Apr 19 2025
Ecommerce Investor on Turnaround Tactics

Mehtab Bhogal is the co-founder of Karta Ventures, a Canada-based acquirer of troubled ecommerce businesses. The firm seeks companies with “issues,” such as unpaid taxes, regulatory problems, and founder disputes.

He says buying distressed companies is like salvaging a crashed car. “What are the parts worth?” he asks.

Mehtab and I recently spoke. He addressed identifying hidden value, turnaround tactics, seller concerns, and more.

The entire audio of our conversation is embedded below. The transcript is edited for clarity and length.

Eric Bandholz: Give us a quick rundown.

Mehtab Bhogal: I’m the co-founder of Karta Ventures. We invest in consumer brands in distressed situations, such as tax issues, regulatory problems, founder disputes, things like that. We move fast and write checks quickly. Our portfolio ranges from a direct-to-consumer succulent plant farm to traditional apparel companies.

Early on, we invested in companies with both income statement and balance sheet problems. Now, I prefer one or the other. We focus on size. We will shrink a company if necessary. An optimal size for us is scaling businesses down to $15-$20 million in annual D2C revenue if we’re buying them outright.

For example, we looked at a retailer once that had peaked at $110 million, was doing $70 million, but we believed it operated most profitably at $30–$40 million in revenue.

Bandholz: How do you find the right deals?

Bhogal: In 2018, when we began, we sent cold emails to over 2,000 companies. We used BuiltWith to analyze tech stacks and backends to estimate revenue. From there, we targeted businesses generating a few million annually. Most of our deal flow now comes from word of mouth, especially since other investors tend to avoid turnarounds.

We also invest in profitable companies with big projects. One company needed help building a new manufacturing facility, which we’re good at. If there’s value to unlock, we’re interested.

Buying distressed companies is like salvaging a crashed car: What are the parts worth, and what could a skilled mechanic do with them? We sometimes acquire the right to buy equity before full diligence. That lets us move quickly, cut costs, and create breathing room while we dig deeper. We often reduce expenses by six to seven figures within a week or so. Meanwhile, we gain insights, and the existing management determines if they want to work with us.

Bandholz: How can you make those cuts in a single week?

Bhogal: It’s all about context. We can usually tell whether growth came from good marketing or a great product.

For example, I know a founder doing 30% net margins on $30-40 million in annual revenue. He has no idea what he’s doing on the ecommerce side. But his product is incredible — strong patents, hard to copy, perfect market fit. That’s why it works.

We’ve developed pattern recognition from working with many companies. We spot inefficiencies quickly, such as bloated teams, sloppy ad accounts, and underutilized staff. For instance, if a company needs only four raw materials, why does it have an entire supply chain team?

Or why does a CFO at a $20 million company have a huge support staff?

Founders are sometimes great at marketing but weak at finance or operations. I can log into a Google Ads account and quickly see if targeting and spend are optimized. That’s the type of stuff we jump on fast.

Bandholz: Is your goal to flip a business or hold it?

Bhogal: It depends. Sometimes we buy the business outright; other times we invest as minority shareholders with no control — both models work for us.

Take the succulent plant business we invested in back in 2018. We helped restructure debt, acquired a farm to integrate vertically, and began growing and shipping plants ourselves from Riverside, California. We’ve held that position and won’t exit unless the founder wants to. That was our agreement — get our cash out in one to two years and go from there.

Other founders want to optimize and sell in 6-12 months. That works too. The key is alignment: Everyone should have the same end goal and roadmap. If those are in place, things rarely go wrong.

Bandholz: What’s your daily focus, researching deals or operating businesses?

Bhogal: We’re hands-on. We teach teams how to manage recurring tasks. But for one-off strategic decisions, such as evaluating whether to use a 3PL or in-house fulfillment, we’re directly involved. The same goes for setting up manufacturing or optimizing marketing. We’ve performed those analyses so many times that we can quickly run the numbers.

We don’t want to be in the weeds long-term, but we’ll dive in initially to gain clarity and speed things up. We want the company to operate without needing our daily involvement. But we’re very engaged for the first few months.

Bandholz: How should founders evaluate debt financing?

Bhogal: First, understand the deal. Model your payments and liabilities. Know if there’s a personal guarantee, if the loan is secured, and what happens if revenue dips. Research lenders on PACER to review their legal history — some are reputable, others not so much. Ecommerce lenders, in particular, can be volatile. Many raised venture money and spent it recklessly.

Ask yourself: Where is this lender getting its money? Is it sustainable, or will its problems become yours in a downturn? In uncertain consumer markets, flexibility matters. We’d rather pay more for a dependable, traditional lender than risk a deal that could backfire if the economy shifts.

Bandholz: Where can people contact you?

Bhogal: Our site is KartaVentures.com. I’m on X and LinkedIn.

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Apr 18 2025
Competitor Analysis In Local SEO And How To Gain An Edge via @sejournal, @JRiddall

In every community, multiple businesses and business types vie for prominence within a limited geographic radius.

As such, when it comes to online visibility and local SEO, competitor analysis isn’t just a best practice – it’s a necessity.

Understanding and responding to your rivals’ strategies, strengths, and weaknesses is the cornerstone of a winning local SEO campaign.

For SEO professionals, this means going beyond surface-level observations and diving deep into data to uncover actionable insights.

Let’s explore how to conduct a thorough competitor analysis and leverage any findings to gain an edge in local organic search, drive targeted traffic, and improve the bottom line.

Identifying Your Local Online Competition

Before you can analyze your competition, you need to identify them.

A business you consider a competitor offline may or may not be a competitor online, which will determine whether or not you can learn and apply anything from how their web presence is structured.

Furthermore, at a local level – and depending on the service or product – you may very well find large players like big box stores or ecommerce offerings appearing in the search results.

Here, too, there may not be much to be learned from a tactical perspective, but you do need to understand what and who you are up against in order to develop strategies for any given keyword or topic.

Understanding who the competition is and how far ahead they may or may not be will help you determine where to focus your attention.

A good starting point for any SEO strategy is from a position of strength.

In other words, those areas where your business has established some authority and visibility relative to your competitors.

