Think SEO is dead in the age of AI? Think again. While ChatGPT referral traffic surged 112% month-over-month across e-commerce sites, Google still commands 99% of search market share and processes 13.6 billion queries daily. Jeff Oxford, SEO expert and founder of 180 Marketing, reveals why smart brands are doubling down on search optimization—and how the strategies that work for Google are also positioning companies to dominate in AI search results. From his data analysis of 152 SEO campaigns showing consistent 75% traffic growth, to the "ranking factor leak" that exposed Google's true algorithm priorities, Jeff breaks down the exact 4-bucket framework that's still generating millions in revenue for e-commerce brands.
Key Topics & Lessons:
- The State of Search in 2025 - Why Google's 13.6 billion daily queries represent a 64% increase from 2024, how ChatGPT traffic grew 112% month-over-month (but still represents only 1-3% of total traffic), and why the "Google is dead" narrative is premature despite real AI disruption
- The 4-Bucket SEO Framework - Jeff's systematic approach covering Technical SEO (mostly handled by Shopify), Page Optimization (title tags, meta descriptions, headers), Content Strategy (200-300 words on category pages), and Link Building (the 0.3 correlation factor that still dominates rankings)
- What Really Moves the Needle - Data from 152 campaigns showing 20% growth at 3 months, 50% at 6 months, and 75% at 12 months, plus insights from Google's leaked ranking documents revealing click-through rate as a massive ranking factor
- The Great Blog Apocalypse of 2023 - Why standalone content sites lost 90% of their traffic while e-commerce stores with blogs thrived, how Google's "helpful content" update rewarded real businesses over affiliate spam, and Jeff's theory about Google My Business as a ranking signal
- AI SEO Optimization Strategy - How to reverse-engineer ChatGPT sources to identify link targets, why product roundups have a 0.45 correlation with AI citations (higher than traditional backlinks), and the overlap between traditional SEO and AI optimization
- The Future of Automated SEO - Jeff's experiment building a fully autonomous AI agency with zero human account managers, AI tools that can screenshot pages and generate optimized title tags, and how Gemini 2.5 Pro is changing the automation game
—
Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!
—
Chapters:
(00:00) The Relevance of SEO in the Age of AI
(12:38) The 4 Components of SEO
(16:19) What Is the Payoff for SEO?
(20:22) Breaking Down Technical SEO
(23:43) On-Page SEO and Meta Descriptions
(25:58) Content Optimization Strategies
(33:27) Link Building
(38:30) AI and SEO: The Future of Search
—
Connect With Brett:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce
- Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/
Relevant Links:
- Jeff’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-oxford
- 180 Marketing: https://www.180marketing.com/
_
Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer,...
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
The tricky part is deciphering a good
(00:04):
backlink from a bad one. Solet's say you have two blogs.
Trying to determine which blog is goingto be helpful and which is going to be
harmful is extremely difficult.
Well, hello and welcome to another editionof the E-Commerce Evolution podcast.
(00:28):
I'm your host, BrettCurry, CEO of OMG Commerce.
And today we've gotJeff Oxford on the show,
and we're talking about SEO search engine
optimization. Going to weave insome ai, some AI optimization,
but you may be thinking what,is anybody still searching?
Is anybody still talking about SEOthese days? Isn't everything ai?
(00:51):
And have we got some insights for you?
Because the good news isif you're doing good SEO,
it's going to help with AI as well,and I can stay with authority.
SEO is not dead. And so with that,Jeff, welcome to the show, man.
And how's it going? It's going great,Brett. Thanks for having me. Yeah, dude,
it was awesome.
(01:11):
Connecting at Steve Chu and Tony Airbox,
event Seller Summit Fort Lauderdale,one of my favorite events.
And I think you've spoken theremultiple times as well, correct?
You're kind of a.
Radio. Yeah, this is mythird time speaking there.
Nice, nice. And you talked about SEO.
I sat in on your talk. I loved it.
(01:33):
What a lot of people don't know isthat actually at the very beginning,
so OMG is now 15 years old.
The first service we offered Jeff,SEO, really SEO for local companies.
It was just something we knew, somethingwe liked. I was a search engine nerd,
and so a business partner loved it aswell. And so that's what we did. Yep.
Search engine optimization. That led toGoogle search, led to Google Shopping.
(01:56):
I had a video background that led toYouTube, but in the beginning, SEO baby.
Okay, so we can go deep inthe trenches. It sounds like.
The We can totally nerd out for sure. Now,
I have not been in the SEOgame in detail recently,
but I still keep up. I canstill talk shop for sure.
But why SEO as a topic now?
(02:16):
And was that just something that Steve,the VIN organizer was interested in,
or were there a lot of requestsfor it? Why SEO as a topic?
So I guess a little behind the scenes ofwhat happened with that is he was also,
he was asking me about AIoptimization chat, GPT optimization.
And this is after wealready got SEO O in there,
but we're kind of at apossible paradigm shift of how
(02:39):
people are searching. Ifwe just look at right now,
June, 2025 as a data point,we just freeze this chat.
Google is still the 800 pound gorilla.
It still has 99 some ridiculousamount of market share.
Chad GD maybe has one to 2% maybe
(03:00):
of the search.
So this snapshot in time SEO is still just
kicking butt, makingcompanies millions of dollars.
But the trend is what getspeople talking about chat.
Yes, it's 1%, maybe one to 2% now,
but a year or two ago it was 0.1%.
(03:23):
And I mean, I can actuallydrop some stats for you.
So being an e-commerce SEO company,
we have access to a lot ofGoogle Analytics accounts,
and I had my VA a few last week.
He went through all ofour analytics accounts.
He looked at how muchreferrals our clients,
our e-commerce clients got fromchat GBT in April versus May to
(03:46):
see what's the.
Fluctuation. Okay, greatcomparison. Love that.
112% Increase in referraltraffic from month to month.
Yeah, from month to month. Wow.
Yeah. And I can evenNow, did he also look at,
and not to get too far ahead of you here,
but did he also look at what percentageof overall traffic came from chat?
Jt? Not impressive. We're talkinglike most clients, it was one to 2%.
(04:09):
But there are some e-commercestores that we're seeing
where chat GT is up to like 20%.
Whoa, that's significant.
Of course, it depends on your niche.
It depends on how muchcontent marketing you've done,
how much blogging you've done,
how much do you have enoughstuff to get cited and chat GPT?
But just if we're just looking at thee-commerce world and averages from this
(04:33):
dataset, yeah, it was about a littleover a hundred percent month over month.
And then average across,
this was about just shy of 300visits a month from chat GBT.
Interesting. And how does thatcompare to Google, Google Organic and.
Google paid, or did you dothat comparison? Luckily, I have those stats here.
(04:54):
I mean, Google's, I don't havethe month over month for Google,
but because it's probablypretty steady, I would assume
similar data point would befor 2024, we took a sample of,
I went over this to mytalk, but we took a sample,
like 80 e-commerce sites that wehave Google Analytics access to,
and also have Google search consoleaccess to. And across these,
(05:17):
you want to see what's the highestperforming channel on Google Analytics.
And number one outside of direct,which just means it's not attributed,
but number one was non-brand organicsearch, followed by paid search,
followed by organic shopping. Soyeah, it's one of those things where,
yes, if we freeze this point in time,
SEO is still the numberone top performing channel,
(05:39):
even non-branded SEO ornon-branded search traffic.
But the tides are shifting a bit.
I was just on a call with a clientearlier today who sells refurbished
computers, and we were looking atsome of their AI referral stats,
and they've already,
this year have had 23 in from chat GBT. So
(06:01):
everyone should be payingattention to the trend
I live in here in Bend, Oregon,where we have the last blockbuster.
And if you're, you stillhave a blockbuster,
we have the last blockbuster on earth.
We were just talking about that.So my oldest kids are 23 and 20,
and so they still rememberwhen they were little,
we still would go to the videostore. There weren't a ton of 'em.
(06:21):
It wasn't super popular, sawred box and stuff like that.
But there was something magical aboutwalking the aisles of a blockbuster.
Maybe they didn't havewhat you were looking for,
but that was all part of the fun.
So we were reminiscing andmissing the video store days.
Yeah, come to Bend, you can get a T-shirtand take a look, see what they have.
So okay, there's quickdive diversion here,
(06:43):
but how's business atthe last Blockbuster?
Do people come from nostalgiato buy? Gees, a tourist.
Attraction now? It's kind what? It's,yeah, it's all about the nostalgia.
You can get some merchandise and theystill have the big blockbuster sign
outside front and they putlittle marquee letters on it.
Super fun.
(07:04):
So I guess the question is,
will Google and SEO one daygo the way of Blockbuster
far off in the future? We don'tknow, but I think we could say, Jeff,
the demise of Googleright now is potentially.
Overhyped. What? Say you about that.I mean, no matter how this plays out,
Google's going to be fine.Google has a corporation,
(07:27):
they've got the infrastructure,
they have all the best AIresearchers in the world.
Their new Gemini 2.5 Promodel is just killer.
It's insane. They've been play with a lot.
Yeah, they've really caughtup to the AI race quickly.
So props to them.
The big question though is what aboutsearch these 10 blue links that we have on
page one? Are we still goingto be searching that way?
(07:50):
And there's a big question mark there.
Google's now testing theirAI mode where it changes the
homepage of Google insteadof having a search box,
it's now a conversation box more similarto chat GPT right now that's just
in testing. So we don't know what'sgoing to come out of that test.
Is Google going to be like, oh,wow, the engagement's way higher,
(08:12):
people are staying on our site longer,we're going to make this the default,
or are they going to be like,ah, people don't trust it yet,
there's still some hallucinations.
We're still the best experienceand they're going to stick to how it's now? It's
a big question mark,
but the one part of it that no one reallytalks about that's so key is just the
processing cost to serve a query.
(08:33):
So if you go into Google and you type in,
let's just say what arethe best gaming laptops?
What Google can process thatquickly, it pulls from their index,
it has temp links. Great.If you're on AI mode's,
it'll pull five to seven queries.
It will then have to pull in all thisprocessing abilities from the LLM to
(08:57):
process the results and then serve it up.
