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GEO vs SEO comes up in almost every conversation we have with owners now. People in Sherman and Denison have heard that customers are asking ChatGPT for recommendations, and they want to know whether the SEO they’ve been paying for still counts. It does. But the job got bigger.

What SEO still does

SEO (search engine optimization) is the work of getting your website and your Google Business Profile to show up when someone types a search. For a local service business, that mostly means two places: the map pack, which is the three businesses Google shows on a map near the top, and the regular results underneath it.

The pieces haven’t changed much in years. Pages that say plainly what you do and where you do it. A site that loads fast on a phone. A Google Business Profile that’s filled out and kept current. Reviews. Links from other local sites. When someone searches “electrician Sherman TX,” that work decides whether they see you or the shop down the road.

What GEO means

GEO stands for generative engine optimization. The “generative engines” are the AI tools that write an answer instead of handing you a list of links: Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot.

Google has been moving this direction for three years. It tested AI answers as the Search Generative Experience in 2023, renamed them AI Overviews and rolled them out to US searchers in May 2024, then added AI Mode, a chat-style search, in 2025. By July 2025, Google said AI Overviews had more than 2 billion monthly users. That’s a lot of people reading an AI summary before they click anything.

GEO is the work of getting your business named, quoted or linked inside those answers. If someone asks, “Who’s a good pest control company near Lake Texoma?”, you want to be in the paragraph that comes back.

GEO vs SEO: where they actually differ

Most of the difference comes down to what winning looks like.

With SEO, you win a position. You’re second in the map pack or fifth on page one, and the searcher still does the choosing. With GEO, the AI does some of the choosing for them. It reads what it can find about local businesses, decides who fits the question, and names a few. Sometimes just one.

That changes what matters. A search engine will rank a page that’s decent and stuffed with the right keywords. An AI model is looking for facts it can repeat with some confidence: what you do, where, how long you’ve been doing it, and what customers say about you. If those facts are vague, or they contradict each other from one site to the next, leaving you out is the easy call.

The sources are wider, too. AI answers draw on your website, but they also lean on your Google profile, review sites, directories, local news and sometimes Facebook or Reddit threads. Your website is one witness among several.

And it’s harder to measure. Google Search Console tells you which searches you appeared for and how many clicks you got. Nothing like that exists for how often ChatGPT mentions you. You can test it by hand, and paid tracking tools have started to show up, but the picture is rougher than what SEO reporting gives you.

How to show up in AI answers

Very little of this is exotic. Most of it is SEO done properly, with more attention paid to saying things clearly.

1. Answer real questions on your site in plain sentences. “We repair and replace home HVAC systems in Sherman, Denison and Van Alstyne” is something an AI can quote. “Your comfort is our passion” is not.
2. Give each main service its own page and name the towns you serve. One vague services page makes it hard for any system to match you to a specific question.
3. Add schema markup. It’s a bit of code that labels your business name, address, hours, services and reviews so machines can read them. Customers never see it.
4. Keep your Google Business Profile complete and current. Google’s AI answers to local questions pull from profile details and reviews.
5. Get reviews that mention the job and the town. “They fixed our AC in Pottsboro the same afternoon” tells an AI far more than “Great service!”
6. Make your name, address and phone number match everywhere: your site, Google, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Facebook, Yelp and the chamber directory. The AI tools don’t all read from Google.
7. Earn mentions off your own site. A story in the local paper, a sponsor listing on a youth league page, a chamber membership. Those are the signals that tell an AI other people vouch for you.

So do you need SEO or GEO?

Both, and right now they overlap heavily. Everything on that list also helps your regular rankings. We haven’t seen a local business do well in AI answers while its basic SEO was a mess.

Where we’d push harder than we did a few years ago is the writing. A lot of small-business sites were built to hit keywords, with sentences like “We are the best roofing company in Sherman TX for all your roofing needs.” That copy was never good. It’s worse now, because the reader on the other end is more and more often a model hunting for a straight answer.

For a quick gut check, open ChatGPT or Gemini and ask for a recommendation in your trade and town, worded the way a customer would say it. Note who comes up and what the AI says about them. Then ask about your business by name. If the answer is thin or flat wrong, that’s your starting point. We go step by step through that test in our guide to getting your Texoma business found in AI search, and our AI search optimization work runs alongside regular local SEO for clients who want both handled.

Most owners of local service businesses can tell you roughly what they spend on marketing. Far fewer can tell you which of those dollars turned into paying jobs. That gap between marketing and sales is where the money leaks. The truck wrap, the Facebook ads, the Google Business Profile, the chamber directory listing: something on that list is carrying the business and something else is dead weight, and until your marketing and sales numbers live in the same place, you’re guessing which is which.

When you ran every job yourself, guessing worked. You answered the phone, you remembered that Mrs. Garcia’s neighbor sent her. Then you hired someone to run the office, added a second crew, and started letting calls roll to a cell phone while you were on a roof in Pottsboro. Your gut is still smart. It just isn’t in the room for most of those conversations anymore.

