Content Wars: Product Pages vs. Resources — Which One Wins in SEO With Kristan Bauer

Kristan Bauer is an Advisor and the Founder of Conifr Media, an SEO consulting agency, which she sold to SEO Collective in 2024 to elevate their success. With over 15 years of experience in search marketing, she has developed SEO strategies for numerous Fortune 500 companies and prominent brands, including Google, National Geographic, and Express. Before Conifr Media, Kristan served as the Director of SEO at Zillow Group, where she managed a channel with over one billion annual visitors, and the Head of SEO at Amazon Web Services. Kristan provides independent consulting, advising, and coaching across various business and marketing disciplines.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[2:15] Kristan Bauer explains the distinction between product and resource content in e-commerce SEO
[4:41] The importance of separating product and resource content into distinct initiatives
[13:49] Common mistakes brands make when creating resource content
[23:36] How resource content helped an e-commerce brand increase organic traffic by 370% in nine months
[32:01] The role of competitive gap analysis in identifying content opportunities
[39:03] Optimization strategies for AI-driven search
[42:52] Technical SEO issues brands overlook and how to resolve them
[52:17] Why Kristan founded Conifr Media and her advice for launching a business as a solo entrepreneur
[1:03:06] Kristan delves into her upbringing
[1:10:09] Kristan recounts a near-death climbing experience and the lessons she learned from it

In this episode…

While most e-commerce brands recognize the value of SEO, many focus too heavily on optimizing their product pages and neglect resource content. Without a strategic approach, companies waste time creating content that doesn’t generate traffic, links, or conversions. How can brands leverage resource content to improve visibility and drive revenue?

According to SEO consultant Kristan Bauer, product content involves optimizing product, category, and merchandising pages for search engines, while resource content educates, engages, and informs users at various stages of the buying journey. Resource content is sharable and linkable, allowing brands to build domain authority and drive organic traffic. Kristan emphasizes that brands must align resource content with user intent, invest in high-quality editorial strategies, and ensure articles support product sales rather than existing in isolation. By conducting keyword research, leveraging competitive gap analysis, and structuring content to maximize linkability, brands can improve their SEO performance.

In today’s episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris invites Kristan Bauer, an Advisor and the Founder of Conifr Media, to talk about optimizing resource content for e-commerce SEO. Kristan shares SEO strategies for AI-driven search engines, how to resolve technical SEO issues, and how to leverage competitive gap analysis to identify content opportunities.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

"The distinction between product content and resource content in e-commerce is pretty significant; it's a completely different search intent."
"Brands that focus on both product and resource content do really, really well long term."
"The volume of content created doesn’t necessarily equate to results in terms of growth in traffic."
"SEO isn’t just keywords, but keyword research helps us understand what people are actually searching for."
"If you want to drive traffic, then SEO should be a part of your content strategy."

Action Steps

Balance product and resource content in your SEO strategy: Many brands focus too much on product pages, overlooking the value of educational content. A strong mix of both helps attract traffic, build authority, and convert researchers into buyers.
Conduct a competitive gap analysis: Analyzing what competitors rank for that your brand does not can uncover missed opportunities. By filling those gaps, you can improve search visibility and capture new audiences.
Use structured data for better search rankings: Implementing structured data markup on product and resource pages helps search engines understand and display content more effectively. This can lead to higher click-through rates and improved rankings.
Audit and prune underperforming content: Many brands create thousands of articles without evaluating their impact. Removing or improving low-performing content prevents keyword cannibalization and strengthens SEO performance.
Optimize for AI-driven search results: AI-powered search engines prioritize conversational and high-quality content. Structuring content to answer user questions naturally increases the chances of appearing in AI-generated responses.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show.

William Harris 0:15

Hey everyone. I'm William Harris. I'm the Founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 million and beyond as you up arrow your business and your personal life. Joining me today is Kristan Bauer. Kristan was previously the head of SEO at Zillow group and AWS, and has been an SEO consultant for over 15 years. She's also the founder of Conifr, an award winning SEO agency. Today we're going to be talking about product, content versus resource content in e-commerce, SEO, and this episode will end with a cliffhanger. I mean that literally, Kristan will tell us about the time when she was on a 1500 foot cliff, thinking, I'm going to fall. So make sure to stick around and see how that ends. Hint, she's here on the show. So it has a happy ending. Kristan , welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast.

Kristan Bauer 1:00

Thanks so much for having me. Well, it's a pleasure to be here.

William Harris 1:04

Yeah, I have to give a shout out to my boy, Nick LeRoy, author of the excellent email newsletter #SEOForLunch, for making this introduction, connecting us to each other, because I've really enjoyed being able to work with you on a lot of different things here.

Kristan Bauer 1:16

Yeah, likewise. Thank you so much, Nick. Nick's an amazing industry, force in the industry, and a good friend. So yeah, he's amazing. Thank you so much for connecting us. It's been a pleasure working with you and collaborating on SEO and paid

William Harris 1:32

Yeah, I want to dig in before we do I want to announce our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired with one that sold for nearly 800,000,001 that ipoed. You can learn more on our website@Elumynt.com which is spelled E, l, u, m, y, N, t.com that said onto the good stuff, like I said, we're talking about what I'm calling like content wars, product pages versus resource pages, which one wins in SEO. But I want to start with, why is this distinction so critical, and how can businesses better navigate this? Definitely, the distinction between

Kristan Bauer 2:17

product content and resource content in e-commerce is pretty significant, if you think about it, it's a different, completely different search intent of someone who is shopping. They know what they want. They're looking for a product, they're looking for a type of product, a category, or if they're just looking for informational intent around a product, or they're researching and so thinking about e-commerce, content and these two tracks between product and shopping and resources is huge because it not only requires targeting a different intent, it requires completely different SEO tactics, and Typically, completely different teams that are implementing these strategies, and so users need both to be honest. I mean, e-commerce companies rely on sales and products and revenue, but users also do a lot of research. These days, there are studies that show how many different touch points they have or how much time they take researching items before they buy, depending on the price range and purchase. And so there's a lot of demand in both categories, and both, I think, are relevant and necessary to really win at e-commerce SEO, if you truly want to be visible for your user, across products, across their questions, and then also digging into the implementation, it's just going to take different tactics to scale up both and be successful at both. But you really do need both. They complement each other and resource content can provide value and additional sales even into e-commerce, shopping, products, content as well.

William Harris 4:00

Yeah, yeah. So I feel like a lot of times when we talk to brands about SEO, and over the years, especially when they talk about, like, oh, we need SEO, they think technical. That's a part of it. They'll think product pages, and then there's like, the resource stuff is, like, almost in the in the back of their mind is, it's like, there's just, like an intern who kind of knows the products and talks about it on a website a little bit, it gets zero shares, zero likes, zero links, like it doesn't do anything right? And I think that's part of like people thinking about SEO is like this blanket, just this blanket catch all thing for optimizing towards SEO? Why? Why is it helpful to think about breaking them out into these different categories?

