Understanding SEO/GEO

What is SEO? What is GEO?

Search Engine Optimization & Generative Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is the way the internet has been working for twenty years. Generative Engine Optimization is the way the internet will be working. SEO has referred to principles and practices to increase visibility on traditional search engines. GEO is the currently popular term used for developing practices to increase visibility within large language models and other AI systems.

GEO is rapidly emerging as adoption of AI is ongoing.

The stories of the death of search engine results are, for now, overestimated. While AI searches and overviews continue to grow, they aren’t replacing search engine results they are replicating them, to an extent. Citations found in Google AI overview were likely from websites already ranked in Google’s top ten on traditional search platforms, per a recent study.

That means that while GEO may be a hot new term and while it may require a diferent system of thinking, these two principles rely on a lot of the same patterns, especially when it comes to the basics. These are hand in hand growths, not replacements. GEO will build on solid SEO practices and AI searches will mean that improved SEO and especially conversational/human readable content are MORE important, not less.

Why is SEO so important?

SEO and the newly coined “GEO” (Generative Engine Optimization) are how your brand and business get in front of users. This remains important rather you’re an internationally available brand looking to scale your reach, or a small brick and mortar hoping your locals can find you. SEO and GEO are markers of visibility.

How do people find new businesses?

Estimates are as high as 90% for people using traditional search engines and new AI models to find new businesses. Even for established brands, like software pioneers Vercel, they are seeing a steep increase in highly qualified referrals from sources like ChatGPT. That’s new business being driven to them by these models.

Search Engine Optimization is in a state of flux as AI usage increases, but it’s not gone away yet. Especially older users (”older” now including millennials, sorry guys), will still rely on traditional search engines. Traditional search engine optimization will also remain important for local and regional searches.

More broadly, SEO basics will continue to contribute good GEO practices. So…

What are good SEO (and GEO) practices?

Practical User Experience Design

Successful SEO and GEO will always start with solid UI/UX(User Interaction/User Experience) principles. The ability for your users AND the bots and crawlers that feed information to traditional search engines and AI models rely on some of the same basic principles.

Where to start?

To improve your SEO you have to start with good website basics. Websites will need to have custom domains, secure connections (hosting), appropriate page schema, markups, and files like sitemaps and robots.txt files. These are the basics that will make sure each page can be reached and navigated by people and by the crawlers and bots that help people find your website. Read more about What Websites Need here.

Once you’ve gotten the basics you can begin to worry about the next steps- which is getting ranked consistently for your keywords and found for long tail queries that come from AI queries.

In summary, though the way people are searching online might be changing, the importance of visibility online remains the same, as do the foundations of that visibility. Good websites basics are your first step in improving SEO and GEO.

Next Steps…

Parts of SEO - On-page, Technical, Keywords, Content, Link Building

Consistent Quality content & Keywords

SO what are your keywords?