From Shopify To SEO: The Software, Apps, and Tools Powering A Growing Candle Brand

We share the exact software stack behind our candle company, from storefront and POS to email, inventory, and SEO. The focus stays on affordable starts, smart upgrades, and tools that integrate so they save time and make money.

• choosing Shopify for e‑commerce and POS
• carrying Square as a no‑signal backup
• running subscriptions with Appstle
• starting email on Shopify, upgrading to Klaviyo
• using Meta Ads Manager with simple weekly checks
• turning on Google Merchant for product visibility
• picking QuickBooks, considering Wave or spreadsheets
• standardising work on Google Workspace, Docs, Sheets
• tracking raw materials and COGS with Inventora
• building graphics and images in Canva
• measuring with Google Analytics and Search Console
• lifting rankings using Ahrefs’ free tools

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Transcript

Why Software Choices Matter

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome back to the Candle Business Pro Podcast. Today we're going to talk about software. What software are we using to operate Garznet Beacon Candle Company with? Stick around to the end. The last one that I give to you is probably the one that has helped our online growth the most. So software is one of those things that we don't like to spend money for it. So I'm going to give you what we're using. And if there's an alternative one that might be a little bit more affordable, especially when we're first starting out, I'm also going to share those tips with you. Also, as a reminder, we do have a completely free supply list in the show notes below. It is an updated list that we are updating almost weekly with any of the supplies or tools that we are using to operate our business with. So you can download that completely for free if you would like. This is kind of going to go hand in hand with that because this is going to be the list of all the softwares that we are using. So let's start out with the operations and selling theme here. And it should be to no one's surprised that we are big fans of Shopify. Shopify is what we use for our website. In fact, behind me here, if you are watching this on YouTube, you can see a plaque that we received from Shopify when we hit 10,000 online orders a couple of years ago. We've only been in business for three and a half years. So getting that from them was a complete surprise, and we really appreciated uh reaching that level. Uh, we didn't know that that was something to achieve with them, but let's talk about Shopify. So, Shopify is going to just be for our website. Now, there are many alternatives out there. You can build on Wix, you can use like GoDaddy's native software and try to build a store off of that. You can use uh Squarespace and you can build on that. Shopify is built for e-commerce. Now,$39 a month, I think, is what it's going to be for you. I actually have a link in the show notes below that you can actually get a few months for free if you use that. Uh, it's gonna have whatever the best current promotion is. And right now, I believe it is you can get three months for a dollar, is what it is. So with Shopify and building on a website, I think it's gonna be$39 a month or so. You can find a cheaper alternative. You can build on Wix, you can build on some other platforms. However, there's gonna be so many things that you need to add on that it is most likely gonna end up costing you more. So why not go with the best one that's out there? And that's why we've been with Shopify since the beginning. And I would not ever think about going anywhere else. It's just built for e-commerce. Those other platforms are built to have different types of websites, right? So um I have a real estate website that I built on Wix, and that is perfect for a real estate website. But Wix is not built for e-commerce the same way Shopify is. It's kind of it's it's the gold standard, it integrates with the most things. So for instance, when we do stuff in Canva um with your Pixel, when you're doing stuff on Facebook or Instagram, whatever you're doing in other areas, Shopify either can natively connect with those, or there's a third-party app that they have that you can get to help you out with it as well. So I recommend Shopify. I don't want to spend any more time on that. There's really not a good alternative to it, just to be honest with you. Um, if you haven't built a website yet, one of the benefits of being inside of our inner circle, which is our inner circle is our uh monthly community membership that we have inside of Kindle Business Pro. We do weekly office hours, we have a monthly workshop, we do what we call family dinner every month. There's a bunch of stuff in there. You can find that in the show notes below. It's called the Inner Circle. One of the workshops that I do, I actually build out an entire Shopify store for you so that you can follow along step by step. It's in three parts where you can literally follow along on the screen and have your complete website built out in a weekend. So something to keep in mind if you thought about joining the inner circle, but you're also thinking about I've got websites to do, I got this and that. It's one of the things I teach you, which is probably the most highly rated of the workshops we do inside of the inner circle is the Shopify One. I'm always here to help you out with that. One thing I say about when it comes to a website is you can pay someone to build out your website for you. Totally fine. But here's the