Why your website traffic is dropping? And what you can do about it in the age of AI overviews?
Let’s be honest, watching your website traffic dip feels like someone turned off the lights just as you were getting noticed. If you’ve noticed a dip in your website traffic lately, you’re not alone and you’re definitely not doing anything wrong. The rules of the game are changing, and it’s time to understand them.
The way people search is changing. With Google’s new AI Overviews and the rise of chatbots like ChatGPT, users are getting answers before they ever click a link. That means your beautifully crafted blog post or service page might not be as popular as you expected unless it’s optimised for this new AI-powered landscape.
In our last blog post, we talked about the on-page optimisations that could help you to be listed in these AI overviews. Today, we wanted to take a step back and summarise on page actions and technical actions you can take.
What are Google AI Overviews? When you use Google you now receive an AI summary answering your query, this is removing the need for people to click through to websites and find out more information. These AI-powered summaries appear at the top of search results.
Changing how you write for Google AI Overview
The key difference between traditional search engine optimisation (SEO) and AI overview optimisation (AIO) is that AI isn’t just looking for keywords, it’s looking for a logical structure, clarity and context. Therefore, you need to have these in mind when you’re creating content:
Write for answers, not just keywords: AI loves content that is modular and direct that it can pick up and resurface in answer to people’s questions. Therefore think about concise summaries, FAQs and how-to content. Don’t bury your insight in long-paragraphs use bullet points and short snappy paragraphs.
We used to be all about keyword density, but now we want people to write more naturally. Rather than repeating your keyword use related phrases. AI can understand related phrases and not just exact matches.
Technical on-page signals
This is a techy one but use schemas to help AI to understand what your content means and not just what it says. It is worth taking the time to understand what your platform currently does. For example, we use Squarespace as our website CMS and they automatically implement the schema mark-up for us.
Because logical structure is important, this means traditional SEO tactics such as header tags are still important. Think about how you are structuring your piece and how it flows before you start writing.
Frequently asked questions
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AIO is about influencing google AI-powered summaries that appear at the top of search results.
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There is some cross over between traditional SEO tactic and AIO tactics, but the key difference is that with SEO you are trying to influence the organic search engine ranking position (SERP) whereas AIO is trying to get your brand included in relevant AI summaries.
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Traditional SEO is centred in keywords and going after high-volume relevant keywords. These could include long tail keywords, which could be phrases or questions which shows the step towards more authentic human sounding copy. AIO is less strict to the keyword, it understands natural language and semantic variations.
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Yes, AI summaries or chatbots like ChatGPT are not fully replacing traditional search. Therefore, this isn’t about diverting all of your attention to optimising for AI, but rather ensuring you are doing activity that optimising for traditional search engine listings and AI.
