We are far past the days when Artificial Intelligence (AI) was only a plot device in books and movies. AI, in the form of machine learning, is everywhere now. Companies use AI for voice recognition, chatbots, optimizing online shopping, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO), among many other applications.
As a blogger, you can also leverage AI in your SEO and PCC efforts in a variety of ways. There are machine learning services ⚙️ that can help you identify potential keywords, aid you in writing content, and even help with on-page optimization. Plus, automated bidding can help you make the most of your online ad strategy.
In this article, we’ll walk you through several ways of leveraging AI in SEO and PPC. Let’s start by talking about keyword discovery! 💬
📚 Table of contents:
- Use AI to help you find new keywords
- Enable “smart bidding” for your ads
- Improve on-page SEO
- Leverage AI to predict page rankings
1. Use AI to help you find new keywords 🤖
Traditionally, keyword research involves using a ‘seed query’. You enter a relevant keyword into a research tool such as Google Keyword Planner or Semrush, and you get a list of results in return. Taking those results and filtering them to identify the best opportunities for your website is entirely up to you.
It takes a lot of practice to identify the best keywords to target. Moreover, you need to determine which searches you can actually work into your content naturally.
Alternatively, you can use AI keyword research to identify those opportunities more efficiently. Tools such as Keyword Insights provide you with data about the search intent for specific keywords. Moreover, you can cluster keywords that play to a similar intent:
There are plenty of other tools that can help in similar ways. However, it’s critical to remember that these solutions don’t provide infallible recommendations. What they do is leverage massive amounts of information to point you in the right direction. They can also help you spot keyword opportunities you would have otherwise missed.
2. Enable “smart bidding” for your ads 📢
If you run Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, you can also use keyword intent data to help you identify better opportunities. Figuring out which keywords have stronger buying or conversion intent means that every dollar you spend on PPC should return better results.
What’s more, some ad platforms such as Google Ads offer “smart bidding” tools. Smart bidding leverages machine learning to partly automate the ad-publishing process.
With this technique, you can set performance goals for your PPC campaigns, and let the platform adjust your ad strategy to meet them. If you’re using Google Ads, for example, the platform will recommend which campaigns to enable smart bidding for:
Keep in mind that smart bidding won’t help you choose which keywords to target. However, you can use “broad match” keywords to give the AI more latitude when it comes to targeting related searches.
Just as with any other automated system, we encourage you to monitor the results of your campaigns often. That way, you’ll see if the automated optimization actually translates into better PPC conversion rates.
3. Improve on-page SEO 📍
On-page SEO requires you to be thorough. That means optimizing every page by adding subheadings, alt text, meta descriptions, and more. In practice, it’s easy to forget to do this or struggle to find the time, especially if you add new content to your site often.
Fortunately, AI tools such as Alli can help you by conducting full-site SEO reports and automatically identifying errors and areas for improvement. With Alli, you can scan your site, go through a list of SEO recommendations, and approve the tool to implement them on your behalf:
This kind of platform can save you a lot of time over reviewing pages one by one. Even so, this is the type of tool where you’ll benefit from having an SEO expert review suggestions before enabling Alli to implement them.
4. Leverage AI to predict page rankings 📊
Perhaps the biggest challenge in SEO is that you don’t know how content will perform until after you publish it. Even then, it can take weeks or months for content that you know is better than your competitors to outrank them.
All that waiting means that takes a long time to get feedback on what improves your site’s rankings and what doesn’t. That’s where AI comes in, with “predictive search modeling” services such as Market Brew:
This platform provides you with predictions about how your content will perform in search engines. It does this by using AI to test your content against top-performing websites. Then, you get suggestions on what changes you can make to improve your rankings.
Depending on the results you get, you can decide whether to put in the time to overhaul content and on-page SEO, or if you’re better off pursuing new projects. Sometimes, it’s far better to scrap or shelve content that you know might not do that well in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), and focus on more achievable SEO goals.
Naturally, AI can’t predict precisely how well your content will rank. However, machine learning can provide accurate modeling by testing your website using its search algorithms (which are based on what data is available from Google and similar platforms). That way, you can tailor your content to meet your audience’s needs before publishing it.
Conclusion 🧐
AI tools offer an interesting option for websites that want to improve their online visibility and conversions. These tools provide you with more targeted recommendations about how to improve your website and which keywords your audience is interested in.
You can think of AI SEO and PPC tools as having access to an expert that can point you in the right direction. These platforms enable you to leverage massive amounts of SEO data to get recommendations, but you still need a human touch to determine when to pay attention and how to implement the suggestions you receive.
Do you have any questions about how to use AI in SEO and PPC? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!
