S3 EP25: SEO Shorts: Ecommerce SEO/AEO Best Practices with Pat Ahern from Intergrowth

There are a lot of people nowadays who are going to LLMs who are saying, I'm looking for product that meets this specific use case that can be shipped to Arizona within five business days. Or I'm looking for this particular product and it needs to be able to ship to me internationally and I live in Sweden. If your business is able to provide those shipping timelines, those shipping constraints, but you don't list it explicitly on your website, LLMs are most likely not going to recommend you unless they can find details somewhere else in all of their analysis that indicate that you do meet those parameters.

But they're far more likely to recommend your competitor that explicitly states those parameters on their website instead. You're listening to Customer Growth Sessions, presented by Intergrowth, where we talk through strategies to help up-and-coming e-commerce businesses bring in more customers. I'm your host, Pat Ahern. Let's jump in.

Hey listeners, welcome back to the latest episode of Customer Growth Sessions. It's just me in the studio today, back with another SEO shorts, or maybe we'll call it AEO shorts today. The big theme for today's episode is how to set up your site properly for LLMs as an e-commerce brand. Now, where this stems from is in the past year, maybe two years, that has probably been the number one question that we've gotten from e-com brands that are interested in getting more customers.

Constantly, e-com brands are asking us, what can we do to set up our site so that LLMs are citing our business and are recommending our products or our brand when our customers are looking for us? So today, we're going to do a deep dive into a handful of the levers that you can pull to maximize your AI visibility. And fortunately, all this stuff is also going to help you a lot from the SEO perspective as well. One other thing I want to note is if you are interested in learning more about this, check out the show notes.

we're going to link out to the full-scale e-commerce AEO and SEO audit checklist that we've built out for businesses like yours that are really serious about scaling up their search visibility and their LLM visibility. So with that, let's take a look at a couple of the big levers that you can start pulling today that are going to get you way more revenue from LLMs. So the first opportunity that I love to talk about with e-commerce businesses is schema markup. Now, there's a lot of misinformation about schema and it is a little bit technical but bear with me i'm going to make this really straightforward to implement there's a lot of misinformation about schema markup that it's the type of thing that you're going to add onto your website and you're going to start ranking overnight schema is like the equivalent of training wheels for search engines and llms it makes it really easy for them to understand your broader business and all of the things that are connected to it.

So it's not like putting rocket fuel on your website. It's ultimately taking all of the authority that you've built out in all these different places, and one, connecting it to your main brand, and two, making it really easy for search engines to understand all of the other components of your business. So some examples of schema markup that you can and should be rolling out for your e-commerce site is one, adding in organizational schema, which is going to tell search engines and LLMs what your business is about, what is your business name, business address, and more.

Those are things that really help search engines, again, to understand your business. Same as schema, I would say for many e-commerce brands that haven't done any technical SEO work is going to lead to a pretty significant lift if it's nothing that you've touched before and if you have prominent brand presence on any other mediums. So the big opportunity for same as schema markup is to connect the dots between your website and all of your various social channels on the internet.

So great example, if you have a huge YouTube following, if you have a massive Instagram presence, but those aren't tied directly to your website through same as schema yet, do that today. And it's going to lead to a really significant lift in traffic to your website. But same as schema ultimately helps search engines again to connect the dots. So you have a great YouTube channel, you have a great Instagram channel, a great Pinterest channel, but if search engines don't understand that these channels in your website are all associated with the same brand, you ultimately miss out on all the value that you've built out from these channels.

So same as schema, it's a couple lines of code that are going to make it really straightforward for search engines to connect these dots. Similarly, there's going to be a whole element of schema referred to as review schema. Now Shopify brands, Shopify has likely set up much of this for you already, but it's good to verify to make sure that you do have it in place properly. So review schema is ultimately going to be something you going to see on a product page or a PDP that is going to list out how many ratings your products have what is the average rating score and ultimately giving customers and search engines a better understanding of the quality of your product.

So with that, I'm going to share a link in the show notes that is going to point to a couple different tools that you can look at in order to audit your existing schema markup and actually create schema markup in a really straightforward manner. From there, take a look, make sure this is rolled out correctly on your site, sit down and implement this. It's a one-time thing that's going to lead to a really significant bump in search engine's understanding of your site, and from there, lead to a healthy bump in traffic as well.

The second big thing that's going to come into the mix is going to be your product listing pages, your PLPs, collection pages, whatever term you want to use for it. PLPs in traditional search engines are, for most brands, the number one organic search driver aside from their homepage. And in some cases, PLPs drive more traffic to brands than their actual homepage does. But that's going to be all those different collections pages you've built out that list out, you know, three, four, 20 different products, let's say, related to an overarching category.

So one, if you haven't built out a series of PLPs yet, and you have more than, let's say, like four or five different products on your site, this is a huge opportunity for you to start working on. PLPs can be a phenomenal way to get people to your site from a page that gives them a lot of different product options So it gives them a lot of variability to choose from And these pages rank extremely well So great starting point if you haven't built any of these yet is take a look at your competitors See what PLPs they've built out for their own website And see if it makes sense for you to build out those same product groupings Again, these pages can rank really well in search.

