How to Rank in AI Search (March 2024 Update)

hello welcome to today's session all about how to rank in AI search particularly Google's sge let us know in the chat where you're tuning in from today welcome to everyone who is joining us um whilst uh whilst people are are coming in um just to introduce myself my name is Tim I am the founder of exposure ninja and uh we're a digital marketing agency we help our clients get ranking get traffic and get business online um not least through through search and that's one of the topics that we're going to be talking about today how to rank in this new generation of AI search engines that are going to be coming with Google's SG being the first one uh first one for us uh to play with um welcome to angel from Romania Dan from Colombia IET from Northampton amazing amazing cross-section of the world there fantastic um whilst uh yeah whilst people are coming in I'm just going to sort of uh explain what we're going to look at today so um for those who don't know SG is Google's new AI search engine generative AI powered search engine we figured out how to rank in it and we've shared some information about this previously um this is a bit of a sort of a recap of some of that information but there's also some new information from uh from updates that we've seen Google make to sge since the start of the year um and some of these updates we're still noticing changes that Google is making um even in the last week and there is some information about where we think Google is taking sge based on um reading some of the stuff that they're saying in in some of the earnings calls as well so a bit of information about where we think all of this is heading um so let's get cracking uh I'm going to share my screen it's usually helpful in these sorts of situations if you've got any question questions throughout by the way please feel free to stick them in the chat window I've got the comments open here so if you got any questions I'll I'll I'll see them come through um and answer them live or we should have some time for some Q&A at the end so what we'll do today I'll explain a bit about sge is for those who uh maybe haven't heard of it um we'll then talk about some of the updates and some of the new changes that we're noticing rolling out I'll take you through some ranking SG ranking case studies um and then we'll talk about next steps and what you can do with all of this because that's really what's most useful to us all cool okay for those who don't know my name is Tim I am the founder of exposure ninja so I um I was actually a professional drummer for a few years I built a website for my next door neighbor which did quite well got it ranked at the top of Google and it completely changed his life so I wrote a book about the process that I used to do that I ended up building a whole bunch of websites then starting exposure ninja in about 11 years ago now so fast forward to today we're a team around the globe um working with clients on on the SEO content marketing paid search paid social email marketing we build websites do conversion rate optimization and branding and positioning work as well so really incredibly talented team uh led by our CEO Charlie and uh I yeah really enjoy seeing the work that we do we've just been hearing from one of our clients this morning they're a they're a mortgage company in the US they um they originated about half a billion of loans this year and they'll do about a billion next year and we've just heard that they've had to hire some some new staff to deal with all of these that we've been generating for them that's the sort of thing that we absolutely love hearing about we're very Roi driven we love making a big difference so of course when this sge stuff and all this AI search came out uh we are right up to date with it and spending our time analyzing to see what difference it's going to make to businesses Roi because that's the sort of flavor of marketing that we're most passionate about we share everything that we learn through our books and our YouTube channel and if you're not already a subscriber on YouTube then I'd encourage you to do so uh because it's where you can keep up to date with the latest info on this stuff we are bang up to date with the latest things that are going on with AI for search uh we're doing some work at the moment looking at um things like how to rank in chat GPT and we'll be sharing some of that info later on this year so if you're not already an ex a subscriber to the explosion ninja YouTube channel then head over there and um smash the Subscribe Button as they say or just tap it gently doesn't that make a difference um so quick survey then um just uh just so I can understand the sort of the level of expertise that we've got in the in the session today if you have used SG before just can you just type a little number one in the chat so just give me a little one if you've used sge before if you've heard of sge maybe you've watched some of our videos or you've read about it or something but you haven't used it yet just give me a number two in the chat and if you've not heard of SG or you don't really know what it is then give me number three so if you've used it number one if you've heard of it number two and if you've never heard of it or you don't really know what it is and you don't really know why you're here the number three that' be great okay we've got plenty of twos we've got some threes as well great okay so have we actually got anyone who's used SG yet has we got any number ones at all I'm not sure I I haven't seen any number ones okay good all right fine well if you're number two or number three oh Jack it's good to see it's been a few years since we last spoke good to see you all right great if you're number two or number three then perfect I'm going to give you a summary of what sge is uh some of the new changes and then we're going to look at how to rank in it so by the end of today you'll be an expert and you'll be going off and optimizing your own website to rank in this new thing great okay well we think that sge is pretty huge and in fact I've been doing SEO through EXP exposion injur and and and freelance since about 2010 um and the first time I worked in search was about 2006 2005 2006 I think this is the biggest change that I've seen um in the world of search this is potentially massive um it really is a fundamental shift to how Google is going to work and how website traffic is going to work just being completely honest as well um this is the sort of thing that we really need to get ahead of we need to be aware of exact what Google is testing it because the implications for all of us that have websites and monetize organic traffic from Google are really quite colossal so we need to make sure that we are up to date with this and we know how this thing is working and that we're making the most of the opportunities it presents because I think the other thing that's worth talking about here is that whilst SG is a fundamental change to how Google works actually anytime there is a fundamental change like this it's also an opportunity for those who get on the front foot figure out how to work figure out how to you know use it tweak their own websites to to make sure that it works so here's here's how it works here's what it looks like so if you go on Google today this is basically the type of search results page that you'd be used to seeing this is an informational search we can tell that we've got this featured snippet here at the top we've also got people also ask section here so with the feature snippet and the people also ask you'll notice that this is text that's taken directly from a website and then Google shows the URL of the page that that text is shown from okay so very clearly Google is using this page as a way of helping you find the page the web page that is right that has your answer then you've got the regular organic results down here the 10 Blue Links that we're all used to fighting over and then we've got some other sort of search Furniture images maps whatever movie