Hello and welcome to another episode, the Winning with
Shopify Podcast and me, your host, Nick Truman.
I'm delighted to be joined again for a second time by Carolyn
from Yost. Carolyn, welcome back to the
show. How are you?
I'm well, thank you for having me.
Amazing. And I mean, what was it, 20
minutes notice? You're such a legend.
I'm so thankful you've come in. We had a guest cancer when I had
the slot free, so I thought, let's do it, Carolyn, we're
going to jump straight in. People are listening to this
episode to know how to use AI to scale their Shopify stores SEO
revenue as fast as possible. How do they do it?
I you don't this, please, please don't, please don't try.
It's if you, you can't, you can't just turn something over
to AI, even even the best agent in the world and say magically
do this stuff for me that I am incapable of doing on my own.
It's not going to AIAI is there to help you do things that you
know how to do faster. It's not there to it can't give
you your strategy, not 100%, not without a lot of a lot of
adjustments and input from you because it's just going to make
things up or it's or it's unreliable.
It can't do math. It's it's just not, you can't
trust it. Not 100% of the time, not enough
to, to just let it run free. So I I have I have opinions
about this. And we're totally aligned on
this, which is why I invited you on like last minute to talk
about this topic. Some of the things people
automate in AI then processes like content production
automations across their sites, which I mean, it scares me.
You mentioned it not being able to do math.
It scares me a lot. Let's start with content.
Some people are posting online at the moment on YouTube and
other places. And I know you're, you're quite
an active commenter on SE Journal and which some of you
guys may never have heard of. But me, I'm an absolute fanboy
of all the authors. As an SEO person, it's, it's the
place people comment on algorithm updates, all the kind
of nerdy SEO stuff. There are so many people saying
that let's start with content. There's so many people saying
that they post 100 articles a day on their site and in an
e-commerce site, traffic's going up dramatically.
What are your thoughts, Carolyn? Like give us some, give us some
clarity on whether that's a good or bad strategy or how bad it
is. I can almost understand, almost
understand the desire to do that if your site is a site that
monetizes based on eyeballs for a site that sells things, which
is what a Shopify store would be by definition, right?
I, I can't even express how how horrified I am by that, that
thought you're, you're diluting, you're diluting your signal.
You're, you're going to confuse everything.
So what happens? I've got.
I'm so horrified I can't even string the other.
Side it's alright, take your, it's a safe space.
Take your time. So you want the LLMS to
recommend your products. You want them to know things
about your products. What are you going to write
about in this content that's going out?
The content is likely going to be rehashed, regurgitated,
repackaged, and probably diluted in a in a in prose descriptions
and little factoids about your product.
All of those facts which should be clean, crisp, clear, and easy
to extract from the product page itself.
You don't need to write a flowery 750 word article about
the the joys of my my pink widget with purple fur when you
should be. The LM should just go oh, I need
information about the pink widget with purple fur.
I'm going to go to Carolyn's website and just get the product
information about it. Because all of that information
should be there, packaged up and easy for them to extract.
If you make them work too hard or you accidentally send them to
a page that doesn't have all the information or has it spread out
on the page in, in, in a story and not easy for them to grab,
they're going to start grabbing the wrong things.
So you're either going to send them to the wrong page, they're
going to start returning incorrect information, not not
the image that you want them to return.
There's all these different problems that are going to
happen when you've got too much content competing with itself.
And when you're letting the AIS write your content without
giving them new angles, new new hooks, new new something, new
data points so that they have unique articles that are
actually interesting for people. They're just going to keep
regurgitating and repackaging the content that they already
have, which is by definition diluting your signal.
And it's just so bad. I can't even articulate how bad
that is. Yeah, I completely agree.
And I think looking at it, because I'm a human and I can do
some math, looking at it mathematically, it's, I find it
interesting that it's like, if you say, OK, we've got all this
content on our website and Google's got a set cruel budget.
There's only so long Google can spend crawling our content.
