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SEO AI Strategy

SEO AI Strategy: A Human-Driven Approach

AI models are revolutionizing SEO, making it more efficient and user-centric by improving search accuracy (with human oversight), boosting content, and building knowledge graphs – relying on AI collaboration.

What is an AI SEO Strategy?

AI SEO, or artificial intelligence search engine optimization, is a strategy that uses AI to improve a website’s search engine ranking. An AI SEO strategy refers to leveraging AI tools and techniques to advance a website’s visibility and effectiveness in search engine results pages (SERPs). It involves using LLMs’ ability to analyze large datasets and multiple documents. LLMs (Large Language Models) like GPT-4 are revolutionizing how we approach SEO.

This form of AI SEO can “suggest” and automate complex tasks. Clearly, it must have human oversight and editors for accuracy and enhancing various aspects of SEO. As the SEO world shifts more towards using AI tools to complete tasks faster, SEO is evolving from simply influencing which websites are featured, to also influencing which AI answers appear.

SEO professionals now adopt a more over-arching perspective. This includes: Using AI to help understand, process, and structure data, as well as shaping your strategy, tools, and integration with the companies businss plan.

Let’s dive into the meat of this article.

Why incorporate AI in SEO workflows?

AI is revolutionizing SEO by automating tasks, analyzing massive datasets, and uncovering hidden insights. This integrated approach lets you automate repetitive tasks, analyze vast amounts of data quickly, identify emerging trends, generate content ideas, optimize content for search intent, and ultimately improve overall efficiency and revenue. Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 are changing how we approach keyword research, content creation, and optimization. AI is a tool, not a replacement for human expertise. Editors and SEO professionals are crucial for ensuring accuracy and quality.

By combining the power of AI with human expertise, you can create an effective SEO strategy that drives results.

What I share below comes directly from my own experience; it reflects what I’m most excited about, but is not conclusive.

AI is profoundly changing the user experience and SEO. It enables more personalized and responsive interactions. AI-driven algorithms analyze user behavior to deliver tailored search results, and content recommendations that align with what people are asking. This is enhancing the overall user experience.

Better AI Interactions for Offsite and Onsite SEO

New AI tools and processes can relieve the increased demands on SEOs work hours, efficiency and productivity.

You have the ability to streamline the entire process. The rapid adoption of generative AI (genAI) models used to process and create text, speech, images, videos, and more, has flipped the SEO world. Completing intensive Gen AI courses to understand how search works today can vastly help. I find that keeping pace requires a continual fast-track of learning.

We must face valid concerns about security, bias, and the level of trust one can place in AI’s output. AI writing tools make it super easy to add a few prompts and gain outputted text. But what’s the quality? Where is the information gain factor? Is it accurate? Does it add to your traditional SEO efforts? It can be all of those, if you have budget, strategy, skills, and testing in place.

“Best Shot Promptings,” distillation techniques, and LLM moderators can support better AI interactions. “Better AI interactions” in the context of SEO means leveraging artificial intelligence to provide better personalized, engaging, and helpful interactions with website visitors. This ultimately leads to improved user experience and higher search engine rankings by keeping site visitors longer, and gaining desired clicks.

Ways your human and AI Collaboration can solve SEO issues

You can avoid the following potential issues with AI SEO:

  • Negative prompt injections.
  • Hallucinations or mistakes in the low-margin-for-error world in AI healthcare content creation.
  • Outdated or stagnant data training data.
  • Risks that your content is deemed “spammy” by search engines.
  • Being identified as using unethical methods.

All or any of the above can negatively impact your website’s search engine ranking and user trust. When AI in SEO is carefully monitored and managed, it can be very successful. For example, to keep your training data current, when collaborators enable an AI model with “retrieval augmentation generation,” or RAG, it allows the model to update and improve itself as new data becomes available without having to retrain the model.

 

How to Create an Effective SEO AI Strategy

Below are areas of focus that will help you avoid wasting efforts on outdated SEO strategies.

