318: How To Rank An Ecommerce Store In Search With Jeff Oxford

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You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now today I have my good friend Jeff Oxford on the show and Jeff is an SEO expert, but what sets him apart is that he specializes in e-commerce stores. So today we’re going to talk about how to specifically rank a physical product store in search. But before we begin, I want to thank Clavio for sponsoring this episode. Now it’s safe to say that most of us have been doing more online shopping lately.

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If you’re an e-commerce brand, that means you might be seeing more first-time customers. But once they’ve made that first purchase, how do you keep them coming back? That is what Klaviyo is for. Klaviyo is the ultimate email and SMS marketing platform for e-commerce brands. It gives you the tools to build your contact lists, send memorable emails, automate key messages, and more. A lot more. And that is why more than 30,000 e-commerce brands like Chubbies, Brooklinen, and Living Proof use Klaviyo to build a loyal following.

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Strong customer relationships mean more repeat sales, enthusiastic word of mouth, and less depending on third party ads. So whether you’re launching a new business or taking your brand to the next level, Klaviyo can help you get growing faster, and it’s free to get started. So visit klaviyo.com slash my wife to create your free account. That’s klaviyo.com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postscript.io for sponsoring this episode. And if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list.

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And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. I sincerely believe that SMS, or text message marketing, is going to be a huge channel for my store going forward, and I have chosen Postscript.io to be my text message provider. Now why Postscript? It is because they specialize in e-commerce stores, and e-commerce is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at a push of a button.

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Not only that, but it’s price well too, and you only pay for the messages that you actually send. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. Now onto the show. Welcome to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast, where we’ll teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host, Steve Chu.

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Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Jeff Oxford on the show. Now Jeff runs an SEO agency called 180marketing.com where he teaches others how to get their sites ranked in search. And unlike other SEO folks out there that make ridiculous claims, Jeff actually walks the walk. He’s helped a number of e-commerce companies. He specializes in e-commerce companies and he’s actually the number one recommended SEO on e-commerce fuel, which is run by my buddy, Andrew Udarian.

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And I actually had the pleasure of listening to this guy speak at eCommerce Fuel last year. And he is speaking at Seller Summit in 2020. And today what we’re going to do is we’re going to pick his brain on how to rank an eCommerce site in search. And with that, welcome to show, Jeff. How are doing today, Doing good, Steve. Thanks for having me. Yeah, Jeff. So give people listening that your background story, how you got into SEO in the first place and why eCommerce? Yeah, great question. So I first got into SEO

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back in college. So me and my roommate, you we heard about making money through AdSense at the time. like, no, we’re going to create a blog and try to capitalize on some of this internet money. So he was a huge fantasy baseball fan. And so he would write all these articles about fantasy baseball. And I was just trying to teach myself SEO through SEO Moz at the time now called Moz going through Rand Fishkin’s Whiteboard Fridays. They learned everything I can. And we actually made a pretty successful blog. We got busy.

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moved away from that and then my next project was actually creating an e-commerce site. So I’ve had my few dropshipping e-commerce sites over the years. My first one, of course, being out of college, I sold beer pong tables online. dropshipped them. I built that one up, sold it a manufacturer. But throughout the past 10 years, I’ve worked for a few different SEO companies and then back in 2013, I left the agency world, or I guess I left an employee of the agency world to start my own SEO company.

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I’ve been doing that for about the past seven years. Awesome, awesome. So is that e-commerce store still alive or no? No, I sold that off and I checked it. was beerpongstadium.com and I’m guessing they probably sold it to a completely different site. And then I got into 3D printers. was selling 3D printers online because I’m thinking, what can I sell that’s really hard to get in person? And 3D printers was one of those like, you hot buzzes at the time. But I realized I’m

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I’m pretty good at marketing in SEO but I’m not the greatest at operations and within one month I got hit with about $25,000 in chargebacks. after that I’m like, you know what, I’m just going to focus on consulting. So that’s what I’ve been up to. Was SEO the primary driver of traffic for that e-commerce store? Yeah, all the e-commerce stores I’ve had, it’s all just been SEO. I mean I’ll dabble a little bit with Google Ads and setting up some shopping feeds but it’s 90 % SEO.

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Interesting. so with that store, we won’t talk about it too much more, but with that store with SEO, like, could you have converted that into like an affiliate type of play also? That’s one thing I was thinking about. And I’ve had some other friends that have success with that model where you make the website look like an ecommerce store. But when you go to the product page and click add to cart, it just takes you to an Amazon product page. So that’s one thing I was tinkering with. But that was when I got hit with all those charge backs. I’m just like, you know what, I’m just gonna

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take a step back and just focus on consulting. Cool. And when it comes to just SEO agencies, like, and this is, I’m not ripping on them in general, but I’ve had a lot of people in my community get kind of outright ripped off by SEO agencies who claim that they can get you the top rankings and that sort of thing. So how can an agency do a better job than you could do yourself when it comes to SEO? There’s definitely pros and cons of going with an agency versus doing it yourself.

