Stop Guessing Your Site Structure and Fix Your SEO
Most large catalogue eCommerce stores let their site structure grow organically without anyone taking ownership, quietly killing SEO growth. Sam Wright from Blink SEO reveals how collection pages generate 35% of all search impressions and why stores need to go much deeper with categorisation—from "sofas" to "blue four-seat corduroy sofas"—using Search Console data to guide decisions. He shares how to future-proof stores for AI search by enriching product data with persona and use case attributes that go beyond basic specifications.
Most eCommerce stores with large product catalogues share a common problem that quietly kills their growth. It's not their products. It's not their pricing. It's not even their marketing budget. It's something far more fundamental: their site structure has grown organically without anyone taking ownership of how things should be organised.
Sam Wright, founder of Blink SEO and creator of the Macalytics app, works exclusively with large catalogue Shopify stores. When asked about the biggest problem he sees across hundreds of projects, his answer was immediate: taxonomy. Or, as most people call it, information architecture, site structure, and navigation. Whatever term you prefer, it all points to the same challenge. And it doesn't just impact SEO—it affects user experience, conversion rates, and even email segmentation.
The Large Catalogue Challenge
What exactly is a large catalogue store? Sam defines it as the point where your catalogue tips into a different type of buying journey.
"With large catalogue stores, the buying journey is based around comparison and filtering," Sam explains. This typically starts happening around 250 products, though it varies. At that threshold, customers aren't just clicking and buying—they're comparing attributes, filtering options, and making considered decisions.
The problem? Most of these stores have grown organically over time. "A lot of the time these stores have grown up organically over a period of time and no one's taken ownership about how the store's organized," Sam notes. "And obviously that impacts not just SEO but user experience, conversion, even email because you can't segment properly, all kinds of things."
You've reached three, four, maybe five million in annual revenue. Things are fundamentally working—you don't get to that point otherwise. But there's this drag on everything. Growth isn't happening as fast as it should. And quite often, the culprit is hiding in plain sight: nobody stepped back to think about how things should be organised and what for.
The Collection Page Opportunity
Collections (what non-Shopify platforms call category pages) are your biggest SEO opportunity.
Sam shared data from across all the Shopify stores his agency works with: "It's about 35% of all impressions come on collections, which is much more than products and blogs. It's basically the entry point for most people when they're doing actual new product discovery."
Think about that. More than a third of all your search visibility comes from collection pages. These are the pages where new customers first encounter your store. Yet most stores really aren't categorised in a way that aligns with how people are actually looking for their kinds of products.
The Granularity Problem
Most stores simply aren't granular enough with their categorisation. This is where the real opportunity lives.
"Most people are not granular enough with their categorisation," Sam emphasises. "A lot of stores will just have a t-shirts category. They won't subcategorise those t-shirts to the level that matches how people are actually searching."
The key is going deeper. Much deeper. Sam uses sofas as an example: "So sofas as the parent category, like blue sofas, blue four seat sofas, blue four seat corduroy sofas. That filtering process, that is how people do search."
The challenge on Shopify? These filters aren't indexable for search engines. You can't serve Google ads effectively on a filter. So you need to break out the popular subcategories and make them actual collection pages.
"The real opportunity for a lot of stores is how deep you go in that categorisation because you've got products that other people don't have," Sam explains. "And that's the easiest way to capture new users."
Using Search Console Data
So how do you determine what categories to create and how deep to go? The answer lies in your data.
"Search console data is brilliant for showing how people are actually searching," Sam advises. Look at the impression data—it throws up all kinds of interesting patterns.
Here's a practical approach Sam's agency uses: "If you look at the Search Console data for a collection page, what you might see is what we would call attribute searches on a collection. So the collection is blue sofas, but we're seeing impressions for eight-seater sofa, like blue four seat sofa, blue four seat corduroy."
When you see those kinds of search terms appearing on a collection page, it's a signal. You can drill down another level.
"You can typically keep going until we probably say like three in stock products is probably the limit for how far down you can go," Sam notes. "And actually, only having a few products is actually quite a good user experience a lot of the time. If you've got three products that are very, very tightly related to that particular search, that's a good user experience."
The Real-World Example
During the conversation, Matt shared his experience redesigning the eCommerce Podcast website, which mirrors many of the challenges large catalogue stores face.
The site had grown organically over 200+ episodes. Episodes were listed like a blog feed with a search bar. It worked, but as Matt put it: "I went on there as a first time user and I'm like, it just doesn't feel sensible really."
So they created a proper hierarchy: top-level categories like "Marketing & Growth," subcategories like "SEO & Content" and "Messaging & Automation," and then specific topics like "Technical SEO" or "Email Automation."
"Now you can quite quickly navigate using that menu," Matt explained. "If you wanted to find out about technical SEO, within one click really, you can see that link and you can go, well, that's marketing and growth or technical SEO. You can click that. And then all of the episodes we've done which are connected to technical SEO then come up on the page."
The result? Better user experience and better SEO. Google now shows dedicated pages for specific topics, each with multiple pieces of related content.
Sam's response was telling: "What's always interesting is the further you get into something, into the levels, the more interesting and more useful that information is. And I think that transfers directly to the e-commerce experience as well."
The Specialisation Principle
Sam's own business journey illustrates why granular categorisation matters so much.
"We started off as an SEO agency. We sort of specialized in e-commerce. We specialized in Shopify. And it's only really when we went to large catalog Shopify SEO stuff that it really kind of took off," Sam shared.
Why? Because at that level of specialisation, everything becomes more actionable. "What people want from listening to this podcast is stuff they can act on," Sam notes. "Technical SEO applies to loads of different platforms. So it's not much good to me if I'm on Magento. You start breaking it down by platform and all of a sudden it starts to become more specific."
The same principle applies to your product categories. The more specific and relevant they are to how people actually search, the more actionable they become for customers trying to find exactly what they need.
Future-Proofing for AI Search
Here's where things get really interesting—and potentially challenging. The entire search landscape is shifting beneath our feet.
In Sam's "saving the best till last" segment at the end of the podcast, he shared what he believes will set businesses apart in the future: enriching product data with persona and use case information.
"I think the real thing that's going to set a lot of businesses apart in the future is by bringing in attribute data that other people don't have, and that is based on things like personas and use cases," Sam explained. "So this is kind of more human data."
He referenced an example from ChatGPT's announcement: "There was in the ChatGPT announcement, I think it was back in March, it gave an example of someone searching in ChatGPT and it's, 'I want to see the best coffee machine under $200 that captures the taste of coffee in Italy.'"
