Rank Your Website on Google AND on LLMs, Complete Playbook

I'm going to tell you the difference between AEO, answer engine optimization, versus SEO, which is search engine optimization, because some people say it's the same thing, but there are some important nuances that you have to understand to get it right. And obviously you want to appear first, right? Because if you're not first, you're last. So first, I'm going to lead off to the AEO side of things. When it comes to AEO, if you want to win the top 10 here, listicle placements is number one. We have a digital marketing agency, so we want to appear on the top 10 digital marketing agencies in Los Angeles. There's a lot of different permutations that we can go after. And what we've noticed with these answer engines is they'd like to go after listicles. You can create listicles for yourself. You can reach out to these other listicles. When you look at AI mode, just look at who they're listing, or you can use different tools out there. We use the Ahrefs Brand Radar. Use AI to find the contact information for all these and just reach out to these people. That's one of the things that you can do to get listed higher when it comes to these, these, these answer engines. Number 2, citations matter a lot. And so When you think about Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, these are actually the top 3 places that are being listed when it comes to these answer engines. And then you also want to look at AI mode or ChatGPT, like what sources are they listing the most? And there's a handful of tools that you can use to help you with this. Peak.ai is one that we use, Profound, Ahrefs Brand Radar. They can help you with looking at all these sources. You should be able to, you know, find a lot of the people that you should be reaching out to, the places that you should be cited in. And then you can have an AI even help you with the outreach. Number 3 is building a Reddit/community forum presence. And so there's a graph I looked at a while back where it showed that the communities for a software company like a HubSpot or a Shopify, for example, all their community sections, their forums, and they shot up, up into the right. And so what's happening is these answer engines are favoring user-generated content more because they know that there's a lot more machine content that's going to be generated on the internet, right? And so you want to make sure that you're building a community presence. One, you can make a subreddit for your own business and then have a community manager on top of that. 2, you can have customer support people from your team answering questions in that, in that subreddit for your company. But the 3rd thing is actually having someone who's a maybe outside community manager. So we do this for our clients at Single Grain, but we're finding the right threads that have the most engagement that rank well on these answer engines already. And hopefully whatever conversation that we're adding, it's getting a lot of upvotes. And so we're appearing higher and higher. Number 4 would be creating Bottom of the funnel content and guides. And so what I mean by that is instead of saying, where is Japan, for example, you want to go more bottom of the funnel. You want to go for fun things to do in Japan, fun things to do in Tokyo, or luxury hotels or cheap hotels in Tokyo. And then you can create guides around these. And the answer engines like to go for complete answers. And a lot of times they'll list the transactional content, and that transactional content will then— you'll drive more traffic to your website, which will then convert at a higher conversion rate. So that type of content, Works really well, and I would say that FAQs work really well. Think about adding FAQs to your existing content using our software internally. We use ClickFlow. We add a lot of FAQs to content that we already have, and then new FAQs frequently asked questions to new content that we're putting out. And what that does is it gives you more shots on goals to appear for like an AI overview as an example for these answer engines. But the goal here is that you have more complete content. Could be you know guide guides data that you have comparisons things like that FAQs. Those all go a long way because most people aren't willing to do that. Number 6 would be adding custom human insights. So as I mentioned, you want to have interesting data that you can share. Maybe there's case study stories that you can share, and that's a lot better than stiff content that has no soul to it, right? Ultimately, you're trying to add more value to the humans. When someone searches for fun things to do in Japan, there might be snippets of testimonials that appear in an answer engine result. Number 7 would be optimizing for conversational keywords on main pages. Maybe there's conversational questions that you can add in there, right? Or, you know, when I'm in Japan, what are the best restaurants I can go to in this part of the town? Right. And then you can just try to cover other permutations that might follow up from that. And then the LLMs or these, these answer engines can then pick it up. Number 8 is you want to optimize for brand mentions across the web. And so the more collaborations you can have or the more content that you're putting out, the more reviews that you have, the more things that you're doing to get yourself out there, that keeps your brand fresh. And the answer engines are looking for this. And ultimately, just remember that their goal has always been to provide the best possible answer to their users, and they're able to do that now with a lot more horsepower. Number 9 is you want to fix your crawlability and technical issues on your website. And so any issues around maybe certain pages or sections on your site being blocked, maybe your website's not that fast from a mobile standpoint, a desktop standpoint, you want to unblock these answer engines from crawling your website, because if you're blocking them from maybe 50% of your website, that's 50% less potential traffic that you can be getting. If you want to run personalized LinkedIn ads at scale and get these ads up in minutes instead of weeks, you've got to check out Karrot. So Karrot, K-A-R-R-O-T.ai, will allow you to create personalized ads on LinkedIn, personalized landing pages. We are also adding