495: Wild SEO Hacks to Boost Ecom Traffic in 2024 | Ronnie Teja

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2:42Ronnie, welcome back, man. Welcome to our e-commerce AI Summit. Excited to have you here. Last time we spoke, we spoke a lot about SEO and organic. You're a bit of a G when it comes to SEO and growing e-commerce brands using SEO. You're a big fan of first-party data and why it's so important to really grow your e-commerce brand. You have a portfolio of brands. The most well-known one that you talk about is Brandzio Watches, which you've scaled. I don't even know how big it is, but it does over seven, multiple seven figures at least a year. So the first question I ask everyone that comes on is, how did you get your job, aka how did you find yourself doing the work you're doing today?

3:26Thank you, Nathan, for having me. How did I find my job? I think I ended up in entrepreneurship as a mistake, right? I shopped around and people said I had a very big personality. So I was never an employee market fit in any organization. So I said, if nobody's going to end up doing their job, I said, I'll create one myself. and that's how I started in my business which is essentially uh you know there's there's that story that I told before when I was with you which is you know picking blueberries working at Best Buy self-taught digital marketer and then you know uh the the story is basically they said you have a big personality and somehow you know people get scared of it and I and I can understand that so I said I'll make my own I'll make my own way and took a chance on myself and I started my business.

4:14And you have a portfolio of brands, which is really interesting. How many brands, e-commerce brands do you have under your portfolio right now? At the moment, about 15. So yes, sir. So a few in the watch market, so watch and watch accessories, a few in software. And the way things are looking now, what we've been working on for the last, I think about eight months is to deploy a product which is quite similar to Microsoft Office, which is called Truly Office. So quite a big undertaking when you're trying to compete with a giant that does about$15 billion in revenue. Interesting. Okay. So last time we chatted, you shared about how you rebuilt your company through content marketing and SEO.

5:02What do you think the state of SEO marketing is right now in particular with the emergence of ai and how easy it is to create content well the the the issue is i would like to sound like an expert but the problem is google has me stumped with exactly what the updates that they've been pushing for the last uh for the last month google's wrote out three different updates right when you're looking at the three different updates it's a bit confusing because if you are if you are a website that is well established or Google goes by EEAT, so, you know, authority and trust and, you know, and everything else under the market.

5:40If you're a trusted site, chances are you will gradually see, you will gradually be trusted and you'll gradually see a bump up, which is happening, right? Now, about a month ago, the algo, what Google launched was something called the helpful content update, right? Now, with the helpful content of it, what's quite interesting is you're finding out that the main winners of this site was something that used to happen in the 90s. So if you had like forums, so coming back to creators and talking about creators, if you have UGCs, so when people think about user-generated content, user-generated content could be in terms of ads.

6:18That's what you're thinking as an e-commerce entrepreneur. It's just like it could be ads, it could be customer testimonials, reviews, etc. But there's a different side of UGC content, which I can talk about, which is the SEO part of it. And when you think about UGC's 1.0, that's forums, right? So when this content update rolled out, it was going back to UGC 1.0, which is the forum-based websites, Quora, Reddit, LinkedIn, and we had communities and people who were essentially creating these communities where interactions were going on, people were asking questions and answers. And there's this whole sort of plethora of people coming together under a certain umbrella, under a certain product.

7:01Those were the sites that were actually rewarded. So when you're talking about UGCs from that perspective, and when you're tying it into SEO, this is a classic example of why you should actually, when people talk about communities, it doesn't mean you need to have Facebook groups or WhatsApp groups or anything else. It also means tertiary, are you creating something, a space where people can have this chat, right? So that's something that I found really, really interesting that what Google is trying to do at the moment. So when it comes to SEO, what's working in your business right now? Yeah. So the interesting thing about AI, right, at the end of the day is like it's everything about Moore's Law in terms of what's happened in the last like eight months is it's a bit overwhelming.

