SEO, AEO and GEO: How to Get Free WebsiteTraffic While Your Competitors Pay for Theirs

SEO, AEO and GEO: How to Get Free WebsiteTraffic While Your Competitors Pay for Theirs

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• First, Let’s Talk About What SEO Actually Is
• The 5 Mistakes Quietly Killing Your Google Rankings
• Beyond Google: How People Search Has Changed. Has Your Website Kept Up?
• What Is AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)? 
• What Is GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)?
• Practical Steps to Improve Your AEO and GEO Right Now
• How These Three Things Work Together
• How Grendesign Can help you woth your website’s SEO, AEO and GEO Optimisation
• Ready to find out what’s holding your website back?

---

Introduction

Most businesses know SEO matters. Far fewer know what’s breaking it on their own website, or how much the rules of search have shifted in the last two years.

After auditing hundreds of sites, we keep finding the same story: good businesses, good products, but a handful of fixable technical mistakes quietly stopping Google from ranking them. And now, with AI reshaping how people search for everything, the gap between businesses who get this right and those who don’t is getting wider every month.

Here’s a full breakdown of what’s going wrong, what’s changing, and what you can do about it.

First, Let’s Talk About What SEO Actually Is

Search Engine Optimisation is the practice of making your website more visible when people search for things related to your business. When someone Googles “best café in Fitzroy for brunch” or “accountant near me” or “top real estate agents” Google runs through billions of pages in a fraction of a second and decides which ones to show first.

SEO is the work you do to make sure your site is one of those top results. It covers everything from the words on your pages, to how fast your site loads, to how many other credible websites link back to yours. Done well, it brings a steady stream of people who are actively looking for what you offer, right to your door.

The catch? Most websites are making mistakes that silently undermine all of that. Because these issues sit in the background, most business owners have no idea they’re there.

The 5 Mistakes Quietly Killing Your Google Rankings

1. Missing or weak meta descriptions.

A meta description is the short line of text that appears under your link in Google search results. It’s not just a summary. It’s your pitch. The reason someone clicks your link instead of the one above or below it.

If yours is blank, copied from another page, or auto-generated by your website platform, you’re wasting one of the most visible pieces of real estate you have. Google may still show your page, but without a compelling description, fewer people click. A lower click-through rate tells Google your result isn’t worth showing.

Every page on your site should have a unique meta description that tells the reader exactly what they’ll find and why it’s worth their time.

2. No image alt text.

Google cannot look at a photo and understand what it shows. Alt text is the written description that tells search engines what’s in your images. Without it, every image on your site is completely invisible to the algorithm.

This matters for two reasons. First, Google Images is a legitimate traffic source that most businesses completely ignore. Second, alt text is a basic accessibility requirement. Screen readers use it to describe images to people with visual impairments. Skipping it means you’re excluding a portion of your audience and missing ranking opportunities at the same time.

Writing good alt text doesn’t need to be complicated. Describe what’s actually in the image, include a relevant keyword where it fits naturally, and keep it concise.

3. Slow mobile load speeds.

The majority of web traffic now comes from mobile devices. If your site takes more than three seconds to load on a phone, research consistently shows you’ll lose a large portion of visitors before they see a single word of your content.

Google is well aware of this. Since 2021, mobile page speed has been a direct ranking factor through what Google calls Core Web Vitals. These are a set of measurements that assess how fast your site loads, how quickly it responds to interaction, and how stable the layout is as it loads.

A slow site doesn’t just frustrate visitors. It actively signals to Google that your site offers a poor experience, and that pushes you down the rankings.

Common culprits include oversized images, too many third-party scripts running in the background, and cheap hosting that can’t handle traffic spikes. All of these are fixable.

4. Weak or missing keyword focus in page titles.

Your page title is one of the strongest signals you send to Google about what a page covers. Yet most businesses either write titles that sound good but mean nothing to a search engine, or they fill them with the business name and leave out the words people actually type when looking for that service.

Think about the difference between a page titled “Our Services” versus “Corporate Tax Advisory for High-Growth Businesses.” Google reads both. Only one tells it clearly what the page is about, who it’s for, and why someone searching for that service should click.

Every page needs a distinct, specific title built around the words and phrases your actual customers search for. This is especially easy to get wrong on service pages, location pages, and product listings, where businesses often use vague or templated titles without realising how much ranking potential they’re leaving behind.

5. Zero internal linking.

Internal links are the connections between pages on your own website. They do more than help visitors navigate. They tell Google how your content is structured, which pages are most important, and how different topics on your site relate to each other.

When pages exist in isolation with no links pointing to them from elsewhere on your site, Google has a much harder time finding and indexing them. You could have genuinely great content sitting on your website right now that Google has never properly crawled because nothing links to it.

A good internal linking structure treats your website like a web, not a collection of disconnected pages. Your most important pages should be linked to frequently. Blog posts should link to relevant service pages. Product pages should link to related guides or FAQs.

Beyond Google: How People Search Has Changed. Has Your Website Kept Up?

