Search Engine Optimization and GEO Quick Reference Guide

Introduction

Congratulations on your new website! …or maybe you're looking to improve the reach of your business? If you were referred to this quick reference guide, you're probably wondering what you, as a website owner, can do to improve your digital reach through search engine optimization and rankings.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the practice of tuning your website, content, and marketing to improve online traffic and conversions. This guide will focus on organic SEO, otherwise known as the methods and practices to improve traffic without advertisements or other paid solutions.

SEO, and now Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, can feel like a complicated, long, and arduous process. However, it's a necessary component of a healthy digital marketing profile and Web presence. It's true that digital marketing, SEO, and GEO, can be careers in their own right. However, learning the background on digital marketing, how to shape and monitor traffic, and the best methods, practices, principles, and tools available to you is an important part of being the owner and operator of a website. These lessons can go a long way to improving the success of your business.

That being said, neither this guide, nor PxO Ink LLC, can guarantee that your website will rank well on search engines or in artificial intelligence and large-language model responses.

Our hope is that the information we've compiled in this quick reference will provide you with some basic information, tips, tricks, and links to other resources that will help explain and introduce you to the world of search engine optimization, generative engine optimization, and digital marketing.

Note: This guide, and your use of it, does not constitute a support relationship and is provided AS-IS without warranty. While this page is updated often, it may not provide the most up-to-date and accurate information.

Table of Contents

1. How Search Engines and Generative Engines Operate
2. Why Website Development Matters
3. Copywriting: Engaging Content and Keyword Targeting
4. Links, Social Media, and More
5. Measurement and Reflection

How Search Engines and Generative Engines Operate

Websites that operate search engines develop robots that crawl the entirety of the known Internet and constantly create indices of available websites, applications, documents, media, and more. Those search engines then use algorithms and analysis to determine how best to categorize these resources. An index and the associated analysis can be simple, or complex, depending upon how the search engine is run. When a user queries a search engine for a keyword, or a set of keywords, the search engine references their indices, analysis, and algorithms to produce a ranked list of search results for the user to review.

Generative engines work very similarly; however, they scrape website data into specially designed databases that allow for semantic search and iterative reasoning. Services like Anthropic's Claude or OpenAI's ChatGPT work both with their own databases and with search engines. The principles contained within this guide, while designed for optimizing for search engines, are still relevant for generative engine optimization and large language models, or LLMs.

Crawling

Crawlers, otherwise known as the aforementioned robots, systematically follow links found on websites they've previously crawled, to discover as much of the known Internet as they deem relevant. While crawlers are usually always running, they may not always be crawling your website. In some cases, depending upon a variety of factors, crawlers may only visit your website once every so often. Furthermore, not all crawling is performed organically. Depending on the search engine, you may be able to submit your website directly so that discovery doesn't need to rely on the organic process. In the case of LLMs, scraped data could be stale depending upon the model used. Most models now have web search as part of their offering, which usually scrapes known search engines, amplifying the need for a robust SEO plan.

Allowing your website to be crawled is arguably the most important part of SEO and GEO. In order for your website to be ranked, it must first be indexed, and in order to be indexed, it must be available for crawling. The first thing you'll need to do is check whether your website can be crawled.

Different search engines provide different tools to test how well they can crawl your website. Using Search Console, Google provides a URL Inspection Tool that will test Google's ability to crawl. Bing also offers URL inspection as well. You can even test with Yahoo!. There are dozens of search engines, so it may seem like an unreasonable task to test your website with every possible search engine. Some search engines, like DuckDuckGo and Startpage, rely on existing search engines. Generally speaking, if Google, Bing, and Yahoo! can crawl your website, you are likely going to be available to the majority of the Internet and the World Wide Web.

Now we're going to get a little bit more technical. There are two magic files that can help ensure that crawlers can read your website, and that the information they're looking for is the information you want to provide. The first is robots.txt, and the second is sitemap.xml. It's important to stress that crawlers are not required to read these files or follow them. However, crawlers for major search engines generally respect these files and they can greatly impact how your website is crawled. We won't delve too deeply into how these files are made, but a quick overview will help you understand how they work.

The Robots exclusion standard is employed by the robots.txt file. This file usually lives in your websites document root and provides optional information to crawlers on how best to crawl your website. Moz has put together a great resource on this file, as well as other techniques that can be employed to help crawling.

