A marketing director can spend six months publishing content, fixing technical issues, and improving landing pages, only to watch a smaller competitor take the search results.
We see this often. The problem usually isn’t one missing meta description or a handful of broken links. It’s that the website is targeting the wrong search intent, building authority in the wrong places, or publishing content that answers a keyword without answering the buyer.
Search has also changed. Google now uses AI-generated answers for more complex searches, while other answer engines can pull information directly from websites and cite them as sources.
That changes the question.
Instead of asking only how to rank higher on Google, we need to ask how to make a website useful enough for search engines, answer engines, and generative AI systems to understand and reference.
Here are 15 ways we recommend doing it.
Want to Turn Organic Search Into Your #1 Revenue Channel?
Let’s Talk →Here’s What You’ll Find On This Page:
- Fix the technical foundation
- Match every page to search intent
- Build content around topics, not isolated keywords
- Create genuinely useful content
- Make answers easy to extract
- Strengthen internal linking
- Improve titles, headings, and URLs
- Add original information
- Build real authority and relevant links
- Strengthen your brand’s search presence
- Improve page experience and mobile performance
- Use structured data where it fits
- Make your content useful for AI search
- Refresh pages that already have potential
- Measure rankings, revenue, and AI visibility
SEO, AEO, and GEO Ranking
SEO, AEO, and GEO overlap more than most marketing teams realise.
SEO helps search engines discover, crawl, understand, and rank your pages. AEO, or Answer Engine Optimisation, focuses on giving direct answers to questions people ask. GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation, focuses on making your information useful and credible enough to be surfaced or cited in generative search experiences.
We don’t need three separate content strategies for three versions of search. We need one strong information system that works across them.
The 15 steps below show how.
1. Fix the Technical Foundation First
A content strategy cannot rescue a website that search engines struggle to crawl or index.
Before we recommend publishing another 30 articles, we check whether important pages are accessible, indexable, internally linked, and technically sound. For a serious website, that means reviewing indexing, canonical URLs, redirects, XML sitemaps, robots.txt, JavaScript rendering, duplicate pages, mobile usability, Core Web Vitals, HTTPS, and broken links.
We use Semrush Site Audit to turn that work into a prioritised technical backlog. The tool checks technical and on-page issues across a site, including crawlability, indexability, broken links, metadata, structured data, mobile issues, and performance.
The important part is what happens after the crawl. Don’t spend three weeks fixing 200 low-impact warnings while an important product page is blocked from indexing. Start with the issues that can actually prevent valuable pages from being crawled, indexed, understood, or used.
If a product collection page is sitting around position 93, don’t immediately order 20 backlinks. First confirm that Google can properly access and understand the page.
That sounds basic. It saves months.
2. Match Every Page to Search Intent
A page can be perfectly optimised for a keyword and still rank poorly because it answers the wrong question.
We use the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool to investigate the keyword before deciding what the page should contain. It shows search volume, keyword difficulty, search intent, related terms, and SERP features, while also allowing us to filter opportunities by intent and difficulty.
For example, if we’re researching “business loan”, we don’t stop at the head term. We look for the questions and related searches around eligibility, interest rates, repayment periods, requirements, lenders, and specific business types.
Then we check the actual search results.
If Google consistently shows comparison pages for a query, publishing a 2,500-word opinion piece is unlikely to solve the problem.
The Reddit SEO community discussion on improving a page stuck around position 93 made this point well. One contributor suggested that a page ranking around position 93 might mean “the site needs a lot of work or it’s the wrong kind of page for the KW.”
That’s a useful diagnostic.
Before changing a page, ask:
What does someone actually expect to find after typing this query?
Then make the page deliver that answer faster and more completely than the competing results.
3. Build Content Around Topics and Not Isolated Keywords
A site with 100 unrelated articles doesn’t automatically have topical authority.
We’d rather see a focused group of pages covering one commercially important subject properly.
Semrush makes this easier through Keyword Strategy Builder and its keyword research tools. We can start with a commercial topic, identify related searches, group them into clusters, and decide which subjects deserve their own pages. Semrush also provides competitor keyword data that can reveal where competing websites have visibility that our site doesn’t.
For example, a fintech company targeting business lending could build a central page around business loans, then support it with content covering eligibility, loan costs, repayment terms, credit requirements, sector-specific financing, and related commercial questions.
