Artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly drives our everyday lives. Smart assistants organize our appointments, robotic vacuum cleaners clean our homes. Now AI is revolutionizing content marketing. Find out here why relevance is the new currency in online marketing.

The most important reader of your website: The Google Bot

In high-speed data journalism or e-commerce, it’s long been clear that the most important persona, audience, or target group is not people, it’s machines. Long before your company’s stakeholders, be they customers, investors, or media, land on your website, the bots have already been there.

Bots are so-called crawlers. They are programs that scan your website with the help of algorithms. They use AI or machine learning to read, understand and categorize the content you have formulated with a lot of brainpower and linguistic skill.

Search engines such as the quasi-monopolist Google try to assign your content to certain search terms (keywords). In addition, these intelligent machines assign the content to the appropriate context or topic. So if you’re looking for the latest hipster barbecue sauce, Google thinks ahead and assigns this to the context “barbecue / BBQ”.

Relevance is the new currency

Why all the magic and effort at Google? The answer is to keep its user on the platform. First and foremost, a search engine naturally wants to display results that are relevant to its users, i.e. the “best” and correct search hits from the user’s point of view. The search engine with the most relevant hits for the user are used, others less or not at all. This is because only a stable, high user base guarantees growing advertising revenues. That is Google’s legacy.

Google is the first and most important reader of your web content.

Search engine marketing: It’s a matter of bare survival online

Being “number one” in the Google search results, i.e. at the top of organic search, is vital for the survival of most companies. If you don’t succeed, there is only one thing left to do: buy Google Ads, i.e. advertisements on Google. In other words, you “buy” your Google ranking.

Apart from the fact that for many users hits displayed by Google Ads are seen as far less confidence-inspiring, you also give your company a never-ending dependency in its advertising budget. Since the Google advertising model is based on a bidding principle, companies bid each other up in the battle for the most important search terms (“keywords”). You end up having to buy your search hits at a high price.

SEO & relevance- A fight with unfair means

One method of not landing on page two or worse in organic search hits (have YOU ever looked at the second page of search hits on Google?) is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Traditional SEO can seem like a Herculean task, trying to fight with wooden swords against an army of star warriors with laser swords. There is an intensive attempt to ensure good organic rankings with a long series of steps.

SEO optimization takes place both on the content and technical level. Technical SEO, through clean programming, minimization of loading times and fast web servers is part of the craft and is required for any site to rank well. The challenge is that authors (humans) write content for users (humans) and rarely consider that humans are only the second readers of the content (after the machines). This is a technical fact, even if many copywriters and authors don’t want to admit it.

Intelligent, AI-supported content creation creates “equality of arms” and relevance

So, if Google uses algorithms to crawl and categorize our content for relevance, why not target the algorithms with the same weapons? What sounds like surrendering to the machines is actually just establishing “equality of arms”. We use Excel instead of slide rules, online translation tools instead of manual translations, computational models to fight epidemics and predict climate.

So why shouldn’t we let smart algorithms optimize – not create – our texts to make them as relevant as possible for Google and its users?

The future is already here. Ensuring relevance in online content is the next competitive advantage to exploit! rellify adds this intelligent augmentation for the modern content creator.