research and Analysis
Most savvy marketers know that keyword research is more than just listing a bunch of keywords — or these days, phrases with keywords in them. The research consists of creating word clusters, often followed by iterations to adjust associations. Organizing the research can overwhelm marketing teams because of the different ways keywords can be used.
This is where features regarding the assistant’s “memory” can be handy. AI assistants reason with past answers based on their recollections of the previous prompts and responses. The reasoning capability creates a follow-up task that organizes the keywords with each iteration.
What to Ask Your AI Assistant:
You can prompt your AI assistant to analyze a niche topic, suggesting related long-tail keywords. For example, I used Claude AI to prompt a list of keywords for an imagined bakery in the heart of Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. Claude AI provided the following response:
As an AI assistant lists valuable low-competition phrases, you can iterate to ask further about ones they hadn’t previously considered. Use your AI tool to develop consistency of words selected for your content text. You want to ensure your content matches what customers describe as products and services when they search online.
Vetting consistency will speed up the content generation process and avoid taking on suggestions from an AI agent who might hallucinate and suggest something that isn’t really a viable option for what your business is offering.
Related Article: Can OpenAI’s SearchGPT Outdo Google?
2. Competitor Analysis
Conducting a competitor analysis is more than examining a competitor’s website and seeing what products or services are offered. The analysis is also designed to convey information on how the business model is being delivered, such as specialty content on the website for a business or how a mobile experience complements an in-person customer activity.
The best application for AI is to treat its responses to your prompts as a mindmap exercise, listing what competitors exist online and what impression they have made online by reviewing their sites and associated media.
What to Ask Your AI Assistant:
You can ask your AI assistant to compare your website content with that of other competitors. Doing so can identify gaps in their strategy that can be opportunities for differentiation. It will outline the layout, how the pages perform such as a quick page loading speed, and how content categories and sections are organized.
The one aspect to keep in mind is the date on which an assistant was last trained. The date can indicate how recent the information is. For example, the free version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet will tell you that its last training date was April 2024, indicating its information will be up to that date.
When I asked about competitors in my bakery example, I had to encourage Claude to respond with the best-known information up to its most recent training date. As requested Claude listed the bakeries that were within a 5-mile radius of Pilsen that would carry churros, a Spanish-baked breakfast sweet.
If you need to refine the analysis, you can ask the assistant to reconsider the information with suggestions based on your domain knowledge of the marketplace. In our bakery example, a good baker would likely be aware of some competitors nearby, but an AI assistant can outline a comprehensive list of ones that are not obvious competitors yet carry similar baked goods.
In fact, the prompt could also represent the bakery’s response to increasing customer requests for churros. Listing competitors can reveal who else carries churros and encourage the bakery to add churros to its offering.
A paid tier, in which AI assistants offer newer, faster models, may be beneficial if competitor analysis is expected frequently.
You can also leverage specific features like Claude’s Artifacts or Gemini’s YouTube extension to organize additional information about your competitors’ online presence.
3. Content Generation and Optimization
Content generation has been the most evident use case that has formed for AI. Well, for marketers it was the first idea that came to mind. AI can create content based on natural language processing (NLP).
The ease of content creation was especially appealing for content needs that describe multiple features or steps. When faced with several elaborate steps for your campaign copy, you usually have an idea of what you want but you may not have the precise words.
NLP, by way of your prompt, allows you to explain what you want to do, even if you do not have any kind of idea how to formulate that query. The response to that prompt is a structured suggestion to follow.
What to Ask Your AI Assistant:
You can start by asking for a set of phrases that represent a content pillar related to your business. In the bakery example, I asked for phrases that customers could potentially use in a search engine. The image below shows what Claude suggested to me.
AI can next used to take a first pass at structure. For optimization an SEO specialist can generate multiple title tags and meta description variations for a product page, allowing them to quickly test different options and identify the most engaging and click-worthy combinations.
Remember that LLMs can string together words that sound OK but they can be impractical in real-world situations. It reflects the true nature of statistics, the idea of looking at distribution and picking the best connection of the presented data. This can lead to surprising associations. Clustering can create unexpected pairings, but you want insights that are constructed around a key parameter for your business model.
4. User Experience
Planning user experience with SEO is paramount to gaining an informed view of customers’ on-site interests. User experience is meant to help customers and potential customers complete their website or app tasks easily.
The time needed to complete those tasks is where pages per session and other engagement metrics become essential to analyze. Pages per session — also called page depth in some dashboards — is defined as the average number of pages a user views during a session. Pages per session are calculated by dividing the total number of page views by the total number of sessions within a given time.
AI assistants can assist in interpreting how convenient the user experience is perceived, noting what elements enhanced user behavior. Assistants can also be used to highlight data meant to indicate what elements are best optimized for the user journey.
What to Ask Your AI Assistant:
You can ask your assistant to analyze your site for the top-performing pages and customer queries, gaining insights into user intent that will help them refine their content strategy and site structure. You can upload a file of page session data and create a few visualizations, like a bar chart or a distribution curve based on session time.
AI assistants will evaluate if the navigation and directory structure of a given site or app functions well. If navigation elements are tested, you can use AI assistants to craft visualization and provide summaries like that for a ChatGPT data analysis (I show prompt examples in my post). These can guide any user behavior analysis, revealing the preferences that will likely strengthen the user journey on a website or app.
Related Article: Assessing the Impact of AI-Driven Web Browsing on SEO and Marketing
5. Technical SEO
Technical SEO usually consists of a very detailed audit of a website, reviewing the many structural elements that go into a webpage or web app. Websites and apps are software, so they can have a lot of components that must be “engineered” and “maintained” to work well in practice.
Some tasks of technical SEO overlap with those of user intent, an element of user experience. But there are significant differences. While user intent is reviewing the usability of visible website or app elements, technical SEO audits the functionality aspects. So discussion about button size — having enough room for a finger to click on a mobile page — also raises verification that a webpage renders correctly or brings the user to the right page.
What to Ask Your AI Assistant:
You can treat AI assistants as an assist in evaluating if the navigation and directory structure of a given site or app functions well. An AI assistant will not cover every audit detail, such as establishing backlinks to preferred site. Backlink tasks remain in the domain of SEO and content specialists to execute over time. Yet the insights from an AI review fit within the overall goal of a technical SEO audit.
There are plenty of standard SEO tools available that can carry the bulk of the necessary tasks. Michelle Hawley covers them in her SEO post. Yet great marketers will find a way to use AI assistants alongside these tools to enhance the quality of their SEO workflow. Blend these tools into your workflow and watch how the AI revolution comes alive for simpler SEO tasks and great SEO results.
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