Today on the Winning with Shopify podcast.
Our motto? Is SEO for everyone?
Yeah. I mean, you could cut SEO in so
many different ways. That's what differentiates EOS
from other apps. I mean, that's one of the
hardest parts of SEOI think. There are always room for
improvement. You've got to survive.
I mean that's that's the main part of the.
Question. This is not something that's
really got to happen. It might.
Happen like that of other brands that have gone down.
Almost like the wrong Rd. Especially now with the use of
AI, this becomes even a bigger problem.
Hello and welcome to another episode, the winning We Shall 5
podcast to meet your host Nick Truman.
It's a lovely sunny day here in the United Kingdom.
And if you're living in a country that's not the United
Kingdom, you're like, why on earth do you always comment on
the weather? It's all we talk about in the
UK. It's either raining or it's
sunny or it's grim or both all at the same time.
Yesterday we had Four Seasons at once.
We had hail stones, lots of other good fun stuff.
But I hope you are all well. I hope the year has kicked off
nice and strong for you. We are heading towards the end
of Q3. How terrifying.
It's gone so quickly. There's loads of turbulent stuff
going on country to country at the moment, but loads of brands
are thriving in that there are opportunities all over the
place, so make sure you stay plugged into shows like this.
Listening some amazing guests. We have brand stories and a
whole range of other things. If you haven't already, hit
Subscribe. And apart from that, let's dive
into today's session. I'm joined by somebody who's
from a business which is very close to my heart, which is why
they're one of our sponsors and they're called Yost.
I was lucky enough a few years ago to meet Yost himself, who I
understand we'll find out from our guest in a second.
I think he's no longer in the business.
I think he's exited and hopefully enjoying his
retirement. But I got to meet Yost himself,
which was an absolute dream of mine, having used the tool for
nearly 20 years. It's an SEO tool.
They have a Shopify plugin and we're going to talk a little bit
more about that as we dive into today.
But I'm delighted and have to read his job title.
Normally I say founder or Co founder or director or something
or CEO. I'm delighted to introduce Sid,
who is the senior customer success manager and merchant
insights advisor. Sid, welcome to the show.
How are you? I'm, I'm doing good.
Nick, thanks for inviting me to your podcast.
It's it's an absolute pleasure. It's great to have you.
Absolutely great. Say, let's talk about your job
title quickly and then we'll get to know you a little bit better
and then we'll talk about SEO. But tell us about your job
title. What do you do all day?
What's your, how did both sides of that title come about?
I know. It's, it's a pretty long title,
but you know, like the, the point is that I work directly
with merchants, you know, like from small businesses to Shopify
glass brands. I review their technical SEO
setup, I identify issues, I guide them on best practices
within the Shopify framework. So this is mostly what I am
doing, but I'm also helping them with effectively using our app
and improving their SU, metadata, content optimization,
and of course on the other side, the merchants insight advisor.
I'm identifying patterns from those interactions that I have
with the merchants and the stores and translate those
insights into internal recommendations that help us
shape and all the product. Nice.
And so I imagine your the work you're doing on one side of that
is almost like a focus group to then take insights back to make
Yost a better plugin for Shopify or sorry, not plugin, it's
WordPress, but app Shopify. Yeah, yeah, nice, nice.
Well, look, we're going to talk more about this as we go
through. We're going to talk a bit about
AI, which some of you might have heard of.
We're going to talk more about SEO and a whole range of other
things in this. But before that, I love this bit
now and we've seen our engagements gone up.
So you guys are clearly enjoying it.
Who are watching? And Sid, what is your favorite
chocolate bar at the moment? OK, since, you know, I am and I
live in Greece, there's, you know, like local brands.
So maybe not very known, it's called EON, but OK, from
international brands, I would say Tony Chuck alone.
So I I think you you know that. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, we do. We do.
We know it very, very well here in the UK.
Favorite song or playlist at the moment?
What you're listening to? Oh, I'm planning to go to a
Metallica concert later this year.
Nice. Yes.
A metalhead.
Yes. I would say.
Love it. Nice, nice.
I, I don't like it now, but I'm a massive metalhead.
I was listening to metal on the way in this morning.
So yeah, enjoy it. I saw them live once, many, many
years ago. And, and final fun question.
We learned a bit about Yoast and you've got to live in Antar
Arctica for a month. What 3 items are you taking to
Antarctica with you? That's a tough one.
I would definitely. Think how cold it's going to be.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, like I would
take my favorite jacket, I guess.
