SEO & GEO FAQ: The 30 Most Common Questions About Search Engine Optimization

Few marketing topics get explained as often and understood as rarely as SEO. Spend ten minutes reading up on it and you'll trip over ranking factors, keyword density, GEO, AEO, LLMO, and at least three agencies promising you the #1 spot. The questions that actually matter to businesses usually go unanswered: What exactly is this, what does it cost, how long does it take, and is AI search making all of it pointless?

This post answers the 30 questions we hear most often, both in first calls with clients and in Google search itself.

Basics: What SEO Is and How It Works

What Is SEO?

SEO is the umbrella term for everything that makes a website more visible in the unpaid results of search engines. The term has been documented since around 1997. It's distinct from SEA (Search Engine Advertising), meaning paid ads in Google Ads. Together, the two make up SEM (Search Engine Marketing).

The key difference: SEA delivers visibility for as long as you pay for it. SEO builds an asset that keeps working on its own, but it needs lead time.

What Does SEO Stand For, and What's the German Equivalent?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, or Suchmaschinenoptimierung in German. In German-language industry usage, the English abbreviation has become the standard, and "Suchmaschinenoptimierung" is used as its full-length synonym. Older terms like "website optimization" are fuzzier, since they can also mean conversion optimization and performance.

What Is "SEO Optimization"?

Strictly speaking, "SEO optimization" is redundant, since the O in SEO already stands for optimization. In practice, what people mean is the ongoing work on a website: improving content, removing technical obstacles, strengthening internal linking, building brand mentions. We're using the term here because people search for it, not because it's technically correct.

How Does SEO Work?

Google describes three stages: crawling (Googlebot fetches pages it finds), indexing (content gets analyzed, duplicates identified, canonicals determined), and ranking (a results list gets assembled for each query). Important, and often overlooked: Google doesn't guarantee indexing. The official documentation explicitly states that not every processed page makes it into the index.

In practice, the work gets split into three areas: technical SEO, content and on-page, and off-page. This breakdown is an industry convention, not a Google framework. And the oft-cited "over 200 ranking factors" doesn't appear in any current Google documentation. Anyone arguing with that figure is quoting a statement from the early 2010s.

What Is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO covers everything that happens on your own website and that you can control directly: content and its structure, title tags and meta descriptions, heading hierarchy, internal linking, images and alt text, structured data, URL structure.

By contrast, technical SEO covers the infrastructure of that same domain (crawlability, robots.txt, status codes, load time, rendering, hreflang for distinguishing between Austria, Germany, and Switzerland). Off-page SEO is everything outside your own domain: backlinks, digital PR, brand mentions.

Honestly, the line between on-page and technical SEO is a matter of convention. Some sources only recognize two pillars and fold technical work into on-page. Which model you follow matters less than whether someone actually owns all three areas.

To see what a technical audit looks like in practice, check out our Technical SEO Audit.

What Is "SEO Copy"?

Classically, "SEO copy" means text written specifically to target a keyword. That's exactly the problem today. Google's documentation on helpful content explicitly calls out "search engine-first content made primarily to gain search engine rankings" as a red flag, and makes clear there's no preferred word count.

What actually matters in 2026: clear authorship, transparency about how content was produced (including any AI involvement), and content that actually satisfies a search intent.

We've covered the concrete editorial approach in Answer-First Content.

What Is "SEO Marketing"?

"SEO marketing" is essentially saying the same thing twice: SEO is already its own marketing discipline, so tacking "marketing" onto the front adds nothing technically. No industry source defines it as a separate discipline. What does exist technically is SEM as the umbrella term for SEO and SEA. People still search for the term anyway, usually meaning "marketing through Google."

Cost: What SEO Costs and What Drives the Price

What Does SEO Cost?

There's no credible flat rate, and that's not a cop-out. The effort involved depends on measurable factors: number of pages and the technical condition of the domain, CMS or shop system, how competitive the target terms are, number of languages and countries, content production needs, digital PR needs, and above all, the client's own capacity to implement changes. That last point is almost always underestimated: an agency can deliver recommendations, but someone inside the company has to actually implement them.