listings weather all that type of stuff so that's Google today um or Google pre sge but here's what sge looks like quite different quite different above the f all of this section here is produced by Google's generative AI so this is like the kind of chat gbt type large language model um which is producing this now of course we've got these Carousel listings here so these are websites which are linked uh in the in the SG result and then we've got little dropdowns uh which you can click to see websites that corroborate the information in each paragraph of the SG answer so big change obviously uh the main change being that they're an three websites visible above the fold instead of many websites visible of the of the the fold so if you're not one of these three websites sad times for you and if you are happy times for you actually things are going to get a little bit funky I'm going to show you that in just a second though all of the regular organic search stuff is still there so the Google search results page is actually unchanged it's just forced down by this big old sge section at the top however I did say things were going to get a little bit funky sge has started to change even since this so this was how it looked in maybe January mid January time February time since then it's actually started to change some people have noticed now including me that their SG results now look like this that Carousel that Carousel those websites that were listed here that we were hoping we were going to get all this traffic from Gone Dead the carousel's gone instead we have these um these little website links here they've lost their featured images um but they're open by default so previously you had to click on the little arrow to see these websites now you can just see the websites by default now we don't want to panic too much about this uh because Google is testing lots of different versions of SG and has been doing for quite a while so we're not going to panic we're not going to run screaming for the hills whatever version of SG Google decides to go with we're going to optimize for it and we're going to benefit from it because we're ninjas um but it's just interesting to see how much Google is changing this uh even you know before it's officially released and I can talk about some of the different searches which are showing SG results uh sorry the the the Carousel and not later on but of course like previously all these other Google results the the Google search page that we're so used to fighting over and spending our our our time stressing over our rankings on it's still there it's just now buried even further so of course um this impacts not just informational searches but also branded searches so here's a uh here's a branded search for exposure ninja where's it gone where's it gone here's a branded search for exposure ninja the text might be a little bit small so I'm going to explain what you can see so all of that section up the top was SG you've still got the regular organic results here so you can see this a very rich um set of search results we've got the Google Business panel over here we've got some tweets embedded here but all of that that stuff is forced down now including the information about the business from Google business page by this huge SG section you can see you can click on these little arrows to see the little websites that um that feed oh no they don't feed it that's they corroborate the information in the sgr so we've got text uh being taken from different places reviews you can have a follow-up conversation with SG as well so you can click on these little questions and that starts a bit of a conversation and brings up more search results here's information about the explosure ninja podcast with all of these websites um corroborating the information there that person just clicked on exposure ninja pricing which was one of the suggested follow-up questions and you can see here that SG has actually made a mistake it's taken information about some SEO tools that we published on our site and it's decided that this is our pricing and of course this is one of the limitations of SG in its current format is it's not always 100 100% accurate and because it's not necessarily citing sources it's just taking information and rewriting them from different websites and it can sometimes be inaccurate but a very different search and uh obviously the potential for this is that we lose even some of our branded traffic to this thing which would be um be quite shocking for a lot of businesses I think so this marks a real fundamental shift from U of Google's from being I guess a search engine to being an answer engine and if you think about what chat GPT does and why chat GPT is so in favor with a lot of people it's because when you go to chat gbt you're not you're not looking for a whole bunch of websites that you then need to troll through you're just looking for an answer and that's what chat GPT gives you and this is Google's version of that where it's looking to just give the Searcher the answer inside the search results rather than giving the Searcher a whole bunch of websites that they then need to go through and find the answer themselves this is a fundamental shift now what impact is this going to have on traffic well the truth be told nobody knows nobody knows what sort of impact this is going to have on traffic it's probably not going to have a good impact um there's a there's an SEO firm from Israel called agile SEO who put this study together last year and they basically made a few assumptions and then they projected four different scenarios based on those assumptions in the best case scenario the average website lost 8 18% of their organic traffic that's the best case scenario okay the average website lost 18% of their organic traffic oh in the worst case scenario the average website lost 64% of their organic traffic so these are huge huge projections now couple of notes on this firstly I think that their assumptions were a little bit pessimistic I don't think things will be as bad as this that's the first thing the second thing is that within each of these average website performance is there was a real Spectrum so in some of these cases some websites lost 95% of their traffic whereas others actually gained traffic as a result of sge if they figured out how to rank for it how to optimize for it and they weren't already ranking for some of those searches but they figured out how to rank for SG then they would actually see an increase in traffic so that is what we have to work on we have to work on optimizing our websites and our Pages for SG so that we can see an increase in traffic rather than seeing our traffic get decimated by this so that's really important by the way if this is seeming a little bit glum don't worry it's going to get a little bit cheerier in the future I hope um where do we see the where do we see the sort of winners and losers in this space well I think I'm expecting to see a drop in informational organic traffic so particularly more generic informational searches how why where type questions um similar to how you know there was a whole industry that sprang up around what's the weather in Bristol today right and then Google just deleted that entire industry essentially and just shows the weather results inside the search uh you know just shows the weather inside the search results and I think a lot of businesses that have relied on getting traffic for phrases like how tall is Ryan Gosling right that's just gone right SG is gonna gobble that type of thing so a lot of those types of searches um are going to be I think the lowest hanging fruit for SG to pick up we're also expecting though on a more commercial note a lot of customers research happening on Google and that's really I think where Google wants to take this Google wants people to be able to research their product and the the things that they buy actually on Google and do more of that research on Google because then of course Google gets to be there when they're ready to make the purchase