Want to get more visitors and customers to your Shopify store? If so, you're going to want to keep watching. In this video, my friend Kai Davis is sharing his proven five-step SEO strategy for Shopify websites to get that good search engine traffic that you've been craving.
Kai is a search engine optimization specialist and the founder of Double Your Ecommerce. He has more than a decade of experience. helping hundreds of Shopify merchants expand their businesses.
So let's get started. You work with plenty of Shopify type websites, e-commerce folks, people selling online. So talk us through your kind of overall recommendations for how you would suggest somebody optimizes their Shopify site for search.
for Google search and other search engines? I mean, we say search and search engine optimization, but really it's kind of like, oh, hey, Google, you got all the traffic. I've been in e-commerce and marketing and SEO for a while, over 15 years.
I've worked with a hundred plus Shopify stores on search engine optimization. And so what I share with you isn't just like, oh, I had this idea in the shower. It's kind of pretty good, but it's like, oh, we've tested this idea and this kind of works better than not.
And so when it comes to search engine optimization for your Shopify store, when it comes to getting more traffic, the most important thing I think you need to start with is to get the right traffic. isn't meta tags, isn't keywords, isn't writing content. It's thinking about, okay, who's our audience? Who are we trying to reach? Who are we trying to sell to?
And then if you can, narrow that down as radically as you can. So you might be like, oh, we sell chocolate. Our customers, anybody in the world who wants chocolate. And you might be like, oh, that's a good idea. We could reach a ton of people.
But when you go that broad, your marketing message, your search engine optimization, your ability to speak to your customer just gets so spread out and diffuse. Really, you really want to... get narrow and really focused in on who your target market is. And so oftentimes when I work with a Shopify store, I'll ask them like, hey, who are your customers?
And they'll come back with like, hey, we did a brand exercise. We have an ideal customer profile. And our customer is something like somebody 35 to 60 years old, enjoys chocolate, owns a second home. And that unfortunately is just really squishy when it comes to search engine optimization. It doesn't give you any hooks to be like, oh, we need to create this type of content to reach that type of person.
And instead. In SEO, you really want your content to focus on the pains and the problems and the issues your specific audience has. And you need to understand that before you even dive in.
So before I go on, what could I elaborate or clarify on that, Marie? Well, so let's take the example of somebody who's selling chocolate, right? So we don't want to just say like general demographics, but what would a more specific example for somebody making handcrafted chocolate be as far as an ideal customer from a search engine optimization standpoint? I think the right way to think about it is kind of in SEO, we use the term like search intent. What is the person searching for?
But before you even use any keywords or buzzwords like that, I think it's important just to think about, okay, well, who are our customers and what often motivates them to buy? And so this idea of a chocolate shop, maybe, you know, you're like, oh, we talked to our customers, we looked at our sales data, and we see we keep getting these surges in orders right before sort of a holiday event, you know, Father's Day, Mother's Day, Christmas. Oh, maybe our ideal customer is somebody who's searching for a chocolate gift box for one of these holiday events. And so you could, I mean, all marketing is a hypothesis.
You look at this, you take this as a hypothesis, and you say, okay, let's test this. Let's create some landing pages. Let's create some content. Let's see if we could reach these people and help bring them in and help them buy an order.
But really, I think that's part of the major trick here. You don't want to just focus on demographics. You want to get a crystal clear or as crystal clear understanding of your audience as possible. and try to intuit and understand like, okay, what's actually motivating them to purchase?
And I think like it highlights the difference when you just contrast the two. If we think about, you know, you're working on a Shopify store and you say, okay, I want to build out some new collections. Who am I trying to reach?
If in one example, all you're handed is like a slip of paper that says, okay, the person you're trying to reach is 35 to 60 female, loves travel and owns two homes. Again, it's kind of squishy. You're like, I don't quite know what chocolate gifts for people with two homes. It gets, it gets wonky.
But if you're handed that piece of paper and it says, okay, the person you're trying to reach, if you're collections, if you're SEO, if you're marketing, oh, there's somebody who's shopping for holiday themed chocolate gift boxes for their relatives. They're looking for Father's Day, looking for Mother's Day, and they're looking for, you know, graduation day. Again, it's a much more crystal clear idea of, oh, that person is looking for this specific thing. If they're looking for this thing in Google, maybe we could rank there.
