Hi Sam, and welcome to the podcast. Hi there. How you. I'm good. Thanks. It's great to have you here.

Why is SEO important for an ecom brand in 2022? Like, why should they be investing in this? What are the benefits?

If they are working in a, in a category that people understand that there's demand there, then really it should be your highest performing channel and you delivering the best ROI as well. A company called Conjuro that do data benchmarking for Shopify brands.

Now we, we looked at the 5,000 odd sites in their, system and saw that organic is the best performing channel. And that's something we see consistently, but it doesn't have anywhere near that kind of the investment that that paid does. And I think a lot of that comes down to the length of time that it takes there's this kind of understanding that that SEO takes a year to work but I think a lot of that can be sped up if you are a multi-category brand, for example, doesn't need to take that long we can really move the needle in three to six months in those instances. Wow. But a DTC brand with a small number of SKUs in a competitive category, that is one where it might take a year.

And because you. To work on it and you know, it's not just a case of scaling through adding more pages

So it's one of the best performing channels and yet people aren't investing in it cuz they're scared that they have to pay the money up front and it may not yield the results and it may take a long time, but actually what you're saying is that it can be quicker than people might think.

But then I guess the second argument is yes, it might take a year, but after that year has passed and you've done the work and you've done the investment, you've got free traffic, right? Whereas we've paid, what we are seeing is rising costs year over year, over year. So Yeah, I think that's a pretty strong argument for it.

It sounds from chatting to you that it is tangibly possible to, for a, you know, a medium sized ecom brand that invests properly to still win its search, right? We've got plenty of projects. We're doing case study at the moment. Someone we work with for like six months, we've.

Revenue increased by 200% organic revenue by 500%. That's just from a category first approach, you know? Wow.

The ROI is so much, is so much stronger in in the long run. What ROI would you expect? We normally try and set a target of 100% increase in organic revenue by month 12, so on a monthly.

But basis, so our kind of normal retainer is around two and a half K uk. If they're doing half a million a year from organic and you're doubling it , then that's a crazy good ROI, right? Yeah, ab absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, we've got plenty of examples of where that's happened. And it is, And it's entirely realistic in, in, in that timeframe.

So what specific steps should a D to C ecom brand be taking now if they wanna be improving their SEO and say six to 12 months time and, and starting to take advantage of that amazing free traffic that this channel offers?

First of all, it's worth kind of making sure that the gr all of the right things are in place. Really, it's about establishing that SEO's gonna be an effective channel. It doesn't work for every business.

The ones that it does work for is brilliant, but a lot of people, Get burned in this, in this space by investing in this kind of thing when fundamentally isn't right in the first place. Yeah. I think one of the first things that we look for is, you know, is a business generating any kind of sales from organic search.

Okay. So what about if someone's generating? So if we have a brand, a DTC brand that's doing a good amount sales from other channels, so they're doing well on Facebook, Facebook ads.

They're getting good sales through influences, pr, that kind of thing, but they just haven't established themselves in terms of SEO. How would you like, you know, they just haven't put any F into it, so they're not getting any sales from SEO. How, what would be the case where they still would be a good fit for SEO and what would be the case where they wouldn't, how do you kind of.

Ascertain whether it's gonna work. Absolutely. So I think there so not all of these channels are kind of the same, you know, they don't behave in the same way. They don't send the same kind of traffic. Facebook ads is, is product discovery. It's fundamentally different from search. Yeah. Whereas Google Ads is very, very similar.

You know, you someone's typing in something into Google and they're being pushed to a page, or they're being shown an ad or, or an organic result. It's, it's the same thing. So they're working up, they've woke up in the morning and gone, I need this thing. They've gone to Google and looked proactively for it.

They know they need the thing or they know they have the problem. So Google Ads then, I guess, is a good proxy for. SEO. If the brand is able to get some sales through paid search and they haven't yet got anywhere with SEO, but they're doing well with paid search and it's generating sales, that would mean that they're potentially a brand that could do well with SEO.

Would you say? Absolutely. I mean, that's, that's a great fit. And the first thing we do is look at those, those sales and see where they're coming from. What kind of things are people searching for? Yeah, that's like, like that's the best kind of starting. Yeah. Cause you can see how they're converting. Yeah.

And that gives you a really good idea. Yeah. Cause I always I always make the distinction when I'm explaining it to people between I always say search marketing and that includes both paid search and dco. It's kind of like your yellow pages. So if you're a plumber or you know, whatever your, you know, whatever your business is, no one's gonna ring up the plumber until they've decided they need a plumber and they open up the O pages and.

