The Ecommerce SEO Game is Shifting Dramatically, with Spencer Millerberg, Founding Partner at DetailPage.com

Transcript

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Peter Crosby (00:00):

Welcome to unpacking the Digital Shelf where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age. Hey everyone. Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. Did you know over 70% of traffic to a detail page is organic? Now that you are aware, do you know what you need to do to win your share of that traffic? And hopefully some of someone else's, the answers to that question have changed right underneath our feet. And winning has become much more of a science than an art than ever before. Driven by the power of AI. Spencer Millerberg, who changed the e-commerce game once before with one click retail is now added again as founding partner of detail page.com. He joined Lauren Livak Gilbert and me with the facts and figures of the changing game of e-comm, SEO. Welcome to the podcast, Spencer. We are so excited to dive into SEO with you.

Spencer Millerberg (01:03):

Wonderful. Thanks for having me. It's good to be back and it's good to see you again, Peter. It's wonderful to be here. So thank you.

Peter Crosby (01:11):

Well, SEO conversion sort of the one two punch of the product page, and so it's really important just for our customer how they get found and how consumers can make a purchase, but not all brands have optimized their content for search performance, which is a super important piece of what you're trying to do on that page. So can you tell us from your work, a detail page, what you're seeing in the industry around search?

Spencer Millerberg (01:40):

Yeah, it's great. I mean, just like what you said, e-commerce is really easy when you think about it. You've got to get people there and you got to convert 'em once they get there. And it's interesting you say, what do I see around the industry? What we're finding is actually a lot of people think that they're doing really well. You talk to executives in large brands, they're like, oh yeah, we're dominating in search. We're doing great. But when we actually apply the metrics and we start to look at it, we find that they're not. There's a big perception gap that they have there. And some of the things that we see here as we start to measure it, we see that share a voice is how much traffic are you getting to the page? And then market shares that conversion to a sale. And we see that there is a huge gap between those two things because people don't know if they have a traffic problem or if they have a conversion problem. And so we see brands who have great share of voice, but then they don't convert. And this happens for a whole bunch of different reasons that we see there. Peter, so happy to dive in even further if you want.

Peter Crosby (02:47):

Yeah, please do. I mean, so when you see folks that have this conversion problem, where do you dive into that disparity? We're getting so many people here, but they're not converting. Do you think of that as an SEO problem or is that your page is not up to snuff or do you not separate those two really from

Spencer Millerberg (03:12):

No, a hundred percent have to separate it. What's fascinating is we start to go into this and when we measure and we see people who have this massive amount of traffic that they're not converting, what happens is you start to look and it's like their images, their price, their in stock are usually the issues that you have there. But more often than not, we find it's actually the backwards from that, that people have their pages dialed most of the time because images are so easy to see if they're going to be right or if they're going to be wrong. And reviews are easy and in stock's, easy in stock, 99% is about the average in stock that we see. So people are really getting those things dialed. So most of the time it's not a conversion problem that we're finding. More often than not, we're starting to see it's a traffic problem that they have.

(04:07):

So we've done these really interesting tests where we'll take and we'll change the bullet points or we'll change the description and we will see no change in conversion. And you think, okay, why is that that you're not seeing a change in conversion? Well, people just don't read. They don't read. And so you have to really realize who is the audience that you're talking to? Because when we do make those same tests and we change bullet points and we change descriptions, we change title. What we do see is a massive change in traffic because the lesson here is really, really clear. Written content is about the search algorithm that is your audience images and images and reviews. And in stock that's about conversion, converting people once you get there.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (04:52):

From an image standpoint, have you done any research around the order of images or the types of images that drive more conversion over another? And maybe it's by category. I'm just curious if that has come up.