If we put up a collection page, a landing page, something with some content. And so again, that specificity. often just acts like, you know, a torch through the darkness. You're able to say, oh, that's where I want to go.
Yeah. The specificity is so important, especially with search and how competitive some categories can be. And like, even with chocolate, maybe it's, you're even narrowing it down to fair trade chocolate or something for people who really care about, you know, sustainability and like all of these sorts of things. Right. And I think the gifts.
category or the gifts search intent is so important for so many e-commerce type businesses. A lot of times when I'm teaching about just basic keyword research for SEO, I'll give the example of like a longer keyword phrase, something like cute gifts for an eight-year-old niece or something like that, right? So you know that it's the aunt or uncle who's searching for that gift.
And so you're getting so much more specific about the tribe. problem you're trying to solve for somebody. No, exactly. Exactly.
And that specificity, it helps with Google. They're able to say like, oh, this isn't a page just about gifts. It's a page about gifts for eight-year-old niece or eight-year-old, you know, nibbling.
And suddenly they're able to rank it more accurately and you actually get the right customers you're after. Okay. So we've narrowed down who we're trying to target things to. Then what are sort of the next steps with optimizing a Shopify store for this? I think a useful step, and it's by no means a blocker, but when I'm doing this process, when I'm coaching people on this.
this process I say okay first we need to get clear on who we're trying to reach and the second thing we want to do is try to get not a definitive idea but a general idea of some keywords they might be searching for or some topics they might be searching for and that's just so when we go to create collections create pages we have you know a first line on the canvas we're able to say ah for this experiment we're gonna veer this way and see what happens and learn from that but We want to get some keyword data, some keyword insights, and I'm going to talk about a few different processes. Some are more advanced than others. Then I'm going to talk about a few tools you could use just so you could understand, oh, okay, here's a free way to do it, and if I want to invest, here's a paid way to do it. A few different processes, the three processes.
are. One is you can look at keywords your current pages are currently ranking for and then see, okay, are there any opportunities? Do I have this page ranking 35th over here? Maybe I could add some content or optimize it and get it ranking higher.
So that's one great way. are you currently ranking? The other is looking at keyword suggestions while searching.
The third method or the third process is looking at the keywords your competitors are ranking for. So, you know, if we have a chocolate shop and we know, oh, there's, you know, Beth's chocolate shop and Dave's chocolate shops over there, one in Oregon, one over in New York. Let's see what keywords they're ranking for.
And maybe there's a few where, oh, we could create a piece of content and also be showing up for those search results. So those are the three main processes I really enjoy for some initial keyword research, looking where you're currently ranking, looking at at keyword suggestions while you're searching, looking at keywords your competitors are ranking for. Any processes you enjoy or you've advocated, Mallory, that I didn't touch on here?
Yeah, no, I love that. I also love using any sort of autocomplete tools. And I always talk about, there's so many search engines that we sometimes don't think of as search engines.
We often go to Google and Google is great, right? But even for e-commerce, looking at the autocomplete suggestions in Amazon, in Etsy, in Pinterest, in YouTube, right? Like any place that people might be searching for something related to what you sell, you can look at...
at those other search engines because they have different data. Right. No, spot on, spot on.
And a lot of the keyword suggestions that like Keywords Everywhere or other tools I suggest come from are by mining those autocomplete suggestions to get a sense of like, oh, what else are people searching for? But oftentimes that's a great, quick and easy way. Hey, we're going to go to Amazon and search for this and see what gets suggested.
Hey, we're going to go to Etsy and see what gets suggested. Grab those keywords and say, okay, here's some initial ideas. When I'm doing keyword research for any of my clients, I start with a combination of these three processes. The exact process differs. I kind of score.
sculpted depending on their maturity and SEO. Like, oh, they do a ton. Oh, we're going to start over here.
Oh, they're a bit more new to SEO. Ah, we're going to start over here. And so often my process looks like jumping into the keyword data in a tool and just like looking through it. I'm just looking for interesting keywords, interesting search phrases that seem to relate. to this brand, to the products we're selling.
