Today on the Winning with Shopify podcast of our most
popular 5 episodes, three of the five were about SEO.
That is showing initiative. We like that a lot.
And AI crawlers we're going to talk about a little bit as well.
You've got to have great unique and informative content and link
building brand awareness. Sometimes if I have a whiteboard
or a piece of paper in front of me, I start drawing boxes going.
That's the web page. And I was drilling a hole and
the wall was a lot stronger than the drill bit I was using and
the drill bit snapped. So my first search online was I
need a masonry drill bit near me.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Winning with Shopify
podcast. If you're not tuned in before,
my name's Nick. I've been hosting the show for a
while and you would have heard this a million times if you have
tuned in before. Massive welcome to all of our
new listeners. I can see all of you guys in the
statistics. If you're listening on Spotify,
drop us a little comment below. Give us a little review.
We're pushing Spotify at the moment because video is now
available on Spotify as well. So you can either watch or
listen to this. If you're listening on Apple,
you are still our biggest audience.
Hey guys, love you all and thank you so much for tuning in again.
If you could leave us a little review, that would be absolutely
really amazing if you just stumbled across this and you're
looking at the topic going, ah, it's an SEO master class.
Well, I've got a very special guest helping me out today.
And if you're watching this video, the reason I've got a
very cheeky smile on my face is I am the guest.
I'm not going to interview myself as much as we did joke
about that. It's some of my colleagues a
minute ago saying, actually, I could just ask myself questions.
But if you're not tuned to the show before or you have tuned in
for a while and I've never spoken about my background and
what I actually do as much as hosting this and absolute
miracle of the editors trying to make me look good.
Still struggling, but we're getting there.
My background is in SEO and PPC, been doing it since 2007.
I would have started, it was a very long time ago and I started
out in PPC and then quite quickly got the ropes of SEO
around 2009 as well. So I've seen quite a lot happen
in the SEO space, My main agency inside this wall, these are real
plants. I don't know what I've seen a
lot recently. There's real plants behind me,
but the other side is wall. I've got my agency, we do PPC
and SEO and we're called Spec and the guys are absolutely
amazing. So we're going to talk about SEO
today. And the reason we're going to
talk about it is our of our most popular 5 episodes, three of the
five were about SEO. It's clearly a hot topic for you
guys, so I wanted to clear up a few things you guys have asked
me questions about. I also want to talk about if
you've never done any SEO, how you can get started and what is
the sort of blueprint to get cracking with this thing.
I've got my iPad in my hands and I'm going to dive straight in.
So a few bits of context I want to give to this and clear up a
couple of it's in the SEO world before we dive into some of the
specifics. And I've tried to keep some of
these two quite simple things. Whether you've got an enormous
Shopify Plus store might be quite complicated to do some of
these things, but they're still simple to understand,
complicated deploy. If you've got a really small
store, you run it yourself, you should be able to work many of
these things out. And if you can't Google it, we
actually check when it's a spoiler.
If ever you come to an interview at our agency, if you say, if I
didn't know what to do, first of all, I'd Google it.
That is showing initiative. And we like that a lot.
So feel free to Google any of these points as well if you want
to see what other information is available out there.
There's three pillars, and then there's 3 levels.
So I'm just going to explain those quickly because that will
hopefully help you guys understand some of these points
a bit better. The three pillars of SEO and I'm
going to go through, we got 6 on the first one, then two, then
four. The first bit is technical.
So I've got 6 points and five sub points under point #1 about
technical SEO. So some stuff you can do in
Shopify, specifically on your SEO there.
We're going to talk about two points and we're going to talk
quite simply about content today because content tends to be the
one people spend most of the time on.
So we're going to talk about the least and then we're going to
talk 4 points as well about offsites.
So it's technical content and offsite are the three areas you
need to improve an SEO. And my advice is do them in that
order as well. Not that you wouldn't continue
doing technical you, you would necessarily move on to content,
but the more technical stuff you fix, it's sort of fundamental,
the more Google's going to pick up the content that you are
showing. And then also you want to sort
your content and your page URLs and things out before you do
offsite and start building more links into site or managing,
which we're going to talk about. It's not just about building
links, about managing those links as well.
So we're going to talk about those in that order because
again, get your technical sorted.
Once you get your technical sorted and you've got really
good theme, it's running quickly.
Now you can start applying some content onto that theme.
Otherwise, Google and other search crawlers and AI crawlers
we're going to talk about a little bit as well.
They're not going to be able to crawl any of that content.
And what you don't want to do is build lots of links into the
site and then you do your technical and content and change
loads of URLs. If you go back and change all
those links or worst case scenario, you can't change the
link and it's now going to somewhere, I'm going to talk
about what to do with those things as well.
So those are the three pillars of SEO.
