SEO is changing fast and we're looking at the dawn of a new era if you think that just writing great content and building the same old crappy backlinks is going to get you the results that it used to you're going to be in for a sad time over the next 12 months there are two big themes that you're going to have to build your SEO strategy around in the past SEO was Google people searched on Google and that was pretty much it so when you're building an SEO strategy all you had to think about was
Google now though for the first time we're seeing real genuine search competition from tools like chat GPT and perplexity and that means your SEO strategy needs to adapt like we're going to explain in this video because you need your business products and services to be found wherever somebody is searching increasingly that's in AI tools including Google's own AI overviews so we're going to go through exactly how to do this in just a minute the second thing you need to plan for is that previously you just had one SEO strategy now increasingly for our clients we're
actually kind of BU building two SEO strategies one for the top of funnel and one for their bottom of funnel traffic again we're going to break that down today if there's one SEO strategy that's going to dominate the next few years it's Geo or generative engine optimization this is the biggest shift in search I've seen since I ran my first Google ad campaign in about 2006 generative engine optimization is a new term to describe the techniques required to get your business featured and and recommended by new generative AI tools like chat GPT and Google's AI
overviews for example if I go on Google and search for generative engine optimization Services you can see we've got the regular web results here but all of these are pushed down by the AI overview and the techniques required to get featured here are subtly different to the techniques to getting featured here for example you can see exposion injures position three in the regular organic results whereas in the AI overviews we've got position S one and three oh yeah but Geo isn't just about Google's AI overviews it's also about tools like chat GPT for example what
company can help me run con generative engines and you can see that chat GPT is happy to recommend specific agencies oh yeah with over a billion people using Google's AI overviews just by the end of 2024 learning and implementing Geo now could get you a real first mover advantage against your competitors okay so how do you actually do geo well we have full videos breaking down exactly how but I can give you an overview basically most of these tools use some sort of background web search to compile their results so the first thing that you
need to do is make sure that you're actually ranking in that web search this is obviously most important on Google's AI overviews because Google's AI overviews are using the regular search results and you need to be in those search results in order to get featured in the AI overview for example here's the website of one of the company that we own we've got it featured snippet at the top of Google and that visibility makes it eligible for the AI overviews now there's a side point here which is potentially a rabbit hole but Ai overviews and
other generative searches really encourage the users to use much longer tail and more specific searches so if you're publishing more specific content you've got a really good chance of ranking for those searches and also informing the AI tools when they're doing their own sub searches about that topic of course now that's not to say that just because you're ranking well in regular search means that you're going to be ranking in generative engines that's not the case at all there are specific things that you need to do but in general if you're ranking well you've got
a better chance of showing up in these AI results so how do you get ranking in regular search well you do SEO this is writing great content it's building links it's making your website super usable and it's being featured all over the Internet and by the way if you want one of our teams to show you exactly what you need to do to get ranking in regular SE search and AI overviews you can always request the free website and marketing review from exposure ninja just go to exposure ninja.com review we'll record you a video showing
you exactly how to do this and a whole bunch of other stuff specific to your website not everyone is eligible for this so you do need to apply but you can go to exposure ninja.com review to do that one of the main ways that you need to optimize for generative engines is to make sure that the content you're publishing matches the answer that these AI tools are providing so for example here we can see the structure of this answer is basically answering the question very simply and then mentioning some of the things that you need
to consider in order to do this thing so if you're trying to rank in an AI overview for this type of search you basically want to mirror that you want to give a concise answer at the start of your content and then you want to go into a bit more detail about these topics so that when Google's looking for websites to corroborate the information in the AI overviews it goes oh yeah cool this exactly matches happy days now we're also seeing these AI tools give preference to websites that show experience so firsthand experience of the
topics they're talking about we're going to come back to that a little bit later on now there's actually a second aspect to being recommended by these AI tools let's go and have a look at a search over on perplexity which is another AI Search tool and actually really powerful so I've just done a search here for what are the best affordable skincare Brands and we can see that perplexity has given me a bunch of answers I'm very happy to see exposure ninja client the ordinary is ranking number one now perplexity is actually kind of using
a multi-step underlying search and then it's combining all the answers for different searches into one set of results if we click on these expandable accordion we can see the underlying searches that it has run we can also see the websites that it's visited in order to compile this answer and I think this for most brands will form the bulk of their ongoing SEO work over the coming years running searches and finding out which way websites are ranking for these types of searches and they're making sure that your brand products or services are being featured on
those websites prominently and that the messages that content is communicating about your brand is consistent and coherent and matches your positioning is going to be the game with generative AI if you can use this type of digital PR and content marketing to get your business featured everywhere that's going to increase the chances that these AI tools are going to recommend your business even if they're not sourcing that recommendation from your website back over to Google now I've run a search for best business bank for mediumsized businesses and this is an incredibly profitable keyword to rank
for but look at the websites that are being featured none of these are banking websites they are all third party sites so if I'm a bank I'm going out to each of these websites and making sure that it's my business that's being featured and when they feature us making sure they're talking about the things that we want them to talk about as a side note Google is really struggling to identify what's different about any of these Banks I mean look at this one the benefit of Metro is that there's no monthly fee if your balance
stays above 6,000 wow sign me up please come on we will start to see branding and positioning become more important in SEO because we need more cerent messages about the product and service and any competitive Mo then there's no monthly fee that's not good enough so any SEO strategy over the next 12 months that doesn't include generative engine optimization is a little bit deficient we've been talking about AI overviews for well over a year now and it's no longer the future of search this is the present of search now one of the side effects of
