808 | AI SEO & GEO Only Work If You Optimize This First (It’s NOT Keywords) | Andrew Holland

The best geo-strategy might not live on your side at all. That’s Andrew Holland, director of SEO at the award-winning digital PR agency, JBH, the voice behind one of the fastest-growing SEO newsletters in the world and the strategist rebuilding the search playbook for the AI era, while SEO agencies are still selling content and clinging to traffic reports. Andrew’s local business clients are being picked by AI inside chat GPT, Gemini and the platforms where buying decisions are actually happening. But how does he do it? We’ve been preparing for this shift for over two years and the model we’ve built has been helping brands win an AI-powered search by prioritizing animals. In this episode, you will learn why SEO, as we know it, is done. Key words are dead. Most of it’s dead. Google made billions by avoiding problem spaces and AI is about to monetize it. What is GEO and how to get your clients featured in search overviews and LLMs? How you are positioned in the wide spectrum of the solutions out there is gonna be how easily you are discovered.

What does on-page and off-page optimization for GEO look like? Publicity, fame, I call it fame engineering and that’s what you want to do as a business. Well I want to break this down a little bit with you. You’ve long said that keywords are dead and now that GEO is about problem spaces. A problem space. People come to search engines with problems and that’s largely a business’s job to answer that problem to be found. Traditionally what people did is they need to get more information to know how to solve that problem. A lot of that information we used to be produced in content for blogs and so forth and now the information out there is vast and AI tools can summarize things for you and give you that information a faster, more efficient rate than clicking on blog posts. That’s just the reality of it. Now the information bit here is where businesses used to go after with the hope that they would gain some brand advertising, some brand equity and still there is potential for that in certain scenarios but a lot of it’s dead.

Keywords are dead. Most of it’s dead. Most of it doesn’t have nothing to do with the situation and it’s just random keywords. In any case, a lot of it now is going to be ripped off to you and summarized by AI anyway. A business needs to be the solution to the problem and needs to present itself to the solution to the consumer’s problem. The problem space has two entry points. It’s the consumer with their problem and it’s the business with their problem is to acquire more customers. Now they meet at the middle of this problem space because the business is the best solution to the problem and it’s like a match. Think of it like a match. You want a match.

Now because of the way AI is, it’s ridiculously great at using search engines whereas humans aren’t. Humans aren’t. There’s a cost involved in using search engines. You have to click on websites back again. It’s a time consumption. AI can go and click on all the websites to different queries, change things around and actually better understand your needs and they can gather a huge resources out there at which point they can filter through that and find a solution out of this broad spectrum that better suits the needs of the consumer that what they’re looking for in the problem. Now the thing is before is we used to solve people’s problems by SEO strategies, you know, dentists near me.

From now the power is back with the consumer. We’re seeing organic search become a far more revenue focused business beneficial channel and also that but that needs a lot of different strategies, many of which of those strategies will be bread and buttered to local SEOs out there and they’ll be like, yeah, this is how we’ve always done SEO. Why don’t you do SEO like this and why haven’t you done it like this? And they’ll be they’ll be shocked at like the they’ll be shocked at how much low-class CEOs are better prepared to this than content SEOs. You know, if, for example, you’re looking for a pest control company that specializes in the removal of crocodiles, you know, not a problem we have here in the UK, but let’s just say that is a problem for somebody in Australia, whatever, is it gaiters? I don’t know.

But the what would happen is they would look for that and they would find a solution where somebody has grated a page or it’s in their website all about how they remove crocodiles, how they specialize in that field and so forth and so forth. And they would match the two of them together. So we’re very much gone from keywords now to problem spaces and the problem spaces best described as a business’s positioning. If how you are positioned in the wide spectrum of the solutions out there is going to be how easily you are discovered and your positioning, your business position, your brand positioning is everything because I’ll give the power to the user to find what they want. I think small businesses specifically are going to win in this and especially if you’re a small business that does something very well, a specific problem that’s solved for specific users. Are there areas like specifically say the website? Are there areas of the content that you would focus more on now than you would have in the past?

What I would do is the way I explain it to people how it works is your website is made up of what I would call information package, their packets or information packages. And some of those are paragraphs and pieces of content you have to put in there because the wireframe was built and you had to fill it with something and the web design company said put some content here and you copy writer or content writer or maybe you did it yourself and you shoved little bits of content all over the page. So those are the information packages or packets that you can optimize around and you can optimize around relevant business information that’s going to talk about your positioning and they can be hooks of information that something can grab onto but it doesn’t just end with your like home page or about page and it’s like that.

