My name's Darren and I'm head of marketing and communications at Transparently, an AI startup which helps companies detect accounting manipulation and fraud. Before this, I spent 18 years at Bloomberg and over 20 years as a journalist. I always knew I wanted to work in newspapers — my first proper media job was at The Age in Melbourne in the late '90s, where I started as a copy boy and worked my way up to the news desk. Eventually, I moved into a digital tech section, which wasn’t a great fit, so I looked around and landed an internship at Bloomberg. What was supposed to be six months turned into nearly two decades, taking me from Melbourne to Sydney and finally Hong Kong.

At Bloomberg, I primarily covered markets, leading regional coverage during key events like the Global Financial Crisis and the flash crash. Later, I shifted to covering banks, which exposed me to fintech and crypto — especially during the Mt. Gox collapse. That curiosity grew further when I met Arthur Hayes, founder of BitMEX, just as his exchange was getting started.

Eventually, I left Bloomberg in 2017 to dive into crypto full-time, joining a startup now called Chaos Theory as Chief Communications Officer. I worked closely with the CEO on various projects — from a blockchain explorer to an underwear brand — and led the build of The AllStar, a sports app still available today. My  journey, though intense, taught me the realities of startup life: how to adapt fast, work lean, and constantly learn. Through my two years at the helm of The AllStar, I developed a deep interest in marketing and SEO, which led me to take courses and shift from pure content creation to a broader marketing focus. 

That marked the start of the next phase of my career, and incidentally led to my first experience with GenAI and AI-empowered content creation AI and content feature strongly at Transparently. A lot of what I do revolves around content — it’s central to our strategy. Because we’re a data-rich, tech-driven product, especially in the AI space, one of the best ways to showcase our value and build our brand is by highlighting the unique insights our data generates. So content plays a huge role in surfacing use cases and telling that story. That said, I’m a team of one at Transparently, so everything from content to social media also falls under my remit.

I see marketing as the intersection of two core things:

If you can’t clearly explain — in one sentence — what problem your product solves, that’s a red flag. You need a product that’s genuinely useful and a clearly defined audience. Once you have those two pillars, marketing is simply the process of bridging the gap between them.

To me, it all starts with strong foundations. I love pyramids as a visual model — probably because I think in terms of funnels and frameworks. At the base of your pyramid, you need absolute clarity: What is your product? What problem does it solve? Who does it solve it for? Everything — from your go-to-market strategy to your product roadmap to your hiring decisions — should cascade from that central understanding.

Once that alignment is in place, executing becomes much easier. Not just in terms of marketing and sales, but in shaping the product itself and building the right team to support it. Strategy, messaging, execution — it all flows from that foundational clarity.

Just a quick word on marketing strategy — there are many different approaches, and the right one depends entirely on your product and audience. A good marketing lead doesn’t come in with a cookie-cutter playbook. If they do, it’s probably time to look for someone else. Every product or service is — or should be — unique, and your strategy needs to reflect that.

So, ultimately, your approach has to be tailored — different products call for different playbooks.

I like to think of SEO in 3 stages:

Before I get into these, I want to address an important point about AI that many SEO marketers are grappling with, which is the rise of Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). 

Annual searches on ChatGPT reached 365 billion within just two years, a milestone that took Google’s search engine more than a decade to match, according to Mary Meeker’s Trends – Artificial Intelligence report. The speed of that adoption shows a fundamental shift in how people look for answers: many now skip the browser bar and ask a language model instead.

That being the case, does this relegate SEO to history? Not really, and let me explain. Generative models are trained on - and continue to retrieve information from - the open web. If your content is not well-structured, crawlable, and linked by credible sources, it has little chance of surfacing in a traditional search result or being cited by an AI assistant.

Think of SEO as laying the roads and signage; GEO is the sat-nav that guides travellers along them. Strong technical SEO makes your site visible to crawlers, while GEO layers on semantic clarity and authority signals so large language models recognise your brand as a credible, expert source when generating answers.

The payoff is visibility: High-quality pages that rank on Google also feed the datasets and real-time retrieval systems behind ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and the next wave of enterprise agents. Master the old rules, then optimise for the new ones.

In short, SEO gives your content an address; GEO makes it a landmark. And that’s why startup founders should still care about SEO and the tips that follow.

A good SEO strategy starts with the basics: What is your product, and who are you trying to reach?

Let’s say your product is tennis rackets, and your target customers are players in Timbuktu. Now, you’ve identified your product and your target market: tennis players in Timbuktu.

To build an effective SEO-driven content strategy, the next step is to ask: What matters to this specific audience? You’d brainstorm relevant topics — like tennis racket technology, tennis venues in Timbuktu, local tournaments, or profiles of top local players.

