2X eCommerce Podcast

Kunle Campbell (00:00.91)
Hey Zach, welcome to the 2xEcommerce podcast.

Zach Boyette (00:04.545)
Thank you for having me on, Kunle. Excited to be here.

Kunle Campbell (00:07.022)
Fantastic. Fantastic. I know we're going to be talking a lot about digital marketing, about SEO, Instagram and the like, but I want to get your backstory, Zach. Where did this all start?

Zach Boyette (00:20.481)
Yeah, so I have always been fascinated about marketing. My first job was at a pizza shop and my boss at the time told me that I should run their Google Ads campaign back in the day when this was a relatively new thing. And I set a broad match keyword for pizza for the entire state of Tennessee. And I grew up on a small mountain in Tennessee. As you can guess, couldn't believe that did not make the best results for that pizza shop. I think I blew the budget in a day. But I was fascinated about this idea that you could advertise to people online.

So I built my first company in college, which was a drag and drop website builder. I coded the whole thing. That company ended up failing. I realized because I didn't know marketing very well. I didn't know how to spread the product. So I went and worked at Procter and Gamble. I worked at Google, trying to understand how marketing works at scale and understanding how these products work. I eventually worked at TopTile, which is a unicorn B2B tech startup and helped lead them to grow to a billion dollar company. I was running their pay media and growth labs department.

And I'd always wanted to leave and start my own agency. I've always wanted to be able to do marketing at scale. So eventually I had people starting to ask me, hey, Zach, I'll pay you $5 ,000 a month to do just a few hours a week on my ad campaigns. And I said, wow, if I could get just a few clients like this, this could be really a business. So I left. Eventually my now co -founder, Irina, was running the SEO department at the company I was at.

we eventually joined forces. She was actually a physicist at CERN, a large Hadron Collider on the team that was recreating the Big Bang Theory before she dropped out and started doing SEO. So our company is Galactic Fed. We've very scientific approach. We really love sci -fi and what we do, which is where our name came from. And yeah, a big, big thing for Ireena and myself too in our journey to becoming a 150 person agency.

We're big believers in remote work and the digital nomad movement as well. I myself spent about six years as a digital nomad and went back to get my MBA at Stanford and then hit the digital nomad lifestyle once again. Our team is fully remote. We have people in 25 countries around the world. And one of my favorite things is to visit them when I'm traveling and learn how we can keep helping our clients grow and get better through the different perspectives we have around the world. So yeah, that's a bit about Galactic FUD. It was very...

Zach Boyette (02:39.201)
We're a growth marketing agency that helps companies with pay media, SEO, organic social, email marketing, web dev and design, basically the whole gamut of online digital growth marketing.

Kunle Campbell (02:53.166)
Wow. There's a lot to unpack there. First of all, you have, you're luminized from CERN, Stanford University, MBA as in like what can go wrong? As in like amazing stuff there. yeah, that transformation from CERN to SEO is, is, is super, super interesting. I would love to speak to Tirena about that, but really, absolutely, absolutely really good stuff here. So you're, you're an SEO email market and CRO.

Zach Boyette (03:03.457)
Alright.

Zach Boyette (03:14.273)
She'd be happy to be on, yeah.

Kunle Campbell (03:23.022)
paid marketing type, you know, digital marketing, you know, agency. What's a distribution like of your stuff when you say that they're around the world and it's distributed and you'd like to sort of visit, you know, them or members of staff.

Zach Boyette (03:36.545)
Yeah. So, yeah. So, so like I said, we have, we have folks in 25 countries around the world. some concentrations, we have a number in the U S in Canada, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Philippines, Pakistan. I'm trying to remember a couple of their countries are hotspots for us, but, really what I love about running my company at remote scale is we find that we can, we can hire the best people in the world, no matter where they are, when we need them. So.

We really don't say, okay, we are only going to hire this type of role in this type of country or something like that. We really, when we put a job posting out, we're very interested in seeing what talent we can get from wherever they are. And sometimes that happens to be folks that are, you know, in the U S or in the Bay area where I am right now, for example, but more often than not, we find the best talent is spread around the world. So oftentimes I'd say the client facing folks we have are on the American time zones or Europeans and says, or our clients typically are.

Those are often more US, Canadian, Caribbean folks as well that are interacting with the clients because that's the thing they enjoy and they're trained for. Oftentimes, we have some of the specialists, the fulfillments for some of the work that we do can be spread all around the world in either different countries that I shared. It's been an evolving model over time, as I'm sure you can imagine, trying to figure out where we can hire from the best and does it make sense to have such a distributed model?

Excited to share if you'd like to some of the tactics that we've had that help us manage such a fully distributed team as well, if that's helpful throughout this conversation.