Do you want it to crawl your products and categories or
collections and, and Shopify, or do you want it to crawl this
massive archive of blog content or whatever, or buying guides
that no one ever reads? I mean, it's fascinating when
you mentioned earlier as well, we'll, we'll put a link in the
description to this, but your LinkedIn post about this kind of
content mill you mentioned. And I, I find it fascinating
that I, I think you said you did the maths on this just to work
out like we've had this many more clicks and you were like,
that's less than one per page, wasn't it?
And it's like, why are we spreading users across that area
of the site? You can't buy on those pages.
And we're a, we're an e-commerce business.
Yeah. So this particular site that I'm
thinking of was doing 202 hundred AI generated articles
per week. So over the course of the month,
that's about 800, right? They had 795 additional new
clicks. So yes, that is incremental
growth. But 795 is less than 800, you
know, may not be a math major, but I can do that.
That's less than one each. So how much, how much damage are
they doing to the site to get less than one click per per new
article that they're putting up? I'll tell you because they did
this for like 3 months. They went from having most of
their articles and most of their pages rank on page low page one
top of page 2 to reliably bottom of page 2.
You know, Page 3 type of stuff. It's if you are not on page one,
it is highly unlikely you are going to get cited.
So what they did was they got less than one per page
incremental click growth and they've now knocked themselves
out of every single citation possibility in the universe.
So congratulations, well done all.
I think I think one of the worst things about this as well,
though, is, as I said, with the cruel budget, is it because it
because of what they've done there and they've got that
incremental growth on the articles.
They're now not getting clicks from customers who are like, I
want to buy a product go and that's their search term into
Google, the keyword. I want to buy a product.
Bang. And then you come up with the
products like you, you've literally said to Google that
that's that's all cool. And you can look at that if you
want Google, but look at all these amazing new non
purchasable articles. It's, it's, although I, I get,
like you said earlier, I see the appeal of like, well, if we
create a page, there's a chance that page comes up on Google.
So more pages equals more chances, right?
And but it, it does. But there's also the problem of,
I think you make a really good point that content should be on
your product page. Now, I was thinking of asking
you quite a mean question, which is, well, what content should be
on the product page? But I'm going to ask you a much
smarter question because it will differ from business to business
and customer to customer. How do you decide SEO hat on and
e-commerce hat on? How do you decide what content
you should put on a product page?
And then we'll look at collections and categories in a
minute as well, because they tend to be the higher volume
ones. But how do you determine what
should go on a product page? So you need to have the, you
need to have the basics. I, I, I make these decisions as
a human, looking at what the product is and then putting
myself in the place of the buyer.
What kinds of questions might a buyer be asking Chachi BT, for
example, about this product? So if they are, I don't know,
let's say dresses because I've used this before.
If I'm talking to Chachi BT about dresses, I'm probably
asking it for specific sizes, specific silhouettes.
So an inline dress, is it a sheath?
What is what's, what's the description of the way that
dress looks? I will probably ask about colors
and remind me about colors because there's, there's an
extra point about that. I will ask about the fabric.
I might ask about the care instructions because believe it
or not, you know, not everybody wants dry clean only clothes.
It's very true. Yeah, but, and when it comes to
colors, one of the things that I've I've found to be a problem
with some some makers is that they get very clever about the
color, their color naming, You know, it's almost like they
think they're crayons. I was asking for a specific
brand, a specific size, a specific silhouette.
I wanted ChatGPT to go find all of the things that matched that
on this one maker's website, and I wanted only the options that
came in white or ivory, which are pretty standard colors.
It returned 5 dresses that matched.
It did not, however, return the dress that I was looking for,
which I'd seen on Facebook, so I knew it was there.
So I went, I went to the website myself and I found it.
I'm like, why on earth did this not show up?
Because it should have. It pulled five other dresses
from the site. Why isn't that one?
There is. The color like Pearl or
something instead of white. No worse for school, right?
It's not even color like honest, honestly, it like if it had been
Pearl, I, I, I can see where an LLM would be smart enough to go.
Pearls are generally whitish. That probably counts, but
pristine is not even a color. That's, you know that there's
lipstick companies that do that too.
They've got the goofiest names for these things.
You have to, you have to put all of the, all of the, the details
into the page either in the, you know, there's like product,
product description fields and attributes as long as they're on
the page somewhere that's going to be helpful.
