From Invisible to Discoverable: Practical SEO and GEO Strategies Webinar

Good content isn't enough if search engines and AI systems struggle to find, understand or cite it. This recent webinar looked at practical SEO and GEO strategies teams can try.

Search is changing, but that doesn’t mean teams should forget the fundamentals.

That was one of the central messages of our recent From Invisible to Discoverable: Practical SEO and GEO Strategies in Progress Sitefinity CMS webinar.

Alexander Shumarski, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Sitefinity CMS, was joined by Zach Stone, VP of Marketing at DeltaV Digital, and Pavel Agov, Senior Sales Engineer, for a hands-on look at how teams can improve their websites for traditional search and emerging AI-driven discovery.

The objective was practical: identify improvements teams can make to existing pages and build stronger search engine optimization (SEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) practices into their day-to-day website management.

Here are six highlights from the webinar.

1. Start with the SEO Fundamentals

The first demonstration showed why a page that looks good isn’t necessarily a page that’s well optimized.

Using the fictional Quantum Digital Bank website, the team compared two pages that appeared almost identical to a visitor but were very different underneath.

The original page contained several common SEO issues: a generic page title, an overly long description and multiple H1 headings. Some links used generic anchor text such as “Learn more,” while an image promoting checking accounts had unrelated alt text.

The improved version introduced a clearer heading hierarchy, with an H1 for the main topic followed by H2s and H3s for supporting sections. Generic links were replaced with more descriptive calls to action, helping both visitors and crawlers understand where those links lead.

Zach also highlighted the importance of making the primary heading reflect what people might actually search for. A heading containing only a brand name provides little context on a page intended to rank for a specific product or service.

The lesson was simple: design and SEO shouldn’t be separate considerations. A page can look exactly as intended while its underlying structure, headings, links and metadata do more to support discoverability.

2. Build SEO into Templates Rather Than Fixing Pages Later

The demo also highlighted an important operational issue: fixing one page is useful, but preventing the same problem across hundreds of pages is much more valuable.

Pavel demonstrated how relatively small changes within Sitefinity CMS can improve the underlying structure—from selecting the correct heading level in a content block to updating the templates used to render lists of products or services.

The key is to make SEO part of the architecture rather than an afterthought.

If a poorly structured template is repeatedly reused, its problems are repeatedly reproduced. But when heading hierarchy, semantic markup and other fundamentals are built correctly into reusable templates and content models, teams have a stronger foundation for every page created from them.

That requires a balance between governance and flexibility. Developers can establish sound defaults at the site and template level, while marketers retain control over areas such as metadata, URLs, social sharing images and individual page content.

As Alex put it during the session, Sitefinity CMS gives teams considerable flexibility in how they build pages. The opportunity is to use that flexibility while making sure SEO is considered before a template ships—not two weeks later when somebody discovers it needs fixing.

3. Protect Search Visibility with Canonicals and URL Management

The webinar then moved into one of the less glamorous—but important—parts of technical SEO: canonical URLs.

Zach explained that canonicals tell search engines which version of a page should be treated as the primary source when similar or duplicate versions can be reached through different URLs.

Without that guidance, organizations risk having multiple versions of their own content competing with one another.

Pavel demonstrated how canonical settings can be managed within Sitefinity CMS, including sitewide configuration and page-level controls.

He also showed how Sitefinity CMS handles alternative or campaign URLs. In the Quantum Digital Bank example, a fictional campaign URL redirected visitors to the primary page while retaining its UTM campaign parameters. The canonical continued to identify the main URL as the authoritative version.

For teams managing campaigns, personalization, filtering or other experiences that can introduce URL variations, that combination is important: retain the information needed for the experience without creating unnecessary ambiguity for search engines.

4. Structure Content for Answers, Not Just Navigation

The session then shifted from traditional SEO toward GEO and the way AI systems discover and extract information.

One of the strongest practical recommendations was to reconsider how content is structured on the page.

A conventional hero might contain a short, brand-led headline and striking image. That can work visually, but it may provide very little information about what the page actually answers.

Alex showed how teams can instead make key pages more descriptive: use headings that clearly communicate the topic, provide a direct answer early on the page and structure supporting information so both people and machines can understand it.