They're also really helpful for LLMs So one, take a look at your competitors, see what PLPs they've rolled out, see if it makes sense for you to roll these out as well. Two, take a look at what are these specific pain points that you solve with your various products for customers and see how you can align PLPs to be related to that. So for example, let's take a couple tangible examples here. One, if you sell, one of our current clients sells bridesmaid dresses.

So one of the great opportunities for them that we've rolled out for them is building out PLPs focused on flower girl dresses, focused on maternity dresses, focused on maid of honor dresses, all of these things. And creating these pages and having all products nested under there that fit in there enables these pages to rank extremely well for keywords like maternity bridesmaid dress, flower girl dresses, junior bridesmaid dresses, you name it. If we, on the other hand, our friends at Joe and Bella, they provide, actually, Jimmy from Joe and Bella just came on the podcast a couple weeks ago.

So hey, Jimmy, if you haven't listened to that yet, definitely check out that episode. He does a really great deep dive into marketing to an elderly group, or call it a more seasoned group of individuals. But for Joe and Bella, they have all of these use case collection pages that they built out that perform extremely well for their brand. So they have clothes that are really intended for people that have all sorts of different ailments that make it really challenging for them to get dressed in the morning or to get undressed at night.

So they have, for example, a dedicated PLP that is focused on button downs for people with arthritis, let's say, just as a hypothetical example. They might have one for button downs for people with Parkinson's. All sorts of things related to that that you know if someone is searching on a large language model or Google search engine results page for these types of queries and your page shows up, these are people who are extremely likely to make a purchase from you on the spot.

Now, once you've identified these product listing pages to build out, the next step is to optimize them in a way so that they're actually designed to rank extremely well in search. I'm not going to get as granular into that right now. Again, check out the PDF that we've put together. It's going to get a little more granular in that.

But some of the big things you want to think about are what are the types of keywords someone is likely typing in when they go to a search engine like Google if they want to find a product collection like this. Make sure that those keywords are incorporated in the title tag, in the header of the page, the H1, in the URL structure, and then ideally you're going to have FAQs at the very bottom of the page that are going to be structured to include a lot of those other subtopics and customer questions in the mix as well.

Now one of the other items I want to look into today because it oftentimes overlooked is auditing your shipping and returns policies So if you selling products you probably have a shipping policy somewhere on your website In my experience many brands start out with a really basic shipping policy very basic return policy In some cases I seen that it not even easily accessible on the site or maybe those pages are blocked from crawlers If those things come into play you run a big risk that LLMs are going to overlook you entirely You started an e business because you had a great product not because you wanted to become a full marketer But here you are, spending a few hours every week trying to figure out Facebook ads, SEO, content marketing, instead of doing the things that are actually going to build the business.

At Ader and Growth, we take customer acquisition off your plate entirely. No more managing meta ads, no more running SEO. we handle all of the customer acquisition for you. So you can get back to doing the things that actually move the business forward.

If you're ready to stop being your own marketing department, go to innergrowth.com slash cgs to book a strategy session with our team. Once again, that's innergrowth.com slash cgs.

So the opportunity here is there are a lot of people nowadays who are going to LLMs who are saying, I'm looking for a product that meets this specific use case that can be shipped to Arizona within five business days. Or I'm looking for this particular product and it needs to be able to ship to me internationally and I live in Sweden. If your business is able to provide those shipping timelines, those shipping constraints, but you don't list it explicitly on your website, LLMs are most likely not going to recommend you unless they can find details somewhere else in all of their analysis that indicate that you do meet those parameters.

But they're far more likely to recommend your competitor that explicitly states those parameters on their website instead. So here's what I like to do. One, read through your shipping policy on your website. Read through your return policy on your website as well.

Ask yourself from the perspective of a consumer, are you clearly stating how long it takes for your orders to arrive when shipped domestically, when shipped internationally? Are you clearly stating any sort of location that you ship to, whether you don't do any international shipping, whether you do ship internationally, but you only ship to certain locations? Other things to be mindful of is rather than having everything listed on a singular shipping policy, are you instead linking up to support resources that give more granular breakdowns of your shipping and returns policies.

The more easily accessible all that information is on one page, the more likely you are to be the recommended brand. Now, from there, the thing I find extremely helpful to do is pretend to be a potential customer of your business. Go to your LLM of choice, whether it's Claude, ChatGPT, or otherwise, and take on the role of that customer. I am a describe your target customer.

I'm looking to buy, insert what your product is. I need this item to be, I'm looking for brands that provide free shipping and only take three to five days to ship. See if your brand does get recommended. If your brand doesn't get recommended, go back to that same LLM and say, what's your perception of insert my company name?

Is this a brand that will likely meet my parameters of, you know, shipping times, free shipping, you name it. If LLMs aren't able to clearly state what your shipping policies are, whether you do provide these items, you won't be recommended. If you are the brand in the eyes of LLMs that does provide these things, you're more likely to be recommended, but likely that information could be more clearly conveyed. It's likely a scenario where perhaps making those resources more easily accessible is going to help you out instead even more.