But when it comes to colors, if you've got creatively named
colors, do make sure that you're putting it like in parentheses
next to like pristine in parentheses ivory or if it's
called cherry, put red, things like that.
Make sure that you're being accurate, but also unambiguous
and exceptionally clear, just so that as it comes through and
it's looking for, you know, semantic matches, it actually
matches. Which as bringing it back to
today's topic about growing faster with AI, the more basic
information you give to AI when somebody asks it, right?
I'm looking for an ivory coloured dress, I think.
I think ivory is an interesting one as well because there's
obviously connotations to the material, which is illegal, I
think in almost every country that has a moral compass across
the world now. And so I, I hear the point and I
think we've had businesses before like come up with random
names like this one's called forest.
It's like, no, no dark green. And then this one's called, what
was the other one was called oak.
And we're like no light green. So, and we, we were doing it
from a Google shopping feed point of view because the Google
shopping especially is like a very, I'd say a lot more
primitive than a, than an AI boy.
It just, it doesn't have the same knowledge as AI will to
kind of determine like it. It the AI will at least go and
look and go right. OK, Ivory is generally A whitish
kind of colour, whereas Google would just go ivory's not the
colour on this. So I'm just going to ignore it
when someone searches ivory. So as you say, I think having
both or doing like olive green is a nice way of, of doing that
or magenta, pink or pink, magenta is a good way to do it.
And so you, but I think giving all this information there means
ChatGPT in the AI bots can actually do their bit to drive
more traffic, to drive more awareness even more.
So where we used to do in the old days of SEO, we used to do
it for accessibility, didn't we? So people that were hard of
site, we used to put in things like alt tags in images and
things like that. But now AI has come up with
another use for those things where you might rather than
doing a search in AI, you might actually give a screenshot or a
screenshot on your phone. I saw this on on Facebook or I
saw this on Instagram and actually want to find and as
products. You give that image to ChatGPT
and then it tracks it down for you and finds the brand and
everything else where that product is, which actually opens
a whole world of opportunities of going.
You can just use your product imagery content on Instagram and
people can still find it through means like that.
You don't have to go and do an expensive shoot, but to scale up
faster. I, I find that if you can't, if
you can't describe the products in text without using the image
itself, things like AI and SEO as a whole and Google show, it's
going to be harder for people to find things.
And I, I, I've been thinking for years and there's, there's
probably millions of these online.
We've been thinking for years, we should make some sort of
checklist and public and publish it just to say, like every
product you ever put on an e-commerce website, you need to
go through this checklist and, and all the basic things of
like, you know, does it have, does it have all the right
parameters on it? I'll give an example.
I, I'm at dad's now. So I instead of buying fun
things like tickets to football games and go and beers at the
pub, I now buy things like roof boxes for my car because my
car's enormous and it's too small.
I mean, it's tiny compared to the States, but it's massive for
the UK. It doesn't fit in parking spaces
really. But I bought a roof box and the
one I was looking at it said it had a load capacity of 75
kilograms. And I thought, that's great.
I don't know how much that is in pounds for you guys.
Over the over the pond pounds don't make any sense, but it's
75 kilograms. But then I was like, but how
heavy is the box? Then that raised it.
But he didn't say that on the website.
I still ended up buying the product, but I had to go to chat
GBC or Google to find out the weight of that brand of roof box
before making my decision. So I I think that's I don't know
what your thoughts are, Karen, but I think that that tends to
be a good rule for me is like, could you explain the image only
using text on the page so that it naturally becomes more
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your discount. I think airing on the side of
too much information is preferable to not having enough
information. Anything that would be in a spec
sheet, I would make spec sheets available.
You know, it's, you never know what very particular use case
someone is going to have that's going to materially affect the
recommendations they're getting back.
And if it's something that you could have gotten into had you
had that information, it it's not going to, it costs you so
little to be very thorough in your documentation on each of
the product pages. We've had conversations with
clients before. We've sort of said, do you guys
think you might have too many products?
