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SEO is extremely competitive.
In fact, there are 5.6 billion searches performed every day on Google. If you think your competitors aren’t trying to get a piece of the pie, you’re fooling yourself.
You need an edge. A way to get ahead. An untapped goldmine that does just the trick is predictive SEO.
This AI-powered SEO strategy finds and suggests missing keywords and instantly alerts you when your competitors’ metadata updates result in significant jumps in SERPs.
Think about all of the big tools right now in the search market. They don’t do that.
They offer some forms of monitoring and competitive analysis, but not the forecasting artificial intelligence offers.
Let me explain further.
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What is predictive SEO?
A lot of people get predictive SEO wrong. Look at this description for example:
That is not predictive search engine optimization. It’s the opposite.
I believe in a different definition: you do little to no work as software takes care of all of the forecasts for you.
For illustration, Morphio’s marketing security software features search anomalies that appear as cards.
You’re instantly alerted when changes in rankings, content, or metadata occur. (Whether it’s your domain or a competitor.)
It also forecasts what kind of changes you should expect in performance based on current strategies and campaigns. Now that’s predictive!
All of this is possible thanks to artificial intelligence called predictive analytics. It is a form of machine learning that uses current and past data to train algorithms that produce forecasts. All of this is conveniently completed within dashboards and easy to read reports.
How to execute predictive analysis in SEO
These are steps you need to take if you want to begin reaping the massive benefits of AI SEO automation and predictive analytics:
Step 1: Choose the right tool
You need the right software—a tool that makes your life easier, not harder.
AI marketing software isn’t hard to come by but few are tailored specifically for search engines. That’s why we designed Morphio to help digital agencies and marketers to grow their companies with search marketing.
There are a few key features you want to keep an eye out for when purchasing this kind of tool. The first is the ease of use.
37% of executives say their main concern with AI technology is the difficulty to adopt it. That couldn’t be further from the truth these days.
As Mike Grinberg mentioned in our customer success interview, this technology is no longer accessible to only Fortune companies and extremely gifted teach teams.
It’s now designed to be easy to use, affordable, and very practical. Let me run you through how the process works with Morphio:
You want the dashboards and UI to be easily navigable and understandable. Predictive findings should be very clear to what they mean and what to do with them. Read my article on predictive vs prescriptive analytics to learn more about this topic.
After that, consider integrations. Does the tool cleanly connect with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other important assets to feed data? The last thing you want is to buy software and realize later it doesn’t work with your tool stack.
Step 2: Feed it data
The next step is the simplest and most autonomous part of the entire process. Your organization will need to collect all relevant data from available sources and integrate it into the software.
Most platforms should take care of this process automatically after you’ve connected third-party apps and tools that contain the search data it needs to produce forecasts.
In some cases, it will need a few days or longer to begin training the models and creating accurate predictions. After all, the more data you give it and the more time it has to learn your individual business, the better.
Step 3: Leverage the predictive findings
You’ve invested in AI SEO software, it analyzed your data, and it’s cranking out predictions. Now what?
There are many ways you need to leverage predictive findings so they turn into decisions and results. After all, a tool is only as good as what you do with it.
Don’t be a part of the 37% of SMBs that don’t have a clear strategy for implementing data and analytics.
You can do so by beginning with organic traffic forecasts. These can be for individual pages all the way up to your website as an entire entity.
If organic traffic is forecasted to continue growing at a reasonable rate, that is a great sign your SEO strategies and efforts are paying off. Continue to do what you’re doing. It’s a green light.
Oppositely, you may see forecasts that show stagnant growth or decline in some cases. This is an early warning sign that what you’re doing may not produce tangible results in the medium to long term horizon. I suggest auditing:
- Topics
- Keywords
- Competitors
- Channels
- Content
What is lagging behind? Optimize content and assets that are not pulling their weight. Learn what topics and channels should be used less in the future.
Next, keyword rankings and overall keywords are other metrics to observe. You want to ensure that the keywords you target (and how many your domain ranks for in total) are forecasted to move up the SERPs.
Other metrics to watch include impressions and click-through. You can have all of the views in the SERPs as possible but if nobody is clicking through that needs to be reviewed. Often optimizing the title tag and meta description of posts will lead to a significant boost in organic CTR.
Wrapping up predictive search marketing
Most marketers approach SEO as an ongoing manual effort in which they have to constantly fix problems, launch new campaigns, and take action when hiccups or obstacles arrive.
However, there’s a much smarter way to approach SEO with the current technology and tools available to us today.
One of which is predictive analytics. This is a form of machine learning (AI) that analyzes incoming data and historical performance to create forecasts.
It takes your current strategies and campaigns to project them into the future. This saves marketers time from determining what keywords and techniques are going to perform the best.
Naturally, this requires you to use predictive SEO software. Try Morphio today for free and jump right into our platform that automatically forecasts SEO efforts while alerting you of data spikes and competitors’ performance.
