Future-Proofed E-commerce Content Marketing w/ SearchPilot's Will Critchlow

Ross joins Will Critchlow of SearchPilot for a wide-ranging conversation on the evolving landscape of e-commerce SEO and content strategy in the AI era.

They cover how e-commerce brands are adapting content for multimodal search, why digital PR is surging, what still works in a zero-click world, and how Siege’s homepage study reveals surprising traffic shifts from AI engines like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews.

Ross also shares lessons from working with Instacart, thoughts on EEAT, brand building in 2025, and how SEOs can think more like product teams to win long-term. Plus: goal-setting, basketball, and how to build your perfect calendar.

Show Notes
0:08 – Introductions
1:00 – Ross on what e-commerce clients are asking for in 2025
2:12 – High-fidelity content and why it still drives SEO value
3:24 – The digital PR spike—and why it might not be right for every brand
4:17 – Rethinking link building: content that earns links without outreach
5:11 – The shift from link bait to real brand-building campaigns
6:34 – Why measuring content value is still messy
7:28 – Investing in analytics and attribution models that actually work
8:52 – Instacart case study: how it’s still winning in 2025
9:59 – Calculators as a defensible content type against AI overviews
11:15 – Homepage traffic is up 10%—what Siege’s study found
12:56 – Differences in B2B vs B2C AI traffic attribution
14:15 – How AI referrals may go dark: no referrer, just branded visits
15:40 – SearchPilot’s view: aggregating dark and disaggregated traffic sources
17:20 – How LM-driven browsing creates long tail referral lift
18:57 – AI is doing the searching: optimizing for “robot” queries
21:00 – Why retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) matters for e-commerce
22:44 – Digital PR’s role in influencing AI citation engines
23:51 – Siege’s brand mention study: impressions up, but who’s watching?
25:20 – Review volume = the next big SEO edge in e-commerce
26:04 – Instacart’s product reviews may be helping SEO more than you think
27:15 – Human authorship: should you expose expert bylines?
28:52 – Where author signals matter most
30:04 – Real-world reviews are the new long tail content strategy
31:09 – Who’s doing it well?
32:14 – Brand authority, SEO signals, and Siege’s convo with Dr. Pete
33:48 – Building a brand health dashboard (and what to track in 2025)
36:18 – Who owns content? SEO increasingly embedded in product teams
37:40 – Product SEO as a mindset, not just a technical checklist
39:24 – Optimizer mentality, health goals, and personal systems
40:11 – Ross’s “perfect calendar” and how it supports business goals
42:06 – Will on process goals vs outcome goals in business and life
43:44 – Can you be too optimized? Balancing mental health and iteration
45:07 – Long-term vision in a 3-week world
46:00 – Where to find Ross online and what Siege is working on next

Show Links
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Will Critchlow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/willcritchlow
Homepage Study:‬‭ https://www.siegemedia.com/strategy/ai-homepage-traffic-increase
SearchPilot:‬‭ https://www.searchpilot.com/
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Follow Siege on Twitter: http://twitter.com/siegemedia
Follow Ross on Twitter: http://twitter.com/rosshudgens
Directed by Cara Brown: https://twitter.com/cararbrown
Email Ross: ross@siegemedia.com

#seo | #contentmarketing