eCommerce SEO with Ryan Martin and Patrick Dhital - Remarkable SEO

Curious about how to master the ever-evolving world of SEO?

Join us for an enlightening conversation with Patrick Dhital, the eCommerce SEO lead at Remarkable Digital, as he shares his journey from a start up eCommerce business, learning how to do SEO, to spending the last 10 years purely devoted to SEO. 

Ryan Martin and Patrick Dhital talk about what is working in eCommerce SEO, where Google has shifted to in terms of SEO best practise and the evolving nature of AI integration. 

Patrick's hands-on experience with natural link building and keyword research, coupled with his insights on the evolution of SEO strategies, provide a treasure trove of knowledge for anyone looking to enhance their digital marketing skills. 

Unlock the secrets behind high-quality content and the EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) concept, and why it's crucial for your brand's SEO success. 

Discover why solely relying on AI-generated content can be a pitfall and learn how incorporating your personal expertise can give you an edge in the crowded digital landscape. 

Patrick sheds light on the importance of investing in SEO for long-term sustainability, striking a contrast with the fleeting nature of paid advertising, and how it targets specific audiences searching for your services or products.

Patrick dives into the nuances of e-commerce SEO, from optimising product and collection pages to the critical components like keyword strategy and user experience. 

Plus, get actionable tips on maximising your e-commerce SEO results using tools like Google Search Console.

Download our Ultimate eCommerce Checklist to improve your eCommerce results.

Join 'A Remarkable Newsletter' for weekly high performance marketing and content actionable tips.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:19

Welcome to the Ecommerce Australia podcast. For those of you seeking direct assistance, remarkable Digital is just a call away. Our mission is to be remarkable, doing great things for great people and great businesses. I understand how much choice you have and how many podcasts are out there, so I'm truly grateful you've tuned in. Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or topics you'd like covered. Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of eCommerce Australia podcast. I'm really excited about this next guest that we have coming up. We're going to talk all things SEO. Remarkable Digital's very own SEO lead, patrick Dettal Mate. Welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 2: 0:55

I appreciate it, mate, good seeing you as well.

Speaker 1: 0:58

Good to see you all the time, mate, 100% You're based where, mate, I'm based in Sydney?

Speaker 2: 1:03

Yeah, so I've always in Sydney. Yeah, all right, so I've always been a Sydney boy. Turns out that you like AFL but you don't like an NRL.

Speaker 1: 1:12

I'm just joshing, I don't mind the storm. Yeah, I don't mind the storm. They're a winning culture. I'll always attach myself to a winning culture. Who do you go for?

Speaker 2: 1:21

I go for Sydney Roosters. Who do you go for? I go for Sydney Roosters. Okay, that's right.

Speaker 1: 1:24

Roosters man, yeah, so pretty basic yeah, and what's a perfect weekend for you, mate? What are?

Speaker 2: 1:30

you A perfect weekend, Honestly, mate, just getting on about. I love being social, so just seeing my friends just hanging out with people going to different places, that's what I really enjoy. What's your favorite thing about Sydney? Favorite thing about sydney? Favorite thing about sydney honestly can't be the people.

Speaker 1: 1:45

surely I was gonna say the people I shouldn't say that the amount of clients and the amount of people I've had.

Speaker 2: 1:52

I shouldn't say that it's definitely the people or it's more the the city. I love the city actually, because I've been to melbourne and I really did enjoy the city over there. Honestly, yeah, the city is something I really like about Sydney. You know you've got a beautiful harbour, the harbour bridge, the Opera House. You know it's picturesque if you ever go over there. So it's definitely a beautiful place and I'm very thankful to be in Australia and to be able to work here.

Speaker 1: 2:19

As a typical Melburnian mate, the best thing about Sydney is the road out of there. It's a great spot. I actually do. I do enjoy it, as much as I don't like to admit it. But yeah, Sydney is a great spot. You've got better beaches than us.

Speaker 2: 2:31

Yeah, I have, mate. Tell me about it.

Speaker 1: 2:34

I don't know about better nightlife. Oh, all right, you get locked out, don't you?

Speaker 2: 2:43

Yeah, you's it.

Speaker 1: 2:44

That's a savior at your age, yeah exactly.

Speaker 2: 2:48

It'd be good to have you come over here, mate.

Speaker 1: 2:50

Yeah, 100%.

Speaker 2: 2:51

I'll show you around.

Speaker 1: 2:52

I'll be up there soon Cool, obviously. We've been working together for six or seven months, so keen to get you on the podcast. One thing that I've noticed looking through all my episodes is I actually haven't done too much when it comes to SEO. So I thought we'd have a really good and in-depth SEO discussion today and the listening audience can walk away with the reasons why or why not, they should be doing SEO, what type of SEO is working at the moment, and perhaps they can look at their own businesses and give themselves a score of how their SEO is going currently. But before we jump into it, a little bit about yourself, mate. How long have you been in SEO? Yeah, do you want it right from?

