Episode Summary
In this episode of 7 Figures and Beyond eCommerce Marketing Podcast, Greg Shuey and Boyd Norwood, VP of Marketing at Nozzle discusses the evolution of search engine results pages (SERPs), particularly for e-commerce keywords. Boyd explains how SERPs have transformed from simple lists of blue links into complex pages with various features such as product listings, AI overviews, and filters. They delve into the importance of product reviews, unique content, and SERP features like “people also ask” and “product packs” for e-commerce businesses. The episode also covers the capabilities of Nozzle’s SERP monitoring tool, which helps brands track rankings and optimize their strategies based on SERP data. Greg and Boyd emphasize how the changing SERP landscape requires brands to adjust their SEO strategies continuously and leverage tools like Nozzle to stay competitive.
Key Takeaways
- SERP Evolution: Over the past year, Google SERPs for e-commerce have become more visually complex, incorporating product listings, AI-generated content, and filters similar to category pages on e-commerce sites.
- Importance of Reviews: Product reviews, especially those aggregated from multiple retail sites, significantly impact SEO rankings and visibility in SERP product packs.
- SERP Feature Optimization: Brands need to optimize for various SERP features beyond just organic rankings, including popular product sections, AI overviews, and “people also ask” boxes.
- Customer Research for SEO: Greg highlights the importance of gathering customer feedback from FAQs and support tickets to create unique content that resonates with customers and ranks well in search engines.
- SERP Monitoring with Nozzle: Nozzle’s tool captures and analyzes all SERP elements, helping marketers make data-driven decisions to optimize product visibility and performance across different SERP features.
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Boyd Norwood LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boydnorwood/
Nozzle: https://nozzle.io/
Ecommerce SERPs Product Results & Merchant Analysis: https://nozzle.io/blog/e-commerce-serps-product-results-and-merchant-analysis/
One PAA Report To Rule Them All: https://nozzle.io/blog/one-paa-report-to-rule-them-all/
Organic Product Grids: https://brodieclark.com/google-organic-product-grids/
Google’s New Category Page: https://searchengineland.com/retailers-google-new-category-page-447069
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:01.144)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Seven Figures and Beyond eCommerce Marketing Podcast. I hope that everyone’s having a fantastic day and that you are absolutely crushing. So today’s episode is kind of an impromptu discussion with my longtime friend, Boyd Norwood. We were chatting on LinkedIn. I don’t even know if I’d call it chatting. We were commenting kind of back and forth about a post of mine, I think last week.
And, you know, I said, Hey boy, let’s, let’s get you on the podcast. fun fact, this is actually Boyd’s very first podcast ever. I know you can’t see him, but he, he looks incredibly nervous and uncomfortable right now. It’s.
Boyd Norwood (00:40.1)
That’s right.
Boyd Norwood (00:46.36)
No I don’t.
Greg Shuey (00:49.496)
going to be an awesome time. Anyway, Boyd was, I’ve known him for a really long time. He was actually one of my first bosses in the digital marketing space. So I had, I had self taught myself SEO a long time ago and I was attending Utah Valley University and as I was walking by one of the job boards,
I saw that his small little agency was looking for an SEO person to join their team. And I just decided to reach out to him and you know, he hired me, he trusted me with his clients and the rest is history. And that was almost 16 years ago. So Boyd, I know I probably don’t say this enough, but thank you. You’re amazing.
Boyd Norwood (01:35.994)
You’re welcome.
Greg Shuey (01:37.688)
Yeah, buddy. All right. So a little bit about Boyd. He is the VP of marketing for an SEO tech company called Nozzle. You may or may not have heard of Nozzle, but they are a full SERP monitoring tool that lets you track keyword rankings for your brand and all of your SERP competitors. OK, for those who don’t know what a SERP is, let’s just pause right there really quick. It is a search engine results page.
Boyd Norwood (01:38.906)
.
