The AEO & SEO Link in Your Merchandising Strategy
The most successful digital retailers know this fundamental truth: isolated efforts rarely lead to breakthrough results. Traditionally, merchandising teams focus on product curation and presentation, while SEO and AEO specialists work behind the scenes to drive discoverability—too often in separate silos. Yet, as the lines blur between commerce and search, integrating these teams is no longer optional; it’s the catalyst for sustainable growth.
Embedding merchandising and SEO/AEO teams for daily, strategic collaboration builds a dynamic bridge between what shoppers want and how they find it. By working together, these teams turn search insights into product placement, optimize category naming based on real data, and ensure every attribute and answer is meticulously tuned for both algorithms and users.
This piece explores the critical role of this partnership, revealing how unified strategies elevate both visibility and conversion. We’ll dive into the impact of brand search volume, the strategic importance of category naming, the power of precise Google attributes, and advanced techniques for AI-driven search. It’s time to break down the barriers and unlock the full potential of your digital shelf—so your products aren’t just online, but truly discoverable. This guide will explore the critical components that connect search visibility to sales. We will delve into the impact of brand search volume, the strategic importance of category naming, the non-negotiable role of Google attributes, and the nuanced techniques that prepare your products for the future of AI-driven search. It's time to refine your approach and ensure your products don't just exist online—they are discovered.
Brand Search Volume: The Double-Edged Sword
High brand search volume is often seen as the ultimate goal—a sign of market dominance and widespread recognition. While it certainly indicates strong brand equity, it also presents a unique set of challenges for merchandising and SEO. When millions of users are searching for a brand like Nike or Zara, the digital shelf space becomes intensely competitive.
For high-demand brands, simply having the product is not enough. Your merchandising strategy must be exceptionally precise to capture a share of that traffic. This means optimizing every product listing to compete not only with other retailers but also with the brand's own direct-to-consumer channels. The effort required is substantially higher because the margin for error is razor-thin. A slight misconfiguration in your product feed or a poorly optimized product page can cause you to become invisible in a sea of search results.
Conversely, for emerging or niche brands, the strategy shifts. The focus becomes building authority and capturing long-tail search traffic—highly specific, multi-word queries that indicate strong purchase intent. Here, your merchandising can shine by being more descriptive and targeted than the larger players, creating a foothold in the market.
Practical Tip: Analyze your brand's search volume using tools like Google Trends or Semrush. If you're dealing with a high-volume brand, focus on competitive pricing, unique product bundles, and impeccable product data. For lower-volume brands, invest heavily in rich content and long-tail keyword optimization to attract a highly qualified audience.
The Power of a Name: Strategic Category Naming
How you label your products and categories has a direct and profound impact on whether customers find you. This goes beyond internal organization; it's about aligning your language with the language of your customer. Consider the terms used for women's accessories. Data consistently shows that the term 'bags' is searched far more frequently than 'purses' or 'handbags'.
A merchandiser might logically categorize items as 'handbags', but in doing so, they could be missing out on the largest segment of potential search traffic. Aligning category names with common search terminology is a fundamental pillar of both SEO and AEO. This requires putting aside internal jargon and industry-specific terms in favor of data-driven, customer-centric language.
Think about other examples:
'Sneakers' vs. 'Trainers'
'Sweatshirt' vs. 'Jumper'
'Pants' vs. 'Trousers'
The correct choice depends entirely on your target market's location and search habits. Getting this right ensures that your entire category of products is visible for the most valuable, high-volume search terms.
Practical Tip: Use keyword research tools to compare the search volumes for different synonyms related to your product categories. Choose the term with the highest relevant search volume to name your primary categories and use the synonyms in your descriptions, filters, and on-page copy to capture a wider range of search queries.
Precision Matters: The Importance of Google Attributes
Google Merchant Center is the gateway for your products to appear across Google's shopping ecosystem. Its effectiveness hinges on one thing: data quality. The attributes you provide for each product—such as size, color, gender, and material—are the hooks Google uses to catalog your items and match them with specific user searches. Incomplete or inaccurate attributes are a leading cause of poor product visibility.
For example, if you sell a unisex t-shirt but fail to specify clear sizing for both men and women, Google’s algorithm may struggle to show it to the right audience. A user searching for a "women's medium blue cotton t-shirt" will only see products that have been correctly tagged with all four of those attributes. If your product is missing the 'gender' or 'material' tag, it's immediately disqualified from that highly specific, purchase-ready search.
Clear attributes are essential for:
Filtering: Enabling users to narrow down results on the Google Shopping tab.
Clarity: Providing immediate, essential information to the shopper.
AEO: Allowing Google's AI to confidently answer direct questions like, "Show me 100% leather boots for men in size 10."
