It means that more than half of all times a user clicked “search” (or hit enter) in Google, they completed their journey without clicking through to a website. 

But what can it all mean? And do you need to dramatically overhaul your search engine marketing strategy? 

Potentially, but let’s not panic. Good decisions are never made in haste, even though they may be made quickly, so here are a few things you need to know. 

What Is Zero-Click Search?

Zero-click search, which you might have been able to glean from the intro here, is when a user searches for something in a search engine, reads the search results, finds the answer they were looking for, and then bounces. This occurs without a click-through to a website. 

Typically, zero-click searches are brought to fruition through one of the “answer engine” search features, like the AI overview, the featured snippets of the search results that used to dominate the tops of the SERPs before the AI overview before it was introduced, and the People Also Ask section, but these are not hard or fast rules. If you got what you were looking for through the search results and didn’t click through to anything, that’s a zero-click search whether you used an answer engine feature or not.

As you can imagine, this can have potentially serious implications for website administrators, not just eCommerce merchants but also those who run websites that rely on the value of their information. If Google is scraping web pages and serving up answers without requiring users to click through, that can tank user experience metrics, rob websites of conversions, and eliminate ad traffic to certain domains. 

So let’s take a closer look at how the rise of zero-click search stands to impact SEO and website performance in general. It’s not all bad. 

How Does Zero-Click Search Impact SEO? 

For any website that is impacted by zero-click search, there are numerous changes you can expect. 

For one, if your website has a lot of good copy, either in the blog, newsletter, or on category pages, expect to get a lot more impressions, and for longer tail search queries. This equates to higher visibility, but the tradeoff is that those pages will likely not see an increase in clicks; in fact, clicks may even decrease. 

It is also possible that with a rise in impressions and a decrease (or stagnation) in clicks, affected pages may see lower time on page, among other user engagement metrics which will be affected in an adverse way. 

You may also see pages coming into ranking for new keywords embedded in long-tail queries, for which the page was not indexed previously.

These are the most important changes you can expect to affect your web pages (or your entire site) although it is important to notice that there could be others as well. 

You should also be aware of the fact that not all websites, and certainly not all web pages, will be impacted by the zero-click search trend. For instance, if a page ranks well but there’s not much copy on it, or many actions to take besides downloading a form or buying a product, there’s not much zero-click search can do to affect performance, since the user’s end goal in those cases is not to answer a question, but to download a form, or purchase a product, respectively. 

How to Optimize for Zero-Click Search? 

Because zero-click search is dependent on user searches for information, the only way to optimize for it, as a general trend under a subset of conditions within SEO, is to target long-tail keywords and search queries that take the form of a question. 

While you can optimize for short-tail keywords, the competition will be fierce and mostly unattainable, and you will lose out to larger information-based websites like Wikipedia for all but the most niche and non-competitive keywords and queries. 

So for instance, let’s say you wanted to capitalize on zero-click search trends for a short-tail keyword like “hiking boots.” 

Rather than optimizing your website, or a series of pages on it for that keyword, you would want to find the long-tail queries containing that keyword that people were searching. You can use paid search tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs for research, but you can also use Google’s Autofill, the People Also Ask section of the search results, and free resources like Answer the Public to find ideas to come up with copy. 

Then, what you need to do is draft long-form copy that answers these questions and publish it on your website. If you can publish it on the page you want to rank for the keyword in question, then publish it on a standalone page, on a CMS page, or in a blog, and embed an internal link to the intended target page. 

As usual, the basic answer to how to optimize for zero-click search is “write better copy that answers questions.” In that respect, even though zero-click searches as a share of the total is on the rise, this is really nothing new. It’s just that the nature and arrangement of the SERPs is making it easier for users to get their answers without clicking on anything. 

Do You Need to Adjust Your Keyword Strategy? 

Potentially, but that depends on your niche and how your website survives. If you blog for fun or clout, and you don’t necessarily need the clicks but just want the extra visibility and brand awareness, then not necessarily. 

If you need clicks, for instance, to drive ad revenue, then yes you will need to adjust your strategy. The best way is to become a trusted resource so that users will search for your website directly with navigational keywords rather than looking through the search results for answers to more vague queries. 

In these situations, the way to stay afloat is to find those long-tail keywords, and the questions associated with them, and to optimize your website in the manner described above. 

For some eCommerce merchants, a shift is not entirely necessary, although it could potentially be beneficial. This is because for most transactional and commercial keywords, the intent cannot be completed through the search results alone. Generally, for keywords with this search intent, the user journey is not complete until the user buys something. That requires a click. 

However, to earn that click, a website must still be found in the search results – if not searched for directly. With respect to this, getting a website or one of its pages found in the era of zero-click search does necessitate a content-forward approach to organic marketing. 

For these eCommerce merchants, to generate as much visibility as possible, it has become even more important to publish copy as a resource on your website that answers questions about your products, or about use or care of them. These CMS pages, which will answer long-tail user queries, will generate higher visibility and greater brand awareness. Done properly, they will drive clicks to your website that will result in conversions, and in an ideal scenario, increase direct searches to your website, which will also yield conversions. 

Is a Zero-Click Strategy Useful for eCommerce? 

Ultimately, zero-click search is going to prove a bigger strain on bloggers, news websites and other websites that rely entirely on content and readership, for reasons that should now be obvious. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be useful for eCommerce merchants. 

Notably, by adapting to this trend by devoting some of your marketing resources to develop materials intended to capitalize in zero-click search trends, your website will benefit from fuller, more informative copy and resources, which should positively impact your brand image while also positioning your website as a consultative authority, and not just an online store.

So, the bottom line is if you can spare the resources, you should devote some of your marketing budget to improving the copy on your website. 

Talk to One of Our Experts About the Changing Search Engine Marketing Landscape 

Hopefully you found this short post useful and informative, but if you still have questions lingering, don’t be afraid to get in touch with us. Get in touch with one of our AI SEO specialists or SEO experts and we’ll be more than happy to speak to you about the trend, myself included. 

The post SEO in the Era of Zero-Click Search appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

While it’s true that the traffic that Google gets in terms of sheer utilization utterly dwarfs ChatGPT’s, OpenAI has recently rolled out a new “search engine” feature that offers some promise to potential online shoppers, specifically to help put them in touch with products that meet their needs. 

This brings up the question of how to use ChatGPT’s search engine, not just as a consumer but also from the perspective of a beleaguered eCommerce entrepreneur whose ambition is to stay competitive. I may be able to shed some light on both. 

Is It Good? A Sneak Peek into How It Works 

First, let’s take a look at how ChatGPT’s search engine works, solely from the perspective of someone whose aim is to shop online. 

I’ll keep this in my wheelhouse and offer some visual cues of the experience, just so I can weigh on it from a professional perspective. 

To try things out, I searched for “What’s the best spinner for trout?” Below is a screenshot of some of the output: 

I can confirm, those are some good spinners for trout. Not sure I’d say either of them is “the best” but they are certainly both contenders for that title. I’ve used them; they catch fish. 

Just to experiment, I wanted to see what ChatGPT could do with a short-tail query based on the output it gave me, so I looked up “Mepp’s Aglia.” You can see the output below. 

Honestly, not bad results, but completely underwhelming. It’s little different from what I’d get in Google, in fact, I’d even say a little bit worse. Google has more and different types of search features that are more useful to someone like me in the position of a shopper. I, perhaps unlike some shoppers, don’t like to be spoon-fed, and it seems like that’s what ChatGPT’s doing here.

All the same, I asked it about a specific model of lure, so I can’t blame the search engine too much on the generality of what it gave me back. 

To drill down a little, I incorporated that keyword into a more targeted, longer-tail search query, “Where can I get a Mepp’s Aglia spinner?” and you can see the results below. 

Not too bad, but also not overwhelmingly great. You can see the results are formatted much like Google ads, with links to well-known retailers like Dicks, Tackle Warehouse, and Bass Pro. Again, can confirm these are legitimate sources. 

So far, so good. At least good enough. ChatGPT’s results are, even if lacking by Google’s standards, legitimate enough. It did give me serviceable answers to my queries, which means that for other shoppers, it will do the same – or at least, the potential is there. 

That about concludes my experimentation as a potential shopper – which brings me to the significance of all this from the perspective of an eCommerce merchant. 

What ranking signals or other criteria does ChatGPT use to assemble results, and how can I find out how to use ChatGPT’s search engine, as a business owner?

What ChatGPT Considers: How to Use ChatGPT’s Search Engine (What It Ranks) 

Naturally, what follows is how to optimize for ChatGPT’s search engine, right? At least, if you’re here because you want to know how to use ChatGPT’s search engine. 

Good news: straight from OpenAI, here are some of the things it uses as “ranking criteria” – what we would call ranking factors or ranking signals in the world of search engine optimization. 

Specifically some of the factors it uses with respect to eCommerce websites and products are:

• Product descriptions: As in the realm of “regular” eCommerce SEO, product descriptions should be informative, contain relevant queries and keywords, and provide useful details about the product specifications. Where possible, descriptions should provide succinct answers to common long-form queries, in keeping with AEO best practices. 
• Product reviews and ratings: This is an interesting aspect of ChatGPT SEO because it is something over which digital marketers and website administrators don’t have direct control, especially if ChatGPT is scraping product reviews from multiple sources. It does make reputation management that much more critical, as presumably ChatGPT will curate its results based on the frequency of positive reviews, or perhaps based on the ratio between positive and negative reviews. 
• Pricing: ChatGPT’s search functionality delivers outputs based on criteria that account for price. For instance, shoppers could search for the lowest price, in which case ChatGPT’s outputs would be delivered accordingly. 

Now that we’ve gotten the official word out of the way, here are some other things I would assume help with ChatGPT search engine optimization: 

• A website that has CMS pages dedicated to answering questions about the products it sells.

• A steady content stream that, even if it is not directly relevant to the products in terms of keywords associated with them, is useful to readers. 

• A strong domain authority with good user engagement metrics. 

• Basically anything else that helps SEO.

It all ultimately condenses down to the latter bullet point, since what ChatGPT is using is basically restricted to what shows up in the search results. Whether ChatGPT has access to web pages that are not indexed is not a question for which I have an answer, but if I had to bet one an answer, it would be no.

