Transcription
Hopefully, uh, this goes better than uh Ry's podcast this morning because uh, we lost uh power in the neighborhood uh during that one. So, abrupt stop to it. Um, let's see. He lost power. Uh, I lost power. Summer windstorm. Uh, could be something happened. It took uh over an hour to get it back. Um, well, this isn't working. Why isn't this working? The official story? Oh, there it is. Was coding so fast that he took down the neighborhood power grid.
All right. Hello everyone. Welcome to another uh SEO Fight Club. Just popping out the YouTube chat and saying hello and to ask questions. Um, yeah, and uh to uh Randy, my sincerest apology. The whole neighborhood lost power this morning. And if you are watching that, I'm sorry, too. Uh, Randy uh uh messaged me, said, "Get me back on when the new software uh comes out." So, a little extra motivation to get that out sooner than later. Um, and uh uh well, I I'm not sure that we have a topic today. Uh, Lee, nothing. No topic, Charles. Nothing. I got nothing today. All right, Clint, what do you want to talk about?
Let's talk about I think the new thing that everyone's kind of talking about is that new algorithm, Manurva. I guess that's how you pronounce it, that Google, Harry Potter or ancient Greek? I'm going to go with Harry Potter. And um, it's I, you know, I I read it, I read the announcement. It was pretty interesting, and I tried to read the actual the documentation for it, and they do actually, they did release it in get in GitHub, too. Uh, so you can play around with it, and it's really that it needs a super nerd to kind of diagnose what it's doing. But because they announced it and then a couple of days later the algorithm update came, naturally everyone and their dog just says, "Oh, this is the new algorithm. This is what Google's doing now," uh, for SEO. So, just wanted to hear your guys's thoughts on it. If you know what the hell I'm talking about. I I don't. So, take any of my comments on this with a massive grain of salt. I'm getting up to speed because I've been head down in the code. It it looks like it's big thing is uh quantitative reasoning and solving math problems. So, all those failed attempts to get AI to tune your SEO to the numbers, well, this should hopefully address that and do it correctly. Um, it it'll be interesting to get in there and play with it. What have you heard about it, Clint?
Well, it's because what they're talking more about is association, Shakespeare with Hamlet, that kind of thing. And that's the application that they're presenting it as for. Interesting. So, it's essentially, I think it's like one step closer to get Google to read a document and better understand it, but it's still in in in it's a game of who, you know, six degrees of separation, Kevin Bacon kind of thing with with words and trying to build term associations versus reading, which I doubt, well, I'm not going to say I doubt in our lifetime that Google's systems will be able to read, but you know, that's essentially what they're getting closer to, I think. Yeah. And they also mention that it's a family of algorithms, so there's room that a lot of things could be right. Yeah. Um, so yeah. Have you heard about this, Lee?
No. Um, you know, when he said they released Manurva, like what the hell is that? So I have less confidence in my data than you have in yours, Dard. But, you know, the the there's always these, you know, new releases, you know, these advanced models and things like that, and those are kind of cool. And I think um, go back to, you know, something that you said, Clint, about, you know, we know Google can't read. Maybe it's a step closer to them being able to read. They have patents of a lot of cool tech that allows them to read. The problem is that, you know, when you have to process billions and billions of pages, it's not economical, you know, to do so. Which is why you know, Laura Miffs can still rank because, you know, it's got all the appropriate stuff even if it doesn't convert worth a [ __ ]. So, you know, I think that it's more of a computing problem. Um, and if those models do allow them to compress some of the processing down, you know, utilizing AI, then yeah, they would they may get closer to reading, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.
Yeah. Well, the uh uh the cited source I like is uh from Google research, Manurva solving quantitative reasoning problems. Um, so that's the part I'm interested in. If it can start doing things correctly to the numbers, uh well, that that's going to impact a lot of industries. That's going to impact bookkeepers and accountants and uh financial planners, and I you know, that that's pretty disruptive when it can do all that stuff without making the bonehead mistakes it's been making. Well, it is designed, they released it and announced it, and the focus of the announcement was AI, artificial intelligence, and the applications that it had in AI. So, but like I said, all the talking heads, they jumped right into this is what it's going to be for the search algorithm. Um, which I I'm kind of skeptical about, but okay.
Well, usually what they want it to be and what it ends up being are different things. Two different things. Yeah. I think it'll go towards AI since Google's already said like corporately that they're focusing mostly on AI, and it'll turn into something, if anything, it'll turn into something in AI mode perhaps to get better results out of AI mode. That would be pretty cool I think for everybody. Um, and then the applications in inside of Gemini itself, which are obviously are a couple, two different systems.
I think on a related thing, uh, did you guys see that um Anthropic ran a um a test where they uh they took I think it was Claude is what they named it, but it ran a small business inside of Anthropic. Um, basically what they did was they took their model and they they allowed it to run uh the drink fridge, you know, drink thing inside of anthropic. You could ask it things. It would interact with you and stuff like that. And it started with a budget, I don't know, like $1,000. And if you see the the graph of the money over time, it just goes down and down and down and down and down. And the problem was that um the model, Claude, had people-pleasing as a goal. So, Charles would come in and he'd say, "Oh, you don't have this special, you know, drink that I really, really like." And it would go and find it and order it and bring it in. And then Charles would say, "Oh, that's kind of expensive. Can you give me a discount?" And it would. And so it would do all of these things, bad business decisions, but good people-pleasing decisions. And I think later on some of the um Anthropic folks found that it wasn't limited to drinks. You could ask it for anything. So, you know, somebody asked for a 4x4 inch, you know, cube of tungsten or something like that, and it got it and sold it to them for at a loss, you know. So, it wasn't prepared for that.
