Building a Balanced Search Strategy for Success in AEO and SEO
When it comes to building an effective digital strategy, you must have an effective search strategy in place that consistently helps your target audience find you at the right time and for the right reasons. The two go hand-in-hand when it comes to seeing long term success.
But as of late, a lot in search has changed, and it continues to change. What made a search strategy successful 10 years ago isn’t the same as what makes a search strategy successful today – the same can even be said for just a few years ago.
That means that to see continued success, you must continually review and make active, strategic changes to your strategy.
And that’s especially true right now with there being more and more places than ever that the initial discovery of your search strategy begins, like traditional search, but also in LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and more, which has made things more complex.
Nowadays, to plan for that complexity, you still need to make sure your search strategy has a solid traditional SEO foundation, but also, a modern AEO foundation to match.
So to see long-term success in your search strategy, you have to plan for both in a balanced way. But what’s the difference between the two?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is primarily focused on building visibility in traditional search results, specifically full-page rankings, prioritization of long-form content, improvement on domain authority, building backlinks, and more.
AEO (Answers Engine Optimization) is primarily focused on building consistent visibility in AI and LLMS systems, specifically citations in AI overviews, visibility in AI Overviews, improvement in zero-click visibility, and more.
★ Want to learn more about AEO and building AI visibility? Have a look at these posts:
- Creating an AI Visibility Strategy for Your Real Estate Brand
- Building a Real Estate Online Presence Strategy to Get Found in LLMs
- Building a Successful SEO Strategy for AI Search Results
- Pivoting Your Website Content Strategy to See More Success in AI Search Results
- Building an Answers Engine Optimization (AEO) Strategy for AI
As an agent trying to stay on top of building a modern search strategy, it can be especially tempting right now to focus all of your efforts on AEO and AI visibility, but both short-term and long-term, that can prove to be a big mistake. To build success, balance is key.
That’s because right now, Google is still the dominating initial discovery channel making up around 90% of all search sources, so even if you think that “everyone is using ChatGPT to search,” that just isn’t true – at least right now.
Plus, most of the technical and traditional SEO work that make a search strategy effective also work towards making an AI visibility strategy effective (like building backlinks, resolving crawl errors, and consistently producing high-quality content), so in truth, they’re all intertwined in some way.
★ Want to learn more about SEO and building traditional search visibility? Have a look at these posts:
- Switching Your SEO Strategy from Keyword Matching to Topic Ownership to Get Better Leads
- The Three Components of a Successful Real Estate SEO Strategy
- Building a Successful Real Estate Off-Page SEO Strategy
- The Basics of Building an Organic, Inbound Real Estate Marketing Strategy
- How to Do Keyword Research for Your Real Estate SEO Strategy
At the end of the day, a successful SEO strategy is all about balance, and if you go too far in one direction, you risk losing what you’ve built in another, so it’s important to make sure your SEO strategy is balanced, takes into account both traditional SEO and modern AEO techniques – and overall, considers all of the different ways your target audience searches online, and making sure you’re being found in multiple different ways.
Want to learn more about SEO and get more traffic to your website? Our SEO Strategy Building Guide is a mix of curated content and self-guided workbook that will help provide insight on how you can build and implement a modern SEO and overall search strategy.
