Rank in BOTH AI Overviews & Organic Search: Topic-first SEO Strategy

[Music] So we will move on to the research aspects within here. So you can always toggle at the side research. You will go into the competitive research section. But what we want to look at is AI search. So, we want to go into the AI search and we're going to embed the um our brand's domain. So, we're going to embed Fenty Beauty. Again, you can choose a location whether it's UK, US, or wherever your um whatever market you want to sort of look at. And we can click analyze. So, when we click analyze, we're now analyzing Fenty Beauty.co.uk to answer questions like, are we just being mentioned or are we being linked as well? or what kind of traffic are we getting from AI citations? Which keywords and pages are are sort of getting picked up? And we

can see here that within sort of Fenty within the UK, they do have a good domain trust. They do have a good um organic traffic, but within the AI search elements, we can see here that they've been mentioned 539 times. and it shows you the percentage share as well as a comparing it month-to-month to see if your mentions are going up or going down. Again, allowing you to better track it for reporting too. So, Fenty appears in nearly in quite a lot of AI AI prompts. I mean, 97% of a share is almost nearly every AI prompt and the link presence is 27. So, only 4% of those mentions are are sort of um linked as linked. So the average position here is 9.5. So slipping slightly um this um slack slightly within August and but the AI traffic is up from 14 um where it was 13 last period. So again very very good for

um reporting but I want you to also make note here that we're looking into AI overviews. What I really enjoy about this is that we can sort of toggle between the different LNM models we want to check. AI overviews, AI mode, chat, jeypity, Gemini, Perplexity. I do believe Gemini and Perplexity are going to be sort of um the full scope will be launched later on. Um but again, you have that option to check different LLM. So, we're not limited to just AI overviews. I would say from a content perspective and to form topical authority, it's very good to check a breath of LLM models just to see if there's one consistency and two which LM model does um you know mention your brand specifically a lot versus um the other and then you can sort of think about how we can streamline the content to make sure that it is applicable for all of those models in general. But let's continue with a deep dive. Um in the last session of course Ben went through in terms of the traffic where you can see the organic traffic as it

falls and where the traffic from AIO picks up. So we can see here that organic has gone down but the AIO traffic the estimated traffic has gone up and we can see how it sort of fluctuates. So this is a classic SEO insight. You can be visible but if you're not linked you're not getting clicks. Um, so that's the rule of thumb that you should you should sort of have. If we look at the link presence dynamics here, we can track and we can see a spike in link presence between um March and June and we can also see a rise in AI traffic around July and August. This could correlate to a few things and it allows you to kind of think about the wider aspect of your strategy in terms of what's h maybe what's happening within the industry, maybe what's happening within the company. So this could be a few things. If you're e-commerce, it can be you might have had a new product pages. You might either have seasonal content being picked up by AI summaries or you might have structured content that is easier for AI

models to to um pass or site. So again, there's so many variations that you can do and allows you to sort of investigate. Um but let's look at the keyword level insights which is down here. So the beauty of it within AI search is again um as Ben said before it shows us these keywords. So it shows us the keyword search volume traffic and type. So let's take the first example blotting is the keyword. We can see it has 880 search volume. Um and then Fenty we can see here Fenty is not just mentioned but they are linked within the snippets. So again meaning that from this keyword within AI search that it is following through and providing a link again providing that traffic into um Fenty Beauty's website. Um as we said earlier it's great to be mentioned but we want to have that extra um extra boost and to have that we want to be linked as well but we can also see other

websites that are being linked for this keyword. So we can see um there's a site called watercolor painting. There is a Collins dictionary that gives us a definition of blotting, a Wikipedia page, and an Amazon page that drives to a product link as well as well as a YouTube link as um YouTube link within that. So again, this is a very key thing for us in terms of our top linking keywords and you can go down and sort of look at um these keywords. A strategy here to utilize is you can sort of take these keywords and go and compare it to your organic search and see when you type in blotting or when you sort of type in um looking at your GSC to see if blotting is part of a keyword that comes up for your brand, where do you sort of rank within traditional search engine? Again, looking at the difference. If you're doing really well on organic search, that's great. But if you're not doing so well on AI search, you might want to think about, okay, how do we reoptimize existing content or do we

