How to Optimize Your Website for AI
In this episode of Elevate Your Practice, I dive into how AI is changing the landscape of websites and search, especially for holistic health practitioners. I break down what AI is really looking for on your website, demystify terms like AEO and GEO, and emphasize that strong SEO fundamentals are still essential for both AI and human visitors. I walk you through six actionable steps to make your site clear, skimmable, and trustworthy—from using plain language and strategic headings to optimizing your meta descriptions, establishing internal links, and submitting your sitemap. I also share tips to ensure your site loads quickly, is mobile-friendly, and is accessible to everyone. Ultimately, I show you how to build a website that not only attracts the right clients but is ready for the next evolution in search.
Key Takeaways
Optimizing for AI means strengthening your website’s SEO foundation, not chasing new tech trends.
AI and search engines seek clear, direct answers about your services, audience, and location.
Use real, straightforward language and avoid jargon to improve both AI and human readability.
Structure content with strategic headings for easier scanning by AI, search engines, and visitors.
Include FAQs on relevant service pages and a general FAQ page for better accessibility and trust.
Meta titles and descriptions matter—each page should have unique, keyword-rich summaries for search and AI.
Create an internal linking strategy so every page connects, guiding search engines and users through your content.
Focus on technical essentials like site speed, mobile responsiveness, accessibility, and clear calls to action.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Samantha Mabe: I am Samantha Mabe, website designer and founder of Lemon and the Sea, and this is Elevate your practice. If you're a holistic health practitioner ready to grow your practice without wasting time on things that don't work, you're in the right place. Each week I share a website, SEO, and marketing advice along with guest experts so you can bring in the right clients and feel confident about how you are showing up and serving the people that you help.
[00:00:35] Let's get started.
How Search is Changing with AI
[00:00:38] You've probably heard a lot about AI and how it's changing websites and search tools like Google Search's Generative Experience and ChatGPT are answering people's questions directly and your website has to be ready for that. Maybe you've heard of AEO or GEO and people are telling you that you need to be focusing on this instead of SEO or anything else in your business. Here's the thing, optimizing for AI isn't about chasing a shiny tech trend. It's about doubling down on SEO and building a really strong foundation.
[00:01:22] Today I'm gonna be talking about what AI actually looks for on your website and the simple steps you can take to make sure that both AI and your potentials can find and trust you.
[00:01:32] It is amazing how many posts I have seen recently and the discussions that I have had with fellow designers and SEO pros about AI and why everyone is convinced that AEO and GEO and all these new terms are the way to go. Let's throw SEO out the window and just focus on showing up in AI.
Why AEO Isn’t Replacing SEO
[00:01:55] Everyone I have talked to has said, this is bad advice. AI, no matter what platform you're using, is a tool that is going to scan, sort, and summarize data that it finds on the web. And it does this in the same way that search engines do. It doesn't read things like a human might, where it skips around and it looks for exactly what's important. It is going through and reading things like a computer would because that's how it's created.
[00:02:29] AI, just like search engines want clear answers, they wanna know who you help, what you offer. Where you're located, the basic things that I am always telling people to include on their website.
[00:02:42] When I asked AI to help me find a chiropractor in where I'm located, it pulled up a list of places, gave me some highlights about those places from their websites, and then gave me some recommendations on how to choose the best fit. What it's doing is it's looking at the websites for those places, and it'll actually tell you this because it references those places.
[00:03:10] Why is this important? Because your website needs to have all of the information, somebody who is typing into Google or ChatGPT or Claude might be looking for. And we want to make things readable for the robots who are looking at our sites, which means things need to be skimmable structured, and we don't wanna get really clever with our jargon. The key takeaway here is if your site is clear for humans, it's clear for AI. AI is trained to think like humans do, and so we want to think like them too.
How to Optimize Your Website for AI
[00:03:53] Here are some practical steps that you can follow to optimize your website for both AI and SEO. And the reason I'm including both is because from all of my research and from everyone I have talked to, good AEO, GEO,, whatever other acronyms we can come up with is built on a solid SEO foundation. If your website is set up with search engines and people in mind, then there are only a few little tweaks that you need to make to your website to make sure that you are showing up in these AI results as well.
