Harry Sanders: We've been doing this for 10 years now, doing SEO and we're pretty damn good at it and we've gotten very consistent at it. It'd be nice to also experience that from the brand perspective. We just ran some fake ads, some like AI creative bits and pieces and just were using it as a guide to see what can we expect to pay. A suitcase comes together, it doesn't have to be just a big box. And that's what we're really playing with and innovating with. And it's just like new study by Caddy Luggage. Boom. That's the link, right? And Google sees that and goes, wow, these Caddy Luggage guys, huh? They're doing studies and data around travel.
Nathan Bush: Hey, it's Nathan Bush or Bushy joining
Nathan Bush: you from the land of the terrible people here in Brisbane, Australia.
Nathan Bush: One of the biggest criticisms, and to be honest, frustrations that many brands have
Nathan Bush: with agencies or service providers in E commerce is, is that they haven't actually walked the walk of being a brand or a retailer before and kind of makes them think that they just don't get it. Well, today we have an agency owner who's actually taken that on board themselves and have gone out and created their own brand and having huge success with it. Today I am lucky enough to be rejoined by Harry Sanders, who is the incredible founder of of SEO agency Studio Hawk, Australia's largest SEO agency and partner of Add to Cart. And Harry joins us because he's launched his own luggage brand called Caddy K A D I and having incredible success 12 months in. Harry first joined us on Add to Cart about three years ago where we talked and nerded out on all things SEO and heard about some of the incredible work that they're doing with clients such as officeworks and Bondi Sands. But today we want to leap straight into what does Harry do when he creates his own brand, where does he start, what role does SEO play and what is he doing differently? And it's a fascinating story. He's already launched multiple versions of the product, from Weekender bags all the way through to hard shelled suitcases and got the first range stocked in Maya, appearing in some of Australia's most respected publications. And he tells us how he does that. Today we also discuss the SEO first principles that Harry carried into Caddy when he was creating it for the first time. And Harry has this knack for explaining some of the most complex principles in the most easy to understand basic, usable, actionable methods possible, even when it gets
Nathan Bush: really nerdy in SEO.
Nathan Bush: So he tells us about those principles. He also tells us why in Australia we are underusing digital PR and showcases the incredible success that Caddy is having by leveraging that first and foremost before technical SEO. And lastly, he tells us some of the ways that he set up the business model for Caddy, including running phantom ads before the product has launched, to make sure that he sets the model up correctly to have a wide distribution in retail, being able to run promotions and have DTC all at the same time right from the start. So there is so much to cover here across the Caddy story. We also talk about best practice for SEO and of course it's not an SEO episod. Diving into the future of AI and what that means for SEO and customer behavior. Without any further ado, thank you again to Studio Hawk for making this episode happen.
Nathan Bush: Here's my conversation with Harry Sanders, founder
Nathan Bush: of Studio Hawk and co founder of Caddy. Harry, welcome. Well, I was going to say welcome to Add to Cart, but it's a welcome back to Add to Cart. How good to have you back here, mate.
Harry Sanders: Thanks mate. Good to be back.
Nathan Bush: A lot has changed. I think we were three years ago that we first had you on the podcast Telling the Harry Story and the Studio Hawk story. So much has changed. Firstly, thank you for partnering with Add to Cart this year and it's been awesome to do events like Online Retailer with you and the team as well as have your support to keep this podcast going. So thank you so much for that. But so much has changed in your world. We've obviously got a lot of changes in SEO which we'll talk about, but you've also gone and just casually launched a consumer brand as well, as well as an SEO agency.
Harry Sanders: Yeah, I thought I would step on over and see if it's all it's cracked up to be.
Nathan Bush: Has it cracked up?
Harry Sanders: Well, it has, but it's completely different game, isn't it? It is.
Nathan Bush: So tell us about it. What inspired you to go from the cushy world of agency where you do nothing but sit around and tell clients what to do all day, to actually running your own brand? What was the inspiration?
Harry Sanders: There was a couple things. So I've always wanted to do product. I always love look, I love agency and I love being able to help brands grow. There's something about seeing your brand being used and I was hanging out with a lot of my buddies who've got e comm brands and you know, we'd walk past places and they'll be, oh look, someone's using you know, my, my business. And I'm like, that's so cool. I mean, our equivalent is you see clients and you're like, oh, wow, that's super cool. I can see my client in the real world. And then the second part of it was, whoa, man. We do a lot of this stuff for brands, right. And that's great. Now obviously the deal is we grow them, they give us a retainer, but they obviously have the upside. Right, Makes sense. It's very fair. I thought, well, what if I had some of the upside as well? You know, we've been doing this for 10 years now doing SEO and we're pretty damn good at it and we've got a very consistent at it. It'd be nice to also experience that from the brand perspective. So I stepped away from the operations of Studio Hook about a year ago, so step back a little bit more. And I thought, you know what, this is the time and a great opportunity presented itself with someone that has a lot of background in E Comm. So she was able to handle the product stuff and the logistics and, you know, background in Proctor Gamble. And I was to come in and help do the SEO and help with the marketing.
Nathan Bush: So you're the marketing guy.
Harry Sanders: That's it.
Nathan Bush: And who's your, who's your co founder, Mayor of Amber?
Harry Sanders: So she's done a few different businesses in the past. Quite successful. Yeah. Lovely.
Nathan Bush: And was it always going to be luggage?
Harry Sanders: Yeah, it was always going to be travel. Right. So we knew especially, and you know, everyone's always asking about July, you know, July, we're coming out. They've revolutionized our travel space and you know, incredible story, incredible job. But I just saw there was so much more in that sector that Aussies love travel and there's a lot of room in that space.
Nathan Bush: Was this gut feel that there's a lot of room in that space or did you have some SEO insight magic to that?
Harry Sanders: Little bit of column A, little bit of column B, mate. So Studio Orcs now operating in the uk, the US and Australia. It's kind of great story around going global. And I'm in the US all the time and I travel with my suitcase and I traveled with a variety of different suitcases in the past and I just thought like, they're all kind of the same, like they look different from the outside, but they're all kind of the same. And I just thought, imagine if we had bags or travel items that were more purpose based, built. And so that was kind of where the idea was born. And we started looking at that from a keyword volume and SEO perspective to see if. If there was that gap.
Nathan Bush: Okay. And did you put a special request into the product team when you were first launching to go, I've got this very specific problem when I travel. I want to see this in the
Harry Sanders: products that we make mate so many times. I got about a 30% success rate on that. The product guys are very dialed in and obviously they know, like, they know what works and what doesn't. I'll be like, oh, imagine if we had like, a magnetic front of the bag or something. And they're like, yeah, cool. So on the plane, that magnet's going to come off and then they're going to lose the front part of their baggage. And I'm like, oh, yeah, that's good. You'll listen.
