With more people beginning to use ChatGPT, Claude, and other Large Language Models (LLM’s) for search, businesses are anxious to do what they can to appear in those search results.
You may hear statements like “SEO is dead” or “SEO no longer matters”. These are misinformed statements. The LLMs state clearly in their documentation that they query search engines to gather data that is then analyzed and presented to the user.
For example, ChatGPT states in its documentation that the search engine Bing, and the Shopify platform are two primary sources of search information. This is a good indicator that following Bing’s webmaster documentation is a logical next step. Claude is thought to be using Brave Search, among other resources, thus incorporating best practices for Brave are also recommended. Google provides “back door” access to their search engine, so one can assume that LLM’s are discreetly using that back door.
For this reason, following SEO best practices is more important than ever. To provide you with the best guidance, we have created a checklist by using Google, Bing, Brave Search, and ChatGPT documentation as a reference. We have included links to the sources.
We read the documentation! In our SEO services, we address each of the items below as outlined in search engine and Ai model documentation. Sources are linked.
A. Content SEO:
- Good Page Titles that “accurately describe the contents of the page” Bing, Google
- Meta Description that “includes the most relevant points of the page” Bing, Google
- User focused content Bing that shows Expertise, Experience, Authority and Trust (EEAT) Google
- Relevant Keywords & Search Terms Bing, Google, Brave Search
- Does the content explain “who, why, and how” it was created? Google
- Internal links with descriptive anchor text to related content on your site Bing, Google
- Outbound links with descriptive anchor text to quality resources that “corroborate what you are writing about“
- Use “unique and original images and videos relevant to the topic of the page” Bing
- Descriptive Alt tags for images Bing, Google
B. Technical SEO
- Ensure crawling is allowed through robots.txt Google
- Have fast loading/ good design/user experience Bing, Google
- Uncluttered pages without surprising visual interruptions
- Test that your Structured Data matches your content Google, Google Test, Schema.org Test
- Check that your website supports Rich Results.
- Site URL Structure is descriptive and shows hierarchy, Google
- Sitemap is submitted Bing, Google, Brave
C. Off Website SEO
Links To Information Sources:
To get information from the source, use the following links to documentation from Google, Bing, ChatGPT, and Brave Search.
Search Engines
- Google’s SEO Starter Guide.
- Google Ai Doc: SEO Best Practices ShortList
- Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines
- Google’s document on how search works
- Google How Page Ranking works
- Google 2024 Leaked Document with annotations
- Summary of Google Leak Document
- Bing Webmaster Guidelines
- Bing Keyword Search Tool