Use Real Language, Not Industry Jargon
[00:04:37] First step, use real language, not jargon. We don't wanna talk about 'radiant transformation' or 'revitalize your life' because they don't mean anything to humans or to AI. Instead, we want to use language that talks about what it is that we do and who we help. What are the actual issues that they are coming to you for and the outcome they're looking for? And we always wanna tie that back to a location if we serve local clients and patients.
Structure Your Content Strategically
[00:05:10] Number two is to structure your content strategically. This is where I see a lot of people struggling because they want their design to be pretty more than they care about what the backend code looks like. But search engines are robots, just like screen readers and anything else that is helping people access your content. And so one of the most important things you can do is to break down your content using headings in a very strategic way.
[00:05:43] Think about it like outlining a paper when you were in high school or college. You start with the title. That's gonna be the main headline on your page: Heading 1. There's only one title in a paper, just like there's only one Heading 1 on a page. From there you might have a little bit of content, and then you're gonna go into Heading 2. This is the big group of ideas that we're sharing in the first section. Under that, you might have a Heading 3. You might even have Heading 4 under those. And then when you're done with that section, we're gonna jump back up to a Heading 2.
[00:06:24] We want to use those in a strategic way so that as AI skims your website, as a screen reader reads your website, as search engines, read your website, they can see this headline is most important, and then these are next, and then these are next. And then finally, I'm going to read the content of the site.
[00:06:46] This is becoming more and more important and it's essential that we use these headlines in a strategic way to share what the section is about. Just like that paper, we want to use our headings and our subheadings to explain what it is that we're gonna be talking about right underneath.
Create a standalone FAQ Page
[00:07:06] My third step is one that can be helpful for both humans and AI: make sure that you are including FAQs on your website and that they are not all hidden in accordions. AI is constantly evolving and changing, and so it is starting to be able to read things that are open and close, but it never hurts to have a separate FAQ page that includes pretty much all of the FAQs about your business, your services, whether or not you take insurance, who you work with, and list them out without making someone open and close or click over to other pages.
[00:07:51] My suggestion here is always to include relevant FAQs on the page where they belong. So questions about your acupuncture service should go on your acupuncture page. But then you should also have a general FAQs page with sections for each of those different types of questions, and you list them out along with all of the answers. That gives people the ability to see everything in one place if they want to, and it helps search engines and AI to make sure they can read everything on your site.
Make sure you have meta titles & descriptions for every page
[00:08:32] Number four: meta titles and descriptions. This is the first impression for AI, humans, and search engines. This is that title and a little snippet that shows up when somebody types something in and it shows them, Hey, this might be a good result. Here's what the title is. Here's a little bit about what it's about. These are so important for both your SEO and for AI.
[00:09:01] You want to make sure that you are following best practices as far as character limits, keywords like your location, your audience, and your services, and that you're not duplicating them on every page. Each page should have a unique title and unique description, and you should be updating that for every page and blog post and product on your website.
Have an internal linking strategy
[00:09:26] The fifth step is to make sure you have an internal linking strategy. We want to make our website into a web. Every page on your site should link to another page, and every page on your site should be linked to from another page. We're basically telling Google, ChatGPT, Claude, and the people who are visiting our site what is connected. How do they go from one topic to the next?
[00:10:00] On your main pages of your site, like your homepage or your services page, you're probably going to have just a few options. Your homepage, you'll probably link to scheduling an appointment. You might link to your about page in your bio section and maybe you link to some recent blog posts if you're highlighting those on that page.
[00:10:21] On your services page, your main call to action is going to be to schedule an appointment or a consultation, and so we want everybody to go over to that scheduling page.
[00:10:32] In your blog posts or other content that you're producing, you want to link back to any relevant services and to any related blog posts within your own website. You can do this in the actual content where you might say, 'oh, if you want to learn more about this topic, I wrote a blog post' or you can have a section at the bottom of your post that says 'Related blog posts.'
submit your sitemap to Google
[00:11:04] Number six, submit your site map. I'm always, always telling people to do this because even if they've worked with a marketing firm that promises to help them with their SEO, there's a lot of times that their site map has not been submitted to Google and Bing and other search engines.
