E1148: Everyone is talking about GEO, AEO, fan-out queries, schema, Reddit, digital PR, Wikipedia mentions, and dozens of other ways to get recommended by ChatGPT and other AI systems.
Devesh Khanal of Grow and Convert thinks most companies are skipping the obvious place to start: bottom-of-funnel SEO.
Devesh shares what Grow and Convert is seeing across clients after years of publishing detailed, product-focused content. Their approach is straightforward: identify the searches closest to a buying decision, create dedicated pages that genuinely answer those searches, explain the product in enough detail for both people and LLMs to understand it, and build from there.
We get into:
- Why bottom-of-funnel SEO should come before most GEO tactics
- The three keyword buckets Devesh uses: category keywords, comparisons/alternatives, and jobs-to-be-done keywords
- Why search volume is often the wrong way to prioritize keywords
- How sales calls, customer support, reviews, and customer questions can reveal better topics
- Why you probably do not need to predict or target individual fan-out queries
- What Grow and Convert found when studying the SEO footprint behind ChatGPT citations
- Why Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, and ChatGPT should not be treated as if they work the same way
- How detailed content on your own site gives LLMs information about your use cases, customers, pain points, features, and products
- Why case studies can matter for AI visibility even when they are not targeting an SEO keyword
- How self-promotional "best" and "alternatives" articles can work without pretending to be neutral third-party reviews
- The difference between transparent product promotion and content that creates an intent mismatch
- Why ClickUp-style mass publishing is different from producing a handful of carefully written commercial pages
- The risks of publishing thousands of lightly edited AI-generated pages
- A company that published 25,000 AI pages and got to the point where journalists could not find the company by searching its own brand name
- Why Devesh still builds backlinks to bottom-of-funnel pages
- Why topical relevance matters more than collecting random links just to raise DR
- Why links directly to the page you want to rank can matter more than general homepage links
- How ranking bottom-of-funnel pages can indirectly create more third-party mentions when writers and researchers discover your brand
Devesh also shares a simple exercise to do this week: make a list of the 10-20 most obvious searches someone would use when looking for a product like yours, then check whether you have a dedicated URL targeting each one. If you do not, that is probably a better place to start than worrying about schema tweaks or trying to reverse-engineer every possible AI prompt.
⭐️ Devesh Khanal's website, Grow and Convert - https://www.growandconvert.com/
⭐️ Devesh Khanal on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/deveshkhanal/
⭐️ Devesh Khanal on 𝕏 - https://x.com/deveshkhanal
⭐️ Grow and Convert Marketing Show on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-grow-and-convert-marketing-show/id1652941589
⭐️ Grow and Convert Marketing Show on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/1CFauYp4GVXaMVNN9h9yxH
⭐️ Devesh Writes on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@deveshwrites
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/
00:00 Episode Pitch Setup
01:40 What AI Visibility Looks Like
03:38 Skip Top of Funnel Prompts
06:21 Self Promotional Listicles
08:01 ClickUp Cautionary Tale
08:59 Do It Honestly
12:11 Scale Frequency And Stability
15:19 Why This Works In LLMs
17:23 Invisible Prompts Personalization
24:05 Keyword Buckets And Formats
29:27 Common Mistakes AI Content
32:30 Alternatives Pages Breakdown
35:54 SERP Analysis And Brand View
39:35 Positioning With Honesty
40:34 Listicles Without CTA Spam
40:56 Transparent Best Of Pages
42:41 Shopping Intent Explained
43:56 Branded Review Sites
47:58 AI Content Shadow Drops
50:12 Site Architecture Priorities
52:01 Bottom of Funnel Keyword Framework
56:29 LLM Visibility Buckets
01:03:46 Fan Out Query Myths
01:06:54 Backlinks And Citation Outreach
01:12:47 This Week Action Plan
01:13:59 Shaping The LLM Narrative
01:16:01 Wrap Up And Where To Find
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/
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