Join WG Content for this 30-minute webinar and learn where you need to adjust your optimization strategy – and where you need to double-down on proven best practices.

What you’ll learn:

  • How to protect your content quality and SEO by focusing on H-E-E-A-T
  • Why adding Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) to your SEO strategy can be a difference-maker
  • If you need to adjust your local SEO strategy to stay relevant with AI Overviews, particularly around provider profiles
  • Use findings from exclusive analysis into ChatGPT, AI Overviews and organic search to better understand what content is rising to the top – and how your organization can do the same

Watch the on-demand webinar video

This video was recorded on August 27, 2024.

0:00:00.0 Lauran McHaffie: Hello and welcome. Thank you for joining us for our second WG Content webinar. My name is Lauran McHaffie and I’m part of the business development team here at WG Content. Some of you may formally know us as WriterGirl. We have not one but two great presenters today who are following the world of SEO very closely. Before we get started, I just have a few logistics. We want to be respectful of your time and we will wrap up today’s webinar in 30 minutes. We encourage you to ask questions there is at the bottom of your Zoom screen, there’s a Q&A box. And that’s what we’ll use for the questions. Time permitting, we’ll answer those at the end of the session. Today’s webinar will be recorded and it will be sent to you via email. Now just a little bit about us. At WG Content, we are empowered to build lasting relationships and shape meaningful content with our client partners. I think we all know without stealing any thunder from Nikki and Diane that meaningful content still packs a powerful punch in search. We are savvy communicators and team players with decades of content strategy, writing, and design experience, helping our clients achieve their marketing and communication goals, often one word at a time.

0:01:15.4 Lauran McHaffie: Today’s webinar is exploring SEO strategies in the age of generative search. Once upon a time, Google trained us in shortcut searches with keywords and choppy phrases. But now Google AI welcomes human conversation. Today we’ll be sharing learnings on HEEAT, SEO, and AO. But more than a study of acronyms, our team has tips on strategy and content as we all navigate these dynamic times together. But before we meet our presenters, we just have a quick poll. I’m gonna launch that. It’s just one little question here. Bear with me. So go ahead answer that for me. It’s just a little click there. And as you’re answering that, just a little bit about our presenters. I’m pleased to introduce two of WG Contents technology pioneers. Diane Hammons is our Director of Digital Engagement, who recently sat on an AI debate panel at Sway Healthcare Conference alongside two marketing powerhouses from Providence and Emory. She is a student of the changing landscape in search and is eager to share and absorb.

0:02:27.0 Lauran McHaffie: She has extensive background in marketing and a graphic designer by trade and is a great all-around leader to have on our team. Nikki Breen is one of WG’s exceptional content strategists. Kudos to her on recently completing her master’s in health communication while working full time and parenting. So yay, Nikki. She has over 10 years experience in healthcare, including a role with an SEO agency. She’s a content expert at leveraging analytics to ensure our clients’digital content is relevant, competitive, and user-friendly. So let me, I’m gonna end this poll. We’re gonna share what the results are. Looks like 71% of you are using a tool outside of Google. I’d love to hear from you if you actually wanna put in a Q&A what it is that you are using. We’d love to just have you share with us. So without further ado, let’s go ahead and start with Diane. Thank you.

0:03:28.7 Diane Hammons: All right. Thank you, Lauran. And welcome, everybody. Quick look at our agenda. Today, we’ll start with just talking a little bit about the current state of search. And then Nikki will share some SEO best practices. Then we’ll consider the next search disruptor and explore the results of a comparative test that we conducted between Google and ChatGPT. The state of search. Google the verb was added to Merriam-Webster in 2006. That means we’ve been Googling for 18 years and Google has nearly 82% of the search market share. So for those of you who haven’t explored beyond that, understandable. So can anything really shake things up? In mid-May 2024, Google introduced AI overviews, or AIOs for short. You’ve probably seen them. They’re kind of hard to avoid. The goal is to provide quick, direct answers so you don’t have to piece things together. And this is generative search. You find what you need to know in zero clicks. And well, that certainly shook things up. As we’ve come to experience with most things AI, AI has didn’t launch quite as smoothly as Google hoped. The great pizza glue incident you’ve probably heard of.

