SEO & GEO in Christchurch
Two jobs, done together: ranking in Google, and being named in the answers ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews give to people who never scroll.
SEO is the old job: make a site a search engine can read, understand and rank, so that someone typing “web designer Christchurch” finds you on the page of results. It is mostly plumbing — structure, speed, headings, the words you actually use — plus the slow business of being mentioned elsewhere.
GEO is the new one. A growing share of searches never reach a list of links: the person asks ChatGPT or Perplexity, or reads the AI summary at the top of Google, and acts on the two or three businesses it names. Those answers are assembled from sources the model can parse and is confident belong to a real, identifiable business. Being ranked ninth used to mean a trickle of traffic; being unnamed in an answer means nothing at all.
The two overlap more than the acronyms suggest. Both reward a site that states plainly what it is, where it is and what it costs; that says the same thing about itself everywhere it appears; and that a machine can check against something other than its own marketing. The difference is that a search engine ranks pages and an answer engine resolves businesses — so the work spends as much effort on being a legible entity as on being a fast page.
What you get
- A technical audit
- Every page checked for the things that quietly stop it ranking: titles, headings, canonicals, redirects, page speed, dead links, what the sitemap actually contains.
- Structured data
- The markup that tells a machine what your business is, where it is, what it sells and what each page is for — written to the real facts, never padded with claims you cannot back.
- Answer-first copy
- The questions your customers actually ask, answered in the first line rather than the fourth paragraph. This is what an AI answer quotes, and it is also what a person in a hurry reads.
- Google Business Profile
- Set up or repaired, categorised properly, and tied to the site so the two corroborate each other. For a local trade this is often worth more than everything else combined.
- Reviews and directories
- A plan for getting reviews you did not write, and listings on the registers a search engine already trusts. Slower than buying links, and it does not get you penalised.
- Monthly tracking
- Where you rank for the phrases that matter, and whether the AI answers name you — asked of each engine on the same day each month, recorded so the trend is visible.
How it runs
- A baseline — What every page looks like today: titles, structure, markup, where you rank, whether anything names you. Nothing can be claimed later without it.
- A fixed quote — A number, in writing, for a defined piece of work — before any of it starts.
- The work — Technical fixes first, because they are certain; then the copy and the structured data; then the profile and the listings.
- A monthly report — The same measurements as the baseline, side by side, in plain words. Including the ones that did not move.
Questions
- What is GEO?
- Generative Engine Optimisation — the work of getting a business named and cited in answers written by AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews, rather than only listed in a page of blue links. The mechanics are different from SEO: an answer engine has to identify your business, trust that it is real, and find a sentence worth quoting.
- Is GEO just SEO with a new name?
- No, but they share most of their foundations. A fast, well-structured site with honest, specific writing helps both. GEO adds work that classic SEO never needed: making the business machine-identifiable, keeping every fact about it consistent everywhere it appears, and writing answers that can be lifted verbatim without losing their meaning.
- How long does SEO take?
- Technical fixes land as soon as a search engine recrawls the site, usually days. Ranking movement on competitive local phrases is months, not weeks, and it depends on your domain, your competitors and how long you keep at it. Anyone who gives you a date is guessing.
- Do I need a new website first?
- Usually not. Most of this work is done to the site you already have. A rebuild is only worth suggesting when the existing site cannot be fixed — when it is too slow to pass, or built in a way that hides its own text from a crawler. That gets said plainly, with the reason, rather than assumed.
- How is it measured?
- Two ways. Rankings, for the phrases agreed at the start, checked monthly. And citations: each answer engine is asked the same handful of real questions on the same day each month, and it is recorded whether the business is named. Both go in the report, whichever way they moved.
- Can you guarantee I will rank first?
- No, and neither can anyone else — nobody selling SEO controls the ranking. What can be promised is the work itself: the audit, the fixes, the markup, the copy, the profile, the tracking, at a fixed price, with the measurements shown either way.
- What does it cost?
- The starting price is being set — ask and you will get a fixed quote for a defined piece of work before anything begins, the same as every other job here.
Ask for a quoteFixed price, in writing, before anything starts.