Spencer Millerberg (05:05):

We have. We've seen from an image standpoint, what people are really looking for are features, attributes, and benefits of the product. And how that starts to manifest itself is typically as a lifestyle image overlaid with the features, attributes and benefits of a product that a customer actually wants. So use an example. If you think about headphones, what is a feature that somebody's going to be looking for? A five hour battery life lasts all day, sit seven hour, eight hour battery life, whatever the case may be, noise cancellation integration to Bluetooth wireless. And so you can see this image where you have somebody wearing the headphones with the battery life overlaid and it says it right there on screen. Those are the types of images that we are seeing that convert very, very well. Then what we are able to do with images is we can take and harvest all of the information that customers do within their reviews, and we can then take and harvest and say, okay, customers actually like these five things and let's grade them against the images to see if those things match up. So conversion, that's a really, really big key to convert. Most of the time though, like I said, traffic ends up becoming the problem.

Peter Crosby (06:20):

So shoppers will read as long as it's in an image. Yeah, it's true. It's three words long.

Spencer Millerberg (06:27):

It's a three word line in top of an image. Okay, so here's the stat that goes along that 94% of customers who make a purchase look at all available above the fold images. So you think about it, you have the majority of purchases happening on a mobile device and on a mobile device, you flip through the image carousel at the top, you actually don't scroll down because it's four or five scroll lengths down to get to the a plus content. And so very few people scroll down, but everybody who does make a purchase looks at all available above the fold images. And so that helps with the conversion. But then how do you get people to the page? That's the part that people that brands especially big brands, start to struggle with because it's an algorithm, it's a backend, it's hard to understand, am I doing well, am I not doing well? Those measurements are a little bit more difficult to see.

Peter Crosby (07:23):

Well, and under that phrase, how do you get the people there? The people are a bunch of different personas or types or desires for the same product. So that's really where I would imagine sort of the art and signs of it comes like how do you make sure that your copy speaks to the personas that you're trying to drive to that page? Is that right?

Spencer Millerberg (07:51):

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So a couple of things to think about here. Last year at Amazon Accelerate, they stood up and they said something that I'd never heard him say before. They said over 70% of traffic to a detail page. It was organic. You think about that. We spend a ton of time and a ton of money on paid search, but what you're seeing is 70% of traffic comes from organic. So we're seeing when we optimize this content, we're seeing a 12 to 20% average lift with some of the smaller brands, like 30 to 80% lift on these smaller brands. And it's because you're not getting what people are searching for. So what are people searching for? We're actually finding that the top search term ends up representing less than 20% of total overall search volume. So you search for toilet paper, backpack, umbrella, face lotion, et cetera. Those terms are less than 20% of total search volume. So you have to get into the lower end of where people are searching for because now it's like umbrella for rain face lotion with SBF 15 backpack for computers. You get all of those very specific terms, and that's what customers end up searching for. And it usually takes over 30 terms to make up 80% of total search volume for a specific product or product group.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (09:18):

And that's an interesting stat. 70% of searches on Amazon are organic

Spencer Millerberg (09:25):

Clicks, 70% of traffic, right? 70% of traffic.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (09:29):

So organic search versus paid search. Let's dive into that. That's a perfect transition to talk about that topic. So a lot of brands, there's a lot of noise around paid search and retail media right now, but I think organic is so important because you don't have to pay for it, and there's a strategy behind it that can help to your point, your products be found from a search perspective. So can you talk a bit about balancing both the paid and organic strategy and how brands should be thinking about that?

Spencer Millerberg (09:58):

Oh yeah, absolutely. Okay, let me give you an example. Okay, so here's the short version. I think you have to do both, but this is an exercise versus supplements type of a scenario. So I coach high school mountain biking. It's a huge thing in Utah, we have over 4,000 kids who participate. It's giant, giant. So this weekend I had a kid, he came to the race, he had not come to practice all season long, so obviously his fitness level was a little bit lower. So he comes to the race, he proceeds to down four energy gels right before riding so many calories. I know, oh my gosh, child,

Peter Crosby (10:38):

That's what I did right before this podcast. I don't know, is that a problem? No

Spencer Millerberg (10:41):

Problems at all. You eat the cool team bar girls.