Traditional attributes—price, product type—are straightforward. But "captures the taste of coffee in Italy"? That's persona-based, use case-focused, benefit-driven data.
"Getting that into your product data, I think, is going to be something that really, really sets lots of people apart," Sam emphasised. "Especially when we're potentially moving into this world where someone might not touch the website."
This is the future Sam sees coming is where AI tools recommend products based on sophisticated queries that go beyond basic attributes. The question is whether your product data can answer those nuanced questions.
Start Modelling That Into Your Data Now
Sam's advice is refreshingly practical: "Start modeling that into your data now."
The challenge? We don't really know how this will all work yet. "We don't know what field is going to be like a persona type in the new chat GPT shopping feed or whatever," Sam admits. "But if you've got your data broken down like that, you can map it to whatever column appears in the future."
Where should you store this information? Sam suggests several options depending on your setup:
- In your PIM (Product Information Management) system
- As Shopify tags
- As Metafields
- Whatever system you're currently using
The immediate benefit? You don't have to wait for AI search to see value. "If you've got your persona types clearly laid as a Metafield in Shopify, you could use that for custom tagging on a collection page, best for X," Sam explains. "That kind of curated experience we know works really, really well."
The AI Shortcut
Both Sam and Matt discussed how they're using AI to accelerate the taxonomy work itself.
"I swear like 80% of my working days is talking to chat GPT," Sam shared. "Working through things step by step. That's probably how I spend most of my days now."
Matt had a similar experience: "We use Perplexity Labs to research what it thought the menu structure should be. So it was 70% there. I mean, again, a bunch of work saved. It was not perfect at all, but it was a good starting point for some conversations."
The approach works: use AI to analyse competitor sites, suggest category hierarchies, and provide that initial structure. Then refine it with your actual search console data.
The Critical Warning
But Sam offers an important caveat about using AI and automation.
"The thing about AI and automation is it's only going to accelerate what you're doing," he cautions. "If what you're doing is a mess, you're just accelerating a load of mess basically."
This is the uncomfortable truth. AI won't fix a fundamentally broken site structure. It'll just help you scale the confusion faster.
The foundation has to be right first. Get your basic structure sorted. Base it on actual data about how people search. Then AI and automation become powerful accelerators rather than mess multipliers.
Your Action Plan
Ready to stop guessing and start fixing your site structure? Here's where to begin:
1. Connect Google Search Console
If you haven't already, get Search Console connected to your store. This is your data goldmine for understanding how people actually search for your products.
2. Audit Your Collection Pages
Look at your existing collection pages in Search Console. What attribute searches are appearing? Are you seeing impressions for more specific variations than what the collection currently serves?
3. Identify Subcategory Opportunities
When you see consistent search patterns for specific attribute combinations (and you have at least 3 in-stock products), that's your signal to create a dedicated collection page.
4. Start Enriching Product Data
Begin adding persona and use case information to your product data. Who is this product best for? What problems does it solve? What experience does it create? Store this systematically in tags, metafields, or your PIM.
5. Use AI as Your Assistant
Let AI help with the heavy lifting—analysing competitors, suggesting structures, and categorising existing products. But remember: it's a starting point, not the final answer. Your search console data provides the validation.
Small Catalogue Stores
What if you're not at 250+ products yet? Sam addressed this during the conversation.
For smaller catalogues, the challenge is different. "With small catalogue stores, it's really a creative marketing challenge. Most of the time, it's all about your positioning."
Are you a challenger brand? Do you have a new product going up against an established category? Then it's more about content marketing—articulating what makes you different.
"What are the use cases for your product? What's your ingredients list that no one else has?" Sam asks. "And maybe that does tie into the whole future of AI stuff as well."
Even with smaller catalogues, you still need to think about taxonomy. But as Sam notes, it crosses over into your broader content rather than just your product content.
The Ownership Question
One challenge Sam highlighted is that nobody quite knows who should own the taxonomy.
"The ownership of taxonomy is a really interesting question," Sam mused. "Does it sit with merchandising? Does it sit with product? Is it development? And quite often a lot of the challenges are because no one's really taken that ownership of it."
His agency came at it from an SEO perspective—they needed the right pages on the site to be able to optimise properly. "As we've got deeper and deeper involved in this kind of stuff, it's kind of exposed that that's where a big gap is for a lot of these stores."
The solution? Someone needs to own it. If you're a solo founder or small team, that ownership is clear—it's you. Make the decision. Look at the data. Build the structure.
Why This Matters Now
The stakes are higher than they've ever been. With about 35% of your search visibility coming from collection pages, getting your site structure right isn't optional—it's foundational.
And with AI search evolving rapidly, the stores that win will be those with rich, well-structured product data that can answer sophisticated queries across multiple surfaces—ChatGPT, Google Shopping, your ads feed, wherever customers are searching.
The good news? You don't need to do everything at once. Start with your search console data. Identify one category worth breaking down further. Create those subcollection pages. Add persona and use case data to your top products.
Small steps. Real data. Consistent progress.
Because in a world where AI might recommend products without customers touching your website, the stores that thrive will be those whose data tells the clearest, most compelling story about what they sell and who it's for.
Start modelling that into your data now.
Full Episode Transcript
Read the complete, unedited conversation between Matt and Sam Wright from BlinkSEO. This transcript provides the full context and details discussed in the episode.
Full Episode Transcript
Read the complete, unedited conversation between Matt and Sam Wright from BlinkSEO. This transcript provides the full context and details discussed in the episode.