Greg Shuey (02:06.626)
So when you type a keyword into Google and you get a page with results, that is what is referred to as a SERP. So with Nozzle, you can monitor who shows up in any type of SERP, including AI overviews, product packs, people also ask boxes, video packs, image packs, and more. And as we start to unpack this during this episode, you’re going to
learn why this is so critical, especially for an e-commerce business, because the way SERPs have been laid out for the last six to 12 months have dramatically changed. there’s no longer 10 blue links anymore. It is incredibly different and far more complex. And so today we’re gonna be talking through that. We’re gonna be looking at some different SERPs. We’re gonna be breaking down what those look like and…
It’s gonna be a really awesome episode. I’m super, super excited. Boyd, thank you so much for being with us today.
Boyd Norwood (03:09.838)
Yeah, no worries. Glad to be here.
Greg Shuey (03:11.96)
Cool. I know I’ve already shared a little bit of history, but before we jump in, could you just take a couple of minutes, introduce yourself to our listeners and share a little bit about your personal story and how you’ve gotten to where you are today.
Boyd Norwood (03:25.732)
Sure. Yeah, so I got started in online marketing 20 years ago. My brother was at college and he called me one weekend and said, hey, I just made 80 bucks. He placed some affiliate links in a newspaper ad at that college and it made some sales over the weekend. And so then I was intrigued. And so I started testing out, placing ads.
And doing the same thing and and then I thought there’s got to be a way to get more traffic to see this the you know, we’re offering and so I learned about SEO and I also started dabbling and you know paper click marketing as well and So I I loved SEO I loved the idea of being able to control what shows up at the top of Google and and so I bought some courses I
looked for a job. found a job at my first SEO job at a company called 10X Marketing, which is no longer in existence. And then from there, I started my own agency in 2007, IO Ventures, which is eventually where Greg came into the picture. And then after a few years of that, I came over to SEO.com. And funnily enough, Greg was my boss at SEO.com, so we swapped roles. So that was always fun.
Greg Shuey (04:48.61)
That was fun.
Boyd Norwood (04:50.062)
and so I was at SEO.com for 10 years and, eventually left there to come to nozzle in 2019. And, and since nozzle is a tool for SEOs, I was a good fit to, you know, to help build the product. I’m not the dev, but I, but I help guide the product development because as we say over here at nozzle, I speak for the people. And so, yeah, cause all the, all the founders of nozzle are developers and they don’t.
Greg Shuey (05:13.835)
There you go.
Boyd Norwood (05:19.47)
do SEO. So that’s my job is to help them understand what SEOs want. And so yeah, that’s my journey, my career journey. But yeah, I’ve loved doing online marketing, especially SEO for these 20 years. And I’ve gotten to meet a lot of awesome people, including Greg. So.
Greg Shuey (05:39.288)
Well, I think I’m going to get you a shirt that says, speak for the people. And then you’re going to wear that to your next conference.
Boyd Norwood (05:46.424)
That would be great.
Greg Shuey (05:49.088)
In fact, think Derek should actually get that shirt for you and just put a big nozzle logo on the back and it says, speak for the people.
Boyd Norwood (05:55.61)
That’s right, I’ll have to bring that up.
Greg Shuey (05:58.424)
Share this episode with him. He’ll be converted. That’s funny. I didn’t know that story about your brother Seth. I assume it was Seth. That’s how I made my first money as well, is I was placing affiliate links on Craigslist. like not a university newspaper, but an online, I don’t know, what do you call that? Classifieds? Online Classifieds, yeah. And then I had the same thoughts, like, okay.
Boyd Norwood (05:59.63)
Hmm.
Boyd Norwood (06:07.674)
Yeah, it was that.
Boyd Norwood (06:15.256)
on this.
