Welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast, brought to you by target internet.com.

My name's Daniel Rolls, and in this episode I'm gonna be giving you some practical tried and tested tips for answer engine optimization.

Now I've just said it's answer engine optimization, a EO.

But interestingly, I've just pretty much the same time run a poll on LinkedIn because it started off, we were deciding is it GEO generative engine optimization?

Is it a EO?

Do they actually mean slightly different things or is it just all SEO and the results of the poll have been utterly unconvincing.

So 23% of you saying it's yes, it's a EO, and 23% of you saying it's GEO 15% saying they mean slightly different things and 38% saying, look, it's all just SEO.

So for the sake of argument in this one, what I'm really talking about.

It's how do we make sure that we get into those AI overviews and mainly in Google.

So, yes, you know, we wanna appear in chatt PT and Google Gemini, but really we're interested in showing up.

Organic search, search engine optimization as normal, but also in those AI overviews.

Now, just a quick message before we get going.

If you fancy spending half a day with me every month target internet has got a sale on at the moment, so just for 30 pounds a month, so half price sale you get access those live half day master classes and loads of other stuff as well.

But it's me running those master classes.

Uh, and we've got one coming up a deep dive half day into what we're about to talk about.

But at the moment you get the master classes as part of the free trial as well.

So hopefully I will meet you on the next masterclass 'cause loads of community get together, uh, and always really good fun.

So, do get over to target internet.com and take a look.

But a I overviews have fundamentally shifted user behavior.

So latest stats are showing over 60% of all Google search results now have an AI overview, uh, in them, and Hres did a study which we'll reference in the show notes, target internet.com/podcast, but saw a 34.5% lower average click-through rate for pages appearing with an AI overview.

And that reduces position one click through rate.

So when you're ranking number one in Google from around 7.3%.

To about 2.6% in some cases.

But they also found that the paid click-through rates, so paid search results, got a drop in click-through rate as well.

Uh, and some reports showing decline of least 70% in certain scenarios.

Now, bear in mind, this is gonna massively impact Google from a revenue point of view, and they will be.

They've already come out and said they're gonna be adding ads to AI results when there is clear commercial intent.

But what's really clear to me is this is a very experimental stage currently, and Google has gone into full innovation test and learn mode.

They've really ramped things up to try and get the user experience right.

The ad experience right as well, which means there's lots of people coming up with theories about what works and we are gonna call it a EO for the, for the sake of it today, what works and what doesn't work.

But the problem is that shifting all the time.

So for an example, and I put the screenshot into the show notes as well, we've seen the AI overviews being shown further down the page, like equivalent to about position three underneath organic listings.

And that's particularly where the publisher that's ranking in the number one positions is actually referenced a lot in the AI overview as well.

So this sounds like a good thing.

But it does mean it's all changing.

So of this in mind and with the pace that the AI views are changing, what can we do to maximize our search engine optimization, but also make sure we're appearing these I overviews without wasting our time on techniques that don't really have an impact.

And I'd say if SEO and A EO were a Venn diagram working in the areas that massively overlap isn't a bad place to spend your time.

Especially as what impacts a EO is still massively opaque.

Really.

And remember, we've looked at SEO for a long time as an algorithm to be solved.

As in, you know, if we worked out what this set of rules were, we could solve the problem, we'd be number one for everything.

But the reality is it's had aspects of AI built into it for a long time.

And a EO is trying to untangle how to get visibility in the large language models.

And obviously in particular in Google Gemini, uh, for those AI overviews.

But the reality is it's not really an understandable set of rules.

This is much more a probability machine.

That adapts and adjusts constantly.

And as far as we can see, the results are massively inconsistent anyway, and particularly when people like Google are trying to personalize those results as well.

So what we've done is say, okay, what are the things that you can do that lend yourself to getting more visibility in the AI overviews, but also will have a big impact on your general search optimization as well.

So we've tested these five techniques out.

We've been doing this for the last year on target internet, and we've looked at our results and we've worked out what seems to be working, where are the trends and as well as going through it in the podcast today.

We've got the masterclass coming up for members, so look out for that.

