Is Your Website Optimized for AI-Powered Search?

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0:00:00.2 Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Today we take a look at how AI enabled web searches are impacting traffic to.edu websites. For example, when you search Google, the first thing you see in the search results is an AI generated answer to your query that synthesizes information from multiple sources and presents it in a concise summary at the top. By the way, that exact description was generated by Google’s AI Overview. Our experts explain how AI enabled search impacts site traffic to your university’s website and what your web team should be doing to ensure your key audiences are still coming to your site and finding what they need. So give these folks a listen and enjoy.

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0:01:07.6 Emily Upton: Well, hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. My name is Emily Upton and I’m the Vice President of Marketing and AI Strategy as well as General Manager here for Agency Services. My team and I are responsible for helping our college and university partners really identify and deploy the right mix of services and solutions to both maximize marketing investment, but also help meet enrollment goals. And one of the really important areas of focus for virtually every college and university that we work with, is the website. Schools definitely need to ensure the.edu is effective at converting prospective students into enrollment leads. But a really the big part of how that happens involves best practices in search engine optimization to generate that site traffic. So SEO best practices, as we know, are constantly updating as traditional search engines and their algorithms evolve. But what’s really interesting nowadays is the emergence of AI powered search. And we have just received and seen an increase in questions coming from all of our partners regarding what does this mean for them? What does this mean for their website? So joining me today to talk about these changes is an expert on SEO and paid search, my friend and colleague, Phil Walton. Phil, welcome to Office Hours.

0:02:21.9 Philip Walton: Thank you for having me.

0:02:23.9 EU: So, Phil, as a way of sort of beginning this conversation today, would you mind telling us a little bit about your background and your current role here at EAB?

0:02:32.1 PW: Sure. So I am the Associate Director of SEO and Paid Search Strategy. I’ve been with EAB for about five years now. I started off in the SEO world about 13 years ago, so I’ve been doing SEO work for about 13 years. I started… Graduated from Longwood University and with a Digital Marketing degree, I went right right into an SEO agency. It’s been really interesting to see kind of the evolution of SEO and search engine optimization from where it was when I first started to where we are now with this new AI and generative AI that we have now.

0:03:03.0 EU: Definitely has certainly been my go to person here, Phil, to ask questions when those things arise in our partner conversations. Many of our listeners here, though, aren’t experts in how search engines operate or how they’re really being impacted by artificial intelligence. So can you explain in layman’s terms, how has search changed with the advent of AI?

0:03:25.1 PW: Yeah, so it’s been really interesting, especially the last couple of years with the rise of AI. I think I always go back to what we’re all so used to seeing with traditional search. You do a search, you see 10 links on a page, right. You see 10 blue links that you wanna click and evaluate. In the past, you would have to do that evaluation yourself, I’m sure, Emily, you remember maybe opening the first four links, right clicking, opening a new tab, evaluating the content yourself. What we’re seeing with this new AI and generative AI is really you get a summary of the results. Google and others, I’ll reference Google quite a bit, but other search engines are summarizing the content on pages on websites for you. So you don’t always necessarily need to go to that website. So users are getting a lot of more information from the search results, from the search tools themselves before they even get to a partner or a school’s website.

0:04:14.6 EU: Phil, you said something a minute ago that I’d love for you to elaborate a little bit more about, which is really how search engine results are now appearing on that page. You know, if I am a searcher for, you know, best MBA programs near me, you know, what are we seeing now at the top of those results pages that we didn’t see a year ago, two years ago, you know, any of those differences that are now a part of this AI generation?

0:04:38.9 PW: Yeah. So there’s two different ways to kind of address that. And I wanna first start with Google. So Google does have their generative AI feature at the top. And so when you do a search like that for best MBA schools near me or whatever it is, Google is going to pull a summary of information. So it’s gonna be a highlighted list of information, whether that’s content from the sites or content that Google’s writing itself. But most of the time, it’s pulling content from a website, so it features that at the top. And now the one thing that I do appreciate is Google is now linking to the content. In the beginning, Google was actually not showing where they were getting their sources from. And so that’s one of the big reasons we were seeing this decrease in traffic. So Google’s now linking to the sources.