Matt Edmundson (00:04)
Well, hello and welcome to the eCommerce podcast. My name is Matt Edmondson and it is great to be with you today. Talking about all things eCommerce. Yes, we are. So welcome to the show. It's great that you're with us. If this is your first time with us, let me extend a very warm, warm welcome to you. It was two English fellows talking today, which is a little bit unusual for the eCommerce podcast, but the Brits are here. The Brits are coming.
so we are going to be, talking to Sam Wright from Blink SEO today, which I'm looking for. We, we've just been chatting for the last 20 minutes and we're like, we should probably hit the record button at some point. So, ⁓ it's going to be a good one today. Make sure you grab your notebooks, make sure you grab your pens. course, if you're a regular to the show, very warm welcome to you as well. Welcome back. ⁓ I love in all the comments we're getting guys genuinely keep reaching out to me on LinkedIn. ⁓
Love hearing from people that listen to the show. Really, really appreciate your feedback. Just appreciate people saying hello. Just makes you realize you're not doing this to the, to the ether as they say. And of course, if you like what we do, check out the website, e-commerce podcast dots nets, where you can find all of our past episodes, our whole archive. We've done a massive redesign on the site, which we're going to get into a little bit today with Sam, actually, because I think it's going to help us. I've done a big redesign. Let me know what you.
think information on there, which you'll find helpful will be things like cohort where we do the, ⁓ the, the sort of membership group, which is free to join, but you just come and join with your peers. And we just talk about e-commerce once a month on zoom, which is great. We've got WhatsApp groups that all the time in the WhatsApp groups, people are just putting in questions that they are, you know, facing in their, in their e-commerce and everybody jumps on, try this, try this. And it's great. We solve it together and we all learn and grow together. And it's a wonderful place to do that. So.
Check that out. The other thing we've got on the new site is a whole resources section now So you'll notice that once a month I'm doing solo episodes where it's just me talking and we throw in a freebie with this download Which is you know, hopefully adding an awful lot of value. So go and check that out You can get the resources you can download them all for free everything on the website is free We're not charging for anything at the moment, you know, because the current economic status means that we don't have to which is a beautiful thing
So do go check into that and of course sign up to the newsletter. It's all on the website, the brand new shiny, beautiful e-commerce podcast website. Go and have a look, see if you can break it for me. And if you can, let me know how you did that, please. So we can fix it. But all of that said, let's crack on. Let's introduce today's guests and welcome to the show, man. How you doing?
Sam Wright (02:49)
Good, thank you. Great to be here. I know it's amazing, isn't it? There's not enough representation for people like us in the e-commerce space, is there?
Matt Edmundson (02:50)
Yeah, two Brits.
Yeah, absolutely. There's I think there's like, and there's a few podcasters isn't there that are British in the ecommerce space and you know, got Adam, got Chloe, you got Nick, there's a few a few other guys and I, and I think it's great and we're all connected somehow and but yeah, I think we definitely need more. We definitely need more. Represent the Brits. ⁓ Apparently, you can listen to the podcast in America without getting charged tariffs as well, which is quite nice.
Sam Wright (03:18)
Yes.
Well, it isn't as long
as...
Matt Edmundson (03:31)
At least at the moment, let's enjoy it while you can. So yes, you probably shouldn't make jokes about the tariffs. Sam, just to introduce Blink SEO, let us know what you do, what your specialty is, and what we're going to be talking about today.
Sam Wright (03:47)
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I'm Sam. I'm the founder of Blink. We are a specialist marketing agency for Shopify stores with large product catalogs. And our main focus always has been SEO. ⁓ And we're also the team behind Macalytics, which is a new Shopify SEO app that launched a few weeks ago.
Matt Edmundson (04:01)
Mm.
⁓ so you've got into the whole sass thing as well.
Sam Wright (04:13)
Yeah, I think once you've been doing agency stuff for a while, there's two paths that you can go down. You either set up a course or a SaaS.
Matt Edmundson (04:19)
Mm-hmm.
Have you done both?
Sam Wright (04:25)
Well, I think
what we're seeing actually with the SAS is there's an education piece that's needed for it. And it's like, well, I'm going to have to do a course with it as well. So I'm going to have to do both.
Matt Edmundson (04:32)
Right.
Yeah, that's generally the way it works, isn't it? I love that you either do a course or you go, ⁓ love it, love it, love it. And how's it gone? How's the app launch gone?
Sam Wright (04:49)
Yeah, it's been really good. It's been really good. ⁓ So it takes the whole kind of what we've been trying to do with the app is make the kind of SEO stuff that we do accessible for businesses that, you know, can't necessarily invest in an agency at the level that we're at. So kind of brands at like, you one, two million plus where there's maybe one owner operator or one head of marketing.
Matt Edmundson (05:06)
Mm.
Sam Wright (05:16)
the idea that they can get in and do, you know, actual impactful SEO work, which means doing implementation, you know, making changes directly in the store. ⁓ and it, yeah, it's been, it's been really, really positive. Like I think we'd like six weeks post launch where we, you know, we're getting good reviews, we're getting good engagement and yeah, it's all going in a good direction.
Matt Edmundson (05:21)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Fantastic. And just let everybody know again the name of the app if they want to go check it out.
Sam Wright (05:42)
Macalytics.
Matt Edmundson (05:44)
Macalytics. So yeah, no very good go to a quick plug for Macalytics. This this week's episode is sponsored by Macalytics your SEO app of choice for Shopify. You can check it out and find out more in the Shopify app store. Yeah, you can use that if you like Sam. That's not a problem. Yeah, fantastic. Brilliant. Oh, let's get into it. So
Sam Wright (05:45)
So, let's just hope it's not going to be long.
Yes, very good. I'm loving this.
Good.
Yeah, I will.
Matt Edmundson (06:14)
I like to ask this question at the start, ⁓ Sam, and I did give you a little bit of fair warning, but if you have a magic wand that you could wave that would solve the biggest problem that you see with most of your clients, what would the problem be that you would solve and why?
Sam Wright (06:30)
Great question. And I always kind of want to preface my answers for stuff like this with the fact that we do focus on one particular kind of project. And that is, you know, we work with large catalog Shopify stores. So kind of all of my experience is colored by this one particular thing. But I do think there are lots of things within that that kind of are applicable to other kinds of businesses as well.
Matt Edmundson (06:41)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Sam Wright (06:55)
And kind of what we see in these kinds of stores, typically that kind of three to five million bracket is one of the real drags to growth is taxonomy or information architecture or site structure or whatever you want to call it. But it all comes down to the same challenge of with large catalog stores, the buying journey is based around comparison and filtering and that kind of demand capture stage.
A lot of the time these stores have grown up organically over a period of time and no one's taken ownership about how the store's organized. And obviously that impacts not just SEO but user experience, conversion, know, like even email because you can't segment properly, all kinds of things.
Matt Edmundson (07:32)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Brilliant. Well, I'm glad you explained what taxonomy was because I, one thing I can guarantee Sam is we will not be using the word taxonomy in the podcast title because people, would be like, if I saw that I'm like, what are they talking about tax? I don't know. And so taxonomy, just to clarify is in effect a fancy word for site structure or site architecture. ⁓ it's the
Sam Wright (07:46)
Yes.