Which means, ultimately, that what ChatGPT search outputs is directly related to what ranks effectively in Google (and possibly through other search engines on the internet) along with websites that have the most organic visibility, overall. 

For More Information on Answer Engine Optimization 

To offer as simple an answer as possible to the question of how to use ChatGPT’s search engine, it would be this: if it’s good for SEO, it’s good for AEO, which is basically what the ChatGPT search engine is. 

For more information, get in touch with one of our digital marketing specialists or see my previous post, Answer Engine Optimization: A High-Level Guide.

The post How to Use ChatGPT’s Search Engine appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

But now, with the advent of Google’s SGE, or Search Generative Experience, and AI-powered engines like ChatGPT, there’s a (relatively) new kid on the block. 

It’s called AEO, or answer engine optimization, and while fundamentally very similar to SEO, it still varies slightly. Here’s your primer, as well as some pointers for how to optimize a website or its contents for AEO. 

What Is Answer Engine Optimization? (AEO)

AEO stands for answer engine optimization, and it refers to the process of optimizing a piece of content with the end result that it be highlighted by or featured in a generative model – such as a rich or featured snippet, Google’s AI overview or SGE, or end up as a regurgitated output through an AI model like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

For the most part, it refers to getting a website or a piece of content to end up as an output to an AI prompt, since AI models are sometimes referred to as “answer engines” hence the name “AEO.”

What’s the Difference Between AEO and SEO?

While AEO is not strictly speaking the same thing as SEO, there is a great deal of crossover, with most digital marketing experts either suspecting or outright recognizing that answer engines use the same ranking signals as search engines. 

The difference is, however, quite nuanced. 

To keep this all relatable, we’ll use a search engine as an example. SEO will get a website or a page to show up in the search results. AEO will get it to show up in the AI overview or, to a lesser degree, in the People Also Ask section of the search results, even though that isn’t strictly speaking an answer engine. 

So, in a nutshell, the chief difference between SEO and AEO is the length of the query. A single keyword is not, in the truest semantic sense of the word, a query. I mean, it is literally a search query but it is not linguistically a query because it is not a question. 

You could type “SEO” into Google and you will get search results. You may also get an AI overview, but to get a good one, you will need to embed that keyword into a broader search query – that is, a whole question. 

Therefore, the main difference between AEO and SEO has to do with the length and completeness of the search query. SEO deals with both short and long-tail queries, and AEO almost exclusively with long tail, very long tail queries. Most AEO relates to fully formed, grammatically complete interrogative statements. 

Therefore, while both SEO and AEO utilize the same ranking signals, the rankings signals that AEO uses are mostly with respect to keyword use and the structure of the content being crawled insomuch as it relates to the question being asked. For the most part, other conventional SEO ranking signals, like backlink profile and site speed, do not factor into AEO (though they do indirectly).

Also, because of the distinction I just drew, it is more accurate to consider AEO a subset of SEO than a completely distinct  marketing strategy or channel. If you do SEO the right way and make it all about content, you’re going to get AEO results. It’s ultimately as simple as that. 

How to Optimize for AEO

Good news: if you know how to optimize for SEO, at least on a functional level, then you already know what to do to optimize for AEO, with a few nuanced distinctions. 

You’ve heard SEO copywriters like myself talk about how you need to focus on quality content, and that is no different here. It’s just more important here. 

So here are the 6 main things you need to do to optimize for AEO.

• Understand search intent and target the right keywords (queries)

It all starts with what people are searching for, as well as why. While keywords are important, what you need to aim for in AEO is a fully-formed question (or an answer to one) that includes the keyword. Not just a keyword itself. 

Also critical is intent. If you want to show up in the generative results of an answer engine, you need to know the reason people are searching for and what the answer is they’re looking for as well. 

So, you can optimize for the keyword “SEO” and you might show up in the search results (good luck with that, through, last I checked that keyword had a difficulty score of 100%) or you can optimize for “How SEO services benefit small businesses” and aim to provide a succinct answer to that – which brings up the next vital element of AEO optimization. 

• Target specific questions 

I’ll just shoot straight. Getting a good AEO result is hard enough. You will never get there if you don’t target specific questions people are searching. And when I say specific – I mean literatim, word for word. 

If you have access to a tool like SEMRush, you can use their Keyword Overview tool to look at actual questions that people are searching for, along with volumes and difficulty scores. You don’t need to come up with the questions; just enter a keyword. 

Alternatively, you can just use what’s free – Google. Type a keyword in and see what shows up in the People Also Ask section. Google gets those questions from real queries people are searching for. These are the questions you should answer. Another good free tool is Answer the Public. 

• Provide clear, concise answers 

Once you have your questions all in a row, then you need to provide clear, concise answers that are accurate and insightful. Forget what you’ve read about keyword and length requirements. The shorter and more concise the better for AEO, especially if you can still provide a complete answer. 

Also, if you’re answering the question succinctly, you’re going to be including the keyword in your answer to the query anyway, so don’t worry about that. 

Using novel information is acceptable, as long as it is accurate. This is because as people find your information and circulate it (either by spending time on your page or linking to your website) both search engines and answer engines will see it as an authority and that will be all the backup they need to keep your answer showing up in their results. 

• Use structured data 

I’m including this only because as a technical ranking factor, it can slightly improve your odds of your copy being pulled for a featured snippet or displayed as a ChatGPT result. For instance, if you implement Schema Markup, you’ll have a slightly better chance of getting those AEO results. However, the first three portions of this how-to section are more important. You need to answer questions before you’ll show up, period. Structured data is an assist, not a solution. 

• Optimize for voice search 

Good news: optimizing for voice search really only means one thing (at least at this point). Structure your copy as conversational, full thoughts. Don’t write using fragments, type everything out as if it were for a formal paper submission, or at least as part of a conversation with another person. The more natural the language sounds, the better it will perform in the voice search results, and the better it will adapt to engines like ChatGPT, into which people enter intact, whole sentences and questions, rather than single keywords or short-tail phrases. 

• Use GSC

Google Search Console is a gold mine of good information that can help you improve the performance of existing web pages while also furnishing you with insights for new pages and copy that will perform independently. 

When you’re looking at the performance of a given web page, take a look at the impressions to see what long-tail queries that page showed up for. Some of these will likely be full questions that triggered an impression. Sometimes those questions will be relevant, and sometimes they won’t be. 

In those instances in which your web page shows up for a question that doesn’t seem that aligned with the page, it means there’s an opportunity for you to answer that question succinctly. Go back in and update that page so that it offers a more succinct answer to the query for which it generated an impression.

Here’s a real life example: 

That’s a snapshot of the company’s GSC for an article I wrote on how to show up in the AI overview. Shown above are a few of the queries for which the post generated impressions but no clicks. The one highlighted in red is a great example of an opportunity because, while I did indirectly answer that question in the article, I did not include the question or an answer for it word for word. 

Yet, as you can see, people are searching for it – it generated 152 impressions in just the last three months. There’s a disconnect between impressions and clicks, which I may be able to rectify by editing the article so that question, and a direct answer, show up in it.

This is a great trick for finding long-tail queries as well as opportunities for improving your existing copy, as well as new ideas for upcoming content. 

Additional AEO note: I would also like to take this point to note that AI models apparently can’t “see” Javascript, so one more pointer for AI optimization is that you need to have HTML code on your website. 

Using AEO and SEO Together 

As I clarified just above in this article, AEO and SEO are not entirely distinct, and AEO can in fact be categorized as a subset of SEO.

Therefore, all the best practices that benefit SEO will also in practice benefit AEO efforts, too. For instance, as all the SEO experts have been saying for years, you want a fast website with no glitches that offers a high-quality UX.

A website with plenty of optimized onsite copy and a healthy backlink profile is also going to be awarded overall higher organic rankings and probably a higher domain authority score than one that hasn’t been holistically optimized, and Google is more likely (taking all into consideration) to scrape a web page for a generative result if it’s been optimized heel to toe. 

The key takeaway is that all SEO best practices remain in force, with the added effect that to optimize for AEO you need to go a bit further. 

For instance, a category or product page is optimized for SEO if it is fast, secure, issue free, and if all the page level factors (image file size, alt text, page title text, meta data field, etc.) have been optimized.

However, it can only truly be said to be optimized for AEO if there are specific answers in the page copy (or other data fields) to equally specific queries. 

So, let’s say that this same web page is optimized for SEO but also contains a FAQs section with several long-tail queries along with accurate, complete, insightful answers – then it is also optimized for AEO.

How Does ChatGPT SEO Work?

ChataGPT SEO is the term that digital marketers and other savants have been throwing around, which refers to the process of optimizing a web page, or a listing, or a post, or some other piece of digitally published content for ChatGPT’s algorithm. 

This should come as no secret to my candid audience, but ChatGPT’s primary source of information is the internet, and since it is able to scrape the internet, the main ranking signals that ChatGPT uses to generate outputs are therefore indirectly also what Google uses. 

Are there other sources on the internet besides Google? Of course, but since Google is the 500 pound gorilla in the room, invariably Google is going to be a big force to reckon with here. 

Now, I am not suggesting that the two algorithms are the same. ChatGPT’s large language model is inherently distinct from Google’s and I will not in any way play expert here. I will only admit that they are different and while I am familiar with what makes Google tick, ChatGPT is still a bit alien to me.

With that said, since ChatGPT is so heavily reliant on what’s already ranking in the search engines for information, regardless of the fact that its algorithm may be different from Google’s, what you need to do to optimize for ChatGPT is effectively the same as what you need to do for Google.

Does ChatGPT Generated Text Hurt Your SEO?

This is one of the most common questions out there relative to ChatGPT and ChatGPT SEO, so, rather than saying yes or no, let me provide an illustration. 

Let’s try something specific. 

Guys, this is so bad, like dangerously bad. These two cartridges are not the same, though they are similar. ChatGPT got that right. What it got wrong is that it said they can be used interchangeably. They cannot. I’m not getting into why. Do your own research if you don’t believe me. 

