Never has it been a more challenging, exciting and tumultuous time for eCommerce business owners online. With AI a new contender in the world of Google analytics, the way you create and optimise content must appeal to the AI Overviews ranking system if you want to stand out. Every day more and more users go to chatbots for answers to their questions, for guidance on what to buy, how to fix this, how to style that. It has even been estimated that we may see a large drop of up to 25% in search engine usage in the coming years. So where will people be taking these searches? To AI chatbots and alternative virtual agents of course!
As much as all these rapid changes can seem overwhelming, there is lots to look forward to in terms of opportunities for growth. If you can maximise both the power of AI Overviews and Google analytics together, you will optimise your reach and stay ahead of the curve. We have some essential tips on how to adapt to these SEO changes, and keep smashing both the Google and AI chatbot game. Read on for 4 essential tips on how to stay ahead in the world of AI and SEO.
AI has reshaped how Google and other search engines understand user intent and the content that businesses create, therefore shaking up the overall search engine ranking criteria.
At a glance, Google has told businesses and publishers that they don’t need to do anything new to reap the benefit from AI Overview. While the future is never certain, it does look like AI Overview takes into account similar factors as Google when deciding what content to push to users.
If you have strategies in place to improve your SERP (search engine results page) ranking, then we highly recommend you keep doing all those things. SEO as we know it is still incredibly beneficial, helping you get seen by more people – now in both search engines and AI driven results through chatbots or otherwise.
Here are our top 4 tips on how you can keep up with AIOs (AI Overviews) changing the way users receive their search results, and maintain those high search rankings:
The results are in and *drum roll please* the higher your SERP position the more likely your site will be included in Google’s AIOs! While this may not come as a big surprise, the data doesn’t lie – if your webpage is rank 1, you have over a 50% chance of being included in the AI Overview at the very top of the search page. Tank 10, your chance drops to just under 37%. You can see how quickly this percentage drops, and how for pages with a low SERP ranking showing up in an AIO is next to impossible.
Here is how you can increase your SEO and therefore your SERP and chance at being selected by AI for that all important AI Overview.
An incredibly important part of SERP rankings is to write high quality content that benefits users, is educational, enjoyable and puts the reader first. Designing your content to include images, videos, informational graphics and graphs will help the reader and encourage them to stay on your site for longer, helping your SERP while still being informational. Backlinks are another way to increase your ranking.
When writing your content, ask yourself is your content original, insightful or interesting? If the answer is no, then make the necessary changes until you feel your site is full of content to benefit your visitors and improve your ranking simultaneously.
Whenever we talk about crawlability, I can’t help but picture a large spider combing through metaphoric internet strings. However, there are no spiders or webs here. If you want to improve SERP rankings and get those AIO hits, then you need a website that search engines or AI searches can quickly and easily crawl through.
To easily comb through your website, you need to make sure that you have an updated sitemap and a clean site structure for easy indexing. Load time is also critical – a slow website means less crawlability, less reach. Being mobile friendly is also great for SERP rankings – create a mobile optimised website and reap the benefits.
It is a little bit of an industry secret that informational keywords rank higher than sales focused keywords when it comes to AI Overviews.
As an example, if you are writing about a product you want to advertise you’ll reap better results with an informational piece rather than simply a sales pitch. Users don’t always like to feel like they’re being sold to, and transactional language can create distance.
Q&As or tutorials such as “how to create the best plum jam” will reach more people and are more likely to be chosen by AIO rankings than simply “plum jam for sale”.
When it comes to being scooped up in an AI generated SERP, the more information the better. The benefit of AI results is that artificial intelligence can comb over information and break down queries, finding hyper specific answers for user questions.
To help boost your content and get captured by the AIO, you need to write long keywords (more like key phrases) and stay away from being too generic. It may seem unusual, but if a user is searching for something like ‘how to choose the right straightener for stubborn wavy hair’ if you are just writing about ‘top 10 straighteners’, someone else who is being more specific will see their content in AIO, not you and your generalised content.
Understanding user intent is a big part of AI SERP. Google AI Overview will sometimes take information and reword it for the user, so you need to make sure that your content is easily understandable, and translatable to whichever question the searcher is asking.
Another thing to consider is emerging trends; if you write about up and coming trends first, in the most SEO and SERP friendly way first, then you’ll reap all the benefits of AIO before anyone else.
The way users gain information is changing, shifting ever so slightly from traditional search engines to AI chatbots and other AI powered information. With this slow trend towards AI search results, businesses and publishers need to stay ahead of the curve and ride the AI wave to stay at the front of these search results.
Before anyone panics, for now it seems that if you have good SEO and rank highly in SERP then AIO will only push your results to more people than before. If you would like to improve your SERP then now is the time.
Unsure how to get started on improving your SERP? Wanting to keep up with AIOs but don’t have the time or understanding? Let us help!
At Immerse Marketing, we make it a priority to know everything about AI and how AIO has and will affect search results. Our team creates incredible SEO to help boost your SERP, putting you number 1 for AI chatbot and search engine results.
Visit our website or shoot us a message to get started on your journey to number 1 SERP ranking!
