AI, Chat GPT, and SEO are all becoming household names. Well, household names if you live with anyone in tech or marketing.
As we speak, the rapid evolution of these technologies is changing the landscape of how we search. AI is creating complex solutions to complex problems faster than we can keep up.
So, how will AI change how your business optimizes for search and launch marketing campaigns in the future?
The short answer is that it’s going to change the landscape drastically. But probably not in the ways you think. Just because you can use these chatbot developments to create content doesn’t mean you should abandon your marketing strategies just yet.
These tools aren’t sharp enough to pass the scrutinous eye of consumers, whose goals, needs, and behaviours are changing just as rapidly. The rules and regulations surrounding SEO and search are already difficult to navigate, much less employ to your advantage.
Businesses serious about growth need a marketing companies to build the most optimized solutions to maximize growth.
In this article, we’ll talk about SEO trends, artificial intelligence’s role in marketing, and how humanized content is still critical to building your business.
Summary:
The SEO and Search Landscape
The search landscape has evolved tenfold since the first search engines were launched. To understand the implications of the evolving neural networks and major SEO trends, it’s important to know how we got here.
The Evolution of SEO: A Short Timeline
In the beginning, there was Tim Berners-Lee. If you don’t remember that name from history class, don’t worry—you’re not getting old. He probably wasn’t in your textbook. Nonetheless, on August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee launched the world’s first website.
We’ve come a long way from that rudimentary code that built the first site. Platforms like Excite were launched next to revolutionize information cataloguing with keyword sorting.
Shortly after, Yahoo and Google showed up on the scene and drastically improved how data was indexed and delivered. These tech giants quickly saw the importance and opportunity for bigger and better searchability.
As did marketing companies.
Organizations quickly took advantage of the algorithms in place with word stuffing, excessive tagging, and backlinking. Updates to the algorithm would often take months, so black-hat SEO tactics littered the search landscape.
Before long, Google began developing better strategies to even the playing field—strategies and penalties, that is. The search algorithms got better.
At the same time, Google created the universal search to capture optimal results from social media and beyond. SERPs were no longer functioning to give users single answers and instead provided full experiences.
Tools like featured snippets, knowledge graphs, videos, and related searches were all a part of the move toward a more user-centric experience. With each update, Google continues to make it clear that they put users first.
The state of SERPs today is thanks to several updates and trends that gained traction in 2022.
2022 SEO Trends That Set the Standard in 2023
In 2022, the search landscape began to shift. There was a bigger emphasis on reviews, multimedia content, and “people-first” practices, which solidified their space in SEO handbooks across the world.
Below are a few trends that graduated to ‘best practice’ in 2023.
1. Reviews became essential.
When it comes to SEO, reviews have always been important. But now, they are critical. The March 2022 Google update saw the company turn their focus to identifying high-quality reviews.
This heavy emphasis has brought review generation to the top of the priority list for many marketers. In turn, it has ultimately changed the way businesses ask for and interact with reviews.
Once upon a time, having a bad review was an ominous promise of certain death. This idea is changing thanks to growing skepticism and an increased number of AI bots.
Now, businesses with around 10% of negative reviews are considered more trustworthy and rank higher among search results. In addition, those businesses that are quick to resolve complaints could generate higher GBP conversions when the owner is responsive.
How does this impact SEO best practices?
Businesses should no longer be going to extremes to remove negative reviews. Instead, they should be prioritizing getting quality reviews and interacting with them.
2. Video is now a priority.
In line with redefining the user experience to include resources rather than simple answers, video is becoming crucial for SEO.
Thanks to social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels, video is now a significant source of organic traffic. In short—it is vital.
Video content can come in the form of testimonials or simple how-tos. Regarding search engine optimization, companies with high-quality audiovisual content score better and rank higher on search results pages.
3. There are new ways to optimize pages.
Zero-click content is real, and many creators tend to overlook this. You’re missing out on valuable traffic if you’re not optimizing your informational pages.
Zero-click traffic happens when web browsers find the information they need without clicking on the content. These pages generally have a low conversion rate.
However, optimizing information with GBP or the knowledge graph is an excellent way to make your website a go-to resource in your field.
The AI Evolution
When OpenAI released Chat GPT in November 2022, the tech world knew the time had come—AI has moved to the forefront of search. Tech giants Microsoft and Google quickly moved in to spearhead the integration of AI into search.
This development is not unprecedented; nonetheless, it is changing the fundamentals of the search landscape.
Of course, everyone has an opinion on these features’ scalability, accuracy, and competency, but the bottom line is that they’re here. The faster agencies embrace them, the better off they will be. AI is going to be a powerful resource for those who are quick adopters and potentially the downfall of those who aren’t.
How do we know? Well, the evolution of AI over the last 20 years is a great metric for understanding how it will continue to change search, SEO, and marketing in general.
Artificial intelligence and automation are giving search a greater bandwidth to bring users better, more accurate content. With machine learning, better pattern recognition, and advanced natural language processing, AI is becoming moving beyond a trend.
Voice search
The evolution of conversational AI has allowed for substantial innovation in text analytics. Over ten years ago, bots like Alexa, Google dot, and Siri changed how users input search queries.
Voice searches generally include more conversational words and users, therefore, expect more conversational answers.
Web browsers and smart device owners now ask questions like who, what, and why. These advanced language processes require AI to pick up on context clues to provide proper results. In other words, these bots had to be able to interpret semantic searches.