Now let’s try something else:

I read the pointers and they’re all pretty good. You can see some of them in that abbreviated screencapture. But here’s one potential issue. I ran the full output (273 words, at least Chat got the length request right) and here’s what ZeroGPT told me: 

Slight problem, for sure. Seriously, couldn’t it even give me 98% or something? 100% AI generated is not a good look, people. 

Besides, let’s just do a thought experiment. If you’re looking for how to optimize for AEO and use AI to do it, you’re just creating an echo chamber, with zero thought involved. It makes no sense and at a certain point will break down. 

More importantly, if Google and ChatGPT actually introduce AI-detection capabilities into their algorithms and flag content that they suspect is AI-generated, then that should be your answer: yes, ChatGPT generated text will hurt your SEO, and by extension, your AEO. 

There are two reasons for this. One is that it’s easy to flag the generated output as AI. The other (and more important of the two) is that there is a serious risk that the generated output will be patently false, and sometimes dangerously false, as illustrated pointedly in the first image above. 

By the way, the Google AI overview is not much better. In fact, in a lot of ways it’s worse. Not that you could use the AI overview output to generate text, but I would caution you against using it as a primary source for literally anything. 

For the purpose of illustration, I tried to find some bad AI overviews but ran into some trouble. I also just noticed that it was disabled for a few of my attempts to find some really bad answers. I’ll save you the trouble of looking yourself; here are a few of the worst ones that have been published since Google rolled out the AI overview. 

Is AEO Replacing SEO? 

Well, AEO is certainly changing SEO, that’s a fact. As more and more people enter long-tail queries expecting a single precise answer rather than a list of results, AEO will start to take center stage. But at the same time, since AEO is just a facet of SEO, it can’t really be said to be replacing it. 

Besides, we could also just look at the numbers. Apparently, as of March 2025, there are over 16 billion Google searches per day. That’s more than double the total global population. It’s also almost doubled (so far) since 2024. If SEO were truly being replaced, wouldn’t searches have to be decreasing? (Spoiler: Yes.)

I had a little more trouble finding figures for ChatGPT usage, but according to at least one source, it gets some pretty good traffic. Somewhere around 38 million outputs per day – a lot, but way, way lower what Google gets.

Alright, that paints a picture of the health of search engine use. What about interest in AEO as a topic? 

Well then, SEMRush, that’s somewhat less than a billion, let alone 16 billion, per day. 

Surely interest in ChatGPT SEO is much higher? 

Apparently not. Higher but not monumentally so. What about regular SEO? 

Plenty of interest there. How about ChatGPT in general? 

That’s a rosier picture. There’s a lot of interest in ChatGPT, but even with that kind of volume, it’s important to remember that ChatGPT’s usership is still dwarfed by Google’s (with ~38 million outputs per day to more than 16 billion searches per day, Google outputs outpace ChatGPT by a factor of over 400). 

As you can see, interest in SEO as a concept is still healthy. That’s apparent from search volume alone. What will happen in ten years or even next month is your guess as well as mine, but it doesn’t look like AEO is replacing SEO or even that ChatGPT is replacing Google. It could happen, but for now they’re both still driving a lot of traffic, though the nod definitely goes to search engines. 

What I can say is this. Continue doing what you’re doing with SEO and when it comes to content marketing, hammer home on those long-tail queries. If you have customers asking you questions about products, how to use them, how to care for them, or what the specifics are, answer those questions fully in your materials, on your product pages, in your newsletter and on your blog. 

By doing so, you will be optimizing for AEO, and will help drive visibility not only through search engines but also potentially in the long run through AI models. 

The post Answer Engine Optimization: A High-Level Guide appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

If you want your store, products, or brand to be mentioned in ChatGPT-generated answers, this is your guide. Here’s how to position your eCommerce business for better visibility in AI-driven search.

What Is ChatGPT Search, Exactly?

Unlike traditional search engines like Google or Bing, where users browse a list of results, ChatGPT delivers summarized, natural language answers to queries. These answers are drawn from a combination of OpenAI’s training data (as of the model’s knowledge cutoff) and, when enabled, live web browsing or plugins.

So when someone asks ChatGPT something like, “What are the best eco-friendly water bottles for hiking?” they might receive a list of curated product suggestions, possibly including brands, models, and even purchase links, all in a humanlike tone. That’s a game-changer for eCommerce. If your brand is mentioned in ChatGPT’s responses, that’s free exposure to an audience that’s highly engaged and often ready to convert.

Why It Matters for eCommerce

ChatGPT and other LLM-based tools are quickly being integrated into mobile apps, search engines, smart devices, and even eCommerce platforms themselves. Customers are asking AI:

• “Where can I buy affordable pet supplies?”
• “What are the top-rated beard grooming kits?”
• “Which online stores offer unique home décor under $50?”

Being included in the AI’s response means you get ahead of your competition, often in a context that’s more trusted than traditional ads or SEO listings. So how do you earn that digital spotlight?

1. Optimize for AI-Friendly Content

AI models love structured, well-written, factual content. To make sure your product or brand is considered a credible source, your website and product pages need to offer clear, useful, and original information.

What to Do:

• Use natural language: Write product descriptions and blog posts in the way your customers talk and ask questions.
• Include FAQs: These are great for answering specific customer queries that ChatGPT might pull from.
• Be specific: Include product specs, use cases, dimensions, pricing, and comparisons.
• Explain the “why”: Don’t just describe features, highlight benefits and what makes your product stand out.

Example: Instead of saying “stainless steel water bottle with 18oz capacity,” try:

“This 18oz stainless steel water bottle keeps drinks cold for up to 24 hours. It’s perfect for long hikes, daily commutes, or gym workouts, and its leak-proof lid ensures no spills on the go.”

This kind of copy gives ChatGPT more to work with and more reason to cite you.

2. Create Topical Authority with Content Clusters

AI prefers citing trusted sources. One way to gain that trust is by building topical authority through content clusters: interconnected blog posts that cover a subject in-depth.

How to Build a Content Cluster:

Choose a core topic relevant to your niche (e.g., “natural skincare for sensitive skin”) and then create multiple supporting posts:

• The Ultimate Guide to Natural Skincare for Sensitive Skin
• 5 Ingredients to Avoid If You Have Sensitive Skin
• How to Build a Sensitive-Skin Routine with Our Natural Products
• Comparing Natural vs. Synthetic Skincare: What’s Best for You?

Internally link these posts to each other and your product pages. Over time, this increases your visibility in both Google and AI-generated answers.

3. Get Mentioned on High-Authority Websites

If your brand or product is cited on third-party websites that ChatGPT trusts, your chances of inclusion in answers skyrockets.

Strategies for Gaining Mentions:

• Reach out to bloggers and influencers in your niche for product reviews.
• Pitch your products to media outlets that write “best of” lists or product roundups.
• Offer guest posts or expert commentary on niche publications.
• Get listed in directories or comparison sites.

For instance, if you sell ergonomic office chairs and get included in a “Top 10 Home Office Chairs” article on a reputable site, ChatGPT might pull that info when someone asks, “What’s the best chair for working from home all day?”

4. Leverage Schema Markup

Schema markup (structured data) helps AI and search engines better understand your content. It doesn’t affect how your website looks, but it gives machines additional context.

For eCommerce, useful schema types include:

• Product
• Review
• FAQ
• HowTo
• BreadcrumbList

Use these on product pages and articles to help AI tools categorize and rank your content appropriately. Tools like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper can help you add this easily.

5. Be Transparent About Pricing, Shipping, and Returns

One of the most common questions ChatGPT gets from shoppers is about price and shipping. Make it easy for AI (and your customers) to find these answers.

Do:

• Clearly display pricing, including discounts.
• Add transparent shipping timeframes and return policies.
• Include keywords like “Free Shipping,” “Ships in 2 days,” or “30-day money-back guarantee.”

The more of this information you present clearly on your website, the more likely ChatGPT is to recommend your store when someone asks, “Where can I find [product] with fast shipping and easy returns?”

6. Use Internal and External Linking Thoughtfully

ChatGPT often relies on context and citation quality when choosing what to reference.

Internal Linking:

Link between your blog posts and product pages to create a strong site structure. For example, a blog about “Best Backpacks for Travel” should link to each backpack you mention.

External Linking:

Cite stats or sources from reputable websites. It shows your content is well-researched, which increases trustworthiness in the eyes of AI systems.

7. Stay Fresh: Keep Content Updated

ChatGPT tends to deprioritize outdated content, especially when it has access to browsing or is pulling from recent sources.

Update your product pages and blog posts regularly:

• Refresh blog content every 6–12 months.
• Update product availability, specs, and images.
• Add new reviews and testimonials.

If you release a new version of a product, make sure that’s reflected in your copy and meta information so AI tools don’t reference the old version.

8. Monitor How You’re Mentioned in AI Tools

Try asking ChatGPT (or other AI tools like Perplexity or Claude):

• “What are the best stores for [your product category]?”
• “Where can I buy [specific product]?”
• “Top-rated [product] for [use case]?”

See if your business is included. If not, analyze the brands or sources that are being referenced. What are they doing differently? Can you get featured on the sites they’re on?

The era of AI-driven search is here and forward-thinking eCommerce brands are already adapting. By creating clear, helpful, AI-friendly content and establishing topical authority, you can position your business to show up more often in ChatGPT-style answers. 

So whether you’re selling home decor, camping supplies, or fitness gear for home workouts, the time to optimize for AI search is now. Create content that’s rich, relevant, and user-focused and the AI will do the rest. It’s not just about ranking anymore, it’s about being the answer to search queries.

The post Tips to Help Your Site Rank Higher in ChatGPT Search appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

I’m not entirely sure I sympathize with that mindset (not just because I consider myself an accomplished SEO expert [ahem]), although I do truly sympathize with the frustration of those making the claim. 

So, not to equivocate, but depending on your perspective, you could make a compelling case that SEO is a legitimate digital marketing channel, or that it is all complete nonsense. Allow an explanation. 

A Compelling Argument that SEO Is a Steaming Pile 

The search results are full of posts and forum threads about how SEO ruined the internet. In some sense, they are right. 

