Andrew Maff 00:03
There's a lot of really wild and over-exaggerated opinions about AI.
Narrator 00:14
Welcome to the E comm Show podcast. I'm your host. Andrew Maff, owner and founder of BlueTusker, from groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies, get to know the ins and outs of the Ecommerce industry from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it!
Andrew Maff 00:26
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the E comm show as usual. I am your host, Andrew Maff, and today I'm going to be talking to you about e commerce and AI. If you are a lot like me, you are so tired of hearing people talk about AI, oh, my God. Like, stop, I get it. It's out there, it's here, it's new, cool. All right, let's calm down. But of course, I'm going to have to do an episode about it, because I think there needs to be a little bit of a level set. There's several factors to AI, right? There's how do we leverage it internally to be more efficient and improve our own businesses. There is, how do I leverage it to create content, which, I guess, relatively similar. How do I do certain things to make sure that I'm showing up in AI more frequently. And then there's also the user side, which is, how is the user going to use AI to start shopping, which is slowly starting to happen.
Andrew Maff 01:31
I'm going to probably end up ranting. So buckle up, because this one, this is a very interesting topic for me. I think that there's a lot of really wild and over exaggerative opinions about AI.
Andrew Maff 01:49
I think that there's a lot of pros and a lot of cons to it, but you know, every time someone does like one thing on AI, they act like they just completely broke through with a whole new concept that you've never heard of.
Andrew Maff 02:06
Calm down, like it's fine, like there's nothing too crazy. So first of all, let's talk about internally first, right? So let's talk about efficiencies, and how we can basically help brands become a lot more efficient, create more content, how they can help them do things just within the average business right?
Andrew Maff 02:25
There are way too many AI platforms right now. There'll be a mass consolidation eventually. Obviously, you have the ChatGPTs and the clouds and Gemini and Grok and all those right Perplexity.
Andrew Maff 02:38
Maybe it'll come down to them. But I'm also getting really tired of every software that has some type of, like, chat capabilities, like, talk to our AI, like, it's, it's just a chat, whatever. I'm clearly a little, like, a little over it, but the efficiencies internally, right? So there's, there's so many of these platforms, it's a little bit overwhelming. And you start to, it's kind of like when Shopify started to really, I would say, like, five, six years ago, maybe a little bit, actually, no, it's probably more than that now I think about it, wow. Yeah, it's probably more than when Shopify really started to like, the apps all of a sudden, just came out, and they were 1000s of them for everything, right? Like, all of a sudden it was app for this, app, for that, app, for this app for that. And there's five every website's got 5000 apps to it, and there was just so many of them that what started to happen was, like, the small like, 15, 20, $30 a month fees. Like, next thing you know, you're spending $1,000 a month on apps.
Andrew Maff 03:44
I can see that being very much the case with AI right now. There's a lot of platforms that can do a lot of different things, and people just don't know how to do it. Or there's platforms that claim they can do things, but, like, they really don't do it well. So like, it's, it's just, it's just a shit show right now. But let's talk about the basics, right? Because a lot of brands, they get really kind of interested in AI, and they never really know where to talk or where to start.
Andrew Maff 04:10
So specifically, the Amazon world, if I have to attend one more conversation about how to use AI to like help you make listing images. Dude, it's easy. They're listing images. It's not complicated, like it's probably not saving you a ton of time either, but it's enough. But honestly, once you create it, once you should be okay, then maybe you're doing some AB testing and things like that. But same thing with like listing, doing keyword research and your listing copy and things like that. Like really, once you do it, once you're going to be making small tweaks, but then after that, you're set. So it's not like a super common thing that needs to be done on a regular basis. So if it saves you a couple hours a year, great.
Andrew Maff 04:58
Anyway, the..
Andrew Maff 04:59
One's gonna be, I'm gonna crank you for this one. So there's okay.
Andrew Maff 05:03
So there's all that type of stuff, right? Then there's this stuff internally that, like, I think is really useful. So, like, one thing that we created that I'm a huge fan of, obviously, at Blue tusker, we're just in marketing, so I basically just created stuff for marketing. And one of the things that I always thought would be kind of interesting was, you know, for any agency you've got, you end up in like,
Andrew Maff 05:25
you end up like, in your own bubble where you are doing your own research and figuring out what works and what doesn't work and blah, blah. So, like, the way that we're segmented, every team is a specialist, right? So like we have to get, let's use SEO as an example. I have an SEO manager who oversees our entire SEO team. And then separately, there's a paid media team with sub departments under them for like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, meta, etc. So everyone's a specialist in their area. And what happens is, they'll do their own research. They'll, you know, obviously we want to try to stay in the forefront of stuff, and so like, they're going to be able to do their own research. But the problem is, is, like, you're still kind of like you're saying your own soundboard. So what I always thought would be kind of interesting was, for each individual department, is there a way that we could hire an outside consultant like to audit our own stuff on a regular basis, to evaluate, you know, are we, is there something we're missing, just because, when you look at the same thing every day, things like that? Every day, things like that happen, just trying to see what we can do to check every box. And I thought that that would be kind of an interesting thing to have an outside opinion on a lot of the stuff we were doing.
