Invest in your skillset to advance your career

Helen says: “Keep your SEO career on track.

When it comes to your skillset, you need to stop thinking of ‘SEO versus GEO’. Instead, you need to understand how to apply your organic discoverability skills to each and every channel that you may need to – and how you can use AI to enhance those skills.”

How much of your SEO time should you focus on developing those skills?

“SEO is a career that is constantly changing, and not just in the sense that what works in SEO is changing. The tools and educational platforms that are available are changing as well.

As a result of that, we really need to be investing a lot in our own careers and in our skill sets. I like to spend at least a little bit of time every day dipping into articles, watching webinars, or just making sure that there's no breaking news within the SEO industry that I'm missing.

Treat it like an investment. Make sure that you are spending a significant portion of your time investing in those skills and keeping current with what's going on, without succumbing to the hype and fear-mongering that also seems to go around the space at the moment.”

If someone's relatively new in their career, how do they know what information to focus on?

“It is really overwhelming, and you can fall down some pretty interesting rabbit holes if you're not careful.

Pick a few people within the industry who are fairly well respected – the names that come up time and time again on LinkedIn, at conferences, or within some of the more popular online publications. Just keep up with what they're talking about and the sources they're citing.

SEOs who've been in the industry for a long time and are quite vocal about new things that are happening will often reference studies or articles that they've read. That gives you an understanding of where to find reliable information, because it's being seconded and thirded by well-known, trusted SEO professionals. You can use that as a bit of a verification, almost like Google does with backlinks.

In our industry, there's such a risk of people jumping from one shiny thing to the next shiny thing. We forget that there's a whole underlying set of skills that are really core to SEO, GEO, or whatever acronym comes next.

Things like making sure that you understand what your users are interested in, how to develop a content strategy, how bots will navigate around your website, or even simple things like stakeholder management or data analysis (which are sometimes the trickiest).

These are going to be prevalent across any marketing discipline. They're going to be prevalent across any discoverability discipline. It's worth homing in on those skills first and making sure that you have a really good foundation there before you start looking at how to apply X, Y, and Z tactics that someone's talking about on LinkedIn.”

How does an SEO identify skills that will help them utilise AI in their workflows?

“It's really about understanding what is taking up your time at the moment, that could be better spent elsewhere. Not just using AI to automate things for the sake of it, but looking at what the value add would be if you spend time trying to vibe code a particular functionality using AI, or try to automate something.

Is it actually going to bring in efficiencies in your workflow, or is it just automating for the sake of automating, which is no good to anyone? Take a step back, have a look over your work week, and understand where you're duplicating efforts. Do you do something each day? Do you check on Search Console or check keywords each day? Are you doing something that is repeated, that AI could summarise for you?

Look at how this is helping you, rather than it just being a new toy that you’re playing with. You should absolutely develop your skills in vibe coding and using AI workflows, but if it's something you're spending a lot of time doing, make sure it is bringing some actual efficiency to your workflow.”

How do you identify which AI to use?

“I would say, use whichever one you feel most comfortable with.

I don't have a preference in terms of which LLMs to use for automation. I imagine 50% of the people that you speak to will have a preference, that's absolutely fine, but just start trying with each of them and seeing which you find most efficient or most accurate.

That, in itself, is good for SEOs to do because it keeps you in the mindset of searchers – people who are looking to do things using LLMs. If you just focus on the one LLM for the work that you're doing, you run the risk of being very specialist within that one, and perhaps not noticing when new features or new types of answers are released in others.

Maybe hedge your bets a bit and try working across a few of them, just so that you're keeping current as they're updating.

Go relatively deep on two or three of them. Maybe you're utilising two to help you vibe code something. You might use one LLM to do the vibe coding and another to spot check how it's going or help with debugging. You're using two in parallel, in some depth.

Then just make sure that you are utilising the other popular ones, or the ones that you see driving traffic to your website, so that you're keeping up with what's going on.

It's like how, in traditional SEO, a lot of people would focus the majority of their time on Google, but that's not to say they'd be completely neglecting Bing or Yandex, because it's still important. They might not be using it every day, but they still need to know what is happening and what is being updated there. Treat LLMs in a similar way.”

Vibe coding is obviously a way to generate code from natural language prompts, but how do you ensure that the code that's produced is optimal?

“If any of my developer friends were to hear me say this, they'd probably be glaring at me. I will say, just be careful, because it probably isn't going to be the most efficient code. As SEOs, we don't necessarily know how to code ourselves, and we're definitely not going to find the optimum way of coding using LLMs.

