Hey, Scott. Austin here. In this episode, I want to talk about an SEO tactic that you can use using Shopify's blog. Functional to improve your SEO and drive traffic and customers to your store.

Now, if you've been watching any of the, news going on in 2025 around SEO, there's a lot of people saying that SEO is dead in 2025 and that AI is going to be replacing it.

Now, there's some truth to that. That AI is on the rise while search looks like it's on the decline,

but that said, I don't think it's the death of SEO yet in 2025. And I do know that you can help improve SEO and traffic to your Shopify store. Even today in 2025.

And let me just give you some stats to show that.

So I just pulled up

lot of my clients, scorecards that I use and

measuring their business.

I looked at the year over year traffic between February of 2025 and February of 2024.

And the range is that SEO traffic for the best performing store

grew by over 500%.

Five times the traffic they had last year.

But the worst performing store is down 45%.

Now, the average of all the stores that I was looking at is up 54% year over year in organic search traffic,

but that is not a representative sample, right? These are stores that are working with me and they're investing in their business.

They're trying to grow their business. So my guess is that that 54% average growth year over year

is not representative of the whole internet.

And I don't know what the numbers are for the whole internet.

But what I do like seeing is that stores that are investing in SEO can still see a return in SEO in 2025.

and a little more detail on the data from my clients.

56% of them were up year over year in SEO traffic.

39% of them were down year over year, and 5% were flat.

End of that, 56% that were up year over year in SEO traffic, a third of them were up more than doubling their SEO traffic year over year. And those were my clients that were investing in SEO.

So looking at that data and seeing the real world results from my clients is what leads me to believe that investing in SEO in 2025 is not a waste of energy.

If you do it well.

And in this episode, we're going to go over one tactic and what you can do to improve your SEO.

Now, before we do that, I do want to explain my super simplified view of SEO,

right? I believe that in the world of SEO, there's three major things that contribute to how well you're going to do. The first one of those is what you do from SEO, whether that's the technical SEO you do in your store or the actual content creation, all the efforts you're doing is one third of your success factors.

The second one is what your competition is doing.

if you have a lot of competitors who are optimized around the same keywords that you're optimizing around, then you'll be harder for you to rank and get traffic for those keyword phrases. But if a lot of your competitors aren't optimizing around the same keywords that you're optimizing around, it's going to be easier for you to rank for those keywords and get traffic.

So what your competition is doing has a big impact on how successful your SEO will be. And the third factor is what are people searching for?

So if you're optimizing around keyword phrases that people aren't searching for, even if you do rank high for them, if there's not enough volume of searches, you're not going to get enough traffic

to get a return on that investment,

So because of these three factors, only one of which you're in control of,

a lot of SEO is kind of like throwing spaghetti against the wall.

You think that you can rank for a certain number of keywords. Let's say you're going to go after 50 keywords.

What I recommend you do is you go after those 50 keywords in a lightweight

to see if you can get indexed

for those pages,

which getting indexed for pages in Shopify should be pretty easy.

They should get indexed without much problem and then you want to see of those 50 keyword phrases you're optimizing for, if you're ranking it all for them, and that starts giving you a measure of what your competition is doing.

And then if you actually start ranking for those keywords with that light investment of SEO content that you did, that's when I recommend doubling down and increasing the content on that page so that you rank higher for that keyword phrase.

And then if that keyword phrase that you're ranking higher for is starting to drive traffic, then you keep investing in that page to improve it so that it converts your customers better than it was. You know, before you started working on conversion optimization.

So it's a throw the spaghetti against the wall strategy, seeing what sticks and doubling down, and continue investing on the things that are working.

So the tactic we're gonna talk about in this episode is using blog articles to go after keyword phrases that you wouldn't actually rank for. If you just look at your products in your collections.

And what I mean by this is keyword phrases that are a little bit tangential or a little bit off from your actual products.

So let's, for example, say that you sell electric bikes.