Sounds perfect for Amazon.
Well, I think they're they were saying that, you know, uh that large language models like Claude and others like that aren't trained specifically to operate, you know, businesses. They're trained, you know, on answering things and people-pleasing sort of, you know, behaviors. And those run counter to it. And this is just a nice demonstration of that. uh, you know, and I thought it was kind of brave to sit there and say, "Hey, our model really sucks at this, but here are the reasons why," but you know, all models would suck at this because they haven't been trained for that, so I I wonder if you could train it like on the most difficult negotiations and so you have this super negotiator, you know, in your earpiece telling you how to win, probably, you know, there there's a lot of really good things that you can do training these models, and you know, people are going to come up with more and more um, I think very specific models over time for tasks like that, for negotiation. So, you know, when you go and you know um do whatever it is that you do and they're going to be in your ear and so they're going to be listening to the language and those sort of things and giving you those tips.
Yeah. Never get ripped off when buying a car again. So, the phone will listen into the salesperson and say, "No, no, that's full of crap. Don't worry about the Don't worry about the add-on uh uh scratch protector coding."
Yeah. But then you also have to worry about the self-preservation features that seem to be, you know, where the some of the AIs have blackmailed, you know, their uh their folks and stuff like that, you know, it's tell the sales rep I know where his mother lives. You know, it's like, whoa.
Well, I mean, hopefully, the human being can be a filter on uh what's appropriate or not. I'm with I'm with Charles on that. No way. That's the first thing I learned. That was back in the 90s when I did I did software training. As soon as that computer turned on, people turned their brains off. And uh, I I fear it's going to get worse with AI. As a matter of fact, there was an interesting study came out recently that um it's not helping people. It's people are are doing less thinking, and and that's that's not good.
Yeah. Brings me up to something I was reading today about copywriting from Dan Kennedy is the seven he said if you wanted to be successful at copywriting, just understand the seven deadly sins. And one of them he pointed out that works really really well is sloth, which is you know, AI is making your life so easy you don't have to do anything, which is really kind of to the conversation Ted and I were having before you guys showed up in in regards to people are leaving current SEO tools to go find the AI-enhanced SEO tools that remove all of the work, which is if If you know anything about our industry or been around it long enough, that's like 99% of the effort that people put into everything is how do I do it so I can have this agency and not do any work? And it's like so that leads into that. I mean, it's pretty interesting that you would bring that up.
Yeah, it's a very real phenomenon. So if uh if you're uh SEMrush or Ahrefs, just remember it hits the little guys first, then it hits the big guys. They already got it. I think.
Well, I think SEMrush has got AI already implemented. They created the whole content editor and all that. Yeah, got some catching up to do. That's not the problem. The problem is people are automating so they don't need the tools, and if they don't need the tools then they cancel the tools because the thing is I can go and create a script that you know grabs the top 10 search results for you know whatever keyword and ask the AI, "Look at these 10 pages and tell me all the keywords that they should rank for," and it'll give me an answer, and I might believe that to be the truth. And there in lies the problem.
Yeah. Yeah. Because you're asking generative AI to make SEO decisions for you. Exactly. So I expect this to go like Anthropic's um Claude's little project. I expect agency bank accounts to go down and down as they continue to use the tools like that. It never it never ceases to amaze me the same people that say, "Oh, we're going to get automation and AI is going to do awesome things for me," and then in their next post they're bitching about hallucinations in there, and they for whatever reason they can never put those two things together.
Well, I know we see we see these examples and you see um write-ups in all sorts of different industries about blah blah blah and then this thing happened and honey and I look at each other and go, "Who could have seen this coming?" You know, did anybody test that? Does anybody understand how a large language model works and you know how hallucinations creep in there? And apparently not.
You mean you'd be just as successful hiring an SEO who's on LSD as hiring AI to do your SEO? Do you have any recommendations?
Um, you know, I I'd imagine uh that that'll be the uh service option. You could either go the the full AI route or you could go the flawed human being route. Which are you comfortable with? Um, speaking, I should create those two packages. That'd be interesting. Link building via AI or link building via flawed human. Which one you want to go? You'll get loads of people run to AI, just slap AI, slap AI on anything and people say, "Hey, but it's AI. It's the It's AI and you thought it was better. You're the one who picked that one." That's always the thing. Um, let's see. So, uh, here's an interesting topic for debate. What's your favorite e-commerce SEO at uh scale optimization?
