Building Your SEO/AEO Strategy for 2027: The Time Is Now

Key takeaways:

• Planning for 2027 in September isn’t premature: SEO volatility, the murky ROI of AEO/GEO, and internal trade-offs all call for three to four months of lead time.
• Start with a review of the past year, then list 10 to 15 actions inspired by your wins, your competitors, and pioneering sites.
• Run the numbers before you choose: click curves, TAM, and conversion rates help you sort your actions and win over decision-makers.
• SEO is becoming Search Everywhere: your strategy needs to cover LinkedIn, Reddit, social media, and AI, not just Google.
• Take a strong stance on the future of search: it speeds up your decisions, and you’re allowed to change your mind.

September isn’t even over yet, and we’re supposed to start planning for next year already? Yes. Far from being heresy, it’s actually a necessity. Between SEO’s unprecedented volatility, the difficulty of measuring AEO/GEO ROI, and all the internal discussions about resource allocation with decision-makers, developers, designers, and everyone else, three to four months is hardly too much time to go into battle with the best possible odds of seeing positive results.

Not sure where to start? Running low on inspiration? Here are a few tips to get off on the right foot.

Pick Your Battles

First things first, take a look at what you did this year, what worked well and what didn’t, then examine the optimization opportunities that remain. Growing a site gets harder every year.

From there, it’s time to list the actions that could drive growth, such as:

• Expanding the scope of an optimization that worked
• Content localization
• A bold bet
• And so on

That all sounds great, but what if inspiration doesn’t strike, or you feel you’ve used up your quota of creative ideas? Go see what’s happening elsewhere:

• Check out sites like SearchPilot that continuously test optimizations
• Look at what your competitors are doing, especially where they’ve overtaken you, and do it better
• Seek out pioneering sites that are trying new things (regularly featured on SEO news sites or forums like Reddit), and choose to follow their authors’ instincts

At this point, you have a list of 10 to 15 actions, and now you need to narrow it down.

Calculate the Potential Gains

Believing that adding Schema markup to a site is valuable simply because it doesn’t have any, for example, is a relatively weak argument. Even if the benefits are real, that time might have a bigger impact on another optimization with greater ROI (return on investment).

To avoid haphazard strategies, several tools are available:

• Build a click curve (method – in French please Google translate). It lets you determine the average CTR based on your site’s positions on the first page of Google.
• Calculate your TAM (SEO method & AEO method). Once you have your click curve, calculating the size of your target market shows you how many clicks or citations you can expect depending on your actions and the scenario you’re considering (optimistic, pessimistic).
• Apply your conversion rates. Once you have your clicks, multiply them by your CVRs for everything you count as a conversion (form submissions, sign-ups, sales, subscriptions).

You’re now armed with solid numbers that will tell you whether a given optimization is worth it, so you can confirm (or rethink) your choices. And when needed (which is often), hard data helps convince decision-makers and remove a lot of roadblocks.

Diversification and a Strong Point of View

Just like Google Search Console, which since this year displays TikTok, X, YouTube, Instagram, and generative AI data alongside standard organic traffic, your strategy will need to be diversified rather than focused solely on Google search results.

So your usual approach of writing blog posts on given topics will, at the very least, need to be paired with posts on other platforms like LinkedIn, Reddit, and so on (to keep it simple).

This broader scope means you need to know the following:

• Where is your audience active?
• What are their main interests on each platform?
• How can you naturally amplify an action on your site across every other place your brand lives?
• How do you track the performance of each channel and weigh its importance?

This is the shift from search engine optimization to search optimization in general (from SEO to SE, for Search Everywhere).

Finally, having a strong opinion about where online search is headed will make your choices easier. We’re still in a period of testing and questioning around AEO/GEO, the future of SEO, and their impact on business revenue in general. Committing to the future that seems most likely to you lets you move faster.

For example: do you think AI search will grow to the point of becoming dominant within six months? Then factor that into your prioritization. Or: do you think Wikipedia will soon be abandoned and that ign.com is becoming a useful backlink source for SEO and AEO? Reflect that opinion in your strategic choices.

The best part? You don’t have to be right, and you can change your mind. It simply lets you make choices that previously seemed too ambiguous, and forces you to think about organic growth in years rather than weeks or months.

In Summary

The best time to plan for 2027 is now. Beyond the numbers and formulas, in a period of high instability, the best defense is creativity: taking paths your competitors don’t know about or underestimate, while also capitalizing on past successes that can be extended to other categories or properties.

Paradoxically, it has never been easier to stand out and “crack the code” of this new era of online search, as long as you’re curious and enjoy running experiments back to back.