Timothy Carter

Defined simply, content marketing is: 1. The Creation of Quality Content  2. The Promotion of Quality Content  In this, step-by-step, all-in-one guide to planning and launching a content marketing strategy you will learn that good content marketing strategy includes both on and off-site content creation and on and off-site content promotion. And they’re almost never mutually exclusive. For instance, video content marketing for Youtube would fit into both the created and promoted buckets. You might create a quality blog post and then promote it by PR and link building outreach, then create more content off-site to link back to your original post. In reality, content marketing may more appropriately look like this: The who, what, when, where why and how you create and promote your content is how one develops the ideal content marketing strategy for success. In order to create and promote, you need to understand your ideal customer persona, where they are online and how to promote to them. In other words, you will need to have the necessary skills to be an adept content marketer. Only then will you gain a true edge or competitive advantage. For instance, a Shopify ecommerce store will have a very different creation and promotion strategy than a local tax attorney or tax service business. How to Plan Your Content Marketing Strategy There are some important reasons why you should plan a content strategy—by which I mean a formally written document—that outlines your plans for success. According to research from the Content Marketing Institute, there are four main factors responsible for differentiating self-described “successful” content marketers from self-described “unsuccessful” content marketers. (Image Source: Content Marketing Institute) The Content “Research Phase” Let’s move on to the actual steps you’ll need to take to draft your content strategy. First, you’re going to need raw information. Remember what I said about needing to have more objective information, rather than relying on your own assumptions and instincts? This is the stage of the process you’ll use to get that information. There are several types of research you’ll need to perform, each with their own challenges and tactics. Your end goal is to walk away with enough raw material and data to inform your strategic decisions. When doing content marketing research, you can use keyword research tools or the unique data provided from organizations like Content Marketing Institute. Let’s take a look at some of the most important research areas: Market research Market research is what you’ll use to identify and understand your target audience. Your target audience will be the ones reading your content, supporting it through social sharing, and eventually becoming customers. Hopefully, you already have a solid idea of who your clearly defined audience is—but don’t make assumptions yet. Take your time evaluating different demographics and how they might relate to your brand and already have brand awareness based on your content marketing. There are several ways you can do this; for example, you can rely on government-drawn census data to learn more about the buying habits and dispositions of your key demographics (and demographics you may not have previously considered), or you can leverage recent industry studies or market research companies to dig deeper into more specific information. Google Trends and Content Marketing Institute are great tools for engaging in custom research on trending keywords as well as research insight from articles on the company website. Device usage You’ll also need to pay attention to what types of devices your target audience is going to be using. For the most part, you’ll find that there’s a great diversity here. More users are opting for multi-platform access to content, switching between desktop devices, tablets, and smartphones throughout the day. Image Source: ComScore (via smartinsights.com) Still, you’ll find that your demographics and your industry likely favor one device more than the others. You’ll need to make your content compatible with all devices, but you might bear one in mind more than the others. Preferred media types Don’t neglect things like images, videos, and audio streams. Beyond that, there are multiple methods of serving these mediums, such as various channels and file types, and many formatting variables, such as length and overall presentation. Most content marketing strategies will benefit from using multiple of these media types simultaneously, but the only way to figure out which ones are best for you (and your audience) is to research it. Competitive research Competitive research adds another layer of sophistication to your research phase. So far, you’ve been researching what audience segments you’ll be focusing on and what types of content they might like to see. This is good information, but it’s all theoretical. Competitive research helps you see content marketing in a live environment—and in your niche, no less. Make a list of your direct and indirect competitors, and take a look at what they’re doing for their own content marketing campaigns. Keyword research Keyword research is specifically done for SEO, though even if you don’t plan on investing heavily in an independent SEO campaign, it’s worth doing. Here, your goal is to uncover various keywords and keyword phrases that might serve as good targets for content topics. (Image Source: ahrefs) Again, keep any keyword insights you find here in balance; your primary goal is to produce good content. Write for readers, not for search engines. Setting Content Marketing Goals & Establishing a Timeline Once you’ve done enough research to give you a broad understanding of your clearly defined audience, your competitive position, and your niche, you can start drawing up the main goals of your campaign—as well as a timeline in which you’ll meet those goals. The long-term nature of content marketing Before you get too ambitious, you need to realize the long-term nature of content marketing. You can’t use content marketing as a get-rich-quick scheme, nor can you use it as a short-term boost for your brand awareness. If you’re going to get involved with content, you need to have a long-term focus. Budgetary considerations Ideally,