Speaker 2: 3:30

the beginning, Right from the start. So yeah, like many people listening to this podcast, about 12 years ago, I'd say I started an e-commerce store with a close friend of mine. It was when I was a broke uni student, so I just wanted to make some extra money and the product itself wasn't that great. It was a hair removal product, but it definitely worked and stuff. But it was a decent product. It was in a super saturated market and it was when dropshipping was a massive craze. So, as I said, I was a broke uni student, so I didn't have money, so I didn't have the money to spend towards advertising. And that's when I started getting an understanding of SEO and its power. And I say I did all of that. But I've got to give as much credit as I can to my business partner at the time. His name is Lucas Vitale, so he learned as much as he could about it and relayed that information back onto me and we started doing some natural link building reaching out to different reporters and journalists, doing keyword research, writing blogs, getting freelancers to write blogs and that worked out really well. But the approach was a little bit ghetto. It wasn't really a structured approach at all, but keep in mind, the landscape of SEO has entirely changed now. But yeah, look, from that we started making quite a few organic sales, probably around $5,000 to $6,000 a month, which is really good money at the time, you know.

Speaker 2: 4:49

And six months later I decided to give that up. You know, at the time my heart wasn't really into becoming an entrepreneur and obviously I didn't really believe in the product as much. And, yeah, I decided to go back to working on my nine to five career. But then a few years later, I decided to do some freelancing work as an SEO consultant for businesses on a platform called Fiverr. You know, I'm sure a lot of your audience have heard about that as well.

Speaker 2: 5:15

And, yeah, just started working for Peanuts but got really good reviews and people could really see that I cared for their businesses and their businesses and obviously got them good results as well, and over time, just basically refined my processes a lot more, worked with big clients on that platform and got them great results. And that's where, basically, that imposter syndrome basically started washing away a little bit and I started to realize, hey, I'm actually pretty good at this. And yeah, about three years ago, Fiverr reached out to me and asked me if I wanted to jump on 7 News, which is a really good experience. So I ended up on 7 News, which is, you know, a really, really fun experience. Nice, it was actually during the height of COVID it wasn't a current affair or something like that, was it?

Speaker 2: 6:02

No, no nothing like that. That was for something else. No, but yeah, it was during the height of COVID, so I had a Justin Bieber haircut and packed on a few pounds.

Speaker 1: 6:13

Oh really, I'm going to have to dig this up. I'm going to have to dig this up.

Speaker 2: 6:19

I'll share it with you, mate. Yeah, after that, probably around about that same time, I co-founded a business called SEO Assistance. So I left my full-time job as a data analyst and, yeah, really gave it my all towards SEO full-time and just polished up all of my processes and during that whole time I became a SEMrush verified contributor. So I actually wrote articles for them, worked with the biggest clients around the world, including companies like InVideo, mygreatlearning, did auditing projects for Wixcom, did a huge auditing project for StepTember, the organization. I'm sure a lot of your audience know about it as well. Yeah, but yeah, I recently left that business now not for any sort of negative reason, just felt like it was the right time for me to leave that business now. Not for any sort of negative reason, just felt like it was the right time for me to leave. And, yeah, and now I'm working for you and Remarkable Digital. But probably what about?

Speaker 1: 7:08

yourself mate.

Speaker 2: 7:09

You're always asking other people questions. What about yourself? What's your background?

Speaker 1: 7:12

Yeah, yeah, thank you, mate. Well, yeah, I probably don't go into my background, but I had that natural progression from 15 years of riding thoroughbred racehorses professionally into SEO, pretty much so straight away. The skills just align from being a jockey and having to try and win on the racetrack to go into SEO. So I had 15 years riding racehorses as a jockey. Weight was always my biggest battle and I'm happy to go into the lengths that we used to go to to lose weight perhaps on another podcast. I could be here all day, but it'd be nothing for me to drop three and a half four kilos in 24, 48 hours in the sauna. But anyway, I got to 30 and I thought, geez, there's got to be an easier way to make a living. So I got out of racing and started in retail and that's sort of where my passion for retail and later on to become e-commerce, has come from. I worked with one of the best retailers you'll ever see, a guy called Craig Gasper at Sports Fever in WA, and he taught me a lot. Then I worked for Raff Bore at the Running Centre and Sammy DeVries looked after two times you and Mizuno. So some really good sports athleisure brands. But that's sort of where the passion came from for retail e-commerce and to where I am today.

Speaker 1: 8:23

So, yeah, I started Remarkable Digital about 18 months ago. I spent three years as a franchise business owner for another digital marketing company. We'll leave that there, except the fact that I wouldn't go into a franchise again because you don't have a lot of control over quality staff turnover results ultimately. So, yeah, I wanted to create my own standard and be the best and deliver results, and I really care about my employees and clients like no other agency could. There are some good agencies. I'm not out here to bash agencies. There are some really elite ones that I've had on the podcast as well. But yeah, I guess that's my background mate.

