Do More With Less: How To Build An AI Search Strategy With Limited Resources
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Juggling multiple channels? Thinking organic search isn’t actionable enough to help you reach your objective? Historically, organic search has been technical, time-consuming, and slow to show results, especially compared to the immediate impact of paid and social campaigns. Add to this that you now need to optimize not only for Google but multiple AI search platforms, and you might just push organic search to the bottom of your priority list. What if you could: -Build an effective search strategy without getting too technical -Implement optimizations in seconds -See growing traffic in days, not months, thanks to AI -Build an SEO strategy to improve your visibility on both traditional and AI search -Receive a helpful SEO framework following a 45-minute webinar Organic search isn't just another channel. It's the tide that lifts all boats. It delivers sustainable traffic that doesn't disappear when you pause campaigns, provides the highest ROI of any digital channel, and serves as the ultimate trust signal for your brand. Watch a session designed for SEO professionals and digital marketing teams wanting to get more from organic search. You’ll learn how to: -Audit and prioritize your most impactful optimizations using AI tools -Execute at scale without overwhelming your engineering Check out to craft a smarter AI-powered SEO roadmap that delivers real results fast, even with a small team.
Do More With Less: How To Build An AI Search Strategy With Limited Resources
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- 2. 2 SEO Consultant, Botify Vince Moreau
- 3. 3 Challenges Faced By Teams Responsible for Search What we’re hearing from customers Too much to do, too few resources Change is happening to fast I have no control over my website I don’t know where to start
- 6. 6 How many weekly users does ChatGPT have today? POLL
- 8. 8 Traditional search relies on crawlers finding your pages and indexing them Pages that fail in the early part of the funnel won’t be indexed. And pages that aren’t indexed will never convert. CRAWL RENDER INDEX RANK CONVERT
- 9. 9 User asks a question Limited answer due to lack of recent content to source it from LLM use static content to answer the question AI search relies on LLMs, models that are pre-trained on “static” content
- 10. 10 On their own, Large Language Models are not up to date
- 11. 11 User asks a question Augmented answer LLM use trained model with relevant fresh content Fresh content retrieval (RAG) Query Relevant fresh content How AI Search engines work today + Google scrapping + New indexes AI Search pulls fresh content from traditional indexes using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
- 12. 12 Do you know how often ChatGPT is crawling your site? POLL
- 13. 13 OpenAI bot visits grew by 4x this year Source: Botify - volume of crawl from OpenAI across Botify’s customer base. All Bots Traffic Overtime (By SearchEngineGroups - SUM of Volumes)
- 14. 14 Being crawled by OpenAI is a chance to be part of the conversation
- 15. 15 Prioritize what will boost your visibility on all platforms at the same time! Optimize for all platforms The future of search is decentralized and fragmented, and you need to adapt. Stay informed Stay up-to-date by checking out reliable sources of information and stay alert for the latest info. Don’t believe too much hype! AI Search is hyped up by everyone, but most lack fundamental understanding of how the tech works. Monitor bot traffic Monitor, analyze and understand how bots interact with your website, and what you can do to improve.
