Everyone. Scott Austin here. And for this week's episode, I have a guest. I'm a big believer in content marketing, which means SEO is really important and I'm not the smartest person about SEO. So I wanted to bring in one of the smartest people about SEO, and that is Josh George, who owns a, agency in London called Click Slice.

Welcome. Josh.

Hey, he's got a thanks. Have me on.

Thank you. Thank you. So can you tell me a little bit about, clicks place and what sort of services you provide?

Sure. So click size is predominately an SEO agency. E-commerce agency based in London in the UK. We've been going since 2016 now, so was about eight years. And we work about 32 clients a month at the moment. They range from, you know, small e-com brands, maybe doing six figures a year all the way up to icon brands in nine figures a year.

And predominately they hire off so they can get seen on Google, generate more organic traffic and of course, more organic sales.

Total side question as you bring it up. Like, what percentage of traffic do most people get from Google versus the other engines? In my clients, it looks like it's 95% Google and 5% everybody else. Is that is that normal?

That is very normal. Yeah, especially for the brands we work with. It's not like that when we take on brands, primarily, what we see is a lot of the traffic is coming from paid social workers, miss or Instagram or stuff like that, and that's great. But as you know, there's not much like search intent behind those platforms.

You just see an ad based on who may be interested in your product, based on audience targeting and stuff like that. But with Google, there's so much more search intent, you know, if you. So I don't know, video lights you want to be seen in front of people searching for video light. So conversions are going to be higher.

So we always kind of kindly tell brands about being too biased that people you want to reallocate your, your marketing budgets to be a bit more effective. But yeah, it's typically Google, around 90%. On the lower end I've seen it is probably about 60%, which is still more than half.

Yep. Is that a country specific thing, or is that just the lowest? Is like a UK thing? Or is it like in Zimbabwe? It's different or something.

No, it's it's pretty much just what I see across the board. I mean, we probably work with clients that are English speaking languages. So, you know, UK, US, Australia and kind of I fall for primary markets. And although UK agency the bulk of our clients are actually in the US, which is actually quite interesting.

Well, we seem to have a lot of e-commerce over here, which is probably why. Well, it's interesting. Like, I would say two thirds of my clients would be maybe three fourths are us. But I also have a lot of international two. But it's all English speaking because that's the only language I know how to talk. And I love the fact that you guys are focused on e-commerce SEO.

Do you see that e-commerce has different best practices than other websites?

It's a real question. We actually started off as a generic broad agency. And actually, to this day, we still ranked number one in the UK for SEO agency London, which is also a generic term. And that's great. But what I found, it was more of a strategic business decision, because when we're offering SEO to a Shopify website, a magento, a local business, WordPress, processes in the back end are a lot different.

It's not the same buttons access somewhere. There's no collection pages on. You know, Magento is all different names and different process, which makes a bit more confusing for our team. So we just had a look at all the clients we have at the time, about 15 slash 20, who are the bulk of our clients, who are we getting the best results for?

Who do we enjoy working with and where do we see the, the future of like kind of search going in e-commerce and going anywhere but nowhere whatsoever. So we decide to niche down on e common in terms of processes is definitely a lot of few things you do differently for Shopify brands in comparison to WordPress, brands don't mean to touch into it.

Or

Oh, absolutely. Our audience is all Shopify, right? My agency is all Shopify. So the more Shopify specific you can be, the better.

Yeah. So is there a lot of practices that you did for a local business? Maybe a plumber in New York, right, that you wouldn't do for Ecom Brand? And when your local business, you want to be seen in the local map park and you start building citations, you get into directory listings. And what I found were those type of businesses which didn't really sit right with me, is we can get in the traffic.

That's not a problem. That's what we specialize in. But if the website doesn't convert well, or, you know, they get in ten leads and their salesperson isn't calling them back at, and then they may come around and say to us, SEO doesn't work. Like what? You've had all these leads, you just haven't close them. And that's kind of not my issue.

That's you need to figure out your business. So when it's more e-commerce, you remove all of that processes. Now pick up the phone, give them a call. Trying to, you know, do a site survey, go to the hat. But you literally just have a product. This is the price. This is the ship and this return policy. These are the USPS.

Would you like it or not. So it removes a lot of that. So stuff I wanted to niche down. But what we found worked really well for Ecom brands, which in my opinion I would say is one of the most effective SEO strategies and also one of the cheapest. So I hope a lot of you viewers can appreciate this is adding content on your actual category pages.

So to touch on that a little more, these understand why that's really important is if you take a step back and look at how Google actually works, it has a spider, which is basically a Google bot. And the job of it is to crawl the entire internet, read your content, look at all of your pages to understand what your pages are about.

Right? But category pages are notoriously known for not having much content on them. You've got your title, you've got your products, add to cart, and that is pretty much it. So when Google spiders come into your page to understand what your category page is about, is not that clear. So to make it more clear to Google what your page is about, you simply add content below the products and give you an example.

If you have a brand that sells, I don't know men's razor blades. I mean, for the viewers that are watching, you'll see I don't have much facial hair, so probably bad example, but if you sell men's razor blades right, you should be adding content below your products on, you know, the different types of razor blades. You know, the pros and cons of razor blades or anything related to razor blades.

That isn't to information. When intent, add that content below your products. Get it formatted. Use a H1 tag H2 tags to get your keywords in there you instantly. I kid you not like probably in 24 hours. Depending on how often your site gets crawled, you will start to rank higher for terms that are relevant to that category page, and then you'll start to get more organic traffic and more organic sales.

And the cost of that is literally just adding content, which is super easy to do in today's age.

Yeah. Well, and. And to reinforce that, because I totally agree with you. Two things you said that I like. The first one was move the content below the the products on the collection page. So that's a little code hack. You have to do a little bit custom bit of coding. I use the flex theme all the time.

So we just put a custom liquid section down there and put, you know, in liquid, you know, collection dot description. And the other thing that you need to think about is when people search, like using your razor blade example, they might search for best razor blades for beards. They're not searching more, you know. Or there's less searches for Gillette beard razor blade skew number 46753.

