What impacts your website’s SEO rankings? It’s more than just keyword strategy

SEO gets treated like something almost mystical, a firefly you can never quite catch, a formula that changes the moment you think you’ve learned it. And fair enough, nobody outside of the engineers building these systems knows exactly how they rank a page. But that mystery has become an excuse to oversimplify, and oversimplifying is where firms lose ground.

So here are two thoughts to build on:

1. Getting found doesn’t have to be a black box.
2. Getting found in 2026 is more than keyword strategy, and it’s more than Google.

That second point is the one most accounting and financial services firms are still catching up to. Ranking used to mean one thing: showing up on a Google results page. Now your prospects are just as likely to ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, or Google AI Overviews who they should hire, and act on whatever those tools say. Real visibility means being found, cited, and recommended across both traditional search and AI search. Let’s walk through what actually moves the needle.

Technical health: the foundation everything sits on

Before a single keyword matters, a search engine or an AI model has to be able to read your site cleanly. Semantic HTML and schema markup do different jobs but share a goal: making the content of a page unmistakable to a machine.

Semantic HTML means structuring your code so its meaning is explicit, using tags like <header>, <article>, and <nav> to label what each part of the page is. Schema markup adds a layer of structured data that spells out context: this is a service, this is a firm, this is a review, this is an FAQ. Google uses it to build richer results. AI engines lean on it even harder, because clean structure is part of how they decide what a page is about and whether it’s safe to cite.

AI search: the co-equal pillar for 2026

Here’s the shift worth sitting with. AI engines don’t rank ten blue links. They retrieve passages, weigh sources, and synthesize an answer, often naming a handful of firms by name. If your content is well-organized, credible, and structured so a model can extract a clear claim from it, you become quotable. If it’s buried in vague prose, you get skipped, even when you’re the better firm.

What earns citations looks a lot like good expert writing done deliberately: specific, verifiable statements, clear headings that map to real questions, definitions where a term first appears, and consistent signals about who you are and what you do across your site and the wider web. The firms winning AI visibility aren’t gaming anything. They’re the ones a model can read, trust, and quote without guessing. If you want to know where you stand today, an AI Readiness Audit benchmarks exactly that and shows you the gaps before you invest in fixing them.

Accessibility: overlapping wins

Picture accessibility and search visibility as a Venn diagram with a wide overlap. Take alt text. From an accessibility standpoint, it lets a screen reader describe an image to a visually impaired visitor. From a search standpoint, it tells engines and AI models what that image contains. Build a site that meets accessibility standards and you strengthen your visibility at the same time. One effort, two payoffs.

Internal linking and site structure

Linking to your own relevant pages from within your content does real work. It builds authority, guides visitors deeper into your site, and helps both crawlers and AI systems understand how your topics relate. The rule is relevance. Links should genuinely help the reader, not sit there padding a quota. A clear, well-connected structure is one of the quieter reasons some sites get found and others get overlooked.

Keyword strategy: still a slice, not the whole pie

The title says it: getting found is more than keyword strategy. That doesn’t mean keywords stop mattering. Understanding the language your prospects actually use, and the questions they actually ask, is a real part of the work, and it maps neatly onto AI search too, since the questions people type into ChatGPT are often longer and more specific than what they’d type into a search bar.

But without the technical foundation underneath it, even sharp content underperforms. We’ve seen a firm whose site was nearly invisible to Google, not for lack of a content plan, but because the platform it was built on undercut everything above it. Content strategy sitting on a broken foundation is effort that never gets seen.

A closing word: don’t sacrifice usability for search

Run from any tactic that harms the person actually reading your site. A post that pulls thousands of visitors but buries the answer under keyword stuffing and a link every other sentence sends those visitors straight back out. A strong strategy knows the goal was never raw traffic. It’s attracting, and then earning the trust of, the right people: the firms and decision-makers you actually want to work with.

We’ve met plenty of clients who inherited blog archives full of keyword-packed posts with nothing of substance inside them, garbled walls of words written for an algorithm that has long since moved on. Be wary of anyone selling that. The work worth doing builds a site people trust and machines can read, so you get found the right way, across search and AI alike.

Curious where your firm stands today? Schedule a call and let’s take a look.