Q&A with Brodie Clark, Co-Founder of SERP Lens

I got my first job in the SEO industry in 2013 at an agency in Brisbane, Australia. I had very little experience at the time in the space while studying at University, with the only selling point for getting hired being that I had been running the Google Ads campaigns for my parents' small business. Because I had barely any experience, I said to the agency (which I had knocked on their office door) that I would intern for free for 2 months, and if they thought I had value to add, then they could pay me. After 1 month of working for free, they then offered me a part-time job. From there, I worked at three different digital marketing agencies that had a strong focus on SEO, then I eventually went out on my own at the beginning of 2019 to start my own consultancy and never looked back. Since starting my own business, I've had the opportunity to consult with some of the largest domains in the world, spanning across eCommerce, news, marketplaces, stock photo sites, and more.

While I'm open to working with all types of large businesses (aside from SaaS - ironically with SERP Lens being a SaaS business), I tend to focus a lot more on eCommerce these days. It's the type of website where I'm able to offer the greatest level of expertise, with my heavy focus on Google Merchant Center and product feeds - areas that have historically been less of a focus for those working in SEO. With that said, I do tend to do a lot of work with marketplaces, which can overlap with eCommerce if being a product-focused marketplace, alongside publishers of all kinds who tend to rely on surfaces such as Discover and Google News. At the end of the day, my specialities are more weighted toward technical SEO, with effectively any large brand that has 1M+ URLs being a project that I would be interested in.

I think the biggest winner when it comes to AI Search will continue to be the tool providers, rather than the site operators themselves. There will undoubtedly continue to be buzz within this space and investment, but ROI will continue to be difficult to show. Within SERP Lens, we have built into our browser some core features related to LLMs that we think are truly useful to our users. The features you are getting are related to what we think develops value for our client, not just tools that get behind existing buzz for the sake of it.

The alternative to traditional search results on Google are surfaces such as AI Mode. Within AI Mode, many of the traditional SERP features are still present, especially when it comes to eCommerce. With this in mind, tracking SERP features still has tremendous value to site owners if done correctly and in a purposeful way. It is helpful to be aware of what SERP features Google are currently showing, the history behind what has been deprecated over the years and for what purpose, along with discovering trends for what is to come. This is precisely what I have done with my Australian clients in the eCommerce space when I originally saw the writing on the wall for what was to come globally in terms of free listings. The US had many of these features for years before they expanded to Australia, the UK and Europe more broadly.