If you’ve been following the massive changes happening at the intersection of AI and SEO, you’re probably asking yourself: What should we do next? The good news is, while the landscape is evolving, there are clear steps you can take to ensure your SEO strategy thrives in this new era, especially with the rise of AI-powered search experiences like Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE).
Important Metrics to Track to Help with SEO and SGE
- Organic Traffic – Monitor how many sessions and visitors are coming to your site via organic traffic.
- Keyword Performance – Ensure you have a short and long-tail keyword strategy to watch performance. This should include tracking rankings, clicks, impressions and CTR for keyword performance.
- Direct/Referral Traffic – This will be important to get a pulse on overall performance. With zero-click studies showing organizations may see a decrease in overall organic performance, but direct/referral traffic should remain the same or increase based on efforts to strength brand awareness by populating in AI results.
Checklists
Top 5 things you should do if you have no SEO SMEs on staff
- Invest in a subscription to SEO software like SEMRush or Moz and audit your site for on-page errors.
- Utilize canonical tags to avoid duplicate content issues with canonical URLs.
- Prioritize the on-page errors such as the meta titles, descriptions, H-tags, and image alt texts are optimized.
- Follow mobile-first best practices during site implementation and build.
- Focus on quality content and ensure you keep content up-to-date, relevant and valuable to improve engagement.
Top 10 things you should do if you have a one-person SEO program
In addition to the previous five activities, make sure to do the following:
- Utilize SEO software to perform keyword research to identify the most high-value keywords that your audience is searching for; update this list quarterly and make sure your writers and developers are working off the same list.
- Ensure you are strategically building internal links to improve site architecture
- Evaluate accessibility scores and fix any potential errors that may be occurring
- Monitor and track core web vital and page load performance to improve user experience and SEO rankings.
- Build high-quality backlinks to boost domain authority and contribute to your E-E-A-T
Top 20 things you should do if you have an SEO team
With a dedicated SEO team, you can expand your strategy to include the following items:
- Build out correct localization of content to improve local search rankings
- Utilize schema mark-up to help populate in Ai results, featured snippets and
- Leverage multimedia content to incorporate images, videos and interactive content to improve engagement and rankings
- Monitor and analyze metrics such as organic traffic, keyword position, domain authority, conversion rates
- Research and analyze competitors SEO strategists and find opportunities where you can outperform them
- Optimize for image search which includes descriptive files names, alt text and captions to capture traffic from image search engines.
- Understand audience personas to guide content creation to meet their needs and intent.
- Leverage A/B testing and personalization to deliver relevant, high-quality content to users based on intent and needs.
- Stay informed on major search engine algorithm updates and adjust strategist to remain complaint with best practices.
- Integrate SEO with other marketing channels such as social media, paid advertising, email marketing to drive organic and referral traffic.
Websites to bookmark to keep up to date on SEO news
This blog was co-authored by Tiffany Laster, Lead Digital Strategist at Perficient.
