Using AI for SEO: 5 methods that actually work

AI is shaking up how businesses tackle search engine optimization (SEO), offering new ways to boost your strategy. Sure, 'powerful tools' and 'best practices' might sound like a corporate mantra, but the truth is, AI can actually help.

Whether it's digging into competitor data, making sense of messy SEO stats, or tightening up your on-page SEO, AI tools make your SEO better—when you know how to use them.

In this post, we’ll explore 5 ways AI can help you up your SEO game. Let’s dive in.

How to use AI for SEO: 5 ways AI transforms search engine optimization

1. Discover hidden competitor opportunities with AI analysis

Do you know why your competitors are ranking higher? Understanding their success can transform your SEO approach and give you a competitive edge.

Based on research by Backlinko, the first organic search result gets 27.6% of all clicks, which means the stakes are high. By analyzing what works for your competitors, you can make informed decisions to outrank them.

How can AI help with competitive analysis? Start by using a chat assistant like ChatGPT to identify direct and indirect competitors in your space. Then, combine these AI insights with SEO tools like Ubersuggest or Semrush to:

• Map out competitor keyword clusters and identify gaps in their content.
• Analyze search intent behind their top-performing pages.
• Extract patterns in their content structure and formatting.
• Find underserved topics with high search potential.
• Create content briefs based on what's working in your niche.

For example, if you run a mattress company targeting tech professionals, you might discover competitors ranking well for terms like "sleep tracking mattress" and "smart bed technology." AI can help you dissect their content approach and find unique angles to cover these topics.

2. Use AI to extract actionable insights from SEO data

Raw SEO data only becomes valuable when you can extract meaningful insights. However, turning raw data into something of meaning takes time and skill. And that can be overwhelming. Unless you’re using AI!

With a chat assistant like Claude, you can uncover patterns that might take hours to spot manually. Instead of staring at endless spreadsheets, AI tools help you turn data into actionable insights in minutes.

Here's a practical approach for turning raw keyword data into a targeted content strategy:

1. Using an SEO tool like Semrush, export keyword data for your target topics
2. Then use Claude to categorize keywords by:
   • Search intent (informational, commercial, navigational)
   • Content type (how-to, comparison, review)
   • User journey stage (awareness, consideration, decision)
3. Prompt Claude to create content clusters based on these insights
4. Then identify seasonal trends and plan content accordingly
5. Lastly, use Claude to predict keyword difficulty vs. potential traffic impact

For instance, if you're targeting "home office setup," AI might reveal that related keywords like "ergonomic desk height" and "home office lighting tips" have lower competition but strong conversion potential.

3. Build a smarter outbound linking strategy with AI

Pages with high-quality, relevant external links make for a better reader experience than those without. However manual link building is time-consuming and often inconsistent. It’s a pretty tough task for anyone wanting to maintain quality while scaling their SEO efforts.

So, how can you make link building easier and more effective without sacrificing quality?

One way we’ve proven to be effective is to automate the process using automation tools combined with AI. You can build an automated workflow that:

• Look at your articles or blog posts
• Scans them for suitable places to link to external sources
• Find relevant external sources that are high-quality
• Adds those sources to a database so you can easily add them to your posts.

Here’s a quick overview of the steps involved:

1. Set up a database using Airtable, and copy-paste the content of your articles to the base
2. Create a Zap in Zapier that uses the OpenAI API to identify anchor phrases in each article that are suitable for external links
3. Build on the Zap so that it uses a search API to find relevant external links for each anchor phrase
4. The Zap will add all suitable links to your Airtable database automatically

By using this automated system, you can significantly reduce the time spent on link building from hours to just minutes. Imagine if you could allocate all those saved hours to more creative tasks instead!

4. Use AI to track SEO performance and spot improvement opportunities

According to HubSpot, 88% of marketers planned to increase or maintain their investment in SEO in 2023. But without proper tracking, that investment might not yield results—how will you know if your SEO efforts are actually working?

Here's how to use AI for smarter SEO performance monitoring:

1. Set up custom dashboards: Create custom dashboards in Google Analytics to keep an eye on page-level metrics, user behavior, and conversion rates for different types of content. By organizing all the relevant data in one place, you can easily track what’s working and what isn’t.
2. AI-powered analysis: Use AI to interpret these metrics in detail. With AI, you can detect content decay (when pages start losing rankings), identify keyword cannibalization issues (where multiple pages compete for the same keyword), uncover technical SEO problems, and even determine if your content aligns with user intent.
3. Automated alerts for fast action: Set up alerts to notify you about significant ranking changes, anomalies in traffic patterns, Core Web Vitals issues, or even when a competitor has updated their content. These alerts help you stay ahead of potential issues, so you can react in real time rather than after the damage has already been done.

5. Master on-page optimization with AI

On-page optimization goes far beyond simply placing keywords in your content. It involves crafting every element on your page—from titles to internal links—to make sure both search engines and readers get the most value.

ChatGPT is a great tool for enhancing meta descriptions, headers, and title tags, as well as site structure and internal linking.

Here are a few tips for getting started—we’ve also linked our full tutorial below which has more detailed steps:

1. Title tags: Use ChatGPT to analyze the top-ranking competitors' title patterns, test different combinations of power words (like "best," "ultimate," "essential") and emotional triggers (like "how to" or "secrets"), and optimize your titles for different devices.
2. Meta descriptions: Create AI-generated meta descriptions that incorporate primary and secondary keywords in a natural way. Remember to include CTAs and address user pain points.
3. Header structure: Build logical hierarchies for your content using AI to suggest H2s and H3s that logically flow from your main topic. Include long-tail keywords, and match the user’s search intent.
4. Internal linking: Develop topic clusters (groups of related content that are linked internally) to establish a strong SEO network on your site. AI can help identify which pages should be linked to enhance topic authority.

If you found this post helpful, you might also like:

• Using AI for off-page SEO optimization
• Improve your local SEO using AI
• Using ChatGPT for keyword research
• AI-powered link building strategies