Like, this is a squishy process. It honestly is. We're jumping in there and just using our human meat brains to say like, oh, you know, if I'm searching for chocolate stuff, these keywords, these seem more realistic, more relevant than not, and swipe them over to a file and use them later.
I'll also search around in Google as if I was part of that customer's audience, start identifying these specific and relevant keywords. And at the end of that, my goal is just to come up with a short action plan. Okay, you know, these are the keywords that are interesting to us. Maybe it's chocolate bonbons or gourmet. gourmet chocolate truffles.
These are the pages. Maybe some exist on our site, maybe some don't, but we want to optimize this page to be a little more about gourmet truffles. We want to create a new page about gourmet bonbons. And so we're taking this idea of like, oh, these keywords seem relevant out in the world, then correlating it with, okay, these are the pages on our site where we want to do this optimization or create some new content.
So what tools should you consider for this keyword research? There's a couple of different ones I'll quickly rattle off. One of the most important tools I recommend...
you run on your site, and I recommend all of my clients run this, is Google Search Console. It's a free tool from Google that monitors basically your search results for you. And so you install it on your website, it plugs into Shopify very easily. And then in Search Console, you could get a bunch of reports in there.
It's sort of like taking your car to the automotive and getting a bunch of readouts. But the most important one is the performance report. And this shows you, hey, For this time frame, these are the keywords your pages on your site showed up for.
These are the ones that got clicks. And this is the average position they were ranking in. And there's just so much good and free data here. If you're saying, hey, what are some keyword opportunities for my store? We've started creating content.
We have some collections. What should I be optimizing? Google Search Console often points you in the right direction. You want to look for, you know, pages where you're ranking. I use the term on the cusp.
Maybe you're down like 35th or 25th. You're not ranking in the top 10, but you're starting to rank. there.
And that's often a great indicator, oh, with a little effort, we can optimize these and rank higher. But if you aren't running Google Search Console on your store, I beg you, please go install it on your store right after this video. It's free, it's easy, it's from Google, you can trust it, and it really will give you better insights into the performance of your search engine optimization. Yeah, Google Search Console is so powerful. And it can be very overwhelming and feel very technical and complicated parts of it if you're not a big SEO person.
But Like you said, if you just focus on that main performance report that just kind of shows you the things that you're already showing up in the results for and kind of give you more insight about that, that's where I would just recommend starting. Full agreement. And honestly, even if you never look at Google Search Console yourself, just install it, have it on your site.
And when you work with a consultant or a marketing firm or an SEO, they'll be like, hey, do you have Search Console? You'll be like, yes, I installed it two years ago. And you'll have all that data. And if you don't, then it'll be like, oh, we don't have that data. So it's worth it even if you don't use it.
It's great just to set it and forget it. Another keyword tool I use, this one is a freemium. They charge you a couple bucks for access to everything.
And you might use this one. I'm not sure if you do, Mallory. It's Keywords Everywhere.
Are you familiar with them? Yeah, that was a good one. It's a good one.
It's one that I'm enjoying more and more. I pay like six bucks a month for it. So it's not too atrocious.
You know, SEO tools could get up there. But what I love about Keywords Everywhere is in the search results, it starts to surface interesting data for you. And so two bits that I love. It shows the estimated search volume for a phrase.
And so you might search something like, you're like, oh, maybe we should create a page about chocolate bonbons. Do people even search for that? I don't know.
How do we find out? Well, with keywords everywhere, you could search for chocolate bonbons. And right below the search box where you enter your input in Google, it says, oh, this is the estimated search volume.
It's not 100% accurate. They get it from data providers and they mix it together with different sources and they come up with an estimate. And when I've compared it against Search Console, I found it to be, you know, let's say within 30%.
So, of what Search Console is reporting. So it's not 100% accurate, but I call it directionally accurate. Oh, this term gets a decent amount of traffic. We should experiment and create a page. This page gets no traffic.
Maybe if it's really easy, we create a page, but otherwise we don't create a page. But Keywords Everywhere is great for surfacing that search volume. Just wonderful to know.
I look at that data probably 50 to 100 times a day as I search. And it's also wonderful at pulling up related long tail keywords. So those are just...
