AI and Technical SEO

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

AI’s data processing capabilities enhance technical SEO. By leveraging AI, you can efficiently pull insights from data, bulk generate on-page elements, and automate schema markup, to name a few.

Pulling insights from data

Imagine working at an SEO agency where a new client is worried about a drop in their website’s SEO traffic.

You log into the Search Console, select the Performance report, set the date range to the last 16 months, and observe a visual representation of the decline.

Next, you’ll want to determine the exact timing of this event and whether it coincided with significant Google algorithm updates. To do this, click Export in the top-right navigation and then select Download Excel.

Next, access ChatGPT. To upload an attachment, ensure you’re using a version that supports this feature. ChatGPT 4o was the first free version to offer this functionality.

Click the attachment icon near the bottom-left of the screen, select the CSV export from Search Console, and enter this prompt:

Analyze the Dates tab in the Performance export from Google Search Console. Excluding incomplete weeks, highlight the weeks when the site experienced the most significant traffic declines. Review whether these declines coincided with a Google algorithm update and suggest other potential reasons for the decline.

ChatGPT then pinpoints the weeks that saw the biggest traffic drops.

Often, traffic drops are usually due to events that occurred in the reported week or the previous weeks. ChatGPT reported the following correlation between Google updates and these traffic drops.

So, we can quickly see that the most significant drop in traffic coincided with Google’s core update in October 2023. In some instances, there may not be a correlation, and sometimes correlation does not imply causation, so our prompt also directs ChatGPT to provide other possible reasons for declines with recommendations.

So you can see ChatGPT and AI can be an incredibly useful tool. However, as with any AI usage, remember to fact-check. Ensure that the weeks that ChatGPT reports for traffic drops align with the visual charts in Search Console. Also, double-check that the dates it provides for Google updates correspond with actual events.

Generating bulk on-page elements

Okay, next we’ll look at how you can hook up Screaming Frog SEO Spider via an API OpenAI’s ChatGPT, local LLMs, or other libraries.

Before we do, and in case you’re unfamiliar, Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a tool that helps with Technical SEO. It’s well-known for diagnosing technical issues that aren’t considered best practices for SEO. The free version can crawl up to 500 URLs, but has some limitations. There’s also a paid version available.

With the paid version and as of Version 20 of Screaming Frog, you can now add Custom JavaScript which opens up the door to infuse AI into it.

You can choose the ‘(ChatGPT) Template’ snippet, open it in the JS editor, input your OpenAI API key, and customize the prompt to query for any information you need from a page during crawling.

For instance, if many of your images lack alt text – a tag used by search engines and screen readers for accessibility to describe an image – you can use AI in Screaming Frog to bulk generate hundreds or even thousands of Alt texts. This not only saves time but also enhances the relevance of your pages.

The potential applications of pairing Screaming Frog’s Custom JavaScript with AI are vast and varied. There are hundreds of possibilities, whether it’s verifying that regional content has the correct meta tags for global sites, generating meta descriptions on your behalf, or reviewing the search intent for each page–and all while saving you bags of time.

The Screaming Frog tool, combined with the power of AI, can streamline the process of bulk checking or making changes, and is especially useful for large websites, ultimately saving you time to focus on other areas of your optimization.

Automating schema markup

Next, we’ll look at InLinks, a paid SEO tool. In the complex world of SEO, ensuring search engines understand your content is crucial. InLinks, an advanced SEO tool, simplifies this with AI.

What does InLinks do?

InLinks specializes in entity-based page and site graph optimization. An “entity” is a specific thing like a person, place, or topic. For example, in a blog about “baking bread,” the entities are “baking” and “bread.” InLinks uses a knowledge graph to identify these entities in your content.

Making content clear to Google

One of the things InLinks can do when crawling your site to understand it is to add a single line of code to communicate these entities to Google through schema markup. Schema markup is like a translator for your website, ensuring Google understands the details of your content.

This automated schema markup can enrich your website’s results in Google, potentially increasing clickthrough rates.

(The star ratings and reviews count come from schema markup)

For instance, for a recipe page, schema markup tells Google it’s a recipe. It can include details like ingredients and cooking time, which would show for some searches, in addition to the review markup, which we can see in the image, it can provide a star rating and review count.

Schema markup through the help of AI helps improve your search rankings by ensuring Google accurately matches your pages with relevant searches.

InLinks has a premium price tag, so it’s more appealing to larger websites with lots of content.