The E-commerce Leader

[00:00:00]
[00:00:31] Jason: Being number one on Google, organic search for your keywords or phrases is incredibly important to being discovered by your prospects. In this episode, we’ll give you tried and true battle plan honed by years of real-world competitive marketing to get you ranked highly for traffic and to grow your business.
[00:00:50] Michael, are you ready to jump into how to dominate Google organic keywords?
[00:00:55] Michael: Yeah, love it. And by the way, I like the word dominate. That sounds like a very masterful action compared to my efforts on Google search so far. So I’m definitely open for this topic.
[00:01:05] Jason: So yeah, definitely. It might be aspirational.
[00:01:10] Michael: That’s good to aim high. I think it’s important. I mean, it’s sometimes I think it’s funny that we were talking in the intro to the life of this podcast. I was saying, this is a marathon, not a sprint. And you say, well, maybe a half marathon. So already your mentality is it’s a bit more doable than my mentality.
[00:01:23] So I think that’s part of it. Isn’t it. It’s kind of getting to grips with these mighty engines like Google and not being intimidated by them is an important thing. So how do we go about this then? Where do we even start with this whole mountain? Yeah,
[00:01:37] Jason: sure. I’ve got a, a little five-part plan as is my custom.
[00:01:40] I kind of made a little outline for us. And so five-part plan that I want to walk through in the conversation today. And, as they say in, whatever your mileage may vary, and everybody will execute against these ideas uniquely in their own situation and have outcomes that are specific to them. So everybody gets that, but I’ll, I’ll lay out a plan that I think is a good, solid general approach to this and give some hints and tips and, you know, true stories along the way here as we talk through these.
[00:02:07] So, so let me jump right into it, and share the first step in the five-part plan is to be laser beam focused on one key word or key phrase in your work with, Google and. As soon as I say, be laser beam focused and foe and get one keyword or key phrase. Every one of course will say, can’t I have to, I must have two.
[00:02:33] I need three, wait, I need five. Wait, I needed like, actually a dozen or, oh, wait, I’ve got 350 products and I want to rank number one for each of those. And so the reality is that the more focused you can be with a keyword or key phrase, the better you’re going to Pierce the, you know, the darkness of Google or whatever the metaphor might be.
[00:02:51] You know, you’re going to, you’re going to have an easier time. The more focused you are, laser beam focused, you know, not be diffused. And so that’s the first thing I would challenge everybody to do is figure out what is the optimal, the number one key phrase for them, that they want to rank for.
[00:03:08] And then, you know, go from there. And I, I know it’s tough. I know it’s a, a challenge, but just think of it like your. Number one north star that you’re guiding everything towards, you know, if you’re. Sailor out 200 years ago or whatever the metaphor would be. You know what, you’ve got to have a direction to go in for all of your content work, for everything that happens on your website and picking that a specific keyword or phrase short phrase, would be the first thing you’d want to do.
[00:03:37] So what are your thoughts on that?
[00:03:39] Michael: I think as a general. Being overly specific is much, much better as a starting point than overly general and trying to be all things. What is it? They say something like this, a very American phrase. If you’re everything to everybody, you’re nothing to nobody or that’s always something like that.
[00:03:55] And I really think that’s so true. It’s the classic marketing mistake is not daring to be specific. So I really liked that. And I think that the most important thing, that you just said is, is the focus thing, what Google does with it is up to Google, I guess. Isn’t it. I have heard the phrase that you should have one keyword per Euro or world per webpage.
[00:04:15] Is that basically what you’re saying?
[00:04:16] Jason: I would say one specific keyword or key phrase that you’re focused on for your entire Shopify site?
[00:04:22] Michael: Specific. Yeah. Wow. That really is specific. I like it.
[00:04:26] Jason: Well, if you think about it, Systematically, the question is, what is the goal of your, your site? What is, you know, what is the specific thing in the customer’s eyes customer’s mind?
[00:04:36] What do you want to be known for? It’s a branding issue and you want to be known for one specific thing in the mind of your customers and in the mind of your prospects. And a lot of people can get traffic to their website, through various means. But, if you’re not laser beam focused in the mind of the customer, when they have that need, or they’re looking for something in the future, they won’t remember that you’re the provider, you know?
[00:04:58] And so it’s better to your point to be something really important to, you know, a specific group of people who are looking for a specific thing, than it is to be a generic. Quasi, you know, generic buffet. They have buffets in London. I, you
[00:05:13] Michael: know, we have a lot of every type of food in London and clearly, yeah.