You know, when they say we haven't got time to put this
information on every product and it's like, well then no one's
going to buy anything. So can we at least choose a
range, get some more revenue from that range and then perhaps
we could hire some external help to get more information?
Because your manufacturer sends you all the information, you
just haven't got time to digest it.
Write it in your tone of voice and make it relevant to your
customer rather than the manufacturer's written it for
you. So.
Maybe that's where AI could be used to help you scale up
quickly. If you've got the information
from the manufacturer, you dump that into, you know, a folder in
Google Drive or something and you have the AI say for each of
these, go through and write an incredibly detailed short
description, long description, give me all of the recommended
attributes. And then maybe you, maybe you
tell it what attributes you're currently, you're currently
writing for so that it can identify those and just make
something that's ready to copy and paste or make something that
you can then shoot into an API and upload.
That would be, that would be an AI use that I, I think would be
actually useful because it's, it's a repeatable process that
isn't that complicated. It doesn't require that much
judgement. And you've got all of this
really rich data that it can review.
So that that is one situation that we've the one situation
we've discussed where I think AI might be able to help you scale
and make money faster. I think the key thing with that
as well, I love the idea and we do for some clients, we, we will
have like a, an agent, an agentic AI where we teach them
the tone of voice. We, but we, we've spent probably
like days, if not weeks training it before we've actually got the
out the first output we're happy with.
And that's, that's what that's my point really is like, if you
want to scale fast, sometimes going actually, we're going to
scale really fast in the last three months of the next 12,
we're going to spend nine months teaching the AI what to do, get
it right, get it perfect. But we've been using AI as well
to do lots of coding. So building systems internally
that you can then like test. And so we're, we're looking at
getting and sorry if, if, if they're listening, they're not
one of our sponsors, but we're probably going to build our own
Google shopping feed management tools soon because the tool we
pay for it costs us hundreds of dollars a month, sometimes
thousands, depending on how many feeds we've got in there, half
the features we don't use, probably more.
And there's things it doesn't do that we then interject manually
before it goes into Google. And it's like, well, we, we,
we've just been vibe coding with AI and same to AI rebuild this
tool for us. But we, we don't need any of
these features and we do need lots of these.
And then I think it was like the 30th or 40th time we clicked get
feed and it finally went, I've got it.
There's 150 products in the feed.
It's like, yes, it was like, I think I was sitting on a train
at the time and I was like, yes. And then it was like, now I need
to get it to do the optimization and the output.
But it was like, but I think using AI for building tools that
people could then do things at scale.
So for example, Carolyn, and I think this is a good point, off
the back of the content is one of the tools we've helped build
for one of our clients now is where they were opening, I think
four or five different pages of things to bring information
together to then make one update on the site.
So we built an AI tool now that grabs all of them through, I
think two or three or through API and one through a Google
Drive structure, just as you said.
And it brings all that together on a single screen.
So the user can scroll through about four boxes.
Everything else was a copy and paste.
So it can copy and paste these things and there's three or four
things it just needs to check, and one or two will need a tiny
edit and just click next. And we took what was like a four
or five minute process and now it's like 20 seconds, which now
means the human can work faster. The human you have to have the
process dialed in in order to have a successful agentic route
to do that same process. Because if it's chaotic, all
you're going to be doing is scaling chaos.
You you need to have a defined process that is functional and
then it'll make it go faster. But if it's already kind of
crazy, you're just going to make the crazy bigger and faster.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
And I said we'll talk about products and then we'll talk
about collections. Collections on a Shopify store
are a bit different, aren't they?
Because they're not just where, where, where products very
specific collection is a sort of, I kind of know what I want
depending on whether you're in sort of like a top level, like
just looking at menswear or just looking at, for example, just
looking at cars at this stage versus like, I want one of these
and this company have 5. So again, a collection's a good
place to land. I guess the, the hardest
question I think I can ask you on this is, and I know it's hard
because we, we get asked this a lot.
How do we balance between having a collection that is very
simply, just like here are the products simple UX, like drill
down to the one you want and click on it and it's got all the
right functionality and the filters and things and
parameters? How do you balance like that?
Fasts, one of my clients calls it Lift and shift.
