Beat the AI Box: SEO Strategies for the New Google Results

[00:00:00] Do you want that new AI Overview box in Google Search Results to quote you instead of your competitors? In the next 20 minutes or so, I'm going to break down the repeatable patterns pulled from 10 independent studies that have been done in the last 12 months that consistently earn links, citations and clicks inside Google's generative results. Let's master the new rules of ranking on this next episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach Podcast.

[00:00:26] Digital, Social Media, Content Influencer, Marketing, Blogging, Podcasting, Vlogging, TikToking, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, Email Marketing. Whew! There's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neal on your side.

[00:00:55] Because Neal Schaffer is your digital marketing coach. Helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neal Schaffer. Hey friends, Neal Schaffer here. And welcome to episode number 416 of the Your Digital Marketing Coach Podcast.

[00:01:24] So one of the questions that I've been getting asked a lot, I've recently taught in Vietnam and spoke at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, among other places, including my digital first group coaching community, is the impact that AI is having on search engines. So you can go into your Google Analytics and you'll probably start to see traffic that actually comes from ChatGPT and from perplexity.

[00:01:51] And like many businesses, you might have seen a decline in actual traffic from Google because unless you've been hiding under a rock, you know that when you go to Google, often the very, very first thing you see is that AI overview box. And often it will have links that you can click on, links that will appear on the right-hand side of that area or links that you can click on when you go further in that AI overview information to find the source of that specific information.

[00:02:17] Now, I like to keep this podcast based on my own actual experiences helping my clients as well as with my own brand. This is a case where, in all honesty, I am still, a few years in, but I am still trying to build out my library of content. And if you've read digital threads, you'll know what I'm talking about. But obviously there's lots of changes going on over the last 12 to 18 months with search engine rankings and my website, like all others, has been impacted as well.

[00:02:44] Part of what I do is obviously build out that library of content. And yes, there are still areas where I am still building, in all honesty. Every year I am doing keyword research, looking for new things that there's greater demand for. So every year I'm finding new things to blog about. And therefore, you know, all those ninja tactics, I'm not really following because I'm really focused on serving my audience and delivering more content. Because unless I have content for those keywords, I'm not going to rank for them.

[00:03:12] I'm not going to get any traffic or any authority for them. So that has always been my rule number one. Right now, 75% of my content still is primarily new content. This is content that I publish on Mondays, Tuesdays, or Thursdays. Now, Wednesdays are the days where I republish content. This is content where every quarter I do a quarterly audit and I look at the bottom 20% of my traffic from my blog posts. Like what are the blog posts that generate the least amount of traffic?

[00:03:42] That would end up being the lower 20%, the 20-80 rule, right? And what I do is I look at it quarter by quarter. And first of all, I wait a year before I look at it. I want to give it a chance to get backlinks and what have you. After a year, it starts coming into my quarterly audit. And if two quarters in a row, if it is less than 20% in terms of its number of views it's getting, that's where the red flag goes on.

[00:04:07] And that's where I put it into a pile where either, you know, maybe the times have changed and there's no need for this content anymore. I'm going to do a new search intent analysis like I do when I'm building my library of content. Is it still necessary? The way that Google delivers search results is obviously based on search intent. But with every new algorithm change, it also changes what sort of content they display. So there are some results where it's just, it's YouTube videos and it's Reddit discussion forums and Quora and branded content.

[00:04:37] And there's no room for content outside of that. You're never going to rank on page one. Whereas two or three years ago, you might have been able to rank on page one. And this is regardless of the AI overview, right? So for that content, I might want to retire it and stop cannibalizing myself because I often do. And forward it, you know, delete and set up a 301 redirect so that it goes to other more valuable pages. And I've been doing this over time, right? But there's also content that I republish.

[00:05:01] Now, when I am republishing content, that's where I'm going into the best practices of what I've learned. And some of the things that I'm doing, and this goes beyond what we're going to cover today, but just to give you an idea about my own personal experience is obviously we're trying to go deeper with the content, trying to give more personal experience, trying to get more information gain. I'm starting to create more tables and more unique images that aren't borrowed from third-party websites, but they are my own doing.

[00:05:29] And actually, the latest iteration of ChatGPT makes it really easy to create pretty good-looking, compelling graphics that you can use in your blog post. So there are a few other things that I know that others are doing, like they're getting quotes from authorities in the subject. So that is another thing that you can do as well. Obviously, adding just way more personal experiences and just finding information that is not available on other blog posts covering the same area.

[00:05:54] Now, obviously, with Google, there's also this sort of domain-wide ranking that they definitely have that definitely affected my website because I get way more traffic from Bing than I do from Google, which is crazy. So obviously, regardless of what you do, you may be in a situation where you need to wait for the next algorithm change or Google regularly has readers that go out, like human people that go out and look at your blog. So if you keep doing well, and now with my new blog posts, I'm doing this.