So their cost per query isgoing to go up a lot. Now,
Google are the kings of infrastructureand servers and data centers,
and so they'll be able to getthese costs down over time.
But if their cost per querygoes way up and their ads,
the revenue per query goesdown because there's less ads,
(09:17):
it starts to not makefinancial sense for them.
So even if the user experienceis perfect and way better,
I'm sure they're going to be balancingout the financial viability of moving to
a more of an AI focused search result.
Yeah, it's a really good call out.
And we got to remember that It'slike 80 90% of Google's revenue is
(09:38):
from search ads or query-based ads,
and you could argue that a largerpercentage of their profits come.
From this. Oh, okay. Profits. Yeah,profits are probably way more than that.
Yeah. Yeah, which is super interesting.
And so a couple setsthat I was looking at,
because I was curiousabout this too, right?
An executive at Apple recentlysaid, Hey, for the first time ever,
(09:59):
we saw fewer searches,
fewer Google searches onSafari was the caveat.
Google, however, released some data.
They did not commenton Safari specifically,
which would lead you to believe that wasprobably true. But they did say, Hey,
we're seeing increased searchvolume across all platforms,
including Apple users. And so what'sinteresting, I looked at this.
(10:20):
If you look at dailysearch queries on Google,
8.3 billion a day in2024 and now averaging
13.6 billion a day in 2025.
So that is a massive leap. And justfrom the financials just to say, Hey,
Google's going to be able to keepthe lights on for a little bit.
Earnings are up 12% yearover year. They had a beat.
(10:43):
So their projections or their guidancethey gave to Wall Street, they beat it.
So things are good from that regardfrom standpoint and what Google has
said, and I was at Google MarketingLive, what Google has said is that, Hey,
the AI mode, that's part of what'sdriving this increase in searches.
But your point is spot on whereit's heard different estimates,
but it's a multiple higherto in terms of compute costs.
(11:08):
To.
Generate those AI mode resultsthan it is just a normal
query. And so Google's going to haveto figure that out. I think they will.
I think they'll be able to incorporateads in a pretty unique and pretty clever
way. And so listen,
I think there's some existentialthreats facing Google.
There's also the antitrustlawsuit and things like that.
(11:28):
And so the future is not super clear,
but I do think Google's going tobe able to figure it out. And yeah,
you mentioned AI scientists in 2015,
that's when Google bought Deep Mind,
which is one of the leading AIresearch companies on the planet.
Some of those top researchers, topscientists are still at Google.
(11:48):
I think they've got thebest team. And so yeah,
I think they'll be able to figure itout. But it is interesting, right?
It is an interesting season right now.
And so any other points on that,
on Google's demise or what the futureis going to hold for them before we get
into some tactical stuff?
Yeah, I think that pretty much covers.
I mean at this point it's no longer aninfrastructure issue with data centers
(12:11):
and servers. It's no longera software issue with LLMs.
They have all that. It's reallyjust a user experience UI issue.
How do they take this all andgive the right user experience?
So we'll see what comes up with AI mode.It'll be interesting. It'll be really.
Interesting to watch. For sure,for sure. So came in super good.
I'm excited about it.
(12:31):
Why don't we do this before wetalk about SEO and AI optimization?
They do go hand in hand.
Let's back up a little bit and talkabout what are the components of SEO.
So I know in the early days we wouldalways talk, Hey, there's technical SEO,
and there's onsite SEO, andthen there's offsite, SEO.
How would you define though SEO nowand what are the big components of.
(12:55):
It?
I have what I call the four bucketsor four components of SEO you already
mentioned. Some of 'em, technical,SEO number one can Google crawl.
Your website is your insightindexable. This is site maps.
This is robots tech structured data,
basically making sure Googlecan crawl all your pages,
(13:16):
can index all your pages and you don'thave any issues that's going to slow down
or hurt your ranking. So that's technical.
SEO number two is page optimization.
This is making sure of your keyword andthe title tags, the meta descriptions,
the header tags, alsohaving it in your content,
just making sure your pages areproperly targeting the right keywords.
Number three is going to becontent. This is e-commerce.
(13:38):
So do your category pagesand collection pages.
Have a description that describesyour products and provides a good user
experience. Do your productshave good descriptions?
Do you have blog posts targeting relevantkeywords? So that's number three.
And then the last one,
which for most people listening to thisis probably the most important. I mean,
if you're a large brandat very high authority,
you probably don't need to focus much onlink building, but most people who are
(14:03):
doing seven figures to low eight figures,
the biggest benefit is probably goingto be link building that's getting other
websites to mention you and link andhave a hyperlink back to your site.
And it's so interesting, andI remember several years ago,
Google's been trying to downplaybacklinks and even say they don't work and
stuff, but I think a lot of the peoplethat have been doing SEOA long time like
(14:26):
yourself, like me, were like, well,that's kind of what Google was built on.
The original innovation that Google had.
It was a project called bankruptjust to get super nerdy.
And the whole idea was Larry Pageand Serge Bren were like, Hey,
what if we could look at the entireinternet, but based on the links?
And then wouldn't that bea vote of confidence if a lot of people are linking to
(14:47):
this page or this site,
that is what gives it authorityor makes it trustworthy.
They created page rank anyway, sosuper interesting. So it's like, yeah,
I don't think they're goingto get away from that, right?
That's still got to be the best signal.
Probably Google's just getting betterat weeding out spammy paid for junkie
links, although that'smaybe debatable as well.
(15:08):
Yeah, and I mean,
there's a study done recently asjust earlier this year in January,
and they looked at, this is coming fromhfs. They looked at something crazy.
It was like, I think itwas a million keywords.
So that's a million search results.
And they did all this statistical analysisto see what ranking factors correlate
or which factors correlate with rankingsand the number of backlinks to a
(15:29):
page. So if we stick withthe whole gaming laptops,
I'm a recovering gamer, so ifwe stick with gaming laptops,
and I have my Jeff's laptops.comwebsite and I have my
gaming laptops page,
the number of links to that collectionpage is one of the highest correlated
ranking factors for thosestats Nerds listening,
(15:51):
it was about 0.3 out with onebeing perfectly correlated,
but in perspective,
most ranking factors in SEOhave a correlation of 0.05
or 0.1. So to have 0.3 issubstantial. It's very,
very high correlation.You're going to have to have,
if you don't have back lanes, it'sgoing to be really hard to rank. Well.
(16:12):
It's like three to six x morevaluable than other ranking factors.
So to put that into context, that'sgreat. And maybe, okay, so we've,
we've got those four buckets of SEO,let's break those down in a minute.
But maybe to back up just alittle bit before we do that,
what's the payoff here? Why do wedo this? If we invest time in this,
(16:33):
hopefully we've convinced you that thedemise of Google's a little bit down the
road at least, so you should investin it. But if we get this right,
what's in it for us? What could thepayoff be? What are the results you see?
I know it varies from categoryto category, site to site,
but what could we seehere if we do this right?
Yeah, I mean, that's the question everyoneshould ask before you invest in SEO.
(16:55):
And it's going to dependon some, a few things.
It'll depend on are people searching oreven searching your keywords in Google,
or do you have a product that's new tothe market that people haven't heard of
where maybe you're better off doingFacebook ads or YouTube ads? So firstly,
is the search interest there, howcompetitive is it? If someone said, Hey.
I want to just real quick on that, Jeff,I think that's a super important point.
(17:16):
One.
Of the ways we like to describe that isdoes your product and does your category
depend more on demand generation whereyou need to go out there and convince
people to start looking for your product?They're not maybe thinking about it,
but if they saw it, they'd be interested.Or is it more about demand capture.
Where.
You are capturing existing demand?And so a couple of examples there.
On the demand capture side, we've donequite a bit in the automotive space,
(17:39):
in auto parts and things likethat, especially on paid search.
And that's one of those things whereit's like, yeah, if I need brake pads,
well, first of all, I'm going to go toa dealership, but if I need brake pads,
they're squeaking and there's an event,
and so then I just go search and I buybrake pads. But if it's something like,
Hey, some new apparel thatI've never worn before,
or maybe the chiefs just made theSuper Bowl and so now there's something
(18:01):
popping up in my feed and I want tobuy it. That's demand generation.
And so understanding where your product,
your company sits on that continuum isgoing to also determine how much is it
going to pay off to invest in SEO.
Yeah, 100%.
So we talked a little bitearlier about dissecting a
(18:22):
bunch of e-commerce analytics accounts,non-branded organic search's traffic.
So that means people going toGoogle searching for a keyword,
but not having your brand name in there.They're not searching OMG commerce,
they're searching YouTube adservices, something like that.
So that was the highestperforming revenue wise.
So we know the potentials there,
(18:44):
but as far as what can youexpect as far as increases go,
I have some data there.
I looked at 152 SEO campaignsover the past few years to see
on average, what was the increase afterthree months, six months, nine months,
and 12 months, three months on average,
we saw about a 20% increase.Six months was about 50%,
(19:05):
nine months was 65,and a year was 75%. So.
That's just.
Ballpark. And it.
Changes increase in non.
Organic brand organic traffic. Correct.
Nice.
Yeah. So
if you're a massive brand and you'regetting hundreds of thousands of
visits a month, that 50 to 75%,
(19:30):
it's going to pay for itselfa thousand times over.
If you're a smaller startup and you'reonly getting maybe a thousand visits a
month,
a 50 to 75% increase mightnot be as substantial.
So a lot of this depends on forSEO to be worth it. Obviously,
the more traffic you have now,
the more organic search revenueyou have now the better.
(19:50):
Think of it as like a multiplier.If you're starting out,
it's going to be at least a year beforeyou really start getting good momentum.
But the potentials there.
If you do it and you're an industrywhere people are searching your products,
it's not too competitive.
And the last caveat I'll give is thatyour prices aren't too expensive.
I mentioned this briefly,
but if you have a premium productthat costs three x to four x,
(20:12):
so people get on Amazon,
you're going to have a much higher bouncerate and Google's just not going to
rank you as high as your competitors.
Right, right. Yeah, totally, totallymakes sense. Okay, super helpful.
So then let's kind of breakdown those buckets then.
Let's go through each one and kindof talk about some of the tactics or
approaches that we should consider two to.
(20:33):
Fill that bucket. Sure. Bucketnumber one, technical SEO.