(10:48):

So here's the thing, did he see a boost? Yeah, he saw a boost in his performance, but from what base did he see that boost? He improved his specific time, but he didn't place well in the race. He wasn't winning. And that's what I see from brands all the time. They turn to the supplement, which is paid traffic because it gives them a boost, but you have to have a strong base to jump from. And so brands will turn to that because it's easy, it's proven. They know they can see results off of their base, but it's not the sustainable base that they need to start from and they don't end up winning in the end. And so they just get frustrated in the end and say, wait a minute, why is my ROAS and my ACOs so stinking bad? Because it's not the place that you see. You see the end up result, the end results, right?

Lauren Livak Gilbert (11:44):

I love that example specifically because my husband ran a 5K this weekend and before the race we were seeing people just eat these gels and we were like, it's only three miles. Don't eat two. I think you're okay. But anyway, very relevant in my life right now. So from an Amazon perspective, let's talk about Amazon for a second because from a search perspective, a lot of people are focused on Amazon.

Spencer Millerberg (12:07):

You

Lauren Livak Gilbert (12:08):

Can't just buy your way to winning on Amazon with paid search or retail media in general. So talk about why and talk about how brands or any examples you have about them balancing the organic and paid on Amazon specifically.

Spencer Millerberg (12:22):

Sure. Yeah. Okay. So we talked about this. 70% plus of traffic is organic that you see there. Now what's happening here is if you think about that organic traffic, it plays into more than just the organic traffic. So Amazon has what's called a variable bid rate formula. Now stick with me, I'm going to get really nerdy here for a second. There's a thing called pairwise data. Amazon's algorithm says, does this ASIN or this SKU match this term? And if those two things match together, it's called pairwise and that they index against those terms. Now then there's the pairwise strength. How strong is that linkage between this ASIN and that term? So when you take that, that's what establishes your organic search rate, is that pairwise data. Now, after that, Amazon has this variable bid rate for paid search, but it's based upon the organic search.

(13:26):

So if you rank lower within organic search, you end up paying more for your bid than you do if you rank higher in that. So I saw this all the time. So when I was back at OneClick, we saw Tide pods, they paid 10 times less for the term laundry detergent pod because they were far more relevant than all was on a very similar type of a product that they have there, but it's still a major disconnect by most brands. They have their advertising dialed in, they have their agency, they're doing it right, but the right hand doesn't know what the left hand's doing. So I can pull up examples from Mondelez, Unilever, pharma by Kimberly Clark, Luco, I could pull up from almost any single brand where they buy these terms, but they don't actually rank organically on them. They're non indexed. They haven't figured out their pairwise data, and so they haven't done the hard work of organic search first. And so then they wonder, man, why is my ACOs and my ROAS so crappy? It's because they're paying 10 times the amount that somebody else is because they're not ranking organically first and then they're like, oh, shoot, all of these offshore brands or these little brands are eating my lunch because they're doing the hard work of organic.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (14:46):

And I think a big reason for that, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, is that the organic team usually sits in a separate team than the paid search team. Organic usually, I'm making assumptions here, usually sits at the e-commerce team. Paid usually sits wherever retail media is, whether it's shopper sales or something, and they just don't talk to each other. Do you find the same thing?

Spencer Millerberg (15:07):

Oh, absolutely. Not only is that, but then there's a whole different criteria that comes into play for organic versus paid search, paid search. They have all these different tools. They're trying to figure out what do customer search for? How do I find a bid to traffic gap and saying, Hey, there's an arbitrage opportunity where I can get lower cost for bids for this. But then on the content, usually that sits within the brand team and they have these copywriters who go out and they do one of a couple of things either first of all, the content is super slim and it just came straight out of their engineering specs as like three bullet points with four words. Or the other end is they go into this copywriter hell where it's all this flower in language that no customer ever will search for. I just saw this on sunscreen the other day where they had something about some specific term that they had, but it didn't say SPF 15, it didn't say the thing, waterproof, the thing that customers are searching for was totally missing.

(16:11):

And so there's this gap in process that many, many groups have and without having a good software also to say, what do customers search for? We have those 30 plus terms that we talked about that makes up that 80 plus percent of search volume. They don't even know what those things are. And so if they don't know what those terms are, there's no way a copywriter could insert those and let alone the mathematical equations and needed in order to do that in the proper location within the detail page. So it's just harder to do and it's in a different team, like you said, Lauren,

Peter Crosby (16:47):

And I'm going to make a presumption that detail page.com is your company. That's one example of software solutions that are able to do that for people.

