Using AI for SEO: Tips, Tools, and Strategies

You can use AI for multiple purposes—SEO is one of them.

Optimization is a long-fought battle by many brands and writers. It’s a vast subject with multiple facets like on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. 

When you write website content or a blog post, it isn’t easy to double-check each SEO checkpoint for ranking. So, why not enlist the help of AI? It’ll help you save time, avoid manual errors, and discard obsolete SEO strategies. 

You need to buckle up and go beyond basic SEO strategies like keyword application or white spacing to rank better. AI for SEO helps you tackle customer acquisition problems and align blog or website content according to dynamic changes by the Google algorithm. 

30% of AI in SEO implementers experienced a 6-10% increase in revenue. To achieve this growth, some of the most prominent functions where AI works today are:

• Content creation
• Schema markup creation
• Keyword research
• Keyword density
• Meta content generators

This is just the tip of the iceberg. AI has a lot to offer for content and marketing teams in distress. Before any team implements AI for SEO, the following questions are sure to cross their minds:

• How to implement AI for SEO?
• Which tools best suit my/our needs?
• What are some advanced tips that can help explore the tools in-depth?

If so, you’re in luck. We’ll tackle all these questions and more in this guide and help you get the most out of AI as a writing and SEO assistant. 

How can AI help with SEO?

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is a type of technology that can solve your queries and generate responses based on prompts. It’s a learning model that extracts data from online sources and user behavior.

 Based on the prompt and criteria, these tools use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to analyze user search intent and create tailored content that is more likely to rank higher in SERPs.

For example:

I added a text in Wordtune and asked it to expand the context with its intelligence, and this was the result. Wordtune analyzes the content and adds more sentences based on its data and understanding. 

As we all know, per the profound SEO rules, if you want to rank higher, the content must be unique. However, the idea or content block is a nemesis of every content marketer. To overcome this dilemma, you can use AI to generate ideas, expand content, or cut the fluff to make it crisp and more impactful. 

SEO is not just about keywords anymore. The most recent updates from Google (namely, The Helpful Content Update) remind content marketers and writers to adopt a “People-first” approach.

Hence, SEO now focuses more on the following:

• Search intent: Unique content that defines specific queries 
• Concept: What subtopics do they want to know about?
• In-depth focus: Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge

Hence, it’s not all sprinkling in every paragraph and distributing it. You actually have to bring something to the table.

Before we jump into the tips and tools, let’s discover how AI helps you!

Ways to use AI in SEO

AI is your assistant, not your replacement. They help aid in tedious tasks and scope the content or website quickly and save time to focus more on core activities like promotion, creation, and meetings. 

Here are some ways in which AI help you achieve pivotal success in SEO:

1. Finding new opportunities

Before you jump on optimizing your content, scoping out new opportunities is crucial. AI helps to find these opportunities and leverage them before your competitor does. From finding new or unexplored keywords to link-building opportunities, AI helps you find the right move and target your audience. 

In essence, AI analyzes the relationship between sites, competitor domain score, and content pages and finds value in obscured pages.

If I search the keyword “Blogging tools” on Wordtracker, it results in a list of keywords with volume, competition, and their appearance in anchor text and title. 

Finding these opportunities alone demands a lot of creative power, but you can preserve your energy with different tools available online. 

2. Content creation

Discussions about AI content have been all up in our feeds since last year. With use cases to online groups for AI content discussion, you can find different instances where AI content tools have been of great help to teams. 

Using tools like Wordtune, you can avoid errors, expand on ideas, write without exhaustion, and generate text while you’re in the driver’s seat.

You can ask AI to write in different content formats for you and you can edit the result as per your tone, target, and consciousness. 

Here’s the result where I asked Wordtune to write a blog post. Now, I feel the content is good enough, but it needs a personal touch I can edit and add. It also lacks space breakup and subheads, which I would consider adding.

In the end, this result will help me find useful data, and I won’t have to hop from link to link on SERPS for the right definitions. 

