The most significant innovation in SGE is “conversational mode”. This is where users can enter into a ChatGPT-style conversation away from the search engine results page (SERP).
Here, searchers will have the opportunity to ask follow-up questions or select from suggested prompts, explore the topic in more depth, or branch out into related subject areas.
Conversational search opens up endless possibilities. Searchers will be able to enter highly personalized and specific queries – and receive tailored responses that match user intent with a level of accuracy previously not possible. This will mark the beginning of a new era of “natural language search”.
The prospect of personalized conversational search should be a wake-up call for creators and publishers. If we want our content to feature (and receive citations) in conversational mode, we must move beyond simply optimizing for short-tail and generic long-tail queries.
Our job is instead to predict the types of follow-up questions that are likely to take place beneath short-tail queries. I use the word “predict” deliberately because privacy considerations mean it’s unlikely we’ll ever know what actually takes place within conversational mode.
One way to make these predictions is to engage in conversations ourselves. At The Alliance, we’re using platforms like Perplexity to have extensive conversations with LLMs to generate banks of potential “follow-up” queries that relate to the high-volume keywords we typically target.
As we pursue these conversations, we keep a record of all the follow-up prompts that Perplexity’s AI suggests. This process helps us to understand the types of ultra-specific, natural language queries that are likely to come up within Google’s conversational mode in SGE. It’s not an exact science, but it helps us uncover new queries that we can potentially target.
The final step is to create new pages (or optimize existing high-traffic pages) to target these more niche queries. In a sense, it’s no different from optimizing pages for People Also Asked queries. The difference, though, is in how we discover these opportunities.
Traditional SEO tools won’t be able to guide us (at least not yet). Instead, we'll have to put ourselves in the shoes of our target audiences and engage in AI search conversations ourselves. Only then will we start to discover the myriad keyword possibilities engendered by conversational search.