If you’re an SEO professional, you likely know this domain is not for the faint of heart. Yet, staying on top of everything, SEO is crucial to thriving in this constantly evolving ecosystem, especially with Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking over.
Google AI Overviews has changed the way SEO works for websites. So, if you’re trying to optimize your website for higher search engine rankings, you need to know all about this shiny new tool.
In this post, we’re going to look at a few practical AI SEO tips that should help you put your best foot forward.
What Are Google’s AI Overviews?
Google's AI Overviews, formerly known as Search Generative Experience, use artificial intelligence to improve search results. Instead of changing the usual results, they add helpful suggestions to improve what you find in your searches.
As an important feature in Google search, it employs generative AI to provide a short description of the topic beside the links to the responses generated for the search query.
These AI-powered responses are presented in a shaded box near or at the top of the Google search engine result page. Users can get a snapshot of the topics, which would typically require multiple queries for nuanced responses.
Long story short, Google AI Overviews is here for one purpose–to provide the most relevant information to users.
Naturally, this shift is forcing digital marketers to move away from traditional SEO and embrace AI-driven SEO best practices.
In case you’re wondering how Google AI aligns with your SEO strategy going forward (and vice versa), this Google AI SEO guide has you covered!
Boost Your SEO Rankings with This Google AI SEO Guide
Up ahead are a few useful Google AI SEO tips to help you elevate your game.
Tip #1: Focus on User Experience
User Experience (UX) has never been more important for websites because it directly impacts user engagement and conversion rates.
A well-thought-out UX design results in a website that is responsive, intuitive, and easy to navigate. As a result, visitors stay for longer, which brings down bounce rates. Further, the probability of users returning and/or recommending the website to others increases.
When it comes to SEO, search engines love websites that provide positive user experiences and reward them with higher rankings. Here’s how to create perfect UI and UX for your website:
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Go mobile-friendly: Make sure your website is responsive and works flawlessly across all devices to provide a seamless experience.
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Optimize for fast loading: Improve your website’s loading speed by compressing large/heavy images, implementing browser caching, and minimizing CSS and JavaScript files.
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Aim for clean navigation and intuitive website structure: This will help users find the information they’re looking for with ease. In turn, the bounce rate will be reduced, and engagement will be higher.
Now the question comes, how do you ensure all these? Well, a website builder with built-in SEO features can be your savior here. It makes it easy to create a user-friendly site that loads fast, works on all devices, and ranks higher in search engines.
We recommend you give Dorik, a no-code AI website builder a try because it’s the best platform for SEO.
Tip #2: Improve Content Quality
The internet may be flooded with content, but most of it is noise that adds to people’s problems rather than solving them.
Cutting through this noisy clutter and finding meaningful content is rare. That’s what makes insightful content valuable. If you want your website to stay on the right side of AI Overviews, focusing on creating high-quality, relevant content is a must.
Consider the following to create helpful content:
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Focus on creating content that provides detailed information that resonates with your target audience. Google AI likes nothing better than content that users are looking for.
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It helps to use a friendly, conversational tone for better readability and engagement.
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Focus on covering topics holistically to ensure your content matches the user’s queries.
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Consider long-form content that touches upon various aspects of a topic to augment performance.
Tip #3: Understand and Optimize for User Intent
Did you know users search Google for various reasons and intents? This is why you should learn about the different types of user intent, such as:
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Informational
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Navigational
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Transactional
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Commercial investigation, etc.
You can use online tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics to study user behavior and tweak your content strategy accordingly.
Remember, your content should ideally answer specific questions that users might have. Add clarity to your content by using headings, subheadings, and structured data to provide helpful information.
Tip #4: Go Beyond Keyword Research
It’s common to center your content creation process around keyword research. However, you need to revamp your strategy with the changing times, especially when you want to drive organic traffic.
This is not to say that keyword research is losing its charm, but it’s also true that research tools are susceptible to missing important topics. Also, they may become redundant when they receive the new data.
Using the “People Also Ask” feature on Google can help. But why would you do that? It’s not like these terms have a high search volume in tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs!