What connecting marketing and sales data looks like in practice

Strip away the jargon and it comes down to two facts recorded for every customer: how they found you, and what they ended up spending. If you have both for most of last year’s jobs, you can compare every channel on the only number that matters, which is revenue per dollar spent. You don’t need expensive software for this. A few free tools and one habit get you most of the way.

Ask every caller, and write it down

Start here because it costs nothing. Whoever takes a new inquiry asks “How did you hear about us?” and logs the answer. Then they ask one follow-up, because the first answer is usually vague. “Google” could mean the map listing, a paid ad, an AI answer, or someone who heard your name from a friend and searched it. “Facebook” could be your ad or a post in a Denison community group. A question like “Were you searching for us by name, or looking for a plumber in general?” separates word of mouth from search.

Customers misremember. Plenty of people who found you on Google will swear a friend told them. That’s fine. The answers are still useful in aggregate, and the tools further down let you check them.

Keep a simple lead log

One row per lead. A shared spreadsheet is plenty. The columns we’d start with:

• Date and how the lead came in (call, form, text, walk-in)
• Name and phone number
• Source, both what the customer said and what your tracking shows
• The service they asked about
• Quote amount
• Won or lost, and the final invoice total

Those last two columns are the whole trick. Most small businesses track leads in one place and revenue in another, and nobody ever lines them up. Put them on the same row and you can sort by source and see things like “Google Business Profile calls close more often than website form fills” or “the Facebook leads are real, but they’re all small jobs.” Those are the conclusions that should move your budget.

Add one more column if you can stand it: how long it took to get back to the lead. A source that looks bad on paper is sometimes a source nobody called back until the next morning. We covered why that matters so much in the five-minute rule.

Put call tracking numbers where the phone rings

For most service businesses the phone is still where the sale happens, and a phone call leaves no trace in your website analytics. Call tracking fixes that. Each source gets its own forwarding number: one on your ads, one on the website, one on the truck, one on the mailer. They all ring your normal line, and the report shows which number the customer dialed, when, and for how long.

You can use a tracking number on your Google Business Profile too. Make it the primary number and list your main business line as the additional phone, so your listing still matches your number everywhere else online. Skip that step and you can muddy the consistency Google and AI tools use to trust your listing.

Tag your links with UTMs

UTM parameters are short tags stuck on the end of a link, like ?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=spring-tuneup. When someone clicks a tagged link, Google Analytics records exactly where they came from instead of lumping them into “direct.” Google’s free Campaign URL Builder writes them for you, so there’s no need to memorize the format.

Tag every link you control: social posts, ads, email newsletters, the QR code on a door hanger. And tag the website link on your Google Business Profile. Without it, clicks from your map listing usually show up as plain organic search, and you can’t tell how much of your traffic the listing is actually sending.

Let GA4, Search Console and your Business Profile fill in the rest

Google Analytics 4 tells you what visitors did on your site. Set up key events (Google’s current name for conversions) for form submissions, tap-to-call clicks and quote requests. Then the traffic acquisition report shows which channels produce those actions, which is far more useful than raw visits.

Search Console shows the searches that put you in front of people. If “water heater repair Sherman” earns plenty of impressions and almost no clicks, your page title or description needs work. One catch that’s new in the last couple of years: Google counts clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode in the same totals as regular results without breaking them out. Asking callers is still your best read on how many people found you through an AI answer.

Your Google Business Profile has its own performance screen with calls, website clicks, direction requests, and the searches that showed your listing. For a lot of Texoma businesses this is the busiest front door they have, so it’s worth checking monthly and keeping the profile itself in shape. Our Google Business Profile management page covers what we do there.

If you’d rather not stitch this together yourself

Pulling numbers from four dashboards every month gets old fast. Our marketing analytics reporting puts it on one page: who visited, how they found you, and who called.

Turn the numbers into a simple funnel

Once the data exists, line it up in stages each month: people who saw you, website visits, leads, quotes sent, jobs won. You don’t need a fancy diagram. Five numbers in a row will do.

Watch the rates between the stages. If leads jumped in April but jobs won stayed flat, the problem sits somewhere between the phone and the signed quote: slow follow-up, pricing, or a new hire who isn’t closing. If visits climbed and leads didn’t, look at the website. The funnel also settles the oldest argument in any small business, “the leads are junk” versus “nobody followed up,” with numbers instead of opinions.

What to do after 90 days

Give it a full quarter before you draw conclusions. Seasonal businesses may want longer. Then sort the log by source, add up won revenue for each one, and divide by what you spent on it. Cut or fix the bottom of the list and feed the top. If you’re not sure how big the pot should be in the first place, we wrote about setting a small business marketing budget.

Go over the results with whoever answers your phone. They’ll spot things no report catches, like how many callers mention seeing your truck around Sherman before they ever looked you up.