You know, like I know I will need special equipment
definitely, but I would take, you know, like my favorite
jacket for sure. I would take my cell phone
obviously. OK, phone for.
Help. Yeah.
And definitely my glasses, I cannot rely on contact lenses.
So I think those not super fun stuff, but practical.
Mostly practical. You've got to survive.
I mean, that's, that's the main part of the question.
So we did desert island a few weeks ago, we've done
Antarctica. So stay tuned everyone, for
where we're going next. I've got a couple of ideas and
Yost as a, as a business. How long has Yost been running
for? When, when was it founded?
And obviously it was WordPress plug in initially, was it?
And now it's expanded. But when, when when did it
start? It it started in 2010, so last
year was 15 years. We celebrated 15 years at Yost
and yeah, now it's the 16th year.
And by the time this goes out, I would have just celebrated 15
years at my agency as well since I founded it.
So we're we're the same year. Check that out.
You guys are doing much better than us, but that's great.
That's fine. I, I want an easier life, I
think than than Yost has had. He's obviously done very well.
And final, final quick fire question.
Then we'll get into some of the meat of today.
What is the most popular country?
Who uses Yost across all platforms the most?
The USI mean like in in general, like how about customers from
all over the world, but the most our our main audience is and
customer base is from the United States.
Yeah, yeah. And when we, if anyone else has
not heard of Yost, I'm going to make you feel really, really
embarrassed now. And Yost is the world's most
used website plugin across any platform.
It's not the most used Shopify app.
I believe that's Judge me and I think they've held that that
trophy for quite a while, but certainly the world's most used
and you'll find Yost on more sites across the entire world
than any other plug in, which is most insane when you think about
like what tech is being used the most.
Yost is there number one and again, all kind of leverage of
the WordPress success and now available on other platforms.
Let's get in some of the meat today then, Sid.
I'm quite excited giving them an SEO person.
I'm quite excited to get in some of the some of this stuff.
How does Yoast then obviously you have a Shopify app now.
How does Yoast work with Shopify?
Like how plugged in are you guys like and how do you work with it
as a platform? Yeah.
Well, as you know, unlike WordPress, Shopify is a close
platform. So we need to follow, you know,
like a certain framework that they provide.
But you know our motto is SEO for everyone.
So we try to move as much as possible from that core and
features from WordPress to Shopify and help also Shopify
merchants. What we do is besides taking
care of the technical aspects of SEO, applying best practices
out-of-the-box for the merchants and help them, you know, with
their SEO efforts, we provide also SEO and readability
analysis. That's what differentiates EOS
from other apps. We help people understand how
they can optimize their content so it makes sense for their
audience and the search engines in order to achieve, you know,
like better ranking, better visibility, and overall better
SEO results. Which I guess you could almost,
I mean, you could cut SEO in so many different ways.
One way you could split it though, is like there's there's
some stuff that is very unique to the business, isn't there?
There's the content, the keywords, the products, But also
there are things that actually just when Google crawls and
looks to index pages of a website, there are simple things
like the site map, the XML site map, the robot TXT.
There are basic things that YOS provides or optimizes or makes
easier more available to to the crawlers that actually should
just be like a box tick for every platform.
But then we still get a lot of people who are on custom
platforms. It's an absolute nightmare.
And how how much do you find? You know, if you if you were to
put a percentage or a score in it, how much would you say, yo
sort of does the technical side of SEO for you versus you still
need to do some of it yourself? Well, there are always room for
improvement, you know, like if someone wants especially, you
know, like on an open platform like WordPress, they can do a
lot of things. Yeah, Yeah.
But I would say in both cases, like 9095%, you know, like a
technical SEO is, is taken care of, you know, like it depends,
you know, like on the needs of a, of a website or a store.
But a lot of of of that, you know, like core SEO technicals
are taken care of by using the plug in.
It depends, of course, you know, like on the situation, you know,
like the app has certain features because it's only for
Shopify merchants. The plug in in WordPress,
there's a free version, there's a premium version.
There are additional plugins that help with specific needs
like local, you know, like video SEO and things like that.
But like I said, in most cases I would say 9095% is taken care
of. Which is good because I mean,
it's one of the hardest parts of SEO I think is because you
can't, you can't read technical, you can't feel it, you can't see
it as a customer. You know, you just, it's just
there in the background. Whereas Google knows because
Google's the one actually called it the pages.