Speaker 2: 9:01

That's awesome. It's always good to hear about that. You said that you lost three to four kilos overnight. I can pack on three to four kilos overnight, mate. That's awesome. It's always good to hear about that. You said that you lost three to four kilos overnight. I can pack on three to four kilos overnight, mate. We're in different categories.

Speaker 1: 9:13

Yeah, it's not fun but anyway. So obviously we've been working together for just over six months. I'm really keen for people to understand why they should do SEO, and what I want them to get out of this podcast is yeah, just to understand the reasons why you should or you shouldn't do SEO and whether it's right for your business. We've done a lot of audits recently and we could just see some massive holes in SEO strategy. A lot of them are really strong in paid, but then you look at the SEO and you're like, wow, there's just so much money on the table here to be made from SEO. How have you seen sort of SEO performance generally speaking in 2024? What's been your take on it so?

Speaker 2: 9:51

far, I would say with the most recent updates, especially with the helpful content update on the backing of the introduction of AI, especially chat, GPT, that's been a game changer for a lot of businesses. So definitely businesses that relied on low quality content they faced issues but companies that had a robust content development plan. They ended up getting much better results even with all of the existing SEO processes remaining the same. So just to clarify what I mean by low quality content essentially, if you've found a keyword, built some content, added an image and left it at that, that's definitely not enough these days. You definitely need to follow the EEAT concept. I'm sure a lot of your audience have heard about it. Essentially, what that stands for is experience, so how much firsthand knowledge you have on your particular subject. Expertise, so how recognized you are on your particular subject. Expertise, so how recognized you are for your particular skill.

Speaker 2: 10:47

Authority, which is how often your content has been able to rank or how often your content has actually been cited by other sources. And trustworthiness, which is just giving an honest, unbiased view. You don't want to be overly salesy with your pitch or with your content. It's the same as any sort of sales. You need to be a little bit relatable. Yeah, so obviously, making sure that whatever content that you're actually developing on your website, it's not just built with AI or you're not just beefing up the content with fluff right, You've got to be making sure that you're answering the question that people actually have. But, yeah, look, in general, my performance in 2024 has been good for e-commerce stores, I would say, but it has been a little bit more difficult for businesses that have relied on lower quality content, and that's especially for service-based businesses.

Speaker 1: 11:37

Yeah, brilliant. And, mate, I'm glad that you just touched on that AI piece and around low quality, because there is differing opinions on whether you can use AI content and still get ranked, which you obviously can to a degree, but where do you sit in that AI discussion? I mean, if you're just looking at that EAT principle, that to me is a pretty clear message from Google that they don't want AI, they want authority, they want expertise, and they want firsthand knowledge of expertise within those and trust as well. Exactly. So that would to me mean that less AI the better. But what are your thoughts on AI content?

Speaker 2: 12:16

AI definitely has a place to understand the structure of your content, how you should develop articles in a certain way, but it shouldn't be the nuts and bolts of what that article actually is. So yeah, going back to what I said about the EEAT concept, it was previously just expertise, authority and trust, but Google have actually added experience within that, and that combats AI, because AI can't give you a firsthand experience of something you'd know specifically about your industry. So, yeah, definitely AI is rampant at the moment, but how you can create a competitive difference and something that Google will actually appreciate is writing the content yourself and showing your own experiences.

Speaker 1: 13:02

Yeah, perfect, I mean. I think that's so exciting as well, because to do what everyone else is doing, if that is AI and you go it alone, you invest in SEO, you invest in a content plan and you actually highlight your experience and authority and trust firsthand knowledge, then that's just going to stand you worlds apart in content, that's just so AI generated.

Speaker 1: 13:25

So I think there's a huge opportunity for people to accept that AI is coming in and various sort of guises, I guess, and it's a good thing to have and it's only going to be more and more. But when it comes to content, if we can really personalize that, I think that's going to actually probably be one of the stronger SEO tactics you can do.

Speaker 2: 13:42

Definitely, mate. Yeah, look, AI should definitely be used as a tool. Any sort of new technology should always be used as a tool, but it shouldn't be used as something that you rely on to develop content for your website. So yeah, like I said, just use it to structure your articles, but then come up with the content yourself and you'll be well ahead of the crowd.

Speaker 1: 14:03

Yeah, 100%, Mate. Why should brands invest in SEO is a question I want to ask you. Seo has been around for a long time. A lot of conversations we have, I know, is we've been burnt with SEO agencies in the past and we'll address that a little bit later in this episode. But from your point of view, why should brands invest in SEO?

Speaker 2: 14:25

Well, going back to the answer that I gave regarding my own e-commerce store when I was a broke uni student, I was able to make money without having to spend on marketing, and obviously a lot of your listeners are people that have much greater business maturity than I did at the time. But essentially, what SEO gives you is long-term sustainability, because you're no longer relying on forcing your advertising to people and you're actually targeting a targeted audience people that are actually searching for your services or your product. And obviously paid advertising has changed now, where the algorithm is a lot more applicable to targeted audiences. But SEO in general is the cheapest way that you can bring people who are explicitly looking for your services exactly right. So I'm interested in knowing why you think brands should invest in SEO as well, mate, so I might throw that question right back at you.