We call those. And then there's 3 levels of
SEO, I would say. So SEO revolves around keywords.
You've probably heard that if you haven't, then this is this
simple beginner's guide to SEO is probably going to be too
advanced for you. Go and Google what keywords are.
If you don't mention your keyword on the page, it's the
first level. If you don't mention the keyword
on the page, you are almost definitely not going to rank for
it. So we've got to mention it on
the page. That bit's easy.
The second bit, which is a lot harder is, and it's what I've
written for this, you've got to have great unique and
informative content as text, imagery, and video about that
keyword. So if you don't have the keyword
mention on the page, you won't rank.
And if you don't have some great unique and informative content
about that keywords, and again, we're talking about e-commerce.
So this is the moment where I always grab something at random.
I'm going to use this pen a lot. This is a little spec pen.
And if you'd like a pen, let me know.
We'll send out some pens for free.
It's got spec PC and SEO consultancy written on the side
of the pen. It's actually in the old
branding now. So we're going to need some new
pens shortly. I just want to interrupt today's
episode to tell you about some big news for Shopify merchants.
Yacht PO, which you might be using is sunsetting.
It's e-mail and SMS products. You may have got an e-mail from
them. And if you haven't, this might
be the first time you're hearing about this.
So if you have been using them, then you might be wondering
what's next? Well, our sponsor Saguno has you
covered. Saguno is the most deeply
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Right now with code WWS 20, you get 20% of your first three
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Shopify. But this pen, if I don't say we
are selling black pens on the page, black pens is my key one.
If we don't say we're selling black pens on the page, we're
definitely going to rank well for black pens.
And then to have great unique, informative content, let's talk
about why this pen is the best specific to our customer base.
So if this pen was bought by agencies who want to put their
logo on it, we should actually talk about how to make your
agency stand out and have more longevity because somebody is
using a pen with your agency's name on their desk rather than
what a lot of people do on SEO, which is not bad and you kind of
need it. But people go down the route of
going, it's silver, it's black, it's got a little thing that
clicks. It's got a little squishy ball
on the end. You can actually click on touch
pads and phones with that little squishy bit, which is quite
nice. If you want to look like you're
actually paying attention on a call and you want to click
something on your phone, use the squishy bits and you're still
holding a pen anyway. People are going to be watching
that on the podcast. Now that's very bad.
So you're going to mention the keyword, have great content
about the keyword. And then the third bit, which is
where off site really comes into play.
So the first two points are both technical and content across
both of them, it's not technical.
Then content, it's both of them revolve around technical, both
revolve around content. That third one, about this third
one, sorry, you want to have the best authority on that keyword,
be the most talked about that keyword, etcetera, etcetera.
And that's where link building brand awareness.
If you sell trainers, for example, being mentioned in the
news saying like this is the fastest growing trainer brand or
this is the biggest craze that everybody's buying now, people
are buying these trainers. That's all really, really good
press and PR about your business.
You're going to build some really good authority in the SEO
space and on search engines for ranking around the word trainers
and maybe longer keywords. Maybe they're trainers made from
plastic bottles. Maybe they're trainers that
drain themselves when you come out the sea.
Maybe they're trainers that are designed for people with
sciatica as a as a medical condition.
So you want to talk about those things and then suddenly the PR
activity starts to write itself. If it's trainers for a specific
medical condition, you want to appear in lots of medical press
or something in the main press. But linking back to your site
and talking specifically about your keywords, your brand and
how amazing you are, reviews are really good for that.
You've got really good Trustpilot review set up.
So you've got thousands of people on Trustpilot reviewing
you and Trustpilot's own site that's linking back to your site
with all this review content. And then you put the reviews on
your own site, you're taking off site because you get the links
back. You took taking content,
etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So let's go into technical then.
And these are 6 things. These are really, really common
things we see. And as I say, they might not
necessarily have simple, quick solutions, but they're important
nonetheless. The first one is page speed.
And if you've listened to lots of podcasts about SEO, you've
probably heard page speed mentioned quite a bit.
Shopify is generally slow, and it's not Shopify itself that's
slow. It's the way people build their
stores. There's five things we got here
that you need to do. And again, some of these you
would have heard a lot. Some of them are probably a
little bit less heard of. But when we run our reports, we
can see what things are taking a long time to load on each of the
pages on your site. The first thing we tend to do is
we remove unused apps. So if you have a Shopify app
running, it does something in front of your site and you're
not actually using it or it's actually doing anything, but the
code is still loading. That code is taking time to load
when a customer's trying to visit that page.
And the bit of code it's loading for that app or the resources
it's loading for that app is actually doing nothing.
So it's pointless to get rid of it.
And that will speed up the site. We, I should have said as well,
we do actually see a conversion rate uplift.