In response to this evolution, search engines like Google have adapted their mechanisms for building SERPs.
Today, over 10 years later, this focus on semantic searches has become foundational to how bots like chatGPT deep search and learn from the neural network.
For the last few years, Google has been focused on bringing answers to search queries faster and more completely. The focus on features like the knowledge graph and featured snippets helped to do this.
Overall, the last 15 years have been a refinement of our current search practices with minimal major upsets.
However, with the advent of bots like Chat GPT and BARD, that is changing. AI is taking up more space online and in the world of business.
One way that we’re seeing this happen in real-time is the implementation of Chatbots. These virtual helpers have become a main staple on websites and even on social media. But we shouldn’t be quick to forget how they looked in the early days of their implementation.
Remember the stories of bots getting embroiled in fights with each other over Twitter?
AI programs like BARD are still very much in a similar stage. As adoption grows, the kinks will be worked out. However, that is still a ways off.
Now, most chatbots are found on website landing pages, offering you help or asking if you have any questions regarding a product. This type of integration is to be expected from AI and will likely be the more realistic implementation of AI programs like ChatGPT in the future.
At the moment, however, most of the content created by AI falls somewhere in the middle of perfect and robotic. AI has yet to achieve the level of human emotion that is critical to good marketing.
As the adoption of AI programs grows, their capabilities will grow as well, thanks to machine learning.
In terms of the future, marketers are in for some major changes. AI will become a major player in building marketing content. With the help of humans, chatbots and other AI systems will be useful in building more quality content, faster.
For this reason, any business looking to implement AI will also need to hire a reviewer to build upon what has already been written. AI tools help scale up content production. However, they still need to be more complex to stand on their own.
Why You Should Continue to Use a Marketing Agency
As artificial intelligence becomes more comprehensive, the question of why you should continue to use an agency to market your business is more prevalent.
Digital technology has a heavy hand in the frequency of this question. But as we discussed earlier, programs like Chat GTP and BARD cannot stand alone as content creators.
That being said, they will be powerful tools for marketing agencies to employ.
Last year alone, businesses spent a total of 616 billion dollars on digital advertising. That number is only going to increase.
As the digital age continues and SEO and the search landscape evolve, creating content that can traverse the nuances of neural networks will only get more complicated.
And while it’s exciting to think about the future of artificial intelligence, we are still far off from replacing human sentiment, content capability, or grammatical nuances.
In short, diving headfirst into an AI-only marketing plan would be like putting quantity over quality. But when you consider combining AI with a strategic marketing plan and humanizing content, you get the best of both worlds.
What AI will do is make marketing agencies more valuable, and here’s why:
1. AI Makes Data Collection and Interpretation Easier
When it comes to building a marketing campaign, data is everything. Currently, many companies are Frankensteining CRMs, CSMs, and a vast array of other plug-in options and software to collect and interpret data.
The rise of AI in marketing will help alleviate the need for this as it can create and interpret large data lakes. Tools like text analytics can leverage natural language processing to reveal trends, user data, and other insights faster and cheaper.
Essentially, the advent of AI in marketing is akin to the rise of textile machines at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Content creation will be faster, smarter, and more potent than ever.
Thanks to machine learning, pattern recognition, and deep learning, AI can collect and interpret more accurate user data in less time.
2. AI Is Collaborative
Just as AI will change how marketing companies analyze data, it will also revolutionize how marketers can build strategies and synthesize research.
Think of AI as the hyper-efficient sidekick of a marketing agency.
Imagine this scenario: A tech company hires a marketing company to build a comprehensive marketing strategy and, of course, all the content that goes with it. This includes building out a blog section.
Instead of spending weeks becoming an expert on all the content that could be put on the blog, a marketer can simply type her query into the AI chatbot.
After checking the sources, she can then use the response as a first draft for whatever article she’s writing that day.
She can also leverage proofreading skills to edit her final drafts and even reformat her post into corresponding ad copy or other important content.
For businesses, this means that they are able to get higher quality marketing material faster. It’s a win-win.
3. AI Technology Requires Expert Guides
Undoubtedly, features like chatbots and AR are going to become large players in customer interactions and SEO.
The role of marketing agencies like Beanstalk will be to help businesses evolve and identify smart implementations of things like AI, AR, and VR assets to promote growth in a rapidly changing online world.
Beyond this, your everyday search engines are not going anywhere—and neither is the practice of SEO. Because AI does not optimize for SEO when creating content, marketing agencies will be critical in optimizing content created by AI bots like ChatGPT or Google’s Bard.
Marketing agencies are going beyond their prescribed roles to become AI experts. Essentially they will serve as the navigators for large businesses attempting to go through the nuances of evolving search landscapes.
AI Is Here to Stay
We have come a long way since the birth of the first website. Marketers and businesses worked together to adapt time and time again to traverse the complicated digital universe. The rise of AI will be no different.
Of course, that means SEO rules and the search landscape will change. However, change is not a synonym for certain death in this scenario. In fact, its most impressive search capabilities will help businesses and marketers become more fluent and efficient SEO content producers.
Companies that remain agile among emerging technologies will find themselves to be innovative pack leaders in their sector.
If you’re curious about how AI and SEO will impact your business or marketing plan, contact us today. Beanstalk is a leader in cutting-edge tech and strategies to help you grow your business.
Let us show you how AI is revolutionizing the world. The tools of the future are AI, and it’s up to you to decide if you’re going to use them.