If you have limited to no authority or visibility, it may be worthwhile focusing your attention elsewhere and considering paid search or social advertising strategies to bridge the gap.

A simple incognito Google search for your primary keywords in your target location will display a list of relevant businesses along with local directories and industry-specific websites, which all represent competition for your customers’ attention.

Alternatively, SEO tools like Ahrefs or Semrush will call out domains/websites, i.e., competitors found to be ranking for the same keywords your domain does.

These tools provide a wealth of content and keyword gap information, which will be used for much of the analysis outlined below.

Key Areas Of Local SEO Competitor Analysis

1. On-Page SEO Analysis

Any effective competitor analysis will naturally begin with a review of competitors’ websites to see “how” they may be able to outrank you and/or what they may be trying to rank for.

Examine the primary website content of any competitors outranking your website, focusing on relevant local keywords you want to be found for.

What keywords do they use in their titles, page headings, and link anchor text. These are presumably the keywords they have optimized for.

Keep in mind that when reviewing a competitive website or content, the assumption is that it was created and published with SEO in mind. However, this may not always be the case, so don’t be surprised if your competitor’s pages are not optimized; rather, look at this as an opportunity.

Are there pages for specific neighborhoods or landmarks? In other words, are your competitors looking to target customers in areas where you are or are not?

Analyze their structured data/schema markup, which helps search engines understand the context of their content.

Tools like Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool can help with this. Structured data is also an important consideration in optimizing for AI Search, a topic we’ll leave for another day.

Assess their website’s user experience and mobile-friendliness by running a Google PageSpeed Insights report on any of the competition’s ranking pages, along with the same on your own, to see what gaps exist.

Google prioritizes mobile-first indexing, so it goes without saying that a mobile-friendly website is essential for local SEO.

2. Google Business Profile (GBP) Optimization

A survey of SEO professionals by Brightlocal found that GBP optimization is the most valuable local SEO service, followed by creating content and web design.

For many businesses, their GBP is as (if not more) important than their website.

As such, reviewing your competitors’ GBP can reveal how often you need to post content or how many reviews you need to compete.

Your competitors’ GBP is a treasure trove of information. Analyze their chosen categories, keyword usage in business descriptions, the quality and quantity of photos and posts, and their engagement in the Q&A section.

Pay close attention to their posting frequency. Are they regularly sharing updates, offers, and events?

According to Google, “Businesses that add photos to their Business Profiles receive 42% more requests for directions on Google Maps, and 35% more clicks through to their websites than businesses that don’t.”

3. Local Citation Analysis

Your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) appearing in citations help strengthen local SEO as they confirm your geographic relevance to Google.

Local directory submission still very much matters when it comes to establishing local authority and visibility.

Here, too, you can conduct an incognito search and review local directories, or you can use tools like Whitespark or BrightLocal to identify where your competitors are listed.

Focus on the consistency and accuracy of their NAP information. Inconsistent citations can confuse search engines and negatively impact rankings.

A study by Moz found citation accuracy is a key factor in local search rankings.

4. Local Link Building Analysis

Similar to citations, obtaining links from relevant, local sources such as local blogs, newspapers, and chambers of commerce is highly valuable as backlinks have the effect of validating both the localness and service/product focus of a business.

Building relationships with local influencers and businesses can also help you acquire high-quality local backlinks.

Use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles. Identify their link sources and assess the quality of those links to see if it would be worthwhile to pursue the same.

Review your competitors’ websites to see if they’ve established local partnerships, and then see if those partners have linked to or mentioned them on their sites.

5. Review And Reputation Analysis

Reviews are a critical factor in terms of establishing customer trust and, by extension, local search authority and rankings.

Effective reputation management can significantly impact local SEO performance.

Analyze the volume, sentiment, and recency of your competitors’ Google, Yelp, or local/industry directory reviews.

Pay attention to how quickly and how your competition responds to reviews, both positive and negative.

6. Local Content Strategy

Content is still king, and a well-planned and effective content marketing strategy can set a local business apart.

Creating and sharing relevant, high-quality content that your customers and prospects want to read, like, and share is key to providing expertise while building authority and trust.

In fact, it can be argued that creating content that will answer all of your customers’ questions about selecting, purchasing, and using your products and services is the basis of modern SEO, local or otherwise.

Analyze the types of content your competitors are producing. Are they creating blog posts about local events, neighborhood guides, or customer success stories?

Identify content gaps and opportunities to create unique and valuable content for your local audience.

Leveraging local news and events can create very relevant content.

Expanded Strategies To Gain An Edge Through Competitor Analysis

Identify Gaps And Opportunities

This is the foundational step in leveraging the competitive analysis you’ve done.

Your competitor analysis should reveal where your rivals are falling short. These gaps represent opportunities for you to excel and surpass them.

Don’t just note the gaps; prioritize them. Which weaknesses, if addressed, will yield the most significant impact on your local SEO?

Consider factors like search volume for related keywords and the potential for increased customer engagement.

For example, if you note your competitors have not taken advantage of certain sub-categories in their Google Business Profile, ensure you do and key on those sub-categories with content like blog posts, images, or videos you create and share via GBP posts and elsewhere.

Reverse Engineering Successful Strategies

Reverse engineering what your competitors have done doesn’t mean blindly copying their website, content, or campaigns.

It’s about understanding why their strategies work and adapting them to your unique business. Again, be sure to select your true online competitors validated by performance data.

Analyze the elements of their successful strategies. Is it their content, their link-building tactics, their GBP optimization, or something else?

Once you identify the key components that appear to be boosting their presence relative to yours, brainstorm ways to improve upon what they and you are doing. Focus on adding value and differentiation.

For example, a local fitness studio might observe a competitor’s blog posts on “healthy meal prep” generating significant engagement on social media.

It analyzes the competitor’s content, noting the use of high-quality images, easy-to-follow recipes, and local ingredient recommendations.

It then creates its own blog posts on the same topic, but it also includes video tutorials, printable shopping lists, and interviews with local nutritionists, providing a more comprehensive and engaging experience.

