Stand still and watch the Sun cross the sky: it is natural to describe the Sun as moving around you. A geocentric model places Earth at the centre and represents the Sun, Moon and planets as moving around it. Such models could organise observations and make predictions, even though their central assumption about the solar system was wrong.
The apparent daily turn of the sky is largely explained by Earth’s rotation. To compare models, astronomers needed more than a familiar view: they used planetary motions and other observations to test which explanation worked.