Speaker 1: 15:16

Yeah, fair enough. Well, look, I've got plenty of reasons why. And obviously we run an e-commerce SEO agency, right? So do we have the SEO blinkers on? Perhaps, yeah, I'm not sure.

Speaker 1: 15:26

But if you look at SEO, as you mentioned, you get free traffic, and I think free traffic and position, which is really important and you get the most amount of profit on the least amount of spend. If you look at paid, you spend a fortune on it, right, and it gets more and more expensive when competitors come into the market. It still only gets between 10% and 15% of the clicks on the search engine results page. And the big thing for me, the day you turn it off, it could not care less about you. You know what I mean. You will never to be sitting in that position again as soon as you stop advertising. The other thing too, it's easy to replicate for other brands. So if you have someone who wants to enter that space and you're not doing any organic marketing, they can just come in. If they've got bigger budgets than you, they can just knock your visibility straight away, of course, yeah.

Speaker 2: 16:19

So true mate.

Speaker 1: 16:20

That's another reason I think you can become the dominant trusted brand organically. Obviously, organic search is the most trusted search because you're not pushing an advertisement, as you said. You're attracting them and it's really intent-based.

Speaker 2: 16:35

Yeah, anecdotally, even people that I've spoken to, like clients that I've spoken to, they've preferred the organic listings when they've actually made a search. So you know, people aren't stupid, they know what a sponsored listing is, they know that those companies paid for that particular position, so I think people gravitate towards the organic listings anyway. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 16:56

So yeah, yeah, you're definitely right on that regard For sure, and Google are trying to change that to make it, you know, to get as many clicks on their ads as possible in one way, but they also cannot hurt the user experience that people go and use a different search engine as well. So that's a sort of a tricky kind of play for them. Yeah, but I think you stay at the top position without paying for it daily. Better conversion rate, more profitable, and the big thing for me is that if someone wants to come along and buy your business, if you're just doing $100,000 on paid performance, it's not worth that much because they could just do that themselves. Yeah, but if you're ranked one for all of these keywords that have taken you blood, sweat and tears and years to get to, that is something worth paying for. 100%, mate. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 17:41

So I think, that exit is something to you know. Perhaps doesn't get the credit it deserves, yeah, but you're building an asset.

Speaker 2: 17:47

Yeah, sometimes I say you know, if a company has a good SEO, like if SEO is a very good channel for them, it shows that their business is doing really well, because it's definitely one of the more difficult areas when it comes to digital marketing in general. But if you get that right, you're doing a really good job. Yeah, 100%.

Speaker 1: 18:07

And I always look at. I had Brendan Gillen on the podcast and you know a little while ago and he mentioned this thing of the traffic trifecta. It really resonated with me. But if you can have a brand where you're getting 30% of your traffic from SEO organic, you know traffic you get 40% of your sorry 30% of your traffic and revenue 40% is through own. So email database text, you know previous customers grow that database, that's 70% of free traffic. And then you get 30% through paid channels. The fluctuations of paid and cost per clicks and results and all that you know can kind of go up and down, but you've got 70%. That's basically free. Yeah, it just means you're a lot more profitable.

Speaker 2: 18:52

Yeah, yeah, that's so true. I didn't hear that podcast specifically, but that's a definitely good analogy.

Speaker 1: 18:59

Mate, what are you doing? You're the only one, Mate. What's the difference between kind of traditional SEO and e-commerce SEO, In your opinion? Is there a difference between the two? Is there?

Speaker 2: 19:14

a difference between the two. Yeah, to put it simply, mate, e-commerce SEO is more about the optimizations you do across your product and your collection pages and bringing traffic to those pages because they have the highest conversion rates, whereas with general SEO, especially for service-based businesses or content-based websites it's more so about what sort of content you've developed and the keyword strategy you're taking around that. It's more so about what sort of content you've developed and the keyword strategy you're taking around that. So, essentially, the product or the collection pages are going to be your main focus for e-commerce businesses. Not saying that you can't create content as an e-commerce business you should definitely be doing that.

Speaker 2: 19:48

But yeah, look, the fundamental concepts of SEO will always remain the same, and that is the keyword strategy you're using, how you're implementing that keyword throughout your website, the technical optimizations you're doing so, like how fast your page loads, the user experience that people are experiencing on your website, the core web vitals, the link building work that you're doing, how you're building up authority, the content development that you have and as well as the digital channels that you're utilizing to bring traffic to your website. So all of that will remain the same for every single business, but the difference between all of them is what sort of strategy are you using, what sort of keywords are you using? Is it relevant to your business? What sort of links are you building and is that relevant to your particular product or your particular company? And what other different keywords are you using for your content development? So obviously all of that requires a lot of research. But, yeah, the fundamental concept of SEO remain the same, but e-commerce SEO is essentially more about your product and collection pages.