Kunle Campbell (05:11.758)
Well, we'll definitely get into it. But what I want to ask you again is what's the most exciting service you deliver at this point in time, you know, given the fact that there's paid me there, there's SEO and there's a lot in between.

Zach Boyette (05:25.953)
Yeah, I'd say, I know you mentioned two of them, but really I see so much potential right now for growth and change in both paid media and SEO. So those are some of the most exciting ones we offer. Obviously paid media and SEO within them are very big channels, right? There's many things you could do within those. On the paid side, something that might be fun for us to chat about today is how things are looking and changing in the election year, for example, and how clients can do different tactics to perform better.

Kunle Campbell (05:36.142)
Hmm.

Zach Boyette (05:54.721)
with paid organic, paid social, and then other side of SEO, I think there's lots changing in the, just the world of entity based search, L and search, and our internal R &D team is seeing a lot of change in that area right now. I'm very excited.

Kunle Campbell (06:11.022)
Yeah, so with the advent of artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI, how is that affecting the way people use search engines? What are you seeing there? Like today, I was looking at some plants and rather than using an app to check what kind of plants this is, I just got my chat, GPT took a photo of it and...

Zach Boyette (06:40.321)
. .

Kunle Campbell (06:41.102)
it gave me a lot more rounded answer, you know, it was a lot more elaborate, it was pretty accurate. So from a business perspective with consumers, particularly in, you know, with regards to, to, to, to e -commerce, particularly with your e -commerce clients, what, what, how has consumer behaviour changing on search?

Zach Boyette (06:58.113)
Yeah, what we found, we have a ton of e -commerce clients and they're some of the ones that are most interested in the new changes in search. I'm going to talk on one side about, of course, what we all think of, which is Google search, the LLM -based search, like ChatGPT, Gemini, et cetera. And then I think another interesting thing to talk about too is search within social platforms as well, because that's an important thing for e -commerce platforms to be evolving.

Kunle Campbell (07:25.582)
true.

Zach Boyette (07:28.033)
I'll start with the the classical recent classical right. LLMs, Google search, these sorts of things, how those are changing. You're completely right. We all use tools like chat GPT, which I'll use as a placeholder for all the other ones that are out there as well, because there's many of them popping up. There there's different ways that folks are using these, especially when it's a much more complicated query, something that might have been more long term, something that people want a true answer and idea for rather than just a quick sort of transactional query.

we're seeing a much higher uptick in usage of these LLM based platforms. So we have a very high demand right now from our e -commerce platforms for basically, you know, if someone searches for, let's say, you know, the top shirt brand in my area, someone searches for how can I buy a fridge or whatever it may be, they want to make sure that they're listed in the top five, the top one, the top 10 for their area, country, et cetera. What we found, I think it's helpful to step back and think about how search is changing in general. So,

For the last two decades or so, Google has been at war in a way with SEOs, SEO managers such as Galactic Fed, who are really have been trying to promote backlinks for their websites. So, you know, e -commerce company that's trying to rank well in certain SEO queries, maybe trying to get other authoritative sites to link to their site by making good, writing good content and other things like that, which can make their site rank higher and seem.

relevant to Google's eyes for the different, irrelevant e -commerce query that someone might be searching for. And it's always been links. It's been links, links, links for the last 20 years in Google's eyes. And of course that came as an advancement over Yahoo, which was just a Yahoo search, which was just a text -based search rather than link -based. Now what's really changing with Google is what we call entity -based search. So Google has gotten, by Google again, I'm using all of the elements as a placeholder here.

But search in general has gotten much better at parsing what we call semantic search or entity based search. And when I say entity, what you can think of is your e -commerce brands name. So Galactic Fed is the name of my agency. So we'll say Galactic Fed is an entity, right? Users might be searching Galactic Fed and Google is starting to parse entity mentions of Galactic Fed, whether or not there have been links associated. So let me give a few examples.

Zach Boyette (09:49.665)
Previously, if let's say the New York Times mentioned Galactic Fed in their article, but they did not link to the Galactic Fed website, that would have much, much less of an SEO result on my domain as if they had linked to us. And same on social mentions, on different social platforms, on different blogs around the internet, on let's say a ranking site for the top products in your area that you want to show up for, for your e -commerce brands.

previously you would have had to have a link from that site rather than just a mention of your brand. But Google is getting much better now at understanding when those show up and not only incorporating those into its classical, you know, blue links SEO results, but also into Gemini as well. And we're seeing that go into chat GPT and other platforms too. So basically some good takeaways from this is basically the current LLMs sister.

