An underused yet powerful tactic, that I’ve helped clients with, is doing on-page SEO for off-page SEO.
This means including your main keywords on third-party sites like review platforms, industry directories, local citations and press releases. This improves performance on the sites directly AND for organic search results.
What makes this even more valuable today is the use of LLMs in ChatGPT & Perplexity, for example. These are emerging as drivers behind top sources of quality traffic (yet still account for just a tiny percentage versus Google search).
These models are influenced by patterns that appear throughout the web. Fortunately, many of these sources are within your control.
This is where digital PR and SEO meet. When branding, PR, content and SEO work together, they can craft brief, well-written, keyword-rich snippets that improve visibility on both search engines & LLMs.
The main takeaway is to have a phrase with keywords describing your brand, used exactly, across external sources. Here are some implications:
➡️ Context that surrounds links has always mattered, but it’s not mostly about backlinks & anchor text now. Whole passages almost anywhere matter.
➡️ Unlinked brand mentions now clearly have impact.
➡️ There’s no SEO or LLM penalty for duplication. Reuse of exact phrasing is beneficial. You can still customize remaining copy on key sites.
➡️ Branded queries are considered beyond SEO. However, we shaped user experiences by directing traffic to ideal landing pages while supporting ORM. This now applies to LLMs by affecting where they pull data.
➡️ Mapping keywords to pages still matters, but it’s now just as important to consider where AI goes to describe your business. This includes previously non-SEO’d, non-external content like your About page.
SEO, rapidly expanding to cover acronyms like GEO, AEO & LLMO (for better or worse) has become more than just search. This knowledge base allows your company to thrive where users seek answers in structured fashion.
Many SEO concepts will apply yet evolve in more open-ended ways!