0:05:17.4 PW: So you could go to the website and get more information if you wanted to. But most of the time you’re gonna get a list and you’re going to evaluate right in the search results page. So you never even need to go to the website. Now with other tools like SearchGPT, they’re doing the same thing. You ask the same type of question. It’s just even more conversational. It’s more of a list of the schools again, like all these different MBA schools, you know, the highlights of those schools. And even SearchGPT is starting to now link to the websites themselves. And so again, there’s an opportunity for users to then go to the websites, but we’re still not seeing that happen. I think a lot of times especially we’re just… They’re getting the information they need from search, from the search results and they never have to go there. And so that’s what is impacting a lot of the traffic that we’re seeing.

0:06:00.6 EU: Gotcha. And Phil, I’m gonna ask you an unfair question, a bit of a conspiracy theorist question. Do you foresee the digital search, the platform search experience overtaking traditional search platforms in the future, like Google, is ChatGPT Search going to become the favored search feature for users? Or do you feel like, no, we’ll just continue to add new tools, not necessarily replace original tools?

0:06:28.8 PW: I don’t know that we’ll ever replace Google. I think Google’s gonna fight to continue to have this experience and continue to join that AI club, if you will. They’re trying to join and make sure they have that same capability. So I don’t think Google will ever go away. I think there’s just gonna be more tools that we’re using. So in conjunction with Google, we’re now using SearchGPT. I mean, Yahoo people go to Yahoo and search just as much. Not Yahoo, YouTube. Excuse me, YouTube. Search YouTube just as much for information as they do Google itself. And so there’s different platforms that people are gonna be using. I don’t think it will ever replace Google, honestly. I think Google is gonna continue to be a lead there as far as search.

0:07:03.5 EU: Makes sense. So, Phil, I imagine that obviously has an impact on what universities have traditionally seen from web traffic perspective. How are partners thinking about that? Does that feel like a threat to them? Is that a positive thing? How would you kind of categorize this change?

0:07:20.9 PW: Yeah, this has been a really hot topic lately with a lot of our partners and schools that we work with. Traffic we are noticing as organic traffic or traffic that’s coming from search engine is down. We’re continuing to see that kind of be a trend. What we’re finding though is that we’re actually getting better traffic. So you’re maybe losing traffic. You may be having less people coming to your actually website, but the traffic that is coming is more engaged. So we’re tracking things like engagement. So percent of users who are scrolling, viewing, clicking buttons, those types of things, we’re seeing more of that type of traffic coming in. And that goes back to kind of what their experience is. And so we’re seeing a lot of users who are looking for quick information. They’re getting that from Google. But users who are ready to take action are making it to websites. They’re filling out forms, they’re scheduling visits, they’re applying for applications and for enrollment. And so things like that we’re seeing more of. So it’s definitely been an interesting conversation that we’ve had where we’ve seen this decrease in traffic. But we’re also tracking other things and so I wanna make note of that as well.

0:08:23.5 PW: So, you know, while we’ve always been so focused on organic traffic, that has kind of been the metric that we’ve all looked at for years is like, how many users are we getting? That number is just not where… That number is not as important right now as we go into this new era of AI, right? The metric that we wanna start tracking is our visibility or Google Search impressions. How often are we showing up? How often are we getting seen in Google and other search engines? And so I wanna encourage those who are listening that Google search impressions, that is a big metric that you should be tracking, that you should be monitoring. And that comes from your Google Search Console.

