The benefit of artificial intelligence is being adopted in every industry and surely search engines aren’t going to be left behind in its adoption. Search engines want to serve the most relevant websites and information related to the searches and the more they are able to understand the users’ search intent and the meaning behind the searches, the better they are able to process and show the best possible websites.

Business owners, webmasters or online marketing professionals alike are worried about AI influencing the rankings of their website in the search algorithm. This brings the artificial intelligence backed algorithm – RankBrain into the limelight where Google is trying to use RankBrain, which is an algorithm learning the AI system, in the SERPs. RankBrain helps Google process search results better and show more relevant websites to the users. For RankBrain examples, how to use RankBrain or how does RankBrain work, please follow this link.

As more and more searches are done on mobile and also using voice searches, Google and other search engines are relying on AI to understand the natural language and users’ intent behind the searches. Additionally, instead of searching using regular keywords, the majority of searches on Google are in the form of questions looking for definitive answers.

So, as a business owner or as a webmaster what should be your SEO strategy in 2018, keeping in mind the artificial intelligence ranking and content optimization to suit the users’ search intent? No longer will you be able to rank by a basic content optimization strategy around few keywords or using a few keyword variations in the contents. The content should match the natural language being used by the users as this is the core of RankBrain, the AI backed search algo of Google.

As more and more companies rely on content marketing for ranking better by publishing contents regularly, it has become tougher to produce contents that stand out in the crowd and influences the customers. So many online tools are available in the market for content syndication and content publishing and thus creating a content war that makes a difference has just for tougher.

One sign of artificial intelligence system is that keeps on evolving and learning with every search and thus over a period of time it performs better. Thus, it is difficult to rank with little optimization tricks. One needs to work intelligently and think like the actual searcher to get the contents right that matters. After the information on how AI is changing SEO landscape, there are many AI SEO software being launched for companies to use and not get left behind the optimization race. A lot of content is being written every day on how to use AI for SEO and how to do SEO using artificial intelligence. Some of the tools available are:

Acrolinx
One Spot
Narrative Science
Market Brew
CanIRank
Pave AI

In a nutshell, with SEO and AI coming together, optimizing and ranking websites are not going to be easy anymore and it is a matter of how well you know your users and what they are searching for.