AIO, GEO, or SEO? Here's How to Tackle Modern Search Optimization

Are you spending too much time worrying about whether you need to impress search engines or AI tools? You might feel panicked and ignore it completely or abandon traditional SEO to chase the shiny new thing. 

Well, both approaches are wrong. The truth is, you can't do AI optimization (AIO) without traditional SEO—they're not separate strategies, and one builds on the other.

In this episode, I'm breaking down what still matters in traditional SEO, what AI optimization actually means, and how these two approaches work together instead of replacing each other. 

I'll walk you through the exact content structure changes you need to make to show up in both traditional search results and AI-generated answers, why AI-generated content doesn't perform well for AIO, and what you should actually focus on if you're feeling overwhelmed by all of this.

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EPISODE 164.
Read the show notes and view the full transcript here: Coming Soon

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Here's info on your host, Erin Ollila
Erin Ollila believes in the power of words and how a message can inform – and even transform – its intended audience. She graduated from Fairfield University with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and went on to co-found Spry, an award-winning online literary journal.

When Erin’s not helping her clients understand their website data or improve their website copy, you can catch her hosting the Talk Copy to Me podcast and guesting on shows such as Profit is a Choice, Mindful Marketing, The Power in Purpose, and Business-First Creatives.

Stay in touch with Erin Ollila, SEO website copywriter:
• Learn more about my VIP intensive options or just book a strategy session to get started right away
• Visit Erin's website to learn more about her business, services, and products