Nathan Bush: You're the product guys and I'm the marketing.
Harry Sanders: That's it. That's it.
Nathan Bush: Awesome. All right, so tell us about. For people who haven't come across, Caddy launched in 2023. You said that you've stepped away from the operation about a year ago to really focus in on growing it. What's the USP behind Caddie? You kind of gave us an insight there, but, like, do have amazing brands out there. Like July. Big shout out to Aan, because he's going to hate me when he hears about us doing this episode together. All the way through to your Samsonites, your Antlers, everyone of that world that's been around for a while, what's the USP for Caddy?
Harry Sanders: Yeah, so I think, you know, how we describe it is you've got your Julys, your Samsonite, your Antlers, you know, a lot of fantastic brands, and they're really focused around the positioning and the visual identity of the product. Right. Which is great. And most of them, with the exception of Antler, probably more premium, kind of, you know, expensive. Caddy's USP is more around having a premium mass product that's designed with kind of modularity or different travel experiences. So one of the things that we're known for is our weekend a bag. So not specifically just luggage, though we do sell a lot of luggage. But we have this weekend bag that is so popular because it's got this little compartment at the bottom and it's waterproof, and it's where you can put your shoes or other soft items so you can separate out your lug luggage. And so girl weekends and stuff like that, that just pops off. And then we've got a backpack which has got a similar Mechanism, which is we launched about a month ago and that's doing really well. And the USP is kind of, we say, innovating the way that people pack. So I'm sure, Nathan, when we went to Goldie together, we had very different configurations in our suitcase. Right.
Nathan Bush: Are you saying I'm disorganized?
Harry Sanders: I'm saying I'm disorganized. One of us is certainly. And you know, there's, there's packing cubes, but there's a lot of innovations to be made in the way that a suitcase comes together. It doesn't have to be just a big box. And that's what we're really playing with and innovating with.
Nathan Bush: I hate packing. It's the worst activity in the world.
Harry Sanders: Yeah, me too, mate. That's why I'm trying to like make it as streamlined, as efficient as possible. So you can take stuff from your backpack, plug it straight into your suitcase so you have like a bag always ready to go and just different bags for different occasions.
Nathan Bush: And from a production perspective, obviously that's a brand new world for you, but luckily you've partnered up with some experts in the space. Have you run into many challenges as you come into it fresh, full of ideas? Are there many restrictions around what you can and can't do or what people are willing to manufacture?
Harry Sanders: I mean, it's funny, it reminds me a lot of programming, right? And bear with me here, in programming, sometimes someone might say something, they're like, oh, we need to change this title on all the SKUs that we have. And you're like, that's like a week worth of dev hours. And they're like, what? It's because it affects so many different things. And then sometimes it might be like, oh, we need to change this whole page to look completely different. You're like, yeah, it's probably two hours work, you know, and as a programmer, it's funny because you know what tasks are really easy and what are really hard, but might seem easy.
Nathan Bush: And the flow on effects totally products
Harry Sanders: a bit similar, right? You're like, okay, cool. Oh, we're doing new zippers call ykk. That sounds great. Let's roll those out. And they're like, cool product cost of that is blah per zipper. And now the bag costs an extra 20 bucks. And you're like, well, hold on, there's only like two zippers. How does that flow on? They're like, well, because it's just these cascading things. And E Comm owners will know exactly what I'm talking About I understand their world now. Like, it's not just. I'm not just throwing SEO at everything. I understand that there's a bigger game at play. So that's what's been fun to learn. That's awesome.
Nathan Bush: And how good that you can now be in the shoes of some of the founders. Because I know that you work with businesses all the way from officeworks through to founder led businesses, but so nice to be able to be in their shoes. And when they're talking about problems, you go, oh, actually I had that problem as well.
Harry Sanders: A hundred percent. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: When you set this business up, did you set it up intentionally at the start? Two questions here on how you set it up. Did you set it up to be global? Let's start. There was the intention that it would always go global from the start. Even though you started in Australia.
Harry Sanders: It's kind of a complicated one. Not really. We kind of looked at Australia and you know, I'm sure we'll come to. We launched it into Maya, right? So we launched it in collaboration with Maya because we knew it would get immediate backing behind it. And also it gives us the funds to then develop the product further because we're on kind of iteration one of the product at the moment. And there's so many exciting things in the second iteration of the product that we're launching soon that our partnership with Maya has been able to give us and also the customer data from all of my customers. And yeah, so that's been huge. But like, there's been opportunities, but we really want to focus on Australia.
Nathan Bush: And now with all the tariffs, you were like, fuck that.
Harry Sanders: I'm standing here. Fuck that. But we've both got the experience to take it global if that's what we choose. But yeah, we'll see where the brand takes us.
Nathan Bush: That's not a small feat. Getting Maya to partner with you in the first edition of the product, how'd you pull that off?
Harry Sanders: I think the great thing about like this not being my first business, there's so many cheat codes, right? So I would always look at people that are like. I would look at caddy in the past and be like, man, guys must got so lucky or whatever. Like, how the hell do they do that? Right? Because when you start your first business, you can't really walk into Meijer and say like, hey, we're gonna do this. But the great thing about having you can.
Nathan Bush: They just won't like it.
Harry Sanders: When you sit up on the shop, they call security and you're just like, well, I'm just trying to sell some bags. But the great thing about having some prior success is it's not like those superannuation ads where they always do, you know, prior success does not dictate performance. You know, whatever the spiel they do brands like working with you because you'd be like, well, I've done this already. I think I could take this brand here and I've worked with these brands, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, great, cool. Let's, let's do something. So you're not that scrappy, you know, where you might still be that scrappy entrepreneur, but it's not your first before. Yeah, you've built things before. Built hundred, you know, plus team members and built countless econ brands for other people.
Nathan Bush: Were my a studio Hawk client.
Harry Sanders: I can't confirm or deny that one, but we're certainly doing some things.
Nathan Bush: Okay, all right. So there was a connection at some point there.
Harry Sanders: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: And then my second follow up question for that because I went onto the site and had a good look around. You're running at the moment a 40% off sale.
Harry Sanders: Yes.
Nathan Bush: And I'm assuming because. And it might be finished by the time this episode goes out, but I'm also assuming that because you have set this up with Maya and going to retail that you've set up the pricing model and structure so that you can discount and you can give away margin right from the start. Was that important?