Greg Shuey (06:26.69)
How do you get more traffic? And then I rolled into SEO, it was crazy. So that was awesome. Well, SEO sure changed a lot in the last 18 to 20 years. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. So why don’t we just jump in? Are you ready? Cool. So when we look at a SERP, like I mentioned kind of in the introduction, it used to be that you could type in a keyword and you had 10 blue links, literally. Maybe some ads on a few of them, but like 10 organic,
Boyd Norwood (06:40.814)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (06:56.364)
links. So over the last six to 12 months, we’ve seen some significant changes. What do you believe the most significant changes have been for transactional e-commerce keywords? Because we still do have a lot of blue links when it comes to other search terms, but e-commerce specifically, we’ve seen a lot of change.
Boyd Norwood (07:18.538)
So the SERPs, Google started adding a lot of product, well, started adding product results a couple of years ago. But over the last couple of years, they’ve been adding more and more, as everyone has noticed. Just in the last year, they changed it so you can see. Well, so there’s five products across the row instead of four. And they’ve made them taller, both the paid product listings and the organic product listings.
They’re all taller, taking up more real estate. then as of last year, we noticed around Black Friday, they started adding, it wasn’t the first time they added the filter listings on the left sidebar, but we noticed a huge increase of appearances of those filters. And it hasn’t gone back since. There’s just a lot of filters there in the left sidebar for e-commerce keywords.
And then recently in the last month or so, they started testing adding product results in the AI overviews as well. So if you click on one of the paragraphs and it opens up in line a row, like a carousel of product listings. And I imagine they’ll continue to do things like that because, well, they’re going to start adding ads in there and they got to make money somehow, right?
Greg Shuey (08:38.53)
That’s what they’re in the business of doing these days, right? Making more money. you know, for me, and I think I posted about this, it was maybe three weeks ago on LinkedIn. I I’m amazed at how they’ve sneakily turned their search engine results pages into glorified category pages, right? Like, boy, you talk specifically about the filters on the left-hand side. When you look at just about any e-commerce website, that’s about where the filters are.
Right? You can filter by size, you can filter by color, you can filter by type. And they’ve made it really easy for the user to be able to narrow down to exactly what they want to provide a better user experience. And, and that has been one big change for sure. think one of the others for me that, that I’ve seen and have really been trying to, to do more optimizations for the popular product section.
Right? Like you mentioned, there’s five across now, but, if you haven’t actually clicked on one of those lately, I’m just on one right now. When you drill down into that, it doesn’t take you over to the website. It used to, you used to be able to click on it. It would take you over to the website. Doesn’t anymore. It pops open. I don’t even know what you would call that. It pops open a section kind of on the, the right-hand side of the page. And that turns into what.
some brands referred to as PDPs or product detail pages where you’ve got robust imagery. You’ve got a listing, which is fascinating to me. You’ve got a listing of everyone who sells that product, which means you’ve got to have a really strong map policy in place. can’t have, you know, I’m looking specifically at baby carriers. can’t have baby lists and you can’t have target and you can’t have Walmart selling for
$40 cheaper than you or you’re not going to get the sale. Goes through it curates reviews. There’s just so many things that are unique to, you know, these, these e-commerce commercial and transactional type keywords that you’re just not going to see in other SERPs. And so I believe that Google is moving kind of to the way of trying to keep people in the SERP and eventually
Boyd Norwood (10:38.554)
Right.
Greg Shuey (11:04.14)
Probably making it so you can buy right in the SERP is what I’m thinking. Similar to how meta shops, TikTok shops, right? You can buy right in platform. I think it’s going to be that way very, very, very soon. You won’t even have to leave.
Boyd Norwood (11:17.05)
That’s wild to think that of all the changes because who would have ever thought that you could buy from within Google SERP 20 years ago.
Greg Shuey (11:23.232)
Right. I think they’re probably getting a little scared, honestly, when they look at some of these social selling platforms and like they’ve got to start fighting back and just making it a really great user experience. top of that, they’ve got loads and loads and loads and loads of data. Right. And they can see what people prefer and it’s kind of an unfair advantage. Right.
Boyd Norwood (11:39.587)
Right.
Greg Shuey (11:48.696)
So it’s going to be interesting to see where SEO and driving organic traffic and revenue through the website goes over the next couple of years. For sure. So we know that Google loves content, right? They love content, they crawl content, they try to understand content. And we know that they give a fair amount of weight to user generated content like reviews.
