The Impact of AI on SEO and How Ecommerce Businesses Can Use it

Artificial Intelligence is at the forefront of every conversation, especially in business.

The rapid growth of AI across various industries has been nothing short of revolutionary.

SEO, a cornerstone of digital marketing, hasn't been left behind.

At SEOKart, we've embraced the transformative power of AI, particularly tools like ChatGPT. (Discover how we integrated ChatGPT with BigCommerce.)

If you're wondering whether that integration was a good decision, you need to understand the impact of AI on SEO, especially for Ecommerce.

According to a study by Hubspot, where they studied 1,350 marketers to learn how they use AI, they found that:

• 48% are using generative AI to conduct research
• 45% of marketers use AI for content creation.
• 22% sAId they use AI to generate ideas
• 70% of marketers sAId generative AI is vital to their content marketing strategy, and
• 42% of marketers trust AI to create personalized content!

What does this mean for Ecommerce brands like you if you still need to jump on the generative AI wagon?

Or…

How can you use it to streamline your Search Engine Optimization strategies?

More importantly, what should you NOT DO to avoid getting penalized by Google?

Let's find out!

What is AI?

AI, or Artificial Intelligence, mimics human intelligence via machines, and can perform tasks like problem-solving, understanding natural (human) language, recognizing patterns, and making decisions.

You've encountered AI in various forms before ChatGPT blew up on the scene.

From self-driving cars, personalized recommendations on Amazon, Netflix to voice assistants like Alexa or Siri, even your curated music playlist on Spotify all use AI to improve your life.

Generative AI, in particular, refers to AI models and algorithms that can generate new content like images, music, text, or even videos.

And what if you want that content to rank on SERP?

You use AI-powered SEO!

What is AI- Powered eCommerce SEO?

AI-powered SEO refers to integrating artificial intelligence (AI) techniques and tools into search engine optimization (SEO) practices, methods, strategies, and tools. For instance, if you make use of SEOKart on your online store, you can experience AI for SEO in the way we audit and recommend optimizations for your website.

In fact, Google uses AI in its algorithm to study and score content to understand user intent better and deliver more personalized search results.

But how does it help Ecommerce brands like you?

Why Use AI-Powered eCommerce SEO?

AI-powered SEO is used for content optimization, voice search optimization, predictive analysis, customer support chatbots, improving user experience, image and video recognition, link-building strategies & more!

Here's why:

• AI can take huge volumes of data (e.g., keywords, organic traffic trends, social media conversations, etc.) and process them in seconds to find patterns related to customer behavior, search performance trends, and more.
• It can sift through thousands of keywords, be it long-tAIl or short-tAIl, and analyze which ones your brand should include in website content, helping you rank higher on search!
• It can then forecast future trends, helping Ecommerce brands stay updated with emerging challenges and outdo their competitors.
• AI also learns from its mistakes - making future iterations more accurate.
• Manual work cannot match generative AI's data processing and analytics, which can take significant time from your marketing and product teams.
• Its speed and efficiency will help automate mundane and repetitive tasks, freeing time for brAInstorming, developing creative strategies, and making better quality business decisions.

Crafting a successful SEO strategy can take days, weeks, or months - and AI can drastically streamline and optimize the process, leaving more time for creation and testing instead of just wondering what you have to do next!

How to use AI for eCommerce SEO?

Ecommerce stores can have hundreds of pages, making optimizing each page for SERP a time-consuming and repetitive process, prone to a high rate of human errors.

With AI, you can significantly use AI to streamline and optimize your SEO tasks.

There are 12 key ways we recommend you start with:

1. Keyword Research

Keyword research, a cornerstone of SEO, can be done extensively and quickly with AI.

It can analyze a website's content or your niche and suggest the most relevant keywords that resonate with your Ecommerce store's target audience.

Using natural language processing, it can understand specific words and phrases, related variations, subtopics, content clusters, or pillars that people commonly search for your or similar products and services.

This way, your domain is thoroughly covered through content that can rank on SERP.

AI can also study your store's content and determine the potential of ranking for particular topics, ensuring that the keywords align with your brand's strengths.

2. AI-driven content creation

AI-driven content creation is a blessing for businesses with small teams and constrAIned budgets that require a high volume of output regarding blog posts, landing page copies, and any website content.

By significantly cutting down research time and providing essential SEO structures like bullet points, well-sized paragraphs, and header tags, brands can concentrate on the core content, freeing them from nitty-gritty technicalities.

As a result, there is a reduction in writing and editing time without compromising on output and boosting your store's ranking on SERP.

And what does more organic traffic mean? Higher conversions!

AI can study search queries deeply and understand and identify user intent, giving you a solid base to model your content calendars.

