How to Use AI for Technical SEO, Straight from HubSpot's Tech SEO Team

HubSpot’s 2024 State of Advertising and marketing Report discovered that entrepreneurs save round 2.5 hours per day with AI. Additional, 60% of entrepreneurs see AI instruments as useful assistants of their jobs.

On the subject of technical search engine marketing and AI, particularly, I got down to reply three burning questions: Are search engine marketing of us utilizing AI? If that’s the case, how? And is it really price it?

To search out solutions, I contacted members of HubSpot’s technical search engine marketing workforce and practitioners from my exterior community.

In the event you’re asking your self the identical questions, you’ve come to the correct place. Let’s get into the good things!

Desk of Contents

Use AI for Technical search engine marketing

Technical search engine marketing refers to something you try this makes your website simpler for serps to crawl and index. Technical search engine marketing, content material technique, and link-building methods all work collectively to assist your pages rank extremely in search.

AI may be leveraged in numerous methods to assist your technical search engine marketing technique. The primary 5 use instances are from HubSpot’s inner search engine marketing workforce.

The ultimate three are from search engine marketing practitioners in my community doing fascinating issues with AI for tech search engine marketing functions.

1. Enhance Inner Linking Structure

I do know what you’re considering: Isn’t inner linking on-page search engine marketing? As with most issues in search engine marketing, it relies upon. (You knew that was coming in some unspecified time in the future, of us, so I acquired it in early for good measure.)

You may not work out anchor textual content for particular person hyperlinks as a part of your technical SEO efforts. Nevertheless, you’ll need to think about inner linking as a part of a website’s general hyperlink structure. To get a transparent image, you’ll want a fowl’s-eye view of any present inner linking.

Enter Killian Kelly’s use case for AI. Kelly is a advertising supervisor and search engine marketing content material strategist engaged on HubSpot’s EN weblog technique.

“I‘m at present trying into methods we will improve our weblog’s inner linking construction by utilizing Screaming Frog‘s Ngram instrument,” says Kelly.

“It’s going to be extremely helpful for navigating by means of the big quantity of content material on HubSpot’s weblog. The instrument is superb at figuring out each linked and unlinked key phrases throughout the content material, which may be very useful for inner linking.”

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Kelly provides, “Throughout this exploration, I stumbled upon the potential of integrating OpenAI with Screaming Frog. It will permit us to make use of ChatGPT prompts throughout the crawl, which may also help automate and optimize totally different features of search engine marketing.”

Kelly explains that the mixing ought to assist automate duties like writing and optimizing alt textual content for pictures, creating anchor textual content, and structuring knowledge routinely.

It might additionally routinely classify the content material into themes, which he thinks could be very useful for understanding web page intent and potential correlations between content material sorts and efficiency.

Greatest for: Lots of the AI automations talked about above are extra related to on-page search engine marketing. So, I believe this use case would profit you in case you have a combination of on-page and tech in your position. And let’s face it, that’s quite a lot of us lately.

2. Generate Schema Tags

The following 4 use instances come from Sylvain Charbit, the senior advertising supervisor on HubSpot’s tech search engine marketing workforce. He discusses utilizing AI to generate schema tags, conduct log file evaluation, and extra.

“There are just a few methods to make use of AI for technical search engine marketing, the most typical one being to generate Schema tags,” says Charbit. “These small blocks of code are used to show wealthy leads to search (amongst different issues).”

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There are a ton of AI-powered schema markup turbines out there on-line. In the event you’re already utilizing Jasper.ai to your content material efforts, you need to use Jasper Chat to create schema markup.

In fact, there’s OpenAI’s ChatGPT. I do know of many of us who use the free model for this process.

As with something AI-related, you’ll need to validate what the instrument spits out to ensure it’s correct and practical.

Greatest for: search engine marketing practitioners who aren’t very snug with coding. However even in case you are, it could actually provide help to save time.

3. Log File Evaluation

“One other means we leverage AI for technical search engine marketing is to have it analyze a part of our logs (the one with out delicate consumer knowledge) and acknowledge habits patterns,” says Charbit.

“Possibly Googlebot is getting caught someplace or crawling many URLs with no curiosity. AI permits us to know what’s going on in a flash and to behave accordingly.”

Disclaimer alert: I haven’t personally examined this. Nevertheless, you ought to be capable of use the Knowledge Evaluation GPT in ChatGPT so as to add some AI magic to your log file evaluation. Theoretically, it needs to be so simple as dragging and dropping your log file into the GPT and asking it a query to get began.

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In the event you’d wish to discover this idea additional, I discovered this tutorial fairly useful!

Greatest for: search engine marketing practitioners who need to acknowledge habits patterns at pace.

4. Get a Second Opinion on Your Code

HubSpot’s Sylvain Charbit shares one other use case for AI in technical search engine marketing.

“Moreover, getting an opinion from AI on a block of code may be helpful to detect a difficulty if a guide evaluation does not present any outcomes,” Charbit says.

I’d say that on this case, no matter AI tool you employ to validate your code, it ought to, because the cool youngsters say, operate as your “intern.”

That’s against taking the lead along with your code. Briefly, for this use case, you will need to have the talents and data to acknowledge whether or not AI is hallucinating.

Greatest for: search engine marketing practitioners with a reliable understanding of code however would love a second opinion.

5. Talk Technical Concepts to Determination-Makers

“Final however not least, communication! Having the ability to simplify and talk technical search engine marketing is essential to getting buy-in from decision-makers,” says Charbit.

He provides, “As I’m continually head down into technical stuff, I can typically overlook that some phrases or details will not be identified to many individuals. AI jogs my memory of this and improves collaboration with a number of stakeholders by offering extra digestible data.”