[00:06:22] And now when I republish my old blog posts, I'm doing that as well. So that is how slowly I'm trying to increase the ratio of these more better optimized for, you know, EAT and the helpful content update and everything that I've learned over time. I don't think this is a one-stop thing. Although I do know some businesses that have spent the last 90 days redoing all their blog posts. So if you have the resources and budget to do that, awesome.

[00:06:46] I have like almost 800 blog posts that would eat up a lot of resources and budget to do it. I'm going to take a slow and steady approach to it. Just wanted to get that out of the way. So that's why I don't have any personal data to share with you regarding the AI overview box. But just like I write blog posts and sometimes the blog post is based on a lot of research data and my analysis of it, I wanted to offer you that for this podcast episode because I know it is important. Now, this is not an episode on how to show up in chat GPT searches.

[00:07:16] It's only for that AI overview box that we're seeing in Google. So the quest to appear in chat GPT searches is a whole other episode that I am working on. And I do hope to have some data for that as well. But that is still a little bit off. So let's start with the AI overview box before we move on, right? So Google's AI overviews. It was before it was called SGE. So you might have heard of that before. But clearly, they are no longer a gee whiz experiment, right?

[00:07:44] The latest data shows that they sit atop roughly half of US English queries and they keep expanding. As we get information that we need from them and move on, Google is going to serve more of those up. It's all about Google serving the end user, helping them find what they are looking for as quickly as possible. This obviously fits into their mission. Now, some marketers see the AI overviews as traffic thieves. I see, you know, we've had this before with like people also asked boxes and other snippets.

[00:08:14] This is a long battle that we as marketers have had with Google. And this is just another iteration of it, right? So I see a fresh slice of real estate that we can do our best to try to win. So I've sifted through 10 of the most comprehensive field reports released over the past year from hands-on lab tests to large-scale data crawls. I threw out the outliers and kept only the advice that I saw coming up in repetitive sources. So what you'll hear today is that overlap.

[00:08:44] And I'm highly confident in the advice that you can use for your own playbook and how you can get your content to appear on AI overviews. So let's begin with why do AI overviews deserve their own strategy? Well, it's just like being featured in featured snippets or people always ask boxes. Early tracking shows that blue link clicks can drop 15 to 30% when an overview appears.

[00:09:08] That's one of the reasons why we're all getting hurt with our rankings and ultimately our traffic coming from search engines. But the URL cited in that card pick up brand visibility and the most intent-rich visits. In other words, if you're not in the summary, you're beneath the fold. And it's important that people that are looking through those AI overviews are looking to dig deeper. So their intent has been confirmed when they click on your link should you be lucky enough to be featured there.

[00:09:38] So let's begin with the content foundations for SEO. And I think this is the same for Google as it might be for AI search as well. So start with E-E-A-T, experience, expertise, authority, trust that you can prove. Every study agreed that pages that surface an overview scream credibility. Author bios, firsthand experience language.

[00:10:03] We don't know if Google in their algorithm looks for mentions of I, right, myself, me. But if your blog posts don't have any of that language, it lacks firsthand experience language, right? So these are immediately some things we can do. External citations and clear date stamps. If a human expert isn't visible, the AI skips you. And this might be the same with the whole Google Helpful Content update as well.

[00:10:30] So those are ways in which we need to prove our E-E-A-T and keep it human. All right. And which gives me a great idea because I show my latest revision date, but I don't actually show my published date, which I may want to add as well. So it's also about what I'm seeing in these studies. It's not about a single post, but a topic cluster.

[00:10:54] This really taps into my library of content thought process, which is that you need to show authority to search engines by having a number of blog posts on a given category of content or content pillar. In this case, we can call it a topic cluster. So multiple data sets showed that when a pillar page is surrounded by tightly linked subguides, the pillar is far likelier to power the overview.

[00:11:19] Think Hub and Spoke, one comprehensive anchor article, and a web of long-tailed deep dives. This is something that, well, HubSpot has been talking about for two decades with their concept of inbound marketing, this Hub and Spoke. But now we approach this with Hub and Spoke pillar pages for each one of our categories that we want to build authority around. I don't think this is new advice, but it bears reminding that if you want to appear in the AI overviews, you need to have a cluster of authority. Okay, here is the other one.

[00:11:49] Answer the user's exact question in 50 words or less up front. So four different experiments of the 10 that I studied found the AI latches onto a question-style heading followed by a concise, plain language answer. So place it in the opening paragraph if your title is a question that you're responding to or the first H2 and then expand.

[00:12:15] Now, I've heard similar advice for featured snippets or for FAQs or what have you, but this seems to be a common thing. Make it easy for the AOI to grab your answer. And this is not a way that naturally you might have been creating content before, but it's something that you might want to consider aligning with this new style. And then I mentioned external citations.

[00:12:41] So the studies are also finding that you should back your claims with numbers, adding current statistics, original data, or even well-sourced third-party numbers boosted inclusion rates across several tests. Quant beats vague every time. So not every answer that you're giving that you're hoping to be covered in AI overviews might have a data point to it. But whatever you can do to add external citations to it will help you.