Our mind can only generate so many ideas in a day, and if you have an additional hand, writing more content will also become easier.

3. Keyword research

Keywords are specific words or phrases that help find the user intent and define what the content is about. Your audience uses these keywords to satisfy their queries and it’s what Google uses to rank your content.

This writer used the SemRush tool to find the difficulty of ranking and the number of searches for the same. 

Since he had AI, he could determine how many people were searching for specific keywords. It would definitely be a daunting task to find out the difficulty of a specific word unless you’re a genius with math and algebra formulas fed into your brain!

With the right keyword research tool, you can create cornerstone content, content cluster, and content calendars ahead of time!

Not only this, AI can sort through hundreds or thousands of words with just a simple click which would otherwise take millennia to achieve.

4. Title and Meta tag generation

Meta titles and SEO titles are the first blocks of text a user comes across while searching on Google [unless they visit your website directly.]

Meta titles are summaries that are 150-160 characters long and define the content on a page. On the other hand, SEO titles are the headers that Google indexes to include in the database. 

AI takes the keyword and title from you and generates titles and ideas to describe the content written. 

AI SEO tools for meta descriptions should have 3 qualities:

• Should follow the 155-character limit
• Create new descriptions or titles without plagiarism 
• The content should make sense and not be a jumble of words

If a tool stands test to the challenge of these 3 criteria, you can easily write titles and descriptions in minutes without worrying about Google’s policies.

5. Find FAQs

Frequently asked questions allow you to directly target specific customers for their queries and also rank for multiple keywords. 

You can use AI to search for these FAQs and understand what are the questions that keep your target audience up at night (or, aggravated during the day).

I recently wrote for a client whose guidelines specifically mentioned adding 3 FAQs at the end of each blog post. And I was on the clock to submit multiple posts within the week. So, I hopped on to AI tools to search FAQs of related keywords—enter the keyword, filter for FAQs, and check the volume of searches for the same. 

While user intent is important, blogs are also meant to rank high to drive more sales and score more leads. With multiple FAQs, you can—score multiple featured snippets.

6. Extract statistics

You can use stats to build—social proof for your statements and build credibility. AI can scour thousands of words in a blink and highlight key extracts for you to find stats. 

For example:

By using the Wordtune Read extension, I can summarize blocks of text with one click. Most of the time, writers are unaware of the stats present in a post. This tool highlights key points and allows you to find stats that might be hidden under blocks of texts or subheads. 

The best part—you won’t have to enter any prompt to get these key highlights, you can just click on the extension, and it’ll get the key points for you.

7. Add emotions

When you target humans, you need to resonate with their feelings and make them feel things while they read your post. For example, AI can help add a casual, formal, friendly, serious, or funny tone to a text that makes it more personal and engaging to read.

I wanted to add a casual tone here—Wordtune’s casual feature came to the rescue. In the same way, I can use it to shorten or expand content and create more SEO-focused results.

The 9 Best AI tools for SEO

Every time I open my browser, a new AI tool or extension burrows its way into my notifications. And while having more options is good, an overwhelmed mind floods the creativity. 

As a writer, I use multiple tools daily to aid in SEO, and while some great sports features, some tools always fall short of satisfying results. So here’s a list of the best ones:

1. Wordtune

Wordtune is an all-rounder when you want to create SEO-optimized content for different narratives. 

It helps me remove errors, write better sentences, complete my thoughts, and even add idioms and counterarguments to a post.

As you can see, it helps you rewrite, and add spices (a new feature). This feature allows you to add statistical facts, make a joke, expand on an idea, and emphasize, or explain sentences. You can accept the first suggestions from the editor or ask for another one that matches your writing personality.

Wordtune is a fun tool for writing that keeps you engaged while writing and also allows you to explore the internet in less time!

‍

2. MarketBrew

MarketBrew is an AI SEO software built by search engineers to help your content outperform the competitors. It is wired to act as a search engine. Its search engine model mimics the algorithm and helps you create content to outperform algorithms. 