Practical Tip: Conduct a thorough audit of your Google Merchant Center feed. Ensure every possible attribute is filled out accurately for every product. Pay special attention to required fields like 'size', 'color', 'gender', and 'age_group'. Use the "Opportunities" tab in Merchant Center to identify and fix data quality issues.
Answering the Engine: Enhancing AEO for AI Search
The rise of voice assistants and AI-powered search results (like Google's AI Overviews) has shifted the search landscape. Users are no longer just typing keywords; they are asking questions. AEO is the practice of optimizing your content to directly answer these questions, positioning your brand as the source of truth.
From a merchandising perspective, this means anticipating the questions customers have about your products and providing clear, concise answers directly on your product and category pages. Think about the common queries related to a product:
"Is this jacket waterproof?"
"How do I clean this type of material?"
"What is the return policy for sale items?"
By creating a dedicated FAQ section on your product pages or integrating these answers naturally into your descriptions, you are creating content that AI can easily pull from to formulate a direct answer. This not only improves your visibility in AI-driven search results but also enhances the user experience, reduces purchase anxiety, and can decrease customer service inquiries.
Practical Tip: Use tools like AlsoAsked or AnswerThePublic to find popular questions related to your products. Create a comprehensive FAQ section on key product pages that answers these questions directly. Use structured data (schema markup) for your FAQs to help search engines recognize and feature this content.
Seeing Is Believing: Descriptive Alt Text for Long-Tail Wins
Alt text, or alternative text, is the description of an image that is read by screen readers and indexed by search engine crawlers. While its primary purpose is web accessibility, it is also a powerful tool for SEO and merchandising. Google's algorithms are becoming increasingly visual, but they still rely heavily on text-based cues to understand the content of an image.
Descriptive alt text helps Google "see" your product. Instead of using a generic alt text like "black dress," a more strategic approach would be "A-line black midi dress with short sleeves and a V-neck." This level of detail does two things:
Improves Accessibility: It provides a much better experience for visually impaired users.
Targets Long-Tail Search: It allows your product image to rank for highly specific, long-tail queries like "black v-neck midi dress," which often have a higher conversion rate.
When Google understands exactly what is in your product image, it can more confidently showcase that item in both standard image searches and Google Shopping results, connecting you with customers who know exactly what they want.
Practical Tip: Review the alt text for your product images. Rewrite them to be as descriptive as possible. Include key attributes like style, color, length, neckline, and material. Automate this process where possible by creating formulas that pull from your product attributes, but always review them for accuracy and natural language.
Breaking Down Silos: Collaboration Between Merchandising and SEO Teams
In many organizations, merchandising and SEO teams have historically operated in isolation—each focusing intently on their own set of goals and KPIs. Merchandisers curate assortments, manage categories, and drive conversions, while SEO professionals zero in on search visibility, keyword performance, and traffic acquisition. The disconnect? These critical teams seldom interact regularly, leading to misaligned strategies and missed opportunities.
This siloed approach can create subtle rifts in strategic focus. For example, the SEO team might prioritize ranking for keywords that drive the most traffic, even if those queries are tied to products with low average order value (AOV) and low lifetime value (LTV). This can result in high site visits but less impactful revenue growth. Meanwhile, the merchandising team is often laser-focused on boosting the visibility and sales of high-AOV, high-LTV products that have a bigger impact on profitability and long-term customer relationships. Without tight coordination, efforts may be spent promoting popular but low-margin products, leaving higher-value items underexposed.
To build a truly high-performing digital ecosystem, this needs to change. Embedding merchandising and SEO experts together and fostering daily collaboration ensures actions on the site are both customer-centric and search-optimized. When teams work in concert, every category name, product description, and site update is crafted with both conversion and discoverability in mind. When SEO insights are aligned with merchandising objectives, keyword strategies can shift to support not just what people are searching for, but what the business most needs to sell—boosting opportunities for higher AOV and LTV outcomes.
Consider the impact: real-time feedback on trending keywords can guide merchandising decisions for promotions, while product launches can be strategically timed to capture rising search demand. Such synergy translates into sharper content, smarter site architecture, and greater adaptability to shifting consumer behavior and search engine updates.
Strategic Insight: Break down internal barriers by establishing regular joint sessions, shared project management tools, or even cross-functional pods. This collaborative culture not only boosts search visibility and user engagement but also empowers teams to respond faster and smarter to market changes.
Your Next Steps Toward a Smarter Strategy
The digital shelf is no longer a simple grid of products. It is a dynamic, intelligent ecosystem powered by data and user intent. By weaving together the principles of SEO and AEO with your merchandising strategy, you create a powerful engine for discovery and growth.
Start today by taking one actionable step. Choose one category and audit its name against search volume data. Or, pick your top-selling product and enrich its alt text and Google attributes. Small, strategic changes, when applied consistently, compound over time to build a formidable and visible brand presence. The future of retail belongs to those who don't just sell products, but also provide answers.
