Why You Should Care About GEO

The advent of AI is changing the search landscape and how people search. How people find your business online has always been dynamic but no algorithm updates, or Google SERP changes have been this big in a long time, maybe ever. Google has introduced AI overviews, along with other AI LLMs that are now starting to act like their own search engines. While your brand is capable of showing up in more places, it is also as competitive as ever. On top of that, this just threw a monkey wrench in your organic rankings. As a consequence, industries and brands started to see their organic traffic decline while impressions either stayed even or increase. Click through rate decreased as a result. For big businesses this can be a minor inconvenience, for a small business, it could be detrimental.

 

As a small business, what can you do about it?  

invest in SEO and GEO and don’t spend more money on useless paid ads. AI builds on SEO fundamentals. It is essential that your website is technically accessible. After this prerequisite is addressed you can build and shape your content. So what exactly does that mean? How do I go about optimizing my content for AI overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity etc?

• Look at existing content and how it is structured and ask yourself, is my blog structured and organized with the headings? Do paragraphs explicitly explain what the narrative is in my headings? Your paragraphs need to be self-contained.
• Highlight, bullet-point or italicize definitions or important parts of the article
• Use visuals, infographics and make sure those are optimized with captions or alt text.
• Something that is often overlooked. Establish credibility with providing a summary of who the author is or a link to another page with that description

 

How will GEO affect local SEO?

Right now, most SEOs have been seeing the affect of GEO on national SEO, that is to say big brands, not small businesses or businesses with many locations. We haven’t seen much development yet in the way of AI overviews or the like in local Google map results. However, there leads coming in from AI to local businesses.

In my experience the local map pack still dominates local search but I have heard clients say that have received  leads through ChatGPT. While this is usually a very small amount, search is still manifesting there.

If you look at the landscape in local results for chatGPT you will see that if you type in mechanic near me you will get results based on numerous factors:

• Ratings and reviews
• Cost
• Services
• Location
• Particular parts and functions

You will also see as Chat GPT is thinking that it often uses other words to associate with your query. For example, as I type in “mechanic near me,” it will associate that query with “auto repair”

Sometimes it will give you between two answers to choose from. One is usually shorter and less detailed than the other or one will give you quick tips so you can know what to look for in a good mechanic.

This is why expanding and refining your content is critical to show up in AI results 

Should you just pay for clicks and forget SEO /GEO?

Paid search has its advantages. It is usually very low funnel intention. Small business owners assume that they can pay to show up for a keyword and thats it, they can just go home and not worry about it. WRONG. Bidding on a keywords is exactly that, bidding. Paid search has an algorithm of its own. You have to make sure your landing page is well-optimized before even thinking about bidding on a high search volume keyword.  A lot of people are going to fall in this trap because soon you will be able to pay  pay to show up in LLM results 

Investing your money in SEO/GEO is the proper first step to building your brand presence. 

Contact West Loop SEO to talk shop!