eCommerce Link Building Strategies Keep Optimising Podcast

🎙️ I hopped on the Keep Optimizing podcast with Chloe Thomas, and we got into the stuff nobody wants to hear about link building. 😅

Here's the truth: a lot of the backlinks people chase are actually dragging their site down. Cheap, spammy links might give you a bump for a week or two, then the rankings fade and you're worse off than when you started. I break down what actually builds authority for an e-commerce store, what to stop wasting money on, and how to spot an SEO company that's about to torch your site. 🔥

I'm Brandon Leibowitz, founder of SEO Optimizers, and I've been doing this since 2007. Some of what we covered:

💰 SEO vs. PPC budget: why good on-page work lowers your cost per click (yes, your ads get cheaper when your SEO gets better), and why remarketing should be running from day one
⏳ The 6-month reality check on SEO, and how to bridge the gap with paid until organic kicks in
🟢 The green dot trap: Yoast, Rank Math, All in One SEO are all fine tools, but chasing green dots is not a strategy. I've seen sites that are all red rank for everything they want
✍️ Write for people, not for Google. Stuffing a keyword where it doesn't belong makes the sentence read weird, people bounce, and you lose
📚 Where to actually learn SEO for free (Ahrefs blog is elite), and why you have to test what you read instead of reading forever
🚩 How to vet an SEO agency: ask for real ranking proof, look at their own website, and find someone who has worked on your platform before
🛒 Shopify vs. WooCommerce, canonical tag headaches, and why URL structure matters more than people think

If you run an online store and you're tired of guessing, this one is for you. Go give it a listen and let me know what surprised you. 👇

#SEO #EcommerceSEO #LinkBuilding #DigitalMarketing #SearchEngineOptimization #Shopify #WooCommerce #WordPress #ContentMarketing #PPC #GoogleAds #OnlineStore #Podcast #KeepOptimizing #SEOTips #EcommerceMarketing #SEOOptimizers #BrandonLeibowitz #OrganicTraffic #MarketingPodcast