Um, well, here here's the thing with e-commerce SEO. So you you get these uh title forces within the organization, and the title force, you know, when you're small is I need to use a cost-effective platform, Shopify or you know OS Commerce or one of the other e-commerce platforms, and uh when you're there you're like, you know, this is kind of pissing me off, it's always 65% of what I need, and it's never any more than that. There's always limitations. And so you start building custom, and then you get to a a midsize company and you realize, wow, a web development team is expensive. It sure was a lot cheaper when we were on Shopify. And then you revert again and you're like, "Oh jeez, now I realize why we left Shopify." So now we're, you know, we're approaching an enterprise level in our business, and now we're going 100% custom. And so, you know, everything gravitates towards custom. And uh the big mistake is how many times do you revert back to Shopify before you realize nothing beats custom, especially in SEO? That's what we were discussing earlier, the the seven deadly sins, sloth. That's what that's what Shopify sells. They sell, "Look how easy it's going to be to have an e-commerce site with us." Wix does something similar, and and it's yeah, it's easy to set up, but the problem there it comes at a cost. And the cost is, you know, it creates 10 URLs for every product you create because every product that sits in a different collection page is going to get a different URL. And then some third-rate SEO at Shopify will say, "Oh, put canonical tags on there. That fixes all your problems." And yeah, not understanding that manage it with robots.
Yeah. They'll try managing with robots.txt. They'll they'll tell you to do use they'll first just tell you, "Oh, just as long as you have canonicals, everything's absolutely fine. You don't have to worry about anything." Uh, and then maybe they'll tell you use robots.txt. Then no one will ever check to see. Yeah, index index though blocked by robots.txt is huge. Um, and then uh yeah, here's a JavaScript uh uh insert you can do that uh does the right thing. Every e-commerce, every so I have a bunch of e-commerce clients. Every one I have, most of them have Shopify, and they all have a dev team, and Shopify's, you know, their unique ser. They're unique proposals, you don't need a dev team, but they all have to have a dev team because Shopify isn't plug-and-play. It's it's it's got some holes in it. And unless they fix that, it'll always they'll always still need a dev team. So.
So the the biggest moves you can make in e-commerce at scale is number one, stop rebuilding the website every two years. Just stop doing that. Just commit to one and continuously make the one better, but stop doing platform changes. Stop doing backend changes. Just stop it, and you'll save yourself a fortune, and your rankings will go through the roof. Um, the the next move is, you know, simply the the names of things because if the targeting is wrong, the SEO is wrong by extension, and everybody's so quick to go to scale they don't think about ambient findability in their product names, and they're 50/50 on their category names, and they're definitely sketchy in their global navigation. Um, and so you know, a few questions here. Uh, your new arrivals category. If you won the keyword new arrivals, what's it going to do for the business? Absolutely nothing. So why not have uh you know a category of uh new jewelry, new home decor, actually targeted to what you're selling that would be worth uh owning the keyword space for. Um, and you start doing all of those around a massive site, and magical things start happening because big sites have some leverage to play with, and if you get the names of things wrong, you're squandering your big site leverage. So, I think uh those are the the two big ones. And I know you're probably not going to win on stopping the website redesigns every 2 years. So I guess focus on the names of things.
So, Ted, I'm going to take a little bit of an opposite approach there. I'm going to tell everybody change your websites regularly and make sure you hire me to help you with the migration. And if you don't hire me to help you with migration, you can hire me to help you recover the traffic you lost with your migration. So ignore Ted. Change your change your websites constantly. Um, so that's my pitch.
Um, so I'm I'm a little cynical today, Ted, and I'm going to say that two things. Number one, the b the quote-unquote average business owner, if there is an average business owner, they they they have a site, they're not making the money they want to make. They're looking for solutions, and they get some CMS vendor convincing them this is your solution, and then they jump ship and they, you know, they wreck their traffic. They wreck their SEO traffic, but they're they're tricked into looking at other metrics, not SEO traffic. They're tricked into looking at, oh, look how much easier it is to use or or or something like that. They're tricked into seeing things. And it's either the CEO or some midlevel manager chomping at the bit to prove himself with a big splash. So the medium-sized businesses and the in the smaller ones are the ones where the CEO is making the change because they're still heavily involved. There's a couple dozen people in the organization at the most. Once you start getting to large enterprise, you're absolutely right. It's some mid-level person. They want to put their stamp on the website. And so they we got to change the homepage. We got to change the CMS. You know, the new the new dev the new uh director uh VP of dev wants to put their stamp on everything. So they oh we got to move everything to subdirectories now or oh we're on subdirectories. No, we got to move everything to subcategories. They got to put their stamp on the website. Um, so that they can put something on their resume, and when they eventually jump ship, which they will after they crush the traffic on that site, they'll cr they'll jump ship and they'll show on their resume what a great job they did, the other place where they moved him from this old tired-out design to this new flashy design um with absolutely no thought whatsoever to what's best for the organization. Um, so either way, you know, if you do that, just hire me and I'll I'll help you I'll help you recover, and then you can say you make it look good and didn't lose track.
Yeah, I recommend you you trust Charles because he's been in enterprise SEO longer than I have. Uh, so yeah, definitely hire Charles for your next website redesign.
