Digital Strategy Summit

This session will explore Google’s AI integration into search and its increased focus on highlighting social media posts and profiles in Google Search results. Attendees will learn how to rank in the Search Generative Experience and Google Perspectives to enhance nonprofit organizations' online presence and outreach. The session will also delve into practical SEO and social media strategies, the significance of user experience (UX), and the integration of AI in content creation. Attendees will learn to leverage social media in search and use AI in their marketing processes. The sessions will provide actionable insights to empower nonprofit professionals with the tools and knowledge to navigate Google’s 2024 search landscape complexities.

Transcript

1. Leveraging Google’s AI Integration and Social Media Focus for Your Nonprofit
2. Katherine Watier Ong • 18 years of online marketing experience (SEO, SEM, social media, web analytics) - 10 in nonprofits • Built and ran Ketchum PR’s online marketing and analytics team. • Voice Search Optimization speaker. • Wrote the first study on consumers’ adoption of wearable computers. • Host: Digital Marketing Victories Podcast
3. Brands Katherine Watier Ong has worked with
4. Why your nonprofit needs to use AI
5. Why AI is important to your nonprofit • Collecting and analyzing data • Make predictions and recommendations about who is most likely to give, and the best approach for reaching out to them (with matched wealth and philanthropic data) • Personalize donation appeals • Reviewing and updating donor prospect profiles • Generate data visualizations
6. Why AI is important to your nonprofit Content: • Faster, better performing search, social, email, and advertising copy • Faster and cheaper image and video assets • Reading and responding to incoming communications https://openai.com/sora
7. Google’s AI & Social Media Focus
8. Google Perspectives “Perspectives” First person Social profiles ranking: • Study.com • Quora.com • YouTube • Facebook
9. News Perspectives • Located under the Top Stories News Carousel
10. Social Q & A panel in search
11. Search Engine AI Chat Options
12. Bing Search - ChatGPT 4 in Search
13. Always Available Sidebar
14. When will climate change be irreversible? - Bing
15. Bing Response Cont. - references
16. Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE)
17. Today’s Top Ranking Term
18. Top Ranking Term with SGE
19. Google Gemini
20. Google Gemini - in beta
21. When will climate change be irreversible?
22. How will Google’s SGE impact me?
23. Latest SGE Research
24. Will searchers use it? • We don’t know how many people will use it • Will they ask a follow up question? For some queries, the AI response auto-loads; for others, you need to click “generate.”
25. How is the response generated?
26. The Search Generative Experience Process 1. The system received a query 2. It selects a set of search results documents relevant to that query or related queries 3. It generates a content snippet from each search result document 4. It uses a Large Language Model to process the search results, document content snippets, and generate an LLM output 5. That is then rendered to the client’s device along with optional search results, confidence annotations, links to verifying search results documents, etc.
27. Content Snippets = Fraggles
28. What are Fraggles? • Combination of “Fragments” and “Handles”. • Helps Google discover the answer even if it exists within the middle of a video file, audio file, or an image. • Multiple answer fragments on a page can be indexed and ranked separately in Google. • Featured Snippets can pull from fraggles - video, audio, text, .pdfs.
29. Powered by Markup/Bookmarks Google Jump Links - “Fraggles”
30. How to get Fraggles for your URLs? Format Matters: 1. Long, multi-topic pages on your site need to be well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. 2. Each section needs an associated anchor (header) with a descriptive name 3. Add to your page a “table of contents” which links to the individual anchors.” – Google Webmaster Central, 2009
31. What will the impact be to your site?
32. Check keywords, create a plan 1. Use this tracking sheet 2. Reduce your server load time to under 500 milliseconds and use caching. Make sure your critical elements are not loaded with JavaScript 3. Note patterns in the Fraggles, your content relevancy, start to run experiments. 4. Monitor rankings in SGE manually once a week, or get an Authoritas account.
33. What do you do to appear?
34. Best Guess for Ranking • Allow search engines to crawl & index your content (remove noarchive tag). • Limit your use of JS, use caching. • Load less than 500 milliseconds • Rank in the top 2 organic results and have the most relevant passage (Passage indexing optimization/Fraggles)
35. More than just your website Rand’s takeaway is that for now, you can be a brand where people are talking about their issues based on Bard’s dataset.
