2017 Predictions #2: Artificially Intelligent SEO

To give you a jump start on the new year, we asked industry experts about their predictions for the future of location, marketing, and technology in 2017. We'll be posting their responses over the next month here on the Yext blog. Follow us on Twitter @Yext for new posts, and tweet at us with your own predictions.

By Kelvin Newman
Founder, BrightonSEO Conference and Training
@kelvinnewman

Most people in the search industry are quickly getting up to speed on the ways machine and deep learning are having a role in how the search engines work. Mostly this has been triggered by RankBrain's attempts to re-write and cluster keywords to deliver better results.

What we haven't seen yet, and I expect to see more of in the next 12 months, is how the ideas of artificial intelligence and automation can aid the SEO process. I.e. how can we use these technologies to make our job easier?

There's great open source image captioning algorithms, we'll start to see marketers using this to better label their images before Google does this automatically as part of their core algorithm.

There's also natural language generation technology that's producing better analytics commentary and reports than some marketers do. That's going to become commonplace.

I'm even aware of a few organisations trying to carry out sophisticated and in-depth technical audits using machine learning. Google's become a black box but that doesn't mean we can learn a few of their latest tricks.

This post is part of a series of 2017 predictions from industry experts.