530: Mastering SEO for E-Commerce - Lindsay Shearer’s SEO Blueprint

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0:39Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder podcast with Nathan Chan.

1:03Well, welcome Lindsay. Thank you so much for taking the time. Really excited to speak with you. We have just created an incredible program on the Founder Plus platform, all things SEO for e-commerce. But before we talk about that and just really how e-commerce founders can get the most out of their SEO programs with their e-commerce store, the first question I ask everyone that comes on is how did you get your job aka how'd you find yourself doing the work you're doing today well it's a very wild story um my best friend this is so so I had a um holistic medical clinic for many years in San Diego that I was a part owner of and I was doing all the marketing for and I had hired this guy off of LinkedIn to come in and start helping me with marketing and all this kind of stuff he and I became best friends I really we realized we were neighbors and at the time um he got a job as like the first hire at manscaped and so me and him were like writing reviews on amazon before manscaped was anything and buying products and going to the warehouse and like trying to figure out all these crazy angles and all this kind of stuff and we were like we felt like we were college like frat trying to channel college frat boys to create all these Manscaped ads before they had a marketing team and before they were really a brand.

2:28It was when they were very first starting. And so I fell in love with the process of advertising. And he introduced me to his best friend who ended up becoming the head of organic marketing and the head of SEO for Manscaped. And I ended up becoming a part of his team. And so I learned and essentially cut my teeth in the e-commerce space and SEO when I very first started and so will the guy uh who ended up becoming the head of e-commerce was became another best friend business partner of mine and so all three of us essentially like birthed the marketing plan for manscaped and so let that was a crazy experience and then that led to obviously other speaking engagements and all those other kinds of things so i got to work really right out of the gate with some pretty amazing brands and that's how i fell in love really with sel There you go.

3:15And why do you think e-com founders should consider SEO as a channel? Yeah. So there are a lot of different types of brands that sometimes struggle with advertising or maybe like I'm working with a client right now who has a very high priced product. And when they're trying to run ads and all these kinds of things, the numbers initially don't make a lot of sense on the ad side. So it's very expensive and they're having a really hard time figuring out some of those numbers. And then the other side of it is once you have really good metrics on your ad side and you're looking for new marketing channels and you're looking for new ways to have more stability in your brand so you're less phased by your ad account getting shut down or all these things that happen to all of us, then you start thinking about, okay, what are the organic marketing channels?

4:05How does it look for me to have some stability in my brand long term and so that's when seo really starts coming into play it's like okay how do we get the organic search customers so that we're actually solving their problems and it actually really helps with messaging and it ends up help with helps with positioning on the ads and everything else because you get a lot of data on the organic side of how people are really trying to solve their problems so it helps affect your ad copy and all of those things long term as well. Yeah. And at what stage, depending on where you're at with your e-commerce business, would you recommend starting with SEO?

4:41Yeah. So I just had a consult actually with someone this week from the founder community and he was asking me the same question. And I told him that really what you need to do is I consider the most important thing is you need to validate your offer, we call it. So you need to get enough sales in the door that you're a hundred percent sure that you're going to go forward with this brand. So you don't want to invest a lot in SEO. Usually I say to wait a little bit of time until you have your offer validated. You know that your supplier is good. You know that everything is actually rocking and rolling.

5:13You have maybe some sales coming in. So you have a little bit of budget because SEO takes longer and it does take some investment upfront. So that kind of thing is not going to break the bank for you. Yeah, got you. And then when you say investment upfront, so let's just say you've got product market fit. you're getting sales, perhaps you're making five, 10, 20 grand a month, you know, that, you know, what, what sort of investment is required? Yeah. So it depends on how aggressive you want to be. I usually recommend if you're a newer brand that you at least start with some press releases and some things like that, they're a little bit more affordable.

5:48And then you can kind of start doing some SEO longer term. So with e-commerce brands, you don't have to do as much blogging and you don't need to create as many on-page SEO strategies as you do more off-page we call it which is more getting links and getting more publicity for your brand so getting in front of other people's audiences getting guest features on other people's blogs getting podcast features those kinds of things are really more important to focus on and I would say it just really depends on your budget what you can kind of stomach I can usually work with any kind of budget because I will just figure out okay you have this much budget at least we're getting started we're The other thing about SEO that's really important that people don't realize is the more your site looks like a legitimate site to Google.