Longer, more specific versions of the keywords. Sort of we go from chocolate as a really short keyword to chocolate bonbons as a medium keyword to gourmet chocolate bonbons as a longer keyword. Longer keywords get a little less search volume, but they're often easier to rank for.
So there's value in doing keyword research and saying like, okay, so what keywords to target here? We want to target this more long tail one and Keywords Everywhere is great at just... surfacing those suggestions for you. Well, yeah.
And those longer keywords often have higher search intent, which means that people, like they already have a more specific idea of what they're trying to look for. So they're kind of more pre-qualified to maybe want to buy something for you, from you, especially from an e-commerce shop. No, you nailed it. And I'm glad you brought that up.
As a quick digression, if we think about intent, if somebody just searches for the word chocolate, are they looking for chocolate design patterns, chocolate drinks, chocolate candy? If they search chocolate gifts. It's a stronger intent.
They're looking for a chocolate gift. If they're looking for like chocolate bonbon gift box, it's an incredibly strong intent. We know like, oh, they're looking for something specific.
And so, yeah, the longer tail keywords are great for mining and harvesting that intent and aligning up with what your customers are actually looking for. Since they're probably not searching for chocolate, they're searching for chocolate bonbon gift box. The third tool I want to suggest, it's a paid one, but it's decently affordable.
The company Ahrefs has been around in the SEO tool reporting space for years. They're They're almost OG. They're a great company. They just released a more affordable plan, a $29 a month starter plan.
And I am loving this plan. I signed up for it. I'm using it for myself and my clients.
And it's just a wonderful way to get more in-depth keyword research and insights. What I especially love it for is competitor research. So sometimes I'll feed in my own site or my client's site and get a sense of these are the top pages. These are the top keywords. Here are some opportunities.
But often when I'm doing keyword research, I'll look at a competitor's site. and say like, well, okay, so if we have a chocolate shop and Dave has his chocolate shop, what keywords is Dave ranking for? Are there any opportunities for us in our content? And so Ahrefs is just absolutely wonderful at input this URL, input this domain, input the site, get a breakdown of like, these are the top pages. These are their organic keywords.
It's great data to have. It's definitely on the more advanced side of the SEO spectrum. And so I wouldn't say like, hey, step one, start with Ahrefs.
I'd say step one, start with Google Search Console. And as you level up and start hitting questions where you're like, oh, we don't have any keyword ideas and we found these competitors. What are we supposed to do?
That's where a tool like Ahrefs really plugs in. Yeah, it's a great tool. I do agree that it's even more advanced.
But again, especially if you're working with somebody who's an SEO expert, using something like that is going to look really super uplevel your game. Absolutely. And it might not be a tool you use yourself, but it might be a tool like Mallory said, like you work with an SEO consultant and it's a tool that they have in their quiver. And now you'll be a little more aware like, oh, Ahrefs.
Okay, that's going to help them. figure out this side of the data flow. So we talked about the importance of, hey, you've got to understand your target market and target audience and narrow it down. We've talked about the importance of some keyword research, understanding like, okay, what are our customers searching for?
What keywords sort of make sense here? The third step for this SEO strategy is, well, starting with some on-page optimizations, taking this data, taking these insights, taking the lessons you've learned about your customers and, hey, getting some relevant content on pages themselves. I'm a big collection SEO guy.
I think most Shopify stores do not have enough collections, are not optimizing their collections enough, and collections are kind of magic. They help you get more transactional traffic, more categorical traffic to your store. One of the biggest impact opportunities is taking the time to optimize your collection pages for these category terms.
And so if you're selling, say, quilting supplies, these categorical terms are things like notions or quarter panels, groupings of products that you'd see on a collection page. If you're selling chocolates, these categorical terms are more like chocolate truffles or chocolate bonbons. Again, logical grouping of products that customers are searching for. And if you're selling greeting cards, you might be looking at categorical terms like Mother's Day illustrated greeting cards or illustrated graduation cards. Just, again, clusters of topics, clusters of related products.
When it comes to optimizing your collection pages, There's a ton you can do. There's a lot of content on there and there's a lot that you'll read online about, oh, you got to make sure you know your stuff keywords in this meta tag field or else it won't work. But really, there's just three or so pieces of content that are really essential, really important for search engine optimization. The first is the collection title.
