AI Search, Shopify & the New Rules of SEO with Garrett Sussman (Part 1)

0:00Garrett SussmanSo the most important thing I would recommend someone do is.

Go on these platforms and search and see how they're showing up.

Like now, if you go into OpenAI, if you go to Google and you look for a product and you click on it, you can see so much information.

Your Google business profile. Your store. All that is being pulled into the shopping graph.

Being pulled into the output, so you know, it matters.

And then ultimately, like I mentioned, like the listicles.

The trade publications, the e-commerce stores showing up on Amazon.

All the retailers. It's not one place. It's everywhere.

0:35Crystal WaddellWelcome to the Simple and Smart SEO show podcast.

I'm your host, Crystal Waddell, here to bridge the gap between SEO strategy and real world business success.

So grab a coffee or your favorite tea. and let's dive into Smarter SEO for your business.

0:48CrystalWelcome back to the Simple and Smart SEO show podcast.

I'm here today with a special guest from iPull Rank.

If you haven't heard of iPull Rank, they are an industry leader in SEO

1:00and AI search, and so you've got to check them out.

I'll be dropping a link to their AI search manual. But Garrett Sussman, who is their director of marketing, is here with us today. To talk all things future of SEO.

So Garrett, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the Simple and Smart SEO show podcast.

1:17Garrett SussmanThank you for having me. I love this show. And I am like so excited to geek out with you on all things Future Search, Shopify, SEO.

It is a weird and exciting time right now, but it's fun, right?

1:29CrystalYeah, it is!

1:29Garrett Sussman on AI and Shopify Integration

1:29And we were gonna just jump right into the AI search manual and talking about that.

But then you happened to drop a couple little tidbits about the integration of chat GPT and Shopify.

So I was like, you know what? I think we need to start there. I would love to hear what is going on with that integration.

1:47Garrett SussmanSo what's interesting is there's a partnership. It's a big black box, right?

But it was announced a few months ago where OpenAI and Shopify basically came to an agreement. And we don't know what that all entails.

2:00How that will ultimately benefit Shopify owners. But the fact that it happened and that it's public, makes you think.

Hmm. Okay. There's something going on here.

2:09The Future of E-commerce and AI Partnerships

2:09I think of it the same way that, you know, Reddit and Google had their big partnership.

Or we have all these different major media publications making partnerships with the open AI and Google.

Like part of me says, okay. Is chat GPT more likely to recommend a Shopify website as a business product recommendation? Than another site?

Now, I'm not saying that's the case. And I don't think OpenAI would ever say that.

But you know that there's something in the works. So if you haven't had a chance to read that TechCrunch article about the partnership.

And the other big thing, which gives a seedling that there are things coming down the line.

Is, as chat GPT starts to offer more product recommendations. There's actually a form that Shopify or e-commerce businesses can fill out on their site.

For when they're looking for merchant feeds to include in the recommendations.

So while there's nothing yet, there is like kind of like a pre rollout form that's for free that you should fill out if you're a business owner.

3:12CrystalI will definitely try to track that down. And then also I remember one of my guests mentioned that perplexity had something like that as well.

And so I did fill out the form for that, but that was months ago.

I really haven't heard anything back on that.

3:26The Role of Chat GPT in Product Recommendations

3:26Garrett SussmanAnd, and it's gonna be important to pay attention to because of the ad model. Like right now, up to this point, Sam Altman has said they're not gonna roll out ads in chat GPT.

And their goal in an interview, he said a few months ago was like, potentially to have this sort of affiliate role where they would take a cut.

So that's gonna be a tricky, you know, conversation, discussion for e-commerce business owners, Shopify business owners.

To decide like, what does that entail? What's that affiliate fee gonna look like? Is that better or worse than advertising? And is that something you want to opt in or not?

Obviously, I hope it benefits business owners and not just open

4:00ai. But that's something that, you know, it's important to pay attention to as well in the news.

