EP #380] [ENG] - Importance of leveraging semantics to scale a brand in Amazon in 2026 - Lou Lou Durant

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From choosing products and sourcing from a supplier, to setting up your Amazon account and marketing your business, you will hear it here. Let's get started. Here is your host, Vincenzo Toscano. Hello guys, welcome to another episode of the Commerce Lab by EcomC, the place where it is related to Amazon FBA, private level and e-commerce.

My name is Vincenzo Toscano, Founder and CEO of EcomC, and today we bring you another special guest. Her name is Lulu, and she's the Founder and CEO of Nova Ecommerce Group, where they specialize on everything that has to do with supporting brand scale on Amazon. And the reason why I wanted to bring Lulu today, there's a very interesting topic I want to bring to the table, which is all the changes that we're seeing with the semantic kind of world, and how we can optimize around that, and much more.

So I know Lulu has a lot of insights, and she has a lot of experience when it comes to Amazon in general. So I think it's going to be a very insightful conversation, especially when it comes to re-understanding how to keep scaling your brand on Amazon. So Lulu, welcome for the first time to the show. How are you doing?

Doing well. Thanks so much for having me, Vincenzo. And it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Thank you so much. So I guess before we dive into the topic, just tell us more about yourself in case somebody doesn't know you or your company. And then we can start from there. Yeah, absolutely.

So Lulu Durant, I am the founder and CEO of Nova Ecommerce Group, have a very broad background in Amazon. I've worked in the space for over 10 years, actually starting my career at Amazon headquarters in Seattle as a vendor manager myself. um, since have worked on the brand side, leading Amazon sales channels for large brands. Um, I also worked on the agency side at some of the largest agencies in the world and some smaller, more mid tier agencies before I started my own.

Um, so our bread and butter of course is Amazon, the largest e-commerce marketplace that exists, but we also do support brands on Walmart and on TikTok shop, which is kind of the gold rush right now. Everyone knows TikTok as one of the upper funnel plays that drives to all your other channels. So really leaning into that for several of our brands as well. Awesome, Lulu.

Thank you so much for that. So I guess let's start with a quick intro, I guess, regarding the topic for today. Before we went live, you're mentioning everything that's going on around the semantics and optimization around that and so on. So I guess for people to first of all have an understanding what that means, And then, of course, we can then jump into the technicalities.

Are you seeing the Amazon space, you know, shifting when it comes to especially last six to 12 months for people has been going deep into that, especially with so much AI, the way Amazon is changing now from Rufus to Alexa and all of that. So what are you seeing happening? Yeah. So the way I like to describe this, and it sounds like this big word is a semantic shift, but we've already seen this.

So that's what's happening on Amazon today, the semantic shift. And it's been happening, like you said, and we've been discussing for the past, you know, 12, a little over 12 months, actually, with the inception of the Cosmo algorithm that a lot of people don't know about. That's one of the backend algorithms that Amazon uses to be able to rank and index your products. A lot of people know the A9 algorithm that is still in existence.

Cosmo was layered on top of that. And then on top of that, we have what used to be Rufus, that chatbot function on Amazon that allowed us to shop just like we were on ChatGPT. But now it's called Alexa for shopping. And that's a very recent rebranding that we saw a couple of weeks ago.

But the same functionality of what Rufus used to do is now just Alexa for shopping. And what we're seeing that means for brands, just like what we saw on Google and Meta about three, four years ago, was really that now we need to focus more on the inputs of retail fundamentals on the listing being fully optimized for those schema that the algorithms read. And I'll get into what that means in a second, rather than just on the outputs of like how much traffic are we driving to this listing?

So when I say schema, that's where that Cosmo algorithm comes in. So Cosmo is an AI algorithm that essentially reads your listing for if you're a brand, you have a product on Amazon, you need to now be able to tell both the customer and the algorithm. them. So you're speaking to machines now, not only your shoppers, 15 different things about what does your product do?

