Introduction

Hi, I'm Jennifer Kettinger. My background is in marketing and communications and I nerdily specialize in SEO and AI has kind of blown that up a lot and there's a lot of discussions around content and how to get visible for brands and I love

this blend of art and science so I'm just gonna kind of walk you through what I've learned and then a case study of a business that I worked with that we We leveraged SEO in the age and era of AI to grow our commercial business.

OK, thank you. I should know my audience better.

SEO vs. AEO: Being Visible in the Age of AI

Search engine optimization. And then there is AEO. They also call, they also say GEO, but I prefer to say AEO as answer engine optimization.

So when you're trying to be visible in large language models.

Is that interesting to anyone, or should I just rush through it a bit more? Oh, yeah. A few hands, a few hands.

Core Pillars of SEO and Answer Engine Optimization

So here are some of the core pillars. I mean, it gets quite technical and goes levels below this, but for the sake of the audience that is just learning search engine optimization,

there's a technical pillar where you look at and it is the page or the website able to be crawled by the search engines to be indexed and identified as citations that are interesting.

Also, core web vitals is the page loading, quickly? Is it a bit clunky? Are there heavy images on it that slow it up?

Then structured data, which is actually how we organize and understand what pages are.

Then on -page optimization, so are there direct answers? Because you're asking certain questions to LLMs, and are there some direct answers on your pages?

That's why FAQs are becoming so much more important to brand pages.

Then topical authority, so associating your brands with specific topics, and even with one level lower entity so keyword that is always kind of hand -in -hand with your brand and then the user experience so does is there an understanding when you're jumping from LLMs into the content that they're possibly linking to

Authority, Originality, and the Shift to a Zero-Click World

sometimes there's no clickable source this is the zero click world so people are just getting information and then closing their chats then content

authority with eat which is experience expertise authority and trust and Google rolled that out back in 2022 so really giving you know public relations even more importance in this whole strategy because trust comes from a lot of those

primary tier media outlets and then originality so everyone's creating a lot of slop uh content right now with llms like a lot i think it's a bit exhausting at the moment um so originality so are there reports that you're coming out with for your brand are you using a human to write your content is it unique um and that will showcase a lot of authority and then

last but not least the off -page authority so brand citations and that's where some of those press clippings come in do you get mentioned from those you can also get brand citations from reviews online from trust pilots really gaining a lot of speed and also reddit massively and then lastly

Where LLMs Pull Answers From (and Why It Matters)

thought leadership so sem rush which is a tool that you can kind of track all of these things came out with a report saying that these are the top sites uh that actually and there's a few more

I pulled out the very, very American ones, like walmart .com. But these are the top sources that are actually cited in LLMs and Reddit, actually.

I read something recently. Brands are starting to destroy the community of Reddit because they're dumping a lot of content. But there's also really great ways

for brands to have touch points. I think everyone's just trying to figure it out. They're launching things like Ask Me Anything from a chef point of view.

then Wikipedia YouTube I think YouTube is super untapped especially from a b2b market and then Google Google tools like Google my business Yelp Facebook

Case Study: Growing Walk-In Traffic for a London Hotel Restaurant

TripAdvisor and so on so I'm gonna go through a case study of a restaurant that I worked with in London and how we kind of started out so they were not seeing any walk -in business they were located inside of a hotel so they were were depending a lot on the hotel being full and when the hotel was not full

they would have issues getting butts in seats at the restaurant so the first

Starting with Data: POS, Search Demand, and Google Business Signals

level and layer of this is kind of understanding what data sources can you get right here I just have two of the data sources of the many data sources that we were looking at the the POS so the point -of -sale data what is selling the most and it was afternoon tea in this regard and they were calling

themselves a British restaurant so we were looking at search volumes based on on what they were offering, and Afternoon Tea had the largest opportunity in it.

We were also looking at different marketing sources. Again, Google My Business is a great way to understand how people are finding your business, and you can get those keywords.

But you can also get what people are saying about the business. So you can kind of use that then to position. But you can also understand revenue streams with some of these things.

And one of the things that we found in the big discovery is when we saw more people interacting with the Google business on Google Maps we were seeing more people coming to the restaurant so that was a huge lever in an experiment that we ran and first off right now all brands need to be doing

Clarifying Brand Positioning and the Biggest Opportunity

this and they need to understand what their brand positioning is and that's important because of what I was talking about before with entity and topical authority and association but also just getting yourself organized who are you what are you and what can you offer and what is the greatest opportunity so we

position this venue as an afternoon tea venue and they offered a very bespoke experience which was a multi sensory afternoon tea and they partnered with different brands like a floral perfume brand they also ran a dog afternoon tea which was very unique to to London and then they were quintessentially British

So basically, this was located in Great Scotland Yard, which was the old jail. So everything that they did was very quintessential British, and afternoon tea is very quintessential British.

