How Bloggers Can Leverage AI in SEO and PPC

Although Artificial Intelligence is a sci-fi notion for many people, AI has a long history. As a great unknown, its unstoppable approach causes feelings of both admiration and fear in our society.

The truth is, AI no longer lives only in the imagination of tech geeks and visionaries. We are interacting with AI on a daily basis — whenever we browse the internet or use our phone’s camera.

Furthermore, Artificial Intelligence offers powerful features that can boost business and marketing performance, not just for corporations, but also for bloggers. In this article, we explore its implications for the future of marketing as it applies to those who post for a living. If you are a blogger into getting more from AI and its underlying technologies for your marketing, stay tuned.

Artificial intelligence and search ranking

In a nutshell, AI is a problem-solving and decision-making technology. It is very close to machine learning technology, in which a machine can create algorithms to program itself without human input. Apart from machine learning, AI integrates other technologies, such as natural language generation and deep learning. To put that in practical terms for bloggers…

…Artificial Intelligence drives Google search. Although Google is secretive about details, we know that AI powers Google’s indexing, audio, and image searches, as well as security and data protection.

While Google is frequently accused of producing “search bubbles” that perpetuate social biases, Bing introduced a substantially different system. A couple of years ago, Bing announced new intelligent search features that automatically provide users with different answers and perspectives on their search queries. This system, too, is powered by AI.

So, one way or another, AI is at the heart of internet browsing and is already indispensable for bloggers, whether they’ve realized it yet or not. On the one hand, AI helps people find what they want more easily (and hopefully, that’s you and your blog). On the other hand, it helps small businesses and profit-seeking bloggers with research, market reach, and SEO optimization, as well as less obvious but important tasks such as reputation management, sentiment analysis, and sophisticated email marketing.

Inbound Marketing, SEO, and PPC

The basic idea of inbound marketing is to form trustful, long-lasting, and meaningful relationships with your followers. It is rooted in various methods of pull marketing that inform an already interested person and draw them into your audience. These methods include content marketing, search engine strategies, social media marketing, and more.

In other words, the purpose of inbound marketing isn’t to urge everyone to buy something. Instead, it builds trust and loyalty by storytelling or giving valuable information or insights to those who are already interested in your general topic, lifestyle, field of expertise, or product line. .

If you want those interested (“primed”) people to know about your blog and brand, they first have to get to your content. It is not an easy task to reach potential readers when there is so much competition busy creating new content on a daily basis. Everyone wants search engines to recognize their blog as valuable and display their content above competitors. That’s why the impact of AI on SEO is so significant.

Bloggers aren’t the only ones paying attention to this. All kinds of companies compete for search-engine prominence because they gain dozens of benefits from content marketing — essential, foundational benefits, from building brand awareness to driving sales. So in a way, they are also competing with you for the eye of the reader. That’s why bloggers must step up their game to reach new followers.

There are two ways most bloggers approach the monumental task of SEO and PPC: hiring an expert agency, or going DIY. If you take the agency route, make sure to find a qualified professional with experience working with bloggers who can spell out the entire content marketing process before you take the plunge. Don’t settle for an agency that can’t do the heavy lifting for you.

If you choose the DIY path, then roll up your sleeves and get ready to learn how PPC complements organic SEO. By using the two together, you can gain fast search results even if your blog is new or your audience is small. Also, give up your preconceptions of writing taking “forever” and content marketing being “overwhelming,” and see how you can take full advantage of AI for your content creation as well as your search strategy. Read on to learn what AI can do for you.

Content creation

AI writing tools are gaining momentum. They are extremely helpful with writing SEO-optimized content for blog posts, PPC ads, product descriptions, CTAs, etc. Although some bloggers worry that AI could take their jobs, that’s not how things actually work. AI doesn’t have ideas or goals. It is humans who create trends, define lifestyles, provide confidence and encouragement, design communities. But when it comes to executing the marketing that goes along with it, AI is just very good at accomplishing what we order it to do.

The list of things AI can do for content creation is long:

• save the writer from detailed learning they otherwise have to perform before writing
• outline, title, tag, and content generation
• content analysis
• paraphrasing
• translations
• corrections
• originality check
• understanding the follower’s intent
• and more.

If you want more convincing that AI could be helpful to you, check out the QuillBot review of ten AI content-creating tools.

Although we’ve focused on things related to writing blog posts in this column, let’s not forget that good blog content takes many forms. Smart bloggers will be looking for continuing AI developments in creating and marketing every facet of content from dynamic online engagement to video and podcast creation.

When it comes to content creation, AI is on the verge of doing for bloggers what an academic paper-writing service does for overwhelmed college students. And that’s great news for blog marketers with tons of content deadlines.

Analyzing big data is a big deal

The first commandment of marketing is “know thy audience.” To do anything — conceive a strategy, write copy, or increase conversions for your existing PPC campaigns — you have to know the people you are addressing. Only then, you can personalize and optimize your content.