When is it used? Why is it used? You know, is there a season of year that it needs to be used in? How is it used?

So we really have to start to use both our images and our HTML copy, your title, bullets, description, to make sure we're speaking to all these different mechanisms of how the product works to be able to inform, you know, what it went, how should this be surfaced to customers and what customers should it be surfaced to? And now Amazon's doing a lot of that legwork for us, which actually makes our job on the ad side easier as long as the listing is fully optimized. Yeah. I mean, you did such a good job, like doing the whole introduction, because I think a lot of people are not even aware of the system that really was driving Rufus and now Alexa for shopping, which is, you know, this, the whole kind of a cosmo ecosystem that also kind of branches into Amazon recognition, Amazon comprehend.

It's a whole kind of a blueprint that Amazon put to read your images, what you put on your text, what is it probably really meant to do or who is the ideal consumer? And I think a good starting point for this conversation, based on the introduction you just made, is like, I feel a lot of sellers really struggle sometimes to understand who is the ideal avatar in the first place. They have a product, they have a brand, but they usually have this mindset, oh, I want to take as many sales as possible.

I want to go as wide as I can. And that's why you start seeing this mistake of the product being very generic and a niche and that why we seeing them now struggling when it comes to really not being you know I guess as recommended as they wanted to buy Amazon And also they seeing a shift in ranking So how are you seeing that being an issue, first of all, with some of your clients or the people you talk to? And how people, I guess, can take the first step and start defining who is the ideal avatar so they can optimize backwards from there, I guess.

Yeah, that's such a great point that you hit on. So I think when you say ideal avatar in other people's performance marketing language, they may say ICP, ideal customer profile. So really, it's figuring out like who is your target audience. And like you just said, most brands have way too wide of an audience that they're trying to hit.

You can't be everything to everyone. And unfortunately, most brands, when they're first starting out, unless you're an experienced marketer or you have a model that works, you don't narrow it in enough. So a good example of this, we actually had a brand come to us. They had a mushroom coffee, but they were, you know, the mushroom, but their mushroom coffee was talking about stress relief in addition to increasing focus and energy.

And so it's like, okay, you're trying to be everything to everyone. How can we break this product out and say, you know, stress relief is probably not what someone needs in the morning. Maybe they need that in the evening. And what they need in the morning is going to be focus and energy.

And so you're speaking to two different customer avatars here. So we actually had them create a second variation of their product and redo the packaging on their original product. Their original product stayed on that focus towards the morning time. So this is when you're going to take it when you're waking up in the morning, you're going to work and you want an alternative or you want something in addition to your regular caffeine, those adaptogenic mushrooms incorporated into your your morning boost, I should say.

So then we had them create a second product that we originally launched separately and later on variated them. But the second product is entirely for stress relief. So it's more something that you take at night. So it has things like it doesn't have the lion's mane in it because that's more of a cognitive boost that you take in the morning.

It does have the cordyceps and the reishi mushroom. I may be saying that wrong. And also it has some ashwagandha in there. So really speaking to an entirely different use case at an entirely different time of day for an entirely different purpose.

And the people who buy these two are actually most likely going to be entirely different people because not everyone who needs their morning coffee needs their nighttime stress relief. But by doing that, they were able to see a massive increase in their sales on the first one because we were able to then completely change the listing, dial it in for when it's used, what it's used for, and speak to a very specific customer in the title and in the main image by calling these features out and also narrow in the advertising targeting.

And then that second one, we were able to start with a blank slate and only push it to that right customer and spend the velocity on those longer tail keywords that were focused towards the nighttime relaxation. Yeah. I mean, that's actually such a good way of leveraging that because I think just as you explained that example right there, a big issue, and I think it comes, I understand a lot of stuff, especially when you're getting started on Amazon, when you really want to scale this, which is what most founders want.