Transcript

0:05

You are creating content that nobody sees. Why? Because you're spending too much time worrying about whether you need to impress search engines or AI tools, and in the time that you do spend optimizing, it's gonna go to waste if you aren't taking a layered approach to optimizing your content. Today we're gonna talk about understanding the optimization landscape before we get into some SEO tactics or AIO tactics or GIO because nobody knows what to call it. And these days. Here's what I see happening. So many business owners or creatives, solopreneurs, they hear about things like AI overviews and AI powered search, and they panic in the panic. What they're doing is they're either ignoring it completely or they're abandoning traditional SEO work to chase this brand new, exciting thing of AI optimization. Both approaches are wrong. I think you knew that. I would say ignoring it's, it's wrong, but chasing this brand new excited AI thing where you have experts that are telling you this is exactly what you have to do to show up in AI search wrong. We're gonna cover the basics of AIO SEO and the difference between the two. In this episode, we will talk about how the two approaches work together instead of replacing each other and what you should actually do with your content to show up in search, to show up in the results from AI tools , like Claude, or chat GBD. Let's start with traditional SEO because it's not going anywhere. And in fact, I would stake a claim to say that if you don't have, um, a foundation for traditional SEO, you're, you're not showing up in those a AI results no matter what. When someone does a search on a tool like Google or Bing or any search engine. They're still getting traditional results. Sure, there may be some type of an AI overview, which we'll actually talk about next episode of the podcast. But underneath the AI overview, if it appears, will be a list of links, which are websites that will show up, and those are there based on relevance, authority, user experience, uh, technical setup. All SEO things that we have been doing since we started paying attention to content optimization. Traditional SEO is about making sure that your website and your content is attractive to search engines so that you can rank higher in those results. Those basics have not and, and will not change. One, your website needs to be technically sound. This means you need fast loading times, a mobile friendly design, secure connections, uh, a clear site structure, uh, pay on-page hierarchy because search engines prioritize websites that provide good user experience, and they also prioritize websites that they can interpret easily and quickly. This is bringing me to two, which is content that you have on your site needs to be both valuable and relevant. Long gone are the times where you could trick search engines with stuffing keywords or having thin, thin contact and boo people who did that anyway. Because why are we putting more and more junk on the internet? We want to put. Quality content out there and the content that you need is to answer questions or to provide value to the people who are searching for whatever topic it is that you're creating content around. You also need credi credibility signals for traditional SEO. This includes things like links from other reputable websites, uh, business information about yourself, but consistent and across the web, meaning how you express yourself on LinkedIn is also stated on your website. How you show up on threads is also, you know, maybe what you are. Public email newsletter looks like these signals tell the search engine that your site is trustworthy. And when we talk about credibility signals, I just wanna point out here that actually linking out to external sites that are considered valid and trustworthy is an excellent idea to build your own credibility. But moving on, you also need clear structure and metadata. Think of it like looking at your page titles, the descriptions, headers that organize your content schema markup. Which we'll talk about again later. That will help search engines understand what your content is about. All of this traditional SEO work is essential. It's still essential. It's going to be essential because it is the foundation that everything else is building on. If your website is slow, if your website is hard to navigate, or if you just have a bunch of thin unimpressive content, nothing else matters. You are not gonna show up in traditional search, and you're not gonna show up in AI powered search results either. So what's the point? But before we talk about. How everything works together. Let me just focus on AIO for a second, or GEO AIO stands for AI optimization , but other people call it GEO, which stands for Generative Engine Optimization. They're both the same. It's just basically showing up in AI powered search results, which includes things like. AI overviews on Google Chat, GBT search results, perplexity answers, or whatever other AI search tools that generate answers instead of just listing websites. The key difference is that traditional search shows you a list of websites and allows you to choose what path you're going to take based on the list of websites that it gives you. AI powered search generates an answer by pulling information from multiple sources and presenting it to you as one cohesive response. So when someone uses chat, GBT to search for, you know how to hire a website designer, they don't get. Two 10 blue links. What they get is an AI generated answer that might include information from several websites synthesized into one response, and it likely will be people within the web design field. However, I have searched because I'm trying to stay on top of my own AIO or GEO, I still haven't decided what acronym I like. What I have found when I've said things like. Who are good website copywriters or, who should I hire for a website copy, things like that, that would be related to my own business. I've actually found that it leads out to larger companies that don't actually offer direct website copywriting. So. Again, the results might not actually be what people are hoping for. They might have to prompt it more to get more specific answers, but those answers are what, what AIO is. And your goal with AIO is to be one of the sources that AI pulls from when it generates those answers in the hopes that it's actually recommending you or your business. Now that you have the basics, let's talk about how traditional s SEO and AIO or GEO, whatever you wanna call it, work together. You can't do AIO without traditional SEO. They are not separate strategies. AIO is building on traditional SEO, and at this point I just want to sing E-I-E-I-O. Sorry. Think of it this way. Traditional SEO is making sure that your website is trustworthy. It's authoritative in the search engine eyes. That trustworthiness is what makes AI tools want to pull the information from your site. If your traditional SEO is weak, if your site is slow, your content's thin, you have no backlinks or external links to quality sources. AI is not gonna cite you as a source because it's prioritizing the same signals that, or similar signals that traditional search engines do. Expertise, authority, trustworthiness. You need both traditional SEO for the foundation plus AIO considerations for how you structure your content and how you present your content, because this is not an either or situation. It's really a, a both and situation. Where traditional SEO and AIO or GEO really differ is in how you structure the content. Traditional SEO cares about things like keywords, headings, internal linking, comprehensive coverage of a topic. While AIO may care about that as well, it's especially focused on clear question and answer formats. In a traditional SEO content structure, you might write a blog post with a strong intro, several sections that cover different aspects of the topic, examples and explanations, and a conclusion. You would include your target keyword naturally throughout. Use H twos and H three headers to organize the section, and maybe you'd even have images that had quality alt text that maybe also had the natural keyword. Who knows that structure is working well still today, I promise for traditional search because it provides comprehensive, valuable content that will keep people on your page. Let's pause here for a second. Everyone. Regardless of what I said before this, regardless of what I say after this. What do you want to do when people get to your website? Excuse me. What do you want people to do when they get there? You want them to make a conversion of some kind. If you have products, you want them to buy those products. If you are a service provider, you want them to book a call or fill out a form that is what matters. So when you have people staying on your site, getting more informed, feeling more like they can trust you, it's so much easier to get that actual conversion. Now we'll talk about AIO content structure. You need everything from traditional SEO, but with that additional layer. AI tools I just mentioned are looking for questions and direct answers. It'd be great if your H two headers were questions. Your audience is actually asking. But make sure that the paragraph that