Interview with Josh Fowler on organic shopping

I'm Josh Fowler, SEO Manager at MindArc, ANZ's first Shopify Platinum Partner, based in Sydney. My last role covered the full scope of SEO, but technical SEO was always my focus, before moving deeper into ecommerce SEO for some of Australia's most recognisable retailers. I lead with product discoverability first, treating the feed as core infrastructure rather than an afterthought, which is what led me to build MindArc's UCP Readiness framework to diagnose and prepare brands for what comes next.

When I first started auditing brands in Australia, I was surprised how many were overlooking organic shopping entirely, some were sizeable brands that hadn't even turned on free listings or set up basics like shipping info. After a few months quietly fixing that in the background, results showed up noticeably faster than what I'd seen in other markets. That gap is what drew me in.

What's kept me here is the flow-on effect. MindArc runs organic and paid under one team deliberately, so the feed never gets optimised for one channel at the expense of the other, and testing made it obvious early on how much upside that unlocks on both sides. Most clients we inherit haven't set things up that way, which is where a lot of my job actually starts.

For me, product data is one of the strongest levers an agency actually has control over. I split SEO into three areas: brand entity, which sits largely outside our control, a bit of bad press or a PR moment can shift it regardless of anything we do, content discoverability, which depends heavily on what the brand side is willing to greenlight, and product discoverability, the one area we can move on with minimal friction, it's mostly a matter of filling the gaps that should already be there.

Even in my relatively short time in Australia, more brands are asking about their product feed unprompted, more people are banging the drum on product data, and it's shifting client conversations before we even get to the audit.

Where I think this goes next: the brands that treat their feed as core infrastructure rather than an afterthought will keep pulling further ahead, on Google Shopping today and on whatever comes after it. Product grids remain one of the best ways to give someone a real sense of a brand online, closer to seeing and feeling it the way you would in store.

Right now we're pushing feed optimisation as far as it'll go, both as standalone projects alongside development teams and folded into existing SEO retainers, with the aim of making it a standardised part of how we approach every ecommerce client, not a bolt-on.

The obstacle is scale. A lot of our brands are sitting on thousands of SKUs, and not every one has the budget or sees the value in development work or a dedicated feed management app. That means a more manual approach on our end, which doesn't always scale at the pace we'd like. The other obstacle is the siloed setup most clients arrive with, feed work touching both paid and organic without anyone owning the overlap and maintenance. Getting that alignment sorted before the technical work starts is half the job.

Productrise has given us a much clearer benchmark of success across new and existing clients through query tracking. Custom reports have always been useful in GMC, but they only tell you the quantifiable stuff, clicks and impressions etc. Productrise fills the gap around what we're actually discoverable for, whether that's brand or non-brand terms gaining traction, and lets us see the marginal impact of feed changes after we've made them, rather than guessing.

The other big shift has been supplemental feeds. Feed management tooling and product data work still isn't always a priority for clients, so having a way to populate or enrich otherwise poor or empty attributes without needing large resourcing has made a real difference.

My advice: search for your own product, then actually use the filters in the results. If the wrong listings show up, or yours disappear entirely, that's your product data telling you it doesn't align with those filters. The goal is getting Google's filtering to behave like your own on-site filtering does.

One of the most overlooked starting points is categories, most brands map products into collections but never assign SKUs to categories, and without that step your products either won't appear in relevant results at all, or they'll turn up in completely the wrong ones. It's the same story as everything above, it's infrastructure work, not a nice to have.