Still, you can’t ignore the fact that they’re a great reflection of what users are searching for, mirroring their search intent. That’s invaluable!
Tip #5: Prioritize Structured Data
The point of all data is to make sense. Only then can it be utilized by computers and humans for better decision-making. Implement structured data and use schema markup to boost Google’s understanding of the context of your content.
Here’s a desirable side effect of structured data–it improves the way your website shows up in search results while creating rich snippets and augmenting visibility.
To provide more context:
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Leverage semantic HTML tags like , , and to help search engines figure out the structure of your content.
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Emphasize schema markup elements such as product information, pricing, description, ratings, user reviews, and FAQs.
Tip #6: Explore the Middle and Bottom of the Funnel Content
Customers just beginning their buying journey typically post top-of-funnel queries to gather more information for their research. AI can now easily answer these queries.
It, therefore, makes sense to turn your attention to customers further down in the purchase funnel. This way, you increase the chances of your content being viewed (while encouraging them to buy from you).
We recommend investing in a reliable SEO log analyzer tool to find out how your content pages are performing. As the name suggests, these smart tools are designed to boost website performance by analyzing the log files. Some of their helpful features include:
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Live log streaming
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Prevention of crawl budget waste
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Identification of the most viewed and skipped pages
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Blocking fake bots
The insights provided by these tools will help you enhance crawlability on your website’s pages and enable them to get indexed and rank better on search engines.
Ultimately, you’re left with more organic traffic, higher visibility, improved rankings, and a fully equipped website to perform in the Google AI era.
Tip #7: Follow E-E-A-T Principles
Even though there’s an ocean of content out there, Google AI is always looking for high-quality content in its search. It’s always a good idea to create content that establishes you as a leader in your industry.
This is where compelling content that creates thought leadership comes into the picture. You can achieve this by following Google E-E-A-T principles:
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Expertise: This is where you demonstrate deep knowledge of the subject you’re writing about. Write like or publish content written by a subject matter expert.
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Experience: The content should reflect the writer’s own experiences. Create detailed author bios that mention the credentials and experience of the writer.
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Authoritativeness: Make sure you highlight your credentials and reputation through your content. If you’re making certain claims, support them with reputable sources.
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Trustworthiness: Ensure that the information on your website is clear, accurate, user-centric, and transparent to build trust with users as well as search engines. Showcase customer testimonials and positive reviews, if required.
Tip #8: Refine Your Linking Strategy
Links work as authority signals that help Google determine which sources can be trusted. This is why we emphasize having a robust link-building strategy in place.
You want to create high-quality, relevant backlinks from authoritative websites. You also want to diversify your link sources and use only those internal links that add to the user experience and promote content discoverability.
Use a reliable crawling tool to regularly audit and disavow bad links and maintain a clean backlink profile. Enrich your content and add context with the right keywords and anchor texts. These simple steps will help enhance your website’s credibility and improve search engine rankings.
Tip #9: Utilize AI SEO Tools
There are several powerful AI-driven SEO tools you can leverage to analyze and optimize your website’s content. Tools like Surfer SEO and Clearscope can help pinpoint content gaps and optimize it for improved rankings. AI tools can also help you discover trending topics and high-value keywords.
Other SEO use cases include optimizing on-page SEO, maintaining keyword density, internal linking, and meta tags. You’ll also be able to assess your SEO performance and gain actionable insights for improvement.
Tip #10: Track Everything
This may sound simple, but the importance of constantly monitoring the performance of your website cannot be overemphasized. Conduct regular SEO audits to identify and fix issues before they can hamper your performance. Tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz can be helpful in this regard.
Also, be aware of the latest SEO algorithm changes and updates. With Google AI taking center stage, the SEO landscape is changing like never before. Staying informed is necessary to stay competitive.
Wrapping Up
In the times of Google’s AI Overview, digital marketers must adopt a multipronged approach to effective SEO.
From creating quality content and understanding user intent to following E-E-A-T guidelines and utilizing AI tools, you can take several steps to navigate the ever-evolving SEO sphere.
Hopefully, the above-mentioned AI SEO tips will help you stay ahead of the herd and achieve long-term success in search rankings.