Hahaha
Matt Edmundson (08:09)
It's the way you structure the site and the navigation of the site in a way that makes the best experience for customers and for SEO. Have I summarized that fairly?
Sam Wright (08:18)
Yeah, absolutely. And it really, most of it stems from product data. So how are you manage your attributes? What your naming conventions are and that, you know, the kind of level that that's opt, yeah, that's the, that's the kind of starting point for all of this.
Matt Edmundson (08:23)
Mm.
Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Which is great. So we've all learned what another word is taxonomy. We can, we can go along with it. It's interesting when you say that you specialize and I loved your, your, your preamble, you know, your disclaimer, because we're British and we like to disclaim everything. It's just what we do. you say large catalog stores, define what large catalog store means.
Because if I've got 20 products, I might think I've got a large catalog, but you might have a different idea.
Sam Wright (09:10)
Yeah, what we're really looking for is that point in the size of the catalog where it tips over into the buying journey is based on attributes and comparison and filtering and stuff like that. And it typically it starts around 250 products. It can be, it can be less, it can be more, but you know, but over the years, that's the kind of like, that's the point where we see that stuff to happen. Of course, like
Matt Edmundson (09:22)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sam Wright (09:37)
As you get up to 10,000, 500,000, know, however many products, the challenges get more and more complicated. But yeah, like that would be where we kind of, start that definition.
Matt Edmundson (09:44)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, no, fascinating. And so what are some of the key mistakes then people are making with this? Which is, why is this the key problem that you want to solve with your magic wand, I suppose is the question.
Sam Wright (10:07)
So, ⁓ there's an, I listened to an amazing podcast recently called history of bad ideas. And it's very good. It's very good. ⁓ it's fantastic. Yeah. My wife sent it to me because she knows, you know, I'm involved in taxonomy and it's called history of bad ideas taxonomy.
Matt Edmundson (10:18)
Just the title of it is brilliant. Yeah.
Sam Wright (10:29)
And it's like, I'll do, have I based my professional career on something that's a terrible idea? And without meaning to go too deep into that. One of the problems with taxonomy historically as a kind of classification thing is there's always been this kind of mismatch of what people say something is and what it does. And, you know, this is the kind of like, this has been the challenge with a lot of kind of information architecture stuff.
Matt Edmundson (10:49)
Yeah.
Sam Wright (10:57)
or like a business owner will decide what something is and the audience that it's for think it's something else. When there's that mismatch, that's when things don't work. Like search can't work when there's that kind of that mismatch. And I think a lot of the problems come down to with taxonomy is particularly in these businesses that we work with, you know, like three million or five million plus.
Matt Edmundson (11:04)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Sam Wright (11:26)
They've grown to a point and everything's kind of working. And, you know, like, cause you don't get to that point without things fundamentally being okay. But there's this kind of drag on everything and things are not necessarily growing as fast as they should. And quite often it's because no one stepped back at that point and thought how things should be, things be organized and what for. And that impacts how your shopping feeds work. The efficiency of your shopping feeds, not just SEO.
Matt Edmundson (11:29)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Sam Wright (11:56)
The structure of your mega menu, all of that stuff is directly related to the decisions that you make with your naming conventions and taxonomy. Does that answer your question?
Matt Edmundson (12:02)
Mm-hmm.
So
yeah, it does. I mean, it's interesting, isn't it? Because taxonomy is a pretty big deal. And actually what I'm hearing you say is even if I don't have a large catalog yet, understanding it now is going to help me because organically, if I'm growing, I can understand what it is to grow into. So I can avoid the problems maybe that a lot of people grow into organically. Would that be a fair?
Sam Wright (12:40)
Yeah, it would. And that's a really good way to think about it. it, I mean, you could think about it as systems designed for the next stage of your business growth or, know, there's all different ways to kind of, yeah, to kind of frame it. But you're absolutely right. Like getting those decisions now before you add an extra, you know, thousand products can really unlock quite a lot.
Matt Edmundson (12:48)
Yeah.
Mm.
So what sort of things should I be thinking about?
Sam Wright (13:08)
Well, I think part of the problem with all of this is that the kind of ownership of taxonomy is a really interesting question. Does it sit with merchandising? Does it sit with product? Is it development? And quite often a lot of the challenges are because no one's really taken that ownership of it.
Matt Edmundson (13:17)
Mm.
Sam Wright (13:29)
And we've only come at it because, you know, primarily we're an SEO agency and you need to make sure that, know, you've got the right pages on the site to be able to, to optimize stuff. And it's just kind of like, as we've got deeper and deeper involved in this kind of stuff, it's kind of exposed that that's where a big gap is for a lot of these stores.
Matt Edmundson (13:37)
Mm. Mm.
Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. So what, what should I be thinking about then? I mean, you talk about someone needs to own it. So if it's just me in the business or it's a small business, it should be fairly clear that I, that I own it anyway, is the, is the, the, the dude. ⁓ what, what are some of the things I should be thinking about here?
Sam Wright (14:02)
Yeah.
So really it is, again, we work primarily with Shopify stores and Shopify stores have a very specific structure. You don't have parent child categories. ⁓ So it's all kind of very flat. You have a single level of collections.
Matt Edmundson (14:20)
Mm.
Okay.
Yeah.
Sam Wright (14:29)
And kind of what a lot of people miss on these Shopify stores is, know, taxonomy is typically handled by filters rather than subcategories, but these filters, you know, they're not indexable for search engines. You know, you can't serve Google ads up really effectively on, you know, on a filter. But that's about where I think it's the, well, you know,
Matt Edmundson (14:44)
Yeah.
Sam Wright (14:52)
I'm going to do a post on LinkedIn on this tomorrow where we look at all of the data across all of the Shopify stores that we work with and look at the impressions by page type. So is it blogs that get the most visibility? Is it collections? Is it products? And it's about 35 % of all impressions come on collections, which is much more than products and blogs, et cetera. It's basically the entry point for most people when they're doing
Matt Edmundson (15:07)
Mm.
Yeah.
Sam Wright (15:22)
like actual new ⁓ product discovery, like new customer, that kind of level in the journey. And yeah, most stores really aren't categorized in the right way, that align with how people are actually looking for their kinds of products.
Matt Edmundson (15:31)
Yeah.
Okay, so let me just ask a few questions here as I'm busy scribbling notes, just for the sake of language, if I can, across different platforms. So Shopify collections, are they in effect category pages on a non-Shopify site? So for example, if I go to Apple's website, a category page would be iPhone and it lists all the different types of iPhones.
