In this episode, Glynis Tao discusses the evolving landscape of e-commerce SEO in the age of AI, focusing on how e-commerce brands can adapt their growth strategies to remain competitive. She highlights the importance of understanding the changes in consumer search behaviour, the AI challenges brands face, and effective SEO strategies that work today. Glynis emphasizes the need for original content, technical SEO foundations, and building trust with both customers and AI systems for long-term success.
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
- SEO is evolving due to AI advancements.
- Consumers are now relying on AI-driven search to make purchase decisions.
- EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) is vital for content.
- Strategic blogging can significantly help establish trust, authority and credibility.
- Content that is high quality and original will likely rank higher in search engines.
- E-commerce brands need to focus on unique value propositions.
- Technical SEO foundations are essential for visibility.
Interview Themes
How is consumer search behaviour changing?
Consumer search behaviour is shifting as online buyers become more reliant on AI-driven search and conversational e-commerce when making purchasing decisions. An e-commerce brand’s website is no longer the main point of discovery or sales channel. E-commerce sites are turning into data sources for AI to parse through. Whether an e-commerce website will be visible to potential buyers through AI-driven search is based on the quality and trustworthiness of the site’s content. Online shoppers aren’t searching and clicking anymore—they’re asking and buying through AI.
What is technical SEO and why is it important?
Technical SEO refers to the backend optimization of websites that allows search engines to better crawl and index through a site’s content. Optimizing technical SEO is important, specifically for AI search, because it helps determine which e-commerce brands will be visible on search engine results.
What is EEAT and how can e-commerce brands improve their EEAT?
EEAT stands for Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness. It is a framework that Google and AI systems use to evaluate the quality and credibility of a website’s content. This framework is important because it is how search engines decide what website content to prioritize on a results page. To improve EEAT, e-commerce brands should create original and helpful content that is developed for a certain target audience.
What are SEO strategies to help e-commerce brands adapt to the age of AI?
The e-commerce landscape is drastically changing as we enter this era of AI. To adapt to these changes, e-commerce brands can implement key strategies.
Optimize for AI Visibility
Ensure that your website’s content is original, high-quality, and well-structured so AI summaries (like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity) can easily prioritize and summarize your site.
Create EEAT-Driven Content
Focusing on creating content, such as blogs, that answer customer questions and demonstrate experience and expertise will lead to the development of a strong customer relationship. Being a credible source of information builds trust and authority with potential buyers, eventually leading to conversions.
Strengthen Foundational Technical SEO
Improving site speed, maintaining a clean architecture, and prioritizing a mobile-friendly user experience will help search engines index and crawl your site, leading to higher site visibility.
Chapters
00:00 Navigating SEO in the Age of AI
02:48 Understanding the E-commerce Landscape Shift
05:32 Key Challenges for E-commerce Brands
08:45 Effective SEO Strategies for AI
11:25 Building Content Authority and Trust
14:11 Technical SEO Foundations
17:24 The Importance of EEAT in Content Creation
20:04 Practical Blogging Tips for Unique Brands
Transcript
Glynis Tao
Hi everyone, I'm so pleased to have you here today. In today's episode, we're talking about SEO strategies in the age of AI. There have been a lot, a lot of changes in the SEO search world, so the purpose of this episode is to inform you of what these changes are and how you can adapt to these changes to future-proof your brand in the new AI-driven search landscape.
This is a recording of a webinar presentation I did on October 9th as part of the SEO School Educational Series. If you want to stay up to date with the latest trends in the e-commerce industry, I encourage you to subscribe to my newsletter. Simply go to info.glynistao.com/newsletter-opt-in. This webinar is packed with so many valuable nuggets from my five years of experience working directly with client websites.
I decided to split it into two parts. The purpose of this webinar is to help e-commerce brands navigate SEO in an AI-driven landscape. This is part one where I will be covering how the e-commerce landscape is changing, key challenges brands are facing, and SEO strategies that work today. In part two, I'll be showing you some case studies, an example of a fashion brand success story, and some action steps that you can do to start right now. Let's do this.