Audience–Offering–Channel Matrix (and a Backlink Strategy to Match)

So the next level and layer was to put a matrix together. So who are we trying to serve and what the offerings are as far as the menu is concerned? And then what is that message? And then what are the channels that we want to go after?

And this is really important for a number of reasons. reasons. You know, with SEO, I was saying it's important to have backlinks.

So when you're going after different media for like the travelers, you want to go for these tier one media outlets like Condé Nast. But then for, you know, the dog owners, maybe with Dog Afternoon Tea, we need to find some very niche dog blogs in London, which very much exist.

And then lastly, listicles. So, you know how Forbes does the best razor or the best breast pump. I don't know why that came to my mind. Those are the sort of listicles that add a lot of value and when you search, they're

the ones that come up the most. So if you can get yourself incorporated in them, they're really great.

So just organizing yourself from a marketing perspective, which is also a bit of a backbone around the positioning.

Keyword Research and On-Page Optimization Quick Wins

So then you would do keyword research and you can do that a number of ways. Of course, Keyword Planner in Google is great, but if you have a business, if you're brick and mortar or even a B2B business, you can pull those keywords from your Google listing as well as even asking to start with the people working in your business and then taking that a little bit further and asking search engines and finding the questions asked around that.

So there's the head which is like the beginning of the search and then it goes into conversational which is the tail. and then these questions are also being heavily used in FAQ so that you can give direct answers that also then will be cited in alarms and then what you do

with those keywords is basically look at every landing page that you have so this was the restaurant landing page the about section and we had a primary keyword a secondary keyword and then we use those into the meta title so the page title and the meta description which hold high value of on page and then a small pro tip

for your business incorporating interlinkings within your website is super critical this is like an easy quick win for you there was an agency out of san fran that noticed that interlinking seven plus links on a page is going to really help your authority your credibility and then

Structured Data (Schema) to Help Search Engines and LLMs Understand You

establish that relevance so structured data this is a bit more on the technical side but essentially how can you use schema markup to identify what that page is and communicate with search engines and LLMs so it was a restaurant we want to serve up the restaurant name the address geolocation telephone etc and

And then with reviews and ratings, that you can also pull that in to the page.

Then with location, location data and events, if there were any specific events around the team.

YouTube as an Underused Channel for AI Optimization

So this was what I was talking about with YouTube. And I think YouTube is super fascinating right now from an AI optimization.

So the most important things is understanding what your topical authority is with the ecosystem, but what the search intent is and the keyword targeting.

marketing, so making sure that the title, which actually I see now that it's dropped off there, has the keyword in it and the description. And sometimes people even put FAQs into the video description, which is also super helpful.

And then one thing that you don't see a lot of brands use, it's a bit the Wild West, they're not responding to comments. And in the comments, you can also pin the comments.

Do you work in SEO? I feel like somebody's... I'm getting lots of nods over here. Okay.

And you can also put links. they're not follow links that hold heavier value but it will help you direct traffic that has high intent and then the metadata which we talked about

and another thing that you can do is actually there's chapters and transcripts so just when you download like videos online they have SRT files for the different languages that also helps you optimize so when you translate them and

then if the transcripts are there there's likely to be keywords and and supported keywords, as well as structuring with chapters.

Local SEO Execution: Optimizing Google Business Profile

This was brick and mortar. So we went heavy into Google My Business, because we saw it was driving a lot of business,

and placing those keywords in the description, but also the menu items, and in the reviews, and responding to those keywords with the reviews, because all of that is indexed by Google.

And they just phased this out, but you used to be able to ask questions to these listings, and then you could answer them and so we were testing that out as well and when

you publish you can also publish different formats you can use different rich media like photos or videos and then you can actually change the names on those photos and videos and you can incorporate keywords don't over keyword

stuff it's more about what is the actual image and how can you build the topical authority around it and then alt text so it's if it's alternative text so if somebody is vision impaired that they get to have this read read to them what it is and then we ran different types

of afternoon tea and we're using the publish updates which is a still great feature that's underutilized and then every time that we were planning different teas whether it was for pride festival or the coronation and the ongoing dog afternoon tea we were always

going after the media outlets that I had talked about more so that we could build

Experiment Results and Wrap-Up

around them and almost to the end here so we the experiment that we were running was how many people can we get on that Google listing and we did

continue to see this correlation go that the the number of walk -in business so that was people not associated with the hotel because that business just came natural to the amount of interactions on the Google My Business listing.

So the experiment was super successful. We saw an increase of 66 % of those interactions and then we almost saw 500 % web traffic lift in a year's time and then over 40 covers, so butts in seats.

So it was an incredible exercise of SEO and AIO and that was it. That's it. I hope I didn't go over on time.

Do you guys have any questions? Thank you, thank you.