If you're on Shopify, you probably don'thave to spend too much time on this.
Shopify is a very SEO friendly platform.
I'm sure most peoplelisten to this right now.
If I had to guess more half areprobably on Shopify. Totally.
Yeah.
Totally. It's a great platform. Very,
(20:54):
yeah, you probably don't have tospend too much if you're on Shopify,
Magento two, BigCommerce or WooCommerce,any of those four platforms,
you're probably pretty solid.If you're on a custom platform,
if you're on Volution or you stillhaven't left Yahoo stores or some of these
old legacy platforms,
you're probably going to want to spenda lot more effort on technical SEO.
But for most people.
(21:14):
It's you're probably goingto want to migrate, honestly.
More so migrate. But for most people,technical, SEO gets overblown.
I honestly think peopletalk about it too much.
People love to talk about it becauseit's something you can control.
You can go in and makeupdates to your XML side map,
and you can make changes to your robotstext that your crawl efficiency is super
(21:34):
dialed in. You can make sure youhave schema on all these pages,
which a lot of times Google's not evenrespecting all the different schemas and
structured markups these days.So honestly, yes, there might be.
It's still good to have a professional,do an audit and say, okay,
fix this and then move on. Don'tdwell on the technical SEO stage.
(21:55):
It should be a one and done typething. It should not be a big project.
Totally makes sense. Number two,page optimization. Very simple.
Make sure whatever keywordyou're trying to rank for,
you have that in thebeginning of your title tag.
And if you're not familiarwhat a title tag is,
if you search a keyword in Google,
it has that blue or purplelink that's the title tag.
(22:16):
It's a very important ranking factor.
Google puts a fair amount of weightinto what keywords you put in there.
In the search in general.Then in the search results,
that title tag is going to become kindof the headline almost for that organic
listing. Not always, Google can kindof put whatever they want to put there,
but a lot of times the title tag showsup there, but also shows up in the
(22:38):
tab of the browser as well.
So it's going to have somepretty prominent placements and Google gives it a lot
of weight.
And speaking of title tags,
like this is one thing I see a lot Ia mistake a lot of people make, and
you can have a very brandable name.
So I was talking with a client who theysell leather conditioners and leather
(23:01):
cleaners. It's a product for,
if you have a car and you want tohave the leather look in its best,
you get this leather conditionerthat you can put on the car seats.
But they don't call it leatherconditioner. They call it rejuvenator oil,
and that's the brand name.
So the issue with that is peoplearen't searching rejuvenator oil,
they're searching.
So their products weren't ranking verywell in Google because they're calling it
(23:24):
what they want to call it.
Not.
What the customers are calling it.
So finding a balance betweenbrandable names and keywords
is always something that you'regoing to have to keep in mind,
but you're going to want to have thatwhatever keyword you're ranking for,
ideally you want to have that in yourtitle tag as close to beginning as
possible.
Love.
It, love it. And then meta descriptions,
(23:45):
that's those two lines of black textthat we see in the search results.
These aren't really a ranking factor.
It doesn't matter if you have yourkeyword in there a bunch or not at all.
The best way I like to describe it ismeta descriptions are your ad copy for
SEO. So having really well written metadescriptions with your calls to actions,
unique selling points, it's goingto have a higher click-through rate,
which will send more traffic.
(24:06):
But if Google sees your listingsgetting a higher click-through rate,
that's also going to have apositive impact on rankings.
Yeah.
I.
Love that. So it's an indirect rankingfactor, isn't it, where it's like,
use this text to get moreclicks, organic clicks,
the more organic clicks you get.
Actually Google's going to rewardthat by ranking you higher. So yeah,
(24:27):
it's an indirect but important piece.
And just to nerd out a little bit more,
Google had this massiveranking factor leak last year.
We saw thousands of documents,
internal documents on what they'relooking at when scoring websites.
One of the things that's confirmed isthey look at the click-through rate and
the search results. So ifyou're in position three,
(24:49):
but you have a higher click-throughrate than position two because you have
either a brand name that peoplerecognize or a really well-written meta
description, Google, it's one ofthe most powerful ranking factors.
Google will move you up so fast.
Yes.
So yeah, metas script is going.
To huge impact. Again, that's a vote ofconfidence, right? That's Google saying,
Hey,
people are voting with their clicksand with their attention that they like
(25:10):
this result. So we're moving it up.
Exactly. And then the lastpiece of page optimization,
second to last would be header tags.
This is what's actuallydisplayed on your page.
This is the big header that userssee. Not as important as a title tag,
but still there's someranking benefits there.
So make sure you have your keyword andthe header tag. That's kind of like the.
Headline for the page, right?So when you open a page, it's.
(25:30):
Basically the headlinethat you see exactly.
It's the big bold text you see at thetop. And then the last piece is content.
You want to include yourkeyword in the content,
preferably at least once inthe first 100 words or so.
You want to includevariations throughout it.
You want to include related keywords.
So having your keyword throughout yourcontent is also a very helpful ranking
factor, which is why for categorypages and collection pages,
(25:52):
you want to have at least 200 to 300words of content and sprinkle your keyword
in there a few times.
Love it. Love it. Okay,
so we got technical SEO that's probablycovered before on a reputable platform.
Most listeners are probably onShopify, so you're mostly good there.
Then we got page optimization, which isreally those factors, title tag content,
(26:13):
header tag. Yeah. Soit totally makes sense.
So then what's bucket number three.
Content? So with content,
where I see the most opportunity ismaking sure your category pages and your
collection pages have that200 to 300 words of content.
It can make such a big differencein ranking. It's so easy to do,
especially with ai.
(26:33):
There's honestly no excuse not to havesome well-written category descriptions
on your pages.
And then there's also blog postsnow I think gets overblown a bit.
In the SEO world, everyone feelslike they have to create content.
You have to keep having fresh contenton your website that way Google keeps
indexing things. There'sall these myths about it.
(26:55):
My take on blogging is youshould only blog if there's
particular topics that have high searchvolume and decent conversion potential.
So sticking with the gaming laptops,
I bet you there's a lot ofpeople searching best gaming laptops or maybe they're
searching Dell versusLenovo gaming laptops.
(27:16):
Any keyword like that, that's like bestgaming laptops or comparison, Harrison,
or maybe it's laptops for
programming students.
Anytime that the keyword has some typeof search intent that they're looking to
do research and byproduct,
those are great blog posts to createThat way you're not just getting traffic,
(27:37):
but you can get conversions. Butwriting about what is a laptop,
how to clean your laptop,how to install Windows 12,
whatever it is, those are not going toconvert. Yes, they'll drive traffic rank.
Whatcha going to get from that? Exactly.
That's all going to be answeredin the AI overview anyway, so.
That's a hundred percent.So realistically,
(27:59):
most clients I see,
I'd say maybe 20 to 30% actually havesome good topics where it makes sense to
go down that direction ofblogging. But for me, honestly,
about 70% of e-commercesites I take a look at.
I don't think blogging's a waste oftime and that they're not going to get a
positive ROI from it.
Just put content on the categorypage, product page, things like that,
and leave the blog alone. Yeah.Now another interesting thing,
(28:21):
I was talking to Steve at Seller Summitand he was talking about how his blog
traffic has died. A lot of blog traffichas died, and that was tied to a recent,
somewhat recent Google update. Canyou talk about that a little bit?
When did blogs, again,
maybe die is overdramatic,
but when did blogs die or whendid they reduce in importance?
(28:42):
Because there was definitely aday early in our SEO careers,
I'm sure where leaning heavilyinto blogs, that was a winning.
Strategy. Yeah, we cango deep into this one.
I was actually working with Steveon his blog while all this stuff was
unfolding. So we had workedtogether, we Forex his blog traffic,
and then it was around 2023 thatGoogle had a barrage of updates,
(29:05):
different core algorithm updates.They had the helpful content update,
and I'm going to give you a littlebackstory and a tie it all back into your
question.
So essentially what happened is Googlewas pretty good at giving results,
but what really dropped theball and really failed was
anything like best gaminglaptops, best protein powders,
(29:26):
best weight loss supplements, best VPNs,
the affiliates. And for those thatdunno what affiliate is, it's basically
I have a blog. I am goingto be an Amazon affiliate.
I include links to products onAmazon. If people with those links,
I get a commission. Sothere's an incentive for these affiliates to rank as high
(29:46):
as they can. They can make a lot of money,and they were making a lot of money,
millions upon millions of dollars.
So they're just flooding Googlewith all these really crappy low
quality affiliate sites that justregurgitating information on Amazon.
It's causing a nightmare forGoogle. Everyone knew the results.
You just can't trust them.
It's just you're hearing reviews aboutproducts and it's obvious they've never
(30:07):
even touched the product in their life.
They're just regurgitating Amazonreviews and other information.
So Google what their solution to this was.
They pretty much justdecimated any middle tier,
low tier, standalone blog. Ifyou're just a blog, you're screwed.
But if you're an e-commerce store witha real business that has a business
(30:28):
address and has customers and youhappen to have a blog doing great,
you're blogs can perform better than ever.
If you're a service provider likeBrett, you or me, and we have a blog,
we're established businesses. Wemight even be Google My Business,
we might have a physical addressand we have a blog, that's great.
But if I'm just a blog and that's allI do and I don't have a product or a
(30:51):
service, those sites got decimated.
Which makes sense.
And a lot of those were back in the daywhen you would pay for backlinks and
things like that. Notthat I ever did that,
but you'd get links from sites like that.
And so a lot of them just got torched.
Yeah, it got destroyed. I mean,the results now are way better.
(31:13):
But one of the byproducts of thatis even really good quality content.
Like Steve and his website, mywife quit. Her job is good stuff.
He's a true industry expert. Heknows his stuff, his content's great.
It's a high authority Ithink of for those SEO nerds,
domain rating 70 or domain ratingdomain authority around 70, huge, huge.
(31:34):
But even then his traffic droppedoff like 90% because these updates.
Now I am working with one contentsite that's pretty authoritative,
and we're doing an experiment right now.
So I have a theory because when Iwork with Steve and I did analysis,
all his competitors that are juststandalone content sites, they plummeted.
They dropped off like 90%.
