SEO content is content built to be found: pages designed to rank in search engines like Google and get cited by AI systems like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Earning that visibility means satisfying three audiences at once:
- Users who want answers
- Search engines that decide what to rank
- AI systems that decide what to cite
Each one judges your content a little differently. This guide covers how to create SEO content that holds up across all three.
What is SEO content?
SEO content can be a product page, a blog post, a video, or an image. What makes it SEO content is that it’s optimized to rank in search engines like Google and get cited by AI systems like ChatGPT.
Unlike most content, it’s designed to be found the moment someone searches for what you offer.
For example, when you search “what are the best walking shoes for plantar fasciitis,” running brand RunRepeat’s guide is cited five times in the AI Overview and ranks first in the organic results.
That wasn’t luck. The page was built to rank.
Types of SEO content
SEO content isn’t one format. The right one depends on what the searcher wants to do at that moment: learn something, compare options, or take action. Match the format to that intent and the page has a far better chance of ranking and getting cited.
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Content type |
What it’s for |
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Blog posts and guides |
Answering a question or teaching something |
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Product and service pages |
Helping someone evaluate what you sell |
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Comparison pages |
Helping people choose between options |
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Landing pages |
Getting someone to take one specific action |
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Pillar pages and topic clusters |
Covering a whole subject, with supporting pages linked to it |
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Images and infographics |
Ranking in image search and earning citations when other sites embed them |
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Video |
Demonstrating something, and ranking on YouTube as well as in Google |
Not sure which fits? Start from the search intent behind your keyword (Step 1 covers how to read it). The SERP will usually show you the format Google already rewards for that query.
Why SEO content keeps earning rankings and AI citations
SEO content keeps working long after you publish it. A page that ranks for a relevant term keeps pulling in organic traffic for months or years.
The tradeoff is time. Other formats are faster out of the gate: a social post spreads immediately, an ad drives traffic within hours. SEO content builds more slowly, but it lasts far longer.
As of this writing, that RunRepeat guide draws about 15,000 monthly visitors in the U.S., all from organic search. It ranks for about 1,600 keyword variations, almost all commercial.
Alongside rankings, Google generates AI answers for many queries. In the U.S., the RunRepeat guide is mentioned or cited in Google AI Overviews across 629 prompts.
How to create SEO content
Here are five steps to write SEO content:
- Target the right keyword and understand search intent
- Add original information
- Prove your credibility with E-E-A-T
- Make your content extractable
- Get the on-page mechanics right
1. Target the right keyword and understand search intent
Pick topics that are in demand and relevant to your business.
Demand means people are searching for it. Relevance means the visibility is worth having: it reaches people likely to buy or sign up.
There are two questions to answer before you write: Is there demand tied to my business? And what do people want when they search?
A keyword research tool shows you how many people search for a query each month and how hard it’ll be to rank.
Enter your keyword into Semrush’s Keyword Overview. For “best walking shoes for plantar fasciitis,” it returns 3,600 US searches a month and a keyword difficulty of 21%. Enough people are looking, and ranking is realistic.
Our keyword research guide walks through the full process. For now, start with a topic that has meaningful demand and a clear connection to what you offer.
Is your topic bigger than one page? If it is, cramming everything onto a single page makes each part thin. The fix is a topic cluster: one main page, several supporting pages, all linked so readers and search engines can move between them.
Whether someone types a keyword into a search engine or a prompt into an AI assistant, the intent underneath is the same.
How to read search intent
Your best tool for analyzing intent is Google.com.
Type your keyword, say “best walking shoes for plantar fasciitis,” and Google’s autosuggest shows you what else people look for: variations by gender, foot type, and brand.
Ads at the top mean the term is commercially valuable enough for brands to pay for it, a sign the searcher is close to buying.
The AI Overview lists features to look for and specific shoe recommendations, so searchers want both education and product options.
A full SERP analysis tells you more about format, depth, and who you’re up against. Google puts them there because they best match the search intent. For this search, RunRepeat’s guide is cited in the AI Overview and ranks first in the organic results.
Put it together, and the SERP (search engine results page) tells you that a good answer needs well-researched shoe options, sorted by different needs, backed by credible information.
2. Add original information
Original information is what’s on your page that isn’t on the other pages. This could be your own data, a test you ran, or what you discovered by doing it yourself.
When someone’s weighing a decision, they usually look at more than one piece of content on the topic. Some of what you cover will repeat what they’ve found elsewhere, and that’s useful. When several sources say the same thing, it confirms what someone was starting to believe. That’s part of how people get comfortable acting.
But repetition alone doesn’t give anyone a reason to choose your content over anything else they looked at. Originality does that.