The XML sitemap provides a way for you to inform search engines what web pages are available to crawl, as well as information about how important each page is, when they were last updated, and how often to expect them to be updated. This file, like robots.txt, usually lives in your websites document root. You can learn more about sitemap.xml by clicking here.

Indexing

In the simplest of definitions, a search engine index is a large database that contains information about what has been successfully crawled and processed, alongside metadata that the search engine deems relevant and important about the context of that information. Once an index has been created, search engines query that index and analyze the results to best serve user requests.

Both search engines and generative engines use a variety of techniques and algorithms to find and analyze previously indexed information, and then determine how best to rank the results based on the search input received.

Unfortunately, these techniques and algorithms are often trade secret and unavailable to the public. These algorithms can also be both complex and weighted based on how the engine plans to profit from their users. Furthermore, generative engines can be even more secretive; as the instruction sets, neural networks, and learning algorithms evolve faster than search engines do. That can make the SEO and GEO processes unreliable and much harder to navigate.

Nevertheless, what we do have available to us, is the basic foundational principles about how indicies and search algorithms work. We can leverage that information to better serve our marketing interests. Understanding these best available practices and principles can help you craft rich information that is search engine and generative engine friendly.

We know that these engines pay attention to what is being written and how often a website is updated. Some have the ability to semantically understand the context of what is being written. We also know that the richness of the content, that is, how well it answers user queries, as well as what language is used, and how easy the information is to understand, is critical. Engines are beginning to understand when content is written by humans, or when it is written by other LLMs. As such, we believe that LLM-written content may not be as valuable as human-written content. All of this, and more, is taken into consideration.

There is also the technical analysis of the website itself and how well Technical SEO has been implemented. Engines measure the performance of a website; how fast it loads and how well it loads across browsers and platforms. They also measure how safe a website appears to be, and in some cases, how well the website meets or exceeds accessibility standards. We'll go over this a bit later.

There is also a common belief that how your website fits into the revenue stream of the engine may also play a part. With generative engines, semantic reasoning and targeted search outside of keyword analysis plays an even greater role on how the information is stored and retrieved later, because LLMs are designed to field natural language queries.

Each one of these pieces of data can be associated with the indices that your website fits in during indexing and used during analysis and retrieval.

It can seem like a lot to consider, but there are a variety of methods and tools that can make it easier to get your website indexed, while also directing search engines on how to index your website. Again, the most important thing is the content that you write on your website. However, employing meta tags and schema microdata are two of the most popular methods of talking directly to engines in a way they understand. For instance, the <title> and meta description tags should always be embedded in a webpage and tailored specifically to the information found on that page. You can learn more about titles by clicking here and meta descriptions by clicking here. These articles by Moz are comprehensive and updated regularly.

Ultimately how your website is indexed is entirely up to the search engine. They may completely dismiss your meta tags in favor of manipulating your content to fit their narration, but may completely ignore your website if you omit them. Furthermore, each search engine indexes the information they've crawled differently. One search engine may rank you higher than others. Remember to follow and keep up-to-date on the best known practices to ensure that you put your website in the best available position. If your website provides important content that a search engine deems informational, it will be included in their index and ranked accordingly.

Ranking

Ranking is the value placed on your information relevant to the search queries made by the user. Search engine rankings are based both on which indicies your web pages are part of, and what metadata has been associated to those pages. As with every other aspect of SEO and GEO, it's generally understood that rank is closely associated with how well a website fits best practices and principles. The actual ranking methods are a mystery, and it is believed that these methods and algorithms also change based on the user's profile; where they are located and what they have previously searched for. That can make it nearly impossible to anticipate how best to rank, so don't give up if you aren't initially ranking well, despite believing you're doing everything correctly. It can be an organic and evolving process that takes time. No one can guarantee ranking results.

Let's focus an example to illustrate how ranking works. For instance, maybe you're trying to sell a particular service in a particular location. When you search for related keywords attached to your area, like "developer in south-east Michigan," you don't see your website or your business listed at all. Maybe you don't see any competitors either, and instead the only results are listing for career opportunities. That doesn't seem right, what might have gone wrong?