Each page should have a reason to exist. The pages should then connect through relevant internal links.
We saw this approach work with DualMint, where SEO performance increased by 38,286%. The strategy focused on relevant content and search opportunities around real-world asset tokenisation rather than publishing disconnected articles.
The lesson isn’t that every site will produce the same percentage increase. It won’t.
The lesson is that search growth often comes from building a clear body of knowledge around a commercially relevant subject.
4. Create Genuinely Useful Content
This is where many SEO programmes lose their way.
A content calendar becomes the target. The keyword becomes the brief. The article gets published. Nobody checks whether it gives the reader anything they couldn’t get from the first five results.
We use a simple commercial test:
Would the customer still find this useful if Google sent no traffic?
If the answer is no, the content probably needs more substance.
For a B2B SaaS company, that could mean using product data, customer examples, implementation lessons, screenshots, or a real explanation from the product team. For a healthcare business, it may mean expert review and careful sourcing. For a financial company, it may require legal and compliance review before publication.
Useful content takes more work. That’s precisely why it can create an advantage.
Our content marketing service is built around this principle. Content needs to solve a real customer problem and align with search intent before volume becomes the priority.
5. Make Answers Easy to Extract
AEO rewards clarity.
When someone asks, “What is technical SEO?” we shouldn’t hide the answer halfway down a 2,000-word article. Give the definition first. Explain it afterwards.
This structure works particularly well for question-led searches:
What is AEO?
AEO is the process of structuring and improving content so answer engines can identify clear, useful responses to user questions.
Then expand with examples, limitations, and supporting evidence.
Use question-based headings where they reflect genuine searches. Follow them with complete answers. Add tables, short lists, definitions, and examples when they make the information easier to understand.
We also recommend keeping terminology consistent. If we call something “technical SEO” in one section, we shouldn’t call it “technical search optimisation” three sections later. Consistency makes the subject easier for both people and machines to understand.
The result should still sound human.
That’s the point.
6. Strengthen Internal Linking
Internal links are one of the cheapest SEO assets on a mature website because we already own them.
The mistake is treating them as an afterthought.
Important commercial pages should receive links from relevant pages that already have authority. A service page for corporate accounting, for example, shouldn’t sit alone while 40 blog posts discuss accounting without ever linking to it.
Use descriptive anchor text. Link where the next page genuinely helps the reader. Build connections between supporting content and the pages that matter to revenue.
We saw the value of this structure in the Sidebrief SEO case study, where more than 100 SEO pages were built around real customer questions, with internal links connecting related content.
For larger websites, we recommend mapping internal links as part of the content strategy rather than leaving them to individual writers. Our SEO and organic growth service includes this type of structural work because internal architecture affects far more than one article’s ranking.
7. Improve Titles, Headings, and URLs
The page title tells both the reader and the search engine what the page is about.
We keep titles specific. Headings should explain what follows. URLs should be short enough to understand without opening the page.
For example:
Weak:example.com/page?id=4829
Better:example.com/business-loans/
The same principle applies to headings. “Important Things to Know” tells nobody much. “How Much Does a Business Loan Cost?” gives the reader a clear reason to continue.
These elements won’t compensate for weak content. They do remove unnecessary ambiguity.
Want to Turn Organic Search Into Your #1 Revenue Channel?
Let’s Talk →8. Add Original Information
AI can summarise existing information quickly. That makes generic content easier to produce and harder to differentiate.
Our response should be the opposite.
Add information that isn’t available on every competing page. That could be first-party data, original research, customer interviews, proprietary examples, expert commentary, product comparisons, or lessons from actual implementation.
This is also where subject matter experts become valuable. A two-hour interview with the head of underwriting can give a financial services article insights that 20 generic AI-generated drafts cannot.
We’ve seen the difference firsthand. Sidebrief grew organic traffic by 1,631% in seven months, moving from just 61 organic visits in February to 1,056 in September 2023.
The important detail isn’t the percentage alone. The work focused on actual business registration, tax, compliance, and document questions that Sidebrief’s audience was already searching for.
That is the difference between producing content and building search assets.
9. Build Real Authority and Relevant Links
Backlinks still matter. Relevance matters more than chasing a large number.
Semrush’s Backlink Analytics tool lets us examine the backlink profiles of our own site and competitors. Backlink Gap can then show domains linking to competitors that aren’t linking to us, giving the outreach team a starting point for finding relevant opportunities.
