Imagine asking a search engine a question and getting an answer instead of a list of links. You could get all the information you are looking for without having to search through multiple websites for the answer. Well, that future is here.
Google has it been testing its generative AI search since last May, but now we’re hearing a lot more. In November, Google added more elements for your generative AI search including a gift recommendation element and virtual try-on options for clothing.
In October, Texas A&M associate professor of information management and operations Ravi Sen wrote an article titled: “After 25 years of growth for the $68 billion SEO industry, here’s how Google and other tech companies could kill it with AI.” Sen predicts that AI generative search will kill the industry for small and medium-sized businesses that rely on optimization to make money.
Sen’s opinion is not shared by all. Some SEO marketers predict that AI generative search will change the industry but not kill it completely. Content marketer Julia McCoy has posted a video raising the question, “Is SEO officially dead? Google’s AI in search.” If you search YouTube for “AI and SEO generative search,” there are countless videos showing doomsday predictions or offering new ways to manipulate search engine algorithms.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO is a set of tactics marketers use to make websites more visible when their target audience searches for information relevant to their business. To understand search engine optimization, you must first understand how a search engine works.
Lumar has one very complete guide explaining how search engines work, but here are the basics of what you need to know:
Tracking: Search engines like Google crawl websites using a technology called a search robot or spider. These crawlers visit billions of websites and follow links from each website to explore more websites.
Indexing: Data discovered by crawlers is added to an index that includes all relevant URLs.
Classification: The search engine ranks all websites it discovers using content keywords, the type of content on the page, how recently the page has been updated, and how users have engaged with the websites in the past .
Results: The ranked content is then displayed on the search engine results page, also known as SERP.
How does SEO work?
SEO help knowledge of user behavior to ensure that search results reach your target audience. Search engine users generally don’t want to sift through pages and pages of links. They want to get their question answered quickly. In fact, only 9% of users will scroll to the bottom of the first page of results. SEO in practice leverages this knowledge (and a few tricks) to make sure your website is seen.
Since over 80% of web searchers use Google over its counterparts, such as Bing, Yahoo! and DuckDuckGo: Most marketers and businesses optimize their content based on how Google ranks search results. And Google has been very good at showing users relevant content because their crawlers rank content based on guidelines called EEAT. These guidelines rank search results by experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. In addition, Google ranks content based on technical factors such as user experience and page speed.
When optimizing a website, marketers use several different strategies that appeal to the delicate sensibilities of Google’s spiders to get websites to rank.
What is generative AI in research?
Google and Microsoft are piloting generative AI programs in search functions through Google Labs and Microsoft’s Bing. If you visit the Bing website, you’ll immediately see the option to ask a chatbot your question right below the search bar.
Google’s AI generative search is still in a pilot phase. To try it out, you first need to visit the Google Labs page by clicking the glass icon in the top right corner of the screen.
This will take you to Google Search Labs, where you can opt into Google’s generative search experience.
IBM Research Blog defines generative AI as “deep learning models that can generate high-quality text, images, and other content based on the data they were trained on.” But what does that mean, anyway? Generative AI uses patterns in data to produce content. For written content, it uses a process called Natural Language Processing (NLP).
NLP models are trained on large amounts of text and use these same types of predictions to spit out text consistent with what the model is asked for. ChatGPT and other great learning models use this process to “understand” the question being asked and then provide an answer.
So when I googled “SUCCESS magazine” with SGE enabled, I got a response detailing the history of the publication as well as information on how to contact SUCCESS for a subscription.
Bing also gave a detailed answer explaining what SUCCESS magazine is and what kind of content to expect from the publication.
Why are search engine optimizers scared and how can you future-proof your website?
Billy Wright is a Senior SEO Strategist at Direct Online Marketing. Wright says many in the industry predict that SGE will result in a 20% to 75% drop in organic traffic for most websites.
This prediction makes sense: If Google simply provides the answer to a user’s question, the user doesn’t have to click through to a website to learn more about the answer to their question.
“Writing content solely to satisfy questions and answers within rich results on Google will likely stop generating the traffic it once did as Google transitions to display its own answers in generative results,” explains Wright. “Instead, you’ll need to focus much more on building authority for your website and expanding your product and location pages so Google knows why to show you over your competitors.”
“If everyone sells the same product or provides the same coverage of a news story, why should you appear over someone else?” he continues “Building authority on your website by telling Google who you are, why you’re an expert, and how you’ve become the leading voice on a topic will go a long way.”
The secret to staying relevant with Google’s AI generative search
Jesse Cunningham owns and owns an SEO agency called 712 Digital a YouTube channel which produces educational content about SEO. It also predicts that employers will need to produce more meaningful and relevant content.
“I’m encouraging business owners to prioritize content that provides relevance and insight,” says Cunningham. “I think the focus will shift to creating unique content with a gain in useful information. This means creating SEO-optimized content in the conventional sense, as well as adding information that is difficult for AI to replicate. In the In practice, this may look like a financial company using internal (anonymized) data to provide statistics available nowhere else on the Internet.”
You can also find a fairly comprehensive tutorial on Exposure Ninja’s YouTube channel with first-hand experience of ranking customers in SGE. But the most important thing to remember is that the world of AI changes more often than underwear: Google SGE is still in testing mode, and there could be significant changes to the model before it’s released to the public.
Photo by Nebojsa Tatomirov/Shutterstock.com
[ad_2]
Source link
