E-Commerce SEO vs. AI Search: Real Strategies for Ranking & Revenue Growth | EP. 213

Andrew Maff 00:02
There's a lot of different platforms, different services, different software, platforms that all claim to help you rank better in the llms. And it's all bullshit. I'm calling it right now. It's all utter bullshit.

Narrator 00:19
Welcome to the E comm show, podcast. I am your host, Andrew Maff, owner and founder of blue tusker, from groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies, get to know the ins and outs of the e Commerce Industry, from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it.

Andrew Maff 00:33
Hello and welcome to another episode of the E comm Show as usual. I am your host, Andrew Maff, and today I'm flying solo because I wanted to talk to you about ecommerce SEO. It has been an extreme hot topic here at BlueTusker, and it's something that I really wanted to talk about, because I think there's a common misconception.

Andrew Maff 00:43
It's really the truth of it. Right before AI started coming out, UX UI became a bigger part of SEO, which makes a ton of sense, right? So I always try to equate website optimizations to the Amazon side of the world, because I know there's a lot of people that listen to the show that are simply on the Amazon side. And so I want you to think of it like this. Amazon's algorithm caters to some very clear things. They want traffic to the product pages through listings, as you would call them. They want engagement, then they want orders, and then they want reviews, positive reviews, and they want to see that you have sell through. If you have those things, you will continue to improve your BSR, for those of you that are just on the website side, that's like improving your organic ranking, right? Well, all of those factors are SEO factors. You wouldn't think that traffic to a page or that engagement on a page is an SEO factor, but the reality is, the more of that that you have, the better you rank. And it is the same thing on Google. It's not really any different. In fact, I could argue that Google kind of took a page out of Amazon's book, because there are very clear correlations between SEO traffic, organic traffic, I should say, scaling as you increase other traffic initiatives. So if you're driving more and more traffic to a website, and those people are engaging, so your average time spent on page is improving, then Google is starting to see that people are spending more time on your website. They're enjoying your website. It's doing whatever it is it needs it to do, and so Google wants to show you more in their search results. Really all Google does, you have to remember that when someone comes to your website from Google, that person now feels like Google took me here, right? So if I were to say, Hey, you got to come check this out, and I grabbed your hand and I walked you to something that was absolutely beautiful and stunning, you would be like, oh, man, Andrew, this was awesome. I hope you take me more places. But if I grabbed your hand and walked you to a dead body, you'd be like, Oh, I don't want that. So, like, that's exactly what I'm talking about. You wouldn't take you wouldn't let me take you anywhere. So it's just Google making sure that they are so I hope that resonated with so many people. It's just Google making sure that it's providing you a good experience, right? So if you come to Google, you look for something specific. Google wants to show you exactly what you're looking for, and the way that they judge that is by making sure that when you get to some new website that you're spending time on it, because then it shows that you showed interest in what Google provided you. So as you have better UX UI on your website, your organic ranking starts to improve. Cool, right? Makes a lot of sense. So Google starts to do all this stuff where it's Hey, just have a good website. Just make sure that you're actually doing true UX UI improvements. Start doing some AB tests, some real CRO stuff. Make sure it looks nice, and then we'll start to show you more and more, right? In many cases, you don't have to have fantastic content. You just have to make sure that your website is functional and you will actually rank better and better for the little content that you do have. But the more content that you have gives you more opportunity to rank for certain things.

Andrew Maff 00:52
A, E commerce SEO is not dead, if anything, it has evolved. And to be quite frank, it is probably more important now than it ever has been. And to be honest, thank God, SEO has been the same crap for years and years and years. There's been BS over the past, you know, 510 years, like, or five or 10 years ago, I should say where it was like, you know, there's some little like, gray hat and black hat areas and blah, blah. But I would say, over the past five years or so, Google, and we'll start there, has done a fantastic job at making updates to their algorithm that really just requires websites to not suck.

Andrew Maff 01:29
You also have to remember that every user actually has their own algorithm. It's like one of my favorite questions when someone reaches out to us and go. Oh, we want to rank for this keyword, but when we search for when we search that keyword, we're not showing up. Well, chances are you're not really engaging with a lot of your own stuff. And so what you're doing is you're actually teaching Google that if you do show up for certain things and you don't click on it, then Google's not going to show it to you anymore, because it thinks that's not what you want. So everyone actually has their own algorithm. So you kind of have to keep that stuff in mind too, because there's an audience element to it. But I digress.

