Why AEO Starts With Better SEO Fundamentals

0:00Lucas Tieleman: The Voices of Search podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything podcast network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit IHearEverything.com. Welcome to the Voices of Search podcast and I Hear Everything production. In this podcast, we'll share the news, knowledge, and strategies you need to navigate the ever-changing world of SEO. Ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts? Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom.

0:41Lucas Tieleman: Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Tyson Stockton. People aren't searching less, they're searching differently, and AI is changing how people are asking questions and how they're discovering products and businesses. In fact, Google still sends roughly 190 times more traffic to websites than ChatGPT according to Ahrefs. But AI search is growing fast and brands that succeed won't be the ones chasing shortcuts. They'll be the ones focused on the strongest fundamentals. My name is Tyson and joining me today is Lucas Tillman, CEO and co-founder of Optiversal. Lucas helps some of the world's largest retailers optimize for AI-driven discovery by turning product data into machine-readable content that performs across both traditional search and emerging AI platforms.

1:35Today, we're going to be talking about why AEO starts with better SEO fundamentals, how AI changes, why brands think about search, and why creating more content isn't the same as creating more value. Welcome to the podcast, Lucas. Good to be here, Tyson. Thanks for joining me. Appreciate the patience through those intros. Always a fun ground for myself. But with that, I want to dive right into the conversation. And one of the things that came up when we were talking kind of before we hit record was around this concept of around like a zero sum game in search. So maybe like to think backwards, setting the stage, like how do you view the state of the industry and how you're looking at like competition in search right now?

2:29Yeah, it's a, you know, really good place to start. So search is not shrinking and new search engines are coming up like all the time. Right. So we have like now, you know, we used to we spent a good couple of decades with like Google being the very dominant player. But now with the advent of AI and chat GPT and AI chat tools, there are sort of new search games in town. And it's very easy for people to react to that. It's like, oh, like the whole market is shifting. They're going all through this different direction. And that means like the other piece of search is now dead in the water. And we have to optimize for the new thing.

3:09How do we rank number one in the new thing? And if you look at the data, that's actually not what's happening. So what's happening is like search is expanding. And so not only is it expanding because there's new tools out there that people use for new types of searches, but also our sort of older tools or traditional tools are also expanding. So people are searching more on Google than they have ever before in the history of Google. So the whole market for search is expanding because consumers are learning that now they can ask different questions of computers. Right. And so their searches are becoming more complicated.

3:48They're becoming more natural in nature. They're asking, you know, more detailed questions. And so this notion of like, hey, there's only one bubble of search and it's getting divided in a different way now than, you know, five years ago or two years ago because of all these new tools is not, you know, really correct or it's not how we view the world. It's actually like the pie is expanding and there's, you know, many more interesting ways to search for things now, including e-commerce products that we focus on. But so, yeah, the pie is expanding, so to speak. And so it's more of like a diversification and it's like you have an expanding market that then has you still have your lion's share.

4:33And like we said in the intro, it's like Google is still sending way more traffic than some of these emerging platforms. It doesn't mean that they should be ignored and they're not, you know, serious players in the space. but it's like from a fundamental level, like you're viewing that as more of like additive layers to the arena that we're operating in versus like one's cannibalizing the other. Yeah. And all the market data kind of supports this as well. Right. So Google search is up and it's not like Google search is like, has been the 10 blue links that we, you know, have known about like since we first used the search engine, right.

5:15That search is also changing. You have AI overviews now. Those are rapidly growing in their prevalence. I think they went from 6 % of searches showed an AI overview to 40 % of searches show an AI overview now over the past six months, and that will continue to grow. So multimodal search is now, you know, part of the core search experience. AI mode is getting pulled in in different interesting ways. So there's a new way to search or there's new ways to search. But it's not this like, hey, one platform is going to lose and the other platform is going to totally dominate now. The other, you know, era of dominance is over.