Predictive text on steroids. It's important to make sure that your brand is showing up and being mentioned, whether that's in podcasts, such as the one that we're doing right now. It's good to get mentions since ChachiBT, Google, et cetera, are now able to translate and transcript voice to text and incorporate that into their entity -based models. But I'd say a few really important takeaways for your e -commerce brand if you're trying to make your company work well with these new LLMs.

One is again, care a lot less about do follow links and care more about getting your brand mentioned in any relevant context. So that could just be a website, article, social mention, Reddit, et cetera. Starting early is really important. LLMs take a much longer time to index and retrain on new data than sort of the classical search model since there's so much text they incorporate. It's also really important, as I mentioned, and we can talk about more maintaining a good social presence.

Since LMs get trained on all kinds of data, including social posts, and social posts have lots of volume, those are important to index while on podcasts and voice is good as well. And also it's just important to find ways to get organic mentions. Just as a page with valuable information for your e -commerce brand might've been a sort of link magnet to get people to come and check out your site in the past. Now, maybe if you have a really interesting and unique story for your e -commerce brand,

Zach Boyette (12:09.217)
that might be a good way to get yourself to be a mention magnet for your brand's entity. So tell interesting stories, try to get in front of the press, create wild, shocking content that gets people talking, you know, whatever you can do to get good relevant mentions of your brand and the space you want, that'll help you show up for these LLM, Chad GPT type of things. And final bit on that, I'd say it's good too, to diversify the way that you talk about your e -commerce brand. Let's say, I don't know, you sell,

fridges, just to use a classical example. And your typical pitch would be, we sell a fridge with two doors and a freezer that is the coldest on the market. I don't know, something like that. If you just kept saying that same phrase over and over again, and every journalistic mention you get, sure, when someone searches for best two door freezer cold on the market or something like that, you might show up number one. But if they search anything else, you might not.

So it's important to talk about your brand in as many different angles as you can and get it mentioned with different types of words associated with it so that you can show up in these LLMs as they start to train. That was a lot of information, Kunleona. See your thoughts on that and happy to chat about the search within social platforms as well.

Kunle Campbell (13:20.078)
Zach, it makes a lot of sense what Google is doing because with the back linking algorithm, there's a lot of spam, there's a lot of manipulation. And I know that's what SEO is all about. It's a tug of war really between the Google engineers.

and SEOs, but there were, there's really murky SEO in the form of Black Heart SEO. And then there's, you know, standard SEO, which, which is decent. So in other words, if I'm hearing you correctly, you need to essentially build a brand, you know, moving forward, you need to build a brand, an e -commerce brand. If you want a lot more references, you need to build citations now.

Zach Boyette (14:04.481)
.

Kunle Campbell (14:13.614)
are through brand mentions. Google is now clever and get in context of how brands are mentioned, whether it's on social media, in the press, they get context and on this and okay, it's this brand that which they're talking about. And that's a vote of confidence. That's okay. If we want to send our users down their way, they'll be the most relevant resource to our users for this particular.

Zach Boyette (14:33.665)
. .

Kunle Campbell (14:40.686)
in this particular context with this particular search phrase, they have pre you know, they've predetermined and you have sort of guided them with with all of the descriptions and and and and you know, mentions you you've managed to sort of accumulate for your brand is that is that what you're saying? Or did I miss?

Zach Boyette (14:57.921)
That's exactly right, Kunalai. That's a really great summary of all that I said. I think you put it really well. It's building a brand is the way to do it now. And that sounds simple, but it's not just focusing on these transactional moments with your users. It's really building a brand association, building yourself in different ways, not just being there when your user is trying to buy your specific product on your site.

Kunle Campbell (15:06.158)
Okay.

Kunle Campbell (15:15.278)
Hmm.

Zach Boyette (15:25.153)
But being there at any point when they're talking about that product, when they're searching for it, when they're thinking about it, you want your brand to show up there.

Kunle Campbell (15:32.43)
So what is the role of an SEO agency now? Are you still buying links? Are you still acquiring links for customers? Does it still matter? Or do you offer essentially guidance on how they can build their brand in a Google -friendly way? What's your remit now as an SEO agency?

Zach Boyette (15:55.969)
Yeah, I want to be super clear. Despite my comments, links are and will continue to be an extremely important signal for Google. And any brand that is ignoring getting good quality white hat links for their brand is doing themselves a disservice. So while what I'm sharing is sort of an evolution and a new layer on top of the existing pyramid of what you need to be doing to make sure you're showing up these LLMs, it's really important for your brand to keep acquiring good links. So

keep writing really good contents, keep trying to collaborate with different other websites around the internet, keep doing the normal building blocks in SEO that have been working for quite a long time. But that said, the newest approaches we're shifting to almost look a little more like PR. We're willing to chat with and work with websites on our brand's behalf and our client's behalf to get them mentions in ways that previously may have been much more of a focus on, let's say, a content collaboration or something that was direct.

do follow. Now, it may be much more working with a different website just to get mentions for the company or helping our SEO clients do podcast interviews, such as what we're doing right now, helping them optimize their social presence, helping them change the way and the type of keywords that they're trying to rank for in the language they use when they're talking about their brand. Since like I said, the more round of an approach they can get with the language, the better.