[00:05:17] But generally speaking it’s because it’s cheap or it’s at a hotel and it’s not caught the best reputation is fine dining. So yeah. And I guess you want to be the best kebab shop in town or the best falafels or the best, you know, Thai food or, yeah. I really liked that. That feels very daring to me. And I think I probably stuck in the mentality that you’re trying to address in some of the listeners, which is not daring to be specific to my own phrase, hoist by my own petard, as they say.
[00:05:44] So, how do we find these, you know, well, how do we even decide that then? Cause obviously we might aspire to be the best running shoe, but that’s probably going to be taken by Nike and customers’ minds and also Google, how do we go between aspiration versus where we actually should be sort of aiming seriously?
[00:06:02] Yeah,
[00:06:02] Jason: I think you’ve got to do two, two parts at the same time. One is the introspective work and looking at your own brand and your own reality, what you like, what you can deliver on. But then the other part is what’s out there in the universe of key phrases and keywords and who you’re competing against.
[00:06:19] Sometimes businesses get lucky and they’re not in a very, very intensely competitive, field for keywords or key phrases, but that’s fairly rare. Usually there’s some mammoth, you know, websites and companies out there that are trying to dominate the key phrases. So, so that work of finding out. Kind of currently out there has done very simply with a few tools.
[00:06:42] And so the first thing I would just encourage you to do is learn how to do an incognito browsing view in whatever tool you use, if it’s Chrome or safari in safari, they call it, a private or no incognito window. Yeah. Oh, no. Sorry. In Chrome. It’s incognito window in safari. It’s a private, window.
[00:07:02] And that means that you’re searching and Google doesn’t know who you are, what your past search history is because you can deceive yourself. Actually, the, the algorithm knows what you’ve looked at previously and they’ll tune their responses to your searches in light of your prior searches. So you want to browse in an incognito window just to see what the truth is.
[00:07:23] Generically out there in terms of the Google organic rankings and, and look for the key. Or keyword that you have, the aspiration to go after, see what the reality is, see where you rank already for it. And then you can also use tools like Uber suggest, which is my favorite. Uber suggest is a great tool.
[00:07:41] We’ve talked about it before. In fact, we did a podcast last September that was about SEO work and we’ll put it in the show notes, but it is, you know, it gives a bunch of tools and ideas, but that was, you know, over a year ago now. So, so this Uber suggest tool is a very handy tool for showing you two things.
[00:07:59] One is the search volume of a keyword or key phrase. And then the other is the difficulty for you ranking against that keyword or key phrase. And they do it in a very nice way. Neil Patel is, the owner of that, tool and he uses it, very effectively, in all of his marketing work. Of course, he’s a genius at this.
[00:08:17] And so you’ll want to find a keyword or key phrase that has reasonably. Traffic coming to it, you know, the search volume. And then also is ideally not that hard for you to rank for, and they do a gradation where they kind of give a green or yellow or red type, you know, reality check. Green’s good.
[00:08:36] Red’s bad, for you to focus on some keyword or key phrase. And so Uber suggest is a great tool for that. And there are other tools out there, that you can use, but th that’s my go-to, and the other, the other one I’ll mention just here quickly is if you want to see what your competitors are doing, and how they’re winning or not, you can also use a tool called SpyFu.
[00:08:54] S P Y F u.com. And that one will give you your own website and reality for how you’re doing in terms of keywords and phrases that you’re ranking for, but also, how you, you know, you can put in your competitor’s URLs and see how they’re doing as well, and get a reality check. So that laser beam focus and the narrowing down is sort of the first big, effort and reality sometimes is a bummer, but you’ve just got to confront reality and say, okay, I’m on page 42 phrase, but I want to be on page one and a in slot one, but, I’ve got a long, you know, long road to go, but there you go.
[00:09:33] I mean, that’s, that’s kind of, the reality is important to get after. So.
[00:09:37] Michael: I like the fact that you started with the aspiration though. I think it is good to go after your dream in stages. A bit like me attempting to one day, run a marathon in some kind of civilized time and doing a 10 K first and then a half marathon.
[00:09:49] And I think, it, it’s good to start without, but it’s equally good to be realistic that if you’re on page 42, then page one is not beckoning and we’ve all been there with that one. I’ve got a couple of other tools to suggest, that I’ve used, key w K w find a.com by Mongols, actually a suite of different tools.