problem with that is when you need to make changes, when you need to make changes to your collections, you have new photos that need to go out there, you want to update all of your descriptions, things like that. If you don't know how it works, then you're gonna have to pay someone to make all those changes for you. And then it starts to get really expensive. So just so just say you can spend, you know,$1,200,$1,500 usually for a basic package to have someone build a website for you, or come hop into the inner circle. It's$49 a month or something like that, and you can build out your website in a day. All right, enough of that. Now, another software that we use that is uh Shopify uh software, but it is separate, is Shopify POS. POS is our point of sale, it is what we use to collect payment out at shows. Whenever we're doing any markets, if you are selling to your coworkers, but you don't want to send them to your website. If you want to carry around, I thought I might have it here uh in the office. My card reader, if you take that with you, you can make sales anywhere. In fact, now with the Shopify POS, you can actually just use your phone and your phone works as a tap to pay. So it's what we use out of markets, it's fantastic. What I really like about that is we you can also use Square. And we also used Square when we were first starting out because Shopify lacked a function two years ago, and that was the ability to take offline payments. So we would be we would be doing a market kind of in the middle of nowhere in a no cell phone tower dead zone. We've all experienced that, right? When you're out at a market and you have shoddy Wi-Fi signal and you're we're freaking out that we're not gonna be able to collect payment. So I always carried around a Square card reader as well. The little bitty one that I would plug into the bottom of your phone is what I'd carry around. You can still get those. And I highly recommend always having a backup. You can actually go to Best Buy and get those for$9.99 at Best Buy, or you can just order it right on Square's website. They'll mail it to you. I carry that around with us. It doesn't need to be charged up or anything because it plugs right into your phone. So it's nice just to have that as a backup, just in general. And for some reason, um, Shopify is down completely. And the three years now that we've had our stores, there's been two days where one was, I think, for like three or four hours, and one was just very quickly, where we thought it was our Wi-Fi that was down, but it ended up actually being an outage. It was an outage of Shopify. It's going to happen. Just last week, there was a massive Cloudflare shutdown that Amazon was down, Macy's was down, all the big retailers were down that used Cloudflare for some security things. Well, it was down, and so all these big names were down as well. And so that's going to happen with Shopify sometimes as well. But that is one of the nice things about being able to take offline payments now. But if you want to have a backup, you can always have a square reader as well. Again, 10 bucks, you set up the uh account online for free, and you can move on from there. One of the things I like about Shopify POS, it is completely free and included with your Shopify account. Now, Shopify will try to upsell you to POS Pro for$79 a month. Um, I run all three of my stores off of an iPad and my Shopify POS that's free, the free version. The upgrade to the POS Pro would allow me to like change some of the information on the receipts to make it fancier. I don't know why it costs so much. I have not found it uh to be something that the benefits of it out, you know, is worth it. So we don't do it. And also you have to do it by location. So I'd have to do$79 like for all three of my stores. I'm not gonna do that, especially when I'm running my whole business off of a$39 Shopify uh account. I'm not doing Shopify Pro or excuse me, Shopify POS Pro. Uh the POS Lite is completely free. You'll better take payments anywhere you go. All right, the next thing that we are doing or using to sell with is an app called App Store. App still is what we're using for our um candle of the month. We have a subscription box service with our our our candles. Uh, we give out a uh candle to our subscribers on the first of every single month, and we you we use Appstol for them. We've tried a few different ones. App still's great. App still starts out free until you get to a certain threshold, and then it starts charging you by the amount of revenue that you're bringing in. So that's one of the things I really like about that is that you can start free and you can build your whole system on that to have a subscription box service. And then once you get to a certain tier, certain level of revenue coming in from that, then they start charging you. And then I think it's definitely worth it. I think it starts out of maybe like$29 a month in, which essentially for us is like, you know, one subscriber, right? Um, but it's gonna take, I think it was probably 50 or so subscribers, um, or or yeah, your candle box subscribers before you hit that threshold. So it's it was definitely worth it for us. It is a little bit robust, it's not as super simple and straightforward. Again, inside of inside of the inner circle, we actually do a workshop on that. We have a whole workshop on how we do the candle of the month subscription boxes um and what's been successful for us. And I actually walk you through building out how to use that app. I don't have an affiliate link or anything like