9 Ways to Use AI in Your SEO Strategies

AI is now an important part of any marketer’s tech stack. And there’s a lot of information on how to optimize for AI search engines, also known as Answer Engine Optimization (AEO/GEO). But there is less information on how to use AI tools (both AEO platforms and others) to improve or assist with your SEO strategies. 

In this article, I will explain nine ways you can implement AI in your SEO strategies to find better ideas to optimize your blog content and improve your success rate through content marketing. 

How to Use AI in SEO Strategies: Keyword & Intent Optimization 

Every SEO strategy starts with keyword research. But before that, you need to know what your audience is looking for so you can create and optimize content that can meet their needs. Here are two ways you can use AI for this: 

1. Keyword strategy 

You probably already have a list of keywords you want to optimize for. But there are chances that you haven’t discovered the keywords or topics that people are asking but you haven’t optimized for. And when you optimize for them, you can convert more web users than you currently do. 

For this illustration, I’ll use a small portfolio website, and you can follow along. 

Head to your Google Search Console, and click on Performance: 

You can see that although this website has a total of 10 clicks, it gets over 5,000 impressions. Which means that there are some queries it ranks for, but aren’t clicked because it looks like the pages (that are ranked) cannot meet the searcher’s intent. 

So, what should you do?

Scroll down to Queries, and extend your rows per page to 100 or 500: 

Scan through the list of queries. 

Here, you’ll find high-value queries relevant to your business (or product) that you can optimize for. If you’ve optimized for them, you can check if there’s an opportunity to do better. 

More importantly, check the volume of impression each query gets. In this example, this website gets a lot of impressions (but zero clicks) for many queries because the content on the page doesn’t seem to be helpful to readers, so they don’t even click on it (this is where meta title is also relevant when you publish your content). 

As you scan through, you’ll see relevant queries with high impressions but low clicks that you can re-optimize for. Export these queries into a CSV (or directly to ChatGPT), and do two things: 

1. Feed ChatGPT a document of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and prompt the AI to provide a list of 20 or 50 keywords that have high impressions and are closely related to what people in your ICP might be looking for. 

More often than not, you’ll find highly relevant keywords you can optimize your website for. And since these are directly from your GA4, they’re likely to bring quality traffic (and possibly, leads). 

2. Take the keywords you’ve extracted from ChatGPT, look at the keywords that have high-buying intent, and optimize for them. There are chances that people are looking for them, and if they find your page helpful, they’ll engage with it. If they’re high-buying intent queries, they may be a lead. 

And when you publish high-quality content with the potential to attract valuable leads, always set up events in your GA4 to capture those leads. 

2. Use AI to understand user intent 

The strategy I’ll explore here is quite related to the first one, but with some nuance. 

Not all keywords are created equal. A keyword like “best project management software” can be a landing page (for a SaaS company that sells software) and can also be a comparison blog post. 

Both types of content can meet the searcher’s intent. And usually, you’ll need to check the SERPs to see the existing content on a target keyword before you decide the content you’ll create for it. 

With AI, you can do something better: 

You can use Google Search Console (GSC), Ahrefs and SEMrush to analyze a large volume of keywords to understand patterns and intent. 

For example, you can take the CSV of the keywords you prioritized from our first point here and load them into Ahrefs keyword explorer feature. See Ahrefs: 

Here, you can identify the intent of the keyword, and also check existing content for gaps they’re yet to cover (more on this soon). 

This way, you can re-focus your content to include details that matter to the reader. Not just what you think you should include in such an article. 

How to Use AI in SEO Strategies: Opportunity Discovery

The next step in your SEO strategy is to improve your SEO performance to match your current efforts. Here are some of the ways AI helps with that: 

3. Content refresh

Content refreshes keep your website up-to-date, so it can be mentioned in AI answers, and so your product can be potentially referenced where it matters. 

This is because, like Google, AI search engines love fresh content. 

In fact, according to Ahrefs, AEOs prefer 25.7% fresher content (over Google). As you can see below, Google’s AI Overviews will still rank content that’s almost four years old, Perplexity will mention/cite pages that are 3 years and a few months old, while ChatGPT prefers pages below three years old. 

So, you need to keep your content updated, especially if they are high-value content. These can be product pages, comparison content, or content pages that have brought in an insane amount of leads and are no longer ranking as much as they should on Google (or aren’t surfacing as they should on AI search engines). 

So, what do you do? Audit your content library. 

• Log in to GA4 and select your property. 
• Navigate to Reports or the Explore section for custom reporting. 
• Choose reports that contain page-level performance metrics that include clicks and user engagement metrics. 
• Select the date range and apply any needed filters. 

• Use the export icon at the top right of the report view to download the data as CSV, Excel, or Google Sheets. 