Andrew Maff 03:08
Here's some interesting things that I wanted to talk about, because now we're in the world of AI, right? Thank God. Finally, SEO can change a little bit, because it's really been about for us, it's four main things. It's really three main things, content, which could be blogs. And then for us it's also, we just refer to them as core pages, so like your main stuff, then you also have the technical side, so just making sure that your website is functional, making sure that it's indexed correctly, making sure you don't have broken links, anything like that, and then backlinking. Backlinking is still extremely important, mainly because Google the one of the Google fact, one of the factors that Google factors, one of the factors that Google factors in fast, screw it. We'll go with it, the more websites that are linking to you, then it's like Google seeing that like, okay, all these people are referencing you. You must be known for these types of things, and then you start to show more, right? So those are the three or four main factors.

Andrew Maff 06:29
Now AI comes into play, and this is where it becomes kind of interesting, because the reality, well, as of the recording of this. It's probably been about a little over a month, maybe a month or so, since Google changed their search results, right? So Google used to have, like, theoretically, it seemed like endless amounts of search results. You would search something, it'd give you, like, 100 something pages. They've limited it to 10. So if you search something, they're just going to give you 10 pages worth of stuff. And what happened is, the reason they did that is because now these other AI platforms no longer have the quick and easy access to kind of just scrape all that information, which is where they were getting a lot of it. And so now it's going to be interesting to see how these AI platforms react, and how they're going to start to scrape the internet themselves, like Google's already doing, but Google's hiding their data a little bit more.

Andrew Maff 07:25
What's interesting is the amount of people that think that there are so many different things that you have to do to cater to these different LLMs, right? So what happened, to give everyone a little bit of a background on it, is around September of last year of 2024 when Google started to release their AI overview. And essentially what that did to a lot of brands was it caused a very large increase in impressions, at least if you had everything in a really good spot and you were making a ton of content, you saw like a huge spike in impressions, and it just continued to go up and up, especially as they rolled out more and more kind of answers through the AI overview. And then you saw clicks come way down, so your organic click through rate started to just tank. And it was not fun. However, in most cases, it was rare to see any significant drops in organic orders or revenue. So if you saw that, that's a different problem. But realistically, what they did is they started to take away from the dumb stuff, right? So if you wrote an article on like, how to, you know, let's say you sell, let's say you sell fishing stuff, and you I don't know why I always do fishing stuff. I don't fish.

Andrew Maff 08:45
So you sell fishing stuff, and it's like, how to catch trout in this river, and then it's like another article, it's how to catch trout in a different river. And you literally started to just plow through all those different river types. Like, there's a lot of brands that do that kind of stuff. All that stuff got eaten up because basically, it's a real quick answer that you decided to write an article about, and now Google can eat it up. I like to compare it to, like these bloggers that do like these recipes, where it's like, give me a recipe for, like, baked ziti, and it's like, well, first, let me tell you about what my life was like as a child, and so those are gone, right? It's just you're getting if you're searching for an answer, it's giving you the answer. You're going to get the credit as an impression, but chances are they're not going to click. So what that required people to do if you were still kind of approaching SEO in the correct way? Now what you're doing is you have to create content that is more interesting for people to and gives them a reason to click on, right? So the how tos are gone, listicles still do pretty well, because they want to know about a specific thing, right? So like, Oh, what are the top 10 gifts for dad? And then like, okay, Google's AI overview may give you 10 different things, but you're going to want to learn about what those things are, and so you click over, right? So that's where that type of content tends to start to do better. And there's a ton of different types. It becomes a little bit more journalistic and maybe a little bit more like timely things. So like, you had to re approach the content you're making.

Andrew Maff 10:16
Nothing else changed, absolutely nothing. Nothing else changed. You still have to have a really sound website. You still have to technically be in a good spot. You still need to get backlinks. You still need to make sure that everything is indexed well, and that the content is where it needs to be, because that's what the LLMs are bringing in. So there's a lot of different platforms, different services, different software platforms that all claim to help you rank better in in the LLMs. And it's all bullshit. I'm calling it right now. It's all utter bullshit.

Andrew Maff 10:52
One thing, for a while there ChatGPT was pulling in data from Reddit, and it stopped doing that, by the way, but for a while there was pulling in data from Reddit,Quora, and I think somewhere else where it was basically trying to aggregate a lot of people's opinions, and that's where it was trying to stay away from basically, like clearly biased content.

Andrew Maff 11:17
Well, that became kind of a problem after a while, so they stopped doing that. But during that time, bunch of SEO companies went ham on, like, writing a ton of crap and Reddit, and it turned Reddit into a shithole. And the problem is, Reddit is already a shithole. And plus, the other issue is in Reddit, it is very, very, very hard to involve yourself in some of those conversations without the people on Reddit absolutely destroying you. They can sniff out if you're trying to sell them something, and they will beat you to death, to the point where you don't want to be on Reddit ever again. So it was really difficult to even try to do that, but that stuff's gone now too, because all that's happening is these different AI these different AI companies, they're all doing the same thing. They're all basically turning themselves into a search engine.