that for App Store. Um, it is in the Shopify store, though, if you want to use it. All right, now let's talk about some marketing and customer engagement. So the first one that we use is called Clavio. Some will say Clavio. I'm not exactly sure on the pronunciation. Essentially, what it is, it is our email service provider. It is the one that is sending out the emails on our behalf. It's robust. The analytics are fantastic. They've got some really cool features. One of the features that I like the most is the when we send an email out, they have this automation that if the person has not open that email in 48 hours, it's going to resend them the email with a different subject line. Uh, so I really find that that's fancy. That's been happening for several months now. We're using that and we can track to see, like, oh, no one opened up that initial email, but they did open up that 48-hour reminder email. And then here's the sales that came from it. It's really robust. You can use it for all kinds of really cool, like smart condition um emailing. So it based on like, oh, like let's re-engage anyone that hasn't visited our website in 30 days or 90 days, or let's send a coupon to people that haven't bought from us in X amount of time. You can do so much with it. It can be a little overwhelming. Um, but what I really like is they have templates for everything. They have templates in there that you click on it and then you it's just plug and play. It's very easy to use. There's a lot of tutorials for it out on YouTube as well to help you with it. Now, if you are not to the point of wanting to go that direction, if you're just starting out, the Shopify inbox, totally fine. You can set up with Shopify Forms, you can set up your pop-up on your website that will collect an email address from people when they visit your website. And then you can use your Shopify inbox to email with them. You're gonna email them codes and then you're gonna email them uh thank you after they purchase from you. Then you're gonna send them a week later, you're gonna want to send them a uh coupon code to come back and shop with you again. There's lots of things that you want to do when it comes to email marketing. Again, it's one of our focuses in the inner circle, but this is not about that. I'm just letting you know that Shopify inbox is free to start out with. Now, they do have a cap on how many emails you can send a month. And I think it's like 10,000. So say you have a thousand people on your email list, you can basically send out 10 emails. Uh, there will be all those emails that are, again, you're gonna be sending out, you know, a follow-up email asking for a review. And then you're you want to send out an email asking for them to come back, uh bounce back, right? So for them to come back and shop with you again. Um, so you can go through those emails quicker than we might think, but they still give you a hefty amount when you're first starting out. And if you are going to have to start paying for Shopify inbox, then you might want to start looking at Clavio as an alternative. Um, if you're gonna be paying, go with the best. The Clavio is fantastic. I I recommend always with Shopify starting out with whatever's native, whatever's free, uh, and then grow with it. Uh, Clavio does have a free option. And I believe that it is up to 500 contacts and maybe a thousand emails. So, you know, so if you had 500 contacts, you'd be able to email twice a month and everything will be completely free. If you have a hundred contacts, you can email them 10 times a month for free. So look at that and see what their best rate is right now on that. Um, we've kind of gone up and down with Clavio with um, because we will clean up our list. We will clean up our list to get rid of people that are just not engaged with this anymore uh to get them off of our list to get our numbers back down so that we can reduce our payment. Uh, but it can it can get to being kind of pricey based on how big your list is. Again, the I guess the theory is the bigger your list, the more sales are bringing in, the more revenue you're bringing in. So you can pay more for these softwares. And I understand that theory, but just because you know, we have three stores, we have a pretty good online presence in an online business. We do 150, 60 wholesale accounts now. It doesn't mean I just have an extra 250 bucks just to throw out for an email software platform just because I'm always gonna be shopping around for what makes the most sense for my business. But upgrading to Clavio is a good option whenever you are ready for it. So the next software that we use often for our marketing and customer engagement is gonna be Meta Ads Manager. This is where we manage our Facebook ads, our Instagram ads. They have plenty of tutorials out there. I do not give ads advice necessarily. We talk about it often in the inner circle, but they are always changing up how it works. So I wouldn't want to put that here in an episode and then it changes something else tomorrow. And quite honestly, that will probably happen because it's always changing. But using Meta Ads Manager, that is what we use. Uh, I'm in there about once a week. I'm I'm not huge on ads. We do run ads for our business. It does bring in revenue for our candle business, but uh, I'm we're busy. We're busy with the stores. We're not doing enough on that ads to justify outsourcing and hiring someone else to run that for us at the time. So I pop in there every week, see what's working, see what's not working, download the data from there, um, and