Harry Sanders: That'd be very smart, Nathan. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. You know, when you're in retailers with like Maya, they expect a discount. The Australian consumer expects a discount strategy. Now you can go against that. You know, brands like July have been very successful in going against that, but it's a different audience. We're not necessarily targeting the same people of July. And so for us, we went into it knowing that and it's also made it very difficult as well sometimes on the DTC side because what we're competing, our own brand will be competing with Maya versus our D2C and it may, it kills your. You know, one of the reasons why we're so deep in SEO in CAT is because from an ads perspective, you know, our conversion rate, sometimes if someone just shop around on Maya, they'll see a better deal there and go there. And that's rough when you've spent the money to acquire the customer. Now obviously, you know, it's great, it's great for us in the long term because, you know, more sales through Maya, good for us, but not so good on the margin. So, but yes, to answer your question, that was definitely part of the strategy. And now we're going down that path of how do you create distinct product lines that differentiate?
Nathan Bush: Okay. And then how do you hold value in that when you've got customers who can shop around and there might be different pricing in different channels, or they see that it goes on sale off and on throughout the year, how are you going about creating value? Is it through the unique product features that you're pushing that.
Harry Sanders: Yeah, I think you really still have to create value in the quality of the product. And I think one thing we're very lucky with that, you know, it feels like you're getting a good deal and that's very key to these things. Right. When a consumer buys a caddy product, they'll be like, oh, wow, I can't believe I got this 40% off or whatever promotion we're running because it feels like, you know, and it's the same material as a July suitcase. Right. It's the same polycarbonate, it's the same, you know, materials, but you're getting it at a value price. So. Yeah. And then we, we also play with things like gifts with purchase that certainly help, and color bundles. There's all sorts of ways to kind of then produce that value that people
Nathan Bush: want to see when coming up with the pricing structure and the business model. Was there anything in your head from what you've seen over your 10 years of building Studio Hawk and building with brands that were non negotiable for you when you were starting your first consumer product?
Harry Sanders: I think the biggest non negotiable was like knowing what our cost per acquisition was and working back from that. So modeling out and running like fake ads essentially to see what kind of CPAs we might be playing with when we have real customers, and then going back to the customers at order and go, hey, sorry, this isn't a real product, but we're working on it.
Nathan Bush: Tell me how you did that. So talk me through that. How far before launch were you running fake ads?
Harry Sanders: Oh, like pretty much, you know, we were pretty far along with product and then we just kind of ran some ads. Honestly, it sounds cooler than it was. We just ran some fake ads, some like AI creative bits and pieces, and just were using it as a guide to see what can we expect to pay.
Nathan Bush: Wow. And so they run and you're talking meta and Google.
Harry Sanders: Yeah, Meta, Google. And then we started playing around with keyword difficulty for SEO. Obviously we couldn't do an SEO campaign on a fake product, but it certainly was kind of. Yeah. How we piloted it.
Nathan Bush: Okay, so you understand your cost per conversion or cost per customer and then built out from there. Has the experiment lived up to the real world? Once you've launched the product, was it accurate?
Harry Sanders: Great question. Oh, like I love this, this phrase actually directionally accurate. You know, it was like we knew what to expect coming in.
Nathan Bush: Gave you enough information.
Harry Sanders: Totally. But it wasn't like that. It held that, nor did we expect it to hold there. Like sometimes it changes around. Right. Like any e comm business. But it gave us enough to know. Okay, there's opportunity in this category.
Nathan Bush: Okay, cool. And that would have validated your thinking that you're in the right category as well. I suppose.
Harry Sanders: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: And that there was enough demand with that message. So you're going out and you're going to launch and you're putting your marketing guy hat on the product teams or off doing their thing, doing what they do best. When you look at the tech stack for setting up the caddy site and the caddy process, where are you going straight away? What were your tech non negotiables.
Harry Sanders: That was easy because you just worked with again that many. You got to remember we've with hundreds of ecom brands, right?
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Harry Sanders: And you just see these brands, you're like, oh my God, what is this? Right? Like what is this? This, These choices. And a lot of the time and it's not the brand's fault, it's just they don't know what they don't see. Right. They were only working on one brand. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: You get to play with everything.
Harry Sanders: Exactly. So I went straight to Shopify. Easy, figurable, customizable. Rather than, you know, messing around with really complex setups. Straight to Klaviyo, really easy email, kind of consumer stuff. What other tools did we build in the stack? There is quite a few, like quite niche ones that we just kind of rolled in mostly around like, I mean I know the order editing guys really well, so that was a great one to roll in to just make it as seamless as possible. And now we're playing around with new tools for putting the UGC up on our product pages and experimenting around with that and yeah, all of that stuff. We know what tools to use and not use.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, nice. Because even looking at the site, it's a nice site but you haven't overly complicated it or created a huge amount of custom functionality in there. So has that allowed you just to go best of breed basically across the stack?
Harry Sanders: Yeah. And then look, we can go deeper into Those areas, you know, it's about building an SEO foundation, which is what we started with for Caddy. It's like SEO first principles from day one for this website, right? And that's been awesome. And then it's now going, okay, cool. We want to change the Weekender page and make it more of a hero product. We want to incorporate more ugc. Now we've got a bunch of press about Caddy. We now want to do a featured in section. You know, I think a lot of people when they start a business, they kind of, they copy. The worst mistake I see people make is they see a website like Nike or you know, a big brand and they're like, I'm a copy that I'm a replicate the big guys. So worst mistake you can make, right? You really need to start in steps.
Nathan Bush: Okay, so let's talk through those steps. What are those SEO first principles that you stuck to when you're building out the site for the first time?
Harry Sanders: So first principles, your category pages, right? Your category pages need to be like elite, right? Because. Well, two reasons now. First of all, that's where Google wants to send traffic. Second of all, now that's where AI wants to kind of fetch products and dig deeper into. So your category page needs to have internal links, it needs to have text at the top so it gives some context to Google and AI what this actual page is about. That was a non negotiable even just having the different information architecture we call it. So you'll notice that there's shop by color, shop by like range. So we do really well for specific colors of luggage. We do really well in terms of rankings for like kids luggage, you know and we really drill down into those quite niche specific terms because we knew we're not just going to rank out of the gates for luggage. But if we get more nation specific with our information architecture and how we lay out this website that's going to give us traffic.
Nathan Bush: It's a really good call out around category pages in that the way you're thinking about category pages is like what are the categories you can own? Not necessarily just creating pages for every piece of your primary navigation menu.
Harry Sanders: A hundred percent. That's exactly right. So you notice we kind of very deliberate with our category pages and very deliberate on our main menu with what categories we call out like our kids is on our top level category because we know where we can rank really well for kids luggage, right. So that's a major call out. Same with the weekender. We call out things like soft Shell versus Hardshell at the very top in our navigation. Because when people come to the site, they either want a soft shell or a hard shell. They don't want to see like, you know, a lot of brands just do it by luggage. Right. But people know if they want, you know, soft or hard. So you've got to separate these things out and make them very easy categories. So if someone came to it from search or through AI, they're immediately on the page they want to be on.