all of this Innovation is that actually your organic traffic might drop even if you're doing a fantastic job of your SEO here's why previously when we were building an SEO strategy we think about top of funnel middle of funnel and bottom of funnel and how we could drive traffic at each of these stages through to our website for example top of funnel traffic would be people asking questions maybe they've got a problem they don't yet know that your business your product or service is the solution they might not even know that a solution exists but
they click on a few websites they'd start learning about the topic and gradually form a picture of the range of solutions eventually they get to the bottom of funnel which is when they're ready to make a purchase and that's when they might start searching for a particular product or brand but with AI overviews and with AI more generally that top of funnel research phase can be done in the AI itself let's go back to this business banking example I don't need to visit any other websites to get a general overview of the features of these
bank accounts so whereas previously I may have gone on the HSBC website to learn about their account and then I might have gone onto the metro bank and then coop operative Bank to learn about these things I may have gone onto a third party site to learn about them now I can do a bit more of this research directly in the search results meaning the next click that I make May well be to purchase something and what this is going to mean is that your SEO strategy might split into two you might have the top
of funnel and middle of funnel strategy which is all about getting your brand or product recommended in the AI answers and then you'll have a bottom of funnel strategy which is all about getting the people that are ready to buy something through to your website to make that purchase for example what's the most indestructible solid state drive well if I'm Samsung I'm pretty happy with this result because that topof funnel informational research traffic is being directly recommended this product because it's covered on these websites so the next step is to implement a bottom of funnel
SEO strategy to make sure that when somebody searches for this product I've got a good chance of picking up that traffic this idea that your customers might spend their research time talking to chat gbt or Google AI overviews rather than visiting your website is a more profound shift that I don't think most marketers have fully appreciated and to be honest we haven't really seen the traffic patterns play out fully yet it'll be really interesting to see how this develops over the coming years now that's not to say that people won't still value website content they
absolutely will particularly if you can structure your website content in a way that makes it way more valuable than the more generic AI answers funly enough Google has been teaching people how to do this for years through eat and now eat now eat stands for experience expertise authoritativeness and trust these are the things that Google wants you to demonstrate on your website in order for it to rank and it just so happens that these are the things a lot of AIS want to show in their results as well so what does this really mean well
what this means is if I'm searching for something like what are electrolytes and do I need to drink them do I want an answer that's being produced by some generic person who's got absolutely no expertise at all do I want someone that's got absolutely no experience of this topic at all and do I want somebody totally untrustworthy talking about this topic obviously not so the next question is well how do we demonstrate these things on our website well most prominently ranking Health websites have been doing this for years now for example you tend to see
this type of thing at the top here where we've got the writer of the article with a link through to their bio where we can learn more about them and their history and their expertise but we can also see how old the article is and when it's next due to be reviewed all of this helps to build trust with the user and it's exactly the sort of stuff that Google likes to see as well and Google has been particularly strict with sites in your money or your life so anything related to health and finance here's
a finance site you need a budget and you can see it's being written by Rachel Wong if we click on her bio we get some information about Rachel and we can see that she's an accredited financial counselor that gives us and Google a bit more reassurance that she's an authority on this topic but what if you're in a space where accrediations and certifications don't mean anything well you can demonstrate your experience in different ways for example this search best funger sides for lawns which you may have seen us dissect before our client Ron from Golf
Course lawn is ranking at the top of Google and we see what we've done here is we've packed this blog post with videos from Ron he's incredibly passionate about this topic he's a real expert and these videos show that he's got firsthand experience of everything he's talking about and that makes these product recommendations so much more valuable than if this was some generic affiliate blog churned out by AI which had no experience of this topic whatsoever this concept of experience expertise authoritativeness and trust is actually something that you can apply across your website it doesn't
just have to sit in your blog or your content Pages for example freesell we can see here uses loads of this stuff on their homepage even as seen in here clinically studied we've got the reviews and the ratings we've got that the products were formulated by Dr conliff we've got leading nutritionists in the UK both regular search engines and generative engines want to show highly reputable good quality websites with experience of thep topics they're talking about and by packing your site full of these types of signals you can go a long way to giving them
the content that they really want to serve their users one of the reasons we just beat out some of the world's largest agencies to win a global search award for the best us SEO campaign with Ron cheers Ron because of the competition to get into AI search results often these AI search results only include a few links we're going to see businesses having to work harder to get a attention for themselves we'll sometimes run uov studies with our clients to go and poll the public on topic and then look inside the data that's collected to
find newsworthy angles which we can go to the Press with one of our clients installs bathrooms for the elderly and we actually started a petition to the UK government to increase Provisions for elderly and disabled people now it's a cause that we and the client really believe in but it's also amazing for visibility and Authority so over the next 12 months I challenge you to think outside the box what else could you do to get your brand visibility in areas that your competitors just aren't the more that Google and AI search engines can see your
brand across the internet the more likely they are to recommend you to their users it wouldn't be an SEO strategy video without talking about voice search now for the last eight years I've been asked every year at the same time is next year the Year of voice search well yes and no yes in that the voice assistance we're getting on our phones and how way better better and actually capable of answering questions that we have but no in that the majority of these questions are still entirely informational basic queries about the weather definitions or the
price of Bitcoin visual search results are still by far the quickest way to collect information and that's why I think over the next 12 months that voice search traffic is still going to be a relatively low value component of all search traffic I really hope someone proves me wrong I think the next year is going to see some of the biggest shift in search behavior that we've seen since the dawn of internet search by the way if you're a local business you're going to need to follow some very specific local SEO strategies check out this
video which shows you exactly how to do that stay informed subscribe to the channel and see you next time
