John McAlpin, Director of SEO at LOCOMOTIVE, joins our host Ranmay on E-Coffee with Experts to talk about technical SEO, AI crawlers, and why so much of GEO is SEO under a new name.

John started building websites at eleven, learning from W3Schools after watching his dad code. That developer background shapes how he audits sites today. He explains why drag-and-drop WordPress builders slow sites down with extra code, and how SEO leaders should decide whether to build their own tools or pay for a platform, including the story of a Google scraper he built that stopped working within three days.

He also walks through an enterprise case where ChatGPT discovered only 3.2% of a large website because internal links were rendered client-side, and why years of band-aid fixes lead to problems like this. For John, AI visibility worries are finally getting long-delayed technical SEO work approved.

On the GEO and AEO debate, he argues that content chunking, question-and-answer formatting, and brand mentions are things SEOs have done for years, and that selling them as brand new is misleading. He also shares how he handles training bots, AI assistants, and AI search crawlers, how he keeps clients engaged while fixing fundamentals, and what technical SEO may look like as AI agents start booking and buying for users.

Get Your Exclusive AIO Growth Plan - We’ll kick off with a Live AIO Audit to see how shoppers find you, followed by Competitor Research to steal their spotlight: https://lunacal.ai/team/dws/dws-meetings

In this episode, we discuss:

00:00 - 00:50: Introduction

00:50 - 03:06: John's path into SEO and Locomotive

03:06 - 04:47: What developers spot in WordPress audits

04:47 - 07:03: When to build your own SEO tools

07:03 - 09:03: Selling SEO without overpromising

09:03 - 10:47: Why ChatGPT found only 3.2% of a site

10:47 - 13:08: Is GEO just SEO with a new name?

13:08 - 14:46: Should you block AI bots?

14:46 - 15:55: Claude vs. Gemini: John's AI tools

15:55 - 17:45: Technical SEO in the age of AI agents

17:45 - 19:35: If not SEO: cybersecurity

Connect with John McAlpin

https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnvmcalpin/

https://locomotive.agency/

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