Over the past two years I have become really disillusioned with advertising and marketing agencies. I’m in a weird, niche, very unique field, so it’s possibly my fault, but on all the accounts I can recall the provider of the marketing, advertising, and SEO services has also let me down professionally.

A friend who is a professional SEO operator took payment for services then never replied to a message after then. Colleagues in the wedding industry took payment for marketing services, then stopped responding when I questioned the low effectiveness of the ads. Countless stories of poor performance. Thousands of dollars wasted on stupid strategies.

So I’ve taken it upon myself to stop paying people and to learn to do it myself and I’ve spent the last year reading and studying SEO and GEO. SEO is optimisation for the search engines like Google, Bing, Kagi etc, and GEO is optimisation for the LLM AI products like ChatGPT and Claude.

I’ve been implementing these new skills and I’m now in the stage of seeing results. Slowly but surely, which is the only true way to win in SEO and GEO, over the long game. Anyone promising a short game win is doing dodgy work that will no doubt come unstuck eventually.

I’m actually happy enough to share my strategy because it’s not really my strategy, it’s just me doing what the search engines, LLMs, and industry says to do. Apparently it’s all out there in black and white ready for you and I to learn and read. We just mostly ignore it and then complain about the algorithm.

It’s a three pronged solution:

  1. Website speed and technicalities
  2. Content on your website
  3. Content on other websites aka backlinks.

Website speed

The easiest way to slice this is to enter your webpages in the PageSpeed Insights tool and to get your pages to 100/100/100/100 on desktop and mobile. It’s hard work.

I eventually gave up trying to get those scores on Squarespace and Wordpress websites and I learned static site generators. In particular, Astro.

This is just an incentives game. Slow websites cost the crawlers literal money because it takes longer to crawl each page. They don’t like you if you cost them money, plus users don’t like you either.

Content on your own website

It turns out that these algorithms don’t know what we don’t tell them. So we need to tell them what we’re about, what we’re good at, what we’re experts and authorities at. In lots of words and photos. A lot of the time. All the time. For a long time.

This basically means blogging but also the whole website should really tell your story. In words.

I’ve gone to great lengths to talk about marriage law and the essentials on my Hobart Marriage Office website, about Hobart wedding celebrancy on my Hobart wedding celebrant website, eloping to Tasmania on my Elope to Tassie blog, and about weddings on my Wedding Magazine blog.

Content on other people’s websites

This starts with social media and Reddit links and call outs, but goes on to people in the same areas of expertise linking to you, and I’ve gone a little farther. I’ve been finding websites that were abandoned by their former owners, and building out websites there like I have on celebrantforyou.net.au or The Tasmanians.

If you have a good and fast website, that explains your whole deal, and others verify that, you can win online.

Feel free to steal this whole strategy, or, hire me to do it for you or to coach you along it. I’m offering the coaching for $100 a month or $1000 a year (commit to a year because it takes that long to really win well), $450 a month or $4500 a year to do it for you if you are a small local business looking to win in one geography, or if you have a larger business we can talk about about something that would suit.

I’m still loving weddings and love doing them, but I looked at my schedule and I could afford to take on 5-10 clients for SEO and GEO, so get in touch if you’d like the help.