6:33So you're getting links, you're getting people talking about you, then typically the better placement you get on your Google ads too. So even if you're just doing a couple of press releases or some things that are affordable in your budget to start, I would say yes, go ahead and do that if you're wanting to run Google ads for sure. Yeah. Okay. So when it comes to, I guess, ranking, you talked about on page versus off page, but how do you rank for like your key terms? Like, let's just say, you know, like this product here, I launched this, now sold it, healthish. It's a time marked water bottle.

7:10So, you know, people would type in Google, for example, time marked water bottle, how would you go about that? So every keyword has a specific number of links that it needs to rank number one for that keyword. And you can find those metrics on Ahrefs or SEMrush, these types of softwares where you can kind of do some little bit of research on your keywords and figure out also the search volume. So you know how many people are searching that keyword and if it's a valiant keyword to look for. and also the difficulty if there's a million other people looking for this keyword as well. And so once you have kind of a plan for that, then you know the number of links that it takes, aka the number of outside authority sources that need to be talking about that keyword for you to rank number one.

7:54So if, for example, time release water bottle is, say, is one of the keywords, and you know that you need 25 links to rank number one for that, then you know you need to start writing at least closer to 50 publications on outside publication sources and getting those published so that you can rank for that keyword. So once you know your keyword, the number of links you need per keyword, then you can start budgeting. Okay, I know for sure I want to rank for these five keywords. Then I need to know I need I know I need to write this many articles and get them published. And how much is it going to cost me to publish?

8:27And that's where you can kind of start thinking through, okay, this is my budget. This is how aggressive I want to be in that process. And then when you said that it takes time, how long should people expect to see a result, right? To actually start ranking for a key term or, you know, and, you know, obviously with the tools you can see the competition levels, but yeah. So the more competitive a keyword is, the longer it usually takes to rank. But I would say in general, minimum 90 days from the time that you start publications until the time you're going to start to see it show up on the rankings.

9:04And that's because of the way that Google indexes, we call it, their terms, which means how they're storing in the folders of how people... So when someone types in a search, then Google has to go and find the relevant information for that search through its folder system. And so that folder system takes 90 days minimum for you when you start ranking to start showing up in Google search. So I usually tell people you want to at least give it six months from the time that you start an SEO plan until you start to see sales. Now, for us, normally it's 90 days because we're pushing really hard in the beginning.

9:41You will sometimes what I've seen recently is that some of our press releases and things like that have been getting picked up faster in the cycle, which is kind of fun. But in general, I usually like to under promise and over deliver. So I would say you want to plan for six months and usually you're going to start seeing the needle move in 90 days. And then when it comes to the press releases, can you talk me through that side of things? Because you said for e-com, it's more off page. So what do you mean by that? So off page SEO means other people talking about your brand and sending links back.

10:13So say you're a guest on a pod, like I'm on the founder podcast, right? So you guys are going to send a link back to my website saying my name. So I'd probably be ranking for my name as a branded search term pointing back to my website. So that's one link of authority for my name. And say I need 10 links to rank number one for my name. Then I need to get nine other people to start talking about me and sending links back to my page. So off-page SEO is other people talking about you and sending their credibility back to your website. And so it's important to really get any kind of publicity. and so what we do with press releases there are different kinds of press releases you have what we call vanity press releases which are essentially like I'm getting an entrepreneur magazine and I have the press cycle picking me up on the Washington Post or whatever those are typically a lot more expensive and you have to know someone it's much harder to get publications there now what we like to do internally is what we call link building press which is where we have a lot of relationships with like local news stations and things like that, where I can write press releases and send them to a bunch of established relationship that I have so that I can get a lot more links for a lot less price.

11:29Because though the number of links, you need a lot of links usually to rank for your keywords. So in this example, if you needed 25 links, that's 25 articles you need to publish in different places. So the press releases allow us through relationships to do a lot of links, a lot of press, get a lot of links out there on really good trusted sites quickly. Got you. And then when it comes to PR, what should people do if they don't have these relationships? What is your recommendation? Hire someone who does. Because it's definitely easy to find a lot of companies that say they do SEO well, but you really want to look for what we call do follow links, which means the site can actually send their link juice, we call it, or you can actually follow that link to the person's website.

