Kern Media® is a founder-led team of SEO, AEO and GEO consultants who work with companies across the United States. We’re heavily focused on content strategy, technical SEO, answer engine optimization (AEO) and LLM optimization to help our clients grow their revenue. We help you grow traffic, leads and sales from Google and from AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot.
Most of our clients are eCommerce brands and lead generation businesses, and we also work with B2B technology companies, financial services firms, publishers and many other types of brands. Between publishing and agency work, we’ve optimized 500+ websites. We bring over 20 years of experience to every engagement.
GoogleChatGPTClaudeGeminiPerplexityCopilotGoogle AI Mode
Meet the Founder
Dan Kern
- Over 20 years of SEO experience and 500+ websites optimized
- Former Senior SEO Consultant at Inflow and Director of SEO at F+W Media, leading SEO for 200+ websites with a team of 5
- Leads the strategy for every Kern Media client, from the first call onward
- Google Analytics and HubSpot Inbound certified
- Ran a guitar gear blog for 13 years, so he knows what it takes to build an audience from scratch
Dan’s work starts with your customers and your business goals. It has doubled organic revenue for eCommerce stores and grown a publisher’s traffic 7x. As an SEO, AEO and GEO consultant who thinks of himself as a strategic marketer, Dan connects the customers you want with the topics they care about and the keywords and prompts they use. He then maps out the content your site needs to attract them and the places your brand should be seen. The result is traffic, links, AI citations and, ultimately, new customers.
“SEO is still extremely relevant, and AI search has made it even more important.”
Much of SEO (and AEO and GEO) is simply putting what we learn about your audience into practice. How can that ever die? Topical keyword research, on-page optimization, creative content strategies and genuine content marketing that builds brand awareness still work. That core strategy earns the natural links, mentions and trust signals that Google uses to rank a website highly, and that AI tools rely on when deciding which brands to recommend. At the same time, we believe traffic should come from many different sources, not only Google. That includes AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude, which can send some of your highest-value visitors. Diversification matters for any investment.
Our Specialist Team
Dan leads the strategy for every engagement. Depending on your needs, he brings in specialists he has worked with for many years, each with 10 to 20+ years of experience in their practice.
Who We Work With
We work with any company that’s a good fit: an established website, a team (or developer) who can make changes, and leads or sales from search and AI that matter to the business. See our services for how engagements and timelines work, and our pricing page for costs.
On a free 30-minute call, we’ll look at your goals and your current search and AI visibility, and tell you whether we can help.
Our Approach to SEO, AEO and GEO
Business Goals
How could any marketing campaign begin without clearly identifying the business goals? We’re not talking about traffic, either. We’re talking about bottom-line revenue goals. What % year-over-year growth do you need to achieve? Are your goals shorter than that? Looking for a certain number of leads per month to feed your sales efforts? Need to reach a certain amount of advertising revenue to hire more staff? Those are the goals that we want to help you achieve. Traffic doesn’t pay the bills, and we’d bet you’d rather have $1M from 1 visit versus $1 from 1M visits. Right?
Customer Personas
Many SEOs start their process with keyword research, yet we like to start even earlier in the thought process and start with the customer. Who are the different types of customers that come to your website? What are their roles, goals, problems, desires and outside interests? What questions do they ask Google, and what do they ask ChatGPT or Claude? Yes, it’s important to get that deep. Just as a musician gets inside the heads of the players who inspire them to master their style, we get inside the heads of your customers to understand them. From there, we can make much more sense out of keyword and prompt research.
Content
The central purpose of most websites is simple: provide content, products or services that offer value your visitors can’t find elsewhere. People come to the internet (and AI tools) looking for information, products, services and entertainment. A website owner must know and cater to their audience with the most targeted, highest-quality content possible, whether that’s service pages, articles, product descriptions or any other resource. Give them what they want and more, and be the best at it. Specific, expert answers are also what AI tools quote and cite, which is the heart of answer engine optimization (AEO). Being useful isn’t enough on its own. We need to repurpose that content in different mediums and through different channels, without duplicating text yet keeping messaging consistent. You must be a publisher to reach your audience.
Email Capture
Most visitors won’t come back on their own, and not every visitor is ready to buy or contact you right away. A useful download or guide in exchange for an email address lets you build the relationship first.
Links & Mentions
Once optimized content is in place on your website, improving search rankings requires that your website attract more links. Attracting inbound links is an important part of the SEO process (after on-page content has been optimized), and is best achieved by creating in-depth content that builds your brand at the same time. Mentions matter too: AI tools pull heavily from third-party sites, so being named on respected industry sites, review sites, award lists and directories helps shape how AI describes and recommends your brand. Links and mentions from topically relevant, authoritative websites are the most valuable, but they require a respectable brand and online presence to attract. This takes ongoing effort.
Brand Presence
Your company profiles across the web (LinkedIn, social media, directories, review sites and more) give search engines and AI tools trustworthy signals about your brand. If those profiles describe your company differently, or have outdated facts, AI tools may repeat the wrong information. Keeping every profile current and consistent with your website is a simple way to help AI describe you accurately. Google wants to rank brands, and respectable brands almost always have obvious, consistent footprints across the web.
Engagement
With search engines becoming more sophisticated, user behavior, engagement, and branding matter. It’s important for Google and other search engines to see that your brand is searched for. It’s even more important that when people visit your website from search engines or AI tools, they stay there, click around, and revisit your site. That engagement is what turns visits into customers.
Technical SEO
Your site must be easily crawlable by Google, Bing, other search engines and AI crawlers, or the hard work in the other areas of SEO and GEO won’t have the impact you want. The basics:
- A robots.txt file that lets both search and AI bots in
- An accurate XML sitemap
- Key content readable without JavaScript
- Canonical URLs that prevent duplicate paths
- Structured data that helps search engines and LLMs understand your brand
- Lean indexation, with thin or low-quality pages pruned so your best content drives the traffic
Nearly every business falls short here without an SEO expert’s help.
Want us to look at these areas for your site? Request a free consultation.
Qualifications & Reviews
★★★★★ 5-star rating on Google and Clutch (read our reviews)
We are Google Analytics certified and HubSpot Inbound certified.
Work With a Senior SEO, AEO and GEO Team
Every client works with senior specialists who have 10 to 20+ years of experience each, not a junior account team.
You’ll talk directly with founder Dan Kern, not a salesperson, and get a custom proposal after the call.
See our services and FAQs, pricing, client reviews, how we report results or our Kern Media company facts page. Switching from another agency? Read our guide to switching SEO agencies without losing rankings.