Kristan Bauer 4:41

So breaking breaking out each one of these initiatives into different categories. And when I say initiative, that's how my mind categorizes it. If you have shopping and product content, like that's its own track, you have resource content that's its own track, like I mentioned, the tactics are going to be different for both and so. For resource content in particular you wanted to complement and support your products. And so that might be the type of products you sell. The industry your brand is in for any e-commerce brand, and so understanding what your users really need help with, what are their questions that is just one way to target and build on resource content. So particularly finding out how to guides, what is questions. Product reviews are huge, best of lists, roundups. All these things are what users do search for related to products. And so they typically have maybe more mid to higher volume or demand in terms of search volume and demand. Now if you think about products in particular, products typically tend to be more of that long tail, super niche type searches. And so you need a lot of them to scale, if you want to scale, or you have to target the category terms that you're looking for in order to really find those kind of more mid to head term. Or when I say mid to head term, like higher volume searches demand basically because it is just going to be a lower level of audio, lower number of searches that are searching for specific products, even still, you want to be visible for that. So it allows brands to target different types of queries and different shifts and demands on queries. And so the resource content, in particular, if you are talking about product reviews, that's going to be a completely different work stream and require skill sets, completely different skill sets to build out a super in depth review roundup that you then want to funnel users back into the actual shopping experience and product experience, and when you're thinking About more product and shopping content that typically is more on the merchandising or development side, where those pages are templates. If you build out a super great template that is scalable, you have your SEO best practices baked in, you have your e-commerce optimizations baked into that template that is scalable and repeatable with a little bit of love here and there, in terms of trying to bake in unique content, make sure you have the right information, reviews, pros, cons, things like that on your product pages and category pages, but that's largely templatized. And so the resource content is something where I do see brands ignore to some capacity, because it just requires a more manual, human approach to creating that resource content. And it takes time. It takes time. It takes, you know, basically, brain power. It takes research in order to really do it right. But brands that focus on both do really, really well. Long term, we've worked with clients that invest heavily into their resource sections, and it's kind of the the rising tide lifts all boats where sales and traffic grow because you have just just a depth of different type of content that meets the users at different touch points on their journey and meets the audience demand. Basically, I like

William Harris 8:21

that you called out volume, the volume of keywords, like you said, or the volume of traffic to those keywords can be significantly higher to the resource content, like you said, unless you're going for, like, the category ones and the likelihood of the average brand, let's just say a ten million brand, the likelihood of them ranking number one for shirts is zero. Like, they're not going to rank number one for shirts, right and so, but this gives them that ability to find something else that is a higher volume keyword that they can go after, versus going after the real tiny, little niche product keyword that they might have, which might not have a whole lot of search volume for it. Like you said, this allows them to go after that. It reminds me of, and like you said, how that can lift all boats, right? And so it reminds me of, there was a time when we were doing this. This wasn't an e-commerce company, but I was working at sell bright and we did like Amazon listing management was a big part of what we did. One of the ways that we decided to reach out beyond just like Amazon listing management or something like that, was we put together an infographic about how does Amazon make its money? And what was interesting about it is because it was very much still connected to Amazon, which was helpful for overall, just relevance for Google to recognize the relevance that our site had with Amazon. But we, I think we got like, 400 and some links to this infographic because it was very well done from the Wall Street Journal and from a bunch of other really high authority websites. And to your point, while that specific post might not have generated, you know, a whole lot of actual trials and signups of the software it ranked. It increased our overall domain authority. It increased. The overall amount of, like you said just now, when people are looking for us, for the keywords that mattered for, let's just say more bottom of funnel things, we were overall ranking higher for those bottom of funnel keywords which was important to this brand.

Kristan Bauer 10:14

That's a fantastic display of this strategy. A couple different components there, where you're talking about the search demand and the volume, and then linkability and shareability, resource content is highly linkable, shareable, way more than product content. Not everyone's going to be sharing this great you know, white t shirt they found at a retailer, but they might share a post about how to find the perfect white under shirt. Or, you know, however you're thinking about that, or, you know, whatever meme t shirt. I don't know t shirt industry very well. Sure, I should probably think about this. But when I think about this. We're thinking about, for example, outdoor industry. Conifr, we worked with REI for a long time, and thinking about the type of expert advice articles they write and the questions that they write, you could think about how to pack a sleeping bag. That's, yeah, that's a huge topic for outdoor folks and how to pack a sleeping bag properly, or what type of sleeping bag do you need there? Because there's so many different types out there, but that's going to target such a higher demand and volume of users versus someone looking for a synthetic zero degree Celty sleeping bag. You know that like a specific model and product, and so if you think about that volume ratio, you can not only win higher, you know, higher percentage of volume and traffic with resource content, but you can also provide resources that users can share and link, and that therefore distributes more visibility. It helps grow back links. Helps grow domain authority, everything like what you're talking about, and we were talking about what the infographic, that's something that you should think about a brand should think about whenever they're producing a great piece of resource content, that type of multimedia can really aid in just user comprehension and linkability as well. Just making a really great asset for your brand. You think about it more than just a piece of content. It's an asset for your brand. Yeah. Why

William Harris 12:34

do you think brands get stuck on this and focus too much on the product content instead of the resource content. And I want to give you my my thoughts, and then I want to have you either correct or or, you know, deep in what we're going with. When I run into this, I think a lot of times the reason brands get stuck in and again, I'm looking at this from the context of a ten million brand, not a $1 million brand like this, is a brand. They have a budget. They They likely already, you know, they're getting decent traffic, like investing in their SEO can make a significant and noticeable difference for their brand, and they will focus on the product content often. And what I've found is that I think that they think that they're doing resource content is the best that I could think. I think that they believe that they are and they are writing content, but not from an SEO perspective, like I said, it could be. It could be an intern. Maybe they hire just like a blog writing company, and they're like, producing content, but it's not content that's actually going to move the needle. Is that one of the biggest things you've seen? Or what do you find out of the hurdles that are keeping people from actually going and saying, Yeah, this makes sense. This is 10x the volume of traffic. Let's start digging into this and taking this series and investing in actual, real budget into producing content that's going to get noticed and shared and linked to.

