Talking about Small Businesses, AI, and SEO Trends

The popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) platforms today leads to many questions. How does it impact search engine optimization (SEO)? Do they mean that small businesses can stop collaborating with digital marketing firms?

This article talks about how AI can help you with your SEO efforts and why you should still keep the human touch in your strategies.

What Is AI for Small Businesses?

The concept of AI is not new. In fact, many of the existing Google and Microsoft products use such technology.

A good example is BERT, which stands for bidirectional encoder representations from transformers. Released in 2018, it is a language model that helps Google comprehend the meaning of texts better. This way, users get more accurate responses.

Then factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic sped up AI growth. There was a surge in demand for AI solutions, particularly among small businesses. And they do not disappoint:

• AI offers cost savings. As companies strive to thrive despite shrinking budgets, they are turning to AI to streamline many routine tasks. Plus, it does not require expensive salary packages, saving businesses a significant amount of money in the long run.

• The technology enhances efficiency. AI automates business routines, freeing entrepreneurs to focus on higher-value tasks. For example, you can turn over basic customer service to chatbots.

• AI optimizes SEO efforts. These platforms analyze website content and find relevant keywords. They deliver accurate data to help businesses improve their search engine rankings.

Marina Turea of Digital Authority Partners (DAP) has also shared the best benefits of AI for small businesses in the coming years. These include enriching the user experience (UX) in content and doing more with even fewer data points.

If you are a company trying to scale in an uber-competitive market, AI is transformative. It can help you reach more customers, make more money, keep your audiences more interested, and get ahead of the competition.

But it also leads to an important question: Can you forego SEO teams now? The answer is no.

How to Use AI and Human Digital Marketers to Scale Your Biz

AI has been making great strides in automating certain tasks. Think about creating content briefs, making outlines, or grouping keywords for topic clusters. But its capabilities cannot replace human digital marketers anytime soon. That is because:

• Digital marketing is complex. AI’s current capabilities do not include nuanced emotions and creativity. These two are integral ingredients of effective digital marketing.
• When understanding customer journeys and personalization, AI struggles recognizing individual preferences or behavioral patterns on a deeper level.
• AI does not know get your marketing goals completely. For instance, it can identify the most important keywords in a text. But it requires human input to determine which ones would be relevant to SEO.

When it comes to search optimization, the best approach is to combine AI solutions with human digital marketers. Here are three use cases:

1. Hyperpersonalize Content to Retain Customers

Combining AI and human digital marketers in content creation can help create personalized, relevant experiences and optimize customer engagement.

• AI algorithms, interaction data, and the latest trends provide insight into what customers need and want.
• You can also use AI for recommending products, cross-selling new services, or providing custom offers for existing customers.
• Meanwhile, human digital marketers can focus on creating content based on customer feedback, monitor and measure engagement, and tweak campaigns as needed.

Content created this way increases customer lifetime value through enhanced engagement and loyalty, which is key to digital marketing success.

2. Add More Meaning to Analytics Data to Make Sound Decisions

By leveraging AI tools, you can quickly gather a great deal of data, generate actionable strategies, and identify optimization opportunities with ease. All of these benefits give people who work in digital marketing the information they need to make more confident decisions about SEO strategy.

To explain these points, consider these examples:

• An SEO team must still turn that data into something meaningful by interpreting the numbers from across multiple channels and creating a comprehensive picture of performance.
• AI can create customer segmentation, but it is up to digital marketers to decide how to target these segments.
• The technology can identify keywords and content opportunities, but human marketers must decide which to prioritize.

In other words, AI is vital to the rapid collection and curation of massive amounts of data. Digital marketers can then use market knowledge to make smart business decisions.

3. Pick the Right Keywords to Match the User Intent

Many marketers use linear keyword research to identify terms to target. They use keyword suggestion tools, enter their seed keyword, and analyze the numbers. These can include the search volume, competition level, and cost-per-click (CPC).

While it can still work, it is likely to become problematic later.

• It does not always reflect how people search online. The words you use to find a restaurant nearby are different when you type on your phone or opt for voice search.
• You can miss out on good keyword opportunities. Linear keyword research can overlook those with low competition but good search volume.

When AI and human digital marketers work together, they can make a powerful force that can help shape keyword strategies and help content creators better target user intent.

Consider these:

• AI’s algorithms are great at finding and analyzing large amounts of data fast. Human expertise is key to understanding how individuals interact with search engines.

• The technology can identify actual searches, related terms, and variations of words. Humans decide which is mos suitable for the digital marketing strategy.

Summing Up

AI helps small enterprises scale and compete against established competitors. And the technology will only get more robust, efficient, and affordable.

But machines do not have the creativity and deep market knowledge that humans do. To win the SEO game, it pays to use both people and tech as allies. Better yet, work with a digital marketing firm that knows how to harness the power of AI.