Survey: AI May Help Marketers Solve Pressing SEO Challenges

To gauge how marketers value SEO, SearchDex recently surveyed 100 industry professionals. Its research found that managing SEO is still difficult for many marketers, and key challenges range from a lack of resources to poor in-house knowledge.

Approximately 91 percent of marketers said that managing SEO is difficult. About 55 percent said that it is hard for them to build a good, knowledgeable SEO team, and 45 percent said the same about working with IT for SEO purposes. Thirty-five percent claimed that they still do not have the right tools for SEO, and 45 percent do not have enough time to analyze their data.

That being said, many marketers believed that artificial intelligence (AI) may one day be able to help them resolve some of these issues. A total of 96 percent of respondents said that they believed they could benefit from AI. This is because they assume AI will give them the ability to focus more on SEO (73 percent) than data analysis, and they will no longer have to worry about using exact keyword phrases (41 percent).

Sixty-one percent of marketers stated that AI may help them search for anomalies in their current SEO strategy, and 58 percent think it will keep their SEO plan current based on the competition.

B2B Marketers and SEO for Revenue Growth

SEO is one of many channels that B2B marketers expect to drive revenue for them in the coming months, despite its challenges. The “2017 State of B2B Digital Marketing” study from DemandWave found that 63 percent of marketers expect organic search to bring in revenue in 2017.

The same percentage said the same about email, and 44 percent claimed that paid search would drive profits throughout the course of the year.