Spencer Millerberg (16:58):

Yeah. Yeah, it is. In fact, we're really excited. About 11 days ago we just received a patent for automatic keyword identification on a retail page. So now we are the only ones that can do it from a patent perspective, so we're really

Peter Crosby (17:13):

Excited. Wow, congratulations. That's really cool.

Spencer Millerberg (17:15):

Yeah,

Peter Crosby (17:17):

Because when you were talking earlier about why the Chinese marketplace companies are eating some of the big brands lunch because they throw people at the problem of trying to uncover what that 80% is made of what's not covered already and what gap can they leap into, they're sort of doing their own arbitrage. How do I take advantage of an underserved market by the big? And I would imagine that what the big folks are now seeing is that their market share is getting lowered not by one other big competitor like all versus Tide, but rather the a hundred companies in China that are each stealing a little niche audience from them and adding up to a competitor like an All. Am I overstating it or is that what's going on there?

Spencer Millerberg (18:20):

It's very common that we see that because yes, Peter, to answer your question directly, we take care of market share and share voice measurement, but then we also take care of search optimization on retail pages. And so we monitor both of those two sides. And what we see is that most of the time what you're talking about is the case, we call them ankle biters, right? You're just getting eaten by all these little teeny brands that take away a lot of the different of your market share. And what happens is they have low cost labor that they throw at these smaller brands have low cost labor that they throw at the problem, and so they test and they test and change and test and change and test and change. So it's not uncommon for some of these offshore brands that we see their content to update upwards of a hundred times per month.

(19:14):

So they are just changing their content constantly to see what it is that does change as opposed to large brands, they have big processes and big problems, and they don't necessarily have that low cost labor. They don't have the software to do it. And so we start to see their changes happening usually once a year is usually what we see. It's an average of 13.2 months if you want to get real specific for these large brands that we see them changing their content. So that just leaves this huge gap between what do customers search for versus what content is actually on page. So that's a really big, big key. Does that answer your question, Peter?

Peter Crosby (19:58):

It totally does. And I think therein lies the urgency to solve this problem, even if you're sort of like, I'm killing it and paid, alright, Spencer, thanks a lot, but I am not going to worry about that as much, or I don't want to talk to the person over on the other side of the company that I don't want to

Spencer Millerberg (20:19):

Talk to.

Peter Crosby (20:20):

But this to me sort of unlocks the urgency, which is that it feels like e-commerce as it's reaching some form of maturity, the opportunities are going to be much harder to crack of existing product lines if you want to not just rely on growth, but on loyalty. If you want to get the mix of business that you need to be profitable, you have to do it at this level of detail or you're just not going to find those opportunities is what I'm hearing from you. And that's what,

Spencer Millerberg (20:57):

Right? Yeah. What we see is most customers, like I said, or most brands, they update their content about every year that they have, but there leaves that gap that's there, and what we've found is that you have to update that at least quarterly. Sometimes it needs to be updated more frequently than that because sometimes there's an influencer who says a specific term and you have to have it there. Sometimes it's a little longer because the content can last, but quarterly makes sense for three reasons. First of all, there's seasonality that comes in. So what we do is we look at last year, last month, and we look at last month, last quarter, and then last year plus a quarter. So what that does is it's going to take into account the seasonality of last year plus a quarter, and you're anticipating the change. So a couple of examples like allergy medication, grass allergy, flower allergies, spring allergies, those are all springtime keywords that we see for our clients versus in the winter we see dust allergy, pet allergies, those types of keywords that start to come into play in grilling.

