By It’s a day ending in Y, which means my social feeds are filled with people attempting to rebrand the acronym “SEO.” Look, I ain’t here to rain on your parade, so if you love calling it AIO or GEO or EIEIO, be my guest. I haven’t been an SEO for more than seven years, despite what all the “top SEO lists” say, so this is hardly my fight.
But… I do worry the field is making things hard on themselves when the answer is easy.
A few years ago, Ashley Liddell from Deviation coined the term “Search Everywhere Optimization” ( well, actually “Optimisation” because the Brits are too fancy to fool around with Zs all willy-nilly). Ashley wrote more about it just last week. And it’s perfect. It should have closed the case. But instead, a bunch of folks are still trying to put their own spin on a solved problem.
Search Engine Optimization = get higher rankings on Google, Yahoo!, Bing, maybe a bit of DuckDuckGo and AOL.
Search Everywhere Optimization = influence audiences in all the places they go to consume content about your topic.
My god, it’s so convenient. The acronym doesn’t change. The messaging fits with whatever platforms win the AI wars, whichever networks win the social media battles, and whatever new discovery tools emerge thereafter.
Even better, all of the panic SEOs seem to be experiencing about their jobs becoming archaic or disposable can now rest easy. So long as human beings attempt to acquire information prior to making purchases, (the new) SEO will be needed.
You don’t even have to adopt new ways of learning skills! You’re an SEO, which means you’re used to:
- Keeping up with ever-changing algorithms and evolving user behaviors
- Having to learn entirely new systems every time Google rolls out a new tab
- Learning, iterating, experimenting, and reverse-engineering complex, machine-learning-based systems
- Optimizing content to fit the whims of both the arbitrary algo gods and the equally-mercurial human beings
I’d bet if you’ve done SEO for the last few years, you’re *already* doing Search Everywhere Optimization. You’ve probably had your boss/team/client ask about rankings in YouTube, getting into Reddit, being visible on Pinterest searches, and of course, showing up in all the LLMs.
So, why not roll with it?
Why not embrace the acronym that’s already associated with the work you do, the expectations you’ve got, and the future we all know is coming (thanks to Google’s desperate need to impress Wall Street)?
I’m the first to admit my early efforts at branding sucked lemons. SOCEngine? SEOmoz? Really Rand? No one can pronounce or remember those. But, I’m dumb enough about branding to recognize that AIO, AEO, GEO, LLMEO, and the other 15 I saw on LinkedIn today are not the way.
Search Everywhere Optimization is good enough. In a few years, I doubt you’ll even need to explain that you help brands influence people outside of just Google rankings. Everyone will assume that the “E” in SEO always stood for Everywhere, and I don’t plan to correct ’em. 😉
p.s. In addition to crediting Ashley Liddell for the original use, I’d also like to recognize NP Digital’s head of SEO, Nikki Lam, who adopted this terminology for her work, and brought it to my attention during a recent conversation.