And just as always, keeping on building good, smart informational content, but also making sure the brand is getting incorporated wherever possible. Just to distill it, you know, just this pure informational content with the sole aim of getting links is not getting the value that it used to have because there's this new approach we need to get that is much more than links. I think another big part too that I'm happy to chat about when helpful is we're helping our brands do.

search optimization within social. And I feel that that is adding a lot of value to LLabs, because they index highly on.

Kunle Campbell (17:54.83)
Is TikTok the biggest platform there with regards to search SEO on social?

Zach Boyette (18:03.393)
So actually TikTok is certainly the highest growing, the fastest growing. And I think I could see a world soon where it is the biggest, but really still I'd say Instagram meta generally is reigning supreme there for now. TikTok very well may surpass that soon though. And yeah, to share some thoughts on that, Gen Z especially and millennials and even generations beyond are really...

getting more of their information now on these social platforms rather than just through Google or even chat GPT and these other LLMs. It's much more common for especially Gen Z folks to search for their favorite e -commerce type products or to search for something that they want to buy on these different social platforms, whether that's TikTok or Instagram, they might search for outfit inspo or they might search for shoes or they might search for watches or they might search for...

whatever it is that whoever's listening right now may be trying to sell. And so it's really important to make sure that your brand is showing up when people are searching for that because otherwise your competitors will. And you don't want to see that sort of really valuable, rich, new and growing demographic to folks who could be building up their SEO and search presence on these social platforms. Because in an age where, you know, AI generated content is just becoming, we're putting a wash of that on the internet, right?

I think we can all sort of see the tea leaves where authentic, real user generated, like actual human contents with something with a face that you can put to it is going to be so much more valuable in the future than just sort of pure informational rich things that you can't really trust the source of. And that's why people are turning to search on these different social platforms because oftentimes they can see the direct user who wrote the thing. They can see who wrote the review. They can see that they're a real interesting person.

And yeah, these things make it just way easier to find relevant content directly within the apps. So for e -commerce brands out there trying to figure out, okay, that sounds great, but how do I make my brand show up on search on TikTok? I don't know how to do that. It's really important to make content first and foremost that addresses the frequent questions that are coming up within your e -commerce space and your certain products you're trying to sell, especially if you're targeting younger audiences.

Zach Boyette (20:26.049)
So for example, let's say you sell watches and you know that a typical comment people have is, you know, what, how waterproof are these watches or can I wear watches out in sunlight for a long time or how long do batteries last on watches? Typically it might be helpful for you to create, let's say a video tear down on Tik TOK or maybe a scrollable guide on Instagram that explains some of these commonly asked questions about watches in general. And then of course it, it plugs your brand throughout the post. So.

Create this sort of FAQ type posts that answer the most common questions. Can be really helpful way for you to get indexed on the organic social platforms, which will also get you picked up on the LLMs like ChatGBT. And yeah, I think that we should be expecting more LLM like features within social platforms for WhatsApp users out there, or really any Meta product users now, Instagram too, I believe.

You might've seen recently that your search bar at the top where you normally search for a contact or something has now been replaced with a sort of LM based thing. That's like ask WhatsApp, anything you want, ask Metta anything you want. And you can search as you could on chat GPT and ask you questions like how do I find the best watch brand for me? And it'll try to give you tailored recommendations. And it's going to be drawing that content from within the content posted on the given platform.

Kunle Campbell (21:42.166)
Hmm.

Zach Boyette (21:48.033)
So if a user is searching within that LLM based feed on Instagram for best watch product for me, you wanna make sure that your brand has created these FAQ type guides, has created a lot of contents on those different social platforms so that you are one of the ones recommended by Meta, by TikTok, by whatever platform it may be.

Kunle Campbell (22:07.79)
Yeah. Yeah. So two things I picked up from there, people buy from people. So if, if I'm doing some, some brand research, have questions, I want to see people answer it rather than read. It's just much more convincing, to, to do that. And then you have to create the content and the content is obviously video content. I'm assuming a lot of this is gravitating towards video content for me. So in the UK, that feature you talked about the meta feature, you talked about

hasn't quite rolled out yet. Perhaps it's rolled out in certain groups, but I haven't received, I haven't seen it yet. For me as a user, TikTok behaves more like a search engine than Instagram. Instagram is very hashtag driven and yeah, it doesn't do like auto correction. There's no trending searches, you know, TikTok seems to be purpose built, you know, saying, okay, this is what Google has done. This is what Instagram has done. We'll do this slightly better.