Right. People are searching a level up from the product. They're searching for categories or solutions and or ideas. And that's where collection pages are going to be far more relevant than product pages. But we spend a lot of time putting the content on our product pages and not on the collection.

It's crazy when you think about it. And to talk to an example that you just said have, you know, razor blades for beards, and they're just generic razor blades. You you. Your two collection pages. These include search intent as well as you probably already know in SEO. And if you used to open two tabs on your browser on Google Chrome, go into Google, and in one tab, search for razor blades and the other tab search or razor blades for bids.

If you look at both his Google results and you're seeing the same websites listed for both different searches, and that tells you the search intent is the same, so you can target both keywords on the same collection page. So if you see two different collection just in different pages, then what that means is you need two different pages.

And this is kind of a big issue. I see where a lot of e-com brands go wrong. They don't do this initial research and analysis. What they do is they say, hey, you know, I'm going to target both terms on the same page. And in reality you actually need a separate page. So the strategy is flawed from the get go and you have no chance of ranking.

Yep. That makes sense. Now, on Shopify stores specifically, you know, people, you know, the first decision they're making in their presentation of their website is the theme. Is there a difference in Shopify themes in what they do on the back end for SEO or they they all essentially equal?

No, I mean, we said we have over 30 clients at the agency and none are using the same theme. A lot of them are using custom themes and some are using ones out of the box. The theme doesn't really matter. It's what you do on top of the theme, and you can edit every theme anyway. But it's funny because a lot of people kind of get, I wouldn't say misled, but they kind of overhype technical SEO.

They need technical data and

glad you said that. Because I hate technical SEO.

it's it's a buzzword and I'll be totally honest. Shopify SEO, e-commerce collection pages. All you really need to do is make sure your website loads under three seconds. The rest of the other stuff. Yes, it's just a tick. It's a tick box. So what do you have? I don't have it on this.

It's it doesn't actually matter. Like we have some brands, turning over insane amount of revenue every year and have the basic technical things that haven't been done, but it's like loads in free. Second, they've got the basic SEO points in check. They rank, they've got high quality bad things. They've got a strategic content marketing plan going out.

Forget the other stuff. Too many people focus on ticking all these boxes and then in reality they make little to no difference.

Yeah, I I'm glad you said that. Because, you know, my, my very skeptical, attitude towards SEO agencies is they'll spend a lot of money doing a lot of technical things, and you'll see no business gain from that. And it's a lot of theoretical. So, so let's let's switch that around. Let's, let's take a, a brand new Shopify store.

They're not doing a lot of money. You know they haven't. You know produced revenue yet. They want to get in the SEO game. What are the first like 2 or 3 best practices that a new store needs to think about as they start investing in SEO?

Short number one is doing enough research in the planning stage. So the example I gave you, the keyword search intent. I'll give you another example to hit home a little bit harder. So imagine someone's listening to this and they have, I don't know, 100 inflatable kayaks in the garage that they want to start a brand for, right. So they would do the same thing.

They would go into a tool like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, all these tools. You can find out what people are searching for. Again, really good to know gives you an idea on the market demand. So if you see people are searching for inflatable kayaks, of course have your collection page for inflatable kayaks. But there's other ways people search for inflatable kayaks, such as best inflatable kayaks.

Again, don't just assume because they're related to kayaks, they can be target on the same page. You do your keyword research and just again open two tabs. You don't even need any tools. Open two tabs in Google and look at the websites you see in different pages. You need different pages to rank for those. Tend to them not the same.

So please make sure you're doing enough research. What we find is the majority of clients that come to us, they are. They simply have the wrong SEO strategy. So it doesn't matter what they do, doesn't matter where they get featured, what blogs they put out, what backlinks they acquire is literally impossible to rank because Google sees your keywords completely different.

So put them together on one page. Again, it doesn't make any sense. The number one thing I recommend is doing enough research in the planning stages.

So that research is. Is determining what your list of keywords is. Correct.

Is that the most important part isn't just determining what the keywords are, it's assigning them to the right pages. So we call it key keyword mapping essentially. But it's mapping that's really, really important.

And we actually do that for for prospects before they become clients. Because if we don't know how many pages we're going to target, then we can't actually quote them effectively. Because for each page you need dedicated resources to push it up. Right. And the more pages we have, the more spread thin. So is always taking a data driven approach.

And as you know, so many ecom brands have thousands of products, hundreds of collection pages. And if the key strategy is wrong, it doesn't matter what you do. On top of that, I guess it's like building a house you know, the keyword strategy would be your foundation, like what you do beneath the bricks. And that's wrong. It doesn't make it the best bricks.

And then the best window is best bifold doors, like it's all gonna come crumbling down.

So on. On the keyword list. Let's. I like your inflatable strategy. Idea or example. Right. So. So I do some keyword research and I find out there's, you know, inflatable kayaks, right. Inflatable kayaks for fishing, inflatable kayaks for, you know, exercise inflatable kayaks. Brands. Best inflatable. You know, so you just come up with this list of keywords and then you determine which are unique by Google's mindset.

Because Google might have a synonym. This fishing one and deep sea fishing same same search term in Google's mind. So you'll put them in whatever euros you'll make a second column or whatever for that kind of thing. And at the end you've got this list of rows, which is your neat, unique keyword, but let's call them sets since we're group them together, like you said, and then you assign them to a page.

And that I assume could be a product page, a collection page, a page page and an article page. Is that is that the way you think about that?

In terms of what you said, in terms of the the mapping, like column one, column two, that's absolutely correct in terms of whether you use a product page, a collection page, or a blog post that is determined by what you see in Google. But often what we'll see is, is nine times out of ten going to be a collection page.

And often what you find is always you can list the same products on all these different pages because users search differently for the same thing. So it doesn't matter if you have the same products on five different collections, but the keyword you're targeting is different. And the reason why this is so, so effective is because if you look at from a user's perspective, right, let's just different example, to make it, you know, a bit more holistic.