One of the things I find I find absolutely fascinating with
Shopify and I, you just reminded me of this when you were saying
like how much of it is just kind of automated just by using the
Yoast app within Shopify. It kind of does a lot of this
stuff for you. One thing I was I'm always
amused by and I have this phrase internally on my team.
Shopify is as it's a closed platform and it's a very good
platform to just launch a site. You've got to check out.
You can upload products, you can start selling stuff pretty much
immediately. Sometimes when people put a bad
design or they break like the standard like home to collection
to product to use a journey or something.
When they do that, I joke with people, especially with the
designers. So like you've broken Shopify,
like default off the shelf theme looks better than this, like you
have broken Shopify, which which is quite a, quite, quite a hard
thing to do, I think overall. But let, I mean, let's let's
move on to our next bit then. So I'm really excited to see
what your thoughts are on this, which why we put this question
in what are the biggest SEO and discoverability challenges that
Shopify fortunes, Mace, sorry, Shopify merchants face today?
So discoverability challenges and some of the biggest SEO
challenges. Well, you know, through the
interactions that I have, you know, with with the merchants I
see often as the most concerning thing is misalignment.
A lot of people are trying to use key phrases or focus key
phrases, at least in our app in a way that doesn't always
satisfy what the potential customer is looking for.
So when that happens, performance suffers.
You know, like you have to align the focus key phrase and the
optimization that you do with customer intent.
As you know, like if even if you do everything perfectly, if you
do not satisfy that intent, most likely you will not convert.
And as you know, merchants is all about, you know,
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I think it's a really good point that sometimes we have clients
that are like, you know, as the agency, they say to us like, I
want to be #1 for this. And we're like, but you're not
the best at that. You're definitely not the best
at that. And you don't have the best
solution to that. And actually, if someone's
looking for that, some companies do that, you do something very,
very similar, but you don't do that thing that they're looking
for quite like everybody else. And I think it's exactly what
you say, isn't it, about that misalignment between almost
between keyword and then the actual content and solution that
the business provides? Yeah, exactly.
And especially now with the use of AI, this becomes even a
bigger problem because yes, AI can help a lot with, you know,
like creating content and providing, you know, like the
information that someone might be looking for.
Because let's face it, you know, like it's, it's not the the most
fun thing to create content for products, especially if you have
like thousands of products. But at the same time, treating
SEO this way, it's something that will not differentiate you
from your competition. And if you just keep on
producing content that doesn't differentiate you from the store
that sells the exact same product, for example, there's no
reason for you to appear like hiring the results or like have
more visibility in LL apps. Yeah, yeah.
And I, I, I, we someone's get it again as an agency where it's
like somebody says, like, can you optimize this and get some
more sales and some like, no, no one likes this product.
We just, you know, there's only so much we can do in the SEO
world, isn't there? Like you can have all perfect
technical, incredible content, the best offsite backlinking
strategy that's ever happened, and then you've got bad reviews
for the product. And it's like Google's just,
they might still rank you because you've done everything
else really well. But yeah, the whole business is
going to fall apart. There's no point selling
products if you're going to get loads of returns.
And so I think you've, you've, you've got to look at this whole
picture together, haven't you? Like, I know it's just the
technical SEO bit or just a bit of content that's all got to be
done in tandem with the, the, the tone of voice, the mission
of the business, the product range, who's the customer.
We've got to get all of this tied up, don't we?
Yeah. There, there, there are so many
parameters, you know, like that affect SEO in an indirect way.
So you have to to make sure that you approach your whole
business, you know, like holistically regarding your,
your SU efforts. It's not just about, you know,
like optimizing your content, it's also about user experience.
If you don't use, you know, like the right theme or you create,
you know, like content that does not make sense so much for your
audience, if and if it's technically perfect, it will not
provide the same experience. People will just leave the page
or not buy the product. And as you know, this will
affect your SEO results. You will not rank so well.
You will not be visible in the LLF.
So yeah, definitely I agree with what she said.
Yeah, and go make something we mentioned a minute ago with the
the way Shopify is actually built, obviously there's themes,
there's collections, there's products, apps.
The other one here is about storefront APIs.
Some people have made Shopify headless.
Let's not get into headless today, do a whole episode on
headless. But there's all these different
things. How in your experience are they
affecting positively or negatively affecting both SEO
and just overall business performance?
Like if someone's not on Shopify or they are in Shopify and feel
limited and restricted, how do you see it?
Do you see it as a good thing? You see it's a bad thing?
Are there ways around these things?
Is it choose a different platform if it doesn't work?