need to create new content? Do we need to optimize products pages and so on. But if we look here in terms of the richest singer, now this has nothing to do with um the product in itself that Fenty sells, but this has everything to do with the brand owner. So sometimes certain brands or certain um if you're looking at from a personal branding perspective certain brands are attached to a particular person Fenty Beauty is owned by Rihanna. So again the richest singer makes sense for this um for Fenty because who the actual founder is but unfortunately um the traffic is zero because I doubt that there are any clicks that leads back to Fenty which I am right here. there are no clicks that lead back to Fenty website. Um, but it's very interesting that, you know, this keyword is is a great way to show the snippet. Again, you might think about this in some of our content. Should we create an about us within our sites to

make sure we have that topical links is ling linking back to um whether our founders linked in. This could work quite well from a B2B perspective. If you have like a executive biography page that you want to make sure comes up within um AI search and links through, you might consider adding a link within those biography pages that will aid citation that will aid those um those back links. So all in all, why does this section matter when we're thinking about creating topical first content strategies? Well, it matters because this gives us real performance metrics. It answers what is working. It answers what content is AI friendly. It makes you think about am I creating these AI content friendly um pieces or landing pages that gets picked up within AI search and it also um allows you to answer what are we leaving and where are we leaving traffic on the table. So from here we c you can audit in terms of

prompts where you mentioned you can audit pages that are linked or not and you can audit topics that drive AI traffic. So another thing I um another um stage after this so once you sort of notified these are the prompts these are um also how we're performing we want to then take this and look at our how to how do we build clusters how do we make sure that from the prompts that we saw in terms of makeup and being mentioned and those prompts that we might use to create content but how about creating existing content fresh content content that allows us to kind of think about um what users want and how do I quickly cluster those? How do I create this um top hierarchy um topic clusters from utilizing this AI visibility? So, it's now time to build that content clusters that captures future visibility and we're doing that utilizing data backed strategies. So we can see all of we can

see where we are sort of coming from. But you might have a mind block, a creative block in terms of how can I actually group this? How can I push forward to write new content or maybe reoptimize the content that we already have on the site? And this is where I would I like to combine SE rankings AI search, AI visibility research with SE Rankings content idea finder. So you could have exported all of those prompts and exported all of your keywords and then upload it into SE rankings content finder which you you will find underneath the content marketing tab and then you will go into the content idea finder tab. So here this tool helps us take a seed topic. Now we know for example utilizing Fenty it's all about makeup but again when we're thinking about content we think about it in different categories. So we think like seasonal content, evergreen content. But if we take seasonal

content, especially from an e-commerce site, sometimes you may see content traffic um either go up or down depending on seasons. Um this is what I noticed when I was looking after OPI, the nail nail brand. As a client, we saw that certain colors of nail varnish were fluctuating throughout the year. So within from o from September all the way down to um November roughly we saw that black nail varnish skyrocketed and we again thought okay that's a concept of Halloween so we may need to now create content that feeds into that keyword that allows us to use black nail varnish as a keyword or Halloween nails as a keyword and you can sort of do this with seasonal content. So that's what I've gone ahead and done. I've thought about Fenty Beauty as a product, as a brand, and thought about seasonal content around Christmas cuz Christmas is coming up. So, think about the idea of gift sets. So, I have loaded at least 50

different keywords within um within the content finder and I, you know, this created the makeup gift set clusters. So, let's think about it. So, let's create a holiday campaign for Fenty, right? We want to create a holiday campaign for Fenty. um making sure that we content that we know looking at those prompts we know that could fit into the answers for those prompts and it can help us create the content that we want. So when we sort of input that we can see all of the different clusters that is given to us. So you have the clusters which is here that I created but you also have the clusters ids. So this sort of tells us how many we have within each clusters. So the first one, Bag YSL, um has at least 10 clusters. It has a search volume and difficulty. And again, you can copy this or export it to sort of add to your keyword clusters bank that will help you build um on this topical idea. So looking at this um it it tells us quite a lot of things. Um to

make it more specific, it also if we look at um beauty gift sets for example, again, these are the keywords. is said that came underneath this clusters. So we can see Charlotte Tilbury again a competitor brand that would tell you that people are searching by brand name but what we do want is non-branded terms. So once we sort of take this the data is telling us what users are searching for what subtopics we can build content around and where that search demand meets intent. So how does this tie back to to to AI? So if we take one of the prompts uh within AI prompt that says what are the best gift sets for makeup lovers that can be that's an AI prompts that was within the 194. So we can go into here utilize knowing that that prompt was there and if you weren't mentioned now you are able to create content um that will be authoritative in order to target that prompt. So if we