This tool adjusts its features to fit your target audience and acts as a pilot test for the content you put out. This tool provides the user with a precise description of what distinguishes the first result from the second one; such as the HTML content or even the Meta description. This cuts off the time that a user spends manually analyzing the internal intricacies of a page or website.

To use this, you’ll need to pay $50 / crawl or $400 per search engine model, USD 65k per year minimum which is quite pricey if you see it from the perspective of small teams or startups.

‍‍

3. Semrush

Semrush is a full-fledged SEO tool for research, analysis, link opportunities, domain overview, and multiple keyword-related needs. It boasts 55+ sub-features for SEO, content marketing, competitor research, PPC, and social media marketing.

Users especially admire its Keyword Magic tool that allows you to search liberally for criteria of— broad match, secondary keywords, phrase match, exact match, and multiple advanced filters.

In this example, I searched for “Email conversion rates,” Its results helped me create a brief for the SEO post in under 1 hour.

I truly love how it tells me the difficulty with color codes. The tools always update the latest data on the website—the downside—limited visibility. If you’re not on their premium plan, you’ll not be able to see all results, which can be frustrating if you’re looking to do extensive analysis through different SEO features. 

To upgrade the tool, you can first try the 7-day free trial to test the features and then decide if you want to buy the paid plan for $141.54 (incl. taxes).

Another special tool in Semrush’s arsenal is the Backlink Audit which determines unique aspects like toxicity score (suspicious links in page), potential linking opportunities, and referral traffic. 

After analyzing these metrics, you can decide if a backlink will help you boost your visibility to the target audience and bring in organic traffic, or if it’ll be lost in the transition of high volume. 

Moreover, this feature helps to:

• Investigate the quality of backlinks through 50+ parameters
• Group referring domains by metrics like IP, category, or link type
• Check for good distribution of anchors and Authority Score
  

Semrush is a tool that allows full-circle SEO audits for teams looking to automate efforts and find better metrics to determine their place amongst the competitors. It’s one of the most lucrative tools for SEO out there.

‍

4. Frase.io

This is a free AI meta-description generator that gets ideas for articles and blog posts. 

It’s a quick solution tool that is free and needs you to just enter the title and keyword, and it’ll do the rest of the job.

The answers it generates are interesting and personalized and follow the instructions meticulously. 

I like that we can adjust the creativity level and calibrate the tone of the description as well. 

It’s an intuitive text editor that uses a topic model to score your content against your competitors. Their list of related topics and the recommended number of mentions for each will help you write like an expert and publish content that Google and your audience will love.

Also, if you don’t want to overload your browser with multiple tools, just use Wordtune for both meta descriptions and writing. It’ll save space and also add more functionality to your writing process.

‍

5. PageSpeed Insights

Page speed is one of the most overlooked SEO aspects of any website. It’s crucial for customer experience and allows the user to scroll faster. Users don’t even flinch when they bounce from one page to another if a page doesn’t load within seconds. 

That’s justified because time is of the essence and users usually have a low attention span (like a goldfish). PageSpeed Insights helps retain visitors and also reduces bounce rates.  

To use this tool, first, enter the URL in the dialogue box:

Once you press “Analyze”, the results will look like this:

It ranks different web pages based on three core vitals of Google and also does a performance diagnosis for your page. This tool is created by Google and helps owners find their ranks for the respective keywords. 

If you fail in the diagnosis, you need to immediately rectify the problems on your page and enhance the speed. Once you pass the diagnosis, you’ll see a significant hike in your organic traffic.

‍‍

6. NitroPack

NitroPack’s tagline says, “Outperform your competitors without writing a single line of code”. It enhances the speed of your website related to all aspects including image, code, and loading speed. 

It has a lot of features and these help with:

Image Optimization

• Lossy and lossless image compression;
• Advanced Lazy loading (including background images defined in the CSS);
• Preemptive image sizing;
• WebP conversion (when supported by the browser).
• Adaptive Image Sizing.

