The nature of search has changed dramatically, even from 5 years ago. In the past, people entered short keywords into the search bar, and SEO experts worked accordingly to connect them with the relevant sites. Today, the familiarity of using search for almost every question you have combined with the increasing use of mobile search, voice search, and devices like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home means that search engines need to contend with increasingly complex — and human — search terms.

It’s not enough to use keywords or even long-tail keywords and hope for the best. Not only are customers not using them, but Google has employed AI to help handle the shift in the search environment. Along with mobile and video, AI is one of the biggest trends in SEO.

Google is one of the leading investors in the AI-first movement, which means that anyone who wants to rank will need to get incredibly familiar with technical SEO and the tools that aid it. What is technical SEO, and how is it changing your role as an SEO expert? Let’s dive into what’s happening on the ground.

Technical SEO is Essential for Dealing with Algorithm Updates

Technical SEO is a type of SEO that focuses on the website’s technical features or the features that interact with Google’s search engine crawlers — not the features site visitors see. Technical SEO is important because it identifies errors that can hold up the crawler and inadvertently cause you to rank lower than you should. It’s all about building a robust infrastructure that serves as a base for your content.

Why is technical SEO so important? It’s relevant because, for the most part, traditional SEO doesn’t account for the increased use of AI in search algorithms.

Back in 2016, Google began rolling out its RankBrain algorithm. RankBrain is part of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm and employs machine learning technology (not quite AI, but close) to better filter its search results. At its core, RankBran relies on the belief that all the knowledge is encoded in the brain’s connections. With its deep learning, RankBrain can learn what a good and bad site looks like in each niche and can identify the right settings for each environment, which changes the way it groups and ultimately selects the appropriate sites for each query.

With AI, SEO Becomes More Technical by Default

Just as the days of keyword stuffing are long gone, so too are the days where you can lob whatever keywords you want into your site and expect results. With the use of AI in SEO, you now need to do things like optimize your keywords intelligently by using keyword data and tools and far more advanced analytics than traffic and ranking scores.

As noted by SearchEngineJournal, one of the new strategies involves leaving behind the process of creating multiple landing pages to rank for each keyword in the group and instead, using a single pillar page based on the one keyword that has the power to rank for all the similar keywords in its group. If you sell watches, RankBrain compares your site to other watches rather than to KitchenAid or GlaxoSmithKline.

At the same time, it also requires you to run structured data. Structured data gives the search engine an upper hand in understanding your site by telling it what’s on your site. There’s a fixed format that your site needs to follow to achieve this, but it’s worth doing. You won’t just score a better ranking (hopefully), but a sound structure also puts you in line to stand out among search results, such as with rich results.

You’re Going to Need AI for SEO Software

Technical SEO is already important, but before you panic, know this: AI will not be taking over SEO in the near future. Even with the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers language (BERT) rollout, there’s only so many ways that AI can be used in a legacy system in the near and even distant future. Why? Because even with investment, the quintessential challenges facing machine learning are far from trivial.

From white hat SEO to black hat tactics, there are a million and one moving parts in SEO anyway. With the advent of AI in SEO, there is now a seemingly infinite number. So, you’re going to need to step away from your current tools and start using AI SEO software.

AI-powered SEO software can do a huge amount of heavy lifting on your behalf. Some of the options already out there can:

• Analyze semantic site structures to help you match to search intent.
• Analyze your competitor’s semantic content.
• Create new content ideas based on new or trending topic ideas.
• Optimize content to match search intent and identify gaps. 

At this stage, getting involved with AI by using technical SEO and using AI-powered (or relevant) tools) will help keep you running ahead of the game. And when you can be prepared for AI and machine learning, you’re more likely to be able to embrace it as it crawls towards a full version of its potential.