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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 What existed was scattered, outdated, or anecdotal — frustrated travelers, lost tourism revenue, and not one resource structured to rank for the high-intent questions people were actually asking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 — 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.