Speaker 1: 20:52

Yeah, brilliant, Brilliantly answered, mate, Love it. So there's a real correlation between user experience and SEO. Right, the better you can have your UX in terms of we're not talking backlinks or off-page, but definitely like on-page SEO and user experience. When we talk e-commerce SEO, we're also looking at things like the way that filters are displayed and used and how the page is laid out, how the filters are, how easy it is to use. I think user experience and time on website has, you know, signals to Google that this is actually a well laid out page and you'll get rewarded for you know, for better trust and authority based on having a really good user experience. Would you agree?

Speaker 2: 21:33

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, as as I said, my background was as a data analyst, so you know, for me, seeing something like google analytics is it's so great. You know the, the amount of data that you can get from that is absolutely awesome, and there's a reason that they've given you this platform, you know, and it's a reason it's called Google Analytics, because obviously it's all within the same ecosystem. So what I've seen is that if you look closely at certain metrics, especially engaged sessions, engagement rate, average engagement rate, average engagement time Sorry, I'm just thinking of it from the top of my head as well as the total number of actions or events that people are actually taking on your page, like the total number of transactions if that's all performing really well, then you're generally going to be performing really well from an SEO standpoint as well.

Speaker 2: 22:24

An example that I can actually give is there was a website that I was working on previously and we were doing SEO for them, and I realized that their website looked a little bit old. So we decided to completely rehaul the website and obviously ensuring all of the SEO components with the new design were polished and set up correctly, but with all of those things remaining the same, their traffic went from you know 50 odd clicks per month to 500 clicks per month and that's with all. You know, seo remained the exact same. We didn't do any sort of additional content development. We didn't do any sort of you know, seo remained the exact same. We didn't do any sort of additional content development. We didn't do any sort of you know, link building work.

Speaker 2: 23:00

But do I think that's an outlier? Absolutely. It's not going to be the same for everybody. So, you know, if there's someone listening and is thinking, oh, if I, you know, redesign the website, you're going to get, you know, a thousand percent increase in your organic traffic. Organic traffic that's definitely not going to happen. But you know, you should definitely consult with someone before you do that. But yeah, look, um, user experience is definitely important ranking signal when it comes to google, and relying on your ga4 metrics is definitely the way to go for that.

Speaker 1: 23:26

Yeah, brilliant mate, love that you mentioned link building. Yep, how important is link building these days. So you know, from what I've seen in my SEO journey, there was a period of time where it was all about well, I don't know if it was ever been about quantity, but quantity certainly worked for a lot of areas just smashing so many backlinks onto a website with low quality but high volume. The way Google has obviously started to get more sophisticated with links and analyzing those sorts of links, that looks like it's less effective and it's, at its least, effective. Right now we're looking at more high-quality links, less links, but more relevant links. How important are backlinks in this day and age?

Speaker 2: 24:09

Yeah, you've got it exactly right, mate. It's more about quality than it is about quantity, but, yeah, backlinks are always going to be important. Going back to what I discussed about content you know and having authority on a particular subject, authority is all about how many other people trust your content, and link building is the signal that Google use to determine that. So, just for your audience, if there's anyone that doesn't really know what backlinks are, should I give an explanation? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can have two websites, right? So imagine you have an e-commerce store and you're selling a particular product and there's another company that's selling their own product that's very similar to yours. Both of you can go into the website and make changes and, you know, do all the on-page and technical optimizations perfectly, but how does Google differentiate between your website and the other website?

Speaker 2: 25:01

The answer to that is essentially backlinks, right? Obviously, I'm simplifying it a little bit, but Google will see that you have more quality backlinks. More quality sources are linking out to you and therefore they trust your content a little bit more and provide you with a little bit more authority, therefore pushing you up higher in the ranking algorithm, and that's remained consistent since Google SEO has been around. So it's definitely really, really important. But, as you said, you know, it's about quality, not quantity. So, probably about 10 years ago, you could build a thousand backlinks on rubbish websites, you know, and that would push you up high in the ranking algorithm. But now these days, you know, google have really really updated their algorithm and have a very good way of determining what a good quality backlink is, and I've actually written an article on SEMrush that goes through, you know, the link building processes that I use. So, and a lot of that is consistent with the messaging that Google provided around how backlinks should be sourced and utilized. So, yeah, you got it right, though, mate Quality, not quantity.