We see more revenue, we see people buying more when sites
load quickly because people trust the site that loads
faster. If it loads slowly, people are
going to get really impatient. So if you imagine if your pages
take 30 seconds per page to load and the average sale needs to
load, I don't know, 1020 pages, you're looking at 3 to 6 minutes
to make a purchase. And if you've got quite a simple
product to understand and people go, oh, that looks really nice,
I'll just buy one of those. Then actually you want to get
them through to the cart really quickly.
So that page load is going to be killing conversion.
So you remove unused apps. This is a bit of a trade secret.
This next one, I'd say trade secret, not spoken about much
online, but it's really effective.
Convert as many apps as you can into code.
So one of the apps that we see in a lot of sites, for example,
shows you how much more you need to spend to get free delivery.
So on the cart, it'll have like that little loading bar and it
will say spend $22.00 more, $22.00 to get free delivery on
your order. And actually, you could write
that with a bit of code, but a lot of people will do the lazy
thing and just grab an app. And fair enough, if you don't
know how to code or you haven't got the budget to pay someone to
do some coding, an app makes sense.
But actually coding it yourself will be a lot faster because
then it's just loading from the page code rather than when the
page loads. To load that loading bar or to
populate that loading bar by the browser, the browser is going to
have to go and grab that information from the other
server where the app is based. So actually you want to hard
code as many things as possible. And that delivery loading bar is
a good example. Image sizes.
Again, everyone talks about image sizes and there's a bit of
a myth around this that I want to clean up.
There's a new image format. There's a few, but the most
popular one people are using is called Web P, And a lot of blogs
and guides will tell you that Shopify automatically makes a
Web P of every image that you upload.
And it's not quite true. It does do it for product
images, but you can override that and you can change it.
Your theme can change it, you can change it in your settings
and anything. Any images you've got in your
theme won't automatically be Web P So actually if you've got
something on every product page that says like big background
picture of meet the team and then some information about the
team. If that meet the team image is
really, really big and is in a JPG format or in a PNG format,
it's going to load in that format on the front end.
Shopify is not going to automatically change that to
Webp and also if the image is quite big web P or not, it's
still going to be a big image. So you want to make sure you
reduce image sizes as much as possible.
Generally you want to aim between sort of 50 kilobytes to
120 kilobytes per image absolute Max.
I ideally you want to stay as far away from a Meg as possible,
which is 1000 kilobytes. Stay away from that.
The other thing to do with images as well is what's called
lazy load. So you can load the page in the
browser. So below the page, when you load
it up on Google Chrome, whatever to see it, but make sure that it
only loads the things you can see.
And as you Scroll down the page, then it loads the images later.
Or you can do it after page load, whether people scroll or
not, which means the page can load quickly.
Customer can start engaging with the page, reading the content,
viewing the images, etcetera. But stuff further down the page
is still loading, but it's not loading as part of the page
load. The page loads and then it
populates bits and pieces later. So that means you've basically
got a bit of a sequence where someone can engage with the
first of the page without the rest of it having any issues.
The only caveat to this, and again this is getting a bit more
technical, there's a thing called CLS Cumulative Layout
Shift, which is part of Google's page speed scoring, and you
don't want the page to change it's layout too much.
But that means if you're loading an image somewhere, you can tell
the page the page as it loads the the main page.
Make sure you've got a height of 400 pixels and a width of 200
pixels for that image, even if the image itself hasn't
populated yet. So the layout of the page won't
shift and change, but the image can still load later.
And this is where some people say like, OK, I can pay a
developer $2000 to build me a theme, or I can pay this agency
$200,000 to build me a theme. The more you're paying, the more
you want things like that to be sorted, which is going to give
you a bit of an edge, a bit of an advantage in the SEO world.
The fourth thing you need to do, which feeds off that nicely.
Actually, I forgot this was the next point, but theme code
optimization. Some themes are just really
badly built. Files are not where they should
be. Or there's too many files that
when the browser loads the page, it has to pull in hundreds,
maybe even thousands of different files.
When actually you can have one theme file and then a head, one
head of file, 1 foot of file, one style sheet and things like
that. Whereas a lot of sites, because
of the plug insurance you use and the way Shopify's engine can
operate, people have things pulling in from all over the
place, which kills your page speed.
Final point on page speeds, videos have got to be hosted on
a CDN. Shopify have a CDN.
You don't want say, say the video was a gig.
You can still have a gig video that people want to watch.
It's quite big, but you can have it loading while they're
watching it, which is how the YouTube player works, which is
why when you load a YouTube video, you don't have to wait
for like a whole gig or two gig video to download before you can
watch it. YouTube just starts streaming
that video straight to you whilst it's loading it.
So you want to make sure your videos work like that and you
can actually use YouTube and things like that.
YouTube is also a search engine, so optimize all your videos on
YouTube, embed them on your website.