then make adjustments based on that. But uh, that's all I'm going to get into as far as that goes today. The next one here is Google Merchant. Google Merchant is important, it connects with your Shopify store super easy. And this is what you want to have set up so that your products are available to show up as a search result. So when someone goes to Google and they type in vanilla scented candle, before it starts going to the websites, at the top, you're gonna see the sponsor. So you're gonna see the ads that people are paying to be in those positions. And then underneath that, you're going to see a bunch of products listed that are not sponsored. And these are the products that Google thinks that the searcher are maybe looking for, and that's why they put them there. For you to get your product listed there, you need to be connected to Google Merchant. It's completely free. They have some guidelines, of course, that you have to follow. Um, but it's completely free, and so many people just don't know to go and connect that. So Google Merchant is the next one here on my list. Go and check that out. Make sure that you had that connected. All right, now we're up to number seven, and we are starting in the financials and the administrative type of theme here. Number seven is gonna be QuickBooks. This is what we use for all of our accounting. Our accountant, obviously, accountants love QuickBooks because they're weird like that. Uh, we just did a workshop inside the inner circle, and we bring in a CPA to help out all the members with. And, you know, talking to an accountant, like they love doing what they do. QuickBooks is the standard out there, but you don't need to use it. And in fact, you know, talking to our own accountant, they said we the the reports that they pull from us. Yeah, it's nice that it's in QuickBooks and they can go in and they can they can access it and they can run the reports how they want to, but any of the other accounting softwares are going to do the same thing. It's gonna be a matter of what's user-friendly and what's not. Wave is an alternative that I'd recommend. It's a lot less expensive as QuickBooks as well. So, Wave is one that if you're wanting to have a software to keep your books in order, then I've I've checked it out. I really like it. I just can't downgrade off of QuickBooks now just because I have so much wrapped up in it. And uh, the price difference isn't going to be substantial for us to get off of QuickBooks, especially because our bookkeeper is proficient in QuickBooks. Um, it just makes it easier. And we have everything set up in QuickBooks. We have our payroll for all of our staff that goes through there. We also have like our automated payments to the IRS and to the state already all set up. So I haven't moved off of QuickBooks yet. Um, I'd love to. I don't like QuickBooks, but it is kind of the standard. It is what it is. So QuickBooks is what we are using. Wave should be a pretty good alternative. Um, or to be honest, if you're just starting out, uh just as our CPA told us last week on the workshop uh that we hosted was just keep very detailed um documentation in a spreadsheet. Have a spreadsheet that has all the money going in, all the money going out, what all the expenses were for. Document all of that. Document all of your mileage. You can go a very, very long way in your business by simply just using an Excel spreadsheet or a Google Sheets workbook. Any of those are going to be just fine. You do not have to have accounting software just because we are operating a business. So keep that in mind. That will save you a decent amount of money if you're looking into it. It might just be easy enough to reconcile everything yourself by looking at your credit card statements and your business bank statements and making sure everything is adding up and documenting all of that in a spreadsheet. So you can talk to your tax advisor on what they recommend and just say, hey, I really can't afford QuickBooks right now or these other softwares. Can I just do all this in a spreadsheet? And how would you prefer for me to do it uh for you? Because uh a couple of other businesses that we have. Uh I do real estate very part-time. Um, it's all just done on a spreadsheet. Uh my lots that I do, expenses going out, um, commissions coming in. Very simple. All right, let's get into the next one here. Google Workspace. So, number eight is Google Workspace. This is going to be our Gmail, our calendar, our Google Drive. It's it's the standard. It's it's it's easy. Um, I wouldn't use a hotmail, I wouldn't use any other email service provider. Gmail or the Google Workspace, excuse me, connects with our Gmail. So I can we check all of our business emails. So our our emails end in at Gardens and Beacon.com, but it's it's set up in Gmail, if that makes sense. That you connect it in Google Workspace. For us, I think the starter is six dollars a month per email address. So you know, I have one, chat has one, half of the staff has one based on on their role. Uh, what's really nice, what you don't have to do, and here's a little trick for you, is if on your website you want to have a customer service at Gardensbeacon.com, and then you want to have an info at Gardens Beacon and returns at Gardens Beacon and help at Garznet Beacon. All of those different email addresses, if I actually want them all to come to me at Sebastian, they can all be aliases. You can have up to like a hundred alias email addresses, which are basically the before at sign is different. So info or customer service