(22:10):

We see gifts for dad versus presents for dad is really important in Christmas for gifts for dad is some reason the thing that customers search for in June for father's Day and then tailgate grill ends up becoming really critical during a fall season or trash bags. Trash bags got to be like you use it all year long, so there's no seasonality there, but we still see this keyword fatigue that happens where people change from small trash bag to 13 gallon trash bag to trash bag 13 gallon, and you have to make sure your content gets updated in order to maximize and move that up. Now, in addition to that, what we see is number two, that Amazon gives you this newness bump, so they reward new content. So we have an advisory board member, he used to run the detail page for Amazon, and what he had told us is that Amazon's algorithm wants to elevate new products up within the algorithm, otherwise the old products just continue to be the ones that are on top and the new products would never get there. And so as we tested this scenario, what we found is if you can update written content by 12% or more, you get this newness bump that Amazon gives you within the algorithm and it lasts for about two to three months that are there where you get this move up within search, that obviously gives you more traffic that's there, right? Does that make sense, Peter so far?

Peter Crosby (23:40):

Totally. And I just don't know how you figure out what 12% of your detail, but I'm sure that's what you do, 50 letters

Lauren Livak Gilbert (23:48):

Of this sentence

Spencer Millerberg (23:49):

Only. Yeah. I wish there was a metrics guy that can help you. I know. Who would that be? That is famous Spencer. Yeah,

Peter Crosby (24:00):

I mean to me that's thrilling in some ways because it supports best practices. The fact that the algorithm is doing that is kind of what in-store always missed. Now actually there is a place you can go to learn what someone wants from you to be successful, and now you're unlocking some of those in a really effective way, which I think is at least if I were working the desk and needing to figure out what to do with my content, how often to time it and everything, this is a roadmap that I think is necessary, like I said, for this next level of e-commerce

Spencer Millerberg (24:38):

Maturity. Oh, it's insane. I have not seen this type of ROI since 2012 when Amazon introduced their A MG, their Amazon media group stuff and nobody was doing it. It's crazy because doing this yet. And so when we do it, we start to see these just really great lifts in traffic because it's just not being done so far. It is literally, I would guess that it is less than 10% of large brands are actually thinking about this right now.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (25:10):

But I love how you started because I think that the concepts are simple. The execution is hard. That's really ultimately what it comes down to, right? We're not talking about brain surgery here, but doing 'em in the right order and to the right detail level and on the right skews. And that's the hard part, having a process and knowing who in the organization needs to do it. When you said that trend thing, I had PTSD of a Kardashian saying something about citrus that I had to add to one of my beauty products when I was on the brand side, and we just didn't have a process. And so it took forever and we missed the trend, but that's a huge opportunity gap that needs to be fixed from the brand side.

Spencer Millerberg (25:52):

That monitoring ends up being so critical because you don't even know oftentimes that this is a problem. And what's funny Lauren, is sometimes it's your big huge products that you have to just tweak and add citrus to, like you're saying. And sometimes it's those medium products that haven't been touched from a content perspective in like three years. And you have to update that content even though they're smaller. Selling the ROI ends up being bigger because the gap in traffic that you're missing is so much larger, and so you have to look at a great monitoring system in order to figure those things out too.

Peter Crosby (26:31):

And Spencer just sort of close out this question of what people can be doing and how should they be thinking about the structure of their program? What is Amazon actually doing to their algorithm on an ongoing basis? How much is it being refreshed? What's going on

Spencer Millerberg (26:47):

There? Sure. So Amazon ends up, we have seen Amazon updating their algorithm on a super, super frequent basis. What we've found, even as recently as this March, they introduced a new field that is a backend field, and we're finding that fewer than 10% of customers when we onboard them have used that field in the past. It's called the key product features field. It's highly indexable when it comes to the value that you get within search, and yet nobody's using it. And so this key product features field is great, but it's just one example as opposed to they have another field that's in their backend called platinum keywords. Sounds really cool, right? Oh, platinum keyboards. It's nothing. It's a dead field. It does not do anything. And so Amazon ends up changing that algorithm. And then in addition, we're finding that AI search is literally changing the game. It's massive information that is being chewed through with fewer results that are provided. And it is not just Rufuss that I'm talking about here. While rufuss is really easy to see on screen, we're seeing that the base Amazon search is being impacted because of this, and the search results themselves are starting to become different, especially when it comes to usage situations or the specific use case of those products, like gifts for 4-year-old boys or products to help with my heart, with my blood pressure. Those kind of things. Very, very, very impactful.