Hyperlocal Content Creation

As discussed, content built to resonate with your local audience is essential for local SEO. It can be the difference between you and your competition in terms of both organic search ranking and engagement with your customer base.

Go beyond generic content. Focus on creating content specific to your target location. This could include neighborhood guides, local event calendars, or interviews with like-minded local business owners.

The goal is to establish your business as the trusted source of local information, particularly in areas where you have unique expertise and experience.

As an example, a local bookstore creates a blog series called “Neighborhood Spotlight,” featuring interviews with residents about their reading habits and favorite books or magazines.

It also creates a “Local Author” section on its website, showcasing books by writers from the area.

Local stories about neighbors can be of real interest to residents of a community and can initiate conversations about the business both online and off.

Another example could be a local hardware store or plumber creating, publishing, and sharing “how to” videos on their website, YouTube, and GBP centered around local weather conditions.

In a northern community, one such video might be titled “How to prepare your pipes for a winter freeze in [town name],” while in the south, it becomes “How to guard against flooding in [town name] during hurricane season.”

Building Local Relationships

Networking and partnering with other local businesses and influencers can significantly boost your local authority and visibility.

You may notice thriving local businesses or competitors in your area leveraging these types of partnerships, and if so, this should be a clear signal for doing the same.

If not, this becomes an important opportunity to differentiate your business.

Building relationships takes time and effort, but they will certainly pay off if properly planned and nurtured.

Participate in local events, join local business associations, and collaborate with other like-minded businesses on joint promotions.

The goal is to create a network of local connections that can amplify your reach, credibility, and trust.

A local coffee shop partners with a nearby bakery to offer a “coffee and pastry” combo deal. The shop also collaborates with a local artist to display their artwork, creating a unique and engaging atmosphere.

All three businesses benefit from increased exposure to each other’s customer base.

In another example, a local clothing boutique sees a competitor gain traction from partnering with and supporting a local community organization.

It then looks to establish similar relationships but ensures the return on investment (ROI) of each partnership by co-creating content, running events, and providing unique, branded promotional codes and URLs for tracking engagement and sales.

Monitoring And Adapting

Local SEO is an ongoing process. You need to regularly monitor your competitors, identify any new entrants or tactics, and adapt your strategies as needed.

Track key metrics, such as keyword rankings, organic website traffic, content publishing/sharing, and review volume. The tools noted above can help you do so on a scheduled basis.

Turning Competitor Insights Into Local SEO Success

Competitor analysis is an indispensable component of any successful local SEO strategy.

By properly identifying the competition and understanding your rivals’ strengths and weaknesses, you can identify opportunities to improve your local search visibility and stave off any threats as they arise.

Remember, SEO is a continuous process that requires ongoing monitoring and adaptation.

By leveraging the tools and strategies outlined here, you can work towards gaining and maintaining an edge.

More Resources:

Featured Image: HZ Creations/Shutterstock

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Apr 18 2025
A Google Gemini model now has a “dial” to adjust how much it reasons

Google DeepMind’s latest update to a top Gemini AI model includes a dial to control how much the system “thinks” through a response. The new feature is ostensibly designed to save money for developers, but it also concedes a problem: Reasoning models, the tech world’s new obsession, are prone to overthinking, burning money and energy in the process.

Since 2019, there have been a couple of tried and true ways to make an AI model more powerful. One was to make it bigger by using more training data, and the other was to give it better feedback on what constitutes a good answer. But toward the end of last year, Google DeepMind and other AI companies turned to a third method: reasoning.

“We’ve been really pushing on ‘thinking,’” says Jack Rae, a principal research scientist at DeepMind. Such models, which are built to work through problems logically and spend more time arriving at an answer, rose to prominence earlier this year with the launch of the DeepSeek R1 model. They’re attractive to AI companies because they can make an existing model better by training it to approach a problem pragmatically. That way, the companies can avoid having to build a new model from scratch. 

When the AI model dedicates more time (and energy) to a query, it costs more to run. Leaderboards of reasoning models show that one task can cost upwards of $200 to complete. The promise is that this extra time and money help reasoning models do better at handling challenging tasks, like analyzing code or gathering information from lots of documents. 

“The more you can iterate over certain hypotheses and thoughts,” says Google DeepMind chief technical officer Koray Kavukcuoglu, the more “it’s going to find the right thing.”

This isn’t true in all cases, though. “The model overthinks,” says Tulsee Doshi, who leads the product team at Gemini, referring specifically to Gemini Flash 2.5, the model released today that includes a slider for developers to dial back how much it thinks. “For simple prompts, the model does think more than it needs to.” 

When a model spends longer than necessary on a problem, it makes the model expensive to run for developers and worsens AI’s environmental footprint.

Nathan Habib, an engineer at Hugging Face who has studied the proliferation of such reasoning models, says overthinking is abundant. In the rush to show off smarter AI, companies are reaching for reasoning models like hammers even where there’s no nail in sight, Habib says. Indeed, when OpenAI announced a new model in February, it said it would be the company’s last nonreasoning model. 

The performance gain is “undeniable” for certain tasks, Habib says, but not for many others where people normally use AI. Even when reasoning is used for the right problem, things can go awry. Habib showed me an example of a leading reasoning model that was asked to work through an organic chemistry problem. It started out okay, but halfway through its reasoning process the model’s responses started resembling a meltdown: It sputtered “Wait, but …” hundreds of times. It ended up taking far longer than a nonreasoning model would spend on one task. Kate Olszewska, who works on evaluating Gemini models at DeepMind, says Google’s models can also get stuck in loops.

Google’s new “reasoning” dial is one attempt to solve that problem. For now, it’s built not for the consumer version of Gemini but for developers who are making apps. Developers can set a budget for how much computing power the model should spend on a certain problem, the idea being to turn down the dial if the task shouldn’t involve much reasoning at all. Outputs from the model are about six times more expensive to generate when reasoning is turned on.

Another reason for this flexibility is that it’s not yet clear when more reasoning will be required to get a better answer.

“It’s really hard to draw a boundary on, like, what’s the perfect task right now for thinking?” Rae says. 

