🎧 Listen to this Special Edition
Ernesto Ortiz is back. The founder of Structural SEO gave us his first full interview, on why algorithm updates only hurt the incomplete, and he’s had me on his own show since. So this time we skipped the backstory. This is a Special Edition of Unscripted SEO, a ten-minute lightning round on what’s changing in search right now, and Ernesto kept landing on one move: spell out who your product is for, and who it’s not for. Here’s the recap. Subscribe to Unscripted SEO so the next one lands in your feed.
AI is the new recommendation layer between interest and purchase
I asked Ernesto what’s on his mind in SEO right now. His answer: people are searching differently. The shift isn’t brand new, but AI is now in the hands of people who aren’t tech savvy, his mom and dad included, and they’re using it to ask what to buy and what to do.
There’s a new recommendation intermediary between interest and purchase and it’s driving people’s decision and it’s not sending the traffic so people think it doesn’t matter but it’s really influencing decisions. – Ernesto Ortiz
He’s living it. Ernesto is furnishing a new apartment, and when it came down to which dishwasher fit the price, he asked AI.
I ask it for the recommendation and I sort of go with what it tells me. – Ernesto Ortiz
Google still has a job, just a later one. He uses it to check availability, pricing and reviews. He thought that was his own habit until he started asking around and found a lot of people work the same way. I pointed out that this is the first holiday season where AI recommendations play a major role in what people buy. If the click never comes, your analytics won’t show the influence, but the decision still got made.
Product pages that say who it’s for and who it’s not for
My follow-up was about the bottom of the funnel: refund information, shipping, packaging and the product page itself. It doesn’t matter if you have a thousand products anymore. AI makes it efficient to give every one of them a detailed entry. Ernesto agreed and went further.
Every attribute and feature needs to be thoroughly covered and explained in a way that it’s very simple to do and understand. – Ernesto Ortiz
He’s done this with a couple of clients, working through most of their product pages with four questions:
Who’s it for? Who’s it not for? What does it include? What doesn’t it include? – Ernesto Ortiz
The point is being extremely clear, including about what the product doesn’t do. He didn’t share numbers, only that “we’ve just had great results with that.”
Why rank tracking data can’t be fully trusted right now
The other change on his radar is the tools.
It seems we can’t trust tools as much as we could a couple of weeks ago. – Ernesto Ortiz
He’s digging into what he calls the poisoned results thing, and he hasn’t made up his mind whether it’s a bug or intentional. What bothers him is the gap: results served to automated requests aren’t the same as the ones a human sees, and that makes decisions harder.
You have to go back to manual because how are you gonna trust results that are thirty percent off? – Ernesto Ortiz
That thirty percent is Ernesto’s own framing of the gap, not a measured figure. His point holds either way: if the rank data is off, the decision you make from it is off too.
Dark queries in Search Console and the growing long tail
I brought my own worry to the table: dark queries in Google Search Console. In my dark-click study of 38 Search Console sites, covering 12 months and about 4 million clicks, the mean site got no query data for 63.6% of its clicks, and the median site 72%. John Mueller chimed in on a search community Slack I’m in and confirmed that these are anonymized queries, ones searched fewer than a couple dozen times a month, and that the anonymization isn’t going away. Between poisoned rank data and a blind spot that size, I told Ernesto we’re almost back to the billboard stage of SEO, where all you can see is general awareness.
Ernesto’s take: the query hiding isn’t new.
It’s never been different and it’s always been quite annoying. – Ernesto Ortiz
What is new is the size of the long tail.
The long tail is now becoming more and more big because people are able to do just more niche questions to their specific situation because AI is able to resolve them. – Ernesto Ortiz
His example is shampoo. Ask Google for the best shampoo for a thirty-year-old with a specific problem, in a specific climate, with a specific hair type, and “it would be a terrible result.” AI gives you a precise answer.
If you don’t provide very specific content in the very specific places you need to provide it in a very clear way, you’re not getting picked up. – Ernesto Ortiz
That’s why small, niche brands sometimes show up above massive industry giants. They went specific, “because they’ve actually defined it and talked about it.”
Your action item: describe who your products and services are for
I closed by asking for one thing he’s added to his SEO workflow. He said he adopted it closer to two years ago than one, and that not a lot of people are doing it.
You need to grab all the features and attributes of the products and services that you sell and describe them really well and describe who they’re for. – Ernesto Ortiz
Then comes the step most pages skip: say who they’re not for, by inference or literally if it’s clear. My examples on tape were a product built for product managers who use additional analytics platforms, and a bucket of interior paint that says it’s for homes with long winters, anybody in the northern latitudes or in Canada dealing with a lot of snow. Specific is useful.
If you want this as a step-by-step play, read the SEO Arcade breakdown of Ernesto’s product page audit. For what it changed in how I write product copy, see my take on jeremyriveraseo.com.
Connect with Ernesto Ortiz
Structural SEO works on SEO and AI SEO for all sorts of clients. Ernesto sees AI SEO as an extension of the same work, and if you want to know how they do it, get in touch.
- Agency: Structural SEO
- LinkedIn: Ernesto Ortiz
The Unscripted SEO Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and find every episode at unscriptedseo.com.