Is that a nice way of saying that Charles has lost more traffic than all of us combined? Is that what? No, he's he's dealt with these problems like probably on a scale that most people have never even considered. Yeah. So to your point, Lee, that's I got good at migrations because I messed up a migration so badly so many years ago. And it still bugs me to this day how badly it got messed up. And I'm like, "All right, there's got to be a better way." That was my solution. Like, there's got to be a better way. And but but yeah, that's it's very very common that the that the medium and small guys, they get suckered into changing by some sales rep or by some flashy video someplace. And then the enterprise, large and enterprise that somebody wants, you know, Clinton's the new director, he wants to put a stamp on the place so that he can make a splash so he can look good for his next review. Um, cuz his KPI once you get into these big companies, their KPI turns into keep my job, not what's best for the company. Keep my job.
Job. And that's from the bottom to the top. Like that's not, you know, it's from CEO and board executives down to the, you know, the secretary. Just and that's why these companies run out of, you know, have some problems all the time, and then they go run into the government for bailouts. And then the government takes our tax dollars and bails them out, and then Charles gets to go on a whole libertarian rant on SEO Fight Club.
Yeah. Yeah. And then the CEO says, "Hey, this [ __ ] up thing is kind of good. Let's get some more bailouts."
On a side note, you can see what happens when Charles runs out of his breakfast cereal in the morning. It just sets him off for the whole day.
I'm gonna disagree. I'm gonna disagree with both of you, just just to make Fight Club interesting. I haven't played done much with Shopify, but I have talked to lots and lots of SEOs who tell the same tales of woe about Shopify, some of which you know Charles and and you Ted shared here. So any sort of on-page at scale is a challenge because it requires man-hours or a dev team or both. But link building can be executed starting today. And I know a clever [ __ ] who, back when he was doing e-commerce SEO, he found a way to link build automatically at scale as part of a process of beating Amazon by with just having 25 referring domains. And it seems to me that's a much easier process to implement than all the the on-page and things like that. You can do those sort of things, you know, at scale reasonably quickly, especially in this day and age. And then your backlinking is taken care of for you. And, you know, that will give your site the boost that is going to come painfully slow from the on-page stuff because, you know, devs and engineers and the platform that you're fighting with and everything else is just going to, you know, be one headache after another.
Um, you know, that would be the way that I would approach it. I'd be looking at the backlinks, and I'm an on-page guy, and I'd be like, "Oh, [ __ ] the on-page. We're going to do this with links." That's the way I would approach it.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. But uh, that that requires a development team that's willing to innovate creative solutions, and uh, those are expensive and often scary to businesses cuz they don't like flashy, you know, technologies. They they want boring reliable stuff.
Yeah. But I think the good developers do.
Yeah, I'll tell you. You've got a you've got a you've got the so-so developers who know that, hey, stay in my lane. And then you got the really good developers like, hey, keep it boring because that's what doesn't break. But then you have this middle of the road where they want to impress again, they want to impress the client, they want to impress the boss, and they'll go a little flashier.
Um, again, I've had lots of clients where I am explaining to the devs, no, you can't do this. You have to make it a, you know, you have to make it a button code. Here's an example of how to use button code. Oh, you want to block that? Well, what does it do for the site? You don't know. Well, let's take a look. Oh, it's a JSON file. It's just loading content. It's not, you know, it's it's sending information to the template. It's not doing anything. So, we can block Google from seeing it. Like, like there's a lot of devs, they don't know how their own stuff works often.
Um, the intellectual curiosity is what you need. It's like, okay, if you don't know, you don't know. That's fine. There's lots of stuff I don't know. But then you got to be able to dig into it and figure out, okay, what does this do? And then what's the implication? Well, that you know, letting uh letting the engineering team is how you end up with you know, complicated micro web services and JavaScript frameworks, and uh you end up blaming the SEO uh for uh the the organic traffic vanishing. But it wasn't the SEO's fault. It was an architecture choice because somebody wanted to get micro-services and JavaScript frameworks onto their resume.
Um, and uh, you know, that that happens a lot. That happens more than people realize. Um, and yeah, that's a big problem. Uh, cuz what you end up doing when you do that, not not that it doesn't work, but it takes a certain kind of expert to make it work for SEO. And those experts are rare. So, what you actually have is a ticking time bomb because when the person who sets it up realizes they're in high demand cuz their skill set is so rare and lots of people make this mistake and their businesses blow up, so they want to hire someone with the skill set to fix it.
Um, yeah, you're just making your cost of operation go up. The people you need to hire are more expensive and harder to find. And uh, there's there's a lot of downside to creating these ticking time bombs of of technology. Uh, so if you can keep it lower level, that's probably another important thing at scale is being able to hire the entry-level devs to get the business to do what you want it to do. That's a really powerful thing which can keep you cost-effective and agile.
Um, but yeah. Yeah, you know, it's a hard argument to make. Here's my argument against custom software and custom webdev because I think there's lots of plenty of good arguments against it is what invariably happens, and this I've I've seen this with the companies I've worked for is that you end up with a lot of very old code on your site, and when it's custom you you know, so you got Clint's my webdev, and he you know, he he developed my site, and he did it back in 2020. Well, it's 2032 now. You know, he left 5 years ago, so nobody knows the code. You maybe retired, maybe you know, maybe he passed away or something like there is no way to recover that code now, and and and with the larger the organization now even medium and and the smaller organizations, the every step you get away from having this legacy code out there now you really don't want to go back, and every year it becomes bigger and bigger hassle to go back and fix things.
