Anyone who has built and launched a website has likely encountered an oft-repeated acronym: SEO (search engine optimization). And while you might not have ever done SEO yourself, you've benefited from it in the past: Every day, search engines like Google employ complex algorithms to sift through more than 400 billion web pages and deliver the most relevant results.
Website owners like you use SEO techniques and strategies to get their websites to the top of the search results for relevant user queries. But SEO is not a one-time endeavor — Google and other search engines change often, and ongoing SEO ensures your website stays in front of the people you want to reach. Just as a physical storefront requires regular maintenance and updates to stay competitive, your website needs ongoing SEO to remain visible amidst the ever-changing digital landscape.
The ABCs of SEO: What is Ongoing SEO and Why Does It Matter?
Don't let the techy jargon intimidate you. HubSpot — considered one of the gold standards for SEO and digital marketing advice — defines SEO as simply a collection of strategies and tips that "expand a company’s visibility in organic search results'' and help "drive more visitors to the company’s website, increasing their chances for more conversions which leads to more customers and more revenue."
SEO Connects the Search Engine Algorithms With Your Website's Content
Regardless of your website's goal or industry niche, all SEO techniques have one thing in common: They look at ways to optimize your website's content, keywords, and links to help search engines rank your website higher in the search results when someone searches for something related to your keywords, content, or brand name.
According to HubSpot, SEO needs to address the key factors that all search engines use to determine the value of your website's content — and therefore how high in the search results your website or specific landing page should appear:
- The intent or meaning behind why someone is searching for a specific term or question
- The relevance between what someone searches for, and the content on your website
- The quality of your content (for instance, a website about physical exercise written by certified personal trainers is deemed by Google to be higher quality than a website where the articles are written by non-experts)
- The performance of your website, such as how long it takes a page to load and whether it works well on mobile devices
Static SEO Versus Ongoing SEO: Why It Matters to Stay Fresh and Keep Your SEO Updates Current
As users' web behavior changes and technology evolves, search engines proactively adjust their algorithms.
If you aren't conducting ongoing SEO maintenance and upgrades, a well-optimized website today can quickly become obsolete tomorrow, causing your search rankings to drop and attracting fewer organic visitors. Google itself updates its algorithms several thousand times per year, including significant "major" changes every few months that dramatically change how it crawls and ranks content. For example, Google's infamous Panda update changed how it ranked how-to lifestyle content on the Internet, causing one major content publisher to lose a whopping $6.4 million of traffic and advertising nearly overnight.
How Ongoing SEO Influences Your Website Strategy
Staying abreast of changes to SEO techniques and strategies provides important guidance to your content, marketing, and overarching website strategy. For example, it can dictate or influence:
- How much content you publish, and the content's format, length, and focus
- How you incorporate other forms of media on your website, including images, video, and audio
- How you organize content on your site, including landing page layouts and your site's navigation
- What keywords and target users your website focuses on
Embrace the Power of Ongoing SEO
Caroline Forsey, an expert in thought leadership and marketing content, looked at the survey results from more than 400 of the world's leading web analysts to predict the biggest SEO trends of 2024. According to her data, some of the top changes in SEO strategies this year include:
- A heavier emphasis on expertise, meaning the content on your website should come from experts in your related field (including bylines and author bios that demonstrate the author's credentials and experience on the topic they're writing about)
- A renewed emphasis on first-person, credible content, especially as more websites generate high volumes of low-quality AI content (Google itself has announced upcoming changes to tackle low-value articles created by AI)
- A priority on websites that are deemed trustworthy, such as e-commerce sites with well-rated customer service, or content sites that do a good job of citing trustworthy research and statistics
- Bonus points on content that is creative and original and doesn't simply rehash content found on other sites
Of course, these SEO trends will inevitably change every year, and ongoing SEO will keep you competitive no matter what Google, Bing, and other search engines do. No matter your website's industry or content strategy, ongoing SEO requires that you:
- Focus on keeping your content fresh and high quality, including new blog posts or regularly refreshing and updating old product descriptions or articles
- Conduct keyword research often, since the terms or phrases that your core audience uses will evolve over time
- Maintain your website's overarching performance, such as mobile-friendliness as mobile devices evolve, and page load speed
- Build a diverse portfolio of high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites within your niche, which may include outreach campaigns, getting others in your industry to write guest blogs, and participating in online forums or communities
- Keep on top of technical and performance metrics, such as scanning your site for broken links (and fixing the links you uncover) and using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track organic traffic, keyword rankings, click-through rates, and conversion rates
- Stay on top of algorithm changes so you can adapt your SEO strategy in real-time
Some website owners think of SEO as the first step of their promotional strategy. But it's less a first step, and more an ongoing journey to ensure you, your brand, and your content stay relevant in such a competitive atmosphere. Whether you choose to go it alone and take a DIY approach to SEO, or you choose to consult with a digital marketing and SEO agency, check in often and make sure your SEO evolves as the world around you evolves.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are offering modern marketing teams new ways to analyze, engage and optimize their social media strategies. These technologies can unlock hidden patterns and insights from the massive amounts of unstructured data on social media platforms, helping companies identify trends, inform content creation and target the right customers with the right message at the right time.
