Organic search’s share of traffic averages around 53% across industries, finds a study. B2B companies that use SEO well generate 2x more revenue from search than any other channel. For every business—B2B, B2C, B2B2C, D2C etc.— across industries, search engine optimization is an important lever.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can make that even more powerful. McKinsey estimates that generative AI can offer a productivity lift of 10% of marketing spending, a significant part of which goes into SEO. An SEMrush study shows that 68% of businesses report increased content marketing ROI with AI.
With search engines like Google continuously updating their algorithms and the online content landscape rapidly evolving, you need the power of AI to keep up. Let’s see how.
In this blog post, we’ll explore how to use AI for SEO, why it’s crucial, and how you can harness AI tools to achieve higher search rankings, better engagement, and long-term organic growth.
How to Use AI for SEO (Use Cases & Tools)
Understanding AI for SEO
AI for SEO refers to the use of machine learning and natural language processing tools to improve outcomes across the content marketing workflow. This can happen in various ways.
- Content support: Helping teams generate ideas, draft content, plan publication schedule, etc.
- Analytical support: Keyword research, intent analysis, content reporting, and dashboards
- Automation: Enabling automated outreach of guest authors, identifying internal links, monitoring for broken links or non-existent pages
Depending on what you would like AI to help you with, you can choose from the many AI SEO tools available today. Before that, let’s explore some of the most common use cases in SEO that you can use AI for.
How to Use AI for SEO
If you’re the curious type, you’d have already tried tools like ChatGPT for your SEO-related work. In fact, even Google Search offers an AI overview of the search results. So, the possibilities are endless. Let’s look at a few.
1. AI-powered keyword research
AI-powered keyword research is a way to use machine learning models to analyze search trends, map competitor keywords, understand search intent, and make a list of terms you want to rank for.
Why AI?
AI tools for keyword research can analyze vast search data to identify the most relevant and high-performing keywords within seconds. As a result, you can:
- Dramatically scale keyword research without additional resources
- Analyze keyword difficulty, search volume and user intent
- Accurately identify likely-to-rank terms, long-tail keywords, and semantic variations
- Group related keywords, making content optimization for multiple search queries easier
- Access real-time data to effectively respond to emerging trends
Google’s keyword planner is great for volume analysis. Ahrefs and SEMrush are good at identifying competitor keywords and content gaps.
📽️ Bonus watch: Check out the best ways to use AI for marketing!
2. AI-generated content writing
Now that you have your keyword list, it’s time to get writing. Since the emergence of ‘generative’ AI, its use in content creation has skyrocketed. A recent study finds that 85.1% of marketers are using AI for article writing.
Why AI?
AI writing tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, and Copy.ai streamline content creation by generating SEO-friendly blog posts, product descriptions, and marketing copy based on given keywords.
With the right prompt, you can get the AI tool to:
- Follow SEO best practices, such as keyword placement, readability, and content length
- Generate SEO elements, such as meta title, meta description, slugs, etc.
- Create multiple posts in a day, reducing content creation time
- Repurpose existing content for formats, such as social media captions, email newsletters, or video scripts
While AI-generated content should constantly be reviewed and edited by humans to ensure accuracy and originality, its value in accelerating content production and minimizing writers’ block can not be overstated.
3. Content optimization & NLP analysis
Drafting a meaningful blog post is one thing. Making it competitive as content for search engines is quite another. This is where the NLP capabilities of AI tools help.
Why AI?
AI-powered content optimization tools can:
- Analyze top-ranking pages and provide recommendations for improving content quality
- Examine keyword density, readability, semantic relevance, and competitor insights to help marketers optimize their content
- Understand user intent and ensure the content matches what searchers expect to find
- Assess on-page factors such as headings, meta descriptions, and internal linking structures for alignment with Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) guidelines
4. AI-powered link building
We’ve seen a few use cases for on-site SEO, let’s look off-site. Backlink acquisition is crucial for improving domain authority. So far, SEO experts manually research various avenues to identify candidates for collaboration. AI changes that.