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
Welcome to E-Commerce SEO Strategies in the Age of AI. The purpose of this webinar is to help e-commerce brands navigate SEO in an AI-driven landscape. In this presentation, I will be covering the AI-powered e-commerce landscape, key challenges brands are facing, and SEO strategies that work today. I'll be showing you some case studies and examples and some action steps that you can do to start right now.
So a quick introduction, my name is Glynis and I'm the founder of Chase Your Dreams Consulting. We specialize in SEO services for fashion, beauty and lifestyle e-commerce companies. I have over 20 years of fashion apparel industry experience and I help fashion e-commerce brands create optimized content and track potential customers through organic search.
So before we get started, I just wanna do a quick little poll and see, show of hands, how many attendees are actively creating content right now? That could be blogs, videos, shorts, reels. You could just say “me” in the chat. Who's creating content out there right now? Awesome. And do you know if that content is showing up in AI search? That's the big question. Not sure. So you'll be a little bit more informed after this webinar and in terms of how to get that content to show up in AI search, as well as how to check to see if that content is visible in AI.
Let's talk about the new e-commerce and AI landscape. If your traffic is down, even though your rankings look stable, it might not be you—it might be AI changing the rules. There have been a lot of changes over the last several months—weeks even—and things are changing so quickly. So it's good that you guys are here and so that you can be prepared, know what the changes are, and know how to adapt to the changes.
The shift from traditional SEO used to be ranking for those 10 blue links, which you see an example on the left-hand side, to now, AI SEO is optimizing for visibility in summaries and cited sources, such as Google AI overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Bing, Copilot, and so on. The way consumers are searching is changing. It’s resulting in fewer clicks and they're getting more direct answers without having to click on the links.
You see here, Google, below sponsored would be like your organic search results and those blue links used to be where people would go and they land on these results and then they would click through it, take a look through the website, see if they can find what they're looking for. If not, then they just move down the list sort of thing. But now you see with AI overviews here on the right-hand side, so same query, right? How to optimize for SEO. Same query, but different result. Here you get a little snippet of AI overviews. Here's your answer right here in the search. You don't even have to click anywhere. You get your result. But if you want to learn more, go a little deeper, then fortunately, AI Overviews cites the website and adds a link here, which is what you see on the right-hand side, which people can go and click through to the website if they want to learn more.
I'm sure you all heard of the latest development on September 29th. ChatGPT introduced instant checkout and agentic commerce protocol. Instant checkout is a new feature in ChatGPT that lets users buy certain products within the chat interface without even going to the website. They are rolling this out to the US users first and so far it will be supporting single item purchases from US-based sellers. But over time, the plan is to expand to multi-item shopping carts, more merchants, like Shopify and other merchants, as well as regions that are beyond the US.
So the question is, is your shop ready for this change?
How consumer search behavior is changing, right? This is absolutely changing the game for consumers. What does it mean for DTC and commerce brands? Well, you have to look at your visibility, trust and customer acquisition challenges. Right now, consumers are looking for trustworthy brands and they rely on the AI filters to give them their answers. It's important that your brand is seen as an authority, as a trustworthy expert in your space, in your niche, so that it's important to build trust with both your customer as well as for AI search engines. Up until now, most brands are treating their websites as the primary sales channel. That's the place where shoppers are discovering and browsing and buying. Now with instant checkout, AI searching conversational commerce is rising. The discovery and transaction layers are starting to move outside the website into ChatGPT. So that means for your website, you need to increase its function, such as having a trusted data source for AI agents to pull from, being a branded hub for storytelling and owned content, and being a backend system for inventory fulfillment payments and customer data, which is often through a Shopify site or it could be through a headless CMS.
So you still would need a website. There's some rumors out there. People think that with this new agentic checkout that you don't need a website anymore. You do because they still need to transact, make the purchases from the website. With all this happening right now, it's like everything, everywhere all at once, one of the key challenges that e-commerce brands are facing today.
