With the era of AI Overview, is SEO optimization doomed to renew itself or die? Maybe the answer is, yes.
Google is adding Artificial Intelligence to the search engine. In this way, when someone does a search they access an AI summary based on what Google considers the best content on the web.
This is very useful for the user, but threatens to decrease the click rate of websites.
In fact, we are on the verge of so-called O-click searches, so it is more important than ever to focus on quality content, fast websites and innovative formats.
But let’s go in parts, it is not a simple topic. Accompany us with your reading to know well what AI Overview (also known as Google I/O) is, how it will affect your SEO and, above all, what we are doing to maintain our web traffic.
What is AI Overview?
After the implementation of ChatGPT and its incorporation into Bing searches through Copilot, there was the feeling that Google had fallen behind in the Artificial Intelligence race.
However, with the announcement of AI Overview, the rules of the game change.
The idea is to improve the user experience during Google searches. First of all, we must remember that the largest database in humanity is on Google. Over 25 years they have organized billions of data about people, places and things.
With the new AI experience it will be much easier to access that information.
This feature is currently only available for English searches by users in the United States. However, it is expected that by the end of the year it will be accessible in more countries.
It works like this: When someone asks a question, the AI generates an answer based on what it considers the best related content. Below each paragraph there is a reference to the page where the information was taken.
The interesting thing is that to put together those answers it will not exactly take the first search results. They have modified the algorithm so that it evaluates the quality of content with more contextual parameters.
Furthermore, this technology will be able to process complex questions. For example, you can ask them to tell you which is the closest place to your house where they sell car batteries, have home service, and include free replacement.
Other AI Features Overview
AI Overview will not only be able to answer questions, it can also help with planning. For example, you could ask him to prepare a 7-day menu for celiacs, to make an itinerary for your vacation, to organize parties or training routines.
You can easily change each element of the plan and export it to Docs or Gmail.
But the most amazing feature has to do with video recognition. Imagine that you bought a printer and you can’t connect it to your home Wi-Fi. Finding a way to ask Google for help is quite complicated.
With this new technology you will be able to record a video, orally describe the problem and ask Google what you should do.
You can also extract information from photos. For example, one of Google’s CEOs forgot his car’s license plate number. He asked the AI to search through all the photos of him and managed to recover the data.
Additionally, this experience will be able to summarize Gmail emails.
How the new Gemini experience affects SEO
Google AI Overview works with Gemini technology, Google’s Artificial Intelligence that stands out for being multimodal. That is, it processes text, voice commands and images.
So far we have mentioned the ideal world of I/O, but not everything is hunky dory. This new experience could affect your click-through rate.
Since the user will have a useful and coherent response, they will likely no longer click through the website to delve into the information.
That is, even though Google takes your site as a reference, it does not guarantee that you will have web traffic. But don’t get us wrong, either way, you should strive to be part of the answers generated by AI Overview.
In fact, those who will see a decrease in organic traffic will be those websites that do not offer quality content. So, more than the death of SEO, perhaps we are on the verge of the death of clickbait.
On the other hand, Google has already announced that in this new experience there will also be ads, so SEM traffic will continue to be active.
In addition, e-commerce also has growth potential through featured product listings. Of course, you will have to make an effort to make useful, clear and, above all, well-structured sales pages.
Optimization for AI Overview
It is too early to draw up the SEO roadmap for the AI Overview era.
Here are the 8 actions we are carrying out.
- Quality: Above all, we focus on quality content. We don’t care about publishing more, but rather better.
- Long-tail keywords: Google searches will become increasingly complex. People will no longer use terms like “hard-boiled egg” but, how do you ensure that a hard-boiled egg does not break during cooking? That’s why we are betting on long tail keywords and Semrush is of great help.
- Editorial calendar design: Google now seeks content from experts, so focus on addressing topics and subtopics. For approximately a year we have focused on posts about AI tools.
- Less optimization: More than keywords, we think about themes. In fact, we are de-optimizing our posts and maintaining a keyword density of 1%. We are also limiting the number of internal and external links and focusing on making them very useful.
- Backlinks: We design a strategy to capture at least one quality backlink per month. Google gives them more importance than ever.
- Technical SEO: We clean the published content, avoiding broken links, posts and obsolete reviews. In addition, we seek to increase loading speed and have impeccable technical SEO.
- Update content: Once a week we re-optimize some of our old posts. We didn’t just change keywords, we practically rewrote them.
- Voice searches: We are also optimizing some posts for voice searches.
In fact, with these actions we have already tripled our web visits in 5 months.
See Also: 10 Business Name Generator Tools with Al
Conclusion
It has always been said that quality content is what will take you to the first results on Google. However, with AI Overview this becomes more relevant than ever.
It is no longer time to publish for the sake of publishing. Try to make your website an expert in its niche, with related topics and subtopics and choose long-tail keywords.
In addition, it is very important that you develop a strategy to capture valuable backlinks. These actions must be sustained over time.
Lastly, work on your technical SEO. Verify that your website loads quickly, has a good mobile experience, and has structured data.
We hope that this information is useful to you and any information you have about AI Overview will be of great help to us. We read you in the comments.