Write a professional book? We avoided that for a long time—and for good reasons. Now we have done it after all and published a book. The title is “Generative Engine Optimization”. “From SEO to GEO – an introduction for companies.”
It is the core topic that has been occupying us intensely for some time. The professional book was published by Springer Gabler in the “essentials” series. You can order it, for example, from the publisher, Thalia, or Amazon.
In this podcast episode, we share our experiences. What motivated us to write this book? How did we deal with the fact that this topic is evolving extremely dynamically—and that a book can quickly become outdated? How long did it take us?
Our GEO professional book: The concept behind it
Springer Gabler’s “essentials” series is characterized by compact professional books. There is a fixed character limit—and within that framework you have to explain a topic. That suits us perfectly. Whether in our podcast, our consulting, or our Academy, our goal is always to explain complex topics clearly and to the point. We also really enjoy reading the “essentials” series privately.
That is why it was clear to us: if we write a professional book, it should be exactly this kind of introduction. It is not a book that goes into every detail; instead, it describes the fundamental change and the strategic challenges. The book is explicitly aimed at marketing managers and decision-makers who want to understand the topic in a compact format.
The book is around 50 pages. You can also read it in an hour in between—on a train journey, in a café, or on the terrace. It is intended for anyone who is not interested in podcasts and is too busy in day-to-day work to dive into the topic.
The writing process behind it
We always prepare our consulting engagements and workshops together. Nevertheless, we clearly have different areas of focus: Fabian has extensive experience as a web developer. Benjamin, on the other hand, is a trained editor. So it made sense for Benjamin to take on the “writing”.
But before you write, you need to know what you actually want to say. Our podcast was very helpful for this. For each episode, we develop a central mind map in which we capture the structure, arguments, and flow. Based on these mind maps, Benjamin then wrote the texts for the individual chapters. Over two months, Benjamin kept working on the book again and again—especially early in the morning.
During that time, Fabian took on a different task: he developed our AI analytics tool J.O.E.. The tool is available in our GEO Academy. Our Academy members can use it to run their own analyses of their AI visibility in ChatGPT.
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How current the topic is: Is a book the right format?
We submitted the manuscript at the end of October. The book has now been published in March. Even in that time alone, there have been many new changes. Nevertheless, our book is up to date: we focused on fundamental strategic topics and deliberately left out details that can quickly become outdated.
A sensitive point: prompt data. As we have discussed several times on the podcast, there is currently no valid prompt data. If that changes, our book will definitely be outdated. But it does not look like that—quite the opposite.
We still do not know what users actually enter in ChatGPT and similar tools. A key difference compared to SEO, where there is search volume for every term. While a tool from the US now offers prompt data, it is based on extrapolations that are highly error-prone (More on this: Prompt search volume: real data or all guesswork?).
Our answer: we need a solid prompt framework to identify the relevant prompts and analyze the AI responses. This is how we determine in depth how visible a company is in AI systems. Learn more about prompt research here.
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For anyone seeking an SEO sparring partner or comprehensive SEO consulting, Fabian and Benjamin are the perfect choice. As an in-house SEO expert, I sought competent SEO support and found it with them. During a very pleasant introductory meeting, we jointly developed an approach to establish SEO among the individual stakeholders and thereby gain more internal visibility for the subject. Based on this initial discussion and a joint kick-off with the stakeholders, they developed a sound SEO and content strategy for a product area. Since then, they have both supported me as sparring partners during implementation.
The collaboration with Fabian and Benjamin is a great pleasure for me and all project participants, as they are masters of their craft and bring immense passion for SEO. This combination is infectious and motivates everyone to achieve peak performance.
I look back with great satisfaction on the SEO project that we carried out with Benjamin and Fabian. Firstly, the collaboration was on a very pleasant, goal-oriented level. Secondly, the consultation was structured in such a way that we could immediately start with the implementation. We received very concrete optimization suggestions that were tailored to our internal capacities and therefore realistically implementable. Even though only a few months have passed, we can already see the first results of our work in the Google rankings. Traffic for our relevant keywords is steadily increasing, and we still have enough concrete work packages from Benjamin in the pipeline to boost our site. Furthermore, through the consultation, we have acquired so much internal SEO know-how that we can now optimize our site independently. And most importantly: Visitor numbers have doubled – with correspondingly positive effects on sales.
