Episode Summary
In this solo episode of the 7-Figures and Beyond ecommerce podcast, host Greg Shuey breaks down one of the most urgent shifts in ecommerce marketing: the move from keyword-based SEO to relevance-based discoverability across platforms like Google, ChatGPT, TikTok, Reddit, and forums. He explains that while traditional SEO still plays a role, relying solely on it is no longer enough due to the fragmentation of the buyer journey and the rise of LLMs and AI-driven search experiences.
Greg walks listeners through how brands can regain traction by prioritizing semantic relevance, creating content that aligns with user intent, addresses questions comprehensively, and builds brand associations across multiple digital touchpoints. He shares a detailed client case study showing that shifting from just keyword optimization to broader relevance strategies (like FAQs, comparison content, and participating in niche communities) resulted in dramatic increases in impressions, AI overview visibility, and LLM mentions. He then outlines a four-step action plan: mining real customer questions, repurposing content, strengthening internal links, and expanding brand presence into external discussions, all of which help future-proof a brand’s SEO while naturally improving traditional rankings.
Key Takeaways
- SEO Is No Longer Just Google Rankings – It’s About Relevance Across Platforms: Discoverability now includes being present on Reddit, TikTok, ChatGPT, and forums. Brands must focus on showing up wherever customers are researching, not just Google.
- LLMs and AI Overviews Are Eating into Traditional Organic Traffic: Tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity are capturing user mindshare and redirecting traffic away from traditional search. Google’s AI overviews are further reducing click-through rates on high-ranking pages.
- Relevance Means Semantic Context, Not Just Keywords: Optimizing for relevance involves understanding user intent, providing value through detailed answers, and building strong brand associations even with competitors to appear in AI-generated responses.
- Real-World Proof: Relevance Boosts Visibility in LLMs and Google Features: Greg shares how one client saw a 170% increase in AI overview footprint and 90% growth in People Also Ask visibility by shifting to a relevance-driven content strategy.
- 4-Step Roadmap to Relevance: Capture real customer questions → Repurpose into robust content across formats → Internally link for topical authority → Show up in third-party conversations and build brand associations.
Questions To Ask Yourself
- How has my brand adapted (or failed to adapt) to the changing, non-linear customer journey that now includes TikTok, Reddit, and ChatGPT?
- Am I creating content that answers real customer questions with context and depth, or just targeting keywords?
- Is my brand showing up in third-party conversations and communities where our competitors are mentioned?
- How often do I audit existing content to check if it supports discoverability in both search engines and LLMs?
- Do I have a strategy in place to repurpose FAQ and long-form content into assets for platforms like YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, or Reddit threads?
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/
Sparktoro: https://sparktoro.com/
Alsoasked: https://alsoasked.com/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:02.344)
Greg Shuey (00:01.432)
Hey everyone, welcome to the seven figures and beyond e-commerce marketing podcast. I am your host, Greg Shuey, and I created this podcast to help direct to consumer brands, owners of these brands, marketers of these brands who are stuck and who are frantically and actively trying to find a way to grow their businesses again for the next few months.
I am going to be recording solo cast. I know I mentioned this on my last episode because I really want to dive deep into Google, both SEO paid search as well as the LLMs like chat GPT. Things are moving so fast in this space and I want people to be able to know what’s going on and to be able to adapt to the changes so they can continue to.
dominate in their categories. Today we’re going to dig into a huge shift that’s happening right under our noses in digital marketing and in search engine optimization. When I talk to a lot of brands these days, one of the biggest complaints I’m hearing is that their organic traffic is either plateauing or starting to dip. Now this isn’t everyone by any means. I still have a number of clients right now that
are growing month over month and year over year from an organic standpoint, which is amazing. But many brands do not have that pleasure. And what they’re wondering is what’s going on. They’re wondering why their best pages aren’t driving the same traffic or the same revenue that they used to. If this sounds like you, then this episode is obviously for you.
I’m going to try to walk through today how relevance fuels visibility, not just rankings anymore. This is not just in Google search either, right? This is in AI platforms, discovery feeds, the LLMs. And I’m hoping that by the end of this episode that you can walk away with a very clear roadmap of how to future proof your SEO strategy. In addition to expanding your brand’s discoverability,
Greg Shuey (02:25.966)
throughout the process. So let’s start by digging into the new customer journey. And I know that I have touched on this several times in a few other episodes. Earlier last year when we got started, it was a big one where we were talking about customer journey, customer research, and really kind of coming to terms that the customer journey is no longer linear.
