SEO/LLMO: Introduction

Questions answered in this module

• What is SEO and LLMO and how do they work?
• What companies does SEO work best for?
• How do I structure my site for better SEO?
• What are the differences between on-page and off-page SEO?
• How do I build links to my content?

Overview

More than 189,000 searches happen on Google per second.

Even with the rapid adoption and expansion of LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, and Claude, Google searches are still growing (at least as projected):

Conversely, ChatGPT processes about 1 billion prompts/messages per day (as of 2025), which is pretty crazy given its relatively short existence. It's safe to assume that LLM usage will continue to increase exponentially.

SEO isn't dead or dying yet

Although the long-term future of classic Google Search is in question, it's at least here for the foreseeable future.

Remember, Google is one of the most deeply ingrained habits and default behaviors in the modern era. Habits are incredibly hard to break. Many people will continue to visit Google (or simply type into their browser bar) whenever they have questions or are looking for a website.

Even if Google completely loses the AI battle against its competitors, that momentum will last them a long time.

And LLMs (AI) essentially do the same thing Google does

When you ask an LLM a question, it will either:

1. Use its training data to respond. This is baked into the LLM for when the specific model was created and whenever the training data's cutoff was, which is likely not recently (maybe even 2023).
2. Search to get you the answer. If you ask it for something recent or for something that wasn't in its training data, it will search the Internet for the answer.

Obviously, getting your startup featured in #1 is mostly out of your control for two reasons:

• The LLM creator needs to update its training data to be recent. You can't control if or when they're going to do that.
• LLM creators are protective of what's in their training data, so you're kind of guessing.

Therefore, it's probably a waste of time for a startup to try to game the LLMs to be the default response for certain questions and prompts because it's a gamble on which data the LLM creator includes and when it does it.

Instead, to get featured in an LLM, your site/content needs to be highly visible to an LLM when it performs a search, so essentially, you need to do SEO.

Getting your site to rank on Google significantly increases the amount of traffic you'll get from classic Google searches, and the amount of traffic you get from LLMs (Google's or otherwise).

So SEO is definitely not dead. Even though classic Google Search may dwindle in popularity, SEO as a field will continue because LLMs are essentially performing the search on your behalf.

Some accelerating trends

Over the past many years, these trends with Google Search have continued to accelerate:

• Fewer and fewer searches end in clicks.
  • As of 2025, around 60% of searches finish without a single click.
  • This is increasingly due to data-rich results like stock charts, Wikipedia-like embeds, and AI summaries and answers.
  • It's becoming increasingly important to be the cited or quoted source for an LLMs answer or a Structured Snippet.
• More ads and more clicks are going to the ads.
  • In the early days of Google Search, there'd be 1-3 reasonably subtle ads before the organic results. Now there's even more, and they're larger.
  • People are increasingly clicking these ads as well.
  • Although these are less likely to show for content-related queries since they're less likely to end in a purchase transaction (so advertisers are less able to get a positive ROAS from it).
• More searches are used as navigation.
  • ~44% of searches are for specific brands. This is people using Google to find a site rather than typing in the URL of the site directly.
  • Given this, it's likely increasingly important to increase your startup's visibility for its company/product name—especially if you don't use a .com domain.

• Video is increasingly showing up in results.
  • Videos can often rank more easily than a piece of content especially if you're new to SEO.
  • Pairing your articles with videos can increase the visibility of both the post and the video.
  • This is less true for LLMs, but that will very likely change as LLMs start to parse and search videos.
• Topical authority increasingly important
  • Having one article about a topic that has 10,000 backlinks is less of the move nowadays.
  • Now you want to have lots of articles around a single topic to demonstrate to Google that you're experts and it wasn't just a one-off.
• Personal branding and author reputation are rising factors
  • Google now uses "E-E-A-T" signals: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
  • If you're a founder writing content, building up your own online presence helps your site SEO.
  • Tactic: Attach real author bios to your content, get cited/interviewed externally, and build your name up alongside your company’s brand.
• Content quality > keyword optimization
  • The old tactics of stuffing articles with keywords and and perfectly optimized heading tags is increasingly unimportant.
  • What increasingly matters is how engaging the content is and how often it satisfies people's search (they didn't hit back and click another link).

Both search engines and LLMs will continue to prioritize Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. The better your content is at that, the more likely you'll get traffic from Google and LLMs.

For simplicity, when we say SEO and Google Search, you can also assume we're talking about LLMs like ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, and Perplexity

Benefits of SEO

Besides getting your content in front of a wider audience, there are two other major benefits of a successful SEO strategy:

• It’s a cost-effective source of traffic. SEO content builds compounding value over time, with a long-term payoff from consistent traffic. There’s an upfront cost to creating it, but in the long run, it’s generally much more efficient than paid marketing or even other content strategies that require ongoing content production.
• It increases brand authority and awareness. People tend to trust organic search results more than paid results, so ranking highly for popular and relevant keywords in your niche establishes your brand as an expert. Stronger online visibility also means more users are aware of who you are and what you do.
• SEO leads to an increase in referral traffic. Working on SEO often leads to increased backlinks to your website, which is also free traffic that compounds over time.
• LLMs are likely to use similar metrics to determine what to cite. Sure, search itself might change, but LLMs will almost certainly care about similar things like:
  • Topical authority (how much authority does your site have for the specific topic)
  • E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)
  • Content quality (how engaging and likely it is to satisfy your question/search)
• SEO can help grow your YouTube account.
  • If you embed accompanying

Our Content Marketing unit covers SEO in the context of content creation, so we’ll dive into the more technical aspects in this module, like how to optimize your website. There are other search engines such as Bing, Brave, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo, as well as LLM Search, but we’ll focus on Google because roughly 92% of searches worldwide come through Google.

What companies does SEO work best for?

For more details about whether your company should pursue a long-term SEO content strategy, check out our Content Marketing module. But whether or not you pursue a long-term SEO content strategy, all companies can benefit from at least the SEO basics for greater online visibility, especially considering 44% of searches are for brand names.

Today’s consumers regularly use Google and LLMs to explore and consume content. Even if they don’t have a short-term goal to buy something, people are exposed to and learn about new products and services through search engines.

SEO has an exceptionally high ROI for companies that:

• Can afford to wait for results. SEO is a long-term strategy—it generally takes at least six months before your content sees any traction in Google’s search results.
• Have access to unique data, insights, research, and visualizations. Articles containing unique research earn a lot more organic backlinks and shares as other creators reference your research in their content.
• Have a broader content marketing strategy in place. SEO supports other content efforts, and vice versa. Companies already investing in content marketing strategies have a competitive advantage because they have existing materials that can be repurposed as SEO content.
• Solve a defined problem that people search for information about. In industries where users have lots of questions, like fintech and real estate, people turn to Google for information. SEO doesn’t work so well for unclear problems where users don’t even know a solution exists. Consider how infomercials often sell products that address obscure, unobvious needs—before Snuggies became popular, no one searched for “sleeved blankets.”
• Solve the same problem for many different groups or categories. For example, Expedia shows hotel listings for cities worldwide, and Canva offers design templates for all kinds of projects. These companies can programmatically generate hundreds of pages about the variations of the problem they solve—giving them tons of long-tail keyword coverage without needing to write a lot of articles.

In short, SEO isn’t just for online businesses or nationwide chains. Even brick-and-mortar shops that only sell locally benefit from it because people use Google to find things nearby.

If you’re trying to decide how much priority SEO deserves, consider how many of the above bullet points apply to your company. The more bullets that describe your company, the more viable SEO may be for your business.