Sam Wright (15:47)
Thank
Yes.
Matt Edmundson (16:11)
that it is selling. That's what I would call a category page. If I went to a clothing company, it would list t-shirts under the t-shirt category. And that's what you mean by collections. Have I got that correct?
Sam Wright (16:22)
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's a Shopify specific terminology. A collection is a category.
Matt Edmundson (16:26)
Yeah.
Okay. So you said that we're not categorizing the right way or not defining these collections the right way. What do you mean by that?
Sam Wright (16:36)
So most people are not granular enough with their categorization. So t-shirts is a great example. ⁓ A lot of stores will just have a t-shirts category. They won't subcategorize those t-shirts to the level that matches how people are actually searching. And that's both on-site and off-site for Google Ads, SEO, it's all the same kind of thing.
Matt Edmundson (16:43)
Okay.
Yeah.
Sam Wright (17:02)
So, you know, it's not just t-shirts, it's blue t-shirts, blue striped t-shirts, you know, you can go several levels deep. And the real opportunity for a lot of stores is how deep you go in that categorization because you've got products that other people don't have. And that's the easiest way to capture new users.
Matt Edmundson (17:10)
Mm.
Yeah.
Okay. So, and again, this is interesting, isn't it? Because if I was to think about, if we stick with the t-shirt example, and this may or may not be a good example, if it's not Sam, we'll figure one out that is.
Sam Wright (17:34)
I have a special
talent for choosing really bad examples. It's nice to see. Yeah, I'll see where this goes.
Matt Edmundson (17:38)
Ha ha ha ha!
Okay.
Yeah, let's see where it goes. If I go to a t-shirt store, would, or a clothing store, I would see t-shirt as a category. And then I would see colors as filters. Or as we like to call it in our, in our place, they're variants and you filter on a variant. So, but you said a blue category or a category might be blue t-shirts, whereas I would have seen a category as t-shirts.
then you can filter by the variant on the colors, if that makes sense.
Sam Wright (18:15)
Yeah, yeah, it does. again, maybe maybe this isn't the best example for the kind of level of granularity. Maybe like if we imagine sofas as the parent category, ⁓ like blue sofas, blue four seat sofas, blue four seat corduroy sofas. And you're like that filtering process, you know, that is how people do search.
Matt Edmundson (18:27)
Mm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sam Wright (18:42)
But
the problem is you can't serve those pages up like for ads or for SEO. So you kind of need to break them out. this kind of, the easiest way to do that is by having a kind of secondary navigation. And if you look at Marks and Spencer's or ASOS or any of the big stores,
Matt Edmundson (18:49)
Right.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Sam Wright (19:06)
That's what they'll do. They'll break out the popular subcategories and have them just below the intro copy usually. And that's kind of what they're doing. ⁓
Matt Edmundson (19:07)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they do that quite well. And
actually this is, I mentioned at the start that, you we've, we've read on the e-commerce podcast website. Now before the website, it's gone through various iterations. When we start, we just wiped it on square square space because we just didn't have any time to do anything other than do the podcast. We then developed our own platform. But it was quite basic in the sense that
⁓ we just had, you know, the episodes listed almost like a blog feed. ⁓ and there was a search bar. ⁓ and then a few months ago, we realized actually we've got, we've got, we've organically grown Sam to use your language and the website, was not functioning. Like I wanted it to function. Like I went on there as a first time user and I'm like, I just doesn't feel sensible really.
Sam Wright (20:08)
I can't find what I'm looking for.
Matt Edmundson (20:10)
Yeah, exactly. And so we did this big project ⁓ internally about defining our mega menu ⁓ for want of a better expression. And so we looked at what the categories were. We then looked at what the subcategories were. And then we looked at the sub or the topics in the subcategory. That's how we classified it. So we had category, subcategory, and then topic. So on the EP site now, we've got
I've just got it up in front of me. So we've got a top category, marketing and growth. In there, we have got subcategories like messaging and automation, influencer marketing, SEO and content, and so on and so forth. And then under SEO and content, we've got product page SEO, we've got content marketing, we've got technical SEO, then we've got category optimization. And so you can quite quickly now navigate
using that menu. So if you wanted to find out about technical SEO, within one click really, you can see that link and you can go, well, that's marketing and growth or technical SEO. can click that. And then all of the episodes we've done, which are connected to technical SEO, then come up on the page, in effect, creating a category page for technical SEO, right? And so I
I, we did this before I knew we were going to have this conversation. It's a we didn't have this conversation six months ago when we started planning. Because now you can tell me everything that I've done wrong. Um, but in essence, we did that for two reasons. And I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on this. Number one was searchability. Like we knew we had a search bar and people could search using the search bar. But I am aware that whenever I go to the site, um, like Marks and Spencer's or ASOS, I like to see the possibilities.
Sam Wright (21:57)
Yeah.
Matt Edmundson (21:57)
So I don't
just type stuff in a search bar. I do on Amazon. I never search on Amazon through the menu structure. I always type what I want. But on like ⁓ &S and ASOS, I always search through the possibilities, just browsing in effect. So we wanted to make it more searchable for the user, but we also wanted to index it better for SEO purposes. Like now Google sees we've got a whole page on technical SEO with some really great content linked on it. It should hopefully.
helpers rank better, I would have thought.
Sam Wright (22:28)
So, yeah, I think it's really interesting, kind of, here you walk through the stages of the taxonomy. And what's always interesting is the further you get into something, into that kind of the levels, the more interesting and more useful that information is. And I think that transfers directly to the
Matt Edmundson (22:46)
Yeah.
Sam Wright (22:48)
to the e-commerce experience as well. Like that idea as well of being reluctant to use search on some stores. I can't remember who it was. I think there's a philosopher that said, you can't imagine a desert island without ever having it described to you before. We can't know something that we don't know exists. And I think this is a bit of a problem with a lot of...
Matt Edmundson (23:08)
Mm.
Sam Wright (23:17)
particularly in the SaaS space, there's this kind of like race towards conversational e-commerce. And yeah, and again, that's like, people need to see what the options are. And again, without meaning to go on too much of a tangent here, we've been through this exercise with the software platform where it pulls out insights from Search Console.
Matt Edmundson (23:24)
Yeah.
Yep.
Sam Wright (23:43)
And yes, we will bring in some kind of conversational things. You can talk to your search console data, but our view was, wouldn't it be better if we decide what the interesting insights are and present those automatically rather than, you know, like, because we know, and we can kind of put that at the forefront.