You also see that at the page headline and that's the bit you enter at the top of the collection page when you first create one. It says, hey, what's the title? And you enter the title there.
That's really important for SEO because Google reads content page down. And so that headline just often has relevant keywords and it's higher up on the page. The next really important bit of content, again, it's on the page itself. It's the collection description.
That's the bit you enter right after the headline, just right in that next form field. A 50 to 100 word description on your collection pages is just super, super impactful. It lets Google, it lets your customers know, oh, this page is about this topic.
It has these products. It's best for this purpose. And all of that data just flows into your SEO and helps collection pages rank a bit higher.
The third important bit and the final important bit in this quick checklist, it's the SEO title. That's the bit that shows up in the browser tab and in the search results on Google. The SEO title is really, really, really important.
Google looks at it as it added a sort of the first bit of data about a page. And so if your keyword is in that SEO title, if you actually have filled it out with a little bit of like description about like, oh, this is what the products are. It's easier for Google to understand.
This is what this collection page is about. So those three pieces of content together, the headline, the collection description of the SEO title. just let you optimize your collection pages to be found by Google. Yeah, I was just, this collections thing, I think, like you said, it's so sort of underutilized. And I think it also applies beyond Shopify to other types of e-commerce platforms too, right?
Like we love Shopify. I generally will recommend if somebody's really just trying to double down on e-commerce, Shopify is one of the best options. But I know BigCommerce is popular, or even for Etsy. I feel like the sections, the kind of category areas on Etsy isn't underutilized, especially from an SEO perspective.
You can do these same things and kind of adjust some of it. You don't have those collection descriptions, but you can change the title of those categories on an Etsy shop even. 100%. And even there, any platform, it could be WooCommerce, it could be Etsy, it could be Shopify, it could be BigCommerce.
The value is in setting up what I think of as, you know, these category pages, these collection pages. They're basically virtual aisles in your store. You're saying like, hey, it's a digital spot. This is where all these relevant products are going to show up and makes it easier for customers to browse.
It makes it easier for Google to show up there. And so whatever platform you're on, doing these logical groupings, creating sections, creating collections, creating categories on WooCommerce, it just improves that experience for your customers and makes it easier for robots to go like, oh, this page is the collection of all of their... gourmet chocolate bonbons.
We better rank that page high in the search results when somebody searches for that. So it all comes together and you're right, Mallory, it doesn't matter what platform you're on. It's a valuable step to take. Okay. So we've organized our shop into little areas of our store, kind of like in a big box store, you've got different departments, right?
It's just like that. So then what is the next step that you would recommend? I recommend targeting your homepage for a more general term in your market. Now, Homepages are often a really powerful page on your site.
Most of the time, people link to your homepage instead of a product page, so it has a bunch of links pointing to it. And Google often sees the homepage on your site as being the doorway to the rest of your store or your website, so they weight it a little higher. And so there's a value in taking time to make sure your homepage is influential for SEO. And I find the most effective way to do that is to have your homepage target sort of a brand term in the title, as well as your actual brand phrase.
And so if you're a quilting store... Maybe your homepage is just targeting something like quilting supplies followed by your brand name. Just a general term, a little more specific than just like quilting or quilt stuff, but not as specific as, you know, designer quilting notions. Something specific yet general.
Likewise, if you're a chocolate store, maybe your homepage is targeting a term like chocolate gifts in location. Or if you're a greeting card store, maybe you're targeting the term illustrated greeting cards. The homepage can go in a couple different directions.
I find it useful to... set that SEO title for the homepage and add a few words, 50 to 100 with a headline to the homepage content just to support whatever keyword optimization you're doing there. But if all you do to optimize your homepage is say, hmm, look at some keyword data.
I have a sense that my customers are searching for this type of thing. Hey, I'm going to set the SEO title for the homepage to that thing. You're in a good spot.
Oftentimes that's all it takes and that's an effective homepage optimization. Yeah, I agree. The homepage is so important. And also associating your brand and your brand name with the main idea, the main topic, the main concept that you want to be known for is so important.