It’s literally all over the place these days. If you talk to any of your customers, which I highly recommend that every single brand does on a regular basis, they are jumping from Reddit threads to TikTok reviews. I mean, they’re even using TikTok as a search engine these days. So they’re specifically looking for solutions to their problems right inside of TikTok. They’re also starting to use chat GPT more. They are…
you know, using email newsletters and even old school forums. I subscribe to a number of different forums and in a lot of cases, those forums are growing much faster than they have been the last three or four years. And they’re doing this before they ever land on your product page. So if we think about it, like the old Google, open up a browser.
type in a search, click and buy. Like that’s slowly fading away for many users. And it’s hard. Like it’s hard to be able to realize this and be able to accept this kind of new territory for brands. The real kicker is, if your brand isn’t showing up across all these touch points, you’re not just missing traffic, but you’re missing trust.
You’re missing attention, you’re missing revenue, and that is going to be pretty problematic moving forward for a lot of brands. And it’s, really sad. So let’s, let’s jump in by starting to unpack what SEO used to look like for e-commerce brands. And it’s actually quite simple. like I mentioned, just briefly, your customer will open Google, type in a query, land on a category or product page and start shopping.
Greg Shuey (04:49.74)
The process for accomplishing this was incredibly straightforward, very predictable, and for a while it was insanely effective. As an SEO, you would open your keyword research tool. You will identify the keywords, transactional and commercial-based keywords. You will take those keywords, you’ll optimize your titles, your meta descriptions, your content on page.
You will take some time to build some backlinks and for the most part, you’ll be able to start ranking in the top 10 for your most valuable product keywords and category based keywords. was a lot of wash, rinse and repeat, but that, that buyer journey, as I mentioned before, is really breaking down quite quickly. And let’s talk about why. So first Google traffic isn’t growing at the same rate it’s been growing out for the last 10 years.
I talked about this on our last episode. A lot of people are saying SEO is dead. It’s not dead. Let’s just get that away. If this is your first time listening to me, it’s not dead. So don’t think that don’t say that it’s definitely not growing as fast as it has been for the last 10 to 15 years. Okay. Biggest reason is we now have LLMs like chat, GPT perplexity, Claude, those are starting to get some traction. They’re starting to take some of that traffic away from Google.
In addition to we have AI overviews, now we have Google’s AI search that is really starting to hijack mind share and visibility for brands. The second thing that we’re seeing is that Google’s algorithm isn’t just rewarding keywords or links anymore. So instead it’s favoring relevance that comes down to content that closely aligns
with user intent and the broader semantic context of a search. So to break this down into its simplest form, if you are a cooler company, your brand needs to show up everywhere where coolers are talked about. You must be part of the discussion. Again, this is in forums, this is in Reddit threads, this is on TikTok, this is on YouTube.
Greg Shuey (07:10.694)
you know, this is on your website. This is on big industry publications. You need to be everywhere and part of that discussion. So in an AI first world, which we are slowly moving to, it’s not about how well you rank for a keyword. It’s truly about how often and how accurately your brand shows up wherever consumers are seeking solutions, whether that’s an answer to a problem or whether that’s a.
product to solve a problem. need to be wherever your consumers are seeking out those solutions. And if you can truly change your mindset to that, it’s going to be a whole lot easier for you to be able to start to build strategy and then take and execute that strategy on behalf of your business.
So let’s dig into relevance here really quick because some people may hear that and be like, I don’t quite understand. Like what does relevance mean? Obviously you could go do a Google search or you could ask chat GPT. but in, in short, what it means is it’s not just matching a keyword to a search query. It’s about semantic relevance, which is answering the why the how and the what and the what’s next behind a search.
So it means understanding user intent. means understanding context. And then it also includes associating entities like product categories, use cases, and in a lot of cases, competitors. And I’m going to talk a little bit more about that in a little bit. Something that makes a lot of my clients uneasy, a lot of our prospects that we talk to uneasy is creating stronger ties and associations with competitors. And again, we’ll get into that here in just a few minutes.
