The introduction of AI overviews in the SERP and the growth of AI-powered search engines such as Perplexity has led many SEOs to examine their SEO practice and test out new strategies.
While the usual SEO best practices still apply, Obility will walk you through the four specific areas we are focusing on to be compliant with generative AI and answer search best practices: creating a cohesive brand story, prioritizing technical health and crawlability, building content collections and writing for users, and optimizing and republishing existing content.
Creating a Cohesive Brand Story Between SEO and Paid Media
Too often, we think of SEO, paid search, and offline marketing as distinctive buckets. While they follow separate best practices, Obility focuses on creating a cohesive story across all digital marketing channels to create a recognizable brand and build trust with users.
Sharing a Consistent Value Proposition on Different Platforms
An important part of creating a brand story is consistency, especially in B2B where audiences will spend a significant amount of time researching potential partners across different platforms.
Obility’s SEO, paid search, and paid social managers meet bi-weekly to share keywords and findings so we’re all focused on the same goals. This practice helps us make sure that our on-site optimizations, paid ads, and all new content reflect our clients’ key differentiators and brand value.
Repurposing Assets Across Marketing Channels
Creating content is hard work and requires the involvement of many team members on Obility and the client’s side. To maximize the content ROI Obility repurposes assets across marketing channels. For example, part of a gated ebook can be used in a blog post that will then link to the full asset. Or, articles and FAQ sections created for the website can be added to a long-form landing page.
Tracking Keywords and Conversions Across Channels
Because the B2B sales cycle is so long, it’s not uncommon for a prospect to first land on a client’s website via a top-of-funnel organic search (we will talk more about how Obility builds full-funnel content later), go visit the Linkedin company page, return to the website to read a case study or two, leave again and return to book a demo after a few days (or months).
For this reason, Obility’s SEO and paid teams use the same document to track conversions across channels. It’s very helpful to be able to see which assets perform the best overall and which ones are favored by paid or organic users. This also allows us to share top-performing keywords across teams so we can decide to either saturate the SERP or only target them organically.
Monitoring Clients and Competitors’ Presence in the SERP
Many of us turn to Reddit, G2, or other review websites to evaluate a product we are considering buying. For Obility this is another opportunity to create a cohesive brand story across channels.
Below is an example from an Obility client: Obility noticed a Reddit thread directly asking if a client’s solution was worth it. The responses were not all flattering but it gave us an opportunity to create a new FAQ page on the client’s website to answer that question directly and give users more information about the solution.
Creating new content isn’t always necessary either. Another client in a similar situation identified existing pages that should rank ahead of the Reddit result. Obility did a review of those pages and found that they were buried in the sitemap with hardly any internal links pointing to the page. By adding links to those pages within the footer, Obility helped boost those pages’ rankings and push down the Reddit thread down to position 9, with the client ranking in the first 8 positions above.
Prioritizing Technical Health and Crawlability
Monitoring Page Speed, Technical Errors, and Core Web Vitals
As Obility’s SEO Supervisor Jamie Belcher mentioned in her article on Generative AI in B2B SEO: “Cleaning up broken links, 404 errors, and other key technical elements will improve Google’s ability to crawl and understand the content on your site. It can also improve the user experience. Features like tables of contents, anchor links, lists and tables can also increase the chances of your written content appearing in AI overviews and SERP features”.
Page speed and Core Web Vitals continue to be significant user experience factors and we still see many websites that are not CWV-compliant or takes several seconds to loads on mobile.
Using Schema Markup to Facilitate AI Crawling
Schema markup is a tool SEOs have always used to facilitate crawling, but it has become even more important with the arrival of generative AI. Schema markup is a great tool to structure the content in an organized way that makes sense to AI and regular crawlers.
Because Obility’s clients are all B2B, we are limited in what type of schema markup can be used, but we often recommend the following schema types:
- FAQpage
- Blog
- Article
- Product / Review
- Video
- Courses
- Organization
The example below is from adding product review schema from G2 to a client’s product pages, which led to impressions doubling in under 2 months!
Making the Most Out of the Top Nav
You have probably noticed that more and more websites now have fully stocked top nav dropdowns that are broken down by industry, personas, solutions, sometimes pain points, goals, or use cases.
Obility is a strong advocate for these detailed navigation menus. Not only are they helpful for users who don’t have time to comb through the website to find the information they need, but they also make it easier for AI crawlers to follow the links used in the top nav and footer.
Building Content Collections and Writing for Users
Earlier in this article, I briefly mentioned creating full-funnel content for users. When it comes to creating content, Obility favors the content collections approach. Content collections are educational hubs designed to provide users with relevant information at every stage of the funnel.
Several big names in the B2B industry such as Venta, CloudFlare, and Hubspot are using the content collections approach to organize information in an easy-to-digest and easy-to-navigate way, as content collections are supporting great user experience and SEO growth.
Targeting Competitive Keywords With a Bottom-to-Top Approach
Content collections perform best when linked in a dedicated section from the top nav or site footer, making it easy for users and AI crawlers to find. As Obility’s founder Mike Nierengarten points out, “a comprehensive SEO strategy cannot be achieved with just a blog” so content collections include several types of content pages (definition pages, articles, whitepapers, ebooks, how to guides, benefits pages) designed to target one top-of-the-funnel, competitive keyword (the pillar page keyword) and several variations of longer-tail keywords (the subtopics).
Each content collection includes:
- A content collection hub targeting the core keyword
- Subtopic pages targeting supporting long-tail keywords
- Related articles widgets
- Internal links from each supporting piece back to the hub page.
Ultimately, the goal of the collection approach is to build thought leadership around the topic we are targeting and to rank in the top 3 positions for short-tail, competitive keywords for which AI overviews are the most common (for now).
Keeping the Content Informative and To The Point
The influx of content created by AI has led to some companies publishing long, drawn out pieces of content that lack a definitive point of view or novel information.
As one of our clients put it, our goal is to “squeeze the water out” and create content that is unique, valuable and informative. In practice, that means:
- Putting valuable information towards the top and using tables of contents for easy navigation
- Incorporating stats, quotes, and real-life examples
- Referencing relevant case studies and articles published by our client
- Pruning existing content and cutting out sections (or pages) that don’t provide value
- On glossary/definition pages, answering the question within the first paragraph
Optimizing Existing Content and Republishing
This may be the simplest tip of them all, but not all clients use it. When you implement the recommendations your SEO team has provided, republish the page with today’s date and resubmit the URL to be crawled by Search Console.
This will signal to Google and AI crawlers that new content is available and will help it get indexed faster. The example below shows how the SEO team managed to get a client’s page in the featured snippet and in the AI overview within 90 days of optimizing the page!
AI has evolved very quickly in recent months, and there’s no doubt it will continue to evolve. SEO has always been a rapidly evolving field and Obility and SEOs everywhere continue to learn, test, and strategize to understand how to adapt to the new crawlers’ requirements and desires of users. Reach out today to learn what we can do for you.