Like what are your thoughts? Well, I mean, Shopify is a
closed platform. It operates in a in a defined
framework. So themes and apps needs to work
within that structure. This isn't necessarily a
limitation, but you know, like it does mean that the solutions
that you will select for your business sometimes overlap or
create conflicts. And when that happens, it will
definitely affect performance and and SEO.
So what people need to do for their businesses is to take into
account those possibilities, those things that might happen
and do not, you know, like, for example, stuff that are stores
with apps that have similar functions or testing things or
themes that provide, you know, like some functionality that
might affect SEO in order to produce, you know, like the
right results. So, yeah, because of that, you
know, like structure, it's good and easy for a lot of merchants
to get started. But as as time passes and you
use like more apps or develop further your store, especially
if you're a bigger one, these things can can create issues,
you know like to the overall user experience and the the SEO
results. Yeah, absolutely.
And we, we certainly have some it's, it's normally like if
someone's come from a Magento developer background, they're
the ones that are like, I can't do this and can't do this and
can't do this. It's like good go and realize
from my point, go and write some content, find some better
products, work on expanding your margins, learn how to do
marketing. Like you don't have to spend
days on end coding stuff in Magento anymore.
Like you just click, it's already done.
You don't have to worry about it.
And if it's not perfect, fine, it's not the most important
thing. Like, you know, having perfect
code is not, it's not the BL and end all.
But to a lot of developers it is because they're very prideful at
the way they've coded it. But I mean, these days there's
so much AI that can support that anyway.
Like I, I literally have been, I've been deleting our
subscriptions on so many tech systems recently, just building
our own apps. Like I've built one that does
our annual leave system. I've built one that does our
applications. If candidates want to come and
apply for a job and work here, I'm building another one at the
moment. It's going to be a new task
management system for our entire company across all our services
and all our clients. And so like we're living in this
age, I think where actually a plug and play platform is the
thing that you need. I I've also been fascinated
that, and this isn't one of the questions on the list.
And I don't know if you, I don't know how close you were to
Shopify at the time, but Google updated when Shopify started to
really boom. Google used to want these long
URL strings with like, you know, forward slash women's forward
slash clothing, forward slash jumpers, forward slash wool,
forward slash blue forward slash size 9.
Sorry, it's not a size size 10/8 and 10.
They go up in twos and they're like size 10.
And then it's like, here's the page.
And then Shopify was like, no, it's forward slash products,
forward slash name of product or it's forward slash collections,
forward slash name of collection.
And it, Shopify changed that and Google reacted and Google said,
do you know what that is actually better for users?
So we're going to upgrade the algorithm on SEO so we can
change. And again, I think looking at
the way things are going, it's Google and Shopify alike are
trying to make things better for customer and use the business
need to then focus on your USPS, your tone of voice, your goals.
It's been fascinating, hasn't it?
Some of these changes where one big tech platform does
something, you go that's nice, but it's going to ruin SEO.
But then Google reacts and Bing reacts and it's like, uh, it's
not been so bad for SEO after all.
It's actually the new norm, but there's been quite a few things
like that. And I guess being part of a
closed platform like Shopify, in a way, it kind of protects you.
Like you're part of a big community of people here that
Google's like, we couldn't we, I mean, from Google's point of
view, they couldn't just stop indexing Shopify stores one day,
but actually they would for the odd custom build shop here and
there. So Shopify's actually a good
solution in that closed platform where you can't change too much,
isn't it? Yeah, yeah, it's it, it, it's
definitely, you know, like good to have like that structure.
You know, like because as you said, when you come from a
different platform, you might see certain limitations and say
why I cannot do this, why I cannot do that, but get out of
what you used to do. So it's a good thing that's
Shopify provides this kind of structure and you can follow how
things can be built one upon, you know, like the other in
order to make sure that your website is scrolled, is indexed.
You will not find yourself in in in a weird situation where you
suddenly see things. Not exactly.
Those are my worst phone calls. When someone calls up and says
we've been put in Google sandbox, Yeah, no.
To. Reject the call, reject it.
We're not getting involved. And no, we can't help businesses
that have had that. And I mean, one of the first
things we do is we just disavow the bad links.
And sometimes you just see revenue goes Ding and it just
goes, it just goes up and it's like, what did you do?
And it's like undid everything that your black, your your Black
Hat bad SEO agency have done. But let's let's talk about AI
like AI, I mean, it's definitely here to stay.
It's changing a lot at the moment.
How is it changing? The the three things we
specifically got here, which I think are really good points.