Obvious tasks include coding (developers might paste hundreds of lines of code into the model and then ask for help), or generating expert-level research reports. The dial would be turned way up for these, and developers might find the expense worth it. But more testing and feedback from developers will be needed to find out when medium or low settings are good enough.

Habib says the amount of investment in reasoning models is a sign that the old paradigm for how to make models better is changing. “Scaling laws are being replaced,” he says. 

Instead, companies are betting that the best responses will come from longer thinking times rather than bigger models. It’s been clear for several years that AI companies are spending more money on inferencing—when models are actually “pinged” to generate an answer for something—than on training, and this spending will accelerate as reasoning models take off. Inferencing is also responsible for a growing share of emissions.

(While on the subject of models that “reason” or “think”: an AI model cannot perform these acts in the way we normally use such words when talking about humans. I asked Rae why the company uses anthropomorphic language like this. “It’s allowed us to have a simple name,” he says, “and people have an intuitive sense of what it should mean.” Kavukcuoglu says that Google is not trying to mimic any particular human cognitive process in its models.)

Even if reasoning models continue to dominate, Google DeepMind isn’t the only game in town. When the results from DeepSeek began circulating in December and January, it triggered a nearly $1 trillion dip in the stock market because it promised that powerful reasoning models could be had for cheap. The model is referred to as “open weight”—in other words, its internal settings, called weights, are made publicly available, allowing developers to run it on their own rather than paying to access proprietary models from Google or OpenAI. (The term “open source” is reserved for models that disclose the data they were trained on.) 

So why use proprietary models from Google when open ones like DeepSeek are performing so well? Kavukcuoglu says that coding, math, and finance are cases where “there’s high expectation from the model to be very accurate, to be very precise, and to be able to understand really complex situations,” and he expects models that deliver on that, open or not, to win out. In DeepMind’s view, this reasoning will be the foundation of future AI models that act on your behalf and solve problems for you.

“Reasoning is the key capability that builds up intelligence,” he says. “The moment the model starts thinking, the agency of the model has started.”

This story was updated to clarify the problem of “overthinking.“

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Apr 18 2025
New Ecommerce Tools: April 17, 2025

We publish a rundown each week of new products from companies offering services to ecommerce merchants. This installment includes updates on tools to reduce tariff exposure, influencer marketing, installment payments, shipping, logistics platforms, and conversational AI for customer service.

Got an ecommerce product release? Email releases@practicalecommerce.com.

New Tools for Merchants

PolyAI unveils Agent Studio with generative AI for customer service. PolyAI, a provider of AI agents for enterprise customer service, has launched its latest version of Agent Studio, a voice-first omnichannel platform for conversational AI. The platform offers safety features while providing new agent control and self-service capabilities. Users can provide feedback on agent behavior, knowledge, and speech recognition performance to train models to react best for their customers. Analytics confirm tuning choices and deliver deep-dive conversational review.

Web page for PolyAI Agent Studio

PolyAI Agent Studio

Swap launches service for tariff reduction. Swap, a backend connector of operating systems, has unveiled Clear by Swap Global, a tariff reduction service. According to Swap, the service partners with brands to reduce exposure to tariffs through leveraging a B2B2C model and provides customers 2-day delivery from U.K. and E.U. warehouses. Partners utilize a streamlined invoicing platform and end-to-end setup to ensure all U.S. operations are structured for customs, tax, and legal compliance.

eBay releases simplified mobile selling tool with Magical Listing AI technology. eBay has simplified the listing experience, integrating its Magical Listing technology with a guided, mobile-friendly flow to improve the ease, speed, and quality of listing creation. The new experience starts with photos and a title and leverages AI automation, maximizing image match and inference capabilities to suggest product details and suitable categories, so sellers can review and approve content and list more quickly.

Sprout Social launches AI-powered updates to its influencer marketing platform. Sprout Social, a social media management platform, has released its updated influencer marketing tool. Sprout Social Influencer Marketing features a refreshed design, AI-driven natural language discovery, and data analysis. Updated features include AI-powered creator search, Creator Lists, Brand Fit Score, and customizable brand safety reporting. Sprout’s search is now topic-led to match how networks serve content, enabling brands to identify creators to foster partnerships quickly.

Home page of Sprout Social

Sprout Social

iDenfy launches a know-your-customer identity plugin for Shopify. iDenfy, an identity verification provider, has introduced its new “Know Your Customer” tool for Shopify merchants. According to iDenfy, the app is a no-code solution for merchants who don’t want to build an ID verification tool from scratch. iDenfy’s integration provides businesses with an automated verification system that ensures compliance while reducing fraud risks, helping save time and money on integration and management.

Affirm and Shopify accelerate global expansion of Shop Pay Installments. Affirm, a buy-now, pay-later network, and Shopify are accelerating the international expansion plans of Shop Pay Installments, exclusively powered by Affirm. Shop Pay Installments will become available to Shopify merchants in Canada and the U.K. this summer, with cross-border commerce capabilities between the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. to follow. The companies will expand to Australia and Western Europe next, starting with France, Germany, and The Netherlands.

Temu and PlentyOne partner to streamline global expansion for sellers. China-based marketplace Temu has reached a collaborative agreement with PlentyOne, an ecommerce enterprise resource planning provider, to help sellers expand into international markets. With the implementation of PlentyOne’s marketplace infrastructure, Temu’s vendors can improve their efficiency across operational facets such as inventory management and order fulfillment while exploring new avenues for global market expansion. Vendors within the PlentyOne network gain access to Temu’s marketing and logistics capabilities.

Home page of PlentyOne

PlentyOne

UPS introduces Ground Saver and Ground with Freight Pricing. UPS has introduced two ground shipping options: Ground Saver and Ground with Freight Pricing. Ground Saver is an economical shipping option that takes a day or two longer than regular UPS Ground service. Ground with Freight Pricing is for businesses with shipments over 150 pounds looking for small package reliability while saving money compared to traditional less-than-truckload carriers, with no additional costs for lift-gate, inside delivery, or pallet weight.