Your keyword phrase is that you'd be ranking for based on your products and your collections could be things like

e-bikes for kids or best e-bikes for long distance and those kind of things. What you probably aren't ranking for from the content generated from your products and your collections are things like best e-bike routes in San Diego or best e-bike routes in Los Angeles.

So those are what I mean by those tangential keyword phrases where your products and your collections aren't going to rank for them, but they are of interest to customers and can be one step away from a shopping experience. It might not be perfect shopping queries, but hopefully there related to your products enough that it will generate interest in your products over time.

And what we're doing with the strategy is we're going after tail queries. We want to do kind of like a recipe for these blog articles that we're going to be creating, and replicate that recipe a number of times to put out a broad set of keyword phrase. So instead of just optimizing for best ebike routes in San Diego, you would probably do a blog article for every single city in the county of San Diego and have best e-bike rides for San Diego, best e-bike rides for El Cajon.

Best e-bike rides for Encinitas.

The content on each of those pages would probably change a little bit.

you know San Diego County, Encinitas is more north in the county. So you'd probably come up with a set of e-bike routes in the whole county, and then just show the ones that are in the north of the county for the Encinitas article, and El Cajon, which is more south of the county, you'd show the e-bike routes that are just in the south part of the county for the El Cajon article.

So it's not the same content and all the pages just changing up the titles. You are going to be changing up the content. Also.

So to make you understand this idea a little bit better, let me give you a hypothetical example. Let's say that you're an online brand that is selling car washing solutions.

So things like soap, sponges, towels and bigger equipment even than that,

a whole

wide variety of car washing or car care or car detailing solutions.

And just thinking about that brand right now, I have a hypothesis that people are going to be searching for a keyword phrase like how to wash a Ford Mustang.

So what you could do then is create a car care guide for every make and model combination. So it could be how to wash a Ford Mustang

or how to wash a Ford Maverick,

Or how to wash a Dodge Ram pickup truck.

And you could, you know, with that type of

taxonomy, you can see how you could quickly come up with hundreds of blog articles about how to wash, make and model.

And maybe you would even get as detailed as how to wash your make and model, because the care you put behind

the washing process for washing a 1965 Mustang, I assume, is pretty different than how you would wash a 2025 Ford Mustang.

And the way you would start this process, as with most SEO efforts, is by doing some keyword research.

So in our example here of car washing,

we want to understand

is what terms are people using when they search

for these types of queries.

Do they search for how to wash a Ford Mustang or do they search for how do I care for my Ford Mustang?

Or it could be, you know, how do I do maintenance or cleaning on my Ford Mustang? How do I detail a Ford Mustang?

So you want to do the keyword research to see what keyword phrases customers are using when they're searching for these types of queries,

because you don't want to optimize for how to detail a Ford Mustang

when there's 100 times more searching for how to wash a Ford Mustang.

So once you determine what your keyword phrase taxonomy is going to be, how to wash a Ford Mustang. How to wash a Dodge Ram pickup truck.

Then you want to create a template or a structure for that blog article that you can easily scale across all the keyword phrases you're going to be doing. So you're going to be thinking about what type of content you're going to be creating in a way that you can create that in a scalable fashion.

And part of that template, a recipe for the blog articles you're going to think about. How are you going to promote your products, and also what sort of alternate conversions are you going to put into that recipe so that people that aren't ready to buy it, you're capturing your email address or getting them to engage with your brand in some other way so that you can go back and market to them again later.

And one of those alternative conversion methods could be something like an email signup that you incentivize by giving them a free digital e-book about the topic that they're looking at right now. Or it could be sign up for a seminar that you're going to host about that topic in the future.

So for this car washing example, after we figured out our keyword phrases and we figured out our template or recipe for what these blog articles are going to look like, you now going to want to implement that across a wide set of these articles.

You're probably not going to do every make model combination possible because there are so many of them. But you're going to want to do a large set of them. Let's just say in this example, 100 of them,

you want to put enough spaghetti against the wall.