and show them an ad or show them a product that they can purchase directly through Google or sorry go directly to a website to purchase so potentially more of a customers research will be happening on Google the example I I like to think about is let's say that you're going to you're you're considering buying a new phone right that might be a search that is actually made up of maybe five different searches so you might let's say that you're going to change phone right you're gonna be really Brave do something that very few humans are ever able to do you're going to buy a completely new pH phone not just the next version of your current one you might start that search by comparing iOS to Android you're trying to work out which which group you're in you might might then search for particular Brands you might search for reviews of certain phones you might decide that you're going to get a you know a Galaxy S or and then you need to F find out which model you're going to get and then you need to work out which color you're going to get and what the cases and accessories all this type of stuff so let's say that there are five different searches that you conduct um and three different Search terms for each of those and let's say for arguments sake that you visit Three websites as part of each search well you've got 45 different websites there that you would have researched on that journey to figure out which web which phone to buy well now potentially Google wants to keep you in sge for as much of that search as you possibly can so I think there's a real chance that we see um that we see some uh so some impacts there uh to to to to organic traffic now was some great questions there from Ron Anna and SAR fantastic fantastic questions one of them is going to be answered in just a second and I'll come back to you in just a minute as well we also think this might lead to fewer topper funnel visitors because these tend to be less committed less brand um less attached to particular Brands uh so these more generic searches where they're not really attached to any one particular brand might also be lost to SG but of course this is also a massive opportunity for brands that do get to grips with SG and can get their website listed in those answers because you then get a chance to have someone come onto your site and capture that person this will give some businesses doubts over their content strategy is there any point doing all of this Google's just gonna eat all my traffic yes there is point to doing all this but hopefully your competitors look at all of this they don't figure it out they get terrified and they just drop themselves out they say right we give up with all of this s SEO was already hard enough it's just got harder I can't take this I'm out that's what you hope because this as I'm going to show you this is incredibly gameable this is incredibly gameable my initial Research into you know chat GPT also shows that actually potentially we're looking at less sophisticated search engines here that we have to play with so if we get our heads around this and we figure out how to optimize for this then actually we could stand to be real beneficiaries of this uh of all of this change okay of course the question is is Google actually going to release this um are they just going to drop it here's what Sundar said in Q2 in their Q2 earnings call which would have been middle of last year so I think they do their they do their quarterly earnings calls like a full month at the end of the following month with that quarter right wait so Q4 ended in December their earning SCS end in January so this was middle of last year so I said over time this will be just how search works we're building the next major revolution in search now that was how bullish uh he was about sge middle of last year then in their Q3 earnings call it was all about yes we're testing different ways to show adverts so someone asked um Anna asked I cannot see how this goes with the advertising model on Google I don't think Google can yet and I think that's probably the thing that is limiting when this thing rolls out Google will not release SG without an advertising model that's attached to it we're going to talk about this in a little bit later on then in Q4 which is the uh the most recent quarter for Google a great analyst question came along which was about um you know rolling out and are we going to see are we seeing uh Google search being impacted by people going to chat GPT Sund just completely dodged that question altogether but I think that shows the pressure that Google is under to roll out something like this to take on chat GPT now Sund was a bit less bullish about SG in this call though and actually Steed away from giving any predictions and stayed away from some of the the maybe the hype uh that he'd been uh he'd been SP in previous earing calls instead said they're increasing the number of searches for which SG is really useful and I think that paints a picture of a future where we'll see sge being one of the features in search so you know how sometimes you see shopping results in a search but you don't always see shopping results sometimes you see local results in a search but you don't always see local results I think that's where we'll get to with sge it'll be one of those things where sometimes Google shows sge if it thinks it's going to be useful for that but actually sometimes it's really not that useful and I think you'll see it uh go from being off offered on most searches to actually showing up by default in some being offered in others but sometimes you won't see SG at all so I think that's where it's going but I think it's incredibly likely they are going to launch this and I actually think their timelines so far uh point to a uh point to them most definitely launching it if we look at what's happened so far um so SG was supposed to leave uh lab mode this is their testing Labs mode in December 2023 so prior to that it was only available to people in the US or using a US VPN using Chrome and on desktop so prior to that it was only available to people in that cohort and then it was supposed to finish testing in December 2023 we all assumed it was then going to launch it didn't they extended the testing period and removed the deadline at which point people are like ah SG is never going to come we can all go back to our old ways we don't need to worry about bad move by February 2024 sge was available in Labs mode on mobile so Google is expanding the surface area of which it can collect user data um and it by by February it was visible on mobile which is also around the sort of time where it um allow people to start using other browsers so for example I can get it on Safari as well so it's not just Google Chrome so what Google is doing here is they're expanding the number number of people that are using SG in order to allow them to collect more data about when it is useful and when it is not useful there's also um some screenshots on Twitter of some Android users being offered sge without signing up for testing mode so this is the first time we've actually seen some limited sort of public roll out of this so I think all of these signs point to we actually don't know when this thing is coming out but it looks like it is coming and Google is increasing the number of people getting to use sge so of course this leads to people giving up with SEO and declaring that SEO is dead uh what's the point of trying to gain this thing Google's going to be keeping all the traffic I remember one of my early marketing Heroes a guy called Chris Cardell declaring the SEO is dead I was devastated by this um of course luckily I took no notice because Chris said this in 2011 around the time of Panda and Penguin and we all know what happened to SEO since 2011 it continued to grow in popularity and importance and has been responsible for build buing multi-billion dollar companies so SEO is not dead and I actually think this phase will be absolutely no different my personal opinion about SEO as long as there is a search engine there