If you work in digital marketing or SEO, you hear about AI constantly. “AI will take your job!” “AI is the future of everything!” There’s a lot of noise, a lot of hype. As someone who’s been in digital marketing for a long long time, managing SEO & SEM, I wanted to share my perspective.
Let’s cut through the buzzwords. How is AI actually changing the SEO tasks we do every single day? Is it really a revolution, or just a new set of tools? Based on my experience advising clients and using these tools myself, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. AI isn’t replacing the need for strategic thinking, but it is fundamentally shifting how we approach our daily work. Let’s look at the changes happening right now.
H2: Keyword Research: Getting Insight Beyond Keyword Relations
Keyword research has always been the foundation of good SEO. Remember spending hours brainstorming variations, checking volumes, and guessing intent? AI hasn’t made keyword research disappear, but it’s making it much smarter and faster. While the keyword data is not up to date within the large language model of the AI, it can give suggestion which an insight that sometimes we amiss in looking for variations and corelation.
- Finding Hidden Gems: Tools integrating AI can analyze vast amounts of data to uncover long-tail keywords and topic clusters I might have missed. Instead of just looking at search volume, AI helps in Understanding User Intent, which is crucial. Did the user want to buy, learn, or compare? AI helps clarify this better than ever.
- Semantic Understanding: AI excels at understanding relationships between words and concepts. This helps build topic clusters that cover a subject comprehensively, which Google increasingly values. Think less about exact match keywords and more about covering the user’s entire information need. In my work optimizing campaigns at Misumi, understanding the precise B2B intent behind keywords was crucial for reducing Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). AI tools today could have accelerated that analysis significantly.
- Efficiency: Brainstorming sessions that used to take hours can now be jumpstarted with AI. Asking an AI like ChatGPT or Gemini for keyword ideas related to a core topic, or analyzing competitor keywords with tools like Ahrefs or Semrush (which now incorporate AI features), saves valuable time that can be reinvested in strategy.
H2: Content Creation: From Blank Page to First Draft Faster
Let’s be honest: staring at a blank page is tough. AI is becoming a powerful assistant in the content creation process, though it requires careful guidance and good prompts (check out my past writing: Guide on Practical AI Prompting for some ideas).
- Outlining and Structuring: Need a blog post structure fast? AI can generate logical outlines based on top-ranking content or your specific requirements. This provides a solid framework to build upon. I often use this to quickly map out the key sections for a new article, ensuring I cover the essential points.
- Brainstorming Angles: Stuck for ideas? AI can suggest blog post titles, different angles on a topic, or questions your audience might be asking. It’s like having a brainstorming partner available 24/7.
- Summarizing and Repurposing: AI tools are great at summarizing long reports or articles, which is useful for creating snippets for social media or understanding competitor content quickly.
- Drafting Assistance (with a Caveat): Yes, AI can generate initial drafts. However, in my experience, this output always needs significant editing. It often lacks unique voice, personal experience (the ‘E’ in EEAT!), and the nuanced understanding a human writer brings. Think of it as a starting point, not a finished product. When I was managing content production at Sriboga Flour Mill, ensuring brand voice consistency was key; AI drafts need careful shaping to meet those standards.
H2: On-Page SEO: Refining Optimization at Scale
Optimizing individual pages used to be a manual checklist process. AI is helping make this more data-driven and efficient.
- Content Audits: AI-powered tools can analyze your content against top-ranking pages, suggesting areas for improvement like keyword density, readability, internal linking opportunities, and semantic relevance. This speeds up the auditing process immensely. There are a lot of paid SAAS that can handle this, such as MarketMuse or SURFER Seo. But in my case I usually create an AI Agent with RAG, that uses the content strategy document and crosscheck alignment between the content with our goal, target audience and any SEO strategy such as content pillar, EEAT principle etc.
- Alt Text Generation: Automate generate alt text for images using AI for SEO-friendly alt-text and better accessibility. In small scale, images alt text generation can be handle manually, but when it is larger scale it can be cumbersome. With AI vision, the image analysis for text generation can be done in large scale and fast. One of the tools for this are ALTTEXT.AI
- Internal Linking Suggestions: Finding relevant pages to link to within your own site can be time-consuming. Some tools now use AI to suggest relevant internal links, improving site structure and distributing link equity more effectively. This was a key part of boosting organic traffic while i was at Misumi, an industrial component ecommerce, and AI can streamline finding those opportunities.
- Schema Markup Ideas: Generating structured data (schema markup) helps search engines understand your content better. AI tools can sometimes help identify opportunities or even generate basic schema code, making this technical task more accessible.
H2: Technical SEO: Diagnosing Issues More Efficiently
While maybe less “day-to-day” for everyone, AI is starting to make inroads into technical SEO diagnostics.
- Pattern Recognition: Analyzing server log files or crawl data can be tedious. AI has the potential to identify patterns indicating crawl issues, server errors, or indexation problems much faster than manual analysis. Imagine diagnosing website slowdowns like those I occasionally faced at my past companies during traffic surges – AI could potentially pinpoint bottlenecks faster in the future.
- Prioritizing Fixes: Some advanced tools are exploring using AI to prioritize technical SEO fixes based on potential impact, helping teams focus their efforts where it matters most. We can see these in work while we do a site audit in tools such ahrefs or SEMRush
The area is still evolving for everyday use, the potential for AI to assist in complex technical analysis is significant. For now, tools like Google Search Console remain essential, but expect AI enhancements to make them even more powerful.
H2: Reporting and Analysis: Finding the Story in the Data
As someone who built performance dashboards using Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio), I know how much time data analysis and reporting can take. AI is starting to help here too.
- Automated Insights: Instead of just presenting raw data, some analytics platforms are incorporating AI to automatically surface key trends, anomalies, or insights. “Organic traffic from this campaign increased 20% week-over-week” is more useful than just seeing the numbers.
- Natural Language Queries: Imagine asking your analytics platform, “Which landing pages had the biggest drop in traffic last month?” AI is enabling this kind of natural language interaction with data. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) in this case has a built-in insight feature that handle the NLP queries data interation.
- Report Summarization: AI can help summarize key performance indicators (KPIs) and trends from lengthy reports, making it easier to communicate results to stakeholders.
Conclusion: Your Strategy Still Matters Most
So, is AI taking over SEO? My take is clear: No. AI is transforming how we execute SEO tasks, making us more efficient and data-driven. It automates repetitive work, surfaces insights faster, and assists in creation. But it doesn’t replace the core need for human strategy, creativity, critical thinking, and understanding your audience.
The real change is that SEO professionals now need to be proficient not just in SEO principles, but also in leveraging these AI tools effectively. It’s about working with AI, not being replaced by it. The hype is real in the sense that AI is impactful, but the day-to-day reality is more about augmentation than automation replacing the strategist.
Start experimenting! Try incorporating one or two AI tools into your workflow for specific tasks like keyword brainstorming or outlining. See how it works for you. The landscape is changing fast, and adaptability is key. How are you using AI in your daily SEO work? Let me know in the comments below
