Class 1: GEO vs AEO vs SEO | FREE Advanced SEO Course
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SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, but technically it could have been called Optimization for Search Engines. The reason is that we are not optimizing the search engines themselves; instead, we are optimizing websites and content so that search engines can better understand, index, and rank them.
If you want to learn SEO, it is very important to understand the work of an SEO professional logically. To perform SEO effectively, you must first understand how search engines work. A modern search engine operates through five main stages.
Discovery
The search engine must discover your URL from somewhere. This process is known as the Discovery stage. You created a website and, let’s say, published 100 pages on it. But how will Google know that these pages exist? No one can manually remember all the pages on your website.
Therefore, you should provide your website’s URLs to Google in one way or another, so that Google can discover and crawl those pages.
Once Google understands and indexes your content, it can display the most relevant pages to users based on their search queries. This can only happen when Google is aware of all the pages on your website.
Crawling
Once Google becomes aware that a website contains 100 or even 1,000 pages, Google’s bot, an automated program, visits those pages to collect information. This process is known as Crawling.
Rendering
The third stage is Rendering, which is often considered an extension of the crawling process. There are millions of websites on the internet built using different technologies and platforms. Some are built with HTML, some are based on PHP, while others rely heavily on JavaScript and many other technologies.
These websites have different designs, infrastructures, hosting environments, and technologies. Google’s bot needs to visit, read, and understand all of them. The process of interpreting and displaying a webpage the way a browser does is called Rendering. The rendering process is extremely important because even if your website appears perfectly to human visitors, it may not be displayed correctly to Googlebot.
If Googlebot cannot properly render and understand your website, it will struggle to interpret your content and may not be able to rank your pages for relevant search queries.
Indexing
Once Google’s systems have understood your website, analyzed its content, and rendered it successfully, they determine whether the page is valuable enough to be shown in future search results. If it is, Google stores a copy of the page in its index. This process is called Indexing.
If Google does not discover a webpage in the first stage (Discovery), it cannot crawl it. If it cannot crawl the page, it cannot render and understand it. And if Google cannot render and understand the page, it will never be indexed.
Ranking
In other words, Google shows your website’s pages to other users in the search engine results pages and tells them, “The information related to your search query is available on this webpage. You can visit it to learn more.” If the stages of Discovery, Crawling, Rendering, and Indexing are not completed successfully, Google will never be able to rank your website.
Content Creation
Every page on your website should contain useful and valuable content. Only then can Google consider recommending those pages to users. If your website has very few pages, Google may have limited reasons to rank it because it provides less value to searchers.
Analytics: You need to collect data from all the users who are visiting your website through different blogs, service pages, and search queries. After collecting this data, you should analyze it. Analysis means examining the data to understand how your website is performing.
We look at which pages are receiving the most traffic, what types of users are visiting, which countries they are coming from, and what search queries they used to find the website. By analyzing these factors, we can determine whether the traffic is relevant to our business goals and identify opportunities for improvement.
Reporting
In other words, we need to demonstrate and prove the work we have done to the client. At the end of the day, our responsibility is to deliver measurable results and show the impact of our efforts.
AIO: Artificial Intelligence Optimization.
AEO: Answer Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing content for ChatGPT and Google AI, which provide direct answers to users’ questions.
AI SEO: Artificial Intelligence Search Engine Optimization. This concept is correct, but the reality is that AI in search engines is not something new. It is not true that search engines have only recently started using AI. In fact, Google began incorporating AI into its search systems as early as 2017.
GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, when we optimize content for platforms that use Generative AI, it is called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Since these platforms also provide direct answers to users, GEO is very similar to AEO.
LLMO: Yani ki Large Language Model Optimization, in reality, we cannot directly optimize for these AI models themselves because they are highly complex systems.
How is GEO Different from SEO?
Response Generation: SEO professionals focused primarily on optimizing website content. In GEO, however, the focus extends to optimizing content so that ChatBot systems can understand it and summarize it. Create a clear summary of your content page so that when users search for related queries on Google, the search engine can easily understand what the page is about. If Google finds the content relevant and useful, it may display the page in the SERPs.
Content Contextualization:
This means that we optimize our content according to the user’s query and its context. The answer is prepared according to the user’s query. Content is created according to the type of problem and query the user has.
Information Synthesis
In GEO, AI chatbots do not usually rely on a single source or webpage for information. Instead, they attempt to gather and understand information from multiple sources, combine the relevant details, and then generate a summarized response for the user. Follow a silo structure, choose one core topic, and start publishing in-depth content covering every important aspect related to that topic.
User Intent Understanding:
In other words, understanding the intent of the users who visit your website is one of the most important aspects.
Algorithm Adaptation
SEO professionals are not usually experts in search engine algorithms themselves. Google’s major search updates are relatively gradual, but AI-related technologies and platforms evolve much more rapidly. Therefore, SEO professionals need to adapt more quickly.
Content Formatting
This is essentially the same thing that SEO professionals have been doing for years. SEOs create different types of content such as blog posts, stories, testimonials, case studies, guides, FAQs, and more. So, this is not really a new concept.
Research-Driven Strategy
Almost every industry relies on research-driven strategies. The same is true in SEO and digital marketing. Professionals conduct research before working on projects because success is difficult to achieve without it. Therefore, this is not really a new concept.
Performance Tracking
SEO professionals use different versions and features of Google Analytics to track website performance and make data-driven decisions. Based on this analysis, they develop and refine their future SEO strategies.