AI in SEO: Use Cases, Case Studies & Vendors in 2024

More than 2 million articles are published every day on the web. In this increasingly competitive landscape, organizations are investing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to increase their brand awareness and generate leads. In the past, companies were able to get traffic via hacks like keyword stuffing, however, search engines have gotten significantly smarter in the past 10 years and now there are no easy ways to increase a company’s search engine traffic. With the rise of AI, companies are looking for ways to combine AI into their SEO efforts to gain a competitive edge in increasing competition.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO aims to increase website traffic from the organic (also called free or natural) search results on search engines by optimizing the page in terms of both content and delivery (e.g. page load speed). Numerous factors affect the ranking of the page. Key factors include

• how easy is to crawl the page and the data provided to search engines: Difficult-to-crawl pages or pages that do not provide structured data to search engines can penalize
• the page’s reputation: The links that the page gets from the website or other website determine its reputation and help search engines identify on which rank their links should be placed.
• attractiveness of the page’s snippet (link and description on search engines): Companies can change the page’s title, meta description, update date, and other parameters to make their page’s presentation on search engines more attractive
• attractiveness of the page’s content: Search engines can estimate how much time a user spends on the website. For example, if a user goes back to the search engine immediately after clicking on the article and clicks on another search result, this shows that the article didn’t satisfy the user’s needs
• page load speed and user experience: These factors also contribute to user engagement

How can companies use AI in their SEO efforts?

Keyword search

Keyword research is necessary to find new content ideas, content optimization opportunities, and tracking keywords of a website.

For example, BrightEdge is an SEO solution vendor, that has an AI-powered keyword research tools such as Instant. Instant uses AI to identify the most relevant topics and keywords to go after. It takes a seed list of relevant keywords and gives you 100X more keywords that you can target. You can also benchmark keywords based on countries so that you can target specific countries. Another example vendor is Concured.

Content Generation

Creating quality content can be considered as the most important factor of SEO success. After all, online readers want to read content that is worth their time. According to Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guideline, the highest quality pages are the ones that reflect expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) to the visitor. Google algorithms require different capabilities from web pages to rank them:

• News content should be in-depth, well-cited, accurate, and meet professional journalistic standards.
• Artistic content should be unique and original content created by talented artists or content creators
• Information content should be original, accurate, comprehensive, clearly communicated, professionally presented, and reflect expert consensus.

For example, these aspects of content creation are possible to automate:

• improving the internal linking of pages. Solutions like ContentFusion have such functionality.
• identifying authoritative articles on the topic

Some vendors also claim to create content but we are skeptical about such claims. None of the vendors that claimed this had hundreds of well-written articles so either the content is not generated automatically or it is low quality.

To learn more about automating content generation, we have an in-depth guide.

Running tests and measuring results

Your page’s snippet is also your first touch with potential visitors. Therefore optimizing snippets is important for your website’s organic growth. Running tests and measuring metrics such as CTR help organizations find the best performing snippets.

SEO Scout’s tool enables you to compare your content to competitors by using natural language processing (NLP) and you can test and analyze different titles and meta descriptions so that you can choose the snippet that gets more clicks for the same positions.

Another approach is to test different title and meta description combinations over time. Though this is a more time consuming approach, its results reflect how these changes impact your traffic. We are big fans of testing and so far this relatively old school approach has helped us optimize our content but it is very cumbersome. You need to record every major change you make and then analyze results based on those. We need a solution that automatically records changes and measures their impact so we are building one. If you also need such a solution, leave us a comment here. That will help us prioritize it more and we will include you as a beta tester.

Personalization

Factors such as time-on-page and dwell time affect page rank. Therefore AI-powered personalized content generators are one way to increase the traffic on your web page. For example, OneSpot’s AI uses machine learning, natural language processing (NLP) and individuals’ web history data to deliver relevant content to each visitor. With OneSpot’s solution, organizations can help create a deeper relationship with consumers and increase the number of website visitors and time spent on their website.

These solutions tend to focus on e-commerce applications as it is more complex to customize long-form text content. For more personalization engine vendors, feel free to check our sortable vendor list.

Prioritization with analytics

Thanks to AI, analytics companies help businesses generate automated insights about opportunities and anomalies. Organizations identify key actions to take. This is important because any tool can suggest hundreds of SEO actions that create limited value. It is more powerful to suggest 3 actions that will improve the website’s stats significantly.

Millimetric.ai analyzes your search console for anomalies, prioritizes pages to act on and helps you discover the root causes of anomalies.

Voice Search Optimization

Though the younger generation is leading the way, voice search is becoming popular among all age categories. According to studies, 55% of teenagers are using voice search daily basis and 18% of consumer spending are expected to be made through a voice search by 2022.

For example, Google’s Dialogflow is the most widely used tool to take action for 400M+ Google Assistant devices. It uses machine learning to understand and analyze what users have spoken to help you respond most accurately.

What are example case studies?

Rocky Brand

Rocky Brand is a footwear retail company. The company’s main focus was to create SEO-friendly content to increase organic search revenue. Therefore they implemented BrightEdge’s tools to prioritize and formulate successful SEO strategies. They used different tools such as

• Data Cube enabled them to reveal keywords that they need to target to drive organic traffic to their website,
• BrightEdge Recommendations enabled them to optimize content such as page title and meta tags,
• Storybuilder helped them track the impact of website optimization efforts on brand equity and revenue.
• Keyword and Page Reporting enabled them to track the performance of keyword and content on pages.

After the implementation of SEO software, Rocky Brand experienced an increase in

• search revenue by 30%,
• YoY revenue by 74%,
• new users by 13%.

Stack

STACK Media is a content delivery website to inform professional and amateur athletes. Just like any other online media company, their business success is correlated with web traffic. After they implemented BrightEdge’s platform, the STACK team was able to

• identify keywords that had a high search volume and were relevant to the fitness category
• analyze the SERP visibility of these keywords
• conduct competitive research such as identifying the content themes and structures of the page URLs that ranked high on SERPs.

With this partnership, STACK Media website visits increased by 61% and average bounce-rate-by-page reduced by 73%.

Fugue

Fugue is a cloud infrastructure security and compliance vendor. Fague’s Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solution competes in cloud security searches where the competition is high due to the presence of vendors with high quality. Fugue used Frase.io SEO tool to optimize their CSPM page.

Frase.io helps Fugue identify the topics that needed to be added to the page and compare the content to the best-performing content in the same segment. Fugue’s CSPM page rank advanced to 1st place from 10th position.

What are the top vendors?

• BrightEdge
• ContentFusion
• Frase
• HubSpot
• SEO Scout
• MarketBrew
• MarketMuse
• Millimetric.ai
• WordLift

We have a sortable, updated list of SEO software, feel free to check out before purchasing a solution.

If you still have questions about SEO solutions, we would like to help: