Do you need to do Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) for your small business or is it just SEO with a different name?

Answer engine optimization, AEO, Generative engine optimization, GEO, search engine optimization, SEO... what the heck does it all mean? What is answer engine optimization, and how does it relate to SEO? Do you need to do both for your small business? Have you found yourself wondering about small business SEO and AEO? Join me in today's episode to find out what it all means, and most importantly, what to do for your business. 

Links mentioned - 

https://www.etchedmarketing.com/blog/the-3-pillars-of-seo

https://www.etchedmarketing.com/blog/why-you-don%E2%80%99t-have-to-be-techie-to-do-seo

Transcript

0:26

Hi there, and welcome back to the podcast. I want to talk about something that I'm seeing pop up a lot lately, which is The question, Rachel: What is answer engine optimization? What's AEO? Do I need to do that? Is it different from SEO? Is it the same thing? What in the world is it? And more importantly, how does it matter to my small business, and what do I need to do? So let's talk about it, my friend. Answer engine optimization, AEO. You may also have heard, um, GEO, generative engine optimization. You may have heard AIO, AI optimization, AI SEO. You may have heard a lot of different terms. Google has come out recently. They actually came out in mid-May and said, "Guys, these terms don't actually exist. AEO and GEO aren't r- they're not real things. They're just SEO." So what I want you to understand, if you've heard people say AEO, GEO, AI SEO, AIO, whatever, you don't have to worry about saying any of those. Y- it's not necessary. Just call it SEO because the bottom line is that's what it is. So answer engine optimization is SEO for answer engines or AI-based search, things like Claude, ChatGPT. Even Google now has moved to AI-forward search or AI-based search. This is where things are moving, moving forward. This is where you still want to be visible. This is where you want your content to be found and be cited and show up in the answers and all of that. So there's not a difference between AEO, GEO, AIO, AI SEO, and SEO. You're, I'm sure, hearing people use all of these terms. There are some people trying to make it out to be this huge change, this huge difference. You've got to learn all this new stuff, and honestly, it, it's not. You know, even Google told us recently it's not different. It's just the next evolution of SEO. So what you wanna understand is, in order to be visible in the AE searches, answer engine searches, AI searches, whatever, you need to continue to do your traditional Google SEO. Now, if you've been listening to my podcast for a while, you know that this is what I've been telling you since ChatGPT first came out two years ago. Continue doing traditional SEO because what we were seeing in the early studies and the early insights long before Google had told us anything, we within the industry were trying to understand how it worked and what worked, and we were researching and seeing, okay, if I test this, this works, this doesn't. And we came back and said, "You know what? It's just really dependent upon your traditional SEO." So what you want to do there for your small business owner, write content that is directly answering the questions that your customers ask. This is the most important thing from an answer engine standpoint, and this does differ slightly from Traditional SEO where we really just focus on that keyword, and then we use that keyword naturally in the different areas because people are searching with a keyword. Now, with AI search, they're searching more likely with a prompt, with a question, um, with a couple of sentences. There's a lot more insight that goes into that search. So this does vary slightly, though Google has said, continue to use your keywords, continue to put everything in the correct places from a keyword standpoint. So what I'm teaching my students to do right now is do both. Choose a keyword, but also make sure we're answering the questions, and we're using those questions as a guide for our content strategy because we want to know what does our ideal customer ask about? What do they search? What are they curious about? So that's one of the most important things, is really understand and think about your content strategy. Write content that directly answers the questions that your customers ask. Then you wanna make sure you're using a clear question and answer format in your content. So where you can actually put the question right there in your blog post or right there on your page, it's gonna be helpful. If you can put it in a header tag, that's even more helpful. Answer it in the very first sentence below it. You can see some examples of this in the blog post that I wrote that goes along with this particular podcast episode. I'll link to it in the show information. It's also on the blog at schmarketing.com/blog. Look for the one that says Answer Engine Optimization. Actually, look at any, any blog post I've written in the last couple of years, and about the last two years, is formatted this way. So the next thing you wanna think about that Google has told us specifically also is to create comprehensive, helpful content, not thin posts. Now, Google went as far as to give this new names when they released the guidelines, and they talked about commodity content versus non-commodity content. In the past, Google has referred to it as thin content. That's what commodity content is now. They used to refer to it more as thin content. What it amounts to is you want to create content that's very helpful, it's detailed, it's in-depth. You also want to build your authority and your credibility. This is where, and we've talked about this on this podcast before, EEAT, your experience, your expertise, your authority, and your trust. These are factors that Google looks at that they use to grade your content to decide, is this a good answer for this person? So make sure you're including your insights and your information, your experience, anecdotes, case studies, um, testimonials, comments from students, anecdotes, anything like that because what we're looking for- What they're looking for, honestly now, is content that goes above and beyond and includes more information than what you would just get in a generic AI summary. So you wanna really think about this and look very clearly and honestly at your page when you're writing something and ask yourself very honestly, "Am I providing value beyond what an AI engine would provide?" Like, if I were to ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, whichever one you like, if I were to ask it to write this blog post, is there anything in my blog post that is different, unique, better, provides more insights? Because if what you're creating is just about the same as what it would create, you're not gonna be visible. You're not going to show up on Google, you're not gonna show up in AI-based search because you're not bringing anything new to the discussion. So this is