If you’re reading this blog, you probably know all about optimising your site for Google. Once in a blue moon you may also come across an article about how to optimise for Bing, and you’ve probably spotted a few articles about how to optimise for TikTok as well.
Now it’s important to consider getting seen by AI tools as well. As much as they’ve taken traffic away from the SERPs, they are also now delivering traffic to our sites too. We see increasing amounts of visitors coming from these tools, and even a few conversions too (which I found more exciting than I probably should have!).
I won’t pretend that optimising for ChatGPT is completely different to optimising for search engines, because I know how annoying that is. There is of course a great deal of overlap, and the general principles of SEO will put you in good stead for appearing in AI search tools. However, it’s probably worth concentrating your efforts in specific areas, plus there are one or two particular tips to bear in mind.
And because I’m not a sensationalist click-baiter, I’ve even included the most important one first! Here we go:
Make sure your site isn’t blocking these tools!
When the likes of ChatGPT first appeared, the SEO community were our usual suspicious and cynical selves, critical of the fact that these tools were using publicly available data (“our” publicly available content no less!) to train their large language models (LLMs).
To stop them scraping this content, many people began disallowing these bots from their robots.txt.
The problem is, AI search tools and AI overviews are taking away a share of search traffic anyway, and by blocking them you’re essentially punishing yourself twice. If you want to benefit from the traffic (and potential conversions) these sites can deliver, make sure your site is not blocking LLM crawlers before you go any further! Do not bite the hand that feeds you (even if that food appears to be the reheated leftovers you already cooked yourself in the first place).
To check, just go to your Search Console account and use the URL Inspection tool to check the accessibility of any given URL.
Subheadings and questions are key
Instances that you’d want your site to appear in a ChatGPT search are when the user is asking a question, whether that’s just asking for information, or looking for companies in your specific sector.
The easiest way for these LLM tools to see that your content is relevant for these queries is to have content that asks and then answers these questions. Clearly formatting these as FAQs and sub headings on your key service pages kills two birds with one stone, optimising for Google and ChatGPT in one go.
Giving clear, concise answers is important. Shorter sentences with succinct answers are likely to be favoured over waffling paragraphs that take too long to get to the point.
Target niche, long tail keywords
I don’t have the stats to back this up, but it’s my feeling that people aren’t typing the broad terms into ChatGPT that they might into Google. I doubt, for example, that anyone is searching ‘SEO agency’ in ChatGPT, and yet it gets 8,100 searches per month on Google.
I find that ChatGPT is most helpful for really niche questions, that Google doesn’t always quite nail with its search results. Providing content for these really specific, and sometimes complicated questions, can give you the best chance here.
The smaller your brand is, the more important these long tail phrases are.
But don’t ask it to optimise it for you!
It pains me to say that ChatGPT is actually better than I expected at drafting content, however when I tested out its optimisation recommendations I wasn’t as impressed.
I asked it to review our SEO page and optimise for the aforementioned phrase ‘SEO agency’, and it all felt a little too 2010 for my liking.
As well as suggesting five extra subheadings all containing ‘SEO agency’, increasing the density within the copy, and cramming it into our page title and meta description more times, it also focused, inexplicably, on London.
Our address, as stated on our contact page, is in Colchester, and we don’t even mention London on our site. And if ChatGPT really believes we’re based in London, why is it using US spelling?!
There are many other SEO focuses that would be beneficial for boosting your visibility in ChatGPT, including building links and authority, however the above points are probably where I’d start for the biggest impact.
And don’t forget to track where your traffic is coming from to see if your efforts are working!