As a labor and employment lawyer, your goal is to advocate for your clients, ensuring their rights are protected in the workplace. But to do that effectively in today’s digital-first world, you need to be where your potential clients are—online. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the tool that gets you there. By optimizing your website for search engines like Google, you increase your visibility, which leads to more traffic, and ultimately, more clients. So, how do you make SEO work for you as a labor and employment lawyer? Why Labor and Employment Lawyers Need SEO First, let’s look at why SEO for employment lawyers should be your go-to marketing strategy. When people face workplace issues like discrimination, wage disputes, or wrongful termination, they often start their search for help online. They type in queries like “employment lawyer near me” or “help with workplace harassment,” and the search results display a list of lawyers who can assist them. If your employment law firm ranks higher in the search engine results pages, potential clients are more likely to click on your website and reach out to you for help. Law firm SEO helps you capture that traffic by boosting your site’s ranking for relevant searches. And here’s the beauty of SEO: it’s a cost-effective, long-term strategy. While it does require an upfront investment of time and resources, once your website is optimized and starts ranking, you can enjoy a steady stream of organic traffic. Compare that to paid advertising, which only works as long as you keep putting cash into the “machine”, and you’ll quickly see the value of SEO. 5 Components of an SEO Strategy for Labor and Employment Lawyers SEO isn’t a one-time thing. It’s an ongoing effort that involves various tactics to improve your website’s visibility. Here’s how to structure your SEO strategy to ensure you’re reaching the right people. Strategic Planning and Keyword Research Before diving into creating content or tweaking your website, you need a plan. This starts with keyword research. Think about what your potential clients are searching for. Your goal is to identify the terms and phrases most relevant to labor and employment law and your specific niche. Some basic employment law firm keyword ideas might include: Wrongful termination lawyer Workplace discrimination attorney Employment contract review Wage and hour disputes Harassment and retaliation claims Employment Contracts Wage and Hour Disputes Discrimination Workplace Safety Employment Benefits Immigration employment law These broad “head” keywords are competitive, but they’re crucial because they define the core of what you do and can set you apart from other employment law firms. However, don’t stop there. You’ll also want to target long-tail keywords, which are more specific and less competitive, like: “How to sue my employer for discrimination” “Can I sue my boss for unpaid wages?” “How can I protect my company against a frivolous employment lawsuit?” By targeting a mix of both, you can cast a wide net while also capturing niche searches with less competition. 2. On-Page SEO and Technical Optimization Once you know which keywords to target, the next step is ensuring your website is optimized for search engines. This means making sure Google can crawl your site easily, your content is relevant to search queries, and the user experience is top-notch. Here’s how to tackle the most critical aspects of on-page SEO: Page Titles and Meta Descriptions: Every page on your site should have a clear, keyword-focused title tag and meta description. These are the snippets of text that appear in search results and help Google and potential clients understand what the page is about. For instance, if you have a page about wage disputes, make sure the title includes “Wage Disputes Lawyer” and your location if you’re targeting local traffic. URL Structure: Keep your URLs short and relevant. A page focused on wrongful termination should have a URL like: /wrongful-termination-lawyer. This not only looks cleaner but also signals to search engines what the page is about. Internal Linking: Make sure your pages are interconnected with internal links. If someone is reading about wage disputes, link them to related content on workplace harassment or your contact page for easy navigation. Page Speed and Mobile Optimization: A slow website can hurt your SEO efforts. If your pages take too long to load, users will bounce, and Google will penalize you for it. Invest in page speed optimization techniques like compressing images, enabling browser caching, and using a content delivery network (CDN). And don’t forget mobile optimization! Most people are searching on their phones these days, so make sure your site is mobile-friendly. 3. Creating High-Quality, Relevant Content In SEO, content is king, and that’s especially true for labor and employment lawyers. The more valuable content you create, the more opportunities you have to rank for relevant keywords and build trust with potential clients. Here’s how to approach content creation: Targeted Blog Posts: One of the best ways to rank for long-tail keywords is to write blog posts answering common legal questions. Topics like “What to do if you’re fired without cause” or “How to handle workplace retaliation” can help you capture traffic from people actively seeking legal advice. Make sure each post is thorough, answering the question in depth, and includes your target keywords naturally throughout. Practice Area Pages: Don’t neglect the core pages of your website. You should have individual pages dedicated to each practice area, such as wrongful termination, wage disputes, or discrimination cases. These pages should include detailed information about the services you offer, relevant legal insights, and clear calls to action. Local SEO Content: Since legal services are often local, you’ll want to include location-based keywords in your content. For example, optimize pages for searches like “employment lawyer in [City Name]” or “labor attorney near me.” Showing Expertise: Google’s algorithm favors content that shows E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). As a lawyer, your content must reflect your legal expertise. Use your blog and practice area pages to show your knowledge of