I did an interview recently with Jeanel Alvarado who's the founder of RETAILBOSS and she said that “Retail strategy today is about being where your customers are—online, in content, and in community.” During this conversation, we both agreed that SEO is not dead—it is evolving. It's moving away from traditional SEOs which used to focus on ranking and search results, driving clicks to your site, and then converting that traffic into sales. But with AI search results and instant checkout, websites are starting to see a reduced number of clicks even when the rankings remain steady.
SEO is shifting toward AI readiness and making sure that your content is structured, detailed, and trustworthy in order to be cited in places like AI overviews and to make sure that your site and the information is being summarized and accurately by ChatGPT and Perplexity. So what does that mean? This means that you have to make sure that your product data contains the right information, your pricing is accurate and consistent, the product availability and your attributes are all correct. This is through a technical SEO that's structured data structure and markup and schema markup is really important. Making sure that your website is also clean and has a clean site architecture with canonical tags and making sure that the content is high quality and the answers to people's questions and queries are descriptive and that they're fully answering the questions that people are asking in search. Because now people are not just typing in keywords like the old days, they are now having full conversations right inside search.
All in all, right now, relevance is greater than presence because of rising competition, paid ad saturation—paid ads are starting to cost more—a lower ROI, organic traffic is declining, despite steady rankings and people are having content overwhelm right now because everyone is publishing but not everyone is credible. We're going to talk a little bit more about technical SEO, what you can do to prepare and make sure your site is structured and the technical back-end is good. Have a mindset that's important to adapt because the brands that adjust fastest win. SEO is no longer just about getting found. It's really about being understood, trusted and transactible by the AI systems.
So now that you know how the commerce landscape is changing, let's talk about some SEO strategies that work in the age of AI. If anyone knows me, I'm always talking about how content is really important because content really builds authority. A big part of the strategy that I use a lot for myself as well as for my clients is blogging because blogging is a great way to be able to establish trust, credibility, and thought leadership. I have a little bit of a model that I use in terms of how to build up your blogging content because it's not just about blogging for the sake of blogging. You want to be strategic about it because creating a piece of content requires a lot of time. A lot of us are probably founders, entrepreneurs, brand owners—we're busy. We're juggling a lot of things. So if you're going to be putting in the time to write an article, you want this piece of content to work for you. Correct? I'm going to talk about the strategy that we use and show you a case study as well on how to build content clusters to be able to build your topical authority. You also want to create content that answers the question so that AI is pulling those into the summaries. I have a podcast episode where I talk about the importance of blogging. That is in episode 43. I talk about how brands that blog consistently become trusted voices and have shown an increase in conversions. So it's important to answer your customers' pain points.
There's various ways that you can create your content and blogs. There's some examples here of a topic cluster that we built up for one of our clients who is a contemporary woman's fashion brand. We built up a cluster around travel. They have written a travel essentials guide, what to pack for a 10-day vacation, what to pack for a beach vacation. These are all articles that fall within this travel cluster. And then, we built up a contemporary woman's fashion cluster here, in which they have a pillar article that is focused around contemporary women's fashion. Then, they built and wrote sub articles, like how to style statement pieces, what to wear this week, and how to put together a fashion-forward capsule wardrobe. As you can see, this cluster all works together. As well, there's a travel cluster. And within those clusters, they all have internal links that link to each other. That just strengthens the whole way that the content and the pages will rank in search.