4:04Crystalas a Shopify store owner, I would feel completely comfortable giving openAI a cut of the revenue if they recommended my product.

That is a no brainer.

Just because I already do it on every other website, you know? Whether I'm selling on Shopify, or I'm selling on Amazon, or I'm selling on Etsy.

You know, like that's just kind of how it works. So I would totally be in favor of that.

4:24Garrett SussmanWe live in a pay to play economy. I mean, yes, it's, it's nice to really invest in organic and get those benefits.

But there are so many different situations where to, to augment growth, you need to do some sort of, and, and personally, I hate advertising. Like I, I am as organic as possible.

But that is very much the capitalist digital economy that, that we need to kind of mitigate.

4:46Challenges and Strategies in SEO

4:46CrystalI was having a conversation the other day was someone where we were talking about that comment that the director of search made over at Google.

They're sending more quality clicks. Just as much,

know?

Or

5:00no, it was my Google Analytics. And I showed that over the last few months, down like 40,000 new clicks or something like that.

It was like a big number for a small business. And so I thought to myself,

I was like, ok, you look at this data, are you telling me that, everything's the same, year over year?

But I also saw, that the only dip in revenue that I had was in January. Everything else remained relatively stable. And I've actually seen an increase in revenue in other months.

So there is like two sides of that coin. It can be true I guess, that they're sending you quality clicks.

But it's just, when you see all that red. It must be terrifying for a lot of companies.

5:39The Evolution of Search Engine Algorithms

5:39Garrett SussmanIt's so tricky right now because there's so much data out there. And in marketing and advertising, just in, in psychology and statistics.

It's so hard to know what to trust.

And people come to conclusions. And we see these sensationalist headlines. And to your point, the best thing you can do is watch your own data.

And try

6:00to use critical thinking. And, you know, not put all your eggs in one basket.

Take risks where you can. Experiment where you can. But otherwise, play it safe and, and try to read the tea leaves.

But don't be drawn in by sensationalist headlines and assume that what everyone's saying is the definitive truth. It's, it's probably their truth. There's probably an agenda there. I have an agenda.

You have an agenda. All the listeners, everyone's got, you know, their, their own motives. And not that, you know, people are bad faith players or good faith players.

But everyone is coming from their own context and their own perspective when they're talking about this

6:34CrystalThis kind of exposes some of the outdated ideas of what drives clicks. And what drives a quality click. You know?

If I'm losing traffic that's not actually gonna generate revenue, I could care less. Send me the stuff that's going to generate revenue. So I, I do feel like that part is good.

6:51Garrett SussmanYeah. Yeah. Regardless, it's important to continue moving forward. Listening, taking advice, you know, question

7:00everything and, and experiment for yourself. And to your point, tie to revenue.

7:03Creating Effective SEO Content

7:03Crystallet's jump into a few things about the manual that you guys created at iPull Rank.

And I want to mention for you listening on the other side, I am gonna create kind of a glossary because I know some of the things that we're gonna talk about are, you know, maybe words or acronyms that maybe you haven't heard before.

So I'm gonna include a glossary that you can download in the show notes as well.

And if you didn't know Garrett, I used to be a teacher. So I was,

7:28Garrett SussmanSame. What did you teach.

7:30CrystalI taught a couple things, but the last job I had was I was an adapted PE teacher, so I, I taught special needs pe.

7:36Garrett SussmanOh, cool.

7:37CrystalBefore that, I was this weird hybrid of a creative writing slash reading remediation slash PE teacher. Because I have a journalism

7:47Garrett Sussmanawesome.

7:48Crystalpe background.

7:49Garrett SussmanThat's the world. You take all these different skill sets and you apply it and that, that's amazing. Very cool. I taught little third graders back in the, this is like tw gosh, 20 years ago. I'm so old.

But yeah, I did it for, for a few years

8:00out of college and really great experience, education.

I have so much, you know, admiration for teachers and it's so important. I have a little girl at home. And, and I think about it every day. Especially in this like AI world, how all this is gonna impact them. So it's, it's important right now.

