What are LLMs and why are they important?
An LLM is a form of generative AI that responds to prompts and has been trained using machine learning. The most well-known LLMs include ChatGPT and Gemini. Common uses for LLMs include assisting with ideas for content creation, summarising information, and analysing data. Google search results now utilise a customised version of the Gemini LLM to generate search results, including the AI Overviews and AI Mode.
As LLMs can be used to make comparisons between different businesses products and services, to increase your chances of your products or services appearing in these results, it is important to optimise your website content to ensure that it is informative, accurate, and in a format that is easy for LLMs to retrieve.
How to optimise website content for LLMs
1. Ensure the content on your website has a clear structure:
Make sure that your headings are in a logical order and follow the correct hierarchy. You should only include one H1 per page. Use H2–H6 headings to structure the content based on importance, focusing primarily on H2s and H3s. You can find out more information about heading hierarchy for SEO here. Make sure each paragraph is self-contained and includes information on a specific topic. You can also provide a summary of the information on the page. This benefits website visitors as it highlights the important information, but it also helps LLMs use your website content in its responses.
2. Adapt your content to be conversational, provide unique insights, and answer questions:
LLM search results usually have a conversational format, so creating website content that can be easily adapted into conversations increases its chances of appearing in LLM responses. LLMs will also look for unique, factual information so include this on your website where possible.
Including frequently asked questions (FAQs) or headings that have common questions in them is another way to increase your discoverability for LLMs. You can find out common questions by using keyword research tools to identify what questions people are searching for. You can also add questions to your website that you get asked regularly as it is likely that these are being searched for online by others.
3. Ensure that your website is crawlable:
Similar to traditional SEO best practices, your website and its content has to be accessible by the LLMs in order for it to appear in generated responses. You can encourage search engines to crawl specific pages on your website by submitting your website’s sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. You can also include Structured Data Markup on your website. This helps both search engines and LLMs understand the content on a page, making it more likely that the information will appear in search results and LLM responses.
4. Focus on brand consistency and search visibility:
LLMs, like search engines, want to include reliable and trustworthy information in their responses. Make sure that all information on your website, Google Business Profiles and social media channels is consistent and accurate. Your website should also have a clear internal linking strategy that helps LLMs understand the related services and topics within your website.
Ensuring that your business’s online presence is consistent is important, as is focusing on search visibility. This is where traditional SEO practices such as optimising content for keywords links with LLM optimisation. Appearing organically in search results for specific keywords and questions will increase the likelihood that your website content will appear in LLM responses.
Here are some of the key points to remember on how to optimise your website content for LLMs:
- The structure of every page on your website must be logical, and each section should focus on a specific topic relevant to the page
- Ensure that your content is structured to answer conversational long-tail queries in order to be effectively sited in LLM results – focus on being clear and concise
- Answer common questions on your site through FAQs, and focus on unique facts and expertise that your business can provide
- Ensure that your website is crawlable in popular search engines such as Bing and Google
- Include accurate Structured Data Markup to help LLMs understand your website content
- Focus on consistency between your website, Google Business Profiles and social media to establish trust in your brand across platforms
- Just like this list, where relevant, summarise the key information on the page as it will make it easier for LLMs to understand the main points to include in its responses.
How Hydra Creative can help your business optimise content for LLMs
Hydra Creative is a full-service digital agency that has over a decade of experience in traditional SEO best practices, and are also experts at optimising content for LLMs. It can be difficult to incorporate both of these as it requires regular maintenance to adapt to ongoing LLM and search engine changes.
Our team of SEO agency experts will develop a digital marketing strategy that incorporates both SEO and LLM optimisation to increase your online visibility. If you would like to discuss how our team can help your business gain increased online visibility, then contact us today.