(31:55):
The sites that absorbed all thoserankings and benefited were the product
and service sites that had,they were in Google My Business,
they were in Google's knowledgegraph. So if you do auto complete,
they'll show up as like aknown entity and Google.
And so right now I'm doing anexperiment to see if I can take a blog,
get them and Google my business,get them a Wikipedia page,
(32:19):
get them all the signals thatshow it's a legit business.
This a real business.
A real business. What impactwill that have? So TBD,
but the correlation is there.
I love that theory, man. That'ssmart. Yeah, keep me posted on that.
That's super interesting.
Yeah, so to be determined,
but the correlation is still there.The sites that have a physical address,
(32:40):
a phone number, they're in Google mybusiness, they're in the knowledge panel.
Those sites were fine.
The ones that didn't have aknowledge panel or any of that,
they all just got decimated.
Got it, got it. Interesting. Okay,super interesting insight there.
Thanks for sharing that. Whatelse about this content bucket?
What else would you advise or coachus on for our e-commerce store?
(33:03):
That's pretty much it. I have200, 300 on category pages.
Include your keyword andthen just one little pro tip.
If you're wondering what relatedkeywords to include in your content,
just search your keyword and Google imagesearch and you'll have that refinement
bar at the top.
Those are all great related keywordsthat you might want to consider ones that
are applicable, including your content.
Interesting. Great, greatinsight there. Cool.
(33:26):
So we've got our technicalon page, our content.
What's bucket number four? Bucketnumber four is link building.
You want to get as many other siteslinking back to you as possible. Now,
if you want to do this, the white hat way,
one strategy that can work really wellfor e-commerce sites is product reviews.
If you have a direct to consumerproduct, you can find some blogs,
(33:46):
you send them some product for free, theytake some photos, they write about it,
and in the writeup, they'regoing to include a link back.
So that's probably one ofthe best ways to do it.
And you can also get some referraltraffic from these sites if it has a big
enough following.
Another strategy that can work wellbut is extremely difficult is content
marketing, creatingcontent, promoting content.
(34:07):
And the reason it's so hard is whenyou're doing content marketing for link
building,
it's less about what topics will appealto your customers and what topics will
appeal to bloggers. So you're probablygoing to create content that might not
even interest your, it could be ifwe're sticking with gaming laptops,
I could do an articleabout gaming statistics,
(34:29):
like what percent of Americans youth spend
10 hours a day or more on video games,
which video games are themost popular by hours?
I do a whole breakdown on all thesestatistics that's not really going to
interest someone lookingto buy a gaming laptop,
but it could interest a journalistwho's writing about screen time on kids
(34:51):
and wants to reference a statistic.Now that's going to get some backlink.
So it's why it's so hard to do it isyou have to really kind of change your
thinking and less of what will mycustomers want versus what will the
journalists and thebloggers want to link to.
Super interesting. Yeah.
So what are the most used tactics then,
and what are you coaching your clientson in terms of practical ways to build
(35:15):
links? Because this has always been oneof those areas where it's the highest
correlation in terms of ranking factors.
It's how Google wasbuilt based on backlinks,
but to do it the right way is reallytime intensive and really difficult.
So what are some of the tips, suggestions,advice that you give to clients?
So I'd say try go the whitehat as much as you can.
(35:38):
Definitely do the contentmarketing or the product reviews.
But here's the sad truth about it.
If you want to get alink to a product page,
if you want to get link to acategory page, nine times of the 10,
a blogger is going to require payment.
You could have the most compellingpitch with the best product.
That's truly groundbreaking.But these bloggers,
(35:59):
this is how they put food ontheir table. They live off this.
This is their income. Andif they check your site,
if you were a libraryor you were a nonprofit,
they're probably not going to charge you.
If you reach out to them and theyclick on your site, it's like, oh,
this is an e-commercesite. Nine times out of 10,
they're going to require payment.So they might call it an editorial fee of
(36:20):
like, oh, we'll write aboutyou, we'll feature you,
but it's going to take time to pull upthat post and make the edits and then
publish it and do all this stuff.
So you can expectanywhere from 50, I'd say,
to a hundred dollars of these editorialfees or blog fees to get featured.
So that's the sad truth of it.
What's even kind of more sad isI wish it didn't work as well.
(36:44):
I really wish that thelinks paid links from
blogs didn't work, but they do. And thecorrelations there, insights rank. Well,
the tricky part is deciphering a good
backlink from a bad one.So let say have two blogs,
trying to determine which blog is goingto be helpful and which is going to be
(37:05):
harmful is extremely difficult.
I see even SEO veterans have beendoing this for five to 10 years.
They still get it wrong.You have to look at, well,
what's the domain rating anddomain authority of the site?
Is this going to help me?Okay, let's go a step deeper.
How much traffic does this have?
Does it actually have some rankings inGoogle? But now they're getting smart,
and I don't know if you know this Brett,
(37:26):
but a lot of sites will manipulateand game their traffic numbers by
artificially running a bunch offake searches on nonsense nonsense
keywords and that they ranked for.So now they're inflating that.
So you have to go a step deeper and seethe keywords that are driving traffic
are those keywords relatedto the site's main focus.
So there's so many checks you have to do.
(37:48):
We'll even go deep and lookat who is this linking out to?
Is it linking out to porn sitesand escort sites and Viagra sites?
So for most people, they stopat level one and level two,
they'll look at the domain rating,the traffic, they'll move on,
but you'll end up buying links that arejust absolute garbage and can hurt your
sites. So link billing, it'sso hard for that reason.
(38:09):
So that's why I say if you're goingto do it, the white hat approach,
going to real blogs and product reviewsand take a stab at content marketing
is probably best. But justknow of all the four buckets,
link billing is the most difficult andthe hardest for an e-commerce brand to
make a core competency.
Yeah, it totally makes sense,man. Super, super helpful.
(38:30):
So let's then get to maybe the questionthat was most burning in people's
minds. Well then what aboutai, SEO? So what do we do?
So, okay, this is our core SEO,and that's aimed at Google,
but what if we want to rank inJet GPT or Perplexity or Gemini,
which is related to Google orother AI that's yet to come?
(38:51):
What's your advice on that?
It's a great question. There is someoverlap. If you're doing SEO, right,
a lot of it's going tocarry over to chat GPT.
So one thing that chat GT does is a lotof times they'll show the sources of
where it's pulling informationfrom and it's pulling from the web.
So content marketing and blockingcan be great if you have some posts
(39:12):
and anyone to this, if you wantto show up better in chat g bt,
first thing you should do is do a bestgaming laptops, best protein powder,
whatever your product is, create a buyer'sguide or a product roundup about it.
So those get picked up veryfrequently in chat GBT,
so you get a little moreinfluence on swaying the model,
whatever you think is best. So blogging,
(39:34):
content marketing is one.Link building is another one.
We see if there's gettingmentioned on other websites,
getting your product reviewson authoritative sites,
those are also getting pickedup as sources. So that can help.
It's like a PR play where themore sites and webpages in the web
that mention your products, The higherchance you have of being cited in these
(39:58):
large language models.
But if you want to be just kind of gostraight to the jugular on how you're
going to rank, well searchyour keyword or go into a chat,
GPT type best protein powder,whatever your keyword is in there,
scroll down, look at the sources,
it's going to tell you exactly whereit's pulling from to generic this result
and try to get yourproduct featured in those.
(40:19):
So it's going to show you allthese top 10 protein powder,
top eight protein powder type pages.You're going to want to reach out to them.
You're probably going to haveto send them free product.
You'll probably have to send them anaffiliate link to make it worth it.
You'll probably have to have a compellingpitch on why they should include you.
But that what I'm seeingis the biggest impact.
We did some correlation research on this,
and it was like we talked about linksbeing highly correlated with 0.3
(40:44):
when it came to chat GPT andgetting your product included,
it was like 0.45 correlationof the number of different
product roundups you were cited in.
So the more product roundups your productis found in, that's in the sources,
the much higher chance you're going tohave of showing up in those chat GBT
shopping carousels.
(41:05):
Yeah, it totally makes sense. And in someways it's similar to product reviews.
And what I mean by that islooking at Amazon reviews,
product reviews make a big differencein terms of ranking and conversions and
all those things. And the issueis that they can be gamed, right?
People can manipulate them. There'stons of fake reviews. So it's like,
well then won't Amazon just get awayfrom that? And the real answer is no,
(41:28):
they can't. There's no better signal.
Every user or every shopperwants to see reviews.
And so it's got to get better atweeding out the crappy reviews.
And I think it's the samething with these roundup blogs,
with backlinks, with things like that.
These are signals that whendone right are the clearest,
most powerful signals thatare out there right now.
(41:49):
And so really just got to do it the rightway, build those things the right way.
But it makes sense to me that those aregoing to continue to be a ranking factor
for SEO and for AI SEO.
Yeah, I would a hundred percentagree with that. Cool. Cool.
Awesome, man. Well,this has been fantastic.
I really want to pick your brain on AIas well. So how about, let's do this.
(42:11):
Let's be like a littleteaser. We'll do another ai,
let's do an AI focused episode. Thiswill be the little teaser for it.
What models are you playingwith the most right now?
What are you most excited about withai and specifically like AI and working
with your agency andautomation and stuff like that?
And is there one cool thing you canshare with the audience related to ai?
(42:33):
Yeah, so models wise, I wasusing Claude 3.7 a bunch,
and then four for a while, but thenI started using Gemini 2.5 pro,
and I think that's my favorite oneright now. What I love doing for fun,
I'm not a coder, I've alwayswanted to be a programmer,
but I dunno how to program. SoI've been using this tool Rept,
which is like an AI code generator,
(42:54):
and I've been able to build somepretty powerful apps that can take a
screenshot of a blog, passthat screenshot to an AI model,
analyze it, and then fromthat analysis also pull on
keyword ranking data for pageand then generate title tags,
(43:14):
meta descriptions and headers.
So basically automating the SEO processwhere you take a screenshot of a page,
you pull on the ranking data,
you give all this to the AI modeland have it optimize the page.
So as far as your teaser goes,
literally just last week I pulledthe trigger and hired three
full-time AI automation specialists.
(43:36):
And we're doing an experimentto build a fully autonomous
AI agency where there'd be no people.