The first ones around how merchants create content.
The second one's about how they manage SEO, and the third one is
about how they compete in search.
So let's talk about content creation like SEO hat on how how
should and shouldn't people? I'm going to ask, sorry this is
a horrible question but. No.
Commenting myself, how should people use and not use AI to
create content for better SEO Gone.
Give us your thoughts. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a
good thing. You know, like a good tool.
This is how you succeed AI as a tool.
It's not something that will replace you or your Sul
specialist or your agency. It's something that can help you
with creating, you know, like doing your research fast, draft
content fast, optimized fast. And in general, it lowers
barriers mostly for smaller businesses, but that also, as
aforementioned, it creates a lot of content and that content is
saturated, which makes very, very important the human input
to that AI content. You have to make sure that what
is produced is actually sensible.
It can it, it, it makes sense for your audience, for your
customer base, so it can actually attract them and help
them, you know, like decide if the product is for them or not.
So overall, AI is, is a great tool, but it needs to be used
wisely. You know, like there should be
people that will review that content and provide input and
adjusted before it's just, you know, like publish happens that
that content on a page. Otherwise, you should not expect
any tangible, you know, like, or even positive results for your
SU when you use just AI without any human input.
Yeah, no, I completely agree. I I love the way you phrase that
of like AI as a tool. The second part to that I'd add,
which my old FD would always say to me is the tools are great,
but they're only as good as the person holding them.
Like if you gave me a a furnace and a hammer and some iron, I
couldn't make you a product, but I couldn't do that.
They're fantastic tools. I couldn't use them, but I'm not
trained in that. I'm not skilled in that.
And I think one of the, one of the things that really struck me
recently is one of one of the brands we took on were like,
we've been producing all this AI content and publishing it on all
our product pages, our blog, and we're just not getting any SEO
traction. So we went and had a read of
some of this content and we, we said, we, we challenged them a
bit and said on your product pages, all this AI content
you've added, do you think that is increasing your conversion
rate or is it decreasing your conversion rate?
And then like, it must be increasing.
It's, there's more of it, it must be better.
We took all of it off and just made it very simple, like 3
little box, you know, 3 little ticks, 3 features of this
product price add to car conversion rate went up tenfold
and it was like actually you were adding loads and loads of
descriptive content for a quite a simple product.
Actually, the image is all you needed.
The image would describe what that product is.
And now we just need those a few, you know, based on the
keyword for it. We see a few of those things.
I always say with with content, if if you wouldn't read this,
then your customers definitely wouldn't read this.
And it's like you should use AI as you say, if you ask AI.
Find me 20 really cool facts about merino wool because I mean
this jump is made of merino wool like it's corporate.
Give me 20 facts about merino wall and it's like great 20
facts. Loads of companies do that.
Give me 20 facts that were only found in the last three months.
Now we're getting something like, now it's becoming unique.
And then it's like, what? What would be a better fact than
this if I could find the answer or prove it myself?
Great team. We're going to do an experiment,
one of our products or some of our material, and we're going to
answer that. And we'll be the only people on
the entire Internet that have done that experiment.
And now we've got a unique blog post.
And I know it's a lot more work, but so often people say like,
yeah, I've been blogging loads and I'm still getting no traffic
or, or worse still. And we met a golf brand a few
weeks ago. And James and Andy, I know you
listen to the podcast, so hi, guys.
And but we met these guys and they were enormous, enormous
amount of traffic coming into a blog post.
And we sort of said, who who wrote that?
And it was Andy. But James runs the blog and he
was like, yeah, I just did one on an afternoon.
He's like, how do we convert that traffic?
And it we sort of said, well, we'll do what we can, you know,
as many product placements, but but people are not, people are
coming in with a question. They're not coming in with AI
want to shop. So it's just the wrong, it's
good for brand awareness, but it's the wrong sort of traffic
if you want revenue. And actually we, we, we also
said to them like this content belongs in an Evergreen
depository of like how to improve my golf swing or
something. Like that's the area to put it
not in a here's just a random blog post that loads of people
now read, get their answer and leave the site.
That's not good commercially. And so, yeah, I mean, you must
have these conversations all the time with Shopify brands about
what kind of content to create, where to put it.
You know, I mean, do you have any examples of like that of
other brands that have gone down almost like the wrong roads in a
sense and gone, we've got all this traffic, but we're just not
getting the revenue? Yeah, I mean like when when I'm
talking to to merchants, in many cases I see the exact same
things that that you just mentioned.