5:57It's a, you know, it's an expanding sort of ecosystem. I totally agree with that. And it's like, to me, it's like, in a lot of ways, we're still playing the same game. It's just like the board's getting more complex. It's getting more vast. It's expanding. But it's like, it's not necessarily meaning that we're playing, you know, something totally unique and totally different than we were. And you do have a lot of people. I mean and I feel like one of the common things you keep hearing in the industry is like impressions up clicks down question mark on conversions where you have some brands hey it's actually higher some hey it's lower but like to me it's just more of like a shifting in behavior versus like the demand isn't changing like the demand is more prevalent than ever it's just more of like how are we meeting those users in their in this new behavior this new arena yeah and i think that consumers are also getting much more savvy right um so the uh we are like people uh are coming to realize that they don't have to ask dumb questions of their computers anymore right they can ask you know very nuanced uh long questions i see this in my own search behavior, but I also see sort of like, if we look at our clients' data, like people are not just asking for espresso machine anymore, right?

7:29Somebody, you know, who loves espresso machines, maybe 10 years ago had to dumb their question down to like, okay, I'm looking for an espresso machine. But now if you're, you know, if you love coffee, you can, you can ask, actually ask like very detailed questions about the, you know, espresso machine in the search, and then get to your answer much quicker than you used to be able to when you just had to search espresso machine, compare a couple of different websites, and then use filters and other indicators to get down to the product you wanted. Now you can kind of take all that searching and all that discovery more upstream and search in a more detailed way.

8:09And so if you're looking for a particular type of foamer or one that grinds beans in a certain way that goes really well with your hipster coffee, You can do that. You can do that now in the search box versus having to figure it all out sort of downstream across different websites. And like building from that, like, how do you see content strategy? Because obviously we have additional tools at our disposal. I feel like table stakes of content has been significantly uplifted with having more of these, you know, systems that aren't necessarily like, I mean, they're new in the current state. but I wouldn't say it's like something that's completely unheard of as far as like generative content but like how do you view content strategy with some of these new tools that we have access and exposure to yeah well I think like one of the really interesting you know benefits of AI sort of creation technology is that you can create content at scale and so you know retailers or brands used to have to make choices like what do you spend your resources resources on in terms of like content and so what that you know usually meant is like you have to uh you know pick certain products that uh you really going to bet on right they're going to be your big drivers for sales and we're going to invest a lot of money in getting the content for those products right or you used to have this seasonal event that you put a whole bunch of marketing dollars and effort behind and you know that was it and then as a result of that there were other products or categories on your site you just didn't spend too much money on right or time on and so the descriptions for those products were kind of like mediocre or uh you know a sentence and a half uh and so you'd have some products that were like your hero products and all the intention went to that but one of the interesting things with like ai technology is like you have to make you can now make less of that choice right and you can also get much higher quality content sort of across your entire product catalog without having to invest uh you know the resources that you don't have so it's like pretty cheap now to create really high quality content at scale which allows you to basically expand um you know the number of consumer touch points you can go after because you might have products in your catalog that have a unique audience, but that audience, you know, two years ago might not have been big enough to justify the marketing spend to create great content.

10:53But now actually the marketing spend is, you know, not that high because you can use AI tools to create that content. And so you now can go after different types of audiences and different niches where there is, you know, awesome consumer behavior that you can now meet without having to spend the same amount that you would spend on your hero campaigns or products no i i feel like in that that is like a crux of the challenge of today is like balancing that volume versus like added value to it because it seems like the table stakes have gotten so high as far as yeah anyone can create this content so what is the trade-off like in your mind how are you balancing like value add quality to volume and it's like how do you look at those trade-offs or how do you kind of determine you know when you're just going through the motions versus like over focusing on, you know, as you said, key products.

12:09Yeah, I think like, I think it's Jeff Bezos who has this, has this interesting theory around like developing things, either technology forward or customer backwards, right? So for the majority of the products that they make at Amazon over the course of their history, they've always tried to make them customer backwards. So you start with the customer and you, what is, what is the need that you're solving for them? And then you work your way back using the technology. And for some products, you actually lean on the technology and you move technology forward. Right. And I think for like choosing what content to produce on an e-commerce site, you should, you know, kind of use the same approach.

12:51Right. And so you should, in fact, you should almost always work customer backwards. So are you adding value to the customer journey or are you just creating content because now you can create content, right? And so you can generate, I don't know, 10 ,000 informational blogs about whichever category you sell products in, right? It's like quite easy now. You can use Cloud or ChatGPT, whatever. You can create 10 ,000 informational blogs. but they will all be sort of a summary of thoughts that are all already out there on the internet right and so it's just like slightly different flavor so that's like kind of a technology forward approach but the customer backwards approach is like well what do we know about the customer and how they search for certain products or how they search for our brands and can we now meet them in a more unique way than having to sort of because of we now have the technology to do this at scale, right?