Nathan Bush: Makes a lot of sense. And just on that text. I think some people struggle with category pages. They either go hell for leather and create all these beautiful custom pages for category pages, or they kind of copy and paste a paragraph from GPT and chuck it at the top and then they just have their standard filtered list of products underneath that. What's your approach to the level of effort you should put into content on those category pages?
Harry Sanders: Honestly, I think you can. Again, this is where it depends what stage. If you're starting out, just having a paragraph there is great. If you have a ton of products, then you can start faceting down that. If you don't, you know, you can have a bit of text and maybe some internal links there. If the site's quite complicated, ours isn't that complicated, so we haven't really gone hard on the internal linking. But, you know, when I think about our work with Bondi Sans and stuff, we've gone really deep into the above the fold at the bottom of the website, really faceted navigation across. And that's allowed them to really boom. And you'll see in Caddy, you know, if you're listening to this, maybe two years later, you'll see very different category pages, probably have faceted navigation, probably have that below the fold content because we've now got more authority and more opportunities to leverage that. Whereas when you try and over optimize that at the very start of your E commerce journey, well, you're doing just that. You're over optimizing and so you're just not. You're not getting the yield you should.
Nathan Bush: What do you mean by over optimizing as a new player? Like, I didn't realize that was a thing that you could over optimize.
Harry Sanders: Yeah, so, I mean, this happens a lot. So basically when you're starting out, you know, if you try and have the level of categories or information architecture or the frequency of blog posts or content that all these big players are putting out, you just disappear. Right. If you just try and start with thousands of skus they just get overwhelmed
Nathan Bush: and they just don't know where to look.
Harry Sanders: Totally. You know, you have a semblance of PageRank, or authority, we'll call it for the purpose of this, that if you dilute too far, you know, Google doesn't know who to show you for. AI doesn't know who to show you for. So by being really specific in with what content you put on a page and how you call it out, that's how you want to kind of own that rather than, you know, putting out a ton of content. And then Google's just like, yeah, I'm not sure. You don't have the kind of credibility to back this up.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, you're not that important. And I'm not going to go to the effort to look through all your pages.
Harry Sanders: Exactly. Exactly.
Nathan Bush: Okay. That's a really good way of putting it. Thank you. All right, so that's one SEO first principle. What else were you thinking about?
Harry Sanders: Digital pr? I've been talking about this a lot. It is big globally. We are behind in Australia.
Nathan Bush: You were talking about this when we did our podcast three years ago.
Harry Sanders: I know, man. And you know what, Nate? We are not much further, which is good for Caddy, to be fair.
Nathan Bush: Exactly. Makes it hard to sell at Studio Hawk, though.
Harry Sanders: Yeah, yeah, exactly. But, you know, we've been in Escape and we've got all these big travel publications, and if you look at our Semrush graph, I mean, it just looks awesome. You just, you can see the moment where that these big publications are kicking in. You can see us already. You know, keep in mind, we've only been really doing this site for six months because we've been in Maya. So it's crazy to see just the uptick we're immediately seeing.
Nathan Bush: And how are you doing that? Is that old school pr, like, reaching
Harry Sanders: out, trying to, you know, the process is more about coming up with database stories. So some of the stories we ran that was super successful for us is best and worst times to fly. So it's very different than traditional PR because we're not really saying, oh, hey, this is our new luggage. You should, you know, it's cool. We're saying. Or we're going to escape. And we're saying, and this is another one we did. Here's. The airline was the most hidden fees. Right. And so they escape. Want to run that story. I'd love to run a story about, you know, hidden fees. These big publications don't want to run a story about your new luggage brand. There's a million luggage Brands. So all you do is you get the data together. And we have a data research team and an ideation team and they kind of bring it together and craft this piece and all it is. Nathan, it's crazy. It's this whole piece of content. It's just like new study by Caddy luggage. Boom. That's the link, right? And Google sees that and goes, wow, these Caddy luggage guys, huh? They're doing studies and data around travel. I know they're a travel brand, I understand that they're in luggage. We're going to pump these guys up. They have a lot of authority, they have a lot of big names in the travel space talking about them. And that's the key.
Nathan Bush: That's really smart. I love that, leading with data. And it reminds me of when we interviewed the lads from Boozebud because they were one of the first to really do this. Well, in Australia they used to do their annual survey, beer survey, I can't remember exactly what it was called, but they used to do it every year and it became a kind of a thing every year that the outlets would eventually reach out to them to go, hey, have you got that data around drinking habits and what people are asking for? And that's how they essentially built their brand and built their SEO authority that way, through their own data.
Harry Sanders: Yeah. So there's a lot of first party data if you have it. Otherwise third? Well, Caddy didn't have a lot of first party data so we just started creating stories and using it. But yeah, you'd be amazed the backlinks you can get when you're providing really good kind of content and data and the links and especially in AI, Nathan, because AI looks at a bunch of different sources and references. If you're in these different references and sources, you're getting cited more.
Nathan Bush: Okay, cool. Any other SEO first principles you had front of mind?
Harry Sanders: Honestly, those were the main ones. Just kind of laying out the pages. Everything else is fairly common sense. You know, good pages, making sure our category pages were good, but really just going hard on digital pr. Like if you look at Caddy's SEO, you'll be like, yeah, like fairly basic, you know, there's nothing crazy going on. But then you look at the digital pr, be like, whoa, like, yeah, I
Nathan Bush: thought Harry was really good at this. This is sick.
Harry Sanders: And all of a sudden you just see it ramping, just being pumped up by externals. And that's because, you know, a lot of people really focus on the technical SEO when they're starting out and I always say it's one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Like, Whether you're using H2 tags or H1 tags, when you're starting out and you've got like, no, traffic is not going to be the difference between you getting a million sessions a month and getting 10 sessions a month. Like, it's just not at a bigger size. At a bigger scale, you know, Officeworks might see a 4% increase. 4% is great when you're doing a million. 4% is not good when you're doing 10, 10 people. So focus on the big things like digital PR, which is going to get you to, like, now we're doing thousands of sessions organically and that's climbing every month. You know, I think we're Gonna hit hopefully 10,000 this month. So that's kind of where you wanna be moving it to.
Nathan Bush: It's a really interesting juxtaposition, isn't it, when you think about what moves the needle on SEO? Cause on one hand you've got the technical side, which you made a great point there. It's not gonna get you where you need to be. It'll get you the little percentages. But, you know, everyone pitches. You know, someone in their bedroom doing all the things late at, optimizing things, backlinks, all that sort of stuff. But then actually the real grunt works happens in more of your agency style, pr, form relationships, have conversations, get it out there into the world rather than focusing inwards.
