Remember when mastering search engine optimization was relatively straightforward? You just needed to create helpful content, target specific keywords, earn backlinks from reputable sources, and voilà, new clients would flock to your website! But times have changed, and now artificial intelligence has taken the stage, impacting everything, including SEO. We’re at starting line of a whole new search engine game, where AI is assisting and focusing intensely on user intent. The exciting part is that this shift is creating fantastic opportunities for small businesses in the health and wellness industry, to thrive if they can adapt and embrace these changes correctly. SEO and Lead Gen Strategist, Chrissy Oliverson is here to guide us through making the most of this evolving landscape. 

You’ll learn about:

• How AI has impacted the SEO landscape for small businesses
  
• Ethical considerations that small businesses should be aware of when incorporating AI into their SEO strategies
  
• How you can use AI to target your ideal audience through local search
  
• What you can do to get started now, even without extensive resources or technical expertise 
  

When the concept of SEO first started, it was of course in reaction to learning that Google had robots crawling our website content in an effort to understand which sites were the best sources of information for their searchers. What happened very early on was this quick burst of people trying to cheat the system by doing things like keyword stuffing and other “black hat” practices. But the way AI works, is that the longer it exists, the smarter it gets. The more information you feed it, the information it has to run its calculations and accomplish its task. We are a good 10+ years into Google having their algorithms, and with how vast the internet is, you can only imagine the amount of data being processed and stored these days. All of that data being gathered by Google’s (and other search engines) AI tools is leveraged and used as a way to meet their user’s needs. That is the #1 goal: to meet the needs of the searcher as quickly and precisely as possible. 

Precision is what it’s all about… being able to precisely target your ideal customer with the right copy, image, video, etc is what everyone is chasing! With the help of AI, health and wellness businesses can now reach a level of personalization that was nearly impossible before. We have so much information at our fingertips, and tools that are only getting smarter by the day… small businesses would do very well to keep their ear to the ground and take advantage of this opportunity. 

AI can assist health and wellness practitioners in targeting their ideal audience through local search by analyzing local search patterns and user behavior. AI algorithms can identify relevant keywords, phrases, and location-specific information that can improve the visibility of practitioners’ websites in local search results. AI-powered analytics platforms can also give us great insights into the preferences, demographics, and search behaviors of your local audience. And that helps us better understand the target audience, segment them based on various criteria, and tailor our marketing to that understanding.

Resources in this episode:SEMRushSurfer SEOChristine Oliverson on LinkedIn