Code Optimization

• HTML, CSS, and JS minification & compression;
• Critical CSS, DNS prefetching, preloading, and more.
• GZIP and Brotli Compression

Loading Optimization

• Built-in global CDN
• Smart cache invalidation;
• Automatic cache warmup;
• Device and cookie-aware caching;
• Browser and session-aware caching.

It’s a better alternative than PageSpeed Insights because you’ll not only know about the problem but the reasons behind it too.

All NitroPack customers get access to our support team for help with general and technical site speed issues.

‍

7. Moz

Moz is an all-in-one SEO toolset for site audits, rank tracking, backlink analysis, and keyword research. 

Moz crawls your site and uncovers technical SEO, allows you to track your website’s rank across 170+ search engines, and tracks the activity for thousands of keywords. It uses charts to define your rank and help you easily track it. 

This tool helps bigger enterprises and small organizations track their SEO success with different plans and is a no-code tool.

‍

8. Pictory

Pictory is an AI video generator that allows you to create videos based on a distinct idea and edit graphics with ease. Visuals are important for any blog. They add context to your text and break the monotony of text in between subheads. 

With Pictory, 

You can create videos in less time and retain more audience while making your content more lively as well. 

As you sign up for the tool, you’ll see a testimonial pop up from one of the customers saying, “My video from Pictory was able to cross a million views.” Impressive—as you enter the workspace of Pictory, you’ll see features to convert the script to video, article to video, edit videos using text, and visuals to video.

I chose the first feature for testing and pasted one of my scripts on it. As soon as I press “Send”, I’m asked to choose a template from the existing options that look like this:

These templates represent different aesthetics and settings. My script was based on an Insurance module, so I chose the “Corporate” template with the aspect ratio of 1:1.

My script was 690 words and Pictory took around 5 minutes, and this was the result:

The video was not very impressive and quite monotonous too, but I feel a small script will do more justice to this tool. 

Regardless, if I want to create a video with text without the hassle of editing on Photoshop, this is the tool I would prefer.

‍

9. Fotor

Just like videos, images for the featured cover, subheads, display images, and other such functions are crucial. And let’s be real—stock photos are being used by every other person online. 

The whole point of SEO is to be unique and target the right audience. Images generated from your unique perspective help achieve this goal. This tool asks you for a prompt, much like other AI tools, and then generates images for you. 

For example:

My prompt was: Hand drawn cute gnomes face in autumn disguise holding pumpkin and maple leaf, detailed face, low angle, high detail, warm lighting, volumetric, godrays, vivid, and beautiful. 

This was the result: 

It took 2 minutes to create this image and the result matches the description a LOT! Let’s try this with a more formal prompt.

The results are satisfactory, if you’re looking for animated blog post covers or looking to add some graphics to your blog posts. 

However, this isn’t ideal for websites that want to have a formal interface and sleek look. If you often write scripts or stories, this tool can help you generate interactive visuals. 

P.S: This could work for pitch decks or the ideation process.

‍

That’s a wrap on AI SEO tools, let’s explore some tips to use them lucratively. 

6 Tips to use AI tools for SEO

You should use AI tools cautiously and find a common ground between your idea of SEO-perfect content. Conscious use of technology will help you rank higher and drive in more sales and traffic to the website. 

Some tips that I stand by are:

1. Always compare and contrast 

Comparison before use helps you avoid disappointment, errors, and time burn. 

There are at least 100+ AI tools for SEO out there. Some are paid, some are free, and some are just incomprehensible. 

So, it’s best to compare and contrast between tools instead of choosing one on a—hunch. 

My process to choose an SEO AI tool looks like this:

• Type the keyword in Google console to find the highest-ranking tools. 
• Go to review websites like “G2”, “GetApp”, and “Trust Radius” to assess the real-life experience of the tool. 
• Compare the pros and cons.
• Choose 2-3 tools then test out their free version. If they’re tools that display unparalleled efficiency, cost, and time savings, I buy their paid version (if they are integral to my daily writing use cases). 

