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| This one is brought to you by our friends at StudioHawk. |  |
Here we are thinking that we've figured out search, and then 2026 comes along and throws it all up in the air. Never fear because this week we are getting nerdy with all things SEO, AEO and anything-EO.
In this special Exclusive Episode, brought to you by Australia's largest dedicated SEO agency, StudioHawk, I sit down with Charbel Raffoul, their Head of SEO Performance and Luke Rainsbury, General Manager of Cooper & Co., the Melbourne furniture and homewares brand they work with.
We talked product page SEO, schema, digital PR, last-minute BFCM tips and yes... LLM search. Buckle up. We're getting search nerdy!
Cheers
Bushy
| Watch the episode |
| Chapters worth skipping to |
| Collection pages are the biggest search terms | 13:53 |
| How Cooper & Co. found 30 to 40 new collection pages | 16:26 |
| Keep new collections out of the menu | 18:03 |
| Writing product data for how people search | 20:12 |
| Picking an AI visibility tool | 25:44 |
| The first-home buyer suburbs study | 29:28 |
| The Ahrefs study on brand mentions | 34:02 |
| How AI shoppers behave on product pages | 40:06 |
| The AI info page | 43:33 |
| Black Friday SEO tips | 46:30 |
| 01 The Big Move |
HOW TO FIND YOUR NEXT 30 COLLECTION PAGES
The brief to StudioHawk was simple. Grow non-branded traffic. Reach people who don't know Cooper & Co. exists. Charbel's answer was the least exciting page on the site: the collection page. Think lamps, bedside tables and LED mirrors. Those are the biggest search terms, so they're the biggest revenue drivers. 13:53
Luke's team went back through their product data and cleaned it up. Out fell 30 to 40 collection pages they never had. "I didn't think to create a collection page for green coffee tables," Luke said. They had the stock and the search demand. The pages ranked almost straight away. 16:26
The usual pushback is the menu. Nobody wants a navigation that looks like a forest. You don't need one. On Shopify a new collection lands in your sitemap automatically. Link to it from the parent collection and shoppers and Google both find it. 18:03
Run the same exercise on your store:
Export every SKU and handle with Matrixify.
Only build where you have the range. A collection with two products helps nobody.
Keep each page simple. Use a clear H1 and 200 to 300 words of real copy at the top or bottom. Link to the collections next door and add schema. 14:36
Leave it out of the main menu if you like. Link to it from the parent collection instead.
“Don't let AI search distract you with gimmicks and hacks.”
CHARBEL RAFFOUL, STUDIOHAWK
| 02 Test Yourself |
A shopper sent by ChatGPT is worth how much more than one from Google?
Submit your answer and get the correct answer at the bottom of this email.
| 03 Before Black Friday |
YOUR BLACK FRIDAY SEO CHECKLIST
SEO is plant now, harvest later. Charbel would rather you started six to nine months out. Here's what still works with weeks to go.
THE BLACK FRIDAY PAGE
☐ Search your products plus "Black Friday". If people are looking, you want a page for it. 47:10
☐ Bring back last year's BFCM page. Don't build a new one. 47:24
☐ Keep the year out of the URL. Black Friday happens every year. 47:50
☐ After the sale, take it out of the menu. Leave the page live. 47:50
THE REST OF THE SITE
☐ Run a hygiene check on your product data. Metafields and filters first. 48:48
☐ Look for three or four more collection pages you can add before the traffic arrives. 48:48
☐ Fill the newer Google Merchant Center fields. Product highlights and product details. 49:58
| 04 Where They Started |
HOW STUDIOHAWK STARTED WITH COOPER & CO.: 3 POWER MOVES
When Cooper & Co. engaged StudioHawk to improve their search visibility, they didn't do everything at once. Here's where they started for the biggest and quickest impact.
01 Clean up the product data first.
Before anything new, the team went through Cooper & Co.'s product data. They fixed titles, attributes and Merchant Center fields. Luke's test for every product is simple. Does the data answer how people actually search? Nobody types "160cm entertainment unit". They ask for one that fits a 60-inch TV. 16:26 20:12
02 Tell Google exactly what each page sells.
StudioHawk rebuilt the product schema. Charbel calls schema "Google's love language". It's code behind the page that says plainly what the page is and what it sells. On Shopify, apps do most of the heavy lifting. Then keep up with Google Merchant Center. It keeps adding fields like product highlights and product details and Luke's team is filling every one. 15:40 49:58
03 Start the digital PR early. Authority takes time.
PR ran alongside the SEO from the start of the nine months. Cooper & Co. ranked Australian suburbs for first-home buyers under the 5% Deposit Scheme. It earned 30 to 40 brand mentions and around 10 strong backlinks, including news.com.au and realestate.com.au. The study went live as a blog on their own site first, so journalists had something to link to. And a mention with no link still counts. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found branded mentions are one of the strongest signals for showing up in AI answers. 29:28 34:02
WANT THIS ON YOUR OWN SITE?
StudioHawk is Australia's largest dedicated SEO and AI search agency. Add To Cart readers get a free SEO & AI Search Masterplan. It's an in-depth audit of how your brand shows up across search and AI platforms, plus a custom roadmap to improve it.
| 05 Steal These Tips |
FIVE AI SEARCH TIPS FROM CHARBEL AND LUKE
1 Build the product page for the shopper who's already decided. AI-referred shoppers skip the homepage. They land on a product and look for confirmation. They check the gallery, the shipping calculator and the reviews. Put up front what the AI couldn't see: delivery, promos, subscription offers. 40:06
2 Pick an AI visibility tool by how it gets its data. Does it scrape or use APIs? Can you track your own prompts? How granular does it go? StudioHawk uses Peec AI across the agency. 25:44
3 Turn your keywords into prompts. Take a Google term like "wall mirrors". Break it into the how, what, why and when questions people ask an AI. Track those. 24:38
4 Only do Reddit if it shows up. Check whether Reddit gets cited for the prompts you track. If it does, answer questions and doubts from an official brand account. The mods are cutthroat. 36:19
5 Link your blogs to your money pages. When a blog mentions a collection or product, link to it. It tells Google that page matters. 35:32
| 06 Free Resources |
FREE RESOURCES FROM STUDIOHAWK
StudioHawk has opened up its toolkit for you. All free.
| Understand AI SEO strategy |
| New Consideration Era Map - See how shoppers discover and choose brands. |
| Chosen, Not Clicked white paper - 100 Australian brands, 21 months of data and StudioHawk's 2027 predictions. |
| Audit your own visibility |
| AI Brand Sentiment Checklist - Find out what AI says about your brand. |
| eCommerce Product Page Optimisation Checklist - Check how well your product pages work for AI search. |
| Put it all into practice |
| Reddit SOP - A step-by-step guide to Reddit for SEO and AI search. |
| eCommerce Visibility Toolkit (Black Friday edition) - Quick fixes to boost visibility ahead of Black Friday. |
| Hawk Academy + Claude skills - Free StudioHawk SEO training and ready-to-use Claude skills. |
And Charbel's team will audit how your brand shows up in search and AI, then build you a free roadmap to fix it.
A big thank you to StudioHawk for making this episode possible. And to Luke for opening up the Cooper & Co. playbook, right down to the green coffee tables.
| Quiz answer |
Answer: 20x. StudioHawk tracked 100 Australian brands for their Chosen, Not Clicked study. A ChatGPT visit was worth about $60. A Google organic visit was worth about $3. It's still a small slice of traffic. But it's why Luke builds product pages for the shopper who has already decided.
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