Digital “marketers” that have learned how to game the system have cluttered the tops of the search results with a lot of thin nonsense that actually makes it harder than ever to find the answer to a pretty basic question. 

Worst of all are the charlatans that use generative AI to drum up thousands upon thousands of words of utter nonsense, verging on blatantly, nearly unethically inaccurate information, optimizing the structure and keyword density to get to the tops of the search results. 

Fortunately, these posts and pages don’t usually last more than a few days, weeks, tops, but their low quality and the disturbingly high frequency of patently false information makes one’s position as a genuine truth-seeker quite tenuous. 

Then there is the slightly different position of those that call SEO more or less a huckster’s digital marketing channel. These argue that knowing how to adjust page titles, a little bit of copy, and make some basic site structure changes in order to boost a domain’s ranking in the search results does not constitute true digital marketing expertise on behalf of the practitioner. 

I’m slightly ambivalent on the matter. On the one hand, if you know how to do it and it gets results, does it really matter that it’s basic? Half the population of this country probably pays $50 dollars at the mechanic to get their wiper blades replaced despite the fact that anyone can do that without tools for pennies. 

To be fair, insomuch as SEO has “ruined” the quality of the search results, it doesn’t really mean that Google is broken. In fact, it should make us sharper, not duller. It requires a thinking mind to sift through the results, and cross-reference them, in order to find the information desired. Does that make life harder? Sure, but nothing worth having comes easy, and what more precious resource is there than knowledge?

Anyway, at the end of the day, is it frustrating to see others in this industry prop themselves up as thought leaders when what they’re doing is absurdly basic? A little bit, yes. But perhaps my willingness to admit that this is not rocket science has been what kept me from outrightly declaring that SEO is bull…caught myself again. 

You get the picture. The truth is, while there are 200 or more ranking signals that impact a website’s rankings, most of these have very little impact on the overall picture. The big ones, in no particular order, are domain age, on-site factors, specifically page titles, backlinks (from quality domains), and content, which I’d argue is the most important one of all.

To reduce this as much as possible; marketers that game the system and clutter the search results with garbage have definitely reduced the overall search experience, and I recognize that. However, I don’t believe that this warrants an utter dismissal of SEO as witchcraft. Rather, I think it’s important to understand what it means to do SEO the “right” way. 

The Counterpoint 

I personally think that the main reason SEO is not an utter, contemptible mess has to do with the fact that, when one genuinely makes a concerted, honest effort to practice white hat techniques, none of the previously mentioned negative externalities materialize. 

As I have stated in my previous publications, SEO is evolving such that the main pillar, content, is indicative of content marketing, not of drivel penned solely for the purpose of meeting a word count and getting a bunch of keywords to appear on a page. 

Do I still utilize keyword research tools and SEO best practices as a copywriter? Absolutely, but I have also expressly disavowed the sentiment that it is these best practices that get results. Quality of copy comes first, SEO techniques come second. 

The evolution of SEO copywriting into content marketing means that what’s published should be published first for consumption by readers and only secondarily for consumption by search engines. The quality of the information you publish simply must be valuable to readers. This is why you can still find 10, even 15 year old posts ranking at the top of page one. 

To make this as simple as possible, it’s fair to call bull on SEO if you’re talking about what most digital marketers talk about – making basic optimizations and blowing them out of proportion. No domain ever got to page one – ever – by changing a few URLs and adjusting the structure of internal links. 

The vast majority of these optimizations are simple and only when made on an ongoing basis, cumulatively, en masse, will have an appreciable impact on search engine rankings. It’s likely true that some so-called SEO experts (present company excluded) oversell the significance, and the impact, of what they services they offer actually entail. 

Moreover, there are ranking signals that SEO experts can’t do anything about. For instance, domain name and age are two fixed ranking signals that marketers can’t change. An older domain with the keyword in the name is almost always going to outrank a younger competitor for that same keyword. 

Furthermore, if you consider the impact of high-quality copy – really high quality copy, that doesn’t just try to meet a word count, and which answers questions with helpful, even original, unique information – then SEO is definitely not garbage. Although, to be fair, I just described content marketing, didn’t I? That was sort of my whole point from the start. 

The Long and Short of It 

SEO is not as complex as some digital marketers would have you believe. You can implement almost any optimization on your own if you have good target keywords. It just takes a long time. 

In this way, there is some merit to the persistent gripes that some in the industry have. To them, SEO is – again, you know. 

But, when implemented properly, using white hat techniques, and pursuing SEO more as a facet of content marketing, it yields a high-quality user experience and is definitely not nonsense.

That’s about as concise as I can make this whole affair. 

The post Is SEO Bull…Well, You Know? appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

But mostly, I’ve learned about copywriting; what works and what doesn’t work, and how to get my work to perform. The vast, overwhelming majority of my work gets posted to websites with low domain authority scores that don’t focus on the UX afforded by the blogs. 

Which means the work rests squarely on me to generate traffic for those blogs. I need to find the keywords, search terms, and topics that are associated with genuine interest, convince Google to index and rank those posts favorably, and then, to get a live reader to click on my result and actually read the post. 

Sometimes it flops. And sometimes I write a post so good it gets thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of views per month. 

Here’s just about every little thing – call them copywriting hacks, if you will – that I’ve learned about how to get content to rank and get readers to show interest in my writing. 

Forget What You’ve Heard About AI 

AI is increasingly being leveraged by digital marketers, as well as by mediocre copywriters, because it is allegedly a panacea for all of creation’s woes. 

It is not. Granted, I have used and benefited from AI in the past but I have still not encountered a model that is effective at drafting copy that will perform. 

What AI does well is formatting; you can ask it to structure a blog and it will knock it out of the park. What it fails to do is get the information right. 

The problem, so far as I can see it, has nothing to do with “tone,” or “warmth,” although those are things commonly cited as issues with AI. Quite the contrary, large language models are becoming increasingly and convincingly realistic.

The issue is that it hallucinates. I’ve asked AI some pretty basic questions and been downright alarmed at how factually inaccurate the outputs have been. 

When we’re talking in generalities, this is not a big deal notwithstanding the fact that increased reliance on the outputs of AI models is probably going to bring down the collective intelligence of our species – but once we get to specifics, the issue is much broader, and much more serious. 

See, the majority of writing I do, I do for clients in the outdoor sphere. I have to furnish real information about shooting and fishing and outdoor sports in general. I simply can’t use AI for these things because (for whatever reason) it doesn’t give me accurate answers. 

I tell you the same thing. If you want your copywriting to rise above the rest of the average results in the search engine pages, write it yourself, the old fashioned way. 

Here, let’s put it this way. If you’re reading this post because you found it in the search engine results pages, that should substantiate my cautions against AI. 

I did not use AI at all for this post; not for keyword research, not for formatting, and certainly not for generative copy. 

Yet you, dear reader, found me in the search results and presumably are reading anyway. If that is not proof of my claim, I can say no more. 

The Value of Specificity  

Suppose you want to write a blog about – copywriting hacks. 

You need to give specific, actionable advice. Don’t speak in platitudes or generalities. You want to avoid telling people things they either already know in the backs of their minds or could figure out through minimal deduction. 

For instance, I’m not here to tell you that your copy needs to be personable and should be free of grammatical errors. Perhaps you weren’t actively thinking about that but even a little bit of cogitation would have brought you to that conclusion, with no help from me or anyone, else for that matter.

Taking this a step further, you need to actually write about something people need to know about and then tell them something they don’t know. 

So, for instance, let’s just say you wanted to teach your readers how to…clean a pair of leather boots. We’ll keep this in my wheelhouse since I specialize in writing about outdoor sports. 

I could tell you to brush your boots off and store them somewhere clean and dry. That’s true but it’s also kind of common sense. That means it’s probably going to be in every other article on the same topics. 

But, did you know that you should unlace your boots and meticulously clean out the tongue, where debris can hide? 

Did you know that if your boots are wet you should never place them next to a heat source like a furnace or a fire, which will dry the leather out too aggressively, and which can cause it to crack? 

Did you know that leather periodically needs not just to be cleaned, but conditioned with an oil like neatsfoot, which fills the leather’s pores, driving out water and keeping the leather fibers supple, so they don’t warp or crack? 

And did you know that compound neatsfoot oil should be avoided because it can be damaging not to the leather, but to the threads that hold the whole boot together? 

I could go on but I think you get my point. Whatever you’re writing about, make sure you are specific and carefully detail your observations. The more thorough you are in your exposition and explanation, the better your copy will perform organically, in the wilds of the internet. 

Understand Your Audience 

I won’t harp on this one too much because it’s a generality and I told you to avoid those. I will say a few words however since it is important to know your audience even though that’s sort of common sense. 

It’s often been said that an “SEO copywriter” can write about any industry, without any specific expertise. 

That is, lamentably, and categorically, true. I can write about theoretical physics or ballet, and I can structure that article according to best-practices for content marketing or SEO. What I can’t do is pass convincingly as though I know what I’m talking about – even if my research is good. 

Let me see if I can find an example. Take the following post on fly fishing basics. Here is an excerpt from this:

“These flies can be found in any specialty store in thousands of models. Knowing the right one to buy is related to the fish you are trying to catch and the type of water you are fishing.”

There are a few issues with this. One is that the writer calls fly patterns “models.” Anyone that knows a 3 weight from 5 weight will know that that terminology is staccato and, while not technically wrong, jarringly off-putting. 

Digging further, we have:

“Fishing freshwater fly requires you standing in the water, mostly in waders casting your rod in a way that imitates a dancing fly on the surface of the water.”

I’m not sure if I’ve ever read a worse, though technically not inaccurate, categorization of fly fishing. You most certainly do not need to wade in order to fly fish, and in some instances, it might be advisable not to do so – for instance, if you want to avoid spooking wary or skittish fish. 

Secondly, the manner of your casting, and the techniques you employ while doing so, have utterly less than nothing to do with the action of the fly once it hits the water. You cast to present (or place) the fly – what you do after is what gives the fly action. 

Anyway, I don’t want to get too deep into beating up a writer I do not know and probably never will. I’m just making a very important point that I hope you understand: if you want to understand your audience, you will need to do more than 5 minutes, or even an hour, of research. 

