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By Adva Priso

Chief Strategy Officer

Moore Digital

Organic web traffic from search could be halved by 2028, with a massive impact on nonprofit marketers, according to research and strategy firm Gartner. This is for two reasons.

First, generative AI is now a viable competitor to traditional search engines, largely without people having to leave their generative AI hosts. Google pioneered the idea of the zero-click search, where you search and get an answer without having to leave the search engine. This year, almost 60% of Google searches ended this way.

Interfaces such as ChatGPT and Perplexity compete for these zero-click searches. In their interfaces, you can type (and talk) like a human and get an answer. Google is competing back with AI overviews at the top of search results. These results push down both paid ads and organic search engine listings on the site. In short, there was a time before Google. Back then, typing words into a box and getting ten blue links out wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Nor is it now.

Second, how people search is now far more fragmented. Traditional search engines are no longer the default for younger generations. Google’s own studies show the plurality of young people go to social networks for searches like where to go for lunch. They’re not going to Google. So:

• Generative AI systems are increasingly relevant, and they prioritize answers with no clicks. 
• Search engines are responding by building AI overviews that decrease clicks.
• More young people are “searching” in systems that keep people in their walled gardens without clicks.

It sounds like a bad time to be in the getting-clicks business. And if your instincts say that these efforts to make clicks rarer will also make them more expensive, trust your instincts (and the law of supply and demand.)

What’s a nonprofit marketer to do? We recommend several key actions:

Write for humans. As searches will increasingly be asking like a human, you’ll want to write like a human. Research on generative AI searchers has found the top tips for writing to be picked up by these engines are remarkably like what your favorite writing teacher recommended:

• Use quotations.
• Use statistics.
• Cite your sources.
• Be authoritative.
• Write for fluency, making your writing easy to understand.

Answering commonly asked questions like “What does [organization] do?” in clear English also helps search engines give your answer to those searching. Take these opportunities.

Structure for machines. Writing for humans doesn’t mean we can ignore our new AI overlords (kidding! partly!). You must ensure that both search and AI engines can crawl your website for relevant information. That means your website’s robots.txt file must be correctly configured to allow search engines to crawl your site. 

Similarly, avoid blocking important pages that you want to be indexed. Structured data (explicitly labeling key information, like author, date, location, or offer details) also helps search engines and AI systems better understand and categorize your content and can increase your chances of being featured in rich snippets and AI summaries.

Act across media. As searches are less about typing to get the 10 blue links, we must adapt. We need to structure content to answer voice queries, tag our images for visual search tools, and create conversational interfaces with users.

Personalize. When you know more about the user than a searching utility, you can create a unique link that makes people come to you. This change in search engines will winnow down the number of different sites that people visit. Personalization is one of the best ways to make sure you make the list.

This, of course, means you need to be collecting as much first-party data as possible. You cannot personalize based on things you don’t know. And you should not personalize based on things you assume are true if the person hasn’t explicitly told you their truth.

Stay you. You can use AI to assist in content creation. But don’t forget who you are. For example, you say “people experiencing homelessness” rather than “the homeless” to make sure people retain their personhood and aren’t defined by an often temporary condition. You need to maintain this oversight because, as generative AI increasingly constructs our reality, we must construct its reality.

Create unique resources. Downloadable guides, interactive tools, research reports, and white papers give people a reason to come to your website outside of the search engine.

Speaking of which, you can learn more about this topic in our new white paper, The Impact of AI on Search Engine Optimization. After all, we need to practice what we preach!

The post How The AI Revolution Changes Your Search Engine Strategy appeared first on The NonProfit Times.

Source From Non Profit Times