will be search engine optimization sge is a search engine chat GPT whether or not you want to debate whether or not it's a search engine people use it as a search engine and you can optimize for it so as long as there are ways of people finding businesses online there will be a way of optimizing the information about your business to make those engines recommend you or offer you up and that's the name of the game that's what we have to do figure out how to optimize the information about our business the formatting of our pages to make uh Google or whoever want to rank us and show us to their searches so we think that there are three slash4 ways to win in sge let me show you what they are so here's an example search um this search is for what is C accreditation UK for those of you who are outside the construction industry uh C accreditation is a construction industry um accreditation scheme um and we work with a client in this space chass so C accreditation is like a generic uh construction accreditation scheme so it's not owned by any one company but chass is one of the providers of this accreditation scheme so the first way to win is as you can see here I've searched for what cast accreditation UK and by default this um this uh link is open okay and it's the chass website that is showing here so whereas in prsg times you search for what is C Cast accreditation UK yes Chaz was ranking we got them ranking top of Google for this term but they were ranking with a whole bunch of other websites now they are the only website visible above the fold Happy Days for them sad times for everyone else that's the first way to win is to get listed and preferably get listed in the first paragraph here so that you are visible by default and I'll explain how to do that in a couple of minutes the second way to win is that SG results will sometimes recommend or reference particular businesses or organizations as they are doing here so you can actually get SG to recommend your business in its answer now the third way to win is a little bit more advanced let me tell you the story of all of this so Chas has is a provider of Cass accreditation but they are not Cass accreditation chass is a company a private Company Cass is a sort of a generic accreditation but look what's happened here in the suggested follow-up questions because we've done so much content marketing about Cass for Chaz then when you search for this sge suggests do you mean what does chess stand for or ch accreditation so think about this this is like you've searched for you know what is a vacuum cleaner and SG has said which is the best Dyson to buy right so that's the other way to win here is if we can influence SG sufficiently we could actually get it to sort of funnel users towards having a conversation about our business or our products which I think is really interesting and a very uh Curious way of uh of you know you're not influencing the search engine you're also you're almost like influencing the assistant that is doing the search okay I noticed this in the very early days when we were first playing with this and um asking it about digital marketing agencies and I actually got Bing chat which is powered by chat GPT to recommend the exposure ninjja free website a marketing review and I thought how incredible is this we have an opportunity now where we can get AI agents to be recommending our businesses to potential clients very very exciting now of course as uh as Anna has very astutely suggested um I cannot see how this goes with the Google advertising model there will be a PPC offering here you can guarantee it this is too big a revenue driver for Google not to launch without PPC I think it's $162 billion of their annual revenue is on search ad so they're not going to launch this without a PPC offering and they are still testing it okay um and of course previous to the new version of SG there was also the Carousel a carousel still exists for some searches by the way um it still exists for some searches but not all and there that is the fourth way to win although in this case that way to win has been taken from us at least temporarily okay so big question can we influence SG can we actually get our website um being ranked and recommended here the answer is yes short answer yes which is a good job because that's what exactly what this session is about um so in this I'm going to show you some before and afters these are all examples that I've run with exposure ninja because I able to log in and hack around and play and see what we could do to get ranking so in this before time in this before search the search term is what is a page title exposure ninja was not ranking in sge anywhere so we were going to get no traffic from sge we had no featured snippet so this featured snippet did not belong to us it still doesn't and we were ranking position eight in the regular organic results so towards the bottom of page one now miles down the page because SG has taken up all this space at the top so in other words sad times SG was only going to punish us when it came out for this surge so our goal of course was to get ranked and to get featured and we're able to do this so after making some tweaks and optimizations um we're able to get ranked position one in the SG Carousel and linked throughout the answer so there's the carousel with the link and there's being linked throughout the answer and you can see by the way in the carousel the importance of those featured images right at how that listing stands out a mile compared to the others because there is a featured image so we got to keep alive to to this potentially being an influencer on click-through rate from sge um then they uh ditched the Carousel and we actually lost visibility managed to get it back though um as you can see here so reoptimize the page uh through the process I'm going to explain and then we got that ranking back within six hours the featured image has gone um since the SG Carousel disappeared but we're able to get that visibility back so this is a a great example you know we weren't ranking particularly well for this search it's never it's not really a search that we targeted to be brutally honest um SG comes along all of a sudden now we're one of the two websites that linked above the fold so the amount of traffic that we would get from this search as a proportion of all the traffic going to websites would have increased significantly here happy days we also noticed by the way that once we optimize for sge in the way I'm going to show you we ranked better in Bing chat as well so let me know in the comments if you've ever heard of this thing called Bing but Bing chat is Bing's version of sge so it's powered by um chat GPT so it's open AI plus Bing makes Bing chat um possibly might form the basis of open AI web search products that they're working on who knows hopefully not but you never know anyway we noticed that once we'd optimized our website for sge in the way I'm going to talk to you about in just a minute we rank better in Bing chat so we ranked position one and we're referenced in six out the seven links to this same search in bing chats that's good news so this looks to be a way that you can optimize for AI search engines in general um in this example this is a search for sponsored tag we had no sge ranking we ranked a position one organically with a feature snippet but didn't rank in sge this is really important just because you're ranking well in featured Snippets or regular organic results doesn't mean that you're going to rank in SG they are different things different things you need to optimize for SG separately Paul says sorry to interrupt will this seminar be available online to watch again yes it will Paul don't worry I'm talking fast because some people have seen some of this stuff before um GJ says I've been devouring your content like a crazy kid with a crush thanks not sure what to say there but thank you um okay example two once we're able to tweak and optimize for SG good news SG Carousel ranking and Link throughout SG answers boom boom so the