It also builds trust. Telling them something they haven’t heard suggests you know the subject beyond what’s already out there.
AI systems can already write the answer everyone else gives. Repeating it doesn’t give them a reason to reference you specifically.
Google may even score this directly. It holds a patent, called information gain, that describes scoring a page by how much it adds to what the reader has already seen. Google hasn’t confirmed whether it uses it. Either way, a page that copies the ones above it tends to be harder to rank.
Decide what you’re adding before you draft. A few places to look:
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What you can add |
Examples |
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Original data |
A survey you ran, numbers from your own accounts, results from a test |
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First-hand experience |
Screenshots of your own results, what broke when you tried it, before and after |
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Expert input |
An interview you ran, a quote you sourced, commentary from your team |
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A framework |
A scoring system, a checklist, a methodology someone else could repeat |
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Custom visuals and tools |
A diagram you made, annotated screenshots, a calculator, a template |
3. Prove your credibility with E-E-A-T
Users, search engines, and AI systems all have to decide whether to believe you. None of them can check everything you claim, so they look for signals that are hard to fake.
How much proof your reader needs depends on what they stand to lose. A recipe that fails might cost them an afternoon and groceries. Tax advice that fails could cost thousands.
Google has to make the same call at scale on pages it can’t verify. The guidelines for that are called E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Quality raters use them to assess the content, the person who made it, and the site it’s published on. Trust carries the most weight, and it matters most on money and health topics, where a bad answer can do real harm.
AI systems make more of that decision themselves. A search results page lists links and lets the user choose which to open. An AI answer gives one response and cites the sources behind it, so the system has already decided which sources were worth using. That’s why the AI often looks for the same claim across sources with no connection to you.
The proof you put on a page falls into three groups. What separates them is how hard each one is to fake.
You can claim something. Anyone can type “we’re the best,” so it counts for almost nothing.
You can show it. A photo, a screenshot, footage of you doing the work. That costs something to produce, so it has more weight.
Or someone else can confirm it: a review you didn’t write, a certification you had to pass, a client who’ll go on record. You can’t produce those yourself. That’s why they’re worth the most.
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Your page |
Claim |
Show |
Confirm |
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Product |
“The best,” a spec list |
Real-use photos, test footage |
Verified reviews, a warranty, and third-party certification |
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Service |
“Trusted by thousands” |
Team bios, client logos, and a clip of the actual work |
A client who’ll go on record with real numbers, a Clutch or G2 profile |
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Guide or blog post |
Stated as fact, nothing behind it |
Author credentials, linked sources, and your published method |
Unconnected sources saying the same thing, other sites citing you |
RunRepeat does most of this at once. They publish the exact method they use to test shoes, down to wearing every pair in the same size. Their reviewers have real experience and specialties. And they criticize shoes they earn commissions on.
4. Make your content extractable
Search engines and AI systems interpret your content using natural language processing (NLP).
They split the text into words and sentences (tokenization). They pick out the words that name real things like people, products, and places (entity recognition). And they work out what a passage means from context rather than from the exact words someone typed (semantic analysis).
Google announced in 2020 that it ranks individual passages, not just whole pages. AI systems retrieve passages too.
So your page isn’t only competing as a page. Each section has to make sense on its own. A comprehensive guide gives you more sections that can surface on their own, as long as each one stands up by itself.
To see this in action, we pulled this RunRepeat guide in Semrush. No single search sends it more than about 4% of its traffic. The rest is spread across hundreds of variations, many of them ranking first. That’s what a comprehensive, well-structured page does. It doesn’t win one search, it wins a thousand small ones, because each section can surface on its own.
Three choices do most of that work: where you put the answer, how you label your sections, and whether you name things specifically.
Put the most important information first
Work out the most important thing on the page, then lead with it. On a blog post, that’s usually the answer to the question in the title. On a product page, it might be what the product is and what it costs. On a landing page, the benefit you’re offering.
In 2006, the Nielsen Norman Group tracked the eyes of 232 people reading web pages. They found the F-pattern: readers scan across the top, drop down, scan a shorter line, then trail off down the left edge.
Their later research explained why. The F-pattern is what people do when a page gives them no clue where the useful part is. Lead with what matters, and they’ll likely read more of it.
Search engines and AI systems also tend to pull from the first part of a page. If your main point sits halfway down, it may not get extracted at all.
Label sections for exactly what they answer
Search engines and AI systems match your heading against what someone searched. The closer your heading is to the question being asked, the easier that match is.
Your reader gets the same benefit. A specific heading tells them whether to keep reading.
Name things specifically
Say the actual product, service, or brand instead of “this feature” or “the company.” Entity recognition depends on working out what your words refer to. A vague reference gives it nothing to work with.
