SEO analysis: what to audit to rank in AI search?

Digital marketing has been one of the most efficient sets of communication actions today. As the audience of large companies and educational institutions spends more and more time online, it makes sense to maintain a presence in this virtual environment.

One of the pillars of this communication strategy is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Respect for good SEO practices is a big differentiator and can put your university in the spotlight on search engines such as Google and Bing, or leave it unknown.

An SEO analysis is what shows which of those two scenarios your institution is in today.

Shall we talk about this subject?

What is SEO and what does it change in organic ranking?

In free translation, SEO means search engine optimization. It is a set of strategies that must be used to improve the positioning of your pages on Google, Bing and any other search engine currently used. Understanding what is SEO is the starting point of any SEO analysis, because it defines what is worth measuring.

Caption: An SEO analysis is only worth it when it ends in priorities: what to fix first and which metric will show the fix worked.

In fact, some companies, such as 4RevOps, offer a specialized service focused on this optimization.

In general, good SEO practices involve a group of rules that must be followed to make content relevant to search engines. It is in this optimization that we have to pay attention to the factors that help your website gain organic positions.

In short, we can say that SEO is a way of organizing the best User Experience (UX) strategies, to make your website relevant to people and, consequently, improve positioning in search engines.

It is important to pay attention to this: UX weighs heavily in SEO, as the behavior of users within your pages helps define their relevance.

So, optimizing your website for search engines also means optimizing your website for those who are accessing it.

That work shows up in the numbers when the team follows the organic ranking of each piece of content month by month, and not only the volume of visits. It is the same reading that answers whether investing in SEO is worth it.

With the advancement of search technologies, traditional SEO has evolved to incorporate practices that aim to optimize visibility in answers generated by artificial intelligence, such as chatbots and virtual assistants.

This new approach, known as Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), focuses on providing direct and accurate answers to users' questions, increasing the chances of your content being highlighted in Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode and in assistants such as ChatGPT.

The name Search Generative Experience, or SGE, fell by the wayside: the feature became AI Overviews in May 2024, and AI Mode gained its own surface in 2025.

Adopting AEO strategies can expand the organic reach of your educational institution, adapting to changes in user search behavior.

Additionally, search engine optimization requires paying special attention to user experience metrics like Core Web Vitals.

INP (Interaction to Next Paint) replaced FID (First Input Delay) as a Core Web Vital on March 12, 2024. The metric measures how responsive your site is to the interactions of whoever is browsing it.

The thresholds considered good are LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) up to 2.5 seconds, INP up to 200 milliseconds and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) up to 0.1. Meeting those standards provides a smooth browsing experience for your visitors.

What is the purpose of carrying out an SEO analysis?

One of the best SEO practices is constantly monitoring how your strategy is being used. Search engines always update their criteria, and the content of your university, as well as its institutional pages, needs to keep up with the changes. By carrying out a complete analysis it is possible to identify points for improvement and observe opportunities.

The analysis also connects SEO to the rest of the institution's digital marketing strategies. Knowing which organic page feeds the enrollment form changes the decision about where to put media budget in the following term.

Without that reading, the team follows loose SEO indicators and cannot explain why traffic dropped. Much of it already fits into an SEO report in GA4.

To do this, you need to have marketing technology that makes such an assessment. That is where Semrush comes in.

How can Semrush help with this SEO analysis?

Semrush is one of the best marketing analysis tools currently available on the market. It has several functions that are essential for understanding an SEO strategy and evaluating its efficiency, bringing traffic, organic performance, technical errors and competition into the same dashboard.

Adobe completed its acquisition of Semrush on April 28, 2026, which places the tool inside the Adobe ecosystem and is worth following when the contract comes up for renewal.

Semrush has adapted to new market demands by incorporating AI-based features to enhance its analytics.

Semrush Copilot, for example, is a tool that uses AI to provide personalized insights into your website's performance, suggesting priority actions for optimization.

In addition, integration with Google's AI Overviews allows you to monitor the visibility of your content in AI-generated responses, offering a more comprehensive view of your institution's online presence.

See how Semrush can help analyze your website's SEO.

Traffic analysis

With Semrush you can identify several important issues about your website traffic, such as:

• traffic volume.
• traffic sources.
• the split between desktop and mobile visits.
• main pages of the website.
• geographic distribution of accesses.

This data not only shows the performance of the site, but also draws attention to issues of lead segmentation, meaning the people who showed interest.

It is possible to understand where the main users come from, whether social networks, ads or organic searches on Google.

This way, your team can direct efforts to focus on the points where capture is most efficient.

The same goes for the geographic distribution of accesses. When you identify that one region has more visits than others, you can create a specific strategy for that location: if the visits come from one metropolitan area, what content does that population prefer to consume?

Another important point is understanding whether access is made via computers or cell phones. If it is the second option, which is very likely, it is important that your team's efforts are focused on optimizing the website's mobile navigation.

Organic search performance

Semrush has a tool for analyzing research and organic keywords, which identifies the best terms used by the competition, points out new organic competitors and analyzes the change in domain positions.

By carrying out this analysis, your team can identify the value of each keyword, in addition to showing the landing pages that the competition has for those terms. This generates ideas for new content.

Your team might, for example, see an increase in organic visits to a given page and observe what that page has done. Then it is a matter of creating a strategy using similar principles.

This reading is what shows whether the organic ranking of the domain is actually climbing or just oscillating inside the same band of positions.

Problem identification

The Semrush tool is also equipped with a complete diagnostic that helps you track your main domain and subdomains.

