Rethinking SEO with AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere today, in every sector, from robotics, medicine, factories to the judiciary- automating the processes along the way. But in digital marketing, AI is already making ripples with the introduction of RankBrain and HummingBird by Google that completely changes the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) game.
Although these processes are far from being perfect or automating the entire process, they develop every day and keep amazing the world.
SEO has also been changing continuously in the past years, from optimizing landing pages to intricate and carefully thought-out strategies trying to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs). The day isn’t too far when companies will provide services that will be AI-approved. Search engines incorporate SEO for 2 primary reasons:
- Better user experience: To achieve this, the engines have to deliver the content and rank them based on content, importance, and exact user requirement. SEO-friendly content allows google to understand, interpret a piece of content better, and use it for the best user experience.
- Keep users on the platform: Any search engine makes money only if users use it, so they want to optimize the experience to the maximum to make sure they stay.
How do Search Engines Incorporate AI for SEO?
Even though we mention search engines, but we mainly refer to Google. Google’s Hummingbird update allowed it to focus on just keywords and focus on related words, synonyms, and more. This update from Google made keyword stuffing a thing of the past. RankBrain was used to modify Google’s search to read huge amounts of data and interpret long, complex phrases, which could be broken down into simpler sentences to help rank content better.
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With these AIs in place, SEO implementation has also changed. Technical SEO has changed from just being keyword density to more of a long-term continuous effort to keep making good content and helping the SE to understand the content is what bears the best results. Link building is also not only about volume.
Only legitimate editorial links are now recognized, which take a long time to be created. This has made digital marketers rethink their strategies, as it was not easy to trick Google anymore. But if the SE is tricked in any way, it leads to zero organic visibility, killing off growth altogether. The companies need to focus more on making quality content with the intent of helping users than trying to rank on search engines. As AI in SEO is still in its nascent stage, only time will tell how much more changes.