Just to get a little technical with you, but this is important and this is what happens on the backend of your website. It's important to make sure that your technical SEO foundations are in place. That includes optimizing your images, checking your site speed. Nowadays, people's attention spans are shorter than goldfish now. It's like you've got two seconds to pretty much convince a person whether or not they want to stay on your site or leave. So you have to make sure you have a fast loading website and make sure that it's both viewable on mobile as well as on desktop. Another thing is to have schema markup for your product pages. This helps AI understand and surface your products more easily. It's a universal language for LLMs to be able to read your website content and understand what it is. This way, it helps your pages or your website to be cited on search and on AI. In those product pages, you could also include FAQs and have detailed product descriptions. I talked about site speed, mobile-first design. If you're working with a developer, make sure that they are focusing on a clean architecture. Making sure the site is very clean, easy to navigate. You don't have orphan pages that are just floating around that are not linked anywhere to other pages. Making sure the site is indexable and crawlable to search engines is really important and having that structured data.
Your website is important. It's still important to have a website because your website is not just made for search engines, but it's made for humans. The human-facing content is there to build the emotional connection and long-term brand equity. And then with the technical side combined, the machine-facing content ensures that AI agents are able to surface and sell your products accurately. So that's why you need to have both and make sure you combine these together because you're not just optimizing for AI search engines, you are also optimizing for your audience, buyers, customers who land on your site. You do need to build up that trust, credibility, and the relationship too. It's really important.
Do we have any questions so far? If you have any questions, just feel free to pop them in the chat. I will also be taking questions at the end.
So I just want to talk about EEAT and that stands for Expertise, Experience, Authority and Trustworthiness. This is important for search and traditional search. Last year, Google did a major algorithm update, one of the core updates, and that was to make sure that the content is written by humans for humans because they discovered that once people discover ChatGPT, people are just pushing out content like crazy. We know that content that's created in AI is mostly regurgitated content that already exists on the Internet. Once this came into place, we saw a lot of these big websites that used to generate a lot of content and blogs that were not the most original, unique, creative. They got penalized and they saw a hit to their traffic. You may have seen sites that previously had a lot of traffic take a hit because of this change and Google saying, ‘No, your content is not really unique. It's not original. It's really spammy, so we're just going to rank your site lower.’ Whereas smaller websites who had been consistently writing helpful original content, they were seeing more of an increase in traffic because of this.
At the end of last year, if you had been following me and I was telling people that it's important to create helpful original content and that it's important that this information is coming from you because you are the expert in what it is that you do. No one else has this information or this knowledge or experience like you do. So if you are able to create this content, then you have a better likelihood of search engines showing it and bringing it up in search results. But this now also applies with AI. They're looking at authoritativeness and citing these sites a lot higher or more frequently than other sites. But the algorithm's improving. They were favoring a lot of the, you know, things from Reddit and different things like that, but over time, they're changing the algorithm to make results a lot more relevant to what the customer, the user is looking for.
Just to emphasize that EEAT is not just an acronym. AI models are trained to cite these authoritative sources. And in order for you to rank, write original content that comes from you. And another thing that you want to make sure is to have author bylines that talk about who you are. Byline as a credit line that attributes a piece of writing to its author. And you also want to include things like case studies or founder stories, customer reviews. All of these things really do help to build that trust.
Hi, Helen. I'm just reading your question. What kind of blogs do you recommend to write about for a candle boutique that can provide the maximum amount of value to audiences? Yeah, that's a good question. I always start off by asking, what makes you or your brand unique? What makes you different from everybody else? As a starting point. I know your brand and you make really beautiful handmade candles from soy and they're like pieces of art—they're decorative. They're not just a scented candle that you burn and forget about, right? I remember you telling me that your candles can be decorative. They're just so beautiful. They're pieces of art that people don't even want to burn. So you could write a guide even on how to incorporate candles within your home decor. So yeah, I would really start off by brainstorming and thinking about what are the things that make your brand different and more unique than anybody else? And how is that relevant to your audience or potential customer? And also, what are the common questions that people are asking—the questions that you get from your buyers? Those are often good starting points because if people are asking that, then probably more people are asking the same question. Those could be ideas that you could use to write your blog content on. Okay. Does that help? Awesome. Thank you.
Glynis Tao
Thank you so much for tuning in. You can find me on Instagram, @glynistao, and my website, glynistao.com. Please subscribe to 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.