So when I follow the very best SEOs on Twitter, on LinkedIn, even my team, right? I consider my team to have some of the best SEOs out there. Instead of treating their content like a place to just stick keywords, right? They’re treating that content like a knowledge graph. And that means that they’re linking brand, product, and customer needs into one cohesive story.
Greg Shuey (09:25.748)
Okay, that can happen on a blog post, that can happen on a product page, that can happen on a category page, that can happen on a third party website. But making sure that you’re taking those three things and linking those together while telling your cohesive story is going to be absolutely critical. We’ve been optimizing in this fashion now for about six to eight months for a lot of our clients. And we are definitely seeing signals that an increase in brand awareness correlates
with more visibility in the different LLMs. Now, Google AI Search just launched, you know, a week ago to where people can actually get to it. Anyone can get to it and start using it. And so we’re still kind of learning through that and testing through that. When I say LLM visibility, I’m mostly talking about chat GPT as well as perplexity. Don’t really monitor Claude. I don’t know why, but we don’t. So what does this mean?
If your brand has a decent monthly search volume, so if you go over to SEMrush or any other keyword research tool and you just search your brand name, you know, if you’ve got at the minimum several thousand monthly searches for your brand name and then you have topical authority, you are significantly more likely to be mentioned in AI summaries and results. This also includes AI overviews. People also ask other rich snippets that are found in Google.
So let me give you a real world example. I’m not gonna be able to share the client name. And I think I mentioned a little bit about this on my last episode, but one of our e-commerce clients was stuck. So we’ve been laser focused on traditional SEO for the last five years of working with them, really digging in and trying to rank in positions one through 10 on Google, chasing keywords, building content, building backlinks, yada, yada, yada. Rankings are strong.
They’re incredibly strong. continue to grow every single month, like a lot. but they’re, they’re rapid growth in terms of organic traffic started to slow and slow a little bit more and slow a little bit more. And instead of running, we’re now crawling. So about six to eight months ago, we started to make this pivot. So instead of optimizing for only keywords, we focused on relevance.
Greg Shuey (11:53.944)
So some of the things that we did, and I’m not proclaiming that this is the only way to do it, but it’s the stride way of doing it. it’s subject to change based on how fast things are moving. But what we did is the very first thing is we added robust, frequently asked questions to their category and product pages. The next thing we did is we created high value, long form blog content tailored
to top of funnel discovery.
Top of funnel is like how to use what to consider buyers guide style type content. And that is really robust, deep thought leader type content that actually helps people solve a problem or answer a question. The next thing that we did is we created compare and contrast style blog content, showcasing them against their competitors as well. Brand competitor versus brand competitor.
brand product versus competitor product, in addition to roundups of the top X in the industry. And we did this in order to, like I mentioned a minute ago, create strong associations with competitors, brand names. So when Google would crawl that content, they would start to put two and two together. This company and this company, they’re showing up a lot together.
The last thing that we did is we started working with their PR team to get included in discussions that were happening on high value blogs and news platforms. Think like tech crunch or, you know, I don’t want to throw Forbes out because I don’t feel like that’s high quality anymore. but some of these, some of these blogs that are very niche specific and have tons and tons and tons of traffic, getting them included in competitor roundups,
Greg Shuey (13:57.006)
product comparisons, again, to create those strong associations. So we worked with our PR team to start moving that forward. What our team did is we started working on getting them included in forum comments, Reddit threads, and so forth. So we were adding to the discussions that were already happening in those platforms. What happened for this business? Well, I already shared with you that they continue to grow in keyword rankings, whether or not that’s driving traffic.
Uh, it’s sure driving a lot of impressions in Google search console, like half a million more impressions every single month. It’s insane. Uh, but their AI overview footprint increased by 170%. When we look at their people also ask visibility that shot up by about 90%. And then they started outperforming competitors about two to one in the LLM mentions. And we monitor.
AI overviews, people also ask, we monitor those in SEMrush just in case you’re wondering. And then LLM mentions, we monitor that in a tool called PEEC, P E E C dot AI. So why did this work? for a couple of reasons. So the content was more contextually valuable. It was better aligned with what users and AI models were looking for. That’s the first thing. it also reinforced brand authority and improved semantic signals.
that search engines in the LLMs really lean into. As I mentioned before, is this the only way to do it? You know, I’m not naive enough to say this is the only way to do it. It’s absolutely not. But I think it’s a great example on how to start educating, answering, adding to the conversation and starting to build trust, which is what you absolutely need to have in order to start showing up in these different places.
