Interview with Kai Cromwell on organic shopping
An interview about organic shopping, product visibility and ecom search.
150+
brands served
$52M
client revenue in 2025
30-40
active clients
About this series
Organic Shopping Talks is a Productrise interview series where I talk with agencies, brands, and freelancers who use Productrise to level up their organic shopping results: what's actually working in ecom search, product visibility, and feed optimization, straight from the people doing it.
Enjoy! - Hugo
Who are you, what do you do, and what does your business look like today?
I'm Kai Cromwell, and I run New Seas, an eCommerce SEO agency for 7-9 figure Shopify brands. We've worked with over 150+ brands across every category, and generated $52 million in revenue for our clients in 2025. We're a team of 7 and are actively working with 30-40 brands at any given time.
Most 7-9 figure brands have a few thousand dollars per month just sitting on the table with Organic Shopping.
What drew you to organic shopping, and what keeps you here?
SEO used to just be blue links. Then as Google redesigned the SERPs and introduced AI Overviews, there were fewer and fewer blue links. As our attributable ROI for clients went down (due to fewer blue links), we realized we had to get better at Organic Shopping so we could generate more revenue for our clients.
Most 7-9 figure brands have a few thousand dollars per month just sitting on the table with Organic Shopping; if we're able to capture it for them, we immediately become more valuable to them.
What's your honest take on where the organic shopping industry is heading?
Hard to say, but I think as SEO gets further and further away from clean click-to-purchase attribution, Organic Shopping is one of the last threads of SERP real estate you absolutely need to own if you want to make any money from eCommerce SEO. I think most people have accepted that SEO is hard to cleanly attribute, but that it's a marketing channel they should invest in if there's sufficient search demand for their product category.
And though it's hard to attribute, in my experience, you can very easily tell when it's working versus not working, even if you're not able to calculate ROI down to the decimal point. In any case, if you can say "Hey, we are regularly in the top row of the product carousel, we're one of the top 1-2 blue links, and we regularly appear in relevant AI Overviews," you can generally view that as a successful campaign.
What goal are you working toward right now, and what's the biggest obstacle in your way?
We're working to achieve an average of 3-4x ROI for all of our clients. The biggest obstacles are time and money; clients want faster results for less money. And as an agency, we're looking to meet that demand while still being quite profitable on our own.
Tools like Productrise enable us to generate more revenue for clients, faster, and without hiring a dedicated Organic Shopping specialist.
Has something changed in how you do your work since you started using Productrise, and if so, what is it?
We didn't spend any time on Organic Shopping until Productrise. As an eCommerce SEO agency working with 7-9 figure Shopify brands, 100% of our clients actively spent tens of thousands of dollars each month on Google Ads prior to working with us.
And as a result, their Google Ads team (agency, freelancer, or internal) was more or less the "gatekeeper" of Merchant Center. And honestly, it was easier as an agency to not get involved when blue links were sufficiently generating tens of thousands of dollars each month for our clients.
But with Productrise, it was extremely easy for our agency to immediately become impactful in the Organic Shopping category with little to no experience.
If you could give one piece of advice to someone just starting out in organic shopping, what would it be?
Do something, even if you're not sure it's the right thing. Something is better than nothing.
I maintain this opinion across all facets of SEO; you have to do something in order to find out what works and what doesn't work. If you do nothing, you learn nothing and make no money.
If you do something, there's a chance you make money and a guarantee that you'll learn something.
Before you go
A quickfire round I ask every guest.
A stat or number you're proud of?
We served over 100+ 7-9 figure Shopify brands based all across the globe in nearly every category imaginable, and we've done it all as a remote team. It truly is one of the greatest times in history that you can run a business like this from a laptop anywhere in the world.
A tool, book, or person that's shaped how you run your business?
I am a student of YouTube University; I truly think it's the technology that has personally touched my life the most. I learned everything about SEO and growing a business from YouTube, and I'll continue to lean on it.
Anything you want to plug?