Keep­ing up with AI-dri­ven devel­op­ments in the search indus­try is the new nor­mal for search marketers.

Tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs, such as advance­ments in voice recog­ni­tion and the cre­ation of pow­er­ful machine learn­ing algo­rithms, great­ly impact how peo­ple search – and con­se­quent­ly how we do search engine opti­miza­tion.

The idea of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence tak­ing over the dig­i­tal land­scape can be daunt­ing to some mar­keters who view it as a risk to their pro­fes­sion­al careers.

But while there is still a lot of guess­work involv­ing the top­ic, there is like­wise ample knowl­edge avail­able for mar­keters who want to get up to speed on AI as it relates to search.

On August 22, I mod­er­at­ed a Best of SEJ Sum­mit webi­nar pre­sent­ed by Pur­na Vir­ji, Senior Man­ag­er of Glob­al Engage­ment at Bing Ads, Microsoft.

Vir­ji offered action­able tips on how search mar­keters can lever­age AI today and pre­pare for the future.

Here’s a recap of the webi­nar presentation.

Over two decades ago, Microsoft Founder Bill Gates had a vision where com­put­ers could one day “see, hear, talk, and under­stand human beings.”

Sig­nif­i­cant inno­va­tions in com­put­ing have been made since then. The advent of cloud com­put­ing, pow­er­ful algo­rithms, and big data helped make arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence a real­i­ty today.

What Is AI & Why Should Search Marketers Care?

Vir­ji defines AI as tech­nol­o­gy that can:

  • Per­ceive.
  • Learn.
  • Rea­son.
  • Assist in decision-making.
  • Act to help us solve problems.

Essen­tial­ly, we learn and use tech­nol­o­gy and, in return, tech­nol­o­gy learns us and dis­cov­ers ways to be help­ful (i.e., answer­ing, coor­di­nat­ing, lis­ten­ing, observ­ing and anticipating).

Mar­keters should care about AI because search is becom­ing more intel­li­gent through it.

For instance, at Microsoft, Bing is a big source of their AI data and it makes all their oth­er offer­ings a lot bet­ter. In return, this AI goes and feeds the search engine to make it smarter.

Until recent­ly, a search engine’s job was all about index­ing infor­ma­tion that exist­ed on the web, orga­niz­ing it, and then bring­ing it up when peo­ple typed in their query.

Through advances in AI such as nat­ur­al lan­guage under­stand­ing and machine read­ing com­pre­hen­sion, we now see that search engines are able to some­how under­stand the con­text of the data, as well as the enti­ties and the rela­tion­ships between the entity.

This means the search engine is not just index­ing, it is also able to rea­son over all of the con­tent on the web.

A good exam­ple of this is Bing’s Mul­ti-Per­spec­tive Answers, a fair­ly new intel­li­gent search fea­ture pow­ered by AI.

Any oth­er search engine will try to give users the results that match their par­tic­u­lar query. This can become an issue because it becomes a lit­tle fil­ter bub­ble right where all we see is our point of view echoed back to us and
that’s not real­ly under­stand­ing true intent.

With Bing’s Mul­ti-Per­spec­tive Answers, a searcher will be able to learn more about a top­ic from dif­fer­ent views (i.e., pros vs. cons).

This is just a sim­ple exam­ple of how intel­li­gent search is able to deliv­er way more per­son­al and rel­e­vant expe­ri­ences to users.

AI helps empow­er both mar­keters and customers.

3 Ways You Can Leverage AI Today

1. Intelligent Visuals

Search is becom­ing more visu­al. Almost 23 per­cent of web search­es in the U.S. are image searches.

Both Google and Bing’s search engine results pages (SERPs) include visu­al con­tent such as images and videos.

The two search engines also let users search for your words or images.

Image search isn’t just con­ve­nient, it allows you to search when you don’t have the words to describe something.

Visual Search Checklist

  • Opti­mize images.
  • Opti­mize prod­uct feeds (if you are a retailer).
  • Add struc­tured data.
  • Cre­ate XML sitemaps.

2. Intelligent Audiences

Search is increas­ing­ly the cen­ter­piece of con­sumer engagement.

AI and machine learn­ing also ben­e­fit paid search. We can now cre­ate and curate lists of users who have shown
pur­chase intent in par­tic­u­lar top­ics through a fea­ture called In-Mar­ket Audi­ences. This is avail­able both on Google and Bing.

In In-Mar­ket Audi­ences, pre­dic­tive intel­li­gence is able to deliv­er lists of users who are ready to buy. Bing Ads pre­dic­tive intel­li­gence iden­ti­fies users who have shown pur­chase intent sig­nals with­in a par­tic­u­lar cat­e­go­ry, includ­ing search­es and clicks on Bing and pageviews on Microsoft services.

There are plen­ty of pre-made audi­ence lists to choose from which enable adver­tis­ers to tar­get users who are more like­ly to convert.

Prop­er usage of this fea­ture can help increase click-through and con­ver­sion rates and ROAS, as well as decrease costs-per-click.

Audience Checklist

  • Iden­ti­fy the dif­fer­ent lists that you can match with what you’re selling.
  • Add the lists and lay­er on with bid mod­i­fiers. (Start with at least a 15 per­cent bid mod­i­fi­er for most of the groups).
  • Ana­lyze and adjust as needed.
  • Fur­ther expand your lists.

2.5 Intelligent Automation

There are also var­i­ous automa­tion options that you can use to increase effi­cien­cies, including:

  • Auto-bid­ding.
  • Auto­mat­ed extensions.
  • Dynam­ic search ads.

3. Intelligent Conversation

Search is becom­ing more con­ver­sa­tion­al. But while adop­tion rates for smart speak­ers are grow­ing fast, voice search per se is cur­rent­ly not that huge in terms of volume.

Right now, voice search use is most com­mon for sim­ple infor­ma­tion­al tasks.

That is not to say that opti­miz­ing for voice search is unnecessary.

At the moment, it might be good not to spend so many resources on it. You should just be doing what you’re doing for SEO.

Voice Search Checklist

  • Imple­ment struc­tured data.
  • Answer ques­tions.
  • “Peo­ple also ask” opti­miza­tion.
  • Opti­mize for fea­tured snippets.
  • Opti­mize your local listings.

Leverage Bots

More com­pli­cat­ed back-and-forth trans­ac­tions, like mak­ing an appoint­ment or order­ing food, hap­pens via bots. Bots could be your dig­i­tal assis­tant or chatbots.

Focus on lever­ag­ing chat­bots which you can build once and then deploy across all channels.

Conversational Checklist

  • Cre­ate a skill.
  • Devel­op chatbots.
  • Cross-plat­forms.

Takeaways

Con­sumer and search behav­ior is evolv­ing rapid­ly and AI is going to help empow­er mar­keters and cus­tomers alike.

  • A bet­ter under­stand­ing of our audi­ence gives us more oppor­tu­ni­ties for increased personalization.
  • Audi­ence tar­get­ing can enable us to expand our reach.
  • Focus on visu­al and con­ver­sa­tion­al interactions.

SOURCE