Not only do content creators turn their hand to any subject, but also ensure that they keep themselves and their clients bang up to date in terms of visibility. And that means any blog posts I write, now need to be structured in a such way that makes blog posts more AI-friendly.

I’m pivoting in my written content work to be not just an SEO specialist but a SEO specialist for AI. As much as a fair few of us hate AI, we need to evolve with it.

That doesn’t mean that I am now using AI to write content, that would be rubbish on all levels. It means that I am adding keywords and structuring my content in such a way that AI will prioritise my content in AI tools and, importantly, bring the content I write to the top of the search results in that little AI paragraph that we try to ignore (and sometimes doesn’t quite ‘get it’) but is increasingly helpful, the “featured snippet.” And that, in turn, increases the visibility of my clients’ blog posts.

How do you optimise a blog post for SEO and AI then?

There are many tactics you can use, and it is ever evolving, but one example of the new “Palmer Owen approach” is implementing a Table of Contents in long blog posts. I started using this approach in one such blog post that I wrote for my UK Education Consultants client, Panoba, back in spring, that provided both career guidance and summer camps recommendations in finance, engineering and leadership. Quite a lengthy blog post as you can imagine. It offered plenty of detailed insight into the three different career pathways, along with recommended summer camps for each. It practically screamed give me links to click on to get to where I want more quickly.

So, once you add the Table of Contents plugin functionality to an website, it automatically adds it to every other post on a site also. and this works well for their longer format blog posts. Panoba have already had business enquiries due to the content I have written popping up in ChatGPT.

A Table of Contents might seem dated.. a bit Microsoft Word even. And, as I say, this isn’t the only tactic I use to optimise client blog posts for SEO and AI. But, to sum up, what a Table of Contents does do is improve user experience and provides increased visibility to search engines and AI. Firstly, by helping those reading a long blog post skip to the one area that they’re interested in, and secondly, by improving clarity and providing structure for search engines and AI. And that is key.