Generating content ideas based on your product, niche, and expertise and finishing an article in less than an hour, content creation can become a breeze!

3. Optimize Existing Content with On-Page SEO

AI tools with advanced algorithms can optimize meta tags, including titles and descriptions, based on their analysis of current search trends, competitor data, and user behavior patterns.

When it studies your Ecommerce store, it can see how good or poor your keyword usage, test content readability, suggest better structuring and formatting, and identify internal linking opportunities, all of which will improve your site ranking on Google.

For example, if you're struggling with low click-through rates or high bounce rates, AI can suggest strong hooks for your introduction paragraphs and increase conversions from relevant traffic.

Also read:

• The Complete Guide to Mobile SEO for Shopify Stores
• Complete Guide to Shopify SEO (2024)

4. Competitor Analysis

Competitive analysis can take days and weeks!

Instead, AI can pinpoint gaps, missed keyword opportunities and unveil potential topics and subtopics for your brand to capitalize on.

It can look at their landing pages, blog posts, and social media captions and provide precise recommendations on the ideal length and quality that you should AIm for in your content and copy.

We're not talking about copying your competitor's content strategy but outperforming them in value and depth.

5. Blog Post Outlines

The foundation of a high-quality blog post often lies in its outline, as your content writer will tell you.

AI can create content briefs and outlines based on SEO parameters and generate a comprehensive list of headlines, subheadings, related topics, essential bullet points, missing content tilt opportunities, and more.

It will tell you specific questions your content should address, ensuring you deliver to user intent and queries for your niche and products.

By having an SEO-focused robust roadmap, with suggested interlinking of topics within your website, the content you create or through AI will rank higher!

6. AI- Enhanced Technical SEO

AI excels at creating static XML sitemaps, ensuring search engines can easily navigate and index a website's content.

It is also handy in implementing JSON-LD schema to help search engines interpret and represent your webpage in SERPs.

AI will also guide you on robot crawl directives, ensuring search engines understand which pages to crawl and index and which to bypass.

These can quickly increase your site rankings, especially if your Ecommerce store has hundreds of product pages to optimize!

7. High Converting Ad Copy

Ask any performance marketer, and they will tell you how tough it has become to succeed at a great ad campAIgn.

CAC or Customer Acquisition Costs are at their highest, leading to marketers needing variation and guidance in content and copy to survive and increase ROAS (Return On Advertising Spend).

With AI-driven PPC campAIgns, brands can ensure that every word in their ad is tAIlored to resonate with the target audience, driving higher click-through rates and conversions.

Think catchy copies, strong hooks, and stronger alignment with your brand's ideal target audience's needs and behavior.

8. Improve the UX of your Ecommerce Store

An Ecommerce store's conversion rate is highly dependent on how easy it is to navigate your site, sift through your product description pages and enjoy a friction-free checkout.

AI can craft compelling and informative product descriptions that match your target audience's behavior and needs without overwhelming them.

Creating content about your product's benefits and uses can drive engagement, trust, and, ultimately, conversions!

Because ultimately, a significant factor for ranking better on SERP is a low bounce rate and high engagement. When users can easily shop from your Ecommerce store, it signals to Google that it should increase traffic.

9. Predictive Analysis

Staying ahead of trends is vital in the competitive and dynamic world of Ecommerce.

Enter predictive analysis, where AI processes vast amounts of data and identifies developing patterns, emerging trends, and viral topics in your Ecommerce niche.

It does this with an eye for detAIl and speed that humans cannot match.

10. Customer Insights and Behaviour Analysis

AI can dig deep into customer behavior, segmenting users based on parameters like browsing habits, purchase history, and interaction patterns.

Such an intensive study can tell what your customers are looking for and also reveals the intent behind their searches- if it's informational, transactional, or navigational.

This way, your marketing campAIgns can be hyper-targeted to your potential customers, helping your brand connect more deeply and authentically, creating long-lasting relationships, and bringing in repeat visits and orders.

11. Voice Search Optimization

With the rise of Alexa and Siri, and other smart speakers and voice-activated assistants, it's clear that voice search will gAIn traction, which means your content needs to include long tAIl keyword phrases used by your target audience.

AI's natural language processing can analyze voice search queries, understand user intent, and provide invaluable insights into how your brand can tAIlor your content to be more voice search-friendly.

Will the search landscape truly become a voice-first era? It's better to be prepared for it than find out you've already lost the opportunity to stand out from your competition!

12. Visual Search Optimization

Platforms like Google Lens and Pinterest Lens have popularized users searching via images.

Then with ChatGPT, AI image generators like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have revolutionized the creation of images.

At the heart of this visual revolution is AI-powered image recognition technology, which can identify objects within images, making it easy for search engines to comprehend and index visual content.