GA4 does not show “impressions” the same way as GSC but it tracks user sessions, pageviews, and engagement metrics for each URL. You can then export this CSV or PDF to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or any other preferred AI platform and prompt the tool to surface the pages that have fewer event counts. 

That’s the pointer you need to know the content to refresh. 

You can integrate this process with the typical way you refresh your content. And when you want to refresh your articles, make sure you do these: 

• Update outdated information to improve its statistical relevance. 
• Add actionable, doable advice (and delete irrelevant information) to keep it tight and helpful for your readers. 
• Improve the reading experience by adding more visuals (where relevant). Visuals can improve readability and user experience. You should also consider adding a table of contents so readers can jump to the point they want to read. 
• Write to meet the searcher’s intent. This means you should address their pain point, explain why (and how) your solution is better, and nudge them to take action. 

4. Content gaps

Content gaps are topics, keywords, or information on your website that your target audience searches for, but are either outdated or your pages don’t cover them at all. 

It’s a process where you evaluate missing content that can help you convert more web users who are in different marketing funnels. When you fill these gaps, it means you create (or improve existing content) to cater to exactly what your audience needs. 

So, where does AI come in all of this? 

AI tools automate these processes to help you find what’s inadequate with your content. 

Here’s how it does it: 

A company (and feature) like Ahrefs Content Gap uses AI to scan your competitors’ websites and content, and compares their topics, keywords, and depth against yours to find where they rank and you don’t. 

It shows you a list of the keywords your competitors rank for and provides potential keywords you can optimize for. 

Disclaimer: AI tools can recommend different types of keywords, but you still need to rely on your knowledge of your business and ICP to choose which keywords to pursue. 

So what should you do? 

• Use AI as a guide, not a final decision maker. Always check if the keywords it recommends align with your content goals and current strategy. 
• Add human insight: listen in on sales calls, talk to industry experts, and talk to your team to decide on the problems prospects have that you don’t yet have content for (more on this in the next point). 

📌Read more: Ahrefs on how to do content gap analysis. 

How to Use AI in SEO Strategies: Content Planning 

You can use AI tools to brainstorm new ideas, create topic clusters, and even create your outlines. I’ll show you how in a jiffy: 

5. Use AI to brainstorm content ideas

The goal of brainstorming is to come up with fresh ideas you can choose from to add to your existing strategy for quick or long-term wins. So where does AI come in?

You can use AI tools to generate fresh ideas based on your input. It can suggest article topics, headlines, social media captions, and even content angles that you’ve not considered. 

For example, you can pull some of your sales calls (or customer success) recordings and upload them to ChatGPT or Zapier. Then prompt the AI to generate a list of keyword ideas from the transcripts that you can potentially create content on. 

Next, format these keyword ideas into a table, and filter them based on relevance. Remember the keywords we extracted from the first point in this article? Follow the same strategy: pull queries from your GSC and see which queries match the keywords the AI platform recommends based on your call recordings. 

Next, update the table and upload it to a CSV (based on their relevance to your business/product), and based on how many times someone on those sales calls complained about the pain point. 

Plug that CSV into Ahrefs and manually find new ideas, so you can add them to the list of keywords you can optimize for. You can do this as regularly as you want: quarterly or biannually, so you can find new keyword ideas to create content for. 

You can even use these ideas to improve existing content. 

6. Content outline 

It’s a common phenomenon to use AI to create your content outline. You can do this in an even better way. 

Once you know the keywords you want to optimize for, go to ChatGPT or Claude and tell it to scan the top-ranking pages for what existing content discusses on a keyword. Here’s my simple prompt for this article: 

“I am writing an article about how to implement AI in SEO Strategy for HigherVisibility, a leading content marketing agency in the US. Scan the top 10 web pages on the internet and let me know the points they explored the most, including what their angles were.” 

It gave more context into the takeaways, and I prompted it to convert the tips and information into an actionable outline: 

“Using this information, write a non-generic, super-specific outline that I can use to structure this article. The goal is to show how marketers can use AI platforms (and tools) in their SEO strategy to work faster.” 

Agreed. This prompt can be improved if I added a document of our ICP, more information about what we do (at HigherVisibility, an SEO agency), and some context into my idea for the article. 

Regardless, rather than being overwhelmed by a detail-by-detail outline, I outsourced the work to ChatGPT and refined its response. 

This way, I was able to organize the key points, subtopics, and also get ideas on insights I can pull from. 

7. Create topic clusters

Topic clusters are how you organize your website’s content around a central theme. You have one main page that covers a broad topic that’s important to your business (pillar pages), and then you create smaller pages on subtopics that relate to the main theme. 

These smaller pages are called cluster pages, and they all link back to the pillar page.

For example, if your business is about cooking, you can create a pillar page on “Italian Cooking” and cluster pages about “Carbonara recipes,” “Italian pizza toppings,” and “Authentic pasta sauces.”