0:04:52.0 Diane Hammons: Well, we’ve been on a roller coaster, all of us, ever since. Actually, it’s felt a little bit more dizzying, hasn’t it? In May, AI overviews were generated for 15% of search queries. Google pulled back to 7% by the end of the month. That was in light of the bad press around the tool, giving users misleading, even dangerous answers, like the pizza and the glue. And Google said at that time that AI wasn’t hallucinating. Rather, it was having trouble interpreting satire from user-generated sources like Reddit. So they made adjustments, and AIOs were back up in July, up to 12%. They were down again by the end of the month, and we haven’t seen the stats quite yet for August. Now, healthcare searches trigger the most AI overviews. Google recently removed AI results from healthcare searches that include words like rare, complex, and genetic, but they’re still popping up around 61% of the time. Why do these statistics matter? Because AIOs occupy prime Google real estate. They push organic rankings further down on the page, maybe even on the page two now, and they suggest, as you can see here, related links, which may or may not pay heed to search engine results page rankings or SERPs. So what does this mean for your SEO strategy? Nikki, you wanna give some tips?

0:06:27.5 Nikki Breen: Sure. Thanks, Diane. In May of 24, Forbes released an article titled, Will Generative AI Mean the End of Internet Searching in SEO as we know it? The unknown can be frightening and even more so when it happens almost overnight. This doesn’t have to be a scary monster hiding in the bed. So let’s talk about it. So This month, August 24, Google Core update prioritizes quality over low-value SEO-focused content. That’s why it’s important to follow HEEAT. You may have heard about HEEAT, but WG content added an H to the acronym. What is this HEEAT? H is for health. This is not just for creating healthcare content, but keeping the health of your website top of mind. Follow SEO best practices. Ensure your site’s technical SEO is in good shape. Also regularly audit and refresh your content. E is for experience. Follow WCAG 3 accessibility guidelines. Include multimedia content and such as videos, graphs, charts, and keep in mind that these can show up in SERPs under your knowledge panel, video, and featured snippet, which boosts engagement and your SEO and topic authority.

0:07:40.3 Nikki Breen: Is your site optimized for mobile users is another thing to consider. Now let’s not forget that experience also includes how easy it is for search engines to navigate your content. Be sure you have schema markups, a clean site structure, etcetera. Do not use just plain language but conversational language. Now let’s do a quick detour. What do we mean by plain and conversational language? Plain language involves making sure that content is understandable for anyone who reads it. Avoid medical jargon as much as possible, and if you need it, make sure you define it in layman’s terms. Have shorter, simpler sentences. Be clear and break down complex information. Use common words. Patient education, patient heart attacks doesn’t need words like occluded or obstruction when the word blocked will do just fine. Plain language also means easy reading. Tools like Grammarly, Microsoft Word, and HemingwayApp.com and others like it will help you drop in your content will allow you to drop in your content so then you can make sure that the reading score is on par often it will give an exact grade level such as grade 5 or grade 12.

0:08:53.4 Nikki Breen: Now as far as conversational language we believe that conversational language should be less formal it can include conjunctions for an example conjunction is didn’t instead of did not use first and second person language like I and you. Does it feel like it’s written by a person rather than AI? Conversational language is similar to how people talk in everyday conversation. It includes making a more personal connection with the reader. One of our writers, Colleen, did a webinar last month about creating powerful patient stories and she dives into making that connection with readers. So that’s our quick side detour on what plain and conversational language is. Now let’s get back to HEEAT. The second E is for Expertise. Create content that offers in-depth knowledge from topic experts, someone with first-hand experience. This includes citations to reputable sources that back up your points and statistics. A is for Authoritativeness. Establish a strong brand reputation, ensure your content is high quality, and publish on a regular cadence. Trustworthiness is the last one. Be transparent.