As illustrated earlier, search engines rank their index based on the type of searches they receive and the type of engagement they've recorded. It's dependent on many factors, including the user's profile searching. They're trying to figure out what people want, and then provide the results that match that assumption. Maybe in your particular area there may be more engagement with career opportunities than people seeking your service. Maybe your profile is flagged for different results than others. It might mean that you need to change your thinking when it comes to how to present your information to the Web. In this case, you may need to survey your users to figure out where they're coming from, how they reach you, and perform keyword analysis with available tools to figure out where, how, and what your users are actually looking for. You might need to adjust your content to focus heavily on local area, like "south-east Michigan" in the above example. You may also need to change your content to capitalize on different keyword types, which we'll go over later. Knowing what your users are actually looking for is half the puzzle of figuring out rankings.

If we know what your users are looking for, what do search engines really want? Search engines are looking to provide results that are rich in informative content with engaging and rewarding experiences In practice, this can mean well developed websites with clear, concise, and particular information that matches the searches that people make. It can also mean websites that respect user autonomy and needs, as well as provide their information cleanly and quickly. It can even mean that popularity might be the most important factor to take into consideration, which often means you need to focus more on social media marketing, or SMM, to enhance your SEO and GEO. In the aforementioned example, working the local environment and becoming a part of the community could help improve your search rankings because users in your area will become more likely to search and visit your website.

Generative engines can be even trickier to rank with. Although most generative responses to user queries are based on search engine rankings, AI visiblity is also based on semantic language. Therefore, conversational information, natural speech, and regular updates play an even greater role in appearing in LLM responses.

Your best bet when it comes to ranking well with search engines is to focus on core best practices when it comes to website development and content creation, and follow that up with focused analytics and measurement to check in with how you're doing. In our next sections, we'll focus on exactly those topics, including how you can register with search engines to improve your rankings and get accurate feedback with how you're doing.

Why Website Development Matters

Content is king, but how content is curated and presented to the user is equally important. Your website, and the totality of your Web or online presence, become foundational pieces that determine whether your content will be seen. It is commonly believed that search engines take into consideration metrics such as reliability, website performance, user experience (how enjoyable your website is to users,) user interface (how your information is presented,) cross-platform and cross-browser experiences, and accessibility standards (like support for disabled peoples.) This is all in addition to the weight of rich information, where high value copywriting ensures that your content is engaging and worth reading by your users. A website that is architected with these aspects (and many more) in mind will meet most of the expectations that search engines have well before the content is crawled. Investing in getting these aspects right is crucial and having the right team backing your website is paramount to success.

Technical Optimization

Technical search engine optimization, or Technical SEO, represents the numerous techniques in website development that can be employed to meet the metrics that search engines look for outside of content. Technical SEO has a strong place in the hierarchy of optimization, because these metrics, as a whole, deal with how the information reaches your users and ultimately how that information is interpreted by crawlers. Let's talk about some of the metrics we've listed already, and why they're important.

Reliability

If you cannot depend on your website to be a reliable source of information, then search engines may not be able to reliably index your website, and in turn, determine how best to rank the content within. Of course, reliability depends on the performance of your website and who is hosting it. If search engines can't crawl, then no one else can either.

Performance and Accessibility

Optimizing your website's ability to load quickly and reliably can be more important than the content it presents. Uptime isn't the only important consideration. Your pages should load quickly and without graphical errors. Content, such as media and text, should be cached and compressed appropriately for browsers to interpret. Your website, and all of its features should be accessible to all people, regardless of disability. Accessibility ensures that your content is available, and there are techniques you should always leverage to improve accessibility, like favoring text-based content and employing alternative text on media for visually impaired individuals. Even aspects like implementing well-structured URL or web address naming can help.

Accessibility isn't just for humans either. Integrating the aforementioned robots exclusion and sitemap standards, as well as well-crafted metatags and schema microdata, or structured data, are also critical for allowing your website and its pages and content to be accessible to search engines.

Other Metrics and Technical Options

If your content moves, or is otherwise inaccessible, understanding the programmatic redirect language and codes (301, 302, and more) needed to communicate with crawlers is important to ensure that your existing rank is upheld and that future growth doesn't start from scratch.

Canonical URLs can help inform search engines where your content is supposed to live, to help with authority and authoritative voice concerns. We'll talk more briefly on duplicate content, which canonical URLs can help alleviate.

Keeping your website safe and free from malware is another important element to consider. Security is another factor that is often overlooked and depending upon the underlying architecture and infrastructure you're using, could be something worth planning out well in advance.

Even where your website is visited from and how the local population understands your content matters. From language and translation to cultural inclusion, understanding what your demographics need will influence how search engines rank you.

