4 Ways AI Chatbot can Quickly Improve Your SEO - Botco.ai

4 Ways AI Chatbot can Quickly Improve Your SEO

Why is SEO so important now? 

With the fall of third party cookies and changes to paid ad targeting, organic traffic is more important than ever for generating website traffic. Search Engine Optimization has always been an important pillar of any marketing strategy, and its significance will only grow in the coming months and years.

Another emerging trend is the rise of the ai chatbot: that omnipresent button in the bottom right corner of most websites. How does a chatbot impact SEO? In short, an ai chatbot can be very valuable to your SEO strategy, but only if you select the right one.

What to avoid

Slow and Heavy AI Chatbots

In the early days, chatbots came with a pretty heavy payload on a website. These primitive bots slowed down the rate at which a website loaded, and poor website performance can damage SEO. Google announced in 2018 that page load speed would be a factor for both desktop and mobile search results.

Many of these primitive bots still persist, and their low-cost cousins are available for purchase. I would steer clear of a very low-cost option. You get what you pay for, in terms of functionality, outcomes, and (most relevant here) load speed.

Botco.ai (along with many other modern solutions) is super lightweight, and users do not see any negative impacts on page load speed.

Primitive Navigation

When most people think of a chatbot, they think of an interface that allows you to navigate website content via clicking buttons and nothing else. Users must follow the journey designed for them by whoever put the chatbot together. 

These interfaces do not give users control over their own customer journey, and are responsible for many of the negative perceptions of chatbots as a category. Research indicates that the most common reasons people do not wish to use a chatbot are as follows: “I don’t believe it will give me the answers I want.” And “I think it’s unlikely to answer complete questions.”

Since users have a limited number of options to choose from and contribute no original thoughts, the insights into user behavior, buyer personas, etc. are very limited. You may gain *some* insights from which buttons they never click, or which part of the conversation they abandon or convert through. Even so, most available chatbots do not have a way to present even this limited dataset.

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What to look for

Conversational Automation paired with Natural Language Processing

If you want to use a chat interface to gain actionable customer insights, it is essential that your website visitors be able to ask questions in their own words. Processing the input and serving up the right content in response requires a true artificial intelligence engine with sophisticated natural language processing capabilities. 

In 2018, Google announced an update to their search algorithm known as BERT, a major step forward in natural language processing technology within search. Now, Google pays attention to previously ignored connecting words (as, or, and, to). It also has contextual awareness to understand words with multiple meanings, delivering more accurate and relevant results.

As Google continues to develop its natural language processing engine to better understand customer requests, it’s only natural that businesses implement their own processes to understand and respond to customers’ requests.

Actionable Insights in a Single Dashboard

Further, if you hope to incorporate the data you collect from website visitors in your overall strategy, you will need a solution that aggregates and presents this data in a meaningful way. 

There’s two things to look for here. First is the ability to collect data at all. Many chatbots have no ability to collect and preserve data from customer interactions. 

The second consideration: where is the data stored and how can it be presented? Typically, teams are drowning in data, and lack the ability to easily organize and access the key insights from a given source (do we really need another .csv file??).

Many chat solutions lack a useable reporting backend, meaning data has to be manually sifted through in .csv files or abandoned entirely. Be sure to choose a chatbot that provides robust reporting capabilities that give your team a competitive edge.

One of the primary reasons we entered the chat space at all was to leverage data collection to help businesses identify gaps and opportunities to grow and scale. We couldn’t do this without a robust reporting capabilities.

For example, a leading wellness brand learned from their chat users that there were a lot of questions about skincare, specifically how massage services would impact/treat acne. They responded by generating content to answer these questions, and also launched a line of skincare products that added a brand new revenue stream. 

Another customer learned that many of their patients dealing with addiction also had challenges with eating disorders. This insight gave them the ability to better educate and serve their patients, improving outcomes while at the same time capturing additional revenue.

Botco.ai: A comprehensive solution

Botco.ai offers a solution that has sophisticated natural language processing and can respond in real time to a large variety of customer requests, whether or not your team is available. We take things one step further to present data in a meaningful way. To differentiate these capabilities, we use the term “conversational AI” to denote a comprehensive solution relative to primitive chatbots.

Botco.ai is leading the way in conversational AI that improves the user experience of website visitors and generates actionable insights for business leaders. Sales, Marketing, and Operations leaders are turning to botco.ai to accomplish a variety of business objectives, and one of those has to do with SEO.

How can conversational AI help with SEO?

Data-Driven Keyword Strategy

What keywords are your customers searching to find your solution? Of course, your marketing team has created a list of keywords that are already producing results, and refining this strategy over time. Many of our customers have found new keywords in their botco.ai dashboard, leading them to expand their list with what they learned.

Long tail keywords are some of the most elusive elements of an SEO strategy, and often begin organically in content strategy. Botco.ai can accelerate the process of discovering long tail keywords as users interact conversationally with the chatbot, using full sentences, punctuation, and even saying thank you after a helpful conversation. 

Add to that our ability to cluster similar questions for natural language processing training purposes, and you have a package of similar intents that can be rolled into your SEO strategy.

Connected Content Strategy

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As search engines have changed their algorithms to improve user experience of their products, content that is rich and useful has become more important than ever. Speaking from experience, it can be difficult to create the most relevant content that will resonate with website visitors. Unanswered questions are typically the best jumping off point for new content. 

Enter fallbacks, or what happens when the conversational AI does not have an answer prepared to a user’s question. Generally, this indicates a content gap. These gaps represent opportunities to answer previously unanswered questions with blogs, landing pages, even new product offerings. Our customers have used conversational insights they’ve gained from botco.ai to open new revenue streams.

Dynamic User Experience

Not every chatbot has a positive impact on user experience. As discussed earlier, chatbots that exert control on the user journey actually damage the utility of a website. Conversational AI takes user experience to the next level, by serving up whatever content a website visitor requests on demand. 

There is a strong negative correlation between bounce rate and top rankings. We consistently see a decrease in bounce rate and an increase in website session length, precisely because we create an engaging and personalized website experience for each user. 

Natively Mobile First

SEO pros already know that Google has implemented mobile-first indexing, meaning that your site has the chance to rank highly on mobile search only if it is optimized for mobile devices.

Botco.ai is optimized for mobile devices, and creates a compelling web experience across desktop, mobile, and even Facebook Messenger. 

To sum it up, conversational AI is set to become a part of the modern marketer’s tech stack. As such, it can inform overall marketing strategy, including SEO, PPC, web design, content strategy, and more. If you’re interested in the ways botco.ai can impact your marketing efforts, schedule a call with us.