Dancing with the Devil: SEO, Algorithms, and AI

Written By Ben Petersen

I have a love/hate relationship with Google. And Amazon. And Shopify. And Instagram. And YouTube. And Facebook. You see, I use each of these platforms to make my living selling pocket knives every day. But I also feel like I’m selling my soul in small bits as I do business with the devils of Big Tech. I’m a slave to the algorithms and the service fees and seller support, and that stupid $7/month app that should just be part of Shopify. If you work in ecommerce, bring it in. Group hug. There it is. Deep breath. It will be OK. Now, let’s chat about these Devils and how to dance with them.

(Note: this post is part of a presentation I gave at Blade Show 2023 in Atlanta. I’ve formatted it as a blog post and embedded the presentation slides at the bottom of the post. Here is the video of the presentation. Feel free to judge my hair.)

Own What Is Yours

We all have a funny entitlement when it comes to the internet: we think we own bits and pieces of it. For instance, my Instagram account: it’s mine, right? Eh… sort of. But not really. It’s rented land. Meta can kick me off at any time. They can change the algorithm and make my 35,000 followers worthless overnight. An apartment is yours until the landlord evicts you. Let’s talk about what is yours and what is not:

The interesting thing about this list for me as a business owner? Many times, me and my team are spending more time on the Rented Land than the Owned Land. For instance, Instagram is a great place to generate impressions and gather new eyeballs, so we spend a lot of time there. However, ideally, we need those followers to end up on our website and email list— the things we own long-term. The devil’s Rented Land is a funnel that should always lead to the Owned Land.

In particular in the Knife Industry, we just expect the Rented Land platforms to work in our favor. I hear a lot about “shadow banning”— the concept that a platform limits content visibility for specific users. At risk of people hating me, I don’t believe shadow banning is real. Or maybe it is, but it doesn’t matter to me. Shadow banning is complaining about the landlord making the rules for your apartment. They can paint it whatever-the-heck color they want, whenever they want. Sure, you can complain. But it was always Rented Land. That’s where Owned Land is so critical. They can’t take away your email list. They can’t stop you from delivering SMS. They can’t shut down your website. (I realize there are notable exceptions to all of these statements with domain servers, email clients, and the like, but for the average site selling pocket knives, Owned Land is yours.)

So, I suggest owning your most important asset and owning it really, really well. Here’s what I mean by that: many brands, makers, and designers in the Knife Industry have done a stellar job making beautiful physical tools, but they’ve done a poor job owning their brand in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Here are a couple examples:

The Spyderco Tenacious is a Spyderco product. Their brand site ranks 3rd in the SERPs.

The Gerber Paraframe is a iconic Gerber knife. Amazon outranks them on their own keyword.

The Burnley Cypop is an integral part of Lucas Burnley’s brand and story. He ranks 3rd in the SERPs.

Now, don’t misunderstand: if ranking 3rd for their own keywords is part of a larger strategy for these brands, they’re winning. If DTC is important to them or they want to be first to tell their story in Google Search, they’re losing; they don’t own their land or their brand. I don’t know their strategies, but I’d want to be owning my land on Google. So, let’s chat for a minute about Google and how it works:

Owning SERPs on Google and ranking is a process, but it’s an easily reverse-engineered process. What does Google want? Relevant, useful, organized content. The creator makes that content. The User consumes that content. Many businesses in the Knife Industry haven’t taken the time to learn the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how to “SEO as you go.” I found this video from Develomark.com to be super helpful to give you 80 ideas of how to improve your SEO. If the concepts in the video sound like Greek, that’s OK. It means you have some learning to do. Dig in.

To me, SEO isn’t a destination. It’s something I do every time I build a product page, write copy on a site, or create a URL. Doing it is natural. Might I suggest a few resources for learning?

I’m of the opinion that SEO isn’t dead. I think it’s changing with AI tools like Google Bard and ChatGPT, but the foundation of those Large Language Models is humans and human knowledge. I advocate for creating and telling stories. Sure, maybe ChatGPT will devilishly steal your story, but they can’t leave fingerprints. We’ll talk about that more in a minute. Put your brand story online and make sure people find it by optimizing your SEO for the keywords that matter to you.