It all depends what they call category entry points in marketing. These are triggers of buying situations that people find them in and it’s a brand marketing concept. So I’ll give you an example that I use quite a lot. So let’s say I’m planning on a trip to London and I’m going to see Les Miserables at the theatre and I need some dining options in the restaurant that suits me, my wife. My wife has a shellfish allergy so I need a menu out there that’s that’s going to have options for her that isn’t shellfish. So what you could do there is you go to chat gbt, you give it the instructions and tell it you know what you want to do and what you want to find. First of all it’ll know where the theatre is because it’s got that data in its knowledge branch where I’m going and then it will start doing different searches around and then it will start filtering through. So that’s a category entry point.

A diner going to the theatre is a category entry point for that restaurant. So it makes sense in that case to have a page on your website for restaurants near XYZ Theatre and have a page on that website that talks about your dishes and maybe also you have your dishes itself, you know, you serve steaks and salads and chips, you’re not a seafood restaurant, we’re probably more likely to be included in the list based on the fact that my wife has a shellfish allergy. So would I, if I was optimizing that local business, I would say you know who comes to your restaurant? Well my you know my consumers come, a lot of them come from dinner from the theatre. That’s one group of people, okay well let’s optimize around that usage point. Okay well who else comes?

Well some of them are tourists who have just been to a nearby attraction. Okay well let’s optimize around that use point because we can create a page on that. It doesn’t need to be on the menu maybe sitting in the footer and so forth but these are entry points into your business and you know you talk about like well I want to optimize around what we serve. You know so my wife doesn’t want to eat shellfish. If you don’t serve fish in your restaurant tell us what you do serve. Okay well if you cater for allergies and you’re really good about that we’ll start putting detailed allergy information on your on your website around each meal.

You’re going to start taking photos of the meals, have a menu page which gives detailed information about every dish from calories and so forth because you want to cater for people like that. Okay well we’re going to talk about wheelchair access to the restaurant. Do you tell me who’s got a wheelchair access or a page dedicated to disabled customers on their website? Probably very very few and yet I think if you ask your restaurant if they cater for disabled customers they will yes of course we do we’ve got a ramp on the front. We’ve got this we’ve got four tables which are specially saluted you know we can do this. There’s options the restaurant can easily moved around because we haven’t got a cut at restaurant or if it’s not great for disabled people you might actually because you don’t want to embarrass you might be honest. Our restaurant is has multiple steps in the location it’s not great for wheelchair users but we do have a ramp that you can access and we can do a member of staff will be on call all times. So it’s all these different use points and thinking multi-dimensionally about how users how your current customers find you

or what customers you want to attract and what entry points because that’s a revenue thing. So what do I want more of and how can I optimize the website and the content around that and that’s what you’ve got to do. I want to jump over and ask about the technical side of things. Has anything changed over there? Is there anything that you know marketers should be thinking first and foremost on the technical side of the SEO work? When I look at pay the first thing I do with an SEO tool is I go look at the the title the matter and the header structure. Header structure for me indicates an awful lot about what’s on that page and what isn’t and usually what is winning these days in search is when people have a really good header structure. First of all header tags so if you look at websites most websites are designed badly and that’s just the way it is. So menu are they using header tags in the menu that’s quite a common problem that somebody’s wants certain font size so they set all the font size to a header header font and then the second thing is that you want to think about the structure of those headers what they say and many people go off in tangents and just completely unrelated

to what they want to do. You have a header that’s not scripted that’s not saying anything today. It’s almost like the header just had to be shoved in there and somebody went off on some kind of marketing spiel but the marketing spiel doesn’t really tell you anything doesn’t give you any extra information about this business and why you should choose them. So I think in header structures think about the content under those headers and think about in terms of why does this exist and what is it doing and what hook can I hang on my website that an ALM or AI power storage can hook into to find out more about our brand’s positioning you know and logical is like location right well where are you okay well think about the consumers do you want to talk about parking locally nearby do you want to give that piece of information do you want to talk about how to access the building do you want to talk about how to phone you and what the company details are and what you should press so we’ve got to think about content in different ways because we’re supplying ALMs with that content but from a technical perspective as long as your website is