You know, like we create content, we we populate the
page, you know, like with content, we provide the
information, we have a list, we have the ingredients or the
materials or whatever, you know, like depending on the product.
But those pages are not convert. Do those information align with
what the customer is actually looking for?
Do you provide, you know, like an example, a use case,
something that answers, you know, like what they're really
trying to find in order to be convinced to buy the product?
So that's why mostly lately with the use of AI, a lot of FAQs are
embedded into actual product description, well included in
product content and description. So people besides the
information about the product can also find answers to their
questions. And that can lead yeah, to
conversion because OK, if an answer is provided right there,
I am convinced and I will buy that product.
So, yeah, definitely it's not just about blog post, you know,
like you can definitely create blog post to provide enough
unique information that make you differentiate yourself, you
know, like from other businesses and also give that unique value,
you know, like to to the to your potential customer.
It's answering the questions that the merchant has where the
where exactly the product is. So providing those information
at the end of the product page can help you convert.
Do you ever find that in your warehouse you have dead stock,
you can't sell it, no one wants to buy it and you can't get a
refund on it. Or alternatively, you're missing
inventory in your warehouse that you need, you've got sales
coming in and you're low on stock and you haven't ordered
more stock in time, All these things hit profit.
And I've been there. I've run my own Shopify store
and had exactly that problem. But we've partnered up with
Inventory Planner who have the most incredible app to help you
manage that and forecast exactly what products, what skews even
down to what colour of products you need to order in advance to
make sure stock levels remain consistent throughout.
They're also running a seven day boot camp.
And if you want to go and sign up to that, it's 7 emails every
seven days and it takes the same amount of time as your morning
coffee. And in seven days, like me, you
can become an inventory management.
Pro. Both links are in the.
Description, Enjoy. Yeah, yeah.
And I love that example you've given about the conversion point
because it's, if you take another, another way of looking
at content, specifically SEO content, it's slotting it in, in
the right part of the journey of the customer journey.
And therefore deciding, is this a blog post?
Is this a collection? Is it a product?
Like when someone searches that, what are they trying to find?
And generally for, you know, sort of small up and coming
business, you want to focus as much as possible almost on like
product and collection journeys because they're the people who
are ready to buy products. They're asking a question or
something. It's like when we when we're
going for kind of like market share and market dominance, then
we need more of this blog content.
But for now, someone's got a problem.
The solution is buying a product.
We need to have either have a collection of product page that
answers that problem with a solution and the solution is buy
this. Or actually we've got 50 you
could choose from. It's a collection.
But then when they land on the collection, what's the next part
of the story? Where does, where does SEO
content play a part? Is it having a description?
Welcome to this collection. We've got a short video to help
you decide what product to buy because it's quite a complicated
purchase or you know what you want.
You're buying on colour and size here, so filter by size.
You do the colours like you're looking at it.
So simply to build a journey and you do that on every collection,
every products, you're going to be ranking well, exactly as you
said right at the start, it's about that user experience, that
journey that people are going to go through to ask you a really
difficult question. And it was on the list and you
said you got notes. I'm excited to see what you say
on this, but all of this is great and this is all today, but
what's coming tomorrow? Like what do you, where do you
guys think Shopify are heading as a platform?
Where do you think things might be very, very different in the
future? And how does that affect SEO?
Well, I, I know that Shopify will definitely become more and
more AI native. It will provide more solutions
embedded in the actual everyday merchant workflows and focus on
practical outcomes. So it's not just about the high,
it's actually using this tool, like I said, AI in a way, in a
practical manner, in a way that makes sense and that helps with
the everyday tasks and and work a merchant has to do in order to
to succeed with their business, regardless if it's a small
business or, you know, like a big plus brand.
At the same time, I think the product platform will continue
expanding and becoming more flexible.
Yeah, yeah. And provide more options for
those plus merchants because like you said, you know, like
people want more customization options, they want to, to
expand, they want to find solutions that will be even more
tailored to, to what they actually want to, to do and
achieve. So yes, I, I, I do see that
there will be automation optimization in, in, in a way
that will be embedded in, in the Shopify platform in, in a
seamless, let let me put it this better, you know, like in a
seamless way, but at the same time provide enough
customization and and options to plus merchants for their
specific needs for, for their stores and businesses.
Yeah, yeah, I, I, I think it's been fascinating and I think
you're right. I think shopping is going to
become way more seamless and more of a, let's face it,
eventually everyone's going to have a personal stylist that's a
piece of AI. And it's like, go and find me
some stores that have this. Then you land on the store and
it's like, hey, I brought you to the store.