Two birds, one stone. Excellent.
The second thing on technical then and again we're going to
get technical clues in the title.
This one is about what's called vendor pages.
So there's a bit of code that any vendor you put in, which is
basically the brand. So if you're selling lots of
brands or you're selling your brand, you will end up with lots
of what are called query pages, which is where it will say
something like vendor question mark Q equals in the code and
then it will have some sort of search query in there.
You do not want Google crawling these search queries or even
site search on your site. And the reason you don't is
because it's an open box. You could put any infinite
arrangement of characters in that box.
And every time you put a different arrangement of
characters, there's now a new page, which is the search
results page. So you can use the robots dot
TXT it's called. And if you use our sponsor Yost,
who I nearly invited on for this episode, but I thought I'm going
to talk more as a consultancy rather than the Yost tech today.
But if you use a tool like Yost on Shopify, who are one of our
sponsors, you get 15% off for life with the code WWS.
I'm actually going to use that, but if you use Yost you can edit
that robots dot TXT and make changes to it and block it from
certain areas of the site. So when Google comes to do a
crawl or a chat bot comes to a crawl or Bing comes to do a
crawl or any of the search crawlers, when they crawl,
they're just focused on your homepage, your products, your
collections, and any information pages as well.
You want to focus on that stuff. You do not want, you do not want
Google spending like 8090% of his time looking at search query
pages because it's it's not going to rank those.
You want to send people into your product pages, your
collection pages mostly that's where they're going to purchase.
So these vendor query pages, you definitely want to get rid of
them #3 Shopify automatically has what's called an XML site
map giant spreadsheet. And on that spreadsheet it will
have a list of all of your pages and some information about how
frequently they're updated and that kind of thing.
And they'll be in a bit of an order, and they have a priority
score, homepage being one, etcetera, etcetera.
So, but what you can do is you can create a page, a Shopify
page, and then use a bit of code to actually link to all of your
collections, all of your pages and all of your products.
Anyway, by having this site map, we call it HTML site map, even
there's not certainly HTML, but it's not the XML site map that's
only available to search instances in Google.
And customers are never going to see.
This is a page that you can link to in your footer.
People can actually see it. And what it means is you're
never going to end up with what's called an orphaned page,
which is a point. I was going to put it in as a
separate point, but thought I'd keep it as part of this.
But orphan pages got page on your on your website and no
links to that page. By having this site map, you
have at least one link to every single page on the entire site,
whether it's in the NAV link to in other places or not.
And if you have done really good linking, so you've got a link to
every page already, this adds a second link to each page, which
from Google's point of view, good indexing, good page, a good
structure, sorry, of pages throughout your site because
there's a lot of good links running around to those point #4
there, sorry, point #4 was the no orphaned pages, which if you
make a, the HTML assignment manually, you might still end up
with orphaned pages. So page where you're sitting
there going, I get no SEO traffic to this page.
Why not? Because you don't link to it.
Nobody can actually get to it through your site.
So Google assumes not important. So point #4 by doing the HTML
assignment and just generally look at all your pages and make
sure there are links in the NAV or from collection level 1 down,
you know, menswear down to level 2, which is then like the
T-shirts, the shorts, the jumpers, the coats, which is all
your level twos. Make sure there's a good
structure of when you land on the level 1 collection, there
are links to the level 2 collection, links to Level 3
collection, which kind of flows into content a bit, but they're
links, they're still technical #5 then canonicals, canonical
tags. We, when these first came out
with every client asking us what is a canonical tag.
And so we had to like, revise. What's the best way to explain a
canonical? It's a bit easier these days.
We've been working with them for a long time.
A canonical is designed to give search engines clarity and
search callers clarity when you have lots of duplicated pages.
But they are the same page as far as search engines concerned.
They're the same for a reason. And you think to yourself, no,
I'd only ever have one product page for each product, one
collection page for each, one collection for each collection.
But actually, if you go to page 2 on a collection, you've got
the same title tag, same page, one same sort of product showing
up, maybe a slightly different variation, but for all intents
and purposes it's the same page as Page 1.
So you might have 5 pages of products on a single collection.
So what we do is we use this thing called a canonical tag,
which on page one points to itself and says, hey, if you
want to land anyone on this collection, land them here on
page one. This is the most important
place. So page one, it links to itself
pages 234 and five or however many pages there are, they
should all link back to Page 1. So you're saying to search
engines, hey, this is the second page, third page, 4 page.
These are all the same page. But when it comes to ranking,
only ever rank page one, which is why you're saying to them,
there's a reason I have duplicated pages.
It's the same on anything that has pagination.
We call it anything goes to page 2, page three, page 4.
So it might be your blog posts and collections, any kind of
filters of things. There might be multiple pages on
those as well. So yeah, make sure you've make
sure you've got your canonical sorted.
