Get a better understanding of your users’ needs through AI

Tamara says: “Predict user needs with artificial intelligence, and then secure backlinks that drive both rankings and engagement.”

How do you predict user needs with artificial intelligence?

“It seems that we have to live with AI now. I hoped this wouldn’t be the case but, as we can see, everything has been using AI this year – even all of the new Google features are using AI. Naturally, we have to adapt to this.

How can we use AI to predict user trends? The answer lies in behavioural analytics. It starts with the data that we already have from our favourite tools. It can be either Google tools like Google Trends, Google Search Console, or Google Analytics, or from other SEO tools.

You can export that data and use AI to identify behavioural patterns, seasonal patterns, and anything else that can tell you a story about what the user needs and what the user does, both on the web and during the search process.”

How does this help secure backlinks and drive rankings and engagement?

“Backlinks have been a hot topic for the last few months because of the recent spam updates and all of the changes within the Google search results. We are seeing fewer backlink effects because of the Google generative-AI overviews. There’s been a question as to whether backlinks are important or not.

However, backlinks are still important because they drive users to the final stage, and the final page that they need. You can use backlinks in the best way possible, both for user engagement and for rankings, by tailoring those backlinks to the keywords and the user’s search intent.

What we used to do in link building was try to manipulate the algorithm and build backlinks for the algorithm. Now, those are considered spam tactics, and they no longer bring a lot of value. We have to turn backlinks more towards the user and make those backlinks useful for them, not just for the algorithm.

Circling back to user experience and rankings, backlinks need to bring even more quality now – not just because you are trying to be number 1 on Google, but because you are trying to bring benefit to the end user.”

How important is user intent as a ranking factor and how should you optimize for it?

“I’m using the word ‘user’ a lot because it’s been a buzzword in Google documents and in the recent Google updates. Everything should circle around, and focus on, the user as well as the rankings.

It’s been quite a race, and a kind of game, with all the new Google updates and features. We are seeing fewer organic results being featured as the number 1 thing that users see on the SERP. SEOs need to be even more skilful and creative to get rankings and push their organic results as high as possible, to fight both paid results and the generative AI results that we now see at the top of the page.”

Is engagement also an important ranking factor?

“It’s very important, and it can be measured both on the backlink page and on your client’s website. There are different types of engagement. You can track engagement with your backlink, and that external engagement, and you can also track the internal engagement on the website.

From the backlink perspective, there are different ways that you can use third-party tools to measure engagement on your backlinks. You can also track the engagement on your competitors’ backlinks and see how users behave on those pages, and maybe try to mimic or repeat those results in your strategy if they are successful enough. Engagement is a very useful metric that you can use in multiple ways.”

How can AI be used to predict user search trends and behavioural patterns?

“This requires a bit of a skill upgrade. I didn’t know a lot about data analytics a few years ago, but I realised that I had to learn more to use it in my future work. I can advise all SEOs to do the same and stay up to date with all of the changes and updates.

With some free courses and free tips (for example, you can find these from Google on Google Cloud and in BigQuery Studio), you can quickly and easily learn Python or SQL tactics and scripts that you can use to filter out and process your traffic data.

When you work with the data a little bit, you can use ChatGPT-4 or some other machine-learning tool to process the data that you collected and filter it out. The AI can help you read the historical data or understand it better, particularly when there is a large amount of data that you are not able to analyse by yourself in a single day.

AI can help you with this. It can read what the users did, how they engaged with the content or the backlinks, and even the email sequences in your outreach process. Then, the AI can spit out the information you need or give you a prediction based on the data that it just read and analysed.”

Should you provide AI with user data from your own brand so that it better understands your users’ needs?

“Yes. You can export data from your own website and from the tools that are connected to your platform. You can export data from third-party tools, whether it’s tools for your outreach strategy, email automation tools, or tools for content or keyword optimization like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Majestic. That data can come from a lot of places.”

Are there any metrics that you look at to identify the users that you want the AI to focus on?

“The best possible metric here is focused on the keywords; the ranking of the keywords, and then the traffic that those keywords may bring. The best context would be competitor analysis and research of the top results for your keywords.

You need to be very careful with how you are reading this data because keywords have certain intents, and a difference of just one word can change those intents. If there’s a different term in the keyword, that keyword can have a very different intent.

You need to have a very sharp eye, and maybe even use AI to help you analyse and interpret the intent of the keyword. Then, when you understand what your user has typed in and what brought the most engagement and traffic, you can understand which keyword to use in your own strategy.”

Have you provided AI with keywords and asked it to categorise those into various intents?

“Yes, I have. It’s actually very successful. Compared to one or two years ago, AI is now more capable of knowing the context behind the search and not just filtering out keywords by clusters or more technical filtering.

It can read and understand the intent, and not only group the intent into the main four categories. It can also give recommendations and tell you whether or not it’s a mixed intent – when a single keyword has two different intents behind it. AI is very good at recognising that, I have to say.”

Can you use AI for the more strategic side of SEO, to build a backlink strategy that attracts credible links, for example?

“Not as far as I know. I work with backlinks a lot and I can say that, for now, AI is not able to plan or carry out a full backlink strategy. It needs guidance and it needs to be used only as a tool to filter or analyse data quickly.

I don’t think it has the capability of understanding what a strategy means and the full business potential or final goal of your client. In that way, SEOs are hopefully safe for another year.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Get off LinkedIn. Stop reading all the crazy updates and the clickbait articles about Google’s comments and recommendations. Go back to your strategy, focus on what’s important for the business goal, and do the testing.

As for how often you should go back to that strategy, it depends. If you have a strategy that works for different types of websites, you can take shortcuts and implement it quickly to save some time, but you never know what the end result will be. You might need to invest a bit more time trying out different strategies.

Usually, a 3-month template will show the results for a website. If you don’t see any results in those 3 months, you know that it’s too slow.”

Tamara Novitović is head of SEO at Bazoom Group, and you can find her over at Bazoom.com.