The webinar highlighted several useful formats, including FAQs, lists, step-by-step content and comparison information.

Internal linking helps too. Rather than relying heavily on generic calls to action such as “Learn more” or “Click here,” Zach recommended descriptive anchor text within the body of the content. This gives visitors more information about where a link will take them while providing additional context to crawlers.

FAQs can also help extend the depth of a page by addressing the questions people naturally ask about a topic. Zach noted that their placement should follow the user experience rather than an arbitrary SEO rule—the important thing is providing useful questions and answers in an appropriate structure.

The broader point is not to redesign pages for machines at the expense of people. It is to create pages where clear structure, useful answers and good user experience reinforce one another.

5. Add Structured Data Without Manually Maintaining Markup

Structured data was one of the most practical demonstrations of the session.

Pavel showed Sitefinity Content Markup for AI capabilities, which help teams create Schema.org-compatible JSON-LD without manually writing and maintaining the markup for every piece of content.

Within the CMS, teams can select relevant Schema.org entities and map their properties to fields already managed in Sitefinity CMS.

For example, a news article’s title, URL, description, publication information and author can be drawn dynamically from its existing content fields. That makes structured data much more scalable.

Rather than updating markup manually every time a page changes, teams can configure the relationship once and allow future content created from the same model to inherit the appropriate structure.

The approach can also be applied beyond standard Sitefinity pages and news articles. Custom content modeled within the CMS can have relevant schema associated with it too.

Structured data becomes part of the content model rather than another manual task editors need to remember each time they publish. This is significant especially for teams managing large content estates.

6. Use AI to Improve Content—Not Simply Produce More of It

With AI making content creation faster, Alex put a direct question to Zach: should teams simply use AI to produce more content designed to get cited?

The answer was no.

Zach described AI as a power tool. Used well, it can accelerate tasks such as drafting, summarizing, generating FAQs and helping with alt text. But using it simply to produce greater volumes of undifferentiated content doesn’t create additional expertise or value.

Search engines and AI systems still need useful, relevant information.

The better opportunity is to combine AI with the knowledge organizations already have—customer insight, subject-matter expertise, proprietary information and distinctive perspectives—and use it to make that content clearer and more useful.

The final Sitefinity demo brought that principle back into the content workflow.

Pavel showed the Sitefinity SEO Agent reviewing an article about an electric vehicle loan. The agent identified opportunities such as a missing primary keyword, limited keyword variation and potential improvements to search titles and descriptions.

Editors could review each recommendation, preview changes and decide which suggestions to apply or discard.

That human control is important. The goal isn’t to automate judgment out of the publishing process, but to make optimization easier to apply consistently—particularly as the volume of content grows.

A Practical Checklist for Your Own Website

One of the webinar’s aims was to give attendees improvements they could start looking for immediately.

A useful first audit would include:

• Check page structure. Is there a clear heading hierarchy? Does the H1 describe what the page is actually about? Are important answers easy to identify?
• Review links and images. Replace generic anchor text where a more descriptive link would help, and make sure meaningful images have appropriate alt text.
• Check metadata and canonicals. Make sure important pages have useful titles and descriptions and that the correct canonical URL is being communicated to search engines.
• Look at content through an answer-first lens. Could FAQs, lists, comparisons or clearer opening copy help visitors find the information they need?
• Review structured data. Identify important content types that could benefit from appropriate schema and look for opportunities to manage that markup systematically rather than page by page.
• Use AI selectively. Apply it where it can improve efficiency and content quality, but keep expertise, audience intent and human judgment at the center.

The individual changes may seem small. The webinar’s argument was that applying those fundamentals consistently—and building them into templates, content models and workflows—can make a much bigger difference than treating SEO as a one-off optimization exercise.

See the SEO and GEO Strategies in Action

The session was designed as a working webinar rather than a discussion of search trends.

Alex, Zach and Pavel moved from identifying problems on real page structures to fixing headings and templates, improving links and alt text, managing canonicals and campaign URLs, structuring pages for answers, implementing Schema.org markup and using the Sitefinity SEO Agent to identify content improvements.

Watch From Invisible to Discoverable: Practical SEO and GEO Strategies in Progress Sitefinity on demand to see the demonstrations in full and identify opportunities to improve SEO and AI discoverability across your own website.