How do you balance that lift and shifter journey where people can
just buy products or get into products quickly?
With the SEO world, that would say you need lots of content and
FAQs and a description, and it might be the first part of the
site they're on. So like how much are we going to
introduce to the business if the SE as worked well?
Like how do you find that balance for a brand?
I don't think the things that we did before are effective or
necessary today and will become less so going forward.
I think the things that are helping you get your your
products into the LLMS right now are almost exclusively like the
product schema and getting into the product carousel on Google
or Bing, whatever. They're scraping the Serps,
they're getting things out of that product carousel.
It's so much less about having the right number of keywords in
a page or the right amount of text on a page.
If you can get it, if you can get it onto page one, just you
have enough brand authority to get up to Page 1.
When they grab that seed list from whichever search engine
they're using, you'll be in there.
And then it really comes down to are you matching?
Is your product matching what the user's looking for?
So it's so it's so specific to the user's search.
Now, I don't know that you need to have you, you absolutely need
to have FAQs. You absolutely need to have, you
know, this, this brand positioning statement and about
Us and all this other stuff. If it's, if you think that there
are questions the user's going to have, like lots of users are
going to have, then yes, have FAQs.
If you think they're going to need the spec sheet, provide the
spec sheet. Think about what the user is
going to be needing and make sure that's available on the
page. But don't include things just
because you think it's necessary for SEO.
The only thing you need for SEO at this point is you need the
the descriptions to be solid. You need that page to at least
rank. Like if you can get in the top
ten, fantastic. If you're at least in the on the
1st 2 pages, I think that's possibly good enough.
Ideally, you want to be in the on the first page, you want to
be in that product carousel. But you need to make sure that
the content that is there can be read easily by the elements when
they come through. And knowing that the inference
time rendering and processing that they do is not the same as
what you know Google's going to do when they come past, I think
is very important to remember. It's really it's almost you have
to D degenzify your your pages. Anything that's like trapped in
in JavaScript, anything that requires a human to touch it, to
expand it so it can be seen. None of those things are
viewable. So even if you have all of this
great information about your product, there's a possibility
that it's hidden and the LLMS can't see it anyway.
So I think for SEO purposes, make sure that all the important
information is, I would, I would default to plain text, like make
it text on the page. Don't, don't trust that they're
going to extract it from the picture or anything else.
Trust nothing. Make sure it's text on the page.
Make sure everything's extractable.
And then do do what you need to do to rank like top 20, minimum
top 10 would be ideal. But don't, don't go through and
do the, oh, we have to have this in the footer.
And I think, I think it's, it's less, I think because of the way
they're doing their searches, it's less fussy, if that makes
sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does.
I love the fact that you're, I think you're being very
reasonable, which is good. I think a lot of people when
they stare at their website are like, what do I optimize next?
And I think the, the, the way of taking what I, I like to
describe as a reasonable approach is going, OK.
Is it, is it a product that's like, is it a pipe connector?
It needs to be exactly the right size.
It has to fit the one that's broken, which is why I'm buying
it. The plumber knows what they
need. The plumber needs the spec
sheet. I, you know, if you, if I go on
a page and it has an installation guide, there's a
higher chance of me buying it because not only can I buy this
product and then all the normal things, delivery time, reviews,
etcetera, price, all those things obviously kick in, but
actually it's telling me how to install it as well.
They're now fixing my problem. They're not just giving me a
product and over to you and you need to hire a plumber.
It's like you're actually helping me fix the problem now.
I mean, I fitted those Wi-Fi thermostats all around my house
recently. So like every room now is at a
slightly different temperature so the baby can have it nice and
warm. And in our bedroom it's nice and
cold where which is much better for sleeping.
And so, but I installed those myself because I watched the
video. It was like a minute long from
the company I bought them through and I was like, well,
that's easy, I'll just do all of that.
And my plumber came round and took him about an hour just to
fit a thing to the boiler, to tell the boiler to come on, to
pump up water until if a radiator needed it.
And so again, I mean, that's just, it's saved me so much time
and money and there's probably better products out there, but
it was easy and it solved my problem, which I think is
really, really important. I should say as well, we've had
not just yourself, Carolyn, but we've had a few of your
colleagues on from Yost in the past.
