How to supercharge your SEO with AI tools

AI tools are fast becoming part of every marketers daily tool kit. But how to know which ones are best suited to your needs? And how to make them work as part of your overall strategy? We spoke to Bobble Design CEO Manpreet Singh to get the low down...

Getting the most out of AI

There are hundreds of AI tools on the market, and in the next few years, you can expect to see that figure jump to the thousands. But which ones are worth their salt, and how should you use them to support your SEO strategy?

Let’s start with how you can use AI tools to support your SEO strategy. AI tools can be leveraged at each stage of your SEO lifecycle and, more specifically - to support the data, insights and execution stages.

There’s a range of helpful tools that will improve your productivity and minimise the time spent engaging in repetitive tasks. This includes content and keyword planning, content analysis, data analysis, creating local knowledge graphs, automating the creation of schema structured data, optimising interlinking, page-by-page content optimisation, and optimising meta descriptions and headings (to name a few).

Right now, the best tools on the market are automating data analysis and providing high-level views to identify patterns and trends that may otherwise not be visible.

For example, let’s look at using AI for topics, keywords and content. You can find out exactly what your audience is searching for on Google (phrases, topics and words) and identify patterns within giant data sets to provide insight into the keywords you should be using.

You can also discover insights into the topics your competitors are currently ranking for or ask your AI tool to analyse a piece of content you’ve already written and make suggestions to help that content increase its ranking for specific keywords and search terms.

Here are some of the AI tools that we use at Bobble Digital to supercharge our SEO:

SEMRush

SEMRush is a suite of AI-powered SEO tools with apps for different aspects of SEO, including keyword research, content optimisation, and link building.

Its bulk backlink analysis tool lets you discover your competitors’ backlinks and identify link-building opportunities. You can input up to 200 websites to help inform your outreach strategy.

MarketMuse

MarketMuse is an AI-driven assistant for building content strategies. The tool can show you what search terms you should target to compete in specific topic categories and identify opportunities for your business to own certain topics.

It allows you to generate content ideas and see what the competition is doing, especially for locally-sourced content.

Frase

Frase is an AI platform that tells you which questions your target customers are asking and then helps you create content around those questions. The tool can generate content briefs on any topic and record and respond to questions from people who visit your website, helping you build smarter content strategies based on actual user data.

Twinword

When you input a primary keyword, Twinword gives you deep insights into it, including related semantic keywords, popular topics, and keyword patterns. From there, you can determine which keywords will help you optimise your pages and content most effectively.

Alli AI

Alli AI uses artificial intelligence to "optimise any website in minutes." The tool requires no coding and works with any CMS. Once installed, Alli AI recommends hundreds or thousands of SEO actions and can help you execute these.

BrightEdge

BrightEdge blends search intent discovery, optimised content creation, and performance measurement into one integrated solution, uses AI to explore what people are searching for, and creates a content strategy that drives traffic and interest.

Seo.ai

Seo.ai is an all-in-one platform that handles everything from keyword research to content delivery, and it is a good option for those who want to use one tool rather than a combination of different SEO tools.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT can help streamline repetitive content tasks like Titles and Meta Descriptions, but you should always proofread content generated on the platform as it can be inaccurate.

Although tools like ChatGPT have their uses, you should not use them to write your SEO articles and website copy from scratch. They simply don’t come close to matching the work of an experienced human copywriter. Firstly, ChatGPT is unaware of content created before 2021/2022, which hinders its accuracy. It’s also built with intentional biases, as it’s predominantly trained to be harmless, helpful and truthful.

Another significant risk is that Google and other search engine algorithms can detect content that AI writes. This was tested with Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) Algorithm.

The last factor worth noting is that digital watermarking is currently being developed, which will aid in detecting content created through AI tools. All in all, it’s simply not a risk worth taking, and those creating their content through AI will likely be negatively impacted down the line.

It’s always worth keeping in mind that AI isn't there to replace people. It's there to help you move from the data, insights and execution stages of SEO much quicker. It helps you complete those manual tasks that can be automated, such as keyword research. The ultimate goal is for AI to support, not to replace. This means SEO experts can be freed up to focus on strategy, implementation and understanding how to use this data in the best way possible.