0:08:57.1 PW: So if you don’t have Google Search Console set up for your website, that’s kind of the first step you need to make sure that that is set up so you can start tracking that visibility and those impressions. That’s one that we’re working with a lot of our schools and partners on now to make sure that they have that set up and that we can report on that. And then the second thing I would recommend is setting up event tracking. So a lot of times we don’t track engagements on our websites. A lot of… I’ve seen this quite a bit, and this is through Google Analytics 4, you’re not setting up or we’re not setting up events to track how many people are submitting forms, how many people are submitting applications. And so that extra data is really important to see, especially if we’re getting less traffic, is the traffic again that we’re getting, more engaged? Are we getting more form submissions? Are we getting more applications? Is traffic clicking on videos and things like that? We wanna understand that story better. So that’s important for us to make sure we’re setting up when we look at this, the data and the traffic.

0:09:50.5 EU: Yeah, that’s really helpful, Phil. And also it does help to explain sort of the difference between traffic in the past and traffic today. These changes are actually really helpful. And the results that are shown from an AI perspective, being more transactional makes sense to me. So that those who do end up converting into the website probably have that higher quality associated to them ’cause they’re looking for additional information beyond that top of, you know, transactional detail. So that’s a really helpful way to describe it. A lot of what you’ve just described also feels like fundamental building blocks of good SEO in general. I guess one of the things that would be helpful to explain to this audience is just what is the different… What is different about optimization for sites based on this AI powered search platform versus traditional search engines? You know, obviously traffic patterns are changing and metrics, to your point, KPIs are changing. But you know, when you think about those differences, do you have additional insights or recommendations for this group as we’re thinking about what it all means for us?

0:10:48.7 PW: Yeah, I mean, there’s definitely things that we wanna make sure we address and highlight and implement as far as the work that we do to optimize for AI. But I also wanna make it clear that we’re not reinventing SEO like SEO, the fundamentals of SEO like you’ve mentioned, are still the same. We still need to do some of the basics, but we need to layer on top of that with some other kind of new things, including keyword optimization. We’ve always done keyword optimization, but looking at those keywords differently. In the past, we may have been optimizing for kind of basic application deadline or application requirements. But now we need to be thinking about the longer tailed keywords, you know how people are searching now is more of what are the application requirements for a student applying to Bayer University. Making sure we’re thinking through kind of the longer phrasing and also replicating that in our content on the site. So that’s a big piece of it is just looking at the keywords differently and thinking through the search intent. So when I talk about search intent you know, making sure that your content is aligned to what someone is searching, making sure that you’re addressing all of their questions.

0:11:50.1 PW: So when someone’s searching for an MBA degree program, what are all the things that they would be wanting on that page and in that content to make a decision about that? It’s not just through a paragraph on a page, it’s thinking through all those different questions and addressing them in the content. And so that’s one big kind of piece that we work a lot on, is just the content and making sure that it aligns with the original search intent. Now with AI, again, I mentioned this before, you need to have more conversational language on your page. That’s one piece of it. You also need to think about the authority, the expertise, the trustworthiness of your site. Google is paying attention to that. I will say with higher education sites that most of the time they have that built in to their sites already, they have some authority. They are seen as a higher education. So there’s a lot of a benefit that our partners have with that. But you also just wanna make sure that your content feels strong, I mean, it goes back to what we always said is content is king. You don’t wanna just throw up a paragraph on a page and expect that to do really well. Thinking through that is really what you, making sure that that content is strong, that it answers the question, that it’s gonna help a user make a decision, that’s really important here.

0:12:56.3 EU: Very important.

0:12:56.4 PW: One other thing I would mention here, sorry, is just structured data. That is one thing that I would say is really important also in this new era, it’s structured data as a way that you can highlight content on your page from formatting it to the code on the back end and highlighting that information so that it can be easily pulled into search engines and other AI searches so that, not to get too tight, so need to be aware of and something that your team should be looking into if they’re not already.

