Clearing The Air on GEO as Sylvane’s Next Revenue Driver

Given the migration, competitive landscape (big-box retailers), and need to win both traditional SEO and AI visibility, we needed a robust and multi faceted approach to this campaign:

• Migration-led technical SEO foundation to protect existing equity & unlock scalable growth on Shopify
• Head-term & category expansion strategy to win high volume, non-branded keywords
• Authority-driven education content to expand audience beyond product-ready buyers
• Focus on AI search visibility in the form of entity-first optimizations, summary blocks & FAQs
• Internal linking & funnel architecture to move users from research to purchase

Migration-Led Technical SEO

1. Full pre-migration URL mapping and redirect strategy (preserve rankings & backlinks)

2. Crawl parity analysis (old site vs. staging)

3. Shopify technical configuration:

• Canonical management
• Faceted navigation controls
• Collection + product hierarchy optimization

4. Structured data implementation (Product, FAQ, HowTo, Organization, Article)

5. Core Web Vitals benchmarking pre & post launch

6. Uploading new content

7. Updating internal linking across the site to remove the redirected internal links

8. Configuration with Sylvane on Cloudflare for maximum CDN capabilities without blocking out the site

Head Term & Category Page Expansion

1. In bulk, recreating the main category/collection page content based on business priorities and revenue driver balanced with search volume / traffic potential.

2. Identifying more closely what consumers were actually searching for on the website to see where the misses were or what they couldn’t find.

3. Building out a robust and repeatable framework for content structure to ensure consistency across the site

4. Developing unique FAQs for each category page to enhance chunk ability and directly map these back to specific prompts that were reported in SEMrush related to each category

5. Ensure the content produce was entity-rich and explanatory. We wanted to be as explicit as possible while ensuring the content was authoritative and engaging.

Authority-Driven Educational Content

1. Building out a pillar guide strategy working closely with the Sylvane team to produce this content while we focused on the high impact collection page content

2. Updating and optimizing the “Best Of” guides - we are now taking this to the next level and developing a “Sylvane rated” system to become a fresh and authoritative data set for LLMs to cite from

3. Developing a problem-based content strategy

4. Building internal content clusters around each core product category

Internal Linking Strategy

1. Work with Sylvane’s design and development team as part of the migration to add Recommended For / Related To modules

2. Adding educational snippets directly on collection pages with strong internal linking to additional pages

3. Strengthening anchor text targeting head terms and natural variations

AI Search Strategy

1. Combining all of the above with entity-first optimization, chunkable structures, authority reinforcement, link acquisition to drive external authority signals, and working with other marketing teams to allow for consistent messaging.

The biggest challenge was to get internal buy in that driving more. focus towards the collection pages was necessary to develop a broader audience vs doubling down on the product pages which had historically always driven traffic and revenue for the brand. 

We modelled out what collection page traffic could look like based on head term keyword positioning across the core categories to help them to understand the potential while starting with the highest value collections first, allowing them to see the value in action as the keyword visibility started to increase. 

A second challenge was the core focus on LLM visibility when even the tracking tools were so new and basic at the time of the engagement starting. There was a big educational gap that needed to be consistently addressed to ensure the client truly understood that the traditional SEO work we were doing also lent heavily into their visibility in GEO.