One contributor in the Reddit SEO discussion reduced the advice to:
“One word, backlinks.”
That advice is too simple for an enterprise SEO strategy, but the underlying point remains useful.
Buying random links or placing your company on unrelated sites isn’t an authority strategy. We want links from relevant publications, industry organisations, credible directories, partners, customers, and other websites that make sense for the business.
The Oxgital SEO case study gives us a useful example. The site started with virtually no organic visibility and no meaningful authority. The strategy combined technical SEO, intent-matched content, competitor gap analysis, and relevant directory listings.
The result was 3,500% organic traffic growth in seven months, alongside a 60% increase in backlinks and 53 additional organic keyword rankings.
For a Nigerian company expanding into other markets, the link profile should also reflect where the company actually operates. A business selling into the UK, US, and Africa needs an authority footprint that supports that wider commercial story.
10. Strengthen Your Brand’s Search Presence
There’s a point where SEO stops being purely about individual keywords.
If customers search your company name, product name, founder, category, and brand-plus-product combinations, search engines have more context about who you are.
Brand demand also gives your organic strategy somewhere to go beyond generic informational queries.
One contributor in the Reddit SEO community discussion argued that branded traffic can be more valuable than chasing generic keyword traffic because people searching for a company already have a reason to find it.
We don’t treat that as a reason to abandon non-branded SEO. We treat it as a reminder that search visibility should support the brand people remember after they leave the results page.
That means keeping business information consistent across your website, profiles, directories, media coverage, and other credible sources.
11. Improve Page Experience and Mobile Performance
A senior marketing team doesn’t need a perfect PageSpeed score. It needs a site that doesn’t make customers wait.
A slow website creates a commercial problem before it becomes an SEO problem. If a prospect clicks an organic result and the page takes too long to become usable, we’ve paid for the opportunity with months of content and technical work only to lose the visitor at the door.
We pay particular attention to high-value pages. A homepage, pricing page, service page, product page, and key landing pages deserve more attention than a low-value archive page.
This is also where SEO and conversion rate optimisation meet. Ranking gets the visitor through the door. The page still has to do its job.
For companies where the website itself is part of the acquisition engine, our website development service can sit alongside the SEO programme rather than treating technical development and search as separate projects.
12. Use Structured Data Where it Fits
Structured data helps search engines understand what information on a page represents.
Depending on the page, that could include product information, organisation details, breadcrumbs, events, or other supported types.
The important part is accuracy. We don’t add schema simply because a checklist says we should.
The markup should match the visible content on the page. If a page says a product costs ₦250,000, the structured data shouldn’t suggest a different price. If a review doesn’t appear on the page, we shouldn’t manufacture review markup.
For teams working across banking, healthcare, insurance, or other regulated sectors, this matters. The markup should reinforce what the page actually says, not create claims that legal or compliance teams never approved.
13. Make Your Content Useful for AI Search
GEO doesn’t require a secret file, special AI markup, or a trick for forcing an AI system to mention your company.
What helps is making the underlying content clear, authoritative, current, and useful.
This means answering questions directly, showing evidence, explaining relationships between concepts, using consistent terminology, and making important information accessible in text.
We also want to build entity clarity.
If a company has five different descriptions across its website, LinkedIn profile, directory listings, media coverage, and product pages, we’re making it harder for machines to build a consistent picture of the business.
This is where AEO and GEO overlap. The clearer the information architecture, the easier it becomes for an answer engine to understand what the company does, who it serves, where it operates, and why it should be trusted.
The Alayo case study is a useful example of this direction. The project used AEO and content strategy to help the brand become the #1 cited sleepwear and loungewear brand in Nigeria across AI platforms.
That is a different visibility metric from a traditional Google ranking.
Both matter.
14. Refresh Pages that Already Have Potential
Creating a new article is not always the best use of the next content budget.
Sometimes the opportunity is already sitting in Google Search Console.
We use Semrush Position Tracking to monitor target keywords and identify pages that are already ranking but haven’t reached their potential. Semrush can track ranking movement across locations and devices, while its keyword research tools can identify terms where existing pages are already appearing in Google’s top results.
That creates a useful optimisation list.
Look for pages ranking around positions 4 to 20 for commercially valuable queries. Then review the search intent, competing pages, content gaps, internal links, freshness, and conversion path.