If you remember half price sale at the moment, but also if you're a newsletter subscriber.

Uh, we've got a one hour session that you get for free as well.

So that's just target internet.com/newsletter, but for free for everyone.

We've done an interactive guide to this as well.

So if you just go through to the show notes you'll find that as well.

There's five things I'm gonna just go through in this session today.

First one, uh, that question and answer content format fairly obvious, but we have changed how we're searching.

We're searching more with longer questions, so answering those questions specifically can lend yourself into getting more visibility.

Then the whole piece around digital pr, so getting mentioned online, but entity reputation.

So the online reputation of your brand, your company, the individuals within your organization and so on as well.

Then advocacy and sentiment.

So looking at what people are saying about your online, the idea of multimodal content, so that's content that's in lots of different formats, and then structured data or schema markup as we refer to it as well.

Talking about structured data I'll go through the principles, but talking you through code isn't gonna be a very exciting thing to do on a podcast.

So what we've done is an online guide with a load of templates that you can just cut and paste out.

You can either put those into place yourself or you can hand those to a developer to really help.

All of these are gonna help, but schema markup really does help with traditional SEO as we kind of call it now, and with this answer engine optimization.

So well worth taking a look at is technical, but you know, we'll, we'll take a look at that in a moment as well.

So let's kind of go through them one by one and just get a little bit, kind of more.

Okay, so the first one, the question, answer, contact format.

So it's pretty clear we've got used to searching for AI overviews and within large language models, and we are searching with questions.

Uh, and those questions have got longer and a lot of the data that's coming out of Mars and HFS is saying that those searches, those questions have almost doubled in length in many cases as well.

So yes, answering questions, but answering specific questions as much as possible as well.

It is also much easier for a search engine or for a large language model to match a very specific question to a very specific answer as well.

So it's fairly obvious that if you're answering a very specific question, you've got a good chance of showing up.

But really think about the inverted pyramid approach to writing.

So you start with a direct answer.

The what, then follow up with supporting details, the how and the why, uh, and really try and avoid any long rambling introductions.

Another really good thing to do is to break down your H one, your main heading is the question.

Uh, and then your H twos are going through and breaking down the question there, the answer to the question there as well.

So really think about.

Actually is the core question answered in the first paragraph?

Ideally, and that can make a big difference, but that that inverted pyramid writing style has been around for a long time.

It's used in lots of news websites, but it can actually really help.

We found when you're answering questions, uh, in that format, websites like Answer the public.com are really invaluable in terms of working out the actual questions that people are searching for as well.

We've really doubled down on this now.

This connects to one we'll come to later on as well.

But a little technique we found is multimodal writing the answer to the question, but then also having a video.

That answers the question as well.

That tends to be a shorter form video, and ideally, we're also publishing those on YouTube rather than putting 'em to Vimeo or somewhere else, just because the likelihood of Google picking those up seems to be much greater.

So what we're seeing quite a lot, you answer the question specifically, you get referenced, you've got a good chance of showing up in the organic results, but also in the references that you're getting.

It's great that you might show up in the question there.

The video might show up in those references in the AI overview, but also when you get the video results, you've got an opportunity of showing there, so you're dominating a few more spaces on the page to really reinforce your brand.

Right.

The next one, uh, this whole digital PR and entity reputation, the idea is that Google, and to some extent in a similar kind of way, the large language models are using a knowledge graph that is the connections between things to understand the relationships between brands, entities, topics, and if your brand is frequently mentioned alongside other particular industry terms.

It's gonna see that strong association between those words and phrases.

Now people have used this technique to try and manipulate the large language models, so we're not trying to do that.

But what we're trying to do is say, okay, if we can get mentioned in industry specific websites and so on, it's great if we can get back links from those places.

'cause that's obviously helped from a search engine optimization point of view, but actually we want our brand being mentioned in lots of different places and appearing around industry related words on these different websites as well, because those volume of mentions are gonna really impact our entity reputation as well.

Now this is something that Google have been doing.

For a long time as well.

But it seems to be having a particular impact on the way that the large language models are trained, which makes sense.