Boyd Norwood (11:48.929)
you
Boyd Norwood (11:55.79)
Right.
Greg Shuey (12:17.942)
and ratings, especially through third party platforms where those reviews and ratings can be verified, right? You can fake some reviews on your website for sure. mean, that’s also known as fraud, so don’t do that. But, you know, how has that focus on this user generated content really changed the way that e-commerce sites should approach the way that they do optimizations of their product pages and just their website as a whole?
Do you have any insights there?
Boyd Norwood (12:50.542)
Yeah, well, I mean, since there’s so much rich data in the SERP with reviews and price and delivery options, free shipping, fast delivery, whatever, I mean, you really have to focus on making sure that sort of information is getting into the SERPs with your listings so that you can compete. There’s a famous SEO guy named Brody Clark who he’s known for
analyzing the changes in the SERPs and like announcing changes in the SERPs. and he, he, he talks a lot about, he has some great content about these product, results, these product packs. And, essentially if, if you don’t have these reviews enabled for your products, if you, if you don’t, if like, if you don’t sell through multiple retailers, and he says, the, you know, the product isn’t popular.
then it wouldn’t, it’s not gonna be, it’s gonna be less likely to rank competitively unless you have these reviews and whatnot added to it. So it’s really important as an e-commerce site to be aware of all these changes.
Greg Shuey (14:04.564)
Interesting. you just said, I want to confirm this, that by selling on multiple sites, and I’m kind of paraphrasing this and taking what you said, that adds a layer of credibility.
Boyd Norwood (14:19.008)
That’s what it seems like.
Greg Shuey (14:22.402)
Huh, interesting. So if you’re selling on your website, you’re selling on Amazon, if you’re selling on Target, if you’re selling on Walmart, that can actually help your business from an SEO perspective.
Boyd Norwood (14:24.474)
Mm-mm.
Boyd Norwood (14:37.73)
Yeah, that’s what the data is showing, least in these product packs, right? So your product listings will appear higher if there’s, well, especially if there’s an aggregate of reviews across all these sites, which is helpful.
Greg Shuey (14:40.47)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (14:52.364)
Yep, absolutely. All right. So with Google, mean, Google’s been on a mission for years to get rid of crap, right? Low quality, thin content. Back to the early days of SEO, I remember keyword stuffing. You could load up a page full of keywords and rank overnight. It’s crazy, like how far we’ve come, right? So.
Boyd Norwood (15:12.662)
Those were the days.
Boyd Norwood (15:18.5)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (15:21.75)
You know, they’re on a war of, you know, getting rid of low quality and thin content. They are working tirelessly to promote and rank really good content. So as you think about how to rank better in one of these very diverse SERPs, like what are some of those steps that an e-commerce brand should take to ensure their product pages?
and their category pages and let’s just even throw in blog posts. They are robust enough to be able to rank. I we’ve already talked about reviews. What else should they be looking at and considering?
Boyd Norwood (16:02.786)
Right. Well, mean, this isn’t really new, the idea of writing unique content. But I have been thinking recently that Google does have a hard job. There’s 10, well, there’s sort of 10 results on a SERP these days on page 1. And if you think about it, how easy would it be to decide of the thousands or tens of thousands of pieces of content related to that query
Greg Shuey (16:10.21)
Yeah.
Boyd Norwood (16:32.344)
which one should be at the top. so it’s harder now than it was 20 years ago when there was way fewer pieces of indexed pages on the web. But now, so I think of it like, if every dentist in the country wrote an article about how to floss, I mean, they’re probably all going to be useful, but that’s going to be thousands of choices Google has to decide. Well, which one’s better? And so in that vein, we have to think about, I mean,
Greg Shuey (16:56.62)
Yeah.
Boyd Norwood (17:01.454)
How do you get unique content? A couple ideas for e-commerce sites. I mean, you want to have a brand voice, like a company personality. That can be useful, especially if you’re writing to a unique persona. And then you want to write about solutions to problems. So that comes to storytelling. So use your brand voice to tell a story, solve problems for people.