look at beauty gift sets for example or if we look at um if we look at yeah let's just go back to um beauty gift sets. One thing I like would be um it also tells you the different titles here that sort of come up for for other competitors. So and looking at again the meta titles that they're using. So how they're calling it out giving you an idea. We can see some use a term premium that can be that's a search term as well like we said seasonal ideas Christmas beauty gifts and you know and we have the different ones the different ones here but another great thing about this is the mind map section. Now, this is my favorite one because it gives you a a very clear picture in terms of how we can sort of do this in terms of okay, it tells me the total volume of this particular um keyword within this sort of cluster. It tells me that the total keywords are 3.9. So, what you can

notice is some are blue and some are red. Um and this is just to signify the ones that are red have a very high total sex volume. So if we going through we can see gift box set has 15,000 search volume total. Um gift set for women 70 beauty set which is blue 9.3. So it's looking at keywords that are less than 10,000 total search volumes will be blue. Keywords are more than 10,000 um total search volumes will be red. So it allows you to kind of prioritize that too. So let's actually now create this campaign. So we'll take one of the clusters and how can we utilize this and create those content assets. We can create the assets from a landing page perspective. So an example headline can be holiday makeup sets from Fenty. If we want to look at it from a blog article perspective, top 10 beauty gifts for her in 20 and 2025. So these are feeding into the type of things your users might actually search for. And then once we're

creating that that content, we are allowing for the the AI prompts to be answered. You can also create comparison posts just utilizing these clusters and that can be Fenty versus Rare Beauty because again we are seeing the titles here. So we know the competitors that also coming up within these clusters. So you know utilizing one of our competitor brands we can either create content for that targets either fragrance shop if you are fragrance company and so on or you can create gift guide um content assets. So makeup gifts for teens, moms and everywhere in between can be an example headline for you. So we want to use the search volumes that we are seeing at the side here and the difficulty score to prioritize the clusters. That gives you the best shot at both ranking organically and earning AI citations. So this acts as a final step within the system. So you found the prompts, you've audited the performance

of the brand within AI and how it's coming up in terms of visibility and you're using that to build clusters based on those keywords where you are seeing your brands being mentioned within AI within the AI search and you want to build keywords around that and build your keyword clusters and then you turn that into AI optimized content. But another amazing thing about SE ranking is you might not have to do that by yourself. You can have existing content or you can create content um new content. And one of the beauty is once you sort of have these keywords, you can go into content editor which is at the top again content marketing and you'll find that find it within that tab. The amazing thing about the content editor, again, we want to streamline all of the tools because we did say SE ranking has over 30 plus SEO tools. So, you can do everything that you want to do within this one platform. So, once you sort of have your keywords, the topics you want

to write, and you're just stuck in how to write it. So the ed the content editor looks at um how to help you write high quality content from creating content briefs which is what I do a lot of the time is we work with copywriters but the content brief is what will inform how well that content does because we can input the meta title the keywords we can input the prompts we're trying to target we can input the internal links we want to have within that um within the brief and again it will help you analyze your top 10 competitors and gain um you know insights into word count, headings and so on. So again it's keeping the basic principles of what Google loves when looking at content and how content should read and how users will interpret that content in order to answer and in order to answer their queries. Um so you can either start a new brief or you can either have an optimizing um have like an existing content you want to do. So I

haven't sort of given an example here but this is just to show how we can create an entire workflow starting from the AI visibility research all the way down to actually writing that content uploading it and then you can go back set up set up an account um within this to track performance and to see where how that content is sort of performing. So all of this ties in together because we are no longer in a world where traditional SEO is enough. Um now we need to be the source AI pulls from. Not just someone who ranks on the page or not just a brand that ranks on the page. But for us to succeed in terms of utilizing AI visibility to inform our content um especially with the data that's been given, we are now going to be topically focused because now we know where we're being mentioned. Now we know what keywords are coming up for those mentions. And now we know what other brands are coming up within those lists