A lot of themes don't have them, and a lot of custom themes that
agencies build that we see don't have them.
And if Google thinks there's loads of duplicate content on
your website, it's not going to spend its time crawling those
all important pages. So you're going to end up with
SEO, what we call SEO drag. So actually your SEO is lower
than it should be because the search engines are a little bit
confused, which is the worst place to be.
Great content, great products, happy customers, but the site
itself, hard for it to index. That's a problem that we need to
make sure we solve. And number six, the final part
and technical and again, easy for this one to do, especially
as header tags on each page, there is a, probably your main
title on a collection. So if it's on the men's
trainers, for example, men's trainers at the top or whatever
your keywords you've put in there is going to be your H1
tag. It's the bit you can actually
see. It's visible on the page and
that is that needs to be AH1 and you want to make sure you only
have one H1 and the one H1 is the main keyword for that page.
We used to then break the page down by H twos.
So it might then say all of our men's trainer products, or we
have 2000 men's trainers or 2000 different men's trainers, Make
that H2. Google's changed a bit and there
isn't really a hard and fast rule as to whether you should
only have one H2 or you should have multiple H twos.
We've in testing found it more effective in about 80 to 90% of
scenarios that one H2 is the best way to go.
And then use H3's for either product names or something else
throughout the page. What you're trying to do is
break the page down into sections so Google can go the
H1. That's the main keyword for the
whole page. The H2 is a variation of that
keyword, which then introduces the main chunk of content on
this page that I'm going to crawl.
And customers are going to read or potential customers going to
read on this page. And then you use the H3 to break
down into that. So if it's a blog post, your H1
would be the name of the blog post, which is like, what's the
best deodorant for women? For example, actual blog post we
did write recently. So what's the best deodorant for
women is the H1 tag on the blog post because that's the most
important one. The H2 then was science backed
women's deodorant study or something similar to that.
Again, mentioning women's deodorant and mentioning the
best, but also a bit longer and talking a bit more explanative.
And then we use H3's to break down to like what, why were we
doing this? Is the first H3 the second or
why were we investigating women's deodorant?
Again, mentioning women's deodorant is the keyword.
Why are we investigating this? And there's a little bit of text
and some images in a video about that.
Then there's the next section, which then says, So what were
the results of this or how big was this test and survey?
And then the next one and with more content, the next one down.
So we're using those H3's to breakdown the page.
I sometimes if I have a whiteboard or a piece of paper
in front of me, I start drawing boxes going.
That's the web page H1 at the top, which covers the whole page
H2, which introduces the main bulk of content, H3's to
breakdown the content into 3456 paragraphs or sections or
something like that. I just want to give a quick
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So make sure you've got your header tags in order contents.
Most of us are probably strongest on content.
I would say it's easy enough to get some keywords and go the
keyword for this product or the keyword for this collection is
this. So I'm going to write about that
and mention it lots on the page. So I'm going to make a couple of
points here about this rather than teaching you guys today how
to do it Cos I could, I mean, on any three of these points or all
three, I could do days and days on this.
I've got sort of 1617 years of SEO experience behind me now.
So plenty to talk about and I talk enough as it is.
So the first point I want to make is you only one really want
to have one keyword per page and then the variations of that
keyword also on that page. I mentioned on one of my Tuesday
tea break talks recently that actually a little plug come and
join in on Tuesday, have a nice cup of tea.
Let me have a bit of a laugh. There's a quivia.
I came up with a new word, Quivia as well.
But I mentioned this on Tuesday, on one of my Tuesday's recently
where Google's done a shift where we used to go.
We've got 50 variations of this keyword.
So we're gonna have the main page with the biggest either
kind of short tail or the two or three word version of the
keyword. And then all the longer versions
will kind of fall into that level 2, Level 3.
Under this page are sub pages. Google's changed.
Google wants you now to include most of those variations on one
page because Google is now looking more towards themes to
decide what keyword to show you for rather than what you used to
do, which was the specific keywords.
So if you do car scratch repair paint like one of our clients
does, if you offer car scratch repair paint, we've got every
brand of car and we've got every model under each of those brands
and we've got every colour. So we're talking 250,000 pages
across the site. But Google switch means actually
out the Audi page or the Ford page or the BMW page.
Actually those pages we're going to incorporate as much as we
can. Even if the user journey is
still going to sort of choose your model, choose your colour
and then audio paint. Google's going to want to send
more people just straight into the Audi page or the Ford page.
And then you get the land on Audi and say, right, I've got an
Audi A1, let's go into Audi A1 and then choose your colour from
there. But Audi or Audi A1 might be the
page that it actually goes for, even if you have searched for
the colour or something more specific.
The reason Google's doing this is Google doesn't want to be
crawling these massive 250,000 page sub page sites anymore.