Andrew Maff 06:34
Super expensive to do, like, crazy expensive. It made sense in a couple areas, not in all of them. And I was like, Man, I wish there was a better way to do this. And so we actually were able to, we hired someone to help create our own GPTs for each individual department. So if you're not familiar, chatgpt has like these GPTs you can create, which is effectively like you're custom developing your own AI to do certain things for you. And so again, let's take the SEO, SEO one as an example. What we did was myself and my SEO manager started them off with just hammering through everything that we needed to do, how we wanted to give us reports, what insights we wanted to give it to us, how we wanted to feed insight to us, blah, blah. And then we hired an SEO consultant to come in and basically fine tune it like here's some things you guys didn't think about. And so now I only paid that person for like, a handful of hours, got some more insight from them, and now I have a permanent consultant. So we have this again, SEO one as an example.
Andrew Maff 07:36
I can pull Google search term data. I can pull Amazon search term data, because it's to me, it's still very relevant in Google. I can pull Google ads, search term data. I can pull sem data, SEM rush data. I can give it insights specific to the brand we're working with around seasonality and things like that. Like I can basically take all of this information, throw it into this GPT, and it will either give me a laundry list of keywords that we can go after and why and rank them. It will give me pillar piece topics and blog topics to go after and why and how we would outrank competition. It'll give me insight into why we might be seeing organic traffic and or revenue dips, even though we seem to be in a good spot from an SEO perspective, so like it basically audits everything for us. We replicated that same concept across the board. So for an E commerce brand, I could see how that would be super efficient, being able to do stuff like that from a marketing perspective, and then even outside of a marketing perspective, I think that feeding it your information on an operational perspective, and giving you insight into when you should probably place orders based on past data and seasonality. Maybe it can factor Shit, I don't know. Maybe it can factor in, like, weather patterns that might slow down, stuff like I have no idea. Once again, operations, not my wheelhouse.
Narrator 08:58
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Andrew Maff 09:31
The ability to create those things are amazing to be able to just have a conversation with what is essentially an expert in that field based on the information that you provided it, and then you just hire an expert every now and then to come in and tweak it. I just thought that that was a very interesting thing to approach. There's a billion other things too, right?
Andrew Maff 09:53
There's AI stuff out there that can reach out to influencers for you. There's obviously a ton of stuff out there that can write content for you. There's, I know there's AI out there that will evaluate your financials, factor in your factor in fulfillment, factor in basically everything regarding your business, and make you, like, some awesome forecasts to be able to make more, bigger decisions from just a general business perspective. So there's a ton of stuff from an efficiency side of things.
Andrew Maff 10:16
Now I want to talk about the other side. This is one that everyone always asks about, especially us, because on a marketing side, geo is a big conversation.
Andrew Maff 10:33
There is a reality to this that is going to it's going to cause marketers are famous for doing one thing, and that is ruining cool stuff, and we're doing it so well right now with GEO. Oh my God.
Andrew Maff 10:48
There is so many agencies out there claiming to a be just a GEO agency and specialist in the space, which is hilarious, because it's been around for like, a few years, there are agencies out there that claim that they are doing wildly different things to help you rank in all these different AIs, LLMs, etc, bullshit.
Andrew Maff 11:15
Here's here's the reality: all these different AI platforms for your chat, GPT, Gemini, perplexity, et cetera. They're all looking for pretty much the exact same thing that you would do from a best practices perspective for your traditional SEO, right? The one differentiator, I would say one and a half differentiators. There's a little bit from a technical perspective on how you want to tweak how data is structured on the back end of your website to make sure it's indexed correctly. Nine times out of 10, your website's already set up that way. Sometimes it's not so you tweak it and you're fine.
Andrew Maff 11:54
The other side of it is traditional SEO takes in a lot of factors from backlinking, right? So they want to know that other people are referencing your content, and that's how, basically, things like Google understand that. Okay, it's a reputable company, because all these other companies are referencing it, right? Great. The big difference with llms is they don't necessarily have to have a backlink, it could just be a mention, right? So if let's take another example for backlinking, for traditional SEO, there you have a do follow link and a no follow link. So basically, when you put the link onto a page, you can set it as a do follow, which basically is telling Google like, Hey, make sure you index this. Or you can do a no follow, which is, I'm providing this information for my user, but I don't want Google to acknowledge it. A no follow link typically does bad fucking nothing for you from an SEO perspective.