Why AI?
AI link-building software like Moz, Majestic, and LinkAssistant can streamline this process by:
- Analyzing competitor backlinks and suggesting high-quality linking opportunities
- Evaluating a website’s relevance, domain authority, and trust score to prioritize outreach
- Automating said outreach with personalized emails, response analytics, and follow ups
- Monitoring industry trends for insights into link-building strategy
5. Automated SERP analysis
Another key aspect of SEO is monitoring how your content appears on the search engine results pages. While trackers have traditionally existed, AI makes it far more effective and scalable.
Why AI?
AI SEO tools like SE Ranking, SpyFu, and RankIQ continuously analyze Google’s SERPs to track ranking fluctuations and competitor strategies. This analysis provides insights into:
- Ranking patterns
- Featured snippet opportunities
- User intent signals for specific keywords
- Competitors’ paid ad strategies
With real-time SERP tracking, you can adapt your SEO strategies proactively, ensuring you stay competitive in the rapidly evolving business landscape.
6. Predictive search trend analysis
Speaking of proactive SEO strategy, AI can also equip marketing teams to forecast likely future demand and prepare for it. Tools like Google Trends, BrightEdge, and Crayon use machine learning to detect shifts in consumer interests and emerging search patterns.
Why AI?
Predictive analytics tools with AI can analyze historical search data and predict future keyword trends, allowing you to create content ahead of demand.
Let’s say you run a fitness equipment company, you can use AI tools to predict searches for your keywords. For instance, searches for “home gym equipment” might spike every January.
Understanding this can help plan your SEO activities to better meet future needs. AI can also suggest content refresh by identifying older pages that need an update!
7. Automated technical SEO audits
The industry best practice is to conduct regular SEO audits to sustain domain authority, update older content, fix technical issues, and maintain content health. However, few organizations have the bandwidth to conduct these audits thoroughly. Along comes AI!
Why AI?
AI-based SEO audit tools like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, and Google Search Console Insights help automate this entire process. AI can accelerate and automate:
- Identifying technical issues that impact a website’s ranking
- Detecting errors such as broken links, duplicate content, slow page speeds, and improper indexing
- Real-time insights for improving Core Web Vitals and mobile friendliness
- Eliminating the recurrence of previously known errors or issues
8. Voice search optimization
While text-based search is the most popular way today, that is dramatically changing. Voice search continues to grow through assistants like Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa. Optimizing content for voice-based search needs an extra hand.
Why AI?
Unlike traditional search, voice queries tend to be longer and more question-based, requiring content to be structured to directly answer user intent. AI is essential for optimizing content to match such conversational queries.
AI tools analyze speech patterns, question-based searches, and featured snippets to determine how to phrase the content. They make formatting suggestions, such as to add FAQ sections or generate schema markup, which increase the chances of ranking for voice search queries.
9. AI-based image & video SEO
YouTube is the second largest search engine, they say. Organizations creating video content need a focused practice of optimizing them for search needs. AI can help with that.
Why AI?
AI tools like Google Vision AI, Cloudinary, and Adobe Sensei assist in improving media-related rankings with a range of capabilities, such as:
- Generating alt text
- Transcribing video content
- Suggesting relevant metadata
- Enhancing image compression, video encoding, and lazy-loading techniques
In fact, AI-powered video transcript generators enable search engines to index videos better, increasing the likelihood of ranking in Google’s video search results and YouTube SEO.
10. SEO performance analysis
Are your SEO efforts paying off? Well, AI can help with that too!
Why AI?
Content performance: AI can analyze user behavior metrics such as bounce rate, dwell time, and click-through rate (CTR) to determine whether a page satisfies search intent. Based on this data, you can continuously improve the quality of the content you put out.
Site structure: Google Analytics, Hotjar, and Crazy Egg use AI to track visitor interactions and provide insights into how the target audience navigate a site. With this data, you can improve user experience by tinkering with the information architecture and user flow.