8:14Crystalis there's been so many people that I've interviewed that were previously teachers.

8:18Garrett SussmanYeah.

Well, it's a profession that's hard to like stay in because it's so undervalued. They should get paid like CEOs, in my opinion.

Because there's so many quality values and it's such an important role.

And yet find ourselves at some point being like, how? I can't put food on the table as a teacher.

So much respect to the teachers out there.

8:36CrystalI totally feel that. So, okay. Well, let's talk about why the old way of SEO doesn't necessarily work anymore.

Why can't you rely on keywords and rankings?

Where should we shift that focus?

8:49Garrett SussmanYeah, it's, it's a, a long a long time happening type of solution. In which, okay, so the technology is evolving, right?

When you think about the old school days

9:00and how we would search for things.

And you put in, you know, some words into Google search.

And it wouldn't come anywhere close to what you're looking for.

So the old school search engines kind of trained us. They're like, okay, if I just put like one or two words. I'm actually gonna find something close to what I'm looking for.

But it'll take a lot of research.

Well. In 2017, they introduced Bert. So these algorithms that can understand language much better, they can understand context much better.

So you can start asking questions.

You can start, you know, using words that that won't throw off the search engine, and you start to get better and better results.

And so as that happens, people feel more comfortable expanding the way that they're searching.

To the extent of when we come today. And they start to introduce these AI search platforms, these large language models.

Which are basically, I think Rand Fishkin called it Spicy Auto Complete.

But they try to predict the next word and give you this

10:00generative output.

They give you text that really answers the question effectively. And they pull it from information all over the web.

And so instead of necessarily as SEOs or marketers focusing on creating content for keywords, now we can really focus on creating content that answers those questions in a more comprehensive way.

And feel comfortable that our content, our websites, our pages. Are more likely to be included in the answers.

So we can go from that keyword mentality to more of a topical mentality.

And not worry just purely about keyword volume. 'cause the other kind of side of the coin with that. Is we got so used to with keyword volume: how many people are searching for email marketing? Or Shopify business?

When you could look at a single keyword and say, oh, 20,000 people are searching for that. That's a worthy investment of my time to create content

11:00for that keyword and optimize for it.

But as people use longer searches, it becomes more complex. The keyword volume goes down.

And it's not just about optimizing for that one specific keyword. But everything related to it.

11:13The Hub and Spoke Model in Content Creation

11:13Crystalthere's that traditional hub and spoke. Model of content creation. Do you think that's still effective?

Or do you think that the spokes could all be within the hub?

You know, like just one super long article versus multiple supporting articles?

11:31Garrett SussmanI think we need to figure it out. I think it's changing.

I do believe the hub and spoke is really effective.

There was this whole idea of, the longer the skyscraper content was, the more likely it would come off as the most comprehensive, authoritative content to be surfaced for that high level, what's called a head term.

Which is like the very simplest top of the category.

But as we get more specific and granular, the hub and spoke model becomes more effective.

Because,

12:00the algorithms, the search engines don't always have, it's not the best use of their resources to go through an entire long document. To find the exact passage. So sometimes it actually makes sense to have a variety of different articles.

It doesn't mean one sentence per page, you know? Across your entire website like that isn't the answer.

But creating kind of a network of content in that hub and spoke model is a great strategy to make sure that you're covering the breadth and depth of the content in a way that's really helpful for people. And the search engines.

12:35Crystaljust a practical takeaway for me.

I could regret saying it later. But you know, it's like so much of the search, you know, what do you, what do you call it? Recommendations. They seem to contradict each other, you know?

And it's like the whole TLDR, don't bury the lead. Give them what they want quickly.

So I'm thinking to myself, like, from a Shopify standpoint.

Maybe it would be good. you, you know, had kind of a comprehensive piece, it was more of an overview. That if you had to

13:00go more than one scroll, that is a sign that maybe you need another page for that.