0:10:02.9 Nikki Breen: Provide your contact information and follow ethical content practices. These are all components of a strong SEO strategy for generative search. Now, another component of SEO that’s becoming more vital is Answer Engine Optimization AEO. We’re used to Google search requiring just a handful of words or phrases like was mentioned earlier. So this is something like lung cancer treatments. AEO helps content appear in AI-generated searches. AEO offers a more human conversational experience by concisely and clearly answering questions so your content appears in AI overviews or featured snippets. It also means that AEO is your content is expanded upon your answer, so you give a more in-depth detail. So it’s high-quality content, which goes back to the HEEAT that we just talked about. An example of this is what are the latest lung cancer treatments? Or my dad was just diagnosed with lung cancer, what are the newest and best treatments? Lean into long tail keywords. Short questions as headers might help with appearing in generative search. For example, what is lung cancer instead of just lung cancer or lung cancer definition?

0:11:16.5 Nikki Breen: Looking at local SEO is particularly important with generative search decreasing clicks as this can boost your visibility. In some instances, AI overviews or chatGPT will provide an answer to a user’s question and answers follow-up questions even before the user thinks to ask. For example, someone searching for info about a health condition, generative AI may correlate that with finding a provider who treats the condition might be a logical next step. So it’ll offer details on local providers. So this means it’s important to keep your local business profiles and location pages up to date and have strong provider profiles and online rankings. We’ll dive more into provider profiles and online rankings in a few minutes. Back to you, Diane.

0:12:05.1 Diane Hammons: All right. Talk about roller coasters. ChatGPT launched in November ’22, and it’s been AI this and AI that ever since. I’m sure your inbox looks like mine. And this includes search engines. So we may never stop Googling altogether, and we’re not suggesting that we should, but AI search engines like Perplexity, You.com, Andi, A-N-D-I, they’re giving us a reason to Google less, and that’s because using them feels like this. They’re conversational and personalized. Google may have trained us to search using keywords and choppy phrases, but that pendulum is swinging. Here’s an example of a ChatGPT prompt. My mom was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. Can you please tell me more about the treatment process? Look how it responded. This first thing it responded with is empathy. And from here, I can follow a stream of consciousness and ask ChatGPT any number of follow-up questions, and I can still stay in this same conversation thread.

0:13:14.2 Diane Hammons: ChatGPT is the most well-known AI search engine. Looking at the numbers, you might be quick to dismiss them though. These numbers are likely driven by those early experiences with the tool. ChatGPT 3.5, that’s what launched in November ’22, and it had issues with hallucinations. And you couldn’t search web data in real time. But with the current model, 4.0, you can, and it’s more accurate. Oh, and there’s this. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, they’re beta testing a new interface specifically designed for search. So change is coming and the number of users will increase. So that got us wondering, what does this mean to the future of search and content strategy? Nikki and I did a little beta test of our own. So first we defined our persona, a 50 to 60-year-old person looking for a healthcare specialist for a senior parent, a parent who was recently diagnosed with a health condition.

0:14:21.5 Diane Hammons: We imagined breast cancer, congestive heart failure, or stroke. We then identified three related service lines, oncology, cardiology, and stroke rehabilitation. Next, we developed a list of broad topic questions our persona would likely search for, such as, who’s the best heart doctor? And our prompts included variations of top ranking keywords such as not only heart doctor but heart specialist and cardiologist. And we conducted parallel searches from IP addresses in Ohio, Illinois, and Virginia just to see where a geography may or may not make a difference. Nikki you want to talk about our findings?

0:15:02.2 Nikki Breen: Yes, so we had some interesting differences that we discovered between Google and ChatGPT results. One was a reliance on published rankings. When we asked questions like, where can I find a good heart doctor, Google’s results focused on local health systems. ChatGPT didn’t factor in location unless we specifically prompted it. ChatGPT results came from nationally top-ranked health systems such as US News and World Report, Health Grades, and similar ranking lists, it advised what qualifies as the best provider, so things like certifications and experience. It also suggested obtaining recommendations from professional organizations and your primary care provider. When we asked questions like, who are the top-rated breast oncologists, Google’s organic SERPs pulled up ranking lists, again, like US News and World Report, Health Grades, and others. Sometimes it offered top ranked health system service line landing pages, but it didn’t give individual provider names. AI overviews gave some of our, oh, I’m sorry, I just lost my notes here.

