How do you get traffic to your website? You’ve spent all this time and effort on it but where are the visitors? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been around for a long time now. With SEO, you are trying to increase the visibility of your site in search results. The Holy Grail, of course, is to be the first result on the first page. But things are changing.
The quality of search results has been steadily declining as ads have pushed the regular results down the page. Now search engines are putting Artificial Intelligence (AI) results at the top which further pushes the results down the page. And people are skipping the browser completely and asking their phones and smart speakers for verbal responses to their questions. Is this game changing for your website? How do you get visitors now?
The short answer? Yes, things have changed and we should refine how we work to get visitors to our websites.
The longer answer? Still yes, but we can continue to use the techniques we have developed in the past. Adapting to newer search formats — Answer Engine Optimization (AI results) and Generative Engine Optimization (conversational agents) — is easier than it sounds.
Let’s say you’re a small organization. Your website is important but you can’t spend all your time trying to get more visitors. What’s the most efficient thing you can do?
We need to back up a step to understand our options. SEO (and its newer variants) consists of two kinds of activities:
- On-site – these are changes made to your site (such as text edits, adding content, etc). Google (and other search engines) pick up these changes and incorporate them into their ranking for your site.
- Off-site – these are changes made elsewhere (e.g. creating links to your site, social media posts, etc) again with the hope that Google sees all of these high quality links to your site and improves your ranking. Of course, this off-site content itself is indexed and can also be found in searches.
I prefer on-site changes because when we refine the copy and add content, we’re getting a permanent benefit and improvement to the site. I dislike off-site changes because they require a lot of effort (and cost to the client) for less benefit. This is because these are on platforms that we don’t control. This off-site content may not be seen by your community. The social media platform can even remove your content. At that point, the value of that content is diminished or lost. Social media, by its nature, is also more ephemeral so needs constant attention. There is an important role in SEO for off-site changes but for the smaller organization, I primarily recommend on-site improvements.
Experts now encourage some different on-site techniques to appear in the new kinds of search results. For example, adding content in a question and answer format (like Frequently Asked Questions [FAQs]) provides a format preferred by the newer AI powered search results. This can help your website appear in those kinds of results. Adding credentials and bios can also help give authority to content.
We should note that the above also help with traditional SEO and also help in general. Adding FAQs and credentials are not new techniques; they’re just a little more prominent now.
So what’s the playbook here?
I recommend expanding your content in this order:
- Add or improve content on your website because this can give a lasting benefit. For most of my clients, add news posts and case studies.
- Engage on social media to get traffic to your website. Which platform you use depends on your community.
- Communicate via regular email newsletters to stay top of mind and to get traffic to your website.
Ideally you have someone in-house who is passionate and knowledgeable about your organization. They love connecting with your community and they can dedicate a part of every week to nurturing that connection. That’s the best case. In reality, we’re always being asked to do more with less time. If you can’t dedicate enough time, consider hiring a professional to help with creating that content and cultivating your community. Your website is great, but we need people to see it.
Your website not getting the attention it deserves? Let’s fix that!
Posted under Communication
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