When it comes to image SEO, it's not just about pretty images; it's adding relevant metadata, enhancing image quality, adding relevant tags, and ensuring optimal formatting that can be better indexed by search engines, helping your Ecommerce store rank higher in visual search results!

Ecommerce AI-Powered SEO Strategies: Best Practices

1. Don't Replace SEO Experts with AI

AI has made significant strides, but it's not without a concerning error rate.

And while it can study customer behavior, it can't pinpoint nuances and cultural references as well as a human.

Additionally, many AI tools are trAIned on past data and will not include updated information on your niche and products.

Human judgment and intuition are ESSENTIAL and work great in COLLABORATION with AI tools.

Also, while AI can generate content in seconds, it often sounds generic, repetitive, and can be jargon-heavy. It's also not great with idioms and metaphors, which help the content sound natural and relatable.

In essence, while AI is a powerful tool in the SEO toolkit, the expertise and intuition of SEO experts are irreplaceable!

2. Fact-check and Edit Rigorously

As mentioned above, AI tools like ChatGPT are trAIned on data sets until 2021, leading to a high error rate with facts, timestamps, and essential events in the content it creates.

It is crucial to have experts reviewing AI-created content, and their deep knowledge of the subject matter will be needed to verify facts and cross-reference sources.

Before publishing, it's important to review the content, ensuring it's free from typos and grammatical errors and accurate, authoritative, and personalized for its target audience.

3. Experiment with Upcoming AI Tools

The AI landscape is constantly changing, with new AI tools released weekly. In fact, there is a website now solely dedicated to finding out if 'there is an AI for that'!

It can become overwhelming, and a seasoned SEO expert can navigate and test new tools, especially considering your Ecommerce store's budget, and find tools that align the best with your brand's content goals and SEO requirements.

4. Measure AI Content's Success with A/B Testing

With any new disruptive technology on the scene, it's wise to treat AI content as an ongoing experiment and test its effectiveness in real-time.

This way, you don't have to repeat the entire exercise and can replace your selected content for the experiment with human-written content quickly and efficiently.`

5. Incorporate Brand Personality

What truly sets your content apart is your brand's unique point of view, its rich experience, and the thought leadership you bring to the table.

A brand's authentic voice is integral to the success of any content strategy, and AI cannot replicate or produce that.

While you integrate AI into your content production process, your brand managers need to work with SEO experts to ensure your blog posts, social media captions, and landing page copies sound distinctly like your brand's style guide.

Will you get Penalized for using AI for SEO?

Using AI won't inherently lead to penalties in your search rankings, provided your content remAIns valuable and aligns with the objectives of your readers.

Google has recently released guidelines to help brands navigate AI content creation which recommends aligning with Google's E-A-T standards – Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

While AI can be a great tool in your SEO arsenal, the content's quality, relevance, and authenticity truly matter in search engines' eyes.

How SEOKart helps using AI for eCommerce SEO

SEOKart’s all in one SEO Optimization app is built for Shopify to optimize your eCommerce store, ensure higher rankings, increased organic traction, and revenue growth.

You can perform an advanced AI SEO audit on 15 pivotal ranking factors so that customers can find your store and enjoy a seamless shopping experience.

Use SEOKart for:

• Bulk Optimizer - Create custom templates for product name, type, SKU, price, etc., update meta descriptions, title tags, and alt texts at scale
• Image Optimizer - Bulk edit both file names and alt texts, convert file formats and modify file size to make all your images SEO Friendly.
• Page Speed Optimizer - Evaluate and improve Core Web Vitals, ensuring optimal loading and interactivity across both mobile and desktop devices.
• On Page SEO - Create Rich snippets, 404 Errors Fixer, and 301 Redirects to ensure your shop doesn’t crash or disappoint shoppers

Using the power of AI, SEOKart is the only Shopify SEO tool you will need to transform your eCommerce store’s ranking and traffic on SERP!

Conclusion

Navigating Ecommerce SEO can be daunting, and adding AI to the mix can leave you overwhelmed.

However, at SEOKart, we've integrated AI seamlessly within our app, simplifying the process for brands!

Ready to elevate your Ecommerce SEO strategy with AI? Try our app today!

Frequently asked questions on AI for SEO

Is AI used in SEO?

Yes, AI is increasingly used in SEO to optimize content, understand user intent, study competitors, recommend keywords, and automate tasks.

Which AI is best for SEO?

Several AI tools benefit SEO, including SEOKart, Surfer SEO, Jasper AI, and more.

What is the role of AI in SEO?

AI plays a pivotal role in understanding user intent and customer behavior, generating keywords and site maps, automating SEO tasks, optimizing existing content, and predicting user behavior.