From there, you’d create content pillars — key themes or categories that help you build topical authority. For example, two possible pillars could be:

Around each pillar, you'd produce high-quality, keyword-optimised content. This shows search engines that you're a credible source on those topics.

The next step is keyword research. Here, you’re looking for two things:

So instead of competing with major racket brands on broad terms like “best tennis racket,” you might target more niche queries like “where to play tennis in Timbuktu” or “famous Timbuktu tennis players.”

This kind of strategy brings in relevant traffic, increases engagement, and over time, drives conversions — in this case, racket sales — by building both visibility and trust.

After keyword research, the next step is prioritisation. Tools like SEMrush (my go-to) and STAT (more advanced, used by larger SEO teams) help identify which keywords matter most for your product and content strategy. These tools can show key metrics such as:

Let’s recap with the tennis rackets in Timbuktu example:

From this, you get a sense of the total traffic opportunity (e.g. 80,000 monthly views). That’s powerful. It allows you to start estimating conversion funnels and making rough sales projections — based on expected ranking positions, click-through rates, and conversion rates.

Once you've narrowed down the list of keywords you want to target and rank for, organise your headline list in a content management system (like HubSpot, Airtable, or even a spreadsheet).

After conducting initial research and formulating a basic content strategy, begin writing high-quality content that aligns with the keywords and audience intent.

Ultimately, Google (and other search engines) prioritise useful, high-quality content — content that informs, educates, and delivers real value. The better your content serves the user, the more likely it is to land on Page 1 — and that’s where the vast majority of traffic stays:

At the end of the day, the number one thing that matters in SEO is simple: Is the content genuinely useful?

You can strip away all the technical elements — fast loading speeds, keyword optimisation, backlinking, metadata — and it still comes back to this: does the content actually help the reader?

It can’t just be a generic, AI-generated response to a prompt like “write 800 words on the best men’s tennis player in Timbuktu.” Yes, word count matters (800+ words is generally the minimum for SEO-optimised articles), but that alone isn’t enough.

Today, search algorithms are smart. Google, which is building its own large language models, can detect low-effort or purely AI-generated content. If the piece doesn’t add real value — whether through research, insight, perspective, or originality — it won’t perform well.

That’s why investing time or money into quality content is critical — especially for landing pages or blogs that are meant to drive traffic and conversions. Whether it’s your time or a good writer’s fee, it’s worth it. Useful content is what gets shared, ranked, and remembered. If it’s garbage, the internet figures it out fast.

When Google crawls a page, apart from content quality, it evaluates a number of other technical factors on your page to determine whether your content deserves to be ranked at the top. Here are some of the most important ones:

Headline Relevance

Your headline is the clearest signal of what your content is about. For example, a headline like "Best Tennis Venue in Timbuktu" will likely have a lot of competition. Google compares your version against others and ranks the most useful, trustworthy, and well-structured content.

Content Structure & Readability

Google prefers content that’s easy to consume:

Rich Media and Visual Aids

Page Performance & User Experience

You never want to make the algorithm — or your audience — work too hard to figure out what your content is about. That applies to any content you produce.

If the keyword you’re targeting isn’t actually present in the article, it's unlikely your content will rank for it. And more importantly, people searching for that keyword won’t find your page. Instead, the article might end up ranking for something else entirely, which defeats the purpose of your content strategy.

So yes, including your target keyword is essential. Does it need to be in the headline? Not necessarily — though it helps. What matters more is still the utility and quality of the content you produce to target the keyword.

Under the hood, I should also mention that there are two places for keyword placement that should not be overlooked:

To improve credibility and search rankings, focus on backlink-building and content distribution strategies such as internal linking, guest posts, backlink outreach, and community engagement. High-quality backlinks build credibility and are a major ranking factor for search engines like Google, and still highly relevant for GEO, which I’ll come to later

A backlink is when another website links to your content. If your article — say, “Best Tennis Venues in Timbuktu” — is cited in a Financial Times piece on global tennis destinations, that link is a powerful vote of confidence. Especially when it comes from a high domain authority (DA) site like the FT or Bloomberg, it signals to Google:

“This content is trustworthy and useful.”

Backlinks act as a barometer of usefulness. The more relevant and high-quality sites that cite your content, the more likely it is to rank well.

Who links to you matters

Other Tips for Backlink Success

Backlinks from relevant, authoritative sources — whether global outlets or niche blogs — boost your SEO, build trust, and help your content climb to page one. These are sites with high “Domain Authority,” which I mentioned earlier, and what we strive for with our backlinking. Let me explain this concept before we move on with links.

Domain Authority is a broad measure of how trustworthy or authoritative a website is overall, across all topics.

Think of it like your site’s general credibility score on the internet — regardless of the subject matter. It’s not tied to a specific theme like tennis or finance, but rather how strong your domain is across all its pages and categories.

