Summary
- SEO fundamentals still matter: Clear content structure, authoritative signals and ensuring technical basics are in like schema and metadata remain essential for visibility in both traditional search and AI-driven results.
- Content quality and clarity matter most: Directly answer user questions, use concise headers, lists, and easy to read paragraphs so LLMs and AI overviews can easily pull out relevant content information.
- Quick wins drive impact even when they are small optimisations: Refresh older content, strengthen internal linking and leverage data insights to ensure content stays fresh, relevant and optimised for AI visibility.
With LLMs and AI overviews changing the way users search online, brands are exploring low hanging fruits and quick wins to ensure their content is discoverable on platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and other AI tools.
The buzz around making content work harder reflects the reality of today’s digital landscape. Keeping up with changes can be challenging for brands, but it’s essential for brands to adapt and ensure they are discoverable wherever the users are – here are some quick wins and low hanging fruits that you can ensure you’re implementing to your content!
Optimisation Strategies
Optimise for Featured Snippets: Aim to be the best answer that can be easily extracted as snippets by AI-powered search features. This means understanding your audience’s needs and pain points and craft intentional content that answers to their concerns.
Leverage your existing data and analyse patterns. Through Google Search Console and SEMRush, you’ll be able to pull out keywords your audiences use to reach your site. Use this customer data to tailor content according to their preferences, which makes it easier for AI tools to crawl and improve your visibility.
The foundation of SEO remains crucial, helping to surface content not just for traditional search engines but also for AI overviews and large language models. By focusing on AI-readiness and optimising your organisation’s content, you can harness the full potential of both SEO and AI technologies.
Content Structure & Clarity
- Identify users’ pain points and basic questions – Instead of obsessing on keyword focus and what keywords to implement – put yourself in the users’ situation and try to identify their pain points – think of the basic questions they would ask in relation to your brand – meaning target questions as this will guide your content along the way and it will guide your content to have more intent around it . Answer questions directly in the first 1–2 sentences (LLMs love clear Q&A style).
- Use concise and relevant headers – Use relevant headers that map to common queries as this will make it easier for both users and AI bots to understand what your content is about. Similarly adding lists or organising your content in this manner makes it easier for AI models to extract or pull out structured information from your content
Authority Signals
- Similar to SEO best practices, add stats, data points and reputable references (cite industry sources). LLMs favour content that looks evidence based.
- Adding expert quotes or brand POV helps distinguish your content as authoritative vs. generic – it makes it sound more in-depth.
SEO Technical Basics
- Surprise, meta titles and headings still matter – Ensure descriptive meta titles and headings include relevant keywords that users might be using when doing their queries – these small optimisations still matter when it comes to discoverability.
- Adding schema markup (i.e. Article, FAQ, HowTo) where relevant to help AI parse context within your landing page – whether you are talking about a specific recipe, an article comparing 2 running shoes, an article teaching step by step guide on how to introduce 2 cats in a new home, make sure you implement schema mark ups in the back end.
Content Style
- Keeping the language clear, sounding natural and factual as LLMs tend to lift content that reads factual or guide-like.
- Write in active, brief and scannable paragraphs to improve “extractability.”
Other Quick Wins for existing content
- Refreshing older content with updated data as AI favours freshness of a content. An exercise would be to look through your past articles and refresh outdated trends, data or stats. That will help with resurfacing them.
- Internal linking still matters. Interlink related articles within your pages so crawlers and AI models see context clusters.
Start small with these quick wins and your content will be ready for both search engines and AI models.