Harry Sanders: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: Which is not the perception of SEO.
Harry Sanders: It's funny, isn't it? Yeah. And I think SEO is very different than. And we spoke about this even three years ago. It's funny, like, SEO is very different than how people perceive it. And, you know, if you can understand first principles of SEO, you're smarter than 90% of SEO specialists, right? Yeah. So I think a lot of people have been carried away with. It's like I'm learning a lot about media buying. Right. Never been my world previously about meta and stuff. And now obviously we see in media buying and everyone talks about it, that it's not so much about the buying or the targeting, it's all about the creative. Right. And SEO is not so much about, you know, the tiny little changes, it's more of the actual strategy behind the SEO. And that's where I really see SEO developing and evolving.
Nathan Bush: Is it difficult for you to jump on board the paid ad bandwagon? Like, obviously being a leader in Australia on SEO, which is, well, some people call it free, but we know it's not free. But and then having to pay zucks every time that you get a click, does that hurt? A little bit.
Harry Sanders: I tell you what, it's made me appreciate SEO even more than I thought I could. Like, I was like, peak appreciation and now I'm like, geez, no wonder. Do brands love this?
Nathan Bush: I really love you, SEO.
Harry Sanders: Yeah, it's. I mean, paid ads, right? Necessary evil. And for some things, like, we really want to focus on our weekender bags and the features. The only way to do that is through, like, that, that storytelling, that visual content, right? But having said, that is so freaking expensive. Like, Studio Hawk is so busy at the moment because so many brands are like, we are just sick of spending so much money on paid ads and we need to be getting that through SEO. And I think this, you know, announcement from Google, you know, a couple days ago at the time of recording this, where they said that the best way to optimize for AI search is to optimize for SEO, has been a big push for brands as well to then go, okay, if that's going to be the new frontier, we need to be, you know, dialed in in this game. But yeah, to answer your question, mate, like, it does sting every time. And it just makes me think, how do I get more free traffic? You know, again, it's not quite free, but it's certainly cheaper than paid ads. Like every dollar I'm putting in digital PR and stuff. Which, by the way, Lawrence Hitches, if you're listening to this, is the general manager of Studiohawk. You need to give me a way better deal on digital PR because I'm paying full rates.
Nathan Bush: Don't you just tell Lawrence what to do?
Harry Sanders: I wish, mate. I wish it was that simple. He wears the pants around here.
Nathan Bush: I know. And he's coming for podcasts too, now. Yeah, I've got a beef with him.
Harry Sanders: Yeah. What's the go, mate? But yeah, so, you know, but it's a lot cheaper even than paying for paid ads. It just is.
Nathan Bush: But you're still doing it.
Harry Sanders: I still have to, you know, you still gotta, like, build the brand. But I'd love to get it to a point where, you know, we've had a few clients now, they're pretty much switched off paid ads. They're just running off SEO and they're so profitable.
Nathan Bush: As you looked at this launching caddy into market, obviously SEOs at the heart of it, paid ads. Is there any other marketing activity that you've started with? Or are those two kind of the foundations?
Harry Sanders: Those are the two foundational ones. We're looking at more, you know, starting to look at viral content and stuff like that, but that's more down the line and we're, you know, with catty, it's kind of like a slow build. We're trying not to just throw resources at it. We're trying to really find that product market fit. We're quite patient with the brand. Something that Studio Hawk taught me. People that are trying to get really quick wins or just like, you know, they, they make short term decisions. Cause they're always just trying to like, you know, make massive gains. But if you compound, like if we're doing 5% improvements per month, right. Like in terms of our efficiency, it's not necessarily our sales. That's huge. That's huge. So just work on the things and focus on the things that are working for us and then as the team grows, as we're making more margin, we can invest in doing other things. But I mean the amount of times I've seen E Com brands just dilute themselves by trying to do everything and as a result they do nothing.
Nathan Bush: Well, I think that also comes back to how you started making sure that you had a market fit and understanding the costs, your main costs that were going to be there and then pricing accordingly. So you're not scrambling every month to hit stupid targets. Right. And that's where you get caught out.
Harry Sanders: Exactly. Right.
Nathan Bush: Let's talk about AI.
Harry Sanders: Let's do it.
Nathan Bush: Let's do it. Google, is it going to be around in five years?
Harry Sanders: You know, it's weird. I think a lot of people think I have a horse in this race and I used to think I did rather. It's like, oh, okay, what if Google dies? It's like, okay, well then Bing or ChatGPT or whatever the hell it is. Or Bing ChatGPT, same thing. I think Google's winning and you asked me that two years ago. I would have given you a completely different answer.
Nathan Bush: I would have been like, I'm the same. I've tried to use as much Google AI as I can at the moment because I think their roadmap is phenomenal.
Harry Sanders: Phenomenal. And so I'm now I still have ChatGPT, but more and more I'm using Gemini now. Right? Yeah. And I think what brands not to get too into it, but I think people are realizing that it's not like people have no loyalty to whether it's ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude. Like people just swap to whatever's the best model. Right. So this whole AI arms race, it's kind of been for moot at this point for my, yeah, from my opinion. But Google's just got so much data, so much time. Remember they were doing generative AI even before ChatGPT was. I just didn't want to release it because I was worried about the implications. But we're seeing this big shift in like all the data suggesting that there's, there's a long answer to this. I'm trying to distill it down. So people are using AI and traditional search engines right now, right? That's what's happening. Traditional search engine you can look at Google's quarterly reports are still growing. AI use is still growing. But they're both still growing. People are using both. Both, Right. So that's kind of cool, you know. And people go, well, what if Google rolls out AI mode, which they have in most regions of the world now and we've been playing with in the US and uk it hasn't been that much of an uptake and it's very similar to the traditional kind of SEO stuff. And then the second part to all of this is all of the backing of how Gemini ChatGPT rank things, as I said earlier, is all kind of underpinned by search. They're just putting another layer on top of it to then prioritize and do all sorts of cool things. And they do something fascinating called fan out queries. I don't know how deep you want me to go into this, but.
Nathan Bush: Oh, let's do it. Lawrence did on our webinar. It was good. So let's, let's go down.