Here, let’s take a slightly different approach with a stock image that I found:

Look closely that image, and you’ll see that the “fisherman” in it is using a massive, conventional big game reel. Those reels are reserved for fighting the biggest and strongest of fish – sturgeon, tuna, swordfish, sharks, and species like that.

I don’t know what that guy in that image is doing on that little creek, but I know what he isn’t doing: fishing. To make matters worse, he has the reel basically inverted. It’s literally upside down. That’s the icing on the cake.

So you can see, lack of authority in a vertical doesn’t just come across in copywriting. Photographers are guilty of it too, and a photograph that doesn’t understand his or her audience will take glaringly unconvincing, even cringey, photos, like the one above.

Truth is, there is no substitute for experience, and this alone is the single best way to become a good copywriter. Know what you’re talking about; that’s how you’ll know your audience. 

Don’t Get Too Hung Up on Keywords

Let me be clear: keywords are important. They are still the single most important (and primary) way that Google determines whether to index a page and where to put it. That’s just the nature of the beast. 

But if you write something so damn good that readers find it, stay on the page, and even, dare I say, link to it, Google will get a lot more flexible with what it indexes that page for and where it places it in the rankings. 

Point is, if what you write is really good, it may eventually rank for keywords that aren’t even directly present in the article – or at the very least, which don’t appear in it as an exact match. 

Don’t get me wrong. Focusing on keywords is a good way to get started and it will help you build authority. But once you have a bunch of posts ranking on a domain, you can start to lay off the SEO-stringency a little bit. Write about what you want your readers to know about and what you know will provide interested readers with value. 

If you can do that, that post will most likely get indexed, most likely be ranked favorably, and if found, will more than likely generate positive interaction metrics like a high CTR and time on page. 

Here’s another proof-is-in-the-pudding moment. You found this post in the organic search results, right? I did no keyword research for it. Let that be a lesson.

Post Structure Matters 

Keywords don’t matter that much. Post structure does. 

What I mean, specifically, is that the way your post is laid out will have two big impacts. One is on how crawlers interact with it and thereby how it gets ranked, and the second is on actual user behavior. 

In the first instance, a post that is laid out appropriately, sectioned off with headers that break up all the relevant sections, Google and other search engines will look on it more favorably than one that is just a solid wall of text. 

Granted, a solid wall of text can still rank well, if it contains good information. But if you write in stream-of-consciousness, you will be fighting against the current. 

Secondly, breaking up your post into short, digestible sections (as I have done here) and according to subtopics, readers will find the whole thing more palatable, too. The chances are that some of them only landed on your post looking for one small specific thing you were writing about and will skip reading the whole thing just to home in on what they want and read that section. 

Breaking up your posts makes them friendly to skimmers and also makes it easier for readers to find the most relevant (or just the most interesting sections). 

Pose Questions, and Answer Them, in Headers 

On the topic of post structure, the single most important piece of actionable advice I can offer is this: take advantage of headers by making them into questions, and, where possible, answers. 

For instance, let’s say I wanted to write a post about how to get an article to show up in the search results. 

My title might be something like:

• How to get your post to rank in the search results.

It’s simple, straightforward, and structured like something someone would actually type into the Google search bar. 

Then, in that same post, I might have some of the following as subheaders: 

• Insert keywords in your H2s and H3s
• Answer common questions in the headers 
• Take questions from the people also ask section 
• Skyscrape the titles of the top 5 entries in the SERPs 

In each case, the header is offering a small bit of digestible and highly actionable information. Direct and succinct, they are all perfect in their own way. 

Know What Tools to Use for Inspiration 

You can learn from what posts are performing currently in the search engine results pages, whether you wrote them or not, to make your writing better. 

Here are a few ways to gain some inspiration:

• Look at the top several posts in the search engine results pages. Look at the title, the topic, then dive into the post and see what sorts of topics they’re covering and questions they’re answering. Use that information to fill out your post. This will increase its chances of ranking well. 
• Look at the People Also Ask section of the search results. This will show you what questions you need to answer in your post. Answer as many of these as possible to increase the chances that you show up. 
• Log into Facebook or Instagram and see what posts a company you follow has created. Consider taking the subject matter of a post that got a lot of attention on social media and reconfiguring it into a blog to increase the chances that it ranks well and gets attention. If it did well on social media there’s a good chance there’s buzz on search engines surrounding the topic. 
• Use tools like “Answer the Public” and other social listening tools that will give you some insight into the sorts of topics that are trending around search terms, as well as what questions people have. 
• Look up a keyword you want to write something about, find a forum entry that’s in the search results, and reverse engineer a long-form blog post or news article about what you see people talking about in the forum. It’s effectively guaranteed to be interesting information since people are talking about it of their own free will and volition.

These are just a few of the tools that you can use to come up with questions that you can then answer in your copy surrounding a topic cluster. 

Use Facts and Figures 

I can write an article about basically anything without including any facts or figures, but the more figures you can include, the more convincing your article will be because it will be inherently substantiated by data. Just make sure you understand the implications of the data you’re publishing because, as they say, figures lie and liars figure. 

Anywhere you can get away with including data, be sure to do so. It will benefit your writing and Google will be more likely to respect your post as an authority. 

Fall-Back on Proven Post Techniques and Formats 

Sometimes, you need to write something that you expect to perform and are just fresh out of ideas and creativity. As a copywriter I can sympathize. I pride myself on interest and proficiency but I’ve still been there. 

On those days, I just use what I know works. Here are some ideas you can put into practice that don’t take too much effort. 

• Create a list of FAQs and answer them all in sequence as thoroughly as you can. This is a proven format that offers a lot of value and has a good chance of generating a lot of visibility. 
• Create a listicle of “best of” products, practices or ideas.
• Write a how-to on some process; it could be basic and high-level or highly detailed and specific. The concept is a proven performer in both cases even though specific is usually better. 
• Write a Q&A on the topic. 
• Do a review of a specific product or technique relevant to the topic. 
• Write a checklist for people looking to get started with something relevant to the topic about which you want to write. 
• Write a high-level “Everything You Need to Know About…” type of guide. 

This is of course just a short list of ideas, but they are all low-hanging fruit and proven to work by results. 

Learn from Your Past Posts 

As a copywriter, maybe you don’t spend too much time in Google Analytics or Google Search Console. Let’s change that. 

These are arguably your two best tools as a copywriter, hands down. In them, you can see which of your posts is getting visibility, what it’s ranking for, what its average position is, and how many clicks it’s getting. 

Through Google Analytics, you can glean even more information, such as the number of sessions and how long people are spending on the page. If you write for eCommerce clients, as I do, you can even see through GA4 if the blog page has any conversion value. 

If you see that a post has no sessions and no time on page, well, little explanation is needed there. For some reason or other, it flopped. I hate to be the guy to tell you this, but you’re going to have posts like this. Don’t let it discourage you. 

On the flipside, Google Analytics will also show you which of your posts are top-performers, how people are landing on those pages, and how they’re interacting with the page once they get there. 

Filter by time on page or sessions, then see which blogs have the best user engagement metrics. Those blogs are performing for some reason or other – visit them and see what you wrote about (if you can’t remember) and then structure a new blog on a totally different topic, but using the same format or technique. 

You will find that you can write more and more effective blogs down the line by learning from which of your past entries did not perform – and which did. 

Leverage the Authority of Those Previous Posts 

Here’s a quick copywriting hack, and one that I won’t beat to death. If you have a post that is performing well and are planning on writing a post for that same domain, go into that previous post and embed a link in there to your new post once you get it posted. 

That will leverage the authority of a post that is already ranking, and ranking well, to transfer some authority to the nascent post in order to give it a leg up in the world. 

Just use this copywriting hack sparingly, because you don’t want to ruin the UX of an old but good post with a bunch of outbound links to new posts that readers might not be too interested in – yet, at least. 

Be Sparing with Outbound Links 

Last but not least, here’s one more copywriting hack – not quite a copywriting technique – to apply to your articles. 

You can use outbound links to increase the credibility of your post, but be very sparing with them, especially if you’re taking ideas from the post to which you intend to link. 

Google will see that and then will sort of see your post like a copy, even though it might not be. Therefore, use outbound links as little as possible because you want your post (not some other) to be the authority. 

By the way, this does not mean not to use outbound links. Just keep them to a minimum and use only where they will make your post better and more believable. 

Want More Copywriting Hacks from Yours Truly?

There you have some of the best copywriting hacks – if I can call them that – that I’ve learned in my time as a professional copywriter. All I can tell you is I’ve leaned on all of them at some point or other and they have definitely helped me produce copy that generates sessions, time on page, and leads for my clients. They can do the same for you. 

If you’re looking for more actionable information, check out: 

• How to Get Images to Rank
• How to Write to Get Featured in a Google AI Overview
• How Do Blogs Help SEO?
• Answering User Queries for Better SEO
• How Many Blog Posts Does It Take to Get Traffic?

Alternatively, you could get in touch with one of our SEO specialists and they may be able to help you out.

The post 12 Copywriting Hacks to Improve the Performance of Your Work appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

Another one that’s also a frequent flier is “Is SEO changing?”

That’s easier to answer than the other one, because as the answer to the former is a staunch “no,” the answer to the latter is a definitive “yes.” 

But this should come as a surprise to exactly none of you since SEO has been changing ever since it became a thing. 

Let’s take a closer look at some of the big ways SEO is in fact changing and how you can adapt your strategies to remain effective. 

How Is SEO Changing?

There are many ways that SEO (and best practices) change with the seasons. But there are three big ones for this year that I want to focus on. If you can dial in on these changing elements of SEO, you can position your organic marketing strategies for greater success. 

1. The Use of AI 

I have belabored the fact before (more than once) that I do not use AI, not only in my professional line of work but in my personal life. 

Be that as it may, I would be remiss to overlook the fact that AI is in fact changing SEO. First, there are more and more content creators (not including myself) using AI to produce and then optimize content. 

There are also ways to ask AI models for help optimizing a URL at the page level, as well as for technical help to improve site structure for better performance. As an algorithm itself, AI can be effective in assisting with these things. 

But there is another fundamental way that AI is changing SEO – the Search Generative Experience. 