So that's what search is, right? There has to be that need that already exists that they're looking for. And then I always say that fa, Facebook ads or social ads are more like an infomercial. You're sitting there on the sofa, you didn't know you needed the thing, and then all of a sudden you've started a.

Thinking about buying this, like, I don't know what it, whatever it might be, an exercise bike that you didn't know you needed. So that's a good distinction. So some brands fit into both, don't they? So like we have a brand that sells baby mats. They're quite innovative and different baby mats, but they do amazing in search because, People are getting pregnant.

There's one born every minute. There's always people searching for baby mats. So search is great for them. So SEO would also be great for them, but Facebook ads works incredibly for them as well because the product's, quite visual. People might have been thinking about a baby mat, but they haven't got run to buying one, and then they see this beautiful one and they buy it.

So I think it's, yeah, that hopefully helps people understand whether they're a good fit for search or not. It's whether the problem exists, people are looking for it. So, okay. So that we've established that it exists. They already sell making sales so they know this product market fit. We're good to go.

What are they, what are they doing next?

Yeah. But yeah, once we know that search is gonna work , then it's like, Is the tracking right? I've not looked at any Shopify sites in the past eight months, probably where Google Analytics has been configured correctly.

There's no issues with reporting and all of the, you know like revenues not being reported to a payment gateway instead of organic or paid, you know, and this would be something that you come up. I've worked on plenty of projects actually, where they are making money from organic revenue. They just can't, it's just not being reported correctly.

Mm-hmm. , and that's not like in a attribution, like that's not in terms of attribution, like first versus last click, it's like it's all being attri attributed to direct because of a payment gateway issue or something like that.

And then really the strategy comes down to what kind of business you've got. If you've got. DTC brands with a small number of SKUs. Or one with a, a larger number. The, the kind of, the strategies are a little bit different. Mm-hmm. If, if there is a brand with a larger number of skews, our kind of recommendation is, is creating category pages essentially.

A while back we went through all of the clients that we've got in our data warehouse. So it's like 40, 50 projects, about half a million URLs and we broke it down into page types, like homepage category, product, blog, other, and 60% of revenue is coming from category pages. So it's they don't necessarily have a product in mind, but they've got a group of products that's, you know, it might be dishwashers, lawn mowers.

Remote control cars, not like a particular remote control car or a dishwasher. And that's why so much of our strategy is, is around category pages. And yes, the content is important there, but it's a very different type of content to that kind of, Yeah. So it's not like writing this long detailed blog post necessarily anymore.

It's more about making your category page the best category page for the search. Yeah. Yeah. And, and how do you do that? I think the Body Shop is a really good example of that in that they have all these kind of use cases. It's like shampoo for fuzz, for frizzy hair, or. I think they've got a shop by my needs section or something like that, which I always like because it reflects how people are actually looking for things, not the categories that you would put them into.

Across all different kinds of areas, you'll have all of these multi-category, like big well known retailers, and then a couple of specialists that are in there and having that kind of real relevancy for a particular thing. It can be an asset for sure.

Building out those, those category collection pages, because that's, The demand is that that turns into revenue. Yeah. And that's one of the quickest ways to grow as well. Because you are not, you're competing for kind of less competitive terms. And it's normally a case of getting the pages up and with a certain period of time. You can, you can see some quite good results. Now there's some complexities around, Shopify with this when you start to have a larger number of categories. We talk about fasted navigation quite a lot, which is a way of kind of layering these categories internally. And Shopify's native way of doing it, it just doesn't work for, for SEO at all.

Mm-hmm. You end up just showing loads of filter. As, as opposed to pages, we tell what's going on with the filter. So we, you know, we've had to kind of engineer some stuff in internally to allow us to, to kind of organize that stuff. So it works for both from the user and, and search engines. Mm-hmm.

It's different on Shopify two because. It's much easier to build out those kind of navigations and have more control over them. Mm-hmm. in Shopify one, it's, it's more complicated. Yeah. Although we should have an app out for it shortly, which would be fun.

But, so yeah, that would be the strategy if you've got enough categories to be able. Or if you can combine your products in enough new categories to do it, or you can launch new products as well. Yeah. So example being let's, if we think about the baby mets, it would be like round baby mets, small baby mets, large baby mats, new ones, waterproof.