Design and Development

One of the most difficult topics to understand is the balance between design and performance. The development of your website or application should strive to portray your business in the best possible light. To be competitive, you may certainly choose to lean heavily on a unique and attractive design. However, going too far could actually make you less competitive when it comes to rankings due to concerns related to performance, accessibility, and other metrics.

You may have noticed that many websites lean heavily on animations and movement to stay engaging. This is a shortcut of the design process in order to lower the burden of creating rich and informative content to drive engagement instead. As we know, engagement is a major component when it comes to SEO and GEO. However, the performance and user experience loss could have the opposite effect. There are no shortcuts to engagement. Plain websites can be just as engaging to users and rank even better than flashy alternatives, if the development is done in the right way. Taking the time to invest in the design and development process, so that every metric receives the appropriate amount of attention is worth every second and every penny. That's why it's so critical to choose the best possible team to back your business.

User Experience

On first glance, crawlers may seem to only take into consideration the raw input they crawl, which in most cases will be your content in text form. However, that is no longer the case. How your users experience your website and what drives them to trust you and convert is now taken into consideration.

Today, search engines crawl websites like real people use them. As we've discussed previously, this is even more relevant for GEO. They can interpret design cues, experience your website in real-time, and mimic user interaction. Therefore, the user experience is even more important than ever before.

While we won't go too far into user experience, design, in-page marketing, and conversion optimization, these are important topics to discuss with the people working with you. Consider the following:

• Is it easy to reach your content?
• Are your users actively engaging in your website in meaningful ways?
• Are your users bored, or losing interest while waiting for your website to load?
• Is the experience reliable and familiar to returning users?
• Are your users happy with your platform and are their needs met expediently?

Websites are Alive

We often joke that businesses are alive, but in a sense, they are. They require consistent care and management to thrive. Websites are just like the underlying business. They are living entities that require just as much care, thought, and maintenance as anything else.

Therefore, a well built website that focuses on the health of your Web or online presence supports your best chance at achieving maximum search reach. Health is operative, because a well crafted website requires long-term nourishment in the form of regular rich content and performance updates. Maintaining your website may be just as important as maintaining your business.

Copywriting: Engaging Content and Keyword Targeting

Search engines want to answer user questions with the best possible answer in context. This means that if you want to rank well, your website, and your content, needs to be something that users want, will engage with, will recommend to others, and will possibly return to engage with again in the future. Where keyword targeting and analysis allows us to understand what users are searching for, engaging content must both answer the question being posed while doing so in a captivating way. This is where copywriting shines.

Writing a website and its content to be engaging is a very difficult task. As mentioned earlier, starting with a stable and reliable foundation is important. Building off of that requires understanding what your users want, and then fulfilling that request in a way that totally satisfied your user and encourages others to follow. You can ask yourself:

• What do my users expect when visiting my website?
• What kind of keywords and search terms will they use?
• How can I best answer those expectations and ensure satisfaction?
• Is my content worth sharing with others?
• What are my competitors doing?
• Can I capitalize on areas where others aren't?

Content and On-Page SEO

We've wrapped up the structural Technical SEO aspects of the process, and now we've come to a major shift and central component of On-Page SEO: content. This is where we build web pages, write articles, curate media, and other forms of content to answer user search queries. There is no silver bullet as to how content should be created that will best serve your digital marketing needs; it's a very personal process dependent on industry and business. However, there are some very basic guidelines that must be met to create the best possible content to ensure best practices are followed.

Content should always highlight quality over quantity and copywriting should take that into consideration. Your content should be comeplling, comprehensive, organically engaging, and rich in the information it provides. It should also be relevant to those you believe are best suited to read or watch. The goal is certainly to attract new attention, but also to retain the interest of those who are already engaged. Like most things we've discussed, this is a balance that takes time and patient to achieve.

Content should also be tested for quality assurance. That is to say, once you have completed writing or recording your content, you should take the time to proofread and watch it, edit it, and test it with audiences or colleagues who have your best interests at heart. This is a major component of traditional copywriting that should not be ignored.

Ensure that your content always stays on topic and targets specific keywords you plan to highlight. You will know that you have found your voice when your engagement, analytics, and measurement reflect your success.

Keyword Targeting

Understanding the specific topics and themes that your users and audience are looking for can help you refine your content over time. What people are searching for can help drive you to decide what to create.

There are two types of keywords that you can target. The first is known as a short-tail keyword and the second is a long-tail keyword.