36. Other theories • Add FAQ chunks based on the searcher’s journey keywords + follow up questions, mark them with FAQ markup • Journal article: How to Rank in AI Search • Wordlift’s service that adds Claim Review schema markup to your pages might boost your future SGE rankings.
37. How do you know if someone clicks from SGE to your site?
38. Can not measure SGE clicks • Bing webmaster tools has AI chat responses but included them with web visits, making it impossible to see chat-only engagement • No idea how Google will provide measurement • Authoritas account can measure SGE ranking
39. Does AI Content Work?
40. Yes - Humans Like AI Content Better Survey of over 700 consumers. Showed them different 2 content versions of in different formats. One version was written by a human, the other by AI. Which text resonates with you? AI won every time.
41. And that content is ranking
42. 2023 Google Updates that impact SGE
43. Helpful Content Update
44. Helpful Content Update • Rolled out in September, driven by machine learning. • Is a sitewide signal, if the % of content is “unhelpful”, the site will be impacted. • Guide around how to provide helpful content lists questions to ask. ◦ Quality content ◦ Written from a place of expertise, with author info clearly displayed ◦ Good UX ◦ Content created for people with a purpose that will help them with their goal. WHY are you creating the content?
45. Site Quality Includes • Layout • Design • Image integration • Page speed • Full list of Helpful Content questions • Content quality can impact crawling and indexing (see here and here)
46. • High content quality • Expertise, trust • Great page experience • People-first • WHO. HOW. WHY. Helpful, reliable, people-first
47. Improve User Signals = Increase your Rankings
48. Google + User Clicks • “RankBrain measures when someone clicks on a page and stays on that page, when they go back.” - Nick Frost, Head Google Brain Toronto/Canada • Placing their target keyword in the URL, title or meta descriptions drives the click. On the landing page it keeps the user.
49. How Bing Uses Clicks Bing uses Bing AI to: “...understanding the web and providing this kind of experience where at the end we can learn the clicks to the website having extremely qualified clicks”. - Fabrice Canel
50. Influence the search snippet to get clicks Meta title URL Meta description
51. Image Thumbnails in Search “Having a website linked within a SERP feature can significantly enhance CTR, irrespective of the position of the actual result.” **If the images is relevant it can increase CTR.*** Journal article: Exploring the Impact of SERP Features on CTR
52. Make sure your Content meets Intent • We know that Google uses “what is the purpose of this page” in its human quality rate guidelines and how well the content meets the user's needs. • Clicks back to search are a negative signal. • Download our guide to understanding searcher’s intent.
53. More Social in Search Hidden Gems Update
54. Hidden Gems, Topics, Notes in search • Surfaces first-person perspectives in search, often via social media posts • Search users can follow topics that they are interested in • Search shows the social media profile’s follower count • Users can comment on your site in search with notes Set up a Google Alert with this as the query: site:content.ucp.usercontent.goog "domain.org"
55. Your steps for your brand in Google’s Perspectives
56. Tips for Social Media Integration 1. SEO teams need to be included in social media efforts. 2. Check what platforms appear for your target terms 3. Build our your brand’s presence on those platforms (branded subreddit) 4. Develop relationships with established influencers appearing in search for your keywords. 5. Set up Google trends monitoring of comments in search.
57. Integrating AI into your Nonprofit
58. Your Focus 1. Understand AI chat benefits 2. Understand AI chat limitations 3. Use Cases for Accelerating Marketing Output 4. Your next steps for integration
59. Guidelines for your use of AI Chat
60. Tasks where AI chat excels • Text summarization & explanation • Translations • Programming • Rewriting • Content generation • Prompt engineering • Mimicking dialogue and tone
61. Things AI Chat is NOT good at • Math • Consistency • Understanding context • High level strategy • Reasoning and logic • Handling uncommon scenarios or rare terms/words
62. AI Chat Caveats
63. Mirrors Your Intelligence • ChatGPT mirrors your intelligence and education level • You must train AI to write for your target audience’s reading level. Image created by Microsoft Designer
64. Trained on the Internet, biased • One of the sites the models are trained on is Wikipedia - 86% are 27 year old, educated white men. • It can generate responses that are biased based on its training set.