Like obviously you need to do a bit of research and, and kind of validate it. There's no point spinning out thousands and thousands of categories that there's absolutely no demand for.

But you know, you can validate this through keyword planner or like, even though search volumes a bit of rubbish metric, but there are ways that you can get a feel for, for whether there is, there is demand there. Well, if you're running paid search heavily, then you'd have some really good data, wouldn't you?

That you could trust. Yeah. And internal search is a good one as well. That can be really good. And also, you know, there are lots of people that have their, like, have their whole sites organized in ways like this anyway. But with that filtering, that means that search engine can't, can't find it.

Yeah. So how would, how would a, a typical DTC Shopify store that maybe has five or six products, they might have a sort of hero product and then some related products that they've rolled out subsequently. What, what's the strategy in that kind of case? It's really interesting cause we've got a few of those projects on, on the go at the moment, and. So in terms of the kinds of pages that rank, Well, it's normally a category, like a traditional category page with product on it that's top and tailed with content, you know? So your standard like collections, Collections all on on Shopify? Do you use the standard Shopify collection page, which has like, you know, the blurb at the top where you can fill it in, pulls in the products based whatever products you've selected or are you building specific pages that meet your needs better?

I mean, it, it depends on the site really. We've got a kind of standard template that we use for a category page, cause we know it's got all of the bits in that work. Mm-hmm. , whether we do that on collections or, or you know, another category depends on.

How long the site's been around, what the structure is or whatever. But, but really you choose one of them. In the kind of cases you are talking about, quite often it'll be the homepage competing with the category page or the or a product competing with But both of them or, or one, or one or other.

And it's, then it's about a case of trying to create a really clear signal about which is the most important page around this. Right. So you're, it means you're diluting, so you are competing with yourself for that top spot. So the three main pages on your site that could be relevant Yeah. In competing with each other to, to get a spot in Google and you're trying to concentrate it on one page.

I think. The, the whole idea of competing with pages I, I try and think of it as like, Google's just a computer script and you've got to make it as clear as possible and anything that confuses, that creates possibilities for, for things to go wrong. Try and make things as clear as possible and and yeah, focus on one specific thing and then that's, yeah, it's where you tend to see the best, best results.

How are you making that clear? Okay. So in the, in this example we've got a DT brand with, so they're selling one hero product and a few variations.

So effectively you've got a homepage that's all about. Pretty much gonna be about the hero product, a collections page, which is pretty much about it and a product. Typically, The page that will rank best for it is the collections page. Cause that's a typical e-commerce page. That's what people expect when they, when they put in a transactional term, is a page with a few products

so if the product page is 2000 words long with loads of reviews loads of the signals, like links and things are going to the homepage, know it's, it's pretty mixed. Then it becomes a case of how, how can we tell Google that we want the collections page to be, to be the one?

And that's normally, yeah, like just making the content incredibly clear. Getting your internal link structure right. So that's generally a strategy that you would do for ecommerces. Whether the large or small, lots skews or not, identifying the keywords you are wanting to rank for, making sure there's a clear category page for all of those that's been signaled to Google through the content that's on it through your link structure, that that is the page that they should serve up when people search.

So that means, Expanding the content on it, you know, making it really, really clear that that is, you know, the, the, the core page. At that point we'd probably be looking at driving links to that specific category page, from external websites. So the idea that is that having. Relevant quality sites linked to yours is, is a signal to Google that the pages is important. And I think people really struggle with doing that for category pages cause they're commercial in intent that you know, how, how do you, how do you get someone to link to one of your, your sales pages essentially?

Yeah. How do you, for DTC brands, just like product Roundups for, for journalists, you know contact all of the newspapers that are doing a Best Baby mats application and say, would you like a baby mat ? That is, that is the, like the tactic. It works, yeah. Product PR essentially in a natural. Links are important. They're a strong signal. For a lot of DTC brands, you know, it's actually quite simple to do link building just by doing product roundups, product reviews, sending out samples to journalists. Typically a DTC brand is D to C for a reason and it's solving some kind of problem or like meeting some kind of need that lends itself quite well to those kind of, those kind of articles. It's, it's work. Unfortunately everything is work and it's, it's, you know it's very hard to do to get me kind of. Results without, without effort, unfortunately. And also, but that's a good thing, right? I always remind people this because if it takes you work and you do the work and your competitor does not do the work, then you've kind of created a moat around your business where you've done that work that's hard that they're not willing to do.

