SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Search Engine Optimisation is the process of improving your website so search engines like Google and Bing can understand your business, services, products and the areas you operate in.
If someone searches for a service you provide, SEO is what helps your website appear in the search results.
Roughly 20% of clicks go to the first result in a search engine results page (SERP), dropping to around 10% for second and 4% for third. The websites showing in positions 1-10 typically receive less than 1% of clicks, with most visitors never visiting the second or third page.
What do you need to do for SEO?
You need to understand what your potential customers are searching for, their intent and what they expect to find, once you know this, you can make sure you have relevant pages that match their search terms and intent. For example, if someone is searching for a term such as ‘how much does a kitchen cost’, they will have completely different buying intent to someone searching for ‘kitchen fitters in my area’, you should have pages tailored to both searches to make sure your customers find you at the correct part of their journey. Your website needs to be fast, well written, and structured in a way that makes your most important pages clear.
This includes things like relevant keywords, topical authority, clear content clusters, writing useful content, technical SEO, internal linking and building authority through relevant backlinks and mentions from other sources.
Search engines want to provide useful results for the person searching, your job is to make it clear why your website is the best result for that person.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)
Rather than only trying to get a webpage to rank for a search, AEO focuses on making your content easy for search engines and other answer-based systems to understand and use when answering a specific question.
You’ve probably already seen this happening with Google’s AI Overviews. These are the AI-generated answers that sometimes appear towards the top of Google and attempt to answer your question without you needing to visit several different websites.
These answers can reference and link back to the sources used, which creates another opportunity for your business and content to appear in search.
Clear question-and-answer content works particularly well here. If someone wants to know “How long does SEO take?”, for example, it helps to give them a clear answer rather than hiding it halfway through 1,500 words of content.
AI Overviews are also changing the way people use Google. When an AI Overview appears in the results, studies have found that the click-through rate of the number one organic result can roughly halve.
What do you need to do for AEO?
Start with the questions your customers actually ask.
Answer those questions clearly and provide enough supporting information to properly explain the subject. Use descriptive headings, keep your content well structured and make important answers easy to find.
FAQs can help, but that doesn’t mean adding 50 generic questions to the bottom of every page. The aim is to create genuinely useful answers to the questions people have when researching your services, products or industry.
Good AEO is really about making useful information easy to find and easy to understand.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)
This focuses on how your business and content appear within generative AI tools and experiences such as ChatGPT, Gemini and other large language models.
Someone might now ask ChatGPT something they would previously have searched for on Google, such as:
“What are some good SEO agencies in Coventry?”
Instead of displaying ten search results, an AI tool can generate an answer and potentially mention, recommend or reference particular businesses and sources.
GEO is about making sure AI systems can understand who you are, what you do and what you know about.
There’s no magic bit of code you can add to your website that suddenly makes ChatGPT recommend your business. A lot of the things that help with GEO are actually things you should already be doing as part of good SEO.
Original research, detailed explanations, first-hand experience, useful resources and clear information about your business all give AI systems more useful information to work with.
It also matters what exists about your business away from your own website. Relevant mentions, reviews, directories, publications and other trustworthy websites can all help establish who your business is and what it should be associated with.
What do you need to do for GEO?
Make it very clear who your business is, what you do, where you operate and what subjects you have expertise in.
Create content that adds something useful rather than simply rewriting information that already exists elsewhere. Original research, case studies, first-hand experience, statistics, tools and detailed resources are much more valuable than another generic article covering the same five points as everyone else.
You should also work on building your presence away from your own website. If your website is the only place on the internet saying you’re an expert in something, there isn’t much information available to back that up.
The aim isn’t to “trick” an AI model into recommending you. It’s to make your business and expertise as clear and well established as possible.
Local SEO
Local SEO is focused on helping your business appear when someone searches within a particular area.
This includes optimising your website as well as your Google Business Profile for the locations you operate in.
For certain local searches, Google displays a map with three businesses underneath it. This is known as the Map Pack.
For example, searching for “plumber Coventry” might show three nearby plumbing businesses before many of the normal organic search results.
Around 40% of local searchers click on one of the businesses shown in the Map Pack, which makes it an important source of visibility for businesses that operate within a specific area.
What do you need to do for Local SEO?
Your Google Business Profile is a big part of it.
Make sure your profile is completely filled out, uses the correct categories and contains accurate information about your business, services, opening hours and service areas.
Reviews are important too, both for visibility and for giving potential customers a reason to choose you once they’ve found you.
Your website also needs to support the locations you’re targeting. That could mean clearly explaining where you operate, creating genuinely useful location pages where appropriate and building links and mentions from relevant local websites.
Most importantly, the information about your business should be accurate and consistent wherever it appears online.
So, which one should you focus on?
You don’t really need to choose.
SEO, AEO, GEO and Local SEO sound like completely separate strategies, but there’s a lot of overlap between them.
A technically sound website, genuinely useful content, clear information about your business, strong authority and evidence of real expertise can help your visibility across several of these areas at the same time.
What’s changing is where people find that information.
Someone could discover your business through a normal Google result, the Google Map Pack, an AI Overview or by asking an AI tool such as ChatGPT.
That doesn’t mean SEO is dead or that every business suddenly needs a completely separate “GEO strategy”. It means search is changing, and your approach to being found online needs to account for the different ways people are now searching.
The fundamentals haven’t disappeared. You still need a good website, useful information and reasons for search engines, AI tools and, most importantly, potential customers to trust your business.