65. AI Limitations
66. Drifting • LLMs have a "context window" governed by concepts of tokens and turns. ◦ A token is a piece of text that could be as short as one character or as long as one word. ◦ Used by Microsoft CoPilot, ChatGPT-4’s context window can handle about 4096 tokens. • Tips? ◦ Use labels and numbered increments within the prompts so you can reference them.
67. Handling Long Conversations (6000+ words) • If the AI loses track of the conversation thread: ◦ Hit the thumbs down button ◦ Rewrite your last prompt including all of the previous conversation - in a new chat thread, or use custom instructions with a custom CoPilot ◦ Use Split Long Text Chrome plugin to split the instructions and give each section a #. Image by Microsoft Designer *not an issue with enterprise ChatGPT
68. Hallucinations • Making stuff up =“hallucinations.” • 3-27% of the time AI is hallucinating. • Treat AI like you would a new-to-you intern and check every step, and you should be OK. • You can ask your AI: ◦ Do you understand? ◦ Please provide references. ◦ If you don’t know, say you don’t know Image generated by Microsoft Designer
69. Info Sharing & Copyright • NOT share proprietary information or PII • Be careful of copyright — don’t generate images “in the style of [artist’s name].” • AI generated images can not receive copyright. Source
70. Proprietary and PII Information Before you roll it out organization-wide, think through your employee policy. Check out our ideas here.
71. AI Prompting Tips
73. Other Prompting Tips • Be clear and specific, give examples and ask for feedback. • Include the right pieces of the prompt • Emphasize that it is an example by separating it with special symbols {}. • Poor output? Ask the AI to interview you to craft the perfect AI chat prompt. Image generated by Microsoft Designer
74. Fine Tuning • Break up your prompt into smaller chunks. (Use this Chrome plugin) • New threads per each new task
75. Give the AI chat context • Give the chatbot context and background about your brand, your audience, and goal for your task before you prompt it with you specific tasks.
76. Brand elements to have handy • Brand copy to feed to the AI • List of words you never use in your content • Any other brand guidelines that you would hand off to a copywriter. • Target personas + website goal for each. “website persona” Image by Google’s ImageFX
77. Bribing/Tipping Improves Response
78. AI Chat Energy Usage • The carbon footprint of training GPT-3 = round trip to the moon in a car. Note: GPT-4 is at least 10x larger. • A.I. tools fueled a 34% spike in Microsoft’s water consumption. • On the flip side, climate scientists are also using AI to understand their big datasets.
79. Takeaways
80. Social Media in Search • Google is only increasing social media profiles & posts in search • Audit your top terms to see what social media profiles/platforms appear • Pivot your organic outreach strategy
81. AI in Search • Check your SGE impact, create a plan • Start or enhance your Fraggle strategy (include audio & video)! • Start experimenting with Gemini/SGE or the live CoPilot (Microsoft) search
82. AI for your Nonprofit • Use AI prompts today to speed up your social media and SEO content creation • Think through the employee policies that you might need to have in place • Find & connect with others using AI in their nonprofit
83. Additional Resources • Grab our Search Generative Experience checklist • Grab the list of 130+ AI marketing tools and AI workflows & prompts for SEO, social media and podcasting. • Fraggles, Image optimization and Optimizing the Search Snippet checklists • Do you have ChatGPT prompts that you love? Send me an email at katherine@wostrategies.com
84. Nonprofit Specific Resources • Charity Digital Skills report • Make a nonprofit custom GPT • Nonprofit Advocacy Ally custom GPT • AI for nonprofits: Social Media Manager custom GPT • Microsoft’s Nonprofit Community: Exploring AI channel. • Microsoft’s Digital Skills & AI Trainer Toolkit & First AI Steps
85. KATHERINE WATIER ONG 202-930-1744 katherine@wostrategies.com www.linkedin.com/in/katherinewatier www.WOStrategies.com