Kristan Bauer 13:49

I think you're spot on with a lot of that in what I see with brands when they think about resource content and even e-commerce and non e-commerce brands the volume of content created doesn't necessarily equate to results in terms of growth and traffic, and it's not uncommon for me as a consultant or the Conifr team to step in and really evaluate what's been done thus far in any kind of blog or resource section and poke holes in that, and not to discount the efforts towards that. For example, even just a few months ago, I was working with a marketplace, a brand outside of e-commerce, just as a recent example, it comes to mind, they had over 5000 articles across their brands that they had been working with and pumping out in terms of blog content and resource content, we did a content audit to try to diagnose, okay, what's the traffic value of all this content? What actual pieces of content are driving? Clicks? Are they driving? Visits? Are they driving? Any kind of signups or conversions or leads, are they driving backlinks? And so taking data from different tools and sources and combining that, distilling that down into a content audit, can be a really powerful exercise, because you can see, okay, are the resources that we are investing in this actually working out of that audit, it was probably less than 200 articles out of like 5000 articles that were driving a meaningful amount of clicks. And so that can be, I hate to be the bearer of bad news in that circumstance, that could be incredibly disappointing for brands to think that they're investing a lot of great resources in the right direction, but without a really comprehensive strategy, then, unfortunately, there's a lot of wasted resources out there when it comes to content production, and that might be another misconception or another hurdle that brands have to overcome, where you just hire a blog writer, maybe someone who doesn't understand SEO. And I'm not saying all content has to be made with SEO in mind. There's lots of different types of content that do not necessarily have an SEO purpose. That being said, if your goal is to drive traffic and organic traffic and understand search demand, then SEO should be a part of that process and baked into any kind of editorial or resource content strategy. So flipping that on its head, I think there is an issue just in terms of direction, in terms of that education on what actually can be successful to drive traffic. Another e-commerce brand that we worked with a B2C, e-commerce brand in the baby and toddler child space you're selling everything from strollers to bassinets to everything you need for raising a baby. Basically, they were in the same boat, not to that extent, but they had a really strong content editor and very experienced content team of writers and actually experts in the child development space, they were going down the same path of just producing content for the sake of producing content because they thought it was the right thing. And so we come in and help build out an actual editorial strategy around search intent, around search demand, around their products, and help educate and train their content team with best practices and understanding the bar of quality content and the type of content you need to include if you want To try to target different types of searches, and if their content program flourished, I think we talked about this as an example where we were able to increase traffic by over 300 and I think it was 70% in one year just by focusing on A very specific SEO focus editorial content plan that had their core products and audience in mind. It's really just trying to put focus around your audience and users. And sometimes it's content tweaks here and there. Sometimes it's a major overhaul in terms of just reframing how people think about it. So I do think brands have that common misconception, just create content for the sake of creating content. That doesn't always work if you want to drive traffic. Another misconception there with just focusing on products content, I do think that it's just what e-commerce brands typically are focused on they want to drive revenue, which, of course, that drives the bottom line of the business. And so just focusing on that is table stakes for e-commerce brands. But I do think that most of the e-commerce brands just think about, okay, we'll get our products out there in the wild, we'll build that content, we can scale it, and then we'll let it run on autopilot. And so that is, I think, a lure for many brands to be like, Okay, well, we can build this and just let it run with proper development, get it set up, plug and play, set it and forget it. That's not always the case. And so I think that's kind of a little bit of two fold that we see most common with e-commerce brands. Those

William Harris 19:17

are great points. You reminded me of a couple of things. One was this idea of 5000 articles and only 200 that are producing anything. That's very true. And just as I say, everything in life, right? Like there's the Pareto Principle, 8020, some people would say even 95 five, right? But it reminds me of a process that I remember Tommy Walker would do a lot, and I brought him into some stuff at GoDaddy and content pruning, RIGHT? Jimmy Daly did a lot of content pruning, I remember, and it's like, you know, one of those things, which is like, basically, what are the things that are actually dragging you down, just leaving it live? It's, oh, let's just leave it live. So what? No big deal. No, it is a big deal because now you're potentially splitting, let's say that you are trying to rank for, you know, best summer shirts, right? And, okay, well now if. Got 50 articles that are trying to rank for the same thing, you're splitting up that, or, let's just say, like those ranking indicators now to Google to 50 different instead of just bringing it all into one and saying, This is the one. This is the one that I want you Google to think of when you think of best summer shirts, this is the one making sure all of those resources are pointing at that and thinking about that. So I think that was good. And then you called out, like, non SEO content too. And I want to at least share, like, a couple of the things that we have done previously that I really appreciated with the idea of non SEO content, that I'll say that I got from Sujan Patel and Rob Wormley were the idea of, like, they had some really good names for it, like, back scratcher content was one of them. And back scratcher content basically what it was was, you know, maybe you're working with a somebody who's, like an industry veteran in your space, and the goal is, it's like, we're a partner, like, I'm going to write this article, and it's very favorable towards you, and we're doing this in a way to where it's like, I'm highlighting this thing that maybe is outside of our wheelhouse, but it's shining a light on you and how we work together and all this stuff, and kind of scratching the back of that partner that bar exam, scratches your back, and so you're back scratching a little bit, right? We had other ones, and I don't remember the name of it, but it's like, you know, like the influencer style, where it's like, hey, it's a it's, you know, maybe roundups don't work as well as they used to, but, you know, the idea, at least at the time, was, let's take you know, 10 people who are all you know in our industry, who we're going to quote them in this article, and then they're going to share that content. And now we've got exposure to their to their audience. Might not have any SEO impact whatsoever, but you've now just gained some exposure to an audience that you didn't previously had. And to your point, we would try to think about it's like, what is the goal of this article? Is the goal of this article? Seo? Great. Let's make sure that that's what we're focusing on. If the goal links, well, okay, let's make sure we're doing this from a link standpoint, is the goal to just expose ourselves to a new audience, then, like, that's that, right? So there's shareability and all these other things that would come into things that might not necessarily be SEO driven content, but we're talking SEO driven content now, so I'll bring it back. But like, I like that you called out that sometimes the goal is not necessarily just SEO focused on some of this content. Definitely, any thoughts on that before I move on, because there's some other stuff I want to get to, but I don't want to cut you off either if you've got some

Kristan Bauer 22:09

stuff. No, honestly, I think you hit the nail on the head with that, and brands need to be cognizant about that too. I would throw in virality into non SEO content, that's something where it's along the same thread of the back scratching content. I love that. I never heard that term before, but I love it. That's something that we will commonly employ with content, with Link Building in mind, but in terms of virality, that is something that SEO can help research and plug into trying to understand those trends and virality and up and coming topics, but it's not necessarily meant to target a specific keyword or search demand or something around that world, but it's meant to capture attention, and that can still drive traffic, but it might not necessarily be as black and white of an SEO play as other types of content.

William Harris 23:06

Yeah, that's a really good point. I wanted to get to some practical application here. You outlined in a case study. Again, you hinted at this just a little bit ago, about how resource content played a role in driving 370% year over year increase in traffic in just nine months. Like, practically speaking, you got into this little bit, like, dig a little deeper, like, what are some of the practical steps that you guys did to be able to take this to 370% growth in a year?

