Episode 67: SEO, GEO and Why I Asked Claude to Fix My Invisible Website

NOTE: This is the transcript from the original recording, rather than the edited episode so timings may vary.

Hello and welcome to this solo episode of the Mum Means Business podcast. This week I’ve been doing some digging into my website and specifically looking at my SEO, or GEO, which is the new kid on the block. The reason I’ve suddenly decided to take a deep dive into my business website is because I had a last minute inquiry a few weeks back, actually the day before we were due to hit the road in the van, that came through a Google search.

They were looking for a local photographer and I was the most local photographer to them that popped up on Google Maps. They booked me, we did a beautiful maternity shoot in golden hour that very evening and I’m now looking forward to photographing their baby girl.

But what this made me realise is I don’t often get inquiries through my website. In fact, I can recall one other inquiry this year that came through a Google Maps search. Both were super last minute, emergency photography sessions, if that’s a thing. I reflected back to the early years of my photography business and remembered how easy it felt to attract new clients on Google. Next month will mark 17 years since I started my photography business, which is wild, and so much has changed since then. Instagram and LinkedIn weren’t really a thing. Facebook was king and everyone was blogging every time they took a breath. There wasn’t so much competition back then and so it was easier to rank on page one.

I often tell the story of the blog post I wrote way back in 2012, where I shared a series of photographs I’d taken during a trip to Islay off the west coast of Scotland. It was essentially a whiskey pilgrimage with my then boyfriend who loved the stuff. I had tried to love the stuff, I loved all the stories about the stuff and why this stuff was different to that stuff, but when it came to the stuff itself I really couldn’t like it at all. In fact I quite hated it. So I published this blog post with all of these beautiful photographs and within a couple of months I received an inquiry from a gorgeous girl, a photographer herself, asking if I would shoot their wedding on Islay. In 2014 I did exactly that and it was beautiful and so memorable. I even took said boyfriend as my assistant so he was able to sample a few more drams of that favourite stuff. I went on to photograph her sister’s wedding over on the east coast of Scotland, which was also amazing. And that was the power of Google back then.

Wedding blogs were massive and pitching to get a wedding featured on those was the essential next step pretty much the moment after you delivered the gallery to your clients. Everything felt very web heavy and it worked because the inquiries came. Then came Instagram and blogging started to fall out of favour as we all moved house and started creating portfolios of our work on these aesthetically curated grids instead. Then came the demand for video. The aesthetics became less important and all of a sudden we had to show our faces and tell our own stories online as the founders behind the businesses. Soon enough the creatives also felt they needed to embrace LinkedIn and TikTok and Pinterest and very quickly we found ourselves stretched thin, running out of hours in the day.

Somewhere in the latter end of that, whilst I was on my second maternity leave, I had decided to build myself a new website. I was pivoting away from weddings to family and motherhood photography and I also wanted a simpler domain name. VictoriaPhippsPhotography.co.uk had always been a mouthful and so I decided to switch to VictoriaPhipps.com. Making all these business decisions without seeking any advice, whilst deep in baby fog, underslept with two under two. Perhaps you can relate.

I felt like I wanted a clean slate, so for better or worse I abandoned my old WordPress site with all its years of blog posts and backlinks and started a new Squarespace site from scratch. I kept the old domain and I think I managed to redirect everything, so hopefully I kept those backlinks, but in terms of content I lost a lot of history and this hit my rankings hard. My baby brain perhaps hadn’t thought that bit through. After 11 years I wasn’t going to be shooting weddings anymore, so I thought there was nothing to be gained in keeping those blog posts. Looking back I was perhaps a bit naive and a bit impulsive there, but it’s indicative of where my head was at the time.

I relaunched my photography business in 2023 after a double maternity leave. And I anticipated that inquiries would be slow because I’d been out of the game for a whole pandemic. In 2024 I was playing with different lead generating activities, mostly focusing on social media. I got as much work as I could handle as I was still finding my feet and trying to figure out what the hell a reel was and how we were all marketing in this post-COVID era.

Knowing that my blog was empty, I had started blogging again and I did this once a week for around nine months from 2024 to 2025. But looking back now, it wasn’t as strategic as it could have been. I didn’t really know how to be strategic, if I’m honest.

It wasn’t until the spring of 2025 when I checked in with my Google Analytics, something I think we’re supposed to be doing fairly regularly, that I discovered my website wasn’t ranking in the first ten pages for anything. It was essentially invisible. And this explained why I was only getting inquiries when I posted about an offer on social media or reached out to people directly. So I decided to do something about it and I invested in a six hour SEO audit on my website in May 2025, and it was so insightful.