Short-tail keywords are often a one-to-three word sentence or phrase. Short-tail keywords are often highly competitive and difficult to achieve. They are most often a service or a product category, rather than a brand; unless that brand is synonymous with a product or service.

Long-tail keywords are often three-or-more word sentences or phrases. Long-tail keywords aren't nearly as competitive as short-tail keywords, but they target very specific niches, which reduce the amount of available traffic that they can capture. Nevertheless, long-tail keywords are often associated with better ranking when it comes to conversion, if you can master a market and take control of that niche.

You will want to target both types of keywords to some degree, but you may find that targeting long-tail keywords in your voice are better suited for early SEO and GEO; especially when it comes to targeting a specific demographic or audience that is searching for those specific phrases.

Once you've done the research to determine which keywords and topics you want to target, be sure to regularly analyze the results of your success, through traffic analytic data, search ranking feedback, and conversion metrics. We'll talk more about measurement soon.

Duplicate Content

When your content is found to be on more than one webpage or even on more than one website, it might be deemed as duplicate content. Duplicate content can not only impact rankings, but it can lower the user experience. Although this is often a component of Technical SEO, continually review the content you have already published, so that you do not inadvertently duplicate it and affect your rankings. As mentioned previously, canonical URLs can help with the authoritative voice and reducing duplicate content.

SEO Ranking Case Study

At this point, you may be feeling a little lost and overwhelmed with all of this information. Don't worry! Consider taking a few moments to read this case study on ranking, which covers a lot of what we've talked about here. Although it's a little old, it should walk through this and other steps found within in our guide.

Links, Social Media, and More

Even if you've implemented perfect Technical and On-Page SEO practices up to this point, you may still find that you are not getting the reach that you believe you should be achieving. This is often because there is more to search engine rankings than simply creating the best content and portraying it in the best way.

Word-of-mouth referrals, recommendations, and community outreach, are worthy components of a digital marketing plan. Furthermore, each individual search engine has tools and methods that may need to be leveraged to ensure that you are in the best possible position to rank. We'll go over some of these methodologies and how they can impact your success.

Links and Backlinks

Links that point to your website from outside of your website are called backlinks. This is in comparison to internal links, which, as the name implies, are links made from one of your resources to another. Links are important because they determine the authority of your website, and more importantly, the authority of your website's content. This reference material is part of enforcing your authoritative voice on your content and your branding. When you have authority, others will reference it. The higher your authority, the more trust a search engine will place in you, and in turn, it's expected that this will increase your rank.

When you look for referrals for services, you often determine how useful that information is based on the person who is making the referral. The same is true when it comes to authority. Sources with established, high authority, provide greater benefits when they link back to your website than sources without much authority.

This can be a cyclical problem. How do we establish that our website deserves backlinking from high authority sources? In some situations you can pay for this as a service, or create partnerships with other businesses you trust. That means community outreach plays an even greater role. The most important tool, however, is still your content. Approachable, quality, rich, engaging content, will increase your authority because other sources with authority will be more likely to recommend your content over lower quality alternatives. Remember, backlinks without authority are effectively useless, or in some cases, detrimental; some businesses end up spending a lot of money on low quality backlinks which tarnishes their reputation.

Don't focus too hard on backlinks alone. Internal links are important for repeat user engagement, and providing a quality user experience. You want to show search engines that you have authority in your niche, but that you also can speak from a position of expertise while providing autonomy to your users to easily explore your website internally.

Social Media and Marketing

Organic link sharing is often the best way to increase exposure for your website. However, where do people share links? Social media platforms, including online forums, have historically provided centralized locations where large swaths of information, including websites, are collectively distributed and shared. These sources of information are often trusted more by users than random inauthoritative websites. The more consistently your website appears in social media and in interactions amongst their users, the higher your engagement will be. Creating and cultivating a community and a social media presence will help your rankings. Not all engagement needs to happen online, either. Engaging in-person with your community and taking that engagement online can help bolster your impact.

Don't forget that social media marketing can often become a trap of short-bursts of low-quality engagement. It's important to understand the role that social media plays in creating and maintaining the health of a brand long-term. Such a topic deserves its own attention, but understand that you must focus on multiple channels for a worthwile and strong digital marketing strategy.