They want to scale their business pretty fast. They think that they answer just to appeal to as many people as possible because they think that's what is going to bring the revenue the fastest. But what they don't understand is that long-term, just as the example you described right there, you're never going to then become the authority or the non-product for any of the niches within the niche itself. So that means you're never going to get in that position.

And more importantly, the attribution that in the semantics Amazon has to see. So then when somebody is looking, in this case, for a specific coffee kind of equivalent, you are the one that coming up, right? And another one that has done the heavy lifting in terms of really being tailoring where their images, their copy and all of that, which I guess brings me to my next question because so far we have described, okay, what is the idea avatar, ICP, how we define it? And then you get that example of what is a good way of doing it.

But then the next thing is how we optimize from there because some people might be sometimes confused something that it only comes down to adding a few keywords, but we have seen that this now goes beyond the keywords. It also goes in your images, what you do with your A-plus content, and also the behaviors of your consumer behind the shopping of your products. So what are you seeing on that kind of area as well when it comes to that? Yeah, so this is exactly where we lean in with our brands who aren't aware of this, which most brands are not, we lean in on day one to, we probably need to rebuild your listing.

And it's not to say that you have a bad listing, you know, maybe you have beautiful infographics, and maybe you have beautiful A plus content, but it's not necessarily what we call generative engine optimized. So that's optimized for Cosmo, optimized for Rufus. Because what used to what how Amazon used to work, and the reason why a lot of people had HTML text in their A plus is because Amazon's algorithm, they only used to have A9. It could only read HTML text.

Now Amazon's algorithm can read and uses all of the text that's on your images. So that means having a fully optimized image stack of seven infographics and every infographic should be pretty simple. It should only answer one key buyer decision question, But it should explain, you know, either what's the product for, when is it used, how is it used, what are some various other FAQs that someone may need to subconsciously have answered before they feel confident in buying. So all of those seven, at least seven infographics should be fully optimized for that purpose.

And then same thing below the fold. If someone's getting below the fold on your listing, meaning they've scrolled down past those rows of sponsored product results that are right below your buy box, and they're now at your brand story module, and you don't have a brand story there saying, hey, this is how our brand started. This is our founder story. Here's our assortment.

You're missing an opportunity there. You also missing an opportunity to better index in the algorithm And then the A content We see a lot of brands have not yet pivoted to premium A plus And as of last month I think it was one or two months ago, Amazon rolled out premium A plus to every single brand. So you no longer have to meet certain criteria. You can have premium A plus on your brand new listing on your brand new account from day one, which is a huge conversion impact.

So taking advantage of those slider modules, shoppable images, adding video into the premium A+, adding those interactive FAQs, those speak directly to what people are looking for in Alexa for shopping. And also we use Alexa for shopping. We actually go probe it when we're doing our initial research for all this content of saying like, what are people asking when they're looking for a product in this category? And we make sure we answer those in those FAQ modules.

So really taking advantage of all of that. um and and optimizing it for not only seo but geo nice so now on all this optimization sometimes people might get especially as we talk more about this and everything over one and thinking you know this is gonna take me months to figure out it's gonna take me a lot of time to really be impactful but the reality is that if you're methodical and you know what you're doing this can start to get effect pretty fast right especially if you know where to tap and where to prioritize your optimization So I want to bring very quickly that to the conversation, because especially now with Prime Day coming up, for example, and then there's other events throughout the year, people might think, oh, man, like I haven't done anything when it comes to this.

I need to now fix all my listing from A to Z and potentially I might lose some of the biggest kind of seasonality effects that have Amazon to offer for the remainder of 2026. So very quickly, based on your experience and what you're seeing, like if this is something that you need six months at least to see an effect or a month. I mean, of course, it depends on the categories and the level of competition, but high level, what are you seeing with that? Yeah, so I guess it's going to depend for every brand.

