Ben Harris
← All work Fix the plumbing first
Page speed, empty alt tags, missing and messy headings, bloated DOM. None of it is glamorous, but search engines and AI models both need a clean, well-structured page before anything else you do will land.
Work / SEO & GEO
SEO
& GEO.
Getting found in Google and getting quoted by AI are really the same job with a few important differences, so I treat them as one. I've done it at FUJIFILM, where I took a good-looking site that earned almost nothing and rebuilt it into something that actually ranked, and I do it now at Author-it, where the goal has widened to showing up inside AI answers as well as the search results.
The FUJIFILM rebuild, since August 2021
0%
of visitors now come from New Zealand, up from 36%
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keywords the FUJIFILM site ranks for, up from just 74
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more daily organic users, from around 8 a day to 46
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longer on the page, from 21 seconds to nearly a minute and a half
+0%
organic traffic in twelve months on the corporate B2B side
A look around
Pages from the rebuild.
Drag, or use the arrows. These are real pages from the live site.
01 / 06
Two chapters
Same job, two companies.
At FUJIFILM the site wasn't broken, it just wasn't earning anything. Hardly any traffic came from New Zealand, it barely showed up in search, and the few people who landed left almost straight away. I learned the solutions inside out first, then worked through it patiently and fixed the right things in the right order.
At Author-it the brief has moved on. Ranking in Google still matters, but buyers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI before they click anything, so the work is as much about being the source those models quote as it is about the blue links. Same foundations, wider goal, and it's exactly the shift I set Cut the Waffle up to help other companies through.
How I do it
Plumbing, then words, then structure for AI.
Keywords and questions
A proper list of the terms and the actual questions buyers ask, worked through the pages, articles and FAQs in copy that still reads like a human wrote it, not a robot stuffing phrases in.
Structure for AI, not just Google
Clear question-and-answer blocks, schema, and a direct answer near the top of every page. Language models don't read a page, they scan it for structure and labels, so I give them exactly that. This is the GEO half of the job.
Tone that earns trust
The old FUJIFILM site sounded like a corporate brochure. Softening the voice so it felt made for New Zealand businesses did as much heavy lifting as any technical fix, and it's the same instinct I bring to the writing at Author-it.
The payoff
The numbers moved, and kept moving.
At FUJIFILM, changing the tone and design so the site felt made for local businesses is what really tipped things over. New Zealand went from barely a third of the traffic to the clear majority, the keyword count grew more than six-fold, and people actually started reading rather than bouncing.
The best part is none of it was a one-off spike. Because the foundations were solid, the traffic and leads kept climbing long after the rebuild, which is exactly what you want. Get the structure right and it compounds, whether the visitor is a person or a language model.
Want to show up in both?
If you want to rank in Google and get cited by AI, that's the day job at Cut the Waffle. Same approach you've just read, pointed at your site.