And I always forget to shout out that if people want to use Yost
as few of the things Carolyn mentioned, the Yost app on
Shopify actually does do those things, which is like the schema
is a lot easier. And some of the files like a
robots, the TXT and site maps and things, they're all, they're
all made much, much better and optimised is the way we tend to
use in our industry. And it's $19.00 a month.
There's a free, I think it's a free trial.
I've got it open here. But the thing I, yeah, the thing
I always a 14 day, that's it. And I, the thing I always forget
to say is if you use the code WWS, you get 15% off as well.
I mentioned it in passing recently and hundreds of people
use the code. So WWS gets you 15% off.
Yeah. Your colleague Anna was very
happy. Some of the few times we had got
a response from her in less than a minute.
It was like, this is great. But yeah, so we, we, we
obviously took you guys on as a partner for the podcast because
we work in SEO. We've been using Yosh, the
WordPress for years. You guys are one of the, I think
the last time we checked you the most used, most use website plug
in in the world. Why don't you tell us a bit more
just about some of the features on both WordPress and Shopify in
terms of it doing some of this scheme of stuff that AI is going
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So it's doing, it's doing all of the schema that is necessary and
we are continuing to add more. That is, we have a team.
That team, we have guys that all they focus on is doing is adding
to the schema and improving it. So the schema's there.
We're doing, we handle the changes to the robots.
We've added an LLMS dot TXT, which I know is a little
controversial. There are people that really
hate that and LLMS dot TXT. It's not like a robot's it's
meant to showcase your information and your key
products to the LLMS only it's written in a markdown format so
it's easy for them to ingest. There's limited use of it right
now. People are like, oh, well, it's
not a standard. Why are you bothering?
It's happening automatically for you.
You're not really bothering. It's an easy thing to add.
And I would like to point out that robots dot TXT existed for
20 years before it became a standard.
So this is very early in its life cycle.
I would rather, you know, if it's, it's like, it's like
there's a dollar on the ground, I'm going to pick it up, right?
There's no reason not to. So we've got that.
We've also added some new AI features into Shopify and we've
got an AI brand insights tool that is also I believe hooks
into Shopify. I'm pretty sure you can use, it
definitely hooks into the WordPress, but it will look at
the things that, the things that the AI's and the LLM's are
saying about your business and present that to you so that you
can see. Does this match what I, what I
believe about myself or what I say about myself?
Are there, are there room, is there areas, are there areas
where I could improve my messaging so that the AIS and
the LMS are returning better data basically?
So we've got just a lot of things in the hopper.
It's, it's a really exciting time to be an SEO because things
are changing so much. So I would love it if everyone
would give it a try. Yeah, I won't go into too much
detail, but there've been a couple of algorithm updates this
year. Just on the on your note of like
it's a fun time to be around. There's been a few where it's
literally like you wake up 1 morning and we as an agency are
like, Oh no, like this has gone totally S for this client.
And then two weeks later Google, like we've rolled out another
update after the update to update the update because the
update had issues. So we've done another update and
it's like, oh, we've recovered. It's like, has the client
emailed us yet? Like is there when we e-mail
clients immediately? But yeah, it's, it's been a mad
time. Unless you actively broke
something on your site, there's there's almost no benefit in
hyperventilating and then reactively making changes right
after a big update, because they could issue a new update 2 days
later and fix everything that just went wrong.
And if you make changes based on that first one and then they fix
it, now you're still screwed because they fixed the thing
that was broken, that you fixed, and now that fix doesn't work
anymore. So yeah, sometimes you just need
to have a cup of tea. Calm down.
Yeah, I, I don't mean to, to make us look bad by saying this,
but it's normally when we've got new clients where we have things
like that a bit fluctuating. If if you find any algorithm
update hits you negatively and it's even more so if you then
recover a few days later when they do another update, it means
you're on Google's radar and not in a good way.
That means something before wasn't right.
I, I always come back to certainly when we have like CEOs
asking us like, can you just explain SEO in like 1 minute
just so I get like, what's the opportunity here?