[00:10:05] Something like 30 us dollars a month. I used it for a while and just stopped because I didn’t have time to implement my findings, but I find it very straightforward to use. I guess, that the sort of industry standard one seems to be H ref C H R E F for Freddy S for sugar.com, which is around sort of a hundred bucks a month.
[00:10:20] And there’s a lot of information there. So it might be over the top, but it’s something else worth considering I think, are those tools you’ve ever come across or any thoughts about those?
[00:10:29] Jason: I love them. Yeah, absolutely. Yep. And everybody kind of ha you end up with your own kind of go-to mental path for the research and, there, but these are great resources and yeah, I love those.
[00:10:38] So you’ll want to, you’ll want to just, you know, bookmark those saved some of those and then over time, build that ideal set of. You know, key search keyword searches and phrases and competition, and kind of, you know, I would think that probably a good way to do this as to go after with a Google sheet or a, you know, Excel file where you kind of keep track of, of things.
[00:10:57] And, so, so there you go. That’s the first big, you know, step in the journey is a reality and a focus on a specific goal. Second big, step in the journey is then to begin to tune your website for going after that keyword or key phrase. And this is where the marathon behavior comes in. You know, that keyword work and goal goals.
[00:11:19] And step number one might take you an hour or two, but the step two here, this tuning your web. To rank that is the marathon that might take you months or years. And, and it will take you months and years because it’s sort of a, never-ending, you know, you’re, you’re signing up for a never-ending chore or, or work when you want to do this.
[00:11:39] And that’s just the reality. And if you don’t want to sign up for that reality, then peace out, to try something else. But for Google organic search, it is a long journey in the same direction. As one author title, his book wants, I love that phrase long, long journey in the same direction.
[00:11:58] Michael: Yeah. And this is an important thing to say because actually I think I’m very guilty and I’m not the only person that I’ve met in this space of doing a long journey, but in 15 different directions.
[00:12:07] So views of maps on Google maps, it would like my running app would look like a sort of star shape, but Ramos and I started going one direction for meaningful periods. And I think that’s what you just said. That’s, it’s so easy to say, but it’s a mentality thing that you’ve got to. Decide either you’re in or peace out, but there’s not much point in sort of doing Google SEO for a month because it’s unlikely to see results, I guess.
[00:12:32] I mean, I’m saying that, unless you’ve got something different, so where do we do this? Is, is it on, do we, where we even start on the website? Is it always about the homepage or just product detail pages or how do you approach that? Yeah,
[00:12:45] Jason: Th the short answer is all the pages. And so what you want to do is have your homepage be optimized for the keyword or key phrase.
[00:12:52] And, and, you know, that’s, there, there are a few common things that are obvious. If you have the key phrase or keyword in your URL, Then thumbs up for you. I mean, it just is very helpful if you don’t, then you have to have a secondary association with that key phrase and your URL and the content on your site.
[00:13:13] So having the, the key phrase in your URL is very handy, which is why very, you know, kind of, specific descriptive brands are helpful, frequently, if you can do that, but if you’re already past that stage and you’ve already got a brand that’s out there, and it’s water under the bridge, then you’re going to have to just work through having your homepage, be tuned to use that word or phrase, in very, meaningful and deliberate ways.
[00:13:36] Content on your homepage that can include, that would be things like, your, alt image tags on your images. That’s an under utilized space. Your, H one tags. So like your header tags on your Shopify site, if you don’t know what that is, you can go learn about it. You want to have, your collections names, like names of your collections or names of your featured products.
[00:13:56] Ideally use the key phrase so that you, when people look at your homepage, they’re like, oh, I get this just organic. And like, you know, visually they scan it and they’re like, this is about whatever it is. And, and Google, it will do likewise with its, you know, crawling of your site where they regularly do that.
[00:14:12] So that’s a simplistic first view of the homepage. You can also do things like, have, reviews through, covet, pics, or, stamped IO, or other apps that play. Customer reviews on your homepage, with text that’s very helpful because then they, then the customers are writing these sentences and phrases that are ideally centered on your ideal keyword or key phrase.
[00:14:36] And so these are homepage, approaches. You’re gonna have a section in your home page. It’s something about your mission or who you are, what you do, just a little, you know, narrative, narrative, narrative, paragraph, somewhere, nicely format on your homepage. The. Twist that people mess up on is they’ll put things on their homepage.