And so if you were to take this right and start executing against it, you would potentially have similar results. so let’s jump in. Like you’re probably asking, how do I tackle this? Sounds like a lot. It’s a huge lift. Well, it really is a huge lift. So I’m breaking this down for you. I think I have these ones written out and in four specific steps to hopefully make it easy for you to be able to digest this and understand.
Greg Shuey (16:18.7)
What needs to be done in what order? So step one is you need to start capturing questions your customers are actually asking. So there are a couple of ways that we do this. So the first thing that I do is we query also asked.com. It’s a pretty slick platform that pulls in all of the people also asked data in the Google search results and actually mines that data from years and years and years.
And it will pull all of this information in. So you can start, you know, going through it, seeing what those questions are. And you can also see the answers that Google was displaying it at these different points in time. The next thing is we start combing through different Reddit threads. I know I’ve mentioned Reddit a few times, going through product reviews, both positive and negative. A big one is going through customer support emails or customer support tickets. A lot of brands don’t do that.
That is a customer service team that handles that no one in marketing ever looks through those. You cannot imagine the gold that you are able to get out of those emails and out of those tickets, because typically people are reaching out to ask questions or complain about something and it is gold mine. The last thing is also going through your social media, direct messages. Same thing. It almost acts like a customer support channel as well.
And you can learn a lot from what’s being asked or said in those direct messages. Once I have that list built out and like a Google Doc or a notes file or whatever, I then take those and we work to create robust, frequently asked questions, sections for category and product pages. That includes the question and that includes a thorough answer. We do this so much for our clients that
We’ve even built and launched an AI marketing agent to help us automate 90 % of this process. So our team can actually ship this kind of amazing optimized and tailored content faster than most agencies right now, which is a, which is an insane competitive advantage. And it’s an insane competitive advantage for our clients when they are trying to match up against their competitors who can’t ship that content nearly as fast. Step two.
Greg Shuey (18:44.766)
is to start repurposing this kind of content. So once you’ve built out all that FAQ content, once that’s published, you can then take those and you can start to expand those into blog posts. You can turn them into TikTok videos. You can turn them into Instagram reels. You can turn them into YouTube shorts. You can turn them into answers on Reddit, in Quora, in the different forums. You’ll also want to make sure that you are really leaning into social proof.
user generated content, cut video, customer testimonials, those types of things, and then layering in a very strong point of view. So add reviews, comparisons, UGC to your pages, and then make your unique brand stance visible and make it credible. Okay. That’s step two. Step three is to start internally linking all of your content together in the past.
and I guess we still do from an SEO perspective. Internal linking is very powerful to be able to send credibility signals back and forth from different pieces of content on the website. Now the LLMs and the different generative AI platforms, they use this to help understand topical authority and the bigger picture of your site. So if you have a hub,
piece of content and a number of different spoke pieces that support that hub content. You need to have all of that linked together so that the crawlers can crawl through those and pull all of this bigger picture together for them to be able to start associating you with the different prompts or queries that people are using. Step four is to then start showing up everywhere. The simplest way to start is adding commentary in the forums, starting to add
comments to YouTube videos, starting to add comments to Reddit threads, also called subreddits and doing so in a manner to help educate and inform not selling the fastest way to get kicked out of these forums, get flagged on YouTube, kicked out and banned from Reddit is to sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. Nope. We are trying to add value. We are trying to
Greg Shuey (21:06.698)
educate and we are trying to be as non biased as we possibly can in these conversations. And when the opportunity comes to be able to add your brand to the conversation, that is where the power comes in. These are all of the places that the LLMs are learning from. They are crawling these, they are capturing the information, they are parsing the information, they are making sense of it, and they are using it to power the results coming out of their platforms.
Once you’ve mastered this piece, which is the lower hanging fruit, the next thing you need to do is to identify these larger publications where your competitors are being talked about and work to get coverage there as well. Couple of tools that we use to do this. There’s a tool called a H refs. People also refer to it as a tref’s. It’s a great backlink analysis tool and we actually use that to be able to do competitive link analysis to see where our competitors are getting mentions and links.
