AI is improving at a very fast rate, this has consequences for so many businesses, not just in the sphere of digital marketing but also how businesses operate in more general sense, such as AI and robotics in factories. How shoppers find information and products online is also changing because of artificial intelligence.

This is why businesses need to be aware of Answer Engine Optimisation or (AEO). Businesses must learn about this, plus how to adapt marketing strategies because a slice of your customers could be using AI, whether it be Google AI Overviews, or say ChatGPT to find your business

 

Table of contents:

• What exactly is Answer Engine Optimisation?
• How is AEO changing how shoppers find relevant information
• What are Zero Click Searches and why does this matter?
• Why marketing companies need to know about NLP or Natural Language Processing
• AI and Machine learning
• Semantic web
• Structured data
• Why good on-page SEO still matters, such as H1-H6 tags
• How to better optimise your business’s content marketing so it is more widely cited by AI
• Why technical SEO is still important
• Writing for real humans is important, rather than just for the search engines (Google EEAT)
  Engagement
• Backlinks still matter
• Google’s Knowledge Graph and ensuring your business becomes a well-known entity

 

What does Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) mean?

For many shoppers, our attention spans are now very short; we all want to find services and products faster than ever before. Therefore, rather than having to wade through search results, in Google’s organic links, people are becoming more acquainted with using AI to do the “heavy-lifting” for them, to present an in-depth answer and fast.

This means voice assistant responses, instant replies from AI powered chatbots, and featured snippets and Google’s AI overviews answers are becoming more frequently relied upon. And as any good marketing expert will tell you, as shoppers get more and more familiar with asking their chosen AI platform for an answer, that behaviour is more likely to continue and to become more common.

So, therefore, businesses, must make sure that they adapt, this means not just optimising for Google organic results but also the AEO answers as well.

 

Changing user behaviour

The search queries have been getting longer and longer for a while. A lot of the top marketing agencies will have noticed the change happened when people started using voice search more often. However, the queries are now becoming even more conversational, as people now chat and ask questions to the AI as well.

Therefore, as we will come on later, businesses must adapt and change their content marketing. It is a very good idea to write the content marketing using a conversational writing style. We would recommend using the full H1-H6 titles. We also highly recommend writing in FAQ style.

Zero click searches are increasing

Recent statistics indicate that around 65% of Google searches end without a shopper clicking on any business’s website. This is what marketeers refer to as a “zero click search”. The number of zero click searches are on the rise, the reason for this is simple- the answer is provided to the shopper directly in the results page (SERP’s).

Therefore, if you’re in a rush, you don’t know how to cook a chicken Tika from scratch, well why would you click on a result published by say the BBC when you have the answer provided by a Google AI Overview. Alternatively, you could be using ChatGPT where it relies on LLM memory to reply an answer, rather than someone clicking a citation.

As businesses we need to adapt, to do this, we must still continue publishing content marketing, however the bar is now set higher.
The content marketing must be that much better quality, so that when you do obtain a shopper to site, say through Google’s organic results, the content marketing should be much better and then you are able to improve the following:
– Improve dwell times
– Lower bounce rates
– Obtain more backlinks
– Obtain more page views

 

AI, NLP and machine learning

We are one of the longest standing SEO agencies in Wales, as such we have been writing about NLP, SEO and machine learning for quite a while.

Here’s the thing, Google and the AI platforms understand languages, just as the way a real human word. For this NLP and machine learning, the search engines and AI have been able to answer questions such as “when’s the next available train due”.

It knows from location data on say an Android where you are stood. It also knows from AI and BERT and MUM models that your not talking about a train that’s due in any other station than the one where you are near.

In the past, before NLP, you might have to manually submit this information, such as where you are, destination, where the train stop you are stood on is, to then be directed to train timetable.
How things have changed, AI is now doing all of these checks.

 

How to improve your businesses content marketing for AI and AEO

Clear unambiguous writing style.

In simple terms don’t waffle, be straight to the point. Don’t write 700 words which are a large block of text. Split the text up, cover everything that needs to be said to answer that question but don’t go off topic.

Use clear question and answer style of writing

What is a sure fire way of improving both organic search engine optimisation, as well as also improving the chances of your business being cited as a citation on say ChatGPT is if you write using FAQ style of writing.

This simply means thinking about commonly asked question that typically get asked about that product or service and answering them within the article.

 

H1-H6

H1-H6 simply stands for headings, if you use a WordPress website, then you can add heading without having to write any code. Most CMS, such as Drupal and Majento also allow you to simply add H1-H6 tags.

The purpose is simple, you can add titles, and then highlight them with this code, what that allows is for Googlebot and ChatGPT to better understand what you are talking about in that piece of writing.

For example, if you have written 6 titles all to do with a change in employment law, then Google’s algorithm will know that your talking about employment law related topic.

Technical SEO (crawlable)

This is a really basic consideration, yet one that is important. Whether your optimising your company website for an LLM, such as ChatGPT or Google, you must make sure the bots they use such as Googlebot can crawl and index the work. Sometimes, by accident, or a problem with the CMS settings, a bot cant crawl the work, if the LLM or Google cant index the work, it wont appear in their results.

Google EEAT is important for organic SEO and the LLM’s

Its always pretty clear whether a real human has written the work, or whether its written by a robot. Therefore, the work that always ranks higher on Google, therefore which is more likely to deemed as high quality and also cited by Google AI Overviews is if the work has a high Google EEAT score.

If someone is clearly passionate about what they are writing about, its cleart that they are then an expert on that topic.
Often then can recall from previous experiences, offering recommendations on how to do something. This is when a piece of work can obtain a much higher Google EEAT score. This stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. If you can therefore write and publish work that’s written by a true expert on the subject this work tends to rank higher.