How Will Natural Language Generation Change SEO?

The ability to automatically generate text that reads as if a person had written it has been a hotly pursued prize amongst AI researchers.

12:47 23 June 2020

With natural language generation, that might now be becoming a reality. If it does, it could change SEO forever.

What Is Natural Language Generation?

Natural language generation involves using AI to generate text that sounds natural, as if written by a human writer. Natural language generation has been on the horizons for a while, but it is only recently that it has really come into its own. Natural language generation is currently used by a variety of businesses in order to automatically generate content for them.

For example, Microsoft has now replaced human writers with AI in its news department. Microsoft’s news service uses content that is rewritten from other sources, with Microsoft splitting the revenue made from each page with the original publisher. While the technology is far from perfect, it is now at the level where we can reliably use it to produce natural human-sounding text from a range of data sources.

Automated Content Generation

With the ability to produce natural-sounding copy automatically, businesses can now realistically consider making automatically generated content part of their SEO strategy. Microsoft’s news service is just one potential implementation of automated content generation, but there are plenty of other scenarios in which the ability to automatically rewrite content could be very advantageous.

For example, a blogger looking to boost their SEO could use natural language generation to produce rewrites of their key content that backlink to the original. These can then be distributed to other websites immediately and will pass a plagiarism check, making them unique pieces of content and ensuring that they will benefit SEO.

Natural Language Processing

The emergence of natural language generation as a technology has occurred alongside the development of a related technology: natural language processing. As you can probably guess from the name, natural language processing is the equivalent of natural language generation but with the objective of understanding existing text instead of creating new text.

Google has been trying to move away from keyword-based searches for a while now. The way that users use search engines like Google has changed over the years and people now often search for full queries rather than keywords, Google wants to make sure that its search engine can interpret these queries as people expect.

Text that is generated through natural language generation can be tailored so that it is optimized for Google’s natural language processing algorithms and is more likely to appear in the results for relevant queries. However, NLP also means that automatically-generated content needs to be very good in order to pass Google’s spam checks. Low-quality automated content is more likely to be marked as spam and end up hurting your SEO. Working with a professional SEO business like Vudu is the best way of ensuring that you are pursuing the right SEO techniques for your business.

Natural language generation could be a game-changer for SEO. However, in its current state, some human oversight is still required. Full automated SEO isn’t quite a reality yet.