The AI bots crawling your website take a virtual tour of every nook and cranny of your house. They see that cabinet stuffed with to-go containers with no matching lids, and they’re taking notes. Your mess is not a secret, judgement is happening.
First, don’t panic. Stick to website fundamentals.
There is a lot of buzz about Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and new tricks needed to make your site visible to AI platforms. It sounds intimidating, but GEO starts with the fundamentals of SEO. Following traditional SEO best practices remains a critical activity that’s within your control.
Yes, the landscape is changing. Non-profits should pay attention as commercial and tech enterprises innovate around AI-based discovery and citation. But until new fundamentals emerge, stick with the unglamorous work of keeping your website organized, clear and fast.
Second, make time for deep cleaning
If your site is messy, AI can lose the plot (who you are, what you do). Just like your home, make time for frequent tidying and occasional deep cleans.
We recently performed a technical audit of a client’s site alignment with GEO-SEO best practices. While we found some new opportunities for boosting visibility, we had to start by rolling up our sleeves to clean up things that inevitably accumulate over time, such as:
- Removing old, orphaned pages that were cluttering the page-sitemap.
- Aligning navigation and key pages to clearly and accurately describe the organization.
- Addressing broken links and Page Not Found errors that disrupt the user (and bot) experience.
- Correcting heading hierarchies that did not present the content in a properly formatted outline
Once the house is clean and tidy, you can think about making improvements. We’ll talk about some enhancements we made for this client in a subsequent post.
Cleaning is Tedious. Cleaning Parties are Fun.
At openbox9, we specialize in building and optimizing custom WordPress themes, helping mission-driven organizations stay lean, clean, and highly visible. We have the cleaning supplies, organization skills, and the perfect playlist to get everyone in the cleanup mood.
Contact openbox9 today to schedule your GEO-SEO audit – including a technical scan, findings report and recommended steps for improvement.
