Google is slowly introducing AI overviews. Users are clicking on search results less than they used to. Users now get their answers from the AI overview and click on the relevant links.
So... is SEO dead?
With AI overview, good SEO has become even more important.
AI Overviews and large language models get their knowledge from scraping the web. Often, when you prompt an LLM, it searches the web first to give you an answer.
Being on page 1 and ideally in the top positions is thus even more important.
Once you're at the top of page 1, there's a good chance you get included in the AI overview and users will click on your site.
How a local service business started to get leads from ChatGPT
In February, we took over the account of a local service business (very high-ticket sales). Their website is about 10 years old (DR20). Recently, it was spammed with cheap, low-quality blog posts from a former SEO agency. No real work has been done on the site for several years.
Results after 4 months: The client has doubled his leads. He now receives leads from ChatGPT and AI overview.
The following have been contributing factors:
On-site SEO:
Updated meta tags/headings/URLs with target keywords. Sped up the server, and renamed images (added keywords to title/description and file names).
Link building:
We built 1,000+ foundational links to the domain with SEOCopilot. It took 3 months and the links are still trickling in. No further link building was done. The domain improved from DR22 to DR30.
Internal links:
Added links to the main pages from the navigation bar
Added links to the main pages from the homepage
Added links to the most important pages in the footer
Added links from blog posts to the main pages
Structured snippets:
Local Business Schema
Article Schema
Product Schema
Breadcrumbs
Site speed and Crawling
Added Cloudflare to cache the website and drastically decrease loading time. Also indexed all pages that weren't indexed before.
Niche edits
Other SEOs suggested that you should try to buy a mention in the articles that the LLM is frequently using.
Example: If you ask an LLM about topic XYZ and it often cites website.com/article-on-XYZ, consider contacting the website owner. You could buy a link placement in that article.
Bottom line:
For the time being, to get into AI overviews, the safest bet is to do good SEO. Once we see new strategies that work, we'll add them to seocopiot.com and share them with you.