What does AI have to do with SEO? Which SEO tools give the best results? What are the latest SEO techniques to have on your radar?

We sat down with Sukh, Sookio’s SEO Consultant, to get expert advice from the man who knows.

1. What role do keywords play in an SEO strategy?

Keyword research is one of the first things we do during an SEO strategy, looking at the clients’ audience targets and their KPIs (key performance indicators).

Let’s say the goal is to increase sales for a particular service or product, targeting a specific audience. We’d have a look at keywords that the audience is searching for to increase the likelihood that they engage with the website and convert.

If the KPI was set for a certain time period, we’d look for competitive keywords that are also low competition. This helps the client to rank for them sooner, versus other keywords that might be high in search volume but could take a while to rank and hit those KPIs.

2. What on-page techniques can you use to improve your SEO?

If we’ve got a map of keywords for pages and types of content to target, we need to meet people’s search intent by showing them relevant content on those pages.

When we’ve made the right people land on the website, we also need to make sure they land on relevant content, and the type of content that they expected. If they do an informational search (asked a basic question), they need to find a simple answer straight away. If it's a more substantial question, then a long piece of content or lead generation is a better approach.

We want to identify the right type of content first, then optimise that content with the keywords that we're hoping to drive traffic from. The two considerations are probably technical on-page SEO considerations with keyword placement, but also the broader user experience, thinking about the type and quality of content as well.

3. What are some of the technical SEO issues that could affect a website's performance? 

The most reoccurring issues tend to be around Core Web Vitals, which is basically how a landing page behaves while it's loading. Do elements of it move around while it's loading? What button do you press and how does it look? Is the page jittery and off-putting and how long does it take to load? If you score highly in Core Web Vitals, then you'll outrank your competitor.

All the factors Core Web Vitals considers are equal, which is an important takeaway. There’s also things like indexation, which essentially means, ‘Can Google find your pages?’ And also, ‘How do they see those pages in terms of their value?’ 

4. Do you have any tips for how people can build a strong backlink profile?

Backlinks are super important to any successful SEO strategy. What we want to do is discover where your competitors are getting links from, and how those links are being achieved. Are they naturally being earned by producing great content?

If so, what are the successful pieces of content that are earning those links? And what can you do to proactively facilitate that strategy? Look at your content. If you know that successful types of content are data-driven, like long-form content or short FAQs, for example, then you might want to replicate that strategy and relate it to your audience. 

5. What are the benefits of repurposing your content for SEO?

This is a great quick win if you've got some existing content that either performs well for SEO and doesn't perform well for engagement, or vice versa.

Perhaps it doesn't rank well, but once people land on it, they do engage. You've got clear opportunities to improve that content, to meet both of those needs.

Let's say you've got a list of blog posts that are ranking quite well, but when people land on the site, they don't spend that much time, they don't engage or go to another page. That’s when you know that SEO-wise, you’re attracting traffic. The challenge is keeping it there! So you look at the content quality. If you're meeting the search intent of your visitors, you can rewrite content and spot obvious best practice. Things like structuring and breaking down a post, filling it with rich content like images, infographics and videos, where relevant - making it more engaging. 

The flip side is if you've got content that is very engaging, but not enough people are landing on it because your keywords aren’t ranking. There are loads of different techniques you can use just with existing content. 

6. What are your favourite SEO tools?

Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console... These tools help you assess the tech SEO performance of a website. It could be those quick wins like title type descriptions, page load speed… And then you've got your keyword-related tools like SEO Monitor and SEMrush that will help you with keyword and topic discovery and help you match the keywords to content. SEMrush is an all-rounder tool that can help with content ideation and some technical SEO as well. Analytical tools like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics will show you how the site is performing.  

There are plenty of local SEO tools as well, like Bright Local and Google Business Profile, that will help you figure out how people are behaving locally, what local keywords they’re searching for and what your local visibility is like. 

7. Which SEO techniques do you recommend for brands in competitive industries?

If you're not ranking as highly as competitors for certain keywords, then find keywords that they are not ranking for or find alternative keywords, maybe long tail keywords (that are less competitive), which you can optimise relatively quickly. What you can also do is assess where you stand in SEO versus your competitors by focusing on domain authority, which is a judge of how many good quality relevant links apply to your size versus your competitors.

And think about keyword visibility. If for example, you've got a low visibility but a higher domain authority versus your competitors, then the gap is with your onsite content. A high domain authority means Google is paying more attention to you and considers you a more valuable resource than competitors. So now that you know you get Google's attention, you need to serve that attention with better-optimised content and that will in turn increase your keyword visibility. 

8. How important for SEO is it to have a mobile-friendly website?

If your website loads quickly, is super user-friendly on mobile and desktop and has a good score on Google Core Web Vitals, then you will get a slight ranking boost. It’s important it loads well, it isn’t jittery, and you can see everything above the fold - it’s quite crucial as a quick win to establish mobile-friendliness upfront before you get into the more resource-heavy tasks like link building and content marketing.

9. How do you measure SEO success?

If you’ve got business targets, you can convert them to digital KPIs (key performance indicators). Then you look at the client’s current resources and budget, and prioritise the tasks that will reach that KPI. One example might be identifying quick wins first.

There's a certain granularity that you can go through with identifying tasks for quick wins versus long-term wins to hit KPIs. And then you measure that by highlighting KPIs in an SEO report and tracking that from start to finish. Typically, you use a timeline graph or an up and down year-on-year comparison in your SEO reports and comment on that every month and identify successes and show where, if you did fall short, the potential tasks are that can help bridge that gap.

10. What do you think about the use of AI and SEO?

The search results on Google are impacted by its use of AI at the moment. It’s essentially using AI to determine what is a useful search result.

And there are a lot of factors involved in that, like how fresh your content is, how relevant it is, whether it meets the considerations of experience, expertise, authority, trust, and a lot of stuff in between. AI has already been a factor for a number of years, but now it's becoming a bit more visual and tangible with Google's generative search results.

The best thing we can do is follow Google's best practice guidelines in terms of what makes good content, what makes useful content, how to do good link-earning content, website best practices, technical SEO best practices… We need to do what it's been telling us to do all these years. Plus think of different ways to categorise your content to serve different types of search results, like information research results with FAQs, image results, video results…the list goes on.

AI can play a big part in informing or creating smaller tasks, such as title tags and meta descriptions. It would be better to use AI as guidance on structure and topic choice rather than writing content, because Google will pick up AI-generated content.  If a lot of people are generating AI content, the AI is getting informed by reading the content that's online. So if it's reading content that another person AI generated, then the quality of its information will degrade over time.

Google doesn't directly penalise for using AI content, but it's looking for content quality and relevancy. AI-generated content that's clearly AI would fall under ‘low quality’. So it wouldn't be a direct penalisation, it'd be a consideration and a ranking factor of ‘Oh, this content isn't original, it looks like duplicated content.’

But search engines will probably have to become more sophisticated and may potentially penalise in the future.

Boost your SEO ranking with Sukh!

Sukh has 14 years’ experience in the field, having started out as a web designer. Realising he was more interested in what happened after websites launched than building them, Sukh made the switch to a career in SEO.

Alongside solving complex SEO dilemmas for clients, Sukh also teaches on Sookio’s SEO training programmes. Take a look at our full range of strategy services for strategic support from the people who get digital!