Obviously, you mentioned unique images and visuals is useful for e-commerce sites. And even still, I mean, it is still difficult to rank, even if you have the best unique content. You’re going to have to keep fighting and building links, getting brand exposure. But the thing is, it’s easy. The first step for Google to just get rid of is to get rid of the thin content, right?
Greg Shuey (17:41.666)
Yeah.
Boyd Norwood (17:57.442)
If it’s not unique, well then you have no chance. So those are some of my tips for writing unique content for e-commerce sites.
Greg Shuey (18:06.092)
I think one of my favorite ways to start to map this out is to start with customer research. I talk a lot about customer research on LinkedIn, like in order to build a strong brand that has the opportunity to scale and have staying power, you’ve got to know who that customer is. And as you’re talking to customers and doing this research, just uncovering what their frequently asked questions are, right? And keeping track of that.
Boyd Norwood (18:12.782)
Yeah.
Boyd Norwood (18:31.992)
Right.
Greg Shuey (18:35.212)
And even if you’re not talking to your customers, very few brands I talk with actually do customer research. But they have a gold mine of customer support tickets, customer emails that they can start to pull those FAQs from and those problems that they’re experiencing. And then from there, you can craft your point of view. From there, you can start to take that and you can start to build that content for your category pages and your product pages.
One of the things that makes me so happy is when I see FAQs right on a product page. Like most brands are lazy and they just put it on an FAQ page. But if you can take that content, you can put that on your product page. That coupled with unique reviews, you’ve got a really strong page that has rankability, that has a lot of unique valuable content that typically, unless it’s ripped off by someone else, it’s going to be unique to you, right?
I think all of those things are absolutely critical and kind of building out those pages that truly have the best chance of ranking in Google, with traditional results, right? You’re, you’re 10 blue links, but also if you optimize properly, you can show up in the people also ask box and you can show up and AI results and, and you can just feed the search engines, the content that they crave and that they know they’re
users are searching for and it will just be able to set you up better to be able to be successful with this kind of work.
Boyd Norwood (20:04.762)
Now this means you need the different departments talking to each other. Anyone who’s client facing, customer sales, they should be sharing this info with the marketers, the website, content writers. So you’ve got to have a cohesive company. Probably not many.
Greg Shuey (20:21.91)
And how many brands actually do that? Very few. Very few. one of the things that drives me crazy is when customer or when clients are doing customer support through just like a, email address versus a ticketing system, right? If you’ve got some kind of a ticketing system or you have some kind of a customer support platform that marketing can log into, sure. You can be anti-social and locked in a dark closet doing your work.
But at least you have access to the information and the data, right? So it’s absolutely critical for sure. You know, as we look at kind of track, and this is where I’m going to give you the chance to kind of self promote nozzle. And I hope that you spend a fair amount of time here. You know, I would say that most SEO people, most, most e-commerce marketers are typically using platforms like SEMrush.
to be able to do keyword rank tracking. to an extent, now I’m sure you probably have a SEMrush account. Maybe you don’t. Just to kind of keep a handle on what’s going on over there. To an extent, it can give me some data about like SERP features. How many SERP features I’m ranking for. And I can go through those and I can click on them and see what those SERP features are. But let’s be honest, it’s a total pain to be able to go through and do that. And I know that you guys are working hard to kind of change that. So,
You know, how, how does nozzle, how are you built to be able to monitor that and then be able to give marketers insights so that they can dominate page one for the keywords that they’re trying to rank for.
Boyd Norwood (22:04.066)
Right? So I mean, the first thing is for every, so for all the keywords you’re in your industry that you’re wanting to track, we are collecting everything you see in the SERP. So if you were to type in Google right now, some search phrase, you’ll see, you’ll see the ads, you’ll see organic results.
