How and why your SEO strategy should evolve

There’s a lot swirling around the industry right now about what the future of search looks like.

• Are keywords dead?

• Is AI taking over search?

• Will AI Overviews kill my traffic?

• Where has my search traffic gone?

There are some serious things going on here with the changes that Google has rolled out and how it’s impacting certain kinds of publishers. 

I want to spend some time today talking about these areas and provide tips to guide you through the process.

1. Are keywords dead?

No. They are still important for a host of reasons. Here are a few:

• People are still going to use phrases when they search. Tying your keywords to those searches will still be a good strategy.

• Google hasn’t given any sign that the basics of keyword optimization are going away. Using keywords in meta descriptions, URLs, image titles, and other key areas is still a best practice and is likely to remain part of how your content gets understood and ranked.

• Google needs to crawl and understand your page and that starts with seeing relevant keywords and search-friendly language.

But what will change is that if your entire SEO strategy is built around keywords, you’re going to be in hot water. I will cover this in this newsletter, but Google is looking for helpful, useful content that answers questions and solves problems. Yes, you can use keywords to help Google understand what that content is about, but you shouldn’t be centering your entire SEO strategy around keywords.

2. Answering questions will be king

If you’ve spent anytime looking at AI Overviews after you do a search you probably have noticed that it’s filled with answers, which is really the whole point of search.

So, creating content that aligns with answering questions or framing content into Q&As that easily helps someone get what they are coming to the story for, will be all good strategies to use to get your content seen in AI Overviews.

Often when I talk with an editorial team about answering questions from their audience, they want to have readers submit questions to them to answer. That’s definitely one way you can do it, but it’s a limited approach. To really set this idea on fire, you should:

• Identify questions people are asking using tools like Google Search Trends, Google Search Console and AnswerThePublic.

• See what questions you have recently received via phone calls, emails and Facebook messages.

• Have reporters listen to their audio recordings of meetings to see what questions get brought up in public hearings.

• Build forms into stories always asking readers what questions they have and in your social media posts ask readers what questions they have about the topic you are writing about. You can do the same things in your newsletter.

• Simply ask your co workers (in other departments) and friends and family what they are curious about.

It’s key that you structure your content in ways that really showcase those questions and answers. Do that in headlines and subheadings in articles and make sure that you are clearly showcasing the answer, often by using  bullets, lists, tables, and bolded subheadings. The format for stories really matters now.

3. Create features readers can get familiar with

This strategy really doesn’t work well if you just answer a question every few weeks. It really needs to be part of your regular content strategy.

This is good for readers but also for your newsroom, so you can build processes and routine to do this kind of content consistently.

So what could this look like if you do regular reader features? Here are a few ideas:

• You asked, we answered: Where you answer all of those curious questions like explaining what shows up on your property tax bill or something lighter like the best day to visit the zoo. 

Tip: Read the book They Ask, You Answer, which is really built on this idea of being there for your customers (audience) when they have questions.

• Ask the government official: Don’t give the mayor or school superintendent an open platform to say whatever they want in a column, but ask them a question about something specific your audience wonders about that they can speak to.

• Ask the editor: Take common questions that readers have — or you think they may have — and explain how you do journalism. You could tackle everything from AI to letters to the editor. Readers really don’t know how it all works.

• Who do I call for that: When I worked in a newsroom, it was always so crazy the questions people would call asking about. But it really spoke to the fact that people trusted us for the information, from when leaves get picked up to getting an answer about a water bill. So why not have a feature that supports those questions and that kind of helpful information.

• Help desk: This could be around a specific topic like healthcare where you could answer questions about insurance or urgent care or something like parenting with solutions for families looking for things like camps.

• Live Q&A on Facebook or Instagram: Let users submit questions in real time and answer them on video or in a recap post either in an Ask Me Anything (with an editor or reporter) or around a specific topic.

We know SEO and content!

Let us help you navigate SEO changes with strategies that will have you showing up in those AI Overviews!

Contact me at David@davidarkinconsulting.com or call me at 832 407 0188.