crawlable isn’t too complicated you know and slow we obviously want websites to be fast and ALM to be able to crawl them and pass the information so I think from a web design point of view it’s more about thinking about the content more and thinking about how that’s going to be put on the website and necessarily the design first so the visual design is probably a less of an element now to some degree you want to know how that content is going to look and I think it’s probably going to need people to rethink web design full stop but that’s a massive conversation but yeah technically as long as your website can be crawled as long as it’s not slow I think a lot of this is going to be content based and thinking about your users and your customers about what their needs are and going deep on that so a good copywriting will naturally do that the way that we think about content super important for this new era of search but so is authority and so authority is still the main way that AI figures out what are the things I’m going to include into the answer do you feel that like the off page signals are changing a lot or are they largely the same

in truth for a long time search engines or google have used authority in a different way and they’ve measured authority in relation to sources of knowledge and information that gets referenced in all the ways so for example your brand and its positioning how many times does that feature to mentioned and how many times has that brand been a source of information a source of trust that other people have referenced the mechanisms of authority are still the same but SEOs probably aren’t thinking or haven’t thought about them but AI forces that conversation and we can see it now because everyone’s doing listical posts best of best SEO agencies best you know paid search agencies everyone wants to be in these lists because it’s a source of mutual information for ALLMs and search engines to draw upon so if you are a lawn company or lawn care company you want it works in Florida you want to be famous and that’s the goal how do I become so famous that people think on me first and once they think on me first that’s great I get brand search and then also how do I become so famous that artificial intelligence chooses me what do I need to do where how do I build that fame what I would call

what I call AI availability so you have two things mental availability and AI availability how do I make AI think about my business in the results and part of that by the way is ranking on Google some of that so logical you need to be on Google you know we’re not just killing SEO because it’s an index out there but an actual fact is that your ranking potential is like very different because humans are going to use search engines less and machines are going to use them for you so so um yeah your your brand positioning now is everything become the greatest showman that’s that’s that’s the goal publicity fame I call it fame engineering and that’s what you want to do as a business make your clients famous for what they want to be known for let’s talk about that changing world for for the marketers and narrow in on the on the content producers you know specifically so for content marketers out there what where do you start when you’re talking to them about what what are the new considerations that they should be thinking about I think I think the first thing he does is what is content for so for many people the illusion of SEO or their belief of SEO

was literally just information like how much traffic we can get let’s produce more bloggers let’s get that more keywords because if that that was visibility and there was some kind of brand effect in truth when you look down at that and you actually analyze it um it wasn’t anywhere near as powerful people thought there was very little confidence that did anything for anyone and if you’ve ever done content analytics you realize that a lot of SEO content was just a waste of money and the traffic was just an irrelevant visit for a few seconds with a high bounce rate while most content does a really poor job of advertising anything especially if it’s keyword focused you know I’m not be funny those blogs that you can read they’re all the same online they’ve been blogged the way they’ve been written is the same there’s very little out there and you’ll read it you’ll consume the information to solve whatever information will need you have and disappear and we don’t we can’t retain that much information so when we create so much content we’re always going to have filtering systems come into place and eventually there’ll be a filter of the filter of the filter of the filter

and that’s all AI really is so if you’re using is advertising you don’t really need to worry too much about keywords anyway you need to create content that’s going to get remembered that’s going to help your brand stand out and also that’s going to make people feel good about your brand that’s what advertising is if it’s content to say that we want to build an email list because that’s what a lot of people said they they did content and they produced content to build that email list so they could sell through their email list while there are loads of ways to build an email list you don’t need to worry about SEO traffic you can use advertising there’s loads of solutions you can do you can create lead magnets you can do organic traffic and you can do content marketing you can promote things and let things get traffic and then build your email list but there are loads of other ways to do that so if we exhaust advertising that’s one option if we look at building the email list another then what’s the final one well it’s called costly signaling you know what you’re doing is you’re using content to signal how good you are how knowledgeable you are and you’re doing it because it helps

clarify your business’s positioning your thinking and so forth and because when someone lands on the website you want to show them how good you are and how much knowledge you are and it makes sense businesses who produce content on a regular basis and different platforms are showing their signals it’s called costly signaling because it comes from behavioral science and it’s the peacock showing its feathers you know we’re doing an awful lot to say to prove to someone in a few seconds they’re knowledgeable and the cost of creating that content is how you win business and it’s not directly attributable to many things now the other side of things is some content that gets synthesized will be pulled through and will help to solve the problem and that’s when it becomes even more complicated but it’s the first part of deciding content is what content are you creating and why are you creating it what is the need are we building an email list is that it are we doing this because we want to show signaling or a mechanism of how knowledgeable we are or are we doing this because there’s another reason because we’re trying to advertise

and once you categorize what this content what you want to do with content then it becomes a lot easier to figure out the rest