or returns or help or whatever. And they all get sent to Sebastian at Garrisonbeacon.com. Or whomever you want them to go to. So you do not have to set up a new email address for each of those individual email emails that you want people to be able to send emails to. They can all just be aliases. So go into your settings inside of your Gmail and set up a and you have to go under admin and then set up aliases. So that is a good way to not have maybe your personal email out there on your website. Just have info at on your website, but then have it come to you. So that way you're not spending per seat, right? Because Sebastian's got an email address, Chad has an email address, and a few of our staff members all have email addresses. We're paying that$6 per on those. Because of course, I don't want those emails that are, you know, the returns out of the customer service ad or the info ad. I don't want those necessarily going to other people. They they need to go to a specific person. So we pay for that seat, but all those others are just aliases underneath it. So something to keep in mind. Some people don't realize that you can actually just have one email account, but you don't want to have your personal that email out on the website. Just put a bunch of aliases out there. Totally fine to do it that way. So something uh to save you a little bit of money there. We started out with the starter. I think we're up to the business level now. So we might be paying like$10 a month per seat versus$6 a month. Um that's going to give you more space on the drive as well. So the drive is where we share everything. All of our production sheets for all of our candle making is out there because anyone in any of our stores, we need to have them be able to access files, right? We need them to be able to look at our employee handbook. We need them to look at all of our standard operating procedures. All of our stuff lives out there in Google Drive. That is our cloud storage. And when we upgrade from starter to business, you do get a lot more storage. And then you're able to share it. So instead of me having a really heavy storage account and Chad's is really light. So then I have to upgrade. Once you go to the starter to the business, we all share the same amount of storage. So we're not having to upgrade individually, which has been really nice. It's also with all the Google Workspace stuff, it's all, of course, they have apps for all of it. So it makes it really easy. Google Calendar, fantastic, easy to use. That's what we use. There's a lot of different calendar uh softwares out there. With Google, I have found that it works great. It merges with all the stuff we do inside the inner circle as well with all of our members. So they never miss any of the meetings that we're doing, uh, or I don't miss any of the meetings that I'm supposed to be hosting. Uh, they just makes it really easy. And even though I've got different businesses and different email accounts with Google, it's easy to, you only have to have one app, and then I can see kind of all my my calendar for everything uh at once, which is super nice to have. All right, and this leads to the next one from Google, and that is Google Docs. Uh, and actually, I'm gonna go ahead and throw in the next one here, number 10, which is Google Sheets. So number nine is Google Docs, number 10 is Google Sheets. I've always been big on Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel. You have to pay for those now. And you can use Google Docs and Sheets with having a Gmail account. So I think it's fantastic and free. And you can access it on the go. There's apps for it now as well. So those are two that I highly recommend. Again, Google Docs is Google's version of Microsoft Word, and then Google Sheets is their version of Microsoft Excel. So those are two. We're in there all the time. Every single day, the notes that I'm reading right now, off of here on the podcast, is on a Google Doc where I keep everything. Uh, inside the inner circle, we share tons of templates and things and actually a lot of emails for our members to be able to send out to their customers. And I just share Google Doc links for that. So it makes it really easy to share everything and it updates it in real time. Uh instead of you know saving something in Word and then having to email it over to someone else. Google Docs is just the easiest way to go, and it's free. So might as well be using that these days. All right, the next one is for our inventory and production. And number 11 here, it's Inventora. Inventora, we have had since day one. I actually have a link for you in the show notes below to get you started completely for free if you want to try it out. I highly recommend them. Inventora uh is what we put all of our raw material in. So not our finished product, not our candle when it's a candle, it's what we uh put all of our wicks, all of our wax, all of our vessels, it is our raw supplies, all of our oils. Everything goes in there, and including like the shipping that we pay. So essentially the way we use it, and in fact, if you just look on our YouTube channel, Chad actually made a video. Uh type in Inventora and it'll pull up. There's a video of Chad, he shows you exactly how he uses Inventora. It is his world, it's his baby. He is in there every day seeing what we're low on, what we're doing okay on, what we need to reorder. And what's really nice is so you put all of your he orders something from one of the suppliers. We receive it, he takes that list and puts it all into inventory, including