SEO + AI Search Strategy
The businesses that are easiest to discover are usually the easiest to understand.
Search has changed.
People still Google. But they also ask ChatGPT, encounter AI-generated answers, search on social platforms + expect useful answers without necessarily clicking through ten blue links first.
Naturally, the marketing industry has responded by inventing approximately seventeen new acronyms.
We take a less dramatic approach.
Because whether somebody finds you through Google, an AI-powered answer or somewhere else entirely, the question underneath it is remarkably similar:
Can search systems understand what you do, who you help + what you know enough about to be worth surfacing?
Our SEO + AI Search Strategy works out what your business needs to become easier to find, understand + trust across traditional and AI-led search.
SEO + AI Search Strategy · Projects from £1,495
Making good businesses easier to find
More visibility won’t fix what people — or search systems — can’t understand.
You can optimise every title tag.
Publish another twelve blogs.
Add keywords to every page.
And still struggle to become meaningfully discoverable.
Because search visibility is connected to far more than keywords.
Your positioning. Website architecture. Language. Expertise. Content. The relationships between your pages. The evidence supporting what you say. The wider footprint around your business.
If those things are disconnected, optimisation can only do so much.
That’s why we don’t just look at rankings.
We look at the search ecosystem around the business.
There’s rather more to search strategy than finding some keywords.
Here’s what we actually work out.
Depending on your business, audience + existing digital presence, your SEO + AI Search Strategy can include:
Search + discoverability audit
We look at your website, current search presence, content, indexing + wider digital footprint.
What’s already working? What’s being missed? And where is the opportunity actually sitting?
Search intent + opportunity
What are the right people actually searching for?
We research commercial searches, service-led queries, questions, problems + informational topics connected to your expertise.
Not just the phrase with the biggest number next to it.
Competitor + search landscape
Who currently occupies the territory you want to be known for?
We look at what search engines appear to reward, where competitors are strong + where there are realistic opportunities for your business to build greater relevance + authority.
Because “they rank for it” is interesting. “Should we?” is the better question.
Topic, entity + authority strategy
Keywords matter.
But search systems are also building a wider picture of your business, people, expertise, services, locations + the subjects you’re genuinely qualified to talk about.
We work out what needs to be connected more clearly so that picture makes sense.
Less keyword spreadsheet. More: what should the internet understand you know about?
Website + information architecture
We look at how your services, cornerstone pages, supporting content + internal links relate to one another.
Can somebody understand the business?
Can search systems understand how the pages connect?
Can important expertise actually be found?
A collection of individually optimised pages does not automatically make an understandable website.
Content + AI search readiness
We identify where genuinely useful content could answer real questions, demonstrate expertise + give traditional and AI-led search systems better material to understand, retrieve + potentially reference.
Not content because SEO says we need a blog.
Content because there is something useful worth finding.
Prioritised search roadmap
You leave knowing:
what needs attention, what opportunities are worth pursuing, what should change + what should happen first.
Not 83 recommendations with exactly the same apparent level of urgency.
Because “do all of this” isn’t much of a strategy.
SEO + AI Search Strategy · Projects from £1,495
Your final investment depends on the size + complexity of your website, competitive search landscape, number of services or audiences, existing content + depth of research required.
You’ll receive a clear scope, deliverables + investment before we begin.
And no, the answer isn’t automatically “publish more”.
Seventeen content clusters.
Four blogs a week.
Six platforms.
A 94-point optimisation checklist every time somebody publishes a page.
No, thank you.
Your search strategy needs to be ambitious enough to build meaningful visibility + realistic enough for an actual human to implement.
Because your brain shouldn’t have to be the marketing system.
And what exactly is “AI Search”?
The marketing industry has managed to give this approximately seventeen names.
AEO. GEO. LLMO. AI Search Optimisation.
There are differences between them.
There is also a lot of overlap.
We use AI Search as the umbrella term because it describes the bit most businesses actually care about:
Can your business be found, understood + surfaced when somebody asks an AI-powered search or answer engine something you genuinely know about?
AEO, or Answer Engine Optimisation, is concerned with helping answer engines find + use information when answering questions.
GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation, focuses more specifically on how businesses, expertise + content may be understood + referenced within generative AI responses.
LLMO is another term you may encounter.
You do not need to memorise any of them.
Because there is no secret GEO button that makes ChatGPT suddenly recommend your business.
AI systems still need something useful to work with.
Clear positioning.
Specific expertise.
Original content worth retrieving.
A website that makes sense.
Evidence supporting what you say.
Consistent information about who you are + what you do.
Authority that exists somewhere other than your own About page.
The technology is changing.
Being worth finding is still the point.
The page that isn’t ranking isn’t always the actual problem.
SEO is often treated as something that happens after everything else.
Someone writes the copy.
Someone designs the website.
Then somebody arrives at the end with a keyword spreadsheet.
We work differently.
Search sits inside the wider business, so we look at it through The Digital Hive Framework™.
Sometimes the biggest search opportunity is in your content.
Sometimes it’s the website architecture.
Sometimes the positioning is too broad.
Sometimes the services are structured in a way that makes perfect sense internally + very little sense to anybody else.
Sometimes you have years of expertise offline that the internet has been given approximately three paragraphs to work with.
The symptom tells us where you noticed the problem.
It doesn’t necessarily tell us where the problem began.
That’s why we don’t automatically prescribe SEO because you arrived saying “we need SEO.”
The recommendation follows the diagnosis.
Not the other way around.
