Hello and welcome to SEO Is Not That Hard. I'm your host, Ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform KeywordPupeopleUser.com where we help you discover the questions people ask online and then how to optimise your content for traffic and authority. I've been in SEO from online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Hello and welcome back to SEO's Not That Hard. It's me here, Ed Dawson, as always, and we're now on to part 11 of our series on So we're now deep into our action plan. So over the last few episodes, we've built a powerful on-pace strategy from the ground up. We started by auditing our entity landscape and really deep diving our competition. We then learned how to build deeply authoritative content using the topic cluster model and the principle of information gain. And last week we got technical, demystifying schema markup and learning how to build our own entity graph to speak directly to machines. At this point, you have a plan for creating content that is strategically brilliant, deeply authoritative, and technically perfect. It's designed to be understood by search engines and valued by your human audience. But there's one final layer to this on-page puzzle. The way people find information is starting to change. They're no longer just looking at a list of blue links. Many people still are, but there is a shift happening. They're starting to seek the answers to their questions directly by asking them to AI assistance to LLMs, and they're getting back synthesized answers. Our job is to make sure our content is the source for those answers. So today we're going to look how to optimise our content for the new gatekeepers of this information, the generative AI engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Google's AI overviews, Claude, and Perplexity. Now for years the goal of SEO was to rank in Google and then get a user to click on your link. Now that's still important, but a new goal has emerged, and that's to be cited by an AI. Now when a user asks an AI what are the best techniques for brewing pour-over coffee, the AI will synthesize an answer based on the most reliable, well-structured information that it can find. So becoming that source of information is the new position zero. It establishes your brand as a definitive authority in a way that even a number one ranking on Google can't. So how do we do it? How do we make our content not just readable, but easily digestible and reusable for an AI? It comes down to three core principles: structuring for machine parsing, prioritizing factual accuracy, and framing your content as direct answers. So let's look at principle one, structuring for machine parsing. So imagine you're writing a textbook for a very smart, very literal machine like a robot, doesn't appreciate literary flair or long meandering paragraphs. What it needs is clear signposts, a logical hierarchy, and information broken down into bite-sized, easily extractable pieces. So the first and most important signpost is your heading structure. This is something that hopefully, if you've been doing SEO well for a long time, is nothing new. And if you've been listening to my podcast for a while, then you'll have come across these, but it's worth reiterating here. So your main title should always be a H1, your main section should be H2s, and the subsections within those should be H3s, and so on. Now this isn't just for visual organization, which it will help for actual real people reading it, but it what it does is it creates a logical table of contents that a machine can pass instantly. It allows the AI to understand the topic boundaries and to navigate your content to find the specific segment it needs. Next, embrace short paragraphs and lists. An AI is far more likely to pull a concise three-sentence paragraph as a direct answer than it is to try to summarise a huge wall of text. Even better, a bulleted or numbered list. So each list item itself is a self-contained, perfectly formatted little snippet of information. And AIs can then easily lift a single bullet point answer to a specific question, making your content really incredibly useful for building AI-genated summaries. The overall mindset here is to think in snippets, not essays. Every section, every paragraph, every list item should be crafted as if it could be pulled out of context and still make perfect sense. Now, principle two is the currency of facts. So this is where, without a doubt, it's the most critical principle of all. So if we go back to episode six where we talked about AI hallucinations and the rise of retrieval augmented generation, otherwise known as RAG. Now remember, RAG is like an open book exam for AI. It helps it combat hallucinations. And it does this by first retrieving information from trusted external sources, and it then uses that information to formulate its answer. And your goal is to make your website the most reliable, fact-filled, and trustworthy book for that exam. So to do that, you must prioritize factual accuracy and unambiguous language. AI models they don't like vague marketing jargon and subjective claims. They're not really telling anything that they don't you can't extract a very well verifiable fact from that. So a statement like our product offers unparalleled performance is useless to AI, it's subjective opinion with no data. What's the benchmark for that performance over what? So a statement like says our product processes data at 10,000 records per second, a 20% improvement over the previous version, now that's perfect, it's clear, 10,000 records per second. And it's backed by that claim of 20% improvement over the previous version. And that's a statement that a machine can pass and present as fact. So every claim you make should be verifiable. So if you publish statistics, cite your sources, link out to reputable research or official reports. This doesn't just build trust with human readers, it shows the AI that your content is part of a