Warp launches FlowSkip, unifying B2B and D2C freight. Warp, a middle-mile logistics provider, has launched FlowSkip, a freight service combining B2B and D2C shipments through a shared cross-dock and truck network. According to Warp, by leveraging zone-skip routing and real-time orchestration, FlowSkip improves speed, reduces costs, and unlocks efficiencies. For D2C shipments, FlowSkip utilizes zone-skip trucks to bypass legacy parcel sortation networks. Retailers and apparel brands use FlowSkip to streamline store replenishment and wholesale less-than-truckload orders.

JD.com launches retail platform Joybuy in London. China-based ecommerce giant JD.com has launched its retail platform, Joybuy, in London as part of its international expansion. Joybuy provides a range of products, including daily essentials, beauty items, electronics, and home goods from domestic and global brands. Joybuy features promotions such as discounts, free shipping, and options for same-day or next-day delivery. The platform is undergoing a soft launch with select users while it recruits merchants.

Amazon Freight launches less-than-truckload inbound shipping. Amazon Freight is now offering less-than-truckload services to customers shipping inbound to Amazon’s facilities. Businesses with shipments that won’t fill an entire trailer can book a portion, depending on the space they need. Like Amazon Freight FTL (full truckload), Freight’s LTL inbound offering utilizes the Amazon network, including 60,000 trailers and advanced tech capabilities. Access LTL and FTL via the self-service portal.

Home page for Amazon Freight

Amazon Freight

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Apr 18 2025
Charts: Grocery Trends in Europe 2025

Retail grocery volume will grow modestly in Northern and Southern Europe through 2030 while declining in Central and Eastern regions. That’s according to a new report by McKinsey & Company titled “The State of Grocery Retail Europe 2025.”

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In 2025 McKinsey surveyed approximately 14,500 consumers across 13 countries in Europe. According to the report, 42% of Gen Z consumers and 37% of Millennials buy ready-to-eat meals at least weekly.

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Additionally, respondents across all age categories plan to purchase fewer environmentally sustainable grocery products (locally sourced and socially responsible) in 2025 compared to 2024.

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The McKinsey report cites the desire for consolidation and scale among retail grocers as driving an increasing number of merger and acquisition deals since 2021.

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Apr 17 2025
SEOFOMO Survey Shows How Ecommerce SEOs Use AI In 2025 via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Aleyda Solis’ SEOFOMO published a survey of ecommerce owners and SEOs that indicates a wide range of uses of AI, reflecting popular SEO tactics and novel ways to increase productivity, but also reveals that a significant number of the respondents have yet to fully adopt the technology because they are still figuring out how it best fits into their workflow. Very few of the survey respondents said they were not considering AI.

The survey responses showed that there are five popular category uses for AI:

  1. Content
  2. Analysis & Research
  3. Technical SEO
  4. User Experience & Conversion Rate Optimization
  5. Generate Client Documentation, Education & Learning

Content Creation

The survey respondents used AI for important reasons like product listing and descriptions, as well as for scaling meta descriptions, titles, and alt text. Other uses include creating content outlines, grammar checks and other assistive uses of AI.

But some also used it for blog content, landing pages, and for generating FAQ content. There’s no details of how extensively AI was used for blog content but a case could be made against using it for fully generating main content with AI (if that’s how some people are using it) because of Google’s recent cautionary guidance about extensive use of AI for main content.
Google’s Danny Sullivan at the recent Search Central NYC event cautioned about low effort content lacking in originality.

The other reported uses of AI was for grammar checking and clarity which are excellent ways to use AI. Care should be used even for these purposes because AI has a style that can get injected into the content even for something as simple as checking for grammar.

Another interesting use of AI is for revising content so that it matches a company’s “brand voice” which is checking for word choices, tone, and even sentence structure.

Lastly, the ecommerce survey respondents reported using AI for brainstorming content ideas which is another excellent way to use AI.

Analysis & Research

The part about keyword analysis is interesting because the report lists keyword research and clustering as one of the uses. Clustering keywords according to similarity is a good practice because it’s somewhat repetitive and spammy to write pages of content about related things, one page for each keyword phrase when one strong page that represents the entire topic is enough.

Focusing on keywords for SEO has been around longer than Google, and even Google itself has evolved from using keywords as a way to understand content to also incorporating an understanding of queries and content as topics.This is seen in the fact that Google uses core topicality systems as part of its ranking algorithm. So it’s somewhat curious that topicality research wasn’t mentioned as one of the uses, unless keyword clustering is considered part of that. Nevertheless, data analysis is a great use of AI.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a fantastic application of AI because that’s all about automating repetitive SEO tasks but also for assisting on making decisions about what to do. There’s lots of ways to do this, including by uploading a set of guidelines and/or charts and asking AI to analyze for specific things. Apps like Screaming Frog allow integration with OpenAI, so it’s leaving money and time on the table to not be investigating all the ways AI can integrate with tools as well as just asking it to analyze data.https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/tutorials/how-to-crawl-with-chatgpt/

For example, one of the uses reported in the survey was for generating an internal linking strategy.

User Experience (UX) & Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Another way ecommerce store owners are using AI is for improving the user experience and CRO.

The survey reports:

  • “AI-powered product recommendations
  • Chatbots for product discovery or customer support
  • CRO/UX audits based on user behavior”

Training & Education

Lastly, an increasing number of the ecommerce respondents reported using AI for generating training documentation for internal use and for creating customer documentation.

The survey reports:

“Less common but growing:

  • Learning how AI tools function
  • Using AI to create training material or SEO learning resources”

Not Using AI Or Limited Use

What was surprising is the amount of SEOs that are not using AI in a meaningful way. 31% of respondents said they are not using AI but are planning to, 3% of the survey respondents were digging their heels into the ground and flatly refusing to use AI in any way, while an additional 4% answered that they weren’t sure.

That makes a full 37% that aren’t using AI in any meaningful way. Looked at another way, 31% of respondents were getting ready to adopt AI into their workflow. Many managed WordPress hosting companies are integrating AI into their WordPress builder workflow as are some WordPress builders. AI can be integrated via WordPress SEO plugins as well. Wix has already integrated AI into their customer workflow through their proprietary Astro chatbot and companies like Shopify are also planning meaningful and useful ways to integrate AI.

