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What Should Your Website be Optimizing for: SEO vs AEO

What Should Your Website be Optimizing for: SEO vs AEO

There are so many new buzzwords floating around the Internet especially since ChatGPT and even Google Bard started to draw attention. One of those words has been AEO. Some people are being bold enough to say that SEO is dead and that AEO has taken over. If you are a business just looking to make the right decisions for your website, then you are caught in the crossfire. But Phantom Copy, as always, is here to help. What should your website be optimizing for: SEO vs AEO? We have answers.

What is AEO?

If you wound up on this page, then you likely know what SEO is already. For the uninitiated, here’s a brief primer. SEO stands for search engine optimization and it’s the art of checking and optimizing the hundreds of little things that make pages and websites rank on search engines. This includes meta descriptions, page speed, heading text, URL structure, keyword usage, and more. Often, SEO experts are also tasked with the writing of website content to ensure that it has the best chance of ranking.

With all that in mind, what is AEO? AEO stands for answer engine optimization. It’s based on the theory that we are moving away from search engines and towards answer engines. It’s the difference between typing “oil change” into Google (search engine) and “where to get an oil change” (answer engine). We’re sure you’ve done it both ways and received adequate results either way. 

With that in mind, so-called “answer engines” are really just search engines, or rather, the direction in which search engines have naturally evolved. There aren’t any Internet tools that claim to be answer engines and not search engines. In fact, most search engines don’t use the former term at all when referring to themselves or their services.

How Does SEO Differ From AEO?

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The SEO practice has changed and evolved over the years. There was a time when it primarily consisted of putting keywords into a special meta keyword field—one that still exists but all search engines currently ignore—but now there is so much more to SEO than there was a decade or two ago.

In truth, if you’ve been working with a good SEO expert, chances are they have already done a lot of AEO even though they may not have ever called it that, and many have never even heard the term. AEO is a buzzword and little more.

Many of the writers at Phantom Copy have been optimizing for questions and answers for years, and they will still call it SEO. In other words, for all SEO experts worth their salt, AEO is just part of SEO.

Is AEO Just Voice Search?

AEO itself is a poorly optimized buzzword as it’s a common abbreviation for a popular clothing brand and even their Nasdaq stock symbol (American Eagle Outfitters). Clearly, whoever decided to coin the term didn’t do their research ahead of time. We would have advised against it.

Often the discipline that some people refer to as AEO is what SEO experts call voice search optimization. In other words, optimizing for things that people would say to a search engine and trying to capture the conversational tone of natural inquiry. This is as opposed to the cold and clipped searches that many millennials were trained to use by their teachers in school back when AskJeeves was cool and Yahoo, AOL, and AltaVista seemed like they would never go away.


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Should You Be Looking for a Digital Marketing Firm That Provides AEO?

If you come across a digital marketing firm that is pushing AEO and trying to use it to set itself apart, perhaps you should run. When they say that, they are just trying to trick you and make you think they are ahead of the curve.

Does Phantom Copy Provide AEO?

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If you are really going to ask that, we’ll say yes. Our writers have been doing what other people call AEO since before the term ever existed. So yes, we do AEO, just like we do QEO (question engine optimization), MEO (marketing engine optimization), OO (organic optimization), and BFEO (business finding engine optimization).

Those are all terms we made up, and we don’t claim that we do them or AEO anywhere else on our website or in our marketing materials. But if you are going to ask, we’re going to say that we do it because they would all fall under the beautiful umbrella that is SEO. Cost of website may play into what you get for SEO as well.

Read More: Who Needs Blog Content?

Hire a Phantom to Write SEO Content

If you want to talk about SEO and skip all the other buzzword terms that don’t mean anything and other terms that we feel like making up, then we are all ears. We know we can help you and your business succeed with our SEO strategies regardless of your industry. Reach out to us today and hire a Phantom.

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