Marketing
Basics of SEO, GEO, AEO in a LLM Marketing Driven Strategy
By
Blake Wisz
February 11, 2026
SEO may enable your search visibility, but GEO should fuel your local relevance. I've worked with B2B businesses owners, SMBs, and SaaS companies all wanting the same thing—to rank higher—for what? To drive leads, sales, and revenue. But SEO isn't one size fits all and it is definitely not instant. A true plan for SEO it means taking the best tactics, tools, and content you can and deploying consistently over time.
This takes true investment, time, and experimentation. Here's a guide to using geographic optimization and search basics to power real growth by matching your content to local user intent. For those asking, "how to do SEO/GEO myself?" here is a breakdown of someplaces you can start. Tools AI today have made the work faster and more affordable for business owners as they enable faster research, content generation (done right), a data entry that often takes hours.
I’ll focus on how to apply these tactics to Webflow and WordPress sites.
Most agencies are stuck in 2015 when they talk about SEO. Keyword stuffing. Meta descriptions. Blog spam.
We don't.
Instead, and this may be the best argument I’ve heard for SEO and GEO (geographic search optimization), viewing them as infrastructure. They are not short-term marketing tricks. These missteps cost you customers every day.
Building on Webflow or WordPress means you do not have to reinvent the wheel. Platforms that give you control and speed, so that you can run a modern search strategy without being stuck in dev queues or buried in technical debt.
We build it for them.
The first pillar is seeing SEO as a long-term asset that will compound steadily.
Forget the 47-step checklist. Three things matter most:
1. Not only does Google care about how fast your site is and whether it checks certain boxes for Core Web Vitals, your users care even more.
2. We write content that reflects search intent, so we’re supplying real answers, not just keywords.
3. And we all know that the technical structure needs to make clear, logical sense.
Webflow’s technically optimized, clean code is built in, giving you visual control over structure without ever touching the back end.
WordPress’s core advantage is its flexibility: You can build a customizable optimization stack with plugins like Yoast, RankMath and WP Rocket. Endless customization when you need it.
- Marketers rely on Semrush to conduct keyword research, perform competitive analysis on other sites, and perform site audits on their own sites.
- Screaming Frog performs a similar role, but only looks at on-site data.
- Use Google Search Console as your main source of truth.
- Use Ahrefs for identifying backlinks and content gaps.
But Jordan Koene, chief executive of Searchmetrics, an S.E.O. and content marketing company, argued that algorithms are now so difficult to game that S.E.O.
And if you've heard the joke “The best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google search results.” you understand no business wants to be on page two.
Pillar 2 is the GEO strategy, the forgotten growth lever.
Local search impacts not only how users learn but also the why.
GEO provides you with the very unfair advantage to your business serves a location, region, or defined market you need to.
Most brands ignore it. That's the opportunity.
- Google Business Profile optimization
- Location-based landing pages
- Structured data for local entities
- Citation consistency (NAP: Name, Address, Phone)
- Reviews and reputation signals
The compounding effect
Service-based businesses report that a single GBP listing drives 30-50% of their inbound leads. Extrapolating that pattern to every location or service area you operate in builds an economic moat that competitors struggle to cross.
Webflow and WordPress both handle this well.
- BrightLocal is an all-in-one local S.E.O. tool that helps you audit, track citations and report.
- Search Atlas to track and optimize website and uncover opportunities
- Google Business Profile Manager is the cornerstone of your local search strategy.
Local SEO is perhaps the most underutilized marketing channel in digital marketing. Are you showing up there? “If you’re not showing up in the local pack, you’re leaving money on the table,” said Darren Shaw, the founder of Whitespark.
Note: When I talk about Webflow , I’m talking about all no-code tools. Use Webflow as a catch-all for Bubble, Framer, EditorX, Ceacle, etc.
- You want to get to market fast, but also need a strong visual handle on your offering.
- You don’t need a fully bespoke build, but you do need a polished marketing site.
- You value performance and security out of the box.
- You don’t need complicated user roles, sprawling e-commerce at scale or heavy back-end logic.
- Fast load times (directly impacts rankings)
- Clean, semantic HTML
- Built-in responsive design
- While custom code blocks make schema relatively easy to implement, it still requires doing it.
- This is the best option for you if you need a deep level of customization.
- Even if you’re running a content-heavy website, such as a blog, resource center or membership site, you still need to make it as simple and straightforward as possible.
- Specifically, you want to look for plugin versatility in terms of allowing certain SEO or GEO features.
- You have or plan to build an internal team well-versed in WordPress.
- The plugin ecosystem — Yoast, RankMath, Local SEO plugins (for small businesses) — covers most basic optimization needs.
- Advanced custom fields (to have different layers of structured content on a page)
- It has mature integrations with CRMs, analytics and automation tools.
- It’s a flexible, developer-friendly platform where you can control every detail of the site.
Both platforms work. What works for you will depend on your team and timeline.
We’ve built successful sites on both. Having chosen a platform, the strategy and execution it brings to bear on that platform will win the games that matter.
