All the same, the investment in not migrating when one is necessary is an investment that will cost you money in the long run.

Here are 7 telltale signs that its time to start thinking about migration. If any of these applies to you, start looking for an eCommerce migration services provider soon.

The Website Is Chronically Slow

A chronically slow website doesnt necessarily indicate that you need a whole new platform, but at the same time, you dont want to have a website thats slow as molasses. Oftentimes, it is the platform - check Google Pagespeed Insights or work with a migration services provider to see.

You Cant Make Basic Changes to the Website Without Breaking Something

Even the least technically inclined can make basic changes to a website, most of the time. The trick is doing that without botching the rest of the website. If this befalls you half the time, work with a pro to move to a new platform.

The Website Cant Scale with Traffic

Your website needs to be fast enough, secure enough, and functional enough to handle big spikes in traffic, regardless of the time of year.

Its So Out of Date There Are Data Security Risks

One of the big issues causing security risks with eCommerce websites has to do with a platform the features of which arent up to date. If youre on an old platform or using old themes or plugins because the platform wont support new ones, its time to make the move.

Theres Tons of Downtime

You likely dont need this article to tell you that time is money, but there it is nonetheless. Website downtime doesnt just incur a bad user experience, it is utterly acceptable and will cost you orders. You need to migrate your eCommerce store if downtime becomes frequent.

It Offers No Mobile Experience to Speak of

If the platform youre on doesnt offer any themes that deliver a solid mobile experience, its time to get out of dodge. Ever since Google started doing mobile-first indexing a few years back, theres been little more important than the mobile commerce experience. This is non-negotiable.

User Conversions Metrics Dont Look Good

Lastly, there are lots of other user conversion metrics that might indicate that your current website isnt delivering. While these dont necessarily imply that you need to migrate, they also dont paint a rosy picture. Some of the metrics to look at are user time on page, pages per session, and conversion rate as your key indicators. If they are lagging, something is wrong, and it just might be the platform on which your entire eCommerce enterprise is founded.

Working with a Professional for eCommerce Migration Services

If any of these applies to you, its time to get with an eCommerce migration services provider.

And, if you were thinking, yes, you can migrate yourself, but there are a lot of things that can go wrong if you do and dont know what youre doing. For instance, a botched migration can result in:

• Data loss associated with orders, order histories, customer profiles and more.
• Losses of pending orders through your online business, resulting in frustrated customers.
• Loss of organic SEO rankings and results, causing an SEO drop-off post-migration.
• Security concerns with the new website.
• A new website thats poorly branded or doesnt meet your other goals.

Among other potential concerns. These are a few of the reasons its best to work with an eCommerce migration services provider that has an established migration process and which offers migration support if you plan on doing this.

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But the thing is that SEO, far from being dead, will have a serious impact on a websites AEO score.

In fact, a modern eCommerce SEO agencys process will optimize, even indirectly, for AEO. Heres what to know.

What Is AEO?

AEO, which is also known as answer engine optimization, is a collection of processes to optimize a domain for answer engines, such as ChatGPT, other AI models, and even Googles People Also Ask search feature.

As more and more consumers rely on long-tail queries and answer engines to help them find products that meet their needs, eCommerce entrepreneurs are looking for ways to get their websites to show up in relevant results.

Unlike conventional SEO, which typically hinges on short-tail keywords associated with transactional and commercial search intent, AEO is all about answering questions associated with long-tail keywords.

It also hinges entirely on content; with SEO, theres a lot of link-building and headlines, with AEO, it all boils down to the quality of copy.

The Crossover Between SEO and AEO

Heres the thing about SEO and AEO; at least at this point in time, there is a lot of common ground between the two digital marketing channels.

Google alone crunches more than 200 ranking factors when determining what results to serve, and at this time, its not perfectly understood what ranking signals answer engines like ChatGPT uses, but it is known that it uses what Google uses, albeit indirectly.

ChatGPT scrapes the internet, not just at the results level, but facultatively at the page level, in order to furnish results that are relevant to the query.

Now, just what an answer engine like ChatGPT uses, specifically, before delivering results, is not that well-known, especially since the answer to the same question can differ over time. But it is known that ChatGPT uses the internet, as a data set, to find information for outputs.

Lets just say, hypothetically, that ChatGPT specifically uses totally different ranking signals than Google to find its results; but it is still using Google for information.

Therefore, whatever ranking signals Google uses are equally important, because if it doesnt show up on the internet, ChatGPT isnt likely to find it (or flat-out wont) and then wont be able to use it for an output.

So, by optimizing for SEO, specifically by targeting long-tail queries and optimizing the quality of content as much as possible, an eCommerce SEO agencys process will also be implicitly optimizing for AEO.

Ultimately, the factors that induce a website or its pages to show up at the tops of the search results will indirectly result in it being a candidate for optimal AEO - which is good not just for the website but for the users that are looking for answers.

Hiring a Qualified eCommerce SEO Agency

Ultimately, youll want to know if an eCommerce SEO agency is proficient with AEO before hiring, since those two things go hand in hand.

One thing you can do is look up some long-tail queries relevant to the agency itself. If you get results relevant to it, and you see their domain in the SERPs, youre on the right track.

Alternatively, you could use an answer engine itself - ask one of these about the companys reviews or process, and see if the answer engine has anything substantial to lend.

Lastly, make sure the agency has experienced, in-house copywriters; thats the most sensitive piece to AEO since they are directly involved in content optimization.

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Whats 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?

Its none of these things. Its copywriters - and heres why.

Why Copywriting Is the Core of SEO

In todays day and age, content marketing and SEO copywriting are effectively indistinguishable. If copy doesnt rank and get picked up not just by search engines but by human consumers, its 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 thats optimized to the gills in terms of on-page optimizations, tech SEO, and backlink profile, and it wont rank as well as a website that has quality copy.

Today, there is one pillar of SEO that really matters, and only one - its content.

A Hedge Against AI

Dont take this the wrong way, but AI is still pretty bad. Very bad, actually, and the truth is that its still churning out garbage thats 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 cant do it because it doesnt think and because it has no experience. Human writers do.

Now theres a caveat here. The writers actually do need to be experienced in some manner or other in your industry. But if they are, thats the hedge youll 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 websites 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

Its 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. Its 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.

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