One step ahead 🥾

How to adapt in an increasingly AI-driven world

Photo by Lindsay Henwood on Unsplash

Hope you all had a great weekend.

As we shift into a new season, let’s talk about the incoming era of AI-driven search and SEO.

Ready or not, AI is transforming our world — work with it to dominate your industry.

Today’s agenda:

🤖 Will AI in Search help or harm?

😓 Navigating “decision fatigue”

📱 The shift to mobile-first

💼 Briefly — our quick news roundup

⏱️ Up & coming

Is SGE optimism just ‘wishful thinking’?

Have you been keeping up with the latest on Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE)?

According to Google, SGE is an “early step” in changing the way we search with generative AI. Simply put, it’s AI-backed Search.

Click here and scroll down to Page 6 to see a preview of how SGE looks in action.

SGE has the following key features:

• AI-powered snapshots that provide an overview to a user’s query, as well as links to additional resources

• Conversational mode where users can ask a follow-up or select from suggested follow-up questions

Google has also said it’s shifting the way it ranks content by focusing on content that has unique experience and expertise.

Naturally, some marketers are nervous that SGE will cause a significant dip in organic traffic, because users may be more likely to find their answer right away via the AI snapshot and their search journey will end.

🚦 But according to a HubSpot report, 75% of web analysts actually think AI Search will positively impact their blogs, and 68% think they’ll get even more traffic.

How to ensure your content competes, via HubSpot

• Check out how other businesses are integrating AI

• Stay informed by attending webinars or conferences

• Evaluate how your team can integrate more AI apps and tools

• Focus on creating the types of “expert, personality-driven” content that Google is prioritizing as it shifts to SGE

So will SGE help or harm my traffic?

The answer to this question depends on your willingness to prepare for AI’s integration with search.

🤖 What steps can you take today to start adapting?

How our daily habits influence our SEO success

Yes, you read that correctly.

Marketing expert Claire Taylor recently explained the connection between decision fatigue, our daily habits, and SEO for Search Engine Land.

🔑 Key takeaways:

• Our brains have a “finite reserve” for decision-making, and every decision we make during the day — big or small — pulls from this reserve

• Making the wrong decisions for your SEO strategy has obvious consequences, so we can’t afford to drain our reserve on less-important decisions

• Deliberately creating habits helps reduce the amount of decisions you need to make in a day, because the habits become automatic and part of a routine

• Prepare to complete your most difficult tasks during high-energy periods of your day

• Make breaks a part of your day, and delegate less important decisions to others on your team

“If you're in the field of SEO, ignoring decision fatigue is not an option,” writes Taylor.

Her advice is especially important as we enter a new era of SEO.

Mobile-first matters

99% of social media users in 2023 access their platform of choice with a smartphone, according to Backlinko.

The key to maximizing engagement on your social channels is to optimize your content for mobile users.

🔎 Here’s how, via Social Media Examiner:

• Keep your captions short to avoid users having to click “See More”, or make sure the hook is above the point where it cuts off

• Craft catchy titles

• Crop photos into either portrait or square aspect ratios

• Keep sizing the same within carousels

• Create more vertical videos

• Add text overlays

• Add polls or quizzes to photos and videos

The best way to get ideas for your mobile-first content is to check out what’s popular on your platforms of choice and start experimenting with which features and tools are feasible for your brand.

Briefly

🎤 The Taylor Swift and Beyonce tours and summer blockbuster movies have boosted the economy, but Morgan Stanley says the fourth quarter will be dragged down by their endings and student loan payments

⌨️ How to use Facebook auto reply to boost your customer service 

📹 Instagram is testing 10-minute video reels to compete with other platforms that allow long-form content 

✍️ How to write alt text for your memes so everyone can enjoy them

🧑‍💻 Check out this free PDF editing app that merges, edits, converts, and even has ChatGPT

Up & Coming

The August jobs report is “exactly where the Fed wants this jobs data to go,” says economist Joe Brusuelas.

Watch this interview with Yahoo Finance Live to see what’s coming next.