Have a Plan

I have a true confession: a couple months ago, I was in the middle of a 6 week stint to improve the cybersecurity of my business. We worked on phishing and backups and all sorts of other security tools. And then… one of my vendors got hacked via email. A bad actor copied the email string perfectly, and started emailing me instructions on a wire transfer. They changed the routing instructions, and I nearly lost $9K into the ether. It was a classic case of spear phishing, targeted at the precise moment to the precise person (me), and I didn’t catch it. It was a sucker punch to the gut. I felt sick, especially after all the training and preparation I had just done. So, I recommend making a cyber security plan and sticking to it. Here are three things you can do in the next 60 minutes:

Additionally, here are a bunch of resources to help you avoid getting scammed:

The big thing here is to recognize that all of your Owned Land means nothing if a hacker rips into your site and demands ransom or obliterates your DAM or File Management system. Have a plan to keep them out.

Run Your Own Race

I have kids. Therefore, I watch Bluey. And I love it so much. This blog post isn’t about Bluey, but it probably should be. I wish I had half the talent of Bluey creator Joe Blumm and his team— they’re remarkable storytellers. In one particularly moving episode, the mother of the dog family is telling her kids about how she previously compared herself and her kids to other people (or dogs?), and it bummed her out. Then she breaks the fourth wall, talks direct to camera, and encourages viewers to “Run Your Own Race.”

Learning to run your own race is critical to making the internet work for your business. It’s easy to get caught up in chasing every new idea or algorithm speculation or trend. Now don’t misunderstand. Adapt or die is real. But I’m of the opinion that your adaption should be measure, tempered, and smartly coordinated with the data you have available. Remember: the man who chases two rabbits catches neither.

One of my Gen Z employees asked me the other day why my company, Knafs, isn’t on TikTok. I have my reasons, among them that TikTok hasn’t historically been friendly to knife content. And frankly, I worry about TikTok getting shut down by the US Government. I’ve made a deliberate decision not to be on there right now.

My friend Melissa Backwoods is running a humming TikTok account with knife content. It appears to be going really well. Does that mean I need to be on there? Maybe. Maybe not.

Maybe one day I’ll end up being a late adopter and have missed the entire TikTok boat. I’ll be the Dodo Bird of knives, easily gobbled up by hungry sailors and left for extinction. Or maybe not. Right now, I’m more concerned about building my email list and adding new products to my website. You see, my race for my business is a sprint to create a product line. As a relatively new company, we need product to sell; we need a product catalog. My race right now is not chasing the latest TikTok challenge. In fact, the viral success that TikTok can bring could actually have a detrimental effect of my business— we’re not ready to handle huge influxes of orders on an Operations level.

Leave Fingerprints

One of my favorite places on earth is in Southern Utah in the Four Corners area. It’s full of small trees, quiet breezes, and Native American ruins tucked into the cliff sides. Finding these relics of history is a riot. Imagine treasure hunting combined with hiking combined with orienteering combined with anthropology. I love it. And I think one of the reasons I love it is because I’ll often spend hours trying to find a cliff dwelling tucked high on a sandstone face. I’ll risk life and limb to get to it, then I hike respectfully up to someone’s long ago abandoned home or granary or kiva. Often I’ll get up close to these rock and mortar dwellings and I’ll see fingerprints in the mortar. These are fingerprints from 1,000 years ago! It’s the coolest thing. The humanity of it is inspiring as I think about these humans that worked like crazy to build their lives in the desert on these wild cliff faces. The fingerprints are inspiring.

Robots don’t have fingerprints. AI doesn’t have fingerprints. It can’t leave the messy, inconsistent, human marks that you can with your beating heart. It struggles with sarcasm, tongue-in-cheek, and hyperbole. It struggles to break grammar rules for style. It doesn’t understand the anomalies and complexity of human beings. For example, I asked ChapGPT to tell me bestselling attributes of pocket knives:

It actually did a pretty good job. I was impressed. I then took those specs and plugged them into AI image generator Dall-E. I was not so impressed:

I think I can safely say my job as a knife designer is secure for now. But I also think there is a great opportunity for makers of products to use AI tools to start the design process. But right now, AI doesn’t have fingerprints. It feels fake. It doesn’t capture the complexity of humans yet. Anyway, here are my presentation slides. I hope some of this is useful, especially for the folks that paid $25 to come see my hot mess of a presentation in person. ;)


Ben Petersen
Previous

How To Design a Pocket Knife
Next

“No One is Coming” and 7 Other Lessons in Entrepreneurship