For example, This is an organized view of the TrustRadius review of Wordtune where I can easily scour the pros and cons and see if people find the tool useful or not.

2. Watch tutorials

If you want to find out about the use cases of an AI SEO tool, there is no better source than Youtube. 

To make the most out of an AI tool, you should know how to use each and every hidden feature. To find these, Youtube videos by the company itself or industry leaders work great.

You can easily find these videos on Youtube or even Instagram reels (if you want quick explanations). Or you can check out blog sections of websites to learn more about the tool. 

If I’m ever stuck about how to use an AI tool, my first instinct tells me to check out their blog or talk to their chatbot for more clarity. 

3. Prepare in advance

You don’t want to rely on a new tool in the case of an emergency. To avoid such blunders—plan in advance. 

It’s best to create tool clusters beforehand and add them to your Chrome default screen. In this way, whenever you’re in a bind or looking to do some SEO work, you can just use your chosen tools from the opening screen. 

This helps you maximize the ranking opportunities and avoid delays when working on crucial and time-bound projects. 

With an SEO strategy like this one, you can organize topics and SEO aspects of your website and have more likelihood to rank for your competitor keywords. 

This will help you maximize the opportunity to scope and deviate from threats. Planning in advance is always a move that benefits your overall results. 

4. Treat AI as an assistant 

This phrase has a deeper meaning than what you perceive. AI helps with numerous SEO tasks that can otherwise take up a huge chunk of your day to organize. 

Moreover, whatever results you get, they're from a bot or algorithm that extracts data from the interest and doesn't have its own consciousness. 

Hence, if you write with an AI tool, make sure to use it for ideation and only copy-paste some of its suggestions with proofreading. 

Sometimes the results can be stellar, but often you'll find more scope for improvement. AI doesn't reflect human emotions, and by tweaking the suggestions a bit, you can personalize content into a unique stance. 

For example: If I get a prompt from AI, I would add some more pointers to make it more contextual and add more meat to make it interesting. 

AI evolves and learns more as we use it for different use cases, it'll provide more accurate answers, but its emotional aspect will always depend on you. Moreover, the pattern can be repetitive and obsolete for AI at times, so you need to write it from your perspective. 

5. Trial and error

Put on your exploration hat and don’t be afraid to try new tools whenever you come across them. It helps you find more new and updated features and also enhances your content by using them. 

Moreover, the more you practice the use of AI the more proficient you’ll be at generating organic SEO traffic. Hence, trying new tools helps you explore the vast and evolving tools that can help automate the majority of SEO aspects. 

Understanding the algorithm takes time and to get maximum utility from the tool, it’s crucial to test the feature for multiple prompts, criteria, keywords, and metrics. 

6. Don’t forget about mobile optimization

There are chances you're reading this content on your smartphone right now! Hence, SEO optimization just for desktops is not enough.

It would help if you focused on mobile optimization so any user can have the same experience while going through your content. If your website renders a great experience—you'll have repeating readers and customers. 

For example, SEO for mobile ensures the alignment, font, visuals, and colors are the same as on the desktop version. 

AI for SEO can also help you find canonical links and avoid confusion for the readers and Google spiders, giving them more clarity on your content's meaning. 

7. Refresh content

Statistics, SEO rules, and user trends are always on the move. 

Hence, it’s important you use AI to recognize and discard the futile aspects of your content. Your content will become more dynamic and users will come back to explore more if they always have new stats to explore and add to their database. 

Technology is a boon for SEO optimization

SEO is and will always remain integral to the success of any online marketing efforts. 

If you want to be on the radar of your potential leads and clients, leverage—AI.

SEO drives 53% of traffic on a website, and if you're looking to gain a competitive edge, it should be your first step to optimize your website for it. 

So be witty about the use of AI and maximize your success with this wonder of technology.