Paid marketing may be the best way to affect your rankings, because sponsorships and advertisements directly affect where you appear when you are ranked among the results. It's important to consider online marketing a part of your strategy like it would be with in-person marketing. That investment could be the deciding factor between success and failure. Nevertheless, paid marketing is affected by organic marketing, and failing to adhere to the best practices and principles of SEO and GEO will negatively affect your paid marketing performance.

Although it's not strictly relevant to search engine rankings, it can certainly help your digital marketing outreach to invest in a reliable and consistent newsletter campaign.

Google Business Profiles, Bing Business Listings, and Apple Business Connect

When it comes to local results, search engine business profiles are mandatory. We touched on this briefly when we discussed some of the unique features and tools that each search engine provides to businesses to better rank within their specific systems. Effectively creating rich and complete business profiles with Google, Bing, and Apple can greatly affect how you appear in search results.

Each service has created guides and articles on how to setup and maintain your business profiles:

• Google Business Profile Guide
• Google Business Profile Help Addendum
• Bing Places for Business Article
• Apple Business Connect Guide

Featurettes

Rankings have evolved over the years, and as you may have seen recently, there are now featurettes that you have to compete with as well. Like business profiles, some of these are unique per search engine. Some of these are also part of the paid marketing mentioned earlier, however, other elements are generated by the engines themselves when they find rich, relevant information for their users. With strong Technical SEO, you can impact how these featurettes appear. Click here to learn more about Google's featured snippets.

Measurement and Reflection

Measurement and reflection on your successes and failures when it comes to SEO and GEO are the only ways to really understand your performance. Once you have an idea of your digital marketing, SEO, and GEO strategies, you can then take stock regularly, over a period of time, and see how your plan is proceeding. Since organic engine optimization can take a considerable amount of time to flourish, it's important to measure performance in context with your goals and the investments you have made toward success.

Key Performance Indicators

While there are a number of tools and offerings from various companies to do that for you, ultimately, measurement really comes from identifying and monitoring key performance indicators, or KPIs. KPIs can come from all sorts of different metrics and how they affect your rankings can be different for each business. Nevertheless, there are some KPIs which are just important for everyone.

For instance, when it comes to analyzing your traffic analytics, you can identify your view growth and how that translates into clicks and ultimately conversions, as KPIs. Other KPIs here could include user time on page (how long users spent on each page,) and their bounce rate (how quickly they left a page after loading it.) Traffic analysis platforms, like Google Analytics, or Matomo, offer this information in detail, and analyzing the patterns can help you understand how well your website is doing. Furthermore, these platforms can also provide you referral information, to help you identify where your traffic is coming from, which backlinks are most popular, and whether it's directly a result of improvements in your rankings.

Keyword Analysis and Search Engine Feedback

When it comes to understanding keyword targeting and analysis thereof, engine feedback is often your best tool to leverage. Various engines provide tools to help you understand what keywords are ranking, and how those keywords change over time. For instance, with Google, you can leverage Search Console, and with Microsoft, you can use Bing Webmaster Tools. You can target and make incremental changes when you know what keywords search engines are, and aren't, highlighting for your content.

Other Metrics and Measurement Options

Because search engines rank differently based on user profile, location, and a wide variety of other metrics, it's nearly impossible to trust your own searches to determine how well your website, application, or content is ranking. Despite that, you can get an idea of how you rank if you employ a sanitized environment, like a cookie-less browser, and a Virtual Private Network, or VPN, to create a more private enviroment. We generally do not recommend this approach however, because analytical data and search engine feedback is far more reliable.

Other important KPIs that could help you understand how well you're doing are heatmaps and scroll-depth metrics. These metrics, often found through tools and services like Microsoft Clarity, and HotJar, can help you understand how your website is being used, which provides context for other KPIs.

The Value of Patience and Attention

Ultimately, the most important part of measurement and reflection outside of identifying what KPIs to measure, is recording that information and identifying trends over a long period of time. This may mean that you need to regularly create your own database of ranking information, and refer back to previous data to identify and explore trends. As mentioned before, SEO and GEO can be a slow and arduous process, but seeing how those metrics change over time can provide real insight into what is, and isn't working for you.

Although hitting best practices and principles can do a lot of the legwork with search engine and generative engine optimization, sometimes testing digital marketing theories through A/B, or other methods, is the only way to truly hone in on what will take your business to the next level.

We hope that this quick reference guide helps you. Remember, if you're a client with a support or maintenance package, or you wish to retain our services to create or improve your website or search engine experience, please let us know! PxO Ink LLC is happy to be of service.