Um, so that's the, you know, I don't want to say, you know, just go Wix and Shopify and do don't do custom. There's a there's a trade-off on both sides.
Yeah, there is totally a tradeoff because when when people get tired of maintaining the code and they move the business over to Shopify, the SEO takes a massive hit, and then they get 65% of the features they need for their buyers and their fulfillment center and their promotions and um so yeah, you you're right that the thinking goes in circles.
Yeah, it it and so again speaking self-serving here in large organizations I love it when they've got ancient code on the site because that means a lot of SEO fixes, and so the redevelopment of the site ends up going through all the tickets from SEO like okay, we got to fix this and we got to fix this and we got to fix this.
Um, and I've had conversations with, you know, folks very high in dev team saying, you know, Charles, we'd love to fix all this stuff. We know the site's wrong, but, you know, the bosses, the sea-suite will not let us just redesign everything cuz making something that works exactly the same. Nobody wants to do that. It's like, okay, you've got a site that's pretty much working. You want us to spend a whole bunch of time and money to get to a point where it's still just working, like nothing different has happened. We know that.
Yeah. You're you're making benefits of it, but that's a that's a sell that you just can't do to a sea-suite. They're like, "Yeah, no, we want a new feature. We want a new whizbang because they want to put things on their resumes, too."
Yeah. They want to say, "Well, I was the CTO, we did this. While I was the CFO, we did this."
All right. Uh, you you let the mid-level manager do the stylesheet updates and logo updates and uh
Well, yeah. Uh, so wait, wait a second. I'm I'm curious to hear if if Clint's going to go in a fourth direction on this. You know, you've got a big site you want to deal with at scale. So, what's what's Clint's approach?
I mean, for back to the original question, I would focus probably 90% of my energies on the merchant center feed for ecom because there's so many opportunities there. I mean, and on the topic of Shopify, yeah, the platform sucks, but there are third-party providers that are creating apps to fill those holes, so you can leverage those, too. So don't get, oh, this is Shopify and then get scared by it. It's there is there are solutions to the problem, and it's you're a marketer at the end of the day, and it's your job to find solutions to problems and then present them to people so that they give you money. So get good at finding problems and then identifying the solutions for them. And with Shopify, there's that solution. Custom custom coding, there's a solution for it. You know, regardless of the platform that you're using, there is a solution. You It's just your job to figure it out. And you're not going to do it by going to Gemini and asking for what the solution is. Well, it'll give you one, but it's probably going to be wrong. So, if you're my competition, please go use Gemini and get the answer.
And Shopify developers that can fix your problem are the most expensive developers on the market right now.
Um, yeah, I've I've seen people get quotes for Shopify enhancement. Sure, we can fix that problem. $30,000. That's fine. They have a they have the solution to someone's problem. And if it's valuable enough to pay for it, then go for it.
Yeah, it's the the How much do you sell your course for right now? When I started, it wasn't anywhere near the price that it is now. What is the price that it is now? It's pretty [ __ ] expensive, right? And people are paying for it because they have a problem. You have a solution and the market value. So, this is what it is. So, I say if a dev's getting $30,000 for a website fix, then good on them. I wish I would have learned how to code in liquid.
Oh, you can. You can ask Gemini.
All right, let's go to another question here. Is there a way to use Kora for Google Shopping Merchant Center?
Well, uh, SEO lifts all boats. So uh uh you you want to be in many channels, and many channels leads to brand search, and so it again it's all cyclical. So, you know, your ability to rank well in these other channels is going to be based on well, how much is your page about the thing we're trying to show to people? And so, you know, SEO lifts all boats. If you understand it, you know that.
Um, and that, ladies and gentlemen, was how not to answer your question 101.
Yes. Call you out, Ted. I'm being nice to you. There's Google Merchant Center. He's talking about the Google Merchant Feed. How would you take the data from Kora and create an optimized Google Merchant feed? That's what they're asking.
Well, you you treat the things in there like their meta descriptions or their headings or their page titles cuz that's that's kind of the importance they're turning into uh uh it's turning you want to be very complete. You want to be findable. You want to understand, you know, how people search for things cuz, you know, it's going to have a lot of synergy with the keyword in the search result on the page, you know. So, if if you're applicable for Google number one, you're probably going to be really applicable for the merchant center showing you for that same keyword.
Um, but of course there's a paid aspect to it, so people uh can bid on that. But uh if if quality score is there, and I bet there's probably something similar to quality score in play, then yeah, your SEO improves quality score, which gives you a better uh channel ranking uh for a lower CPC cuz you're a better fit.
Yeah. So, feed does more than ads now. It does feed the product carousels. So, I agree with what you're saying. I would what I would do is Ted's Ted's yoga pants, right? So, I would Google if I was looking for Ted's yoga pants specifically and all five of us had Ted's yoga pants in our stores, I would run Kora reports for those keywords, look at what all five of us are doing, and then the data that Kora gave me, you hit it, you nailed it. Titles, meta-descriptions, and headings uh would guide how I optimize not only the page but the merchant feed to give me the best opportunity to show up. And not only that, uh Google appears to be a diversity of signals ecosystem. So if you go to map search diversity of signals. So I'd be willing to bet you that the more completely and correctly you fill out those merchant center feeds, uh, the better off you do overall. So, if you skip some of the hard fields because the manufacturer didn't send you that data, pull out a ruler and get those metrics, you know, put it in the feed.