[00:14:54] That’s an image and Google doesn’t read an image like your viewers to on your website. Google’s looking for a text-based, you know, information input. So you’ve got to have, all your images, serving both the visual viewer of your site, as well as Google. And so again, the all damage tags is an important piece of that.
[00:15:14] And even naming, naming the image files, a lot of people will do this as well. They’ll name the image files with the keyword or key phrase in the actual name of the file. And, so, so just simple things like that can help on the homepage, obviously in your footer section of the homepage, you want to pay attention to that in the menu.
[00:15:33] Of your homepage. You want to pay attention to that. And all of it again is tuned to your north star, not in a ridiculous keyword stuffing, you know, stupid way, but it’s gotta be logical and it’s gotta be a way that’s appealing to customers, but also, you know, clearly telegraphs to Google what you’re doing.
[00:15:50] So there you go. And then all of the pages on your site beyond that, your collections pages, your product pages, your blog posts, everything on your site. You want to have, done in light of this primary key phrase or keyword idea that you’re trying to rank for. And it’s, so it’s really, it’s like tuning a piano or tuning a guitar.
[00:16:10] I mean, you want to be, you want to use all the various components of it to get focused. And if you’ve got a big site already and you’re unfocused, it can be a lot of rework. If you’re just starting out, you just want to have this top of mind and be like, okay, this new blog post or this new collection page, or this new whatever needs to serve my, my organic keyword purpose.
[00:16:33] Your thoughts on that?
[00:16:34] Michael: It’s, it sounds like a lot of work, but on the other hand, it’s very clear. So this is really, really helpful. Very, very simple, actionable stuff for the home page. And it does sound like more like tuning a piano, which has surveyed check keys. And I don’t know how many, 150 strings or something, and actually an a graduate level job it’s actually really skilled.
[00:16:51] And it does sound very similar. It’s be very helpful to most people I’m more familiar with kind of cheating as people probably won’t, but, you know, but it does sound like this shoe. I like the idea of tuning. And I guess, one question I’ve got for you then is simply say if let’s take an example, if we’re after the word, I don’t know, couture dolls, clothes, or I don’t know what sort of thing you might target and pixie fan, for example, then would you literally have that keyword appear multiple times in every single page on the site?
[00:17:18] Or how do you actually kind of do
[00:17:19] Jason: that? Yeah, there’s a phrase that the, folks use the called keyword stuffing, which is basically a native. Connotation or phrase, and you don’t want to do that where you just cram the keyword in over and over, or, you know, densely packed the keyword. What you want to do is have well-written, content, and, but you want to have it be centered around the keyword or key phrase.
[00:17:41] And so it’s a dance, you know, it’s a balancing act. And so, you know, you you’ll want to think through how to have it be appropriate for readers and use the right phrases. And so, so you don’t want to keyword stuff, but you want to have it thoroughly included. And so the truth is, or the re the, the, the wisdom is somewhere in between those ideas, in terms of blog content, that’s one place that you really can hit home runs.
[00:18:05] Blog content can be, Very consumed by Google, very highly, you know, ranked, for, if done, right. The best practices. And again, Neil Patel is a great go-to resource for how best to go after this. But best practice for blogging, looks something like a 15 to 1800 word, long form blog posts.
[00:18:25] That includes a thorough overview of a specific topic with subheads that are relevant to the primary question or issue and, good, solid, links to other sites images as well. And then, of course, a narrative, text of know, and that’s quite a bit of writing 1500 to 1800 words. And the reason that’s recommended is because.
[00:18:49] Nerds have geeked out over this and really observe what Google is preferring and what Google prefers. Statistically is long form blog posts like that. And you might not like that. You might as a consumer, not want to look at a blog post like that, but this is what Google prefers, not what you prefer, it’s what they serve.
[00:19:09] And that statistically is the case. So, so that’s something to think about is, you know, maybe having a few, they call them authority, blog posts, where you really crush it on, you know, one central con concept or idea related to your keyword or key phrase and have a post that you then, tend to over time, not like a one and done.
[00:19:31] See you later. I talked about it five years ago. I’m never going to talk about it again. The best people in the world on this do these long authority, long form blog posts, and they curate them and tune them themselves, themselves as a content piece. You know, a couple of times a year. And they buy that refreshing effort, why they update it, they also get Google’s attention and, and that is a tried and true path.
