Discover a powerful 30-day SEO playbook to master AI search visibility. We break down a simple, effective strategy for picking topics, creating authoritative content and securing placements that drive real AEO and GEO results.
These tips are part of the session "GEO Status Update: Optimizing Content Creation for AI Consumption," where our speaker, Sarah Evans, Partner and Head of PR at Zen Media, helps PR professionals learn the latest GEO (generative engine optimization) tactics to ensure that their stories—from earned media to press releases to digital content—remain relevant in the AI era.
This session was part of the PRNEWS PRO Online Training Workshop: "The AI Shift: Practical Strategies for PR Leaders."
Watch the full session at this link.
Full transcript:
[SARAH EVANS]
Really quick what does a 30 day playbook look like without overwhelming you. One week one pick a topic something that your brand or client is trying to be known for. Draft an anchor article. If you have an SEO team, if you have a web dev technical team work with this, them on this. Again, it has to be long form. It has to be authoritative. Look up examples of pillar pages. That's a great first place to start, and think about any headlines that you'll be pitching, any ways that you're going to package and position this—all of those authority points that your brand has accumulated over the last 36 months, and put that into one long article written for machines, that a machine can reference. That means thinking about schema bullet points. Write it really clean, really structured. Publish that anchor article.
Pitch. Let's go with thought leadership. For this example: pitch thought leadership around that. When you land something, and you're going to get a URL associated with that thought leadership from your subject matter expert, make sure you're pointing to that anchor article. Then share it on social media. Have the subject matter expert do it. Let's call it...you're securing 5 to 3 one topic-aligned placements, and then run your answer. Share again. Run that prompt visibility. Find out in I say week 4. You could also do it by quarter. Um it depends if you're using a third-party plat- third-party platform or system or you have to do this manually, and if you're doing it manually you might only be looking at ten to 20 prompts. See if you impacted anything in there. Do not change your topic midstream. Finish one cadence and then go on to the next one.
Just a quick example of a client we have in rail infrastructure and sustainability. They actually were showing up for 0 prompts uh when they first started working with us. They had no anchor URL, very fragmented messaging. Within about 4 weeks we got that anchor article published. We got them 7 placements. We went after just 5 queries because it's a very finite space. They know every single one of their ICPs and those 5 queries which are prompts um actually impact five thousand different prompt variations. They're already almost to 50 percent securing those prompts, and they immediately saw a nineteen percent increase in anchor traffic to both their anchor article, even though it's written for machines, but in inbounds from ChatGPT.
One thing to think about is just start small. Figure out that topic you wanna own. Figure out what that is for... the brand. For this particular client it was rail infrastructure s-sustainability, and they had 3 things that they wanted to be known for: reliability ,um pricing and what other thing I'm blanking on right now. So we wanted to anchor that um why or what rail infrastructure sustainability requires in 20 to 25. Again I'll critique myself. Take out that 20 to 25. It was a 2200 word piece with data, FAQs. Um we supported it with earned media coverage and then we reran it because we have built and and have proprietary um prompt monitoring uh tools.
The headlines that worked really well for this brand: How Rail Tie Innovations Reduced Track Failures by 40 Percent. That was one of our thought leadership pieces that we pitched secured linked it back to that anchor article. It was a small move but we had fast proof.