13:52So can we basically scale value versus just scaling content? And so I think like that is where the value is, is like, you know, at the end of the day, as a retailer, you should still really understand and, you know, know your customer and what is valuable to them, and then create the content to meet them in that moment of value and in that customer journey. And the cool thing is now you have the technology to do that at scale. But you shouldn't just like say, okay, I can create 10 ,000 blogs. Let's go with 10 ,000 blogs. Because, you know, that might work for a very short period, but almost always that doesn't work, you know, over a long period of time.

14:34Agreed. Which is like funny too, because I feel like that's been like the world we've been in in search for a while. It's like, I mean, I remember 10 years ago or so working on some like generative AI projects where it was like yeah we were producing massive content volumes but it was just like and shot in the dark like kind of the yeah like bulk like you'll get a small percentage but it'll work out in the end but i think now it's like being that it's so much more approachable there is a little bit more of a focus on like the target and the quality of the efforts versus this like yeah whatever i'll get like a half a percentage conversion point and i'll just spray these pages yeah yeah yeah so to give you an example it's like uh we work with like a jewelry i'll take a jewelry brand as a big jewelry brand here in the united states and they um you know they have an interesting like customer problem because like the majority of the year um you know that like the way who they sell to changes across the year, but they sell kind of the same product.

15:49Like if you're selling a necklace in January, it's like it's a Valentine's Day necklace. Right. And then if you sell it in May, it's a Mother's Day necklace. And then graduation rolls around and then the holidays roll around. And so like the same product, actually, the context of that product changes quite a bit. Right. And so they used to have to like create sort of an overarching campaign. there's like the Valentine's Day campaign and this necklace is a part of that campaign. But what they can do now is like, and what we help them with is like, we changed like the description of the product and the frequently asked questions of the product and the structured data of the product around Valentine's Day.

16:30And then once that season's over, we move into Mother's Day and we change it all again, right? And we talk to the audience, you know, hey, this is a great gift to buy for your mom. And mothers love it because of X, Y, and Z. and then graduation comes around you can talk about like graduation specific things and so that is now possible and it's you know very helpful to the consumer and it turns out like people go online and search for what's a great necklace to give to my daughter who graduated and so you can do that now and like i think it's like a cool example of like you can sort of like Like, yeah, anyway, you now have the skill to meet the customer, like, in the moment that matters to them, right?

17:16Versus having to just do one cookie cutter. You know, here's my necklace. It works for all of these use cases. no i guess not to like hyper focus on the one example but like in that scenario are you creating multiple experiences and landing pages for each of those moments throughout the year or is it more of a repurposing of that existing product page and how you're ordering reviews product description whatever it may be so is it more of like edit existing assets or have specific assets for the events it's all of the above so you can uh right so you can change your product detail page throughout the year for example or very you know something we do quite a lot is like you change your google merchant center right so you add this type of content to your google merchant center feed because people are searching for that.

18:18And so you're competitive, your quality score goes up if you have those types of seasonal awards or occasions inside of the structured data in the merchant center feed. And then you can create landing pages around gifts for Mother's Day, right? And you might have, in the past, you might have had like a Mother's Day gift hub, but now you can create all of these offshoots of that, like necklaces that are great for Mother's it gets earrings and so you can create all of these variations that might meet consumers in their in their search journey now i know this is a little bit off topic that we described earlier but like you hit on the merchant feed and i feel like that's an interesting component because i i mean i come from like an e-commerce background and i feel like that's been something that's just been consistently growing in significance and it makes sense given like the structured data nature of it like are you looking at merchant feeds outside of paid and also within like organic or like how are you looking at merchant feeds yeah so i mean like i think like merchant feeds are extremely important and getting more important because in the case of Google, like merchant feed is what powers, like what they call the product graph, right?

19:43Which is the system that searches products right inside of Google. And so it powers the universal commerce protocol, right? And so, and it has all these things that are optimized for that specific system, right? And so So it has Google product categories, right? Well, your site taxonomy and the Google taxonomy are hopefully not the same, right? Because, you know, if you made good choices about your own merchandising strategy, you probably have a site taxonomy that's very specific for your site. But then Google has to normalize these things somehow. So they have their own taxonomy as well. And so what you can now do is you can actually take your existing site taxonomy and translate it into the right Google taxonomy.