0:13:21.4 EU: Gotcha. Thanks, Phil. Well, and that kind of leads into my next question, which was really around how can web teams monitor and assess the impact of these changes to ensure that they are achieving the desired results going forward? You started to answer this a little bit with some of your KPIs and sort of set up structure recommendations, things like that. But curious if there’s any other advice you can provide?

0:13:42.2 PW: Yeah, I kind of got into that a little bit when I was talking about the organic traffic. I don’t want to say that we shouldn’t track organic traffic. You still need to understand how your organic traffic is coming in. How much are you getting compared to last year, compared to next, the previous month, things like that. I just wanna put less stock in that particular metric. I think there’s more information to be more value found in engagement rate. So engagement rate is another metric that I mentioned before. Is your engagement rate fairly strong? Is it higher? You want your engagement rate to be higher. If any of you remember bounce rate, that was the percent of users who landed on a page and bounced off, we’re moving more to the opposite of that. How many… What percentage of users are engaging with the content? So that metric is really important to track. I encourage that in all my reporting and for others to track as well. And then again the search impressions, tracking that, specific site engagement, again, going back to that piece of it as well, making sure you have your event tracking set up. And then also, I think it’s important to understand your keywords.

0:14:36.1 PW: I know a lot of times we don’t wanna necessarily get into keyword data, but it’s important to understand what keywords are driving clicks to your website. If you’re getting clicks for keywords that are really irrelevant, it’s not providing much value. I see a lot of schools and partners that I work with, they rank for a lot of stuff, but it’s not always the stuff that’s gonna drive a prospective student. You know, I’ve seen everything from psychology movie lists and to bed bug information like it just, there’s a variety of content that your site may have that you may be ranking for that isn’t gonna drive meaningful traffic. And so it’s really understanding what you’re showing up for, is it the right stuff, be sure that you either optimize your new content, your content that you want people to show up for correctly so that you can kind of show up for the right things.

0:15:21.6 EU: Thanks, Phil. You know, it reminds me of something you taught me a long time ago, Phil, related to how people search in, especially in the adult learner space. You know, we’re working with multiple generations of people and they have very different search trends. So we know millennials have these short, brief keywords they’re kind of typing into queries. And the search intent that connects to that is very different than what a Gen Z student is going to type into their query. And so I’m just curious if there is a new perspective in how the different generations are searching and related to results. Now for AI, do teams have to think differently based on those generational differences or are the strategies that you’re talking about kind of universally applied?

0:16:04.4 PW: I think we do have to think differently about the different audiences and how they’re searching. You make a good point that different generations are searching differently with different types of language and different keywords. And so it’s important to keep that in mind. I think we ultimately… There is some universal language that can be used, but when we’re talking about adult learners, there tends to be more language around online, especially when it comes to programs or working adults or finishing my degree. So thinking through some of the keyword language that that audience is searching for is really important. Whereas undergrad audiences are usually searching for admission requirements, they’re searching for campus tours. So there’s a different aspect to think through as far as the language of how people are searching, that I think is important when you’re doing work on your site, for sure.

0:16:49.6 EU: Yeah, that’s really helpful because obviously it seems like this could be a space that is more straightforward than it probably is. Underneath it all, it’s much more complex with all those nuances and the ways engines are changing, the ways that people are searching, et cetera. So what is a good way for universities digital strategy team to really assess their own capabilities in this area? And when should they consider getting help from outside experts?

0:17:14.3 PW: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think when we work with these teams and with these schools, I think the first thing is to evaluate the current team that you have. Do you have someone who is thinking about the SEO strategy, who is thinking about the AI strategy. Most of the time, they have web guys and web teams that are working on these. And those teams are very busy doing the development. They’re putting up new pages, they’re changing things, they’re fixing things that are broken. They don’t necessarily have the time to think through the strategy, optimizing page titles and meta descriptions and making sure that there’s not duplicate content here versus there. And so I think you need to really evaluate the team that you have. And I know there’s content teams as well who are actually writing the content, but again, they’re focused on the messaging, they’re focused on getting the information there.

