This week on Local Search Tuesdays, I’m sharing a tip to help you prepare for the future of AI search. While AI search hasn’t hit local yet, it’s coming, and the big shift will be moving from link building to mention building. Mentions of your business on other sites seem to matter more than links in AI results. Don’t ditch link building since it is still critical for Google traffic, but start layering in mention building so you are ready when AI search plays a bigger role.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, I’m sharing a tip that will help you potentially show up better in AI search results. As AI search becomes more prevalent, you need to shift your strategy to mention building.

While AI search results haven’t really affected local searches yet, we all know it’s coming in the future. There’s a huge scramble in digital marketing with everyone trying to figure out how the AI search systems work. Things are changing constantly, and it doesn’t help that a lot of shady vendors are claiming to already have the secret sauce for showing up in AI results.

If you’re a local business, you have the benefit of being able to sit back and watch the chaos - and learn from it. By the time AI search starts to affect local searches more significantly, we’ll likely have a much better handle on how things work.

Link building has been a cornerstone of SEO strategy from the beginning, but we’ve already seen that the AI systems don’t really care about links. Instead, they seem to value mentions of your business on other websites or sources.

From an SEO standpoint, we care much more about getting a link, since a simple mention won’t do much. In the future, that exact match keyword anchor text on a link likely won’t be anywhere near as important or influential as a mention of your company.

So, as you think about shifting your SEO strategy to include activities that will potentially help your visibility in AI search results, you should start to consider the shift from link building to mention building. 

The good news is that getting a mention of your company on another site is significantly easier than getting a link to your website from another site.

I’m not saying you should stop link building. Don’t make the mistake that too many businesses are making and cut SEO to try to optimize for AI results. At best, AI search traffic is only about 4% of the search volume. The vast majority of your traffic and conversions will still come from organic searches on Google.

But, there’s no reason you can’t add mention building to your task set. It pairs naturally with link building, so it should be an easy shift. By doing both link building and mention building, you’ll cover all the bases - the links will help with search results now, and the mentions will help when search behavior shifts to AI searches instead of Google.

That’s all the time we have left for this week’s episode, so you know what that means. Put your hand on the screen right here: We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.