Speaker 1: 26:09

Yeah, exactly In every area of life, mate, I would think. But yeah, I think for those that need more of a simple analogy of that, you know me trying to explain to my family what SEO is. It plays quite the battle. I don't think I've quite got it right, but essentially it's. You know, if you use that same analogy, it's probably like you know a business networking group, right, and there's two SEO people there. You know, if you ask 100 people in that room who you network with, which one's the better one, then if 60 people that are highly regarded say that you know ryan is the best seo specialist around, then that will get me more favorable than if you know 40 people say that patrick's the best seo specialist, but those 40 people aren't as credible, if that makes sense. So it is a bit like a popularity contest at school, which I never won. But yeah, that's sort of how to explain links. What's the process, mate? Like how do you get a backlink?

Speaker 2: 27:08

So, yeah, there's a couple of different methods, mate. I think the most traditional method these days is to do a guest post, but you have to make sure that, wherever you're posting, the metrics of that website is correct. But just to answer your question, it would usually come in the form of email marketing campaigns. So reaching out to various different websites, whether that's your blogging website, whether that's a journalist, whether that's a registered author, a website administrator so just reaching out to them, and sometimes you'll find them through email. Sometimes you'll find them through like a Facebook group, sometimes you'll find them through LinkedIn, you know, just finding strategies to connect with those types of people and asking them if you can publish content on behalf of a company and, assuming that that content that you've written is really good quality, sometimes they'll be happy to post it on their website.

Speaker 2: 28:01

So, yeah, it's really about finding a diamond in the rough and hoping that they actually like your content and are willing to post on their website with it. So it's a quite extensive process. Sometimes people aren't keen, so we really got to know how to negotiate around that. So sorry, it's super cold, so you're getting a little bit tongue-tied.

Speaker 1: 28:21

You're all right. Do some people request payment for that link? Like, do you have to pay for links?

Speaker 2: 28:26

Yeah, so, look, you know, obviously Google say that you shouldn't ever pay for a link, but, honestly, these days it's unavoidable. You know, with more and more people knowing about SEO, honestly, these days it's unavoidable. With more and more people knowing about SEO, with more and more people understanding the power of a backlink, it's very, very rare for you to be able to contact someone and for them not to ask you hey, mate, can you actually pay for this? So, like I said, you'll occasionally find that diamond in the rough, someone that's just willing to post content because they like your content. So that's the type of people that you should be going after. But, yeah, it's unavoidable, it's unavoidable. And if there's just a word of caution to other people that are, you know, looking to hire an SEO agency, if your SEO agency says they don't pay for links, they're lying to you. So, unless they're, you know, really elite companies, it's more likely that they're lying to you.

Speaker 2: 29:19

More likely they would have their own sort of PBN network, yeah, like a PBN network which aren't known for quality links? No, no, and they're actually more harmful to your business than anything else. Is that sort of link farming? Yeah, yeah, link farming. So essentially, it was a term that I coined, and Sam Rush have actually coined it as well, and it's called artificial inflation. So what that actually means is websites that artificially inflate their metrics.

Speaker 2: 29:51

So building up authority through using multiple different PBNs to build up their own PBN right, and it makes the website appear nice when you look at statistics like domain rating, authority score. So a lot of SEO agencies will try and sell you on that link and say, hey, you know, it's got very high authority, it's got very high domain rating, but usually it's got very high domain rating. But usually those websites have been built through PBNs, so it's not actually a good quality link at all, and usually they have no traffic either, and then traffic is one of the more important signals when it comes to understanding whether the website is good or not. So, yeah, definitely stay away from PBNs and utilize good quality backlinks. That's all I could say.

Speaker 1: 30:38

Yeah, nice, and the agencies out there that are using PBNs won't tell you that they're using PBNs, no, no, they'll just mention that they acquire a lot of links and there's a little bit of slick talk around that.

Speaker 2: 30:50

Yeah, what I've seen is that they call it Web 2.0 links. So if someone's telling you that it's not a PBN link and it's a web 2.0 link, usually they're the same thing, right? So a good way to know whether the links that you're getting are good quality or not is just to double check whether it's on a subdomain. So if there's two dots in the URL before it goes into the URL slug, then it's usually a sign that the website's not very good. So Really, yeah, there's two dots.

Speaker 1: 31:20

I did not know that.

Speaker 2: 31:22

Yeah. So you see, like mystrikinglywhatevercom, if you see something like that, usually those links aren't that great and they're not going to transfer any authority to your website. So obviously you want relevant domains. You know websites that have content focused on your particular subject. So, for example, you know if you're selling kitchen goods, obviously you'd want links from websites that focus around recipes and food and stuff like that in general. So that's the type of links that you should be going for.

Speaker 2: 31:54

Is there some links that are, you know, web 2.0s or PPNs that might help you? Yes, but would I be willing to take that risk with my own clients to get links from there? Absolutely not. You know Google come out with spam updates basically every single three months. So you know you might see good results for three months but then suddenly your website goes to zero. So I've seen that happen to a lot of different businesses. Obviously I wasn't doing the SEO for them, but I've seen that happen and, yeah, it can be very, very difficult to bounce back from that. So, yeah, be very careful with backlink. That's all I can say.