Zach Boyette (22:38.561)
Hmm.

Zach Boyette (22:45.857)
Yeah.

Okay.

Kunle Campbell (23:05.486)
that's why I'm picking and, yeah, you, you see that, in terms of like how it connects to their trending topics also. So, but, but back to the Google, the Google conversation, for, for brands, how, how should they allocate resources paid media, you know, with, with Google shopping on there, which is huge for e -commerce and then SEO. What is the timeline for, for, for a, for brand who's, who's just.

Zach Boyette (23:05.985)
Yep.

Yeah, so for the growing e -commerce entrepreneurs and owners out there, pay media is always a great place to start, always a great approach. As Kunlei said,

Kunle Campbell (23:33.55)
grown, say with paid media and they're now thinking, okay, we need to start driving, you know, more, more search traffic through. How would you, if you have a conversation with, with, with me as a brand owner, how would you say I, where'd you say I focus my efforts in?

Zach Boyette (23:59.841)
Google shopping is always huge for e -commerce brands, Google search in general, especially if you are a type of product that people already wear off. If someone already knows that they're looking for, I keep going back to watches or fridges or hats or whatever your products may be, it's much easier to show up there when they're looking for that. But then again, the search competition for that may be a bit higher if it's a bit more of an industry that has lots of competition.

so yeah, I think that as, as much as you can allocate towards pay media in the beginning and as much makes sense with your budget and really getting a good platform going there and getting that flywheel spinning, that'll always be the fastest way to get a brand up and going. that said too, I think that if you really want the full 360 flywheel marketing, you really do need to have organic search as an important component and piece of your brand. And as Kuhnle mentioned earlier, this really comes to.

not just being a brand that is a transaction that just shows up when people are looking for a commodity and allows people to buy it. Because if that's the way you're selling your brand, you're going to be a race to the bottom in terms of pricing generally. If you want to build a brand that people are willing to pay a bit more for, who associate with quality, who they believe that buying this e -commerce thing that you're selling is something that will be worthwhile over other brands, even if it costs a little bit more.

you're going to need to build a real brand, you're going to need to build a presence, organic and probably social as well. But I'd say the real kind of staying power of getting earned media and getting organic media as well is something that will stay around for a while. So to answer your question, Koonlai, it's a bit hard to say exactly, you know, if I had $10 ,000 per month, exactly how to allocate that because it can depend in the life cycle of brands, which makes sense to do at a given time. But

I think the earlier you can start on investing and getting some quality backlinks on getting your brand mentioned in the press, on doing articles yourself, on writing authoritative content and guides, on writing these FAQ posts on organic social, you won't see results in the beginning. This is something that we often see brands get disheartened and have false negatives where they say,

Zach Boyette (26:16.097)
You know, man, we've been investing in our organic search for the last three months and we haven't gotten a single transaction from this or hardly in at all. And meanwhile, we're spending a lot of money on Google shopping or these paid approaches and we're seeing a lot more results there. Sure. The ROAS may only be a 3 .0, which isn't, you know, the, the crispest we'd like, and we'd like to have a five or a 10 or something like that. But you know, it's working and we can predict what we get. We put more money in, we know what we get out.

But you'll find that this is a sort of a losing mentality because many brands keep doing that and then they really plateau on the paid side of things. Or they find that a big entrant has come in to the market and is starting to crowd them out. Or there's a change in the algorithms or there's something happens within a given platform, let's say meta that they think they're doing well on. And now they have this sort of non -diversified marketing approach that makes them much more weak to a single chink in their armor.

So we find this really helpful to continually try to invest at least a small amount over time in organic social. And you'll see that these changes build up.

Kunle Campbell (27:22.018)
I liken what you just said to, to viewing paid media, particularly Google AdWords more is like haunting and then SEO is more like farming that there's a harvest time. But the problem is you don't know this, you don't know how long the, you know, the seeding season is going to take, but when it's, it's mature and ripe, it's, it's for the pickings really, it's just open.

for the pickings and it lasts for a long time, unless if Google throws some sort of algorithm change, which it does every now and then. Okay, so with paid media, what is your approach? And there's exciting times I hear about YouTube shopping. There's an announcement where today, or a few days, not actually a few days last week, where YouTube wants to do the same thing, TikTok shop.

Zach Boyette (27:57.217)
Mm -hmm.

