What Is A Search Engine?
SATS (Simple Answers That Stick)
Search engines are like free tour guides, they TRY to help people quickly find info online. For business owners, search engines act like highways with big signs & billboards.
1.5 MILES – EXIT 3
CLICK TO EXIT
How Do Search Engines Work?
Imagine you ask a tour guide where to find the best pizza. They would think about it an give you a few options. That’s what search engines do when you type in a search box – they think about all the websites they know, prioritize the options, and gives you a list of choices.
Why Does SEO Focus on Google So Much?
Well, Google is like the most popular tour guide in the city. It has about 92% of the global search engine market, so most people turn to Google when they need information. Because of this, SEO usually revolves around what works best for Google.
Google’s aim is to provide the best search experience to its users, or searchers. It’s like a tour guide who wants to make sure you find exactly what you’re looking for as quickly as possible.
How Does Google Make Money?
It’s like a tour guide who also sells advertisements on their bus. Google provides useful search results for free, but it also allows businesses to pay for advertising placements at the top of the search results page. When people click on these advertisements, Google makes money.
When you look at the search results page, you’ll see both paid search results and “organic” search results. Organic results are like the pizza places the tour guide recommends because they genuinely think they’re the best, not because the pizza places paid them to say so.
What SEO Stands For In Business
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a critical tool for enhancing a business website’s visibility and attracting internet traffic. SEO involves the careful alignment of a website’s technical setup, content relevance, and link popularity, enabling its pages to become easily discoverable and relevant for people. As a result, search engines, such as Google, assign a higher rank to the business website where more people click on links.
The Role of SEO In Business
The role of SEO, and LLM SEO, is to improve your ranking in these organic search results. It’s like trying to make sure your pizza place gets recommended by the tour guide as often as possible. Despite all the paid advertisements and other elements on the search results page, SEO and LLM SEO can be very powerful tools.
What Are SEO Strategies?
SEO strategies focus on improving the user search experience and the page’s ranking.
These efforts may include:
- using good keywords in titles
- meta descriptions & headlines
- using descriptive URLs with keywords – no numeric strings
- using schema markup to clarify the page’s content.
The ultimate goal is to ensure that the content meets user search needs, encouraging search engines to rank the pages higher.
What The Prompt Is Going On With AI Chat Search and SEO?
Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Google Bard have recently been changing the landscape of online search. These AI tools generate responses to user queries that are often more nuanced and contextually relevant than those provided by traditional search engines. As these models continue to improve, they’re becoming an integral part of the search process, helping users find information more effectively and efficiently.
Traditional Search Vs. Prompt Search
While LLMs and AI chat tools can transform the way we search, it’s essential to remember that they still rely on traditional search requests and questions. Though these tools provide the ability to generate comprehensive and accurate responses, they don’t yet offer all the features of a traditional search, such as images, news, or videos. As a result, search engines still have an incentive to keep traditional search prominent, at least for now 3 .
The Future Of SEO
This technological evolution has left many wondering about the future of SEO. How do we optimize websites in an era where consumers can find answers without ever visiting the source site? Despite these changes, the fundamentals of SEO remain valid.
Expertise, in particular, continues to be a significant factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. Websites that provide comprehensive answers to user queries, especially focusing on long-tail keywords, and the expertise that a subject matter expert brings, may help your content rank higher than AI-generated content.
Optimizing your pages for LLM generative AI tools
Optimizing your pages for LLM generative AI tools involves structuring your pages in a way that is easy for search engines to understand. This includes having clear headings and subheadings, schema markup, and clear and concise points that answer the questions users are searching for. This strategy is also effective for optimizing not only search but also voice search, snippets, and new LLM chat engines.
Another strategy to consider is implementing AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants into your websites. This not only enhances user engagement on your site but also leverages the power of tools like ChatGPT to answer questions about your website, reducing the volume of calls to your call center. Providing users with a more engaging experience on your site gives them more reason to visit your site vs. finding answers via Bing with ChatGPT, for instance.
The world of SEO is evolving
The world of SEO is evolving, and it’s more important than ever to keep up with these changes. As the use of AI and LLMs continue to grow, they will undoubtedly play a significant role in how we optimize our websites for search.
However, the fundamental goal of SEO, improving your website’s visibility and attracting relevant traffic, remains the same. So keep learning, adapting, and optimizing your SEO strategies. With these tools and strategies at your disposal, you’ve got this!
Need Some Expert SEO Advice?
SEO Counselors provides hourly consulting to answer all your burning questions about the current state of SEO, where it’s going and how you can take advantage of it for your business.