Kristan Bauer 23:36

So it was a multi faceted strategy, and I'll talk through some of the key components here. Firstly, we did do a lot of audience research to truly understand what this brand's audience cared about. Obviously, parents. Moms a big community. We tapped into mommy blogger community. We tapped into parenting communities, websites. There's a lot of it's big industry in terms of parenting and raising kids, basically, and so really understanding their audience. So we need a deep dive into who are their primary customers, what are their pain points? And doing keyword research around those pain points, essentially, so trying to understand, okay, if someone has a question in this area, what does that actually equate to in terms of search demand and keywords searches? You know, SEO isn't just keywords, but keyword research can help us understand what people are actually searching for and what types of phrases they use, and how people talk about certain things. And so that was a big component in terms of building out a just robust keyword strategy. We like to call them at Conifr keyword categorization matrix strategies. So we'll basically take a topic and we want to blow it out and to try to find everything under the sun that someone is searching for with a topic. So that might be, let's take a stroller, for example, trying to find the best types of strollers for twins or two kids, or jogging or, you know, walking off road, there's just travel. There's so many different facets about strollers and so breaking out that category completely into what would say more product related searches, but then also informational searches. And so from there, we can basically distinguish, okay, what types of keywords and trends go towards product content and category build out, and that's something that might be helpful to talk about as well. In terms of building out that product categorization and that whole section of shopping is another can of worms in terms of SEO strategy, but in terms of resource content identifying, what keywords are informational, what are questions and making sure it's relevant to that brand's basically product inventory. And so we did that. From there, we took an assessment on where that site is currently ranking, and it wasn't really covering much in terms of what we could tell from our keyword strategy. So from there, you really work on building out an editorial strategy and understanding, okay, what's the capacity that this content team can handle? We work with brands who publish once a week. We work with brands who publish four or five times a week. It just really depends on the resources across the team, the capacity and what type of keywords you want to target your velocity, basically. And this is different for e-commerce versus other types of industries, like B to B, that publishing cadence might be a lot slower. e-commerce, there's there's a lot to cover, generally. And so from there, building out an editorial strategy, making sure we align keywords with the right type of topics and map them out to new landing pages. And so like what you're talking about, making sure that you don't have too many topics that are cannibalizing each other, and when I say cannibalizing each other, we don't want to have five different articles talking about the best jogging stroller so and not something that you want to be cognizant about. There is a place for content clustering. Let's say we want to talk about, you know, stroller, like a certain brand of strollers, or what kind of questions they have, or attachments or dry, you know, there's, there's a lot that you could dig into. So I think content clustering is important, as long as you can map that to unique topics versus too much coverage and saturation into one similar topic. So from there, we build out outlines for writers and not something where SEO can be a great partner in terms of providing that direction, where we can actually help build out the outlines. If we want to talk about best jogging strollers or how to use a jogging stroller. We might want information about, you know, benefits of jogging strollers for moms, dads, newborns, and how to properly fasten your newborn or things to look out for. You know, jogging strollers, these are things that I'm looking into because we're having a baby here soon. But like how to basically make sure your new board is properly strapped in and where you can run, or things like that. So making sure just have an outline on what to look for with that particular stroller. You have your SEO keywords. You have your metadata that's these are all things that SEO can be a great partner and just providing those fundamentals, and then it does make it easier to pass off to content teams when they actually have an outline and a plan. And so we don't want to stifle the creativity of content teams, but we want to give them direction and arm them with enough data to where they feel supported to create a very SEO friendly piece of content that not only speaks to the user, but will rank and drive traffic. So that was a big component of this strategy. We did a lot of education with the content teams. And for this particular brand where we saw a lot of growth, we regularly did working sessions with their content team and writers. We did review for their content and provided feedback so we could incorporate that into a feedback loop. And we did also build out a blogging network that could link and share a lot of these assets as well. And so that was really cultivated across the. Their audience, their core audience, and influencers in that space as well. And so it really was kind of that A to Z content approach, where we took their their products inventory. We did research across what are users searching for. We isolated informational queries and question queries. We took an inventory of what the brand is actually ranking for, and then we built out that tactical editorial plan, we created guides, we did education, and then we also did that amplification side. And so if you think about that running from A to Z in terms of that type of program can yield those results, like those 370% year over year. I mean, we were blown away with the results, as well as the brand and so, and that was really because everyone was committed and all in and the brand was very committed to invest the resources to make this a success. And so yeah, it paid off. That was very long winded answer, no,

William Harris 31:04

but it's very good too, because, I mean, to your point, it's, it's helpful for people who are listening to realize that it's not just about writing content, right? And again, this is like, where it gets down to, it's like, no, you have to be writing the right content in the right way, promoting it to the right people in the right way, doing the audience research, figuring out how you're not cannibalizing. There's a lot to it. And if you're, if you've said to yourself, we've tried SEO, we hired this blogger on Fiverr, whatever is going on and you're not getting the results. Maybe it's because the strategy itself isn't complete enough for you to actually see the results. And so it's, it's, you know, it's worth looking at, like the breadth of what it takes to be able to impact that. You also talked about competitive gap analysis for the content right content gap analysis, how does identifying those gaps? Well, how do you identify those gaps, and how does identifying those gaps help inform like, a really good strategy for content. So in

Kristan Bauer 32:01

terms of competitive gap analysis, that's something that we love here at Conifr, and two fold for e-commerce, you can do competitive gap analysis for product, shopping related content, for categories and sub categories, that is one track. You could do it for resource content as well, that is another track. And so we like to do it for both and a lot of the e-commerce brands that we'll work with. We we like to create a specific work stream around competitive gap analysis and Categorization Project. And so this is focusing. We'll talk a little bit about the shopping side, for the shopping content side for a little bit in terms of categorization for shopping content. Think about it as in different permutations and how people are searching for products. So for example, if you have backpacks, people are hiking backpack, people are searching for hiking backpack, women's hiking backpack, day hiking backpack, multi day hiking backpack, lightweight hacking backpack, kids hiking backpack. And so there are so many different permutations where you can build out categories. And so we call that our Categorization Project, basically where we will try to understand the different permutations for specific categories that are relevant to our clients products. Competitive gap analysis can be incredibly helpful there as well, because it does complement that keyword research component, because we might not think about everything in terms of the tools that we use and the completeness of that, but the competitive gap analysis does provide direction in terms of additional research and ways to explore products. And let's say a competitor is particularly excelling in a specific area that might be something we take a look at. We'll pull data from third party tools, will say, Okay, what does this competitor rank for that our brand does not or what does this competitor rank for where they outrank our brand? And so you can pull different types of reports to understand, Okay, our brand is maybe ranking for these terms, but they might be ranking in position 50 or 60 or even higher than that, and that's basically non existent. Yeah, totally, yeah. You're not gonna get any traffic from that. And so that's an indicator that we don't have the right type of content ranking for that. And so that that's one work stream identifying. Okay, what are those topics where we might have some content coverage, but it's not the right type of content. And then you can pull the data purely where our brand is not ranking for but competitors are winning. And also you can pull in multiple competitors as well, if you want to say, Okay, well, we want to target competitor A and B. You know, what are. They both ranking for the overlap that our brand is not ranking for. So we'll pull those reports, and you basically want to filter and distill those down into meaningful data, because different brands have different types of products that they offer that other brands don't, that may or may not be relevant. So what we like to do is pull those reports and filter out any kind of branded terms. We want to filter out any known phrases or things that that aren't relevant to our brand. We also want to look at where that competitor might be actually ranking well, because third party tools will give you everything that they're ranking for in the same boat, where they might be ranking in 70 or 90th position, that's not that's not necessarily helpful for our purposes. And so what is this competitor ranking for top 30? That might be that they actually have a good piece of content targeting that phrase. And so then you can sort by search volume. You can provide parameters to cut off volume, and it's basically a lot of grooming from there to understand what types of phrases and content topics will be relevant for our brand to go after. That can fuel more keyword research that can content development and ideation, and not something where you can apply that on the category side, you can also apply on the resource side. In order to apply it on the resource side. From there, you want to take those queries and try to isolate what's informational versus transactional. And that's data that third party tools can provide as well, and it does also provide a manual review. You could also use AI tools these days to help categorize the research as well, and so that's something at Conifr, we like to use AI to aid in our research and just make it more of an efficient process, rather than replace it. But that's something where you can very easily, say, categorize these into transactional or informational type of queries, and so from there, you can really distill that down into editorial plan or categorization mapping. That's something that we notice. One of the outdoor retailers we were working with last year we noticed a lot of their competitors were ranking for colorways and gender, and those were facets that we had not opened up with our brand. And so that would be something someone looking for, like a blue sleeping bag or um, a white running shoe or a, you know, whatever kind of color, yellow hat, you know, anything that people are searching for. And so we were able to open up color ways, but with a limited capacity and knowing what users actually search for, and not necessarily just opening up everything that had zero search volume. And so that was a really successful project for Rei, where we did open up colorways to be visible for products that mattered. And but I want to say open up colorways. That's opening up new sub category and landing pages on the the product side. Basically,