Imagine electric bikes, right? You have foldable electric bikes, fat tire, electric bike step from electric bikes. Right. Half of these bikes are pretty much very similar. Like the bike for a fact is the same as a generic that tire. But if I'm a user and I go into Google and I search for foldable electric bikes, and let's just forget that some of the different ones fold anyway, if I now see a collection page that says Foldable electric bikes, here's what the descriptions fold.

Look twice. Here's some content about that is 100% bang on what I searched for, so I'm way more likely to convert as well. Where if I land on that generic page and I want on a foldable when I go to click a filter and it's just long for me, so you know, it doesn't matter. I have the same products across multiple collections.

It's just about making sure the user journey is 100% spot on.

That makes sense. That makes sense. So, step one. In our beginner's SEO strategy, make your keyword mapping.

Correct.

right. What is step two for that? That small store

Step two would be optimizing those pages. So when it comes to SEO, as I said, there's like so many things you can do. And I don't like to talk about every single thing because in reality, like 200 different signals a month, Google looks at I'm not a guy that has 200 hours of time to do these things. I like to focus on the 81 year old or 28 year old.

Sorry. And the most important thing you should be doing is putting your keyword in your URL. Because what that does is, is a very clear signal to Google before even looks at this page. I know it's pages about this is about fat electric tires or foldable electric tires. But if you visit your page, nobody knows what your page is about, so keep it in Europe.

Second thing is keyword in your title tag. So the title tag is essentially the title you see in Google search results. When you carry out term again, get your keyword in the title tag. Don't just chuck it towards the end or in the middle is actually an SEO hack for me, but it works very well. But the keyword was in front of the title tag was it gives it more weight in Google's algorithm, so keyword in the URL should.

In the title tag, the first thing is put your keyword in the h1 tag, so the main heading above your collection page again to make it very clear. And when I'm saying put in your keyword. But I'm not just saying like just put photo words, photo like that is spammy. It needs to be, you know, user friendly as well.

So maybe the best electric bikes in in the US or electric bikes to save save you time on your journey, like make it more conversion friendly as well. That's the free things. And then you always have your keywords in your H2 tags and that will be the content you have below the product. And it's really important you target as many relevant keyword variations as possible.

So if you've done your keyword research and mapping correctly, you just open up your, you know, your Google Sheet and say, oh, these are all the keywords. These are all on the same page. These are all relevant. So I'll just include, you know, for electric bike, for, bikes that fold, you know, strong foldable bikes, durable like all the different terms are all related to foldable on the same page.

And that was what we call on page SEO. So you found your keywords. The next stage is applying those keywords on your website, hence the name on page SEO.

That. That makes sense now, if people just have the spaghetti strategy, where they're just going to take as much content as they can create about their their products and throw it up on collections and product pages without doing that first step of keyword research. So they may not use the exact phrase that the customer is using, like, what sort of lift do you think?

And I assume it's just a guess. I doubt anybody's ever measured this, but like, what sort of lift do you get in the amount of, you know, search traffic or sales by adding that extra due diligence of actually doing the keyword research? So you're doing things in your customer's language, not in your language.

Great question. It definitely. You definitely would have an increase than what you had prior. However, that doesn't mean it's a positive and you should do it. And the reason why is there's another part of SEO and what you can do. Technical is called keyword colorization. And that basically is when you have two page on a website competing for the same term.

So if you just minus the chock some keywords in your collection, just assume they are relevant. What can happen is if you already have a blog post on this topic, or maybe you have a blog post in three months on the same topic and you publish it, what you find is your collection page will compete with your blog post and only one page can rank.

So what happens is one day your collection will rank, the next that your blog post will rank, and then it's just fluctuating all the time, and eventually you'll lose both pages. And what that means is Google is unsure which page to rank because you have two pages targeting the same term. So then you have an issue of redirecting one to the other.

And when you do that, the other page may not jump back in rankings. And it's just not a situation you want to be in. And I'll be totally honest, the campaigns we struggle with the most are campaigns. When clients come to us like that, where they just put tons of content out on the website, and it hasn't been fought out, and we've got hundreds of pages all competing with each other, because before we do any SEO work, we spend the first literally two months trying to tell Google, forget about the last six years of this brand and what they've done.

This is now correct. And it's basically unlearning. And that takes a lot of time. And the most stressful part about that is it's not it's not in our control. We can't control when Google decides, okay, I agree, this is not a new page for some brand. It can take three weeks from other brands. And no exaggeration, it's been two years, but once it pops through they make the money back.

But it's just too risky, so it's just better to do the research initially, get it right and you have one less headache because it's a headache. You don't want to have an SEO, one of the worst ones you can actually have.

Yep. You know, it makes. That makes a lot of sense. So is there anything else for our beginner SEO? Execution.

Yeah, I would say another low cost effective strategies. So if we look at what we said so far, you've got your keywords, you map them, you've done the on page SEO, you've got the key words on the page right. So what you've done so far is you made it very clear to Google what your website is about, you what the keywords, and you optimize your website.

But that is not enough to rank because someone could do exactly the same as you. So there's two components to Google that really determine where you rank. And the first part is relevancy. And the second part is affirmative. And again ignore the buzzwords. They all sound way more technical than they actually are. And if you look at it from Google's perspective, all Google is trying to do when you correct any search is return the best results to you.

Like imagine Scott, you know, I don't know, maybe you run 20 K and you want to buy some running trainers right? Maybe you go into Google and you search for yellow running trainers. Imagine if Google returns blue running trainers to you. You're not going to be happy. Is a bad user experience. You won't use Google again. You use Bing.

So we try to do that to give you the best results. So to rank on Google, when you put the basics down, you basically to convince Google you are the best at what you do and you are the most relevant. So the way you increase your site's relevancy is by publishing blog content, which is related to the collections and products you sell.

So if you have issues in our example, if you have a, you know, a Shopify website selling Humidors, right, you know, cigar humidor and stuff like that, right? You'd publish a blog post on what is a cigar humidor, how much do you have? It was cost, and that is all content related to the products you. So now when you publish these blogs, you want to link them together and the link directly back to the collection that targets the transaction type keywords.

And that is how you start making it more clear to Google that you are relevant in that cigar humidor niche.