good news is this is um tweakable now when this uh when when Carousel disappeared for this search with sge the good news is we kept ranking and actually we went from position two um to position one here so we changed nothing here I didn't have to reoptimize the page when Carousel disappeared for this one we actually gained some visibility so sometimes when the carousel disappears or when SG changes you gain visibility sometimes you lose visibility and SG as I'll talk about in a bit is a lot more Dynamic it's the sort of thing where I'm finding we have to reoptimize for it as the SG answer changes and as they change the format of the SG answers you might have to reoptimize for it um but you know the good news is you can rank in SG very quickly the bad news is you know within a matter of hours the bad news is you can also lose your ranking it's much more Dynamic it's much more changeable okay so how are we doing this um well actually let me just give you uh yeah let me just take you over to search so let's just go for uh see if this works okay so SG answer here um so what we did is I noticed that in the early days of SG it doesn't do this anymore in the early days of sge when you click on a website the URL um that the site goes to had a massive modifier and what it did is it took you to a piece of text on the page and it highlighted that text in purple and what I noticed is it was basically rewriting the highlighted purple text I called this out as a massive potential legal issue for Google because it was very clear that they were basically just taking the content from the page and rewriting it in Search and they were even showing you which bit of text they were taking interestingly they now dropped the purple bit they've dropped the um they've dropped the sort of reference bit the URL modifier thing it's all gone interesting right but what I noticed whilst that purple thing existed is I noticed that a lot of the websites that um SG linked to it was referencing text towards the top of the page particularly first couple of paragraphs so I thought well right that's pretty interesting normally when you make a post like this so this this blog post is fairly typical what are no follows sponsored in ugt tags and what you do when you write a post in the old school world of SEO is you would start off by telling the story right you'd explain that these different tags are attributes that you would use to show Google information about your page whatever and here read on to find out exactly what they are you know that type of thing SG doesn't seem to dig that SG likes you to get straight to the point give that answer almost immediately so what we did is we reoptimized these Pages reconfigured them to add a paragraph right at the start which basically summarized the answer that SG was giving and that's really important right this answer essentially summarizes exactly the answer that SG is giving and in particular we're very careful to summarize the start of the answer a sponsored L tag is a link attribute that indicates a link is paid placement advertisement or sponsorship related the reason we want to give information that corroborates the start of the SG answer is because then we get listed in under the first paragraph which is open by default what we might do is we might include some information uh like this bit we might write something that backs up this statement here but if we did that we'd get listed here which is no good is it because very few people are going to get there we want to be one of the sites that recommended right at the top open by default because that gets you listed here and that increases your chance of being in the first three positions in the carousel so that's what we've done we've basically added summaries to the tops of the pages which corroborate the information in the SG answer and what you'll sometimes find is that when you do that um and you have to submit this through search console by the you have to go and submit it to search console otherwise you don't get the benefit so go make the changes to the page go to search console submit the page uh request recrawling and then usually you'll know if you're going to rank or not in SG within about 12 hours if you're not doing it 12 hours it's not going to happen so what you might want to do then is go back and reoptimize and then keep trying until you get something the Google wants to reward so that's broadly how this this process works we add that text to the top of the page summarizing the SG answer for for reindexing through Google search console absolutely crucial that you do this um and then usually you can get ranking in this case within 5 hours and five to six hours is a typical sort of time period for getting ranking in SG if you've already got a page that's ranking reasonably well on Google that's the other thing um another example this example is uh we do marketing tear Downs of different businesses Sheen in this case so this is a search for Sheen marketing strategy um we had no s G ranking but we got SG ranking position one in the Carousel and twice from the answer and again we had to take a completely different approach to content to rank this post because this post started off by you know exactly how you would start off a post like you'd start off talking about you know Sheen is a fast fashion brand from China and it's been well known for its fast growth SG hates all that stuff just cut all of that out gets straight to the point Sheen's marketing strategy is based on micro influencers user generated content low minimum purchase and free shipping and just massive amounts of media spend so we just summarize the answer right at the top and then we go into more detail later on that seems to be the sort of thing that SG really loves um and when they updated and removed the carousel we uh we kept our visibility um exactly the same so still the first linked website there and we didn't have to reoptimize for this by the way we didn't have to reoptimize for this okay uh We've also done this from clients for clients including um Ron who is I I believe he is with us we are big fans of Ron and his fantastic business Golf Course lawn if you want your your lawn to go from what mine looks like which is a sort of a uh wild Heath area Heath Zone a wildlife Nature Reserve an informal Wildlife Heath Zone might be disused and you want want it to look beautiful like a golf course then Ron's business has all the information and the products needed to do so and we got Ron ranking for some SG searches in less than a day so for these searches best seed to grow grass Ron wasn't ranking anywhere no visibility ranking well on Organics but nowhere in SG we got him ranking position one in the carousel um in less than a day and this one best fungicide for lawn same deal in less than a day and this one actually still shows a carousel uh this is an interesting example which I can talk about later on um so we've got some questions um I'm just going to answer a few of those questions before we move on Michael says how do you get sge to show up instead of Google search great question Michael so at the moment you need to be signed up for Google search Labs so if you go on to Google and you type in search Labs you sign up and you can then choose to be uh using SG and when you are using via a up us VPN then you will see your SG results it's not the easiest things to do in the world but it is there um another question we've had uh not really a question just a bit of uh annoyance here Google has been getting worse you have to scroll like three screens before any Real Results they cluttered it with tons of ads images info boxes are ads more important than SEO these days mg great question people are still clicking on organ results I can tell you that for sure uh they actually the the number of the percentage of Searchers that click on ads doesn't seem to have really changed that much over the years that I've been tracking it so people are still clicking on organic results they're still fighting through and with sge potentially I think we'll see