How to advance your SEO career in the age of AI

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In 2000, Yahoo pulled off the worst strategic move in the history of search-

No, I am not talking about Yahoo refusing to buy Google at $1M.

I am talking about the time when Yahoo partnered with Google and let Google power their organic results.

And guess what?- every organic result that was powered by Google on Yahoo, had a tag ‘result powered by Google’.

Beforehand, Google was a little-known search engine. Hardly known!

But with this move, Yahoo ended up introducing their largest competitor to the world and Google became a household name.

2000 was also the year when Google launched Google ads.

It was also in 2000 that the Google Toolbar became available on Internet Explorer, allowing SEO practitioners to see their PageRank score (a number between 0-10).

Meanwhile, a group of webmasters informally got together at a pub in London to start sharing information about all things SEO in 2000.

This informal gathering eventually turned into Pubcon, the largest search conference series that still runs today.

For history geeks, I am sharing a timeline of Google below with all the major developments:

From 2004 to 2006; many developments happened, introduction of Local SEO, personalised results, no follow tags.

It was in 2006 that Google acquired YouTube for $1.6B.

It was also in 2006 when Google launched the first version of Google Analytics and Google search console.

From 2006 till date, Google made many enhancements in the favour of a better user experience.

And for webmasters, Google provided many features for them to make the content of the website easily discoverable. Updates like schema, knowledge graph etc.

This newsletter is not about picking history of Google and talking about them in detail. (maybe I will cover the history of Google in one of the newsletters from how Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page conceived the idea at a Stanford corridor)

This newsletter is about how the career of SEOs will evolve considering Artificial intelligence is already here.

I came across the term ‘Artificial intelligence‘ in 2016 when Gmail launched reply suggestions. Which was powered by AI technology.

Since then many tools including Google, Facebook have been using AI in their own capacity and to their advantage.

For ease of understanding let me give you a no-faff definition of AI:

AI or artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines. So any process that humans can do, machines can intimate or possibly (in some cases) do a better job.

AI is already impacting many functions including Marketing.

Is AI likely to replace any job role in Marketing?

Unlikely, marketing is probably the only function in an organisation that is both a business function and a support function.

Business function because it is responsible to generate revenue from Digital mediums.

Support function because it plays the role of providing support to other sales channels.

In my opinion, I do not see AI replacing any marketing role. Though if a marketer is not using AI to increase productivity can surely be replaced.

As it is popularly said: AI will not replace your job, a person using AI will.

When it comes to SEO, it is no different.

SEO as a role is accustomed to change more than any other role in marketing.

Google changes its search algorithm so frequently that SEOs develop a habit of navigating through these updates and changes.

But note this, AI is not just another change or update. AI is here to disrupt.

So, how does one advance their SEO career in the age of AI?

First, SEOs need to wear a business hat. Not tomorrow, not later, but starting today.

Smart and to-date CMOs do not get excited with rankings anymore.

Yes, rankings are important but they are dynamic.

Today, SEOs are expected to have a business view from Day 1.

Please, stop relying on the old cliche phrase - SEO takes time.

It is a given now. Any marketer knows this today.

You need to have a view of how much time, what are you doing to capitalise on organic users, and what is your plan to capture the digital footprint of such a user.

What is the size of the net that you are casting to catch a user?

Draw a timeline of your SEO approach.

How much time will it take you to set the foundation right? And what will you do to set it strong?

How much time will it take you to go from 1st user to the 10,000th user? what’s the approach? is any sale expected during this phase?

How much time will it take to go from the 10,000th user to the 1,00,000th user and again approach and are conversions expected?

It is okay to be a little pessimistic here. But having a roadmap is important.

If you struggle in charting this out, take help.

Take help from an experienced agency, take help from experienced SEOs.

Secondly, AI will reduce the time in the phrase- SEO takes TIME.

AI will help SEOs from their first step in SEO which typically starts with understanding the total addressable market on the search to actually writing the content, publishing it & analysing the results.

If a SEO practiotioner takes 2 days today to do keyword research and write SEO-optimised content and publish it on the website, this time will be reduced to 2-4 hours if I have to be precise.

AI will help SEOs shoot up their productivity. Coming up with ideas, executing them, seeing the impact and pulling out results, all of it will be much faster than what it is today.

Let’s understand this with the help of an example,

Let’s say you are tasked with doing SEO for a new website.

The first step a smart SEO does is finding how big the SEO opportunity is for the website depending on the product or service they sell.

Like I mentioned earlier, finding the total addressable market (TAM).

Today, SEOs find TAM by spending hours on different tools and doing keyword research. Tools like Google keyword planner or SEMrush or Ahrefs.

With AI, this will be done in an instant. Google is already working on a B2B version of Bard (Google’s AI bot) which will help SEOs and brands find answers to many of such questions in an instant.

After finding the TAM, an SEO divides their approach into Informational-led keywords and transactional-led keywords and decides the structure of the website accordingly.

While there is no confirmation from Google how AI will help ease this yet but tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs already help SEOs understand the nature of a particular search.

Now comes the most tedious and most important part: writing SEO content.

This is where AI is the strongest, generating content.

While you can use AI to write SEO content but remember- As per Google, it can identify which content is written by AI and which is not.

AI generated content contains word use patterns unique to both human and AI-generated content. Statistical analysis reveals which content is created by AI.

Plus one of the disadvantages of using AI to write SEO content is that your content may not be unique.

Hence, a SEO practitioner may use AI to generate skeleton content but human brains will still be required to make the content unique, user-friendly and eventually search-friendly.

Take Grammarly for instance, it is a tool powered by AI that many marketers including SEO practitioners use.

It takes a so-so piece of content and makes it better by fixing grammar and spelling mistakes and catching repetitive use of words.

Still, Grammarly needs initiatial feeding of content. It improvises already written content.

The sheer pace of SEO steps will be much faster than what it is today with the help of AI.

Hence the time it traditionally took for SEOs to show results, will reduce drastically.

Finally, pulling the results and generating insights with the help of AI will also become faster and more useful than ever.

Google is already moving to Google Analytics 4, July 2023 onwards.

And GA4 already uses AI to generate insights about your website.

And my sense is, with generative AI this will only get better.

Hence for a SEO parctitioner to advance their career, they have to start using these AI capabilities starting today and become more productive and use AI to reduce the time it takes for SEO to show results.

And when I say results, I do not only mean rankings, organic traffic, bounce rate, time spent etc.

I mean business.

Also, collaborate with cross-functions like technology and product teams more often to ensure you are able to capture the digital footprints of the users who are coming to your website organically.

In the age of AI, SEOs will have to collaborate more with the 2 teams mentioned above in their organisation. It will help them in generating cash flow from SEO faster.

One of the things that I am currently working on along with the product team in my organisation is automating banners across the website and app.

Basically, we are building a system where banners across the website and the app will be automated depending on various factors like the landing page content, use type- new user or repeat user, shopper or non-shopper etc. and there will be a layer of AI over this that will help serve the best-performing banners to most relevant users more frequently.

This is what I mean when I say, collaborate, use AI to your advantage and wear the business hat.

That’s it for today, folks.

Ease up this Sunday.

By the way I am planning to launch an SEO break-down LIVE masterclass.

In this masterclass, I will break down the fundamentals of SEO in extremely simple English & Hindi. This will help you crack SEO for any business or pass any interview.

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Cheers,

Apurv