What I. What I do for my client store. So you tell me where I'm wrong here, or if I'm wrong is we build out those blog articles a lot, you know, I'm a big fan of content marketing, so with my clients, we're doing a lot of that. But what we do is we bring the, products into the blog article instead of pointing the blog article to the collections.

Is, is that okay?

That is that is absolutely fine. And we do that as well because the blogs will attract traffic. And you don't want you don't want someone to click a button to then go through to the blog. So if you add the products in the blogs, you have higher sales, higher conversions, but you want you still want to be linking to your product or collection page because that's the SEO part, right?

The goal isn't to rank the blog posts. The goal is to use the blog posts to support the product or collection page. So those are the pages that right? Because again, if you have a, I don't know, a blog that is talking about, you know, video likes right. That's your collection page selling 50 different video lights that people can buy.

And you have your blog post on how to use a video, like, right? If you rank number one for how to use a video, like you're going to get tons of traffic, but people already have the likes is looking how to use it like they're not ready to make a purchase. And you know, that means you're not making more money.

So you want to focus on pushing your video like page higher. You know, your collection page and getting that traffic because not all traffic is equal. And I think you've probably seen it yourself. A lot of agencies just just they just literally have one metric. Your traffic is going up. SEO is an SEO is a success. But it's not.

It's it's only success if you're making more money. And if you're not, it's all vanity traffic.

Yeah. Yeah. I've actually had clients where I've told them you're. You know, you need to take these articles down because they're. They're what I call, you know, 2 or 3 steps removed from your business where, you know, you're, you know, like, I have one, that it was foot orthotics and they were talking about, you know, how much water to drink, like, oh, it's helpful, but you're not a health site.

You're a foot health site. Right? It's there's a difference there kind of thing. And then the other thing we do for a lot of our clients is we also measure in Google Analytics your email signups. There's a lot of SEO traffic. What you're saying is higher level. So you don't see the result in your sales number directly.

But we actually show in our scorecards with our clients the email signups so that they can see that, oh, at least we're converting them to email. And they're, you know, they're confident that their email strategy will convert them to the purchasers down the road. But so we've got this whole list of, of pages, the keywords we revamped it all out is that all the beginners need to do.

And the reason I ask that is you haven't mentioned yet something that I'm a big fan of, and maybe it's not as important as I think it is, but images and video for that matter, right?

Images and videos. Definitely important. Another thing I would mention. I mean, it's very related to the keywords. But it's kind of not because I see a lot of brands still getting this wrong. Is if you use another example of a fashion brand, right, that sells maybe, a men's shirts.

Right now we have the main collection page for men's shirts, and then you go to the left hand side of the website and there's a filter for size, color, material, and that is it. They've got one collection page for men's shirts where for everything else that you have, you should be having a normal collection page. And it kind of goes back to the keyword research stuff.

So if you see people searching for men's black shirts, men's white shirts literally build out a whole nother collection. Just list the products that are out of that collection and then do the same process. Add content, ones, URLs, title tags, start to publish blogs, internal link to it and you will start to rank and a lot of people say, as if I've got a filter for black shirts and Google knows I sell black shirts.

It doesn't because most most I'm the number ten. That filter page is just a dynamic URL and it's not actually indexed, which means Google's not aware of it. So build out as many collections as you possibly can because you're increasing the chances of getting that traffic. And at least until what you said images. Right. That's assuming you've got the traffic.

Now you need high quality images, like a lot of brands come to us that start off like dropshipping. They're using the images from the dropship or in the low quality images. And, you know, you even if you have dropshipping, I still would recommend just buying the products yourself and taking your own photos to make yourself stand out from the crowd because, you know, people buy with the eyes.

It doesn't matter how cheap or how good of a deal is. If I'm going to buy a t shirt and in the picture it looks crinkled, well, I know you're going to. I'm going to find it myself. I'm less likely to make that purchase. So just make the images really high quality. And yet you can't be cutting corners on that.

It's guess you couldn't have like go into a shopping mall, right? And you're buying trainers that are dirty. Like, I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't clean your trainers.

Well, I totally agree. Like, I have one client. I actually have four clients. They all compete against each other, and there's one dropshipping space, and they're like, you know, 4/5 of the whole market. And if you do a Google Shopping query, they all have the exact same dropshipping photos. And I keep telling them all the first one of you to create your own photos, it's going to start differentiating, but none of them sit down and actually do that hard work of creating photos.

The other thing I was talking about with images is so when I take my own photo and it says image, you know, underscore 0258, jpeg, is there anything I can do from the SEO standpoint for that?

Yeah. You want to? I'd say it depends, I think. Would Katie and SEO as well called keyword density. And essentially how many times you mention the keyword on a page. So if you haven't mentioned the keyword a lot of times on a page in your content below the products in your collection, then you have more room to start mentioning keywords and images, because Google sees that users don't see it and start to increase your keyword density.

What you don't wanna do is go too aggressive with it and start putting your keyword everywhere, because then you're you can have over optimization when you're trying to do too much and most people don't actually understand this, but if you make it very clear to Google, you're doing SEO, it has a negative effect on your website because surprise, Google does not like SEO, because if you do SEO, you don't spend money on Google ads and way to make the bulk of their revenue.

So you want to do SEO without looking like you're doing SEO. So our best practice for images is just to be as descriptive as possible. So if you have a picture of, I don't know, a black office chair, I would call it black office chair and maybe the brand name. Hello, I wouldn't be an office chair or a black light.

I would just make it descriptive as possible. And that way, you know you shouldn't have any issues. And again, always think long term. You don't want to just rank number one today and hit by a Google algo, update the company a few months time and lose all the traffic and rankings.

So back to your. Your collections. And having a collection for black shirt. White shirt, yellow shirt. I like that, and I get it. And literally today in a client store, we had a mega menu. So they sell old posters. And we had a mega menu for how to search for, you know, browse old posters by country, by topic, by age and all these different categories.

