It used to be that winning organic placement in search engines was enough to attract new business and get noticed. But with the advent of AI search results display, competition has become fiercer.
In 2023, 13 million adults in the US alone used generative AI search as their primary online search tool. And that figure is projected to reach a whopping 90 million by 2027. That means significant traffic is being steered from traditional search models.
So it’s no wonder that some businesses are seeing their website visits and traffic erode due to poor visibility in AI search results. Thus, understanding the best ways to optimize your content for AI isn’t just a suggestion. As any experienced SEO agency will tell you, it’s now a necessity.
The introduction of AI has changed the landscape considerably. And it’s no longer just a futuristic concept. It’s quickly becoming the blood and bones of modern search engines. So as much as the old-school tactics have served you up to this point, now is the time to start grasping the way AI ‘thinks’, as it were.
In searches, users find AI tools 2-3 times more efficient than traditional tools because it requires fewer searches to find the answers. In fact, about 27% of consumers use generative AI for at least half of their internet searches. For consumers under 40, this number rises to 37%. AI platforms are expected to drive more website visits than traditional search engines in the next three years.
As such, understanding AI ranking factors is not only crucial for staying competitive, but it’s critical for the survival of your company. Search engines are getting smarter. So you need to as well. We’ll take a look at five of the best ways to optimize your content for AI so you can boost your digital presence.
To be clear, AI does not invalidate traditional SEO. It just changes the focus from optimizing for keywords to prioritizing the user’s intent. That means you have to understand the question behind a potential customer’s search query and be ready to respond with a comprehensive yet easy-to-understand answer.
AI also puts a premium on quality. It can easily detect if you’re just repurposing old content. It also demands that you pay attention to some of the technical SEO elements such as mobile-friendliness and page speed. The new set of criteria that search engines use to evaluate and rank web pages are actually powered by artificial intelligence. Imagine that.
To break it down, it’s advised that you prioritize the following actions:
You may be asking, what in the world is E-E-A-T? It’s an anagram that stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. AI utilizes E-E-A-T as to filter out subpar, potentially misleading or even harmful content.
So as you set out to create and publish content, ask yourself the following important questions:
AI algorithms look for signs that your website and content creator are credible, and will award those with the most reliable and trustworthy information.
Lastly, content that has a strong E-E-A-T profile is likely to be mentioned from other sources online and linked to from other sites and blogs. These also act as signals elevating the authority of your content and help with its positioning in AI search results.
If you want to attract AI’s attention, prioritize creating content that is clear, simple, and easy to read for the end user. Use conversational language and write naturally. Keep in mind that human-friendly content is typically created by humans. And it easily recognizes when content was created by AI. And these search engines can understand the relationship between words and phrases. So go beyond just keywords. Create content that comprehensively covers a topic, its subtopics, and its concepts.
The sophisticated algorithms of AI will always favor content that has a well-rounded yet detailed and insightful exploration of a topic.
In understanding the user’s intent, you have to be able to grasp the context behind a search query. So, for instance, in the old days of search engines, the user would type in something like “best hotel in Detroit” and the algorithm would spit out results based on the typed words. But now, the same search might warrant the most affordable hotel in Detroit, the best one for families, or one that allows pets.
To identify the core intent behind a user’s search, you can use tools like “People Also Ask” or related searches on Google to get a sense of the questions users are asking.
Accumulating information like this when creating your website content will assist in presenting your content in the right context from which AI can pull snippets and nuggets that appear in AI overviews, as citations, or full detailed explanations in search results.
Part of optimizing your content includes how well users are interacting with it. And user experience (also known as UX) will reflect this. If users aren’t staying long on your site (called dwell time), are immediately leaving after landing (known as bouncing), or aren’t clicking on your link in the search results, AI may flag your content as unhelpful.
In addition, if the content you have created doesn’t factor in the user experience and is instead engineered to artificially win placement it may even be deemed spam and removed from the index.
Furthermore, if your website’s loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability don’t meet Google’s standards, AI will not reward you with higher rankings.
When creating content, do you use a clear hierarchy of headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to organize it? How about bullet points and numbered lists to break up long paragraphs? If not, you have a bad case of unstructured data. And AI sees any unstructured webpage like this the way you might experience a textbook without a table of contents, chapters, or headings. It will not reward this.
There are also technical items to consider for structured data that can be addressed with using third party utilities. One of the most popular plugins for WordPress for this function is the Yoast SEO plugin.
So when it comes down to communicating your content with AI search platforms, take advantage of structured data, or schema markup. This remarkable tool is a type of code you can add to your website that helps search engines make sense of the meaning and context of your content.
If you want to stay relevant (and who doesn’t?), it’s important to know and incorporate the above ways to optimize your content for AI search. If you have a website and don’t know where to start, our team can help you.
At BizHive, we have SEO down to a science.
And we can help you by providing a proven process of topic and keyword identification, competitive research, strategic planning, and, of course, strategy execution to dramatically increase your AI visibility. So contact us today. And go beyond just getting noticed.
