Special Edition: Ernesto Ortiz on Who It's For and Not For

AI is now the recommendation layer between interest and purchase, and Ernesto Ortiz of Structural SEO says the product pages that get picked are the ones that spell out who a product is for and who it is not for.

This is a Special Edition of Unscripted SEO: a 10-minute lightning round and a return visit. Ernesto already knows the show, so Jeremy Rivera skipped the origin story and asked what's changing in SEO right now. His answer starts with his mom and dad asking AI what to buy and ends with one action item you can start on today.

His first full interview was about why algorithm updates only hurt the incomplete. The full recap of this Special Edition has the whole conversation.

In this Special Edition

• AI is the new recommendation layer - "There's a new recommendation intermediary between interest and purchase, and it's driving people's decision." It's not sending the traffic, so people think it doesn't matter. "But it's really influencing decisions."
• How he picked a dishwasher - furnishing a new apartment, "I ask it for the recommendation and I sort of go with what it tells me." Then he checks Google for availability, pricing and reviews.
• Who it's for, who it's not for - Jeremy says there's no excuse for thin product pages, even with a thousand products. Ernesto went through most of the product pages for a couple of clients: "Who's it for? Who's it not for? What does it include? What doesn't it include?" In his words, "we've just had great results with that."
• Can you trust rank tools? - "It seems we can't trust tools as much as we could a couple of weeks ago." Ernesto hasn't made up his mind whether the poisoned results are a bug or intentional. His question: "how are you gonna trust results that are thirty percent off?"
• Dark queries - Jeremy's dark-click study of 38 Search Console sites found the mean site gets no query data for 63.6% of its clicks, and the median site 72%. Jeremy says John Mueller confirmed in a search community Slack that these are anonymized queries, ones searched fewer than a couple dozen times a month, and that the anonymization isn't going away.
• The long tail keeps growing - hidden queries aren't new to Ernesto. What's new: "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." Think a shampoo question with your age, climate and hair type.
• Small brands above the giants - "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." That's why small niche brands that "actually defined it" show up above industry giants.

The action item

Ernesto adopted this about two years ago, and few people do 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." And, "if it's clear, who they're not for."

Jeremy was a guest on Ernesto's own show too: The Podcast Link Building Strategy You Can't Fake or Buy.

Chapters

• (00:00) Ernesto's back for a lightning round
• (00:59) AI is the new recommendation layer
• (01:50) How Ernesto picked a dishwasher
• (02:25) Product pages: who it's for and who it's not for
• (03:35) Can you still trust rank tools?
• (04:20) Dark queries in Search Console
• (06:57) The long tail keeps getting longer
• (08:26) Action item: describe every feature and who it's for
• (10:10) Where to find Structural SEO

Notable quote

"The biggest change is people are searching different." - Ernesto Ortiz

SPONSORS: uSERP, the GEO agency; Oleno, shared marketing context for AI tools; and ClearLead Digital, property management SEO. uSERP, Oleno and ClearLead Digital are paid sponsors of the Unscripted podcast network. Links to them are marked as sponsored.

Unscripted SEO is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. More episodes at unscriptedseo.com.