Thanks to this, your team can monitor the main problems and errors that occur, such as:

• pages that are not indexed, meaning not registered by search engines.
• broken backlinks, which are hyperlinks that lead to pages that no longer exist or that have changed URLs.
• amount of content.
• use of related main and semantic keywords.

It is still possible to compare your domain with the top ten in Google rankings to understand the main differences, points for improvement and strengths of your website and blog.

Another important feature is the Keyword Strategy Builder, which uses artificial intelligence to help you create more effective keyword strategies.

This tool analyzes the potential of specific keywords for your domain, considering factors such as topical authority and custom difficulty, allowing your marketing team to develop content that is more aligned with users' search intentions.

Dig deep into the data and transform your website with accurate SEO analysis.

Complete benchmark and observation of new niches

Because Semrush allows multiple analyses of other domains and of the competition in ads and organic searches, it is possible to generate enough data for your team to understand:

• main positive points of the competition.
• best strategies being employed.
• ad styles that generate higher conversion.
• types of content that have received the most clicks.
• pages with longer retention time.
• pages with the greatest growth in Google rankings.
• source and geographic relationship of competitors' accesses.

This data not only serves to understand what the competition has done positively or negatively, but also helps to identify new niches and opportunities for your university based on the SEO work done.

In a scenario where voice search and interactions with virtual assistants are on the rise, it is crucial to adapt the content of your site to serve these new forms of research.

Strategies such as creating frequently asked questions sections optimized for Google's "People also ask" feature and using natural language in texts increase the chance of your content being selected by voice assistants and artificial intelligence platforms to answer users' questions.

This adaptation not only improves the accessibility of your website, but also expands its reach across different search channels, positioning your content more strategically in organic results.

What do SEO audits cover today?

SEO audits cover four blocks: crawling and indexing, content and search intent, technical performance and authority. A well-made SEO audit does not hand back a list of three hundred errors, it hands back the order in which they need to be solved and the expected gain of each correction.

The first block answers whether the search engine can reach the pages. This is where pages outside the index, redirect chains, wrong canonical tags and outdated sitemaps show up.

The second block compares what the page delivers with what the person was looking for. A course page that only lists subjects loses to one that answers tuition, duration and how to apply.

The third block measures speed and visual stability, with Core Web Vitals at the center. It is where LCP, INP and CLS leave the report and become a development task.

The fourth block looks at links, mentions and the consistency of institutional information. Google's helpful content documentation records that E-E-A-T is not a specific ranking factor, and that trust is the most important of those aspects.

Each block has a warning sign of its own:

Table: The four blocks of an audit and the symptom that usually appears first in each one.

Running SEO audits on this rhythm also protects the budget. A correction that costs two hours of development is cheap when it is caught in the quarter, and expensive when it is discovered during an admissions campaign.

What are zero-click searches and how do zero-click searches work?

Zero-click searches are searches that end on the results page itself, with no click through to any website. Understanding what are zero-click searches became a premise of any SEO analysis, because it changes the meaning of being well positioned.

A SparkToro study using Similarweb data, published by Search Engine Land, reports that 68.01% of Google searches in the U.S. ended without a click between January and April 2026, against 60.45% in 2024.

The same survey records that AI Overviews appear in more than 20% of searches and that, when they appear, the CTR (Click-Through Rate) falls by around 60%. In the period studied, 0.34% of searches moved to AI Mode.

How zero-click searches work inside a diagnosis: the average position of a page can improve while sessions fall, and both things are true at the same time.

That is why reading clicks in isolation is misleading. The analysis starts comparing impressions, average position and presence in AI features before concluding that a piece of content lost relevance.

Living with zero-click searches has two paths. One is answering fast and well in order to be the cited source, and the other is reserving the decision information for the page, where it justifies the click.

For a university, the split is usually clean. Short informational queries lose clicks to the results page, while decision queries about tuition, course length and admissions season keep bringing visits.

How to rank in AI and measure SEO in the AI era?

How to rank in AI depends on being citable, and not only on being well positioned. AI search systems retrieve passages of a page, so content that answers inside a self-sufficient block has a better chance of being used.

Google states that there is no extra technical requirement to appear in the AI features of search. The same helpful content practices and the same crawling and indexing guidelines apply.

Three editorial habits tend to help: citing named sources, using verifiable statistics with a date, and bringing quotes from an identified specialist. Those are provenance signals that a model can reproduce in its answer.

In measurement, SEO in the AI era adds questions the old report never asked. Does the brand appear in the generated answer? With which page?

The same logic applies to the work of how to rank in AI inside assistants outside Google, such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, where citation depends on the content being accessible.

Practical SEO in the AI era also means revisiting old pages. A page published three years ago with an outdated figure is still retrievable, and it will be quoted with that outdated figure unless someone updates it.

None of this replaces the basics of website optimization. A page that loads slowly, breaks on mobile or hides its answer behind three scrolls is a weak candidate for citation and for a click.

SEO is essential to make your university stand out in search engines. With Semrush, it is possible to analyze traffic, organic performance, keywords and competition, identify technical improvements and follow how content adapts to voice search and to artificial intelligence.

Frequently asked questions about SEO analysis

Where should you start your SEO analysis?

Start with what blocks results right now: index coverage and the performance of your enrollment pages. Only after that is it worth opening the content front, because fixing copy on a page the search engine cannot reach does not change organic ranking.

With that block in order, define the routine. A short monthly reading, one SEO audit per quarter and a dashboard with impressions, average position, clicks and presence in AI-generated answers cover most of the decisions.

The third step is integration. An SEO analysis gains strength when it talks to the other digital marketing strategies of the institution, from email to paid media.

If your team wants to turn this diagnosis into a work plan, talk to Mkt4edu and evaluate which corrections come first in the next cycle.