That starts with finding more followers, and naturally that leads to the topic of AI-assisted lead generation, where intelligent automation can manage backend processes as well as interactive public-facing functions of generating leads, such as personalized promotional email campaigns or even AI-assisted chat boxes to support events your blog might promote.

And let’s not forget about the importance of monitoring the competition. After all, what AI does best is collect and analyze data. Thus, AI tools can help you thoroughly track competitive behavior and follow emerging trends. If you never find enough time to read the hundreds of blogs that are competing for your reader, then remember, the amount of data AI can analyze can’t even be compared with anything achievable by human experts.

By the way, just because AI is brilliant at analyzing big data, don’t overlook how useful it can be with “little data” as well. For example, if you blog for a business that uses a VOIP phone service, you could engage in call recording and let an AI tool scan what callers say for keywords and trends. (Are their mentions of Problem A or Solution B increasing? Are they influenced by Trend C or Celebrity D?) Analysis of consumer call information can help you choose new content directions, identify better search terms to bid on, or update your strategy. Make sure to customize your communications so that AI can access audience-generated data.

Identify the best bids

The so-called bidding for ad space or position is the digital version of an auction. In the process of bidding, Google rents the space for ads to those who offer the largest amount. And guess who the auctioneer is? AI, of course.

Bloggers who advertise know that bidding is closely related to keywords, as everyone wants their paid ads to be shown to the most relevant searches. Not only does that bring better results in terms of leads, reads, and likes, it also can involve a pretty big expense. But, just as Google relies on its intelligence systems, so can you. In fact, AI is one of the biggest PPC trends for bloggers and marketers to make use of in the coming year.

How does AI help you here? In many ways. It can automatically detect weak keywords and freeze them. Furthermore, it enables easy modifications, split testing, and more effective bidding. All these options make your audience exposure much more efficient.

Also, AI’s ability to hone in on keywords can help in other ways, too. For example, a strong, evergreen keyword in your area of specialization will always be a good domain name choice, menu item, page title, or even product name. In some cases, it might even suggest a logo design or mascot – all things that can boost brand identity and recognition among the consumers you are working to attract. In blogging terms, if you capture a domain name that mirrors one of your key search terms, you can point it to your branded blog. That not only helps attract readers but also blocks competing bloggers from using that keyword-rich domain name.

Make predictions

Knowing which keywords are relevant to your blog is critically important. However, in the highly volatile context of the contemporary internet, predicting both popular and unpopular phrases in time is essential for outrunning the competition, and nowhere is that more important than blogging. Knowing which keywords will become (or stop being) relevant takes you to a whole new level of marketing efficiency.

This affects more than your standard marketing. Let’s say something happens to cast a shadow on your reputation. You’ll need to do more than respond to negative online reviews; you’ll need to find ways to predict where that trend is going, and then remove, minimize, or repair negative online search results so consumers and followers will be attracted to you, not be pushed away. Using AI for fast, deep SEO-related solutions is becoming an essential part of modern reputation management.

You’ve probably guessed this — AI has psychic abilities as well. Because it can access and process extensive amounts of data, AI understands consumer behavior patterns and psychology exceptionally well. Therefore, it can help you stay up-to-date with the latest trends and minimize losses of time or PPC funds in the future.

Save time

The best thing about AI is its colossal efficiency. The amount of data it processes in minutes or hours is something a human would need a lifetime to match. It enables quicker content generation, much more thorough and reliable data analytics, and much easier coding. All these features relieve you and those who support you from tedious, repetitive chores, leaving you more time for the creative work you love.

While AI can show you where to go and help save time getting there, it can also show you what to avoid. For example, AI will automatically detect issues such as dropping traffic and weak keywords, usually before you will notice them and keep you from investing your time and money in tactics that are no longer working, or trends that have lost their momentum.

AI can help in other areas of your blogging business as well. If your content creation drives sales on your blog, and you sell at a steady volume, then you’ll want to associate yourself with a payment processor whose systems are built with AI and machine learning technologies. You won’t have to manage the AI/ML tech directly on your blog because payment processors do that for you – but you will benefit from it. That’s because current credit card payment trends include higher credit card acceptance rates and faster processing, resulting in more sales for you.

Wrapping up

Expert bloggers know that marketing that integrates both SEO and PPC has an excellent chance of success. Although pay-per-click was initially an advertising tool established to benefit outbound marketing, it has become a huge compliment to inbound marketing strategies as well. And that’s why it matters to bloggers.

As content marketing, analytics, SEO and PPC tasks have become thoroughly automated, they have opened the door for AI to enter the picture and become the superpower every blogger wants to have in their corner. After all, the more valuable your content is for users, the more search engines will reward it with traffic. AI is not yet perfect, but even in its emerging state, it brings a wealth of advantages to every blogger who understands its capacity to boost the performance of content creation, operations, and promotion. What’s not to like?