[00:13:10] Any numerical, quantitative aspect that you can add to it seems to improve your chance of being featured in the AI overviews. All right. Next up is format and readability. So I covered, you know, content foundations, authority and intent. The second area would be the format and readability. Make it skimmable. And this is like with all content, post-helpful content update. I think we're seeing similar advice.

[00:13:37] Short sentences, one idea per paragraph, lists and tables where possible. I know that I am breaking down my paragraphs that used to be three, four, five sentences into a max one or two sentence per paragraph. Key takeaways or summary boxes give the model a ready-made snippet. You might see these in a lot of other websites. I have not done this, but you often see it after the introductory paragraph before the first stage two.

[00:14:01] You might see a key takeaway or summary box, which makes it very, very easy for the AI to serve that up as the snippet. And then FAQ blocks covering related sub-questions often get surfaced verbatim. That is a very encouraging thing. I once had a lot of FAQ blocks on my blog. I took them down because a lot of those FAQ blocks, in all honesty, highly leveraged AI-generated content. And I don't think that that is the right thing to do.

[00:14:28] So at some point, I'll probably include FAQ blocks again one at a time. But with this in mind that you're covering a related sub-question. And if it was to be featured verbatim, what would you want that to look like that would best represent your brand and your voice? So we're not just putting up FAQs for some SEO hack. We really want to make sure that they are branded and represent us and give us our best ability, not just to appear in this AI overviews, but should we appear, that someone would want to click through and learn more.

[00:14:58] All right. The third thing here that we want to look into to improve our chances of getting into Google's AI overviews are the technical and schema moves. So a few things here. Schema still matters. FAQ, how-to article, product market. These were common denominators in the cited pages, even though rich result visuals are throttled. So we're just talking about the basic text here. Now, sometimes you will see images. Images need contexts.

[00:15:28] Descriptive alt text plus a clean, ideally transparent PNG or high-quality photo has been shown to increase the odds your visual appears besides the text. Something to consider here. And then, just like anything in SEO, site health is table stakes. Fast load times, mobile responsiveness, crawlable architecture, and HTTPS. Yes, we're mentioned in every technical checklist. So what is old is new.

[00:15:55] You need to make sure you have all those traditional technical SEO boxes checked. All right. Number five. Or I should say number four. Sorry. Keep it fresh and measurable. Revisit top-performing posts quarterly. Update stats. Add new insights. Tighten the summary answer. This is now about the PDCA, the plan, do, check, action of how we get into a cycle of Kaizen, especially if we are targeting the AI overviews and we want to make sure that our data is up to date.

[00:16:24] Now, if you are making major edits, you can manually request re-indexing in Google Search Console and multiple case studies saw an inclusion flip, believe it or not, within 6 to 12 hours. So let's give you a quick win checklist based on everything I have talked about. Pick a page that is already ranking in the positions 4 to 10 for an informational query.

[00:16:53] Insert an H-style question plus a 40 to 60 word answer right near the top. Layer in FAQ schema covering related sub-questions. Add a fresh stat or citation that ideally is dated this year. Compress replace images. Write alt text that restates the core answer. Then request re-indexing and see if there is any movement.

[00:17:23] Obviously, you know, incognito mode, monitor the AI overview tab for movement. And I think if you try this on a few blog posts, that would be the best way to see, to really validate, will this work or not? Will it impact your ability to be seen in the AI overview tab? This is exactly what I plan on doing in the not so distant future. But before I had the chance to do it, I wanted to give you this advice. And I would love your feedback as to whether you saw any success doing this or not.

[00:17:52] So my final thoughts on the subject are that AI overviews aren't necessarily the end of organic traffic. They are the next evolution of it. As I like to say, you know, nothing in life is guaranteed, including traffic from Facebook, from LinkedIn. And although until now we've been able to get a lot of traffic from Google, those days are, I think, gone, right?

[00:18:13] With the emergence of ChatGPT and different ways in which people do searches, it's really going to be hard to increase traffic compared to the levels that we used to have if there's not an increased number of people that are searching, right? So obviously there are outliers and there are things for which AI overviews do not exist for. And there might be things where people are looking for deeper answer that an AI overview is not going to be sufficient for. So we're all, you know, everybody in marketing is all trying to figure this out.

[00:18:42] But when you combine your undeniable expertise, crystal clear answers, structured data, and a habit of continual refresh, the algorithm rewards you with headline real estate is what these data studies are showing. So start small, right? I have a slow and steady approach to all this. Maybe optimize one page this week, measure and iterate.

[00:19:07] If this podcast helped you win a citation in the AI overview tab, tag me on LinkedIn or Instagram. I'd love to hear your success story. I will have all the research links that I used in the show notes that you can look at them and gauge them yourself. And I want to thank you again for listening, subscribing, and if you were kind enough to do, reviewing and rating this podcast so that others can take advantage of the knowledge that I share and we can all grow together.

[00:19:36] This is Neil Schaefer, your digital marketing coach, signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach. Questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast.neilschafer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilschafer.com to tap into the 400 plus blog post that Neil has published to support your business.

[00:20:02] While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community. If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.