So if you're a brand owner and you want to know where should I focus first and what's going to be the highest impact for Prime Day, for example, take a look at your top listing. So what are your top one or two listings that are driving you the majority of your revenue and dive into a couple of key metrics there. Number one is your click through rate and your click share. So you can pull you obviously can pull your click through rate from your ads console.

And then click share is something that you would pull from your search query performance report and brand analytics. If your click share is below the category average, your lowest hanging fruit is going to be to optimize your main image. You want your main image to stand out amongst all the other competitors that are going to show up on a search results page. The secondary things you can look at there are your title and your price psychology.

But main image is going to be the number one thing that you can do. And if you improve your main image, you can obviously run an A-B test through Manager Experiments and Seller Central. But you can see an impact within days, within a week. You can see your CTR hockey puck if you do a really good main image optimization by understanding what your buyers are looking for on the top searches that you're being found for.

What is that person looking for? And make sure you stand out for that. The second metric to look at is conversion rate. So if your conversion rate, meaning your purchase share, if you look at SQP and your ad console, if those two metrics are below the category average, then you want to look at your listing.

So maybe you're capturing a lot of clicks, but people are not actually buying once they get to your page. They're clicking away for whatever reason. You need to do some optimization. And I would start with your listing image carousel.

So that the seven infographics, why are people clicking away? Dive into any negative reviews you have or any reviews where people are saying, you know, I really like this product, but I wish I had known. And make sure you're answering those and subverting any reason for people to click away. cool now with all these different areas and ways of optimizing that some people might ask themselves a question of which one is the most impactful because you quickly went over the copy you also mentioned some of the images i bless content all of that so far and sometimes especially if you're getting started and your resources might be a potentially limited you might have to prioritize as one over the other.

And we know for a fact that depending on which optimization you do, some of them have a heavier, we can call it weight, in terms of prioritization on Amazon. And it's another, maybe the title more important than the bullet points or things like that. So when it comes to all these kind of methodologies you mentioned so far, is there an area you recommend starting to be the most impactful? Or you don't think necessarily there is, I guess, a blueprint most people should follow to be the most impactful as soon as possible, I guess.

So I think your question here is if someone is starting out as a brand new seller or they're launching a brand new product, what's the most impactful thing you can do when you don't have data to understand what's my historical? That's a great question. So I, you know, making sure I'm actually going to say that it's none of the above. Probably the most impactful thing that you can do as a brand new seller with no data is number one, ensuring product market fit.

And that's, that does include pre-market research. So making sure that there is a need for your product in the market. And then also you're, you're differentiated from the top competitors, that there's room for you in the market. It's not oversaturated or over fragmented and that there is, and that you have a COGS that works for the, for a market price that you can launch at.

And then I'm going to tell you that you need to launch a lot lower than where you want your target price to be because you need to generate social proof and you need to also generate sales velocity as quickly as possible in those early months. And price is the best lever that you have when you don't have a lot of reviews. And so that's the social proof to be able to convince people that your products great, you need to convince them on price. Say, hey, my product is exactly the same or has a better feature than this top seller.

And I have less reviews. So I'm going to convince you based on price that you should buy mine and give me some trust early on Nice No very good answer I think I agree with you like especially at the beginning the most important thing is it a good product because everything we discussing so far is meaningless if your product is not good it's you don't have the economics to make it work the prodigy is a copy paste of everybody out there like you know those fundamentals have to be there for everything we are discussing built on top of that in the shape of success um which now that brings me And also to another question when it comes to this whole methodology, which is, let's say when everybody goes through all this optimization process, they eventually get to the point that they manage to optimize, you know, all their ACO, the semantics behind the images and love that.

A lot of times I feel the mistake I see is people think this is a one time job. They do it once and then that's it. That's it. I'm optimized.

People do the same mistake with PPC. I'm sure you see it. Like the thing is, this is a one-time thing and then it's going to run perfect forever. And that's not the case, especially with the way Amazon is shifting and how behavior of consumer is shifting.