And no one ever clicks on it and uses it. So those collections are important from an SEO standpoint. We believe, but they're not important to the browse experience because they want to see all posters to start, and then they actually do want to use the filters. And we have, you know, a filter app that does a really good job with that kind of stuff.

So the question I'm asking is, I make all these collections for all these different colors of shirts, but it's not a good experience to add them to my customers. Browse experience. How do I link to

Great question. That's a really good real question, actually. So when you create these collections, the only way people can find them is if they carry out a searching Google for them. They should not be accessible from your menu, your filters, your photo, the essentially hidden pages, the only there for SEO purposes. Because if someone like you said, if someone is on my my website and I sell shirts, I'm not a no ties and they want to see what I have available because they don't know what color they want, they don't know what styles I have.

They want to browse, and that's when they would have the normal user experience. I go to shirts, add the filters. That's absolutely fine. But there are thousands of people every month that are searching for men's black shirts. They know what they want. The further down the buying funnel. So that's where you want to intercept them and say, hey, forget the generic page.

We have to play around with filters and just go direct to the black page and you'll find what you want. So the just there they're going to be indexed on your website. So Google's aware of them. They're going to do an SEO to them writing blog post, building backlinks, them pushing it up higher in Google. But no one's going to see that on a surface level.

But the people who need to see it are the ones who are going to find it.

That makes sense. That makes sense? Yeah. It's totally so. So our beginner. I think we covered it for them, you know? You know, have to worry on all the technical stuff. It's just make good content, have a strategy, map it out. Which means you have to know your catalog, which is a really good thing. So let's shift gears and and move to the opposite side.

Let's say we have an existing store that's been in place for 6 or 7 years, or do a $100,000 a month or more. So they're stablished and, you know, they've got a product catalog, let's say a thousand products. Right? It's in my my client's business. It's a large it's a large catalog. But they haven't done this the right way from the beginning.

How does that store go into their existing infrastructure and start out and create create the map for their keywords. How do they how do they do it the right way, even though they didn't in the beginning? Like you said, those are the your nightmare clients. It's a lot more work. What does that store have to do to get that work done?

How do they go about rationalize doing their non-rational SEO execution so they can clean it up moving forward?

So the first step I would be looking at is the data of the current website. So you can use a free tool, a Google Search Console. Hopefully everyone has it installed on the website, but I prefer Google Search Console to do analytics, which sounds absolutely crazy. But the reason why I prefer it is because it shows you how your website is performing organically.

It shows you what people search for that generate your clicks, impressions, your pages, your countries. You can compare. So if you open a Google Search console, it will literally tell you what you are getting organically. So it will show you most important pages. So you already know what pages are joining the bulk of traffic. So what I've done is number one is I wouldn't say have 100 collections.

And I figure out the top three collections are, I don't know, men shirts, men's ties and men's trousers. Like, I wouldn't even I wouldn't worry about cufflinks, belt shoes. I would just focus on those three for free collections. Now I know what my free pages are. I will look at how I can improve them. If you take those individual collection pages and plug them in an SEO tool like Rest, which is just literally the letter A page, Ahrefs or SEMrush, the exact same thing that will show you all of the keywords that pages ranking for.

So now you can see, okay, my page is ranking for all of these keywords. I'm not even actively targeting them. So that's when you start to say, okay, cool. These are the keywords I'm somewhat relevant for. I might be on page five, page six. Now I want to write better content to add to these collection pages to increase the ranking and generate more organic traffic.

So that's the most effective strategy you can do because you're not reinventing the wheel. You're basically just tweaking what Google already understands to be relevant about for your collections, and just further pushing that relevancy. Even once you do that, I would still go back to basics and carry out keyword research because you need to know just what you rank for a hundred terms.

It doesn't mean there's not another 60 times that people are searching for that you're relevant for. So if you saw missing off keywords, literally all you're doing is leaving money on the table and you don't want to be doing that, you want to make sure you capture as much traffic as possible to increase. You know, your LTV, your all of that.

Like it all comes back to the equal numbers and it starts of getting that traffic. And the third thing which we do, which works really well as well, is if you know, your client is, I don't know, ABC.com, you should take the collection page or the category page or whatever platform they're on. Plug that into the same SEO tool.

So SEMrush and again it will show you all the keywords that they are seen for. Then it's a case of opening your keywords. The keywords spot the difference. Make sure you take ones that are relevant and go ahead and optimize your website as well.

Okay, so you're just looking at, you know, instead of trying to figure out ahead of time what you want to rank for, you're actually looking at what you rank for, what your competition ranks for and saying, all right, now let's optimize for those keywords and improve our ranking over time.

Exactly. Fill in the blanks and it works incredibly well. And you know, I would love if every brand come to us with a fresh blanket and we just start fresh. But it never works like that. And again, I mean, the brands that come to us like that, it's not the end of the world. The ones that are really challenging is when they have pages competing.

And just because you've done SEO and you haven't had any strategy in the back end, it doesn't mean you're going to have keyword cannibalization. Like for context, if we had, I don't know, 100 inquiries come in. We probably see it on about 15 sites, like really bad. So it's like 15%. It's not a high percentage, but it does happen.

And again, it does take a lot of time to to rectify. And if you're unsure if you have it and you're listening that you know, I'll be happy to take a look or you one of my guys, just to clarify that, that's fine, that it would take us five minutes to do.

Yep, yep. Thanks for that. Now, you mentioned, HDFs and, SEMrush for the smaller stores. Those become significant investments. They're not the cheapest. Service. Is there a free way to do this or. You just got to bite the bullet? If you're going to be serious about this, you got you got to pay the cash.

There is a free a free alternative, but it doesn't give you the dates you need. So the free alternative is actually in the Google Ads dashboard. So when Google Ads is a thing called, Google Keyword Planner, so g kb and it helps you plan key, which is a target for Google ad campaigns. But what you can actually do is you can go into a Google keyword planner again, which is free to use.

You have to sign up to a Google Ads account. I think you have to create a fake campaign and say, yes, I want to run ads. And then as soon as you run, that pulls it straight away. So no money goes. Then it says you have an active card, an active campaign. You can access the data and you can go into there and say, look, I sell men's black shirts, same example, and I'll give you lots of keywords that are relevant to men's black shirts.

