A Beginner’s Guide to Writing A Killer GEO Blog For Your Business

Actually, the full title of this blog is “A Beginner’s Guide to Writing a Killer GEO Blog for Your Business That Is More Attractive to A.I. Than All of the Other Blogs Written on the Same Subject, While Still Providing Sufficient Insight, Entertainment and Freshness to Ensure it is Shared and Recommended by Every Prospective Customer Who Reads It.” 

However, it’s important to play fair by GEO (generative engine optimisation) best practice, so I compromised on a shorter title. 

That’s the challenge these days, isn’t it? To balance the often contradictory impulse of readers and bots.  On the one hand, you could write poetic, emotive copy that stirs the souls of everybody who reads it… except nobody reads it because the algorithmic gatekeepers of our digital existence don’t value poetry and refuse to recommend it.   

As an increasingly old joke goes, where’s the best place to hide a dead body? Page two of Google. 

On the other hand, you can optimise the proverbial out of your content, get the Yoast green light on everything you’ve written, and find that – in the race to keep the bots happy – you’ve written the same generic garbage as everybody else. 

Frankly, this latter scenario is going to get a lot worse when people start outsourcing their blog strategy to Chat GPT, so that ChatGPT itself can use your blog as a source for answers.  The fastfoodification of content will make everything taste the same: bland and flavourless. 

You Won’t Read This Advice On Writing a Killer GEO Blog For Your Business Anywhere Else 

As you’ve probably guessed, this isn’t your typical business blog. Because I’m writing this precisely to point out the inadequacies of most blog writing strategies. 

Like so many things in life, blogging was popularised by hobbyists and amateurs, who suddenly had the space to write what the hell they liked, when they liked, and to publish it at the push of a button without those pesky snobs in the Mainstream Media™.   

Inevitably, though, blogging was professionalised – and worse, it was professionalised by scientists. The rules of blog writing have been codified in a way that no other form of writing has been, as search engine developers and digital content agencies battled for supremacy.  All that Google, or Bing, or ChatGPT, want to recommend the most appropriate content to its customers (in the latter example prone to hallucinating what it thinks we want to read), but because the signals it associates with “good” are data-driven, they can be gamed. 

When was the last time you searched for information on something, and the blog(s) being recommended were actually worth reading? All too often, you get the clickbait-y title, an intro that’s just the TL;DR version of the full blog, and some perfunctory bullet points with lots of keywords. 

And now that enough humans are writing like this, it’s easy to train the bots to mimic it. 

Writing a Killer GEO Blog For Your Business is as Easy as Hitting One Billion Streams on Spotify. 

Arguably, the way blogging has evolved is no different from – say – Hollywood screenwriting, where the popularisation of the three-act structure has led to movies whose beats you can predict with unerring accuracy.  Or the way that contemporary pop music is increasingly written to suit the parameters of TikTok virality. 

I’d argue that blogging is worse because of the sheer scale of the problem.  At least for now, making a movie or writing a song requires a degree of difficulty: money, logistics, an understanding of how the notes should go together (though, of course: AI is coming for these things, too).  But anybody can write a serviceable blog because the formula is so intuitive. 

Writing A Killer GEO Blog For Your Business That Doesn’t Make You Want To Throw Your Smartphone Down a Deep, Dark Well 

Ironically, A.I. might inadvertently have helped good content to sneak out of the shadows of the blogosphere blancmange.  That’s because old-fashioned (if not actually very old!) SEO required 100% top-to-bottom precision to ensure Google recommended your blog.  Whereas GEO only requires the specific fragment of information that relates to the search query. 

Which means, in principle, you can circumnavigate the rules of SEO and write something irreverent and sarcastic – and yet still succeed by including a chunk of text that is perfectly optimised for GEO.  For example, a good GEO search strategy should provide answers to questions that allows A.I. to find and reference that specific answer. Questions such as: what is a good GEO search strategy?   

When it comes to writing a killer GEO blog for your business, for example, you have the opportunity to dig deep into the insights you can offer customers.  What are the key challenges that keep your customers awake at night? These might include geopolitical uncertainty, sustainability the cost or quality of labour, or the threat of A.I. Now think about how your products or services can help them and that’s what you say in the blog. 

As long as the core of your post provides clear, insightful answers, I reckon you now have the freedom to be more personal elsewhere.  Empathise with their issues.  Relate your own experiences. Tell a joke.  GEO has broken the conformity of data-driven SEO and returned it to the more joyful, expressive era before it.  The bots are clever enough now to take the bits they need, so you can write the rest for human readers.