So we might even get rid of those last stage pages
eventually and just incorporate all of that content to one place
and just have a drop down for choose your make.
Choose. We know your make because you're
on the Ford page. Choose the model, got Ford
Fiesta, choose the colour. It's one of Ford's whites, but I
know exactly which white it is. Choose that and then add it to
cart. So the user journey is smoother
because you're doing it all on one page instead of multiple
pages. So that's been a big shift.
So you only want to have one main keyword per page, but all
sub keywords. You want to start mentioning a
few variations that page and have faith that Google should
start to understand those things.
Over the summer of 2025, we've seen a massive shift in a lot of
people's rankings based on that alone.
So I thought that's a good one to mention.
Again, a lot of you guys will be writing good content anyway in
terms of text content, images, adult tags, title tags,
etcetera, etcetera. And videos.
You can optimize all the videos, especially using YouTube or
something. Optimize the video on YouTube
and then embed it with some cool content around that it can load
quickly. Put some.
You can put some code in as well to tell Google what the video is
about. You can even have a transcript
available if someone clicks a button, a transcript then pops
out but don't have it visible before.
Again taking all the accessibility for anyone who
wants to watch that video. Second part on content as well.
This one's really important, and this is where I think a lot of
brands get it wrong from a strategy and data point of view.
A lot of people just go, let's grab that keyword and start
optimising. How do you know if you're going
to rank for that keyword? How do you know how difficult it
is? How do you know if you're going
to get sales out of it? And we've certainly seen plenty
of brands that are #1 for something amazing, like we had a
client recently who was #1 for the word owls, as in their, the
animal number one for the word owls.
When we looked at it, it was actually an image of an owl, not
a number one listing. And if you were searching for
owls, you were not going to buy their products.
So as much as it was exciting to say it's a 3 letter word and
we're top of Google for this and we appear before the 1st SEO
listing in the image section. This is great.
And we were getting quite a lot of people clicking on it coming
into the website, reading the blog post 0 sales.
It was the wrong keyword. So my point here really is my
second, second and final point of content is matching intent.
So if someone is looking for a specific size of product, a
specific colour, a specific material, a specific delivery
time, next day delivery or click and collect or a lot of people
use the phrase near me so it's like I want to buy.
I was doing some DIY the other day and I was drilling a hole
and the wall was a lot stronger than the drill bit I was using
and the drill bit snapped. So my first search online was I
need a masonry drill bit near me.
And I managed to click and collect and but by the time I
got to the store as well, I don't even even had a text
message. A 5 minute drive had a text
message saying your products at at the till.
I'd already paid for it ready to go, picked it up, got back
drilled the hole, wife was happy.
But the point being is that intent, what is the customer's
intent based on keywords? And what you can do is you can
actually just Google the keyword and go right on Google.
And I look for this, am I seeing categories?
Am I seeing products? Am I seeing services?
Am I seeing locations and then decide quite quickly is that the
relevant keyword for me or not? Just because they are men's
jumpers doesn't mean men's jumpers is the right keyword for
me. Someone might be saying, what
are some of the latest men's jumper trends?
So you might create a collection saying on trend, you know, on
trend men's jumpers or in season or currently in fashion men's or
whatever the keyword is. It's useless keyword.
But you get the you get the idea of actually the thing that
someone's looking for is something is in trend right now,
they might not actually be in the market to buy that product.
So you don't do all that hard work, get to the top of Google,
get into the top three, Let's target on Google, get into top
three and it doesn't work. So just be really, really
careful about that, please, guys, because yeah, see so many
brands waste so much time and energy targeting the wrong
thing. You imagine it's like a shit and
the destination is pinpointed, you know, thousands of miles
away. Imagine you could get just a few
degrees off course you're not going to reach port.
And that port is top three on Google in this in this metaphor.
They have a good metaphor. Got loads of them.
E-mail me if you need some metaphors and stuff coming up my
ears. Anyway, offsite.
I want to talk a lot about offsite because so many people
ignore it. Some SEO agencies just do
offsite. Some PR agencies and social
agencies claim to do offsite but don't do the rest of SEO, which
kind of doesn't make sense to me.
And the reason doesn't make sense is because all the offsite
activity needs to point back to content on the site.
So if you want to be #1 for a keyword, it's got the right
intent and you're making sales from that keyword On PPC, it's a
good example. OK, we're making sales on PPC.
We want to be an SEO as well. And if you want to know whether
you should lower PPC budget as SEO goes up, great idea.
No one ever does. So PPC is profitable.
And you're number one on PPC and you're number one on SEO now,
and they're both making profit. Why would you turn PPC off?
But PPC is a good indicator of this.