Speaker 1: 32:28

It's a hard one too, because most of the time you know your e-commerce manager or your marketing manager. You'll go through and talk to a few agencies, but you probably won't get into that level of detail around the links and where they're coming from, because you've got another 12 things on your plate. But it is important for transparency just to understand that agency and really learn their ethics and what they're about. We've both worked for agencies. We've both been a part of different agencies. What do you look for when hiring an SEO agency? What would be your? Let's say that they didn't want to go with Remarkable Digital? But we're here to educate, first and foremost, what to look for when hiring a good SEO agency.

Speaker 2: 33:08

Yeah, definitely someone that's going to set realistic expectations for what your business can achieve. Right, and I didn't really talk about this. But there's a reason that I joined Remarkable Digital. You know, I've known you for a very long time now. I've had you in my ecosystem for a long time and obviously six months ago we started working together.

Speaker 2: 33:27

But you know, the thing about you that's different from everyone else is that you properly scope out what the client actually needs, as opposed to just putting money in your pocket and I completely get it. We've all got money that we want to make, but if you understand what the client needs, that's the most important thing. The reason that we go into digital marketing in the first place at least I did was to help businesses and to get results from them. That gives you the most happiness and the most fulfillment from this particular role. But somewhere along that line, where you start making money, that messaging gets lost a little bit. But it doesn't seem like that's happened to you and obviously I'll keep you in check now that I'm working for you.

Speaker 2: 34:07

But that's the reason that I joined Remarkable Digital and I think that's what you should be looking for when it comes to an SEO agency. It's just people that are out there to help you, and it's very hard to figure out what the red flags are, but one of the key red flags is if the business is all about, you know guarantees and you know they're going to do this for you, they're going to do that for you, but you have to go on like a 12-month contract with them. You know, if they're doing something like that, then you know they're just trying to put money into their pocket. But, yeah, definitely, communication is a big one as well. Making sure that they're able to communicate technical concepts to you in a way that you'll be able to understand. That shows a person that has a lot of knowledge on that particular subject, like anything, right, if someone can explain something to you, you know that they know what they're talking about.

Speaker 2: 34:57

So, yeah, that's what I would say. What about yourself, mate? What would you say is the key things people should look out for?

Speaker 1: 35:03

Mate, very kind words of you before I answer that I appreciate that. No, it means a lot. Yeah, I think you're right. The thing that I see a lot is, if you're speaking with multiple agencies, the customer generally will go with the one that's promised the most and potentially is the cheapest or close to it, and there's not a lot of congruency around that. So I think you're right. The question to ask is is this a sales pitch or is this an education piece? And so that's the key difference. And so when I hear there's some brands and we hear it all the time, you know we've been burnt with three different agencies it's like okay, well, where's the lesson here? Before we take the, even before we take this client on, we need to be wary, because we don't want to be the fourth agency that burnt them, so to speak.

Speaker 1: 35:50

So it's all about the ability to know your business, understand your business. It's not trying to sign you up there and then, on the spot, it's actually doing some research, and that's why I'm a little bit kind of I don't like doing free audits, because I feel like free audits are just an opportunity to sell someone on why they should use you Exactly. So you know, I'm sort of playing with the idea of a paid audit to start with as a workshop, and that way it's completely transparent. You can take that and you can go to any SEO agency you want to use, but you've paid for some transparency and honesty. Now there are agencies out there that do free audits and do it really well, but it's all about education. It's all about doing the right thing for the client and understanding that it takes time. Yeah, and I'll ask you this question around why does it take time for SEO? But understand that it's not a quick fix and, whilst I don't want to lock people into 12-month contracts, the reason that I do see contracts work sometimes is because we understand that this is a long-term play, and what I'm particularly proud of at Remarkable Digital is that we want to be clients and partners together with each brand that we take on till 2029, right, not three months, not six months.

Speaker 1: 37:04

This is like any relationship you get into. There's going to be ups and downs, ebbs and flows. There's going to be things that go right and things that go wrong, but if you're entering into a long-term partnership with someone that you trust and your values align with those, there's not a lot can go wrong If you do good quality SEO, build good quality links, be completely transparent in results, how they're going, and communicate in a way that doesn't make the client feel stupid for not knowing something. So, to your point, communicate to the level that they understand, so you're not trying to bamboozle them with you know, I see I go on a bit of a tangent, but I can see like, literally, if you want to make a campaign look good, you can play around with the metrics, the timeframes, different results to any campaign that looks great. Right, it's like I don't know, it's don't know.

Speaker 1: 37:57

Look at this shiny thing over here. We're doing well. Meanwhile, the house is on fire over here. If you've got really good relationships and you guys both trust each other, you can say listen, this month hasn't been great. Here's what we've done. Here's what we've tried. The traffic's down a little bit. Here's what we're doing to fix it.