Matt Edmundson (23:52)
you
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting one, isn't it? I think you're right. And again, this whole thing with AI commerce, I'm really fascinated obviously with where AI is going and, and, and where it will end up and what you can and can't do now with chat GPT and whether you'll just talk to your AI bot and you don't even go to an e-commerce website. I think
I think there'll be a little bit of excitement about it, but again...
Just like if I'm going clothes shopping, I like to go to the shop to see and touch and feel the clothes, because that's a big part of it. Going onto a website, the browsing, the seeing things, the seeing things in context, the comparison, all of that actually is super useful. just to have, unless it's like, I don't know, for cornflakes or whatever, something that I buy regularly, I don't care, just buy me the cornflakes. But if it's for something that, that isn't
Sam Wright (24:56)
Yeah.
Matt Edmundson (25:00)
like that. Well, actually, I want to see the site, don't I? I want to get on there and have a little bit of a play. so, and this is why I'm always intrigued by, I don't know if you've seen them, there's a bit of a fad where e-commerce websites literally had no menu. You just had a search bar. And I'm like, well, it looks great. But I can't imagine you're selling anything other than the four products on the front of your homepage.
Sam Wright (25:18)
Yeah.
you
Matt Edmundson (25:30)
Do you know what mean? was, it was a really strange fad that we went through because of that need to see things in context.
Sam Wright (25:31)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely fascinating. And I think we're, you know, again, without meaning to go too deep, deep into this, um, that AI journey that you're talking about, we do see a bit of a fork there for, um, like for commodity products like corn flakes. Yeah, absolutely. Pure transactional, just get good product data running into AI. And that's what that kind of journey is going to be like. But for fashion brands where brand is important.
Matt Edmundson (25:59)
Mm.
Sam Wright (26:07)
we're seeing a bit of kind of reticence from some fashion brands because they're going to be losing that kind of merchandising experience like through AI. And I think that's, yeah, there's an interesting fork that's going on at the moment.
Matt Edmundson (26:13)
Mm.
There is, it? I don't know if you've ever shopped with a concierge, this kind of service where you go into a concierge, you have a conversation and they come back the next day with the products that they think you want. You know, the sort of the lifestyle and the rich and famous. I've got so much money, I'm gonna have a concierge shop for me and they're gonna come back. I've tried it a couple of times.
And actually I've, I mean, not because I needed to, but because I was really curious about the experience. And I thought, well, goodness me, this is, this is interesting and I'm not enjoying it because I, and this is where, where I feel like AI could be a little bit of a misnomer. think some people will enjoy it. Some people won't. and I'm curious, I'm genuinely curious, you know, about how we do this. ⁓ but bringing it back, Sam, so
Taxonomy, so I need to think about my categories. I need to think about my subcategories, my topics, my collections, whatever the language is, I need to think about that hierarchy. Even on Shopify, which is quite a flat site, I need to present it in a hierarchical way to the user because they will enjoy that shopping experience better. ⁓
How do you determine, suppose?
the categories and then how do you determine how far down you go that rabbit trail? I'm curious to know.
Sam Wright (27:55)
Yeah. so how do we determine the categories? there's, you know, we look at it in a number of ways where there's Shopify has its own taxonomy, ⁓ takes you usually to a point, but then search console data is brilliant for showing how people are actually searching. ⁓ impression data is throws up all kinds of interesting things.
Matt Edmundson (27:58)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Mm.
Sam Wright (28:23)
One great use from analytics actually, and this is a plug obviously, is if you look at the Search Console data for a collection page, what you might see is what we would call attribute searches on a collection. So the collection is blue sofas, but we're seeing impressions for eight-seater sofa.
Matt Edmundson (28:28)
Go for it.
Sam Wright (28:49)
like blue four seat sofa, blue four seat corduroy. And if you've got enough products that kind of correspond with that search, I've just triggered the automated thumbs up animation by being a bit too...
Matt Edmundson (29:00)
The thumbs up. Yeah.
You're on you're on an Apple product, aren't you?
Sam Wright (29:06)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's like through me. ⁓ But yeah, when you see those kinds of search terms at a collection, it's normally, okay, we can drill down another level here. And you can typically keep going until we probably say like three in stock products is probably the limit for how far down you can go. And actually, only having a few products is actually quite a good user experience a lot of the time.
Matt Edmundson (29:15)
Mm.
Sam Wright (29:34)
If you've got three products that are very, very tightly related to that particular search, that's a good user experience.
Matt Edmundson (29:42)
That's really interesting. what if I'm, I'm coming back to the e-commerce podcast website here, what I'm hearing you say is if I've got a page, technical SEO, for example, and on there is 20, 30 different episodes. What I probably should then start to think about doing is breaking those down into smaller subcategories.
Sam Wright (30:01)
Yeah. And funnily enough, this is kind of like the journey we went through with our positioning as well as a business. And we started off as an SEO agency. We sort of specialized in e-commerce. We specialized in Shopify. And it's only really when we went to large catalog Shopify SEO stuff, but it really kind of took off because at that level of specialism, your
Matt Edmundson (30:20)
Yeah.
Sam Wright (30:26)
You know, you go into everything you're doing is about each project advances all of the others and you start to go very, very deep, very, quickly. ⁓ and I think the kind of like what people want from, so listening to this podcast is stuff they can, they can act on, you know, like you can, you can do immediately and you think you go, okay. So technical SEO applies to loads of different platforms.
Matt Edmundson (30:34)
Mm.
Yeah.
Sam Wright (30:55)
So it's not much good to me if I'm on Magento and you're, you like it's all too general. can't execute on it necessarily. You start breaking it down by platform and all of a sudden it starts to, you know, technical SEO for Shopify. It starts from a bit more specific, but then you wrap in large catalog, DTC, whatever. And all of a sudden you've got like exactly your business type and you can get, you know, the information is going to be so much more actionable.
Matt Edmundson (31:00)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's really interesting. So now I've got to go through the website and figure out where we've got too many articles and then break it all down. ⁓ Yeah, that's not going to happen for a while. ⁓
Sam Wright (31:33)
Everything's work,
isn't it? I'm just throwing more work at you.
Matt Edmundson (31:39)
Yeah, no, but it's interesting, isn't it? Because it's not something that I've really thought about actually, in terms of what I've thought, obviously about how to hide the site structure and how to do hierarchy. What I've not done is gone actually even on that one, if I follow that down, blue, Koi Roy sofas, actually, we're still showing 50 products. I would have gone, okay, well, there's this filters or whatever on there.
