Are You Using AI In Digital Marketing?

It’s been a while since my last LinkedIn article.

Since then, there’s been some exciting changes and innovations at our digital agency that I’m keen to share and that I hope might help you with your marketing plans for 2022. 

The focus of today’s article is the use of AI in marketing. More specifically, why we use AI in SEO, why it’s the future of our industry and how you can start incorporating this into your own processes. 

When we hear people talking about artificial intelligence, we think about human-like robots, maybe the Boston Dynamics robots. While all of these AI innovations are exciting and have clear potential for use in the future, the reality of using AI in SEO and for digital marketing is maybe less exciting than its use in the home, but here at Neural Edge, it’s just as important. 

I’ve been working in SEO for nearly a decade now. I started building websites using Wix and then WordPress, which got me into learning about SEO and eventually digital marketing. 

What I’ve learnt over that time is that SEO takes time. I’m not just talking about how long it takes for a client to see the needle move in terms of new traffic. I’m talking about the days and weeks of prep work that goes into creating an SEO campaign. 

For anyone that’s done SEO, you’ll know what I’m talking about. 

Behind The Scenes of SEO

Here’s a shortlist of some of the main tasks we carry out for a client before a single piece of content or line of code has been changed on a website.

• Full audit of your website to see what keywords you rank for, which pages are driving traffic and which pages are redundant and need culling
• Technical check of your website to ensure Google and other search engine crawlers can easily read and crawl your website so they can index it quickly and correctly 
• Review of your competitor’s websites in the SERPs to see what opportunities you might be missing and how you can stay one step ahead
• Keyword research to identify hundreds if not thousands of keywords that are relevant to your website, cover every stage of intent and that you have a realistic chance of rankings for
• A full backlink profile check to see where external links are coming from and to see if there are any bad links that need disavowing 
• An audit of your social media profiles and how we might leverage these platforms to promote new website content to increase reach and frequency

As you can imagine, this is not only a lot of data to analyse; it’s a huge amount of data to collect. 

That’s where we leverage the power of AI for SEO. It would (and did) take a human (me) days to gather this data, transform it into useful insights and craft a strategy using the data points I’d collected. 

Leveraging AI In Digital Marketing 

AI allows the data collection process to happen much, much faster - to the point where we might be able to gather all of the information we need using specialist AI tools in 24-48 hours. 

This innovation in the SEO industry means that the manual element of data collection is significantly reduced, so we can spend more time planning a strategy and implementing it. 

The benefit for our clients is that we can gather more insights, create a more comprehensive strategy and produce more content.

AI Writing Tools

The use of AI in SEO doesn’t stop there, though. While AI writing tools and assistants have (and continue to be) trashed, it’s time for marketers to get over it and realise these tools have genuine potential to help us as marketers deliver better results for our clients. 

No, AI writing tools like Jarvis are not at the stage where you can set it to write a blog post, you come back 2 minutes later, and it’s done. And I don’t think it ever will get to that stage. But, it’s a fantastic tool for generating a bit of inspiration when writing a long-form post, re-wording a phrase or paragraph that doesn’t quite work and trying out different writing styles to match the different tones and personalities of your customer’s brands. 

You don’t need to look far to see some AI writing fails. Major news outlets use these tools all the time, and you can see it in poorly written articles that have grammatical errors and seem to repeat the same paragraph over and over in a slightly different way, different way, different way... 

AI In Marketing Is The Future

It all boils down to this: using AI in SEO isn’t shady, risky, unprofessional, a shortcut or a cop-out. If you’re performing any SEO or content writing activities, having fundamental marketing knowledge is essential and only then can you understand how to use these tools to their maximum potential.

There’s a lot of hate for platforms like Fiverr, where you can buy cheap content that probably isn’t of the highest quality and is produced by an AI tool. But don’t let that put you off the use of AI in SEO altogether. 

We’re excited to be using AI as part of our marketing toolset and will continue to do so as long as it provides benefits to our customers. 

To find out more about how we use AI in our SEO processes and help you leverage this technology for business success, book a free strategy call with me and let’s talk AI!