credible, interconnected web of information. Think of every page on your site as a potential source that an AI might quote directly. Your job is to make it airtight. Then principle three, this is where you need to frame your content as answers. So large language models are at their core, they're answer engines. They're designed to respond to natural language questions. So the most effective way to optimize for them is to structure your content to directly address the questions your users are asking. And the most powerful tool for doing this is the FAQ section. Adding a frequently asked questions section to your articles or service pages or wherever on your site where it makes sense is a really strategic thing to do. It provides clear, self-contained, perfectly formatted question and answer pairs that an AI can easily lift and then repurpose with minimal efforts. Where do you find these questions? You don't have to guess. Google tells you exactly what people are asking. Go search for your main topic, look at the People also ask box. These are the discovery queries, these are the informational questions that users are asking about a topic. Build sections of your content or even entire articles that directly answer these questions. This is something you'll have heard me talking about again and again on this podcast. And obviously, you can go to Google directly or you can use keywordspeopleuse.com, which we built, to easily mind these questions. It's that simple. If you frame your content as a series of clear answers, then you are aligning your website perfectly with what the primary function of an AI is. That's to make it incredibly easy for it to choose your content as its source. Finally, there's one last quick technical check. And this is like the equivalent of making sure that your door is unlocked for the LLMs to come in. Your content could be brilliantly structured, factually brilliant, but if AI crawlers are blocked from accessing it, none of it matters. So you need to check your robots.robots.txt. This is a simple file in the root directory of your site that gives instructions to web crawlers. So you need to ensure that you are not going to block crawlers accidentally from the major AI companies like OpenAI or Google or Gemini or Anthropic or Perplexity. And also check your content delivery network. If you're using one such as Cloudflare or something like Amazon AWS CloudFront, I actually found this on one of my sites. We were letting in all of the LLM crawlers via robots.txt, but then our content delivery network was blocking ChatGPT crawlers, meaning that ChatGPT couldn't answer the sites, access the sites. So we had to go modify the settings in our CDN to make sure that it wouldn't block OpenIs robots so that it could see our content. And while you're there, checking out robots.txt, just check you've got a clean up to date XML sitemap. This file will act as a roadmap for your site, helping these crawlers discover and index all of your important content efficiently. If you're not sure what robots are or what XML sitemap is, search on our podcast because we've done episodes in on both of those individually. So that brings us to your next steps for this week. It's time to put these principles into practice and make your content truly AI ready. So I want you to choose one of your most important and popular blog posts or articles or web pages. Your task is to perform an AI optimization audit on it. So first of all, check the structure. Look at your heading hierarchy. Is it logical? Are you using proper headings? Can you break up any long paragraphs into shorter ones or turn a dense section into a bulleted list? Secondly, rewrite for facts. See if you can find any subjective marketing claims in the article and rewrite them to be specific, verifiable, data backed statements if you can. And thirdly, add an FAQ section. Go to Google or keywordspeopleuse.com. Search for the main topic of your article and find two or three questions from the people or swash box and add a new FAQ section at the end of your article and provide clear, concise answers to those questions. This exercise will give you a tangible feel for how to refactor your content to be not just human-friendly, but machine friendly too. But that is the key thing. Always make sure it's human friendly, because that will make it machine friendly too. Now we have completed our deep dive into one-page entity-first optimization. We've got a complete strategy for creating and structuring content that's going to build authority with users, search engines, and AI. And in our final episode next time, we'll look beyond the borders of our own website. We'll explore the world of off-page SEO and how to build powerful entity associations across the entire web. So until next time, keep top mising. Stay curious and remember SEO is not that hard when you understand the basics. Thanks for listening, it means a lot to me. This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my SEO tools and services. You can find links to all the links I'm mentioning here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, the Ed is spelled with 2Ds. You can find me on LinkedIn and Blue Sky, just search for Ed Dawson on both. You can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast. The link is in the show notes. You can turn on my SEO intelligence platform, Keywords People Use, at KeywordsPopleUse.com, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people asking online. Post those questions and keywords into related groups so you can know what content you need to build topical authority. And finally, connect your Google Search Console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content. Find what keywords you want for and then help you optimise and continually refine your content. Targeted personalised advice to keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit www.eddawson.com. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SU is not a hammered.