You know, for instance, the AI overview that pops up for lots of searches, which shows up at the top of the search engine results pages?

Whether we SEO experts like it or not, the fact that Google has decided to shove this down our throats by placing it above the organic results (and preventing us from disabling it) means that it is part and parcel of SEO at the current time. 

And, to be fair, the AI overview is synthesized from organic results. So even though AI hallucinates and the overview frequently delivers criminally (and embarrassingly) bad and patently wrong information, it is part of SEO. 

Knowing how to show up in the AI overview is one way to adapt to this. That’s something I can help with. (Read my previous post.)

1. User Engagement Metrics 

I personally assumed Google always referred to user engagement metrics in some form or other when assigning rankings, though I could not prove this – and I do not know how anyone else could definitively disprove it, either.

At the same time, understanding how Google values quality content and the page-level experience, I just can’t see a page that has a 100% bounce and 2 seconds average time on page maintaining its rankings for long. 

With that said, I find it quite validating that other SEO experts are now starting to suggest that Google will be officially considering user engagement metrics when assigning rankings. 

Ultimately, what this means for you is that we are no longer looking at an SEO landscape in which on-page optimizations and link strategy are as simple as they once were. 

Moreover, your pages cannot simply offer an interface that results in a good UX. They have to capture them. Things like time on page, pages per session, and conversion now officially count. 

For writers like me, it means I can’t just stick keywords in blog titles and answer a bunch of questions with thin answers (not that I ever did). I now have to (officially, once again) start thinking about writing blogs that people will actually take time out of their busy days to consume. Although, to be fair, I always have. 

Anyway, that’s something to be aware of. Moving forward, if you notice rankings are slipping, take a look at user engagement metrics through GA4 and see if they are slipping too. If you can’t find another reason, you may have just found the cause. 

1. E-E-A-T

Long has Google prioritized E-A-T, which stands for Expertise, Authority, Trust. Now, there’s a new kid on the block and it’s Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust. 

Here’s what this means to you. An anonymous article can convey expertise, authority and trust. But how can an anonymous article convey experience? Whose experience, specifically? 

If you’re thinking it can’t, good job – you pass Logic Assessment 101. It can’t. Without an author assigned to a piece, there’s no way for Google as a search engine to vet the experience of the writer of the article.

It also means that the more writing a single author does in one vertical, the more they will be seen as an authority in that niche. This is good news for freelancers that focus on one or a few industries, and not the best news for ghostwriters. But let’s be honest, ghostwriting is shady at best and unethical at worst. 

For businesses, it means it might be time for you to hire dedicated content producers (they don’t necessarily need to be writers) and include an author bio for work associated with them – like video, audio, photography or other creatives, and of course, writing. 

How to Adapt Your Strategy Given These Changes 

Now that we’ve glossed some of the ways SEO is in fact changing, what can you do to ensure your organic marketing initiatives remain viable and effective? 

Well, here’s a start. 

1. Write (or publish) more and develop authority 

This may not come as welcome news to those that are not born content creators, but content is (still) king, and the vast, considerable bulk of content that weighs on SEO is written content. 

This includes but is not limited to product and category page copy, CMS page copy, blogs, news articles, and press releases. It also includes all evergreen copy on your website including FAQs and “About” pages. 

The more useful information you can publish (not fluff, never fluff) the better your domain will perform in the end as a direct result. 

Now, of course, not all content is written, even though most of it is. Getting active on socials (organically) or publishing videos or new creatives to your website is another way to boost your SEO. Just make sure all metadata, including alt data, is updated and optimized accordingly. 

1. Watch your Google Analytics metrics like a hawk 

This is actually not new but if you weren’t doing it before, you should absolutely be doing it now since user engagement metrics are now officially ranking signals. 

Pay close attention to the amount of time users spend on key, high-traffic pages, how many pages per session there are, and if they eventually convert.

For blog and CMS pages, you ideally want more than 2 minutes time on page, average. If you can manage this you’re in a good spot. Less than 20 seconds is not good, as is a high bounce rate. 

If you see low-performing pages, you should take action where possible to adjust them for user experience. Go back, edit them, or add additional information to keep them interested. Any and all of these things (among others) can be beneficial.

1. Focus on link quality, consider old-school methods 

The problem with link quality is now indelibly, inextricably tied to E-E-A-T. You see, if your company is using cheap backlinks that come from low-DA websites and the content from which the link comes is vapid and anonymous, well, you don’t need me (I hope) to tell you that is bad news. 

In the new era, I estimate that one quality backlink from a reputable website will be worth a hundred or more trash backlinks; more importantly than this, it is well known that Google can and does penalize websites for low-quality link “building” inclusive of buying links.

This means that eventually it will become in your best interest (or at least, in the best interest of your marketing team) to do outreach to gain real, legitimate links from trusted sources – not to take the cheap way out and buy links. Eventually, that will catch you. 

1. Leverage other channels 

SEO is just one marketing channel. In fact, it is only one of an even smaller echelon of channels, being organic marketing. There are other organic marketing channels you can leverage to bolster your overall lead funnel. 

One of the best is social media, and social media marketing, like SEO, relies heavily on user engagement metrics and perceived authority and trust. This is the reason that influencers, who operate basically exquisitely on social media, are effective at what they do. 

Their brand image, an extension of their interests or aesthetic, conveys credibility, authority, trust and desire. 

However, it takes different strengths to be an effective social media marketer, or an influencer, than it takes to be an SEO copywriter. 

If you know that you (or your marketing team) would be better suited to a different channel – like social media marketing – consider leaning more heavily on that than you do solely on SEO going forward. 

1. Use AI to your strengths

Lastly, I’m going to leave you with a shred of wisdom that I am loath to offer – yet I will offer it in the spirit of honesty. 

There is a place for AI in SEO. It’s just not in content generation. 

Here are some things you can ask AI for help with, as it respects SEO.

• Give AI a URL and ask it for suggestions for on-page optimizations. 
• Give AI a list of keywords and ask it which ones are a good fit for your business. Alternatively, you can ask it to offer up keywords for you. You should double-check AI, though, as (as I have stated) it is dangerous to rely solely on its outputs. 
• Give AI a blog post and ask it to optimize it for a content cluster, or for a group of keywords. 
• Ask AI for some topics that you can use for your content streams – AI is generally good for idea generation, just not copy generation (at least in my experience).
• Ask AI to scrape a URL for technical errors. 
• Ask AI for recommendations on how to improve page speeds. 

These are just a few of the ways in which you might be able to leverage AI to produce greater workflow efficiency. There are others – but this is a good start. 

Is SEO Still Practical in 2024? (and Will It Be Practical in 2025?)

Since 2024 is mostly elapsed, I will make this answer for the coming year and save myself the effort of writing a whole blog in early 2025 to this effect: Yes, SEO is still practical in 2024, and it will remain practical and effective in 2025. I expect it will remain practical for many years after that. 

In fact, since the main manner in which SEO is changing is with an emphasis on high-quality content and how users interact with it, and since that is fundamental not only to marketing but to the general human experience, I expect SEO to remain relevant basically forever. 

Is SEO Obsolete? 

I have what I believe is a starkly concise answer to the question of whether or not SEO is obsolete. It will never be obsolete as long as people are using search engines. When search engines are obsolete, so too will be SEO – and not before. 

Is SEO Changing? Yes, but It’s Not Going Away 

Hopefully I’ve answered as far as, is SEO changing or not. Yes, it’s changing, but it has been for more than a decade. It has changed considerably and it’s still here. Fortunately, for writers like me, there has been an increasing emphasis on the quality and value of copy. That is welcome news for me, as well as for my readers. 

Ultimately, SEO is changing but it’s just getting better. With luck, and assuming Google’s algorithms improve, these changes will result in a better user experience not only for you but for your customers as well.

The post Is SEO Changing? appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

For some in digital marketing, specifically SEO, AI has been touted as the savior. In some ways, content is the most important pillar of SEO, and it certainly is the pillar on which authority and credibility both firmly rest. 

AI has promised to automate the entire content process, from keyword research to copy generation and optimization. It has promised to produce better outputs and cut costs across the board.

Except it hasn’t. Well, it may cut costs, but it doesn’t produce better outputs. In fact, it produces far, far worse outputs than I even thought were possible. 

I wouldn’t believe some of these things if I hadn’t seen them firsthand.  

The Broader Problem

Before I launch completely into my full-bore anti-AI spiel, allow me to frame the issue with some real world facts. 

Feast your eyes on the following article about the use of AI in litigation. Yes. It really happened. Real, actual, barred lawyers asked ChatGPT to prepare a brief for a legal proceeding. But it gets better. ChatGPT made up legal precedents. And then a real, actual lawyer who went to law school presented them in court before a judge. 

Dear reader, it did not go well. 

This is only one instance of many. There are so many of them I could actually probably write an entire article on the cringe-inducing, jaw-dropping things that AI models are churning out for people – even when presented with reasonable prompts. 

Here are some a few of them: 

• Google’s AI insisted that Kenya does not start with the letter “K.”
• It seems to think gasoline can be used in some recipes.
• Did you know that bathing with a toaster can wash away stress? (Disclaimer: do not attempt.) 

And let’s not forget when Bard publicly, before perhaps thousands of people, erroneously claimed that the first picture of an exoplanet was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. (It wasn’t.)

Forgivable, no?

Not to me, and not to any who seek the truth, which appears to be an increasingly difficult thing to find nowadays. 

Which is actually my first reason that you should not use AI in SEO.

Reason 1: L-AI to Me 

The reason content is such an important pillar of SEO is because content contains information. This is the crux of SEO, the foundation on which the entire edifice rests. If the content be corrupt, the whole structure be a poison tree.

Err, I mean, if you have false information on your website, your SEO score will slide over time. 

Now, as I have demonstrated already, AI is critically bad at presenting information and often gets it wrong. In some instances it apparently blatantly makes things up. 

But I have better examples. I literally just asked one of the free versions of AI for some good winter tactics for fishing for bass. 

Admittedly, it appears to have improved. It suggests that I fish deep and very slowly. Check and check. It has the potential to deliver good information.

