Interview with Callum Lockwood on organic shopping

I'm Callum Lockwood, Director of Organic Search at Re:signal. We're a specialist eCommerce Organic Search agency. I have been in search for about 16 years now, my role used to cover both strategy and delivery. But as we've grown, that's split out, our Head of Organic Search runs delivery day to day and I focus on where the function needs to go next. We work with a number of eCommerce brands and retailers like ASICS, Rogue Fitness, Sigma Sports and Vivobarefoot and we're currently sitting around 30 team members.

Honestly kinda hard to remember the specific moment, I looked back at my previous talks and blog posts and one thing stood out. About 4 years ago I saw a study from SEOClarity that made me want to start looking at the saturation of Organic Product Grids across eCommerce SERPs.

Basically, we ran SERP reports for our clients against their current rankings and the saturation of Organic Product Grids was huge, the lowest being around 60% of keywords showing the grids on the first page. Since then it's obviously grown across Europe, in fact recently I did a study with SISTRIX which found that 98% of commercially focused terms in women's fashion were returning product grids.

So naturally, after realising how much coverage these grids got we started testing and for some clients we were seeing them get in the tens of thousands of Euros per week without even optimising the feeds (I can't share specific numbers). From there we started to realise 2 things: how unaware a lot of the industry was on the benefits of optimising for Google Organic Product Grids and how undocumented the optimisation methods were. Now we're in a place where we have an incredible process and library of knowledge on this.

What keeps me here is the belief that everything we're doing for Organic Shopping now is going to be incredibly relevant for AI eCommerce experiences.

My unfiltered and honest take on this probably isn't very contrarian, I think we're heading to a place where AI is involved in most purchase decisions and the work we should be doing is optimising our product data at source. Because that not only benefits us right now in Google Organic Shopping, but it will be the foundation on which your product visibility in AI is built on.

Not necessarily something that people are getting wrong, but I genuinely struggle to understand sometimes how AI search (in a general sense) is taking up more real estate in Organic Search strategies than Organic Shopping. If someone is searching "what are the best running shoes for X" you don't need an article with a perfectly summarised intro and chunked content, what you need is for the LLMs to understand your products better. Obviously I'm aware there's a level of social proof that comes with the recommendations that AI search makes, but without the foundational understanding of the products from source, you risk either your products being misrepresented or misunderstood.

I guess that leads me onto my final point and that's what I believe is the future state for organic shopping. AI search will absolutely replace certain eCommerce journeys we have, it's not hard to imagine category pages ceasing to exist in organic results, with customers landing directly on products.

There's also a lot of noise about agentic commerce, but I think that's still a fair way off from where we actually are. The more immediate shift is already happening, the ability to purchase directly in the SERP via Google's UCP. Once consumers get comfortable with that experience, we'll likely see another massive shift in how products are bought and sold through Organic.

We're working towards an approach that brings all of the optimisations for Organic Shopping to large scale eCommerce sites. Scale is the biggest challenge for data accuracy and quality, broken processes, different sources of information and human error. Then making sure that data is used effectively through on-site, schema and in feed adds another layer of complexity.

Proving Organic Shopping is worth the investment isn't actually much of an issue (especially with Productrise). But the challenges we have had have generally been oddities in Merchant Centre and then the scale of optimisations.

Yeah absolutely, reporting for sure, it's added a lot of depth to our reporting and ability to test sub-sets of categories for optimisations.

I would liken it to reporting on organic traffic without knowing what keywords and rankings drove that traffic. With Organic Shopping that gap had always been a bit of a gray area, but with Productrise we can now report on the full layer of metrics from visibility > traffic > revenue. Obviously goes without saying having that insight into visibility changes and the impact on revenue allows you to replicate it.

• Test before you launch mass scale product feed changes
• If you're on the Organic side and don't have access to your Merchant Centre, then it's time to make some new friends in the paid team
• If you're making feed optimisations, consider changing the data at source too e.g. product titles, if they're poor in your feed they're probably poor on site and in your schema too