I learned really important things like, apparently H tags aren’t just there to make your website font look pretty. And it is possible for pages on your website to totally cannibalise each other and compete for the same searches. I gave my website a full overhaul in one day and then waited patiently for it to move up the rankings. And move up it did. It settled at the top of page two for searches like film family photographer and family photographer Cheshire. But let’s be honest, who looks at page two? I still wasn’t getting inquiries from Google unless the client in question found themselves digging into Google Maps in need of an emergency photographer that day.

I wanted to go in and update my website anyway, because I still hadn’t implemented the beautiful new brand that Liz Mosley designed for me that I launched for the podcast back in June. Go back to episode 57 to hear the story of the rebrand. So last week I went into my analytics and my Google Search Console again and tried to decipher what was going on. I couldn’t really, as my brain floats off into its own little world when you show it any sort of data.

I’m also aware that the world of SEO is changing fast and I felt as though whatever knowledge I thought I had, even after that in-depth SEO audit of 2025, might be out of date already. So I literally Googled what is the difference between SEO and GEO. And this is what Google said.

Search engine optimisation helps your content rank on traditional search engine results pages like Google’s blue links. GEO, Generative Engine Optimisation, helps your brand get cited and recommended inside AI-driven answers from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. SEO aims to drive click-through traffic to your website. GEO aims for zero click satisfaction, where AI synthesises your content to answer the user instantly inside a chat or overview.

I went on to learn that SEO relies on specific keywords, backlinks and search volume, which was the game I was playing a decade ago. Whereas GEO places more weight on clear entity recognition, brand mentions across third party forums or media and conversational clarity, which means essentially writing content that reads like a direct answer from a human expert.

So armed with this new knowledge and already feeling overwhelmed and unsure what to do next, I did what every solopreneur would do in 2026 and I exported all the data to share with Claude. I started a new chat, explained my challenge, prompted it and gave it all of the stats. You can Google how best to do this and it’ll give you a fairly straightforward step by step process to follow. And honestly, thank God for AI to explain AI. Because when you’re a time-poor, business-building mum in the depth of the summer holidays, you do not have time to go and research this stuff, watch all the YouTube videos and upskill yourself to thoroughly understand things that frankly aren’t in your zone of genius, or at least aren’t in mine.

I know AI is trained to please us, but honestly, Claude was so helpful. We covered so much ground, from my Google Business profile and reviews to which pages are ranking on my website and for what. We did a full site analysis and dug into my goals, what was working, not much, and what wasn’t. And it was able to give me a list of next steps to take in order to have maximum impact in the shortest amount of time. It even told me off when I went down a rabbit hole of geo-tagging every blog post because they were all set up by default to Squarespace HQ in Manhattan. This is something it had flagged but told me not to spend my time amending because it wasn’t going to have the most significant impact. But what can I say, when I’m feeling overwhelmed I can’t help but give myself a quick win with the lowest hanging fruit. Perhaps you can relate.

My point is I now have a list of actions to take over the coming weeks that I feel confident are in line with my goals and will have a positive impact on my website’s visibility.

I think when you spend so much time in the online space, on social media and in communities of other business owners who are also online, you forget that a lot of people still go to Google for local service-based businesses. And I want them to find me, just like they used to back in the good old days.

I could have paid a real human to go through all this with me, but unless it’s a fully done-for-you service, they will not have time to do a deep dive into your Google Analytics, and to pay them to do so could get really expensive. For me in this moment, working with Claude feels like a good next step.

I know SEO or GEO is a slow burn and it will be interesting to keep an eye on my rankings once I’ve made all the recommended changes. Maybe I’ll report back in six months time with a full debrief on whether Claude’s advice hit the mark or not. But in the meantime, I’d be so interested to hear how you feel about your SEO. It’s not the sexiest thing, but are you a five star pupil who blogs regularly and strategically, dives into their analytics once a month and ranks on page one for all their favourite searches? Or are you on my end of the spectrum, thinking about it once a year, making all the changes and then crossing your fingers and hoping for the best? And have you ever used an expert, human or AI, to help you decipher all the stats and guide you to take the next right steps to help you attract more right-fit clients to your website?

Come and find me on Instagram at @mummeansbusinesspodcast or @victoriaphippsmbe and let me know. I would love to hear and I will speak to you soon.