Excerpt from Milestone
Milestone’s Take: Search Generative Experience impact and how your business needs to adapt
We’re going to be calling out the key changes your business needs to be ready for – to adapt and drive its visibility on search:
BARD and Google Lens Integration: Visual Search is gaining prominence
Quoting Wall Street Journal, Google is now making the search experience “visual, snackable, personal, and human,”. Not only are you going to see image and video rich results along with generative AI answers, but with BARD and Google Lens integration, you can now use images as part of your prompts/queries. That’s right, ask a question/prompt using images!
Action: Optimizing your images for visual search is imperative to grab SERP visibility. In short, follow Google’s image SEO best practices as elucidated by Google’s John Muller. Ensure quality and safe search, include descriptive titles, captions, filenames, and text for your images. Optimize images for page speed and add schema or structured data to drive entity recognition. Most importantly, treat your images as entities (no duplicate images across locations and channels) for them to be recognized effectively in Google’s Knowledge Graph.
Zero Click Results Redefined
With BARD going to be everyone’s first interaction on search, most likely the featured snippet rich result is going to be a thing of the past. But this means that the “new” Zero click results that will be powered by Generative AI will showcase multi-modal results (images, text, video) – in-depth material in a single answer.
Action: Optimize your content for relevance, expertise, and authority across formats – text, image, video, and voice. Use the Helpful Content guidelines to offer content that relates to the users’ needs and optimize your content for entity recognition using schema.
Generative AI Content is here to drive efficiency
Is Google going to rank AI auto-generated content? The answer is yes! Based on their guidelines for AI-generated content, they will reward “High-quality content, however it is produced”. Of course, auto-generated content used for spammy content will be flagged.
Action: Implement AI in your content creation process to drive creativity and efficiency. After all, SGE is meant to offer multiple insights and viewpoints as a result of a single prompt – the focus on driving efficiency in a creative process.
SEO Neglected? No Way! Page Experience update and the importance of Foundational SEO
With Generative AI now going to determine and drive the user experience of search, the question is whether SEO matters. Google has stated that its AI-generative capabilities are founded on its SEO, Search Raters, E-E-A-T (Expertise-Experience-Authority-Trustworthy) Guidelines, and the Helpful Content System to deliver reliable, helpful, and high-quality information to users.
Foundational SEO is still important for a website’s visibility on search and Google has even added Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a new metric to their Page Experience Algorithm. INP measures all the other interactions on the page (Not just FID) to determine the actual page latency before an interaction.
Action: Continue to cover and automate all aspects of foundational SEO – crawlability & indexability, page experience, schema & clickability, content relevancy, and local authority for your websites and social channels. Ensure your content is crafted to the customers’ needs.
Laser sharp focus on Local Listings and Product/Services management
With vertical experiences a key aspect of SGE, it is imperative that you manage the profile completeness of your local listings to be found for local or hyper-local searches. In addition, ensure your product and service details are thorough when submitted to Google.
Action: Not just UNAP, optimize your local listings for profile completeness – descriptions, attributes, amenities, hours of operation, etc. Create content for hyperlocal searches to drive your relevance. Ensure you’ve listed all product/service information (description, price, expiry, etc.) and use schema to drive entity recognition of your offerings and rich result visibility.
Click here to read complete article at Milestone.