After ChatGPT was released in November of 2022, it was an arm’s race for all the competitors to publicly launch their AI chatbot. While Google’s Bard became a public access resource shortly later, it is important to understand that Google has been using AI for almost a decade. It has not been a major part of the Google Search algorithm, but it is becoming more prominent every single month. The latest updates are updates that include predictive text and predictive answers. This is where a searcher will see the “finishing” of their search along with the best search result.
This means it is even more important to be #1 or the best result in Google Search. Note that #1 is not always the search result that shows up with AI or some of the other interactive search features. Must of the time it is, but not every single time. So, how does a small business get into the AI Google Search results? Provide great, consistent content.
It has been said time and time again that content is king. That has never been more true than in 2023 and going into 2024. What most people do not understand is the important of unique and high quality content. It is better to provide a single high quality page on a website than 20 very sparse and unappealing pages. It can be argued if one very long post or several short posts is better, but what cannot be argued is that it needs to be unique and of high quality.
There are link building and other SEO techniques that can help a website rank highly in search, but the links need to point to content that is so unique that it was first seen by the Google algorithm with its spiders crawled that specific piece of content. Anything that is even remotely close to other content is going to get lost in the shuffle as the algorithm gets better when it gets brand new information. As some marketers like to say, “it is better to be first than good.”