Most GEO advice is either theory or a sales pitch. This is neither: ten concrete actions, ordered roughly by effort against impact, that any company can start this month without buying a single tool. Do the first five and you will be ahead of most of your market.
1. Ask the engines about yourself
Spend an hour asking ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini the questions your buyers actually ask, and write down every answer. Who gets named? What does the engine believe about you, and is any of it wrong? This single exercise reframes the whole subject, because you stop guessing and start looking at the actual battlefield.
2. Fix what they get wrong
Wrong descriptions usually trace to stale or contradictory information: an old address, an outdated service list, a directory profile from a previous era of the business. Hunt down the sources of the error and correct them at the origin.
3. Make one page answer one question, immediately
Take your most valuable buying question and make sure a page on your site answers it in the first two sentences, in plain language, with specifics. Not a teaser, not a form gate. The direct answer, then the depth below it for humans who keep reading.
4. Standardise your entity everywhere
Same company name, same one sentence description, same core details, everywhere you appear: your site, social profiles, directories, review platforms. Every inconsistency is a small tax on the engine's confidence in naming you.
5. Add structured data to the pages that matter
Organisation, product, service and FAQ markup, correctly implemented on your key pages. It is unglamorous plumbing, it takes a developer an afternoon, and it makes you machine readable in exactly the way retrieval systems appreciate.
6. Get ten real reviews on the platform your market trusts
Engines cite review consensus constantly. Identify the one platform that matters in your category and ask your genuinely happy customers to write honest reviews there. Never buy reviews. Bought reviews are both an offence against the platforms and exactly the kind of pattern engines learn to discount.
7. Answer real questions in your community
Find where your buyers actually discuss the problem, often a subreddit, a forum, an industry Slack, and contribute genuinely useful answers under your real identity. Engines read these spaces. So do your customers.
8. Publish one number nobody else has
From your own operations: a real cost range, a real timeline, a real benchmark. Put it on a permanent page with your method. Original data is the single fastest way to become citable, and most of your competitors will never bother.
9. Refresh the dates that deserve it
Engines favour maintained sources for questions where answers change. Update your key pages with current facts and current dates, but only where something genuinely changed. Fake freshness is another pattern the engines are getting better at ignoring.
10. Set up a monthly measurement habit
The same questions, the same engines, once a month, recorded in a spreadsheet. Share of answer is a trend, not a snapshot, and the companies that win it are the ones that watch it.
None of this is magic. It is consistency, applied where the engines are actually looking.
If you would rather see the whole picture done properly in one pass, that is what our free audit is for. Either way, start this month. Consensus takes time to form, and it is forming right now, with or without you.