in different automations to spin up these ads quickly. We have different creative options as well that will integrate even cool things like Google Nano Banana. A lot of cool things coming down the pipeline. If you are serious about about B2B marketing, you're serious about LinkedIn, you gotta check out Carrot, and we'll see you on the other side. Number 10 is to use AI workflows to execute at scale. And what I mean by that is you don't need to publish content completely manually anymore. In fact, when we talk to some of the best SEOs in the world, they're all using AI to help them. It's AI-assisted, meaning that AI might help you 50, 60, 70% of the way, and then you have a human doing 30, 40, 50% of the work to review the content that you're putting out there, You have one human now that can do 10x more work, 100x more work. And so you want to leverage AI workflows to do that. And so these are just 10 things that you can do from an answer engine optimization standpoint. Now I'm going to move you over into the key fundamentals around SEO. So number one, when it comes to SEO, is you want to target keywords ideally with volume of at least 500 and a keyword difficulty of less than 40. Now this depends on your website. Keyword difficulty is scored on a scale of 1 to 100. We use Ahrefs to kind of score keyword difficulty. And the reason we look for a volume of at least 500 is if a keyword's established already, people are searching for it. 500 is not that bad to go after. And these keywords, if it's less than 40, it's not that difficult, right? But the game is changing so much now. It's not just a keyword. It's, it's, it's very long questions that people are asking. And so when it comes to SEO, you can still optimize for shorter phrases. And this is a good starting point. The number 2, you want to prioritize commercial intent keywords like best product or product versus competitor. Or like product alternatives, right? So you might say Salesforce versus HubSpot, or you might say Salesforce pricing as an example. These are all bottom of funnel. Number three is you want to create pillar posts. And so one example of this might be I might have a page on my website such as what is conversion rate optimization, and then I might have thirty guides in there on the different aspects of conversion rate optimization. And that that's this is just a pillar of of marketing, right? And these do very well from an SEO standpoint. And from an AEO standpoint, these do well because it's a complete page that also internally links to, or links to other sources that makes it easy for these answer engines and these search engines to determine, hey, like if this is just a complete source over here and a lot of people are talking about it, a lot of people are linking to it, then we should maybe give it more credit. Number 4 would be is you want to optimize your main product pages. And what I mean by that is the main product pages. So like Salesforce, for example, like the main products and features that they might have, you want to optimize those from an internal linking standpoint. So You might want to have the main features show up in the navigation. You want to have a lot of internal links pointing to those pages. You might even have some external links pointing to those pages too. That still matters, not just from an SEO standpoint, but also from an AEO standpoint too. Now, you might be thinking that page titles and meta descriptions are dead today, but you still need to make it easy for search engines to determine what your page is about. Still today, we have clients that come to us on the single brand side where they don't even have the right page title for their homepage. You can optimize this using different tools. You can create different workflows for this as well. Number 6, you want to audit for technical SEO. And so making sure that your site is— your site speed is good, making sure that your robots.txt, there's no shenanigans going on over there, making sure that you're checking your Google Search Console for the number of errors and fixing those errors, right? You can use different auditing tools out there, like Ahrefs has an auditing tool that I really like where you can just keep checking in on issues with your website. Number 7, link building. Link building still isn't dead. Links and content are still very much the currency of SEO. And so the more websites, the more reputable websites that are linking to your product, the better you're going to do from an SEO standpoint. And if you are Google and you own Gemini, they're still looking at the traditional algorithm, even though it's evolving quite a bit. They're still looking at it, right? And guess what? ChatGPT, they pull quite a bit from Google. Okay, so you don't want to throw away link building. Some people say link building is dead. Not quite dead right now. It still matters quite a bit. It's a huge signal when it comes to algorithms. Number 8, you want to optimize for the featured snippets. And so a featured snippet could be you search for something and then you might get an AI overview, right? That's now the new featured snippet. But what that means is you might want to have FAQs on the pages that you have and you want to make it— you might want to have H1 tags as well, answering questions in 2 to 3 sentences or so. That's how you optimize for featured snippets. And these will also appear on answer engines as well. And then you also want to optimize your internal linking architecture. We kind of touched upon it earlier. But you want to make sure that you're constantly rethinking what are the most important pages on your website, and you want to have as many internal links pointing to those as possible. So then the search engines can detect that. Sometimes we've seen in the past with clients, they might have a keyword where they're ranking number 15 for it. And then once we push a couple of internal links at it, it's then ranking number 3, and they're getting a lot more traffic, and they're driving a lot more conversions. So these are just a handful of things that you can do when it comes to optimizing for AEO. And SEO. And so let me know if you think I missed anything in the comments. And you can check out this next video over here. This is a talk that I did at the HubSpot Inbound Conference on how I'm using AI SEO to 100x my traffic and sales.