Harry Sanders: Yeah, let's do it. Well, I'll give you, I like giving the simple version of these because I feel like everyone can give really complex, crazy answers. But a fan out query, how it used to work is you do a search, Google does a search for that keyword. Wham, bam, here's your 10 blue links, nice and easy work. Work worked for, you know, 28 years. Good system. Now what they've realized is, well, people don't often know what they want. It's not the search engine's fault. It's just people just type in things and they, they don't always get what they want. So what they now do in AI, because it's super smart, is it does what's called a fan equity. So let's say I say, you know, best SEO company in Australia, right? You're like, okay, cool. Previously that would just return a bunch of links. Now it goes, what is an SEO company? What makes an SEO company Great SEO company reviews, blah, blah, blah. And it just this does like maybe 20 different searches, gets like an average and then like goes to those websites and then compiles an answer for you. Now the higher you rank in Google, obviously the better you're going to do in that compilation because it's basically just doing 10 different searches and looking at the results that come up the top of those searches. But that's kind of the key to it all. So now people have got to think about what related fan out queries might be getting served when someone searches your brand. And Perplexity actually does that automatically. It tells you what queries it's doing. So super cool tool if you are looking to have a look at what searches someone might do.
Nathan Bush: Really interesting Perplexity. I've wrote about this in the newsletter today, which might not be relevant by the time this goes out.
Nathan Bush: But they just partnered with PayPal.
Nathan Bush: Did you see that?
Harry Sanders: Yeah, I did.
Nathan Bush: And they're giving like link your PayPal account and you get Perplexity Pro free for 12 months.
Harry Sanders: Yeah, yeah.
Nathan Bush: So I was like, I'm onto that. Like, so I'm playing around with that at the moment. It's pretty cool.
Harry Sanders: Yeah, I think, look, I think all these guys are just trying to find the way to, to be relevant and where the product market fit is. Which, you know, if I worked at one of these companies, I'd be pretty scared of like Google and all these things. It's like it's, you're really struggling, I think to find the product market fit
Nathan Bush: at the same time. I saw this meme the other day. It was like our kids are gonna look at us so weird when they're like older to go, I can't believe you just typed in one or two words and then you picked the best of 10 blue links to follow.
Harry Sanders: It sounds crazy thinking about it. Like you'd perhaps. What would you search like luggage, like buy luggage. And everyone's like, I need to rank for buy luggage. You know, I need to dominate these films. And now it'll like, if you type luggage into ChatGPT, it almost just sends you back a question mark. It's like, what do you want?
Nathan Bush: Like, give me some freaking context here.
Harry Sanders: Yeah. Now it's like, how long's your trip? Where are you traveling? And then it starts recommending stuff which is, you know, definitely the future. But I certainly think that I was shocked that people are using both. But then I thought about it and I use both. So it does make sense on the
Nathan Bush: fan out Queries does That make it hard because the way you explain it's really great, but as a brand you go, oh, so instead of like picking the keywords that I really want to rank for and going hard on those keywords, do I now have to pick those keywords and then times it by 10 because of all the fan out queries that I've got to rank for. Because in the balance of probabilities that the LLMs are going to rank me on, I need to kind of show up in all. Does it actually make it really hard for brands to optimize what they want to optimize for on LLMs, or is it just following the same SEO principles?
Harry Sanders: It's the same principle. So I think if brands are still thinking about like keywords haven't been that. And maybe this is controversial take, haven't been that like big of a thing in SEO for like three years, like maybe longer. Like you don't go, I don't go to a brand and go, great, I'm going to optimize you just for hard shell luggage. And you're not going to rank for anything else. Like that's the term we're going for. Like it doesn't work that way because you know, you're building an entity, you're building authority and you're building topical authority and these are all cool sounding words, but it basically just means you're building expertise in a particular product or subject that you have. Right? And you're going deep in that. So if you're thinking about SEO is still like putting the right keyword on your page a million times, you're starting at the wrong start line. So does it make it harder for brands? I would say SEO is harder for brands in general. It's a whole new game now. There's just so much nuance to it. But does it mean it's harder to optimize? No, it just means that you need to continue building out your authority and continuing to niche down. Like we're seeing brands like Kogan and Temple and Webster. You know, this is. I actually really want to write a post about this. If I had more time. Really suffering in SEO, right? Really suffering. Because over years they've just broadened out their product catalog so much that no one really knows what their niche is, what their authority is anymore. Nor does Google.
Nathan Bush: And is it also getting harder for them? And I'll pick on Kogan because I don't mind picking on them. That search and AI is also taking into account context. So it's not just how often you show up, but it will go well. Actually, I'll have a look on Reddit and see what the sentiment is here before I recommend this to you.
Harry Sanders: A hundred percent. Yeah. There's all sorts of, like, sentiment analysis. It'll do or give you pros and cons. Reddit's become a big thing that these LLMs look at and I think there's a lot of hype around. I've been using Reddit for, honestly, 16 years too long. I love Reddit and I spent two. I looked at my other monitor just now and I've got Reddit open. So that's awful. But it is. Like brands think they can just jump on it. Like, the only real way to participate in Reddit is if people are already talking about your brand. You've got a decently sized brand and then you can look at what people are saying and you can comment and reply. And it's almost like a customer support channel, like a forum. Right. But if you go in thinking like a marketer, thinking, oh, I'm going to put my product in Reddit and like, I'm going to blow up, oh, yeah, people are going to kill you. Like, people hate capitalism in Reddit.
Nathan Bush: So have you searched yourself on Reddit?
Harry Sanders: Oh, I have once. Luckily, I'm not that important. There's like a couple random things, but nothing bad. So if you're watching this, please don't post something bad. But you can, yeah, you can then kind of reply and kind of of get involved. But if you're getting involved in the conversation rather than trying to dominate, yeah, get involved. But if you don't already have a big brand, then you're not.
Nathan Bush: When you wrote copy and created the landing pages and everything else you did for Caddy, did you do anything differently for AI? So there's a lot of talk. Obviously using Shopify's knowledge base was a tip that's been shared here recently by Heather at Nutrition Warehouse. She saw that 300% increase in traffic from LLMs once. Actually got around to doing that. Talking a lot about getting schemas right, talking about making sure we got FAQs structured correctly. Like the importance of that. Is there any tips around that to make sure that it's set up properly more for an AI engine?
Harry Sanders: Look, there's a lot of kind of things you can do that are like more hot tips. Look, AI, it's really interesting. I don't think you need to intrinsically write different for AI. AI's job is to comb through trillions of words and synthesize that into meaning. That's what it does incredibly well. Right? That's literally its purpose. People try and use it for data analysis or marketing. It's not designed for that. It's designed to synthesize and understand content. Right. So having said that, like, you want your content to be authoritative, you want it to be, you know, FAQs help a lot. You know, some, some easy kind of hacks we have are kind of like on blog posts, having it so that you can have a button to just have it all, like view this in ChatGPT or whatever. And so it feeds up straight into an LLM. Those are kind of little hacks. But in terms of the way you go about content, nothing at this stage suggests massive changes outside of, like, focus on original content. Right. Like, you know, and I think this isn't a new perspective, but if you're just spinning up AI category pages and you're not editing that at all, then that's a bad idea. Right? Edited. At least it needs to be edited. Please, guys, please, please.