[00:11:21] A site map is basically code that your website platform is going to write for you that explains what pages are on your site and how they are linked. When you submit this to something like Google Search Console, it is going to tell Google to look at your website and it's gonna tell it which pages to look at.
[00:11:44] If you don't already have this set up, you can do it for free. You just wanna go to Google Search Console, set up a property, and then submit the site map that your website platform has created for you. Each of them has slightly different instructions on how to do this, but it's generally pretty simple, and then you just let it work. You don't have to go back in and make a lot of checks or changes. You just wanna make sure that your stuff is showing up on Google instead of waiting for it to stumble across your website.
[00:12:16] If you follow those six steps, you're gonna have a really strong SEO foundation because you're talking about who you work with, what you do, how you help them, and where you're located on your site, and it's going to be set up so that AI, search engines, and people can get the answers that they need about your business.
Create a Website Designed to Rank on AI
[00:12:40] I also wanna note that AI doesn't care about pretty branding. It doesn't care that you have the best color palette or really pretty images, but it does care about how fast your website loads, if your website is mobile responsive and if things are easy to read.
[00:12:57] A couple things you can make sure that you're checking here are that your website is loading quickly. You can use PageSpeed Insights to run a quick test to tell you how your performing there.
[00:13:10] You wanna make sure that it's mobile friendly, and my tip here is to actually visit your website on your phone instead of just depending on your website platform to give you an accurate preview.
[00:13:24] You also wanna make sure that you have fonts that are legible. Stay away from lots of script and all uppercase text and you wanna make sure that things are high enough contrast. There are lots of tools that you can help you with this as well. I use WebAIM's Contrast Checker that tells me if my background and my text have enough contrast to meet accessibility guidelines.
[00:13:51] You also wanna make sure that you've got really clear calls to action, that your buttons are easy to see, they're large enough to click on, and that it's clear what the next step is going to be. So something like 'book your free consultation' is great where 'next steps' might not be as clear. We just wanna let people know when they click on this button, what should they expect to happen?
[00:14:16] This all ties back in to patient experience as well. If your site is easier to use at midnight when somebody is desperately looking for an answer, it's also easier for AI to recommend to people because it's super clear what you do and it's going to be easy for them find your site and use it.
Good SEO is the foundation for AEO
[00:14:38] AI is just the next evolution in search and at its core it's about building that strong SEO foundation that serves both algorithm. And actual people. Remember your SEO basics: things need to be clear, you wanna have a good structure to how your content is outlined, you wanna use keywords that people are searching for and that accurately represent what you do, you want your website to be accessible to a wide range of people. Those things aren't going anywhere.
[00:15:13] If you get those pieces right, if you get that SEO Foundation in place, if you have a design that supports accessibility, you don't have to chase every new AI update that somebody tells you about. Instead, you can sit back and say, 'I know I've got a really strong foundation and I am going to let AI work for me.'
[00:15:37] If you're not sure if you've got that foundation or what AI thinks of your website, you can always go and ask it. Go to ChatGPT or Claude or whatever else there is, and ask it to tell you what your business is about. See if that summary matches what you would tell somebody in the real world. And if it doesn't, that means we need to make some changes to your site content, not necessarily to optimize for AEO.
[00:16:13] If you're not sure if your website is ready for this next wave of search, let's fix it together. You can book a Refresh VIP Day and in one day we'll make sure your site is easy to read, easy to trust, and easy to find by both people and AI. You can learn more about that on my website at lemonandthesea.com.
[00:16:35] Thanks for listening to Elevate your Practice. If you enjoyed today's episode, follow the show and leave a review. It helps more practitioners find these tips and start growing their practices with confidence. And don't forget to check out the show notes for links and resources from today's episodes.
[00:16:55] I'll be back next week with more strategies to help you build a thriving practice.
