Working for the digital agency Clever Marketing, just over the border in Surrey, I conduct the day-to-day SEO for the company and its clients. And one thing that has been challenging us recently as been the increasing prevalence of AI Overviews in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
These AI Overviews are increasingly showing up in search results but not for every question. However, digital marketers ignore this trend at their peril.
The way to deal with these new zero-click searches is to conduct what is really a spin-off of SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, in a new branch that’s been dubbed Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).
In much the same way that we conduct SEO on websites and web pages, so GEO is similar. However, with the nature of AI generated results curating the top sources, that’s really where GEO is driving web content to be – at the very top.
Of course, “getting to #1 in Google” has been a constant in the quest for search engine optimisation, but now, more than ever, if AI Overviews are to be a permanent feature, we all really do have to create the very best content that is worthy of the number one slot.
And what do the top results in AI Overviews look like? They’re like featured snippets but generated on the fly, with sources links included. So now Google is at the top of Google SERPs, and it’s using your scraped content to provide an answer to users. And if you’re really lucky, you get a mention, maybe in the form of your brand’s favicon, brand name, and a link to the webpage you created that Google used for (part of) its answer.
An Example of GEO in action
You can read the full story over in the CMUK article “What is GEO?” that I wrote this week. But to give you an idea of what GEO can do, we wrote a blog post for a local IT support company in Surrey where we celebrate Microsoft Word turning 40 this time last year.
Looking at the Google Search Console stats this week, a fellow SEO guy in the company pointed out a huge spike in impressions on the IT firm’s website. He asked why they were ranking for terms around MS Word. I asked him to see which page it was and it was the 40th anniversary post. When he asked the pertinent question why, I suggested it may be AI related.
I then searched on Google, got an AI Overview snippet, and presto – there was the client’s website, listed as a source for Google’s AI-generated answer.
How Did We Do This?
My long standing attitude, from writing content and conducting SEO over the past 26 years is this – make your content meaningful. Make it helpful. Make it comprehensive.
If there’s one big lesson I learned, it was this:
I once worked on curating content for a website that paid a third party for industry news stories. We built a custom tool that took the XML formatted news, converted them into HTML then pushed them as drafts onto the website. Ready to be proof-read, they were always edited because – the information within them was never satisfactory.
This approach of really questioning the value of the content was important. The stories were always “thin content” being only 200-300 words long and they were extremely basic. There was maybe a quote, some figures, and a name or two, but that was it. I read each piece and, putting myself in the mind of an entrepreneur or business owner, I was left unfulfilled – I had more questions than I had answers from what I’d just read.
One example was where the Royal Bank of Scotland had published its latest report on the state of finance in the SME sector. There were a couple of hundred words, a quote, and some numbers. But where was the report? There wasn’t even a link to it.
I immediately set about improving every single piece of “news” that was sold to us and turned each item into a far more valuable story.
That RBS piece from around 2007 was fleshed out with more quotes from the report, more nuggets of information, and I even screengrabbed the report’s cover and provided a link to it. In fact, when I viewed our search data in Google Analytics, I saw people were interested in old reports, and so I archived copies of the originals on our own server. That way, when businesspeople were searching for past reports, and the bank had “retired” and removed it sold content, we still had copies for people’s reference. We served a very good purpose. We added so much value.
And THAT is what content creators and SEO people should do today for Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).
Create content of value, give your audience something to get their teeth into! They’ve asked the search engine a question and it’s presented you as the answer – give the best answer that you can in every way.
Paul Mackenzie Ross is a digital marketing expert with over 26 years experience in conducting SEO, writing content, and everything you need for a successful commercial website, campaigns, and strategies.
Leave a Reply