Greg Shuey (22:21.408)
Yeah, so so I’ve got baby carrier up on my screen as we do work with some baby carrier companies. So like I’ve got ads, I’ve got sponsored next. I’ve got popular products. Go ahead.
Boyd Norwood (22:24.59)
Okay.
Boyd Norwood (22:29.964)
If you see, yeah, so the products. you see, do you see filters on the left there for this? And.
Greg Shuey (22:35.276)
I got filters on the left and then I have two blue links and then I have in stores nearby, which is newish, which how on earth do you optimize for that? If you’re not in stores nearby, you can’t. So, that’s cool. people also ask.
Boyd Norwood (22:44.954)
All right.
Boyd Norwood (22:54.141)
So you got the questions and then if you click on the question, there’s there’s the answer, right?
Greg Shuey (22:57.526)
Yep. And then I have four more blue links and then I have buying guide for baby carriers.
Boyd Norwood (23:05.274)
Which also, if you click on the dropdown, then there’s some sort of answer in there. Yeah.
Greg Shuey (23:07.628)
Yep. And that’s newish. I’ve got images. I’ve got save your favorite brands to get more relevant results. That’s newish as well.
Boyd Norwood (23:18.818)
Okay, and back to the images real quick, there’s what, like 10 maybe or 15 or… Okay, so sometimes I guess they’re doing less these days, but 4. Okay.
Greg Shuey (23:22.456)
Not four.
Greg Shuey (23:26.348)
Yep. Two more blue links and then I have discussions and forums, which is newish as well. And Reddit usually dominates that. Yep.
Boyd Norwood (23:34.84)
Right. And then, and then at very bottom you have probably related searches or people also search for something like that, right?
Greg Shuey (23:42.166)
Yeah, well, I have a few more. It’s deals on baby carriers, fast pickup or delivery. People also buy from and then people also search for. So it’s complex, right?
Boyd Norwood (23:52.76)
Yeah, so everything you see in that SERP, we are storing in our database. And so therefore, you can analyze different features or different data from, the people also ask boxes. So that’s the first thing. Second thing, even if you can’t see it, so if there’s a carousel and you can scroll to the right, those are also being, we can tell you, like I’ve seen one that was like 60,
results wide. And we have data for all 60 of them. We do mark the ones that are visible without scrolling over. We mark those as visible so you know which ones are more prominent and all the others are marked as not visible. But still, you can analyze anything in the SERP, how often all of your competitors show up in any of these SERP features. Anyway, so the point is we collect everything you see. We it in BigQuery.
Greg Shuey (24:22.072)
60 products wide, really?
gosh.
Greg Shuey (24:33.186)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (24:46.498)
Ciao.
Boyd Norwood (24:49.422)
That may not be important to you or to most people, but that’s where we store it. Some people like to know that. And then we can in Nozzle, our dashboards, pull the data from BigQuery. Or people can build their own dashboards in Looker Studio or Tableau and all the data from BigQuery and build their own charts. And obviously, the value there is they can pull in data from, other sources. Their analytics or even their shopping cart data, they can.
Greg Shuey (25:05.89)
Mm-hmm.
Boyd Norwood (25:18.596)
combined with the ranking data. And then, I guess, going back to talking about writing answers to the questions that your clients have, one way to get a whole bunch of questions is if you track, 10,000 SERPs, even just one time in Nozzle, just get the data. That means we’ll have all of the questions that show up in the People Also Ask boxes for 10,000 SERPs.
And usually there’s four questions per SERP. mean, not every SERP has them, but almost every SERP has them, right?
Greg Shuey (25:51.306)
You’ve got 40,000 questions. I mean, you’ve got some duplicates in there, but thousands.
Boyd Norwood (25:53.498)
Correct, so we can do it for sure. But that’s the other thing is we can sort that list of questions by how often each question showed up across those 10,000 SERPs. And then you know which questions Google is showing the most to your industry. And then we also have who ranks as the answer to all those questions. So then you can analyze who shows up the most as the answer. But we can extract the answer titles and content that shows up in the SERP.