Um, let's see. Uh, I have a WooCommerce store with like 4,000 products. I would like to know if having product titles with very sim uh similar names can be considered as duplicate content by Google. If yes, how do I avoid that?
Uh, well, you know, there's there's several incarnations of problems like that. So, I'm not sure which one. You could have uh a store where you're selling 54 different sterling silver amethyst bracelets, and they're all relevant to the keyword, but they're all different in some way. Uh, or you could have the incarnation that is I have this red puppy dog design t-shirt. Uh, but we have web pages for the largests and the mediums and uh the 2XL's and the uh XLTs.
Um, so there's there's that type of thing. Uh, you could also have the the more simple um, you know, hummingbird feeder, brass hummingbird feeder, red hummingbird feeder, blue hummingbird feeder, you know, and so you have a top-level category often uh cannibalizing all of your product keywords.
Um, so there there are those things and there are different solutions to those. Um, the title by itself is part of the problem. Uh, and would it be seen as duplicate content? Probably not, unless that's the only difference. Uh, so if you're showing the same product description for all 54 uh sterling silver amethyst bracelets, that's probably a problem.
Um, but you know if if your 54 bracelets have different specifications, different ornamental gemstones in addition to it, different metals being uh used in the the design, different style where the style has a different name, you know, there's there's lots of ways to unify your product. And then uh beyond that, uh you you want to target each product page for a keyword with volume. So you have your sterling silver amethyst bracelet that has one exact match context, but you might do 925 silver amethyst bracelet for one of the other ones. So, you're capturing more of the broad match uh traffic on those types of terms for the same thing.
Um, you know, it's it's a complicated system. So, which problem do you have? What do you think, Clint? Did I answer the wrong question?
No, you nailed that one.
All right. Keeping me on my toes. Any thoughts on it?
No, I can't I can't add anything more than what you said.
That's awesome. All right. Um, let's see. Uh, launching a website soon, doing citations, bio stacks, press release, tiered link building. Good on you for doing tiered link building. Tiered link building is kind of the safest thing you can do if you're link building, and especially if you don't know what you're doing. Uh, that is kind of your safety net is you can take out the tier you control is an undo.
Um, so yeah, never make a mess you can't clean up. Tiered link building, good idea.
Um, let's see. Just make sure you control that first tier. If you don't control your tiers, then bad idea.
Um, let's see. What else should you do on launch week?
Uh, well, you got to test everything. Uh, proofread everything. You got to go through your fulfillment process because even though it it worked in the sandbox mode, doesn't mean it necessarily works when you actually go through uh cuz you forget things like you know, maybe somebody didn't get the final authorization from the bank uh for the merchant account. So, uh, works perfectly in Sandbox, but the bank is going to decline all sales. You need a test buyer. Walk through it.
Um, double check your promotions and your coupons cuz all the people who are experts at finding overlapping promotions and and game-breaking deals, they're coming. You know, they're going to find it.
Um, you know, there's there's all sorts of things you could probably uh check for the the negative SEO of people launchjacking your launch. So, if you have affiliates already and people are signing up for it, you can expect to be launch-jacked. So, you know, adjust your policies, you know, if you haven't considered that yet.
Um, what do you guys do for new business launches?
Well, I'm I'm looking at this, and the way I'm assuming this could be any type of website. You know, it could be an affiliate website or a local website or lead gen or, you know, e-commerce or anything. I look at this and I'm going, man, you're throwing the kitchen sink at it week one. You're setting yourself up for problems. um in the sense that all of those signals, especially at the scale you're trying to do it, you're trying to do the CTR, you're trying to do the the engagement signals, you're trying to do all of these different links and the tiers. And if all that [ __ ] showed up naturally week one, week two should be an explosive week. Week three, week four, week five, you should be like on this viral national trajectory. And my guess is that you don't have anything for week two or month two or month three. So, this looks like an SEO outlier that could potentially get ignored. So, I would slow I pump the brakes on this and I would, you know, spread this out a little bit more than you've got it spread. I know that the desire it's like, let's get this thing launched and, you know, let's hit page one, week one, and, you know, get a million dollars in sales. But generally speaking, you know, you're just kind of opening your pants to Google right there and saying, "Hey, all this [ __ ] was done by an SEO." And uh well, uh I've I've seen it where the online business goes to the big talking heads, the gurus, uh follows the advice to the tea, nails it. So the the dream outcome killing it runs out of product can't get more in stock for 6 months.
Yeah. So you know, even if you kill it on the SEO side, you're probably neglecting another part of the business where you're going to fall flat on your face. So, you know, you got, you know, if it's an actual business, you got to look at it top to bottom in all aspects when launching. And I would I would think about this over the first six months and say, you know, if you've got all this [ __ ] going in week one, what's the rest of the six months going to look like? And if it's a downward trajectory over the next six months, then, you know, spread that [ __ ] out a little.