7:46Right. So I'll give you the basics of it. What I use as a tactical tactically for my business. Right. So about eight months ago, I was using Jasper and Jasper was all the buzz and et cetera, et cetera. Right. And Jasper costs you about$100 to$100 a month. But now if you go to Bing, right? Bing literally has ChatGPT and everything else built into it. And it does live crawling of all the URLs that are indexed on Bing itself, right? So there's a couple of things that I actually use. Number one is I live crawl all the URLs in Bing just to get an idea of what I'm actually looking at. So for example, if I'm looking for top watches of 2023, right?

8:24Or next release of watches 2024. Bing will actually come and generate all the results, the articles out of, let's say, the top 10 blogs that it trusts, right? So you actually know you have a baseline for the top 10 blogs that Bing has indexed to be, right? I would essentially take these articles and then move them all into OpenAI. So the chatDVT function at the end of the day, right? And from there, I would ask chatDVT with a prompt to rewrite these articles in a more SEO-friendly, reader-friendly way, right? So option number one is you can use Bing itself. Option number two is you can use ChatGPT with the plugin of Bing as well and sort of do the same process, right?

9:00Your prompt is what is going to be the most important part and how you're actually asking the AI to rewrite your content, right? The third part, which a lot of people ignore, is basically you need to edit it. You need to edit it to sort of for a human to read it because this is a machine that's actually coming up with it, right, at the end of the day. So you need to have a human edit it. You need to see what the layout is, what the flow is, et cetera, et cetera. And that's the time you're able to push it live. Now, what a lot of smart SEOs are doing is they're using something called Make, right, which is like Zapier.

9:29And within Zapier, they're able to deploy with MidJourney or DALI. DALI is one that works right now. With DALI and ChatGPT, you can actually ask it to write an article, do the image prompt within DALI as well. So it gives you like a massive, let's say, a thousand word article with images of like emperor penguins, et cetera, et cetera. and then it's off to the races and then it's published on a wordpress blog so it's literally like five minutes it's live yeah and you're not getting penalized for doing that nope no no you're not it's it's it's uh it's what google had frowned upon years ago which was basically page builders so page builders uh was basically like it used to be this old school software where you could just deploy if you like the website you could literally copy that website and deploy hundreds of pages that look like this website one fine day and Google had shunned it.

10:22But in this last update, it seems like it's not the way forward anymore. Google is actually saying, yes, you can deploy multiple pages of multiple content because you need to feed the beast. And that's what Google's looking at right now. Feed me as much information as you can. Hey, FounderFam, I want to talk to you about something super exciting. We're officially partnered with OmniSend, the email marketing and SMS platform built specifically for e-commerce founders. We've been recommending OmniSend to founder students for a while now because it just works. Whether you're launching your first store or you're scaling to seven figures, it really helps you automate your marketing and get real results.

11:01Did you know on average, OmniSend customers make$68 for every$1 they spend, which is an insanely good return on investment. And because you're part of the founder community, you get 50 % off your first three months with the code FOUNDER50. Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. But that's insane because the content is effectively being respunned from a, yeah, wow, that's wild. I'm as confused for the last like, let's say six to eight weeks because it's exciting in the way that you could literally spin out 100, 200 pages and see how they go.

11:49But 100, 200 is on the low end. You could be spinning out 1 ,000 pages a month. Super easy. But the part that's what Google calls the helpful content is actually the not-so-helpful content update. And then they rolled out another one, I think about a week ago, which penalizes all affiliate sites, which have reviews, best-of. uh you know like so example best watch is 2024 it's not going to work anymore google's actually just going to eat it up and put it into page search which is interesting crazy okay so right now you're just using that method to spin out ridiculous amounts of content and articles and your ranking well i have so we have a test site so usually we have a 30 url we'll test this on like a live WordPress site and see how it works.

12:43We don't do it on our main sites because we need, you know, we don't want to penalize the main site. So please don't do it on your main site. So if you do get a chance, have a test site, try out everything on there. And if it's working on that, like a couple of weeks, you know, you'll know when things are indexing and how quickly they're indexing. So yeah, I mean, they're working on the test site. So we're able to bring it back and actually like deploy it on the main site and say, look, let's just scale as quickly as we can. We don't know how long this is going to last, right? Because there's another content update that's going to come November and then one in December.