Greg Shuey (26:08.184)
fascinating.
Greg Shuey (26:22.296)
Hmm.
Boyd Norwood (26:22.434)
And so the other day I had a list of 20,000 rows of answer titles and content. basically I exported it out of the Looker Studio report and I put it into ChatGPT and I said, show me what were the top 10 things mentioned in this big list, right? Or you can do whatever you want. Whoever the imagination can think up. So that’s some examples of helping write content with the people also ask. You could do the same thing with the buying guides, for example, as well.
Greg Shuey (26:33.26)
make me a blog post.
Greg Shuey (26:39.212)
Yeah, sure.
Greg Shuey (26:50.22)
Sure. Yeah.
Boyd Norwood (26:51.154)
Those don’t show up as much, they are showing up more. Anyway, going back to just the first thing I would say is you want to analyze for which of your keywords do you have product listing showing up or maybe multiple product listings showing up. Which of your keywords have buying guides showing up? And then you would obviously want to, once you know that, then you can optimize certain pages.
to answer those questions to those buying guides. Also, things to know packs are showing up a lot of times on not only e-commerce results, but also on e-commerce results. Basically, you start with a strategy of, which keywords have these certain type of features? And then from there, you can make a plan to know how to optimize for the buying guides or for the things to know based off of which keywords are surfacing them.
And then obviously with the product listings, you can analyze. So as you said earlier, we don’t have the URL anymore. When you click on a product, it doesn’t take you to a landing page. And that actually changed somewhere. It was around March or April that all of a we stopped getting those URLs. Yeah. But we do get the merchant name. So whatever is the merchant name at the bottom of the product listing,
Greg Shuey (28:01.868)
Yeah, was like six months ago.
Boyd Norwood (28:11.566)
I know there’s more merchants when you click on it there’s more merchants, but like the main one that’s showing up on that product listing, we are extracting that merchant name, which means we can report on across all of your 10,000 keywords or whatever the number is, we can tell you which merchants show up the most. And if they show up in the visible products or if they’re scrolling over the right, like how many of the products are not visible. then anyway, it gives you a very clear picture on who’s dominating.
Greg Shuey (28:37.4)
Hmm.
Boyd Norwood (28:41.358)
the space in the product pack results. And especially if you get a new client, you can then work on their e-commerce SEO. And then you can easily report on, we started out at this level, and now we have this many product results showing up. So those are some e-commerce related things that Nozzle can be useful for. And then guess last thing I’ll say maybe is that those filter labels on the left sidebar.
Greg Shuey (29:04.632)
awesome.
Boyd Norwood (29:11.102)
we can extract all of the filter labels, that show up in those search filters across from all of your SERPs and then basically tell you how often each label was listed. And you’ll have an idea of like, okay, the color ones are showing up the most or, or, you know, size or whatever, whatever the options are. But, but that may help you with your optimization efforts or, or maybe even help you decide what product lines to roll out next.
Greg Shuey (29:39.266)
That sounds like a product development strategy. I like that.
Boyd Norwood (29:42.078)
Yeah. I mean, that’s kind of new that we started extracting those and we’re actually, we get some of our best ideas on what to do with the data from our clients. They’d say, hey, can you do this? And then we tweak it and send it to them. So yeah, we’re excited for more people to test it out and give us great ideas on what to do with the data.
Greg Shuey (29:57.528)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (30:03.106)
That’s cool. Yeah. And I think for some brands, this might feel really overwhelming, right? You look at this and you’re like, how on earth? I’ve got to have 10 different strategies to dominate this. I think it’s important to realize like, it doesn’t all have to be done at once. It shouldn’t all be done at once. Like take it piece by piece and figure out how to just dominate each section from the paid to the organic shopping to your traditional SEO. You’re, you know, people also ask.
like the quick answers and just take it piece by piece. But I love that. I love that you’re gathering all that data and using it to help inform strategy. kind of going forward, like where do you see the SERPs evolving to even further? Do you have any insights there?