It's just I'm going to see howmany of the SEO steps can I
automate with ai? And instead ofhaving an actual account manager,
you have your AI account manager. So thisis something that we're building out.
(43:58):
Dude, can't wait to see that. Okay.That was a good teaser right there.
That was powerful. Definitely goingto do an AI episode coming up next.
And so looking forward to that. But Jeff,
as people are listening to thisand they're like, dang, alright,
I got to think about seo. I got to thinkabout ai seo. I need to talk to Jeff.
How can people reach out toyou? How can they work with you?
Yeah, you can go to my website.It's just 1 8 0 marketing.com,
(44:21):
180 marketing.com. Or you canjust shoot me an email directly.
My email is Jeff at 1 8 0 marketing.com.Happy to hear from you guys.
And Jeff, as you can tell,just super cool dude,
the kind of guy you want to hangout with. Grab a beer with talk,
SEO and talk e-commerce with. And sowith that, Jeff, awesome job, man.
Thanks for the time and looking forwardto that AI episode. Thanks, Brett.
(44:44):
This has been fun. Awesome. And asalways, thank you for tuning in.
Would love to hear from you,
connect with me on LinkedIn orshoot us a note about the pod.
Or if you like this episode,
share it with somebody that youthink will enjoy it. And with that,
until next time, thank you for listening.
The tricky part is deciphering a good
(00:04):
backlink from a bad one. Solet's say you have two blogs.
Trying to determine which blog is goingto be helpful and which is going to be
harmful is extremely difficult.
Well, hello and welcome to another editionof the E-Commerce Evolution podcast.
(00:28):
I'm your host, BrettCurry, CEO of OMG Commerce.
And today we've gotJeff Oxford on the show,
and we're talking about SEO search engine
optimization. Going to weave insome ai, some AI optimization,
but you may be thinking what,is anybody still searching?
Is anybody still talking about SEOthese days? Isn't everything ai?
(00:51):
And have we got some insights for you?
Because the good news isif you're doing good SEO,
it's going to help with AI as well,and I can stay with authority.
SEO is not dead. And so with that,Jeff, welcome to the show, man.
And how's it going? It's going great,Brett. Thanks for having me. Yeah, dude,
it was awesome.
(01:11):
Connecting at Steve Chu and Tony Airbox,
event Seller Summit Fort Lauderdale,one of my favorite events.
And I think you've spoken theremultiple times as well, correct?
You're kind of a.
Radio. Yeah, this is mythird time speaking there.
Nice, nice. And you talked about SEO.
I sat in on your talk. I loved it.
(01:33):
What a lot of people don't know isthat actually at the very beginning,
so OMG is now 15 years old.
The first service we offered Jeff,SEO, really SEO for local companies.
It was just something we knew, somethingwe liked. I was a search engine nerd,
and so a business partner loved it aswell. And so that's what we did. Yep.
Search engine optimization. That led toGoogle search, led to Google Shopping.
(01:56):
I had a video background that led toYouTube, but in the beginning, SEO baby.
Okay, so we can go deep inthe trenches. It sounds like.
The We can totally nerd out for sure. Now,
I have not been in the SEOgame in detail recently,
but I still keep up. I canstill talk shop for sure.
But why SEO as a topic now?
(02:16):
And was that just something that Steve,the VIN organizer was interested in,
or were there a lot of requestsfor it? Why SEO as a topic?
So I guess a little behind the scenes ofwhat happened with that is he was also,
he was asking me about AIoptimization chat, GPT optimization.
And this is after wealready got SEO O in there,
but we're kind of at apossible paradigm shift of how
(02:39):
people are searching. Ifwe just look at right now,
June, 2025 as a data point,we just freeze this chat.
Google is still the 800 pound gorilla.
It still has 99 some ridiculousamount of market share.
Chad GD maybe has one to 2% maybe
(03:00):
of the search.
So this snapshot in time SEO is still just
kicking butt, makingcompanies millions of dollars.
But the trend is what getspeople talking about chat.
Yes, it's 1%, maybe one to 2% now,
but a year or two ago it was 0.1%.
(03:23):
And I mean, I can actuallydrop some stats for you.
So being an e-commerce SEO company,
we have access to a lot ofGoogle Analytics accounts,
and I had my VA a few last week.
He went through all ofour analytics accounts.
He looked at how muchreferrals our clients,
our e-commerce clients got fromchat GBT in April versus May to
(03:46):
see what's the.
Fluctuation. Okay, greatcomparison. Love that.
112% Increase in referraltraffic from month to month.
Yeah, from month to month. Wow.
Yeah. And I can evenNow, did he also look at,
and not to get too far ahead of you here,
but did he also look at what percentageof overall traffic came from chat?
Jt? Not impressive. We're talkinglike most clients, it was one to 2%.
(04:09):
But there are some e-commercestores that we're seeing
where chat GT is up to like 20%.
Whoa, that's significant.
Of course, it depends on your niche.
It depends on how muchcontent marketing you've done,
how much blogging you've done,
how much do you have enoughstuff to get cited and chat GPT?
But just if we're just looking at thee-commerce world and averages from this
(04:33):
dataset, yeah, it was about a littleover a hundred percent month over month.
And then average across,
this was about just shy of 300visits a month from chat GBT.
Interesting. And how does thatcompare to Google, Google Organic and.
Google paid, or did you dothat comparison? Luckily, I have those stats here.
(04:54):
I mean, Google's, I don't havethe month over month for Google,
but because it's probablypretty steady, I would assume
similar data point would befor 2024, we took a sample of,
I went over this to mytalk, but we took a sample,
like 80 e-commerce sites that wehave Google Analytics access to,
and also have Google search consoleaccess to. And across these,
(05:17):
you want to see what's the highestperforming channel on Google Analytics.
And number one outside of direct,which just means it's not attributed,
but number one was non-brand organicsearch, followed by paid search,
followed by organic shopping. Soyeah, it's one of those things where,
yes, if we freeze this point in time,
SEO is still the numberone top performing channel,
(05:39):
even non-branded SEO ornon-branded search traffic.
But the tides are shifting a bit.
I was just on a call with a clientearlier today who sells refurbished
computers, and we were looking atsome of their AI referral stats,
and they've already,
this year have had 23 in from chat GBT. So
(06:01):
everyone should be payingattention to the trend
I live in here in Bend, Oregon,where we have the last blockbuster.
And if you're, you stillhave a blockbuster,
we have the last blockbuster on earth.
We were just talking about that.So my oldest kids are 23 and 20,
and so they still rememberwhen they were little,
we still would go to the videostore. There weren't a ton of 'em.
(06:21):
It wasn't super popular, sawred box and stuff like that.
But there was something magical aboutwalking the aisles of a blockbuster.
Maybe they didn't havewhat you were looking for,
but that was all part of the fun.
So we were reminiscing andmissing the video store days.
Yeah, come to Bend, you can get a T-shirtand take a look, see what they have.
So okay, there's quickdive diversion here,
(06:43):
but how's business atthe last Blockbuster?
Do people come from nostalgiato buy? Gees, a tourist.
Attraction now? It's kind what? It's,yeah, it's all about the nostalgia.
You can get some merchandise and theystill have the big blockbuster sign
outside front and they putlittle marquee letters on it.
Super fun.
(07:04):
So I guess the question is,
will Google and SEO one daygo the way of Blockbuster
far off in the future? We don'tknow, but I think we could say, Jeff,
the demise of Googleright now is potentially.
Overhyped. What? Say you about that.I mean, no matter how this plays out,
Google's going to be fine.Google has a corporation,
(07:27):
they've got the infrastructure,
they have all the best AIresearchers in the world.
Their new Gemini 2.5 Promodel is just killer.
It's insane. They've been play with a lot.
Yeah, they've really caughtup to the AI race quickly.
So props to them.
The big question though is what aboutsearch these 10 blue links that we have on
page one? Are we still goingto be searching that way?
(07:50):
And there's a big question mark there.
Google's now testing theirAI mode where it changes the
homepage of Google insteadof having a search box,
it's now a conversation box more similarto chat GPT right now that's just
in testing. So we don't know what'sgoing to come out of that test.
Is Google going to be like, oh,wow, the engagement's way higher,
(08:12):
people are staying on our site longer,we're going to make this the default,
or are they going to be like,ah, people don't trust it yet,
there's still some hallucinations.
We're still the best experienceand they're going to stick to how it's now? It's
a big question mark,
but the one part of it that no one reallytalks about that's so key is just the
processing cost to serve a query.
(08:33):
So if you go into Google and you type in,
let's just say what arethe best gaming laptops?
What Google can process thatquickly, it pulls from their index,
it has temp links. Great.If you're on AI mode's,
it'll pull five to seven queries.
It will then have to pull in all thisprocessing abilities from the LLM to
(08:57):
process the results and then serve it up.
So their cost per query isgoing to go up a lot. Now,
Google are the kings of infrastructureand servers and data centers,
and so they'll be able to getthese costs down over time.
But if their cost per querygoes way up and their ads,
the revenue per query goesdown because there's less ads,
(09:17):
it starts to not makefinancial sense for them.
So even if the user experienceis perfect and way better,
I'm sure they're going to be balancingout the financial viability of moving to
a more of an AI focused search result.
Yeah, it's a really good call out.
And we got to remember that It'slike 80 90% of Google's revenue is
(09:38):
from search ads or query-based ads,
and you could argue that a largerpercentage of their profits come.
From this. Oh, okay. Profits. Yeah,profits are probably way more than that.
Yeah. Yeah, which is super interesting.
And so a couple setsthat I was looking at,
because I was curiousabout this too, right?
An executive at Apple recentlysaid, Hey, for the first time ever,
(09:59):
we saw fewer searches,
fewer Google searches onSafari was the caveat.
Google, however, released some data.
They did not commenton Safari specifically,
which would lead you to believe that wasprobably true. But they did say, Hey,
we're seeing increased searchvolume across all platforms,
including Apple users. And so what'sinteresting, I looked at this.
(10:20):
If you look at dailysearch queries on Google,
8.3 billion a day in2024 and now averaging
13.6 billion a day in 2025.
So that is a massive leap. And justfrom the financials just to say, Hey,
Google's going to be able to keepthe lights on for a little bit.