Peter Crosby (28:34):

And you can't say anything else because we're having you back in three weeks to dive into that because when we started talking about it in our prep, we were like, oh my God, we can't fit all of this into a 35 minute podcast. And you were insane enough to say that you talked to us twice. So thank you. Hang on listeners, because we'll have more on AI search coming up in a few weeks, but Lauren, what are we talking about

Lauren Livak Gilbert (29:00):

Next? So metrics, let's talk about metrics measuring search. What should brands be looking at? I mean, the old standard used to be in the top 10 of search, but not every brand is ever going to be in the top 10 of search. So what do you suggest? How do brands measure success? What should they be marching towards from a measurement perspective?

Spencer Millerberg (29:23):

Yeah, I would say that there's three things. Share a voice, content, freshness, and then indexing on B terms. Those would be the three things that I would say. Now, your example is really relevant, Lauren, because it's not just, Hey, I want to be in the top 10 search, but we talked about less than 20% of total search volume is on that big, huge top term. So they have to measure share of voice, which means how do I take those 30 plus terms, weight them appropriately to figure out what my share of voice is on there? So you first have to know where you sit from a share of voice perspective because maybe you're one of those brands that's doing super well in share of voice and let's go focus in on conversion. But more often than not, you have to know where you sit on that share of voice.

(30:11):

So that would be the first metric because it's kind of like a map or a compass. If I don't know where I'm pointing or where I'm going, it doesn't matter how to get there. That starts to give you that baseline of where you are. The second one we talked about with content freshness, but that's an ROI measurement that you have here. You have to see how frequently you're updating your content and then what the ROI is. So if you are less sophisticated on that measure, you don't have a process to measure the ROI measurement and the gap between where the customers are. Just measure are you updating your content every quarter? That would be the second metric. And then number three is, this is a funny one, we haven't talked about this, but you have to index on the B terms. So it's not just a terms that you have to win on, but when you talk about B terms, they actually impact the ROI and your advertising in a major way.

(31:09):

So you can't, for example, win on backpack because everybody calls it a backpack, but you can win on laptop, backpack, personal item, travel bag, or you can win on all those. And what Amazon's algorithm does is it takes those B terms and it creates this pairwise connection that you have there, and then it actually boosts your share of voice on a terms of backpack. So you have to measure indexing on B terms, and it's just a super simple formula of what you type into the Amazon search bar to determine if you actually are indexing or not. So those would be the three things that I would measure, share of voice, content, freshness, and then indexing on those B terms.

Peter Crosby (31:53):

Spencer, as you are delivering this message to your customers and saying this is kind of the scale of work that's required, if you're going to earn what you deserve, how does that go over and how do you find that they're adjusting their processes, how they achieve scale in content? What do you see are the shifts that are happening in response to this of the people that are taking you up on this journey?

Spencer Millerberg (32:23):

Yeah, no, it's actually been pretty phenomenal. We have well over a hundred clients now. We have 120% renewal because things work really, really well. But what we're seeing is it's a new method of thinking, and it's the same thing that we saw when e-commerce came onto the scene 15, 20 years ago. And it's the same thing when a MG came on board like 12 years ago. You have to shift that executive leadership thinking to realize this is a new tool. It's something that we have to do to be successful. And so it takes typically about a quarter for people to understand the process. And it's even harder because these are ones and zeros and computer algorithm talking to computer algorithm. But when you start to see the results where that traffic starts rolling in on a consistent basis, then you go, ah, I got it. This is sustainable. This is long-term. You do this for two to 300 bucks a skew as opposed to keeping those supplements and those gels going in all the time and never actually increasing the base. It's hard though, right? It's so much easier to take those gels than it is to do the exercise and do the base, but once you actually increase the base, everything else starts to work a lot easier.

Peter Crosby (33:47):

Well, I would presume once you've been doing that for a while then, and I don't know whether people are doing this, so you can tell me, but you can have a more economical ad spend, paid spend because you're getting the organic boost and you're starting to see that on some of your more tenured, tenured clients.

