4 Ways to Help AI Recommend Your Business

Presently, marketers are using AI to improve on the traditional search by search engines. You can for instance ask AI assistant where to find a good plumber, accountant, restaurant, or marketing firm. The results you get may look very different from a traditional web search. This is because instead of returning a page full of links, AI tools may return only a few business names. This tilts more towards a personal recommendation. Businesses without this kind of assistance may become harder for potential customers to find. This inevitably has very huge implication for marketing results.

When AI helps to improve a company’s chances of appearing in search responses, marketers refer to it as “answer engine optimization,” or AEO. The idea is similar to search engine optimization, but the goal is different. Traditional SEO aims to help a website rank higher in search results. AEO focuses on helping tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini understand, trust, and cite a business when users ask direct questions. The results are much more direct and the implication for businesses is very huge. Many buyers now rely on AI to make their purchase decisions and roughly 50% of buyers begin their research with a chatbot rather than a search engine. So, helping AI to find your own business is a very smart thing to do since more consumers and business buyers are presently turning to AI tools for recommendations.

Here are four ways you can help AI to find your own business.

1. Ensure Your Business Website Gives the Real Picture

AI systems do consider how your business is described elsewhere online. Accurate listings in respected directories, mentions in local news coverage, professional association pages, and genuine customer discussions can all strengthen the visibility of your business. To assist AI to help you out, consistency is hugely important. Your business name, address, phone number, business hours, and service area should match across websites and directories. It is mostly in your website you can enhance this.

2. Make Your Credibility to Matter

AI tools can better assist you when your business is credible. In this wise, credibility really matters. Your pages are more likely to be trusted when they include a named author, visible publication or update dates, specific facts, and clear contact information. AI tools need information they can quote or summarize with confidence to help them recommend your business. Therefore, you should make sure your business websites are easy for search engines to find and understand. Some experts even recommend submitting sites to Bing Webmaster Tools, particularly because Microsoft’s search systems may help supply information used by certain AI services.

3. Make Getting Mentioned Really Important 

Optimization specialists say AI systems tend to favor clear, factual pages that directly answer common customer questions. This is instructive. So, your business website should clearly and plainly explain what the business does, where it operates, who it serves, and how customers can get help. In this quest, simple service descriptions and useful FAQs may work better than pages filled with slogans or vague marketing language.

4. Use Reviews to Help Establish Trust

Technically, fake reviews, planted comments, and phony customer accounts may create a temporary boost, but they can seriously damage the reputation of your business if discovered. Honest feedback and real third-party mentions are far more valuable over time. Businesses can thus accurately test their visibility by asking several AI tools the same questions their customers might ask. If for instance a business asks AI “where can I find a great restaurant in this area?”, the results can reveal which competitors are being mentioned and what information the AI is using.

So, if you run a restaurant and another business appears in these results, and yours does not, the answer is a pointer to your next marketing task. Explore ways to improve your service pages by adding clearer facts, updating your directory listings, answering more customer questions, or building stronger local credibility. As AI changes the way people search, businesses are now challenged to think beyond just appearing in a list of links. Increasingly, the goal is to become one of the few names an AI assistant is confident enough to recommend.

5 Best Practices for Repurposing Content

As most content creators very well know, creating fresh content all the time requires a lot of work. Repurposing content comes handy when you are not in the mood to create fresh content. Repurposed content serves about the same purpose as fresh content if well handled in line with best practices. These here five best practices are highly recommended. 
  
1. Start with High Performing Content

Experience shows that only a small fraction of published content tends to drive most of the traffic. Meaning, these relatively small set of high-performing pieces of content tend to do most of the work. So, if you notice a blog post that is generating strong traffic, engagement, and product clicks, and it’s closely aligned with your target market and keywords, such post is a strong candidate for repurposing, as it’s already proven to connect with your audience.

However, when refreshing the post, you must keep the URL, title tag, and H1 the same, as these are already indexed and ranking. Just update only the content, not the structure. Update stats and dates, add new examples, and cut what’s no longer relevant. The goal is content freshness, not a full rewrite. That saves time but still delivers good results.

2. Adapt Content for Different Platforms

Different platforms have different formats, expectations, and audiences, so, tailoring your content ensures it works more effectively in all the platforms. B2B-oriented content for instance tends to perform better on LinkedIn, where a high volume of B2B social leads originate. Meanwhile, Instagram or TikTok may reach a more consumer-focused audience, particularly among younger consumers. Social media platforms are not only hugely popular, they tend to attract different demographics. Smart marketers target these demographics with their content. In addition, each social media platform requires a different approach to formatting. For example, Instagram is geared for visual-first social media content, while LinkedIn is oriented toward professional written content, and TikTok is suited to short, engaging video content. Your content performs best if you take these peculiarities into consideration when repurposing content for each platform.

3. Use AI to Scale Repurposing

You can effectively use AI smart tools to streamline your content repurposing workflow. You can for example select a blog post and ask AI to generate multiple social media captions, email drafts, or even infographic ideas. It is possible to take the captions from your video, feed them into ChatGPT, and then have it write excellent newsletters for you. With AI smart tools now readily available online, there’s no reasonable excuse for you not to be able to turn one piece of content into several other posts on different platforms and in record time too.

4. Align Content with your Marketing Goals

You can repurpose your content into your marketing strategy for best results. If you rank your marketing goals, you can then decide which content to repurpose first. If for instance, your goal is to drive organic traffic, you can repurpose video or social content into SEO-focused blog posts. If however your goal is brand awareness, you can turn blog posts or long-form content into short-form social media posts. This puts your content in front of new audiences through social feed discovery. Additionally, if your goal is conversions, you can repurpose educational content into product-focused pages or email campaigns that guide users toward purchase. Significantly however, most online businesses strive for all of these goals at the same time. But, you must avoid doing everything at once. It is best to choose which content will move the needle the most now then work through that first.

5. Diligently Track Performance

Diligent tracking is of utmost importance in content marketing. You can use tools like Google Analytics or YouTube Analytics, or Instagram, TikTok, and Meta Business’s native analytics tools to measure content performance. You can therefore effectively track clicks, views, saves, and follows and/or subscriptions. These tools can also track engagement, traffic, and conversion rates, thus helping you refine your repurposing strategy over time. With diligent tracking you’ll know which content is performing and which isn’t. 

If for instance a blog article was performing and now isn’t, it’s a clear signal to refresh it, then repurpose and reshare it. Whether you choose to update high- or low-performing content first depends on your content marketing goals. If you’re trying to reach new audiences fast, opt to repurpose high-performing content first. If however your goal is steady organic growth, opt to refresh low performers first.
 
With analytics, you can easily find out what’s really working once you’ve repurposed your content. You can compare the engagement rate of a repurposed clip against the original to see which format your audience prefers, then double down on the higher performer. If you find that a repurposed short clip performs better than the original long video, it’s a sign that your audience prefers short-form content. You could then repurpose longer videos into shorter clips on purpose.