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And I actually rag on agencies all the time because I haven’t been in the agency world. You see the same stuff. You get pitched by the A-Team. You have some rock star guru come in, tells you, promises the world. And you get handed off to someone who’s maybe it’s like their first job out of college. I’ve seen that a few times. I’ve seen agencies where it’s actually interns doing the work. So there’s a reason that a lot of people don’t trust SEO agencies because they haven’t always.

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delivered on their promises over the years. I’m sure there’s probably listeners that might have even been penalized because they hired an SEO agency and they built a bunch of spammy links and took a bunch of shortcuts and their rankings and traffic plummeted. Another common thing I hear is you have an SEO agency, they’re very professional, you get these really nice branded reports with all these graphs and they tell you everything’s going great, but when you actually ask what’s going on and look under the hood, there’s really nothing happening. There’s no links being built, they’re not really making optimization.

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pretty much paying thousands of dollars a month just for a fancy report and no movement. yeah, I’ve seen that where people have been skeptical to hire SEO agencies for those reasons. So I mean, when you do it yourself, at least you know you’re getting stuff done, but at the same time, there’s also so many nuances that come with SEO and specifically e-commerce SEO that it’s so hard unless you’re really living in it for so long. If you just look at optimizing a page, there’s so many elements. If you look at

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how to acquire links, there’s so many things and nuances you gotta focus on. when you outsource, you definitely get the expertise and some people think maybe I’ll just hire an SEO person, but an SEO specialist, you usually have a technical background. That’s just gonna be one aspect of SEO. You really need content, you need a good writer who can write, you need maybe a developer who can fix technical issues.

07:58
maybe you’re going to need someone to do some social media or outreach and build relationships with blogs. So since there’s so many different core aspects of SEO, it’s hard to find, hire just one person in-house. So that’s where the agency model comes in place because they have all those resources. Yeah, yeah. So you mentioned e-commerce SEO. And I know for a fact, running an e-commerce store myself, that content can actually be a problem if you’re trying to rank your category pages and your product pages.

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Let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about what’s working and what’s not in terms of just e-commerce SEO today. so like what I’ve noticed, if you’re trying to rank for a keyword, first thing that you should do is search that keyword into Google to see what kind of results is Google showing. Are they showing mainly category pages? Are they showing mainly product pages? Or maybe they’re showing articles. And that’s going to tell you what kind of content Google wants to rank for that keyword. So if it’s a category page, you’re going to focus that keyword. You’re going to put in the title tag of the category page.

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put in the header tag, you want to optimize the content for it. Typically, I recommend on your category pages to have at least 150 to 200 words of content, but preferably more. I if you can get over thousand words and what I’ve seen work really well is maybe have a few lines of content above your products. Because if you have a huge block, it’s going to push your products low on the page. It’s not going to provide a good user experience. It’s going to hurt your conversion rate. So what you can do is just put a little bit of sales copy above your products and then below it, you know,

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answer any FAQs someone searching for that product might have. Maybe they want to know which one’s best for them, why, what should they look at, what are the unique selling points of these different products, and have that in there. So it’s not just for SEO, it can actually help drive conversions. And if you’re curious what to write about, you can just search that keyword into Google and maybe you’ve seen a lot of SERPs will have the people also ask boxes. And these are questions that customers have and you can just put them on that page.

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answer them and that can really help your category pages rank a lot better. you recommend hiding that text with JavaScript and have them click to read it so it doesn’t push everything below the fold? So here’s the thing is Google’s gotten really smart and they have patents all about crawling and parsing and understanding HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. So if it’s not visible on the page, they know it’s not visible and they’re not going to weight it as highly. So if you have it like visible at the bottom of the page,

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that’s probably going to have a bigger impact on SEO than if you had it at the top of the page behind a collapsible div. Ah, interesting. So you recommend like below the products putting all this verbiage. Yeah, I like a hybrid approach. It’s still good to have some content above the fold. So maybe have like 100 to 200 words of content above the fold. And then if you have the resources and you can develop 500, 1000 or even 2000 words of content below your products, we definitely go with that. There’s a huge correlation between number of words on a page

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and rankings. you comment on, you mentioned facts below the fold in the category page. Would you recommend using the schema markup for that? So first of all, can you define for the audience what that is and then whether you recommend it or not? So schema markup is this fancy word for rich snippets or basically improving how listings appear in search results. So maybe you’re searching for product and you see Amazon’s listing and it has that star rating with the price.

