When it comes to people finding your business online, the last 25 years have been dominated by search engines. And just as search engines were the portal to the internet then, we’re seeing a similar trend with AI now. Where people once asked Google questions, they now ask the same questions to ChatGPT and other Generative AIs. You want to capture them with generative engine optimization (GEO) but also keep all that great search engine optimization (SEO) you already have. What if I told you that you could do both?
How Your Website Can Become AI Search Results
While AI is a constantly evolving technology currently being thrown at almost every aspect of life, one of the areas it is consistently criticized is trust. In the early days of AI, ChatGPT would confidently provide answers without citing sources. This, compounded with the AI getting confused and wanting to provide information it didn’t have, caused it to do things like hallucinate, i.e., make up stuff.
Today, generative AI may be less prone to these flights of fancy, but people are not only suspicious—they may want to dive deeper. This is why platforms like ChatGPT and Google AI have started to provide links to the sources they have used and for further reading. This is where GEO comes in: steps you can take on your website and in your marketing to make sure it’s your results that show up in AI searches.
How Generative Engine Optimization is Search Engine Optimization
As we talked about in our blog post, Ask Engine Optimization (AEO) Isn’t Hard—If You’ve Done SEO, if you’ve already been doing search engine optimization for your website, you’re most of the way there for generative engine optimization. However, it also means that, like we’ve learned for SEO, any black hat hacks for GEO will eventually backfire in your marketing. So it’s time to:
- Write Good Content: Write original content that has been thoroughly reviewed (free from typos or formatting errors) that is clear, concise, and talks about products and services using terms people may search for (keywords).
- Do Your Metadata: Metadata (meta titles, meta descriptions, and metadata for images) isn’t just for search engines. All crawlers (including AI crawlers) use this data to review pages and quickly extract important information.
- Update Content Occasionally: Refreshing your pages’ content periodically or creating new content regularly will also help, as updated content is prioritized over older data.
Learn more about troubleshooting your current SEO with our blogs Overhauling Your SEO: Uncovering the Issues and Overhauling Your SEO: Content Re-Creation.
What Marketing Can I Do Specifically for GEO?
Now that we’ve talked about the double-duty that SEO best practices can do for ask engine optimization, let’s talk about what specific additions and changes you can make to your website to act as magnets for AI results. We go over this in detail in this blog, but we’ll cover the basics here:
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ): A FAQ section covering your services and products is a great resource for answering questions people may have about generative AI. Focus on answering the question succinctly at the top before you go into more detail below.
- Write a Business Blog: Blogs are a great way to fill up your site with content for search and AI without bloating out your menus and sitemap. Any industry can write a blog, but writing one that is both useful to bots and readers can be harder. Check out some of our tips to get started.
Of course, it’s easier to talk about making content than actually doing it. If you need help writing content and hooking it into your marketing—generative AI and otherwise—it’s time to get some help. Contact Vision today to start talking about your marketing, from granular support on marketing to AI to broader marketing strategies. Want to start with more expert advice? Check out the rest of our Vision blogs, our enVisioning Success podcast, and our downloadable Marketing Strategies Playbook.
