Let’s do a small thought experiment. Let’s say you’re planning on hiring an eCommerce SEO company in the near future.
What’s the single most important thing they can offer?
Is it an in-house developer? Someone, or a team, that constitutes technical SEO experts?
Is it the incorporation of AI into the model or process? Or is it an outreach manager with a ton of high-DA third-party sites to be used for link building?
It’s none of these things. It’s copywriters – and here’s why.
Why Copywriting Is the Core of SEO
In today’s day and age, content marketing and SEO copywriting are effectively indistinguishable. If copy doesn’t rank and get picked up not just by search engines but by human consumers, it’s not going to perform.
Copywriting that signals to search engines (and by extension, to AI models like ChatGPT) that it is authoritative not just in terms of structure and keyword density (like the old days of SEO), but in terms of the questions it answers and information it contains (the new age of SEO and AEO), is what performs.
You can have a website that’s optimized to the gills in terms of on-page optimizations, tech SEO, and backlink profile, and it won’t rank as well as a website that has quality copy.
Today, there is one pillar of SEO that really matters, and only one – it’s content.
A Hedge Against AI
Don’t take this the wrong way, but AI is still pretty bad. Very bad, actually, and the truth is that it’s still churning out garbage that’s getting sent to the bottoms of the SERPs, if it ever gets indexed at all.
An eCommerce SEO company that has a team of in-house copywriters with various skills is the single most important instrument to getting organic results. AI can’t do it because it doesn’t think and because it has no experience. Human writers do.
Now there’s a caveat here. The writers actually do need to be experienced in some manner or other in your industry. But if they are, that’s the hedge you’ll want to leverage against AI.
Someday AI may make it possible for you to optimize a website in a few steps. But till then, human copywriters that can produce page copy that shows up in the search results are the answer.
The Other Ranking Signals
There are still hundreds of other ranking signals that are picked up by search engines (and also by AI engines like ChatGPT) which technically do have an effect.
Some of these are:
- Speed
- Security
- Site structure
- Navigability
- Page titles and headers
- Metadata
- Link profile
- Domain age
- URL structure
While these technically still do impact a website’s rankings, there is only so much you can do with them.
Copy is dynamic, can be edited and refreshed in many ways to repurpose it for changing website needs, and embedded in copy are also real answers to real user queries.
It is the most important one.
Working with an eCommerce SEO Company vs. Doing It In-House
It’s always better if you can hire subject matter experts in-house and have them optimize your website with quality copy. The thing is this is cost-prohibitive for some businesses. It’s also the reason that so many choose to work with eCommerce SEO companies instead.
If you do hire one, the most important thing you can square away is that the company has content producers that are experienced in your industry, specifically and have produced demonstrable results.
If you can make certain of that, you can outsource.