I don't want to get too deep into the weeds about the recent like Google algorithm, like leak that happened a few months ago. But this was one of the things is like the importance of brand and how that relates to search. Because if people are searching. for your brand, that just helps overall, right? That is the foundation of everything.
You want people to know who your company is compared to that other chocolate shop down the road. You want them to remember your chocolate shop name and be searching for you directly, ultimately. 100%.
And I think it all comes down to like trust at the end of the day. We want content online that people feel is trustworthy, that helps people, that moves them forward, maybe buying, maybe not buying, but... Those touch points, those engagements, it leads to a sense of trust. And maybe somebody encounters your site three or five times and then finally is like, oh, I need some chocolate.
And then they Google you and purchase from you. But it's because they built up that trust with your content over time. There's one final page type I want to talk about optimizing for a moment, and that's ranking your product pages. And when it comes to SEO, I found a lot of stores are focused on product pages as the end-all, be-all.
Hey, we're going to optimize every single one of our product pages. We're going to get a ton of traffic and we're going to win. Unfortunately, it... doesn't often work out that easily. Your product pages do their jobs for search engine optimization by targeting very niche product-specific terms.
And that helps them rank when people are searching for exactly that product. So what exactly does that mean? Well, let's say we're selling, again, chocolate. So we might have a collection page targeting a phrase like dark chocolate gift boxes.
And within that collection, we might have a product targeting dark chocolate sea salt caramel gift box, 20 pieces. Sort of specific collection, you know, sees all gift boxes, much more specific product. And so that's really how you want to think about your products.
Your products exist to be optimized for more niche, more targeted, more specific search queries. The other day I was talking about a friend and the example which is still stuck in my head is, well, maybe you have a collection, women's leather jackets, and maybe you have a specific product, women's red leather jacket size 7. So much more specific to rank for those product-specific queries, where your collection, that's ranking for like... women's motorcycle jackets, that categorical query.
So in all cases, you want your collections targeting a broad yet specific term and your product pages really zeroing in on that more niche and product specific terms. And in all cases, I find it really helpful to optimize product pages with these details. You want to make sure you have an optimized product title and product description. So the title is the first bit you fill out when you create a product.
The description is the full-on product description below that. I find it useful to where. include attributes in your product title.
And so that might be mentioning things like the size dimensions, the weight, the color, the quantity included, the fabric, if anything else like an envelope or a gift box is bundled in. All of that just helps your search engine titles stand out, helps your meta description stand out, and helps people better understand like, okay what is this product? It just says chocolate gift box. What exactly is inside it?
But when we start saying things like caramel chocolate, sea salt chocolate, 20 pieces, In that title, we start to have a better sense of like, okay, what exactly is this product? If you were a product reseller, maybe you're drop shipping, maybe you run a mercantile and you're reselling other products. It's very, very important. You have unique content in your product descriptions.
Too often stores will say like, okay, we got this product from the supplier. We just copy and pasted the title and the description into our site. We're set, right? Unfortunately, now reusing that content in that way, it confuses Google. Since they'll see that same description across a dozen or ten dozen different pages, they'll be like, okay, well, what's the most relevant page here?
We're getting kind of confused. We're not going to show any of these. And so a very impactful step to take if you are reusing product description content like that is to take a few minutes and rewrite it. You could do this yourself, you know, pop it into a text file and just turn it into your voice. Or you could use an AI tool like ChatGPT.
Either path is fine. You just want to get to a point where you have more unique content, not reused content. The final detail I'll mention is. Product SEO can feel overwhelming if you have a store with hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of products. It's like, oh gosh, I got to optimize a thousand of these.
I don't have time. What I recommend is prioritizing your list. Start with products that have a higher profit margin for your store.
If you're like, oh, we'll make a thousand dollars each time we sell one of these, go sell more of those. Optimize that product page. See if you could get more traffic to it. If you have products that are in very high demand by your customers, optimize those as well. See if you could start getting that demand even higher.
And also look at products that are ranking on the cusp for a keyword. Products that might be, you know, between 15th and 35th for a keyword you decided was relevant for your business. There, some optimization can help them move up.
