Dr. Jeremy Sharp (00:00)
All right, everybody. Welcome back to the testing psychologist. We’re talking about business stuff today. Specifically, we are talking about optimizing your website for AI search. If you don’t know what I am talking about, that’s okay. I’m going to talk through some of the details and give you some strategies here in the episode today. This is one of the, think, most important, but probably least understood shifts in online visibility for our practices. ⁓ As AI has gotten more popular, you probably
heard, I would imagine that a lot of people are using AI tools like chat GBT or just, ⁓ you know, Google AI search to look for things on the internet. And what we previously talked about as search engine optimization or how people can find your website when they search on Google. now we’re talking about AI optimization and there’s some overlap of course, but there are some differences too.
And we’re going to talk about that. So if your practice relies on word of mouth and Google to bring in new clients, this is something that you definitely need to know about. All right. Because the way that people are finding us is changing pretty fast. We’re moving from like a type and click sort of situation to the ask and answer era where all these AI tools are summarizing the search results for the user instead of just showing links that match the search terms. So.
Of course, the question is, how do you make sure that your practice still shows up when AI is the middle person? Now, if this question feels important and you’re thinking to yourself, my gosh, I have no idea how to do this. Maybe you listen to the podcast and you’re like, my gosh, I still, I’m not sure how to do this and I need somebody to help me out. That is the perfect thing to talk about in our membership community, Craft, which is going to be launching in January.
Like I’ve said before, it’s going to include lots of hands-on work together. It’s all about application of the knowledge that you may be gaining here in the podcast and elsewhere. All right. So this is not just another membership with tons of theoretical content. It’s meant to help you put these things into practice in a group with some accountability and one-on-one support. So if you’re interested,
You can get on the wait list, means you get first access when the door is open for craft. You can find that at the testing psychologist.com slash craft. All right, let’s get to this episode and dive deep into AI search optimization.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (02:34)
Okay, everybody, we are back and we are talking about AI search optimization. So let’s start off. want to talk about what this actually is and what has changed or is changing from the current paradigm that we are aware of as far as search engine optimization. And full disclosure, as we get into this topic, obviously I am not an expert in search engine optimization or AI search optimization, but
I am a practice owner and I love technology and have a pretty good understanding of AI at this point. So this is meant to be a primer. I fully intend to bring on a true expert in this area down the road to talk in more detail. But for now, I want to give you some introductory information and hopefully some helpful information that you can use to make some tweaks to your website over the next few weeks or months. OK, so what is actually changing? Obviously, ⁓ AI search is becoming a big thing.
Okay. So as best we can tell, you know, the estimates I found are saying that about 50 % of folks in the U S are using some kind of AI tool at least once a week for information or recommendations. And according to current, uh, SEO industry analysis, AI summaries and these zero click results now account for a significant percentage. Again, often cited somewhere around 50 to 60%.
of search impressions. And we can say for sure that this is increasing rapidly as more and more folks get turned on to AI and are using AI either deliberately or not ⁓ to find things. And when I say or not, that’s just referring to the idea that Google is now putting AI search results at the top of the list, ⁓ whether you know it or not. You probably
have recognized it, but it’s labeled as AI search results. So you may not even be going to a separate tool like ChatGPT to search for things or ask questions, but ⁓ it’s built into Google. ⁓ what does that mean? That means that people are getting answers without ever visiting your website, right? So previously people would search for who’s a good child psychologist in Los Angeles. And ⁓ if you
don’t have a good way to answer that question on your website, ⁓ you are now kind of invisible. Whereas previously you might’ve had great search terms like child psychologist, Los Angeles, and been able to be found through a typical search. But if you can’t answer these sort of conversational questions on your website, then you’re going to be at a disadvantage. ⁓ those of you who may have great search engine optimization, including myself in this camp, ⁓
you might lose the advantage and not even know about it. So the goal of today’s episode is to help you fix that. All right, so how does AI search work? I’m going to try to explain this in plain English. So AI systems like ChatGBT and Perplexity and Google’s AI search experience don’t crawl the websites exactly like Google does or used to.
They read and summarize using language models trained on high quality structured text. these language models, they’re going to prioritize clarity of language. So simple conversational explanations. They’re going to prioritize structured data like sections, headings, and FAQs. They’re going to prioritize credibility signals like professional bios and credentials and citations and location info. So this is good news for us actually.
And then critically, I wanna highlight this concept called EEAT or EAT, I’ll just say EAT, I don’t know if that’s right, but it stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Again, EEAT, experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. So this is Google’s primary framework for assessing content quality, and AI models have clearly adopted it at this point.
So for clinical practice, this means demonstrating your credentials and experience is no longer optional. It’s fundamental to being quoted by an AI model. So while search engine optimization used to be about keywords, AI optimization is about context and trust. So when someone types, a neuropsychologist near Boulder who specializes in ADHD and autism, an AI
doesn’t just match keywords, it looks for structured, human sounding content that answers that question directly and confidently and backed by clear professional expertise. So this was interesting to me as I was doing research for this episode because traditionally, you know, when I’ve consulted with folks, I have advised against writing a bio on your website that is overly technical and professional and
stuffed full of credentials. think it just, kind of turns people off when they’re reading your website and it’s just too sterile. I think there’s a place for it, but I definitely wouldn’t have emphasized that content. But now the optimization strategies for AI are saying that ⁓ that’s actually really helpful. So I’m going to give an example later in the episode of how to rewrite a short bio paragraph to optimize for AI. But this was interesting to me. All right.
