marketing – Trooming

SEO & AEO: Any Different?

Almost 2 years back, when I was working with one of my clients, he asked his SEO team: “How can we get shown up in ChatGPT”? The answers were quite different, and most of them were not quite sure how to approach this.

Fast forward two years, and we started seeing changes in the way ChatGPT presents the results and became a new channel in revenue generation. Seems like many were ignoring or were not aware of it.

Recently, I heard the same question in the meeting room and the responses weren’t much different. During that meeting, I encountered numerous obnoxious comments, such as…

SEO is going to die.

3. You can’t optimize for AEO

4. Someone even gave an obnoxiously big quote to do AEO.

5. and many more

It was all a mess. The big takeaway question I have is, “ Are they different? Is SEO going to die? I will try to simplify things as much as possible, so let’s dive in!

Before we start, let’s first look at the basics and definitions.

AEO → Answer Engine Optimization (some people will call this GEO, but don’t worry, it’s the same. It just means Generative Engine Optimization, but I prefer and believe the first one is a better choice of words because generative engines mean that they can generate images, videos, etc, but our context is around text.)

SEO → Search Engine Optimization

I am not going to explain this here. Because there is already a wealth of information available online about this, you can explore further by reading…

The first question is: Is it worth investing money and effort into doing AEO optimization?

The simple answer is Yes! Because, as per the latest data, the conversion from LLM is 6X better than Google. After the latest update of ChatGPT, the search results are showing up as tiles and clickable links; the conversion is going to go up even further.

So, how can you show up in LLMs?

How do you show up in LLM chats, like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude etc.

In order to understand this, we need to look at how this used to happen in the SEO world.

Simply put, in traditional SEO, we used to create landing pages for high-volume keywords. Over a period of time, you will get domain authority, get value for your url, etc.

With AEO, this stays the same, but the Head and Tail are different.

For those who don’t understand head and tail in SEO:

Head or Head Terms: Head terms are phrase that refers to keywords which are broad in nature and have a high volume of monthly searches. For eg: Shoes, running shoes, pet food, pet toys etc..

Tail or Long-Tail: Long-tail keywords are the more specific, and therefore less frequently searched-for, phrases related to a chosen topic and its head terms. for eg: “wide toe box running shoes”, “best dog toys for angry dogs”

What’s different about the Head in the AEO world?

If we simplify things in the AEO world, the head is whatever you do in SEO plus + getting as many mentions in the citations. If you get mentioned in a citation, you will eventually start showing up in the LLMs.

What’s different about the Tail in the AEO world?

The tail is larger in chat because of the follow-up questions. As per the latest study, the average words in an LLM tail is 25 vs 6 in traditional SEO.

So basically, this means certain things are in our control, and that you could optimize.

Before looking into those, let’s try to understand how LLMs are finding information in a simple way.

Learning Models of LLM

At a high level, the LLMs have two core learning modules: the Core Model and the RAG( Retrieval-Augmented Generation).

Core Model:

This crawls millions and millions of web pages and trains the model. This is as if we read books and get knowledge about the world.

For example, if you type who invented the electric bulb, then it will automatically predict the next word “Thomas Alva Edison”.

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation):

This is the equivalent of a search. This means that LLMs do the search and then summarize the search in simple English.

So if we know how and where LLMs look and value more, we could optimize and get our results across to LLMs using the RAG module. Because influencing or changing the core model is not easy and would require a lot of effort, it may not even yield the desired results in the near future or not at all.

Onsite & Offsite Optimisation

So let’s look at what’s in your control and what you can do: There are things you can do onsite and offsite. We are not going to go into detail, as this is intended to give a high-level idea and a real starting point to understand the topic.

OnSite Optimization:

Anything that you can do on your site is called onsite, like site content, pages, indexes, etc. These are things that are 100% in your control.

Remember the point AEO = SEO + Something Extra.

What are these “ somethings”? The strategy for finding some of those perks is:

Find the questions people ask, then answer them as much as possible on your site

If you could create a page with all the possible questions users will ask, then you could win this. But the question is, how to find these questions?

Step-1 :

Take the search data, find the keywords from that. Use these keywords and create questions for those using ChatGPT.

Step -2:

Identify all the keywords currently being bid on in paid. Use these keywords and create questions for those using ChatGPT.

Step-2:

Find the keywords your competitors are bidding for. Same as above, create questions for those using ChatGPT.

Step-3:

Get all the questions which is being asked to your customer support teams, store team, delivery teams etc.

Step-4:

Answer all of these and create landing pages for these. If you are an e-commerce company, then you could even answer some of the product-specific questions in the product page itself.