Interestingly, the cost question gets debated especially intensively in AI search. Our own SISTRIX analysis for Austria shows that on the topic of SEO costs, AI search sees a strikingly high number of multi-step follow-up questions, and most of these conversations happen before anyone even contacts an agency. In other words, people actively ask AI systems for guidance before they reach out to a provider.

What Billing Models Exist, and What Does an SEO Agency Cost?

Three models are common:

How Do I Recognize a Reputable SEO Agency?

A reputable agency won't guarantee you a ranking position, and according to Google, no one can credibly promise that anyway: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." What you should look for instead: references from comparable markets, compliance with Google Search Essentials, clear results within a clear timeframe backed by traceable measurement, and open, well-reasoned communication about every measure taken.

Warning signs include unsolicited cold emails, lack of transparency about planned actions, claims of a special relationship with Google, and mass submissions to "thousands of search engines."

The point that gets mentioned least often is the most important one: if deceptive tactics get used, it's your website that gets removed from the index, not the agency. You're the one carrying the risk, always.

An SEO check beats gut feeling: our Strategic GEO/SEO Check gives you a solid assessment before you commit to a model.

Timeline and Impact: When SEO Kicks In

How Long Does SEO Take?

The most solid data comes from Ahrefs (updated analysis, May 2025, based partly on 1.3 million random US keywords):

• Only 1.74% of new pages make it into the top 10 within a year (in 2017, that figure was still 5.7%). For English-language pages, the number is notably higher at 6.11%.
• 72.9% of all top-10 pages are older than three years.
• The average page in position 1 is five years old.

Important context: this is correlation, not causation. Old pages don't rank because they're old, they rank because they've accumulated links, authority, and revisions over the years. There's also a survivorship effect at play, since bad old pages have long since disappeared.

How Long Until SEO Measures Actually Show Results?

It varies, and varies systematically. Technical fixes, like resolving an indexing issue or correcting canonicals, can show results within days. New content in competitive topic areas takes months to years.

One revealing detail from the same Ahrefs analysis: of the new pages that made it into the top 10 at all, 40.82% got there within the first month.

One frequently cited figure you should retire: "Google says SEO takes 4 to 12 months" comes from a 2017 Google video and no longer appears in current documentation. The documentation now just says some changes take effect in hours, others in months.

Why Does SEO Matter for Businesses?

Three arguments backed by evidence:

1. Google holds an 82.36% search engine market share in Austria (StatCounter, August 2026; Bing at 9.52%, DuckDuckGo at 2.65%). The entry point remains clear.
2. According to a Similarweb analysis of more than 40,000 of the biggest US websites, organic results still generate roughly ten times as many clicks as paid ads.
3. Positions you've earned tend to be comparatively stable, while paid visibility ends the moment the budget does.

What Role Does SEO Play in the 2026 Marketing Mix?

SEO is shifting from a traffic channel to a visibility and demand channel that has to serve two surfaces: the classic search results page and AI-generated answers. The Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2026 shows that digital media accounts for more than two-thirds of media investment, and 15.3% of marketing budgets now flow into AI.

Gartner's publicly available data doesn't break out a separate figure for SEO. Anyone who tells you "SEO makes up X% of the digital budget" didn't get that number from actual market research.

Is SEO Dead?

No. But "business as usual" isn't quite right either.

The most relevant figure for the German-speaking market: SISTRIX analyzed over 100 million German keywords (published February 2026, updated August 2026). The result: roughly 20% of keywords now show an AI Overview, and the click-through rate for position 1 drops from 27% to 11% when one appears, which extrapolates to about 265 million lost organic clicks per month in Germany alone.

The honest caveat with all these numbers: queries that trigger an AI Overview are systematically different from those that don't. So the comparison partly measures the type of query, not the effect of the AI answer itself. Causation hasn't been proven.