Nathan Bush: And tell me about the traffic that you're seeing. You know, when you talked about. We are doing both. We're using Google and we're also using LLMs. Talk me through the traffic that you're seeing come from both onto the Caddy site. Are you seeing much difference in behavior or conversion from the entry path?
Harry Sanders: Big time. Okay, so this, this is a fun one. So like, and again, we have hundreds of clients at Studio Hawk that we can look at their data. There are so few, like, we're talking about even across our brands with the most AI visibility, they're getting 0.1% of their, like, sales or like, revenue through like an AI, like, yes, Perplexity or AI mode or whatever to a purchase. I think that'll improve, that'll go up. But people tend to do this. They'll use AI to research a product, then copy that brand name, go to their website and purchase product so it comes through as a direct traffic source, when in reality it's probably coming through AI. I think the real shame of AI, I think it's a massive opportunity for SEO. I think it's a massive opportunity for a lot of ecom brands. I think the tracking is going to be a bloodbath. I think it's going to be like meta when they remove the pixel. Right? And there's just so many steps removed Now I can tell you we're doing all these changes and visibility is going up and you'd be like, oh, how much more traffic are you Getting. Well, I can't really tell you much, but I can tell you we're getting more conversions now. That's tricky. Right. So I do think the quality of the traffic's obviously much higher. There's a much more commercial intent behind the traffic, conversion rates, you know, all those kind of things. But yeah, I think the trackability across the board for a lot of brands is not going to be that good. But I almost think brands in a way are kind of used to that, you know.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, I was about to say it. So I think we've got two schools of brands at the moment. Those who are of almost given up on attribution and just like it is what it is, like we'll use Myrrh or we'll use whatever it is to kind of get an overall view on what we're doing, whether it's going up or down. And those who are still seeking that silver bullet in attribution from a agency perspective, do you even try and justify that anymore?
Harry Sanders: Well, we have to, we have to justify, you know, why a client would spend. That's, that's honestly a big. It's very different being a brand side. I don't really have to. I know it's working, working, right. I can see my visibility graph increasing. Right. That's all I'm really worried about. I can see conversion, I can see visibility. But if I was, you know, a brand owner and I get it now because they're working on a million things, I used to be like, how do brands not understand how important SEO is? I just frankly don't get it. Now I see because they're working across pay, they're working on product development, they're working on a million different things. Dealing with freaking influencers. Don't even get me started. And by the time they look at SEO and they're just like, like, okay, I don't understand the difference between non branded attribution or branded. I understand what this visibility chart in Semrush that someone's feeding me graphs going up. Okay, what is this? You know, I get how they don't have the time or sometimes a headspace to really understand it. But I think for me as a brand owner with Caddy, I'm not that worried about attribution. I'm worried about my visibility charts going up in Semrush because that does dictate my SEO and my sales. So if my non branded visibility is going down, big problem, right? Big problem. But if my non branded visibility is going up, great, no problem. And then I look at, you know, attribution more in my meta ad, paid ads, but even that's not perfect. Sometimes they bleed over. We use Triple Whale, which is a great tool for that. But I really do think that you can get a baseline. Like something somewhere in the middle is nice. You can't go, I don't know about any of my channels. I don't know what's working. I just do it. Like, that's like, okay, that's kind of dumb. Or it's like I track every single channel's return on roas and profitability. And you're like, okay, well, that's kind of dumb because it just doesn't work like that either. It's not. There's no silver bullet somewhere in the middle where you're like, huh, that's weird. This changed recently year on year. Or this is different. Or I was explaining.
Nathan Bush: You're looking for the outliers.
Harry Sanders: Yeah, exactly. That's useful, right? So if you're sitting around being like patting yourself on the back because you're like, oh, wow, direct traffic's up 50 in this past six months. But my SEO stayed the same and my ads have stayed the same. That's incredible. Well, where do you think that direct traffic is coming from? It's coming from either your ads or your AI or SEO. Like, I mean, you know, that's where you got to look into.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, cool. That makes a lot of sense. You explain things so well. Harry, you mentioned there Semrush and Triple Whale. Are there any other tools that you rely on to get that visibility and to track your marketing?
Harry Sanders: We've got like a internal tool we call Hawk Pulse, which is like an AI visibility tool. Look, I'm not gonna go on this whole rant about, like, proprietary tools. They're great to have. You can do a lot of what we do through Semrush. It's just nice to also have a bit of visibility on the fan out queries and where we're placed. But obviously it's not feasible for any com brand to build our, like, proprietary tool like that. Right. And the tools that are on market, like the reason why we built our own are just so freaking expensive and just bulky. That's why we kind of developed a tool to do that for us and our, our brands. But that's the only other thing that I would say we use for visibility. But you can do, like I said, you can do most of it with Semrush and Triple Whale. Yeah, cool. But again, I mean, Semrush, those Guys are listening to this. They can. They need to hook me up with discount too. We're paying like 20 grand US a month with those guys. I mean, not just Caddy, but yeah, tools like that are expensive.
Nathan Bush: If you can't get a discount. With Semrush as Australia's largest dedicated SEO agency, we are all screwed, mate.
Harry Sanders: You are telling me, Nathan. You are telling me.
Nathan Bush: Okay. I really loved your reflection before around the empathy that you have for brands now when they're dealing with so much stuff. You know, you talked about influencers and everything else, and you're in this of. What I've always respected about Studio Hawk is that you go, we're an SEO agency. We're not trying to do anything else. We're just bloody good at SEO. Have you changed anything at Studio Hawk based on what you've learned around running a brand at Caddy for the last 12 months?
Harry Sanders: Honestly, I think it's just more empath. They're a room of, you know, 120 SEO specialists. Right. Like, and we think about SEO all day, every day. We literally have murals on the wall that says SEO never sleeps because we have the Melbourne office signs off and the London office kicks on. Then the Atlanta office kicks on and it's 24 7. But like I was saying earlier, it's hard when we. We don't feel like brands understand it or respect it or give it the love. But now I just have a deeper understanding of just the amount of things that they're thinking about about. Like, if we think about one thing, brands have to think about many, which is, you know, makes me love what we do at Studio a little bit because it's, you know, you can kind of find someone to do SEO and have it done, but then you've just got so many channels. But the biggest thing we've done differently is more just having our own test environment. I mean, the amount of tests we run for Studio Hook on Caddy now are great. And having people be able to fiddle around with it and play with it and see what it's like for a real brand outside of, like, obviously we can't test stuff on clients without their permission. It's been great for doing that.
