4 Incredibly Smart Ways to Use AI and Machine Learning for SEO

Your favorite search engine is powered by artificial intelligence, so it makes sense your SEO activities should be, too.

After all, AI can help marketers optimize and rank at scale, thanks to the power of machine learning.

But how do you discover what AI can actually do for your SEO?

What tools do you look at?

In short, how the heck do you get started with AI for SEO?

Don’t worry, we’re here to help.

At the Marketing AI Institute, we’ve spent years profiling more than 40 AI-powered vendors, and track more than 750 AI companies with combined funding north of $4 billion.

Here are some of the top companies we’ve found to supercharge your SEO strategy with a healthy dose of artificial intelligence.

1. Optimize for Search Engines—at Scale

BrightEdge is a global leader in SEO and content performance marketing that blends search intent discovery, optimized content creation, and performance measurement into one integrated solution.

The company’s platform is powered by DataMind, their proprietary AI system. BrightEdge’s AI identifies consumer search trends, automates keyword research, and prescribes actions based on the data.

That makes it dead simple for search marketers to rank their content in the smartest, most efficient way possible.

The platform has three AI-powered components:

• Content Discovery — BrightEdge’s AI surfaces high-value topics and offers recommendations for improving content performance.

• Content Development — The platform automates critical SEO activities like using header tags, cross-linking, and optimizing copy.

• Content Activation — With a button click, marketers can then activate new content at any time. Each piece of content is “optimized for organic performance and customer experience—such as schema for structure, AMP for better mobile experiences, and Open Graph for Facebook. Marketers can amplify their content in social networks for greater visibility,” says BrightEdge CTO and cofounder Lemuel Park.

The result? AI-powered SEO—at scale.

2. Manage Business Search Results Across Voice and Text Search

Yext is a Digital Knowledge Management (DKM) platform that gives companies control over their brand experiences across maps, apps, search engines, voice assistants, and other intelligent services.

The platform makes sure your business pages, listings, and reviews across locations and platforms are consistent, accurate, and up-to-date—all of which are musts for great SEO and consumer experiences.

This includes business data management in voice search, the critical new frontier of the search landscape. Yext’s platform will make sure the voice search algorithms used by today’s tech giants have the most accurate information about your business.

3. Identify Ranking Opportunities and Gaps

MarketMuse is an AI-driven assistant for building content strategies. The company’s platform shows you exactly how you rank in topic areas related to your industry compared to competing ranked sites.

It then identifies gaps in how your existing content is optimized, as well as how you can create new content to seize SEO opportunities. The tool will even recommend changes as you write, so you can better capture the attention of search engines.

4. Create SEO-Friendly Pillar Content and Topic Clusters

Marketing automation platform HubSpot has a ton of features to help marketers produce and publish optimized content. One of them, the Content Strategy tool, is an AI-powered piece of that puzzle.

The Content Strategy tool “uses machine learning to understand the themes that search engines associate your content with.” This results in suggestions for pillar content and topic clusters that are critical to capture search traffic.