Sam Wright (32:00)
Yeah.
Matt Edmundson (32:01)
But it's like, actually, how can I break that down again? So it's easier in the main navigation to get straight to the page that you want. And also from an ads point of view and also from an SEO point of view, to get straight to the page where you want. I think that's quite clever. I've not really broken it down further. I think mainly because I've never needed to go that deep, I don't think. ⁓
But it's only recently, there's a few projects I've got involved in where we're having hundreds of products on the sites where I've started to think about this a little bit more. So that's really helpful. Well, absolutely. Absolutely. So, go on.
Sam Wright (32:35)
I'm glad I can be of use.
Yeah, just
to kind of expand on that, what you will see, you will see signs of that happening in your search console data. You'll see a particular page where it's triggering impressions for things that are more specific than on that particular page.
Matt Edmundson (32:50)
Yeah.
Right, so actually what I should do now is connect, make sure my search console is connected, which I was explaining to you beforehand. But actually just keep an eye on that. So rather than me just assuming I need to break this down further, actually look at the data in the search console first and pick out what's actually happening as a result of user behavior.
Sam Wright (33:16)
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, one of the things that we do internally, if this was a Shopify store, we'd, we break all of the, we pull out all of the tags and all of the meta fields and then run a script or some, you know, our data team would look for combinations of three or more in stock products. And then we can see whether there's search volume for them. This is actually a feature that we're building into Macalitics, which I'm really excited about.
Matt Edmundson (33:34)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Wright (33:42)
ability to break out subcategories on a collection based on the data and just implement them really quickly.
Matt Edmundson (33:44)
Yeah.
Yeah, that's really cool. That's really cool. What about ⁓ sites then that have less than 250 products? Maybe I've got 20 or 30 products. How should I think about taxonomy there?
Sam Wright (34:00)
you
So I suppose the question is, what rate are you planning to scale? Are you going to be a 250 plus store? In which case you want to get that structure right. And if not, it's really about making sure that you've got that alignment with how people are discovering your products. And I think the challenge for smaller catalog stores,
Matt Edmundson (34:08)
Mm.
Sam Wright (34:29)
is compared to larger catalogs is like what you need to do is very different. We specialized in large catalog stores because typically it's a data problem. You can do some data science stuff to create new categories and scale really dependently. With small catalog stores,
It's really a creative marketing challenge. Most of the time it's all about your positioning. Like are you a challenger brand? Have you got some new product that's going up against an established category, but you're different in which case it's like a content marketing piece and, perhaps then the taxonomy stuff.
Matt Edmundson (34:52)
Mm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sam Wright (35:08)
crosses over into your broader content rather than your product content. What are the use cases for your product? What's your ingredients list that no one else has? And maybe that does tie into the whole future of AI stuff as well. And obviously that can apply to large catalog stores as well, and it's a good thing, but that's the fundamental difference, I think.
Matt Edmundson (35:24)
Yeah.
Mm.
It's a good point. I, I'm thinking about one of the sites that we have, we've got a supplement site called vegetology and it's a handful of products, like 20 products on the site. So it's definitely what I would call a small catalog sites, but the complexity that we've had in defining the navigation is all around the content. ⁓ because again, there's a lot of content on there. ⁓ and there's a lot of ways you can get to in effect, take more vitamin D, right?
and there could be a hundred different routes to that conclusion. And that's more done in our content. So even with the small catalog, we still have to think about taxonomy, but like you say, switch it slightly out more towards the content rather than just the products.
Sam Wright (36:18)
Yeah, supplements is a really interesting space because it's quite congested. Users or customers are quite educated a lot of the time. And there's a lot of real value in being really granular about your information. Like what's your manufacturing process? Because not all supplements are created equal.
Matt Edmundson (36:22)
Mm.
Mm.
Sam Wright (36:39)
This increasingly is where we're seeing a lot of value for, like where you can really differentiate yourself with AI stuff as well. Cause that surfaced in the, in the search queries. Like if you're saying that your product is manufactured in a, a different way, you've got a, you know, a higher dose of this particular bit, maybe doses, some imprecise language, but you know, like that real detail.
Matt Edmundson (36:46)
Mm.
Mm.
Sam Wright (37:05)
is potentially your kind of moat compared to other businesses doing the same thing.
Matt Edmundson (37:10)
Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? I, yes, I would agree. Uh, salmon in a very, very quick way. And I'm intrigued by where SEO is going with relation to AI. Like when we read it, I was saying before we hit the record, but when we did the.
the restructure on EP and it was a big work to project. And in effect, we had 200 and some episodes. And what we did was we had AI analyze the transcript of every episode. And we're like, right, out of this menu structure that we have, what does this relate to the most? Right? So, give me that. And actually having AI read through the transcripts saved hours and hours of work and just thinking through
Well, actually this would connect really well with this topic because of X, Y, and Z. And we had AI score it. And then we had it write like a bespoke description as to why that episode connects to that topic, which we can show on that topic page. And so it's interesting now how we're starting to use AI a lot more into
reducing our workload. Like if I was to try and done this five years ago before AI came about, I would have just gone, this is no way. I'm not, this is way too much work. No, this is way too much work. But now actually, mean, Sadaf, who's the show's producer, bless her, had a shed load of work to do with all of this. But also AI did a lot of the back, back breaking work and it, it makes it really interesting now, doesn't it?
Sam Wright (38:30)
Even in the palace.
Yeah. Though what, what I think it's worked for you because you've got those fundamentals down. You know, there's the basic structure is right. And then you can use AI to quickly go through like the stuff on top. And the problem with most people make with AI, yeah. And we've come at this because, ⁓ yeah, we've been building our own data products for years. ⁓ like before chat GPT came along.
Matt Edmundson (38:55)
Mm.
Mm.
Sam Wright (39:16)
Ian, our CTO has a PhD in machine learning from 20 years ago. So we're pretty kind of well versed in the data thing. And I think the thing we always say is that AI is only really useful when you've got the data engineering bit down. Things need to be organized in the right way and then you can do an AI bit on top. But if you haven't got that kind of structure down, then you're just...
Matt Edmundson (39:21)
Mm.
Mm.
Sam Wright (39:44)
accelerating a load of mess basically.
Matt Edmundson (39:46)
Yeah.
Yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely. We actually had AI research. ⁓ we use perplexity labs, ⁓ to research what it thought the menu structure should be. So it was 70 % there. I mean, again, it, ⁓ a bunch of work saved. was not perfect at all, but it was a good starting point for some conversations and,
Sam Wright (39:59)
and how close was it?
Matt Edmundson (40:13)
And it can just spend 10, 15 minutes going away and researching and then categorizing and subcategorizing and do what he thinks. But like you say, you the reward data from your search console from what's going on. Don't you? And now we can optimize it. Now we can, we can change things around by incorporating that data pretty easily. ⁓ but just using AI, just to give you that starting point was so helpful. Yeah.
Sam Wright (40:35)
Yeah, that getting over that barrier of
Yeah, and I swear like 80 % of my working days talking to chat GPT. That's probably
Matt Edmundson (40:43)
Hahaha
⁓
Sam Wright (40:46)
working through things step by step. That's probably how I spend most of my days now.
Matt Edmundson (40:48)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. It's fascinating. I'm the same way. And again, with SEO and with like menu structures, like there's a few sites I've been looking at in relation to one of the sites that we've got that we're, we've, we're, we're working on at the moment. And, ⁓ again, just using AI, go to this website and analyze this menu structure for me. Tell me why it's done it the way it's done it, break it down. What's the psychology, what's the search engine optimization? Why does it work? Why does it not work?
And again, it's not going to be spot on balls accurate, but it's going to give you a really interesting starting point, you know, and, and, and actually I find that really, really helpful. ⁓ Sam, listen, the time man has gone already. It's just remarkable. ⁓ how do people reach you? How do they connect with you? If they want to do that, let's get that in.
Sam Wright (41:35)
Yeah, absolutely. So you can go to our website, which is www.blinkseo.co.uk, or can drop me an email on sam at blinkseo.co.uk or I'm on LinkedIn, unfortunately. It's a necessary evil, but I'm easy to contact on that. of course, yeah, Macalitics is on the App Store as well.
Matt Edmundson (41:50)
Yeah.
Fantastic. We will of course put all of those links in the show notes, which you can get along for, you can get for free along with all the other bits and bobs in the newsletter. If you're subscribed to it, if you're not go subscribe to it, of they'll be on the website. And of course though, if you're on the podcast, they're going to be in the podcast app. If you're on YouTube, it'll be in the description. Just go and reach out to Sam and say, how's it Sam? You know, someone's been around a while, right? Digital stuff when they still use www.
when referring to a web URL.
I'm like, Sam's old school. He's using www. This is funny. It's Sam, listen, let me, let me do two things while I remember. Number one, let me ask you for a question for me. This is where I take your question and we'll answer it on social media. So what's your question for me,
Sam Wright (42:37)
So it's posted on GeoCities.
So what would you say is the biggest challenge that you've seen with taxonomy? ⁓
Matt Edmundson (43:05)
Okay. I will answer that question on social media. I'm not going to answer it now. I will think it through. I actually know how I'm going to answer that, but we'll put that on social media. If you want to find out more about that, come follow me on LinkedIn as well as Sam Edmondson. And I will put it on there at some point in the non-todicent future. Sam, listen, before we end the show, I'd like to do this thing for the people that have stayed to the end that are that committed to listening to all the content. God bless you. It just really helps us with our...
analytics. We have started doing this feature called saving the best till last and this is where I'm like right Sam you've got two minutes I want you to give us your best tip the best piece of advice that you can give us that we've not already talked about for someone who is listening to the show on the topic of taxonomy you have got two minutes sir the microphone is yours
Sam Wright (43:56)
Okay.
Good stuff. okay. We appreciate that taxonomy is based on product data. I think the real thing that's going to set a lot of businesses apart in the future is by bringing in attribute data that is, that other people don't have, and that is based on things like personas and use cases. So this is kind of more human data, I think is really going to be very, very important.
So how can people use your products? Not base attributes. There was in the ChatGPT announcement, I think it was back in March, it gave an example of someone searching in ChatGPT and it's, want to see the best coffee machine under $200 that captures the taste of coffee in Italy.
There's some traditional attributes in there of price and product type, but then how do we optimize for captures the taste of coffee in Italy and that kind of softer data that's more persona based and use case and ⁓ benefit based. Getting that into your product data, I think is going to be something that really, really sets lots of people apart. When, especially when we're potentially moving into this world where someone might not touch the website.
So how are you going to have that kind of brand messaging in a way that's portable and ready for optimization across loads of different surfaces, whether that's chat, GPT, your ads feed, et cetera. So really it's personas use cases, start modeling that into your data now. And that's going to put you in a really interesting position with the way things are going.
Matt Edmundson (45:29)
Mm.
Fantastic. And how would you do that? Would you do that with specific attributes? Is that just content in the content itself? How would you structure that?
Sam Wright (45:53)
So I think there's a case for, we don't really know how a lot of this stuff is going to work just yet. We don't know what field is going to be, you know, like a persona type in the new chat GPT shopping feed or whatever. But if you've got your data broken down like that, you can map it to whatever column appears in the future. yeah, I, know, depending on how you're set up.
Matt Edmundson (46:16)
Yeah.
Sam Wright (46:21)
start recording that stuff in your PIM, ⁓ or you could have it as a Shopify tag, Metafield, whatever, and then it's there. And immediately you can start to do things with it though. ⁓ If you've got your persona types clearly laid as a Metafield in Shopify, you could use that for custom tagging, like ⁓ on a collection page, best for X.
Yeah. And that kind of curated experience we know works really, really well, but it's really about like, start thinking about your data in that way and start kind of modeling it as best as best you can.
Matt Edmundson (47:01)
Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, there you go. Top tip for those that stayed till the end. You know now how to future proof your business. Sam, thank you so much for, yeah, absolutely. Thank you for joining me, Brad. I really enjoyed the conversation as always. I've got lots of notes, still got lots of questions, but that's just the way it goes really. But genuinely really appreciate you coming on, man. Thank you so much.
Sam Wright (47:08)
Well, that's it.
Thank you, it's been pleasure.
Matt Edmundson (47:22)
Well, there you go. What another great episode of the e-commerce podcast with Sam Wright from Blink SEO. And as I said before, do check out Sam's links. They'll be in the show notes. They'll be in the email. They'll be on the website. Do go connect with them and do go say hi. Put into practice some of the things that he's talked about and let us know how it's helped your e-commerce business. But that's it from me. That's it from Sam. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a phenomenal week wherever you are in the world.
I'll see you next time.
