In this conversation, Glynis Tao discusses the importance of adaptability in today’s changing e-commerce landscape. With the popularization of AI-driven search, Glynis emphasizes the importance of foundational SEO best practices that still apply. Through a case study, she shares how one of her clients used strategic blogging to earn a citation from AI Overviews, resulting in an increase in visibility and organic traffic. She also discusses what makes a valuable blog, how to build trust with your audience, performance metrics that you should be monitoring/measuring (besides just clicks), and more. Websites and SEO are not disappearing—they are evolving.
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About Glynis Tao
Glynis Tao is the founder & CEO of Chase Your Dreams Consulting, which is an apparel business consulting & online marketing agency that specializes in SEO & AI search optimization for e-commerce companies. She helps fashion, beauty and lifestyle e-commerce brands create optimized content and attract potential customers through organic search results.
With over 20 years of experience in the apparel industry, Glynis is an expert in creative entrepreneurship and fashion business operations. Driven by a mission to empower and help her clients build e-commerce businesses that are purposeful and profitable, Glynis uses her industry experience to develop data-driven strategies.
Beyond SEO consulting, Glynis is passionate about fostering a community of like-minded business owners. Through her Chase Your Dreams podcast, e-commerce blog, and collection of free resources, Glynis provides guidance and inspiration for entrepreneurs striving to grow their brands.
Takeaways
- Adopting an adaptability mindset is key to staying ahead in the e-commerce industry.
- Creating consistent and helpful content will keep your brand relevant.
- Strategic blogging will drive visibility and organic traffic to your site.
- Valuable blogs are often ones that answer common customer questions.
- Schema and metadata helps search engines understand your content and increase your site’s visibility.
- Establish trust with your audience by sharing expertise.
- The earlier and faster you adapt to industry changes, the better.
Interview Themes
Why is adaptability so important for e-commerce brands today?
Consumer behaviour and new technologies, such as AI, are constantly and rapidly changing the online retail landscape. If brands aren’t adapting to these changes, it’s easy to fall behind. It’s more important than ever to adopt the adaptability mindset and be open to learning new tools, platforms, and strategies to gain a competitive edge and stay relevant in the e-commerce world.
What is AI search? How can brands use SEO to rank higher and increase organic traffic through AI search?
AI search is a search tool that uses artificial intelligence to parse through, summarize, and cite webpages with relevant information in response to search queries. It’s a new way for people to streamline their search. Instead of manually clicking through websites to find the information that they need, AI search does that for them.
This affects how consumers discover brands, how they perceive brands, and how they shop. For brands to increase their visibility and organic traffic through AI search, they can optimize their websites with SEO strategies. Best practices like strong metadata, schema markup, and keyword optimization will help your website rank in AI search alongside well-structured content.
What are the benefits of blogging?
Consistent, helpful, and question-driven blogs help build authority and trust which increases the likelihood of a website’s content being cited in AI-driven search. Knowing what content your audience needs and will find valuable is key to creating blogs that will drive organic traffic.
What practical steps can brands take to improve their site’s visibility?
To adapt to the changing retail landscape, brands can do the following:
- Identify the most relevant customer FAQs and turn them into blogs.
- Optimize product pages for title tags, metadata, and schema.
- Build trust through founder stories and customer testimonials.
- Commit to creating consistent, high-quality content.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
01:30 Adopting the Adaptability Mindset for SEO
04:14 Fashion Brand Case Study: Increasing Visibility in AI-Driven Search with Blogging
13:07 Visibility in Search Engines That Aren’t Google (Bing, Yahoo, and More)
14:43 Practical E-Commerce SEO Strategies in the Age of AI
18:19 Q&A Session: SEO with GoDaddy, Squarespace, and Wix
23:01 Conclusion
Transcript
Glynis Tao
Hi everyone, welcome back to the Chase Your Dreams podcast. I'm so glad you're joining me again for Ecommerce SEO Strategies in the Age of AI, part two. If you haven't listened to part one yet, I recommend going back to that episode first. In it, I shared how the e-commerce landscape is evolving, the key challenges brands are facing, and what SEO strategies are working today. In this second part, we're going to dive even deeper. I'll be walking you through real world case studie—including a fashion brand success story—and showing you practical action steps you can take right now to future-proof your online store in the age of AI search.
This is a continuation of the webinar presentation I hosted on October 9th as part of my SEO School educational series. If you want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and AI trends, follow me on Instagram @glynistao or visit my website at glynistao.com. All right, let's jump into part two of Ecommerce SEO Strategies in the Age of AI.
