We are optimizing our Shopify store. It is a medical nutrition company that offers a Surgical Nutritional Program. One of our core challenges is navigating SEO within the constraints of regulatory compliance. Most of our terminology—such as “medical food”—is clinically accurate but not commonly used by general consumers.
Keyword research indicates that users often search for broader, more accessible terms like “muscle loss supplements” or “nutrition for orthopedic surgery”, which may border on sensitive medical claims.
Given these limitations, I’m looking for guidance on the following:
· What are the best practices for optimizing SEO in regulated industries (e.g., medical) while staying compliant?
· How can we incorporate user-friendly, high-ranking keywords as we don’t want to make any unsubstantiated health claims either?
· What content strategies (e.g., blogs, FAQs, meta descriptions) have worked well for balancing compliance with discoverability?
Additionally, as AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and Perplexity are becoming more prominent, what are the initial steps we should take to start gaining visibility on these platforms?
Your strategy should be to separate your content. Keep your product and collection pages strictly compliant, using only your approved clinical terms. Use your blog and FAQ sections to write about broader, more user-friendly topics to attract new customers. This separates your educational content from your direct product marketing.
How to Incorporate User-Friendly Keywords:
You incorporate these keywords safely by creating helpful, educational content. Write blog posts that target the problem your customers are searching for (e.g., “A Guide to Nutrition for Surgery Recovery”). Within that article, after providing value, you can then include a soft call-to-action to your compliant product page.
Effective Content Strategies:
Use your blog for in-depth educational articles. Use an FAQ page to answer common questions and capture long-tail search queries. For your meta descriptions, keep them descriptive (“A medical food formulated to…”) rather than making direct health claims (“Stops muscle loss…”).
Initial Steps for AI Search Visibility:
Your educational content strategy is the perfect foundation, as AI prioritizes trustworthy answers. The single most important technical step is to implement comprehensive structured data (schema). This gives AI engines the clean, factual data they need to understand and recommend your products. Also, structure your content in a question-and-answer format to match how users interact with AI.
Of course. For AI-driven keyword research, your goal is to discover the specific questions your audience is asking, and there are several excellent free tools for this. The best place to start is AnswerThePublic. You can enter a broad topic like “surgical nutrition,” and it will generate a visual map of all the related questions people are searching for online. This is a goldmine for creating the kind of helpful, question-based content that AI search engines are designed to find and feature.
Once you have a list of potential questions and topics, you can use Google Keyword Planner to validate them. This free tool will help you see if those user-friendly terms have enough search volume to be worth targeting.
Finally, of course, you can use generative AI itself, like ChatGPT or Gemini, as a free brainstorming partner. Give it a prompt like, “What are the most common questions someone has before surgery?” to generate a list of content ideas that are already in the natural, conversational format that AI search favors.