Kunle Campbell (28:18.506)
What are your thoughts on YouTube advertising, particularly for e -commerce businesses and adverts?

Zach Boyette (28:25.249)
Yeah, so I think as with any new Google products at the rolling out, I think it's good for brands to be slightly wary at first, not put all of your eggs into one basket there and not say, wow, this seems huge. We're going to go all in on this. I myself used to work at Google and in their ad products and understood this. So I've seen how some of the rollouts can go. But that said, on the other side, if it's one that will end up growing a lot,

It can be really valuable to be one of the first brands into a new program like YouTube shopping and making sure that you're first, you know, first at bat and learning and getting those learnings and building up and even getting a chance to partner with the Google beta programs and see if they'll allow you to get in on early features next time. But, yeah, I think that Google recognizes here that, wow, tick tock is really eating our lunch in a way with video content. and it's growing so much faster in, in different dimensions, especially with certain demographics than YouTube.

YouTube is still the second largest search engine in the world after Google. So I think Google is really recognizing that, wow, there are a lot of people on YouTube and we need to make sure that we're rolling out different features that allow people to engage with audiences in a different way than YouTube, whether that be rewarding creators in often a more dependable and fair way as creators typically find on YouTube versus TikTok and making YouTube just a more mature feeling audience and more.

for some audiences, respectable and easier to use. And with that, yeah, I think that YouTube shopping presents a really great opportunity. It's a huge platform. Typically, this shopping product is much more search -based. And I think it still can be shirts -based again, because again, YouTube is such a great search platform as well. But YouTube allows for such a better indexing of certain conversations that I think e -commerce brands might want to be in front of.

And I think another thing too that that e -commerce owners out there need to remember is that Google is getting way, way, way better recently about indexing the actual verbal conversations that people have, like the ones that we're having on this podcast right now, and transcribing that into text and allowing that to show in results when people are searching for things, even if it's not just in the title of their description.

Kunle Campbell (30:32.718)
Mm -hmm.

Zach Boyette (30:41.953)
And so that makes it way easier for these shopping products to show up alongside the right relevant audience on a given YouTube video. Whereas previously it may have been a little bit harder for the Google engineers to make that happen. So in short, yes, I recommend e -commerce owners as this product becomes available in their given country or region. Do give it a try. Don't go all in and divert all of your budget away from the traditional approaches and stuff.

just to do this new thing, but I would certainly put a good bit of budget towards testing.

Kunle Campbell (31:13.742)
makes sense, makes sense. Test, test, test, test. Okay. So outside of search, we talked about, you know, organic and unpaid, would you say that CRO is like the next important layer to tackle in order to get the best bang for your buck on any channel, so to speak?

Zach Boyette (31:44.417)
Yeah, absolutely. I think that for e -commerce brands out there, oftentimes you can build the best audience of people coming to your site. You can have perfectly dialed and email sequences. You can have tremendous pay media campaigns that are bringing really great high quality traffic to your site. You can have amazing content that's information rich and authoritative and getting you brand mentions all across organic places like Google and Chattjiputti.

But if the site sucks and people get there and they don't know what to do or the checkout flow is bad or the call to actions are unclear or you have products that aren't organized in a clear way, it's going to make it so it appears that all of the marketing results you're doing are not working well. Whereas at Galactic Fed, we initially, when I started my company and we started helping clients, I was like, okay, we're not going to do web dev and design or CRO ourselves.

specialties, pay median SEO. But eventually I realized, wow, if I really want to drive fantastic SEO and paid results, I need to build a really killer CRO and web dev team ourselves because that is just such an important part of the total halo effect. Because yes, I mean, you can imagine that the effect of going from a 1 % conversion rate on your site to a 5 % conversion rate on your site, that's a 5Xing of the results and no good paid ad campaign in the world.

is going to get you good results if you have a 0 .01 % conversion rate or something like that. So yeah, I think we find that some of the basic things like optimizing your sites to make the checkout flow really clear, giving users a clear choice for what they want, having the products clearly displayed, having the most popular products upfront can really make the checkout flow better.

And then also getting that flywheel in with remarketing and email marketing and such to make sure that users, you stay top of mind for users can really help increase conversion rate. And I believe one of your previous guests as well, Kunle, spoke about AI -based conversion rate optimization as well. And that is a big thing that we're seeing too. There are certain products that can help really understand what users are spending time on certain sections of the site and make sure that you're using AI to optimize how those look.

Zach Boyette (34:17.761)
Sorry, are you still with me?

Kunle Campbell (34:22.094)
Yeah, so, yeah, we've spoken about AI and CRO on the podcast, but speaking about AI, how's AI streamlining your operations in search and in SEO and paid media? Are you integrating AI into the work you're doing? How's that working?