So that the search engines don't have to waste their crawl budget. People don't have to waste their time trying to get to it. But you're kind of covering both bases.

I always think about how I can do that, know, efficiently and, and you know, okay, just in case things change, I've got it over

13:19Garrett SussmanI've got it over here with.

13:20Crystalthen. It's over here this other way.

Just in case there's a shift in the future. .

13:25Garrett SussmanIt's such a good point.

13:26The Importance of Brand Authority

13:26And the other reason that plays in from a technical standpoint.

Is as we're moving to the AI search, one thing that came out from some of these patents, and trying not to get too technical.

But when you see the AI summary called AI overviews at the top of a search result.

Or a full like, conversational search like chat GPT or AI mode.

What these are starting to do is they're not even just finding content.

For what you're searching for. They're doing what's called this "query fan out."

Which is, the search engine is taking, you know, "best

14:00basketball sneakers for a dad."

And then they're starting to look at 20, 30, 40, 50 related queries. So it's actually, you know, what's the best basketball sneaker?

What's the best basketball sneaker for dads, moms kids?

What's the best basketball sneaker for dads who have bad backs?

And it's trying to predict all these different searches that you would do.

Then it grabs like the top 10 results for each of those, pulling little paragraphs from each of those other articles.

Pulling them all together. And it's not even just paragraphs, it's like videos, texts, you name it.

Multimodal is the term for that.

All different types of mediums. Pulling together to create this like comprehensive, you know, output that answers all of your questions in like one go as best as it can.

And so to your point about the multiple pages, Google doesn't want to just. Pull all those answers from one page.

It wants to pull from different sources.

So when you're creating multiple pages, it's like

15:00little raffle tickets. Like you're giving yourself multiple shots to be pulled in and cited in different pages. For these more comprehensive, generative answers. And that's another aspect of where things are going.

15:12CrystalThat is an awesome analogy. Again, from the smaller business perspective, it's like how can we maximize our time?

15:24Garrett Sussmanso cool

15:25Crystaland I thought, oh my gosh, that's so true.

If you can create those little snippets, and think of it not just on your website, but

oh, you could put this on your Reddit profile. Or your Facebook profile.

Or your Instagram profile.

15:40Garrett SussmanNow you are a source in

15:41Crystalplaces, so those are like your raffle tickets as well. I've never thought about it like that but that's how I connect it with what I know so far.

15:48Garrett Sussmanit's great. And the other, like the other cool thing about that, one thing we need to talk about beyond just the content you're creating.

Is as a business owner, you're creating a brand. And every time you have one

16:00of those snippets, that's like the core of who you are, defining who your brand's for.

What you offer, your types of products you are associating.

Those words, those sentiments, that sort of information with your brand.

Which is gonna continue to be important as the recommendations become a bigger part of the AI search engines.

Like how do I know that Crystal's product is good for me? Well, it's mentioned on reddit, or you know, this listicle that's an authoritative source. Or on the Google business profile.

All of these, you know, omnichannel like mentions, contribute to your brand authority.

And ultimately signal to OpenAI or Google that you are the right recommendation for this type of search.

16:50CrystalI love that because I don't have the vocabulary to describe why this works. I just know that it makes sense and it works.

And so when I hear you say these words, I'm like, yeah,

17:00that's the explanation I've always been looking for!

Okay. So. When you think about products showing up in a Google search. Or even some of the other search engines now.

What do you think is the number one way to make sure that these search engines show our products?

17:15Maximizing Visibility Across Platforms

17:15Garrett SussmanSo my, my unfair answer is there is no number one way.

When it comes to like e-commerce, you need to think about where are the sources of information that Google or chat GPT or perplexity are pulling from.

To know to include your content. Like you need to be visible. You need to be where they're pulling from.

And so. For a business, there are multiple sources that you need to take into consideration.

Keep clean and keep populated and keep accurate.

So for instance, with Google. The Google Merchant Center.

The feed.

Making sure that all the attributes, all the details about your product are up to date.

