A Quick Masterclass on SEO & AI (appearing in AI results)
A Quick Masterclass on SEO & AI (appearing in AI results)
SEO Isn’t Dead. It’s Evolved. How SWFL Businesses Win Search, AI, and Revenue in 2025
A joint insight from SWFL Inc and Olympia Marketing
By Zach Katkin, Founder – Olympia Marketing
This article is part of an ongoing educational series I’m producing in partnership with SWFL Inc, focused on helping small and mid-sized businesses across Southwest Florida market smarter, grow faster, and compete effectively in a rapidly changing digital economy. First here’s the video covering everything we’re going to go over in this blog post:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T934iL3lyj8
For an expanded blog post about the topic, including the full slides please checkout the original blog post over on Olympia Marketing’s website: “Fort Myers SEO & AI: How to Optimize Your Business for Results.”
In this edition, we’re tackling two topics that are inseparable today:
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- AEO (AI Engine Optimization) — how your business shows up inside AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Google’s AI results
There’s a lot of noise around both. A lot of bad advice. And a lot of fear. Let’s clear it up.
SEO Is “Dead”… If You Don’t Understand It
SEO is Dead… Long Live SEO
You’ve probably heard the phrase: “SEO is dead. ”It’s not wrong—but it’s not right either. Traditional SEO as most people practiced it is effectively dead.
Here’s why.
Since COVID, Google has aggressively expanded paid ad real estate. On many local searches, organic results are pushed so far down the page that you’ll scroll twice before seeing them. At the same time, private equity and VC-backed roll-ups have been buying local service businesses at scale—flooding Google Ads with massive budgets.
Southwest Florida used to be insulated from this.
That era is over.
Competition is national now—even for local searches.
So yes, SEO as a standalone traffic strategy has been weakened.
But SEO as a foundation has never been more important.
Because here’s the part most people miss:
If your website is poorly optimized for search engines, it will also fail everywhere else - including AI results.
Proper SEO has become the absolute minimum to succeed – it’s effectively become infrastructure.
The Digital Highway: Billboards vs Buildings
Every business in Fort Myers, Naples, Bonita Springs, Cape Coral, or Estero is competing on the largest highway humanity has ever built—the digital one.
- Over 16 billion Google searches per day globally
- Over 3.6 billion searches per year locally in SWFL
If your business doesn’t appear there—organically, contextually, or inside AI responses—you’re invisible.
In my presentation to SWFL Inc members I framed it this way:
- Ads are billboards – powerful, but rented and temporary
- SEO is property – slower to build, but compounding and permanent
Smart businesses use both.
Great businesses own the land.
What SEO Actually Is (And Why 99% of Businesses Get It Wrong)
SEO is not a trick. It’s not backlinks. It’s not “blogging more.”
SEO is the discipline of making your website legible, credible, and valuable to machines so they can confidently recommend you to humans. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years. I’ve watched Google change thousands of times. And I can say this plainly:
Most businesses—and many agencies—do not understand SEO at a structural level.
A proper SEO foundation starts with three things.
1. Removing Digital Speed Bumps
Technical friction kills rankings before content even matters.
Common issues:
- Slow load times
- Broken internal links
- Missing metadata
- Confusing page hierarchy
- Poor mobile performance
If Google struggles to crawl your site, it won’t rank it. Period.
2. Building Pages Around Real Search Demand
Guessing what people search for is a losing strategy.
You need data:
- What people are actually typing
- How often
- How competitive each query is
- What related “long-tail” searches exist
At Olympia Marketing, we use both Google’s tools and our own AI-driven keyword systems to map entire demand ecosystems, not just keywords.
This is where most opportunities are hiding.
3. Structuring Your Website With Intent
High-performing websites follow a repeatable formula:
- Clear top-level categories
- One page per service
- Clean URLs
- Strong internal linking
- Descriptive titles and headers
This structure becomes your digital real estate portfolio.
Not aesthetics.
Architecture.
Real SWFL Examples: When SEO Is Done Right
Gulfside Repairs – From Zero to Page One
We launched a brand-new handyman client company in North Fort Myers. No domain history. No SEO footprint. Within weeks, they ranked #1 & #2 on Google for competitive service terms—outranking companies that had existed for decades.
Why?
Because structure and the additional elements we include on each project supporting SEO beats age. Every time.
Physician Aesthetic Institute – Winning in a Saturated Med Spa Market
Within five miles of Bonita Beach Road, there are 30+ med spas competing for the same patients.
Our client needed:
- Page-one visibility fast
- Results on a limited budget
- Authority against competitors spending 3–4× more
By aligning SEO and AI visibility from day one, they now rank at the top of both Google and AI-generated results—locally and beyond.
This wasn’t luck.
It was fundamentals executed correctly. In less than a year we were outranking competitors with 10x our budget, both on Search results, as well as on AI mentions (across various AI tools including ChatGPT and others). Right now, if you search for any of the following items:
- Bonita Springs Facials
- Waxing
- Dermal / Facial Fillers
- Lip Filler
- Microneedling
- Anti-Wrinkle Injections (e.g., Botox/Dysport)
- PRF Injections
- Sculptra Injections
- Esthetic Consultation
They come up often in the top 3, and always on the first page – a crazy feat considering that much of their competition has been around in some cases for decades. Not to mention, they’re also showing for AI related searches as well – which is particularly vital for the industry because of the nature of AI use.
Why Website Structure Determines Everything
Your website can look beautiful and still fail completely.
Google doesn’t rank design.
It ranks clarity.
Winning sites:
- Use one page per service
- Write content for users, not bots
- Use proper alt text for images
- Maintain clean metadata
- Connect to Google Search Console
SEO is not visual.
It’s structural.
Long-Tail Keywords: The Real Future of Search
Search is no longer short phrases.
People don’t type:
- “Fort Myers plumber”
They ask:
- “Why does my toilet keep running after flushing?”
- “Best handyman for custom woodwork in North Fort Myers”
AI, voice search, and conversational queries make long-form content the most powerful asset you can build.
This is where:
- Featured snippets
- AI overviews
- Voice results
- “Position zero” rankings
are coming from.
One strong article per month outperforms most competitors.
AI & AEO: What’s Real and What’s Not
Let’s ground this in reality.
AI currently drives 1–3% of total traffic.
The rest still comes from:
- Organic search
- Google Business Profiles
- Paid ads
- Social media
AI isn’t replacing Google.
Google is AI.
The way you optimize for AI is simple:
Do SEO correctly.
The only addition is authority:
- Press mentions
- PR placements
- Consistent brand citations
This is why SEO + PR is becoming the most powerful combination in digital marketing.
Where This Is All Headed
Expect:
- Longer queries
- More conversational search
- More predictive answers
- More structured content requirements
But the fundamentals won’t change.
The winners in 2025 aren’t experimental.
They’re disciplined.
Your SWFL SEO & AI Checklist
If you do nothing else, do this:
- Build your site from keyword data
- Create one optimized page per service
- Rewrite titles and image alt tags
- Install Google Search Console
- Publish one long-tail article per month
Bonus: Layer in PR for authority acceleration.
Final Thought: Smart Businesses Win—Not the Biggest
SEO isn’t magic.
AI isn’t a threat.
They’re leverage.
And in a region like Southwest Florida—where billions of searches happen every year—the upside is massive for businesses that get this right.
If you want a strategy that’s executed surgically, not theoretically, reach out.
You’ve seen the examples.
You’ve seen the data.
Now imagine your business showing up everywhere your customers are already searching.