The SEOFOMO survey makes it clear that AI is a significant part of the SEO and ecommerce workflow. Those who don’t use AI shouldn’t feel like they have to. But if you’re unsure how to integrate it, one way to think about it is to ask: what kinds of tasks would you hand off to an intern? Those are the kinds of tasks that AI excels at, enabling one worker to produce at a level five times greater than they could without using AI.

Read the SEOFOMO in ecommerce survey results:

The SEOFOMO Ecommerce SEO in 2025 Survey Results

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Apr 17 2025
Google Says LLMs.Txt Comparable To Keywords Meta Tag via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller answered a question about LLMs.txt, a proposed standard for showing website content to AI agents and crawlers, downplaying its usefulness and comparing it to the useless keywords meta tag, confirming the experience of others who have used it.

LLMS.txt

LLMS.txt has been compared to as a Robots.txt for large language models but that’s 100% incorrect. The main purpose of a robots.txt is to control how bots crawl a website. The proposal for LLMs.txt is not about controlling bots. That would be superfluous because a standard for that already exists with robots.txt.

The proposal for LLMs.txt is generally about showing content to LLMs with a text file that uses the markdown format so that they can consume just the main content of a web page, completely devoid of advertising and site navigation. Markdown language is a human and machine readable format that indicates headings with the pound sign (#) and lists with the minus sign (-). LLMs.txt does a few other things similar to that functionality and that’s all it’s about.

What LLMs.txt is:

  • LLMs.txt is not a way to control AI bots.
  • LLMs.txt is a way to show the main content to AI bots.
  • LLMs.txt is just a proposal and not a widely used and accepted standard.

That last part is important because it relates to what Google’s John Mueller said:

LLMs.txt Is Comparable To Keywords Meta Tag

Someone started a discussion on Reddit about LLMs.txt to ask if anyone else shared their experience that the AI bots were not checking their LLMs.txt files.

They wrote:

“I’ve submitted to my blog’s root an LLM.txt file earlier this month, but I can’t see any impact yet on my crawl logs. Just curious to know if anyone had a tracking system in place,e or just if you picked up on anything going on following the implementation.

If you haven’t implemented it yet, I am curious to hear your thoughts on that.”

One person in that discussion shared that they host over 20,000 domains and that no AI agents or bots are downloading the LLMs.txt files, only niche bots like one from BuiltWith is grabbing those files.

The commenter wrote:

“Currently host about 20k domains. Can confirm that no bots are really grabbing these apart from some niche user agents…”

John Mueller answered:

“AFAIK none of the AI services have said they’re using LLMs.TXT (and you can tell when you look at your server logs that they don’t even check for it). To me, it’s comparable to the keywords meta tag – this is what a site-owner claims their site is about … (Is the site really like that? well, you can check it. At that point, why not just check the site directly?)”

He’s right, none of the major AI services, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, have announced support for the proposed LLMs.txt standard. So if none of them are actually using it then what’s the point?

Mueller also raises the point that an LLMs.txt file is redundant because why use that markdown file if the original content (and structured data) have already been downloaded? A bot that uses the LLMs.txt will have to check the other content to make sure it’s not spam so why bother?

Lastly, what’s to stop a publisher or SEO from showing one set of content in LLMs.txt to spam AI agents and another set of content for users and search engines? It’s too easy to generate spam this way, essentially cloaking for LLMs.

In that regard it is very similar to the keywords meta tag that no search engine uses because it would be too sketchy to trust a site that it’s really about those keywords and search engines are better and more sophisticated nowadays about parsing the content to understand what it’s about.

Read the LinkedIn discussion here:

LLM.txt – where are we at?

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Apr 17 2025
Google Found Guilty of Illegal Ad Tech Monopoly in Court Ruling via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

A federal judge has ruled that Google maintained illegal monopolies in the digital advertising technology market.

In a landmark case, the Department of Justice and 17 states found Google liable for antitrust violations.

Federal Court Finds Google Violated Sherman Act

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that Google illegally monopolized two key markets in digital advertising:

  • The publisher ad server market
  • The ad exchange market

The 115-page ruling (PDF link) states Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act by “willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power.”

It also found that Google unlawfully tied its publisher ad server (DFP) and ad exchange (AdX) together.

Judge Brinkema wrote in the ruling:

“Plaintiffs have proven that Google possesses monopoly power in the publisher ad server for open-web display advertising market. Google’s publisher ad server DFP has a durable and ‘predominant share of the market’ that is protected by high barriers both to entry and expansion.”

Google’s Dominant Market Position

The court found that Google controlled approximately 91% of the worldwide publisher ad server market for open-web display advertising from 2018 to 2022.

In the ad exchange market, Google’s AdX handled between 54% and 65% of total transactions, roughly nine times larger than its closest competitor.

The judge cited Google’s pricing power as evidence of its monopoly. Google maintained a 20% take rate for its ad exchange services for over a decade, despite competitors charging only 10%.

The ruling states:

“Google’s ability to maintain AdX’s 20% take rate under these market conditions is further direct evidence of the firm’s sustained and substantial power.”

Illegal Tying of Services Found

A key part of the ruling focused on Google’s practice of tying its publisher ad server (DFP) to its ad exchange (AdX).

The court determined that Google effectively forced publishers to use DFP if they wanted access to real-time bidding with AdWords advertisers, a crucial feature of AdX.

Judge Brinkema wrote, quoting internal Google communications:

“By tying DFP to AdX, Google took advantage of its ‘owning the platform, the exchange, and a huge network’ of advertising demand.”

This was compared to “Goldman or Citibank own[ing] the NYSE [i.e., the New York Stock Exchange].”

Case History & State Involvement

The Department of Justice initially filed this lawsuit in January 2023, with eight states. Nine more states later joined, bringing the total to 17 states challenging Google’s practices.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel explained why states joined the case:

“The power that Google wields in the digital advertising space has had the effect of either pushing smaller companies out of the market or making them beholden to Google ads.”

Google has consistently denied wrongdoing. Dan Taylor, Vice President of Global Ads, stated that the DOJ’s lawsuit would “reverse years of innovation, harming the broader advertising sector.”