13:10And that for sure is going to hit different things. But while it's good, I would highly suggest it because every page that I'm seeing that I'm putting out programmatically is being indexed, number one. Number two, am I able to... So simple example, to get traffic between 5 to 10K clicks a month, right, it would... Well, 5 to 10 clicks a day, it would previously take me about three to six months to get to that volume. Today, I didn't get to that same volume in about seven days. Wow. So you're getting five to 10K clicks a day. Yeah, you can scale it in a week versus six months. So it's like, so it just depends on the execution tactic, right?

13:56So something that I can talk about, which I guess we discussed earlier, was programmatic SEO, right? So when you look at programmatic SEO from, let's say, a very wide perspective, so let's put it like a broad perspective. So, for example, if you're looking to sell courses, right, let's say digital marketing courses, people are looking for digital market courses in different geos. So you're looking at, let's say, digital marketing courses in San Diego, digital marketing courses in LA, digital marketing courses. So you take the top 50 cities that you want to target, right? So you take the top 50 cities.

14:30next you're going to write everything about digital marketing courses with this particular location in that particular city and of course you want to make a really nice long page which is helpful with the pictures of your courses you know a couple of videos about it uh you know link it link it to your uh to either linkedin and youtube and everything else where people can actually see your content and then of course you want to make a page let's say about a thousand to fifteen hundred words long which actually talks about the digital marketing courses what makes them so special etc etc but now you're not doing it for the san diego you're doing over every major city, you make a massive pillar page, right?

15:03So that pillar page essentially is where all these 50 sort of cities are housed, digital marketing courses, San Diego, et cetera, et cetera. And the intro is probably about, let's say, about 500 to 1 ,000 words, right? Which talks about digital marketing courses in general. Chances of this ranking, say locally, or whenever people are searching for digital marketing courses in those particular cities, are going to be through the roof. You'll rank locally. I guarantee you within a week if you were to follow this particular strategy, which is, and this is what programmatic SEO is essentially. Yeah, wild.

15:38Okay, crazy. And are many people doing this? Do you know many people that are doing stuff like this? Like I have the privilege of actually learning, being with some of the smartest minds in SEO in Thailand. So when you hang around being the dumbest guy in the room, some of their intelligence definitely gets to rub off on me for sure. So one thing that's also interesting is you mentioned offline that you are scaling ads as well. So when we spoke about a year ago, when it came to kind of your marketing mix, you were still pretty strong, top of funnel, first party. you still spent money on paid but now it sounds like you're really scaling it out talk to me about your your thoughts there yeah look i'll first party data and the data that you own is still is still my brand but at the end of the day right but the thing is you need to start looking at it from a wider funnel so if you want to go from let's say uh you know if you want to go from like a 10 million dollar company to a 30 million dollar company you need to start driving in a lot more traffic.

16:50And the problem with first-party data, as well as, let's say, the SEO way, right? It's a constant, like, it'll move, right? So, for example, the helpful content update, I'm happy to admit that I'm one of the losers, right? Maybe my traffic's down 15 to 20 percent. That's fine. No problem, right? I mean, we'll gain it back over the next... We have a six to one-year-long approach to it, right? I mean, Healthline, for example, lost 13 million visitors. wow a month yeah wow so so we are not in the grand scale like if you and the seo game and your your website visits are anywhere between you know 20 to 30 percent down that's the average if you're only five percent down consider yourself a winner right uh why ads is the thing so the ads landscape's changing pretty pretty interestingly right so when you're looking at the ad landscape there's a few there's a few interesting uh plays in the market number one uh which i'm sure it's going to be discussed is TikTok shops, right?