You need to be on top of, you know, the new terminologies that might pop out, the new behaviors and things like that. So being said that, how frequently do you think people, after they do all this methodology we have described so far, they should go back to the drawing board and say, I need to draw some optimization again, you know? Yeah. So again, I'm going to go back to the data.

You know, we could say an arbitrary number of quarterly refreshes is ideal. And for your top sellers, maybe quarterly is ideal. But I think more important than that is to keep a pulse on your metrics. So that's your click share and your purchase share compared to the category average.

When you see those dropping below your competitors, that's when you need to go in and optimize a listing. Cool, cool. and and I guess when it comes to moving into the final kind of stages of the data like you mentioned data and I love the fact that you bring data a lot because I'm also very kind of numbers driven when it comes to this and I'm curious to know is there any kind of kpi specifically that you focus when you're kind of monitoring this like do you so for example check a brown analytics or any other tools like high level, of course, without going to the technicalities, what is like your way of monitoring how your progress is going?

Yes. So I've mentioned it a few times on this call so far, and I will emphasize again, search query performance report is probably one of my favorite reports that Amazon released, I don't even know, a year or two ago. This data didn't used to be available to us. And it's essentially benchmarking your listings versus your competitors.

And that data is gold because if you're underperforming your competitors, then, you know, you need to go in and optimize. And then if you're overperforming, let's say you have an outsized purchase share, an outsized click share, then, you know, to lean in on ads. So so it's going to call out your winners and your losers. And it's also going to help you identify, you know, where to put your efforts, both in boosting the tailwinds that you have running, pushing you ahead.

And then also, what are your headwinds and how should we focus on prioritizing where to dive in? Yeah, I love it. Yeah. Search query performance is also my best friend.

That's where I find all the answers when somebody asks me anything about the account. But it's good that we make an emphasis because I'm sure you also see this on a daily basis. A lot of people don't even know exist, which is crazy, you know. Yeah.

And it's something that we need to make people aware of, you know. Yeah. Yeah. And vendors are not so lucky.

So if you're a vendor, unfortunately, you don't get access to this. But sellers, we have a goldmine of data in front of us. Obviously, there's a ton of other resources to Amazon Marketing Cloud. There's a whole other call on that.

But if we're just talking about the retail fundamentals, that SQP report, it's found in brand analytics of Seller Central. Dive in for sure. Love it. Awesome, Lulu.

So I guess to bring this to a closure, I mean, we touch on a lot of things. Very insightful, first of all. And I would love to bring this to, I guess, maybe a final piece of wisdom you want to share with us or maybe a tip or maybe a mistake. You see people don't try all this methodology that they should avoid.

Is there any last thing you would like to mention during today's episode? That's a great question. We touched on so much. I would say, yeah, I would say, you know, just the resounding theme of everything we spoke about is ads are probably not the issue.

Unless you have all your retail fundamentals, meaning your click through is above market average and your conversion rates above market average, ads are probably not your biggest leak. That's not to say that ads are not important. You do need an expert in your ads account. But but definitely start with the inputs first, especially as we move more towards this AI driven world where Amazon's not focusing on who's bidding the highest on a keyword.

They're focusing on what listing converts the best. Yeah, very, very, very important. So I appreciate that, Lulu. It was very insightful conversation.

Thank you so much for all those tips. And I'm sure a lot of people might want to continue this conversation with you. Also find out more about what you offer. So tell us how people can find you.

And of course, I will make sure everything is down below. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So if you're interested, I'm on LinkedIn.

We'll make sure that it's linked below. I am very active on there. I I post frequently about this topic and others. So follow me on LinkedIn.

And also you can go to our website, Novaecommercegroup.com and book a call directly with me. Thank you, Lila. So it was a pleasure.

Hopefully see you soon at one of the upcoming events. Yeah, thank you so much. Yes, thank you so much for having me. Take care.

Have a good one. Bye. Bye. Thanks for listening to The E-Commerce Lab by EcomC.

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