Some eCommerce SEO agencies will waggishly tell you that SEO is dead, even while continuing to collect a paycheck from content marketing efforts dedicated to increasing organic traffic. Others will staunchly and stalwartly deny the claim.

It is the latter members that are correct; as always, SEO is simply evolving so that its former iterations are ineffective and its new self is somewhat unrecognizable, rather than dead.

But since the advent of these new AI engines, like ChatGPT and Gemini, on which consumers are becoming increasingly reliant, SEO companies have really had to up their game.

This short post will shed some light on how they continue to perform, even in the face of generative engines and answer engines like ChatGPT and Gemini.

Traditional SEO Marketing Strategies and AI: The Merger

There are two big prongs to this. One is that, even if all an eCommerce SEO agency offered were wrote, eCommerce standard SEO services, if those were effective, they would have a theoretically positive impact on AEO, or showing up in the AI engines.

The other is that if the SEO strategy relied on quality copy, it’s going to be doing basically everything that’s needed for AEO anyway.

Let’s just take a closer look at what goes into standard SEO services. There are few big pillars here, which are:

• Technical SEO
• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Content

Under these there are a bunch of operations that impact the ranking signals that improve overall ranking:

• Link building
• Content publication
• SEO content creation and optimization
• Optimization of current category and product pages
• Optimization of page titles, meta data, and other on-page signals
• Site structure improvements
• Speed and security updates and improvements
• Internal link optimization
• Reputation management

Together, these and other efforts will increase a website’s rankings in the search engines, which is intended to take advantage of the billions of searches that Google is getting every day.

They will also improve the overall organic footprint of a website which should in turn improve the website’s, or its brand’s, visibility in AI engines.

Adapting SEO to Answer Engine Optimization

In the modern era, effective eCommerce SEO agencies adapt their strategies to be more effective in ChatGPT and other AI models.

The main adjustment that SEO agencies make to their processes to be more effective in AI engines is through the quality of the copy they publish.

It is no longer about meeting some arbitrary word count, or about putting the keywords in the right places. Those things still help, but AEO is a bit more nuanced.

Really, it all comes down to search intent. You can get a post or a page or a brand mention as an output through a model like ChatGPT as long as you answer the questions people are asking, as many of them that they are asking, and as succinctly as possible.

But, as already stated, if the copy being published pursuant to the SEO campaign was performing on the grounds of search engine optimization, there is a pretty solid chance it might also produce results through AI engines.

The truth is search engines are becoming increasingly reliant on information-dense copy that answers many questions in sequence and which offers unique, original and actionable insights into those questions.

In addition to these content optimizations, eCommerce SEO agencies that focus on AI may work on social media presence, reputation management, and more.

Working with an eCommerce SEO Agency for Continued Success

If you’re leery about hiring an eCommerce SEO agency solely because you don’t know how they’ll be able to perform with respect to AI models, ask to see examples of their work that has produced results, preferable for a client in your industry. If they can do that, you’re likely in good hands.

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