Three acronyms get used interchangeably, usually by someone selling one of them. Here is what each actually means and how much of the work is genuinely shared.
SEO
Search engine optimisation. Being found in conventional search results. It splits usefully into two:
- Traditional SEO aims to rank a page where location is not decisive, such as a treatment explainer. Slow, competitive, and in health topics you are up against major medical publishers.
- Local SEO aims to appear when a place is attached to the search. Map results, the local pack, and the profile panel. Driven by business profiles, categories, services, NAP consistency, directory coverage, and reviews.
For a practice with physical offices, local is where the return is: faster, less competitive, and far higher intent.
AEO
Answer engine optimisation. Being the source of a direct answer rather than one of ten links. This covers featured snippets, voice assistant answers, and generated summaries.
The practical work is clear writing: answer real questions plainly, use question-shaped headings, keep facts in text rather than images, and add FAQ structured data where you genuinely have questions and answers.
GEO
Generative engine optimisation. Being named by an AI assistant when someone asks who provides a treatment near them.
The essential thing to understand is what GEO is not. There is no listing to submit, no feed to supply, and no placement to buy. Assistants assemble answers from the same underlying material as everything else: your site, your map profiles, directory records, and reviews.
The dominant lever is entity consistency, which is the same lever as local SEO. What changes is the stakes: a page of ten links tolerates ambiguity, a three-name answer does not.
How much overlaps
Most of it, which is the point:
- Accurate, consistent business data helps all three.
- A real page per office and per treatment helps all three.
- Structured data helps local, answers, and generative surfaces.
- Reviews feed local ranking and the sentiment summaries assistants produce.
- Clear, factual writing helps everything.
So you are not choosing between three programmes. You are choosing where to start.
The order for a clinic
- Local first. Claim and complete your profiles, fix your data, cover the directories that matter, build reviews. Highest return, fastest feedback.
- Generative and answers second. Largely a by-product of doing local properly, plus structured data and honest cross-engine measurement.
- Traditional third. A small number of genuinely useful pages, maintained rather than churned.
If someone proposes an aggressive content programme before your profiles are verified and your data is consistent, the sequence is wrong.
How to judge a proposal
Two questions cut through most sales pitches:
- For any GEO offer: what is the specific submission mechanism? There is not one. If they claim guaranteed placement in AI answers, they are describing something that does not exist.
- For any SEO offer: does it start with data accuracy and profile completeness, or with content volume? The first is the right sequence.
That is the end of the curriculum. If you take one thing from all ten chapters, take the one from chapter one: define your canonical practice record, then make every system on the web agree with it. Everything else in this course is downstream of that.