- Google Analytics 4, which brings conversion funnels to life with event‑based tracking, has long been our go‑to tool.
- And HotJar and or Microsoft Clarity has been indispensable to us for reviewing what people do on our site, offering everything from heatmaps to session recordings.
- Clearscope does help teams that use it properly rank higher.
- So does SurferSEO, another popular on-page optimization platform that features a strong content editor.
- Instead of doing that, AnswerThePublic shows what people are really searching for—the questions and phrases behind their queries.
- PageSpeed Insights is a useful resource for Core Web Vitals benchmarking.
- GTmetrix: To understand exactly how your pages load and where bottlenecks occur.
- Cloudflare is best known as a content delivery network and for providing security and speed.
- Schema.org is the official vocabulary used for structured data and is the standard that websites follow so that search engines can uniformly understand their content.
- Using Google’s Rich Results Test can validate that your markup is eligible for rich results.
- Luckily, the folks at Merkle created a Schema Markup Generator, for those looking to speed up the process on simpler sites.
Here’s the process we once customized for each client, but now use cookie cutter with all clients.
- Technical audit (crawl, speed, mobile, indexing)
- While we continue an audit of GEO, a review of GBP and citations and local content gaps for us, we are taking insight from what it’s told us so far.
- Competitor benchmarking (who's winning and why)
- Keyword and topic mapping
- Content architecture and internal linking plan
- Local landing page strategy (if applicable)
- Schema implementation roadmap
- On-page optimization (existing content)
- In terms of new content, blogs and landing pages led the way, followed by resources.
- Technical fixes and speed improvements
- GBP optimization, review generation, citation cleanup
- Rankings and visibility trends
- Organic traffic and conversion rates
- Local pack performance
- ROI reporting – results matter, vanity metrics don’t.
SEO and GEO aren't marketing tactics. They're business infrastructure.
- Reaching people at the specific moment they are searching for what you offer allows your business to grow.
- By taking measurable steps to be trustworthy and considerate before the conversation even begins, you establish the credibility that makes that dialogue possible.
- You generate leads while you sleep
- Sell your attention to someone else, you are investing it in your own ability to sustain a focus on things where you are able to compound value.
- You're invisible to your best customers
- You end up wasting money on paid ads.
- When they get there first, we’re handing them market share.
Why we stopped thinking in keywords and started thinking in prompts—and what that means for businesses
Something fundamental changed in the last 18 months.
People aren't just Googling anymore. They're asking ChatGPT. Perplexity. Gemini. Claude.
And those AI systems don't rank websites the way Google does. They cite them. They summarize them. They recommend them inside conversational answers.
If your brand isn't showing up in LLM responses, you're invisible to a growing segment of your audience—especially decision-makers who use AI tools to research before they ever click a link.
This is AEO: Answer Engine Optimization. And it's not replacing SEO. It's layering on top of it.
As one practitioner on reddit put it:
"I stopped thinking in keywords and started thinking in prompts. LLMs seem to care more about clarity and structure than backlinks."
That's the unlock.
Some companies are seeing up to 25% of signups come from AI mentions alone. Tools like Tally are case studies in getting this right early.
But here's the catch: traditional SEO still matters.
Recent studies show it's hard to get mentioned by AI systems if you don't already rank in Google's top 10. LLMs pull heavily from high-authority, high-ranking sources.
So the strategy isn't SEO or AEO. It's SEO and AEO working together.
When someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini a question, the model:
Here's the key insight from someone who worked on training Gemini:
"If you are a plumber in Portland but don't have any information in Google (location data, business data, etc.), the LLM will return plumbers set up inside Google Business before recommending anything else. It prioritizes Business data over Search data."
Translation: Your Google Business Profile isn't just for local SEO anymore. It's training data for AI engines.
If you're a service business, contractor, professional firm, or B2B company:
LLMs love:
Be the definitive answer for:
Think:
LLMs cite useful, authoritative resources—not blog spam.
Ask yourself:
Most businesses—and most markets—aren't thinking about AEO yet.
That's the window.
If you're already doing SEO and GEO well, AEO is the natural next layer. Same principles (clarity, authority, structure), different application.
And unlike SEO, where you're competing for 10 spots on page one, AEO is about being mentioned in the answer—which means there's room for multiple winners.
Here's the stack that's working:
SEO - Rank in traditional searchOrganic traffic, rankings
GEO - Own local searchLocal pack visibility, GBP views
AEO - Get cited by AI enginesMentions, AI-driven referrals
Each layer feeds the others. Strong SEO makes AEO easier. GEO gives you structured data LLMs love. AEO reinforces your authority, which helps SEO.
You don't pick one. You build all three.
We're actively testing AEO strategies for clients and tracking what works in real time.
The playbook is still being written—but early movers are seeing results.
If you want to future-proof your search presence (not just optimize for Google circa 2015), this is the conversation to have.
Further Reading:
The bottom line: Think in prompts. Structure for clarity. Be citation-worthy. The brands that adapt early will own the AI-assisted search landscape for the next decade.
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