'cause if you are being mentioned in lots of places around particular topics, you're likely to be very relevant for those.

Very much in line with that is advocacy and sentiment.

Large language models are very sentiment aware.

They're digesting millions of reviews from different places and comments and discussions.

And if the consensus around your brand is negative or it just doesn't exist, it's unlikely you are gonna be recommended as the kind of best answer to that question.

But if you think about Google.

Having eat, experience, expertise, authorit and trust actually experience that component of e is really heavily derived from what other people, uh, are saying about you, not just what you say about yourself as well.

So having something like a voice of customer program trying to automate review requests and actually trying to, um, reply to negative reviews and mitigate any negative sentiment can be really important, uh, as well.

Then let's come back to the idea of multimodal content.

Google is very much clear on the fact that they are moving through to allowing you to do a search with an image, so you could redo this, but more adding in text and images together.

So yes, I can drag a picture of my face and try and find out who it is, but if I upload a picture of something and say, why isn't this working?

And I've got something in an engine for example, it would try and identify what the problem is from the image.

Um, I can also upload a video and say, why is it doing this?

And I could have a thing of my bike making a certain strange noise or something like that.

So increasingly, if we can put together images, text, video, audio, it becomes really important.

And if you're only providing text, you're kind of missing a large percentage of the input signals that Google, in particular, is kind of now looking at as well.

Google is also looking for original images as well.

They're trying to tune out things like stock photography transcriptions of podcasts.

Transcriptions for videos become really, really important as well.

But also what we'll come to in a moment is the idea of schema markup, labeling our content as well.

Uh, one of the things you really want to make sure as well is if you are going through.

And adding transcripts to your YouTube videos, make sure you can add an SRT transcript file.

Don't let it be auto transcribed because you'll just get much better results if you do it that way as well.

And that brings us nicely into the fifth of our five items to really help with your a EO, which is your structured data, your schema markup.

So schema markup allows you to label.

And it removes ambiguity.

So it says this is a product, this is a price.

This is the author, this is the event.

This is when this was published.

This is when it was updated.

So we can do a load of things to mark our code up with different parts of our code as well.

But things like setting up the details about our organization are frequently asked pages linking through to our social media profiles can be really important as well.

Now, what we've done in the show notes is we've linked through to the schema.org official documentation.

There's a tool from Google.

That allows you to do a rich result test to work up if that markup's working.

But we've also done a step-by-step checklist guide for you where you can go through, look at the different elements of your page and look at how you can mark them up.

And what we've seen is this has a really, really strong impact for the large language models.

'cause it makes it easier for to understand them, but it's also brilliant for Google.

'cause obviously Google is looking at this kind of anyway as well.

So, make sure you're looking at that and it is a bit more technical to implement 'cause you need to change the code in your web pages.

Uh, but well worth the effort to go through, uh, and do that.

So question answers, content.

Think about your digital pr, the reputation of your brand, your entity.

Really focus on some sort of advocacy and outreach program, and build up the positive sentiment online.

Create content in lots of different formats.

You've got multimodal content, and then put structured data into place.

If you do those five things, they're gonna really help you from an SEO perspective, and it'll really help you appear in the AI overviews as well.

And most of all.

They're all things that are actually useful to your target audience as well.

Because you're answering their questions, uh, you are discussing and making your brand more visible online.

You're encouraging people to talk about your brand and actually getting them to help judge the quality of what you're offering.

OTM mobile content is gonna be more accessible.

It's gonna appeal to a wider audience of people and that structured data.

Although we're doing it for the Google crawlers and for the large language models, it really helps our target audience to understand our content and the click through rates of structured data content.

When it's shown within Google or chatt pt, actually the click rates go up as well, so it demonstrates that it's really being useful.

For the target audience as well.

So, uh, we've got that in-depth, interactive content target internet.com/podcast.

You'll find all the links there, uh, in the show notes.

Uh, and hopefully I will see you on one of our masterclasses soon.

So thank you for listening to the Digital Marketing Podcast, and we'll speak to you again very soon.

For more episodes, resources to leave a review or to get in contact, go to target internet.com/podcast.