What remains true: the equation "ranking equals traffic" no longer holds. Informational content is losing the most, while commercial and transactional queries stay more resilient. We've written up how to measure the value contribution anyway in GEO KPIs.

SEO in AI Search: GEO, LLM SEO, and AEO

What Is LLM SEO, and How Does It Work?

LLM SEO refers to measures aimed at getting content cited, or brands mentioned, in the answers generated by AI systems. Technically, you're no longer optimizing for a results list, but for retrieval pipelines that assemble an answer from passages pulled out of multiple sources.

The most important counterpoint comes from Google itself: the official documentation on AI features states there are no additional requirements for appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special files or markup needed. Anyone selling LLM SEO as a completely new discipline is contradicting the search engine.

What Is GEO SEO, and Does It Have Anything to Do With Geography?

Two things that constantly get mixed up.

GEO in the sense of Generative Engine Optimization is a term with academic origins. The paper that coined it came from researchers at Princeton, IIT Delhi, Georgia Tech, and the Allen Institute for AI, was submitted in November 2023, and was accepted at KDD 2024.

"Geo" in classic SEO usage, on the other hand, refers to geography, meaning geo-targeting and local search. Google's own documentation exclusively uses "local SEO" and "geotargeting," never "GEO."

So when people search for "GEO SEO," they sometimes mean one thing and sometimes the other. For local visibility, Local Search Management is the right topic; for visibility in AI answers, it's the AI Search Audit.

What's the Difference Between SEO and GEO?

The technical foundation is largely the same: a page needs to be crawlable, indexable, and relevant. What changes is the target metric.

We've broken this down in detail in SEO and GEO in Austria.

Do We Need an llms.txt File?

No, not based on current data. Google has repeatedly confirmed it doesn't use the file and has no plans to. An Ahrefs analysis of 137,210 domains (May 2026) found that 97% of existing llms.txt files weren't fetched a single time in a month. Of the few fetches that did happen, 96% came from bots, mostly SEO audit tools.

Tools, Video, and Technical SEO

What Are SEO Tools, and Which Ones Do You Actually Need?

It makes more sense to organize them by function than by vendor:

The most important tool, by the way, is free: without a clean Google Search Console and a properly set up GA4, every other piece of data is just a guess. If something's not right there, check out GA4 Setup & Tracking.

What Is SEO Software, and Is It Different From an SEO Tool?

Practically synonymous, with a slight difference in connotation. "Tool" tends to mean a point solution for a single task (a crawler, a redirect checker), while "software" or "suite" implies a multi-module system with project management, user roles, and a subscription.

There's no authoritative source that draws a hard line between the two, and vendors undermine the distinction themselves anyway: Semrush calls itself a platform, Ahrefs calls itself tools, SISTRIX calls itself software.

What Are the Benefits of Video Marketing for SEO?

The provable advantage has shifted, toward AI search. Otterly.AI analyzed over 100 million citation instances (published March 2026): YouTube gets pulled as a source heavily, with 38.7% of YouTube citations coming from Perplexity and 36.6% from Google AI Overviews. Especially relevant for smaller brands: 40.83% of cited videos had fewer than 1,000 views. Reach, in other words, isn't a gatekeeper.

That fits with Ahrefs' correlation analysis across 75,000 brands, where YouTube mentions turned out to be the single strongest factor for AI brand visibility.

If you want to use video systematically: Video Search Management.

Questions Clients Actually Ask Us

We Already Run Google Ads. Do We Still Need SEO?

Yes, but not as a replacement. Paid delivers results immediately and predictably, but stops the moment the budget does. Across large website samples (Similarweb, more than 40,000 of the biggest US websites), organic results still generate roughly ten times as many clicks as paid ads. But the real reason is different: AI systems cite organic content and brand mentions, not ads. If you only run paid, you're invisible in AI answers.