Like, And I always say Google's ethos has never changed.
They want the best website with the best solution, the best
answer to the user's problem or question.
And they just want the best, the best response up at #1 every
change has revolved around that. That is their mantra is to help
the world, help the Internet. At the point of it being free,
I'm free, Well, free to use the Google bit and then go through
from there. So yeah, sorry, it's WWS 15.
That's why I don't read these codes out as I we have them for
most of our parts, but it's WWS 15 to get 15% off.
But winding back the clock or even looking at some of our
custom builds, platformed clients in e-commerce or Magento
clients on Shopify, especially, even more so than Woo commerce,
where where you guys obviously have the integration your, your
famous integration, whatever on Shopify, because a lot of this
information about product data and stuff is actually built into
the Shopify engine. An app like Yoast can grab it so
easily that you literally, I've got the screenshot open on my
screen here, but you, you turn schema output on, you just
enable it and it's like, great. Well, that's sorted.
And then underneath it, I think it would turn them all on by
default. But you can turn on and off
things like organization, which feeds schema data through the
code to anything that wants to crawl it about who your
organization is. I think it also includes like
who the CEO is, what year you were founded and you can
website. You should obviously have turned
on because you are a website. And the fact is a web page, you
can have them turned on for articles because when you post
an article within Shopify, it knows it's an article that lives
within one of its what it calls blogs.
So again, there's, there's such simple things like this.
And it's the same with product if you there's also rich
snippets checker, which is a Google tool.
I'm just going to check if it's still called that Rich snippets
testing tool. Rich Snippets test, it's called
at the moment. They changed the names.
They changed the name in Looker Studio to Data Studio, but they
only called it Liquor like a year or two ago in my memory.
But yes. Looker was not the greatest
name. I wouldn't.
It wasn't, no. Data Studio sounds better.
Yeah, I think got enough complaints they were like, all
right, call it data. But yeah, the, the ease of
turning this thing on and if you use the rich snippets checker or
it's whatever I just called it, I've just closed it now.
But if you use that as a free tool from Google and it will
tell you what schema is coming through and what's not.
Start Yo's 14 day trial and click the button and turn it on
and see what it's now pumping out.
And then keep an eye on the data and see like we're now getting
more listings And Google Search Console will also tell you like
some of the bread crumbs that are being used and reviews and
stuff like that as well. Any questions?
You know, one thing that I don't know, Bing Webmaster Tools is
doing some really interesting things now.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it does a lot of the
same things that Google Search Console does, but it has a very
nice, this is how you're showing up in AI and LLMS. And these are
the pages that we're citing. So you can get, I think you
might get a, a deeper view of how you're performing in the AIS
and LLMS from Bing Webmaster Tools.
And if you already have Google Search Console set up, you can
log in and just import everything over magically.
So if you're not, I mean, it's a free thing to do.
So if you're not doing that, I would I would add that to the
your list of things to maybe do Monday morning.
Absolutely, absolutely. And I'm going to, I'm going to
land on a really hard question, Carolyn, because you're very
good with hard questions looking forwards from now.
What do you think? And I'm not asking for
prediction, but what are some of the things that are going on
already that you're aware of around AI?
That anyone that's running a Shopify store, running an
e-commerce business, these guys should be concerned, should be
excited, should be aware of more of these changes coming around
AI and the way they run their processes, the way they approach
SCO, the way they manage content.
Yeah. What are some of the things that
you're aware of on on Your radar?
The biggest thing that I'm concerned about is making sure
that client sites are easily traversable by the agents that
might not be. There's there's different kinds
of agents. There's the agents that people
are coding with the intention of doing something specific, but
then there's like the agents that are just randomly going out
and shopping for people. And those agents might, they
need, they need to have an easy default way to get through your
website. So my concern with a lot of
older client websites is that they were not built in a way
that's easy to traverse by an agent that's using a text only
browser. In the beginning, the agents
will use the the text only browser like links.
