🔥 The SEOs Diners Club - Issue #160 - Weekly SEO Tips & News

Play at the Top in AI Search Engines

AI is profoundly reshaping how search engines operate and redefining digital marketing strategies. Traditional keyword-focused search engines give way to AI-powered platforms that understand questions in natural language and provide contextually relevant answers. The rise of platforms like Search GPT presents both fresh opportunities and challenges for content creators and digital marketing professionals.

Securing top positions not just in Google but in these next-generation search engines has become a critical priority for reaching target audiences and enhancing brand awareness. This guide presents proven methods for succeeding in AI search engines, informed by my extensive experience.

Content Diversification: Show Up on All Platforms, Not Just Google

The old SEO approach typically aimed to create one perfect blog post and rank high on Google. But in the age of AI-powered search engines, this approach falls short. AI is becoming increasingly adept at determining the most suitable content format for a user's search intent. Therefore, it's vital to maintain a presence across different platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, Bing, and even Microsoft Co-pilot, optimizing your content specifically for each platform.

• Videos for Visual Learners: Creating video content on platforms like YouTube that covers the same topics as your blog posts allows you to reach users who prefer visual learning.

• Blog Posts for Those Seeking In-depth Knowledge: Blog posts are ideal for presenting topics in greater detail and offering comprehensive information.

• Short Updates for Quick Information Seekers: Sharing brief, concise updates on platforms like LinkedIn that highlight key points from your blog posts or videos can capture the attention of busy users.

Presenting your content in different formats increases the likelihood of reaching users regardless of their preferred format. This multi-faceted content strategy helps you gain broader visibility in AI search engines.

Question-Focused Keyword Research: Discover Users' Real Questions

Instead of the short, general keywords often used in traditional SEO, succeeding in AI search engines requires focusing on long-tail questions in natural language ("question keywords") that users ask. Users now type direct questions into search bars like "pipe repair London price."

• Understanding User Intent: Question-focused keywords allow for a much deeper understanding of user search intent. Someone searching for "broken pipe" might be looking for general information, while someone asking "Why is my pipe leaking?" wants to learn the cause of the problem and likely find a solution.

• Tools for Finding Long-tail Questions:

  • Google's "People Also Ask" (PAA) section: This section, which appears when searching for a specific keyword, provides valuable insight by showing other questions users ask about related topics.

  • AI-Powered Search Engines (e.g., Perplexity): AI-based search engines like Perplexity can analyze and present a wide variety of questions people ask about a specific topic. These tools go beyond traditional keyword research tools, helping you uncover users' genuine curiosity and information needs.

AI-Assisted Content Creation: Target-Oriented Content with Persona Prompt Technique

AI can be a powerful assistant in the content creation process. However, adopting a strategic approach is important to best leverage AI. The "persona prompt" technique aims to help AI tools like ChatGPT produce content more suitable for your target audience and topic by assigning them a specific role (persona).

Persona Prompt Example:

Let's say you want to prepare a blog post about digital marketing strategies for small businesses in London. You could give ChatGPT a persona prompt like this:

"You are 'Digital Marketing Expert Jane', an expert with over 10 years of experience in SEO, social media management, and content marketing, especially for SMEs in London. The blog post you're writing should provide practical solutions to the digital marketing problems faced by Mr. Smith, the owner of a boutique in London. The content should be friendly, informative, and include advice that Mr. Smith can easily implement."

With this prompt, AI can produce more personalized and effective content by understanding the perspective and needs of a business owner in London, rather than just offering general information.

Answer the Key Question Quickly: Clarity for Users and AI

AI tries to understand the structure and clarity of content. Therefore, it's crucial to answer the main question clearly, concisely, and directly right below your H1 heading in every piece of content you create. The journalistic principle of "putting the most important information first" applies here.

For example, if your blog post title is "The 5 Best Breakfast Places in London," you can directly list these five places in the first paragraph and then detail each one. This approach helps AI quickly understand what your content is about and allows users to find the answers they're looking for without wasting time. Directly addressing the topic instead of "beating around the bush" enhances both user experience and the likelihood of your content being correctly evaluated by AI.

The Power of Traditional SEO: Don't Forget the Fundamentals

While AI-powered search engines open a new era, it's important to remember that traditional SEO practices still remain vitally important. Core SEO elements like backlinks, meta descriptions, internal and external links inform AI algorithms about your content's reliability, authority, and relevance.