Beyond that, you need to think about like social. So you know, going to the forums, like going to Reddit.

Making sure

18:00that you're showing up there, your own website and product pages, providing as much information and context and visuals. That's a really big thing when it comes to the future of search, is having good product images.

Because one thing that we're seeing more and more is like in in, in the Wild, if you have retail products, you know, beyond just your e-commerce store.

People using Google Lens or taking pictures and search, being able to recognize those images and pulling that in, is valuable.

So the most important thing I would recommend someone do is.

Go on these platforms and search and see how they're showing up.

Like now, if you go into OpenAI, if you go to Google and you look for a product and you click on it, you can see so much information.

Your Google business profile, your store all that is being pulled into the shopping graph.

Being pulled into the output, so you know, it matters.

And then ultimately, like I mentioned, like the listicles.

The trade publications, the e-commerce stores showing up on Amazon.

All the

19:00retailers. It's not one, it's not one place. It's everywhere.

19:04Crystaltotally fair. Totally fair.

I guess maybe this may not even be a relevant question anymore in terms of like platforms that drive shoppers.

Google's got Google Merchant Center. OpenAI now has this integration with Shopify? What about Bing? What about perplexity?

I mean, can you do it and it goes to everybody or do you kind of have to optimize for each one now?

19:23Prioritizing Google for SEO

19:23Garrett SussmanI think it's a combination.

As we move into more of like a AI search, conversational search platforms.

You wanna look at the market and search engines and Google is still dominating the market.

When we're talking about what data to trust, it's hard because there's a lot of data out there. And you don't always know what sources are reliable.

Rand Fishkin has, has run some great studies with Datos, which is a data collector.

Looking at the amount that people continue to use Google.

It still has like 90% of the search market. So if you think about that visually and like 90% of the pie versus a small sliver, it's hands down

20:00Google you need to focus on.

The nice thing is, for the most part. A lot of " focusing on Google" will benefit the other platforms. And a lot of the other platforms will benefit Google.

For instance, like YouTube being another alphabet product, you know, creating videos. That shows up on Google and that will help your cases of authority.

We found out maybe a month or two ago that open AI chat GPT is actually depending on Google a little bit as well in their index.

Initially we thought it was only Microsoft and Bing because of OpenAI and Microsoft's business partnership there.

But a few different SEOs like Aleyda Solis has like run these experiments that show, oh....

they are pulling information from Google.

So I would say. Definitely focus on Google.

I mean, e-commerce, it's, it's your choice whether or not you're gonna put yourself on Amazon.

But like, Amazon's always gonna be like the giant elephant in a room when it comes to, to products.

And that's as a business owner deciding whether or

21:00not that's a channel that you want to participate in.

It's all about prioritization and Google should be your priority.

21:06Leveraging Amazon for Small Businesses

21:06Crystalanother thing I try to teach small business owners is that in order to compete, we have to leverage what we don't have.

And so at the very least, Amazon gives us visibility in the SERPs.

And we can just borrow that domain authority.

Like you said, brand build over there.

So yeah, I can't forget about Amazon as the major search engine.

And a lot of times I don't frame it that way.

21:28Garrett SussmanI think the other big part of it is understanding your audience.

Like who you're trying to appeal to. And figure out where they are, where they spend their time.

Like, if you are mostly on social media and people are finding you through word of mouth, like you're gonna invest in social media.

At iPull Rank, we, we work with a lot of other businesses.

We're very much B2B.

So, our strategy is mostly being on LinkedIn. As opposed to being on TikTok. Don't get me wrong, I have some amazing tiktoks out there.

But I'm focusing on LinkedIn

22:00these days 'cause that's where my audience is.

22:01Crystalso what about like the different rules for the different platforms? If I can't do everything, what's the simplest step to adapt content?

22:11Ensuring Your Content is Crawlable

22:11Garrett SussmanYeah, so going back to what I was saying with how chat GPT kind of depends on Google. I wouldn't get too tied up in the minutia.