Duplicate content can be bad. Using the same content, either in total or partial form, on your website leads to a poor user experience, and triggers a red flag in Google’s search algorithm. In the old days of SEO, duplicate content was often used as a cheap trick to get more keywords and more content on a website, so Google evolved a system to weed out the spammers who violated best practices by doing this. Today, if you’re caught using duplicate content, your domain authority could suffer and your keyword rankings could drop. In this post we discuss: What is duplicate content? Why is it bad? Content syndication & duplicate content What other content production tools can cause duplicate content? Types of duplicate content. Which are benign, which are toxic. How does Generative AI (artificial intelligence) content fit into the mix? How to avoid and/or clean up duplicate content Duplicate Content Defined In the vast majority of cases, duplicate content is non-malicious and simply a product of whichever CMS (content management system) the website happens to be running on. For example, WordPress (the industry-standard CMS) automatically creates “Category” pages and “tag” duplicate pages which list all blog posts within certain categories or tags. Or, the www vs.ur non-www version of a site may not be redirected properly, causing duplicate content from multiple URLs. This creates multiple pages or URL parameters within the domain that contain the same content. 1) Google may decide to let me off with a “warning” and simply choose not to index 99 of my 100 duplicate posts, but keep one of them indexed. NOTE: This doesn’t mean my website’s search rankings would be affected in any way by the duplicate content. 2) Google may decide it’s such a blatant attempt at gaming the system that it completely de-indexes my entire website from all search results. This means that, even if you searched directly for “Example.com” Google would find no results. So, one of those two scenarios is guaranteed to happen. Which one it is depends on how egregious Google determines your blunder to be. In Google’s own words: Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the pages with duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a canonical version of the content to show in a given search result. This type of non-malicious duplication is fairly common, especially since many CMSs don’t handle this well by default. So when people say that having this type of duplicate content can affect your site, it’s not because you’re likely to be penalized; it’s simply due to the way that web sites and search engines work. Most search engines strive for a certain level of variety; they want to show you ten different results on a search results page, not ten different URLs that all have the same content. To this end, Google tries to filter out duplicate content and documents so that users experience less redundancy. So, what happens when a search engine crawler detects duplicate content? (from https://searchengineland.com/search-illustrated-how-a-search-engine-determines-duplicate-content-13980) How to Find Duplicate Content Fixing duplicate content is relatively easy. Finding duplicate content is the hard part. Like I mentioned above, duplicate content can be tricky to detect—just because you don’t have any repeated content from a user experience perspective doesn’t mean you don’t have repeated content from a search algorithm’s perspective. Your first step is a manual one; go through your site and see if there are any obvious repetitions of content. As an example, do you have an identical paragraph concluding each of the pages on your site? Rewrite it. Did you re-use a section of a past blog post in a new post? Make a distinction. Once you’ve completed this initial manual scan, there are two main tools you can use to find more, better hidden instances of duplicate content. Perform Your Own Search First, you can perform a search to see through Google’s eyes. Use a Site: tag to restrict your search to your site only, and follow up with an intitle: tag to search for a specific phrase. It should look a little something like this: Site:thisisyoursite.comintitle:”thisisyourtargetphrase” This search will generate all the results on your given site that correlate to your chosen phrase. If you see multiple identical results, you know you have a duplicate content problem. Check Google Search Console (GSC) A simpler way to check for duplicate content is to use Google Webmaster Tools to crawl your site and report back on any errors. Once you’ve created and verified your Webmaster Tools account, head to the Search Appearance tab and click on “HTML Improvements.” Here, you’ll be able to see and download a list of duplicate meta descriptions and title tags. These are common and easily fixable issues that just require a bit of time to rewrite. To determine whether a sample of duplicate content is going to pull down your rankings, first you have to determine why you are going to publish such content in the first place. It all boils down to your purpose. If your goal is to try to punk the system by using a piece of content that has been published elsewhere, you’re bound to get penalized. The purpose is clearly deceptive and intended to manipulate search results. This is what Google has to say about this sort of behavior: Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. Copyscape For 5 cents per search, you can have Copyscape vet an entire piece for you. But if your budget won’t allow that kind of expenditure, you can still use Copyscape for free. The catch with free Copyscape is that you’ll have to