0:18:00.3 PW: They’re not thinking, how are people searching for this? And how do we make sure we align to that? So I think evaluating your current team and then understanding that if you don’t have anyone who’s thinking through that, there really is an opportunity to hire someone or bring in an outside team. Like what we do, where we come in and we really help partners focus on the SEO, you know, everything that we do starts with an SEO audit. So we come in and we really audit everything to make sure that we are looking at how things are ranking, what content’s performing well, and we do it. I think it’s really an interesting take on it where we dive into specific sections of the site. So we know admissions is really important. We dive into that section of the site or we go to, if we worked with law school, we dive into the law school site. So digging into those areas is really helpful, I think, to uncover some of these areas of opportunity for SEO and optimization and AI optimization.

0:18:47.3 EU: Well, to your point, some site traffic is not like other site traffic. Some is more meaningful, and some is really driven for that conversion for enrollment purposes versus just information sharing. So I love that you made that distinction. That’s really helpful. So I guess, Phil, you know, obviously this is an incredibly complex topic and we are barely scratching the surface here in this episode. But before we really go for the day, would you just recap and share with everyone your top advice to university leaders who are concerned that maybe they’re not yet taking the right next steps to adapt to this AI world in their search strategy?

0:19:22.8 PW: Yeah, I think what’s really important, again, is to take a look at your own site, making sure that you and I encourage leaders to look, do a search, go to your website, can you find the information that you’re looking for? Can you search for it? If you’re having a hard time finding information on your site, you’re a user, you have the ability to then see, okay, this isn’t working, that we need some support here. And I will say one of the biggest things that I see with partner websites is information architecture issues where there is just content all over the place and it’s not organized in a clear way. So you may have competing content. Right? So duplicate content that lives here and then over here, somewhere else. And those are all important things to address from a search perspective because you don’t want Google to be making the decision about which content is more important. And so those are things that I just wanna make sure I highlight that because I think that is really important to understand is that, that is one of the biggest issues I see with schools and websites is just content being outdated, content living over here and living over there competing for the same types of keywords.

0:20:23.5 PW: I always think of the example of tuition information being in the tuition section, but then you have financial aid information, and sometimes those things can compete against one another. And Google’s picking one versus the other to rank and so highlighting that information and going back and looking at that. But again, some of those, as far as leaders, looking at your teams, really evaluating, do you have the right people in your team to help address some of these things? And if not making the decision now, you don’t wanna be caught behind. And I will say, like, at this point, if you’re not thinking about SEO and AI search and how it’s changing, you’re kind of behind at this point. Your team needs to be thinking about this. You need to be taking action. You don’t wanna just leave your site to just put up content and leave it there. You need to be updating, optimizing all the time. That’s one of the things that we do, is we continuously optimize pages so that we are constantly updating and making efforts to do that. So you wanna make sure you have a team that’s gonna do that and support that work.

0:21:16.2 EU: That’s great. Yeah. Just to kind of recap that in your words, really it’s about good content hygiene and making sure that we are directing where we want Google to go versus where Google is gonna take itself. Because duplicative content can sometimes confuse the algorithm as to which page to show. Also the dedicated team, or at least the in-person who can really be responsible for consistently looking at this data, helping to optimize that information and make sure it stays evergreen, that’s one of the things that we get a lot of questions about too. How often do we need to address the content? How often do we need to make those updates? And our answer is very similar to yours is we are strategists who know that the algorithms are evolving and that users are changing what they’re searching for sometimes. Sometimes it’s also very consistent. And those enrollment critical things need to be very well crafted and very easy to find. So that’s part of those strategy as well. But really appreciate your time today, Phil. There’s a lot here we could finish unpacking, but just really appreciate you helping us scratch the surface of this topic with all the new things coming with AI. I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.

0:22:21.4 PW: Thank you for having me.

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