20:25So instead of sending it sort of a mediocre, like, hey, this is what we think it is, you can actually find and normalize against the Google site taxonomy, which is very helpful if you want your products to get found in that system. So you don't have to choose anymore, right? You can basically optimize for both angles. Same thing goes for questions and answers go in there now, right? And you start to see those up in organic results, right? Where you click on a product and it says, look, do you want to know next? and it sort of lists these questions that most customers ask, that's fed by the merchant feed.

21:00In AI mode, same thing, it's fed by the merchant feed. So yeah, optimizing your feeds is very important and becoming more important. And then it's also going to be, I think, what we're seeing is it's becoming a little bit of a competitive differentiator between the platforms, right? So meta has slightly different fields for the product feeds you send them. And then OpenAI is like working on that as well, right? They are now also adding, you know, specific fields. And so, yeah, really having a feed strategy beyond just like making sure the shit gets to the place where it needs to get to, right?

21:37But sort of optimizing for each of those channels is very important. And the cool thing is, similar to like our earlier discussion, like it is very possible now. So you can actually optimize your Google Merchant Center feed for all the things that Google wants to learn from you. Which is also, it's a, it's a great point too, because as we go more and more down this path, it's like, you're going to see more commercialization between these, like the feeds are the easiest kind of lowest barrier source for that. So I feel like those, I'm a hundred percent on board. It's like, that's going to be more and more prevalent, And similar of like, we're going to see schema markup and like this general just structured data value that we'll carry through.

22:29We spent a fair amount of time earlier. I mean, not before, during recording, but previous recording, like talking about these kind of like fundamentals of SEO and like how that lives in this GEO, AEO, whatever acronym you want to give. but like how like I thought you had an interesting take on the fundamentals and like what those mean today like how would you describe that to the audience of like what are the fundamentals of search as a whole and how do you take advantage of that yeah so the I think like the like ultimately like when you optimize your site for search uh you want to optimize it to be found right that's like the goal of it.

23:15Right. And so, um, the customer in the case of a search engine, right, is a bot that visits your site and they don't really, they will not put in the effort to, you know, figure out what's on the site. So they will like, if it's not there, uh, it's going to go to the next site to see if, you know, it can find the information that it wants somewhere else. Right. And so you kind of want to structure your, the content on your site to be as structured as possible for a machine to read, right? And so those are all sort of the classic sort of technical SEO fundamentals that you want to signal to the search engines, whether it be traditional search engines or large language model-based search engines.

24:04So you need to get them really clean data in a really easy way. And yeah, I wouldn't bank on the fact that like, oh we'll figure it out eventually because it's probably not going to and if your competitors is a good job it's just going to go to your competitor and i feel like we're getting like a mixed signal of like in some ways the industry is like swinging back into like i guess like i don't know some like earlier like signals and like focus areas and in some ways it's like shifting also in like the new environment but it's like i do i do agree that you have like that that makes peace and in some ways it's like a new flavor to it but in a lot of ways to me it's very reminiscent of just yeah it's still the same game like we're still plane on the same principles it's just yeah a different field that we might be running on yeah i also think like there's some i think something like there's a there's a there's an interesting like mindset shift and budget shift at the executive level right as a result of sort of this new uh these new engines right so the seo teams like lester hearts um but like seo was cool like long time ago and then it kind of got like table stakes right and so with table stakes came the table stakes budgets and like those types of things right and so um you know three years ago if you were pitching to really update the schema at the highest quality level across all the pages in the company like that's a tough roadmap decision like you're out you know you're like you're not going to win that uh most of the time right but now all of a sudden like chat gpt is here, AI overviews are here.