Andrew Maff 12:52
But not only can backlinks help from an LLM perspective, but the more that people even reference your name and don't even link to you are more beneficial. So that's where things brands with like, super generic names, it kind of sucks, because, like you, it's probably going to skip over it, because it won't know that it's referencing you all the time. But for companies with super weird, crazy names that no one ever understands, like BlueTusker, anytime it gets brought up, we get the benefit of like, LLM seeing that we're just being mentioned more frequently, and that's how they start to justify here's what a lot of people are talking about. And so this is why we're leaning into it. It used to be six months ago that Reddit was the big thing, because people would just it would scrape a ton of stuff out of Reddit, because that's where a lot of people were talking about certain brands, and then Google went ahead and made sure that those LLMs Couldn't index everything through Google, and so Reddit basically completely gone. So most of those references are out the window now.
Andrew Maff 13:53
So the only real things that brands need to change is a little bit from a structural perspective, and then making sure digital PR, basically making sure that you're getting referenced in as many places as physically possible, to get these LLMs to start to rank you better. The other stuff, all of your traditional SEO is all still very relevant, like you still have to have a really good UX UI element to your website and make sure it's fully optimized for a great user experience. Because the llms, just like Google, want to make sure that if we're referencing you, people are going to go there and they're going to get the exact information that they want or find exactly what they need. And so if they go there and they bounce immediately, they're like, oh, this was not the right thing to send them. So it stops sending them. So UX UI is still a very big play in the SEO world. Content is obviously still a really big play. The only thing that's changed on the content side is the days of creating blog articles just to answer a super basic question where I'm like, Hey, I could answer this in like two sentences, but here's 1500 words long gone, right? How Tos shit like that basically useless for the most part.
Andrew Maff 15:03
What we've seen is that articles with a little bit more context, articles with a little bit more opinion to them, basically content where there's a incentive for the user to want to read more about it, right, where it's like, here's what so and so said about this, and then that's where it's linking over. So it's almost like it's a little bit like a stretch from a journalistic perspective.
Andrew Maff 15:29
That's where the content starts to work really well from an LLM side. So like a lot of the brands that we work with, where we're focusing on, what can we do to get them ranked to be mentioned in LLMs? More, we have to focus on getting more brand mentions. Backlinks are great. They're ideal because it'll also help the SEO side, the traditional SEO side, but even brand mentions anywhere else are going to be very helpful. And then content has to be completely different, because we don't really care about impressions and clicks are really difficult to get now, because clicks have fallen off, what we're focusing on is really what we should always be focusing on, is organic revenue. And the interesting thing is, ever since these LMs really started to kind of get put into motion, which was September 2024.
Andrew Maff 16:15
What we started to see was organic traffic coming way down, but impressions going way up, and that's because Google was just still giving you an impression for if your content answered the question that the person was looking for, but if they didn't click, you're not getting the click right. So all those clicks are gone. But what was interesting was we saw a significant increase in quality of clicks. So organic revenue, organic purchases have almost continued to climb. So from an AI perspective, it's actually helping people find a lot of the brands we work with a lot easier.
Andrew Maff 16:50
So, you know, I'm just calling snake oil bullshit. That is what I'm seeing from most these other agencies. There's really not a ton of other stuff that you need to change. It's digital, PR, content adjustments and a little bit of thing, a little bit adjustment from a technical perspective. But otherwise, everything that you've been doing from a traditional SEO perspective is very much aligned with exactly what's going to help you. From a GEO perspective.
Andrew Maff 17:15
There's like a couple other small things here and there on, like how you want to do keyword research and how you want to kind of focus the content that you're creating, but like, that's really about it. So the issue is now you have all these agencies that are like, Oh, we have a strong focus in geo and blah, blah. Like, well, that's awesome. But also the reality is, like, there's not a ton of volume coming out of AIs right now. Like, it's good, but it's still nowhere near what Google search is pulling.
Andrew Maff 17:41
It may get there. It very well may get there. I could probably guarantee you that, you know, definitely Gen alpha is going to be the ones that are basically not using Google much anymore, and they're just using AI platforms. But then you got to talk about the other side, right? So then you have the user side. How are they going to start to use it? So, like I just said, Gen alpha is probably gonna be one that ends up using it a lot, would be my up using it a lot, would be my guess, because they're growing up with it. But your boomers, they're not touching this shit. Like they're like, No way. I know a couple tech savvy boomers that are playing with it. But then outside of that, like they're Google and everything, just like they always did.
