In the beginning, there was SEO — a digital marketing tool that isn’t hard to understand, but it can be very hard to master.
Now, we’re in the era of AI-SEO, which is a new type of SEO created to optimize how your digital content is found by AI-powered systems, such as Google AI Overview, ChatGPT, and Claude.
It’s true that the purpose of both types of SEO is to make your online content more visible than competing content. However, they have distinct differences that are important when crafting content that you want to be discoverable to AI systems.
What Is AI-SEO?
In the most basic terms, AI-SEO is a process of helping to make your online content more attractive to AI systems.
The latest research found that 62% of Americans interact with AI several times a week. From virtual assistants to creating content to asking questions, there are lots of ways that people can interact with AI systems.
With so many people depending on AI platforms to provide them with the information they need, ensuring your content is strong with AI-SEO is crucial to helping ensure your content is what AI systems are reaching for.
SEO Versus AI-SEO — What’s Different?
In the most basic terms, traditional SEO is all about optimizing your content so it ranks high on search results, like Google and Bing. Instead of focusing on search engines, AI-SEO enhances your online content so that it shows up in AI-generated responses.
For example, imagine you have a blog post on your website explaining what a contested divorce is. When someone asks what a contested divorce is on ChatGPT, you want your blog post to be cited directly in the AI’s response as a highly reputable source.
When comparing traditional SEO to AI-SEO, some of the main differences include:
- Primary goal: Traditional SEO aims to have your website listed as high as possible in search engine results, while AI-SEO focuses on having your business name and content cited or included directly in AI-generated responses.
- Primary strategies to hit that goal: Traditional SEO relies mainly on keywords and metatags, where AI-SEO uses long-tail content that is structured to look for question-based headers and direct answers it can easily pull out to answer a user’s question.
- Metrics: Traditional SEO relies on keyword rankings and click-through rates to measure how well it’s doing, while AI-SEO is measured by AI visibility scores, such as how frequently your company is cited in AI responses.
- Authority building: Traditional SEO uses quality backlinks to show the content is reliable, while AI-SEO depends on your company’s reputation and looks for clear signs of your trustworthiness for specific topics.
How to Optimize Your Content for AI-SEO
With a better understanding of the differences between traditional SEO and AI-SEO, here are some tips on how to optimize your online content for AI-SEO:
- Create AI-friendly content: Rather than focusing on keywords, develop content with clear headings and “clippable” answers to specific questions that are easy for AI systems to extract. Keep your paragraphs short, and consider including informative lists and tables in your content.
- Focus on sub-queries: Instead of writing a blog about Florida’s Divorce Laws, focus instead on the sub-queries under the broader topic, which are more in line with the actual question someone may be using AI to answer.
- Make it conversational: AI systems look for content that sounds like it was written by a human, with a conversational tone using natural language.
- Don’t forget to EEAT: Just like with traditional SEO, focusing on the principle of EEAT (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) helps you establish greater authority and trustworthiness with AI systems, giving you a better opportunity to be pulled into an AI-generated response.
- Use multi-format content: Make your content more AI system-friendly by using not only text, but also videos, images, and other interactive elements to create content that is more engaging to users and can be referenced by AI systems in many different ways.
- Keep content fresh: Both traditional SEO and AI-SEO look for online content that is up-to-date over content that’s obviously outdated — constantly update your content with updated statistics and facts to stay relevant.
- Use smart schema markup: When AI systems are searching for a response to a user’s query, they use schema markup such as your business name and contact information, product and services names, and FAQs to quickly discover the information it needs. This helps increase your chances of being used multiple times in AI-generated responses when AI knows exactly what you do and what you offer.
And here are a few common mistakes to avoid when optimizing your content for AI-SEO:
- Directly using cut-and-pasted AI content. AI platforms don’t like AI content because it doesn’t sound human. Your best bet is to always have a human write 100% of your online content to make it more acceptable to AI systems.
- Continuing to focus on keywords. Yes, keywords are still important for traditional SEO. However, AI systems are searching for authoritative content that answers specific questions rather than specific words. Not to mention the fact that using too many repetitive words may signal to an AI platform that your content is not trustworthy.
- Fact-check your EEAT. In order to become and stay a trustworthy authority, any facts or stats you use in your content need to meet EEAT guidelines.
- Forgetting all about using traditional SEO. Using both types of SEO is very important for your best possible results.
Optimize Your Website for AI-SEO With Better Content Matters
It’s important to remember that AI-SEO is not replacing traditional SEO. Traditional SEO still has its purpose and is a great building block for online content with strong rankings and an authoritative presence.
However, AI-SEO adds a whole new dimension to the SEO game, providing your content with new visibility and a way to potentially reach a whole new client base.
If you still have questions about how to write content where traditional SEO and AI-SEO work together, the good news is you don’t have to go it alone. The writing and editing experts at Better Content Matters are ready to help — give us a call today.
