Forbes magazine recently said artificial intelligence is a “must-have when it comes to being competitive in today’s markets.” When it comes to company websites and search-engine optimization, AI can serve the role of a mind reader, with a look into buyers’ behavior and future needs.
This machine learning is being increasingly incorporated into search engines. Justin Marshall of Brave River Solutions, a Warwick web design and technology consulting firm, spoke to Providence Business News about the AI development.
Seifert Systems Invests in Energy Efficiency to Strengthen Operations
For manufacturers, energy is more than just another operating expense. It plays a critical role…
Learn More
PBN: “Automation” has a great sound to it, as if AI will do all the work for busy marketing executives. What kind of SEO tasks can be automated?
MARSHALL: Here are some ways AI can automate SEO duties:
- Technical audits: Fixes … server errors, improves load times, improves sitemaps and updates robots.txt files [which tell search-engine crawlers which pages or files the crawler should request from your site].
- Keyword/topic research: Makes suggestions on topics, keywords/long-tail keywords, synonyms, grammar and spelling.
- Content optimization: Personalizes content. Optimizes meta tags and on-page content. Improves duplicate content issues. Provides natural language (entities, categories and concepts) analysis to match content with search intent.
- Content distribution: Distributes the right content through the right channels to maximize engagements and conversions.
- Tag management: Adds popular and highly searched tags.
- Internal linking: Updates broken links and builds internal link structures.
- Architecture: Develops a hierarchy that improves the user and bot experience.
- Internal search: Creates landing pages based on internal search volume and history.
PBN: We understand that search engines and their category numbers continue to grow. What does that mean in terms of how difficult it is becoming to get a high ranking on Google if you are a business or a corporation?
MARSHALL: Search-engine results can include webpages, images, video and instant information through features like Google’s universal search results. There are 37 different search-engine result page categories – a growing number that’s not slowing down any time soon. Research indicates that “84% of queries on Google return universal search results. This occurs as Google uses AI to match the layout of search-result pages to the user’s intent.”
It’s much more difficult to rank when Google answers questions without showing your organic results.
Some tips to improve your visibility: create content that is better than the competition; incorporate the appropriate schema, which helps search engines understand your content and the page intent; advertise, to instantly place you above organic results; focus on long-tail keywords and topics; fully optimize your local SEO.
PBN: Two areas where you say AI can improve SEO is in understanding the customer journey and improving crawlability. How so?
MARSHALL: ML [machine learning, an application of artificial intelligence that continually learns and improves with experience] and AI help you pinpoint the underlying need in your customer’s journey. AI can help determine where the user is in the buying process, what information they seek and how you can move them closer to making a purchasing decision.
AI can also ensure exceptional crawlability [how easy it is for a search engine to process information on a website]. It can confirm and suggest how your website can be easily crawled, viewed and accurately understood by search engines.
PBN: What areas of SEO may not be ideal to be handled via AI?
MARSHALL: Even Google has trouble with semantics. They have improved using AI, but the understanding of content compared to a human isn’t 100%. AI can’t create high-quality content unless it’s pulling information. A great example is with Wall Street or real estate, where sentences can be created from pulling data points like market changes, company information and housing statistics, and placing them into meaningful sentences.
PBN: What is the most overlooked area of SEO?
MARSHALL: Local SEO is missed by a high percentage of companies globally. It’s not only simple to do but also has high rewards – l ike dramatically building reputable backlinks and improving your brand visibility through hundreds of websites, maps, directories and Google categories, including local search packs.
Susan Shalhoub is a PBN contributing writer.