Andrew Maff 18:17
Even millennials, they seem to be using it pretty frequently at work, and then have one they almost want nothing to do with outside of work. So some of them, it's kind of a split there. Same thing with Gen Z really, where it's like they'll use it for kind of their personal, everyday life. They're not really getting into it from a shopping perspective just yet, but it's slowly getting there. ChatGPT, obviously is working on their integration and stuff with Shopify to be able to check out in ChatGPT, that'll be a really cool thing.
Andrew Maff 18:47
But think about how you use AI, right? Like you ask it a question. It's great for if you're trying to figure something out and you don't know exactly how you would search it on Google, so you just kind of talk to the thing for a little bit, until it's like, oh, okay, I know what you're talking about. And then it shows you, well, it's going to really limit the amount of products that's showing you, right? So like, if you went to go search for something on Amazon, here's 1000 different options. This is going to be, like, a hey, here's like, three, and that's it. So you're going to have significant limitations around how people are going to find you. So getting ahead of the geo game does make a lot of sense. But if you're doing anything, it's, it's the same thing that everyone says about marketing, right? Like you're there's no there's no way around it there. You can't cheat the system. The way that most of these things are built is to ensure that the user is actually having a good experience. So if you have a website with really good UX UI, and the users are super happy with it, they can easily find stuff. They know what they're looking for. Your time spent on page is great. Your bounce rate's not bad. Like you're in a good spot.
Andrew Maff 19:56
You're creating content on a regular basis that isn't just burned and churned shit that you're writing on all the time, and then your technical like the back end of your website is the code is structured so that the Page Speed loads fast, and the Google and everyone can rank can index everything they need. As long as you're doing that, not only will you rank well on Google, you will rank well on the llms. It's just the reality of it, but it's a waiting game of once these LLMs start to become more and more used, so the average consumer using it more frequently, it's going to take some time. That's not going to happen overnight, especially from a shopping perspective. Once ChatGPT releases shopping, the people that use AI all the time are gonna be like, I'm gonna be like, I'm gonna buy 500 things off of this. But the reality is, your average consumer, the typical person that you're probably going after them actually using the the ability to shop on it is not going to happen anytime soon. So you know, you do get the benefit of being a potential first mover. You can be on there so that when it does start to happen. It's a nightmare for your competition to try to catch up to you. I completely agree with it, but you have to not forget about your traditional SEO, because that is probably from an organic perspective, that's what's feeding your organic revenue now, more so than chat GPT is or then perplexity is, etc.
Andrew Maff 21:22
So just a little bit of a cynical approach to the AI side of things for me, just because, to kind of round it out, of like, I really do feel that AI agencies are absolutely ruining it. They're making it sound like, you know, they're charging 1000s of dollars or even more, I've seen a month to do GEO things, but it's really the exact same shit that you're doing from an SEO perspective.
Andrew Maff 21:46
And then even on top of that, I'm seeing 5000 new AI platforms every day. It feels like and so and so, posting some crap on LinkedIn about, like, here's some magical thing I did to do God Mode. Like, oh my god, stop. Like, I absolutely hate the ridiculous prompts that these people come up with just to make the AI do what it's probably going to do for you anyway.
Andrew Maff 22:10
So it's just, yeah, it's fun. So I figured I'd use today's episode to vent about it, but to also give you the reality of what it's like behind the scenes. Like, I could tell you, from an agency perspective, there's not too much more you got to do different from the geo side of things, there's a ton of different reporting that cost me stupid amount, but I don't understand a different different podcast.
Andrew Maff 22:31
But the AI side is very interesting. It can definitely help you be more efficient, but you absolutely have to have a person behind the helm keeping an eye on things, especially writing, right? Like, for us, yeah, we use AI to help write articles, but it still takes several hours when you have a writer who specializes in it, an editor to make it, to look it over, so you get a second pair of eyes on it. Like it's not, you know, you're used to take 5,6,7, hours to write an article. Now you're down to, like, two or three, which is great, don't get me wrong, but it's not just like, hit a button and publish, because then you're just pumping out crap. So something to think about. And E commerce, AI, I think it's going to be very interesting in the coming years. But I think from a shopping perspective, you might still be a little bit far out, but I still do love the idea of being a first mover in it. That was my thoughts for today. Thought it'd be fun to do a little more relaxed let Andrew vent about e-commerce. AI.
Andrew Maff 23:26
For everyone who tuned in, thank you. Make sure you do the usual thing, rate, review, subscribe, all that fun stuff, whichever podcast platform, podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the Ecommshow.com or ask AI what the greatest ecom podcast is, and then when it says something else. Tell it. No, you're wrong it's the E comm show. But thank you all for joining and I will see you all next time. Have a good one!
Narrator 23:49
Thank you for tuning in to the E comm show. Head over to E commshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTusker YouTube channel. The E comm show is brought to you by BlueTusker, a full service digital marketing company specifically for E commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetuskr.com now for more information, make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E comm show!