And so now you've got SEO positioning that they don't have,

Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Okay. Well that makes sense. It sounds like the process is fairly straightforward. It takes some effort on the technical side. It takes some effort on the kind of creating the right kind of page and the right kind of content, and then it takes some, some sustained effort getting those external links pointing at the, at the right page, but all very doable.

Yeah, I mean, for most businesses Improving your category pages is a good thing to do regardless of such. And so, so it's not gonna, yeah. Yeah. It's not like it's. Stuff that isn't a good idea in the first place. Yeah. And then also telling people about your business is probably not a bad thing. Yeah.

as well. So those product roundups are not gonna hurt you, are they? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yes.

Okay. Interesting. And so is blogging still worth doing for a brand for, for SEO purposes? Like as long as you clearly articulate how you solve the problem. Yes. And I think that's where, top of the funnel content. That's where that stuff can work really, really well. Yeah. lot of people waste a lot of money on it. . Yeah. And a lot of time actually this is something we, we spend quite a lot of time doing something called content pruning where we'll just go through and remove anything that's not getting any traffic or any value just to And what's the purpose of that?

Like surely it's. Better to have more content than less. Say, not actually. The web is full of rubbish. And again, if we think that. Search engine's, just a script that's trying to work out what your site is about. The more noise you've got on there, that's not particularly around the things that it's about.

You know, it, it creates that kind of confusion. So you're pruning out the stuff that's like random and irrelevant and kind of confusing Google about the core. The core topic that you want to rank for. No one's read it for a year, then it can probably go that's pretty, you know, that's one good signal.

But yeah, I mean, yeah, the relevancy thing is, is, is so important. You know, if your site is selling, I dunno wine glasses for example, and you've got content on there. Something that, like cardboard boxes or whatever, you know, it's just, it creates a, you know, it, you start to lose that kind of, that relevancy.

Yeah. And all I think it does, it's not necessarily bad from a brand perspective either. It, it, it's better to be about one thing and do it well rather than, you know, lots of other things that, and not do them particularly well.

And does EO still involve these days, like doing keyword research, identifying the key phrases you wanna rank for tracking over time, how you rank for them?

Is that stuff still happening? It is I think what we find though is it's about making small adjustments based on that data. That's the thing that really makes a difference and that's why we spent so much time on the, at the data engineering side of things. So talk to me about that. So search consult is pretty much what most people will be getting.

Their understanding of what terms they're ranking for. Yeah, you can go in there and you can see what terms are triggering clicks. Now, A lot of that data is only accessible if you, if you use an api. So if you use an api, basically you get all of it. If you go in the web app, you get some of it. Right.

So if Google's sampling it and just giving you a little taste of the data, but not the full Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of data that's missing from search console. Even when you do use the API connection,

So there's an under reporting typically of around 50% of clicks are not. You know, you don't see which keywords they're, they're go that the, the clicks are are triggering. I remember back in the day, we could actually see in Google Analytics all the keywords that triggered that triggered organic search traffic.

Then one day around about, I don't know, 15 years ago, 12 years ago, Google just said, Nope, we're not gonna give that data to you anymore.

So you are saying to me, by using an api, you can get a lot of that data back. Is that right? Some of it 50% of it, Yeah. Yeah. To to, to a degree. Now actually, what you're talking about, There's a really interesting product out there called Keyword Hero. Yeah. And we've we used them before and have come back to it recently, basically on the back of our own data work.

Cause the methodology that they use to replace that data is actually really interesting. What they do is bring together a whole bunch of different data sources and then do some maths that I won't go into here to kind of predict which keywords. You know, a, a triggering revenue. Mm-hmm. . So what we are working on doing at the moment is pulling that into our data warehouse, along with the search console data and then some other rank tracking API data as well, because search console's position tracking is, A bit weird and then stitching it all together so we can get something that's probably not quite as good as what you would get from a PPC campaign, but like a million times better than, Wow.

Yeah, And the benefit to that is getting back what Google took away all those years ago, which is actually knowing what keywords are really bringing traffic in. So you can see. What the effect of your efforts and what's working and what's not. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. That's it. That's it. I mean, it's not gonna be a hundred percent, but even if it's 70%, then that's better than nothing.

So where can we follow and find you? So I'm on LinkedIn obviously. Sam, Wright on LinkedIn. . Website as well. www.blinkseo.co.uk. Cool. We'll put those in the show notes.

Awesome. Thanks for coming along. Thank you.