Working as a tax lawyer requires generating a steady stream of leads, and search engine optimization (SEO) for lawyers happens to be one of the best lead-generating methods around. SEO will get your law firm’s website to show up in search results whenever people in your area search for legal help on sites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The goal is to get your website to appear as close to the first page of results as possible, and when you achieve that, you’ll get more traffic and ultimately more leads. How SEO gets leads for tax lawyers Your best leads are people who need a tax attorney right away, and those people will be searching online for legal help. Optimizing your website to get discovered in the search engines gives you more opportunities to be found by those who are looking for a tax lawyer. Law firm SEO involves several components: Keyword research. As the foundation of SEO, keyword research will give you ideas regarding what keywords and phrases you should be targeting to get your content ranked high in the search engines. Local SEO. Nationally, law-related searches are highly competitive. If you don’t have a huge budget to compete with national law firms, local SEO will be extremely helpful. Local SEO only puts your content in front of users who are from your general area. This is determined by their IP address and/or zip code if they’re logged into a Google account. By narrowing down the audience and excluding non-local sites, your website has a better chance at showing up in search results. On-page SEO. When your web pages are optimized for the right keywords, you’ll rank better and generate relevant leads. Part of on-page SEO also involves making it easy for leads to contact you, like placing your phone number in large text at the top of every page. Backlinks. Backlinks are links that go to your website that are published on other people’s websites. Generating backlinks has always been an important component in SEO, and it’s how search engines originally determined rank. Today, it’s not the only ranking factor, but backlinks are still important. Content marketing. The more content you have, the more opportunities you have to rank that content and get found in the search engines. Content marketing is nuanced, but in general, it helps you generate backlinks and organic traffic by creating and distributing your content across the web. Although this is not a complete list of what’s involved, all of these elements work together to make your law firm’s website more visible in the search engines, which helps you capture a steady stream of leads searching for your legal services. If you’re not currently getting a healthy flow of leads from search, SEO will help. Let’s take a closer look at each of these elements. Targeting the right keywords and phrases Keywords are how your visitors find your website in the search engines. When a person needs legal help, they’re going to search online using keywords related to the type of help they need. The first and most obvious keywords and phrases to target are those relating to your practice areas. For instance, you might choose to target the following: Income tax Corporate tax Estate tax Tax planning and compliance Tax disputes If these are your main areas of practice or your specialties, you’ll want to target these specific keywords and phrases related to these main topics. Here’s an overview of how that looks: Individual pages for each area of practice. While your home page is ideal for providing an overview of what you do for your clients, including showcasing successful case outcomes, you also need individual pages dedicated to each area of tax law you practice. This gives your visitors a chance to read more about what you do, and it puts more content into the search engines, which increases your chances of ranking for various search terms. A dedicated category on your blog for each main practice area. These days, you can’t just have a static attorney website with a few services pages. You need a blog with solid, quality content, and it helps to continue adding content over time. With dedicated categories, you can publish plenty of detailed content to educate people on tax law, which can also help you generate leads. Using your chosen keywords and phrases throughout your website. Your target keywords should be used throughout your law firm website on all of your webpages. However, they need to be placed strategically and in context. For example, if one of your phrases is “tax planning and compliance,” you’d want to include that in a paragraph, perhaps in a section that explains what it is and why compliance is important. Although, not every keyword should be on every page. Your text needs to be natural and you should avoid “keyword stuffing.” In addition to targeting main keywords associated with your practice areas, you’ll also want to target more long tail keywords, especially those which have more potential to bring you hot leads. These keywords are called “buying keywords.” In your case, since you’re aiming for leads, your money keywords will be what people type into the search engines when they need an attorney immediately. For example, “income tax lawyer in Dallas” or “estate tax lawyer near me.” The good news here is that you can optimize your site for these types of phrases with local SEO for law firms. Local SEO for tax lawyers Local SEO is one of the most important components in search engine optimization for tax lawyers. If you don’t target local counties, cities, and towns, you’ll only be able to compete nationally in the search engines with all the other million plus law firms doing the same thing. Local SEO eliminates a large amount of competition by excluding national results. Without optimizing your site for local SEO, search engines won’t have any reason to tag your law firm website as relevant to narrower markets determined