Glynis Tao
Welcome to Chase Your Dreams, a podcast for fashion entrepreneurs who want to build a purposeful and profitable clothing business so they can make a living doing what they love. I'm your host, Glynis Tao, an apparel business consultant and SEO specialist with 20 years apparel industry experience. I'm also a mom to a wonderfully energetic little boy named Chase.
Glynis Tao
Another quote from Jeanel is, “If you're not adapting to how consumers shop today, you're already behind. Agility is the new competitive advantage.” I know all this tech is changing so fast. You're like, “oh my God, I’m not a techie person.” “I don't even know what to do.” “Where do I even begin?” It's so overwhelming and you're probably being bombarded by all these other messages of what you should be doing and I totally get it because I can relate to this. I feel like I'm in the same boat.
What I want to present to you is just very simple, very strategic ideas and concepts and strategies that you can implement when you get off this webinar today because really, it's not that hard. I want to keep things very simple and to let you know that even though things are changing fast, a lot of the SEO best practices still apply. Okay. So making sure that your foundation is there and then layer on the AI stuff. Having that adaptability mindset is important right now. It's not like, well, when I change—you have to change now. Even if it means taking small steps right now, or at least just having the level of awareness and knowing what's happening right now and being prepared for it, I think, is important.
That can mean testing a new tool, like AI assistance, chat box, personal search, if that works for your business. Tracking performance, making sure you're measuring the right data, how your impressions are performing versus your clicks. How much brand visibility do you have? You're not just looking at clicks, but you're kind of looking at the overall picture. What are people saying about you? There's lots of data that you can look at just to make sure that it's not just one thing, like your traffic giving you a very pretty picture right now, but maybe there's other signals that are happening out there, other conversations people are having on your brand. You need to understand that as well and monitor those impressions and know what your AI visibility is, beyond just clicks. Make sure that you are staying nimble because whether we like it or not, AI search will keep evolving.
I want to share a real-world example from client work that we did that we used the blogging strategy that I had just mentioned previously to help land their blog content into an AI overview placement. This AI overview citation that showed up also increased their visibility and we saw a revenue lift from organic traffic. There's so many benefits to having your brand or your page or website show up in AI search because it also helps to build that authority and credibility within AI-driven search. Even doing a few searches within the search engines themselves and seeing what comes up and if your content is even showing or coming up. You don't even need any fancy tools to do that. So, you could just do a search for a particular question or topic or something. What every article is covering or talking about, you can just look that up and see what comes up.
So for example, what we did for one of our clients, Nomi Designs, which is a fashion brand based in Victoria, BC. I'll show you this case study will show you how they were able to grow their visibility in traffic using content clusters that I mentioned and blogging. So the results were that they had a higher AI overviews visibility, increased sales from organic traffic—organic traffic is their highest traffic channel. This really shows you the power of blogging. Here's an example of what we did, in terms of building up the content clusters and having them write their blogs.
This shows you a few examples of blog articles on their website, but if you notice, there's these two articles here, “How to Pack Linen Clothes for Travel.” This is, by the way, a linen clothing company. This article that they wrote on “How to Pack Linen Clothes for Travel” and “Can You Wear Linen Clothing in the Winter?” These all came about as me asking questions to the founder and owner of the company. I'm like, what questions do you get asked a lot? What are some FAQs that you've got? And she's like, you know people will firstly have this misconception that they think that you can't wear linen in the winter and we're in Canada, right? So our winters can get cold and she's like, well, I really want to break that myth. I want to give them some truth and some information that linen can be insulating and you can layer it and wear it with other fabrics like wool—you can layer them and they can be very warm. So she wrote this whole article just around this topic of being able to wear linen clothing in the winter. Well, this article is one of her top performing blogs and shows up in AI overviews.
Same with this, “How to Pack Linen Clothes for Travel”, because as we all know, what is the one characteristic of linen fabrics? They tend to wrinkle, right? Nobody wants to travel or take linen clothing with them for traveling. So again, she wanted to break that myth and write this whole article on how to pack linen clothes for travel. Again, this is one, another one of her top-performing blogs.
So I'll show you just what that looks like here in terms of the type of results that she got for, “Can You Wear Linen Clothing in the Winter?” Say we did a Google search here for the benefits of wearing linen in winter. This comes up in AI overviews and also the first result links to the Nomi Designs blog, “Can You Wear Linen Clothing in the Winter?” She's also the number one organic result too. So there you've got three—like there's a link here, there's a link there, and there's also the organic SEO link. So there’s three places where this page shows up. This really shows you the power of blogging. Lesson here is consistency plus helpful content equals being relevant and we said relevance is very important.