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all within Google search results. That’s what we mean when we talk about rich snippets or structured data. And there’s a few different types of structured data. Maybe you’ve seen recipes show up. Maybe you’ve seen events. In the e-commerce world, popular one is products. Now, Google recently released one for FAQ, FAQ Schema, where it actually show related questions underneath your listing. It’s still newer. haven’t seen, it’s one thing that we’re actually testing right now to see, will Google pull it in for a category page?

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if you have those FAQs on the page. as far as will that work and will it show the FAQs for a category page, that’s to be determined. I’ll let you know what I find. It’s working on the content pages. I’m actually kind of curious since we’re talking whether that has improved the click-through rate of your posts. Yeah, when you have pretty much any sort of rich snippets you have showing up, whether it’s for products or for an article, I have seen a huge…

12:07
improvement in click-through rates. So like, you if you have your product page and you have the star rating and it says, you know, four and a half out of five stars and you’ve got the price in there, you know, those little orange stars catch the searcher’s attention. So that can definitely attract more clicks, increase your click-through rate. And one thing people might not realize is that Google’s looking at the click-through rate as a ranking factor. So if you get a higher click-through rate, that alone could move you up in the search results.

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So in terms of getting people to click, for the actual titles of your pages, do you recommend using enticing language or just the keyword of the product that you’re selling or the types of products you’re selling? So we used to just do the kind of more keyword focus. if you have selling, what’s the e-commerce site that you’re working on right now, Steve? Oh, Bumblebee Linens. Bumblebee Linens. And what do you guys sell there? We sell handkerchiefs and linens. And what’s like a big keyword that you’re mainly focused on?

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Ladies handkerchiefs. like ladies handkerchiefs, you know, before we might just make the title ladies handkerchiefs and that would work really well. But in the past, like two to three years, we’re seeing a trend where Google’s putting more weight on user metrics like click through rates. So, you know, now it might be Bumblelinens or sorry, that keyword again? Bumblebee linens, ladies handkerchiefs. Ladies handkerchiefs. So it might just be ladies handkerchiefs. Now we might do like ladies handkerchiefs dash free shipping.

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or ladies handkerchiefs as low as $4.99, whatever it might be. And we found that that kind of is a good hybrid approach where you get the keyword in there, you can rank well, and you’re getting a good click through rate. You know what? I tinker around with it every now and then. And what’s funny is I tried that for a little bit. And what I found was before I would put keywords, like different permutations of keywords in the titles. And so I would actually naturally rank for those permutations, even though Google is generally smart enough to figure that out. But sometimes they’re not.

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And what I found is that when I replaced it with that language, I actually lost rankings for those other keywords that used to be in the title tag. And I was wondering if you’d comment on that. Is that normal or have you seen that happen? Are you talking about using like related keywords and long tail keywords? Yes. Yeah, there are times where we see that happen. So maybe people are searching for women’s handkerchiefs for sale or best women’s handkerchiefs. And you have a title tag that’s just, you know, best women’s handkerchiefs for sale. And maybe you scale it down to just be women’s handkerchiefs.

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Yeah, then yeah, you’ll see so often times you’ll see the related keywords go down. So it’s it’s one of those things you really got to see what keywords you’re targeting on the page. What keywords the page is already ranking for SEM rush and hrefs are great tools for this so you can see like what are some really high volume keywords this page is ranking for and if it’s just one main term that has all the search volume, maybe it has 2000 searches per month and all the other keywords have just a few hundred and you can just go.

14:56
go all in on that one main keyword, but if there’s maybe two to three that have high search volume and you can kind of combine them together like, you know, women’s handkerchiefs for sale or best women’s handkerchiefs, then it’s definitely worth kind of incorporating those variations. Yeah. So there’s, there’s different rules and different circumstances involved. Yeah. There’s, yeah, there’s a lot of nuances, but you know, before we ever touch a page, you want to see everything it’s ranking for, cause you might try to improve rankings for one keyword and in doing so you might.

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you know, optimize it for that one keyword and the other keywords it’s ranking for might actually go down in positions. Okay. Okay. So I would like to actually continue with this interview kind of with a hypothetical case here. Let’s say you have like a brand new e-commerce store and we can use your old one as an example and you got this unlimited SEO budget. What are some things that you would do just right off the bat starting from complete scratch? Okay. So is this, do you already have the website up and running and now it’s just take it? Yeah, website up and running and let’s say you have

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know category pages with content and you have really good product descriptions and everything I guess maybe from a conversion perspective and what not is all good to go. in that case and you already kind of touched on this but just to really hammer the point down is making sure all your product pages, category pages have great content and I’d say if somebody, person here is listening and maybe they don’t want to hire an SEO agency and they want to do it themselves I think the most valuable resource for SEO is a good writer. Having someone who can create you know

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great content. There’s a lot of great keyword research tools out there and seeing what are your customers searching for and creating content around that like really long form content. Maybe it’s a few thousand words, has custom illustrations you could work with a graphic designer for and then promoting that content to other websites in your industry to get backlinks. So what’s great about this is content marketing. You’re creating content that people are searching for. It’s answering questions. Oftentimes it can even convert.