Nathan Bush: You can just run wild.
Harry Sanders: Run wild. You know, I've been playing with some AI stuff. I accidentally de index a site for an hour. Yeah. You know, just fun stuff like that. And I got this ping in my email. I was playing with some settings. You know, vibe coding. That's dangerous. Vibe coding. And yeah, just get an alert from this monitoring system we use and it's like, hey, your robots. Or TXT is like forbidding people. I'm like, I didn't even touch the robot. Was it txt? But anyway, it's a fun story.
Nathan Bush: How good? All right. Also, I was going to ask you now that you own a travel company, that must have some pretty good tax implications when you go on holiday, doesn't it?
Harry Sanders: Hey, that's. Look, now we're really thinking deeper. Now we're thinking, I hate holidays. I just like to road test my luggage. No, no, that's what I tell the ato. I hate holidays, mate. I wouldn't do it if I didn't have to.
Nathan Bush: Exactly.
Harry Sanders: But I love. But I have to test the luggage, guys.
Nathan Bush: I have to test. Exactly, you know, well, if you don't do it, who's going to do it? You can't leave it up to influencers
Harry Sanders: who's going to do it. But it is so cool. I mean, just final thoughts on, like, the product is so cool. You know, I was at the airport just last week and you see people wheeling around their caddy bags. But funny story. And this is a little lesson for the E Comm owners or maybe you've done this. I thought it'd be great and great content for me to just kind of, you know, take a photo of some people in their caddy bag walking down the airport. So I'm walking through and I'm like walking past this, like, couple trying to. I'm just trying to get like the right photo. And they turn around and, are you all right? And I realize I look like a creepy guy that's just had my phone out filming them. And I was like, started fumbling over them. Oh, it's like my luggage, you know, brand. They're looking at me like, who is this cooker?
Nathan Bush: Did they get it?
Harry Sanders: I think I got it out. They kind of politely smiled and went on their way, but there certainly wasn't a good explanation. But yeah.
Nathan Bush: Remember the first time you saw it out in the wild?
Harry Sanders: Yeah, probably. Probably a year ago we started the Caddy in the Wild. We have a slack channel for it because we think it's cool. And that's when we first started seeing it and asking people about it. And it's. It's fun just like going to people and be like, oh, what do you think of that bag? And they're like, oh, yeah, I love this bag. I've been traveling around with it. It's been here. And I think it's super cool. Super cool.
Nathan Bush: So cool. Congrats, Harry. I love the evolution. I love that you never sit still. You should start enjoying holidays. I know it's burdensome, but thank you so much for sharing today. And I also love that, that as agency owner that you're kind of putting everything to the test. You're putting it all on the line. Right. Because you're showing that we can walk this walk and it's a really refreshing approach.
Harry Sanders: A hundred percent. I think it's good to put your money where your mouth is. Like, you can say you've grown brands, but to have an E Comm brand, it's. It's really telling. But it's really cool to just, I think still have the agency super focused in SEO as that grows out. But understanding that we're a small part of the public puzzle. Right. But a valuable and an important part.
Nathan Bush: Well, especially for Lawrence, because you should start giving you discounts on it.
Harry Sanders: 100 Lawrence, please hook me up.
Nathan Bush: Harry, thank you for joining us and thank you for all your support on ADD to cart. We really appreciate it. It's been great having you on board and awesome to chat today.
Harry Sanders: Thank you. Likewise.
Nathan Bush: I always get off a call or
Nathan Bush: a conversation with Harry and go, oh,
Nathan Bush: maybe, maybe SEO isn't as complicated as
Nathan Bush: I thought it was.
Nathan Bush: Maybe building a business isn't as difficult as what I think it is. But we all know it is. Harry just is able to explain things so simply and so clearly that it's no wonder that he's given his team that's now over a hundred people the confidence and the clarity to be really,
Nathan Bush: really good at their jobs.
Nathan Bush: What an incredible guy and just amazing
Nathan Bush: person to riff with.
Nathan Bush: So I really enjoyed that pleasure. There are three big lessons that I took out of this that I think that any of us can take into our E commerce businesses. Number one, Harry was very clear on this. We are underutilizing digital PR when it comes to SEO. Yes, it's very tempting to do all the technical elements of SEO, right, all the way from sitemaps to internal linking to all the little technical site speed, the rest. But Harry said actually they're the small 1% of the. What you actually need to be doing is focusing on digital PR and in particular using data that you own to tell stories about the category you're in. Don't use digital PR to go out and talk about a new product that you're launching in market or a new store that you're opening up. Think about what gets the headlines and then connect it to the data that you've got or potentially the audience that you've got to get the data and tell that story. As Harry explained there, the flow of on effects around creating authority in your category by releasing that data and having it published on credible sites and media publications will do way more than any technical tweaking that you might do in the background. Number two, test your unit economics before launch. Harry was pretty open around the fake ads that they ran for Caddy before they even had a product ready to sell. But it's never been easy. Easier to spin up ads using AI, using product imagery that you might already have or mockups and take that out to market. Obviously you've got to be very careful around what you're promising if you have orders come through from those ads. But as Harry said, he was able to model, even if it wasn't perfect, a rough idea on what the cost per acquisition or cost per customer is going to be and build that into the business model model. Build that into the pricing from the get go so that you know what you're dealing with ahead of time. Really smart strategy, both for if you're launching a new brand, but also maybe if you're launching a new product or a new product range. Give those fake ads a go. And number three, don't over optimize early. It's one that I hadn't thought about a lot, but Harry explained it really well. Is that when you're a young brand or you're just starting out, the temptation is to go really hard and make sure you've got category pages for everything that you got all your product pages set up with a heap of information, huge footers doing all the SEO essentials correctly. But Harry actually said strip it back because you haven't got the authority yet from the engines and they'll just give up on you. So when you are starting out or you're early in your journey, really focus on the key categories or the key products and push them hard and then expand out rather than trying to do everything at once and confusing the engines. All right, that's it from us today. Thank you again to Studio Hawk and Caddy for bringing us today's special episode. I hope that you enjoyed it and got a lot out of that from both. Inspiration from an agency owner who is now testing his hand at brand but
Nathan Bush: also there was a heap of SEO
Nathan Bush: fundamental and AI fundamentals in there for you. Now if you want to discuss anything that you heard in today's episode, come on over and join the add to cart community. It's free to join. There's over 500 e commerce professionals in there ready to discuss and get nerdy on all things E commerce. You can join at add to cart.com au jump on over, fill out the application form and we'll get you in there quick.
Harry Sanders: Smart.
Nathan Bush: Thanks again for joining me on Add to Cart Up. See you next time.