more people clicking on organic results than before um so I absolutely think organic results are the way forward of course paid search can be absolutely phenomenal we've got some incredible paid search clients incredible results generated by paid search so I don't think this is an either or I think this is a both and of course you want both in a particular time of turbulence like this because last thing you want to be doing is relying on organic search for all of your traffic only for Google to update SG and you lose your visibility likewise you don't want to be relying on paid search and then if Google increases the prices because it's now built on some AI thing and you can't afford to play that game anymore and you've got no organic visibility sad times for you so you really want both of them particularly in a time like this um okay Sara says how do you see this changing the best practice of Epic skyscraper content if I wanted to write about topic show and now be breaking it down into different articles and blogs really good question Sara I don't think so but I would write individual blogs if you know what I mean so I'd still write that massive skyscraper content because that's going to pick up links that's going to get featured that's going to get you know citations that's going to get people talking and that's going to be really useful for for clients but I can't lie if you want to rank in SG as it stands today you do want micro blogs we call them exact match blogs which Target one specific topic I'm going to show you an example in just a minute uh Ron has asked uh given the uncertainty around how much SG will potentially impact organic search traffic doesn't make sense to increase spending paid social and Google ads um yes I would say I i' what I would say is if paid search and paid social haven't been a part of your marketing mix I would definitely add them because you want that backup plan now you might find as a lot of our clients find that actually paid search can be incredibly profitable and they want to keep paid search and organic search going hand inand because both of them are earning Roi so let's do both that's just the fastest way to grow your business um if paid social and paid search aren't massively profitable for you what you might want to do is keep those campaigns keep those channels ticking over you're not necessarily diverting huge amounts in but then if SG comes completely rocks your world to the negative side you got those channels warmed up and you can increase your spend so as to minimize any disruption to business okay we're gonna keep going uh oh Jack's asked a great question here what are the implications on text versus bids picks great question let's come back to that in a bit um okay great let's keep going the other thing that I wanted to play with is can we change sg's answers cuz sometimes SG gives like random or wrong answers can we actually Force this thing to spout out our truths instead we live in a post-truth world right we live in a post-truth world can we get sge to report on our truths instead of its own truths well friends yes we can turns out um so in this search how many books has Tim Cameron kitchen written the answer that sug was given was five books and it was a pretty rubbish answer if you look at this answer you can see how to get to the top of Google is listed here but then it's listed two other times as well so it's it's rubbish answer and it's actually wrong because there are two more secret terrible books that nobody knows about um so what I thought is or okay let's let's just influence this so we can influence this um and actually manag to influence this within five hours so SG had been pulling those answers that answer from Amazon and Goodreads and Thrift Books like all of these high quality websites so I just wrote a really trashy blog on my own personal website which is you know we've all got those personal websites that we never use never up to date this thing looks like a 100 years old I don't touch it I've forgotten the logins but what I did is I went and wrote a blog post on this website called how many blogs how many books has Tim Cameron kitchen written where I gave the answer and this is what I was referring to in sar's answer the exact match blog and actually influen sg's answer within five hours so within five hours SG is change its answer so this seems to imply that you can change sg's answer if you target it with a very specific piece of content about exactly that topic okay if it's aggregating from multiple sources you write a very specific piece of content about that exact topic and you can influence sg's answer this is very important if you're in the sort of reputation management or um you know corporate common space as well okay so how do you SG rankings well the first thing is exact factors are going to vary based on you versus your competitors because you need to be ranking prominently in Google search First in order to have a chance at ranking in sge most of the pages that we've been able to rank in sge have been already ranking in the first say page of Google results okay and then it's a case of tweaking and optimizing specifically for SG so we take an experimental approach we do the page copy adjustments I've shown you sometimes we'll create new Pages if needed uh building links if the page isn't ranking already we'll need to build links we'll need to get that page ranking first um and then of course you've got all the on-site technical optimization that's required to get a page ranking on the first page of Google as well you'll have to optimize your Mets um of course too so what do you do with all of this do you panic do you run for the hills do you just give up and go and cry uh there's the world seems to be getting terrible in every area and now we've got this are you freaking kidding me why can't we just have a nice year well three approaches three three three ways that we've seen um yeah Angel says I know about you guys but it seems like we are F yeah right well there's three ways of responding to this Angel and Co I'm going all in on SG right now ah I'm going to reoptimize our entire website every single page on the site we're going optimize making it top priority in case Google rolls this out immediately and it suddenly takes off these people are well prepared they sleep well at night but I think this is actually an overreaction at the moment because we don't know when St is going to rank uh is is going to launch the second approach people pretending that this is just going to go away hopefully they're not going to launch this this is your friend who tapes over the warning lights on their car dashboard you know generally a bad idea anyone who's been hammered by a Google algorithm update in the past will know that ignoring these things is not generally a good battle plan that brings sad times so we don't want to do that either the approach that we've been taking with clients is that they need to make plans with this or we need to make plans on their behalf for this so what we've been doing like for run sites for example we've been making sure that the team understands SG making sure that the client understands the potential impact of sge and if you're working with an SEO agency or an SEO person they need to know this thing inside out because this could drop at any time and the impact could be massive we don't know you don't want to be that business that's been doing SEO for years only to wake up one day find that SG is launched you've got no idea what you're doing all of your visibilities disappear that's rubbish okay you don't want to be that person so what we're doing is we're doing some initial research for all of our clients to experiment to see which searches bring up SG results we're then optimizing some of their pages to see what it takes to get those pages ranking for that particular website in that particular space that gives us and the client of course confidence okay when this thing rolls out or when we get notification of it rolling out we can then go through the rest of the site and