Almost every industry is leveraging the benefits of Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL). Then, why not digital marketing & SEO? Undoubtedly, machine learning is also helping tackle some in-depth problems associated with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). These advanced technologies are a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) and have become a core digital marketing engine. Many high volumes and data-intensive tasks get rendered and solved by machine learning. If you want to know more about how SEO leverages machine learning and AI, this article is for you. 

What is Machine learning?

Machine learning is a branch of Artificial Intelligence and the study of computer algorithms that leverages data to train a machine or model. Machine learning deals with computer programs and algorithms that can learn on their own by leveraging new datasets. Enterprises also use machine learning algorithms to predict the future from past data. Spam filtering, business process automation, recommendation engines, malware detection, etc., leverages machine learning to understand complex business tasks.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

It is a set of practices and techniques that help a website improve its positioning and appearance as per the search engines. It optimizes the impression of the website to increase its visibility when users search for that site in the search engine. It leverages various techniques to rank the web pages and sites higher on popular search engines like Google and Bing.

How can SEO leverage Machine Learning (ML) techniques?

Today, all users live in an instantaneous world where they want their information delivered as expected. That is why large organizations invest more in artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques. As SEO professionals and digital marketing experts, we also need to leverage machine learning in the best possible ways. Search engine optimization can leverage datasets from bot crawls and other search mechanisms to enhance website searches through machine learning. Let us now look at some domains where machine learning can help in optimized search results.

• Pattern Detection: Search Engine Optimization experts manually try to find low-quality content by looking for similarities that are already there in other content and websites. Often they use tools that help in finding the similarities among the content. Also, low content quality appears when content goes to outbound links that have no connection with the source page content or is going to some unrelated page. Another situation that renders low SEO content is when the content contains unnecessary keywords spammed without proper frequency. Search all these things manually is a tedious task. Hence, there comes the role of machine learning. 

Through machine learning algorithms, SEO professionals can identify these patterns & flag them so that the model can understand which one is good for SEO. Also, professionals can feed data from user interactions to make the ML model understand which content is inappropriate to rank from the SEO perspective. Putting such datasets helps machine learning algorithms detect keyword-based spam structures and websites having duplicate content. That is how machine learning can eliminate a massive workforce that companies usually require if done manually.

• Voice-based search optimization: The voice-based searching technique gained momentum over the last few years, and Google has invested heavily in optimizing this mode of searching. Various metrics go hand-in-hand to comprehend the voice-based search. One such metric is the voice-based searching system that uses word error rate data to help improve the machine learning technology by recognizing users by their voice and characteristics. So, the point is – even in voice-based searching techniques, SEO matters. Users speak through their devices, looking for what they want via typing. SEO professionals are trying to make the voice recognition system better (through ML) to deliver accurate web pages according to user queries. Machine learning is also helping SEO specialists to recognize trends in spoken keywords and written keywords and efficiently provide the search for the right set of websites.
  
• Link building in optimizing the SERP: Creating a specific link or set of links has become a significant area where machine learning can play its role. Google’s AI leverages machine learning to crawl through different website links to check how familiar a specific content is with the other link on which it is crawling. It matches for relevancy based on the keyword frequency and automatically understands the context of one link to the other. Based on the context, relevance, and a few additional criteria, most search engine ranks their websites in the SERP. With the advent of machine learning in sorting relevant content, professionals have become more thoughtful in choosing and implementing SEO keywords, anchor texts, etc.

• NLP to understand user queries: Every website expresses a specific meaning through content that aligns with the website’s goal. SEO professionals try to leverage keywords, tags, backlinks, meta descriptions, and other SEO elements to make the search engine understand what the website caters to for bringing the page/site to the top of SERP. To understand the sensitivity of what the site wants to convey through keywords and metadata, Google uses Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). This natural language processing framework helps the search engine comprehend the context of any search query nicely. Users often use the same word to represent different meanings. SEO professionals leverage NLP & ML to put additional efforts into framing the website content to reach the exact audience. Machine learning helps SEO experts understand what the user wants to see through the search query. On the other side, search engine technicians are training AI, NLP, and ML models to assure that their users get what they are searching for as a query.

SEO and machine learning can work in close tandem to help us derive our websites at the top of the SERP. Many search engine companies like Google and Bing are working closely with machine learning to understand the users’ search patterns. Trained machine learning models help rank those web pages in their most optimized form. SEO experts also have to learn how to leverage machine learning to optimize websites better through precise utilization of SEO.