Same AI, you know, like what, what sort of thing you're
looking for. Like, you know, have your
measurements changed since you shopped 3 weeks ago?
And this other shop, you literally have this personal
stylist that will follow you around, I think, and talk about
these things. Or rather than, and I've started
doing it now, rather than saying like I need a new phone case,
you go and ChatGPT and say, this is my lifestyle, this is what I
do, I want to be smart or I need something really secure and
rugged. Like what kind of phone case
should I be looking at? And it doesn't.
And if you put it on the right mode, it doesn't come back and
say, here are some phone cases. It actually comes back and says,
what's your budget? You know what, what exact phone
model have you got? What is your budget?
And when you say you're working in a rugged environment, you
want a building site or are you travelling a lot?
Like how rugged are we talking? And is is it rugged and good
design or just I just need to make sure it doesn't smash when
I drop it. That's the conversation people
are having and I think there there's that on the front end,
isn't there? And then Shopify sidekick, I
don't know how much you play with Sid and, and all of you
guys listening. Sidekick's incredible.
The amount of meetings I sit in now and people are like, this is
our best selling product and I go, is it?
And us, I go, no, it's not it's 4th like that's your best
selling product and it's a gift card.
Like we just learned something really important about our
customers and what we should actually be pushing on the site
is don't know what you want to buy as a gift, like buy a gift
card. Like we should have that as a
call to action because we're going to get the sale later.
But if we've got a higher chance of selling a gift card than a
product right now, then great. Look, our, our range is
beautiful. Buy a gift card and set the gift
card pricing at you can afford a pair of trousers if you buy this
gift card AT shirt, this one jumper, this one.
So whoever you gift it to. And again, this is like the user
experience. Is it whoever you gift it to do
this. But I mean, how, how do you
find, how much are you finding? Given that you talk to merchants
a lot, how much are you finding? They're using sidekick or some
of them are like, Oh yeah, we haven't played with it yet.
Or some are religiously like we use it constantly.
Like this is this thing's amazing.
Well, I would say it depends on the size of the business, but I
do see it being used more and more.
And it does make sense because this is, like you said, a
really, really useful tool. It can do a lot of things.
I remember when I first saw how the psychic works in the Shopify
edition. Step back in.
Yeah, yeah, in May. I remember.
Yeah, it was, it was amazing. It was amazing.
And I think as the time passes, you know, like, and people
become more and more familiar with the, the, the, the
capabilities of, of the tool, they will use it more and more
and it will develop more. So I do see it, you know, being
used, but not that much like at this point, at least with the
people and the merchants that I'm interacting right now.
But I definitely see this becoming more and more frequent
as a tool on those for those businesses.
I think it's like, like you said earlier about tools, and I
commented as well, it's like the more people know what Sidekick
can do and trust it, the more they will use it.
So I think it's a matter of when, not if.
Yeah, yeah. And final question then.
We love asking this especially to people like yourself who's
not in one specific like merchant store.
You work with lots of merchants, so you obviously see lots and
lots of different things. If you were starting a store
today or, or, or if somebody is starting one, what's your advice
to them? Or what would you do if you were
starting a store like specifically from an SEO point
of view as well? Like what were some of the
things you would do from day one and just bake into the business?
Yeah, it's a great question. You know, like and something
that's I've been asked, you know, like again and again I
would say in in many cases. So if I was starting a business,
I would say who is the store for and how it can realistically
compete with with other stores, you know, like that might be
similar. Then I would try to validate the
demand through keyword research and interpret those keywords
through buyer intent. Like I said, this is very
important. You know, like the, the, the SEO
fundamentals haven't changed and they're still applied today, but
people, businesses and merchants need to focus on what their
audience, what their potential customers are looking for.
So I would definitely optimize through that lens through
intention. And I would prioritize my top
products, top collections, making sure the SEO metadata are
properly optimized, my content is optimized.
And then I would support that those products and those
collections with additional content, blog posts, FAQs,
things that could help customers make those decisions.
And of course I would. I keep on working on my SEO and
I iterate and refine continuously because as you
know, SEO works best when it's disciplined and and ongoing.
Not the one that think, you know, like that you set and
forget. This is not how I say it works.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, I love that.
Thank you so much for that answer.
We, we ask a lot of businesses that, especially merchants on
the show, and it's fascinating hearing the difference between
merchant often I find, which is, which is totally understandable.