Transcript

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What if the backlinks you're chasing are actually hurting your SEO instead of helping it? In this podcast episode, I'm breaking down the truth about e-commerce link building, what actually moves the needle, the tactics you should stop wasting time on, and the smarter ways to build authority that drives real sales and real rankings. I'm Brandon Liebowitz. Founder of SEO Optimizers, and I join Chloe Thomas on the Keep Optimizing podcast to share what's working right now in e-commerce SEO. Stay tuned, and if you want more data-driven e-commerce insights, make sure you hit subscribe before we dive in. So guys, thank you very much for joining me. Yeah, my name is Brandon Liebowitz, and I've been involved with digital marketing since 2007, helping out businesses with SEO, social media, doing paid advertisements, but really focus more on search engine optimization, just get you that free traffic. So that's what I've been focused on over the past 15 years. Brandon, your take on the budgeting side of things? Yeah, I would say definitely if you're just starting out, I would put more money into the SEO just initially because also If you optimize your website and the on-page well, then your cost per click is gonna drop for the ads. So if you're trying to save money, you're gonna still wanna do SEO on your website. Even if you are running ads, you're still wanna optimize the on-page elements to try to reduce that cost per click. But I do recommend remarketing ads. I would run those immediately and keep those on as long as possible, as long as they're converting, but follow people around that have been to your website that didn't perform a specific conversion action, but Unfortunately, SEO does take about 6 months on average to take full effect. If it's a brand new website, could take a little bit longer. In the meantime, you probably want to supplement it with some paid ads. But once you start getting those organic rankings, then you could pull some of that money away from the paid ads and keep pushing that organic, which is going to be the better long-term strategy. So you have to keep spending money on ads, but just depends also on the return on your investment, trying to make sure that you're and positive return and what your ticket item is or the sale item of your price product services. But yeah, there's a lot of variables. Like Justin was saying, you gotta do the math and make sure it all works out properly. See, I like your answer. I like all your answers, to be honest, because for me it's not as simple as SEO versus PPC. It's almost every month, especially in those early stages, you're going, where should the money go? Where should the time go? And looking at the results and and amending as you need to. Brandon, Justin, anything you wanna add on the Yoast SEO Shopify side of things? Oh yeah. Yoast is a decent plugin. I mean, there's a ton of plugins or apps on Shopify and just like Luke was saying, it's all about what you do with it. Just cuz you install an app or an extension or a plugin on WordPress doesn't do anything. You have to properly utilize it by doing the right keyword research. And then also just take everything with a grain of salt that Yoast tells you. Just because they're saying put keywords in places just to get those green dots doesn't necessarily mean it's true. It's just recommendations. And I've worked on websites where they're all red and they're still ranking for all their keywords. So it doesn't necessarily mean you have to put keywords in the front of the title tag or all these weird places because it's going to make it not readable for humans. And you want to make it readable for humans. Like, Yoast is more optimizing for SEO, just for Google's algorithm. But gotta balance out. You can't just throw keywords in there to throw keywords in. Maybe 10, 15 years ago that was fine, but nowadays you gotta optimize for people as well, which is a big part of it. Because if people come to your website and leave immediately, it's a bad user experience. Or if they're reading, the verbiage doesn't make sense because you're throwing a keyword in there just to throw it in there. It's not going to read properly. So I always tell people, just write for people, don't write for Google. In the past, you could sprinkle some keywords in there after you write the content, but don't just try to put keywords in there because that's what Yoast is really going to tell you a lot of. And there's tons of other apps out there that are good that have been around on Shopify that will help you out. So I wouldn't say necessarily switch over to Yoast just because Yoast is out there, but maybe if you're starting a new website, you could put that on the list. But there are a lot of great apps out there that take care of SEO really well. But Yoast is again another choice that's been around for a while, but there's tons of them out there, like All-in-One SEO for WordPress. Rank Math is another pretty popular one on WordPress. So check those ones out as well. Brandon, I love, I love your, your mention there of the green dots, because I do love the way that Yoast is kind of like, and many of the other tools, gamify SEO. Yeah, if I get all the green dots, it'll all be fine. But it can lead you to get obsessed with the green dots, which is not your objective. Your objective, as you rightly say, is to create a website that both humans and the search engines like. For someone starting off with SEO, for, so for someone who has just installed an SEO app or they're just going, right, I need to start caring about SEO. Are there any free, cheap video tutorials they should go and get started with? And you are welcome to plug your own courses if you have them. Brandon, you are— you're grinning up there, so I'm going to come to you first if that's okay. Oh yeah, no, that's fine. There's a ton of stuff. I like Ahrefs blog is pretty good and they write really in-depth content, but I would just say read as much as you can. Search on Google, on YouTube. Facebook groups are pretty good nowadays, but just make sure whatever you read is somewhat recent because stuff gets outdated pretty quickly online. So if you're reading something from 8, 9 years ago, it might still be relevant, but it might have changed. So I would just be wary and also just take everything with a grain of salt. What you read doesn't necessarily mean it's true. I would always tell people, test and implement. Don't just read and read and read, because reading is good, but you gotta really try and test it out and see, does this work? Does this not work? Did it used to work, or do I have to put my own spin on it? But There is so much great