Now, the last thing that we're going to dive into today for this audit is what I refer to as LLM sentiment analysis. Now, what this is, is this is the process of going to a large language model, or ideally going to multiple large language models over a longer span of time, and asking questions about how LLMs perceive your brand, so you can find holes in LLMs understanding, gaps in information about your brand on the internet, or negative sentiment that you can perhaps speak to in a more positive light.

So the way that I like to do this is I'll go to an LLM of choice and I'll ask it, what's your perception of intergrowth or what's your perception of insert client name? What I'm looking to see is a handful of different things. One, I want to read everything that the LLM tells me about this brand. I want to first of all understand any factual inaccuracies that LLMs are pulling in.

So if intergrowth started out in 2016, if an LLM says that intergrowth started out at a different time span, that's a factual inaccuracy that I likely want to correct. So what I'm then looking to do is to see what are the sources that are actually being cited for those factual inaccuracies to see, one, is that a profile that our team can directly influence, whether it is a review site where perhaps we can claim the profile and fix that inaccurate information? Is it a social media profile that perhaps is just outdated and needs to be updated from our end?

Is it a third party review site where I can reach out to the reviewer and see if there's a way that we can get them to fix this inaccuracy But either way first thing we looking for is factual inaccuracies that are coming into the mix Second thing that I really looking to see is any sort of negative sentiment about our brand or about the client's brand that is coming out on any sort of third-party review sites or third-party forums. So the most common examples you're going to see, there's a whole bunch of different review sites that'll come into the mix.

That'll be one overarching grouping. The second is going to be any sort of forum sites, whether it be like a niche forum site for your industry, whether it be more so a Reddit, Quora, looking to see if there's a way that one for those review sites that perhaps are citing a couple negative reviews, looking to see if you can get a couple of your upcoming happy customers to leave reviews on those new platforms instead that are being cited more regularly is a great way to alleviate some of that negative sentiment and at least balance the scales in your favor to get a more accurate picture of your brand.

Now on the forum side of things, what can be a huge opportunity here is if there are forums, let's say Reddit, where people are saying negative things about particular elements of your product, of your service, you name it, that's a phenomenal opportunity for you to join into the discussion to one, if there's outdated information, see if you can provide additional context or clarity into it. Two, if there is negative feedback, or if someone had a negative experience, from a customer service angle, it's a wonderful opportunity for you to chime in and hopefully trying to alleviate the situation, again, from a more gentle customer service angle.

The third element that we'll sometimes see coming into the mix is going to be what I would call like the individual reviewer websites. So this might be either a larger publisher site, you know, picture like a wire cutter. It could also be like a personal blog where someone wrote an article about their experience with your product. Oftentimes these things that will get cited might be a couple years old.

Maybe the product that they're citing is either no longer in stock or no longer offered, let's say, or maybe the product has been updated since then. So either way, reaching out to those individual reviewers and one, seeing if there's a way that you can get them to provide an updated review, even if it's saying, hey, you know, is there any chance we can send you a free version of our product in exchange for updating this review and just making sure this information is up to date?

Those are all angles that you can look into. Now, the final opportunity for LLM sentiment analysis is to ask LLMs to point out gaps in your product marketing. So the big opportunity here is to take on the role of that potential customer. Start asking LLMs for their perception of your brand.

What I find really effective to do is to nudge them towards your brand name. So let's look at Intergrowth as a hypothetical. If I'm looking to do this for intergrowth, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to, let's say, ChatGPT. I'm going to type in, I am an e-commerce business owner running an e-com brand that does 5 million annual revenue.

I'm looking for an SEO or AEO agency that can help me to profitably acquire more customers. I've heard what I would add in here to, again, nudge it towards intergrowth is something like, I've heard good things about the agency intergrowth. what's your perception of this brand? What I'm likely going to get in that result is a breakdown from ChatGPT that includes some good things, includes some negative things.

It's going to start out with an overview of the brand. But oftentimes there's going to be follow-up questions that ChatGPT recommends that you either research online or you ask the brand about directly. If ChatGPT or your LLM of choice doesn't directly include that in the response, I would ask a follow-up prompt of what are some follow-up questions I should be asking them or looking for more information online about before I move forward with them. What this is oftentimes going to tell you is questions that ChatGPT, or again, your LLM of choice, isn't readily able to access online.

So what this probably means for you as a brand is these questions are not things that you've made easily accessible on your website or on your social channels. Some of these might be nuanced questions that wouldn't really be feasible for you to include as a frequently asked question, but look into the questions that do populate. One, are these opportunities that you should convert into a full-length blog article that ChatGPT or Claude can then cite in future responses like this?

Two, maybe if it's not that extensive of an answer that's required, consider adding an FAQ section to your website or expanding upon your existing FAQ section to include that question and a detailed answer within the mix. So that's all we have for today. Again, if you are interested in diving deeper into our AEO and SEO audit for e-commerce brands. Check out the links below.

We're gonna have a breakdown for a full PDF that lists out all of the different core action steps to make sure you have a proper AEO and SEO foundation in place for your e-commerce business. Check it out, download it, entirely free for you. With that, we're signing off from here. I'm Pat from Intergrowth.

Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.