Content marketing for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Content marketing means regularly publishing a blog post or video that truly adds value to your target audience will make a significant contribution to achieving your online marketing goals. “Content-is-king” in SEO: your ranking on www.google.com and www.bing.com will significantly improve if you blog frequently. A website with many interesting articles on a specific topic is more easily found in search engines because you are seen as an authority. You can also link to your blogs on your website through social media posts, online advertisements, and newsletters. That’s the whole point: attracting customers to your website, as that’s where the conversions take place. This creates a funnel to your website.
Content marketing for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Besides search engines, more and more people are using generative artificial intelligence chatbots like chatgpt.com, Google Gemini, or claude.com. The trick is to get your brand cited in those chatbots when potential customers search, preferably with a link to your website. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the new name for “SEO” for chatbots. Fortunately, SEO and GEO are largely similar. It’s important that your website has a clear structure and builds authority, for example, through blogging. In addition, external factors are important for GEO, such as reviews on independent platforms, social media, etc. These signals are also important for SEO.
SEO and GEO are complementary
The old game was about ranking on page one. The new game is about being cited inside the AI-generated answer (AI Overviews). SEO measures success in clicks and rankings. GEO measures success in citation authority and zero-click visibility. Most Google searches in the EU now end without a single click. It is a structural shift in how people find information, and it changes everything about content marketing. They sound like competitors, but they are deeply complementary. Strong domain authority and a solid backlink profile boost your chances of being cited by AI models, and controlled tests show that GEO-specific tactics can increase AI visibility. Meanwhile, AI Overviews have reduced position-one organic click-through rates. If your entire strategy still depends on traditional search traffic, you are building on shrinking ground.
Structure your content with direct answers first, question-based headings, and FAQ schema markup. This maximizes extractability for both search engines and AI parsers. Invest in original data assets such as proprietary surveys, industry benchmarks, and case studies with specific numbers, because these function as citation magnets. Attach real expert credentials to every piece. Author bios with verifiable experience, LinkedIn profiles, and professional affiliations build E-E-A-T signals for SEO and trust signals for GEO simultaneously. Pursue tier-one media mentions strategically, because PR now functions as a way of teaching AI models who the authorities are. Brands unmentioned in authoritative sources simply vanish from AI-generated responses.
What is AI slop and why it fails both SEO and GEO
AI slop is low-effort, machine-generated content that lacks original data, unique perspective, or verifiable expertise. Google’s Information Gain scoring actively suppresses content that merely restates what already exists. If your article adds nothing new, it gets filtered out. AI models like Perplexity and ChatGPT work similarly. They favor precise, citable statements backed by data over generic filler. AI slop is not just ineffective. It creates a compounding disadvantage, because without citation history your brand loses authority over time as models learn to ignore you. Authenticity in content marketing means original research, first-party data, verifiable expert credentials, and structured authority signals like detailed author bios and third-party endorsements. It’s about quality over quantity. Use AI as a tool, not a replacement for the human expertise that makes content worth citing. Treat every piece of content as an AI-trainable asset. Make it interconnected, data-rich, and authored by real people with real credentials. The brands that do this will compound their visibility across both search engines and AI platforms. The brands that keep pumping out AI slop will wonder why they disappeared.
Writing a Blog
If you want to publish a blog post, I’d be happy to set it up for you. If you prefer to do it yourself, read the following tips.
- Consider carefully what your target audience will search for in search engines (keywords) and in chatbots (questions/conversations).
- Determine the right “tone.” Do you use polite language? Do you use easy-to-understand or academic language?
- Ensure a good introduction, paragraphs, and conclusion. Write an article of at least 350 words.
- Include links to external websites that are considered authorities in this area.
- Collect images, videos, and documents to add. If you can’t find images, you can also generate them with chatgpt.com or Nano Banana Pro (Google Gemini).
- Limit the use of chatbots for blog writing. Write as much as possible yourself.
Publish a blog
- Log in to your website. All WordPress websites have a backend. Only administrators can log in to the backend with their username and password. You can access this backend by typing the following after your domain name in the URL bar of your internet browser:
wp-admin/
or
/possibly-a-secret-code/?login/
If you have forgotten the secret URL, please contact us. - Click Post – New Posts (in EN) or Messages – New Post (in NL). A text editor is installed, so you can edit the text in the editor’s text box without having to worry about the HTML code. You can make text bold or italic, add links, images, etc.