What This Means for Digital Marketers

This ruling has implications for the digital marketing world:

  1. For publishers: If Google must restructure its ad tech business, the decision could give publishers more control over ad inventory and potentially higher revenue shares.
  2. For advertisers: Changes to Google’s ad tech stack may lead to more transparent bidding and lower costs over time.
  3. For marketing agencies: Using a variety of ad tech providers may become more important as Google faces these challenges.

What’s Next?

Judge Brinkema has yet to decide on penalties for Google’s violations. Soon, the court will “set a briefing schedule and hearing date to determine the appropriate remedies.”

Possible penalties include forcing Google to sell parts of its ad tech business. This would dramatically change the digital advertising landscape.

This ruling signals that changes may be coming for marketers relying on Google’s integrated advertising system.

Google intends to appeal the decision, extending the legal battle for years.

From it’s newsroom on X:

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Apr 17 2025
Ask A PPC: How Much Should PPC Management Cost? via @sejournal, @navahf

There have been lots of really good questions, but this one from Phil of Trumbull stood out:

“What is the average amount companies take for running a PPC campaign?”

Factors That Influence PPC Management Costs

Here are key factors that determine how much you should expect to pay:

  • Vendor Experience Level: Seasoned experts often charge more but bring efficiency and strategic insight that can offset higher fees.
  • Scope Of Services: Are you asking the vendor to handle creative (ad design, landing pages) or just campaign management?
  • Number Of Channels: Managing multiple platforms (Google, Microsoft, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc.) requires more effort and expertise.
  • Strategic Vs. Tactical Execution: Do you want a partner who proactively optimizes and strategizes, or someone who executes based on your direction?
  • Bundled Services: Some agencies offer PPC as part of a broader digital marketing package, such as SEO or social media management, which can provide cost efficiencies.

There’s no universal “cheap” or “expensive” option. What matters is that you align expectations with investment.

What also matters is that you set reasonable expectations for your vendor and the campaigns they will be creating/managing for you.

[PPC Trends 2025] Download the free ebook →

Common PPC Pricing Models

When engaging a PPC vendor, you pay for expertise and time – whether for technical execution or strategic oversight.

Below are the most common pricing models:

1. Percentage Of Spend + Flat Fee

Historically, the percentage-of-spend model was popular, but it has fallen out of favor because it doesn’t always align the management fee with the client’s well-being.

If an agency makes more money simply because you’re spending more on ads, there’s less incentive for them to optimize your budget efficiently.

Instead, many agencies now structure their fees around effort and results rather than ad spend alone.

  • Flat fee component typically ranges from $500 to $2,500 per month.
  • Percentage of spend varies between 5% and 15%, though agencies increasingly favor alternative pricing models.

2. Flat Rate Pricing

Some agencies prefer a predictable flat rate. This can either include ad spend or be separated into management fees and media costs.

  • Flat-rate management fees generally range from $2,500 to $10,000 per month.
  • Pricing increases based on additional services such as:
    • Ad creative and landing page design.
    • Advanced conversion tracking setup.
    • Frequent campaign pivots due to evolving business goals.

3. Performance-Based Pricing

In this model, agencies charge per lead or conversion rather than a fixed fee.

While appealing, it often means the agency retains account ownership, which can be problematic if you ever want to take control of your campaigns.

If you’re comfortable never owning your PPC account, this could work. However, if transparency and long-term flexibility matter, a traditional pricing model is a safer bet.

Choosing The Right PPC Vendor For Your Budget

Beyond cost, choosing the right PPC management partner depends on your budget, goals, and internal capabilities:

  • Budgets under $2,500/month: Consider managing PPC in-house or using automation tools, as agency fees may eat up too much of the ad budget.
  • Highly seasonal businesses: Flat-rate pricing may make sense to smooth out cost fluctuations.
  • Stable spend accounts: Percentage-of-spend pricing often results in lower overall fees, but ensure it aligns with your business goals.
  • Looking for strategy and execution? Higher-priced agencies provide strategic insight and proactive management.
  • Need a hands-on executor? Lower-cost vendors typically require you to direct the strategy.
  • Considering a full digital strategy? Some agencies bundle PPC with SEO and social media management, which can provide better synergy and cost savings.

[Free Download] Top PPC trends to shape your 2025 strategy →

Final Takeaways

There’s no fixed rate for PPC management.

What you pay depends on the level of support and expertise you need. The key is balancing cost with expectations to ensure a strong return on investment.

Have a question about PPC? Submit via this form. See you next month!

More Resources:

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

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Apr 17 2025
How To Get A Job In Digital Marketing In 2025

It can be hard to get a job, especially right now it is difficult to land a job as the market has changed.

There are significantly fewer jobs available for both permanent and temporary positions.

But, this article will provide you with tips and advice to help you stay motivated.

Falling Job Vacancies

The current market, with fewer jobs available, is in stark contrast to what we saw during the Great Resignation (a term coined by Anthony Klotz), where there appeared to be a spike in the number of people quitting their jobs in 2021 that started before the pandemic.

According to a survey by KPMG and REC, vacancies for permanent jobs in the UK declined at their fastest pace for four years in January 2025.

The survey also shows that temporary vacancies fell in December 2024, and the labor market had been slowing down in 2024.

The U.S. has also seen the number of job openings fall.

In October 2024, this dropped to 7.4 million versus 7.9 million in September 2024.

Jobs in healthcare and government agencies also saw a lot of losses (the latter may be due to the election).

According to Newsweek, the number of Americans leaving their jobs dropped to its lowest since August 2020, but the number of layoffs increased.

There may be fewer Americans leaving their jobs voluntarily because they are more satisfied with their jobs.

According to Pew Research, half of U.S. workers are happy with their jobs, and 38% are somewhat satisfied.

There are 12% who are not satisfied with their job. Those who are self-employed (60%) are more likely to be highly satisfied than those who are not self-employed.

11 Tips To Get A Job In Marketing in 2025

Employers can now be more picky about who they hire. So, how can you make sure you land your job this year?

Here are my tips from my experience of looking for a job in this current climate.

1. Be Patient

Securing a job will take longer, unfortunately.