But here’s where things go haywire. It also suggested I use a small bait. Now, downsizing your baits in the winter is a recognized tactic for fishing, but failing to mention that lethargic fish are more willing to expend energy to strike a bait if they can justify that expense through a larger meal is egregious bordering on disingenuous. 

That is to say, ChatGPT didn’t tell me to use larger baits, which is a much more widely acknowledged winter fishing technique than downsizing. 

I recall in the past doing research for a client wherein I asked ChatGPT for tips for hunting pheasants without a dog. What I got back was comedy, but not the kind that makes you laugh. 

It told me to use scent control and a decoy. It also told me to be very quiet so as not to spook the birds. My friends, I hope some of you reading this are hunters so you can realize how fatally bad this “advice” is.

Of course these are not things you would not know if you were not an angler or a hunter, and that’s where the problem lies. 

Now, the danger here is not when AI does not know better. It’s when the person asking for something doesn’t know better. 

You might ask ChatGPT something, get an output, and if you take it as gospel, you will at best be garnering false information and at worst putting yourself in peril.

Why else would OpenAI have a whole page dedicated to safety?

What is the danger here, people? 

I digress. The point is that the biggest argument not to use AI in SEO is that it gets it wrong. Unfortunate, but true. Until it gets much better, you simply can’t use it to perform reliable research. 

Reason 2: It’s Theft 

AI is subject to a condition called data bias, which means it can only produce outputs based on the data it was trained with. This has a whole load of implications (including some related to ethics). 

It also harkens back to the old adage, “garbage in, garbage out.” The long and short of what I’m getting at here is AI is limited in what it can put out by what is put in. 

And that means sometimes AI straight up steals copy from elsewhere, which can get you a duplicate penalty. 

I wouldn’t gamble with duplicate copy or plagiarized copy. It might not get you an outright penalty from Google, but it will not build your rankings.

And besides, it will take you longer to fact-check AI and vet it for plagiarism than it would take if you just did the research and drafted copy the old way. You know, the way that works?

Reason 3: You Cannot Build Authority with AI 

Remember E-A-T? It’s actually E-E-A-T now. That’s Expertise-Experience-Authority-Trust. 

Now, technically, if you vet the AI outputs you use on your website, you could build trust, if the information is accurate. 

But authority does not just come from accurate information. It comes from experience – and AI cannot produce an experiential component. 

Forget the fact that you need a human author for the “expertise” part. I’m not sure if Google is awarding rankings by cross-referencing the articles and posts published by the same author on different websites or even within one domain. 

But here’s what I can say. Authority comes from that experience, and it is sorely lacking in AI. Human writers, regardless of the topic they are writing on, can capitalize on their own experiences, reflecting, extrapolating, and applying reason to those experiences in order to present digestible information, sometimes containing actionable advice, to whatever readers come their way. 

AI can only produce based on the data on which it is trained. This is, by its nature, limited. Theoretically the entire data set of the whole, extant human experience is limited, too – but guess what, it is way bigger than whatever data set was used to train any given AI model. 

And that means you’re getting a way broader pool of experience when you lean on actual writers rather than AI.

Who knows, AI can improve. I certainly won’t say it can’t get better, and perhaps with further iterations it will actually become better than any one given human contributor. But that time is most certainly not now.

Reason 4: It’s Cringy and Spammy Beyond Your Wildest Dreams 

AI output is so bad, you guys. I’m not going to overdo this section. If you don’t believe me, visit OpenAI and use one of their tools. 

Ask it a question, then ask it a similar question and tell me it doesn’t repackage the first output it originally gave you. 

It is repetitive, flat, and spammy. It seems novel for an iteration or two but then that quickly goes down the drain. 

By the way, Google does not like spam.

Reason 5: It’s Categorical Black Hat Nonsense 

Remember how SEO “experts” used to boost rankings with spam content, keyword stuffing, and copy hidden in page margins or other “no-access” portions of pages? 

And then do you remember how the domains that invested in those strategies basically collapsed and were unable to recover? 

Yeah, that was called black hat SEO. Today, those techniques don’t work because Google recognizes them, but it doesn’t mean black hat SEO is dead. 

It’s just a different animal, and one of those new “black hat” techniques is to use AI. 

If you don’t believe me, just check this out. 

Straight from the horse’s mouth. Google will crack down on you if you do it. Actually, in my line of work I’ve already seen this happen. 

Don’t say you haven’t been warned. 

Reason 6: It Flops at Technical SEO 

Apparently AI flops hard at coding. I’m not 100% sure about this because I’m not a developer, it’s just the vibe I’m getting from people that do know. 

That means AI is also categorically bad at technical SEO, which revolves around structured data, site structure, streamlined integration, and issues with security and speed. 

Would you relinquish technical command of your website to a tool that can’t get basic questions right? I know I wouldn’t.

Anyway, do your own research here. Though I can speak authoritatively on the other aspects of AI’s shortcomings, this one is little more than a rumor to me.

But, considering the other execrable qualities of the current AI landscape, I think it merits further investigation. 

Reason 7: AI Cannot (or Simply Does Not) Keep Up with Algorithm Updates

Finally, AI either cannot or does not keep up with Google’s algorithm updates, unlike an actual SEO expert that reads the news and keeps abreast of updates and other best practices and trends. 

Also, for instance, ChatGPT was trained on data the most recent of which is from 2021, which means if you ask it for current stats or data, you’re going to be working with outdated information. 

Not a big deal across the board, but still something to consider. Anyway, you don’t want to lean too heavily on AI only to find out a few months or even a year from now that it was a bad idea all along. 

It’s not like you didn’t know better, right?

The Solution: Work with Humans 

Before you charge and crucify me for what you might call protectionist, isolationist rhetoric, be apprised that I would like to intercept that charge on the grounds of self awareness. 

I am fully cognizant of my position as a copywriter and that, conceivably, if AI could do my job as well as I can (it can’t) I could be cost-effectively replaced. 

This is not unknown to me. But the truth is simply that. I am telling the truth. You should not use AI in SEO for all of the reasons I have enumerated here, and perhaps others. 

It’s not like I don’t have other skills. Believe me, I love writing, but I am in no way attempting to protect my industry by publishing biased, dishonest drivel that paints these machines like the precursor to Automated Hell. 

I’m just sharing my experience. I know firsthand what authoritative copy and SEO best practices (executed by thinking individuals) can do. And I also know firsthand what serious low quality results AI generates. 

So, make your choice. I’ve done my part.

The post 7 Reasons Not to Use AI in SEO appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

This should come as a welcome relief to consumers, who have, as of late, had to sweep through hundreds of reviews (if not more) to find credible information on the products they intended to buy.

Why Fake Reviews Suck, Honestly 

To be frank I don’t even really know why I need to spell this out, but fake reviews just make buying anything online that much less pleasant. 

I can only speak for myself, and I’m not a gambling man, but I can’t feel as though I’m the only person out there that would buy in person all the time if I had my druthers. I only buy online whenever whatever it is that I want can’t be easily had in-store. 

And, on that note, fake reviews have made life as an eCommerce a pain. At least 95% of consumers read reviews before buying, and with all the fake, AI-generated (and intentionally misleading) reviews out there, it’s nearly impossible to winnow the wheat from the chaff. 

But that’s not the only development to note here. 

But Wait, There’s More 

Not only did the FTC drop the hammer on AI generated fake reviews (and regular fake reviews). It also put the kibosh on another common practice: companies will now no longer be able to pay for reviews, either positive or negative, to influence their impression online. 

On top of that, businesses, or the marketers they employ, will no longer be able to pad their follower counts on their social media platforms with bots. 

These developments come as a welcome relief to consumers that are weary of slogging through reviews trying to get to reputable information before buying products online. 

What This Means for eCommerce Businesses 

While this is potentially positive news for consumers, this development has pretty big implications for eCommerce businesses, especially those that outsource their marketing. 

If your business has ever paid for false reviews in the past, it’s time to review your practices to keep compliant with the new regulations. One false review might bring down a minor fine, but thousands upon thousands of false or misleading reviews can quickly accumulate and result in serious punitive penalties. 

Now, I’ve written at length on the issues of using AI in digital marketing before, but this is more serious. Previously, my caution was for businesses not to run afoul of SEO best practices. Now it is a warning that by using generative AI to create reviews, or by paying consumers to leave reviews as though they are disinterested third parties, your business will be breaking the law. 

For more information on the FTC’s ruling, please visit their website. 

Anyway, this ruling should not be seen as all doom and gloom for businesses. It’s good for consumers, and what’s good for them is good for the businesses that support them. It does mean businesses will now need to put in a little more legwork into reputation management, but you know what they say, 

“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only that gives everything its value.” 

Well, Thomas Paine said that, and I agree. Nothing worth having comes easy.

The post Big News on Fake Reviews appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

Some great ones were “turn off AI Overview Google,” “How to turn off AI Overview Google,” and “How to disable AI overview Google.” 

This is both amusing and validating to me, since I’ve been critical of AI since the start. I’ve posted about this at length, and the frustration that other users have with AI is neither alien nor unrelatable to me. 

I mean, seriously, just look at this humorous entry I pulled from the AI Overview just the other day. 

It’s real, it showed up on my browser (that’s not a snapshot from a meme page or anything) and as far as I know, you can find it on Google to this day. 

Here’s another:

Dear reader, Andrew Johnson, esteemed 17th President of the United States, died in 1875. That would make him the first President to have graduated posthumously from UW not once, but eleven times. 

With outputs that hilariously (and offensively) bad, I’m hardly surprised that the search terms with the most volume surrounding this monstrosity have to do with how to disable it. 

It’s not the only one like it. Check out some of these absurd (and real) Google AI Overviews. 

They range from funny to patently false and outright dangerous, and it’s a sin that this is what we’re dealing with in 2024.

Nonetheless, my job, to the letter, is to furnish information to willing readers, and that’s what this post is going to attempt to do. 

So if you’re here because you want to learn how to write copy that has a chance of getting scraped by and featured in the AI Overview, buckle up. 

What Is a Google AI Overview? 