Factors influencing your Domain Authority include:

For example:

Topical Authority

Topical Authority is subject-specific credibility — how trusted your site is within a particular topic or niche.

It’s about depth and consistency. If you repeatedly publish useful, well-ranked content on a specific topic (e.g. tennis venues, startup law, or crypto markets), search engines start recognising you as an expert in that field.

Factors influencing your topical authority include:

For example:

Now that we’ve established the importance of Domain Authority, let’s continue with link building.

This form of link-building happens when your content is so useful or insightful that people naturally cite it.

Essentially, you should aim to create unique, original content — data, insights, rankings, or research — that others want to reference.

At Transparently.ai, we generate proprietary data on companies that are at risk of collapse, based on our internal ratings. We package those insights into high-quality content, then pitch it to journalists. If they write about it and cite us, we earn a backlink — and traffic, authority, and credibility along with it.

This is where you intentionally reach out to other websites, bloggers, or journalists to get them to link back to your content. This can be labour-intensive but also highly effective. Once you’ve produced and optimised your content, media outreach becomes a key tactic. This kind of engagement is highly valuable because citations from credible sources boost your domain and topical authority.

Beyond media outreach, you can create a deliberate link placement strategy. This means identifying websites where you’d like your link to appear and reaching out to them — essentially asking them to include a link to your content in one of their existing or upcoming articles.

1. Reaching Out to Journalists

One method involves identifying journalists who cover topics related to your content. You can pitch them original insights or exclusive data and suggest that your content could enhance one of their upcoming stories. This is often mutually beneficial.

2. Collaborating With Bloggers and Peer Sites

Another method is to connect with other businesses or bloggers operating in a similar space. For example, if you’re selling tennis rackets in Timbuktu, you could reach out to someone doing the same thing in Egypt and suggest a simple link exchange. This is commonly referred to as link swapping, and it can be an effective way to build authority and drive traffic.

For unpaid outreach, the key is to personalise your message. Reference a specific article and give genuine praise. Then, identify a gap in the article — for example, maybe it doesn’t mention Timbuktu — and suggest your content as a useful addition.

You could say something like, “I noticed you didn’t include anything about Timbuktu. Here’s an article I wrote that might add value to that section.” If the person understands SEO, they’ll immediately see the benefit of improving their own article while also helping you.

Ultimately, it all comes down to exchanging value. You’re not just asking for a favour — you’re offering something that enhances their content. If your suggestion improves their SEO and helps their audience, it’s a win-win.

3. Paying for Link Placement

You can also pursue paid link placements. This involves contacting site owners and offering to pay them to insert a link to your content in a relevant article. However, it’s essential that the context is appropriate — both the page and the anchor text must be thematically aligned with your content. 

For instance, placing a link to a tennis article in a blog post about flowers would be irrelevant and potentially harmful. Some site owners are willing to pay for links in all kinds of sites unrelated to their own service or product. Be aware that Google will penalise you for this.

4. Working With Link Placement Agencies

There are agencies that specialise in link placement. You can give them a budget, and they’ll manage the outreach and insertion for you. However, you should proceed with caution. If the agency places your link on low-quality or spammy websites, it could damage your domain authority rather than help it.

I touched on GEO earlier, and it’s relevant in this backlink discussion because when credible sites link to your brand or reference your insights, you increase the chance that large language models associate your name with a given topic. These links and mentions act as semantic reinforcements, helping AI systems surface your company in responses to user prompts.

Put simply, backlinks are not just for Google anymore—they are the digital proof of authority that both humans and machines rely on.

You can think of each backlink from a reputable site as a signal flare: "This brand knows what it’s talking about." LLMs, which rely on patterns, associations, and reinforcement, are more likely to reference entities that are repeatedly and consistently cited in high-quality contexts.

If you want to show up in AI-generated answers, your content needs to be useful, your brand needs to be mentioned in trusted sources, and your site needs to be structured in a way that machines can understand.

Prioritise citations from expert sources: Industry newsletters, analyst blogs, and topic-specific Substacks. These are disproportionately influential in LLM outputs compared to generic or low-value backlinks.

If you’re a startup founder making your first foray into SEO, you probably won’t have the budget to hire a full in-house SEO team. Instead, you have a few options:

A good SEO consultant will take you through the three stages we’ve discussed. Specifically, they should:

Some consultants and agencies will offer packages that include strategy, content, and link-building. Others may focus more narrowly. The key is to find a solution that aligns with your goals and resources.

UnMute works with startup founders to align commercial strategies with marketing goals, offering “end-to-end storytelling” from brand ideation through to channel activations. UnMute also offers prompt workshops and GenAI consulting services to individuals and corporate marketing teams.