Special Edition: What Ernesto Ortiz Taught Me About Saying Who a Product Is Not For

I told Ernesto Ortiz there’s no longer an excuse for a thin product page. It doesn’t matter if you have a thousand products, every one of them should have a detailed entry, because AI makes describing them efficient. He agreed, and then added the part I hadn’t said out loud: write down who it’s not for. That came out of a Special Edition of Unscripted SEO, a ten-minute lightning round and Ernesto’s return visit after his first full interview.

The product description question I’d been leaving out

My version of product page advice has always been about completeness. Cover refunds, shipping and packaging. Fill in the bottom of the funnel. Ernesto’s version has a second half. He’s taken a couple of clients through most of their product pages with four questions:

Who’s it for? Who’s it not for? What does it include? What doesn’t it include? – Ernesto Ortiz

The first and third questions are the ones you’d expect. The second and fourth are the ones you probably skip. Saying a product isn’t for somebody can feel like turning away a sale. Ernesto’s answer is that being extremely clear is the job, and “we’ve just had great results with that.” He didn’t put a number on it, so I won’t either.

Why AI recommendations reward the page that rules people out

The reason this matters now is where the decision happens. Ernesto described AI as a new recommendation intermediary between interest and purchase. He’s furnishing a new apartment, and when he’s picking between two dishwashers that fit the price, he asks AI.

I ask it for the recommendation and I sort of go with what it tells me. – Ernesto Ortiz

Then he goes to Google to check availability, pricing and reviews. He thought he was the only one. He asked around, and it’s a lot of people. I said on tape that this is the first holiday season where AI recommendations play a major role in purchasing. It’s easy to miss, because none of it shows up as a click.

The questions people bring to those tools are long and specific. Ernesto’s example: the best shampoo for a thirty-year-old with a particular problem, in a particular climate, with a particular hair type. Google never handled that well. AI gives a precise answer, and it has to pull that answer from somewhere.

If you don’t provide very specific content in the very specific places you need to provide it in a very clear way, you’re not getting picked up. – Ernesto Ortiz

A page that says who a product isn’t for is a page that answers the specific question. That’s how a small brand that “actually defined it” ends up recommended ahead of an industry giant that didn’t.

Dark queries mean you can’t see the long tail you’re writing for

Here’s the part that worries me. You’re writing for queries you mostly won’t see. My dark-click study looked at 38 Search Console sites over 12 months and about 4 million clicks. The mean site got no query data for 63.6% of its clicks, and the median site 72%. John Mueller chimed in on a search community Slack I’m in and confirmed these are anonymized queries, searched fewer than a couple dozen times a month, and that the anonymization isn’t going away.

Ernesto wasn’t surprised. The query hiding has always been there, and in his words “it’s always been quite annoying.” He’s more worried about the tools. He’s seeing results for automated requests that don’t match what a human sees, he hasn’t decided whether that’s a bug or intentional, and he asked how you can trust results that are thirty percent off. That’s his framing, not a measured number, but it matched my own frustration. Between rank tools you can’t fully trust and a Search Console that hides most of the long tail, I told him we’re almost back to the billboard stage of SEO.

So you can’t wait for the data to tell you which specifics to write. You have to write them because the buyer needs them.

How I’d write who it’s for on a can of paint

When Ernesto gave his action item, he said it’s something he adopted about two years ago and that not a lot of people are doing it.

You need to grab all the features and attributes of the products and services that you sell and describe them really well and describe who they’re for. – Ernesto Ortiz

Then say who they’re not for, literally if it’s clear, by inference if it isn’t. The example I reached for was a bucket of interior paint. Don’t stop at the color. Say it’s for homes that get a lot of winter, anybody in the northern latitudes or in Canada dealing with a lot of snow. For a software product, say it’s for product managers who already use additional analytics platforms. Every one of those lines tells a buyer, and a model, who should pick it and who should keep looking.

Who it’s for, who it’s not for: the product page questions I’m adding

So here’s what I’m asking about every product and service page I touch now. Does it say who it’s for? Does it say who it’s not for? Does it say what’s included, and what isn’t? Could a model answer a long, specific question about it using only that page? If you can’t answer yes, that page isn’t getting picked up.

The full conversation is in the Unscripted SEO Special Edition recap, and SEO Arcade has the step-by-step product page audit. You can find Ernesto at Structural SEO, where his team works on SEO and AI SEO for all sorts of clients, and on LinkedIn.