Getting clear on who your target audience is can be one of the most helpful steps in the business growth process. And as your revenue grows, you’ll want to consider who your most profitable customers are. This is best done through a process known as market segmentation. In this article, we will walk you through what market segmentation is, why it’s important for search engine optimization (SEO), what types of segmentation exist, how you can segment, and a few simple things you should and should not do in order to get the best possible results. Sound good? Let’s roll… What is Market Segmentation? The concept of market segmentation is pretty simple and straightforward. It’s essentially the process of dividing your company’s target market into specific and approachable groups. If you think of your customer base as a collection of colorful balls in a playground ball pit, market segmentation is the process of organizing these balls into color-specific piles. They’re all your customers, but each set has unique attributes. Typically, market segmentation involves creating subsets of your market based on factors like needs, demographics, interests, priorities, and other criteria. The goal is to be as detailed as you possibly can without mislabeling. In other words, be specific but don’t make illogical assumptions just for the sake of segmenting. The Top Benefits of Market Segmentation I’ll dig into more of the “how” regarding market segmentation momentarily, but first I want to make sure you’re clear on why it’s important and how it can benefit your business moving forward. Here are a few top perks: Better understanding. Who doesn’t want to know their customers better? When you get serious about market segmentation, your entire approach changes. You’re no longer taking shots in the dark and hoping something sticks. You know who your customers are and you’re able to reach each group in a very specific way that resonates with them. Stronger marketing. The key to successful marketing is to reach the right person with the right message at the right time. Market segmentation enhances your ability to accomplish each of these goals. Better targeting. Because you’re able to target each customer with a very specific approach, you’ll see your response rates increase, acquisition costs decrease, and conversion rates go through the roof. You’ll waste a lot less money barking up the wrong trees. Greater control. Market segmentation takes you from a reactionary approach and transforms your business to adopt a more proactive stance. In other words, you control the direction of your business – not the marketplace. Superior niching. As the saying goes, there are riches in niches. With careful market segmentation, you’re able to niche down and reach very specific demographics. In some cases, this may unlock totally new revenue streams that didn’t previously exist. When you target niche markets though, be sure your total addressable market (TAM) is big enough to sustain a viable business for you and your competition. Greater innovation. Through market segmentation, you become intimately acquainted with what your customers want and need. This can lead to better product innovation in the future. At the end of the day, market segmentation makes mathematical sense. Research from Bain & Company shows 81 percent of executives believe market segmentation is a crucial aspect of growing their bottom line. Furthermore, those organizations that have thorough and documented market segmentation strategies see a 10 percent bump in their profit margins when compared to those that don’t. 5 Basic Types of Market Segmentation Most marketers agree that there are four or five basic types of market segmentation. If you focus your efforts on the following “buckets,” you’ll see positive results throughout your business: 1. Demographic Demographic segmentation is the most basic. (And thanks to the rich data trails that people leave behind online, it’s also one of the easiest to work with.) It typically includes information like age, gender, income, location, education, ethnicity, family situation, annual income, and other key details. While demographic segmentation can be very generic for some businesses, it can be quite helpful for others who naturally need the ability to filter based on factors like age, gender, location, etc. Take a dance academy for example. They might have dance programs for women and dance programs for men. These programs may even be separated based on age and zip code. Knowing which demographic segment customers fall into makes it so much easier to target the right people with the proper offers. 2. Geographic Geographic market segmentation is pretty self-explanatory. It’s typically based on factors like country, region, state, city, zip code, climate, urban vs. rural, and/or proximity to a certain location. Geographic market segmentation is obviously important for brick and mortar companies and local businesses. However, it’s also vitally important for online businesses that sell physical products or services that may be impacted by something like climate. Geographic segmentation is what local SEO is all about. Amazon.com is a really good example. They’re very aware of where their customers live and have the ability to promote products that coincide with weather patterns. If a snowstorm is coming through the northeast, they’re able to recommend cold-weather products. However, a customer down in balmy Fort Lauderdale will see something totally different (bathing suits or sunscreen). 3. Firmographic Firmographic market segmentation is very similar to geographic segmentation, except that it’s designed primarily for B2B organizations. Firmographics look at things like company location, company size, number of employees, gross revenue, and other factors specific to the makeup of the business. In essence, firmographics help you properly target businesses in sales and marketing situations. It gives you the information needed to approach a small business with 20 employees with one message, while coming at a national corporation with 2,000 employees in a totally different manner. 4. Behavioral This is where it starts to get interesting. Behavioral market segmentation involves separating customers based on their decision-making patterns. This includes consumption habits, purchase patterns, lifestyle, and usage. In order to get clear on behavioral segmentation, you