the shipping. And then when we make a product, it pulls from there. So they're called recipes. So he'll have a recipe for a peppermint stick candle. And whenever he runs the recipe for, okay, I would need to make 50 of that, it's gonna take 50 of the labels, 50 of the tins, 50 of however much wax is needed, what wick it is, how many warning stickers, everything. And it removes all of that so that we have accurate levels. And then he has reminders that were alerts that lets him know when we need to order more. And what's also really nice is it merges or integrates, excuse me, with Shopify. So when he does that production run of all this stuff and it it removes all of it out of inventory, and then it will put that final product into Shopify where it needs to go. So we're not having to do that extra step, which is pretty nice. Now, there are some glitches occasionally. We have found, especially with those integrations, they're not always the smoothest. Sometimes it's easy, just like, okay, we just made 50 of these, so let me just hop into Shopify and update that to 50, because sometimes it doesn't go over there. I don't know if it I don't know. I'm not I'm not a 10 person, I don't know why. Sometimes it doesn't work. That's the only downside we've ever found with it. Um, crafty base is an alternative, but crafty base is more expensive. When we were shopping them both out, the Inventora was the least expensive. And also with Inventora, it grows with you. So based on how many raw supplies they call materials, based on how many of those you have, you can start out at the free plan if you use the link that we have. And then it goes up to like$19. And then I think it goes like$29 or$49, uh, based on what level you're at. So we've had to upgrade. So we're not on the free plan anymore, uh, just because of the the business that we're doing. Um, but you can start out and you can get quite far on the free. And I like, since I like to know the numbers and the business side, I like to know what our cost of goods are all the time. And Inventora calculates all of that because it knows, including the shipping that you're we're paying to all of these suppliers, it calculates all of that in there. So I can hop in there at any time and see how much of this candle costs. And then we order more supplies, and you know, it's gonna vary based on shipping, based on how bulk of an order you place. Your cost of goods are always gonna fluctuate, and inventora is able to calculate all of that for you. So that's what I really like about Inventora. Again, we have a link in the notes below. You can certainly grab that if you would like. All right, let's move on to branding design and creative. There's only only one that we use uh daily, uh, and that's Canva. And you probably already use Canva. Canva is the standard, it's the standard. Everyone's using it. You can do so much with it now. They even have some like AI features in it. We have not done any of that, but we use we're in Canva every single day, either on the desktop version, uh on our computers or on the app itself. We do all of our graphics in there, we do all of our signs that we print off, all of our social media graphics we do in there. We also have a lot of stuff that we end up giving away to uh our members that we design in there, and then we just share that template with them. Uh, in fact, if you have heard about our candle business pro, um, our candle business planner that we sell at Candle Business Pro, it is a Canva template. It's like 207, 210 pages. Um, it's our full planner of how we operate business and to help you start and scale a business. And it's in Canva. So you can actually go in and change any parts of it that you can input your stuff. So you're not printing out 207 pages. So we're also saving a lot of trees as well. Uh, and you can just work on the areas that you want to um in there. So Canva is fantastic. Uh, I can't say enough about that. The it's completely free, or you can pay the pro. And for us, I believe the pro, I think it's$12.99 a month, or it's$10 if you pay for the entire year. So like$120 for the entire year. It does we're literally in there every day. It's user-friendly. We will use like Photoshop for um, or actually Pixel Mater is what Chad will use on some of our images. But he was just able to get rid of that software and just use it in Canva. He does a whole photography workshop inside of the inner circle that he showed people how to get like all of your images completely the same to where you can just swap out the labels, um, which makes it really nice. So it's super cohesive. If you haven't checked out our website, Gardasnetbeacon.com, you'll see like our product images are super cohesive. They're all exactly the same. They're real images, they're not AI, they are real images, and he just is able to swap out the label on them, um, which is something that has saved us so much time and energy and and and effort, uh, and not having to pay a photographer every single time as well. So lots of great things about Canva. Highly recommend it if you aren't using it right now. All right, so we have three more here, and these are to do with your website and your SEO. So number 13 is going to be Google Analytics. You got to have Google Analytics set up. It's easy, it's free. You go into Shopify and go to sales channels and click on Google, and it'll walk you through how to connect it. This is how you can see the true traffic that your website is getting. You can see where uh the journey that customers are going on, where they are leaving your