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AI built websites are going to destroy keyword SEO
Here’s a bold prediction about how AI will change SEO: engagement is going to become the single most important metric in determining your website’s Google rank, and it’s going to happen a lot sooner than you think. I read an article by tech thought leader, Om Malik, titled AI & Internet’s existential crisis. The threat he pointed out is that AI can create almost infinite websites with SEO designed to rank well with Google and other search engines in less time than it takes a person to come up with a good keyword strategy. Remember content farms that were only limited by the number of humans they could find to create cheap content? Now there’s no longer a limiting human factor. The sites that use AI to manage SEO will outperform the sites that are created by humans. The proliferation of machine-made sites, linking and amplifying each other in an ever-expanding web of SEO keyword goop will inevitably muddy the waters of the internet to the point that keywords, and even content itself, can no longer be trusted as the best way to direct searchers. Wow. That’s going to make online marketing even harder. It will look like what happened to email marketing—only it will happen in months, not years.
So what’s the pushback?
What will the search engines do when faced with a tsunami of content? Well, Google recently limited the content crawled on websites and started favoring new content. That means the AI content bots will adjust and start refreshing content more often. AI can iterate on one top-ranking piece of content infinitely. Every time search engines defend against an AI strategy to beat the algorithm, AI sites are going to come up with new strategies. It’s going to be a never-ending whack-a-mole game at mind-boggling speeds. The Google and Bing bots are going to be using AI to detect AI content. AI-generated sites are going to be constantly adjusting to stay ahead of the algorithm. But, wait. STOP! If all the legitimate sites are using AI too, how will the search engines sift through all the churn and clutter to determine where to send searchers?
Does Your Site Do This?
It can with Stylaquin! Stylaquin is the easy to add Shopify app that transforms your website. Stylaquin makes shopping faster, more engaging, and more fun. Stylaquin shoppers stay 70% longer, view 185% more products and come back 25% more often. Find us at the Shopify App Store.
Searchers not bots
Remember, Google’s #1 success metric is how happy searchers are with the results provided. Google’s job is to make people happy by finding the best website, or information, to answer the searcher’s query. Without reliable keywords and unique content, how will the search engines determine which sites to send searchers to if there are umpteen million of them all looking remarkably the same? More importantly to you—how will you get the search engines to send searchers to your website?
What about ads?
You can, and probably will, spend a ton more money on advertising. But even ad spend is directly linked to your site’s SEO rank. So how do you outsmart AI and also make nice with the search engines?
Change is coming!
That’s where my bold prediction comes in. I think the most likely answer is going to be a huge shift in the importance of customer engagement as a key SEO metric. Customer engagement may well become the most important metric used by search engines to rank websites. Think about it for a minute. Customer engagement is the hardest metric to fake. Engagement tracks events, the things shoppers do on your site. Getting shoppers to engage with your website, look at more products, click on more things, play with more things, and return to your site more often is the only way to improve your engagement score. AI can’t help with that. You can’t fake real people having fun and participating in an experience of discovery. But you can make a website more fun to shop, more interesting, more memorable, and more likely to get return visitors. The easiest way to increase engagement is simply by adding Stylaquin to your website. If you’re a Shopify store and haven’t taken a few minutes to check out how Stylaquin get’s shoppers to view 180% more products, stay 70% longer, and come back 25% more often, now might be a good time watch the video below and visit the Shopify App Store. If you’re not on Shopify, give us a call, or join our waiting list.
Whatever strategy you use to create more customer engagement on your site, be creative, have fun, and don’t lose sight of the simple truth that you can’t out-iterate AI, but you can be way more fun to spend time with. As humans, we all seek out fun things, and happily go back to the things we enjoyed doing. The best engagement strategy is to be the website that’s the most fun to shop!
P.S. If you’d like to learn more about increasing engagement here’s a blog post on How to Increase Engagement Without Spending a Fortune.