26:02And so the CEO is like, you know, using his phone and yelling at someone saying like, why are we not the first result in JetGPT? And so with that, with that yell come budgets. And so I think there's also like, yes, we are kind of talking about the old stuff, but it's also like now finally you can get some of the old stuff prioritized in the way that it maybe should have been prioritized a long time ago. But like the, you know, people are like really thinking about like optimizing their site for search again and so um yeah take advantage of that but also like don't just take advantage of that by buying like the the coolest new tool on the block that will make maybe help you do one or two things but like think about like okay um well will the coolest new tool help us you know or should we just have like really really good clear structured data did we have that today and then maybe if we have that in place the coolest tool will help us even more well and how do you reframe that conversation because i do agree it's like right now there is a huge opportunity for seos and just in search because you have this broader executive awareness and interest and i think it's like i've gotten more questions personally from like friends and family than i have in like the last like 20 years on just what i do it's like there is this like i don't know greater market awareness that's going on i do also agree with you it's like yeah a lot of those fundamentals are things that we've been preaching and like banging the drum on for a while so it's like how do you reposition those to take advantage of that groundswell of like interest even if it may be something that's not entirely net new from a tactical perspective well i think like the um i think the art is in like combining several factors right of the of the thing that needs to happen so like it's like a very unique opportunity to go create a bunch of customer value or to be a destination for customers.

28:18And so like, if you have the best schema in the world, but you have nothing to unique to tell your customer, it doesn't really matter either. Right. And so it's like, I think it's like a, the companies we see that do it best, you know, work together sort of internally across a wide variety of, you know, functions to create things that they couldn't do before. versus like trying to do the thing that they used to do more efficient. But it's like, okay, well, what are the things that we can do that are not possible before that includes like high quality technical SEO, structured data, good fundamentals, unique customer journeys, highly optimized content in merchant feeds, on the PDP and landing pages, in email.

29:06Like there's like all of these avenues that you can like kind of work together to create like awesome customer journeys now. And so I think that that's kind of the trick. So like reframing it, not just like, hey, we're going to fix some of the fundamentals and we'll all be okay. ChatGPT is going to find us. But it's like, okay, well, what like, what is optimizing for ChatGPT look like for us? What are the types of... Time for a one minute break to hear from our sponsor, Previsible. So you're looking for SEO help and you got a couple of options. You could start replying to spam from agencies that claim they can get you to rank number one on Google.

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30:58Questions customers are asking, do we have the answer? Do we have a unique answer? How do we present that? and do we present that in a technically sound way, in a customer journey way that is pleasant for them, that leads to higher conversion, et cetera. That's kind of my take on it, at least. Totally agree. Now, one other thing I want to circle back to before we run out of time, and it stuck with me in kind of like the pre-conversation. And part of it was like, Because it's so much of like a fundamental or principle of the industry of this like test and learn. And you kind of reframed it to me and you said, no, it's like learn and test.

31:44Like, can you expand and kind of like elaborate on that to the audience of like, what do you mean about like that mindset for that paradigm shift between test and learn to learn and test? Yeah, I mean, I think like you don't always want to optimize for the super short thing, because the super short thing will only get you benefits on the super short thing, right? And so you can run like a million experiments on a e-commerce site that never get to statistical significance. but then you sort of claim that they do, right? But you can kind of reframe it as like, you know, learn what the audience is saying and then test if your validations are right, if that makes sense.

32:30You now have the power to run so many tests because you can create the content to do so. And so again, sort of framing it from the customer backwards and thinking about it that way, I think is very, it's generally very helpful instead of like trying to like, hey, let's run a thousand experiments and see which one sticks. It's like, well, how do you, you know, what can we learn about our customer and how can we test against like that hypothesis? Yeah. So it's like in some ways it's like just being smarter about your test too of like, let's take a moment about what can we actually learn, think critically about how then we can be more strategic in our test.

33:11but it's like it's not yeah abandoning the like test mentality to me like that sounds more of like be smarter about the test that you are then willing or the bets that were you're willing to make yeah yeah and make like you can make different bets now and they're not as mutually exclusive as maybe they used to be in the past as well not at all yeah yeah the most important you know yeah the most important thing is like uh i don't know or at least what we see is like like think about all the things you can do now that you couldn't do before right uh and so we always have this like sort of like when new technology comes around like Like we have this like, I don't know, there's a tiger.