and those citations for us to do in-depth research in the type of content that they sort of writing. And it's not about reinventing the wheel. It's about looking at the strategies other competitors are using to see what works for us. And now we have the capabilities to make sure that we are being specific and quite meticulous in how we're using AI to sort of do so. And now we have that visibility to see where those mentions are. So now that we have that, we are now able to align with AI prompt formats. We now know the prompts. So there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to create new content or develop existing content based on those prompts. And now we're able to be structured for um extractions. So think so think clean answers, think sematic clarity and tra actual link presence and AI traffic because now we're able to see if you know by creating these new content whether we are increasing our AI traffic, we're increasing those mentions. So with the AI with the SE

ranking suite of AI tools that we have, we now have everything we need to sort just that. We can now discover what AI is asking. We can now track our brand performance. We can build those clusters. So this is how you build a closed loop AI first SEO system because it's not necessarily um AI does not sit within a silo and you can now even utilize this for um other channels like social search or PR um and that can sort of complement it in terms of where citations are coming from. Um, and these are way to kind of embed and create an ecosystem, a marketing ecosystem that puts AI, search, SEO or AIO in the center. Um, that sort of lets us, you know, do the work the best way that we can. Um, so I so I'm going to sort of go through the comments and ask you and read out the the content and read out the comments that you guys are sort of um asking. Um the first question we have is from it's from Alex. Um how do you

match topics to intent through the customer journey and keep that up to date when AIO shrink or reroot queries? So this is a very good question. So topics and intent um I I love sort of looking at the bias journey. So if you look at the consumer's journey from awareness all the way to to decision um there is a system that I tend to sort of use um utilize with that. So with the intent that we have informational um navigational, transactional and commercial. So based on your actual brand a lot of times when it comes to e-commerce a lot of times when it comes to some B2B a lot of queries stay withinformational because people want to find things very very quickly. People just want to know more information. But I think with AI search we now have to incorporate navigational because of those citations because we want to actually drive it. So if we kind of link them up in a way where for the awareness stage if you think about a farm that's

when people want to discover information and find that out. So what you can match is looking at the topics within um within the SE ranking tool. So if we go back to the shared screen and let's take it back to the AI search. So let's take it back here for example. So some of the some of the um prompts that we have for example if we go into blotting here um if we go into blotting here so it tells us for this particular search term once you sort of click into it it will tell you the difficulties 15 search volume but if you sort of scroll down um you will see here the AI overviews a lot of the content that comes up and you read it you will notice that the content being created areformational content so you're able to match certain keywords based on one what come what what type of content comes up within the AI answers what are the what are the brands what are their content saying and you can

sort of match it with that when it comes to adding citations I think you need to look at your goals do you just want to be mentioned or do you also want to drive links if you want to drive links which now makes that query both informational and navigational you want to make sure that within the content you're creating are you including CTAs in the in the sni in the in the content that you have, are you actually um you know breaking down and structuring the content that makes it easy to follow for for AI to think yes this is a well ststructured semantic topical content we're going to sort of include a link so when you're sort of mapping out your keywords to search intent and consumer journey you might want to create like a like a road map and kind of map out all of the four all of the consumer journeys and then put and sort of create like a um kind of bloss around where those keyword will sit. So, anything that's awareness will be informational. Once people get into the consideration stage, we might be navigational um intent keywords. It might still beformational,

but once we move into decision, we're now going into more transactional keywords. So, think about modifiers. If you see keywords that have, you know, download or buy or discount, you already know the consumer is thinking of buying. If we think about um awareness andform informationational you will see those modifiers what, how, when, why, those will then tell you those topics are based around informationational, based around finding out answers to a particular question or wanting to dig deeper to find more um more content around that. The next question is from Steve Steven. Steven says, "For repurposing content to fill cluster gaps like FAQ steps, comparisons, what's your go-to method that keeps entities consistent and avoids keyword um keyword cannibalization kind of my pain point?" I totally totally empathize with you on that, Stephen. It is a very um it is a massive pain point um for a lot of people because sometimes it kind of

becomes quite repetitive and you are unsure about how to navigate keyword research or repurpose content. But what I like to do and think about is repurposing content to fill cluster gaps. Your cluster gaps should not try to answer um only an overarching question. The issue a lot of marketers tend to have is that they stay within that overarch. They do not drill it down. So customer gaps are meant to fill I guess yeah fill out the gaps within it. So think about different angles. Sometimes certain questions might be um certain questions might be asked but the angle in which is answered might be different. So if we think about makeup gift sets for example that's an overarching keyword or overarching topic. You might already have content that talks about makeup gift sets, but have you considered maybe looking at it from a seasonal perspective? Adding a modifier, makeup gift sets for birthdays, makeup gift sets for Mother's Day. So now you're creating new content

