All through 2024, Google’s focus has been on AI. We see it everywhere from Gemini to Google Cloud to Gemma.
Google AI SEO Updates – what is it?
All SEO experts are screaming out “SEO is DEAD!” after a recent spate of announcements and updates. News publishers are also calling it a catastrophic event.
To quote Danielle Coffey, President & CEO, News/Media Alliance “This will be catastrophic to our traffic, as marketed by Google to further satisfy user queries, leaving even less incentive to click through so that we can monetize our content.”
But in reality, the changes Google is implementing are going to penalize low-level SEO or brute-force SEO experts out there.
Let’s look at some of the changes that Google has made in 2024:
March 2024 Core Update: This was a significant update that addressed low-quality content and introduced new policies to combat manipulative spam. Google’s Helpful Content System, which emphasizes user-centric content, became part of the core ranking system with this update. The result is that unhelpful content is expected to be reduced by 40% in search results. The focus for SEO remains on creating high-quality informative content that meets user needs.
Google AI Overviews in Search: You honestly can’t miss this. Any Google search now returns AI-powered results on top – not Google ads or websites. The AI Overviews (formerly Search Generative Experience (SGE)) is Google’s AI summarizer of search results directly on the search engine results page (SERP). Now this is worrisome for most SEO and content experts as you are losing out on being at the top of search results.
Here’s what we know so far:
- Not a direct ranking factor: Google clarifies that AI summaries are not directly used to determine a website’s ranking in search results. However, they can indirectly influence how users interact with your website by making it more likely they’ll click through if the summary effectively highlights your content’s value.
- Focus on user experience: These summaries aim to improve user experience by providing a concise overview of relevant information from top-ranked websites.
- Potential visibility boost: If Google’s AI identifies your website’s content as a good source for summarizing a particular search query, your content might be featured in the summary, potentially increasing its visibility.
What does that mean for marketers and SEO experts?
For years I’ve ghostwritten about marketing personalization at scale – well we are here now! Instead of sounding the alarm we can look at multi-step reasoning and focus on user intent to cater to complex buyer journeys. By understanding the “why” behind B2B searches (e.g., researching a solution vs. comparing vendors), content can be tailored to address specific decision-making stages.
If you’ve followed good SEO practices, understood passage ranking, and truly written good content that is for humans and not bots then the chances of Google summarizing and linking your text is higher. Google calls it “letting Google do the Googling for you.” The updates are in line with what content was meant to be about – writing for humans and not for bots. (To make this fun I decided to ask Gemini to give examples of the updates.)
Google’s update focuses on:
- Emphasis on E-A-T and Credibility: AI prioritizes accurate and trustworthy information, especially for sensitive topics. Focus on building Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) of your website and content creators.
My 2 paisa: This one is a no-brainer. Focus on delivering good content that is authored by experts, including enough data from credible sources/institutions, and case studies/whitepapers/ebooks around your topic. Build your website’s trustworthiness over time with clear company information, history, team, awards or recognitions, and customer logos (with permission).
- Multi-step Reasoning: Google can now understand complex queries with multiple steps. Content needs to be well-structured and answer a variety of user questions around a central topic.
My 2 paisa: This is basically setting up the right content pillars and structuring the content based on the user. While pillar blogs act as a central hub for a main keyword phrase, multi-step reasoning informs the structure and content itself to address various aspects of a topic comprehensively. They serve as a complementary strategy to your pillar blog with each page considering multi-step reasoning to address user questions related to that subtopic. Again, it’s something any good content marketer/strategist would implement in their plan.
- Structured Data and Semantic SEO: As AI gets stronger, clear data structures and semantic SEO (using natural language) will be even more crucial for machines to understand your content.
My 2 paisa: Semantic searches are where some SEO experts might engage in keyword stuffing to allow a page to rank higher. Understand that semantic search prioritizes understanding the meaning and intent behind a search query. If you structure the content well then you don’t have to stuff keywords. Note: This in no way interferes with your basic SEO of technical or on-page SEO.
- Focus on User Intent: AI will likely get better at understanding the intent behind searches. Focus on creating content that addresses a user’s goal, not just keywords.
My 2 paisa: The example is self-explanatory. Divide your content to know who you are writing for (research your target audience). In B2B, this gets into writing for your funnels – ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu content buckets.
So if Google is doing all the Googling for us, then what work do content marketers have?
We still have a long way to go before we become redundant. While AI is helping summarize information, it is on us to provide the right information. You don’t have to worry about keyword stuffing if you write genuine content that connects with an audience.
We also have the time to experiment with ideas that we never dared to before either due to a time crunch or it not being ‘bot-friendly’. Here are some updates from Google IO that might interest you, if you like experimenting.
Gemini 1.5 Pro version now has a larger context window, which means we can analyze large text documents and find new opportunities for content analysis and optimization. I wonder what analysis I can run on “In Search of Lost Time,” written by Marcel Proust.
Check out YouTube AI Quizzes – can be a fun way to gauge a potential client’s understanding of a technical topic or personalize future content recommendations based on their quiz results.
If you are in the U.S. then you can fiddle around with Notebook LM to improve your content research and citation creation processes. I can’t comment on it first-hand as I sit here in India and wait for the release 😐
Catch all the updates of Google I/O 2024 here :https://io.google/2024/
It’s a brave new world for marketers! Focus on high-quality content and let Google take care of the rest for you 🙂
P.S.: Remember SEO is an evolving field and we are learning as we go about AI and its impact on all things SEO.
