149% more traffic and 50% more leads for an internal communications firm.

The challenge

The Grossman Group is a leadership and internal communications agency headquartered in Chicago, working with Fortune 500 and mid-market clients across the country. By the time they came to me, they were already doing a lot of things right. Their organic search traffic had been climbing steadily for a couple of years, largely on the strength of a highly active blog, and they were looking for a partner who could take things to the next level.

Over a decade in, we’re still working together. What started as a focused engagement to capture more of the visibility they’d already earned has grown into an ongoing SEO strategy consulting covering content strategy, on-page optimization, link building, and (more recently) AI search visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews.

The approach

The foundation

The first stretch of the engagement was focused on capturing the visibility their site was almost ranking for. I started with comprehensive keyword research across their commercial pages, mapping out the dozens of consulting services, frameworks, and proprietary tools with real volume in the category that weren’t yet being matched to dedicated pages.

From there, the work covered the basics done well: title tag optimization revised page-by-page based on the research, on-page edits to push pages already ranking just below page 1 over the line (the easiest wins to capture quickly), and link reclamation, which meant finding the dozens of unlinked brand mentions across the web and turning them into actual links. Standard SEO work, executed thoroughly.

The content engine

The Grossman Group has always been a publisher. Their blog has been ranked the #1 leadership blog by Feedspot 10 years in a row and consistently been the engine behind a meaningful share of their organic traffic. Over the course of the engagement, my role has evolved from optimizing what they were already producing to actively shaping the strategy: identifying the topics worth writing about, the gaps in coverage, and the existing posts worth refreshing or re-anchoring against current search behavior. Two SEO-driven posts a month, sustained over years, have compounded into one of the strongest content engines in their category.

AI search visibility

A few months ago, we built a 25-prompt monitoring strategy designed to capture the topics prospects actually search for when looking for what The Grossman Group does. The prompts weren’t generated in a vacuum. They’re grounded in their last 16 months of Google Search Console data, which means they cover roughly half of the site’s actual organic search traffic by topic.

The results have been striking. Across the 25 prompts we track, The Grossman Group has roughly 2x the AI search visibility of their closest competitor and outpaces every competitor we benchmark against. Their site is the third most cited domain across these prompts, behind only LinkedIn and YouTube, and ahead of Forbes, Reddit, Harvard Business School, and every competitor in the category.

That data isn’t just a scoreboard; it’s actively shaping the work. We’re commissioning new in-depth blog content for topics the prompts surfaced as gaps, adding detailed FAQ sections to service pages where prospects are asking AI tools the same questions, and adding structured data markup to clarify entity relationships for LLMs. We’re also pursuing third-party citations on Forbes Council, SHRM, and similar industry outlets, because in AI search, who cites you matters as much as what you publish.

In AI search, who cites you matters as much as what you publish.

The results

The numbers from the foundational work still hold up. Across the first 10 months of the engagement:

• Total site traffic up 149%
• Blog post traffic up 151%
• Organic search traffic up 71%
• Of 103 primary keywords tracked, we improved rankings on 72 of them, with 28 reaching page 1 and 54 in the top 3 pages of search results
• Contact form submissions from organic search up 50% (first month vs. last month of the campaign)

But the more meaningful proof point is everything since. The engagement is still ongoing, organic traffic continues to grow, and AI search (a channel that didn’t exist when we started) is now a meaningful part of the visibility picture and source of inbound leads.