Ryan Kelly: Are you on?
Devin Halliday: I’m on.
Ryan Kelly: All right, OK, here we go. Hey, welcome back to AI on the Fly. I’m Ryan Kelly, your host. And in this third part of our three-part mini series talking about tracking AI metrics, we still have our friend Devin Halliday, Director of Marketing for WSI Smart Marketing with me. In the first video, we kind of covered can you track AI and does it matter? In the second video, we talked about what metrics to track and where to track them from and how to measure if you’re being successful. In this third video, I thought I would ask a really simple question, Devin: when we’re going after search engine optimization, when we’re going after answer engine optimization, we know that when you do really good search engine optimization, you’re sort of doing some foundational stuff for answer engine optimization. And likewise, when you’re doing good answer engine optimization, you’re oftentimes doing good search engine optimization at the same time. So if I were to ask you what are like three tactics that you think are really moving the needle right now when it comes to getting found on answer engines and in AI overviews and in all those places, what do you think are the top three main things we can do to gain traction on AI results?
Devin Halliday: Yeah. So this is a simple one. It’s simple, and it’s design, but really it requires deliberate effort. So I’d say the first thing, Ryan, is that you want to remember it’s all about the O: optimization. So foundational search engine optimization is still very important. Those foundations help make sure that you have the right authority, that you have the right structures. But onto authority, this is another one that’s really important: authorship of the content. So when you have some credibility in your authorship, it’s not a blog posted by a generic blog post. It’s posted with an author attributable, who has a social media following and profile, who has maybe other published works out there. That authorship adds to the credibility and the authority that helps build it. And then I think the last one is really, from a content marketing standpoint, making sure that you answer the questions that are always being asked right now. You can do that in ways we talked about in video two of this series, some of those tactics that are there. So if you haven’t watched it, go watch it. And then really, I think beyond that, it’s making sure that we have a really clear, really consistent foundation.
And then I think the last one is really writing like you are the authority: add content that answers the questions people are looking for. Make sure that when you provide anything on your website, it’s useful to people who are searching and it answers questions. Because the number one thing people are doing when they’re looking through GPT, through Claude and others, is they’re looking for an answer to a question that’s more complex. It could be planning for something. It could be trying to understand why something works or doesn’t work a certain way, which is different from the way we’ve maybe done structured content marketing in the past. So this adapted approach to content marketing is the answer.
OK, so, tactic #1: foundational SEO. Make sure your website is fast. Make sure you don’t have broken links. Make sure you have good metadata, good descriptions of things. Make sure that you have good video. Make sure that your name, address, and phone number across the internet all match everywhere. Just normal foundational SEO stuff. #2: authority. Build authority. Become the authority in your industry. And you can oftentimes do that through #3, which is adapted content marketing. Good authorship. Answer real questions. Make sure that you’re writing to an audience. You know, they say that when you talk to a person, they listen. When you talk to people, they don’t. So talk to a person. Be specific in your messaging.
Ryan Kelly: Devin, I think this is great, man.
Devin Halliday: Thank you guys.
Ryan Kelly: Thank you, Devin, for being here on our trip as well. And I just want to say, if you like this and you like the short-form content, please subscribe to our channel. And until next time, I’m Ryan Kelly, your host of AI on the Fly. Take care, all right?