William Harris 38:17

sure, sure, yeah. I like that shifting into something a little bit less practical than more theoretical. You hinted at some of the AI stuff from a tools perspective. But what do you think about, let's just say AI search optimization, right? So making sure that you're showing up in the AI tools and things like that. My perspective has been that, for the most part, if you're doing good SEO, you're kind of doing good AI optimization to a point as well, because it's pulling from a lot of the same resources and data and things like that. But are there any other like hints or tricks or tips or ideas you could have for making sure that people are thinking about how they can show up in the AI searches as well.

Kristan Bauer 39:03

I completely agree with you, in terms of doing SEO is generally what's known thus far to do well in AI search engines. And so that is something that we are advising brands around as well, in terms of tips in general. Beyond that, one thing that we are encouraging brands to do is quantify that contribution from Ai search, and so that is something that we have guides and resources on actual pulling the right reports and GA four and your data in terms of trying to quantify that contribution, because we want to make Sure we're focusing resources in the right direction and in terms of actually ranking and becoming more visible. Of course, the SEO tactics are leaning into what's known right now for a excuse me, search engines making sure you have clear site categorization and site structure. But. Making sure that you have high quality content, making sure that you are using structured data correctly. And those are more technical aspects for brands listening where that structure data is an html5 markup. Users don't really see it, but in SEO, it does provide rich snippets and search results, which can help. We can talk about that more too, but in terms of AI search visibility, all those things are known to help, also focusing on semantics, and that semantic search, so more conversational search, that is something where we'll that will lean more heavily into that resource and non transactional space in terms of trying to lean into those keywords and kind of tying kind of full circle back into our resource content conversation, where focusing on more conversational keywords and searches will really help, because AI search engines tend to be more conversational and informal versus someone just going to Google and looking for a hiking backpack you might be having a conversation with your AI chat bot, basically on how to figure this out and so and find the right product for you. Also, I do think within Google specifically understanding where AI overviews are being shown versus not being shown has been really helpful. We've been doing a lot of work with brands lately where you can pull this data from tools, from SEO tools, where what keywords are your is your brand ranking for where AI overviews are being shown. And so there are ways where you can try to refine that content in order to try to get be ranked. Basically, within those AI overviews, there are clicks to be had from a overviews. I think I read a study. It's, you know, anywhere between seven to 14% if you're one of the brands listed, depending on your position, on where you're linked within AI overviews, and so there's clicks to be had there, and then also doubling down where AI overviews aren't present as well, because there's just more clicks available for organic search. So there's a couple different components there for like, pure AI search engines, as well as Google's AI experience?

William Harris 42:22

Yeah, I like that. You took this into where I wanted to go next, which was a little bit on the technical SEO side of things, because I don't want to have a conversation about SEO, not at least address this in some capacity. You mentioned before that SEO, you know, the technical SEO, can be some of the biggest obstacles that e-commerce brands have faced. Can face, what do you think are some of the most overlooked technical problems that you think are easy to fix but often ignored?

Kristan Bauer 42:52

That is such a great question, and a technical SEO is a very large bucket for e-commerce SEO, very large, very large. And it does depend on the size of your your brand from e-commerce perspective too. So it really does depend on the number of SKUs that you have and how big your product inventory is, basically. So technical SEO is a separate work stream that is so important because there are very specific technical tactics for e-commerce and very common technical pitfalls for e-commerce in terms of SEO. So I'll talk through some of the common ones and see what's easy to fix. Not everything is going to be easy on the technical side is generally requires development resources, sure. So in terms of technical one of the biggest things we see are issues with the faceted navigation that is, hands down, one of the most common technical traps we see for brands with e-commerce, because if you think about the faceted navigation, that's the typically what you see on the left hand side bar, it has all the filters, it has all the different sorting features that brands want to give their users, which is a core part of that user experience with e-commerce. So with the facet of navigation, that can typically lead to crawl traps, to where Google's trying to crawl the site, and they just get stuck in all these URL permutations. And so however, the facet of navigation returns URLs. This might be different for every brands what platform they're on, if it's homegrown or not, or Shopify, et cetera. And so thinking about, what does that look like if a user selects the price or a brand or a color or any kind of other product features, a user might select five different facets. It's and that's not necessarily something that we want, indexable for SEO. And when I say indexable, I mean actually in Google's index or other search engines index, but Google might be crawling that, and then they could just get stuck in all these URL permutations that might just be these incredibly long, ugly, parameterized URLs. And so controlling the facet of navigation is huge, and that there can be opportunity on both sides in terms of controlling it, but also capitalizing on it as well for opportunities in terms of controlling it, thinking about what facets should truly be indexable and or crawlable. And so there are different SEO applications to both in tags, basically that you'd apply to both users don't see these. This is all for sake of pure Search Engine Optimization behind the scenes, in the code, thinking about what facets you want Google to crawl or index by applying, you know, any kind of no index or no follow tags. And then those combinations generally will want to close off certain facets, like you might want to close off price no one's searching for trail running shoes Hoka trail running shoes between, you know, $70 and $90 but they might be looking for Hoka trail running shoes in a particular product way or color or style. And so there are certain facets where you just want to close off and put row no follow tags on and make sure Google's not crawling into those facets. And I would say brands would be surprised what Google can crawl. If this is all client side and JavaScript, it's still fair game and so in combinations as well. Generally, you want to limit any kind of combinations that are crawlable and or indexable to a few, basically knowing what that threshold is. And so someone might be looking for women's Brooks trail runners, size nine, and this is something where that combination has a few different types of filters applied to it, and making sure that maybe beyond two or three filters, you want to close it off for crawling and indexation, you also might want To create pages for that as well to index and so that would be something where you want to apply a specific structure to that, where you have a static URL structure, where you basically force a URL structure no matter how a user lands on that page, whether they start with women's shoes first, or they start with trail running shoes first, or they start with Brooks shoes first. If they land on the Brooks women's trail running page, regardless on their entry points and combinations, they will be returned the same URL. They will be returned the same h1, heading, tag, they will be returned the same title, tag, meta description, on page, content, etc. And so controlling that facet of navigation will be both on the technical side, but you also want to think about it from the opportunistic standpoint on what are people searching for as well. So

William Harris 48:37

your points on what you just said there, that I that I think that I've seen happen is if they're always return that same URL for that thing, if somebody does happen to link out to this in a guide or whatever, they're linking to the same thing, and it's actually building up some equity, versus being dispersed across 50 different permutations of this URL. Yeah, exactly.