So let’s talk about some of the essential things ⁓ for AI search optimization for psychologists. Okay, we can get very practical here. And these are steps that I’d recommend that every practice owner takes if you want to future proof your web presence. So use natural conversational language wherever possible. Okay, now you should kind of be doing this anyway, but you want to write your website like you speak to a client. So instead of quote, comprehensive neuropsychological evaluations are offered to facilitate differential diagnosis.
You’re going to say, quote, we provide thorough neuropsychological evaluations to help you understand what’s going on and what to do next. So AI systems love clarity. ⁓ A recent readability audit, for example, found that plain language pages were significantly more likely to be featured in AI generated answers. So clarity signals confidence and accessibility, which are key components of trustworthiness, which was the T of that eat.
And if you are having trouble figuring out the language and converting your pages, ⁓ this is a great use for AI, actually. You can copy and paste a paragraph into an AI program and say, ⁓ rewrite this paragraph and maximize for AI search optimization based on the EAT model. All right, second thing you want to do, you can add FAQ sections to every major page. Now, this sounds a little bit like overkill. Actually, I don’t love this.
⁓ AI models love structured questions and answers because they mirror how users ⁓ phrase their questions. if you can add short, even just like two to three questions, like short FAQ blocks to your homepage, your assessment page, and any specific service pages, as well as your contact page, I think that’ll go a long way. So examples will be like, what ages do you test? How long does an evaluation take? Do you accept insurance? What’s the difference between a psychological and a neuropsychological evaluation?
So you want to use complete sentences and answer those questions. And it just helps the AI recognize your content as authoritative. And it improves your regular Google SEO as well.
A third thing that you can do if you don’t have it already is build a very clear, like who we help and how it works section. ⁓ AI engines like to extract structured snippets. So when you clearly outline your process, it gets indexed more accurately. A simple three-step framework works well, like book a call, schedule an intake, get clarity, know, something like that. Or book your call, complete your testing, do your feedback. So
A simple three-step process format gives AI language models a concise narrative that it can quote when summarizing your practice. So you might consider using ordered lists that are even explicitly numbered, like one, two, three, to ⁓ capture that structure in an even better way.
⁓ Fourth thing that you can do is you want to strengthen your ⁓ credibility signals. So what does that mean? This is that EAT model again. So AI favors verified trustworthy sources. So you want to include your full credentials like ⁓ Jeremy Sharp, PhD, licensed psychologist. So put your degree, your licensure after your name and any of your clinicians names if you have a group practice.
to professional organizations like APA or NAN, state boards, things like that are gonna go a long way. Publication mentions and speaking engagements. And maybe crucially, some kind of dedicated, detailed about us page that does not just list the staff, but links their credentials to verifiable external sources. Okay, so if you have these things listed, make sure you go back and link to these entities like APA or NAN and whatnot.
Industry studies would show that pages with verifiable professional credentials are far more likely to be cited in AI-generated responses compared to unverified bios. So this is a cornerstone, I think, of building AI. Trustworthiness is really leaning on your credentials. Then the last thing that I might talk about is embracing your location clarity. What does this mean? So AI search is hyperlocal. All right, you want to include your city, your state.
surrounding areas naturally throughout your copy, not just in the footer. Okay. So a good example here is we provide ADHD and learning disorder evaluations for children and adults in Fort Collins, Loveland, Windsor, and the greater Northern Colorado region. So that one sentence alone tells an AI system exactly where you are and who you serve. So this is, this is some overlap with, ⁓ you know, traditional SEO where Google likes those location cues.
All right, so that’s five kind of bedrock, like basic things that you can do, I think, to improve your AI optimization. But if you want to go a little bit further and do some advanced optimization, here are three tactics to do that. First one is called schema markup. All right, so already I’ve probably lost 90 % of people, including myself.
Schema is essentially like structured data code, I guess, and it tells the AI systems exactly what your page represents. you can add schema ⁓ markup to your pages. You can Google it and learn how to do this, but you essentially want to add like local business and person and FAQ page schema tags to your website. These are going to be invisible to the reader, but highly visible to AI.
models. And again, you can do a search. ⁓ There’s documentation out there on how and like even copy paste templates on how to do this. A second thing, ⁓ if you for some reason, if you’re one of the folks out there who has a podcast ⁓ or you you are truly like updating your blog regularly in a conversational tone, ⁓ AI models love transcripts and ⁓ long form.