Key takeaway: The more questions you answer, the better

Off-Site Optimization:

There are many things that you could do, but we are trying to cover only the high-level and the basics. You need to strategize for each of these and execute and evaluate them continuously.

1. Who is showing up in Citations?

Citations are sites or content that talk about your product or company, so that you sound more authentic. Sounds like traditional SEO, right? But LLMs have a slightly different way of looking at this(maybe this is another topic for another day).

Search about yourproduct or content in LLMs and check which citations are appearing — this tells you where you need to have a presence. These are some quick wins

“The basic rule is that the more citations, the better.”

2. Some trusted places LLMs refer to and value for citations

These are some of the places LLMs value the most ( this is as if now, and these examples are generalised for all LLMs. This might & will change in the future)

a. Youtube

b. Viemo

c. Reddit

d. Blogs

e. Credible sites

In the above YouTube and Vimeo videos are easy wins. Another quick, but expensive strategy will be : If you are ready to spend money, then you could get referred to some of the prominent players in their content (citations). This will be expensive but an easy, risk-free winning strategy.

Difference between Search and LLM

In search, it targets thousands of keywords on one page and matches them against the search term. In the case of LLM, instead of keywords, it looks at questions and follow-up questions, then it makes context out of it before showing the results. This means if you provide answers to those questions, you have a chance of appearing in the results.

**Now that we understand the basics, let’s look at what happens when someone searches for “wide toe box running shoes” in an LLM.**

First, it looks at its internal knowledge (core module) and sees if it has relevant information. If so, it responds almost instantly. If not, it will deploy the RAG to fetch the results before generating a response.

This is where your onsite and offsite optimization will come into play, and “voila, you are there!”.

So now, coming to the most important question, which we asked at first: Is SEO going to die? Is SEO different from AEO?

Simple answer to both is: Not really!

We have been hearing this theory that “Google search is going to die”, for a long time. We have heard this many times with the launch of Facebook, Insta, TikTok, etc., but the fact is, Google hasn’t died and is not going to die anytime soon. Instead, all of these have become new channels to businesses.

So LLMs are going to be another channel, probably the most converting channel. ( This is already happening- you might not be able to see this in your analytics. Why you are not seeing this is a whole topic of its own (maybe another topic for another day).

Second part of the question: Is SEO different from AEO?

I would say there’s definitely a lot of overlap, and the basics of SEO remain the same. At the same time, AEO requires some additional efforts, and that will complement SEO.

I tried to keep the explanation as simple as possible to give you a basic understanding of how this works. We have barely scratched the surface, but I believe this gives a solid starting point to build your knowledge further. I would love to hear your thoughts and take on this in the comments…

A digital takeaway from “The Nike Story”

Nike, a company that once owned 38% of the shoe market, a company that always focuses on athletes and innovations. But if you look at the sales for the last quarter, they are falling. It’s the lowest since the 1990’s. Because of this dip in sales and to drive innovation, Nike has fired 2% of its workforce. Nike and the analyst are looking into the reasons for this downfall and they are coming up with various reasons for this. One such reason is “digitization initiatives in Nike”. We are going to look at this factor.

John Donohoes became the president and CEO of Nike in 2020. He has been on the board since 2014. He came to Nike with the experience of leading digital product companies like eBay, Paypal, ServiceNow etc. His presence on the board and becoming the CEO were some of the major reasons for the digital focus of Nike.

This was the time when Nike started focusing heavily on digitization and digital innovation. Nike started bidding on the “Direct To Customer” strategy by leveraging their Digital innovation and products like apps, websites, etc. During the same time, Nike started investing in its Global store concepts and four mobile apps.

Soon the sales numbers started responding positively to this strategy.

By the end of 2020, the digital initiatives started paying off and the sales from the app doubled and 20% of Nike’s sales were through digital channels.

The Strategy and investment boosted during the time of the pandemic. During the pandemic time, the competitors were struggling to reach out to their customers using their below-par digital presence and products. Nike was able to capitalize on this gap and as a result, the digital sales went up 30%, and the membership of Nike apps went up to 160 million.

This became an eye-opener for its competitors and many other retailers.Suddenly all of them started investing in digital.

During this time in one of the meetings Nike claimed that “Consumers today are digitally grounded and will not reverse back” and they predicted 50 % sales through online channels. They started production based on these projections.

By this time the lockdowns were lifted globally and people started returning to the stores, the digital story slowly began to reverse the online sales started going down, not just for Nike but in general for all the retailers. As customers walked into stores they started realizing what they were missing out on while they were in the digital world. They started seeing innovation and fashion created by other brands. People started trying out new products and they started appreciating the new styles and innovations created by other brands.

