Should We Optimize for AI Mode? — Whiteboard Friday

Now I am going to come over here and talk about best practices that we should be doing. 

And I use the word “best practices” because AI Mode should be a result of all the other great things you’ve been doing in your SEO strategy. It shouldn’t be the entirety of your strategy. 

Publish like a journalist

The first one is to publish like a journalist, not an SEO to build affinity. And I think this is going to be something that is very hard for us to do because, for a long time, we’ve been writing content like SEOs that wanted to show up on SERPs. 

So what do I mean when I say publish like a journalist? Think of newsrooms like CNN, New Yorker, and the rest of them. Think about how you form habits of going to this website every day to read content as part of your routine. That bypasses SERPs. 

For me personally, I start my day with reading Yahoo News, and I never ever go to Google to look for any content from Yahoo. I go to Yahoo as the source. That is what we need to start doing. We need to start writing content that comes from an original idea that we had and that is written to attract affinity. Affinity being that people start to seek you out directly instead of going through SERPs to look for information.

Affinity and writing like a journalist really doesn’t have anything to do with keywords and more to do with how you respond to the questions and the trends that you are seeing out there right now. And then you share your opinion as a thought leader on what people should be doing. 

Again, best practices, not hacks. 

Invest in digital PR

The second one is to invest in digital PR to support off-page SEO and brand-building efforts. 

Yesterday, my colleague at Moz, Tom Capper was talking about how digital PR and digital PR strategies generally are a great way to improve your visibility, and specifically, we’re talking about third-party content here. But this is just one part of digital PR. 

So you publish content on third-party websites because Gaetano also said that yesterday, Gaetano DiNardi said that when LLMs, like Google and ChatGPT, are featuring recommendations or showing that in answer, they are not pulling from your website. They are pulling from third-party sites, like Tom’s Guide, CNET, and the rest of them. 

So if you want to get your answers or your content featured, or your brand featured, you need to be going through these third-party websites. And what is the best way to get on third-party websites? Digital PR. That is how you get the reviews. That is how you get the affiliates. That is how you get the influencers. That is how you get featured on news and on all of that. 

You need a digital PR strategy as part of your SEO. Digital PR is no longer just PR. It is now part of any core SEO strategy. 

Build an in-house team of SMEs

Build your own in-house team of SMEs. I think about this as build your own in-house team of Avengers. How do you nurture specialists in-house who are doing the work to start publishing more content, not just on your own websites, but also on third-party sites? 

So, as SEOs, these third-party sites will be places like HubSpot, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land. Any of the publications, or even through companies like Moz, Moz blog, I know we accept guest posts, would be good places to start publishing content. You need to get your authors out there because their affiliation with your brand is going to support your Brand Authority. 

And as your Brand Authority improves, it also rubs off on your internal SMEs. So your brand can’t stand alone anymore. There is that entity recognition between who are the people writing this content? Do the LLMs and Google’s AI see them as thought leaders? There has to be an entity recognition for the terms that you are trying to rank for, for the solutions that you offer, and that also correlates with the authors who are publishing content around these issues. 

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