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and you can also get links from it. So it’s a traffic driver and as it gets links, it’s gonna help out all your product and category pages rank. So that’s the first place I would start is just really get some resources in place to create good content and then promote it out to relevant blogs. So are you suggesting creating your own blog? Like do you feel like every e-commerce store requires a blog these days or can you just get by with content on the category and product descriptions?

17:12
That is a great question and I’m glad you asked it because I’ve looked at analytics for so many e-commerce sites and it’s very rare that blogs drive more than 2 to 5 percent of the revenue and I’d say in most cases about 80 to 90 percent of cases what my clients are spending on blogging and content is driving a negative ROI. It’s usually not driving more revenue than it’s worth.

17:38
I mean, here’s what happens if you check your blog and you can go to Google Analytics, you can add a filter for blog to see all your blog posts. Oftentimes it’s driving good amounts of traffic, but that traffic just doesn’t convert. It’s just too high up at the funnel. If you’re selling ladies handkerchiefs and someone’s searching what is a handkerchief, they may not be ready to buy. That’s why we look for kind of more high converting keywords and just some tip for your listeners. Any keyword that has best

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reviews or versus, those are much higher converting keywords. If someone typed women’s handkerchief reviews, they’re getting pretty close to pulling out their credit card and purchasing. If someone searched best women’s handkerchiefs, now they’re also in the mindset that they’re almost ready to buy, or versus, if they’re comparing two different brands. Again, those kind of keyword variations I found work really well for blog posts and are more likely to convert.

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So do you believe in the blogging model and getting them on your email list where you can nurture them? I guess that’s a little bit harder to measure. Yeah, that’s a great question. It can work really well. It depends on your business model. Like if you’re having success with your email funnel and all you need is more subscribers to fuel it and you can build a relationship with them, you can nurture those leads and those email subscribers and absolutely create your content with the mind of getting email capture. Maybe you have some…

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lead magnets that they can download and they just have to enter their email and maybe just have a subscribe box. That can work well, but only under the assumption that you have a of an email funnel that’s already working for you. So based on everything that you just said, so blog, yay or nay? I’d say in most cases nay, unless you really know what you’re doing. As far as blogging goes, I’m a huge fan of quality over quantity. I’d much rather see somebody do one really good post once a month.

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then try to just crank out something once a week. It’s kind of one of the fallacies is everyone here is need great content. So they’re just running to crank out as much as they can. But when you look at the stats, it’s not really drive that much traffic or revenue. And it’s 2020 now, you know, got so many people are creating content. It’s not just the media companies and the publishing companies. You also have e-commerce stores and lawyers and real estate agents and pretty much everybody. So the bar has been raised really, really high. And if your content is going to get noticed, if it’s going to rank, if it’s going to drive links,

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you really have to have the best content out there that’s really worth ranking on page one. with that in mind then, if you don’t have like a blog, I guess you’re suggesting that you focus all the content on your product pages and your category pages. Is that accurate? I’d say as far as getting revenue, that’s probably going to be the better focus. Okay. And there’s a few caveats here. mean, if you have a really good writer and you’re able to produce really good content that people want,

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then absolutely invest in a blog, create content, and promote it out. It’s just one of those things where it’s so hard to create really breathtaking content these days that unless you’re really going at it 100%, it may not be worth it. That’s interesting. I actually have a completely opposite view on that. If you put out content, in my opinion, if you put out content that’s very catered to your target customer and you’re building an audience of just those people,

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and you become like an influencer in that space, then you can just take that email list and you can point them at whatever product that you want and people will just tend to buy it because of you and your brand. Yeah, that’s and that’s totally true. And I agree that if you have great content and you’re building email subscribers, and I’m sure with your websites, you’ve seen this model work super successfully and you know, I’ve seen you put out some really good content out there. What I think that the disconnect might be is a lot of the

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A lot of e-commerce store owners are so focused on so many things. You’ve got operations, customer service, paid search, SEO, it’s kind of more an afterthought. like, we need content. Let’s just create some content. And so the content out there might be good. It might answer the question, but it might not be good enough to draw on that many email subscribers. It might not be good enough to rank as well. So I agree with you in the sense that if you’re going all in on content and you’re really going to invest the money,

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and time to do it right, then it can really be a great way to get traffic, get leads, and build an email list. But for a lot of the e-commerce sites I’ve seen, it kind of doesn’t get the love it needs, so it doesn’t perform as well. That makes sense. I guess that applies to everything in life, I guess, with ads and everything as well. I would agree. All right, so yeah, let’s take that assumption, actually. Let’s take that assumption as you’re an e-commerce owner, content’s not going to be your thing, so you’re not going to spend hours and hours and hours drafting blog posts and whatnot. So let’s go on.