0:16:07.2 Nikki Breen: We’ve got so much that I wanted to write everything down here. AI overviews gave some of our WG Content testers individual provider names, but not every time and not always related to the tester’s IP address. ChatGPT gave a few individual provider names, titles affiliated health systems and sometimes links. However, we found issues here. Some of these providers were no longer affiliated or never affiliated with the health system. Sometimes ChatGPT confused research faculty for clinical providers. It also offered providers who were over age 60. It seemed to favor them, those who had more publications or years of experience. Another example that we found was a map here that shows where do I find a good cardiologist. So in this case, Google did not provide an AI overview, but once you get past all the sponsored links, you can see how it prioritized business profiles of local health systems. And the first organic article was US News and World Report for best heart doctors and cardiologists located in that state.

0:17:20.9 Nikki Breen: Now you can see here is ChatGPT’s results. It had steps of how-to recommendations. It also listed four highly ranked health systems. So at the time of our testing, ChatGPT’s results didn’t necessarily correlate with page one SERPs. Google SERPs aligned with content that Google deems most relevant to the search keywords plus pages that follow EEAT or HEEAT that we mentioned earlier. AI overviews gave short answers and attempted to predict our next step by suggesting follow-up links. ChatGPT, however, delivered succinct answers and longer answers, sometimes recommendations and next steps, and offered service line or home landing page links but not child pages. These pages didn’t necessarily rank high in SERPs. We also found distinct differences when referencing health information websites. Google’s organic SERPs favored sites with strong SEO, topic authority, and keywords that aligned with the query. SERPs were often a mix of health system, professional medical association, healthcare media content, and even relevant video media. A recent study found that Healthline.com is among the most frequently linked websites and AI overviews.

0:18:41.5 Nikki Breen: At the time of our test, Healthline wasn’t appearing as much as it does today. When we directly asked ChatGPT for its sources, it advised it referred to a variety of sources that provide comprehensive reviews and ratings based on patient experiences, expert opinions, and hospital affiliations. These ChatGPT sources included Healthgrades, US News & World Report, Castle Connelly Medical, Vitals, ZocDoc, leading hospital websites, and nonprofit medical societies. Video content was included in ChatGPT’s results, but our prompts didn’t specifically request that media. We do have a blog post that came out, I believe this morning, about more details on the tests that we ran. Another big question is, do these findings matter once SearchGPT rolls out? Unfortunately, we weren’t accepted into SearchGPT’s beta testing. But last week, researchers at BrightEdge published their experience with it. They found that SearchGPT consistently draws from various sources, including academic institution, industry-specific platforms, and government websites.

0:19:57.2 Nikki Breen: So similar to our findings with ChatGPT, BrightEdge says that SearchGPT provides more detailed responses than AI overviews. As you can see, each search result in SearchGPT includes a button that opens to a citation panel. These responses also include more real-world examples and practical applications. So this could indicate that there’s a focus on reviews and perhaps patient stories as well. So we’ve thrown a lot at you. So a summary of what we have and discussed is maintain a solid SEO strategy focused on HEEAT that we discussed. Lean into AEO by including long tail keywords and full length questions. Make sure you have a conversational tone even in headlines. Optimize provider profiles, reviews, and local service information. And finally, get curious conduct test to see if, when, and how your organization appears in generative search. So Lauran, that’s everything that we had to share today.

0:21:03.9 Lauran McHaffie: Alrighty. So now we have a time for a little bit of questions. That was great guys. Thank you so much for your constant vigilance into studying this ever changing landscape. I know it’s probably gonna be different tomorrow, but so here’s a couple questions. I think this one might be best for you, Nikki. So what is the biggest takeaway from this in terms of identifying and implementing their own SEO strategies?

0:21:31.0 Nikki Breen: So I would say it’s kind of a case-by-case basis. So consider what you’re currently doing. Are you following SEO best practices, like using the HEEAT acronym that we talked about? Are you doing AEO? Is there room to make your local SEO more robust? Run searches with some of your top keywords. See if you’re showing up in ChatGPT, AI overviews, Google’s top SERPs, any other kind of AI search. If not, what are the top performers discussing in their content that maybe you aren’t? That could be an opportunity to either discuss that content or if nobody’s really answering it correctly, that could be an opportunity for you to just dive in there and be the first one to really give a good answer. So there’s some investigation needed, but that’s where we suggest that you start.

