Interview with Bart Haagmans on organic shopping

My name is Bart Haagmans. I am the e-commerce SEO lead at Depends SEO Agency. I handle the bigger e-commerce clients for our agency and have worked with brands like WEBA (a Belgian furniture retailer) and Xandres (a Belgian fashion brand). In total I have around 7 years of experience in e-commerce, split between digital marketing and product management.

I love that it is a lever that many brands are not using yet, or not properly. Most shops export their feed once and never look at it again, while it is exactly what powers their shopping visibility. If you put real work into it, you often see results faster than with classic SEO. That is what keeps me here: the low-hanging fruit is still there.

I think a lot of people are getting distracted right now. Clicks are down in most verticals, everyone is talking about GEO, and clients start to doubt SEO as a channel. But when AI tools and Google's AI features recommend products, they still pull that information from product data: feeds, Merchant Center, structured data. So the work that matters has not really changed. Clean titles, correct attributes, good prices and reliable stock data still decide whether you show up.

What worries me is reporting. If we keep selling SEO purely on clicks, we will lose that conversation, because clicks will keep going down. We need to talk about visibility and revenue instead.

What excites me is that most brands will not do this work. Their product data is an afterthought. The shops that do take their feed seriously will be very visible in whatever interface comes next.

My goal right now is to make a feed audit the standard starting point for every e-commerce client we work with. It almost always surfaces actionable points, so clients see concrete improvements early on instead of waiting months for the first results. That also makes the rest of the SEO story much easier to sell.

The obstacle is that it has been, at times, quite hard to defend SEO as a channel because of everything that changed in the last couple of years. Clicks in most verticals are down, and many clients have heard somewhere that GEO is the new thing to focus on. That often results in losing focus on the actual SEO work that needs to happen. So a big part of my job now is education, and proving the value with the right metrics instead of only traffic.

It made me start every e-commerce audit with a feed audit. It is so easy to use and instantly shows you possible quick wins, where I used to spend so many hours in spreadsheets first. It also changed the conversation with clients, because I can start with fixes they can apply the same week.

Just focus on how people actually search and check if your feed reflects that, starting with your titles. Most of the quick wins in organic shopping are right there.