My Background of AEO & GEO
Hi, I am Hansel. I've been studying the digital marketing industry since I was 16. I learnt that I had a genuine passion for it. I graduated both diploma and bachelors in the subject of digital marketing. I learnt the fundamental principles of each digital marketing channels from the holistic view.
At Timber Tropics, I independently built and executed a full digital marketing strategy from zero, conducting keyword research, mapping search intent, producing 200+ articles and product pages, optimising on-page elements including meta tags, header hierarchies, and internal linking, and tracking performance through Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console. Within 12 months, I grew the website from zero to 5,900+ active users across five international markets in a really niche industry, United States, China, Germany, Singapore, and Indonesia, entirely through organic search with zero paid budget.
On the topic of link building specifically, traditional outreach-based link building has extremely low ROI in 2026. Cold outreach response rates sit below 2%, and every site worth linking from now charges a premium for placement. Chasing backlinks at scale is expensive, difficult to sustain, and increasingly deprioritised by Google’s own guidance. That was a clicking moment for me, I realized it is not sustainable anymore. Therefore, I switched to focusing on Answer's Engine to promote the products.
My approach instead focuses on building topical authority through content depth, structured information, and GEO and AEO optimisation, ensuring content is discoverable not only through traditional search but also through AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. LLMs retrieve and cite based on content clarity, query-intent alignment, and topical authority, not domain authority or backlink counts. This approach drives both traditional rankings and AI search visibility simultaneously, with far better ROI than link building campaigns.
I bring a data-first mindset to every campaign decision, tracking performance via Google Analytics 4, identifying what works, and iterating continuously based on real data.
