How SEO helps Google Ads A.I.
Google Ads A.I. products have been steadily rolling out these past few months and the results are impressive, with conversion rates often returning around a five-fold increase. But there’s a catch.
What I learned
- Google A.I. advertising will assist our revenue targets
- Conversion rates have defied expectations
- The catch is that the site needs good SEO
- Speed, brand, User Experience and paid media all still need to click
- What’s your revenue goal?
Transcript
Hey, welcome back Rankers. We’ve finally moved into the new office. Closed off the old office over the weekend. Worked hard. Very sore. But that’s okay; we’ve moved. We’ve learned a lot this year and we’ve radically changed our direction for next year as well. As many of you know, we now focus on revenue as our primary metric. So we don’t care about rankings necessarily. We don’t care about traffic necessarily. We might in the right context if it’s to achieve a revenue goal.
A.I. Revenue
Basically focusing on revenue leads you to look at a lot of different things. And one of the things that we’ve learned this year is getting results like this. So we’ve spoken about the Google AI advertising products before at the Avinash Kaushik at the SEMrush Summer Jam in Helsinki was telling us about some of these things. And we’re starting to see more of these roll out. And I just want to show this latest one we’re trying on a client and this client, basket sizes around 250 bucks. They’re in the professional equipment industry I guess you’d call it. And they have only gone to a mobile site about a month ago.
But we’ve only just switched on one of these new AI products and what we’ve learned from that is that we need to lift our expectations because on this site, he’s always had about a 1 to 2% conversion rate. And it’s been difficult to get that up. An e-commerce conversion rate specifically.
Some of these ad products are getting 5, 6% conversion rates. That’s a five-fold increase, right? From an ad product. Using AI. Here’s the catch though. That ad product only works really, really well on this site because the site’s got good SEO. What? What? How’s that work, Jim? Well, glad you asked.
Think of it this way. AI is a robot, it needs structure, it needs to understand tables, logical data, all of these things. If you have a site and obviously the Google Ads bot has to crawl the site too, right? If you have a site that’s got a horrible crawl or the bot gets lost, well that’s going to affect these sorts of numbers. Similarly, if you have a site that’s full of internal duplication and it’s not canonicalised correctly or it’s got no index or you know the bot shouldn’t be crawling it but you’re letting it crawl. Whatever it might be. If you’ve got content that is confusing on that site in your catalogue, that’s going to affect this.
We’ve seen it time and time again when we’ve taken over emergency and recount and you say there’s a lot of products just not approved. Just can’t get in to say, Google shopping. And quite often, that’s because of the structure of the site. It might be that the site has inconsistent page totals. It might be that the site has duplicate page titles or page titles too long. Things that you would look at for SEO.
So the sites that we’ve done SEO on and then we apply some of the Google AI advertising products, boom. The ones where you go and use some of these new AI ad products on where the site hasn’t had as much SEO, technical SEO done to it. They don’t work as well. So you have to get back and work through those SEO issues.
A.I. Needs a Strong SEO Foundation
So some of those SEO issues are things like speed. That affects the user. But it also affects these products. Brand. So the stronger your brand is the higher the click-through rate you’re going to get in the search results. More often your ad’s gonna appear. Lower cost per click.
Brand. AI. SEO. Paid media. They all come together under one roof, which is the user experience. How does the user encounter your brand? What’s the experience when they hit your site? And even after they transact, do you follow up. For instance, if you are an Amazon seller or an eBay seller, does the user know once they’ve got their products what your store name is? What your brand is? Not Amazon or eBay.
They’re the things you’ve got to think about. Is there a way to get them back to your website outside of marketplaces? How do you establish a connection with that user long term? And the user experience starts from the moment they find you in the search results or in a backlink or whatever it might be, through to the time they receive their products. And using the tools of AI and I mean, those numbers are extraordinary. That’s a 1,200 and some of them we’ve seen 1,600% return on ad spend. But only on the sites that have got the good SEO done.
So you know, speed, cataloguing, all those sorts of things. AI, brand, SEO, paid media, they all come together. So next year, what our primary focus is is sourcing the sort of e-commerce site we want to work with. And we’ve established that down to the right niche. The right ideal company structure that we want to work with. Where they want to head. What their goals are for next year. It’s amazing we’re going through and asking a lot of clients, “Okay, what are your revenue goals for next year?” And for some of them it’s a bit difficult because the site hasn’t had that sort of focus, but what we’ve learned is if you put that sort of focus on your e-commerce sites. If you put that sort of focus in on what’s our revenue goal? How are we gonna make it? How are we going to achieve it? And then do all the other things that we know work. With SEO, with PPC, with a brand, that’s all you need to do. Game over.
That’s it for this week’s show. Hope to see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