12:22So you really want and Google considers do follow links higher authority than what we call no follow links, where you can't actually follow them from the website to your website. So you want to look for that and you want to look and make sure that you're the people whoever you're hiring or posting on good high quality sites that have high search volume that have a lot of visibility and those kinds of things so and that they all have also a high what we call da score or domain authority is the score that google gives every website to say this is an authority site it's a it's a ranking from zero to 100 and the higher you get the better so you want to try to find sites with good domain authority or da and good search volume that are going to give you good authority and link juice back to your site that are do follow links yeah okay got you and then what about some of the clients you've worked with and some of the results because you you detail all this framework in the program uh on the founder plus platform but like can you talk to us like what is possible some of the craziest results or stories it's wild like um for example um when we i was working with manscape they were spending anywhere between 15 and 18 000 a month on links and they were making, I think it was like close to 185 ,000 a month from just organic search marketing.

13:44So and it really just depends. I mean, I've seen all kinds of wild results, everything from 3x to 100x on their search terms, just depending on the amount of search volume. And so that's one of the things that the very first thing that we do when I'm working with a client is we'll go in and create a plan and find as many opportunities as we can, where you have really good search terms that have super high search volume, aka a lot of people looking for those terms every month, and then low competition. So not a lot of other people are trying to rank for them. And that's really where the magic is at because then you can go in, it takes less authority, less links, all of those kinds of things to rank for these high searching volume keywords.

14:22And the more of those that you can do in your budget, the better. So that's what has given us a lot of advantage in helping a lot of e-com brands and also breaking this myth that you don't need to create a million blogs and you don't need to do all this stuff. You already have tons of pages on your site that just need to be matched up with these search terms so that when people are searching that term, your landing page, you know, your product page is coming up and showing them a result and answer a solution to their problem and making sure that you have solution-based messaging to some degree in your product page.

14:56So the better you can match that and the more authority that you can get from these outside links and the higher quality key terms and all those things, the easier it is for you to rank and the faster that you can do it and the faster that Google is going to come in and point all that out. But I would say I have seen like wild numbers. And the cool thing is it creates stability over time. Sometimes it's a little bit of a hump to get over initially and that's everybody. You're really not going to get around it. It's just a time thing. And so the faster you can do that. And if you have a brand, because some brands that I work with, they have just like a lot of competition, you know, toothpaste brands or stuff like that.

15:34Sometimes it's hard to get in there because Crest and all these guys are already ranking and they've already spent a ton of money on that. But that doesn't mean they have the smartest SEO teams either. I've outranked everybody. So you absolutely, the cool thing is you have the opportunity to do that. It's just more of a, the harder the search terms are, the longer it's going to take and the more it's going to take. But if you can find those opportunities, the faster you can do it and the faster you can get better results too. Hey, Founder Fam, I want to take a quick break from the show to tell you about something we're really excited about, our Black Friday offer, because this Black Friday deal is different.

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16:48Picture this, with the help of founder plus you could be running your own black friday sale this time next year or you could be smashing it out of the park smashing all-time records so don't miss out this deal closes soon start building your business today at founder.com forward slash plus that's p l u s or click the link in the show notes all right now let's jump back in the show yeah okay and talk me through what are some of those opportunities like yeah can you can we unpack that a bit more yeah so like for example if you're so when you get on like an ahs refs or an sem rush you will see like if you start looking for some key terms they have key suggestions or they'll and they'll they'll have once you type in your key terms they have suggested terms on there and so there's a lot of opportunity for you to see, okay, these terms are what other people are searching.

17:42These have high volume. And then it'll actually give you some sample headlines of the highest ranking articles. So you can see what your competition is doing. And so a lot of times people just like, like you may have, say, we're going to use the example of a blue t-shirt. Then instead of just trying to rank for blue t-shirt, you could try to rank for how do I find the perfect blue t-shirt or whatever. Try to find these longer term keywords that are a little bit more obscure, and they're going to still have good search volume and they're solving this problem of like, how do I find this? Or where do I find this?

18:13Or what's the best material? Or whatever. There's like got to be some additional problem solving questions. So every time we do an initial keyword research plan for our clients, we're always looking at, okay, I always write sample headlines. How does this, how could this key term be used in a headline to solve a problem that someone is looking for a solution for? So, and then that gives you some other ideas and then you go in there and you look at search suggestions too so for example even like say i'm working with a supplement brand not only would i be say they lower the a1c and it has to do with diabetes so some key terms that we could want to use would be like diabetes a1c and then it could also be things like these are the ingredients is this a calcium is whatever it is and then you can look at okay these are the search suggestions for people searching for calcium, searching for lower my blood sugar.