34:03Run. They're scared. Like it's going to take our jobs or like whatever, you know. But like it's like the question is actually where you can do all of these things now you couldn't do before. And so like how many of those can you do and which ones are like most valuable? And, you know, that's awesome. Which is like it's like truly awesome, right? And so all of these things that we've been talking about as an industry for like ages, like personalization, like um you can like actually personalize a site now like not in like a you know not in like a sort of like you you get different product recommendations than i do because we clicked on something else type of way um but like in like from a content perspective right you can write content for different personas and present those different personas with different types of content like you can do that like that's like totally within you know you can do that like this month um and so that's like awesome because it might work really well um so you know does that make so like it's kind of well and it's it's revisiting some of like the aspiration i feel like you can revisit some of those previous ideas and thoughts and things that we just weren't able to do quality that then is effective whether it's like personalization it's like that's not necessarily like a net new like no one's thought about personalizing content before but it's like we were just limited on production capabilities scale input data is whatever it may be but i think there is also in coming back like earlier in the conversation it's like there's reason to revisit some of those like fundamentals and then apply the new technology world what have you to that and it's like you're gonna you're bound to have a different end result from it yeah or if you think about things like you know we don't do anything in this field, but imagery, right?

36:13And so everybody knows lifestyle images convert better. It's like a tale of all this time. It's very obvious. And it doesn't work perfectly. It doesn't work perfectly for all categories, but for a bunch of categories, it actually works really, really well. And so that's something you can do. And it's not that crazy hard. It's not that crazy expensive and you can do that like now and it will most likely have an impact on your sales because that's you know that's why we do it for the big hero products right it impacts sales if you see what the shirt looks like on something or you see a product in the context of how it gets used so you know yeah there's lots of opportunities where you can kind of have that mindset of like what can i what can i do now that i couldn't do like last year and i feel like there's like a sweet son between the two in the sense of like if you take e-commerce you have some of the like mid to large players that were investing in their own product imagery great take those same unique assets and then now throw on some like ai variant layers for lifestyle that's going to speak to those different personas you could have a really really strong compelling imagery story everything behind it that's not going to come across artificial gimmicky like it's it's the combination of that like hard-fought asset with the technology that i think the greatest opportunity exists rather than people thinking it's like one or the other, like AI image or net new.

38:03It's like just merge the two, lean into it, take your assets and then apply it with the new opportunity. Yeah. And the same thing goes for like all of these other things as well, right? It's not like there's a balance between, you know, writing a thousand blogs or 10 ,000 blogs using Claude about sort of random shit and then hand crafting a buying guide right there's like a balance where you can actually create 200 buying guides that are really good that you spend some time on and got a bunch of help from ai on and which you trained really well and uh you know and so like now all of a sudden so the choice is not one buying guide or 10 000 blogs it might be like hey i can now actually build 200 buying guides with a unique perspective from my as a retailer and they perform well and they talk to a new audience that I couldn't talk to before and there's search volume there so it you know brings new people to my site and that drives brand awareness drives conversion all those things absolutely and I I really agree and like believe with you in the sense of like you need to take those fundamental principles and then kind of apply the new perspective to it.

39:21But it's not this like completely night and day, hey, we're playing this new game, new world. I do want to be mindful of your time and I can keep the conversation going, but I want to get into kind of the more lightning round or shorter form questions with you. So I don't keep you too long on here. first question i want to throw at you what's the biggest misconception about ai search today um that it's uh the same as search 10 years ago and so it's not the same it's very different it's also in many cases much more personalized right so if you search something and i search something we're probably going to get different results and so the focus should not be on like if i type in the result am I first the focus should be on do I have the right content for people to come to my site and you can prove that in the data that you see and you can prove that by creating the content and it that's it's such a nuance in like especially in your answer in the sense of it is different but it is the same but I do agree too it's like as an industry we've been trying to condition people into like keyword ranking, average keyword position.

40:43It's like, yeah, throw that out, go back to more of like the consumer behavior principles of like, what is the audience looking for? And are we matching to that rather than this like traditional average position rank visibility paradigm? Yeah. It's still important to track your search engine positions, right? still important to look at keyword volume all those things are still important but are they the thing that you build your dashboard on probably not yes and is that is that what you want the executives and the leadership team then to be asking you about and it's like to me it's like that's kind of a missed opportunity if they're only asking about that same thing perfect segue into the next question though what's one seo tactic that you think marketers should stop doing today i think like slow optimization is the thing you should stop doing if you are going to do a bunch of keyword research and turn it into 1500 word posts based on the keywords that you researched and just feed them back into the model you are perpetuating the problem and you're not going to make more money yeah it's like don't go through the motions just because you can go through the motions but have a purpose behind it yeah and then like maybe the other thing is like stop watching youtube videos you know bros that like us they kind of look like us that tell you how to rank number one in chat GPT it's like yeah it's like bullshit designed to you know it really is it's like kind of nonsense it has nothing to do with like actually winning agreed I mean not to say that everyone should stop watching this YouTube video no no this one watch but we're not telling you how to win number one another one no but like sort of like those tactics Like if you only do this one thing, like you will win.

