Building a Unified SEO + GEO Strategy for the AI Search Era
Challenge #1: Search Visibility Is Splintering Across Platforms
Yes, Google still matters and it still drives the largest share of search traffic, but it's no longer the only place that matters. Your favourite LLM pulls from several different sources, weighs signals differently, and cites brands in different ways. If your content is only optimized for Google, you're going to be absent from a meaningful share of the conversations your customers are having.
Challenge #2: Most Brands Have No Way to Measure AI Visibility
With AI still being relatively new as a technology, most brands have no answer to the basic questions: Does AI even mention us? What does it say? How often do competitors get cited instead? Which sources are LLMs pulling from in our category? Without that baseline, content investment becomes a guess, and there's no way to tell whether the work is paying off.
Challenge #3: SEO and GEO Are Often Treated as Separate Workstreams
A common pattern we see quite often is agencies bolting on "AI visibility" as a separate offering, with a different team, different reporting, and recommendations that sometimes conflict with the SEO work already underway. The result is wasted effort and content that performs in one channel at the cost of the other.
Both SEO and GEO operate as one practice at Northern. The same keyword and intent research that informs traditional content also shapes what we write for AI citation. The same technical improvements that help Google crawl a site help LLMs understand it. Reporting pulls both views together so clients can see and understand where they stand for both Google rankings and on AI share of voice in one place.
Semrush is Northern's platform of choice for this work. It combines the largest U.S. keyword database with the largest ChatGPT prompt database, alongside market-leading SEO and backlink data. Northern's senior practitioners then turn those insights into action: not just into dashboards, but content strategy, technical recommendations, and proactive monitoring that protects organic performance and grows AI share of voice.
The Shift: From SEO to SEO + GEO
Most brands optimize for SEO. Few are prepared for GEO. Northern builds for all three.
For Villas of Distinction, we used Semrush's keyword research and content gap analysis to find under-served topics in the competitive luxury travel space. That work translated into a prioritized content roadmap tied to specific organic growth targets, with briefs that aligned search intent to the editorial voice the brand was already known for.
A few months in, our ongoing backlink monitoring caught something else: a sudden spike of toxic referring domains pointing at the site, the early signs of a backlink spam attack. We pulled the full referring domain profile, identified the toxic links, built a disavow file to protect the site's authority signals, and put ongoing monitoring in place to catch the next one early.
The Saskatchewan Workers' Compensation Board runs two public-facing domains, and they were showing up very differently in AI. Northern ran an AI visibility analysis across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini to understand share of voice, sentiment, and which sources were being cited.
The picture was uneven. wcbsask.com carried 84% share of voice but only 24% positive sentiment. worksafesask.ca was the inverse: 61% positive sentiment, but only 12% share of voice. AI was finding the organization, but not consistently reflecting it the way WCB wanted to be understood.
From there we recommended a content and brand approach focused on plainer language, tighter alignment between the two domains, and more human-impact storytelling, all aimed at shifting how AI characterizes the organization over time.
Northern's SEO + GEO approach, powered by Semrush, gives clients:
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