Interview with Jamie D'Alessandro on organic shopping

I'm Jamie D'Alessandro and I'm an SEO Manager at JAKALA. I've always considered myself a digital marketer first, and an SEO second. I've been agency-side now for close to 5 years, but came up in Content/SEO probably close to 10 years ago now!

I genuinely enjoy working on a plethora of different business types and clients. That's what makes our industry so exciting. Our challenges are often as unique as the people we help.

I love shopping. Like, it's one of my core attributes. I've always enjoyed commerce as a whole (don't let me see a market in the wild. I will disappear into happy oblivion). Fun fact: I originally wanted to go to college for something in Fashion but the cards didn't fall that way, which led me to majoring in Marketing to one day "market my own brand."

What keeps me here is the premise of commerce itself and the psychological reasons behind why we buy, either for necessity, for joy, for making our lives easier. It sits at the intersection of SEO and brand for me which I love.

Organic shopping is only going to get more competitive and more difficult to maintain sustained visibility. New products enter the marketplace every day. Google tends to prioritize marketplaces over brands (this one fires me up the most but I can't pretend I don't understand why). Attention spans are getting shorter, budgets continue to grow tighter for customers (products are often ranked by affordability). Not to mention, Google has to keep up with the enormous amount of product data it has to manage on its end.

As we've seen, brands and websites that make it incredibly easy for Google to extract product data, make it as enriched as possible and valuable for the user will have an edge. Google's job is to show a product from a merchant who it feels customers can trust. When was the last time you audited your ecommerce website from an E-E-A-T lens? When things feel tough, remember the foundation you're building or support the brand on. Make sure that's sustainable. Everything else can follow.

The biggest thing I'm struggling with right now is bad data input from the jump. I've seen a few instances now where the initial input in the CMS or PIM isn't great. I'm talking duplicate attributes, inconsistent naming conventions, discrepancies between how a merchant is calling a product vs what the wider marketplace acceptance is. It's being pulled into other parts of the website and by proxy GMC. It's not enough to fix a few one-off instances. It's trying to figure out how to optimize the process systemically.

Just having more visibility into how my client's products are performing organically is HUGE. The product results can be so volatile but Productrise makes performance so much more transparent. It makes testing and optimizing better too, because you're armed with actual benchmarks. I love the query grouping report especially, since many ecommerce sites have various categories they prioritize.

Organic Shopping is the output of the work brands are doing behind the scenes. The principles of marketing never go away, put yourself in your customer's shoes. Is this product listing enough to entice you to buy it? Do you even know the brand selling it? Don't be afraid to test, try, learn, and test again! Those learnings make us smarter.