SEO and AI Search Training for Marketing and PR Teams

What the day covers

How search actually works now

Classic blue links, AI Overviews, and what has changed about who gets the click. Crawling, indexing and ranking explained without jargon, then the honest bit: which queries you can still win a click on and which ones are now answered above the fold.

• What a ranking factor is, and which ones your team can actually influence.
• How AI Overviews change click-through rates by query type.
• Where organic search still pays, and where it no longer does.

Keyword and intent research

Free tools your team can keep using, building a target list from your own data rather than a keyword tool’s suggestions, and reading intent properly. Most wasted SEO effort goes on terms the buyer was never going to type.

• Search Console as a research tool, not just a report.
• Separating informational, commercial and navigational intent.
• Judging whether a term is winnable from where you actually sit.

On-page work your team controls

Titles, headings, structure, internal links and the things a marketer can change without raising a developer ticket. We do this on your own pages, live, and write down the ones that need a developer separately.

• Title tags and meta descriptions that earn the click rather than describe the page.
• Heading structure, including using the buyer’s real questions as headings.
• Internal linking that supports a cluster rather than a menu.
• Structured data, and which types are worth the effort.

Content that earns the position

Depth, originality and the information gain that makes a page worth ranking. Also what to do with the pages you already have, which is usually more valuable than writing new ones.

• Auditing existing pages: improve, merge, or remove.
• Experience and expertise signals that survive scrutiny.
• Writing for a person and a machine at the same time.

AI answer engines, GEO and AEO

How retrieval-based answers are assembled, why a page gets cited rather than ranked, and the practical structure changes that make your content quotable. We cover measurement too, because most teams have no idea whether they are being cited at all.

• Why citation and ranking are different problems.
• Answer-shaped content, question headings and clean structure.
• Tracking your visibility in AI answers, using free methods.
• What to put in a report when the traffic no longer arrives as a click.

Getting cited: press, listicles and third party sources

This is the section other SEO courses cannot teach, and it is the half of AI visibility that matters most. Large language models lean heavily on third party sources rather than your own website. In professional services the overwhelming majority of AI citations come from listicles, directories and forums, not from company pages.

We are a working PR agency. Getting an organisation mentioned in someone else’s article is the thing we do for a living, so this session is about how to actually earn those mentions rather than a bullet on a slide.

• Finding the listicles and roundups that already rank for your terms.
• Pitching to be included, and what editors actually want.
• Directories and industry listings that carry real weight.
• Where user generated platforms fit, and where they do not.
• How earned coverage and search work as one programme rather than two departments.

Measuring it honestly

What to report, what not to claim, and how to present search to a board when part of the value no longer shows up as a session in analytics. We build the reporting view in the room.

Who runs the day

I am Chris Norton and I run most of these sessions myself. I founded Prohibition, the PR, social and content agency behind this site, I have worked in public relations for more than twenty years, and I have been running training since 2009. I co-authored Share This Too, the social media handbook published by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, and I have been a CIPR member since I was a student.

Where a session goes deep into technical work, our search lead comes with me rather than being described in the third person. We run search and content programmes for paying clients continuously, so the examples in the room are ours.

Almost no page competing for this term will tell you who is delivering the training. It is worth asking every one of them.

Delivered across Yorkshire and the UK

We are based in Leeds and a good share of this work is delivered in Yorkshire, at client offices in Leeds, Sheffield, York, Bradford, Harrogate and Hull. We travel nationwide and we deliver live online for teams spread across sites.

If you want the session at our end rather than yours, we run it from our Leeds studio. See social media training in Leeds for how the local sessions work.

Should you train the team or hire an agency?

We sell both, so take this for what it is worth, but the answer is usually clearer than people expect.

Train the team when you have people who will do the work, when the site is small enough for them to own, and when the problem is that nobody knows what to prioritise. Training pays back fastest where there is capacity but no direction.

Hire an agency when the site is large and technical, when nobody has hours to give, or when the requirement is sustained link and coverage acquisition rather than knowledge. No day of training creates capacity that does not exist.

Plenty of organisations should do both, in that order, so the internal team can brief and judge the agency properly. We will give you an honest read at the scoping call even when the answer is that you do not need the training.