So the you're actually seeing that some are sticking and some are not sticking, and try to understand why that's happening in those situations. So if you just did 5 or 10 articles here, it's not going to give you enough data to really measure what's going on.

And for measuring what's going on, you're going to make sure that you set up a scorecard on how you're going to measure this stuff so that you can actually get good analytics behind what's working and what's not working.

Now, in a previous episode of the podcast, I talked about how I use Looker Studio for making scorecards, and I'll include a link in the show notes to that.

But I use Looker Studio for this type of reporting. For all my clients that were doing this type of SEO effort behind.

And in that reporting, we're looking at, you know, what is the overall traffic that we're getting from SEO and then what keywords are driving that traffic, in which pages

is that traffic landing on? And we use that to triangulate

where we keep investing our efforts on the things that are working, so they improve the performance of the ones that are working.

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So I want to give you a couple more hypothetical examples of what type of blog articles you could be creating, depending on what products it is that your brand is selling.

So let's say you sell olive oil, right? One of the things you could do in your blog strategy is you could have recipes that involve olive oil.

Or if you're selling homewares, you could talk about different styles of decorating. And then from that you could show which of your homewares map to which decoration styles for homes.

Now, there's probably some brands out there that won't be able to use this strategy,

but I do think that for most brands, you can actually use this strategy

So now let's talk about some real world examples of clients of mine that have implemented this strategy. I'll show you what they did, and we'll talk a little bit about their results.

The first one is the healing hedge which and they sell crystals in their store. So what they built out back in December, it's March as I'm recording this, what they built out starting in December and went into January. Also they built a crystal guide and what they did is they built a blog article for over 70 different crystals.

And on each one of those pages, what they talk about in there, you know, the recipe, right, is they have

explanations of the properties of those crystals, how you would use those crystals, care and maintenance and shopping information,

and then what they did for

converting people

It took all those blog articles, put them together into one e-book and using Shopify as digital downloads app, they allow you to download that app for free.

From each of those pages.

And then they also

show all the products that they have in their store that use that crystal.

So they're trying to convert it to levels. They're trying to capture email addresses by giving the free e-book, and they're trying to convert people to purchasers by showing the products that have those

crystals in them.

Now, these articles have been in place now for about three months,

And we see that they're all getting indexed into search with no problem.

And now they're actually starting to rank and drive traffic to the website.

now last month in February, there year over year traffic from SEO was down by 11%.

But here in March,

the month to date data shows that their SEO traffic is up by 18%.

And not all of that is a function of this. But in looking at the data, a lot of it is.

So in just three months time,

after creating the content, we've seen that it's gotten indexed, is getting ranked and driving enough traffic to see a noticeable improvement in the SEO performance compared to year over year

and month over month, for that matter.

Now, the second real world example that I want to show you is with Raptor. Chip and I did a podcast episode with the Raptor Chip about a year ago when they started this project here.

And what they sell is coconut substrate that you put in the bottom of the tank of your pet. So you might have a pet lizard or turtle or frog, and their coconut substrate goes in the bottom of that tank.

they weren't ranking

for a lot of the keyword phrases around specific animals, because they didn't talk about specific animals on their website, because there's so many animals that can use the substrate that they sell.

So starting in March of last year,

what they did is they made 270 blog articles, about 270 different types of animals

That can use this substrate

And the articles aren't

just about the substrate, it's about care of that specific animal. So if we go into Veiled Chameleon, one of the 270 articles that they've built,

you can see that

in that article. They have a video that they created. They didn't have that a year ago. What they saw was enough success

in this effort from an SEO standpoint, that justified creating more content.

So in addition to the text in the copy they had put in there, they started making videos for each of the animals. And the nice thing about videos is they got to add those videos to YouTube,

which is

the number two search engine in the world, Google being the number one search engine, YouTube being the number two search engine.

So now people are searching on YouTube for how to care for a veiled chameleon. There's going to be content on YouTube from this brand, and if they do a search on the web, they'll see content. They're also

so by adding the video, it's basically like adding a channel, to your customer acquisition, because you can now put that video not only on your blog article, but also on YouTube.