While still in the early stages of adoption, AI and automation are gradually assisting marketing teams with tasks like content scheduling, analyzing customer sentiment, automating responses at scale, identifying influential followers and finding optimization opportunities across different social platforms. The market size of AI in social media marketing is estimated to reach $12 billion by 2031. With the ability to process huge amounts of social data in seconds that would take humans days or weeks, AI promises to significantly augment the effectiveness of marketing professionals and social media strategies.
In this article, we'll look at some of the ways modern marketing teams are using AI and automation to supercharge their social media marketing efforts.
7 AI Use Cases in Social Media Marketing
Here are some of the ways marketing teams are using AI to augment and improve their social media marketing and management strategies.
1. Social media scheduling and publishing:
AI tools can analyze historical post performance and engagement data to determine the optimal times to schedule social media posts for each network and audience segment. They can automatically suggest schedules to maximize visibility and engagement.
When it's time to publish, these tools will post the content to the appropriate social networks according to the schedule. This helps ensure content is distributed when audiences are most likely to take notice.
2. Sentiment analysis:
AI can analyze the emotions and language used in social media posts to gauge positive, negative or neutral sentiments about a brand, product, service, or topic. This can provide an indication of how audiences view a brand and its competitors.
Analyzing sentiments over time also shows how opinions change, for better or worse. When negative posts are detected, marketers can address them directly and take corrective action. Monitoring trends in sentiments helps identify potential PR crises before they spread widely.
3. Audience targeting and segmentation:
By analyzing social media profiles and behaviors, AI can group audiences into segments with common attributes and interests. These audience segments enable personalized social media experiences and content tailored to unique group interests and needs.
They also allow for more precise targeting of social media advertising to audiences most likely to respond. Dynamic audience segmentation helps ensure that the right content and ads reach the intended target groups with minimal waste.
4. Content creation:
AI can generate social media content ideas, headlines, images, tags, and even first drafts of posts. By analyzing trending topics, hashtags, keywords, and influencer content, AI can get a sense of themes and formats that tend to resonate and engage audiences.
While the content still needs human judgment, AI can take on the initial heavy lifting to provide a starting point. This speeds up the content creation process and reduces the chance of writer's block.
5. Influencer marketing:
Identifying and partnering with the right influencers is key to effective influencer marketing. AI can analyze hundreds of data points for millions of influencers to determine their audience size, reach, engagement, content, personas, and brand alignment.
AI ranks influencers based on these factors to help marketers evaluate influencer partnership opportunities at scale and determine potential influencers that are the best match for their brand and goals.
6. Trend analysis:
AI tools analyze keywords, hashtags, links, images, videos, and more across social media platforms at high frequency to detect trending topics faster than humans. Marketers can get reports on the latest trends, get alerts as they are happening, and compare how trends differ across locations, demographics, and interests.
Staying on the pulse of trends helps ensure content and social media strategies are timely, relevant, and plugged into the latest conversations customers care about.
7. Customer service and support:
Marketing teams can use AI to improve social media customer service and support in several ways. AI-powered chatbots can provide quick and efficient customer service, while automatic responses can address common customer inquiries and complaints.
AI can also help personalize customer interactions and predict customer behavior, allowing teams to offer proactive support. All these functions work together to provide faster resolutions while freeing up human agents for more complex issues, maintaining a human touch in their responses.
Leveraging AI for Improved Social Media Marketing and Management
AI is revolutionizing social media marketing by automating tasks, analyzing data for insights and optimizing campaigns - freeing up marketers for higher value work. When used strategically to assist rather than replace humans, AI gives marketers superhuman capabilities for experimentation, optimization and continually improving social programs, resulting in higher ROI and brand value.