optimize because we've already got some proven case studies um so this is the approach that we would suggest and of course we we can help you with this if you need so if you want a free review of your uh your website's SG potential you can apply for this at exposure. ninja sge so go to exposure. ninja ssge and we can talk to you about this we can uh review your website to see your SG ranking potential and whether you look to stand whether you look to gain or get hammered in the face by SG and of course make sure that you got a plan for this um we're also we're doing this for our clients as well exposure in clients get SG optimization it's one of the services that we offer we're one of the first agencies in the world to share the process that we're using for this publicly we think we're one of the first two agencies in the world to actually figure out how to optimize for SG and we're now doing this for clients and most agencies still aren't talking about this a lot of agencies don't even know that SG exists even SEO agencies don't even know that this thing exists that Google has been quietly testing it ready for a roll out they just got no idea at all so you need to make sure you're with an agency that actually sort of gets this stuff oh we've also started running training with different businesses to show them how to do this for themselves as well so if you've got a large in-house content team for example we can show you and we can actually work with you to do some tests um and to get some of your content ranking in SG to give you the confidence that you know you can do this for yourself as well okay so if you want to do any of that stuff then you can go to Expos . ninja slsg right we've got about 10 minutes to answer questions um and also I can show you how to find Opportunities to rank an SG using semrush so if you've got a website that you'd like us to if you'd like me to live demo um I'm not going to optimize you for SG I'm just going to show you how you would find some pages that will be a good fit for SG uh then just drop your website URL in the chat and I'll pick one at almost random okay so JX asks what are the implications on text versus video and piics great question Jack so some SG responses show videos and pictures embedded in them but not very many if I'm honest not very many at all most of the in fact all of the case studies that we've got of ranking in SG have been on uh using text um so if you're primarily publishing video content I know you've got a bunch of media properties but if you're publishing primarily video content you probably want some sort of transcription of that or at least summary notes and that paragraph at the top which summarizes whatever topic that you're talking about would be my my intuition of where you'd want to go with this so that you're making sure that you're giving SG what it really really wants um of course there are implications for video with Google's New Perspectives filter which is another massive massive change to search which we're expecting to come out as well um okay on pictures though just going back to the Carousel let me see if I can just quickly show you a demo um so right here here's an example of a of a search so this is a a search I've just done today I'm on a US VPN which is why I can see this and I'm signed up for search Labs which is why you got this thing now here's an example for a search which is a commercial search it's produced the generative AI answer so all of this up to here is the generative AI answer and look at what we've got these are being pulled from Google's um AI powered organic product feed um but we've still got the Carousel and what I've been noticing is that for commercial search Google is now more confident showing product listings here but if you want information if you want like to read someone's opinion or you want to read a guide on how to find the best uh you know cameras for you or some considerations it's still showing a Carousel and it's including websites in the carousel now what you'll notice is that only one of these sites has like a featured image which is showing up in in the carousel so which one are you going to click on you going to click on this one because you probably can't even be bothered to read the information here I don't mean you jack you're you're incredibly not lazy but and you know you're going to click on the one with the image particularly if the image is compelling and backs up the topic of the article so that's one implication for images is we want make sure each of our Pages has a featured image which SG is likely to show and then sometimes in some of these you'll also see images too so I think bets to be safe than sorry and have images that work in this sort of thumbnail size um okay uh next question we've got from Daniel who says have you tested these strategies in perplexity yeah great question Daniel so um yes uh perplexity and chat GPT are the other generative a I type answer engines which I've been playing in now they seem to work slightly differently so what um what I've noticed for example with chat GPT in fact all all of these all of these AI chat uh search engines or Arts engines seem to basically work it in a pretty similar way um and that is they they they carry they you type a query they pass your query into you know search language Boolean search language and then they run a background search and then they summarize some of the results that are brought up by that background search so chat GPT does exactly this let's say that you search for uh best pizza restaurants in Bristol right we got someone tuning in from Bristol best pizza pizza restaurants in Bristol what chat gbt will do is it will go and run a Bing search for best pizza restaurants Bristol okay so it takes if I give it a really lengthy oh I'm going to Bristol next weekend and I want to go my family and I want to find out the best pizza restaurants I want to find the best restaurants I'm thinking about pizza yeah Pizza would be pretty good if I dump that train of thought garbage into chat gbt it's going to go right okay let's just let's just search on Bing for best pizza restaurants Bristol it's then going to run that search and it's going to pick out some of the websites that are listed in the search results and it's going to then rewrite or select some of the information from those sites and essentially rewrite that in the search results that seems to be what perplexity is doing as well so the background is basically doing a web search and then it's just rewriting some of the content from the sites so the the name of the game in those in those search engines or those answer engines of these gen gen Bots is to figure out which websites it's referencing first of all so we can make sure that we're found on those websites or we can provide one of those websites so we can influence the answer and then of course how it's deciding which bits of information from those pages to take and regurgitate to the user so that's that's what I've been researching recently um and yeah kind of interesting chat gbt seems to favor um really sort of low quality blogs bizarrely so you know if you search for best pizza restaurants Bristol you would get predominantly Trip Advisor trust pilot that you know those types of uh you know local directory type um websites but chat GPT doesn't tend to site those as its sources instead it tends to focus on you know mummy blog travel or I travel kids you know stuff like this like really sort of I don't say low quality because that's disservice these are these blogs are run by people who are really passionate but they're not they're no like condas traveler that's for sure right but chat GPT seems to favor citing these types of sources instead so I think that's interesting whether or not they continue to do that as they build on their search product I'm not sure um but yeah some just some initial thoughts there okay uh Dale's hungry great so what we're g to do is just have a quick look at someone's um website to see where we can find some opportunities for sge ranking I'm going