SEO is changing and Google AI is here – is your business adapting online?

If you aren’t currently investing in SEO, it’s likely that it’s been a part of your marketing strategy at some stage in the past. Whether you’re B2B or ecommerce, an SME or enterprise, regardless, the headline for SEO in 2024 is – it’s changed. 

For most businesses, SEO is synonymous with two things – ‘keywords’ and ‘links’. And, to an extent, these elements still apply, but it’s a bit more technical than that. Today, Google wants to: 

• Showcase content from experts who are an authority in their niche.

• Share broader perspectives and opinions from ‘real people’  

• Tie in multiple sources to formulate a reputable, condensed answer in the form of an AI overview

• Understand topics easily from your website 

We’ve all spotted that AI is increasingly integrating with search engines online, and most recently in the UK, this includes Google with its AI overviews. 

This major change to the search engine is but one of the new SEO trends businesses all need to be paying attention to. This is because what used to work before, probably won’t work nearly as well today. 

Is your website ready for this new future of search? 

SEO – What’s new today E-E-A-T is everything

E-E-A-T or experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, is something Google is increasingly passionate about. The content on your website should be written by someone who has experienced the topic at hand (e.g. if you’re reviewing a product) and has the expertise and authority to be writing about the subject matter – e.g. accreditations, years of experience etc. This in turn builds Google’s trust of your website.

E-E-A-T is especially important for websites that focus on financial topics or health. Naturally, with content around this, Google wants to rank websites that are reputable and that it trusts.

Makes sense right? Of course – but is your business making this easy for Google to see? 

Businesses should focus on: 

• Incorporating authors on articles with bios and relevant certifications and experience. This allows users and Google alike to associate content with a person. Even better – link up their LinkedIn in their bio to reinforce their qualifications and experience. The more content they author online, the more their name will be synonymous with the subject matter.  

• Updating their about page – often neglected after a site is launched, the about page on your website is the logical place to showcase the business’s expertise and authority. Make sure you include information on the business’s history, updated accreditations, certifications, awards and testimonials. 

• Upload fresh case studies and testimonials – and showcase these across your website. 

• Encouraging reviews – this isn’t anything new, but it’s something that often gets forgotten about. 

Incorporate more real-life experiences and opinion-based content on your website

Not only for E-E-A-T – but with AI becoming increasingly prevalent, it’s also more important than ever that businesses include unique personal experiences in content and give individual, expert opinion – this is something that AI can’t do. 

We can see that these real-life experiences and opinions are something that Google increasingly values too. Google has released a specific tab in search for ‘Forums’ results (originally labelled Perspectives) so that users can experience a range of answers and opinions on a subject. Not to mention that it’s been well-reported that Reddit is benefitting from increased visibility in the organic search results this year. 

So – get your experts talking onsite and offsite in relevant publications, showcase case studies and incorporate opinions into industry stories and news.  

Entity SEO & Salience

Don’t be put off by the jargon – it’s simpler than you realise! Not to be confused with keywords, an entity is a word or a phrase that reflects a thing that Google can identify and categorise, including organisations, events, locations, people etc. Think of an entity as a ‘thing’ that you could find on Wikipedia.  

When it comes to entity SEO, you want to ensure you have a group of relevant salient (prominent/important) entities around a topic. For instance – if you had a blog about the Best Italian Restaurants in London – your salient entities could be: 

London, Restaurant, Italian food, Pizza, Pasta. 

However, when looking at your competitors’ articles, you can see their top salient entities include ‘Italy’, but not in your content. 

Entity SEO isn’t about the number of times specific words are written necessarily, it’s more about how prominent a word is as a ‘subject’ of a sentence. 

Entity salience can be measured using a number of tools, the most common of which is Google Cloud. 

Stay ahead of the curve

There you have it – yes, unique content, strategic keyword targeting and offsite SEO are still a fundamental part of SEO, but businesses need to consider how they can better leverage their expertise in content, real-life experience,  and bring that ‘human’ element to content in an ever-growing world of AI, and it isn’t going anywhere soon.