Start Preparing Your Business Now for an AI-Infused SEO Future
Get ready for AI to dominate Google Search and find out the steps you should start taking now to pivot your business’s current SEO strategy and turbocharge your website content for an AI-assisted future!
Generative AI continues to dominate the media news headlines in 2023, shaping the future of multiple information infrastructures with the potential of machine learning.
Just last month, Google announced several new features that will surely affect our day-to-day interactions with their search products. Get ready to move beyond the trusted query bar and embrace the full potential of voice search, featured snippets, and soon… an AI-assisted search bar that directs users to ideal answers by providing next steps, follow-up questions, prompts, and suggestions all in a conversational chat mode!
"Even in a world where AI can provide insights, we know that people will always value the input of other people. These new generative AI capabilities will make smart searching simpler." sourced from Google I/O '23 keynote address.
Where Do We Go with SEO?
The inevitable impact of artificial intelligence on our daily lives is gaining serious momentum, deepening a divide in content quality in its wake. With many businesses already not dedicating enough resources to editorial content generation, achieving priority organic rankings on SERP’s will only grow more challenging.
The future AI-evolution of SEO will feel like a punch in the gut for many businesses. Website SEO has long been a mysterious undertaking with a knowledge base that falls somewhere on the spectrum of “Yeah, I think we have a blog,” to “Our marketing team monitors our site’s performance monthly and optimizes our content for keywords and reach.” If your answer is not leaning toward the optimized camp, acquiring new business will only grow more challenging.
Google‘s new generative AI search feature will likely attract mindshare and direct the flow of web traffic like a friendly, omnipotent traffic cop. If the information it‘s pointing to isn’t coming from you, you are losing out on potential clicks. Even high-ranking search results may become over-shadowed by the results directed by this shiny new object coming to the top of the page.
Adapt to AI or Pay for Traffic
The message is simple: businesses that can adapt their SEO and digital marketing strategies alongside these new developments in generative AI technology stand to win big.
This is only my prediction. But, based on how we’ve seen Google Search evolve from a search bar with sidebar and popup ads to featuring covert ads embedded into organic search results, expect to see an AI ad monitization model. And while Google is not wholly dependent on Search for its revenue… opportunity thrives where desperation lives!
In matters of business and life, I prefer to serve it up straight. The SEO strategy that brought you traffic five years ago has lost its mojo. While some underlying principles may remain relevant, today there are new considerations that can set your content up for an AI-assisted future and get more traffic onto your website- I’ve highlighted a few of them below.
Help Google Help Your Business
SEO copywriting structures content on your website like a secret code, providing Google with a map to content that intuitively provides the best answers to human questions.
Google relies on structured data markups to evaluate your website and assess your authority on any given topic. Website content done well gets a shot at showing up in cool features like snippets and knowledge graphs, and eventually, on their generative AI Search model.
Semantics Matter Most
Strategy is in your words: it’s time to rethink your vision, identity, and purpose. Clearly communicating the things that make your business or product unique will have a magnetic effect on intuitive generative AI search models.
Having a well-thought-out strategy based on human insights and actual benefits can provide your business with niche identity, nuance, and context that AI can turn to when guiding queries to exacting and deep solutions from high-authority sources. But you’ll need to find the right words to make it work!
Give ‘Em Something to Talk About
Optimize for voice search by sprinkling some conversational phrases and long-tail keywords into your content. Deep dive into common questions and provide clear, concise answers that your audience or customer would appreciate.
Working With Word Projects
If you feel your website is losing its mojo, Word Projects can set your content up for an AI-assisted future to help get more traffic onto your website
Word Projects offers professional SEO services and bespoke content development that adapts to the latest industry trends and insights. Despite best efforts, our output will remain exponentially slower than AI! But I like to think we make up for it with a dynamic brain and lived human experiences. Asking questions like inquisitive journalists, probing deep into the psyche of humanity like Freud or Jung, and describing details with the soulful precision of an artist- Word Projects is a reliable partner that can leverage the benefits of generative AI to better shape information for a human-guided future.
Just For Fun- Let’s See How AI Would Write This Article!
I’ve asked Chat GPT to write this article for me. As a writer, I’ve enjoyed using this tool to jump-start my writing projects. Typically, I end up using very little of the content provided and what does stick, ends up getting highly edited for readability, context, and tonality.
There is no denying the results AI provides are impressive. But copyright issues loom in the background and, in contrast to the human element, authority seems shallow and requires a series of additional prompts that can pull in references from specified and trusted information sources.
Below you can find links to two writing samples that use Chat GPT prompts to write a similar article:
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