Narrator 12:02
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Andrew Maff 12:35
Thank God, though, because here's what's changing about SEO. SEO is now becoming more of like website asset development, and it's becoming a mix of not just the content on your website, and not just, yeah, the backlinks to prove that you know, a lot of people are referencing you, not just the ability for these LLMs to scrape all of your information, that they're indexed correctly through different schemas. Those still are a thing. So it's none of that. It's not just that. It's also making sure that it's a good experience on the website, making sure that people can find what they're looking for. Literally, these AIs are doing what Google they jumped ahead of what Google was trying to get to, which was effectively just provide a good experience. Shut up and provide a good experience. It's not that hard, like it's not complicated. You should always be improving your website, heat map and scroll tracking. Dear God, probably going to end up turning this into a rant.

Andrew Maff 13:34
It's probably one of the most underutilized tools Microsoft Clarity is, while it's free, it's completely free. You can put it on your website. You can get a heat map. You can watch people use your website. There's claims over it slows your site down and blah, blah. Look, if you're not improving your website, then if it slows down by a couple seconds, you're gonna be okay. That's not let me I digress, because I'm going to piss a lot of people off saying that if you have a slow website, it's a different problem. Microsoft Clarity shouldn't be slowing down your website that much, but you can also set it up where it's like, Hey, I just want to monitor X pages for a little bit. And that's the ones you look at, you optimize, and then you move on to the next one so it's not across the entire website. But either way, there's better ones out there. You have stuff like Hotjar, which is not free, but they have a free version, and you can use that, and it doesn't slow your site down as much. Or if you want to go ham and you want to go ham and you start doing like, true AB testing, VWO has their own stuff. Like, if we're actually doing AB testing, we use that, but if we're just, like monitoring stuff and making like UX UI changes, Hot Jar, Clarity better than nothing, but at least you're seeing some improvements on your website. Now you still have to create the content.

Andrew Maff 14:40
Here's the other side of it that I wanted to touch on, because this one's always kind of interesting. This is, at this point, about 14 minutes into this episode. I'm sure I've lost a lot of the Amazon sellers. This is so I'm actually going to be speaking about this in Q1 at one of one or two different conferences

Andrew Maff 15:02
Amazon sellers don't realize how much off Amazon SEO initiatives affect their on Amazon business. So stay with me for a second. Every single page on Amazon is indexable, thus it can be found through Google, right? You ever come across a product on Amazon? And let me, I know that everyone has you come across a product on Amazon, it's outranking your product, and you can't figure out why, because it's maybe it's slightly more expensive, it definitely has less reviews like you just cannot figure out why it's ranking so well, or how they're doing so much volume. Well, chances are what's happening is they've leaned in on off Amazon approaches, and one of those things that works probably the best is the SEO side of things. So every website has a domain authority, right? So the entire domain is effectively given a ranking. Google for years, said that this was not the case, and then they, quote, unquote, accidentally leaked their algorithm in May of 2024, and it turned out that was BS. But either way, every website has a domain authority, but every page has its own page authority. So when you're a highly ranked domain authority for your full brand. Once you launch a new page, it starts with a lower page authority, but its ability to get to a higher page authority tends to be easier when you have a higher domain authority. Well, guess what has a really high domain authority? Fucking Amazon. Duh.

Andrew Maff 16:40
So when you launch a new product, it's going to have a really low page authority, but it can get up there higher. And so many people focus so heavily on fighting the fight on the marketplace, they don't think about the fact that you're on the internet, not just on Amazon. So if you think bigger, you can actually develop different content strategies, definitely different backlinking strategies that will actually improve your Amazon listing over time, which will improve the page authority. So certain keywords will actually show your Amazon listing when people search for it on Google, and they will actually find you more often on Google than they will on Amazon, which is driving more off Amazon traffic to your listing, which is giving you more traffic, more engagement, more orders, more sell through, more reviews. And guess what Amazon loves? All of that.

Andrew Maff 17:31
So if you can actually improve the off Amazon SEO initiatives for your Amazon listings, you can actually improve your Amazon business. So this is when we start looking at brands in more of a holistic way. So we start looking at, okay, we're writing all this content on your website. We're doing all these different things. We know that it's great to have external backlinks, so why don't we use your own Amazon listing so that you can get some backlinks from it? Or, Hey, we know we want to have your website start to rank better and get backlinks for this, and that once we actually work with someone and get a backlink from them, why don't we reach out and see we get another one from them towards one of your Amazon listings, and so now we start to monitor the overall off Amazon SEO initiatives for individual listings to see how well they're doing, so that we can kind of backdoor in our way to getting those different types of orders so you don't have to be so reliant on advertising.