- 16. 16 02 Start with a story, end with a strategy
- 17. 17 The Journey The R oadm ap T h e A r r i v a l T h e D e s t i n a t i o n The Plot People Love Stories ● Decision acceleration ● Memory retention ● Emotional connection Context and meaning ● Simplification
- 18. 18 The Plot Setting the scene The Plot Your stakeholders need to understand the context before they agree to go an a journey with you: ● How is the company performing? How is it performing in the context of our industry? ● What are our strengths and weaknesses? ● Where does SEO fit in your marketing mix? ● What is our current website performance? ● Who are we fighting against? ● What did we do and what has worked? The Journey The R oadm ap T h e A r r i v a l T h e D e s t i n a t i o n
- 19. 19 If you don’t know where to start, AI intelligence can help you
- 20. 20 Audit your website’s current performance Questions to answer: ● What do I want Google & bots to see? ● Are they seeing everything I want them to see? ● Is there crawl waste? ● Is my website architecture optimal? ● Should I block/remove some parts of the site? Technical Audit
- 21. 21 Audit your website’s current performance Content Audit Questions to answer: ● What do I want Google & bots to see? ● Are they seeing everything I want them to see? ● Is there crawl waste? ● Is my website architecture optimal? ● Should I block/remove some parts of the site? Questions to answer: ● Is my content structured correctly (templates)? ● Is my keyword targeting on point? ● Are there gaps in my keyword/intent strategy? ● How do I compare to competitors? ● How is my current content performing? ● What content do I need to go where I want? Technical Audit
- 22. 22 Real Example: % of Crawl Activity By Traditional and AI Search Bots (3 months) Assess your situation across all platforms
- 23. 23 Ask your organization the right questions: ● Why do I need my website to be found by bots? ● Do I want AI models trained on my content? ● Which content do I want (or don’t want) models to access and train on? ● Do I want AI search to find my newest content and summarize it for consumers? ● Which content do I want AI bots to find and prioritize? Which one should I block? Understand bot traffic and build a governance plan Build a Governance Plan
- 24. 24 Ask your organization the right questions: ● Why do I need my website to be found by bots? ● Do I want AI models trained on my content? ● Which content do I want (or don’t want) models to access and train on? ● Do I want AI search to find my newest content and summarize it for consumers? ● Which content do I want AI bots to find and prioritize? Which one should I block? Understand bot traffic and build a governance plan Build a Governance Plan Identify New Opportunities Once you have a good understanding of your governance plan and visibility on what pages are visible and not visible to bots, you can start optimizing to ensure your critical content is being crawled and correctly understood.
- 25. 25 The Destination Setting the Objective The big question here is: “what does success look like?” This is true internally and externally (with vendors). This should be specific to your overall company objectives, industry, short, medium and long-term projects. Examples: ● “We need to migrate from Shopify to Salesforce Commerce Cloud in Q3 with less than 20% traffic loss” ● “We want to increase non-branded traffic to 40% of overall traffic mix.” The Plot The Journey The R oadm ap T h e A r r i v a l T h e D e s t i n a t i o n
- 26. 26 T h e D e s t i n a t i o n The Plot The Journey The R oadm ap T h e A r r i v a l The Roadmap Mapping the Journey It’s now time to map the path to your objective, to connect where you are (Plot) with where you want to be (Destination). ● How are we going to achieve this? ● What should we prioritize? ● How does it help to achieve the company’s greater objectives?
- 27. 27 Build your strategy around these core pillars Existing Content What type of content am I missing to target new keywords and perform even better? Technical Health Can my website be discovered, crawled and indexed efficiently by search and answer engines? New Content AI Search Readiness How do I make sure we show up in AI search like ChatGPT or Perplexity? What can I do to maintain or improve the performance of the content I already have? Crawl Frequency Sitemaps Status Code Keywords Linking PDP, PLP Intent Keyword Gap Facets Logs AI Governance AI traffic
- 28. 28 Align with your company objectives Website Health ● “Cleaning Up” for new product releases, upcoming migrations, upcoming PIM change, etc… Content Optimization ● ”Defending our brand against resellers to preserve our margins and help our profitability efforts” ● “Help our net-new revenue growth efforts by pursuing new keywords and different personas” AI Search ● “Make sure we have first mover advantage and we’re ready for all the new features that are about to release” (Shopping) Prioritized by impact Rank the issues you found by: ● Is it a critical issue? ● Lowest effort, maximum impact ● Number of platforms it will have an impact on ● Amount of convincing and developper time
- 29. 29 Rank the issues you found by: ● Is it a critical issue? ● Lowest effort, maximum impact ● Number of platforms it will have an impact on ● Amount of convincing and developper time Prioritize by impact Use AI to help you speed up the process
- 30. 30 Your winning SEO roadmap For each task: effort, impact, timeline, planned time, specific details (w/ additional reports), owner, etc. Create a list of tasks Group tasks by month, quarter and try to group them thematically Estimated time to complete Make sure to have a detailed timeline Technical SEO objectives Existing content objective New content objectives Group tasks by SEO objective Where we are? Where we need to go What’s blocking us How we’re going to overcome this Summarize your story in a deck
- 31. 31 Without a story, your “strategy” is just a to-do list
- 32. 32 Roadmap & strategy vs list of tasks Strategy: The story of where you are and where you’re going Roadmap: How you’ll get there, step by step ● Endless checklist ● No purpose ● Tough to prioritize ● Tough to understand ● Tough to report on “Last month we fixed 3xx/4xx inlinks because they’re bad for you” LIST OF TASKS ● Overarching themes ● Tied to company objectives (big or small) ● Easily prioritized based on most pressing issue/objective “Last month we finished cleaning up our internal linking errors as part of the cleanup effort for our upcoming Q3 migration. This will help transition smoothly and avoid traffic loss.” ROADMAP/STRATEGY
- 33. 33 Final product: a list of issues and solutions
- 34. 34 T h e D e s t i n a t i o n The Plot The Journey The R oadm ap T h e A r r i v a l The Execution The Journey Execution is where most SEO projects fail. We’ll cover the 2 main reasons why most SEO tasks do not get implemented. Make sure to take both into account, and strategize a way to solve them!