But by focusing on those three categories, higher profit margin products, high demand products, and products that are already starting to rank but aren't ranking well, you shrink that population from, oh no, I need to optimize a thousand products to, oh sweet, I got 20. That's still a little work, but at least it's only a smaller fraction of the overall. What can I clarify about that, Mallory? Yeah, I was just going to say for product pages, especially, maybe we can touch on the importance of reviews and how those can help with SEO. And then also potentially using video content.
Like you were saying, if somebody has a thousand products, this probably isn't useful necessarily. Or if they are products that are sort of limited time, you can only make them and then they're sold out, right? But if it's something that you're going to keep in stock, that's going to kind of stay the same, something like a video, especially if it's a YouTube video, because...
YouTube is owned by Google, right? No, I'm a big fan of both of those. So let's talk about review content first and then talk about YouTube and video content. So review content does a lot of good in a couple of different directions.
If people are leaving reviews on your product pages and sharing that user-generated content, it might be a testimonial, it might be text, it might be a photo, it might be something else. But if they're sharing that content, that adds more unique content to those product pages or wherever you're displaying that content, which helps you in the... in the Google with the searching. It also helps with the rich results.
You probably have seen in search results when you search for a product, sometimes you'll see like number of reviews or quantity or price range displayed underneath the site results. That's called rich results. And that comes from structured data, a data form that's become more popular in the past few years, a bit of the sort of hidden SEO information. And so when you have reviews on your site, when you have customers, you know, rating your product highly, hey, this one has 100 reviews and a 4.3 star rating.
That information can start to show up in the search results itself as part of your product search result. And so when people are just browsing, they're like, oh, I searched for chocolate gourmet bonbons. Oh, this one has 100 reviews and a high star rating.
We should click it. And so in that way, getting reviews on your products helps surface that information in the search results and incentivizes, helps people feel like, oh, I could trust this site. It's well reviewed before they click.
So I think getting that sort of social proof is incredibly impactful. It definitely straddles outside of SEO to more overall marketing and growth for your store. But man, what a great lever to pull.
You get testimonials, you get content, you could reuse it elsewhere. It helps your SEO. It helps with your rankings.
It's a high impact opportunity. Yeah. And so much of it is all related. I feel like that's what we're seeing more and more of is that You can't just think of one marketing tactic or tool or whatever in a silo separate from the rest.
You really kind of have to think about a big picture marketing strategy. And SEO is a big piece of that. Completely agreed. It is sort of like converging in an interesting way.
I'm seeing SEO become more and more sort of like, well, digital marketing. And SEO is a strong channel within there. But oftentimes when a store is like, yeah, we want to grow.
Well, you're right. It's not, oh, we want to just focus on this one channel. It's like, okay, well, we kind of have to understand it all.
who's our target market, who are our customers, what voice and messaging resonates with them. And then it gets into the channel specifics. Here's how that feeds into our ads, our email copy, our search engine optimization. But man, it's all just like that beautiful marketing smorgasbord. We touched briefly on the YouTube thing, but right.
Like, so a lot of times people think of these things as separate entities. And yet a lot of the stuff that we're talking about for, you know, your product pages also can be adapted to. even making the YouTube videos and then embedding them on your product pages or some of your other pages. But on a YouTube video, you've got the title, you've got a description, you've got all these similar things that you can think through a lot of these concepts and apply them to different platforms. Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. Just like At the end of the day, it's all headline, it's all text, and it's all making sure it resonates with your audience. And yeah, you could take, that's what I really love about marketing. You could take the lessons you learned here from the SEO you're doing with the customers and apply it over here as you create videos and apply all those new lessons over here as you work on your email. But it really comes down to understanding your market, understanding your audience and what motivates them to buy.
Yeah. Because at the end of the day, that's who we're trying to sell to, right? As actual human beings, we just use all of the computers and technologies and tools as a way to make sure that we can get found by other human beings. But that's who we're trying to reach. That's who we're trying to reach.
Google isn't buying our chocolate. I'll tell you that much. No. Maybe some of the people working up there in Silicon Valley are buying our chocolate, but not Google, the big Google.
Not Google itself, not Google's robots. Awesome. Thank you so much, Kai. No, of course.
Delighted to share the insights on this. Thanks for having me on.