Play the SEO hand you’re dealt...not someone else's
Traditional SEO ‘best practices’ might become a thing of the past for marketers as artificial intelligence ups its game and moves in for the win. Jonathan Epstein, CEO of Brewco, looks at the advantages of AI in SEO and how it is changing many industries for the better
Understanding search engine optimisation (SEO) and how to work it for your igaming business is one of the fastest ways to boost your revenue and margins.
With online gaming continuing to grow, the stakes are higher than ever, and the alternative of purchasing search traffic is getting more expensive – £15 to £40 per click in the UK.
But some igaming CEOs have eschewed the benefits of SEO in favour of paid advertising. SEO takes a while to make an impact, whereas paid ads can be started and stopped on a dime, and for the right money, deliver predictable results. And AI is now optimising paid search campaigns to improve returns further. Meanwhile, SEO has appeared to many to be ‘folklore’ … more art than science.
What guides most SEO efforts today are ‘best practices’, such as:
- Make your content and page titles and descriptions align to your search terms;
- Improve your user experience and page speed;
- Link key pages on your website to others, and fix broken links; and
- Get sites that matter to link to yours
To get your fair share of organic traffic through SEO, you need to play the hand you are dealt, not the ‘average’ hand of your site and its competitors.
Fortunately, artificial intelligence is starting to become a mainstay of SEO as well, so those that want the house advantage can take it. There are excellent tools that automate link outreach, scheme generation and guide content writing.
The biggest advance, though, is in the use of AI to better understand how search engines develop rankings for various keywords.
Search engines – AIs themselves – look at a variety of on-and-off page factors for any website to make their ranking decisions. There are positive attributes based on your content and descriptions and how pages are linked, and there are negative penalties applied for things like keyword stuffing and duplicate content.
Should you work on more backlinks? Better content? Streamlining internal links? Understanding how each of these factors is weighted has been impossible until recently, as they vary from query to query, from search engine to search engine, and between every geography.
Given this, the only way to rip the cover off the black box is to build a simulation – a replica – of your target search engine for each of your queries. Without AI, this would be impossible, but by using genetic algorithms it is possible. And the simulation, unlike the search engine, is not a black box.
What does this mean for you? It means that your SEO team will know exactly what moves the needle for any given keyword. It means they won’t spend their time fixing things which don’t matter. And, it means they can A/B test SEO changes and accurately predict their rankings impact 60 days before they actually occur.
Every search is different and every site is different. If you want to win the SEO wars, a bespoke approach is now within reach. There are three times the number of organic clicks than paid clicks, at a fraction of the cost. It’s worth playing.
SEO is still a long game but AI is changing that game. Just like Big Blue beats the chess grandmasters, and AlphaGo takes down the top human Go players, so are AI-based search engine models defeating the traditional ‘best practices’ approach to SEO. Game on!
Brewco was created to free the world’s enterprises from over-reliance on expensive paid search advertising through artificial intelligence solutions that enable a new and more precise way to optimise search engines.