Reviving My Ghost Town Website: The SEO Strategies That Brought It Back to Life

I can’t believe I let my website become a ghost town. It was like a blinking light in the dark, begging for attention but getting none.

I had poured my heart into creating content, but it felt like shouting into a void. I remember staring at my screen, wondering why no one was visiting.

I thought I had it all figured out, but the truth hit me hard: I was missing the best SEO strategies for 2025. I felt like I was on a sinking ship, and the lifeboats were nowhere in sight.

I realized I needed to change my approach. I dove deep into research, learning about keywords, backlinks, and user experience.

It was a game-changer. As I started implementing these strategies, I felt a sense of empowerment. Slowly but surely, my website began to glow instead of blink, and I was in control of its transformation.

The lesson here is that if you want to stand out online, you need to stay ahead of the game. Just like I learned, the correct SEO strategies can turn your website from a dark corner into a shining beacon.

So, if you’re tired of your site being invisible and you’re interested in learning more about SEO strategies, mention ‘SEO strategies‘ below. This will help us better understand your needs and get you the help you need to light up your online presence!

The Changing Landscape of SEO

SEO is changing fast, and we’re looking at the dawn of a new era. If you think that just writing great content and building the same old crappy backlinks is going to get you the results that it used to, you’re going to be in for a sad time over the next 12 months. But if you’re ready to embrace the change, the future of SEO is full of exciting possibilities.

There are two big themes that you’re going to have to build your SEO strategy around.

In the past, SEO was all about Google. People searched on Google, and that was it. So, when building an SEO strategy, all you had to think about was Google.

For the first time, though, we see real, genuine search competition from tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. This means your SEO strategy needs to adapt now. You need your business products and services to be found wherever somebody searches. Increasingly, that’s in AI tools, including Google’s own AI overviews. The time to adapt is now, not later.

The Need for Two SEO Strategies

Previously, you had just one SEO strategy. Now, increasingly, for our clients, we’re actually building two SEO strategies: one for the top of the funnel and one for their bottom-of-funnel traffic.

If there’s one SEO strategy that will dominate the next few years, it’s Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). This is the most significant shift in search I’ve seen since I ran my first Google ad campaign in about 2006.

Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is a new term that describes the techniques required to get your business featured and is recommended by new generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI overviews. In simpler terms, it’s about optimizing your content to match the answers these AI tools provide, thereby increasing your chances of being featured in their results.

For example, if I go to Google and search for ‘generative engine optimization services,’ I can see that we’ve got regular web results here, but the AI overview pushes all of these down. The regular web results are the typical search results you see on Google, while the AI overview is a feature that provides a brief answer to your query. The techniques required to get featured in these two types of results are subtly different.

The Importance of Ranking in Web Search

However, GEO isn’t just about Google’s AI overviews; it also includes tools like ChatGPT. For example, if you ask, “What company can help me run generative engines?” ChatGPT is happy to recommend specific agencies.

With over a billion people using Google’s AI overviews by the end of 2024, learning and implementing GEO now could give you a real first-mover advantage against your competitors.

So, how do you do GEO? Most of these tools use background web searches to compile their results. You need to make sure that you’re ranking in that web search. This is most important on Google’s AI overviews because Google’s AI overviews are using the regular search results, and you need to be in those search results to get featured in the AI overview.

For example, here’s the website of one of the companies that we own. We’ve got a featured snippet at the top of Google, and that visibility makes it eligible for the AI overviews.

The Power of Specific Content

AI overviews and other generative searches encourage users to use much longer-tail and more specific searches. This means they’re asking very specific questions, and if you’re publishing more specific content that directly answers these questions, you have a good chance of ranking for those searches and informing the AI tools when they’re doing their own sub-searches about that topic.

Of course, just because you’re ranking well in regular searches doesn’t mean that you will be ranking in generative engines. You need to do specific things, but in general, if you’re ranking well, you’ve got a better chance of showing up in these AI results.