Kristan Bauer 48:56

And that also leads into what you're saying earlier on, the cannibalization aspect, because what if you opened up URL structure and index ability for 10 different pathways to land on the same URL, Google's not going to know which one to rank, and so they all are just not going to rank very well. Most likely, if you have 10 different combinations of Brooks woman's trail running shoes, then they're all just not going to rank well or at all. And so you want to consolidate all of that equity into that one page, like you mentioned, for the link ability, shareability, but also just for the ranking power and potential within that specific page. And so you get rid of a lot of just duplication and just low quality, confusing content for Google.

William Harris 49:50

100% Yeah, yeah, I cut you off before you were going on to the next point,

Kristan Bauer 49:54

though. Oh, no, I could talk about technical stuff all day long if there's more things one other so. Thing that I do think brands commonly forget about. Some platforms have this more plug and play these days, so it's a little easier. But structure data product structure data is huge for e-commerce. And if you're thinking about this, and you don't necessarily know what this is, as we're talking through it, think about if you're searching for products and you see those star ratings and search results, and you see inventory count, you see price that is a result of structured data being implemented. And so that is that html5, markup behind the scenes users don't see that search engines do, and it does display that what we call Rich Snippet in search results. And so that dramatically improves click through rate. And so that is something where, hands down, you want to focus on having the right structure data. In particular, product structure data, I always

William Harris 50:51

think about it when I explained it to brands. It's this idea of, imagine Google asks you a question, and it's like, Hey, do you happen to have this right? Like your Google's asking you, do you happen to have this product? And you say, I do. But you know, in order to get there, it's like, you're going to the store. It's like, but I don't have any street names. I took the street signs down. You got to find it on your own. And Google's like, can you make my job a little bit easier? Just guide me to where this is. And I think that's what structured data is. Is a road size is helping it to make Google's job easier. And if you make Google's job easier and all the other search engines, they'll reward you with that. The same is going to be true for AI. So again, structured data like that being so important for AI to be able to know. So if you say you're having a conversation with AI, hey, do they have it in yellow? Yeah, they do have it in yellow. Hey, do they have any good yeah, they do have their good reviews. Here it is, like it's very easy for it to find, and if it can't find it very quickly, it's going to move on to some place that it can find that it can find that information quickly.

Kristan Bauer 51:43

I love that way to think about it, definitely. And you also can use structured data across different types of content, resource, content, as well. And in terms of marking that up with the proper article or any kind of authorship information is huge these days as well. And so making sure that you have the right type of structured data marked up for the right type of content, whether it's products, whether it's resources, it's available for most everything

William Harris 52:10

these days. Let's talk about Conifr. Why did you start Conifr?

Kristan Bauer 52:17

So I started Conifr because I wanted to be my own boss, and I had wanted to start SEO consulting. I've been in SEO for a long time. My husband and I were in Seattle for a while when I worked at Amazon and Zillow. We needed to move back to bend, and and I knew I had to look outside of the local community for job. But basically, at that point, Zillow was not a remote company at that time, and so with my skill sets there, just there wasn't really demand in the local community. And so I knew I had to look outside. I had been working towards building consulting very heavily for quite a while, and Conifr was really born out of solo SEO consulting that grew into a boutique agency. And, you know, I always wanted a certain agency, and I had actually tried before, even years before, starting consulting, and it didn't work out. And so this time around, I knew a, my first stop was consulting. B, the second stop, if things were all going well, would be to build an agency. And in terms of that origin story, I know we've talked about this before as well, where I have been working towards building consulting on the side for quite a while, and was at a crossroads in terms of, do I stay corporate, or do I actually go out on my own? And I have been offered this really great remote SEO director position tech company, and coincidentally, the same week, I had landed three retainer contracts for consulting that same week. And so I was at this personal crossroads where I'm like, okay, everything I've been working towards is here, but it's still scary. Do I make the leap. Everyone I had talked to was like, keep it safe, take the corporate job, take the good paycheck, like you got this, you're good. And then I just couldn't, in my heart, go that route. And so I knew I was like, Okay, I have entrepreneur, entrepreneurship spirit at heart. This is my opportunity. This is my time. This is a clear sign that I should just go this route, and so that was the precipice where I just went all in. I started consulting, and Conifr really just blossomed. From there. It was a really slow ramp up in terms of growth, because I wasn't really sure what direction I wanted to take my consulting practice at that time. But obviously did build Conifr into a boutique agency, and things Snowball from there. I think, as you do good work, as you are good partners and do good work, and you see results for your brands, like there is kind of that snowball effect eventually,

William Harris 55:12

yeah, if I remember correctly, you told me that it took you about two years before you hired your first employee. Why And What advice would you give to others who are building a business and maybe hesitant to take that leap?

Kristan Bauer 55:26

So it did take me two years, definitely. That's a long time. I was really dragging my feet with hiring an employee. I had worked with contractors, mostly my other buddies in the SEO industry, who I knew and trusted, and I just really took that role of providing livelihood for someone else very seriously. And at that point when I was first consulting, I mean, all I wanted to do was be my own boss and go skiing, and that was kind of my jam back then. And so when I hired my first employee, I took that job very seriously as an employer, and from there, it gets easier the first employee, at least for me, would love to hear your experience here too, but at least for me, the first employee was the hardest, because you're really making that leap from going from Being a solo entrepreneur to an employer, and from there, it was a lot easier to hire 2345, etc, down the road, but that first one was one of my close friends. I had worked within the industry, and I just really took that job so seriously. And I think for other entrepreneurs who are facing that, I think just recognizing your track record for work and revenue and leaning into knowing, okay, I've done a good job thus far, if you have done a good job thus far in terms of consistent revenue, to really support This person, and being a good steward of that responsibility as an employer, it is a shift in mindset where you are building out that team, and I think just facing that head on, but knowing when you're at that breaking point when you can't do everything on your own, and you may not want to rely on contractors. At that point, I had been working with contractors. It really wanted someone to be a part of the team. I wanted to build a team who was all in on Conifr, not just contractor. And so having a team and that dedication, I think, allows brands to be and agencies in particular, to be more successful because you have people and talent who are focused on what you're trying to build and your clients and your industry, versus someone who might just be contracting on the side. And so that was something I made, that conscientious decision on was, well, I want to shift actually building a Conifr team of people who are focused on what we're doing and believe in what we're doing, passionate about it and want to grow it, versus just putting together resources to get the job done. Yeah, yep,