to choose one which I want one that's fairly High Authority and has some decent ranking so [Music] um okay let's go for I'm going to go for Fitness hyphen nation . Ro now I think this might be a Romanian site let's see I change tabs here we go so we're going to go Fitness and by the way this is how I find Opportunities to rank in uh in SG so this isn't like I'm not going to guarantee that you're going to rank if you follow these steps but I find some rush we use SE ranking as well exposion ininja to be really good hey look at that organic traffic chart high five to you who's who submitted this site Angel nice one okay uh we obviously got a bit of visibility worldwide but predominantly in Romania as you would expect now damn it I don't speak Romanian ah foiled here okay I'm going to talk you through the process anyway this is what I would do so first thing I would do is have a look at the the keywords that we're ranking positions like one to 24 um and the reason we oh gosh things have just gotten slightly weird all right there we go that's why okay so we're looking for keywords that we're ranking positions say 1 to 20 this actually I've just realized um that this isn't going to work for this particular case has anybody got uh higher traffic site in us or UK let's go for Nick Wilcox Brown wild photography.co.uk I'm really sorry Angel wild photographer. c. okay okay there's not enough traffic to this site really for this to work but okay now maybe there is maybe there is okay so this search here this is one that I would look at okay low traffic currently yeah so so what what I say here firstly Nick let's get a dedicated page about Wildlife photography holidays which we could optimize for this search and let's say that it's a dedicated page that's ranking for this search now you're ranking position nine for your homepage for this so it's not the end of the world let's just have a quick look at the page and see how optimized it is for the phrase holidays okay wild photography holidays okay all right so the next thing I would do once I found a page that's a bit like this which is ranking reasonably well on Google for this term the next thing I would do is I go and check to see if we're getting SGU results so Wildlife holidays UK and what I'm going to do is all right so here we can see we've already got this SG panel it hasn't asked us to generate it's automatically generated us an SG response now the top ranking site here is the guardian so I can see that you're not ranking here nick uh but that doesn't mean you couldn't um and then we're having a look down here now I can see that you're not ranking anywhere none of these are yours okay but I wouldn't be too put off by this so what I would then do wa what's going on there what I would then do where's it gone what I would then do is I'd look at this response here this answer and I would make sure that at the top of my page I was covering each of these so some of the best Wild Life holiday options in the UK include K gor's National Park a bit of information about this not too much because we want this section to be maybe one or two paragraphs M hdes cruises Lo sh cruises you know and so on you basically summarize the answer here at the top of the page in Fairly short language then further on in the page you're going to give much more detail about each of these but I would bet that none of these are going to have none of these are probably going to comprehensively cover all of this information they'll each cover a bit right space side Wildlife is that one there okay so they're probably only going to cover that one how to spot those in a fer Crossing each of these is going to offer Pac mail bits of this answer if you could cover all of this answer and you're already ranking reasonably well for this term now you might not be ranking reasonably well in the US for this term it doesn't look like you are but if you're already ranking reasonably well for this time you've got a decent shot there oh I've just realized this is absolutely tiny and you can't see it you got a decent shot there of um of picking up SG position and probably one of these first ones um so that'll be how I'd approach that okay um okay anybody else got a a website they want me to take a look at or anybody got any SG questions that they want me to take a look at feel free ohd St some for me I think I've answered all of those great if you got any questions drop them in the chat otherwise I'm going to go and grab some food cool but stay sharp with SG obviously keep testing it I'd encourage you all to play with it um you need to know how this thing works you need to know the types of searches that it's um that it's bringing up uh in in your space you need to know which types of searches are triggering SG results and you need to see how this thing's working as well what you don't want to be doing is trying to optimize for something that you're not familiar with so you need to spend some time digging into this um right doy reports.com Paul's just submitted that we're going to do that one then we're gonna all go and do some other stuff doir reports.com but thank you everyone for tuning in I hope you found this useful right so doy reports.com where are we it's not loading oh is loading it's another fairly low traffic site this one so I'm not sure this is going to work either but okay School Port school report writer okay nice nice I mean you got all sorts of questions about AI haven't you here but anyway all right school report writer so what we do is we'd head over to SG and we'd just search for school report writer and see right so this is one of those where SG isn't by default providing an answer it does give us the option to do it so if we do that let's see what we get but that but by the fact that it doesn't give me an answer by default makes me imp makes me think that actually this probably isn't going to roll out by standard um but nevertheless you can still optimize for it this is really interesting this is really interesting this is one of the few SG results I've seen that actually doesn't site any sources at all what it's doing is it's summarizing these answers wow okay so what I might do here is um produce a a page on your site something like best uh free school report writing tools or something like that and then of course list yours whether or not it's free or not I don't know you might want to have a of a play with that but if you could write some content here which might might influence this even if it has to influence the version when they've retuned this and you know it's ingested all the world's information again that's that's the plan here so what I maybe think about might be some other terms like how to or maybe school report templates something like that see if that brings up any any links yeah Okay so we've got some here all right these tend to be more design focused I'm not sure that that's actually what people are going to be wanting here interesting yeah so I'd have a play with this anyway I think it's going to be very difficult to unseat canva because it does seem to want to show actual templates here but if you could have maybe a blog post which offers some free templates uh free written templates as well as maybe some designs as well um then you know you've got a chance of of competing for some of these okay I've got to go thanks everyone for tuning in I hope you found this useful um don't forget to uh to go to exposure . ninj sge if you want to talk to one of the team about us either implementing this for you or training your team on it um then uh then do that no worries thanks everyone I'll see you soon enjoy

Channel: Exposure Ninja

Views: 1,519

Keywords: exposure ninja, tim cameron-kitchen, exposure ninja live, how to rank in sge, how to rank sge, rank in sge, how to rank in search generative experience, rank in search generative experience, rank top of sge, rank top of search generative experience, rank top of google, how to rank top of google

Id: em17d_1s-YQ

Length: 65min 21sec (3921 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2024