Specific writing is also easier for a person to picture and remember.
5. Get the on-page mechanics right
On-page elements are attributes on your page that search engines and AI systems read to work out what the page covers. People read them too, usually in the search results.
Start with your primary keyword. Best practice is to include it in:
Be careful not to go further than that, because Google treats keyword stuffing as spam. Use secondary keywords in your subheadings and body copy where they fit naturally. Our SEO writing guide covers how to work them in without the copy becoming stiff.
Your title tag and meta description are what someone sees in the search results, so be clear about what the page covers.
Alt text is a description of an image. Screen readers read it aloud, and search engines use it to work out what the picture shows. Give every image a descriptive filename and alt text.
Lastly, there’s schema markup. It’s code that tells search engines what type of content this is, like a recipe, a product, or an FAQ. It makes you eligible for rich results, the listings with extra detail attached. Most platforms have a plugin. Otherwise, Google’s documentation covers it, or ask a developer.
Link to your related pages using descriptive anchor text. Internal links help readers go deeper and help search engines understand how your pages relate.
You don’t have to check any of this by hand. Semrush’s On Page SEO Checker does it page by page, and our guide to content optimization covers what to do with what it finds.
Set up a campaign for your domain, open Optimization Ideas, and click into a page.
Under Content, it tells you whether your target keywords are in the title, H1, and meta tags, and which ones your body copy is missing. It checks the reverse too: whether you’ve stuffed them anywhere. And it confirms your title and description match what Google displays.
How to measure SEO content performance
Measuring SEO content now means tracking search and AI visibility together. That gives you a complete view of your organic presence.
Start with the free tools
Whatever you track, tie it back to what the page is forr: the traffic, sign-ups, or revenue it drives. Visibility only counts if it moves those.
Google Search Console (GSC) and Bing Webmaster Tools cover the two largest search engines. They show clicks, impressions, and average position for any page you’ve published. And both are rolling out reports for AI visibility on top of that.
Google announced GSC’s Generative AI performance report in June 2026. It shows impressions for AI Overviews and AI Mode, broken down by URL. Discover’s generative results get their own report. It’s in beta and rolling out to a subset of sites, so it may not be in your account yet.
There’s no click data in it, so read it next to your regular search results report for the same page. Side by side, you might see impressions hold steady, or even climb, while clicks fall. That’s not automatically bad news. It can mean your page is feeding an AI answer without earning the click.
Bing Webmaster Tools goes further. Its AI Performance report tracks citations across Microsoft Copilot, Bing, and partner AI experiences, by URL. It also shows Citation Share: the percentage of all citations for a given grounding query that went to your site. It doesn’t name the domains you’re up against.
Go deeper with the AI visibility tools
AI visibility tools track where your content gets mentioned and cited across AI platforms. They run prompts at scale and record which sources each platform uses.
Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit runs on a database of over 317 million real prompts and AI responses, collected from AI search clickstream data and Google’s AI Overview keyword data. Semrush groups them into topics rather than tracking single prompts, because one question gets asked a dozen different ways. The prompt database refreshes daily.
The scale is the point. Running a few prompts through ChatGPT yourself tells you about those few prompts. The toolkit checks your topic against the range of questions people ask and keeps checking. If there are specific prompts you want to watch, you can track those individually too.
The exact numbers move around because AI answers are personalized and change fast. Read the data as a trend, the same way you’d read a ranking that shifts a little day to day.
Inside the Visibility Overview report, the Cited Pages tab lists every page on your domain that shows up in an AI answer and how many prompts triggered each one. Filter it to a single URL, and you can see whether that page is getting cited, rather than guessing from a brand-level score.
Semrush’s Position Tracking covers Google, ChatGPT Search, and Google AI Mode in one campaign, so you can watch rankings and AI placements side by side.
Keep your content current
Nothing you publish stays accurate for long. Products get discontinued, prices change, data goes stale, and someone else eventually publishes something better.
All three audiences care, for different reasons:
- Users can’t follow a guide with outdated product images
- Google weights recency more heavily for some queries than others, so a page that falls behind can lose ground on those
- AI systems answer questions people are asking right now, so they tend to favor pages that still reflect how things work
Start with the pages that matter most. If a page drives revenue, sign-ups, or the bulk of your traffic, watch it closely.
Then let the data tell you when to act. A drop in clicks, impressions, rankings, or citations is the signal. So is a change on your side: a new product release, or a feature getting discontinued.
Protecting the pages you already have is often a better use of time than publishing new ones.
Run a page through the five steps again when you update it. The SERP will show you whether the intent has moved and whether what you added is still something the other pages don’t have.