19:04Logical things that people would be searching for that your product is solving the problem for. Yes, I see. And then what about on page? You talked about off page. What about on page? What is like some low hanging fruit that people can implement on their store literally today? Absolutely. So on page SEO has to do with are you using the search term on your product page for e-commerce brands is usually where I recommend you start? Are you using your keyword in your images? Are you using your keyword just in the regular text of the page? Are you using it in the headlines, the meta descriptions? Making sure that your keyword is in all of those places.

19:43And now Yoast SEO, which is the most famous WordPress plugin for SEO, there is a Yoast SEO plugin now for Shopify. So you can use that and it gives you the suggestion saying, hey, it actually gives you like a little score and it says oh your page is in the red because it doesn't have the keyword here and it doesn't have a link here and it doesn't have an internal link and it doesn't have all this stuff and you can kind of just go through that list now i'm like okay i need to add my keyword here and i don't have it in this description and my image and those kinds of things so and tags and all those other other things so when you open that up it gives you some easy low-hanging fruit to be able to do that for sure got you yeah so big one for people listening watching right now definitely download the Yoast Shopify plugin and just follow the prompt or follow what it tells you to do basically.

20:31Yeah, that's gold. Okay. Well, let's talk about, I guess, more tactic side of things. What can people expect in the incredible program that you taught for us on the Founder Plus platform? What can people expect to learn? I'm so excited about this program. It's amazing. We literally, so I took all of the complicated parts of SEO out and I made it super actionable for you guys to be able to go in there and take all the fluff and all the theory and all of that kind of stuff and say okay this is what I need to do for technical SEO this is what I need to do for on-page SEO this is what I need to do for off-page SEO here's a checklist of all the things to go through and do we literally tried to make it as simple as I possibly could so that you didn't have to feel like you have to become an SEO master and get all technical and all this stuff.

21:21I also wrote a list on there of what you should hire out, like what I usually recommend you should give to a developer to do, what you can do yourself. And I have some really good instructions on how to use Google Search Console and some things like easy tools that everyone should be using and how to easily install those. There's literally step-by-step instructions on how to do some of those super basic things. If you're a DIYer and you just want to do that and you want to know what your metrics are and you want to know how to research on the back end of Shopify what's actually working and how to use the tools, the third-party tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to figure out where to create a keyword plan.

21:59Literally step-by-step, not overwhelming, as simple as we possibly could make it and taking out everything that's complicated that you don't need to do and then just saying, hey, here, hire here, do this yourself. This is when I recommend that you hire somebody to help you. This is when you can do it yourself. Try to break it down as simple as possible and make it super tangible for you guys. That's super e-commerce focused as well. So very specific things to add to your product pages. And there's instructions, step-by-step instructions on all of that gets to fit in there for you. Yeah, love it.

22:33Super excited. And like what I love as well is some of the resources and templates you've created. So we try and do this with all of our programs at Founder. Like we want to make it as plug and play as possible to remove as much friction for the student and you've got so much wisdom so many incredible experiences you've got so many incredible client case studies and success stories where you're taking like a small portion of that and really helping people hit the ground running yes that's the goal to make it exactly like you said as frictionless as possible i know when i first started and it was very complicated and overwhelming and i feel that way sometimes for my clients i'm like okay let me break it down for you as simple as i possibly can so that you know what you need to focus on and i'm going to focus on what I need to focus on.

23:15And we'll make sure that you have the easiest, lowest hanging fruit that's going to give you the fastest results as possible. Love it. So we've talked a lot of tactics, right? A lot of tactics. What are some of the fundamentals that you believe, even if somebody's listening to this from two years from now that are not going to change when it comes to SEO? And I'd love to you take of the impact of AI as well? Yeah. So your metrics that you're looking for, for really good ranking keywords. So looking for keywords that have high search volume and low difficulty, trying to find sites that you can publish on with high domain authority, those things are never going to change.

23:56Making sure that you're using the metrics inside your Google search console, that you're looking at what's ranking on the back end of your Shopify store and that you're using third-party tracking software to figure out how the keywords match and all of that stuff those types of things are never going to change how google ranks over many many years has not changed how they consider what they consider authority hasn't really changed so really trying to find outside sites that you can link back to your website are the most important things and just making sure that your site is good high quality and all of those things are critically important a lot of people think that ai is just going to replace seo and all this kind of stuff and actually that's not true at all in fact the opposite is really true google can recognize things that are ai like so fast and that's really one of the ways to get your site like ranking lower really because it's at they actually value really good authentically first person written articles and pages more than they do they can recognize things that are plugged into chat gpt or Jasper or any of these kinds of things.