I would make sure that your content is crawlable, that you're not blocking it from search engine bots. Whether it's Google's bots or, or Bing's bots.

Or Perplexity's bots. So it can be found.

That your content isn't hidden by JavaScript.

I know like Shopify's pretty good at not having that be an issue.

But JavaScript is a language that potentially you can do some really cool visual effects or behaviors.

But sometimes it'll actually prevent the bots from finding details about your product or you know, information that's important. And if the bots can't find that from

23:00a technical standpoint, then you're basically invisible.

And you're preventing yourself from being seen. So just making sure on a technical level that any of these different platforms can find your content.

That they can index your content.

Meaning that they can include it in their results, and then ultimately that it's optimized for relevance.

That you are focusing on the topics that your audience is actually searching for. And I think in a lot of ways that is very platform agnostic.

23:31CrystalIt reminds me of that

23:32CloudFlare's Controversial Decision

23:32announcement that came out from CloudFlare. Or something about CloudFlare blocking, like LLMs or AI search engines.

And then immediately, I was like, okay, I've heard of Cloudflare, but I

was like, does Shopify run on CloudFlare? I went straight to ChatG PT to ask and sure enough,

23:47Garrett SussmanSure enough.

23:48Crystalso I

23:48Garrett SussmanYeah. So I thought,

23:50Crystaldoes that mean that the new Shopify stores will automatically be defaulted into invisibility.

Blocked to the, to LLMs?

What do you think about that? about that?

23:58Understanding Robots.txt Files

23:58Garrett SussmanYeah, so, so kind of

24:00like what you're referring to is, is there are rules that websites can put in place that give permissions called robots txt files.

That give permissions to these bots to check it out.

And like CloudFlare, which is a hosting provider. Basically decided for new business owners that they were going to block it by default.

And this was controversial because the reality is AI search does go to your site, scrape your content.

And use it in their answers, which like a media publisher or like a writer is like, that's unfair.

That's literally stealing my, my property. My creativity, my creation. And so the answer for those websites were like, well, I'm just going to block you.

From finding my content, which does make sense.

24:45The Ethics of AI Content Scraping

24:48And at the same time, as a business owner, it's a business decision.

As to, okay, do you accept the fact that they might steal your content, at the expense of losing business?

So ultimately, you know, I think that

25:00the CloudFlare issue is problematic because it's making a decision for business owners who don't know better.

That could potentially prevent their customers finding them.

25:08CrystalThis leads me to a thought that I've never really followed up on...

when you sign terms of service agreements and privacy policies or whatever, I mean, be honest, I don't read it. I just click it. I'm like, I gotta keep it moving. You know what I mean? So.

25:21Garrett SussmanYes.

25:22CrystalI just wonder what, did I sign away when I said, Hey, I'm going to use Google Chrome. Or I'm gonna use Google search. Or I'm gonna put my website on the internet. You know, like, that's something I wanna follow up on

25:32Garrett SussmanI.

25:33Crystalyou know, are they actually doing something that's wrong? Because if it's in their terms of service, that they can scrape it and use it and manipulate it and change it, or do whatever they need to do to make it more palatable to their customer. You know, maybe I already and probably already said, Hey. That's okay. Go ahead.

25:50Garrett SussmanIt's a really tough, I mean that's, that's even a bigger like social issue that we need to deal with.

That the EU deals with like data privacy.

And this situation

26:00where there are so many terms and conditions or rules when we're playing in somebody else's kind of sandbox, if you will.

That we have to play by their rules. And kind of give away a lot of our rights.

And so, yeah, it's really important to be informed.

But there's also a certain amount of helplessness to participate.

So I think, every business owner needs to seriously know what they're getting into. And evaluate those decisions. But. It's not always going to have our, our best interests in mind, and so we play the game as best we can.

Trying to, you know, protect ourselves while, while not like abdicating the space completely.

I.

26:40Crystaltough, it's a tough place to be. ​