Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was never a steady field of study. It has been in a constant revolution since its beginning. After the introduction of AI-Powered SEO into digital marketing, the SEO experts have to adopt an entirely new strategy.
Artificial Intelligence has already started affecting our Search Engine Optimization techniques, but it is too early to predict how machine learning and AI will affect the future of Marketing. Let’s dive into some basics and then the recent developments on AI-Powered SEO that can affect the SEO plans in the long run.
What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
Artificial Intelligence is another name given to the intelligence of the machines. They work just like humans and often more efficiently than them. Auto driven vehicles, speech recognition and Plagiarism checkers are some common examples of Artificial Intelligence.
How Does Google See Artificial Intelligence?
When we talk about big search engines, we discuss Google, Bing, and Yahoo. But we all know about who is the largest shareholder in terms of search queries. Even if we know Google’s way of working, we surely can understand the others because most of the other search engines comprehend the modelling of it. So let’s just talk about Google and its approach towards incorporating AI.
Google’s changes and develop its search algorithms, keeping one primary goal in mind which is “to provide a user with the best possible and relevant search results”. They want to keep the user as long as they can so that they can earn maximum revenue by that (everybody wants that, Right?) It solely depends on how long a user stays on Google.
So what’s the role of AI in Google search rankings? If you know the basics of Search Engine Optimization, you may be already aware of how Google penalizes duplicate content. It does so by using Machine learning and detecting the amount of plagiarism on the web page. There are millions of web pages to which it matches the content, and it cannot be done without the help of AI-Powered SEO.
Google RankBrain
Google’s RankBrain is a new machine learning upgrade to Hummingbird. If you haven’t heard about the Hummingbird update of Google yet, It massively restricted the black hat SEO and spammy tactics to rank content. The purpose of that update was to give search results for user’s intent rather than for the exact search queries. In this way, Google started ranking content for its synonyms and related phrases. Keyword stuffing is no longer helpful since then.
The RankBrain allowed Google to interpret each user’s search phrase and evolve its related keyphrases with it. Think of a long, convoluted and challenging keyword whose search results are minimum or none. This update allows Google to convert that keyword into a simple and specific keyword to return more and relevant search results for the user.
We cannot help but let our imagination think about how crucial RankBrain is for the future of digital marketing. It’s a perfect example of AI, which is learning continuously and improving itself without any help of a human being, saving millions of dollars investment.
Content Quality
After the recent updates of Google algorithms, the generic content has somewhat lost its original worth.
Google tends to rank such content which is short and specific, and that helps to solve a particular problem for a user
Therefore, some general blogs have lost behind a bit, and specific category blogs have shown up in the Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). You may notice the search results for a particular query. The results shown by Google will be the websites that specialize in that specific niche.
Watching it happen, we can say that there is no room for bad quality content, for now at least. Google’s algorithms are smart enough to recognize your content and rank it according to its excellency.
As Google and other search engine are making use of AI, the content creators do not want to lose in this race. They are thriving to develop such software that can rephrase the content without plagiarism. It is only a matter of time we will soon watch a growing competition between search engines and marketers on AI.
Backlinking
Google has made it tough for the black hat SEO marketers to optimize their website by making irrelevant backlinks. It certainly doesn’t mean that there is no worth of backlinks anymore. It surely is, but not for bad or spammy backlinks.
Now the content owners have got two options to build backlinks.
- The first one is free but is a lot more difficult, i.e. if your content is good enough, the other people will refer to it and will give you an external link for that (And trust me, it really works if you do a stellar work)
- The second one is easy but may require some extra investment, i.e. you may outreach to other content creators and may request them to publish a guest post for you or put an external link to their already existing posts. Most of the people charge for these backlinks, and it is okay to pay for it as long as the budget is sensible.
Individualism
Google is well aware of the fact that the user’s search intent is extremely dependent on his or her location. So it returns the search result that best matches with his or her location.
Let’s take an example of someone in London searching for “SEO services “for his newly built website. Even if he doesn’t search for “London SEO”, he would still get results based on his location. Google will return the London based SEO agencies that are near his location. This is what we call Individualism and Google is really good at it.
The Bottomline
The advancements in AI will drastically change the world from what it does look now. The digital marketing experts are seeking every knowledge of AI-powered SEO in order to compete with other digital marketing geeks.