SEO Was Not Enough. Now We Have GEO
SEO was not enough.
No. Simple suffering was not enough. Now we have GEO also. Because apparently it was too easy before. Apparently it was not enough to stare at rankings, crawl reports, backlinks, search intent, schema, site speed, internal links, content briefs, cannibalisation, and Google’s monthly episode of divine punishment. Now we must also sit and discuss how to make the machine understand the page better so maybe, just maybe, it may bless my client and his reusable condom business with one extra sale.
Every day we put up meeting.
One man says entities. One man says citations. One man says authority. One man says answer extraction. Another says trust signals. Another says semantic relationships. We all nod like nuclear scientists trying to stop reactor meltdown, when really the mission is to help some bloke sell flavoured rubber on the internet.
I should have studied neurosurgery.
Or aerospace engineering.
Or some other field where the suffering at least comes with dignity.
But alas. Fate had other plans.
Now I sit here in front of a laptop, pretending I am engaged in high intellectual labour, while a man on LinkedIn explains with full confidence that the future belongs to those who structure their headings for retrieval readiness. Retrieval readiness. What a beautiful phrase. What a majestic way to describe begging a chatbot to notice your paragraph.
everyone talks like this is sacred knowledge. Forbidden knowledge. Ancient knowledge. As if we are not all just making educated guesses in slightly different fonts while Google, Reddit, and random forum posts continue to eat half the internet alive.
I am tired.
Tired of the updates.
Tired of the acronyms.
Tired of the self-appointed prophets.
Tired of pretending this is some elite IQ profession and not a deeply unserious line of work populated by spreadsheet goblins, ranking shamans, and grown adults arguing about whether changing one H2 will increase “surfaceability”.
Sometimes I look at doctors.
Engineers.
People building bridges.
People doing cancer research.
Then I look at myself.
Refreshing Search Console.
Checking if impressions moved from 4.1K to 4.3K.
Explaining to a client why 19 suburb pages with the same copy is perhaps not the masterstroke he thinks it is.
This is my burden.
This is my curse.
This is my calling.
I hate being this intelligent.