Boyd Norwood (30:49.376)
I just guesses. I mean, looking at kind of, was thinking, Google, their main competitors aren’t really other search engines like Bing. It’s more sites like Amazon, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, even though they own YouTube, ChatGBT. And so as we were talking about the product results today, just you brought up that the SERPs are like category pages. And it’s really…
Greg Shuey (30:51.542)
Let’s hear your guesses.
Boyd Norwood (31:18.786)
Maybe Google was losing a lot of traffic to e-commerce traffic to Amazon. People were just going to Amazon directly. And now it feels like they’re doing this so they can steal back some of that traffic. People will come to Google directly because they know it’s going to be a very useful page with lots of product options. mean, basically it’s a category page that aggregates dozens of e-commerce sites, right? So it’s valuable in that way. And I think that they’re doing that so they can steal some traffic back from Amazon.
You know the AI overviews probably came out to not probably they came out to compete with chat GPT a lot of I talked to a lot of college kids these days and they and they they use chat GPT for most of their searching And so now maybe Google’s trying to steal back some of that Type of you know searches So I where are they going next?
Greg Shuey (32:07.82)
Yeah.
Boyd Norwood (32:11.15)
I don’t know exactly, but whatever steals their traffic, they’re going to start competing and change their SERPs for that type of industry to steal that traffic back. And like you said, they have a lot of data, right? So they are going to, you know, they’re always testing. And whatever, you know, gets them the most engagement on the SERP and clicks, they’ll keep those features. just read just this week or earlier this week, I guess yesterday or anyway, they are getting rid of the, what is it, the site search.
Greg Shuey (32:19.33)
Yeah.
Boyd Norwood (32:41.09)
It doesn’t show up much, sometimes on someone’s result, there’s a site search. And they’re getting rid of that because, well, probably because no one’s using it. Right. So, so it’s just going to evolve into whatever the people want. They need a guy like me, someone who can speak for the people. They actually have lots of data that tells them that. But that’s, mean, again, that’s kind of vague. don’t, I don’t really have insight into what, you know, I don’t, can’t see the future, but I just know that it’s going to be whatever.
Greg Shuey (32:48.728)
People don’t use it.
Greg Shuey (32:57.688)
Speak for the people, baby.
Boyd Norwood (33:10.414)
competes with sites that steal traffic away from their SERPs.
Greg Shuey (33:15.256)
I like that. I like that. That’s a great closing kind of remark right there. That’s fantastic. Well Boyd, have you had a good time? Was this a good first podcast? All right, we need to get you on some more podcasts with some other people. We gotta start pushing the nozzle. Yeah, buddy. Well, cool, man. Appreciate your time today. Yeah, I thought it was a fantastic discussion. You’ve got a lot of great insights and you’ve got a fantastic tool. Make sure to link that up in the show notes.
Boyd Norwood (33:24.442)
It’s been excellent.
Boyd Norwood (33:30.682)
Yeah, that’ll be great.
Greg Shuey (33:44.8)
so that everyone can head over and learn about it. Do you have a free trial? Like, give me one last plug. What do you got?
Boyd Norwood (33:51.418)
Yeah, so we have, you just go to our site, there’s a start trial button and it’s a two week trial. There’s no limitation on, you get access to all the features during the trial. I mean, you can’t put a million keywords in for, so we just limit the number of keywords, but it’s still a lot. I mean, you can put in 10,000 keywords during your trial if you wanted, but most people don’t. But yeah, so there’s the free trial and we have,
I mean, like I said, we’re always looking for feedback on how we have so much data. We’re looking for feedback on how to use the data to better help you in your SEO strategy. So if you have ideas, just reach out and we’ll be able to help you gather that data and analyze it the way you want.
Greg Shuey (34:42.402)
Awesome. Cool, man. Well, thank you again. And to our listeners, as always, I think we’ve learned a lot today. So take what you’ve learned here, make a plan, go do the free trial of Nozzle, get your data, make a plan, and take massive action this year. Thank you, everyone, for joining.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