[00:19:54] Listicles also work very well as a. Or page a content component listicle is, you know, 10 best ways to cook rice or, you know, the five best restaurants in London or, you know, the 14 best places to retire. Google loves those. They rank frequently very, very highly in Google search results. And you will all know this.
[00:20:16] If you just go poke around on Google for different phrases or words, you’ll see these very commonly are displayed. And so YouTube can take advantage of that and create listicles, on, you know, on your, your website. I will say that, Well, go ahead. Sorry. I’m just blathering on here. Michael, what are your thoughts?
[00:20:31] Well,
[00:20:32] Michael: on the contrary, I think you’re giving tons of extremely practical advice. I think this is excellent. Not much to say, except that my experience as a Google user is interesting for certain types of topics. It seems like the best ranking content is from 2015 or something. And often it’s something like how to, for example, I was trying to work out if I could schedule or schedule my Facebook posts on my.
[00:20:53] Facebook profile, by the way, if you’re trying this, my experience is you can’t, but please let me know if you can. But, one of those things that I found is quite frustrating because, the stuff up there was kind of ranking well was from two, three years ago. And so I think that this effort to refresh stuff, is really basic.
[00:21:09] If you think about it from the consumer point of view consuming content in this point of view, that we want something that’s relevant to today’s world and things change very quickly in therefore, being out of date might actually, you know, even if Google likes it temporarily, not do any favors with your, you know, searches and view it.
[00:21:24] Yeah.
[00:21:25] Jason: It can be very frustrating to be working on. On great content and have a great product and really be trying your best to serve customers with fresh new, you know, things of interest. And then looking at the keywords results and seeing a site that was built in 2002, that looks like, you know, it was built in 1994 and it’s ranked number one and you’re like, come on Google.
[00:21:51] They’re not even trying, but, but Google’s algorithm, you know, keys in on a bunch of things like the age of the domain and, authority backlinks from other sites and some of those things, which is why. At the beginning, this is a marathon, not a sprint. Some of those things, do not develop overnight.
[00:22:09] And unfortunately for you, if you’re competing against a well entrenched, keyword competitor, and they’re very old and mature, they’re going to have those components that you simply cannot recreate. And so that’s a challenge. And so that’s where the BA it’s a L it’s a war of attrition and, you know, a real battle, ensues and that’s rally, you’re signing up for a war, against those kinds of players.
[00:22:32] I will say that there’s some tricks of the trade. If you can’t be number one in Google organic search, the second best thing is to be number one inside number one. And here’s what I mean by that. Many, many searches nowadays are listicles and they’re listicles of, interesting things, frequently it’s products.
[00:22:52] And, if you can be including. As the number one item in the list for the site that is ranking for the number one slot in Google for your key phrase, then you win, even though you’re not winning, if that makes sense. So for example, here’s a practical example. The spruce.com is a very well entrenched number one results, generating machine they’re, a lifestyle, blog tool.
[00:23:19] It’s built by a company called dot dash. These people are eating the internet. They know what they’re doing in terms of long form blog, content and listicles and frequently. You’ll see if you search for a keyword or key phrase, the spruce.com or related dot dash websites, ranking number one. And if you click on those, you’ll say, it’ll say something like the seven best soaps or the six best, yoga mats.
[00:23:44] And, and your opportunity then is to. In that list. This happens across the internet, across Google in many, many categories. And here’s the trick behind the work. Those blog posts again are curated they’re there they’re tended to every six months or whatever by those companies. And they cite who the blogger is.
[00:24:07] There’s no reason you can’t reach out to that person and be like, Hey, so, so awesome to see your number one, you know, a blog article for such and such. If, and when the time is right for you to update the post wanted to let you know that we too are in that space and have more reviews than anyone else, or have awesome, you know, reviews or blah, blah, blah, whatever, make your pitch to the blogger.
[00:24:29] And there’s no reason you can’t do that. I, I encourage our clients to do this all the time. We have done this. These are real people writing for. Websites. And, they’re like a reporter in a way. And if you get on their radar, you can be included. The other thing that can happen is, and this is true in our case for some of our work is we’re included in those lists, but not in the ideal way for us.
[00:24:52] So in other words, those authority bloggers just, just threw us in there. And so film’s up for that, but it’s not to the right URL or not the right, you know, wording or whatever. And that too is an opportunity to go back to those people and be like, Hey, we’re so grateful. You included us. It’s amazing.