22:21
Where would you dedicate your budget? just like before, content would probably be the main focus. think it’s good to have. You want to make sure your on-sites all dialed in. So maybe work with a developer or an SEO company to make, crawl the website like Google would look for any technical issues. Let’s talk about the most common mistakes that you see on the technical side, actually.

22:44
The most common mistakes I see, the first one that comes to mind is on category pages. Oftentimes, if you filter and sort, it’s going to create different URLs. if you change the, if you sort by price, maybe that’s going to add parameters to the URL. If you limit to only show 48 products instead of 24, that’s going to change the parameters. And oftentimes, every time you’re changing the URL, that’s creating a new page that Google’s indexing. So you essentially have multiple versions of the same category page.

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all kind of competing with themselves for the same rankings, is creating duplicate content. So that’s kind of one of the more common things I’ve seen on category pages. Is that not something that the popular shopping carts take care of? You’re talking about like a canonical tag? Yeah, exactly, canonical tag. So Shopify is probably the most SEO friendly platform out of the box. I’m sure most of your listeners are probably using Shopify. Magento can be really SEO friendly.

23:39
I always recommend the Mageworks SEO extension and once you put that in it pretty much makes it just as SEO friendly as it can be with Shopify. But there’s a lot of platforms out there that out of the box they have canonical issues with their category tags. I even now I still work with clients and you look at it and they have so many versions of the same category pages getting indexed. Interesting. Okay. All right. If you want to just kind of define the canonical tag and how to consolidate all that, that’d be great.

24:06
So the canonical tag, it’s a line of code that goes in the head section of the source code and it tells Google which version of the page should be indexed. let’s say, going back to the women’s handkerchiefs example, let’s say you have women’s handkerchiefs sort by price, order equals limit 24 products per page and all these different versions of the URL. If you have a canonical tag, it’s going to say, hey Google, whatever version you land on of this URL, don’t index it, only index the main

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women’s handkerchiefs page. And so once it sees that, it’s basically kind of going to see all the different versions and it’s going to it’s won’t index it. It’s only going to index your own category page. It can really help cut down on duplicate content. Cool. So that’s one major mistake. Are there any others? Site speed is a big one. Site speed has become more and more of a ranking factor. Before it used to just be that sites that load really slow don’t rank as well. But now we’re seeing like Google, especially with the big push to mobile,

25:05
Google’s really starting to stress site speed as a ranking factor. having a developer that can go in, optimize your first byte connection, optimize the theme, compress files, that can have a big impact. you’d be surprised, just improving site speed a good amount can have a noticeable impact on your rankings and traffic. on a side note of that, site speed is huge for conversion rates. know Amazon did a famous study where they found for every 1,000 milliseconds of

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of page load time they shaved off, saw a noticeable improvement in conversion rates. So it’s one of those things that, I’m sure it’s good for SEO, but there’s also so many other benefits with improving your site speed. If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce

26:04
and provide strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself. Now, first and foremost, protecting your IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Counsel provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees,

26:33
website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to emergecouncil.com and get a free consult. And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com. Now back to the show. Can you give some guidelines? Like what, what speed is too slow? I’d say

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the goal to shoot for would be if you can get under two seconds, you’re flying. That’s going to be great. But I’d say at least under three. At least under three. So these days with all these plugins and everything, adding JavaScript code and all this extra gunk on there, how do you create a site that’s so fast if you want to use all these services? The quickest way and the simplest way is just use Cloudflare. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Cloudflare. this kind of

27:27
It takes everything on your website and like does a lot of this site speed improvements for you. So it will like compress your files, minify your JavaScript and CSS files. It’s on their servers, which are really fast. So it’s going to connect quickly. mean, it’s going to say, mean, we’ve seen times where just putting on CloudFlare most of the time cuts the site speed in half. So there’s a lot of improvements using CloudFlare. And the reason I recommend it is it’s so easy to use. You just connect it to your site. You don’t need to hire developer.