0:22:19.5 Lauran McHaffie: That’s great. Hey, Diane, would you put the last slide up again? Just we had a request for that.

0:22:24.7 Diane Hammons: Yeah, absolutely.

0:22:28.5 Lauran McHaffie: All right, Diane, this one’s for you. How do you keep up? How do you do it? What are your sources?

0:22:36.0 Diane Hammons: That is a challenge. Yeah, the inbox gets flooded, honestly, and it does. It is literally changing week to week. The information we’re sharing is only things that have come out the last even few months. So I recommend just pick a few good sources that you feel like you can trust that are good at culminating all of the information and putting into one package for you. So Nikki and I, we certainly follow Search Engine Journal. That’s where we get a lot of our up-to-date information regarding SEO. TechCrunch is another great one just to follow what’s changing in the world of AI in general, how that impacts marketing, healthcare, but also other industries, because sometimes that’s where you find maybe your use cases. Fast company, I would put in that realm also. Obviously, they’re not focused only on AI, but you get a lot of great articles related to how different industries are using the tool. But let’s see, beyond that, I really encourage, as I have myself, to kind of identify your local tribe.

0:23:53.5 Diane Hammons: There are meetups likely in your area, conferences, webinars like this, but search in your own backyard. I’ve recently found a podcast, Creativity Squared, that’s hosted by Helen Todd, and she happens to, she splits time between New York and Cincinnati, but with her right in my backyard here in Cincinnati. It’s someone that is accessible, someone that I have seen speak firsthand, and I can ask questions and really get direct advice on things like prompting and security of certain tools, things like that. Marketing AI Institute is another one now. They happen to be headquartered in Cleveland, but that’s my recommendation. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. And don’t stress yourself with reading everything. Just find those few great sources.

0:24:46.0 Lauran McHaffie: Thank you. That’s great. Here’s another one. What should I look for? And this could be for either of you or both when conducting my own test and what can I learn from it.

0:25:00.1 Diane Hammons: I’ll let you take that first Nikki.

0:25:02.2 Nikki Breen: So I would say you want to look and see what are you ranking for if anything what keywords are pulling up your appearance in say ChatGPT AI overviews if you’re not appearing in it kind of like what we mentioned before look and see what is being discussed in the competitors content are they directly answering the question maybe your content isn’t such a direct answer maybe they’re going at it from a different angle. Maybe that’s beneficial. Maybe there’s not really anybody who’s answering it like head on. And so Google is just trying to figure out, oh, this is the closest answer to anything that exists right now. That’s an opportunity for you to step in and just snatch it up and be the one to directly answer with very thorough and lengthy content. So it’s short, you’re gonna be able to appear in AI overviews, but it’s a little bit longer. So you’ll be able to appear in ChatGPT and other search engines. Diane, what else do you have to add to that?

0:26:00.7 Diane Hammons: I would just add to reinforce that we focused on ChatGPT today because, as we said, they are a dominant player. But they aren’t the only player. And likely consumers, maybe yourself, have tried some other search engines as well, other generative search outlets. And that’s great. So as you are keeping up with kind of the news of the day and with each release of these different tools, you might find users gravitate more towards perplexity because it’s generating better results for a while and then it may swing back to GPT or something or some other search engine that’s out there, Gemini. So I encourage you to get curious and also explore some of those other tools so you don’t have to only focus on ChatGPT and see how things are coming up across the board.

0:26:54.0 Lauran McHaffie: This one pertains to that. Do you recommend using ChatGPT or generative search to assist with long tail keywords? Do you have a thought on that?

0:27:05.6 Diane Hammons: To assist with creating?

0:27:07.2 Lauran McHaffie: Long tail… Yeah.

0:27:12.0 Diane Hammons: Yeah.

0:27:12.8 Lauran McHaffie: I think the strategy. Or is that one we should answer at the… We’ll we’re running out of time. So we will answer these questions for you. We can if it’s an in-depth answer, we can certainly share that.

0:27:25.3 Diane Hammons: Yeah, I can jump in and just say from this is truly personal experience. We were chatting about this a little bit before this webinar started. I personally, the more I use ChatGPT, I’ve found more value in it. Some of the issues with inaccuracies are improving. Now, it certainly would data check anything that’s health content related. But to just get some general ideas, to have a good summary or a definition, I’ve found that as a user, I personally really enjoy that conversational style. So I am using that more and more myself. Nikki?