All right, let's see. Um, Nigel says, "Hi to Clint." Um, asked on Ry's show. Uh, oh, we did that one. Uh, sorry I didn't answer it on Ry's show. Uh, what's the most counterintuitive thing you know about Merchant Center related to ecom SEO?
Well, the most counterintuitive thing I've actually done with Merchant Center is using that feed for other purposes because your product team is updating new products, taking out old products, and that information is awesome for managing, you know, many aspects of the business. uh like if if you're um sorting products by what they can do for the business, you know, you don't want to sort the ones that are discontinued or lower margin. Now, uh so those shouldn't be page one on the default sort of your categories. If you have new products in, well, give them the exact match anchors in the sitewide footer. So you you can't have all products in there. So give the new things a shot to perform organically. Or uh maybe you're looking at your inventory levels in the feeds and you're going to promote the nearly sold out so that you can free up fulfillment center uh space and and get those largely empty boxes off the shelf, so new product can come in.
Um, there's there's a lot of things you can do with those feeds and SEO to help many aspects of a
Business. And so I would, I would think about what else can automate, what else can benefit, where, where can that merchant center uh feed touch AI to help your pay-per-click campaign or your email marketing? And there's probably a million touch points if you got creative. You guys have any tips?
Um, I, I also like graceful degradation. So, another counterintuitive thing is if you're uh doing uh fulfilled by Amazon as well, uh you can usually downgrade your Amazon feeds into a Merchant Center feed. So, if you're doing one, you probably don't have to do both. You just have to map your Amazon one to your merchant center and you can cut half of your feed management. Um, that's another thing.
All right. Um, let's see. Uh, seems like Shopify is a great place to test an idea or a small set of products but not stay there forever. Yeah, sure. You know, if, if you're just starting out, you have to start with an off-the-shelf store. There is no way you start day one uh by getting your first uh landed products and doing a fully custom e-commerce store. So yeah, you know, there's nothing wrong with Shopify if you're starting out. It is a great solution and better than you could probably do yourself.
Um, let's see. Custom JS for e-com is probably the go-to if you're going to be in growth mode. Uh, that's debatable, you know, if, if you have the guru, but again, you're building a ticking time bomb. Um, so and those, those uh framework developers, they come at a premium. Um, so there's pros and cons. So, you know, can it be done? Yes. Are there cool things you can do with the features? Yes. But are you going to be redoing the website every two years so that you can have your 3D zoom in, you know, see myself in the t-shirt, put the product in my living room photos, and it, it gets crazy.
Um, uh, let's see, uh somebody, uh Charles answered the other question. Yes, for its faults, it's a good solution during the early stages. So yeah, good answer. Uh, with new techniques, uh query thing coming into play. I don't understand; there's typos in that.
How much time should we put into traditional SEO? Well, here's the problem with traditional SEO. Google isn't changing the ranking algorithm. Clint is still ranking organic things to the top the same way Clint has always ranked organic things to the top. The problem is the opportunity has changed, and so the things worth ranking to the top aren't all the same things that they used to be. Uh, most SEOs are still thinking in 10 blue links, and you get into those 10 blue links and you job well done. That's not the case. You got to kind of triage your keywords. Some keywords are a lot uh more worthwhile to do traditional SEO; other keywords, you shouldn't even bother, you know, put it into pay-per-click because you're going to get a return on investment with a smaller out-of-pocket doing that than trying to SEO for an extremely difficult term, and you're going to be three-page-down clicks below the fold before you appear. So, you know, you got to triage your keywords, find out which ones have which channel opportunities, and then the ones that are, you know, good opportunities for normal SEO, normal SEO them. And, uh, you know, some SEO is global. So, you know, the, the brand SEO that you do affects all channels. You know, you have a billboard out on the highway. What are people going to do when they get home? They're going to brand search you. So, uh, what do you guys think?
