With Google evolving its ranking system in response to the rise of AI in search results, search engine optimization (SEO) beginners, experts, and everyone in between are looking into how to increase SEO traffic. Don’t worry — you’re not alone!
If you want to rank on the search engine results pages (SERPs) you’ll need to evolve your SEO strategy to stay competitive.
Read on to learn how to improve SEO traffic in the age of AI.
Before we get into the ‘dos’, let’s address a major ‘don’t’ in content marketing:
Don’t use AI to mass-produce content to try and manipulate search engine rankings and increase traffic.
Sure, one of the best things about AI is its ability to create content at scale. However, if the content generative AI tools are producing doesn’t add value for searchers, Google may flag it as scaled content abuse, which they consider spam.
Violating Google’s spam policies is one of the worst things you can do if increasing organic traffic to your site is your goal. If one of their human reviewers detects it, you could face a manual action that could result in lower rankings or removal from Google’s SERPs entirely.
To understand whether AI spam is affecting your SEO, try Originality.ai’s website scanner. After you learn how to use AI website analysis scanners (don’t worry — it’s easy!), you’ll receive a comprehensive report of the amount of AI content on your website, enabling you to make adjustments where necessary.
While you shouldn’t use AI to pump out mountains of content, it can help you enhance the content creation process. As long as you follow best practices for using AI tools, you can increase traffic by leveraging the technology to:
For example, you can use AI to study the top-ranking articles from your competitors, identify what they share in common, and then use this information to create a detailed outline so your content achieves similar results. You can then focus on creating the kind of people-first content that both users and search engines love, increasing traffic to your website.
It’s not enough to only target the who, what, where, when, and why questions in your content anymore, as generative AI tools can easily do that. Instead, you should focus on creating in-depth content that satisfies Google’s E-E-A-T criteria to help increase organic traffic.
E-E-A-T stands for:
Added by Google in 2022, the first E has become especially important for standing out in the age of AI. By going beyond just answering questions and including first-hand experience in your content, you can provide the kind of unique perspectives that you just don’t get with generative AI, enhancing content authenticity.
To clarify, E-E-A-T isn’t an official ranking factor, but Google does tend to give more weight to content that satisfies its E-E-A-T criteria. Including first-hand experiences in your content can help you stand out in the sea of AI-generated text, improving your search engine rankings and increasing organic traffic.
With 62% of Americans using voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, optimizing content for voice search is another great way to increase organic traffic.
Using AI technology like natural language processing (NLP), these voice assistants interpret and respond to verbal search queries from users, making online searches more convenient than ever.
To optimize for voice search, try:
For example, many people use questions when performing a voice search, like “Where do I find..?” or “What’s the difference between..?”. By including these questions and their answers in the headings and body of your content, voice assistants may choose your article to respond to these types of queries.
If you really want to gain a competitive edge when it comes to increasing traffic, you should start optimizing content for one of Google’s latest innovations, AI Overviews.
In 2024, Google started rolling out their latest AI model that generates summaries and links at the top of SERPs in an effort to save users even more time in finding answers to their queries.
To nab one of these top spots, Google claims that you only need to follow their Google Search Essentials, including SEO best practices like:
However, since this is still a new feature, there’s a good chance that this will change over time. The best thing you can do is experiment with different strategies to see what gets results.
While traditional SEO best practices still have their place, you can’t rely on them alone to increase traffic in the age of AI. In addition to the basics, you need to both leverage the power of AI technology and optimize for it if you want to improve your rankings and reach more users.
So, start experimenting with some of these methods today, and remember to track key metrics to see what works and what doesn’t. Google’s AI technology and algorithms are constantly evolving, so if you want to see results, your SEO strategy needs to evolve right along with it.