0:28:09.0 Nikki Breen: Yeah, so I’ll add on to what Diane said there. The key word is get it. Ideas from it. So I have not done anything with it within the last three weeks. But prior to that, I was playing around with it. And I found that like ChatGPT and such AI tools were giving lists of keywords. But then when I actually applied them to like Google and other search engines, they were keywords that weren’t really ranking quite right, not the right user intent, didn’t have much volume. So use it to get a list of ideas. And then I would put it into some tools like SEMrush or Moz and ones that can give you keyword volume and double check it because keep in mind that AI is still new and it’s going to have some struggles and things like that. So just use it as a idea generation right now, but keep an eye on it because I’m sure it’s going to rapidly improve and we might be able to just use it to replace some of our keyword tools.

0:29:02.5 Lauran McHaffie: All right. That’s great information. Will you flip to the next couple slides there, Diane, for me. So again, thank you for joining us for our webinar today. We appreciate you taking the time and being so interested. Do have some more questions and we will answer those via the email that comes with the link to this recording. We also have a white paper on this subject. You can see that there. And as Nikki mentioned, the blog. There is a post survey. So it’s only three questions, three quick ones. Please answer those for us. We appreciate your feedback. Next month, our webinar is the art of marketing report writing, and that’s on September 24th. And we will be sending out information via email and LinkedIn. So thank you all again. We will see you in September. Have a great day.

0:29:51.0 Diane Hammons: Thanks everyone. 

Diane Hammons, director, WG Content

Diane Hammons, Director of digital engagement

In a world of digital possibilities, Diane ensures that the technologies we use at WG Content serve our employees and clients well. Her expertise allows our growing, remote workforce to be creative, productive and connected.

Diane came to WG Content in 2021 with an extensive background in marketing, having worked for a local hospital, national health insurer and private cloud storage company. A graphic designer by trade, she applies “design thinking” to solve problems and overcome challenges, helping all of us at WG Content to do our best work.

Curiosity drives Diane in her understanding of all things digital. She soaks up knowledge by attending conferences and workshops, listening to podcasts and keynote speeches, and sharing ideas with clients and other thought leaders. Her expertise and insights guide the development of our martech stack and provide employees with the resources they need to thrive.

Known for her adventurous spirit, Diane will try anything at least once (except skydiving). Recent explorations include goat yoga, maple syrup tapping and a family trip to Vietnam. She is a volunteer docent at the Cincinnati Museum Center, where she leads tours of the historic building’s Art Deco rotunda.

Nikki Breen content strategist, WG Content

Nikki Breen, Content strategist

Nikki is passionate about delivering accessible content that educates and empowers readers. She’s an expert at leveraging analytics to make client websites and digital content relevant, competitive and patient-friendly. Nikki keeps up to date with innovations in the healthcare and content industries—perhaps one reason people often say they learn something new every time they talk to her.

Nikki has over a decade of experience in the healthcare industry, with previous stints at a medical communications agency, healthcare think tank, SEO agency, and oncology community outreach for Illinois’ largest healthcare system. Her varied background allows her to bring additional knowledge and expertise to projects. Nikki says what she enjoys most about working here is the empowerment to be an expert, yet the camaraderie to ask someone for help when you don’t know the answer.

When not working, Nikki enjoys reading, spending time with her family and dog, and practicing writing fiction to one day become a published novelist. She has a bachelor’s degree in pre-veterinary medicine and will complete a master’s in health communications in July 2024.

Lauran McHaffie, Client partnership coordinator

Lauran McHaffie, Client partnerships

It’s about people for Lauran. She is passionate about collaboration, empowering others to reach new heights, and having fun along the way. Her diverse client-focused marketing and communications experience encompasses healthcare, higher education, philanthropy and wellness.

Lauran has a BA in advertising and marketing from the University of Alabama. (Roll Tide!) In her free time, she’s been certified to teach group fitness and provide personal training since the days of leg warmers. You’ll also find her playing pickleball and showing a little love to her family and friends by cooking for them.