Zach Boyette (34:43.585)
Yeah, so I think that right now we're actually in the midst of our AI great leap forward as we've been calling it the last year. So really across every department at Galactic Fed, whether that's finance or HR or sales, or of course our product focused things like pay media, SEO, CRO, we're really figuring out which AI products are the ones that can help our clients get the best results and help us work smarter and work better as a business.

I'd say the good news of this is that lots of the most commonly used products are doing it already themselves. You know, Google, meta, TikTok to a degree, et cetera, are implementing AI based products within their own platforms and have been for many years. This sort of AI buzzword as a phrase has just been something that's recently hit the market in the last two or so years. But I mean, Google, Google ads, for example, has been doing AI based products for.

many years now since, you know, even just conversion based optimization approaches and bidding approaches and stuff like that were some of the first examples of it. But yeah, we are testing lots of different tools and products that we can use for the CRO side, for example, to see what makes sense to help brands drive better CRO on their sites. We are testing AI based content stuff as well for our brands with the caveat that we are always very careful in sort of

conscious of the fact that real human -based authentic content is always the best. But we found that sometimes rather than having 20 writers spend 40 hours a week each writing really long, in -depth articles, sometimes it can be better to have 10 writers writing really great prompts that really are information -rich, stay the exact way that they want something written.

and can speed up their time there, helping the content written or at least generated and giving them ideas and going from there and then editing, editing, editing and make sure that it has the right tone and voice can be helpful. But yeah, there's lots of tools and lots of change in this right now. And I'm really excited to see what the next few years bring in terms of all the different products across marketing that'll be used for AI.

Kunle Campbell (36:48.398)
Yeah.

Kunle Campbell (36:58.318)
Yeah, I'm equally as excited. I mean, it's, it's such a time saver for people who understand prompt engineering, who understand how to write, write prompts. It's just phenomenal work and do. And then there's the other, there's the other AI platform clod. That one's really good for, for turning out long form content. Cause I think, chat GPT does have a, have a cap, you know, on it. My own fear is really just the.

Zach Boyette (37:23.809)
Mm -hmm.

Kunle Campbell (37:27.47)
What are you seeing? Because the SEO community, because I've been in the SEO community, I was in the SEO community for a bit of time. We, we at the time, we could abuse a lot of new systems. You hear that there's a new thing coming on and you just blast it to the end and then Google just rains thunder and firestone on you.

Once you've hit saturation points, I've seen it over and over the cycles over and over again. My, my question really is this with, with, with, with AI is there, is there like so much content being pushed out? A lot of content, you know, pushed out now with, with AI and, and how, how are agencies like you, how are brands managing with, with all the content that's been pushed? Is Google ignoring it? Is Google placing, how's Google even managing?

because I can imagine so many fly by night websites coming up with AI generated content. It's.

Zach Boyette (38:27.169)
Yeah.

Zach Boyette (38:33.377)
Yes so it's interesting google google has said publicly that they do not have an issue with a i based content provided it is relevant authentic and well written essentially now google has a history as we all seen with this this a p i leak information of saying certain things and not quite meaning it so i think it's to be terminated google does not analyzing a base content and google's very good i'm sure it's acting what is a based or not.

Kunle Campbell (38:45.454)
Hmm.

Zach Boyette (39:02.625)
which is why I think it really comes down to what, what I, what I have, what we've learned at Galacti Fed is that something that Google will always appreciate is authentic story driven content, that is human centric. So I think that where brands really miss a lot in AI. And I think that sort of the easy cheat that a lot of e -commerce brands are trying to do is just really sort of blast out this sort of listicle style. just.

bam, bam, bam, like here is the top level information you need to know about my e -commerce space or something like that, where whenever you can have something that is much more human centric, that is a story about where this information came from, a story about your brands and information like that, even if you did use AI to help ideate that or to refine the way that you wrote it, Google appreciates the authentic aspect of a story.

Kunle Campbell (39:36.205)
Mm -hmm.

Zach Boyette (39:56.353)
And so that's kind of a unique insight that we've had as we've been testing a bit with AI -based content. But you're exactly right. I think that a phrase that we've come to use internally at Galactic Fed that we're wary of is a new sort of LLM -based wild, wild west where rather than in the past, people were just spamming links everywhere and links, links, links, trying to get brand mentions. It really might be just people screaming mentions of their brand name, their entity out into every place they possibly can.

They may be paying people just to mention their brand name, even when it's not relevant on a given website. Whereas previously they might've done some black hat SEO to get links pointed at them. So I think that I could, I predict a future where Google might really sort of have a way of detecting when brands are doing this and seeing when brands are getting sort of an inordinate level of mentions of their brand name in sort of dubiously related spaces and punishing them in that way.