William Harris 58:14

not. I love it. I think that you explained that very well, similar to you it, I don't, it was probably more than two years for me. I think I built it to over, over a million in ARR before I actually hired my first employee, building off of contractors. And you know, a lot of them, I mean, they felt like a team though, right? Like it still felt like a team to your point, yeah, with the contractors, but it did reach that breaking point where, like, you said it's like, it felt like you wanted, like somebody who was drinking the Elumynt Kool Aid, if you would, right where it's like, you could totally, I could come up with my mission, vision values, and I could share that with a contractor, and a contractor would do their best, but they've got maybe five other agencies that they're doing some work for, and so they just can't get completely into it, maybe The same way that you would want them to. And them to, and maybe the way that they're approaching a problem or solving a problem, and so it's like, but this is how we solve this problem, and this is this is why we're going about this, and this is why this is important. And it did get to a point where, like you said, I think you know that tipping point, and I'd say similar to you, took it very seriously. I had been an employee for, you know, years at a lot of different industries, from hospital to SAS companies to to e-commerce companies. And so took that very seriously. I experienced good bosses, bad bosses. I'd experienced good situations, bad situations. You know, when we were, uh, even we were a VC backed SaaS company that I was working with, and we didn't yet have health insurance or whatever, when I was there, right? It's like, but, you know, there's, there's money for it. But I said, Okay, from employee one, we will have fantastic health insurance, right? It's like, I want amazing health insurance. And so it was like, it was, we stuck to that. Was like, Okay, great. First employee we've got amazing health insurance. Like, ta da, here it is, right, and continue to build that out there. Because, to your point, it's like, that matters. It's the people in our company are literally the lifeblood of whether or not if my goal, I think about it from CEO, my goal is to take really, really good care of my people. Because if I take really good care of them, that puts them in a position to take really, really, really good care of our customers. And that's what the customers want. And so they can't do that, though, if they're distracted by me not taking care of what they need. Exactly 100%

Kristan Bauer 1:00:30

within agencies, people are the lifeblood of an agency. I mean, obviously clients do, but yeah, you can't have flourishing client relationships. If you don't have a flourishing team that truly does good work and is genuinely fulfilled. And so at Conifr, I always talk about Conifr is all about working with great people and doing great work period, and that includes our team. We want to work with great people on the team. We want to work with great clients. It's not uncommon to get off a call with a client be like, we love them. Everyone's on stock. Oh my gosh, they're so nice. Like, I we love our calls with them. And so I think that also helps with agency fulfillment as well being conscientious about just making sure work is enjoyable, and a lot of that is that people interaction, whether or not they're part of your team or clients, and so that's a huge part of our culture, and just making sure we properly vet clients as we bring them in, and that they generally will be great good partners to us and we'll be great partners to them as well.

William Harris 1:01:39

It reminds me of something that I said on Twitter a while ago, which was, there's two different types of clients, and these are taken from exact from real examples. Both they could say, I love you, but have very different contexts. There's the one client where, you know, we'll get off of a call with her and she says, I love you. You are so amazing. You are so sweet and wonderful. And it's like you get done with this. It's like you just talk to your grandma. Talk to your grandma, and you're like, Man, I'm on cloud nine, right? And it's like she genuinely means it. And then there's another client who's like, I love you. And for some reason, the way that he says it, you're like, looking over your shoulder, like, like, Is this, like, right before you shoot me? Like, I don't know, right? It's like, hey, remember, I love you, right? It's like, I don't know. I didn't get that context from the rest of the call, but thank

Kristan Bauer 1:02:21

you. Yeah, thanks. I love you too. Man, that's awesome. I love that. Yeah, definitely different, different personalities across the board, but that's what makes agency life great, and working with a variety of brands, it's

William Harris 1:02:36

so fun, I want to take the last couple minutes here to dig into who is Kristan power, because I love getting into the personal side of the human, human of Kristan Bauer versus just, you know, the work of this. You talked about wanting to be your own boss, and I understand that, that my wife is a youngest, and so I understand that to definitely be a youngest. And you mentioned you to me. You've told me before that you are a youngest as well. But tell me a little bit about your childhood and how you think has helped shape you into being where you are today,

Kristan Bauer 1:03:06

for sure. And I know we've talked about this, about it. I am the youngest in my family, the baby, and outside of work, I tend to be pretty goofy. I was a really goofy little kid growing up. I was a little kid that just cracked a jokes constantly. And, you know, I don't think anyone really takes me seriously in my family. I know we've talked about, like, I don't know if anyone realizes I've built a seven figure business, and we don't want to talk about that. We just talk about other stuff, you know, when you're with your family. And so in terms of growing up, I was the kid, I would always come up with these business schemes. Like, I would make bracelets and go door to door and sell bracelets, or at his candle making business. My mom's an artist, and I would sell candles at her galleries, and so things like that. Like, I always just had this little business schemes going on, and that was just something that I enjoyed to do being little. But I also I think being really light hearted comes with a mindset of just not taking myself too seriously, even though, on the business side, I do take myself very seriously and can make serious decisions. Obviously, have built a successful business. And then also, I do think there's a lot of strong mentorship, particularly my mom was a legal assistant as well after, you know, an artist period. And I've worked at law firms a lot when I was in high school and growing up, and it really taught me the basics of professionalism and being in a corporate environment and communication and that I have carried with throughout all of my professional endeavors. And I think that has aided me really well to have mentorship early on to help me with what. Resume and email communication and being on time and like all these different professional aspects that I don't think everyone gets exposure to, just depending on what they have in their life, growing up and and where they get exposed to. I mean, like I did filing at law firms, but I still had to work within a professional environment, so it wasn't necessarily glamorous, but it did teach me lessons that I could carry with and I'm very, very thankful and grateful for that experience. But also we talked about on the on the personal side. I mean, outside of business, I'm pretty self deprecating. I just like to have fun and a good laugh. And that's something that does help me balance out the business mindset as well. And I think does help with team culture building and relationship building, where everything doesn't have to be a serious you get people enjoy genuine personal relationships. And so that is something where I think just being more relaxed has also helped out in certain capacities.

William Harris 1:06:06

You said you worked at law offices, so not job function, but like personality. Which character would you be in, like suits or name one other you know, law show. You seen suits? Okay,

Kristan Bauer 1:06:21

have you seen? Oh, no.

William Harris 1:06:24

No, any other law shows or legal shows? No, okay, well, then that's when

Kristan Bauer 1:06:28

it comes to pop culture. Sorry, that's okay. In the office, the person who maybe like does a good job and does their work, but on the personal side, just a little goofy and relaxed. And yeah, so yeah, I'm sorry I live under a rock when it comes to pop culture. It's so

William Harris 1:06:48

good i Yeah, there's very few that I would watch as well. There's I had my one that you'll see on my phone cases. My my favorite show is Psych. And so it's like people who know me know I'm just a die hard fan of psych, but Okay,

Kristan Bauer 1:07:00

watch it. What

William Harris 1:07:02

are some things that you ever have? You ever read that? Okay, so not pop culture, but let's just say a little bit more normal culture. There's the tell tale heart by Edgar Allan Poe, are you ready with this book at all? The short story. Okay, so why do Edgar Allan Poe, obviously, yeah. So he basically tells the story of, like, where this guy, I think it's like, his this guy's like, fake eye irritates him so much, until eventually he like, he like, can't stand it, kind of thing. And it's like, then he, like, murders him. Like, this is an Edgar Allen poster, right? Like, murders him. And it's like, and then he can hear the heart beating, even though, like, he's not there. That said, we all have certain things that can irritate us that just aren't rational. It's like, this guy's eye, right? Is there anything that you find you have like, this irrational like, just irritates you?

