An Impact Guide on AI & SEO
SEO is central to your business’s online visibility; and as search engines become more sophisticated, your digital marketing strategy should follow suit. Mastering SEO has become a delicate and intricate commitment that includes both strategy and investment in quality content.
To make matters even more complex, enter artificial intelligence, AI. AI and SEO are becoming increasingly intertwined, and this guide explores how AI is altering SEO, and provides insights and actionable solutions, so you can re-evaluate your digital marketing strategy.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation is about helping search engines discover your website’s content and connecting it with searchers by delivering relevant and valuable results, based on what has been searched. SEO is the foundation of your website’s visibility, but is an everchanging matter as search engine preferences shift.
SEO is the practice of improving your website’s content, structure, and perhaps most importantly, user experience. By mastering these elements, your organic search visibility will improve through higher rankings on search engines, like Google, Safari, or Microsoft Edge.
On-Page SEO: On-page SEO refers to the information on your webpage / website. On-page SEO encompasses your original and quality content, which is tailored to include keywords that your audience searching for.
Off-Page SEO: Off-page SEO includes all the activities across your business’s social media, which also influence your brand’s SEO.
How does SEO work?
SEO works by optimising various elements of your website for search engines to understand your content and place it within search ranks. This process involves crawling, indexing and ranking. Crawling is how search engines discover content, indexing is how search engines hold and store content, and ranking is how search engines rank results. To rank highly, ‘crawlers’ or ‘spiders’, assess the following:
Audience & Intent: Naturally, your audience will affect your SEO – keywords are determined by your searcher’s intentions, and what they are searching.
Keywords: By assessing what individuals search for, you can utilise keywords and phrases that people search for.
Content Quality: Creating content that is valuable and original and answers searchers questions will rank well.
Technical SEO & User Experience: Ensure your site loads quickly, is mobile-friendly and easy to navigate and easy to crawl.
Backlinks: Increase the number of backlinks from other reputable websites, linking to your own website.
What is AI’s impact on SEO?
Search engines’ inclusion of AI in search results has represented a significant shift in how searchers may find your site’s content. AI algorithms can identify patterns, trends, and stats, revealing valuable insights regarding user-behaviour and audience intent, thus keywords. The data-driven approach then allows you to make informed decisions surrounding SEO, evolving alongside user audience intent and search engine algorithms.
Whilst it’s important to write SEO optimised content for Google, Bing, and other search engines, it’s important to consider that the way we search is changing; and AI tools, like Chat GPT, Google AI Overview, and Copilot are altering search behaviour. Whilst there is no proven system to appeal to AI, there are a handful of tips to follow to improve the likelihood of your content appearing in AI-generated responses.
Enter GEO…
Generative Engine Optimisation is the practice of optimising content to be featured in the AI-generated answers produced by chatbots and generative search engines. Good GEO prioritises the relevance, authority and accuracy of content, so AI models can incorporate it into their summarised responses. GEO is beneficial in terms of increasing visibility, impact, credibility, relevance, whilst giving your brand competitive advantage.
Content Creation and AI
Generative tools like ChatGPT have revolutionised content creation and SEO performance. When prompted, ChatGPT can quickly produce content, whether that be a social media caption, image, or blog piece (no, this blog was not created by ChatGPT). Whilst being incredibly time efficient, AI tools like ChatGPT cannot replace human creativity. A human approach to content creation holds incredible value, as it highlights quality, uniqueness, and critical thinking that still resonate with users. We believe that human-generated content will continue to stand out amongst your competitor’s content.
As the SEO landscape is everchanging, striking a balance between human creativity and AI will become increasingly important. Leveraging AI’s data analytics skillset to enhance SEO is a valuable insight, whilst using AI to generate pieces of content, in spite of its time efficiency, signifies a demise in creativity, human connection, and integrity within work.
Looking for any guidance on SEO, or GEO, or AI? Get in touch with us today.