So I think it's really important to remember sort of the flip side of what I was talking about, about getting more mentions in your brand and getting attention is you need to make sure that it's really happening organically. You're not paying to do this in weird ways. You're being careful and considerate about it. And really always first and foremost, just trying to add value to users, telling a story, being helpful and getting your brand mentioned in places that are actually relevant to the product that you're trying to sell in your e -commerce site.

Kunle Campbell (41:40.206)
So I think Google is quite good at determining what a bad website neighborhood is, a spammy website versus a branded website, a publisher that's been around for years. And it would put some sort of grading system in brand mentions from whatever neighborhood they're coming from. I don't know, maybe that's the case.

Zach Boyette (41:49.857)
hehe

Zach Boyette (42:06.721)
That's a really good way to put it. Yes. I think another thing that Google, this API leak that recently happened on the SEO showed that sometimes really new sites are put in sort of almost a probationary period or a timeout where Google is really taking a closer look at what they're doing on their websites and making sure that they're not doing anything sketchy. They're not getting showing up at brand links or showing up in sketchy areas. So I think especially if you're first launching your e -commerce site, it's even more important to make sure you're following the rules.

Kunle Campbell (42:33.934)
Mm -hmm.

Okay, so I know we're about to wrap up. Would you mind just giving us a summary of this API leak? I came across it on my feed, I think Rand Fishkin, just there was a video and I didn't really watch the whole video. Do you want to just give listeners a summary of what this API leak is?

Zach Boyette (42:58.145)
Yeah, so basically Google has for years been, you know, saying certain things about SEO, SEO works and users, sorry, SEOs have always sort of thought that, okay, but maybe behind the scene there's some other things that are really going on. So there's recently a leak, this ABI and a lot of information got out. So one, I'd say four, a couple of key takeaways.

One is, as I've been mentioning, brand is paramount. Google favors large, powerful brands over smaller independent websites. This is unfortunate for newer brands, but it's even more of a good emphasis that the more you can build up organic mentions, the more traffic you're going to get. So building a notable, popular brand is going to be really important for getting your search intentions going up. Also,

Navigation patterns on your websites and the intention of a user on your website are really important factors for Google ranking their SEO. So this is even more of an emphasis on the SEO, sorry, the CRO we were speaking about. Getting good CRO in your site, making it crystal clear to users what they should be doing and helping them do the thing they want, which is typically purchasing an e -commerce product on your site as fast as possible will actually help you show up faster in SEO results.

Also, yeah, I think that it's important to have good experience, good expertise for your website, good authority, these sorts of things, good trustworthiness. Google tried to sort of downplay those things in the past and say like, okay, they're really important. And it seems that those have been maybe a little bit overstated in a way. I think that content needs to be trustworthy, but...

This trustworthiness is actually less emphasized in Google's ranking systems than we thought. It's really more important to have influence on your site. So making sure that the things you say are translated across the internet well, that users are picking up on it rather than allegedly trustworthy, because that can be something that's hard for Google to parse. So those are some summaries we've seen. This is really high level and just now coming out, we're still working through it at Collective Fed.

Kunle Campbell (45:11.342)
Yeah, it makes sense. It makes sense. What other people say about you when you're not in the room, you know, is the true reflection of you. I like Google's approach, you know, there. Exactly. We could go on and on and on, but really appreciate this rundown. So my takeaway really is just the importance of starting that SEO journey early because, you know, it's it takes time for it to sort of, you know, trigger.

or for you to see the effects of it. So really, really appreciate it. For people who want to find out more about Galactic Feed, it's galacticfeed .com. That's G -L -A -C -T -I -C -F -E -D .com. Is there any other social media platform you're active in or the agency is active on that you think will be worth a follow?

Zach Boyette (46:02.401)
Yeah we love anyone interested in ecommerce help with galactic fed we love to help your brand grow we help tons and tons of the commerce sites from small and growing ones to large and establish once i would be good link that is well we post a good bit there share lots of really information rich stuff to help ecommerce brands such as yourself. Where are you eating our own dog food if you understand how important organic.

Social posts are for our own brand mentions, so we try to post a lot of helpful content there. We'd love people to check out Galactic Fed. We'd love to help make your dreams come true and grow your e -commerce brand.

Kunle Campbell (46:39.182)
Zach, a great many thanks. We'll link to all the resources in the show notes and many thanks for coming on the pod.

Zach Boyette (46:46.433)
Thank you, Kuhnle. Excited to be on here.

Kunle Campbell (46:49.55)
Nice.