Well, we may not have achieved the technological singularity. But there’s no question we’re squarely in the middle of the age of AI. Artificial intelligence (AI) has worked its way into nearly everything, from our smartphones to our project management platforms – and now, even our search engines. Search engine optimizers are no strangers to adapting to new technologies, but the AI era has certainly been a doozy. While many of the fundamentals of SEO remain unchanged, there’s an entirely new structure for Google search results – and perhaps even more importantly, we’re witnessing the emergence of entirely AI-based search tools. In response, many digital marketing professionals, including ourselves, are doing our due diligence to stay ahead of the game and come up with strategies and tactics that can help us and our clients rank in AI-based search engine services. We call these strategies, collectively, generative engine optimization, or GEO. So what are these strategies? And how do you use them effectively? The Era of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) The era of GEO is based on the rise of AI in our search experiences. You may have noticed that for many queries, Google now offers something called AI Overviews. Above the fold of conventional search results, Google will attempt to answer your query directly or provide you with summarizing information designed to improve your user experience. For example, it might summarize a word or phrase for you, or give you some pointers on the topic for which you requested advice. Knowledge Graph answers and rich snippets are nothing new, but AI-generated results add a new twist to the idea. Note that Bing is offering a very similar service, with AI summaries above the fold of conventional search results. Another interesting development is that many engineers and innovators are attempting to develop their own, completely novel AI-based search engines, competing with Google and Bing directly by offering an upgraded experience, at least ostensibly. For example, Perplexity AI has made a splash in the search engine world by attracting more than 500 million queries and 10 million active monthly users – despite being around for only a couple of years. Perplexity functions intuitively, but in ways that diverge from Google, Bing, and other first generation search engines. Additionally, open AI has announced the upcoming deployment of SearchGPT, which promises similarly disruptive innovations in the search world. This is a rapidly advancing niche, and one we’re paying close attention to. Already, we have strategies to help you get more visibility in AI search results in Google and Bing, and many of those strategies will be similarly valuable in AI-first search engine services. However, there’s still a lot we don’t know – and we expect things to change even more rapidly in the future – so it’s important to understand that nearly all GEO strategies are somewhat tenuous and in flux. GEO SEO vs. Conventional SEO: What’s the Difference? How is generative engine optimization different from search engine optimization? As we’ll see, there’s considerable overlap between the two concepts. GEO, like SEO, has a primary aim of boosting the visibility of your content in search engines, with the end goal of producing more organic traffic. Like conventional SEO, GEO requires your careful attention to SEO fundamentals like technical onsite optimization, content creation, and backlink building. However, Google and other AI-based search engines sometimes use different criteria for producing results. AI technology is notoriously opaque, so we don’t know all the details, but we do have some helpful clues to point us in the right direction of new tactics that can support visibility in AI-generated results. Is GEO a Replacement for SEO? The short answer is no. Growing organic traffic has always required adherence to SEO fundamentals, and that remains unlikely to change in the near future. Even if you were exclusively focused on building visibility and traffic with AI-generated results, you would still need traditional SEO as the foundation of your strategy. Also, at least for the time being, AI-based results still only represent a portion of all the visibility and traffic that can be generated from favorable positioning and presentation in search engine results pages (SERPs). In other words, there’s still a lot of value in building conventional organic rankings. How to Optimize Content for AI-Powered Search Engines Now for the good stuff. How do you optimize content for AI-powered search engines? For starters, you need to follow best practices for traditional SEO. Consider this a functional prerequisite on top of which you will develop your GEO strategies. There are many tactics that can shift the odds in your favor, but there are three that stand out as particularly valuable. Cite Your Sources Research suggests that one of the best methods for reliability improving your visibility in AI-generated search results is citing your sources. A study by Princeton University, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI, and IIT Delhi has verified this. There are a few elements of effective source citation you’ll need to bear in mind:       Cite credible sources. Citing a random source on the web isn’t going to cut the mustard. If you want your citation to be valuable, you need to cite credible sources. Look for industry experts, trusted names, and well-established institutions.       Provide inline citations. Your citations also need to be inline, meaning they need to appear in the line of text where they are relevant. Footnotes and endnotes are acceptable, but they should be considered supplementary, adding context and elaboration to your inline citations.       Add a hyperlink. Part of your citation should include a hyperlink to the original source, if relevant.       List your citations at the end. Finally, include a list of citations at the end of your content as a redundancy measure and as a way to show off the full scope of your research. Add Quotes From Authorities It’s also a good idea to add some quotes from authorities. Authorities are experts or