  • Expanded SEO Strategy: The advent of Google Multisearch means that people are less reliant on using words to find products. However, more importantly, Multisearch can also mean adjusting SEO strategies to be more inclusive of additional search engines and platforms. A multipronged approach is a better way to reach people.
  • AI Image Answers: More and more, query answers are conducted by image search. Use Google Lens app and learn if your images actually appear for relevant queries.
  • Competitive Research: See what competitors are ranked in Google Lens or show up in “People Also Search For” within your Knowledge Panel
  • Google Discover: Efforts put into being found in Google Discover gain significant rewards. While how search works will evolve, today, implementing structured data can still positively boost your efforts.
  • Multi-Platform Distribution: The more platforms you engage on, the more hard work you put in. AI can help here.
    • Reach the right audience
    • In the right channels
    • With a resonating message (topics they query, product news, by answering their top questions, data journalism)
  • Go Beyond Text: Incorporate videos, podcasts, infographics, audio, interactive elements, and other engaging formats to provide a richer experience for users and improve content discoverability.
  • Provide clear answers: AI loves featuring a good Q&A. There is a lot of logic in the statement that Google is an Answer Engine. Most searches are conducted in question format. Logically, this then merits my attention. It is a huge part of why people use the Internet. I strategically add FAQ schema markup to make question answering content clear and easy to consume.
  • Building Knowledge Panels Many of my clients were at first unaware that Google is building a Knowledge Panel about them. They seek clarification between how a Google Business Listing presents versus what a Knowledge Graph looks like. Both have a growing importance.
  • Adhere to federal laws: The need for legal checks has increased with AI usage. Whether your audience is in the United States, or Europe influences this. However, you still need to think if your users live or engage with you in other countries. Some examples of new laws are the EU AI Act, Biden’s order, and internal legal processes. The FTC has fined many marketing agencies for making misleading statements.
  • Incorporate article schema markup: Then so beyond a bare-bones structured data approach. Multi-Typed Entities (MTEs) can combine two or more types and their properties (like Organization and Place schema, Product and Vehicle etc.) and be very powerful do disambiguate similar entities. This is much more than about winning rich results in SERPs.

SEO Concepts that Leverage AI Skills

We used to talk more about backlinks, internal links, titles, topic hubs, etc. Today, those SEO tasks are basic and lack making a difference like they once did.

SEO skills needed today:

  • Know your competition is Google: Google’s AI overviews can be a real threat to your website traffic. These AI-generated summaries are impacting brand visibility. Google wants its SERPs to be the end all answer to all things.
  • Include cosine similarity concepts: This means co-similarity; it requires analyzing cosine similarity on sites. Google understands what information is relevant on a page even without it being directly used. Ensure content is placed higher on the page that has strong similarity.
  • AI SEO requires additional guardrails: We need to learn what guardrails are necessary to prevent common LLM issues like hallucinations, sensitive information leaks, and off-topic responses. Mistakes can be costly to brand reputation; with less chances to be visible, we have to make every opportunity to reach new consumers count.
  • Broaden how we gain web traffic: “Relevant” traffic is about proximity and has less value for clicks. It is better used for creating momentum. Look for increased organic traffic from other sources, like forums, social, and Bing.
  • Write comprehensive yet narrowed topic pieces: Specific content created to answer direct questions increases changes of being featured in Google and Bing Artificial Intelligence Overviews (AIO). When we understand query types, we can better identify when instant answers are best and when we have a better chance to encourage the user to read answers on your website. Zoom in on a specific area within a larger topic to provide a more focused user experience.
  • Search intent optimization: This begins with user intent analysis. This includes but surpasses traditional keyword strategies. Better than keywords, write content with intent targeting. Use target terminology that supports the purpose of each page. Comprehensive content that aligns with the broader goals, intents, and motivations of users will perform better. This is the type of content creation that search engines reward.

AI Caution Balanced with Embracing AI Opportunities

It doesn’t have to be daunting; make the opportunity an exciting SEO upskilling!

Search engines invest years and billions into developing search results to accommodate a diverse set of content formats. In turn, people have a plethora of search options. This ramps up the stakes in how you compete for user’s attention and clicks. In the end, whether you still rely on traditional SEO or advanced AI SEO, it’s about winning in the CRO game.

Users have more ways to add context to the information they’re looking for. By adding semantic search you are providing the data that helps search engines surface how your answer to fulfil “intent.”

Search can return a snippet that combines multiple online sources compiled succinctly into a single query answer. There is no shrinking from AI-fueled search features. To get featured, continue enriching the user experience on your website and providing human-authored quality content.

I find that it takes time and a balanced approach to be an AI adopter. However, already it is saving me time on some tasks. In addition, new federal AI regulations stress AI use and algorithm transparency.

Adopting New AI-Enriched SEO Processes

LLM tokenization and vector search are key components in how LLMs understand and process information, making them valuable for AI SEO.RAG works well for retrieval after relevant documents are approved. Use an agentic system where an AI agent takes various steps like calling your database and grounding services. It is exciting that this can be done dynamically to get the right answers.

Using “multimodal” can involve round tripping through symbolic language. I find it best to consider the specific multimodal needs of each application and how each model aligns with my requirements. Tokenization in LLM means the process of separating word sequences into discrete components (or tokens). These tokens may include words, letters, or sequences of letters. The process of LLM tokenization can enhance model-building efforts by selecting the best tokenization.