- 35. 35 Why most SEO initiatives end up failing ● One person to handle many topics (PPC, SEO, Content, etc.) ● SEO manager focused on internal coordination or internal projects ● Marketing manager with little or no SEO experience ● Not enough overall SEO knowledge in-house I don’t have the bandwidth or knowledge to execute SEO My optimizations are stuck in our engineering backlog ● Tough to prove value or specific SEO tasks prior to implementation ● Most SEOs do not speak the dev language ● Tech constraints on large websites can be huge, and impact SEO.
- 36. 36 Make sure that hiring externally won’t cost you more time The right story has the power to unlock budgets ● Show them what they can get! ● Tie everything back to a larger goal T h e D e s t i n a t i o n The Plot The Journey The R oadm ap T h e A r r i v a l First step: Show the size of the prize!
- 37. 37 The full backlog conundrum The Problem Engineering teams are involved in many projects As SEOs, we have critical issues we want to tackle fast
- 38. 38 Own the end-to-end optimization process with PageWorkers ● Make search optimizations to your website at scale in just minutes with just a few clicks ● Reduce implementation time from months to minutes, minimizing reliance on your dev team ● Test for the most impactful optimizations leveraging split testing capabilities ● Maximize crawl budget faster by taking actions with no delay
- 39. 39 Optimization example 3K+ SUCCESS STORY meta titles and descriptions updated in a day TIPS Focus on template-level optimizations, PDPs, PLPs Follow the prioritization you already did Use AI tools (Botify Assist) to easily identify scalable optimizations
- 40. 40 +42% +27% Impressions per optimized URL +11% Clicks per optimized URL Click through rate Leading retailer used Botify Activation to create and test content at scale SUCCESS STORY
- 41. 41 Use Generative AI to create content at scale Use AI to analyze your first party data and prioritize the most impactful optimizations Example of an Agentic Workflow Automate the deployment of changes to see results faster The Solution Automate for Speed and Scale
- 42. 42 T h e D e s t i n a t i o n The Plot The Journey The R oadm ap T h e A r r i v a l The Arrival Your new baseline to do it all over again Traditional SEO and AI search is an iterative process ● Now is the time to reflect on what you’ve done and whether you’ve made it ● You also need to start all over again, and adjust your strategy and roadmap to newer objectives.
- 43. 43 Measure success with the right KPIs Traffic KPIs (clicks, impressions, sessions, etc.) Revenue KPIs (Conversions, revenue) With the right tools, you’ll be able to access the right KPIs for every goal:
- 44. 44 But don’t lose track of your leading metrics Number of canonicals self not equal Number of 404 or 301 links Number of crawls to non-200 URLs And more…
- 45. 45 Evolve Your Roadmap and Story to Stay Current
- 46. 46 Key Takeaways Prove effectiveness as fast as possible Use automation to speed up your time to market to prove ROI. Equip yourself with the right tools Identify issues and fixes with the right tool for the job. Iterate, iterate, iterate SEO and AI search is a never-ending process. Keep fixing, testing and improving fast. Speak everyone’s language Don’t assume everyone understands SEO and AI search. Adapt your message to match your audience's understanding.
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- 48. 48 We’re here to help Vincent Moreau https://www.linkedin.com/in/scalecrushvince/ Find me on LinkedIn https://bit.ly/SEJ-consultation
- 50. Thank You!
- 51. Thank You!