something really important to understand. It's also important to understand this is why we don't have ChatGPT or Claude or whoever you like, whichever tool you like, we don't have them write your content for you because content that comes directly out of those tools is a regurgitation of all sorts of other information that's already available on the web. There's nothing new, which means it's all that the AI engine already knows and it's the AI summary, which means there's nothing new, unique, different. There's no other insight. Now, that's not to say that you can't use them at all. What I'm saying is don't just do a copy-paste. Google actually released an algorithm update probably 12 to 18 months ago that was targeting AI-based spam because, I mean, every time something new comes out, people try to figure out how to cheat the system and how to make it work easier for themselves. And so there were companies in the very beginning that were creating tons and tons and tons of content at scale using ChatGPT mainly back in the day when it was the first one on the market to create all these blog posts. And they did-- it did work for a split second. They did rank, they did get traffic, and then Google very quickly caught up and said, "Yeah, no. That does not meet our standards. That is not what we're looking for." And so they released the AI spam algorithm update or AI spam f-- I don't remember, I think it was the AI spam update, and it reduced the amount of AI slop or AI spam content significantly in one-- that very first time that it ran, and they've run it a few times now. They really don't want that information in the search results because it's not really helpful. Now- It's just directly in the search results anyway because it's what they're giving people. So if that's all you're creating, you're not gonna end up in there because you're not giving them anything new. Now, beyond that, beyond creating content that's new, that's unique, that provides additional value, that answers the questions, you also need to build your authority and your credibility because the AI tools like Google are learning which websites to trust, which sources to trust. And so with traditional SEO, Google looks for links from other outside websites linking back to you, which basically say, "We like this site. We trust this site. You should like this site. You should check it out. You sh- whatever." Like, it's your... It's a way of another site saying, "Hey, we like this one." Versus AI-based search is a little different. They look for citations. They don't care if somebody's linked to you. They're just looking really to see, are people talking about you? Is there anything going on on the web? Are they talking about you on social? Are they talking about you on a podcast? Are they talking about you in an article? Like, are they talking about you? And then more than that, what's the sentiment? Is it positive? Is it negative? Like, what's going on? Because they want to cite sites. Say that three times fast. Cite, C-I-T-E. Sites, S-I-T-E-S. Yeah, I feel bad for anybody who's not a native English speaker. We have some crazy words. Anyway, they want to cite sites that are Particularly good at the subjects that they talk about, that have experience and background and expertise, and they want to make sure the people they're referencing are good answers to those different questions. So Google wants you to focus on your EEAT: your experience, your authority, your expertise, and your trust. Experience, expertise, authority, and trust. Those also are going to be helpful for you for AI-based search. Another thing that you wanna do for answer engine optimization, SEO, A- all of it, is to make sure your website is technically sound. Now, this is make sure your site can be crawled easily. Maybe check your search console report and look at your sitemap just to make sure you have one. Make sure that your pages are able to be indexed. Make sure you don't have pages that Google's looking, like crawling and not indexing, because that's not a good thing. If they're crawling your site but they're not indexing your content, you have a problem. Um, maybe take a look and make sure that you don't have important pages that are like 404 errors because maybe you moved a page and you forgot to do a redirect or something. Like, you just wanna make sure that your site is technically sound. You also can test it out using tools like the Google PageSpeed test or Pingdom. Those are both tools that'll help you test the speed of your page, your page load speed, because Google does like a website that is speedy. I have a blog post on this as well that you can find on the blog that kind of walks you through what matters from a speed standpoint. What you wanna look at is how fast does my site load, because the reality is people aren't gonna wait for a slow site. It's just not gonna happen. So you want to look at that. Generally with small business sites in particular, there are gonna be some things you can change and some things you can't. You can't change the code if you're on WordPress or Squarespace or something like that, and you're using a, a builder. You're not gonna be able to change some of the stuff with the code, and that's okay. The thing that you can generally change that has the biggest impact is how big the image files are on your page and how fast they load. So that's something you can look at and clean up is how fa- how big are my image files? We want them to be in kilobytes, not megabytes. We want them to be smaller so that they load faster. If you're on WordPress, there's plugins you can get, um, for other websites. Some of them automatically minimize the site, the images, some of them do not. You can use tools that'll help you minimize it, all of that. So if you want to focus on this, you want to be able to be visible in the answers when people are searching answer engines, things like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, et cetera, you want to make sure that you are doing SEO. That's really what it amounts to. I'm teaching a free live class right now. You're going to be able to, um, join. I've got webinars this week. I'm teaching a five-day bonus session. Like, you've got so much insight that you can learn if you want. I would love to be the one to teach you all about this, and just get signed up. The link is here in the notes. You'll learn how all of this works, and then if you wanna work with me, we're kicking off a new cohort next week. So join us, and let's work on this together. All right. That's it for today. Hopefully, that helps you understand what's going on with Google and ChatGPT and Claude and what exactly is answer engine optimization, and do you need to do it, and is it separate from Google, from SEO? So hopefully, we've answered a bunch of those questions for you today, and I hope to see you in the training this week and on the trainings Wednesday and Thursday, and most importantly, in Simple SEO content so that we can work on this together and make sure that your website stays visible. All right. Bye for now. Have a great day.