What Is AI Driven SEO?

AI or Artificial Intelligence encompasses a wide variety of technologies like Machine Learning (ML), Neural Networks, Natural Language Processing (NLP) to name a few. The term SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a digital marketing process to attract relevant traffic to your website using Google’s AI powered search engine ranking algorithms.

SEO is a set of mundane tasks that are performed by humans to make a website search engine friendly and help rank the site at the top of Google search listings by following best practice guidelines laid down by Google. A top listing attracts ton of eyeballs and culminates in a stream of regular visits to your site.

In 2020, AI powered tools have brought about the automation of these seo activities like optimizing web site content, provide ideas for new content suitable to a targeted demographic, landing page optimization, learning from users behavior to refine calls to action (CTAs), provide constant recommendations to improve optimization and automate the site maintenance by optimizing underlying website code.

How Do Businesses Become Smart?

Gone are the days when businesses could dominate a sphere and rest easy. In this day and age of digital disruption of almost every industry, a business becomes smart by thinking ahead to prepare for changes and uncertainties that impacts its day to day functioning. This builds resilience and allows it to thrive in a dynamic environment.

Counterfactual Simulation

Josh Kaufman, author of The Personal MBA , discusses counterfactual simulation. He defines it as imagining future possibilities that are completely independent of the current situation or circumstances. This paves the way to uncover hidden opportunities which you wouldn’t have possibly thought even existed.

Impacts On Businesses In An AI World

Assume you own a fairly large business manufacturing lawn mowers and selling US wide. It is a reliable brand trusted by millions and dominates the field and has been a money spinner over the years.

Out of the blue, another newbie competitor springs up touting lawnmowers powered by AI and Machine Learning, the uniqueness being the mower can mow the lawn by itself without human intervention, subject to the dimensions of the area to be mowed keyed in before setting it loose. The price point is very attractive given the amount of manual labor and weather elements at play.

This is earth shaking technology that can decimate your livelihood in a fraction of the time that it has taken to build your entire business. This has happened before, happening now and will do so in future.

Another classic example is Kodak, the multinational giant that dominated film photography for decades. Despite a Kodak engineer inventing the world’s first digital camera in 1975, the company failed to anticipate the disruptive digital technology and paid the ultimate price by going bankrupt.

Vince Barabba’s book  offers practical advice to companies facing digital disruptive technology issues on how to avoid becoming another Kodak.

Smart Company That Embraces Counterfactual Simulation

A smart company in the shoes of the mower manufacturer example above would have considered potential technological challenges some time ago and taken the lead in launching superior products in the market. This is a typical example of counterfactual simulation.

Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Digital Marketing

As digital marketers, we have to think about what’s around the corner that can have a huge impact on marketing. The single biggest impact affecting marketing today is AI.

AI and ML Are Disrupting Marketing

AI and Machine Learning are on course to change the very face of digital marketing. All the strategies that were prevalent until a few years ago have become outdated today.

As a business owner, if you are not taking steps to face the changes wrought by this technology onslaught, you are preparing to be left behind online with the rankings that you now enjoy on the Google SERPs disappear, your ad campaigns turning unprofitable and your clientele doing a Houdini act.

AI and SEO In Tandem Are A Game Changer

The previous paragraph is not mere fantasizing, it is happening as of now. AI and SEO together are changing the playing field in a dramatic way. Google has openly declared that it is an AI first company.

Google’s primary search algorithm architect, Amit Singhal, who was a classical information retrieval scientist had to make way for a machine learning engineer John Giannandrea who is the head of Google’s search today. The search algorithm is updated almost on a daily basis, with minor or major changes occurring all the time.

These changes are affecting the way AI driven SEO works, the tools and software that are evolving by understanding these changes and the way these tools are used.

Google Ads and Google Display are dominated by machine learning algorithms today. The Google Ads Smart Bidding and Smart Goals features are a direct consequence of AI technology. AI can think faster and outsmart humans especially when it comes to superior data crunching to make real time complex decisions on the fly. This is so true of Google Ads where every search query triggers a real-time auction in which dynamic bids are placed by several brands competing for top positions, relevant to that query.

