Enterprise-scale Ecommerce and Retail SEO Lessons From Thousands of Experiments Featuring Will Critchlow

Garrett: All right, welcome back to The Next Chapter of Search brought to you by SEO Week and iPullRank. I am so excited. Remember, if you haven’t already, get your tickets for April 28th to May 2nd in New York City. We are going to have over 36, 37, 38 of the best speakers in our industry and I am joined by one today. I’m joined by Will Critchlow, who is the founder and CEO at SearchPilot. Thanks for joining me today, Will. How you doing, man?

Will: I’m doing great, Garrett, and very much looking forward to a trip to New York City. So yeah, looking forward to that.

Garrett: We were just saying, and it’s going to be so fun to be able to converse with all these brilliant minds. There’s so much happening in our industry. You are very much doing tons of experimentation, tons of testing. From your perspective, what is the current state of SEO?

Will: I’m excited about the current state of SEO. I know there’s a lot of noise and a lot of change. I have been having a lot of conversations recently about what folks are thinking in terms of, obviously, the impact of AI and large language models and the startups, the ChatGPTs of the world, but also how Google is using that tech. And I’ve got a bit of a kind of now, next, and later framework around that and more of that at SEO Week. But my view on the now, just to kind of, it ties directly into what you’re saying there, is Google is the AI discovery channel right now.

There’s very exciting growth in all these other tools, but the two things to realize are Google is huge, orders of magnitude bigger than everybody else, and AI-powered. And I think it’s that second point that has perhaps been underappreciated in the industry is the move ever since – I date it to when Amit Singhal left in 2016, I think it was, and they kind of opened the floodgates on deep learning, as they called it at the time, in the organic algorithm. And ever since then, it’s just been incrementally more and more and more. I was talking about it back then, but now we see it in our faces, front and center. And for me, that’s particularly exciting because it aligns with the direction we’ve been going of needing to test to figure out what really works in organic search.

Just like the way that you’ve always needed to test to figure out what humans like, the more complex and nuanced the preferences of the machines become, the more you can’t just follow a checklist and say, well, they like it now. And you have to kind of say, I’ve got a hypothesis and I’m going to run an experiment.

Garrett: I love it. And those are so much more dynamic. And we’re even seeing over the past six to 12 months, this rollout of AI organized search results specifically for shopping. They have a whole new version of shopping, kind of segues right into what you are going to be presenting at SEO Week. Can you speak to what you’re seeing, what you’re thinking about, and why people should come and see you speak at the event?

Will: Sure. So, I’m going to be diving deep into e-commerce land. And so, yeah, shopping is a huge part of that, obviously, as in the shopping tab, but also the way that product information is getting incorporated in regular search results and the blending of organic and paid. And we’ve got some new data, some new methodologies, some new discoveries, some tips and tricks that I’m definitely going to be bringing for e-com and retail in general. And so, I’m hoping it’s going to be must-see, don’t miss information for particularly those super- where we’re specializing, the super large websites, really big e-com and retail brands. And yeah, for any folks who are specializing in those areas, I’m hoping it’ll be must-see content.

Garrett: Oh man, I am so excited. And just as like a preview from all the research and experimentation you’re doing, what is one practical, actionable thing that e-commerce brands can do right now to improve their visibility?

Will: Well, so actually I’m going to take it in a subtly different way. I definitely will be answering that question at the show. The thing I’m going to give away right now is more of the next feature. So, I mentioned this kind of now, next and later kind of framework.

The next piece is in my view, e-commerce and retail is one of the verticals where folks should be least scared and most excited about the AI revolution, whatever we want to call it. Because as long as humans are still consuming things, we don’t just get a chip implant or a Ready Player One-kind of environment where we just believe we’re happy, then people are still buying stuff and they’re going to buy it from a retailer. Ultimately, they’re not buying it from the LLM makers or from Google themselves. So, while discovery might change, it’s an exciting and disruptive time for the retailers themselves.

And to that end, my tips are twofold related to just future-proofing around the coming AI revolution, which is one is- both are about being visible. One is audit your robots.txt because a lot of folks are blocking the AI crawlers. And I think there are strong cases for doing that in some spaces, some sectors, but I don’t think there’s a case for doing it for most e-commerce and retail websites. So, if folks want to disagree with that, you can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn and I’m always happy to have the debate, but have a look and check that you’re letting in crawlers beyond Googlebot and the classic search crawlers.

And the second piece is to kind of go back to where, I mean, I remember making this recommendation as a young SEO 20 some years ago is have a look at your JavaScript reliance, because there’s been a ton of great research that has been coming out showing that most of the crawlers powering the AI tools, but where the crawlers aren’t from an existing search engine, they are not executing JavaScript. So, if your content is invisible without JavaScript, it’s invisible to the large language models. And as I say, that might be what you want in some sectors, but I don’t think it is in e-commerce and retail. So those are kind of simple tips. We’ll be getting deeper into the current, what works right now and some of the forward-looking pie in the sky stuff when we meet in New York.

Garrett: I love that. And especially when you’re thinking like big brands, we are not seeing, aside from Google, some of these big LLMs necessarily prioritize brands. So it’s like a lot of these basics actually do need to be implemented in ways that they, you know, larger enterprise might’ve gotten away from at different points. Now your framework, you have a later, can you tell me what’s coming next from your, or what’s coming later from your perspective on SEO?

Will: For sure. So the sneak preview of this is I have, I’ve tied this to the hypothesis. I don’t know if folks are familiar with years and years ago, I remember Jeff Bezos, when he was purely Amazon-focused, before his, you know, rocketry days. He had this thing he used to say about Amazon as e-commerce retailers saying that “we know that customers want low prices and we know that they want fast delivery and we know that they want a vast selection of products on offer.” And he basically said, “I’m betting those three things are going to be true 10 years from now, 20 years from now. Those are the things that are not changing. And I’m going to build my business around that.” And I think some of the equivalent for what Sundar has done in his time at Google is essentially a bet on freshness, completeness, and relevance.

The bet for information is that you want to know the latest, you want to know that you’re getting everything, and you want to know that it’s the right stuff. And those things are not changing, right? In 10 years from now, that’s still going to be true. The exact source, the exact modality of that might change. By the time, I believe, so my bet, the bet I’m making at SearchPilot is by the time that the challenges, whether it be ChatGPT or Perplexity or whoever it might be, by the time they are genuine kind of channels that are big enough that we might need to test against them independently in the same way that we care about Google, as I said right now, they’re going to have to be fresh, complete, and relevant. And the freshness in particular is the key thing. The fact that they’re going to have to incorporate real-time information is what is going to enable us to run experiments against our visibility in those places. And they’ll look like CRO experiments, right? They’ll look like the kind of experiments that we run for humans or have run for humans for decades.

And so, the, yeah, I guess the final point I would say, the way I’m framing this is my thinking is that in the longer term future, and this is almost true now if you account Google, is before a person is likely to buy from you, a machine has to recommend you. And those machine preferences are looking more and more human-like and subtle and complex. And that’s why, yeah, that’s why I’m all in on hypothesis-driven testing.

Garrett: There you go. Oh my goodness. There’s so many valuable things that, and that’s the whole thing with your approach to all this, Will, is it’s all actual. It’s not just theory. It’s all backed up by the experimentation. It’s all things that you can do, which is just one easy reason to buy your ticket. So, if you want to see Will give this dynamic, really interesting future-focused presentation on e-commerce, the LLMs, and Google, please buy your ticket for SEO Week. My name is Garrett Sussman of iPullRank, and we’ll see you in April.

Will: Catch you later.