A page ranking at position 11 can be a better investment than a brand-new article targeting a keyword where the site has no authority.
We used this principle with Adilo. After realigning content with product intent and improving technical SEO, Adilo’s site-wide organic traffic increased by 132.4% in 90 days, while blog traffic increased by 92.6%.
The lesson is simple: sometimes the best SEO content is already on your website.
It just isn’t doing the right job.
15. Measure Rankings, Revenue, and AI Visibility
SEO reporting becomes difficult when the report ends at traffic.
A CMO needs to know whether organic search is contributing to the commercial target. A founder needs to know whether the channel can justify another quarter of investment. Finance needs a number that connects to revenue.
We use Semrush Position Tracking alongside Google Search Console and analytics data to monitor movement in the queries that matter. Semrush also now provides tools for tracking visibility across AI search surfaces, giving teams another layer of visibility beyond traditional rankings.
We track both leading and commercial indicators.
| Metric | What it tells us |
|---|---|
| Impressions | Whether search visibility is expanding |
| Rankings | Whether target queries are moving |
| Organic clicks | Whether visibility is producing visits |
| Non-branded traffic | Whether new demand is being captured |
| Qualified leads | Whether visitors fit the target customer |
| Pipeline | Whether SEO is influencing revenue opportunities |
| Revenue | Whether organic is contributing commercially |
| AI citations | Whether content is being referenced in AI answers |
The important point is that we don’t use Semrush as a substitute for business reporting. It’s part of the measurement layer.
A ranking isn’t revenue.
A citation isn’t revenue either.
The commercial value appears when search visibility brings the right person into the buying journey, and the website gives them a reason to continue.
Our digital marketing analytics service helps connect these search signals to the wider marketing picture.
How We Use Semrush Across an SEO Programme
Semrush works best when we use its tools as a connected workflow rather than opening a different report whenever something goes wrong.
| SEO task | Semrush tool | What we use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Technical audit | Site Audit | Find crawl, indexation, performance, metadata, and technical issues |
| Keyword research | Keyword Magic Tool | Find relevant keywords, intent, difficulty, and related searches |
| Competitor research | Organic Research | Understand which keywords and pages drive competitor visibility |
| Content gaps | Keyword Gap | Find valuable queries competitors rank for that we don’t |
| Backlink research | Backlink Analytics | Analyse authority and referring domains |
| Link opportunities | Backlink Gap | Find relevant websites linking to competitors |
| Content optimisation | On Page SEO Checker | Identify practical on-page opportunities |
| Ranking measurement | Position Tracking | Monitor target keywords and ranking changes |
| AI visibility | AI visibility tools | Monitor how the brand appears across AI search experiences |
The value isn’t the number of tools in the subscription.
It’s the connection between the data.
We can use Keyword Magic Tool to identify an opportunity, Organic Research to understand who already owns it, Site Audit to check whether the website can compete, Backlink Gap to understand the authority requirement, and Position Tracking to measure whether the work actually moved the needle.
That’s a much better workflow than publishing an article and checking Google three days later.
And for teams managing serious SEO budgets, that distinction matters.
Want to Turn Organic Search Into Your #1 Revenue Channel?
Let’s Talk →Conclusion
The biggest mistake we see in SEO is treating rankings as the destination.
A position 3 ranking for an irrelevant keyword won’t rescue a weak acquisition strategy. A page that appears in an AI answer but gives the buyer no reason to trust the company won’t create much commercial value either.
The stronger approach is to build a site that search engines can access, people can understand, and AI systems can confidently use as a source.
We’ve seen what happens when that foundation is built properly. MainSqueeze grew organic traffic by 4,800% in eight months and became a category authority in its niche.
We’ve also seen a different kind of result with TheHospitalBook, which reached 40K monthly organic traffic through programmatic SEO.
Those numbers aren’t benchmarks we promise every business. They’re examples of what becomes possible when technical SEO, search intent, content, authority, and commercial goals work together.
The next step isn’t to publish another 50 articles.
Pull your last two quarters of Google Search Console data. Find the pages already sitting within striking distance of valuable rankings. Then compare those pages against search intent, internal links, content depth, technical health, authority, and commercial relevance.
If you want a second pair of eyes on that exercise, bring the data to our SEO strategy call. We’ll look for where search visibility is leaking and which fixes deserve the next budget allocation.