These cluster pages create a structure that helps Google, and other search engines, understand that your website has experience on that topic because it shows a list of related content. 

So how does AI help?

• You can find broad topic ideas for your pillar page with the tips I provided for brainstorming. You can then use your GSC queries list to find cluster topics that make sense, based on the intent of those pillar pages. 
• You can create content outlines for your pages with AI (we talked about this earlier). And when you write your articles, always link back to your pillar pages so that Google (and AI search engine bots) can understand the internal linking structure to understand how to improve the webpage. 

How to Use AI in SEO Strategies: Easier Workflow

Everything we’ve discussed so far has shown how AI can ease your workflow, so you don’t have to do it all by yourself. I’ll also share some other ways: 

8. Use AI to validate your schema 

Schema markup is a way to help traditional and AI search engines to understand the content of your website. With the schema code on your website’s HTML, they can understand context such as: 

What your page is about, 

Who or what is featured on the page, and 

The type of information that’s on the page (for context, whether it’s a product, user reviews, or an announcement for events). 

Now that AI agents rely on schema markup, you need to embed them in, at least, your high-value blog posts to improve how AI bots crawl and discover your website content and products, so you can be mentioned more. 

To implement schema markup on your website and content pages, read these articles: 

• How to Add More Local Context with Structured Data
• Schema markup for local businesses (which is also helpful for companies without local businesses). 

9. Use AI for link prospecting 

AI can help you find websites that can potentially link back to your site to increase your backlink authority. Now, AI will only do a fraction of the work; you’ll still do the bulk of it. 

For example, I asked ChatGPT to show me a list of websites that could potentially link to a dog food brand. I got a long list of authoritative websites that I can link to the dog food brand. The more specific my query, the more specific the response would be: 

You can use this same strategy to find websites that can link to your website. You can also take a different approach, one where you add context to details such as: 

• The ICP (so that your target audience are their target audience as well), 
• The sort of content you want them to link to on your website (so that there’s alignment on it), 
• Context into whether they’re local newspapers, national news outlets (depending on your business/needs or a global niche-publication). 

All these contexts can help you find authoritative websites that you can write to for a guest post, which you can embed links to your website in. 

Read more: Guest-posting, how to do it to get crazy results (and attract high-quality links to your website). 

How to Optimize Your Strategy to be Visible on AI tools and LLMs 

Now that you know how AI tools can help with your SEO strategies, here are a few tips on how to stay visible on AEO so they can use your content while writing answers. 

1. Write content that meets user intent 

Content that meets user intent is what leads to conversions and sales. This is because Google bots and AEO platforms match answers to the intent behind a query before they can use you as part of their responses to user queries. 

So, always make sure you meet search intent with your content, and be as helpful as possible. 

2. Cover (semantically) related queries extensively 

When a user types in a query in an AI chatbot, they find answers from search engines and provide the response. But they also pull in semantically related topics to offer more context. 

In some cases, a tool like Perplexity AI would show other topics/questions you can explore based on your initial query. 

It’s like the People Also Ask (PAA) box of AEO. 

So if your page is about “dog food for puppies,” add some context about the type of food they’ll feed it when it’s becoming an adult. You should also cover topics like “feeding schedules,” “nutritional needs by breed,” and other related ones. 

This way, AI search engines can recognize your authority in this niche and frequently cite your website because your content overlaps. 

Caveat: the traffic (and mentions) from this kind of content may not matter if you don’t create BOFU content that can convert web (or AEO platform) users. To do that, always explain what your product does and how it does it so AEO platforms can send qualified leads to your websites. 

Read more about how to insert how your product works in your content. 

3. Create content based on the user journey

AI tools personalize responses by drawing on recent searches and the user’s overall query pattern. 

If a user first asks about “high-protein diets for active dogs” and later asks “ what are the best brands for xyz breed?,” an LLM is more likely to suggest content that connects those dots. This means you need a content library that includes a comparison of different brands for high protein diets for active dogs (which, of course, mentions yours. 

Other tips include: 

4. Choose keywords with high buying intent

5. Associate your brand and product name with your product use case. 

6. Publish content that’s easy to scan. 

7. Use plain language while writing your content. In other words, avoid ambiguity. 

Conclusion and Next Steps: 

This, of course, isn’t an exhaustive list of how to use AI in your SEO strategies. To learn more about how to optimize your content better and increase your visibility on traditional and AI search engines, read these articles: 

• How to Optimize Content for Generative Engines: 6 Practical Tips That Work. 
• How to Optimize for Zero-Click SERPs. 
• Why Being Invisible in Answer Engines Is a Real Business Problem, and lastly, 
• How to know if Your GEO Content is Driving Results. 

At HigherVisibility, we help brands get the best bang for buck with their SEO. Check our SEO services to see how we can make you unmissable on traditional search engines and in AI platforms.