You can also take an existing URL and paste it into Google Keyword Planner to get more keyword ideas. So it's a similar process. But it doesn't give you the exact monthly search volume. So when you're using tools like SEMrush, it will tell you 900 searches per month, 16,000 a month. What Google Keyword Planner does is it gives you a range, and the range is a very broad.

It's like 1000 to 10,000. And that could literally be 1001. And you're spending hours and hours and hours on that thinking is, you know, a lot higher than that. So the ranges are very, very broad, which doesn't help that much, but it's better than nothing.

ACM and HDFs and ACM. Rush, if I remember correctly. They also give you your ranking and things like that where there's there's no free alternative for that. Right. So if you want if you want to measure your performance, you're going to have to put the money down. Correct.

Yeah. I mean, to to check your rankings, the free rate literally is to Google your keyword every day, but it will fluctuate based on your IP address where you are. So it's not the most efficient. But I like I said, I think the most best tool someone can use that is free is Google Search Console. It tells you actually your average position.

So where you rank across your page free to use, it shows you what you're getting clicks for. You show you what you're getting impressions for. It shows you the countries, it shows you. A topic like that is the one to recommend. Like, I could probably rank a website just, using that one tool with no other tool.

It gives you everything you need.

and what I like about Search Console is, if you use Looker Studio. But Looker Studio is Google's own data studio. And in Looker Studio, you can bring in Search Console data and Google Analytics data, and you can combine them into one score card. And that ends up working out really nicely to have a balanced view.

spent so many weekends playing around with these little geeky stuff and integrations and creating these custom dashboards. So colorful when I show you. So I'm like, oh, I looks really cool, man. Yeah, it's all right. I was like, yeah, I spent like six hours on this. So yeah, it's so many cool things you can do.

Yeah. I have a scorecard for Shopify stores this year. I'm really proud of it and I use it all the time. Hopefully my clients find value in it too. You know, they don't geek out as much as I do. So this issue is hard. It's complex. There's all this stuff going on. We got this beautiful new technology out there called I should I be using AI in my SEO work, and if so, where's the right place to use it and where's the wrong place to use it?

So we don't actually use our content in the content we put on client sites. And the reason for that is because it's still very newish. There's a lot of errors and nuances in AI content as well. Something absolutely amazing. You wouldn't even know that I. But the downside, which we find from SEO, is Google's all about serving the best result to users.

And AI content is not unique. It's regurgitated content that you find for what it's being trained on in the models. Right? So when you're using AI content to put on your collection pages, for example, all you're doing is copying content from somewhere else on the internet. And it's not unique, which makes it harder to rank. And you want to have control over the content so you know what keywords to mention.

How many times mentioned, what your header should be. That's why we don't use it on client sites where we do use our content most like it's very recent. The image kind of trailing it is there's a part of essay which I haven't touched on yet, which is remember I said there's relevancy and FRC relevancy is your blogs make it more clear to Google.

The other half is authority and that is link building. So link building for those who are unaware is essentially another third party website linking directly to easy going. Wikipedia is all the links you click them take to another page that is a link. And if all is equal, what are your keywords? The same. Your on page SEO is same.

You're publishing ten blogs a month just like your competitors. The deciding difference, and I would argue today and I've got a day to back this up. The most impactful SEO strategy still to this day is link building is giving Google the signals that other websites are vouching for your content. And you know, if you've got two collection pages both in, I don't know, laptops.

Right? And one page has 100 high quality backlinks, 100 high quality websites linking directly to it. It's the votes of confidence. So thumbs up that that's that's what Google looks at this algorithm to determine who ranks above the other, where the other collection has 60. Well this is more popular. So I'm going to rank this to Google. And I rank this season.

So link building is very very effective. And because the links are happening from other third party websites and linking back to you, the content isn't going on your website, it's going on their website. So that's why we started to train a little bit and play with a bit of AI content. Again, when I say play, we're using 10%.

I might even take human. We still can't go with an AI because if the backlinks don't work and AI clients don't rank, we can't really risk that. So that's the only place we're looking at using AI in the content. We are using it for briefs to figure out what we should produce. Headings, outlines. But again, our team is still going into an edit because what we're finding is the keyword density is off.

They're not targeting keyword variations. And I think it's because we're still at the early stages. So for me, I guess we'll be a bit more cautious. There's a lot of clients that rely on us, to generate organic revenue. So, you know, we're not kind of testing too much and kind of taking a lot of risk. I do actually own a few ecom brands myself, and I'm going very ham with AI content on them, so I can get some data to determine what we're gonna do going forward.

Because, you know, a lot of people on Twitter, you know, saying, content works, AI content doesn't, and I can't base my client success on what I saw and what I need my own data. So, yeah, what I'm seeing so far, though, because you probably wondering, is it was working really, really well, and it was a Google algorithm update that came out, two months ago now.

And the site, one of the sites actually tanked and the other is saying stagnant. And either nothing different on these sites. They're in the same niche, different content, same products and same same processes, and one tank, one flat. So already have a bit of reservations, like why is one going down one why hasn't? Is Google just like a Google?

They have a part of the ranking, segment called ranking random ranking factor, which basically means if two sites do exactly the same thing, Google may throw one just so it's hard to figure out what works in SEO. I don't know if it's like, has it? Oh yeah, it's still very early days, but I'm sure I'll find out.

Sorry I forgot. Very geeky that I get carried away with this. So

I love those answers. And I have two questions for you. And? And they're very different. Right. So the first one is, you know, or maybe it's more of a comment on this one. Would I like to use AI for an SEO or just content generation? Is outlines like write me an outline for an article about this thing.

Like I'll even do podcast episodes that way or like give me an outline for this and I might use one fourth of it, but it it'll like probably it usually fills in the gaps of what I wasn't thinking of kind of thing. So I like it for that. Now on the the other side of, of this is on the link building side.