However, to make sure that you have something that is usable, I would suggest you use more than one LLM. You might use Perplexity to help you with the initial coding, then use ChatGPT to help you spot-check things, debug, and make sure that you are creating something that is usable. The big risk is that you spend a lot of time, and Perplexity is telling you that you’re doing a great job, but it doesn't work.

You definitely want to be careful that you're not releasing code onto your production website without running it past someone who genuinely knows how to code first. That's a huge caveat.

If we're talking about coding tools that you can use yourself within your SEO workflows, you can be a little bit more experimental. It might not work perfectly the first time, but that's when you iterate.

If it's something for your own use, or for you and your team, then you can be a little bit more lenient. If you're trying to code something that's going to go out into your production website, then be very, very careful.”

What are the most common types of code to produce with LLMs?

“As SEOs, we want to be looking at things like schema, because that can save you time. If you're there trying to manually code schema, or you're using tools that aren't very efficient, then you could use an LLM to help you.

It's also very quick to check. You can then run the code that it's produced through Schema.org's validator. That's a very quick way of saying, yes, this is going to work, or it's not – which makes things a lot easier. Then you can have a bit more certainty that, if you do put it on your production website, it's going to do what you think it's going to do.

It can also help you check other implementations. If you notice that something's not really working on your website currently, you can use an LLM to help you diagnose what's going on. That could be quite helpful for SEO.

I would always be cautious with what information you're putting into LLMs, and remember that they are not necessarily security-checked by your infosec team. If you're giving any important data to LLMs to help with coding, be very mindful of the fact that it's going into the servers of a third party. However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't be experimenting with it.”

Is there an API with a schema.org validator, or is it something that has to be done manually?

“I don't know. That's something worth looking into because, if you are using an API, that's going to make things a lot quicker.”

How much overlap is there between GEO and SEO?

“There’s a huge overlap. Strategically, and in the way you think about optimizing for SEO and LLMs, it's very similar. The strategy behind it is very similar.

Where the differences occur is in the tactics. For skill set, if you're looking at where you should be investing time that's going to benefit you in both SEO and GEO, I would look at things like how you understand what your audience wants. User intent analysis. How do you understand what it is that they're looking for or what stages during the buying journey they are using a traditional search engine like Google versus an LLM like ChatGPT?

They may be using one for one part of their discovery journey and the other for another part. Be really aware of how to analyse your audience. Then, with things like content strategy development, there are tactical differences.

We talk about stuff like chunking with GEO, and making sure that the LLMs can really understand the concept behind the content that you're creating. However, you're not going to create a completely separate page for LLMs from the one you're creating for Google. It's going to be the same page.

Content strategy, in essence, is going to be very similar. You might just need to tailor the way you produce the content slightly to hit both goals of being accessible and usable for search engines, as well as LLMs.

Then, of course, the basics of technical SEO will be needed across both types of discovery engines because they need to be able to get to your website, they need to be able to parse your website, and they need to be able to digest your website in order for you to appear within their answers – whether that's Google's answers or Perplexity's answers.

Thinking of it like that (understanding that these are very similar types of platforms, they’re trying to meet the needs of the user, and they're creating an answer to meet the needs of the user) helps you realise that there's not a huge amount of difference between the strategies. It is the tactics where the differences really start to show up.”

What are the key elements of semantic chunking, to make your content more extractable and quotable?

“The fact that we've gone full circle and we're asking about content length again shows just how similar GEO is to SEO. That's a question that's plagued SEOs for many years: How long should my content be? We're in a very similar place with GEO again, looking at, should paragraphs be a certain length? How do they need to be set out?

I will hold my hands up and say, I don't have all the answers to that just yet. That's where we should all be, because I don't think we're at a place where we can definitively say what you need to do when it comes to creating content for LLMs. After all, they themselves are developing at such a rapid pace.

I would say that you need to keep experimenting. If you're finding that a certain type or format of content is working really well for you, and it's getting picked up a lot in the LLMs at the moment, keep working on that. If you're not getting much exposure within the LLMs, start trying different formats or ways of creating that content to see if that does help.

The way that we think about content still needs to be about user intent and usability. If we're really looking at how to create content that is scannable and easily digested by human users, we're going to be looking at shorter paragraphs with subheadings that help people scan and find the information they want, and maybe a nice overview table that helps people navigate to the bit of content that they're looking to get to.

As with SEO, we need to keep the user at the heart of GEO. By doing that, we'll hopefully be getting closer to the optimum for both SEO and GEO.”

Helen, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“You shouldn't feel overwhelmed that GEO will require a whole new strategy.

Instead, focus on the core skills that are important for SEO and GEO, whilst staying current on the tips and techniques that use AI to your advantage.”

Helen Pollitt is a Director of SEO at Getty Images. Find out more over at GettyImages.com.