I don't know if you remember links until they get to the
point where they're sure that they're going to make the the
purchase and then I'll flip over to a visual browser so they can
do everything, you know, they can actually complete the
purchase. But if you don't have an easy to
traverse site, you're going to lose out on sales and getting
those sites retrofitted, which there was a lot of UX work done,
a lot of design work. And a lot of designers will be
offended because you're sometimes we have a lot of
digital jazz hands on our websites and the agents don't
want to be distracted by the digital jazz hands.
So you have to like. They just want like binary data,
don't they? Like how heavy is this product?
How many are available? When was it launched?
How much it? Might not have as much glitter
as you want it to have, but it will be more sales.
So money Trump's prettiness in in all situations.
It's just convincing people that that's what they need to do
because nobody wants to make themselves more ugly.
But you're not it's, it's just, it's utilitarian.
It's not ugly, isn't it? And.
I think I would say the approach like get all the information and
content in a format somehow, like on a document or even on a
staging site or whatever. Then say to a designer, this is
where we make money. And when people do this, do
this, do this, these are the things we need to therefore
communicate, make it look nice, make it pretty, or make people
go through that. You know, if there's four things
they need to understand for the buy, the product design, the
page so that they want to go through those four things don't
make it look pretty in a way. That that causes things to not
be able to read it exactly exactly.
I had to, I had an interesting browse around some case studies
a couple of weeks ago. And one of them, it started with
a discussion with a client who said we're going to put our, at
the moment it's got like all their kind of level 1
collections and they Shopify store across the main NAV And
you can just click on one of them and it takes you to that
top one and you can put your way down from there.
And they said, we're going to put that under a shop drop down.
I was like, why are you adding a step?
Like it's the number one place people go and all your money
comes from people finding a product, adding to cart and
purchasing. Why are you then like they were
like, oh, but we want to express ourselves.
We want to like have the about us section and the blog.
And I was like, what else are you doing?
There's a client, another client I went to see a while ago.
I'll come back to the case study in a minute because it's, it's
hilarious the statistics. There's another client a while
ago and they've got like a, a few collections in there now.
Then they've got the About Us page and then a few more
collections and it's, it's like their core collections, then the
About Us and then some of the like kind of seasonal things,
exciting stuff like sale or whatever, or gifting.
And they said like, yeah, our About Us page, we're about to
embark in quite a big redesigns, new content and stuff.
And I looked in GA 4 because it's like no one goes on it.
I was like, it's the least clicked place.
And the people that do go on it, they click on it from your
emails. When they get an e-mail, they
go, oh, let's go. I bought from this company and
they're talking good game. Like, yeah, I was going to check
the about us page. They come in that way, they
don't use the NAV. And then one of the one of the
people just went delete it now. And I was like, Yep, that's the
right, delete it now. And not delete the page, we just
delete it from the menu. And that was it.
The case study, though, there was a 10% increase in sales when
a company had a hamburger menu on desktop and mobile and you
click it to open up the NAV to then get through.
They made it so that the first item of the NAV was visible on
mobile and the whole NAV was visible on desktop. 10% increase
in sales just by getting rid of the hamburger.
And it was one of those classic like the CMO doesn't like it.
And it's like, well, the CMO is 10% wrong.
That's a That's a bold statement.
It is. Indeed, when people say they
like stuff, I'm like, give me some data.
Like I'm not listening to give me some data.
And Billett, Carolyn, thank you so much for jumping in and and
also for jumping in last minute. Sherry, so much and AI, it's
always a pleasure to talk to you.
So, yeah, I really appreciate your time.
Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me.
Amazing. And for ever listening, we'll be
back. Again on Tuesday's tea break
talks back again on Friday. We've got some amazing face to
face stuff coming up that I've booked in London.
We've done one or two so far but yeah, we've got loads of those
coming out with some really cool brands and and a celebrity.
I don't know which one was a celebrity, yeah, but I'm told
there's a celebrity I'm interviewing in London, which
would be super fun. If you want to go and try out
Yost WWS 15, WWS 15. It's when you would shop for
5:15, but WWS 15 is the code to get 50% off.
It's a 14 day free trial. Make sure you go and check that
out. Thanks for tuning in.
Hit subscribe button if you haven't already and I hope you
can do this again next time. See you later guys.
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