Sara & Nik’s Podcast:
Nikki Halliwell

About this conversation

Today’s episode of Sara & Nik Podcast features Nikki Halliwell, a technical SEO pro with over a decade of experience, who shares her unique perspective on GEO and SEO, which she sees as the exact same thing.

Nikki works for Journey Further, runs her own business, and writes the Tech SEO Tips newsletter, among being involved in other projects on the side. Today, she joins Sara and Nik to talk about SEO, GEO, AI development, and why SEO “Is not going anywhere. It’s just changing”.

GEO is “Still Just SEO”

Right off the bat, Nikki doesn’t buy the GEO label and essentially calls it a meaningless acronym, mostly marketed by LinkedIn influencers. In her view, GEO is still SEO and she has the reasoning and data to back it up.

As she explains, to rank for LLMs you need to do the basics well: well-written, valuable content, accessible, well-structured, and crawlable pages, and reputable links. These all form the foundation of SEO. The notion of GEO is just a description for something that happens naturally, because LLMs will pick your business up automatically, so long as your SEO campaign is effective.

That being said, she admits that the market is increasingly steering towards AI, so she can’t really ignore the topic. The most common question she’s getting today is how her team is handling AI:

“They just want to feel reassured that you are still the right agency”.

This is what prompted her to create VISIBLE, the framework that covers the visible content, structured data, brand authority, and informational hubs, among other data. The goal was to give shareholders the confidence that the strategy is well-monitored.

She doesn’t sell GEO services separately, because she doesn’t see that as realistic.

“Nobody can properly track it.” she says, the reason being that the referral traffic from LLMs is negligible, which makes visibility tools unreliable in this area.

Nik intervenes to mention that his agency tracks LLM referrals with GA4 and Looker Studio.

Why AI Didn’t Change Nikki’s Auditing Routine

Nikki admits that AI didn’t change how her team performs audits, which is why she doesn’t have a dedicated LLM section. Instead, she prefers to do it the old way: opening the website and clicking around to check features like responsibility, pop-up density, and utility.

That’s because, as Nikki explains, clients value and pay for the human judgment before anything else:

“It's the experience. It's the actual analysis that makes up an audit”.

Nik agrees and explains that this is the exact reason why he also includes UX and UI checks in his audits: traffic numbers don’t mean anything if users can’t complete their journey. Nikki reinforces the idea by sharing the analogy of a car mechanic working to keep the engine running and explaining how SEO works in a similar way:

“That's exactly what tech SEO does. It keeps your website running so that your customers can find it.”

As Nikki admits, this doesn’t mean that things are always smooth. In many cases, shareholders will disagree with her recommendations. When that happens, Nikki always goes the “challenge with data” way. She asks for the reasoning, she presents her data, and she backs up her claims and strategy with verifiable numbers. Lastly, she always seeks a middle ground.

What she doesn’t do is take things personally.

About Newsletters and Why SEO is Here to Stay

Nikki’s newsletter journey started in 2021, when she was posting weekly tips under the umbrella of Tech SEO Tuesdays. Finding new ideas and subjects each week was challenging at first, before she found a system to help her out. She now uses LinkedIn posts, networking events, and even questions from colleagues and clients as inspiration.

Questions, Nikki believes, are the foundation of fast growth for SEO newcomers. Asking a colleague, messaging people online, and even watching webinars, going to events, and taking courses are all necessary steps for those looking to expand on their SEO credentials.

Her own event, Tech SEO North, which Nikki runs with Chris Lever in Manchester, helps with that. The event consists of 3-4 in-person meetups per year, across different northern cities, during which they give newcomers a friendly stage.

Her message is that nobody should buy the AI/GEO hype and that “SEO ultimately is not going anywhere. It's just changing.” So, the best thing SEO junkies can do is to run tests, follow the data, and improve on their skills every opportunity they have.