Focusing on what SEOs can control

I recently read Mordy Oberstein’s LinkedIn post about the role of the CMO and who is responsible for LLM visibility. He wrote, “LLMs aren't trying to understand ‘a thing’ (pun intended), they are trying to understand and then synthesize ALL of the things.”

I’m in agreeance with Mordy on his approach to “LLM optimization” and that it just doesn’t make sense. Unity across channels is what’s necessary for better visibility. But SEOs aren’t in charge of everything. We don’t get to decide what the team responsible for TikTok or Instagram does (and we shouldn’t).

Now is the time to upskill on the things we can control, with that mainly being communication.

Focus on what we can control

I’ve talked about SXO (Search Experience Optimization) for a while now. It’s a holistic approach to improving a website that combines SEO and UX principles. Basically, focusing on creating a user-friendly and accessible site which in turn can influence traffic and conversions.

This process can really cover a lot of bases when it comes to the advice you see SEOs give about optimizing for LLMs. Let’s go through a couple of examples.

Multimodal search

Search isn’t just text based. LLMs can pull in videos and images and users can talk to the LLM or give it images to use for search. This helps give users a better search experience when an LLM can provide an image or video that is more helpful than just a text based response.

As an SEO, you can make the recommendation to add visual content to relevant pages. Whether you’re tracking traditional SERPs to see what features show up (short videos, video, images, etc) or monitoring AI mode or ChatGPT. You can find where users are looking for infographics or video explanations (and whether they are short or long form) for the product/service of the business you’re working with.

You can then use user behavior data after implementation to see how adding these features affected how they interacted with the page. You should look into the time on page, heatmap click and scroll data, and what the next step was for the user. Did they leave? Did they visit your YouTube (if you decided to embed a YouTube video)? Did they end up making it to the next page? Or did they convert (if that was a potential next step in the journey)?

This is where communication across channels and teams is crucial. SEOs aren’t making the videos to accompany the content on the site. Whether that’s being able to source existing videos or images from social media or working with that team to create something new.

User journey content

I would argue that the importance of investing in quality content is even more crucial than it always has been. Anyone can produce generic blog posts or website copy now with access to ChatGPT and other tools.

While creating topic clusters is great as well and can be helpful, it’s even more important for teams to be working on buyer’s journeys and funnels. Again, communicating with others like the content team, product team, customer service, etc, are necessary to get the right information to know where to start. The era of collaboration is here for SEOs. We can’t work in a silo anymore.

Get the right data and information to build out buyer’s journeys and map them out in GA4 or Microsoft Clarity. Tracking this data and seeing how many users drop off, make it to the next page, or convert can be very helpful in seeing if you’re missing some steps in the buyer’s journey. You can use this data to help justify if more content and context is needed to convince a user to complete an action (stay on the page and read, visit the next page, call, etc).

Moving forward

Like Mordy said, LLMs are trying to understand all the things. And that means we can’t operate in a vacuum and expect visibility to follow. If SEOs want to have a real impact, we have to lean into communication.

UX, content, product, social, we all play a part in shaping what users (and LLMs) see and understand. So while we can’t control everything, we can be the glue. Focus on what you can influence, get aligned with your team, and keep pushing for clarity.