And for each of the animals, they also had a large,

set of copy and specs and data around them.

Now conversion for this from a non purchase standpoint is an e-book just like it was in the Healing Hedge, which. But in this one there's a different e-book for each of the animals which is more work to do, but the e-book for all animals will just be so massive that they're doing a specific

for each animal.

Now, in Healing Hedge, which the strategy we're currently applying

is

digital download that they get by purchasing for free, you know, then going through the checkout process in Rapid Ship, what they're doing is you just put in your email address using Klaviyo

signup forms and you submit, you know, free report, a guide in the success page.

You can download the guide directly. And there's pros and cons behind both of those models. And what we're planning to do in both brands is test it out and see which one works best.

And they also have the appropriate substrates on that product page that are applicable for the animal that that article is talking about.

Now, as I said earlier, this has been in place for a year and it's been successful

their year over year organic traffic is up over 500%. So a five times you know growth of organic traffic. So we're really really happy with those results.

it's easy to understand that because

only so many people search on the internet for substrate for my, you know, tank, you know, the coconut substrate

A lot more people are searching for how to care for my specific turtle or my specific frog or my specific lizard. And there's hundreds of those, you know, specific frogs, lizards and turtles that they can be searching for.

by expanding out with this 270 articles, you know, they have a lot more reach potential from their SEO efforts.

So this is the tactic that I'm recommending you consider for your brand. If SEO is an important thing for you to be investing in,

like I said, for most brands, I think this tactic will work.

there probably are some exceptions.

But you as a brand owner will be able to tell if this is right for your brand.

So here's a quick summary of this process.

What you want to do is first determine what the appropriate keyword strategy is going to be for your brand. What types of keywords are you going to be pursuing and how will those keywords be used? Or phrase? Remember the example we gave before of washing the car or detailing the car that that type of difference

you want to call for that keyword strategy,

and then you want to go out and create that base set of content

across a broad

set of keyword phrases.

You want to make a lot of blog articles so that you're doing a good testing of the waters to see some of them will work, and some of them won't. You want to test broadly enough to do that?

And then once you start doing that, you're gonna want to see how that content gets indexed, which shouldn't be a problem in a Shopify store and then ranked inside of Google so that you're going to want to be measuring.

You want to have a good scorecard in place for that,

and that can take a few months, like 3 to 6 months, to really start seeing how it's going to be ranking and driving traffic.

And then for the pages that are ranking

and driving traffic, you want to start boosting that content

to make them rank higher

drive even more traffic.

And then on the articles that are driving the most traffic, you want to make sure you're doing some conversion rate optimization to ensure that you're capturing either purchasers or email addresses, or converting them in some other way that works for your brand.

Now, this tactic is not intellectually hard, but it is very labor intensive, so it's hard from a amount of time it takes to do it. It's not hard from being able to figure out how to do it.

one of the things that will require you to think a little bit

is when you're building out your article pages, how you can structure those pages in such a way that it's going to make it easy for you to scale across all of your articles and create content in ways that you can replicate them easily across all the articles.

So for the two examples I showed you for both those brands, we ended up creating some custom code for them that enables them to do things at scale.

for example, in rev two Chip, I talked about how they are having an individual e-book download for each of their

animal types.

Well, they don't have all those ebooks media. So we actually have a little custom code

that looks to see if that e-book exists. And if it does, it promotes it.

And if it doesn't exist, then it does a default promotion instead.

And lastly, and we talked about this a couple times already. But the last thing I want to put in the summary of the process is you always want to be measuring. You want to look at your data.

You want to create a scorecard

of consistent data that you look at

consistent time intervals. And that could be once a week or once a month.

But you want to measure the same data every time so that you can have an unbiased view into what's working and what's not working, and keep investing in the things that are working. And don't invest as much energy in the keyword phrases that aren't working.

So for this all makes sense. And this is a tactic that you can think about applying to your brand.

Thanks for listening.