Experimenting With AI in 2024: 5 Tips to Strengthen Your Website’s SEO Strategy

Authored by: Richard Nosek.

Artificial intelligence can be a force multiplier for marketing leaders — especially in organizations where resources are tight. You undoubtedly got that message loud and clear in 2023. 

But let’s be honest: The initial frenzy around AI was equal parts exhilarating and overwhelming. And if your team is already stretched thin, learning how to use AI effectively may have felt like one more “to-do” in a never-ending task list.

So if you haven’t made significant strides toward harnessing the power of AI at your organization, don’t sweat it. You’re not alone. But AI isn’t going away. And organizations that lean in and embrace AI’s potential will almost certainly outperform those that don’t. To stay competitive, it will be crucial to carve out time to experiment with its capabilities in the months ahead. 

We don’t pretend to have it all figured out — but we have spent time exploring the tools readily available (e.g., ChatGPT, Bard, Bing AI) and learning how they can enhance our clients’ web strategies. So in the spirit of curiosity and discovery, here are 5 tips to help you use AI to level up your SEO.

1. Uncover the Intent Behind Search Queries

The words users type into Google don’t always clearly match up with their underlying needs and motivations. That’s a problem since understanding what users are looking for is fundamental to creating a user-focused SEO and content strategy.

AI can help get to the heart of user intent by quickly analyzing large volumes of data and distilling it into actionable insights.

First, you’ll need to know your organization’s search data. Using Google Analytics and Google Search Console, identify the common keywords and phrases that are bringing people to your site (if your site has an internal search function, analyze those search queries as well).

Then, prompt ChatGPT (or your preferred AI tool) to look at those specific keywords and phrases and tell you what the probable intentions behind them are. Or, feed it large query datasets and have it categorize the intent while providing additional ideas for related long-tail variations you can target. 

Understanding the intent behind search queries will help you tailor your content strategy and zero in on providing useful information you know your audience is searching for.

2. Stay on Top of Industry Trends and Keyword Research

Keeping your organization at the forefront of industry trends —  and crafting an effective keyword strategy that relates to those trends — can be challenging. Manually analyzing the data available to you on social media, industry news sites, forums, and other resources is time-consuming and, for many organizations, prohibitive. 

This is where AI truly shines. AI-powered tools can function like an always-on, never-tired research assistant and quickly perform tasks like: 

• Trend Analysis. Ask it for updates on trending topics, news, and discussions relevant to your industry. 
• Keyword Research. Identify high-ranking keywords and related terms and use them to inform your content strategy (topic ideation, topic clustering, etc). 
• Social Media Listening. Use monitoring tools to track conversations, hashtags, and trending topics to understand what’s capturing your audience’s attention. 

Experimenting with AI in this way will empower you to make data-driven decisions, continually refine your content marketing and paid media strategies, tell stories that resonate with your audience, and differentiate your organization from the competition.

3. Analyze and Benchmark Content Performance 

Many marketing teams operate with the assumption that their existing content is performing well for SEO. But few take the time to regularly visit Google Analytics and tools like heatmaps to ensure their content is truly delivering the results they’re looking for.

AI tools make this process easy and empower a deeper analysis of content metrics that goes beyond surface-level views and clicks. 

Teams can prompt AI to assess which blog posts, content modalities (like video), and formats (like white papers) are indexing with search engines. Even better, tools can provide insights into which of these are driving users to take action — like downloading a resource, submitting a contact inquiry, or finalizing a purchase. 

AI can also pinpoint content gaps where new formats like interactive calculators or assessments may better answer user questions and differentiate you from your competitors. 

Having this big-picture knowledge will enable you to cull ineffective content with confidence — and replace it with content that drives results.

4. Conduct Competitor and Sentiment Analysis 

Do you know where you stand in relation to your competition? Are you cognizant of the gaps in the market that your organization can fill? And do you know how your audience feels about your brand? 

Competitive analysis, gap analysis, and sentiment analysis are additional data-rich marketing tactics that should inform a strong SEO strategy. But again, comprehensively tackling all of these at scale is enormously time-consuming. There are simply too many articles, too many sites, and too many metrics to cross-compare.

AI handles these activities at lightning speed. For example, you can prompt AI to:

• Crawl competitors’ sites, catalog their content topics, and see exactly what they’re covering. 
• Identify topics they’re not covering — and find gaps in terms of unmet user needs — in order to create content that sets your brand apart. 
• Summarize the sentiments people have about your brand so you can better understand audience perceptions and interests. 

All of this can help you capitalize on zeitgeist moments before your competition does. 

5. Maintain Human Oversight When Experimenting With AI

When you start to unlock the potential of AI, you may initially feel dazzled by the possibilities. And no wonder — it’s thrilling to discover what AI is capable of. 

But AI isn’t perfect. It doesn’t always get its facts straight. Sometimes AI “hallucinates” and produces pure fiction. And though it can analyze vast amounts of data, it’s notoriously bad at simple tasks like counting. 

At the end of the day, AI tools should be treated as assistants and collaborators, not oracles. That means you should experiment with enthusiasm and curiosity while also remaining appropriately cautious. Lean into its power, but don’t take anything AI generates as gospel truth. 

The good news is the opportunities are limitless — and you don’t have to figure this out alone. We’d love to help, so just reach out.