Robin Singh
March 9, 2021

AI and Content Marketing: How Machine Learning Is Impacting SEO

How Machine Learning Is Impacting SEO

Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have become very prominent as a subject of discussion in tech circles. Their popularity has to do with the fantastic application potential these two technologies have for various industries, businesses, and even civic services.

Google and other search engines already use machine learning and AI to formulate their search engine rankings and provide the best possible results to their users. This means that understanding machine learning can help us create better content, optimize our websites better, and ultimately get better rankings.

Let’s see how Machine Learning is impacting SEO and how SEO will further change as Artificial Intelligence continues to change our world.

AI and Search Engines

Most of what search engines do is now handled by AI and enhanced through machine learning. For example, keyword stuffing and poor quality backlinks are some of the negative factors search engines identify. And they have become better and better at recognizing these and other negative factors thanks to machine learning.

Through the use of AI, search engines are only going to get better at ranking quality content high while rooting out fluff pieces, with spammy content, bad links, and poor grammar. 

This means that understanding how search engines go about analyzing content is crucial when creating said content. 

The Use of AI in Content Strategies

While AI still isn’t as advanced as we’d like it to be, it can help us with a lot of things. The main thing AI is used for is extrapolating targeted results from large databases. 

By now, we use our content to engage and interact with users through many channels. Each one of these channels has its own data analytics. Of course, if we had the time and resources, we could draw all kinds of conclusions based on it. 

This is where AI can step in and help us find a target audience that has specific attributes we’re looking for. This kind of data can be used to find potential leads with high conversion capabilities. These are users who might be interested in sharing your content, creating more reach, or tackling several other goals.

AI and Content Distribution

We have developed many different flavors of content intended for various audiences and various stages of their customer journey.

Furthermore, personalization is one of the biggest factors in online sales and digital marketing. There has been a massive surge of available data. We can use it to personalize the journey of basically every visitor that lands on our website, shop, etc. 

Search engines can discern context based on user entry and previous searches to provide them with the right answer to their queries. Using this data, we can discern customer intent and feed them the right offer or piece of content to move them through our funnel. 

One of the biggest innovators in this approach currently is Starbucks. They use data that they gather from their app and their loyalty cards to tailor custom offers to customers. 

Here are some other things that we can do by using automation and AI:

  • Implementation of dynamic content
  • Specialized landing pages based on user profile
  • Customized user experience
  • Product recommendations
  • Upselling
  • Cross-selling & Outreach service

This is just the tip of the iceberg, as we are yet to find optimal ways to implement AI and machine learning in our content creation strategies.

AI-Powered SEO tools

So far, we have a lot of tools that help us with automated tasks related to our content. For example, we have tools that help us gather the most successful and profitable keywords. Not only that, we can go even deeper with a keyword difficulty tool that assesses how difficult it would be to rank for particular keywords. 

BuzzSumo

We also have tools to help us track the performance of our content. BuzzSumo, HubSpot, and others like them allow users to keep track of their contents’ digital lifespan and their performance throughout that time. 

This allows better insight into what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to content creation. And it allows us to modify our approach by drawing conclusions from the available data. 

These tools are only going to get more complex and sophisticated as the algorithms search engines used to rank content become more advanced. It is simply a necessity for this industry to stay alive.

Will It Impact The Way We Market Our Content?

Of course, it will. 

According to a Salesforce study, 66% of consumers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. This is where AI steps in. From content curation to proactive chatbots & cloud-based IVR systems, AI is keen to make a remarkable impact on marketing. 

More Personalized Content

Due to its ability to analyze and interpret huge amounts of data, it is having a huge impact on content marketing. One of them is that it will help marketers understand their target audience.  In turn, this will allow them to create more personalized content for their customers. 

But how does AI do it? 

Well, the answer is quite obvious. AI can analyze and segment huge amounts of data. 

Additionally, it can help you understand who forms your audience, what platform they use, what type of content they read or prefer, and more. 

Better Marketing Strategies

Better Marketing Strategies

AI marketing assistants can literally analyze all of the data that your business owns. Then, you can ask questions that companies need to answer in order to put together a marketing strategy. 

But, without an AI assistant, gathering & interpreting a vast amount of data would be more than a tad difficult!

Additionally, you can:

  • Create segments of your target audience
  • Plan your content marketing strategies by seeing how different strategies would work 
  • Reduce the amount of time it takes to plan content by examining what customers are after, and by evaluating successful, previously produced content.
  • Predicting what content type will resonate well with your target audience, or what kinds of content will enable you to connect with a new audience.

More than anything, it can help marketers make sense of the data, segment, and speed-up time-consuming tasks. This, in turn, helps marketers make quick decisions to make sure customers receive only the best experiences. 

What Does The Future Hold?

Quite clearly, AI will rapidly become an even bigger part of digital marketing. 

Well, it’s simple; AI becomes a core aspect of search engine algorithms capabilities to provide users with quality search results. This means SEO specialists are forced to figure out the technology to reach the standards proposed by search engines. 

Through this combined effort of both sides, we’re going to push the quality of results provided as well as content produced to the next level. 

AI is going to be indispensable when figuring out content strategies for individual brands, as well. Through machine learning and data analysis, we’re going to find unique edges for brands and build content campaigns that serve their specific audience, product, and goals. 

We are still not close to perfecting AI to the level that it can produce original content – in other words, do creative and relevant work. 

Be it creating incredibly detailed marketing strategies based on huge amounts of data or generating content automatically; digital marketers will start using AI more and more to help them every step of the way.

This is something that we shouldn’t expect in the near future, but it’s definitely something that will happen down the road.

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Robin is a Technical Support Executive. He is an expert in knowledge management and various Knowledge base tools. Currently, he is a resident knowledge management expert at ProProfs. In his free time, Robin enjoys reading and traveling