[00:25:11] We’re honored or humbled. W we just wanted to introduce ourselves, BTW, if you wanted to tune it up a bit, next time you refresh, you can send people to this URL instead, and you know, you’ve got to word it coolly and be smart and all that, but that is a back door to number one. For many, many keywords or key phrases.
[00:25:32] So that’s marketing gold, I’ll charge you zero for that pro tip, but that is a pro tip that really can get you a higher up in the rankings than you otherwise could get on your own. It’s sort of a, it’s sort of a Trojan horse deal, I guess if we’re using the war metaphor. Yeah.
[00:25:47] Michael: Wow. That’s so smart. And as soon as you say it sounds obvious, this is always that way with good wisdom, I think is that as soon as somebody said it, it sounds obvious, but you’d never thought of it in your life before.
[00:25:56] And that’s absolutely true. I really liked that. And by the way, if you’ve got any kind of traffic and when I get reached out to very often by people, who’ve, we got links to from amazing FBA is not the greatest site, which is to put it mildly in terms of its SEO organization. But it has a ton of links to a lot of things.
[00:26:13] And we get a lot of people reaching out to do exactly that same thing. And generally I will get my assistant. She needs to, to, you know, to say yes, I mean, sometimes I’ll ask for a favor to get a back link. Small question on that, I guess. Well, we’re talking backlinks, so I guess we’re sort of getting into that, that area we say rather than get down the rabbit hole.
[00:26:32] Jason: Yeah. Big, big, big bucket. Number three here on our journey, the big, big work, step number three is work on authority back links from high authority sites. And if you’re not familiar with, you know, site authority and, that kind of thing, then you can geek out over that and learn which sites have, high page rank and authority in your industry or categories and, and beyond, but suffice it to say, and we all realize if you get featured in USA today or New York times, or you get a link from them or other large and trusted, you know, legacy content providers on the internet, it’s going to do a good thing for you.
[00:27:12] And it won’t just do a good thing for you in the burst of traffic you’ll receive. It’ll do a good thing for you in the. Signaling that Google receives, because then they’ve just, got the association from, an authority site that, tells them that you two are a trusted, you know, provider resource, whatever, whatever.
[00:27:35] And so that authority backlink as they call it is incredibly valuable. There are a lot of ways to go after that. I just mentioned the dot dash, and the spruce, you know, ideas and trying to reach out to bloggers or people who are doing listicles. That work is one way to go about it. There are, you know, other things you can do including doing, earned media work, where you reach out to, you know, reporters, that kind of thing, a tool that’s very helpful in that regard is help a reporter out here.
[00:28:07] You can sign up for help a reporter out or have somebody on your team, you know, look at it every day, sign up for it as a company, I guess you could say, and then assign it to somebody and, help a reporter out is basically a marketplace of ideas for reporters who are looking for stories, quotes, information on specific, you know, articles that they’re working on.
[00:28:28] And you too can be a helper to the reporter. And the outcome of that help is that they will cite you in their, in their article and frequently, those are big shot companies. And so if you’re looking for authority, backlinks, Legitimate, you know, real kind of work. That’s not black hats, spammy weirdo type stuff.
[00:28:50] Then go help her reporter to help a reporter out. And you’ll be, you’ll be rewarded with back links. And so those are, those are two tips, direct reach out to somebody that’s a blogger or listicle maker on like the spruce or dot dash. And then the helper reporter out methodology, different way to go about it.
[00:29:07] Yeah. I like
[00:29:08] Michael: this under, I have to say that whenever a friend of mine in this of Amazon space appears in an article like that ill. So I must say he gives great credibility, even if you know the person. And they’re saying stuff you knew, they told you last week, there is some mental thing about a big name, third party.
[00:29:24] Endorsing some of these comments that has an effect, even for those who know them. So I think that’s a, just a reminder of just how powerful that is in terms of, yeah, not just SEO, but also how you’re viewed by, you know, readers and viewers. By the way, one thing we’ve, we’ve not mentioned is we were talking about reading a lot, but we haven’t mentioned really videos.
[00:29:43] And I guess that a lot of the results that I see on, on the search engine results pages are video. So, I guess we’ve, we sort of jumping back for a second to tuning your website to how do we deal with that? Huge,
[00:29:54] Jason: yeah, good question. We skipped over a couple things, I think, in our little outline here, but it’s, it’s a good question.