I'll show you these results here. It's a screenshot of Google Search Console that shows you top pages, one being her homepage. Second is this blog, “Linen Clothing for Canadian Winters.” It's our second highest performing blog. In the last three months, you can see the number of clicks and impressions that this blog has received and you can see that it just goes on an uptrend. So this blog is definitely driving traffic to their website—to the Nomi website. And I can tell in their Google Analytics, their direct and organic traffic channels are their highest revenue-generating traffic channels, even better than social media. And she's not even running paid ads and she does a little bit of email marketing. But right now organic is totally driving her traffic and bringing in the revenue. I'd say about 50% of her revenue right now is coming from organic search. That all-in-all shows you the power of blogging and how it can help your site establish itself or build a sense of authority and be a trustworthy brand, but also help show up in the search engines, results pages and being cited in AI overviews. This is also a way for new customers to discover your brand because through this popular search, can you wear linen in winter is a very popular question. This helps with discoverability and brand awareness. If somebody is just typing that in Google Search and your article comes up, that's another way for them to discover you.
Also when you are creating this content, like I said, if you're a founder, owner, designer, sales marketer, you want to make sure that your content is working for you. So not only are you writing this piece of content and it's working for her right now, bringing in sales, but also, you could take this content. You could repurpose it into an e-letter, into your social media posts. I use the same strategy for myself. I also take it and I also create podcast episodes, YouTube videos, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts. It's endless what you can do with this one piece of content. And then that way it makes sure that everything that you create is all aligned. And then, if you think about it, your distribution, right? You want to make one. Create the content once and then distribute it everywhere across all the channels.
So have I convinced you yet on the importance of blogging? Yes, awesome! I really believe in it and I do this myself for my clients and it really works and you can see the results here. And just another quote from Jeanel, the founder of RETAILBOSS, she said, “Brands that survived the retail shifts are those that adapted fastest to digital and content-first strategies.” Now, you know a little bit more of what's happening in the AI landscape—how commerce and retail is changing, what are some of the challenges people are facing and, a case study of a simple strategy that you can use to get your brand to show up and increase its visibility.
Somebody has a question. “I do all these things and Google isn't showing my site in search results, only my social media channels. DuckDuckGo has no issues. I think about it everyday.” Well, you know what? If it's showing up on Bing, then that's not a bad thing because ChatGPT is pulling their data from Bing. Nowadays you're not just optimizing for Google. You're optimizing for Yahoo, DuckDuckGo as well. So I wouldn't discount these other search engines because ChatGPT is saying that they are citing from Bing. So don't be discouraged and don't give up. Another thing is I would check your indexing on your Google Search Console. Check your indexing and see if those pages, like your blogs, are being indexed on Google. This could be a matter of that, you know, they should be indexing it, but sometimes it could use a little push because the Internet is such a vast place and there's so many websites. You can do a manual index and submit it to Google. Make sure you have a Google Search Console set up. Make sure you submit your site map to it to trigger its crawling and indexing. Also index those individual pages as well. So check that. Hope that helps.
I want to give you a few practical steps that you can do today to get started. Like I said, it doesn't need to be this big, overwhelming, daunting job. You can just start small. You can identify the top three customer questions and turn those into blogs. Like I said to Helen as well, make a list of top questions that you get asked all the time from customers and those could be potential blog article topics. Audit your product pages for technical SEO basics. Add schema markup and optimize your metadata. Basic SEO best practices here. Title tag, meta descriptions, image alt text, H1 H2 tags are still important. Building trust is important. Showcase your founder story, values and reviews. I don't think a lot of brands do that. It's unfortunate because I work with friends and on one site, they're looking and I'm like, their products are so beautiful, but their “about” pages really don't do them justice and they don't really tell the full story. And so I will really try to build that up and tell your story, your brand, your founder story, why you started it. Why does it exist? I also had written a blog specifically about AI search optimization and that's what that QR code is here on the screen. If you want to learn more, you can just scan that QR code and you can read the blog. The blog actually covers it more in detail and goes through it.
You want to make sure that you’re checking your Google Shopping listings because it's been found that they're pulling like… Google shopping is another way that you can be found. You don't have to pay for ads—Google Ads. There's also Google Organic listings. So it's just a matter of optimizing your product pages, making sure your titles, pricing, images and policies all meet Google's standards. You could start by updating your top product pages, having more specific product descriptions, photos, and including keywords within the titles and the descriptions and, like I said, writing helpful blog posts that answer common questions that you get from your customers because AI tools are often pulled from blogs. So when you're giving the answers to those common questions, then your content is going to be readily cited more. Just make sure that your content is original and helpful. Commit to consistency. So even starting with one blog a month. It's better than none.
