Is Google’s conversational, generative AI chatbot going to help or hinder your placement in Google search results?

That depends. Bard changes the game in some ways, and leaves other SEO best practices unchanged. Here’s what you must consider when factoring Bard into your SEO program as a manufacturer.

What Bard Doesn’t Change for Manufacturers

At RH Blake, we’ve performed Voice of the Customer (VoC) research with hundreds of manufacturers that offer complex solutions and who have long sales cycles.

The VoC journey starts with either asking a trusted resource and then validating what they say online, or by starting online and then validating what we find with a trusted resource. We’ve proven that, for companies selling to manufacturers, appearing high in search results is only becoming more important.

This means every manufacturing SEO program should already be focused on the basics:

• Conduct keyword research that assesses potential business value of keywords and not just monthly volumes
• Build websites with a strong technical SEO foundation
• Deliver an excellent online user experience
• Generate backlinks from trusted and high-authority sources
• Leverage analytics to refine and improve SEO performance

What Bard Does Change for Manufacturing SEO Programs

Bard’s impact on your website will likely depend on the type of search being performed. For example, for manufacturers selling complex offerings with varying implications on their specific applications, Bard is challenged to provide a relevant answer to the searcher. There are just too many specific and unknown variables for Bard to deliver a valid result.

Remember, Bard is a large language model that depends upon existing content for its answers. If there are no content resources for a particular kind of query, Bard will not be able to generate a helpful answer.

But Bard will change the game for manufacturers with discovery-focused and top-of-the-funnel search queries. Someone who asks Bard “What is a Chemical Pump” will likely get a useful answer because this question, and ones like it, have been asked before.

Here’s an example of how Google is incorporating Bard in search engine results. Notice that the result at the top of the page is created by Bard, Google’s generative AI chatbot.

Source: https://io.google/2023/

Best SEO Practices for Manufacturers Moving Forward

Bard will have a significant impact on many manufacturers. To ensure that your site stays at the top of Google search results, follow these five best practices:

1. Continue to create content that educates your target audience using Google’s EEAT (Expertise-Experience-Authority-Trustworthiness) framework
2. Diversify away from a blog-only content strategy/ Publish content on multiple channels because Google will increasingly compile search results from publications, social (LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube) and other channels
3. No longer treat SEO as its own channel. Instead, integrate SEO more closely with social, PR and other channels
4. Heighten energy on driving quality backlinks as this is a key measure for Google and one that Bard won’t be able to easily impact
5. Focus on visitor quality and conversion, not number of visitors. The volume of web traffic may decline as Google attempts to address certain queries directly with Bard (and thus not sending traffic to your site). If you focus on EEAT framework, the quality and relevance of your visitors will likely improve, which means you need to maximize every visitor opportunity with effective content that educates and helps them along their buying journey

We can help – Complimentary assessment

RH Blake has developed a reliable methodology, RHBlake SEO7™, that has proven to enhance organic search engine rankings and deliver targeted, measurable results for manufacturers—results positively impact the bottom line. Get Your Free SEO Footprint™ Assessment.