17:49When you look at TikTok shops in the grand scheme of things, as an e-commerce entrepreneur, when I look at how much commissions Amazon is charging me, right? The base of Amazon is between 15 to 20 % with ads and everything else, pick and pack, shipping, et cetera. I'm paying about 40 cents to the dollar to Amazon. TikTok shops is about, and I'll speak about Southeast Asia in general, is about 4%. TikTok has its own warehousing facilities where they use it for fulfillment like Amazon does. The cost of fulfilling on that is another 2%, right? So I'm paying between 6 % to 8 % plus ad costs, let's say another 10%.

18:27So there's 18 % what I'll pay on TikTok versus about 40 % that I'm going to pay on Amazon. That's just a no-brainer for me, right? So when we do want to do a global launch at the end of the day, we would probably like to do something with TikTok, for example, or there's other options out there which people are not thinking about like timu timu which is another interesting competitor in the market right uh it's timu timu is giving timu is funded by i think tencent or one of those guys and they've they've they've hit the u.s market they're using what they're losing about 30 to 50 dollars per user but because of the funding that they have they don't they're only acquiring users left right and center so it's it's it's a it's a good probable cause to get onto these new platforms which are trying to break through and try to dethrone amazon at the end of the day and for a person who i mean amazon is bread and butter it's good it's a good baseline keep it as is right but you need to start looking at different uh market market alternatives right uh timu or tiktok or etsy or you know groupon very interesting model as well or facebook facebook facebook's great man facebook is still good for scaling i think I think what happened post iOS and I was one of the guys who got hit really really hard with with Facebook post iOS I started again on Facebook I would say three months ago three or four months ago so we we got back on the Facebook course and I'll tell you what uh the advantage plus shopping campaigns that's the money maker essentially for you so uh without getting too much into the details If you were ever thinking about that media buying is complicated and you need to move the needle with sense, you need to go and change bids every day, you need to change everything else.

20:14I think that whole buying game has changed altogether, right? Media buying is now automated. What is not automated and what a lot of intelligent people will say is it's a creative, right? Which I 100 % would agree on. The best companies, and True Classic is a great example of this, they just deploy, let's say, 30 or 40 creatives, and they just let the audiences optimize for it. A really smart person who does this in the market that I really look up to is WeShred and Aesthetic Greens, right? They're testing out 150 different creatives. So you have a top of funnel creative testing funnel, right?

20:49You're testing out 150 different creatives. You're putting a hard limit stop at$50 a test per creative. You take it down to the mid-level. you know you have whatever your metrics are could be a sale ROAS or it could be click-through rate or it could be anything else like that right then you take it down one level more and you look at the middle funnel we're going to take test out the next 50 creatives we're going to spend 100 bucks on them see which one performs the better and then you of course take them to the lowest funnel the stuff you can't control today is the creative and let's not forget the landing page right that landing page testing becomes extremely extremely important as well so you can drive the traffic you know you can take the horse to the water but i mean is it going to doing it or not, that's your landing page.

21:27Then that's the most important thing here. Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying this episode and learning a ton. As you know, in this series, we interview some of the greatest founders of our generation to find out how they did it. However, if you're thinking of starting your own business and you want to hear from some incredible stories from everyday people like you or I, who are actually in the trenches, only been building their business for maybe one year or two years, like they're building right now and they're really in the early stages, but they're getting success. You should come and check out our new podcast, From Zero to Founder, hosted by our community manager, Molly Flynn.

22:05These are in the trenches stories from our very own successful students that have gone through some of our programs. People just like you who are deep within the process of building their very own successful business. These are the founders of tomorrow. You can find the From Zero to Founder podcast on all platforms. And remember, it's founder without the E. All right, now let's jump in the show. Yeah, look, a lot of talk about, you know, from doing this summit around Facebook, but also that it's come back in a big way and that it's all about creative in a big, big, big way. Yeah, 100%. I think you want to know something crazy?