website. There's so much you can do inside of Google Analytics. You can spend weeks learning it in and out, but it is getting a lot more user-friendly to show you when you first sign into Google Analytics the most important things. But regardless if you're going to do anything in it or not, you need to set it up right away. This is going to help you with the other thing that I highly recommend that you've got to get set up, and that's Google Search Console. So, Google Search Console is going to show you what people are searching for and what you are getting impressions on those search results. So when someone is typing in a vanilla scented candle, are they hitting your website? It is showing you where traffic is coming to your website from. What are people searching for to hit your website? That's really important because if you know that your website is a search result, when someone's searching for something on Google, you want to make sure you optimize around that, right? Uh, and that's going to kind of lead into my next thing, which is uh the SEO software that we use. So, first make sure you have Google Analytics set up and then make sure that you have Google Search Console set up. That is Google's version of showing you, hey, this is why we're sending you traffic. Um, this is what people are searching for, and then I'm sending them to your website. So it's very important to know so that you can optimize for that. And so the last one here to talk about today is all refs. A-H-R-E-F-S. All refs or a refs is how it is pronounced. This is the SEO software we use. There's other alternatives out there. Um, there's SEM Rush, uh, which is good as well. I like the setup from all refs. Also, it's free. We do not need to pay for it. Now, if you want to pay for it, it's like$99 a month. SEO software can get really, really expensive. We actually do an entire workshop inside of the inner circle on how we do SEO and how I use REFs um every week inside of our business. I like how it analyzes our entire website. It sends me a weekly report that I get on Sunday night that tells me what I'm ranking for, what I can do to improve rankings, what titles I can change, what product descriptions I can change, what metadata uh needs to be updated. It gives you everything. And the way I like to use this is I go into their keyword explorer and it shows me everything that I rank for on the first page of Google or close. So it'll show you like what you rank for in the first page of Google, and then it'll be like the second page to the fifth page. So those are the ones that we really want to get on to the first page. So then I know, okay, I'm on the second page for this keyword, like vanilla scented candles. I want to get to the first page, so I need to optimize all those pages that have to do with vanilla scented candles or my collection pages where I need to write more blogs about that. There's so many different ways of optimizing your SEO. So we're not going to talk about that today. If you are in the inner circle, go and watch that workshop. I think that's going to extremely help you out. People have found it to be super helpful. This is the stuff that we've used. This is why Garznet Beacon is on the first page of Google for vanilla scented candles, which brings us uh Traffic. Um, right now, just off the top of my mind, we are the number one result in the world on Google for driftwood scented candles. Problem is it's not too many people are searching for that. But right now, if you search for driftwood scented candles, my business will be the number one result on there as of today's date. Bergamot, we are going to be on the first page of Bergamot scented candles. Lots of things that we're ranking for, and we use all ref to tell us where we're close. If we're getting close, then I want to put focus onto that to drive, and I and we explain kind of how we do that inside of our inner circle. But also just on all refs website, there's tons of tons of free articles on how to do SEO. I trust them with our business, and I would recommend that you check them out. I don't have any affiliate links or anything like that for them. I'm just big fans. I love how I get an email from them every single week of them analyzing my website and Google and telling me where I've ranked, if I've gone up or if I've gone down. And then also some uh kind of like low-hanging fruit, some things that I should really focus on. This is what has helped our business grow organically is making sure our SEO is optimized. So we're in there pretty often. Once a week I peek and you know, once a month I'm going in there and actually making changes because organic traffic takes time. I can set it all up right now, and I might not get any significant results for a month or two. That just takes time. That's just the reality of it. So you want to start on it whenever you have your website built. RFs is, of course, what I use. There's a lot of other ones out there as well, but that's the one that, and I use the free version. I do not pay for the um upgraded one. So just keep that in mind as well. Hopefully, this episode has helped you out today. If you use a software that we did not list, please drop it in the comments below. That could help us and other makers out there as we are running our business. There's definitely lots of options out there. And if there's one that you're a big fan of, let us know. Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you wouldn't mind hitting that subscribe button, that would help us out tremendously. I will chat with you next week. Take care.