Interview with Marnix Lont on organic shopping

I'm Marnix Lont. I'm an E-commerce SEO from The Netherlands. I've worked solely with e-commerce clients since 2014. I worked at tech and marketing agencies small and enterprise for 10 years and am currently working freelance. I support my clients with a product-led approach to e-commerce, combining my experience of tech and (organic) marketing to build successful e-commerce brands and platforms.

I just like the dynamics and technical challenges of E-commerce. I was working on stores before Free Google Shopping was introduced and was already telling clients to focus on master data and clean information structures needed to build smarter components. When Shopping became an organic feature, I dove straight into PIM and feed management.

Then in 2023 with the launch of product grids in SERPs here in the EU, I found it an exciting topic to dive deeper into and master. It's still a blindspot for many vendors that the product grids they see are organic and not paid and that it can actually be a pretty good traffic driver. I like helping brands discover the full potential and connecting the parts needed to be competitive in organic shopping. It touches so much more than just SEO basics which makes it more interesting.

I think organic shopping is here to stay. E-commerce as a search category is one of the few stable or even growing categories. Though I think here in the EU it will be more straightforward.

I work mostly for EU brands where SERPs are regulated by the DMA. Google was fined for 2.4 billion in the 2024 antitrust ruling, after which they had to reduce their shopping comparison to a MVP and have to provide visibility to competitor comparison services. At this time AI mode here is not even connected to the shopping graph. It just uses search. AI assisted shopping is not available here.

And I sincerely doubt that's gonna change anytime soon. They cannot integrate the shopping graph and AI assisted (agentic) shopping here as it would instantly be ruled as a violation of antitrust rules. There would have to be a really good business case for them to launch anyway and go through the hassle. (Maybe I'm naive, but we are generally at least 2 years behind for some time.)

So yeah, I think organic shopping and product grids in its current form are gonna be around for quite some time. Some of the mechanics behind it will evolve the same as it would outside the EU. Google trying to digest more and more information and real-time offers they can work with. But we will likely have an alternate slimmed down SERP version compared to the rest of the world where things don't change as much.

I'm working on devising information architecture in a store that feeds UX and translates as best as possible into proper feed data. Think separating information found in product descriptions into separate fields. Mapping specs. Building actual user Q&A flows, incorporating expert details and aligning pretty much every field's requirements and integrating that into daily work or automations.

The biggest obstacle I'd say is still the notion of merchants that shopping is a paid 'thing' and paid marketers work with different requirements based on what's necessary for ads or just hack stuff in feed managers instead of actually solving problems and making the feed work for both paid and organic. Often paid specialists are from another agency and clients have not allocated budget or specified in the briefing that they should work together with organic. Let alone set shared goals or KPI's :').

I went from 'hey this organic shopping thing is important' to 'look your competitors are raking in 3x as much traffic from organic shopping' or '#1 is a shopping grid in 25% of all your customers transactional searches'. That changes the entire conversation with managers and helps setting measurable goals like share of shopping which I use besides regular share of search reporting.

Then the next question is what to work on and there Productrise has added valuable quantification to the qualitative feed audits I was doing.

Understand your clients business, their customers, their platform and the products they offer first, then build a plan that aligns their store, structure and information with shopping requirements. Educate yourself in PIM and master data management. It will help you a lot.