If I had been to do that, I believe I’d most likely enlist Grammarly, certainly one of my go-to AI-enhanced tools, for the duty. Why? It’ll accomplish two issues directly.

First issues first, it’ll test the textual content for spelling, grammar, and tone. Second, you need to use the brand new “Improve the influence of your textual content” function to spotlight any elements of the textual content that you simply may have to make clear for a newbie viewers.

I’d additionally extremely suggest the “Readability” operate. I’ve been actually impressed with how a lot that’s improved within the final yr or so!

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I’d begin by setting the “Viewers” aim to “Basic.” I’d then click on “Improve the influence of your textual content.”

I do have a phrase of warning for this Grammarly function, although. Generally, it may be somewhat excessive with its options. Then, earlier than you understand it, fairly than filling in your viewers’s potential data gaps, you’re really speaking right down to them.

I usually use this function to spotlight potential areas for enchancment fairly than utilizing the options offered by Grammarly.

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Greatest for: search engine marketing practitioners who want to speak technical concepts — together with the enterprise advantages of implementation — to non-technical stakeholders.

6. Observe Headers Throughout Audits

Subsequent, Mike Ciffone, an search engine marketing marketing consultant at Ciffone Digital, shares how he’s been utilizing AI for technical search engine marketing audits.

“Whereas maybe not probably the most glamorous use of AI, in my audits, I’ve been utilizing it to maintain monitor of headers,” says Ciffone. “After I fireplace up Screaming Frog, I take advantage of the JavaScript execution function to retailer the HTTP response of every URL. Then, with AI, I’m merely asking questions and getting advised the story.”

Ciffone asks AI questions like:

Are there any patterns in response codes?
The place are we getting probably the most cache misses?
Do I’ve X-robots headers setting no-index/nofollow or canonicals anyplace?

He provides, “In my view, there’s means an excessive amount of intuition concerned in auditing for AI to be very helpful for any form of automation (for now at the very least). Nevertheless, as a private assistant, it’s drastically improved my effectivity and shortened my turnaround occasions.”

Greatest for: search engine marketing practitioners working with the mixture of getting a separate cellular website (e.g., m.instance.com), a number of language and geo variations, and in addition working with a progressive internet app versus merely a responsive website.

7. Deploy Schema at Scale

I wished to construct upon the schema tag technology use case offered by Sylvain Charbit (quantity two on this listing.)

So I contacted Worldwide search engine marketing Guide Aarne Salminen, who I observed speaking about producing schema templates in bulk to deploy sitewide in MostlyMarketing’s Slack neighborhood.

“I do that for websites which have lots of of content material sorts = schema templates and hundreds of thousands of URLs,” says Salminen. “In case you have just some sorts of content material, I may not go the AI route, however on large-scale tasks, it appears to hurry up issues, together with setting all the things up.”

Salminen provides, “I do not use AI in any energetic part within the course of as a result of reliability is most certainly nonetheless a difficulty. So it’s within the preprocessing stage and/or starting stage, the place you construct up templates per content material kind, protecting the massive image of the web site infrastructure and inner connections in thoughts.”

I requested Aarne to share what this course of seems like. He mentioned he feeds it the information of their website, resembling Screaming Frog kind of knowledge with recognized and manually verified web page sorts, and lets the AI run the primary go of options.

After that, he verifies and validates the AI enter, tweaks it, and does a second go if want be. Then, he verifies and validates once more, and eventually, it goes to implementation.

Greatest for: search engine marketing practitioners engaged on websites which have giant portions of content material sorts and URLs.

8. Visualize Google Search Console (GSC) Knowledge

Final however not least, I discovered about this use case from Sreeram Sharma, an search engine marketing marketing consultant and co-founder of Angleout.

“I take advantage of ChatGPT to visualise the GSC knowledge whereas searching for pages that had been hit or gained site visitors throughout a selected time interval,” says Sharma. “This helps me to plot a graph and visualize stuff fairly than utilizing Tables or Looker Studio. I like utilizing this strategy in comparison with Looker Studio.”

I requested Sharma to increase upon the method:

“I run a screaming frog audit and export it into sheets, then use vlookup to map them with clicks + impressions earlier than/after site visitors drop. Now, I add the sheet to ChatGPT and ask it to visualise and present a correlation of the variety of tech errors versus the drop in site visitors.”

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Sharma provides, “This helps me get an approximate concept of site visitors drop and makes it a bit simpler to elucidate to my purchasers on month-to-month calls. To date, they’ve beloved it.”

Greatest for: search engine marketing practitioners searching for a substitute for Tables or Looker Studio.

Including AI to Your Technical search engine marketing Technique: Yay or Nay?

Ever since OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT within the winter of 2022, there’s been a ton of hype round AI.

Upon the again of the discharge — and seemingly within the blink of a watch — we went from AI being a creating idea, effervescent away within the background, to it being in all places. Built-in into something and all the things.

The floodgates had really opened.

Now, it‘s the summer season of 2024. You look to your left: AI. You look to your proper: Oh, howdy, that’s some extra AI. However in contrast to 2022, the mud has settled considerably, and perhaps you are like me, continually asking: Is the juice actually well worth the squeeze?

On the subject of AI for technical search engine marketing, the reply is each yay and nay. Truthfully, it is dependent upon your distinctive state of affairs. That mentioned, there are two issues I can say with absolute confidence:

1) There‘s actually no level utilizing AI for tech search engine marketing merely for the sake of it. If it doesn’t add worth to your course of (i.e., prevent time and enhance effectivity), it is hype — plain and easy.

2) In the event you take away the human from tech search engine marketing at this stage, the place AI is correct now, you are cooked.

On the latter level, will this alteration sooner or later? Who is aware of. I personally don‘t suppose you’ll be able to ever absolutely take away people from search engine marketing. However that’s simply my humble opinion.

What do you suppose?

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