AI, while being a new and advanced tool, should be built on a solid SEO foundation. Just like a house's foundation, sound SEO principles ensure your content remains standing in the AI world. Therefore, it's necessary to continue paying attention to factors like keyword optimization (even if question-focused), site speed, mobile compatibility, and user experience.

The Importance of Visual Elements: Enhance Interaction and Comprehensibility

Although AI primarily processes text-focused content, visual elements (images, illustrations, infographics) make your content more engaging and shareable for human readers. Tools like Napkin AI can help you create unique and stylish visuals for your blog posts and other content.

Visuals indirectly positively affect your SEO performance by increasing the time users spend interacting with your content. Remember that search engines also consider user interaction as a ranking factor.

Additionally, you can increase the comprehensibility of your content by visualizing complex information and appeal to users with different learning styles. For example, in a blog post describing popular tourist spots in London, including high-quality photos of each location and a visual showing their positions on a map would significantly improve the user experience. Don't forget to optimize your visuals (file size, alt texts, etc.).

Search Engine Registration and Notification: Make Discovery Easier

There are important steps you need to take to ensure that your high-quality and optimized content is discovered by AI and other search engines. Registering your blog posts and other web pages with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools ensures these search engines are aware of your content.

Especially, submitting content to Bing is necessary to achieve good rankings in Microsoft-based AI search systems like Search GPT. When you publish new content, it's important to send a request to search engines through these tools to crawl and index your content. This helps your content appear faster in search results.

Video and Blog Integration: Create a Content Ecosystem

One of the most effective ways to stand out in AI-powered search engines is to create YouTube videos that answer the same questions as your blog posts and embed these videos within your relevant blog posts. This strategy allows you to create a rich ecosystem around your content.

Users can access the information they're looking for either by reading text or watching videos. Additionally, having your video content in your blog post can increase the time spent on your page, which can positively affect your SEO performance.

For example, if you've prepared a blog post titled "Where to find the best curry in London," you could shoot a YouTube video with the same title, where you taste curries at different establishments and provide viewers with a visual experience. By embedding this video in your blog post, you provide users with a comprehensive answer with both text and video content.

This integration helps AI better understand the depth of your content and the value it provides to users.

High-Quality Content: Always a Priority

At the core of all these AI-focused strategies lies the necessity to create high-quality content. While AI is a powerful tool, the "garbage in, garbage out" principle applies here as well. The more good and relevant information you provide to AI, the more valuable the output will be.

Focus on creating content that is based on solid research, written in clear and understandable language, and provides comprehensive answers to your target audience's questions. AI can strengthen these fundamental elements and help you reach broader audiences, but it cannot replace quality content.

When speaking specifically about the UK and London, producing content that is relevant to your target audience's interests, cultural sensitivities, and language will increase engagement and success.

User Interaction and Satisfaction: New Measures of Success

In the AI-powered search world, it's necessary to go beyond traditional metrics (keyword rankings, website traffic) to measure success. Now, it's more important to focus on metrics that reflect user interaction and satisfaction.

Factors like how much time users spend on your content, whether they find the answers they're looking for, whether they share your content, and whether they come back again provide important clues about how your content is evaluated by AI and other search engines.

The goal is to create a real and valuable connection with your target audience, rather than manipulating systems. Creating informative and engaging content that provides effective solutions to users' questions is the foundation for long-term success.

Multimodal Content Strategies: Enrich with Different Formats

In the future, it's expected that multimodal content that combines text, video, audio (podcasts), visuals, infographics, and interactive elements will become even more important, beyond merely presenting content in text or video format.

AI can help you create different content formats and translate them into different languages. This approach allows you to appeal to users' different learning preferences and make your content richer and more engaging.

For example, if you're preparing a guide to historic artifacts in London, you can enrich the user experience by adding high-resolution photos, 360-degree virtual tours, and an audio recording featuring music from that period, alongside text descriptions.

UK and London-Focused Examples

To concretize the strategies mentioned in this guide with a UK and London focus:

• Question-Focused Keywords: Target questions users directly ask, such as "romantic places to visit in London on weekends," "2025 Edinburgh Festival events," "where to eat the best fish and chips in Brighton," "tips for brewing the perfect English tea."