Earnings are up 12% yearover year. They had a beat.
(10:43):
So their projections or their guidancethey gave to Wall Street, they beat it.
So things are good from that regardfrom standpoint and what Google has
said, and I was at Google MarketingLive, what Google has said is that, Hey,
the AI mode, that's part of what'sdriving this increase in searches.
But your point is spot on whereit's heard different estimates,
but it's a multiple higherto in terms of compute costs.
(11:08):
To.
Generate those AI mode resultsthan it is just a normal
query. And so Google's going to haveto figure that out. I think they will.
I think they'll be able to incorporateads in a pretty unique and pretty clever
way. And so listen,
I think there's some existentialthreats facing Google.
There's also the antitrustlawsuit and things like that.
(11:28):
And so the future is not super clear,
but I do think Google's going tobe able to figure it out. And yeah,
you mentioned AI scientists in 2015,
that's when Google bought Deep Mind,
which is one of the leading AIresearch companies on the planet.
Some of those top researchers, topscientists are still at Google.
(11:48):
I think they've got thebest team. And so yeah,
I think they'll be able to figure itout. But it is interesting, right?
It is an interesting season right now.
And so any other points on that,
on Google's demise or what the futureis going to hold for them before we get
into some tactical stuff?
Yeah, I think that pretty much covers.
I mean at this point it's no longer aninfrastructure issue with data centers
(12:11):
and servers. It's no longera software issue with LLMs.
They have all that. It's reallyjust a user experience UI issue.
How do they take this all andgive the right user experience?
So we'll see what comes up with AI mode.It'll be interesting. It'll be really.
Interesting to watch. For sure,for sure. So came in super good.
I'm excited about it.
(12:31):
Why don't we do this before wetalk about SEO and AI optimization?
They do go hand in hand.
Let's back up a little bit and talkabout what are the components of SEO.
So I know in the early days we wouldalways talk, Hey, there's technical SEO,
and there's onsite SEO, andthen there's offsite, SEO.
How would you define though SEO nowand what are the big components of.
(12:55):
It?
I have what I call the four bucketsor four components of SEO you already
mentioned. Some of 'em, technical,SEO number one can Google crawl.
Your website is your insightindexable. This is site maps.
This is robots tech structured data,
basically making sure Googlecan crawl all your pages,
(13:16):
can index all your pages and you don'thave any issues that's going to slow down
or hurt your ranking. So that's technical.
SEO number two is page optimization.
This is making sure of your keyword andthe title tags, the meta descriptions,
the header tags, alsohaving it in your content,
just making sure your pages areproperly targeting the right keywords.
Number three is going to becontent. This is e-commerce.
(13:38):
So do your category pagesand collection pages.
Have a description that describesyour products and provides a good user
experience. Do your productshave good descriptions?
Do you have blog posts targeting relevantkeywords? So that's number three.
And then the last one,
which for most people listening to thisis probably the most important. I mean,
if you're a large brandat very high authority,
you probably don't need to focus much onlink building, but most people who are
(14:03):
doing seven figures to low eight figures,
the biggest benefit is probably goingto be link building that's getting other
websites to mention you and link andhave a hyperlink back to your site.
And it's so interesting, andI remember several years ago,
Google's been trying to downplaybacklinks and even say they don't work and
stuff, but I think a lot of the peoplethat have been doing SEOA long time like
(14:26):
yourself, like me, were like, well,that's kind of what Google was built on.
The original innovation that Google had.
It was a project called bankruptjust to get super nerdy.
And the whole idea was Larry Pageand Serge Bren were like, Hey,
what if we could look at the entireinternet, but based on the links?
And then wouldn't that bea vote of confidence if a lot of people are linking to
(14:47):
this page or this site,
that is what gives it authorityor makes it trustworthy.
They created page rank anyway, sosuper interesting. So it's like, yeah,
I don't think they're goingto get away from that, right?
That's still got to be the best signal.
Probably Google's just getting betterat weeding out spammy paid for junkie
links, although that'smaybe debatable as well.
(15:08):
Yeah, and I mean,
there's a study done recently asjust earlier this year in January,
and they looked at, this is coming fromhfs. They looked at something crazy.
It was like, I think itwas a million keywords.
So that's a million search results.
And they did all this statistical analysisto see what ranking factors correlate
or which factors correlate with rankingsand the number of backlinks to a
(15:29):
page. So if we stick withthe whole gaming laptops,
I'm a recovering gamer, so ifwe stick with gaming laptops,
and I have my Jeff's laptops.comwebsite and I have my
gaming laptops page,
the number of links to that collectionpage is one of the highest correlated
ranking factors for thosestats Nerds listening,
(15:51):
it was about 0.3 out with onebeing perfectly correlated,
but in perspective,
most ranking factors in SEOhave a correlation of 0.05
or 0.1. So to have 0.3 issubstantial. It's very,
very high correlation.You're going to have to have,
if you don't have back lanes, it'sgoing to be really hard to rank. Well.
(16:12):
It's like three to six x morevaluable than other ranking factors.
So to put that into context, that'sgreat. And maybe, okay, so we've,
we've got those four buckets of SEO,let's break those down in a minute.
But maybe to back up just alittle bit before we do that,
what's the payoff here? Why do wedo this? If we invest time in this,
(16:33):
hopefully we've convinced you that thedemise of Google's a little bit down the
road at least, so you should investin it. But if we get this right,
what's in it for us? What could thepayoff be? What are the results you see?
I know it varies from categoryto category, site to site,
but what could we seehere if we do this right?
Yeah, I mean, that's the question everyoneshould ask before you invest in SEO.
(16:55):
And it's going to dependon some, a few things.
It'll depend on are people searching oreven searching your keywords in Google,
or do you have a product that's new tothe market that people haven't heard of
where maybe you're better off doingFacebook ads or YouTube ads? So firstly,
is the search interest there, howcompetitive is it? If someone said, Hey.
I want to just real quick on that, Jeff,I think that's a super important point.
(17:16):
One.
Of the ways we like to describe that isdoes your product and does your category
depend more on demand generation whereyou need to go out there and convince
people to start looking for your product?They're not maybe thinking about it,
but if they saw it, they'd be interested.Or is it more about demand capture.
Where.
You are capturing existing demand?And so a couple of examples there.
On the demand capture side, we've donequite a bit in the automotive space,
(17:39):
in auto parts and things likethat, especially on paid search.
And that's one of those things whereit's like, yeah, if I need brake pads,
well, first of all, I'm going to go toa dealership, but if I need brake pads,
they're squeaking and there's an event,
and so then I just go search and I buybrake pads. But if it's something like,
Hey, some new apparel thatI've never worn before,
or maybe the chiefs just made theSuper Bowl and so now there's something
(18:01):
popping up in my feed and I want tobuy it. That's demand generation.
And so understanding where your product,
your company sits on that continuum isgoing to also determine how much is it
going to pay off to invest in SEO.
Yeah, 100%.
So we talked a little bitearlier about dissecting a
(18:22):
bunch of e-commerce analytics accounts,non-branded organic search's traffic.
So that means people going toGoogle searching for a keyword,
but not having your brand name in there.They're not searching OMG commerce,
they're searching YouTube adservices, something like that.
So that was the highestperforming revenue wise.
So we know the potentials there,
(18:44):
but as far as what can youexpect as far as increases go,
I have some data there.
I looked at 152 SEO campaignsover the past few years to see
on average, what was the increase afterthree months, six months, nine months,
and 12 months, three months on average,
we saw about a 20% increase.Six months was about 50%,
(19:05):
nine months was 65,and a year was 75%. So.
That's just.
Ballpark. And it.
Changes increase in non.
Organic brand organic traffic. Correct.
Nice.
Yeah. So
if you're a massive brand and you'regetting hundreds of thousands of
visits a month, that 50 to 75%,
(19:30):
it's going to pay for itselfa thousand times over.
If you're a smaller startup and you'reonly getting maybe a thousand visits a
month,
a 50 to 75% increase mightnot be as substantial.
So a lot of this depends on forSEO to be worth it. Obviously,
the more traffic you have now,
the more organic search revenueyou have now the better.
(19:50):
Think of it as like a multiplier.If you're starting out,
it's going to be at least a year beforeyou really start getting good momentum.
But the potentials there.
If you do it and you're an industrywhere people are searching your products,
it's not too competitive.
And the last caveat I'll give is thatyour prices aren't too expensive.
I mentioned this briefly,
but if you have a premium productthat costs three x to four x,
(20:12):
so people get on Amazon,
you're going to have a much higher bouncerate and Google's just not going to
rank you as high as your competitors.
Right, right. Yeah, totally, totallymakes sense. Okay, super helpful.
So then let's kind of breakdown those buckets then.
Let's go through each one and kindof talk about some of the tactics or
approaches that we should consider two to.
(20:33):
Fill that bucket. Sure. Bucketnumber one, technical SEO.
If you're on Shopify, you probably don'thave to spend too much time on this.
Shopify is a very SEO friendly platform.
I'm sure most peoplelisten to this right now.
If I had to guess more half areprobably on Shopify. Totally.
Yeah.
Totally. It's a great platform. Very,
(20:54):
yeah, you probably don't have tospend too much if you're on Shopify,
Magento two, BigCommerce or WooCommerce,any of those four platforms,
you're probably pretty solid.If you're on a custom platform,
if you're on Volution or you stillhaven't left Yahoo stores or some of these
old legacy platforms,
you're probably going to want to spenda lot more effort on technical SEO.
But for most people.
(21:14):
It's you're probably goingto want to migrate, honestly.
More so migrate. But for most people,technical, SEO gets overblown.
I honestly think peopletalk about it too much.
People love to talk about it becauseit's something you can control.
You can go in and makeupdates to your XML side map,
and you can make changes to your robotstext that your crawl efficiency is super
(21:34):
dialed in. You can make sure youhave schema on all these pages,
which a lot of times Google's not evenrespecting all the different schemas and
structured markups these days.So honestly, yes, there might be.
It's still good to have a professional,do an audit and say, okay,
fix this and then move on. Don'tdwell on the technical SEO stage.
(21:55):
It should be a one and done typething. It should not be a big project.