content out there like Search Engine News, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch, all these .com search engine websites are really good, but Ahrefs has a really, really good blog. Cool. Yeah, I always think that, you know, installing the app is, is kind of like 101 procrastination slash ignoring of SEO tasks. And then number 2 is I've read 20 blog posts, I've done 20 videos. Did you implement it? Not yet, but I've got a great plan. And Luke, we better come to you for this one too. Yeah, so there's one thing I'll start with, something to avoid actually. So there's been a bit of uproar on Twitter, which is a great resource for SEOs as well, to be honest. Google have put out their own course for SEO, and I think that's the most ridiculous thing you could spend your time on. That is quite a polarizing opinion, but the reason why I say that is Google themselves are terrible at SEO, right? They're just— the irony is unreal, but Ignore it. Like, it's the sort of thing where if Justin, Brandon, or myself were hiring and that was something that was on your CV, I'm personally, I'm immediately thinking this person doesn't know what they're talking about. Just avoid it, right? The analytics courses are great and everything else, but there's just something that's very weird about Google launching their own SEO course. So that's one thing I'd say to avoid. Should we go into that as this is the first time you guys are hearing it as well, or should we just let that settle? No, that's good that you could finally change URLs because URL structure is very, very important for SEO. And Shopify is good for e-commerce, but I do prefer WordPress with WooCommerce because you get full control of everything with WordPress, whereas Shopify, it's good for beginners, it's more user-friendly, it's a little bit easier, but you have to pay for it, whereas WordPress WooCommerce, it's all free. So and you get full control of that. But that is nice how you're getting a little bit more control on Shopify, just like you were saying earlier with like Squarespace and Wix. 5 years ago, you'd look at them and be like, all right, there's not much I could do with on-page because it's just so limiting. But hopefully more and more sites start realizing that SEO is pretty important in 2022 and that they should take some of these recommendations. And otherwise, people are gonna switch platforms and go to a different platform where some of these SEO optimizations or recommendations shouldn't be too hard for them to implement, I would think. Again, not a programmer or coder, so not too sure how tough it is, but some of them are just kind of basic, like canonical tags. Took forever for Wix and Shopify or Squarespace, and not sure if they still even have them on both of those platforms, but just some basic stuff that's really, really important for the fundamentals of SEO. If I, I don't know how deep or granular that will be, but that is again, one of the biggest bugbears of Shopify as a platform was the weird I won't go into detail here, but there's a weird disparity between the canonical URLs on products versus the actual internal URL, which just causes a few— it makes you gritty teeth. It's not enough to call it bad SEO, but it's just a little bit, you know, it's 2 clicks to the left of what best practice is. But apparently there's a solution for that. But I don't know, it could be Christmas, it could be 2 weeks. I have no idea. But just know it's coming. It. Just, just know it's happening. I just don't know when. All right, so I, I just heard that, that Luke Carthy promised it would be out next week. I'm going to share that. You should call and complain to headquarters if that doesn't happen. Thank you. Very excited. Who goes, we'd love to help you with your SEO, please tell us your keywords. It's like, no, no, that's your job to tell me the keywords. So yeah, I agree. If they're not asking, you know, if they're not asking you questions and they're not helping and helping you along that route, but if asking you for your keywords, probably not a good sign. Brandon, how about you? What would you, what would you say someone should, should ask or check for? Definitely reviews, but checking out actual rankings. So if they could show you like, I've ranked for this keyword, or actual like proof that they've done these, because unfortunately reviews and all that stuff could be fake. There's a lot of fake stuff out there online, but For the most part, if you can read through them, you'll see that which ones are real, which ones are fake. But definitely looking at like past history of a portfolio or even their own website, that's one good thing is check their website out. I know a lot of business owners don't have time to optimize their websites, but if they're missing like the basics, then maybe that's a red flag that maybe they're not the best, even though they still could be. It's just, I know a lot of business owners, a lot of web developers that don't build good websites because they just don't have time to build a good website for themselves, even though they're web developers. I'm like, that's your portfolio, you should try to make it look nice, but sometimes you just get caught up with other things and helping out clients. But yeah, I would definitely look at that and see what their strategy is. How are they going to approach SEO? Because if you do the wrong tactics, if you're going after a company that are going to build you low-quality backlinks or do kind of some spammy stuff, it might rank you higher temporarily for a couple days, a week or two, but after a while you're going to drop down and lose those rankings. So you got to be really, really careful and make sure you really vet the company or person that you're working with and make sure they know what they're talking about. Otherwise you might get that temporary boost and then it just fades away, which is the last thing we want to happen. And I'm going to add another one inspired by you there, Brandon, which is you want someone who's worked on a similar site to yours before. So if they're brilliant at, at SEO optimizing websites for local businesses, or they're brilliant at optimizing it for lawyers or dentists or something, they're not who you want as an e-commerce business because you have interesting website structures. You know, if you're on Shopify, you want someone who's done Shopify. If you're on Wix, you want someone who's done Wix before, because you don't want to be paying them for that learning. You want to benefit from their expertise in your, your platform, in your field. Guys, I'm going to say goodbye to you now. Bye, Brandon. Bye, Justin. Bye, Luke. Thank you so much for being here today.