In the current media landscape, AI is reshaping the way consumers search and impacting how businesses attract, engage and convert their customers, making the funnel less linear when it comes to how consumers interact with brands as they move through the decision-making journey.
For marketers and businesses, traditional SEO has always focused on using the right keywords, meta tags and keywords to focus on the organic ranking of their website. AI is fundamentally changing consumer behaviour from keyword-driven searches to focus on contextual and semantically relevant intent-based interactions.
Using AI, businesses are now able to change how their consumers engage and consume media. Marshall McLuhan once said, “The medium is the message”, meaning that the medium, in this case AI, changes how consumers think and behave, irrespective of the content. Typically, consumers would search and look across multiple links that ranked at the top during their consideration stage of the customer journey. With AI-powered search, such as ChatGPT, consumers are now able to receive direct answers from their search. With the support of the right marketing in place, businesses can utilise this shift in behaviour to engage with their consumers from the first touch point of their customer journey, when discovering their brand, to building that brand trust through to the bottom of the funnel in terms of conversion.
According to a study done by SEMrush, ‘57% of mobile users and 53% of desktop users do not click on an organic or paid result after searching’. With the advancements of AI summaries from search, especially across Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE), consumers are receiving their answers instantly, which reduces the need to click on the content to find their answers.
SEO is no longer just about your website ranking, but more about how it can drive your visibility across AI responses. It is important for businesses to understand how AI understands and ranks content when providing summaries or direct answers to searches, as being featured in these outputs ensures businesses stay visible.
From a business's perspective, it is still important to invest in your SEO strategy as, without optimised and contextually relevant content, AI will not feature this information when consumers search. Together, both SEO and AI are complementary tools that should be part of any marketing strategy. Using AI, this tool can support businesses to increase the chances of their content being discovered and build that brand trust and credibility online.
Here are some simple tips on how to improve your content with AI in mind:
1. Review your keyword research and optimisation strategy – most consumers’ searches are now more conversational and encourage a more natural tone. Your content and the keywords used must reflect this. As consumers ask more questions when searching, as a business, if you haven’t already included FAQs on your website, this will help answer common questions that your consumers ask and will increase the chances of these summaries being pulled into AI-generated responses, which will increase your brand's visibility.
2. Focus on intent and context – AI increasingly understands consumers’ search intent better than ever before. So, as a business, your content must align with your consumers’ needs to drive action, such as a purchase. When writing your content with SEO in mind, it is essential that you consider whether it is EEAT compliant. Checking your content is either written based on direct experience, expertise, or based on industry updates and accurate information will help drive the content across AI responses.
3. Stay relevant – optimised SEO content that is high quality and well-structured will rank and appear more in AI responses. This can also be applied to your local SEO strategy, ensuring your Google Business Profiles are up to date to ensure your listing will appear when consumers are searching for phrases such a ‘branch near me’, etc.
4. Track – with AI developments occurring quickly, it is key to understand how search engine results pages change, so using tools like SEMrush will help track how your website is performing.
Driving traffic to a website has always been an important KPI, especially if you want consumers to act. However, with AI altering the way consumers search, businesses need to have their brands mentioned across all AI outputs to stay at the forefront of consumers’ minds and support their brand recall during their decision-making journey.
Now more than ever, it is important for businesses to have authentic, well-structured content supported by data, according to LinkedIn to add value and increase the opportunity to be across AI-powered interfaces. By optimising your content for both SEO and AI, your business will appear across all search sources.
At BBJ&K, we have a team of experts who always stay attuned to the digital transformation. We track digital channel developments like AI and SEO to ensure we are delivering your campaigns across the right channels to engage with your target audience at the right time. We can use AI to make our campaigns work harder and deliver better results, whether that is through contextual, relevant ads or smarter targeting to help your customers engage and interact with your brand better.
SEO and AI are the perfect pairing and crucial for business success in this new digital age. If you need support in your SEO strategy and want to understand more about how we can support in getting your business to appear in AI responses, please get in touch.
Author: Lavanya Asirvatham