that's not cannibalizing because you're now looking at maybe Mother's Day queries alongside makeup gift sets or you're now looking at Christmas queries alongside makeup gift sets. And that way you are now filling out gaps. One, the gap is seasonal or two, the gaps may be surrounded around maybe new product launches or surrounded about maybe um new um yeah new business initiations that that's all come into play. So you want to think beyond that overarching topic and that's how you can sort of fill out um the gaps without analyzing the the keywords because now you can streamline different keywords based on that niche um category that you have kind of drilled down into. Um, so Bernard has asked in your content brief which elements most often help win both AIO mentions and C improvements things like questions, tax flows, definition, schema at any scale wins you can share. So one thing I love to include in the

content briefs, I've always said content briefs just because it's called a content brief, it doesn't need to be brief. It doesn't need to be brief. It needs to be as detailed as possible because when you're working with the copywriters within the content team or within the company um they are there to write creatively. You are the expert. You have to feed that data. So within the content briefs what I always I always break it down. I have a table in the in the first brief. I have the objective of what this content is supposed to do. So you need to give an in-depth analysis of the content is meant to you know we want the content to answer this query or the objective is to um promote a new product is meant to answer um x amount of questions. You want to include the intent that they need to write from and sometimes you might have to define what that intent is. So I will always say in the content briefs this content is anformational it's anformational content so therefore the word count will will be much larger.

you include any internal linkings that you think will drive traffic. So go into your Google search console, go into your GA, see what other pages that are relevant to the content that you want to write that you can now link internally link to drive to make sure um traffic is shared or to make sure it signals Google that these content are linked. This is giving the user extra information. You definitely want to have your keywords there. So your primary keyword that you're trying to target and your secondary keyword. Secondary keyword should be around maybe three or four, not too much. Add in the word count you think is um is ideal. When I was working with a client called um the what shop, all the content briefs I had created, I had broken it down from the H1s to the H2s to H3s in terms of the idea that what we should be talking about. And what I did was I also linked competitor articles that are doing what I'm trying to do very well that are outranking us

in this area that doing better in their content. And I always link them to give the copyriter a visual representation of where where I'm trying to go in order to structure this where I think those internal links should be fitted in which section within that brief. It has to be as detailed because again you are providing that SEO expertise and you're and now that we have AI into it include the prompts that we're not ranking for. So like we saw the prompts that has zero mentions. I want to include the prompts that I want that this content is meant to serve and we're trying to push in order to come up for those mentions. So I hope that um answers your your question um Bernard. Thank you so much for asking that. Um, the next question is from Redback. Does using AI to write articles and blogs impact rankings? It's usually pretty clear AI is used even if you modify content to remove indicators. This is a very funny one. Thank you so

much back for that because I have been struggling in terms of um when people sort of have these modifiers that AI picks up and I just think you know it's it's just grammar. But I do agree that AI, utilizing AI to write blogs, it's not a bad thing. What is the issue is the input that we're giving AI. We're not giving AI enough input in order to get the best output. A lot of times people just say, you know, here are the keywords. Write me a blog about, you know, the topic utilizing the keywords. That's not enough. AI can only give you exactly what you tell it to. So when you are feeding it this content, again, when you're feeding AI this content, feed it like a content brief. Actually create a content brief and upload it to the AI platform. Now we, you know, with chat GPT, with Perpetity, with Claude, you can actually attach files. Um, I will go

in and attach a full-fledged out content brief that has everything I need. And in that content brief, it's okay to write tone of voice because the brand has a tone of voice. Um, you can absolutely um embed that into it. Now that we have concepts like agentic AI where we can create agents that match certain tone of voice be it in you know formal um if you have a brand guideline embed that in and then give it the prompt and then say utilizing the attached documents write a um an SEO or write a blog that has SEO in mind. You can even feed it the principles that you want that you know follows the Google guideline. Feed it the EAT. Are you trying to target expertise, authority, trustworthiness? And sometimes when it gives you the output, read it through. Whatever you don't like, then go back in and say change it. And you might have to do that a few tries before you get the final best result. So it's not that it is bad.

It's just that it's not that the AI think using AI to write blogs is bad. It's just that our prompts are bad. We're not actually feeding it very detailed prompts that we should to get the best output that we sort of have.