EXPLORE THE DIGITAL HIVE FRAMEWORK™ →
The expertise was there. Search just needed a better way to understand it.
Anne came to us with years of experience, an established body of work + genuine expertise.
But being brilliant at something and being findable for it are, annoyingly, two different things.
“Before working with Natty, SEO felt like something I knew I needed to think about, but I didn’t really understand how all the pieces connected. I had years of experience and expertise, but my website wasn’t necessarily making that clear to the people searching for what I offer.
Natty helped me look at search much more strategically. It wasn’t just about adding keywords to pages. She looked at how my services were structured, what my audience was actually searching for, the language I was using and how my expertise could be better understood across my website.
What I really valued was that she made something that can feel incredibly technical feel clear and manageable. I now understand much more clearly what I want to be found for, where the opportunities are and what needs to happen next.”
Anne Binning — Vibrational Fitness Training
Marketing Strategy + Consulting · Website Design, Strategy + Copywriting · Brand Strategy, Messaging, Identity + Design · SEO + AI Search
SEE MORE OF OUR WORK →
SEO + AI Search led by Natty Bernasconi.
The search strategy bit? That’s me.
I lead the SEO + AI Search thinking at The Digital Hive Studio, connecting search, website structure, content + positioning rather than treating SEO as something that happens in isolation.
Because the platforms keep changing.
The fundamentals of being worth finding really don’t.
Founder & Marketing Strategist of The Year — UK 2026
Creator of The Digital Hive Framework™.
Strategy first.
Implementation if you need it.
Some businesses need the thinking.
Others would quite like somebody to actually do all the things the strategy has identified.
We can support implementation across:
Website Copywriting
Search-informed website copy that still sounds unmistakably like your business.
Website Strategy + Design
Where architecture, UX or the wider website needs more substantial work.
Content Strategy
Building the useful body of content around the expertise + search territory you want to become known for.
SEO + Search Implementation
Page optimisation, metadata, internal linking, content improvements + agreed technical search actions.
Or you can take the finished strategy to your own team.
The strategy is designed to stand on its own.
Use it yourself. Hand it to your team. Or ask us to help put it into practice.
No mysterious dependency where the strategy only becomes useful if you keep paying the people who wrote it.
The things you may still be wondering.
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Projects start from £1,295.
That includes your core Email Marketing Strategy, subscriber journey, platform + setup review, sign-up and opt-in direction, reusable branded email template, five-email Welcome + Nurture Sequence, measurement framework + strategy walkthrough.
Practical implementation, additional sequences, migrations + more complex requirements are scoped separately.
You’ll know exactly what’s included + what it costs before booking.
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The core project gives you the strategic + creative foundations your email marketing system needs.
If you'd also like us to implement those foundations inside your email platform, practical setup can include forms, basic segmentation, your branded email template + Welcome and Nurture automation.
We’ll agree the exact implementation scope before the project begins.
Already have somebody who can implement it?
Also fine. We’re perfectly happy giving them something sensible to build.
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We currently work with Mailchimp, Flodesk + Kit.
Using something else?
Tell us when you enquire. We’ll let you know whether we can support it or whether specialist technical help would make more sense.
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Yes.
But first, we’ll work out what role it actually needs to play in your subscriber journey.
Because “apparently I need a lead magnet” isn’t much of a strategy.
Copywriting, design or development can then be added where required.
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We use what’s working.
If something needs improving, we address it.
If you only need one missing piece, we’ll tell you that too.
You do not need to buy a bigger project simply because we happen to sell one.
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No.
The question isn't simply how many people are on the list. It's who is on it, why they joined, what the relationship needs to do + whether email has a useful role in your customer journey.
For some businesses, a smaller list of the right people is considerably more useful than a large one accumulated through three years of freebies + good intentions.
We’ll look at the role email can realistically play in your business rather than prescribing list growth for the sake of a bigger number.
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Yes.
Our Ongoing Email Marketing service covers regular email planning, copywriting, build, scheduling + optimisation from £750/month, with a three-month minimum.
You don’t need to commit to ongoing support when you book Email Marketing Strategy + Setup.
Build the foundations first.
Then decide what you actually want help with.
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Yes, where the foundations are already strong enough for that sequence to have somewhere sensible to sit.
Standalone projects can include Welcome + Nurture, Lead Magnet Nurture, Sales + Launch, Evergreen Sales, Re-engagement + Post-purchase or Client Journey sequences.
Projects start from £750, with more complex sequences scoped according to length, research, audience + offer.
If the bigger email journey needs sorting first?
We’ll tell you before we start writing emails into the void.
Interest doesn’t always become a decision overnight.
Give it somewhere useful to go in the meantime.
Someone can discover your business today + become a client months from now.
You can’t control when they’ll be ready.
But you can make sure the relationship doesn’t disappear in between.
A reason to subscribe.
A proper welcome.
Emails worth reading.
Relevant offers.
Clear next steps.
And a system connecting all of it.
So when “not yet” eventually becomes “now”, they don’t have to rediscover you from scratch.
Email Marketing Strategy + Setup · Projects from £1,295
Strategy · Subscriber journey · Core email foundations · Five-email Welcome + Nurture Sequence
Tell us what’s happening with your emails.
A thriving list. A neglected list. Three automations nobody remembers building. Or a blank Mailchimp account looking expectantly at you.
Give us the slightly untidy version. We’ll work out what the system actually needs.
No need to tidy the email account before we look at it. We’d rather see what’s actually going on.