No one thought this could happen nor Nike. They ran into an inventory nightmare as the products started piling up in the warehouse at the same time sales were going down.

So post-pandemic the competitors and retailers got another key takeaway from Nike, “You should always focus on your core products and never stop innovating”. Nike made this mistake with their digital-focused initiatives.

Don’t get me wrong I am not saying don’t invest in Digital. Instead what I am saying is, “Use digital strategies to innovate in your core business, and don’t try to create a new digital product”.

Never forget that the customers are sticking with you because of the product innovation, or because of the style you are bringing to the products. The experience you provide is only a wrapper. Tomorrow someone else can easily come up with a better wrapper but it is not easy for them to continually innovate like you do with your products. Hence innovative products should be the primary reason for customer acquisition and retention. Digital should be only a complementing or supporting factor for that.

The key takeaway from the pre and post-Nike story is “ Digitization is needed for all brands. While doing so, it should not become your core focus of innovation instead, use digital to drive innovation in your core business”

Humans Need Stories to Work Together: The Power of Storytelling

One key factor differentiating humans from other animals is that we can work together in big groups. Yes, some animals can work together in groups like wolves or chimpanzees but in a maximum size of 50 or 100. But we are not like them, we can work together in groups of millions or billions. Yes, you read it right “millions or billions”

Take the case of religions, millions of people march towards achieving their spiritual principles even though they don’t know each other, people from different parts of the world, from different ethnicities, cultures, values etc. Have you ever wondered how and why this is possible?

That is the power of storytelling. Take the case of religion. Take any religion in the world they all are collections of powerful stories that connect directly to our emotions. Stories that paint a bigger picture or cause, a cause for your existence, a role that you have to play, or an inspiration from a character from the many stories those books have.

All of those stories have conflicts, resolutions, relatable characters, motivations, and emotions, that create a sense of belonging and community. This is the reason why people who haven’t seen each other rally behind these religions.

You might be wondering where am I going with this. The reason why I thought about this is because of this project incident.

My friend has been working on this team for the last 10 to 12 years. A team that was delivering consistently for these years but suddenly things have changed and now everything is stuck,and things are not moving.

What happened was:

This dev team was part of one of the biggest companies in the world. The dev and business team used to be under the same company until one day they found that they wanted to increase the profitability, and their numbers were not going in the positive direction according to the competition in the market.

The C suites sat together and looked at the numbers and they pulled out the most powerful tool they had. “ The Excel sheet”. They started playing around with the numbers and found out that if they could reduce the dev cost then the numbers could match up to the figure they wanted.

This was the eureka moment for them.“ Sell or outsource the dev work” !

They formed a separate unit inside the company whose responsibility is to make the parent company profitable. By either selling, handing over, or outsourcing the development team. Effectively they made their problems someone else’s. Simple!

So what happened at the end was the dev team who had been working on this project for many years was suddenly bought over by another big service company in the world. During this process, some of them lost their jobs. The new service company outsourced those roles to save money and the remaining was being absorbed under their banner. A story that looks perfect in paper. The numbers became positive and happy ending for the C suites, They achieved the target.

But the same people who were super productive earlier are not effective now. Projects are not getting delivered, systems are failing one after the other, escalation emails are flying right left-center, nothing is happening and the team doesn’t care. Why?

This made me wonder why the same set of people is not able to resolve these issues or not care about what is happening now.

The reason is, they lack belonging, they lack purpose, and they feel cheated. Now there is no story that connects them to the new flag that’s being flying above their heads. This is similar to the feeling of the people who are being conquered by another empire.

Almost with every merger and project pressure, most of the corporates miss this part. The power and effectiveness of storytelling. You have to realize at the end of the day every project in every company is a group of individuals, they need a common belief, a role which they all have to play towards a bigger story, and the leaders have to articulate that story and stay true to that narrative.

People seek purpose in life. If work lacks meaning or purpose, they will leave despite friendships. To retain employees, ensure the company’s mission resonates personally with them.

This incident ignited a spark in me about “why people collaborate”? What I realized is, that for us to work together we need a shared story or goal and one of the most impressive thing about storytelling is the ability to communicate and create feelings.

When you come up with stories, remember that storytelling starts with your audience and not with the story. For this, you must know your audience and empathize with them. Otherwise, you will be like that uncle who repeats the same story repeatedly. Not just that, you should keep your words and actions in sync so more and more people will start believing in your story and will start following you. Thus creating strong lasting teams.

Also, keep in mind that it is not just a number game at the end of the day.

I would like to know your opinion about the power of storytelling and team building. Please feel free to share your comments below.

The content is also available on my channel: https://youtu.be/Ke8jjejPG30