Fixing those five issues will give your rankings a real lift. But if you stop there, you’re preparing for the way search worked five years ago, not the way it works today.

Search behaviour is changing in a way that most businesses haven’t caught up with yet. A growing number of people now turn to AI tools before they open Google. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s own AI Overviews, and voice assistants are all changing how people find information and make purchasing decisions. This is where AEO and GEO come in.

What Is AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)? 

Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of making your content the source that AI tools and voice assistants pull from when someone asks a direct question.

Think about how people use voice search. Nobody asks Siri “Melbourne plumber reviews.” They ask “Who is the best plumber in Melbourne?” That’s a conversational question looking for a direct answer. AEO is about structuring your content so you’re the one that gets cited.

The same applies to AI chatbots. When someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation in your industry or city, it has to pull that answer from somewhere. AEO is about making sure your business is positioned as the credible, authoritative source it reaches for.

This requires a different approach to writing. Traditional SEO content is built around keywords. AEO content is built around questions, written in a way that delivers a clear, direct answer within the first sentence or two.

If people in your industry regularly ask “How long does X take?” or “What’s the difference between X and Y?” or “Who should I call for Z?”, you should have a page or section that answers each of those questions plainly and completely. AI tools are constantly scanning content for these kinds of digestible, factual answers.

What Is GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)?

Generative Engine Optimisation is about how AI models understand and represent your brand when they generate responses.

When a large language model like the one behind ChatGPT writes a response, it draws on everything it has been trained on, as well as real-time web content in some cases. GEO is the work of making sure your brand shows up in that pool of trusted, citable information.

There are a few ways this works in practice.

Being mentioned and linked to by credible third-party sources carries enormous weight. If industry publications, local media, respected directories, and well-regarded websites all reference your business, AI models are far more likely to treat you as an authority worth citing.

The structure of your content matters too. Well-organised pages with clear headings, concise answers, and factual information are much easier for AI to parse and reference than dense, unstructured blocks of text.

Your presence on established platforms also plays a role. Google Business Profile, industry-specific directories, and review platforms all contribute to how AI models understand who you are, where you operate, and what you’re known for.

GEO isn’t about gaming any one system. It’s about building the kind of genuine, well-documented online presence that both humans and machines recognise as trustworthy.

Practical Steps to Improve Your AEO and GEO Right Now

Write answer-first content. For every page or blog post, lead with a clear, direct answer to the question the page addresses. Don’t bury the point three paragraphs in. AI tools and busy readers will both thank you for it.

Build out an FAQ section. Frequently asked questions are one of the best formats for AEO. They mirror the natural language people use when talking to voice assistants and AI tools, and they give search engines a clean, structured format to pull answers from.

Add Schema markup to your site. Schema (also called structured data) is code that sits behind the scenes on your website and tells search engines exactly what your content means. It can flag your business name, location, opening hours, pricing, reviews, and much more. This information feeds directly into Google’s Knowledge Panel, rich search results, and AI-generated responses.

Get cited by other credible sources. Reach out to industry publications for guest posts or expert commentary. Make sure your business is listed accurately across local directories, review platforms, and your Google Business Profile. When other trusted sources mention and link to you, it builds the kind of authority that both Google and AI models use to decide who to recommend.

Audit your existing content. Look at your most important pages and ask honestly: does this content answer a specific question clearly? Is it well-structured with proper headings? Does it include accurate, specific information rather than vague generalities? The more directly useful your content is, the more likely it is to be surfaced by AI tools.

How These Three Things Work Together

SEO, AEO, and GEO aren’t separate strategies sitting in separate boxes. They work together, and when they’re all firing properly, the results build on each other.

Strong technical SEO gets your site indexed properly and ranks it for the searches people are already doing. AEO positions your content to be pulled into AI-generated answers and voice search results. GEO builds the broader authority and credibility that makes both of those things more effective over time.

A business that gets all three right ends up with visibility across every part of the search world: traditional Google results, AI Overviews, voice assistants, and AI chatbots. That’s a real advantage over competitors who are only thinking about one piece of the puzzle.

The other thing worth knowing is that these results build on themselves. Higher rankings bring more visitors. More visitors generate more engagement signals that Google takes as proof your content is worth ranking. More credibility earns more third-party mentions. More mentions improve your authority with AI systems. It’s a cycle that gets harder to disrupt the longer it runs.

How Grendesign Can help you woth your website’s SEO, AEO and GEO Optimisation

Most businesses don’t have the time, tools or technical background to audit their own website, rewrite their content strategy, and implement Schema markup on top of running their actual business. That’s exactly where we come in.

At Grendesign, we go through your website in detail, find exactly where the technical issues are, assess how well your content is positioned for both traditional search and AI-driven results, and give you a clear, prioritised plan for fixing it.

Ready to find out what’s holding your website back?

DM us on socials or email us to get a free “SEO AUDIT” of your website and we’ll show you exactly where you stand and what needs to change to start building real, lasting visibility.