27:54
or anything like that. As far as just getting something up and running this week and making improvements to your site speed, CloudFlare is gonna be the way to go. And it’s free. Yeah, have starting plans free. don’t know, I think if you have like, if you have like a dedicated SSL certificate, maybe they charge you more, but I know they do have free plans that work great, especially for WordPress sites. Are you using any of the paid plans there? And is there a rationale for using one of the paid plans? That is a good question. Usually I just kind of point the…

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clients in the direction and let them find the one that they need for their site. But I know they have some other improvements like security can be big like if you have a pretty big brand and you nowadays Internet security becoming more and more of a thing with like WordPress sites getting hacked left and right. Yeah, so I definitely recommend it but usually you can get by with just their free plan or their pro plan which is only 20 bucks a month. Right and I think you get some additional features there where like

28:54
It’ll transform all of your images to JPEG 2000 or something like that. Some additional benefits of paying. I don’t remember exactly what the list is. Yeah, one thing that I love about it, they also have their own content delivery network. So they’re going to save all your images on their network and they can just send it way faster. yeah, Cloudflare super easy. Are you using it Steve? I am not actually mainly because there’s caching issues and whatnot. So and I just lazy load my images and whatnot, but it’s been on my list.

29:21
I just a little bit more anal about the control aspects. definitely got more control if you do it yourself. Yeah, and my page loads in under two seconds, I think. So if I want an extra boost, then I will eventually get there. There’s a few tools that I always use to look at page speed. GTmetrics, and that’s metrics with an X at the end, .com is great. It’s a free tool. You put in any URL. It will tell you your speed as well as actual steps you can improve.

29:50
you can take to improve it. then Google has a great tool, the PageSpeed Insights tool, where it will tell you exactly what you can do to improve it as well. That’s actually the one I would use because I think that’s the way Google determines page speed, It is. The reason I recommend both is because the PageSpeed Insights tool, you’ll put in a URL and it’s such a hard grader. You could have a pretty fast site and it’s still going to give you a 32 out of 100 score. So I like to use

30:19
both sources and it doesn’t give you as much data on the actual page speed. The load time is more focused on this way you can do. if you use both of those, you’ll have plenty of actual steps you can take to improve your load time. I actually like web page test mainly because it enumerates each and every file that you can go through and reduce the resource load and exactly what order it’s being done. don’t think, does GTmetrics do that? Maybe it does.

30:46
I actually, I use web page test too. like those three that we just went over is like the three ones that I touch on. Okay. Yeah. So those are all great. Awesome. Awesome. So we keep talking about content here, but without a blog, where do you actually put the content? So if you don’t, let’s say you don’t have a blog, you know, whether you’re on Shopify or Magento, you know, can create a static page. whether it’s, if it’s Shopify, it’s going to be in the slash pages directory. If it’s Magento, you know, just like you’d have an about us page or contact page, you can create.

31:14
a static page. So if you’re just doing content once in a while, you can get away without having a blog. If you’re doing it more regularly, like once a month, know, having a blog is just going to make it easier to keep everything consolidated. And so if you’re not producing regularly, then and you have these static pages, how do you actually get those static pages to rank? So first thing is whatever your keyword is, you want to make sure it’s mentioned in the title tag, kind like what we talked about before, right? Having

31:43
Meta descriptions is one of the most overlooked opportunities I see for e-commerce stores. I’m seeing product pages with no meta descriptions, or it’s just pulling from the content category pages with no meta descriptions. And people overlook meta descriptions because it’s not technically a ranking factor. Whether you have the keyword in there, not at all, or a bunch of times, it won’t make any difference. But just like with Google Ads, having a well-written ad copy can have a huge impact on your click-through rates and your traffic. Well, the same applies for meta descriptions. So having a well-written meta description

32:12
can really increase your click-through rates. And like we talked about before, as you get higher click-through rates, that can help your ranking. So definitely make sure you have compelling, kind of sales-based meta descriptions. You want to have the keyword and the header tag of the page. You want to put the keyword mentioned within the content. So a general guideline is mention it once for every 50 to 100 words. That’s a very loose guideline. It really depends. But you also want to use related keywords.

32:40
So if you whatever your keyword is what I recommend putting it and put into Google image search and at the top Google is going to show you all these kind of keywords across the top that are related to that keyword and try to mention as many of those in the content because Google is not just looking for enough. We go with the women’s handkerchiefs example. It’s not just looking for women’s handkerchiefs. It wants to see what are other variations so it can kind of build a better sense of relevancy of what the page is about. So

33:10
That’s a great way to get related keywords is just using Google Image Search and looking at the words and phrases at the top. the keyword in the URL is going to help as well. Doing some internal linking. So whatever your most linked to pages on your website, for sure your homepage, but maybe there’s some other content that you’ve done that has lots of links, go to those pages and add links to the new page you’re trying to rank. And those internal links are going to help boost your ranking. So if you do all those things, that’s pretty much you’re going to see some good results.