Engagement: AI tools can segment users based on behavior patterns helping you tailor your content for better engagement.
Personalization: AI-powered chatbots improve user experience by delivering personalized results. This, in turn, boosts SEO performance by increasing page retention and reducing bounce rates.
Sounds exciting? Let’s see what using AI for SEO would look like in practice.
Using AI Software for SEO
There are dozens of AI tools that you can use for isolated SEO tasks—SEMrush for keyword research, RankIQ for SERP tracking, Screaming Frog for SEO audit, etc.
While each of them perform a specific and limited function, you might be better off with a more generalized tool like ChatGPT for SEO or a complete workflow management platform like .
Here’s how it works.
Keyword research with Brain
Begin at the beginning with Brain. Ask the AI tool to analyze trends, competitor data, search intent, and generate a list of high-impact keywords for your niche.
Unlike traditional keyword tools, which provide raw data, Brain contextualizes keyword insights. This helps you determine which terms to prioritize, how to structure them within the content, and where they fit your overall SEO strategy.
Brainstorming ideas with Whiteboards
Once you have the keywords in hand, it’s time to map them out, form your hub-and-spoke model and what have you. Whiteboards are a great way to visualize and simplify this process.
Brainstorm with teams, map out ideas, organize keyword clusters, and create a marketing roadmap for your content workflows. Drag and drop elements, add sticky notes, tag people, leave comments, and collaborate in real time with .
Mastering content briefs with Docs
Make the hand-off from SEO specialist to writer to editor seamless with an AI-powered ideation tool like Docs. Get the AI assistant to create a brief. Add your inputs and suggestions and share them securely with the writer.
To make sure you have included everything the writer would need, try ’s SEO Content Brief Template. This beginner-friendly document template is ideal for creating outlines and stating quality requirements.
Writing better with Brain
From writing to editing to polishing it with SEO elements, Brain is a powerful AI-based creative partner.
The writing assistant can help spin up your first draft. The spell checker can correct your typos gently. The chatbot can also help you create meta descriptions, headings, internal links, and readability improvements.
It learns from your past SEO performance and aligns recommendations with your SEO goals and objectives, making your optimizations more data-driven and strategic.
SEO project management with Tasks
SEO is not a one-time task. It is an ongoing activity with long-term benefits. To manage it, you need a robust SEO project management hub. for Marketing Teams does precisely that.
Whether you work solo or manage a large SEO team, Tasks is a centralized space for content planning, social media management, and campaign tracking.
- Create tasks for each content item
- Add descriptions, deadlines, and related links
- Include checklists for quality control
- Assign it to users and watchers
- Monitor dependencies in the workflow and adjust plans accordingly
- View team workload and adjust resource allocation
Manage your SEO practice end-to-end with .
If you are new at this, get started with ’s SEO Project Management Template. Use it to set up your SEO tasks, track progress, manage budgets, allocate resources, and much more.
Monitoring and improvement with Dashboards
Good SEO needs good analytics that ensures that your strategy delivers the desired results. Dashboards enables that with customizable, real-time, KPI-driven reporting. With , you can track metrics such as rankings, organic traffic, backlink growth, and content performance, all in one place.
If SEO is your jam, you’d find some of the best SEO agency software interesting.
The long-running marketing joke goes, “Where do you hide the treasure so no one finds it?” Answer is in the second page of Google Search.
While appearing on the first page of Google search results provides enormous benefits to organizations, not succeeding in this effort means complete obscurity. AI-powered search engines make this truer than ever before.
So, businesses spend significant time and energy honing their content operations to rank on Google.
This effort is better served with AI. Using AI for SEO enables you to have smarter keyword strategies, faster technical optimizations, improved user experience, and predictive content insights. Brain can do all this and more.
By integrating Brain into your workflow, you get an AI assistant who can brainstorm, research, write, and manage content operations by your side. What are you waiting for? Try today for free!
Everything you need to stay organized and get work done.