Spencer Millerberg (34:07):

Yep. Yeah, absolutely. You're going to see an improvement in ROAS you're in cause because the bid rates start to come down on the paid search, and then in addition, you start to move up in traffic in total because your organic search starts to work too. And then we see it supercharged, ironically enough. So we just had Prime Day a little while ago, and what we found is that a customer who had done this two months or more prior, all of a sudden it was like gas on a fire when prime day hits because you all this traffic comes in and they have this shoot up in that acceleration that starts to occur, and then they really separate themselves from customers. And so it's a major win, like you're saying, because it's very sustainable, but it's also something that you can't do right before a big event. You have to very much like exercise. You have to put in the time months beforehand in order to get the benefits during those really, really big Super Bowl moments when you have all the traffic that's coming in play.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (35:19):

And Spencer, before we close out, I want to ask this one question because it is a question. I always get a question that I talk about a lot with a lot of brands, competitor terms. What are your thoughts about that? Because for example, for audience, if you're Pepsi and you're using Coca-Cola as a competitor term, I know I'm air quoting not allowed on some retailers and some it's questionable. Can you talk a bit about should that be a part of your strategy? Do you think it's a good idea? What are your thoughts on that?

Spencer Millerberg (35:46):

Yeah, everything. It depends, but most of the time it doesn't make a impact. If you try to use Coke on Pepsi or Pepsi and Coke, there's two things that happen. Number one on Amazon, Amazon is algorithmic based. Walmart is rules-based. Walmart just shuts it off, and they don't even have you appear. Amazon's algorithm ends up suppressing that for most of those competitive terms. Now, the reason I say it depends is it also depends. Sometimes you have a brand name that is also another common word that you have.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (36:21):

Kleenex.

Peter Crosby (36:21):

Yes,

Spencer Millerberg (36:22):

Right? Well, Kleenex is one of those, but I'm thinking about human makes beat vitamins, they're awesome. But when you say human beat, human isn't, you can't actually take that as a brand term.

Peter Crosby (36:38):

You can't suppress on that.

Spencer Millerberg (36:40):

You can't suppress it. And so that suppression for their competitors doesn't work, right? And so sometimes it works. Most of the time it's not going to be valuable, but there are some instances when it does end up creating some marginal value.

Peter Crosby (36:56):

Gosh, the complexity of all of this just as always stuns me. But this has been so helpful, and I would hope that the message to us discovering this with you and then to our listeners is the fact that this is a change. The opportunities here have not really been understood or present or sort of findable before. And now that it is do something about it is that I would even say

Spencer Millerberg (37:26):

That it wasn't possible, right? Because five years ago prior to the AI revolution that existed, we couldn't, you could have one piece of it. You could maybe identify some of the keywords or maybe start to insert some of them in the proper place. But in order to have a software solution that puts it all together and puts 1, 2, 3, and does it all together, it was impossible. Without that AI revolution, you couldn't identify all the keywords, you couldn't rewrite those into, you couldn't place them within the algorithm on the proper placement of where those need to go. Then you couldn't measure how the changes were happening on the backend and which new terms need to be relevant and capturing those gaps. None of those things were possible without this new AI revolution. And so with this, if you're not using it, it's like digging a ditch with a shovel versus a great big old tractor. Use the new tools that are in existence.

Peter Crosby (38:26):

Well, Spencer, thank you so much. Again, we give a warning that three weeks from now, unless we change the schedule, but I don't think we are, we will have part two of this conversation with AI, SEO. And this is why we wanted to have you back because such a shift and so fascinating. And I want DSI listeners, and Lauren wants to be able to take advantage of this sooner than a lot of people who may not be paying attention. So we really appreciate you giving the gift of your knowledge to our community. Spencer, thank you so much.

Spencer Millerberg (39:01):

Well, thank you guys for having me. Sure. Loved being on with you guys.

Peter Crosby (39:05):

Thanks again to Spencer for joining us. Keep up on all the shifting ground of eCommerce by becoming a member at the digitalshelfinstitute.org. Thanks for being part of our community.