of natural language examples. So these tend to prove expertise to the AI. So if you add these transcripts, especially if it’s a podcast transcript, you can increase the discoverability up to maybe 25 % according to some research from 2024. Then the last thing is to just consistently update your website. So this carries over from previous SEO knowledge, but
AI models want to prioritize freshness, right? So SEO data, think, generally confirms that monthly site updates can definitely increase the odds of being cited by AI summaries. So this is where you want to update your website as much as you can with a blog or like a news section, things like
Okay, so we’ve got some practical tactics. Let’s talk about a little bit of a mindset shift from, you know, traditional SEO to AIO or AI optimization. You want to think of this as moving from, well, search engine optimization to truly optimizing for AI. And the difference I think is the intent and conversation. So traditional SEO asks,
the basic question of what keywords are people typing, whereas AIO is asking what problem are people trying to solve? What questions do they ask? And how can I answer them clearly and credibly? So the new goal is not to trick the algorithm. It’s more to teach an assistant to recognize you as an expert worth quoting. All right, so what do you want to avoid in this?
circumstance. You want to avoid keyword stuffing. So old school SEO tricks. I don’t think we abandoned keyword stuffing a while back, but you know, old school SEO tricks actually hurt readability and confuse the AI. So you don’t want to just like cram specific keywords into your pages haphazardly. You also don’t want to have like a generic about page. You want to personalize your story.
AI systems can detect redundancy and filter it out. So if you remember that EAT model, generic is basically the opposite of expertise and authority. ⁓ So you wanna make sure that it’s tailored and specific and unique as much as you can. Another thing to avoid is neglecting accessibility. So…
⁓ Alternative text and readable color contrast help AI interpret your visuals and signal professionalism as well. ⁓ using AI to write your content without heavy human editing ⁓ is not good either. So this is a little bit of a, I guess it seems counterintuitive maybe, but if you’re like heavily relying on AI to write your content without ⁓ human oversight, AI is going to spot AI generated filler.
content. So this is really where you can bring your own lived human experience into the copy and not rely heavily on AI generated content.
All right, so what did we cover? We covered some practical tools and things to actually change on your website. We talked about what to avoid. Let’s talk about some more practical stuff. ⁓ You could do a quick, I think a very quick checklist or like a 10 minute kind of website audit where you can ask these questions. You can say, does each page answer a clear question? ⁓
This is a big one. Is your language conversational on your website? Do you have visible credentials and city names? Are FAQs included? Are your blogs updated? If you have a podcast, is that updated as well? Do you clearly state your professional license type and number? And if you said no to any of those, that’s a great place to start to optimize your site for AI.
So let’s see. What else? What’s coming in the future? Maybe that’s important. So the next 18 months, we think by, I don’t know, certainly next year, industry analysts are predicting that over 70 % of consumer web traffic is going to flow through AI intermediaries somehow. So that means that visibility is not just about search rankings. It’s going to be about
you know, being part of the answers that people see. So if your content doesn’t feed this AI ecosystem, it’s going to be more and more invisible, even if your search engine optimization is perfect. The good news is that the bar is still pretty low. So most psychologists honestly haven’t updated their websites in years. And so a few hours of intentional updates now are going to give you a long runway of advantage, I think. So.
What do do? Wrapping up here, if you take away nothing else, sit on the idea that clarity wins. AI does not reward fancy marketing, it rewards clarity and credibility and consistency. If you explain what you do and who you help and why it matters in plain language, then the technology is going to amplify you and not ignore you. So you can easily take a Saturday morning, pull up your website,
and just ask, would an intelligent assistant know exactly what I do and that I’m a credible expert? And if the answer is no, then now is the time to fix it. And as promised earlier, I will give you an example here as we close of how to rewrite a professional bio in a way that is more AI friendly.
Okay, so here’s the bio paragraph that is gonna be kind of a failure in AIO world. Dr. Smith is a licensed clinical psychologist who’s been working with children and adolescents for over 10 years. She specializes in various forms of testing and received her degree from a university in the Midwest. I don’t know who says that. She uses a compassionate, client-centered approach. All right, pretty generic.
So just to contrast, here is an AI optimized bio paragraph.
Dr. Sarah Smith, board certified in neuropsychology, is the founder of Northern Colorado Neuropsychology PLLC. With 12 years of experience specializing in the complex differential diagnosis of ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, and learning disabilities in adolescents and adults, Dr. Smith provides testing tailored to educational and occupational success. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Mayo Clinic and maintains an active
License as a licensed psychologist. It gives the license number with the Colorado State Board of Psychologist Examiners with a link to that page. Our work has been cited in three publications by the Journal of Pediatric Psychology. You want to link to the list. Dr. Smith’s expertise ensures that testing leads to actionable evidence-based recommendations. So you can see the difference there. I’ll include these examples in the show notes so that you can
Copy and paste them if you want to or you know get a good idea of how to adapt it for your website And that’s just one small example. There are plenty of examples out there if you want to do some searching but ⁓ lots of ideas lots of ways that you can ⁓ Improve and update your website for AI AI search ⁓ That’s gonna be it for today ⁓ If you want again step-by-step help implementing some of these things
Check out Kraft launching in January. We’re gonna do work just like this where we walk through your website and actually make some of these changes together in real time with a group of folks who are also focused on a similar goal. Testingpsychologist.com slash Kraft. All right, until next time, stay focused and keep doing great work.
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