- Scroll down and enter your meta tag.
- In the right-hand column, add your featured image.
- Click Update.
- That’s it!
SEO and GEO
Check your post for the following points.
- Does each page have a unique descriptive <Title> in the source code with the most important keywords as close to the beginning as possible?
- Does each page have a unique <meta description> in the source code with the most important keywords as close to the beginning as possible?
- Are the <Meta Keywords> empty, as is currently recommended?
- Are the most important keywords incorporated into the content, especially at the top of the page, etc., and is this not excessive? Are there sufficient descriptive links to the page from other pages on the same website?
- Have anchor texts, such as “click here…” or “read more…” been replaced with descriptive text containing important keywords?
- Are large blocks of text divided into paragraphs and subparagraphs?
- Do the paragraphs have headings containing the most important keywords?
- Have you spell-checked the text?
- The slugs (URLs) should be short but concise. Therefore, remove unnecessary, meaningless words. The URLs should contain the main keyword for that post.
Inserting Images
To insert an image or video, click Add media. If your image is already on your server, select it from the list and click the “Insert” button.
If the image isn’t yet on the server, we need to upload it first. But before we do that, we need to resize the image to the correct resolution. Feel free to ask me if you don’t know how. Then you can upload the image via Add media – Upload files.
Images are important for search engine optimization. Many people search for images on Google about the
The relevant topic. If your image appears and people click on it, they will be redirected to your website. Therefore, it’s important to give your images the correct file name.
File Names
Regarding the image file name, the following is important:
- Use only lowercase letters, no capital letters.
- Do not use spaces, but use the minus sign (-) between words.
- Do not use other characters in the file name, such as: _&@:#*/.
- The file name must include a keyword that corresponds to the page where the image appears.
- If the same image is used in multiple places, with different resolutions—for example, once large in the banner, once normal in the text, once small as a featured image, etc.—add a suffix to the file name to distinguish the images. This can also be an abbreviation or the number of pixels. This prevents us from using, for example, an overly large banner image when it could be a smaller image in terms of pixels.
ALT tags
When uploading, images must have a good alt tag and title. This text is important for screen readers, for example. A screen reader converts web pages into speech for blind people. Google considers it very important that the web is accessible to everyone, so it is a ranking factor. The alt tag should be a keyword for the page where the image is located.
Size and quality
To ensure the image is indexed correctly, it is recommended to submit an image sitemap in Google Search Console. Images should not be too large in file size. Photoshop allows you to compress images. We then reduce the quality, which slows down the loading speed. For WordPress, there are handy plugins available that automatically optimize images for you, such as the Imagify plugin. Make sure you keep a backup of the original, unedited, high-resolution, high-quality photos. You may need them later, for example, for print work.
Size and pixel dimensions
The images must have exactly the right pixel dimensions. It’s therefore a bad idea to upload an overly large image and then resize it with HTML code. The oversized image will still have to be downloaded, which will compromise speed. You can assume a standard website width of 1150px on desktops. Full-screen images, such as full-screen headers and background images, should be around 2500px wide so they still display sharply on high-definition screens. If SEO and therefore speed are important, consider not displaying a full-screen image.
Customizing the Menu
Customizing the menu in WordPress is done via the Dashboard – Appearance – Menus. Some websites list all blogs in the menu, while others only list the categories, so adding a menu item when publishing a new blog post isn’t necessary.
Templates per Blog Category
If you plan to blog extensively, it’s recommended to consider a category structure for each of your areas of expertise beforehand. If you only blog occasionally, a single category, “Blog” or “News,” is sufficient. The general layout of all web pages, as well as the style (color, size, alignment of all text, headings, links, and lists), are centrally controlled in the template. This allows a website to have a standard layout and style applied to all pages and text within a specific blog category. So, if you want to change something there, for example, a text in the footer, you can change it all at once instead of having to edit all the pages individually. The advantages of this are, of course, a huge time saver, a clean source code, and a consistent style.