You know, you mentioned how important link building was and I thought it was less important than it used to be. Like, I have clients who have no links at all to their website, almost literally like five. And that's it. Right? And they do really well with Link Build that. A client who back in 2019, I told them an SEO strategy for them would be a waste of time unless they got like 100 links to their website, because I looked at all their competition.

And so, you know, how how much authority they had when they had way more than 100 links, like go to a link building strategy. And then it appeared to me that in 2020, Google ranked the content on the site more valuable than the links, and this company who did an SEO strategy started getting 4,050% of revenue from SEO, proving me completely wrong in what I was saying.

So is and I heard you say link links are a tie, which to me seems like it's still content. First, link second. Is that all accurate?

I would say content is important because it's the foundation of the website. And if you go back to example of, you know, content and keyword research being the foundation of a house, no matter what you do on top of it, if you need to get the best links in the world, you get Forbes linking to you, the Wall Street Journal, all these massive site loads before you see.

Right. You're still not going to rank if Google Cube doesn't know what your site is about, because what is it ranking you for? You got all this authority but not relevant any topic. So getting the content on there is to me. Or is it to be number one because Google read content and content. But the second thing is links.

Because again, with all these AI tools coming out now, guess what? Everyone can produce content in mass and they're using outline. Some people are writing the whole blog post and I just shoving it online. Yet 20 looks going to build that relevancy going to do my it. And it's like, wow, how can you compete with that if you're using human rights?

All right. It's a lot harder. So it's not just about the quantity of what you're doing is the quality in it. So you know links are very, very effective. And I'll give you a really good example. We took on this client and it was a I went to the Ecom Expo in London in October. I think they onboarded in February this year.

And then we ecom brand, they sell these surfboards, all custom designed by a Ise in London, and they wanted to rank for surfboards, paddle boards, some some other relevant keywords, right, like charge and stuff like that. But anyway, that one's rank for that, for those terms that all the SEO perfect. They had blogs, they're doing six blogs a month, handwritten.

They had the keyword research done perfectly that a guy in-house doing this, they had everything H1 title, but they weren't ranking. They ranking on page two, which to me isn't ranking because we have a joke in the SEO industry, the best place to hide their body is on the second page of Google, because no one's ever going to find it.

No one goes there. So they're ranking on page two. But they weren't making any money. So what do we do? We, boot them, say, look, I know what you're missing. You're just missing high quality links. And he went on to Fiverr in the past. He's purchased these links. He knew links were important, but it's not. Links is the right type of links.

Now, if you're buying links on sites that everyone can go and buy in, the links forums and these sites is up just to link to people, it's going to add no value. What links or real sites have real traffic. And then rule 40. So we built him. I think it was nine links a month from February up until April, so not even that many even that long.

And yeah, he jumped up the position free. And the own difference we done was publish or acquire these high quality links and publish the content as part of the guest post. But again, links are incredibly effective and I personally believe from all the data we see, I think Google has given more weight to links because everyone is using their content, so it needs somewhere else, which is harder to kind of misinterpret.

I would say.

Yeah. I didn't think about that part. Like. Yeah. In 2020, you didn't have AI content, but now you do. So they have to. They have to just. That's that's fascinating. Now, you mentioned high quality links. So can you explain the differences in high quality links and low quality links and some, you know, a couple of best practices on how to get high quality links.

Yes, I would say in one statement because I understand it and I'll expand on it as well. Is the most valuable link you can acquire is a link that is really, really hard to replicate. So if you go into, I don't know of famous, I don't I don't name a website because I'm, I get in trouble. They may find me and complain, if you go into a very common website where you can upload the content yourself and get a backlink because you upload it, you write what it's about and it links you well, you've managed to manipulate Google and get a backlink.

Great. But if it's that easy to do, your competitor can do that whilst they're watching Netflix, which means that link now has no value because everyone has it. So you always know if I was on links that are harder to acquire. So that's the mindset you should have when you're building links, the different type of links you can get right, you can get PR, you can get niche edits, you can get guest posts, you can do so like there's so different, so many types of links.

The best things that we've seen to work best is guest post links, because you're basically a guest on someone else's website. You're writing the content, you control it, you control the hyperlink, text links back to your website. You control what page you link to. It gives you full control. And the more control you have, the less variables there are and the more you can kind of basically predict you getting really good results on SEO.

That's the first time guest post links is what I would focus on now. It doesn't mean you should go and email every website out there, say, hey, can I write? If you kind of write for you, you want to focus on sites that are somewhat relevant to your niche. So if you have an E-Com brand selling maybe, I don't know, garden fertile houses, right?

You want to get a link from another site that is at least in the outdoor niche, should not be a life like garden site because it can be limited, but it needs to be somewhat in the outdoor niche. Getting a link from a generic magazine that talks about Kim Kardashian and what's going on in the sports like that's not relevant.

Like you want to try and get as much relevant as possible. That is a high quality link. Now the second thing you want to check is does this site actually get organic traffic? And you can check this using tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, another one called SimilarWeb, which I think gives you like ten free searches a day. So again, free to do as well just to spread it out.

But if you find this site gets no organic traffic or maybe just 50 users a month, then what that means is Google is not ranking that site for keywords, so Google doesn't like it. So why do you want a link from that site? You don't right. So again that's another criteria. There's a metric called domain rating in SEO which basically kind of domain authority for Moz.

It tells you how a forward to a website is. Again you want to use that. As a rule of thumb, you don't be getting links from sites that are below domain rate 20 because they're not authoritative. So the whole point of link building is to build your authority. So, you know, getting links and sites on the first. You've kind of undermined the whole strategy.

So there's lots of criteria you can use. And that's just free. A fourth one again, probably really effective is when you're plugging these sites into these tools, you want to double check they haven't been penalized by any Google algo updates. And what we found is we actually got a client, over years ago now, I think it was 2021, 2022.

And when we looked at their backlink profile, they had loads of high quality backlinks. And I thought, oh, is it really great? They got traffic. You know, they got high domain ratings. And when we looked at those sites in a bit more detail, what we found is I think it was 65% of them have actually been penalized.

