How is Optimizing For AI Search Results different from just doing SEO?

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Optimizing for AI Search vs SEO graphic split down the center

So What Is The Difference Between SEO and GEO?

There isn’t just one answer to that question because of the number of ways people describe SEO or provide SEO services. It is definitely subjective. It’s all about goals. Some believe ranking in Google is the end goal and whatever happens after that, conversions, signups, etc. aren’t their concern. Technically they aren’t wrong in the strictest definition of SEO. However, business owners are looking for more than that.

If you define good SEO as…

  • Putting up a bunch of thin keyword-rich content and buying a bunch of backlinks.
  • Building 100s or thousands of junk pages to target every possible variation of your keywords.
  • Adding a bunch of city pages that have the same content and just change the city names.
  • If you use FAQs, Glossaries, How To Articles, etc. as a way to spam your keywords and/or links into the page.
  • Stuffing your keywords in every single header tag and repeatedly in the text where it isn’t natural.

Then, I believe you are in for some surprises and a lot of work to do sooner than you might think. If that is how you define Good SEO, then there are a lot of differences between what you are doing now and optimizing for AI search.

A lot of people use shortcuts rather than putting in real work. And if you think using these shortcuts is valid, the rest of this post isn’t likely going to interest you.

On the other hand, If you have been…

  • Writing high-quality, conversational, customer focused content.
  • Attracting links instead of buying them.
  • Building content clusters that use a good internal linking strategy, (not an automated tool).
  • Been structuring your website, your URLs and your pages so they are easy to understand and easy to use for visitors.
  • Creating unique geo-targeted pages for service areas that address the unique problems and perspectives of the people that live in each of those areas.
  • Creating FAQs, Glossaries and How To Articles that are actually helpful to your visitors instead of writing them for the search engines.

Then you aren’t going to have to change very much to get mentioned in AI search. And you’ll likely be interested in the rest of the article. Defining it this way, I agree that Good SEO can help you get more brand mentions. Structured, authoritative sites are easier for AI systems to trust

Of course, in just this one post, I can’t possibly cover every single thing that defines Good SEO or AEO or GEO or AI SEO. But I think you get the idea. Quality matters more than quantity and that’s true no matter what acronym you want to use.

Read the rest of this article and more on the Search Everywhere Optimization Blog

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