• Persona Prompt: For an agency offering SEO services to local restaurants in London: "You are 'Gourmet SEO Expert Jack', who has been providing SEO consultancy to restaurants in London for 5 years, knowledgeable about local flavours and focused on customer satisfaction. You need to prepare an SEO strategy proposal for a new client, the 'Historic Flavors Manor' restaurant in Soho. Your suggestions should attract the restaurant's target audience of both local and foreign tourists and include budget-friendly solutions."

• Multimodal Content: For a blog post promoting Stonehenge tours; alongside text descriptions, you could offer high-resolution photos of the stones, short videos taken during the tour, a drone video showing a bird's-eye view of the area, and perhaps even a virtual reality (VR) experience.

March 2025 Google Core Algorithm Update Has Started

Google has officially launched the March 2025 Core update. The update will take two weeks to complete, and many sites may see changes in rankings during this process. Google did not provide information about specific changes. However, based on previous updates, it's possible to say there could be significant changes regarding content quality and relevance.

What You Can Do:

• Track your analytics: Closely monitor changes in organic traffic and rankings.

• Identify affected pages: Analyze content that experiences a drop in rankings.

• Improve content quality: It's known that Google makes content-focused updates. Prioritize E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) factors.

• Check your link profile: SPAM content or low-quality backlinks can affect your rankings.

• Perform competitor analysis: Determine your deficiencies by analyzing why your competitors are rising in rankings.

This update represents a potentially broad-scope change among Core updates. Google's goal is to improve user experience and highlight more relevant content. If you experience a drop in your rankings, it could indicate that your content is not meeting search intent well enough. At the same time, you could also experience sudden increases in your ranking, in which case you have an opportunity to understand which content strategy is working.

You may see fluctuations in your organic traffic in the coming days. However, carefully analyze your data before panicking and focus on optimizing your content strategy.

New Robots.txt Guide from Google

Google has published an updated guide on the Robots.txt file. This guide contains critical information for SEO professionals and publishers, ranging from the basic principles of Robots.txt usage to advanced applications. So, what do these innovations mean for the SEO world? Let's explore together.

Highlights:

• Google emphasized the 30-year history of the Robots.txt file, stating it's a stable and reliable method for web administrators.

• The new documentation addresses Robots.txt usage with both basic and advanced topics.

• Advanced applications like targeting specific bots to create different rules and blocking specific URL patterns were detailed.

• It was explained that the 404 error message received in Google Search Console when Robots.txt is missing is unimportant and disappears within 30 days.

• It was emphasized that only a text editor is needed to edit the Robots.txt file.

Why It's Important for SEO Professionals:

In the SEO world, Robots.txt is one of the most critical tools for controlling how search engine bots crawl your site. Google's new guide aims to prevent common mistakes in Robots.txt usage and provide site owners with more conscious optimization opportunities. Here are some points SEO professionals should pay attention to with this update:

• Managing Bots in a Customized Way: You can now manage not only Googlebot but different crawler bots with customized rules through Robots.txt.

• Don't Worry About Error Messages: It was explained that 404 error messages seen in Google Search Console don't harm SEO. If you don't have a Robots.txt file, don't worry about this situation or create an empty file to eliminate the error.

• Pay Attention to Pages That Should Be Blocked: Make sure you correctly block pages you don't want to be crawled, especially payment pages, shopping carts, and special membership areas.

• More Flexible and Powerful Rules: Google has now provided clearer explanations of advanced configurations made with Robots.txt. This allows you to more effectively block specific URL patterns (such as PDFs or site search results).

AI Tools of the Week: Tools, Services, and Tips

• Google has made its AI-powered research tool Gemini Deep Research available for free use. This feature conducts in-depth research on the web to create comprehensive and readable reports on complex topics. Free users are limited to five reports every 30 days.

• ChatGPT can now be used directly on the macOS platform with code editing capabilities. With this innovation, developers will be able to detect code errors, complete missing code, and perform complex data analyses much faster by seamlessly integrating ChatGPT into their development processes. This integration provides a more efficient and effective working experience by increasing software developers' productivity.

• Semrush has updated its Keyword Strategy Builder with useful filters. Thanks to this AI-powered update, it allows you to see queries that are easiest to start with, more commercially focused, or have more traffic potential based on a combination of various metrics. It also provides a new summary for each page of clusters, including top SERP features, main competitors, and more. If you use Semrush, I recommend checking it out!

I hope you've enjoyed this week's SEOs Diners Club.

See you in the new edition of SEOs Diners Club next week, full of new information, tactics, and strategies...

Wishing you a good week, take care!

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