How Do We Measure SEO Success When Rankings No Longer Mean Traffic?

With an expanded KPI set. Beyond rankings and organic sessions, you need impressions and clicks from Search Console broken down by query type, the share of branded search queries, and, for the AI side, citation frequency, share of voice, and prompt coverage. The concrete definitions and realistic benchmarks are in GEO KPIs, with ongoing reporting covered in Search Intelligence.

Does AI-Generated Content Hurt Rankings?

Not inherently. Google doesn't judge the production method, it judges the outcome. What gets penalized under "scaled content abuse" is mass-produced content created primarily to manipulate rankings rather than help users, and that explicitly includes AI-generated content. What matters is clear authorship, editorial review, and real value. To see how that works in day-to-day editorial practice, check out our AI Editorial Workshop.

How Many Backlinks Do We Need?

There's no target number, and in 2026, that's the wrong question anyway. In the Ahrefs analysis of 75,000 brands, brand mentions (0.66 to 0.71) correlated with AI visibility far more strongly than raw backlink count (around 0.19 to 0.22). A better question is: is our brand getting mentioned where our audience and the models themselves do their research? Depending on the industry, that means trade media, Wikipedia, industry directories, LinkedIn, Reddit, and YouTube.

How Often Do We Need to Update Content?

Whenever the content itself has actually changed, not on a fixed schedule. The evidence here is mixed: at an aggregate level, AI assistants measurably cite fresher content than organic search does, yet in a granular analysis, Ahrefs found that the publication date field itself wasn't a usable signal, with a median age of around 500 days for cited pages. So cosmetic date updates aren't backed by the data, but genuine content refreshes are. You can approach this systematically with a Content Audit.

SEO In-House or Agency?

In-house gives you maximum context and closeness to the business, but comes with fixed costs, tool licenses, and the risk of everything depending on one person. An agency brings breadth, tools, and seniority, but needs onboarding time and internal points of contact. Freelance is cheaper and often more deeply specialized, but it's a single point of failure.

The realistic model for most businesses in Austria is a hybrid: strategy and specialist disciplines outsourced, execution kept in-house. That's exactly what Managed SEO & GEO is built for.

Is Google Enough, or Do We Also Need to Worry About Bing, ChatGPT, and Perplexity?

Google remains the dominant entry point in Austria with an 82.36% market share, but the source selection AI systems draw on overlaps less than you'd think. In an Ahrefs analysis (ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, data as of June 2025), only seven domains appeared in the top-50 source lists of all three platforms, and 86% of sources were platform-exclusive. In practice, that means Bing Webmaster Tools needs to be set up, since Copilot relies on it, and visibility should be measured per model, not averaged.

What Do We Do If AI Systems Don't Mention Us at All?

This usually comes down to one of a handful of causes, and they're all diagnosable: missing or contradictory entity data, no mentions on the sources a given model pulls from, technical blockers for AI crawlers, or simply content that doesn't contain a citable statement. We've gathered the seven most common reasons and the fastest countermeasures in When AI Ignores You.

How Improove Helps With SEO and GEO

We've spent years working at the intersection of organic search, AI visibility, and paid search, out of Vienna and Madrid, for clients in more than 60 countries. What sets us apart from classic SEO support: we measure visibility not just in rankings, but also wherever answers actually get generated today.

Concretely, that means:

• Strategic GEO/SEO Check for a solid read on where you stand before any budget gets spent.
• Technical SEO Audit for everything to do with crawling, indexing, and rendering.
• AI Search Audit to answer whether and how you show up in AI answers.
• Managed SEO & GEO for ongoing support across both surfaces.
• Search Intelligence & Reporting for reporting that brings both worlds together in one dashboard.

If you're not sure where to start: an initial call costs nothing and takes 30 minutes.

About the Author

Diana leads holistic, cross-channel search strategy at Improove, connecting content with SEO and GEO. Her focus is making visibility measurable wherever decisions actually get made today: in classic search and in AI answers alike.