43:01I think like that there is no, there's no silver bullets. And it's like searches like a remark, like, I think like two things that like are very misunderstood searches, like a remarkably nuanced business, right? There's like a lot of nuance in like how the system works. Right. I don't think even like the people who build the system know exactly how they work, right. Or why certain things work at certain points in time. Right. and um so like that's like and then the second thing is like shopping is like remarkably emotional and so um the sort of notion to optimize for like super clear um you know non-emotional things is also you know i think the highest average order values are like past midnight uh which in that vein of like the same like avoiding the clickbaity like do these 10 things and you will win it's like i think personally that's why i'm like so much more gravitated towards the the theoretical and the principle driven pieces because it's like It's more of how can you take that and then apply it to your expertise, your niche, your segment that you're working for.

44:22But it's like, yeah, anyone that says do these 10 things across the board, probably full of shit. And it's like there's no way that that can work across the bases. but there are fundamentals and principles that you can use, I think across the board. And it's like, yeah, I guess it's a semantics or nuance of doing it, but I agree with you. It's like, and yeah, I guess more of like my own interests of like, that's why the theoretical and the principles matter is because you can apply them in a variety of ways. Yeah. And you can apply them at scale now. That's also the very, like it's very different.

45:08Like they used to be like very, very hard to do, like nearly impossible, right? Yeah, so. Totally agree. What's one SEO fundamental that matters more today than you think it did five years ago? Structured data and clean entity relationships. And with that, would you group product feeds into structured data or would you view that as something separate? Yeah, no, those are part of the same equation. Yeah. All right. So you're looking at product. The only reason they're asking for product feeds is so they can get more structured data. True. Right. Because they want that data more structured and it's like pretty hard to parse.

45:57And so they were like, well, screw you. just send it to me because like it's too hard to figure this shit out and it's too hard to get you guys to standardize on things so just send it to me and you know I'm big enough now that you can send me a structured data feed so please do that but yeah structured data like off-site and off-site yeah the understanding and how that can be utilized is so much greater than before yeah and then you know um yeah and then like entity is very important like ambiguous like like like it's very hard for a machine to figure out like what the what the relationship is of different entities right um inside of certain things so uh yeah that's very important agreed next question if you could give every e-commerce team one piece of advice what would it be um well obviously to buy opt reversal um then you know um the other thing is like really understand your customer like if i could give one like piece of advice it would be to work in the retail store and try to sell your own product and have that mindset.

47:20Like if I, if you walk into the store, like I'm trying to sell you something, like what would I actually say to you? And I bet it's not what's on the product detail page. And, uh, you know, I used, I learned this trick at Apple long time ago. um it's not don't talk about how much gigabytes a computer has talk about how many photos you can store on it and uh because the you know person that's walking into the parent that's walking into the store cares about the pictures they can store of their kids uh they don't give a shit about the gigabytes and so uh the gigabytes might be important for one for one audience right um so So it's actually nuanced.

48:08Sometimes talk about the gigabytes. But it's like, if you were in the store and the person would walk in, what would you actually tell them? And is that reflective of what you're doing in SEO? I had such good advice, but also brings us back into those fundamentals. And for me, it also like it's that forcing of taking a step back and being like, it's not my perspective of like what I think they need. It's like listening more from their side. and to your example with like apple it's like yeah you're probably not gonna have that many like soccer moms are coming in saying hey i want 100 gigabytes it's more of hey my phone keeps maxing out on photos because i've been taking x number of pictures of timmy in his soccer practice So I think it is a great reframe of, again, back to the basics, but then thinking critically about those and then applying it to the new opportunities and new technologies that we have today.