The other great tool that we use is a tool called Spark Toro, and I’ll make sure to include these ones in our show notes as well so that you can access those very easily. That will help you build your list. OK, these blogs, these platforms not only feed content to the LLMs, but as I mentioned earlier, they create strong brand associations with your competitors, which is absolutely needed, especially if your customers are saying, you know, what are the top 10 companies for?
men’s polos for an athletic from from man with an athletic build, right? Those are the types of prompts that are being asked in these LLMs and in Google AI search. And if you are associated with those other competitors, you increase your chances of being able to be included in the subset of of brands that are included in in those results. OK, pretty straightforward. So you might be feeling a little overwhelmed.
Honestly, you’re probably are feeling overwhelmed, especially if you are the marketing department. Anytime I hear that, have you ever seen the episode of King of Queens where I believe the next door neighbors, they’re the sacks keys. They live next door and his dog barks all night and Doug Heffernan, the lead on King of Queens goes over and confronts him and he breaks down.
Greg Shuey (23:34.158)
I can’t remember his name, but he breaks down. He talks about how his division just laid off two people and he proclaimed I am the marketing department. That’s literally what it’s hilarious. Go Google or chat GPT it King of Queens. He is the marketing department and watch it. It’s hilarious. Anyway, that’s what I think about every time someone mentions they are the marketing department. I’m with you.
I understand how overwhelming it is to manage all of your businesses, marketing channels, all of the different pieces of the puzzle, especially if you are the only one there moving it forward. So here are some tools that make this more manageable. And I know that I’ve already mentioned some of these, so this may be more of like a roundup. People also ask. Grab those questions out of.
also ask.com. Reddits forums, peak AI to monitor your brand’s present in the presence in the LLMs manual prompting. So if you have a chat GPT account, think through how your ideal customer would be asking questions and go to chat GPT and ask those questions to see how your brand shows up.
And then probably the hardest piece of this is making sure that you have like a really good technical foundation for your website. So making sure that you’ve got the proper schema markup, ensuring that your pages are crawlable, that they include entity rich metadata. And more importantly than not, like pick one category to start with or pick one product or pick one blog post and then do an audit.
Figure out what you need to start to add in. Do you need to add in a frequently asked question? Can you then take that frequently asked question and start to repurpose it? Just start just. What’s the word I’m looking for? Just start like chopping away at this little by little. It doesn’t all have to be done tomorrow. So as I’m kind of wrapping this up, if I had to leave with you kind of one thought, it would be this is that relevance.
Greg Shuey (25:52.59)
is not just a new buzzword. Even though you do see it a lot, if you’re on LinkedIn, looking at posts, like it’s a lot of people are using it now, but I don’t believe it’s a buzzword. I believe that relevance is your new growth engine as an e-commerce business, as any business, honestly, it’d be a services business. could be an agency. Relevance is that new growth engine. You’re not just optimizing for isolated keywords anymore.
you’re optimizing for discovery across the buyer journey. I think that’s important to remember as well. Cool thing is when you do this, you’ll also naturally rank better in Google for the keywords that you want to rank for and that will drive traffic at some point through that buyer journey. So by taking this approach, you’re actually gonna kill two birds with one stone. If you just continue to try to optimize for keywords,
And build links and optimize landing pages and get them as tight as you can with keywords. You’re not going to crush the relevance side of things. So lead with relevance and you will see gains on the keyword ranking and the organic traffic side. So I guess my, my challenge for you is I talked about just a moment ago is to take some time today or tomorrow and audit one of your content assets. Just pick one. This could be a blog post, could be a video.
could even be a category or a product page and then kind of go through my steps and see if that particular piece needs a tune up. It doesn’t have to be overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be hard. It doesn’t have to be time consuming. Pick one, just take it a day at a time and one content piece at a time and you will be amazed at how far you come over 90 days. So I hope that that
Made sense to you. I hope that that was valuable and that you’re able to be able to kind of take that road map and start executing. As always, if you have any questions, I’m always available. I’m happy to talk to just about anyone and help them kind of troubleshoot, identify gaps, areas of opportunities and opportunities to grow. So I hope that you all join me next time on the next episode of Seven Figures and Beyond. And I hope that you all have an amazing day.
Greg Shuey (28:14.776)
Thank you for joining.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