[00:29:59] And the part of the work that you want to go down in terms of a rabbit hole is to look at all the Google. Search results pages. So when you, you know, just go use Google, you’ll see that there’s, images that they want to display and show you as a result, there are shopping, there’s you know, Google shopping and there’s, videos and news.
[00:30:20] And so those each have a different path that you want to, tune yourself up for. The Google shopping can be a boon. I mean that a lot of a Shopify store owners that we work with, Kyle and I work with, if they don’t have their Google shopping feed tuned up and set up correctly, it’s one of the first things we do.
[00:30:39] It’s just like so obvious. This is like, okay, all right. You know, is that rigged up correctly? No, it’s not. Oh, okay. Let’s do that right now. You know, because it’s a huge, huge benefit. If you can, if you can populate your, you know, product image, highly in, in the, you know, the shopping. Then, it can be a huge, you know, a benefit to you.
[00:30:58] So, so, but there are other strategies, you know, for video versus the news articles, that kind of thing. So that’s part of tuning your site in my view, and your content for the full presentation or display on Google search results. Yet, it’s a key thing. One of the things we didn’t talk about in that regard for, at the beginning of the show, the work that the first stage in the list, if I can circle back to that one is you really want to think about what keyword or key phrase you’re in the mind of your customer is a, a buying word versus a non buying word.
[00:31:32] In other words, if I searched for, new Rolex, am I buying. Or am I just a researcher wondering about the category known as Rolex watches. And so you want to learn in the mind of your customer, what words or phrases they’re going to use that are the, I want to buy something words, not just the, I want to learn something words and of course Google and in particular, YouTube as well, they can be packed with people who just want to learn something and they have no interest in buying.
[00:32:04] And so you don’t want to camp on a non buying keyword or key phrase. So I should’ve said that at the beginning and I skipped over that. It’s a really central idea for your initial keyword or key phrase, work. And, it can mean all the difference really in terms of your outcomes. Yeah.
[00:32:19] Michael: Yeah. It’s a very good point.
[00:32:20] Thanks for, for, putting that in now. I guess. This is a big area, but just to briefly touch on it, I’ve heard that from the most SEO experts, I don’t think in terms of a funnel. So there’s the top of the funnel, for example, what is a Rolodex cleaner, not somebody who’s going to fork out 3000 or whatever it is dollars for it, versus, you know, best price for Rolex, very specific type watch, which is a very clear buying word.
[00:32:43] So, how do we sort of deal with that in the simplest way? Because it’s a broad overview I
[00:32:48] Jason: realized. Yeah, no, the question is a great one. And so you’ll hear the, the phrase long tail keywords, have come up. And so for every keyword, and you know, when you’re picking your keyword key phrases you want to camp on, then there’s derivative sets of associated words or phrases that are referred to as the long tail keywords or key phrases.
[00:33:07] So, you know, if the phrase to use a silly one is buy a Rolex right now, or where can I buy a Rolex today? Then the, that’s the key word or key phrase you want to camp out or not whatever, but the long tail versions of that would be, you know, where can I buy a Rolex today in London or where can I buy a Rolex today in Seattle, Washington, or, where can I buy a Rolex today?
[00:33:33] Whatever you get the idea. And so these long-term words or phrases are derivative ideas. These are the things that you want to also include in all of your work. You know, it’s sort of that north star, you know, in terms of the, you know, your Mariner’s path out on the ocean that you’re shooting for, but then you’ve got these little, second.
[00:33:50] Flashes of light that you want to, you know, drill into and, and that sort of the idea, one key word or key phrase to camp on is not really one key word or key phrase. It’s, it’s a terminal goal that then has lots of other associated phrases and words that will immediately become clear and make sense.
[00:34:09] Michael: So would you suggest that for certain pages, you’d be trying to capture the searchers who are still earlier at higher up the funnel. If you want to put it that way, that they are still considering what is a role it’s, how do I decide where to buy it? Or, you know, what are the different models in which is the best one to go for, as opposed to where do I buy it?