In a nutshell, Google’s AI Overview is an AI-powered iteration of the venerable Featured Snippet. But whereas the Featured Snippet is taken directly from preexisting copy on some page that was ostensibly authored by an actual person with subject matter expertise, the AI Overview is a synthesized, amalgamated summary drawn from multiple sources that attempts to succinctly answer a query, as directly as possible, without relying on a Featured Snippet for the purpose. 

In other words, you ask Google a question, and the AI Overview is Google’s (puerile) attempt to give a direct, succinct answer. 

Results may vary as to the reputability and accuracy of the outputs, but that is what the AI Overview is. 

Now, considering my thus-far trenchant observation regarding the matter, you might wonder why I’d be writing this post. 

First, because I expect the functionality of the AI Overview to improve. Secondly, because, whether I like it or not, this thing is probably here to stay. People are going to use the AI Overview to answer their questions, and since I’m in Search Engine Marketing, I have to live with that. 

Thirdly, because I’m adaptable. There’s no reason for me to hate Google’s AI tools, inchoate and feeble though they may be, when I can use them for my benefit. If I can write copy that’s so good it gets featured in Featured Snippets and People Also Ask entries, I should set my sights on showing up in the AI Overview.

So, here are some things I’ve learned (firsthand, real examples to follow in this post) about how to write copy that gets featured in Google’s AI Overview. 

(Spoiler alert, a lot of what I mention here is just “SEO best practice” anyway, but more drawn out, as you will see in a moment.)

With no further ado, here are four suggestions that are proven by results to get your copy featured in the AI Overview.

Focus on Long-Tail Queries 

You’re not going to see many Google AI Overviews generated pursuant to short tail queries. I’m not entirely sure what the reason for this is. It could be that it takes an insane (and untenable) amount of power to churn out just one AI Overview; but more likely, my guess is that short tail queries are too vague. 

When you search for something short tail, it’s hard for a search engine to know just what it is you’re looking for. And so, you get a whole bunch of outputs. Actually, the truth is there usually aren’t featured snippets for short tail keywords either. Same thing. 

By contrast, the longer the tail of the keyword, the more it resembles a traditional question, and the better AI-powered models can grasp what the answer could (or should) be. 

And so, while it is conventionally easy to optimize a page for a short tail keyword, optimizing a page, a blog, or an article using the same methods won’t work for the AI Overview. 

You’ll still want to use target keywords in the copy (just like “conventional” search engine optimization) but for the AI Overview, you need to go a layer deeper. 

You can either embed the keyword in a longer query, or back-form the whole query around it. Either way, don’t get hung up on volume here. If your goal is to secure a Google AI Overview entry, you need to worry more about the quality of the question and the directness of the answer than about that. 

Which brings me to my next point.

Forget About Keyword Volume 

Traditionally, in eCommerce SEO, we look at two important metrics when we’re doing keyword research: search volume and difficulty. 

Keywords with high search volume are attractive because they will generate more impressions. Keywords with low difficulty are attractive because it’s easier to rank for them. Put them together and you have the magic combo. 

Not here, though. Admittedly, these things still come into play, but the fact of the matter is if your goal is to get featured in the AI Overview, you need to be so specific in your copy that there’s probably going to be negligible search volume for that query anyway. 

There’ll be a modicum of searches for it and related keywords, but very few overall. 

Your goal needs to be about authority and building credibility, not about getting more eyes on your website. At least for the purposes of this specific initiative. 

Now, this actually comes back to the traditional maxims of eCommerce SEO. In this capacity, we’re aiming to show up in the overview, which will only happen with good, reputable copy (most of the time). 

That builds a little something called “E-E-A-T.” The more reputable, authoritative and trustworthy your website is, the better its chances will be of ranking for shorter tail, more commercial and transactional keywords in the future. 

So you see, these things are interrelated. Anyway, I digress. Again, make it about the quality of your copy, not just about getting visitors to your website that want to buy something. You’re answering a question here, not selling, at least for the time being. 

Answer More Than One Question in the Post 

As important as it is to focus on answering one question (see below) to increase your chances of showing up in the AI overview, I suggest answering a whole lot of other questions in the post. 

For instance, if you’re going to write a CMS page about how to clean a pair of boots, don’t just write about how to clean them; write about why it’s important to keep them clean in the first place. Do you have suggestions on what not to do? Put them in the same post. 

The more thorough you can be, the more value you will offer potential readers. Google’s AI is (supposed to be) able to interpret this, and will analyze and compile its AI Overviews accordingly. 

Not to suggest that one single entry with a lot of information on a single topic won’t get featured, just that the more comprehensive you can be regarding the vertical, the better are the chances the algorithm will consider you an authority. 

Be Detailed, Offer Personal Insight 

As is the case in SEO, the more accurately you can answer a question, and the more detailed you can be, the better your chances are of showing up in the search results, in this case, in the AI overview. 

But there’s more to this than just stuffing the entry full of relevant details (although that is good advice and I stick to it). 

If you can offer personalized insight, from experience, that no one else has (or which few others have, as a close second) do that. The more you can speak from experience, the less likely it is that there’s going to be an entry to rival you. 

Do not underestimate how much copy out there, in the wilds of the internet, has been researched and regurgitated by people that have no idea, fundamentally, what they’re actually talking about. 

I myself am guilty of it sometimes. It is possible to research a topic about which I know nothing and still speak with a shred of credibility, if I have been assiduous in my research and cross-referencing. But I know better than anyone that the copy I have written from personal experience performs the best and carries the best weight with an audience that knows what they’re reading about. 

The point is, when I write from experience (as I am doing in this post) and talking about things that I have done with my own hands (so to speak) I know I’m offering value that isn’t somewhere out there on the internet in another blog or news article. 

That is, no one could poach it without coming to me first, and that makes me the original source. The authority, if you will. 

And that’s what you want to do for your copy. Anywhere and everywhere you can, write from experience. Your copy won’t just show up more competitively in the organic search results, it will be more likely to show up in an AI Overview for some or other relevant query. 

Which brings us to the crux of the article, which is why you can trust these pointers in the first place. 

Let’s go over some actual AI Overviews that have been generated from my work. 

Don’t Just Take My Word for It: Here’s the Proof 

Naturally, you’ll want to know if the suggestions I’ve outlined here work, right? To quote Cervantes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. 

Let’s start with one that’s only a few months old as of the time of this publication: 

You can see what the search query is, along with the fact that Google references my post (and a separate pillar page) in its bid to generate solid answers to the question. 

Interestingly, the search query is not even that long tail. It doesn’t even take the form of a question. It’s almost more of a statement. Still, Google took enough of that into consideration before reproducing an output that answers what people who need digital marketing for cigar stores are after. 

Here’s another, and a better one. If you look up “What are SEO impressions” you’ll get the following (at least at press time):

I’ll be the first to admit that it’s kind of a weird query, since most people who want to know the answer to this question know enough not to look up “SEO impressions” and just call them “impressions.”

But that’s the entire value case here. Not everyone is familiar enough with digital marketing to know what an impression is, just that it’s associated with SEO, and so when they type in the former query, my article is ready to capitalize on that unfamiliarity with a pleasantly straightforward answer. 

Google’s AI engines saw that, and generated their response from my article – and their own sources, which you can see cited next to mine. 

Here’s another, of which I’m considerably more proud. Let’s see you’re out there, on “the Google,” wondering how many blog posts you need to get traffic. You might ask it the following question, and you’ll get this Google AI Overview: 

That’s not a particularly easy search term or query to show up for in the regular organic results as it is, so showing up in the AI Overview? That’s a feather in my cap. 

For some context, that is one of the more informative and useful posts I’ve published. I answer not only the main query but many others that are relevant, along with many practical and actionable extenuating bits of information. As you might imagine, it’s not a single numerical answer – there is a lot more that goes into how many posts it takes to get traffic than how many posts you actually publish. 

Last, consider the following: 

The only reason I’m showcasing this one is because, as boring as the subject matter is, and as little as I enjoyed researching and writing that article that appears above, it shows that Google’s AI Overview isn’t just lusting after brand-new nonsense. That post is three and a half years old. 

But, guess what, it’s good, and the information is not just accurate, it is still relevant. What’s true today will be true tomorrow. Times change, facts don’t.

And so, I tell you this because I want you to know something very important about the AI Overview and organic marketing in general. Quality is so much more important than quantity, and so much more important than recency. 

Make what you publish good. It may take you a while to get results, but if you follow the best practices, you’ll get them. 

Why You Might Want to Get Featured in a Google AI Overview 

I’ll be completely honest and offensively direct here. I’m one of those people that would disable Google’s AI if I could. The only time I look at AI is when I want to be amused by how disconcertingly bad it is, or when I want a laugh. I simply cannot use it for research in my job because it is too unreliable, and too inaccurate [almost all of the time]. 

But, in the spirit of honesty, it is likely to get better, which is going to make it, as a tool, a staple of SEO in the broader sense. So while I can’t personally make use of it, there remains a use case for digital marketing in general, and it is as follows.

It is proven that the greater your domain’s authority, the better will be its organic rankings, overall. The more authoritative a source, the more users engage with it, consume and trust the content on the website, and ultimately, the more likely they are to become customers. 

So, as this tool evolves, it will become a weapon in the arsenal of experienced digital marketers, and their customers, to increase credibility and trust. There’s no substitute for that in a world in which Content is King, and content is what gets featured in the Google AI Overview. 

So, even though you won’t be optimizing for commercial and transactional content in your bid to show up in a Google AI Overview, the case in point is that you will be benefiting the positioning and reputability of your brand, and if I have to sit here and type out why that’s a good thing for your business, we’re both going to be talking past each other. 

In a word, optimizing for the AI Overview will position your website and your business in general as an authority in its industry, and there is no substitute for that, and little more valuable.

Update on How to Show Up in the AI Overview

I’ve been waiting a bit for this to happen, but I knew it would eventually. Take a close look at that AI overview that generated in my search results in early November 2024.

Don’t mind me, that’s just my blog on how to show up in the AI overview, you know, just casually showing up in the AI overview.

That’s how it’s done. If that isn’t proof that the tips in this post are the real deal, then I don’t know what arguments I can make to convince you of the value of good copy.

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