But processes without strategy are useless.

Your SEO AI strategy must have human logic and oversight

Both people and Google are looking for the human touch in content creation. AI cannot replace the great value the human author brings to unique, and engaging articles that resonate with users. This allows content to stand out in a competitive market and contributes to building trust with your audience. Google Search systems intend to reward the types of things that searchers find helpful and reliable. A checklist cannot help one “think” the same as an SEO who grasps who search works today.

SEOs have to get past a checklist mentality. Do your pages have author bios? Done. Done. Dord your page load fast? Done. Are your headers and descriptives effective? Done. Is the article written in a manner that demonstrates experience, expertise, authority and trust? Done. Does your content provide “information gain”? Another task done. But the bottom line to search engines is, does anyone take action on the SERP? On your page? The bottom line to business owners is, does it ultimately lead to revenue?

What I’m learning is that Google’s algorithm is built to reward their click data that signals that searchers like.

You have to know your business niche. You have to know your audience’s preferences. An author bio doesn’t make a page rank better; however, in many verticals, clarifying the experience of your authors is something that readers appreciate. For example, in dental marketing, the relevant trained physician who writes, has more authority on the topic.

Better tool building

Google’s John Mueller has suggested more than once lately, that SEOs can get stuck on what the tools say. Newer tool combinations help us focus on the user. While many are adding capabilities to evaluate success in AIO, I’m daily benefiting for how Vertex AI and NotebookLM give me more strategic tool building workflows. Vertex AI notebooks provide fully managed, scalable, enterprise-ready compute infrastructure with new security controls and user management capabilities. I find it much more intuitive than Kaggle. But each person can find what works best for them.

Multimodal generative AI models further expand artificial intelligence’s capabilities. Some AI systems are limited to one type of input. Commonly, this is text; as well, they produce only one output type, such as text. Other AI systems can be grounded in multiple types of data inputs, such as text, video files, PDFs, and images. Their output is also expanded. These are called multimodal AI systems that empower creating content across multiple models. SEOs are tasked with gaining visibility in new ways and additional places.

The digital ecosystem is flexing and adapting at a staggering pace. We are already seeing many SEOs buried in traditional tasks and learning approaches are rolled out of jobs. Former easy-to-gain clicks from informational queries are slim. Compatible tools, strategies and tactics are forced to align with opportunities of being featured in AI Overviews. And these opportunities will be fewer as Google Search keeps more and more users right on its interface.

To utilize Codelabs for enhancing your AI coding skills, focus on learning how to use libraries and frameworks like TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch. You can then utilize them to build basic AI models like image classification, text generation, and sentiment analysis, while also practicing data manipulation/cleaning, and model training. Guided steps are provided by the Codelabs platform.

AI is Revolutionizing How Search Works

We can break data silos to build connected, omnichannel customer experiences and proactive engagement.

Focus on what your audience needs versus what you think will garner favor with a search engine. It’s an ongoing learning journey to keep up with how AI is impacting search engine algorithms. It changes what SEO strategies are still effective. Keyword research has become entity phrase matching or “Entity-based SEO.” Entities provide details and context within a topic that a keyword focussed strategy misses. and content creation.

Many SEOs find that standard practices to optimize content fall short today. Our traditional concepts of SEO need to expand (or be retired). Heuristic, handwritten rules lack the ability to help us create content that truly is original, insightful, personalized and more helpful. Priority SEO efforts should center on what makes a page substantially more helpful to people.

My personal opinion is clearer than ever. Technical SEO isn’t dead. Schema markup implementation isn’t dead. Being an expert content writer isn’t a dying skill. They are simply evolving. And coding skills to build AI models in Google Codelab can give you insight to what works and why. The secret to having content that stays indexed and makes a difference is simple. It’s about publishing content that users find helpful.

Which specific actions a user takes on the SERP and on your website dramatically impacts Google’s rankings.

CONCLUSION: The evolving Nature of SEO Driven by AI

An effective SEO strategy requires a deep understanding of audience needs and preferences, combined with a strategic application of AI tools to enhance content creation and optimization efforts. Automation and business growth are closely intertwined. Skilled SEO optimization techniques include in-context learning, prompt engineering, and additional emerging techniques that build an extensible data fabric and brand authority.

Call 651-206-2410 if you’d like to reach out and chat.

We can help you create your SEO Strategy using AI and Knowledge Graphs

 

 

Featured image created with Imagen 3

Jeannie Hill:
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