Speaker 2: 38:22

I think that's a better relationship. Oh, 100%, mate. Transparency is the key and you got it so right. I've worked for different SEO agencies, especially while I was at SEO Assistance. We used to do some white labeling work for different SEO agencies and what they would say to us sometimes is can we just report on the wins that we got this month and not the losses? And that just goes to show you. These are the types of people that will actually burn your money, because you think everything's going well when in reality, you know everything's hit the fan and there's issues everywhere, right, yeah. So, yeah, being transparent, that's really, really important. And, like you said, you're going to see highs and you're going to see lows right, but as long as you're trending upwards, that's the main thing. And, yeah, seo is a game of patience. It's not like paid advertising, where, as soon as you put your money in, you're either going to see results or you're not going to see results. Seo is something that will always work. It just requires a consistent approach.

Speaker 1: 39:14

Yeah, 100%. I liken it to the gym, obviously into my health and fitness. You can go to the gym for three months and then that month three to month four. You look no different. You're like what's going on?

Speaker 2: 39:28

It's not working.

Speaker 1: 39:29

Do you sack your personal trainer, maybe? Or do you just accept that there's ebbs and flows in life? Things happen. It's never linear, like success is never linear. So there's just no direct correlation between doing the work and getting the results Exactly. You know, it might take three, four, five months of doing the proper work and then you'll have a big spike. But if you quit at month four, you've missed out on that and actually you've just wasted four months of SEO budget or a gym membership. So the takeaway is really understand. It's a long-term game. Do the right thing. Partner with a reputable agency that will actually, step-by-step, do the right thing. Build good quality backlinks. Do good quality content, help with the user experience, talk to you, communicate. I don't think you can go too far. Wrong, exactly, right, mate, exactly right.

Speaker 2: 40:20

One more question for you. Yeah, no, jammers, I'd be happy to talk to you forever, mate.

Speaker 1: 40:26

How do brands know if they need to invest into SEO? Like the takeaway from this, they go look. We understand why SEO is the most profitable, most efficient, most trusted. But how do they know if they have an SEO problem?

Speaker 2: 40:40

That's a good question, mate. Honestly, if your business has been around for at least a year and SEO is not at least 25% of your total revenue, if it's not even coming close to that, then SEO is definitely the right answer. So that's probably the best way that I can answer that question, utilizing metrics and obviously I'm simplifying it a little bit because certain e-commerce businesses will be different. But yeah, look, honestly, a simple answer to that question is probably to ask yourself that question Do you feel like you're doing enough from an SEO point of view? A lot of business owners are probably thinking in their minds right now about whether they are or aren't and whatever the answer is to that, that will let you know whether you need SEO or not, right? Because if you're just relying on an overseas company to write you a couple of blogs, build you a couple of links and that's it, that's definitely not going to be enough to compete with the bigger brands. So yeah, look, I might throw that question back at you, mate. What do you?

Speaker 1: 41:43

feel like is the easiest way to know if brands should invest in seo. Yeah, well, as you say, data driven is always a great way to start. So look at your you know website traffic and and look at you know basically is it sort of close to 30 percent of of traffic is coming from organic search. And then look at you know the conversion rate of that organic search as opposed to other platforms. You could clearly see why you should be doing more of it. But I think to really even go like simplify it even further, just Google, like your main five products, and see where you rank in the Google search. Yeah, because you know, if you're not in those top three positions, you're missing out on 65% of the clicks.

Speaker 2: 42:18

Yeah, so that's where I'd start. Yeah, there's a lot of people out there that actually don't know about google search console. So I've known big brands that don't know about google search console, which is quite ridiculous. So if there's anyone out there that's listening to this and um want to be able to see what's happening with your organic se SEO without having to rely on different tools, just set up your Google Search Console, go to the Google Search Console for your website and look at the performance tab. That's where you can really see what are your most valuable keywords and something I hope someone can take away from this particular call that I've had with you.

Speaker 1: 42:54

Fantastic mate. It's been great to chat. I appreciate you joining us. I'm really thankful and grateful that you're a part of the Remarkable Digital team.

Speaker 1: 43:02

You've got great knowledge and great ethics is what I absolutely look for in an SEO specialist to work with myself and all our clients at Remarkable Digital e-commerce businesses to kick things off in July and August. We're really selective on the type of brands that we work with and also how many we bring on one month, because we want to make sure that that onboarding is really seamless and we really want to take the time to understand your business, but we do have room for a couple more e-commerce businesses looking to improve their SEO results. If you liked what you heard on this podcast and want to know more, just get in touch with myself or Patrick and we can kick it off with an initial discovery call where the aim is for us to do 80% listening and 20% talking. I think that's the best way Really understand your business and then put a plan together and a strategy to make your SEO the most profitable channel, like it should be within your business.

Speaker 2: 43:59

Sounds good, mate. Yeah, well, I appreciate you having me on, mate. And yeah, like you said, if there's any sort of e-commerce businesses out there, you know, looking to improve their SEO results, we're here for you. So reach out when you can to Ryan or myself and I'll be happy to help. Legend.