They look back on their mistakes and say, well, I wouldn't do
that. I wouldn't do that and I
wouldn't do that. And we'd scale faster.
But I also say that's part of the journey, isn't it?
Whereas talking to someone like yourself, who's on my side of
the fence, where we work with lots of merchants, we talk to
lots of people all the time. It's like actually having seen
some of the mistakes they've made over the years or, or
actually some of the bits where we've seen like exponential
growth or really quick growth. I, I find it mad though, how
many? I just want to touch on one
thing you said because I find it mad.
How many businesses and brands don't look at actual demand?
They just come up with the idea of a product and go, oh,
everybody needs. I mean, this is I fiddle with
this while I'm on shows because I can't sit still.
It's the lens cap for the camera, right?
And they might go like this lens cap's rubbish.
And there's loads of faults with the way this works, like the way
you put it on. It's also plastic.
If they put something fluffy on it, it would clean the lens when
I put it on. Like there's lots of little ways
you can innovate it. But if you look on SEO, how many
people are looking for, like if they're looking for a lens cap
replacement, it's normally, you know, there's a Sony camera.
I just need a Sony lens cap replacement for my Sony camera
and I want the right one. People would probably, you know,
they might be wrong, but if they don't look for them, it's like,
why are you starting a whole business and investing all your
money in this thing? So no, I completely hear you.
And if there's demand on search, those people looking for it,
they're already looking for it. They already want it.
And rather than trying to find a market where nobody wants this
thing yet because they don't know it exists, that's always a
lot harder because you have to do the brand and education
piece. But it's Sid.
Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for the prep you've done.
Thanks for some of the insights you've given us the answers
you've given. It's been great fun talking to
you. If people want to check out Yost
and use it on their Shopify store, how's it spelled?
How can they find it in the App Store?
And I I forget the discount code, I'll put it in the
description, but how can people find the app if they want to
want to go and use it? Simply type Yost SEO and the
Shopify App Store and you will find our app.
It's, it's available on two different plants monthly and
annually. But we definitely suggest, you
know, like the annual option because it's already discounted.
And of course you can see actual results, you know, like when you
are really engaged and invested in SEO, you know, like I want to
be 100% clear with this. If people try to do SEO, you
know, like starting a business and expecting results in one or
two weeks, this is not something that's really gonna happen.
It might happen, but it definitely it's not something
common. So it has to be a continuous and
a disciplined effort in order to get to those results.
Like I said, you have to try and to differentiate yourself from
other businesses. Yeah, yeah.
And the traffic itself is free. So yeah, it's it's good.
It's good when you get the traffic.
It is worth the wait. But as you say, it won't happen
overnight. Definitely, like you said, you
know, like you gave also some examples before, but something
that I also share in my discussions with merchants.
It's like a treadmill. If you, you can buy the best
treadmill in the world, but it depends on how frequent you use
it and the way that you use it in order to get those results.
If you don't use it properly or frequently enough, you will not
get the the results you want. So it's really important to be
consistent. You know like gradually you will
get there, but you have to be consistent.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Sid.
Appreciate that. And if anyone's got any
questions as well, send them over hello at winning Wish
shopify.com, send any SEO questions or anything else ever.
And we'll we'll forward any of them across to Sid as well and
get his thoughts or connect you guys up on e-mail and you guys
can have a quick chat and and get some support with that as
well. Thanks for joining us today.
Check out Yost. I think it's WWS 15.
I think it's the code, but it'll be confirmed in the description.
But if you can't find it, then drop us a note.
We can we can sort that out. Yeah, you get I think it's 15%
off through through us, which is awesome.
So thanks for joining us. Thanks for tuning in, everybody.
We'll be back again next week. And if you want to check out my
little episodes where I have a little rant about things going
on in the marketing industry, check out Tuesday T Rate Talks
as well. It's on the same podcast, just
hit subscribe. They all come out in the same
place. And but that's every Tuesday
because it's Tuesday T rate talks.
And then we've got loads of these interviews recorded or
queued up to record at the moment as well.
So we've got loads of Friday episodes coming out with amazing
people like Sid. And some of the merchants we've
had on as well. So thanks tuning in, hit
subscribe if you haven't. And we hope you can join us
again next time. I just want to interrupt today's
episodes tell you about some big news for Shopify merchants.
Yapo, which you might be using is sunsetting is e-mail and SMS
products. You may have got an e-mail from
them. And if you haven't, this might
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So if you have been using them, then you might be wondering
what's next? Well, our sponsor Saguno has you
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