AI search brings new SEO metrics. I cover mentions vs citations, share of voice, where to find your numbers, and my gripe with prompt tracking.
Enjoy the episode!
🧰 I love me a good digital marketing tool. This week’s recommended tool is Make.
Make is a behind-the-scenes wizard for automating all the little stuff that fragments your day. Like connecting all your favorite apps so they talk to each other without you lifting a finger.
Let’s say someone fills out a form on your site. With Make, you can auto-pop that data into a spreadsheet, ping your Slack, create a task in your fave task tool, and even send a personalized email… all without a single post-it-note reminder.
Aaaand… you don’t need to know how to code. Just drag, drop, and map out your automations visually. It’s super powerful and kinda fun once you get going.
🎧 This week’s recommended podcast episode is AI Tools Transforming My Business This Summer on the Website Design Made Simple show with Jenny Belanger.
I always love to hear what other people are doing their business and this was a fun one. Take a listen and see if anything tickles your fancy.
If you listen to the book, let me know how you like it!
Find other recommended episodes here.
Other Resource Links
- [webinar] Updating Your SEO Strategy for AI Search
- Do you really need an SEO tool to show up in Google?
- Amadora AI LLM Tracking
- Data Studio – I think I called it Looker in the podcast but it changed names, again.
Listen on Spotify
tbdListen on Apple
tbdThe thing I struggled with the most as AI search came on the scene, is the accuracy of the tools and do I know it’s correct? I can NOT have something wrong when I report to my clients.
There are new measurements that people are throwing around. Which ones matter?
That’s what we’re covering today. Not what specific tool to use, but what measurements to look at, at often and how to find them. We also cover a little bit about prompt tracking. I have a bone to pick on this one.
So last week we talked about how we can’t ignore AI search anymore. Provided it is or is becoming a priority for your business, we need to understand where we stand in the various search platforms so we know where to focus our website marketing strategy.
For now, we have two main measurements, traditional SEO and AI SEO.
Traditional SEO is impressions or visibility, how many people see your website in search and the traffic from organic that you see in GA4.
AI SEO success is measured by Share of Voice and Visibility.
Inside of AI search there are mentions and citations. These are what feed in to share of voice and visibility.
A mention is where the search says your business name in the output.
A citation is where the search used your content and lists your website off to the side as a resource.
Now, citation can happen without a mention (they link to your website but never say your business name), and a mention can happen without a citation (they say your business name but not link to your website).
As you might imagine, the brand that is being mentioned and/or cited first or higher in the output or the resource list, has a better chance at earning the person’s choice to click than being lower on the list.
Ok, now we understand what high level metrics to look at, now let’s go into where to find these.
Everybody and their brother and their brother’s cousin twice removed has an SEO or AI SEO tool. It’s quite overwhelming. I did a podcast episode way back in [whatever] around SEO tools. For the most part, choosing a metrics tool comes down to your preference in interface and the your energy level for how much work you want to put into set up and or customizing.
For SEO metrics, I’m a big fan of using Looker Studio, a free Google product, to pull in information from GA4 and Google Search Console in a way that suits my needs.
For AI metrics, I’m currently using a tool call Amadora AI. It’s more for agencies vs a single business, however, I think it’s the most simplest interface I’ve seen so far and the support is responsive.
Side note: support is one of my make or break deals when choosing a tool for anything. If there isn’t good support, I don’t stick with them.
For the love of beer, do NOT, and I repeat, do NOT, ask Claude or ChatGPT or any of those to report to you UNLESS they are connected to your measuring tools. They are generative, meaning, they pull the most logical next word vs actually having the data you’re looking for.
Ok, let’s get back to where to find the data. A lot of the traditional SEO tools have already started including AI tracking, something for an additional fee, which really chaps my ass, but whatever, they can do what they want. I’ll just go somehwere else like I have.
One way to find a tool, is to use your AI chat of choice to find the AI tracking tool, ha ha h ah… just tell it what you’re looking for, or have it ask you questions so it can help you.
Something like….
Recommend 3 to 5 affordable AI visibility tracking tools, not enterprise priced, that show how often my business gets mentioned in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. For each one, tell me what it tracks, roughly what it costs, and how easy it is to use for someone who isn’t technical.
And yes, I had Claude give that to me for you to have. LOL Of course that’s just a starting point. You’ll go back and forth. Many times I end a prompt with “ask me any clarifying questions.”
The thing that’s becoming a thing is purchase credits. Remember the days when you paid once for a tool? Yeah, those are gone. Now we have subscriptions. Monthly or annually. And now… drum roll please… we have credits.
Tools sometimes offer tracking but for various options or tasks inside the tool, it might cost credits. Some tools it takes more credits and cost to set up and then much more manageable to run monthly.
*Oh, a note about AI search tracking… a lot of tools call them LLM tracking. Because technically they are called LLMs, large language models.
And it’s called prompt tracking instead of keyword tracking. Many tools will offer prompts to start tracking based on it scanning your website.
My bone to pick, as I mentioned in the introduction, is that we can’t see what people are putting in as prompts. Well sort of, turns out Google Search Console is showing a little because of their AI overviews and how tools are researching for people. If you go into your GSC and filter on query containing “context” you can see the search phrases someone sent to their tool to go research for them. It’s trippy.
Oh, back to the prompt tracking… While tools will give you some starting prompts, so far, I found them not realistic to how someone would type something in.
Example… for my website, a tracker suggests “What is a good SEO agency that doesn’t use confusing jargon for small businesses?” Really? I don’t think anyone in the world is going to type that in.
Be sure to give some proper thought to the prompts you want to track otherwise you’ll be wasting money and making decision on bad data. Start with just a handful to get used to the tool.
It’s sort of weird, because you have to give the tool the prompt for it to look up and track. It’s not the other way around. Plus what comes up is based on personal variables of the person searching. It’s not an exact science but it’s what we have for now.
Finally, let’s chat about how often to check where we stand. What’s the famous quote… If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. But if you measure it every day, you’ll go crazy. So what’s a good cadence?
Weekly for a quick check or an email sent to your inbox. Not so much to make a decision off that one week of data, only for keeping it top of mind.
Monthly is a good cadence for review and action items. Many times, I recommend month over month, year over year and a trend line… because of the volatility of search, month over month isn’t a good enough metric alone to base a decision on.
Let’s remember that our true goal isn’t more website traffic or showing up in search. Our true goal is conversions that support our business objectives.
Once you know where you stand, the next question is what to do about it. And that’s what we’re getting into next week.
You don’t have to make sense of all this alone. Join me in this month’s webinar called. Updating Your SEO Strategy for AI Search.
In this webinar, you’ll get a plan for showing up in AI search while keeping your eye on the reason you wanted visibility in the first place: the conversion.
- An understanding of how online search has evolved and why
- Ways to check your AI visibility and how it lines up with the SEO numbers you’re tracking
- A tactical list of on-page and off-page moves to show up in AI searches
You’ll leave with next steps to fold in AI search optimization with your traditional search strategy.
The Takeaway
Even if you’re not actively doing AI search optimization, start tracking. Get visibility and awareness so it helps you build your plan.
About This Show
The Get More Website Traffic Podcast covers the strategies, tools, and tactics that help small business owners get more people to their website and turn that traffic into leads. Host Barb Davids breaks it down in plain language every week, with bonus episodes featuring other business owners sharing their expertise on topics that matter to running a small business. Produced by Compass Digital Strategies.
