The way we search is evolving, and AI is at the forefront

In a previous blog post, our head of SEO, Mollie Ellerton, explored whether or not SEO is dead and the answer was a resounding no - it’s just evolving. With users headed to social media instead of your traditional search engines, AI overviews popping up at the top of search results and Chat GPT being a household name, AI is at the forefront of this change. As SEO professionals, it is our job to keep up and our knowledge is constantly evolving so we can support our clients in staying top of mind and at the top of search.

Optimising Your Site for AI with SEO

We’re actively speaking about AI everyday here at Hookflash and with our clients. That’s why we’re excited to share our best recommendations for optimising your site for AI. All of these recommendations are based on industry best practice and our own experience in getting our clients at the top of AI results, so if you want the same for yourself, this is your guide.

Fresh Content is valued by AI models

AI models want to be sure that they are using the most up-to-date information for their users so the pressure is on to keep our sites and our content up to date.

Of course, this includes adding new content to your site regularly so you can be the go-to source of information within your industry. But beyond that, this also looks like regularly reviewing current content, and signalling freshness with ‘reviewed’ dates. We don’t have to be constantly adding new pages/posts to our site, but we do need to be consistently reviewing and updating what we already have.

Before you rush to AI to pump out more content though, make sure you check out this article about whether using AI to write content is good/bad for SEO and our recommended best practices.

Structure your content to be easily understood by bots

The content you create should also follow a clear and easy to scrape structure. LLMs are learning from our content anyway, so we want to make sure it’s easy to understand.

This includes things like headings, tables and bullet points which not only make your content easier for readers to consume, but also AI bots as well.

Of course, it will always be our recommendation to keep your user at the centre of your content, as is emphasised by Google, so consider how users search using AI and structure your content to support that. For example, you can use questions as titles/subtitles and then answer those questions directly, mimicking how people may search and making it easy for bots to understand too.

E-E-A-T, and specifically 'Experience', is more important than ever

Although LLMs have become a great source of ideas and advice for users, one thing they cannot demonstrate is real-world experience, so it relies on sources that can. Things like reviews, reddit threads, case studies and UGC - these are all things that LLMs love to quote in their results, as well as content that is one-of-a-kind. So what can we do to demonstrate that real-world experience that LLMs crave? Here are a few of ideas to get you started:

Case studies
Unique studies & insight
Substantiated claims
About pages that highlight USPs
Reviews & testimonials
YouTube videos, UGC
Content authored by experts
Author & resource pages
Active language e.g. “we tried” and “our experience”
References to authoritative resources.

The best part about these things? Not only does demonstrating real-world expertise increase your chances of showing up in AI, all of these things are equally examples of Google’s E-E-A-T framework which is more important now than ever. So if implementing these things helps you get found in both AI and Google’s search results, they’re a no brainer.

Prioritise technical optimisations so your site is easily accessed by AI bots

LLMs capture their information using bots so we need to make it as easy as possible for these bots to crawl our sites.

The way we do that is very similar to the technical optimisations we would be making for SEO purposes anyway. Things like avoiding rendering content with JavaScript and prioritising site speed within development.

One method through which we have seen positive outcomes for our clients is through adding structured data to make the page content easier for bots to understand. In this case study we shared how adding structured data has benefited our clients with a +6.5% increase in average daily AIO visibility as a result of adding schema to the site. This small change alone resulted in a sustained and meaningful improvement in their presence within AIOs across their keyword set and therefore demonstrates that adding structured data is a must optimising for AI.

Your site hierarchy acts as a roadmap for LLMs

Similar to the SEO best practice we’re all used to, it’s essential to ensure your most important pages are linked in your site’s main navigation. Other content should also be internally linked so that no pages are left orphaned and hard to find by bots. Of course, when it comes to internal linking, you also want to make sure highly relevant anchor text is used when hyperlinking.

All of these things contribute to a clean and clear site hierarchy which is particularly important when it comes to AI visibility because a clear internal structure acts as a roadmap for LLMs. It helps their bots to quickly identify relevant pages and therefore increases your chances of being referenced in their answers.

How AI is shaping our SEO services at Hookflash

You may be starting to notice a theme here… A lot of SEO best practice overlaps with AIO best practice too so it’s essential you keep your site in a healthy condition. However, its still important to note the differences between AIO and SEO and the need for separate monitoring and strategy.

That’s why at Hookflash we are growing our SEO services to also cover AI optimisation as well. We’re actively working with clients to audit their AI performance, make tweaks to their sites and monitor their performance as part of our forward looking SEO services.

If you’re a business looking for support with your AI performance and want to stay ahead of the curve, then please do reach out, we’d love to support you.