Andrew Maff 18:26
SEO is just leaning in heavier and heavier into building an asset. And if you want to show up on any of these LLMs, the absolute best way to do it is to keep doing what you've been doing, because all they want is the same shit that Amazon, sorry, that Google wants, which is a good experience. They want to know what content you have and what it is you're talking about. Make sure that you identify yourself as a thought leader in that space. Make sure that it's quality content and that it's something that people want to read. Make sure that you've got people linking to it to prove that it's not a ton of shit, and then that's going to be what actually starts to improve better on the LLMs.

Andrew Maff 19:05
Functionality is a little bit different. They did, you know, ChatGPT did release the ability to sign up for checkout once they start to roll that out more. So that's a different beast. But being able to find your products on those LLMs, guess how they're going to scrape all those different products? Chances are it's going to be through different schema codes. It's going to be through what they can index on on different platforms. And it will probably also be the same shit that Google does, where you will probably have a way to feed your entire product data into ChatGPT, which is going to index all of your titles, your your bullet points, product descriptions, your specs, everything, just like Google does. And that's going to be how it starts to show for stuff. And then when you start to figure out, Oh, I wonder how ChatGPT is going to like suggest things to people if they're searching for a certain theme of product, huh? It's probably the content champ. It's the same stuff. There's not a huge difference here. I realize how heated I'm getting over this.

Andrew Maff 20:07
The E commerce, SEO is so wildly important. When I first started BlueTusker, the first thing I did after we launched the website was made content. Started making content. The first thing I did was start doing SEO, because I knew SEO, especially if you do it right, it's not really going to start to show its face for six months to a year, and so you just got to do it, and it's building an asset. Once you can build your website into an asset, the pros far outweigh the cons, right? Because think of, if you get to a certain situation, especially with E commerce brands, you get into a situation where you're having a cash flow issue, and maybe you've got to cut back on your advertising because of different cash flow issues that you're having. I'm not going to get specific on them, your ads will plummet, right? Like, if you're averaging for Hey, every 10 clicks, I get two orders like, great. Guess what? Soon as you pull back on those 10 clicks, those two orders are gone, right? And then multiply that by however much you normally do an SEO you have a cash flow issue, you got to pull back on the amount of content you're making. Guess what? Probably not going to go anywhere. Your organic traffic is probably going to maintain for a good amount of time. Your organic revenue is going to maintain for a good amount of time. It will take a while for it to start to fall off. So if you really want to start to rank in the different LLMs, and you really want to see an improvement in the overall asset that is your business, not just your website, because as I talked about, you can do the same on your marketplaces, from an off marketplace perspective. And by the way, it's the same for all the other ones, it's just Amazon ranks better. You have to invest into developing content, having a quality, UX UI optimized website. You have to make sure that, from a technical perspective, it is being indexed correctly, so that all of these different platforms can pull in the data. And you have to make sure that you're getting the needed backlinks. There's even a case for like, the brand awareness element there. Some people are calling SEO now, search everywhere optimization. And I don't know what it is about that term, but it makes me want to strangle someone. It's fine. It's still search engine. Like they're all technically search engines. We don't have to give everything a new label.

Andrew Maff 22:23
But, all of these optimizations will have an effect on people finding you on Tiktok. They will have an effect on people finding you on Instagram or Facebook, and definitely on YouTube. There's ways now to actually take your content that you've written, take some of your top performing articles, turn them into a video, make it sound like a podcast, or make it sound like a how to whatever you want to do, take that video, embed it into your blog post, and now you have two different areas where you can be back feeding both YouTube to your own blog. There's so many different things you can do, from an SEO perspective, to make sure that you are just taking up as much real estate as possible, and when they get to the place that you want them to go to make sure they don't regret it, that's going to be what really helps you stand out, not only in a traditional ecommerce, SEO perspective, but also through your LLMs.

Andrew Maff 23:15
I apologize if I offended anyone. I always turn these into like, oh, this will be a fun learning session, and then I end up just ranting and getting kind of upset about stuff, and that's the podcast. But to everyone who joined today, thank you all for joining as usual, please make sure you do the same stuff as usual rate, review, subscribe. Head over to the ecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes, but I appreciate everyone joining us, and I will see you all next time. Have a good one!

Narrator 23:47
Thank you for tuning in to the E comm Show. Head over to Ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The Ecomm 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 bluetusker.com now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E comm show!