Totally makes sense. Number two,page optimization. Very simple.
Make sure whatever keywordyou're trying to rank for,
you have that in thebeginning of your title tag.
And if you're not familiarwhat a title tag is,
if you search a keyword in Google,
it has that blue or purplelink that's the title tag.
(22:16):
It's a very important ranking factor.
Google puts a fair amount of weightinto what keywords you put in there.
In the search in general.Then in the search results,
that title tag is going to become kindof the headline almost for that organic
listing. Not always, Google can kindof put whatever they want to put there,
but a lot of times the title tag showsup there, but also shows up in the
(22:38):
tab of the browser as well.
So it's going to have somepretty prominent placements and Google gives it a lot
of weight.
And speaking of title tags,
like this is one thing I see a lot Ia mistake a lot of people make, and
you can have a very brandable name.
So I was talking with a client who theysell leather conditioners and leather
(23:01):
cleaners. It's a product for,
if you have a car and you want tohave the leather look in its best,
you get this leather conditionerthat you can put on the car seats.
But they don't call it leatherconditioner. They call it rejuvenator oil,
and that's the brand name.
So the issue with that is peoplearen't searching rejuvenator oil,
they're searching.
So their products weren't ranking verywell in Google because they're calling it
(23:24):
what they want to call it.
Not.
What the customers are calling it.
So finding a balance betweenbrandable names and keywords
is always something that you'regoing to have to keep in mind,
but you're going to want to have thatwhatever keyword you're ranking for,
ideally you want to have that in yourtitle tag as close to beginning as
possible.
Love.
It, love it. And then meta descriptions,
(23:45):
that's those two lines of black textthat we see in the search results.
These aren't really a ranking factor.
It doesn't matter if you have yourkeyword in there a bunch or not at all.
The best way I like to describe it ismeta descriptions are your ad copy for
SEO. So having really well written metadescriptions with your calls to actions,
unique selling points, it's goingto have a higher click-through rate,
which will send more traffic.
(24:06):
But if Google sees your listingsgetting a higher click-through rate,
that's also going to have apositive impact on rankings.
Yeah.
I.
Love that. So it's an indirect rankingfactor, isn't it, where it's like,
use this text to get moreclicks, organic clicks,
the more organic clicks you get.
Actually Google's going to rewardthat by ranking you higher. So yeah,
(24:27):
it's an indirect but important piece.
And just to nerd out a little bit more,
Google had this massiveranking factor leak last year.
We saw thousands of documents,
internal documents on what they'relooking at when scoring websites.
One of the things that's confirmed isthey look at the click-through rate and
the search results. So ifyou're in position three,
(24:49):
but you have a higher click-throughrate than position two because you have
either a brand name that peoplerecognize or a really well-written meta
description, Google, it's one ofthe most powerful ranking factors.
Google will move you up so fast.
Yes.
So yeah, metas script is going.
To huge impact. Again, that's a vote ofconfidence, right? That's Google saying,
Hey,
people are voting with their clicksand with their attention that they like
(25:10):
this result. So we're moving it up.
Exactly. And then the lastpiece of page optimization,
second to last would be header tags.
This is what's actuallydisplayed on your page.
This is the big header that userssee. Not as important as a title tag,
but still there's someranking benefits there.
So make sure you have your keyword andthe header tag. That's kind of like the.
Headline for the page, right?So when you open a page, it's.
(25:30):
Basically the headlinethat you see exactly.
It's the big bold text you see at thetop. And then the last piece is content.
You want to include yourkeyword in the content,
preferably at least once inthe first 100 words or so.
You want to includevariations throughout it.
You want to include related keywords.
So having your keyword throughout yourcontent is also a very helpful ranking
factor, which is why for categorypages and collection pages,
(25:52):
you want to have at least 200 to 300words of content and sprinkle your keyword
in there a few times.
Love it. Love it. Okay,
so we got technical SEO that's probablycovered before on a reputable platform.
Most listeners are probably onShopify, so you're mostly good there.
Then we got page optimization, which isreally those factors, title tag content,
(26:13):
header tag. Yeah. Soit totally makes sense.
So then what's bucket number three.
Content? So with content,
where I see the most opportunity ismaking sure your category pages and your
collection pages have that200 to 300 words of content.
It can make such a big differencein ranking. It's so easy to do,
especially with ai.
(26:33):
There's honestly no excuse not to havesome well-written category descriptions
on your pages.
And then there's also blog postsnow I think gets overblown a bit.
In the SEO world, everyone feelslike they have to create content.
You have to keep having fresh contenton your website that way Google keeps
indexing things. There'sall these myths about it.
(26:55):
My take on blogging is youshould only blog if there's
particular topics that have high searchvolume and decent conversion potential.
So sticking with the gaming laptops,
I bet you there's a lot ofpeople searching best gaming laptops or maybe they're
searching Dell versusLenovo gaming laptops.
(27:16):
Any keyword like that, that's like bestgaming laptops or comparison, Harrison,
or maybe it's laptops for
programming students.
Anytime that the keyword has some typeof search intent that they're looking to
do research and byproduct,
those are great blog posts to createThat way you're not just getting traffic,
(27:37):
but you can get conversions. Butwriting about what is a laptop,
how to clean your laptop,how to install Windows 12,
whatever it is, those are not going toconvert. Yes, they'll drive traffic rank.
Whatcha going to get from that? Exactly.
That's all going to be answeredin the AI overview anyway, so.
That's a hundred percent.So realistically,
(27:59):
most clients I see,
I'd say maybe 20 to 30% actually havesome good topics where it makes sense to
go down that direction ofblogging. But for me, honestly,
about 70% of e-commercesites I take a look at.
I don't think blogging's a waste oftime and that they're not going to get a
positive ROI from it.
Just put content on the categorypage, product page, things like that,
and leave the blog alone. Yeah.Now another interesting thing,
(28:21):
I was talking to Steve at Seller Summitand he was talking about how his blog
traffic has died. A lot of blog traffichas died, and that was tied to a recent,
somewhat recent Google update. Canyou talk about that a little bit?
When did blogs, again,
maybe die is overdramatic,
but when did blogs die or whendid they reduce in importance?
(28:42):
Because there was definitely aday early in our SEO careers,
I'm sure where leaning heavilyinto blogs, that was a winning.
Strategy. Yeah, we cango deep into this one.
I was actually working with Steveon his blog while all this stuff was
unfolding. So we had workedtogether, we Forex his blog traffic,
and then it was around 2023 thatGoogle had a barrage of updates,
(29:05):
different core algorithm updates.They had the helpful content update,
and I'm going to give you a littlebackstory and a tie it all back into your
question.
So essentially what happened is Googlewas pretty good at giving results,
but what really dropped theball and really failed was
anything like best gaminglaptops, best protein powders,
(29:26):
best weight loss supplements, best VPNs,
the affiliates. And for those thatdunno what affiliate is, it's basically
I have a blog. I am goingto be an Amazon affiliate.
I include links to products onAmazon. If people with those links,
I get a commission. Sothere's an incentive for these affiliates to rank as high
(29:46):
as they can. They can make a lot of money,and they were making a lot of money,
millions upon millions of dollars.
So they're just flooding Googlewith all these really crappy low
quality affiliate sites that justregurgitating information on Amazon.
It's causing a nightmare forGoogle. Everyone knew the results.
You just can't trust them.
It's just you're hearing reviews aboutproducts and it's obvious they've never
(30:07):
even touched the product in their life.
They're just regurgitating Amazonreviews and other information.
So Google what their solution to this was.
They pretty much justdecimated any middle tier,
low tier, standalone blog. Ifyou're just a blog, you're screwed.
But if you're an e-commerce store witha real business that has a business
(30:28):
address and has customers and youhappen to have a blog doing great,
you're blogs can perform better than ever.
If you're a service provider likeBrett, you or me, and we have a blog,
we're established businesses. Wemight even be Google My Business,
we might have a physical addressand we have a blog, that's great.
But if I'm just a blog and that's allI do and I don't have a product or a
(30:51):
service, those sites got decimated.
Which makes sense.
And a lot of those were back in the daywhen you would pay for backlinks and
things like that. Notthat I ever did that,
but you'd get links from sites like that.
And so a lot of them just got torched.
Yeah, it got destroyed. I mean,the results now are way better.
(31:13):
But one of the byproducts of thatis even really good quality content.
Like Steve and his website, mywife quit. Her job is good stuff.
He's a true industry expert. Heknows his stuff, his content's great.
It's a high authority Ithink of for those SEO nerds,
domain rating 70 or domain ratingdomain authority around 70, huge, huge.
(31:34):
But even then his traffic droppedoff like 90% because these updates.
Now I am working with one contentsite that's pretty authoritative,
and we're doing an experiment right now.
So I have a theory because when Iwork with Steve and I did analysis,
all his competitors that are juststandalone content sites, they plummeted.
They dropped off like 90%.
(31:55):
The sites that absorbed all thoserankings and benefited were the product
and service sites that had,they were in Google My Business,
they were in Google's knowledgegraph. So if you do auto complete,
they'll show up as like aknown entity and Google.
And so right now I'm doing anexperiment to see if I can take a blog,
get them and Google my business,get them a Wikipedia page,
(32:19):
get them all the signals thatshow it's a legit business.
This a real business.
A real business. What impactwill that have? So TBD,
but the correlation is there.
I love that theory, man. That'ssmart. Yeah, keep me posted on that.
That's super interesting.
Yeah, so to be determined,
but the correlation is still there.The sites that have a physical address,
(32:40):
a phone number, they're in Google mybusiness, they're in the knowledge panel.
Those sites were fine.
The ones that didn't have aknowledge panel or any of that,
they all just got decimated.
Got it, got it. Interesting. Okay,super interesting insight there.
Thanks for sharing that. Whatelse about this content bucket?
What else would you advise or coachus on for our e-commerce store?
(33:03):
That's pretty much it. I have200, 300 on category pages.
Include your keyword andthen just one little pro tip.
If you're wondering what relatedkeywords to include in your content,
just search your keyword and Google imagesearch and you'll have that refinement
bar at the top.
Those are all great related keywordsthat you might want to consider ones that
are applicable, including your content.