AI Powered Content Creation

As of this writing, the day when AI can write better optimized content than humans is not far off. The evolution of the GPT-2 model as a large scale unsupervised language model with 1.5 billion parameters is astonishing and it is trained on a gargantuan dataset of 8 million web pages.

It can generate coherent paragraphs of text, perform reading comprehension, answer questions and summarize content, all done without task specific training. Refer to the Open AI model for more information.

A great tutorial by Max Woolf shows how to train a text generating neural network for free, using the chart RNN architecture where the neural network takes into account the previous n amount of characters and tries to predict the next character.

With all these advancements galloping ahead at full speed, creating specialized content that targets a certain demographic is a no brainer and serves a twin fold purpose – creates effective resource of information for future reference and most importantly, provides a valuable experience for the readers.

AI Giving Birth To Smarter New Tools

Google Ads and Google Analytics are both increasingly driven by AI and becoming more sophisticated. Google Analytics has introduced its new analytics software Google Analytics 4 built with machine learning as the main form of data measurement.

This lets it create data models that can extrapolate existing data and make assumptions on user behavior, site traffic etc. Customer journey across devices will be better defined. It also gives the end to end customer journey metrics, ie. a full picture of data telling a great story.

AI Inspired Concepts

AI has brought into existence an entirely new set of concepts which we will see in future blog posts. Some of them are as follows

AI vs Machine Learning

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the broader field concerned with machines able to execute tasks intelligently that highlights the smartness aspect akin to humans. Machine Learning (ML) is a subsidiary application of AI that encourages machines to have access to data so they can learn by themselves.

How to conduct SEO now that Google is an “AI first” company

Google has declared itself as an AI first company with renewed focus on machine learning, contextual information and AI driven intelligent technology to create an optimized customer experience. This extends to AI driven SEO where users get the best results in response to their search queries.

Chatbots

Many a time, a window pops up on the home page of a site asking what you are looking for.

This is an AI driven conversational program referred to as chatbot. It simulates the human speech and written word and strikes up a conversation with a real human visitor. These are increasingly popular in customer service and answer basic questions. If it is a complicated query, they guide the visitor to the help and FAQ sections of the site.

Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising involves the use of software to purchase digital ads against the traditional human involved advertising process of RFPs and manual orders. AI driven machines do all the grunt work especially when it comes to Real Time Bidding (RTB) which is a subset of programmatic ad buying.

Big data

Big data is a field that treats ways to analyze, systematically extract information from, or otherwise deal with data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data-processing application software.

RankBrain

RankBrain is an integral part of Google’s search engine algorithm using Machine Learning (ML) to display the most relevant results on the Google SERPs in response to user search queries. Google keeps refining the results, based on machines learning through repeated data inputs, like user behavior on the search results page.

Digital assistants

A digital assistant also known as virtual assistant is voice-command driven technology that can execute tasks like checking the nearest gas station as you are driving, without having to use your hands.

Smart phones come with built-in digital assistants. Today, users can search Google using its Google Voice Search on mobile and desktop devices without having to type in data.

Data science

Data science is an inter-disciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge and insights from many structural and unstructured data. Data science is related to data mining, machine learning and big data.

Latent Semantic Indexing

Latent semantic analysis is a technique in natural language processing, in particular distributional semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the documents and terms.

In the past, keyword phrases that users searched for, were repeatedly stuffed into page content to show the search engines that  the content was closely related with the user search. But LSI has helped Google look for synonyms and other contextually related terms that a good quality content piece would contain in the specific niche of interest. In fact, Google penalizes sites with content that exhibit keyword stuffing.

Conclusion

AI along with SEO is clearly shaping the future of internet marketing. It is important to keep track of these changes enveloping the digital marketing sphere. Again, going by the definition of counterfactual simulation, you will be a far advanced marketer open to embracing new technologies and well prepared for the changes around the corner and in the years to come.