[00:34:27] What’s the best deal. Those kind of be it buyer keywords. How do we organize that across the sites? Most
[00:34:33] Jason: people who do this work for the longterm, realize that it’s obviously much easier to rank for a long tail keyword and the aggregation of those successful ranks can lead to the. Playground. So in, I guess, American baseball terms, you know, if you’re, if you’ve got, if you winning at the single a level with long-term key phrases, and you know, kind of the junior leagues or the Bush leagues, and you can win, win, win all the time, then you start to realize, okay, these are, these are small key phrases that I’m winning for.
[00:35:05] What are the bigger key phrases and they can compound and stack. And so, and that’s what will happen if you do this work for a long time, you’ll start to see that you rank for specific long-term long, long tail key phrases. But not for the, maybe the one you wanted, the biggie, you know, the big prize.
[00:35:21] And so that’s just the nature of the work. You start to build your system to win specific search result outcomes. And, towards that north star, No goal. And that’s kind of how you think about it and go after it. And so, for example, if, if you, you know, have a content strategy that looks like winning a again, buy a Rolex today.
[00:35:41] You might have, a blog article that says, you know, six ways to buy a Rolex today in London and walk home happy. You know, that article would rank for something, for some phrase and, and, so then, you know, so you win that and then you’d have other blog content or pieces that, and you know, you’ve got people on your site now, maybe it’s just a few people on your site from that, but, it gets you in the game and then you start to see what else you can rank for Uber.
[00:36:05] Suggest again, is a great tool for, for that.
[00:36:06] Wrapup: Hey folks. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the e-commerce leader. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I do. I think Jason just fired out so much value today is really worth going back over and really having a listen. By the way, I should mention that at the e-commerce leader.com, we keep it very simple.
[00:36:25] Bullet points notes. And we also keep the resources and there are several resources that were mentioned today that you’ll find helpful in this quite technical area, I think, but we also have a transcript of each and every single podcast at which I think in an episode like today, you’d be very well advised to go and download, to go to the e-commerce leader.com and we’ve also organized things via different.
[00:36:46] Strategy sort of areas that we’re covering today’s was traffic strategy. So just thought I’d mentioned that because there were lots and lots of great things that I think we got from Jason today. The laser beam focus on one keyboard or phrase, not just per web page, which was something I was familiar with as a concept and have tried to implement it in whatever SEO work I’ve done, but if your entire website, which is quite radical for me.
[00:37:08] And I think this is really, really great To focus your mind and force you to make decisions I’m considering buying versus non buying keywords as well. When we’re thinking about what keywords to target is also a key thing and how we deal with the different parts of the funnel, really. It seems like Jason’s strategy is to think about short.
[00:37:25] Sort of medium, a long tail keywords as steps towards ranking for your killer keyword, like, you know, buy a Rolex. Now was our sort of famous example today. The other thing was talking about tuning a website content to rank for that keyword phrase or on page SEO. I understand it’s called Some great, great tips on the home page, having the keyword in the URL, content and home page in all tags, lots of different things, which I would suggest you check out from the transcript at the e-commerce leader.com websites.
[00:37:56] What else did we have that really? If you can’t rank directly, number one on Google, because you’re doing. Tough competition, getting ranked number one in 90 list within that top ranked site is a super smart hack, which I really, really liked. So those were the highlights for me. Lots of things I think are worth checking out as ever folks.
[00:38:16] We will be doing our very, very best to bring you the. Strategy advice, I guess you could broadly call it sort of high-level stuff, but also very actionable today. I thought it was particularly actionable from Jason. So if you enjoy this stuff, don’t forget to subscribe on your podcast player of choice.
[00:38:32] You can join a very steadily growing stream of subscribers we can see, which is great. Spotify is one place you can do it. Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, whatever it is that run many, many platforms now. And the other thing. Obviously on apple podcasts, if you can give us a rating, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 stars, that would be really, really helpful to enable other people, to discover the podcast and to trust that it delivers what it says on the tin, which is to make you the best e-commerce data.
[00:38:59] You can be. The other thing I’d like to just flag up is that we’re moving into what we’re calling our season three of the podcast, and we’re very excited to bring. In some special sort of standing guests and a panel of people, we’re going to reveal more about it, but they’re going to also be using an app, which I was going to reveal, but I won’t reveal that yet either just tease it out there to say that we will be getting a lot more interactive in our third season and bringing in some, some really super powerful big players in the e-commerce basis stay tuned.
[00:39:29] And he wants to be kept up to date about that. Obviously the best way is to keep listening to the podcast. Thanks so much for. And look forward to seeing you or speaking to you in the.
[00:39:39]