33:39
And then there’s the whole part of off-page SEO that we haven’t talked about. Yeah, that’s what I was going to get to for these last 10 minutes. Yeah, with link building. You then want to promote that. Here’s the thing, it’s really hard to get people to link to a product or category naturally. Typically, if you’re going to get links to a product or category page, it’s either going to be doing guest posting where you write an article on a relevant website and have them link back to your product or category page.

34:05
Or you can do product reviews. actually send out product in exchange for review. You give free product to a blogger. They review it, they write about it, and they link back to your site. There’s actually a lot of opportunities there if you use Haro because there are these bloggers out there that just want free product. Yeah. They’re not the best blog. So I have certain standards where I think they have to have a domain authority over 30. But I generally don’t find really huge, high quality blogs there.

34:33
What do you use to actually find these opportunities? So I don’t know if I actually mentioned this to you, Steve, but I built a tool for pretty much for e-commerce store owners and other solopreneurs that want to do link building but don’t want to hire a company. It’s called Link Hunter and it kind of does what you talked about where you can find relevant keywords, whether you want to do guest posting or product reviews, you kind of choose how you want to do your outreach. It’ll find relevant sites that have actually either

34:59
published a guest post before or published a product review before so you know they’re likely to link to you. And then will pull in domain authority as well as the number of keywords the page is ranking for so you can make sure it’s a good prospect before you reach out to them. So kind of like you, I look at domain authority or domain rating as the hrefs equivalent of at least like 25 to 30. I want to make sure they’re relevant. I want to look at

35:21
how many keywords are they ranking for and what’s their traffic? Because oftentimes you’ll have websites that have a really high domain rating or domain authority because they’ve built all these spammy links, but they’ve been penalized and they’re actually not ranking very well. that’s kind Do the spammy links contribute to domain authority a lot? Yes. They do, really. It’s one of those things like Google knows if a link spam you’re not. Hrefs and Moz, they’re just purely looking at, know, I mean, Moz actually factors in some spam control under domain authority now, but you’ll still see sites that have-

35:51
really high domain authorities that have been penalized and really aren’t ranked for much these days. Interesting. Because I do see a lot of sites with really high domain authorities, but they don’t get that much traffic. even like blog, like for example, let’s take e-commerce fuel since we’ve talked about Eudarian a little bit. He’s got an insane domain authority, but I think he doesn’t get as much traffic because he doesn’t target the keywords. It hasn’t been a focus for him. Yeah, that’s one part of it too.

36:20
like look at his website, sure he’s got a really good domain rating, 74, but he also has, mean, his site’s ranked for like 20,000 keywords and it’s got pretty good traffic, but you’re right, you might not be targeting like really broad keywords, so it’s not the end all metric, but if you look at them in tandem, if you look at domain rating and estimated organic traffic for website, usually you can get a picture of which ones, if you have like a domain rating 50 site, but the traffic’s only a thousand, that might.

36:48
raise an eyebrow and you might not want to contact that site. Interesting. I’m just kind of curious what your guidelines are. I mean, if you really want to get kind of little more deep dive, what you can do is with HREFs or SEMrush, just paste the domain in there and just look at their history graph. Like is the chart going down or is it going up? And if it’s going down or if it’s had like a huge drop off where it’s clearly been penalized, you probably want to stay away from that site. Okay. Okay. And do you have a specific technique for outreach?

37:18
Yeah, mean, we’ll start with guest posting. Guest posting is probably the most straightforward. You find a relevant website, you reach out, you offer to write an article, and you can get a link. So there’s some tips to find guest post opportunities. Whatever your keyword is, just put it into Google and add n-url colon write-for-us. And this is going to show you all the related blogs that have a Write for Us page. You can also change Write for Us with guest-post.

37:48
to see other pages that have a guest post and this is going to be the quickest way to find those opportunities. And I say that because a lot of times we’ll reach out to just a random blog. Maybe they don’t do product reviews, maybe they don’t do guest posts. So by looking for sites that you know for a fact are already looking for contributors and guest posts is going to be the easiest way to find those opportunities. And then, so they’re expecting guest posts but is there anything you do in your language or do you recommend having anything available before you even

38:17
ask for a guest post? Because I get like 10 of those requests a day. Yeah, I bet. Like when I’m doing guest posts, I think the biggest things to touch on is how is this going to benefit the person reaching out to and know your credibility. So if you I mean, you really need to mention like if I was reaching out to you, Steve, I say like, Steve,