Interesting. Great, greatinsight there. Cool.
(33:26):
So we've got our technicalon page, our content.
What's bucket number four? Bucketnumber four is link building.
You want to get as many other siteslinking back to you as possible. Now,
if you want to do this, the white hat way,
one strategy that can work really wellfor e-commerce sites is product reviews.
If you have a direct to consumerproduct, you can find some blogs,
(33:46):
you send them some product for free, theytake some photos, they write about it,
and in the writeup, they'regoing to include a link back.
So that's probably one ofthe best ways to do it.
And you can also get some referraltraffic from these sites if it has a big
enough following.
Another strategy that can work wellbut is extremely difficult is content
marketing, creatingcontent, promoting content.
(34:07):
And the reason it's so hard is whenyou're doing content marketing for link
building,
it's less about what topics will appealto your customers and what topics will
appeal to bloggers. So you're probablygoing to create content that might not
even interest your, it could be ifwe're sticking with gaming laptops,
I could do an articleabout gaming statistics,
(34:29):
like what percent of Americans youth spend
10 hours a day or more on video games,
which video games are themost popular by hours?
I do a whole breakdown on all thesestatistics that's not really going to
interest someone lookingto buy a gaming laptop,
but it could interest a journalistwho's writing about screen time on kids
(34:51):
and wants to reference a statistic.Now that's going to get some backlink.
So it's why it's so hard to do it isyou have to really kind of change your
thinking and less of what will mycustomers want versus what will the
journalists and thebloggers want to link to.
Super interesting. Yeah.
So what are the most used tactics then,
and what are you coaching your clientson in terms of practical ways to build
(35:15):
links? Because this has always been oneof those areas where it's the highest
correlation in terms of ranking factors.
It's how Google wasbuilt based on backlinks,
but to do it the right way is reallytime intensive and really difficult.
So what are some of the tips, suggestions,advice that you give to clients?
So I'd say try go the whitehat as much as you can.
(35:38):
Definitely do the contentmarketing or the product reviews.
But here's the sad truth about it.
If you want to get alink to a product page,
if you want to get link to acategory page, nine times of the 10,
a blogger is going to require payment.
You could have the most compellingpitch with the best product.
That's truly groundbreaking.But these bloggers,
(35:59):
this is how they put food ontheir table. They live off this.
This is their income. Andif they check your site,
if you were a libraryor you were a nonprofit,
they're probably not going to charge you.
If you reach out to them and theyclick on your site, it's like, oh,
this is an e-commercesite. Nine times out of 10,
they're going to require payment.So they might call it an editorial fee of
(36:20):
like, oh, we'll write aboutyou, we'll feature you,
but it's going to take time to pull upthat post and make the edits and then
publish it and do all this stuff.
So you can expectanywhere from 50, I'd say,
to a hundred dollars of these editorialfees or blog fees to get featured.
So that's the sad truth of it.
What's even kind of more sad isI wish it didn't work as well.
(36:44):
I really wish that thelinks paid links from
blogs didn't work, but they do. And thecorrelations there, insights rank. Well,
the tricky part is deciphering a good
backlink from a bad one.So let say have two blogs,
trying to determine which blog is goingto be helpful and which is going to be
(37:05):
harmful is extremely difficult.
I see even SEO veterans have beendoing this for five to 10 years.
They still get it wrong.You have to look at, well,
what's the domain rating anddomain authority of the site?
Is this going to help me?Okay, let's go a step deeper.
How much traffic does this have?
Does it actually have some rankings inGoogle? But now they're getting smart,
and I don't know if you know this Brett,
(37:26):
but a lot of sites will manipulateand game their traffic numbers by
artificially running a bunch offake searches on nonsense nonsense
keywords and that they ranked for.So now they're inflating that.
So you have to go a step deeper and seethe keywords that are driving traffic
are those keywords relatedto the site's main focus.
So there's so many checks you have to do.
(37:48):
We'll even go deep and lookat who is this linking out to?
Is it linking out to porn sitesand escort sites and Viagra sites?
So for most people, they stopat level one and level two,
they'll look at the domain rating,the traffic, they'll move on,
but you'll end up buying links that arejust absolute garbage and can hurt your
sites. So link billing, it'sso hard for that reason.
(38:09):
So that's why I say if you're goingto do it, the white hat approach,
going to real blogs and product reviewsand take a stab at content marketing
is probably best. But justknow of all the four buckets,
link billing is the most difficult andthe hardest for an e-commerce brand to
make a core competency.
Yeah, it totally makes sense,man. Super, super helpful.
(38:30):
So let's then get to maybe the questionthat was most burning in people's
minds. Well then what aboutai, SEO? So what do we do?
So, okay, this is our core SEO,and that's aimed at Google,
but what if we want to rank inJet GPT or Perplexity or Gemini,
which is related to Google orother AI that's yet to come?
(38:51):
What's your advice on that?
It's a great question. There is someoverlap. If you're doing SEO, right,
a lot of it's going tocarry over to chat GPT.
So one thing that chat GT does is a lotof times they'll show the sources of
where it's pulling informationfrom and it's pulling from the web.
So content marketing and blockingcan be great if you have some posts
(39:12):
and anyone to this, if you wantto show up better in chat g bt,
first thing you should do is do a bestgaming laptops, best protein powder,
whatever your product is, create a buyer'sguide or a product roundup about it.
So those get picked up veryfrequently in chat GBT,
so you get a little moreinfluence on swaying the model,
whatever you think is best. So blogging,
(39:34):
content marketing is one.Link building is another one.
We see if there's gettingmentioned on other websites,
getting your product reviewson authoritative sites,
those are also getting pickedup as sources. So that can help.
It's like a PR play where themore sites and webpages in the web
that mention your products, The higherchance you have of being cited in these
(39:58):
large language models.
But if you want to be just kind of gostraight to the jugular on how you're
going to rank, well searchyour keyword or go into a chat,
GPT type best protein powder,whatever your keyword is in there,
scroll down, look at the sources,
it's going to tell you exactly whereit's pulling from to generic this result
and try to get yourproduct featured in those.
(40:19):
So it's going to show you allthese top 10 protein powder,
top eight protein powder type pages.You're going to want to reach out to them.
You're probably going to haveto send them free product.
You'll probably have to send them anaffiliate link to make it worth it.
You'll probably have to have a compellingpitch on why they should include you.
But that what I'm seeingis the biggest impact.
We did some correlation research on this,
and it was like we talked about linksbeing highly correlated with 0.3
(40:44):
when it came to chat GPT andgetting your product included,
it was like 0.45 correlationof the number of different
product roundups you were cited in.
So the more product roundups your productis found in, that's in the sources,
the much higher chance you're going tohave of showing up in those chat GBT
shopping carousels.
(41:05):
Yeah, it totally makes sense. And in someways it's similar to product reviews.
And what I mean by that islooking at Amazon reviews,
product reviews make a big differencein terms of ranking and conversions and
all those things. And the issueis that they can be gamed, right?
People can manipulate them. There'stons of fake reviews. So it's like,
well then won't Amazon just get awayfrom that? And the real answer is no,
(41:28):
they can't. There's no better signal.
Every user or every shopperwants to see reviews.
And so it's got to get better atweeding out the crappy reviews.
And I think it's the samething with these roundup blogs,
with backlinks, with things like that.
These are signals that whendone right are the clearest,
most powerful signals thatare out there right now.
(41:49):
And so really just got to do it the rightway, build those things the right way.
But it makes sense to me that those aregoing to continue to be a ranking factor
for SEO and for AI SEO.
Yeah, I would a hundred percentagree with that. Cool. Cool.
Awesome, man. Well,this has been fantastic.
I really want to pick your brain on AIas well. So how about, let's do this.
(42:11):
Let's be like a littleteaser. We'll do another ai,
let's do an AI focused episode. Thiswill be the little teaser for it.
What models are you playingwith the most right now?
What are you most excited about withai and specifically like AI and working
with your agency andautomation and stuff like that?
And is there one cool thing you canshare with the audience related to ai?
(42:33):
Yeah, so models wise, I wasusing Claude 3.7 a bunch,
and then four for a while, but thenI started using Gemini 2.5 pro,
and I think that's my favorite oneright now. What I love doing for fun,
I'm not a coder, I've alwayswanted to be a programmer,
but I dunno how to program. SoI've been using this tool Rept,
which is like an AI code generator,
(42:54):
and I've been able to build somepretty powerful apps that can take a
screenshot of a blog, passthat screenshot to an AI model,
analyze it, and then fromthat analysis also pull on
keyword ranking data for pageand then generate title tags,
(43:14):
meta descriptions and headers.
So basically automating the SEO processwhere you take a screenshot of a page,
you pull on the ranking data,
you give all this to the AI modeland have it optimize the page.
So as far as your teaser goes,
literally just last week I pulledthe trigger and hired three
full-time AI automation specialists.
(43:36):
And we're doing an experimentto build a fully autonomous
AI agency where there'd be no people.
It's just I'm going to see howmany of the SEO steps can I
automate with ai? And instead ofhaving an actual account manager,
you have your AI account manager. So thisis something that we're building out.
(43:58):
Dude, can't wait to see that. Okay.That was a good teaser right there.
That was powerful. Definitely goingto do an AI episode coming up next.
And so looking forward to that. But Jeff,
as people are listening to thisand they're like, dang, alright,
I got to think about seo. I got to thinkabout ai seo. I need to talk to Jeff.
How can people reach out toyou? How can they work with you?
Yeah, you can go to my website.It's just 1 8 0 marketing.com,
(44:21):
180 marketing.com. Or you canjust shoot me an email directly.
My email is Jeff at 1 8 0 marketing.com.Happy to hear from you guys.
And Jeff, as you can tell,just super cool dude,
the kind of guy you want to hangout with. Grab a beer with talk,
SEO and talk e-commerce with. And sowith that, Jeff, awesome job, man.
Thanks for the time and looking forwardto that AI episode. Thanks, Brett.
(44:44):
This has been fun. Awesome. And asalways, thank you for tuning in.
Would love to hear from you,
connect with me on LinkedIn orshoot us a note about the pod.
Or if you like this episode,
share it with somebody that youthink will enjoy it. And with that,
until next time, thank you for listening.
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