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SEO · AEO · GEO
How Is The Sargassum?
A real-time Caribbean sargassum tracker that ranks #1 on Google and gets cited by ChatGPT.
Visit howisthesargassum.com
The challenge
Tourists and resort operators had no reliable, centralized source for real-time sargassum conditions across the Caribbean. What existed was scattered, outdated, or anecdotal: frustrated travelers, lost tourism revenue, and not one resource structured to rank for the high-intent questions people were actually asking on Google, voice search, or AI engines.
My role
What I actually did
- Keyword architecture. Mapped high-volume, high-intent queries across travel, tourism and resort planning, then structured the whole site around the exact questions people ask before booking a Caribbean trip.
- Schema markup. JSON-LD structured data including Dataset, FAQPage and WebSite schemas, making the content machine-readable for search engines and generative models alike.
- AEO content structure. Wrote in direct question-and-answer form so every major query has a concise, factual answer search engines can lift straight into a featured snippet.
- GEO authority building. Built citability through real data and backlinks from tourism and environmental publications, the trust signals that make an AI engine willing to name a source.
- Technical SEO foundation. Core Web Vitals, mobile-first responsive design, canonical URLs and an XML sitemap. Crawlability and speed that support the ranking rather than fight it.
- Conversion design. Behavioral design patterns guiding visitors toward SunSolSEO.com, with SEO and UX pulling in the same direction.
Outcome
A live proof-of-concept for what SEO, AEO and GEO do when they're designed together instead of layered on. The site pulls tens of thousands of Google clicks a month, holds top-three positions on head terms like “sargassum cancun” and “cancun seaweed”, and is cited by name in ChatGPT and Perplexity answers, with readers arriving directly from those citations.
Questions
About this project
How does a website get cited by ChatGPT?
By being the most directly useful answer to a question people actually ask, in a form a machine can lift. For How Is The Sargassum that meant answering the literal query (is there seaweed on the beach today) above the fold, in plain language, with structured data behind it and real-time data feeding it. Generative engines cite sources that resolve the question cleanly. They skip sites that bury the answer under a brand story.
How did the site reach #1 on Google?
It targeted the questions travelers were genuinely typing rather than the keywords a marketer would guess, answered them faster and more concretely than anyone else, and backed that with schema markup and real-time satellite data so the page was both fresher and more machine-readable than the competition.