49:25Yeah. And we see, by the way, retailers that do have those types of concepts in their data and on their site do extraordinarily well. If you talk about pet food in terms of like, does your dog have a sensitive stomach? Or if you talk about washers and dryers and whether they fit in a small apartment. Or if you talk about mascara, whether it's good for if you have sensitive eyes, like all of these sort of problem-based, human problem-based, right? Then you win customers. Like it's very interesting. because customers search that way they search from their problem and so uh the problem is not does it have eight gigabytes the problem is like can i take a gazillion pictures of my kids and have them on my phone forever and in in so many ways it's like very simplistic but then also like it has that level well to do that well it's quite hard but the uh but the cool thing is like you can again you can do these things at scale now uh and like it is quite hard and and so that allows you also to miss right so you can get it wrong and that is totally fine like because you can now create many different things and if you get it wrong it doesn't really matter because like the incremental cost of doing it was not not that high so if you're willing to you know be unemotionally attached to your own ideas uh you know you can you can try a bunch of stuff get rid of them and try new stuff and keep the things that work.

51:02And I think that that in itself is a huge key. Last question I have for you. Five years from now, what will we laugh about in today's AI search conversation? I think like agendic commerce, but not, I'm not trying to take a shit on agendic commerce. So the answer is slightly more nuanced, but I think like the, again, like shopping is emotional. You get something from it. Right. And so I think like the fact that like you would let an AI agent buy on your behalf is like, I don't really see that happening, honestly. In some cases I do, but in some cases I don't. And so, you know, I was a target this past weekend to buy pool floaties.

51:54And I walked past the detergent aisle and people buy detergent in grocery stores, in gallon sizes. And it's like one of these, like, no, no, the truth is like one of these mind boggling things to me, right? When thinking about like a gentic commerce, because that would be the ultimate use case. Because like you always buy the same detergent. right? Everybody's like really loyal to the detergent for some reason. And then there's brand affinity. And so like you could end like, plus all the technology is there for your detergent to be delivered to your home automatically through subscribe and save, right?

52:34All of these things exist in the world and are available to people in Austin, Texas that go to this specific target, right? And for some reason, there's an aisle with detergent. And you know what I mean? It's like, it's fascinating to me. And so clearly technology has not solved the problem. And there's a different need that technology that we haven't, as e-commerce people have not figured out. We have not figured out that need because people are still buying detergent in the gala. And it's the lowest consideration purchase. You always buy the same shit. All the technology infrastructure is there.

53:12It is unbelievable that there's an aisle in the target with detergent. And so if you look at that and you look at agentic commerce, if it doesn't even work for detergent, how is it going to work for clothing or how is it going to work for large purchases? There's so much to be figured out. And how do we have machines that help us guide through emotional shopping journeys and they're going to be really good at it. I'm very convinced. So I'm like very bullish on the fact that like an agent's going to help me shop. But I don't think it's going to be like, I'm going to tell the agent that I need a pair of new running shoes and it's going to purchase the running shoes for me.

53:59Does that make sense? But it's going to be very helpful in a very awesome way. And I'm not sure what it is. And I think we'll laugh at the fact that we thought that like that was the journey which and i the way i would view that too is it's almost like you're this stage that's being started to be met as far as like that early discovery you know you're navigating the space like personally i find myself going there more for like you know things that i'm really unsure of of like yeah help me narrow this down into what i should be looking at then that like gap between help me research versus i'm gonna trust you to make my emotional decision of a purchase does seem to be like a pretty and i would assume we're gonna see that close over time and it's like it'll probably get closer but to think that it's just gonna leap prog and be like great like yeah yeah what's like if you if you if you think about like the very best shopping experience you money can buy right so even like if you think let's go to the like most expensive store in the world and tiffany's i think they have the highest uh dollar value per square foot right and if you think about the shopping experience there um it's always a shopping experience of choice because they because like even if you like like that person knows exactly what you should buy right um when you come in and you tell them your budget like what you're looking for and if it needs to be like giant or small or whatever right they they will figure like they know what you should buy they're very good at their job but they still give you a choice because you want at the end of the day you want to be the person that chooses because that gives you that feeling.

55:59And so I think like the notion of like the AI is going to choose for you is like, I don't know. I don't really see it, but you know, maybe I'm getting old. With that though, that's going to wrap up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Lucas Tillman, CEO and co-founder of Optiversal for joining us. If you'd like to contact Lucas, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or also be sure to go over and check out his company's website, see what they're doing, see how they're supporting e-commerce companies at Optiversal.com. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO, AEO, GEO, content marketing knowledge in your product feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app on YouTube or in your preferred app, and we'll be back in your feed in the following days.

56:54with that. That's all for today. Thanks for something by the voice of search, and we will see you in the next episode.

57:24Thank you.