So although they still had like 3000 visits a month, they were getting 60,000, but they lost so much of the traffic that, dodgy SEO stuff. So you really need to pay a lot of attention and do enough due diligence when it comes to link building. Because like I said, if you get these links that are easy to replicate and have no value, you are literally just throwing money down the drain.

So do avoid Fiverr by all means. What you literally have put your money on file for literally.

Well and do links from social. YouTube. TikTok. Instagram. Do they help or are they negligible?

They help, but they don't have much value because they're very easy to replicate. So if you were to say, put this podcast episode on YouTube, which I know you do anyway, and then link to, maybe my website, Josh from clicks likes and then like, that's great. But then my competitor could just go and publish a video of literally him doing a selfie in the garden and then put it, and then it's the same thing.

Unfortunately it doesn't. Look at how many views you have. You engagement. Google looks at. This is a backlink from YouTube. Here's a backlink from YouTube. And what you find is these backlinks aren't even indexable. Or once they index, they're actually no follow. So I don't get too technical. Okay. But there's different types of links. You have a do follow link and a nofollow link.

So do follow link is any normal link you have on your website and Google follows this, hence the name Dofollow help your SEO rank and then a no. Following is a link you add to the user. It looks exactly the same, but it's a bit of code in the HTML which says no. Follow, which basically means Google will not follow this link and not give that website any SEO benefit of it.

Yeah. So if you. If you're going to invest in a link building strategy. Social is not the way to do that.

Know that you want to focus on guest post links. Sites that are real, have traffic, have authority, have been hit by Google updates. Now you know that are somewhat relevant to your niche, and then you want to focus on right? When you find these, you want to reach out to them, send them email, send them titles you can write, go back and forth and maintain link velocity.

That's very, very key thing. And it's very hard to do, which is why I think most will outsource it to agencies. You don't want to get one link, two links a month because all you're doing is saying, oh, that website that actually mean that website that actually the more links you have, the more momentum you build. Momentum is absolutely key in SEO.

And as you probably realize in the client, you work with SEO compounds as well. So you know, it really is dramatic when you start doing it for, you know, at least six months. I would say.

Yeah. Well, the thing I love about SEO is, you know, you'll you'll create this content in 2016, and it still gives you 3000 visitors a month today kind of thing. It's just it's a gift that keeps giving, when it when it works, which is most of the time, if you do it right.

I agree, like like I was saying to you before we start recording the podcast, like we're an SEO agency and all of our leads come from SEO people searching for, you know, Shopify SEO agency. We rank number one in the UK. And we made that page years ago. And it still brings in leads to this day. And I don't have to run paid social ads, no Google ads.

I mean, we actually run Google ads anyway because we like to get two spots on Google because both search and ten. But, you know, I can't stress that enough. You know, even if, you know, you're watching this now and your brand new just started out, if you've got a budget and it doesn't know what your budget is, but just allocate some to SEO, you don't have to hire and you can do it yourself.

Just start investing. Because even if you want to exit your brand in the future, is way more appealing to a buyer. When it has organic traffic and it's not all reliant on paid ads.

Excellent, excellent. So, last topic for you. And it's kind of kind of a nice segue you just did. There is small brands or just Shopify stores, you know, brands that are growing their, you know, they want to do SEO. How much the SEO should they do themselves? How much can they do themselves? And when do you know it's time to bring in some professional help?

Okay, there's three questions in one. I remember that my memory's getting back bad. Is Friday six the 7 p.m. in the UK. So the first one was, how much second do themselves right if I click right?

Well, how much can they do themselves? And how much should they do themselves? Like, you know, there's it's technically possible and there's the you should know this before you hire the experts. If you understand the difference there.

So I would say as a brand owner, you should know the products you sell, at least the collections maybe of individual products. So you should be okay to do the initial keyword reset list. Are all the keywords that your collections are relevant for the keyword mapping. You can do that yourself, can take a lot of time and you don't have tools will be a lot harder.

I'm a big believer of if you're not an expert in it, outsource it. So that example, I probably could run the meta ads. I probably could run some Google ads myself. I mean, I'm, I say me, I mean me, the agency can camera a specialist, but I'm that's not my skillset. Like I'm better off using my time what I'm good at.

So if I mean if I'm a ecom brand owner, I'm probably good at sourcing products, supplier negotiations and maybe the branding. Right? That's where I come in. So I would honestly outsource every part. You don't know 100%, because if you do make mistakes, you are going to cost yourself a lot of time and wasted money in the future paying someone to rectify them.

But if you do have time, you are, you know, very resourceful. You can go into YouTube, you can go into Udemy. I have a lot of courses on Udemy. Actually, the best selling SEO course. Funny enough. I made you in lockdown, so there's lots of out there, that you can learn. But like I said, you want to just figure out, is that really the best use of your time right now?

Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. So. And it goes without saying that click slice is always available for brands to, contact if they want. Do SEO. We'll have a link in the show notes to to your website. Love all the information you've just given us. You know, I appreciate you sharing that with us. Is there anything Shopify store owners should think about with SEO that we haven't covered?

No, I, other than just the last point I hit on, is like, do think long term. And we've have had, like, a few horror horror stories where brands have come to us, where they were literally all relying on meta ads to generate the sales, and then their ads account got banned, or the Google ads account got banned in the traffic.

Just going overnight. And, you know, then now I need to do SEO new results tomorrow because like SEO does not work like that. You know, when you're doing SEO, you're looking at a minimum of six months. You know, you can get results quicker if you're an established brand and been around for years. But if you're starting from scratch, you need to layer at least six months and even longer, depending on the keywords you're targeting.

So, you know, like I said, even if you do things yourself, you know, you learning videos on YouTube, Udemy, whatever, just start implementing something. Don't leave it too late because we hear it all the time and there's nothing we can do. And it puts a lot of pressure on us. And, you know, we would never say yes to a client.

Yeah, we would take you on and get results next week. We only do that if it's a large brand. I mean, no, you just pull a few levers, you build a few links, and they're there. So that would be, my final words. You know, think long term. Invest in SEO in some way or another. Yeah. And Keegan amended upwards.

Excellent. Excellent. Thanks for your time today. I appreciate it, Josh.