It used to be a struggle to get noticed if your content landed on page two or three of Google. Now, with AI overviews taking up prime real estate, it’s just one more challenge to get eyes on your content. That’s why it’s time for marketing teams to adjust the way that they’re doing SEO work.
And we’ve got just the expert to help you out.
In this episode of Spark the Space, ClearEdge’s CMO, Lesly Cardec, sits down with Digital Consultant and SEO expert, Jessica Castaneda, to dive into how AI is changing the way SEO happens and what you need to do to stay on page one.
SEO in the Age of AI with Jessica Castaneda
How AI Is Changing SEO
Artificial intelligence may still be the new kid on the block, but it is already having a major impact on the way people search.
Evolution of Search Behaviors
Whether users are choosing tools like ChatGPT or relying on Google’s AI overviews, artificial intelligence is changing the way people search the internet. These new AI-generated answers often pull content from multiple sources, allowing a searcher to get their answers more quickly.
Content Quality Standards
While search engines are now using AI-generated content to get answers to searchers, they’re still prioritizing quality content when choosing what they serve up. “Search engines are really good at identifying thin, generic, AI-generated content, so businesses and brands need to create much deeper, more experienced, directed, original content that will genuinely help the user now more than ever before,” Jessica shared.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO focuses on backend efforts to help search engines find, crawl, and index your website pages and is becoming more important than ever. It includes things such as site architecture, site speed, mobile optimization, data structure, etc. Getting your technical SEO in check helps search engines understand your website better and pull your content into both traditional SEO rankings and the new AI-generated overviews.
Where AI Delivers the Most Value for Your SEO Effort
When it comes to where AI can help you most, Jessica shared two ways she finds particularly valuable.
Content Planning
AI can be a great tool to help you ideate new topics that are relevant to your audience or even help you audit existing content to generate ideas for related topics.
By prompting artificial intelligence tools with details around your audience, your services, and any other important information, it can help you avoid the writer’s block that tends to come with a blank page.
Understanding Your Audience
One of the tasks artificial intelligence is best at is understanding and synthesizing data. “It can help you find patterns through your website data to really understand and create a better user experience,” Jessica said.
Inputting your website data can help you to find where potential clients are dropping off, what content they are and aren’t interested in, and more.
The Number One Mistake To Avoid When Implementing AI Into Your SEO Strategy
Too many businesses get overly excited about how quickly AI can generate content, such as blogs, landing pages, and descriptions, that they end up flooding their site with generic, low-quality content.
Search engines want to surface content that is helpful, original, and quality, and solely AI-generated writing just can’t deliver that quite yet.
A better approach is to include AI as part of the writing process, rather than the be-all and end-all. As Jessica mentioned during the episode, “You really do need human insight, human editors, and that SME expert to really understand and make your content valuable for the user.”
If you’re in need of extra SEO support, we can help with that.
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