Okay, I'm almost done. I know we're reaching the end of this session, so I just want to say, in summary, websites are not going away, but the role of the website is transforming. SEO is not dying—it's evolving from ranking for clicks to structuring your site for AI agents. The brands that are able to adapt early will become preferred sources for AI systems, thus winning visibility and sales in this new ecosystem.
So now I’ll open up the floor for any questions that you have or feel free to share any current SEO challenges that you're facing with your e-commerce business. Does anyone have any questions? If you have questions, you could put them in the chat or unmute yourself.
Webinar Attendee #1
Actually, Glynis, hi, thank you so much. I have a question. So I actually run my own online nutrition business consulting and I used GoDaddy to create my website and then I also do a blog on there as well. I'm just wondering is it better to use a different platform just for SEO and ranking because currently with GoDaddy, I just have a website builder and I have limited access to SEO.
Glynis Tao
Does it have a place for you to edit your title tags with meta descriptions?
Webinar Attendee #1
It does, yeah. It has that feature.
Glynis Tao
Have you checked your rankings in Google Search Console?
Webinar Attendee #1
Yeah, I have been. So I have been looking into that, but it's not performing very well, so that's why I'm just asking the question. I think you kind of answered it in one of the questions. I do a lot of recipes, so I don't have recipe schemas on there. So I wonder if that would help.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, I'm not sure how robust GoDaddy is, honestly. I’ve come across a few of those. I haven't worked on GoDaddy sites. I mostly work, I'd say like 90% of my clients’ sites are on Shopify, a few on Squarespace and Wix. So I'm actually curious to know how GoDaddy performs on SEO, but I feel like if you have the ability to do those optimizations and that you are doing them and tracking them as well, because you want to be able to measure, right? And see, is it even making any difference before and after you've gone through and optimized. Go through those recipe pages. Just see if you can add schema and then just ask their support and so the important part of your website, you want to make sure that those are showing up in search engines. Technical backend stuff is important and making sure that there's nothing potentially blocking your site too, on being crawled and indexed. There's some checks in place that have to be done to make sure there's nothing potentially venting your site from being indexed in the first place and then knowing how your site is performing currently and then start to make a few improvements on it. Maybe picking a few articles or recipes that you think are more popular amongst your audience and going in and optimizing. I always say, optimize for one focus keyword, that way you're able to track it and see if you are even ranking for that keyword and how high you are currently ranking. And then it may require some on-page tweaks as well.
Webinar Attendee #1
Okay, thank you.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, hopefully that helped.
Webinar Attendee #1
Yeah, that's great. And in your opinion, I was thinking of switching over possibly to Squarespace or Wix just so that I have more functionality. Which one do you recommend or prefer?
Glynis Tao
Between the two?
Webinar Attendee #1
Yeah.
Glynis Tao
Well, in my experience, I'm with Squarespace over Wix. I think Wix has a lot of these customization functions. Either can, if you know how to use them, they're good, but if not, it can be very confusing and even for me, I find it a little hard to work with a Wix website. Squarespace, I find a little bit more user-friendly.
Webinar Attendee #1
Yeah, like they're pretty much drag-and-drop, right?
Glynis Tao
Yeah. I feel like it's a cleaner interface.
Webinar Attendee #1
Yeah, no, for sure. Thank you.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, no worries. And if you do do that and you move to a new website platform, I would recommend that you make a list of your current web pages because you want to make sure you redirect them. Say if your pages are performing and a page in particular is performing, you want to preserve that traffic, right? So make sure you map it out and then make sure you put the proper redirects in place.
I know we're reaching the top of the hour, so I really do appreciate and thank everyone for attending the session. And as a bonus for attending this live session, I am offering all attendees a mini site audit and strategy session where I will provide custom recommendations on how you can future proof your brand for AI. So to take advantage of this offer, scan the QR code you see on the left, book a call with me, and the first three people who book a call will also receive an AI visibility report. I think it's really important to know where you are right now and where your site stands in order for you to then decide on the next steps and what to do. And I would love to help you with that.
So I hope you all found this webinar to be helpful. I know there's a lot of information, but I try to bring you the most important and relevant information for you. It's a simple, easy way that you can hopefully take and start to implement some of these steps in your business.
Glynis Tao
Thank you so much for tuning in. You can find me on Instagram, @glynistao, and my website, glynistao.com. Please subscribe to the Chase Your Dreams podcast if you haven't already. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with others who you think this may help. Lastly, it would be great if you left a rating and review for our podcast. See you next time!
If you need help building your SEO strategy for the age of AI, please reach out to me. Call or visit my website, glynistao.com, for SEO strategy and services. I have a new page up now dedicated to AI SEO, and I'll have other free resources and more to help support you along your journeys. Until next time, take care.