So with the offsite, you want to make sure you're doing the
onsite activity. And the onsite activity should
determine what the keyword is that you're then going to find
websites, publications, partner companies, sister companies,
suppliers, customers, whoever it is that can start talking about
you and linking back with good sentiment.
I'm going to talk about as we go through, there are 4 stages to
offsite and a lot of people jump to stage 4 and it's really
ineffective. And, and stage 4 is the most
difficult and expensive. And that's where brands go
wrong. So if you're a small brand,
you've got an opportunity not to get it wrong in the 1st place.
If you're a bigger brand, it might be time to put the brakes
on this and have a real think about how do we do this and how
do it effectively and how do we get the best result.
So #1 which a lot of brands don't do.
And Google says these files have very little weight anymore.
But I have so many case studies that say otherwise.
And the new spec site, which I don't know if it'll be out when
this episode comes out or not, but the spec site, we've got a
couple of case studies on there talking about this.
And it is Google's disavow report that's DISAVOW, Disavow.
A disavow report is a small TXT text file, plain black and white
text file. And it has a list of websites.
And that list of websites is you saying to Google, we have links
from these sites, but we do not want to be associated with them
by removing that. We've seen people's what's
called domain authority jump and jump by scored out of 100.
I think our record was over 20, which is again, it's all kind
of, if you've never heard of this stuff before, it's all kind
of in context. That's really good.
So the difference between if you're in a small sort of niche
industry, if you've got domain authority of 15 or 20 out of
100, it's probably quite good. And this is one of those
situations where your competitors, so the people that
are in the top three on Google for the keywords you want to
target, you only need to run faster than them across all
points on average. So you might do really well on
domain authority and then not so well on content, but you still
do better than them overall. But disavow means that you look
at all the links coming into your website using tools like a
hrefs. You can also download a list of
them from Google Search console. SEM rush has this SE ranking has
a form of this as well. There's loads of ways to see
those links. We've even been using AI bots to
try and track down links for some of our clients and also
give us recommendations on how we can improve the links, which
comes in a minute. But the disavowing just by
getting rid of all the like spammy SEO directory 123 if
Google thinks and this is the this is the crux here.
If Google thinks you're doing link building for the sake of
SEO and for the sake of link building, they will mark you
down and mark you down means lower your rankings, which means
less traffic, less revenue. So you do not want them to find
random website directories, Web world's top billion websites and
we're listed somewhere on there that is a bad link.
If you sell, I don't know, lighting like I've got in the
studio, we sell these lights. And actually you want to be
spoke. You do not want to be spoken
about these lights on an SEO directory.
It's nothing to do with these things.
You don't want to be spoken about on dodgy websites.
Sites in other languages sometimes can be a bit of a, a
bit of a problem. And there are ways to quantify
these, these sites. So Long story short, we get a
list of all the ones that are bad.
And just because SEM Rush or AHF says they are bad or I think SEM
Rush calls it toxic, do not just copy that list and disavow it.
It'll be wrong. We, we had quite a big financial
institution we're working with, with lots of sites.
And SEM Rush said that each of their sites were toxic to one
another. And we're like, they're not,
it's a group of companies. So don't just take that.
You need to digest it and go, no, no, some of these are really
good for us. But yeah, these ones we
definitely get rid of. And also, if you've got loads
and loads of bad links that you need to disavow, and they're
quite a big percentage of your total backlinks, then actually
I'd suggest doing it in little stages so you can keep adding
more and then uploading the file again with more in it and then
more in it and then more in it. Watch what happens to your
domain authority. Watch what happens to your
rankings, what happens to your traffic.
Maybe do it every two weeks if you're doing it staggered.
So disavowing is the first and most important part of this.
Second thing. This one is big.
We've seen rankings fly by looking at what links a brand
has from other sites into their site.
Good links that currently land on a 404, if they land on a 404,
you're going to get next zero recognition for them.
And what tends to happen is sometimes one of your products
gets listed somewhere. Those people link to it, but
they're linking to that product, product goes out of stock or you
discontinue it. So the product page now is a
404, a dead page. It just doesn't exist and you've
still got all these links going into that.
If you redirect them to the main collection, 1 redirect is fine.
As far as Google's concerned, I talk a lot about Google here,
but this does apply to AI crawlers, to Bing crawler,
etcetera, etcetera. So if we add 1 redirect, which
Google says it's fine to add 1 redirect, that authority, that
benefit of that link endorsing something can still happen
across one redirect. What you don't want is it to hit
a redirect. It hits a redirect, it hits a
redirect. It's called a redirect chain or
a Daisy chain of redirects. You just want it to have one
redirect. So this is about you keeping
your redirects up to date within the site.
Again, by changing this, we had someone go from 6th on Google
for 140,000 a month search volume keywords, 140,000 people
a month searching this keyword and we were 6th on Google and we
landed up at second overnight and we stayed there, which is
amazing. So imagine the traffic that
brand started to get complete game changer.