38:39
I love what you’re doing over there. I’ve been following your blog for a while and maybe mentioned something that shows you I’ve actually been reading your articles like, oh, I love that post you did about this. I never thought about doing that way. I always did things this way. Anyways, I want to reach out and see if you’re looking for any, if you accept guest posts or any outside contributions. And this is where you can highlight your experience. I’ve been doing SEO for 10 years. I’ve spoken at few conferences. I’ve written for Forbes and other places. And another big thing is

39:06
showing examples of work you’ve done in the past. So if I were to include links, like here’s some other articles I’ve written in case you’re curious, and maybe link to other articles published on blogs, that type of guest post is gonna have a much higher response rate than you’re just, you know, sending them articles or just like having a generic, clearly a template. So I think the biggest way to stand out is personalize your email templates to show that you’ve actually read the site and you’re not just a robot or doing a bulk email blast.

39:35
highlight your experience and also provide examples of content you’ve written in the past. Okay. And then what about for product reviews? Do you have any method for that? So for product reviews, you kind of like what you said, there’s a lot of bloggers just looking for products. So if you’re giving them free stuff, usually it’s not too hard of a sell. I think the biggest thing is just finding sites that are already accepting product reviews because a lot of sites aren’t really that interested. So you can just do a search, whatever your keyword is, and just do n-url colon review.

40:04
and see what’s coming up or you know what’s really helpful is whoever your biggest competitors are search their brand name and add an URL review and see who’s reviewing your competitors and that’s probably gonna be a really good place to start to try to get them review your products. Cool yeah. Hey Jeff so I kind of threw you that softball in the beginning about agencies and I know you you run one so that’s why but uh can you tell me why your agency is different and talk about some of the services that you offer? So

40:33
The biggest thing that’s different about us is we just do e-commerce, SEO, nothing else. Back in the day, we used to do SEO, PPC, email marketing, conversion optimization, just like everyone else. But we made the conscious decision that we’d rather be the best at one thing than just be good at everything. So we live and breathe it. mean, it touches all of our processes. mean, even till now, we’re still adjusting, fine-tuning, and tweaking.

40:57
how we do things, because there’s so many nuances as far as which keywords you’re to target on which pages. How do you prioritize which page you build links to if you have an e-commerce site with hundreds of thousands of pages? So we’re also very transparent. That’s worked well for us. So we always show our clients exactly what we’re doing. We open up the hood and show them our processes. And here’s how we found these keywords and why we chose these keywords. And these ones have high conversion potential. So we’re really revenue driven.

41:26
and we kind of use that into every decision along the way. So when we’re choosing keywords, we’re not just looking at the search volume, but we want to see, you know, what’s the average order value for this page? What’s the revenue per click or conversion rates? And when you kind of steer the focus less on traffic and rankings, but more about revenue, makes it much easier to get better results. And I think the clients also appreciate it. completely agree with that. There are certain keywords that we rank for that generate a lot of revenue.

41:56
that get less than a thousand searches a month. Yeah, and we’ve had times where we’ll create content for a client and it’ll drive, you know, it’s like a relationship building piece to build relationships with bloggers like, you know, the top 50 wellness blogs and we’ll reach out to them and the main purpose is to build relationships. But like we’ve done this where that post will actually get, you know, thousands and thousands of visitors and, you know, client, know, a smart client, you know, sure it’s great to get more visits, but if it’s not qualified and it’s not driving your revenue,

42:25
It’s really not going to make a dent in your bottom line. If you’re spending money on SEO every month, you’re going to want to get that return. So it’s important to focus on the revenue side of it. Does your agency actually write the content also and do the outreach for link building? We’re set up to do everything. So we got writers that write the content. We got an outreach team that will promote it and build relationships with relevant bloggers. We got designers if we need infographics or custom illustrations. And we got developers if we need to implement it or even make interactive maps or

42:55
and other type of unique tools. Jeff, where can people find you online if they have any questions about anything we talked about today or just SEO in general? So the website is 180marketing.com. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions. And then that tool Link Hunter that I mentioned earlier, if you want to do your own link building and you don’t want to spend a lot of money on an outsourced company, you can also do it yourself with Link Hunter. And that’s just linkhunter.com. Is that a free tool?

43:25
That is paid tool. It’s $49 a month. Okay. Okay. And as I mentioned before, Jeff is actually going to be speaking at Seller Summit 2020. So if you want to see the guy in person, see him speak and ask him questions in person, then grab your ticket now. Thanks a lot, Jeff, for coming on the show. I really appreciate your time. Awesome. Thanks, Steve. It was great.

43:47
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now most SEOs focus mostly on ranking blogs and content sites, which is why having Jeff on the show was very helpful. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 318. And once again, I want to thank postscript.io, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. Now SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve.

44:16
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for eCommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store,

44:45
Head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day meeting course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.