Data from recruiting software company iCIMS, a recruiting software company, said that the average time it takes to fill a role is seven weeks.

A friend of mine in Australia applied to 74 jobs over a 4-month period, but they only heard back from 27 – just 36% of companies responded.

Some job sites state they will not get back to you (such as the recruitment site called Seek in Australia). But, there were some jobs where after making a presentation it took two months to be told they were not successful.

Candidates are not happy about waiting so long.

Hays recruitment firm in the UK carried out a survey of 11,900 employers and employees in March 2024.

It found that only 18% of candidates believe three rounds of interviews are acceptable, and 6% are willing to wait more than a week to hear back from the company after the final interview. This means candidates want to hear back from potential employers quickly.

2. Build On What You Know. Don’t Try To Get Into A New Sector Without Experience

The market is already tough. Do not try to “pivot” as people may have done during the pandemic.

Focus on your skills. Do the job you want to get.

For example, if you want to do a podcast in your next job, create your own YouTube show.

I started Tea Time SEO during the pandemic, and I really enjoyed it. Then, in November 2023, Mike asked me to co-host SEO Office Hours.

The show did not give me a new job, but it did help me market myself and allowed me to learn a new skill, which I feel more confident in applying in my new job.

3. Make Yourself Stand Out: Building Your Brand Is Key

According to iCiMS, in March 2024, there were 43 job applications per opening in the UK and EMEA, which is 44% higher than in February 2023.

Competition is fierce, so focus this year on building your brand.

If you do not know how to start your personal brand or what is your brand, have a friend or former colleague help you.

Brainstorm first what you want to be known for and have a neutral person (not your family) write down what they think your brand is all about.

4. Network

Make the most of your contacts. Go to networking events in your sector.

According to Money.co.uk, among the 2,000 people surveyed, 40% secured a job through networking. This is particularly true for Millennials. 50% of those who took part in the survey landed their job through networking.

5. LinkedIn

Do not be afraid to ask others for help. There is no shame in posting on LinkedIn if you are looking for work.

Globally, more than 220 million people used the “open to work” banner on Linkedin in January 2025, which is 35% higher than it was in January 2024.

I posted on LinkedIn that I was looking for work, and I have seen far more people do this in 2025 and 2024 than in previous years.

Posting that I was looking for work led me to others sharing the type of job I was after and also meant my current employer reached out to me.

6. Refresh Your CV

A friend of mine in Australia applied for 74 jobs between November 2023 and March 2024. They managed to secure a job after having their CV reviewed and amended.

Ideally, a CV should be no more than two pages and highlight the key achievements in the role you are applying for.

Many CVs describe what you did at the job, for example, managed the content on the website, created a PR campaign.

Instead, try to show the results. For example “I doubled the content on the news section and increased downloads by 40% over the space of 12 months.”

“I created and launched a PR campaign that drove 3,000 unique visits in one day, which was 75% more than what was seen in previous campaigns.”

7. Try Not To Do Too Much Free Work

We have seen an increase in the amount of unpaid work during the interview process.

I know many who have done presentations, only to be then told they are not successful.

According to a LinkedIn poll, 85% of respondents said they had been asked to do unpaid work during the interview process, with 44% of them spending three to five hours and over 19% over six hours.

If a company is asking you to do free work, ask them to specify the time for the tasks and when they expect to come back to you with an answer.

8. Make A Realistic Plan

Research the types of companies you want to work for, whether they are a big brand, whether they share the same values as you, or if they are 100% remote-only companies. Make a list and plan when you will apply to them.

Try not to overload yourself by applying for 10 jobs one day and one the next. Instead, plan it out evenly over the month.

I kept a Google Sheet so I could see where and what roles I applied to and was able to follow up if I had not heard back. It helped me with my job application process.

Out of the jobs I applied to, I heard from just 40% of them.

Out of those initial replies, I then followed up but had no further contact, meaning that 30% of those who initially messaged me ghosted me. Having this Google Sheet helped me to track my progress.

If you have a plan for the number of jobs you apply to and when, it is easier to control your hours.

9. Try Not To Take Things Personally

You cannot control whether or not someone will return to you, but you can manage how you react.

Some companies will not be transparent, and some companies will not respect your time. They will not get back to you to tell you no, the position has changed, or it has been canceled.

It can help to talk to a neutral party about your experience or even colleagues or friends in the same recruitment drive position as you.

10. Join Communities

Applying for jobs can be soul-destroying. Join communities where people can also share job opportunities.

People within these communities want to help one another and support one another, and they are more than happy to pass on referrals.

However, be careful, as there are still people within the communities who are looking for help but then do not reply.

Out of the jobs I applied to within a community, where people were asking for candidates to fill a role, 56% ghosted me.

11. Get A Mentor

I started speaking with a mentor after being in my “career” for 10 years. It is probably best to do this sooner rather than later.

According to Forbes, 76% of people think having a mentor is important, but only 37% have one.

A mentee may not know where to look for a mentor, but 61% of mentor relationships have developed naturally. Therefore, there may be someone at work or an older friend who could help you.

Many mentors are happy to pass on their knowledge to others, and they found it enhanced the meaningfulness of their work.

Keep Applying, Keep Improving

My last piece of advice is not to give up. Applying for jobs is soul-destroying, and you can really feel you are not making any progress, yet you spend hours researching and applying.

However, if you give up, as we are moving so fast in digital marketing, you will be moving backward.

You are not alone and will get work, just don’t give up.

Methodology:

Please note that my research covers the U.S. and UK markets. I applied for 160 jobs from when I started making a record, which was from April 2024 until December 2024. I applied for remote jobs in the UK, the U.S., and hybrid jobs in Barcelona. I used LinkedIn to find jobs, and also through the communities I am part of.

I posted on Linkedin in October 2024 that I was looking for a full-time job and I was contacted by a few people and I now have my job because of that. It took me 8 months of looking for work to secure a full-time contract. I had started looking before April 2024 as I could see the market was slowing down, but as I was going to become a parent and take a couple of months out, I was not apply to secure a full-time role. Therefore I started the research again after my child was born.

More Resources:

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