So the second thing is optimise those dead links or links,
sorry, that land on dead pages #3 optimise the content around
existing links that are good. So if you've got content you
want, you always want your links to try and go to collections and
products, ideally not products because your products tend to
disappear, but collections are fantastic.
So you want lots of links going into your collections.
So if you're sitting there saying we sell lots of great
water bottles, we want loads of links into the different water
bottle collections that we have. Homepage isn't as effective as
going into those water bottle collections because your
homepage has to be a bit of a broad Church of everything on
your website. What you can do then is you've
got good links, reach out to the sites that have those links or
if it's on your social profiles, your Trustpilot profile, you can
edit all those BIOS and actually change what's written about them
and insert a few more keywords and again update that link.
So if it's going to the homepage, which about 90% of
links to all sites generally go to the homepage before we get
started, start changing them, putting them to other pages
because the homepage itself is going to have a nice big
keyword, but you've got, I don't know, 200,000 links.
They're going to be a whole range of different topics around
those links. You want those 200,000 links
going to the the most relevant pages for the topic they're
reading about. And then reach out to those guys
and change this point #3 change the content around the link on
the other website. So if it says like, for example,
we, we work with one company that sells lots of jumpers.
So all their links, we want them to say like these organic cotton
jumpers, these are vegan jumpers.
These jumpers are made from recycled materials.
That's all really, really good. And then linking into our
jumpers collect and because they sell men's and women's, we've
got a women's jumpers collection and men's jumpers collection,
but that link was men's and women's.
We've only get one link. We actually sent it to a unisex
landing page or a welcome to our jumper jumper shop.
And then you can choose men's or women's from there or go into
other sub collections. So you see that's an SEO
strategy around the links available to get the best
possible user journey, to get the best possible ranking on
those pages, which also means we actually get traffic and revenue
from good links as well. So many people build tons of
links and they get nothing back for it.
There's no traffic comes in. It's just an SEO exercise.
And like I said, if you just build links for Google, terrible
way to do it. As soon as Google realizes they
can have an absolute field day, as are all the other search
engines. And finally, point #4 and I said
do not jump to point #4 sort out all your links on points one to
three first #4 create some new links.
It is really, really difficult to generate links.
You're trying to convince another website to link to your
website. So if you've got multiple
companies, that's a great place to start.
If you've got multiple brands, you can link them all together.
That's a good place to start. Talk to all your suppliers and
say, could you list us as one of your clients, please?
That's another good place to go. Lots of our clients here at Spec
ask us to link to them and feature them.
And we offer as well because again, it's another link coming
through. And because of all the
podcasting stuff we do, the Spec website and the Winning shop
websites, we've got some good domain authority on them now
we're getting some good links through.
We've also got page speed on the spec website in the 90s on
mobile, which is unheard of going back to my first point.
And there's no aim. It's just faster than everybody
elses before everybody emails me and ask.
But offsite generating links is really, really difficult.
A couple of quick tactics to do it.
Number one is go and look at competitors site links.
You can run them through the same tools and just go, what
links have these guys got? And then go through them and go,
these are really good quality. They've got high domain
authority, the competition's strong.
They post content regularly. And actually, yeah, we could
reach out to them and say, hey, you've got an article about one
of our competitors, but actually we've got this, this and this.
It's better than them. Do you want to write an article
about us and see what they say? So you can do stuff like that.
The second thing you do with links as well is just anything
you can control, which goes from Google Maps through to things
like Yell. If you're in the UK, again, any
resellers, ask anyone that's reselling your products to link
back to you to say this is one of our stockists or we're one of
their stockists who stock their products, that kind of thing.
User generated content, super good.
So any social channels, review platforms, all that kind of
stuff as well. So technical content off site,
go make it happen guys. If you want any help with SEO
course, reach out to us. We're always happy to help.
We offer a free audit to people as well and I was going to offer
at the end of this as well. We did ask people to send their
sites in for free audits. We've got through about half of
them. We got it's back in May and I'm
recording this in September. So we were inundated and we are
working our way through them. So sorry guys, it's taking ages.
A lot of them we decided not to publish because we found so much
stuff that they didn't want us to publish them.
But that's what we do. We find things that can be
improved. So I am looking for someone if
you want to come on for a future episode and do a live SEO audit
with me of your website. You don't have to say yes.
We might not do it. We might have a few people
interested and decide not to. But if you are interested in
that, reach out. We'll have a quick chat and see
if that's something we can do. But you'll get some free
consultancy and we would love to post it as one of our episodes
as well. If you haven't already, hit
subscribe. Thank you so much for tuning in
today and join me again on Tuesday for Tuesday tea break
talks. Take care guys, speak soon.
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