25:03If you're just directly, I would never recommend that you type anything in there and just copy and paste anything on your website. It's going to get flagged and demoted essentially and seen as less authority than it's going to do the opposite and actually more harm to your website. There are some softwares that you can use that will allow you to get some prompts and some ideas for SEO. So definitely like your chat GBTs and those kinds of things are a great idea so that you're not just staring at a blank computer screen and you don't know what to write about so getting some ideas for prompts and maybe some bullet points and things like that that you can cover in your articles or add to your product page those are great ideas or even find good keywords sometimes google has or chat gbt sometimes has some good keywords and stuff like that but i would never ever just use straight ai or straight software to add something directly to my site yeah and i i think you see a lot of stuff where people say you can do like you know ai you don't need to worry about content creation anymore but like google are so smart they are not going to allow people just to spin up article after article after article and then you can just publish it but like you said with e-commerce it's less about on page and more about off page it's really true any belt too yeah not even just e-commerce but yes should you be still writing articles and blog posts do you think that that is necessary for a shopify store not necessary if you have like a personality element to your brand then you definitely could consider it what we usually recommend is maybe creating five to ten what i call pillar pieces of content that essentially have a almost like uh we call them hero pages which is essentially a modified blog slash landing slash product page that's really intentionally more of like a funnel structure than it is just like a product page or a blog page.

27:02I would never recommend just straight blogging anymore. Typically, you want to make it look like a landing page, almost like an info product, like just to have a lot more content. Say your product has really good sourced ingredients, things like that, where you have maybe three or four pillar pages that are really more like landing pages, then I would say yes. But creating an endless amount of blogs is not really necessary unless you have a lot of money and you want to rank for a lot of keywords and you're kind of going wide with your keyword strategy, which most brands are not in the beginning.

27:34Once you get some meat on your bones and you're really going heavy with SEO, then yes. But for most of us, and that's like kind of way down the line, usually it's hard enough just to rank for your general key terms like even if it's 100 key terms so once you're getting in the thousands then i would consider that strategy but in general you really kind of want to stick with something that's a little bit more tangible for your core core keywords that you want to rank for gotcha yeah because that's it's quite contradictory because most people think if you want to rank on seo you would need to write a ton of blog posts that's definitely a miss miss that i want to burst you already have tons of pages just match them up with the keywords that you already have and if you want to create some pillar pieces of content that's awesome but not necessary okay what are some other myths um let's see that you need to have a uh well lately i've been seeing a lot of people say that you just need to create really short blog articles and that the create a lot of short blog articles with a lot of keywords and Google doesn't consider those authorities.

28:43So think about it like a Neil Patel type of site or a HubSpot blog type of site. What Google favors now more is you being like the ultimate authority on your topic. So coming and creating an article that's like 2 ,500 words that has research and images and case studies and information and outside links and all of these kinds of things are favored much more highly than just creating these kind of like short spammy type blogs. So that's definitely a myth that needs to get broken. And then I would say on page SEO being more important. A lot of times I'll see SEO agencies and stuff. They're trying to sell you like, oh yeah, we're going to write all these pages and we're going to do all this stuff to your site.

29:24Much less important than it is off page SEO. Getting publications, getting people talking about your brand is what actually ranks. I've ranked some terrible sites before that people didn't want to spend the money to like redo their site and all these things for better for eventually, but for better conversions. And so really you can rank anything without even any on-page SEO. So I don't, I mean, I don't, I don't necessarily recommend that, but it's that important that you focus on off-page SEO. Yep. Got you. Okay. All right. Well, look, this has been an absolute whirlwind. I'd love to talk to talk about tools we can't do this episode seo without talking about tools what are your top five seo tools that you'd recommend yeah i have a lot of tools that i use but i would say in general my favorite is ahrefs you can go in there and figure out your keyword research and all of that kind of stuff i love sem rush i you can that one's a little bit more accurate for search volume and then of course like the yoast seo plugin that i just recommend for your app on the app store for Shopify.

30:29And then I would say we do use like some content generators just to get ideas to send to our content writers. So there's a lot of different ones that we're plugging in and testing and rewriting and those kinds of things. So whatever one is your favorite, you can definitely choose for that those as well. Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Well, look, this has been an absolute whirlwind of an introductory to SEO. If people want to learn more about SEO and using it for your e-commerce store and building a channel, you have to go and sign up to Lindsay's program on the Founder Plus platform. I just wanted to share one last question with Lindsay.