So how do you get ranking in regular search? You do SEO. This means writing great content, building links, making your website super usable, and being featured all over the Internet.

Requesting a Free Website Review

By the way, if you want one of our teams to show you precisely what you need to do to get a ranking in regular search and AI overviews, you can always request a free website and marketing review from Exposure Ninja. Just go to exposureninja.com/review. We’ll record a video showing you exactly how to do this and other stuff specific to your website. Not everyone is eligible for this, so you need to apply. You can go to exposureninja.com/review.

Optimizing for Generative Engines

One of the main ways to optimize for generative engines is to ensure that the content you’re publishing matches the answers these AI tools provide.

For example, here, we can see the structure of this answer: it basically answers the question very simply and then mentions some of the things that you need to consider in order to do this.

If you’re trying to rank in an AI overview for this search type, you want to mirror that. You want to give a concise answer at the start of your content, and then you want to go into more detail about these topics. This way, when Google’s looking for websites to corroborate the information in the AI overviews, it goes, “Oh yeah, cool, this exactly matches. Happy days!”

The Importance of Experience

We’re also seeing these AI tools prefer websites that show experience—firsthand experience of the topics they’re talking about.

Now, there’s actually a second aspect to being recommended by these AI tools. Let’s have a look at a search on Perplexity, another AI search tool that is actually really powerful.

I just searched for “What are the best affordable skincare brands? ” Perplexity has given me many answers. I’m very happy to see Exposure Ninja client The Ordinary is ranked number one.

Perplexity actually uses a multi-step underlying search and then combines all the answers for different searches into one set of results. If we click on these expandable accordions, we can see the underlying searches that it has run and the websites that it has visited to compile this answer.

This will form the bulk of most brands’ ongoing SEO work over the coming years. It will be crucial to run searches, find out which websites rank for these types of searches, and ensure that your brand, products, or services are prominently featured on those websites.

Consistency and Coherence in Messaging

The messages that content is communicating about your brand must be consistent and coherent and match your positioning. This is going to be the game with generative AI. You can use this digital PR and content marketing type to get your business featured everywhere. In that case, that will increase the chances that these AI tools will recommend your business, even if they’re not sourcing that recommendation from your website.

I’m back on Google now. I’ve run a search for “best business bank for medium-sized businesses,” and this is an incredibly profitable keyword to rank for. But look at the websites being featured. None of these are banking websites; they are all third-party sites.

If I were a bank, I would visit each of these websites and ensure that my business was featured. When they featured us, I would ensure that they discussed the things that we wanted them to discuss.

As a side note, Google struggles to identify what’s different about these banks. Look at this one: the benefit of Metro is that there’s no monthly fee if your balance stays above $6,000. Wow, sign me up, please!

The Future of SEO: Branding and Positioning

We will start seeing branding and positioning become more important in SEO because we need more coherent messages about the product, price, and competitive moat.

Any SEO strategy over the next 12 months that doesn’t include Generative Engine Optimization is deficient. We’ve been talking about AI overviews for over a year now, and it’s no longer the future of search; this is the present of search.

One of the side effects of all this innovation is that your organic traffic might drop even if you’re doing a fantastic SEO job.

Here’s why: when we were building an SEO strategy previously, we considered the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel and how we could drive traffic to our website at each stage.

For example, top-of-funnel traffic would be people asking questions; maybe they’ve got a problem they don’t yet know your business, product, or service can solve.

Conclusion: Embrace the Change

In conclusion, if you want your website to shine and not just blink in the dark, you need to embrace the changes in SEO.

The landscape is shifting, and the strategies that worked yesterday may not work tomorrow.

By focusing on Generative Engine Optimization and adapting your approach to the new AI-driven search environment, you can ensure that your website stands out and attracts the traffic it deserves.

So, are you ready to transform your website from a ghost town to a bustling hub of activity? If you’d like to learn more about SEO strategies, mention ‘SEO strategies‘ below, and let’s start lighting up your online presence!

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