How SEO got a top sales trainer recommended by AI search
A new client asked AI for the top sales trainers, and his name came up in the top three
This client is a top sales trainer, LinkedIn coach, speaker and author. On LinkedIn, people know exactly who he is. His website was a different story. Enquiries through it had slowed to a trickle, and people who found him on Google arrived without any of the context his LinkedIn audience had.
He’d been burnt by SEO before and came in cautious. The brief was a six month project to get the website working for him: fix what was broken, get him ranking for the work he wants, and make sure anyone landing on the site understood straight away who he is and why he’s the right person.
Keywords ranking in the UK by the end of the project
Keywords ranking
Old pages redirected when the site moved to the brand domain
Blog posts rewritten or written from scratch
SEO for a sales trainer whose website had stopped bringing in work
The groundwork came first. I researched what his buyers search for, the heads of HR, sales directors and CEOs who book training, and took a baseline. At the start he ranked for just two keywords.
The site had problems too. Nine pages had empty main headings, including the homepage, and others had several. A previous company had also filled his blog with AI-written posts, some live on the site and more sitting in drafts. He called them awful, so they went.
Moving a website to the brand domain without losing rankings
The website was on his personal name, while his business, books and social profiles all used the brand name. After talking it through, we moved the site to the brand domain so every signal Google saw pointed the same way.
That meant 81 redirects, so none of the old pages got lost. For a few weeks the old domain’s numbers fell while the new one’s rose, which is what a move looks like from the inside. By month three Google had all but finished the switch, and the brand terms were sitting at number one on the new domain.
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See my SEO servicesRewriting old blog posts so Google and AI search can find them
He had years of blog posts. Most were short, and few were written with search in mind. We rewrote 39 of them into longer, properly structured posts, wrote 13 new ones from a content gap analysis, and posted 10 as LinkedIn articles to build links back to the site.
To keep everything sounding like him, the first drafts came from him: his stories, his deals, the conversations he’s had with buyers. We did the rest. He also got a proper author page with structured data, which helps Google and AI search understand who’s behind the content.
Why AI search recommends businesses that rank on Google
By month five, people were telling him they’d found him through AI search. One of them came through his contact form, and when they met, she said AI had listed him as one of the top sales trainers.
I checked ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini and Grok, logged out so my own history couldn’t skew the answers. His website was cited in every one of them. AI tools take most of what they know from Google and Bing. Nobody optimised anything for AI here. The site ranked on Google, so AI search cited it.
SEO results for a sales trainer
By the end of the project he ranked for 21 keywords in the UK, up from 2, and 18 in Ireland. His brand terms sat at number one. Several of his key business-generating terms reached page one, and his main local service term overtook his own name as the top search bringing people to the site. Bing started sending visitors too.
That July enquiry turned into a half day of training in Dublin, with follow-up work booked and a LinkedIn strategy programme underway. It’s the kind of client he wanted the website to bring in: a business that went looking for a sales trainer, found him, and booked.
SEO handover for a business that writes its own content
This was always a six month project, so the last stretch was about making sure he could carry on without us. He got a final site audit, SEO guidelines, a checklist to follow every time he publishes, a tone of voice guide, and the keyword research and content gap analysis to plan his next posts from.
What the client said
Want AI to recommend you? Rank on Google first.
AI search pulls its answers from the same places Google does. Book a call and we’ll work out what’s stopping your website being one of them.
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