22:46And I don't know if a lot of people agree with me. My best performing creators are actually static ads. Interesting. Yeah. Do you use AI to make them? Yeah. Mid-Journey. I'm sorry, for lack of a better word. I was just like, there's a really interesting smart guy out there. His name is Rory. And Rory actually showed me ads he was making using Mid-Journey. And I was like, what? I was like, what the hell don't want to know about this and basically we sat down for a session for two hours and i think in two hours we would bang out about like 50 to 75 ads wow so you just yeah so you just need that much time if you if you set yourself to it to sort of do it um it's quite interesting i mean if you go so something for the audience that they might be interested in is for example is canva canva just released magic editor so you can actually like uh put a banner out give it a prompt and throw up an image that you can use and add immediately for Facebook or whatever, and then deploy it in different sizes.

23:48But that costs you about 140 bucks or something a year. But if you want the free thing, you can go to Bing. And on Bing, they have the DALY option. We can create your own image and then you can edit the image using Microsoft Editor, which is all of this is free, by the way. It's game-changing. Oh, awesome, man. This is gold. So talk to us around more AI tools, man. um so what what i what other tools are you using in your business we talked about dali we talked about chat gpt we talked about uh mid journey what else uh jasper i'll use jasper why do you use jasper and not chat gpt for copy i use both actually jasper is actually a little bit better in terms of the output, the way it reads, to be honest.

24:38But, you know, the jury's out on it, right? I prefer using Jasper. My team prefers using ChatGPT. And sometimes I'll just switch, right? ChatGPT is very interesting now. Here's the other thing, right? We were talking about creatives, right? How do you get good ideas for creatives? And I don't know if anybody else has talked about it, but I'm definitely happy to talk about it. The best creatives come from looking at a competitor, right? You can actually get Bing or whatever, ChatGPT, to crawl your competitors' reviews. Look at the reviews from five-star to one-star. Take out all the two - and one-star reviews.

25:15Put them in a table. You can actually give that prompt to ChatGPT. Put them all in a table. Look at the two - and one-star reviews. They will give you the pain points that your competitors' customers have that you're looking to solve. And then you actually make your ads and copy based on those particular reviews. That's cool. game-changing. Yeah. So kind of interesting from where you wanted to go at the end of the day, right? Yeah. Wow. Crazy. All right. Any other tools? Any other game-changing tools you want to share with the audience, community? These are the most basic tools I use. The issue that I find is that there's a lot of noise out there in general, right?

25:56And unfortunately, I also have been caught up in it for the last few months, but these are the basics I use. everything else for me was a distraction. I mean, people can go and if they want, they can kind of like experiment with it and see what works for you. I mean, 11 Labs is another one which experimented for a while, which was quite interesting in terms of voiceover changes. So if you want to use the voiceover and you want to translate it and have it done in different languages. So 11 Labs was definitely it. But for us, wanted to keep it simple, man. Yeah, love it. Thank you. And look, this is what this summit's all about, man.

26:29And this conference, right? Like just getting people right to the source, speaking to legit founders that are using it day to day, how they're using it, how can people get ahead? So thank you. What is the main challenge that you're finding in regards to implementing AI solutions into your e-commerce business? Well, it's something that I was talking about before, which is the noise, right? There is so, I think on my last, on my last count, there's about a hundred different AI tools being basically deployed every day and everybody's getting funding for them because AI is the new thing and everybody's excited about it.

27:04And everybody on Twitter, apparently, is doing really well with AI tools, right? So don't believe half the stuff you hear. I think, personally from experience, what, I'll go back, go back to the basics, right? Go back to using the three or four tools that you're most comfortable with. In regards to our team, mostly we've gone back to the basics, right? Because the crazy person who was testing all the tools was me. And then I found out about three months in, this is a complete waste of time. So the main challenge is, number one, is going to be the noise. Number two, you've got to look at what fits your business model the best, right?

27:45For an e-commerce company, you know, copy is king or queen, creatives are king or queen. And, you know, you start from the basic building blocks, right? Then you can sort of train your financial models, et cetera, et cetera, as you go up. Word of caution, please don't feed, you know, all your financial data into open AI stuff because it's just going to consume it tomorrow and just you don't know if it's safe or secure. A lot of companies have done this. Not small e-commerce businesses, but I'm talking about law firms and stuff. So not the smartest idea ever because that data could at some point in time be exposed.