immediately follows the H two answers that question directly. Don't elaborate on anything else further. All of those people who tell you like tell stories. Tell stories, yeah, tell you a story later. Get the answer out there. Because AI search tools scan content looking for question patterns matched with answer patterns. When they find the clear questions and answers, they're gonna pull that information. They're not gonna try their hardest to sort through your information and be like, Erin might have something I can use here. I'm not sure, but I used something else from her before. Make it easier for them. I'm not sure if you need an example, but if you do, here's one. In traditional SEO blog post of the past, You might have an H two that says The seven benefits of a hiring a copywriter. Immediately following that H two is an H three that says Benefit one. Whatever the benefit is, followed by a text paragraph, maybe even there's bullet points. There's a story. You give examples. Now you have an H three benefit two, and so on and so forth. Here's how an AI optimized structure works for the same type of content instead of an H two that has an amount of benefits. You would have an H two that said what are the benefits of hiring a copywriter? The first paragraph is a direct answer. Hiring a copywriter will save business owners time while improving content quality. A main benefit includes professionally crafted messaging, faster content creation, and higher conversion rates from strategic copy. FYI folks, I literally asked my AI tool that and just copied and pasted because I wanted to see what it was looking for so I could provide an answer that is similar in this example. After that, you get to elaborate with examples, share your stories, have those details. You can even add some H threes in, like you could have, you could say. Where the H two is, what are the benefits of hiring a copywriter? If you have a two sentence answer, and in that two sentences we listed what, 1, 2, 3, 3 or four actual benefits, your next H three is benefit one. Professionally crafted messaging. Now go into the professionally crafted messaging part. So I'm, I'm really trying to break this down and share you an actual example so that you can see you're doing the same thing. It's not about gaming a system. It is literally about organizing information in a way that is serving both human readers and AI tools. This search and question answer layer of, you know, SEO well, AIO on top of SEO makes a lot of sense for people, but let's talk quickly about what the AI search tools actually want. One, they want fresh, updated content. AI tools are favoring recently published, or keywords here recently, updated content. If you have a blog post from 2019, that is still relevant. Go on in there and update it. Change the publish date, add some new information if you can. Even minor updates, signal that that content is current and relevant. AI tools are also looking for a clear expertise signal going back to what Google's calling the EEAT Experience, expertise, authorit and trustworthiness. See, that's Google saying that that's traditional SEO. AI tools want the same thing. Can AI tell the real human with real relevant experience wrote this? Are you using first person language? Do you have specific examples from your work? AI generated content that sounds generic. It's not gonna cut it. You need actual expertise and perspective in the content to rank higher in those AI outputs. AI search tools also want structured and scannable format. Just like I said before, you make it hard for them to find the answers. They're not gonna waste their time, which means you need to focus on headers, short paragraphs, clear organization. Make it easy to quickly identify what each section is about. Long, dense paragraphs don't work, and unorganized content where it's all jumbled doesn't work either. Bringing me to the specific direct answers to specific questions. Don't just give general information about a topic. Again, we need to stop putting content out there in this great wide world of the internet that has no use being out there. If you wanna say something, say something important. If you wanna say, say something, make it. You know, detailed, make it come from your experience, make it helpful. And you do that by providing direct answers or providing specificity. So stop being general and give clear answers to actual questions your audience has. And the final thing AI tools are really looking for are citations and links. When you're referencing data, if you have studies or you are including any type of sources, cite them. Link to them. This is building credibility and helping AI understand that you are providing trustworthy information. And I talked about this a second ago, but before I move on, and before I sum this up, I wanna be clear about something AI generated content does not perform well for AIO. That's proven and it makes sense when you think about it. AI tools are not gonna prioritize content that's created by other AI tools. What they're looking for is that unique perspective, specific example, first person experience, all of that stuff AI can't provide. So you can use AI to help with content creation. You know, we've been talking about this maybe just for outlines, for editing, for repurposing, and I'll link to that whole episode. But the final content needs to have clear, clear signals of human expertise, of human experience, you know, and this means using first person language. That's simple, right? I, I remember when I started in the marketing world. I don't know if it was in marketing or if it was just in creative writing, but the word I was like. Don't use, I don't make this about you. Like I should never be in your copy. Guess what? Here we are, 20, 25 and into the future, and I is very helpful. You wanna say things like, in my experience I've found when I work with clients, whatever, right? Like it doesn't have to be all about you, but you do have to be part of it. It also means things like using specific examples from your actual work, having a unique perspective, you know, not just resharing generic information that anyone could. And having details, using details that show a deep understanding of the topic. You want it to perform well in traditional search and you want it to perform well in AI search. So make it, make it quality. Let's make this practical. If you're a small business owner trying to navigate all of this, here is exactly what you should focus on first. Get your traditional SEO foundation solid. Make sure your website's fast. It's mobile friendly, it has clear navigation. Make sure your content is valuable and organized. This is a non-negotiable, and if you are already overwhelmed, hire me to do an SEO audit for you so I can get these things figured out and fixed. Second. Audit your existing content. I mean this, you could hire me to do this as well, but audit it so you can find AIO or GEO opportunities. Look at your best blog post. Can you add clear question based headers? Can you structure answers more directly? Can you unpublish dates or update the the previously published date? Those are all quick wins. Third, create new content with both traditional SEO and AIO in mind, valuable content. You know, again, if you're already doing, let's say, YouTube, show notes or podcast show notes, you're creating content, add the structure, add the questions and answers. It's not more work, it's just being more intentional about the work that you're already doing and forth. Make sure that expertise and experience is in there. No more generic content. If you're writing new things, share examples. Share your perspective, your experience. Go back into the quality content that you've already written and add your experience, add your stories, add your examples in there. And finally, keep your content fresh. Set up a system where you review and update your top performing content regularly. Even minor updates are signal signaling that there has been a current change or there there's a current relevance. And again, this is why working with someone who is experienced in both SEO and content could be very helpful. We have systems where we can do this on the backend for you and provide you just a report on what's going on. You know, are you ranking well? What needs to be adjusted? Is there any new content that needs to be written? What can we go in and edit to make this all easier and work better for you? But to wrap this all up. Traditional SEO, it's not dead at all. I get so annoyed when I hear people say things like this without traditional SEO, there is no AI optimization. There's like, it's doesn't there. But on top of that, AI optimization also is an optional. You need both. And they work together rather than competing. Fundamentals here have not changed. Create valuable, trustworthy content that serves your audience, it that shows your expertise, but what's changed is how we're structuring slightly and presenting the content to serve both human readers and AI tools. Next we're gonna talk specifically about AI overviews, what they are, how they work, the, the strategic decisions you need to make about whether you even want to show up in them, and then how you can optimize more for ai, search for for your business.