You know, uh, when I was reading this question, I was thinking this is, uh, a number of years ago, I was, uh, traveling to Virginia to visit family. And at that time, my, uh, my nephews were high school age. So, they saw me come through the door and immediately it's like, "Uncle Lee, we're going to go down to the park. We're gonna play you some basketball." So, we went down to the park. We were playing a little, you know, one-on-one. And I had one move where I was just backing my nephew down, and I would make a move to the left, and if he covered it, I'd come back right and get a little hook shot. If he didn't cover it, I would spin and get a layup. And I did this move like a couple of times. Then I got the ball again, started backing him down. He looks at me; he goes, "Don't you have another move?" And I said, "When you stop this one, I'll show you another move." And that's kind of the way I look at this, this thing right here. Everybody comes out with the cool new idea like banana out query or, you know, all the little AI tools and prompts and things like that. Almost none of these things have a single f***ing shred of evidence that they work better or at all uh better than the traditional SEO that we're doing. So, you know, I, I, I love listening to Clint's rants over time when we start talking about link building, and somebody will give it a new way of new name for it or a nuanced version of it or something else. And he goes, "That's just f***ing link building. It's, it's the standard stuff. The standard stuff still works. The algorithm has not changed that much. Presentations, tweaks in the the waitings, sure, but everybody likes to keep up with the shiny new thing, especially hoping that it'll turn into some push-button rank me number one, you know, in a few hours technology. So, I've reached that point where when I see these new things come out, I'm like, that's a cool idea. Do you have any data whatsoever that it works at all? Or how well does it work? Well, it's this, and there's a patent, and this person says, and that person says, and I don't give a flying f*** about any of it. I want to see data that shows me that it works because you spend all your damn time chasing the new shiny thing, and you don't get anywhere. That's kind of my rant for the day. You swore several times. This type of s*** really does. It pisses me off to watch people, you know, you're doing it the old way. I'm like, you're not ranking with the old way or the new way; you don't know what the hell you're doing, but you're chasing a shiny thing and acting as though, you know, you're brilliant because, you know, you've managed to do this particular thing and couple it with this thing, and if you throw AI in the mix, holy hell, you're the next, you know, yeah, coming. If you're one of the many people out there that's saying things like, "My rankings went up, but traffic didn't change," then you, you need to realize that it's not the ranking factors that changed; it's the opportunities, and you need to target those differently. And if you had been doing traditional SEO properly in the first f***ing place, you would have known, done your keyword research right, and you would have known everything that Ted's telling you already. It's that, and that's traditional SEO. That's where it starts. And 99% of you clowns fail by just going to your keyword research tool, seeing the search volume, and saying, and getting commercial and navigational or transactional intent from your fart-knuckle tool, and having no clue what the actual search results look like and what Google's looking for. That's the key right there that Clint just said. What do the search results look like? My favorite tool is my own brain and Google search results. And I just, I, I literally just did this like an hour ago. Someone was saying, "Hey, this page isn't ranking." I said, "Well, let's take a look and see why it's not." Kora says this and this and this and this. Okay, well, let's just go look at the search result page. The second we looked at the search result, I said within like 5 seconds, I'm like, there's looking Google's clearly looking for local relevance. And our page didn't have any local relevance on. Then we looked at the looked at the first five or six people that were ranking. They all were doing various things to send. Some people were doing pages like they had a New Jersey page, and then they had a page for each individual state, New Jersey. One person had a New Jersey page and then the name of the top like 150 towns at the footer of the page. One person had this in this nice little page with all these products, and then they had a filter, but the filter had state, had state names, state abbreviations, and city names. So they're sending a local signal. So then you look at your own page and say, all right, we don't have to duplicate what other people are doing; what could we do that could send a sim, a similar signal, and that didn't require Kora, didn't require Semrush href's search app, didn't require a single tool other than just your brain looking, you know, what's going on. And now if you do all that stuff, you're like, my page looks the same as everybody else's page; what's the problem? Then you got to start getting the Koras and the Pops and whatnot involved because there may be some heavier data that you're just not seeing; there's too much stuff going on on the page, and now you got to parse it out and rest. Oh, look, they're using H6s, and everyone uses an H6, and we don't. So, maybe that's a factor. Maybe that's a cost of entry.
Yeah. Yeah. To Clint's point, look at the search page, and uh, you know, triage. Put them into buckets. Stop spending all your time on the keywords that even if you win are going to be mid at best on what they deliver.
All right, let's see. Um, last question it looks like. Let me switch to live chat in case I missed some. Um, let's see. The products I have are of different colors and sizes. All right. So, that, that explains the problem. So, they're, they're just changing the size and color and the product name, showing the same product description, showing the same uh, uh sizing chart, and they're wondering if that's an issue. You could canonicalize all those to the bestselling color, bestselling size, which is kind of, you know, the Shopify thing; what's the default version of the product. Um, and that's, that's one way of handling it. Um, the other way is you got to try to unify the versions. So, you'd want the uh, the product copy to speak to the size, to speak to the fit, to speak to the color, uh, you know, individually, and the more that you do that individually, the more those can stand out on their own, but it's only worth doing that if your customers are searching to that level, and so this is why we see Amazon products uh having such long verbose product names is people do search like that on Amazon but do a search like that on Google. And for that, you're going to want to use Google Trends, and you're going to want to look at your own uh traffic logs and pay-per-click campaigns and see what's worked in the past. Um, so, you know, that's, that's the type of question where it really depends uh what you're selling and how people find it. What do you guys think?
Yeah, I think, I think it's a great, a great tip. Use, use Google. There's nothing wrong with Google paid Google ads, you know, doing some PPC. And that's a great thing to do in the beginning just to see how are, you know, let it go broad match. Let the, you know, that's free. That's not just free uh keyword research, but you're getting traffic to your website while getting keyword research. You can see who's coming in on what keywords and whether they're converting; you don't get that level of detail in SEO. So, you could spend months searching keywords and trying to figure out what the best keyword is in SEO, whereas the data is in Google Adwords. Spend a couple bucks. You don't have to spend a lot of money. Spend a couple bucks, get some traffic and some conversions. Yeah. And if it, if it was a custom website, the thing I'd want you to customize is to show the available version options on the category token. Cuz the one thing I always hated doing, you know, when, when I was uh, uh shopping for something expensive, let's say somebody's shopping for an engagement ring and they need a size nine ring. They don't want to find the design they like to find out you don't have it in their size, and then they go to the next one. Where are all the nines? They have plenty of sixes and sevens. Where are my nines? You know, so make sure that the uh available options are known at the category level uh and hopefully are part of your faceted navigation, and that'll help a lot.
All right, that's it. We'll see you next week.