Kristan Bauer 1:07:48

I love this question. There are a few things that I will say, just get my goat. And to preface this, we have talked about, I am normally a very easy going person, very relaxed. And there are a few things where I just get so irrationally worked up. One, my husband and I are historically now, we're kind of in kid phase right now, but historically, we've been very avid outdoors people, and so spend countless nights in, days outside. One thing that just gets my go is if you're hiking and someone just pulls out right in front of you and they're slower than you, or they won't pull over on the hiking trail. And so I just have these memories burn into my mind where my husband and are in like, a climbing trap, and we're hiking our approach, and then someone's just out for a casual stroll, which is great, but then they pull out, they're like, stopped, and then they start hiking again right in front of us, and they they won't let us buy and that just makes me fume. I like, irrationally, can't explain it, where my husband's also is equally relax and chill. And he's just like, calm down. Kristan boy, I just, I'm like, Oh my gosh, people, can you just pull over and let us buy because we are obviously faster than you. You obviously pulled out in front of us. It's like, I equate it to someone just pulling out in front of you when you're driving, and then having them go like, 15 miles under the speed limit, for sure, not as dangerous on hiking trail, but it is just as aggravating to me, which is funny, though, when I'm driving, I don't have that same experience, but it's in the different, I guess, different environment, where that just gets my go, and I'll just, like, sit behind them and fume as we're hiking up the trail and cough, you know, and like, try to make some noise. And this is totally not like my personality to be passive aggressive there, but that is one thing that just gets my goat.

William Harris 1:09:47

We all have them that's good. Yeah, I said we were gonna end on a cliffhanger. So sticking with hiking, you were on a 1500 foot cliff, and you think you're thinking to yourself, like. Uh, I'm gonna fall How did you get into this situation, and how did you get out of this situation? Yeah, good questions. Now, so

Kristan Bauer 1:10:09

my husband and I do have a really rich history in climbing and mountaineering. We are very experienced alpinists, and on this particular trip, we were on a 10 day trip climbing up in the bugaboos, Canada, which is just this gorgeous natural like National Park or provincial park. If you haven't been there and you're excited about getting outside, for sure, look it up. It is beautiful. We had just finished climbing North Ridge on the Bugaboo Spire, and have been climbing all day, and we're on our descent. And I can't remember this route. I mean, this was like over a decade this is like a decade ago, pre kid era and and so we are on our descent for this, this route that was over, you know, a 2000 plus foot route for sure, and we had repelled off of the summit, and we had repelled too far, and so we had repelled onto this ledge that wasn't on the descent route. And we had this tiny little ledge on this, you know, 15,000 plus foot face, because we had already descended a little bit, and basically had to climb out of this area and climb out of this ledge. And there really wasn't. There wasn't, there weren't many other options, basically. And what I call this like a junky crack, because it wasn't clean, it was just full of dirt. And, you know, vegetation, basically, was kind of like our way out, where we try to clean a little bit enough to put some anchors in. And my husband's an extremely experienced climber, very, very, very skilled outdoors man. And so he led, led the the climb out from this ledge, and we were simul climbing. And so simul climbing is necessarily where you are both going to be moving in tandem. And so it's not necessarily with within alpine climbing you might in track climbing in general, you have, generally one climber moving at a time, and you have anchors, and you know, multiple touch points of gear. You place gear as you go side mount climbing is a little different, and we tended to do some run out pitches, and so not quite as much gear. And so within simul climbing, you don't want to fall because you don't have as much gear in the rock. And so my husband goes, I'm waiting for the rope to, you know, get taught so there's not any slack in there. That's when I know it's my turn to start simul climbing. And so I'm climbing up this just junky crack where I can't get a good grip, because it's dirt, and I feel like I'm slipping, and I know we're simul climbing, and I am just thinking, Dear God, please help me get through this, because if I fall, there's a high potential I will pull both of us off of this face, because just just it might not happen, but it's a potential and and so thankfully, unbeknownst to me, my husband had actually stopped and put an anchor point in. And so he was anchored in so even if I fell, that I we would both be safe, basically, because he had stopped, he had put an anchor point in, and as I'm climbing up this just junky crack, feeling like I'm gonna fall just cleaning on for my dear life, you know, honestly made it through and just sheer willpower, grabbing on to anything I could, made it through this, this like crack section, and thankfully there, but, you know, had that flash before my eyes where I'm like, just this big, oh crap moment, I'm gonna fall and I could potentially take both of us out. This is not a good feeling to have. Thankfully, it was short lived, and I saw my husband just broke out in tears. He's like, you're fine. I got an anchor. You're good. We're safe. Like, sit down. Okay, wow.

William Harris 1:14:25

I can only imagine what's going through your mind, like, Heart racing. You know these did you come away from that with any like, epiphanies about life,

Kristan Bauer 1:14:38

just to be more careful where we are repelling. That wasn't the first situation where we've accidentally repelled a little too far, not far enough and or you get your rope stuck. Or, you know, there's always going to be those situations, but, you know, just in terms of epiphanies, yeah, the repelling one, just be safe when you're repelling. But I've. Kind of always had this, but lean into what what matters most in life. You know, family, friends, just, just try to be a good person, try to love those in your community around you and try to do the right thing, try to be a good person in your corner of the world. Is really, it

William Harris 1:15:16

really is that simple, like, if everybody has that same goal, like, imagine what would actually happen,

Kristan Bauer 1:15:23

right?

William Harris 1:15:26

Well, Kristan , it's been absolutely amazing. Talking to you, learning from you, learning about you. If there's somebody who wants to work with you or wants to follow you, what's the best way for them to get in touch? Stay in touch.

Kristan Bauer 1:15:39

Please. If you have any questions, or if you want to reach out after this, or have any conversation about SEO, e-commerce, climbing, skiing, anything Conifr, like I said, our SEO agency would love to chat with you. If you are e-commerce brand and you need help with your SEO, or you want to explore what's working, what's not working in terms of your SEO strategy, Conifr is Conifr without the E, so conifr.com, and please feel free to reach out to myself, our partner, Michael as well. And if you go to the website, pretty easy to find us also. I am on LinkedIn as well. So for Kristan Bauer on LinkedIn and also personal website. Kristanbauer.com would love to connect with any of you all today, and thank you so much for listening. And hopefully, hopefully you all learned something useful about e-commerce or just life in general today

William Harris 1:16:38

that's so good. Well, thank you again for sharing your heart, your mind, your wisdom, your ideas, with us. It has been very fun talking to

Kristan Bauer 1:16:46

Yeah, thanks for having me here. It's been a pleasure.

William Harris 1:16:48

Thank you everyone for listening. I hope you have a great rest of your day.

Outro 1:16:50

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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